Ted Kennedy died tonight, at the age of 77, after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was, according to Wikipedia, the third-longest-serving senator of all time, elected in 1962, as soon as he became eligible at 30.

He was a great liberal and he ac­com­plished much. He will be remembered for much more than being the youngest brother of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

To my tech supportees:

XKCD’s Tech Support Cheat Sheet nails it! This is es­sen­tial­ly what I’m doing when I sit down at your computer and dig you out of your latest hole.

If only you’d make some more in­tel­li­gent guesses for yourself, you might be able to solve more of your problems.

But it’s not quite that simple.

You probably don’t understand very much about what you’re doing. I have enormous depth and breadth of experience which informs my in­ves­ti­ga­tion. I am—no false modesty here—a master of debugging. The extra context helps me hone in on a solution more often than not.

Still, do give the flowchart a shot. Being able to solve your own problems is …continue.

Jack Aubrey was disgraced in The Reverse of the Medal. He is now a civilian privateer, bitter at having been framed. Two ex­tra­or­di­nary actions do much to recommend him to the general public and make him wealthy, and by the end of this book, it seems certain that he will soon be restored to the Navy List. Stephen Maturin’s own fortunes improve as he effects a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with his wife.

The Letter of Marque is the twelfth novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series. O’Brian once again writes …continue.

Patricia Teeling wants to experience more of life than farming and university, and moves to Dublin to be a science teacher. She quickly finds herself adrift, belonging no more in her country home yet not of the city. She is soon drawn to the married Englishman who lives downstairs. His wife is murdered after she receives obscene telephone calls. Then an attractive man with a limp—­dubbed the Goose­foot—ap­pears.

While the author has an enviable command of English, I found his characters to be tiresome and in­scrutable yet un­ac­count­ably eloquent. Patricia is improbably untouched by the …continue.

Before we left on our trip, I picked up a pair of 4GB SD cards for my point-and-shoot Canon Elph. I brought my Linux netbook along, which has a built-in SD card reader, and the cards worked fine with that.

But they didn’t work at all in any of the external card readers that I have, and I had to resort to a USB cable to transfer photos from the camera to my other computers.

Wikipedia discusses com­pat­i­bil­i­ty issues with 2GB and larger SD cards, which is initially what I thought the problem was. On looking more closely at the cards, I see that they’re the newer SDHC cards. The card readers were …continue.

When we were in Spain in July, we visited the Dalí museum in Figueres. The museum is Salvador Dalí‘s monument to himself; he spent his latter years building it. The guided tour was well worth the money. I came away believing that Dalí was both enormously talented and full of shit.

The next day, purely by chance, we passed a sign for Gala’s castle at Pubol while driving around in the coun­try­side. We spent half the morning looking around the castle that Dalí had bought for Gala, his wife …continue.

Senator Patty Murray visited us at Cozi this morning. She was there to hear from small business people about healthcare reform and she met with half-a-dozen local small business owners, including our CEO, Robbie Cape. I sat in on the meeting as an observer to take photos.

We heard a number of stories.

Jason runs a record store. When they decided to insure all of their employees, it meant that everyone had to take a pay cut. One guy didn’t want to take part, but Jason convinced him. Weeks later, that guy broke his arm and ended up in the emergency room. Not long after, the same guy had another accident. Later he …continue.

Those town halls are getting uglier.

A dozen gun-toting paranoid guys walking around at Obama’s town hall in Arizona yesterday, some of them with ties to the violent Viper Militia.

In the video above, Barney Frank takes a question from some woman who’s comparing Obama to a Nazi and tells her she’s talking “vile, con­temptible nonsense”.

I hope it’s not going to escalate into outright violence.

Tommy Flood is another of Chris Moore’s Beta Males. He’s also a brand-new 19-year-old vampire, newly turned by his girlfriend Jody—her­self only a vampire for a few months. He’s not too keen about his new state, but he’s trying to cope. It doesn’t help that his former crew of shelf stockers at Safeway are trying to hunt his vampire ass. And he has a 16-year-old Goth chick for a minion who thinks the Lord Flood is like OMG totally hot.

Funny but not mean-spirited.

When using Lightroom before, I was never able to figure out how to move photos from one folder to another. You’d think that you could just click on a photo and drag it. I just spent twenty minutes figuring out what I’ve been doing wrong. After you’ve selected multiple photos, click on the photo thumbnail and not the sur­round­ing gray frame, and then you can drag the photos to the target folder.

I had become accustomed to clicking on the frames to multi-select photos, so naturally I assumed that was also how you dragged a set of photos. But clicking on a frame of a selected photo merely deselects all …continue.