Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post just penned an op-ed of sufficient blindness to push me out of my blogy silence (yes, blogy silence). He posits a sort of Obama Infatuation where the Press has “largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.” His key indicator is a Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism study that concluded “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.” Based on this observation he declares the checks on the President have failed and a runaway presidency is in progress. But is that the only possible answer? Read more…
probonogeek Politics
A few days ago I was reading some post about the state of some poling question when examined in generational groupings. The pollsters have all sorts of clever names for these generations. In fact, there is an entire Wikipedia article about generational names in America (though, it would seem to be a highly debated article). This list includes:
- Interbellum Generation
- Greatest Generation
- Silent Generation
- Baby Boom Generation
- Generation Jones
- Generation X
- MTV Generation
- Generation Y
- Generation Z
Read more…
probonogeek Personal
I know it’s been a while since I last posted about ExtJS… things have been quite busy at work and I’ve forced myself to take a sabbatical from the project that has me working with ExtJS everyday. I’ll get back to it soon, don’t worry, and I have lots of topics in the queue. In the meantime, I have a bit of a public service announcement for those who use ExtJS with git. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
As is becoming an annual tradition around my house, taxes are finally done and paid just in the nick of time after scraping together the necessary cash at the last minute. I even paid CA “use tax” on the engagement ring I had purchased through Blue Nile which is based out of Washington State (and thus afforded me a temporary reprieve from sales tax). But the tax man… he always gets what’s coming to him eventually.
I was actually a bit worried about waiting until the last minute as I am using H&R Block’s online system and there have been reports in the past of the site going down on tax day. But I had clear sailing the whole way and am now ready to begin my 2009 tax odyssey!
probonogeek Personal
Several months ago I made a good faith attempt to upgrade my laptop from the reliable KDE3 to the avant-guard KDE4. Having decided not to even dabble with KDE 4.0 and the growing-pains associated with that particular release, I had high hopes for the venerable desktop environment’s 4.1 release. Sadly, the experiment ended in disaster, with too many crashes, too much slowness, and too many missing features that — at least for my work flow — were critical. I thus reverted back to KDE3 and went about my business. Read more…
probonogeek Technology
Two big events in the past twenty-four hours and I just can’t decide which one is more blog worthy! So I’m just going to blog about both in the same post and let the reader decide. Read more…
probonogeek Personal
Yesterday marked the passage of April 5, 2009. For those who have visited my humble Santa Cruz apartment, you may remember the letter from the California Bar Association posted on my refrigerator declaring my moral fitness to serve as a lawyer in the State of California… a certification that expired yesterday. Read more…
probonogeek Personal
In my last post I said that ExtJS is a front-end widget system. No doubt you could use it to create an entire system, front to back, in nothing by ExtJS, but that’s not my project nor is what I plan to talk about in these posts. Which brings us to the first question you need to answer when setting up your ExtJS environment: what am I going to use as a back-end? There are probably lots of right answers to this question, and a great deal of debate over which one is more right, and I gleefully leave that fight for others. For my purposes, the answer to that question is merb (it’s like rails, but better), so if that’s not your platform of choice, you will have to make some adaptations of your own. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
The Washington Post published an OpEd yesterday by Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and the Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Budget Committee. His words, penned under the title A Budget to Beggar Us, should be considered reflective of the Republican Senate Caucus on the budget… and should have us all very worried. I might expect this sort of knee-jerk ideologically motivated writing from the House, but to see this from the Senate is very disheartening.
As an exercise, I’m reproducing the entire article below and will respond to each point, because he’s pretty much wrong on every issue and a summary rebuttal just isn’t going to cut it this time. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
I’ve largely avoided discussing the individual appointments made in these early days of the Obama Administration — with notable exception — because the appointments have all been more or expected and get tons of ink already. But a couple of news items have been floating around that inspire me to comment on the process as a whole, in particular as it applies to White House advisors. Read more…
probonogeek Politics