the frig blig

“I cannot support anybody with the foreign policy he advocates, you know, perpetual war. That is just so disturbing to me,” Paul said in a Monday telephone interview. “I think it’s un-American, unconstitutional, immoral and not Republican.”

– Ron Paul on Senator McCain, as reported by Jason George in the Chicago Tribune, February 11.

I snapped this photo of my coffee cup the other day and gosh but if it isn’t one of the best coffee cup photos I’ve taken in recent memory…if I do say so myself (pat pat).

In other extremely nonimportant news, whilst driving J and W on a short tour of Seattle this afternoon I noticed the bumper of the car in front of us bore a sticker with the following message, which made S and me smile and nod:

Born OK the first time.

The thrill of marking up a library book (about thinking, no less) is reinforced by the startling sight of a black 8-sided asterisk penned into the margin on page 5 — yes!

Libraries empower by helping us share not just books but our ideas and feedback about those books…inside them, becoming part of those very books.

Yowza! Every book a blog!

S and I were lucky enough to view up close many original drawings and prints by R. Crumb, underground comix illustrator and more. I’m happy to report that he is still going strong! He even has a website: www.rcrumb.com where you can buy his books and stuff.

I discovered his work via Zap Comix in the early 1970s, spending countless hours engrossed over their mind-blowing pages. It was quite inspirational to me and my housemates at the time (Jeff & Dina & Bob & Janet & David: the Electric Flamingo gang).

Seeing his stuff again after so many years, the originals lifesize at the Frye museum, almost made me cry. He is a master illustrator and observer, and has no fear. He is my hero. He is weird and offensive and hilarious and shallow and deep. He has drawn/painted some true classics, for instance “A Short History of America”:

After loading my Windows Forms app into the spiffy new Visual Studio 2008 I was excited to find the generated release exe ran on a PC without requiring installing the 3.0 version of MS’s dotnet framework. That’s good. However where did my app’s menu go?

Turns out the old-fashioned menu control has been replaced in the WinForms toolbox by a menuStrip control. Like a spiffed-up menu, it works mostly the same; however my initial experience indicates that the ‘checked’ property behaves slightly differently from that property’s behavior under the old menu control.

Specifically, the ‘checked’ property is true when the menuitem is clicked — this seems correct and natural, but it’s a change from former behavior…which happens to break my code.

Just what I didn’t want to do…spend a bunch of time recoding UI plumbing in my app to make it compatible with the upgraded developer tool.

Update: it only took about an hour to fix this issue. Sometimes I just can’t help kvetching though.

S and I spent friday and saturday being tourists in Victoria BC. We visited some residents at St. Joseph’s hospital, swam in the hotel pool, and did a lot of walking. More photos are under the Victoria listing in the galleries.

(As in, ‘take one’ yielded George Washington, ‘take two’ yielded John Adams…)

Q: What’s the difference between candidates Clinton and Obama?
A: Obama is Clinton without the baggage.

New York Times reporter Mike McIntire has a nice story this morning on senator Obama taking credit for passing a bill which never actually passed. The bill he introduced would have required nuclear energy plants to notify local authorities if and when radiation leaks occurred — sounds like a good idea. But not only did the bill fail to pass, the final version was weakened by the nuclear industry, who successfully lobbied Obama to change the notifications from mandatory to voluntary. So even had it passed, the bill would have been toothless and essentially useless.

Oh yes: Exelon Corporation, the owner of the Illinois nuclear plant which kept its radiation leaks secret, spawning the public outrage which inspired this legislation, is one of Obama’s biggest campaign contributors.