This is so great. The Brattle Theater’s schedule, in iCal.

The not-so-trusty PowerBook G4 just got back this afternoon, from trip #4 to the AppleCare hospital in Houston for the same funky display issue. Trip #3 was a simple trip on an airplane: “could not reproduce, so we didn’t do anything”. Trip #4 looks like it’s actually fixed, but then again, so did trips #1 and #2. Again, props to Apple for speedy turnaround on it; I took it into the store over lunch on Tuesday, and it came back to the house via DHL this morning.

I have some faith that it might actually be fixed this time, because the “Genius” at the Apple store said he knew exactly what it was (and his guess was one of the two things that I think it could be, too). But that might just be my Charlie Brown nature, thinking, yes, maybe Apple will really let me kick the football this time.

PS: I put quotes around the “genius” because I think it’s a dumb name, but every single person working at the Genius Bar that I’ve encountered has been excellent. I also don’t see how Apple could possibly make their job harder by having such a crappy system that does nothing but make already-irritated customers even madder, which is something that warrants a whole post on its own someday.

The very small slice of my readership who cares about this sort of thing– and even a lot of you who think you don’t– should read Nicholas Carr’s recent long piece on the environmental and business benefits of greener data centers.

The fragmentation of computing has led, by necessity, to woefully low levels of capacity utilization – 10% to 30% seems to be the norm in modern data centers. Compare that to the 90% capacity utilization rates routinely achieved by mainframes, and you get a good sense of how much waste is built into business computing today. The majority of computing capacity—and the electricity required to keep it running—is squandered.

Prickett Morgan calculates that, including secondary air-conditioning costs, the world’s PCs and servers eat up 2.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, amounts to “$250 billion in hard, cold cash a year. Assuming that a server or PC is only used to do real work about 15 percent of the time, that means about $213 billion of that was absolutely wasted. If you were fair and added in the cost of coal mining, nuclear power plant maintenance and disposal of nuclear wastes, and pollution caused by electricity generation, these numbers would explode further.”

The Dow hit another record high today. In spite of the Democratic victory or because of it? (OK, it was only 20 points, but still, it didn’t tank right? I have long suspected that the Bidness Republicans don’t really have much in common with the Jesus Republicans, and I think it’s the Jesus Republicans that really lost).

Seeing his tearful brood half-a-dozen strong last night almost, almost made me feel sorry for that psychopath Rick Santorum, until I realized, I really felt bad for his poor kids. Especially that poor, poor one whose doll’s dress matched hers. Even the one that died after a few hours has not been safe from the public spotlight; such an unfortunate loss should be a private family tragedy, not told to the press to score some kind f’ed up political points.

More tough love for the Democrats.

The NY Times has an editorial that sums up what I was trying to say last night when I said I wasn’t very excited even though theoretically my side won. Basically, this is just a lesser-of-two-evils vote.

The Republicans created their defeat by focusing obsessively on the right-wing “base,” ostracizing not only the Democrats but their own party’s more moderate legislators. The conflict between the extremist House and the conservative Senate created a phony center, far to the right of the general public’s idea of where the middle ought to be. Yesterday, moderate Republicans in heavily Democratic states were done in by their party’s excesses. In Rhode Island, more than 60 percent of the voters told pollsters that they liked their Republican senator, Lincoln Chafee. But he was soundly defeated anyway.

That’s moderate Republican Lincoln Chafee who voted against the war (unlike our own Democratic junior senator John Kerry), but got the boot anyway because 72% of his constituency was opposed to the war in Iraq (which says that either people didn’t check his actual record, or the opinion that his loss was a referendum on Iraq that news outlets keep putting forth is wrong).

The Democrats won a negative victory, riding on the wave of public anger about Republicans. The new House majority will certainly call the administration to account on any number of issues, but it will have to do far more than run investigations if it is to build on its victory.

For years now, the Democrats have been not only the minority party, but a particularly powerless minority, elbowed out of virtually any role other than that of critic. The House Democrats will have to shift from the role of tactical opposition to shadow government. They will have to pass bills — bills that might not make it into law, but that would provide a clear idea of what their party would do if it were really in control.

Saying they were “elbowed out” gives them too little blame; curling up and dying is more like it. And.. er… why do they have to be a “shadow” government? Last time I checked, congress was part of the actual government. I think that wording is a subtle example of progressives being timid about leading and being in power; sometimes I think they prefer being the opposition with their babble about “speaking truth to power”. Time to be the power, folks.

Anyway. Last night I also mentioned the Republican “revolution” of 1994, which I think, as a temperature check of the voting public, was fantastically overstated both then and now. But they did have a well-spoken leadership who had a came at things with a coherent set of principles, and it made the election seem like a referendum. What do the Democrats stand for these days? Beats me.

As far as I’m concerned, the Democrats didn’t win this because they’ve found their way, they just got lucky. Let’s hope that another way this is not like 1994 is that this momentum keeps up for the next presidential election (but I’m not too optimistic there either, to be honest).

Our governer elect’s father was in Sun Ra’s band (according to The Dig and Exhibitionist).

I’m on a Warhol kick here, so I’m chuffed to see that Marco is coming around to Warhol, too. I’m currently reading a book of interviews (I am Your Mirror) that Terri bought for $6 somewhere or other recently, maybe in Virginia. We also recently watched the recent documentary on American Masters on PBS (the first part of which was great, and the second was somewhat uneven).

I used to think he was a fraud, but years ago, I came around and realized he was a fake, a real fake, sometimes in spite of the famous vacuousness and some times because of it.

I’m theoretically glad that the Democrats are winning the key races tonight, as we watch the returns on CNN, but I do wish they had a more coherent strategy (a la the Contract with America in 1994), and weren’t getting swept in by virtue of not being Republican.
I’m theoretically glad Deval Patrick won in Massachusetts.

I hope Jill Stein wins Massachusetts Secretary of State, to unseat the Democrat who wants to bring in Diebold voting machines.

I feel like I should feel more enfranchised than I do.

I watched The Price Is Right possibly every day of my life until I was maybe 6 or 7. My great grandmother never missed a day, and she made all television viewing decisions for the house. (You could attempt to, say, watch some cartoons, and she’d let you, but you had to deal with the running commentary: “that could never happen” or “anvils are heavy– he’d be dead if that fell on him in real life”. It just wasn’t worth it.)

I always loathed the noon news on KDKA with father/daughter anchor team Patti and Bill Burns. But I didn’t mind TPIR: all those buzzers and bells, the little cartoon mountain climber climbing the alps, the big wheel. I realized when I read this bit in The Morning News, how much I too ached– still ache– to spin that big wheel and get as close as I can to a dollar without going over.

…Now, it seemed to sum up America in some meaningful way. It was a show that rewarded its contestants for being consumers. Its backbone, its raison d’etre, was product placement. And oh my God, how I wanted to spin that Big Wheel. I still ache for it. The next time someone asks me what I’m taking to a desert island, that’s what I’m telling them: I’m taking the Big Wheel.

There was also some interesting talk of The Price Is Right as an exemplar of clarity over at the Signal vs. Noise blog that’s worth a read.