So last night and this morning I spent a couple of hours and hammered out a very basic bit of blogging software using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. It doesn't do comments (yet) and doesn't do searches, but it suits my needs as a way to get fresh content out to my friends, family, and internet stumblers that happen across it.

So, off you go now: KBlog 0.1 awaits!

When we picked out paint colors for our house we were worn out from our renovation, so we generally went we "safe" colors. Well, "safe" can mean "drab". I've never felt that we managed to get enough color in our new bedroom to give it life, so I suggested we repaint. I was thinking about a tuscan red of some sort. Elizabeth was game, so we grabbed some swatches and stuck them on the wall for a week.

None of the earthy colors worked at all, but Elizabeth had thrown in a few others that caught her eye. Among them was the color we chose: lupin. Easy choice (you can always paint over a bad selection!), so we bought two gallons and a couple of fresh rollers and brushes, and I set to work bright and early Saturday morning with a little help from my daughter.

It took most of yesterday, and much of today, but here are the results. With our furniture and prints it gives the room a Caribbean feel (perfect!), but the color of lupin blooms with our spruce-colored winter down comforter should make it feel like a cozy bit of Maine in the winter months. It's exactly what I was hoping it would be. In fact, I think by repainting it with a bit more personality, I finally feel a real sense of belonging in our room. I'll sleep well tonight -- but that might just be due to all the work!

I especially like his "On the Shoulders of Giants" series.

While I'm here, let me point you over for more Tikitastic Stuff from Konakai.com. See where watching Tiki Bar TV gets you?

We took off Thursday and Friday of last week as a prolonged anniversary celebration. What did we do? EVERYTHING WE COULD THINK TO DO!

Wednesday evening we had dinner with our friend, Katie (who is of Irish descent) over at WB Yeats Irish Pub. Tasty! If you get lucky, the bartender there will be the one that draws shamrocks in the head on your Guinness. From there we decided to try East End Martini Bar on Franklin Street. Good drinks, hip styling and hip staff, but the music is more dance hall volume than martini bar. I'm not saying loud music is bad (I'm guilty enough of that!): I'm just saying you have to hit the right volume for the venue. In a martini bar it should provide background without masking the snatches of conversation around you (much less your own!). LOUD music is for dance clubs where it makes people move in very close to one another. In any case, though, we had fun there!

Thursday was a day trip to the beach (Wrightsville). It's the beach: of COURSE we had fun. Stopped by a Smithfield's on the way back for tasty and cheap BBQ. Yum...

Friday we started with an adventurous, hot, sweaty Geocaching hike (what did you THINK I was going to say?). Yeesh. It's not that kind of blog! Found the cache, found some chiggers. Such lovely little creatures!

Friday afternoon we drove to Greensboro to an indoor shooting range and shot fancy handguns. I'd never fired a handgun before, and Elizabeth had only shot her dad's revolver years ago, so it was a cool experience. We brought back our bullet-ridden target as a memento, named him "Steve the Stiff", and put him up temporarily on the wall. I figure if anyone tries to rob our house they'll see Steve and decide there MUST be a better place to hit down the street!

After burning through 150 rounds of ammo, we drove over to Grove Winery, sampled their offerings, discussed the merits of various oaks for barrels, and toured their facility. A bit of a varied day, no?

Saturday was a putter-around-the-house day until that evening when we went to our favorite French restaurant (Provence). I can't believe we have such a great place so close to home! We're just luckly that way!

Sunday was the day after our anniversary, so we went back to a bit more normal middle-class American lifestyle and went grocery shopping and steam-cleaned the carpet in our daughter's room. Anti-climactic? Perhaps, but after all we'd done, we were just about celebrated out!

Then again, July 4th is just around the corner... is that a second wind I feel coming on???

http://www.wikimapia.org/

We'll also be doing some individual site design, though. This morning we finally finished the first such site: an 11 page layout for Elizabeth's dad's vacation rentals. You can check out the site and the cabins over at Winkler's Creek Cabins.

Step by step! Starting a business takes a long time to get it off the ground.

See for yourself.

I'm not saying you should expect great fiscal responsibility from the Democrats, either, but the Republicans need to put up or shut up. Controlling spending? Who? Where? All I've seen in the past few years is a government grown bloated and corrupt with massive diversions of public funds into the pockets of private contractors and perks for politicians while one bill after another is introduced to protect the profits of large corporate benefactors at the expense of the pocketbooks and rights of American citizens.

In any case, we couldn't wait the weeks it would take to get it repaired, so we bit the bullet and bought a new MacBook.

Side note: Some of you that know me as a Sysadmin might be surprised by that fact that we're a Mac family. What would really surprise you is the number of people that work on Windows professionally that won't touch the thing at home. OS X just has more functionality for the power user (like built-in ssh, perl, apache, bash, ftpd, and on and on and on) along with a great user interface and application suite that just work.

