The Conversation Pit

Still blogging elsewhere...

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:49:47 GMT

I haven't updated this much in a long time, but I've been blogging daily on my website for years now, and that blog has an rss feed.

Just FYI.

Which religion is Santa Claus the god of?

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 05:14:26 GMT

Something I wrote last year, but never posted...

---

Personally, I consider Santa (and frosty, rudolph, the elves, scrooge, etc) to be a separate pantheon. Zeus had Mt. Olympus, Santa has the north pole. The sacrifices (milk and cookies) are pretty benign. The altar's a tree (gilded with tinsel and lights and colored balls). The vestments are red suits, white beards, and green elf costumes. The collection plate's a kettle. The confessional is at your local shopping mall where Santa Incarnate sits on his throne in front of a long line of supplicants. (The priesthood here is very very part time, but every parent gets in on the act so it works out.) And the hymns (jingle bells, frosty the snowman, rudolph the red nosed reindeer, I'm dreaming of a white christmas, let it snow, santa claus is coming to town, here comes santa claus, and many more) are quiet catchy and singable. There are even participatory rituals (caroling, candy canes, hang your stocking)...

Does Santa have godlike powers? He flies through the air with magic reindeer to visit millions of houses in a single night and distribute thousands of tons of presents. It's all based on a "naughty and nice" list that every spy agency on the planet, working together, couldn't compile.

And yes, Santa's an omniscient enforcer of morality. He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good... Although he's more a positive reinforcement type rather than fire or brimstone, so he'll just give you coal in your stocking if you've been bad rather than condemning you to eternal fiery torment.

And when you're a kid there's plenty of evidence for Santa. You see Santa in the mall, in the thanksgiving parade, on television and in movies. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. The history goes back hundreds of years, and you even get real presents, under your tree, showing up on Christmas morning saying they come from Santa! The whole society, from major institutions to your own parents, conspires to perpetuate the Santa Mythos. Everywhere you turn, people tell you about Santa! And how good he is, and generous, and kind. Your classmates may doubt, but they have no _proof_ he doesn't exist, and if you don't believe will you still get the presents? The reindeer have names!

As with all religions, the message that's repeated, over and over, is "believe". Santa Claus _is_ Coming To Town. Long before the Polar Express's magic bell, you had to learn from Scrooge's experience and keep christmas in your heart. The little girl in Miracle on 34th street, "I believe, I believe, it's silly
but I believe" and bang she got her house, because true believers are rewarded.

Eventually, your parents come clean about the whole Santa thing. It's part of growing up. And it can be a valuable learning experience in critical thinking, parental fallability (if not outright deception), and the ease of self-deception. Learning that with enough external reinforcement, you can talk yourself into almost anything no matter how silly it sounds. And that people who have your best interests at heart can not only be wrong, will not only suppress their own doubts, but will knowingly _lie_ to you "for your own good"... That's a valuable life lesson, that is.

Each of us can firmly believe things that turn out to be wrong. This doesn't mean we were stupid, it means that when literally millions of people participate in a vast (if well-intentioned) conspiracy to maintain an edifice of belief based on deception, it is easy to be fooled. And it can be hard to make your own choices and have the courage of your convictions when you're so obviously swimming against the tide. Belief is not the same as truth. "Are you sure?" is not the same question as "Are you right?"

Does all this mean that Santa is a less valid pantheon than the "official" one? Why would it be? The same parents who taught you about Jesus (walking on water, turning water into wine, bringing Lazarus back from the dead, loaves and fishes, virgin birth) and the corresponding pantheon (father/son/holy ghost, angels, saints, etc) taught you about Santa. Generally at about the same age.

No, comparing their validity or relative merit is left as an exercise for the reader. Comparing Santa and Jesus side by side and asking "Ok, now, which one seems more plausible?" That's frowned on in our society. Especially with "faith based reasoning" holding high political office. (And admittedly, each one is said to be based on a historical figure...)

Pedal-powered laptop.

