Author: VD

I still haven’t heard a response from Al Franken, the great champion of Democratic Party manhood. I assume he’s simply been tied up with his book tour, but in case he somehow missed seeing the column in which I posed a challenge to him, I decided to send the following email to his press agent.

Dear Mr. Franken,

I’m a little disappointed that I have not heard from you as yet. Perhaps this column did not happen to come to your attention, in which case I am rectifying matters by sending this to you here. I should also like to interview you, either pre- or post-incontro della contesa.

Very best regards,

Vox Day

Universal Press Syndicate

I hope he’ll get in touch with me soon. I was also interested to see that Rich Lowry has finally addressed the question of Mr. Franken’s slur on his character, although I’m disappointed that Mr. Lowry seems content to contest the matter on the field of words, not combat. My profile is quite a bit lower than the editor of the National Review, but I still feel that it’s a real pity Mr. Franken did not address his original challenge to me. I would have been happy to take him up on it.

Anyhow, Mr. Franken, I eagerly await your response.

16/30 157 5.23 1 2

11/26 126 4.85 1 0

That’s Donovan McNabb’s performance since the affaire d’Limbaugh, which has mysteriously inspired a panoply of headlines crowing that the quarterback was not only not overrated, but was back in a big way as proved by the Eagles’ win over the Redskins. Right, a 48 percent completion ratio to go with an average of 1 TD and 1 INT per game is really stellar, gentlemen. Of course, a lot of these jokers who purport to be sportswriters picked the Eagles to run away with the NFC East, which now looks like this:

4-1 Dallas

3-3 Washington

2-3 New York

2-3 Philadelphia

Looking at that sparks one big thought – dang, but the Big Tuna can coach! The Eagles are by no means out of it, as yet, but a loss to New York next week would make it very, very difficult for them to reclaim the division title if Dallas beats Detroit as expected. Look, Donovan is a decent quarterback, but he’s inaccurate and is looking less and less likely to be a top QB over the next few years. I wouldn’t have dumped James Thrash earlier in favor of picking up Andre Johnson and keeping the faith with superpsycho David Boston – which won me a big game last week – if I had any faith in Donovan’s ability to get him the ball in the end zone.

If you want a black quarterback to talk up and cheer, there’s one in Minnesota worthy of high regard. Welcome back, Mr. Culpepper!

Okay, after some thought and a bit of reader lobbying, I’ve come to the conclusion that it does make sense to add a blogroll. I’ve always been of the opinion that quando a Roma, fa cosi come i Romani, and a brief tour of the blogosphere has proved that a blogroll is standard operating procedure. While I still believe that it is important for a person in the public eye, even one who is barely in the far corner of the public’s peripheral vision such as myself, to be careful of their words and their associations, it would be crazy to be held responsible for something that someone else has written on a site over which one has zero editorial control.

Nevertheless, I fully expect that at some point, my critics will throw a hissy fit when someone on the blogroll goes off the deep end. They’ve shown very little logic or reason in their past attacks, so there’s no reason to assume that they’ll start exhibiting it now that I’ve got a blog.

I’ve also decided to distinguish my readers blogs from the general blogroll, because without them, a writer is basically just talking to himself. Doug Kenline and Christian Bowman, two long-time readers who encouraged me to start blogging, have the distinction of heading the list. I will not be adding a comments section, however, as my blogosphere tour also taught me that an unacceptably high level of public comments on many sites are polluted by trolls, salesmen and porn ads. If you want to make comments about my blog, well, you’ve got a blog too, don’t you?

I will be publicly addressing the occasional email here, though, so if you don’t want me to address yours openly: a) don’t be derogatory, and b) tell me so.

You have to love Matt Drudge. He is the proverbial middle finger, not simply raised to the left-liberal mainstream media, but jammed painfully into its collective eye. While speaking with my fellow WND columnist Bill Press, Drudge challenged everyone in the media to ‘fess up to whatever medications they are on before slamming Rush Limbaugh for his admitted drug addiction. That’s pretty funny, considering that more than a few of them are likely on Prozac, Xanax and the various prescription drugs du jour:

“And I will just state this, because we’re headed into quite a weekend of media bashing here, I know all is fair in media wars, but I challenge everybody in the media business, listening to this today, empty their pockets! Empty their pockets! We will be passing out jars and dishes and they can go to their respective washrooms during the commercial break — and come out with the pills they’re on! This story is very sensitive in a lot of ways and before all the big media bigwigs point their finger, they should really question their medicine cabinet.”

I myself have a drug habit, albeit one that is both legal and reasonably under control, of two cappucinos per day. And it is a real addiction, I think, as I get to enjoy a fairly nasty headache if I don’t get the first one steamed before two in the afternoon. But I’ll never quit. Just the smell of the first one in the morning is JUST SO GOOD!

