Not So Fast

Britian doesn’t owe us anymore for World War II.

You British and African-American types, respectively.

You wonderful old internet people.

To you Seinfeldians. It’s a Festivus Miracle.

The airing of grievances begins in the comments section.

Improve your grammar. I’ll study the comma section.

Wall Street Journal’s Best and Worst Ads of 2006.

Blogger is no longer in beta. Does this mean they’ll start charging for it?

To all the pagans and wiccans out there.

Roombas caroling.

If you have a lot of time to kill you can watch the 50 greatest cartoons of all time.

Scott Adam’s theory of everything. It involves doughnuts and ants. I like doughnuts.

Want an out-of-print book? Just print one up.

The $50,000 vending machine is about to debut in somewhere between 10 and 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007, including the New York Public Library in February. The machine can produce two books simultaneously in seven minutes, a time which includes all the printing, binding and cutting involved.

Top 10 stories we didn’t hear about in 2006 according to Foreign Policy.

Village? They have villages? What is New York state stuck in the Middle Ages?

A discussion of A Christmas Carol. You should read it this week.

Alright, if you must watch the movie, the Muppet’s Christmas Carol is best.

Colbert mocks you and Time magazine.

A tempting woot. And robot uprising songs are always gold.

Sylvester Stallone knows Christianity sells.

This whole robot’s rights thing has been covered. If this scientist had read more science fiction he would know this has all been hashed out, repeatedly.

I recommend Bicentennial Man. Not the movie. DO NOT see the movie. I think it’s safe to say never watch any Asimov story made into a movie.

10 Weirdest People on Earth. Even weirder than that one guy that hangs out in front of the grocery store.

via EO

Okay, I’m not a huge fan of the whole Simon & Garfunkel sound so I don’t know why I like this, but this is a great Christmas album. Really. Inexplicable.

Plus it’s 42 songs for 20 bucks. It’s a steal! Even if a bunch of them are really short. Hmm, maybe that’s why I like it.

If only the US would sign on to Kyoto Swedish gingerbread houses would be saved.

Just in time for the holidays, outdoor survival tips. Seems to be: carry a first aid kit and duct tape, think, and think positively.

Mark Steyn.

Seattle Airport could certainly put up a menorah. And maybe a commemoration of Eid, and Kwanzaa, and something for solstice worshippers, and perhaps something for litigious atheists. But to do that is to turn society into a kind of greater airport departure lounge — to say it’s no more than an assemblage of whoever happens to be in it at any particular time. Successful societies (unlike plastic trees) have deep roots: Nobody should be obliged to believe Jesus is the son of God, but likewise nobody should take such umbrage at trees and tinsel and instrumental versions of “Silent Night” that he would deny the reality of the land he lives in to the vast majority of his fellow citizens.

Top 40 obnoxious quotes of 2006 as compiled by RWN.

I am Time’s Person of the Year. That’s going to look good on my resume.

/you are too
//you unique snowflake,you

To those so inclined that way.

XM has your Hanukkah music needs covered.

The normal free trial of XM Radio Online lasts only 3 days, but miraculously we have been able to extend it to cover all eight days of Radio Hanukkah.

Everyone blames Israel.

Heumann: Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?

Sheikh: I think so.

Ooookay.

Oh please, oh please, oh please!

This is the problem with fighting global warming. It’s going to impact my tasty beef products.

As a greenhouse gas methane is about 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide by weight. Rising world affluence translates into rising demand for meat and that means more cows, sheep, and other methane producers.

So we should all eat vegetarian, except then they’ll be too many plants which will again somehow upset the delicate balance because everything upsets the delicate balance. Polar bears or ribeye, hmmm.

Upcoming cool stuff. No mention of rocket packs or flying cars.

Most of the time living in a small town irks me, but occasionally it is amusing. Like when I keep hearing sirens so I go outside to see whose house is on fire but it’s the Fire Department with a Santa float cruising the neighborhood.

I swear to you that somewhere I have read a similar story. A big old tall guy reaches down an animal’s throat to grab something to save it’s life. I’m pretty sure it was even a dolphin. Probably one of those animal anthology books.