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:21:00 GMT

Yes, this is what I meant. (mirell pointed me at it.) It's an MIT student project so I can't order it, there's just a prototype. But I want one.

What's with all the mouseover javascript???

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:16:31 GMT

Livejournal decided to go crazy recently. Every link has turned into something that does a pop-up window big enough to obscure a large chunk of the paragraph it's in. How do I turn this off? (I suspect disabling javascript for the livejournal domain is the only way...)

Cookies.

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:38:40 GMT

Oh yeah, I have a livejournal. Maybe I should post to it from time to time.

Fade got drunk and is making cookies. (Gingerbread.) A night of debauchery around here, woo.

Watching the first season of Law and Order on netflix. Wow, first season sucks. I think I'm starting to actively hate the fat cop. The one with plastic hair is merely annoying. The lawyers are good, but not as good as Sam Waterston. When does Jerry Orbach show up?

Refinery capacity?

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:50:47 GMT

Ok, when did "refinery capacity" become a code word for "taking this peak production thing in the teeth"?

I just bumped into this again while catching up on the dilbert blog. The oil industry keeps trying to claim that the limiting factor on oil production is refinery capacity. This is silly.

For those of you who don't remember "peak production", it doesn't mean there's no more oil in the ground, just that we can't extract it any faster than we're doing. It's easy to understand why we've already found all the existing oilfields of any real size: the bigger they are the easier they are to find, and we had sattelite geosurveys back in the 70's and reasonable computer models by the mid-80's. The planet's only so big and we've been over every inch of it, including most of the oceans. We can only get so many barrels per day out of a given oil field, and since we've already found and developed all the interesting oilfields you can't suck oil out of the ground any _faster_ than we're doing right now, but demand keeps increasing (with the big spike between 2001 and 2005 being due to China going from essentially no imports to the second largest importer in the world very quickly).

Why can't we get oil out of existing oilfields faster? Has to do with geology and flow rates through rock. The fastest way to get oil out of the ground is steam injection. (If you try to just suck oil out you create a vacuum and the oil won't come, something has to go back down to fill in the hole you make taking out the oil. So we pump steam down one pipe to push oil up the other. Luckily, oil floats on top of water anyway.) When the largest field in Saudi Arabia first started using steam injection it got 80% oil and 20% water back up the output pipes. By 2002 the output pipes were averaging 20% oil and 80% water. Sinking more wells just ups the oil-to-water ratio because beyond a certain density you get the waste water from nearby wells. (And that's ignoring the fact it's a waste of money to sink more wells to go after a finite amount of oil in the oilfield, which we expect to be able to extract all of with the existing equipment.)

But the thing about refineries is you can build more (or expand the existing ones) and parallelize production all you want. Yes, they're expensive, but not as much as microchip fabs and we keep building more of THEM. The chemistry to covert crude oil into gasoline was something we were managing basic versions of when the Model T came out a century ago, and the modern version of this technology is not beyond the reach of even the third world. Yes there are significant environmental problems too (these suckers are dirty) that keeps us from building new domestic refineries in the US, but A) not from expanding the ones we've already got, B) this is a problem for Iran how?

Have you heard about the huge glut of unrefined crude oil backing up in tankers around the world, waiting for refinery capacity to become available to process it? Me neither. If the oil companies are letting refinery capacity stay flat or even dwindle, there's probably a _reason_ for it.

I'm reminded of the old joke about someone coming into the doctor complaining about a sore elbow, and the doctor hitting their foot with a hammer. "But you're not worrying about your elbow anymore, are you?"

Treadmill with a laptop stand?

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:21:50 GMT

My friend Heather in Abilene found http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6656631.stm which is cool, but I'd still prefer one based on an exercise bike rather than a treadmill. (Standing for twelve hours gets a bit old. Plus walking involves up-and-down motion that interferes with typing and reading a bit more...)

And a laptop stand still means I can use the same laptop I use elsewhere without needing extensive setup...

