Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

These executive orders and memos are gathered at my favorite archivist of open, secret and classified documents, Cryptome. Most are short: no more than a page, and well worth the read. My heart is made glad by all of them, but the open government, presidential records, and FOIA ones are particularly exciting. If transparency is truly in place, then a lot of other repairs can follow. ‘If’ being the operative word. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, this seems like a really good start. And not half bad for three days work.

Assistance for Voluntary Population Planning is back. Presidential memorandum of January 22, 2001 is revoked:
Obama Order on Abortion Foreign Aid January 24, 2009

The start of an Open Government Directive. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government…Government should be transparent…Government should be participatory…Government should be collaborative.”
Obama Memo on Open Government  January 23, 2009

Belt-tightening for all: “…as a signal of our shared commitment to restoring the country’s economic vitality and because of the serious economic conditions we are facing…”
Obama Memo on White House Staff Pay Freeze January 23, 2009

Not just closing Gitmo, halting the Military Commissions too:
Obama Order on Gitmo Closure  January 22, 2009

And let’s not forget the guy who isn’t at Gitmo but isn’t in the regular legal system, either:
Obama Memo on Detainee Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri January 23, 2009

Setting up a task force to have a close look at what’s been going on, detentions-wise:
Obama Order on Detention Policy  January 22, 2009

In the meantime, let’s stop being creepy sadists and go back to the rulebook: “All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order”:
Obama Order on Lawful Interrogations  January 22, 2009

Lobbyist gift ban. Revolving door ban. Lobbyists entering government ban:
Obama Order on Executive Branch Ethics  January 21, 2009

Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked. Former and incumbent presidents may claim executive privilege if they fear their secrets are about to be spilled, but it might not do them much good, as the Archivist gets to check in with the AG and others.
Obama Order on Presidential Records   January 21, 2009

FOIA gets its spine back: “In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public”:
Obama Orders FOIA Obedience  January 21, 2009

Bush flies away. AWAY!

See the vertical division? The stuff on the left is my files. The stuff on the right is the system, including applications, in orange near the top.

I was down to 4 remaining GB on my laptop. Photoshop groaned. Final Cut creaked. New client content threatened to fill up the remaining few slots. The situation was dire. Then I discovered Disk Inventory X. The way it works is to graphically show your files in a color-coded tile-like pattern. The color of a box shows the file type, and its size represents how much space each file is taking up on your hard drive. Click on the box and you learn exactly what the file is, and where it is. Thus I found and deleted such things as identical copies of videos used in long-ago job-applications. After a few such clean-ups my happy laptop hard drive is back to 53 GB! 

While trying to figure out how to dump a large and mysterious file not of my own making, I also learned about the sleepimage file. It’s a Mac system file that contains a copy of the contents of your RAM when you put the beast to sleep. The info is thus restorable if the juice runs out while sleeping. The sleepimage file is always as big a the amount of RAM you have installed, which in my laptop’s case is 4 GB. So that’s the big green rectangle near the bottom right. The other green things under it are other systems files. I *could* get rid of it by turning off the hibernation feature, but I think I’ll leave it be.

This also explains why it takes my laptop so damn long to properly go to sleep. Every time it does so, it first copies the RAM into sleepimage. I’d learned early on not to try and re-wake it during the first minute of sleep, because that sometimes caused it to get stuck for ages. It’s good to know the sleep delay has a reason other than sheer digital obstinacy.

Why do some men find the character River on Firefly (played by Summer Glau) so attractive? She’s sick and needs constant care/supervision. She looks like a child.  She’s not (made to appear) particularly pretty. She has little personality apart from the cold semi-autistic state she spends most of her time in, or the occasional crazed out-of-left-field personalities she slips in and out of. And she makes some pretty bad decisions, causing the rest of the crew danger and strife. Sure, she’s super smart and psychic, but this is what you like? Really?

(Disclaimer: I have only seen the TV series, not the movie. Maybe the movie takes the character to a new level?)