Category Archives: Uncategorized

Written here.

Hi-res images of Mars. 3’D too. If I only had some 3-D glasses.

If you used a credit card outside the United States between February 1, 2006 and November 8, 2006, you can get some money back because apparently some people don’t expect to get ripped off by credit card companies and sued them. And won.

I think energy conservation and alternate sources of power are good ideas in their own right, and must be pursued; I just don’t think lower Manhattan will be awash in 2050 unless we cut carbon emissions to a level previously associated with the 15th century, and I’m not going to live in a state of guilty panic over my carbon footprint. If others want to walk around wearing sandy underpants, fretting over what they cannot avoid doing and scolding others for buying produce shipped from Brazil instead of buying local, they’re welcome to it. Everyone needs a purpose in life.

Link

Bonus quote:

In any case, I suspect that the impulse to bring all these untidy unhelpful examples of flagrant individualism under the steady hand of the Ministry of Rational Allocation has something to do with that fretful busybody insistence that people are simply not living right. If we had Star Trek replicators in every house that would conjure goods and meals out of boundless energy produced by antimatter teased from a three-micron fissure that opened into a universe populated entirely by unicorns who crapped antimatter in such abundance they were happy we used it up, and used their shiny pointy horns to poke more of it through the aperture into our dimension, columnists would bemoan the disconnect between labor and goods, and the soul-corrupting influence of endless ersatz vegetables. You can’t win. Because you shouldn’t.

I can’t wait to see how this ends. Back to salami tactics.

It’s nice and normal where I work, unlike where these people work.

The seventies, they weren’t kind to anyone, regardless of race, creed or color.

Indiana Jones production pics.

“I want the state prosecutor to look into bringing a suit against CNN for instigating murder in Venezuela,” he said. “… undoubtedly it is part of the psychological warfare.”

Yes, CNN is in Bush’s coat pocket when it comes to foreign policy.

Hewlett Packard’s inkjet technology is being applied in the medicine patch field.

If your computer starts playing Fur Elise or It’s A Small world, your power supply is going bad.

You know, I’m looking around for something amusing or outrageous or even vaguely interesting, but the news is in that end of the year slump and the Top 10 end of the year lists aren’t out yet. Also, I used up my slice of life quota last week, so it’s thin pickings around here today.

I could complain about the slow drivers now that it’s snowed until next week when I complain about the idiots that forget that brakes don’t work on ice. I could complain about the snow, but it really isn’t unreasonable that it snows the last week of November and we haven’t had a really dreary fall and I don’t really feel up to it, so I got nothing there.

Now I can start my Christmas shopping.

The worst book title of the year is……Cooking with Pooh!

Back in my day we didn’t have mumps outbreaks.

It’s like we’re trying to slide back to the 15th century. Let’s not feed the hungry with genetically modified foods, let’s not protect people from diseases with vaccinations, don’t turn on those lights you’re hurting mother earth, let’s not try to expand the borders of our knowledge and imagination. Let’s just sit here and wear hemp.

Obama would take the massive amounts of money that the Constellation program at NASA gets for 5 years and use that to reform education. Yeah, that’ll work. I bet building a couple less museums named after various senators would net more money.

The short story is that she was living in the bushes in front of my house for a day or two. The neighbor took her in, but in a few weeks decided they couldn’t keep her. So, I agreed to keep her. She’s heels, doesn’t chew, but doesn’t come, sit or stay. And she poops in the house when she’s upset. She’s about to learn the joys of crate training. But all she wants is to be near someone. The neighbor’s kid named her Daisy, so that’s her name now.

Continue reading →

Yes, a very special day in the life blog post from me. Don’t be jealous of my life.

• 6:30am – walk the dog
• 7:10am – get ready for work
• 7:45am – go to work
• 8:00am – start this list
• 8:01am – read birthday email from insurance agent, go make coffee.
• 8:05am – It’s a birthday miracle! Doughnuts! leftover from yesterday
• 9:15am – Asia calls to sing happy birthday – tres cute. Because she’s little. It’s not cute when you do it.
• 11:15am – Tuesday Taco Bell lunch. I had the nacho cheese chalupa as a special treat. It was delicious.
• 2:15pm – surprise birthday gift. yay!
• 3:00pm – birthday brownies. yay!
• 5:04pm – going home
• 5:30pm – decide to have birthday brownies for dinner and watch I Dream of Jeannie. Did you know that the theme song is all wrong and has a voiceover for the first few episodes. No, it’s true.
• 6:30pm – decide some fish would be nice with the brownies.