When Newt Gingrich starts making sense, something is wrong.

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:42:13 GMT

Washington — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001.

A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support.

More here.

Exercise bike with laptop stand, take 2.

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 04:55:31 GMT

My old friend Heather the librarian in Abeline pointed me to an exercise bicycle built into a desk, with a raised keyboard tray. It's not quite a laptop stand, but looks quite workable, and I want one. :)

Rob

Still want an exercise bike with laptop stand.

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 03:33:14 GMT

So for years now, I've been looking for an exercise bike with a laptop stand. It doesn't seem like it such an outlandish idea, I sit in a chair all day, I might as well be pedaling. I've used exercise bikes while reading, why not while computing?

But nobody makes one of these things. My grandfather said I should patent the idea, but it seems too obvious and I haven't got the time to start a company around it anyway. I just want one.

Ideally, I'd want the it to also be a bicycle powered generator that charged the laptop. That way there's a built-in incentive to keep pedaling. But I'd be happy with just the basic model to start with...

Rob

Sundays are not working out for me recently.

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 04:06:26 GMT

So last sunday (June 3rd), while visiting Eric and Cathy, I ran over a cat with my car. I'm still kind of upset about that (I am a cat person). I was only doing about 15 miles per hour but it ran from a patch of weeds next to the road right out under the wheels, made two loud ka-thunks, and made it to a yard on the other side of the street before dying of a broken neck. I had about a quarter second reaction time, and just didn't hit the brakes in time. I apologized profusely to said cat on some random stranger's lawn, and made what burial arrangements I could (said random strangers had a box and a shovel), neither of which helped. I had Fade drive for the rest of the day because I just wasn't up to it. I was down for days, and still don't like to think about it. (Feral cat as far as we could tell, so at least I didn't have to face an owner. Not that this made me feel any better, every cat I've ever had has been some variant of adopted feral.)

This sunday (June 10), my laptop didn't boot. I left it doing something and came back half an hour later to a black screen saturday night, hard powered it off to deal with in the morning, and in the morning it got "disk buffer errors" trying to replay the ext3 journal so it could mount hda5, my home partition. And here I am going "ooh, that's not good". Asked Fade to burn a knoppix disk with her computer. Apparently, there's nothing useful a Windows XP machine can do with an .iso image without third party software.) Dug up an old kubuntu install CD (which is also a live CD), boot it up, try to mount hda5 as ext2... No dice. It can read the partition table, and apparently it can read at least bits of hda1. But hda5 is just gone.

Right. My last full backup was right before I left for Austin, about a month ago. I have incremental backups of my web page directory and my email directory that got rsynced nightly (last one was saturday before the big hard drive death). But between those, what's missing? (I used to do periodic rsyncs of the whole of /home to my work machine at TimeSys, but I haven't had a dedicated desktop system since then.)

Sunday afternoon, I bought a cheap 64-bit Compaq laptop. Wrestled with it through monday afternoon, when I decided it had won and returned it, which cost me a 15% "restocking fee" of about $90. (Now I remember why I buy used hardware so much: if it's been out for a year Linux runs great on it. If it's brand new, lspci -v gives you 12 "unknown device" listings and that's if you're lucky enough to have enough drivers driving hardware in legacy compatability modes for Knoppix to boot up to a desktop (which it did, with no network, no hard drive, and the widescreen display at a squashed 1024x768 resolution). Kubuntu hung booting (at five different places on my multiple reboot attempts). The Kbuntu "alternate install" installed fine... and hung booting the result.

I got that far burning CDs from the x86-64 server that's been powered off because it segfaults or panics if you try to do anything major with it. This seems to be a hardware problem. All memtest86 could find was a single bit error that occurred once running overnight and that's AFTER it had turned off Error Correcting Codes in the memory. But Firefox segfaulted after ten minutes of web surfing and doing a Firmware Linux build hangs the machine hard after about five minutes, every time. Sometimes it's a kernel panic, sometimes not.

