Via this article in French (which I found a very interesting read, btw) I found out that the version of Woody Guthrie s song This Land Is Your Land that was sung in Obama s celebration was the unabridged one, and that Pete Seeger himself (aged 89 now) was on stage to sing it together with Bruce Springsteen. You can see in the video he was visible moved, and that rocks. According to the post in the Le Monde Diplomatique linked above, Obama also signed a couple years ago the petition to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Seeger.

The changes to whitehouse.gov are being used as an example of ephemeral digital content.

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.

At the same time, the Obama administration is chafing under rules that don't allow them to use Facebook, gmail, Blackberries, and Twitter. Because of this pesky Presidential Records Act.

Suddenly, they have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live. They are being forced to return to older technologies (or they will once those technologies start working properly), and abandon or become more guarded in their use of newer technologies.

Anyone else find the dissonance am(az us)ing? Seems that anyone who really wants a copy of that missing booklet will be able to access it via FOIA in a few years (unless it got wiped with all of Cheney's files). Meanwhile, if the new guys find a way to stop being hobbled by the law, their digital content will likely be truely ephemeral, since they have become addicted to "newer technologies" that eliminate all expectations about data's preservation and privacy. I think this is one case of the law not keeping up with technology that I can support. It might be more fair to describe it though, as technology not keeping up with the law.

The funniest thing I've heard about The Economist is that it is full of neo-liberal absurdity and supported criminals like Reagan and Thatcher.

A few months ago, I asked for suggestions for magazines to subscribe to. I got a lot of helpful suggestions, and subscribed to three: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist. Today, I m reviewing the only one of the three that I m disappointed in, and it s The Economist. This comes as something of a surprise, because so many people (with the exception of Bryan O Sullivan) recommended it. Let s start with a quote from the issue that found its way to my mailbox this week:

A crowd of 2m or more is making its way to Washington, DC, to witness the inauguration of Mr Obama. Billions more will watch it on television. [link]

Every issue, I see this sort of thing all over. An estimate, or an opinion, presented as unquestioned fact, sometimes pretty clearly wrong or misleading. For weeks before Jan. 20, and even the day before, the widely-reported word from officials was that they had no idea what to expect, but if they had to guess, they d say that attendance would be between 1-2 million. In the end, the best estimates have placed attendance at 1.8 million. Would it have killed them to state that most estimates were more conservative, and to cite the source of their particular estimate? That s all I want, really, when they do things like this. I knew going into it that the magazine (to American eyes) essentially editorializes throughout, and I don t have a problem with that. But it engages in over-generalization far too often and that s just when I catch it. This was just a quick example from the first article I read in this issue; it s more blatant other places, but quite honestly I m too lazy to go look some more examples up at this hour. I do remember, though, them referring to members of Obama s cabinet as if they were certain to be, back before Obama had even announced their pick, let alone their confirmation hearings happening. One of my first issues of The Economist had a lengthy section on the global automobile market. I learned a lot about how western companies broke into markets in Asia and South America. Or at least I think I did. I don t know enough about that subject to catch them if they are over-generalizing again. The end result is that I read each issue with a mix of fascination and distrust; the topics are interesting, but I can never really tell if I m being given an accurate story. It often feels like the inside scoop, but then when I have some bit of knowledge of what the scoop is, it s often a much murkier shade of gray than The Economist s ever-confident prose lets on. Don t get me wrong; there are things about the Economist I like. But not as much as with the New Yorker or the Atlantic, so I ll let my subscription lapse after 6 months but keep reading it until then.

Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. . . Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. - Barack Obama, inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2009

This, right here, is why, for the first time in my life, I actually feel good about an American president. Why I have hope about our government for the first time in years. Why I m glad I used a vacation day to sit on the couch and watch TV yesterday. On the occasion, once every 4 or 8 years, that is a celebration of American strength, power, and pride, we see our new president speaking of humility, of peace, of moral leadership, this is something remarkable. Past presidents have used occasions such as these to speak of crushing our enemies, of wanting people dead or alive, of grand government promises that turned out to triple the national debt. Obama spoke of extending the hand of friendship to anyone that would unclench their fist. He spoke that we had kicked the can down the road too far, and now we ve reached the end of the road. We have to stop thinking that we can have everything: low taxes, expensive programs, and a large military, simply by mortgaging our future. And he leveled with us: we all are in this together, and all have to work to make it better. Conventional politicians assumed it would be political suicide to say even half of what Obama has said. Yet he went out there and did it. He was blasted during the campaign by people on both sides of the political spectrum for being just words . He s the first presidential candidate that meant what he said about bringing Americans, and their representatives, together. The shock in Washington has he invited gasp! both an openly gay bishop and an anti-gay evangelical minister to give prayers was telling. It s as if people were saying, Wait, he really MEANT that? Yes, he did. Let s hope he can pull it off. And as Rev. Lowry concluded with his benediction:

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. . . Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. (amen) Say Amen! (Amen!) Say Amen! (AMEN!)

Portrait of myself today, on the day the United States of America inaugurate their first black president. This post will probably be more valuable to me in years to come than anyone else right now, but never mind... I'm tired tonight. I mean physically tired, not mentally. Reading this back to myself if I just wrote "I'm tired" I'd assume mentally fatigued, as that seems to be my ground state. I'm suffering a mild cold but it's nothing serious. I'm unseasonably upbeat about work; for anyone looking forward, predictably but conciously disorganised, but improving. Tomorrow I have my annual review. I ate Quorn Korma tonight, one of my (very few) signature meals. I'm about to make the mistake of leaving the dishes until the morning. I'm in my third year occupying the NM queue and currently making a concious effort to get through it. On sunday I spent several hours on the effort; first, beating some of my packages into shape; then, looking at my outstanding questions. Tellingly I found the latter much more rewarding than the former. I'm also going through one of my seasonal "why do I do this" moments with Debian, perhaps not coincidentally whilst we are mired in a freeze for an overdue release. More on that in another post. I had a flat viewing this morning, one last night and another scheduled for thursday night. I'm living in "cosy" a one-bedroom flat with a nice view and terrible heating. I'm about to go to bed and pick up my current novel, "the Family Trade" by Charles Stross. As it's a fantasy novel, I can kid myself that I've broken out of the habit of reading Science Fiction novels (this after finishing Crichton's "State of Fear", an undeniably SF novel that sits in the mainstream literature shelves of just about every book shop). I shall probably write and publish book reviews for "State of Fear", "The Family Trade" and "Accelerando" (another Stross, thank you AJ) at some point.

There are hard times ahead, but I figure that Obama might be just the right man at the right time to handle these issues. He gives the impression of being exceptionally smart and able to gather smart advisors around him. So I'm amazed at this huge step the US has made the previous weeks - one of the pictures of the year 2008 was Jesse Jackson crying after Barack Obama had been pronounced election winner. You do get the impression that after years of stagnation, the US is now trying to get ahead of the curve again when it comes to civil and human rights.I must admit that I really envy the US for this election result. We could definitely use some of that spirit in politics as well. And we also could use some smart people there ...

It s been quite the day. This evening, Jacob had a new first. He requested I read him an owner s manual for his bedtime story. Yes, I m sure years from now, he will still remember how to operate a Motorola W376g cell phone. He had found the manual in its box and had been carrying it around, reading it to himself for days already. I can feel him following in my footsteps - I remember pulling the car manual out of the glove box on long trips and reading it. For fun. So yes, Jacob chose an owner s manual over nice children s bedtime books involving caterpillars. This morning, I set out on what would be a 43-mile bike ride - home to Wichita. It was about 28F when I left. I had been wanting to ride from home to Wichita for some time now, and finally found the right day. The wind was at my back (mostly), the sun was shining (I even got burned a bit), and the ride was fun. It took me about 4.5 hours, including the 1.5 hours I spent for lunch and other breaks. I didn t take a completely direct route, but that was intentional. This is my second-farthest ride in a day, behind the time I rode 55 miles in a day for charity. But it is the farthest I ve gone in winter. I was taking the bike to the bike shop for its free 6-month tuneup. So I even had the perfect excuse to ride it. I hope to ride it back home if the weather is cooperative. As for the third milestone, while I was riding to Wichita, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were riding a train to Washington. I recorded it, and have been watching it this evening. Remembering all they said during the campaign, seeing how they act it really does give me some hope in this country s government, some hope that some important things will be accomplished in the future. One TV commentator pointed out that the Bush administration carefully avoided using the word recession as long as they possibly could, while Obama is trying as hard he can to be straight and direct with people about the situation. I appreciate that. What a milestone the next few days represent for the country.

