Gary’s random musings and clippings
Hey, if anyone with a Livejournal account is reading me here, and not at LJ, maybe you should check out the LJ once in a while too (while logged in to LJ, duh). I post the rare friends-only post over there, cuz I don’t want to make people register on my personal site too.
The oil industry in the USA isn’t using most of the oil fields they have leases for, but they’re begging for more? I don’t understand. The USA uses 21 million barrels of oil per day, and produces 8; the oil fields they have access to which they are not using could be worth 5 million barrels a day. Meanwhile, the proposals to open up more offshore drilling, combined with the proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, could lead to 2 million barrels a day. So, they’re begging for the ability to get half of what they already have available which they aren’t using. I honestly don’t understand economics, but that just doesn’t sound kosher to me.
I understand the investment to exploit the open fields would be substantial, and the leases they are asking for would be cheaper to exploit. But, still - makes you wonder about the rhetoric about who is patriotic, eh?
Ever since listening to the fantastic FM & AM album during my broadcast journalism class back in 1982, I’ve been a huge fan of George Carlin. Son of WINO was a great piece of absurdist humor (weather report tonight is dark, with scattered light toward morning), his counterculture cred got a bit of unneeded burnishing with his appearance in the Bill & Ted movies (far outshining the acting ability of the stars), and his social commentary was always biting and spot-on.
I’m amazed at his consistently funny career, his ability to come up with topical humor for fifty years, and his almost unnatural capacity to seem to be a young smartass well into his AARP years. His passing will leave a giant hole in the world of satire and humor, and he will be missed by anyone with a funnybone.
Kat’s kayak arrived via big truck last week, and then sat on the love seat for two days due to lack of time. Here it is.
When Kat arrived home Friday afternoon, she chanted “It’s kayak time” repeatedly until I changed into swim trunks and slathered on some sun screen. I took my inflatable kayak, which is (in contrast) a big pig of an overgrown pool toy. But, still got us around the lake for a couple hours, during which we saw critters. There were many turtles poking just above the surface, a nutria putting on a diving show for us, a swan, and a water snake. Maybe that water snake, who knows?
The only problem with taking the kayak out, other than sunburn? The cat no longer has a giant bed.
Kat is working as a naturalist at the local nature center, and gets to spend much time with the critters. She’s owned snakes and lizards and all manner of furry, finned, and scaled critters over the years. She minored in biology. She’s not generally squeamish.
Saturday, I’m finally getting the 2007 DVDs ready to ship to far-flung relatives, when I get a call. ”There’s an emergency, I can’t get in touch with [Snake Guy] (her boss at the nature center), and I need you to come out here.” So, I hit the road for the lake, pop in and she’s standing in the middle of the main room, with the door to the reptile room blocked, while she madly dials anyone who can help with the unidentified snake in the room. Last seen heading for a dark corner, the reptile has decided to enliven the morning and cancel a child’s birthday party.
After a couple hours of searching, a snake wrangler in flip flops (!) pulling apart the reptile room, and general panic trying to identify which snakes might be missing (without going into the “venomous” room if avoidable), the little bugger finally decides to reveal himself. It turns out to be a fairly dehydrated water snake. One of the enclosures appeared to be missing a water snake, except that snake died three weeks ago. This one is the same species, albeit much younger and smaller. He broke into the nature center. While we’re trying to figure out which snake had escaped, it turns out this one was a burglar. What are the odds?
Ron Moore, you sonofabitch. You evil, twisted, sick muthafracker.
Anyone who has read anything of the British crypto effort during WW2, especially regarding the Enigma machine, should be familiar with the name Bletchley Park. It was the home of the UK equivalent to our NSA, and also housed Alan Turing during the war. You’d think preserving such an important location would be completely uncontroversial. Apparently everyone agrees that the site is a wonderful historical locale and its museum of computing is also a great resource. But, they’re not too willing to pay for it.
The curator says they may be able to keep running for two more years, unless some generous folks step up. That would be a shame.
Oh, and if you’re not a crypto geek, at least read Between Silk and Cyanide - it’s a fantastic read and a very interesting look at the difficulties of covert agents and how they tie in with the crypto geek culture as well. Crypto geeks have all read Cryptonomicon, so I won’t bother to link to that one. 
Yeah, Weezer is totally the band of geeks everywhere.
“Liberal in the good sense…” Because the liberal media is so ineffective at propagandazing that the term liberal has become a curse word, while somehow conservative is still a respectable term.
Although I’ve been battling a cold since Sunday, yesterday was an especially good day for Us. Kat first drove down from Lubbock to see me one year ago, on the 14th of May. To commemorate this momentous occasion, we went for a bicycle ride to the river with The Boy, then for dinner we had fish tacos (her favorite of my cooking thus far), and knocked back a fabulous bottle of Moscat Spumante to finish up the night. I didn’t even know that spumante was made with muscat grapes, but it was very nice - not at all dry and very very drinkable.
I’ve told her that one anniversary per year is all you get, so next year there will be no date-aversary. Gotta hold the line somewhere…
Remember when the MSN Music Store shut down over a year ago? Remember that Microsoft said that songs you “bought” from the MSN Music Store were going to be yours to keep forever? Guess what, sucker? After August, you can’t upgrade your computer without losing your music.
