Not So Fast

I might actually get cable if they did the a la carte thing.

Doing ping-pong matrix style took a lot more work than kids these days with the fancy-schmancy computer effects.

Even more Simpsons quotes from Right Wing News.

It’s the crushing of innovation like this that causes a country to stagnate.

via Fark

Frank J. solves the problem of poor people. And killer robots. Not killer as in “dude, killer waves”, killer as in “Aaagh! run for you life!”.

Is it just me or has it been a slow news and opinion couple of days?

Office Depot will recycle my computer junk. Yours too. But not you, yes you, there in the back.

An excellent opportunity for the comeback of the “Da Bears” SNL skit.

Threat fatigue.

I’m afraid if we don’t make improvements in the system,” Mr. Turner said, “the public’s going to lose trust and confidence in that system and won’t pay any attention to it anymore.”

Seriously, why don’t they just put out press releases when there is a credible threat. Threats that aren’t realized, whether by their action, or the terrorists bad planning or whatever, are all going to contribute to the “crying wolf” syndrome. There’s no way around that, except a sucessful attack, and that would be–as we say in the trade–bad.

Ain’t they cute. Now I have to name them. I’m not good at naming cats. Feel free to make suggestions.

Book publishers are starting to worry about used book sales. What will the next industry to be challenged by the internet be?

IE security concerns are causing a mad rush to Mozilla. Sort of. More like a slow trickle.

I suggest Opera.

I wonder if these people live anywhere near all this land they are so worried about.

The Roadless Rule, finalized in January 2001, was the most popular rulemaking undertaken in Forest Service history.

Really? A quick google found this: “In January 2001, following the most extensive public involvement in the history of federal rulemaking, the US Forest Service issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.” (emphasis added)

Oh, wait: “The “roadless rule” was developed during the last three years of the Clinton administration after more than 600 public hearings and more than 1.6 million official public comments, making it the most popular federal rulemaking in history.”

600 hearings? 1.6 million official public comments? Sounds like a heck of a fight.

Indians are upset that Bush named his cat “India”. I can’t help but think this is an Onion story that got out of hand.

via Inoperable Terran

Frankly, I’m shocked that the federal government doesn’t have contigency plans for major disasters around election time already.

With cool new gadgets. Like the Segway Bubble.

Oh, this is a beauty. Also this one. If only I had a reason to need one. Unfortunately our 6-year-old SR32 is still going strong. Even after I dropped it. I need to carry it around more.

A poll on love at first sight (from the hard-hitting Bonner Daily Bee). There’s so many ways to answer that, I can’t decide.

La Shawn Barber has an interview with The Daily Dispatch. It highlights the difference in world-views between the liberal and conservative blacks quite nicely.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Do the trivialists want Saddam and the Taliban back in power? Does a Mr. Allawi repulse them? Do they wish 10,000 American troops back in Saudi Arabia? Perhaps they want Libya to resume its work on nukes? Do they care whether Dr. Khan returns to his lab? Or do they think it is child’s play to hike back through the Dark Ages into the Pakistani borderlands looking for bin Laden? And is it all that easy to have prevented another 9/11 attack for almost three years now of constant vigilance? Perhaps they would like to deal with the corrupt, duplicitous, and tottering Saudi Royal family, which just happens to sit on 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves — without whose daily production the economies of Japan, Korea, and China would almost immediately grind to a halt.

On why Sudan has been at war for the last 20 years. The Arab government wants the land sans the people. Having failed in the south, now they are trying the west.

There’s no such thing as brontosauruses (brontosauri)? What?

School, they kept doing this to me. They teach you one thing in Algerbra, tell you to forget it and it’s really this in Geometry, then in Algerbra II, forget all that other silly stuff and now it’s this. And let’s just not talk about Pre-calc. Not that I’m bitter about that.

If you are ordering french fries at McDonald’s healthy eating cannot possibly be your main concern.

It is reported that the Monty Python musical is coming along nicely. It may be a sign of the Apocalypse, but that’s quite a cast they got there.

Probably not.

More on Tblisi. Wow, now I know more about Georgian politics than I ever wanted to.

Yes, come to Idaho where it is safe to be a conservative.

via Instapundit

South Ossetia? Uh, Ghost Recon anyone?

The US comes in dead last in software piracy.

