I resigned my position at the University of Michigan, and I’m moving to California Thursday, March 10. Specifically, San Francisco.

I have a LiveJournal which I update frequently. It’s friends-only.

Still in love, vegan, into my iBook, underslept, not chewing what I have bit off, etc.

Oh yeah, if you have an iPod and access to a Unixy shell (specifically, the find command), you can extract all of the music files from the iPod to another disk in the following way:

1. Go to the /iPod_Control/Music/ directory on your mounted iPod
   ** For example, on an OS X Mac, this would be /Volumes/Your_iPods_Name/iPod_Control/Music/
2. Issue this command: find . -type f -exec cp {} <somewhere> \;
   ** somewhere = a path to a folder where you want your music placed
3. Wait a long time (this took about 10 minutes on my almost-full iPod mini)

That is all that I feel is worth saying at this time.

It’s pretty scary how much I’ve been insulted from these tactics, as a white middle-class voter. Tonight at the phone bank, we learned that it has been confirmed that Challengers will be at EVERY polling place in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Nice try, Rep. Papageorge and associated goons, but we’re one step ahead of you!

A lovely quote that demonstrates one of the reasons why we will be out there tomorrow:

Last week, LCCR sent letters to both Gillespie and his Democratic counterpart, Terry McAuliffe, expressing concern about published reports regarding plans to mount aggressive challenges to voters Tuesday. The letter cited an article published in ‘U.S. News & World Report’ in which Michigan State Rep. and Bush campaign official John Papageorge was quoted as saying that Republicans could lose the state “if we do not suppress the Detroit vote.” Detroit has one of the highest concentrations of African Americans of any U.S. big city.

This is a non-partisan organization. If it were the Democrats that were going to be out there trying to limit people’s right to vote, I and others would still be out there countering this sort of behavior. It’s sad that some people now think that voter suppression is an acceptable way to try to win an election.

MICHIGANDERS: GET OUT AND VOTE!

Michigan is no longer a sure shot for Kerry. The rednecks and xenophobes have been mobilized throughout west and northern Michigan. By Zogby’s four-day tracking poll, Bush is leading by two points in our state, one with such a dire budget and health care outlook.

RALLY

Get your neighbors and friends and the good people of Michigan out and to the polls. If we mobilize the vote, particularly the urban vote, Michigan’s 17 electoral votes will surely go to Kerry. In the once-heartland of industrial output in this country, the bastion of the working-class citizen, to think that fearmongering and divisive rhetoric have been used so extensively to get out the right-wing vote is shocking. Let’s show the country that Michigan is blue!

VICTORY IS ATTAINABLE

At the current state of the electoral vote, Michigan going Kerry would give Kerry the presidency. That assumes that New Jersey, which is tied, will go Kerry. Most likely it will. Michigan going to Bush could mean four more years, more unneeded war against crippled nations, more job loss, less healthcare, and a “whole lotta hurt” for K-12 education.

AND REMEMBER

Vote November 2nd. Your hopes, not your fears. We were meant to do better than this.

Anyway, I called around and finally got through to someone (Humane Society of Huron Valley) and they came to pick him up. The man that came out was really nice, and I am very impressed that he is out rescuing “pesk” animals on a Friday night. I have a special place in my heart for squirrels, so I was delighted to hear the rescue technician say that he looked “pretty good.”

Here’s a pic of the little guy. I am guessing he is brother to the two healthier babies I “fostered” yesterday. When this picture was taken, he was healthy enough that he moved out of the mitt and next to the water bag. Credit card included to show relative size (it’s an old, voided one, so don’t bother trying to decipher the numbers!) :

Now back to my frantic packing for California!

And now… Pictures! :

Excerpts of John Kerry’s Remarks

The election comes down to this. If you believe this country is heading in the right direction, you should support George Bush. But if you believe America needs to move in a new direction, join with us. John and I offer a better plan that will make us stronger at home and more respected in the world. And we need your help to do that.

