BunkBlog

I’ll write more tomorrow, but I’m tired and have to go to work in (checks clock) 7.5 hours.

Yay for dinosaurs!

And, just to make Kat jealous:

The Boy and I are in Dallas for the giant robotic dinosaur show tomorrow. We got stuck on a tollroad that had a broken change machine and no attendant. If I get a ticket for dropping a dollar into the change bucket (after displaying it to the camera) for a 45 cent fare, I’m so gonna be pissed.

I’ve deleted nearly 600 pieces of comment spam in the past two days.  I’ve noticed, in the past, one or two legitimate comments being tagged as spam, but I didn’t look through this recent flood for such stragglers.  Every time a legit comment was tagged as spam, it’s because the commenter was using an obviously fake email address in their info; no email address is needed, so if you just don’t put one, it should be good. If you’ve commented recently and it didn’t post, there ya go.

Frickin’ spammers…

Last week, the Nokia N800 tablet started dropping in price at various retailers, from its MSRP of $400 to a new normal of $240.  So, it’s hardly surprising that Nokia has announced the N810 this week.  The jump in specs is pretty impressive.  Not only did they add a built-in 2GB of storage, in addition to the 128MB of RAM they had in the N800, they’ve got a GPS receiver in that bad boy now.  And, of course, the big jump – a real keyboard.

My N770 is looking pretty “first generation” now, but considering that I don’t need the thing in the first place, I still don’t regret buying it when it went on clearance this summer.

In case you’re interested in comparing the three Nokia tablets that have been released, here ya go:

Nokia also claims the screen is brighter than the N800, and there’s a built-in FM transmitter (according to one site anyway). The web browser is now Mozilla-based (instead of Opera) and handles AJAX, Flash 9, and all the rest of the Web 2.0 stuff. A Skype client is pre-installed instead of being an additional download.  The Gizmo client now handles video.

The N810 is coming out next month for $480, which is about what I could spend on a cheap laptop. As the Internet Tablet has always been a niche product, is the higher price going to kill it, or is the addition of GPS and a keyboard going to save it? If the battery really does last for four hours of use, as claimed, it’s going to beat most UMPCs for portability and battery life, so it may do well.

Apparently, not every story ends like the Pina Colada song.

My sexy friend Michele seems to think she’s old.

So, I looked up who else was born in 1970. Heather Graham, Minnie Driver, Matt Damon, Lara Flynn Boyle, Mariah Carey, Rich Schroder, Uma Thurman, Tina Fey, Naomi Campbell, Beck, Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan, Claudia Schiffer, Deborah Gibson, Bridget Moynahan, Ani DiFranco, Kelly Rippa, Bai Ling, Nia Long, Ethan Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Jennifer Connelly, Michael Shanks – does anyone really consider these folks old?  I saw Nia Long on the Late Late Show this week; she’s so incredibly hot.  Not old.

Now, if you still feel you’re old, don’t hesitate to send racy photos to me so I can evaluate and give you my expert opinion.  😉

For years, the private terror-hunters at the SITE Institute have been infiltrating jihadist chat rooms, and spying on the extremists congregating online. Now, the group its digital cover has been blown — and Al-Qaeda online communications channels have gone dark — thanks to a ham-handed move by the Bush administration, it seems. “Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” SITE’s Rita Katz told the Washington Post.

More here and here. “To make the accusation that the intelligence community leaked this to the media is totally false,” intelligence office spokesman Ross Feinstein said. I’d never assume the intel community leaked anything.  That’s something politicians do.

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