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Monday, April 14th, 2008
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10:44 pm
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Y'know, I was reading a box of Cheerios and I noticed the text: "Contains 13 vitamins and minerals!" Is it wrong that I thought: "Y'know, that can't be all the minerals; a handful of dirt has got more than that."
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
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3:23 am - Whee, I have a sinus infection.
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At least, I'm pretty sure I do. It's in one of the sinuses behind my right cheek, and when I'm not on my combination of pseudephedrine and asprin, it make it feel like two or three of my teeth have horrible, horrible cavities. That's a neat trick, since one of those teeth is a wisdom tooth, and I don't have it any more, and another one has had a root canal. So, I figured it had to be sinus-related, putting pressure on the nerve that runs down there.
...Then, today, I came up with a symptom highly indicative of a sinus infection, but one I've never run into before: bad breath coming out of my nose. I brushed and flossed like three times, went nuts trying to find the source of the horrible odor in my room, before I realised it was coming out of my nose. Christ, this is nasty.
If it doesn't clear up tomorrow, I'm gonna see if my physican can work me in Friday morning, 'cause I won't be able to take this much longer. Y'know, I wish it was possible for responsible people to just be able to go to the pharmacy and get a course of antibiotics. Going to the doctor for this is like me calling up tech support when my cable modem isn't working; I know what's going on, I know what they're going to tell me to do, and 90% of the time I figured out what the problem is long before they do. I -know- my doctor will prescribe me some generic antibiotics -- it'll be whatever you take when you can't take amoxicillin because of a penicillin allergy. To me, the doctor's visit is just throwing money down the hole and wasting both of our times. Same thing with ear infections; I got them relatively frequently when I was a kid, and when I knew I had one that wasn't gonna just go away, I'd tell my mom we needed to go to the doctor, he'd diagnose an ear infection, I'd get the usual antibiotics, etc.
This is yet another one of those cases where the stupid people ruin it for the rest of us; because they can't be trusted to be responsible, no one can be.
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| Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
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3:18 pm - Holy crap.
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3:04 am - So, I got vermin...
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I wound up getting three rats from Mainely Rat Rescue, in Maine, as they were already doing a transport down to Long Island, and it was easy to throw another few rodents on the pile, as it were. Lady's a female PEW (pink-eyed white; your standard 'lab rat') with a standard coat and dumbo ears; Creme Brulee's a female black hooded rex coat with standard ears, and Dominic, Creme's cousin, is a neutered male black berkshire (he's got a white stripe running down his belly) with standard ears and a rex coat. Dominic's coat is definitely more 'rexy' than Creme's, though hers still hasn't grown back all the way from minor surgery to remove some abcesses.
Though they had some problems at first, after a week, I've managed to mostly get them into shape and being good rats.
So, without further ado, here're some pics I snapped a few minutes ago. The cage is a Martin's, the R-695, IIRC; it's 30Wx18Dx36 high, and is quite the monument on my desk.
( Rats! )
No, I didn't name them; they were the names they came with, and for lack of anything else, I started using them. Then after a day I had them answering by name, so I couldn't really switch gears on them at that point; it'd fry their remarkably agile yet tiny little minds.
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| Saturday, February 16th, 2008
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5:30 am - The Greater NY Metro Area Has Sorely Disappointed Me.
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I've been looking for rats again, lately; I want to get a few. I want to get rats from a good breeder, someone who knows what the hell they're doing and actually does things like keep pedigrees and breeding bad traits out of lines, and socializing the animals from birth.
I can't find a single breeder online within the NY Metro area. Long Island, the City, Westchester -- there's fuck all. I can't even find any rat shows in the area. There're no rat societies or clubs I can find in NY.
...Let me repeat that. I can't find a single active rat society, club, breeder, or show in NYC or on Long Island. In New York City or Long Island, for god's sake. Do you have any idea how hard a time I have wrapping my mind around this? Gah. Ten million people and not one of them's running a rattery and has a web page.
So -- since I can't believe that they don't exist, they probably do exist, and it is simply that I don't know about them. Thus, this post, which I know is a long shot. Anyone know of a rat breeder in my general area -- preferably within two hours of NYC or anywhere on Long Island -- that they can recommend to me? Or even rat shows where I can meet other people who'd know such things?
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 1st, 2008
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3:41 am - ...A reminder
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| Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
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2:15 am - To let you know...