A Thanksgiving post, that’s not really about Thanksgiving, naturally.

I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.

I find it hard to believe that the internets will not be upgraded to keep up with demand. Threaten broadband companies with loss of revenue and they’ll hop to fix it.

But not in Britian. There they’re just with you for your economic stability.

Why we don’t want the Pakistan boat rocking.

No really.

Earthset. This is why NASA needs to get cracking on their space program. We should be able to watch this in person.

The prototype heat shielding for the Orion spacecraft is completed.

Unless they step this up a bit there aren’t going to be colonies on the moon in my lifetime. And then where will I spend my retirement years?

Peter Pan is getting married. You will want to follow the links. Oh, yes, you will.

Top 10 liberal media quotes in the last 20 years.

Nitrates are good for you!

Nitrites and nitrates are also availalbe in vegetable form for you health freaks.

Happy Birthday to the helicopter!

Victor Davis Hanson with some sound foreign policy advice. Which will, of course, be deemed not practical.

There is no poem, btw.

I haven’t seen misogyny like this in ages.

But female ineptitude in the kitchen is not just a product of the fullness of a woman’s timetable. We all have busy lives these days, so there must be something else, something far deeper and intrinsic that makes women so hopeless at cooking. I have a few theories…

However, it gets worse. As well as being incapable of experimenting, women are useless at following written instructions, which in this instance are called recipes.

Blinded by a series of numbers and symbols, they get confused, and usually add the wrong amount of sugar or salt, or, more likely, substitute one for the other.

Time Magazine is about to pick the Person of the Year. I have good American money that says it will be Al Gore.

/no we can’t discuss my freakish talking money

Sarkozy’s speech before Congress. I realize it’s only polite to say nice things to a foreign governing body if you are speaking before it, but that was impressive.

And it’s rather telling that Congress cares more about global warming than the Middle East.

It sends morse code for the first 10 minutes, but then it stops.

As a citizen. I had every intention of voting on my way home. I even wondered at all the traffic as I drove by the library. And guess what? Yes, I completely forgot.

Which means that if they spend $1 million renovating the hideous old* city hall I can’t complain. Curses.

*built in 1979, need I say more?

UPDATE: Phew.

I’m as against illegal immigration as the next person, but taking $50,000 off a guy leaving the country is a bit low. Yes, yes, here illegally, didn’t pay taxes, taking food from some poor teenage dishwasher’s mouth, I know, I know.

“I need this money. I have no money in my country, I have nothing. Let them take the taxes (I owe) but don’t take everything.

Don’t say that, the IRS will leave you with less than they’re willing to let you keep now.

T-mobile has trademarked magenta.

We’ll send you an email saying you get 10% off and free shipping, today only, only online. But, haha, the sites down. Thanks for being a loyal customer.

Assuming a pitch black night, do flowers have any color in the middle of the night? Is color an inherent part of them or is it imposed on them by the interaction of light and our eyes?

Don’t stay up too late pondering this.

to discover commodity traders have been driving the price of oil up lately.

Instead, traders who treat oil like any other commodity are widely thought to be driving prices upward, bolstered by a weak dollar and money flowing out of stock markets and other investment vehicles.

You too can play The Last Starfighter.

Hugo Chavez.

I never saw this coming.

The new steampunk laptop.

The History of LOLcats.

I admire the dedication, plus they also double as elf ears should you choose to renounce the Trek, so I can see why someone would do it.

Not that I would.

I see Amazon has changed their look. I hate it when they do that. Now I have to get used to looking in different places for stuff. And it’s yet another site that I have to make as an exception to my flashblock (greatest. addon. evar.).

Also, now they have (for an additional fee) the “read it online” option on some of their books. Tres chic.

