Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

In one of Barack Obama’s recent stump speeches, Obama made the following remark about John McCain’s platform:

“At a time when we’re fighting two wars, when millions of Americans can’t afford their medical bills or their tuition bills, when we’re paying more than $4 a gallon for gas, the man who rails against government spending wants to spend $1.2 billion on a tax break for Exxon Mobil.  That isn’t just irresponsible. It’s outrageous.”

Obama’s point of view that a $1.2 billion tax break is an expense rather than a savings is fairly typical of big-party politics these days, especially on the political left.  How exactly does that work?  Why should a tax break be seen as an expense on the government’s behalf rather than money left in the hands of those who earned it?  He’s talking about a tax break, after all.  He never mentioned a rebate.

Whose money is it, anyway?

Let’s Not Get Riled Up, Now…

Does anyone else find this rant absolutely hilarious?

If a middle-aged white woman from New York is a second class citizen, then what does that make me?

First Homebrew Attempt

It’s been at least a couple of years since I first toyed with the idea of brewing my own beer.  Last week, my roommate and I finally bit the bullet and split the purchase of a basic homebrew kit with a large stainless steel pot from Austin Homebrew Supply.  Yesterday (Wednesday) I finally took the time to head to the homebrew supply in person to pick up our first recipe kit. I settled on an extract kit, as suggested by one of the employees there. 

Got a Problem? Blame it on NAFTA.

In the following video, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) ties NAFTA, CAFTA, and the NASCO international highway to increased trade deficits, rising tuition costs, increased student debt, and, of all things, rising healthcare costs.

Two-Party System Woes

A particularly cringe-worthy exchange took place May 21st on Larry King Live. The exchange was between Jesse Ventura, the former (independent) governor of Minnesota and a philosophical libertarian, and Charlie Rangel and Robert Wexler, two Democratic congressmen. A snippet of the transcript is included for those of you that missed it:

Proof That God Exists

It’s official — Hercules Double IPA is now available in 4-packs.  Follow the link, scroll to the bottom, and head to your nearest Central Market.  That’s where I got mine.

First Day of Work

Well, I just finished my first day of my second internship at Centaur Technology.  It was every bit as great as I remembered.  In fact, my office was eerily similar to how I left it.  My desk and computer hadn’t even been touched since I left last summer.  I was still logged into a workstation remotely.  There was even a box of free lemon-lime tic-tacs that I remember leaving on the table next to my desk.

Oh, and there were over 4,300 new emails in my inbox waiting to be sorted through, even after moderate filtering.

Oh well, I’m not complaining.  The bureaucratic portion of my day (red tape and such — the necessary evils) lasted under an hour and, as always, I got delicious free breakfast and lunch.  Go team!

Quick WP Script Update

Apparently os.popen() has gone out of style.  I had no idea.  I’ve replaced calls to os.popen() with the much trendier subprocess.call() and subprocess.Popen().

It also now won’t set your wallpaper to nonexistant wallpapers that you’ve deleted since you last ran the update script.  If it picks a wallpaper and finds out that it no longer exists, it just tries again until it finds a suitable wallpaper or just gives up.

Grab the new tarball here.

John McCain is Funnier than Keenan

And he’s probably the best thing to happen to SNL in the past decade.

In case you missed it, he just made a few appearances on SNL.  I can’t directly embed the first clip (available here) but I’ve included the second clip from last Saturday as well as an older sketch that he did.  Enjoy.

“Do I know how to sing?  [pause]  About as well as [Streisand] knows how to govern America.”

If this whole election thing doesn’t pan out in his favor, he should consider trying for a full-time spot on the SNL cast.  He’s already funnier than the rest of ‘em.

Wallpaper Switcher

I’ve put together a couple of python scripts to automate switching wallpapers at regular intervals in Linux.  It uses localtime and the average color of individual wallpapers to try to choose wisely — the script should deliver bright pictures during the day, dark pictures during the night, and medium pictures in between.  It’s currently written to use gnome but it should be easily modifiable for other DEs and WMs.

Grab the initial release tarball here.