So I ordered one of the new Dell laptops preinstalled with Ubuntu. (It turns out you CAN get a 64 bit processor from their website, it's in the customization options.)

But that won't be here for 2 weeks. (Possibly not before OLS. EEP!) Meanwhile, I have work to do and have already lost two days to this, plus setup time to get a new system working, plus the work I lost that wasn't backed up. (It also explains why the machine was acting wonkier than usual for the past week. I'd only moderately noticed because I abuse systems into instability anyway, hence "wonkier than usual". My regular software suspend procedure is "killall nspluginviewer; sync; echo disk > /sys/power/state", and half the time it tells me there isn't enough memory because when it died I had over 100 konqueror tabs open and Kmail threading the linux kernel mailing list back to january...)

So I dug up an old 32 bit desktop system from the storage space, and an old 17 inch CRT. It has Ubuntu 5.04 on it, and that's contemporary from when it was mothballed. Burned a 7.04 CD to install on it later tonight.

The rest of the month's going to be fun. I feel like I've gone from cell phones back to a land line, or from having a car to taking the bus. My day job _and_ over half my hobbies go through a keyboard and screen, and now I'm back staring at a CRT on a system with a slower CPU, less memory, smaller screen resolution, and I'm not even sure it has enough hard drive space to decompress my backups. Plus a week or more of lost productivity between lost data and recovery time. Plus a noticeable financial hit I wasn't planning to take until AFTER I got to Austin. I can't work from the coffee shop (or even the Reduced Cat room) until I have a laptop again. I now have to worry about half-second power failures rebooting my machine.

But I'm still noticeably more upset about running over that cat.

Kiggy. :(

Webcomics.

Sat, 26 May 2007 01:49:20 GMT

On a daily basis, I try to follow Sluggy Freelance, Kevin and Kell, Dilbert, Ozy and Millie, MindMistress, Nukees, Wapsi Square, MegaTokyo, El Goonish Shive, Something Positive, Schlock Mercenary, Real Life Comics, Questionable Content, Misfile, Irregular Webcomic, The Whiteboard, Order Of the Stick... And about there my memory peters out and I have to start looking 'em up (which is why the rest get visited intermittently).

The order isn't by popularity, it's just the order I remember to visit them in. It's related to the order I discoverd them in, but isn't a 1:1 match. I've been known to start the day out with Schlock Mercenary or Something Positive just because I'm in a hurry and want to skip to the good stuff. :)

Of the intermittent ones, some I've never visited regularly (partially clips, penny arcade,the devil's panties... there are a couple dozen of these I have listed in a text file), some stopped updating regularly (like Green Avenger, Crap I Drew on my Lunch Break, GPF...). A few I used to follow regularly but stopped visiting entirely (clan of the cats, alice comics, scary go-round) because they just lost my interest.

I miss some that stopped (like Casey and Andy, although Cheshire Crossing is great, but 3 months between issues).

At Penguicon 4.0 I got introduced to Home on the Strange, and although I still catch up to it intermittently rather than following it regularly, this one is just beautiful. The "intermittent" ones like that become part of my daily trawl when they can keep me coming back regularly for a couple weeks. Then it becomes habit.

Immigration reform bill.

Thu, 24 May 2007 16:05:17 GMT

Ok, not the sort of thing I normally worry about, but I'm trying to figure this out. If you've made it to this country and have been living here illegally for some time, and the government hasn't managed to find you yet, the new bill proposes that you:

1) Pay them $5000.
2) Go back to your own country.
3) Profit!

Have I mischaracterized this turkey, or is it really that obvious?

Still in Austin through Saturdayish.

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:42:32 GMT

So I haven't made it to Star Ranch, nor have I managed to get a passport for the OLS trip next month (apparently I need to get a copy of my birth certificate). But I've gotten lots of walking in. I think I've lost about 5 pounds. (My weight fluctuates almost that much per day so it's a bit hard to tell, but I've gotten lots and lots of late-night walking in. I should get me one of them digital scale thingies like Mark has. Had one once, but it stopped working...)

