Procrastiblog

October 30, 2006

Act Now

Filed under: Not Tech, Politics — Chris @ 7:33 pm

Tired of reading snarky comments about George Bush and George Allen? Step up and do something about it!

Living, as I do, in a state where the Democratic candidates for governor and Senate are up by 48 and 36 points, respectively, and and a district where our congresswoman (Nydia Valazquez) won with 86% of the vote in 2004, it can seem like there’s nothing one can do to make a difference in this world. And there’s not. However…

There are lots of close races in the greater New York area that could benefit from a little old-fashioned door-knocking and phone banking. Rick Santorum, the man who can’t draw a distinction between contraception and bestiality, is on the ropes just one state away. 8 of the most hotly contested House seats in the country are in New York and Connecticut, including New York’s 26th, home of Tom “I think maintaining a Republican majority is more important than protecting a few kids from a sexual predator” Reynolds.

Next weekend, I am going on canvassing trips to Westchester and Pennsylvania organized by Act Now New York. You should come too. If you can’t do that, you should make phone calls. If you can’t do that, you should donate money.

And if for some reason you read this blog but you don’t think that Republicans should be held accountable for the appalling corruption and incompetence that have been on display in Washington (and Iraq) (and New Orleans) for the last six years… I have no words. None.

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Edgy Eft-ing Flash

Filed under: Tech — Chris @ 5:11 pm

Thinking about installing Ubuntu Linux 6.10 aka Edgy Eft? Thinking about upgrading to Firefox 2.0 on Linux (the first implies the second)? A word to the wise: Firefox 2.0 is highly incompatible with the Flash plugin. Like, your browser will crash in the blink of an eye if there’s so much as a YouTube embed on a web page (and there are precious few YouTube-free web pages these days… ah, Web 2.0). Never fear! Just add

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

as the next-to-last line in /usr/bin/firefox (before the exec line). Makes Firefox YouTube-arific. For this and other useful Edgy tips, visit The Ubuntu Guide.

P.S. This is actually Major Complaint the Second about my Edgy upgrade. Major Complaint the First is that it has completely hosed my Suspend/Hibernate settings. I am hopeful that this will fix itself with time. Major Complaint the Third is that Broadcom and Nvidia still won’t play nice, about which I am less optimistic (There is actually a potential fix for this in not-CVS, but it is entirely unclear* when it might show up in a mainstream distro.)

* Seriously unclear. As in: maybe next month and maybe never.

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