Republicans have called John Kerry unfit for the Commander In Chief job. Today Kerry turned the tables by saying that Dubya failed the “fundamental oblication” of that role — to keep America as safe as possible. Kerry accuses Bush of trying to hide until after the election the news that 380 tons of explosives were snatched from an Iraqi installation in the days following the invasion.

“He has stood in front of the American people day after day, telling us how much progress we are making in Iraq and how much safer we are under his leadership,” Kerry said. “And what did the president have to say about the missing explosives? Not a word.”

“Mr. President, what else are you being silent about? What else are you keeping from the American people?” he asked.

[…]Kerry also called Cheney “out of touch” for describing Iraq as “a remarkable success story” despite the steady diet of bad news — attacks on U.S. troops, the murder of Iraqi policemen, kidnappings and beheadings — that Americans get from television every day.

“They don’t see it, they don’t get it, they can’t fix it,” he said. “I can and I will.”

I dunno. It seems to me like Cheney may be in touch with Dubya’s supporters, who aren’t living in the real world anyway.

Kerry has pledged to spend $60 million more in homeland security over the next 10 years on screening cargo for nuclear materials, creating an integrated terrorist watch list and increasing the number of border patrol agents. I think I’d rather see that money spent here than in Iraq.

In other election news, Republicans are mobilizing thousands of volunteers to challenge voters they believe are not qualified to cast ballots. Democrats are mobilizing to guard against voter intimidation. Both sides are sending out an army of lawyers.

Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie charged on Sunday that Democratic-backed groups had registered thousands of fraudulent voters.

In Ohio, he said there were “people with fictitious characters being registered to vote, Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins. In New Mexico, we’ve seen 13- and 15-year-olds get registration cards in the mail they didn’t even ask for. In Nevada, we’ve had illegal immigrants being registered.”

That’s not good, obviously. But is it really cleaner than what happened in several states including Oregon, where Republican volunteers were throwing away Democratic registration cards?

And then there are the new electronic voting machines — some of that print paper and some that don’t. And hanging chad in the states that still use punch ballots. And misread marks in the states that use paper ballots.

Dan Seligson, of the nonpartisan election information service electionline.org, said some problems that occurred in Florida in 2000 would not repeat themselves.

“Instead, we could find some new ones. Certainly, every vote will count. Whether it will be counted is another matter,” he said.

Iraq blames US

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Tuesday that “major neglect” by U.S.-led forces was to blame for the murder of 49 Iraqi army recruits last weekend.

“There was an ugly crime in which a large group of National Guards were martyred,” he told Iraq’s national assembly.

“We believe this issue was the outcome of major neglect by some parts of the multinational (forces).”

Since we’re in this pretty much along, “multinational (forces)” be us.

Allawi has ordered an investigation into the incident. An unnamed senior Iraqi official has said that it appeared that the attack was well-organized and that the insurgents had good intelligence and potentially inside information on why the ambushed Iraqi soldiers were traveling without weapons or armed escort.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led forces in Iraq said that terrorists were to blame, and only they could be held responsible. He pledged cooperation with the investigation.

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Neither my CD burner nor my DVD burner are hooked to either the mobo or the sound card with analog audio cables. They aren’t necessary. It’s a simple task to check the “enable digital audio” box in the device manager applet to tell XP to send the sound digitally via the IDE bus. Even Win98 would do that. The end result in SuSE: An audio CD plays a whole lot of silence. Nor can I figure out how to tell it that the sound should be digital. And, given the amount of stuff already crammed in my case, I just don’t feel like messing with analog cables. So, no music.

SuSE came with a TV app, which gave me great hope that I could get my TV card working. It recognized my TV card. It will scan the cable channels. And I get a B&W picture (no color at all) and no sound. The sound from the TV card runs via cable directly back to the sound card, and it claims to know this, so there shouldn’t be an excuse for this at all. I know I have some sound, because every now and then SuSE makes a sound to let me know I’ve done something that was a no-no. So it’s not the sound card. Or maybe it is. I can’t tell.