I received a SanDisk Sansa e260 (v2) for my birthday. It was one of those presents that acquired for myself on behalf of someone else because it worked out easier that way. I bought it for cheap from Woot! I thought I'd use it to play podcasts while I'm at the gym. We've been listening to NPR for a while now, and there's lots of excellent programming, and it's all available in download for as well. Since I don't spend all that much time in the car, I'm not listening to much of it. The first mission was to upgrade the firmware. Getting the player into MSC (instead of MTP) mode with the original firmware was a little tricky, but I got there in the end. Then I had to locate the firmware in a Linux-installable format. I think I ended up resorted to using Windows, but I later found the raw firmware image without needing an installer. I'm using Rhythmbox at the moment to download the podcasts. I thought I'd try out its MTP support, just because it actually had it, but either Linux 2.6.26 has a problem with MTP, or the player is particularly flaky doing it with Linux, because I just seemed to get a pile of USB errors when connecting the device in this mode, so I'm sticking with MSC for now. Oh, and I had to put a .is_audio_player file in the root of the device to make it show up in Rhythmbox. I later discovered that it worked most optimally if I put

audio_folders=MUSIC/
folder_depth=2

in the file. I'm still trying to come up with an optimal way of managing the audio I want to listen to. It seems somewhat tedious to drag and drop all of the podcasts from Rhythmbox to the device. I kind of want some sort of plug and play auto-sync method. It seems I can't use a connection-triggered rsync, because some of the podcasts seem to get downloaded with non-FAT-filesystem-friendly filenames. Rhythmbox seems to take care of this by doing some sort of automagical renaming at transfer time. That said, not everything is showing up in the music list with sane names. There's a few things that have an unknown artist I think. That may be a deficiency in the ID3 tags of the MP3s themselves though... What I really want some way of getting home, hooking up the player and just getting what's new, without expending too much effort (at the time of hooking up the player, anyway. I'm happy to expend some effort getting to that point) The next weird thing is that the device wants to talk USB 1.1. I'm not sure what is at fault here, but I can, allegedly at least, make the device reconnect at USB 2.0 by removing and reloading the ehci-hcd module after connecting it. Here we have the device initially attached:

apollock@icarus:~$ lsusb -t
Bus#  5
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0002
Bus#  4
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  3
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
   -Dev#   9 Vendor 0x0781 Product 0x7423
Bus#  2
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
   -Dev#   6 Vendor 0x413c Product 0x8103
Bus#  1
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001

lsusb says that bus #3 is ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Then if I do a spot of presto-changeo...

apollock@icarus:~$ sudo modprobe -r ehci-hcd
apollock@icarus:~$ sudo modprobe ehci-hcd
apollock@icarus:~$ lsusb -t
Bus#  5
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0002
   -Dev#   3 Vendor 0x0781 Product 0x7423
Bus#  4
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  3
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  2
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
   -Dev#   7 Vendor 0x413c Product 0x8103
Bus#  1
 -Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001

Bam! It's moved over to bus #5, which lsusb says is 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Weird. I wonder if I should try running Rockbox on it? Seems not, it's only for v1 players. Oh well.

