New stuff

Last weekend I brought home a Samsung CLP-315 Color Laser Printer. It was $149 at Office Max and seems to make high quality color prints. I also ordered a Dell Inspiron 518 which was delivered on Thursday. The last few PCs had been HPs. Probably anecdotal, but I had a LOT of problems with them. Our current desktop has a bad hard drive. So it made sense to go with Dell. Somebody at work gave me a code that got me a discount, saved about $50. I was able to custom order it, which makes it a lot better than buying from a retailer. I got 4GB RAM, a media card reader, Vista Home Premium, and NO productivity software. I like Vista so far. The only casualty would appear to be my scanner, which I can't get to work even though the vendor has drivers for Vista.

Marathon

I was awakened at 7 AM yesterday to the sound of rock and roll music outside. WTF? Oh, the marathon. Indeed the band that would play at 7th Ave/Thomas was doing a sound check, warming up. I knew it was coming but had forgotten about it when I went to bed. Had enough time to get up, get breakfast, grab cameras and walk to the end of the street. The race starts at 7:40 and they take something like 12 minutes to get here. Pictures here.

Chris Bliss at Dodge Theatre

We went to see the Smothers Brothers at the Dodge last night. rode the Metro down, had dinner at Thai Elephant (which was packed!). The brothers were good, still had the ability to entertain, Tom is in his 70's but still acts like an impish little kid. We had great seats (third row, a little to the right of center). They were less topical than I expected them to be. Tom did make a comment about how the morons would not be running the country any more, but most of it was the usual shtick where he irritates his brother. One of the most amazing aspects was the opening act, Chris Bliss. I am sure that I have seen him somewhere before, maybe one of the Alice Cooper Christmas Pudding shows, but I am not sure when. Anyway, he was a very funny comic, better than most opening acts. He was done, it seemed, and we were satisfied, but he wanted to do one more thing. Maybe you have seen this before, but here is a video of him doing this bit somewhere else. You have to see this...

More Metro

Today we decided to go to the Eye Masters at Christown to order some new glasses for Susan. It took 14 minutes to get to the station and about a 3 minute wait for a train. This was the first day of regular hours for the trains, which started at 4 something in the morning. There were no more volunteers to help people but the trains are still free through Wednesday night. The train was a bit crowded but we were able to get a seat by lowering a 3 seat panel that was folded against the wall. The seats would have been filled if people had known what to do... We got a the end of the line at 19th Ave/Montebello around 11:20. There was a small line of people waiting to get on the trains. We saw several TSA and Department of Homeland Security people on the platform. Although the station faces the mall, it is not completely an enclosed mall anymore. The stores that face 19th Avenue (Target, Ross, some others and some new still empty stores) do not connect to the mall. You have to go all the way around to JC Penney (in what I think was the Monkey Wards when we shopped there 20-25 years ago) to get into the mall. The stores that are in the mall include Penney's, Costco, Walmart, Bath and Body works and a few smaller stores. I bought some olive oil and a blu-ray disk in Costco while Susan ordered her glasses. Then we headed back to the station, this time going behind Target which I think was shorter. There was a huge line but the nice Homeland Security man advised us as to how to avoid the crowd and we got on a train relatively quickly. It was full leaving the station and got fuller at 7th Avenue and Central/Camelback. We got out at Campbell to have lunch at Pane Bianco. Unfortunately it is closed on Mondays. It is open until 3 Tuesday-Saturday. So we walked to the Indian School stop. There were a bunch of people waiting and when the train came it was so full that few go on. We then waited another 20 minute or so for a train and when its doors opened it was no better. We got anyway, to the protest of some of the people inside. Welcome to mass transit, folks, get used to it! The problem was that over the weekend the volunteers were making sure that the trains left the endpoints only partially full so that people could get on elsewhere. There was no one to do that today, so getting on it was very difficult. But get on we did. We got off at Encanto and ended up getting lunch at Schlotzky's, where it was nearly two and there were a bunch of non-business-types eating. I attributed it to the metro but the proprietor grumbled that it wasn't helping him one bit and would not. Anyway, we walked home from there, 3.5 hours all told but an interesting experience. We had planned on riding to Tempe for dinner tonight but decided to wait for Friday when they started charging people and the crowds would thin out. Still I might try my trip to Mesa tomorrow morning if I get up early enough.

