dougkearney

60-Year-Old Hippie Pitied By 40-Year-Old Punk

dougkearney — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:51:53 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO After spotting Dave Coleman, a 60-year-old with a graying ponytail and a frayed Hot Tuna shirt sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park, 40-year-old punk rocker Brian Patterson said Tuesday that he felt sorry for the aging hippie. “He's just living in the past when the world has obviously moved on,” said the middle-aged Patterson, adjusting the spiked leather collar on his neck. “Guy needs to act his age, 'cause nobody cares about that shit from 20 years ago. God, what a sad, out-of-touch loser.” According to nearby sources, both the 60-year-old hippie and the 40-year-old punk were later pitied by a 30-year-old raver sitting barefoot in the grass.

via The Onion.

Ticketed For Parking In Own Driveways

dougkearney — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:32:19 +0000

During a news conference Monday, Finkbeiner ignored a reporters question of whether the crackdown and fines were related to the citys budget crisis.

Isn’t that what most parking tickets are about? Why else would the cost of citations keep going up?

via Ohioans Ticketed For Parking In Own Driveways – News Story – KTVU San Francisco.

Underdogs

dougkearney — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:51:39 +0000

Rooting for the Lakers amounts to pulling for a bunch of elitists

In basketball its all about the underdog.

The great cover-up

dougkearney — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:01:15 +0000

This is the great shame of the Catholic Church. Not only were children around the world being molested and abused under the cover of religious authority, but the church hierarchy knew about it and not only covered it up, but allowed the pedophiles to continue victimizing children by moving them from parish to parish. This is incredibly twisted and horribly sad.

Wednesdays five-volume report sides almost completely with the former students accounts. It concludes that church officials always shielded their orders pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

via Thousands raped in Irelands Christian Brothers schools.

Justice

dougkearney — Sat, 02 May 2009 23:24:52 +0000

“The sentencing disparity is based on race and class, and borders on intentional,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “We have long known that the drugs [crack and powder cocaine - ed.] are pharmacologically identical and that the sentence imposes a disproportionate burden on African Americans. “Criminal justice is one of the last frontiers of the human and civil rights movement and this disparity is a drastic example of injustice.”

via Advocates predict change in cocaine sentences.

"You Are Being Lied to About Pirates"

dougkearney — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:14:20 +0000

In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the countrys food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

via Johann Hari: You Are Being Lied to About Pirates.

More information can be found in this article, with my pick for money quote:

During the four-day ordeal, however, we got a break from soaring unemployment, collapsing industries, toxic debt, global warming, Mexican drug wars, and the general breakdown of society. For four days we got to go back to a simpler timethe 1730s, to be specificand a good old-fashioned shootout with buccaneers. Three skinny kids born into a chaotic violent collapsed society were shot dead by the worlds most powerful military, and the Obama presidency was saved. Its a weird world for sure.

State goes after legendary all-ages music clubs

dougkearney — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 14:13:39 +0000

Sounds like some overzealous bureaucrats are running rampant over at Alcohol Beverage Control. Like so many others, I can’t imagine a world without the Du Nord, Great American Music Hall, or Bottom of the Hill. These venues are local treasures, let’s not let some over-reaching governmental agency close them down. I always liked how these places served food and usually had a meal while there (Bottom of the Hill Sunday BBQ anyone?), but I never knew that it was how they were able to be all ages venues.

State goes after legendary all-ages music clubs

Obama Depressed, Distant Since 'Battlestar Galactica' Series Finale

dougkearney — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:15:04 +0000

You and me both, man.

Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale | The Onion.

Annoying "feature"

dougkearney — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:38:11 +0000

In Mail.app, when you compose or receive a message with a photo or one page PDF file, it appears “inline”, meaning the file is previewable right in the message without needing to open another application such as Preview. Other types of documents, including multi-page PDFs appear as an small document icon. Now, this is a great feature for photos, but in my experience (and I’ve been exclusively using Macs in the workplace for 10 years now), the inline PDFs just confuse people. One thing they don’t understand is when they attach the PDF, it the document appears to be “open”, rather than attached. “I tried to send you the PDF but it kept opening when I tried to attach it”. I’ve explained that for this type of file you can right-click and “view as attachment”, and also that what they are seeing is not necessarily what the receiver of the message will see, depending on the behavior of their mail client. Another issue is that when a recipient of an attached inline one-page PDF wants to print the document, they just print the email resulting in a small “thumbnail” image of the document, rather than opening the PDF in another application and then printing. Further, when you attach or receive a mix of one-page and two-page PDFs, some are inline and some are attachment icons, but the average user sees no rhyme or reason and has no idea why some of them are “open” and other not! The proper way to deal with these inline attachments is the same way you would deal with any attachment, double-click them to open them in your default image or pdf viewer.

Ok, so I don’t like this behavior in Mail.app. I know that I can control it on individual attachments with the context menu command “show as icon”, but can I set this as a default? Yes I can. The only drawback for me is that I wish I could continue to view images inline, but all PDFs as icons.

To view all attachments as icons in Mail.app by default you can do one of two things – run the terminal command defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing NO or use the excellent system preference pane “Secrets (OSX 10.5 only)” Once installed you can access Secrets from the System Preferences. Select Mail from the list on the right and uncheck “show attachments inline” box as shown in the photo:

First trip to the record store

dougkearney — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:00:11 +0000

I’m sure my parents had bought some Beatles albums or some such thing as a birthday gift when I was growing up, but I remember the first time I went by myself to the record store and bought some albums with my own money. It was in Boulder, Colorado, where I lived for one year, 7th grade, the ’79-80 school year. I rode my bike down to the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder (as seen in Mork & Mindy!), and bought Steve Martin’s Comedy is Not Pretty (his third and third best album), along with Led Zepplin’s In Through The Out Door, which came with a variety of different covers, but was wrapped in brown paper so you couldn’t choose which one you wanted. Did they think people would keep buying them until they had the full set? This was the last actual Zep album, past their prime. I remember riding the bike home, which had the drop-down ten-speed style handlebars, and pinning the albums with my thumbs. This caused them to bend a bit but caused no permanent damage. Why I couldn’t plan ahead enough to bring a backpack, I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with being 12.