Monthly Archives: June 2006

Back when I was typing book reports on my parent’s Apple IIe, the cool kids were registering domain names.

Available only in Mexican candy and not for much longer. Explains a lot about that nasty tamarind stuff.

The ACLU says the government could possibly use brain scanning during terrorist interogations. The Tok’ra were unavailable for comment.

It’s for the children and it will fight terrorism. You can’t argue with that.

It’s a risky idea. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Chicago council member wants to stop restaurants from using trans-fats.

“I don’t know that this ought to be adopted. But I certainly don’t see anything wrong with bringing in experts. . . . This is designed to start a debate about whether or not these chains ought to do what Wendy’s did. Wendy’s took the dangerous cooking oil out of their process.”

And now Wendy’s is a bastion of healthy food. Mmm, Frosty’s.

via Fark

Props to Tom Petty for not suing the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“If someone took my song note for note and stole it maliciously, then maybe (I’d sue). But I don’t believe in lawsuits much. I think there are enough frivolous law suits in this country without people fighting over pop songs.”

Spaulding has a new technologically advanced official basketball coming out with the new NBA season. I wonder if it can help my play even though I haven’t touched a basketball in months. After all, it has “revolutionary design and breakthrough materials”. If that doesn’t help, what will?

RIAA going for a folksy, hometown feel with the lawsuits.

With all the horror stories about Paypal you’d think people would be happy to have an alternative but I can see where it might be worrying to some that Google is taking over the world.

Jim Baen has died.

Obituary, on a hugely annoying background, here.

The topic of Coke Blak came up at lunch today and since we don’t have it around here, as near as we can tell, we made our own. The recipe:

1. Get a sixteen ounce cold cup
2. Fill with ice
3. Add ~10 oz Pepsi (unfortunately that’s all we have around here)
4. Add two shots espresso
5. Add one or two shot(s) half-and half (half-and-half makes everything better)
6. Stir.
7. Share and Enjoy.

The soda really brings out the bean flavor, which is nice. I believe further experimentation is required to find optimal ratios and soda choices, but it was a solid start.

UPDATE: Hummingbird on crack would be the physiological effect.

Orrin Hatch needs some time in the Total Perspective Vortex.

I was asked this afternoon by a large body of media: Is this the most important thing the Senate could be doing at this time? I can tell you: You’re darned right it is.

It’s a flag, it’s not like they’re burning down federal buildings. Lighten up, Francis.

I’m not a big fan of McCain, but he’s right about this.

So why has my party, the party of small government, lately adopted the practices of our opponents who believe the bigger the government the better? I’m afraid it’s because at times we value our incumbency more than our principles.

Okay, so these little strips tell you how long something has been open or whatever. It still doesn’t solve the problem of how long is too long. These strips will just lead to confusion. Who cares when I bought or opened it? Does it look or smell funny? No, then eat it. If I start throwing away food based on these arbitrary standards of days and weeks, I’d waste even more food those poor starving kids in Africa need, not to mention killing my grocery budget.

This rant is all Lilek’s fault.

Bush on the line item veto.

Special super-duper limited edition rerelease DVD of the Lord of the Rings movies.

Now, I love twinkies, they are the pinnacle of the Hostess snack cake pantheon, but Twinkie Lasagna is just plain wrong. They should be eaten as God intended, deep-fried.

It’s days like today that end up going horribly awry. I woke up before my alarm, a miracle. Actually had time to go for a run and could coast leisurely through my morning. The weather is beautiful, the sun is shining, birds are singing, I’m in a good mood, I have a tasty hot beverage, Get Fuzzy is especially funny, and all is generally well with the world, so something bad has to be coming. Like, “oh, by the way, you’re fired” or “your house just burned down” bad.

Also since I’m rambling here, what I hate, hate, hate about living in such a small town. At the grocery store the cashier said, “Didn’t I see you jogging this morning?” Argh. Yes, yes you did. Can I not even go out for a run without being noticed by a stranger that I will see an hour later? If being out at 5 freaking 30 in the morning doesn’t provide some privacy, what will? I ask you.

Mark Steyn.

You gotta hand it to these guys: “Redeployment” is ingenious. I’ll bet the focus-group consultants were delirious: “surrender,” “lose,”,”scram,” “scuttle ignominiously,” “head for the hills” all polled poorly, but “redeploy” surveyed well with all parts of the base, except the base in Okinawa, where they preferred “sayonara” — that’s “redeploy” in any language.