Or, my doppleganger is going through life backwards and I get brief glimpses of the future from it.

UPDATE: I’m pretty sure it was a basketball player.

For my own future reference: I-90 driving conditions info.

Magnetic storm coming tonight. Have these things ever done anything? Doesn’t everyone just adapt and everything is fine?

It’s nice that the next UN chief is going to be personally involved in whatever the UN is going to do in Dafur.

Perhaps they can send more vehicles.

Free Mozart if you want it.

Because pain is hi-larious. Even emotional pain.

via Manolo for the Brides 

It’s odd to look up and see stars at 5pm. It’s really odd that there weren’t clouds in the way.

Well, now I’m off to watch Miracle on 34th Street (originally released in May—odd no?) and eat some (hopefully) yummy crockpot stroganoff.

Enjoy your evening.

Evangelical Outpost’s top 10 6 videos of 2006. The first 4 are must see.

No more white dolphins. I blame Bush. If he had signed Kyoto this never would have happened.

Time’s top photos of 2006. I’m whelmed by it. Too much black and white. It’s not dramatic anymore.

Wacky dictators and their wacky past times. Given absolute power and tremendous wealth I shudder to think of what weird things I would end up doing.

I learned there was a country called the Republic of Kalmykia. I miss the good old days when it was all USSR. Cartographically speaking, not in a “yay communism” way.

via Tim Blair 

By Tom DeLay. Whom I would trust to the end of…well, no I don’t trust him at all. Doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong though.

I just can’t get excited about an election that’s 1.75 years away. They always end up picking some governor I’ve never heard of anyway.

I can’t watch.

I’m just not feeling the news. If there were some best of 2006 articles out there, I might be into that. Instead, here’s a pic that I just photoshopped as a little pick-me-up for the aid workers in Dafur cause their vehicles got stolen by some faction or another.

Yes, it’s an appallingly bad extraction, I was going for time, not accuracy.

So the road trip:

Leave my house at 7AM, debate calling in to work to remind them I won’t be there. Decide against it. Pick up the rest of the bunch. We all squeeze into the rented minivan. We’re on our way!

Continue reading →

I’m not really into the MMORGs, I prefer my time to be devoured by other things, but a game in the Firefly universe? Awesome.

Come back two days. I’ll be en route to and from beautiful Portland, OR, in order to see Trans Siberian Orchestra.

UPDATE: 12th row center. It’s good knowing people that know people. It was a great show, as always.

Presents, presents.

25 most important questions of the universe answered.

NASA says they have evidence of water on Mars.

Bonus Rocketman quote:

“He’s the key to discovering life on Mars. Ohohohahhahhahh! I’m training him using calls that he’s familiar with to retrieve specific rock samples from the underground fissures.”
“Of course. There’s still moisture under the surface. And where there’s water there could be life.”
“That’s right. Good Boy.”
“Or death. Death to anyone who dare to disturb the Martian Crust Devils with their venomous feed and their wet-sucking lips.”

Celebrate the “no environmental footprint” weekend by living like those in war-torn, third-world, poverty-stricken countries. Woohoo. Makes me want to save the environment.

My plans for the weekend include a gas-guzzling trip to Portland and back (TSO! w00t!), using several computers, heating my house as much as I dare, a crockpot cooking some beef for hours and hours, and leaving light on in rooms I am not planning on going back into. You know, the usual.

It’s not your imagination, spam has been getting worse lately. Mine seems to be stock tips and fake watches. I don’t understand how they make money off of that. Of course, between whatever Gmail uses, Spam Assassin, Spam Karma and Bad Behavior, all I notice is large numbers on the Spam folder. Spam away, you cretinous, low-life, scum of the earth.

Three years ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, made an audacious prediction: the problem of junk e-mail, he said, “will be solved by 2006.”

And 640k ought to be enough for anyone.

No doubt letters from Sens. Rockefeller and Snowe are on the way to these guys.

Microsoft wants to compete with Adobe in the graphics suite arena.

And by cool I mean “really nerdy”.

