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So Barack Obama gave an impassioned speech about race. People have mixed reactions about it (mostly positive, it seems) but the real news is that he wrote the entire thing himself.  No speechwriters, no campaign managers, no one but himself sitting up late at night putting the words together.  Apparently no sitting president or presidential candidate since Nixon has done such a thing.

I thought this was a great quote about it:

Here’s a fun beach to visit.

Zack shows off his latest schwag from my clients: this time it’s Annie’s Naturals, makers of those delicious little cheddar cheese bunny rabbits.

Kyra and Hannah decided that Pumpkin’s gerbil cage was just too restrictive, so they grabbed a bunch of cardboard boxes from our crawlspace and built a huge “playland” for her. The finished product isn’t pretty, but it’s big and Pumpkin seems to enjoy running around it (probably desperately searching for a way out).

“I know all technology is actually run by magic gerbils.”

— Steve Morrey

After five years of living in Longmont, I decided that the Builder White paint in our house was pretty dully, so it was time to paint some rooms. Laralee was supportive of the idea but didn’t really have any suggestions, so it was more or less up to me to figure out what rooms, what colors, yada yada.

In the end I decided that our family room really needed to be green.

It looks pretty good– our barstools are green, and our ficus tree (barely visible here) goes well. The funny thing is I picked an “accent color” because that’s all the rage these days, but the colors are so close that it just looks like a trick of the light that one wall is darker. Dang paint swatches; it’s hard to tell when looking at a one-by-one inch square of color.

Blue seemed like a good color for the living room.

It’s really blue. Again, those paint swatches didn’t do justice to what an entire wall will look like. Thus, the living room reminds me of some aquatic adventure now. It’s a nice blue, but it’s a little overwhelming.

I suggested to Laralee that we get a huge plasma screen, hang it on the wall, and run a screensaver application of tropical fish. It’ll be like going to the city aquarium!

The animal kingdom invaded suburbia today: Laralee spotted a hawk flying around the neighborhood, and the kids tracked it down. It had apparently killed a pigeon and was looking for a place to dine.

Eventually it managed to carry the pigeon from the rooftop to a neighbor’s fence, and it was dinner time!

The kids were pretty stoked because they were able to get within about ten feet of the hawk. Pretty cool.

Pumpkin (Kyra’s little gerbil) certainly gets around these days. It seems like she’s involved with every aspect of our daily lives.

She sits on Alex’s shoulder while he does homework, probably whispering answers in his ear.

Today I found this shot– taken by one of the kids– of Pumpkin sitting in an empty baking powder can and surveying the room.

The good news is the little bugger is much easier to care for than a dog, and only occasionally manages to architect an escape and hide under the couch or dryer.

I’m having some problems with a client’s Linux web server, and just can’t figure out the weird behavior. So I’m taking a page from the Windows playbook and rebooting it, on the off chance it’ll fix whatever ghosts are lurking in the machine.

I hate to reboot something that’s been running for 13 months straight, though… it seems such a shame.

[fixed: 11:08:12 up 386 days, 16:52, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.01
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root ttyp0 11:08 0.00s 0.01s 0.00s w]

So Bush exercised the tenth veto of his presidency to overturn legislation that would force the CIA and other covert agencies to adhere to the same standards of interrogation as the military. Thus those agencies can continue doing whatever the heck they want, including the oft-used phrase “enhanced interrogation”, without regard for law or even human decency.

In defending his veto, Bush used his standard rhetoric:

Ahh, the terrorists. Those mythical shadowy figures that make it okay for our country to abandon its standards and sink to their level, if not below it.

The other tired line Bush used was this one:

I call that the Elephant in My Backyard argument. I paid a billion dollars to install an anti-elephant defense system in my backyard, and in the five years it’s been in place, not a single elephant has been in my backyard. Thus, the billion dollars was well-spent and clearly the defense system is the reason there haven’t been any elephants. The Bush administration’s use of this argument is a non sequitur and proves only that they have no strong justification for their course of action.

I can only hope that when he leaves in ten months, some semblance of reason and humanity will return to this nation.