…

North Korea is a weak power: Its population is starving but it’s about to “test” the latest variation on its aptly named No Dong missile. I mean “test” in the sense that I test my new shotgun by firing it through your kitchen window.

So, for the first time since it came to Coeur d’Alene, I went downtown to watch the Ironmen finish last night. Not a pretty sight. I totally respect what they accomplished but boy, do they make it look hard and not fun at all.

I don’t need a computer that knows what kind of mood I’m in, I need a computer that knows which button I meant to click.

In my continuing series of incredibly untimely movie reviews, Howl’s Moving Castle, which I stayed up far too late last night watching and was almost late for church because I didn’t hear my alarm this morning. Luckily the cop had his radar pointed at Seltice and not Mullan.

I liked it. It was pretty. The animation was nice. But I couldn’t help but compare it to Spirited Away which I thought was much better. Howl’s Moving Castle lacked the bizarre, foreign-culture feel that made Spirited Away so good. And it seemed a bit rushed, everybody learned their lessons and lived happily ever in the last 10 minutes for no particular reason.

To sum up, Howl’s Moving Castle is good, but I’d recommend Spirited Away if you want to watch a Hayao Miyazaki work.

Norm Mineta resigned, which really wouldn’t matter to me at all except (long [for me], rambling, poorly-written personal story follows) …
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American’s have .86 fewer close friends than 20 years ago. Clearly, the social fabric of the country is falling apart.

It amazes me what Congresspeople will say on record. At least he apologized. And yes, it made me laugh cause I’m a bad person.

I’m going to protest, um, high gas prices and skip dinner tonight. I learned it from Saddam.

Shatner “singing” to Lucas. Seriously, LOL. I almost fell out of my chair.

via The Corner

So what does cause gas prices to jump every summer, coincidentally, when we switch over to boutique fuels?

Cool flash thingy on how the new missle defense works.

National Review has their summer reading list, so obviously you were wondering what I was going to read this summer. Here you go:

As soon as I finish Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson I have to begin The Confusion, since I previously finished Quicksilver, which, so far, was better than Cryptonomicon.

A little history, of course. Also, Brother Number One.

I find myself getting dumber so I’m planning on doing a quick refresher with Precalculus. Do I know how to have a good summer or what? Oh yeah.

And some fluff, Mercedes Lackey, Fred Saberhagen, and Jane Eyre.

And if I get that far I might try Harry Potter or The Dark Tower, just to see what the fuss is all about.

Technology for the gardening-impaired.

If you’re stealing money, or doing anything illegal actually, don’t write it down. Der.

via Fark 

Lileks says it so well.

I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios. I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!

Bah.

Yes, the venerable Senate, full of important people doing important things.

Stephen Hawking scaremongering in China.

He said he was afraid that Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”

I’m no brilliant astrophysicist, but wouldn’t Venus’s proximity to the sun be the leading cause of that sort of thing rather than the chlorofluorocarbons in my can of Aquanet?

Pete found this. It’s funny cause it’s true.

Except for the Folgers part. Don’t drink Folgers unless you are trapped in a third world country or your grandparent’s house. Not that there’s a lot of Folgers in third world countries, it’s mostly Nescafe there, from what I’ve seen. But that’s not important right now.

Arming packbots. So, can my Roomba get a 9mm or something? It’ll need it for the inevitable robot uprising.

A chart of everyone that has died of bird flu. Strangely enough, contact with sick birds seems to be the leading cause.

Looking out my back door.

Lawn mowing for time: 26:21. Front and back.

The Princess has Seersucker Day in the Senate covered for you.

Tattoos with UV ink. Look at it when you want to, invisible the rest of the time.

Living in Africa pretty much sucks.

Well, we know what Americans don’t want. And that would be Hillary.

My google-fu is weak today. All I want is a dorky little fan for my video card. I want to spend, like, $5. I don’t need a ducted watercooled monstrostity for $50. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

And what’s with the fan sounding like it’s grinding a knife edge after only 6 months, dear Chaintech?

UPDATE: In other news, I got a new mouse. Can you tell?

Further UPDATE: Can someone explain, in English, why time is related to the speed of light.

Iced tea, if left in the refrigerator under proper conditions for long enough turns highly viscous. Sorta frightening, but cool.

