Can we Please have a new Law to Expose the People Pulling the Strings?

Gentle readers. I’m sorry for getting political.  The Supreme Court decision on 1/21/10 declaring that Companies, Unions and anyone with tons of money and an axe to grind can buy all the time they can afford to express their political views and influence ours, is just so very wrong to me.  I have a suggestion to combat this.

The Problem.

It seems like Freedom of Speech is no longer free, that is if you really want to be heard.  An average citizen can scream at the top of their lungs, but the wealthy corporation can buy huge oil-fired amplifiers that “go to eleven”, drowning everyone else out in the process.

– if you want to comment, feel free to, I’ll print any support, slings and arrows and about anything else as long as it stays within reasonable, and polite bounds.  I also promise not to do this very often and when I do, I’ll endeavor to be as moderate and populist as possible.

The Wizard of OZ law.

Companies and other large groups hide behind shell committees with nice names like “Citizens for a Completely Free America”, “Concerned Fiscally Responsible Patriots”, “People for Healthy Puppies”, etc.  They don’t want to get their hands dirty in politics or reveal who they actually are – they prefer to stay behind the curtains and manipulate the controls, just like in the “Wizard of OZ”.

I believe it is time to use their tactics against them.  They can advertise all they want, but there should be “rules” governing the advertisement:

• The advertisement can be no less than 30 seconds long.
• At the beginning of the advertisement, the group must disclose in large readable type what companies and persons are involved in the advertisement, along with a clear voice-over.
• Every 15 seconds of the advertisement, a box at the bottom of the picture comprising of no less than 10% of the viewable “safe image” of the screen must scroll the names of all the corporations that have contributed financial payment to the advertisement.  The type must fill the scroll box and roll at a speed that is legible to the average person.
• Time must be allotted at the end of the advertisement for the CEOs of the corporations/unions that have contributed to the advertisements to announce that they are the CEO of “X company”, and that they approve the message.  It must be clear, recorded and available on the company website.

No more hiding behind the curtain calling your group some flag-waving, patriotic, catchy name.  We as citizens must see the truth, must see who finances the advertisements and know who’s pulling the levers and twisting the valves, just like in “The Wizard of OZ”.

I’m sure that you can think of additional ways to ensure that the public knows the truth, and to make it very difficult for people to hide behind the curtain.  Let’s beat them at their own game.

Feel free to send this to anyone you wish if you agree with it.  I don’t care about the credit for the idea as much as I care about doing something about only a few wealthy people holding sway and power over all of us.

Moto Guzzi V7 Classic — 3600 miles and the season is ending

December 2 was the last day I rode.  I went out to the patio on December 6th, and, after 3600mi, I think the season is close to over.

Time to make room in the garage after 4 months and 3600 miles

What can I say? It’s been awesome. I checked the oil, and not a drop has been used. Cold starts? Pretty much history after the last ECU Mapping upgrade in October. Made 4 500 mile days. One weekend was over 1000 mi. The bike just hums.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Where’s my SD Card?

I’ve had one heck of a hard time getting the SD card to mount on my Ubuntu Karmic Dell Precision 90 laptop.  Not a thing.  Searched through the forums and found a solution that worked for me.  Now the SD Card mounts on my Dell Laptop just fine.  Just takes a quick command-line call and a cut-and-paste into “gedit”.  Once the edit is made, close and reboot, and the SD card problem with your Ubuntu Karmic Koala is gone!

First, at a command line, do:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Then, in gedit, cut and paste:

options sdhci debug_quirks=1
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: linux-image-2.6.28-6-generic 2.6.28-6.17
ProcCmdLine: User Name=UUID=e309fb14-05db-4e9a-b137-c6bf63eeb6a4 ro quiet splash elevator=noop
ProcEnviron:
SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.28-6.17-generic
SourcePackage: linux

Save the file, then reboot.

Your SD Card should show up.

Test Driven Development — How to start with a test

Test driven development is mystical to anyone that hasn’t done it from the ground-up. It’s almost like riding a bike; you really don’t know how easy it is and how much fun you can have with it until you get up and going. When the training wheels are off, it then becomes a brand new world full of possibilities.

I have been writing unit tests for years. Having come to the Java game later than most of my colleagues, I really like to make sure that everything I commit to my various development communities are well-tested and as clean as I can make them. Unit testing has allowed me to verify this in two different ways. First, it guarantees that what I’ve writting works, and more importantly, it makes me keep my code simple. Frankly, if I start writing a test and it becomes a dependency-driven, closely-coupled to the implementation monster, I can pretty much guarantee that the code is going to be the same. I’ll try to refactor this and use my tests in this manner as a guage for it’s quality.

Petrana Gurovich’s Meatless Pinto Bean Recipe (with Copper Hills variant).

Petrana’s Meatless Pinto Beans

(The Copper Hills variant is this recipe plus the stuff at the bottom!)

Petrana was my Dad’s mother.  She came to the U.S. in 1901 — through Ellis Island. When she and her husband, Elia, landed, they were met by a man that spoke Montenegrin and he gave them tickets to go to Montana where a job was waiting for them.  For the entire time on the train, they only ate ham and eggs, because that was the only thing that Elia could speak in English.

