It bothers me that some of my friends have become so obsessed with the inadequacy of one of the two major party Presidential candidates that they seem to have quite lost sight of just how inadequate a President the other man can be expected to be.

There is no good choice on the ballot, and I expect greater national despair by the next mid-term elections. (We'll see whether, at the time of the next Presidential election, the other party, whichever it may be, offers a better candidate then, or decides that, in the context of their rivals' failure, they can push the envelope of opportunism, of lunacy, or of both.)

The Windows installation on my computer is currently spending many hours to accomplish something that should take less than a minute.

Most computer storage systems have a sort of thing that some of us know as directory and others know as folder. People speak and tend to think of files as being in these things, but actually files are only in these things in much the same sense as a persons are in a phone book. Hence, directory is at least the less misleading term (paper files being in paper folders more as people are in buildings). Directories are usually themselves implemented as files, which then makes it trivial to put directories in other directories.

Logical disk C on my computer entirely resides on one physical hard drive. I have a directory on C such that I'd like to move it from one parent directory on C to another on C. What that literally means is that I would like to add a listing for it to another directory, remove a listing from the earlier parent, and change what the moved directory lists as its parent. I don't want to relocate the files that it contains to another part of the logical drive; I certainly don't want to relocate them to another physical drive. I don't even want to relocate the directory in question. I just want to change which parent directory lists the directory in question (and what it lists as its parent directory). So I did a cut-and-paste from one folder to another, something on the order of twelve hours ago. The move is still in-process; the progress bar indicates that it is less than half done. The disk drive is in a state of near-continuous activity, and the dialogue box is listing the subcontents of the directory one-by-one.

(Sadder still, this move is in preparation for moving the files in question to a different physical device, which will take considerable time no matter which operating system is used.)

Donald Duck loses $700 billion in bad mortgages: That's right: $700 billion, in bad mortgages.

Considering that Donald Duck doesn't generally wear pants, it's especially bad when he loses his shirt.

The Woman of Interest and I have been wrestling with the migration of her site to a new host. Naturally enough, the new hosting service began yester-day to up-date its servers, and we were stymied in our efforts for a while as their own migration ran into difficulties.

If everything has now gone well, then, as DNS tables are up-dated, visitors will be routed to a new site that is indistinguishable to them from þe olde Site. If something has gone badly then, well, we will be at the task of fixing things.

Up-Date (20:18PDT): The relevant change is probably still propagating amongst DNS tables; but, otherwise, the move seems to have been successful. The new site seems virtually identical from the perspective of a visitor.

One often hears or reads of a problem of no hot water, where water will flow from the hot-water tap, but it won't be hot water.

Early this morning, I had a rather more unusual experience of no cold water. Water flowed from the cold-water taps, but it was scalding hot.

The problem seemed solved later, but when I was showering this after-noon it briefly recurred — not something that one especially wants during a shower.

Evidently a valve failure caused an input pipe to function as an output pipe. I wonder how far up-stream the hot water got.

You know that childhood dread that, lurking behind things and in cracks, are big, black spiders? Some people outgrow that fear; such outgrowth is dementia. Those big, black spiders are really there.

In the course of a renovation, a local business placed a planter in front of their site; to-day, they pulled it away exposing one of those big, black spiders

In the wake of a ruling by the Supreme Court of the State of California that required the state to recognize and effect same-sex marriage, there is a measure, Proposition 8, on the ballot to amend the state constitution to halt recognition of further same-sex marriages. I oppose this measure, though (as I have stated various places) what I really want is for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether, and to treat marriages simply as private contracts. (I think that participants should see marriage as far more, but that's not the business of the state.)

This after-noon, I stopped at the San Diego headquarters of Vote No on Prop 8 to buy a couple of bumper-stickers, one to actually slap on a bumper, and one to put on the case of my note-book computer.

The guy who greeted me there was a fool. Instead of just selling me a couple of bumper-stickers, he tried very aggressively to get me to make a substantial donation, starting with the idea that I should give them the equivalent of a dollar an day for a year, by donatiing $365. There isn't a fr__king year left until the election; there's about 40 days. Had he begun by suggesting a $40 donation, well, I might have gone along with that; as it was, he had my back up, and I said no to the other sums that he suggested. I gave them $5 and they gave me the two bumper-stickers that I'd sought. In addition to the bumper-stickers, I left with considerable annoyance.

Another irksome thing, not the fault of Vote No on Prop 8, was that I had to fill-out a d_mn'd form, because I'd made a political contribution, however small. It was a gross violation of my rights as acknowledged by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but if I didn't fill-out that form, and truthfully, then the money could be confiscated by the state.

After four months, one week, thirteen hours, and thirteen minutes, the Wikipedia arbitration to which I previously linked was finally closed.

One of the seven editors involved — indeed, the editor who petitioned the Arbitration Committee in the first place, specifically targetting another editor — has been stripped of his administrative privileges. He and two other parties to the case are part of a larger cabal who've abused administrative privileges and acted like a pack of hyænæ. Although his petition launched the case, at some point he seems to have ceased to actively participate, and thus made himself the best candidate to be thrown under the bus. The remaining four parties, two of whom are also members ot the cabal, have been admonished. The original target of the petition seems to have been the least scathed party.

In any event, it appears that the cabal has taken enough of a hit to pacify its active opponents, but not so great a hit as to bring about an intervention by Wales on its behalf. But the Arbitration Committee has (somewhat as predicted) lost much respect all-around, albeït perhaps even more for having taken so long to reach a decision than for having failed to act more decisively against the cabal.