Andrew,

wc -l <$file

America is a land brimming with paradoxes, one of them being our simultaneous obsession with freedom and rules. We purport to be the land of the free (and while this is and may not be true, we do hold steadfast to this idea). But we also love rules rules and rules, and wait there are more and more and more rules, too many rules, which often come in the form of the form of a sign, this one being one of my favorites. (shall not produce grease laden fumes?! yes, I think it was written by an academic). So I appreciate small reminders that poke fun of and holes in our love of rules and warnings, such as the one I found on my new bamboo-based shirt, pictured above. I have taken a huge liking for bamboo shirts as of late (I am obsessed with the tactile and can only stand soft cloth, which is why I love bamboo-based cloth) and I ordered a few shirts of the Internet. I only noticed the warning when I pulled the shirt out of the dryer late the other night and it was by far one of the only times I smiled from left to right at 1 am when doing laundry. More people should take the time to plant these easter-egg type jokes as they are, I am sure, much appreciated.

America is a land brimming with paradoxes, one of them being our simultaneous obsession with freedom and rules. We purport to be the land of the free (and while this is and may not be true, we do hold steadfast to this idea). But we also love rules rules and rules, and wait there are more and more and more rules, too many rules, which often come in the form of the form of a sign, this one being one of my favorites. (shall not produce grease laden fumes?! yes, I think it was written by an academic). So I appreciate small reminders that poke fun of and holes in our love of rules and warnings, such as the one I found on my new bamboo-based shirt, pictured above. I have taken a huge liking for bamboo shirts as of late (I am obsessed with the tactile and can only stand soft cloth, which is why I love bamboo-based cloth) and I ordered a few shirts of the Internet. I only noticed the warning when I pulled the shirt out of the dryer late the other night and it was by far one of the only times I smiled from left to right at 1 am when doing laundry. More people should take the time to plant these easter-egg type jokes as they are, I am sure, much appreciated.

Pierre,

do we trust our release team ;

• No.

shall we delay the Lenny release for firmware issues or not (We answered that twice in the past with huge majorities btw) ;

• Possibly.

shall we modify the meaning the the SC/DFSG.

• Only to remove SC#5 or remove the DFSG#4 compromise.

How should I vote?

Via Steve (new domain name, otherwise as usual), this inspiring little PowerPoint-ish presentation from Dr. Steven Chu, Obama s choice for Secretary of Energy: This video features about as many charts per minute as did An Inconvenient Truth, but left me far more hopeful about our long-term prospects on Earth. It is reassuring to see so many powerful positions being filled by people with domain expertise, rather than partisan hacks. If this administration doesn t get us back on course, we might as well stop having children. Technorati Tags: Steven Chu, Obama, Climate Change, Energy, Environment

As the Australian government wants to show how well they understand technology, they have started a blog about the “Digital Economy” [1]. So far they have hundreds of comments, most of which just tell them that their censorship ideas are wrong. In what may be related news, Barack Obama has announced details of some of his plans [2]. He will spend money on improving net access (something that the Australian government could learn from) and on improving schools (which will probably be about as effective as putting lipstick on a pig). I really hope that we don’t have someone in his administration deciding that improving schools requires censoring the Internet for the entire population (people tend to turn their brains off when it’s time to think about the children). He is also allocating money to road building (a stupid idea when cars are becoming increasingly expensive and world fuel supplies are running out - he should be building train and tram lines). But his idea about improving the energy efficiency of federal buildings is a really good idea, that will lead the development of technology that everyone can use to increase efficiency. He also wants to “modernise” the health-care system by moving to electronic medical records - this seems unlikely but I guess that all spending on IT is somehow good for those of us who are involved in the computer industry. One of his advisors has realised that there are economic benefits to really fixing the health-care system, so there is some hope that it will get fixed [3]. The FLOSS Manuals project has released a document about circumventing censorship systems [4], I expect that many people will be using them before the government even gets their Chinese-style filter installed (if they ever do).

• [1] http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/industry_development/digital_economy/future_directions_blog


• [2] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16258.html


• [3] http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/daschle_fixing_health_care_top.php


• [4] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools

It’s close! In the township where we live, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 15 votes! I guess I should mention that the victory margin was 166 to 151. So it’s not like it was 15 votes out of millions. In all, 333 people in our township cast ballots, or about a third of the total population of our township. Just to give you a sense of scale, there are an average of 29 people per square mile out here. And the nutty jail expansion was defeated 3:1. Our county commissioners will just have to figure out some other way to house the county’s prison population (around six inmates) for awhile longer.

