When you have to explain that your humor columnist’s column is supposed to be funny, you’ve pretty much lost the battle already.
Thought for the day.
September 9th, 2009The jokes; sometimes, they write themselves.
September 8th, 2009Marc Katz has announced plans to run for lieutenant governor.
I have nothing against Mr. Katz, and, indeed, he could be a perfectly fine officeholder.
But this raises the somewhat mindboggling possibility (arguably, a slim one) that the State of Texas could be run by a cowboy and a deli owner.
Lake Travis, September 7, 2009.
September 7th, 2009
Taken with the spectacular Nokia N800 CrapCam ™ and the gpscamera application.
Some questions on the subject of rights and the Constitution.
September 7th, 2009Late last week, Patrick over at Popehat posted an interesting entry about the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision in Britt v. State. The short version is that Britt was convicted of quaalude possession (a felony) in the 1970s, sued to maintain his right to own firearms, and won.
The Court, in a 5-2 decision, limited its holding to Britt’s specific facts, finding that the exercise of state police power to bar firearms to a non-violent felon, who had demonstrated good character for thirty years, was an unreasonable restriction of the state right to keep and bear arms.
I strongly recommend going over to Popehat and reading all of Patrick’s excellent post. But I want to use it as a jumping-off point to discuss a question I’ve been wondering about, without hijacking Popehat.
Where does the State (I’m using “the State” to refer to both state and Federal governments) get the authority to deny Constitutional rights to felons?
Frickin’ Lasers.
September 7th, 2009By way of Say Uncle, we learn that someone has come up with a laser sight for the NAA .22LR and .22 magnum revolvers.
While we admire the cleverness of the idea, this strikes us as being a solution in search of a problem (to quote the late Col. Cooper). It doesn’t seem that this is going to increase hit probability very much on a tiny weapon, which is basically intended to be used at not much more than contact range. And the sight goes for about 50% of the price of the gun; that seems high, but perhaps not out of line compared to Crimson Trace grips.
The video on that site is worth watching, if only for the cheese factor.
Project e, Part 3: The Virtualizing
September 3rd, 2009Work on Project e continues, slowly, as time permits.
- The Alfa WiFi adapter worked right out of the box; just a simple plug and play operation. Who’d a thunk it?
- Built-in wireless continues to be a problem, but mostly on my home network. I am starting to wonder if this is an issue with the access point. Wireless at St. Ed’s (where I’m spending a lot of time these days) isn’t great, but at least the connections stay up.
- As far as I can tell, the current version of Wireshark for Ubuntu 9.04 is 1.0.7, while the current stable version for other platforms (including Ubuntu Karmic, aka 9.10) is 1.2.1. Between that and the other wired/wireless networking issues, I think I’m going to wait until Karmic drops in late October, then upgrade and install Wireshark and Kismet if networking is stable.
In the meantime, I’ve spent the last few days playing around with something else…
Inglourious Basterds discussion (contains spoilers!)
September 2nd, 2009Commvault Bryan and I have been involved in an ongoing discussion of Inglourious Basterds during our breaks and lunch hour at work. I thought I’d throw this open to the masses and see what you guys have to say. Big, huge, giving away the entire movie spoilers after the break…
Clippings: September 2nd, 2009.
September 2nd, 2009The University of Texas has decided to end participation in the National Merit Scholarship Program. This saddens me, as I was one of those folks who benefited from the program when I was attending UT.
Starting next fall, the university will begin channeling that money into need-based aid instead.
I’m a little shocked that there hasn’t been more attention to this NYT article about Memorial Medical Center in the wake of Katrina.
It is now evident that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood. When the names on toxicology reports and autopsies are matched with recollections and documentation from the days after Katrina, it appears that at least 17 patients were injected with morphine or the sedative midazolam, or both, after a long-awaited rescue effort was at last emptying the hospital. A number of these patients were extremely ill and might not have survived the evacuation. Several were almost certainly not near death when they were injected, according to medical professionals who treated them at Memorial and an internist’s review of their charts and autopsies that was commissioned by investigators but never made public.
Linking to this Fast Company article about fonts that make people mad (thanks to Radley Balko) gives me an excuse to link to one of my favorite Achewoods.
Someone thinks it is a good idea to cancel their morning local news program and replace it with a televised radio show. Yeah. I don’t see this ending well. Televised radio works very well; if your name is “Howard Stern”.
This is already on FARK, but I couldn’t let it pass; last week they linked to a NY Daily News story about a former rapper who got Warner Music to pay for her Ph.D in psychology. Great story; persecuted artist sticks it to the evil record company execs, right? Except the story was a complete fabrication.
Quick thoughts on Inglourious Basterds.
August 30th, 2009- Overall, it was a pleasant way to spend a 100+ degree summer afternoon.
