BunkBlog

Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the following (real places, names, things).
You CAN’T use your name for the boy/girl name question.

What is your name? Gary

4 letter word: grab

Vehicle: Geo

TV Show: Grey’s Anatomy

City: George, WA

Boy’s Name: Greg

Girl’s Name: Gabrielle

Alcoholic drink: Gin & Tonic

Occupation: Garbage Collector

Something you wear: gabardine

Celebrity: George Clooney

Food: Green beans

Something found in a bathroom: Gross things

Reason for being late: Gin & Tonic

Cartoon Character: George of the Jungle

Something You Shout: GAH!

I don’t know why, but the Boy decided that he wanted a seahorse piñata this year.  How’d we do?  He helped with the paper mache and with the tissue paper.  I think it looks like a penguin or a demented hummingbird, but he thinks it looks suitably aquatic.  I predict explaining the shape many times in two weeks.  🙂

  

The guy behind me at dinner tonight seemed to complain non-stop. I was thrilled when his entree arrived, but he still didn’t let up. Some folks just need to bitch, I guess.

The Boy ate a massive amount of crab legs, as usual. Oink.

Karl Schroeder has released Ventus as a free ebook download.  It’s very good.  If you’re interested in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, post-apocalyptic fiction (not strictly speaking, but a reversion to more primitive life yada yada), or just good speculative fiction about the future of humanity, give it a read.

Now to add a bunch of Schroeder books to my Amazon wishlist…

When the Republicans ran the Senate, they made a huge deal over not being able to put certain nominees for the Supreme Court and other appointments to a “up or down vote,” due to the threat of a filibuster from those evil Demoncrats.  The Dems, in typical spineless fashion, agreed to a “compromise” in which they agreed to not filibuster and the Republicans agreed to do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

Now, the Democrats are just barely in charge of the Senate, and they can’t get anything significant past the Republican filibuster machine.  Return habeas corpus?  Filibuster.   DC getting a Representative? Filibuster.  12 different spending bills?  Filibuster.  In fact, there are a record-setting number of threatened filibusters this month, with 56 cloture motions contrasted with 21 motions in the same period of 2005.

Why is this not a big story on the news?  In the GOP Senate, the cloture issue was brought up and the drum beaten loudly and frequently for all the 24-hour news networks to fill the airwaves.  Now, with arguably more important issues being blocked, it’s just considered business as usual.  I guess it’s true – marketers are all Republican.  These Democrats can’t seem to figure out how to get public support for anything.

Is this normal?

One of my coworkers was bemoaning the proposal to restore habeas corpus rights to the suspects in Guantanamo.  I tried to get him to understand that the rule of law is dependent on treating everyone, friend or foe, as a human being with certain inalienable rights.  That phrase may be in some document you’ve heard of but probably never read completely.

Anyway, I just don’t get it.  There are so many people who seem to think that, just because someone has been apprehended and stored in the extra-national prison in Gitmo, they are automatically evil and their life is forfeit.  Since when did accusation equal conviction?  How can allowing them a day in court in any way weaken our national strength or safety?

Just as popular speech doesn’t need protection, but only the unpopular speech, so too do obviously innocent people not need their rights protected as strongly as the suspicious ones.  Nobody would be able to get away with randomly throwing people into prison, one would hope.  But, if the selection wasn’t random, but instead fit in with preconceived notions of what a bad guy looked like, or where a bad guy lived, or what religion a bad guy held…all bets are off.  Making decisions based on emotion rather than on evidence and facts leads to a very slippery slope.  Of course, maybe this is all a vast conspiracy, and someone has been looking at ways of converting a democracy into an authoritarian dictatorship.  Hint: look in Austrian history in the 1930s, or Zimbabwe today.

This is quite frightening.  55% of those polled think the Constitution of the United States established a Christian nation.  There is not one mention of any deity in the Constitution; not one.
Half say teachers should use the Bible as a factual textbook in history classes.  Seriously?  Did you know there’s no archaeological evidence for the Jews wandering in the desert for forty years?  Did you think that three million people might have left a slight impression?

56% think that freedom of religion applies to everyone.  The others say that there are some groups that don’t deserve the same freedom they want for themselves.
On the plus side, “only” 25% say the First Amendment goes too far, which is better than five years ago, when it was half.

I have moved from the moribund and seemingly unmanned CCLHosting to the more vibrant and hopefully operational Dreamhost. We’ll see how this goes.

Right now, I’m hoping that the LJ crosspost plugin still works. And…it does! Woohoo!

