That moment of illegitimacy

I was driving into work today when I heard our president this morning announce his illegitimacy. It was a moment that nobody has heard since 1974 and when I heard it I felt a strange, shrill clutch at the base of my skull.

During a press conference on Monday President Bush announced, "I think about Iraq every day." To me, this statement had the exact same flavor as Richard Nixon's famous quote, "I am not a crook." It was said in the same voice, the tenor that announces that he is not believed and he knows it and, perhaps, he is not to be believed after all.

Iraq is without a doubt the most significant news story of our day, yet the networks insist it won't play well to the American people and so it gets very little airtime; perhaps as much as the latest celebrity gossip. It is a war this President got us into. For him to have to insist that he "thinks about Iraq every day" implies that we, the American people, do not believe that he does.

Patch against LJ-Update 3.3 to support tagging.

The following is a diff entry against the emacs client lj-update 3.3 that supports tagging. Note that the client makes no effort to check the tags, ensure they're consistent with anything else you've ever done, or enforce comma-correctness. Brad's entry makes it clear that tags can be "short phrases," therefore it's up to you to put commas between your "short phrase" and single-word tags.

( Diff follows )

Well, that's a little bit better

I've gotten two things done: I've gotten my pink-and-white theme back, somewhat, although there are still things I want to do with the page, and I've gotten my emacs Livejournal client to post with tags. So, all in all, it's been a successful day, geek-wise. And hey, that was my first time ever hacking elisp. I'm pleased to see that it went so well.

I'm so happy that they've chosen to put tags in, although it would take me forever to update the tags on a given post. There has to be an LJ protocol for changing the tags on a post you've made, right? Not that I want to go through the approximately 445,000 words of LJ posts I've made so far and tag them all.

(Set and Osiris, is it really 445,000 words, not counting comments on other people's blogs? I guess so.)

Trying to recover

Well, I have managed for four days in a row now to get enough sleep, and I'm happy about that. Yamaarashi-chan has come to live with us now, and we're getting into the groove of her night rituals. That is one heavily medicalized kid: prescription toothpaste, allergy medicine, and then there's the daily therapy for her lazy eye. I discovered this afternoon that she's been cheating, tilting her head in one direction so that her weak eye does very little work and her strong eye does all the moving to generate parallax. (Oooh, I've always wanted to use the word "parallax" in a sentence.)

I haven't written much in the past four days, not for lack of wanting. It's just that all of life has been crushing in on me, hectic, frustrating, stressful. Still, I'm getting miracles done. At work, I spent three weeks down in the bowels of Samba, trying to make it user-friendly with our product. I wrote thousands of lines of code. You know what got people's attentions? I made a one-line code change to the menuing system so that now instead of just popping into view, they fade in gradually over 0.2 seconds. It looks great, but it's just a setting.

Last night, Omaha and I went over to friends' house for Midsommer Rite, where we sat around and ate honeyed bread and had mead (or apple juice for the kids). Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan love the two little girls who live there, twins with bright blond hair, but that much childish conspiracy frightens me sometimes.

Tonight, I made angel-hair pasta with scallop-and-lemon marinara. It was a new recipe, with the scallops cooked first and then the pan scrapings, garlic, lemon juice, parsley, capers, one big can of whole tomatoes (gently smushed with a spoon), and white wine all cooked together into a sauce. I put the scallops back in to rewarm them, then cut up three scallops for the girls. With a drinkable but unassuming shiraz called "Little Penguin," (I'm a Linux geek; I got suckered by the penguin logo, but it wasn't a waste, it's a good wine for the price) it was delicious. The girls made it all disappear.

The past three weeks, Omaha and I have been on the go-go-go. Barely time for each other, we haven't had time for the garden, so it's a no-go this year. Sad. And I really haven't had time to do the proper maintenence on it anyway. I discovered this evening when I went out that the one hardy plant I rely on, the parsley, was being choked to death by morning glory ivys. Friday evening and Saturday morning, I think it's time to get out the shears and commit some major botanicide. (Is that a word?)