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Agriculture, skepticism, politics

State fair, state fair

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I posted the video and live blog of my trip to the fair on Wednesday over at the AuctioneerTech site for anyone who is interested, so if you haven’t seen it yet head on over and check it out.

Here’s a nice, juicy morsel from our friends over at www.dreamnotoftoday.com that needs to be spread far and wide. There’s a joke here about Palin, but I’ll let you make it.

The front fell off

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I had a request to post this. It’s two Australian comedians performing a skit. Reminds me of Monty Python…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg[/youtube]

Screwed by GoDaddy

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GoDaddy screwed me. I migrated my domain names from NetworkSolutions to GoDaddy because I’m a sucker for cheap domains, making sure to check the “leave everything the way it is” button so I wouldn’t have to mess with my mail records. The transfer just completed and traffas.net is hosed. Because I use Google Apps for Your Domain for the family email accounts, we’re kind of screwed for the time being. If you’re emailing me or anyone @traffas.net, please resend in a day or so.

Go Daddy.

New website

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I’ve been posting more and more posts that are technology- or auction-related over last few months. In an effort to both not bore existing viewers of this page as well as provide a medium where I can focus more on auctions and technology, I launched auctioneertech.com where I can cover current technology and auction events and issues without mixing in with the alt-country, political and general entertainment focuses of this site.

Chrome Palin

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Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat, ignorant bastard. I listen to him when I leave work during the day in my car and forget to grab my Zune. It’s better than more entertaining than music, and in the doldrums of the day between Morning Edition and All Things Considered, it’s about the only thing without a beat that comes in on my radio.

Today he was ranting about how the liberals (said, of course, with audible disdain) were trying to make political hay with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. He said the ‘rest of America’ had already moved on.

First, let’s ignore how thie ‘rest of America’ is actually the liberals he dispises and focus on this simple concept: liberals care about Palin’s daughter in the same way they care about a lost puppy. They want to help it, feed it and give it a good home, unlike the Republicans who want simply to eat it.

Liberals don’t factor Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into the political equation. It’s something that happens and, like the sex lives of political candidates, it won’t effect how Palin would govern. We liberals have plenty of hay to make over the issues and what kind of governor (used generically) she would be were she to hold a higher office than Governor. The political group with the most desire to make a big deal out of her daughter’s predicament is exclusively the right-wingers, who see it as an affront to their monotonous abstinence-only drone that continues to fail to produce real results. Perhaps she’s not as conservative as she was made out to be. Or, perhaps, and I think this more likely, she’s not as good at leading and demonstrating those conservative values as she was made out to be.

I spent a fair amount of time today immersing myself in Google’s Chrome. I watched the live announcement today and downloaded it within a few minutes of it being released to the public. Unlike the server shortages that plagued Apple with it’s last big product launch, Google’s offering was easily conveyed to the multiple computers on which I installed it.

Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Balls fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.

New shows section

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Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering
Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering
We had a great show at Bobby T’s on Friday. Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in to the broadcast. Thanks to Ty and Rob, our friends from San Francisco, who called in with credit cards to buy us rounds of drinks from several states away.

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of WordPress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past – all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.