Britian greets the a Saudi monarch with the Imperial March. You only have to watch the first 30 seconds. That is so awesome.

Stargate SG-1, Star Trek TNG or A-Team? 13 out of 20.

490 years ago Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenburg Castle Church door.

Of course Americans put the shark up the river to scare the Iraqis. It’s what we do.

For all your ghetto spy laser mic needs.

Lileks goes off on the non-evils of Big Corn and he’s got a new gig at NRO.

Got it. DST ends next week; Standard Time begins. It’s one of the crueler events of the year, depending on your position – if you’re one of those hardy souls who bounds out of bed at 4 AM whistling a jig and picks up a pail to go milk the cows, then wakes the rooster on the way back from the barn, you like having light in the morning. The rest of us, however, do not live on a farm, and are unsure why we must reorder our lives along the demands of the harvest. Especially since tractors and combines have headlights. It’s not as if Farmer Brown is out in the field at 5 AM with a lantern tied around Bossie’s neck. Farmer Brown lives in Edina and sold the farm to a company that installed giant stadium lights so they can use GPS Robot Tractors to farm at 3 AM, remotely operated from Bangalore.

The rest of us, however, have to stagger along in permanent night from November to February, and it’s one of those long dark black intervals that turns people surly and desperate. Dark we can take. Cold we can take. Dark and cold, though, is like a toothache during the flu.

Pretty much I don’t care which way it goes, but it would be nice if they quit the whole changing thing. Sure, I love the fall back with the extra hour of sleep which I notice for approximately 2 days, but the spring forward is a killer that messes me up for weeks. Okay, I care a little and would rather have the light at the end of the day when it’s useful to me.

Next Tuesday everyone gets a free taco at Taco Bell.

So, this thread got me thinking it’s time to clean out the junk in my house. This weekend’s plans will include a trip to Goodwill, and possibly the dump. It’ll save boxing up all the crap that I don’t need when I get around to moving too.

Also, Amazon has some decently priced fire safes, in case you don’t get 10 minutes warning.

And btw, I would grab the cats, my computer, my important documents—which would probably take about 5 minutes to gather up, need to work on that, my print pictures and, um, maybe a book or two to read. Gosh, I have a serious lack of irreplaceable stuff. My furniture, TV, clothes, I would be happy to replace.

I guess it was an area wide disaster I would then start in on my camping stuff. Sleeping bag/mat, tent, fire starter, hatchet, cold weather gear, emergency power bars, water purifier, etc. In case all the hotels were full.

To put it mildly, I’m no fan of Bill Clinton, but this deserves a nod.

When another heckler shouted that the attacks were an “inside job,” Clinton took even greater umbrage.

“An inside job? How dare you. How dare you. It was not an inside job,” Clinton said.

I recommend Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, mostly because it’s the only one I’ve seen.

Branagh video. Lawrence Olivier version.

Giant Dumbledore tattoo. On an adult.

The Toshiba HDDVD player is at WalMart for $200.

Personally, I’m not touching HDDVD or Blu-Ray until one wins or a dual player comes out.

Some reporter pulls a do-you-know-who-I-am to the checkpoint guards in Iraq and now the entire world is mad at him. I scanned through the first 100 comments looking for someone defending him, but there weren’t any. That’s got to be some sort of record.

It’s interesting that the most informative blogs lean right. Discussion on why the lefty blogs are more heat than light will not be discussed here.

Gyms with “no grunting” policies irritate me. I grant you some people become annoying when they’re screaming all 12 reps of their 20 pound bicep curls, but if you’re going to actually exert yourself while exercising—and I admit it doesn’t happen that much at the average gym—some noise will be made. Weights might clang down, people might grunt, or even yell. I’m sorry if that distracts you from your reading of Muscle and Fitness as you walk.

“Some people grunt to give others the impression that [the grunters] are doing a lot of work. It’s just like flexing and strutting, trying to attract attention,” she told the Orange County Register. “The other reason is a more physical one — they’re not breathing properly. In order to grunt, they have to hold their breath and exhale forcefully.”

And what is the proper procedure in lifting weights? I do believe you hold your breath the first half of the movement and then exhale forcefully the second half.

