On Immigration

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My fellow Americans, I know that the problem of illegal immigration is a contentious and troublesome issue. It’s a poor thing for a sovereign country’s economy and security, to allow just anyone to flow through our borders without going through the proper channels. Yet at the same time, it would be beneath the spirit of America to deny access to those seeking to reach for their dreams of a better life and livelihood. Utterly closing the borders would be a foolhardy gesture of cruel isolationism, but a broad amnesty would only worsen an already severely backlogged government immigration service.

Hence, I am proposing the Friends of Brownpau Immigration Act, or FoBIA. Under FoBIA, all immigrants who are Friends of Brownpau to the second degree (i.e. friends and friends of friends) will be immediately naturalized and given a United States passport, King James bible, 12 gauge shotgun, “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon bumper sticker, half a dozen little American flags, and optional cowboy hat. All immigrants who are not Friends of Brownpau will be deported. To Pluto. Which isn’t a planet. Acquaintances of Brownpau who are not exactly Friends will be judged on a case to case basis. Those who do not pass muster may still get citizenship, but will not be offered the cowboy hat option.

I ask Congress to pass FoBIA immediately. America needs Brownpau’s Friends.

(But add an exception for anyone who is a Scientologist. This is the XenuFoBIA amendment. Yes, that was a really bad setup for an incredibly lame joke.)

Five Blades

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Guess what I just bought:

We're Doing Five Blades Five. Blades. Now I am a man.

Oh yeah, baby, that’s right. A Gillette Fusion Power razor. Five blades. Count them. Five. Blades. And battery-powered micropulses. Now I am a man.

(I was originally going to try and get it free, but the catch is that you have to sign up for at least three partner offers — for deals which could potentially cost more than the price of the product — plus give your personal info to a bunch of direct marketers. I figured it was still cheaper in terms of time and money to just get it at CVS. And guess what: it was on sale for $7.99.)

WaPo, Fenty, Tobacco, Times, Johns

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I really love that Washington Post endorsed Adrian Fenty for mayor in the DC Democratic Primaries, right alongside a “Lawlessness of Big Tobacco” editorial, so soon after Smokefree DC’s Fenty endorsement. Fenty was a key Smokefree DC ally a few years back, when he and Kathy Patterson drafted the DC Smokefree Workplaces Act, so to have his endorsement juxtaposed with another major tobacco industry news item is a pretty strong issues-oriented plus for his campaign — and for Smokefree DC, too.

Ah, poor Marie Johns, endorsed by the Moonie Times. I suppose it was to be expected, given the paper’s strong Republican slant and Johns’ big business background with Verizon, but a Times endorsement in a liberal city like DC is not going to be good for her campaign. QED: Rusty reconsiders his Johns vote.

MT 3.32

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I have now upgraded this site to Movable Type 3.32. The upgrade process was not without problems — but these could have been avoided with a little more attentiveness to similar issues during past upgrades.

Kiss my ASCII

First off, you must upload ASCII files explicitly as ASCII. Don’t trust whatever FTP app you use to know the difference in AUTO mode; when uploading those CGI, PL, PM, TMPL, PHP, and HTML files, specify ASCII — most especially for the main CGI files in the MT root and the lib and extlib directories. Running the upgraded MT install the first time got me a cryptic Bad ObjectDriver config error in mysql.pm, and I worried at first that my host had changed something in DBD::mysql just as I was in the process of upgrading. It turned out that Filezilla had simply uploaded the PM files as binary, and a re-upload in ASCII got everything running just fine.