Elia worked in the mines around Helena for a few years until 1908, when he heard about a large masonry dam being built in Arizona.  Elia was a trained stone mason, and he moved to Miami, Arizona to work on Roosevelt Dam.  When the dam was finished, he settled in Miami and began working at the Miamii Copper Company as a Blacksmith.  He built up enough money to purchase a boarding house where Petrana fed her family of four children plus boarders, and Elia worked in the mines and distilled Loza Rokeya, which is basically grappa, a family recipe that is still made on our family farm back in Spuz, Montenegro, to this day.

Slimy COLD! Run — Fall 2009

The Fall 2009 Slimy Crud Run.

This is just a beautiful motor

It was 46 degrees when I fired up my V7 Classic to ride up to Slimy Crud with a new friend of mine from the Chicago Vintage Motorcyclist Group.  Mark met me at the Starbucks on Logan Square, mounted on his BMW tourer.  Mark’s a fire fighter and owns a few properties in Wisconsin, so I was more than happy to ride with him up there.  I had my long underwear on, a pair of Olympia Thinsulate Gloves, Jeans, Turtleneck and fleecy vest under my “First” leather jacket.  The weatherman predicted warm afternoon.  I’m going to find that guy…

Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10 Beta) Buggy Touchpad Behavior

I recently upgraded my Dell Precision M90 Laptop to Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I’m running it standalone, no Windows anywhere. When I upgraded using “apt-get upgrade” my touchpad didn’t work. Nothing. The touchpad was completely disabled. I assume that this is a problem on M70’s, ect.

Found a fix after searching for two days — in case you’re having the same problem, here it is.

Open a terminal (if you don’t have a mouse hooked up, use Alt+F2). then “su” and give the root password (I tried doing this with sudo and still didn’t have enough permission. I “think” you need to be root). At the prompt, type:

echo options psmouse proto=exps > /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.modprobe

At the next prompt, type”

reboot

Your touchpad will come back up after rebooting.

Update 11/12/09

I did an apt-get upgrade just after the release was announced.  It killed my NVidia driver and would boot up “once in awhile” in recovery mode.  I finally got frustrated and downloaded and burnt a DVD on my Mac, wiped the disk on my Dell and reinstalled the thing.  It’s working fine now — there was no bugginess in the touchpad, etc…

Ubuntu changed a lot of stuff in this release.  I find it almost similar to Mac’s move from OS9 to OSX, except that Mac “warned us” that this was a big move.  Ubuntu rushed this release to coincide with Windows 7 and frankly they really dropped the ball on the message, the QA and the overall polish of the product.  Thank God I never trusted it enough to leave anything important on the Dell.  I’ve got Macs for that all over the house that are as stable as the Pyramids.  Snow Leopard was a “bug fix” release.  They’ve come a long way from the pre-”Jaguar” days.  Ubuntu should take note.

Funny thing is, I actually like using the Ubuntu more than the Mac, but then again, I like writing Python code in front of the TV with a cocktail…

Moto Guzzi V7 Classic — 2500 mi Review

I purchased my V7Classic from Rose Farm Classics on August 8 of this year.  About 8th I passed through my first 2500 miles as the weather in Chicago begins to close out the 2009 Riding Season.  I think I could have cranked another 1000 miles out of the bike this year, but family and work prevented my riding on the Labor Day weekend and all day last week.  We can probably blame precipitation for a few more lost days.  That’s the way it is, balancing good riding days with happily accepted family responsibilities and work.

It's colder than it looks. Motionless at 44°.

Michigan Moto Guzzi Rally Live with the V7 Classic

3:31– packing up, getting ready to leave soon. Too many delays trying to get out of town. I haven’t chosen a route yet. Guess I’ll just wing it, take 94 to the 31, head north and see if I meet up with some other folks.

4:19. On the road. Goodbye pic

6:30- Sawyer, Michigan, for water at a T/A truckstop

8:30-Holland. Got gas-42mpg. Pretty steady 80 mph cruise. Saw a little faster. Decided to take the “easy” way up through Grand Rapids. Checked the mileage to Interlochen, looks like I was about 100 off of my estimate for distance. Don’t know if I’ll make the rally tonight, the Sun’s down.

9:50-Checked into the Holiday Inn in Big Rapids. Temperature had dropped into the 50’s. Saw a couple of ex-deer on the roadside as well. Time change makes it actually an hour later. Beer and burger. I’ll hit the sack and get an early start for tomorrow morning.

The “Danko Special”

If you’re looking for Danko’s Salad Dressing, it’s here.

When I was a young man, I worked at my Father’s Restaurant on the line at nights.  One of the most often-ordered dishes on the menu was the “Danko Special”.  It was a dish that my dad developed — we ate it out our house for as long as I can remember — it consisted of a dish that had some Yugoslavian accents, some 1950’s-60’s-style dining accents, and just a little bit “magic dust “sprinkled on it by our Cordon Bleu-trained chef, Michel Gehin.

The Copper Hills Restaurant Burned down in 2001, and the Danko Special hasn’t been served in any commercial form since 1991. I want to release this recipe to those that remember ordering it, others that wonder just what the heck all the fuss about the Copper Hills might have been about, and finally as a recipe that you’d enjoy. This recipe is for all of you that have ordered it in a some “past life”. This special time for me seems so long ago; I never thought that there would be a Globe Miami without a Copper Hills. You know who you are, and you’re all part of my extended family.