It also claimed to recognize my USB printer. But damned if I can get it to print anything. When I try to print, the printer suddenly disappears. It appears to my noobie eyes that, although it recognizes my printer (a Canon S830D), it doesn’t have drivers for it. I bought movie tickets off Fandango while in SuZE. I wanted to print the invoice. I finally had to resort to “printing” it to a file on the FAT32 partition, and then rebooting to Windows to actually print it on the printer.

My video card — an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro XT — is apparently not supported by any Linux distro. I downloaded the drivers from ATI, but installing them has so far defeated me. I don’t know why. There is no clue in the user manual. Info found on the net is cryptic (to me) and assumes a level of expertise I do not possess.

After a very frustrating 3 or 4 hours, I went back to XP to watch a little TV, listen to some CDs, print some documents, and generally get some work done.

I want to like Linux, because I don’t necessary love Mr. Gates, but so far Linux is not making it easy.

It’s important to me that my web sites are hosted on Linux servers. I know how to work with that. My host provides a graphical control panel that makes it easy. I understand the file structure. I know how to do the simple things I need to do on them like set permissions and schedule a cron job. I like Apache servers because of their robustness and their security.

But when I sit down at my desktop to work, I want stuff to work. I realize that Linux is very different from Windows, and I expected a certain learning curve. I’m a pretty techie sort, and I figured I could handle it. I’ve used multiple operating systems and user interfaces in the past — some text based and some pretty darn cryptic. I’ve picked them all up pretty rapidly. What I wasn’t prepared for was hardware that is recognized by the OS but still doesn’t work, installers that destroy everything in their path even when told not to (more of a MS trick, eh?) and relatively non-leading-edge features like digital audio not being available. I was expecting tasks like installing new software to be accomplished in some sort of logical fashion (after all this is software). But nothing seemed logical to me at all.

I was expecting that when something didn’t function, I would be given some kind of indication why. Instead SuSE pretended that everything was hunky-dory, leaving me no clue as to where to begin to look for solutions. Even if I could have gotten some kind of cryptic message like, “25324k frumpjik missing swrifty floryt,” I could have looked those words up somewhere and began to piece together what was happening. (I still remember how to debug, dammit!) But, no such luck.

I’ve worked in IT for a long time. Early on I learned that to believe that the end-user is stupid and always wrong because they have no interest in becoming an uber-geek is a misguided attitude, to say the least. End-users understand the business. Without them, IT would become rapidly unnecessary. IT is there to support the business experts with tools that streamline their processes and help to solve business problems. TOOLS And tools must be useful, or IT has missed the boat.

Ahh… but the open source community creates software pretty much just for itself. Yeah… that makes a difference, I guess.

Windows rules the desktops of the world not only because of Microsoft’s admittedly draconian marketing practices — which I in no way agree with — but because the guy off the street can for a few bucks by a CD, stick it in a drive, install a new program, and do some useful work, all with very little training. And can bring home an external drive and plug it into a USB port and have it magically work. And can bring home a new printer, plug it in, and print a picture of his kids without having to understand a bunch of cryptic command-line gobbledygook. Microsoft plays to that because it has learned the lesson of the end user: Make it simple enough for anyone to use, and everyone will want to use it — and they’ll bring their friends along to the party. And, yeah, that makes XP a bunch less uber-geek techie than Linux, and therefore less sexy to have on your desktop. But it also makes it more useful to the typical person-on-the-street. Those who denigrate Windows for it’s eye candy, etc., should remember that M$ is crying all the way to the bank.

When the open source community stops its circle-jerk and starts creating software with the end-user in mind instead of what gives it a collective hard-on, then Linux will give Windows a run for its money. But not until then.

Yesterday I went to a movie with #1 Son and one of his friends. #1 Son is currently wearing his hair “charged,” (i.e. sticking straight out all over his head, a la finger-in-light socket). On the way out of the theater, a woman started gushing (there is no other word), “Oh! How do you get your hair to do that? Oh! That’s so cool!” She went on and on and on. #1 Son just kept walking, and with a perfectly straight face said, “It’s magic.” I laughed all the way home.

I’ll keep dinking around with Linux when I have time, because I’m stubborn and I want to learn more about it, and yadda yadda yadda. But, darn it, when I sit down to do useful work, I don’t want to have to drag out the blow drier and the straightening iron and the hairspray. I want it to just be magic. I promise not to gush about it.

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