Metro!

I was at the opening of the Metro (light rail) this morning as an "ambassador". My assignment was to answer questions, give directions, etc. My shift started at 8 although the trains did not start taking on passengers until 10. I arrived at the Encanto station about 7:55. I had not slept very well, didn't feel good and it was really cold out, the exact circumstance under which to stay in bed but I had been waiting for this for years, literally, and was not going to miss it. We got our instructions and orange vests and then stood around for a couple of hours. I really needed coffee but had been afraid to consume liquids if I was going to stand out there for 4 hours. There was not much of a crowd waiting. By the time that 10:00 rolled around, there were maybe 20 or so people waiting on the platform. At 10:09, the first train (shown here), a northbound train heading to 19th/Montebello (Christown) rolled in, and a southbound train arrived before the northbound one left. The trains ran were supposed to run every 10 minutes in each direction but were pretty erratic. The station became fairly crowded as my shift progressed and there decidedly more passengers wanting to go south than north. On a few occasions the trains were so crowded that people refused to get on. Susan arrived a little after 11:30 and on my advice got on a northbound train (see picture). She went one stop up to Thomas and then walked back. By that time I was done so we squeezed on a southbound and got off at 1st Ave/Jefferson. We walked around a bit, found the booth where I picked up a t-shirt and key ring as reward for the volunteer work. We then got on at 3rd St/Washington and rode back to Encanto. As the day has progressed the crowds at the stations and at the parties has seemed to grow considerably. It was a good thing to get in early. It was all very cool. Trains are free through the end of the year. I think I might wait until about Tuesday and ride the full length of the lines. You can see more pictures here.

BUY the Big 3

GM, Ford and Chrysler are once again testifying in Washington, this time with a plan. They want $34 billion in loans. Michael Moore has what sounds like a better idea. In his Daily Beast article he suggests that the government just buy them. Pointing out that all of the outstanding common stock of GM could be purchased for about $3 billion, he makes a pretty good case. Detroit would have to put up the companies' assets as collateral, and when they inevitably defaulted on the loans, we'd own 'em anyway. By buying them now we could save some money, dismiss the bozoes who run the 3 outfits, and retool them to make green vehicles, light rail cars, etc., the very things we need going forward. Moore is not exactly one of America's leading economists, and there is probably something wrong with the proposal, but it is entertaining and makes sense to me...

Happy Birthday to me

I got a Blu-Ray player for my birthday yesterday. I did a lot of research and picked the Panasonic DMP-BD35K. It is a platform 2.0 player, which means it has BD-Live, picture in picture and a few other things. It got a good review on CNET, which convinced me to pick it over the equivalent Sony. Among other things, the Sony needed a firmware upgrade for platform 2.0, and this one was already there. So far I am very impressed with it.

I had some issues in setting it up, but that is half the fun. Things have progressed a lot since the days when you would hook your antenna or cable up to your VCR, run another cable to your TV, tune your TV to channel 3 or 4 and there was your system.

After hooking it to the TV with an HDMI cable, it worked right out of the box. The audio at this point was coming through the TV. I had also attached a network cable, and when I did the connection test it passed, and showed my the IP address that it had obtained. When I hooked up the optical digital audio cable connected to the receiver I got no sound. I screwed around with this for a half hour or so, trying different settings, etc. The issue with audio is that it can output the latest audio formats (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD) to receivers that can decode them if you are sending data to your receiver with HDMI. My receiver is a couple of years old and lacks both HDMI input and the ability to decode those formats. The manual implied that it would send old style Dolby Digital and DTS along in that situation but I was getting nothing. Finally I checked out the cable and saw no red light emitting from the end that would connect to the receiver. That meant it wasn't passing data. I found another cable and tried it and it worked! I have no idea why the cable went bad, as it had been working in another hookup last week. Ironically the bad cable was a Monster and the replacement was a cheaper Radio Shack cable. The lesson here was that the default setting worked.

