Mike Cohen

Slow motion train wreck

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Whenever I watch an interview with Sarah Palin I feel like I’m watching a slow motion train wreck. She actually makes Dan Quayle seem intelligent and articulate. When McCain picked her, I lost what little respect I still had for him. There has to be more qualified people he could have picked. Choosing Sarah Palin was one of his most transparent political moves.

links for 2008-09-22

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  • Hiding in Plain Sight
    Mr. McCain's selection of an inexperienced and relatively unknown figure was unsettling, and the campaign's decision to keep her sequestered from serious interchanges with reporters and voters serves only to deepen the unease.
    (tags: politics mccain palin)
  • Plastic: Why Do They Vote Republican?
    "people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues."
    The thesis goes on to postulate that this instinct is the root of the politics of fear that supposedly works so well on conservatives.
    (tags: politics republicans)
  • Automating My WordPress Workflow
    A workflow for creating WordPress themes.
    (tags: wordpress)

Disk space eater

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Today I suddenly noticed that the free space on my MacBook Pro was down to 7.6 GB. The culprit turned out to be caches in /private/var/folders, in this case Pukka. According to the author of Pukka, these caches are created by the system. He’s actively looking into it and working on a solution.

Baseline
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Nikon introduces their first AF-S prime lens

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Nikon has announced a new 50mm/f1.4 AF-S lens, their first prime lens with an internal auto focus motor. Unlike their current prime lenses, including the popular 50mm/f1.8 AF, this new lens will support auto focus on the D40, D40x, and D60. One of my reasons for upgrading to a D90 was the D40x’s lack of internal auto focus.

The new lens will be available in December for $439 in the US.

R.I.P. Verda

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I found out that one of my elderly neighbors, Verda, died yesterday. She was a former condo association president & still came to every board meeting, until she became too weak. Verda worked at the polling place for every election as long as I’ve lived here. She took care of every stray cat & had a few of her own, but she wasn’t the stereotypical “crazy cat lady”.