Senators Rockefeller and Snowe feeling their oats.

NASA plans to have a moon base by 2024.

No one wants the dried out nasty brownie edges. They want the luscious, soft, slightly gooey brownie middles.

With a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.

And some hot fudge.

Maybe a little whipped cream.

What is with the Europeans and their blind faith in GPS units? And why are their GPS units always the ones misdirecting them? They’ve had cartographers since at least 1492, according to my elementary school teachers, they should have some darn accurate maps by now.

The United Federation of Planets.

So the install of the wifi card didn’t go quite as smoothly as the rest of the Ubuntu install. Partially that would be my fault since I bought the “one dollar after rebate” card as opposed to finding out what was known to work. On the other hand, I’m still not quite sure why it started working when it did.
None of it matters now as I can surf teh intarwebs from the comfort of anywhere in my house. And probably outside my house, but it’s too cold to go outside now. You’ll have to wait for spring to find out that part.

I finally, finally nailed down the whole path to file in a command line thing. I never quite got it before, despite using DOS and Linux on occasion. Hurray!

I also found out how to force OpenCalc to comma-delimit files, and even harder, how to make the date format MySQL wants stick to the delimited files.

I need a nap.

Aren’t most thing that end with -ium deadly when ingested?

UPDATE: New and improved coherent sentence structure.

Still butterflies though.

Early Beatles and Stones recordings are falling out of copyright. They need to get Disney on the case.

Politics are different in Mexico.

If you need a better interest rate on your savings, INGDirect. Let me know if you want a referral. They’ll give you 25 bucks for starting an account and me 10 for referring you. I make more interest in a month than my bank gives me in a year.

Go to Google Images, type in “DSC0” followed by any 4 digits. I like birthday-type digits—day/month or year. Look for the fun images. There’s tons of that are just random people, but then there’s the interesting ones (that is correct, people aren’t interesting to me. I just don’t get them). Like yaks grazing in a field.

Or a little engine that could.

Or confused drummers drumming.

Or Australians.

I wanna know who’s the guy that saw the problem and thought, “I bet Silly String would work!” And then, who had a can of the stuff to test it with?

*what would Macgyver do?

Repetitive prayer leads to physiological disorder in this one guy.

It would be nice if the planners of Ground Zero’s reconstruction adopted an attitude that has become more common among architects in recent years: humbly pick the style that’s “right for the job,” then adhere to it with some deference to that style’s internal, traditional rules. As the Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman says, we want buildings to please their users, not help architects make a philosophical point—a self-indulgent tendency in 20th-century architecture that reached its reductio ad absurdum with the “deconstructionist” architects, who deliberately designed buildings that no one would want to live in.

It’ll never work.

If you buy your dip—of any sort—in a tub or jar you get what you deserve. Don’t be suing about it, dumb-person.

Not that I don’t enjoy the occasional cheese-like food product once in a while. Mmm, nachos.

Watching National Review lately has been fun. A few weeks ago they were all, the war is going poorly, whose idea was this, we need to do something. Now Baker is in town threatening to pull out and they’re all, hey now, let’s not get carried away. Except it’s all nuanced and quite defensible, of course. “What I actually said was..” Yeah. Still amusing.

Russia may have to get tough with Allofmp3.com.

Maybe Russia can just irradiate someone instead.

More dead terrorists. It’s sorta sad that they have to explicitly say they don’t purposely hurt civilians, but terrorists will. You’d think that would go without saying.

via Inoperable Terran

My November energy bill rivals that of January or February of last year. That’s a bad sign. It wasn’t even particularly cold this last month.

Avista, don’t spend all the money in one place.

I guess I could get a part time job to pay the bills. Then I would be home even less and save that much more. Hmmm. It’s so crazy it just might work.

