December 2010 Archives

the radio announcer just went over the latest and greatest totally arbitrary and nonsensical limits on various substances that can go through security (of course, no limits on firearms).

a last minute feature request to expose two database fields, "commit to required by" and "commitment date" is revealing a startling personal difficulty with conjugating and spelling the word "commit". i can't seem to get the correct number of m's and t's in any form.

compare:

On this matter, we look forward to further demonstrating to the American people the discipline and loyalty that have been the hallmark of the United States Marine Corps for over 235 years.

vs

"and all over America, there'll be gold stars put up in windows, in the rural towns and communities all over America that don't partake in the elite schools that bar military recruiters from campus, that don't partake in the salons of Georgetown and the other liberal bastions here around the country, but there will be additional sacrifice."

60-80% of the american people supported the repeal of dadt. one of these men knows how to listen to his superiors.

will make me sad we avoided this guy:

"There will be high-fives over all the liberal bastions of America," he predicted, from "the elite schools that bar military recruiters from campus" to "the salons of Georgetown" and the "talk shows" where people -- "most of whom have never have served in the military" -- will crow over the law's repeal..

Crow.

White House Kid Indoctrination Video Contains Dangerous Advice

there is no depth to which right wing bloggers will not stoop.

this is truly pathetic.

my beloved G1 is, to put things nicely, a little bit obsolete. it's pegged on android 1.6, while new devices ship with 2.3. It's got barely any storage at all, and a wimpy processor. Still, it works, and I'm not the kind of person who always has to have the latest greatest thing, especially when it's a phone.

Last week, google released the Nexus S, the latest greatest thing in the android phone universe. This is google's second phone, a follow up to the Nexus One, which was sold directly from google's website. It didn't sell very well. I guess google figured they needed a retail presence. Unfortunately, they've decided that best buy is the sole source for the Nexus S.

I friggin hate best buy.

Here's one reason. The Best Buy / Monster Cable machine is bad for humanity in general. A large part of the problem is Best Buy, as they apply the Monster cable scam to all their products, and push bogus warranty crap and lame-ass in-home installation scares.

Anyhow.

I was very disappointed to find that the Nexus S would only be sold in BB. Still, I wanted to see it. Since it doesn't have a hardware keyboard, I was skeptical whether I'd like it. But it's the bleeding edge, and it's supported by Google, not a mobile carrier, so that's nice. Updates come out sooner and will be very well tested.

In the BB store, I couldn't find the phone. They had lots of phones out but no Nexus S. And most of the phones were fake phones. I found an employee and got a blank stare after explaining that Nexus S was a phone. She found me a phone guy to help. He needed to clock in.

Once he'd clocked in I asked him where it was and he led me to it. The Nexus S had it's own little kiosk in the worst possible place: out of the line-of-sight of the entrance (the phones area is directly in the path of the entrance, this booth was off to the left, out of the range of vision) with its back to the area containing the rest of the phones. In other words, you can't see it from the door, but you can see the other phones, so you go into that area, and now the booth is behind you and you really can't see the phone, even if you turn around. Nice.

So I played with the phone a little. The dude hovered and I finally said I'd just like to try it out, and he left. The phone had a huge old lock thing on it so I couldn't get a feel for it at all. I tried to load some websites. No joy.

The thing apparently had 4 bars of service, but no 3g. I turned on WiFi, still no luck. I went into the wifi settings and looked at the available networks. 5 or 6, all with un-remembered passwords. I dispatched hops to retrieve the clocked-in guy, but while she was off, an open wifi network named "best buy" popped into existence. I selected it and off I went.

After that, the phone wasn't so compelling to me. Reviewers the web over are ranting and raving about how great it is. Maybe I'd love it if google/samsung had sent one to my home, but standing in hateful best buy, with a giant brick and chain attached to the back of the phone, with a poorly functioning wifi network, with a gaggle of recent parolees staring me down, I can't say I had a great experience with the phone.

And I can't say I'm surprised.

I don't know what google thinks it's doing teaming up with BB. As with the Nexus One, at $530 + tax + best buy snake oil, I don't know who google thinks will buy this thing. I think google fans like myself will have bad experiences in the store and walk away pissed. Maybe they'll overlook this and maybe they'll buy the thing sight unseen. I don't know much about marketing.

The original Nexus phone didn't sell because (I think) it didn't have retail presence and you couldn't buy it subsidized -- so it always cost half a grand.
People would have to buy it without playing with it, and it would only go to people who sought it out, not to clueless people who just wanted a smartphone. I suspect Google is trying to address these problems by putting it where people can play with it, and where plenty of clueless people congregate and will end up with it largely due to indifference when starting a new contract. I don't think it will work. I don't know much about marketing.