On to video. My TV is a two year old 720p Pioneer plasma. It came out just when 1080p started making its appearance. It had the unique offering of accepting both 1080p input and 24p input. Film cameras work at 24 frames per second but most video is 60 images per second. Blu-Ray videos can be 24p which makes for smoother more realistic images. My TV can handle and properly process both 1080p input and 24p input, which is not the norm for a 720p monitor. Anyway I wanted to get the setting such that would allow these things. I was looking at something and pushed the button that made the monitor tell me what it was displaying and it said 1080i. The setting for resolution was set to Auto which means let the player figure out what the monitor can handle. Figuring that this was wrong, I switched it to 1080p. It warned me that that might not be a good idea and that I would have to hold down a couple of buttons for 5 seconds if things did not work out. The screen went black. Holding down those buttons yielded an error message that suggested I had a bad HDMI cable. I had to hook up a composite video cable to again see the screen to get out of the mess. Once again able to see the screen I set it back to Auto. I then messed with settings for a while. At one point it was only outputting 480p. Eventually I set things back to the default. Then I tried to play a movie and checked the monitor and it was in fact 1080p. I turned on 24p on the Blu-Ray player and that worked too. The lesson here is that the player, at least with the Auto setting, puts out either 1080i or 1080p depending upon the content, and that the default settings worked for me.

The remote also provides some issues. I have a Panasonic DVD Recorder/VCR. It has a nearly identical remote. So the remote turns on both players, etc. The solution is to change the "control code" on one of the units, which defaults to "1", to "2" or "3". That works just fine but the Harmony software only seems to understand code 1.

Finally, I am underwhelmed with BD-Live, at least with the one disk that I have looked at, Wall-E. I should start by saying that the internet connectivity works fine and I was able to update the firmware from version 1.1 to version 1.5 fairly effortlessly. It is set to automatically watch for updates. When loading the disk you get a message that says something like Network Connection Started. The first time I started Wall-E, I got another message saying that it needed to update my system (!?) in order to do BD-Live on the disk. I answered OK and it displayed a progress bar for about 10 minutes. The next time I started the disk the same thing happened, but the firmware update was in between and it has not done it again. Still it was painful. Whatever updates it is making must be things stored on the SD card, which is required for BD Live. I got a 4GB card for $9.99 at Fry's. So then after some time spent loading it asks you to log in, directing you to a Disney website to get one. After doing that you learn that there is a verification process via return email AND that your screenname will be approved at a later date. (They rejected "pbenjamin" for some reason, by the way.) Finally armed with an account I logged in. The interface to type in userid and password is cumbersome AND it fails to remember you the next time. After about 30 minutes of work I finally gained entrance. This disk provided 4 options. Two were mail and chat with other people who have managed to register, sounds about as promising as Twitter turned out to be. A third was games, which seemed like a good thing except that the private games had yet to be implemented and the public game that was offered would start in 15 minutes. The final option involved redeeming points (obtained by registering Disney Blu-Rays) for valuable gifts. Wall-E (the movie itself) is highly recommended.

The player itself is wonderful. The picture quality is on par with the best HD that I've gotten from cable, better than most of it given the trend towards broadcast subchannels and compression by the cable companies. So far I own 4 disks: Goodfellas and American Gangster, which I got as birthday presents, and From Russia With Love and Thunderball, which I bought for myself. Wall-E came from Netflix, as will Hancock (which is a BD-Live disk -- second try) tomorrow.

