fetjuel’s Neighborhood

I remember the Mac shareware boom in the 90's. You'd get a CD-ROM tucked inside a Mac magazine stuffed full of shareware goodies and the quality was actually pretty good. I'd usually find a few gems per disc.

I remember the version tracker boom several years ago. It was sort of like the first boom but with all the improvements the Internet enables, like ratings, comments, and "more like this" sidebars.

I think the AppStore boom is going to be a much bigger deal. The distribution is better, sure,, but the exciting part is that this will be a whole new platform.

I think I'm about to download about 100 new apps in the near future. I'm not kidding or exaggerating.

Obama is a centrist. If this is a shock to you, you *really* haven't been paying attention.

This is why i'm voting for him. If you want a liberal version of Bush, completely unwilling to compromise and keeping your lib cred intact, I hear Nader is running again.

Just over 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln warned us that "a house divided against itself cannot stand". While the image of national disunion, prophetic as it was, was what captured the national imagination, his actual message was not that the house would fall, not that the Union would crumble, but that

It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it... or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States...

His speech was a call to action, a warning that the Union was on a path that would lead to that which the North felt was inconceivable, the full legalization of slavery. It was a warning of the course the Republic was on, unless direct and strong action was taken to avert it. Sadly his speech was not strong enough to rally him the support needed to attain the Senate, let alone achieve his goal. Rather, it wasn't until the house actually began to fall, that states seceded, that a war was fought, that he achieved his goal and then paid its price.

I can easily imagine the horror he felt as his nation trod relentlessly towards slavery or disunion. I can imagine it because our house, our houses today are divided. The nation is divided, the Republican and Democratic parties are each divided, the proponents of civil liberties are divided. Polarization is rampant, and it endangers what we cherish.

A bit over 250 years ago Franklin wrote the following

As to the other two acts. The Massachusetts must suffer all the hazards and mischiefs of war, rather than admit the alteration of their charters and laws by parliament. "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety".

The last quote, which he published in slightly altered form a few years later, is reminiscent of his maxim of 270 years ago to "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

All of this is advice that is extremely timely. All of it came to mind as I read Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann, two staunch and outspoken defenders of our civil liberties and tradition of the rule of law not men, bickering with each other, sparked by Senator Obama's abandonment of his pledge to fight against retroactive immunity and the expansion of presidential power, presumably to increase his chances of being elected. All this while we as a nation take step after inexorable step away from habeas corpus, away from posse comitatus, away from the separation of powers, away from the rule of law towards the rule of men, the ever strengthening unenumerated inherent power of the man who is the decider in unitary executive.

The time has come to put aside the bickering between Obama Democrats and PUMA "Clintonians" and put a stop to the Republican advancement of the authoritarian destruction of our civil liberties. The time has come for civil libertarians such as Greenwald and Olbermann to put aside the bickering between them. The time has come for Obama to refuse to sell liberty to purchase power. The time has come for virtue over greed. The time has come to realize that it is not immigrants, legal or illegal who are stealing our jobs, but corporations and wealthy CEOs that are shipping those jobs overseas. The time has come to realize that Islamic radicals cannot steal our freedom, only we can sell it out of fear and greed.

The time has come for Republicans to stop sacrificing every conservative principle, every liberty in the name of party loyalty. Authoritarian rule by a unified executive that can at a whim nationalize the National Guard, and employ the Armed Forces in the US in "other circumstances", augmenting that with mercenaries who operate outside both American law and that of the nation they are "helping", and law breaking public carriers immunized at the word of the unified executive--these are not conservative values. Crippling national debt is not fiscal conservatism whether it is brought on by a spendthrift congress or a Commander in Chief who refuses to budget or collect taxes for America's longest war.

