Basil beat me to it, but here’s a great update of Will Ferrell’s amazing George W. Bush impression.

The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Clinton has really surprised me. I didn’t plan on watching (honestly, didn’t realize he was on the schedule) - just happened to look over at my treasured blocky, stamp-sized C-SPAN window to the convention. What he lacks in oratory prowess he makes up in messaging in spades. I tell you what, not many people might not know him - and woefully, will not if they’re not at the convention or watching C-SPAN - but they’re the worse off for not hearing his speech. With the ever-present problem the Democrats face as not having the knowledge, guts, whatever to offer what it takes to command the military, he extended the message Michael Moore offered at the end of “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in a very meaningful way for this political party: Thanks be unto our troops, who volunteer to be put in harms way to defend our country; all they ask for in return is to be lead responsibly, be given the support necessary to get the job done, that their families are looked after in their absence. I wish I could rewind the video feed (I can only hope that they’re going to at least post his transcript - I don’t do justice to what he said so much more eloquently).

The presentation of the seven retired, formerly high-ranking military men (including Wesley Clark) was impressive, but not as much as if they had been given some airtime. I’m still trying to find if there’s archived footage of the Veteran’s Caucus…

So I managed to connect to C-SPAN’s generous live feed of the convention just as Al Sharpton was finishing up. Kinda sorry I missed it (definitely sorry I missed Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich). Wasn’t too impressed with Bob Graham’s, but he still had valid points. I’ve been catching up on reading some blogs that get censored blocked by my employer’s firewall software while keeping the feed going on in the background. My ears picked up the middle of the “clean coal” argument by Ed Rendell. Given that he’s the governor of Pennsylvania, it doesn’t surprise me to come from him. What surprises me is the usage of the word “clean” with the word “coal” and not being prefaced with a “not” or some other negation. Clean coal? Really? Is there something I missed as I’ve been anxiously reading more and more about biodiesel?

OK, so I utilized what resources I had at my fingertips to track down a café with free wireless (Cheese Bikini, Beast Blog & Bay Area Free Wi-Fi), only to miss 3 of the 4 speeches I wanted to see (Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama & Ron Reagan). Here’s some helpful information for those of you who might want to be at a cafe later than, say, 7:00pm:

• Fertile Grounds - Closes at 8:00
• Addison Annex Café - I have no idea when they close, but they were not open around 6-6:30
• The Musical Offering - Closes at 5:30

Of course, Berkeley Espresso closes around 11:00, but they were the ones without access to begin with. In trekking back towards the car, I decided to pop into Starbucks (2128 Oxford St; closes at 9:00; doesn’t have a restroom) and just eat the T-Mobile charges.

After seeing Teresa Heinz Kerry’s speech, well, it was totally worth it. Out of all the speeches I’ve seen (President Carter, President Clinton, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton), I’d rank it the second best thus far (first being Bill). To go off on a slight tangent, I have to say I really wasn’t impressed with Hillary’s speech at all (kinda makes one wonder what all the furor about getting this more important role in the convention was all about), although Tim Grieve and Geraldine Sealey of Salon claim that this was because she was originally supposed to introduce both her husband and Kerry but plans had changed at the last moment. Whether this is the case or not, I am much more impressed with THK - her speech was wonderfully eloquent and gave me goosebumps a couple of times it was so moving.

Other good news: At least I can go back and watch (or read) the speeches I missed (including Vice-President Gore’s). I just wish there was someplace that had the Veterans Caucus event (between Carville, Clark and Cleland - goosebumps galore). My convention-going friend Dave shot me a quick email about the amazing talk Michael Moore gave for “Take Back America” - hope that one makes its way online too (frustratingly, right now Salon’s got a picture of Moore at this talk, but doesn’t mention anything about it).

So I booked it over from work to my usual café that offers free wireless access so I could watch Ted Kennedy’s speech courtesy of a blocky, postage-stamp-sized Real Player window offered up by C-SPAN (I know, beggars can’t be choosers - at least I’d be able to listen to it with any sort of problems). Well, the technically-unversed “barista” had no idea why the wireless connection wasn’t working (don’t blame him - I don’t think he’s being paid enough to serve up the usual café fare and troubleshoot a DSL line shared to the general public via a 802.11 base station). Doesn’t change the fact that I’m not particularly happy right now. Time to slam my smoothie, pack things up and seek out a new place in time to catch Teresa Heinz Kerry (and maybe Ron Reagan, if I’m lucky).

Courtesy of Boing Boing:

Apparently there’s someone with money out there who thinks the Earth is hollow and thinks the inner part can be reached via the North Pole.

I probably find this a little more curious than some, simply because I’m reading Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” presently (incidentally, I’m finding it pretty boring, especially in contrast with “Around the World in Eighty Days“). Perhaps someone needs to tell these people they need to go caving in Iceland instead of meandering around on a Russian icebreaker.

Slashdot points to a Reuter’s article announcing a new phone that Motorola will be coming out with that will be fulling compatible with iTunes. The Slashdot post notes that it will only hold about a dozen songs. Neither the Reuter’s article, a competing AP wire, nor the mutual press release make any mention of this 12-song limitation.

Now I’m all for the former bedfellows to cozy back up with each other, but I honestly can’t figure out this 12-song limitation (indeed, I’m not the only one - this feature seems to be having the most airtime on the subsequent ranting with the Slashdot crowd). I mean, if you’re going to add the functionality to the phone, why not offer it as a competitor to the iPod? If I’m going to have the ability to listen to songs on my phone using my (hifi) headphones, how much sense would it be have to keep around an iPod to handle the rest of my music catalog? I’d rather just not pay for that particular premium and get a phone that has phone features I want and keep the iPod for music. Truth be told, I’ve never been one for the combination of my cell phone with any other device. PDA? Heck no - you want your cell phone to be small, but everything about a PDA screams for a smallish size that’s just too-large-for-comfort for a phone.