So, I just installed Ubuntu on an old laptop someone gave me (PIII, 1Ghz, 256 ram). Old. And I don’t have a copy of Windows for it, so I went the free and hopefully easy route. I went with the stable 6.06 (Dapper Drake) version. It was an easy install. It’s a live CD, so you boot to the CD, and can test drive it if you want, but I don’t care about that so I clicked on the install icon, and answered 6 questions. It could have been more questions had I wanted more than one partition. Possibly 7 or 8 questions. So it chugged along for about 20? minutes. I rebooted, and presto! It is similar enough to Windows that I have no problem finding things. I even right-clicked on the desktop out of habit to change it and it gave me just what I was expecting. By far, the nicest Linux installation I’ve ever done.

It’s reasonably fast, especially for such an old computer.

I plugged in my ethernet connection. And waited for something to happen. I was wasting time. It was connected and waiting for me to hop on the internets.

I plugged in my external USB hard drive. It recognized the drives and popped them on my desktop for my browsing pleasure.

I downloaded and installed Firefox 2.0. The install was so fast thought I messed up something and it didn’t work, but no.

My only complaint so far: I understand the purity of nothing but open source, freely available stuff and you don’t want to mess that up, but you’re never going to take over the world with an installation that doesn’t play mp3s out of the box. Add another question to the installation outlining your position if you want, pop up a notice when I click on add programs, something.

Right now I’m updating my software, since it’s the older version it’s not surprising that there are 60 updates. It took about 10 minutes.

Friday I’ll try out a wifi card and see if it can handle that seamlessly.

To sum up, I like it. So far. I’d even recommend it if you want to switch over and are lazy like me, not particularly wanting to get all gritty learning new-fangled ways.

The most artistic class photo I’ve ever seen.

For the three people that know me personally in Idaho that read this, Steve has a few India photos up if you want to take a look.

The decline of Western Civilization.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking–won at such a great personal cost–to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

The making of millions and millions of tiny, colorful blocks. I love this country Denmark.

Seems like I’ve been working all morning. The news was boring anyway.

I didn’t even notice, but Google has an online word processor.

Google: they make dreams come true. Actually my dream will come true when it automatically and seamlessly updates with whatever computer I log in with, but at least they’re trying.

A burglar was so outraged by the child pornography he found on a computer he stole, he turned the guy in. That takes some guts.

Grow your own loofah sponge.

Turns out money does buy happiness. It also buys really nifty gadgets.

Orson Scott Card on the Glenn and Helen show talking about his new book.

Glenn and Helen need to work on sounding natural during their announcing. They’re fine when they get to the interview.

So, if you’re like me you and you make your Italian dressing from the little packets, but then are annoyed when the oil solidifies in the frigerator forcing you to “plan ahead” and take the stupid stuff out and let it come to room temperature before you can have your salad, I have a solution.

Buys some Cavender’s Greek Seasoning. Sprinkle liberally on your lettuce, sprinkle balsamic vinegar, and if you want —I skip this part because that’s just the way I am— olive oil. Presto, instant Italian dressing, no defrosting, no muss, no fuss.

Lazy? Or just plain clever? It’s hard to tell.

Also this avoids the uni-tasker problem of a bottle of salad dressing. And don’t tell me I can use it as a marinade, it’s too darn sweet for marinade. Maybe I should start a little bumpersticker saying, Buy Ingredients, Not Crap. Hmm, needs some work.

You will not explode if exposed to hard vacuum.

At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat….

Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.

Exposure to the Dyson vacuum has similar effects.

But we still aren’t really sure why people get the flu more in winter. If the sun hadn’t been shining today I’d be depressed about this.

Wiimote could qualify as a deadly weapon.

Also, no need for an expensive sensor bar, just use candles.

Americans fear the wrong things. I blame Bush. And possibly the media. And the nervous nelly that wrote this article trying to substitute in what he wants us to panic about.

“People call these crises wake-up calls,” says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

“But they’re more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don’t follow through.”

Props to Pakistan for passing the Woman’s Rights bill over objections from the hardline Islamic parties.

Winning the poorest designed series of articles ever award, New Scientist has a bunch of predictions from top scientifical minds.

I’m guessing most of it will show up with our flying cars, rocketpacks and nuclear kitchens.

The holiday flavored Jones sodas are out. And nothing says “holidays” like peas and antacid. Mmm-mmmmm.

A Very Cheat Commando Thanksgiving.