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I'm now working a 2:00-10:30 shift, coaching new hires. This'll be for the next five weeks, so I won't be available in evenings on weekdays.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, January 26th, 2008
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5:35 pm - Still feelin' kinda crappy.
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Today's blah. I'm still feeling kinda crapy, though much, much better than I was a few days ago. Waiting for Josh to call if we're going anything tonight. Even so, I don't particularly have any desire to leave the house. Blah.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 24th, 2008
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4:54 pm - Blargh 2
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Took off from work early, working only a half-day. You know you're sick when everyone including your manager says something to you along the lines of "You look like crap!"
Also, today is apparently National Depression Day. I think I'll celebrate by hurling myself under a bus.*
* Yes, that's sarcasm. No, I'm not going to throw myself under a bus.**
** I'm much more likely to use high explosives!
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12:18 am - Blargh
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I called into work today; I've been feeling like something that had been hacked up by a cat or something for most of the day. In fact, I didn't really get out of bed until 10:00. PM, that is. Hooray for fever and intestinal distress! A few hours later, now, I've mostly started feeling human again.
Also: God, I hate the couple of days after I wash my hair. It's all over the goddamned place and poofy, constantly getting in my face. Blargh
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| Saturday, January 12th, 2008
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12:16 am - US District Court Rules Gitmo Detainees Untermenschen
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Actually, not even untermenschen. The DC Circuit court of appeals ruled that the Gitmo detainees aren't 'persons.'
( Text of article below cut )
The Opinions are particularly vile little pieces of work. This is corruption in action, folks. This is the government which was 'elected' 'by the people' and which no one has had the balls or simple, basic decency to kick the fuck out of office.
Y'know, once, this country was a shining beacon in the world. Its flame has guttered and died, and now the lighthouse being used as a communal cesspit by the morally diseased, lurching, shit-flinging, gibbering things that run its government. That any judge -- that anyone who has sworn to uphold and protect the constitution -- could make such a ruling -- all respect I have for anyone in the field has been diminished, so gross and egregious is this miscarriage of justice.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, January 5th, 2008
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1:20 am - So...
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New photo. I've decided to try and take at least one halfway decent photo a day; let's see how long this lasts.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, January 4th, 2008
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5:57 pm - Best Disclaimer Evar
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Here."
Among other highlights:
"The Preserve does not provide rangers or security personnel. The otherpeople in the preserve, including other visitors, our employees,agents, and guests, and anyone else who might sneak in, may be stupid,reckless, or otherwise dangerous. They may be mentally ill, criminallyinsane, drunk, using illegal drugs and/or armed with deadly weapons andready to use them. We aren't necessarily going to do anything about it.We refuse to take responsibility. "
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5:37 pm - God, I hate LED Christmas Lights
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Sure, they're brighter, give off purer colors, and use less energy than traditional incandescent lights.
But they flicker. They evidently use cheapass converters that either just chop off half of the waveform or don't even bother and just throw it all at the LEDs, resulting in a 60 Hz flash. I can't stand it. And I hate it when I'm driving, and eye-movements turn the lights not into the usual smear of color, but into a series of dashes. This is the same reason I hate LED brake lights on cars; they do the same damned thing.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
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11:02 pm - Seriously...
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...What the fuck was Marvel thinking with all of the cross-connecting between series in the '90s? I tried reading the X-Men series that started in 1991, and by the time I got about 16 issues in, I'd already encountered not just references to other series (which are fine,) but entire plotlines that started or finished in other magazine lines. I know from what I've heard that DC was doing about the same thing at the same time -- no fucking wonder that Marvel and DC got into such horrible financial problems in this time-period. To keep up with your favotire story you'd have to buy all these other godamned comics.
...Thank goodness for Bittorrent, but even with that, I'm afraid that I may not be able to stomach reading that particular X-Men series.
Right now I'm reading the Uncanny X-Men, having started with the reboot that happened in issue 96 or so, where the old team was dropped and the new team was formed -- with Wolverine, Colossus, etc. And at this point -- the late 1970s -- Marvel had it right. I don't get the weird, disconnected "what the fuck is going on?" feeling that I've been getting with the 1991 X-Men and even with Ultimate X-Men. Yeah, there're references to things that happen in other series and such, but the core plotline is pretty self-contained, or else you're given a quick rundown of things that're happening in the world. That's the way you do it, folks. Sheesh.