ComputerWorld reports:

“Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has ordered a halt to all Department of Energy operations using controlled removable electronic media (CREM), including classified hard drives and computer disks, in order to improve security procedures to protect such media.”

(Apologies to Saturday Night Live and the originating writer)

So my friend Dave is at the Democratic National Convention at the Fleet Center in Boston. He just called me to tell me he was interviewed by The Daily Show (unfortunately I don’t have satellite tv at present - nevermind the fact that I’m at a wireless cafe presently). We only chatted very briefly, but he said that it’s kinda crazy because all the traditional news media is interviewing the bloggers. Yeah, the same bloggers that they were dismissing out of hand when the DNC awarded them press passes. Should be interesting to see what comes of this…

So it seems like there might be a trend starting about reporting positive customer support experiences. The funny thing is, I noticed it just after I had a great experience myself. First, I read Michael’s recent post, praising both Speakeasy and Bare Bones. Then, not necessarily a post about good experiences as an end-user, Brian at Unsanity had his own recent post. I suppose the reason why this kinda surprised me is because I read both these entries one right after the other (and it’s safe to say there isn’t necessarily a common thread to ordinarily link the two blogs).

Well, not five minutes before turning my attention to my favorite blogs, I checked the email for this account to get a startling example of “going above and beyond” in customer service by none other than my web hosting company, Server Logistics. I’ve already had a fair number of great experiences with them in the short time I’ve had this domain (and thus been a cheerleader from the beginning), but this really surprised me. The short story is that I’ve been having a bit of an issue with the mod_rewrite Apache module that is required for the pretty URL scheme for permalinks in WordPress. I googled, I crawled through the WordPress support forum, I even tried reading some tutorials on mod_rewrite. Everything I tried came up short. Exasperated, I shot Aaron from SL an email. It’s not really his/SL’s problem, but I figured it was worth a shot. He asked me a few questions, I took forever to get back to him (and apologized profusely) and he wrote back that he think that he fixed it by doing a little twiddling to my .htaccess file. Bang. Fixed. No more problems. Totally did not have to do that, but he did all the same. Aaron’s the man. No doubt in my mind.

You also have to realize that I started this relationship without necessarily not having the most stringent expectations — don’t get me wrong! It wasn’t because I had read or heard anything that would make me think that SL was anything but great, just that I hadn’t read or heard anything about them. At all. Why did I decide to go with them? Well, I had three criteria that I was more or less not going to be flexible with: (1) Price (can’t really afford too much presently to throw at this venture), (2) the ability to run a blogging package, and (3) the ability to host on a OS X platform. I figured points (1) and (3) would give me a narrow selection to choose from (it did), and thus it wouldn’t really give me the best opportunity to get a kick-butt hosting service. Man, oh man - I am so happy I was wrong. Server Logistics ROCKS! I can’t recommend them highly enough!

Update: Add Adriaan from the ecto project to the list of great & speedy responses. I’d been bashing my head repeatedly against the proverbial wall trying to get ecto to work with my WordPress installation for a few days now. Tonight (7/26) I posted to the support forums for help and now I’m using ecto to update this post. Nifty!

Courtesy of Macintouch:

Haven’t had the time to read it yet, but Stephen de Vries has posted a whitepaper on securing Mac OS X: “This guide is aimed at users in environments requiring stronger security controls in an operating system, making full use of the protection features offered in OS X. It would also be of use to system administrators wishing to enforce an organisation wide desktop security policy for Mac OS X.

Couldn’t hurt anyone choosing to lock down their OS X machine further, eh?

Courtesy of Salon’s War Room, the Progress Report has noted that in an effort to help the homeless, the Bush Labor Department has set up a website. According to Progress Report, “The Department did not announce plans to give out wireless laptops to the homeless or provide the homeless with homes with desktop computers connected to the Internet.”

Bad News - PBS voluntarily censors itself in fear of getting smacked by the FCC. Good news? Richard Dreyfuss has some choice words about it.

(Kinda old) Microsoft IE engineers get chewed out. Best part? The quote from the IE Product Unit Manager: “IE is a super powerful Web browser that hundreds of millions of people choose to use.” Choose?

According to Kevin Rollins, the new CEO, Dell has a pretty cool management evaluation process.

Well, W Ketchup might not be a new tidbit to some out there - it seems like it’s something that belongs on Snopes (but it isn’t - I just checked. When Ken forwarded along the URL, I thought it was a joke (consider the tagline: “You don’t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?”). I checked the whois data (alas, they’re using a host provider), random Google searches… The only thing that pointed to W Ketchup, LLC as a legitimate entity with a legitimate product were the few referenced blurbs in the press section of their website. As with anyone who has an ounce of skepticism running through their body, I checked on their argument and the logic behind it. I found that using the word logic might have been a little too generous.

So I decided to do my own research and sent them an email asking a few questions before purchasing their product…

Well, my one or more reader(s), I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to posting. I kinda have a reason: my old hard drive went down hard just hours before the external Firewire housing (that would actually house the original, problematic drive in my Powerbook) arrived. Yup, yet another reason to hate UPS.

So needless to say, I was flirting with danger and not having backed up my said problematic drive since the last time I was having issues with it and the whole thing wound up biting me in the butt. I have the majority of my passwords, but not the ones to the blog, maintenance of this site, etc. I’m still hoping to resurrect the drive just long enough to get everything on to my new, spiffier, larger & faster drive now residing in my Powerbook. We’ll see how that goes.