Hot Dog on a Stick is 60 years old. They have the coolest outfits ever.

Men and women are stereotypical in their fiction choices.

If you’re willing to use Yahoo! search you can support your favorite charity while doing it. You can even get a toolbar for Firefox or IE.

via Samizdata 

The senate sometimes amazes me. In a good way.

/yes, the link is satire, I’m talking about the underlying story but Scrappleface deserved the link so there you go.

So, listening to Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt and Quicktime just stops outputting audio, then crashes Firefox and pretty much causes me 10 minutes of annoyance. I will grant you that I was encoding mp3s and writing CDs at the same time on only 512M of RAM, but still, a-nnoying.

In a fatal car crash there’s one too many heads. Zaphod Beeblebrox wanted for questioning.

via Fark

On the other hand, I think the RIAA is doing us a favor by cutting back on the number of homemade music videos on YouTube.

Caffeine protects mice from lethal radiation. So have another cup of coffee, Mickey.

When even the museum curators can’t tell what art is, it’s time to step back, realize you’re just talking jibberish, and possibly make something nice looking.

Truly the world is full of wonders.

Running naked across the street may not be the best way to convince your girlfriend to marry you. Especially if someone starts chasing you with a gun.

via Fark 

The acceptance speeches from the Webby Awards.

Amazon grocery, like Costco without the free samples or bags of frozen salmon.

Silly liberals, you can’t indict Rove, his genius is too great for your granola-addled* minds to trap.

*Full disclosure: I enjoy granola in moderation

Test your ears frequency response. Or find out what frequencies all that hard rocking has destroyed. Requires good headphones.

Humans must colonize space to survive, according to Stephen Hawking. And he’s smart so we should do that.

Darkness, thunder, lightning, gumball sized hail. I love spring in the Northwest.

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to go 0-60 in less than 9 seconds, it’s super Prius!

The British write better books, paint better paintings, and write better music than Americans. But we can sure as heck name our spacecraft better. Which is nice.

It’s bad enough on domestic animals. This is just wrong, Mr. Nutkin.

It’s just their culture, who are we to judge?

via Inoperable Terran

The flight back, blessedly free of interpersonal communication. Dunn Bros. coffee was good but bland. I was finishing up reading Quicksilver, which since you aren’t going to read it probably, is about Newton and Leibniz and Wren and Hooke and all those guys. It was sorta weird to realize there was a fairly straight line between what they were doing 350 years ago, experimenting on dogs and tuning strings to the same pitch as fly’s wings, and the piece of airplane wing I could see out my window lofting us through the air at 35,000 feet and 500 miles an hour. Makes me wonder what stuff I’m going to miss out on in 2356, besides the Enterprise, of course. And then I mowed my lawn. Good times, good times.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

So, cute wedding. Hawaiian themed. My outfit looked fabulous.

That sums it up.

FYI: Everyone flying to Minneapolis from Spokane is not necessarily from Minneapolis. Though I admit that the Appleton, WI sweatshirt I was wearing was a tactical error.

There were several people on the flight that were n00bs that had no concept of the entire airplane/airport system. And there was a particular one that had a distinct lack of knowledge of personal space. The armrest should be like the Berlin Wall, he treated it like the Mexican/American border.

I learned that if you need goose control, there is a solution. An ad at the Minn. airport informed me. I had no idea that there was enough of a problem to require a business.  I knew those birds were not to be trusted.

Caribou Coffee, meh. Not horrible, but not that exciting. I’ll try Dunn Bros. on the way back.

So, after having to disabused several Minnesotans of my non-Minnesotaness and the Canadian with no respect for the armrest, on the way to Springfield, the flight attendant asks what I want to drink and then says, “Is your name Hoppe?” Um, yes. And then we tried to figure out which branch of the Minneapolis Hoppes I was from. Yeah, I was a people person today despite my best efforts to the contrary.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

I’ll be flying the friendly skies today, so no posts for you. Visit the fine links on the right for all the news, opinion and stuff you need for the day.

And if you happen to be in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport this evening, I’ll be the one with red hair flying Northwest. Stop and say hi.

I just like this quote.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is expected to propose wording to delineate planets from other small, round objects at its 12-day General Assembly meeting in Prague this August.

In Minnesota leotard-wearing superheroes masquerade as pizza delivery guys.

via Fark

I find this highly unsurprising. I also talk to my computer daily, but it’s more of a “hello computer” “don’t do what I click, do what I want, you stupid machine” sort of thing.