Seriously, this is what's kept me from reading normal superhero comics for all these years -- because when I was interested in these comics, it was the 90s when they were pulling all of this crap. So, not only would I feel the need to get caught up-to-date on the series I'd like to read, but then I'd also have to go out and buy issues from entirely different series in order to actually follow the plots. At the time, this was, frankly, impossible, unless you had thousands of dollars to throw down on back-issues and collections and such. Being po' as I was, yeah, the barrier to entry was entirely too high -- particularly when, for about two to four times the price of a comic, I could get an actual book that would entertain me for far longer than it would take me to consume the contents of your average comic book.
Now, a decade later, with the advent of high-speed internet connections, bittorrent, and a blatant disregard for intellectual property laws, I actually -can- start reading these things. Then again, it's not like I could go out and buy these back-issues, and the compilations from the era are, AFAIK, entirely in black-and-white and greyscale, which has zero appeal for me for a comic which was originally rendered in color.
Companies need to learn the following:
1: You shouldn't make the reader go out and buy more crap just to enjoy the basic experience of a product.
2: You should keep your barriers to entry low, particularly when you're in a market which is largely made up of kids who don't have jobs, or at least was.
3: You should make your past products available in ways that're easy to acquire, won't break the bank, and aren't substantially inferior to the original product, particularly if you're asking me to pay money for it.
See, the latter point is one of the best justifications for 'illegal' file-sharing that there is. There is so much material out there which simply -can't- be purchased for love or money -- well, for lots and lots of money, yes, but I ain't gonna spend the money to get X-Men #1 from 1960-something just so I can read it. No. And I'm not going to spend money for a no-color version of a visual artform which originally included and depended upon color. Once something becomes a 'collector's item' because it is no longer being produced, there's no loss to anyone if you acquire an illegal copy of it. It doesn't lower demand for surviving originals, because true collectors -- the only people who would buy the stuff at the prices it's available for -- will do so anyway. I think that this is one of the core problems with current copyright laws -- they allow stuff to disappear into the dustbin of history, unless people are willing to break the law to distribute it. No, we'll never lose the data on Marvel comics, but what about minor bands and other short-run things that were fantastic -- or at least, that _I_ thought where fantastic, but were originally released in limited amounts and haven't been published for 20 years? This is one of the things that makes it a true bitch to collect old filk music; it's not in publication, and, because of the fucked-up trail of "who owns the rights," some of it probably never -will- be published again. However, if I'm lucky, I may be able to find a copy of whatever-it-is online.
Also, there's the simple issue of a perceived unfairness inherent in charging new-release prices for something that was published before I was alive and has been in perpetual publication since. Pink Floyd's great, but, goddamn, why do their CDs tend to cost more than the average new release? That's simply unfair.
In short, this little screed is just airing my feelings about how the current copyright system just doesn't work in this day and age. I -want- to give money to the people whose works I enjoy, but sometimes it's either impossible, overpriced, or unavailable in unadulterated form.
You want to get money from me? Look at the way people like Tom Smith and Phil Foglio operate. I can read the entire Girl Genius comic online, but I've bought three of the print books that're out and will probably buy the rest next I-CON. I've bought many filk CDs from the artists -- directly, mind you -- when I've already got all of the tracks from the album downloaded to my machine. Sometimes I'll re-rip at better quality than the MP3s I downloaded, but generally I just toss the album into my Bin 'O CDs as insurance against a disk-crash. Look at the Baen Free Library, a fantastic marketing tool that came about as the result of a bet. Basically, you can download a few hundred novels that've been published by various authors -- full text, no DRM, etc. They're often the first (or first few) books in a series, older novels, etc. Who cares? The point is that it gets people to try out an author, and gets them to buy that author's stuff. They've actually tracked increases in sales based on authors releasing works to the BFL, even if the actual works released are no longer in publication.
Why do people 'steal' all of this stuff online? Because the perceived value is lower than the price of the product, by a significant factor. Fix that, and people will 'steal' less.
(Side note: Downloading IP without a license is not theft, damn it, it's copyright infringement. Theft deprives another person of actual property. Copyright infringement may deny them a potential sale, but in reality, the owner of the product isn't out any money or product. I'd argue that most of the time, it hasn't even denied them a sale, since the people who're infringing wouldn't buy the product anyway. College students, for example, are too poor to go out and buy every album they want, so they buy the albums of the bands they truly love, and just DL the rest of the stuff.)
Blargh.
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| Friday, December 28th, 2007
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6:58 pm - Okay, I need some quick help...
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There was a web page/comic about something like "Wy living with your cat is like living with a psychopath" and it goes on in this vein for some time. I haven't been able to find it with googling. Any of you have any idea what I'm talking about and an URL for it?