Obviously, I need a new motherboard with this PCI Express thingy on it so my games look even better. I love Adventure.

UPDATE: Check out this page, lots of cool stuff about Adventure.

Cough syrup doesn’t work any better than water. It’s all in me head.

Drudge has the best take on the Kerry/Edwards ticket. The “We’ve Got Better Hair” platform. Made me laugh.

Well, this clears it up not at all. But at least a college professor is unsure too.

Lileks has a couple of points concerning Minnesota “where millions of consumers were apparently forced at gunpoint to buy Windows machines.”

The sun is a mass of incandesent gas, but Saturn is just a mass of gas.

Professor Stan Cawley of Britain’s Leicester University, who is involved with the spacecraft’s magnetic field measurements, says Saturn is a huge ball of gas with no rocky surface.

Funny comments on the creation of Linux.

Iraqis (my tinfoil-hat-half says “paid by US”) are threatening al-Zarqawi.

It’s Vacation Bible School time! I have the “I just want to be a sheep; baa, baa, baa, baa” song stuck in my head now. If I had more time and bandwidth, I’d post it for you to get stuck in your head, but alas, I don’t. The morning will be slim pickings. This afternoon, however, will be a cornucopia of fascinating posts, I’m just sure.

POSITIVE QUOTE OF THE DAY

To get your ideas across use small words, big ideas, and short sentences.

— John Henry Patterson

Dumb Idaho laws.

Interesting, and some good points, but how boring would it be for Christians if every message started with a half-hour (being generous, it’d probably take longer) defining term and outlining the underlying philosophies.

Church is for Christians to fellowship, worship, and learn. Evangelism takes place out there in the big bad world.

via Evangelical Outpost

I suffer from doubt that it is better than Heinz ketchup. Someone with money to burn should look into this.

Finally a use for math. Finding the best seats in the house.

Minus points for not working sound into the equation though.

/boy that doesn’t look right: “a use”. But “an use” is just plain wrong.

…Right.

And this is good stuff too.

Now the Department of Homeland Security is saying don’t use IE.

Opera.

Marlon Brando may or may not be dead.

UPDATE: Yes, he is dead. Way to go, Phoenix, with the scoop.

Car manufacturers are running out of VIN numbers. Looks like good times are here again for the programmers.

And the new Walkman will be there.

I’ve been saying we need to use up all the oil all along.

We need SUVs twice the size of the Lincoln Navigator, capable of fuel inefficiencies in the two-to-three mpg range.We need snowmobiles as big as tanks, motorcycles with six-liter V-8 engines, gas-powered carving knives, blenders, and toasters. And we’ve got to make a much larger national commitment to RV’ing and speedboating.

Hillary to give up book advance for “common good”.

US claims it hit al-Zarqawi’s safe house.

Alf gets a talk show. We all knew the commercials were leading up to something.

Wow, even the government thinks IE is troubled. And the government knows troubled.

Glenn has a couple of interesting links concerning the war and the Iraq handover.

He also has lots of good links today over at Instapundit.

Idiots! Stop clicking the spam links!

Huh? Oh, yes, I do have an opinion on this subject.

Kristin, Your ideal job is a Professional Hippy.

The Job Predictor.

In light of how eco-friendly these are, but are they comfortable?

via Fark

I predict they will go the way of the Yugo.

This sounds rather communistic:

“Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Here. You can listen to Saturn.

via Slashdot

Khartoum can’t seem to keep from killing with it’s own people. They barely have the almost 20 year war with the south done and they start in on the west.

Saddam has got to be a little nervous about all this.

It’s 4 in the afternoon, they started at 7 this morning, and some are still on the bike leg, going past the church. They still have to ride back to Coeur d’Alene and then they have to go run a marathon. Crazy.

Doing an album with William Shatner. Can you rise any higher in the musical universe?

So Wolfowitz apologized for saying that reporters are afraid to leave the Baghdad hotels, but does that mean it’s not true, or he just shouldn’t have said it?

There is something to be said for wishy-washy people.

My conquest of the real estate market has begun. I now own almost a quarter of an acre of prime Idaho property.

You didn’t think I could say “prime Idaho property” with a straight face, and you were right.

Taking out the trash.

The assessment won’t leave a stone unturned, even “sending it to the sun on a rocket ship,” said Angelos Bacopoulos, the city’s manager of garbage.