I think I've started the Linux Foundation job. I've spent this week reading and writing documentation-related things ("drinking from the firehose" in the case of the linux kernel mailing list). I got them the signed contract stuff last week, and have gotten back an email of a fax of a signature that presumably means something, but I have no idea what. There may or may not be a check in the mail, possibly to one of the addresses at which I have lived recently.

Apartment hunting's down to two places, either of which are fine. I'll ping 'em tomorrow and try to grab one. (Presumably giving them Fade's phone number to deposit money, since most of the money in my Austin bank account went to car repairs once I got here and went "ooh, reputable mechanic I trust (Lamb's on Far West), this darn "automatic" window doesn't roll up right and the cigarette lighter isn't providing current to charge anything with and the air conditioner doesn't work and my car needs to be inspected..." They fixed the power door locks while they were fiddling around with the electrical system, which is nice but I need to get used to that again.

So I'm at Metro, and they're decidedly not 24 hours anymore. In in fact, tonight at midnight they close and stay closed for a MONTH. (Until summer session classes start.) That's sad. Mojo's closed and the building is now a Moroccan restaurant. The 24-hour coffee shop up near the laundromat (Kiva Hahn, perhaps?) truncated its hours at the same time the other two did...

I suspect if I want a 24 hour coffee shop I need to _start_ one. But one entrepreneurial venture at a time, and I won't have time to do it right until after the documentation fellowship...

I'm at Metro! I have Chai!

Sun, 06 May 2007 15:43:05 GMT

And lo, I am back in Austin for two weeks. Apartment hunting, attending mirell's graduation, and a few other things. Loooooong drive.

One of the big advantages of a 24 hour coffee shop is you can show up whenever and it's always there. Unfortunately, Metro now opens at 10 am on sundays, and since I'm on eastern time and more or less a day schedule, I showed up here around 9:30 and had to wait around half an hour before I could go in. This is sad. The chai's still good ("big train" brand spiced chai made with steamed milk), the couches are comfortable, and the wireless works. And the cute red haired girl behind the counter has selected classical music, something nonintrusive with flutes and violins.

Later today, I should swing by Fry's and see what they've got.

I've missed Austin. It's not perfect, but it's not Pittsburgh either.

Huh. Fire.

Wed, 02 May 2007 21:39:20 GMT

A car caught fire, parked on the street about 30 feet downhill from the Te Cafe. One of the women who works at the shop told us as she came in, as the fire truck was pulling up. We all went out and watched, which was probably dangerous but no more than being inside a glass storefront under the circumstances. The fire truck put it out about a minute after arriving.

Something near the right front tire caught fire. Coffee shop theories range from a discarded cigarette lighting the tire to a fuel line leaking on hot metal under the hood. I feel bad for the owner; even if they have collision, it wasn't. It's gotta suck coming back and finding out your car caught on fire while you were out.

I'm also pondering my position that while I'm willing to carry around an Orwellian tracking device, giving it a built-in camera is going too far. Last time this happened, Mark got pictures with _his_ cell phone...

[edit] Dear livejournal: unquoted URLs in an anchor tag are not "irreprable markup".

LJ drama! Oooooooh.

Wed, 02 May 2007 16:44:03 GMT

Ok, it was a mistake to take jer_ out of my spam filter over on penguicon-general. I added him the first time for argumentatively inserting himself into the middle of an existing conversation (his online style annoys the heck out of me, I tend to have problems with the "nothing to say, loudly" approach. I'm also reminded of the old quote, "the person who says it's impossible should not interrupt the person doing it").

But then I met him in person in the con suite, and he seemed friendly enough, and his livejournal showed signs of intelligence when I was tracking down con reports (and filtering him chopped up threading on the list), so I removed him from the filter. Two days later, he jumped right back into the middle of an existing conversation (misinterpreting it, of course, but being firmly convinced of his position despite this). And I blew up at him, which reminded me why I asked to be removed from the concom list last month. (I got a little enthused during the actual con, but I'm still not local to Michigan. My reasons to want to disentangle myself remain valid, and getting distracted from them was wrong.)