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, December 21st, 2007
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1:16 am - Rargh. Update, and CRUSH, DESTROY!
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I'm starting to ramp up to an "ARGH! MUST CLEAN!" frenzy; currently I've excavated a portion of my desk. I stopped when my allergies started kicking in. I think I may attack the rest of my desk and at least a portion of the rest of the room tomorrow.
Also, for the record? I hate DVI connectors. They simply don't seem to connect as securely as VGA connectors. Particularly when you're using a DVI->VGA passthrough dongle.
I need to find someplace to put al my damned CDs. These things accumulate like leaves; you buy some electronic item, poof, more CDs. Argh. I guess I'll go out and buy another massive CD binder. Eventually.
I 'fixed' my mom's Win2K machine. Fucking piece of shit Win2K. Something got fucked in the SYSTEM dir, and then I tried to 'repair' the installation. Well, whoopdefucking doo, it said I didn't have an installation of 2K on my comp, and I would need my rescue disk. Note that I installed 2K in the default dir. Argh. So I installed another installation alongside of that. Hopefully I'll be able to rescue some of the data that was on there. All the essential crap Windows needs to boot really should be more ... redundant. But then, they did seem to fix that stuff in XP.
Still, I want to rape bill Gates with a cactus.
I've been leeching comics from torrents. So far, I've read Lucifer (a spin-off of the Sandman universe,) The Walking Dead (Zombies!) and I'm making my way through Promethea now.
Lucifer was generally excellent with a significant Gaiman-like feel; there's humor and pathos and depth all mixed up in there. I definitely recommend it.
The Walking Dead is a post-zombie-apocalypse story. It's horribly gory and the author loves doing horrible things to his characters. Unlike Lucifer, this one isn't finished, yet, so it's one I'm going to be following. It's great, though, if you love the genre. I wound up DLing it sight unseen from a newsgroup, and I'm glad I did.
Promethea's ... odd. It's a superhero comic with certain themes I really like, but ... it's a superhero comic, and I dislike some of the tropes. On the other hand, most of the time, it's poking fun at these. I'll have to read more before I give my verdict. It'd definitely not bad, though. Of course, it's by Alan Moore, so it's not gonna suck.
Oh, yeah. I also snagged V for Vendetta, and that was a truly magnificent and fucked-up tale. I recommend that for everyone.
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| Monday, December 17th, 2007
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4:49 pm - Wisdom Tooth
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Just had a wisdom tooth pulled; if you talk to me tonight I'll probably be at least somewhat fucked up on vicodin. ;)
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| Saturday, December 15th, 2007
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2:53 am - I have a desperate need...
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...To read comics. Problem is, I'm not all that knowledgeable about what's out there that doesn't suck.
To give you an idea of what I like: Transmetropolitan, Preacher, Sandman, The Watchmen, V for Vendetta -- basically, smart, fun comics. I'm also interested in the better storylines from things like the X-men and such, but don't know where to start. I also loved old stuff like Weird Tales and such. So, give me your suggestions -- and if you know a good torrent tracker, let me know. ;)
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| Monday, December 10th, 2007
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12:17 am - Self-Interest and When To Depend On It
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You can't depend on other people helping you, if it requires any significant effort. You can generally depend on people trying to help themselves. The optimal result is when people can help others by helping themselves -- or help themselves by helping others.
I bring this up because of a recent Slashdot article. John Dvorak slams the OLPC in an article. Essentially, he says that people in Africa are all starving and will be better helped by $200 worth of rice than a $200 laptop, and that the Internet is useless, anyway, because of spam.
Bullshit.
The United States, Europe, and most other first-world nations have been giving $200 truckloads of rice to Africa for generations. Generations! And, for the most part, it has had no real effect. It's just treating the symptoms, not the problems. In some cases, it has actually caused more problems by destroying local economies.
"What are the problems" is the question that must be asked. I thinkg I have a few answers to that.
1: Lack of infrastructure. In some cases this is roads and hospitals, in some cases this is simply things to provide a viable source of potable water and to provide for basic hygine.
2: Lack of jobs. Whether this is because they practically live in the bush doing subsistance farming or because they live in a ghetto where they go to their sweatshop job every day, they have few options, if any at all. They don't have the skills to do better. Of course, this all ties into:
3: Lack of education. When you have people who don't know any better, things won't improve. When you have people who don't understand how diseases spread, you will never establish hygeine in the population. Even if you see something as a problem, you may not know how to approach it in order to solve it.