Also, being somewhat of a weightlifter, I can get downright homicidal if I don’t get that much-needed endorphin release from lifting heavy pieces of metal and putting them back down again. Caffeine and iron, that’s pretty much it for me.

Now that I’m fully operational on Linux – there are two or three applications for which I stil require Windows, but nothing vital – I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve chosen the right distro. I’m using Red Hat 8, primarily for the rather prosaic reason that one of my boys happened to have the CDs at the time I decided to take the plunge. Red Hat is up to version 9 now, but I’m a little loathe to bother upgrading since everything is working fine and having a slightly prettier interface is not at the top of my list of concerns right now.

It’s typical, of course, that one no sooner makes the leap to Linux than one begins to plunge headlong into the endless debate of which is the One True Distro. Fortunately, the general consensus appears to be that Red Hat is a reasonable choice for us non-hacker power-user sorts.

Of growing interest to me is Debian, which not only appeals to my libertarian ideals and comes with Neal Stephenson’s recommendation, but also makes what now, post-deflowering, appears to be an increasingly plausible case for fewer operational headaches down the road. The Red Hat Update Agent, while incomparably less intrusive than Microsoft’s odious automatic update system, is more than a little clunky, and the August timeout bug that I had to wrestle with today is exactly the sort of problem that corporations regularly create for themselves and their customers in the interest of preserving their competitive advantages. They have a long, long way to go before they can be accused of aping the nefarious ways of the evil empire, of course, but it’s annoying to encounter even a faint echo of the very sort of thing one is trying to escape in the first place.

I’m happy with Red Hat, though, which in combination with the Opera web browser and Evolution email, makes me feel almost giddy, as if I’m breathing in the fresh air of the country for the first time after spending years choking down the polluted smog of Redmond. So, I’m going to resist the urge to upgrade the kernel for now, and instead I’ll let the happy little penguin amuse itself downloading Debian via jigdo while I’m taking in the NFL action. Just in case… just in case. By the way, it’s worth considering a switch from IE to Opera even if you don’t have the skillz or the gutz to make the big OS switch. Opera is small, fast, and has a brilliant radio button for controlling pop-ups that’s incredibly easy to operate. It’s got some definite quirks, especially related to the fonts used on some web sites, but on the whole it is much better than the increasingly bloated space hog that is Internet Explorer.

From what I’ve seen so far, while Linux is by no means ready for mainstream prime time, it is now fully practical for the power-user who isn’t afraid to tinker. A few years ago, that was really not the case, as one needed to be a hacker with programming skills if one wished to use it. The conclusion: Don’t be afraid. Go for it. Drive the tank. Be the penguin.

I am he as you are we etc etc whatever…. HOLY CATS IT WORKED! I’m actually posting this from my dual-boot machine running Linux, accessing the Internet via my wireless network which is now also running happily as a hamster under Linux. I was so psyched I had to call my best friend, who is a bona fide stud programmer and approximately 500x more technical than I am, and he was just as fired up despite the fact that he was taking the call in a wet, naked and half-showered state. He’s been contemplating going Penguin himself, and now that I’ve achieved exit velocity, he has no choice but to follow suit if he wishes to preserve the tattered remnants of his techno-manhood.

It turns out that the trick was to ignore the linux-wlan-ng download that pops up on most Google searches and go with the preconfigured packages (RPMS) put together for the Red Hat distros by an RPM packager in Raleigh, Tim Miller, who I will soon be recommending to the Vatican for beatification.

Make sure you read the README, and keep in mind that as usual, the programmer/guru tells you everything you need to know, but not exactly what you need to do or what you should expect. I would add the following directions:

1. Figure out which version and kernel of Red Hat you’re running. Do this by firing up a terminal (System Tools / Terminal) and typing cat /proc/version.

2. Click on the appropriate Red Hat version (7.3, 8, or 9) found under Serve up the packages! Download the appropriate three packages, as indicated by your wireless card/adapter and kernel number.

3. Install each package separately. Do this by finding where you saved the RPM files, then right-clicking on the first file. Select Open With, then Install Packages. Click continue to complete the installation of the package. You’ll do this three times, once for each package.

4. Edit the file as directed in the README. It’s just the one change in the first file, followed by the renaming of the second file.

5. Stick your PCMCIA card in. Don’t reboot or anything, and don’t expect a happy little beep or a message telling you that new hardware has been found. Nothing happens.

6. Fire up Mozilla – Internet/Web Browser – then type in a web address. Watch in shock and delight as it actually appears.