But I do know I'm not going to be getting one. It was far from compelling enough for me to overcome my hatred of the store.

When I got my G1, my first smart phone, it changed my life in ways I didn't imagine. It's possible that a beefier smartphone like the NS will do the same, but I expect it would only be a small incremental change this time around. That's not worth the pain to me, and I'll probably end my 2 year contract with the G1, happily.

i renewed my fancy domain today, and when it came to the part where they asked for the name on my credit card, i had a hearty chuckle -- same name as the domain, nyuk nyuk.

our neighbors, with whom we share a duplex and a washer/drier, have head lice.

BRING IT.

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x6d!

I'm sporting a trim gone horribly wrong. There's a reason I'm not in command of significant portions of the armed forces: I don't always have a good exit plan. Actually, if that's all that's holding me back, I should be an Admiral by now.

Anyhow, my hair was nice and long, and I've been telling people for weeks "it's warm for the winter!" which is nicer than "don't you have something more interesting to talk about than my hair?" with the added bonus of being entirely true. i liked it longer and was beginning to look forward to gels and mousses and all that good stuff.

for some reason i felt a strong compulsion to cut my hair today, and not wait for the weekend or any other time that hops could do it (for example, this evening). i successfully shortened it with the #4, and then went to finish the back, and of course, that's where things went bad, fast.

in fact, it was mainly for the back that i was cutting my hair. the armies of darkness were making significant inroads up the back of my neck and needed to be whacked. so i whacked them. a little too high. and only on one side. sigh.

there was only one exit plan at that point.

it's gonna be a cold winter.

what the hell was that?

no, really... what did we just watch?

that was the most bizarre movie i've seen in quite a while. is it a superman movie? a richard pryor slapstick? what?

it wasn't exactly lame, it was just bizarre... the two-supermans fight scene? what? huh? the borg scene? what?

also, it was incredibly distracting to listen to the giorgio moroder soundtrack, which was noticeably different from the john williams score in ways that i lack the musical vocabulary to describe. as i explained to hops: i can plainly hear Star Wars in the JW score for supermans 1 and 2. no star wars at all in superman 3, and that's a bad thing, i tell you what.

s1 and s2 were not especially great either, but they were at least relevant. s2 was necessary after s1. s1 was an origin movie. great, we get it. neither was especially compelling but neither was pointless.

s3 starts off as basically an tv episode: superman saves this or that or the other, whoopie, and proceeds to a richard pryor movie. and so on.

i did get to try a stove-and-oven steak recipe and for the first time ever i cooked a decent non-grilled steak. it would have been better if i'd gotten the beef from my usual butcher, and if we had gas appliances. but not bad for a first effort. better than superman 3.

i never see a word of mention about how repubs in congress treat the worshipful idols of 9/11:

GOP Filibuster Defeats 9/11 Responders Bill in the Senate

suck it up heroes, pay for your own damned medical care.

my favorite right winger asks:

When jihad-bent American Muslims target American soldiers on American soil, why does America yawn?

I didn't read the rest as a year's worth of subscribing to MM and DP and their ilk has shown me that right-wing anti-logic is damaging to a programmer's brain. but the question she raised at the very beginning, before descending into strawmen like "If Hussain's targets had been abortion clinics, we'd hear no end of denunciations of the hatred and intimidation" and "But it's a damned shame more Americans can't muster as much anger over troop-targeting "Allahu Akbars!" as they do over Dancing With the Stars" (okay, i peeked).

Every time some retard with a bomb fails to kill anyone on US soil, the right wingers get their panty-bombs all in a bunch and start wailing and gnashing teeth about how nobody cares, and also about how the fact that the idiots were successfully caught proves that we need more big brother tactics in our war against terror.

It's been pointed out by others that we are in the midst of a War on Terror -- not a Massacre on Terror, not a Hit-And-Run on Terror, not a Nuke-Them-From-Orbit on Terror, but a War on Terror. As stupid as I think the idea is, I understand that War is not a one-sided ordeal. In War (as opposed to nuking from orbit) there is damage to both sides of the conflict, that's pretty much fundamental to the definition. I'm still not a great proponent of the GWOT, but I'd have to say we're making out pretty well: "we've" killed lots and lots of people, and "they" have killed very few of "us".

Now it's highly debatable whether the people "we've" killed ever had any ill intentions toward "us", and it's even more debatable who "us" is (witness the underwear bomber's father turning him in, the mosque-goers in SoCal turning in the FBI provocateur -- all big heroes to MM. no? huh.). And it's hard to say that "we" have comported "ourselves" in a dignified manner, though I will accept that this is the sort of thing you get when hiring mercenaries.

