It's the Secrecy, Stupid

Enron is a sideshow. The persistent ill-behavior of the present administration is most evident in its relentless bent toward secrecy – secrecy for Republican administrations, that is.
A court just ruled that the Admin must release thousands of documents pertaining to those same energy policy task-force meetings that Cheney is stonewalling the GAO about. Hiding of Reagan-Bush era records is also telling. You can run, W., from history but you can’t hide.
x-post: mediajunk

frazzled, but

the pressure from the book in the home stretch is getting to me. (why is it always at the end that you think of great topics that should have been addressed in earlier chapters?) i’m doing what i can to stay centered, but i’m having trouble relaxing. remind myself:
busy < > rushing
relaxed < > lazy
on the good news front, the first half of the payment for SYX.com from ShipYardXchange.com finally came through. TiBook here I come….

Parents and OS X

writes about converting his dad from a Mac to a BeOS box to a PC and now back to the Mac with the new OS. I never would have dared try to set up my parents on the Be system but I did intuitively put my dad in a Mac when it was time for him to get a computer. Later his company got him a Sony Vaio which I told him was quite the status symbol for a salesman, but he never liked it as much as the Mac.
Then this past xmas the kids got him a new iMac (not the new model, but the blueberry kind) running OS X and when he has questions about that system I often don’t know how to answer them (not till I get my new TiBook of course, heh heh).
For instance, he recently asked me, ” One technical problem that seems to escape us is that Mom in looking up houses on the internet managed to have one picture remain posted up in the left hand corner of the bar running across the top of the screen when we go onto the internet.
“I tried dragging it to the trash but it just popped out and she even returned to the site and tried to remove it with no success. Any suggestions?”
I couldn’t quite picture this… A picture of a house became an icon in the top-left of their menu bar? There’s no Apple menu now in OS X, right? So what icon goes in the top-left normally? I asked him, “a picture? how big? on the menu bar? only when you go on the internet? i’m trying to picture this.”
His reply: “I get it, “picture” it!!! Ha Ha!!! Serially tho folks, it is a reduced version of a full screen picture of a house. … Instead of going away when she quit the program, this one particular shot stayed and has located itself in the upper left hand corner of the top bar. That’s not the dock, rather a menu of choices.”
i’m not sure what it is.

does Verizon bite?

is it just me or just where i live (s.f. east bay, hillocks), or is it my habit of moving around? or does verizon totally suck? what is the current standard of lameness in wireless phones? i’m new to this and it’s hard to judge. can a specific phone be especially bad at keeping connection up?

cat vigilance

because our adopted cat fraidy is only allowed in the kitchen of the house, we constantly have to shoo her out of the bedroom or the livingroom or my office. this leads to a hallucinatory effect called phantom cat where a pair of boots or a pocketbook or even some socks – out of the corner of an eye – register as a sneaky cat sneaking where she’s not allowed to go.
it doesn’t help that fraidy enjoys the game of being caught and then running like mad back to the kitchen where she jumps into her basket and pretends she’s asleep.
so, here i am coming out of the shower recently and what do my blurry eyes see but a cat insouciantly lounging on the table in our bedroom:

subconscious much?

so i’m in the middle of my “long morning” yoga routine when the phone rings. i hate it when people call before 9 A.M. but then i hear the voice on my answering machine. it’s my therapist wondering where i am. once again, i’ve missed my Monday morning appointment! how frustrating! am i doing it on purpose?

radioactive smoke alarms

well, the smoke alarms in our house have both been nonprotecting us for some time now. there’s no battery in one and the battery in the other is dead. recently i bought some new alarms that claim to have a 10-year battery life, but it seems that they all use a radioactive element to detect the smoke so now i’m waiting to hear back from the Alameda County hazardous waste disposal authority to tell me how to get rid of the defunct alarms.
x
in other news, my vain anticipation of a possible TV appearance in two weeks led me to go get my hair cut extremely short. i love getting my hair cut. i like being pampered, having someone shampoo my hair. i like the light gentle touching and mild shearing feeling as hair is cut and shaved off me. sometimes it give me chills. sometimes it almost feels illicit, so intimate.

message in a bottle, yeah

proving somehow that life is continuous and accretive, and not a series of disconnected flashes and interludes as it sometimes seen, i am now discovering on my hard disk, in my e-mail archives, and stashed away on my web server many little time capsules left there for me to find by an earlier me.
i tell you, bit by bit, i am hooking up all these little connections from flow to flow. as bones said after wearing the hairdryer of knowledge: a child could do it! a child could do it!

slowly, the beast awakens

put together a page for my past online journal experiments and some of the ongoing newblogs I hope to make part of my PEP project, including Uncle John’s Blog for Dead Heads and the already mentioned artsflow blog for people into emerging art and literature.

if you are dick cheney, press 6

check out http://witcity.com/enron/index.htm for wit city’s take on enron’s voicemail tree.