It's not Jer's fault, of course. I've had similar blow-ups with Matt for years, and the year 3 con chair, and even year 1 with Tracy's registration people (who had no email address, didn't use the internet at all, and were handling registration for a technical conference). At the last two cons I went so far as to work around the concom entirely, adding new things (LN2 ice cream in 2006 and panel recording in 2007) that I did myself, and didn't have to coordinate with anybody else ahead of time. (Other than asking the 2006 con suite lady for space, which was only polite.) It seems incredibly silly in retrospect, having to avoid the concom like that, but at Penguicon I got excited enough that I was honestly thinking of doing friday morning tutorials, and a call for papers for 2008, and a heartbeat blog on penguicon, and...

But I'm still not local to Michigan, I still get pushback from people who meet in person quite often but only speak to me via email. The best thing I can do for the Michigan crowd is to stay out of their way, and instead put my effort into launching a sequel to Linucon when I get back to Texas.

Right. Step 1: Come up with a new name. (I still can't top "Penguicon". It's not just Linux, it's fannish. "Ford, you're turning into a Penguicon. Stop it." "And now it's time for the Penguin on top of your television set to explode." Penguin books. One by one, the Penguins steal my sanity... Everybody can get behind penguins. Linucon got handed off to other people for year 2 and all the paperwork's expired even if anybody knows where it is, easier to start fresh. And I was never really fond of that name. But the best I've come up with since is "Y'allnix", which has a joke going for it (a southern version of Usenix), but it's just too tech-heavy. It's not a good name for a science fiction convention.)

Hmmm...

Penguicon!

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:07:06 GMT

Ok, I should get into the habit of using my lj account again. I mentioned this in my other blog but it really belongs here.

Penguicon was this weekend, and Fade and I got married (Steve Jackson officiated, Eric Raymond was best man, and Randy Milholland photoshopped us up a "gurps matrimony" cover which he and Steve both signed afterwards). We arranged a discount rate so our relatives coming in for the convention could attend the con if they wanted, and the wedding adjourned to the con suite afterwards where we made LN2 ice cream for everyone, chocolate chocolate chocolate and Oreo of course.

The wedding was in Maple A, and we moved it to 4 pm to avoid conflicting with an Elizabeth Bear panel Fade wanted to see. We blew our lines (when Steve asked us about getting married we said things like "yeah" and "sure" rather than "I do"). We exchanged plastic glowy rings (Fade couldn't find more blinky rings, and besides, wedding rings traditionally differ from engagement rings). Afterwards we noticed that the white green and blue cakes should have been red green and blue, but on well. We ate most of the cake and took the rest to the con suite. We got to go out to dinner with various friends and relatives four times, one of which the restaurant (the Red Robin across the street from the con hotel) found out about our weddingness and bought us ANOTHER cake (a much better one, marvelous chocolate thing we ate lots of despite already being full) and gave Fade a bunch of balloons! (One of which popped and one deflated slowly and noisily on the way into the hotel, before we figured out that the hotel ceiling's texture includes sharp and pointy bits.) I think we left the baloons in our room when we checked out. I know we left my electric shaver in the bathroom. Oh well.

I got Fade a t-shirt ("fight like a girl") based on one of Howard Tayler's designs, via the print on demand t-shirt vendor. She bought me a book (the sequel to "Kitty goes to washington", the third book about a werewolf radio talk show hostess). We also got wedding gifts (Dr. Who dvds, the complete 9th doctor and 10th doctor season 1. And a Wii! I can honestly say that after our wedding I got to play with Fade's Wii.)

Penguicon 5 was FUN.

Now we have to go wrestle with the state of Pennsylvania to get their paperwork to agree with us about the whole marriage thing.

