Every now and then, if I've been reading nothing but the dirt dug up by Kerry and Gephardt and Rove, I begin to forget who Howard Dean is. Then I see a speech, and it all comes back to me. Click below.

Dean starts speaking at about 29 minutes in; before him speaks Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, and Tom Harkin. You can skip 'em :)

Just how insulated is President Bush from the real world? Well we already knew he doesn't read newspapers or get any news other than from his advisors (Emperor's New Clothes, anyone?). But did you know that it is against the law to express any opinion other than President Bush's within half a mile of him? Click on the link

There's a teacher in a small Texas town. She asks her class how many of them are Bush fans. Not really knowing what a Bush fan is, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raise their hands except one boy, Johnny. The teacher asks Johnny why he has decided to be different. Johnny says, "I'm not a Bush fan."

The teacher says, "Why aren't you a Bush fan?"

Johnny says, "I'm a Howard Dean fan."

The teacher asks why he's a Howard Dean fan. The boy says, "Well, my mom's a Howard Dean fan and my Dad's a Howard Dean fan, so I'm a Howard Dean fan!"

The teacher is kind of angry, because this is Texas, so she says, "What if you're Mom was a Moron and you're dad was an idiot, what would that make you?"

Johnny says, "That would make me a Bush fan."

Well, the Attack of 10.3 is over. Installing Mac OS version 10.3 broke a lot of things on my computer:

1. MySQL (Database)
   • This was an easy one: Somehow the permissions on the data directory got messed up. Solved!
2. SMTP (Outgoing mail sender)
   • 10.3 uses Postfix instead of Sendmail as an SMTP server, so I had to figure out how to set it up. That wasn't a big deal.
3. POP
   • This didn't break until I changed my password. When you change your password, 10.3 stores it shadowed, and uses a different method to get at it. So, to get POP working, I had to recompile qpopper with PAM support, and set it to use the NetInfo password stuff.
4. Perl
   • 10.3 includes its own copy of perl, which didn't know where all my libraries were... play with shortcuts
5. Tomcat
   • This got me for a while. In the end I think the problem was just that I had 'localhost' in the webapp connector, which seems to trigger a big bug in 10.3 where localhost is often not recognized. But I started changing other stuff trying to fix the problem, and accidently started using port 8080 to connect, instead of 8008 like you're supposta. I just figured it out and put things back in order. Now I can get started on my bioinformatics class project! Yay!

But on the plus side, system services are starting more reliably. And everything feels a lot faster! yay.

There's a funny little article on msn.com showing how Dean's rivals have constantly brought up his moderate stance on most issues in an attempt to discredit him, and how that has really brought him credibility as a moderate.