That’s a good idea.

via Fark

Using cows as billboards. I wonder how many people see the average cow?

See, the US is giving the country back to Iraq. So, you don’t like the US. Fine. You don’t like the new Iraqi government. Fine. If you don’t like the leaders, you vote them out. Get it? Blowing things up is no way to make friends and influence people.

Why does the International Criminal Court have any jurisdiction (or whatever the legal term is) over US soldiers in the first place? Who signed that agreement (or whatever the political term is)?

I guess people do still watch TV news, because this seems to be a big deal.

Apparently we won the little Al-Sadr battle. Weird, I hadn’t really heard anything about it.

Drudge’s little thing on Clinton’s book is hilarious.

For those playing the home game, the drive is dead, long live the drive. I did manage to get a lot of the important stuff off though, so that’s good news. And the better news is that there will be more blogging.

Enterprise’s price is going to be cut in half. Of course, there’s always the point of throwing good money after bad.

Ten bucks says they never collect.

And you’re supposed to say, “I’m not intimidated by you or your freakish talking money”.

Okay, there’s a audio file that goes with the title, but you can’t hear it because it’s on that low-downdirty-rottenrassenfrassen hard drive. And, by the way, Ivory soap is supposed to float.

We are experiencing temporary technical difficulties. The computer is still really messed up. Or actually, it’s just that XP doesn’t want to recognize the other drive. I wish they’d just play nicely with each other. Didn’t they learn anthing in hard-drive preschool?

UPDATE: In related news, this is a nice little admin password recovery tool.

FURTHER UPDATE: That’s it, I’m going to take the thing home and work on it on a computer that isn’t schizo. Also, my pecs are hurting a bit from the frisbee golf I played Sunday night. Clearly I need to do more bench pressing at the gym.

So, I just had a hard drive go kaput. Or at least windows thinks it went kaput. The BIOS thinks everything is dandy. Luckily it is just the drive where I store my files. Unfortunately, all my work from the last two weeks is on there. I’ll be working on that for the rest of the evening and possibly tomorrow. Talk amoungst yourselves.

Make sure you read the comments. At least down to where the guy from WSJ is posting.

And the In My World isn’t too shabby either.

JMS has a new idea for a Star Trek series. I don’t know what to think.

via Slashdot

I’ve got some Gmail invites to spare, if anyone needs one. Just email me (kristin at kristinhoppe dot com) your address.

The first private astronaut.

I wanna live on Mars! All the books I have read said it could be done. Sure, they were all science fiction books, but they were still books.

I don’t think we can terraform Mars, if terraforming is, as it was originally defined, making Mars suitable for human beings. But what we could do is make Mars suitable for life.

Human beings are a particular subset of life that require particular conditions. And it turns out oxygen in particular is very hard to make on Mars. That is, I think, beyond our technological horizons – it’s a long time in the future.

Okay, sure we don’t have rocketpacks yet, but that’s just impractical. People can barely drive cars, and you want them to fly? But given the right imputous, we’ll figure out how to make Mars suitable for humans soon enough. Maybe to save us from impending global disaster.

As I was reminded recently, a year ago today I started this blog. It’s rather painful for me to read my own entries, but you can, if you want. I would recommend against it though.

So Car d’Alene is this weekend. That’s swell. Except Sherman was blocked off so they could do their cruise tonight and I was too tired to remember to stay on the freeway and come home the back way. Naturally I ended up behind some person that had no idea where they were or where they were going. It was a fun 5 minutes going those seven blocks. I know it may not be immediately obvious, but when there are hundreds of people attending an event, you aren’t going to get a parking spot one block away. Please proceed at something approaching the speed limit to where there are spaces between the cars and park there.

Tomorrow, though, there will be cheesecake on a stick. Mmm. And one of those Peruvian bands, no doubt. They rock.

Interesting timing.

This is great stuff. I saw the I heart Haliburton shirt on a Right Wing Stuff blog ad earlier today too. My birthday is only in 5 months, so take this as a hint.

via Pete.

On why what you believe in matters.

Arafat agrees that Israel should exist as a Jewish state? What? Quick, does Spock have a beard in this universe? I mean, good news and all, but is this for real?

Okay, I hate, hate, hate websites with talking ads on them. I’m recording a program out on to tape, checking to see exactly how hard the wind is blowing, and all of a sudden there’s someone selling the little purple pill talking over my program. There’s 10 minutes wasted. Thank you, and I’ll never visit your site again.

