O’DonnellWeb

• ABC News: Setting the Perfect Temperature for a Drink
  Local blogger David Turley is quoted in the first line of the story. Nice!
  (tags: beer, Fredericksburg)
• Search | Home Inspection Nightmares : This Old House
  You could easily waste an hour laughing at these
  (tags: housing)

We went to see Wall-E yesterday. Pixar gave us robot characters with more depth than most real life human actors can put forth. Sure, it’s a satire on our consumption driven society. Wall-E and Wal-Mart, coincidence? I think not. It’s also a rather distopian view of the future of earth and it’s inhabitants. However, since this is Disney, you already know that we humans will be redeemed in the end. But really, at it’s core, it’s a classic love story. Boy meets girl, girl gives boy the brush-off. Boy persists, and eventually gets the girl. Except that the robots deliver this story with no dialog beyond uttering each other’s name. And you never really notice. If any animated feature is every going to win the Oscar for best picture, this is it. I’m already looking forward to the DVD, because this is one of those movies that you’ll be able to watch over and over, peeling back new and interesting layers each time.

In other words, go see it.

• teams/fredlug - Software Freedom Day Wiki
  (tags: fredlug linux foss)

I like my holidays with a a side of silly.

Thanks Paul.

While I was reading this article about parents that are upset because Muffy or Tad did not get into the Holy Trinity of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, I was mentally composing a post about how being rich and stupid are clearly not mutually exclusive. Paying $46,000 to a college admission consultant just to help your precious snowflake get into Harvard? However, then I hit this line, and I knew I had to go with it.

“The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”

I can just imagine just how awful this must be, having to compete with the riff-raff from the public schools and the crazy homeschoolers. What’s a rich upper east side Manhattan snob to do? How the hell can their children succeed in life if they have a John Hopkins or Tulane degree on their resume. My God people, their child’s college roommate might actually be wearing off the rack clothes. Can you imagine the horror? I’ve got two lowly Purdue degrees and a graduate degree from GA State. I guess I should be happy I’m not washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant somewhere.

I also found this line from the article curious, but for a very different reason.

“It’s stressful for the kids in these prestigious private schools,” says philanthropist Suzanne Cochran, whose youngest son, Robby, just graduated from the Trinity School and will be attending Duke University come fall. “At our pre-prom cocktail party, everyone was still hoping to do better by getting in off the wait list. There are just tons of kids still on wait lists.”

Pre-prom cocktail party? Even us lowlife military brats on Kwaj had pre-prom cocktail parties, but they weren’t sanctioned by mom who was talking about it in the New York Post. Parents in the DC area get arrested for feeding their kids pre-prom alcohol. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it’s interesting the rich white people in Manhattan can do it with impunity while middle class folks go to jail.

whoisi.com is the newest, coolest social network thingy. It allows you to follow your friends in one place, without forcing them to sign up for yet another social network. It’s beta, and very new, so this your chance to get a nice low userID number that will make you feel cool when everybody is using it

If your wife has been buying a lot of watermelon lately you need to consider whether it’s just in season and cheap, or that maybe she saw this article before you did

Apparently, a couple of loons who happen to be county level democratic officials in NC have been busted for something related to satanic rituals and rape. Somehow, this absolves every Republican on the planet of everything wrong they have ever done, ever.

I’m not kidding.

As Democrats continue to pander to the Culture of Death by enthusiastically supporting abortion, homosexual marriage and all angles of the liberal agenda to remove any word of ANY religion in schools or government (the pledge of allegiance, 10 commandments, manger scenes, Easter break, crosses from 300 year old colleges, prayer from legislative sessions), it seems that one organized party platform plank needs a bit of adjustment—the one that should read, “We the Democratic Party shall rape victims during our Satanic kidnapping escapades.”

Of course, the fact this this is a big deal for them shows just how little they have to sell to the voting public. Ronald Reagan is probably spinning in his grave at what his party has become.

• The Hole is Just Too Small, Mommy! | Ask Metafilter
  Great discussion full of recs for low flow toilets that actually work.
  (tags: toilets)
• Fredericksburg.com - Ferry Farm archaeologists find George Washington’s boyhood home
  (tags: Fredericksburg)

That seems to be the point of this fine display of ignorance and (implied?) racism.

Yep, these are my neighbors.

• Ubuntu Linux Resources
  (tags: howto linux tips tutorial ubuntu)
• A VC: The Post American World
  Interesting book review of an interesting sounding book
  (tags: books)
• Enable Commercial DVD Playback on Ubuntu 8.04 : Ubuntu Tutorials : Dapper - Feisty - Gutsy - Hardy
  (tags: dvd ubuntu)

The octopuses, they are smart.

The next time somebody refers to Republicans as fiscally responsible refer them to this chart.

via The Agitator.

After dinner, Breck let me know that his computer crashed while online today, and now it won’t boot. He wasn’t kidding. It wouldn’t even boot into safe mode. Luckily, I still have the install CD, so I tried a repair install. It failed. So then I booted from CD into the recovery console and ran chkdsk. It found some disk errors. After that, I was able to complete the repair install, although I got about a dozen file not found errors during the process. Somewhat surprisingly, the computer booted after that. Not surprisingly, I had no wireless. My XP CD is an original, pre SP1. I don’t think XP had wireless back then. So I hauled everything up to the living room so I could plug into the router to get network access. That accomplished, I tried to run MS update. It crashed several times. I’m guessing XP gold can’t handle the current MS web site? Anyway, I found a way around that and was able to use Firefox to download an ISO of SP3. When I went to install that I got an error that I needed SP1 first. I guess when SP3 says “includes all previous updates” it means something different than what I took ALL to mean. Fucking Microsoft. So here I sit watching SP1 install. Then I imagine I’ll need to reboot, then install SP3, then reboot. Hopefully that will be it. Hopefully.

I have no idea what could have happened online to hose XP this bad. We are firewalled and anti-virused out the wazoo, so I don’t think anything malicious could have made it past my defenses. However, I think sometime in the very near future I’m going to set up his computer to dual boot XP Ubuntu and teach him to do all his online work in Linux and save XP for gaming only.

Update: After the SP1 install I lost all USB. Thinking maybe something came loose when I moved the computer near the router I opened it up and checked all the motherboard connections. Everything looked fine. When I rebooted I still had no USB, and none of the lights on the front of the PC worked. I was able to use the keyboard to navigate enough to get the SP3 install going, and then I checked the connections again. The LED jumpers looked fine, and the same connection powers the power and reset switch, both of which work fine. So I don’t know… After the SP3 install and reboot, I deleted all the USB drivers, and on the reinstall of those USB came back to life. So all seems to be fine, except the pretty lights on the front of the case.

I went to bed at 2 AM. If your wondering why I stayed up so late working on this, it’s because I got more sleep this way. If I had gone to bed at a normal time I would have laid awake all night thinking about things to try with the computer. I simply would not be able to sleep until I had either fixed it, or was convinced it was unfixable.

• USOC to rescue wayward U.S. Fencing Association - Brian Cazeneuve - SI.com
  (tags: fencing)