Whither Twitter

Feeling hopelessly out of it, and never having ventured into myspace or facebook, I set up a Twitter account to find out what it was all about. I think I understand now but it is next to useless as I don't know anybody who uses it. Does anybody who reads this do Twitter? For that matter does anybody read this? Anyway, there is a link down a ways on the right hand side of the blog page that point to my (at least for now) Twitter presence.

Motown Mess

The Detroit automakers need help. As anyone who reads, watches or hears the news is aware, they are on the verge of bankrupcy and asking for help. A poll released today alleges that 55% of Americans support the idea, but to hear some of the media you would get the opposite impression. Not helping them has some appeal. They don't seem to learn, these guys. They lost a ton of customers to Japanese automakers in the 1970s when gas got scarce. They continued to lose customers due to the perception that quality was subpar. They made progress on quality but they never quite got religion about fuel efficiency. In the 90s When Americans went nuts over SUVs and gas was cheap they did everything they could to build bigger and bigger bloated behemoths. Why should we give them more money when they can't seem to figure out what Toyota and Honda did when they concentrated on hybrids?

I look at it a little differently. I grew up in Detroit, my brother worked for Ford all of his life and my cousin Bob did the same trick at Cadillac. Half of the people I knew there either worked for one of the Big Three or worked in a company that was dependent on them. A couple of my friends from high school met me in Fort Lauderdale a couple of years ago for a road trip to Key West. Chris was retired from a GM plant and Itura worked for a company that did drafting for Chrysler. Itura lost his job in May. They say if one of the Big Three goes under the job loss would be between 2 and 3 million.

People are going to buy and drive cars. If they stop making them in the US, we will just buy them from other countries. Automobile manufacturing is one of the few manufacturing industries that remains in this country. We have to produce something, we can't all make a living selling services to each other. We have to figure out how to keep the industry alive.

Are they guilty of making gas guzzlers while they should have been planning for a day when gas stopped being cheap? Absolutely. But who helped them get there? Take a look on the road at your fellow citizens with their big ass pickups, their Hummers, Navigators and Suburbans. Think about the government that stopped increasing CAFE standards in 1990 and kept the standards for light trucks (which includes SUVs) much lower. Detroit might have screwed up be we helped them royally.

Give them money to stay alive but make sure that they retool to make more fuel efficient vehicles and invest in the techology for electric, natural gas and fuel cell. Use the economic mess as an occasion to shake things up and improve the industry. Things will get better, even the Depression ended eventually, and when they do, do we want to be buying our cars made by people in Japan and Korea, or people in Michigan and Ohio? Most Americans would buy the better car and not care so much. Let's insure that the better cars are made here.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I found this on YouTube. We were watching MSNBC when the announcement came in. I think I switched to NBC for HD coverage after a minute or two but this was how it started.

Yes We Did

Jon Talton on the election

From Rogue Columnist:

This moment

And so it comes down to this. A day that will mark the most important election in my lifetime and certainly the most consequential since 1932. The polls show Obama leading and yet... One wonders how wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, standard bearer for the Party that Wrecked America, could have even 41 percent support, much less higher, much less be, perhaps, competitive in Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

This support for a candidate who wholly represents the ruinous governing philosophy of conservatism -- a set of ideas so discredited, exhausted and out of step with the values of most Americans that McCain's only strategy was a dishonorable campaign of despicable attacks on his opponent and riling up a hateful "base." The man who claims "Country First" picked -- or was forced to pick -- the most unqualified and dangerous vice presidential candidate in American history. Who are these supporters and what are they thinking? Has ignorance, television-induced brain damage and Republican hate finally pushed us past the tipping point? And election fraud, that determinative agent of the 2000 and 2004 elections, is an ever present danger. And the confluence of moneyed interests that fears Obama.

And yet, we have this moment, this last chance. John Adams reflected the realism of the Founders when he said democracies always eventually commit suicide. Decades later Lincoln rightly called this an experiment, not a fixed or secure order in human events. Now the American generations living will be tested at history's fulcrum.

