A couple of days ago I watched Barack Obama’s speech “A MorePerfect Union” and at the end I had tears in my eyes.
I am not the only one to speak in these terms of the speech. In case you missed it, here it is, video and transcription.

Informed Comment: Obama: “A More Perfect Union”

It finally convinced me that Barack Obama isn’t a phoney: he didn’t do what would have been easy, but what was right. I was also impressed by the internal consistency of his arguments, perfect in such a lengthy speech. His intelligence, his honesty, and his political courage are now for me out of question. Whether he defused the situation remains to be seen, but I agree with Jole, who says Obama that day made history.

Anything I didn’t like? Well, this sentence, for example.

I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Why only in the US? Why not in Israel, Canada, Germany or Australia? And it’s not like the US has seen many black candidates to the presidency before. I can think of none with as shred of a chance, and one in all: Jesse Jackson. This belief that the US is unique bothers me, because it’s the same dumb US nationalism that has brought so much grief to the world in the past few decades.

Thanks to Wikipedia (but this is a long story) I found this site.

Metadata database of Japanese old photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period

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Wonderful pictures. And now that you are at it, check this one too. Wonderfully crazy.

China Eats Crow Over Faked Photo Of Rare Antelope - WSJ.com
Earlier this week, Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, issued an unusual public apology for publishing a doctored photograph of Tibetan wildlife frolicking near a high-speed train.

Take a look at the enlarged version of the photo. At the WSJ they maybe reactionary, but they know how to explain why it’s doctored. I honestly wouldn’t have noticed, and I am fairly good at Photoshop.

Damen

Why did he do it? The way is the goal.

I have been an MS DOS/Windows user for something like 22 years, and a Mac user for about 17, so I remember the bad old days when, according to the world at large, to be a Mac user you had to be either dumb or gay or both. (And, to be honest, I always thought myself to be a privileged observer of the clash between the two platforms because I am that rare thing, a dual user. I know both platforms just as well. So I, unlike 95% of those who express an opinion, actually know what I am talking about.)

Mac OS has always been far better than Windows, but it used to be treated with disdain and more than a whiff of machismo, as if convenience were somehow not a virile feature. The command line was for real men, a GUI strictly for fags and perverts. That changed of course with Mac OS X. Not that OS X is, all taken into consideration, much better than OS 9. (As a matter of fact, there are things I miss of good old OS 9.) But it’s difficult to use a nickname like Macintoy when talking about a machine that runs Unix and can run Windows. Mac OS X has gained a modicum of respect.
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Obama’s mantra is change. Judging from this Alternet article, however, is voting record isn’t all that promising.

AlterNet: Understanding the Obama Surge
In the past year, Clinton voted with her party on 98 percent of the questions that pitted a majority of Democrats against a majority of Republicans, while Obama’s score was 97 percent.

Obama hasn’t taken any chances, and has always stood safely in the middle of his party. And who believes the Dems want change? Not I.

The only site I know that regularly criticize Barack Obama is onegoodmove.org. Since he seems to be on a roll and I seem to know very little about what he actually stands for, these days I find myself often at onegoodmove.

Some criticism is debatable, other much less so.

A reason to distrust Obama

Obama reconciliation strategy is harmful

A pertinent question

and more.  BTW, the site’s search engine doesn’t seem to work.

I have seen optical illusions before, but these are special. You can’t believe your eyes.

From BoingBoing.

Do not forget to take a long look at this site, which is where BoingBoing’s pictures come from.

I suddenly became an Obama fan after his victory in Iowa: his speech was electrifying and worthy of a president. He promised change and, since I am convinced the world as it is is nothing to be proud of[1]  I am a sucker for change. But I know that changing ANYTHING is hard. Changing carrots, leeks and beans into good soup is hard, changing the world even harder, making it a better place next to impossible. Never trust people who promise radical change. If they were wise they would use the word more carefully. As a consequence, recently though I am having doubts about good old Barack, which is too bad, because I am left as usual without candidates I like in an immensely important election (can’t vote anyway …).

Besides the fact he seems to me to be promising the moon, one reason is his health care plan (I believe health insurance must be mandatory).  The main problem however is that I realize mine was an entirely irrational support. I knew little about his plans, and I still do because he rarely makes them clear. This morning I read on onegoodmove.org first a piece called Crossing the Mara, then its sequel, Seizing a moment, and I thought they were spot-on at least in one respect. Read this quote:

onegoodmove: Crossing the Mara-Mara
It is not so much that [Obama] has wide-spread support, it is the kind of wide-spread that he enjoys. It is not very reflective nor deep, it is based on a hunch and a willingness to go along for a ride. It is rarely born of pensive assessment but more properly of opportunism.