People often talk about "memorable moments" -- times where pretty much everybody in the country remembers where they were at that exact time.

There are probably only two of those moments I can remember: the 1989 earthquake during the World Series and the time 9/11 happened. My car was in for service that day, and I was sitting in the lobby of the mechanics watching it on TV.

So now I have a third: watching Barack Obama win the presidency.

We were installing some new blinds in the kitchen while listening to the coverage on NPR, periodically going over to the office to watch the TV coverage on the computer. (Our TV is upstairs right now, so that was more convenient.)

A few minutes before the election was called, I remember Brian Williams saying something like "We're going to go to local stations now, but you better not walk away. We'll have some amazing news at the top of the hour."

We watched that announcement, then saw McCain's speech, and finally Obama's speech (missed the first minute or two of it actually). What an amazing evening.

Then seeing the stories of people celebrating all around the country and around the world: the impromptu party in front of the White House Tuesday night, the small gathering at the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday morning, the Obama parties all around the world. And we watched it on TV in our house while Jacob slept. I feel like I missed out somehow.

A lot has been said about the elections already. I just want to share my personal experiences about it. During the weekend, Tom invited us to his place in lower Harlem (we live upper Harlem) on 123rd St and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Ave, for Tuesday night. As Tuesday arrived, we didn’t see too many people too excited about it. Living in Harlem, we were pretty used to black people supporting Obama, so getting closer and closer to the elections, we didn’t feel people anxious. On Tuesday, we commuted to work and some of our co-workers got to work late because they have been standing in lines for a couple of hours to vote in polls. The whole day was about talking on how much that day was representing for the US and the world, guessing how they results were going to end up, etc. Later at night, Greg, Phil, Raquel and I headed to Tom’s place for his watch-the-results party. His fridge was full of Blue Moon beer, but he also had some Red Stripe Since I like to go light on politics, I preferred some other American variantion, Coors Light Vermont, Connecticut and a few other New England states were claimed by the Democrats. Matty, a friend of Tom attending the party brought US maps with the electoral votes on each one for people to color them as they were called. It was pretty fun. At some point we forgot about the maps since it was pretty clear that Obama was gonna win. But when they called him at around 11 pm (and I was starting to feel nicely drunk), the whole neighborhood and people in the streets just went completely nuts. It’s something I hadn’t experienced at all in my life, it was like if Mexico would have won the f tbol World Cup (which yes, it will never happen anytime soon :P), but nicer. People went out to the Harlem State Office Building square were cars were honking, and a huge amount of people gathered to celebrate, play brass music, cheer “Yes We Can”. Ghetto guys, white hippies, curious latinos, Africans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, just a lot, a lot of people, all kinds of them, just a clusterfuck. They projected Obama’s speech from Chicago and people went nuts. It was just, fucking amazing. The images they projected from Harlem to the outside world was in that same square we were in. Our Flickr set for the celebration here.

I opened my eyes this morning at 7:00, and immediately felt he was also awake. He got up and briefly wandered around. I felt this incredible expectation, even while barely awake. Something important had happened. As he returned to bed, I asked Who won? . Monsieur Obama , he replied as he slipped back into bed. I broadly smiled and he cuddled up against me, hugging me from behind. I peeked through the open bedroom door and could see the cats smiling in the living-room. Still one more hour before I had to get up for work and life was already good. That early in the morning! Definitely good.

Last night they could, and Yes! they did. And I am truly thankful.

Change is upon us, lets unite and embrace it. Maybe we can make this country a better place and once again be a Role Model to the world of a young ( yes, 221 years young ) Democracy taking its place in the international community for the betterment of all as an Example Nation, not a unnecessarily forceful and arrogant one. Change is here, and tonight I will sleep well for the first time in ages dreaming of this change. 13 comments so far.

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© Brandon Holtsclaw for http://www.imbrandon.com/, 2008. This Post and Originating RSS feed is released under CC-BY-NC-SA license.