My Quiet Life

My friend Clay has vowed to eat nothing but pudding until he is capable of watching the Titans in the Virgin Islands.

And they said our generation would never accomplish anything.

A brief smattering of my reading material of late. I just picked up The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck and read it last night. It's a great, short one-sitting read about the occupation of a fictional small town occupied by Nazi forces. It's a little depressing, and if I had more time, I could make some insightful parallels to Hideous Dream, both stories about the folly of trying to subdue an occupied people.

Also, if you've ever wondered why the term "oriental" is considered offensive, Mahmood Mamdani sums it up nicely in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:

Edward Said summed up "the principal dogmas of Orientalism" in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that protray "the West" as "rational, developed, humane [and] superior," caricature "the Orient" as "aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior." Another dogma is that "the Orient" lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes "that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically 'objective.'" And the final dogma is "that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible)."

Google loves my site, so I am putting this out there for others who may be tearing their hair out like I was. I was trying to make CUPS print to an HP PSC 1210 shared via samba on a windows XP box. It wouldn't work. No matter what I did. I even tried installing an Lpd spooler on the windows box and even THAT yielded the same error: "Error - printing". Gee, thanks, Windows, that really points me in the right direction.

No matter what I did I got a job in the queue with "Error - printing" that showed 64.0 KB / [job size] downloaded.

The answer, as referenced here is to simply turn off bi-directional printing in the properties for the HP PSC 1210.

Phew.

Thought I'd pass this along from my dad. Don Leslie was the inventor of the now ubiquitous "Leslie speaker" for the Hammond organs:

LESLIE-Donald James Leslie, Born Danville, Illinois, April 13, 1911, Passed away September 2 at home at the age of 93. Parents were Benjamin Franklin Leslie, and Lucy Keller Leslie. Preceeded in death by his sisters Dorothy, Helen, Eva, Mary and brother Robert Joseph. He is survived by Carolyn, his wife of 48 years, daughter Jeanine, sons Scott and James, six grandchildren, and sister Mary Elizabeth Grime.

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