4: Misadvantageous society. Some societal traditions destroy people's ability to thrive or better themselves. This ties into 3, above. In some cases the society must be, at some fundamental level, destroyed, because poisoned roots grow poisoned fruits. Is this ethnocentric? Yes. It is also, IMO, true.
Of course, one must also consider that there are effectively several Africas. Most of it isn't like a 1980s aid commercial. Most people aren't having problems getting enough food to survive. The OLPC isn't designed to go to areas where people are simply completely invested in simple survival, and failing. These cancerous areas are those best served by traditional aid.
The OLPC is designed to help people who live in poverty -- that class who're making a few dollars a day, and surviving off of it. See this talk for information on the people of the class that the OLPC is designed to help.
The OLPC can improve places through a combination of exploiting self-interest to improve the lots of others and through providing education and access to the global community. Through those, everything else can follow. Education lets shows you how to build infrastructure and why it's needed. It gives people skills to get better jobs. Exposure to the world community helps dilute and destroy the more maladjusted aspects of a society.
Check out this guy. At 14, he went to a library, studied a book on windmills, and then built his own. (Not only built, but modified the design after testing it.) Look at the windmill. It's built out of garbage. He did this 'cause he wanted light and to power some radios. He's planning on building another to pump water and provide more power. With just a bit of education and self-interest, he's improving the situation for his family and community. Also, he's done something very important: he's shown people that it can be done, and how it can be done can be copied or learned from him. With a farm that's better-irrigated, his family can make more money selling their produce. He could sell windmills to other families, making them more productive.
A lack of ability to communicate makes the small markets in Africa and other places more volatile and less profitable. I recall a news story about how cellphone rental use by microloan businessmen in India had made it possible for small farmers to connect better with buyers to sell their harvest, increasing profits. This talk goes over how fucked up the commodities market is in Ethiopia. I think that you can see how something like common, internet-connected PCs could help establish a less-local commodities market in many places; hell, all you'd need is a webboard for an area where people could post things like "I want Yams!" and "I have Yams!" Of course, this leads to the possibility of having to bring different products to disparate areas in a short time, before they go bad. This leads to the farmer paying some guy to bring his yams to market while he sells his collards or whatever somewhere else (...and he may well pay him in yams.) Look, you've just created not just a job, but, if more people in the area have the same problem, a trade, an industry! As more farmers in the area take advantage of this, they make more money, which they invest into their farms to become more productive, which makes them more money and leads to an even greated demand for a shipping industry, even if it's based on mules pulling carts. This leads to the guy with the mule-cart buying another mule and a cart and employing someone else so that he can deliver more product to more areas. This is a business for her. This is milk for everybody else."
People will improve themselves if they can. One of the easiest ways for people to improve themselves is through access to educational materials. The public library system in the US was vastly successful for this reason. It let people access information when they needed it, on a vast number of subjects. We, in America, have become spoiled; we take the simple and transparent ability to access information for granted. The public library system helped bring us whole generations of engineers, scientists, and writers who otherwise would have been farmers, miners, or factory workers. A library requires a relatively large investment of infrastructure to work, however. You need a big building, you need to fill it with books, and in most places, this place needs heating/AC/dehumidification to preserve the books. A connection to the internet -- doesn't, in comparison.
The educational value of the internet is huge if one is self-directed. You can learn the basics of any science with information available on the internet. (By 'basics', I mean at least to the level of a basic college course.) Of course, that doesn't really help people living in huts.
Okay, then. You can learn how to create a drip-irrigation system, the advantages of crop rotation, animal husbandry, agriculture, etc. You can learn how to identify iron ores, how to smelt them into raw iron, how to forge that into tools. You can learn how to make a way to refrigerate food items with clay, fire, and water. You can learn how to build a windmill. You can learn how diseases spread and how to prevent their spread, how to purify water, and basic sanitation techniques. Poor people learn quickly and are highly motivated. They're more used to 'thinking outside the box,' because they can't afford to live in the box.
Of course, there're problems with the idea. For one, most of the internet is in English. However, as more places come online, they'll create their own content and translate existing content. Access to the information will drive demand for english teachers. And, of course, once people have a basis in a language, they can educate themselves so long as they have a dictionary.
Anyway. While it's no miracle cure, I think that the OLPC could do a lot more for poor people than any amount of foreign aid could. It empowers them directly, allowing them to decide their fates, not some NGO or whatever.
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