mojo jomo

Kerry looked 20 years younger tonight.

BTW — headlines got even stranger. Here’s the top two:

Bush Plans Flextime Proposal – Washington Post

“Most wanted” Qaeda man held – swissinfo

Point – Cobra Kai

A quick look at the top two headlines on news.google.com has me scratching my head:

Kerry set to accept Democratic ticket – Reuters

FBI: Ghailani ‘friend of al Qaeda’ – CNN International

Those are the top two stories tonight. I’m writing this as Kerry is speaking.

After almost zero investigation, I find that Ghailani was arrested in Gujrat, Pakistan this past Sunday. Today’s Thursday. This is the fucking twenty-first century — how did the story remain buried until tonight?

Odd, none of the top three links to the Ghailani story discuss the timing:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/07/29/ghailani.profile.ap/
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5113982
http://www.cfra.com/headlines/index.asp?cat=2&nid=17583

I had to go to foxnews.com to get even a bit of information on the timing:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,127475,00.html

Exerpt:
“Pakistani leaders have rejected allegations they time the announcements of major terror arrests for maximum impact, though several other arrests have come on the eve of important Pakistan-U.S. summits. Al Qaeda suspect Ramzi Binalshibh (search) was nabbed in Karachi on Sept. 11, 2002, the one year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”

Riiiiiight. They knew who the guy was (see above links), and yet didn’t release the information until the day of Kerry’s speech.

That’s BS politics. As our future president Barack Obama put it — “The politics of anything goes”

Seeing Barack Obama’s speech the other day — I wouldn’t say I had chills or anything, but damn — I’d vote for him. For the first time in my life I know we’ll have a black president — maybe not him (though a quick whois search shows that obama2012.com is already taken , but I feel it coming. The guy is the freaking Tiger Woods of the democratic party.

Tanya didn’t catch that speech, though tonight we did listen to the Sharpton speech, and watch Edwards.

She had me pause Edwards speech a few times to ask “So why isn’t this guy getting top billing?”

By the way, last Wednesday Liam scored two goals in Soccer…he didn’t score today, but he was trying pretty damn hard. There was a kid on the other team who has “the gift”. Amazing. The kid had no help at all from his teammates – could outrun any of the other kids – and had a big shot. A little goal of mine is to at least get Liam to kick like that — we spend most of the time on footwork and keepaway…time to get a net…

Outside of that, something I need to get off my chest.

I hate editoralizing when it’s disguised as fact-telling. Give me fucking facts and I’ll make up my own mind.

When I want the editorial page, I’ll turn to it. I like the professionals on the Mclaughlin group and to a lesser extent, those on Hardball. At least I know where they’re coming from.

A quick plug for my favorite website: Liam Morast’s website

Should I set up a blog for my four year old? He’s written some odd stories about dreams and skylights — maybe I should post those…

Bush won’t beat Kerry with Cheney on the ticket. There’s just too much baggage attached to the man, and I think Bush will drop him in some sort of “promotion” or due to an illness.

Being a bit of a betting man, I’m willing to wager that Cheney will be dropped from the ticket prior to the Republican convention. Email me and we’ll work out the details.

Let’s play oddsmaker for a second:
Cheney dropped from red ticket: 2-1
Powell added as VP: 40-1
Guliani added as VP: 20-1
Bin Laden found before election: 5-1
Kerry is considered as impressive as a corpse during debates: 5-1
Edwards is seen as the next “Great Communicator” during debates: 5-1
During debates, Bush handles non-scripted questions poorly: 2-1

No, I’m not sure I’m willing to bet on all of these, but I should check and see if I can wager some cash on these items in vegas…

Encryption is a pain. It’s hard enough to get people to stop sending me endless “FWD: This joke is teh funny!!!” dribble, getting them to send it encrypted is simply going to be asking too much of them.

That being said, the process to setup encryption through the awesome Mozilla Thunderbird email client was …almost… painless.

I’ve been using thunderbird for quite some time, currently using version 0.7.1. Download and install it from http://mozilla.org.

Next you’ll need the gpg encryption software. Go to http://www.gnupg.org/ and download the current stable version (I grabbed the binary for WinXP). I’m not sure how to check an md5sum using windows so I’ll just trust it for now.

I unzipped the gnupg download (version 1.2.4 for those keeping score) into a directory on my desktop. Following the instructions I copied three executables into my path (in this case I copied gpg.exe, gpgv.exe, and gpgkeys_ldap.exe into c:windows). Again, following the docs I created a c:program filesgpg directory, and added a regkey (Started regedit, Found HKEY_KURRENT_USER->SOFTWARE, added key GNU, and subkey GnuPG, then a string in GnuPG named HomeDIR, with a data value of c:/Program Files/gpg (forward slashes intentional)).

Then I generated a key for myself using the following document as a guide: http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN26

gpg –gen-key

After that I downloaded the xpi’s (mozilla installation type of file) for enigmail from http://enigmail.mozilla.org, and installed them (enigmail-0.84.2.xpi and enigmime-0.84.1-tb-win.xpi).

From there it was pretty straitforward, each step of the way that I tried to use the new features, the application recognized when I needed to configure new components.

I still need to send my public key out to folks…more on that later.

The process might look a little confusing, but it’s much cleaner and easier than the other attempts I’ve made.