Ruminations of an Expatriate

January 1st, 2009 1:42 pm

VLC Media Player

I tested playing videos stored on a portable hard drive on my Mini 9, only to find that the Windows Media Player pre-loaded crapware didn’t display the video. The audio comes through fine, but the screen is dark. Consequently, I did a Yahoo search for “open source media players” and stumbled upon VLC Media Player. It is a fully functional media player, yet much lighter and more nimble than the likes of Windows Media Player and Real Player bloatware with their annoying “Media Centers” and ads.

It is open source software so anyone interested may obtain the source code and modify it as they see fit. So there is a network of geeks, a term I use not pejoratively, around the world changing and improving the program. There are folks who have designed different themes to change the appearance of the media player from its rather drab default “skin”.

If you haven’t already, and you’re like me in trying to avoid Microsoft products to the extent possible, you may want to give it a try.

Above is a screen shot of the tidy media player which has mixer and playlist components which can also be displayed. I have selected a simple black “skin”, the menu of which provides access to all if its functions, including preference settings.

I am so taken with the VLC media Player that I am considering removing the Microsoft Media Player from the Mini, to conserve space on its relatively small 16Gb storage capacity, but am a bit concerned that removing Media Player may some how effect the Windows operating system.

Here is a screen shot using a skin which incorporates the Windows Media Player appearance, along with my MS Office 2000 short cut bar, which is one of the MS products I refuse to give up, along with the office 2000 calender.

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January 1st, 2009 11:55 am

My New Year Eve

Ringing in the new year at Tavola Trattoria restaurant was interesting and entertaining.

The owner invited me to share her table, with her friend Roberto, whom I had met before, and about seven children, two girls and five rowdy boys from three different familes, ranging in age from about five to twelve. The youngsters were all very well mannered; and passed the time giggling over their jokes, which I failed to understand, and engaging in at time risky sparkler behavior. Amazingly there was but one minor burn to the thumb of a rowdy boy of six with a missing front tooth and an amazing mass of curls.

A nice dinner of pork, applesauce, and veggies was served, along with grapes in champagne; and soon out came the pens as everyone wrote upon a napkin their wishes for the coming year.

Thirty seconds before midnight Roberto took up a frying pan which he rang with a wooden spoon to alert the assemblage to the countdown from thirty, not merely from ten as to which I am accustomed. At midnight sparklers were lit and everyone began burning their napkins of wishes. No one was able to explain the significance of the burning ritual.

All-in-all a low key New Year Eve enjoying conversation with Roberto, a very interesting, rural living photographer, and the antics of the children.

I took the photos during previous visits to Tavola. The children above are two of the Tavola owner’s three children who reside in the living quarters off the courtyard, and the fellow in the lower photo is my dentist.

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December 31st, 2008 7:00 pm

George W. Palin

My six readers may have noticed that I often refer to President Bush as Incurious George and to Vice-president Cheney as President in fact Cheney.

Here are a couple quotes from Lawrence Wilkerson, “top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell”, from a current Vanity Fair piece, An Oral History of the Bush White House.

We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.

He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.

And

Cheney brings this accumulation of power and ability to influence the bureaucracy to a fine art. He surpasses Kissinger even. This is all the more ironic because Cheney was the antithesis of this when he was chief of staff of the White House under Gerald Ford and when he was secretary of defense. He was very deferential. He was not trying to insinuate himself.

But he turns everything on its head and he becomes the power. And he does it through his network. This is a guy who’s an absolute genius at bureaucracy and an absolute genius at not displaying his genius at bureaucracy. He’s always quiet.

So are most of his minions, not all of them. [David] Addington [the vice president’s counsel] is brilliant, and Addington is a strange beast, and Addington is sort of the Ayman al-Zawahiri for Cheney, the brains trust. [Chief of Staff Lewis] Libby was the doer. Libby was a real bureaucrat’s dream.

And from Richard Clarke, “chief White House counterterrorism adviser”.

We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been around for a long time before he got there—didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright. He was trying—sort of overly trying—to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.

The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?

Read the whole Vanity Fair piece for perspectives on the Bush administration from people who were there if you’re interested. Our eight year national nightmare will end in twenty days.

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December 31st, 2008 2:26 pm

New Year Eve

I will be spending New Year Eve partying at the Tavola Trattoria, my favorite restaurant here abouts.

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