In America we the people can directly influence government policy over the internet. Go vote for the Thanksgiving turkey’s names now.

/Flyer and Fryer in ’06!
//I approve this message

Oh, the wonder of it all.

In other words, for 68 minutes of working in the U.S., a minimum-wage worker can take home some of the beautiful fruits of the efforts of strangers in Ecuador who plant, tend, and pick flowers – of other strangers (where?) who make the protective packing material used for shipping the flowers – of yet other strangers who pilot the planes and drive the trucks that transport these flowers fresh from Ecuador to U.S. supermarkets – and of the countless other strangers who build the planes and trucks, who fuel the planes and trucks, who pave the runways and roads used by the planes and trucks, who feed the pilots and drivers, who insure airlines, trucking companies, and supermarkets against casualty losses, who wake up at pre-dawn hours to put the flowers into an attractive display in the supermarket.

The sheer volume of suff we produce and consume in America amazes me.

From Ace.

*Storebought pies are of the debbil. Don’t do that. Pies are ridiculously easy to make, and the house smells so good when they’re baking.

*If you have a full house and need to set up a separate table for the kiddies, try to orient it so that you can reach the back of the worst kid’s head with a spatula. That way you won’t have to get up during the meal.

*Put a long-handled spatula next to your plate.

A couple quibbles:

Pie is easy to make. Pie crust is possibly the hardest thing on the planet to make properly. I think I’ve had three really good pie crusts in my life. And store bought pie crusts, while nasty, are generally better than those people make at home, sad to say. Know your limits.

And be nice to your red-headed cousins. We know you just hate us because we’re beautiful, but really, you’re going to have to get over it.

Peter Jackson and New Line have a falling out over money, so he won’t be directing The Hobbit. Whoever they get better not suck.

Milton Freidman, Republicans, and freedom.

Actually, I like I-15 better, but either way, thank you, Mr. Eisenhower. We need you back to update it now.

I’m sure all your gifts and cash are in the mail.

One of my fondest memories of high school was as a TA for my biology/oceanography teacher. He had us cleaning out a frosted freezer in the back storage room. The freezer a solid block of ice, and as we chipped away at it we came across all sorts of dead animals: fish, squirrels, various other rodents. It was fun. We never found any radioactive material though. Now I’m disappointed.

“Why have something laying around that could become a prank? We don’t want to be the headline of the national news.”

Words to live by.

/Hi, Mr. Vexler.

A Very Alaskan Thanskgiving.

So I was driving down the street on my way to the bank, listening to the radio. Some catchy music came on that I half recognized. It was a commercial for the production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” that’s coming to town. I sang along with the clips. Then I was sad. “I would love to go see that,” I thought. But tickets are expensive and I’m too cheap most of the time to spend money on that kind of thing. But, lo, I remembered. Someone has given me a ticket! Yes! And thus my day was made.

L33t ancient sword makers secrets recently rediscovered. Nanotubes and wootz were involved.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Do we really want to be creating robots that use the Scientific Method to learn? First they learn to toddle, then they learn to run, then they learn to subjugate humans.

McCaaaaaain. He’s so annoying. Especially when he’s right.

I’m not annoyed that he’s right, I just find blatantly triangulating politicians annoying.

New Hotness: Curing. For your Thanksgiving, yet another way to attempt to cook the perfect turkey.

I love Thanksgiving.

Milton Friedman has died.

I’m sure it had nothing to do with time travel. Probably.

Every time you start messing with time travel, it’s bad for grandfathers.

Quantum physics makes me dizzy and fall over.

Fight global warming climate change with pollution!

The first plausible explanation for Bush’s behavior lately that I’ve heard.

NASA thinking about a manned asteroid exploration to keep our interest between the moon exploration and the manned Mars mission. Um, you have to get my attention before you need to worry about losing it.

Those annoying extened warranties, not worth it.

Nevertheless, it’s estimated that non-savvy consumers will drop a combined $1.6 billion on fruitless warranties this year

Snapped some pictures of the bizzaro incoming storm clouds. (Click to see the larger sizes)