Category: Life

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The kiddo managed to get another Halloween out of last year’s homemade Minecraft Spider Jockey costume. But it’s not easy to run around and play in, so we offered to buy him an alternate for parties, and he chose Ant-Man. Curiously, the costume didn’t come with gloves, so Katie took a pair of plain black gloves and attached controls to them.

It’s a good thing we had it, though, because the straps on the spider started digging into his shoulders a couple of blocks into trick-or-treating and he wanted to come home early. (But not before running into a Steve? in diamond armor!)

Cue the alternate costume!

Oh, and check out this year’s pumpkin carving as well! Hardly anyone saw it, because all the trick-or-treating action seemed to be a block away, and no one walked up to our door until 9:00.

Ant-Man’s helmet is carved on a real pumpkin. The goofy face on the right is a plastic one from a few years back.

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But I got the new printer set up on just about everything, and I bought and downloaded the latest Humble Bundle full of Java reference books, and I fixed the .htaccess on this site to force access over HTTPS.

Regarding the printer: When CUPS works, it’s more or less automatic, and stays out of the way. Perfect! When it doesn’t, it’s a freaking pain to get working.

I’m really not liking this new editor, by the way. I mean, yeah, it’s cool than you can do stuff like setting the colors for a paragraph, and setting drop caps, and all that, but for what I actually want to do, it’s overkill. And it takes forever to load the editor page if something else is downloading at the same time (like all those Java books and supplements).

Anyway, time for bed.

zzzzZzzzzzZZZZZZzzzZZZzzzzzZzzzzzz….

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The other day I saw an argument that things like environmental regulations should be done locally, because if we don’t rely on the federal government, a change in administration can’t just roll back protections.

Ignoring the fact that pollution doesn’t stop at the city, state or national border, I can’t help thinking of crap like this:

California Escalates Battle With Trump EPA Over ‘Clean Car’ Rules

or this:

California agrees not to enforce its net neutrality law as Justice Dept. puts lawsuit on hold

where we are doing things at the state level, but the feds are still shutting it down.

Sessions, of course, used to be really big on “states rights” when he was representing a state, but now that he’s representing the federal government…

Not a surprise, given that people who talk about “states rights” rarely (if ever) seem to care about the principle so much as whether they can use it as a tool to interfere with civil rights.

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Californians! Today is the last day to register to vote in time for the midterm election.

Don’t sit this one out!

Even if you don’t care which Senator wins, even if the propositions are overwhelming…

We’re choosing the next governor.

We’re choosing the House reps & state legislature.

For Secretary of State we’re literally choosing between one candidate who’s touting his success registering eligible voters (Padilla) and another whose campaign statement is all about how he wants to purge the voting rolls (Meuser).

So get online NOW. If you’re not registered to vote, register before tonight’s deadline.

If you are… Check to make sure you’re still registered and haven’t been dropped by mistake (it happens!) while there’s time to re-register.

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The air has finally cleared up enough to see Downtown Los Angeles and the mountains. After several weeks of smoggy days, wildfire smoke, and occasional gloom, it’s nice to be able to see something other than a gray blur in the distance!

Also interesting: seeing how much the view changes from late afternoon to really late afternoon. These shots were taken at 4:22 and 5:52pm on the same day. Unfortunately I seem to have held my camera at two different heights, so the foreground jumps around, but the skyline and mountains are in nearly the same spots, and you can see not just different colors, but different details as the shadows move.