And I Would Walk 500 More

Also note that if you are publishing static PHP files in archive directories, permissions are important. MovableType CHMODs archive files and directories to 777, and a lot of web hosts won’t let you display world-writable files and directories. Result: 500 Internal Server Errors on new entries (and also old ones on Rebuild). This wouldn’t have been an issue if I hadn’t decided to start with a fresh mt-config.cgi, quite forgetting to copy the pertinent suexec/cgiwrap directives from the old one. If you’re publishing PHP or CGI files from your MT templates, don’t forget to add these important lines to your mt-config.cgi:

DBUmask 0022

HTMLUmask 0022

UploadUmask 0022

DirUmask 0022

Back to the Trackback

Because I’m a sucker for punishment, I’ve re-enabled trackbacks. Despite having been burned before, (1,2) I can’t help but want this awesome exotic cross-linkage technology to work. Sure enough, the trackback spam has already started rolling in, though the filters have performed admirably so far; not one spam ping has gotten through to an entry page yet. If the filters continue to work, without overworking the server, I might just keep trackback on.

NMAH Parting Shots: Doll and Hansen

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Just a couple more photos I liked from the NMAH before I stop talking about it: a closeup from a room in the Faith Bradford Dollhouse, and a 1.6 second exposure of Stephen Hansen’s “Life in the Information Age” carousel. (I was trying for 6 seconds but this camera doesn’t give much manual control.) Click on the thumbs above to see them larger on Flickr.

National Museum of American History Closes

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Hope you all had a good Labor Day long weekend. Today was the last day to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of American History before it closed for renovations till 2008. Many exhibits and displays had already been shuttered or emptied.

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I spent most of the weekend hanging around there, snapping photos of whatever was still open, trying to soak it all in before the place as we know it today disappears for the next two or more years.

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In a way, I’m glad it’s being renovated. The Behring Center (named for philanthropist Kenneth E. Behring) was originally built to house what was called “The Museum of History and Technology,” and only later refocused on American History in 1980. Much of the museum, especially the ground floor, is still oriented towards science, technology, and industry — topics like computers, transportation, materials, maritime enterprise, and the industrial revolution. Great stuff for my geeky interests, but the museum still fails to offer a real overview of American History in general, and that needs to be fixed if it is to live up to its current name.

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So farewell for now to the NMAH. Here’s hoping it reopens on time in 2008. (Yeah right.) For the time being, a large exhibition hall in the National Air and Space Museum will be devoted to “Treasures of American History”, featuring various items from the NMAH collection while it renovates. Read more on the history of the NMAH, and see my full “NMAH Farewell” photoset here.

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Oh, by the way, I’m sad to report that Foucault’s Pendulum will not be returning to the renovated museum. :(

Pandora’s Day: A Timelapse

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An average Sunday for the cat, taken with my webcam hooked up to my iBook, with Evocam grabbing frames at 30 second intervals all through the day:

Ernesto Fells Tree on 18th Street NW

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Ernesto is here, and with it, wind and rain and cold: a much needed respite from the heat and drought. As I headed in to work, wearing a jacket for the first time since April, I noticed some commotion around the 1700 block of 18th St NW: fire engines, police cars, and lots of leaves and branches where there shouldn’t be leaves and branches. Ernesto’s winds had knocked over one of the block’s older denizens.

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The tree took out a window, scratched up the front of the building, and came to rest blocking the front door. No one was hurt, thankfully, and city services were already attacking the fallen leviathan with mighty chainsaws. By workday’s end, a truck was carting off pieces of the old tree’s trunk, though signs of the chaos remained in shattered glass and a bent fence.

I was thinking of checking out the new Trader Joe’s, but it was just too crazy windy out to walk, and the Orange Line was packed and delayed, so I just went home and got me some cream puffs.

IE6: Where 0 = 14

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Dear Internet Explorer 6:

When I specify padding-bottom: 0; for an <li> selector nested two lists deep, I do not mean padding-bottom: 14px. Just so we’re clear, 0 is not the same as 14. And if I say !important, I bloody well mean it.

Your cousins Firefox and Opera get it right; why can’t you? This is why Uncle Z won’t give you candy.

Man, I can’t wait for IE7 to be distributed as an automatic critical security update. Assuming it really is as compliant as they say.