Do they suppose that I run a legitimate copy one day and then what? load a pirated copy the next day? If they’re so worried about the program going postal shouldn’t it unistall itself or perhaps, crazy as this sounds, not release it until they can reasonable expect it not to freak out.

Who knew? If the media is reporting this, I guess it’s officially summer now. You’d never guess by the weather around here.

If you’ve got a nice zippy machine you’re willing to mess with, Windows Vista beta is available.

If you just want your computer to look cooler, try this.

*I haven’t tried either of them and am not to blame when they explode you computer into a micro-nova of hot plastic shards

Zarqawi is dead and Instapundit has a nice roundup of links.

You know, when the world is dancing around singing ding dong, the witch is dead at your death, it’s safe to assume you have made some poor life choices.

I’m all for scientific advancement, but cloning human embryos? I don’t know enough about it to really form a solid opinion, but I’m leaning toward the we need a really, really good reason to go there. Not just because it might help someone some time in the future.

Cloning an embryo means taking DNA from a person and inserting it into an egg, which is then grown for about five days until it is an early embryo, a hollow ball of cells smaller than a grain of sand. Stem cells can then be recovered from the interior, and spurred to give rise to specialized cells or tissues that carry the DNA of the donor.

So this morning I had to get something nice for the wedding this weekend. Nordstrom’s Half Yearly sale started today. Truly the world is admirably arranged. Of course, nothing I wanted was on sale. Such is life. But I really like the Nordstrom shopping experience. I can’t afford it, but I like it.

All that to say I’ll be posting this afternoon. Sorry about the delay.

MIT OpenCourseWare has some classes on video now. Not that I’ll be taking any of them probably, but the fact that it’s there makes me feel better about the world.

You know, I would put up with racial slurs for two years for $61 meeellion dollars.

It seems there is regularly unrest in Iran, but it never goes anywhere productive.

John Hawkins interviews Patrick Ruffini, with this interesting quote.

Politics increasingly isn’t command and control anymore, but it is network warfare.

I don’t know what the implications are, but it is interesting.

It’s 06/06/06!

Of course, there’s debate whether it should be 616 these days.

And it’s actually 2010, so where’s my rocket pack?

A Frank guide to battling Satan.

More importantly, my sister reminded me that we will be in the same area this weekend, which usually spells disaster for some part of the country (9/11, Katrina). Good luck, world.

Harsh, but true.

And, if you’re one of the ever swelling numbers of molting hawks among the media, the political class and the American people for whom Haditha is the final straw, that’s not a sign of your belated moral integrity but of your fundamental unseriousness. Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something. And, in the scales of history, it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.

In lieu of something interesting, here’s my most recent mp3 playlist for you to determine my current mindset and lack of coolness.
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Lung cancer, cashew, it’s hard to tell.

The worst songs of the 80s. However, any list of heinous songs that doesn’t include “We Built This City” is not to be trusted.

Norway postal service won’t ship your dead parakeet.

/it’s just resting

Friday afternoons.

I’m inclined to think there is a more mundane explanation than alien life forms raining down on India, but hey, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Choose Your Own Adventure making a comeback. I always ended up dead and had to backtrack. Good times, good times.

So in the stupid political moves today we have….

The comptroller—now, who came up with the word comptroller. I mean, it’s a cool word, but where does that come from—of New York had to apologize for suggesting that Senator Schumer (most annoying Congressperson evar. Could he be more narrowminded and smug?) would shoot Bush if he thought he could get away with it. Yeah, death to the president == not smart.

The world has gotten together and promised to buy Iran a Coke if they will give up their nuclear aspirations. Yeah, that’ll go well.

Roger Simon has some wise words for Hastert. Siddown.

I’m all for regular Joe’s going to space, but strapping yourself to a rocket-propelled crossbow bolt is not my idea of smart.

Greenpeace memo. If it’s real, it’s hilarious.

There may well be a solid third party in contention in the next 8 years, but not to worry, it won’t last. Besides, what would the party’s platform be? Less spending? Lose the progressives. Less war? Lose the conservatives. Less immigration? Lose the minorities. Less government intrusion? Lose the progressives. More government intrusion? Lose the conservatives. If the Libertarians with their fiscal conservatism and social liberalism can’t hack together a solid winning platform, who can?