evanmorris.com
From the daily archives: Thursday, August 28, 2008
This is a very interesting keyboard, a Dell AT-101W from 1998. You can find them on eBay selling for between $.99 and — no kidding — $147.00. The same keyboard (without the stupid Windows keys, of course) used to be bundled with high-end Silicon Graphics workstations. It uses Alps mechanical keyswitches, which give a much lighter touch than the IBM Model M, yet are still clicky (though not as loud as the Model M) and far superior to the rubber-dome crap that passes for keyboards today.
This board must have been bundled with the pricey Dells at that time, because I ordered mid-range Dells in 1993, 1996 and 1998 and never received anything but cheap, mushy keyboards.
There’s no healthcare crisis. It’s just a vocabulary problem:
[T]he numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
“So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”
As usual, the reporter assumes that the government takes ultimate responsibility for paying the cost of ER care. In reality, hospitals, including the “not-for-profit” ones, can and frequently do sue the patient.
… After securing the nomination in June, Obama’s first priority had to be healing the rift between himself and Hillary Clinton. Candidates who can’t put nomination battles behind them well before the convention usually lose. Think of Goldwater in 1964, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. There are only two candidates I can remember who succeeded in overcoming intraparty rifts during the convention–John Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald Reagan in 1980–and they did it by nominating their primary opponents to be vice president.
Obama, who evidently did not see a nail-biting election looming, chose not to do that, and is reaping the consequences. I didn’t think so last spring, but I realize now that Obama would have been better off had he chosen Hillary Clinton. Of course, he might have faced a nightmare in January 2009 with Bill and Hillary in the White House, but at least he would have been more assured of making it there. As it is, he may not be able to count on Clinton’s fundraisers in the fall, he may not be able to count on all of her voters, and states that might have been in play with the two Clintons in tow–Florida, Arkansas, and Missouri–probably won’t be.
But noooo. Better to pick a pasty white guy who reminds people of their unpaid credit card bills.
Unfortunately, they sound like lunch for the full-size coyotes living in our north field:
It’s the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle.
Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.
For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.
Just right for the garden: a mini-cow – Times Online.
A couple of years ago, two guys in a beat-up pickup truck showed up wanting to sell us steaks, which they were evidently transporting in two large coolers in the bed of the truck. I explained that I don’t eat beef, and they acted like they’d never heard of such a thing.
Last week a guy in a pickup truck shows up and explains that he happens to have a whole truckload of hot asphalt with nowhere to go, and asks would we like him to pave our driveway, cheap. I demurred, explaining that we liked the driveway as it is, two long ruts decorated with a strip of crabgrass.
I’m hoping that if these folks are keeping a map (or chalking symbols on the road like the hobos used to), we’re now marked as “hopelessly insane.”
today’s moodcat