At the Boy’s martial arts class today, I somehow didn’t avoid conversation with another parent. *sigh*

He started out with the usual stuff about Che Guevara being a commie – yeah, duh. Then it went downhill, with aspersions cast at those evil liberals. Apparently, the USA Patriot Act is not as bad as any rational person thinks, but it would be much worse if the liberals were in charge, as they’d certainly not have any sunset provisions. You remember the sunset provisions the conservatives have been so assiduously trying to extend into perpetuity.

The finale to this surreal trip down lala lane ended with a quick aside about how global warming is a crock. I have no response to this. Are other scientific findings equally suspect? Is germ theory also silly, since it makes no sense atavistically? I didn’t want to bring up evolution, but I think we can all guess where chucklehead would end up on that issue, eh?  He even claimed that Mount St. Helens has produced more greenhouse gases in one explosion than all of human historical input.  That’s incredibly wrong.  That’s orders of magnitude wrong. All the volcanoes in the world produce 130 million tons of CO2 per year.  Meanwhile, human activity per year produces 27 billion tons of CO2 per year.  For those of you who think math is hard, billions are larger than millions, and humans produce 200 times the CO2 of volcanoes per year.  That’s not Mount St. Helens, that’s ALL volcanic activity in the world.

There are days I’d really like to get out of this town. Fortunately, I can avoid these morons most of the time, and it is cheap here. Mostly. Anyone have a job in Monterey they need filled? Anyone? Anyone?

Every so often, Ted Nugent shows up on Faux News or in a print publication, and he gets to hold the unenviable position of the Cool Republican. After all, according to conventional wisdom, most of the entertainment industry is filled with crazy lefties, but Nugent is the edgy guy in the GOP.

He’s so edgy, he brought a couple of weapons on stage (they appear to be M16s, so they are probably AR-15s) , and waved them around. Ooh, edgy. And then, he screamed obscenities about a variety of Democratic politicians. Edgy. He told Senator Obama (who he respectfully calls a piece of shit) to suck on his machine gun. Um, edgy? Senator Clinton, lovingly called a worthless bitch, is told to ride a gun into the sunset. WTF?

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Nugent spoke of Democrats (in response to a former Hustler writer saying he had dibs on Rush Limbaugh for conservative hunting season), “I find it just reprehensible that they would recommend violence, not to mention murder and shooting people and assassinating people. This is bizarre.”

You’re right, Nuge. It is bizarre.
You can find the video if you search online. I’m not linking to that crap.

Do cell phones make schedules permanently flexible?  Is the very concept of a fixed meeting time completely outdated?

Some people believe everyone has a cell phone with them at all times.  This means that, if you’re running late, you can reschedule on the fly.  As a corollary, it seems that a distinct lack of respect for other people’s schedules is common.  After all, you can always reschedule everything on the fly, as well.

Since I don’t have a mobile phone, I don’t understand this attitude.  To me, a decision to meet at 10am at the corner of Hollywood and Vine means exactly that.  To others, it means to try to meet at 10am, but maybe 1pm, and maybe in Santa Barbara.  Hey, it’s all good, right?

What have cell phones done to our society, for good or ill?

U.S. military deaths in July of each of the past five years, in Iraq:

July 2003: 48
July 2004: 54
July 2005: 54
July 2006: 43
July 2007: 80

U.S. military deaths in Iraq, this year, with 2006 figures in parens:

January: 83 (62)
February: 81 (55)
March: 81 (31)
April: 104 (76)
May: 126 (69)
June: 101 (61)
July: 80 (43)

So, exactly how is the surge working? Michael O’Hanlon of the “liberal” Brookings Institution said, “I think we have reduced the amount of violence overall.” Um…Maybe he doesn’t understand numbers so good. If you want to say that the violence decreased in July, you may have a point, but the violence always decreases in July in the Mideast – it’s a jillion degrees there, and even psychos with bombs get heat stroke.

Iraqi citizens also had an increase in month-to-month and year-to-year casualties, of approximately 25% in both cases.  So, while U.S. military casualties in July went down from June, the Iraqi casualties actually increased.  But the surge is working.

* for some values of “working” that can’t be measured

There was an ad in the paper yesterday for an external Hitachi hard drive. The drive was less than 300 bucks and had one terabyte of capacity. That used to be a number listed just below “kajillion” in computer terms. It made me look at my current gadgets and toys and put them in perspective.

For Christmas in 1980, I got my first computer, a VIC-20 – it had 5000 bytes of memory (3000 for the user) and no storage other than a cassette drive. I don’t know what the capacity of a 90 minute cassette was, but I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t a lot.

