mushin no shin

After stumbling to the computer this morning, as coffee medicated a mild hangover from a kickass shindig the agonyzer hosted with his partners in crime to celebrate their success in a damn fine production of A Christmas Carol — my firefox went batshit and commandeered my morning.

Long story short, over the course of maybe a half to a dozen page loads, the thing just ground to a halt. It wouldn’t respond within the page or in the menus. It acted like took control of X, or at least of KDE, by seeming not to let you switch to a different window, but it was actually just slow, and once switched, you could move between all the *other* windows and terminals with ease. One thing it did leave me was the ability to close the program from the corner ‘X’, and it closed quickly and cleanly. I’d relaunch — no alerts, it was a clean close and didn’t believe itself to have crashed — and as the tabs from the previous session opened, it crawled to the same condition.

Repeat several times, closing out all but the standard dozen or so tabs I keep open 24-7, which I know aren’t likely to have any out of control scripting — no change. No change in safe mode, or after using safe mode launch to restore some program defaults. Try an apt-get upgrade (think “Windows Update”) on the system (running debian testing on a pretty old amd xp-1700), and a dist-upgrade (think “Windows Service Pack”). These installed a new enough firefox that I had to upgrade some plugins. Finally an install –reinstall on firefox, err, iceweasel. Rebooted after each of the last three. All without making a lick of difference.

Exasperated, I closed all the aforementioned always-open tabs, restarted one last time — and everything worked like a champ. Of course I immediately reopened all the same standard tabs, without a hitch.

So it doesn’t seem to have been the pages, but something with the browser’s cache of information about and controlling one or more of the tabs and their content.

As far as the awesomeness goes — well it *was* pretty impressive how consistently firefox reproduced my session tabs, through all those ups and downs and upgrades and even the reinstall. Even if it did suck that it had to reproduce whatever the hell was wrong in the process.

Dear Internets,

Once again I must lament the lack of a furniture search engine providing advanced searches by dimension.

OK, so, I’m trying to find a tv stand. TV console might be a better description of what I want. Problem is everything I find is either wide and short, or tall and thin. I need medium-tall and medium-wide.

I like my tv to sit a bit high. So I’m thinking 30″ high at least. Give or take -2/+8 or so… Most everything I’ve found in that range are also around 30″ wide. But I want something probably between 40″ and 60″ or so … 45″ to 50″ probably being the sweet spot.

Open shelving for gear in the middle. I don’t really care what kind of small shelving or storage flanks the sides, but *some*, eg not an all-open shelf thing.

Probably black. Prefer wood, metal/glass/other considered. Straight lines, modern or classical

This “Low Cabinet with Sliding Doors - Antique Black” is sooo very close that I very nearly pulled the trigger — before I found precise specs for the interior space on another site, and found the interior shelves won’t hold any gear. You need at least 15″-16″ depth, and on the width, figure the devices are usually 17″ and you want some breathing room.

If the Kathy Ireland IMTL363 - Tribeca Loft Tall Console has a little cousin it could be a contender. But still, really looking for more open space in the middle, smaller utility shelves/drawers/doors/whatever on the sides. And, uhh, I won’t cripple the search with an exact price requirement, but, umm, not that much. Just figure I already broke the budget getting what goes with it :)

If anyone finds the winner I’ll definitely buy you beer. Two if I like you!

UPDATE: I might have found it. It’s a little more than I want to spend, but maybe not more than I can realistically expect. I’ll sleep on it and give it some time in the morning before I say go. Beer offer still applies if you happen to find the same one. In fact I’ll buy three just in appreciation of your accuracy :)

UPDATE2: OK, done deal, we have a winner.

I’m afraid if I don’t post something, then the gears of this software might rust or atrophy or something. So I’ll tell ya that I got a couple of Philip Glass discs for Christmas, including his latest opera Waiting for the Barbarians.

Which is excellent, except it’s funny because for the last month or so I’ve been listening the hell out of Artificial Soldier, the latest album by long time favorites Front Line Assembly, which has a fantastic track called Future Fail, with a chorus that chants “Hail… the barbarians / … / Greet… the barbarians / … “.

So naturally my weird little brain is trying to mash the two together. It really doesn’t work very well.

I can prove it! Using nothing but the most advanced forms of wingnut logic.

See, Ronald Reagan was a member of the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater was also once a member of the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater once employed a speechwriter by the name of Karl Hess. Karl Hess said of Emma Goldman:

Hess said that upon reading the works of Emma Goldman he discovered that anarchists believed everything he had hoped the Republican Party would represent, and that Goldman was the source for the best and most essential theories of Ayn Rand without any of the “crazy solipsism that Rand was so fond of.”

