Dan noticed this interesting bit of discussion about packages:
“How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives?” Boehner asked. “How does that stimulate the economy?”
Boehner said congressional Republicans are also concerned about the size of the package.
I bet!
So, I flew out to DC to see the inauguration. Today, we got up at 5 AM, left at about 6 AM after a missing ticket panic. (Tim accidentally picked up my ticket.) Dan and Alex headed to the Mall, and Tim and I got in the line for the purple section a little before 7.
It was a long line. It wound around a couple blocks and went through tunnel under the Capitol (which started near an I-395 on ramp) and came out the other side. It seemed to be about 2-3 miles long. There were no cops or other line guides down there, nor anyone announcing what was going on. It was just tens of thousands of people standing in a freezing tunnel.
It took four hours, but we got through the tunnel. There was a few more blocks, then we saw the signs for the purple section gate. We pushed forward slowly. Occasionally, there were people going against the stream, saying that they had closed the gate and weren’t letting more people in. Disturbing. Well, if I was going to be turned away after all this time, I was determined to be turned away by someone with a badge.
The gate had been shut for a time when Bush had taken the stage but opened up again later. The problem was that security was processing people very, very slowly. I had severe doubts that they’d be able to get us in before the constitutionally-scheduled noon swearing-in.
Sure enough, at 11:56 AM, there was still a crush of hundreds of people in front of us. We’d be lucky if they got us in forty minutes. We gave up and went to the train station.
At Union Station, there was a gift shop blasting the new president’s address from a portable stereo. Not surprisingly, it was a good address, and the shop was filled with people listening intently. Besides the expected call-to-arms, I liked that he explicitly mentioned us unbelievers and hyped science. It was a “fireside chat” kind of moment, and not a bad place at all to hear the speech.
In fact, the intimate sense of community that that gift store imparted made up for the long ordeal of the morning.
Heh, just kidding. Of course it didn’t.
That sucked. I really wanted to President Obama take the oath of office live. It would have meant a lot to me.
Unfortunately, because the Presidential Inaugural Committee couldn’t bother to do some simple thinking about how – roughly – long it takes to process a person through security, I didn’t get to see or hear it, not even on Jumbotron, TV, or YouTube. I mean, this wasn’t a matter of being off by a few hundred. There was an army’s worth of people behind me.
A lot of those people took days off of work and bought flights just to see that moment. One of my friends and her husband drove across the country, even though they have to work on Wednesday. That is costly for people, in terms of money and opportunity. Katt almost did this, and if she had, I would be livid with the Presidential Inaugural Committee. As it is, I’m just disappointed and surprised by PIC’s casual disregard for people’s time. Really, there’s no excuse for taking a couple days to figure out how many tickets they should pass out. Also, I’m relieved that this committee wasn’t running the campaign.
In the greater scheme of things, though, I got the president I wanted. As defeated as I felt as I walked away from the purple gate, I felt a certain peace when I heard the celebratory explosions signaling the completion of the swearing in.
Adding icons to a Flex WindowedApplication project should really be super simple, but because the error messages you get are when something is off are not specific about what is wrong, it took me about forty minutes of googling to find out what was up with these “303: ERROR” messages. So, just in case, you, readers of Notes of Chaos, ever want to specify icons for your Flex desktop application, I’m going to save you some time and tell you what to look out for.
1. You specify the icon files in the yourappname-app.xml file under the <icon> tag. There’s child nodes under that tag: <image16×16> through <image128×128>. Whether or not you think an icon size is going to show, you need to specify one valid image for each of those image tags, or you’ll get the 303 error.
2. The content of those image tags must be a path to an image file that is somewhere under src in the project hierarchy. Flex can’t find the image files outside of src. So, if your 16×16 icon is in src/icons, you’d specify: <image16×16>icons/myicon16.png</image16×16>
3. I read some posts by a guy with an Adobe logo as his userpic that the images have to be in PNG format and that they have to be the sizes specified by the tag.
4. In Project | Properties | Flex Compiler, the “copy non-embedded files to output folder” option must be checked. This will copy the icons to the output folder, and I guess Flex looks for them there, because without it you get the 303 errors.
5. When you build the debug build, no attempt is made to incorporate the icons, as it’ll be running from the debug launcher anyway. When you build the release build is when it actually bothers with them.
6. In the Export Release Build wizard, you can usually just hit Finish on the second panel, but not if you have icons for your app. There’s another panel, which I didn’t know about before. Hit Next on the second panel, and you’ll get to the mysterious third panel, “AIR File Contents.” It lets you select files you want included in the built package. By default, it’s going to include a bunch of unneeded crap, so you probably want to hit Uncheck All and then check the folder containing your icons.
Hopefully, once you do all that figurative i-dotting and t-crossing, Flex should stop giving you a message box full of cryptic 303 error messages and build you an AIR package that installs an app with fancy, or at least non-generic, application icons.
Someone wanted to talk to me about Children International. A couple of blocks earlier, someone wanted to talk to me about Greenpeace. Instead of saying “nah,” I should have told them about each other so that they could have a good conversation about international children and the environment!
I regret not providing this solution, but I’ll remember for next time.
Like any activity, poker can involve any of the human emotions, but it typically features some more than others. I played a hand last night that feature a sampler of all of the prominent poker emotions.
It was at the end of the night (for me). The table was starting to get shorthanded. One guy was away from the table, and there were about six players active. Everyone limps, I limped in on the button with 7-6 offsuit.
So, at this point, I am bored.