Angela Merkel has finally sealed the deal to become Germany’s first-ever female chancellor. It’s been almost two months since the actual election.

If it takes them this long to agree on the coalition I don’t think that bodes well for its longevity. There must have been a lot of issues to hammer out, no doubt there’s some really delicate parts that could unravel at the slightest pressure.

Maybe Germany will be just like Italy–elect a new government every few months just for entertainment.

I’ve got Ubuntu Linux running on an old Mac G3, but it doesn’t seem to have built-in drivers for the little D-Link Wireless USB adapter. So I can’t get network connectivity to the Linux Mac which is a real bummer.

I dragged the box into the living room, where my cable modem and wireless router sit. Plugged the Linux Mac into one of the wired ports on the router and it works fine. So I know that networking is possible, just apparently not wireless networking. At least not with the particular wireless adapter I have for the old Mac.

So I think maybe I can set up a wireless bridge instead. I’ve got this old Llinksys WAP11 access point that I haven’t used in years. Mainly because it doesn’t support the VPN protocol that my employer uses so it got replaced by a newer SMC access point several years ago. The Linksys has been sitting in a storage box ever since.

I dug it out yesterday and tried for about 30 minutes last night to get it set up for bridging. I know it’s possible, at least according to the manual. It just isn’t very clear from the directions how to do it.

I’m going to spend some time today poking around in Google to try and find more detailed instructions. It feels like I’m close, but in the frustrating way where you don’t really know what the last couple steps are.

Carrie Weil, who was until very recently going by Carrie Harned, has apparently divorced from Kevin Harned. She’s the morning anchor on Wave 3, the local NBC affiliate. And he’s one of the meteoroligists on that same Wave 3 station. They’ve been together, both personally and professionally, for something like four years or so.

Kevin doesn’t usually do the morning weather but when the regular guy is on vacation Kevin sometimes fills in. So they were probably on-air at some point together even as their divorce was moving ahead. That must have been weird.

I saw them eating lunch together at Qdoba’s a few months ago. The one thing I remember thinking was that they certainly didn’t seem happy to be there. At the time I figured they were just tired–their dress indicated they had just finished working out or doing a bike ride, something like that. Turns out it was something far more than that.

Dropped by Border’s yesterday and picked up a copy of A Feast for Crows, which I’ve been waiting on for several years now. Got turned onto George R.R. Martin’s series a few years back and plowed thru the first three books, then had to wait along with all the other fans for Martin to finish the fourth book.

So now I have this almost 700-page book I need to read. I’m hoping I can spend a fair amount of the weekend getting into the book, perhaps even finish it.

I suspect I’ll be a bit disappointed, since this book only covers action in Westeros, nothing involving people in the Free Cities. That stuff was cut for the fifth book, which Martin claims should be out next year. Given the way he missed so many previous deadlines I won’t hold my breath.

Somebody at the gym is selling a 1992 Ford Taurus SHO. Saw the posting on the swap board this morning, they’re asking $1,800 I believe. Might be $1,700, I can’t remember exactly.

I’ve never owned a Taurus, but I definitely remember lusting after the SHO back in the day. My first job out of college, a guy I worked with bought one of these bad boys. And that was the beginning of a long line of futility–me lusting after cars I could not afford.

His SHO was a thing of beauty–a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On the outside there was very little to distinguish it from the regular family sedan version of the Taurus. But the SHO stood for “Super High Output”, and that engine was worthy of the name. Made that boring Taurus family-mobile into a sports sedan. Probably the finest American sports sedan of the time.

I am so tempted to call the person who posted their SHO and make an offer. But what the heck would I do with a second car?

Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign is apparently on pace to match or even top the $74 million he spent in his initial election run. Unbelievable spending considering his competitor is an under-funded Democrat.

It’s more than the two candidates for New Jersey governor spent on their combined campaigns. One of the nice benefits I guess to being a multi-billionaire–Bloonberg basically funded his campaign out of his own pocket.

Independence Air, which used to have a bunch of flights out of Louisville, has filed for bankruptcy. I’d been wanting to try them out, just hadn’t found a time and a place that made sense. Then last month they pulled out of Louisville and a bunch of other cities, apparently in preparation for this month’s bankruptcy filing.

Bummer, choice is a good thing and I hate to see one more competitor drop out. Seems most airlines are in bankruptcy these days, makes you a little nervous about flying. Who knows what kinds of corners they cut when trying to save money in a bankruptcy?

I’ve been wanting to get a linux install at home but haven’t been able to decide on which one to use. Then I ran across Ubuntu, and that’s what I’m using now to wrtie this post.

What decided it for me were two things. First is that everything I read indicated Ubuntu was really easy to use, but more importantly it’s one of the few installs I’ve seen that supports both Intel and PowerPC. I’ve now got Ubuntu installed on two ancient machines at home–a wheezing old ThinkPad 390C and an almost-as-old G3 PowerMac.

In fact I’m using the PowerPC version to compose this entry. It’s a little weird, but cool to have the same OS running on both platforms.

Next step is to set up Apache on this PowerPC and use it as my personal Web server. Hope to get that done this week.

So we’re well into the second week of the rioting in France, day 10. The weird thing is I was in Paris earlier this year and it seemed perfectly peaceful.

Though I did definitely notice certain types of jobs were predominantly held by people of certain ethnic backgrounds. Like the cab drivers, many of them were of African descent. Recent immigrants judging from the accents. And apparently a lot of the rioters are, similarly, of African descent.

Which makes you understand somewhat the situation–I stayed strictly within Paris, only venturing beyond the Isle de Paris when we went to Normandy. So most of the taxis I took, within Paris itself, were driven by Africans. Yet very few can actually afford to live within Paris, they’re all out in these poor suburbs where the violence is emanating from. They’re working amongst all this wealth and privilege in Paris, but can’t earn enough of that pie to actually live where they work.

I know it’s a bit of schadenfreude but in a way I think the French deserve these troubles. They’ve been ignoring this inequality in their own backyard, while looking down their noses at all the racial and social problems over here in the US. About damned time they learn these issues are not strictly an American problem.

So the Cartoon Network is debuting the animated version of The Boondocks this Sunday as part of their Adult Swim block. It’s kinda late for me, especially since I have to work on Monday, but I think I’m gonna try and catch the show.

I’ve enjoyed the comic strip, though it does sometimes push the boundaries more than a little. But that’s the whole point, and the attraction to seeing it in animated form.

Hope it does well, there’s not a really good history of comic strips making the leap to TV. Dilbert failed big time, for example.