Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to mvt!!! Have a great one!!

Odd dreams

I slept well even without cyclobenzaprine last night (though a hot bath was a pretty good substitute); there are odd bits of dream floating around in my memory now. Something involving rain, a large building that was something between a hotel and my old junior high school, swapping songs with gmcdavid, and two guitars: Plink and Snuggles.

I hardly ever remember even that much of my dreams. If my subconscious is trying to send me a message, it will have to speak more clearly. It's mumbling.

The Goddess of Safe Returns

Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go theres no need to rely on a single third party. Whats more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner or an agent of the owners choosing can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owners laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information such as IP addresses and local network topology that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

[...]

Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns.

(from InfoWorld)

OpenDHT looks very interesting in its own right.

I'm a single-issue voter: I'm a Democrat

I want my country back, and the only way to get it back is to vote for a Democrat in every damned election I'm qualified to vote in.

The Department of Health & Human Services moves to define "contraception" as "abortion".

I live in California. Our initiative process has made it entirely clear that any small, cynical group of greedy bastards can cobble together enough special-interest votes to get almost any hare-brained scheme that benefits them passed by a simple majority. The Bush administration and their puppet masters have done that on an even larger scale; the entire Republican party has been turned over to the religious right as a way of keeping a small group of extremely rich, extremely cynical people in power. This latest move is a blatent attempt to drag mainstream Catholics into the conspiracy, and it may very well succeed.

One more term with a Republican in office, and there will be a right-wing nutcase majority on the US Supreme Court. DO YOU WANT THAT? If you have to think hard about it, I'm not sure I want to know.

( A little history. Cut-tagged for strong language and graphic descriptions of violence toward women and minorities. )

I am old enough to remember people driving across state lines to get abortions. To buy contraceptives. DO YOU WANT THOSE DAYS BACK?

I am old enough to remember when Jews and Catholics, as well as African-Americans (as we call them now) were routinely discriminated against in jobs, housing, and college admissions. When restrooms, drinking fountains, and schools were segregated. When Jewish kids like me were routinely teased -- if not worse -- at school. DO YOU WANT THOSE DAYS BACK?

I am old enough to remember when a divorced-and-remarried relative couldn't go back home to Italy for fear of being arrested for bigamy, because divorce wasn't legal there. DO YOU WANT THAT HERE?

Think about whether you want the bad old days back before you vote Republican, because that's what you're going to get, and worse. Much worse.

We are one Supreme Court justice away from a right-wing religious dictatorship. If that. It may already be too late, because the ones pulling the puppet strings aren't necessarily tied to the religious right. That's just where they can get the votes now. If that coalition falls apart, they'll start to cobble together a different set of single issues. We may only have one or two terms to root them out. They already have a head start.

I am also old enough to remember when Richard Nixon was considered by many to be a corrupt right-wing nut case, and to remember that he was somewhere to the left of most of today's Democrats. I am old enough to remember when "liberal" was considered middle-of-the-road. I am old enough to have been proud to call myself a radical.

I am old enough to remember when the US had a middle class. When most rich people paid their fair share of taxes. When we learned the Bill of Rights in school, and knew that our government was there to enforce it and not to undermine it.

I am old enough to have learned the Pledge of Allegiance before a Republican administration added the words "under God" to it, and I still say it as I learned it.

DAMN IT, I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!

Thanks to this post by snobahr, this post by kyburg, and this post by ravan. Planned Parenthood has an online petition.

Take back the Economy

Close the Loopholes - On July 17 We Take Back the Economy!

Buyout firms such as Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts have made billions of dollars using special tax breaks that reward them for buying and selling companies; and they’ve slashed wages and destroyed jobs all while using tax loopholes to pay an even lower tax rate than everyday Americans on their billion-dollar profits. On July 17, in cities from New York to Bangalore to Paris, SEIU members will be joined by activists from 25 countries to take aim at the special perks and tax loopholes that buyout firms depend on to get rich.

There is legislation in the U.S. Senate to close the loopholes that would provide money for tax relief for middle income taxpayers and fund healthcare. The buyout industry has spent millions to defeat this legislation.

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I got this link from our building manager -- I work just down the street from the main target's HQ.

Particularly apropos in view of parts of my previous post, don't you think?