P.S. The wind is blowing at about 20mph

The Japanese get all the good games.

All told, Yoshinoya is quite possibly one of the greatest beef-bowl simulators on the current generation of game consoles. Bold words, we know, but the simple gameplay mechanics, the tight pacing, and the wacky assortment of bosses give it an undeniable charm.

Having put up a big fence, Israel is now going to build a moat. They need a fire-breathing dragon that likes muffins to live under the bridge .

Scotty is getting a star on the walk of fame. Finally, I can sleep at night.

I’m picturing link guns from Unreal Tournament.

Maybe it’s good to keep the legislators from legislating.

Time for my favorite Will Rogers quote: This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

It’s the motherlode of Star Trek quizzes. Some of those are tough.

If only they could get a foot in the door in the Islamic countries.

“How can we let our women drive or lift their veils or mix with men? What is next? Shall we see them one day sitting in a cafe and drinking tea together?”

Great Space Coaster. I saw it about three times, but they always talked about the gnus. At the time I thought it was such a clever pun that I still haven’t gotten over it.

Anyway, the reason for this post is News is dumb.

Finally, Star Trek: TOS is coming out in a boxed set. And there was much rejoicing.

Ah, yes, here’s what I remember the news saying back in the 80’s. Of course, this is an opinion piece, but the difference is slight.

weblogs.com just stopped hosting blogs.

Ack! They’re coming back. I knew it. Already I’m seeing them zipping about downtown on their bikes. Soon I’ll be frustrated by them anywhere I try to drive.

Won’t someone think of the tree octupi?

via A Family Runs Through It, who has all your Pacific-Northwest-outdoor family-fun-type news.

This doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement.

The FTC recognizes that a do-not-spam list wouldn’t work. And here’s the kicker, they aren’t going to do it!

Whatever will happen to the world if Iran refuses to cooperate even more with the UN atomic energy watchdog thingy.

If I didn’t go to a Calvary Chapel I’d probably end up being a Southern Baptist. We disagree on a couple minor points, but at least they stand for something.

The December report complained that some in the alliance had questioned “the truthfulness of Holy Scripture,” refused to affirm the necessity of conscious faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, promoted women preachers, criticized the SBC and its foreign mission board and adopted an “anti-American” tone.

Luke sent me a gmail invite. Thank you Luke!

Now I’m one of the cool kids. And I’m not stuck with an address like: fho32uf98uf@gmail.com. Neener-neener.

There may not be quite as many uninsured Americans as the numbers indicate.

Testing gmail spam filters.

And by the way, anyone wanting to send me a gmail invite, I would be most appreciative.

Boy, Frank has a way with the women.

Here we go, continuing on our quest for moose. The first one is an interesting one. The artist put another moose on its back. I’m not sure of the artistic signifigance of that.

Then, right down the street is this one:

Really, rather dull in the panoply of moose. So we quickly continue on to:

A camouflaged moose. Or it would be camouflaged if it were in the woods. But it’s not, it’s in a parking lot. So, it’s not really camouflaged at all.

And now the piece d’resistance, the impressionist moose:

A closer look:

Really, very nice. Odd to do it on a moose, but still, very nice.

Coming soon: moose from the northern side of town. Assuming the moronic hooligans don’t get to them first.

I’m Fred Randall, a 35 year old male from Houston, Texas that works as an engineer for NASA and makes over $100,000 a year. My zip code is 77007, and I live on Alston St. Well, that’s what the newspapers that have worn me down to registering think.

And unless you are the New York Times or the Washington Post or of similar stature, you aren’t going to get me to register, *cough*spokesman-review*cough*.

via i am always right

Yeah, but does it makes you look fat?

I don’t understand why they aren’t calling me for quotes. Cest la vie.

When Rehnquist, O’Conner, and Thomas all agree you know your case is going down in flames.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist agreed with the outcome of the case, but still wrote separately to say that the Pledge as recited by schoolchildren does not violate the Constitution. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas agreed with him.

Oh sure, it looks nice, but if it still tastes like cauliflower, what’s the point. Couldn’t they get it artifically cheese flavored since they were tinkering with it?

That is not the way to strike fear into the hearts of Americans. His other ideas were much better.