Posts with mood ecstatic (8)
A big, big day for gay rights
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2012-11-07 09:57:00
Tags: gay politics
Words: 192
Along with all the other stuff, yesterday was a huge day for gay rights:
- Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin, becoming the first openly gay US senator.
- There were four same-sex marriage measures on the ballot - Maine, Maryland, and Washington were looking to allow it, and Minnesota was looking to prohibit it in their constitution. We won in Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota. (the numbers are still being counted in Washington, but it's looking good!) To put that in perspective, same-sex marriage has _never_ been allowed when put to a popular vote (it's something like 0 for 32), and same-sex marriage bans in the state constitution have only failed once (Arizona in 2006). The marriage map has been updated!
Now, the four states are all pretty Democratic-leaning, and the votes were close, but between people getting more comfortable with it and the fact that the president and Democratic party endorsed it, I think the tide is turning towards same-sex marriage, and it's turning quickly. In Maine just four years ago, voters rejected same-sex marriage 53-47%, and it looks like it passed this time by the same margin, which would be a 6 point swing!
old-school 3D
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2010-04-06 15:52:00
Tags: palmpre wedding
Words: 174
We watched Coraline last night - the Blu-Ray disc included a 3D versions, and it came with four pairs of old-school 3D glasses (with red and green lenses), so we gave it a shot. It actually worked reasonably well - it took a little while for my eyes to adjust but you could definitely see the 3D effect! The colors did appear a little weird, though. I'm guessing they did red and green for the lenses instead of red and blue because Coraline's hair is blue. After it was over, looking out of one eye looked very different than the other - our eyes had compensated and now saw the opposite color they had been looking through.
We picked up our wedding album today! The binding is very elegant and the pictures turned out well. I also got a CD of lots of pictures which I'll post in the near future.
I'm going to Palm Developer Day in California! (as kind of a birthday present) Looking forward to meeting people and learning more about WebOS and such.
health care (basically) passed! and a local shoutout
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2010-03-22 14:28:00
Tags: lj for webos essay projects politics links
Words: 409
The health care bill passed the House! The plan is for the Senate to pass it this week and then Obama will sign it into law.
The bill: Here's some information on the final bill - it was confusing for a while with the House bill and the Senate bill, but this is the final one. It expands coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans. It prohibits lifetime limits on insurance coverage and denial of coverage due to preexisting conditions. Yes, it's not a perfect bill, and it's hard to predict how well the cost control measures will work, and there's no public option, but there's a lot of good stuff in the bill. And it will be easier to adjust this bill in the future than if we had started over or given up because it wasn't "good enough". As James Fallows said:
There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these. Despite everything that is wrong with this bill and the thousand adjustments that will be necessary in the years to come, this is a very important step.
same-sex marriage legal in vermont!
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2009-04-07 10:03:00
Tags: gay politics
Words: 35
This just in - the House passed the override vote 100-49, which is exactly what was needed. Vermont is the first state to allow same-sex marriage without a court order.
I have a map to update!
still up watching results
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2008-11-04 23:57:00
Tags: politics
Words: 50
Obama already has 338 electoral votes and he could very well win North Carolina and Indiana!
McCaul beat Larry Joe Doherty in TX-10. Oh well.
Staying up for a bit to see how Prop 8's doing (exit polls show it losing but it's close) and to avoid a hangover tomorrow :-)
President-elect Barack Obama
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2008-11-04 22:15:00
Tags: politics
Words: 10
He took Ohio AND Florida. Well deserved. I'm so happy!
meaning to post for a while - here it comes!
Mood: ecstatic
Music: New Kids On The Block - "Keep On Smilin'"
Posted on 2005-06-17 12:54:00
Tags: linux asmc tivo family computer
Words: 1065
Hmm. I meant to post yesterday, but I guess I've been kinda busy. I'm leaving after work to meet my family at a condo in Conroe (hmm, that kinda rhymes!) for Father's Day, as wonderjess has been mentioning. It'll be nice to see everyone in a relaxed environment. And apparently there will be pie! Mmm.
So David left yesterday to go home for Father's Day as well, so I was on my own yesterday. Work went pretty well (finally fixed my stupid problem), but I didn't leave until 5:40, which is really cutting it close to eat dinner and get to ASMC rehearsal by 7. I ended up cutting dinner a little short and not finishing the spaghetti I had reheated so I could get there on time. Baaad move, as we didn't start until 7:15, and we didn't "really start" (i.e. start running a scene) until almost 7:50. This is frustrating. But I'm still gonna make an effort to get there on time. And I brought the new Penrose book The Road to Reality, which is >1100 pages and supposedly a heavy read (I'm still reading introductory math stuff, but even some of it is stuff I haven't looked at in a long time). It's a birthday present (thanks, Mom & Dad!) that I'm slowly working my way through...