The fashion belt. Yes, just keep reading it. All the way to the end.

He is so clever, chasing the Democrats out of Louisiana just so they can elect a Republican governor.

At least it’s not cheap for the government to spy on you.

The cost for performing any FISA surveillance “requiring deployment of an intercept device” is $1,000.00 for the “initial start-up fee (including the first month of intercept service),” according to a newly disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement (pdf).

Thereafter, the surveillance fee goes down to “$750.00 per month for each subsequent month in which the original [FISA] order or any extensions of the original order are active.”

So, how about those fires, eh?

Live news feed. It’s Hal, the guy that used to do the 4:30 news when I was a kid. He’s my favorite.

Thinking about what you would do in a case like that? The Red Cross has answers.

How to win customers and make money.

Other cultures, same tattoo issues.

ING Direct, savings account. Interest rate in bank savings .2%, ING Direct interest rate 4.3%. You open one and put in $250, I get 10 bucks for referring you, you get 25 bucks for being so cool.

The only drawback, it takes 3 days to get money from your bank checking account to your ING savings account or vice versa.

So if you want a referral, holler. Or leave a comment.

Comcast is blocking some P2P sharing.

Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer _ it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

How fortunate that I’m on Time Warner now.

The treadmill computer station. I like the idea but wouldn’t it be hard to type and walk at the same time? Or read and walk?

Robert Jordan died. Last month. I didn’t like his work, but he was a pillar of the Fantasy genre. How could he not be with the size and volume of his books. RIP.

Shatner will have a cameo in the Star Trek XI: Teh Suck.

/please don’t suck, please

The first 10,000 posts are your worst. So things ought to really be taking off here in a couple more years.

Gutsy Gibbon 7.1. I will not be getting it as my poor 1GHz processor is choking on Feisty Fawn. I dare not go further, cool as it sounds. Also, it is still not a OS killer as I can’t install Java or play mp3s without going through a bunch of folderol.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

So, can we relax the rules a little then? Since it doesn’t matter much.

I’m having a hard time feeling sorry for them. Perhaps they could branch out into ditches.

His name is Caden.

He’s blurry, but I think he’ll grow out of it.

Maps of the change of rule in the Middle East over the last 4000 years.

Where Ron Paul’s money comes from.

California passes law saying employers can’t force employees to be tagged. I’m glad they did it, but was anyone saying their employees had to be tagged?

Tim Blair on the Gore peace prize. He can pack more into a few sentences than anyone else.

The first boomer has applied for Social Security.

An estimated 10,000 people a day will become eligible for Social Security benefits over the next two decades, Astrue said. The Social Security trust fund, if left alone, is projected to go broke in 2041.

I have no doubt Congress will get on this sometime around 2032 or 2036.

How to win a Nobel peace prize.

A debate on the Assertion of Western Civilization vs. Reluctance to Assert Western Civilization. As in all debates they talk past each other, but it’s interesting. Plus they have cool accents. The “Reluctant” ones should have started with the third guy and built on that in their opening statements.

I have mixed feelings on this as a vehicle for political change.

Way to rock the old skool ooga-chaka baby though.

I’m trying to think of how they could make the Nobel Peace Prize more ridiculous. Ahmadinejad was the only thing I could come up with on the fly.

Has no one, in the world, done anything to forward the peace of the planet in the last year? Maybe they should only give them out once every five years if this is a problem

So 40s sci-fi. So cool.

Artists these days. They should just write letters to the editor.

But someday soon someone is going to paint a pastoral scene filled with Greek mythological features that will be enjoyable to look at and meaningful and it will rise to international acclaim. It will give rise to a new birth of art causing artists everywhere to rediscover line and color and perspective. A, what’s the word, renaissance, if you will. I can hope, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, it was a bad idea. But it’s not my fault.

Thundercats: The Movie.

The origin story expands on the major heroes and villains from the animated series, with the plot focusing on Lion-O coming of age as the leader of the Thundercats…The property revolves around a group of humanoid cats who must flee the planet of Thundera, which is destroyed. Once crash-landing on another planet, Third Earth, they must thwart Mumm-Ra, an evil sorcerer bent on killing them off.