Anyway, my review after the jump...

The biggest differences between the MacBook and MacBook Pro are screen size, video memory, and price. The Apple rep also clued us in to the fact that the MacBook chassis is stronger and more rigid (good!) and that the wifi antenna placement in the MacBook is better than in the Pro, so the MacBook gets a little better wifi performance.

The MacBook Pro has larger screens (15- and 17-inch models) and dedicated video RAM. I'm a fan of dedicated video RAM, but it's really essential only if you are a gamer. However, if you have a shared RAM model I would recommend that you add system RAM to improve overall performance. The Apple rep said that he had not seen any actually difference in video performance between the machines even when doing video edits.

We immediately ruled out the lowest-end MacBook (no DVD writer) and the highest end MacBook Pro (a 17-inch behemoth -- too big for us to consider it a laptop). We settled on the mid-level MacBook as the "sweet spot" in the Apple laptop lineup.

PROCESSOR: 2GHz Intel Core Duo
The dual-core Intel CPU is blisteringly fast. In spite of the fact that we have only 512MB of RAM at the moment and are sharing it with the video card, this little laptop screams. Photo Booth is a little application that lets you use the built-in camera to take pictures of yourself and to apply various warps, distortions, and special effects to your picture. My daughter LOVES the app. Here is where you can really see the speed of this machine: it previews NINE of the available special effects in near-realtime (I notice a quarter- to half-second lag between when you move and when all the previews show the move). Applications launch with amazing speed and the system itself boots really fast.

SCREEN: 13.4-inch Glossy
I was really trepidatious about having a smaller, glossy screen after working with my 15-inch matte-finish PowerBook for the last 3.5 years. What about glare? What about size? Well, glare has not been a problem, though I can see that it might be outdoors on sunny days. Of course, if I'm working in the sun a pair of sunglasses with polarizing lenses will likely solve that problem -- and I don't work in the sun often anyway. In terms of size I discovered that I'm not losing as much as I thought. The 13.4-inch screen has a 1280x800 resolution. The 15-inch screen on my PowerBook is 1280x854. By telling the dock to autohide I reclaimed more than 54 pixels, so I have a little more real estate (pixel-wise) that before (I didn't use autohide on the PBook). Also, this screen is much crisper and brighter than the PowerBook screen. It's a real pleasure!

RAM: 512MB
512MB of RAM is standard in the MacBook, but I recommend 1GB. Don't upgrade at the Apple Store, though! The machines come to them pre-built, the machine has two slots, and the RAM must be installed in matching sets. So, if you upgrade at the store, they sell you two 512MB sticks of RAM, install them and hand you the two 256MB sticks that were in it. There is no "trade-in" on the RAM!!! If you don't have to have a computer immediately (as was our case), order via Apple's online store and upgrade there. If you do have to buy from a brick-and-mortar store, don't get the upgrade. You can do it yourself via Edge Memory at a considerable savings -- not as cheap as ordering a custom build from Apple, but still cheaper than the Apple Store.

MISCELLANEOUS
Along with the MacBook itself, we purchased a Mighty Mouse. The little scroll ball (which allows for vertical and horizontal scrolling) is one of those things that you immediately "get". It's a great innovation. However, the MacBook has its USB ports located halfway to the front of the left side of laptop. If you are right-handed, this means the mouse cable must go all the way around laptop, leaving you a little short on cord to be really comfortable. Either the mouse cable needs another 8 inches of length or Apple should place a USB plug where it would be more accessible.

Another minor complaint is that the MacBook has a Mini-DVI connector rather than S-video. That's okay, but they don't include a DVI-to-AV cable, so you you have to buy it separately for $20 if you want to connect to your TV. That would be okay, too, but Apple is pushing FrontRow (a cool app!) as a kind of media center. They even include a remote control for it! Too bad I don't need a remote for watching anything on a 13.4-inch screen! However, I could use it if I had a DVI converter!!! It's a minor gripe, but I really wish the cable was included.

ROSETTA
Rosetta is the the translation layer that allows Intel Macs to run applications that use PowerPC binaries. Fortunately, the Intel Core Duo processor is so fast that they still run at near-native performance. However, I did have a problem getting Quicken 2006 to launch. I threw away preferences and search the web for solutions. On a hunch I tried launching Word and it crashed on launch as well. This clued me in: Rosetta had gone belly-up, not Quicken. A reboot fixed the issue for both apps, but it made me realize that Rosetta really is a bridge until new binaries are available rather than a permanent solution for compatibility.

SUMMARY
The MacBook is a well-built, high-performance machine that's a sheer pleasure to use. It has a few minor design flaws, but is a great little machine. I think the 2.0 GHz white MacBook is the sweet spot in Apple's current lineup for features, performance, and price. Upgrade the RAM to 1GB to get the most from it. I'm looking forward to OS 10.6 which will most likely bring Windows applications to the Mac as well running at native speeds without the need for dual booting.