For three days in New York, instead of talking about jobs and the economy, we heard anger and insults from the Republicans. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because they can’t talk about the real issues facing Americans. They can’t talk about their record because it’s a record of failure.

We all saw the anger and distortion of the Republican convention. For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief. Well, here’s my answer. I’m not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq.

The vice president even called me unfit for office last night. I guess I’ll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty.

Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi Royal Family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions [in] government contracts to Halliburton while you’re still on their payroll makes you unfit. That’s the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it’s not going to change (that’d be “flip-flopping!”). I believe it’s time to move America in a new direction; I believe it’s time to set a new course for America.

And we have a specific plan to do just that. So tomorrow morning, John and Elizabeth and Teresa and I are hitting the road across America’s heartland. From here, we’ll go out and talk with Americans in towns across Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan. And because a stronger America begins at home, we’ll talk about our plan to create jobs, cut taxes for the middle class, lower health care costs, and make America safer and more secure.

I like to see Kerry in hard-hitting mode like this. One of my problems with his campaign is that he has sometimes let Bush have it too easy. There are so many weak fronts on which to attack Bush — economy, foreign policy, environment, women’s rights, war-bungling — but unfortunately, Kerry rarely does. Positive campaigns are great, but sometimes enough is enough. Suffice it to say, I can’t wait for the debates. This is going to be beautiful.

I know the Republicans have tried to appropriate the idea of patriotism and steadfast leadership, but I say they’re more about jingoism and bullheaded bungling. It’s sort of funny that this party is putting two corporate executives, who did everything to avoid serving overseas, ever, on their self-billed ballot of “strong leadership.” These are not soldiers, no matter how many flight suits they don, no matter how many times they look into the camera and say, “Bring ‘em on.” These are men of privilege who have sat behind their millions, playing soldier while real soldiers lose their lives just so we can have a second fucking oil swing state. Coming from a rich, well-connected background, Kerry could have dodged service, just as Bush did by having his father ask a favor of the then-Lieutentant Governor of Texas.

And this “flip-flopper” straw man setup is pretty deceptive and disingenuous on the part of the Republicans. Big surprise there. Zell Miller and his leash-handlers say that Kerry wanted to decommission cold-war weaponry after the fall of the U.S.S.R. After all, Donald Rumsfeld asked the Senate for just that. But if you have a weak short-term memory for truth, you can easily spin this into “Kerry voted against the weapons that won the cold war.”

Surely, there are more important issues than who served where and how three decades ago. But I say if the Republicans want to fight the battle of honorable service in war, “bring ‘em on!” Come November, you’ll have to decide who is better - a flip-flopper that’s not really a flip-flopper, and served this country in both war and peace, or a hate-spewing clan of attack-dogs headed up by a guy who was unemployed and snorting oil-subsidized coke for most of the years the other guy served as a senator. I’ll take the go-getter intellectual over the cock-posturing poser cowboy any day.

There ya have it.

It’s a drop-down menu. If it is situated near the bottom of your browser’s viewpane, it might be called a drop-up menu, or a fly-up menu. Either way, though, there is no pulling required to get the menu to appear.

Thanks. Now back to finishing up this pull-down menu-based navigation. :)

Hey Eric, how are things, etc.?

[four paragraphs of computer-related questions]

OK great, see ya around!
Take care,
X

If anyone reading this blog hasn’t talked to me for a while, and feels like randomly e-mailing me your shitty little questions, only do so once you understand my consulting fee is 75.00 USD/hour. Thanks, and have a nice day.

Sincerely,
Your Friend of Convenience

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
Set them free at the break of dawn
Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base bugs in the software
Flash the message, something’s out there
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells it’s red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky as 99 red balloons go by

99 Decision street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we’ve waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

99 dreams I have had In every one a red balloon
It’s all over and I’m standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go

Update: Star Captain Liana “Starblazer” Kerr has created a Star Captain Paperdoll!

Meet Star Captain Anna “Andromeda Ranger” Kerr: