Possibly Deep Thoughts

I had CNN on in the background, and I heard Wolf Blitzer say something like “we’ll be showing President Bush’s speech after Kofi Annan has finished.” The US media aren’t even paying lip service to the UN. Even the journalists don’t consider it important at all. Not that such an American-centric view of the world isn’t a surprise.

Most Canadian media led off with Annan’s remarks, and then went to Bush. And Paul Martin claimed a small victory too, which has to be covered here.

There’s an interesting analysis of media “drug panic” in Slate, and another article there by the same writer. There’s a number of interesting articles by Jack Shafer, who seems to be applying logic and reason to the normally hyperbolic and reactionary drug stories.

For a few weeks, crystal meth was the latest media drug fad. Stories included all of the usual propaganda about being most addictive drug ever and stories of users dying from their first use. Nobody trusts the drug warriors hype since they say that about every new drug. It might even be true this time.

The ecstacy stories of a couple of summers ago lasted for weeks. I don’t expect them to match the staying power of crack babies, but it’s like the media and cops didn’t really try.

There is also not much real information. Isn’t this just another name for Methamphetamine
which has had it’s popularity peaks in the 50s, 60s and 70s? Our culture doesn’t only recycle fashions, but drug trends too.

The only real change, I guess, is that the recipes are easier to get on the internet. It’s been a while since any story could be hyped by using the magic phrase the internet, but I guess the lure of two sensationalized topics was good for a day or two.

I’ve run into a couple of things in Gnome that are either impossible, or poorly documented; I can’t be sure which.

The first is trying to reset the bottom panel. I was playing with mine, and made a mess of it. I just wanted to get it back to its initial state, in other words, reset it. It’s possible to delete it, but if you add a new panel back, it’s empty.

I Googled for a while, and then tried to tackle the configuration files. I edited and/or removed files in ~/.gnome2, ~/.gnome2_private, ~/.gconf, ~/.gconfd and ~/.gnome. (I’ve been running gnome on this particular machine for years). The information is probably in /etc/gconf/schemas/panel-default-setup.entries, but I have no idea how to use it. Presumably I would have to merge the contents into some file in the directory ~/.gconf/apps/panel, but this has already eaten upwaay too much time.

The other annoyance is the seeming impossiblity of setting different font sizes for different displays. My console runs at 1280×1024, and I often connect from my windows box running the Cygwin X server at 1600×1200. I can choose fonts that are either too large or too small one the other display, but can’t seem to set font based on the display, or DPI setting, or display size.