7. Phone your friends. Post on your blog. Cackle madly and gesture rudely in the direction of Redmond.

8. Celebrate. You’re driving the tank!

I don’t know if it was the perfect synchronicity of yesterday’s good news out of Dallas, caffeine, Neal Stephenson and a random good mood, or what, but the computer gods elected to smile on my usually fruitless technical efforts this morning. I mounted my floppy! In Linux! Not only that, but this amazing feat of Eloian prestidigitation was followed up by an even more amazing stunt… I also managed to mount the hard drive partition that lets me access my Windows files! It’s actually pretty easy, of course, once you find a decent set of instructions on how to do it.

There’s still a lot to do before I can make the leap into full-blown Penguin mode. The hard drive mounts automatically now, but I’m still doing a lot of manual navigation due to my unfamiliarity with both Gnome and Nautilus, and I only have read access to the drive right now. This is functional, for the time being, but I’d originally set up three partitions to allow for safe(?) writing to the shared third partition from both Windows 2000 and Linux and I’d like to get that going too. The bigger challenge is getting the Penguin talking to my wireless network. Unfortunately, it turns out that my WUSB adapter is version 2.6, not the version 2.5 for which the Linux drivers are available, so I’ll have to strip a PCMCIA card from one of my other machines. I’m not too happy about that, but all will be cheerfully forgiven if I can just get the wireless up and running.

Unfortunately, the instructions that came with the linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1-pre9 download are not exactly user-friendly. Hard to imagine, I know, with a filename like that.

So, does anyone else suddenly have the image of an out-of-control tank lurching wildly across the countryside, as farmers, sheep and chickens run for their lives? But so what? I’m driving the freaking tank! Yee-ha! Say, I wonder what this big trigger thing does….

Seriously. My mother was an old friend of Roger Staubach’s when he was at the Naval Academy, and then of course there was the indelible impression that The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders left on a young, impressionable boy, so I cheered for the Cowboys until that infamous unflagged pass interference no-call against Drew Pearson that killed Fran Tarkenton’s father and made me realize that there really wasn’t room for two teams in a Purple heart.

Anyhow, I’m delighted to announce that my syndicate, UPS, informed me today that my column will be appearing regularly in the Dallas Morning News, starting in November. This is pretty cool, I think, as it has the seventh-largest Sunday circulation and the ninth-largest daily circulation in the country.

Bill Bennett is a gambler and Rush Limbaugh is a drug addict. Isn’t it possible to find conservative leaders who practice what they preach? I know there will be many outraged Republicans who will argue that it is unfair to castigate these men for their relatively minor offenses – gambling is legal and drugs should be – when there are plenty of far more egregious offenses committed by the leadership of the left, but accountability on the level of Caesar’s wife is an integral part of the game if you are going to stand up for the good, the right and the true.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying this from a sanctimonious, holier-than-thou perspective. I assure you, I’ve quite likely done worse than either of these two good men, which is why I am so very grateful to my Lord Jesus Christ. He forgives, and so too we must forgive when forgiveness is requested.

Nevertheless, there is a public trust that one is expected to uphold as a conservative voice. Mr. Limbaugh, like Mr. Bennett before him, has betrayed that trust. Is the betrayal a fatal one? Should his fans abandon him over it? No, I don’t think so. There is a vital difference between cynical hypocrisy and a failure to meet one’s own high standards. But I do hope that this experience will encourage Mr. Limbaugh to rethink his position on the abominable and unconstitutional War on Drugs. By his own lights, Mr. Limbaugh may well consider himself to be a criminal of sorts; I do not.

In any event, I wish Mr. Limbaugh very well, and hope that he will return from this challenge stronger, more determined and more successful than before.

I like Linux. I am pro-Penguin. I am a Linux supporter, but I am not, as yet, a Linux user. Now, I am not a techno-neophyte and I have successfully installed Red Hat onto one of my machines, thus converting it into a dual-boot system. However, there are two things preventing me from becoming an actual Linux user.

1) I set up three drives. One for a) Windows 2000, one for b) Linux and one c) to be shared. Windows recognizes a) and c), but Linux recognizes only b). Anyone have any suggestions?

2) In order to access the Internet, I have to get my Linksys USB working. I’ve downloaded a few files which purport to be Linksys drivers, but the instructions are terse to the point of total incomprehensibility. I’ve read one-page, one-sided motherboard manuals in broken techno Koreanglish that were more informative.

But I’m not giving up. I just re-read Neal Stephenson’s unspeakably brilliant In The Beginning Was The Command Line, which has again inspired me to make another effort to escape the evil Gatesian empire. One way or another, I WILL be a tank driver!

Any information or suggestions with regards to either issue would be most appreciated.