Hi, oops I think we filled up a log file, and then I couldn't get into the server because of [long dumb chain of technical bullshit]. We're back up now. And SSL works again too, so there's that. How is everyone? Ew gross ____Not the real rusty There Now user profiles only show up if either the user is a real user, or the person looking at the profile page is a real user. So bio spam can't be seen by google anymore. ____Not the real rusty When did I say that? No, I didn't mean it. I'm not sure what "the latest scoop" even is anymore. ____Not the real rusty lol no I finally got someone to come and take it though, so it's not my problem anymore. My friend got a nice 24 ft racing sailboat so I get to race that and not have any of the hassle of boat ownership. ____Not the real rusty That page That message is ancient, I'm not entirely sure where it even comes from. I may look for it, but to be honest it's way more likely that I won't. :-) ____Not the real rusty Today in K5 History Ever wonder what else was posted today? I probably should I was planning to add it there or something. But at this point the old shit is far and away the most interesting thing about K5. ____Not the real rusty K5: now powered by fossil fuels I got an email this morning that said the hosting facility was down because of a problem with the fuel filter or clutch or something. I actually forgot that K5 is located in lower Manhattan. Anyway, it seems to be back up now, so it's either been migrated elsewhere or we're currently being powered by fossil fuels. So slap big old "I POLLUTE" bumper sticker on us wheee! There you go ____Not the real rusty Lights in the sky Either the 10 million candlepower RUSTYSIGNAL projected over Gotham, or, like, email. rusty@kuro5hin.org has always worked. I pretty much never look at help@ anymore though. ____Not the real rusty What's funny is All that text was from long ago, when we actually did move servers. It had nothing to do with this downtime. I sort of feel like I should put up a page with a random made-up explanation for when the next downtime happens. ____Not the real rusty Dude We can scrape off cum with 0 downtime now. Priorities! ____Not the real rusty Oops How do I server? So what happened was first the db server crashed, and Voxel discovered it and fixed it in the middle of the night on the Fourth of July while I was really quite drunk on Johnny Walker Black label, which is good stuff by the way. Then the web server crashed, and Voxel fixed that too, but I forgot that the proxy apache has to be restarted by hand. And then this morning I remembered that the site was down and did that, so here we are again! Four nines uptime baby. 90% of the time, 9 out of 10 pages will load in 9 seconds or less. And the fourth nine is just made up. Tell him you fucked his wife? ____Not the real rusty No sign of one I did some poking in the database. If he had one, it wasn't obvious. ____Not the real rusty Why assume mutuality? There are lots of people who know me but I don't know, and vice versa. I wouldn't assume that list membership is mutual automatically. ____Not the real rusty Perfect "Rusty you're a cunt." This thing is amazing! That's exactly what I would have said to me. ____Not the real rusty Lion So I got a macbook air, and I like it a lot, but Lion is forcing me to reverse my sense of which way the page goes when I scroll. It feels a little like learning to drive on the other side of the road all pf a sudden. Update [2012-5-21 12:8:42 by rusty]: I edited this just to say I'm not even gonna bother fixing that typo. DEAL WITH IT In case you missed it in HHD's diary: http://i.qkme.me/3pdpc3.jpg :-) I doubt it She used to look at my diary once in a while, but I think everyone's forgotten it exists by now. ____Not the real rusty Why? ____Not the real rusty Haha I talked to a girl! I must have the hots for her. Nerd virgin. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh my god I'M A MUENSTER! ____Not the real rusty It's fine so far The scroll thing is weird, but I see the reasoning for it. I'm getting used to it and it's only been a coupe days. You can set it the old way but I figured this is going to be the new hotness and I might as well just learn it. It's a new machine though, so it's not like I had to upgrade. I've heard about people finding that things suddenly don't work, like photoshop and whatnot. I'm probably not going to upgrade any of my other machines in a hurry. ____Not the real rusty See http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/5/21/12741/5117/6#6 I'm not complaining about it, just getting used to it. ____Not the real rusty You know what they did do though? They turned off the double tap to grab and drag thing. That killed me for hours till I found out how to re-enable that. It's in like Accessibility Prefs or something, which is bullshit. I dn't know how they thought anyone was supposed to use a laptop without that. ____Not the real rusty How do you drag? Or select? ____Not the real rusty But then You have to keep it held down and what if you slide off the edge of the pad? I dunno, I'm just not going to give up my click-lock. ____Not the real rusty Waste of a perfectly good finger I could be picking my nose or doing any number of useful things with that finger. ____Not the real rusty You must be loose ____Not the real rusty I'm glad we're on the same page here ____Not the real rusty Kuro5hin.org: Technology and Culture, for Llama Fuckers. ____Not the real rusty Spaces I don't even really understand how to get more desktops anymore. I couldn't even find spaces. Does it still exist? ____Not the real rusty Oh look! I guess there are still multiple desktops. That's great. They made it all a lot less obvious though huh? ____Not the real rusty Thanks! http://i.qkme.me/3pdpc3.jpg ____Not the real rusty In this diary, we post pictures of ourselves Hey you weirdos. Link to a picture of what you look like. I'm curious who's still here. I'll start: http://imgur.com/Dt3q1 Take a shower and shave, you filthy hippie. Update [2012-5-17 14:8:41 by rusty]: All clean! http://imgur.com/Ic5zs That was, by the way taken just now. I'm going to go clean myself. Hrrrrgh. ____Not the real rusty PICTURE Help this not be a total failure. ____Not the real rusty lol faggot Same shirt though. :-) ____Not the real rusty BAN ME IF YUO CAN bundle of sticks ____Not the real rusty TWO CAN PLAY Guess which one is Jane and which one is Jane's gay lover. Hint: Everyone got pegged later that night. http://imgur.com/EfHb7 ____Not the real rusty roofie face? ____Not the real rusty Use a uniform resource locator Otherwise known as a URL. I'm sure they don't know what those are at HuSi. I don't want to host your ugly face. Put it on imgur like everyone else. ____Not the real rusty O_O o_0 ____Not the real rusty Nope Although that's probably what made me think of it. No! This is about my quest to see pictures of the rest of you. ____Not the real rusty YAY Well done, non-coward :-) ____Not the real rusty Why don't you have a seat over there ____Not the real rusty If Terry Pratchett had a child with Saddam Hussein. ____Not the real rusty And this is worse than being one of those people who posts on K5? I mean, really. Being at rock bottom already means you have a lot of freedom. ____Not the real rusty Except for the bridesmaids, who were dressed as pruple-assed baboons. But that's how they're dressed in most weddings. ____Not the real rusty Or hobo http://www.regretsy.com/2011/08/02/its-called-poverty-youve-probably-never-heard -of-it/ ____Not the real rusty Also misogyny and antisemitism Are there people who claim they love 1940s culture? ____Not the real rusty Dat ass! Forget about you, post more of Jeannie :-) ____Not the real rusty We're old. AND NOT EVEN SORRY ____Not the real rusty For a design slice? Pff. Designers hate that shit. All the ones I know quote slicing and html work higher than they need to because they don't want to do that work. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I'm not saying slicing is monkey work -- producing a good accurate cross-platform html/css slice from a psd is a specialized skill. It's just one with a sort of awkward place in the design/code hierarchy. I know one designer who actually enjoys doing it, and prices it lower than his straight design work. He gets plenty of work. I know the hardest position to keep filled at the places I've worked has always been design and implementation. We've never tried offshoring though. Maybe we should. ____Not the real rusty No way to tell Without nudes. There are just too many ways to make them look different with clothing. ____Not the real rusty Why are you looking at cosplayers then? ____Not the real rusty Uhhhhh facepalm? ____Not the real rusty But The bankers didn't loan money to Greece. They loaned money to an EU member state. They knew full well that the Greeks weren't good for it. The loans were always going to be paid by Germany. The right answer here is basically to make Germany pay off the Greek debt (which is what they promised to do by allowing them into the EU) and change their retarded monetary union into a proper fiscal union, if they can. ____Not the real rusty gay diary ____Not the real rusty Atheism is a faith The choice of belief of unbelief in a god or gods is a question of faith, always. By definition. And I say that as an atheist. Atheists who claim they got there by way of reason are stupid. ____Not the real rusty It drives me nuts too Atheists trying to argue against religion by way of logic is as retarded as religious people trying to argue against science by way of faith. At the very beginning, everyone has a choice. Do you believe in a universe that operates according to fixed rules that are, in principle, knowable, or do you not? There is no rational basis for making this choice either way. You just have to choose whether you put your faith in a supreme being or in the existence of fixed rules. Everything else you believe flows from that act of faith. If everyone understood this, we wouldn't have to have this dumb religion vs science argument anymore. ____Not the real rusty Also... If everyone understood this, it would be obvious why religious scientists are suffering from some very confused thinking. I can understand believing in religion like as a story or a philosophy, but if you believe there's an actual God who's actually omnipotent or whatever, what is the point of doing scientific experiments? It doesn't make any sense. ____Not the real rusty Yes, that may well be, but, on the other hand, you're a crazy person. :-) ____Not the real rusty I suppose But you're just playing, if god can change the rules or make exceptions at any time. I mean, philosophically you can't really see it as building an epistemological structure. Just passing the time and finding out whatever god wants to let you find out. ____Not the real rusty Ehhh If that's your standard then sure, I'm "agnostic." But by my argument, no one has ultimate knowledge. There is no knowing whether there's a god or not, just belief either way. So everyone is agnostic and some of us have faith one way or the other. I don't really see what that changes though. ____Not the real rusty Sure I don't have an absence of belief. I have a positive faith in the existence of universal rules. ____Not the real rusty No True Scotsman $ ____Not the real rusty The Athiest's Creed: 1. I, and only I, am a TRUE atheist ____Not the real rusty I disagree For the explanation of which, see above. I've already explained it as clearly as I will ever be able to. I guess all I'd add is that I'm not a skeptic. I'm a believer in a scientifically knowable universe. ____Not the real rusty No, no I'm talking about the "IM A SKEPTIC HURR DURR" Penn and Teller thing. You don't need to be a skeptic to believe in the method of science. There's no need to use the word "skeptic" except to invoke a particular brand of current atheism that is marked mainly by its own self-regard. ____Not the real rusty Sort of? We seem to meet at "everybody has religion," although I'd reword that to "everybody has faith in something." But for the most part I feel like we're conversing at different levels. What I'm saying is really simple. Don't try to overthink it. It's just that the question of whether to believe in a god or gods is, by definition a religious question -- a question of faith. The question of whether you believe that the method of science is capable of determining truths (eternal, unfuckwithable truths) about the universe is also a question of faith. This proceeds from science only being able to prove negatives, never positives. You have to make an assumption that observations you can repeat enough times (for some definition of "enough") will always remain true as long as the same conditions hold. There's no possibility of proof, for this. You just have to believe it. That second assumption is incompatible with belief in a god that can just change the rules at will. Period. It's a fork in the road -- you can believe in one thing or the other, but not both (consistently). Or you can choose not to choose, I suppose. But a choice of one path or the other is a leap of faith, no matter which path you follow. So, I'm saying, everyone is faced with a choice, that exists wholly on the grounds of faith, whether you believe in the conditional truths of science, or the religious truths of some deity. That's all. The idea of skepticism, or scientific method, or most of the things you're talking about are down the road from this fork. They're not really relevant to what I'm trying to say. That's all. And no, I have no illusion that this is the mainstream view of either side. It's not my view alone, but it goes little recognized, unfortunately. I feel like it gives both atheists and the religious a common ground to understand each other, and helps me not be bothered by religion as such, as a choice. What the religious do still bothers me sometimes, but what atheists do bothers me sometimes too. As for "what is a life worth living?" I don't really see any meaning in the question. The universe doesn't care. And everything that happens in your life happens regardless of your illusion of free choice. But that's a whole 'nother area where I do not speak for the mainstream. :-) ____Not the real rusty This is probably the easiest way to explain it: http://imgur.com/liv5H,GApz8 ____Not the real rusty You're on k5 I think the right word is obvious. :-) Fighting the political influence of religion is another matter entirely, really. I'm just talking about my own take on the philosophical underpinnings of what I believe. ____Not the real rusty I don't speak for anyone else but my own faith in the absence of any god or supreme being is absolute. I put all my trust in the proposition that the universe operates according to... etc. see above. ____Not the real rusty Pfffff If a god wanted to intervene it could just change all the records and memories. Until five minutes ago, the average acceleration of gravity on the Earth's surface was 9.2 m/s^2. Prove that it wasn't. Nope, you have to decide a priori. If you decide to believe in evidence, that's great. Me too! But it's a faith. ____Not the real rusty #k5isdying #meatflaps ____Not the real rusty You're right Why is anyone linking to K5 from G+? That's odd. ____Not the real rusty INFORMATIVE! #trending ____Not the real rusty What is this even about? Made front page because flesh eating bacteria. But I have no idea what this poll is about. ____Not the real rusty FLESH EATING BACTERIA NEWS? Oh jesus i had my cruise control on there... Is this something I need CNN to know about? ____Not the real rusty Congratulations! ____Not the real rusty Pics or it didn't happen :-) ____Not the real rusty POST THEM! I don't think I've ever seen a picture of you. Anyway there's only like four people here now. ____Not the real rusty PS That shit cray. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfM_wS7qYfY ____Not the real rusty She should think of it as gaining a space where a leg used to be. ____Not the real rusty Anybody use the twitter? I got banned from facebook for a day yesterday, and honestly my facebook network is really lacking in random assholes from the internet that I don't even like. So I signed up for twitter to remedy that. Feel free to follow rustyk5 if you like to read tweets that aren't funny or interesting. Isn't that great? I love that picture. I had just got up and not shaved in like a week. I look fucking evil. ____Not the real rusty Shhhh I was talking about you. ____Not the real rusty Just for fun Also yeah, no, K5 is not "major" anymore. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you. Crawford annoyed people. TBH I'm not sure what he did. Just seemed like a good idea. ____Not the real rusty HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA It was epic. Those faggots think I'm banned now too, but I'm not. ____Not the real rusty Now I am lol ____Not the real rusty It's exactly as horrifying as you imagine ____Not the real rusty My wife and I have sex. ____Not the real rusty Yes but that's the wrong kind of sex. ____Not the real rusty rustina.mov ____Not the real rusty Ummmmmmm <.< ____Not the real rusty Lots of jobs suck So? ____Not the real rusty Cause why? Which one? ____Not the real rusty There's already a list ...of the best diaries of all time. It's just empty. lololol Nah, but seriously y'all. That's a good idea. How would they be chosen? ____Not the real rusty This man makes an excellent point. ____Not the real rusty Kill yourself ____Not the real rusty Chubby thighs ____Not the real rusty I saw them when they came to town recently. I don't think they're ironic -- the older stuff is straight-up fat blues rock. It's really good. Brothers and El Camino got a little more expansive with organs and extra guitars and stuff, so hoefully they return to the roots soon. But man, when it's just those two guys on stage, they kick ass. ____Not the real rusty Hot ____Not the real rusty No We need the Committee for the Promotion of Horsecock and the Prevention of Schitzoaffective Disorder. ____Not the real rusty It's Christmas Vacation! And I forgot to start drinking for almost 45 minutes. Fixed that now. Hey K5 turned 12 years old a couple days ago. I didn't mention it or anything, but it did. What are you drinking for the holiday season? Crappy We had some kind of chest cold w/cough that lasted for at least two weeks. My wife had it for a month. It was horrible. I got it, but really only for a week or ten days. I think the vitamin D is paying off. ____Not the real rusty I've never even heard of freeway cola ____Not the real rusty So far You're winning. I'm drinking cider. ____Not the real rusty What happens? ____Not the real rusty Is that chrome? If so, I probably know what's up. The new chrome does something really stupid when you give it a url with two slashes in a row. It pretends they're one slash. As far as I know, this is the first browser ever to act this way. ____Not the real rusty Let me know if it keeps happening. I fixed what I suspect was the problem, but maybe it's something else. ____Not the real rusty Cancel? Cancel cancel. Cancel? Cancel. ____Not the real rusty That's not really true For the most part, his best work was done before the drugs and the booze got on top of him. When he was coked to the tits 24/7 he wrote shit like Tommyknockers. I suspect that if they hadn't been so fucked up all the time Poe and Thompson would have done more and better work. Thomas de Quincey and Coleridge probably needed it though. ____Not the real rusty No Too old. ____Not the real rusty Testing... test ____Not the real rusty Dress better That's a good one. Stick with that. But purposely fail the rest of them -- those are stupid resolutions. ____Not the real rusty Over easy Or scrambled. I had scrambled with Jarlsberg cheese this morning. Yum. ____Not the real rusty If there's a way I can make it so you lose all your text before posting it instead of only some, just let me know. ____Not the real rusty WHERE'S THE FUCKING LIKE BUTTON What a shit website. ____Not the real rusty You accidentally the whole chicken on purpose? ____Not the real rusty Old website is old Yeah, K5 crashed last night because it's running an OS from, like, 1962. Voxel noticed and fixed it in the middle of the night while I was sound asleep but they didn't get the web services restarted. So sorry about that. I know I've said it before, but Voxel is really kick-ass. I'd say that even if they weren't hosting me for free. I've had other hosts, and Voxel is just in a whole different league. We're going to get shit upgraded around here. You now, not stuff that you'll be able to see, but under the hood. [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] ____Not the real rusty That's so outrageous that my outrage is outraged. ____Not the real rusty My outage is also outraged ____Not the real rusty lol fake VEVO ____Not the real rusty Four days? Are you completely kidding? Is this what people believe now? Two weeks is just fine. Nothing's going to be wrong with refrigerated chili in two weeks. Probably nothing would be wrong with it for a month, at least. The first thing that would happen would be that it would start to pick up off flavors from the fridge itself. Any spoilage or mold that eventually formed would be harmless -- maybe not appetizing, but not going to hurt you. Honestly, if you people are throwing away food that's four days old, you're out of your minds. ____Not the real rusty Not that freezing is bad I mean, if you're not going to eat something in the immediate future, freezing it is fine. It'll keep longer and better. But I still take exception to four days as a limit. That's just crazy talk. ____Not the real rusty HEY Y U LEAVE FACEBOOK Now it's my turn to pry. That time of month? ____Not the real rusty I would think sandwich ethics would be important to you. ____Not the real rusty I've been taking Vitamin D I have no idea if it's doing any good, but it hasn't killed me. Supposedly everyone is vitamin D deficient. ____Not the real rusty That's ok I take WAAAAAY more than you're supposed to. 4,000 IU/day instead of the ridiculously low RDA of 600 IU/day. It seems like up to 10,000 IU/day is fine, but there is a lot of uncertainty. I need to get a blood test done pretty soon to see if it's doing anything. ____Not the real rusty I don't know for sure I've read that it's because the human body is tuned for an "optimum" level of D that's equivalent to what your skin can synthesize when it gets full sun exposure (i.e. like you were naked) for ~16 hrs a day. Which obviously no one gets. But it's always hard to distinguish nonsense from reliable info when you get into vitamins and supplements. I think it's reasonable to assume that since it's the only vitamin that our body actually makes, and it's entwined in a shitload of processes in the body, it's probably fairly important. The preceding may all be utter bullshit. ____Not the real rusty Vitamin D is fat-soluble You can overdose on it, and it's very hard to purge form the body, unlike the water-soluble vitamins. Vitamin E, A, and K, same thing. ____Not the real rusty Yes arctic circle candy etc ____Not the real rusty That was fun, wasn't it? I hope you all enjoyed the occupation. I know I did! Also: 3Jane posted more than four diaries within three hours, which triggers an automatic ban & erasing of the diaries that triggered it. I suppose I could change that if you all feel like we don't need it, but it's basically just an anti crapflooding thing. I gave him his account back (again) anyway, the useless twat. I'm glad I could help fuck up the rest of the internet for you. Noscript is a pretty blunt tool though. Adblock plus does everything it does, but better. ____Not the real rusty You betcha Done. What's funny is the version on K5 was updated more recently than the version on localroger.com. ____Not the real rusty Probably I don't know. I needed a long break from K5, I think. I was just burned out and tired of it. I'm feeling a lot more cheerful and tolerant toward all your bullshits these days though. ____Not the real rusty You are so extremely clever! We've never actually been hacked, in this way. One of the servers had a rootkit on it once, but that appeared to be just blind vulnerability probing. It didn't seem like anyone had deliberately targeted us. ____Not the real rusty Um no I'm fucking with all of you. I don't know why that's so hard for everyone to conclude. It looked like it would be fun. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm a mellow dude I really just want my carpet back, man. ____Not the real rusty The fun part is It's viral. If you comment in an occupied story, the protesters move on and occupy your stories. ____Not the real rusty You're not protesting You're being protested. For associating with that lowlife one percenter Lady 3Jane in some way. For extra fun, see if you can track the viral spread of the #occupy movement through diaries. ____Not the real rusty AdBlock Plus which you should be using anyway. But I'm going to make them go away now in any case, so whatever. ____Not the real rusty Delete system32 That'll fix it. ____Not the real rusty This. ____Not the real rusty Wow Just wow. ____Not the real rusty Not civil war He's preparing for a military coup, when the country votes to leave the EU. I think he's sick of being the bad guy and peddling the German bankers austerity, and he's giving the Greek people a chance to say no thank you, and give him a political out for doing what he should want to do already. ____Not the real rusty mfw 2011 Not using adblock. ____Not the real rusty Maslow's Heirarchy: Food, water, sex Safety and security Love, family Self-esteem, confidence Awesome watches. Steampunk Furry / cosplay ____Not the real rusty 60% I chose at random. ____Not the real rusty Yeesh I don't even want to eat a Big Mac that smells like a Big Mac. ____Not the real rusty And still... ...there isn't really any place that primarily focuses on original writing, is there? Except, like, fucking Huffpo. Sites like The Daily Beast are starting to do more of a blog take on the news, but still. There isn't yet anything like what K5 used to be, really. You have to wonder if it's just impossible, or what. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I've come to agree. I always hoped it could be crowd-sourced, but it just can't. Some combination of user moderation, reporting problems, and pro moderation is probably the best balance, along with tools to let people filter out those they consider annoying. I basically just don't have the time or the will to do what would need to be done to make K5 work (potentially) again. But there is still a lack. ____Not the real rusty Ghadaffi's Capture in HD From a purely aesthetic point of view, this is some amazing footage. If you were to say "please identify 2 minutes of filmed media that encapsulates the 21st century so far," I'd give you this and call it a job well done. I'm thinking more aestheticlly than politically I have no idea how the Arab Spring will turn out -- I suspect a long process of messy parlimentarianism, sectarianism, and possibly low-level sectarian violence. But I'm looking at this clip more from a filmic point of view. It captures the time, I think. There's an anonymous desert, and the sort of sun-dazzled air of violence that has been so pervasive with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a crowd of semi-military looking guys, there's a former all-powerful leader looking greasy, bloody, and wrecked (c.f. Saddam's spider hole & the famous dental exam video). There's the over-crisp hyper-saturated HD phone-cam effect, where the camera swings wildly but there's never any motion blur at all, which, especially combined with the super bright sunlight, lends the whole thing a surreal look, almost like it's computer-generated. And then there's the filming technique itself -- the wild swinging and dizzying changes of POV and focus, and very occasionally, just one or two seconds of totally clear, still view of Ghadaffi, or a gun, or someone saying "Allah hu Akbar," or whatever. At one point Ghadaffi actually spreads both his arms out and falls to his knees. There is not a director alive that would have the balls to put such a blatant Jesus reference in a bit of video like this. I would probably have to write pages and pages to really get at what is so striking here, but that's the sort of tl;dr summary. ____Not the real rusty From "The Stranger" I waited. The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother's funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations--especially in my forehead, where all the veins seemed to be bursting through the skin. I couldn't stand it any longer, and took another step forward. I knew it was a fool thing to do; I wouldn't get out of the sun by moving on a yard or so. But I took that step, just one step, forward. And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight. A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing. ____Not the real rusty Oh also The sheer fact that I'm seeing this because someone on a chan site said the vid was on liveleak, where it's tagged with the logo of some fucking Libyan political organization or something. No formal media organization had anything to do with this video from production to when it reached my eyeballs, except the one that actually sells me bandwidth. That's a new thing too -- the anarchization of media, as you said. But that has been progressing for a while. It's certainly a major theme of this century too, though. ____Not the real rusty Well... In Libya, I don't think there was anything that could be described as an invasion. The execution of Ghadaffi was pretty clearly murder though. He's walking under his own power in several videos, and then a short time later he was dead. This will go down as a really unfortunate stain on the Libyan revolution. ____Not the real rusty Hippie fail ____Not the real rusty No We buried it with a little string that runs up to a bell on the surface though, just in case. No signs of life yet. ____Not the real rusty I SEE YOU STARTED EARLY SOLDIER ____Not the real rusty Otter Box I have their case for my ipod touch, and I like it. Most cases suck, but Otter's do not. http://www.otterbox.com/iPhone-4S-Commuter-Series-Case/APL4-I4SUN,default,pd.htm l ____Not the real rusty I like this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZPCusOjX58 That is all. Also this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g48C0CEL0dQ ____Not the real rusty Not *all the time* But once in a while, when I'm in the right mood. Andrew Bird is wildly inconsistent though. I hate a lot of his songs, and really like some. ____Not the real rusty ror I'm sorry, you'll have to go back to fucking sheep instead. ____Not the real rusty It seems like he's been slightly famous for a long time. Doesn't seem to be getting any more or less famous though. If he had a show here I'd probably go, if it wasn't inconvenient. ____Not the real rusty Ask K5: Why don't I have a tattoo? I've never gotten a tattoo. Why is that? I have no good reason. I'm not opposed to them. Most people I know have one. I just haven't ever had that moment where I think "I have to get this permanently inked on my body forever." Do you have a tattoo? If so, of what, and why? Should I get one? Not a submarine? Then my ass could be full of seamen. ____Not the real rusty Welcome to Jamaica, mon and have a nice day ____Not the real rusty Yeah... Me too, sort of. Although I haven't thought I'd regret it, so much, just that nothing's ever said "you must get this!" It seems like most people with tattoos don't really think that way, though. Judging by the relative casualness that a lot of people show about it. Maybe there are just tattoo people and non-tattoo people? I think I wish I was the former, but might be the latter. ____Not the real rusty You're quirky I like the cut of your jib. ____Not the real rusty What's your emblem? pics or it didn't happen ____Not the real rusty Why wouldn't I? I mean, it's not like you get to a scanner without handing over your ID three or four times. It's a little late by then, no? I'm not really convinced that who I am is rightfully secret or privileged information. That is, I don't know that anonymity is a right, in the physical world. ____Not the real rusty Is this a trick question? do you tag photos in facebook? do you not encrypt your phone calls & emails? Of course I do! Of course I don't! Srsly. Why live like you're already a criminal? ____Not the real rusty My ballsack already has tomtom ____Not the real rusty Sounds convenient capitalist running dog. ____Not the real rusty I can't watch that vidya. I look so little! ____Not the real rusty Typo should read "Learn to PROMOTE suicide" ____Not the real rusty Hay Guise What's Up I'm trying to read Stephenson's new one, REAMDE, but I keep thinking that if any character in it stopped acting retarded for even one single page, there would be no plot at all. It's pretty lousy. I'm about halfway through and stopped to read "Lunar Park" by Bret Ellis instead. I'm enjoying that a lot more so far. noobs I know right ____Not the real rusty Yes I mean, no. Time, not space. No, I don't understand the question. ____Not the real rusty No, I didn't get it Which is kind of a surprise, as our postal people are pretty good at that stuff. I still get mail addressed to my first address here, from ten years ago. I wonder if it was the lack of ZIP code. Weird. I would have liked to have gotten that. ____Not the real rusty Still and all Peaks is in the ZIP code database. I mean, I have a copy of it, and it's there. Surely the USPS also has a copy of the zip code db? ____Not the real rusty You know... I hated Anathem the first time through. Hated it. Just completely. But I read it again not that long ago and the second time I didn't think it was that bad. Not that it was good, but it wasn't as bad as I remembered. It suffered from trying to explain philosophy without naming the actual philosophy being discussed though. He sort of had to do it that way, but he painted himself into a corner and fucked that book up before it even properly got started. The Baroque Cycle is remarkable because he's writing about actual history, so he can just fucking write about it. It works. Hallaleujah. This one is more in the Cryptonomicon mold. What irks me is that there isn't one real character in it. Nobody is like any of these people. and if you find yourself, more than once, writing in your action thriller: "If this was an action thriller no one would believe that had just happened!" then you have failed. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I liked Anathem the second time because I already knew what the retarded plot was and could just ignore it. He should just write pop-sci nonfiction. It would be fantastic. ____Not the real rusty It's true The best parts of the Baroque Cycle were all when some character was explaining something to some other character. A whole book of Neal explaining shit to us would be pretty great. ____Not the real rusty Well I liked Snow Crash a lot 15 years ago. I think I have tried to re-read it since and... it didn't hold up so well. I really read very little scifi of any kind though. The Baroque Cycle books, I personally love to death. But a lot of people hate them, so who knows. It seems to be one or the other. ____Not the real rusty You know what it is? Pynchon, DFW, Anthony Burgess All writers who care a lot about people. What drives them, why they do things, etc. Also people who are generally very knowledgeable about weird stuff, but the force of all their writing is about people. That's why they're good writers, who happen to be able to make a novel about, say, surveying in early America so totally compelling. Stephenson is like an aspie Thomas Pynchon. He's Pynchon if you take out all the understanding and interest in people. His novels only have people in them at all because he can't literally write a novel about nothing but technology. ____Not the real rusty However His female characters are all supernaturally masculine and badass. And then every once in a while they cry, to remind us they're female. REAMDE features yet another one of these. ____Not the real rusty The only exception ...is Eliza in the later Baroque cycle books, where she has kids and starts worrying about how to survive in the world as a woman. It's the only time I think he actually gets near what it actually means to be a woman, and the only reason he can is because it's "the past." Obvs he thinks that's not such a concern these days because women can just be men with vaginas now. ____Not the real rusty Wasn't me I don't actually know what Trade Wars is. It seems like I'm not the only one that got bored in the middle of REAMDE though, huh. The best part is that I'm still on lots of PR zombies email lists, so the publisher sent me my copy for free. I'm thrilled I didn't pay the assraping $35 cover price for this thing. Even for free I'm kind of meh. ____Not the real rusty I stopped using linux a few years ago because I was tired of sysadminng. iMacs ftw. Mac laptops are nice but they cost a lot and wear out fast. ____Not the real rusty The goddamn power supply The power supply breaks in such a way that it will never again charge a battery. And the "geniuses" say "Well Gee we never done seen that before" even though it is apparently the deahthmode of like 75% of mac laptops. It's kind of infuriating that they've been doing this for more than five years and it's still not fixed. ____Not the real rusty The motherboard power controller It's something that they can't fix without basically replacing the machine. Grar. ____Not the real rusty I don't know If anyone knew that, presumably they wouldn't still be shipping with the same parts. I'm half-temped to assume that they keep it because it conveniently kills laptops right around when the applecare warranty expires. The magsafe adapter also sucks -- it has delicate pins that get stuck and prevent batteries from charging. But that's relatively easy to diagnose and fix. The other problem is fatal. ____Not the real rusty $20, same as in town. ____Not the real rusty Ah ha ha ha No, I was just bored. :-) ____Not the real rusty I love it so far I was hesitant because Glamorama was so shitty. But Lunar Park seems like a return to form. ____Not the real rusty Zyrtec ____Not the real rusty Which who were you? I might have just been cleaning the friends list and not recognized your name. I'm not friends with very many K5 people, anyway. Or I might have not liked you. lolololol ____Not the real rusty That's another one I really liked DA the first time through, and then tried to re-read it and just couldn't. I think it might be that I just don't like science fiction very much. Although give me some Phillip K Dick or Margaret Atwood (when she's doing sci-fi) and I like that. So I think it's more likely that most sci-fi just kind of sucks. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Well, see my thoughts on him elsewhere in this thread. I will say I've read the Baroque Cycle like five times, and it never gets old. So for that alone, I forgive him. ____Not the real rusty Is that all-time or some time range? ____Not the real rusty I gotta add some like csv export routines or something. Screen scraping must be a bitch, and it's definitely harder on the server than generating an arbitrary csv would be. ____Not the real rusty I'm not saying that you're doing anything wrong. Just that dumping lots of data into a csv and the streaming that out to you would be lighter weight than building all those pages. Also a hell of a lot faster. ____Not the real rusty I loved the Baroque Cycle books The plots are sorta ridiculous, but they're like the plot of educational films. Just there to make sure all the information gets conveyed. I was absolutely enthralled by them though. But REAMED -- yeah, what you said. What a terrible right-wing mercenary porn wank festival. I was revolted. ____Not the real rusty It would be my understanding... ...that downloading anything you want would be ok, but redistributing would not. Note that if the day comes that I declare K5 moribund, I'd make an archive anyway. I don't know if that affects your project or not, just thought I'd mention it. The content will never just disappear. ____Not the real rusty Oops I upgraded debian on the db machine and it came back up without an ethernet device. Thanks for fixing my screwup Voxel! Voxel is great, seriously. It was a teeny tiny little two or three person web hosting shop when they started hosting K5, and has since gone on to get really big and important and professional, but they still host K5 and their support is always top-notch. Anyone been reading the AVClub Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation series? It's very good. Yes There is that. Which I appreciate! But I'd say the same even if I did have to pay them -- they really are good. ____Not the real rusty That is probably not related to this It did that before I started upgrading -- it's something to do with the memory use monitor killing off mod_perl threads before they finish serving a page. Is it frequent? I haven't seen any since we came back up. ____Not the real rusty I don't really know I was off to college in 1994, so it was all Slint and Man or Astroman and like rediscovering Devo and stuff like that. Orange 9mm, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion... college radio stuff. I don't really know what was going on in pop music then. Oh hey! Wikipedia says that Rancid released Out Came the wolves in 1995. So there was the neo-punk thing going on then too. And Smart came out in 95. That's a hugely underrated album. I still listen to that pretty often, which makes it almost unique for the era. ____Not the real rusty Aw Now I want a sleeperbloke t-shirt. I actually never knew they were popular anywhere. They were fairly obscure in the states. It's strange to find out now that there was a whole British genre going on that I didn't really know about at the time. ____Not the real rusty Of course I did n't. ____Not the real rusty I kind of want to see them propose a British-style austerity budget. If we're going to have this bunch in office, I think I'd rather see them do what they claimed they wanted to do. If it works, good for them. If it doesn't work, at least they weren't the same old bullshitters we always get, which I suspect they actually are. ____Not the real rusty Let's see it Let them cut what they think should be cut. I want to see a balanced budget out of these assclowns. I hope Obama publicly announces that he supports the national vote for conservatism, and won't sign a budget with a deficit. ____Not the real rusty By the way Sorry to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure Halliburton is already a sovereign state. It has a huge military that sports ironic american flags and "US ARMY" logos. ____Not the real rusty OH HAI! K5 has a new kernel. It seems to be working again. Sorry about that. Update! While I'm at it, I think I'm going to upgrade mysql and the db box as well. So we might be down again in a little while when I need to reboot and whatnot. It's all for the good. So, what's up? It runs Debian Just like your mom. ____Not the real rusty No She likes some awful tweenie song, but I refuse to play it for them. ____Not the real rusty Ha. I don't have a copy of it. But if I can get one from my parents I will. I was actually sick that year, so I never went out trick or treating in it, but my Mom made the thing so they dressed me up in it and took a picture. I have a fever so my face is appropriately bright red. ____Not the real rusty They never did If you want DST you have to go to preferences and choose an hour earlier. Or later. Whatever it is. It never updated for DST automatically. Yes, this is lame. ____Not the real rusty The database box... ...is updating, but it has to download a zillion Mb of new stuff, so it's not likely anything else interesting will happen until tomorrow. And then maybe I'll break everything! Who knows! ____Not the real rusty Updating the webhead The Voxel theory is that our web machine's OS is so ancient and creaky that the nic driver is failing somehow. So I'm upgrading it. The weather report is continued flakiness for a little while yet. ____Not the real rusty Hopefully today If I can't get it working I'll drag Voxel back in and make them upgrade it. We may be down at some point today, but it won't be much longer. ____Not the real rusty Ha Well we're on a new kernel now. And it may be too soon to say, but I'm not seeing the network latency so far. ____Not the real rusty There is a reason for it The webhead and db were recently moved from physical hardware onto Xen VMs. I'm assuming that something about the underlying new virtual machine is unhappy with the old kernel and nic driver, that worked fine on the old hardware. ____Not the real rusty I think... It's something to do with communication between the db machine and the web machine, right now. The database seems fine, nothing's overloaded, it just seems really slow getting information out. ____Not the real rusty Check out the ping Across the internal net, between the webhead and the db: PING [db] 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3.03 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.152 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.180 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=405 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=0.164 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=31.0 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.880 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=0.155 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=0.159 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=16.3 ms 64 bytes from [db]: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=0.334 ms 31ms? 405ms? Pinging the other way is consistently ~0.15ms. I have a support ticket in about it so we should get it worked out soon. ____Not the real rusty They're checking it out. Both "machines" are Xen instances. But this seems like some kind of routing issue to me. Then again, I am not an admin, so who knows. ____Not the real rusty Not always If you owe more money than you have in cash (i.e. if your finances look like the great majority of people) you benefit from inflation, because it makes your debt smaller. I, for one, am hoping I can inflate my way to an early mortgage payoff. ____Not the real rusty Server shuffle Voxel's closing the datacenter we were at, so they virtualized our boxes and moved them. It went very smoothly. ____Not the real rusty Rent a wet saw You'll need it for what, a day? It'll be cheaper to rent the right tool than buy the wrong one. ____Not the real rusty Pissing in the shower ...is environmentally responsible. You use gallons less water than if you showered and pissed separately. Showering in piss alone would be even better. ____Not the real rusty The live ones are not paid for. So, not really live. ____Not the real rusty Is any needed? He was running like six accounts and annoying the living fuck out of everyone. It was just a matter of time, really. :-) ____Not the real rusty The app store No way is their power to deny apps that compete with their services going to last forever. ____Not the real rusty Or... ... if they'd adopted an open policy for apps, where the only consideration for approval was just whether they they didn't make the phone crash too badly. The vague and inconsistent standards and reasons for approving or disapproving apps is what's going to bite them in the ass. ____Not the real rusty If you still have the growing tip... ...you can just plant that. Tomatoes can produce roots from any part of the stem. So you can start that same tomato again by just planting a growing tip if it's not already dead. ____Not the real rusty Floating dome? My understanding is the ice formed from the gas actually lifted the giant dome. Also, I'm not sure you can drill into a concrete dome the same way you can into the seafloor, and finally, the crystals are probably produced by the oil and gas being out of the ground already, and no longer under the pressure they are in the ground, which is normally maintained all the way up the pipe. (These are all guesses assembled from reading and news reports, from a total non-expert, it should go without saying.) ____Not the real rusty Also... Apparently the "leak" is more like a spray, that would easily take your arm off if you were to wave your arm in front of it. Ans it's full of seabed sand and grit, so it's effectively an oil-lubricated cutting jet. Whatever the original leak was, it's getting bigger constantly as the grit wears away at the holes it's coming out of. So there are only two states this problem can be in: completely shut off, or continuously getting worse. ____Not the real rusty Mine went down too It is puzzling. You would have expected them to put in an "up only" ratchet in the terms. Stupid banks -- this is why we're in this mess. ____Not the real rusty My truck rotors look like a 100x magnification of a vinyl copy of the Bee Gees Greatest Hits. The brake material was completely gone, and I had to change the pads because you could hear the grinding. Also, metal on metal doesn't provide the kind of stopping power you'd ideally desire. I thought about changing the rotors, and then laughed heartily at that idea and didn't. But it is an island truck -- things only get fixed that need to be fixed on a vehicle that will never exceed 20 mph. ____Not the real rusty Maine is Appalachia I see this guy tooling around the bay all the time: http://www.soundingsonline.com/news/coastwise/241122-its-a-car-its-a-boat-its-ca -boat ____Not the real rusty Flounders in the Night ...one-sided glances... ____Not the real rusty My entire state? I'm pretty sure all of Maine suffers from SAD. Some people use lights, but most of us just suffer in stoic silence until spring. And then April comes around, and it snows, and we remember we don't have spring, and the weaker among us kill themselves. The rest suffer some more. And then July comes, and it's foggy for the next six weeks. Again, we lose some weaklings. We're probably better off without them. For the last two weeks of August, half of us spend all of our time outside trying to store up sunlight for the winter, and the other half say "Fuck this" and move to Florida. Then it's winter again. ____Not the real rusty Oh, also Beer. I'm feeling about a pint low right now, actually. ____Not the real rusty So are you and me. She's just doing it quicker, and with more doughnuts. ____Not the real rusty There is a pretty good argument to be made in favor of death by cheesecake. ____Not the real rusty I like the ...last three sentences, where the conservative political moralizing makes it whiplash from funny right to sad. ____Not the real rusty RIP ____Not the real rusty Yer Welcome [nt] Thanks for pinging me about it. Yes, the [nt] was a lie. ____Not the real rusty Sort of similar I recently found a friend that I lost touch with around 6th grade. He found me really - I've looked before but he has a really common name and I could never figure out which one was actually him. We were, for a while, really close. Then he moved down to the Cape and I went there and stayed with him a few times, but eventually we just lost touch. I haven't actually talked to him yet. Anyway, I was thinking that there must have been a last time we spoke, but I have no idea when it was. Neither of us knew at the time "this is the last time I'll talk to this guy for two decades." The social networking thing is strange in that if we were both 20 years older, I'd have just never heard from him again, and always wondered what became of him. Now, there he is again. ____Not the real rusty Brilliant Shipping companies should invest, as a hedge against piracy. ____Not the real rusty WTF mysql Sorry about the crashes today. Mysql keeps biting the wax tadpole. I am, meanwhile, on the downeaster train to Boston and trying to do server maintenance via an iPod. But hey good thing there's free wifi, right? Anyway, I don't really know what's wrong. Mysql keeps crashing. It may very well die again, and if so I tender my apologies in advance. I'll look at it tonight when I have an actual computer available. It's not traffic Something got corrupted or something. I don't really know, but it's not a traffic issue. Mysql itself keeps going down. ____Not the real rusty I hit post too fast I was going to say, nope and anyway he does have an account. The one he's using now is the real thing. ____Not the real rusty Or not? I need to go to sleep I think. SeenIg things. ____Not the real rusty All I can say is If it's someone else posting, MDC bought the account for them. I suspect meds for any difference in tone. ____Not the real rusty Red flags All up in ur Amtrak. ____Not the real rusty Here's a quote for you: "... no tree ring-based reconstructions of northern hemisphere temperatures that includes the 1990s is able to capture the range of late 20th century warming seen in the instrumental records. This means that instrumental records show warming, but reconstructed temperatures from trees show cooling or no change." That excerpt appears immediately above a graph that shows how temperatures inferred from tree-ring records since about 1850 (the "proxies") are a pretty good match for actual temperature records derived from thermometers right up until the 1980s. After that, the tree-ring data begin to show lower temperatures than were actually recorded. Just why tree rings no longer provide useful proxy data for temperatures is not known. There are several theories, many of which suggest that climate change itself is the problem. Trees no longer grow as they once did before the climate started changing so rapidly. But the point is, there is no question that tree-ring growth rates of the past -- before we had thermometers -- can serve as useful proxies for historical temperature data. They are much less useful now, but that doesn't matter so much because we have actual temperature records. All of this was sorted out back in 1998. It's not new, nor even particularly interesting, to anyone familiar with the science. From here. Tree rings don't match instrument records in the last 20 - 50 years because global warming is so true that something has changed and now they don't grow the same anymore. That is the sort of thing that makes deniers out of skeptics, and skeptics out of believers who have had even the smallest, most casual scientific training. I mean... that's just an absurd explanation. The whole blog post is absurd. I agree that the tree-ring problems do not in any way invalidate the entire field. But if there's a problem with them now, and no one can explain why there's a problem with them now, that we've got to assume there's a problem with them overall, no? This guy's saying that old tree rings are fine, but for modern times we don't need them anymore because we've got thermometers. Sheesh. ____Not the real rusty Thank god There's someone else who thinks the same thing as me. It's a difficult position to fit into the current discourse around climate change without upsetting pretty much everyone. I tried to explain this on Metafilter and they pretty much ripped me a new one, which I knew would happen, but it was interesting to see it anyway. ____Not the real rusty Oh well At least we have K5. A tiny place for reasonable people, who also have an interest in horsecock. ____Not the real rusty Lots of science is that There's a lot of value in comparing a number of different data sets that other scientists have already collected. Quite a lot of published papers are just that. ____Not the real rusty You don't have to be a skeptic I don't know how things are in the research centers, but it's so hysterical outside of them that all you have to do to be branded a "denier" is to suggest that the earth's climate is an incredibly complicated system, and climate science is about 50 years old, and we may not know much of anything yet with any certainty, and we should do all we can to keep the science in the field developing. This is, mind you, even if you agree wholeheartedly with all the things they say we should do -- increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon outputs, greatly expand renewable energy, etc etc. It's gotten so I don't much even like to talk about it anymore, simply because I try to look at the science with a scientific spirit. That sort of thing is Not Allowed. ____Not the real rusty Ha That could have perhaps used more wordiness to get at what I meant but it remains true. Nice to know you're stalking me on MeFi though. :-) You do need to look at the rest of what I said in that thread. I'm defending evidence-based medicine there. ____Not the real rusty This is so street. ____Not the real rusty WIPO: both Where's the "both" option? I have a butter dish for toast and so forth, on-deck butter or cooking butter in the fridge, and bulk storage butter in the freezer. ____Not the real rusty Buzz Rickson's Black N-1 Deck Jacket I sort of really want one of these. I've been looking for a fall/winter/spring jacket that doesn't look like I'm off to climb a mountain for a while, but haven't found quite the right thing. I think I found the right thing. It's $650 fucking bills though. I doubt this piece of apparel is in my future. Anyone feel like buying me a nice jacket? More pics. I make Scoop fixes all the time It's what I do for work, after all. Just not so much, y'know, here. (That question, BTW, was rhetorical. Or facetious. Or something along those lines). ____Not the real rusty Although If you're offering, I'm listening. What's worth $650 to you? :-) ____Not the real rusty Got any suggestions? This jacket hunt has gone on for over a year now. It's getting a bit silly. ____Not the real rusty Been looking Will continue, but no luck so far. ____Not the real rusty Something like Either the above, or a black or dark gray wool car coat type of thing. ____Not the real rusty This one? http://oldnavy.gap.com/browse/product.do?pid=688928002&tid=onfr1r I'm not keen on the double-breasted thing. I'm a skinny bastard. Double breasted stuff makes me look like I'm wearing someone's Dad's clothes. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, that's not bad [nt] ____Not the real rusty They are creepily obsessive perfectionists Buzz Rickson's has a lot of the materials custom made, on the original looms and sewing machines used in the 1940s. Some of the zippers and buttons are actual old-stock, some are custom made repros. Basically they do their best to build a brand new original old jacket. It isn't actually that I think it's not worth that much. If anything, I'm sort of surprised it isn't more. You can certainly spend a hell of a lot more money on a jacket, if you have a mind to, and usually you're paying for a name, not the actual custom production of the fabrics and materials. It's just that I don't think I have such a deep investment in the concept to justify me spending that much. ____Not the real rusty What makes you so sure it's sub-par? ____Not the real rusty I don't know It depends on what you're looking for. I would guess that if you compare a cotton/alpaca jacket made today to a cotton/alpaca jacket made in 1944, or one made to be a replica of one made in 1944, the old one will be better made. It will also be a lot more expensive, like it was at the time. There's no doubt clothing has gotten cheaper, and materials have advanced for lots of purposes. No gore-tex in 1944. But I'm not looking for a Gore-tex coat. I'm looking for something in either cotton or wool, and both of those are ancient materials that haven't changed that much in the last hundred years, let alone the last 50. So the main difference is mass-produced vs hand-made, and hand made is pretty much always better. ____Not the real rusty Not really in any way the same I kind of like the one on the left though. ____Not the real rusty I like the cut of your jib I also wish to subscribe to your newsletter. ____Not the real rusty But It is lined with alpaca. Also, it's not "cotton" like we generally get these days. It's the burly-ass stiff as hell canvas type cotton. And also also, I'm not really looking for it to be weatherproof technical gear -- I have that. I'm looking for style. ____Not the real rusty Where's my codpiece? MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (911 nevar forget) ____Not the real rusty Ha I should. A one-day only special event. I could offer a one-time purchase and reactivation of any banned account for the low-low price of $650. :-) ____Not the real rusty I suspect If it came down to a binary choice, she'd rather get me a nice jacket than spend $650 on the boat. She's an unusual treasure like that. ____Not the real rusty Ha My first real-world job ever was circa 1998 in DC, doing temp work for a government contractor, fixing a lot of html pages they generated from Word and Excel. This was pretty much before any kind of mass-authoring or CMS tools existed, so they had a bunch of temps who could write HTML, or at least had heard of HTML in some vague way. They gave us a bunch of files and said "here, fix these." Basically we were just manually cleaning up things Microsoft's "save as HTML" didn't do right. I didn't actually know any perl or anything at the time, but I was bright enough to recognize that most of the files had the same things wrong with them, and I could fix 90% of it with a few standard search-and-replaces, which I did, and promptly caused the same sort of "Whoah shit boy, we get paid by the hour here" response. So I'd run a few snr's, then fuck around for the rest of the day. That project ended up taking plenty of time. ____Not the real rusty That was Jason? I didn't even know. Or, actually, care now that I do. I banned them because after you "left" they were clearly getting ready to move on and grief HHD. It seemed like everyone had had enough of that. ____Not the real rusty Actually I heard you do bleed out your genitals. Protip: antibiotics, dude. It's not so much that it was HHD, as that the immediate change of focus says this is what they're planning to do in general. Who needs it? If they'd switched to you, or anyone else, it would have been the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Sure NO DRAGON AGE! YOU HEARD ME! INSTABAN FOREVER! ____Not the real rusty I have no idea what you're talking about I don't even know what "Dragon age" is. So let me amend that slightly to "Dragon Age references I understand are grounds for banning." Carry on. ____Not the real rusty No I don't know what's going on though. Server weirdness... ____Not the real rusty like this captcha2: HRQAX9 captcha: U@@%9W ____Not the real rusty Ob http://knowyourmeme.com/i/4302/original/tonightYiff_in_hell.jpg?1246172420 ____Not the real rusty Huh Does it really have a u? That's funny. I have that book on my shelves somewhere, I'll have to look. I knew Derek slightly in SF. We had lunch once or twice. He's a good guy -- you can't really fault him for looking at what people were doing at the time. No one knew what was going to work and what wasn't. ____Not the real rusty I'll ride your ticklepants any time. ____Not the real rusty You forget I'm a parent of young children. I have learned that you don't make threats you're not prepared to carry out, and when called on a threat, you carry it out without hesitation. It's the only way. ____Not the real rusty I do Ellie's going on five and Calvin is two and a half. I think wikipedia hasn't caught on yet. ____Not the real rusty I did Guess what our middle name is. ____Not the real rusty OMG Teh dramas So Mike emailed me this morning and said that the lawsuit machinery is being cranked up. I have no dog in this fight whatsoever, I don't know anything about Mike's personal or work problems, and I am not even faintly interested in defending K5 against a defamation suit. So I've taken down the obvious stuff where Mike attacks certain former co-workers. And I politely request that people just drop the subject here. Now I know you assholes plenty well enough to know that someone will have to test it, and will probably repost something about it. So, go ahead and get it over with, but use a dupe you don't care about, because it will be removed and the poster banned. This is your warning, there won't be any more. Let this also serve as a good faith notice to anyone involved in this, that I'm not part of this fight. If I missed anything, email rusty@kuro5hin.org and I will take it down. Um? I thought I did give a reason. But I'll try again -- No, I haven't personally received anything except Michael's message, that "Just now I got a letter from a legal firm announcing that if my posts... aren't removed from Kuro5hin, they will sue both myself and you for defamation." I don't have any reason to doubt that, since we pretty much all saw it coming. I also, having seen the posts, wouldn't give him very good odds in court. I'm a pretty strong advocate of free speech in the public interest. I have been threatened before and kept stuff up that I thought was legitimately a free speech issue. This case, I just don't think it is. This is an employee who has a disagreement with an employer. And not like a "Wal*Mart locked us all in overnight off the clock" kind of systemic disagreement. Just someone who couldn't work out personal issues with his management. I don't have any strong conviction that it's my job to make sure one side of that tiny meaningless fight is free to insult the other side at will here on K5. Mike has plenty of web space, and pages galore to devote to this if he chooses to, and he can fight it out in court to his heart's content. But I have a job, a family, a life to live, and I don't see any reason to involve myself or K5 with any of this. ____Not the real rusty Who knows As far as I can tell, 99,999 of every 100,000 emails to help@k5 get spam-filtered. They may have tried to contact me. Gmail probably thought it was a 419 letter. ____Not the real rusty Sorry, I wasn't clear The bannination rule applies to Michael as well. I haven't banned anyone, and hopefully won't need to, as you all now know the score. ____Not the real rusty I saw that I didn't see anything that could be reasonably objected to in it. I really did try to take down as little as absolutely necessary. I mean, he didn't even get the name right. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, well I have a soft spot in my heart for the hopelessly insane. What can I say. I did warn him a few days ago, and he didn't post anything objectionable about it since then. ____Not the real rusty A thousand pardons "...you assholes and cunts..." ____Not the real rusty Ha I missed that one. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty Well When K5 is threatened with a citation for illegal left on red, I'll come to you first. ____Not the real rusty Just trying to get to Burger King so we can get some left-handed Whoppers. ____Not the real rusty I have no faith in common carrier status I don't think K5 would pass even the most casual test for CC status. I never counted on it for any sort of protection, and I don't think I'm keen on trying it now. I've done some level of policing here since the beginning, and it wouldn't be hard to prove that at all. ____Not the real rusty Not my problem Until they hand me the keys to Google, anyone who has a problem with what shows up on Google is free to take it up with Google. ____Not the real rusty But the first law of lulzodynamics states that lulz can neither be created nor destroyed. the lulz still exist, they have merely been converted into a different form. ____Not the real rusty What? It's just some guy's name. I don't know nothing about nothing. ____Not the real rusty I'd love to let this stand... ...cause it makes me look good. But the truth is, I started fixing it just before you asked, because it didn't work for me either. So, um, we could say that I proactively addressed a problem I knew would affect my beloved users? We could say that, right? ____Not the real rusty Not as many as we'd all hope And by "we all" I mean "me." ____Not the real rusty Not really I could probably look it up. I mean there are records, and it's usually not hard to figure out, but mostly I don't care. ____Not the real rusty Jesus Fucking Christ What a dummy. ____Not the real rusty WIPO: Perl ____Not the real rusty Crawford News Apparently he's not dead. I make no claims as to the truth of the email below, but a couple things lead me to believe it's probably legit. It seems to have come from an actual person, who is who they claim to be, anyway. Read on for pasta. I edited a few details, because honestly I don't trust you guys not to try to track him down and harass him in the hospital. Update [2009-11-11 14:33:1 by rusty]: Sorry, the person who emailed me asked me to remove the email text. The gist is that Michael's alive and in a hospital. I thought about it But then I thought "Do I really want to talk to Crawford on the phone, in the mental hospital on speed?" and the answer to that question seemed really obvious. ____Not the real rusty Almost It's like retarded bukkake, where all the dudes stand around jizzing on each other and the one girl looks on in disgust. ____Not the real rusty My content providers? If you're all trying to provide content for me, you're doing a piss-poor job. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't know The number was included in a "If you need proof" kind of way, to me. I don't think it's my call to pass it out to anyone else. ____Not the real rusty Nope All I have is what's above. I took out the name of the hospital, the phone number, and the sender's name. Otherwise, it's just a paste. ____Not the real rusty Hell no. See below. ____Not the real rusty Surely someone has it... ...in their cache. Also, For fuck's sake, I hope all of you know this, but don't email a total stranger something you wouldn't want them to share with the whole world. What is the matter with people? ____Not the real rusty Yeah Apparently most of the email was just for my personal amusement. Or something. I don't know, man -- this is a whole rat's nest of crazy that I try my best to avoid. ____Not the real rusty Not really Although a distinct scarcity of people I liked was part of it. I wasn't even there a whole year, though. I didn't make many friends here for a lot longer than that, either. Mostly I'm just not a Westerner. ____Not the real rusty Nope Not so far. ____Not the real rusty Oh, I don't know If it wasn't him, it would probably be someone else. And really, say what you will about the guy but he's proven to be pretty damn fireproof. Most people would have thrown a total hissyfit and stormed off by now. I respect him for not doing that. ____Not the real rusty Also This pattern long predates K5. If we can believe what he says about his own history, I don't see that we've had much of an effect. ____Not the real rusty Fixed Fixed for me anyway -- make sure you force-refresh to get the new dynamic js file. It's kind of amazing that that javascript still worked, actually. It's seven years old. ____Not the real rusty Sorry about that It wasn't intentional, just a side effect of the warning happening to come while you were editing something. You should always write in an editor and paste into the site, to avoid just that sort of problem. And no, no one has contacted me about any of this. I can just see where this is all heading, and I don't especially want to go there. ____Not the real rusty It was just a warning. Should be obvious enough... ____Not the real rusty Meh They're kind of meh. And on the front page... puzzlingly inside baseball, if you ask me. But whatever. The ones I dropped were just fucking around with ASCII flipbooks, lacking any sort of nod to narrative content at all. Do that stuff in a diary unless you can make it really incredibly clever. ____Not the real rusty I use RT It does kind of blow. I have a set way that I interact with it, and I generally know what it will do. But I never even try via email. Its email behavior is completely random. ____Not the real rusty Nuts You have a fireplace? You didn't day so before. Christ, that thing is costing you buckets of heating money -- as you point out, it's a frigging heat pump. As in, it's pumping heat out of your house, all the time. Put the woodstove in the fireplace. Put an insert in that covers up the flue and has a hole for the stove pipe. Pack it with that fireproof insulation they sell for this purpose. Run the flexible pipe insert up the chimney. You just: Saved yourself an assload of heating money every winter Saved yourself an assload of money and hassle not putting another chimney on your house Got a heating appliance that actually adds heat to the house, rather than removing it, which is what fireplaces do. Simple. ____Not the real rusty Bah Can't argue with that though. Have fun cutting holes in your wall and paying a zillion dollars for pipe. :-) Have you though about what you'll put behind it so the wall doesn't catch on fire? ____Not the real rusty Yeah I helped a friend put a woodstove in his fireplace last year. It's not really that big a deal. The key things you need to have are a chimney with an unused flue, or a flue used by a fireplace that you're going to put the woodstove in. If you don't have that, then you're lookng at standalone metalbestos triple-wall pipe, which is ugly and expensive as hell, and you might as well forget it. Some pellet stoves can be direct-vented, but pellets have been kinda scarce the last few years. Most US produced pellets go to Europe, where they've been running pellet stoves for a lot longer than we have. And the spike in oil prices led to a giant spike in pellet stove sales, which led to pretty much everyone running out of pellets the last couple of years. It might not be as bad now, with oil cheaper. I know someone with a woodstove in the basement, and it seems to work fine. You would want some big registers in the floor, but I have no idea what they have. I know the house is always warm. Putting it upstairs is not a good idea. It will do nothing to heat your downstairs at all. Heat from a woodstove goes up extremely fast. The house I grew up in had a woodstove and a smal register in the cathedral ceiling gable that led to the upstairs hallway, and that by itself warmed the upstairs pretty well. Final note: You don't want your woodstove pipe on your deck. It will heat it negligibly, and smoke you off the deck whenever you're running the thing. If you don't have a lot of experience operating and living with woodstoves, it's probably worth having the guy come out for $100. Putting the right kind of stove in the right place in your house really makes all the difference in the world. ____Not the real rusty A lesser pipe? Ah, I see. I thought you meant second floor. The ground floor would be fine. What's wrong with using a lesser pipe? You mean, like not a double or triple metalbestos? Several things -- they get really really hot on the outside. Like flash point of your framing hot. Also they're illegal to use for stove venting purposes, pretty much everywhere, for that reason, with the exception of like a riser pipe that goes from the stove up into an existing brick chimney, where it's not close to anything flammable. Generally woodburning appliances are a bitch with your house insurance. There's always all kinds of absurd regulations, and around here, you have to get either a local fire department official or a licensed inspector to come and sign off on a new woodstove. Whcih is kind of fair, considering they routinely burn houses down. If you have a chimney with an open flue, you can buy a kit that consists of an expandable flexible steel duct and a cap for the chimney top. You take the duct up on the roof and drop it down the flue and stretch it out till it reaches your stove, then cut off the extra and attach it to the stove and the chimney cap. It's not cheap, but it's a hell of a lot less than $250 for four feet, because it doesn't have to be super-insulated. That's why I mentioned converting a fireplace -- it's much easier than installing a whole new chimney or pipe stack. And yeah, the new stoves are a lot better than they were ten or twenty years ago. They burn a lot hotter, and therefore more efficiently, and all of them have catalytic converters to cut way down on smoke and creosote going up your chimney. Still, there's a pretty thriving used market for older stoves, and you can find them for 25% or less than they cost new. so if you have to do a lot of expensive chimney ducting, that might be something to look into. ____Not the real rusty 25% I mean 25% or less of what they cost new. Not 25% less than. The point being, older stoves are often for sale really cheap. ____Not the real rusty Ha Not much. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wood indoors Not a good idea if you're using cordwood. There's all kinds of bugs and shit in that stuff, and at least some of them will be termites or carpenter ants. Even storing it up against the house isn't a great plan, although a lot of people do it. But indoors -- just keep what you'll burn in a week or so. ____Not the real rusty Reminds me of Day of the Locust Ever read any Nathaniel West? ____Not the real rusty Try them on They're both good boots. Try them on and get the one that fits your feet better. ____Not the real rusty I got some plastic boots last winter One trip and they ruined my ankles. I had nerve damage for months. It was ugly. I'm flat-footed, and I suspect that my ankles slant inward a little because of it, but really this was pain beyond all reason. I'm probably going to resell them this year and look for something more comfortable. They were nice and warm though. ____Not the real rusty That's what it always comes down to Planting evidence is so easy and risk-free for the cops that it's not worth the risk of pissing one off anymore. All the clever civil disobedience in the world falls apart when they can so easily just pop you in jail for a month for "marijuana possession." ____Not the real rusty By 'recipricating saw' do you mean ...a Sawzall? I was confused, because a jigsaw is a reciprocating saw. But assuming you mean a jigsaw or a sawzall, here's what I'd say: A sawzall is a super useful tool if you work on houses, but it is really only for demolition. It's powerful, but extremely hard to control and makes very coarse cuts. That's fine when you're using it for what it's supposed to do, which is take down walls fast and cut through anything. A jigsaw is much easier to control, can make precise cuts,a nd, with the right blade, can also make very clean cuts. It is less powerful and doesn't have the crazy long (like 12 or 18 inch) blades that a sawzall will take. They've never been combined because if you combined them you'd get either a shitty jigsaw or a shitty sawzall, depending on which body style your combined tool went with. They're just completely different tools. Sounds like you need a sawzall for the car, and it'll work for the cat door, so get that. Someone else said a cheapo will do fine. I personally disagree -- always buy the best tools you can possibly afford. Something like a Sawzall will take massive abuse over its lifetime, if you're using it right. Those things just get beat on, by the nature of what they're made to do. Get a Milwaukee and you'll have it forever. ____Not the real rusty iPod touch If your train has wifi, great. If not, load it with anything you need to work on before you leave. They're surprisingly easy to type on. ____Not the real rusty Ahem Something like this perhaps. ____Not the real rusty Bah My tomatoes got late blight. I topped them, and now it's just a race of blight vs. ripening. My money's on the blight. ____Not the real rusty No kidding He just stood there, surely knowing he had at least one SS sniper trained on him at all times, and that if he so much as gestured toward that gun, he was a dead man. I disagree with him entirely about politics, but still. Ballsy. The man was either unbelievably oblivious or wholly ready to die for what he believes in. ____Not the real rusty Cleaner Get a lot of this stuff. It's the only thing I've ever seen actually work. ____Not the real rusty Was he drunk? ____Not the real rusty Unfilmed, Conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED. ____Not the real rusty Truth? I don't even know what to say. I'm so sorry. ____Not the real rusty Glad you're not dead My gut said it wasn't true, but I was a bit worried. Another day or so and I would have emailed to find out. Anyway, welcome back to the land of the living, if that is in fact what K5 is. ____Not the real rusty Seriously? Jesus. If this is true, I hope he's ok. If it's not true, I hope you both DIAF. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's still true I still believe that about the semicolon. ____Not the real rusty Barely I've been ridiculously busy for the last two months, and I'm going on vacation for three weeks starting this weekend. So no bugs are likely to be fixed before the end of July. But really, that cancel bug has been there for ages. Not that that makes it ok, but it's kinda hard to see it as urgent. ____Not the real rusty So true The time zone thing is not extremely simple, but it's not that complex either. The cancel bug is probably nothing. ____Not the real rusty It's pretty custom Daily kos has all kinds of very DK specific stuff going on in it, lots of the fancy JavaScript stuff is in the blocks and boxes layer (and also is just old enough to not be the way I'd implement that anymore) and finally, the codebase I regularly work with is actually much newer than DK anyway. If and when it eventually gets upgraded, I'd use my work version. This Scoop is ancient though, you got that right. ____Not the real rusty The problems with K5 are too many to count Or so I'm told. ____Not the real rusty Reminescent of... ...a fictional film from Infinite Jest called "Cage III: Free Show," where a carnival barker entices passersby to enter a tent and watch performers perform acts of degradation so unspeakable that the audience members eventually turn into giant eyeballs in their seats out of total rapt fascination. And on the other side of the tent, another barker entices passersby to enter with the offer that, in return for performing unspeakable acts of degradation, they will get to watch ordinary people turn into giant eyeballs in their seats. ____Not the real rusty One of my favorites No, I love that book. I've read it probably four times now. I think the key is I didn't know anything about it -- I bought it because it was long, hence good value for my book dollar. So I didn't know I was supposed to be scared of how "hard" it is. Which, I think, it mostly isn't. ____Not the real rusty Huh I don't really get that sense from Wallace. I think he's doing a fairly different thing than Pynchon. Like, Pynchon is sort of deliberately obscurantist, such that you really have to read his books twice and you get it the second time around. Wallace is just a maximalist by style, but tells a fairly clean and coherent story. ____Not the real rusty Different strokes I think the characters, settings, and plot in IJ are all top notch, and tend to be in everything Wallace writes. But, you know, de gustibus and all. There's stuff I can't stand that everyone else loves too, so whatever. :-) ____Not the real rusty What asshole wrote that? ____Not the real rusty Did your back lift gate handle fail yet? That's fun. When it gets stuck shut it's nearly impossible to get to, and apparently it happens to all Jeeps eventually. Mine went last summer, and I spent several hours swearing at it before giving up and having a shop do it. ____Not the real rusty If only you knew... If only... ____Not the real rusty Toilets? I don't understand what a lag bolt is for toilets either. Care to expand on that? Do you mean a closet bolt? And if so, is the toilet really not bolted down? And if so, WTF? ____Not the real rusty Every time I flushed... ...I'd be wondering, "Is this the time it lets go?" ____Not the real rusty Holy jesus I do have to say, a lag bolt is not at all the same as a closet bolt. A closet bolt has a much thinner head, and is shaped to fit with the threaded end sticking up in the little groove thingy in the flange, and not turn when you tighten down the nut. A lag bolt (which is more properly called a "lag screw") is a type of thick screw with a hex or square head that has a threaded end that tapers to a point (i.e. it's a screw), and is used in situations where there won't be a nut, like bolting a ledgerboard onto a house for a deck. A through bolt is most similar to a closet bolt, but generally has a thicker head and wouldn't work in a "bolting down the toilet" situation. Don't mess with me and building materials terminology, boy. I'm a parser. All that said, leaving the toilet unbolted is nutty. You're gonna want to get a new wax seal, pry that thing up, and reseat it with some closet bolts. It's easy to do though. ____Not the real rusty Hm It kinda looks like it's going to get erotic a few frames on in the set, maybe... ____Not the real rusty Oh hey! That second picture is me. Those were better days, though. ____Not the real rusty Er I meant third link. Second picture-only link? Whatever. ____Not the real rusty Hey, next... ...is the kitchen. so pretty soon I'll have to stop eating as well. ____Not the real rusty WIPO Eating real food, and running. 5mi @8:35/mi on Monday. I was awfully pleased with myself. ____Not the real rusty Gay singularity approaching! Yeah, it's a nice (ass) run. Relatively flat, but some parts are cold and windy in the wrong weather, and it's always hard to tell whether it will be or not from my house. It's four miles if I just do the basic loop. Or I can go down to the north end of the island first and roughly follow the 5 mile road race route. Or go around twice for 8, as I did one time for no obvious reason other than that I felt good and didn't want to stop at 4 miles. I credit Modest Mouse with what (for me) was a hell of a good time. I was listening to Lonesome Crowded West, which turns out to be great running music. Lots of tempo and energy variations, so I was sprinting half the time without really realizing it. ____Not the real rusty Argh What is up with people? I seriously want to get a-stabbin' when I'm walking around in public. I can't even figure out how they do it. I'm right behind someone, right, and they're moving continuously, but going so slowly that I literally have to take a step and then wait, and then take another step and then wait... and so forth. How do they walk that slowly? ____Not the real rusty Heavy chain + padlock And hey, you can also use it to lock up your bike. ____Not the real rusty Urban biking I bike as aggressively as possible. Either Stephenson or Sterling has a line about this in one of their books, to the effect that if you're relying on drivers seeing and avoiding you on your bike, ur doing it wrong. You might as well dress in black and ride like a bat out of hell, because you're the only one who can ensure your own survival. ____Not the real rusty I liked it I saw it many years ago, but I remember liking it. Moody and eerie, if I recall. If I were in the mood for jiggling boobs, it probably wouldn't be my first choice. ____Not the real rusty Sure, sure You candy koala bears out the dick fanatics are always saying that. In the 1970's? We were ten years away. In the 1980's? Ten years away. 1990's? Ten years away. And today, on the brink of 2010, we've still only managed to dribble 0.5 picograms of Pixy Stix dust out of one vagina. I for one don't believe it will ever be feasable, and I'm putting all my chips on the Anal Candy Corn Cannon (ACCC) program. ____Not the real rusty That was kinda awesome. ____Not the real rusty Not new That's been here for years. ____Not the real rusty Srsly You thought something was new? :-) ____Not the real rusty It's being moved ...to a new server. I don't actually host scoop.k5 or have much if anything to do with it. But what I'm told is it needed to go on a new server, and should be back soon. ____Not the real rusty Ouch That sucks. ____Not the real rusty Now take the next step And show her how what commercials are really selling is reflexive desire: the desire to desire, the want to want things. Dissatisfaction. Envy. Starting with the method they employ is a good step, but get her all the way to the deductive endpoint. ____Not the real rusty That guy's... ahh... Wow. ____Not the real rusty You cannot I'm done. Give up. Stop trying to contact me. I've done all I can, or will. The end. ____Not the real rusty In a cup? ____Not the real rusty Hardware store Plumbing aisle. The good local Ace or True Value or something -- not Home Depot. Find a place where they employ a guy who got sick of being a plumber. Tell him you need a blind gasket. He'll point you to a big case of them and tell you to go nuts. ____Not the real rusty Ace is locally owned So I can't say. Ours is really good. At least, the guys there are always very helpful, and they always have what I need. ____Not the real rusty Yes on prices The prices are higher. On the other hand, I went to HD looking for a glass cutting wheel once, and every single person there looked at me like I was asking them for a sloppy blowjob on the sales floor. Like, never heard such a question. At the Ace the first person I asked took me to the spot on the rack where they had three different kinds hanging up. I appreciate that sort of place. :-) ____Not the real rusty Look on craigslist There are constantly working fridges and freezers for $50 or less. It's not worth the effort to try to mickey mouse something together. You'll spent more just for foam insulation. ____Not the real rusty Not that different They just had three different ones. Like, different brand, handle design, etc. More than one company makes glass cutters. When you get down to it, they're all the same thing. It did me no good, btw. I can't cut glass worth a damn. ____Not the real rusty geographically avant-garde Nice. ____Not the real rusty What My birthday's in July. I'll be 33 this year -- the age geniuses die, so we'll finally know for sure. ____Not the real rusty The public? And the public sees this transparently. Check the polls. The public is massively behind the stimulus. Also, Congressional Republicans are about as popular as a child molester smeared with dogshit at the moment. If they're playing politics at all, they're doing it by entirely the wrong rulebook. Clinton was trying to wrench the party in a direction most of them didn't want to go. I don't see any of that from Obama. I can't even think where you're getting that comparison from. ____Not the real rusty Those Rasmussen numbers I don't know. They seem very odd compared to everything else I've seen, but they're not asking quite the same questions. Congressional GOPs for example have an approve/disapprove rating of 19%-69%. That's pretty awful, and was the basis for my graphic metaphor. I'd say 38% for to 29% against indicates at least a cautious optimism. It's a blistering torrent of approval compared to what people thought of the banking bailout. And health care reform in the 90's was torpedoed by an ineffective Clinton message machine, an extremely effective right-wing messaging machine, and irresistible lobbying by insurance companies and drug companies. The media climate of the time made it impossible for Democrats in Congress to even act like they were interested n a universal health care plan, and the Clinton White House totally failed to overcome that. In a nutshell, "Harry and Louise" and the word "Hillarycare" killed it. I was talking more about Clinton's centrist fiscal policies, NAFTA, "triangulation" and so on. Basically, the Democrats were in disarray, badly disciplined, and on their way to the disaster of 1994. I don't lay all that at Clinton's feet -- he was really just lucky to have had Ross Perot in the race. The country as a whole was swinging well to the right at the time, regardless of him. ____Not the real rusty Here's the thing though The Republican votes were pure theatre. When it comes down to it, they knew the house could vote against it, and if they released Collins, Snowe and Chafee, they could let it pass and still look united. You think none of those three could have been swayed by the leadership if the wanted to block it? No way. They let it go through while still looking like they opposed it. When it works, watch for them to come out and claim the credit. ____Not the real rusty Ha! How much have you watched American politics? If something works, everyone tries to claim it. For instance, if I were the GOP I'd claim that it was the tax cuts in the stimulus, modest though they were, that prompted the economic recovery. They would have worked sooner but they were hampered by all the spending we had to vote against in the bill. See how easy that is? ____Not the real rusty 1996 called They want their music back. Alright, I gave it a try. I just don't have that much use for techno anymore I guess. It's ok, but it does nothing for me. ____Not the real rusty That looks like a buttplug for a cow-fucker. ____Not the real rusty I like those too But not the ones with the super-fine tip. Those just end up looking like dotted lines for me. ____Not the real rusty Mont Blanc makes ball point and rollerball pens and refills too. ____Not the real rusty I like The Uniball Gel RT in medium point. Enough that a while ago I bought two big-ass boxes of them, and have been hiding them from my wife since. ____Not the real rusty It's a mosaic It's like a jillion pictures stitched together. There are a lot of oddities where people moved their heads between shots or whatever. For example, if you zoom in on W, and then follow the aisle up behind him to the last aisle seat in that first section, there's a man without a face. Now that's creepy. ____Not the real rusty It looks from here... ...as though you may actually be responsible for getting MC a job. Raising his profile somehow? The timing is highly suspect. ____Not the real rusty Sigged bitches! ____Not the real rusty I am unable to help myself I can't leave the beginning of a sentence uncapitalized. I tried, I just couldn't. The rest of it though, whatever. ____Not the real rusty Stew is thick Soup is more liquid than stuff. Stew is more stuff than liquid, and the liquid part is usually thicker than a broth. ____Not the real rusty DO NOT RESIST ____Not the real rusty I'll stalk you for very reasonable hourly rates. ____Not the real rusty Like doesn't come into it This is purely an economic proposition. ____Not the real rusty He should have gotten an extra medal The Green medal for not only beating everyone else, but beating them while high. I would endorse Michael Phelps for a Green medal as well. ____Not the real rusty Women reach their sexual peak... ...at fifteen years older then whatever age you are now. That's the rule. When you die, you go up to heaven and God has a huge chuckle at you. He loves that shit. ____Not the real rusty HAPPY NOW? Who stamped "brewing guru" on my ass? I need to brew again. It's been a while. I'm running low on porter. Althoguh I still have almost the whole batch of Belgian white left. It's aging nicely. Not so bitter anymore. ____Not the real rusty Ah ha. Ha... hahahah HAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA HAH HAHAHAHAHA HAAHAHAHAHHAHA... OMG. Heh. Whoo! I needed that. Also, my esteem for Douglas Hofstadter, already high, just climbed a few more notches. ____Not the real rusty I don't know It seems like Hofstadter's always been pretty up-front about the failure of AI to manage to get anywhere. He's an AI researcher but he seems like one of the least woo-woo about it. Kurzweil, though... Jesus. I read The Age of Spiritual Machines and felt like I had just been dry-humped by the Epcot Center. ____Not the real rusty Make-up water I've never added it. I do often come out with less than I wanted to collect, but I usually just go with it. If I'm paying attention, I try to start my boil with a lot more than I want to finish with. Like 1.5-2 gallons more, because you lose some in trub and racking and whatnot as well. That said, I doubt it makes much difference if you add a little make-up water. For the sparge, I think the idea is to sparge with like just enough water to make a thickish second mash. Like "water to just cover grains" should work. You didn't say which was the brew pot. 5 Gal? That seems a little high to me -- I'd have probably done it in two batches. On the other hand, if that makes your life difficult dealing with extra pots, forget it. It probably makes a negligible difference. Really, find a process that works for you, measure a lot, and adjust recipes based on what your process yields. If you know how your equipment works (knowhatimean?) you can get the results you want, one way or another. ____Not the real rusty Because why? Cause it's taking up the space all the rest of you are not filling? ____Not the real rusty After 20 years... ...surely it can wait another decade or so. ____Not the real rusty I see it It was in the list, but we don't read Atom feeds. Can you get in in RSS 1 or 2? If so, add that url to the "add a feed" thingy and ping me again. ____Not the real rusty What?! What?! Do you mean to say that every culture and ethnicity includes assholes? No! It can't be. ____Not the real rusty Mike Hunt's Close ____Not the real rusty LEGALIZE & REGULATE That is all. ____Not the real rusty Not entrapment, doof The Fox Network. ____Not the real rusty That orchard he mentions Lost Meadow, that's where I get my juice. I'm convinced that good cider has little to do with the fermenting process. If you get it fermented, fine. Slower and colder is better. But if you don't start with good cider juice, there isn't any way you can really produce a good cider. Anyone who wants to make good cider, start either growing trees of some classic cider apples or driving around looking for orchards run by weirdos. It's the only way to get there. ____Not the real rusty That depends Lots of orchards don't have a press. On the other hand, if they're growing cider apple varieties, they probably do. And yeah, if you manage to track down someone who's got Dabinett and Chisel Jersey trees, they'll probably be hapy to talk about it with you all day long and press you a batch in the fall. Essentially, my point is that to make great cider, you do not need to know very much about brewing. What you really need to know is apples -- what kind, and where to find them. Or you need to be very lucky and live within a reasonable day's drive of someone who does. ____Not the real rusty Also Bottled after a month? Sheesh. If you're in a hurry, make a beer. Cider is no good for at least a year. Two years is better. ____Not the real rusty Reproduction Like everyone else, the timing of it was wife-driven. I made a rule that we had to find a house to buy first. What I meant was that we should buy and settle in to a house before we had kids. As it worked out, we closed on the house and found out she was pregnant in the same week, so I ended up emptying a dumpster worth of junk and painting the whole place by myself. But I was ready to have kids, for more personal reasons than biological ones. It seems to me that the middle aged and older people I know who never had kids are sort of stunted in some way. Like they never learned to look beyond themselves. They seem like overaged teenagers, forever. I didn't want to be like that. I wanted to find out what it is that kids have to teach me. Also, I don't want to die alone with no one left who knows or cares who I was. That seems like a very real risk if you forego creating a family. As for how they'll turn out, I just want them to be happy. People turn out to be the people they are, regardless of how they're raised. The best parents can do is give them the basics of social interaction, right and wrong, and ethics and let them figure it out. I was raised Protestant and turned out to be an atheist. I was raised by people who don't really drink at all and turned out to be a brewer. I share politics with my mother but not my father (except on a few things, where it's the opposite). People are who they are. Nothing good comes from fighting that. My wife's mother came to the US from Germany, and has done just what you describe -- moved overseas, assimilated to the culture, and didn't teach her native language to her kids. Her Dad is also German, but he moved here younger, with his parents, who decided to become American after WWII because they had been Bosnian Germans and that didn't work out so good for them. Point being, I've seen it happen in my own family, and it's not the end of the world. If my kids did that, I hope it's because it makes them happy. That'd be fine. I'd just have to learn their new language. The thing is, all this stuff seems much more important before you actually have kids. Having them you suddenly realize that they're people, they're actual individual persons like you are, with their own interior life and experience of reality, and you spend more time learning from them than you do trying to mold them into some idea you have. I see my role as to make my wider experience of what the world contains available to them, teach them how to behave in a personally and socially responsible manner, and help them become whatever it is they're going to become. Choosing what that is is not up to me, just like it's not up to me to choose what you are. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, no kidding "Oh, paint fumes and unnamed toxins from cheap 1960's furniture are bad for the baby" my ass, right. Don't think I didn't notice the coincidence there. ____Not the real rusty My experience: Your children will break your heart. My experience is that they do it almost constantly. But it's worth it. ____Not the real rusty Links of STFU I especially want to see someone argue that table sugar is not sucrose. ____Not the real rusty OR links or stfu. I meant. ____Not the real rusty Bah For homebrewing purposes, table sugar == sucrose. Not that sucrose is, y'know, necessary or desirable for homebrewing purposes, particularly. ____Not the real rusty I'm surrounded by perverts. ____Not the real rusty But how much? In a 1/2 cup of table sugar, how much cornstarch do you think there really is? Virtually none. Anyway, don't put table sugar in your beer. Or sucrose. It adds no flavor, just raw alcohol. ____Not the real rusty Chocolate vs cocoa Raw dutch-process cocoa powder is fine to put in beer. It's pressed cocoa solids that have been treated with alkali to make the fats soluble in water. That's actually the entire point of cocoa powder -- they wanted to make a chocolate drink that wasn't gritty. You're right about any kind of actual chocolate though. Anything with milk solids should be avoided. And sugared cocoa powder... well, that just seems like a lot more calculating hassle working out the addition of sugars to the wort etc. Cocoa nibs will just impart flavor and are removed before drinking, so those are fine too. Chocolate flavors in beer are generally either nibs (high end) or cocoa powder (low end). Incidentally, lactose is what to use if you want a milky sort of thing. ____Not the real rusty Coconut If I were ever insane enough to want a coconut flavored beer, I'd either make or buy coconut extract and use that. Yeah, clearly, everything you use in beer has to be water soluble. ____Not the real rusty I generally mix a bucket of sanitizer that's the same volume as my bottling bucket, and bottle the sanitizer first. Then I go back and dump out one bottle, fill it with beer, cap, dump out next bottle, fill, etc. The useful part of this is it settles exactly how many bottles I need. The unuseful part is it takes somewhat longer, since I'm really bottling twice. ____Not the real rusty Iodophor also stains spoons and racking tubes. My tubes are all dark yellow. Not that it makes any difference, but it definitely does. ____Not the real rusty Well, that too. ____Not the real rusty WITH MJ ON BACKUP Red flag. ____Not the real rusty Huh China, like, openly manipulates its currency. Many red flag touches. We don't officially recognize this fact? China's currency controls are entirely the reason why all the manufacturing has been drawn there. If they allowed it to float, they'd be priced out of most things almost immediately. ____Not the real rusty Why cheap? Chinese labor is cheap because they manipulate their currency float w/r/t the US dollar. Labor in the entire area is cheap, from India all throughout East Asia, and west to Eastern Europe. Why does all the work go to China? Because they make sure their labor stays the cheapest, for us, by pegging their currency to ours at a certain rate. Compared the the rest of the region, China is pretty much on par with everyone else in lack of labor or environmental regulations. It's the currency, stupid. ____Not the real rusty E. Coli FTW ____Not the real rusty Seconding ask her out For God's sake, you're not going to live forever. If she says no, what the hell. Then you know and can just be friendly or whatever. If she goes out of her way to wave at you, at the very least she doesn't think you're horrible. So any no will be "Nah, I like you but not like that," which is no big deal. It's not like a totally cold approach where someone might think you're truly revolting. Also hirez plx. ____Not the real rusty Ah, sensitive K5 Plz refer this thread to the sMothering magazine forums, stat. ____Not the real rusty Heh Nope, no midwives in CA. Here's their licensing legislation. So maybe your friend was just a back-alley unlicensed midwife? ____Not the real rusty Looks liike it was murky From here: She learned that the Legislature had never passed any law making the traditional practice of midwifery illegal in California. Without any specific authority, the Medical Board simply decreed that midwifery was an illegal practice of medicine. This questionable interpretation was based solely on the 1975 California Supreme Court decision in Kate Bowland's case. The Bowland decision was adjudicated by a panel of supreme court justices in a case that never even went to trial! This illogical conclusion persists to this day - unlicensed midwives continue to be prosecuted, even though the Licensed Midwife Practice Act does not make the unlicensed practice of midwifery illegal. (see `Bowland Revisited' on the College of Midwives web site)So it seems that the CA medical board was acting like midwives were illegal, although they weren't. Pretty long jump from that to "Midwives are illegal in the US" though. You may wish to fire up the Google first next time you find yourself abut to make a large assertion like that based on what someone told you 17 years ago. ____Not the real rusty WTF? You're talking out your ass here Mike. Midwives are perfectly legal, and very common and easy to find in the US. Different hospitals have different policies about who may attend at a birth, might be where you're getting this particular crazy from. Our first hospital had an arrangement with our midwife and she was allowed in with us and helped with the c-section. Our second hospital didn't have any associated midwives, and we ended up having an OB-GYN for that one. If you want to have your birth in your home or in a birthing center you're free to have anyone you want there. Midwives in the US do love to act persecuted and misunderstood, though, by the evil medical establishment. So who knows what fantasies your friend was living out. ____Not the real rusty Oh man If you had had a baby in the last 7 or 8 years, you'd have gotten a whole fucking snootful of this. FWIW I agree with some of it. A lot of women schedule a c-section just to know for sure when the birth is going to happen. But the flip side is what happened to us. With our first kid we went the whole birthing center midwife all natural route. We didn't do it at home, because having a kid on an island seemed sort of irresponsible, but we weren't in a hospital either. Se we go in to the birthing center when labor starts, labor till morning, fall asleep, and then finally the midwife discovers that our baby is breech, and we have to go to the hospital and have a c-section anyway. So now we're conflicted and my wife took months to accept that it was necessary and the right choice, because we'd spent months being indoctrinated by the natural childbirth brownshirts to think that hospital birth is EVIL. So there's definitely two sides to this, and right now they leave damn little room for common sense in the middle. And don't even start with the lacto-fascists who will tell you straight out that formula is poison. Can I just give a big ol' Fuck You out to them? Assholes. Birthing in America is a battleground at the moment. ____Not the real rusty Hippie chix are easy n/t ____Not the real rusty Heh, probably She wasn't really ever a hippie. She was a socialist when we met, and I was a libertarian, and we've gradually met somewhere in between those two extremes. We're actually bothy more hippies now than we ever used to be, but I plead the influence of place. If you live among Eskimos, you better learn to eat seal. That doesn't necessarily make you a seal-eater. Exactly. In some sense. ____Not the real rusty I agree with that We were very happy with our midwife, and the approach that pregnancy is not inherently a medical problem is very reassuring, and usually true. On the other hand, it demonstrably helps to have a doctor involved at certain points, so I think the generally emerging model of midwives with medical supervision (which really means just that there's an ob-gyn familiar with each of the midwife's cases who can be called in for more info if necessary) is a good one. ____Not the real rusty Oh, the 'research' I love the research especially. These people have absolutely no idea what science is. It's like trying to debate quantum mechanics with a witch doctor. Total cargo-cult. The nursing I am convinced is good for kids. Absolutely. And we tried. Oh how we tried. The problem is, there is no lacto-fascist "breastfeeding consultant" who will admit that yes, there are actually some women who cannot breastfeed. I understand why, because "some women just can't do it" is the breastfeeding equivalent of "I have a hormone imbalance that makes me fat." It is true, there is such a thing, but it is also far more rare than you would think if you listened to the self-diagnosed, and it's more often an excuse for laziness than an actual condition. So their solution is to just not admit it, and put your baby through weeks of hunger and misery and your wife through weeks of shame and misery and sore boobs and those hideous pumping machines, because they are not allowed to admit that formula isn't poison and if it makes you all happy just use it already. I will tell you this: some women can't nurse. That is a true fact, and when some lacto-fascist tells you there's no such thing, they are lying to you and should not be trusted at all. If we hadn't all been so miserable, I would have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of watching the consultants come and personally affix the pumps and assure us both that 2 oz of fresh piping hot mommy-juice was on the way, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, growing ever more perplexed when this thing that they have founded their whole career on believing is not possible happens right in front of them. It's nice to watch the smug get proven wrong. But not so much when it's at the expense of your family. ____Not the real rusty Lol I know someone else who has 18-month-apart kids for the same reason. "You can't get pregnant when you're breastfeeding" is up there with "the check's in the mail" and "She told me she was 18" in the pantheon of Great Lies. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Although the anti-breastfeeding thing is rapidly going the way of the dodo. Our generation of parents don't really think anything of it, and I imagine our kids will be mystified that there was ever a problem, when they become parents. Hopefully by then we can have a little perspective on the benefits and drawbacks of both. ____Not the real rusty Key difference In the UK, major surgery costs everyone. I imagine the national health has a strong motivation to discourage it. In the US, major surgery makes everyone involved a lot of money. I mean, it still costs everyone, but there's no one in charge of actually watching out for that. ____Not the real rusty lol That's great. There's nothing more fun than judging other parents. ____Not the real rusty What I'm Reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, D. Wallace. And good lord, is anyone who's read this surprised he offed himself? It is grim. ____Not the real rusty He was depressed Extremely so. Managed with medication for some time, then he went off the meds, and getting back on them didn't work. It's not hard to figure out. It's just kind of hard to read this book now, with hindsight, and not think that here was a profoundly hurting individual putting it all on the page for us. ____Not the real rusty "Understand" in what way? I don't understand it either in the sense of "have felt how that choice must feel." Wallace himself probably captured it best, though, when he used the analogy of the jumper from the burning building. Imagine you are trapped in a high-floor room of a burning building. You stand at the window with a sheer drop in front of you, and certain death at the bottom. Behind you, the flames creep ever closer. This actually happens, and nine times out of ten the person will jump. Does that mean they are any less afraid to jump than someone who is standing at a non-burning high window? No. They're just as afraid as they would be with no fire. It's just as certain that they will fall and die. But they jump anyway, because they're compelled to by something else that is even worse. Suicide due to depression is usually just the choice of a quick death over a long, lingering extremely painful death. One probably even worse than the burning building, because at least that holds out the prospect of death in the fairly near future. Depression doesn't kill you. You just get to stand there in that burning room all alone for every minute of your long life. And also, as an added bonus, you get to have people generally avoid and shun you, treat you like an infectious leper, and think or even say to your face that you're selfish and self-absorbed. And when you jump, most of them will condemn you for it. So that's what I understand of it. I have never personally felt that way though. ____Not the real rusty I can see that That kind of pain is probably beyond the human ability to really empathize with. Even if you personally have experienced it. I've noticed that it's impossible to remember what pain feels like. Like, there's no such thing as tactile memory, per se. Think of the worst pain you ever felt, then try to actually remember, physically, what it felt like. I bet you can't do it. I know I can't. This is probably an evolutionary advantage. ____Not the real rusty You're a human being By definition you are evolutionarily better than most. There is virtually not a single living thing on this Earth you can't kill by wanting to. I mean, the evolutionary advantage is not really in dispute here. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense Put AIDS in a lizard and what do you have? Dead AIDS. Sure, there's lots of ants and beetles, but how many other species have ants and beetles competed into extinction? I'm gonna go ahead and say none. It's not about sheer biomass. I'm talking global ecosystem-wide king of the hill here. The only species with any hope at all of wiping out humans at this point is humans. ____Not the real rusty Meh I understand your POV. And when we do manage to sufficiently poison or blow up our environment to make our own survival unlikely, I will agree with you. But I think you're looking forward rather than looking at the way things are now. Like, it's easy to say dinosaurs weren't that great because they didn't survive the meteor (or whatever killed them). But up to that point, when the environment changed drastically, they had absolutely ruled for hundreds of millions of years. At that time, they were king shit of shit mountain. That's what I'm saying we are now. ____Not the real rusty Yeah This whole argument is based on a fundamentally false and unsupportable teleological premise, that there is such a thing as a "best" or "most adapted" or "most powerful" species. Clearly there is no such thing -- it's not a race but just a loop. ____Not the real rusty Nevertheless As a human being you are a nearly unstoppable evolutionary badass, was just my original point. ____Not the real rusty Just barely you. ____Not the real rusty So you know what's weird Still reading Brief Interviews, and yesterday I read "Octet," which is sort of a failed super-short cycle of things structured as Pop Quizzes, which ends with a faux-meta-pop-quiz where Wallace basically comes out and confesses that the whole thing isn't working and explains what he was trying to get at with it in the first place, which actually almost rescues the whole thing by being really funny. I say "almost" because it turns out that what he was trying to get at is the fact that human interrelation, to be in any way real, involves sacrifice. You have to give something up to really (as he put it) "be with" another human being. Whether it's your comfort, or some illusions about yourself, or your defensive walls, or even your life, in extreme cases. And that's where I sort of had to stop and stare off into space for a while and marvel at the fact that he did all this work, and in hindsight most of what he wrote is basically about this core fact, which seems sort of obvious to me. Him finding this so revelatory and important and surprising is pretty sad. I think he felt tremendously isolated and alone... is exactly it. To the extent that he didn't really know until whenever this was written -- 1995 or 96 or something -- that this is how human relationships always work. That it was such a surprise and revelation that he basically dumps his soul onto the page about it in an effort to explain it to people, the vast majority of whom have got to have already grasped this fact. It's like he went swimming and rushed back to exclaim to us all that he's just discovered that WATER is WET! The poor man was unbelievably brilliant and erudite but also fundamentally broken, as a human being. ____Not the real rusty If you haven't seen it This is just about the best summing-up so far of Wallace's life and work. Also, this article from '99 in Salon talks quite a bit about the Charlie Rose interview, and pretty much perfectly sums up why it's so hard to watch:What makes Wallace such a good/bad talk show guest and profile subject is that he attempts to answer fully and in nuanced ways the questions he's asked. The publicity machine can artfully photograph around him, they can catch the near-blondness while largely obscuring the monastic agonies and fanatical intensity marking his face, but they have trouble with the quotes. On "Charlie Rose," Wallace was like a giant combine moving through a field of wheat when he was supposed to be posing with a cute donkey and an old leather plow in front of the family barn.I had a lot of sympathy watching that. If they ever tried to put me on TV they'd probably get something very similarly unwatchable. Anyway. He saw many shrinks and has at least two known disorders -- drug/alcohol addiction and severe and nearly untreatable depression. It's more a wonder that he lived as long as he did and produced so much, than otherwise. ____Not the real rusty I was thinking about that the other day The Ethical Assassin, that is. This made me think of it. You read it? ____Not the real rusty I loled ____Not the real rusty Not exactly heroics here This is some way low-hanging fruit. It's like he came into office and immediately repealed bans on cute bunnies and ice cream, and canceled the executive order requiring all men to be castrated at 18. I mean, this is just no-brainer stuff. The standard actions anyone would take when they replace a super-villain. Hopefully he moves quickly to the more difficult issues. ____Not the real rusty hulu works fine for me on FF/linux. And if it works on linux, it works on everything. ____Not the real rusty Check the video on Roberts It may have looked like that from the audience, but what happened was Roberts totally fucked up the oath. Obama stopped and waited for him to do it right, he stumbled again, and Obama picked up the pieces as best he could. Also, right on to including athiests in a public ceremony. That has to be a first. ____Not the real rusty I doubt it It's kind of a high pressure moment. I think he just screwed up. ____Not the real rusty Youtube The oath. Roberts: "That I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully." Obama: "That I will execute..." [significant nod at Roberts] Roberts: "the off... faithfully the office of President of the United States" Obama: "the office of President of the United States faithfully" So actually Obama didn't end up doing it right either, but he was clearly doing his best after the stuttering hash Roberts' made of it. "That I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully" indeed. ____Not the real rusty What's funny is... ...Obama stopped, waited for Roberts to say it right, and then continued with the repeating the original, wrong version. Just basically sort of a screwup there, all round. ____Not the real rusty Not infinitives I think you mean split adverbial phrases. ____Not the real rusty OATH UPDATE Apparently they did it again, to shut down the wingnuts. ____Not the real rusty It's funny the kind of magic-spell thinking that goes into even worrying about it. It's not an incantation. It's a promise. Is there significant semantic difference between promising to "execute the office of President of the United States faithfully" and "faithfully execute the office of President of the United States"? Either way, to actually make any sense you have to insert an implied "the duties of" in there somewhere, and with that I don't see how it makes any difference. Yes, it's in the Constitution blah blah. Of course "so help me God" isn't, but including that at the end is ok? I just find it interesting how people view this. ____Not the real rusty Must be the yeast If you're getting cidery flavors from nothing but yeast and table sugar, I suspect one or both of two things: You have a very strange idea of what cider tastes like, and/or The yeast is producing some esters or something which you're picking up as "cidery." I mean, if you're not fermenting anything but table sugar, then by definition all flavors are coming from the yeast. I don't really buy your "bread yeast is neutral" theory. If anything, I'd be inclined to expect it to be less neutral in flavor. After all, it's not bred for flavor neutrality, and a loaf of bread has a lot more capacity to cover up odd tastes produced by the yeast. You could make some further investigation of this by trying your all-sugar brew with some common brewing yeasts. ____Not the real rusty Yeah but describing a taste as "cidery" pretty much guarantees that he's talking about aroma more than taste. If it's not sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami, it's an aroma. ____Not the real rusty OMG SQUEE Look what I just found on the internet OMG cute! ____Not the real rusty Wow That host woman looks weirdly... artificial. ____Not the real rusty I generally can't tell them apart either. Then again, I don't watch news on TV, so the issue rarely comes up. The Onion actually hires small-market and aspiring tv news talent to do those bits. There was something about it on This American Life, I think. It was interesting. ____Not the real rusty Obligatory overly harsh and uncalled-for reply I weigh 165 naked, and 290 wearing a fat suit made out of the tanned skin and preserved blubber of your mom. ____Not the real rusty 6 feet even Maybe a half inch less. ____Not the real rusty This is the worst comment since the Great Depression! It's a perfect storm of addlepated nonsense! We have to help the diary ghetto along with the front page! ____Not the real rusty Er? The federal government pays exactly zero teachers. Schools are paid for by municipal or county government, and virtually 100% out of property taxes, which are the only taxes most cities can still collect. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, you're right There are some grant programs and stuff. It's not a big part of school funding, overall though. That said, "Imagine if the gov't couldn't afford to pay teachers..." is true enough if you include local governments. ____Not the real rusty Ummm Generally state governments bitch to the Federal government that they want the fed to pay for more stuff. The Federal government pays for some things, gives money to states to use for other things, and sometimes makes rules but doesn't fund them at all (like No Child Left Behind). Basically, it's complicated. They're supposed to be separate, but in practice they're neither separate nor related in any coherent way. ____Not the real rusty But wait, there's more! In a number of places, if you work in a different state or city than you live, you get to pay taxes in both places. Usually there's some agreement where one place will discount what you paid in the other place. For a couple years, I was paying US Federal income tax, Maryland state income tax, DC income tax, and Virginia income tax, because I lived in DC and worked in MD and VA. ____Not the real rusty What's the NZ tax code like? Here, the tax code is a favorite policymaking tool. Rather than mandate something, the government will give you a tax break for behaving in some way they'd like you to behave. On the one hand, it's a less coercive way to govern than just making rules. But on the other hand, it makes our tax code a mess. In Europe they just say "here's how much I made, and here's my payment." I always envied the hell out of that. Simple, one sheet of paper, five minutes and you're done. I've employed an accountant to do my taxes for years. It's just such a pain in the ass, especially with having a business and a regular job, and a spouse who's a contract worker. ____Not the real rusty By "benefit" ...they mean the soft sense of "not hurt so badly." I.e. if the banks fail anyway, the government just spent 700 billion dollars and got nothing. If they don't fail, perhaps they'll only have spent 150 or 300 billion, because they'll make the rest back in dividends or something. It's like the benefit of anything not killing you making you stronger. ____Not the real rusty Boooo Do some research on the payback rates of those "substandard" loans vs. speculators and flippers. Don't just parrot the racist talking point of the day. Do some research and then come up with your own, true, racist talking points. ____Not the real rusty Um, no I mean look at the rates of default on the poor black people loans vs. "liar" loans. The actual numbers are out there. The poor people loans have a staggeringly lower rate of default and foreclosure. Standards of approval were actually higher for the government-backed CRA loans, compared to open market subprimes. Those standards were so low because no one involved had any stake at all in seeing them paid back. The lenders were just going to bundle them up and sell them off anyway. Whether they were paid back made not one bit of difference to the originator -- they'd have made their money in months, not 30 years. Look, here's the study. Page 28 has the gist of it in two simple graphs. 90-day delinquency rate by loan type, and credit score distribution of CAP borrowers vs. subprime borrowers. CAP borrowers tend to have a higher credit score, and the second lowest delinquency rates, beaten only by traditional prime mortgages. ____Not the real rusty Liar loan A liar loan is "[a] category of mortgages known as low-documentation or no-documentation mortgages that have been abused to the point where the loans are sometimes referred to as liar loans. On certain low-documentation loan programs, such as stated income/stated asset (SISA) loans, income and assets are simply stated on the loan application. On other loan programs, such as no income/no asset (NINA) loans, no income and assets are given on the loan application form. These loan programs open the door for unethical behavior by unscrupulous borrowers and lenders." CRA loans (since the government was the backer) required actual documentation of employment, income, debt ratio, etc. All the normal stuff that any sane lender would naturally require. So it's not all that surprising that they performed better. But yes, "liar loans" were based on no documentation and either "trust me" numbers or no numbers at all. There were no background checks done. It was only a "massive conspiracy" in the sense that lenders knew they were going to make money on these loans (because they were going to bundle them up and sell them off to investors) regardless of whether they got paid back or not. It was not a massive criminal conspiracy, since these loans were legal, except in the sense that some large lenders (like Countrywide, notably) pushed people into bad loans who could have gotten much better terms, sometimes by outright lying to them about what they were signing. I don't understand your confusion about the difference between CRA and subprime loans. CRA is a federal program, and loans made under it were reported as such. There isn't any overlap. That study further clarifies it by controlling for your exact point -- it's not comparing good areas to bad areas. It's comparing loan type performance for identical types of borrowers. That is, Joe and Bob live in the same area, make the same money and so forth and so on. Joe got a subprime liar loan, Bob got a CRA loan. Who's more likely to pay it back? The answer is Bob. Anyway. I know I'm unlikely to convince you, but arguing for anyone else who might be reading, the point is that the crash was primarily due to speculators, not poor people trying to buy their own home. The facts are unequivocal. I know "poor people couldn't afford their mortgages" sounds plausible, but it's not what happened. What happened is "speculators got fucked when house prices actually couldn't rise forever." ____Not the real rusty To be clear I'm not arguing anything in particular about the desirability of having the government involved here. My point is just that a) CRA loans are not to blame for the mortgage disaster, and b) CRA loan to subprime loan performance rates demonstrate that some kind of basic checking on a borrower's ability to pay is good for the banking industry and the borrowers in general. If the banks were doing their homework on borrowers at all we wouldn't be in this mess. The lesson of CRA is not "we need the government to force loans to be made," but "we need borrowers to be checked for ability to pay, like they used to be." If poor people miss too many payments because they lose their job or because of pressure not to be discriminatory got them approved for a loan they really couldn't afford, this is just as burdensome on the bank as not realizing any profit from the homes they've repossessed. You're leaving out a major part of the problem here. It's not just "poor people." A big piece is speculators who overpaid for a house, put a lot more money into it in renovations, and discovered when they were done that they couldn't sell the thing. Those people sent the banks jingle mail (keys) and walked away. It's a major, and hugely incorrect, assumption on your part that the bulk of the problem was poor people who couldn't make their payments. But no, you're not going to convince me that "no-doc" loans were the vast majority of the issue when the securities market itself bought and traded these like any other. The securities market buying and trading these bundles of loans is what I'm saying the problem is. There was a strong market for packages of loans, because the criminally idiotic ratings agencies were grading them as equivalent to cash, therefore there was a strong motivation for lenders to make as many loans as they could, because the loans were the raw material for the securities that they were actually in the business of selling. The more loans you can originate, the more CDOs you can issue, the more money you make, and Moody's says they're all AAA regardless of what kind of insanity your lending process looks like. Once you've sold off the CDO, you don't particularly give a shit if the loans ever pay back. You already valued them and sold them at that value. It's the next guy's problem, and he's not a bank or a lender (or, he doesn't think of himself as one, even though now he actually is). "Moral hazard." So when the housing bubble topped out and suddenly house prices went down, a lot of institutions and investors were suddenly holding a lot of paper whose actual value was suddenly unknown. Maybe your CDOs are all fine. Maybe they're composed entirely of no-doc flippers from central Florida and Pheonix. Nobody knows. So all these investors (banks, hedge funds, pension plans etc) find themselves holding a huge number of instruments with no known value. Pension funds, by and large, are forced to sell them off immediately when their rating goes in the crapper, because they're not allowed to hold junk investments. But no one wants to buy the stuff. So the value those sales set is practically zero. So everyone else holding these things can either hang on and pray something good happens, or write them off as a complete loss. And for many banks, that's no choice at all -- they can't do either of those because this is money they're supposedly capitalizing their bank with. SO IN CONCLUSION everyone's fucked. One route out of this mess is for Papa Bernanke to tool down Wall Street in a dump truck full of cash and buy up all the mortgage-backed securities at some price the banks and the fed can agree doesn't totally bend over either party (and by either party, I mean "the banks.") Then the stinky securities are off the bank's books, they have money instead of a mysterious black box that might be empty, and maybe they took a small loss, but it's probably not that bad. They get back to doing banky shit. Meanwhile the government now holds X number of CDOs that it paid $Y billion for. It's the government, so it just holds them and sees what shakes out. Chances are, most of them will pay back at a reasonable rate. Not great, maybe, but not one cent on the dollar either. I mean, there's lots of foreclosures but not that many, you know? In time, the loans mature and we eventually find that we spent some money but not anything like $700 billion, in the long term. That's what the bank bailout was supposed to be. Remember? BUT NO! Those assholes couldn't even do that right. Instead they bought shares in the fucking banks. Because... because... I don't know why. It's so idiotic I can't even fathom it. So what we did was invest in banks, who are still holding this stinky paper, and still don't know if their investments are worth anything or not. And so we have spent a lot of money and not actually done a goddamn thing to solve the root problem. Which is why nothing has improved. Essentially we tried to hire a hooker by investing in Victoria's Secret. Not only did it not work, it was a full-blown Michael Crawford-level insane idea to even consider it. It is dadaist policy-making. Any third grader could have explained why this was stupid. So, to sum up. The problem is not borrowers, per se, at all -- rich, poor, or otherwise. The problem is people who were so shit-stupid they though house prices always go up, even in a really obvious bubble. And on top of them were lenders who were so shit-greedy that they were willing to ignore that house prices do not always go up and that we were clearly in a bubble, because they were making a lot of money on the bubble. And on top of them, ratings agencies who decided that a bunch of home loans were as safe as cash, for no reason anyone can fathom, except the weak-ass claim that they believed house prices always go up. In other words, stupidity and greed as usual. ____Not the real rusty What? Isn't the TARP money coming from Treasury bills? I do believe it is. And actually, t-bills are the only safe investment right now, and they're paying at pretty much nothing. So we're not printing money to pay for this stuff, we're borrowing it at almost zero interest. ____Not the real rusty Not really They're borrowing existing money, from investors (people, institutions, foreign governments, etc). This does not expand the money supply. ____Not the real rusty Lots of them right now Cause the choice is "park my money in t-bills at 0% and keep what I have now" or "put my money somewhere else and lose 30% of it over the next few months." Basically, t-bills are the only thing out there with little to no risk. Who believes the US government is going to default? No one. It won't happen. So if you're not making anything, at least you're not losing it either. ____Not the real rusty Yes We still have to pay off the bonds. This is just the way governments (and lots of large companies) finance stuff, rather than save up money beforehand. It's the United States Government's Visa card, and the bill will come due. ____Not the real rusty Well, kind of Ok, look at it this way. You buy a 10 year t-bill for .80 on the dollar. You pay $80, the face value is $100, and in ten years, you get your hundred bucks. That transaction added $20 to the money supply, because it surely wasn't there when the government printed that bond. But the flip side of that is that short-term treasuries are selling at a premium right now. 30-days are selling at slightly above face value. People are actually opting for a known loss over an unknown gain or loss (probably loss, and probably big) in other markets. That is actually shrinking the money supply. Not much, I grant, but a little. So yeah, it tweaks the money supply in one way or another, but much less than just issuing $700 billion of freshly printed US currency. ____Not the real rusty Bset RIDAL evar! ____Not the real rusty Indeed Without you, it would just be noodle. With you, it's noodle and psychotic self-absorption. ____Not the real rusty Public service announcement Remember, men, it's not gay unless the balls touch! ____Not the real rusty You're missing the key point My religion is eternal, immutable, inherently correct and real. Your religion is obviously wrong and silly. ____Not the real rusty Go back to? When did we stop? ____Not the real rusty "We" in the broadest sense, as in "humanity in general." I, personally, belong to a culture that mainly kills people over natural resources, which is at least as old a tradition, and possibly the same thing anyway. ____Not the real rusty I thought I'd bike They say the road there is paved with good intentions. Sounds fast. And I bet it's a wicked long downslope. ____Not the real rusty Damn There's one in Dupont now? When I was there we had to truck all the way out to like Arlington or someplace. Jealous. ____Not the real rusty Kate Winslett has two golden globes. ____Not the real rusty Close It monitors and kills apaches that are sucking up memory out of control. It doesn't check every request though, so sometimes you hit one just as it gets killed. I don't know what's up with the memory-sucking issue, but it was a pain in the ass. The monitor deals with it fairly well, apparently. But still. It's annoying. ____Not the real rusty Actually I do know what's going on. I forgot before. There are a few stories with lots of comments and/or very very deep threads. The design of the comment display system means that these take a while to render and tend to take up a huge chunk of memory. They're not loaded very often, but when google's doing a major reindex, it tends to hit them all more than once. So just a couple loads of one of these stories will bloat up a couple of apache threads, and can use up more or less all of the available memory. Fixing it would be... somewhat involved, let's say. More involved than I have the time or the energy for, when instead I can just latch a process monitor on to the thing and have it shoot bloated apaches in the head for me, like so many North Vietnamese captives. ____Not the real rusty I, too, like the hip bones. I don't know if that make you normal or both of us pervs. Take your choice. ____Not the real rusty Blew Man What? Too obvious? ____Not the real rusty I have already told that damn joke here except it wasn't ubuntu when I heard it. ____Not the real rusty 5 guys rules. I like how they don't line anything up properly, like the meat's all hanging off one side, and there's toppings all over the place. It's like you know what? This is a great goddamn hamburger. It doesn't need to be neat. Also, the peanut oil fries are awesome. I miss five guys. ____Not the real rusty OMGBBQ! "Roland wants an office. It's another thing to chisel on his Ramses II pyramid," said Judy Baar Topinka, a former Illinois state treasurer and Republican candidate for governor. She added: "His ego is huge." OMG political enemies badmouth each other stop teh blogs and presses! ____Not the real rusty Well sure He does. OTOH, if I were him, I'd be pretty proud of myself. On the third hand, a chiseled monument to me greatness ain't really how I roll. On the fourth hand, what the hell am I doing with all these hands? ____Not the real rusty No, but There is a distinct absence of reports from the ignorant fool's point of view. Joe hopes to fill this gap, and is well suited to do so. ____Not the real rusty Or The Times, of London. ____Not the real rusty Not only Russia But the gas comes from Russian gangsters and has to be piped past the Ukrainian gangsters. It's a wonder Europe doesn't ow them gas by the time all that skimming is finished. EU: "What do you mean used minus 400 million cubic meters of gas? How is that even... oh fuck it. Yes, fine, we'll pay." Lol. ____Not the real rusty Specifically It's hotmale that does this -- releasing old email accounts for re-registration, which just seems insane to me. ____Not the real rusty Kiwi, eh? "Like in Flight of the Conchords? Do you know those guys?" I'm just getting you warmed up for 90% of your conversations with Americans. The other 10% will involve Lord of the Rings. I don't live in NY but I do have some co-workers there. Park Slope is where people move when they're married and ready for the minivan. That's the single thing I do know about NYC neighborhoods. ____Not the real rusty lol Yeah. Throw another shrimp on the barbie mate! ____Not the real rusty It does It's called "American History." There. I saved you the trouble of looking like an ass in front of all the hot girls in your class. Thank me later. ____Not the real rusty You should read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I see it's not on the list, so points there. Plus it's a hell of a good book. ____Not the real rusty No really It's a good book. Very readable and entertaining and thought provoking. The class, whatever. You should read it. ____Not the real rusty That explains it! craigslist used to be 100% homo, and I was wondering what the difference was lately. Burn. ____Not the real rusty The irony of Germany relying on Russia for, what, like 40% of its energy just 60 years after WWII has to be in any top ten list of lolworthy things about our current world. ____Not the real rusty Good time for a lager ...assuming you're somewhere coldish and you have a basement. I'm planning to put a pilsener in the basement shortly and let it sit around in the cold till spring. ____Not the real rusty Hm My attic tends to change temp wildly from day to night. It would be a bad place to lager beer, regardless of the difficulty of getting a carboy up a creaky ladder. But hey, any moderately cold place that works. For me, the basement happens to be a pretty constant 55 degrees F (~12 C) all winter. I just did a winter warmer with a friend that should be going into secondary in the next day or two. I can't say it's good yet, but it damn well ought to be. The recipe is here -- it's my second shot at this one, and the brew went very smoothly, unlike the attempt in that diary. ____Not the real rusty Dude Easter. That's easter. ____Not the real rusty oic "Nail," or "knock up." "Nail up" is a different thing. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense We used to have real White Supremacists. Don't you remember Baldrson? Tiber is just a shock-racist. If anything he's helping combat racism by making it lolworthy. Baldrson was creepy-serious about it, and always tried to mask and deny his racism. ____Not the real rusty What's wrong with stockpiling weapons? ____Not the real rusty Please don't off yourself Mike I give you as much shit as anyone else here, but I don't want you to die by any means. Glad you're seeking help. Keep doing it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Facebook I use facebook very occasionally. Although I (almost) only friend people I actually know in person. So yes, stop sending me facebook friend invites. Seriously. But I hate all that crap too. ____Not the real rusty Lol He posts anything and you eat it right up. Ever think about that? ____Not the real rusty Laughing out loud? I don't know. I had a long day. ____Not the real rusty Christ that was terrible Remember the front-page stories saying that all Clinton supporters were racists, automatically? I checked in a couple times during that fiasco, and it was revolting. ____Not the real rusty lol Yeah, that was the one. I was kinda pissed off. :-) ____Not the real rusty GIVE ME A POLL THAT DOESN'T SUCK ____Not the real rusty ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? COG IN THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? ____Not the real rusty I have just the church for you. Reverend Carlton Pearson came to much the same conclusion, and was branded a heretic for it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah That right there? I'm hard like that. ____Not the real rusty Your whole system is screwed up here You start with a volume of air, N, in the bowl under the plastic wrap and over the beans. You heat the beans and the air to 100C, say, and the volume of the gas expands correspondingly. But here's the problem with trying to treat this as a temp/pressure problem. The plastic wrap doesn't hold a constant pressure. It acts as a one-way valve. So a lot of the air escapes when it's heated, and stopping the heating closes the one-way valve, effectively sucking the plastic wrap against the food because now you have a partial vacuum in there. The steam doesn't shrink by a factor of, like, anything. It's just that you've created a tiny volume of very hot vapor inside a container with a one-way valve. This is the same principle home canning jars work on, incidentally. ____Not the real rusty Apparently, they called him the Hebrew t-bill. I loled. ____Not the real rusty An Hero of the Great Battle of Stolichnaya. ____Not the real rusty If it's not too late Pretend it didn't happen at all. "Cuba? What? I didn't say anything about Cuba! I didn't even talk to you last night..." If you're insistent enough, the other guy will start to doubt his own memory. ____Not the real rusty Split up actually Around here, Adelphia became Time-Warner. My own lovely hometown cable monopoly. I will say this about TW: their local support people are good. If I can get through support line hell to the actual Portland office, they're no-bullshit. ____Not the real rusty Its probably still not there Great swathes of rural Maine still have nothing but dialup. Barring an Obama Rural Internetification Project, this will probably never change. ____Not the real rusty Did you look at the maps? That's in major metro areas only. The places that are already drowning in high speed internet access. They have no coverage in all of New England. And apparently not even NYC. So I'm thinking that's not much of an alternative there. ____Not the real rusty iptables /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 220.231.15.134 -p tcp -j DROP ____Not the real rusty Huh I'm about 4/5 of the way through re-reading my mass-market fourth-printing paperback of it. ____Not the real rusty Just out of curiosity How heavy is the hardcover? The paperback is like a police-lock bar's supporting block of lead. The hardcover must be like Atlas Toting the World heavy. ____Not the real rusty What's a henway? ____Not the real rusty Sheesh Egg on my face. ____Not the real rusty Science fiction? IJ is science fiction in really only the absolutely loosest possible sense. It's set in the "near future," which reading it now actually is kind of an alternate-near-past, since it was written in '96 and seems to be set roughly 2000-2005ish. It posits some sciency atmospherics, like "annular fusion" and the Great Concavity and stuff, but those are transparently just big-R Romantic metaphors for various of the book's themes. It's not really sci-fi at all. The value is purely human-interest, IMO. There's nothing particular special about the IJ first edition, except that it's one of the best books ever written in the English language and the author just offed himself. ____Not the real rusty Another one It's sort of like Margaret Atwood's science fictionier stuff. Called "sf" because literary fiction is still pathologically averse to any kind of mention of technology. ____Not the real rusty Population: YOU! amirite ____Not the real rusty The celestial aether FTW ____Not the real rusty Hey I did my second cooler batch yesterday. Batch sparge worked like a champ. We were up around 80% efficiency, which is pretty goddamn good. The mash was about 1.2 quarts/lb (12.5 lb grain, 3.75 gallons), and I sparged with 3 gallons and 3-ish gallons. The second sparge didn't get drained all the way cause my boiling pot was full. So I ended up with 7 gallons at 1.056 which I'm estimating should have boiled down to 6 gallons at 1.066 which was dead-on in terms of target OG. So in short, it went fucking great. ____Not the real rusty The drain The drain is actually sort of channelled down into a little well in the bottom of the cooler. So if it were sitting flat and full of water and you opened the drain, it would empty the whole thing. Of course with the fittings and screen it's not quite as effective. I had to stick a couple books under the non-drain end to get liquid flowing all the way over to the drain side. About the efficiency, yeah I was very surprised. I'd have been happy with 70% and very pleased with 75%. 80% is just about bordering on implausible, to my mind. It's possible my measuring was sloppy or something, and I will also issue the caveat that the volume of liquid was somewhat estimated. There's no volume markings on my kettle, so I'm not absolutely sure it was 7 gallons. If it was really like 7.5 gallons, then the efficiency would be a little lower. But ballpark, it's 75%+ still. I do have Palmer's book, that I mostly use to look up the extraction math every time. I think the whole key is just that draining all the wort each time gets you right up to par with the crazy flow-diagrams and manifold layouts and whatnot that he's so keen on. Your new screen looks like it should work fine. If anyone's interested I can post a long tedious process diary about my last brew, because the overall process worked very well and it's still fresh in my mind. ____Not the real rusty I suspect That it isn't that they didn't want you to quit, so much as they didn't want you to be batshit insane. The symptoms would manifest the same -- even the things the sympathetic managers would say would be the same. "We're really sorry to see you go, we wish we didn't have to replace you, it'll be tough to find someone as skilled as you..." But your assumption is that the underlying feeling is "We don't want you to quit," whereas mine is "We wish you weren't so crazy we have to get rid of you go at any cost." Just my four ha'penny. ____Not the real rusty Open your eyes ____Not the real rusty I TOO DEMAND 1) Ultramodern sun beehive 2) Priority to the electric doughnut holder of small children 3) The freedom of thinking to be 4) Close all city center to pigeons it is for the pedestrian use and bicycles only. Also no mercy to seagulls 5) The reptiles of dawn This is what we want and what we'll get no fascist police or polity can stop it ____Not the real rusty Congratulations You have upheld the dictum that your first all grain batch with untested equipment will be a fiasco. :-) The next one will go better. ____Not the real rusty As the new user ...actually you're a good focus group here. If you had the option, would you have submitted a story or just laid down the Lincoln? ____Not the real rusty I love you. ____Not the real rusty Make you a deal Get a good story posted and I'll give you a refund. :-) ____Not the real rusty It'll only fly If you Randomly Capitalize Phrases You Think might be Important. Writing about Robots is not for the Weak At Heart after all. ____Not the real rusty PS I will post pics of your wife's brassieres any time, provided she is occupying them. And by "post" I mean "keep totally to myself." ____Not the real rusty And by... ..."keep totally to myself" I mean "auction off for monocle polish funds." ____Not the real rusty You see, this is where you demonstrate that you didn't read the pile of crap in the queue. Cause he says he'd have been in the camps too. I do not recommend you read it just to find that out though. ____Not the real rusty "Made love" That better, Sally? ____Not the real rusty You bitch That's better than mine. ____Not the real rusty Damn ____Not the real rusty It is well known that according to the laws of physics, bumblebees cannot fly. The hypothesis of vortices is pressed with many difficulties. ____Not the real rusty That's probably enough diaries for today Mmmkay? ____Not the real rusty Hi-Rez Pruf clicky. ____Not the real rusty It's being helpful ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry That would severely curtail posting. From like, everybody. ____Not the real rusty Oh, I misread I thought you meant five words total. Just inro copy, I see. It is possible to limit intro copy, actually. I don't do it here mainly because it only rarely is a problem. When someone purposely floods the intro, I just edit. I usually give everyone pretty wide latitude for long text, provided it is actually text. It's not like your scroll button is broken, and the number of posts shown is the same regardless of how long they are. ____Not the real rusty Well It's a small price to pay for the hours of entertainment MC provides, I feel. ____Not the real rusty We can only hope But hey, marital breakup, pursuit of a BPD sufferer with a violent sociopathic boyfriend... Nah, there's no way any of this could turn out badly. ____Not the real rusty Liar ____Not the real rusty Probably a more useful way to think about it What do LwSD and Links have in common, and do not share with the stuff you've submitted that's been dumped? It's not the editing technique. It's that both of those were informative articles on subjects of general interest, not personal minutia of your life. I suspect the confusion stems from the first being largely about your life experiences. But the key thing to understand is that it was interesting because you brought personal experience to bear in illustrating a subject of more general interest, in a pretty competent reporterly way. That article could have been written by someone else, using you as a subject to explore and humanize the disease itself. That's what made it good. It was (no offense) not popular because we inherently care about your life. ____Not the real rusty No Sorry, Mike. I'm kinda disappointed that you regard what we've done as special favors in the past as your right that you can rely on now (i.e. "I'll post this half-formed crap to the queue because I can always get more time"). So I'd really like to nip that in the bud. And honestly, of what possible necessity are pictures in an article about your love life? Jesus. ____Not the real rusty No, really No. On your own site, you should feel completely free to post any graphical amusements you feel are meaningful and suggestive. But that's never been the way here. I once in a great while agree to add pics to an article that needs them to illustrate some key thing that really just can't usefully be described with words. The whole subject of your article fails that test. There can be no possible picture that is so important to this story it can't be omitted. Not to mention this story isn't going to fly, and you probably ought to just save yourself a lot of time and give up on it now. I'm sorry to hear about you and Bonita splitting up, btw. That's too bad. If you felt like writing an article that might get posted, the one about BPD you mentioned (in a totally general sense, at the very most extremely lightly salted with one or two personal anecdotes about your experience with this other woman) would probably be a hell of a lot more interesting than your personal issues. This one you're working on is a diary at best. ____Not the real rusty Lol Exactly. ____Not the real rusty All aboard! ____Not the real rusty There is nothing false about vibrating space age synthetic vaginas. Nothing. ____Not the real rusty You lie! First of all, you simply cannot use the phrase "poor spoor." I mean really. Try to say that out loud. "Poor spoor." "I am not a poor sport!" "No, 'Poor Spoor.'" "Pour some more what?" "Oh forget it." The only possible exception would be if you were headline writer assigned an article about a spate of river fishermen taking undersize catches, and you wrote the headline: "Trout Rout: Poor Spoor" which would be pretty awesome. And secondly, I rest my case. ____Not the real rusty Huh $30 for 50ft of 3/8 coil is pretty good. Only $40 for 1/2 inch. For that it's just about worth building one. I've held off building or buying one so far because copper prices have been so damn high. Commercial chillers were $100 or so and a coil of tubing wasn't much less. Perhaps the time has come... ____Not the real rusty Uh... Yes, that Rahm Emanuel. ____Not the real rusty It's not a stutter It's an upper-class stammer. The correct libel here is that Obama is an elitist. Please get your smears straight. ____Not the real rusty To play devil's advocate here... Cities see sports franchises as a big draw to business in the city. The argument goes that they get people into the city and spending money. I'm sure someone has sat down and worked out "Each game attendee spends $x on average in the stadium and surrounding businesses." It also presumably has positive effects in just getting suburbanites into the city and demonstrating to them that it's not a scary hellhole and maybe they should come back for a nice dinner or a show now and again. Does the income balance out the extra traffic hassles and police overtime? I don't know. Someone ought to figure it out. I'm just pointing out that it's not impossible that municipal support for sports teams is a net win for the city overall. ____Not the real rusty Well pointed out My own city wastes its money in large-scale development graft. It seems like spending it on a stadium would probably be an improvement, if only of the "higher circle of hell" variety. ____Not the real rusty Hot And creepy. I feel a little worse about myself reading this. Nice job! ____Not the real rusty Pasta salad Cook lots of spiral or bowtie pasta, toss it in a huge bowl with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, veggie stuff like fresh broccoli, carrots, chick peas maybe, snap beans, you know hit the produce aisle and go nuts. Add herbs or spices to taste. I practically live on this stuff in the summer, and the longer it sits around, the better it gets, as all the oils and flavors mingle. Also, no cooking unless you count boiling a big pot of water. ____Not the real rusty Flooding machines are expensive as hell I looked into getting one oh fuck it paste it in here yourself. ____Not the real rusty Fooling machines are expensive as hell I looked into getting one a few years ago, and decided I'd be better off with a K$5 membership. The cheap ones are crappy and the good ones cost a mint. It's possible this has changed -- I think this was 2002ish that I looked. But I kind of doubt it. ____Not the real rusty Sewing machines are expensive as hell I looked into getting one a few years ago, and decided I'd be better off with a quilting bee membership. The cheap ones are crappy and the good ones cost a mint. It's possible this has changed -- I think this was 2002ish that I looked. But I kind of doubt it. ____Not the real rusty Are you thinking of the sailboat? That's not a rowing machine, it's a sinking machine. Ad it works perfectly. ____Not the real rusty SS means steamship You want S/V Failboat. Where S/V means "Sinking Vessel." ____Not the real rusty It hasn't really gotten started yet Neither my friend nor I have had time to get to it yet. I spent the fall expanding the garden and weatherizing the house, and he spent it getting drunk and watching movies, or whatever it is childless people do. We set a goal to have the hull patched up and painted by next winter. I think that's plausible. This is a medium-to-long-term thing, anyway. As long as we make some progress on it next summer, I'll be happy enough. ____Not the real rusty Rowing machines are expensive as hell I looked into getting one a few years ago, and decided I'd be better off with a gym membership. The cheap ones are crappy and the good ones cost a mint. It's possible this has changed -- I think this was 2002ish that I looked. But I kind of doubt it. ____Not the real rusty Not that you asked, but... Rock climbing is a surprisingly good aerobic workout. If there's a gym near you, go try it out. Most indoor climbing gyms have beginner courses and you can usually find someone there who'll belay you. It should also be fairly low impact -- you certainly have the option of overextending yourself and tweaking a knee or something, but careful climbing within your skill level usually won't. It's not like running, which is sort of inherently damaging, even if you're doing it right. ____Not the real rusty Outdoor is way better Both in terms of experience and the actual climbing. You just can't duplicate the natural variety and feel of real rock. I also find it a hell of a lot easier, because you have 100% of the surface to choose from, as opposed to gym walls, where you can only use a severely constrained ~40% or less. However, unless you live right next to a great crag, the gym's the only consistent option. And they are fun. Almost a whole different sport, just a very similar one. For $40 a year, hell yes you should do it. It's not as cheap as swimming, gear-wise if you decide to get your own gear. But on the other hand, a decent pair of shoes and harness will last you decades of casual climbing. I bought a harness and a pair of shoes more than 10 years ago. I really need to replace the shoes, but the harness is still fine. And that's a total layout of about $200. ____Not the real rusty Yup Lemme see... I graduated from high school in '94. I didn't even start learning perl till musta been '98. Scoop is (this will not surprise some of you) truly the first non-trivial piece of code I ever attempted to write. And it looks like it will be the last too. Truly I am the Margaret Mitchell of collaborative media software. ____Not the real rusty No, don't know, no, stuff, no and not really. I can't say I particularly like writing code. I started learning because clearly it was going to be a better career choice than html monkey. And I wrote Scoop because I was interested in how people can use the internet to do stuff we couldn't do before. Programming itself wasn't enough to hold my interest for very long. I mean, get some data from here, display it there, change it, put it somewhere else. It's pretty fucking tedious. I didn't graduate college. I dropped out of William & Mary halfway through my senior year. I was physics for freshman and sophomore year and film studies for junior and that first half of senior. "Literary and Cultural Studies," technically, which was a catchall self-designed thing where my emphasis was film studies. So I am not actually trained to do anything much. What would I like to be doing now is quite a question. I'm pretty happy with what I do now, which is basically build Scoop sites and build sites on that platform which sometimes have little to do with Scoop other than as a web application platform I'm good at working with. If I found myself unable to make a living working with Scoop though I have great doubts whether I'd do something else in programming. Just imagining learning how to do the same crap in a different language makes me feel tired and bored. I'd probably change fields to something else. What else is a completely open question that I kind of hope I don't have to face anytime soon. ____Not the real rusty Heh. Could be I know what you mean about every job having its tedious aspects. That is entirely true. If it were fun all the time, they wouldn't pay you to do it. That said, here's the thing for me. Writing code is basically about figuring out and exploiting the capabilities of the system you're working in. Whether it's adding features to Scoop, writing applications, massively-parallel rendering, whatever. You have this system, you figure out how to make it sing. That is, in its way, interesting. I just find myself more interested in doing that with other systems these days. Like things that aren't made of bits and contained in little grey boxes. One of the things about programming is that it can be maddeningly ephemeral. That's one of the advantages to it too, mind you. Whenever someone asks me if something is possible, the standard answer is, "of course it's possible -- software is imaginary." This is already disorganized and rambly. Sorry. Anyway, yeah the pay is good. I'll keep doing it as long as I can -- I am, as I said, happy in my current job. I'm definitely not looking to change. I'm just looking around at the economy and pondering what I would do if I had to. Making money is necessary. I'm not by any means too good to find a job I can get someone to pay me for and do it, whatever it is. If it means I have to learn Ruby on Rails, oh well. I suck it up and do it. I've done worse. I have a hell of lot better resources and skills to fall back on now than I did last time I was out of work. But doesn't it make sense, while it's not a pressing concern, to poke around a little and think about what I might want to do? What else is outside the gray boxes? I think so. I'm also saving money hand over fist, so I can take a little time if necessary. I disagree though that web dev isn't intellectually stimulating -- or can't be to the same extent as other coding. For me I think it's be the opposite. I'm not that interested in the pure puzzle of it. What drives me is seeing people actually use my stuff, interacting with them and helping them interact with each other. Put me in the backend shuffling bits around for too long and I go nuts. Anyway, don't worry about me. I always find something. :-) Oh why did I drop out? College wasn't good for me. I don't know if it was that particular one, which was not in any way well suited to me, or if it was just the general atmosphere, but I wasn't happy. I'm a good self-directed learner, but at that place, I didn't know what I wanted to learn. I needed to go and live and see what was outside the academy. It worked out pretty well -- I have a great family and they propped my ass up for a few months while I got my shit together. I went home and worked at the furniture shop where I had worked summers. My car crapped out and my dad cosigned on a used Buick for me. Then my parents cut a deal with my sister somehow where I could go live with her in Northern VA and find a job. I did so, landed in a few ridiculously overpaid HTML-monkey jobs (literally -- stuff we'd use software to do now, like "fix the HTML errors in these converted from excel tables" for government agencies), got an apartment in DC, and learned to code. In retrospect, it was truly the right decision, and if I had any regret at all it would be that I didn't do it at the beginning of senior year instead of the middle. I wasted several months sleeping late and screwing around at that place. On the other hand... well, personal issues. It wouldn't have worked any other way, suffice it to say. ____Not the real rusty That's a nice kitchen What's going to happen to you when the bank forecloses on the owner of the place? ____Not the real rusty There is also the problem that 99.999% of signups from China/East asia (and Russia, while we're at it) are spambots. That's unfortunately how it is on the 'nets these days. So free China accounts would be a sort of stupendously bad idea, in the sense of letting in all the stuff we're trying to keep out and vice versa. I don't know. Anyone got any great idears about how to get some more people in here without at the same time having the craptastic free for all that led me to close it in the first place? ____Not the real rusty First person plural possessive Second person would be "you" or "your." ____Not the real rusty Sounds like mine Your mash tun sounds part-for-part identical to mine. Just make sure you batch sparge. So hey, if you ever read books, check out this one. Like from the library or something, I wouldn't buy it. It's pretty good, but not that good. Anyway, I just read it and thought of you killing all your mice. The book has a fairly large anti-animal-experimentation component, part of which is the notion that almost no animal experimentation that we do is actually necessary, from a scientific standpoint. The book (or a character therein) claims that for the most part it's done because it attracts funding. So being an animal experimentation guy, is that true? Would there be any way to do your work without killing mice? I mean, even if it was more expensive or slower or more difficult -- any way at all? What's your sense as far as the field in general goes? ____Not the real rusty No, he mentions that Obviously product testing and LD-50 studies are slammed. But the book specifically claims that most medical work could be done without animals, if we made it a high enough priority. The stuff that even most animal activists would see as "regrettable but necessary." I don't know enough about it to judge at all. Hence the question. ____Not the real rusty Interesting Food for thought. Anyway, read the book. It's a pretty good suspense novel, and I'd be interested to hear your take on it. ____Not the real rusty I like that one too I recently re-read that, along with Mason & Dixon and Vineland. So fie on your "trashy fiction." I just read everything -- trashy stuff in great volume from the library and Great Books. There are book I won't read, quite a few from the library (my wife does the librarying mostly, so it's always a surprise) that I either skip based on the cover blurb or that I don't get more than a few pages into. As far as popular fiction goes, I'm a moderately big fan of Laurie King (the Sherlock Holmes / Mary Russel books and the non-series one-offs, but not the series mysteries) and Walter Mosely. And Jasper Fforde too. ____Not the real rusty I do He actually came to my college to do a reading from My Dark Places. That guy is, I believe, nuts. If you ever have a chance to see him in person though, do it. It was a good reading. I kind of forgot about him. I should see if the library has any of his older books that I haven't read. To bounce it back -- if you like Mosely and Ellroy, you'd certainly love Jim Thompson. ____Not the real rusty Deck the halls with boughs of fail. ____Not the real rusty Also "Peak coal" is centuries away. ____Not the real rusty I've bought two new cars A 2000 Mazda Miata and a 2001 Jeep Wrangler. Of course, it was a mistake both times to buy a new car, and I wouldn't do it again. The Jeep was slightly less of a mistake. I was young and foolish, but I don't regret a thing. Traded the Jeep in for a 2000 Cherokee in '04, and that's all paid for now. It's beaters for me from here on out. ____Not the real rusty I am permanently in your sig ____Not the real rusty I feel like we've had this conversation before... Don't you come back every once in a while and say something quite like the above? Hm. Well, I'm still willing to do my part: If I banned you, I don't recall why, and I apologize if an apology is warranted. Your turmeric account is still active and available for use anytime you like. Or you can come back in a year or two under this or another name and we can do this again. That'd be fine too. I'll have forgotten this again by then. :-) ____Not the real rusty Give Meg Mail? Christ, I've been reading it wrong this whole time. ____Not the real rusty Smoking a turkey From context, I infer that "turkey" is a regional slang variant for "pole." ____Not the real rusty No Those are fakes, put there by God to fool you. Like dinosaur skeletons. ____Not the real rusty Sure-fire way to avoid blackouts DON'T DRINK SO MUCH, ALKIE. ____Not the real rusty lol ur on the rag. ____Not the real rusty lol ur on the straw ____Not the real rusty No I am a member of the Untitled Fools. But no one has yet felt it worth $5 for an account. So we remain silent. ____Not the real rusty Cock The other two are orifices. ____Not the real rusty Well argued That question would not be a very good one for a standardized test. Another possibility: pussy. The other two are both elements of male biology. Which leads us right back to my original answer, because the other two are elements of female biology. A poorly conceived question all around. ____Not the real rusty Ha Excuses for the poor scorer. I understand. ____Not the real rusty It would only be good for people who cannot read. ____Not the real rusty But "pussy" and "ass" both have a double s. ____Not the real rusty Yeah wtf I don't know what the answer on that one was supposed to be. I got a 142. I really wish they'd tell you what the answers are. ____Not the real rusty Pff, Mensa. Bunch of 98th percenters. You can get into Mensa with a pre-'95 SAT of 1250. 1250! It would be fascinating to see the Mensa members scores database. I bet it goes 98.0th percentile to 98.99th percentile. High enough to be vain, but also low enough to be insecure. ____Not the real rusty You're thinking of the Five Percent Nation (of Casiotone) ____Not the real rusty Exercise moar fatty. Weak core muscles lead to back strain. Not that this helps you right now. I recommend Percocet. ____Not the real rusty I picked up a serious contact crazy from this diary. ____Not the real rusty Where does it go Let's say you bought a stock for $5.00 a share. You bought ten shares. You spent $50.00. A year later, your stock was worth $20.00 a share. You now notionally have made $20.00 x 10 - $50.00 = $150.00. However in reality, you haven't made anything yet. You're still $50.00 in the hole, because you haven't sold it. A month after that, your stock craters, and you finally sell when it's worth $6.00 a share. You made $6.00 x 10 - $50.00 = $10.00. $10 of value was created in that time period, and that's what you have now. Good on you. But when you watch the news, they'll talk about the fall from a peak of $20.00 to a low of $6.00, and whine about how your ten shares lost $140.00 of value. Sure, they sort of did, and anyone who bought at $20 and sold at $6 lost this money. But for you, it wasn't lost. It never existed. So a money loss is money that goes from someone's pocket into someone else's pocket. A value loss is purely notional. It's a bad sign for the economy, but it has no fixed relationship to actual money. Also, people don't have to sell for prices to decline. People just have to refuse to buy. If you offer a share for $10.00 and no one wants it, it's worth less than $10.00. We know that, without any sale having been made. In actual markets it's a lot more complicated, but that's a simple way of thinking about it. As for where all the actual money that's being taken out of equities markets is going, mainly it's going into treasuries in very stable countries, like the US. Treasury yields are in the crapper right now, because everyone's buying them. ____Not the real rusty Boo! ____Not the real rusty I read it as "Being a doctor is a huge pain in the ass." It seems like if doctors could spend their time seeing patients and helping people, as opposed to arguing with insurance companies and trying to get paid, they'd be happy doing it for what they make. There are also issues with the expense of education. By the time you're actually licensed, you will be paying student loans for the rest of your life. ____Not the real rusty Even a Fool could figure that out. ____Not the real rusty Not true Opiates were unregulated for a long time. I wouldn't say they did no harm, although that harm would likely have been much less if people knew what they were messing with. But society very plainly did not collapse. If opiates were legal I would still not become an opiate addict. I would say the same is true for the vast majority of people. And those for whom it isn't true are likely to become addicts anyway. Why not let them meet their addiction with a safe, regulated product that they can get without by definition engaging in crime? ____Not the real rusty Where are these men looking? Sheesh. Wherever you're meeting women like that, go somewhere else. I don't know anyone like that. ____Not the real rusty Hm The whole article makes it a little more explicable. There is a hell of a lot of confusion about what women expect now, not helped by the fact that most women do seem to change their expectations of male behavior hourly-ish. My strategy has always been to be myself and not worry about what they expect, and it's worked pretty well. But then I'm a bit of an asshole, in a sort of charming way, so I might just have been lucky enough to naturally be what the article claims women are actually looking for. In any case, married now so I hardly even have to shower anymore. ____Not the real rusty Yeah The horror stories I hear from my friends who are still dating... oy. The pool gets pretty fucking shallow after college. ____Not the real rusty Heh My experience is all pre-1998ish. And the vast majority of it was in 1996. So it may no longer be true. Or perhaps 1996 was just a strange year, where a dork could get some without very much effort. I have to say, if you've been yourself for 30 years and got nothin, it may be time to try being someone else. You could be me for a while. Hell, as you point out, I'm not using it. ____Not the real rusty First! Took a while for anyone to mention that. I'm always curious whether anyone notices when I change that. ____Not the real rusty Dido -- White Flag This was not my idea, but it fits. ____Not the real rusty lol I couldn't remember who it was, but I thought it was funny. ____Not the real rusty I think ...by general acclamation, it was this. ____Not the real rusty WTF Supposed to be [posted to this https://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/11/17/83131/413]. I need moar coffee. ____Not the real rusty ARGH ____Not the real rusty The kuron you have dialed cannot be reached at this time due to shotgun mouthwash. To leave a message, dial one, or wait for the tone. To send a callback number, dial three. ____Not the real rusty TITS OR GTF... ...Oh, never mind. Good on yer mate. ____Not the real rusty What, blue? ____Not the real rusty Your TV defaults to yellow? You must have bought Chinese. Is the screen all slanty too? ____Not the real rusty Yeah, it's interesting... ...how fast demand can go off the cliff. It appears to show there's a lot of waste and excess in the system. We use lots of oil not necessarily because we need to, but just because it's there and cheap. Americans drove some crazy number of trillion miles less in the first half of 08 than in the first half of 07. Slap a tax on fossil fuels high enough to make developing alternatives competitive, and we'd have a plan b pretty quick. ____Not the real rusty Not really A few days ago I had to figure out or reset the logins to a couple banks my wife and I have business with, where she had already set up accounts. Despite knowing scads of personal data about my wife (SSN, commonly used passwords, email addresses, answers to lots of personal questions, etc) I was still only about 50% successful. It's not very easy to get a financial institution account reset. ____Not the real rusty Nope It was all manual, baby. And it was hot. ____Not the real rusty Post racial jokes Some more: Q: "Why do white country-club girls cry after sex?" A: "Because it shows how much Daddy loves me." ____Not the real rusty It depends Bathrooms can be pretty easy or they can be a total money and time sink. Believe me, I know. If you're basically happy with the bathroom, and it has like an old clawfoot tub, you can get a shower add-on unit for those for pretty short money. A couple hundred bucks and a weekend would do it. If the tub is something weird where there's no way to add a shower to it, or there's no tub at all (what?) then you'd be looking at installing something. Either a tub/shower unit, a standalone shower (like a corner shower or something) or something else. The cost and time investment with that depends on a lot of factors you don't specify. Is there space for it in the existing bathroom? Is there plumbing in place? Or are you looking at moving walls? Is it on the first floor? Etc etc etc. There's a lot of variables. Tell me more and I could maybe help out. Oh, so incidentally, say you wanted to gut an existing second-floor bathroom, move a wall, replace an exterior window and change a dormer roofline, run all new plumbing, drains, and electrical, put in generally high-end fixtures and a restored antique clawfoot tub, run a separate thermally-balanced shower with rain head from the ceiling, and put in all custom finishes (varnished beadboard wainscot, tile floor, etc etc), all of which requires fairly extensive structural work on the first floor. Well that'd cost you in the low tens of thousands and five months of nearly constant work, and just about drive you insane. But that's pretty mush the upper limit. ____Not the real rusty The long run... It always pays to remember that the long run is usually a fairly long time. My eaves are nearly bare of paint, for example, and have been since we moved in. "In the long run," that will rot the walls and make the house fall down. But I figure the long run is longer than a couple more years, so it's not at the very top of my list. It sounds like a semi-big job, to me. You might want to just live with it for a year or two and take the time to decide what you really want to do, rather than do something right away and then change your mind later. We lived with our old upstairs bathroom for three years (it was truly vile and hideous), and the ideas for it changed a lot in that time. I'm glad we waited. ____Not the real rusty Heh. Permanent Majority is the new "Thousand Year Reich." ____Not the real rusty That's why it's the new... The "Permanent Majority" has bested the "Thousand Year Reich" on both fronts -- both longevity of claim, and inaccuracy. "Permanent" is a greater claim than "1000 years" by a factor of a where a is the limit approaching infinity. And we can score their accuracy mathematically too. The TYR lasted 12 years, therefore it can be given an accuracy rating of 12 / 1000 or 0.012. The Permanent Majority managed eight years out of a projected infinity, so it's accuracy rating is n where n is the limit approaching 0. In terms of both hyperbolic overreaching and eventual wrongness, the Permanent Majority has set a new, and truly difficult to beat, standard. ____Not the real rusty Hm We may need some new math to prove that Rome's infinitesimal is larger than the GOP's. You get started on that and check in when you've got something. ____Not the real rusty '08 vs '92 I was struck by how red it all is compared to '92 as well, but I looked at some of the individual states, and it looks like what happened was that Perot voters went home to the Republicans. Generally from 92 to 08, the Dem numbers stay pretty close to the same, and the Republican numbers absorb the 15-20% that's just missing in '92. 1992 was just a weird election. I wish it went back one more to 1988. I think you'd see a sudden huge blue shift again. ____Not the real rusty Wait a bit It's not over yet. I mean, your point still stands, in that Stevens shouldn't have been able to get within ten points. But Alaska may yet spare themseves the embarassment of having Stevens booted out by the Senate. ____Not the real rusty There's a couple counties yet As of early this morning, there were still 60-75,000 votes to count according to Begich. Stevens is only ahead by 3300 votes or so, and Juneau isn't counted yet. So there's still hope. ____Not the real rusty "Let"? I'm thinking "make." ____Not the real rusty Red & Blue Those are actually pretty recent, and were made up by TV stations who needed some easy map-based way to show results. Wikipedia says it was Tim Russert in 2000 who first got Red and Blue to stick, and they've since been sort of unofficially adopted by the parties. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Tim Russert was like a big ol' sheepdog. Kind of furry and goofy and cute, and not that bright. I mean, red == left has been a pretty longstanding convention. But perhaps it was clever -- the Democrats might have been a little sensitive to being labeled "reds," while the Republicans were not likely to mind it, because clearly they're not. Perhaps ol Tim was brighter than I give him credit for. ____Not the real rusty They did mention it I recalled hearing it mentioned during the lengthy eulogizing. I don't know. Russert may have had integrity, but he was a fluffy interviewer who never followed up a question, and got a ton of undeserved credit for being "tough." He seemed like a genuinely good guy, and he did die far too young, but as a journalist, I didn't have much use for him. ____Not the real rusty Voted for Nader? Massive lulz. ____Not the real rusty Mismanaged to death Even you would have to admit that the prosecution of the Iraq war has been a colossal clusterfuck and has produced the biggest failstink since Vietnam. I said, back when it started, that toppling Saddam would be easy, and that I was giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on the reasoning behind it, and that I had little confidence they wouldn't fuck up the aftermath beyond all power of imagination. And lo, it has all come to pass. So you can agree with the premise that we're all better off without Saddam, but you simply can't call the war in its totality a success. It hasn't been. ____Not the real rusty We don't care about guns anymore The democratic party has quietly given up that loser of an issue. Thank god. We love guns now. Guns and abortion for everyone! ____Not the real rusty Lockbox. ____Not the real rusty Heh Wasn't the landslide we wanted? Great googly moogly. Your own party has been claiming a mandate for eight years, based on 286 - 252 (2004) and 271 - 266 (2000). We're looking at, most likely, 364 - 174 here, with a popular vote spread of 8%. That's an ass whipping. A monumental ass-whipping, considering the political landscape of post-Reagan America. I know you don't like it, but it is the landslide that Obama, and the rest of us, wanted. ____Not the real rusty Boll? I always thought he was the lesser of two weevils. ____Not the real rusty What do you mean? ____Not the real rusty Damn And here I pre-blacked my own dick and got in line first... ____Not the real rusty I will enjoy watching them prosper, along with the rest of us. ____Not the real rusty You are wrong You know me, and I think Biden would be a fine President, in the hideous event that became necessary. He could never win the election, but the skills to win an election are not necessarily the same as the skills to do the job. And you know me, so now you know someone who thinks Biden would be a good replacement. ____Not the real rusty Perv Only Fools would promote a picture of a young black man being flagrantly leid by an older white woman. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention When are all these meth researchers going to publish? It's like they're not even doing science. ____Not the real rusty Darcy Burner Geek cutie. ____Not the real rusty Pre-election static is high It is interfering with many humor emitters and receivers. Please try your joke again Wednesday morning. ____Not the real rusty Heh I got that from somewhere else already. It's very cute. ____Not the real rusty But... ...the vote didn't even GET Ba-rocked. ____Not the real rusty No, I didn't You probably dreamed it. Also, ewww. ____Not the real rusty There's no traffic to speak of here ...in Maine. Except on 95 at the tollbooths in the summer, but I'm never there. When I was in San Francisco, motorcycles used to split the lanes routinely, but if they were blocked they'd just stop and wait. There aren't that many people who are willing to risk death to get one car farther up the road. ____Not the real rusty No multiple choice? I drive a 2000 Jeep Cherokee and a 1991 Ram 250 pickup. Neither breaks 15 mpg so I don't drive them very far, usually. ____Not the real rusty Yes I have a wide stance. ____Not the real rusty Oh man Against the Day has ruined a number of other books for me too. Now whenever I get a sort of steampunk-y or Victorian adventure type plot, I'm almost always disappointed right from the start. Did you read Mason & Dixon? That's another one. ____Not the real rusty Vineland is pretty meh I just recently had a little Pynchon festival, so I've just read those three. I have to get a copy of GR. I only read it once, and it was a long time ago. Anyway, Vineland is definitely B-reel Pynchon. Think Crying of Lot 49. It's not among his best work. I had the same feeling about Mason & Dixon. It's the highest compliment I can give a novel that I miss the characters when it's over, and that was definitely one of those. ____Not the real rusty The headscarf: Rescuing the muslim butterface since 610AD. ____Not the real rusty The Slack. ____Not the real rusty But not so much a house... ...as a game of dominoes. So it's like a game of dominoes made out of dominoes. AND IT'S ALL GOING TO COME TUMBLING DOWN! ____Not the real rusty Er, sorry I was at my parents house this weekend with the kids, and offline. What happened? ____Not the real rusty Nope Lately it's been Google sending ~10 req/sec for tags pages. I don't know what's up with that -- I was hoping they'd stop soon. ____Not the real rusty Exactly. ____Not the real rusty They changed the graphic It used to be two ads, now it's just one that encompasses the space that used to be between them. It might be a bit taller, but not much. It just looks bigger because it's one unit. And Voxel sent me new logos, which are smaller than the old ones. I don't think that was any sort of plan, just happened that way. ____Not the real rusty Not shared anymore rsync and johncompanies were sharing the cost of that ad space. Rsync isn't participating anymore, so the johncompanies ad has expanded. ____Not the real rusty The difference has got to be all about job creation and trade, and healthcare, because one in five jobs today being created in the trade sector. So while some poeple say this difference is all about shoring up the, ah, shoring it up, it has to be about tax cuts and healthcare to really create jobs. You betcha. ____Not the real rusty Those stem valves When they leak, get a pair of vice grips, and fasten them on the little collar that's around where the handle goes into the valve (that's where they always leak). Loosen it a little teeny bit -- you'll see the leak increase a little. Tighten down the handle as tight as you can get it, and then tighten that collar back up with your vice grips. Usually that'll stop the leak. You probably have to loosen the handle collar again when you want to open the valve, because if it's tight enough, it makes the handle impossible to turn. But for a while, you can get by without replacing them. Quarter turn ball valves are the way to go if you're prepared to replace the old kind, but the leaks are usually just because that handle collar has loosened or corroded a little bit. Want to know more? ASK ME ABOUT LEAD AND OAKUM JOINTS! God bless ancient plumbing. ____Not the real rusty In the wastewater lines Dummy. ____Not the real rusty How is Obammy formed? ____Not the real rusty Weird huh? I remember the Sklyarov thing. I was out in SF at the time, and actually met him. That can't be that common a name. ____Not the real rusty You are your fixie better get the trucker cap out of here before I throw a PBR at you. ____Not the real rusty They forgot to put the music in it. ____Not the real rusty Enough alcohol to kill a horse Bottling time is a great time for a cider maker. The stuff's been sitting around for a year while you fill in with the endless labor of making beer, and then suddenly a few nights of bottling and you have enough booze on hand to kill a Red Army division. The trick is not to drink it all before June. We have long winters. That is not as easy as it sounds. Currently on hand: 42 0.75 liter wine bottles 24 16 oz flip-top bottles, conditioning 24 22 oz crown cap bottles, conditioning a half dozen or so '06 wine bottles 54 12 oz bottles on Belgian White, conditioning I also have one more 6 gallon carboy of '07 cider not yet bottled. It'll go in some nice Belgian-style bottles I have waiting. Some of this (5 gal altogether) is promised to a friend already. The rest if MINE! All mine. Ok, some for Christmas presents. But basically all mine. You're killing me I bottled the Wit a week and a half ago, and I'm dying to try it. But I vowed to wait till at least after this weekend. Really I should give it three weeks at least. But I've got two cases and a sixer, so the loose six is up for early drinking, I think. ____Not the real rusty Ha! The half bottle Yeah, I've used that excuse too. I haven't yet sunk to purposely filling a couple of half bottles so I could open them early, but I've thought of it, which is the first step. ____Not the real rusty Yeast In '06 I did two batches, both with Lalvin 1118. Last year I did 5, two with 1118 and three wild. The wilds worked so well that this year I'm not using any yeast. I've got 45 gallons of juice in the basement right now, in three 15 gallon plastic barrels. Probably a third of that is going to be passed on to a couple of friends, who will most likely not add anything to it either. The rest I'll do with just the wild yeast. It's been 2 and a half weeks, and two barrels are showing clear signs of starting to ferment, the third is still not. I wouldn't be worried for at least a month though, so all seems fine. The guy I buy my juice from has been building up his yeast population on his press pretty carefully for a few years, and he's doing all wild ferments now too. It goes a lot slower than pitching -- last year the pitched batches were dry months before the wild ones -- and it seems to leave a lot more complex flavors. But of course you have to be able to get juice with a wild yeast population in it, which is not that easy. Last year's I did all plain. I actually literally put them in carboys at the press last October and did absolutely nothing to the till two weeks ago, except pitching the yeast in two. It worked out nicely. This year I might experiment with one or two jugs -- I've got some great fresh cranberries from a friend's family bog, possibly raisins... I might even venture into oak chip territory again. Much less oak this time though. Much less. One of my '06s just became semi-drinkable this summer, after being way too oaky for a long time. ____Not the real rusty Oh, I could If that ever were to become necessary. I doubt it will. My point was more that a slow ferment is desirable, so a slow start is fine. I won't start be concerned about the third barrel for quite a while. ____Not the real rusty Oak Real careful. I used like a healthy handful of lightly toasted chips in 5 gallons and it was absurdly too much. If I do it again, I'll use maybe a quarter cup. At the most. I wouldn't have believed they'd give it that much flavor, but they really do. ____Not the real rusty Quite a while I don't exactly remember. Months, anyway. Probably too long. It was a total fiasco. ____Not the real rusty No, my friend A friend of mine's parents are cranberry growers in MA. They just did the harvest so he came home with a big bin of hand-raked berries. I tried raking once. It was terrible. I got nothing but stems and leaves. He goes out there and goes "swoosh swoosh swoosh" three times with the thing and fills up a 10 gallon bin. I helped out with the harvest last year (the real one, with flooded bogs and hip waders). It was fun. We were on vacation this year though so I couldn't do it. ____Not the real rusty They do use bees for pollination They hire hives to come pollinate. Apparently it's always a hassle because the time they spray for worms is right around when they pollinate, so they've always got to hunt down the bee guy and get him to move his hives out before they can spray. I doubt I'll ever get my hives down there -- I'd have to truck them off the island and 3 1/2 hours south, and then hang around there and take care of them. If it ain't on the island, my bees will not be collecting pollen from it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hell of a battle Put a bunch of Finns on one side of a field and a bunch of Russians on the other. In between put massive amounts of alcohol. Whichever side drinks itself to death last wins! ____Not the real rusty Abomination Pumpkin ale is. Not to be confused with Obama-nation. Si se puede! ____Not the real rusty The pumpkin should be in the background way, way in the background. Like, in another room, if possible. ____Not the real rusty Belgian wit! Give me some credit. ____Not the real rusty Cultcha? I got cultcha comin out my... I don't really download mp3s or videos. Too much hassle. I have Rhapsody and Netflix, so why bother storing stuff? I've been listening to a lot of Ben Folds, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Melody Gardot lately. And the Decemberists. And Bjork. I haven't seen a movie recently that I especially liked that springs to mind right off. Fido was not bad, but kind of suffered from being so... kinda cheap looking. Still, watchable. I just read Anathem too, like everyone else. It's not Stephenson's best. Not his worst either, but just not anything like as good as the Baroque books. I just feel like when you can take reality and make such a great story out of it, it's kind of a waste to make up this wanky Long-Now planet and fart around with multiverse nonsense. Also, "I can't digest your alternate universe food." WTF? Look, either an atom can exist under the rules of the universe you're in or it can't. The "slightly different oxygen" stuff was just bogus. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, and newmatter Which I gave a pass because I didn't think the stupid woo-woo explanation of it was going to be a major plot point later. The idea that people from some alternate cosmos would come in with their different physical constants and somehow bring those constants with them, but just for their own matter is weak. Either the constants are built-in, and their matter would simply adjust instantaneously, or the constants are The Law and incompatible universes cannot have any contact. Oh, while we're on it, the attempt to provide a physical grounding for Plato's idiotic theory of Ideal Forms via multiple universes was also painfully weak and tedious. Basically I hated all the pseudo-science and high school philosophy, but the book was largely saved by having a well-realized setting and engaging characters. Stephenson is a good enough writer to get away with that much bullshit. I did enjoy reading the book, and I'm sure I'll read it again. But actually trying to discuss it just makes me think of all the stupid stuff in it. ____Not the real rusty Deer are farmed Not on a very large scale, because they just don't take to it like cattle. But it's been done pretty routinely for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count reindeer. Here you go. ____Not the real rusty Just leave at lunchtime Don't tell anyone, just get in your car and go. Let them wonder if you were abducted. I did this once. It worked well. ____Not the real rusty Right on We need to recruit him. ____Not the real rusty Would you like to know more? ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute That's 12/6ths! Good thing I had a quality American education, so I could catch your faux pass. ____Not the real rusty That ...the AIP thing, is perhaps the one single thing I don't have any problem with about Sarah Palin. Of course, I'm wearing my US out of VT t-shirt, so... ____Not the real rusty Amazingly Sarah Palin only managed to be right once, ever. And really, it was her husband. We must of course recall that a stopped clock is right twice a day. A clock that merely functions very badly can be wrong all the time. ____Not the real rusty OMG HE FOUND IGNORANT AMERICANS! I've been trying to do that for years and still haven't fund any. Some people have all the luck. ____Not the real rusty THIS DEAD CAT AIN'T GONNA BOUNCE ITSELF! ____Not the real rusty It's dropping! SELL! SELL! SELL! ____Not the real rusty Meow? Meow meowed $5 for meow? ____Not the real rusty Neither more nor less funny But definitely more satisfying. ____Not the real rusty NEW RESULTS Researchers have just announced the discovery of a strong red-shift in the bell curve when observed from K5. "We interpret this result to mean that either the Bell Curve is moving rapidly away from us, or we here on K5 are rapidly retreating from it. Due to our singular position in spacetime it isn't possible to distinguish between those two states." ____Not the real rusty He could have "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb Pakistan" totally works. ____Not the real rusty An obsolete term for KGB agent, used primarily by really old people who are not clear on a number of modern developments, such as email, the internal combustion engine, socks, and the fall of the USSR. ____Not the real rusty McCain was meandering and seemed confused. He really sounds like he's gone off the rails. You might like what he says more, but his manner is just awful. And "my friend" is something you say just before you punch the guy in the bar. It sounds hideously threatening. I would say he's gotta stop saying it, but it's not going to matter anyway. ____Not the real rusty You knw who won, my freeeeinds? Ya might never guess! That one! ____Not the real rusty I was shocked He didn't say it once during the first debate. It's weird that he held it back completely the first time, and returned to it this time. Maybe it was just that the town hall format confused him and he kept thinking he was at a rally. He was probably wondering why no one was yelling "Lynch the nigger!" after his attack lines. ____Not the real rusty There were better choices To make himself palatable to the base, he could have chosen virtually any fundie nutso. But his picked the one that was young, hot, and female. Now, did he pick her because she was palatable to the base, or because she was young, hot and female? Republicans fail it at identity politics. Trying to use it was a big mistake. ____Not the real rusty And suffers from PTSD He'd probably be a lot less angry if they got him on a good antipsychotic. ____Not the real rusty lol OMG A VOTE FOR OBAMA IS A VOTE FOR NUCKE-YOO-LAR HOLOCAUST! Jesus. Even dailykos isn't usually that crazy. I encourage you to be embarrassed by the kooks on your own side. It's only fair. ____Not the real rusty Nutty First, Ahmadinejad doesn't control Iran. If the ayatollahs don't want it done, it don't get done. Second, why the hell would they nuke Israel, guaranteeing a prolonged conflict with both a (nuclear-armed) Israel and a (even more nuclear-armed) United States? We just took out their two biggest regional rivals for power. Iran is poised to become the most important Middle Eastern state. So on the one hand, they could normalize relations with us and Israel and get on with being powerful, and on the other hand they could lob their pathetic single nuke over at Jerusalem and then enjoy the absolutely guaranteed destruction of the Iranian state and probably Persian culture. The right-wing's whole anti-Iran program requires that you believe the Iranian leaders are foaming-at-the-mouth insane and bent on nothing but chaos at any expense to themselves. This is a laughably childish view of a 4,000 year old culture. I am personally embarrassed that people in my country are so dumb as to believe it. And if this has to include you... well, that's too bad. Also, and just to reiterate, Ahmadinejad doesn't control Iran. Anybody analyzing Iran who starts with "Ahmadinejad..." can and should be ignored. They don't know fuck-all. ____Not the real rusty It's 10:20 I'm all set for the shattering event. Nothing so far. ____Not the real rusty Update! 1:50pm here. Nothing yet. I continue to stand by. ____Not the real rusty Au contraire British men are widely known to be fond of Poles. ____Not the real rusty UR TRYING TOO HARD ____Not the real rusty I'm investing in hard cider. When the Depression's on, a bottle of this stuff will bring in enough to feed my family for six months. ____Not the real rusty Hm I just started it, and I'm getting all the same vibes as you. I get what he's doing with the words, but it's just a little too twee for my taste, even with the attempt at an explanation/excuse in the preface. Also, "concent" is pronounced the same as "consent." Tee hee! Ick. And I've seen some other reviews, so I already knew that we were going to be exploring what, in these post-Terry Pratchett times, simply cannot be referred to as anything other than the Trousers of Time. Unfortunately this whole book is already striking me as something pretty much along the lines of what Pratchett has already simultaneously written better and parodied completely to death. So my hopes are relatively low. I am enjoying it though. It just takes an effort of will to ignore the more hamhanded of the made-up words. At least he calls a carrot a carrot. ____Not the real rusty rural != conservative Look back in American history. In general rural people have tended to be more populist and community-oriented, as opposed to rich conservative urban plutocrats. The US was this way till, like, Nixon. We have a weird upside-down dynamic in the US right now, where great swaths of rural working people have been persuaded to vote against their interests by a cleverly marketed right wing and an amazingly pussified and hapless left. It will certainly not last forever, and IMO won't even last another generation. ____Not the real rusty Ha I actually don't have to even debate this. You're wrong, and you said nothing that makes me think you even have any inkling of that. I'm not basing any of this on my personal experience with rural maine, which a) I don't have any of, and b) is no more liberal than the rest of rural USA right now. I'm basing it on US history. "country always swings more conservative than city, for all countries, for all time periods" is nonsense. It's not even plausible, dude. You can do better than that. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, there is that "Conservative" and "liberal" are shifty labels. I had policy in mind more than social issues. Maybe that's where me and cts failed to connect. ____Not the real rusty Oh Heathcliff! ____Not the real rusty I was here to make that comment I don't really know why I even bother anymore. ____Not the real rusty NPR FTW ____Not the real rusty That was a clever answer He said "as far as the state's concerned, we should not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex unions. The definition of the word "marriage" is a religious matter and no concern of mine as a policymaker." That's a winning answer. Notably, it's the exact same answer Palin gave, though she tried to spin it so that fundies would hear her as being opposed to 'gay marriage'. ____Not the real rusty If you are interested in Iran You should give this interview a listen. Robert Baer pretty convincingly dismantles the idea that Iran is not rational, as a nation. ____Not the real rusty Silkworms We attack Iran, Iran starts sinking oil tankers in the Gulf (which they could easily do) and shooting missiles at Israel, which they could also easily do. Israel responds with nuclear weapons, we respond with the second Great Depression (because we have just lost most of our energy supplies), and the world as a whole responds by going to hell in a very tattered handbag. If we attack Iran, they will respond in a wholly disproportionate way at whatever targets they can access. They would probably go after Saudi Arabia too. It would be such a bad idea that I'm actually not sure the order would be carried out, if given. Our military knows all this much better than I do. Iran is not Iraq, and it would be a terrible mistake to think Iran is weak. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but Their region is one of our weakest tender spots at the moment. I'm saying what's wrong with letting them just be the regional power? Ideally we can do it in concert with the (very large) sane and relatively secular element in Iranian society. Basically they're not irrational nutters. It has been a huge mistake to treat them like they are, and it would be a globally catastrophic blunder to attack them that would make Iraq look like a fairly good idea in comparison. A couple specific things: now, i imagine we'll still get oil from our partners in the americas Venezuela? Chavez is just dying for us to give him a reason to cut off the oil. We've still got Nigeria and Canada, yes, but it would hurt bad if suddenly the Persian Gulf was closed to exports. It would also hurt Europe real bad, and if you think they'd just roll over and take it, I think you're wrong. it would be a blessing if they went after the saudis, but i doubt the ayatollah is that crazy If we're already attacking them, what do they have to lose? The Saudis are a negligible military power. Iran hates them. They've got 650 years of enmity there. And quite frankly, if we're going to pick an ally, Iran makes a hell of a lot more sense than the Wahabis. Basically the really tricky thing about being a global power is backing off when there's already a regional power we can deal with. So far, we've been lousy at that since the USSR fell. I'm hoping we can get a little better. ____Not the real rusty Weak In terms of troublesome. The fact that our whole goddamn military is there is exactly what makes me say it's one of our weakest regions. If we have to park the US Defense Department in one spot on earth, I'd say we've got some issues at that spot. You have to widen the view a little. The question I'm raising here is not "how logistically do we take military action against Iran?" but "why shouldn't we, from a strategic point of view, take military action against Iran?" ____Not the real rusty Far, far worse Not even any comparison. But the current CW is that IRAN IS DANGEROUS!!! so no one's allowed to say that. We're all supposed to pretend that it is not hugely in Iran's national interest to work for peace in the region, now that we've eliminated their two biggest enemies for them and paved the way for the new Persian empire. I always have to laugh when W talks about how evil Iran is. It's like if we went in to Europe in 1944, carpet bombed France, the UK, and the USSR and then made a lot of speeches about how much we mistrust the Nazis. ____Not the real rusty I called that one Ifill asked the question and I said "My great flaw is that I'm too passionate about Freedom and Democracy." Cause we all know that one from the job interview. I always say "I'm too focused on my work," but I always want to say "My addiction to porn." ____Not the real rusty She was mayor of the meth capital of Alaska. She probably knows how to fire up a crack pipe too. ____Not the real rusty apparently it's Alaskan They claim that that's how Alaskans talk too. The fact that we all hear it as Minnesooota is just because Alaska is America's Siberia and no one has ever met an Alaskan.* ----- * I went to my senior high school prom with an Alaskan. She didn't talk like this idiot, and I have heard recently that she loathes Palin. ____Not the real rusty I can see that There are surely people out there who think, "Gee. Obama seems like a bright and energetic leader, who really has some great ideas about how to get things done. On the other hand, McCain is clearly a dour old soul-eating grumpus who will keel over within weeks and leave us in the terrifyingly idiotic hands of the Palindrone. I'm just... so torn! I guess I better go with my hard-earned homespun wisdom, which says 'Don't ever vote for a nigger.'" ____Not the real rusty TEAM OF MAVERICKS! Plus, it's little known that John McCain personally won Vietnam. Well thanks to Palin, now we all know. ____Not the real rusty Maverick maverick maverick Me and Goose are goin' for beers after the debate. Care to join us Iceman? ____Not the real rusty and I quote: "John McCain knows how to win a war." --Sarah Palin, VP debate. So there you have it. John McCain was only in one war. Conclusion: John McCain won Vietnam. ____Not the real rusty FUTURE DIARY On Elections, Or, Epic Failure By JohnMcCain in JohnMcCain's Diary Wed Nov 5, 2008 at 06:29:39 AM EST Tags: Sleep, Somnambulism, Time Management, VPILF (all tags) I didn't win last night's Election. The reason was that I had stayed up all night groping and fondling Sarah Palin's goodies. When I was done with that I had to drive to Flagstaff (I just moved to Mesa) to send Cindy her wire, as yesterday was payday. Then I went to Best Buy to buy these special, expensive Photo Lithium batteries because my UltraLast rechargeables don't have the juice to make my camera flash, and I really needed to take some more super-hot Palin Porn Pixxx. Buy the time I got home, I only had two hours to sleep until I had to wake up at 5:00 to book my Election appearance. I don't remember doing so, but I must have shut the alarm off. I ended up sleeping round the clock. I feel bad because I'd asked a bunch of friends to vote for me. When I awoke my phone was full of text messages from them, wondering how I could lose so badly. I am aware that just about the worst thing a politican can do is to fail to even show up at an election. I'm determined never to do this again. Taunt. ____Not the real rusty METH RIDE THE SNAKE ____Not the real rusty The enemy of my my enemy can still be an insufferable twit. ____Not the real rusty I came to say that. ____Not the real rusty I approve of this tedious meme. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I was gonna say... ...if you shut down K5, my first amendments rights would be about the last ones violated. ____Not the real rusty What's really weird MA is the same way. No booze of any kind on Sunday (bars can be open, but no packies). I don't know about hunting. ____Not the real rusty My goodness I haven't lived there in a while. I didn't know Romney repealed it. ____Not the real rusty Looks more like Janet Reno amirite? ____Not the real rusty Huh Apparently the reasons include: Salmonella Giardia Starvation Mucus So. Three "You're going to die"s and one "It's just snot." ____Not the real rusty It will pay for itself! ____Not the real rusty You should go line up at a branch And demand your $23.21 in nickels. ____Not the real rusty lolwut? I've even read the Dodd Bill. Me for Preznit! ____Not the real rusty Pff McCain's last Senate vote was in April. The one before that March of 2007. McCain hasn't been a working Senator for a long time. McCain didn't do his homework, and he knows he's going to look like a fool. So this is the neutron bomb of lowered expectations. When he shows up friday and looks like a doddering senile twink, his spinners will just say that he's been very distracted by all the important presidenty stuff he's been importantly doing, presidentyally. I'm still looking forward to the VP debates a lot more, myself. ____Not the real rusty I hope I hope and pray that he just demolishes her like he would any incompetent male opponent. I mean, no matter what he does their side is going to cry "sexism," so he might as well go for the kill. Not to mention, he can put on padded gloves and speak in single-syllable words only and she'll still look like a 'tard. Did you see the Couric interview? For God's sake, any question more complicated than "what is your name" and she completely chokes. ____Not the real rusty That's not quite it It's not that we're pissed off the Democrats roll over constantly. Compromise is necessary in a democratic system. It's that while roling over and knuckling under, they don't accomplish anything else. That is, the problem is that all they do is cave. So we do all of the compromising and consistently get nothing for it. ____Not the real rusty Lesser of two evils By a little. At least they want to do what I want them to do. So maybe someday they'll manage to do some of it. With the Republicans, they don't even want to. And before you say "third party," none of the third parties desire as many of the same policies as me as the Dems. So while there may be more or less overlap, it would still be electing people who share fewer of my goals and have less of a chance to implement them. ____Not the real rusty Bernie Sanders (Ok, independent, but better than a Democrat). Russ Feingold. Uhhh... that's all I got. ____Not the real rusty Why is this a diary and not in the Q? Why must you drop pearls before these swine? ____Not the real rusty We use nagios too Not my end of the company though, so I can't say anything about it either way. Just that we use it. ____Not the real rusty vulg.? Is that vulgar? I always thought that was the non-vulgar way of putting it. ____Not the real rusty Ah There's me feeling kind of dumb then. ____Not the real rusty It's what they use to straighten the vegetation in their bogs. Brits are fastidious that way. They hate a mussed bog. ____Not the real rusty He's gay for you Not that there's anything wrong with that. ____Not the real rusty The latter ____Not the real rusty But in a totally free market Your mom would still be a whore. ____Not the real rusty CPVC I've seen cooler-based mash tun kits for sale that use pvc or cpvc. I don't remember if they said which it was. A common setup is to use stainless steel mesh from a regular flexible faucet connector as the collector, and 3/8" plastic tube on push-fittings for the sparge. I would probably avoid pvc glue, myself. That stuff smells nasty. I don't like to think of what it could be putting into beer. Plus it is heat-sensitive. It's not like you're going to have high pressure, it seems like barb fittings would be fine. I can't imagine why anyone uses copper. I think they don't -- a lot of the instructions you find that say to use copper are from the good ol days, before copper was more valuable than titanium-plated hookers. Anyway, watch this. It would be better if the guy had turned the damn lights on, but hey. ____Not the real rusty More complicated than necessary For the sparge, you don't need to actually sprinkle the sparge water over the whole top (ignore any online idiot who says you do). If you're doing it right, your grains are all covered by water anyway. The only thing you need to avoid is one strong flow of sparge water that drills itself a little hole through your grain straight down to the collector. So a simple tube that feeds in through the lid (with an adjustable valve so you can regulate the incoming flow) and has a few small holes along its length (inside the cooler) will be easily as effective as something that uses more elbows and fittings and crap. All things considered, why use extra parts? For the collector, you'd need to drill a shit-ton of holes to get anywhere close to the open surface area a foot of stainless mesh would give you for free. It's not worth it. Trust me on this. I drilled holes in a bucket bottom for my mash tun and I had to drill about a million of them for it to work. I rue the day, I tell you. When I finally get around to building my tun, it's stainless mesh all the way. ____Not the real rusty See youtube link In my first comment for the supply line thing. AND LERN TO READ SCIENCEFAG! Thank you. ____Not the real rusty Probably wise It's just a guy explaining how to make a simple cheap mash tun, including the details on "get steel mesh from a supply line." I forget that most people don't work in blissful solitude. ____Not the real rusty Frgt to say You could also ditch the whole continuous sparge idea and just batch-sparge. No input side, you just drain out most of your wort and then reload the whole cooler with hotter sparge water, wait a minute, and drain that. It seems like at an amateur level, the extract efficiency difference is so little that you'd never notice it. ____Not the real rusty In any order you choose. ____Not the real rusty Computah says Naaaaaah. HOOOOOARK. ____Not the real rusty I agree The laugh track is the worst part of that show. It's not a tremendously great show anyway, but it's pretty funny, at times. Except the damn laugh track is always there providing a strong motivation to not laugh. ____Not the real rusty You sure see a lot of accidents Drivers in PA must be a pack of raving assholes. ____Not the real rusty Selling bonds Much of it is coming from bonds. I.e. we're borrowing it from countries that aren't broke yet, with the promise that we won't invade them if they agree to buy our bad debt. It is, essentially, a global protection racket. We can keep it up until every other country is also broke, or they get together and decide they'll all stand up to us. Here's hoping! ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry I'm sure you tried your best though. ____Not the real rusty Someone's got a sandy vagina today ____Not the real rusty Wanking, like voting... ...is a binary activity. It's important to realize that there is no way to express tone or mood in either one. You're either voting / wanking or you're not voting / wanking. ____Not the real rusty The transatlantic accent It was mainly an actorly convention of that era, called the "Transatlantic accent." A few snooty people -- bankers, Franklin Roosevelt, and so forth -- affected it as well, but mostly it was a media thing. I think the idea was a voice that wouldn't sound jarring to either Brits or Americans. It wasn't anyone's natural accent. They had to get vocal training for it. ____Not the real rusty It's a better use for the money than killing Iraqis. I'm all for it. Could the Fed come and bail me out while they're at it? I've still got a bit of cash on my credit card from the whole bathroom renovation. It'd be keen if they could pay that off for me. I'd say like barely $1 billion would totally cover it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, good point Better make it $1.8 billion. Still, paltry! ____Not the real rusty Fairly bad I have a small 401k that has consistently lost money since I opened it. Yay. I look at it as a forced savings account, though. Sure, perhaps I've lost some, but if I didn't have it I'd have just pissed away that money on hookers and blow my lovely family. So I'm still better off. Eventually it'll go positive again. ____Not the real rusty Fixies represent! ____Not the real rusty No one read the article Google's crawler picked it up, and posted it, and then a bunch of automated "news flow analysis" trading programs got it from google and acted on it. There were no people involved here at all, except conceivably the one person who hit the story in the middle of Sunday night. But probably not even that. Quite frankly, the machines are now just doing whatever they want. ____Not the real rusty It wouldn't be all that hard for the NWS to include "Storm surge danger: 10!" or something. I mean, stupid people don't necessarily deserve to die for being incurious or busy. ____Not the real rusty Both basically right Although Obama, as usual, could have really used an editor. ____Not the real rusty pi == 3 TEACH THE CONTROVERSY! ____Not the real rusty TEACH THE CONTROVERSY ____Not the real rusty Depends how you teach them For example, teaching evolution in science class and creationism in the "Myths, legends, and pre-scientific superstitions" elective is fine. Or spending half of one of the science classes telling kids about creationism and explaining exactly how it is not in any way science and has no place in a science class is fine. It's very useful to teach kids how to distinguish between a scientific theory and a religious belief. Or, for the Catholic schools, teaching evolution in science class and creation in religion class would be acceptable. There are many perfectly fine ways to teach creationism in schools. But somehow I don't think the fundies are gonna be happy with any of them. ____Not the real rusty You've sussed out the secret plan! ____Not the real rusty 'evolution to progressive' What are two words fundies don't know, joined by a common preposition, Alex? That's right! $400 and you have control of the board. ____Not the real rusty I'll take "I Have a Hard-on" for $600. ____Not the real rusty Go back to Gin Lane, babykiller. ____Not the real rusty It's not gay if the balls don't touch. So you should be safe. Unless there was more that you didn't mention. ____Not the real rusty Guns don't come to your door. PEOPLE come to your door. With guns. ____Not the real rusty I concur All the reading I did about all grain makes it seems really sciency and precise and difficult. But in practice, it's exactly the same as doing a specialty grains and extract brew, there's just more time steeping the grains, and somewhat closer attention to temperatures is worth it. I would like to get myself a mashing cooler, but even a bucket with holes in the bottom and some bubble wrap has worked out fine. ____Not the real rusty Nice Nothing like brewers to go all gear-geek. Well, brewers, hikers, rock climbers, kayakers... uh. Everything I like to do, now that I come to think of it, has a powerful gear-geek component. Interesting. I've been delaying the mash tun project for some time, due to low funds and many more pressing projects. One day though. One day. ____Not the real rusty I was going to say this It's a thing called "being asian or native american." ____Not the real rusty Water left Unless the grain is pretty wet, it won't flow very well, and even if it does, your sugar extraction will be wonky. The fluid grain bed is your main filter -- the screen or false bottom is just a pickup for the liquid coming out. So you don't want to actually drain the water out of the grain. You just want to very slowly add water and drain water at a balanced rate until you have as much wort as you want (or until you've stopped getting any more sugars, whichever comes first). When you stop collecting wort, your mash tun will (or should) still have about as much water in it as you had when you did the mash. The key phrase in the pp about fly sparging on that page is: and not compact the grainbed, which would stop the runoff.. As for your question, probably it doesn't matter that much. My guess is the bazooka will be easier to rig up, so I'd go for that. Get the biggest one you can find. ____Not the real rusty It was by request ATE asked me to do it. Not my choice, and not done for any punitive reason at all. ____Not the real rusty oh nigga, you had me at "the hunger for gay cock." ____Not the real rusty By request by request by request OH MY GOD NO ONE PANIC! TO THE BUNKERS! MAN THE BARRICADES! ____Not the real rusty By request Settle down. ____Not the real rusty Hm trying to raise a baby without "gender-coding," That's doomed. Kids gender code themselves, as anyone with two kids of different genders will likely have noticed. You can certainly encourage kids to do what they enjoy regardless of the usual boy-stuff vs girl-stuff categories, but in a ton of ways, girls and boys are different, and pretending they aren't ain't gonna make it so. ____Not the real rusty Dunno if that's determined yet Physical sex is coded in the DNA. I personally lean very strongly toward the opinion that a lot of what will become gender is too. But I don't know that it's all that clear-cut, biologically. ____Not the real rusty I see what you're saying I was just sort of pointing out what Sgt. York was saying -- girls will (99% of the time) be more girly and boys will be more boyy. I think a lot of parents of my generation tie themselves in knots trying to fight that, because they think they're supposed to. It's a losing battle. I mean, my daughter is not especially girly, but having a son, there are obvious differences in how they approach the world. Still, I do "guy stuff" with my daughter, if she's interested in it. We feed the worms and garden, and she shows no signs of being easily grossed out by anything. Basically, if you're not actively pushing them one way or the other, you're doing fine, is what I'm saying. It's good to know that gender differences are real, you are not causing them, and there's probably nothing you could do about them if you wanted to. I get annoyed roughly equally by people who actively try to enforce gender differences and people who deny they exist. ____Not the real rusty School let's say you have a child who isn't so "booky", hates to read, is kind of fucking up in school. His school is probably doing it wrong. I know someone very much like that, he's been one of my best friends for years. Never liked to read, thinks very visually. He's very smart, but in a totally book-centric school he'd have done rotten. He was fortunate enough to go to a school where they recognized and understood how he thinks, and let him do things like learn traditional Japanese wood joinery rather than write a paper on the history of Japan. The point of school is learning, and even more learning how to learn. People get a little too wrapped up in the idea that there's a certain set of facts you're supposed to know, and a certain way to get there. I don't think either is a particularly useful way to approach education. So I guess I'd fall well on the "channel the natural tendency" side of things. Not just let it take over, but as a parent, you ought to be able to find what motivates your kid and know how they need to learn. ____Not the real rusty No sulfates Ha ha I screwed up your mystery. Also, the above cider recipe is only for people who want stuff that will get them drunk with minimal work (which it will). It will taste like ass, or like nothing much at all, because juice apples are not the same as cider apples. ____Not the real rusty Nah, it'll probably be fine Hardly anyone has had good cider anyway, so who's gonna know? ____Not the real rusty Lemme see My notes say the '07 batches were as follows (numbers preceding varieties are "parts"): 1) * 3 Northern Spy * 2 Jonathan 2) * 3 Golden Gibson / Delblush * 1 Sweet Alford * 1 Dabinett 3) * 3 Golden Gibson / Delblush * 1 Bramley / Stembridge cluster * 1 Ashmeade's Kernel / Wickson 4) * 2 Liberty * 1 Northern Spy * 1 Chisel Jersey * 1 Ashton bitter 5) * 2 Liberty * 1 Burgess Russet * 2 Yarlington Mill Basically the idea is to get a good blend between sweet, generally the base apple that provides the bulk of the sugar but not that much flavor, and sharp, which adds what you'll actually taste when the sugar's all gone. Bittersweets and Bittersharps are the second half plus some tannins for astringency. Wikipedia has a very basic summary, and UKCider has some more detail. The thing with juice sold as fresh juice is that it almost always lacks any sharps or bitter-anythings. It's basically all sweet juice, because no one's blending it with an eye to what it'll taste like if you remove all the sugar. Usually what it tastes like is not much. A lot of alcohol and a faint apple aftertaste. Cider juice has a much different flavor than regular apple juice. Sometimes it's similar to a rustic "fresh" cider, but often it actually doesn't taste very good. Too astringent or acidic for drinking fresh. Once you turn the sugar into alcohol, that's what gives a nice tart cider rather than a sort of vague alcoholy mishmash. ____Not the real rusty Passed out drinking jug wine from a straw while playing videogames. Truly, you are the K5 demographic. ____Not the real rusty Someone's gun, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Ayuh. ____Not the real rusty Hm. ____Not the real rusty Wow Good stuff. ____Not the real rusty Tying both hands and feet together and crawling with your lips gets you places faster than Muni. ____Not the real rusty You can still smell it? With a respirator and organic vapor cartridge? That's surprising. I would actually worry about that, unless you checked with others and they all said they could too. I used a respirator w/organics cartridge when I stripped my old bathtub, and in a small room with an entire gallon of paint stripper spread over a big bathtub, I couldn't smell anything at all. I cracked the respirator off my face for a few seconds and almost passed out. And then I went and checked again that there were no open flames of any kind anywhere in the whole house. :-) ____Not the real rusty Long leash ____Not the real rusty Never takes long Before the peace love anti-war wing squirts up one of these. ____Not the real rusty Sherry Palmer what a crazy bitch. ____Not the real rusty ror by pointing out he understands the economic ideas behind prosperity What? Marry rich? ____Not the real rusty But seriously, I'd like to remind you that John McCain never made any concessions when he was a POW for five years. ____Not the real rusty PA turnpike == WORST ROAD IN THE COUNTRY I've driven a lot of them. The PA turnpike is the worst. 95 through CT has the worst (and most utterly mystifying) traffic, but in terms of sheer white-knuckle terror, the PA turnpike beats all the rest. ____Not the real rusty My terror was specifically on the stretch between Philly and Harrisburg, in Eastern PA. This was quite a few years ago, but it seemed to be under construction at all times. No two trips followed the same actual route, as they were perpetually crossing you over the median and making the whole thing one narrow lane each way. Perhaps it's improved since then. ____Not the real rusty Pff I used to routinely drive the DC beltway, and never had any problem with it. If you can get the hang of "inner loop" and "outer loop" and you have a sense of where on the clock you are and where you want to be, the beltway is cake. Perhaps it's frightening to people from the south, but I learned to drive in Massachusetts. The beltway always felt like a little visit home. ____Not the real rusty Though related to a peer, I can hand, reef, and steer, And ship a selvagee; I am never known to quail At the furry of a gale, And I'm never, never sick at sea! ____Not the real rusty I am the very model of a modern web developer I can massage the client base and sing to them for my supper I've mastered all the jargon from Ajax through Zend and there-a-for I am the very model of a modern web developer I'm very well acquainted too with Ruby and the Rails platform I'm capable of making up good reasons why it won't perform In fact in matters technical and project managerial I'm bursting at the seams with exculpatory material! He's bursting at the seams with exculpatory material! He's bursting at the seams with exculpatory material! He's bursting at the seams with exculpatoratory material! I'm very good at filling up the ticket tracking hourlies And billing so much more than the contract should have allowed of me In short I'm the epitome of technology contractor, I am the very model of a modern web developer! In short he's the epitome of technology contractor, He is the very model of a modern web developer! ____Not the real rusty No, never! ____Not the real rusty Hardly ever! ____Not the real rusty I think this series is a good idea. We should follow it with the inevitable companion series "Lady3Jane Failures." ____Not the real rusty When you reply What does the "Signature Behavior" selector say? If it doesn't say sticky, log out and log back in. ____Not the real rusty Change it in the post form? I'm doing that now. It stays set through a preview, anyway. Let's see if it stays for good. ____"Don't tase me, bro." --Andrew Meyer Doesn't seem to Odd. Not the bug you originally reported, but one nonetheless. ____Not the real rusty zer0 Not an admin. Just, oddly, noticed the diaries link before I finished writing the introduction. Kind of appropriate though, that some random kuron posted a vapid one-liner first. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! You pay for it at a health food store? My morning wood seems to just arrive free every day, like clockwork. ____Not the real rusty Hm Just watched half of the first episode. I haven't laughed yet. It kinda plays like a weakish improv troupe. ____Not the real rusty Also I'm doubting the premise severely. All three of those dudes are as queer as a $13 bill. ____Not the real rusty Those screenshots are great I love how the very best the weather gets is "mostly cloudy". Are you really not allowed to hunt unless the weather utterly blows? ____Not the real rusty Isn't he in MN? If so, the answer is: Wisconsin. ____Not the real rusty Those are hash browns everywhere else too PA is screwed up. Where else can a waitress ask the question "Have you decided what you'd like to order awhile?" with a straight face. ____Not the real rusty ...and then I'll be free to marry this goat. ____Not the real rusty Help Me With Truck I have a new old truck. My old old truck started squirting transmission fluid, so that along with the missing exhaust system and the fact that it's a tiny little truck and I wanted a bigger truck anyway provided a suitable pretext for finding a new old truck. My new old truck is a 1991 Ram 250. It is fairly awesome. It's from back when trucks were all square and there's a big ass statue of a Ram for a hood ornament. The bench seat sleeps 8 comfortably. So I like it. But it has a problem. It was missing a windshield wiper motor when I bought it. I knew about this, and no big deal right? So I got a new wiper motor, and tonight I installed it. Unfortunately, it still doesn't work. I turn on the ignition and turn on the wipers, and nothing happens at all. And yes, I did plug it in. That means it's an electrical problem of some kind. Could be the switch, but the "push down to squirt wiper fluid" part of the switch works fine. I have no idea if that means anything relevant to whether the "turn the wipers on" part of the switch should work or not. So, anyone have any advice about how to track down an electrical problem in automotive wiring? Assume I know nothing. This is a safe assumption, because I know nothing. What tools do I need? How do I eliminate this or that piece of the wiring as a possible culprit? What am I likely to need to do to fix it? How? Remember I said I know nothing. In theory, I figured that's kind of what I'd need to do. But how exactly do I do that? The plug has four wires coming in to it, and four skinny slots that mate with four... whatever you'd call the sticking out pieces in the male side connector on the motor. "Electrococks" for lack of a better word. My multimeter has the standard red and black probes. So, what do I do? ____Not the real rusty You're just hot for my electrococks. ____Not the real rusty Not the fuse I did check that. After everything else though -- I was totally prepared to see a blown fuse and feel like the world's biggest jackass for replacing the motor. :-) But it's not the fuse. At least, it's not the panel fuse. I don't know if there's a fuse somewhere else, but I would think that if so, it would affect more than that one thing. ____Not the real rusty Answers: No, of course not. I'm a total dumbass. Actually, I'd have had to fool around with grounding jumpers if I had -- it's grounded via the bolts. I have a multimeter. That'd probably work. I have little idea how to use it though. The motor is brand spanking new. Not a rebuild. Totally new. I seriously doubt it's the motor -- I will, at this point, only entertain that idea if I can prove to myself that it definitely should work, but doesn't. The wiring consists of "plug in the connector." So I don't think I could have screwed that part up. The connector fits perfectly. ____Not the real rusty Thanth oo ver muth At worthed leal ood! ____Not the real rusty Ha The hood ornament is awesome. :-) ____Not the real rusty lol donorcycles. :-) ____Not the real rusty Eh? It's a 3/4 ton pickup truck. What do you think is a truck? ____Not the real rusty It does And the truck starts and runs fine and everything else electrical works, engine running or not. The battery's fine. ____Not the real rusty Hm Well, it's got about 70k miles on it. It's my island truck. Another 30k miles will take me about 30 years. So I'm probably not going to worry about it. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's got a delay too There's low, high and time delay on the wipers. So that probably throws an extra monkey wrench into it. But I bet you're generally right about the wiring. ____Not the real rusty That sounds like a plan. This truck came with not one but two wiper motors (neither installed, both reputedly bad). How much you wanna bet they both work fine and the one I bought was unnecessary twice over? Sheesh. ____Not the real rusty Yes, true There is more than one switch, from an electrical POV. Clearly. What I'm wondering is whether one part of the overall multifunction is likely to go without affecting any other part. I dunno. I'd have to go with "probably" I guess. ____Not the real rusty Got the Haynes book It does have wiring diagrams, and I have two engineer friends that I'll be calling in to figure them out if it comes to that. The book is useful, but in certain places maddeningly vague. ____Not the real rusty Damn This thing was a huge pain in the ass to get bolted in. I'm praying I can ensure a good ground using the one bolt that isn't hellishly difficult to get to. Incidentally, that one bolt has a little thin metal flange that it goes through, which is attached to the mounting plate. I'm betting that's for grounding purposes amirite? So hopefully that's the one I'm supposed to be paying attention to anyway. ____Not the real rusty The flange is attached to the mounting plate, which is bolted to the motor (three bolts on the inside, under the seal) and to the truck frame (three more bolts). So it goes Bolt -> motor body -> flange -> mounting plate -> truck. The motor is brand new and bare metal where it contacts that flange, so I'd guess that's good. The flange itself looked pretty clean, but I didn't inspect it that carefully. It wasn't obviously corroded, anyway. That still leaves the mounting plate (old, dirty) to truck metal (old, dirty) connection though. ____Not the real rusty How is computar formed? I never claimed to be a hardware guy. And I had a lot of help with the wiring in the house. ____Not the real rusty That was the old truck The transmission fluid leak on the old truck, while certainly fixable, will not be fixed by me. It's not really the truck I need, so I'll be damned if I'm putting any time or money into it. The new truck does need the brakes bled. They're spongy and feel like there's air in them. I'll tackle that after I get the wiper thing sorted out. ____Not the real rusty Mmmmm. Silky fleeced. ____Not the real rusty Kaine ____Not the real rusty You know it Also the self-satisfaction. Although since I guessed Kaine, you can take it as gospel that it's not him. I have a remarkable ability to be wrong much more consistently than mere chance would allow. ____Not the real rusty Tiny penis. It's more to be pitied than censured. ____Not the real rusty Don't be butthurt, bro. ____Not the real rusty Oh my That is such a great idea I can barely even stand it. Oh please, please let this happen. ____Not the real rusty "She"? Lulz. ____Not the real rusty Sasha Grey Lack of affect. Likely abuse or neglect victim. Possible drug abuser. Like most porn actresses. That industry is a cavalcade of human suffering. ____Not the real rusty No, that's NH I'm not anti-porn -- don't get me wrong. It just strikes me that a lot efhot performers probably have issues. I have no proof, so I can offer you nothing but stfu. I would like some stats as well, for what it's worth. ____Not the real rusty efhot -> of the sometimes I type two words together inside-out. ____Not the real rusty ha ha I am thikniguotba porns. ____Not the real rusty AKA The "fucking infix." Or, if you prefer, the "fucking in-fucking-fix." ____Not the real rusty Here's the thing though I am against the death penalty, in all cases. And I agree with you completely, that there are some people I would gladly see dead. I just can't trust the state to execute people. It's an extremely fine distinction, but I think it's a very important one. Just because you believe some criminals do not deserve to live doesn't mean you therefore necessarily have to grant the state a right to kill. ____Not the real rusty All for it. ____Not the real rusty We wouldn't have to add a star It would just become part of the existing state of Georgia. ____Not the real rusty That would have been awesome That's totally the way it should have gone. Unless, y'know, you made it sound creepy. But if you could do that charmingly, she'd have loved it. ____Not the real rusty No, I know I could've done it, probably. Just pointing out that there's ways it could come off creepy. ____Not the real rusty Or... I see her name disappear from my contact list. I rush to the elevator so that I arrive first (this will make it seem like more of a "chance" encounter, and not as though I had planned it). Me: Hi. Her: BOYFRIEND! ____Not the real rusty Ions? K5 emits prions. ____Not the real rusty You wanna watch what you say For literally a fucking month straight someone in my house has been sick. It's gone around all four of us twice by now. I'm starting to get suspicous as well. BTW thanks for the box of cookies. They were yummy. And we had a good laugh over the label. "Not infected with anything really honestly!" indeed. Guffaw. You card. ____Not the real rusty Dude Ok, I can laugh along with a gag as well as anyone. Hardee har har. But you totally owe me a shirt. ____Not the real rusty I do occasionally I got both of your emails, but I was sick most of last week, and I didn't get them till it was too late. Sorry. It's been the plague house over here. ____Not the real rusty You should have joined the Partial Emergency Recovery Lineup. Everyone knows PERL is better than PHP. ____Not the real rusty Related story: Three College Students Groped by Man Claiming to be FBI Agent Three Longmont college students have complained of being fondled and molested by a man purporting to be with the FBI, sources say. "His hat clearly said 'Federal Breast Inspector' on it," said one of the students. "We were like, 'Well, I guess it's official...'" ____Not the real rusty And she's no boy. ____Not the real rusty How much you want to bet... ...she let him call her Anne Coulter? ____Not the real rusty There you go. Birds: 2. Stones: 1. ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok. ____Not the real rusty Shit goes down I see wut u did thar. ____Not the real rusty Difficult? Since when is that a difficult word? That's not even a particularly difficult architectural word. I mean, architrave? Plinth block? Or, quick, what's the difference between a baluster and a balustrade? ____Not the real rusty Nothing "Every day over the last month" is the key here. The banhammer grinds slow, but exceeding fine. ____Not the real rusty Like "The Darwin Awards"? Yes, I saw that. No, you shouldn't. ____Not the real rusty yuo + crawford + fatmouse = gay fatmouse. ____Not the real rusty THIS. IS. K5! I actually watched 300 the other night. Unintentionally hilarious. Best part: Wife: An apple? What the fuck? They carried nothing! Where did he get that apple? Me: He was carrying it in his codpiece. All Spartan soldiers brought an apple in their codpiece. No Spartan would even leave home without his cock-apple. ____Not the real rusty Don't wanna hear no Sonic Youth ____Not the real rusty Ha I am more 90's college radio hipster than you. "Freedom of Choice" is a great album actually. The Chia Pet cover of "Don't you Want Me" is awesome, and solely responsible for my knowing all the lyrics to that song by heart. ____Not the real rusty So I just read this book. Pretty much the whole thing was like that. Torture. ____Not the real rusty No, it doesn't Activating the account (the k$5) puts you in the group "Users". When that subscription expires, it reverts to the group "Users." Basically it's just a trick for a subscription system that only knows about time-limited subscriptions. If you got the ad-free membership, the ads would come back after it expired. But that's the only thing that's extra anymore. ____Not the real rusty Aye a lot of street bike tires simply will not hold the pressure they're supposed to for any length of time. I have to pump mine up every time I ride. It's normal. ____Not the real rusty Yeah yeah "Tires" is used here as shorthand for "rubber stuff around the wheel." I know the tubes are what hold the air, Captain Pedantic. ____Not the real rusty Actually My mountain bike got a hole in the tire last time I rode it, and it wrecked a brand new tube. The structure of the tire holds the pressure of the tube evenly all around the wheel. The hole in the tire almost immediately led to a bulge in the tube where the hole was, and that blew the tube out. So a hole in the tire won't necessarily cause an air leak (depends on how big the hole is) but it definitely isn't good for the tube and will probably cause a leak sooner or later. Anyway, my point was just that in loosely discussing bike tires (and tubes) and air pressure, it's perfectly understandable to use "tire" to mean not only the tire, but also the tube and sometimes even the wheel. ____Not the real rusty What do you do with the pollen? ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry sir... ...I was merely looking for the homepage of a prospective new client, the J. Ugsbo Obstits Corporation of Akron Ohio. The depths domain squatters will sink to these days... ____Not the real rusty Not surprising Vampirism has always been about sex, in the same way that zombies are about disease and werewolves are about mental illness. You may just have less impedance between brainstem and erectile function than most men. ____Not the real rusty Hot. ____Not the real rusty There's different ways to interpret And a few different places where the stress has been laid over the years. But I'm boiling it down to the absolute basic commonality. I also left out that once in a great while you see vampirism being used as a metaphor for addiction, which is more of a recent development and doesn't tie in very cleanly to the sex angle, except via your narcissism route. So that's handy. Look! It's a handy three comment literary-critical Summary of the History of the Vampire in Film, Literature, and the Popular Imagination, and also cocks. ____Not the real rusty Damn right That's why I stick to baboons. Like they say: "Buttocks bright red? Take her to bed!" ____Not the real rusty It never even occurred to me That the above comment might be anything but a non sequitur. I think I forgot I was on the internet for a minute. Those were good times. ____Not the real rusty Youtube is the same as all media The advertiser is the customer The viewer is the product being sold. The content is just the means of production -- its the raw material that youtube fashions into a product. If youtube made cars, the videos would be raw steel. And youtube would be the most profitable carmaker on the planet, because its steel suppliers would give it endless amounts of steel free, for the sheer joy of seeing their steel made into cars. The important thing to remember here is that the viewer is not a customer. The viewer is the product. It's important to keep the viewer happy only in the same sense that it was important to keep the slaves alive and in moderately good health until you could get them to market. ____Not the real rusty You know who makes a good kit? These guys. They assemble their own extract and partial mash kits from commodity stuff, and all the ones I've made have been pretty good, and very reliable. The Shamrock Stout was ok, but not stupendous. But the St. Peter's Pilsner and the American Pale Ale were both awesome. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, the website's awful But the beer's pretty good. That probably was the pilsner. I think it's the only pils I've made so far. The ale, I don't know. Maybe. There have been a number of ales. I tried a test bottle of my last batch last night, and it's damn good. It turned out to be an ESB, with a hint of Shipyard/Ringwood-y diacetyl. Reminds me a lot of Old Thumper. It was pretty much just Maris Otter + a little crystal 60 + northern brewer + White labs british ale. Which I guess ought to add up to something like an ESB, right? ____Not the real rusty Technically, ESB isn't a style at all. By the numbers, this batch is right at the line between Best Bitter and Strong Bitter. "ESB" is a brand name in England and a sort of marketing term in the US for strong bitter. Mine wound up in the 1.011 FG gray area between the two. I think the OG was 1.052, which would make it barely a strong bitter. It doesn't have much of an alcohol bite, so if I had to pick, I'd call it a best bitter. Think London Pride but with a little more of everything. Are you sure you're not thinking of Old Thumper too? That is Shipyard (US -- Ringwood UK). I can't find anything online called Old Bastard that looks like it's actually distributed in bottles. ____Not the real rusty Huh I can think of Atlantic Brewing (Bar Harbor -- their Coal Porter is awesome, the Real Ale less so). They make something called S.O.B. (Special Old Bitter). Maybe the "son of a bitch" implications are what you're remembering? Scroll down. Bar Harbor is apparently lousy with breweries actually. There's also Maine Coast Brewing Co and Bar Harbor Brewing Co. ____Not the real rusty Ver. Mont. Eh? Are. You. A. Vermont. Slow. Talker? ____Not the real rusty "Coded" == died. Basically. In a modern hospital actually dying generally takes a very long time, and involves any number of people and devices and eventually lawyers and stuff. But for practical purposes, a "code" in a hospital is where someone would, if they were not in a hospital, be considered dead. ____Not the real rusty I don't know That would put me squarely in the realm of uninformed guessing. But my uninformed guess would be that coding (i.e. death) does bad things to the brain which often bring on a coma. The sepsis could have led to the code any number of ways -- shock, fever, some sort of heart thing... that part I don't know. ____Not the real rusty Nice Connie Willis taught me all I know about emergency medicine. Seems she did her research well. ____Not the real rusty Sounds good to me Just be careful you don't get an ass-cold. ____Not the real rusty It works better if you maintain your starter for a while, and feed it up a few times. The first batch will have a bunch of different bugs in it, and the likelihood is very much against it being particularly good tasting. Over time the starter develops much more character and flavor. The drawback is it's kind of a pain in the ass caring for one of these things. However, if you ever find yourself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with flour but no yeast, you can totally make bread this way. And you might get lucky and grow radiation-mutated super-yeast that, when baked, will give you the ability to benchpress a million pounds and learn the Wisdom of the Squirrels. So that's cool too. ____Not the real rusty I'd hit it Uh, I mean, I'd do it. What's the plan for getting the word out though? ____Not the real rusty And you'll stay plastered! It's the clip that never stops giving. ____Not the real rusty Clearly Obama's still got his balls. This looks like revenge, and I say good for him. ____Not the real rusty Fail C'mon, you've got nazis, death, pedo, and you can't get a single joke out of it? Worthless. ____Not the real rusty Sorry I didn't mean you, I meant whoever draws the comic. Cause, like, nothing funny manages to happen in it. It's all set-up and no payoff. It is the gross-out comic version of the following knock-knock joke: Knock, Knock. Who's there? It's your neighbor. It's your neighbor who? It's your neighbor Bob, and I've brought you a letter of yours that the mailman put in my box by mistake. ____Not the real rusty Reported Attack Site! This web site at spectator.org has been reported as a right-wing attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences. ____Not the real rusty I had that one But I had to disable it, because no matter what page I looked at it would give me a red screen that said "GET OFF TEH INTERNET YOUR GAY." ____Not the real rusty You forgot the crap This is just a . flood. And by "flood" I mean "single .". ____Not the real rusty When you do get used to it though... It took me ages to get used to OS X's fascist focus model, but I like it better now. Using OS X and linux on alternate days didn't help. I also missed highlight-middle click to copy and paste for a long time, until I realized that cmd-c cmd-v is always faster if you have to paste over something, which I almost always do. So now linux copy on select annoys me, because I have to erase what I'm pasting over first. ____Not the real rusty Lobster was limited ...to no more than three times per week, or something like that. Course that was back when catching lobster involved walking along the beach and picking them up. And it wasn't slaves, IIRC, it was prisoners. I don't think they ever had slaves here, in USA times anyway. ____Not the real rusty I think it was actually being poor. There have never been any black people in maine. ____Not the real rusty And yet... ...it does taste good. The only reason it was disdained, I suspect, was because there was so damn much of it. Although I have to say that "lobster tail" is for suckers. The claw is clearly superior. The tail is just what you eat for sustenance after you've enjoyed the claws. And the best meat on a lobster is in the body, where the tourists never find it. ____Not the real rusty No one eats the feathers ____Not the real rusty lol Wow. "In California, people are, by global standards, stupendously astoundingly unbelievably rich and comfortable. But in Mississippi they are merely stupendously astoundingly rich and comfortable! DOOOOOMMMMMMM!" And the map? Dear god, what happened to new england? Apparently New Jersey occupied southern New York in 2000, and somehow wiped Cape Cod off the map entirely, took over Rhode Island and western Mass, lost most of Maine to Canada, and forged the rest of New England into some New Hamsterchusetts superstate. ____Not the real rusty 3 for perfectly phrasing what would have been my comment too. ____Not the real rusty No fuckin way? Noth Shoah? Wicked qaure, dude. ____Not the real rusty Jesus Mary and Joseph. Effin Glosta! No effin way! ____Not the real rusty Nah, ya know what I'm thinkin? Noodie bah! ____Not the real rusty See also: Rag. ____Not the real rusty Holy crap Are you my ex-landlady? Cause she had those exact same two dogs. WTF? ____Not the real rusty GTD Grumpus the Dongnibbler. ____Not the real rusty I've seen that story before Since I don't own a television, I have lots more time to do things like read The Onion and weep softly with loneliness and despair. ____Not the real rusty BSG? What is that? Is that some sort of TV program? Because I don't even own an "idiot box." I have much better things to do with my time, thank you very much. ____Not the real rusty Starbuck? He was a good first mate and all, but I don't see him as lust material, per se. ____Not the real rusty Too much racism. ____Not the real rusty $200,000 I'd sell it for that. With the stipulation that it's not sold before a simple "download all my stuff" script is written, and users given a way to purge their personal info (not content, just email address) if they want to. ____Not the real rusty Lemme put it this way If that price was a good investment given the current revenue, I would be asking for more. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm not asking at all I'm just responding to a (presumably) fantasy-league diary entry with a reasonably serious response. Given serious interest by someone I thought wasn't full of shit, that's what I'd probably be willing to sell it for. To the right buyer, I dunno, it could be worth that. I'd give it a 0.01% probability of ever happening though. ____Not the real rusty t'ain't my fantasy I'm just answering the question. ____Not the real rusty I have a question You sat down and wrote this long-ass letter rehashing your career and mental state and personal finances and so forth. Why didn't you spend that time working on the assignment? ____Not the real rusty It's a serious question Like, maybe that's one of the problems, you know? ____Not the real rusty Jesus H Christ You don't have to be nice to localroger. All I ask is that you not trail around after anyone to harass them. It so happens that localroger is the current object of lust for a couple people. If it were someone else, I would be saying the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Um, either? If you're actually stalking someone, I'd suggest you not do that either, but there isn't much I could do about it. I mean specifically on here. ____Not the real rusty Awesome! While you're at it, plz also address why you're writing a diary justifying your not working instead of working. :-) ____Not the real rusty Godammit I missed it. Crapola. I do love to see Federer lose. ____Not the real rusty Also Nadal is not really Spanish. He comes from outer space, where he was originally born on a world of clay. ____Not the real rusty ror I believe I posted a diary about that when it happened, noting that I fulfilled my pre-race goal of beating nearly all of the 60+ women. If you check the stats, I believe only one 60+ woman beat my time. :-) Yep, it was an ugly race. I came in so far back mainly due to walking a lot of it. It was hotter than hell that day and I'm not at all used to running in the daytime, let alone in a hot sunny daytime. I might run it again this year. If so, I'll be sure to let you know how lousy I do. ____Not the real rusty Incorrect The correct form for a new poll request is: "The old poll is done. Pleae replace it with this one: [The new poll you wrote follows]" Please rewrite your request in this form and I will. ____Not the real rusty What's going on in the back there? Is that a rat tail? ____Not the real rusty But that's a good thing right? It's still all crap, so at least there's less of it? ____Not the real rusty I don't know For me personally, I have been busier than a one-armed juggler lately. Summer is also always slow. And probably most importantly, building websites for a living day in and day out leaves me with very little motivation to do it in my free time too. ____Not the real rusty Totally The world may never know. ____Not the real rusty Two things: He was probably planning to test for the AIDS too. How inept do you have to be to fail to collect your DNA sample in the time an average woman spends in the bathroom? What the hell was he doing for the other 14 minutes? ____Not the real rusty Not in the SW I'm in the opposite of the Southwest, but ants haven't been a problem for me. The important thing, if you're getting ants, is to turn the compost regularly. Ants won't live in soil that's repeatedly disturbed. Also, they won't do any harm to the compost or the worms, if you do get some. I can see how you might not want to be attracting them into your house, though. ____Not the real rusty Man goes berzerk in office Hey, remember that video where the guy goes nuts in the office? That everyone bought, but I said was fake? That one? Yeah, it's fake. That's right. My bullshit detector is finely tuned. Every minute you stay in that room you get weaker. And evey minute I squat in the net I get stronger. Worms I've had a worm bin for several years. There's nothing to it -- if you're ever going to do it, do it as soon as possible because it takes a while for them to produce a worthwhile volume of compost. While you're building the rest of your whatnot, the worms can be worming away readying you some good seed starting soil. You don't need anything fancy. I got one of those plastic stackable layer type worm bins, because it makes it fairly convenient to remove castings eventually, but I started with a fish tote and an old cabinet door for a lid. Basically, shred some newspaper, moisten it, dump it in the box, and dump the worms in. When you have some kitchen scraps, put them in. That's about it. I took my first crop of castings this year, to mix with peat moss for seed starting. I just picked the remaining worms out of the layer by hand. They're not gross. All the seeds grew, so I think I can say it was a triumph. I also have a bunch of the worms in my big compost bin outside, and they've been in there over a winter and came through fine. If you wanted to eventually harvest enough castings to actually fertilize your garden, you'd need to scale up pretty big, and find a steady source of food for them. Kitchen scraps from an average house won't really ever produce the kind of volume you'd need. But there's lots of other things you can use for the garden. The worm castings are for special occasions. ____Not the real rusty Bottoms My 3 1/2 year old daughter loves playing with the worms. But I don't think anyone's ever told her they might be gross, so it probably hasn't occurred to her. My bin assembly thing has a base with a drain on it, then the trays have little holes all in the bottoms. It is best if you can drain liquid out of the bin, somehow. A lot of food scraps have lots of water in them that has to go somewhere, and worms can drown. Not to mention, if their bins get much wetter or direr suddenly, they sometimes try to move out en masse, which is always exciting. If you're building it outdoors, probably some heavy wire mesh and then gravel on the ground would be fine. You just want to keep animals out of the food, basically. ____Not the real rusty In memory of K5ARP Boooo! Yay! / \ / \ \O/\O/\O/ Guns For Everyone! O O O &pipe;\O/\O/O/ / O&pipe;\O&pipe;O&pipe;\O / \&pipe; &pipe; \O/ -&pipe;-/&pipe;O&pipe;\/&pipe;\ / \/ \ &pipe; \O/ / \ /&pipe;\ / \ / \ &pipe; / \ / \ ========================================================== Yay! Booooo! / \ / \ \O/\O/\O/ Abortions For Everyone! O O O &pipe;\O/\O/O/ / O&pipe;\O&pipe;O&pipe;\O / \&pipe; &pipe; \O/ -&pipe;-/&pipe;O&pipe;\/&pipe;\ / \/ \ &pipe; \O/ / \ /&pipe;\ / \ / \ &pipe; / \ / \ ========================================================== Yay! Yay! / \ Guns For Some, / \ Abortions For Others! \O/\O/\O/ O O O &pipe;\O/\O/O/ / O&pipe;\O&pipe;O&pipe;\O / \&pipe; &pipe; \O/ -&pipe;-/&pipe;O&pipe;\/&pipe;\ / \/ \ &pipe; \O/ / \ /&pipe;\ / \ / \ &pipe; / \ / \ ____Not the real rusty High murder rate The DC murder rate's nothing like as bad as it was back in the 90's. Perhaps that's the gun ban, but I sincerely doubt it. Mainly it's because the pendulum of urban vs. suburban has swung back toward urban, and great swathes of the city have been gentrified and deghettoized. Even when I lived there, circa '98-2000, there was only one shooting in my neighborhood, and I never felt the slightest bit threatened. This was in the safe quarter of town, mind you, but still. It's easy to live in DC and never risk getting shot, provided you have a job. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, well, Anacostia That's fucking Beirut down there. ____Not the real rusty Ether. ____Not the real rusty Me too You have to click the link to get it. ____Not the real rusty Awesome! And when you're done with all this effort, she will definitely take you home and fuck your iPhone while you watch from the closet and weep quietly. ____Not the real rusty We go Slovakia yes? We stay at hostel and have sexy good time, yes? ____Not the real rusty Needs more Ogg Frog. ____Not the real rusty Try it about an hour later The flights out of Portland are early. Most of the day it's basically just an hourly flight out to NY. The place is deserted by 8 am. ____Not the real rusty Ha Nothing happened. I mean, he came over and visited, and we talked and shit. Normal things people do when they visit each other. The kids got all excited about him again though, cause he said he came to visit. I'm just saying don't harass people. ____Not the real rusty Now listen you queer, If I was in your class, I'd sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered. ____Not the real rusty Sorry I just had this image of egil and Ni as Buckley vs. Gore Vidal. Desperately wanting to have a fight, but both far too gay to actually engage in fisticuffs. It just reminded me of that moment. ____Not the real rusty COMMENT DELETED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. ____Not the real rusty ror I know someone who went to Wentworth. Having visited him, I cannot even describe how not surprised by this I am. ____Not the real rusty No no It costs $70,000 and after you've paid they don't bring it to you. ____Not the real rusty Ahem That's spelled "lobster". What it actually is, no one knows. ____Not the real rusty He did enjoy one of my homebrew stouts. But the man's got a medical condition. It is not Mick Ultra by choice. Also jesus wtf I missed XX and Corona the first time through. You better be bleeding copiously from the eyeballs or something, to excuse that. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense Storing aggregate data makes sense if read-speed is a concern, and especially if the aggregation is complex. He doesn't say whether he's doing the calculations on write or not, but that is one way to do it. An issue that can crop up with that is what if your process goes wrong on a write and the calculation doesn't get done? In some cases (and also if the calculations themselves take a lot of time), it's more reliable to have some timed process that does calculations like this at fixed intervals, regardless of writes and updates the aggregate data. Basically we're talking about data warehouse design here. ____Not the real rusty They just could not ...come to an agreement on the "you have land we want to take" issue. ____Not the real rusty Indeed Skyrocketing Iraqi gun sales also indicate the healthy return of traditional outdoor sports. ____Not the real rusty Hey Couldn't you just duse them all with some nasty poison? Probem solved, right? Ror. How much do you want to bet her next step is to find some "pest control" company shady enough to come out and take her money for exactly that, no questions asked? ____Not the real rusty thread's closed due to prions. ____Not the real rusty Uh Getting the most swing votes is the job. Seriously. The VP has no duties except being President of the Senate and very occasionally casting a tiebreaker vote. There is no job. He's just there to be alive if the President becomes dead. ____Not the real rusty I doubt it Nowhere in the Constitution does it specify the duties of the VP, beyond the two I mentioned. Cheney knows that perfectly well, and is not at all dumb enough to disagree with it. The vice president may be assigned other duties by the President, at the President's whim. The Vice President may represent, puppetmaster-like, the interests of the shady cabal of military-petro-industrial powers that placed the current President in office. But "the job" entails nothing but presenting a balanced electoral ticket and possessing a beating heart. ____Not the real rusty A tool is yuo. ____Not the real rusty Amazon is Down http://www.amazon.com/ Update [2008-6-6 14:51:27 by rusty]: it's back. So about an hour. D'oh. Update [2008-6-6 14:52:58 by rusty]: I spoke too soon. Not using it anymore Wikipedia says they have something called Gurupa now. ____Not the real rusty It is not on your end It would never want to be anywhere near your end, frankly. No one does. ____Not the real rusty So fired I wonder what Amazon makes per minute. I fully expect to see articles where someone figures out what this clusterfuck cost them. ____Not the real rusty Could be true I mean they are probably making this guy's salary per minute. Why risk it? OTOH, why did he bother showing up? ____Not the real rusty Nothing worse than a thin fatty. ____Not the real rusty 2000 Chrokee All the spark plugs wore out shortly after we got it, one by one. And a few months ago we sprung some kind of air hose leak. Otherwise it's been fine. I miss the Wrangler though. The Cherokee is a compromise-mobile in comparison. ____Not the real rusty Das fakeski ____Not the real rusty I'm not convinced by the extras Watch all the women in the office. They spend the whole long rampage sort of shuffling forward and backward and looking "shocked." If you ignore the crazy guy and watch them, it really looks like some director told them to move around but keep in the shot, and they get kind of repetitive at it. Why wouldn't they all just leave the area? Who hangs around and gawks at somebody going berzerk with an axe a few feet away? There is also the weird cut at 1:19. What's that? ____Not the real rusty Obama Electoral votes: Obamae: 302 McCain: 236 ____Not the real rusty WAIT WAIT WAIT I would like to change my numbers. Obama: 275 McCain: 263 Reasoning: I think Obama's going to lose both OH and FL, which makes a landslide pretty much impossible. But he squeaks it out by putting together the northeast and coastal midatlantic (VA up to ME, notably including PA), the Pacific coast, and his midwestern home base area of MN, WI, IA, MO, and IL. Throw in HI and that gets him to 266. So it'll come down to one of the mountain or SW states -- most likely CO or NM. Either one of those will do it. It's gonna be a weird year for a few suddenly important tiny swing states. I'll climb out on my limb here and say it'll be CO that does it. Hence my final numbers. If I were Obama's people I'd be making plans to spend a ton of time and money in PA, CO, and NM. The second-tier that will need shoring up is MO and VA. He'd almost be wise to let OH and FL rot. The rest of us are damn sick and tired of hearing how important they are, and by semi-ignoring them, he can claim it's a "50-state strategy." Whereas it will still really be a five state strategy, just five states we haven't heard too much about already. ____Not the real rusty OH Ohio is possible, yes. But I'm so sick of trying to figure out what OH is going to do, it seems safer to just act like it's already lost and figure it out from there. I hope Obama's team is doing the same. It is not, fundamentally, friendly territory to him. Where it's not working-class, it's deeply conservative. Ohio is only Democratic in a very centrist, DLC, factory-worker kind of way. If Obama pulls out OH, it would probably be in a situation where he also wins FL and every single other close state in a massive landslide. ____Not the real rusty Economically, yes I was thinking socially. Don't-ask-don't-tell, DOMA, weak on civil rights, generally uneasy with strong social liberalism. Given that Obama and Hillary are basically policy clones, I'm betting that "identity" issues are going to be a stronger factor here than policy positions. I also probably should have put a slash in there: "...in a very centrist, DLC / factory-worker kind of way." I'm interested to see whether the blue collar union vote comes around strongly to Obama with Hillary backing him or not. No one has really been able to clearly tell whether it was policy or race issues behind the split. ____Not the real rusty Obama For The Record ____Not the real rusty Awesome At the end of the tour, can we boil these nitwits alive? After all, as human beings, they are not protected by any of their ethical concerns. ____Not the real rusty Ridiculous Incidentally, Whole Foods doesn't talk about it much, but they have stopped selling live lobsters everywhere but Maine. We would have run them out of the state on a rail if they tried that shit here. Actually, I wish we'd run them out anyway. ____Not the real rusty It's still not especially cheap ...to my way of thinking anyway. $9.00 or so a pound is common. Occasionally you'll find it cheaper, if there was a good catch the day before or whatever. I expect it'll be more expensive this year, since diesel is a major factor in the cost of lobster. They're also saying it's supposed to be a lousy catch this year. ____Not the real rusty Damn your poisonous rectum. ____Not the real rusty Zatarain's? On lobster? Are you crazy? What would be the point of having lobster? That's like getting a nice grass-fed filet mignonne and covering it with horseradish and A1. I'll make you some lobster. The whole trick is you boil it in seawater. That's it. Melt some butter, that's all you need. ____Not the real rusty Ha We do have Zatarain's here. It's excellent with shrimp and crabs. It just seems like it'd be wasted on lobster. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope Hillary supporters are practical grown-ups. We'll vote for Obama. Woe betide the party if it had turned out the other way around. Obama's crybaby kiddies would have vociferously boycotted the polls. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, well You get your nuts in every large group. If you're lucky. Never mind. Ahem. What I mean to say is, my characterization was "in general." There are significant numbers of Hillary supporters who won't vote for Obama (racists, fools, etc). And I'm sure vice versa. But I think more Hillary voters will vote for him than Obama voters would have gone for her. The drawback is that I suspect (without any proof, mind you) that the ex-Hillaries who won't vote for Obama will actually vote for McCain. I don't think the reverse would be true. Obama voters would stay home, but I can't imagine any of them voting for McCain. So I don't know what the overall upshot is. I do know it's Obama's race to lose, now. Jesus Christ, McCain looks like he's about to start channeling Homer Simpson's dad any second. "My pants are made of cheese!" ____Not the real rusty Saturday Hillary's campaign sent an email this morning saying she'll concede officially on Saturday. Which of course she was going to do, and all the jabbering idiots on TV and the blogs having conniptions because she didn't go and physically suck Obama's dick immediately after the South Dakota returns should get a grip. This is going to be a tiresome campaign. ____Not the real rusty Wall St. Journal Even stranger. ____Not the real rusty Senate Majority Leader ____Not the real rusty All-Grain Disaster ...or Yore Brewing It Rong!... ...or Lights Out Ale... I brewed my first batch of all-grain beer this past Saturday. Not a single thing went right. Not one goddamn thing. If this beer turns out to be not poisonous it will be a miracle. If it turns out to be in any way drinkable, I am Jesus*. Please, read on, that you may avoid my many mistakes. I've done four or five batches of extract, specialty-grain and one partial-mash. "How hard can all-grain be?" I thought. Well, it's not hard, but that doesn't necessarily mean I can do it right on the first try. But I'm more interested in the details of brewing than in cranking out fairly mechanical extract kits, so I decided to try anyway. My recipe was an attempt to simulate Shipyard's winter warmer seasonal beer, Prelude. The recipe goes like this: Grain: 11 lb. British pale 8 oz. British crystal 50-60L 4 oz. American chocolate Boil: 60 minutes SG 1.047 7 gallons Hops: 1 oz. Cascade (6% AA, 60 min.) 1 oz. Fuggles (4.75% AA, 60 min.) (Willamette substituted) .5 oz. Kent Goldings (aroma) .5 oz. Tettnanger (aroma) (Saaz substituted) This is a simple single-infusion mash, I was aiming for 152 degrees mash, 170 mash-out. So what to use for equipment? I have a lot of miscellaneous brewing equipment already, and it seems that the main purpose of most specialty all-grain equipment is to make brewing easier, not possible. So for the time being, I plan to continue with my own ghetto homemade rig until I know what's worth buying and what is just toys for the rich. So the first thing I did was make a mash/lauter tun. This is the hoary old bucket-in-a-bucket design, because I have extra buckets. So I took one bucket and drilled a lot of small holes in the bottom, put it inside another bucket with a tap near the bottom, and wrapped the whole thing in industrial-strength bubble-wrap for insulation. Good enough, right? I already have two big stainless pots and a digital probe thermometer, so all set there. And that's about it for equipment. So I heat up my mash water on the stove to about 165, put the grains in the mash tun, and pour in my mash water. This was the first thing I did wrong. I should have added grain to water, because I got a sticky doughy mess that was pretty close to unstirrable. Much effort and struggle later, it was more or less evenly mixed. I put a cover on the bucket, with the thermometer probe in the mash, and set my timer for an hour. Then the power went out. I didn't mention it above, but my stove is electric. It's the only heat source I have, and now I have no way to heat up any more water until the power comes back on. Also, my mash is only at 149 degrees. Close to the desired temp, probably close enough, but just a little more hot water would put it right there. Tough shit for me, because I can no longer produce hot water. So I lit a candle and placed it where the light would shine on my digital probe thermometer (battery powered), marveled at the incongruous juxtaposition for a while, and reflected that if they got the power back on within an hour or so, I'd still be ok. Then I waited, and fretted, and ranted, and fretted, and waited. I filled up my sparge water pot from the hot tap, so it was roughly 120 degrees. I ranted some more. I fretted. The power did not come back on. After about an hour and three quarters, I finally gave up and decided to go ahead and sparge anyway, with what lukewarm water I had. So I ran a hose down from my sparge water pot to the tun, and another off the tap on the lower bucket to my boiling pot, and started flow from both. Everything went fine until the space between the upper and lower buckets went empty. That should not have happened. In theory, the water should filter down through the grains, into the gap, and out the tap in the lower bucket continuously. But in practice, all my little holes were full of grain and no wort was flowing at all. I stirred and stirred, but this did no good. I tried various means of pressurizing the upper chamber to force the wort out, but this also did no good. Finally, in desperation, I hung a grain bag over the top of my boiling kettle and dumped the whole damn tun through it. So I got wort, and removed most of the grains, but I also got a heap of cloudy crap that should have bee filtered off by a properly flowing sparge. Lesson: DRILL MORE HOLES! For my next batch, I will be modifying my equipment by drilling lots more holes, of a larger size, in the bottom of the bucket, and stretching the grain bag over the outside of the inner bucket, to act as a fine-mesh filter. So the holes let the wort through, the grain bag does any necessary filtering. I expect to find out that this doesn't work either, and think maybe a picnic cooler mash tun is one of those things that it is actually worth making. But I'll give it another batch to see. So now I have wort, finally. I forget to take any hydrometer readings at this stage, so my only information about how well I managed to extract sugars is highly suspect (see below). I did taste the wort, and it tasted right to me, based on previous tastes of my extract worts. So, on to the boil. From here things went a bit better. The power finally came back on, which is fortunate because I'd otherwise have been sitting around with a full pot of wort and nothing to do with it. I got the boil going, added my hops, and so forth. Nothing remarkable here. I chilled the wort using my ghetto fish-tote chilling technique, which still works great. 212 degrees to 75 degrees in about 25 minutes. I finally thought to take a hydrometer reading at this point, and it showed 1.062. That is actually just where it should have been, which cheered me up. I considered it a bit suspect though, because the wort at this point had a ton of hop residue and gunk in it, and I have no idea how that affects the specific gravity. Does anyone know? It seems like it would change the density of the liquid, but I don't know in what way. So I poured the wort into my fermenter, and pitched in a bottle of saved-up yeast residue from my last batch. This was also highly questionable, since it's been basically sitting in an airlocked bottle in my basement for a few weeks. The yeast, questionable or not, certainly was still alive. 18 hours later it was bubbling at a vigorous clip. Bubbled busily for about a day, and then slowed down. So this morning I racked into a secondary. There was, I kid you not, a gallon and a half of sediment at the bottom of the primary bucket. I only ended up with four gallons of even marginally clear beer in the secondary, which frankly sucks for yield. I took another hydrometer reading, and it's 1.012 now, which is also all well and good. It's still bubbling, but very slowly. Looks like it'll probably go down to 1.010 and stop. My problem with it now is I took a taste today and it tastes terrible. I can't decide if the terrible taste is "horribly bitter," which would be ok since it still has a lot of hop residue and stuff, and bitterness is to be expected, or "horribly sour," which would mean it got infected along the way and is a total loss. I'll let it finish and clear and see how it tastes then. My best guess is it's probably overly bitter, because the low mash temp would tend to produce a lot of fermentable sugars and not a lot of unfermentable sugars, so the beer would be left with little maltiness to balance the fairly heavy load of hops. This style should be very very malty, and I doubt I achieved the necessary maltiness and body to manage it. So it'll probably taste like crap. Chalk the first one up to experience, anyway. I will try again, and I know a lot of things not to do wrong next time. Next batches: a plain old standard IPA and a Blue Moon style Witbeer. IPA ingredients arrived today, but the bastards didn't crack my grains, so I have to drag myself shamefacedly to the local homebrew store and get them to do it. So I'll have to put together another recipe to buy the grains for there, since I can't very well waltz in and ask them to crack grains I bought elsewhere and not buy anything. So, what other beer should I make? I'm leaning toward a stout. I like me a stout. And if I have a stout, an IPA, and a Wheat, I'd pretty much have the entire range covered no matter what I felt like drinking. * I am not Jesus. It will not be good. Seriously. How did you know? Actually, I didn't mention it in the recipe, but I did in fact use 11 lbs of British pale malt that was specially taken from the mouths of starving African children. It costs a little more, to export it over there, fill the bowls of swollen-bellied fly-eyed waifs with it, then at the last moment scoop it back out of those bowls and re-import it to the US. But I feel the slight infusion of salty tears of despair gives the final brew just that je ne sais quoi that turns an average beer into a truly extraordinary experience of trans-national schadenfreude. ____Not the real rusty Ahem Please see here. ____Not the real rusty lol That's good. I will. ____Not the real rusty Thanks I didn't know whether suspended solids would affect the hydrometer. Good to know they don't. Also about infection. I'm leaning toward thinking that it was an excess bitterness, which will either smooth out with time (and settling), or won't because the coolish mash didn't provide much malty flavor. I would really have liked to mash somewhat on the hotter side, really, to get more maltiness out. Oh well. The fish tote chiller is a big rectangular plastic tub called, in these parts, a "fish tote" because it's made for fishermen to put fish in. It's probably 20 or 25 gallons-ish -- loks like this. I set one of those up on my counter, with one end blocked up, and fill it with cold water. Then when the boil's done I put my whole boil pot in there (the cold water generally comes up the boiling pot sides right to the top of the wort, which is nice). I put the sprayer from the sink in one end of the fish tote, running, and then let the water drain out the other side into the sink. So it's just a water-bath chiller, but the key is keeping the water moving. Moving water carries away heat, still water just absorbs it very slowly, and mostly insulates itself. The water doesn't have to be particularly cold, just as long as its moving. This is a good way to defrost meat too, incidentally. You don't need a whole fish tote, obviously. ____Not the real rusty Dummy The cured the aids in The Gambia. (Why does it get a definite article, anyway?) ____Not the real rusty Excude me! You got your THE AIDS in my THE GAMBIA! ____Not the real rusty Oh hey Me too, actually. My last run was 4 miles at a well-nigh shocking 8:40/mi. I was aiming for anything under ten minutes, so I guess it helped. ____Not the real rusty Not that surprising Booker T. was all about self-improvement. Many blacks, from his time till today, consider him a traitor for basically saying that blocks aren't going to get anywhere until they emulate whites. I think he had some wisdom in his "clean up your own house" message, but it's certainly not the whole truth. ____Not the real rusty Running vs. biking My impression is that they don't even really use some of the same muscles. After running for a few years, being able to do five 8:30 miles with little trouble, I got on a bike and completely blew my legs out. The two activities just don't seem to use the same equipment. General cardio fitness will get you through it, and it'll be easier to come up to speed, but switching from biking to running or vice versa will hurt fairly bad at first. ____Not the real rusty Not doing much I have a POS Ram 50 pickup that I drive once a week or so, to the dump or the garden store (~ 1 mile in either case). A Jeep Cherokee that gets approximately 10 gallons to the mile (not a typo!), but the family as a whole drives maybe 20 miles a month. And a Subaru Outback in town that we share with my wife's parents, and I use for trips to e.g. the hardware store and whatnot. Once a month or so I go somewhere over 5 miles away. I have been walking to my office more lately, but mostly that's just because it's nicer weather and I haven't needed to run errands as often. I basically just don't drive much, and haven't for years, so high gas prices == big deal. Now high fuel oil prices are gonna hurt if they're still this bad next winter. I have basically no other heating option. That kinda sucks. I did improve my house's weatherizing this winter, but I might be doing some more of that in the fall. ____Not the real rusty Also, 30 mile commute? WTF? You think you're going to live forever? Is that total, both ways, or one way? If it's 15 miles one way, you should be biking. Planet-raper. ____Not the real rusty 10 miles per doughnut ____Not the real rusty This room is full of win ____Not the real rusty They are common here Sad but true. We've become inured to it. ____Not the real rusty Squash? All you have to do is break off an open male flower and rub it into an open female flower while getting all sexay and going "Bwom chicka bwowww-wowww wakka-wakka wakka-wakka" under your breath and then throw away the male flower. That's all you need them for anyway. ____Not the real rusty A gentleman would say "cooze" ____Not the real rusty I think the bromance is gone. ____Not the real rusty Four words: Doped. To. The. Gills. ____Not the real rusty High-rise fires Say you're stuck in a smoky high-rise building and your chioce is to take your chances with waste vent air or die of smoke inhalation... http://totallyabsurd.com/toiletsnorkel.htm It's actually not a bad idea, really, in extreme circumstances. Also catch the retarded mis-snark in the page above: "Here's our question... couldn't he have, just as easily, invented the Faucet Snorkel instead?" BECAUSE TEH FAWCETTS GOES TO UH DIFFRENT DRAIN PIEP AMIRITE? What a tool. ____Not the real rusty In a 50 story office building? You're welcome to spray your extinguisher as much as you want, but chances are still good that the fire is not in your office, and may be blocking your escape route, and in any case is pumping smoke throughout the building's ventilation. Having a fire extinguisher and an alarm are both good ideas, but won't necessarily save you from death by smoke inhalation. ____Not the real rusty Welcome to the Police State More fear == more power for cops == more money for cops == more cops == more stupid cops. ____Not the real rusty To be more specific When I say "more money for cops" I don't mean better paid cops. I mean cities and states and nations put more total money into police apparatuses with the explicit goal of "getting more cops on the streets." So pay stays the same but numbers rise, which is why it leads directly to more dumb cops. More warm bodies are needed to do the same shitty job for the same shitty pay, so you start to scrape lower and lower in the barrel. The same thing we're seeing in the US military right now, in other words. ____Not the real rusty Not really Nursing pays more because there is a dire shortage of nurses. That's all. Doctoring, in fact, doesn't pay all that well any more because so many people became doctors believing it was the path to riches. Now they graduate from their 200 years of school with a million dollars in student loans and discover that the last time you could be a rich doctor and not work all that hard was the 1950s. Also, your idea about bridges sort of runs into the economic complexities of municipal funding. If you, personally, were going to have a bridge built, you might spend more to hire a top engineer to design it. But the hiring by committee that cities and states do complicates that to an enormous degree, and separates individuals concerned about strong bridges from the actual engineers by many intermediary layers. Basically, you're rocking a sort of a programmer / libertarian's notion of workplace economics here, and I think it's kinda oversimplified. ____Not the real rusty I suppose I would Health care is a mess everywhere, but apparently in different ways. ____Not the real rusty I don't know about that theory I majored in going to the cinema, but it turned out there were few jobs in that field, so I had to settle for working in the software industry. Perhaps it has changed a lot since then, but it certainly worked out for me. ____Not the real rusty Nah I didn't finish my degree in going to the cinema anyway, and no, it didn't help. My natural ability to bullshit my way through the door, combined with the internet boom, was what got me into this miserable field. I didn't even know how to code, actually. Got one of my first employers to allow me to learn while working there. I don't have any grudge against properly trained software engineers. I just dislike the whole field. It's kind of a bullshit industry. I also think that as the novelty of it wears off, software engineers will be increasingly regarded as just more technical tradespeople, like plumbers and car mechanics. I just hope we never reach the point that traditional engineering is at, where there's a fixed series of hoops that you have to jump through, and they essentially serve simply to prop up the "professional" image of engineers, without actually making them any more competent. Or to put it another way, you can still learn how to program on the job, and if you care to you can learn to be as good as any other programmer. There's no such thing as an engineering apprenticeship (in the US anyway) anymore. ____Not the real rusty Yeeees... ...so we're sort of agreeing -- I hope it remains clear to everyone that software is imaginary, so excepting extreme cases where software is dierectly keeping people from dying, it doesn't need to be as regulated as, say, bridge building. But I'm also saying that the rules and procedures for engineers, here anyway, are mostly nonsense and force everyone through one mill. There's no official learning by experience or apprenticeship structure, which is dumb because that's how all the actual learning gets done anyway. Also, about as many engineers are directly responsible for lives and safety as programmers are. The very great majority of them are mainly professional catalog shoppers. ____Not the real rusty I don't know "IBM: We're not fascists, we're just war profiteers" doesn't sound a whole lot better. ____Not the real rusty My goodness Someone finally admitted that Java is designed for idiots. :-) ____Not the real rusty Why the Lincoln Memorial? The turbo encabulation is on 18th St. I'm puzzled by the choice of protest location. ____Not the real rusty No way I use "hm" a lot too, and I consciously do it because it provides a steeper and steeper hill for the other person to climb, conversationally. That is, I use it to shut down conversations I'm not interested in having without the other person being able to point to anything I did to do so. Semantically it's an empty signifier. It means nothing. So someone facing such a response just feels more and more like they're talking to a wall. They always stop, and usually fairly quick. It's particularly useful when someone is outraged about something that you don't want to get involved in. And the absolute best use is for family disputes that you want to keep well clear of. "Did you hear what your Aunt Marge said the other day? She said she didn't care whether I was invited to Susan's wedding or not. Can you believe that?" "Hm." See? Where do you go from there? That's usually all it takes. I would never "Hm," my wife, probably even if I didn't care about what she was saying. She knows full well how I use it and would be quite insulted. Most people just experience a sort of conversational pothole though, and are left feeling like you responded but not sure what your response was. So donnalee, if you find yourself on the receiving end of a lot of hm's, you may want to reconsider your audience's potential interest in what you're telling them. It means exactly what you think it means. ____Not the real rusty I usually say something a little wordier, like "I don't know," or "How 'bout that." Or, occasionally, "I don't really care." Telling her that I don't care is a lot more polite than just blowing her off. I can't necessarily say that you're rude doing it. Just that we've actually discussed (my wife and I) this particular expression and I've told her exactly how I use it, so she'd see it for what it is. And I probably still do it sometimes, anyway. Kind of hard to break the habit. ____Not the real rusty Fuck Scotty McClellan If he's so upset about the bullshit he himself peddled, why didn't he quit and speak out when it could have done some good? Another Good German. Fuck him. He lied more enthusiastically and constantly than any of them. It was his job to lie to us, and he full well knew it. If there was any justice, he'd be telling this story in front of a War Crimes judge, not making money off it. ____Not the real rusty It's true In which case it's doubly surprising that our government isn't in front of a tribunal. We might have to amend that saying to include "and those who cannot admit they lost..." ____Not the real rusty That's not the headline The headline is: "Obama Accidentally Admits Uncle was a Communist." Get your politics of personal destruction right please. ____Not the real rusty But it could be! The media collectively missed a great opportunity for spurious personal attack there. They're gonna have to shape up. ____Not the real rusty Good work, Ford Ford Motor Company does realize their name is being used in this ad, right? I wish it meant more than "I'm not going to purchase a piece of shit" when I say this, but I'm not going to buy a Ford. I actually was considering an F-150 for my next truck. Guess not. I'll go with a GMC 1500 instead. ____Not the real rusty I got several Seems to be the world's most pointless email virus. ____Not the real rusty He's going to They'll be out here for a couple days. ____Not the real rusty Hey -- email me I switched all my email over to gmail and in the process currently don't have access to my archives. Shoot me an email would you? ____Not the real rusty Hillary Clinton Eastwood ____Not the real rusty CAN YOU SMELL THE JOEMENTUM? I CAN! ____Not the real rusty That would be awesome I wonder of one person has ever been the losing VP nominee twice from two different parties before. ____Not the real rusty Not even that A lot of the actual good stuff is walled off now, completely. Private blogs, private facebook groups, etc etc. I think one reason it's so much harder to find that kind of thing now is because for most people, it's not worth the extra hassle of dealing with the (huge idiotic) public. So they just set it up private and only talk to their friends. In a way, "social networks" have made the internet much less social. ____Not the real rusty Now my genius becomes apparent, eh? One day it will be obvious to everyone. And all three K5 readers will be glad I did what I did. ____Not the real rusty Handy siphoning trick I don't strain the hops, so my primary always has a thick layer of crap at the bottom. I've developed a trick to make that easier to work around, and to increase the overall amount I can cleanly siphon out. Basically, it's just this: When I set up the primary, I stick a block of wood or a book or something under one edge of the bucket, so it's tipped a little. That way the trub settles down more on one side of the bottom than the other. When it's time to siphon, I very gently slide the object out, tip the bucket the other way, and slide it back in under the side that has the deepest layer of crap. If done with enough savoir faire, so as not to disturb the layer of muck, you've now got most of your sediment on the uphill side of the bottom of the fermeter. Put the racking cane down into the clean (now lower) side, and you can pretty much just plonk it on the bottom and siphon away. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It only works if you can keep everything pretty still. I generally leave the primary up on my kitchen counter, and siphon right from where it sits. Moving the bucket very slowly might work. The stuff does sort of cake together somewhat. ____Not the real rusty I Has a Bukkit Meet, chat, and share stories with people who say 'I Has a Bukkit' Nooo, they be stealin' mah bukkit!... lol I may never have seen a place so ripe for trolling. ____Not the real rusty Why should I? ____Not the real rusty Hey It was laboriously typed in by hand from a totally not online source, whose owner is pretty well guaranteed to not care about it. Putting the text online at all is practically a public service. It's an edge case, anyhow. You already know I tend to err on the side of "let it go" for edge cases. ____Not the real rusty I dress nondescriptly Mostly because I'm fussy about clothes, but partly because I want my clothing to say "You don't know anything about me." Also, because I am a fully actualized psychopath. ____Not the real rusty I do wear t-shirts with logos But I also tend to favor ones that will not make very much sense to anyone but me. I also tend to tell people, if asked what they mean, "It's a band." It's amazing how well this answer stops further conversation. ____Not the real rusty No... well, depends I don't have any internet meme shirts. Right at the moment, I'm wearing "Pierce & Pierce, murders and executions" from busted tees. So kinda net-hipster, but at least it's a literary joke. That's me in their promo picture, by the way. I can't stop touching my own face-pubes. ____Not the real rusty Ironically, no ____Not the real rusty Yes I also turned Syrian, as you can see. :-) ____Not the real rusty That is true Dumb, but nevertheless true. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget that while Neville Chamberlain was appeasing Hitler, Prescott Bush was getting rich off supplying Hitler's war machine. ____Not the real rusty Pretty much That's how it's done. I've done this a number of times. Actually coding the importing script is usually no big deal. It's when you discover how shitty the data is that the trouble happens. Like how your unquoted text within the tab-delimited file has tabs within it. Hooray! Now you get to write a script to determine which six arbitrary tabs delimit fields within a row that contains seven tabs. As far as I know, there is no real universal algorithm to do this. It usually involves rules of thmb and guesswork, like these two fields are text and sometimes contain tabs, so usually we can look for this other field starting with a number and work backward from that one. Or we drop the offending row into an errors file and someone has to actually look at it and escape it properly before this is going to work. ____Not the real rusty Love that Childers / Davis picture http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/POLITICS/05/13/miss.election/art.childers.ap.jpg Travis Childers: Man's man. Firm but kindly. The sort of guy you'd like to have a beer with while you work on your old pickup together. Greg Davis: Sweaty child molester. ____Not the real rusty One for the audition reel ____Not the real rusty I remember high school. We didn't have youtube, so we'd have to hear this kind of shit live from the class drama queens. The upside to that, though, is that when one of them threatened to kill herself, you could actually tell her directly to try not to make a mess. Ooh. There's one for the meanest things file right there. ____Not the real rusty OMG LIKE Portland used to be called "Falmouth" a long time ago and then they changed the name. That totally makes me want to blow up Jews. ____Not the real rusty Of course they do They got their asses kicked in two wars over the territory. I imagine that still rankles. ____Not the real rusty What? Everclear is from St. Louis, MO. In fact, according to wikipedia I've never lived in a state where full-strength Everclear is legal. Except briefly in early toddlerhood, in NJ. ____Not the real rusty You're better than me You sound a little like the Crash Test Dummies singer. Being persistently flat didn't hurt him, apparently, so probably don't worry about it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Obama / Clinton '08 Oh please, please let's not screw this up. That has to be the ticket. Has. To. Be. ____Not the real rusty I don't know This looks to me like the moment it became clear to Edwards that nothing substantial was going to change, but the race was not yet so "officially" over that hye'd look like a me-tooer. I.e. this is the optimum moment to endorse. It still appears like there was a meaningful choice, without there actually having been one. In a way, everyone who jumps on board after this is too late to get anything much out of it. ____Not the real rusty He flooded her ninth ward. ____Not the real rusty Because the baby jesus is an emo pussy. ____Not the real rusty I lost the number ____Not the real rusty 54 ...and the Snowdens of yesteryear have flies in their eyes. Also, I see everything twice. ____Not the real rusty internet catchphrases fail it. ____Not the real rusty Human ____Not the real rusty Sloppy Joes Funny you should mention that. I do, these days, enjoy a good sloppy joe. But for a long, long time I would not eat them, under any circumstances. You see, when I was maybe, oh, 7 or 8, my parents sent me to a day camp for a couple weeks in the summer. I hated it like death. It was boring as hell, and I didn't like any of the other kids. Loathing, is the feeling I'm trying to get across here. There was a screaming fight every day when she forced me onto the bus there. So for the big finish of the camp, we were going to have all the parents come for an afternoon, and do a little sing-song skit type thing. They taught us "Bingo" and gave us all big cards to hold up, each with one letter. B - I - N - G - O. I was G. We did our song, and when we all held up our cards, I was that dumbass whose card was upside down. It was mortifying, especially since it also involved singing and loathsome day camp. And the lunch they served was sloppy joes. I associated sloppy joes with that humiliating day and that hellish camp for years and years after that, and couldn't even stand to smell them. They're still not my favorite thing, but I can eat them now. I have pretty much moved on. Although my mother knows damn well I still have not entirely forgiven her for that camp. ____Not the real rusty Have not decided yet I was going to collect opinions and then put it up for a main-page vote if the general opinion seemed to be in favor. And I haven't stopped because I'm a pyronecrobestialiholic. Can you possibly try to show a little sympathy for my mental-health condition here? I admit I have a problem. ____Not the real rusty VHS It's The Standard. Can't argue with that. And c'mon, it's not like videotape quality was all that great no matter what you used. And the Nazis would have had very capable engineers to program their VCRs to record Dallas for them, and also produce a picture-in-picture view of how many Jews had been killed that day. ____Not the real rusty No ____Not the real rusty Oh man, that's tough I would have to say there are a few choices there, depending on where your sympathies lie. When I was little, I killed a frog by throwing it against a wall. I'm not sure that counts, because I didn't actually know what I was doing. I felt really bad when I realized it was dead forever though. Later, I blew up a turtle with firecrackers. It didn't kill the turtle, but badly damaged its belly shell. We put it out of its misery. But I felt pretty bad about that too. Much more recently, maybe a week after my son was born he was awake and crying in the middle of the night. My wife had already been up with him several times (she was also still recovering from his c-section, mind you) and we were both exhausted. She asked me (trying to sleep) if I'd get up and change him or something like that. I said, and I quote: "Is there something wrong with your arms?" That was pretty mean. She loves to tell that story now. I can't think of anything meaner than that at the moment. Although I did some fairly mean stuff in high school as well. It'll have to do. ____Not the real rusty No I was < 10 at the time. I wouldn't have known how to clean them. ____Not the real rusty Man, was I ever tired I kind of think fatigue strips away my self-imposed civilization and reveals the mean bastard I truly am. I've said a number of other extremely cruel things when half-asleep or very tired. I always feel bad when the superego comes back on line, but it always shows up too late. ____Not the real rusty Both, in equal measure ____Not the real rusty Anecdotally This happens all the time. ____Not the real rusty It was a typo It was supposed to be "Dial it back, dude." Now it just sounds like I dropped a call. ____Not the real rusty I think you mean falafel. ____Not the real rusty I'd give you some ideas But honestly, I can't be bothered. ____Not the real rusty Who should be a mod? ray thinks more mods would equal more win. I have been thinking, of late, that perhaps a couple more might not hurt, although honestly there ain't much work for them. Perhaps there would be unexpected follow-on benefits. Who the hell knows. What I had in mind would be people who would be able to do some basic site cleanup, hiding the routine crapflood diaries and such, issue warnings, and possibly ban or temporarily ban users. I would want all of us to be able to see and review decisions, in case someone unexpectedly freaks out under the pressure of letting you idiots be idiots to the extent permitted by custom. This may also entail trying to hammer down some more coherent guidelines than "my gut says this is bad." Anyway, I have a few people I would immediately think of, if they'd be willing to do it. Who would you nominate for moderator? My list of people I probably inadvisably would trust, to enough of an extent to give them a shot anyway: GhostofTiber XC000000bee guy localroger mybostinks Sgt York wiredog ray eckson (no, I'm serious. Knock it off) LilDebbie Additions? Deep reservations? Also, anyone want to initiate a crack at some coherent and followable user guidelines, and probably more importantly, moderator guidelines? FYI, I issue an average of perhaps one warning every two weeks, and clean up the regular diary crapflood as it happens, usually around once a week. This does not, as you might imagine, take a lot of time. So it seems like the only likely benefit to having more mods would be quicker cleanup and the exciting risk that one would flip out and go all Paul Dunne on us some day. Nevertheless, I look forward to your opinions as ever. It may well be... ...in case my own reservations weren't already abundantly clear. Just putting it out there. ____Not the real rusty OMG NO I WOULD DIE IF YOU DID THAT. You know you'd be the first person to stomp off in a huff? Like, ever in the history of ever? Do you really want to go down in history as "The Guy That Broke The Huff Barrier?" ____Not the real rusty Ha That's the only thing you've ever said here that's both almost coherent, and true. :-) ____Not the real rusty I was gonna include review I guess the only question is whether the review is amongst moderators or public and open to general bitching. I sorta lean toward the latter, for the lulz. ____Not the real rusty Regular banning is eminently reversible. The only unreversible thing I do is delete comments, and I do it pretty rarely. I'm still not sure how to manage that with volunteer mods, but maybe they just wouldn't have delete comments power. It's not gonna kill anyone to have to wait for me to show up and finish any necessary cleanup. ____Not the real rusty Like this isn't already the last train to crazyville. ____Not the real rusty Ha It didn't even occur to me that you were the only one with relevant professional experience for the job. Hm. I guess bee guy sort of does too. ____Not the real rusty pwn ____Not the real rusty Reply here. ____Not the real rusty HuSi ---> ____Not the real rusty ror I win. :-) ____Not the real rusty lord almighty No one got kicked off of anywhere. He was just warned. Baldrson was warned lots of times too. It's how the admins tell people they've crossed the line. If I knew there had to be this much drama every time someone got a warning I'd have done it in Spanish and sold the whole thing to Telemundo. ____Not the real rusty God Save the Queen ____Not the real rusty it wasn't localroger Someone did file an abuse report, which I agreed with. It wsn't Roger though. I say this only because I'd hate him to look like a crybaby. Also, filing an abuse report doesn't mean anything happens. I decide if any action is needed. ____Not the real rusty Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice... fool... can't get fooled again! ____Not the real rusty Okey doke ____Not the real rusty No doubt I have no question about roger's ability to ignore it. lonelyhobo has just been increasingly tedious lately with the constant barrage of crap. He clearly camps out here just to follow certain people's comments with attacks. We, collectively, don't need that. ____Not the real rusty You shouldn't either But seriously, you're a lot more entertaining than he is (which is to say, slightly entertaining at all) and tend to pick better targets (i.e. assholes). ____Not the real rusty If? What do you think I've been trying to do all these years? ____Not the real rusty That couldn't be If that were true, you'd be huge. ____Not the real rusty Hai! Who has not heald of the Rast Light Wing Conspilacy? ____Not the real rusty Yes ____Not the real rusty WHAT PART OF THIS DON'T YOU GET We've gone over this before, and you always end up with "So, you just make the decisions eh?" and I always go "Yup," and you always go "HA! GOTCHA!" Do I have to tattoo it backwards on your ass so you can see it in the mirrored ceiling while your girlfriend pegs you? Anyway, it was just a warning, and a pretty damn mild one at that. I said I would do more warnings instead of bannings, and by crikey I have. I hope next time you feel the urge to have this conversation, you can refer to one of our previous go-rounds. The answers aren't going to change. ____Not the real rusty Exactly! Man, that's exactly it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but you nailed it. The opposite of HuSi, it turns out, is the same thing. I'm all in favor of criticism that has an object. Lonelyhobo's has none. It's just "feelings." Screw that. ____Not the real rusty Easy, except ...that we all know it's just some basement dweller being a doofus. I mean, honestly. He's about as convincingly threatening as a plastic spork. I'm more pointing at the notion that that comment, and his other stalkery behavior like it, doesn't do anything positive for the site, and isn't even entertaining, and would be better all around if it stopped. ____Not the real rusty Yes and no In my experience, there are people who are fundamentally not jerks under any normal circumstances online or off, which amounts to about 99.999% of all people. Then there are people who are jerks, whether they hide it offline or not, about 1 in 1000. And a very special tiny subset of those people, or about 1 in 10,000 people altogether, is a total sociopath who you'd actually be nervous about giving any personal info to. The good news is that the last group is really hard to miss. They stick out badly in any kind of anonymous or pseudonymous context. lonelyhobo is not one of those. He's just a garden variety jerk. I also do consider there to be a difference between "winding up total strangers" and "tweaking the self-important." Lots of people will do the latter if they have the wit and the particular cast of mind to pull it off. Not so many will just grief random people for the hell of it. If you start to find yourself attracting a lot of negative attention -- more than you could explain with the relatively rare random griefer-- it may be a sign that you're giving off the wrong kind of signals. I don't like to blame the victim, but I've seen too many cases where there is no victim. Just two willing participants, if you know what I mean. ____Not the real rusty Well See this 'ere thread for a pretty good example. ____Not the real rusty I wonder that too Seeing the energy that goes into hammering the nail that sticks up slightly on a place as meaningless as this, I have often wondered how real famous people ever hold it together at all. I mean, just imagine what that must be like. ____Not the real rusty Nope The reporter was most definitely not a lh dupe. ____Not the real rusty Steel Doors Subject: I visited your website and had a question I was looking at websites under the keyword Steel Doors and came across your website http://www.kuro5hin.org. I see that you're not ranked on the first page of Google for a Steel Doors search. I'm not sure if you're aware of why you're ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is. There's no reason you can't have a top three ranking for the keyword Steel Doors based on your site structure and content. You have a very nice site. You need significantly more one way anchor text backlinks. If you're interested I can help you with this... I'm talking about getting you ranked for ALL your keywords. Adding new backlinks on a steady and consistent basis from high PR quality websites is what produces the rankings you are looking for http://www.kuro5hin.org. The right kind of links are very critical in getting top ranking....and I can hand deliver these quality links to you. My partners and I own 1000's websites and offer private linking to hundreds of website owners just like yourself. I didn't send this email out to very many people but I am currently reaching out to a list of your "keyword competitors" as well. But I do favor your website because I can see your website monetizing the targeted website traffic the keyword Steel Doors can deliver. I have your contact information and phone number. Is it ok if I give you a call? I have a very simple way to prove that what I do works and it's risk free for you to try. Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes Is it ok if I give you a call? I would love to pursue this further over the phone with you or should I go somewhere else? Sincerely, Gabe Sumpter (480) 588-8900 ext. 600 www.linkshog.com P.S - If the tables were turned and somebody I didn't know came to me with a proposition, even one that was appealing, I would be hesitant because I would be wondering - what's the catch? What does this guy know that I don't. But then I would think he does know something that I don't know. He does have thousands of high PR websites, he does have hundreds of thousands of pages indexed and ranking in Google Yahoo and MSN. Sites that can deliver the quality anchor text backlinks. I would also think that I need to get my website in the top rankings. And he is offering to turn key top rankings for me...on all my keywords including Steel Doors. Even keywords I'm not currently competing for. Keywords that produce traffic that's potentially worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. I emailed you because It's a win -win for both of us. Think of it this way - Who wouldn't be interested in buying money at a discount? Because that's what I'll be able to do offer you...Money at a discount. Is it Ok to give you a call? Or you can can call me anytime at the number above? Kuro5hin. Your #1 source for steel doors. Screen doors ...are only appropriate for Polish submarines. Best for seeing the fish, you know. All other boats should stick with sturdy steel doors. ____Not the real rusty You can all do your part Words used in diary titles tend to rapidly improve our standing in google for those terms. I totally encourage all and sundry to bear this in mind and stop wasting your diary titles. ____Not the real rusty I show #15 at the moment. ____Not the real rusty Although it seems to vary ____Not the real rusty The next wave of SEO "Search Engine Protection." Pay up, and we'll make sure your site doesn't get linked in those "bad neighborhoods." If you know what we mean. ____Not the real rusty Weakling I finally got running again last week, after taking the whole winter off while working on the house every night. Did my usual 5 mile loop. Ok, it did suck a lot, and I'm still a little sore four days later, but I did it. Then again, I have been running for years now. Must be, what, six years? Sheesh. It took me quite a while to get up to three miles. But as I recall, three miles == five miles, effectively. If you can do three, just pick a day and keep going. You'll be able to do five. One time I felt good, so I did my five miles and kept going, and ended up going ten miles just for the hell of it. You'll be very surprised at what you're actually capable of, if you just have the balls to try. ____Not the real rusty I'm just giving you shit. I vividly recall the first run I did. About 1/4 mile and I thought I'd die. I was never fat, but had just been completely sedentary ever since high school, which amounted to 8 or 9 years. That was in the spring. By that fall I was doing 5 miles. I haven't really increased my distance since then, but I can do it with some enjoyment now, as opposed to total misery, and in somewhat better time. So anyway, keep it up. I'm just cheering you on in the K5-approved way by calling you a flabby useless twinkie-gobbling fucknozzle. ____Not the real rusty What is it with the shoes? I have NB too, because all I could find were pointy ballet slippers last time I went looking for new running shoes. Adidas used to make a fantastic running shoe, but of course every year they have to melt down all their old forms and start again, cause god knows our feet all change shape year after year. Long and pointy seems to be the new black for shoes. ____Not the real rusty lol I just came to make the same joke. ____Not the real rusty I know how to say "I want to sleep with a yak" in Nepali. Seriously. Although years after learning it, it occurred to me that I don't actually know if the phrase" "sleep with" has the same sort of dual connotation in Nepali, or whether, if it doesn't, I know how to say "I want to go to sleep with a yak" or "I want to fuck a yak." I may never find out. Unless I find myself in Nepal on a very cold night. I suppose I'll find out pretty quick then. ____Not the real rusty Don't knock detergent suicide It's a clean death. ____Not the real rusty Lady3Jane: 1 Yuo: 0 (points awarded for getting the joke) ____Not the real rusty I believe you're right Right now, Obama's got an OH and FL problem. Clinton vs. McCain Obama vs. McCain It's gonna come down to OH and FL once again, since the rest of the country is pretty well set. And as of yet, those people don't show much inclination to vote for Obama. Both states are very close still, mind you. But it'll be a scrape all the way. OH likes Hillary by ten points and FL likes her by 8. Basically McCain vs. Obama in OH and FL are both going to come down to who's the believable centrist "maverick." McCain's had 127 years in the Senate to build his image as that. Obama's just some black guy that the moonbats of MoveOn like, as far as the midwest knows. An Obama/Clinton ticket might have a chance. Obama alone? I'm not optimistic. ____Not the real rusty The hate doesn't matter. If it were popular vote you might be right, but we have an electoral college, so all that matters is the state electoral vote breakdowns. Right now, they look far better for Hillary than Obama. ____Not the real rusty To be clear I mean "better for Hillary" in a hypothetical general election vs. McCain that won't happen. Obama will be the Dem nominee. I'm just afraid we're going to realize his demographic weakness too late. He'll win all the usual Dem strongholds and add a little in the mountain west, but without Ohio or Florida it still won't work. However, give McCain some time to reveal himself. He's a complete fraud and a cranky old bastard too. Whoever runs against him, their best possible move is to question his patriotism and military service. It'll send him right over the edge and he'll do something really vicious, and put off the few Republicans who liked him to begin with. I do think this ting has a chance of turning around when we have a real nominee. ____Not the real rusty Mmmm I could really go for an ice cold glass of ADES right now. ____Not the real rusty Re: poll I would like to revise and extend my votes to specify that all those things be done in the correct order. That is: 2, 4, 5, 3, 1. ____Not the real rusty I can't Where would I find the pure? These jerkins don't tan themselves you know. ____Not the real rusty Bush Sr. Wasn't elected to much, but had spent a long time being a party hack. A very long time. ____Not the real rusty Too competent For the job of President. He should have stayed a behind the scenes spook. ____Not the real rusty I like it I've listened a few more times since it was last mentioned, and it's not great but it is pretty good. It has its moments. Zip download here for anyone who missed it the first time. ____Not the real rusty Sounds deserved This was in response to #421167, which does indeed look like an error for which Mr. Droge should in fact choke on a bucket of cocks. Any self-respecting programmer would agree that yes, his massive fuckup pretty well deserves to be memorialized like this and let it go. Incidentally, if you had put that in the title of this diary, it'd come up on a search for "Sebastian Droge" for approximately ever. Name your diaries carefully people, c'mon. ____Not the real rusty True dat ____Not the real rusty SEPPUKU FTW ____Not the real rusty Wow Someone took a picture of the box I sent to GoT. "Beer exchange" ftw. ____Not the real rusty What about Asterix? Pronounced "AssTEReecks." ____Not the real rusty K5 will get you in trouble Erik Moeller's in trouble, partly for some posting he did here in 2001. I have never quite understood the power of K5 to cause problems for Wikipedia, but it appears to continue. Just letting you know -- it is entirely possible you will come to regret what you wrote here. Also, "putting the 'ped' in Wikipedia since 2001" amirite? Not so far I dunno. The CMF was obviously a fiasco, but one of my own doing. No one ever blamed me for FNH, apart, I suppose, from implicitly as the "you" in a lot of the "You should be strung up by your ballsack and severed limb from limb" type comments, and really who cares. I can't think of anything I've actually written that's bitten me in the ass. Of course, if you look, you'll find I actually keep my own life and opinions pretty rigidly divorced from my online self. People have met me and realized after a while that they didn't actually know much of anything about me from online, even though they always felt like they did. I hide in the open. ____Not the real rusty I'm saying that five years down the road when you try to claim you've never had a root canal, your ass is fucking grass, boy. ____Not the real rusty Did you check the comments? He goes into more detail, iirc. Honestly, I couldn't be bothered to wade through the flood of verbiage that Erik tends to produce to find the gold, but I do remember that it's in there. ____Not the real rusty We have always been at war with Wikiania. ____Not the real rusty Constitutional? AFAIK Erik's German. Other than that, of course it is. It's a Denton blog. ____Not the real rusty BLACK POWER ____Not the real rusty "So, Mr York... ..it's so nice to finally meet little Jimmy's daddy. He talks about you all the time. What branch of medical research are you in again?" "FUCK YOU, THAT'S WHAT!" ____Not the real rusty ror Apple gave you a tiny pianist? ____Not the real rusty We're all Mac or Linux I think most people have either a bootcamp partition or an old windows laptop or paralells around, to browser-test stuff in IE. But I don't think anyone at my company is mainly on windows. ____Not the real rusty Long ago Yeah, I've had a Real Job since 2006. You guys didn't think K5 was all I do, did you? Jesus, no wonder everyone thinks I'm lazy. And I still get my hair cut twice a year whether it needs it or not. ____Not the real rusty Not for ages I did that for a spell in between moving here and getting a job, but it's not much of a living unless it's all you do. Sorry to shatter your misconceptions. :-) ____Not the real rusty Tuppence! I say, sir, a mug up on your newfangled device is not worth a farthing more than ha'penny, if that! ____Not the real rusty It took some doing That rally that you're thinking of is the one from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. It's not widely known that that was a re-take. The first attempt at that rally was a fiasco -- no one was in the right place, Hitler had to basically shove his way through a marching band to get to the podium, and on and on. If you can find the clips, they're actually hilariously inept. She basically re-staged it for them and then shot the film that's known today. So it's not so much that the Nazis had good aesthetics, as that they had good design consultants. ____Not the real rusty Who says it's quittin' time? I's the foreman, and I says when it's quittin' time! Quittin' Time! ____Not the real rusty Your system ...would operate indistinguishably from the actual system. Which means that I inadvertently created a fully Turing-test-capable Simulated Drunken Admin. There should be some sort of AI prize for this, I think. ____Not the real rusty lol what? What documentation? I don't even understand it. I don't blame sausalito for being confused. Now if you'd said "one would think your time would have been better spent [doing almost anything unrealted to autopost] rather than writing a diary about how you don't understand autopost," that I'd agree with. ____Not the real rusty Trees In your mangina. Here's a hint: They grow in the sand. Clean that out, you'll have no problem. ____Not the real rusty Using Gmail for spam-filtering I checked my email after being offline all weekend, and I had 1600-something messages to rusty@k5. They were almost all spam, but that kind of volume is tough for any reasonable client-level filtering to cope with. So I'm outsourcing it to Gmail. Anyone else doing this? All I did was make a new gmail account, forward rusty@k5 to it, and set up imap access. So functionally, it's the same as my old setup, but mail should come in pre-filtered. So far, it's doing very well. Does anyone else do this with an old high-spam address? If it works, I might actually be able to use my true email address again. It's been very much less useful lately due to hellacious spam volume. I did have spam filtering But it's all at the client-level, since I don't trust server-side filters that I can't tweak or check the results of. My client was just overwhelmed trying to plug through it all. And yeah, wide web exposure for about 8.5 years now means its a spam vacuum. I also realize I didn't invent this idea. Just wondering how many people are doing it. It looks like there's easier ways of setting it up, too, now that I poke through the preferences. You can directly add another email account to Gmail if you can get it via POP3. Since I can mess with the delivery of k5 email accounts via an easy web tool, this worked for me. ____Not the real rusty See above I don't run the server, so I'd have to organize it with the admins, who I try not to bother because they don't charge me for any of this. :-) This way is probably equivalent in effectiveness, but simpler for me. ____Not the real rusty Vivid. ____Not the real rusty Dunno I was using whatever Evolution uses. It sucked. My Mac in town was slightly better at filtering, but not much, and the filtering doesn't seem to sync between the two either. I needed a new system, basically. ____Not the real rusty Current ratio One legit message to 72 spam and counting. And the actual message is just a Vonage voicemail alert. ____Not the real rusty No I changed it from being a local-delivery account on the k5 mail server to just forwarding. So that address simply bounces everything to gmail now. ____Not the real rusty All Aboard! The Failboat ____Not the real rusty Nah I like this setup because I can bail anytime I wait to. I don't trust Google infinitely, and I'd rather maintain the control I have. ____Not the real rusty Yeah? Seems ok so far. This is not really a time-critical address for me, but so far it's been fine. I can see a small lag between the web client and IMAP, looks like 10 minutes or under so far. I can live with that. Access and client operation times have been fine. ____Not the real rusty I don't run it I have access to it, to create addresses and stuff, but I don't run the server. ____Not the real rusty Probably But that would make it hard to check for false-positives in the spam folder, since it would be left behind in the gmail account. I have it set up so the outgoing address from anywhere is rusty@k5 anyway. The gmail address is completely hidden, so there isn't really a reason to forward from it. ____Not the real rusty I'm disappointed that that's not a real domain. ____Not the real rusty So far... I haven't seen any false positives yet. I got about 10 false-negatives over the course of yesterday. I can live with that. I'm watching the spam folder pretty closely, neverhteless. ____Not the real rusty Link Big-ass 86Mb MP3 zip here. I'm giving it a listen now. First impression: Thank God, it isn't Ghosts. It appears to be an actual album. That's about all I can say right now. Later: While I was waiting for the file to upload I've listened to most of it, and it's pretty good. Nothing that grabs me like Year Zero yet, but we'll see. It fails to suck. ____Not the real rusty No No no no no no no no, it is not better than The Fragile. Which was itself not better than Downward Spiral and so therefore this is not even in the top five NIN albums, I'd say. It's not bad though. ____Not the real rusty Anybody looked at dKos lately? I haven't read it in a while, but I poked over there today to see what was going on, and ho-lee shit. It's a nonstop Hillary flambe. Hillary == Bush. Hillary only cares about rich people. It's like I'm reading the Rush Limbaugh forums. So, ok, attacking the other candidate is one thing. But then Kos says: You know what's going on? White people west of the Mississippi like Obama fine, those east of the Mississippi have a problem with him. "A Problem." Yup. Eastern white Hillary supporter = Obama: hey, he's not really my guy, but I like him a hell of a lot better than McCain. He's a great speaker, but I find his ideas naive and fluffy. Hillary's pretty shrill and unlikable, at least in her public persona, but she's a fighter and I like most of her policy plans. But Obama's cult of personality? What a pack of drooling assholes those guys are. Get a grip. There is almost no plausible scenario under which Obama fails to gain the nomination, at this point. Why the hell are they out there conducting a scorched earth campaign against Hillary's voters? I can only hope that little of this toxicity is leaking out to the general public. When Obama does get the nod, it may only be after a bit of a floor fight at the convention. I hope they don't let the Kossacks within a mile of the place. Obama's already shaky support in the working-class base is going to be utterly trashed if they get wind of what his supporters really think of them. And rightly so. Incidentally Anyone who wants to go over to dKos and start some threads about why they honestly support Hillary is likely to have a fine trolltastic time right about now. They're in a froth. It would be about as easy as getting bites by posing as a pedophile in the Mothering Magazine forums. ____Not the real rusty Probably even you could get bites. ____Not the real rusty A ignorant racist What are you, an hero? ____Not the real rusty What I don't get is... ...why aren't Obama supporters automatically misogynists? I sort of find the whole thing laughable, since IMO Obama's about as black as I am, and Hillary almost certainly has a bigger dick than me. By any reasonable socioeconomic measure, they're both better White Men than I'll ever be. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I did some back-reading I had mostly missed it, due to basically taking a few months off from paying attention due to primary fatigue. I was so blown away by it that I dug up some of the media coverage of the Great Defection. Sounds like a localized shitstorm alright, and I can see the source of the swirling floodwaters now. ____Not the real rusty But What he's personally doing now on the site is mainly trashing Hillary. So, where'd that rule go? ____Not the real rusty Nope Cheney's powers are entirely delegated and permitted by the President. Unlike the Bush Imperial Presidency, which will carry over to the next incumbent, the office of the vice president will be recreated completely from scratch with a new administration, and resets by default to zero authority. ____Not the real rusty You think Obama would give up the new powers of the Imperator? I don't think any of them will. Probably the worst thing about Bush, in a very wide field of choice, is the heavy thumb he's pushed down on the Constitutional balance of power. That's what will outlast him, and history says that virtually no one gives up power voluntarily. It will eventually either come to a crisis where the other branches manage to wrestle some of it back, or we just continue the slide toward Rome in the time of Caesar. Bush == Tiberius Gracchus ____Not the real rusty Indeed And if we were back in those days... well hell. Ok, I would vote for him. Knowing what we know now. But do you remember Al Gore the candidate? He was awful. He was not the Al Gore we have now by any stretch of the imagination. And I still think he wouldn't have been a very good president. Better than what we got, probably. But that's a pretty fucking low bar. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I stopped reading about when Edwards dropped out, but before that I remember the place as being surprisingly Edwards-friendly. It doesn't really shock me that they're pro-Obama on the whole. I mean, the internet is by and large white, educated and urban. It's the level of officially sanctioned vitriol that's surprising. ____Not the real rusty Your first guess A lot of people bought very expensive homes with interest-only or balloon mortgages. So the payment was low enough for a period of time that they could afford to buy a lot more house than they would have if they'd had a traditional mortgage. The plan was live in the McMansion for a few years, then sell it at a massive profit before the payments went up and move on to something else. Oh but that only works if values keep skyrocketing. Lol. ____Not the real rusty Bloop... bloop... The sound of the eternal bubble. The fact is, by definition half of all people are of below average intelligence. They'll never learn. It was obvious to everyone I know that the housing market was a bubble, it was widely called a bubble in general conversation and in the media. I bought my house just about at the peak of it, but I got a good deal. I wasn't about to pay the ridiculous prices some people wanted for POS cottages here. I know a number of other people who were looking for a house then too, just to live in, and who also refused to buy in to the "OMG ITS TEH LONG BOOM!!!!!" hype. The victims of this are by and large two groups: People with more money than sense, who bought a house even though prices were clearly inflated, blithely believing that the market would keep going up and they could bail out in a few years Speculators I don't have a lot of sympathy for either group, unfortunately. ____Not the real rusty lol I saw his original comment and just thought it stood up for its own stupidity pretty well. There didn't seem much point in arguing with someone willing to dispute the definitions of statistics. And see? There wasn't. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sorry You should have found out what a interest-only loan was though. I mean... "interest-only." It's kinda right there in the name. Could you refinance into a regular mortgage and still afford the payment? If so, do it. As soon as possible. ____Not the real rusty Hew, well... ...at least if you have to walk away, you'll be an unremarkable part of the great flood of foreclosure victims, rather than an outlying deadbeat. I bet one foreclosure on an otherwise clear credit record isn't going to raise many eyebrows in a couple years. ____Not the real rusty Welcome to the dystopian future I'm surprised it took this long to arrive. ____Not the real rusty Well To be fair, the market will keep rising. If you hold a house for ten years or more, it'll almost certainly be worth more than what you paid for it, assuming you weren't completely insane when you bought it. The trouble is in the five-year or less outlook. Something like this comes along and wipes out your equity for a while. If you were counting on a short-term exit, then you're in trouble. ____Not the real rusty Me neither I bought this house to live in forever. I would like to be buried in the backyard if at all possible. So I'm cool. :-) ____Not the real rusty Out a quarter million? I doubt that. If they're lowering to that, it's probably only a little more than the houses cost to build. Their plan was build a lot of houses for $180,000 and sell them for a half million. They're probably creeping up on the point where holding costs will put them underwater, so they want to unload the things at whatever profit they can squeeze. Also, anyone who buys a spec-built house for a half million dollars is a knucklehead. Corners will have been cut so hard the frigging house is probably round. ____Not the real rusty You have to be kidding These homeowners signed a deal. It was not "Out of the goodness of your heart you, the bank, have lent me money for a house and I am morally bound to pay you back no matter what." The deal was "Here's the money for a house, and if you don't pay us back we'll take the house instead." So a lot of folks are going "Ok, here's your house," because it would be stupid to keep paying when you owe more than the house is worth. By signing that contract, the bank took a risk. Sometimes when you take a risk, you lose. Tough shit. ____Not the real rusty Not exactly I mean, you're right -- there were both recourse and non-recourse loans. But a surprising number of them were non-recourse, because the idea that the asset would depreciate wasn't on anyone's mind at all. The bankers figured you'd either pay or, if something happened to you, they'd take the house and the quick profit instead of th 30-year profit. Both sides were pretty much blind to the possibility that the house might suddenly depreciate. Except for the banker writing recourse mortgages, naturally. ____Not the real rusty I've been in them My Dad's a real estate agent, and a lot of his business lately has been cleaning out foreclosures for resale. He'll go to the house, take anything the last owner left behind that he (or I, or my sister, or anyone else he knows) can use, and then contract a cleaner to come in and dump everything else. I went along with him to one house. Got some toys for the kids, a few miscellaneous things. It was, I have to admit, fairly depressing. Picking through the scattered remnants of somebody's wrecked life. Got a nice car jack though. ____Not the real rusty Fat but fit Pfff. Can you run a 9 minute mile? Just one? No? Then you are unfortunately merely obese, not "fit." Walking to the fridge and back for more cool-whip a total of thirty minutes per day is not exercise. ____Not the real rusty Boo Corn ethanol is a gigantic handout (scam) to agribusiness under the cover of "Green." I don't know anyone who actually cares about global warming and supports biofuel from corn. It's an idiotic idea, and we're only seeing one reason why -- the other is that you don't actually get positive returns on it. Remember the CA electricity "shortages?" Came out of nowhere, no clear reason for them... oh but wait, we eventually found out they were caused by some assholes fucking with the market. We'll be finding out the same thing about this. There's plenty of food. If it's not being distributed someone is to blame. ____Not the real rusty Huh That was an interesting article. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty Everything Is Growing sleepy as the rain falls As children draped in flowers form a chain They sing a song with jelly jars and bird calls As night falls into dust and it's day again I'm not afraid of a love parade in my daydream Old men with kazoos and beating drums But I awake and I see the streets are ice cream It's just you and me and oh dear, our life has just begun Everything is beautiful here It's spinning circles around my ears I'm finally breaking free from fear And it's fading Oh beautiful smiles, won't you stay awhile We could close the door and sleep all day It's a September sky with pretty pictures in my mind That's lost its feeling of so afraid Everything is beautiful here It's spinning circles around my ears I'm finally breaking free from fear And it's fading Grown sleepy now as the rain falls As children draped in flowers form a chain They sing a song with jelly jars and bird calls As night falls into dust and it's day again Everything is beautiful here It's spinning circles around my ears I'm finally breaking free from fear And it's fading ____Not the real rusty lulz I'm sorry. I feel bad about this, but I just had this mental image of you standing there next to your car, car stereo in your hand, gazing into the car at your keys with your face all bandaged up and seeping gore. And for some reason in my imagination it was raining. I found this kind of funny, in a pathetic way. Note that this mental image is probably based on personal experience, so my lulz were not untempered by empathy. I locked myself out of the car way out in the woods once, and discovered it when the rain started pouring down. It was one of those memorable low points that lives have. ____Not the real rusty Really? I lived without a car on the island here for four years. We now share one car in town with my wife's parents (I use it perhaps three times a month). Here we actually have a pickup and a Jeep now, but I can still imagine life without one. I imagine a life where getting stuff to the dump is more difficult, but that's about it. So yeah. Take that buddy. And I don't like your pants either. ____Not the real rusty I jimmied it It was an 80-something Plymouth Caravelle (short-lived Plymouth version of the Chrysler New Yorker) which turned out to not be very secure. I got the screwdriver from a swiss army knife into the door key slot and wiggled it a while, and the lock popped. It never locked properly again, but obviously it never had to begin with, so I didn't care. ____Not the real rusty Obama can't "renounce" Wright Any more than he could "renounce" his nigger-hating granny, who used to string up jungle bunnies and then cook the best gosh darn homemade apple pie you ever et over the coals from a burning cross. We have to accept the full rainbow of American bigotry if we wish to move forward together. Obama's a uniter. ____Not the real rusty That is the most concise and coherent explanation for this problem I've ever seen. Well done. ____Not the real rusty Please List All Contents: "Homemade food gifts." They didn't ask me what it actually was. And my description was 100% accurate. About the signing -- I actually never have to sign for anything, because UPS and FedEx consider a box delivered when it gets to the ferry terminal. Whoever's in the freight shed there signs for it and puts it in a big cage that will eventually get out here on the boat. Then one of two or three locals who contract with UPS and FedEx (yes, both of them) loads stuff in their rickety old van or pickup and brings it out to the house and leaves it here. --- You should follow the Beer Rule: Thou Shalt Not Open A Batch, Nay Nor Drink Any Beer Therefrom, Until The Next Batch is in the Fermenter. The Rabbis tell us this rule may be stretched, if you happen to have two or more finished batches, to merely leaving at least the equivalent of four cases untouched until a fresh batch is in the bucket bubbling. But no further. The Law has held me in good stead. ____Not the real rusty Um, ok, yacht. But NO monocle polish So, the day has finally come. I knew it would, eventually. I bought a yacht. It's a 25(ish) foot 1961 Seafarer Meridian (pics not of my boat, but same kind). Mine looks like most "before" pictures you see of project boats. It needs a lot of work. Before anyone freaks out, you should first know that this is a $300 purchase, split with a friend. It basically fell into our laps. A guy on the island wanted to sell it, and with a lot of restoration, it'll be a nice boat. So what the hell. You can't go too far wrong for $300. The big problems: Lots of holes in the hull This was a salvage boat for the owner before last. Reportedly it hit a seawall in Biddeford and stove in the side. That owner had those holes professionally repaired, and they did a fine job. But then someone set it down on blocks on the (hollow) fiberglass in front of the actual keel ballast, and put a hell of a crack in the bottom of the keel. So that needs to be cut out and reglassed. Also, at some point someone drilled a lot more holes in the hull. Surveying? Checking for rot? We can't figure out what these holes could possibly have been for. But they have to be reglassed too. Neither of these are terribly difficult things to fix. No Boom This boat has a wooden mast and spars, which we have, but no boom. The original boom was wood as well (spruce), and it should be possible to build one, but I don't have any of the boom hardware either. So we might end up fitting a regular aluminum boom. We'll see. Need sails There are some sails, but they're not the original ones, and are apparently somewhat too big. We'll probably have to have new sails made. Interior gutted In some ways, this is good. Hell, at least we don't have to gut it. But the interior needs to be completely rebuilt. This should actually be fun, for a certain masochistic value of fun. Apart from that, there's a million little things that will need to be repaired, replaced, or puzzled out. We're looking at this as a 3-5 year project before it goes in the water again at all, with a fairly rigid annual budget (to keep us from going crazy with it). I'll have spent about half this year's budget buying the boat and picking up a new set of stands for it (the ones I have now are borrowed and I have to give them back). The rest of this year's budget will probably go on fiberglass and new varnish for the wood parts we do have. Pics will be forthcoming when I take some. In the meantime, please feel free to revel in all of your long ago predicitons coming true at last. Already got a name Fortunately it's unnamed, so I don't have to put up with whatever stupid crap name the last owner came up with. We're ging to name it after my daughter -- Elinor Rose. Pretty name for a boat, I think. :-) ____Not the real rusty A, um, different boat? I don't know. I don't think it's mandatory to name anything after any of your children. She just happens to have a pretty name for a boat. ____Not the real rusty Indeed I always said we needed a boat. There are severe limits on my time and finances for boating though. I've made do so far with a kayak, but the eye has always been out for the right boat at the right time in the right place. And this week, it appeared. ____Not the real rusty I did mail you! I even sent you an email with the tracking number, yesterday at 3:45pm. Check your junk mail, or something. Anyway, they're on their way. ____Not the real rusty Didn't have it yet I'll send you some broken boat parts next time. Yes, there are plenty. If possible, I'm going to let my partner in crime handle the fiberglass repair. He's better at that sort of thing and more interested in it. I'm assigning myself to the woodwork. ____Not the real rusty I got the replacements too No lossage there. I've been letting it all settle in the fridge, but I'll probably crack one open this weekend and judge your worth as a brewer and a person. ____Not the real rusty Ah, but You were not built in Holland. That probably explains it. Most people are consumed with an immediate and overwhelming urge to drill holes in Dutch things. Probably why they had so much trouble with the dikes. ____Not the real rusty I haven't heard of that Of course, I too harbor dreams of sailing around the world, but I'd give them maybe a 10% chance of ever happening at this point. I've never heard of the Atlantic Rally though. That does sound like it would be a nice way to ease into a long passage without perhaps quite as much terror as it would involve alone. ____Not the real rusty More importantly How do I get that number? Cause I haven't so far. ____Not the real rusty 47 I just looked it up. There have been 47 total since the beginning. So about 6.7 per month. That's not bad. Seems like a reasonable rate of new users to me. ____Not the real rusty Rumors of his death have been ...greatly exaggerated. The dope managed to auto-ban himself. I disagree with The System, so he's back. Don't post lots of diaries quickly, folks, unless you desire immediate surcease from your K5 sorrows. ____Not the real rusty Uh, no That was a deliberate suicide. Who am I to meddle? ____Not the real rusty I've heard some good things There's a guy out here on the island who runs a seasonal garden store and has a couple big greenhouses. Every year he raises up a batch of mantises or assassin bugs or something like that in the greenhouse in early spring and releases them when it's warm enough. Reputedly they help. Although you do have to be aware that they will go where the food is. If your neighbor's yard has better pickings, they'll go there. I've read about people releasing lots of ladybugs, who eat all the nearby aphids and then either die of hunger or fly off elsewhere, and are gone when the aphids return. So it's not a sure-fire win. Just one possible line of attack. ____Not the real rusty We have tons of ladybugs And yet, I've never seen an aphid. This is either very weird, or makes perfect sense. I'm not sure which. ____Not the real rusty Hrm Honey is hydrophilic. However, it seems like smearing it on your skin would tend to draw moisture out of the skin, into the honey. So it would be drying. Not to even mention that "moisture" in skin is generally oils anyway, which honey would probably have nothing to do with. It is also antimicrobial, but I don't know if it has anything in it that would kill human-skin-dwelling microbes. "Antioxidant" is just marketing babble. ____Not the real rusty Weird Why are bees more important not to kill than plants? I never really understood the vegan "you can't kill anything furry or feathery" rule in the first place, but bees? ____Not the real rusty I stopped reading slashdot when it became clear that I no longer cared about anything they cover. I suspect it was me that changed, not them. ____Not the real rusty Penis bird? Sadly, no It seems to be defended against linebreaks, and carats, and only displays two lines max. But this one's not bad. You can't buy it though. It probably has to do with the hash parameter later in the URL, which either the application uses to look up the actual shirt they're selling from a defined list, and the rest is just interface, or it's a safety measure based on the headline, url, date, or something to just check for valid shirts created on the fly. ____Not the real rusty Oh man I didn't pay close attention to the rest of the shirt. Given the standard footer, this is subtler, but better. I just saw it on CNN! ____Not the real rusty Not bad Clever owl-into-text interpolation. ____Not the real rusty Wow That's ugly as fuck. Can't you pick some better colors? Someone might see it and think that was my fault. ____Not the real rusty Step 2 implemented Only in story summaries and comments, at the moment. But it does seem to work. The rule format you want is, e.g.: kuro5hin.org#*(wastedyears) It's tricky if users have a space in their username, but this works: kuro5hin.org##table.ray.eckson It might not need the table specified but I couldn't get it to work without it. ____Not the real rusty neat ____Not the real rusty This was real easy If I were to go through really thoroughly and try to do this everywhere a user might appear, there could be snags. But in the comment and story summary blocks I already have the nickname. Implementing this was just adding class="&pipe;nick&pipe;" in two template blocks. It took much longer for me to work out those filters than to add the classes. ____Not the real rusty yeah well. Something odd would happen. Maybe. There's not much css here now. To do this right, I'd have to make it "user_&pipe;nick&pipe;" and change spaces to underscores or something. Let's make a deal: nobody register "header" or "light" for a while, in appreciation for my actually doing something promptly. ____Not the real rusty Like I read it. Skimmed. Skimmed. ____Not the real rusty Half fabric half paper stuff Is it Tyvek? Polypropylene? ____Not the real rusty It was a joke He apologized via email, for that and the panicked flailing that followed. It would be best to drop it, I think. ____Not the real rusty You just posted shit you regret Think about me. I built the site. ____Not the real rusty There is no difference Except that people who claim they "run" but don't "jog" just don't want you to know that they want to "fuck" "men." It's the difference between partly sunny and partly cloudy. ____Not the real rusty Please enter a subject for your comment. It turns out that for all the talking frogs and Clydesdale horses, the largest American beer companies aren't all that good. Like Oh. My. GAWD! Nah Wai. Nah. WAI!!oneone I'm not even the target audience of that shlock and I feel insulted by it. ____Not the real rusty It's not broken Comment gotta have a subject. Otherwise minimal doesn't work. I just couldn't think of one. ____Not the real rusty Boring That gets you a thread with a bunch of identical filler titles. Scoop can actually be set to fill in "Re: [parent subject]" automatically, but it's off here because I hate it. ____Not the real rusty Argh I hadn't gotten to the end yet. Where she brags about drinkinf Spaten. Jesus Christ. Spaten's fine and all, but it's an import, a huge German brand, not a microbrew, and basically conforms to ZERO of the recommendations above. That whole article is bullshit. What she does is find the beer with the most difficult name, and order that. If they made a Budweiser Cockulator Triple E-squared Dopplelager, she'd order that ricewater shit too. ____Not the real rusty Look at the microbrew tank farm LOOK AT IT ____Not the real rusty If you did that here They'd look at you like you were insane. Even in really good pubs. We just don't have that. You can go to the British Beer Company in Plymouth MA and get London Pride on tap though. ____Not the real rusty Oh, half pints My (then-future) wife went to Bath for a year in college, and the girls would go out drinking and they'd all get halfs because it was "ladylike." My wife was having none of that, observing that it cost more and you just had to order more frequently. Half pints are not for girls. They're not for anyone. ____Not the real rusty Ha Maybe it's a super-clever satire. ____Not the real rusty I do sometimes But with you, I get your email and then look here and you've already posted it as a diary, so why bother? ____Not the real rusty Beer has arrived! I got a box with two bottles in it. One has an X and one does not. So it looks like I got one each beer & cider. Both bottles smelled very much like spilled beer. I washed them thoroughly. No round ball either. :-( I assume UPS repacked it, because there were no shards of glass or puddles of beer or anything. All they did was wrap each bottle in bubble wrap. Given this experience, you can expect a fairly big box with a really absurd amount of packing material. ____Not the real rusty I either agree with this or I don't. ____Not the real rusty What to do now: DON'T SPEND ANY MONEY! Don't buy a car, unless you really, really need one. And if you do, pick a price and don't spend more than that, and wait till you can put down cash for it. It's pretty easy around here to find a decent 8 - 10 year old pickup truck for a couple thousand, for example. Save for a few months, buy it, and remain debt free. Buying a house doesn't necessarily fall into the category of spending money. If you're reasonably smart, buying property is an investment. But find a place you can get for below a reasonable market value (not a crazyland market like we've had, but a sane market). And save as much as you can for a down payment first. Probably the best thing you can do though is not think about how to spend money at all. Open a savings account, and pretend you're still $25,000 in debt. Pay every spare nickel into that savings account until you're out of your self-imposed hole. Then start thinking about what to do with it. Now's the time, after all, while you're already used to sacrificing to get out of debt. ____Not the real rusty True I've had IRS agents request I write down what we agreed on the phone and mail it to them so they have a record. ____Not the real rusty Ha Good luck to him. When they catch him he'll be on the hook for: All back taxes owed Penalties and interest, compounded for the entire time he has been withholding his taxes Criminal prosecution, meaning fines and jail time ____Not the real rusty Not sure I think active evasion, of the sort where you shift all your income to a self-dealing trust, is probably a criminal matter. That's well beyond simple failure to pay. ____Not the real rusty You forgot a verse in the middle Oh shock oh shock he's swallowed my... ____Not the real rusty Socks ____Not the real rusty Argh Damaged due to having been drunk, amirite? I will pack yours with this in mind. I've got some badass bubble wrap down in the basement. I'd like to see them damage this stuff. ____Not the real rusty Do you have an example where it doesn't work? I didn't know there was anything wrong with it. If you can find some search where it returns wrong results, that would help figure it out. ____Not the real rusty Huh I can't get any Story search results out of the archive at all. Diaries it finds though. That's weird. I will investigate. When I'm less drunk. ____Not the real rusty Buy a vowel ____Not the real rusty THE BLACK GATE IS CLOSED DUE TO AIDS. ____Not the real rusty Orcs? I thought orcs were a minority. And Frodo and whatsisname were clearly gay. ____Not the real rusty Sweet Yours is going out tomorrow. I have a sewage situation here that demanded my time today. More on that in a diary later. ____Not the real rusty Not quite that bad Thank god. But same basic problem. ____Not the real rusty I have 1800 gallons of sludge ...if you'd like that instead of either of the above. ____Not the real rusty My god Someone here understands me. I'm astonished. ____Not the real rusty Nope He was warned repeatedly. He was reported for abuse repeatedly -- more than anyone else here. He was persistently obnoxious. I followed all of our guidelines, issuing several warnings, and even un-banning him the first time in favor of more patience. He didn't change a bit. He's not being unbanned. It will happen still, when someone really demands it. I am willing to accept the risk of looking like an idiot acting on a whim to those who aren't paying attention. ____Not the real rusty More He was warned for: Harping on about the time zone thing well after it was confirmed and explained and I indicated that it was not especially high on my list of things to fix. I'm not annoyed about him noticing or mentioning it, although it wasn't particularly useful (since I've known about it for eight years). What was obnoxious was to keep harping away at it constantly, in a sorry effort to annoy me. The guideline at issue here is "don't be annoying for the pure sake of being annoying." At least be entertaining about it. There are few things worse than a tedious troll. Modbombing to manipulate story auto-post Acting like NIWS. He was also reported for modbombing practically every day. If that was all, I could have just disabled rating, but what am I here, Jesus Christ? It was enough. ____Not the real rusty my a tedious troll what? ____Not the real rusty Sorry Yes, I tweaked auto-post again. Lowered the score threshold for auto-post, since lack of comment ratings was pulling scores down more than they ought to. It would probably be better at this point to ignore comment ratings altogether in that, really. ____Not the real rusty We should have that Admins can reply to an abuse report, and we do sometimes. But there should be something indicating you have reported someone before. And possibly encouraging you (the general "you", not you in particular) not to do it again every day. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mythbusters They filled a car with it on Mythbusters. It was fairly cool. Although probably more to do than to watch. This is more or less the same stuff as in triple expanding foam sealant as well. Sticks to everything? I had a dab of that stuff smeared on the finger of my work gloves for over a year. I dug a garden, I installed a greenhouse (digging foundations, backfilling with gravel) I gutted half my house with those gloves. The smear was still there. The gloves wore out before that smear of foam showed even the mildest wear. ____Not the real rusty It's just a tragedy That the Italian woman Hitchhiking for Peace would happen to get picked up by the Turkish man Murdering For an End to Naive Trust... ...well, who could have seen that coming? ____Not the real rusty or ones with no relation to the EU ____Not the real rusty Good advice above My advice is mainly not to worry too much about it. "Room temperature" basically means 55-75 degrees. It'll ferment slower at the cool end of that and faster at the high end, but the job will get done. Yeast is happier when the temp doesn't vary much, so it' better to find a place that stays fairly constant (like within 5 degrees-ish) than to worry overmuch about the exact temperature. For your first batch ever, get the minimum possible equipment, rig up any ghetto replacement you can think of for the expensive gear, and just have fun. You'll get great beer out of it anyway. Oh, for wort chilling -- an ice bath is fine, but a running-water bath is even better. Get a big bin or bucket or something, put your kettle in it when your boil is done, and run cold tap water into the bin continuously until the wort is cool, letting the water flow in at one and and out at the other. The moving water will carry heat away far faster than a still ice bath. This is a great way to defrost meat too. If you, y'know, ever need to do that. ____Not the real rusty ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? It's perpetual now. ____Not the real rusty Don't blame "women" Blame "crazy rich people." I don't know a single woman who would do this, and probably have never met one. Hell, I don't think I know anyone who would have that done to herself, Let alone an 8 year old. (Seriously. Let alone an 8 year old. Just let her alone.) At a certain level of wealth, people apparently lose their minds. Or, alternatively, people who have lost their minds tend to attain a certain level of wealth. Or, alternatively, there are crazy people in every class, and the rich ones do things that we find hilarious and absurd, as opposed to the poor ones, who generally drink five bottles of thunderbird and shit themselves. ____Not the real rusty monohydrogen nonoxide. ____Not the real rusty Ahem Lady 3Jane Anyone who picks a Neuromancer reference as a nick is definitely a dude. ____Not the real rusty Winter Gardening in Maine Remember when I said I was going to try to grow plants this winter? Well I did. Inside: how it worked out. Updated! Pics and no STFU. So, it went both good and bad, I guess. The greenhouse I have is uninsulatable, and really can't be sealed against weather. On a sunny day it'll be toasty warm in there, but at night it's basically whatever the outside temp is. There's no way to keep in the warm. So my greenhouse was mostly frozen solid all winter. Before it got really cold, most of the things I planted sprouted, and they generally got to "established seedling" size. Things were still growing into the end of December, which is a good two extra months of season extension here. Then January and February came, and the soil in their bed froze. Many of the times I checked on my poor seedlings, the plants themselves were actually frozen. The leaves were still green, but if you felt them they were stiff and crispy. So I mostly assumed it was a write-off. I didn't really water most of the winter, because the ground was frozen anyway. Layering ice on top seemed kind of pointless. Imagine my surprise then when I discovered last month that most of the plants have woken up from the deep freeze and resumed growing. It's like they just hit the pause button till it got warmer. The champion is spinach. Those are back to the extent that I will be picking a pile of baby spinach leaves for our dinner tonight. The leaves that overwintered have grown to "baby" size, and the plants have lots of new leaves coming in. The row gets smaller as it approaches the outside wall of the greenhouse, where it's colder. But pretty much all the spinach plants are fine, and look set to produce very well. The chervil has also come back strong, but I don't have any idea what to do with it. Chervil sort of tastes like licorice, and has teeny little leaves. Anyone got chervil ideas? Other things: The romaine is coming back slower than the spinach, but still pretty well. I would guess it'll be a month or so till those are big enough to start picking, but romaine will produce leaves forever, so we should have a good supply. I planted two or three types of cress. None of them got very big before the freeze, and none are coming back very strong. I'll probably dig those out and use the space for some peppers or something. The arugula (rocket) is coming back. I don't have any sense yet how well. The miner's lettuce is doing well, but I have no idea what to do with that either. It doesn't taste like much. I'll probably scrap it. The kale is looking sickly. It does have little leaves, but they're all edged in brown and I don't see a lot of new growth. I'll let them go for a while and see if watering and feeding helps. Parsley, basil, and cilantro are all a total write-off. Only the cilantro ever even sprouted, and it's all dead it actually might be coming back, now that I look at it closer. I should have put some chives in there. Those would be growing strong by now. Anyway, it was an interesting experiment. Next year I will probably start some of the stronger greens in mid-september, to let them get a little better established. I may not get anything over the winter, but garden greens in early April is pretty nice. It seems like the greenhouse extends the growing season, for at least a select few things, from four months to nine months, which is a pretty big win. Hey I'm bout ready to do a beer trade if you're still up for it. I've got a nice pilsner and a hoppy ale that's conditioning, and ought to be ready in a week or so. ____Not the real rusty Sure I could throw in a bottle of each of my last year's ciders too. One is very good, and exceedingly rare (I have three Grolsch bottles of it left). The other is only ok and not rare at all. I have nearly two cases of wine bottles of it still, because it's just getting to the point where it's drinkable. Same address as you sent before, still? I'll get a selection in the mail next week. ____Not the real rusty CORRECTION The ale is all set to go. And damn good. ____Not the real rusty I plan to Not sure if I'll get them in this year or not though. ____Not the real rusty Thank... ...wait, what? ____Not the real rusty Ha! I forgot. Yeah, that was on purpose. :-) ____Not the real rusty Added pics. ____Not the real rusty It's weird Apparently there's a genetic thing that makes cilantro taste like poison to some people. I have no problem with it though. I actually like it. ____Not the real rusty No windows It's a plastic hoop-house style greenhouse. Also, the edges of the plastic cover flip up all along for ventilation, which is great in the summer, but impossible to weatherize in the winter. My idea was to line it with bubble-wrap, but that didn't work. No good way to get the stuff in there, and I don't think it would make any difference anyway. Eventually, I will build a proper greenhouse. Eventually. Meanwhile, if I can keep this thing producing greens for me October through December and April through July, I'm happy enough. I've also got a big bubble-wrap insulated shelf with grow lights hanging over it in there, for seedlings. I'll put a little space heater in there to keep it like above 50. I think it's warm enough to start those as soon as I get some seeds. ____Not the real rusty Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Yes, cilantro does very well as a houseplant. Yes, parsley does too by reputation, although the one year I tried it, mine all died. I think I just didn't find the right spot for it in the house. Basil just hates being inside, for some reason. I have brought in basil plants that were practically catching and eating kittens, they were so healthy, and they went tits up in a month. I think basil needs lots of direct sunlight, and without a solarium you just can't get enough inside. Those three were in the greenhouse in the spirit of inquiry only. I didn't expect any of them to live long, but I figured it was worth a try. The parsely and basil never even sprouted. The cilantro looks dead from a distance, but close up each little sprout actually seems to have two or three new stems coming up, so maybe it just set down roots and it'll come back. I'll leave it and see. And yes, as far as I know you can take spinach leaves and the plant will keep making more. Most greens will do that, if you leave them enough young leaves to keep growing. A lot of greens even grow much better if you do that -- less old foliage to support. I had three or four summer crisp lettuces last summer that took a while to get established, but when they did, I could take a salad's worth of leaves off them every single day. It was kind of amazing to watch. I just planted a bunch more summer crisp in the greenhouse tonight, actually, in those empty zones. That's good stuff. Also, I hope spinach will keep growing, cause I took a big bowl of those leaves for dinner tonight. Garden greens in (very nearly) the first week of April! Who'd have thought. ____Not the real rusty Make sure... ...you pollinate any flowers you get. Tomatoes rely on wind of bees to pollinate them, neither of which you'll likely get indoors. If you see a few flowers bloom, just brush a small paintbrush or something like that from one to the next a few times around. Otherwise you won't get any fruit. You have to do this with greenhouse tomatoes too, unless you let bees into your greenhouse. ____Not the real rusty wind OR bees ...not "wind of bees" which does sound awfully poetic. Or, possibly, like bee farts. PAGING ENSIGN BEEFUCKER! DO BEES FART? ____Not the real rusty Huh The sids are different, so it looks like it's resubmitting it. I gotta fix that stupid cancel bug. I'm sure this is just an offshoot of that. ____Not the real rusty It's true No one buys sheetrock by brand. Most purchses, in fact, are sight unseen. You call up the lumberyard and say "I need 24 sheets of 1/2" rock." And they send whatever it is they sell. Presumably USG knows this, and concentrates their marketing effort on distributors. ____Not the real rusty What? How dare you imply that dear little Pedro isn't undermyne's. ____Not the real rusty Oh right, sorry I forgot. It's hard to keep track, what with the other four. Jean-Michel, born nine months after your honeymoon in Paris. Darling dusky-skinned Keisha, who arrived shortly after that time you spent on safari in Kenya. Mahmoud, who came along after your wife's brief but intense Muslim phase, and Bubba, born a little less than a year after you guys finally moved out of that trailer park. ____Not the real rusty Hey Me and my son Mogumbo both resent that. ____Not the real rusty Fuck motherfuck shit I had a long and very interesting comment here all set to post, and then realplayer crashed my browser. Ask me about media hostility this summer. ____Not the real rusty Ace of Spades HQ? Ha! They got gamed so hard. The conservative / libertarian answer to the Daily Kos, the Ace of Spades HQ, (AoS) has been going strong since 2003, and recently recorded its 10 millionth hit. Ok, let's see. 2003 to (beginning of) 2008 is 5 years. 10 million hits divided by 60 months is an average of 166,666 hits per month. That's fucking pathetic. That's about a half hour's worth of daily kos traffic. Even at our slow modern rate of traffic, we do in an average four months their total lifetime traffic. Oh Time. You're like babes in the woods here. ____Not the real rusty It shouldn't What you might be running into is there's two different places you can have comment display prefs. If you change the display in some particular story, like at the top of the comment section, that becomes your default for this session. In the absence of a session preference, your prefs page settings are used. Do you change your display options on story pages a lot? And if so, you don't need to kill the browser. Just change them on some other story page to what you want. Or don't change them on story pages, but only in your prefs. ____Not the real rusty Yeah If you had something set in a comment form, that will be your session pref, and will continue to override your prefs page choice. Logging out, like you did, will revert it to your saved prefs. ____Not the real rusty Hm Well that doesn't sound right. As the end user, I blame you. ____Not the real rusty WIPO Use more lube next time. ____Not the real rusty Option Three: kidnap her and keep her tied up in your room wallet until she agrees to marry you. Fixed that for u. ____Not the real rusty What about Sudan? China's got bigger skeletons in its closet than Tibet as far as I'm concerned. What about their long support for the genocidal Sudanese government? ____Not the real rusty Er I don't drive in China. I don't actually drive much anywhere. And the US doesn't import any Sudanese oil. Also, your equation is wrong. It's "China wants oil, the Khartoum government has guns, therefore they can steal the South's oil and kill the Southern Sudanese in order to supply China with oil and buy more guns, and China doesn't give a shit who dies." And independent Southern Sudan would have plenty of oil to sell, and an independent north would not. ____Not the real rusty Yes, I am People are people. People don't deserve to be slaughtered just because they don't produce anything I want to buy. As for "Made in China," yes, a lot of the things I own are made in China. Have you ever tried shopping solely for non-Chinese goods? It is currently impossible. Nevertheless, I avoid buying Chinese when I can, and I support trade policy changes that would shift the balance of imports away from all-China all the time. We got along fine 10 years ago, before everything for sale was made there. We could again. If you'd like to know where I'm coming from here on China / Sudan, check out What is the What. Doesn't really mention China much, but their funding was largely behind the events described. ____Not the real rusty Orlrighty I assume you won't be reading that book I recommended or learning anything? At the very least, you might learn how to avoid being raped in the resettlement camps when your turn comes. Oh right, I forgot. It can't happen here. Ha ha. Sure. ____Not the real rusty It's not like that So basically it's the story of a Sudanese man, Valentino Achak Deng, who was forced out of his village and orphaned in the 80's, live in refugee camps, and so forth. He told his story to Dave Eggers, and Dave Eggers wrote the book. They can't call it a memoir, because a lot of the plot structure is made up (his story is told as a series of flashbacks), but it's a novel of this guy's life. This makes much more sense when you read it than it does to try to describe what it is. It's pretty obvious, reading it, what's been fictionalized and what hasn't. And hey, bonus points for not trying to sell it as a true memoir a la James Frey, as far as I'm concerned. ____Not the real rusty Haven't read anything else about it If I do, I'll let you know. ____Not the real rusty It's on my list Thanks for reminding me. I have been wanting to read that. ____Not the real rusty True Unfortunately. ____Not the real rusty Don't have to go that far. The US, as a nation, can do a lot without even approaching trade reductions or embargoes. We could start simply by speaking up about it, and officially connecting the dots between Chinese policy and Sudanese genocide. In actions totally unrelated to any of this, but which would strengthen our trade position with China, we could replace our blinders-on "free trade at any cost" policy with fair trade policies. I.e. we increase tariffs on goods imported from countries without minimum living wages or worker protections until they cost as much as goods from countries that do those things, to correct the systemic tilt in favor of exploitation. Look into our truly shameful abandonment of Vietnam is a responsible producer country under W. We've moved backward in this respect in the last eight miserable years. It's not a coincidence or the result of great blind global forces that China has suddenly become the largest exporter in the world. It is US trade policy that has done that, and we could change it if we chose to. Why are we actively supporting the Chinese regime over many others who we could be helping? I do think that the US government has for a very long time cared less about who dies than the US people do. Our policy is well out of whack with popular sentiment, has been since probably the 1970s, and is kept that way mainly by enforced ignorance. People are told "well, what can we do anyway?" and they mostly believe that. They are not told what we are doing, which is causing a lot of the problems we "can't do anything about." ____Not the real rusty Yeah, it's a hairball I do think that by and large, people have come to recognize that intervening in the former Yugoslavia was the right call, and was executed properly. Even people on the left. I mean, it was a Democratic president who did it, after all.I also agree with your force vs. no-force asessments, on Sudan -- it's all of southern Sudan that's in trouble, incidentally, not just Darfur, which is kind of an odd sub-case involving the Muslim Darfurians vs. the Muslim janjaweed militas. Most of Southern Sudan is inhabited by Christian Dinka tribes,whose problems with Khartoum go back to the 80's. And on Tibet, where we can't do squat other than complain diplomatically. ____Not the real rusty What error? ____Not the real rusty Dunno Perhaps the PSP browser sucks? ____Not the real rusty Ah ha I double-reemphasize my comment above. If you're thinking about how long you have to go, you are definitely running too fast. Like I said, run at night, or force yourself to stare at your shoes and think about anything but what you're doing. If you can get your brain off somewhere else, your body will set the right pace for itself. ____Not the real rusty That was my guess It takes a while to be able to judge your pace on the road. You're probably going too fast. Try running basically as slow as you can, and see how long you can go. Then work your way up slowly from there until you have a good sense of what the right pace is. Also, if you're not already, try running at night. I have a much harder time during the day. I tend to go way too fast. Night limits the visible horizon sharply and helps you focus on your own running rather than how far the road goes ahead of you. ____Not the real rusty Good advice. When I run in the public parks at night, I often wear my rubber pants and studded leather codpiece. I find it's the most comfortable outfit for running in. But I do sometimes wonder why all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock. It really brings down my average mile time. ____Not the real rusty I thought about getting one ...but decided the specs weren't worth the price. It's basically underpowered, even compared to Apple's other options. The size of it is not so radically terrific as to justify the expense and feebleness. You're wrong about Apple products all sucking though. Your assessment smacks of someone who is still thinking about OS 9 and Motorola processors, which did indeed fail dramatically to live up to the hype. The Intel Macs are excellent machines. I have a 20" iMac, and it's all-around the best computer I've ever owned. ____Not the real rusty Huh Looks like no, that suit is only about laptops. And they are going to have an uphill battle if what they're considering proof is data passed into windows by an emulator. I do have a macbook pro as well, and never had any problem with the display. Of course, the power supply is dicked (it won't charge a battery anymore) which sucks. If I do buy another mac I'll be getting the extended support. Other than that I have no issues with them. ____Not the real rusty I probably have an older one I got mine... summer 2006 I guess. ____Not the real rusty You know that I love cake. ____Not the real rusty 1 nautical mile == 1 minute of latitude. This greatly simplifies navigation at sea. It's the statute mile that doesn't make any sense. ____Not the real rusty Try Charlie and Lola. Also Blue's Clues is surprisingly not bad. But if I ever meet the people responsible for Dora I will kill them. ____Not the real rusty Argh! Little Einsteins. ARGH! Kill me now. ____Not the real rusty Hmph Well, I like it. The books are good too. Lola reminds me very strongly of my daughter. Franklin is not too bad, although I think the books are better than the show. You do have to understand that my standards are pretty low. I'm going for things that my daughter enjoys and which don't make me want to stab my own eyes out, here. There are a number of childrens books that I actually think are really good. The Skippyjon Jones books are tremendous fun to read, if you really ham it up. Almost anything by Suess is a good time (except the really tedious baby books, like Red Fish, Blue Fish). But I assume you already know that no matter what you do, they'll get hold of some crap and obsess over it until you literally have to burn the damn thing because either it goes or you do. Oh, also, Disney can rot in hell for the crap books they produce summarizing their movies. Possibly the worst one is Bambi, where, get this, Bambi's mom doesn't get shot. She just disappears in a forest fire. I read that, and afterward explained what really happened. That just could not stand. ____Not the real rusty I don't think ...I've ever had to suffer through a Diego. The thought of Dora still gives me PTSD though. Woods! Rock! Waterfall! Woods! Rock! Waterfall! Woods! Rock! Waterfall! Woods! Rock! Waterfall! WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU REPEATING THIS SHIT TWELVE TIMES ARGH WHERE DID I PUT MY AMMUNITION!!!!! ____Not the real rusty No kidding This kind of sausage party is exactly what Sharia Law intended. ____Not the real rusty Everybody does that Lots of people do that. I generally give them a pass on it once. ____Not the real rusty It's your dvd player DVD players vary dramatically in how well they cope with scratches or dirt. My old one used to crap out at some point on virtually every movie, form any source. I got a new one, and now it's rare. DVD players are extremely cheap. Get a better one. It's worth it. ____Not the real rusty Huh I was about to say, "Man, ESR really cleaned himself up." ____Not the real rusty Colonel "Nuts" Nutsackk That's gotta be worth $5 to someone. Christ, I might have to register that myself. Also: Clancy's old books, about the Rooskies, are pretty well plotted. Ok, his writing is leaden and plodding and his characterization is usually heavy handed as shit. But sometimes you feel like a book where some armies go at it. In a field with a lot of piss-poor options, he was always the least irredeemably awful. My advice though, if you feel like a military thriller, is go for something about the 18th century British Navy. Embarassing wealth of good choices there. ____Not the real rusty Weak Also, caulk. ____Not the real rusty Or best for a vanishingly small number of investors. At random. ____Not the real rusty Where were you? I went, but you were not there. WTF? And who was that guy? With that thing? And all the... stuff? ____Not the real rusty Nice Sometimes you do indeed get the elevator. ____Not the real rusty Black Guy Asks Nation For Change. ____Not the real rusty Indeed And if you thought that the whole wound-fucking incident was forgotten too, you sir are sadly mistaken. :-) ____Not the real rusty lol ____Not the real rusty Haven't seen it However -- if I were to cut my finger off I could also easily spend 6 to 12 hours waiting in an emergency room for medical attention. And this costs me a lot of money, as opposed to Canada, where it wouldn't. Canadians never quite seem to grasp that we have all the same problems you do with health care (limited resources, long waits, the evils of managed care) but we also get to pay through the nose for it. It seems to be a widely believed myth that because we pay for health care we get it better or faster. Not true. It also depends where you live. In some states it's fairly easy and affordable to get health insurance. I had an individual plan in California that cost ~$150 a month. Here in Maine, that individual plan would cost $1200 a month. Just for me -- not with the family included. My wife worked part-time for more than a year after our daughter was born solely because her job provided insurance. All of her take-home pay went to the daycare that we wouldn't have needed if she wasn't working. But it was the only way we could hope to have any insurance. And at the time, it's not like we were poor. Income-wise we were right around the average in the state. It is also a fact that the US government pays more in tax money per capita for health care than Canada. This is not including the private payments that most of us also make. Just tax money -- we still pay more. Basically, the US is set up as a big fat pork pie for the medical industry. And their lobbyists keep it that way, and stupid Americans prattle on about how evil Socialized Medicine would be. It's already socialized, and also privatized, you dopes. And they'll keep bleeding us until we wake the hell up. ____Not the real rusty if i showed you a video of hitler... ...and said it was a reason to vote against mccain, would you believe that? Yes? Is that a trick question? ____Not the real rusty No! I might touch my face, in order to cover my eyes (or stop the bleeding), but that's it. ____Not the real rusty This is actually kind of a pain There are basically three ways to do this, and none of them are ever exactly what you want to do. I've had more run-ins with this issue than I can even count. 1. Just use tables The simplest answer is just to use a little table for each picture and caption. Tables will scale themselves to wrap the contents, so your captions will always actually be in the right place. As you've noticed, divs do not shrink-wrap themselves to an image. Which bring us to... 2. Give your divs a width The only way to do what you're trying to do above is to set an explicit width on your wrapper div. This would presumably be image width + padding + border. Then center the caption text inside that below the image. This works fine if you always know what your image widths are, but most of the time it's a hassle up with which we shouldn't have to put. So, one other answer is... 3. Scale your wrapper and your image Give your wrapper div a container-relative width, like say 40%. Then give your images (generically, like all of them in that wrapper div class) a slightly smaller relative width, like say 35%. So your wrapper and your images will scale proportionally together, and look decent no matter what size the browser window is. The drawback here is you're sort of at the mercy of the browser for image scaling. ____Not the real rusty They set a width Basically like this, in pseudo html/css: div width: auto; div width: img width + 2 img caption div div /div What you (meaning, everyone) need to get is [https:/addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 firebug]. Lets you just poke through all this stuff live. Modern web development cannot be done without it. As to how Wikipedia's setting that wrapper div width, my guess is they either scale the images server-side, so the page already knows how big it is, or there's some js to set the div width. It wouldn't be very hard to do. There's a bunch of javascript in the head, but I'm not about to go through it all to see if that's where they're setting the width. ____Not the real rusty IFI at my own site Firebug Auto-format doesn't recognize https as a valid marker for the beginning of a url? Weird. ____Not the real rusty Meh People get annoyed about tables because they're a much more cumbersome solution than necessary for 90% of the things people use them for (excluding actual tabular data, of course). I personally get annoyed about tables because I generally get them from someone slicing a photoshop comp into plain html, for me to build a scoop site with, and it's almost always much harder for me to do things programatically with tables. Like say I need two columns on a page with headers and some story links. Half the time I'll get that as one table, when I'm generating it with two completely distinct boxes that can't (or don't want to, and why should they?) cooperatively create a single table. And it's always easy to reformat it properly, making the two columns distinct block elements. So why do it wrong at all? The last reason I get annoyed about tables is some fancy javascript things will not work right with them. This is rare, but really a bitch when it does come up. On the other hand, very occasionally using a table "wrong" really is the easiest way to just accomplish what you need to, so go ahead and do it. Incidentally, do not look at the K5 source. It was done in Ye Olden Dayes and does not conform to any of the above advice. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cheater Use a div and display it like a table eh? Bet you think that's pretty fucking clever. I mean, it is. But still. ____Not the real rusty Never took it They have web designer class now? No, everything I have learned has been under some protest, out of necessity. ____Not the real rusty Look brain, I don't like you and you don't like me. So let's learn this CSS and then I'll get back to killing you with beer. ____Not the real rusty Pretty sure he wasn't I think he just left. I can't recall anything we would have banned him for. ____Not the real rusty Huh I don't know. Blocking out the bad, perhaps, but I don't remember any of it. The account has 4852 comments, 19 stories, and 411 diaries, and it's active and available for use. So it doesn't look so much like it was "destroyed" as "not destroyed at all." Not sure what else to say. ____Not the real rusty Indeed. ____Not the real rusty I don't see a poll attached to that story. Generally dumped stories will continue to keep their polls attached. I'm not sure whether the polls are visible to the general public or not though. ____Not the real rusty Naked lunch poll is here. ____Not the real rusty Ergo Miracle Whip != Mayonnaise QED. ____Not the real rusty Kozmo Does anyone else still miss Kozmo? Or even remember what it was? I just looked, and amazingly it is still in my bookmarks. I will never forget you Kozmo, and the ice cream you brought me. Never. Old diary from 2000 where I mention Kozmo. That high speed chase was pretty cool. The fireplace log sucked though. The main problem / opportunity was that they didn't charge any delivery fee. So you'd rent a movie and get some ice cream, and they'd charge you the same as if you walked to Blockbuster and the 7-11. This was great for the customer, but utterly stupid for the business, and everyone knew it. Furthermore, no one I knew who used Kozmo ever said they wouldn't still use it if they tacked on $5 or something for delivery. But they never did. It was just retarded. I still think that would be a great business in cities. Just without all the dotcom bubble nonsense. It could have worked. ____Not the real rusty Scary If I never have another car accident of any kind, it'll be too soon. Although the time I rear-ended El Jefe in DC was kind of cool. I may have written about it here. Points if anyone can find out whether I have. Looks to me like no, but who knows. ____Not the real rusty New SSL Cert I just installed K5's new SSL cert. Hit port 443 to ooh and ahh if you ooh and ahh over that sort of thing. Yesterday my "Renewal Advisor" actually called me to tell me my cert was going to expire (oops -- all email notices got spam-filed). I thanked her, and she went on to try to sell me some upgraded products, like "extended validation" and some junk that force-upgrades the encryption even for old browsers. I actually listened to the whole pitch, for the sole reason that she had the world's hottest accent. Probably South African, but it sounded to me like the bastard offspring of British and maybe Swiss. Anyway, undeniably pleasant to listen to. I came very close to telling her so, but I thought it would come off as sleazy, so I didn't. I did, however, have to totally shoot down her pitch to upgrade my cert from the $449.00 for two years basic version to the $1495 for two years version. There was some funny conversation about it, along the lines of: Her: Well, this offers much more security from your customers against phishing attacks. Me: For a thousand bucks more? They can pretty much take their own chances. No one's out there organizing phishing attacks against my site anyway. Her: This other option will greatly increase security for 99.9% of your customers, even if they're using older browsers. Me: My customers are pretty clued in. If they care about their security they'll be using a new browser anyway. And if they don't care, why should I? She was nonplussed. I get the feeling this "don't you care about your customers?" line of sales talk is not usually met with the response: "At that price? Nope." I don't have time to come up with some line of bs that makes me look better, and I frankly don't give a shit what Thawte thinks of me. So she found herself aboard the straight talk express. Let me extend a warning to all and sundry: if you care about your security online, get a reasonably new browser and make sure it supports 128 or 256 bit encryption. Cause my cheap ass isn't going to force you to. Yes! That's exactly who it was. Lol. Wonder if she's assigned to all American deadbeats. ____Not the real rusty Does it? What page gave you that error? Usually that means there's an image or something coming through unencrypted. Ah, I bet I know what it was. The google ad stuff won't run through ssl, so that would happen. Normally there's no reason to use SSL on any pages but where you're paying for stuff anyway. ____Not the real rusty The ads aren't for you They're for the search engine traffic. I block them all. :-) ____Not the real rusty I have heard reports of this before But I've never actually seen it. Anyone got a copy anywhere? ____Not the real rusty Incidentally Did anyone know we were Google hit #4 for "pornography"? ____Not the real rusty Well That goes without saying. ____Not the real rusty Old dog, Mike Webalizer ____Not the real rusty I don't know Yeah, I saw that too. Looks like a bot got the wrong idea and went apeshit. The most likely explanation is actually some kind of log spamming -- like some bot got hold of that fucked up URL and hit it a few thousand times with some search terms in order to spam our logs. That'd be my guess. ____Not the real rusty They're all in there The webalizer interface, unfortunately, only gives you a year's worth of links, but the URL format remains constant. So e.g. for March, 2007 it's http://www.kuro5hin.org/pages/stats/usage_200703.html. February is http://www.kuro5hin.org/pages/stats/usage_200702.html ... and so forth. Looks like it goes all the way back to February, 2000: http://www.kuro5hin.org/pages/stats/usage_200002.html. Wow. That's actually pretty cool. The site didn't exist in any form until December 1999, so that's very nearly the entire history. ____Not the real rusty Now you owe us an article analyzing traffic over that time period. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oops. Don't you guys have insurance for this sort of thing? Or is it that your insurance company is going to go after them? It seems like trying to collect from the renter might not always be the easiest thing. ____Not the real rusty Eh wot? When you make an account, the first time you log in it tells you how to pay and activate it. If you miss that, hit http://www.kuro5hin.org/subscribe and choose the first option, "Activate Account". I admit it's not as clear as it ought to be, if you miss the first-time login screen. Also, the email you get totally lies and says it's free. Oops. ____Not the real rusty UID 11? Jesus H Christ. Welcome back. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope My fairy godmother was looking out for me. We bought at the peak of the bubble, but got a "fixer-upper" for about 2/3 of the potential market price (at the time). Prices haven't dropped very much here -- just a bit at the low end of themarket -- but our mortgage is still well below the value. Especially with improvements we've made. My Dad's a realtor and has had a lot of business lately taking foreclosure houses or walk-aways and cleaning them up for sale. He goes through them and pulls out anything the old owners left behind of any value, since they just have to pay someone to cart away any remaining junk. So we've been getting a few new goodies out of it. And the Circle of Life continues... ____Not the real rusty What's funny about that I'm actually a lot meaner in real life, because there's a lot of ways you can say really mean things in person and have them be funny and not offensive (or at least so out of bounds offensive that they are funny) that don't work in text. It's tough to be faux-cruel in a text-only medium. Perhaps it's just the challenge that draws people here to it. Fag. ____Not the real rusty FUCK YOU ____Not the real rusty 2-3%? Dude, lose the percent sign, and you've got it. ____Not the real rusty Oddly Drinking keeps me awake. I suspect it's just that everything keeps me awake. But drinking a lot totally prevents me from sleeping, which doesn't make much sense. PS: I'm not stalking you. ____Not the real rusty I think you forgot to in your comment. I didn't understand. ____Not the real rusty Oh I see I have a six month old baby. But I'll be sure to try this advice out in a year or so. ____Not the real rusty y'all ____Not the real rusty We prefer "undead" ____Not the real rusty Need new readers [the audio version is awful ]. "Ell Oh Ell Cat Bible"? SRSLY? PLOX! ____Not the real rusty Oh hai I fails at teh link. ____Not the real rusty I'm thinking tabby with mango chutney amirite? ____Not the real rusty Wait a minue. "Hot Carl"? Oh. do not want. ____Not the real rusty Ever since you got here ____Not the real rusty Ahhh ha ha ha ha They will never know about K5. You'll know the day they learn to use computers because suddenly K5 will disappear so completely it'll be like it never existed. ____Not the real rusty Nah, I'm kidding. I'm fairly sure K5 will be of no interest to them whatsoever. If it is, it'll be a good opportunity for discussion of such things as situationally-appropriate behavior, playing with social identity, and horsecock. ____Not the real rusty It's funny That video sort of makes me like Obama more, by associating him with such things as those black olympians, Malcom X, and Public enemy. Except that they have all these clips of him waffling and disclaiming it. Which makes me sort of not like him again. Anyway, I think it's working on me but for the exact opposite of the intended reason. Anyway. I will stop bagging on him as of now, because it looks like he's our guy, and I won't be the one keepin a brother down. ____Not the real rusty Bush meat Can't link directly cause of flash but go here and see the second to last picture. I too find the concept of cooking and eating unquestionably human-shaped arms disturbing. On the other hand, if I was hungry enough, I probably would. ____Not the real rusty Is a fine hypothesis How many believers in that idea have inoculated themselves with live HIV virus to demonstrate its harmlessness? I thought so. ____Not the real rusty Windows + Perl == fail You're doing this wrong. They will always fight. You basically need to already be a perl expert to get perl to operate properly on windows. ____Not the real rusty Alright buddy I put up with a lot here, but bringing in nasal sex is going too far. ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry only robots smoke electronic cigarettes. ____Not the real rusty My point stands. ____Not the real rusty patch -p0 < quit_smoking.patch ____Not the real rusty He's not gone You just don't recognize him. ____Not the real rusty Philthadelphia ____Not the real rusty In the next episode... ...I'd like to hear more about which skin creams and hair products you use, and also you should bring your gerbil run. Otherwise, nice story, Patrick. ____Not the real rusty That's not tetanus That's the Holy Spirit, baby. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha ha Let me see: Front door: Just replaced, has a nice bolt, but I do not even possess a key for it. Not to mention that the door jamb isn't finished, so there's no receiver hole for the bolt anyway. Also, the door is almost completely made of glass. Conclusion: NOT SECURE Back door: Steel fire door. Also do not possess a key. Conclusion: Secure, on its own, if I ever locked it Basement bulkhead: Piece of plywood on hinges. Unlockable. Conclusion: NOT SECURE Basement windows: tilt-in, unlockable. Conclusion: NOT SECURE First floor windows: Rarely locked. No other screens or obstructions. Conclusion: NOT SECURE Basically, the only hope of security here is that perhaps a would-be burglar will be so overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways to easily break into my house that he will become confused by the choice and flee. Unlocked houses are pretty common on the island. Also, most people leave the key in their cars. I routinely park my truck all day with the keys in the ignition. There is the occasional car theft, but generally it's just someone lazy who wants to get home from the boat. Stolen cars are usually found quickly. ____Not the real rusty Heh I needed some wood glue the other day, so I went over to my friend Eric's house. No one was there, so I went in, poked around in his basement till I found some glue, and took it. I told him later, and he said "I didn't even know I had any." Another time they came home while I was there writing them a note explaining that I had taken their car. We're pretty casual around here. ____Not the real rusty Ohh, what if it was spyware? My browser knows (or could know) how I spend my money, where I spend my time, who I like, etc. Would I allow--indeed, beg--Firefox to collect information on these things in order to provide me more tailored advertising, social networking, etc.? Absolutely. Fucking. Not. I hope Mozilla isn't seriously thinking about this. It's dotcom asshat play #1. "Hey, the suckers will install our spyware bullshit if we promise them we'll control their user experience for them! It's lose/lose you fools. This article frightens me. Mozilla's such a good browser. Please don't let the business jackasses screw it up. ____Not the real rusty Executive summary "I'm going to take a half hour to fail to disperse any of the utterly toxic fumes of my minister's paranoid rants." [ ...29 minutes of speechifying... ] "...Oh yeah, and the bit about the US government creating AIDS to cause a black genocide? I totally buy that one. Thank god you are all asleep by now. In conclusion, HOPE! CHANGE! SI SE PUEDE! FALL UPON THINE KNEES AND WORSHIP ME, PUNY MORTALS" ____Not the real rusty I'm torn about this though ...because I'm really picking up what Pastor Wright's laying down. I smell what he's cooking, if you know what I mean. If that church was here, I just might go to it. And that's saying something, for me. I mean, maybe some of the stuff he says is nutty, but you don't really get passion like that without a bit of a nutty streak. Plus, comic relief. But anyone who's willing to stand up in front of a crowd and say "God Damn the US of KKK A?" I like that guy. If Obama stood up and said "Hey, the stuff about AID is wacky. But a lot of what he says, while it may hurt, is as close to the literal truth of this country's history as anyone is ever going to say in public. Look up Rutherford Hayes, reconstruction, the lynching postcards. Read anything about race in America, you ignorant chuckleheads." Well, he'd lose the election, and badly, but he'd gain my respect for being honest. And lose any respect I would have had for him as a functioning politician. So, basically a wash. Anyway, what I mean to say here is, this has put me behind the Rev. Wright but vastly increased my contempt for Obama. Anyway, it's fun to see his so-called post-partisan, post-racial ass hit the meat grinder. I just hope it isn't too late for us to get out of nominating him. ____Not the real rusty No, not trolling Obama's a lightweight. We are not in some kind of bullshit mythical "post-partisan" era. We will not enter one as soon as he's elected, if he could get elected. He will either smarten up, which will take some time, or he'll get chewed up and spit out by DC. Either way, I'm not buying what he's selling. I'm not interested in kissy kissy post-partisanism. And neither s the other side, incidentally (what if you threw a unity movement and only the suckers showed up?) I'm interested in getting some important shit done right now, by any means necessary. That's what politics is. It's not a Movement, it's a fight. I don't see Barack fighting. Unfortunately, it also looks like there's no way Hillary can win without losing all of Obama's suckers wide-eyed idealistic new voters, potentially crippling us in the general. So we've got our two strongest candidates in living memory, and it looks increasingly likely that the tard-fest that is the Democratic nominating process is going to kill them both off and put that vile 1,000 year old blood-guzzling vampire in office. And speaking of whom, what in the hell is happening to his jawbone? It gets more distorted every time I see him. What are they injecting into that corpse to keep it alive? ____Not the real rusty For example, what? What mass delusion were people suckered into such that it became reality, and was anything other than a disaster? Name me something. I can't think of anything. I don't say the herd doesn't move. I say the herd does, and should, move slowly and deliberately. I also say that a herd that moves fast is called a stampede, and is a disaster, much more likely to trample its own young and trap itself up a blind canyon than it is to arrive anywhere better than where it was. I distrust revolution and prefer evolution. I'm, gasp, a moderate at heart. Granted, I'm a radical moderate, but nevertheless. ____Not the real rusty Um I wanted you to show me something good that came of a charismatic leader getting elected. For JFK you've got Bay of Pigs which led right to the Cuban missile crisis and almost got all our unborn asses nuked. You've got the escalation of Vietnam. Assassination and ensuing chaos. Johnson. Basically, I don't see what good came of JFK. Got anything else? ____Not the real rusty Er You're not really making it sound all that attractive, I have to say. Nor are you contradicting my point, which is that charismatic leaders are generally bad news. I'm not debating whether it exists or not. Of course it does. I'm saying it's a bad thing. And you seem to be agreeing. Or something. ____Not the real rusty What's wrong with your browser? Browsers that work properly will go where a 301 redirect sends them. ____Not the real rusty But why is it still getting bigger? The jaw seems to be still expanding. Why is that? In any case, I do not have any respect for John McCain. He's a craven political opportunist of the worst kind -- the kind who masquerades as a "straight-talking reformer." Of course, the rules apply to everyone but him. You want to know the real McCain, look at his campaign finance issues right now. The man's breaking the law with his own name on it. That says everything there is to say about him. ____Not the real rusty McCain-Feingold. Duh Ok, he may be either violating it or strenuously attempting to violate it. In short: He applied for public funds when his campaign was in the shitter. He agreed to be bound by the expenditure and fundraising limits attached thereunto. He did not actually get this money, but he (it seems) used the certainty of it as collateral to obtain a loan, and possibly also to get on the Ohio ballot. That is to say, he benefited from the existence of the money, and according to his own law that's equivalent to having spent it. It locks him in to the rules. Now that he's back on top, he's trying to withdraw, so he can skirt the spending limits. That is, having taken the benefit of the money without actually handling it, he now wants to release himself from the rules that accompany it. Well, who would know better how to skirt the campaign finance laws than the guy who wrote them? So, whether he's technically breaking the law at this instant has still not been decided. And chances are he's going to go on as though he were not bound by McCain-Feingold, and any uppance will be coming far too late to make any difference. But my point remains -- Mr. Straight Talk believes the rules apply to everyone but him. He's a politician, not a hero or a straight talker. ____Not the real rusty What makes you think... ...a ruling would be in his favor, or even in his interest at this point? If ruled against, then what? Right now, he can just go ahead and do what he wants. Ruled against, he'd be in a pickle. Either way, there will be a ruling. By my lights, a pledge of a pledge is just nonsense. The whole point of collateral is to say "If I can't pay you back, I'll give you the following." If it says instead, "If I can't pay you back, I'll at that time promise to give you the following..." you have said the same thing. And don't forget Ohio. ____Not the real rusty What's taking so long? Obama has a hold on it, to prevent a commissioner who was involved in disenfranchising voters. I assume you know that. Are we supposed to conclude that McCain is not being dodgy because Obama's doing something in the Senate? Make your own point, if you have one please, rather than weakly trying to imply something by asking questions. This format is tedious. ____Not the real rusty Sorry, a link about this Here. Incidentally I totally agree with the conclusions of that piece -- the campaign finance scene is fucking byzantine, and is direly counterproductive. And spending tax money on campaigning is absurd. ____Not the real rusty The 80% rule? That 80% of what comes out of McCain's mouth is self-serving bullshit? :-) ____Not the real rusty You never know. ____Not the real rusty And I almost missed it So you're saying that JFK was a good thing to happen to US politics? I beg to differ. The man himself hardly had a chance to show us anything, though what he did show us was uniformly terrible, and the sort of amateur-hour shit I fully expect from Barack as well. His assassination (for which I don't blame the man, mind you -- I'm just looking at what actually happened) ushered in an era of political failure that the US still has yet to exit. ____Not the real rusty I'm more fond of democracy, myself Charisma, that I can think of, has given us political failures in functioning democracies, and cult of personality autocrats everywhere else. You're wrong to say I underestimate charisma -- it would be more correct to say I deeply mistrust it. Charisma is sexy, and democracy is not. Democracy is boring, tedious, frustrating, frequently brutal. But I still think it's better than Dear Leader. ____Not the real rusty Ouch Reminding me why I dislike Obama's supporters' behavior too. ____Not the real rusty Maybe you've missed the campaign dynamic Obama people have been largely dismissive of Hillary in exactly that kind of sexist way. Like, The Lord Obama deserves to be president because after all, who's the opponent? Just some bitch. It grates. I have to say, it grates bad on me. Especially whe it's coming in support of a half-breed porch monkey. ____Not the real rusty Arguing with you is like boxing with mashed potatoes. ____Not the real rusty Everybody has And it's been disproven since the early 90's. Please join me in stamping out this myth. ____Not the real rusty The best they'll say is... ...we don't really know for sure. Because, basically, we don't know much about how the brain works, or about alzheimer's, and it's incredibly difficult to create convincing animal tests. It is telling though that scientists have pretty much stopped investigating it. So here's the Straight Dope in 1983 reflecting the then-current interest in the topic. Here's the Straight Dope again in 1997 sorta kinda backing off that and admitting also that no one's pursuing it much anymore. Here's Scientific American, also in 1997 summarizing the same info. And, the kicker, here's Rense.com from... "3"? 