Sounds fantastic.

Possibly the stupidest thing you’ll see today.

Hollywood strike may cripple US TV.

You Tube University.

Turkey is thinking about heading into Iraq to hunt down Kurdish separatists.

Flying is a hassle. Just look through the photos of London and save yourself some money and the embarrassing wanding.

The poor children who need governmental healthcare. The story. Mark Steyn.

He’s an internet expert, you know.

Amazon’s MP3s, while a great idea, have nothing*! No Carbon/Silicon. No new Dame Shirley Bassey. No Little Man Tate. No Rodrigo y Gabriella. No The Fratellis.

*nothing I’ve been looking for anyway

The IgNobel prizes have been announced. Among the winners:

“Linguistics” – Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona – for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
“Peace Prize” – The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called “gay bomb,” that “will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other”.

Today, since it’s Friday, I guess, I decided to use a lot of commas, and also go to Starbucks for some coffee. The guy misunderstood me and I ended up ordering a white mocha. Or he might just be pushing them.

“Ah, I’ll have a orange caramel machiatto.”

“So that’s a white mocha, what size?”

*Eh, whatever, just get me through this line* “Grande.”

Anyway, it was delicious. I recommend it.

Star Wars defense system is coming online now.

And here we see the fundamental problem between consumers and the music companies.

Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

Yes, ripping a copy of a CD you bought to your computer—much less another to your mp3 player— is theft, according to Sony.

Teeny tiny invisibility cloak for flatlanders invented.

Know why kids don’t know anything about WWII? You spend weeks talking about slavery at the beginning of the semester and in the last two weeks you cover the entire 20th century.

/also, 10/10

This is why you should be careful in curtailing freedoms you disagree with. The pendulum always swings.

A Bosnian muslim wanted to blow up the US Embassy in Austria.

He was foiled by a metal detector. It is mind-boggling that he would try to go through one with a backpack full of nails. Clearly, these people need to watch more movies with cunning plans in them. Maybe a Mission Impossible TV show marathon or something. I think even Get Smart would help.

But it’s the UN, what do you expect?

“The reason we couldn’t come to an agreement,” said South Africa’s U.N. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, “was because most of us feel that this was a terrorist act” and every report says it was done by rebels, but some council members argued that they wanted to wait for the results of an investigation to find out what happened.

Scrappleface has a clean, new, newspapery look.

He must be sliding in the polls back home or something.

Because I don’t watch local news, I didn’t realize the anti-circus bunny theft was in Spokane. Until I read about it on an Australian’s blog. Weird world we live in.

On Slashdot a guy asks what he can use to replace his Thinkpad because he doesn’t want to support China give the situation in Burma. Well, I think there was one actual computer suggestion.

The best line:

You do realize Lenovo is selling the Thinkpads now because… *drumroll* they were the company that made them all along?

The government is getting a bit hot under the collar, killing protesters.

In case, you too, were wondering. Ah yes, another one of Britian’s colonies.

It has been argued by some people that the policy of partition always led to Civil War. It certainly did in India and Cyprus and Palestine and Ireland. This was no bad thing for Britain. It kept them busy and instead of fighting us they fought each other. This meant that it was no longer necessary to have a policy about them.

Lileks is on the front page of MSN (don’t go there, the horror), which means his site was hammered into the ground, which means my morning is incomplete. *shakes fist*

Why there won’t be meaningful illegal immigration reform. This is New Jersey, imagine what it would be like in Southern California.

How much that change in your pocket is really worth.

Nickel’s are where the money’s at.

Amazon’s new MP3 service is up, mostly cheaper than iTunes and DRM free.

The flaw would be that the music preview doesn’t work for me and they don’t have the ratings by song, yet. I want to know what the most popular songs on an album are!

The one large small portion of your life that hasn’t been taxed just might be, come November 1st.

A history or media and blogs. If you’ve been around a while, it’s nothing new, but it’s organized well.

A mathmatical discovery leads to parallel universes. Which, if you think about all those quantum level decisions, is a lot of universes. Of course, in some other universe I understand all that math.

It’s a distant universe.

It also brings up a lot of questions about the nature of personality and reality.