Americans never have the "perfect candidate." I can imagine what today's Republicans would do to Lincoln; his adversaries at the time likened him to an ape or worse. Franklin Roosevelt was seen as a lightweight, a dilettante, despite his testing and suffering in the aftermath of polio. Eisenhower was slimed by the conservative attack machine, just gaining its training wheels in the form of Joe McCarthy. Behind the winning smile, Ike did McCarthy in -- and Tailgunner Joe never saw the lethal round coming. Each of these imperfect men and many more like them led America to a sunlit future that we baby boomers witnessed -- and have seen slipping away, especially through the past eight years.

George W. Bush rightly hides now. He presided over the debasement of the Constitution, the enshrinement of torture as American policy, an unnecessary and dangerously costly war waged on cooked intelligence, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden, the lethal federal incompetence in New Orleans and the worst financial collapse since the Depression -- caused by the deregulation and oligarchy he championed. As bad are the opportunities deliberately lost, especially on global warming and the limited world oil resources that even Bush admits. America has lost its moral compass, squandered precious moral capital in the world, wasted precious time. The Justice Department and federal judiciary have been poisoned, not only for the theocrats, but to give big business and monopoly an unbreakable hold on power. And John McCain would depart from these policies not one bit, except perhaps to open a new war in Iran.

All of this can be reversed. It will take sacrifice and hard work that Obama rightly said little of during the campaign. A nation living off the sacrifices of previous generations has been living in a haze. President Obama will give clarity and vision, courage and strength, the ability to articulate (!) our vast challenges and opportunities. The president can't and shouldn't do it all. But the past eight years have taught us just how much a president can do, and the danger of another George W. Bush.

For now, we have this moment. God help us that it will be enough.

Dick Cavett on John McCain

I heard him say that when the White House phone rings at the dread 3 o'clock in the morning, you don't want someone picking it up who has to take time to "think and analyze the situation, but someone who will act." This, coming from a man with the "thinking and analyzing" traits of a snapping turtle cannot help but bring the Cuban missile crisis to mind — and what the world might be today had the Arizona senior been in charge. If it (the world) would even be at all.

Good ad

Construction Update

Trees are planted, wall is rebuilt and painted, patio cover is rebuilt and we got tile put on the barbecue counter.

Willo Solidarity

Somewhere in the early primary season, before Arizona voted on Super Tuesday, we got an Obama yard sign. It was the only one on our street for several months, was ravaged by the weather in August and eventually replaced with a new Obama/Biden sign in September. Now there are four on our street (three pictured here, ours is the white one). There are no McCain signs on our street and very few in Willo.

Interesting Endorsements

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it

I sure hope we don't get too overconfident here.

Must See TV

So the debates are over. I am hoping that years from now people will talk about the debates being a critical part of the election of President Obama, that the comparison of the cool, even tempered Obama with the testy, twitchy McCain will be considered similar to the juxtaposition of John Kennedy with Richard Nixon. There is a long list of debate narratives that includes George H. W. Bush looking at his watch, Al Gore yakking about a "lockbox" and Ronald Reagan's "there you go again" that many people believe are critical parts of elections. The opinion that Nixon's 5:00 shadow next to Kennedy's youthful vibrancy cost the GOP the 1960 election is widely held.

Television is clearly an integral part of the current political scene. Many believe that Lincoln's homeliness and FDR's wheelchair would prevent either of them from succeeding in the TV age. But the debates and the endless advertising are only part of the deal. Regular programming on TV, far beyond the news shows, has also been a part of the process. In 1968, Richard Nixon did a cameo on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Laugh-In was a variety show that spent a great deal of time with endless cuts to clips of people telling jokes, doing mini-skits, reciting catch phrases, etc. "Sock it to me" was one of those catch phrases. The cut to Nixon saying "sock it to ME?" was hilarious and helped soften the humorless bastard's image. Bill Clinton went on the Arsenio Hall Show, donned shades and played sax.