Anyways, the point is: we kill them, they kill us. And vice versa. That's what war is. That's what you get when you support war. To pretend otherwise is silly. This latest "homegrown terrorist" failed, and was handily taken care of by law enforcement. Our system worked great. A pat on the back might be more appropriate than a yawn, but a yawn is a much better reaction than frothing and screaming about imaginary, powerful enemies, when the evidence shows so much the opposite.

Question: does the Swedish warrant take precedence? Or will the US strong arm the UK into extraditing him?

that's a joke, yeah? we already know (thanks to wikileaks) that the US strongarmed spain, and that's just what i've heard without reading the actual leaks. in any case, when the UK must choose between the US and sweden: which do you suppose will win?

using a form of sympathetic magic i have influenced the weather toward the warmer range. sunday i undertook the hated task of shopping for clothes, and more traumatically, for pants. i had grown tired of being cold and leggingless, so i ventured forth to buy pants.

now dear reader, you may not know this, but i have a large bottom half of me.

okay, you probably know that. what you may not know is that pants in the US are made for men with large asses and chicken legs.

now you see my problem, dear reader: i do not have chicken legs. my legs do not generally fit in the pants which are wide enough to accomodate my ass.

so what can i do? i keep on supersizing the pants until all my parts fit in there, and by then, i'm wearing several waist sizes too large, and they look awful and don't stay up. now anyone who knows me must realize that i'm not terribly bothered by looking awful, but having my pants fall down all the time is a logistical inconvenience, and anyone who knows me must also realize that i am terribly bothered by logistical inconveniences.

so i hate shopping for pants, because i shop like a stereotypical woman, trying on dozens or hundreds of options and rarely finding the right pair. unlike the stereotypical woman, if i ever do find a pair that fits, it usually doesn't look especially nice.

anyhow, so we experienced a large failure at the first store, and the second store, REI, chosen only for its proximity to the first store, featured one pair out of 12 that actually seemed to work. the downside? $60 for the pants. the really downsize? i'm hopefully not going to need pants this large by the next cold season. but i justified things like so:

a) i fucking hate shopping for pants
b) i haven't bought pants in at least a year
c) for $60 it could all be over for this year, even though it'd be nice to have several options

anyhow, c clinched it, so i sucked it up and bought the pants.

and now it's too fracking warm to wear them.

but like my hero sarah palin always says, it's better to have a pair $60 pants and not need them than to need a pair of $60 pants and not have them.

sarah palin has got to be the most entertaining thing to happen to politics in my lifetime. there is no-one else i know of who so relentlessly inserts herself into every discussion, no matter how un-related it is to her personally or politically.

like this:

The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

Okay, this may or may not be true -- but is it news? And not only is it not-news, but Palin herself emailed the scoop to ABC! Because the American People must know that her website has been hacked! First Amendment! Free Speech!

(Unless, of course, the free speech is that of revealing secret documents.)

Anyhow, Palin had the usual word salad falling out of her cyber-mouth:

"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," Palin emailed. "This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."

Actually, I'm pretty astonished/entertained that in an email this is the best she could do. I mean, it's one thing to mangle the Queen's English when you're behind a podium in front of a crowd. But in an email? when you could have an intern proof it?

My favorite part is when she calls an Australian residing in London "un-American". You betcha!

spoken on a righty blog:

Just extend the current tax rates and structure, across the board. Period. So that the job creators could get back to doing what they do best, creating jobs.

I'm pretty tired of both the phrase "job creators" and the implication that the "job creators" are sitting around, cowering in the corner, waiting to find out the direction of their marginal tax rate before they go out and create thousands of jobs.

what?

but this is the implication here: that there are mythical job creators who are too fixated on congress' machinations to get around to creating jobs. the tax cuts are in effect right now, so where are the jobs?

to a hot pan, add copious olive oil and butter
fry half an onion until soft
add plenty of sliced mushrooms
add more whole cumin than you'd think
add cracked pepper
fry until well browned
add 1 package of defrosted ground venison
fry for a bit
add a goodly amount of semi-dry amontillado sherry
fry a bit longer
add salt
add more semi-dry amontillado sherry
add whatever paprika remains in your pantry
let rest 5 minutes

pairs with cabernet sauvignon and Superman II.

transparency

for a long time i've known about demon's souls. based on that brilliantly written review, i decided to get it. based on the $60 price tag, i decided not to get it. well, dear reader, sony decided to rebrand the game as a "ps3 classic" or whatever, you know, the red stripe of discount, and now it retails new for twenty bucks. so of course i sprang for it. so far it's atmospheric and entirely enjoyable. i've died about a billion times already in 5 hours of gameplay. no frustration yet. i knew what i was getting into, and i haven't really even gotten into it yet.

recommended for at least 5 hours of gameplay.