Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Everyone’s asking me what I thought of the inauguration yesterday and the contracted speech (no, Obama didn’t write it — a 27 year old white professional propagandist kid did)… It will be very interesting to see how much actual “CHANGE” President Obama is able push through over the next few years. I think he’s more centrist than many of his followers see him as — he’s no Kucinich — but at the same time, I think he’s more dedicated to and capable of actually doing what he says. That said, as much as the neo-con figurehead/mascot that was Bush rode off into the sunset (that is, sold his faux ranch and moved into a whites-only gated urban community), the forces he represented — the rich — are deeply ingrained in the political process and still have an enormous amount of power.
Take the widely supported financial bailouts… In my opinion, they do very little to help the “little man”, since it’s all money borrowed — with enormous interest — from the people anyway. As I see it, the rich unsustainably stole enormous amounts of money from the system, and when the system collapsed, instead of being forced to put that money back into the system, they simply took by force the required assets from the poor in order to allow their crime to continue. One of the biggest reasons that I think Obama could be a good thing is that he’s the least indebted to the wealthy and the corporate, and the most recently poor personally. For the last hundred-plus years, the US government (and really, most governments around the world) has worked for one primary purpose — to move wealth up the class system, and keep it there. What I’m most excited about is that Obama may be a politician dedicated to reversing that trend while at the same time protecting the free market system.
Anyway… I’m continuing to work on the Kubla Khan children’s book… Today after school I’m going to pick up a couple more panels so I can get started on the next pages. I think I’m going to 90% finish everything, and then come back to them for the finishing touches. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to post-process them digitally or keep the process “pure”. I’m leaning toward the latter but there’s a lot to be said about the former.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I doubt this will be of immediate use to any readers, but you never know.
I was moving my sister’s blog, and one of the problems was that her previous site had crashed, and her old host was uncooperative in giving her FTP access to download it. Luckily most of the files were linked from another blog, so I had many of their URLs. What I had was a text/html file that contained the links, so I wrote a utility that goes through an html file and finds all the links off a given URL, and then downloads those files to a local directory.
Usage… you’ll be asked for a bunch of different things:
- Input File – This is the local file that contains the links. It’ll use all links enclosed in single or double quotes (ie. links, images, everything) and download all types of files. Up to 5,000 distinct links can be done. Example: C:\Documents and Settings\billy\Desktop\harvested.html
- Link Site – This is the URL to look for links from. For example: https://zentastic.me/
- Output Directory – This is the local directory that the links should be saved to. For example: C:\Documents and Settings\billy\Desktop\dl
It’s pretty simple to use. It will do larger files, but on anything larger than a couple meg it’s pretty slow. If someone needs a version that does more files or larger files, wants a GUI, or needs custom web-harvesting applications, drop me a line. They only take me a few minutes to customize.
Download: linklist.exe (35k)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
We got some active time in the last few days — no video games! Yesterday we played at the park, and went for a walk through the forest. Because of the fresh snow, there were dozens of bunny trails for us to “track” on our exploration. Today we skated at the Natrel rink until a bit after sunset and then came home to a nice big healthy meal. I think now I’ll paint until Caitlin gets home and then — today being an appropriate day for it — wrap up on the couch and watch “W” since I just got the screener…
As you know from my other blog, I’m a big fan of classic fiberglass VW kit cars, so I was quite thrilled to stumble upon a related gallery of fiberglass boats from the fifties that mimic the styling cues of cars of the time… There are some absolutely beautiful boats on the site (the first in my images here especially), and they capture an era of design that I like a lot — they evoke a period of unbridled optimism for the future. Maybe when Caitlin and I finally move back out East we’ll get a motorboat — I love waterskiing and I’m pretty sure Nefarious would too. Our homestead there is on the Mira River.
In the “oh so sweet” category, we were telling jokes at dinner yesterday — you know, like “why is six afraid of seven — BECAUSE SEVEN ATE NINE!!!” and here is Nefarious’s made-up-on-the-spot joke:
“Why did daddy cross the road?”
“To get to the beautiful girl he loves!”
Nefarious has managed to collect enough change from couch cushions and such that tonight after a forced visit to the park (it’s not her priority today) she’s going to drag me to Walmart and have the thrill of buying her own Littlest Pet Shop stuff. Total obsession!