It’s a precise description of my support for Barack Obama. I don’t know enough about the man to know if the other doubts Charles Lemos has are correct, but I am convinced this one is. People support Obama not because they know his positions and approve of them, but because he promises change and he talks about the power of hope.

I may support Obama in the future, but I want reasons to. I will see if I can find any beyond the fact I would like to see a black man in the White House and his early opposition to the Iraq war.

[1]
As a kid I devoured  Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo short stories, stuff I still am fanatic about and that I think the whole world should read. The main character Don Camillo is a Catholic priest, and he likes to talk to the crucifix in his church. The Christ on it actually answers and is an important if infrequent character. His replies are often surprising and always outspoken. I remember this remarkable conversation between the two:

Don Camillo: Christ, the world is in a terrible shape. There are too many things that don’t work as they should.
Christ: I don’t agree, Don Camillo. With the exception of man, everything works perfectly.

Well said, Jesus, well said.

One of the most important features Apple’s OS X Leopard possesses is, at least marketing-wise, Time Machine. And here let’s have one of those mandatory Wikipedia quotes:

Time Machine is a backup utility developed by Apple which is included with Mac OS X v10.5. Time Machine, like many backup utilities, creates incremental backups of files which can be restored at a later date. It allows the user to then restore the whole system, multiple files, or even a single file. It works within iWork, iLife, and several other compatible programs, making it possible to restore files without leaving the application.

I had been using a mirroring RAID array to safeguard my data for years but I decided to try TM for four reasons. I had been using a proprietary RAID program called SoftRaid I was unhappy with because it’s incompatible with anything (Leopard included) but itself, and I wanted to get rid of it. The second was sheer curiosity. Plus, I had been using the very same OS for 4 years and I felt that, although it was working perfectly, the purchase of Leopard was as good an occasion as any to get rid of all the crap that had accumulated here and there during that time: reinstalling the OS, as was necessary to move to Time Machine, wasn’t a problem. The last reason is that a RAID and TM in a sense serve two different purposes. A RAID array won’t guarantee recovery of a file deleted by mistake, but TM will. On the other hand, TM won’t guarantee continuous functioning of your computer as a RAID array does, but curiosity prevailed.

So I did it. I bought a 500 MB HD to have plenty of storage space and installed it next to one of my old 250 GB (a G5 tower has only two HD bays), and proceeded. It turned out me and TM are not made for one another. Getting such a big drive proved a good thing: Time Machine proved to be profligate in its use of hard disk space.

Having a backup program and not using it often is IMHO like not having it at all, so I set TM to backup every two hours, but the whole process is not altogether transparent. Actually, I find it rather annoying. The 500 MB hard disk is a little noisy and TM slows significantly my aging G5 down, so backups are not something I can ignore. Plus, TM’s backup isn’t bootable, so if your bootup disk fails (as mine did a week ago), you are out of luck. I just hadn’t thought about it enough, and in any case my curiosity is just too strong: I would have installed Time Machine anyway.

Then some time ago I started having random crashes and odd problems. I didn’t know it, but my hard disk was failing. I actually blamed my problems on Leopard, assuming it had teething problems. When the drive finally broke down and the problems it had came to light, I tried recovery on a new disk from the TM backup, but it didn’t work. All the time and the expense that went into it were for nothing. The computer freezes almost immediately after the recovery starts, every time. Today I found out the likely reason.

From Mac OS X Hints :

10.5: Beware using Time Machine with a failing disk
… I don’t profess to have investigated the matter thoroughly enough to be certain. However, what appears to happen is that Time Machine attempts to run a backup which terminates due to an I/O error like this:

Jan 28 22:41:02 guinness kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
Jan 28 22:41:03 guinness kernel[0]:
Jan 28 22:41:02 guinness /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2963]: Error: (-36) copying /Users/denty/Pictures/From camera 01:11:2007/DSCF0181.RAF to (null)

But, bizarrely, Time Machine does not post an alert to the logged in user: the error above never even gets seen unless you happen to look in Console.app. Worse, it looks as if Time Machine itself actually thinks that the backup completed successfully. Any files that were not yet copied, including any later files that might have been fine, Time Machine seems to assume they have “gone away.”

In simple words, if you do use Time Machine with a disk about to go to hell as I involuntarily did, you copy together with the good stuff all the crap the failing hard disk is generating, and this invalidates the backup. Worse, Time Machine knows there is a problem, but tells nothing. Beware using Time Machine with a failing disk. Sure. But who knew my hard disk was failing? Not me.

Conclusion: one should not rely on Time Machine to guard against hard drive failures. It’s good to recover files deleted by mistake and little else. This is why I think that, as long as it’s incompatible with RAIDs, it’s a dud. Let Steve say what he wants, but as it is now it’s a dud.