BunkBlog

If you woke up and I was in bed with you, what would be your first thought?

And now you’re supposed to post this same question on your blog/journal/bloxsom/whatever and see who responds.

Yet another major study of the world’s oceans has proven yet again something which many people with whom I work refuse to acknowledge: we are causing global warming.

“The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people,” said Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable.”

Naturally, the luddites will continue to believe whatever they wish, much as they continue to disbelieve evolution is real. Wonder if they disbelieve the theory of gravity or germ theory as well?

I love the Green Day album, “American Idiot” – it’s been on my MP3-playing Clie for the past several months, I have it on the MP3 CD at work, etc. Today is the first time I’ve ever heard the title track on the radio (butchered heavily, of course). They played it on the local “best variety” station (like ClearChannel but lower production values), with no comment. I guess it took winning a Grammy for redneck radio to give ’em a listen. Think they realize that most of the slams made in that track are directed at folks like the majority of this town? Probably not.

Thinkgeek, one of my favorite stores ever, has some entertaining undies – HTTPanties. They have status codes like, “411 length required” for the randy geek boi.

Kyoto Accords go into effect today.

bq. Kyoto comes into force 90 days after Russia’s approval, ensuring the required threshold was met for ratification by countries accounting for 55 percent of emissions. The U.S., the world’s largest producer of the gases, hasn’t accepted the pact.

The experiment du jour was Panini. We made grilled sandwiches containing coppa, sopprasetta, tomatoes, and two kinds of cheese. It was good, definitely a keeper. And oh so difficult (make sandwich, spray with olive oil, grill for three to five minutes)!

Dessert? Why, yes there is – super rich brownies.

Tomorrow is clam chowder. I’ll keep you informed.

If, like me, you’d never played the GTA series when they were new (first one in 1997), Grand Theft Auto is now available for free. Also available, Wild Metal and GTA2. That’s about a gig of shooting and driving badness.

What a time sink this will be…

Today’s epicurean experiment was a cassoulet. This particular recipe called for sausage and chicken, with lima beans and the usual winter veggie stuff (mirepoix?). It got mixed reviews. The chicken was good, the lima beans perhaps overdone, and the sausage definitely overdone. If we make it again, the sausage goes in later and the beans will be dry when we put them in (crockpot meals give you such flexibility).

Important news for fellow BSG geeks. Now, to figure out how they’ll resolve those cliffhangers the first season ends with… Let the wild speculation and fanfic begin!

Silly “where have you lived (not just visited)” meme…

La Puerta de Santa Maria, Cadiz, Spain
Long Beach, CA
Hayward, CA
Detroit Lakes, MN
Frazee, MN
Stockton, MN
Bellflower, CA
Anaheim, CA
Monterey, CA
San Angelo, TX
Ayer, MA
Tokori, DongDuCheon, Korea
Monterey again
Anjungri, PyongTaek, Korea
Tacoma, WA
Anjungri again
Monterey again
San Angelo again
Sierra Vista, AZ
San Angelo yet again

I purposely omitted Fort Leonard Wood, MO – where I had Basic Training – because that ain’t livin’. Eight weeks of bizarre hours and irritating Drill Sergeants. Yay.

Finished downloading the BitTorrent of Eyes on the Prize this weekend, and just got around to looking at moving it to a DVD to watch on TV. I guess I should make that two DVDs – it’s over three hours long. Wow.

The genesis of the recent civil uprising against copyright law is interesting to me; too bad it hasn’t made any impact at all on the wholly owned subsidiary of the entertainment industry we call the U.S. Congress. Why in the world does it make sense for a movie to be considered legitimate for 20 years, and then suddenly it’s breaking the law? What twisted mentality takes “the most important civil rights film” and turns it into something that school children are not allowed to view without someone bootlegging it? It’s messed up.

Recently, a group of civil rights leaders posted an open letter supporting this civil disobedience masquerading as piracy. I find it disheartening that the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr is among those who object to distributing this movie. Way to honor his memory, guys.

Free your mind.

At work today, one of my cow-orkers referred to Ellen Degenerate and the oh-so-amusing PIAPS(Pig in a pant suit) aka Senator Clinton, in the space of a few minutes. Why are the folks on the Right still feeling so marginalized that they lash out with such vitriol at the various people they believe personify the evil which is Liberalism? You know that a small cadre of pundits spends hours every day coming up with new slurs and epithets to hurl at the people of the Left, because the way that so many people suddenly come up with identical witticisms is a bit . . . hard to believe. I know the Ellen Degeneres slur came from Jerry Falwell, a man who is living in a glass house of his own. I presume the PIAPS moniker is from Rush (the drug abuser) or G Gordon Liddy (the convicted felon), but I’m not 100% certain of that.

Why does the GOP believe itself to be under siege? Why are Republicans convinced that they are the underdogs? They own a huge chunk of the American business landscape, and all three branches of the federal government. Hey, ya know what? When you run the country, you can stop pretending to be the minority. K? A’ight.

Ya know, when I was in the Army, things like this never happened anywhere near me. Nobody ever invites me to these things!

After my post about trackback spam, I checked my email and got three junk faxes in my eFax account.

Didn’t junk faxes get ruled illegal some time in the Reagan administration? Why am I getting them now? I note that I have had this eFax account for years, and only since the CANSPAM(Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act went into effect have I been getting junk faxes. This leads me to assume that CANSPAM did something that made the formerly illegal practice of junk faxing legal. Way to go. I read a recent article that showed that email spam has gone up quite a bit since CANSPAM went into effect, so it’s been proven emirically to be completely worthless and perhaps even counterproductive in the fight against spam. Go, Republican Congress!

Since comment spam has become a well-known problem with well-known solutions, I guess it was inevitable that a new scourge has arisen – Trackback Spam. This morning, I have received no less than a dozen trackbacks from online gambling sites. Since I use WordPress, the trackbacks get sent into the same queue as comments and nobody but me sees them. But I still have to clear them out manually. It’s about time I got a spam-killer plugin for this thing…

So, with the one gigabyte Memory Stick in my Clie, I’ve finally gotten around to ripping some DVD video to it. So far, just a Looney Tunes short, “One Froggy Evening,” but next is one of Alex’s movies. Something about Dino Thunder Thunder White Thunder Ranger Thunder Power Thunder I think.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that a PVR(Personal Video Recorder) would be a cool thing to have, but hearing the stories about the studios reaching into machines and turning off features, I’m a bit wary of the commercial Tivo and MCE products. Then, Tivo starts adding commercials when you’re trying to skip them…

So, I’m putting together plans for a MythTV based recorder once I graduate this spring. Figure nobody gives a 34 year-old graduation presents, so I’ll get ’em for myself. 🙂

I took The Music Awareness and Taste Test at OKCupid.

Steve Vai
You scored 90 awareness and 70 taste!

Oh my good God…you’re Steve Vai. Master of all things related to music itself, able to recognize a good tone at the drop of a hat. You may need to brush up a tiny bit on your taste, just to be a little more accessible. Otherwise, you rock everything.

Thank you for playing. Rabbit Hole Day was a fun time for all.

We now return to our regularly scheduled surrealism.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “thru” isn’t really a word any more than “lite” is, but what the hell.

So I went to the drive-thru today, and it just reminded me of why the South and Texas (since they are not apparently part of the South) are so weird to my Western self. They have people manning the microphone. Now, what’s absurd is that the machines of the autochef are still doing all the work inside the Jack in the Black Box, but the people at the drive-thru get your order and then repeat it to the voice recognition program to actually place it. The “human touch” is so important, they’ll add layers of error to things just to pretend we’re still in the 19th Century.