Rehearsal went well - we did "my" scene, and I have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work. Although it takes a lot of energy - we're supposed to be generally disorganized, running around and poking each other and stuff. Fun, though :-)
After I got home, I did some packing, printed out directions (there are apparently no good ways to get to Conroe from here, everywhere has me going on like 6 or 7 different highways...), and worked on a computer problem that I eventually solved.
So one of David's and mine (um, how does the grammar work there?) longish-term projects is to get TV shows off of the TiVo (using TiVoToGo) and burn them onto a DVD. So my first approach was to get them off onto David's computer, turn them into MPEGs, then edit them on my computer and burn them to DVD. I tried this a while ago, and I couldn't find good programs to do it on Linux (and burning a video DVD on Linux is crazy complicated, with .xml configuration files to configure the menus and stuff like that. Stuff that I probably could eventually figure out, but I finally gave up). So our next approach was to download the trial software that TiVo recommends to do it, and see if we could get that working.
The software is Sonic MyDVD, and it worked well once I figured out that I had to downgrade TiVo Desktop to 2.0 (you can download it from here) - it crashes all the time with version 2.1. Anyway, so I did that and eventually created an .iso image, and things were looking good.
A few days ago, I tried transfering the .iso file to my computer using WinSCP. It was going well, until the program wasn't able to make the file bigger than 2GB - it would error, and then quit and crash if you tried to reconnect and resume. This is where I was until last night.
So David and I had a number of ideas why this was happening - maybe the WinSCP program didn't work with greater than 2GB files, maybe the protocol didn't support it, or maybe my filesystem didn't support it. I had done some research that suggested that the protocol did support it, the WinSCP program did work with it, and my filesystem (ext3) did support it. So I was a bit at a loss.
The night before I wrote a quick program in C to try to create a 3GB file and see what happened. Lo and behold, it would quit once the file was 2GB, saying "File size limit exceeded". So I figured it was one of two things - either my C program needed to use 64-bit aware function calls, or my filesystem didn't support it.
So, we come to last night. First I looked at the filesystem, and everything I could find seemed to say that ext3 with 4KB block sizes should support up to 2TB files. I even tried creating a new ext3 filesystem on a spare partition and creating a big file there - no dice. So then I thought maybe my particular C program was the problem, and found a bunch of random documentation on the web about how to make the calls correctly. But all the documentation was old, and everything suggested that these calls should have been being made correctly by default, and indeed I couldn't solve it that way.
So I was kinda frustrated at this point, and thinking maybe my particular ssh daemon (the server side of SCP) was broken in some odd way or something. Finally, inspiration struck - there's a shell command "ulimit" that sets various limits on stuff you can do - how many files you can have open, how many processes you can be running, and, at long last, the size of files you can create! I had apparently played around with this before and set the maximum size up to 2GB (back in early college, I think). And I think the word "limit" in the error message I got should have tipped me off a little bit. But anyway, I fixed that, and it transferred over just fine. Then I burned it onto DVD (after first creating a data DVD that had the .iso file on it - doh!), and lo and behold, it played in the DVD player. Hooray!
That was oddly cathartic.
Anyway, the upshot of the story is that I was up until 2:20 or so, which was kinda fun (especially since I got stuff working!), but now I'm a little on the tired side. Should be OK for the drive, though.
Public Service Announcement: It has come to my attention that some readers of this journal are not impressed by del.icio.us. So, to increase understanding and adoptance, I will be posting neat features of del.icio.us on my future posts. (starting with the next one) Look for them in a journal near you!
In a related story, LJ added support for tags, which is pretty cool, so I'm gonna start tagging my entries. And you should too! :-)
I'm in a happy place!
Mood: ecstatic
Music: Depeche Mode - "Behind the Wheel"
Posted on 2005-04-18 12:36:00
Words: 129
So I'm in a really good mood. This week is my birthday, I'm well-rested, work's going really well, and it's a beautiful day outside!
Well, actually it's cloudy and raining on and off. But I'm still happy!
Weekend was fun - hung out with onefishclappin and krikwennavd on Friday night, played some games, watched some Veggietales. Good stuff. Hung out with wildrice13 on Saturday, played some Frisbee and later FFX-2 (although I was programming during most of that time, and I mostly finished the project I was working on, which tends to pump me up). Visited Sarah and then watched Shaolin Soccer with djedi and destroyerj (I'm really into these <lj user> tags today...).
I have some thoughts about my birthday that I'll be posting later. Now, back to work!
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