The Supreme Court recently reaffirmed that the Constitution valued habeas corpus even before it affirmed the Bill of Rights. And out of party loyalty, and fear of stateless terrorists, Republicans and Conservatives pilloried them for it. What conservative principle is served by fear mongering, of surrendering our most fundamental rights? None! The only reason that Liberals and Conservatives are fighting over this issue is because of what side the other is on.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. PUMA, Greenwald, Olbermann, Get A Grip! Sell not Liberty to purchase power. Obama, stand firm! Do not capitulate on principles for fear of being soft on terrorism. It is not "Strong on Terrorism" to give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety! It certainly isn't soft on terrorism to hold law breakers accountable--even if they were asked to break the law by the president.

We have allowed polarization to divide our country and our parties. We have allowed fear to cause us to sell out our principles and our liberties. Great Republics do not fall to small bands of fanatics. They fall when fear and divisiveness cause the people to surrender their rights and freedoms to the Leader, the Dictator, the Emperor. They fall when they allow their armies, their mercenaries, their spies, their police to be turned on them. They fall when they allow the government to keep a "little list" of people who cannot move freely, when they allow free speech to be confined to zones, when the leader's agents are immune from the law. They fall when the wealthy can buy the law.

Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln, Eisenhower all have warned us repeatedly against fear, greed, manipulation, the combination of money and military power. People! Stop! Think! Stop hating the enemy. Stop fearing the bogeyman. Dear me. Obama and Clinton differ in the details. Greenwald and Olbermann are on the same side of all the issues. They're calling each other names over who should be blamed for what. It doesn't matter who is blamed! What matters is what we do! Anthony Kennedy is a Conservative for great Ghu's sake.

When did it become a great Conservative value to fear monger!? Scalia says that Americans will die if we follow habeas corpus? The McCain campaign thinks it would be good for Republican political aspirations if after 8 years of the Republican Bush administration a terrorist attack was successful!? Republicans are rooting for Al Qaeda? Huh? The failure of the Republicans to keep us safe means we need more years of them? What?

Stop! Take a breath. Let's take a quick survey: Small government, low taxes, balanced budgets, states rights, free market economics, original intent, strict constructionism. Aren't those conservative values? Where did they go? The Republicans are so afraid of dissent among the ranks that they are willing to sell conservative principles for party unity and loyalty and follow a Republican president wherever he will lead.

The Democrats have so sanctified and so demonized their own leaders that they are willing to follow the Republicans into the same unprincipled "rule by men, not laws" future. The Dems, and the advocates of civil liberties are so focused on casting blame that they will attack their own allies.

Fear and division.

A House divided against itself cannot stand.
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

Please, get a grip.

Thank you. I'll be quiet now. We return you to the civil war, already in progress.

Kesh’s post reminds me: Firefox 3 comes out tomorrow, Tuesday the 17th—but I’ve already been using it. Despite overcoming the lack of Greasemonkey and Firebug, Safari still has no Awesomebar, and I can happily report that since upgrading to Firefox 3 rc2 (now rc3) and Firefox 3 versions of my extensions (Firebug, Greasemonkey, and Adblock Plus), I haven’t noticed any crashing, either.

• That first link is about Spread Firefox’s Download Day 2008, the attempt to get Firefox into the Guinness World Record book for “most software downloads in 24 hours.”


• Deb Richardson compiled a field guide to Firefox 3 showing off all the new features and improvements.


• If you don’t want to read, watch Mike Beltzner’s screencast guide to the major features instead.


• The improved default theme for OS X is more OS X-y, but if it’s not quite OS X-y enough for you with all the rounded buttons and whatnot, try one of the GrApple themes.


• Lastly, feel for Mark Smith, who’s working at Mozilla, supporting all this craziness.

If you aren’t going to use Firefox 3, there’s still good news: even at $0, the market for browsers is competitive again. Safari is a better browser because of Firefox, and Firefox 3 is a better browser because of Safari. Here’s looking forward to a Safari 4 that makes me want to switch again! (But hopefully not too soon.)

My favorite thing art school was the peer review. I loved getting  feedback on my art, and I loved talking to other artists about their  approach. It made all of us better.