In 1984, I got the Commodore 64. As indicated by the name, it had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory, of which 39k was available for use. I traded in the cassette deck for a massive 1504 floppy drive, which was larger than a shoe box and recorded to 5.25 inch floppies with a capacity of 170 kilobytes. Combine that with my 1200 baud modem to connect to the River Conditions BBS, and I was styling. RC had the largest hard drive of the underground C64 scene in Los Angeles when I was in high school – 20 megabytes. Oh, yeah.

In 1992, I belatedly saw the writing on the wall, as Commodore continued to find ways to make superior products fail in the marketplace (I can also tell you about the Atari Lynx if you want further proof of my lack of prognostication ability). I bought a CompUSA 486DX3, with 120 megabyte hard drive and 4 megabytes of RAM.

In 1994, I bought one of the Quantum Bigfoot drives that were so cheap that I was able to get 500 megabytes for less than 300 dollars.

So, let’s compare a few things from the past 15 years or so. On my desk right now is a defunct Sony Clie. Sony no longer supports it, the battery is dead, and I can’t take it to work anyway. But, in 2002, it was brand new and had better specs than that 486 for one quarter the price. And, unlike the 486, I could put the Clie in my pocket.

I recently bought a Nokia N770, because it was on clearance and the N800 is far outside my price range. The N770 has 64 megabytes of memory (16x the 486), I’ve got a 2 gigabyte RS-MMC card in it (16x the 486), and it has wifi. The screen is about twice the resolution of the 486, and I could buy over a dozen of them for less than the 486’s price. Oh, and it fits in my pocket.

My DVR, desktop computer, and external backup drive for my desktop now have a combined capacity of something close to two terabytes of space.  And Alex was worried about having too many shark shows recorded.  🙂

No wonder nobody can predict technology for crap. Who could have imagined, looking at this game of the 1980s, that we’d have all the cool toys we have today?

As if there hasn’t been enough evidence that two of our branches of government are at war, Scott Jennings actually claimed today that his job description was covered by executive privilege. WTF? His job is secret?

One of my cow-orkers delights in learning things that are relatively old news and then acting as if he’s sharing something of earth-shattering importance.  Among his recent discoveries: Agile Development, AJAX, Six Sigma, and Ruby on Rails.

It’s always cute to hear him espouse the way something from 3 years ago will change everything. And it’s always buzzword-compliant too.  For good or ill, he is on to the next old new thing often enough that he rarely implements much.  Well, there was that Agile Scrum thing, but I avoided it.  Meanwhile, I just put together a database documenting the capabilities of all the disparate simulations the programmers have built this year.  Not a word of appreciation from the boss-types.  *sigh*

From my local elected representative:

Democrats in Congress are once again attempting to take on the role of Commander in Chief and make the irrational decision to pull out of Iraq without any sort of post-pull out strategy.

This implies that the Republicans made a rational decision to a) invade, b) occupy, c) de-Baathify, d) disband the Iraqi military, e) Everything Else. You can’t bitch about your opponent being irrational if you have no rational response.  By the way, why does nobody in the media seem to bring up the 1993 Congressional vote to defund and withdraw from Somalia, as a comparison?  We forget even recent history, it seems.  The Republicans want to portray the desire to get the heck out of Iraq as something unprecedented, when it is actually very precedented.  For that matter, why has Congress completely abdicated its responsibility for declaring war?  We haven’t had an actual declared war since 1945, yet we’ve been shooting at other people almost every day since then. Separation of powers?  That Constitution sure is a pesky thing.

Ratatouille is a cool flick. The Boy was very amused, naturally. I can’t believe how awesome the water looked. I know, that makes me a huge geek, looking at the rendering. Sue me.

Anyway, the story is very cute, and the animation is awesome.  The end credits are a great retro look, and the short film played before the main movie is also quite funny.

Oh, and the wifi at McAlisters Deli almost reaches the theater, but is very usable at the ice cream parlor. 😉

And, now I’ve gotten the N770 to post on my main site, too. Geek Power!

There’s a great deal of scientific information in this interview, but it’s interesting enough even for laymen to read, I think. The basic story is that fructose and sucrose are not the kinds of sugars we evolved to consume in large quantities, so they mess up our body chemistry and make us pigs. The good doctor even demonizes orange juice (any kind, including organic fresh-squeezed).

Good news, though – eating oranges is good for you. Some of this is sort of common sense, if you think about how we ate 20,000 years ago compared to now. Our bodies haven’t changed in that time, but our diets have changed vastly. Nobody drank orange juice before industrialization; they ate oranges. Nobody drank sodas; they drank water. So, those people who decry processed foods, here’s another data point to use in your quest to return to a diet better designed for our natural metabolisms.