Garden Of Blog

I just scored Evan Dando’s 2003 album “Baby I’m Bored.”

Remember Evan Dando?

Yo. Me again.

Listening to a little live Mike Doughty, courtesy of Justin. Diggin’ it. Drinking a Rolling Rock, etc.

Oh, I know what I’ll tell you about. My boss Pete recommended an incredible book called The Kite Runner which I can in turn recommend here with no reservations. It’s a great book. It is packed with genuine human emotion. But if nothing else, it is an easy and enjoyable way to personlaize Afghanistan for yourself, if you’re an ignorant like me. Here is the book with a link over to Amazon.

Have a great night.

I’m getting kind of excited for the next presidential election: time for a change.

This image keeps coming to mind, over and over again, when I think about 2008.

Like the Clintons or not, see if this image doesn’t stick in your mind, too.

Well, I gave it away in the title, but guess who I just got an EMAIL from? Innes Tolman himself! Not snail mail, not a phone call, and NOT the Pony Express… but an email! The technological innovator (inventor of the Tolmanagi) himself has finally surfaced electronically and we are oh-so-glad to have him.

Cyberspace just got a whole lot cooler.

In recent privacy debates, it’s often noted that much of the private information now available in the public domain is actually *volunteered*, in blogs. Gone is the time when your exposed privacy is someone else’s fault. You have bared everything in the blog.

Of course, we all approach blogging differently. Many see a blog as an electronic newspaper column, in which they tackle topics of wider public interest than, let’s say, what they ate for breakfast this morning. Others treat the blog as a personal diary on steroids, published for syndication right alongside the pretentious “columnist” blogs, addressing delicate issues of the soul and the details of daily life. My wife Jessica mostly takes this latter approach on her domain The Zucchini Patch. And the bitch gets more hits than Garden of Blog these days. Hmph.

Part of that is because she is so prolific, and has simply made more material available on her blog than I have. But another part of it is her following in the family. With such an open window into our daily family dealings, our relatives feel almost obligated to look in on us and see how we are doing.

Thus we live a very public private life. Like a lot of blogging families these days. The internet has grown into a panopticon that is frankly not spying on us but allowing us to spy on ourselves. And the closer we look, the more imperfections we discover.

The Supreme Court shouldn’t be validating the minority homophobes in the military. Not being able to state your sexual preference without losing your job is a crime. I mean, if you hate gays so much, wouldn’t you want them on the front lines? Doesn’t make sense to me. Jesus, get a private shower if you have to. Whack off in there for all we care.

Pretty soon they’ll be treating gays like hippies. They’ll find a genetic marker in your blood and start “gay testing” along with drug testing. Then they’ll categorize a whole pedigree of social deviance genes and blacklist entire DNA sequences, those at risk for disease, and on and on. It’s coming.

They’ll only reconsider when about 5% of the population remains eligible for employment anywhere.

Mac users only:

Ugh! The Finder isn’t recognizing my CD or DVD at all, and the “eject” button and functions are all greyed out. Do I have to pop this puppy open to get my disc? Even rebooting doesn’t work.

Nope. Check this out. At the command line, run the “disktool” command with the “-l” flag to list what discs the system *really* sees:

$ disktool -l
***Disk Appeared (’disk1′,Mountpoint = ‘’, fsType = ‘’, volName = ‘’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1′,Mountpoint = ‘’, fsType = ‘’, volName = ‘’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1s1′,Mountpoint = ‘’, fsType = ‘’, volName = ‘’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1s2′,Mountpoint = ‘/Volumes/Untitled CD’, fsType = ‘hfs’, volName = ‘Untitled CD’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0′,Mountpoint = ‘’, fsType = ‘’, volName = ‘’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0s1′,Mountpoint = ‘’, fsType = ‘’, volName = ‘’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0s3′,Mountpoint = ‘/’, fsType = ‘hfs’, volName = ‘Macintosh HD’)

Ah! There’s my “Untitled CD”. Appears the systems knows it as “disk1s1s2″ for whatever reason. So now we eject it with “-e” flag:

$ disktool -e disk1s1s2
disk1s1s2 device will attempt to be ejected …
***Notifications Complete for type 1
***Responding yes to unmount - disk1s1s2
***Disk Unmounted(’disk1s1s2′)
***Disk Unmounted(’disk1′)
***Notifications Complete for type 4
***Responding yes to eject - disk1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1s1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1s2
***Disk Ejected(’disk1′)
***Disk Ejected(’disk1s1s2′)

It ejects!

No idea why my Finder freaked out and lost sight of the disc, but I am sure am glad to have found this helpful tip. Keep it in your “just in case” files!