Linkmeister

Crime & Mystery readers, take note

Left Coast Crime "is an annual mystery convention sponsored by mystery fans, for mystery fans. It is held during the first quarter of the calendar year in Western North America, as defined by the Mountain Time Zone and all time zones westward to Hawaii."

It's holding its 2009 convention at Waikoloa on the Big Island March 7-12, and one of its members is blogging the preparations. Sign up now!

More on Geoghegan

Tom Geoghegan just announced his candidacy for Emmanuel's House seat, and he's explained his reasons over at Kos.

He wants to

• Expand Social Security
• Establish single-payer health care
• Re-enact usury laws to limit financial firms' behavior, and
• Establish the Employee Free Choice Act

Here's his campaign website.

Uh-oh

Bush to create marine monuments, the headline reads.

The Marianas Trench is among the areas protected by this action.

Hmm. I can think of half-a-dozen Dirk Pitt novels in which he'd be trespassing in these protected areas.

Oh well, I'm sure Clive Cussler will get around this problem just as Pitt has gotten around all the ones he's confronted over 30 years and 20 books.

Rahm Emmanuel's House seat

If you live in Emmanuel's district, you should be supporting Tom Geoghegan in his attempt to win the special election to replace him.

Who's Geoghegan? A practicing labor lawyer (bio at Facebook) who wrote one of the best books I've ever read on the plight of the American labor movement. It's called Which Side Are You On?, and it was originally published in 1991. It was an attempt to show how Corporate America, particularly under Reagan, was winning every battle against its workers, often with the collusion of the National Labor Relations Board and even its own international union colleagues.

If you're not from that district but you'd like to help, here's the ActBlue page for his campaign.

Department of "huh?"

Updated below.

Leon Panetta to head CIA?

Former Congressman, former White House Chief of Staff, former member of the (largely-ignored by Bush) Iraq Study Group.

Well, you can't get much more outside of the normal Intelligence Community than he is. Maybe that's a good thing. He's supposed to be a very good manager, which after Porter Goss's tenure would be a welcome change. He'd succeed Michael Hayden, who's been entirely too happy to defend Bush's torture policy for my taste.

Update: One thing you can say about Panetta; he's unequivocally opposed to torture as an interrogation tool.

Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

That's how I feel too.

CD thoughts

Dear CD/DVD jewel case manufacturers:

Get your Quality Control working better. I'll bet of the 108 CDs I have at least 10 have cracks in the covers. Worse, several have broken "ears," the extensions with the hinge pins that are supposed to hook to the spine of the case.

When buying used CDs I expect problems of this nature. When buying brand-new ones at full price, I don't.

This guy has the right idea: a Digital Jewel Box.

So how about making a Digital Jewel Box? Here’s how it would work: The DJB sits next to your stereo or computer in its charging dock. Similar to a digital picture frame, it syncs wirelessly to your home network via WiFi, syncing itself with iTunes or whatever digital player you use. When a new song comes on, the DJB’s screen shows the album cover art for that song.

At any time, you can take the DJB out of its dock, sit on the couch with it, and use the controls on its side to flip through the rest of the liner notes, including track listings, lyrics, song credits, acknowledgments, and whatever else is included in the paper version. The pleasure of flipping through liner notes doesn’t need to go away just because CDs do.

I like liner notes and cover art. Downloading digital music doesn't offer those things; the DJB does.

While on the subject, if you're looking for cover art for your iTunes (seems like the older the album the less likely the cover will be there, and that doesn't even cover the artists whose music isn't sold through Apple [ahem, The Beatles]), try AlbumArt. Select which country the album was released in at the bottom of the page or you may get unexpected results.

Once you've got the artwork and you have pasted it into your songs, will it stay there? Nope. It lives in a separate folder. If you want the appropriate code to be associated with each song, you have to embed it (apparently; don't swear by what I'm saying here). To do that, iCoverArt is a script which I've seen recommended. I haven't tried it yet (now that I have a backup of the entire libray, maybe I will). If anyone has a teeny-tiny library and wants to give it a shot, I'd be delighted to learn whether it works correctly. Testing it would, I think, involve encoding the art to your library on your hard drive and then synching to your iPod (which I can't do, since I have no iPod). If the art appears on the iPod then the encoding worked, or so I'm surmising.

Backup

Well, that was fairly painless. Using its backup tool, I just backed up my iTunes library: 2089 songs, 7.13GB. It took two DVD-R 4.7GB disks and about 20 minutes. If I'm reading the documentation correctly, it doesn't back up album artwork, so if I (or you) want to save that, the album artwork folder needs to be saved separately. If I'm wrong and somebody knows otherwise, I'd appreciate being advised.

Football

I'm sure the International Bowl is or will be a fine addition to the bowl game lineup, but when I think of Buffalo and Connecticut I think of the Bills in the first instance and the basketball Huskies in the second.

The NFL offers us the Atlanta Falcons versus the Chicago St. Louis Arizona Cardinals, followed by the Indianapolis Colts versus the San Diego Chargers.

Yawn.

Puzzle

While watching football on the television in the kitchen I could put this Christmas present on the table and frustrate myself to no end.

Hmmm. Which of the remaining games look to be lousy and uncompetitive?

Um, this is news why?

Headline at the WaPo today:

"Obama's Team Rankles the Right
To Some Conservatives, Advisers Are Alarmingly Liberal"

Gosh, you think?

I don't have access to Lexis/Nexis, but I wonder whether there was a similar article written in 2000 or 2004 citing liberals' concerns about Bush's appointments. I have my doubts.

Elections have consequences. We Democrats were told that when we objected to many of the Bush Administration policies; maybe the Republicans should remember it.

Equal Opportunity Slanderer

Most of us remember Will Rogers's famous line about Democrats: "I belong to no organized party. I'm a Democrat." But he also said this: "The Republican motto is 'Boys, my back is turned.'" That seems worthy of more notoriety in light of the financial mess we find ourselves in due to Republicans' hatred of regulation.

From Roy Blount, Jr.'s Alphabet Juice, which I was given for Christmas. (Click the link if only to read the subtitle, which is wonderful all by itself.)

2009: It begins

So, who's hungover? Which of today's football games are you going to watch? Is there a special New Year meal you're preparing?

Is your air still replete with the odor of cordite like ours? We're tidy out here; shortly after midnight when all the firecrackers had been exploded my neighbors were out in the street with pushbrooms sweeping up the mess. That always amuses me and restores some of my good will after three-plus hours of increasing annoyance with the racket outside my windows.

What's up, world?

What Are You Doing, New Year's Eve

Nancy Wilson.

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou, everybody!

Twitter question

How do I get that Twitter badge in the left sidebar to reflect new tweets from other people besides myself? The people I'm following, in other words.