Yet another in a long series of “DRM Hates Customers” stories. You’d think the computer industry ditching copy protection years ago, coupled with the complete meltdown of DRM in music over the past couple years, would make the movie industry wake up and kill their copy protection plans. You’d be wrong. Not that their DRM will hold up either… Oh, yeah - it didn’t! HAH!
I’ve been using a WD MyBook 500GB USB-attached drive for my nightly backups for about a year now. This week, it stopped working reliably (SMART errors intermittently). Of course, it’s out of warranty, so it had to die.
I’m looking into a more reliable storage system, perhaps a RAID or Drobo box, maybe attached to the network, but probably direct-attached to the desktop. Does anyone have any advice, based on personal experience?
The Drobo looks awfully sweet, if a bit pricey. I like the idea that I can just swap in a new drive whenever I have some extra cash (or drives drop in price or go on sale), and the device just uses it automagically. The traditional RAID approach of having multiple identical drives, preferably all the same model, seems somewhat rigid and unreasonable to me. What happens if a drive fails a year or two from now, and that model is no longer available? Imagine you have a RAID filled with 80GB drives today; good luck finding a replacement drive new.
After a great ceramic show at the museum, where Kat caught up with several fellow artists (and a few students who want extra credit), followed by a wonderful dinner downtown (despite the best efforts of the most inept waiter ever seen), there was a presentation. Kat insists that I inform all and sundry throughout the world, so I will.
Yes, she is actually pointing to the ring after having put marker on her finger pointing to the ring as well. Thorough, she is.
October 14th is the big day. We’ll be having a dinner for locals (and whoever wants to travel to the middle of nowhere) on the afternoon of Sunday October 19th, which happens to be my son’s (and sister’s) birthday.
The estate tax only affects estates valued at above $2 million today, and maybe down to $1 million if things are allowed to lapse in 2011 (not $675,000 no matter what your talk radio told you). How much do you expect to leave in net worth for your heirs? More than a million dollars? Not likely. Yet, a significant number of people who will never be affected by the estate tax are fighting to repeal it, on behalf of people making amounts of money most of us can’t imagine.
There are so many complicated economic issues wrapped up in estate tax debates, it would be ridiculous to try to summarize them. My curiousity is piqued by the rabid defense of the “repeal the death tax” mantra by people who will likely never have to pay it anyway. What kind of strange phenomenon causes people to spend time and effort fighting for something that helps only people most of us would classify as filthy rich?
I recently read a Princeton research paper, which showed quite clearly that the party in the Executive has historically been a good indicator of the rate of increase in income inequality. Republican presidents have been very good to the top 20% of Americans, and pretty crappy to the bottom 20%, with a relatively straight-line graph between them. Democratic presidents have been pretty good to the bottom 20%, and just about as good to the top 20%, with a straight-line graph between them as well. The difference, of course, is that the Dem graph is nearly horizontal. Income growth is about 2.5% for the top quintile under either party, but under a Dem that’s about the same level for everyone in the country (2-2.5%). Under the GOP, on the other hand, the top quintile still gets a nice growth rate of 2.5% or so, but the bottom quintile gets growth of 0.5%. The only exception to this pattern is in election years, when the Democrats seem to shoot themselves in the foot with the poor, and the Republicans somehow discover they can give money to the plebes to gain votes. Economic stimulus package, anyone?
By the way, I’ve been told by someone near and dear to me that the Princeton paper is not nearly as fascinating a read as I think it is. Something about “deathly dull” was murmured, as I recall. I am focusing on income inequality because it is so stark a statistic of economic health for most people, as well as being an indicator of widespread discontent. Discontent breeds instability and all that, ya know. So, currently, the top 1% of people in the country have 22% of the income, which is the greatest concentration of wealth in such a small group since before the Great Depression. We all know how well that turned out, eh? Another good indicator of economic health is personal savings. In 1982, that rate was 11%; in 2006, it was negative 1%. I’m pretty sure that’s not good.
If this income inequality issue is so blatantly obvious, the question remains: Why does anyone who isn’t already wealthy vote Republican? My theory is “the media makes people crazy.” Look at the giant storms of controversy and outrage the media talking heads have been stirring up over relatively minor issues of things like “bitter people” and cleavage and flag pins. Do any of those things really matter to the citizenry? Of course not. But, people have grown so accustomed to the din of information flowing from the magic box that shows them both parties looking stupid and venal and self-serving and hypocritical, people assume there’s no difference between them. We’ve watched the offshore outsourcing and domestic dismantling of our industrial base, through several presidents of both parties. People have become used to the idea that either party will screw the citizenry over. So, the parties end up ceding the ground of substance to “none of the above” and spend all their time fighting over trivia and “social issues.” Most of the social issues affect very few people, and based on my reading of that quaint document called The Constitution, are none of the government’s business anyway. But, you can sure rile folks up if you claim your opponent wants to take their guns or Bibles away (no matter how fictitious your claim may be).
It’s all rather disgusting. If you can stand it, watch the Pennsylvania Democratic debate - the first half is devoted to flag pins and bitterness. We’re so screwed.
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