- However, Inglourious Basterds suffers from much the same problem I think Death Proof had. Quentin Tarantino is too much in love with the sound of his own voice as a writer. Sure, he’s somewhat entitled to be; when he’s on, he’s very good at it. But apparently no one around him is willing to edit him; there’s no one to say, “Q, the basement scene goes on a little too long,” or “Q, less talk, more Nazi killing.”
- Mélanie Laurent is something special.
- I was glad to see Zoe Bell, even if it was just stunt credit; she was the best thing in Death Proof, and I hope Tarantino or someone puts her in a real movie sometime soon.
- Edited to add: I should have linked to Jesse Walker’s essay on Reason‘s web site when I was composing this last night. Sorry.
We like the moon, but not as much as a spoon…
August 30th, 2009The Austin American-Statesman has a wonderful profile of UT geology professor Bill Muehlberger, the man who has been teaching geology to NASA astronauts since 1964.
…he believes it’s important for humankind to return to the moon — and not just to finish the work begun at the old landing sites.
“I think it would be more valuable to go to new places,” he says. “One of my favorites is the Copernicus Crater. You could land in the bottom of it and be within a mile of the central uplift, which brings you stuff in from deeper in the moon. Or you could go over a mile in the other direction, to stuff that fell back out of the crater during the impact, and get a 3-D sampling. You’d be landing on glass, on the melt rock that flowed in during the impact. Hey. We could keep going forever … “
I’m fascinated by geology, but, sadly, not very good at it. That hasn’t stopped me from reading John McPhee’s and Simon Winchester’s books, though. In that vein, I’d like to recommend Donald Beattie’s great book, Taking Science to the Moon
Random notes from a Friday night dinner.
August 28th, 2009First of all, if any of my friends (or even blog readers who are not friends) are considering purchasing Snow Leopard from Amazon, here’s the link
To keep this from being a 100% “Buy Amazon! Give me money!” entry, I want to mention a web log that’s new to me; by way of Lawrence, we have Lovely Listing. One entry that he found particularly striking was the velour people. Lawrence also included this link, but I’m not sure where he found it on Lovely Listing.
When he mentioned the names Arakawa and Gins, I thought they sounded somewhat familiar. Indeed, they were; it turns out Arakawa and Gins were two of Bernie Madoff’s clients. (That second link is by way of Nancy Nall, who has some pungent things to say on the subject.)
Principles.
August 28th, 2009I’m about 99 and 44/100ths percent Liberatarian. Every so often, however, something comes along and makes me question my principles.
For example, when I see that the State of Texas has approved personalized license plates that sell for $395 a year, I’m tempted to endorse increasing the income tax rate to 90% for anyone dumb enough to pay that kind of money for a license plate. (The same applies to anyone who would pay $4,295 for a tone arm to improve the playback of their 78s, or $500 for an Ethernet cable
I heartily endorse this event or product. (#2 in a series)
August 27th, 2009I’ve generally been pleased with the quality of the No Starch books I’ve picked up. And they’ve been a constant and friendly presence at DEFCON for as long as I’ve been going.
What pushed me over the edge, though, is that I ordered some books on Saturday. They were at my PO Box by Wednesday, shipped priority mail, and No Starch didn’t charge me anything over actual cost for the shipping.
No Starch is also running a 30% off sale through August 31st; enter voucher code 100896985 at checkout.
Clippings: August 26th, 2009
August 26th, 2009I haven’t been to NYC since Jesus was a corporal, but for some reason I enjoy reading the NYT food coverage. Retiring food critic Frank Bruni has a nice retrospective piece in which he answers questions like “What’s the best sushi?” (Answer: are you willing to drop $400 a person?) and “What’s the best steakhouse?” I would have liked to see more of his greatest hits, such as the classic review of Ninja, but you can’t have everything…
Speaking of the NYT, I have a new blog to watch: The NYTPicker. This looks like it could fill the void left by SmarterTimes and the late lamented J. J. Hunsecker’s Spy column. If they start referring to “bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord”, I am there, man.
I feel compelled to say something about Teddles, but I (and probably a dozen other people by now) have already used the “…unavailable for comment” trope. So I’m grudgingly linking to Michael Kelly’s “A Sober Look At Ted Kennedy“. I say grudgingly because the formatting and pagination of this version of the article is horrible. You’d be a lot better off finding and reading a copy of Kelly’s excellent posthumous collection Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings
Clippings: August 25, 2009 (plus blogging slowdown)
August 25th, 2009Classes have started up again at St. Edward’s, so blogging is likely to slow down a bit. I’m planning on taking Project e with me to classes, so I may have some time to blog before class and during breaks; however, St. Ed’s made some changes to the wireless network this semester, and so far connectivity isn’t working very well for anyone. Work on Project e does continue, slowly.
I did want to point out two interesting articles: this one from The Atlantic on health care reform, and why the current proposals will do nothing to fix the structural problems of our health care system (by way of Radley Balko), and Roger Ebert’s latest journal entry on AA and his alcoholism.