The "new thing I added to the con" last year was LN2 ice cream, and this year it was fully integrated into the convention (including throwing some into the pool on sunday, which I missed but there are pictures). This year's new thing was panel recording, I bought six little digital lecture recorders (now donated to the con) and managed to record more than half the panels. Steve Guterman has the recorders now so mp3s may make it onto the web someday.

Next year I'm pondering the friday morning tutorial track as the "new thing". Make that actually work. (Call for papers and attendee baggies would be good too.)

Con reports are being gathered, and should be posted to the penguicon lj community.

Stuff.

They scheduled the next concom meeting for May 19th. I'll be in Austin (Mark graduates on the 18th). Maybe I can phone in for it...

Sad how LJ keeps deteriorating...

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:25:16 GMT

When I first started using LiveJournal, my friends list went arbitrarily far back. Since there was no pressure about reading it, I did so fairly regularly.

A year or two back, I noticed that somewhere past skip=250 messages it would stop showing anything older, unless I went into the individual friends' journals one by one and read there. Knowing there was a deadline before posts would "fall off" reading became a bit of a chore (especially churning through long posts from neilgaiman or twistedchick, which I _wanted_ to read but take time). Currently, skip=135 is showing all the way to the end of what the database fetch will do. That's sad. It's wandering off towards useless from my point of view.

I should set up a real rss aggregator...

Rob

And I'm assured I live in a good part of town.

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:52:38 GMT

It's 5 am and the police just left, after another of my downstairs
neighbors' loud public "domestic disputes", this one involving two women
swearing at each other in the middle of the street at the top of their
lungs for several minutes, plus an awful lot of banging from inside said
apartment (furniture moving, I'd guess). Fade and I were woken up shortly
before this by an absolute _plume_ of marijuana smoke from downstairs, and
I opened the window (no matter how cold it is outside breathing isn't optional)
until the screaming got so loud 15 minutes later Fade got up and closed it
again.

Of course said neighbors were back inside when the police came, were very
quiet with the lights off and didn't answer the door, and Pittsburgh's Finest
drove away again after about 5 minutes. (The unnerving part probably wasn't
audible from the street, it was the "help me, don't touch me" repeated several
times by a woman, followed by a lot of "mmmmm, mmmmm" smothering sounds.
Sounded like the "take the baby" woman from October, not the younger (or at
least higher pitched) one she was screaming at earlier. No idea where said
baby was through all this, didn't hear it once. This was about 5 minutes
before the police arrived, and may have been the reason it was extremely quiet
when they got here. Dunno.

I am now awake. I'd head in to work, but I really don't feel like Fade
would be safe if I did. No idea what to do about any of this. Fade doesn't
think anybody died downstairs tonight because apparently this is by no means the
loudest it's been (although it lasted unusually long this time). I feel like
a coward for not going down and getting involved, but I'd be an idiot if I did
(the man downstairs outweighs me by 100 pounds and domestic disputes are how
most police who die in the line of duty get killed). But what really worries
me is Fade's safety when I'm not here.

I hate Pittsburgh. I'm sitting in my apartment and I want to go home.

What do you do with a drunken rss feed?

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 22:35:11 GMT

So Christian wrote a python script that parses my development blog into an rss feed, and I added it to my "rsync my laptop's www directory to my web server" script.

I'm not quite sure what to do with it, otherwise. I update that blog far more often than I update this one (daily, actually), since I can do it with vi. But there's no way for anybody to comment there. Which, considering the livejournal comment spam I get here every day or two, isn't _entirely_ a bad thing, but there it is.

Thingy.

Livejournal continues to misunderstand security...

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:42:53 GMT

When somebody attaches yet another spam comment to the same ancient livejournal post, clicking on the "delete this comment" link doesn't actually show me the comment, just asks me to confirm that I want to delete it, sans context.

This means that anybody who wants to can spam me with fake livejournal things and the link can go to other comments (or entire posts) they want me to delete, and I'll probably click on it and report it as spam without being able to verify that it's the right one.

