Great news! Van Halen is back together, releasing a new album and going on tour! :yawn: This is almost as exciting as the news that John McCain has endorsed…um…I forget. Heard it yesterday, I think. I dunno. He endorsed one of those douchebag Republicans running for Preznit.
With the release of Firefox 9, I have switched back from Chrome. It seems to work better for me, with the exception of the bookmarks menu on the MacBook. For some reason, if I get into a submenu, I can no longer go back to scrolling/selecting the main menu w/o going all the way to the top or using the keyboard. The bookmarks toolbar works fine. This is somewhat annoying, and not something that happens on any version of Windows or Linux that I’ve used. It’s one of the many annoyances with the Mac OS that is so beloved by many, but doesn’t do much for me. Not that there aren’t things I don’t like about it (two, three, and four-finger gestures, for instance), but I’ve been able to get that functionality via other methods.
One thing I don’t get is what’s the point of the little red ‘X’? I mean, does it do anything different the the little yellow ‘-‘ button? Not as far as I can tell. All it does is make me think I’ve closed the program, only to eventually discover that, yes, I have 100 things running. I mean, I can always command-Q, but, still, why have both buttons if all one does is initiate the cutesy shrinky-uppy graphic. Cute, the first few million times, but after that? Meh.
And, man, I sure need to make sure I actually close down the programs, ‘cuz this thing turns into a dog if I’ve got more than a few things running. No offense to dogs, of course.
I think I need a new sittin’ & surfin’ device. Yesterday’s Woot was a Thrive tablet, refurbished for $279. Pretty good deal, with Honeycomb pre-installed and at least the promise of support for Ice Cream Sandwich on the horizon. Alas, that’s a toy I just can’t justify at this point in time.
Oh well, time to get started on Friday (it is Friday, right? Please don’t tell me it’s Thursday again) and get this week over with.
Although the direction of the administration was made clear in October, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will on Monday finalize a 20-year ban on new uranium-mining on some one million acres of land near the Grand Canyon. The announcement will be made at the National Geographic Society HQ in Washington, D.C.
The ban, which is actually an extension of an existing ban, has been under consideration since 2009. Under the Bush administration, thousands of new mining claims had been encouraged under the 1872 Mining Act.
After Salazar’s position became clear when he chose “Alternative B” from the Bureau of Land Management’s final environmental impact statement on withdrawing lands, Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, as well as Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, announced their intention to introduced legislation that would allow new uranium mining.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/06/1052300/-Ken-Salazar-to-announce-20-year-extension-of-Grand-Canyon-uranium-mining-ban?detail=hide&via=blog_1
I probably shouldn’t single him out, but I think McCain is a dick!
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is calling for immediate cuts to Social Security benefits and says the country can’t wait to phase in reductions as most of his rivals have advocated.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/06/1052295/-Rick-Santorum-says-we-should-cut-Social-Security-benefits,-starting-immediately?detail=hide&via=blog_1
I assume this is Santorum Salad’s way of saying that he has no desire to win the election, which is OK with me.
Santorum appeared Friday morning at a townhall meeting in Keene, New Hampshire, population 23,409. To an emergency-room nurse who said her son had had cancer at age 5 and asked the candidate his views on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance coverage or charging them more for it, Santorum replied:
Insurance works when people who are higher risk end up having to pay more, as they should. You say, in your case, your son absolutely obviously did nothing wrong. Obviously, there are a lot of other people that increased their health risk that did do things wrong and as a result … it resulted in higher health care costs. So, of course, you always have cases, if it was all the same case as your son then maybe you could make the argument, well nobody did anything to cause their … instance of health care costs to go up, but of course, that’s not the case.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/06/1052218/-Rick-Santorum-says:-Behave-or-pay-more-for-health-insurance?detail=hide&via=blog_1