Today they all want part of the action. Fred Thompson declared his candidacy on Leno. Hillary Clinton was on Letterman multiple times. They all seem to make it to Oprah, Ellen, etc. Additionally, Saturday Night Live has experienced an unprecedented revival, not only having guest spots but doing some spot-on impressions (Tina Fey's Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler's Hillary Clinton).

One of the biggest impacts, though, has been a cancellation. John McCain's non-appearance on Letterman has been the topic of Dave's monologue pretty much daily since it happened. It has gone beyond the running joke phase into clear criticism of McCain. McCain is scheduled to appear tonight. I am hoping that it will result in some probing questions. "Just what were you thinking when you suspended your campaign?" and so forth. Don't miss it.

Voted

I voted over the weekend, haven't mailed it yet, but it is sealed up. I stopped and looked at every contest but ended up voting for every Democrat on the ballot and left the contests where there was no Democrat blank. I voted for Jonathan Weisbuch for District 5 Maricopa County Special Health Care District (the post is non-partisan, I googled the names and liked what I read about him.) I voted for Lela Alston for Phoenix Union High School District governing board at large -- I met her when I ran for office, she was a State Senator then. I skipped over the Phoenix Elementary District race, didn't know enough about them. I also skipped the judge retention part, which I usually do unless I know something specific. Here is what I did on the propositions. The reader is free to print this out and take it to the polls as a guide. I get more votes that way. I will admit that I am often swayed by who is for and who is against a proposition.

Proposition 100 - bans any new sale or transfer tax on real property transactions.

I had a hard time with this one. On one hand the last thing that needs to happen today would be to do something that would further depress the housing market. On the other hand, this is an amendment to the state constitution that would last forever, it may be appropriate in the future to slow down growth or otherwise finance needed infrastructure items, education, etc. The pro arguments came from a list of people which included not only the usual suspects, Farm Bureau, Contractors, Cattlemen, Chamber of Commerce, Arizona Tax Revolt, etc., but also a few people I respected such as our state Senator Ken Cheuvront, Rose Mofford and Eddie Basha. The only con arguement from a source that I had heard of came from the Arizona Education Association. Ultimately I voted NO, worried about future handicaps to raising funds.

Proposition 101 - "freedom of choice" in healthcare.

This sounds like something that would ultimately be used as a roadblock for universal healthcare. The supporters included a bunch of people in the healthcare field, the Arizona Restaurant Association and State Treasurer Dean Martin. The opponents included more healthcare folk plus the Green Party, WESTMARC (a west valley coalition), National Organization for Women, and the Republican Party. I voted NO, it was Dean Martin that convinced me.

Proposition 102 - defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

This is hateful and unnecessary. NO

Proposition 105 - "let the people decide act"

This is ridiculous. It requires that a majority of REGISTERED voters vote yes on any initiative that would raise taxes or cause an increase in spending. Looking at the turnout in previous elections, that means that you would need at least 75% of the vote. In the 1998 general election the turnout was 45.8% which would mean that nothing could pass. With this nonsense in place no initiative that would raise taxes or spending could possibly ever pass. NO

Proposition 200 = Payday loan reform

This came from the payday loan industry. These people are blood suckers. It is not reform, it is license. NO

Proposition 201 - Homeowners Bill of Rights

Supported by unions and consumer groups, opposed by the usual suspects including the Home Builders. YES

Proposition 202 - Stop Illegal Hiring

This is opposed by Russell Pearce, the state legislator who succeeded with all of the anti-immigrant stuff 2 years ago. YES

Proposition 300 - Raise legislators' salaries from $24K to $30K

It should be $100K. This is a full time job if done right. You get what you pay for. YES

School District Consolidation

If you live in an elementary district that is proposed to merge with a high school district, you get the opportunity to vote yes or no. In our case, Phoenix Elementary, along with something like 16 other districts, would join Phoenix Union High School District. There is all sort of boo-hooing about loss of local control and having to raise teacher salaries in below average districts but that has to dwarf the benefit of getting rid of all the unnecessary administrative costs. YES