Stuck halfway through "New Earth".

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:19:26 GMT

So Dr. Who Season 2, disk 1 arrived in the mail on monday, and I watched it monday night. (Fully intending to watch it _again_ when Fade got home from Seattle.)

The christmas episode was great, and the first 2/3 of "new earth" was good too. And then the disk stopped, the PS/2 going "unable to read disk". Huh. (Hard crash, have to restart from the beginning and search through the stupid intro ads to get to the menu again.) Try again, reset to the right bit, play and... same problem, at the exact same point. Ok, check disk for scratches. Looks ok. Fiddle a bit... The later chapters of that episode cause it to crash too. The special features (Billie's video diary and the "children in need" clip and so on) are all similarly unavailable. What the...?

Take the disk to Fade's computer, plug it into the DVD player there, get the episode to the right place, play... And it pauses for a moment and then jumps ahead. To an actress we haven't seen before, in a different set, wearing a sexually suggestive outfit that's unlikely to wind up on Dr. Who (not that I'm objecting to that part but it seemed odd at the time), and she's escaping from something but the doctor and Rose _were_ just being chased by plague victims so maybe this is a B ark of the plot that I wasn't paying enough attention to? Now there's a guy tied to a chair and some kind of sheriff guy with a strong texan accent (which seems a bit authentic for a Welsh production on the BBC, but maybe they hired an actor who...) and that's leatherface. I haven't see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I've seen stills and that is definitely leatherface with a chainsaw, and yes it's a close-up of him sawing off the legs of the guy in the chair, one at a time, with extra fake blood. (Obviously done by special effects guys who know little or nothing about anatomy, but oh well.) Skip ahead a bit to see if Dr. Who comes back on... And now it's a dinner scene with the legless guy and the girl from earlier (and some stoned blonde) tied to chairs at a table where the sherrif guy is bringing out a big pot and is yelling at people. Whatcha wanna bet the guy's legs are in the pot? (I haven't seen the movie but I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the BBC version of The Silver Chair with Tom Baker as the Marsh Wiggle where they found out they were eating a talking stag.) Didn't stick around to see if I'd guessed right.

Phoned Fade so she could report the disk defective. Apparently, Netflix has no way to specify HOW a disk is defective, but I'm guessing they figured it out.

Still awaiting the corrected disk, and glad Fade didn't see it. She probably didn't have Anatomy and Physiology right before lunch. (11:30, dissect a perch. 12:30, tuna surprise. Ah, the taste of formaldehyde. Alas, I can no longer name the origins and insertions of all the muscles in your average bucket of kentucky fried chicken, it has been a while...)

I should just read the episode synopsis on Wikipedia. It's unlikely to be much more inaccurate than NetFlix was. :)

Rob

Dr. Who and the planet of in-depth reviews.

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 01:22:06 GMT

I've been reading Televison Without Pity's reviews of the ninth doctor's episodes, and I'm surprised by how good they are. Brutal, of course, but highly amusing, and there are some smashing in-jokes. (I've made it up to "Adam could frankly be a little more sonic.")

Also, the /portal way of posting doesn't seem to have a "preview" button, but oh well...

Kittens and livejournal's infrastructure.

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 23:29:35 GMT

So three of the four kittens have now been deployed. Mini-dragon is off with Gary, and Fade is driving Mini-aubrey and Not George to Chicago. The closest home we've found for Mini-peejee is with Mark's father in Arkansas (meaning we put her on a plane if we can't find something closer in the next few days).

And then we get Dragon fixed.

So I'm trying trying posting with http://www.livejournal.com/portal which doesn't do the crazy javascript stuff that the update.bml script does. What does bml stand for, anyway? It also doesn't let me set mood and music and such which aren't actually relevant but which I've grown vaguely accustomed to. Oh well. I don't know why Livejournal decided to break its' infrastructure, but at least there's a workaround...