Happy Birthday, Gipper!

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. You can keep up with all the news of events during the year-long centennial celebration at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. You can keep up with all the news of events during the year-long centennial celebration at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library.

One of the new features of Snow Leopard (a feature which some love and many hate) is that special keystrokes (like CMD-Tab for application switching) get passed to the target machine rather than being captured by the local machine. I like this feature quite a lot, but unfortunately, it stopped working on my iMac and I couldn't seem to figure out why (nothing obvious related to ScreenSharing, VNC, or ARD preferences).
Well, after determining that the problem only existed with my user account, I removed all of my preferences, logged back in, and Voila!, problem solved. However, getting rid of all your preferences is a huge pain. That's why I missed Conflict Catcher today. It was a method of automating a binary search to find a problematic extension. I decided to apply the same technique (manually) to my preference files.
Well, after half a dozen iterations, I narrowed it down to one of two widget preference files:
widget-com.apple.widget.calendar.plist
widget-com.apple.widget.dictionary.plist
Since I didn't need either of them, I declared victory at that point.
By the way, if anyone is interested in how to toggle the special keys passing feature on and off in Snow Leopard, you can find the details here.
UPDATE: As noted in the comment below, Quicken Scheduler is the culprit. This is a know conflict between Quicken Scheduler and key-logging applications, detailed here and here.
Courtesy of Auto-Tune the News:
Christ is Risen. He is truly Risen.
Alleluia.
From the Onion:
WASHINGTON--According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.Deputy Education Secretary Anthony W. Miller said that many parents who school-home find U.S. households to be frightening, overwhelming environments for their children, and feel that they are just not conducive to producing well-rounded members of society.
[...]
"It's really a matter of who has more experience in dealing with my child," Cincinnati- resident Kevin Dufrense said of his decision to have his 10-year-old son Jake, who suffers from ADHD and dyslexia, school-homed. "These teachers are dealing with upwards of 40 students in their classrooms at a time, so obviously they know a lot more about children than someone like me, who only has one son and doesn't know where he is half the time anyway."
"Simply put, it's not the job of parents to raise these kids," Dufrense added.
Though school-homing has proven to be an ideal solution for millions of uninvolved parents, increasingly overburdened public schools have recently led to a steady upswing in the number of students being prison-homed.
Today is Lazarus Saturday in the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Catholic Rite. In preparation for Holy Week, this is well worth a listen. Byzantine Chant is awesome.
Health Care legislation is getting down to the wire. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a page that makes it easy to send e-mail letters to your Senators and Representative urging them to oppose any bill that takes the Senate's approach to abortion, conscience protections, and immigrant coverage. You can add to or edit their pre-fab letters here.
This was not the kind of morning I had leaving for work today:
*NB: The title of the video, according to Google Translate, is "I am very glad, because I'm finally back home"
Over at National Review Online, Mark Steyn excerpts a John Stossel piece on California micro-regulation run amok:
Micro-regulation is tyranny with extra paperwork. With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From John Stossel:For 15 years, the B & B Do it Center, a local hardware store in the small California town of Camarillo, has been putting out coffee and doughnuts for its morning customers. Actually longer, says owner Randy Collins; the previous owner did it too. Customers liked the courtesy, but . . . well, you know where this is going.
Indeed.
Inspectors told Collins that unless he was willing to install stainless-steel sinks with hot and cold water and have a prep kitchen to handle the food, he was violating the law. . . . "What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service," said Huff. "Those establishments have permits."
In California, what doesn't? Stossel adds:
It's amazing that they still allow people to have children without permits.
You can read the original Ventura County Star story here.