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The Change not everyone believes in

scaredpoet

So finally, the 8-year-long nightmare has ended. Yesterday, I breathed a sigh of relief. And while I realize that a nightmare that long still has a significant aftermath, at least I’m not screaming inside anymore.

Still, while Obama takes the White House with the one of the highest approval ratings of an incoming President, there’s still some bitter boobs out there who are using the internet to spew some pretty wild ultraconservative banter. I personally don’t want to link any of these sites because, well, I find them idiotic and giving them direct web traffic is not something I find worthy of doing, but just do a Google search for “Nobama” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

You find such gems as this fine comment in one such discussion (all typos and grammatical errors kept intact):

I cannot stand the sight of his arrogant face. I refuse to watch anything about him. I am to the point of denouncing my citizen ship. He is NOT my president, I did NOT vote for him.

Remember when conservatives were getting all up in a huff when some liberals were proclaiming they’d do the exact same thing? Yeah, so much for being more Patriotic than the liberals, eh? I guess all that talk about being Patriotic Americans regardless of who is in office was all just puffery. And I suppose threatening to renounce your citizenship is only treason when you’re a liberal, but perfectly acceptable speech when you’re a conservative.

All in all, it seems like the conservatives who have butthurt over President Obama are having the same anger and resentment quite a few of us felt about 8 years ago. As someone who survived it, let me offer some soothing words of comfort: don’t worry, my friends. You’ll get over it eventually.

Linux makes a PR coup

scaredpoet

While the weekend was spent by millions of geeks crushing web servers in an attempt to download the beta of the latest installment of Microsoft Windows, some members of the Linux community got a little welcome PR from the New York Times. Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical Ltd., and the guy behind Ubuntu (the linux distro that powers this website), was interviewed by NYT about his alternative OS, which challenges the commercial software model by giving away the store.

Microsoft had an estimated 10,000 people working on Vista, its newest desktop operating system, for five years. The result of this multibillion-dollar investment has been a product late to market and widely panned.

Canonical, meanwhile, releases a fresh version of Ubuntu every six months, adding features that capitalize on the latest advances from developers and component makers like Intel. The company’s model centers on outpacing Microsoft on both price and features aimed at new markets.

To those of us who’ve used Ubuntu and other linux distros, the article isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but it does give a mainstream public relations polish to Linux, and presents the alternative to those who’ve never really thought that you can run something other than Windows on your PC.

And I love this quote from Shuttleworth:

“I want to find out what it’s like to have a gigabit connection to the home,” he said. “It is not because I need to watch porn in high-definition but because I want to see what you do differently.”

I had always envisioned this guy as some inaccessible, eccentric billionaire. He’s definitely eccentric, but it’s also clear he’s in fact quite human.

…and you KNOW porn really did have something to do with broadband motivations. 🙂

MacRumors Live Coverage gets Pwned

scaredpoet

Macrumors live

Looks like the trolls at 4Chan have gotten their sticky, unwashed mitts into MacRumors Live coverage of the MacWorld Expo 2009 event today. Twitteriffic!

The above is a screenshot of the live “coverage” as it was just getting hacked (click for a larger, full-window view). Shortly afterwards, the site went blank, followed by periods where it came back with the typical chaotic LOLspeak prevalent among the lulz crowd. The culmination was the posting of a nice, ugly goatse-style image, making the final results un-postable here (simply because I try to keep things at least marginally SFW).

It was hilarious at the start. Then once every tired meme was spilled out on the scrolling twitter feed, it kinda got old.

/b/tards suck. MacRumors, however, sucks harder for having such lax security and allowing access to their feed to get leaked out like this.

Bush Gets the Shoe

scaredpoet

This poor Iraqi. He did what a LOT of people have wanted to do to ol’ Dubyah for a long time, and got so much grief for it.

The full story is here.

Bush met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai Monday to reassure him of continuing U.S. commitment under his successor. A day earlier he stopped in Iraq to endorse a security pact that paves the way for U.S. withdrawal.

As he addressed a news conference in Baghdad, an Iraqi journalist flung his shoes at the American leader and called him a “dog.”

“This is the farewell kiss,” reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi yelled as he hurled the footwear — a strong sign of contempt in Arab culture.

Check out 30 seconds into the video. The expression of total idiocy and failure on that guy’s face is just digusting. And then the joke he tries to make at the end? Just resign already, please. You’ve embarrassed us enough!

McCain’s BlackBerry Jam

scaredpoet

McCain's Blackberry

Very rarely does the public pay attention to what happens to the campaign of a presidential candidate who loses an election. The campaign must of course wind down its operations, dispose of any equipment it can no longer use, settle any debts, and the like. And while it seems commonplace to most of us, it’s only been this past election where mobile technology has really been a huge factor.

Well, much like Sarah Palin’s clothes, All those cell phones, computers and BlackBerries purchased by the McCain Campaign have been relegated to the disposal bin, to be sold off to any willing buyers looking for a deal on some slightly-used gadgets. To the end, this past week McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, VA, held a sale, where all of their election assets – from office furniture to knick-knacks to BlackBerries – could be had for cheap. But how they handled this technological yard sale makes me hope that they cleaned Palin’s dresses, because they sure didn’t wipe their smartphones.

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

Gee, aren’t you glad you’re not a VIP in the former McCain campaign?

It’s really not that hard to wipe the memory off a BlackBerry. In fact there’s several well-known ways to do it. You’d think that the campaign who claimed their candidate helped created the BlackBerry would know better than to sell one armed to the teeth with sensitive info.