preparing a brief memorandum concerning the life of Correggio

“Let it not be said that no one cared, that no one objected once it’s realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy.”
-Ron Paul

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off

The folks over at thetruthwins.com have done a great job of consolidating the reasons why Newt is probably the worst choice for a Republican candidate for president. I have strongly opposed Newt for a while, for many reasons. Thetruthwins has compiled them all for me in one quick read. If you are thinking of voting for Newt please turn off the TV and read this.

On my HTC Vivid (Android 2.3.4) I noticed when I clicked on links to YouTube videos that they played in the browser instead of starting a native application (like the YouTube application) to view it.

This is nice because not every video you might want to watch is on YouTube. It may be hosted on another site, and that site might not have its own app. So by default ALL videos work (unlike iPhone), but the most common ones aren’t all they can be. Viewing a YouTube video in the browser makes it more difficult to pause, fast-forward, rewind, and seek.

If this is bothering you, follow these instructions to make the video play natively.

1. Open your browser
2. Open the context menu (the 3 stacked dashes at the bottom of the phone)
3. More->Settings
4. Enable Mobile view

Now reload the youtube page and click on the video. It should start in its own application.

If you recently (Oct/Nov 2011) updated your Oneric install you may notice slugish performance, or your laptop’s battery draining quicker. The problem might be due to upstart-udev-bridge. The defect is only present in laptops with certain batteries. So far it seems to affect the MacBook Pro, Some Dell’s, and my Lenovo Y560.

To confirm run the top command. If you have the issue you will see upstart-udev-bridge at the top, and hogging 99-100% cpu. If you kill the process it will come back in a few minutes. To fix:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jamesodhunt/bug-829980
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade


Then reboot, and the upstart-udev-bridge process should not reappear in the top list.

Take a look at this video. Watch Ben Bernanke refuse to tell a U.S. Senator where $2.2 Trillion went (~15% of the national debt) . Might make you wonder who’s really in charge of this country…

So if you are like me you are here because you found out the hard way that scp is not restartable. Most likely you lost your network connection when your file transfer was ~90% complete, so you googled “scp resume” or “restartable scp”.

Well the solution is to use rsync instead:


rsync -P --rsh=ssh


-P: Is the same as “–partial –progress”
–progress: Show transfer progress.
–partial: This is where the magic is, saving the partial file prepended with ‘.’ and appended with random characters.
–rsh(-e): which remote shell program to use.

If you dont want to type all that gibberish each time you want to SCP a file just add a line to your .bashrc or .bash_aliases:
alias scpr="rsync -P --rsh=ssh"

During the transfer the partial file is hidden in the destination directory. Use “ls -a” to see your file with a ‘.’ prepended.

Elbert Hubbard penned this essay in the late 1800′s. The moral of the story has been applicable during many difficult times in this nation’s history, including today.

In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When war broke out between Spain & the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba- no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.

What to do!

Some one said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”

Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, & in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.

The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing- “Carry a message to Garcia!”

General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.

No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man- the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, & half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, & sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant. You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office- six clerks are within call.

Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Garcia- and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.

Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.

And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place.

Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply, can neither spell nor punctuate- and do not think it necessary to.

Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?

“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.

“Yes, what about him?”

“Well he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.”

Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?

We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “downtrodden denizen of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” & with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.

Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer- but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go.

It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best- those who can carry a message to Garcia.

I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to any one else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress him. He cannot give orders; and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself.”

Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular fire-brand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.

Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slip-shod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude, which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry & homeless.

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds- the man who, against great odds has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes.

I have carried a dinner pail & worked for day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; & all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous.

My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly take the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town and village- in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed, & needed badly- the man who can carry a message to Garcia.

I found this on my travels around the Internet and thought I’d share. I think it originated from here.

I remember the day I found out I got into West Point.

My mom actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to get out of class. She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she had opened up my admission letter. She wasn’t crying because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how hard I’d worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry officer. I was going to get that opportunity.

That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me the following: “Nick, you’re a smart guy. You don’t have to join the military. You should go to college, instead.”

I could easily write a tome defending West Pont and the military as I did that day, explaining that USMA is an elite institution, that separate from that it is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it is to get admitted to college, that serving the nation is a challenge that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons, but I won’t.

What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.

In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four years. In Vietnam, 4.3% served in 12 years. Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has served in the Global War on Terror. These are unbelievable statistics.

Over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse. Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a child in the military. Taxes did not increase to pay for the war. War bonds were not sold. Gas was not regulated. In fact, the average citizen was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts.

The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation. You.

You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You’ve lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you’ll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don’t understand. And you come home to a nation that doesn’t understand. They don’t understand suffering. They don’t understand sacrifice. They don’t understand that bad people exist. They look at you like you’re a machine – like something is wrong with you. You are the misguided one – not them. When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science teachers that discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can’t understand the “macro” issues they gathered from books with your bias. You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at that. Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more.

But the amazing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never pay back what you’ve given up. You know that the populace at large will never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them. Hell, you know that in some circles, you will be thought as less than normal for having worn the uniform. But you do it anyway. You do what the greatest men and women of this country have done since 1775 – YOU SERVED. Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

You are the 0.45%.

Fluxbox:
Add the following to your ~/.fluxbox/startup:
#Disables touch pad while typing
# -t Disable taps and scrolls only (good for gaming with the touch pad...)
# -k Igonre modifier keys (shift ctl, etc) might remove this
# -i ## how long (sec) after the last key is pressed to remain disabled
# -d daemon mode
syndaemon -t -k -i .5 -d&
synclient PalmDetect=1 PalmMinZ=80 PalmMinWidth=8


For Gnome/Gnome2 (There may be a less complicated way to do this, but this will work):
Put the following in a bash script named palmdetect.sh (or whatever you prefer) in the directory of your choice):
#!/bin/bash
synclient PalmDetect=1 PalmMinZ=80 PalmMinWidth=8

If gnome doesnt automatically start syndaemon (you can check with the command ‘ps aux | grep syndaemon’) then you can add this to the top (but below the #!/bin/bash):

# -t Disable taps and scrolls only (good for gaming with the touch pad...)
# -k Igonre modifier keys (shift ctl, etc) might remove this
# -i ## how long (sec) after the last key is pressed to remain disabled
# -d daemon mode
syndaemon -t -k -i .5 -d&


chmod the file to 755.

Then navigate to: System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications
Add the command: ~/palmdetect.sh
After you click Add make sure the checkbox is checked so that the command will be run at startup.