In Soviet Russia, the government owned the corporations. In modern America, the reverse is true.

As I watch our intellectual property laws become more and more regressive in hopes of protecting corporate profits for companies that can't figure out how to compete in a changing world, I realize that our patent and copyright law has become exactly the failure Thomas Jefferson warned it might.

Our democracy has been undermined by two dreadful rulings in our courts:

1 - That corporations are people in the eyes of the law and enjoy all the rights thereof.
2 - That the spending of money is free speech.

Bull on both counts.

Corporations are legal entities whose right to exist stops when they act contrary to the public good. They have the right to try to make a profit, but not if they do so in a way that makes our undermines our common best interests.

Money is not speech. That ruling is nothing but a clever tactic to quiet our voices by letting those with wealth control our elections by controlling campaign finance.

Kevin's simple guide to election reform:

1 - If you can't vote, you can't fund campaigns, parties, or PAC's. Donations from citizens only.
2 - You can't provide funds to candidates for whom you can't vote (i.e.: if you live in NC, you can't donate to a California senate candidate). That's their election for their representation, not yours.
3 - No corporation or individual can fund perks for politicians: no junkets, no fancy meals, no "educational travel".
4 - No politician can become a paid lobbyist upon leaving office. Serving our country is a privilege, not a cash cow.

We seriously need to get the corporations out of the process of running our country. I'm not a consumer, I'm a citizen.

"New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment," Bush said. "And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the enviroment."

Dear Mr. President:

1 - Not all technological changes lead to an ever-improving environment. In fact, it takes a lot of active effort to make sure that new technologies do as little harm as possible. It doesn't just happen.

2 - We know the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere are caused by human activity. I think you must have been trying to discuss global warming and not greenhouse gas concentrations. However, that has also been a dead-and-buried debate except for a few folks such as yourself as the scientific consensus is wide and deep. You are also wrong as to whether or not it matters. It matters because the most effective and cost-effective method of protecting our environment is dependent on understanding the causes of global climate change.

3 - "focus on technologies" What does that mean? Does that mean you now support higher CAFE standards and requiring the installation of technology to reduce the generation of greenhouse gases during manufacturing? What about requiring higher energy efficiency in homes and home appliances to decrease electricity consumption? What about better mass transit? These are technologies that do exactly what you describe: they improve our lives while reducing pollution. Unfortunately, these are steps that you have never shown interest in taking.

It's nice to see you addressing the issue, but you need to address with more than simple platitudes devoid of any vision or strategy. Some leadership of some form, perhaps?

1. Network Systems and Data Communications Analyst
2. Physician Assistant
3. Computer Software Engineer, Applications
4. Computer Software Engineer, Systems Software
5. Network and Computer Systems Administrator
6. Database Administrator

Cool... I have expertise in numbers 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, with number 5 being my "official" current position.

Maybe Governor Easley will wake up and raise university salaries a bit since they are woefully out of line with the industry? Nah, he'll wait until everyone with real expertise leaves for greener pastures and will then farm it out to the private sector as a huge hand-out to industry. The taxpayers will pay for the higher salaries AND a profit margin to the private companies that will take over. Of course, the private sector will be more efficient, so maybe it'll be a wash for the taxpayer, though our universities will have to live without immediate onsite service (instead they'll have to call in their contractor), which has its own costs.

FYI: the problem with carbon dioxide isn't its presence in the atmosphere, but the quantity we have added from the use of fossil fuels.

Does anyone ever fact check anymore?

The Times is running a story on it on the front page of the website in the top news. From the article:

A minor traffic accident involving Representative Patrick J. Kennedy caused a major stir today as questions arose about the congressman's condition at the time of the mishap and the treatment accorded him by the Capitol police afterward.

But CNN reported today that a police report said Mr. Kennedy had been drinking, and that his ability was impaired. The police report attributed the accident to speed and alcohol influence, driving on the wrong side of the street and inattention by the driver, according to CNN.

It goes on to cover the burgeoning scandal in detail. Where's the frigg'n cover-up?

Of course, blogging from the left of the spectrum isn't much better: Raw Story has a story that spins a principal's refusal to allow an elementary school student to perform "Dear Mr. President" by Pink at the school talent show as being an infringement of rights to political free speech. Of course, the lyrics contain words inappropriate for elementary school performances, drug and alcohol references, and address issues that many parents would rather not have their kindergarten children dealing with at school.

Considering how many real issues we face, is it really necessary for bloggers left or right to be beating war drums for silly or imaginary reasons? The level of discourse in this country is low enough already.

Glad our CongressCritters have all our more pressing problems solved...

Tiki Bar TV follows the adventures of Dr. Tiki, La La and Johnny Johnny as they hang about their in-home tiki bar. Episodes 9 and 10 are my personal faves. I think you could make a great party theme centered around this vodcast.