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In the current climate it’s difficult to believe that anything that should give pause to the US administration (or public, for that matter) will. Nevertheless, it’s still good to see such things getting some attention and maybe something will gain the critical mass and longevity to really make a difference. The latest is Harpers Magazine’s coverage of a document thought to be from the safe house of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (either the mastermind of the Iraqi insurgency for many months or a buffoon, depending on which day’s governmental press releases you chose to read) stating that: ...

It used to be said that no two countries in which McDonalds had set up its “restaurants” had ever been to war with one another. I suppose it was some sort of capitalist mantra about how global trade makes us aware of our interdependence, rather than simply suggesting that all the chemicals ingested at McDonalds’ reduced our inclination towards warfare. This morning it occurred to me to check the ongoing veracity of that claim. There are/were nine McDonalds’ in Lebanon, and there are more than 80 in Israel. ...

Kyle Adams posted in the comments on my RubyConf MI entry to say that the first BarCamp in Michigan will take place in Grand Rapids the weekend before RubyConf MI. As I’ll be leaving for Greenbelt a few days later, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it for the whole thing, but I’m definitely planning to drop in for at least some of it. At last a tech conference within a bike ride of my house! ...

It’s far from a secret, but today Kari made the first public posting (and her first blog entry in a year) to announce that we’re planning to move to England some time next summer.

For the past few weeks I’ve been responding to Fred at Slacktivist’s requests that his readers select a particular section of the alphabet and post in the comments any songs whose titles fall in that range that we enjoy and he doesn’t have in his list. Since I’m making the list anyway, I thought I’d post the results here. Today it’s songs whose title begin with the word “Don’t”, and the list that follows represent the playlist from my iPod, which is a small fraction of our overall collection. ...

UPDATE (10/2008): This plugin is no longer maintained. I’d recommend looking at one of the newer alternatives such as acts_as_amazon_product if you need this functionality. I’ve been procrastinating on getting my first Ruby on Rails plugin (first anyone else might be interested in, at least) out the door, mainly due to some configuration problems with Subversion, but finally I have that all sorted out and the plugin ready to go. loads_from_amazon is an ActiveRecord Mixin that works with the Ruby/Amazon library to let you populate an ActiveRecord object with the details of a product listed on amazon. In the README I use the following example: ...

The more I hear about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the harder I find it to understand her reputation as a figurehead of liberalism in the United States. Even once I get past the fact that most of those considered ’liberal’ in US politics would barely be considered centrists in most of the rest of the democratic world, there’s the fact of her vigorous support of the administration’s hawkish tendencies in the Middle East. ...

If this transcript of an accidentally amplified conversation between Messrs. Bush and Blair gets you down (and aside from the satisfaction of ’told you so’, it probably should), perhaps the new Gnarls Barkley video will provide a little cheer. Tags: gnarls barkley, tony blair, george w bush

NPR’s foreign correspondent, Deborah Amos, was interviewed on Morning Edition this morning about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Particularly interesting in her report was a comment that for many on the street, Hezbollah’s action has united Sunni and Shi’a muslims. Hezbollah is a Shi’a organization, but the Sunni population of the region is largely supportive of them. That’s particularly significant in the broader current context, since one of the distinguishing features of Iran (within the region) is it’s Shi’a government and population. Some hawkish commentators have suggested that other Middle Eastern countries would welcome western intervention in Iran, and that religious differences would hold them back from becoming involved. What those commentators miss is that while the fault lines between Sunni and Shi’a are very real, Middle Eastern and Islamic identity will always trump that division once outside forces become involved. ...

It only took a couple of days, but I’ve already made the switch to using Firefox 2.0b1 as my default web browser. Not only is it considerably more responsive than 1.5 ever managed (not quite up to Camino, but getting close) but it’s already helped me enormously thanks to its crash recovery options. My generally wonderful MacBook Pro has been playing up of late, you see. It’s not unusual for it to require a restart once a day, and sometimes more. While I work out a time where I could bear to be without it for a few days while it gets repaired, I have to find ways of working that aren’t too heavily disrupted by the occasional unexpected reset. The new firefox’s ability to remember which tabs I had open is a considerable help. ...