Emma Goldman of course was a domestic terrorist, and would one day be an inspiration to feminists who would ally with the Nashville Peace and Justice Center. And apparently The Nashville Peace and Justice Center once shared a landlord with the US Communist Party.

QED, Ronald Reagan was a Communist.

If the conservative nitwits are terrified of anarchist icon Emma Goldman, does that mean we can finally dispense of the notion that conservatism has anything remotely whatsoever to do with libertarianism?

I think the words of another famous American domestic terrorist are apt:

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

– Thomas Jefferson

PS: And just look at all those other horrible people the NPJC is involved with! Recycling! Veterans for Peace! People who care about the homeless! People who care about the environment! People with the audacity to think immigrants and refugees are human beings with rights! Quakers! Four other church associations! What dastardly villains these people must be!

See also: Aunt B

…is that the frequent making of fists is an incredibly effective way to remember to keep your fingernails trimmed.

Yeah, that’s how little I have to talk about right now. Well, there are things, but all the good thoughts are sloshing around in the muddiest depths of my brain, clearly in no shape to go out in public.

No time for an in depth post but I just heard Obama’s looking at Richardson for Commerce Secretary. So that’s a bit of good news. Not as good as giving him foreign policy, but it is another strong area for him from a left-libertarian perspective, him being known as a market-oriented sort but not a market-worshipping ideologue.

This is pretty cool. Mother Jones told us about The Typealyzer, which probes your blog and computes your Myers-Briggs type based on content:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

UPDATE: I took this quickie online quiz which calls me an INTJ. I’m sure it’s not the most scientific quiz ever, but this does feel more accurate:

While the content of the post is completely unrelated, the Onion somehow managed to perfectly capture the essence of the woes of Tennessee Democrats with just a title:

Phil’s Party Reminds Area Man Why He Doesn’t Go To Phil’s Parties

A friend of mine recently IM’d me a blog post arguing against the proposed bailout for Detroit — I think it was this one — with a comment to the effect of “this is why I don’t like the Democrats OR Bush”.

I didn’t answer because I wanted to respond more thoughtfully and in depth than I could over IM at the time. Because, sympathetic I am, but neither do I embrace the fatalistic No Bailouts for Anyone Anytime attitude being taken, in earnest by libertarians, and in disingenuous rhetoric by many (especially House) Republicans.

First point, look I think you’d be really hard pressed to make the case that Democrats have been responsible for more corporate welfare over the years than Republicans. I would suspect the opposite, but for now let’s assume it’s a pretty even split. Because I think what we have here is a situation where alliances tend to form diagonally across the Nolan chart, so the issue doesn’t fit neatly into left-right or partisan terms. Somewhat upper-left, economically pragmatic Democrats find themselves working tepidly with lower-right biz-pig mercantilist Republicans in favor, while upper-right libertarian Republicans find themselves in uneasy alliance with lower-left populist Democrats in opposition.

Now, the heart of the libertarian argument against these bailouts has always been that we should let the free market sort things out, that companies go bankrupt because they deserve it, and that we have to let the invisible hand smack ‘em around to get them to work properly.

In the abstract, I think that’s absolutely correct.

But here’s the problem — as I’ve said many times, we don’t have a free market, and we apply free-market principles to the system we have often at our own peril. We have a mercantilist system rooted in statist corporate privilege and a perverted allodial take on capitalism. Together these things result in a degree of centralization and concentration of wealth that could never happen in a truly free market.

In other words, never in a free market would some 3 million jobs of real human beings who have little control over the major decisions of a small handful of corporations hang in the balance while we let the invisible hand do its job.

I’m not necessarily arguing in favor of bailing out the auto industry — I’m no economist, and I don’t have the data to crunch the numbers myself. All I’m saying is that sometimes, such bailouts may be necessary evils.

But in such cases, I want a few things in place to minimize the evil. I want strict control over tight strings to make sure the assistance does what we want it to do. I want caps on executive pay. I want oversight and public input on the direction the corporation should move (for example in the case of the auto industry, the proposed requirements to move towards producing greener cars). And most importantly, I want the beneficiaries of the structural flaws in our system — which, while not necessarily including every wealthy person, does include the vast vast majority of them, and certainly includes the corporations themselves — to pay most of the cost.

And for the job of implementing these conditions, I place infinitely more trust in the upper-left pragmatic Democrats than I do in the lower-right biz-pig Republicans.