I just got back from Apple's big developer conference, and realized  how much I missed peer reviews. I don't know that I have ever had  an idea of higher quality than the ideas that routinely bubble out  of a brainstorming session.

I am thrilled about the ideas I will be implementing in the coming  months, but I can't take sole credit for any of them. But I don't  mind.

It's like being given the best food you've ever tasted - don't be  mad it's not your recipe, learn from it, enjoy it, and incorporate  it into your personal cookbook.

To follow up:

• With stories like this, I really really hope what Walt (I think) pointed out is right, and they announce a new iPod Touch in a month or two. After all, they did it with the original iPod Touch, announcing it in September after the iPhone came out in June. OTOH maybe “we fixed all the design bugs with the iPhone!” includes fixing the need for a phoneless iPod Touch.
• Jesse Gardner posted directions and an awesome icon for doing the Fluid menu extra thing with the iMT app for Movable Type. Nice! I found how to fix the icon problem I had by digging around inside a generated FluidInstance. You can also set whether the FluidInstance defaults to a regular SSB or a menu extra, which I was hoping to do to make a distributable FluidInstance for an iPhone app... but the developer asks that you not do that, which makes me rather less excited about Fluid when wearing my web app developer hat.

So one of the things I did to build it up... I branded it.

DSC01972

I added a couple buttons since last time: the LJ button Abe got me and a Yelp button (the purple one at the bottom).

Buttons-2

Jonathan Gitlin at Ars Technica's Infinite Loop mentions what I've been mulling since Monday: the iPod Touch is now a pretty bad deal. The price is higher but the TCO is lower... as long as you don't have a cell phone. I'm not so hot on the new AT&T deal, so I would definitely probably maybe order a 16 GB iPod Touch with GPS at $300. But $410, with no GPS? I hope there's another shoe to drop.

In other Mac news, I had ignored Fluid, but read about it today when I thought it was something else. The Menu Extra feature looks great for iPhone apps like Blog It.

Blog-it-desktop

Sorry for not updating~ I've got some small news with my doll family but that can wait until I take the related photos ;; Anyway today was the first day of the Dolpa but unfortunately my camera card malfunctioned a little bit after it began.... so most of the pictures will be added later since I managed to get some taken on the wonderful Evelyn's camera.

The ones I'm posting now are a bit bad...soooo sorry! The following are what were displayed at the FDQ limited model area. I'm so happy to see Irvine is gorgeous in real life and not orange! The SD16s are still not my cup of tea but I'm sure many will find them to be beautiful girls. There were also FCS dolls in that area, including the new Sato-exclusive MSD fairy models but unfortunately my camera stopped working at that point ;;..........

More to come-!

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Now for better photos! These are for the second day...I brought a different memory card with me this time so no problems! 

Westley is today's disgruntled dress model...

 Limited Items & Workshop - Today was mostly for buying limited items and the makeup and body maintenance workshops. Volks brought over some outfits made by Japanese vendors as well, I got there a bit late so a lot of the goods were gooone ;;; But I managed to snag a cute MSD dress set for girls by Tsukika that Westley had to model since I had him along today, he wasn't very happy about that... 8w8; There were also kimono and a limited elf outfit for sale.

Limited Dolls - Irvin was on display again today accompanied by the mysterious snowskinned Irvin and the Yo-SD Four Sisters (Megu, Nana, Kira, Sara). Both Irvins are beautiful but I've been trying so hard to keep my collection in the smaller range so it was a bit difficult to turn them down. The Yo-SDs were so cute! I gave in and put in a ticket for Nana; they'll be contacting the winners via e-mail on June 16th so I can decide then if I win her.

Unfortunately a sad incident took place during the event. 6 unique and beautiful dolls that were on display on the first day, along with one of the Irvins, went missing overnight. It was heartbreaking to hear Mr. Shigeta and Mikey break the news to us, and hopefully they will be found and donated to the Make A Wish foundation as Mr. Shigeta has hoped. More information can be found in the Den of Angels thread. I will be on the lookout so everyone else, please also make an effort to locate these unfortunate dolls.