Via DailyKos, Will Ferrell as Dubya making a Special An­nounce­ment on Global Warming.

Via Emma.

I’m in­dif­fer­ent to most fantasy books, but I’ve been a fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, since I read the first book, A Game of Thrones, in 1997. I read the second book A Clash of Kings, in 1999. The third book A Storm of Swords came out five years ago, and I’ve been awaiting the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, ever since. After several post­pone­ments, it’s finally out.

It’s an epic tale of love, war, and intrigue. Five Kings are fighting for control, by sword, by guile, and sometimes by magic. Strange creatures are rising in the frozen North, beyond the Wall. Dragons are reap­pear­ing in the South. The young Starks, separated by …continue.

Bill Moyers speaking at the 50th an­niver­sary of The Texas Observer:

Mc­Carthy­ism was a raging plague in the 1950s and the virus rampaged across Texas like tum­ble­weeds in a wind storm. … The low point, said Maverick, came when the state Senate passed a bill to remove all books from public libraries which “ad­verse­ly” reflected on American and Texas history, the family and religion. Even the state teachers as­so­ci­a­tion endorsed the bill, in exchange for a pay raise. …

That was the lay of the land in the 1950s. And Democrats were in charge, remember? That’s right: Texas was a one-party state; Re­pub­li­cans were as scarce in high office as Democrats are today. No matter …continue.

A year ago, I ran into a problem with Skype squatting on port 80, which I had long forgotten about. Today, I ran into one with Skype squatting on port 443.

I was trying to set up SSL on my Windows Server 2003 dev box. My ultimate goal is to experiment with client certs and server certs for SOAP, but that’s a story for another time. I was running into all kinds of strange problems, ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the relatively strange IIS con­fig­u­ra­tion on my machine.

I tried SslDiag. In hindsight, it pointed me towards the underlying problem, but I couldn’t see it at the time. I did a lot of digging around on …continue.

Last Wednesday night, Emma emailed a dozen of our friends, inviting them to join us for Thanks­giv­ing dinner. One reply arrived the next morning. Then nothing.

By Sunday evening, I had grown ex­as­per­at­ed enough to send out a snarky followup:

The courtesy of a belated reply would be ap­pre­ci­at­ed. So far, we’ve got exactly one RSVP.

It served its purpose. Replies cascaded in. Most, alas, said "no"; they had other plans.

Would that this were an isolated incident. Time and again, I’ve issued in­vi­ta­tions that were not responded to. A simple "yes" or "no" is ideal. A "maybe" is acceptable too, especially if you follow up with a "yes" or a "no".

RSVP is not a mean­ing­less formality. It’s …continue.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle strike again. This time, we’re coun­ter­pos­ing William Butler Yeats against Walt Whitman, the Dueling Poets. We’re leading off the evening with some real dueling between fencers from the Academia della Spada.

More details here.

See what Thun­der­bird 1.5 RC 1’s spelling checker flags as misspelled words.

Seems to be a known bug.

I finally updated my blog to run on dasBlog 1.8. Not too painful. I unzipped the binary dis­tri­b­u­tion, downloaded the content folder from my server to my local drive, ran the provided upgrade utility, and used WinMerge to update the con­fig­u­ra­tion files.

The most obvious change is that I’m using a new theme (skin), which gives the site a very different look. The previous default theme had problems if your browser window was too narrow, due to some hardcoded table sizes (I think).

I also figured out how to post to dasBlog via w.bloggar. I looked for info on con­fig­ur­ing w.bloggar a few weeks ago, and couldn’t find it then.

Followup: the multiword links in …continue.

On Tuesday night, Emma sent this out to our list of friends.

Subject: Decision about evacuee housing

Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:22:32 -0700

From: Emma Bartholomew

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who has assisted George & me in our attempt to ready our home for hurricane evacuees.

Re­gret­tably, I have come to realize that I’m not emo­tion­al­ly able to make this commitment after all. I thought I could open my home to others, but I have sunk into a depression over the past few weeks that has finally convinced me that I tried to bite off more than I could chew.

George & I are …continue.