Noteworthy entries.

On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

When Norway's Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Barack Obama, they hit America's right-wing zealots with egg in the face. Here's how Steven Weber put it at Huffpo:

As the predictable mobs of crypto-racist/sexually repressed obstructionists coagulate around the recipient, the Norwegian Nobel committee has acted unilaterally and struck a blow for the rest of humanity. The big tent Republicon party, which shelters everyone from flat-earthers to Taitz birthers, from gun-toters to Swift Boaters, in other words every scrap of social flotsam which identifies with the right's disdain for All Things Other, is coming away from its stakes.

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My Cat Died and I’m Feeling Old

This morning my cat was stiff as cardboard. He'd died overnight. It was not much of a surprise, as he has refused to eat for 26 days. He basically died of AIDS, the feline variety (FIV). So I've been a bit distracted for about a month, and now the sword has fallen. I posted a short photo essay of his short life here, if you are curious. Then I read today's XKCD: XKCD is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 So I've outlived several cats, and kids born after too many events I experienced are old enough to bring them to mind. I've lived on the same block for as long as it took me to go from birth to two college degrees. I predate manned space flight and weather satellites. My first record player had both 16 and 78, as well as 33 and 45. I have changed tubes in my radio. 1984 still feels like it should be the future. I celebrated the American bicentennial. I still have a Vote McGovern button from just after my parents got their citizenships. No real point, today.

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Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing "Daughter". Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons. Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men. Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women's rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

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My Stuff Expanded to Fill All My Gigabytes, Ergo Got More Gigs

I am old enough to remember floppy disks that deserved the name. They bent. I remember wondering why I might need more than one to back up my files. 360,000 characters was a lot of writing. A full novelette. When I bought my new desktop computer a couple of years ago, I got what I thought was an adequate hard disk: Equivalent to 417,000 5¼" floppies, or room for about 100,000 five megapixel photos. But then I started playing with video. A normal digital video at 640 x 480 30 fps eats 100Mb/min. So my once open spaces got filled in. What to do? I considered adding a second drive. I'd done this on several of my previous computers. It requires remembering what is on which drive for daily use, as well as backing up. And how does one reliably back up such huge amounts? I didn't want to do this, yet again. So I decided to replace my main drive. "What?" you may well ask, aghast. This is not the ordeal it once was. I got a bigger drive, cloned the old one onto it, and then swapped it. Easy, and here's how (assuming you aren't stuck with a single-source machine (Apple)): (Details "below the fold")

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