Comments on the Palin aftermath

I really love how all the commentators on CNN and other stations are in a state of mock shock at the fact that the McCain campaigners are saying Palin was utterly and shockingly unqualified, not to mention plain ignorant. "How could they mislead the population!? It's unconscionable!"

Of course the McCain campaign knew how ignorant she was. Maybe not when they chose her but I'm sure in a few weeks they realized her level of knowledge....or lack there of. How about some truth in media. Political campaigns lie to get us to vote for them. How shocking!!

In any case I think it's poetic justice for McCain. He went looking for someone to appeal to the far right, religious conservatives. and what he got was a horrible caricature of everything that the religious right is accused of being.

An ignorant, self-righteous, arrogant cook, who believes in witch doctors and 'fake Americans'. Someone who thinks that wisdom is not something to be earned by learning but is as a gift from God granted to the faithful. Someone who believes that faith is an excuse for ignorance and predestination means everyone is either with them or against them.

Someone who will forever remind McCain of that famous saying...Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.

Elections and Hackers

Hot on the trail of the Obama win we get these little tidbits of information. Both his and McCain's servers were compromised. The FBI believes this was a foreign party (read China) intent on getting intel for future negotiations.

The funniest part is Obama's view on global warming :)

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

USB stops working in Ubuntu

For the last couple of months I've been having a problem connecting usb devices to my Ubuntu PC. Everything seems to be working fine when I bootup but if the machine stays on for a day or so, usb just stops working. I couldn't even charge my iPhone.

After looking around Ubuntu forums and Googling the only helful hints I could find was adding noacpi to my boot options. Since I sort of like my ACPI based soft shut off functionality I tried a different way, which actually worked just as well.

I call this the windows way of fixing software glitches since this pretty much just restarts the usb modules:

sudo rmmod usbhid && sudo rmmod ehci_hcd && sudo rmmod uhci_hcd && sudo rmmod usbcore
sudo modprobe usbhid && sudo modprobe ehci_hcd && sudo modprobe uhci_hcd && sudo modprobe usbcore

A word of caution first. Killing uhci, not to mention usbcore, will most likely temporarily disable your usb 2.0 devices like the mouse. They should come right back when you modprobe the modules back in.