Blog Master G

Who’s capable of going head-to-head against Arnold should the conservatives engineering the Davis recall get their way?

AlterNet: “That progressive candidate is Arianna Huffington, the wealthy, brilliant writer and TV personality who has confounded progressive circles with her transformation over the past six years from the conservative wife of Republican Congressman Michael Huffington to influential populist leader. Huffington has emerged as arguably the most visible and effective progressive female leader in America.”

I couldn’t agree or support this idea more. There is hope after all. How beautifully poetic would it be if the Republicans lead the way to unseat Davis and a progressive ends up in office? Only in California.

Please, Arianna! Step up to the plate. We need you!

This is it. The beginning of my final week at work before flying to New York to become a married man. It’s a trip. The wedding has been this destination on the horizon for so long — more than a year — that it seems unreal that’s it’s only 11 days, 10 hours, 15 minutes, and 40 seconds from now. Wow. I’m definitely very excited and ready for it to the Big Day (in fact, I had a dream the other night — again about the wedding — that it was the day of the wedding and I was blogging about it that day. Of course, the reality is such that we’ll be in a hotel and I wasn’t planning on bringing my laptop along…although now that I think about it, it would be pretty cool to upload photos the same day. I’ll have to think about that one.

Anyhow, over the weekend we finalized the script for the service, went to Jen’s office to put together the program (with which we’re both very happy), and generally just got in the mindset for the Big Day. (Hanging out at Zeitgeist Friday night and at Ron and Seana’s BBQ Sunday helped to relax us, no doubt.)

I recently purchased Quicken and have been spending the last couple weeks inputting all accounts and back data (at least back through January 2003). Not counting Jen’s separate accounts (but including mine and our shared accounts), it’s pretty scary how much we’ve spent on everything. Good thing Jen’s parents are kind enough to pay for the reception and some miscellaneous things here and there — and my parents the rehearsal dinner.

It’s going to be great to have our lives back when this is all over with. Hawaii is like the gold at the end of the rainbow for us. And once we’re back from there, I hope to dive full-speed ahead into real estate investing!

Boston.com / Valedictorian who sued is dropped from Harvard class: “A New Jersey student who sued successfully to be the sole valedictorian of her high school has been disinvited from attending Harvard University for plagiarism, according to a published report.”

What comes around goes around.

This part of the story is especially ridiculous: “She is also seeking $2.7 million in punitive and compensatory damages. A hearing in that matter is scheduled for Aug. 13 in U.S. District Court in Camden.”

If she wins that case, there’s something seriously wrong with our legal system.

Let’s toss this one into the “Headlines that make you say, ‘Hmm…’ category:

Gerbil farming brings its own delights, challenges

[via Fark]

Of course Bush is trying to put the blame on the CIA and vice-versa.

CBS News | Bush: CIA OK’d Iraq Speech | July 11, 2003: “CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that before the State of the Union speech was delivered, CIA officials warned members of the president’s National Security Council staff that the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.”

Sign Howard Dean’s petition for guilty parties to resign.

[via eclecticism]

Back in May when Mozilla Firebird was released and I started using it, I was blown away by how cool it is — in particular, the popup window blocking feature (and tabbed browsing, which I’ve grown to love). Since then, I’ve been using it pretty much as my primary browser. And IE 6 as backup — since there are a number of IE features I miss (like Yahoo Companion bookmarks and the MT It right-click feature). This week, though, I’ve installed the beta of the Google Toolbar 2.0. There are two features that will likely bring me back to using IE as my primary browser again: Popup blocker and AutoFill forms.

The Google Toolbar popup blocker works splendidly — and even displays a different mouse cursor and plays a sound when popups are blocked. And the AutoFill feature is super-cool: Fill in your name, address, phone, shipping address, and even credit card info ahead of time, and whenever you land on a page with a form containing corresponding fields, the Toolbar will highlight those fields yellow for you. One click and boom, there’s your info. Very handy.

Now if only Microsoft would hurry up and steal Mozilla’s tabbed browsing feature…

How trippy would it be to fall asleep in 1984 and wake up in 2003? Nearly 20 years in a coma. I can’t even begin to imagine what that would be like. Terry Wallis was 19 when he went into a coma and woke up 19 years later — when his daughter is now 19…the same age that he was when he was last awake. That’s nuts. I’m sure he doesn’t see himself as a 39-year-old man — nor does he have the life experience of the average 39-year-old — so his mental and emotional state has got to be equivalent to that of his daughter. Weird. I wonder if his wife remarried… It reminds me of the 1986 Disney movie Flight of the Navigator…woah, Terry would not even have seen that movie. How strange must the world look and feel to him?

IOL : Friday the 13th ‘miracle’ for coma victim: “Terry Wallis, who had been in a coma since a 1984 car accident, regained consciousness last month to the surprise of doctors and the delight of his family, including his mother, who heard his first word in 19 years.”

Since beginning my beta test of TypePad this week, I’m not the only one faced with the question/challenge of maintaining two blogs. As I’ve begun to poke around the blogs of some other TyepPad beta testers, I’ve seen this question handled a number of ways…keep them separate…switch over to TyepPad exclusively…import all MT postings into TyepPad…or, like me, still post primarily in my main blog and occasionally here…why? Because I’m a bit neurotic when it comes to losing data — especially stuff I write. Not that I think six apart or TypePad are suddenly going to go away, but I’m a bit cautious about not having any of my posts on my own server for which I pay…of course I’ll have the option to pay for TypePad at some point following the beta, but what if I decide not to subscribe to TypePad? What happens to this beta blog then? And how long would I have to get all my posts out before they disappear?

[via eclecticism]

(OK, so I’m a month behind, but still think this is pretty newsworthy.)

The Sydney Morning Herald: “It’s a strange form of legitimacy – perhaps even a coming of age – when a group of internet users are important enough to get their own version of Google.

“Web logs or ‘blogs’, the popular form of personal journal publishing, are growing up and are about to get a search engine of their own. Diarists who discuss everything from daily chores to current affairs can at least look forward to a dedicated tab on the world’s largest search engine. Google claims to index more of the internet than any other search engine, polling an ever-increasing number of pages – more than three billion at the time of writing. A blogs-only search tool was announced by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt at a telecommunications conference earlier this month but the details are yet to be unveiled.”

Another hot day here in Marin. I ran some errands at lunchtime…sunshade for car, CD with wedding song on it, canned dog food. Tonight is Bay Area Wealth Builders meeting here in San Rafael.