Category: Life

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So you don’t like the candidates in national elections? Vote in the primaries.

You don’t like the primary choices either? Vote in the state-level and midterm elections.

You don’t like the midterm choices? Vote in your local elections.

National candidates don’t appear out of thin air. They start locally and climb up. And those local offices affect you more directly than the national level offices.

Plus: the smaller the area covered, the bigger percentage of the final tally is represented by your vote. 1/1,000 may be small, but it’s a lot bigger than 1/100,000,000!

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I don’t have the time or ideas for Nanowrimo this year. It’s actually been a decade since I last did it, now that I think about it. But I’ve done NaBloPoMo a few times, and I think I can manage a month of posting one blog entry a day.

Plus it’ll be a good way to test Pterotype federation and other stuff.

I’ve already posted two days in a row at my main blog K-Squared Ramblings. Yesterday I posted a couple of Halloween photos, and today I posted about a hosting problem that took out this blog for a few days.

I do feel like I should try to put some effort in rather than just taking a tweet/toot and calling it a blog entry. But what makes something suitable for blogging vs a social media post?

  • Long-form writing that doesn’t fit in a short note.
  • Image(s) with long descriptions or extended commentary.
  • I think I can probably take something that fits a series and justify it as a blog entry even if it’s short or just a photo with a caption.

So between Key Smash! and K2R, I’ll try to post at least once a day this month. If there are days I end up only posting here, I’ll probably move the posts over when I’m done.

And somewhere along the line I’ll turn on Pterotype on K2R!

Update: I tried for a couple of days but dropped out. Though I did manage to make 19 posts across 15 days of the month between the two blogs – probably more, since I didn’t import all of the Key Smash! posts before taking it offline.

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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.