2003 I guess? saying it's definitely linked. The last one does it for me. If it's on Rense, it has graduated to... well, can't use the tin foil for hats anymore can we? Anyway, that territory. Basically, the early links didn't hold up, there's a lot of questions about whether the splashy results that everyone has remembered were even legit, and no one's doing any research into it anymore. Scientifically speaking, it's a dry hole unless someone comes up with something a lot more convincing, and also no one's looking. Also, all that said, you still face the burden of demonstrating that cooking in an aluminum pan exposes you to significantly more metallic aluminum than, say, drinking a coke. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense nonsense nonsense Urban legend. Or at the very least disproven scientific hypothesis. Also, soils that have high aluminum contents? I most strenuously doubt that, unless you're talking about villages on top of bauxite mines. Aluminum doesn't exist in free metal form in the soil. And finally, Le Creuset pots are fantastic, but a 10 gallon cast iron Le Cresuet pot suitable for brewing beer would cost about $12,000 and weigh 250 pounds. ____Not the real rusty Technically I don't yet My first all-grain ingredients are still awaiting brew day. See other comment -- I have a couple of 9 gallon pots. They've been fine for full-boil extract batches, and since I'll be drawing the wort out of the tun into this pot, it should be fine for all-grain as well. I mean, at the point when it gets into this pot, there's no difference between grain and extract. If I ever were to go buy a pot just for brewing, I'd get one that was tapped and big enough for a 15 or 20 gallon batch. That hypothetical day is probably far off, though. ____Not the real rusty 36 Qt stainless I have two of these. Not sure if it's that exact brand, but basically the same thing. They're great. They do dent fairly easily, but really who cares. A dent or two makes no difference. They're a little spendy, but I got both as gifts, so who cares about that either. :-) I think it's worth it to own at least one good huge pot. I use them all the time, for chicken stock, big batches of soup, canning stuff (for the cooking, not for the canning), etc. ____Not the real rusty Shorter The Road We're carrying the fire, right Dad? asked the boy. Sure son. Here, eat this bullet with me. ____Not the real rusty What? Really? What's the point of Soylent Green if it's not people? ____Not the real rusty My iPhone is RaptureReady ____Not the real rusty I have been appreciating that too It's like the Socratic dialogues, if Socrates and his interlocutor were both internet retards. :-) ____Not the real rusty Really? Americans are nothing if not adept at ignoring reality. Most of us don't even have to ignore it -- we're genuinely ignorant of it. As long as it stays complicated and no one clarifies anything to the general public, we'll devalue and bailout our way out of this and come into the next Democratic presidential administration smelling like roses. Just hope we don't go and elect McCain. That would not be good. ____Not the real rusty Like givemegmail111, I'm lovin' it! Ok, so here's the thing. All these Wall Street people screaming about the financial markets? Those are people with investments. Those are the people losing their shirts here. Me? I'm like most Americans. I have a moderately leveraged life. That is to say, mainly what I own is debt. Not a ton of debt, mind you. That's trouble too, but not really because of the current financial situation. That's just ordinary risk of default and bankruptcy. But this financial market shit? None of us ordinary Americans are going to go bankrupt because of that. I don't have any savings to speak of, so the inflation and weakening of the dollar isn't draining away my nest egg. I basically just converted what small nest egg I had into home improvements, which turned out to be a great decision. In fact, recent news has been terriffic for me. With the inflation of the dollar, I'm gaining equity in my house just sitting here on my ass. I bought at very close to the lowest interest rate of the boom, financed about 90%, and actually managed to find a house for a price that was below what it was worth then, and is still below what it's worth today, even with the bottom fallen out of the market. The payments are no problem, and I just paid off my car and student loans. I've got a recent wad of credit card debt from this house renovation project, but even that's about half paid off, and will be whittled back down to nothing in 5 months or so. I have a 401k, but I just opened it last year. So yeah, it's basically acting like a savings account with a negative interest rate right now, but that'll change in the long run. Unemployment is still extremely low. US goods are rapidly getting to be a lot more desirable overseas, because of the weak dollar, and also foreign companies are starting to look at more US production, both because labor here is cheaper now compared to e.g. Europe, and because Americans can't afford to buy shit they make over there anymore. If they want to stay in this market, they're going to have to do more production here. So overall, what I see is a lot of rich people losing their shit. So yeah, the government's going to take my tax money and bail them out with it. SFW. They weren't doing anything for me with that money anyway. Meanwhile, I'm pretty pleased with how things are going. ____Not the real rusty Actually BMW plans to increase US production while cutting workers in Germany This sort of thing may expand, if the dollar stays weak. ____Not the real rusty milling about i c wut u did thr ____Not the real rusty Meh I always see people say mod_rewrite has a steep learning curve. I could never figure out why. If you're familiar with standard unixy regular expression syntax, the rest of it's pretty obvious. But I wouldn't be your target audience here, so don't consider me a vote against. ____Not the real rusty Overture: All-grain beer recipe As promised, here's my recipe for my next beer. It's an all-grain, aimed at more or less cloning Shipyard's Prelude, which I love but they only make it for a few months a year. Inside, some info on how I went about researching and developing the recipe, and what I eventually came up with. I've never done an all-grain before, so any comments or advice from any of you who have are very welcome. I'd like to make an all-grain beer, I thought to myself. And I like Prelude. Why not start by seeing if I can recreate it? I'll call it Overture. Get it? Prelude? Overture? Yeah, I'm just that clever. That seemed like enough justification for this project. So I did what any good kuron would do first, which is search around online. Shipyard doesn't provide much detail on their beers, unlke Geary's who are kind enough to specify OG, %alcohol (i.e. FG if you do the conversion), malt and hops varieties. Essentially, Geary's gives you their recipe, which is awesome. But not Shipyard. I was fortunate, however, to find this newsletter from the Beer of the Month club, with more details. What I care about is the following: Int'l Bittering Units: 45.0 Alcohol by Volume: 6.6% Malts: Pale Ale, Crystal, Chocolate Hops: Cascade, Tettnang, Fuggles, East Kent Goldings Sweet. So that gives me the malts and hops they use, an idea of the alcohol percentage, and the IBU value, which I can use to figure out the likely hopping schedule. The second useful tool I found is the Beer Recipator. This thing lets you put in all your ingredients, gives you some style guidelines, and does all the calculations for you. So my goal was to take the ingredients above and combine them in such a way as to hit roughly the right alcohol level and IBU values. I basically did this by taking a guess at the initial values, and adjusting until it looked right. My first guess was something like 10lb Pale Ale malt (clearly the base malt here), and 1/2 lb each for the specialty malts. And I guessed that the Fuggles and and Cascade were bittering hops and the Tettnang and Goldings were aroma hops, but it took some futzing to get the IBUs to come out right. Skipping a few minutes of tweaks in the recipator, what I ended up with was the following: Overture Style: English Old/Strong Ale Type: All grain Size: 5 gallons Color: 28 HCU (~15 SRM) Bitterness: 42 IBU OG: 1.066 FG: 1.010 Alcohol: 7.3% v/v (5.7% w/w) Grain: 11 lb. British pale 8 oz. British crystal 50-60L 4 oz. American chocolate Mash: 75% efficiency Boil: 60 minutes SG 1.047 7 gallons Hops: 1 oz. Cascade (6% AA, 60 min.) 1 oz. Fuggles (4.75% AA, 60 min.) 0.5 oz. Kent Goldings (aroma) 0.5 oz. Tettnanger (aroma) So what's worth noting in there? First, it's a very strong beer. 11 3/4 lbs of grain is pretty high for a regular 5-gallon batch. And the alcohol % of 7.3... well, Prelude is strong too. :-) I'm actually aiming for 7 gallons to start the boil, because you always lose a gallon in the boil, and I always manage to lose at least another gallon between the two subsequent rackings. I suck at maintaining adequate yield, so I'm trying to aim high here. My FG value of 1.010 is totally a guess. To be honest, the last time I had Prelude I wasn't paying much attention to whether it was particularly sweet or not, so I was guessing sort of dry. My friend thinks it was on the sweet side, in whch case 1.010 would be kinda low. I suspect it's going to come out however it comes out, and I'll probably be happy with it regardless. So if the FG is higher, it'll just be a little less alcoholic. There's plenty of room in there. I mean, Prelude's apparently only 6.6%, so I've got 7/10% to play with. The brewing process is a plain old single-infusion mash. It basically goes like this: I drill a lot of tiny holes in the bottom of one of my brewing buckets, and slip it inside another bucket that doesn't have holes. Then I wrap this whole thing with some greenhouse bubble-wrap insulation I happen to have lying around. That is my mash tun. The grain goes in the upper bucket, and I add 4.5 gallons of water at about 162 degrees. Stir around and adjust with hot or cold water until the whole thing's at 152-155 degrees. Let this sit for an hour, stirring every ten minutes or so and checking temp all the time. I have a remote digital probe thermometer, which is extremely useful for this. After an hour, I take this mash tun and put it on a chair that's next to my counter top. Above it, on the counter, I'll have a second bucket full of water at around 168 degrees -- this is my sparging ("rinsing" in regular English) water. Below it, on the floor, will sit my big steel boiling pot. From the tap on the mash tun, I draw off a few cups of the wort and pour them back into the mash tun until the runoff is pretty clear. This is just to keep the boiling wort as clear as possible. Then I drop the hose from the mash tun's tap into the boiling pot and let it drain a bit. While that's draining slowly, I run a hose from the upper bucket, with the sparge water, into the top of the mash tun. Then I start the sparge water draining into the tun, aiming to keep the same flow rate on both taps. The point is to run the clear water slowly through the grains and draw out the maximum possible fermentable sugars. After I've got about 7 gallons of wort, we're done with grains and it's a-boilin time. Put the boiling pot on the stove, wait a year and a half while it comes to a boil, and then add the Cascade and Fuggles hops. Side note: I have a bunch of extra Willamette hops left over, so I'm using those instead of the Fuggles. Practically the same thing. I also couldn't get Tettnanger in pellets, so I'm using Saaz instead of those. Anyway, when the wort's boiling, add the bittering hops. Boil for 58 minutes Add the Goldings and Tettnanger (er, Saaz) Boil for two more minutes Cool the wort to 70-80 degrees, pour into primary fermenter, pitch yeast, pop in an airlock, and wait. For yeast, I'm probably going to use a leftover starter from my friend Rob's last batch. It was an ale yeast of some sort, so it'll be fine. I meant to keep the trub from my last batch for a starter, but I forgot like a dope. That's it. I'll probably brew this weekend, so I'll let you know how it goes, and what I ended up with for gravity measurements. Thx Adding grains to water make some sense, except I was worried about temperatures -- say I have my mash water at 170, won't the first grains to go in get somewhat too hot? I figured adding the water to the grains would generally make for a more even temperature decline to the desired mash temp. I do like to retain head. I usually cool to about 70 degrees, which is slightly above room temp, but my house does tend to be cold. Wouldn't be much longer to go to 65 or 60. My wort chiller is a riot actually, but it works great. I have some big fish totes, which are basically large open-topped plastic boxes that fishermen use to carry around frozen dead fish. So I put one of those next to the sink, and wedge some wood under one end, to tip it toward the sink. Then I pull the sprayer to the high (away-from-sink) end of the tote, and clamp it so it stays on, eventually filling up the tote with cold water. When the wort's ready for cooling, I carry the pot over and put it in the downslope end of the fish tote, and leave the water running. So the cold water is continually carrying away heat from the pot. Think wort chiller but from the outside of the wort. The tote holds, I'd say, about 20 gallons altogether. The first time I tried this it was basically because I just didn't have a wort chiller. But it works shockingly well. It'll take a 6 gallon boil from 212 to 70 degrees in about 20 minutes. I don't think an expensive commercial wort chiller would do any better. So, the drawback is it's cumbersome to set up and a pain to carry the pot across the kitchen. But the upside is the whole setup cost me $13.00, and I use the totes for all kinds of stuff between brews. And the simplest way to convert measurements to metric is just to recall that one gallon is 128 fluid ounces and one ounce is 0.000124007937 hogsheads. For dry weights, simply remember that one pound is 12 ounces, one ounce is 24 scruples, and there are 28,800 scruples to the quintal. Simple! ____Not the real rusty Stirring I don't stir it. It might make it a little quicker, but between aeration and contamination it doesn't seem worth the risk. 20 minutes is fine by me, and I can go off and do something else while it's cooling anyway. ____Not the real rusty As long as I keep paying ____Not the real rusty 8 gallon stainless I actually have a couple. They're good for cooking lobsters, big batches of chicken stock or soup, etc. Eventually I need to pick up a turkey fryer too, but right now the only place I could use it would be outside. No garage or anything like that. So I just put up with the long boil time. ____Not the real rusty Plain old electric It takes 30-40 minutes to bring 6 gallons to a boil. I have to cover the pot too, so I keep a pretty close eye on the temp. Well, what I actually do is set the thermometer alarm to 210 degrees, and not keep a close eye on it. Once it is boiling, I have to keep the burner all the way up. I control how active the boil is by sliding the cover off or on a little bit. Yeah, it's a pain, but it gets the job done eventually. I tend to brew while I'm doing other stuff, so it mostly doesn't matter. ____Not the real rusty This thing I happen to have the remote unit sitting right here on my desk. It's a Maverick Redi-Chek Remote. Noteworthy for terrible spelling, but it works pretty good. The probe plugs into the black unit, which shows the temp, and the silver thing reads it remotely and lets you set an alarm for a particular temp, and works as a timer. The only thing I wish it could do would be set an alarm for a decrease in temperature. Like, when I'm doing a mash, I'd love to be able to say "alarm if the temp drops below 152." but it only does alarm on a rising temperature. Other than that, I have no complaints with it. ____Not the real rusty Dunno I've never had a problem with it. And I can assert from having just recently watched it read a big pot of wort as it came to a boil that it's accurate. It says wort boils at 214 degrees, which I would guess is about right, with the sugars raising the boiling point slightly. ____Not the real rusty Chris, where have you been? I DON'T KNOW! ____Not the real rusty I thought Ron Paul was the Ron Paul of the internet generation ____Not the real rusty OH HAY! Does your timestamp say "XX:XX:XX EST"? Did you know that it's not standard time right now? If you'd like your timestamps to reflect daylight savings time, go to "Display Preferences" in your user menu, and in the second option, "Your Time Zone" choose "Eastern Daylight Time". No, it doesn't change it for you. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. Not even kind of sorry enough to make it automatic. :-) ____Not the real rusty ITS NEITHER A BUG NOR A FEATURE It just is. ____Not the real rusty Whoah whoah whoah A half pound of hops? In a five gallon batch? 8 ounces? Jesus H Christ son! I like hops probably more than the next guy, but 8 ounces... that's a lot. I realize you were looking at the outside most but still, I'd say 4 oz at most. ____Not the real rusty lol I always wondered what the hell tat was supposed to mean. "Noble hops". I also now have a new appreciation for what they're saying when they say "we use only 2-row malt." There's no fucking difference between 2-row and 6-row, other than 2-row is easier to brew with. Brewed properly, you'll get the same beer out of either one. Sam Adams: Playing on your ignorance of brewing for 25 years now. ____Not the real rusty Hops Hops basically come in three forms for brewers: Hop pellets: The most common form. This is hops that have been ground very fine and then compressed into little pellets, like rabbit food sorta. They're nice to use because they can be blended and standardized to achieve a particular alpha acid level, and the grinding means there's tons of surface area to expose to the beer, so you don't need much. Hop plugs: These are whole hops that have just been smushed into a plug shape. Just like whole hops, but the plugs are always 1/2 oz, so they're easy to measure. Whole hops: what you'd get off a vine. Hop flowers, dried, in a bag. These are a little less convenient because you have to weigh them yourself (unless you buy exactly what you need). There's also less surface area, so recipes tend to call for a little more whole hops or plugs than if you used pellets. 40 pounds would be enough for... a very long time. Long enough that you'd probably need to actually get a vacuum sealer to have any hope of keeping them fresh. Frozen in a vacuum, they'll keep ok for some time. Hops are reputedly easy to grow. I'm going to put in a few varieties myself when I get around to it. ____Not the real rusty More about hops I've actually done quite a bit of investigating so here goes: Hops are grown from rhizomes, for the most part. I don't know of anywhere that regularly carries seeds. Rhizomes are perishable, so you generally can only get hops in the spring. If you find a place that does carry them, they'll start taking orders probably in the next mnth or two. One common way to grow hops is up a vertical rope or wire. The vines are heavy, so yes, horizontal trellises need to be very sturdy. A vertical rope just needs to be strong enough to hold up, which almost any heavy twine would be. I'm actually planning to run strings up the sunny side of my house, from the ground up to the outside of the eaves, to carry my hops. They'll be away from the house itself (the eaves project a good foot and a half or so), and when it's time to harvest, you just unhook the top of the string and lay the whole thing down on the ground. ____Not the real rusty No more than the 100 gallons allowed by law wink wink. Technically, of course, it'd be 200, since my wife counts too. But lemme see. This year I've done: 25 gallons of cider (still fermenting) 2 5 gal batches of beer done so far. 2 more currently sitting on my counter ready to be berwed. So we're up to 45 gallons, and here it is only March. Yikes. The cider eats up a big chunk of my legal allotment, cause you sort of have to do it all at once. I would guess that tiber's estimate is pretty good -- it'd be hard to do more than one or two batches a month, tops. Bottles start to get scarce, for one thing. I eventually want to pick up a cornelius keg and CO2 system, so at least I wouldn't have to bottle, but that would more or less limit me to however many kegs I have available. Stay tuned, I've got an all-grain batch ready to go. I'll post the recipe and stuff in a diary. ____Not the real rusty I will certainly What I'm waiting for, mainly, is for my fridge to become my "old fridge." It's going to in the near future (like within the next year) and at that point it will become the spare freezer / kegerator. I don't want to pick up a different ld fridge because I hate my current fridge, and if we're going to buy one I'd like a new main fridge. Also, the house renovation has been expensive, so I need to pay that off first. I have five carboys dedicated to aging cider right now, and next year I'll probably swicth to 15 gallon plastic buckets instead. So I probably won't have a problem tying them up with cider. When the cider's ready, I'll just keg it for drinking. ____Not the real rusty Nah The guy I buy my juice from does his fermenting in plastic. He seems to know what he's doing. I figure lots of people make lots of noise about lots of things, but most of it is nonsense. For example, everyone knows don't brew in aluminum right? But there appears to be no good reason why not. No taste issues, the supposed link to alzheimer's has been entirely disproven... at this point, it appears to just be legend. As long as you keep your plastic clean and wash it carefully (i.e. no scratching) and of course follow proper sanitation and sterilization procedures, there doesn't seem to be any problem with it. ____Not the real rusty That's still $458 Not worth it. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I meant to say thanks for that. Wow. That's a hell of a... chair. ____Not the real rusty That's not right. 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e::::::eeeeeeeeeee l::::l c::::::c ccccccc r:::::r u:::::uuuu:::::u e:::::::e l::::l c:::::::cccccc:::::c r:::::r u:::::::::::::::uue::::::::e l::::::l c:::::::::::::::::c r:::::r u:::::::::::::::u e::::::::eeeeeeee l::::::l cc:::::::::::::::c r:::::r uu::::::::uu:::u ee:::::::::::::e l::::::l cccccccccccccccc rrrrrrr uuuuuuuu uuuu eeeeeeeeeeeeee llllllll jjjj kkkkkkkk j::::j k::::::k jjjj k::::::k k::::::k jjjjjjj ooooooooooo k:::::k kkkkkkk eeeeeeeeeeee ssssssssss j:::::j oo:::::::::::oo k:::::k k:::::kee::::::::::::ee ss::::::::::s j::::jo:::::::::::::::o k:::::k k:::::ke::::::eeeee:::::eess:::::::::::::s j::::jo:::::ooooo:::::o k:::::k k:::::ke::::::e e:::::es::::::ssss:::::s j::::jo::::o o::::o k::::::k:::::k e:::::::eeeee::::::e s:::::s ssssss j::::jo::::o o::::o k:::::::::::k e:::::::::::::::::e s::::::s j::::jo::::o o::::o k:::::::::::k e::::::eeeeeeeeeee s::::::s j::::jo::::o o::::o k::::::k:::::k e:::::::e ssssss s:::::s j::::jo:::::ooooo:::::ok::::::k k:::::ke::::::::e s:::::ssss::::::s j::::jo:::::::::::::::ok::::::k k:::::ke::::::::eeeeeeee s::::::::::::::s ...... j::::j oo:::::::::::oo k::::::k k:::::kee:::::::::::::e s:::::::::::ss .::::. j::::j ooooooooooo kkkkkkkk kkkkkkk eeeeeeeeeeeeee sssssssssss ...... j::::j jjjj j::::j j::::jj j:::::j j::::::jjj::::::j jj::::::::::::j jjj::::::jjj jjjjjj ____Not the real rusty Teletype I.e "use a fixed font". ____Not the real rusty So... ...marriage is about nothing other than sex? That's what you're saying? You sound like a fundie.That's all they ever think about too. ____Not the real rusty I always thought ..."Hit Me Baby One More Time" would make a hell of a bluegrass song. I'm serious. No, really. Listen. It would! ____Not the real rusty Ah, that explains it I went to private school. We were busy learning, rather than being tranquilized by the drone of rote memorization. They must have run out of Xanax for the water supply that day... ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Kale Kale and chorizo soup. ____Not the real rusty Kale? ____Not the real rusty Kale kale kale Kale kale, kale kale kale kale kale kale kale. Kale kale kale kale kale kale , kale kale kale, kale: Kale Kale Kale. KALE! Kale, kale kale kale kale. Kale kale? Kale. Kale kale "Kale kale, kale kale kale kale kale... kale," kale. Kale kale kale kale kale, kale? Kale kale kale kale. Kale kale kale, kale kale kale kale? Kale kale kale. Kale kale, kale kale kale kale kale kale, kale kale kale chicken. ____Not the real rusty I listened to it again the other night while I was doing some painting. It made a tedious task that much more tedious. I have to say, it just is not good. ____Not the real rusty Exactly It's completely unfinished and unedited. Now what would be rad is if he released this, basically saying "this here is Stage 1 in my musical process. Here's the raw material, a few tunes, some noise, some drum tracks, some guitar stuff... a pile of musical whatnots. I'll take all this and work it into an album somehow, but why don't you do the same and we'll all see what we can get." But he's presented this like it's something finished, and it's not. It's just stuff that could be made into an album, if someone cared to. ____Not the real rusty Teh lollercaust will not be televised. ____Not the real rusty By way of Tool Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life ____Not the real rusty LGF? See, that was your mistake there. C'mon, hated paragon of librulism is caught with his pants down, and the best they can do is whine that the media isn't saying "DEMOCRAT New York governor..."? Lame. LGF is lame. You have to stop enlaming yourself by referring to them all the time. ____Not the real rusty Listen Can you hear that distant (or not so distant, if you're cts) "kaboom" sound from the direction of New York? That's Eliot Spitzer's political career exploding. Truly epic fail. I think this is an EXplosion I considered "imploding," but I could think of no legitimate reason to propose that his political career consisted of a shell surrounding a vacuum. Plus, I can't see how an implosion would make as much noise as this is surely going to make. So I forewent the cliche and said "exploding." ____Not the real rusty But... ...it's also a shrapnel-spewing disaster that's likely to take out a number of bystanders. So either way really. ____Not the real rusty Incidentally It's a wooden kayak thank you very much. ____Not the real rusty Why not? I'm as entertained by a good political scandal as anyone. Actually, I've always been a big fan of Spitzer. I guess I'm glad this sort of thing came out before he was really important. ____Not the real rusty Yeah He was sticking it to someone, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Well thank you But I'm a more hands-on kind of god. Like the Old Ones. Not so much relying on people to create their own chaos pestilence, but right down there creating chaos and pestilence myself. It's only the right thing to do. ____Not the real rusty What? That was a triumph. I believe I made a note at the time... let's see... where was that note... oh yeah, here it is. It says "HUGE SUCCESS." It's still hard to overstate my satisfaction with that policy. ____Not the real rusty Seems like it Actually, from the sketchy evidence it sounds like he's going to be revealed as being involved in the business side of things, not the, uh, "business" side of things, if you get me. Which is kinda ballsy. Better than bjs in the airport stall, anyway. Go Dems! ____Not the real rusty That's why they're called business socks. ____Not the real rusty Corection I guess they have him on tape aranging a session. "Assignation"? What do you call a meeting for sex with an expensive hooker? Also, married 21 years? Governor of New York? WTF, man? What is wrong with these people? At no time was he like "Hey, maybe this will fuck everything I care about in life or, y'know, something." ____Not the real rusty Flag on the play The linesmen are reporting that you already made that comment in this thread. Five yards. First down. ____Not the real rusty You didn't know? I always enter a thread butt naked. ____Not the real rusty You should listen to more NPR I swear, they were all over General Butt Naked. ____Not the real rusty Mmmm Pygmy: The Other White Meat. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah Hey, come over later. We're gonna have a sacrifice and stuff. It'll be rad. ____Not the real rusty I hope so after we eat your heart. I always feel like some soccer after I have heart. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I'm with you there. Or, if that's really the best we can do, Spitzer's response to political attacks about this should be along the lines of: [Governor Spitzer takes podium] "Thank you all for coming. Today I'd like to respond to recent Republican allegations that I paid $5500 an hour for sex with a prostitute. My response is: At least it was a girl, you fags. I'll take questions now." ____Not the real rusty Lady Veronica DeSauterne was quoted as saying: "Unusual tastes? I dunno. Kinda like chicken, I guess. Not that unusual." ____Not the real rusty Nice Good for NY. Plus he's blind, so even he will be surprised when it's revealed what it was that he paid to fuck. ____Not the real rusty But he should have had the foresight to see this coming. ____Not the real rusty And turn into a pizza and 6 pack at midnight ____Not the real rusty Federal wiretap recording: Priceless. ____Not the real rusty Who is that? The "this" link? ____Not the real rusty Of course it is But you're probably a normo. ____Not the real rusty Yiff in hell, furfag. ____Not the real rusty Of course it is I didn't see the ER, but I did see the furfag CSI. Awesome. Plus it has given us the phrase "Yiff in hell, furfag," which is a triumph. ____Not the real rusty You will fail Wait, lemme ask first, do you live on the slopes of a very high mountain, or on a high plain of some sort? That's the only place coffee will grow well enough to actually produce coffee. Or, coffee worth trying to drink anyway. Also, they bushes take a good decade to really produce anything. So enjoy your decorative coffee shrub. But don't worry about the farmers. :-) Incidentally, coffee "seeds" are available all the time. You can plant any green (i.e unroasted) coffee bean and it wil probably grow. Very, very slowly. It is possible to avoid the ugly side of coffee production, but you have to be pretty careful about your sourcing, or find someone else who is and buy from them. That Sweet Maria's link above is an excellent place to start. ____Not the real rusty Nah, seriously Altitude matters. There isn't any such thing as low-altitude commercial coffee. Lots of useful info and links here. That said, they really do makefine houseplants. I've been meaning to plant a few myself. I just wouldn't go into it expecting to grow your own supply is all. ____Not the real rusty Something about bean density Apparently coffee grown at low elevations doesn't attain a workable density in the bean. Odd, but it seems to be true. It seems like it must be related to the barometric pressure, one way or another. The only other possibility I can think of is that it's not the pressure, but the weird climate you'd get at high altitude in a tropical region. The same sunlight and rain patterns as tropical areas, but much cooler. Perhaps that's it? On the other hand, at 4000 feet you might be ok. Quoting my links above: "...The subtropical regions, at high altitudes of 16-24 (Illy, 21). Rainy and dry seasons must be well defined, and altitude must be between 1800-3600 feet...." So if you can fake a subtropical climate and volcanic soils, your altitude might be ok. ____Not the real rusty Becoming obscenely wealthy made me lol Cause we all know the poverty of the Catholic Church. Rofl. "Taking drugs"? All drugs? Like the alcohol that Belgian abbeys are famous for brewing? Like the alcohol in wine that they serve for communion? Aspirin? Deadly sin? "Carrying out experiments on humans"? Any experiments? Like, are Myers and Briggs completely fucked here or what? I applaud the motivation behind the idea of new deadly sins, but they need to get someone without Down's to make the list. Or, you know, alternately how about everyone who believes they have a direct line to God hasten their way to heaven to meet him and leave the rest of us here to figure things out ourselves. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I've had a daughter in daycare for over two years now. I am practically a God. I have antibodies actually performing sweeps in the air around my body, looking for new diseases to attack and mutilate. Sometimes they don't even kill them. They, like, chain them up with some sort of protein based ectoplasm and then prance them around like Muppets, recreating famous scenes out of Shakespeare. Just for fun. ____Not the real rusty We MUST return to the moon! It's the only way we can hope to alleviate the terrible dust shortage plaguing us here on earth! If we don't start the process now, we may completely run out of dust before we make it back. For the sake of our children, and our children's children, and our childrens' children's children'ses... we can't let that happen. ____Not the real rusty But It can give you scurvy! ____Not the real rusty I refer solely to... ..."a full larder of jerked venison and bear meat..." ____Not the real rusty But there's no sense crying over every mistake. ____Not the real rusty And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun ____Not the real rusty still alive ____Not the real rusty Even though you broke my heart and killed me. ____Not the real rusty Now these points of data make a beautiful line ____Not the real rusty I don't know To answer your Opera question, my only guess is because Opera is a piece of shit. What happens when you try? Do you get an error? Does it just churn? Do you get a dialog that says "We're sorry, Opera is a piece of shit. Why are you using this when there are browsers that work?" More info plz. Second, I listened to the new NIN and I have gained a new and massive respect for Trent, because he totally just released whatever crap he had lying around the studio to see if people really would buy anything he sold them. And it worked! Awesome. His next album is going to consist entirely of him belching and saying "Fag." over and over. And he's going to make a million dollars on the special limited edition box. I realize that sounds snarky, but I seriously mean it about respect for Trent. The man knows how to make money. And music, when he has a reason to care. This pile of tripe though... largely it's just that. There's about five minutes of decent music in there. It would boil down to one pretty good song, with a lot of judicious editing. But what the hell. I paid nothing for it, so I am a satisfied customer. ____Not the real rusty Yes Although electric kettles are not nearly as common in the US as they are in the UK and much of the rest of the world (see here). The reason is the electricity. We have 110-120 volt, the UK and most of the world has 220-240 volt. This makes little difference except in an electric kettle, 220v boils water a lot faster. On the other hand, most US large appliances, like electric stoves, do get 240 volts, so they work quicker. Most people have a stovetop kettle. Most people that I know, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Er, I was going to add... ...I used to have an electric kettle but basically it took forever to boil so I ditched it. ____Not the real rusty Pip pip! I can barely even flatten my knickers with them! Ta! Pip pip! Bumbershoot! Didn't everyone dress as ladies in their public school? I say! ____Not the real rusty I choked so bad on that comment My "see here" link was supposed to be after the bit about electricity standards. I give up. ____Not the real rusty The economy The economy is key here. McCain is already trying to run a national security election, while people are keyed up about the economy. If he doesn't smarten up real quick, he's going to wonder what truck ran his ass over no matter who the dems nominate. It's the Economy (Again), Stupid. ____Not the real rusty I sorta buy Jonathan Alter's argument ...that Clinton can't win at this point. Basically, she has no chance of coming to the convention with a pledged delegate lead. So her only route ot winning is via superdelegates going against the popular vote. It could happen, but I think it would be a big setback for the Dem's chances in the general. A ton of Obama fanatics would just stay home. I don't like Obama, I don't like the cult of idiots and political pollyannas who are pushing him on us, and I don't think he'll be an effective president. BUT I don't see at this point how we can avoid nominating him and have any hope of beating McCain. Basically, it comes down to Obama supporters showing all the signs of being whiny bitches if they lose, and possibly having a pretty good argument for so being. I think Hillary's voters are by and large older, more mature, and much more likely to accept Obama gracefully and vote for him as the "Oh well, at least he's a Democrat" candidate. ____Not the real rusty True, and true I don't support Obama but I'm also not in love with Hillary. At this point though, I don't see how Hillary can do anything but harm by not stepping aside. She'll be a good VP. Or John Edwards would be too... :-) ____Not the real rusty Nonsense That "demolition" is a bunch of irrelevant nitpickery. Particularly galling is the rampant ass kissing in the comments. It all basically adds up to making languagehat look like a pedantic and envious tool, and conforms rather embarrassingly to the common perception of the blogger as the perpetual critic without any accomplishments of their own. Shorter "demolition:" I disagree wth prescriptivism, and therefore I will destroy this prescriptivist essay by applying the most rigorous possible prescriptivism to it to show that its author is in some tiny ways a slight hypocrite and therefore everything he says must be wrong. This is basically the same idea people had about destroying deconstruction by applying deconstructive critical techniques to it, and equally idiotic and full of fail. ____Not the real rusty I don't know At 31, I still think 44 is old. However, I see your side, in that it has suddenly gone from the unimaginable kind of "wonder what I'll be doing when I'm..." old to the more frightening "I'm going to be that old any day now" kind of old. ____Not the real rusty lol "Do a download, ponder the results" ____Not the real rusty Wacky Well that's a hell of a bug. It's all better now. Looks like your diary hit one of those one in a million situations that croaks the whole show. ____Not the real rusty Don't discount complexity This bug was a result of several very specific circumstances combining, and was contributed to by at least three different people, none of whom could have had any really plausible way of imagining this bug on their own. Overall system complexity always has the potential to give rise to bugs that are simply not predictable until they happen. ____Not the real rusty Ha It was actually lonelyhobo who found it. But it happened in your diary so... I guess it was somewhat you, too. And with that, I challenge anyone to tell me what the bug actually was. You now have enough info to find it, if you're clever. And no, it won't happen anymore, even if you figure it out and duplicate it. ____Not the real rusty No You fail it at reading where I said it was lonelyhobo. ____Not the real rusty No You'd have to know something about scoop internals to get it. Just guessing will not work. ____Not the real rusty So that's where you keep it That explains a lot. ____Not the real rusty There were many red-flag plunders. ____Not the real rusty Ray Eckson's Chance of Sexual Encounter With Girl: Vanishingly Small (Subhead): Much Like His Penis, Say Experts. ____Not the real rusty No, not too hard. (Subhead): Much Like His Penis, Say Experts. ____Not the real rusty i saw what u did there ____Not the real rusty Team RAMROD! ____Not the real rusty What's brewing? Just wondering what K5 homebrewers are up to lately. Haven't seen any SPOILS OF WORT lately. Me, I've got a pilsener conditioning in the bottles (tastes kinds like Spaaten, needs more time for proper carbonation), a northwest-style pale ale in the primary (ready to be racked and dry-hopped as soon as my damn hops get here), and a stout in the mail. After the stout, it's time to go all-grain for the first time. I'm thinking about doing a winter warmer type ale, based on Shipyard's Prelude, which is awesome. I have two big brewpots, so I'm basically rigging up the rest of the grain brewing equipment with what I've got on hand. Bucket-in-bucket (wrapped with insulation) for the lauter tun, and my super awesome fish-tote based wort-chiller as usual. I gotta post about that one of these days. Nice ____Not the real rusty An african swalllow? Are you sure... oh Christ I can't even finish due to high school flashbacks. ____Not the real rusty homebrewers.com That Northwest IPA came from them. It was a partial mash, and so far has gone swimmingly. I neglected to mention, because they're just kind of always there, but I still have 25 gallons of cider gathering dust in the basement. Gettin' bout due for their six month checkup in fact. Cider making is a much more leisurely process than beer making. ____Not the real rusty Iraqi children are not cute ...so no one cares when they die. But puppies. Man, you can't kill puppies. ____Not the real rusty I'm not struggling, but... I bought my house at the peak of the boom, but I got a great deal from a seller who was essentially just not willing to squeeze every penny he could out of the house, and wanted to sell it to a young family who couldn't find anything else. That was us. So I got the place for probably 2/3 market value. And the top of the boom was also very near the bottom of the interest rates. So our rate is good. All that said, if there's going to be free equity handed out here, I goddamn better get my piece. Hey, I have an idea. Let's reward the people who didn't buy way above their means! ____Not the real rusty Er A full-scale exodus of the left wing from the Dems would leave us with 40% republicans, 20% right-wing democrats, 20% left-wing (greens or whatever), and 20% "other" (nutbars of various flavors). So, you see, an exodus of the left from the democratic party would simply ensure a massive right-wing advantage. That's what you want? The way to make the Dems shape up is for the left to stop pissing on its own shoes and JOIN them. ____Not the real rusty Sorry bout that I always forget to startssl. It's back now. ____Not the real rusty Dear AFF I am a woman looking for love and an intense sexual relationship. I had huge tits but I left them in Times Square. If you find them, please return them. ____Not the real rusty One of my favorite songs No, really. It seems like a novelty tune at first, but it holds up well. ____Not the real rusty rustina ____Not the real rusty What you don't know tiger hand? Ask Aziz! ____Not the real rusty This is my sixth comment ____Not the real rusty bug report I just played, and the word was "land-lubber". Including the dash. I would have gotten it when I was at -a----ubber, but i couldn't figure out what the hell that extra letter was. Patched version: perl -e'@a=<>;$&pipe;=$a=lc$a[int rand@a];chomp$a;$b=join"",a..z;for$c("2J", "1;3H___ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; -+-------","3;5H(_)","4;6H+\10\13&pipe;", "4;4H--","4;7H--","6;5H/","6;7H\\"){$f="\033[";A:$_=$a;eval"tr/$b/_/";last if$_ eq$a;print"$f$c${f}3;15HWORD: $_${f}4;15HTODO: $b ${f}5;14HGUESS: ";do{ $d=getc}while$d!~/[a-z]/;goto A if$b!~s/$d//;($e,$_)=($_,$a);eval"tr/$b/_/"; goto A if$e ne$_}print"${f}9;1HANSWER: $a "' /usr/share/dict/words ____Not the real rusty RIP MC Truly a wall-eyed schitzoaffective link-whoring Canadian icon. ____Not the real rusty A SCREWDRIVER DO YOU HAVE ONE? ____Not the real rusty Various times Over the past couple years. I haven't adjusted it in a while. Although I may have bumped it down a wee bit more when we went evil paysite. Other than the numbers, I also did tweak the FP vs section threshold to be a lot more forgiving. I would like to get rid of section-only votes entirely, actually. Just haven't gotten a round tuit. I haven't changed anything about the relative weights for autoposting since... ever that I can think of. It doesn't really work that way anyway -- it'll pull in votes and ratings and produce an overall average number for the whole story, based on both. That's the number that's adjustable, for the most part. The only other factor is the number of ratings for a comment to get before its counted. I may have changed that but not recently. ____Not the real rusty I don't If you poke through diaries or site news, I may have announced some of them. I know I didn't always announce them though. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty Don't need to see the rates to sum up: Scientists kill themselves too often Advertising people kill themselves not nearly often enough ____Not the real rusty Uh If that's true, he's already come back as his own zombie. This adman died Feb 22. Check givemegmail's comment history. Also, nice to see Bill Hicks finally making some headway. ____Not the real rusty Can I really be the first to say it? Ahem. Dude, You're Rottin' in HELL! ____Not the real rusty Buckley? He can't be debating the temperature, because he's got Ronald Reagan's cock too deep in his throat. For all eternity. In hell. Nah, it's a cute fantasy, but both of them are just rotting in dirt. But Buckley's doing it with a poncy fucking put-on accent. ____Not the real rusty I wish there were a rating labeled "I loled." ____Not the real rusty They do make better films I'm not a huge fan of Hollywood or anything, but they demonstrably do make better films than Final Destination IV, at the rate of probably 10-15 per year. You could almost definitely watch one new film per month that is better than this one will be, if you chose to. I would even go so far as to say you could probably watch one truly excellent film per quarter strictly from the studio system. Four great movies a year is not bad. But why do they make this one? Because even with all the cash they sink into this turkey, they'll almost certainly still turn a profit. And even if the profit is small, they've also kept a whole bunch of people working for a few more months, who will be available when they suddenly need to film the big chariot scene for Ben-Hur II: Ben Hurrer!. And on a personal note, as far as teen trash is concerned, the Final Destination series is being underrated here, I think. I didn't see 3, but 1 and 2 were both extremely entertaining, well-paced and well-plotted and competently directed and acted. Sure they're fluffy and stupid, but they weren't supposed to be weighty meditations on The Meaning of Everything. They were supposed to be fun, and they succeeded. ____Not the real rusty Same here Maybe not record-breaking but cold and snowy. ____Not the real rusty Yeesh My butterfly bush won't bud for... lemme see... if it's the end of Feb now... approximately for-fucking-ever. Seriously, end of May, at the earliest. Three more months. ____Not the real rusty Well, when you put it that way At least it doesn't rain for 8 months here. :-) The reason people live here is that summer and fall are unbelievably gorgeous, and winter is mostly nice if you like winter and it helps you appreciate how great summer and fall are. Spring sucks though. There's nothing good about spring here. It isn't even like we really get spring per se. It rains for three months while all the snow is melting, so everyhting's covered with mud. And it's only warmer on average. It goes cold -> too warm -> cold -> too warm -> cold... until summer finally starts at the end of June. ____Not the real rusty Dude, I'm not a racist or anything ...but that black king is in the wrong hizzouse. ____Not the real rusty Boom baby! It's the evil midnight bomber what bombs at midnight. ____Not the real rusty Would you prefer ...if the warning just said "Please stop sucking"? Please stop sucking. This diary does not fulfill that request. ____Not the real rusty A ROOM GET ONE ____Not the real rusty Hive Security Alerted ____Not the real rusty Stay away Think of all the tedious church shit she'll want you to do. It just isn't worth it. ____Not the real rusty DEAR SIR GOD BLESS YOU FOR READ MY AD POST ON THE CRAIGHLIST. I WISH INTEREST IN YOUR GOODS I MERELY REQUIRE A BANK DRAFT WITH YOUR NAME, ADDRESS, TELEPHONE NUMBER AND SOCIAL SECURITY IN ORDER TO TRANSFER YOU THESE FUNDS IMMEDIATEY. PLEASE WRITE BACK AT YOUR FASTEST CONCVENIENCE. ____Not the real rusty Tell him If he emails me, I'll reset it. ____Not the real rusty Interesting FP from me if you submit to the Q. I also agree with most of your conclusions. And yes, I am actually surprised by the story posting stats. ____Not the real rusty That goddamn bug That's been there forever. Basically what we know about it is that some setups add increasing slashes and some don't. There seems to be no particular reason for one vs. the other. Every time someone fixes it we discover that it has now been broken for the other half of people, for whom it worked before. If you'd care to figure out why the hell it does that and fix that bug, I'm sure everyone would be very grateful. ____Not the real rusty Ha What host was this? ____Not the real rusty I don't blame you Me too. ____Not the real rusty 1941 Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley. 'Nuff said. ____Not the real rusty I'll show you the life of the mind. ____Not the real rusty Indeed. I still think either that or The Hudsucker Proxy is their best movie. ____Not the real rusty bumperjaw That brought me very close to an actual real-life coffee spit-take. ____Not the real rusty That was the best part. ____Not the real rusty What? Just a second, there's a predator lurking in those bushes over there. Lemme just call down a space based directed energy beam on it... there. Now what were you saying about big brains again? ____Not the real rusty Dear Ralph Nader, You're no William Jennings Bryan, mister. Wait, no. I mean you ARE. Sincerely, rusty PS: Shut up. Jesus Christ just shut up. SHUT UP! Seriously, I mean it. Shut the fuck up. ____Not the real rusty The military won't allow it The military will do anything they can to avoid returning to the draft. The Vietnam era draft years were the US military's lowest point, and much of it because the rolls were packed with people who didn't want to be there. It took decades to recover with the professional military. They won't go back willingly. ____Not the real rusty Ok, look I know this has been brought up a number of times, and I've always kind of gone back and forth myself on whether to allow it or not. I could spend three hours typing all the pros and cons in here and explaining my ultimate decision, but it seemed like it'd be much easier to just make a quick video directly explaining what we're going to do. So, in an unprecedented K5 exclusive, please just watch me explain the plan for images here. ____Not the real rusty Yum yum bumblebee Bumblebee tuna I love Bumblebee Bumblebee tuna Yum yum Bumblebee Bumblebee tuna I love a sandwich made with bumblebee. ____Not the real rusty Also worth noting France it our only ally that's never screwed us over. I never really got the antipathy to France. They're the only constant ally our country has had. ____Not the real rusty lol eXamine Your Zipper ____Not the real rusty Not me I'm flashing my AMEROS! That's how I roll. ____Not the real rusty Um A lot of vets are endlessly tormented by their memories. ...But the very worst ones, who were held and tortured for months, simply have their psychotic break and go on to attempt coldbloodedly to gain ultimate power, in order to exact their revenge on humanity. ____Not the real rusty All the Dem primaries are like that They're all proportional. They do have a few different algorithms for dividing up delegates, but there's no winner-take-all states for the dems. We hate and loathe the notion of choosing a candidate before everyone's had an opportunity to fully disgust the general public with our infighting. ____Not the real rusty Blueberries You won't get any blueberries ever if you only have one plant. Blueberries are self-sterile, and you need at least two bushes, of different varieties, to get fruit from them. Ok, according to this not all highbush types require cross-pollination. But it always helps. ____Not the real rusty Yes you can My 2000 Cherokee is a locker. It's kind of a pain in the ass, because you can really only use 4WD on very slippery surfaces. A road that's 50% clear and 50% ice, you'll have a lot of shuddering on the sticky parts. ____Not the real rusty I thought the difference was essentially that you can't turn off AWD. I used to have a Wrangler which has a limited-slip differential which you could engage or disengage, thus making it 4WD. Whereas Subarus are always four wheel drive all the time, so they call it All Wheel Drive. I dunno. ____Not the real rusty HSW More on this at How Stuff Works. They seem to agree with both of us on 4WD vs. AWD, somehow. ____Not the real rusty Subarus are good for dirt roads and some snow Unplowed snow up to about 8 or ten inches is generally fine. They're good on dirt roads, and generally reliable. Ground clearance is still basically that of a car, so you can't really go Jeep-style crazy with them off-road. ____Not the real rusty Those Polish tractors ...remind me of my friend's dad's cranberry harvesting trailer. Odd and little-known fact: there is no such thing as a commercially available cranberry harvester. I don't even think anyone makes the pickers (little tractor type things that drive around on the bogs with a rotating rake to pull the berries off the vines so they float). So every cranberry grower has this idiosyncratic collection of machinery they've cobbled together and refined and adapted over the years to actually harvest their crop. It's only in the past few years that anyone's even produced the floating corrals they use to round up berries in wet-harvesting. Before that, everyone also had a giant pile of boards that weighed a thousand tons. ____Not the real rusty What? There's still lots of cranberry bogs. Not up here, really, more in MA. Although Wisconsin has taken over most US cranberry production. ____Not the real rusty Philthadelphia. ____Not the real rusty Your wish == my command ____Not the real rusty lollercaust if [the Germans] had managed to prolong the war some months longer... they'd still have been out of rubber, metal, and fuel. They'd have to have developed new and deadly Gilligan's-island-style straw and twig-based aeronautic technology to have made any difference. And if they'd used their straw and twigs for weapons, they wouldn't have anything but rubble left to eat. ____Not the real rusty Very dangerous It wasn't known at the time, but it turns out upsidasium rapidly decays to the deadly but little-understood lackadasium-29. Scientific investigation of this substance has proven to be very difficult, with most researchers unable to publish results any more conclusive than "Ah, who gives a shit, anyway?" ____Not the real rusty Dnkmaster The person in charge of the whole process is called the Dnkmaster or Dnkmistress and has considerable status in his peer group. Wikipedia FTW. ____Not the real rusty Ask K5: RCMP I need your opinion on contacting the RCMP concerning jail and rehab for my son. The story goes like this: He is in drug court program and has been to rehab twice and jail for one up to nine days off and on for dirty tests. Side note: He is mentally ill; schizoaffective disorder. Recently, in the last month, he told them he took one tylenol 3 for back pain two to three weeks ago and got one day even though urine test came up clean. Then, wasn't able to pee for officer who came to house, but went to PO's office wiothin the hour and came up clean, but got three days, as not peeing when officer came constitutes a dirty test. Made him paint and carry heavy stuff and caused sciatca to act up badly. Also, didn't have all of his psyc meds which stopping suddenly can cause dangerous consequences. Next, on Monday of this week, went to emergency room for the pain, Doc gave him one Tylenol three and muscle relaxer. Piss test came up dirty, but before the test he told PO, had hospital discharge papers, and now they want to stick him in rehab again for three months. Should I contact RCMP? They are constantly screwing up his meds and the last two I whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I can say this cab is rare, but I thought 'Naw forget it' - 'Yo homes to Bel Air'! But then... He paid for his dog with a $10 and the vendor just took it. "What about my change?" asked the zen master. "Change comes only from within," replied the vendor. ____Not the real rusty Kent Don't worry about me I've got a bed I've got a Christmas tree Inside my head. --- Inside: I hurt myself. I was working on my door by myself last night. Or, really, I was about to start working on it. See, we had to switch the side of the door the hardware was on, because it used to open to the left and I need it to open to the right. It's an old fashioned mortise lockset, so first we mortised the opposite edge of the door and cut the holes for the knobs and lock stuff. That's all in place, so the next step is to fill in the old mortise and holes, so I can repaint and my door won't have a lot of holes in it. What I needed, first of all, was a block of wood 5 1/8" long, 3 1/2" deep, and 1" thick. That'll slide into the old mortise, where I'll glue it in and then patch up the faces and edge of the door to hide the old hardware holes. A piece of 2x6 seemed like a good choice for this filler block. So I cut a piece to 5 1/8" long on the chopsaw, then ripped it down to 3 1/2" wide on the tablesaw. Not having a planer, I needed to resaw it down to 1" thick also on the tablesaw. Resawing is always a sort of sketchy operation. The blade only goes up about 2 1/2", so you have to do it in two passes. And 2 1/2" of blade extension needs a lot of pushing on the workpiece. Nevertheless, I've done this lots of times. I set the tablesaw to 1", crank the blade all the way up, make a little push block to keep my hands away from the blade, and get started. The cut goes fine, I slide the block through the saw until the near end of it is past the midpoint, the highest point of the blade. My cut is effectively done at this point. I can either push the workpiece the rest of the way through or just turn off the saw and wait till the blade spins down. Pushing through would put my fingers uncomfortably close to the blade, so I decide to hold it and wait. I flip off the switch on the front of the saw. And here's where it happens. My attention somehow... wanders. I just flipped my brain off with the saw. I'm thinking ahead to the next step and I start to let go of the push block holding my workpiece in place. But the saw hasn't stopped yet. Looking at the workpiece later, it's clear that the internal stress of the wood has made it bind up pretty tight on the sawblade. When I let the pressure off the pushblock, the workpiece is still clamped tight to the blade, which is still moving very fast. Just a little slack in holding it, and it's immediately out of my control. The blade whips this chunk of wood straight up and back at me. Judging by my injuries, it scraped past the edge of my right third finger, glanced off the nail of my index finger, splitting it about halfway, and then impacted in the meaty part of my palm just below the thumb. The last impact felt like someone hit my palm as hard as they could with a large hammer. First it was numb, then it started tingling distantly. There was a lot of blood, but I couldn't tell where it was from right away, and I couldn't feel my hand at all. As long as it takes to write it all down, this whole event was maybe a half second in duration. I knew the block had been thrown, but I wasn't sure, at this point, that my finger hadn't slipped forward into the sawblade. My index finger was covered with blood, and my thumb looked like it was sitting at a strange angle to the rest of my hand. And I couldn't feel it at all. I wandered toward the kitchen, not really sure what to do yet. It took a couple more seconds for rational planning to break through the fog of surprise. "Direct pressure" I thought. It's funny how a phrase like that can stick in your head and just sort of appear on its own, when you really need it. It took a bit for me to sort out what that even meant, "direct pressure." But then I had it. "Ok, I have a possible sawblade cut and a possible broken hand, I need to stop the bleeding first, if I can," I thought. I had drifted near the paper towels, so I wrapped my index finger in some paper towel and squeezed. Brain functions were returning rapidly now. I could feel the end of my finger through the towels, so I suspected I had not hit the blade. It was still possible I had just nicked it, and had a 1/8" groove in the end of my finger, but I thought that would hurt more. The other good news was I was regaining sensation in the hand. I tried a couple cautious squeezes, and my thumb appeared to be responding and without any deep pain. There was a long gash in fold between my thumb and my palm, but I could tentatively rule out broken bones as well. I unwrapped my fingertip, and got a quick glimpse of a split fingernail before fresh blood welled up out of it and covered it up. No obvious kerf there, and it looked like the blood was all coming from under the fingernail. So, I concluded, I was not badly injured. That's when I started shaking, and getting those mental movies of what could have been. If I'd been standing in a slightly different spot, that block could have gone into my face, or my throat. I could have a crushed larynx, and effectively no way to even seek help at this point (not sure the block had enough mass to do that, but man it came out of that saw hard). To calm down I started collecting band-aids and covering up the injuries. I shut everything down and went home. Clearly, I needed to take a break. I haven't had an accident like this in quite a while. I used to do a lot more woodworking, and these things happen, inevitably. More or less depending how lucky or stupid you are, but they eventually happen to everyone. At an old job, I was using a radial arm saw to cut a piece of 8/4 maple. The saw was big. I don't know what size exactly, but something like a 16" blade. The maple was about 10 inches wide, 8/4 rough sawn (so 2 1/2" thick) and about 12 feet long. I was cutting a couple feet off it for table legs. The problem was the piece of wood had a bow to it, and I read it wrong (or failed to read it at all). I put it up on the saw table with the bow down, so the wood could rock a bit along its length. I started the cut -- for those who don't know, a radial arm saw is a saw that hangs from an arm, and slides toward or away from the operator, with the blade below the saw motor. The blade teeth come toward the operator on top and push away underneath. So you place your workpiece on the table, and then pull the sawblade toward yourself to cut through it. This means that the saw naturally wants to claw its way toward you, and the cutting movement is a sort of weird combination of pulling the saw toward you but also pushing against the blade's inclination. Anwyay, in this case my giant piece of maple shifted about halfway through the cut. The far end went down and the end past the blade, that I was cutting off, went up. The blade grabbed hold of the piece and the whole thing sort of twisted very fast, and at the same time the saw took a big lurch at me. I did what you (hopefully) instinctively do when a powerful tool gets out of your control, which is let everything go and jump back with your hands way up in the air, in an attempt to save fingers. In this case, it worked. It also scared the shit out of everyone else at the shop, that time. We had an early lunch break that day. So I'm ok. I've got a collection of new band-aids, on my right third, index and palm. The index hurts the most, but overall I thought it was going to be a lot worse. The swelling isn't even particularly bad. I generally type with my two middle fingers (yeah, it's very weird looking) so my typing is not impaired. The piece of wood has an obvious bloodstain on one corner, which I suspect is the corner that traveled in the shortest possible line through my third and first fingers. I fully intend to finish the job with that piece of wood, and make it a permanent part of my house. Instant update! I just finished the cut, with a much better push block. And then found out that that 5 1/8"? Supposed to be 5 5/8". Shit. Like I said, last night I should not have been working. ____Not the real rusty Who's gonna buy Chinese stuff? China imports raw materials, makes stuff out of them, and we buy the stuff. Repeat. Right now, the Chinese people don't have the money to buy all the junk we buy from them, and importing materials and exporting goods makes for a lot of activity, but not a huge amount of actual profit (compared to manufacturing goods from domestic raw materials). The rest of the world isn't as dumb as Americans, and either have tariffs to ensure local products are favored, or just doesn't buy as much cheap crap. So if we stop buying, China's boom goes right in the shitter with us. This trend is changing, and China is producing and using more domestic raw materials. But they're not there yet. Also, that trend is backed by foreign investment. If that goes away, they're still stuck. China can't walk away for decades yet. ____Not the real rusty Meh. I think you're drinking the kool-aid China's economy is very busy, and growing very fast from all that activity, but it's not what I'd call globally strong. China remains a relatively poor country with an enormous number of relatively poor people. That is, it's active but not very deep yet. If the factories slow down, all the families of all those young women concentrated in the manufacturing centers go back to being half-starving subsistence farmers. ____Not the real rusty The trend is still troubling Especially when you realize that the vast majority of Americans are still mentally living in the late 1970's/early 1980's. If we don't wake up to our slipping global status soon, it's going to be too late. Walk the streets and ask people who has the best health care in the world, the best education system in the world, and the strongest economy in the world. They'll say us, and it ain't true. ____Not the real rusty Not exactly China used to import piece goods and export finished materials. That is, they were mainly an assembler, because a lot of assembly work is labor intensive and China's labor was cheap. So they'd import fabric and export clothing, for example. Or they'd import a lot of electronic parts and export consumer electronics. Over the last five years or so, they've moved to importing more raw materials and producing a lot of the piece goods themselves s well as assembling them. They're just starting to ramp up production of domestic raw materials (mining, growing cotton for fabrics, etc). Ironically, this process is likely to eventually end for them the same way it did for us. Higher standard of living, wealthier citizens, and labor too expensive to do what they made their nut doing. Two further points: China's main benefits from us are as a market for finished goods, and as a supplier of investment capital. We don't sell them much at all. Not even raw materials -- we don't produce raw materials here anymore, for the most part. So if the US economy crashes, a few things happen: We don't have any extra money to buy their stuff We don't have any capital to invest there Also, a really serious collapse of the dollar would make Chinese goods too expensive to be worth shipping across the Pacific, compared to e.g. Mexican or Central American stuff. Bottom line, if we get hurt, China gets hurt as bad or worse. ____Not the real rusty Could be I'm with Kissinger, hoping for a British-style drift into comfortably reduced relevance. Let the Chinese preside over the next boom if they want to. ____Not the real rusty Hm I don't think I buy that. WWI grew from the end of easy imperialistic expansion for European nations. They had all been busy for the preceding century carving up Asia and Africa inot little colonies and protectorates to exploit. By 1914 they had all run out of room, and you had a bunch of would-be empires jostling for superiority. Worse, these empires were all nearly equal in strength (due to longstanding balance of power" policies), and were largely consumed with a reflexive nationalism. So WWI happened, and WWII was basically just WWI Part 2. WWII cost the British so much that they basically couldn't afford to be an empire anymore. At which point it started losing colonial properties, which continued over the next 50 years or so in a, as I said, gradual decline and drift into global mediocrity. If anything, Western Europe as a whole has come out of the past century of conflict much stronger than it entered it. In the 19th century and before, Germany and France both had trouble even moving raw materials from production to manufacturing sites within their own territories. No, they don't have global empires anymore, but they're arguably a lot better off trading with an independent third world that they don't have to pay to administer. Anyway, I think it's more complicated than either of us puts it, but I don't think calling Britain's decline gradual is entirely wrong. ____Not the real rusty No, not really I was saying that the British Empire's decline has been post-1947. The wars played a role in bringing it on, but England never had a massive collapse. They made their way slowly through the tough times at the end of WWII and then gradually faded out as the world's superpower. I disagreed with you about Europe, since before the end of WWII there wasn't any such thing as "Europe" as a world power. There was a collection of squabbling nationalistic would-be empires jammed together on one small and arbitrarily designated "continent". I realize I was a lot more conciliatory than most people who disagree with you here, but that doesn't mean I was agreeing. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah, this is the part where I call you a tool. Aaaaand... we're done. ____Not the real rusty My theory They all killed themselves because they were each the only gay in the village. ____Not the real rusty Does that work? I would expect the bottle to assplode the second the plasma touched it. ____Not the real rusty You know what would work? Oxy-acetylene torch. ____Not the real rusty Ooooh. neat It'll be a few years before we can play Does It Melt? with the kids, but I look forward to it. When we were kids we used to make potato guns with PVC pipe and ether or hairspray. My friend's dad decided to make one with welded steel pipe and oxy-acetylene as the fuel, on a tripod mount. It didn't so much shoot potatoes as sublimate them directly from solid to gas form. ____Not the real rusty The structure of the human eye proves... That god is a hack. ____Not the real rusty Big greasy breakfast If you can get it, I generally go for: Fried eggs (minimum 3) Bacon and/or sausage Home fries Toast Lots of coffee Somehow the greasy breakfast soaks up hangover poisons and flushes them for you. ____Not the real rusty Awww yeah Whenever I make eggs and bacon I fry the eggs in the bacon fat. It's the only way. ____Not the real rusty Well of course I thought that was assumed. ____Not the real rusty I have canceled this diary in my area. ____Not the real rusty Hey, when I see a car accident... ...I jump out because I know I'm, like, the only one that can really help. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Ha. LRH technology FTW. ____Not the real rusty Given K5's history We could use an article called "How to Kill Yourself Properly". Although I guess we've proven fairly competent at it already. Still, you can't be too careful. ____Not the real rusty Ha The only thing I remember clearly from that day was they hooked up the IV, and then injected something into the line. The anesthetist said "This is a synthetic morphine..." and after about three seconds I said "Ooooh. That feels nice." Then I was in recovery. It really did feel very nice. ____Not the real rusty Cortland ____Not the real rusty KILL KILL If mice ain't dying, grantmakers ain't buying, boy. ____Not the real rusty Your favorite text editor + Firefox + Firebug plugin. ____Not the real rusty No way I wish there was firebug when I did K5. ____Not the real rusty Orion failed it OB faked suicide. Which is the only way you can possibly get any more lame than actually killing yourself. So I guess it was predictable. ____Not the real rusty klerck And I don't think trhurler was a suicide. ____Not the real rusty It's the "hordes" Dupes per se are no big deal. But this makes people think about it first. Not so many hordes, although there still exist a couple of old-time hordes. ____Not the real rusty $1 One dollar creeps awfully close to losing money on every transaction. I didn't work out the numbers precisely, but I know that with $5 I'm not actually paying money for signups. So it was about the cheapest amount that was still positive. The point is not so much to assign value. It's more to apply a brake to signups -- to put up a barrier. The idea is to limit duplicate accounts without altogether preventing them, to make creating new accounts a bit slower, and to make it unfeasable and uneconomical to automate. ____Not the real rusty I don't think the price matters I believe that the difference between $1 and $5 is nonexistent from the user end -- that is, someone who will not pay for an account won't pay $1 or $5, and someone who will pay for an account would pay either without drawing much distinction. If that's the case, why not price it to ensure that I make a buck or two, instead of try to work out exactly the point which is cost. Also, that point is difficult to figure, since fees are not linear with transactions. "Cost" can vary from month to month. Also, anyone can hijack old user accounts, under a very particular circumstance, thanks to fucking hotmail. Hotmail apparently releases expired account names back into the available pool. So if you can find an old account that was registered with hotmail, and figure out the hotmail email address, and it happens to be expired, you can register it and re-activate the old account. That's why we don't display email with user info anymore. I do regret the loss of a path for casual signups, but otoh there hadn't been many casual signups for some time. The vast majority of new accounts were actually spammers or would-be spammers, and this has cut that traffic down to zero. On the whole, I think it's a net win. But if someone would come up with a free system for reliable identity online, I'd jump at using it. ____Not the real rusty Read it again, cockbite. ____Not the real rusty I still find it hard to believe That you paid actual American currency for this dupe. Although, on a dollar per hour of entertainment scale, I guess it's not a bad deal. ____Not the real rusty lol pwn! ____Not the real rusty Good riddance One less bigot. ____Not the real rusty A penny saved is a penny earned. ____Not the real rusty Cover art is broken I get a generic Cheeseburger from geocities. ____Not the real rusty Quin es ms foxy? Yo soy ms foxy. ____Not the real rusty Oh christ There goes another one. I can't wait till Sun rewrites mysql in java. ____Not the real rusty Lord help us It's mostly workable with postgres already. I just never liked postgres, so I never had much motivation to make it work. But it's an option, should it become necessary. ____Not the real rusty Facebook == CIA front ____Not the real rusty Oh sure That's what they'd have you believe. ____Not the real rusty Fix it! Unless it's really disastrously ruined (like missing big chunks of wood, badly water damaged, that sort of thing), you should fix it. At the very least, find a floor refinisher or two to come and look at it and give you an estimate and some professional advice. Most will do an estimate for free. ____Not the real rusty Try to find the... ...giant tradeshow-sized Apple penis bucket. It should be near the entrance. ____Not the real rusty Construction Update What's done, and what's not. I just went back and re-read, and I find that the last installment saw me just wrapping up the living room beams. I'm a goodly way along from that now, thank God. In the living room, we finished gutting the front wall of the house, ran a new outside outlet to the front porch and a couple more inside, insulated the whole thing and have most of the sheetrock up (more on that "most of" later). My electrical sub-volunteer and his dad also installed two recessed lights over the couch area, one light in the middle of the living room (still awaiting fixture delivery), a light in the stairwell, and a light on the porch, along with switches by the front door to control this newfangled welter of modern eeeee-lectrikal gewgaws. This four-gang basically doubles the total number of light switches in my house. The previous owners weren't big on light switches. That "most of" in the sheetrock section is the result of an unexpected find at the dump. I was there trashing a load of plaster or something when another pickup pulled up. The guy in the truck was an islander renovating a house in town, and one of the things he'd brought back with him to dispose of was a beautiful old wood front door and matching wood screen. I can't even fathom wanting to throw these things away, and curse the owners of that house as tragic philistines (but bless them as American Wastrels who are willing to give me $1000 worth of fine architectural salvage for nothing.1) The only drawback is the door currently opens the wrong way for my house. So I have to switch the hinges and hardware, and probably mill the edges of the door a little bit, since the handle edge has an angle to permit it to open and close. I also have to enlarge the door rough opening and build a jamb to fit it to the house. Neither of which is a huge deal, and now, when we've got that wall all opened up, is the time to do it. I just haven't found the time to work on that yet. Hence "most of" the drywall is up, since we're waiting till the new door is in to finish it. Going to have to get to that pretty soon. The other notable thing about the new door is that it ticks off the only remaining aspect of house construction that was not involved in this project: an exterior door. The MDF beadboard has started going up on the living room ceiling. It looks nice. I only wish they milled tongue and groove edges on these sheets -- matching the edges of panels accurately is a pain. Upstairs, the actual bathroom has finally progressed by leaps and bounds. Due to unavoidable drain pipe location issues, the finished floor had to sit three inches above the joists for the toilet flange to work. So I threw caution to the wind and went with a full three-layer-of-3/4 inch CDX (plywood) subfloor. That's right, 2 1/4 solid inches of plywood. I no longer have any concerns whatsoever about putting a 68 inch cast iron bathtub up here. On top of that will be 1/2 inch cement tile backer board, and the tiles themselves to bring the finished level up to 3 inches. Anyway, the plywood is now down. Before that, all the new copper was sweated and brought up above rough floor level and capped. All the new framing is done. I ended up having to remove the wall between the bathroom and the second bedroom as well (see diagrams -- the wall between "Bath" and "Bedroom" in the second diagram). It was a crappy wall, for one thing. 2x4s edgewise, so it was mainly held up by its own drywall. But more importantly, it sat on the old board floor between two joists, so there was no way to strip out the old floor without removing that wall. It was no big deal. So that wall, the wall to the hallway, and the wall to the master bedroom are all done. There's a knee wall at the end of the tub to mount the shower valve on, and put a linen closet behind. There's a chase wall for the heating duct that runs up next to the sink, and conveniently defines a cozy little toilet nook. And finally there's a little 12 inch shelf enclosure behind the sink that hides the sink plumbing and will provide a place for a shelf behind the otherwise shelfless pedestal sink. In a spare half hour at the end of one night, I ran the new ductwork up. The only duct to my upstairs was a 4x8 rectangular supply duct coming up from the basement. I converted this to 6" round duct via a sort of half-ass 10" oval to 6" round adapter bashed into roughly a rectangle and attached with lots of duct tape. Then 6" round duct up into the attic, where it tees, extends off in two directions through 6" insulated flexi-duct, tees again, reduces to 4" round, and comes down the wall between the bath and master bedroom as two 4" flexible ducts that will end in 4" x 10" wall vents. The other side of the first attic tee will eventually do the same thing in the wall between the two smaller bedrooms. And as if by magic, my upstairs has heat. It's amazing how many houses in what is, by all measures, a cold climate never had any upstairs heat. It's really common here. I can't say there's much to simple forced-air HVAC work. The only tools are basically fingers and duct tape. Tin snips and some scissors will probably come in handy too. It's a restful sort of job. The bathroom electrical work is in. Supply feeds a GFI outlet first (so everything's ground protected) which then branches off to another outlet, an over-sink sconce, a combined vent fan and light over the tub, and a recessed light over the toilet. Each of the lights is on its own switch, and the fan is on a both / off / fan-only-timer switch thingy. I'm waiting on the recessed light fixture to be able to finish the electrical stuff completely. My lighting source kind of fell down on stock -- I went in to buy five fixtures and they only had two in stock. Oh well. Finally, just this past weekend, we replaced the window. I wanted to rehab the old weighted-sash window, like I did in my daughter's room, but this one had a rotten sill. Repairing it would have involved rebuilding the entire frame. And worse, the window itself sits in a shed dormer, and the dormer sort of cut into the roofline, but not all the way through the roofline. So right below the window was this sort of flat spot with a pan of flashing sitting in it. Water would drip off the dormer roof, splash on that flat metal pan, and soak the windowsill. Hence the rot. If I kept this arrangement, any future window was going to have the same problems. So I bit the bullet and ordered a smaller tilt-out awning window. The plan was to pull out the old window, fill in the old cut-out section to match the rest of the roofline, rebuild the window rough opening to match the new window, and install the new window. And this went surprisingly well. Saturday we pulled out the old window and surrounding junk, restored the original roofline, rebuilt the rough opening, and installed the new window. Sunday we wrapped up the dormer with tarpaper and did the exterior trim and new cornerboards. Monday it snowed like hell, so thank god that was done. The dormer looks way better sitting on top of a continuous roofline than it did notching into it. Hopefully next summer I'll get to replacing all the eave trim, which is badly weathered, mostly unpainted, and generally scabby and shot. Then the house may begin to look occupied again. The replacement window is a Marvin, and (plug) Marvin windows are awesome. It went in just as smooth as anything, and opens and closes like there was no weight on the crank at all. Very, very nice stuff. The exterior is fiberglass-clad, which I've heard good things about. Inside is wood, of course. So that's where it stands. What's left to do: Install front door Finish living room ceiling, trim, and drywall Finish above-floor bathroom plumbing (shower valve / shower head, sink supplies, sink drain) Dormer siding Bathroom wainscoting Bathroom blueboard Bathroom ceiling (drywall) Bathroom floor tile Linen cabinet Living room bookcase (I forgot to even mention this, didn't I? More on that some other time) Install fixtures Install remaining lights Install bathroom door and Ellie's room door (one of those things I never got to when I did her room way back when) Lots of painting and staining and finishing LOTS of cleaning The most interesting thing I've learned so far is that an enormous project can be taken on three nighttime hours at a time. But only at the cost of all of your free time and most of your sanity. --------- 1 The following is in a footnote because it is in very poor taste, and I know my parents read this stuff. You have been warned. I later was talking to a friend of mine who got a window from the same guy, and had learned that the house this door came from was being remodeled by a lesbian couple. "Oh yeah?" I said to him. "What kind of door would they replace this with?" "A lesbian door?" "What kind of door is that?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. "Tongue and groove?" I warned you. What the... Where the hell have you been? ____Not the real rusty Just one cat The one we got from our landlady died. Or, technically, we had her killed, but she was going to die shortly anyway. That was surprisingly hard to do, for a pet neither of us liked very much in the first place. The other one's still around being a huge pain in the ass. ____Not the real rusty Vets are for pussies Good thing I took my pussy to one, eh? ____Not the real rusty Tried that I first got an offset flange because there was originally a joist right where I wanted to put the toilet. Once I decided to put the beams in downstairs though, that was no longer necessary. I just headed off that joist and then shifted the rest of it over to sit two inches away from where it had been. So I am using a shallow flange. The hole going into the iron vent pipe is basically higher than it ought to be. The top of it is only maybe an inch below the tops of the joists, so add that the barest minimum possible slope to the pipe run and the height of the flange, and 3" was the best I could do. It's not as bad as it sounds -- I was afraid it was going to be a huge step up from the hallway, but it's not even noticeable. ____Not the real rusty If they were I could hire someone to do this. :-) ____Not the real rusty What? No it isn't - unless "water circulated heat" is something different than what I'm thinking of. Lots of houses have hot water baseboard heat. It's at least as common as forced air, if not more so. The reason I don't have it was probably cost. A furnace and some air ducts to the ground floor are cheaper than a good boiler and running copper water pipe all over the house. The previous owners didn't have much money, and they generally went with the cheapest option everywhere. The reason I don't have much insulation is probably because when the house was built, insulation was expensive and cordwood was cheap. Most turn of the century houses here had little or no insulation, they'd just plop a huge wood burning furnace in it and make lots of heat. I'm slowly insulating whenever I have a wall opened up. Eventually the whole oplace will be insulated, but it takes time. ____Not the real rusty Huh The northeast is a little odd -- for one thing, #2 home heating oil is almost universally the standard fuel here, which is true nowhere else. I'd guess it's about 50/50 here between hot water baseboard radiators and forced air. I think water is actually better, myself. More even heating, and more efficient. My in-laws house has hot water in-floor radiant heating, which seems like a good idea but I wouldn't ever install it. I don't think it's very efficient, and it's played hell with their wood floor. All the heating and cooling has made it the creakiest (relatively) new wood floor I've ever seen. A warm floor is pleasant though. ____Not the real rusty Ah ha NYTimes from 1996. Apparently yes, hot water is a northeast thing. ____Not the real rusty Where do you get the time? Is this whole papercrete project a spare-time kind of thing, or where do you find the time for it? ____Not the real rusty I remember that Brady Bunch too [nt] ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty Also, new trolling opportunity From MeFi today: Scrapbooking Forums. See also. See also. See also. ____Not the real rusty See also "See Also" #2. I know about this -- I think if they can get that worked up about a scrapbooking contest, they are ripe for the plucking. ____Not the real rusty The Quiz I got 92% as well. I missed the meteor question and mammal respiration. The latter, I think, is not a particularly good question. Anaerobic respiration can be used by mammals but it's not by any means the primary form, nor is it any good for us. It's more of an emergency fallback. I read the question as asking what the primary form of respiration was for mammals. ____Not the real rusty 26 questions One wrong would be 96%. ____Not the real rusty Graded on the 8th grade curve... ...we both got a 1237%. I was also disappointed by how many of the questions are essentially "define this science word." It's been a long time since I was in 8th grade, but shouldn't they be learning more about "how stuff works" and less about "what we call stuff?" There's a great anecdote Richard Feynman told about his dad telling him that knowing some bird is called a red-breasted titmouse is a lot less useful than observing that it is small, forages on the ground for berries and seeds, appears to make nests in low shrubbery, and so forth, even if you make up your own name for it. ____Not the real rusty DOES NOT IMPROVE GARFIELD ____Not the real rusty Limerance? Star Fox found himself at a glory hole And instantly lost all his self control He inserted his wang and falsetto he sang... "PRESS Z OR R TWICE FOR A BARREL ROLL" ____Not the real rusty Ow Don't quit your day job. K5ers often would josh and MrHanky joined in with panache But when limericks he tried Everyone merely sighed And suggested some shotgun mouthwash ____Not the real rusty Perfect demonstration of libertarianism in practice. And I bet not one of those goobers learned a damn thing. ____Not the real rusty Not at all And this was clearly libertarianism, not anarchy. Or, to put it another way, it was exactly the libertarianism that is functionally indistinguishable from anarchy, since it is what anarchy (being inherently unstable) instantly decays to. That is, different groups band together and the most powerful kicks the ass of the less powerful. Absent the backing of a strong government to level the playing field, this is what we get. ____Not the real rusty But harm who? And how? While there's inevitably doctrinal conflict, the general basic tenets of libertarianism seem to be: Contracts trump all other legal considerations There is no such thing as an inherently illegal or unconscionable contract So I believe that even the most ardent libertarians believe that a police force is necessary to punish those that attempt to break a contract into which they entered. "Harm" here would mainly be defined as "not living up to your contractual obligation." The inevitable result is that the state will organize to defeat the weakest at the behest of the strongest. When people attempt to organize themselves into, say, labor unions, the state enforcement apparatus will be mobilized to prevent them. Child labor is no problem, provided the children have signed a contract. After all, they chose to do it... right? I, along with most sane people, point out that a contract signed at the point of a gun, or entered into when the alternative is starvation, is inherently unconscionable. I think the whole point of government is to lend the power of all of us to the weakest and strongest among us equally. I don't think there's ever been a government that's achieved that completely, but that doesn't justify not trying. To get back to your point, yes, anarchists would generally be more in favor of ad-hoc collectives dealing with each other, rathe than a formal state apparatus. But that situation would just devolve almost immediately into the strongest collective subsuming all the others and becoming the de facto government. That government might take any form, but the most likely (because the most beneficial to the powerful, who would be the ones who get to pick) is a robber-baron style libertarianism. I mean, it's what we got for a hundred and fifty years after the American Revolution, despite the efforts of many of the powerful to avoid it. Also, I don't think you can separate "economically" and "physically" here. At the state level, the two are the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Fair enough I'm arguing more from the actual historical experience of libertarianism (i.e. the industrial revolution), rather than the theories, of which there are a number, with varying limits on freedom and rights. Essentially I'm arguing this as one would argue about the tendency of communist systems to devolve into authoritarianism, which is not in any real way a fundamental of the theory, but has always been the case in practice. ____Not the real rusty I meant... ...to observe that communism devolves into cult-of-personality style authoritarianism by a single strongman leader. Not the generalized state authoritarianism implied by the political theory. If anything, the result is the opposite of what the theory posits. I'm drawing a parallel to libertarianism, in which the result is true freedom for only a few, despite the theoretical "freedom for all" starting point. I prefer to maximize fairness rather than raw freedom. ____Not the real rusty Perhaps... Marx and Engels didn't have much experience with crowds. ____Not the real rusty Libertarian, and anarchist, basic flaw That "state of nature" premise is exactly where libertarianism and anarchism both fail it -- right at the very beginning. No human being ever has been born in this mystical "state of nature," free to intelligently and rationally choose their social allegiance and the limits of their personal loyalty to a state or collective society. We are all loaded up right from the start with a whole history and society (in the global sense) to which we are indebted from well before our own birth. Then we're raised through childhood, accumulating even more social debts. To claim that at the age of majority we can suddenly wipe the slate clean and start from scratch as rational free agents is absurd. It's a nice theory, but it can't ever happen in a species arranged as ours is. Any attempts will end in much larger suffering for many more people than if we accepted our social obligations and went from there. Also, if you look at history, governments owned and controlled by their society as a whole always lead to continually less suffering for more people. We've got a lot of problems in the US, but an overly effective government ain't one of them. ____Not the real rusty For your life Small humans, generally known as "children," are completely defenseless. Without the social structures that protect us, very few would survive to the point where they are capable of making the imaginary "rational choice" whether to join this or that social structure. It is the epitome of selfishness to leech from our safety net until you get to college, and then decide you don't need the rest of us anymore. I don't feel any compunction at all about compelling the few would-be free-riders to join the rest of us. Alternatively, we could oblige libertarians by allowing them to register as a special class of citizen, to whom none of our laws apply, and whom none of our laws or public institutions will protect. That would pretty much end the movement in a couple years, at most. ____Not the real rusty Nope Those laws wouldn't apply provided you were discharging them at libertarians. Granted, it would be a bit of a legal muddle in theory, but in practice it would only be a brief period of confusion so most of the issues would probably never need to be worked out fully. ____Not the real rusty Take another step back I'm saying good families are born out of good social conditions. A strong middle class, solid opportunity, legitimate and equitably enforced laws. Compare, e.g. socialist Denmark to the US. Where are the Danish trailer trash? By your argument, Denmark should be rife with welfare queens. It is, in fact, almost entirely middle class, and is the happiest country on Earth. The choice between socialism and libertarianism is not a choice between welfare and freedom. It's a choice between the reality of a society caring for all its members rights and basic needs, and the tantalizing (in the classical sense of unattainability) myth of getting rich. Also, I love the sentence: "Bad families thrive off of the stolen virtue of productive families in socialism." Americans have got to be the only people in the world who are convinced that those poorer than them got that way by stealing from them, whereas rich people became rich by alchemically transmuting God-granted inherent virtue directly into personal wealth. It's utterly nonsensical. ____Not the real rusty Oh come on... "Strawman slayer?" Dude, I managed to slip "libertarians support child labor" in there. :-) If you weren't being sarcastic, then I have become more powerful than I ever dreamed. ____Not the real rusty Mostly agree with you there About corporations as people, and I do have some left-libertarian leanings myself. Libertarianism in the US is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon though. That is the philosophy I deride with such gusto. ____Not the real rusty I don't know you can put a $5 crack whore in a vera wang dress I beg to differ. Have you ever tried? Those bitches are slippery. And they bite. ____Not the real rusty Yes And Christina Aguilera is especially greasy. ____Not the real rusty Ah, I know I just wanted to say that she was greasy. Cause you know, she always looks greasy. But you're right. ____Not the real rusty Flies hatch really fast We just had a January thaw, and the first day it crept over freezing, my sunny upstairs windows were covered with flies. This always happens when there's a sudden thaw. I don't know where they hang out when it's cold, but they show up really fast when it gets warm enough. Of course, I RAID their asses back into the happy fly hunting ground immediately, and that takes care of that. Also: disgusting. ____Not the real rusty Better choice Opening windows ventilates a house at the expense of wasting any energy you burned heating it. Check out air to air heat exchangers. Or you can go the old house route, which is to have your house ventilated by lots of holes and missing insulation. Drafts: The open window you can't ever shut. ____Not the real rusty Why? If you're stealing anyway, steal people food. Good lord, do I have to do all the thinking for you people? ____Not the real rusty Um... Space is bigger, yes. Definitely bigger. Much bigger. More... space there. It's got that going for it. In every way relevant to sustaining human life though, all of the space we can plausibly reach is worse than useless. It would be far, far easier to render the bottom of the ocean habitable than Mars. For one thing, we can actually get there. IMO, if they want space, they can have it. I'll stay right here where the environment is not unbelievably hostile to my life in every way. ____Not the real rusty The beam in thine own eye Puerto Ricans are purebreds compared to you filipinos. We'll eventually have a whole filipino world. But there will be a Puerto Rican phase on the way. ____Not the real rusty Two points: This delegate loss won't happen. When the conventions roll around, the nominees for both sides will be completely clear, and the parties will magnanimously seat the "barred" delegates anyway. This is all party-level stuff, which doesn't have any relationship to disenfranchising anyone or preventing anyone from voting. Parties can run their shit however they please. I could start a new party where the nomination rules are that all nominees must eat a pickle in front of me and three of my friends, and I decide who the best pickle eater is, and that's our nominee. ____Not the real rusty McCain? Put the crack down. McCain wins NH and loses everywhere else. No one but NH likes McCain. Romney has the money and the "establishment candidate" cred. Never mind that he is the Republican John Kerry. He's your guy. Start getting used to it. ____Not the real rusty Huckabee is the only other viable candidate McCain is too old, has too much baggage, and has outgrown his old "maverick" label. Not t mention he's a lousy campaigner. Wait till Romney manages to make him angry. He'll self-destruct, like always. Romney doesn't have much going for him, I'll grant you that, but he doesn't have much against him either. He's bland enough to survive and pick up a first here and a second there until he's managed to amass enough halfhearted support to actually win the nomination. If the GOP had a decent candidate at all, I wouldn't give Romney any chance. But with this field? Meh. ____Not the real rusty It's always a good idea! You can believe me about that, because I'm going to make you a lot of money! ____Not the real rusty MI == Free Points! Dems: Clinton (duh) GOP: Native son Romney Also, in all of our defense on the NH debacle, EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN POLE said Obama was gonna win it handily. What the Christ? ____Not the real rusty Also I called it correctly in an email conversation with my Mom. I shoulda stuck by what I thought rather than what the "conventional wisdom" said. ____Not the real rusty Gasp shock horror! Ron Paul, a racist?! My goodness, I never would have guessed. ____Not the real rusty My wife Occasionally brings our son into the office. She did it with our daughter a couple years ago too. She's not full-time, nor does she even go into the office every day she does work though, so it works out to be maybe once every couple weeks, on average. Everyone there seems to like it. And Calvin loves going to work. ____Not the real rusty I suspect it probably depends most heavily on the temperament of both baby and mother. Some babies would be charming, some absolutely wouldn't be, and ditto mothers. I know I wouldn't want to be the parent in that situation, in any case. Moms are continuously amazing. ____Not the real rusty Both / Neither DKos has a few core code modifications, most of which have made it back into the code. All the custom Ajax interface stuff, and the supporting code, is not public yet but it's recently been decided that it will be. Kos paid for the development of that (paid a good bit, actually) and didn't distribute it, so it was always his choice what to do with it. ____Not the real rusty Not really It's a loophole that I fully endorse, and Scoop remains under the GPL 2 because it exists. I don't think that allowing people to use an application for its intended purpose is the same as releasing it -- I think that equivalence is an error on the part of the GPL 3. Or, at the very least, it's a philosophical change that I don't support. Look at it a different way. If I ran a mainframe / client system for a large company, where most employees access a powerful machine via dumb clients, and I provide them with a GPL word processor (running only on the mainframe, mind you) that I have made some tweaks to, I don't see why that should trigger the release requirements of the GPL. Even further, if I made a change to that word processor and deployed it across my entire company's network of PCs, it still should require me to release all my changes publically. So why should running a web app require it? I think the key moment for "give back" is when you distribute the program outside of a private context. And for web apps run by a single organizaton, I don't think that moment ever happens. ____Not the real rusty Argh, paragraph 3: it still should not require me to release all my changes publically ____Not the real rusty Huh what? No Democrat will switch to Huckabee. What on earth will you get from Huckabee that you don't get from Obama besides overt Bible-thumping? Obama would beat Huckabee like a drum on top of a rented mule carrying a red-headed stepchild. ____Not the real rusty But... but... ...a Kenyan was elected. We're doomed either way! ____Not the real rusty No no no ALWAYS take the middle urinal, so as to present an unresolvable conundrum to the next poor bastard who comes in. Maximum entertainment. ____Not the real rusty He's an analyist and a therapist. An Analrapist. ____Not the real rusty And make sure you are going... "Beyeeew! Beyeeew! Boop boop Psshhhhhhht!!! Byeeew!" ____Not the real rusty NH Obama Romney I was not all that terribly right last time. This time my Romney prediction is based on the idea that too many independents will go out for Obama and bleed just enough from McCain to put him in second. I still say Hillary for the Dem nomination. I'm going to change to Romney for the Republicans though. I don't think Huck can sell it nationwide. ____Not the real rusty Bee Guy Goes Big Time Voice of the Hive gets namechecked on MeFi. Right on. Also, yes I was in first with the K5-whoring. Nah I just like XC0x65's writing, and am glad to pimp it at any opportunity. Also, he sent me hunny. ____Not the real rusty You're right I should not have been so quick to ban. The diary will stay gone, but I reinstated chlorus with a warning. ____Not the real rusty You're welcome Cockbite. ;-) ____Not the real rusty vs... 76,890 in equity? I'll take the equity. It's harder to piss it away on hookers and crack family-friendly wholesome entertainment. ____Not the real rusty Ah, yeah But by then you should be able to convince some other sucker to pay much more than you did. :-) ____Not the real rusty You forgot the important end to that ..."given sufficient time." Where the value of "sufficient" varies. I mean, on average I doubt anyone who buys a house and sells it ten years later will lose money, regardless of what particular ten years it spans (and assuming they maintain it, and so forth). Many houses also offer very good opportunities to add sweat equity, by making repairs, upgrades, etc. But the market's somewhat cyclic. It's a dumb idea to buy a house and have to sell it at a particular time. People can get stuck with a house they have to get rid of for personal reasons, and that's a shame. It's also dumb to buy at what is really fucking clearly the peak of a boom in the cycle and expect to unload it for a profit in a short time. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I agree, with the proviso that you can't live in a pile of stock certificates, and that renting has no possibility of return, as opposed to a house's middling possibility of return. My point is just that renting has a 0% chance of return, owning has a non-0% chance. ____Not the real rusty Suicide by admin [nt] ____Not the real rusty Where's the part about identity? I poked through the docs and it seems to be mostly about the hashcash and crypto stuff. None of that is even necessary (although I'm sure someone would find it useful) if you could just have strong identity on the internet. I don't see where they explain how they'll ensure that one identity is only one actual person and no actual person has more than one identity. Without that, none of the rest of it means anything. ____Not the real rusty Meh So it's a trust network that punishes you for anything anyone downstream of you does? That'll work. If your goal is a trust network of one. It just returns us to the main problem, which is that no social controls work unless identity is unique. It's funny that something that is so taken for granted as to be nearly invisible in the real world is so difficult to do online. And by "funny" I mean "a big problem," since this is the root of the boom in identity theft lately. As we move "identity" into computer records it starts to disappear completely. ____Not the real rusty Probably strategic That looks like a Stop Hillary maneuver. Kucinich is guessing that Obama and Edwards will split the anti-Hillary vote, so he's trying to drive his people toward the one with more strength. Philosophically, Obama and Kucinich have virtually nothing in common. ____Not the real rusty He cut a deal then too The Kucinich / Edwards deal in '04 was part of a larger "Stop Dean" agreement among the top tier in 04. Kucinich gets an awful lot of credit from the far left for someone who is, when you get down to it, one of the most cynical and opportunistic political maneuverers in the party. He's always known he has no chance nationally, but he likes to hear himself speak and he likes his chance to push the big boys around. He was at the doors at the Maine caucuses in '04, and I shook his hand. It was just like picking up a dead fish, but without all the warmth and human connection. His eyes were empty black discs, and his skin was waxy and glistened slightly, like something recently deceased. I have never, to my knowledge, met a more repellent pseudo-person. He reminded me most strongly of a mushroom pretending to be human. ____Not the real rusty That's true Yeah, you're right, Obama has always taken the hardest anti-war stand. Which he vigorously opposed from his exalted seat in the (snicker, snicker) Illinois state legislature. I bet that was a tough stand to take. ____Not the real rusty Iowa Democrats: Hillary FTW Republicans: Huckabee FTW ____Not the real rusty Ha ha ha ha ha Sure. ____Not the real rusty Check your comment preferences Specifically "Show Hidden Comments." You'll want either "Yes" or "Show until I've rated". ____Not the real rusty Extras: Ron Paul will not break 8% anywhere in Iowa or NH. He will not break 2% anywhere else. Dems: Edwards second, Obama third. The media narrative coming out of Iowa will be "Is Obama Finished?" But a strong #2 in NH will end that. IA will be Edwards' high water mark. After NH everything gets boring as Hillary rolls up the nomination with relative ease. The only remaining interesting question is who will Hillary pick for VP? Republicans: Romney second, McCain third. McCain will also place third in NH, and will thereafter commit a major campaign blunder by letting one of his opponents (or the press) make him angry and will drop out after a lot of rotte super tuesday results. The IA win will give Huckabee a huge bump, and though Romney will win NH, Huckabee will have pulled so close to him that Huck will get all the media coming out of NH. General election: Hillary vs. Huckabee. Hillary wins by 5 or 6 points. (Look at me teetering way out here on this limb! :-)) ____Not the real rusty You're a rageaholic You can't live without rageahol. ____Not the real rusty I'll have to add a new section in the top nav. "Rice PAP Recipes"? "Toys you can Make out of Mud and Dung"? Also, it's lease on life. ____Not the real rusty ~300% Went from contracting to salary. It was a nice raise. ____Not the real rusty I stand by my original recommendation Venice on the Mississippi. C'mon how awesome would it be if they just flooded the streets and raised all the buildings? ____Not the real rusty OMG ur rite! One anecdotal example proves it! :-) ____Not the real rusty Have you ever transcended time and space? Yes. No. Space but not time. I don't understand the question. ____Not the real rusty Er, whut? No I didn't. ____Not the real rusty Read the links This Nazi claims that Paul's line is bullshit -- that he regularly meets with and discusses policy with the Stormfronters. It's not about whether he took a check, but whether he's regularly slurping down Pad Thai with Der Fuhrer. ____Not the real rusty Well, like most people... ...I already disliked Ron Paul for other reasons altogether, so this doesn't change anything for me. It is lulzworthy though, to think of all you internet would-be robber barons supporting the Choice of Der Reich. ____Not the real rusty Aw, don't be mad That was just a gentle nudge at the internet-nerd fantasy that in an unregulated economy they would naturally be on the top. I completely sympathize with and very strongly support both of your goals. But there are three factors that prevent me from supporting Ron Paul even though he espouses both of those: Ending the war on some drugs: He would be unable to accomplish any such thing due to having no party support. That has to be done at the legislative level. His end the Iraq war solution (remove all US troops in a day, or as close thereto as possible) would add calamity to disaster. The power vacuum would spark a much bigger regional conflict, that we would be forced to intervene in sooner or later when it got even worse than it is now. The rest of his platform is Batshit Insane. Also, I'm not aware that John Edwards has a known coke problem. Are you talking about Obama? I don't like Obama either. ____Not the real rusty More of an obvious lack of quandary If someone wants to show off their junk at the workplace, who is anyone to tell them no? Let the boys enjoy the view and leave it alone. ____Not the real rusty Hm I still think you should leave it alone. I mean, if she asks, tell her the truth, assuming that's the sort of relationship you have. But why go out of your way to throw sand in the gears? ____Not the real rusty Fred Thompson Biff! ____Not the real rusty Clarifier, I think It globs up pectin to clear the cider. There's a technical term for "globs up" I think. But I don't know it. ____Not the real rusty Your microbrewers must suck [nt] ____Not the real rusty Dunno I can't recall drinking a Canadian beer... uh, ever. ____Not the real rusty Drug laws We all know that niggers are much more susceptible to drug use prosecution than whitey. Fixed that for u. ____Not the real rusty Eh, you look it up There's been plenty of studies on racial factors in prosecution, criminal penalties, sentencing, etc etc. If you're determined to, you can find ways to reason around the fact that the US criminal justice system is a huge machine for locking up US blacks, but it takes some doing. For just one recent example, see the Supreme Court decision about crack vs powder cocaine sentences. Sentences for 5 grams of crack == 500 grams of powder cocaine? Who uses crack vs who snorts coke? Also, look into the history of why marijuana is even illegal in this country. ____Not the real rusty Some of both, probably Many drugs laws are racist. That's not to say they are applied differently between races, but that the laws themselves are born from fear of the favored drugs of one race by a different race. And here, that means fear of hopped-up negroes by whites. See mary jane (1920s); crack (1980s-present). I'm talking about laws that don't bother white people because for the most part we have no interest in breaking them. That is what I consider a racially biased law. One group using its power to say that some common practice of another group is illegal and subject to punishment at any time. This is especially egregious in the case of drug laws, where the majority of harm done by drug use is a direct result of the illegality of drug use. On the other hand, yes, many of our poor are also minorities, and with prohibition still in effect, the quickest route to the American Dream is in the black market, and the biggest black market is, was, and will always be drugs. When it was booze it was the Irish and the Italians. Now it's drugs and blacks and latinos. Same old tale though. Still and all, that's not much of an out. So it's not because they're black, it's because they're poor and black? I also don't know the numbers for sure, but I'm willing to bet that with blacks being 13% of the population there are more poor whites in absolute numbers than poor blacks. And yet where are the poor whites in prisons? There are some, but they're radically outnumbered. I think there's more to it than that. What I always sort of end up coming back to is that we have so many laws, and so many that are routinely ignored by virtually everyone, that the apparatus of the state can very nearly imprison anyone at any time. But who do they choose to imprison with droning regularity and with absolutely no regard to how utterly overrepresented they are? Blacks. I'm uncomfortable, to say the least, with the notion that black people are naturally more inclined to criminal behavior. Plus that explanation does not are with my experience of reality. So there's very little left ot explain it, other than our society and our criminal justice system are pretty radically unbalanced in favor of keeping blacks in prison and in the underclass, on a multi-generational and apparently ongoing basis. And don't even get me started on the death penalty. ____Not the real rusty The Ghost of Laundry Yet to Come LilDebbie crept towards the drier, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the tag of the neglected pants his own name, LILDEBBIE. "Am I that man who lay upon those damp sheets?" he cried, upon his knees. The finger pointed from the drier to him, and back again. "No, Spirit! Oh no, no!" The finger still was there. "Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse (I said "intercourse" lulz). Why show me this, if I am past all hope!" For the first time the hand appeared to shake. "Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!" The kind hand trembled. "I will honour laundry in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will starch in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the crusty stains on these tighty whities!" ____Not the real rusty But how do you know that they want to dry everything in the drier? I wouldn't do that because I'd be afraid I'd ruin some chick's expensive fluffy sweater or something. I mean, personally I have a Darwinian attitude towards clothing and the drier -- if it can't stand being dried with everything ese it deserved to be weeded out. But I'm aware that not everyone feels that way. ____Not the real rusty Bork. ____Not the real rusty It's easier to dig a hole than build a pole. ____Not the real rusty Question: Which part of 'NOT COLD' ...applies to Chicago? Answer: "COLD." ____Not the real rusty Depends The one I didn't mess with was great after about 10 months. The one I did mess with I screwed up, and may never be any good. I'm just aging it in forlorn hope. I'm not screwing with any of this year's, other than making at least one sparkling variety. I expect good things. OTOH your adding water to it makes the baby cider jesus cry. Why would you do such a thing? Even if you add more juice, it'll still be watered down. Also, if you do add juice, beware the restart of fermentation and bottle bombs. I suspect your wife has never had real cider -- that seems to be the source of most "I like sweet cider" sentiment. Sweet alco-pop type cider is basically just vodka + apple juice. It's a whole different thing. Or to put it another way, adding water to your grape must if you were making wine would get you seriously lynched in France. ____Not the real rusty I don't know about seriously gross, just weak. There's lots of water in cider and juice already. What's your OG? It should be somewhere in the 1.050-1.056 range. ____Not the real rusty Or even up to 1.060 [nt] ____Not the real rusty Low That's even low for a beer. I checked all my OGs from this year and last year's ciders, and none of them were below 1.054. I'd add concentrate up to around there and you should be fine. ____Not the real rusty Same as anything Basically, it'll clear up, and your hydrometer reading will stay the same for a week or two. It's just like beer, but slower. Factor everything by ten or so -- if you would call a beer done when its gravity read the same for 3 days, make it 30 days with cider. A 1.0 reading would mean it was done too, since that's fully dry. But it won't necessarily ferment down to zero remaining sugars. Sometimes they finish quite a bit sweeter than that, for reasons no one really seems to understand. There's never any harm in letting it sit around in a cool place if you're not positive it's finished, or if you're busy, or feeling too lazy to deal with it, or anything else. Sitting around can only make it better. It also won't hurt to rack it off the lees at somewhere around 1.02. Slows down the ferment, helps it clear, and gets the yeast debris (sulfury flavors and whatnot) out of it. ____Not the real rusty Just checked mine My goodness, they went kinda fast this year. The two I pitched are down to bone-dry 1.000. The other three are in the 1.01 - 1.014 range. I'll probably rack those in a little round-robin to slow them down further. But it just goes to show, a natural ferment, under the right conditions, is not a lot different than pitching yeast. Also, I racked my pilsener. I unfortunately broke my hydrometer, so I won't get a reading till later tonight when I can borrow one. But it tastes pretty funky. Not bad, just young and unsettled. I suspect that I will not like this one as much as I like ales, but my father-in-law will love it. He likes Spaten and lagery type german beers, and this bears a strong resemblance to Spaten. It should be a good refreshing summertime beer -- I'll probably like it with some lemon. Well, the in-laws have been putting up with us for a month now, and we've probably got another month to go, so this'll be a nice gift for them. :-) ____Not the real rusty About two months I shoulda racked them all a month ago, but I've had too much else on my plate. Oh well. ____Not the real rusty More time == better I've got five glass carboys pretty much committed for the rest of the year, myself. Fortunately I do beer in plastic buckets. :-) I'm fermenting in the northeast corner of the basement, next to a window, so it's about 50 degrees all the time. If I could keep it closer to 40, I would. If you've got yours in more like a 60 degreeish area, it'll ferment faster. I still strongly recommend bottling it and then sticking it in the basement for at least 6-8 months, though. Preferably closer to a year. ____Not the real rusty Pilsener progress So my pilsener is down in the basement having the World's Slowest Ferment. I think I murdered the first batch of yeast -- I basically took liquid yeast out of the fridge and pitched it directly into 80 degree wort. Waited a week, and no sign of any sort of business going on, so I added the other packet of dry yeast. That's working away at it now, but it's ~51 degrees so the ferment is very slow. I'm regarding it as an experiment in lagering, and probably fine. It's been going for a couple weeks now, with pressure in the bucket but nothing like very active bubbling. I'll probably rack it to a carboy today or tomorrow to see what it looks like. The kit came with a whirlfloc tablet that seems to have captured lots of gunk and turned it to jelly. I'm curious to get a better look at that stuff too. ____Not the real rusty Raise to 8 C? 8 C is about 46 F. You mean cool it down below 46, pitch, and then raise to 46-50? Actually, if the first batch of yeast did nothing (which I think it didn't) that's more or less what I ended up doing, with the second pitch. ____Not the real rusty Thx for the PROTIP beeyatch. ____Not the real rusty Tragically short list Step One: Put unprocessed apple squeezings in a large airtight container Step Two: Cover with airlock Step Three: Wait. That's about it. I could jargon it up some and add some good links. But that's really the process. Oh, I almost forgot Step Four: Drink. ____Not the real rusty It depends This year I have five batches. Three are natural ferment, two are yeasted. Last year I didn't do any natural ferments. It depends on where you get your juice, what sort of juice it is, what's been done to it or not done to it, etc. I get mine from a guy who blends and presses specifically for fermenting cider, I get it the day it's squeezed or the day after, so I'm cool with some natural ferments. The two I added yeast to are basically backups in case of massive systemic failure, but no such failure happens. they're all fermenting about the same. I suppose I could write an article about this. ____Not the real rusty Sulfites are your friend What my guy does is sulfite the juice at a low level -- enough to kill or drastically harm the bad bugs, but not enough to kill the good bugs. So the good bugs get a head start and generally outcompete the bad. Plus keeping it under an airlock helps -- the stuff you don't want usually requires oxygen. The juice I pitched we sulfited at a "kill em all" level so the pitched yeast would have a clean environment tho start with. ____Not the real rusty Right "Pitched" being the jargony form of "added cultured yeast." Specifically Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast. ____Not the real rusty Hillary vs Huckabee Hillary because no one can match her organization or connections, and Huckabee because all the Republican so-called "front runners" are direly compromised in one way or another. He'll win Iowa, and the Huckabee train will be unstoppable thereafter. Huckabee will be destroyed in the general though. Hillary by 10 points. ____Not the real rusty We'll see You can lose NH and still roll on just fine. Huckabee needs either IA or NH to gain traction, though. I think he'll take IA. Also, "pissed off the Mormons?" There's like 300 Mormons, and I don't get the impression the rest of the west likes them all that much. If that were the case, why would Romney have to apologize for being a Mormon? And have you ever taken a look at what those people believe? I'm always amazed they get treated as seriously as they do. Honestly. What a pile of rubbish. ____Not the real rusty He did get elected governor of MA. But MA has a history of electing nutty token Republicans governor. It helps the massive and permanent Democratic legislative majority deflect criticism. ____Not the real rusty The competition was nobody much. It was hard times in MA if you like politicians that either have any sort of leadership qualities or are actually residents in your state. ____Not the real rusty Reid is a Senator from a state with, statistically, zero people. He could have five eyeballs and a nose sculpted from marzipan and he'd still have a pretty good chance of getting elected in NV. After that it's just Senate and party rules that put him in the leader chair. I don't think that particularly disproves the idea that the rest of the country is likely to dissolve in helpless laughter if they ever find out what it is that Romney actually professes his faith in. ____Not the real rusty Wacky Well, Christianity and Judaism, and the rest, are certainly wacky too. But at least their wackiness is, like, historical. Rather than transparently made up by one dude 100 years ago. Then again, there are lots of Scientologists too. People are stupid. ____Not the real rusty It's a syllogism! People are stupid. Stupid people make good neighbors. THEREFORE all people make good neighbors. QED. ____Not the real rusty Yadda yadda Women love Hillary, Democratic men will swallow hard and then vote for her. Plus you can't stack vague truisms and conventional media wisdom against cold cash and boots on the ground, and Hillary has more of both than anyone else. McCain is a perpetual loser. He will lose again. No one wants grumpy grandpa for president. Giuliani is the only other possible Republican contender. He'd probably do pretty well, actually, but I don't think the hicks'll let him win the primary. ____Not the real rusty Generally speaking, they do. ____Not the real rusty Women. I know some. They actually talk to me. Go figure. ____Not the real rusty Halogen? Halogen bulbs are even less efficient than incandescent. I don't see how those are a reasonable replacement. CF, on the other hand, is well worth the switch. I just bought two recessed lights for my living room, that'll take 13W fluorescents. ____Not the real rusty Take them to the hardware store ...where they're sent off to be recycled and the mercury recovered. I wish more towns had simple CF recycling bins at the dump or transfer station, but we can't even get waste oil handled right out here yet, so I don't have high hopes. It's not a huge big deal though. ____Not the real rusty Ace Hardware in Portland Ah, I see why we're confused. Well, my advice would be buy your bulbs, and by the time they burn out in ten years, your state will probably have a recycling program too. Tons of stores here take them for recycling. ____Not the real rusty Stats are here. ____Not the real rusty A tattoo of Jesus? WTF? ____Not the real rusty I don't think so I like it way better here since the wall went up. Why would I want to go back to the bad old days? All the nullos were the same guy anyway. ____Not the real rusty It's lift your head up HIGH you failure. Oddly, I've had this song stuck in my head for the past couple days. ____Not the real rusty The Promised HIREZ As I promised last time, here's some hirez of this whole thing. Me in demo gear. I have a better mask now, resistant to asbestos and lead dust. This is looking up from the living room -- I'm standing in what will be the bathroom. You can see a little bit of my iron vent stack between the top and middle joists visible here. It's that black pipe. The PVC elbow is part of the toilet drain. The living room ceiling, pre-beam. You can actually see the sag. The upstairs bath is in the left corner, above that closet door. That closet door, incidentally, backs on the downstairs bathroom and opens on to a wall. It's coming out too. The living room ceiling, after beams. Lovely new beams, all up and joist-hangered. I think the best part is the orange sticker with the "P" on it (on the far right). Those are freight stickers they stick on anything going out to the island, and half the stuff I own has one on it somewhere. After a while, you just stop removing them from stuff. That one is going to be encased in the beam box and will probably be there for the next century, till the next person comes along to fix whatever I've screwed up. Dude Like ALLLL of them and the last was only with grenade jump ____Not the real rusty Where are you at? Crappy young spruce / pine / fir is the plentiful local construction material hereabouts. I love modern dimensional lumber. Leave it sitting for a day or two and see all the fanciful shapes it twists itself into. ____Not the real rusty How about that I have spent time with some Europeans here, and they tend to be astounded by all the wood houses. They seem to fall into two categories about it -- half of them can't believe anyone would stoop to live in something made of mere wood (pronounced the same as "rancid cow dung"), and the other half think wood houses are extremely cool and impressive. I haven't met anyone who has no opinion about them. Which is odd, because I've been to Europe and myself had no particular opinion about any of the prevailing construction materials. What was impressive to me was the people whose house was built in like 1412, and it's just a house. Not a national or continental historic site. Simply a fairly well lived-in house. ____Not the real rusty Didn't have em on at the moment I wasn't causing wreckage, just avoiding the poisonous atmosphere. I do have to get a better set of goggles though. The glasses I have now don't work very well. ____Not the real rusty Heh You are a framing crew natural. :-) I find every aspect to be both fun and a pain in the ass in about equal measure. I get bored doing any one thing, so I guess it's good that I'm doing the whole project. With the possible exception of drywall. Drywall sucks. But it is pretty brainless, and sometimes that's what you need. I would have loved to go with joists over LVL too -- my basement has two solid 6x6 beams running the length of the house with joists sitting on them. But second floor, so it has to be all fancy. I've never worked with versalam. 15" eh? That must have been fun to lift. :-) ____Not the real rusty They've come up here before ..and I know K5 is already a den of secret fans, but don't miss Hum. In sort of vaguely the same general vicinity there was also Slint. PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love" from 1995 stands up pretty well. G Love and Special Sauce's self-titled 1994 album still is in moderate to heavy rotation here in the last bastion of the 90's. ____Not the real rusty PJ I really only like that album and a couple tracks from her others. The other albums always sort of seemed like more of the same but not as good, to me. ____Not the real rusty OGG FROG ____Not the real rusty A barrel roll? I had this conversation with my 3 year old daughter once. It was glorious. Me: Ellie, can you do a barrel roll? Her: A barrel roll? Me: A barrel roll. Her: A barrel roll? Me: A barrel roll. Her: A barrel roll? Me: ...etc We'd still be doing it but my wife made us stop. ____Not the real rusty A barrel roll? ____Not the real rusty Fail I'm sorry, I'm an old man and most of the meme-space in my head was already filled long ago with Guns 'N' Roses and Public Enemy lyrics. And the monorail song. ____Not the real rusty A barrel roll? ____Not the real rusty Soupon? Just a tiny bit for me, merci. ____Not the real rusty Where the story go? ____Not the real rusty I assumed he had done it Because there's at least one "shitty" and a fuck or two left in there. I assumed he had posted it thatw ay and they left it. If so, that's a huge clue to how fucked up this kid was. He had a little censor in his own head somewhere. How hard do you think that is to live with? ____Not the real rusty Looks like some kind of assassin bug. If so, and if you happen to have a garden, let the bastard out. Those things are great. ____Not the real rusty More... Looks just like the assassin bug nymph here (scroll down, or look at http://images.whatsthatbug.com/images/assasin_nymph_plague.jpg Maybe there was an egg in the coffee somehow, and it hatched in the can? That would be sort of a hoot. This just confirms what I already thought of mass produced ground coffee though. Sheesh. ____Not the real rusty Did I say I was working on a bathroom? By "bathroom" I actually meant "whole goddamn house." Apparently. The bathroom project has expanded. Here's the situation: My house is your classic "rectangle with a roof" New England style house, of the type you'd often see gussied up with some pediments and crap and called Greek Revival. Mine does not have any Greekiness to it, just the basic shape. It's about 22 feet wide and 35 feet long. The layout downstairs is like this (ascii art not to scale): back of house +--------------------------+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Play &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Room &pipe; &pipe; Kitchen &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +--------+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Bath &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +--------------------------+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Living Room &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +-===----------------------+ (door) front of house And upstairs, it's like this (also not to scale, displayed as the post-renovation layout): +--------------------------+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Bedroom &pipe; Bedroom &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +------------+----+--------+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Hall &pipe; Bath &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +-----------------&pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +________+ &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; Master Bedroom &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; +--------------------------+ A few things to note: The master bedroom is right above the living room, and is the same size and shape. The floor joists run across the shorter dimension of the house, and are continuous 2x6es. Downstairs, the wall between the kitchen and the playroom serves as a bearing wall, leaving that space with about a 14 foot span over the kitchen and an 8 foot span over the playroom. There was at one time a similar bearing wall in the living room, to the right of the front door, that split off an entrance hall from the living room and also split the space in front of that mid-house wall into an 8-foot span (hall) and a 14-foot span (living room). At some point, someone removed that living room wall. This itself was not a bad idea, since I imagine it made the downstairs into a sort of chopped up warren of little rooms. But they didn't replace the wall with anything structural, which left the living room ceiling / master bedroom floor composed of a clear 21 foot span in 2x6. For those of you who don't know off the top of your head, modern code specifies the maximum span of a 2x6 as 8 feet. Eight. Feet. We had 21 foot 2x6es. Now we need to take a short detour into some structural engineering basics here. There are two problems that happen when a house has insufficient structural support. One problem happens when a lot of heavy stuff is built on top of a weak structure: this is sag. We had some sag in the bedroom floor, because there was flooring and furniture above, and very heavy plaster and lath ceiling below pulling down on it. But there was no further structural weight above that 21 foot span, so actual collapse was not a major threat, and the deadweight sag was noticeable but not actively dangerous. The other problem with an underbuilt floor is deflection. That is, how much does the surface "bounce" when live load (like someone walking across it) is applied? This we had in spades. Code for a bedroom floor is "L/360", which means basically that across a 12 foot clear span, the surface should deflect a maximum of about 1/3 of an inch (12 feet x 12 inches per foot = 144 inches / 360 = 0.4 inch). That's about the threshold for "does it feel like it's moving?" More deflection than that is perceptible to a person walking across a surface, less than that is not perceptible. Needless to say, with a 21 foot span of 2x6, we had incredible live load deflection. I would guess the floor bounced as much as two or three inches under normal walking. My dog trotting across it would hit some sort of resonance frequency and bounce that bastard probably 6 inches. It was truly awful. I always knew that at some point we'd have to do something about this problem, but I hoped it would be part of a later overall downstairs renovation. Now we come to the second thing to note. The old upstairs bathroom was tucked in at the end of the hall. You see in my diagram above it now extends into the master bedroom space a little bit ("a little bit" here is about 2.5 feet). The new tub is pretty long, and the space was generally unworkably tiny before, plus the bedroom was larger than we need, so we're trading a little bedroom for a bigger bathroom. Unfortunately, this puts that piece of bathroom on top of that horrible weak bouncy floor. We're tiling the bathroom floor, and tile is very brittle and doesn't exactly like being deflected, so the whole thing was a recipe for cracked tile. Not to mention that when we did eventually put some jacks in downstairs and do something about that bedroom floor, we were going to play merry hell with the lovely new bathroom. All in all, it became clear that the time to fix this structural problem had come, rather sooner than anyone expected. We're all out of the house and instaled in my in-laws place for the time being, so if I'm going to have to rip up the living room, I guess now is the best time. So on Thanksgiving weekend, we started tearing the ceiling out of the living room. This, as you can imagine, created a tremendous mess and about 500 pounds of plaster and lath to clean up. But eventually, it was out. What I needed to do was add beams in the living room ceiling that would cut the 2x6 spans below 8 feet, and carry the upstairs weight down to the two main beams in the basement that carry the weight of the house. I'm lucky to have two continuous solid 6x6 beams that run the long dimension of the house (supported by 4 6x6 posts on concrete footers and built into the front and back sills of the house) and split it roughly in thirds lengthwise. I'm also lucky that the dimensions work out so I could insert two new beams into the living room ceiling directly above those and run the posts down through the living room floor to sit on the basement beams (in the middle of the house) and the sill (in the front wall). I called my friendly local lumberyard and asked them to spec out what I needed for these beams. I knew I'd be using LVLs (laminated veneer lumber) for the beams, because steel is heavy as hell and doesn't get you much in terms of reduced size per load capacity. LVL is basically a piece of engineered 1 and 3/4 inch plywood, produced at varying depths from about 6 inches to over 18 inches. You nail two or more of them together on site to build up a beam of the specified strength for what it has to carry. The lumberyard called Weyerhauser and eventually told me that I'd need two beams (I knew that) of 3-ply 11 and 7/8" LVL (I guessed that). That is, the 21 foot living room span would be split into three parts by two beams of 5 1/4" by 12". The length of the beams is 13' 10", the length from the front wall of the house to the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. This gets each of the three spans below 8 feet, and the size of the beams achieves L/360, since there's a bedroom above it. Now there's two ways I could go about installing these things. The simplest way, which I would have loved to do, would be to throw some jacks up in the living room to push the ceiling up to something resembling flat, stick the two beams under those ceiling joists perpendicular to them, stick some beefy posts under the beams, crack open a brew and call it a day. So the joists would just sit directly on top of the beam, the same way they do in the basement. The downside of this is that my beams are 12 inches deep. In an 8-foot living space, this means that before I have added any trim or anything to those ugly plywood beams, I've already reduced the headroom to 7 feet. I'm a 6 foot individual, and a 7 foot ceiling starts to feel a little perilous to me. Not to even mention it would look very strange, to have these enormous foot-deep beams in this relatively small space. The second way to do it is a bitch. What you have to do is jack up the ceiling to roughly flat, as before. Then on each side of one beam location you put up temporary walls that support all the ceiling joists (this can be done like regular framing, or more eaily by using more jacks and beefy top and bottom plates). Then you cut through each joist, leaving a gap between them as wide as the beam. Then you insert the beam, either by building it on the floor first and lifting the 250 pound monster all at once, if you can, or by putting each of the three layers of the beam in place one at a time and fastening them together when they're all up and supported by some temporary posts or jacks. Then you go back and add joist hangers to tie in each of the joists on both sides fo the beam. Then you do all that again for the second beam. This turns a continuous 21 foot span into three sub-8 foot spans loading the outside walls and the two new beams. It also has the advantage of burying at least 6 inches of the new beam up in the ceiling framing, so the beam only sticks down about another 6 inches. This does not look terribly strange, many living spaces have a beam about that size sticking into them somewhere. I went with plan #2. I used some 12 foot PT 4x4s I had lying around for top and bottom plates for my jack walls, and ended up using 6 jacks and wishing I had two more for the first beam. By the time we did the second beam, the first two jack walls were down so I had enough extra jacks then. I coulda used the extra two doing the first beam though. Predictably, the first one took two weeks and the second one took two days. There's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. So now the first beam is done and buttoned up, and the second one is six joist hangers away from being done. It's amazing to walk around on my bedroom floor and not feel it bouncing around. In add-on benefits, since we've already removed about half of the interior of the front wall, we're going to strip the rest of it and insulate it before putting up new sheetrock there. It'll be nice to have some insulation in the living room, for a change. I've also got insulation up in the bathroom, since it's turned cold here and the bathroom and living room both being open had basically created a continuous cellar to attic chimney that was sucking any and all heat directly out of the house. This was a scary project. There are very few things in remodeling that actually put your house at risk of falling down, but this is one of them. Say my jack walls are weak, or the floor under them is weak, and I underestimate the weight above when I go to cut the ceiling joists? Jack walls collapse, floor above folds downward, outside house walls possibly pinch inward (this house is balloon-framed)... worst case, the roof basically compresses down and crushes the house structure. Ever done that thing where you stand on an aluminum can and then tap the side of it, and it flattens instantly? Like that, only with my house. That's not a likely event, mind you. There's a lot of redundant strength in a house, even a weak house. My friend once demolished a rickety old barn, and his first try was to pull the main support column out of it with a backhoe, expecting it to fall down lickety-split. He pulled out the column and nothing happened. Nothing at all. Barely even creaked. He ended up having to tear it apart piece by laborious piece. But even a smallish risk of your house falling down is still a pretty scary thing to contemplate. I have not been sleeping well, and I'm damn glad this project is done. I'm going to close the living room ceiling back up with some painted MDF beadboard (oooooh, island-ey) and put some kind of crown moulding frippery on the beams and the new middle-of-the-house posts, which couldn't quite be buried in that wall for various reasons (put that in your trim budget and smoke it, localroger). The front-of-house posts will be enclosed in the front wall. Now I can get back to the actual point of all of this, which is the bathroom upstairs. When it got put on hold for this massive digression I had the drains in place and the new copper laid out but not sweated yet. That's the next thing, then I can lay down the new subfloor and start putting up walls. I have pictures of all of this on two different cameras, but none of them are available to me at the moment, so you'll have to wait for the HIREZ. Ugh At least this was old plaster on a surface that had been flexing half a foot daily for god knows how long. The plaster was covered with this paperboard ceiling covering, and under that the old stuff was basically already dust. A few swings of the claw end of a hammer would take down large sections at once. Cleanup of course took 10x as long as demolition. As always. ____Not the real rusty Black snot averted! I got me one of these. Very very nice. The quicklatch thing is especially well designed, like for when you really have to sneeze unexpectedly. ____Not the real rusty Uh... what? ____Not the real rusty Funny you should say that Taking down the living room ceiling released some vermiculite insulation, which almost certainly is asbestos contaminated zonolite. Well. What are you gonna do. I bought a better respirator and cleaned it up. ____Not the real rusty Architect! lulz Actually the downstairs bath was added not too long ago, when the man who used to own the house got too sick to go upstairs. His sons built him a bath downstairs. What we have as the playroom was his bedroom. However you're right about the vent stack, and why they put the bathroom there. That one is coming out eventually, to be replaced with a half bath on the other side of the downstairs. Yeah, the vent is 4" cast iron. Tying into it upstairs was fun, but it's done now. :-) And yeah, 21 foot 2x6. Jeeeeeeeeeeebus. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, they do And occasionally the city even sends an inspector out to stop any illegal building he happens to notice that day. But there is a long tradition of island builders ignoring such petty annoyances as permits and codes. Maine as a whole has no statewide building code though. The city is under the uniform national code, but many counties and unincorporated townships here don't have any codes at all. Maybe you should come up here and do your experimenting in R11S13 or whatever. ____Not the real rusty Most people do I never said it was a palace did I? :-) It's a good house for us. I love the location, I love the land, and we have plans to eventually make it a little bit bigger. Not much -- we'll probably add 120sf of porch and 300sf or so to the downstairs. That plus a workshop / office out in the back and I'll be happy. Not to even mention I don't have to live in the dirty south. ____Not the real rusty Newfies? I'd imagine the standard hunting fee is a half bottle of screech and a good story about life in the big wonderful world outside of blasted miserable Newfoundland. :-) ____Not the real rusty Newfoundland primer See The Boat Who Wouldn't Float by Farley Mowat for more on Newfoundland. It's possible things there have improved since the 80's, but I doubt it. ____Not the real rusty Doors & Windows I see doors and windows broken out, but it doesn't specify door and window finishing work. I would assume that D&W trim is lumped in with all the other trim. "Trim" is also interior and exterior. There's an awful lot of time and stuff involved in that little line item. Basically everything that goes into the difference between "tarpaper-covered empty box" and "finished house". They break out siding, so not that. But all the door and window surrounds, cornerboards, eaves, any porch trim there might be,. Inside you've got baseboards, mouldings, window trim, closet doors and closet trim, possibly stairs (I don't see that mentioned anywhere)... lots of stuff. The other factor is that trim carpentry is finish work, and finish carpentry is not unskilled or cheap labor. You actually have to sort of know what you're doing to make it look halfway decent. So labor costs per hour are probably significantly higher than a framing crew. The materials budget does look a little high to me. I can't quite figure out where $12k-$15k goes in materials. I would have guessed more like $7k-$8k. There must be something expensive in there that I'm not thinking of. ____Not the real rusty More on materials On page 16, they break out interior vs. exterior trim materials cost. Exterior basically includes the money I can't account for. So whatever it was that was so expensive, that's where you'll find it. ____Not the real rusty Probably the porch I would guess the porch trim too, absent anything but those pictures. Two stories worth of porch will eat up some materials. What is it with the houses they're building now completely minus trim? My sister rented a McMansion near DC a year or so back and I saw pictures of it. This gargantuan, like 4500 sf house, and it was just like you describe -- sheetrock right up to the windows, no mouldings anywhere, baseboard was like 1x3. What an awful thing to do to a house, or the inhabitants of it anyway. I guess this cost table shows why, if trim and trim carpentry is half the cost of building the thing. I'd rather have a 1200 sf house built right, myself. ____Not the real rusty I disagree Actually, I think it's going the other way. Trim is a high-COST add-on, and most people don't (apparently) notice or miss it much when it's gone. So if you can build two identical houses but cut 50-60% from the trim budget of one of them, chances are they will still sell for about the same price. So you tend to not see much in the way of trim on spec-built houses, up to and including the "sheetrock flush to window" sort of monstrosity discussed somewhere below. ____Not the real rusty Sunday, 1pm Ours goes off every Sunday at 1pm. I have never found out what information the sirens are intended to convey, apart from "It's 1pm on a Sunday." ____Not the real rusty #5 Lights, very bright, floating above me. Blurry. Cheerio I think. Pip-pip, bloody hell. What's the last thing I can remember? No, it was too long ago. It's gone now. Hackney. I never should have gone to Hackney. Some burke slugged me. How long have I been out? Do I even still, geniunely, exist? Maybe if I pinch myself. Ow. Ow, fuck. That really hurts. Guess so then. I'd kill for a fry-up, mate. I'm that hungry. ____Not the real rusty OS X is the difference OS X is a very nice OS. That's what still makes them substantially different from PCs. If anything, it's the reverse -- back in the day, they were different from PCs in that the hardware sucked as bad as the OS. These days, the hardware is the same stuff, and the software is a lot better. On the other hand, something on my MacBook just died and now it won't charge the battery anymore, so I'm not so sure I ought to be defending them. We'll see how bad they hit me to fix it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, probably. ____Not the real rusty Not my experience I don't know. UI is a matter of preference, but I quite like it. And when the hand-holding UI gets in my way, I just open a terminal. I also haven't had any trouble with fink or any of the fairly limited amount of ported stuff I've had to install. I use Macs to code perl and build websites. Generally the environment the sites are actually running in is elsewhere, so I'm mainly using a browser, BBedit, Photoshop, that sort of thing. No, it's not an especially heavy load to shoulder. I guess if you need to do more than that, use what you need. If you're doing a lot of stuff with fink, you should probably have a linux os *BSD box around for that stuff instead. It's worth pointing out that (to make up a conservative statistic) 90% of computer users need to do even less than me with them. The upside is that the macs (with the annoying exception of my currently screwed up macbook) just work, without a lot of fussing and nonsense. One other thing -- it would probably be worth using a mac for Parallels alone. That's saved me from having to have a whole separate machine just to test in fucking IE. ____Not the real rusty Um So what's up with the toilet? ____Not the real rusty lol Hah. Wow. I took that for a weirdly placed mirror. They must be big on team-building there. ____Not the real rusty Here's what you need to do Go in there late at night some day with a sheet of diamond-plate steel that's about 1" larger than the size of the hole all around. Screw it in to the wall with one-way screws. Then, for the look of the thing, stick tape all around the edges. ____Not the real rusty Ah Dragging an erect cock through cedar shavings tends to put a damper on the ol' sex drive. That sounds like the voice of personal experience speaking there. No, we don't want to know any more about that. ____Not the real rusty YOU SUCK Busy little bees, full of stings making honey. ____Not the real rusty That's the best I can do Two Zombies is too long. 9-fingered is waaaay too long. You want anything else, you're going to have to start going with acronyms. "9FVZZAMaZ"? ____Not the real rusty ROFL So I was scanning diaries, and I opened a few links in tabs, including this one, and then got reading about the latest Wikipedophile trainwreck... Eventually I was clicking back through open tabs and came to this one, no longer having any idea what it was from or why I opened it. Made my day right there. Thank you. ____Not the real rusty Never did Failing it since 1976. ____Not the real rusty srsly? I mean... seriously? Is there some sort of subculture involved here that I don't even know about? This shit sounds like MJ backing synths from 1982. ____Not the real rusty Hm More accurate than I could have known. So basically this is retro targeted to a musical period I do not believe needs resurrecting. Except for this of course. And this. ____Not the real rusty Sorry I was offline all weekend. Did aph take care of the update? ____Not the real rusty There you go Fixed? ____Not the real rusty It's a picturebook I'm amazed this is getting any attention at all. The EEE is, literally, a rebranded Sony Picturebook, possibly with some different chips in it. This computer was out years and years ago. I had one circa 2002. So, since that's the case, I can tell you exactly what's good and bad about it, and why you shouldn't get one. Good: Small, light, really super portable Bad: Take a look at this picture That's the Picturebook's and the EEE's Achilles heel. That's a lousy battery design. The battery's in the hinge, and the hinge (that is, the battery) is what you'll always be carrying the machine by. The battery clips will loosen and it'll start pulling out unexpectedly when you wish it wouldn't. Tiny screen. You'll really wish it was bigger. Tiny keyboard. I found it very hard to type on. My wife liked it though, so it depends on whether you have tiny, soft girlish hands. Probably. Generally flimsy construction. Though its size says "Take me everywhere!" its build quality says "Leave me on a velevet cushion in a glass case!" Now, the only difference is the price. For $300, it might be worth it. For the Picturebook's price, it was a ripoff. ____Not the real rusty Yes I ran linux on mine. The state of ACPI support in linux was an ongoing problem for me on it, and suspend/resume never worked properly. I had to patch it with swsusp, which is kind of slow. But yeah, it was a transmeta machine, and given that there was a fairly active group of people running linux on them. I'm sure the EEE is a lot more powerful, as you'd assume from the fact that it's been five years since the picturebook. But the battery design was the biggest problem with the picturebook, and it looks to be exactly the same with the EEE. Still and all, for $300? That's a pretty good price point. I might not have been so bothered if that's what the PB cost. ____Not the real rusty X10 REMOTE ACTUATOR lulz. I thought I was the only one who remembered those. ____Not the real rusty I second the whole bean suggestion If you're making 5 gallons of beer, splurge on one vanilla bean. I wouldn't even soak it -- just split it lengthwise and (seconding Altus) hang it in the bucket for about a day before you do your bottling. Vanilla really won't hang around long in any kind of heat, and cooking it won't improve it in any way. What you want is to just soak up the aromatics and then get it sealed as soon as possible. In just about every recipe that calls for vanilla you add it as late as possible. I would run with that. ____Not the real rusty Well done ____Not the real rusty A General Observation Sometimes, what you really need is a strap wrench. This message brought to you by me, and only paid for by your neighborhood Ace Hardware through their everyday competence and helpfulness. Like I'd change an oil filter No, I make it a habit not to work on cars. This was a plumbing issue -- I had to get the ancient standing waste off my tub without destroying it any more than it has already been destroyed. After struggling with it for several hours the other night, I finally got myself two strap wrenches, and they just solved the two major problems I was having. It's great to have the right tools for the job at hand. ____Not the real rusty HIREZ PRUF The drain in question Problem area (snazzy red arrow) Cross-threaded argh Two strap wrenches were exactly what I needed to get that cap part off the rest of the drain pipe. It also got the bell off the filler pipe, which was my other nightmare. Also, in the last pic you can see my camera and fingers, but not my dong because this is not eBay. You may also observe the luxury of my fabulous multi-million dollar island home. Next month, in fact, we're going to be featured in a major spread in Modern Squalor magazine. ____Not the real rusty Nope The larger top tube screws down directly onto the smaller bottom tube. The strap wrenches took it apart nicely. Now I'm screwed though, because the drain shoe underneath the tub is screwed up. Some jackass at some point ground off the threads inside it and soldered a drain pipe on to it. So now the surface I need to pry against to unscrew it is so thin it'll just break when I pry. Even if I get the goddamn thing off, I don't know if it's restorable. Hell. ____Not the real rusty Maybe The thing about this is I'm trying to get this drain restored. I mean, if I was just replacing it, I'd have had the sawzall out long ago. But I want to save as many pieces as I can, so I won't have to pay for expensive antique replacements for them. This drain shoe might be fubar though. I'm going to consult with my restoration guys and see if they have a replacement. I sort of think it's done for already. If so, it's hacksaw time. ____Not the real rusty Restoration The restoration is being done by a shop in CA who specialize in these things. This drain is already missing a ton of parts, but they say they have another similar one they can cannibalize for my job. I'm just not sure if this particular piece is one they can scab in or not. There are a couple of pieces that they probably can't replace or remanufacture -- the mixing manifold, in particular. Fortunately, I have that and it's in ok shape. Anyway: You can't assemble it properly now that the threads are gone, and you can't reassemble it improperly if you're going for nice restoration. Pretty much says it. I don't think I can get the fucking thing off anyway, regardless fo what I'd like to do with it. ____Not the real rusty Really? In the last pic, right in the center of the frame, on top of the gap between parts, there's a dark half-circle. That's the camera lens. The gray square behind it is the camera, and you can see two fingers, one ot the left of the camera and one above on the right. You can actually even see my wedding ring, at the bottom of the frame. Ah hell, here's an annotated version. There's my utterly wasted ten minutes for the day. ____Not the real rusty I will post more In tonight's good news, I've managed to tie the 4" iron bell to 3" PVC, and got the drains for the sink and tub arranged. I also have confirmed that there is enough room to drain the toilet. Tomorrow I've got to notch a joist and the drains will be complete. And none of them even have to flow uphill. Which is a plus. The tub guy says 2-3 weeks after they get the stuff. So I actually might be able to hook it up around when everything else is done. Anyway, I will be posting more. This damn thing is going to absorb my life for the next month or two. ____Not the real rusty Also (like not letting us comment on a comment from the 0-5 days) What does that mean? ____Not the real rusty Wow Just... wow. ____Not the real rusty Nah It doesn't really work like that. This is old plumbing -- it's ornate, but none of it is decoration. They didn't build things like that. The top is all set -- I got the pieces apart, and they're in fine shape. The resto place will buff them as best they can and replate everything with nickel. Most of the gouges in those pictures are in the plating anyway. The shoe, I got the word from the place to kill it, so killed it is. The strainer is in fine shape though, so they'll either match an existing part ot it or re-machine a new shoe. This strainer, by the way, is a beauty. At least a pound of solid brass. This is one of those "they don't make them like that anymore" items right here. Now I just need to get the feet off the tub (for sandblasting and replating as well) and one of my two biggest worries is done. Halleleujah. ____Not the real rusty No no, jesus no No, the tub is just being scraped and repainted here. I just have to paint the outside -- the inside of the tub, while slightly dirty, is actually damn near pristine. None of the bad scratches or staining you usually see on a tub this old, so it doesn't need refinishing. The plating is for the feet and the drain. We're painting the outside a very light blue, and the plumbing and feet will be nickel. ____Not the real rusty No trouble here What do you think I use the ground auger for? Opens jars up to 12" wide and 4 feet tall. ____Not the real rusty See thread with t1ber below for HIREZ ____Not the real rusty Uh A bath? ____Not the real rusty Oh but I am You'll see. It's always darkest before the dawn. I'm actually nearly past the worst of it. If I can get this drain assembly off for restoration and get the toilet drain situated, I'm over the hump. The rest is just a lot of work, but it's all stuff I know how to do. ____Not the real rusty A Modest Proposal The real one. Recognizable by every /. wannabe titling their attempts the same without knowing where it comes from. ____Not the real rusty Offer them on eBay If you're lucky, you won't have to pay someone too much to take them off your hands. ____Not the real rusty Much more interesting Red Mars has a lot more interesting ideas in it than Mars. They're both clumsily written, in that way that SF is apparently allowed to be. If you read Red Mars, you can give the Bova a miss. It adds nothing. Blue Mars and Green Mars were just crap though, I thought. Robinson pretty much shot his wad on the first one. ____Not the real rusty We need a census I sometimes get the feeling that 80 or 90% of K5 brews their own beer. ____Not the real rusty Let it be done ____Not the real rusty Gaaaaah You just hurt my brain with that. ____Not the real rusty Life always creeps in I think that's one of the things that keeps me going here. Even when most of us are trying really hard not to let it, life still creeps in. ____Not the real rusty I had one of these ...when it was made by Sony and called the Picturebook. I liked it, but it was ultimately too flimsy. The battery ended up wiggling itself loose with absurd frequency. It was nice to travel with though. ____Not the real rusty That's a good idea Why not just let everyone tag the archives? Sure, there'd be lots of silliness, but I imagine overall it would be more useful than nothing. I will put it on the list. ____Not the real rusty Ha "The list" is an entirely theoretical concept, for the most part. Whenever I happen to think about what might be on the list, it sort of gets reconstituted depending on what I'm thinking about at the moment. I would, though, really like to update K5's codebase to include a lot of the stuff I've been working on in the last couple years. That's a project, mostly because it would involve a complete rebuild of the interface to actually resemble a modern site. It's in the works, just at a creeping pace. The tagging thing wuld be no more than an hour or so of work though. So it's in a whole different section of the nonexistent list. My other thought was why not let story authors tag their own stuff. There'd be a ton of stuff still left out, by people who've moved on or disappeared, but we'd get a good number of things that way, probably. Might be a start. ____Not the real rusty Yeah The plan doesn't involve changing the interface much, if at all. Just re-engineering it so it isn't such a godawful clusterfuck of FONT tags under the hood. ____Not the real rusty Too old school? I still read MetaFilter almost every day. ____Not the real rusty I can totally sympathize I spent two hours last night taking apart an ancient lead and oakum joint in a cast iron drain pipe. If I had a shotgun handy and thought it stood a chance of working, I don't know that I wouldn't have taken a couple of shots at the goddamn thing. ____Not the real rusty QA? QA, afaik, stands for "quality assurance." Have you ever seen quality or assurance here? I rest my case. Oakum -- and this is just fascinating if you're a total dork like me -- is jute fiber, what they used to make jute rope out of, impregnated with pitch and bentonite clay. Bentonite expands greatly when it gets wet, so basically it's a seam-sealing material. They used to use it to caulk the seams between boards on wooden ships. And probably still do, if you have one of those kind of boats. What I didn't know was that it was also used in plumbing. Back in the day, the larger waste pipes were all cast iron, and the way you fit them together was you slip the smaller end of one fitting (the "spigot") into the bigger flared end of the other (the "bell"). Then in the gap all around between the two you stuff in oakum, which will swell up and seal the joint if it gets wet. And on top of the oakum, they actually poured in melted lead. Then they'd hammer in the lead to spread it out and force it against the pipes all around. So when the oakum swelled, it didn't just pop out of the joint. This is how the drain in my bathroom was attached to the vent pipe, which is all 4" cast iron. If they're done right, you get a seal that will last forever. But to get them apart you have to drill out most of the lead and sort of scrape and pry enough of it out to bash the fitting apart. I broke a good half-dozen drill bits, but got the bastards separated. What's great is that to convert this to PVC I'll need to make a new lead and oakum joint, where the spigot end is PVC and the lead is actually lead wool caulked in over the oakum, because PVC can't handle the temperature of melted lead (and because I'm not exactly skilled enough to pour a horizontal lead seam). ____Not the real rusty Thank you for the zeros I do enjoy imagining you reading my comments and groaning. I like to make the cool kids feel icky. ____Not the real rusty Mwaahahahaha Exactly. ____Not the real rusty Not very good There are few things I find more distasteful than a purported eulogy that is in fact all about the eulogizer. Even H.L. Mencken didn't do that. Skewer the man all you feel you need to, although god knows he did nothing to deserve it from you. But don't make it about yourself. Your instinct to keep this on HuSi was right. That's the place for self-involvement. ____Not the real rusty Yes, probably. That would have instantly nullified my criticism, at least. "Eulogy" sort of implies something that this, I thought, didn't make it to. I could possibly have observed that this wasn't really up to johnny's standard either, but I probably wouldn't have been moved to. Anyway, consider it observed. ____Not the real rusty I'm drinking my beer and tearing up my house I'm consuming my first beer (which turned out just fine, thank you all for your help) and tearing the floor out of my upstairs bathroom. My in-laws are away on a cruise for three weeks, so we've moved into their house so I can do a lot of noisy and dirty work on the upstairs bathroom in our house. It's a complete gut and rebuild, including expanding it slightly into what was my bedroom. Well, still will be my bedroom. Just slightly smaller. You get the idea. It's unbelievable how much stuff there is in a bathroom. This is a small room -- about 67 square feet of floor space. And yet it will involve every system in the house. Even heating, because the only heating duct upstairs runs through this bathroom. I'm going to extend it up into the attic and then run vent ducts to each of the rooms from there. So heat, electrical, plumbing, walls, ceiling, subfloor, tile, wainscoting, blueboard, windows. And in a bathroom, every damn thing has to be special to deal with moisture. GFI electrical circuit, blueboard instead of drywall, cement backer under the tile, ceiling vent and on and on and on. Oh, and new tarpaper and siding outside on the dormer. I'm almost done with demolition. I need to take up the old floor, and that's about it. Monday all the building materials arrive, and I'll probably go shopping for plumbing, heating and electrical this weekend. Christ I'll be glad when this is done. Also, this beer is good. Ok, back to work. Ha Who's petty now? ____Not the real rusty But are you also petit? ____Not the real rusty The bathroom I don't know if it's the center of the house, but I do know that working on one is like doing neck surgery. ____Not the real rusty shop? Who'd have to shop? ____Not the real rusty Yes I know I was making a joke. Like, "Who'd have to shop a large black man taking a dump in my bathroom when there's already one there doing just that practically all the time?" Didn't quite come across, I guess. They can't all be winners. ____Not the real rusty I will My only "before" is unfortunately after we already took out the sink and toilet. But man, this really was the foulest most ghetto bathroom I've ever seen. It was just... unbelievably vile. In every way. Right now, gutted with cellulose insulation and plaster dust everywhere, it's cleaner than it was when it was a functioning bathroom. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, plastic There's plastic feed lines now, that are supposed to be pretty good. For a long time plastic had a mold problem, but it seems they've solved it. At least that's what they say. I think it remains to be seen. ____Not the real rusty Ha A man after my heart. I'm like "Yeah, when I see a hundred year old house still plumbed with plastic I'll believe in it." Self-defeating, I know. Hey -- the cider I was going to send you is, not to put too fine a point on it, crappy. I bottled it, and pondered for a while and decided I think it kind of sucks. I'm letting it age some more and see if that helps. Basically, I used too much oak chips, and the oakeyness is overwhelming. Time might fix it. But I'd hate to send it off to you and have you guys also think it sucks and that cider is just not good. Or mine isn't, in any case. Anyway, one way or another, I have not forgotten I owe you cider. I've got 25 gallons in progress from this year, so if the last batch still sucks next summer, I'll send you some of that instead. ____Not the real rusty Stuff I'm only tiling the floor, so I'll use a durock underlayment over 3/4 CDX. The walls are (everyone tells me this is a terrible idea but screw them, I know better) 3 feet of poplar beadboard wainscoting with mahogany stain and (lots of coats of) spar varnish, and painted blueboard above that. And yeah, I'm using copper. It's expensive, but I don't need that much and I'm comfortable working with it. I've never even seen anyone install plastic water pipe, so I'm wary of trying to do it myself. Plumbing is hot/cold up from the basement, split off to the sink, run across the room to the bath and a separate shower valve, and around a corner to the toilet. Altogether, it's probably 60 ft of so of pipe. The bath/shower is going to be cool. We found an ancient 60" clawfoot tub at a salvage yard, with the remains of a standing waste and low-bell filler. I'm going to send that out to be restored, and then the shower is a separate valve that runs to a rain showerhead in the ceiling over the tub. So, like, not only am I doing this, I'm basically skipping all the easy just-install-it fixtures they have now. Ah well. I have to do things the hard way. ____Not the real rusty Yep My friend has one, and he's got these ceramic foot pad things that go under the feet and spread out the weight. I'll probably get those as well, and also put some extra cross-framing in the general vicinity of the feet under the floor. It's a big tub. It's the only tub I've ever been able to sit in with my legs out straight. Also, it weighs about a million pounds and nearly killed us getting it up the stairs. I would gladly burn down the house rather than try to take it back downstairs. ____Not the real rusty Ha I wish. No, I've been going to work all day, having dinner, then working on the house from 7-10pm. ____Not the real rusty Don't you learn from history? If we took Hitler's strategy, we'd have to make fun of HuSi and then invade and take it over. I don't want it. Hitler would have been better off if he'd stayed in Germany. I will not make the same mistake. ____Not the real rusty Do it on the edge of a boat Someone recent shot himself on our ferry, arranging it so that he fell into the water. Pros: Not much cleanup, other than someone has to fish you out of the water Cons: Lots of extra hassle for a few dozen people who were just trying to get home. ____Not the real rusty I think we have achieved a coherent worldview. ____Not the real rusty I doubt he was thinking of K5 If I'm aware of it when my time comes, I very much doubt I'll be thinking of K5. And if I'm not, why would anyone else be? You do wonder though, don't you? How utterly irrelevant and trivial will your last thought on earth be? It'll probably be something like "I wish I had some water." ____Not the real rusty I don't know about that I don't know what the trail's like there. It's easily possible for someone, who maybe hasn't done any serious hiking in a while, to struggle even with 10 miles a day. 10 steep rocky difficult miles can be a real bitch. I did a trip a couple winters ago where 14 miles in a day nearly killed me. Took about 14 hours too. That was on snowshoes, but also was mostly downhill. ____Not the real rusty 512M of ram? Dude, 1994 called... ____Not the real rusty Probably not My memory's not so good. Still, 512 is kinda lame these days. ____Not the real rusty And he looked about 10 too ____Not the real rusty Macs are quite good these days ...but the crap from that guy was classic old-timey Mac zealotry, when it was actually not true at all. Back when Macs were, in fact, overpriced and underpowered, and crashed all the time because the OS was non-multitasking (!) You can divide the people who understand why Macs are decent now from those who don't by asking them how many times a day they use the console. ____Not the real rusty Oh christ were they bad I didn't use them either, but I worked in a room with three OS 9 users for a while. The day was punctuated with the mac startup sound as they crashed again and again and again... it was truly absurd. ____Not the real rusty Damn right Him and johnny, two that should be much more widely published and better known. You mark my words -- long after we're all dead, they'll be "discovered" by some 23rd century hipsters and finally recognized as the true greats of this corrupt and useless age. ____Not the real rusty I like the cut of ur jib. ____Not the real rusty Dumbass It's "Maths am hard." ____Not the real rusty Looks like no I can't find any in my spam folder. Looks like I missed ut on some great deals on C14l15 and V111agxcra though. ____Not the real rusty Yes! ____Not the real rusty It's like if you fucked a snake in the ass and he turned around and said "dude, how in the hell did you even find my ass? It's like 3mm wide? WTF?" And then bit your cock off. (I like this return to the Tex of yore, btw. Very funny.) ____Not the real rusty OMG A BOAT CONSTRICTOR!!!111 LEAVE MY BOAT ALONE!!!!1111nine/eleven ____Not the real rusty They admit it's by design So it's still not a bug, but it is a stupid design. You're complete right -- "no-cache" does not mean "never store a local copy." It means "don't hand out the local copy when the user tries to load this from the net." ____Not the real rusty I missed... ...above where you pointed out "no-store." Dur. So yeah, I just repeated in a lot more words what you said. ____Not the real rusty Looks like no All I can say is, as someone who runs websites and would be deciding whether to use no-cache or not, I would never have thought of it working that way. I would assume, and I'd think most website operators would also assume, that copies get written to disk all the time for all kinds of reasons. As a website, I don't see how I have anything much to say about that. The point of no-cache for me has always been to force the client to refresh of content rather than display cached content. Also, now that I look it up, it appears the official protocol explicitly describes the commonly understood meaning ("If the no-cache directive does not specify a field-name, then a cache MUST NOT use the response to satisfy a subsequent request without successful revalidation with the origin server.") And also, there is a "no-store" directive (next section down in that link), which specifies the behavior that MS is incorrectly applying to no-cache here. So I will go further than before, and say that given "no-store" exists, this behavior is demonstrably wrong, not just a poor choice. If you wanted the client not to store a file, you would use no-store. MS loses again. ____Not the real rusty Well, not exactly My take on the gist of the bug is that Word won't automatically open a file because it would normally have gotten it from a temp cache. It doesn't say that it's not possible to download and save a document and then open it. Just that it won't do it for you. Granted I'm describing a totally different situation at this point, so it doesn't mitigate the lose. But what it sounds like is: If there's no-cache, the doc should work normally. It just should be refreshed live from the server and not the cache If there's no-store, it should give you a dialog that says, basically, "Can't open that directly, but would you like to save it to disk?" Probably followed by something dumb like "Yes No Cancel". They probably never even heard of no-store. Or have decided it means, like, User Cannot Shop Here. ____Not the real rusty Man, I hope not I played with matches. I assume all kids play with matches. For the vast majority of them, nothing bad happens. We're supposed to think now that maybe you'll burn 100,000 square miles and kill dozens? I call that a mistake, combined with very bad timing, at worst. ____Not the real rusty What? What? Vampires + The Arctic + Josh Hartnett + Based on a comic book? How can that not kick ass? That's, like, all three of my favorite movie themes and Josh Hartnett. I'll netflix it. I suspect that maybe your mistake was that you went to a theatre to see it. I find that imposes too high a bar for me to enjoy most movies. But I'm happy with almost any crap at home. ____Not the real rusty DO NOT WANT ____Not the real rusty failfaggot zomg we never will. ____Not the real rusty Sounds awesome And ten miles a day is a nice pace. Have a great time! ____Not the real rusty I always thought it was interesting ...how much of science fiction is about politics, and not about science or technology at all. Like, most of it. The vast majority. I have no particularly good idea why this is, but it's interesting. This as a decent book review. Why not in the Q? ____Not the real rusty Wicked mashup! Copyleft yo! Fair use! ____Not the real rusty It depends Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes a certain kind of collection of otherwise non-copyright data is in fact copyrighted. It is possibel to defend copyright on a database of public info. Basically, if you're worried about it, there's probably a reason. Not reading the Terms won't save you from being bound by them. If you can make money from this, your best bet is probably to talk to the web service and see if you can work out a deal. ____Not the real rusty Uh I think that was supposed to be a reply to #4 above, not this one. Sorry for the apparent non-sequitur. My ability to competently use my own site has been pretty weak lately. ____Not the real rusty IGTT 3/10 Too obvious. You should have turned it around, and written about how Dumbledore being gay will in fact help the world, by getting little boys more in touch with their gay side, thereby reducing violence and increasing personal hygeine and interior design quality worldwide. ____Not the real rusty Dunno Never heard of it. What's it doing blocking websites to begin with? ____Not the real rusty I am voting for: Tom Allen for Senate. Chellie Pingree for 1st District House Whoever the Democrat is for President. I like John Edwards, but I don't think he's going to get the nomination. Besides him, I don't care much whether it's Obama or Hillary. I'm not excited about either, and won't likely be very interested in that race. ____Not the real rusty Hey, it works I believe that any Democrat in this race will do more of what I want than any of the Republicans, so they get my vote, even if I don't like them. I will be voting for a couple Republicans locally, because I'm rather pissed off about some specific things the Dems here did. It'll be a fart in a high wind, but it'll make me feel better. ____Not the real rusty What? I'm confused. What are you talking about? ____Not the real rusty Heh No. Affordable housing is a big issue here though, and because of exactly what you say. A lot of peole from fucking NY come here and build their big fuck-off mansions that they stay at for two weeks every summer, and in the process they price most of the actual citizens of the state out of the real estate market. Lobstermen haven't been able to live anywhere near the water in most places for years. That's just retarded. Because some goombah wants to look at it in August? Screw that. ____Not the real rusty Lobster laws The lobster laws are mostly voluntary, and also mostly designed by the lobstermen themselves. V-notching, for example, was completely voluntary and enforced by lobstermen for years before it became law. I'm sure you can find someone to say otherwise, but the lobster fishery is, along with Alaskan wild salmon, one of only two sustainable fisheries in the US. The laws are working. ____Not the real rusty Undergrad We've all got two years of college physics or equivalent here, right? ____Not the real rusty Oh, I do. ____Not the real rusty That would be great If what he truly believed had more philosophical depth than I could scrape up at any Kappa Kappa Gamma pledge drive mixer. ____Not the real rusty I like Edwards But I'm not all that interested in the Presidential race this cycle. I don't think Edwards is going to get the nomination, and besides him, none of the others move me. I'll vote for whichever Democrat we nominate. ____Not the real rusty Let me count the ways Ron Paul: Wrong On Everything. No abortions for anyone! (Oh, actually, I mean no abortions for the poor in Jesusland. Lots of abortions for the rich coasties.) No health care for anyone! No taxes, therefore no government services for anyone! (The rich will be fine without them, don't sweat it.) Close the borders! Boot the illegals! I have not thought about any of the dire side-effects of kicking out a major part of our national work force! Who cares! Rising inflation is killing social security! (WTF?) NAFTA and the ICC want to take away your herbal supplements! Oh NOES! The UN wants to tax us! (Oh my fucking god, I can't even mock this anymore.) Ron Paul is a straight-up nutbar. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but he's got fuck-all chance of winning, and the fact that he appeals to you should make you think real hard about your own political beliefs. He's basically put together a checklist of nonsense designed to appeal to your own racism, sense of entitlement, and sense of personal superiority. In the enormously unlikely event he actually won, he'd be completely unable to implement any of his platform. I'm with him on Iraq and gun rights, but I can find those positions elsewhere, without the rest of Ron Paul's package of stupidity. ____Not the real rusty More Jesusland doesn't like abortions. Coasties do. If everyone lives under the set of laws and customs they prefer, isn't that better than making all 300 million of us follow the same set of laws? We all get to suffer the results of making abortion illegal in places where people are too poor and ignorant to know better. I'll tell you what. When Jesusland becomes its own country, and the rest of us can say "go fuck yourselves" when they come for the handouts, then I'll agree with you that they can do what they want. Until then, I'm not interested in my country suffering from the ignorance of someone else's creation myth. You could just, ya know, dip into your monocle polish fund and buy your own fucking health care. Health care is not a free market. In Maine, no one can afford individual health insurance. We have a monopoly insurer here, but even where there's choice, if you don't regulate prices, who's going to choose death rather than paying the price the health care industry wants? The mess we have now is the result of pretending it's a free market. It will continue to get worse, and the longer we wait for national health care, the harder it will be. Check the constitution, if that's what you and Ron want to refer back to. LIFE, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's the first one. How can we possibly assent to a government that ignores LIFE as a basic right? If you like taxes and having the government wipe your ass for you, just move to California or Massachusetts. I'm sure they'd be happy to raise state taxes to compensate for the lost federal fundage. Ha! I already live in the state with the highest per-capita tax rate. And you now what we get for that? Jack Shit. Just what we get from the federal government. Don't get me wrong -- our spending priorities are utterly screwed. People hate taxes here because they don't get anything for them. But we could actually serve our needs with the tax money we collect. Just cutting taxes is the wrong way. We need to change our spending drastically. The dollar is worth less than it was and falling. The dollar is worth less compared to other currencies. This is not inflation. Inflation is not rising. Ron Paul asserts that it is. He is wrong. The International Criminal Court is trying to regulate our dietary supplements? That was slightly hyperbolic. He is screeching about the UN meddling in supplements. His thing on the ICC was a different issue. The UN tax. WTF Ron? Who does he think pays for the UN? That was the point where I just gave up. ____Not the real rusty Q to the A On abortion: How is this different than now? Ron Paul is promising to make Federal abortion policy give way to state policy. Right now, it's the opposite. The federal government doesn't run any clinics, but they enforce Roe V Wade, which ruled that abortion is legal, nationwide, no matter what the states want. Also: If it wasn't different from now, what would be the point of promoting it as a difference in his platform? Dummy. I wasn't aware that he was going to outlaw the healthcare that the vast majority of us have now. He has no apparent plan on extending health care access to the millions of Americans who don't have it. Furthermore, he appears to oppose the work of the FDA to keep our food supply safe. Right on! Food safety is a UN plot! If you think they should be here, then advocate that they all be fast-tracked for naturalization, 3 months and they're citizens. Open the borders. I do advocate for it. Amnesty for all working immigrants in the country now, and open the fucking borders. We might stand a chance of being a great country again. It's not just the practical argument, it's also the principled one. Closed borders will always enforce an illegal workforce, an underclass, which is subject to none of the labor protections we've fought for over the last hundred years. For illegals, wages are too low, jobs are too dangerous, and the social safety net is nonexistent. This hurts all of us. Our meat-packing is done by illegals not because Americans won't do the job, but because we won't do it at the poverty wages and under the deadly conditions that illegals will. No illegals == no underclass sweatshops. Simple as that. Immigration is what made the country great. Make them all legal workers and we could also boost up the workforce and help bail ourselves out the baby boomer social security nightmare, as a handy side-effect. I wonder who ate all that money? It wasn't inflation, I can tell you that. Your middle-class wages, as you rightly point out, have not risen. Check out wage changes for the top 1% or 1/2%. They've skyrocketed. It's no damn secret who ate all that money. And cutting their taxes isn't going to change that in any way that will help you. If people want to believe in pseudoscience, shouldn't they have the right? a) Not all supplements are pseudoscience. I use melatonin regularly, and it works great. b) I wish like hell the FDA would get into the business of ensuring that when I buy my melatonin, it actually contains what it claims it does. Right now, I just have to hope for the best. Not to even mention that the maximum effective dose is 0.3 mg, which you can't buy because some university has a patent on it. Only in an unregulated market... c) "Blame the UN" is retarded reason for anything. The UN is almost entirely funded by the US, and has no actual power. ____Not the real rusty That explains a lot When asked about Kucinich, he claimed that they saw eye to eye on alot of issues. He didn't rule him out as a running mate. And his biggest objection to things like social programs had to do with reducing deficit spending first, so that we could actually afford these things. I think Kucinich is wron about almost everything too. It's true, the two distant ends do tend to meet in the middle. Rusty, I dare you to spend an hour or two writing up some real objections to his policies, and suggest others What, am I running for President now? This has been an entertaining thread, but the man has no chance of winning even the primary, let alone the general. I'm not too concerned about talking people out of voting for him. ____Not the real rusty Yeesh I was just going on his own "Issues" pages. That's a nice one. I notice he doesn't draw much attention to it. Hey, while we're at it, let's outfit some privateers to sail against the music pirates! Lol. ____Not the real rusty Uh? Lower the minimum starving wage? You have to be kidding. I would actually open the borders and also raise the minimum wage. But it's not an issue you can do anything about with one decision. Doing the above alone would just shove a lot more work overseas. It would also take policies to implement fair trade protection. We need to stop ordering our companies to follow our wage and safety laws, and then fucking them because we don't require the same from any offshore importers. "Free Trade" is entirely responsible for the drain of manufacturing work in the US, but the solution to free trade is not protectionism, it's fair trade. The answer is to raise our taxes on imports to make up the difference between what they cost to make here, and what they'd cost to make there if they were forced to follow the same regulations. Countries that implement worker-protection parity can import freely. Slave nations will have to pay. ____Not the real rusty Oh christ Call me back in ten years, we'll talk then. "As long as no one is coerced to participate." Roffle. ____Not the real rusty You've just graduated high school, right? I believe I saw you say that elsewhere. If not, my apologies. But you sound like me when I had just graduated high school. I don't mean to be condescending, but all the thing you think now will probably change. Please be open to that, because they need to. ____Not the real rusty Hm... any day now ;-) I don't know. I know exactly where you're coming from. Like I said, I thought so too. I think the biggest change is when you start to see that calling for self-reliance is not just wrong but a harmful lie when the playing field is so badly rigged from the start. Given a level playing field, sure, let's all see who can work hardest and succeed. But I can't see a level playing field anywhere. I see a cliff, and the middle class falling off it. In the world we have, saying "hey, self-reliance man!" is like telling that guy falling off the cliff that he better grow some wings, and fast. I'm not a big fan of handouts either, and I do agree that handouts and entitlements are a temporary band-aid at best, and a way to continue the problems at worst. But I don't see anyone making the kind of systemic changes we need to fix the systemic changes we;ve made that are screwing the people surviving on handouts. If you can parse that last sentence at all. I've been typing for too long. :-) ____Not the real rusty Voluntarily No one voluntarily enters into a contract that is unconscionable. I'm thinking whores and pimps here. Let's see. You fuck men for money, and I'll take all the money and beat you. According to you, no one will ever enter into that contract. So why do they? ____Not the real rusty I don't know You said "No one voluntarily enters into a contract that is unconscionable." That's a pretty categorical statement. I was just thinking of counterexamples. How about illegal Mexican slaughterhouse workers? They get paid shit to risk death. I would say that people enter into unconscionable contracts all the time, as a result of the two parties to the contract being wildly divergent in relative power. Legitimate contracts can only be concluded between equals. Whenever you have an overclass and an underclass, you will get contracts that are unconscionable. Pimps and whores, giant agribusiness and illegal immigrants, and so forth. The whole idea of federal labor and wage standards is to give the weak party the power of the US government in negotiating their contracts. Before we did that, we had the age of child labor, sweatshops, and robber barons. US citizens do have every right to say "fuck you, I quit." And those who do, have every right to lose their home and have their children taken by Child Protective Services, and live in shelters. Big fat pile of terrific rights they have, there. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget One fall off the roof you're roofing for minimum wage. Oops, you're crippled. ____Not the real rusty You have to give up You gotta know when to hold 'em, and know when to fold 'em. When you're in an argument with someone who claims that by definition, any contract entered into by two parties is not unconscionable, it's time to walk away. It may, in fact, be time to run. :-) ____Not the real rusty I see one problem You seem to be saying that contracts only exist if they're legal documents. That is, you're addressing one small branch of overall contracts. There's a large body of law dealing with oral contracts and implied contracts, which are not written out or signed. I'm also talking about de facto contracts which are unenforceable due to, as you point out, the black market nature of the transaction. I'm trying to point out that wehn we create black markets, we also create unconscionable contracts, since the contracts will exist, but the parties will not have equal power of enforcement. And yes, my mortgage lender and I are equal in the contract we make. If I break it, they can call the power of the state doewn upon me to compel me not to, and if they break it, I can do likewise. ____Not the real rusty It's both together That's my point. If you raise the minimum wage, you increase the incentive to hire illegal workers. But if you raise the minimum wage and eliminate the notion of "illegal worker," you just helped kick a whole lot of people up within reach of the middle class. And I said what I'd do to enforce fair trade. Ahem:The answer is to raise our taxes on imports to make up the difference between what they cost to make here, and what they'd cost to make there if they were forced to follow the same regulations. Countries that implement worker-protection and living-wage parity can import freely. Goods from slave nations will get more expensive.Tariff policy. That's all it takes. ____Not the real rusty Why not? Again, they haven't minded the immigration process to date for things like insurance and social security, do you reasonably expect immigration services to go kicking in doors and telling these people they will become citizens Or Else? If, as you think, free and unencumbered immigration still doesn't end illegal workers (and I suppose it wouldn't completely) then I'd be all for maximum enforcement to end illegal employment. I would lean more toward enforcing it at the company level. I.e. document your workers with your payroll tax filings every year. If you cannot, we will fine you something like 100 times whatever you paid the laborers you can't document. With a much larger labor pool, I don't see what company would take that risk. ____Not the real rusty Er, also So then they sell to China or Europe That's fine. They sell their stuff there, and we make our own stuff here. We'll see who hurts worse: us, keeping our money in our own economy, or them, losing the (by a large margin) biggest consumer goods market in the world. ____Not the real rusty What bothers me I was down in MA a few weeks ago, helping my friend with the cranberry harvest, and he was telling me about this guy who worked for them when his grandfather owned the bogs. This dude was basically just farm labor. He helped out around the bogs, worked on equipment, did whatever needed doing through the year. He made enough money to support a family, his wife didn't work, he had a few kids, they owned a house and a car. A farm laborer. He was solid middle class. So what the hell happened? Economic policies happened. This isn't an inevitable shift -- we decided to make it happen, maybe by accident, but we did it. We've got to fix this. There's a number of other things that would help, and are probably needed to make any difference. I don't mean to make it sound like I think that's a magic bullet. But it's one thing we ought to do among many. ____Not the real rusty I like John Edwards ...however, my support is sort of moderately better than lukewarm. On a scale of 32 degrees to 212 degrees, I guess I'd be at about 110 degrees on Edwards. I'm at about 40 degrees on everybody else though, so that's not bad. I like Edwards' health care plan. I think he's the only one saying we really do need public health care in the US,a nd he was the first one to make it a major issue. I think he's saying most of the right things about Iraq, and he's the only one to come out and say "I was wrong in my vote on Iraq." I'm not real impressed by anyone's plans on energy. Edwards has the right goals, but I haven't seen anyone come up with any way to implment them. I like Edwards' commitment to labor. Essentially, Edwards is my "close enough" candidate. I don't trust Hillary, and I think Obama's an empty suit filled with hype. ____Not the real rusty Not in this race She's so tarred by the Hillarycare debacle, she had to hold off on even making it an issue until Edwards did. She's also entirely compromised by her medical industry funding, at this point. I would actually be more excited to vote for 1992 Hillary, if I could. Those days are long gone, though. She's deep inside now. ____Not the real rusty I don't think she did I think Hillarycare was when that happened. Before that, she hadn't ever had to face the reality of practical politics herself. Only vicariusly, and I bet big Bill shielded her from the worst of the asslicking he had to do. ____Not the real rusty Help Me, Beero5hin Is my ferment stuck? See inside. I've never brewed beer before. The very idea of a 48 hour ferment strikes me as implausible at best, and utterly crazy at worst. I'm used to cider, where you stick it in the basement and check on it monthly, if that. So I got a beer kit, and started it fermenting. Two points in the instructions worried me a bit: first, they said that as long as the wort was below 90 degrees it was ready to pitch. Second, it said I should just sprinkle the yeast into the wort and go on my way. I thought 90 sounded high, and I also thought my yeast was likely to be healthier if I bloomed it first. But hey, I said, I've never done this, so I'll follow the directions. It all seemed fine at first. Good active bubbling started within a couple hours. It bubbled away from Thursday night till about Saturday morning. Call it 36 hours. Then, it stopped. I was expecting 48-72 hours for active fermentation, so I was a little concerned. I took an SG reading, and it was about 1.016. The target is 1.012, so it was still a little high. Not wildly high, but clearly higher than the kit's target range. So it's definitely not done, and it's not really fermenting anymore. I also tasted it, and (once I got around the hop bits and assorted wort schmutz floating in it) it tasted not-quite-done. So last night, I either saved or wrecked it. I re-aerated it (by draining it splashily out the spigot into a second fermenter). I needed to use the airlock that was on there for cider, so I hooked up a ghetto airlock (drilled rubber stopper + plastic tube + glass of water) to it. This morning, it's producing gas again, but pretty slowly. It took all night to push the water out of the tube (about three inches), and is now bubbling perhaps once every half hour. Something's happening, but not very fast. So my question is, is this normal? Does beer tend to have a fast fermentation with a long tail-off period? I'm still well within the suggested week, but outside of the two or three days they say fermentation will take. Anyone seen something like this? Did it turn out fine, or was it a problem? ----------- In other news: 2007 cider must has been obtained. I have five varieties, three of which are very weakly sulfited and going to be wild ferments. The other two were sulfited more and I pitched them with a 1/2 packet each of lalvin EC-1118. I'm going with the "slower is better" theory on those too -- I didn't even bloom the yeast. Just sprinkled it in. I realize this is exactly what I didn't want to do with the beer, but the desired outcome is different here. I want the yeast to struggle and take a long time. Also, the general verdict on last year's second batch is it needs more time in the bottle. The biggest issue is it's too oaky. I'll let it age till the 2007s are done, and if it hasn't improved I might use it for blending if I have a 2007 batch that's too sweet or too tannin-y. Sort of It seems like the question was whether the wort was actually fermented or not, w/r/t re-aerating it. Some advice I saw for stuck fermentation recommended aerating, while I know that once it's fermented, you don't want to aerate. I'm leaning toward that was probably the wrong decision now. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I don't know. I guess I'll find out if it's wrecked. I could probably grab a sample any time now and see. The racking at least cleared a lot of the sediment and hop debris from it. The wrong way, yes. But it did. :-) ____Not the real rusty Will do. That sounds like a reasonable plan. ____Not the real rusty Cider The best thing to kill off wild yeasts in cider is sulfites. Campden tablets are the standard for a smallish volume. Yeah, it's a chemical, but basically you add the sulfites, let it sit for a day, and pitch your yeast. At the recommended rate, it won't leave any flavors or odors. I believe the "kill everything" rate is about 2 crushed tabs per gallon, or about 100ppm. That said, the very best thing you can start with for cider is unprocessed, unpastuerized juice straight off the press. Do you live somewhere where they grow apples at all? If so, find a local farm. They're probably still pressing juice now. Treat it yourself and you know exactly what's been done to it. If you can't find anyplace local that's pressing juice, look in organic type supermarkets. Pasteurized juice is fine -- any method (I don't think there's any such thing as "chemically pateurized" -- that's preservatives, which see below). What you have to avoid is anything with preservatives. Those will kill your yeast. But you must not have been using that -- it won't ferment at all. I wonder what the "off flavors" are about, myself. Wild yeasts are generally the gold standard for cidermaking. The only reason to pitch, really, is if you just can't get enough wild yeasts to go. Apples are fairly low in wild yeasts, so it's a tricky balance of leaving them on the press without leaving lots of other bad gunk on there too. My guess would be that either you didn't let the cider sit long enough (it tastes very funky at first, no matter what) or you've got some bacteria or mold in there with the yeast. Sulfiting will cure the latter problem, and time will cure the former. I've talked to some people around here lately who believe that three weeks is long enough for a good cider. It is not. It is about 1.5 orders of magnitude too short. So maybe you're just not waiting long enough? I ferment for a year (racking once or twice when the layer of dead yeast gets pretty thick) and then age in the bottle for however long it needs. Possibly another year. Of my two batches last year, one was great and the other probably needs several more months of aging. ____Not the real rusty Like Delirium said Sulfites are used in most wines, both to kill off wild bugs and to stop fermentation in finished wine. If you bottled it up right away, it would probably taste funky. But SO2 dissipates quickly, so as long as it has 24 hours to clear, you won't taste it. ____Not the real rusty Maybe it's the varieties I haven't heard of anything about people reacting to sulfites, but on the other hand, I do know they're not especially good for you, and a lot of people do avoid them. I buy sulfite-free bacon, myself. I basically figure no one drinks that much cider, to worry overmuch about it. But yes, UV pasteurization would probably do the same thing. On the other hand, it's expensive and not that widespread, and I would guess that juice that's been UV pasteurized has probably also had preservatives added. I would think a sour flavor would be more due to the apple blends in the juice than the yeasts. What kind of apples are they using? ____Not the real rusty Heh Clearly, between multiple-year cider making and screwing up my beer, I'm never going to be able to produce enough booze to become a violent drunk. ____Not the real rusty Insecticide resistant fruit flies It's pretty easy to breed a population of fruit flies that's resistant to some insecticide you'd like your fruit flies to be resistant to. Get a bunch of fruit flies, kill most of them with insecticide, breed the few that are left. Do that a bunch of times (which takes, like five minutes, because they're fruit flies). It's not that interesting though. If the experiment could be expanded to, say, breeding flying rats by throwing a lot of rats off a cliff and breeding the survivors, that might be a little more exciting. But probably not doable on a human timescale. ____Not the real rusty So it was you! I was wondering who the hell did that. You didn't have anything to do with those goats, did you? What the hell are those things on their heads? ____Not the real rusty It wasn't obvious? Didn't anyone read the bit where he went to meet the future Voldemort, and he was dressed in a purple velvet suit with a ruffled shirt? I mean, come on. Does his name have to be Gay McGay of the Gaytown McGays for anyone to pick up on it? ____Not the real rusty Do you even have to? I'm perfectly capable of reading the double-entendre in "wand" all by itself. Actually, I just saw one of the moview, where it starts with Harry staying up late playng with his wand under the covers, and, like, I rored. ____Not the real rusty something "like" love Not love. But something like it. To one with a certain turn of mind. Ok, enough of that. We all know by now that gay men are almost never pedophiles. It's just not right to continue this admittedly hilarious line of thought. ____Not the real rusty Heh I should have perhaps been clearer: Amongst all pedophiles, vanishingly few are gay. ____Not the real rusty Bye Vlad I was just allowing everyone to recall what a cockbite he is. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! ____Not the real rusty Oh my god Less remarked upon is the clear fact that Nobel laureate biologist Jim Watson is clearly a zombie. ____Not the real rusty BOOOOO Discourage (1). ____Not the real rusty Yeah, it sort of is I mean, the AG is not the final arbiter, but it is his job to determine if he thinks he can win a case on the constitutionality of something, and if so to bring the case. So it is his job to interpret the Constitution. I agree with you about the Dems being spineless though. Lot of grandstanding, but they're expected to confirm him in a walk. Bah. ____Not the real rusty A followup question: Mr. Mukasey, if you're still not certain, would you mind if we strapped you in an inclined position and placed cloth over your face and poured water on it to simulate the feeling of drowning? It might help you decide whether the practice "amounts to torture" or not. ____Not the real rusty What? DC chicks? Hot? They weren't circa 1998-99. ____Not the real rusty Wasn't me That's interesting. I will see what this is about. ____Not the real rusty I can has beer kit I finally made it to the homebrew store yesterday, so bottling of the second cider batch proceeds tonight. The first batch was completely and utterly destroyed by my so-called friends. I have 7 bottles left. 5 weeks it took them, to go through 26 pints. That works out to 0.75 pints guzzled per day. And I have promised three of the remaining 7 to t-1ber, so I really only have four left. Truly, the good die young. Fortunately, I got two more 6-gal carboys yesterday, so I have five ready to make the trip to Vermont this weekend. Next year those sponges can bogart their own batch and leave mine alone. I will be doing at least one wild ferment this year too. Yay. Here's hoping I'm not just making vinegar. While I was there I also picked up my first beer kit. True Brew IPA. It's all extract, but hey, it's my first try. We shall see. I gotta get some bottles. All I drink comes in screw tops, dammit. Perhaps I should ask the pub here to save them for me. Hmmmmm. I bet they would. Also: I forgot a big chunk of what I was going to include here. So I was thinking about beer yesterday, cause like who wasn't right? And poking around online to find out what malt is and how you make it, and I realized that there isn't any reason I couldn't grow my own beer. It's just barley and hops, and both of those would grow just fine here. The problem is finding barley seed. It seems to be extremely difficult, for reasons I can't fathom. All I could dig up were some ornamental 6-row barleys. Where the hell do barley growers get their seeds? And does anyone know of a place that carries 2-row malting barley in sub-truckload quantities? ____Not the real rusty Yes Malting is easy. Soak barley for 8 hours. Drain for 8 hours. Soak for 8 hours. Drain for 8 hours. Look for little white rootlet thingy. Dry in oven at 125. Look, you can has malt! Then you toast it to the desired goldenness. I'm actually wondering if my coffee roaster would do this. I think it depends on how small the grains are -- but I could probably fit a smaller screen in the bottom of the roast chamber. If not, then it's just the oven again. I checked Johnny's, but it looked like they only have 6-row. From what I read, 6-row has higher protein and doesn't malt as well in general. I feel like if I was to go to the trouble of growing and malting my own barley, it ought to be at least something as good as I could buy. I suspect the only way I'm going to get this done is by calling up a huge-ass seed farm and begging them for scraps. On the other hand, they might think it's entertaining, what I want to do, and send me a couple pounds for the cost of shipping. This place looks to be family run. And Canadian. I should try there. ____Not the real rusty Found another one I saw this site yesterday, but missed the disclaimer. They have malting barley on request. I guess there isn't all that much call for it. :-) I have no problem with a 55 lb bag. I just couldn't even figure out where to order that from. Also, shipping would be kind of a bitch. I also found this thread where a guy does the yield math for me to figure out how much I'd have to plant. A 20'x20' plot would theoretically yield 20 lbs. Thereby giving me a 50% margin of error for at least one batch. I could easily plant 400 sf. I wonder if deer eat barley. Probably. ____Not the real rusty Good news Apparently deer hate and loathe barley. Awesome. If I don't have to fence, I've got quite a bit of land I could plant in barley. ____Not the real rusty I LIKE IT We've discussed the deer's inaccessability before though. Shame. Right now they're out there eating windfall apples every morning. I could have a 50 foot shot at them from my breakfast table. ____Not the real rusty Huh? FedCo sells hop rhizomes. Most hops are grown from rhizomes, not seed. And lots of people grow hops. Also, it looks like this grafting myth has been widely debunked. I think your friend may have been, y'know, smoking too much of the crop. :-) ____Not the real rusty Um Of course I can. But a comment is a reader lure, so why pass up the opportunity? ____Not the real rusty bottles The thing is, I mostly drink Geary's and Shipyard, two Portland micros that both use screw-tops. Drives me nuts. But they're excellent beer, especially Geary's, so I'm reluctant to start drinking something else. Now that I think of it, the pub here on the island is owned by Shipyard. I don't know if they even serve anything else. Crap. Maybe I should go talk to the recycling center at the grocery store. I bet they'd let me pick through. Cider, generally, only improves with age. The ones in the Grolsch bottles are really good right now though -- this is already 1 year old cider, mind you. The one in the wine bottle I don't know yet. I'll have a sample when I bottle it and see if the flavors have sorted themselves out yet. It had honey and oak chips, so there was a lot more smoothing to be done. Last time I tried it it was pretty good, but still, I thought, noticeably young. ____Not the real rusty The fridge puts me off, and the immobility If I kegged I'd have to keep it cold, which means another fridge, which means more electricity all the time. Meh. I'd also only be able to drink it at home. Judging by this last cider batch, I don't drink at home all that much. Most of those were consumed elsewhere. So bottling is a pain, but I think I'll stick with it. ____Not the real rusty Hmm I do have a bunch of Grolsch bottle I could bottle from for traveling. I will give that further consideration. ____Not the real rusty Yeah From what I read it appears that forage barley and barleygrass are no good. ____Not the real rusty Viable barley? Like, plain barley seed, or malt? If it's malt (and your line about types and flavors makes me think it is) then it's not good. If it's unmalted, then that would be plantable. And cider presses are expensive as hell if you just buy a manufactured one. Better to get a couple 100-ton hydraulic jacks and some 8x8 timbers and build your own. Presses really are more expensive than seems justifiable. ____Not the real rusty I will Yours is the batch I'm bottling today. It's got some of your honey in it. I didn't think I needed to pester you, since I can get your address from your site whenever. It'll arrive in the next couple weeks. :-) ____Not the real rusty I can has horsecock! ____Not the real rusty Kurdistan If there is going to be a Kurdistan, we will have to choose sides. Kurdistan, or Turkey, Syria, and Iran. And probably the rest of Iraq too. It's fine to say it will happen, but it won't happen without at best a regional war. My assumption is we'll fuck them over, like we have every other time. ____Not the real rusty Apocalypso. No wait. The other one I made the mistake of watching Apocalypto last night. Mel Gibson is a no-talent assclown. So this movie is just Predator with Mayans instead of aliens. And the Mayan villain even kind of looks like the alien. It was shot in DV, which shows painfully. It looks like a student film. The lighting design is crap. The cinematography is crap. The acting is generally passable, but the writing is crap so no help there. It's gory, but so gratuitously so that the deaths that are supposed to produce an emotional effect in the viewer just fail to. "They cut his dad's throat," you think. "Bummer." Its one supposed redeeming feature was that it shows a part of history from a non-euro civilization. But it doesn't. The sets are all a garbled mixture from different periods and civilizations, the timing makes no sense, and none of that even matters because the movie explains nothing about who any of these people even are. Without copious outside info, you wouldn't have any idea these are even supposed to be Mayans. I give this movie a two enthusiastic thumbs deep in Mel Gibson's eye sockets, in the hopes that he will never make another movie. Yeah, mostly Rotten tomatoes has it at like 67% positive. What the hell, reviewers? ____Not the real rusty No, it isn't It's a pastiche of good action flicks that everyone has already seen. Everything that was good about it was already done elsewhere, better. So even the good parts were annoying, by being such transparent rip-offs from better movies. ____Not the real rusty Titties Well, yes, some of the women were hot. But then why were they always sporting the beaded shirt thingies? If we're going to be prurient here, let's get it on. ____Not the real rusty Well now... I don't know if I'd say it was worse than Manos: The Hands of Fate. That's going a little far. And it still doesn't approach my personal touchstones for Bad Movie, U-Turn and Nothing but Trouble. But it was pretty bad. Much worse than I expected. ____Not the real rusty WHAAA? When I die, I will try my best to make sure my last words are "WHAAA?" ____Not the real rusty I don't know How much is a "stone"? ____Not the real rusty Stone never caught on here It seems like even in the UK, it's only used for expressing people's weight. We never use it at all. 14 pounds is not a very useful unit. ____Not the real rusty You're confusing... ...epidemiology with individual cases. It's all well and good to say some individual eats shitty food and sits on their ass all day, and that's largely true for most people, but on a society-wide scale, that shallow observation doesn't do anything useful for us. The question of why so many people make such bad decisions, and whether there's anything systemic we can do to cause more people to make better decisions is a useful question. And, as you recognize, is one we need to ask because we're paying for fatty's insulin and joint replacements. What this all comes down to, more than anything else, is farm policy. We (the US, UK, and most industrialized nations) have farm policies that punish diversified farms and "specialty" farms (like, say, vegetables) and pay farmers to grow soy and corn. Soy and corn are processed into the flood of cheap calories that make bad food so inexpensive and easy to obtain. People eat the cheap and easy shit because it's cheap and easy. People get fat and die of vascular disease and colon cancer and type II diabetes. (Incidentally, that food is so cheap because we're paying for it up front in taxes. Another reason our farm policy pisses me off. Even if I never buy a single Frito, I'm paying for them anyway.) We, as a species, have lived in a condition of endemic starvation for so long that we have never even considered the notion of "too much food," let alone the rather surprising public health implications of it. We currently have too much food. This obesity epidemic can be fixed, and without all that much difficulty. Making corn more expensive would pretty much take care of it. Expensive corn would make a lot of crappy "convenience food" economically unworkable, and it would make factory meat unworkable too. Overall, all calories would get more expensive, and people would not so easily be able to pack in 4 or 5 times as many of them as they need. Now the question is how to make that happen. I'm hoping the one-two punch of ethanol initiatives (silly for energy but quite useful for making corn more expensive) and peak oil will take care of it. Cause god knows our governments never will. ____Not the real rusty Also... I agree with you that the report is full of shit. Not once do they mention the real root of all this. Yeah, let's rely on the food industry to develop new processed shit that feels like food but isn't. Cause I'm sure we can chemically process our way out of this problem we chemically processed our way into. Tax fatty foods. Jesus Christ. Hey, we can pay our corn subsidies from the new fatty food tax! Bunch of dopey assholes. The basic rule is whenever a government panel on obesity says the problem is "very challenging," they are selling you a pile of bullshit, or they have totally misunderstood the problem. It's not challenging at all, other than the apparently insurmountable challenge of standing up to a powerful lobby. ____Not the real rusty lol At least we'd have a lot of quick deaths from malnutrition. Fat people starving to death would be such a surprise that I doubt there would even be any treatment. Can't you just see them, sitting there at the dinner table carefully carving the last cheez curl and serving everyone a slice? ror. ____Not the real rusty Vitriol I didn't accuse your stance of being rational, but it is extremely common to hear. I wasn't arguing with you, so much as with that viewpoint, which plenty of people sincerely hold, whether you do or not. Yeah, there is some personal responsibility, but a) how much can you blame people when apparently they share their character flaws with 70 or 80% of other people, and b) I think the personal responsibility is still overstated. For example, I have a hell of a time finding time to go out running. I'm juggling full-time work and two young kids, but at least I'm married and have extended family nearby. If I were a single dad, there's no way I would have time to exercise, period. It's not because I don't want to, there's just a limit to what you can do every day. A lot of people are at or beyond that limit, without having to find time to get to the gym too. Their work forces them to sit at a desk. Their work is 25 miles from their house, and the only way between is the freeway. Their neighborhood doesn't have any sidewalks or bike lanes, and their road dumps straight out onto a divided four-lane suburban feeder. So I think it is, in a lot of ways, someone else's fault those people are not exercising. I'm prepared to say that the extent to which it's their fault is not choosing to live somewhere else. But it's not like everyone has much of a choice, or can choose ther home based on opportunities for exercise. Our infrastructure has systematically robbed millions of people from any reasonable means of getting off their ass. It can still be done, but how hard do we want to make it? Why should it be hard at all? Why shouldn't some daily exercise just be a condition of living in the world? I don't know. The case for personal responsibility gets weaker the harder you look at it. ____Not the real rusty Moar Hemingway Walking he walked across the street and saw the rat. It was big. The rat looked at him. He stepped aside. "I haven't seen a rat that big since the war," he said. His companion nodded. Silently they continued across the zebra crossing striped like the bars of the setting sun through window blinds, broken and crazed. ____Not the real rusty I see them... ...saying "Hey, that's some pretty good faux-Ernest." Oh who am I kidding. I see them saying "rusty who?" followed immediately by "Ernest who?" and "Screw all that, please pass the soylent green." ____Not the real rusty Vermont Has been trying to secede for ages. ____Not the real rusty It is my fondest wish I've been practicing the national anthem and everything. The truuuue north strooooong and freeeeee.... ____Not the real rusty WIPO All of them. I mean, all the rest of the countries, everywhere. The United States of Earth. It'll happen, as soon as the aliens arrive. ____Not the real rusty How to Serve Man ____Not the real rusty Proposed <pre> Capital &pipe; Name &pipe; ABBR --------+--------------+----- Lubbock &pipe; Jesusland &pipe; WWJD Dallas &pipe; Trashylvania &pipe; TV Austin &pipe; Nascar &pipe; NA El Paso &pipe; Mexico &pipe; MX </pre> ____Not the real rusty heh I suck at using Preview. ____Not the real rusty Can't edit comments Not even admins. Not without mucking about in the DB anyway. I could delete it and post a new one, but meh. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I've never really needed it. You can delete comments, or erase them but leave a note that there was a comment there that was erased. I don't know if hulver added comment editing to husi. I always figured if I could edit comments then people would always want me to, and fie on that. ____Not the real rusty Winter Garden Q: Gardening in the winter? In Maine? Are you nuts? A: Yes. Yup. Probably. This weekend I took out one set of shelves from my greenhouse, emptying the southern side, and put in a growing bed. It's about 3.5 feet wide, 12 feet long, and 11 inches deep. I laboriously carted in the last of my loam, dumped in a bag of peat moss, scooped out some compost from the bottom of the bin, and mixed it all together. Now I have a winter garden. Well, not quite. I actually had to plant some stuff first. Other than the general category "greens" I don't know what will do well in there, or how long it'll survive, so I planted a few of lots of different things. Three or four types of cress, some kale, a few lettuces, claytonia and chervil (does anyone know wtf chervil is?), a spinach. Parsley and basil too, for which I have very low hopes, but if they manage to sprout before it gets really cold, they might live for a while. Arugula. And so forth. I wanted to put in a couple pepper plants and a tomato or two, just for giggles. But I'm out of tomato and pepper seeds, so I guess next year. I think they would actually do ok if I planted them in there in like mid-August. Mid-October is probably hopelessly late anyway. My outdoor peppers are still flowering, with night temps in the low 40s. I may I could put a cold frame on top of the bed in the greenhouse, which should help a lot. I've even got a stack of old windows lying around out back, salvaged for just that purpose. I just haven't had time to do it yet. ____Not the real rusty But no! That's the thing. A lot of greens can not only survive a frost, they can literally freeze solid, and live just fine when the temps rise again. Apparently all you have to do is make sure you don't pick them when they're frozen -- they turn to mush when they thaw, without the living plant to support them. At least, that's what folks like Eliot Coleman would have me believe. He does this kind of thing though, in Real Maine no less (not pretend Southern Maine where I am). So I'll believe him until I can prove otherwise. It does seem that a lot of things won't grow much (if at all) when the ground is below 45 degrees or so. So I might have planted too late to get much. It depends how much the greenhouse can raise the average soil temp in that bed. ____Not the real rusty I just read a book about that Well, not about that per se, but it's a major plot element. What the hell was it called? Ah yes. Intoxicated. It was pretty good. Doesn't tell you all that much about forcing rhubarb though. ____Not the real rusty It's not heated And I'm not going to heat it. First, it's basically a hoophouse. Pumping heat in there would mainly have the effect of raising the temperature of the world an insignificant amount. Second, I can buy veggies a lot cheaper than I can heat a greenhouse to grow them. Like exhorbitantly cheaper. So much cheaper that even I won't really consider doing it. :-) Supposedly, most of these greens will survive actually being frozen. We don't have really severe winters here, as a rule. There often a few very cold snaps in February, but it never lasts more than a few days. Daytime temps in the 20s are pretty common in the winter. With sun, the greenhouse should be able to make it at least into the 40s on a day like that. I'm going to spend some more time sealing it up as much as I can, but due to design there isn't a whole lot I can do. I may also line the inside with clear bubble wrap, which would reduce light transmission a little, but raise the R value a lot. About getting an early start -- I also cleared off the other set of shelves and set them up with my hanging growlights, for starting seedlings in the early spring. I'll wrap the whole shelf with some reflective water-heater insulation and lay down some electric soil heater mats and I should be set for seedlings. I raised them in the living room this year with a heater and the same lights, and I think I didn't even need the heater really. All the sprouts did great under the lights. ____Not the real rusty Titter at my pumpkins Chuckle at my peas. Hoot at my broccoli. Weep at my cabbages. I have no luck with cabbages. ____Not the real rusty Don't know much This is the first kale I've planted, and the seeds went in yesterday so all I can tell you from personal experience is: "kale grows from seeds." I got a pile of kale from a friend a few weeks ago, so I know that it is (at least sometimes) very dark green and has big leaves. Lots of other leafy veggies have varying leaf colors though, so that probably doesn't tell you much. I also know there is such a thing as ornamental kale, which maybe is what you got. To drag out the internet cliche, according to wikipedia there's no problem eating ornamental kale. We use it in Rachel Ray's kale and chorizo soup which is absolutely great. It's good in frittatas or quiches too. Just blanch it or sautee it down in some butter and salt first. And make sure you chop it up pretty well. The leaves don't really break down from cooking, so what looks like a uniform mass turns out to be long individual strings when you get a fork into it. That is not desirable. ____Not the real rusty Ew, it does taste like grandma I'll take 40 pounds. ____Not the real rusty poinless "Without poin." It's from the French. ____Not the real rusty WIPO Day of the Locust. Really unbelievably good, and massively underread. ____Not the real rusty That's the one I have I stole it from my high school English teacher. Well, she loaned it to me to read because she thought I'd like it. I did, so much so that I could never bring myself to give it back. Sorry Mrs. Hough. Thanks for the book though. ____Not the real rusty Blackwater could redeem itself by sending a small team out to Burma to clean up the situation there. Just saying. ____Not the real rusty Have you seen the logo? Actual Blackwater logo. It should totally say "No Gurlz" under the bear claw. ____Not the real rusty Also: Good riddance Soe Win. I hope it was painful. ____Not the real rusty Please Let you be the last to say it too. :-) ____Not the real rusty faux-snooty literary in-joke "W.A.S.T.E." is a reference to The Crying of Lot 49, which Radiohead doesn't seem to realize is Pynchon for kindergarteners and actually doesn't demonstrate their literacy so much as reveal its shallowness. ____Not the real rusty Me too Radiohead has always had that property for me too -- I don't like it until after a really silly number of listens. I don't know why I give them that much time. You'd think I'd just go "nah, it's crap" and listen to something else. But eventually I always like it. Mysterious. ____Not the real rusty Heh Michael Crawford touched my junk neutrally. :-) ____Not the real rusty And yet Those tools refuse to delete my entry. How can any encyclopedia be taken seriously when I'm considered notable enough to merit space? Not to even mention the number of mistakes they pack into three short paragraphs. ____Not the real rusty It's been tried It's survived a couple deletion requests and my own personal appeal to Jimmy Wales for its removal. I don't really want to have anything more to do with it at this point. ____Not the real rusty The cartoon is funny though ____Not the real rusty berblog LL. ____Not the real rusty I'll change your name What do you want to change it to? ____Not the real rusty Here's something pretty gross Inaugurating the sure-to-become-classic "mouse guts" tag below. From time to time my cat brings in mice. He is a fine hunter but has no killer instinct, so more often than not the mice are alive. After a number of Keystone Kops experiences where me and the cat both chase the mouse around for an hour, I have developed a foolproof method of dealing with this situation. I follow the cat until he puts the mouse down, and then I stomp the mouse and dispose of it. This usually works fine. Generally the spine breaks, the mouse expires quickly and cleanly and all is well. Not last night. Somehow I managed to stomp last night's mouse sort of on the guts. So its guts shot out of its ass in a blackish-red glistening wad and splattered against the bottom of the toilet, and a few reddish bits rolled here and there. Possibly eyes. It was hard to tell what they were. So that was gross, but what really capped it was the smell. My god, that was one of the worst things I've ever smelled. I was gagging through the cleanup, and it took liberal applications of citrus oil spray to cut it. I may have to rethink my approach to mice. Am not. I have a cat, but that doesn't make me a cat person. That just makes me married to a woman. I am actually not a cat person. I'm surprised it hasn't happened before too. Or I was, until I'd stomped a few mice this way and had nothing like this happen. Then I just figured it didn't work the way I feared it might. Apparently it does, I just wasn't stomping hard enough before. ____Not the real rusty They get re-caught. The mice that get caught tend to be the maladapted ones that either freeze or squeak loudly when there's a cat around. I've tried letting them go, and the cat just goes and catches them again. Killing them myself is quicker and moderately more humane. ____Not the real rusty He's a boy And he learned to catch mice at all relatively late in life. He was indoor till we moved here. He's also declawed, so his success at hunting is pretty impressive. He catches birds too. How do you catch birds with no front claws? He's gone from catching the most pathetically puny baby mice we've ever seen to pulling in fairly plump ones over the last few years though, so maybe he'll eventually learn to kill them. ____Not the real rusty We FI? Hold on, there chief. YOU don't get laid, and therefore WE fail it? I got laid. So who fails it? Eh? ____Not the real rusty Too much DDR terminology. ____Not the real rusty Does not the way it's described there anyway. But langpair=es&pipe;en seems to leave anything that isn't spanish alone. So that works just as well. ____Not the real rusty husi ---> ____Not the real rusty They think you're me? Or I'm you? Oh hell, why am I even asking this. I absolutely do not care. Never mind, please don't answer. ____Not the real rusty What Stephenson should do Is when he needs a sex scene, just write: AND THEN THEY DID SEX ROFL! This would work. ____Not the real rusty Walking 3,000 miles... ...might help with the gut, Fatty Seatbeltbuckle. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Hey Were you hyperbolic pants explosion on dKos too? I always wondered that. ____Not the real rusty Sacajawea? I had a whole dump truck of jawea. ____Not the real rusty Around 10 By my count, since this started. A whole bunch of that list above are would-be spammers. ____Not the real rusty Doesn't look like it Most of them have posted something, or at least voted on some stories, and don't appear to be preparing for the spamocalypse. I can't imagine it'd be worth $5 for anyone to spam anywhere, let alone one little site. ____Not the real rusty It's a test If you don't know how to spell "fellate" and "cocksucker" you don't belong here. ____Not the real rusty Get a new flapper Those toilet flappers wear out eventually. It's pretty easy to replace them. Just shut the water off to the toilet, figure out which bits you have to unscrew to get the old one out, and take it to your hardware store. Find one there that looks like what you have, buy it, bring it home, and replace. ____Not the real rusty First for both now "no text" ____Not the real rusty The latter, naturally I might have paid more if they'd said what the format would be. As it is, I weighed the risk of it being some DRMed crap vs. the reward of getting it cheap. Also, I don't like all Radiohead, so there's a good chance I won't like this anyway. Also, one pound is likely a hell of a lot more than they make on a CD sale. So it's all good. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh good god I was given a pumpkin beer recently by someone who sincerely regretted it when we both realized what he'd done. I could barely bring myself to drink the whole thing. It was vile. I've said it before and I'll say it again: fruit has no place in the beer brewing process. None. Whatsoever. Under any circumstances. Maybe the airlock isn't bubbling because all your yeast committed suicide when they realized what you were trying to make them produce. ____Not the real rusty When I brew some, sure I've been trying to get to the homebrew store for weeks now. I gotta get some bottles for my cider. I was planning to pick up some beer supplies too, since I've got all these extra buckets lying around anyway. If you want to trade some cider for some (non-pumpkin) beer, I could do that. Otherwise you'll have to wait a bit. ____Not the real rusty Yum I love me a hoppy beer. ____Not the real rusty I hesitate to say it but I feel that someone has to. So I will sacrifice myself and point out that in Soviet Russia, President runs for YOU. I'm truly sorry. ____Not the real rusty Ok, but... ...once I have DNA from my strawberries or man-juice, what can I do with it? ____Not the real rusty Could I... ...(once I have strawberry flavored jizz, of course) actually do any like plant-based kitchen table genetic experimentation? Are there any good introductions out there about what is possible to do in a totally non-lab context? I realize this is making me sound a little nuts. But I do think this stuff is cool. ____Not the real rusty Bah What ever happened to the DIY genetics future that cyberpunk promised us? I should create my own breed of tomato. File that one away in the future projects drawer... ____Not the real rusty Mmm. Tomacco. ____Not the real rusty Now that's what I'm talking about. Gene gun! Sweet. Imagine it, you're just walking down the street when suddenly "Blooooweweweweweweop!" Now you have antlers. Is there any limit to the fun you could have with a gene gun? I don't think so. I would start by making all my neighbors resistant to RoundUp, at the very least. ____Not the real rusty Hey Nifty. I paid 1.45 for it. I just hope the download is plain mp3. ____Not the real rusty New term for libertarians: "Jolly sailors on the imaginary Freedom Ship" I loled. ____Not the real rusty Can anyone give me... ...an executive summary of that dollar slide article? I will admit to finding it totally opaque if someone will try to make it less so. Thanking you in advance, Me. ____Not the real rusty Troop deaths are no longer counted as "causalties" unless they are inflicted with a throwing knife from the victim's 3 o'clock on a Thursday. ____Not the real rusty So true I killed an insurgent who was on his way to kindergarten just this morning. ____Not the real rusty Really My sense is the "official tally" fails to include so many obvious combat deaths that those cases are like near the bottom of the list of "things that should also be included." ____Not the real rusty Nope Clients will send you 1099s, which also go to the IRS, so they can prove that they didn't keep the money they paid you. Uncle Sam knows when you've been cheating. Also, you're required to file anyway, even if you file that you made no money and owe no taxes. ____Not the real rusty Any K5 gardeners? I'm wrapping up my first season of gardening, which was purposely a learning year where I didn't have much hope of producing great quantities of vegetables, but mainly just wanted to learn what the local pests and diseases are. And so I did. I'm writing up what attacked my plants and how I fought back, and I'm wondering whether to submit it as an article or just go to diary. It's going to be pretty long, I think. About 1000 words and I'm only through two pests so far. I've got maybe 4 or 5 more to go. Is it worth it? Does anyone else here garden at all? Does anyone care? Pole &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; &pipe; ---> How much land? My fenced area is 32'x32'. Without the fence anything I planted would be instant deer food. I think next year I'm going to expend it to 32'x64'. This year I had basically four raised beds, 4'x15'. I also have a little greenhouse, 8'x10' that I mainly used for seedlings in the spring. So not a whole lot of land. Considering what I'd like to do, I wish I could jsut deer fence most of the yard, but that would be kind of ugly and expensive. Also, really no fertilizer of any kind (not even fish emulsion)? I stuck to organic as much as possible. I did spray my pumpkin leaves with some fungicide to try to control powdery mildew whcih I think is not organic, but that's about it. Still, I wouldn't be gettng anywhere without my fish juice. Perhaps with a few more years to compost... ____Not the real rusty My land I actually only have a half acre. I'm sort of fortunate in that it's a very old half acre, and the house is in the very front corner of it, where setbacks would never allow it to be built today. It's about 10 feet from the road on two sides. And the rest is all grass (with one apple tree and one maple tree). So in only a half acre, I can still comfortably fence off a pretty big chunk of the back of it for the garden. It looks like more than it is. Now, my neighbor owns all the land in a U around mine, about 10 acres altogether. He is the brother-in-law of the guy I bought this place from (their wives were sisters) so it used to be sort of a family compound. I'd like someday to buy the acre or so in back of my property, which includes a great big area that's clear of trees (lots of brush, currently, but no trees) and is just custom-made for my future barn. :-) Also, I do want to get some bees. But I also want ducks (for eggs) and chickens (seasonally, for meat) so the bees might not be for a while yet. My friend just bought a house out here and he actually knows something about bees, so I'm trying to push him into getting the bees and keeping them in the woods behind my house. And the deer idea -- unfortunately we're not really allowed to touch them. A few years ago they were much worse -- something like 1 deer per 10 acres average on the island, which is crazy excessive. They ate everything and lots of them still starved. And it took several years of that before the hippies would agree to a seasonal cull. But that's all we get. A team comes out and shoots the ones they decide most need killing. I think residents can sign up for meat. I ought to look in to that. But I don't mind them -- they like to eat the windfall apples in my yard, and they're practically tame. Plus my dog gets plenty of exercise futilely chasing them. You just have to deer-fence any sort of garden area, and that's all there is to it. ____Not the real rusty Ha That's what would happen if she ever managed to catch one. But my dog is a slug and the deer can practically walk to get away. ____Not the real rusty Not a poison The pheromone is just to attract them to the hanging plastic bag. Then they hit the vertical plastic thingy the bait hangs on and fall into the bag below, from which there is no escape! And they dehydrate and die. Actually, lots of them do escape. Those traps are more like Japanese Beetle lures than traps. So if you want all the beetles in the vicinity coming to your yard, go to it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Possibly Maybe I should include a section on Mexicans in your garden and how to deal with them. ____Not the real rusty Ooh, me too I didn't get around to it this year, but it's in the long-term plans. ____Not the real rusty Try Fedco They're not taking any more orders for this year, but see the FedCo catalog here (pdf), page 29. ____Not the real rusty Bah I didn't know you were in EUistan. I guess none of my suppliers will work. ____Not the real rusty How can you grow hops in permafrost? ____Not the real rusty Yes People who grow food to save money are... well, either dumb or hungry. Or both. It's called "subsistence farming" people. You didn't invent it, it is not cool or hip or new, and it has never been a good way to keep yourself fed. Nah, I garden because I think it's interesting. I like watching the plants develop, and figuring out all the stuff that goes wrong with them. Also finding out what all those bugs are and which ones deserve nothing but instant and painful death. I imagine that I will feel a great sense of satisfaction in creating a working garden that produces efficiently, but I couldn't tell you yet, having not done it. I did grow what might be the world's most expensive ten ears of corn. They were good. I mean, they better have been. they were like $15.00 each. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha Poke back in my diary a bit for my cider experiments. :-) In my defense, I only know of one company making proper hard cider in this country now, so while you can buy cider, it's very hard to find and fairly expensive. My own cider probably didn't cost much more than buying theirs. ____Not the real rusty Not all that close The closest the AT gets to me is probably 4 or 5 hrs drive. It's mainly up in northern and western Maine. ____Not the real rusty By "non chemically"... Do you include "organic but kind of chemically"? For a lot of things there's no good option that isn't at least a little bit chemically. But for organics, usually the "chemical" is some kind of host-specific bacillus. ____Not the real rusty Ror I have done that. Man, does that make me mad. I usually go on a weed-killing rampage after one of those. ____Not the real rusty Huh I actually don't think I knew that. FWIW, the reason we kept booting the PP accounts was the video links. If you kept that under wraps, Poopy would almost certainly still be here. I liked most of the stories, personally. Well, maybe "liked" isn't quite the word. But you know. ____Not the real rusty Good. Let the French lose this one. C'est magnifique, le guerre. ____Not the real rusty Ta geule. Mechante. ____Not the real rusty Aaaah ha ha ha ha Oh yes. That'd be great. Israel conquers Persia, thereby guaranteeing that the Middle East will not be remotely peaceful for the next 500 years, instead of the 100 more we're looking at now. Fabulous. I can't fathom why they don't appoint you Secretary of Defense immediately. ____Not the real rusty That's not fair The French won the French Revolution. Of course, many say that's because they were fighting the French... ____Not the real rusty Just goes to show Don't quote fascists. ____Not the real rusty I know When I say "fascist," it's mainly shorthand for "sometimes a fascist and sometimes just an overblown tool with an unbelievably exaggerated sense of his own wisdom." I ain't got no love for Nietzsche. When you look into the void, apparently you vomit up aphoristic dribble, and halfwits lap it up down the years thereafter. I think on the whole, he gets a whole lot better rap than he deserves -- that is, most people just think he was a fascist. ____Not the real rusty I was thinking about this some more... ...last night, wondering why Nietzsche so direly rubs me the wrong way, and yeah, you're right. In part it is his writing style. But I think mostly it's because he represents the point at which philosophy collapses into mere opinion. If he had an editorial column in the Wall Street Journal, I'd think... well, I'd probably think the guy was a loon. But fine, you know. He's free to spout his opinion all he wants. What bothers me is that his opinions (and they are, for the most part, asinine opinions) get treated with a whole lot more legitimacy than they deserve because he bamboozled some academics into stamping him a "philosopher." Nietzsche bothers me because all he is is the 19th century's Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. ____Not the real rusty Sorry The loudmouths of the left are not so successful, by and large, so they don't tend to spring to mind. Also, Nietzsche was more right-wing than left. As for not writing for casual readers, as far as I can tell, he wasn't writing for anyone sane. That doesn't really convince me that I should have any higher esteem for his half-baked opinions. ____Not the real rusty You sure trolled me good. It still stings. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er What? That... doesn't make any sense. I can't even argue against it, is how much sense it doesn't make. To my brain, it's like you just said "Fish and socket wrenches are naturally the cube root of 12." That isn't even wrong. ____Not the real rusty I love the laughter Sir, you run a major country. And a bunch of college kids just laughed at something you said in all seriousness. Totally unashamed laughter. Sometimes I do love this country. I'm also glad they let him come and speak. ____Not the real rusty Good thing they're filtering... ...for all the children working at DOD. ____Not the real rusty +1 YouTube material. ____Not the real rusty She turned you down eh? So it goes... ____Not the real rusty No tasing. Do not care. ____Not the real rusty That's the problem It's not a great fascist conspiracy, it's a troubling mindset change of the American people as a whole. The problems are: The cops knew they could do this and get away with it (and it can be assumed that police are automatically in favor of a police state) Lots of people do condone it. "He had it coming." Look right here in this discussion. People condoning and defending it. This is the poster case for an increasingly common event. And the response, in general, is "Well, you have to do what The Authorities say." That, to me, should be a deeply un-american attitude, but unfortunately it's the epitome of modern American servility. It's not a sign of some creeping fascist conspiracy. It's a sign of Americans giving up our love of liberty and preparing the ground for the Strong Leader when he cares to show up. And he will. ____Not the real rusty Paranoid hysteria? No, just disappointment. ____Not the real rusty Asserting what is reality without backing it up isn't reality either. You say 'potato,' I say 'servile ignorant sheep dazed into drooling compliance by their televisions and consumer goods.' Let's call the whole thing off. ____Not the real rusty Yes We've had this conversation before too. I would agree with you if it was 1950. But not anymore. The common man is a HUGE Bill O'Reilly fan, and thinks your ass should be shipped back to Manila with all the other Puerto Ricans. Good luck. ____Not the real rusty Jacques Ellul: Too French. Didn't read. ____Not the real rusty 1:30 His rambling questions were 1:30 long. Documented in video from numerous angles. And at 1:30 he had asked two questions and was ready to hear them answered. Except he didn't hear them answered, because he was busy being tortured by police in the back of the room. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha Hail Mary, full of grace help me sell this goddamn place. ____Not the real rusty O HAI R U STILL TALKING? ____Not the real rusty O HAI R U STILL TALKING? ____Not the real rusty I don't think I ever owned it Someone else had it and pointed it here. ____Not the real rusty Ear candles Are total bullshit. The best you can hope for is that you won't burn your eardrum. I prefer to avoid burning my eardrum by not putting burning things in my ears. ____Not the real rusty Really? You must need a long syringe to get all the way down there from your ear. ____Not the real rusty I hate that That started for me a couple years ago, when I woke up one day with one completely blocked ear. It went away, but ever since then, I go through periods where it's every morning. Sucks. I never did anything about it. Maybe next time I'll go get my cerumen sucked (omg wtf lol!one). It usually goes away before I get up the gumption to call a doctor. Of course I normally have to be pretty much dying before I call a doctor. ____Not the real rusty The Democrat ...i.e. Hillary. But I won't be very happy about it. However, I will be pleased to vote for Tom Allen and Chellie Pingree, as well as (probably) John Anton and Mark Reilly (on the principle that most of the Portland City Council needs replacing). I also can't wait to vote against Ethan Strimling, no matter who runs against him. Slimy bastard. Although he might run for Congress too. Well, I'll vote against him wherever I have the opportunity to. ____Not the real rusty There's always text Which account was it? I can look and see what the warning was, if you missed it. ____Not the real rusty lol wut? There's no record of it. I've only got two warnings on your account, one for 1234567890 and one for the wikipedia pasta. One was 09/02 and one was 09/04. There's nothing in the database, and there's also no record of your having acknowledged a warning today or yesterday. Or the day before. Or the one before that. So, in conclusion, I propose that you may have been extremely drunk and/or high when you hallucinated this event. Or, alternatively, something very odd is going on that we have not yet figured out. ____Not the real rusty The thing is If you had acked a warning at all, real or fake, there would be a record of it in the server log. And there isn't. I could believe someone exploited a warning hole, except that there's no record of it happening or of you responding to it. ____Not the real rusty I don't know The only thing I can think of is this could happen if an account was in the "Warned" group without having actually been issued a warning. But that wouldn't show my name, because there's be no warning to show. I don't know. If it hapens again, do take a screenshot and note the time. ____Not the real rusty Whate? ____Not the real rusty Wait... "ok"? I was so distracted by "develope" that I neglected to even think about the notion that someone would need a spellchecker to tell them whether "ok" is spelled right. Now that's funny. ____Not the real rusty Thred on mefi This has a long and semi-arduous thread on MeFi as well, which is worth it for all the extra links. There are five or six different angles on this whole thing. And Christ, does Kerry look bad here. He just drones on while the cops fucking tase the guy whose question he expresses interest in answering? What a cockbite. And yes, he did say "Noooo I woooould liiike tooooo aaaaaanswer hiiiiiiiis impoooortant queeeeeeestion..." But he did fuck-all to stop the ten-officer takedown going on in the back of the room. I don't know about John Fucking Kerry, but to me one of the key aspects of free speech is that when someone asks me a question, I prefer to answer him before the tasing begins. But he "didn't know" it was happening, and "condemns" it well after the fact. Good job John. You will never hold public office again, and rightfully so. ____Not the real rusty No kidding Though I don't agree with you about the libertarians, it's pathetic that that was the best the Democratic party could do. Kerry was an asshole Senator and would have been an asshole president. Not that that would be worse than we have, but I doubt it'd be much better. The Democratic party has problems, sure enough. But, unlike any of theother parties, it has a very active wing working for solutions. Give us a decade or two, there will be a very different democratic party in this country, provided enough of us don't give up on it. ____Not the real rusty That's not exactly the problem... ...I don't think. I think the problem is machine politics and dynasties. I mean, Maine is one of the worst examples of a machine Democratic state, so I get to see it firsthand all the time. It's not an issue, for me, of who I agree with and who I don't, but the fact that the people in power in both parties are not beholden to us. When I say there's a wing pushing for change, I mean change in how the party operates, not change in this specific policy or that one. This is a problem with both major parties, but the Republicans are not even trying to do anything about it. I think there's plenty of room for people who get some things right and other things wrong. I mean, besides myself, I've never met anyone who gets everything right all the time. :-) The question is who's running the show. ____Not the real rusty Also relevant: Kerry's comm director posted a dKos diary about it. And what a pile of steaming self-serving horseshit it is. "He had no idea what was going on... He is completely blind to a pile of cops taking down some college kid 100 feet away up the aisle of an auditorium whose stage he is standing on... He has a rare genetic condition that causes police-state blindness..." Read the diary. It's vomit-inducing. ____Not the real rusty What should we do? ____Not the real rusty Yeah That was the only answer I could come up with too. It's gonna take a lot to get us there. In fact, by the time the American people get there, there won't be any way to do it anymore. So I wouldn't get your hopes up. ____Not the real rusty His big mouth ...is a deadly weapon. Bro. I can't say I find anything to disagree with in this column. That's about how my college years went, and I went to a "good" school. And as for dictatorship, come on. That's clearly satirical. I don't know. He reads to me like a relatively normal, intelligent college kid trying to figure out what he thinks. He's doing it publically in the school newspaper, while most people do it privately over illicit beer with their friends, but we all did it. I could probably have written any of those articles. Although I'd have written them better, of course. But you'd have to go a lot further than that to actually piss off everyone at a college. And, though he is often confused, and was clearly ranty and distracted by irrelevancies, I didn't find anything disrespectful in his questions, and I'm glad someone's engaged enough to try to ask them. None of that in the least excuses this bullshit. As for why no one tried to help him, who wants to be next up for tasing? I'd like to think I would have, but let's be honest, I wouldn't have. Maybe after seeing this I would. Maybe after seeing this a lot of other people would. There were a lot of people screaming things like "Why are you doing this?" and "Stop it!" which is probably the best you can hope for. ____Not the real rusty Yes and no Sure, the guy was, in part, one of the reasons I'm sometimes embarrassed for my political party. If I'd been there, I would have been glad to see his time in the limelight come to an end. He was presenting a familiar medly of the current Left Wing's Greatest Conspiracy Hits. But none of this in any way justifies the tasing. None of it even justifies the police dragging him out of the room like they were trying to. I mean, come on. He did nothing more threatening than hog the mic at a public speech. This was some shitty policing, and Kerry standing there droning over it was utterly shameful. ____Not the real rusty He was clearly unarmed His hands were well clear of anything the entire time, the cops had been manhandling him for more than a minute when the tasing occurred, and he was also fully immobilized. You can see the struggle very well in several of the other angles. One tape is by someone who's standing next to Meyer through the entire confrontation. If you haven't seen the struggle well yet, poke around a little till you find one of the better videos. His "use of force" here means that he was resisting actively - i.e. he tried to get away from the officers and struggled against their frong-march. The alternative charge would be resisting arrest without force, i.e. lying down limp or curling into a motionless ball on the ground (which is totally the way I'm going if I'm ever called upon to resist arrest). The latest word is that he was arrested for disturbing the peace and resisting an officer. He was told immediately after the tasing (also in one of the videos) that he was being arrested for "inciting a riot," which is such dire bullshit that he's pretty much speechless, for the first time in the whole altercation. At which point he says something like "What riot?" Looking at it from his POV, I'd be freaked out too. They would not tell him, at any time, what he did wrong and why they were trying to force him to the ground and handcuff him. So he asked an obnoxious question? Would you, or anyone here not be at least a tiny bit surprised to be dragged away in handcuffs for saying something slightly obnoxious? My read is that he frankly is in total panic mode when they grab him and doesn't really even realize he's struggling. In the hallway afterward he seriously believes that he is being taken by "the government." He says, several times, "they're going to kill me." Maybe he's crazy, maybe he's stupid, but this kid is in fear for his life at that point. I just don't find any kind of police action defensible that led to that. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha See, the thing is, I wouldn't have any faith that the justice system would do anything, and I'm damn sure he didn't either. In any case, it's after the fact -- they can't restore his opportunity to ask the Senator a question. But that's still not even the point. What the hell were kampus kops doing policing the speaker time limit at an event like this in the first place? That is the core of this bullshit. He may have been long-winded (although watch the video clock -- he spoke for one and a half minutes total). That is worthy of arrest? Hell no. That isn't even worthy of having his mic shut off. That doesn't even approach the status of being forced out of the room by a moderator. My problem with this whole thing is why on earth was he put in a situation where resisting arrest was even a possibility? I know it seems reasonable to say "well, you have to do what the cops tell you to," but this is a case where having the cops telling you to do stuff at all is outrageous. That's my point. ____Not the real rusty Loser. ____Not the real rusty 7:19/mi Pretty good. I am a slow slug, so I generally run for distance rather than speed. I can do 10 miles at about 10 min/mi. Unfortunately, I can do three miles at a not much better 9 minutes or so per. Going fast never motivates me very much, but I do like increasing my distance. ____Not the real rusty I run around the island My home happens to be surrounded by what amounts to a 5-mile coastal road loop, so I do have some nice scenery. Of course, I only run at night, so it depends on whether you consider ocean sounds and smells "scenery." I do, I guess, now that I think about it. I probably wouldn't be down for ten miles of strip malls and gas stations at any time of the day. And a treadmill is completely out of the question. I get hives just thinking about running indoors. Really though, the only way I can run for ten miles, especially at my pace, which takes more than an hour and a half, is to have a lot of other stuff to think about. I can only make it if I'm at best dimly aware of my surroundings and what I'm doing. ____Not the real rusty Mario Yeah, but it's embarrassing when you find yourself hopping up with your fist raised and going "Bloop! Bloop! Blingblingblingbling!" So I try not to do imaginary Mario anymore. Also. ____Not the real rusty Nuke who? Ohio? ____Not the real rusty Petraeus: The Hero of the Iraq Surge! His motivation to put a positive spin on it would be to paint himself as the guy who saved Iraq for us. When all looked lost, President Petraeus rolled in there and got the job done. Etc etc and so forth. I don't see how he'd live down being known as President Ass-kissing Little Chickenshit though. ____Not the real rusty I just showed him what a warning looks like ...cause he asked. There's no harm in it. Warnings don't ever automatically cause anything to happen. Sheesh, settle down people. :-) ____Not the real rusty OMG! It's like rats deserting a floating ship! :-) I only request that it not be as dull as HuSi. ____Not the real rusty Dunno really I have a lot more time to comment now that I don't have so much administrative bullshit. I also have a bit of a slack period at work going on. ____Not the real rusty Yeah... Although I'm not sure the correlation goes the way you expect. I tend to post a lot more when there's less dumb admin crap to do, i.e. when the arseholery index is down. Not saying it's definitely that, but it's a possibility you should keep in mind. ____Not the real rusty THE SURGE IS WORKING! We have reduced the violence on K5 to June 2006 levels. I ask for at least another year to restore peace and tranquility, and give the political process time to work... ____Not the real rusty I expected a lot more outrage Christ, if I were to change a pixel in the header, it would be apocalypse. But charge for entry and mostly everyone's ok with it. I will never figure this medium out. ____Not the real rusty Here I looked for individual insurance here when we first moved. $1200/month. That's the mania. ____Not the real rusty This was six years ago When I was 25 and it was just me and my wife. Granted Maine is the health insurance black hole of calcutta, so this is about the worst it gets in the US. In CA my individual plan was $250/month. ____Not the real rusty They had the one big radio hit "Stars" was all over the alt-rock station circa... oh hell. 1994? 1995? I liked it, and got the album, and liked the rest of it more. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I heard that on the radio when it aired. I remember it because they refused to do some acoustic bullshit, and I thought that was ballsy. I remember thinking they had some strong rockstar tude for a band that wasn't very famous at all. ____Not the real rusty Hey I listen to hum. ____Not the real rusty "An Astronaut" I think we'd prefer it. ____Not the real rusty Are you threatening to issue a chargeback? I'll refund you right away if that's your plan. In fact that probably is what I should do. I suspected that might be your idea. I'll go do that now. Sorry man, but I don't trust you. If you want back in, go with paypal. ____Not the real rusty No Just returned to new signup status, with return of money via CC gateway. He can certainly come back via paypal. ____Not the real rusty Whatever it was I don't need to risk my creditworthiness, in any case. ____Not the real rusty Money money money I actually don't want to do this for money. It's just the universal poker chip. What I'd be much happier with would be a way to ensure that each user account is one distinct individual person, for free. That would actually accomplish what I want to do rather than just creep up on it a little closer. And you can pay $2.00/mo for ad-free k5 already (for a long time now). Otherwise, I don't see charging for anything else. ____Not the real rusty WIPO Nedit. BBedit a close second. ____Not the real rusty Sort of As far as I can understand it, what happens a lot is that you can hand over the keys and walk away, but if the bank forgives any part of the original loan you are taxed on that money as income. And taxes aren't wiped out with bankruptcy. So there are plenty of ways for people to still get screwed over here. I'm not sure how this applies to foreclosure, but a foreclosure is a huge black mark on your credit. Good luck ever getting another loan with a foreclosure on your record. ____Not the real rusty Does his plan distinguish at all (or attempt to) between people who bought one home to live in and flippers who overpaid for ten or twelve houses as an "investment"? ____Not the real rusty Jason Pawloski: The kind of person you want on your website? As you have noticed, Jason is back. And yes, he actually paid. Heh. So, since we're being all welcoming and stuff here, I thought I'd temporarily suspend the ban-on-sight policy and ask you guys: Should he stay (for the moment, until he does something ban worthy again, which will be days if not hours) or should he go immediately? Take the pole inside. I will go with the will of the peoples. I said take the pole. TAKE IT. [taps left foot three times] [waves hand under stall divider] ____Not the real rusty FWIW He's the only one, and it's because of his long, long, long record here. ____Not the real rusty My plan worked! Almost a year ago I left myself a little present for the future, in the form of the solution to a problem I always have building mod_perl on Debian. I craftily seeded the title with the string that I always recognize and search for when I run into this issue and forget what the simple answer is. And today, it bloody well worked. Thank you, me from the past. Love, me from the future. Altogether true My problem was that this hosting company tends to release servers to me that don't have a lot of dev packages built, especially that one that produces this error if it's not on there. The whole system works, it's just a matter of finding the package I'm missing. And the error also grows out of me building apache/mod_perl by hadn rather than using apt-get for that. ____Not the real rusty lol I don't even know where to begin. You want a perl module to know enough to tell me what debian package contains the particular library function it's looking for? I assume it should also know if I'm using a redhat-based system, and therefore what rpms might be missing, or... you see, every module would be infinitely large. There's a place for command-and-control in software (i.e. OSX) and everything, but there's also room for mix and match and experiment. I'd hate if all software was locked down like my beloved macs. ____Not the real rusty I never quite realized it before... ...but you really are nuts. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hmmm Make an app that associates your informational search text of choice with a nonsense word that isn't going to appear on Google from any other source. Insert the nonsense word into the title of your diary, blog post, whatever. Offer a search that looks up your informational text locally and converts it to the nonsense word, and then run a google search for that nonsense word. Profit! Except that would be dumb because if I'm looking locally already why not just return the diary you wanted to begin with? I suppose this could be used to link a post anywhere to a high google result. But why would I want to bother doing that? So if anyone else would like to implement this, feel free. ____Not the real rusty I removed it for him on request ____Not the real rusty Get a room [nt] ____Not the real rusty I HAVE ONE ____Not the real rusty Some jackass on the interweb recommends... ...sodium metabisulphite. Probably worth a try. But get some glass carboys anyway. ____Not the real rusty Carboys The one thing to watch out for with those carboys is they're a lot easier to get stuff in to than get it out of. I had oak chips in one of mine for a while, and once I'd racked the cider off them, getting the soggy chips out again was a bitch. If you have a step that involves stuff with volume or stuff that will swell when wet, probably still best to do it in the plastic. Keep the hoppy bucket for future hoppy beers, and just pull them into the carboy when you want the hops out. ____Not the real rusty You forgot bull semen ____Not the real rusty Oh, sorry The answer is no. I 3ed this comment to endorse it, but I suppose that's not the most obvious answer. ____Not the real rusty I am making pickles I just found myself with a dozen fresh cucumbers that aren't getting any better, so I decided to have a stab at the cucumber's leap toward immortality: the pickle. Using the following: 12 sliced cucumbers 8 sliced onions 1/2 cup salt 48oz white vinegar 3 tsp mustard seeds 3 tsp celery seeds What you do is, take the cucumber and onion slices, toss them with the salt in a big pot, and let them sit for about an hour. My theory is this draws a lot of the water out of the raw vegetables and makes them more amenable to soaking up the pickle juice flavor later, but I don't know that to be the case for sure. When they're done, drain the veggies and boil up the other stuff. I had no choice but to mentally call this mixture "pickle ichor," a term which shall be used from now on. Then stuff the cucumber and onion slices in jars (I used wide-mouth pint jars, and this recipe makes an even dozen), and fill the jars in with the ichor, leaving about 1/3 inch of headspace, get any air bubbles out, and then process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes. I'm sort of paranoid, so I actually closed up my pressure canner and did the normal vent for ten minutes process that I would do if I was pressure canning, so in effect I processed them at like 2 or 3 pounds of pressure for ten minutes instead. I don't relish (ha ha) the thought of death by home preserved food. How are they? I don't know. They're sitting on my counter cooling. I'll let you know in a few weeks. Mine did a bit too well My cucmbers went all nuts. I've got them growing up an 8-foot high sort of net tent thing, and several of them have gone over the top of it. I'm actually planning a second batch of pickles with a bunch of small cukes that are coming up right now. I'm going dill with this batch. My peppers (bell, not chili) did weirdly. The plants barely grew past seedling size, but they have produced lots of good peppers. The corn did pretty well, tomatoes did not as well as they should have considering I have about 85 plants in the ground. I should have planted fewer and pruned them more. They're basically an unmanageable jungle at this point. Got lots of tomatoes though. The leeks looks great, and I have a few other things that the jury is still out on. I may have some decent broccoli soon, if something bad doesn't happen. ____Not the real rusty heh I need to store up for the long winter of, uh, no pickles ahead. Or something. No, I am part of the new wave of back to the land hippies. The first wave (circa 70's) thought they could make a great living in the burgeoning field of subsistence agriculture, so they sold everything they owned and bought a worthless plot of swampland and went completely broke and starved and gave up. I'm part of the new wave, who already have good telecommuting or consulting jobs and live in the sticks and do this old fashioned crap because it's interesting and costs less than getting seriously into road biking or luge. ____Not the real rusty I know someone who has one [nt] ____Not the real rusty Great link I always thought domes were a bad idea. Having seen the one here, I still think they are. Apart from all their other problems, they are ugly as hell. ____Not the real rusty Ah, I wish My wife won't let us move to any of the more remote islands. She has this hangup about, like, being part of civilization, or something. I'd be there in a heartbeat though. In my role as island councilor, should I win, I will push to reduce or eliminate the police presence here though. ____Not the real rusty Ichor I have been washed in the blood of the pickle. Halleleujah! ____Not the real rusty Bah I like pickles. And also, I still don't know of any other way to preserve fresh cucumbers without destroying them. Even if cucumbers tasted inherently better than pickles. ____Not the real rusty If Apple made pickles, it would still be iChor. ____Not the real rusty I always knew that ____Not the real rusty It'd take a miracle. ____Not the real rusty lol You think we don't know who you are? ____Not the real rusty Draw up a schedule Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat: Free healing clinic, first-come first-served (limit 1 per day) Sun: One-day healing auction. Highest bidder gets healed immediately. ____Not the real rusty Well, you know what they say... ..."When all you hav is neurosurgery, everything looks like brain trauma." Actually, I have a question -- are you in a union? ____Not the real rusty Also AT&T suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuwait for ituuuuucks. ____Not the real rusty Basil? You don't really want your basil to be flowering, unless you're trying to produce seeds. The leaves turn bitter and aren't much good once it flowers. ____Not the real rusty If it's already flowering... it may be too late. But try lopping off the whole flowering tip, down to the first pair of leaves below where the flowers start. And if you have any plant food or fish emulsion, give it a good dose of that. Basil usually only flowers when it's stressed, or old (sometimes). If you can keep it happy it tends to not want to flower as much. However I've found that when mine starts flowering it's hard to prevent it from continuing. You might just go ahead and let it and collect some seeds, now that it's started. Grow some new young plants for the leaves. ____Not the real rusty Go for it I was thinking about doing that myself. Feel free, I'd like to hear the howls of outrage ideas of the membership. ____Not the real rusty Paypal would be fine I don't have a problem with that. We can take either for ads and subscriptions anyway. Also, we don't store any CC info -- it gets passed on to the CC gateway for processing. What I'm talking about would be a hash of probably the last 4-5 digits, expiration, and name. Enough to identify one card, not usable for fraud, and really not recoverable from a hash at all anyway. ____Not the real rusty Ha I actually don't know that for a fact. You'd be amazed at the amount of effort a couple people have put into crapflooding here. I could see it both ways, but I'd probably start off on the safe side. ____Not the real rusty About banning I would expect to be issuing a lot more warnings than bannings if members had paid for their accounts. As it has been, we do a lot of summarily banning multiple dupe accounts of people who already know better. It always seemed pointless to issue lots of warnings to dupes. For paid accounts, honestly I hardly would expect to have to ban or warn anyone, but there would be much more use of warnings than there has been in the past. ____Not the real rusty Why? I never provided you with a reason to make a free account. Why would this be any different? If you come along and want to participate, and you think it's worth $5.00, then you presumably would pay. If not, you wouldn't. I don't have much to do with it either way. ____Not the real rusty Blockquote... ...includes its own paragraph break. Autoformat will also create a p break if you leave the blank line. Hence you get two. To format more smoothly, don't start blockquotes on a blank line. E.g. this: La la I am a paragraph<blockquote type="cite">I am a blockquote</blockquote>I am another paragraph Will format up as this: La la I am a paragraphI am a blockquoteI am another paragraph ____Not the real rusty Yes, well... Latex is a professional typesetting language, whereas Scoop's autoformat is a website entry formatting kludge designed for people who are too lazy to type <p>. So there's the difference in features and functionality explained. :-) ____Not the real rusty I was thinking $5.00 But it would actually be charged. That plus a hash of the identifying CC info so you only get one account ever, and I think we'd either shrivel up to nothing and die, or solve the spamming and crapflooding issues. Funny that someone else is thinking about this right now. It'll probably happen before I turn new signups back on. ____Not the real rusty I agree That just makes sense. ____Not the real rusty Yes That's true. It's not a dupe-proof bullet, but it'd cut down by orders of magnitude. I think "good enough" is probably good enough. ____Not the real rusty Um Re-reading, I see that that metaphor makes no sense at all. Mentally rewriting it so it does is left as an exercise for the reader. ____Not the real rusty This D-1ary Contains Cider And may have been processed in a facility that also processes nuts or nut products. First, Calvin is doing great. Gaining weight, starting to wake up occasionally for more than a few minutes, and generally being extremely easygoing and likable. It's a whole new world; he actually lets us put him down sometimes without fussing. Ellie never did that. She wanted to be held constantly. His only flaw so far is that he is a slow eater. A perfectly good eater -- he'll polish off a 4oz bottle in one feeding, but it take him 30-45 minutes to do it. Ellie just started her little internal vacuum pump and drained the bottle as fast as it would go. So that's taking some getting used to. In cider news, I finally bottled batch B1 last weekend, in 16oz Grolsch bottles. I used the flip-cap bottles for my convenience, mainly, and because I wasn't going to add any priming sugar for extra carbonation, so there's not much pressure to worry about. I ended up with 33 pints. I started with five gallons, so that's a loss of about 7 pints. Most of that loss comes from the tapped buckets I was using, which won't siphon right down to the bottom. So every time I racked I lost 1 - 2 pints. I got some glass carboys, which I did the last stages of the ferment in, so I'll probably use those to reduce the overall loss this year. It came out really good. Surprisingly sweet, considering I did none of the fancy stuff you usually have to do to produce a sweet hard cider. The problem is that we use champagne yeast, which can live in up to 11 or 12% alcohol (as opposed to beer yeast which dies around 6%) so generally without any special handling the juice will ferment right down to fully dry, leaving no remaining sugar for a sweet taste. There are a few ways producers get around this -- there's a French process that uses an added clarifier to do something odd to the juice at the beginning which generally produces a sweet cider, or you can drop sulfates in when the SG is where you want it to kill any remaining yeast and stop the ferment. When you do that though, you have to carbonate it with a counterpressure filler, because there's no yeast left to produce CO2 from bottle conditioning. I didn't do either of those things, the ferment just stopped by itself. I'm not complaining, it's great stuff, but I am a little worried that bottling could have stirred things up enough to restart the ferment in the bottles. There probably isn't enough sugar left to do anything but make it fizzy, but it would lose the sweetness. My plans for both batches were 180 degrees wrong -- this one ended up tasting like a farmhouse cider, and the other batch is very dry and champagney. Well, I got one of each anyway. I'll put the other batch in wine bottles when I get around to buying some. The stuff has a kick though. It's dangerous, because it really doesn't taste that strong, but it's actually 8 or 8.5% ABV. Two friends and I split two bottles between the three of us, and we were all loopy. My friend Rob calls it "the one-drink bender." The cider mill opens again soon, so I'll be making another trip out to VT. I'll try to pick up three batches this year, and I want to do a wild ferment on one of them. It's all kinds of likely that it won't work, and I'll get 5 gallons of cider vinegar, but hey. I can use that too. I'm willing to lose one batch for the chance of a really outstanding natural yeast cider. Meanwhile, I have enough brewing junk now to do a batch or two of beer anytime, so I'll pick up a couple of kits when I get to the homebrew store for wine bottles. Stay tuned for more extremely intermittent updates on that too. She's ok The first week she was completely fine. The second week she got a little clingy around mommy. I think it's just the disruption of her normal life that's doing it -- her mother is her comfort, so she goes there. She doesn't blame Calvin at all -- she's been really sweet to him, which is a relief. She is 2 1/2 now though -- old enough to sort of understand what's going on, and she had a lot of warning. I think she actually likes him. Hopefully they don't get into the real fighting until he's old enough to defend himself. ____Not the real rusty You could try gardening Not too expensive, can take about as much time as you'd like to devote to it, can be done anywhere (even in a small city apartment, if that's where you are) and there's always some new kind of bastard bug / fungus / disease attempting to destroy your labors. ____Not the real rusty You're a creep. You're a weirdo. What the hell are you doing here? You don't belong here. ____Not the real rusty In the Federal Government, there are three separate yet equally important groups. The Congress, who make laws, the Executive, who enforces them, and the Judicial, who examines them for constitutionality. These are their stories. Dah DUM! The word on Thompson is that he's lazy. He was consistently one of the most absent Senators, and generally admitted to being bored by a lot of the mundane details of legislating. My predicition is that he doesn't have the drive to last through a long and bitter presidential campaign, he'll raise surprisingly little money, and he'll wash out quickly after one or two disappointing primaries. Honestly, the man really does look like he's enjoying his life too much to bother with all the unending bullshit of trying to become President. ____Not the real rusty Lazy Fred I'm just irresponsibly repeating what I've heard about Fred. Whether it's true or not, it's turning out to be a very sticky tag. It's a mistake to think things like that don't have a serious effect (flip-flopper, anyone?)... ____Not the real rusty Could also be the delicious taste of wood alcohol, which is much more prevalent in homemade wines and sprits than it should be. Mmmm. Taste the blindness. Which reminds me, I have some free time today, maybe I'll finally bottle my cider. ____Not the real rusty Will do In the meantime, the executive summary is: bottled one batch, got 33 pints, tastes very good. :-) ____Not the real rusty The avant garde in art... ....is still considered "what we were doing in 1968." So it's still ok to use those words. Yes, Art, where even what's new is old. ____Not the real rusty Never has a comment been so aptly followed by a sig. :-) ____Not the real rusty This is me also mentally inserting all of the events of these diaries into the milieu of Scrubs. mariah == Elliot ____Not the real rusty You ordered water They dehydrated it for you before shipping, to save you money. ____Not the real rusty Here's an easy mnemonic: Being gay is A-OK! Being a hypocrite means you're full of shit. ____Not the real rusty You'd have to call it "Camel Toe Pilsener" Just sayin. ____Not the real rusty u fail it where it is being noticeable enough to ban. ____Not the real rusty eh? I know you didn't. That's why you fail it at being banned. I was just answering your question. ____Not the real rusty my funny rusty what? ____Not the real rusty Baby update Born 8/21/2007, 8:20 am. 7 lb 9 oz. 22 inches long. Huge hands and feet, round cannonball head and lots of black hair. Baby and mommy are both fine, daddy is recovering a bit more slowly. :-) So today we're blessed with a four-day-old and a 2 1/2 year old with an ear infection, spewing yogurt and blueberries like some kind of lacto-sprinkler. So I don't have a whole lot of time. But all is (more or less) well here. It's only a handful ...if you have extremely tiny hands. My guess is "one" actually. ____Not the real rusty K5 is having a massage... I don't have any more time for dealing with the silliness here, unfortunately, so new user signups are going to be off for a couple days while I get the whole baby thing going again. I would expect them back maybe Thursday or Fridayish. Not my first choice, but meh. You guys can probably live for a week without a new dupe, right? Everything's still on schedule, although my wife has a cold so we'll have to see if they'll still do the surgery. I hope so. I don't think either of us can wait any more. OMG NOES! I didn't thinking of them. But now is too late. Outside the wall they stare noses pressed against the glass LETS US IN! they cries but no. Now is too late. ____Not the real rusty No problem We only produce the best here. ____Not the real rusty lol I'm right with you on "all newborns are ugly." Also, I consider newborn to be anything under 6 months. I don't expect it to be different this time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Fuck you very much. ____Not the real rusty Front page Do you remember which ones were front page? I can restore them. And yes, part of the general chaos. ____Not the real rusty never mind I put them all back on FP. After th first day or so it doesn't make that much difference, and yours, bee guy's and localroger's are all good anyway. Not worth trying to fiddle around with which was FP and which wasn't. ____Not the real rusty Thanks Tuesday. Please, please let it be done tuesday. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's a boy You need to keep up with my high-volume newsletter. ____Not the real rusty I kind of liked Nebraska Compared to a lot of flyover farmland, it's quite pretty. And I did have the best hamburger I've ever eaten there. And the people were not even a quarter as scary as the people in Idaho. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Nebraska. Scary-ass bugs though. You have to basically stop and scrape your windshield every twenty miles. ____Not the real rusty Pwn ____Not the real rusty That video is shopped I can tell from some of the pixels and from having seen quite a few shops in my time. ____Not the real rusty Not censorship Just teh bug. Sorry about that -- it's very much restored now. ____Not the real rusty Not censorship Just a bug. Sorry about that. ____Not the real rusty Here's what that was about I was tweaking some code this morning, and I pasted a box into the wrong browser tab, where it overwrote a block that loads some stuff in the head section of most pages. Oops, noticed right away, replcaed the block and put the box code in the right place. So no harm done right? Well, strangely, it seems like some of the apaches didn't get the message, and held onto that code in the block. I just checked that the block's still right (it is) and kicked the webserver. It oughtn't come up again. No omghax unfortunately. And if you tried to use that form it wouldn't have worked. Weird that it even showed up after I fixed it the first time. Dunno. ____Not the real rusty We're having a baby on Tuesday The nine months are almost up, and we're scheduled for a c-section on Tuesday. Just like ellie was, the boy is also upside down (or right side up depending on how you look at it). Backwards for birthing purposes, anyway. So my wife goes under the knife again in T minus four days. This one will be a boy, so we'll have the complete set. Any of you ever observed a Cesarean birth? I wasn't sure they'd let me actually see anything last time, but everyone was busy, and when I stood up to look over the little curtain, no one told me not to. It was fascinating. I can now tell my wife that I've seen her insides. Although she doesn't like it very much when I describe her as "well-marbled." So that's a pretty big deal, to me. In other news, I'm running for Island Council. We've been trying to secede from Portland for going on two years now, and got as far as the state legislature in August, which shot us down due to blatant maneuvering by the powerful Portland reps. Bastards. And Democrats, too, which is galling. I'm going to have to grit my teeth and vote for some Republicans locally next time around. But as part of their saying "lulz Portland pwnd j00 suxors" the legislature forced the city to institute an Island Council of seven members, to be elected in November. It has no actual power, no budget to speak of, and no right to make or enforce policy. It has, officially, the right to speak to our City Council members. A right which, by definition, any citizen has. So this is not exactly the Supreme Soviet if you're following me here. But I think it's a key opportunity, if we don't screw it up. What I am pushing to do is take this council and make it the Board of Selectmen for a town meeting government. This accomplishes two things -- first, anything the council presents to the city would actually be decided by islanders directly, and thus carry a lot more political weight. And second, when we do eventually secede, we'll have a functioning island government to step in. I have to go to town and get my nomination papers notarized today, and turn them in on Monday. Which itself is a story, because I was actually at a notary yesterday for something else and didn't get it done then, because I am retarded. Less retarded than the city council though. That should be my campaign slogan. "Vote Rusty. He's less retarded."* What else? The garden is booming. My corn is growing ears (kind of late because I planted in the middle of July), the zucchini and pumpkin vines are enormous, and we are getting 4 or 5 pounds of tomatoes a day. Everything's probably going to go to hell next week due to neglect. Oh well. Maybe I can get someone to come do some fill-in gardening for me. That's what's going on here. Wish us luck. -------- * I'm retarded, and I approved this message. Neither Grilled, extremely rare, with a little chive butter for preference. The yacht currently mounts only a 3/4 inch potato cannon. And Acadia is beautiful this time of year. We're in the last two weeks of ridiculous summer crowding now. By the beginning of September things empty out and we get our best weather of the year. September and early October are our reward for living here. ____Not the real rusty Learn how to sex a lobster before you go Not sex up a lobster, mind you, but determine its sex. Important difference, as I have well learned. Now. Anyway, flip it over, and find the first pair of flipperettes under the tail, right where the tail joins the body. On a male, they're fairly long and, uh, stiff. And yes, that's for a reason. On a female they're softer and floppier. People are generally impressed (or at least amused -- totally unlike the reaction when you sex up a lobster, by the way) when you can tell them if theirs was a girl or a boy. Don't really know why. I only learned so I could name them accurately when I drop live into the boiling pot of steam. Y'know, Larry vs. Linda. ____Not the real rusty We're both going to be there I don't know. She's the one having the surgery, but I'll be there too. So I think WE are scheduled. At least I didn't say "WE are getting out uteruses sliced open..." That would be wrong. ____Not the real rusty You are not the only one to think of it We could plausibly try to become part of Nova Scotia. There are many of us who want to. On the other hand, that would have radically less chance of success than our previous unsuccessful attempt to simply form a town, so, probably not. ____Not the real rusty The first one went great We actually came home the day after surgery the first time, and she never took any of the heavy-duty painkillers they gave her. Just Motrin for a while. I'm hoping this one goes as well. I'm also considering asking if they could just install a zipper while they're in there anyway... ____Not the real rusty Och! Whet wee file beesties is these an' gang aft auglew i'the gloamin o'the chlanargh? Och! ____Not the real rusty Thank you And also, my goodness, look who comes out of the woodwork. :-) ____Not the real rusty I hate those double strollers too Never, ever, ever will I use one. Just stupid. And I'd be peeved if some little girl was sniggering at me while I tried to get my morning crack on too. ____Not the real rusty Eponysterical! ____Not the real rusty lolbertarians I don't trust any of therm -- my point in trying to help some local Republicans is two-fold: On the local level, here in Maine, the Republicans are actually pretty much old-style "hands off" traditional Republicans. Not the christers or the neo-con crazies. So it's not too scary to help them out a bit, and The Democrats own Maine. They control all branches of government here. And regardless of the party in control, I'm wary of unitary government. We'df have done much better if there was a stronger split in party affiliation, simply because one party leader from Portland wouldn't have been able to pull all the strings in the committee and squish us at will. So I'm not deluded about party politics, and my voting is and remains strategic. Without a good reason not to, I'll vote democrat because their policies tend to line up with mine more often than not. But here I have a good reason to oppose certain people and the absolute power of one party. ____Not the real rusty The question is ...how many Hop Rapes equals one Gypsy rape? I guess it depends on what the final SG of the beer is... ____Not the real rusty Hey speaking of which You still coming to the Running of the Jew? ____Not the real rusty O'Re-1lly I don't understand how the tides could come in and go out and the sun go up and down! I am a complete and utter fool! It must be teh gahd majiccx! Holy shit, is that guy retarded. ____Not the real rusty eXistenZ Don't play squishy pulsating video games. ____Not the real rusty Retard Mmmmm. Was it good for you? ____Not the real rusty That explains it I was out running at night last week, and saw a lot of meteors. Not like super-meteor-shower quantities, but several over the course of an hour or so. I was wondering. ____Not the real rusty ALL-MIDGET DOWAGER CHORUS DOWN ON THE FARM ____Not the real rusty Routers are terrifying I used to have a job that involved using a router daily, and I have still never gotten over being afraid of those damn things. Table saw? No problem. 18" radial arm saw? Piece of cake (even though one of those did try to take my arm off once). Huge-ass 7 foot tall bandsaw? Whatever. But routers are just scary. The bits are always razor-sharp (because if they weren't, it wouldn't work at all) and the whine those things make as they spin at 1000 times the speed of sound (apparent observed speed) speaks of rending flesh and powdered bone. Plus it's a handheld, relatively lightweight tool that, by the nature of its intended use, is almost always very poorly balanced on the very edge of the workpiece. Basically, if I absolutely have to use a router at all, I will be happy to pay as much as possible for the best bit I can find and thank whoever's selling them for the opportunity. Those things are death on a stick. ____Not the real rusty Hopefully you were not too utterly upset by my playfully (but not maliciously!) amusing myself by copiously sprinkling my comment with unncessarily profuse adverbs. You're right though. It's been way too long since I wrote an article. ____Not the real rusty PERHAPS IF YOU TOOK A BREAK FROM MASTURBATING LIVESTOCK YOU'D HAVE LESS HORSE CUM ON YOUR HANDS ____Not the real rusty Nonsense The deer here routinely swim between the islands. In fact, there's some suspicion that they're now actually swimming off the island when the teams come out to cull them, and then swimming back. I can't swear to that, but I've seen them swimming, whole families, and they can cross a mile of water with little trouble. ____Not the real rusty Strangely enough... ...amusingly the only thing easily won in the dimly lit and sparsely attended casions of Vegas these days is a ridiculously large and torpidly wriggling sack full of overweeningly unnecessary adverbs. Really, I just wanted to write "torpidly wriggling" you know. ____Not the real rusty Er, what? Your account is allowed to post. You posted this, yes? Stories are stories, whether diary or front page submissions, and you are wholly unrestricted. You seem to be quoting me, but I never said what you're quoting. Where'd you get that from? ____Not the real rusty Ha! Nice find. ____Not the real rusty True ...and here I never thought sye served any purpose at all. Wait, is that what you meant? ____Not the real rusty You're welcome We do what we can. Which isn't always all that much, or all that fast. But is a lot more than most people ever notice. ____Not the real rusty It made me sad too I don't know why he wanted to throw it all away with some copypasta in the queue. But ours is not to wonder why. ____Not the real rusty That email Which I added to the story, was actually from Theo. To my knowledge, he doesn't have a posting account here, and regular comments purporting to be from him are probably fake. The first one certainly was, anyway. ____Not the real rusty That comment Was not Theo. I erased it. ____Not the real rusty Braaaaaaaaains... ____Not the real rusty Ha ha! The foot's on the other hand now, Mr. Cramer. ____Not the real rusty I have to disagree The difference between a project with a competent project manager and one without is night and day for the people "doing the work." So while it may not seem like you're doing anything, if you do it right, the developers will love you for it. Actually, your analogy to the conductor of an orchestra is perfect. It seems like he's not doing much, except that if he wasn't there every member of the orchestra would have to know what every other member is doing at all times. It would be a wreck. They can practice forever, and know their parts perfectly, but they can't know the exact timing until they're all actually playing it, and then only if there's someone cuing them with a good understanding of the whole thing. Same thing with a software project. If you're doing your job right, they can do theirs without everyone having to be worried about everyone else the whole way through. Of course, if you make a total mess of it, you will probably not cause it to be any worse than it would have been without you. But I'd recommend you take this to be your main task, and not worry too much about not doing the coding yourself. If anything, PMs shouldn't be actively coding. It'd be like trying to conduct and fill in on the French Horn at the same time. You'd do a bad job of both tasks. ____Not the real rusty The first season was not bad I mean, I have a soft spot for Kiefie anyway. But the second season. ZOMG WHITE WIMMEN MENACED BY COOGARE! I loled. ____Not the real rusty One of the reasons... ...to know the style rules is to know when you can break them. Now if this guy can't write in any other style than this, he's shitcanned in a week. This style, deployed to describe, say, a suicide bombing in Baghdad, would be wildly inappropriate and infuriating. It's not for every story, and the safe bet is always to follow The Rules. But in a situation like this, given what is clearly a silly story, the dude decided to pull out all the stops. I say bravo to him. He took the ridiculous and made it, in its way, sublime. ____Not the real rusty Er, sorry I forgot to say: SHOTGUN MOUTHWASH T MINUS 3 SECS PLZTX K BAI failfagg0rt. I can't imagine what came over me. Please accept my apologies. ____Not the real rusty You're right though Seriously, why not ask why it's the government's job to provide healthcare, or spread freedom, or save the environment? That would actually be the best Presidential debate question I've ever seen. Not because I think they couldn't answer it -- indeed, the answer to that question pretty much defines what actually differs about most political parties. But I doubt most Americans have thought about it much, and it would be great to get answers from people who (presumably) have. ____Not the real rusty I got my fist I got my pen I got survivalism. ____Not the real rusty Ror "Cultural commentators" and "public intellectuals" who latch on to a fluffy children's fantasy series for their grand theories about What's Wrong With The Western World Today are the best. JK Rowling, thought she clearly didn't intend it, is still an accomplished troll of the self-appointed elite. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I love when someone requests a feature we already have. So, the way it works is yes, you do see your own ad, but no, it doesn't count those impressions. Mainly this was so that you didn't get counted for times you view your own ad stats and so forth, but it helps for when you're just reading the site as well. Not so quixotic after all, eh? Or, perhaps, in light of it already existing, the request is in fact quixotic. "Impractical"? I don't know. Already done, anyway. ____Not the real rusty What is it with the dust masks? Those stupid things do nothing, under any circustances. I don't even use those for routine building stuff. How hard is it to get a cheap half-face cartridge respirator, people? Not hard, that's how. ____Not the real rusty I usually get ...the cartridges for organic vapors, so I can use it for painting and such too. They're probably more expensive, but I think I've bought two sets in the past six years, so what the hell. ____Not the real rusty So I said... ..."That's not a banana!" and she said "Well, that's not my parakeet either!" Guffaws. ____Not the real rusty It's just you I don't see it in the screenshot. ____Not the real rusty Oh, yeah I see it now. Huh. ____Not the real rusty I has horsecock? here ____Not the real rusty Cookies Login is via cookie, and cookies are distinct by protocol. If you're logged in here to http://www.kuro5hin.org/ , try hitting https:/www.kuro5hin.org. You won't be logged in. ____Not the real rusty Could do that, I suppose Assuming you wanted logout to always mean "destroy all my sessions from everywhere." K5 has a separate logout for that ("Logout from all locations"). ____Not the real rusty Ahhh, so, it says here... ...that your shit's all fucked up, you're wicked retarded, and you talk like a fag. ____Not the real rusty Also link ____Not the real rusty Ha So it does. Oh well. ____Not the real rusty If only Maine is like Canada but without any of the services that Canadians pay their high taxes for. What they do with our high taxes, I have no idea. ____Not the real rusty But... On the federal level, sure. That's what the US gov't does with all of our federal tax money. But the state of Maine also has a pretty high tax rate, and we have neither fences nor paid fallow fields. Here you can walk through the woods to Canada anytime (eh) and if you don't grow potatoes no one pays you squat (I know this for sure -- I don't grow potatoes and make no money at it at all. I might have to get a second job, like not growing wheat or soybeans, just to make ends meet). My only theory is they're bribing the lobsters not to move en masse to Newfoundland and thereby end the only native industry we have left. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I obviously don't post enough anymore. "Intelligent!" "Normal!" Rich. ____Not the real rusty Man That was a weird night at the Castle. I still from time to time say "I make clothing out of latex." Just cause. Incidentally, I didn't go to that EFF dinner, and neither did Prince. So Prince and I have something in common besides being black funk-rock stars from Minneapolis. ____Not the real rusty Username is so good I can't bring myself to ban it. ____Not the real rusty Will you call it GayBorg? ____Not the real rusty Are you drunk? If so, kick up your font a few notches. You should be able to increase the spacing to the two or three inches you apparently need around any potential click targets. And we here at Kuro5hin.org Industries welcome your insightful contributions. ____Not the real rusty Except When Rudy says it, it sounds like Daffy Duck. "Oh my God, the terrorithth!" ____Not the real rusty "in the habit" eh? I see what you did there. :-) ____Not the real rusty New account name: 512 ____Not the real rusty Well played Well played, indeed. ____Not the real rusty In America... ..."The Government" is popularly viewed as essentially an uncontrollable mob of oligarchs who have the power to kill us if we disagree with them. It's pretty hard to get anyone here to think of "the government" as "me and you." This, to an enormous degree, is what is wrong with this country right now, and basically the wellspring of the craziness the rest of the world has witnessed from our corner of the northern hemisphere. I also can't really say it's an incorrect view. We've steadily concentrated social power further and further away from the individual for 200 years, and at this point, it's trivial for someone with enough money to just step in near the top and run shit, regardless of what "We The People" want. Not to mention most of us don't want anything but to believe the government is something outside of ourselves which is responsible for everything bad that happens to us and cannot be changed in any way. ____Not the real rusty No one says your neighbors have to like you The law doesn't have a thing to say about whether you'll be happy in a neighborhood, or whether your neighbors will all be assholes and hate you, or anything. It just says they can't keep you out. Don't mix up regulating actions with regulating beliefs. The law just says you can't do certain things -- like prevent someone from buying a house based on skin color. It doesn't say you can't hate black people. It doesn't say you can't (or must) move to a neighborhood where all your neighbors will hate you. The point of such laws isn't to force everyone to be happy and get along. It's to ensure that all people have a fair chance at certain basic things. A house, wherever they want and can afford to live. A job. A ride on the bus. It's overreaching to say we should abandon the idea of a level playing field because it can't accomplish the impossible goal of making everyone like each other. ____Not the real rusty Japanese xenophobia Japan is 98.5% ethnically Japanese. If you have a minority of only 1.5% of the population, I'm guessing you can treat them like shit for quite a while before it bites you in the ass. The US, on the other hand, is 81.7% white, 12.9% black, 4.2% Asian and whatever's left "Etc." And that doesn't count Hispanic, which isn't a clear racial group but would, I'd say, count toward ethnic variability. Let's point out that 10% of Americans speak Spanish and leave it at that. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about how to deal with different races and ethnicities based on Japan. You might as well try to find out what Fruity Pebbles tastes like by eating a bowl of Cheerios. (All numbers from CIA World Factbook) ____Not the real rusty Horse puckey Yeah I said it. Horse puckey. That is to "our current state of integration is the result of direct compulsion from the Federal government." What we have of equal opportunity is the result of direct compulsion from the Federal government, but we always had plenty of integration before that. Africans didn't come over here and start setting up their own all-black slave plantations in their own all-black townships, my friend. The US has been settled by successive waves of people of different races and ethnicities, and virtually none of those waves set themselves up in distinct segregated locations. Even at the height of Jim Crow, when we were probably the most segregated we've been, it was only at the neighborhood level. ____Not the real rusty Neighborhood neighborhood neighborhood ____Not the real rusty Green and wrinkly? ____Not the real rusty We've upped our ante Now up yours! ____Not the real rusty A common mistake However, Jerry Falwell is not dead. The clue is in that CNN article -- his body was found "unresponsive" in his office. Nope, he's not dead. What happened was The Rapture, and as it turns out, only Jerry Falwell was taken, just like he always secretly believed. So at least that's over with, anyway. ____Not the real rusty It was an experiment in lulz. ____Not the real rusty 4.0 I have relatively moderate wisdom. That's good. I'd hate to feel like I have nothing more to learn. ____Not the real rusty Oh, this and that My internet was out all weekend at home, so I had a little K5 vacation. Had to check in again. :-) The article that goes with that wisdom survey is interesting too, btw. ____Not the real rusty Macs would have to have a "bucket" I Encourage (3) anyone who gets that. ____Not the real rusty President Ahmadinejad added: "We just did it for the LULZ anyway." ____Not the real rusty What? He didn't even use the phrase "glass factory" in referring to possible outcomes for Iran. In America, that makes him a moderate, shading to leftist. It's just one step from where he is now to the absolutely pinko commie position of suggesting that a massive bombing campaign might not, under some circumstances, within 30 days of the original capture, be the best response to this event. ____Not the real rusty Now that would have been lulz. ____Not the real rusty No kidding I blame work. I swear to god I've had zero web time beyond work for the last month or so. It's really starting to be embarassing how long it's been since I've posted anything here. I believe the worst of it is over, and I can start to poke my head out now. However, I'm probably lying to myself about that. ____Not the real rusty Well For me it is. I'm probably the only one though. ____Not the real rusty Funny how Kristol completely ignores all the US intervention in Latin America in the 80's, and in fact our intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq around then too, which arguably put us squarely where we are today and can hardly be described with any words more positive than "disastrous." He also dismisses the Balkans with "were were slow to act," thereby rather stupidly skipping what might be the only semi-relevant supporting example he could have deployed. Except oh, right, that was NATO and the UN, not us acting unilaterally, which is what this pigfucker wants. I say let's send troops into Iran, and let's have Bill Kristol go first. We'll all wait here and see how it goes Bill. Good luck. ____Not the real rusty Ha Serves you right for watching TV "news". It's funny -- the total of NPR coverage of this story was the following, on the day Anna Nicole died: "...and model and television star Anna Nicole Smith died suddenly today. In other news..." That was it. I was shocked when I turned on CNN for a few minutes a week later in NY and discovered that they were still wall-to-wall with that nonsense. It's no wonder americans are so ignorant. ____Not the real rusty The button It says "EJECT" in big black letters on it. ____Not the real rusty Not better, just different Nah, I was in London a week ago, and I'm in NY now, so between the two I haven't had any spare time to talk here at all. One day, I will return. ____Not the real rusty circletimessquare check out your window So I'm in NYC for work, and I'm staying on 45th and 8th ave. Last night I peeped in cts's window and saw him sodomizing a goat. Nah, not really. It was a llama. Therefore necessarily also the smartest LOGIC MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT ____Not the real rusty You say misleading... I say terrific. And don't forget, trolls are also the most average people here. ____Not the real rusty Loyalty One of W's most famed and oft-praised (by his admirers, anyway) qualities is his "loyalty." Keeping Rumsfeld for so long when his strategies were so obviously not working is Exhibit A in this, but there are many others (Condi Rice, Heckuvajob Brownie, and so forth). One of the glaring patterns of the Bush II administration was the tendency for failures to be promoted. It strikes me that this elevation of loyalty over success or competence is pretty much the same thing as Enron's Star System, just veneered with political jargon rather than management-speak. I don't think it's a Republican phenomenon at all, actually, any more than Clinton's success was a Democratic phenomenon. But the two do provide an excellent example of exactly the contrast that article draws between successful companies and Enron. Thanks for the interesting perspective. ____Not the real rusty Balanced the budget actually left us with a looming budget surplus (quickly squandered). Also presided over eight years of really unusual peace and prosperity, and threaded some very tight needles with more diplomacy than bombing campaigns. Probably ended a war in the Balkans. Was generally a good leader. He did some things that I'm not so keen on as well, like basically throwing the American economy under the Unrestrained Free Trade bus, which we're paying for now. But you can't win 'em all. On the whole, he was clearly a hell of a lot better than what we got now. ____Not the real rusty 6.5/10 But only because so many people bit. I'm surprised. We're collectively losing our immunity or something. ____Not the real rusty Cider Since we're on the subject -- my cider's nearly done fermenting. One batch is just a wee tiny bit above 1.000 (the batch with the honey in it) and is dry as hell and pretty rough, flavor-wise. That one's gonna need a good long aging to smooth it out. I have my hopes for it though. The other one, which I didn't do anything fancy to, has more or less stopped fermenting at 1.014, and it's pretty damn good. I don't know why, but there's a lot of residual sweetness left. I suspect it was the half-ass way I woke up the yeastfor this one. It always fermented slower than the other batch. I will probably bottle that pretty soon with a little charging sugar and hope it keeps the sweetness. And in future ciders I'm probably going to pitch dry yeast directly into the cold juice. I'm very happy with how this one went. ____Not the real rusty See diary here. All I really have to add to that is I racked it once about midway through ferment, and one more time last week, when it seems to be about done. I'll post an update with a nice picture of my excel SG graph when I get around to it. Probably at bottling time, which is not far off. ____Not the real rusty Yeast I used Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast, which is dry in the packet. What you're supposed to do to start it is put it in some amount of warm water (I forget how much, a cup or whatever, and 90-100 degrees F) and let it sit for fifteen minutes. I did that for the first batch, but I totally shorted the time on the second batch. That one I mixed the yeast with the warm water and let it sit for maybe five minutes. I think that turned out to be the better plan, as the slower ferment definitely produced a better product. Course it was also different must, so who knows if it was the yeast or the apples. I fail it, where it is proper single-variable experiments. :-) ____Not the real rusty More on politics and the english language David Foster Wallace has a sort of related essay in the form of a book review of a usage guide called "Authority and American Usage" and subtitled "Politics and the English Language is Redundant" in here. You can also read most of it here online, in the form in which it was originally published, in Harper's Magazine. I believe the book version is expanded. ____Not the real rusty Brown I hate Brown because I don't think he is good at what he does, regardless of the value you place on what he does. There are far, far better mass-market thriller writers out there. And even the book Brown ripped off for Da Vinci was actually a lot more readable and interesting. ____Not the real rusty 5 hours on the battery lol. ____Not the real rusty Wonder how... ...using half of the audio battery life would affect your remaining talk time. Presumably half is half either way? Anyway, it is awfully pretty. I'll wait a couple years till they release the $99 iPhone mini though. :-) ____Not the real rusty That joke was very funny when I read it in the MeFi thread about this. I think it only works the first time you see it though. ____Not the real rusty We finally discovered slood Can't think how we've missed it all these years, now that it's been found. ____Not the real rusty "Guest workers" == permanent labor underclass. It's an idiotic idea that has already worked out terribly in Europe. Not to mention one would have thought that it had already been satired to death by H.G. Wells. Why should people from Mexico have to prove that they aren't drug addicts or speeders before they're allowed to be Americans? I didn't have to prove that. White immigrants don't have to prove that. Open the borders. ____Not the real rusty Looked pretty coherent to me too from perl-land. I wrote a similar kind of line a couple days ago, where when I was done I looked at it and thought "this looks inside-out somehow. Oh well." The ?: operator tends to lead to that kind of thing, IME. ____Not the real rusty wtf is nil anyway? They had to make up a new Ruby word for that, or what? ____Not the real rusty lol ____Not the real rusty This was a clever goatse There's still room for creativity. People get banned mainly for being uncreative. ____Not the real rusty Oh, I'm sorry ...but that meme-train left the station 60 years ago. I'm afraid your pop-culture referencing license will have to be revoked for that. ____Not the real rusty +1 Furry Porn ____Not the real rusty You were always wrong about that We have meaningless rules arbitrarily enforced by mostly-ethical-shading-to-apathetic admins. ____Not the real rusty Nothing personal I just dump stuff when I happen to look in on things. Obviously tonight is not the night for me to be around, so I'm gonna go watch a movie. You kids have fun, and don't stay up too late ok? School night. ____Not the real rusty They're all you I'm not real clear on the purpose of imagingineering this argument with yourself, but basically shut up. No one cared when they thought it was different people arguing, but when it's all just you? Sad, man. ____Not the real rusty Why do Republican legislatoterrorists hate America ____Not the real rusty I thought you already had been I went to anonymize you this morning, and somehow got the impression you already had been. I see now that I was mistaken in that. Anyway, now that I've got some coffee in me I find that I'm content to just give you a warning. So here: crapflooding is not ok. Please don't do it anymore. Thanks! ____Not the real rusty I am officially tired of you You're on your own. ____Not the real rusty OMFG YOUR SIG IS ANNOYING! ... ... I feel better now. ____Not the real rusty I hate tha game. ____Not the real rusty I believe you meant... ..."Please feel free to correct my grammar and usage." Also, semicolons are for the weak. Compleat Gentlemen use periods. ____Not the real rusty I think you were mistaken I checked the email notice, and the story's overall auto-post score was 2.0, which is well below the front page threshold. You sure you weren't looking at "Everything"? ____Not the real rusty Well then So much for my first instinct, which was to reply "WTF LOL! ARE YOU DRUNK?" And here I am being all nice about it. ____Not the real rusty I am dull You probably wouldn't want to meet me. Besides, I don't really like people, so people who meet me usually go away feeling like I didn't like them. Which, to be fair, I probably didn't. ____Not the real rusty ror All online communities reflect the personality of their founder. It's an ironclad rule. ____Not the real rusty Absolutely But the point of this Plain English award appears to be that you always have to explain every complicated thing you mention to anyone who might be reading your work. I agree with the people who say this is a stupid use of such an award. They should be giving them out to people who are expressing concepts that everyone already understands in ways that make them utterly opaque, not to people who are using technical terms for concepts that most people just aren't very familiar with. In other words, I think there's a clear advantage to saying "unsynthesised manifold" rather than "the endless flood of undifferentiated sensory data we accumulate throughout our waking hours," or "TCP/IP" instead of "the system of computer codes and agreements that allow different computers to communicate reliably over the internet" as both are both more succinct and more precise in the technical jargon. There is clearly not an advantage to saying "vertically oriented lined masonry combustion gas release channel" when what you mean is "chimney," unless you're writing an engineering spec and every one of those specifics could vary. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I started on a reply to the comment below yours, agreeing with it, but had to abandon it because I got busy. But basically, yeah she could easily have outlined the basic idea in a couple of words. I still don't particularly see the need for an organization giving out awards like this to some person writing a newspaper article, but whatever. ____Not the real rusty Oh dear god That was actually pretty clear to me. I only had to read it twice to folllow the last bit completely. I do not think this is a good thing. ____Not the real rusty Or it was a coincidence Actually it was a coincidence. Pretty much. :-) ____Not the real rusty Very weird That's what I thought too -- like, since when does osm expect a mature audience? How awfully strange people can become when they get old. ____Not the real rusty I thought that couldn't have been what you meant I still think you're an old weirdo now though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Even I have... ...an Egil tribute dupe. Think about that. ____Not the real rusty Hm That was not very convincing. I am inclined, by and large, to agree with him, but as an argument, it was pretty shakily supported. A few points that jumped out at me: "...from the early 1970s to today the return on investment of oil and natural gas extraction in the United States fell from about 25 to 1 to about 15 to 1." He states this, which is believable, but then goes on to assert the overall decline of EROI around the world without even making a pretense of demonstrating that the figures for he US are generalizable. I don't doubt the figure for the US, but he gives me no reason to believe that holds true for, i.e. the Middle East, or Venezuela, or West Africa. He does mention the Alberta tar sands, and the very fact that anyone's bothering with these low-yield sources of energy tends to support his argument, but he doesn't really come out and draw the connection. One example of declining EROI in a major oil-exporting region (which the US demonstrably isn't) would have gone a long way to shoring up this point. The fact that it's lacking makes me suspicious. "Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can't push them back indefinitely, because our species' capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they're needed, isn't infinite." That paragraph is total hand-waving at best, and defeatist nonsense at worst. Pushing back energy supply problems "indefinitely" doesn't automatically require "infinite" innovation. For example, fusion power would probably solve both the greenhouse gas problem and the energy supply problem for the forseeable future. I'm not saying fusion's right around the corner (or down the block, or in the next city down the turnpike for that matter...), but it would be a solution that does not, presumably, require "infinite" innovation. In fact, a much more coherent statement would be that pushing back constraints indefinitely would require indefinite innovation. That is, the ingenuity to solve the problems we have, when we have them, on an ongoing basis. I would say that's pretty much what we've been doing all along. So far, all of our solutions to energy problems have tended to cause further problems that we didn't forsee while we were busy solving the old problems. Whale oil greatly increased the supply of energy, but the drawback was it killed a lot of whales, and whales are not a rapidly renewing resource. So we found sources of enbergy to replace whale oil and started leaving the whales alone (more than we had been, anyway). Yes, we started burning fossil fuels instead, which brought a host of perhaps worse problems than dwindling whale supply. But it's worth not forgetting that the whales are, for the most part, back. That is, we did solve the problem we had at the time. Ok, this example is a little like falling into a combine and finding a penny in your hospital bed later, as you lie there with no arms or legs, but I still think it's a valid point. I don't really expect that trend won't continue. There isn't any magic bullet on the horizon. But if zero-emissions coal technology works out, that would push the supply issue back another 200 years or so and make a good start on fixing the greenhouse gas problem if combined with other measures to reduce CO2 emissions and start recapturing what we've already put out there. We probably can't produce all of our power from renewable resources, but we can certainly produce some of it, and start filling in the demand for more energy with clean energy. There's a grab-bag of partial solutions already out there for the problems we face now. They don't require infinite (or even, really, very much) innovation to put into practice. And in the last three paragraphs in general, he seems to conflate a bunch of not-very-related factors into the overall term "innovation." Most of his issues there are more public policy problems than anything to do with technology. If public policy changes can be considered "innovating," then he further undercuts his argument that we can't innovate infinitely, because I would assert that we can change public policy forever. There doesn't seem to be any natural cap on legislation, any more than there are a finite number of possible novels that can be written. In short: generally good thesis, but not backed up by much in the way of coherent argument. ____Not the real rusty It sounds like... ...the opposite kind of crap as the editorial above. Like you could basically take this article as representing the "It's hopeless ! Someone call the Waaaahmbulance!" POV, and The Bottomless Well as the "Problems? What problems? Everything's great!" POV. I'm just getting this from the blurb you linked to, of course, but it looks like a fine example of that type. His section of this point-counterpoint shores up my assumption that he's a nitwit. He says that "America currently consumes about 7 billion bbl. of oil a year" and then goes on to argue that "Alaska contains 18 billion bbl. of off-limits crude. We've embargoed at least an additional 30 billion bbl. beneath our coastal waters." As if this is some kind of solution. So our domestic supply pushes the end of oil back by a whopping 6.85 years, assuming demand doesn't increase? He also claims "Alberta's tar sands contain 180 billion bbl. recoverable with current technology," without mentioning that you're going to have to spend 1 bbl for every four of those you recover, or that exploiting tar sands is indeed the last gasp of a dying energy source. Not to mention the nightmare of trying to extract frozen hydrocarbons from offshore Alaska. We can barely manage to extract crabs from the waters off Alaska. And you don't even have to drill for crabs. I'm annoyed by this NYT editorial not because I think it's wrong, but because I think it's right and very poorly argued, which is almost worse. This kind of hand-waving just gives the starry-eyed "we can waste energy forever" camp more room to confuse people. We have really serious problems. If we don't stop the greenhouse gasses, the planet will stop them for us, by wiping us out or reducing our numbers so drastically that we can't continue to have thye kind of global impact we have now. That's just a fact. We can ignore it, but we'll pay the price later. It is also a fact that we have the knowledge -- both of the problem and of ways to solve it -- to reverse this situation. The way to solve it is not to pretend there isn't a problem and all we need to do is find more hydrocarbons, however. ____Not the real rusty As a waiter once said to me... ...while I relaxed and pondered my evening's selection in the exclusive French restaurant where I take nearly all my meals, after rolling the three long blocks from my penthouse apartment in my stretch Lincoln Liberal limousine to get there and ducking quickly past the uniformed doorman with my head under my arm so as to avoid the adoring throngs that mob the gilt-encrusted front door desperately hoping for just a glimpse of me, or perhaps in their wildest dreams for a drop of my actual sweat to land glistening on their cheek or upper lip, to be oh so carefully collected in a tiny crystal vial and kept in the reliquary they each have set up in the living-dining-bed-combo-room of their single-wide plebe trailers and treasured for the rest of their extremely nasty brutish and short lives, "Sir, do you like pasta?" ____Not the real rusty u lost me due to not mentioning jungle poon ____Not the real rusty Collaborative Media Inaction $ ____Not the real rusty So much better than the Da Vinci code. ____Not the real rusty The interweb geniuses at metafilter... ...determined that their comments are moderated. So they only allow the fawning ninnies through. Also, see the fine MeFi thread for further evidence that "die in a fire" has spread beyond our borders. And never have three people so justified the invention of that meme. No, there's no link to the relevant thread. Goole! Do you speak it! ____Not the real rusty Damn A fine comment ruined by cold hands. That of course should have said "Google" ____Not the real rusty You got it. ____Not the real rusty Due to a LOT of AIDS. ____Not the real rusty I have Right there with you. I was totally not good enough for her. I eventually dumped her -- as it turned out, she was actually not good enough for me. So it goes. (PS: I can't believe I am the first, but plz consider this an official request for HIREZ PROOF) ____Not the real rusty Works fine for me too $ ____Not the real rusty Or... He does actually have interesting things to say, he just says them at great and tedious length and with very little style or readability. So in the case, I'd say he could get attention by killing people or by not being a shitty writer. I know which I'd recommend. His ideas actually resonate with an awful lot of people. It's a shame he was a mathematician. ____Not the real rusty OMG Tickle Torture! Banned by the Geneva Convention! Call Dick Cheney! ____Not the real rusty Bleach is ok As long as it's the unscented kind, and you rinse it out well. If you plan to do this more, get yourself some Iodophor or similar, since it's much quicker and doesn't need rinsing. ____Not the real rusty Take one of these ...and don't call me till morning. ____Not the real rusty I don't hate you yet $ ____Not the real rusty No, they shouldn't For all the same reasons that Republicans shouldn't have. But also, they would never get it done. Don't forget that the Dems majority in the Senate only comes down to Lieberman. He'd never vote for it, so it'll never happen. But it shouldn't anyway, so no loss there. ____Not the real rusty ror Yeah, the spin attempt on the right is that it was "conservative democrats" who won. Kos calls bullshit on that pretty effectively. ____Not the real rusty Best. Election. Ever. So yes, we took the House by a stupendous margin, and appear set to take the Senate too (which even I thought was impossible late last night). Took over a ton of state legislatures, governorships, etc. Rummy's gone. The Republicans didn't gain one goddamn seat like, anywhere. That's all great. But what I actually think is the most exciting result is my city councillor in Portland lost to the Green Party candidate. I didn't think there was a chance in hell of that happening. Incumbent Will Gorham was the presumptive next mayor of Portland. And his victorious opponent, Kevin Donoghue, is both a Green and the only candidate in town who's a renter. I guess housing issues really are important. But what's important to me is that Donoghue is also the only candidate who doesn't outright oppose the island's secession effort. He's been very critical of the city's high-handed stonewalling. He hasn't come out in favor of secession, but he's willing to look at it fairly, which is all we've ever asked. So electing him is about the only useful thing we could have accomplished this election, and we did it. Best. Election. Ever. Get used to it It's about all we're gonna have today. You soviet canuckistanis might want to go spend a day or two on hotmoosefucking.com or something, come back in a bit. ____Not the real rusty Jaded apathy is so 2000. $ ____Not the real rusty Thank god someone noticed Kos and me are just about twins, politically. He's liberal, but not nearly like most of the members there. We both think gun control is a stupid issue, and a number of such liberal anti-orthodoxies. It's tiresome to see him trotted out as a stalinist so often by the right. ____Not the real rusty Hey See my diary above. ____Not the real rusty I am drinking liberally I am drinking liberally in NYC. We are winning. That is all that really matters at this point. cts if you feel like going out, come down to the Park Ave Country Club. I'm in the back corner. We got the house and it looks like +29, which is a fucking blowout. That's higher than any projection I saw. We're not gonna take the senate, is my guess. Looks like TN and MO are both unlikely, and VA pretty unlikely. ____Not the real rusty Do they all have adams apples? Like [M]Ann Coulter? ____Not the real rusty Hey If [s]he admitted it, I'd be the first one up there cheering for hir. ____Not the real rusty Headline: After successful pointy object ban, West Herefordshire MP calls for sharp limits on heavy things Balsa hammers, papier mache tire irons among changes under consideration ____Not the real rusty ror yfi $ ____Not the real rusty It was a sports bar Decent place, but the name was tongue in cheek. Normally it's just a sports bar but they went wall-to-wall with the election coverage for one night. ____Not the real rusty Let the Hearings begin! $ ____Not the real rusty I don't think it matters Assuming Lieberman does caucus with the Dems, they don't need any vote to hold hearings. They'll control the committees, and the committees are the ones that can hold hearings. They can also compel sworn testimony. What I want is just for someone to put some of these crooks in front of the cameras and ask them about what they've been up to. ____Not the real rusty Lieberman? The Dem leadership is going to reward him for campaigning against the party? I don't see it, but anything can happen. Are you thinking they'll need to bribe his highness to keep him in the tent? ____Not the real rusty Chocolate mousse Also, tiramisu is pretty good. And you can't go wrong with a nice hot fudge sundae. ____Not the real rusty You're right I forgot about cheesecake. ____Not the real rusty But It's very common in the english speaking world. It wasn't clear to me whether they had to have been invented here, or what. ____Not the real rusty Theraflu is the shit While it may not heal you, it will very likely allow you to sleep, which is almost as good. ____Not the real rusty Ha I came up with that same theory about the taste of theraflu. And my wife has always resisted it, but succumbed recently when she really was sick enough to need it. So so far, experimental evidence bears that out. ____Not the real rusty Where do you think 'botched' came from? Kerry said (paraphrased) "I botched the joke, which was aimed at Bush, not the troops." That was the apology. Sorry you missed it, but that doesn't actually mean it didn't happen. Then he went right back on the attack, rather than bowing and scraping to the hysterical right wing ninnies who wanted to make a story out of this. Leading all of us to wonder "where the hell was this guy during the campaign?" ____Not the real rusty FATMOUSE + RED WINE = HEALTHY FATMOUSE! ____Not the real rusty They'll come back When the bee poison wears off, eventually some more bees will come by and go "Hey! Looky here! A nice bee apartment, and vacant!" Getting rid of bees involves tearing down walls. Assuming they're in some part of the house, of course. If they're outside, well it'll still probably happen but you won't need to tear down any walls to get at them. ____Not the real rusty I've never had sex with a man... in Denver Have you? MeFi. Google News. Denver Post. Also, just one day before he was booted out of the closet, Haggard reminds us that he loves him some Republicans. Did you notice that "sodomy" is the #2 tag on K5, and is only exceeded by "User Diary", which was automatically appllied to every diary ever posted when we started using tags? So really, "sodomy" is the #1 user-chosen tag on K5. I think it does deserve an image. Anyone want to come up with one? ____Not the real rusty ror I've got it. We need the K5 bridge circle logo, but with a couple of hands on either side... pulling... ____Not the real rusty Ah, I see That's good. Very good. Someone produce a sufficiently HIRES version similar to the other tag images we have, and I'll put it in. ____Not the real rusty The mefi thread is interesting I''ve already had the long version of this discussion there. Starts around here. Read the whole thing, and find where I confess to being a closet fundie. ____Not the real rusty Yes Cause they were all foursquare committed to democracy. ____Not the real rusty You bastard Beat me by four and a half minutes. Well, I had to dig up more links. And add a Pole. ____Not the real rusty I was never beaten off... by cts... in Denver. Nonetheless I will resign as moral leader of Kuro5hin while the Cabal investigates these baseless claims. ____Not the real rusty It's true. I'm a totally flaming straight guy. ____Not the real rusty Burnout Handling the business side and the development side yourself is a recipe for burnout, sooner or later. Or, if not, at the very least one aspect or the other will suffer while you spend your time doing the other. You can do it for a little while, if necessary, but start looking around right now for either someone to take some of the business burden, or someone to take some of the development burden. By the time you find the right person, you'll really need them. ____Not the real rusty It's nano now Please update your bookmarks. ____Not the real rusty Wow How does it catch the sheep? ____Not the real rusty It's the new policy Every video you upload to youTube has to be screened for 6 of google's lawyers now before it can be posted. Your video should be available in 6-8 weeks. ____Not the real rusty Because you already have an account... ...that works just fine. I assumed the other 40 or so were probably just taking up storage space in your garage, so I helped you clean house a little. ____Not the real rusty Mind you If you really like this one, you can keep it and I'll drop the old one for you. Your call. ____Not the real rusty It's not exactly an ironclad policy... But you and a couple others have created a very large number of accounts recently, for no clear purpose. I get suspicious about that. Like Egil makes his sock puppet of the week, but it's always a character that he then plays with and doesn't use to rate or vote or whatnot. I worry about a lot of accounts with randomish names that don't seem to be doing anything. That suggests the imminent possibility of automated voting and rating pools, and stuff like that. Plus you make some random account and then rate people with it, and people find ratings from some nullo all over their comments and send us abuse reports about it, and I either have to endure a crapload of abuse reports or just kill the account. So when I know you already have a perfectly fine account, I'm a lot more inclined to do the latter. So basically, if you want dupes that live to troll another day, don't ever use them to vote or rate comments, and chances are extremely good that no one will ever bring them to our attention and nothing will be done to them, is what it boils down to. ____Not the real rusty Lol my screen is so hi-rez I saw your red-flag capital I's well before they could get anywhere near my junk. ____Not the real rusty Comic Sans Problem solved. ____Not the real rusty Damn We got one of these bike trailers for Ellie to ride around in this past spring, and it's been great. She loves riding in it and so forth. It was parked in the backyard last weekend when the Great Storm blew through. Take a look at the picture on that page -- see the handle that goes across the back? The storm dropped a chunk of tree limb on that, and snapped it off. And it turns out that what broke is a primary structural aluminum pipe that connects the front of the thing to the sides. The worst part is that handle is removable, and doesn't even need to be there when it's being used as a trailer. If the handle was off, the limb would have missed it entirely. Crap. On the cider front, A1 is starting to bubble (very slowly, but it's definitely working). B1 is not really bubbling yet, but I think that's because I cracked open the top of the bucket last night to look at it and let out a lot of CO2. It's also fermenting, I think it's just slow filling back up from my ill-advised interference. Yes... ...but she was unhurt. ____Not the real rusty There's a long tradition of British cider So I could call it something like "Old Arse Knickers Bumbershoot," or "Piss off Cheerio Wot Wot." ____Not the real rusty I have names for them But they're not cider yet. They don't get names until they're drinkable. So until then, it's A1 and B1. ____Not the real rusty It's not a big deal Just if the airlock is bubbling, I know that a) fermentation is proceeding, and b) there's probably not much air left in the bucket. Both of which are good things. But I know B1 is fermenting, in any case, so I'm not worried about it. ____Not the real rusty I sterilized my bunghole thoroughly. That's my gift for some poor .sigless bastard this holiday season. ____Not the real rusty Was pretty cool We're going to try to get a replacement part, but I have great doubts about the likelihood of that. I mean, it isn't really their fault. Sort of a freak accident. ____Not the real rusty Argh I have a scathing pan of A Million Little Pieces that is, I realize, coming way after that bus left the station. But still, I have to write it, so I might as well submit it here. I will attempt to force myself to write it tonight. ____Not the real rusty I forgot ...that it was Halloween. I was requisitioned for family duties tonight. But stay tuned. ____Not the real rusty You shouldn't. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Because it's made of plastic [nt] ____Not the real rusty Hi-Rez Proof! ____Not the real rusty Rumsfeld Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said media manipulation by enemies of the US is the only thing keeping him awake at night. 100 US soldiers dead in Iraq this month? Not keeping Rummy awake. Nope, it's media manipulation that has him tossing and turning. Fuck you Donald Rumsfeld. I'll dance on the day you die. May it be soon. ____Not the real rusty As Supreme K5 Commander, I hereby declare this... ...an Official Sock Puppet Thread. All sock puppets out of the woodwork here. Let's see you all do your stuff, Socky McPuppethand. The OSPT begins... right now! ____Not the real rusty Got Juice? I drove to Vermont and back yesterday to pick up my cider juice. The Big East Coast Storm was still fitfully semi-raging, so it was a weird patchwork of snow, rain, sleet, sun, wind, more snow, more rain... and so on all the way across northern New England. I also had the stupendous good luck to have to cross the Kancamagus twice in one day. Which is especially fun because after the first time, you know what you're getting into coming back. But it all worked out, and I now have about 11 gallons of fresh juice in the basement. If you care what the plans are for it, read on. I've got two batches, named A1 and B1 (because they are the first batches started in buckets A and B respectively. Hey, we all need a naming convention). Both batches were sulfited to about 50 ppm at the press and left 24 hours. This should have killed most of the nasties, but probably not any wild yeasts that may have been present. They were pressed with sterilized equipment though, so wild yeasts are probably not copious. I'm not relying on them in any case. Batch A1 This is a dessert blend, with the following fruit and ratios: 1 Golden Russet 4 Liberty 1 NJ 109 1 Gala 1 Northern Spy 2 Crispin / Mitsu 5 Dabinett Raw, this blend tastes extremely sweet and very mild. It actually would make a fine drinking juice, although a little exotic. Neither Christina nor I like apple juice much, but we both like this. It almost tastes like apple syrup -- it doesn't have the tart bite of regular apple juice. It started at a SG of 1.056, or about 8% potential alcohol by volume. Last night, I pitched in a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast, popped an airlock on the bucket, and put it in a corner of the basement which stays around 60 degrees F. My plan for this batch is to let it ferment down to about 1.030, then rack it into a carboy and add 2 pounds of honey and a bag of oak chips. The idea here is to make a New England style cider, sort of an Uncle Jimmy farmhouse special. The sweet dessert blend is reputedly particularly good for this sort of thing. It should pick up a nice oaky flavor from the chips, and the extra sugar from the honey will take it up to perhaps 9-10% ABV. So it'll be strong. I tasted a sample of this style at the press (I believe what I had was 2005 #2 on this page -- I agree about the bourbon flavor being a little too strong, and I'm not a big fan of bourbon so that was the only drawback to this for me. I won't use bourbon on the chips), and liked it immensely. The oak barrel flavor is quite noticeable and adds a lot. So that's what I'm shooting for. I will probably rack it again before the secondary ferment is finished, to slow down the ferment further. Then there's two options -- one is to wait until it's about 1.010 and bottle, trusting the continuing slow ferment to carbonate it. The other is to let it sit until it's pretty much done fermenting, and then use priming sugar to bottle-condition. I haven't decided yet which I'll do. It sort of depends on how the ferment is going and how much I'm willing to risk a somewhat unpredictable natural bottle condition. But letting it condition itself is my inclination, so we'll see. I expect the first ferment to take 4-8 weeks, the second 3-4 months, and then I'll leave it in the bottle till about this time next year. This batch will be named xC0000005, for obvious reasons. Batch B1 This batch is actually in bucket C now, because the tap on bucket B was leaking. A useful lesson: if you get drilled plastic fermenting buckets, make sure you scrape any remaining bits of plastic away from the hole before you attach the tap. Anything between the gasket and the bucket wall will cause it to leak. I didn't lose much juice, it just would have made a mess fermenting. Anyway, B1 is a strong bittersweet blend, of the following: 1 Golden Russet 1 Liberty 3 Dabinett This is much less sweet than A1, with a strong tannin body and more tartness. It wouldn't be much good for drinking, because it sort of leaves a sandpapery feel in your mouth. Imagine apple juice mixed with tea. This should produce a good body in the cider though. This started at SG 1.058. I pitched EC-1118, same as A1. The plan for this is a dry champagne-y cider. I'll let this ferment down, probably also to 1.030 or so like A1, then rack to a carboy. Then I'll leave it alone until it's as dry as it's gonna get. Bottle with appropriate priming sugar, and I should be done. I'll leave it in the bottle for at least 6 months, or until I can't wait any more (or until it tastes good). :-) Current progress Both batches were pitched at 9pm last night. So it's been about 16 hours. No obvious activity yet. Given that the tanks are sitting at about 60 degrees, and when I pitched the yeast the juice was about 55 degrees, I expect progress to be fairly slow. I'd actually put them somewhere colder if I had such a place. 35-40 degrees would be ideal. That means an extremely slow ferment (like, no real bubbling at all for two weeks) but this seems to be good for cider. A fast ferment tends to strip all the sugar right out of the juice and leave you with no sweetness and much less character than a long slow ferment. Or so they say. At 60 degrees, which is just about the bottom of the "normal" temp range for this yeast, I expect something to start happening within 2 or 3 days. Further reports as warranted. Many, many thanks to Terry Bradshaw of Lost Meadow Cidery for the juice, and his hospitality and advice. And for a couple of free bottles of cider, one of which provided great motivation to take all my SG measurements and pitch my yeast last night. Good god Beet leaves? That sounds revolting. I mean, I don't really like wine because I don't really like grapes. And the basic taste profile for wines from whatever is: "Alcohol... alcohol... alcohol... fruit!" So when the end of that is "Grapes!" I'm like "Ick." And when the end of it is "Apples!" I'm like "Yum!" It seems like if the end of that was "Beet leaves!" I'd be running as fast as possible away from that glass. ____Not the real rusty Oh I believe you I certainly believe that you can do it. I'm arguing about whether you should. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ayuh. ____Not the real rusty You try pitching hay sober. [nt] ____Not the real rusty It is an illusion You never had a life before this. You are one of us. One of us... one of us... one of us... ____Not the real rusty The apples came from... ...Poverty Lane, for the most part. The weird Euro cider apples anyway. I keep meaning to see if I can chase down some of their cider here in town. ____Not the real rusty Applejack! The frozen drink you're describing is called applejack. Basically it's cider that's distilled by repeated slow freezing and thawing to separate the water from the alcohol and everything else. Done right, you can get it up to 60-80 proof. I plan to try to make a jug of that next winter, when I have some finished cider. Also, pressing low quality fruit is just as bad as eating it, if not worse. It should not be done. You should press your best fruit -- you can eat around brown spots in an apple. You can't drink around rot in your juice. ____Not the real rusty I will certainly post about applejack But it's going to be a long wait for that one. I'm expecting it to be sort of the apple version of a drink my wife's German relatives make out of cherries. They call it "Kirsch," but it bears about as much resemblance to cherry schnappes as jet fuel bears to coal. Same family, but a whole different breed. This stuff will singe your nose hairs at 200 feet. ____Not the real rusty Also... ...cider presses cost a fortune everywhere. The cheapest way to get a cider press is to build one -- basically you need a strong frame, an 8+ ton hydraulic jack, and a bunch of marine plywood. Gimme some time, and I may build one. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm sort of confused It's not real clear how the grab relates to the advice -- but my best guess is it's actually a compiment to aph for good linkage in the story text there. ____Not the real rusty So... Did they come up with anything firefox hasn't had for two years? If IE7 at least doesn't have the crappy CSS bugs that IE6 had I will think it's a raging success. ____Not the real rusty Why od they even bother? Why does MS spend money developing this thing, when it doesn't make them a buck? Kind of mysterious. ____Not the real rusty Foxpos Search the extensions. It's been there for a while. I installed it, but then dropped it because as it turns out, it's not that useful. ____Not the real rusty Looked good to us We just reviewed all our sites in IE7 and for the most part, they looked fine. I guess if you only tested on IE6 you might be screwed. But if you only tested on IE6 you deserve to be screwed, long and hard and sans lube of any sort. All I know is we didn't have any big problems. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Is it even possible to downgrade IE, without a full reinstall? It seems like I recall people bitching that they make it very hard. ____Not the real rusty Nah, just this one Actually Scoop's pretty much all better, as far as that goes. K5 is a throwback. ____Not the real rusty Now that ...is a punctuation suggestion I can get behind. I mean, we already have the period and the comma fuck why do we need a punctuation mark made of them both? Yup, it works perfectly. ____Not the real rusty Those semicolons touched my junk liberally. The worst part of it all is that nobody seems to notice this gradual decline; or care. The book remains static in your hands; on your lap; on the desk; forcing you to move your eyes to each consecutive word. I don't own the words I read online, I'm merely a guest; it's impersonal. Online publications are becoming a whole different medium ("Netspeak"?) to writing; part speech, part writing. I am the proud owner of a double-barreled, hyphenated surname; Dunlop-Walters. (I can't quote any more without thinking that this whole post has got to be a troll. No one can misuse that many semicolons in a row by accident.) People who use semicolons should be shot. People who use semicolons just to show off how smart they are in a blog post about punctuation should be... well, also shot, but slower and more painfully. And people who use the semicolon wrong in every goddamn paragraph of a blog post on punctuation should not even be shot. They should merely be laughed at. In case anyone was wondering, the easiest way to remember when to use a semicolon is this: Don't ever use a semicolon. If you think you need one, there is something wrong with your sentence and you should rewrite it until it clearly doesn't need one. And if you cannot do that, stop writing and take up some other pastime. Like hockey, or knitting, or suicide. ____Not the real rusty Huh I'm struggling to force myself to finish James Frey's A Million Shitty Pieces, and the above altered quotes read almost exactly like Frey's illiterate "style." I may have to rethink my support for the idea. (And seriously, that book is a piece of egregious crap. It should be illegal for Oprah to recommend a book anymore. I understand why Franzen was so embarrassed to be chosen.) ____Not the real rusty How about that plot summary a world where a Napoleon-era ship captain teams with a heroic dragon to save Britain from French invaders It's like Horatio Hornblower meets The Never-Ending Story. It'll be a smash hit. We'll call him "Horatio Poleblower." ____Not the real rusty For a writing class? Like as in "How not to..."? I'm probably going to post a diary on this book, because I really yearn to hear others here pan it as well. I was so prepared to forgive him making it all up, if it was at least a good book. Unfortunately, it is so not. Stay tuned for my (so far at least) four point analysis on why it's impossible to forgive this piece of crap being made up, and why it would still suck almost as badly if it weren't. ____Not the real rusty Those are ok The first example is going to be awkward no matter how you do it, so you might as well semicolon it. That would work just as well with commas too though. The second example is at least not painful. The problem is that certain people seem to get hopelessly addicted to the semicolon and use it all the goddamn time, while most people can get by without it for their whole lives and never even notice. That's why my general advice is don't use it, because if you're asking for advice about using it, you're probably one of the addicts. If anyone asks me to edit something, one of the first things I do is remove all the semicolons. It has never yet made a piece of writing worse. :-) ____Not the real rusty At the worst of times... ...North Korea actually causes grain grown elsewhere to disappear, thereby in effect "growing" negative amounts of grain. ____Not the real rusty Uh Wut? ____Not the real rusty OIC You could also have linked directly to the pictures. I didn't have the faintest idea what you were talking about before. I did, in fact, look a lot like that at 4. ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry, but... ...saying you won't vote for a libertarian because his myspace page is ugly is like saying you won't fuck a horse because it has bad breath. ____Not the real rusty Just because I can prove this is you doesn't mean I didn't already know, Egil. ____Not the real rusty What post was that? ____Not the real rusty I think the store screwed up See the product site -- this thing is clearly pitched at bachelorette parties and that sort of thing. Adults, in any case. While it is sort of a toy or game, it's not the kind of toy or game you'd want to sell right next to the kids toys. Course the article very strongly implies that it is made an marketed for kids, which is totally not true, so a big YFI to the Daily Mail as well. ____Not the real rusty A string walks into a bar ...and the bartender says "Hey get outta here. We don't serve strings in my joint." So the string walks outside, twists himself up, and frizzes his ends. He goes back into the bar, and the bartender says "Hey, aren't you that string I just threw out?" And the string says "No, I'm a frayed knot." ____Not the real rusty He say you Brade Lunnah! ____Not the real rusty Yes I'm on vacation tomorrow, and pretty much out of work to do today. Why, does it show? ____Not the real rusty CAN'T YOU READ? VACATION MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT? ____Not the real rusty Holy jesus Having gotten home and tipped back a few myself, I thought HAY THIS IS NO PROBLEM. LOL. I went through this basic process in preparing for a camping trip a while ago. That didn't go any better than it sounds like your brewing session went. (Sparge with hot water, man! 170F. I swear I just read the book on this last night.) ____Not the real rusty What? I think you're missing a step here. After the mash, you have to boil the wort anyway, and hop it and so forth. Don't you? Then you cool it? The directions you linked to go: Single infusion mash at 155 F. Boil Tettnangers for 60 minutes. Sparging should happen between those two. Right? ____Not the real rusty Camping It seems like the proper drinking stage of camping is while you're already camping, was my key take-away from that earlier experience. Drinking while you're gathering the supplies to go camping too often leads to clever realizations like "HAY WHO NEEDS FOOD ANYWAY LOL!" and "THIS HAMBURGER WILL BE FINE IF I WRAP IT IN MY SLEEPING BAG!" ____Not the real rusty Get a roaster This one is reasonably cheap, and works good. ____Not the real rusty Four More Years!^H^H^H^H^HBeers! I renewed the kuro5hin.org domain for an optimistic four more years today. I remember the last time I renewed it, wondering what would be going on when it came due. 2006 seemed like a long time away then. But more importantly, I got all my brewing supplies yesterday! And I also measured my big lobsterpot and discovered that it's 8 gallons, so I already had the most expensive single thing that isn't included in a starter kit. Anyone have a favorite recipe I should try? I'm going to be making two buckets of cider, but I will have an extra fermenter and bottling bucket free for a good long time - plenty long enough to try a batch of beer to tide me over while I'm waiting forever for the cider. I like ales and pilseners, mainly. I like a stout now and then, but not enough to make 4 cases of the stuff the first time out, really. Also, we're going to Quebec City this weekend. Please comment only about domain renewals, beer/cider brewing, or Quebec City. Your comments will go on your Permanent Record. Yeah, it's beer season apparently The kit came with: Fermenting bucket Settling or bottling bucket (i.e. two buckets total, both with tap and stopper hole in the lid) Some plastic tube Bottling wand A couple of airlocks and stoppers Bottle brush Priming sugar Big spoon Big nylon straining bag Hydrometer Iodophor Caps and capper Dial thermometer I also picked up two extra buckets with taps and airlocks and etc, for fermenters. I'm thinking I'll do a couple batches with extracts, before I get into the all-grain business. For one thing, I think it would require another big pot, and while I have one great pot, that's about it. My two next biggest pots are aluminum and chipped enamel, so neither of those is any good. Eventually I'll get a nice 12 or 15 gallon wort pot, and use the 8-gallon for grain extracting. But I'm already at the very limit of spousal approval for brewing supplies, so I have to put it off for a while. ____Not the real rusty I've been wondering... I have a small mudroom off my kitchen, which tends to be maybe 5 degrees warmer than outside during the winter. I'm pondering whether I could use it as a lagering room to make a nice Pilsener in the winter. We usually get a couple months of freezing to near-freezing temps... think that's crazy? ____Not the real rusty For the lagering I can actually get nice steady temps from 50 to 65 degrees for fermenting, in various places in my basement. It's the lagering part that I'm thinking of here. Well, we'll see. I'll stick a thermometer out there this winter and see how it looks. ____Not the real rusty Question: I like the sound of your recipe there, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter try it. But it appears to be timed and ingrediented for a partial boil. I can do a five gallon wort all at once -- do you know of any changes needed to the ingredients or times? I've heard that a concentrated boil will tend to get less bitterness out of the hops, so using the same ingredients in a full size boil might make for a super-bitter beer. ____Not the real rusty I checked again Here's the quote I dimly recalled: "The primary disadvantage of [partial boiling] is that when the wort being boiled is highly concentrated, the amount of 'goodies' extracted from hops is reduced proportionally. In other words, if you only boil half the wort, you should add twice the hops called for to make up the difference." That's from Brewing Quality Beers, the "basic brewing" book they included with my kit. He seems pretty down on concentrated boils in general, although that was the only really specific quote I could dig up. ____Not the real rusty Brewing is the ultimate nerd hobby I never quite realized it, but brewing is the consummate nerd hobby. The process is, essentially: Do some math Run a biology experiment Get beer What could possibly beat that? ____Not the real rusty ha I'm already planning my hops patch. :-) ____Not the real rusty Eeeeexcellent Then I will be ready to move on to Phase Two... ____Not the real rusty Joker.com / $12.00 a yr / I've never had a problem ____Not the real rusty I should make K5 Pole Ale. :-) ____Not the real rusty The golden years Actually I think most of the years have been golden, for various reasons. The beginning of 2000 to late 2001 were sort of the baby steps, where everyone was very excited about this new idea, voting for stories and so forth, and everyone was working together to build this thing. Then end of 2001 to probably the beginning of 2003 was an era of growth, where the diaries really got traction and became the big engine of the site. But at the same time, it started to get too big and busy -- people didn't really know each other that well (beyond a sort of core gang of obsessive reloaders who mostly inhabited the diaries), and there was growing tension between techies and diarists about what the site was for. That era was sort of capped off by my failure to start the CMF and a bunch of server trouble that eventually led to the HuSi exodus. 2003 pretty much sucked. Traffic crashed, we had more server trouble, and I got piles of shit about the CMF. That was about the only time I didn't much enjoy running the site, and it was worse because I had only myself to blame for it. Since the beginning of 2004, traffic has been pretty stable and growing very slowly, we haven't had any major influxes of people from anywhere else all at once, just a steady small trickle of folks who arrive via google or whatever. The boom of sites like DailyKos and lots of other communities about different things has taken a lot of the pressure off K5 to be just about this or just about that, or cater to everyone's need to talk about X all the time. It's also let us be the place that doesn't try to cover all the breaking news immediately all the time -- you can go elsewhere for that. I think K5 is, and always has been, good at taking the longer view of current events, and digging deeply into oddball topics from all over the map. The point here is more about the writing than the speed. I still think we're one of very few places that's like that, so I'm not very concerned the niche for K5 is going away. Since 2005 the crowd here has also largely been purged of people who take themselves or the site way too seriously, which I think was always an issue with the people who mostly left for HuSi. Yes, we have trolling and juvenile humor here. I feel like the people who are here now generally can enjoy that for what it is, too. The trolling actually seems to be much less than it was during what most people think were the "golden years," I think mainly because we don't have so many biters anymore. I've actually enjoyed just hanging out here and reading stuff more in the last year than I have probably since 2000. So yes, I'll keep it running. And as long as we continue dying, I think we should be ok. ____Not the real rusty I will keep it in mind For a batch that deserves it. Also, Q: What do vegetarian zombies eat? A: "Graaaaaaaains!" (My favorite joke of the week) ____Not the real rusty Second batch? You know I got the first one. I take it this means you sent more. Yay! No I didn't get it yet. Incidentally, I've been reading up on honey in beer, and it seemes that there too, lighter, milder honey is desirable. ____Not the real rusty Update! I hadn't checked the mail yet today. Yep I got it. Did you measure? It looks to me like 2.25 lbs, but I don't have a scale that's better than wildly inaccurate at that range. I could easily imagine it being 1/4 lb off. ____Not the real rusty For the throat It's often recommended, and sounds really gross, but I have sometimes had very good luck with the old salt-water gargle. Basically, mix a small glass of warm water (as hot as you can comfortably gargle) with enough salt to taste distinctly salty and unpleasant. Some lemon may help with the taste a little. Then take a great big mouthful and gargle it, making sure to get it back there where your throat hurts. Then for the love of god spit it out, because it tastes nasty. It seems like this only works on some problems, and its hard to tell beforehand whether it will or not. Sometimes this has provided great relief for a few hours, and sometimes it hasn't done anything. I'd say try it once, and if it works, then great, and if not, forget about it because it's probably not going to. ____Not the real rusty YHBT. YHL. HAND. ____Not the real rusty Perl_gthr_key_ptr So for years now, every time I try to compile Apache/mod_perl on a Debian system, I invariably get stuck with a crapload of errors that always start by telling me about an undefined reference to Perl_Gthr_key_ptr. I have long recognized this problem as one I've had every other time I did this, but I can never rememebr what the damn solution to it is. So I google and google for ages until I finally stumble across the answer again. Well no more. I leave this diary in the hope that it will henceforth always be the first Google result when I hit this error again, and that perhaps it will help someone else as well in the meantime. The solution is: #apt-get install libperl-dev See http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/16/105155/80 ____Not the real rusty Neither Perl 5.8.8 is installed. The problem is that debian puts header files and crap in a separate package, libperl-dev, which is not generally installed when I get a fresh machine. And the problems crop up when I'm trying to compile mod_perl and it can't find any of that stuff. Compiling 5.8.8 from source would also solve the problem, but given that I'd also have to uninstall the original debian package of it, which otherwise works just fine, and that the easiest solution is one apt-get, my way seems entirely more desirable. ____Not the real rusty They're not dependent Just to clarify, Debian isn't doing anything wrong here. As curien says below, I'm bypassing the packages for this one thing, and it always leads to this same missing package that I need and can't remember which package it is. I don't blame Debian for this at all, it just drives me nuts that I've laboriously solved this stupid problem like a half dozen times and I can never remember from one time to the next what it is. Hence the reminder. Hopefully next time I'll at least remember that I posted about it here once. ____Not the real rusty apache/mod_perl 2 ...is what Debian wants to use. I want apache/mod_perl 1. Plus I've never quite trusted mod_perl from a binary package. ____Not the real rusty PHP is for teenagers ...and Java gives me a headache. ____Not the real rusty yeah, it is And there's some kind of convention about package naming that I just don't get. I can never guess what debian packages are going to be called. RPMs I can guess maybe 70% of the time. ____Not the real rusty That's a bummer Every batch a learning experience. What's the super-cleaner stuff called? ____Not the real rusty You failed in your job Netflix sent me a cracked disc once. I had a crack in it that was big enough to make it unplayable, but small enough that it might easily be overlooked in shipping. I sent it back in enough pieces that it wouldn't be sent out to anyone else again. I recommend that policy to everyone for unplayable netflix discs. Please, do it for the rest of us. ____Not the real rusty Janis said it Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. ____Not the real rusty What's a tortoise? ____Not the real rusty YFI It should have been "Mark Foley Touched my Junk Conservatively." ____Not the real rusty There is no list See the code. Poll votes are anonymous. I mean, I could grep back through the logs I suppose, but c'mon. For a Pole Vote? ____Not the real rusty I don't know We did everything we can do to break any trail you might have left as somaudlin. Since then, you show up with a new name, announce who you used to be, and then get upset that people know. There's nothing any of us can do about that. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty I wouldn't stop you I have approximately no time to contribute to such a thing, and you already seem to understand the copyright issues, but I wouldn't stop anyone from attempting a project like this. With a lot of work (trolling through six long years of potential material), it could be a pretty cool book. If you're worried about profits, why not just not have any? Most POD printers have a minimum per-copy price that pays their expenses, you could just sell it for that. Or run a front-page poll to decide what charit[y&pipe;ies] should get any small profits that could be made. It's pretty easy to deal with the money issue if you just start with the premise that no one makes any. :-) ____Not the real rusty Look! It's homebrew night on K5 I will be doing some beer sooner or later as well. I'm too spoiled here thought. Portland is stuffed with good microbrews already. ____Not the real rusty Options: "I hate pie" "I hate pie and you" "You remind me of pie" "Fuck you and your pie" ____Not the real rusty I got my honey I received my official xC0000005 honey today. It does indeed as promised "taste like honey." I'm not by any means a honey connoisseur, so I couldn't possibly compare it to any other kind for you. But it is noticeably light colored. And tastes like honey. I got some because how could I not. But I actually have a plan now for what I might do with it. I've been gearing up to ferment some cider over the winter, and what goes better in cider than honey? I should have 12 gallons of fresh pressed juice in a couple weeks, and I think I'll probably pitch the contents of my bears into one batch of it and see how it comes out. If all goes well, I can reciprocate by sending xC0000005 a couple six packs of the finished product. Hopefully he doesn't see this as a tremendous waste of his labor of love. The fact is though that we don't, as a family, use very much honey as a matter of course. I think that between this and it sitting around on the counter waiting for us to come up with a use for it, becoming the key ingredient in a batch of good cider is the best choice. And I will name that batch "xC0000005." So what more could you ask? Well, there is one thing more, I guess. I could actually use another pound of honey. The way the numbers work out with the size of the fermenters I have, 2 pounds would be better than one. I feel bad about asking though, since he so clearly doesn't want to sell the stuff. If I absolutely have to, I'll find some local honey to add to it, but my sense of purity will be slightly offended. I'll still call it xC0000005, though, because what more hostile name could possibly invented? (ahem. besides "kuro5hin"). Not actually mead I think the technical name for what I want is Cyser -- a drink flavored with honey where the main ingredient is apples. Mead is more a drink flavored with fruit or herbs where the main ingredient is honey. So the honey requirements are a hell of a lot lower, and actually a mild honey is better than a strong. I'm guessing that the pale color indicates a mild flavor by honey standards (indeed, About.com claims that fireweed honey is "Light in color and mild in flavor." Sounds perfect.) Basically what you end up with is a very strong (high-alcohol, due to all the extra sugar) cider with a bit of whatever honey flavor survives the ferment. So, if you have an extra pound that won't make good mead, I'm betting it'll make good cider. Send it over and I'll ship you a couple cases of it when it's finished. And if it's no good, I'll send you something else. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also Move your story to vote already so I can vote for it. ____Not the real rusty I agree We need to have a K5 swap meet, where we all get together and trade all the crap we make. And as for honey cider, this link (sorry, pdf) gives a good outline of the idea. You don't end with icky sweet honey-flavored cider, because the yeast eats all the sugar out of the honey and converts it to alcohol. So you end up with a strong cider that has a little of whatever flavor honey has besides "sweet," and a bit of extra sweetness if you stop the ferment at the right time. I'm planning to make mine sparkling, because I like it dry and a little fizzy, so the sweetness will probably be very minimal. That's also why you want a mild honey. I think that if you take the taste of honey and subtract all the sweet from it, what you're left with is probably best used in moderation. A strong honey would probably leave a very odd flavor behind, but a mild honey should just tend to smooth out the acidity of the cider. At least, that's the plan anyway. We'll see. ____Not the real rusty Weird It worked a few minutes ago. I've got the pdf still sitting here open. But now it doesn't work anymore. I will warn you that when you start venturing into the honey-alcohol areas of the net, you're getting dangerously close to mead territory, and that's where the Ren Faire people hang out. You don't want to get too close to them, lest you find yourself one day shouting "Hail to thee, fair sirrah!" while wearing something with slashed velour sleeves and leggings. Just, you know, FYI. ____Not the real rusty I don't know Never had it. It strikes me as something I probably wouldn't like, but maybe that's just Ren Faire association spillover. That whole scene has probably done mead more harm than good, really. ____Not the real rusty Ah, there you go I don't like wine. Hence my preference for carbonated, dry cider, which is much more beerlike than winelike. I do know that I like a good dry cider, although I haven't had any in ages. It's hard to find proper cider here in the states. All we get is alcoholic apple juice. ____Not the real rusty Brittany I went to Brittany in high school, which, along with Normandy, is renowned for its cider. And with extremely good reason. The British make a good cider too. And it appears that traditional hard ciders are starting to come back in the US as well. There's a place in New Hampshire that by all reasonable standards looks like it must make some damn good cider. I will try some and let you know. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yaaaar Arrrr! Saaaars! Sarsgaard! Saaaaarsgaaaaaard! ____Not the real rusty I'm all kinds of wholesome Really revoltingly so. ____Not the real rusty Not with champagne yeast That stuff will eat anything and live forever. Honey might tend to discourage bacteria, but dissolved in plenty of liquid and hit with an energetic yeast, it's just a lot more sugar for them to eat. ____Not the real rusty Wow That's unbelievably bad. Tom Green amazes me yet again by having even less talent than I suspected. ____Not the real rusty You just bought yourself... ...several more months indulgence for the nonsense you usually post. Bravo. ____Not the real rusty Melatonin The research indicates that melatonin reaches maximum efficacy at 1mg. Dosages over that don't appear to do any harm, but don't do any further good either. If the 1mg bottle is cheaper, get that next time. ____Not the real rusty Eerie That's exactly the backstory of Nightmare on Elm Street, except Freddie Krueger was in the house and burned to death. ____Not the real rusty More on "creepy" Thank you for refreshing my memory about what I found so creepy in W2. I wasn't a parent yet when I read it, and now being one I find his concept of group parenting even more laughably unworkable. The drive to treat your own offspring specially is not socially conditioned, and trying to break it would do incredible harm to both the people involved and the society that tried it. That's not to say that kids having good relationships with other adults is not a positive thing -- it definitely is. But to treat your own kids like they were just any old kid is deeply sociopathic and disturbing. The Planners and their minions were creepy, for the usual reasons a technocratic cabal in charge is creepy, with the added layer that they kept it secret, which is tantamount to an admission that it's a bad idea. (And before anyone makes the obvious comparison with how K5 is run, I fully agree that it's not what I wish were the case here either. The key difference is that he's proposing it as the best way for a society to be run, while I accept it as an odious necessity in the absence of any way to ensure even halfway reliable democracy given the current state of this social medium.) The eugenic overtones, collective ownership, and grown-ups encouraging teens to go off and bump nasties were all creepy for the obvious reasons a 21st century American would find those things creepy. The idea that 15 or 16 year olds are mature enough to make a good decision about who they should marry is also stupid. Basically, like pretty much all utopian writing, there were so many things in there that said a lot more about what B.F. Skinner wished the world were like rather than what would be good for people in general. It all ends up feeling like an icky tour through the man's personal hangups and obsessions. I had much the same feeling reading Stranger in a Strange Land, by the way. Overall, the effect of both is more "Central Park Flasher" than philosophical treatise. ____Not the real rusty omg hax! lol ____Not the real rusty I did That was my tribute. ____Not the real rusty A++++++++++++++ DIARY POSTER WILL READ AGAIN! ____Not the real rusty I do my best It isn't much, but it's my best. ____Not the real rusty That CSS article ...is 100% right. And has actually amde me realize that implementing variable-enhanced pseudo-css in Scoop owuld be stupendously easy. Maybe I'll do that. Then at least we can have proper CSS until the rest of the world catches up. And maybe someday I'll actually convert K5 to a css based design too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Laptop I was writing that on the laptop, and I haven't quite adjusted to the keyboard yet. One of the drawbacks to not touch-typing is that my typing quality is very dependent on being accustomed to the exact spacing between keys, and that laptop is a little more spread out than my regular keyboard so my timing gets thrown off and I tend to reverse letters. And checking the post time -- no, I had not started drinking yet. :-) ____Not the real rusty No A British aphorism is "All knickers and no bumbershoot sends the lorry round the roundabout." I think you were looking for the word "euphemism." ____Not the real rusty British It sounds like a British concept of classes to me. Americans have always defined it by income level alone, when we allow ourselves to even contemplate the idea of classes. ____Not the real rusty It seems like that would have been a funnier story if it wasn't quite so short. ____Not the real rusty lol She was so awesome. K5 just isn't the same without her. Who would even imagine a sex chat diary could crop up without her chiming in? It's just hard to deal with. I suppose we'll all have to move on somehow. I did hate how she kept giving away her goddamn passwords though. I hope that in the incredibly unlikely event she did come back, she won't do that anymore. ____Not the real rusty Walden Two was wicked creepy I didn't have a very clear idea who BF Skinner was or what he thought when I read that. All I had was the "behaviorism" tag associated with the name, but not much past that. So I read Walden Two sort of waiting for the punchline the whole time. Like, here's the setup, now let's skewer this mockery. And it just never happens. The book ended and I just closed it aghast, realizing that no, he really believes this would work. It's like a utopia created by someone who has heard human beings described pretty thoroughly but never actually met any. ____Not the real rusty There was a Blade series? Huh. I liked the movies, despite (or possibly because of) how awful they were. I would probably have liked that too. Is it worth getting from netflix? ____Not the real rusty For t1ber... ...it's cocktoberfest all year round. :-) ____Not the real rusty Universal Department of Irony Works Overtime Are they all either on the take of kiddy-fiddlers? From ABC News: Saying he was "deeply sorry," Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned from Congress today, hours after ABC News questioned him about sexually explicit internet messages with current and former congressional pages under the age of 18. A spokesman for Foley, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said the congressman submitted his resignation in a letter late this afternoon to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Hours earlier, ABC News had read excerpts of instant messages provided by former male pages who said the congressman, under the AOL Instant Messenger screen name Maf54, made repeated references to sexual organs and acts. There you go. Vote Republican! It's the Grand old Party of torturers and boy-love. Please post your rors and lols below. And vote in the extremely fair and accurate poll, as well. This whole story makes me nostalgic... ...for the good old days, when our most prominent philanderer went in for adult women. ____Not the real rusty They just couldn't fathom it Why would he go for that chubby breeder when he was probably surrounded by just as much luscious mid-teen boy meat as they are now? They found it outrageous and unfair, and jealousy blinded them. ____Not the real rusty Can I point out... ...that by the time mad king george got around to his Iraq invasion, we discovered that Iraq was in fact militarily a non-entity, had no more WMDs, and was a completely eviscerated former power? Whatever the nincompoops in charge believed, those are the facts we now know to be true. Did Bush do something miraculous to Iraq in his two years in office before the invasion? No, he just carried on the no-fly zones. So it's reasonable to conclude that in fact Clinton's handling of Iraq worked, no invasion was necessary, and we've just been pissing away our soldiers down a sandy latrine for nothing these past four years. ____Not the real rusty I'm not sure what you just said but I think I agree with it. ____Not the real rusty Indeed In his worldview, corruption, torture, and pedophilia are sometimes ok. ____Not the real rusty Ah, stop being so reasonable I suspect that you and I are nearly identical in political views on the issues. Except that while I also see protectionism as a problem, I have equal trouble with the free-traders, since the evidence is against unrestrained free trade being much good for either side -- it ships our jobs overseas while not actually improving life any for those who take them. The solution is not free trade, but fair trade. Our trade policies need to actually enforce a better standard of life for overseas workers in our trade partner countries, in exchange for our money flowing their way. Free trade without fair trade is just more exploitation. Google the recent history of the Cambodian textile industry for a good example of this. Fair trade can be had for just pennies more than completely free trade, and I'm more than willing to pay for that. My problem with the Republican Party at this point is that it appears to be deeply rotten, and mired in the kind of corruption and vice you pretty much have to expect from such a large group of frothing "moral" crusaders. It's practically a truism at this point that moral crusaders are always self-loathing pervs, so I take particular glee every time one of them is outed for what they truly are. The (mostly former) Republicans and conservatives that I personally know and respect for their generally thoughtful views on actual political issues, though I migth disagree with them, feel pretty much the same way about today's republican Party (or, "NAMBLA"). Conservatives that aren't sex perverts or sadists need to get together and try to form a new mainstream conservative party in this country, and leave the GOP to the bug-eyed loonies running it now. ____Not the real rusty Not fags I have no problem with fags, provided they aren't in the closet and giving state jobs to their lovers (*cough*McGreavy*cough*). It's the ones that are gearing up to molest young boys I have a problem with. ____Not the real rusty I can just see his shock to find yet another long-rinning Daily Show joke ("...or NAMBLA") come true. ____Not the real rusty Less than Abstain (0) ____Not the real rusty That's interesting I just finally bit the bullet and bought a coffee roaster and 20lb of Columbian Supremo Popayan. I'm tired of drinking bad coffee. Or, at least, not as good as it could be coffee. So I guess I'm not quitting any time soon. ____Not the real rusty Nope. Wait there was this one... ...no, there wasn't. We have a cafe, that does breakfast and sandwiches and stuff. They make Green Mountain coffee, so it's not bad. But still, like I'm going to truck all the way down there every day. I rarely even shower before lunch, and going somewhere in the morning to get coffee seems very cart before the horse to me. ____Not the real rusty I'm not really into espresso I use a press. It can rescue even relatively weak coffee, but with good stuff, it's heavenly. ____Not the real rusty I actually do have one of those I've used it for espresso a few times, but I didn't think it did a very good job. I haven't tried it with just regular grind. Never really occurred to me. I can see the theory about pressure though. I went to France in high school, and my friend's father there had this coffee maker that forced steam through the grinds under pressure. Not an espresso machine, but sort of similar operating concept. It was the best coffee I have ever had, to this day. She used to send me boxes of the brand he used in the mail afterward, for years. That was good stuff. I should see if I can get her to send me some more of that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ensign bee guy! Please to be emailing me. About the you know what. That wasn't a hoax -- really. Ok, I'll read your diary now. ____Not the real rusty So nobody should offer life insurance? $ ____Not the real rusty Likely to die? There is proverbially no greater likelihood than that, no matter who you are. My point is that barring the usual "out" clauses, a life insurance policy is absolutely guaranteed to be collected from the instant it's sold -- much more surely than even flood insurance in the most flood-prone area. Saying that insurance companies shouldn't sell insurance for events that are guaranteed to happen doesn't make any sense. Insurance is a tool to collect a lot of people's money in one place long enough to get a profit from investing it, and return enough to offset the risks of those people's activities. It has nothing whatsoever to do with how likely an event is -- that just affects how much it needs to cost. I'm saying that "NOBODY should offer "insurance" against events that are guaranteed to occur" is a dumb thing to say without the necessary clause: "at rates that are too low to cover the expected expense of claims." Which is exactly what you followed up with, in a sort of muddled way. You're just looking mainly at the likelihood of the insured event, rather than the cost of insuring against it, which is backward. ____Not the real rusty There was this one time... I saw a jellyfish. ____Not the real rusty Get away! This island is mine. Find somewhere else to hermit. ____Not the real rusty Not possible If you wiped out all of what we experience as pain now, we would just start experiencing states of lesser pleasure as pain. The range is relative, with your least pleasant experience at one end and your most pleasant at the other. All these people want to do is shift the range -- most people wouldn't notice any difference. ____Not the real rusty All forms of pain? These wirehead guys are talking about all forms of pain and displeasure. Like boredom, jealousy, anxiety, and so on. I believe you that physical nerve-ending type pain can be shut off, but I think that beyond that you're into some much murkier waters. ____Not the real rusty The beginning of this is confusing It's not clear for a while who is talking to who about who. You should stick some names in the first (non-italic) paragraph, to clarify. ____Not the real rusty Nope Wait, what are you trying to say? ____Not the real rusty I've been working on this While it's not quite so dire as you describe, I've always had similar problems. My natural cycle seems to be about 28 or 29 hours long, so if left to myself I will slowly progress around the clock, going to bed and waking later and later every day, usually capped by a sleepless night, a hallucinatory day, and a reset to begin the cycle again. I've been working on this problem for the last four months or so, because I finally got tired of not being awake enough to enjoy spending time with my family on weekends, and working through the night rather than during the day when they're gone. Here are the things I have learned that help me: Exercise, as others have said here, helps. I don't schedule it rigorously, but when I start having trouble settling down I know it's time for another run. Even something like mowing the lawn or organizing the basement will usually suffice. I try to get in some kind of moving around every day, and a more serious period of exercise once or twice a week. I also have to exercise my brain. Sitting around reading crap on the web all day is just as bad as not exercising. My brain and my body both have to be tired. Usually just working does it, because I work solely with my brain, but it's useful to realize that that also has an effect. Eating three regular meals helps a lot. It seems like breakfast starts my daily clock -- I will go to sleep some number of hours after I eat breakfast. I used to skip breakfast all the time, but that just made lunch my breakfast and pushed back my sleep further. I try to eat something when I get up now, every day. For the times when I've done everything else but I still can't quite get to sleep, 1mg of Melatonin works wonders. It seems to nudge my brain off just enough that I can fall asleep without feeling like medication, or causing any tranqulizer hangover the next day. I took it every night at the beginning, now I take it maybe three times a week. Basically it's about finding balance. Enough exercise, regular meals, enough brain work. Those things go most of the way toward fixing the problem. For the last four months I haven't slept later than 10:00 (and that only a couple of times -- most days 8:00) or gone to bed later than 2:00 (usually 11:00-midnight). When I'm awake I feel much more rested, and it's far easier for me to get up when there's something to do. It's also been very good for my family, who actually have me around now, awake and engaged rather than a sleep-deprived zombie. I don't make any claims that any of this will work for you, MC -- you have other issues that presumably complicate things. But I would guess there are other people here like me, who are basically healthy but can't keep a sleep cycle. The above will almost certainly help them. ____Not the real rusty Could be If it's a placebo effect, I'm lovin' it. I actually have thought about doing a little double-blind experiment on myself to see if it is a placebo effect. I'm not sure how to make placebo pills that are indistinguishable from the real thing though. ____Not the real rusty Winning this poll ...is like being voted "Best looking pedophile." Thank you, I'll be here all week. ____Not the real rusty lol His movies suck so bad he has to punch someone to get in the news. Uwe Boll: When you die, millions of people will smile. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cingular blows I hate that they bought the previously excellent AT&T wireless service and turned it to shit. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I don't know if they split them up, but I had AT&T's digital service, and they got bought out by cingular. ____Not the real rusty It's called Kabbalah. $ ____Not the real rusty My New Yiddish Posting Technique is Unstoppable i'm in ur base, SCARSin ur d00dz ____Not the real rusty I encourage (3) this comment ...and fee likewise. Although I'm completely certain that we will soon be finding out (posthumously) about Chavez's secret prison camps and kiddie porn dungeons, and we'll never really know for sure if it was true, or just another cheap third-world CIA coup. But we can always remind outselves that we do know for sure about our own secret prison camps. ____Not the real rusty FEEL likewise Goddammit. ____Not the real rusty Is anyone reading Only Revolutions? I got my copy of Only Revolutions today. I'm 24 pages into each side, and so far it seems to be basically gibberish. There's sort of a story, I guess, but beyond the vague outline provided by the dust jacket flap, I'm not getting much. My most frequent thought so far has been "Gee, I wish I were reading House of Leaves again instead." Anyone else reading this? Does it get any better? Yeah... ...but I actually got used to that pretty quick. My issue is that the writing seems to remain like those first couple of pages too. ____Not the real rusty It's split in half So, both covers are the front cover -- one's Sam's side and the other is Hailey's side. The stories are printed on (roughly) half the page each, one upside down to the other. The reading suggestion from the publisher is that you read eight pages of one, then flip the book over and read eight pages of the other, and this seems to work pretty well given that the story is divided cleanly into eight page chunks. It looks like as you get further into each story it takes up less of the page and the font gets smaller. There's also a sidebar on each page (in each direction) with random historical notes from one day in history. This, as far as I can tell, can be entirely ignored. It's actually a lot less random than HoL -- it even comes complete with two bound-in ribbon bookmarks, which I thought was a friendly touch. There's no footnotes, no random inset chunks of some other story. It's just two books fucking. My problem is that the writing is hopelessly opaque. It's an epic poem, really, despite claiming to be a novel. While HoL was a brilliant marriage of experimental form supporting the narrative, this seems to be a lot of experimental form wrapped around some random words to no particular purpose. I don't know. We'll see how the rest goes. I will probably try to write a review when I'm done, or when I give up in disgust, whichever comes first. ____Not the real rusty I haven't I don't actually seek out this kind of book -- I stumbled on DFW randomly in a bookstore looking for a book that was long enough to get my money's worth, and went home with Infinite Jest. And I, like probably 3/4 of his readers, discovered Danielewski through his sister's album Haunted. That IJ and HoL ended up being two of my favorite books is probably more despite the form than because of it. Either one of them could have been written as straight fiction and been just as good. Possibly better because they wouldn't be fraught with the sort of baggage that gets tagged onto anything that's "postmodern" and thus might actually be read by more people. Anyway, all that by way of saying if you think I should I'll check out Mitchell. The excerpt doesn't look bad. ____Not the real rusty You never were, my friends You never were. ____Not the real rusty lol rex kwan do. $ ____Not the real rusty I'm... ...the entire first page of "rusty foster". Yup, those are all me. But there's only a few others at all, and none particularly famous. I should change my name to "George Washington." Or, if it's net anonymity I'm after, perhaps "Bukkake Reacharound" would work better. ____Not the real rusty I suggest... ...that the next episode end with either: "The boy suddenly held up his hand. 'What was that noise?' he hissed." or: "Will our hero be dashed on the sharp rocks below? Will Elbows McGee finally find what he's looking for? And what ever became of Swamp Girl? Tune in next time to find out!" ____Not the real rusty In that order? ____Not the real rusty A cat basket That's the only thing on my desk right now that isn't normal desk-stuff. It's behind the two big monitors. One of the cats more or less lives solely in my office, and she likes the warm corner created by two giant blazingly inefficient CRTs. Otherwise, there's a Sonos and two sonos speakers, a mac mini, two 21" CRTs, a 19" LCD, a crappy old Dell laptop, a Sharp MM20 laptop that has a partly-dead keyboard, a cell phone, a Casio Exilim digital camera in its dock, two regular PC speakers, and a jar of pens. Oh, and I see there's also an unopened box of Clavamox, a veterinary antibiotic. The cat had a festering head wound that has taken several months to heal, but it didn't respond very well to antibiotics, so I didn't bother getting into this second bottle. ____Not the real rusty I think you've got the general idea ____Not the real rusty Do you count kindergarten? I had (including K) 7 years of public school and 6 years of private. The legit answer according to your criteria would be for me to answer "US, public school" but I think that would be more or less wrong. Should have been an even-split option. ____Not the real rusty Correction: The accepted luminaries of contemporary literature suck. And only because they're all famous enough that no one will bother editing them anymore. It happens to all authors now as soon as their name alone can sell a book. ____Not the real rusty Grisham and King ...are both excellent examples of this phenomenon themselves. I'm less familiar with Grisham, but King's work I know well, and when he became Stephen King Incorporated his writing went to shit. Fundamentally there is no difference between the career arc of any of the literary gentlemen mentioned above and Stephen King. And while we're at it, let's include Jay McInerney in this list. I just read his 9/11 book, "The Good Life." It was so tedious and forgettable that I just had to look up the title on Google, despite having finished the thing less than a week ago. The New Yorker has a review here. My review would be a lot shorter and would go like this: Jay McInerney's new book The Good Life would have been a lot better if all of the characters in it had been in the twin towers on 9/11. ____Not the real rusty Check off 'search archive' ____Not the real rusty Oh my God That Amis excerpt is... is... I can't come up with anything that even comes close, so lets just say "bad." "Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh." Holy jesus fuck. I thought that was the worst thing I ever read, until I continued and discovered: "Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn't even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged." I would recommend Martin gargle with a good solid helping of shotgun mouthwash, but presumably this tripe would just be published posthumously, so it wouldn't do any good. Too bad for all of us. ____Not the real rusty cts is me when I'm Phillipino. ____Not the real rusty You're on the Cape? ...just kidding. I remembered this time. :-) It's definitely getting on to soup season here. I hope we have a winter this year. Not like last year's couple days of chilly weather. ____Not the real rusty Venice is pretty cool I'd like to go back there sometime. I was there for one day a few years ago. It's a fun city to just wander around in, because there aren't any cars and there's lots of cafes and whatnot where you can just hang out. From what I remember, it was surprisingly dirty and crowded, and I had more fun in the regular streets than seeing the big tourist draws. But I think that depends on the season. It's also pretty damn expensive. The whole economy is basically tourism, so you pay through the nose for anything. I'd say it's worth a visit though. ____Not the real rusty Hmmm I call shenanigans -- your answer is several homophones: vein, vain, vane. I don't think that's legit. One word that has more than one meaning, sure. But I don't think you get to have clues that resolve to separate answers. Not to mention the flagrant homophonual agenda. ____Not the real rusty Lol Did I ever tell you about the time I replicated Young's famous double-slit experiment with your mom and your sister? ____Not the real rusty HI-REZ PRF or STFU. ____Not the real rusty I have a good friend who grew up in Voorhees. I'm pretty sure the closest I've ever been is driving by on the Turnpike. ____Not the real rusty Or emulate Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry Mike But now that sye's back, you are no longer K5's most batshit insane member. We can all only hope that you will regain that status soon, with her prompt departure. ____Not the real rusty The key is in the names The indefinite article is for any example of some noun. It's not definite (indefinite) about what it refers to. "An apple" -- not some specific apple, just any apple. The definite article refers to some particular thing. "The apple I gave you." Not any apple at all, but specifically that one that I gave you. The starting-with-the-indefinite thing makes sense in a situation like: "I had an apple in my lunchbox. Where did I put that apple?" "An apple" first because this is the first time we've encountered it in the statement. I'm asking you to picture an example of an apple, and imagine it in my lunchbox. But in the second sentence, I'm referring no longer to any old apple that you could imagine, but the particular one I asked you to imagine the first time. So now it's "that apple." If the second sentence was "Where did I put an apple?" listeners would be confused because now I'm again inviting them to imagine any apple. It's not clear that this one and the first one I mentioned are meant to refer to the same object. Your "Ross's Thing" question: it's because "Ross's Thing" is another way of writing "the Thing belonging to Ross." The posessive takes care of specifying that it's a particular Thing and not just any old Thing. Note that it's not because of the name -- the object there is "Thing," not "Ross." But if it was just "The One with Ross" you still wouldn't use the article because, I guess, the proper noun implies a particular Ross already (I'm not really sure whether this is a sensible rule or just a convention actually). You could say "a Ross" (meaning, presumably, any of the things called Ross) or "the Ross" (implying one extra special Ross) but either would be odd and require some kind of explanation in the course of the show. Incidentally, "I've started to use definite article very often" should have been "the definite article." ____Not the real rusty Sigged! ____Not the real rusty By logical extension of the argument... ...I would assume so. ____Not the real rusty Seige engine support "WTF do you mean you don't even have it pushed up against the castle wall? Jesus, these fucking n00bs." ____Not the real rusty I always knew you were an intertextual. ____Not the real rusty Yeah seriously I'm getting some serious chafing here. Cut it out. ____Not the real rusty Thank you I very much doubt it, but you never know. That story hasn't been exorcised yet by the half-ass retelling in that diary, so maybe it'll come back again. ____Not the real rusty Ah ha ha ha How droll, old man. How droll. ____Not the real rusty And don't forget People who hate peanuts also hate black people. End the reign of peanut racists! Let the brown nut be free! ____Not the real rusty According to wikipedia The Klingon word for "peanut" is "Gr'hargh'rgh". ____Not the real rusty Same here (in Maine). But we do have September and October on the way, and those are traditionally the most beautiful months of the year. And best of all, it's when all the goddamn tourists have gone home. Oh Labor Day, you cannot be past soon enough. ____Not the real rusty I'm going to make pancakes I'm going to go make some pancakes. Yummy pancakes, with blueberries in them. And bacon. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. Last night was my fifth wedding anniversay. Coincidentally, it was also my wife's fifth wedding anniversary. We went out for a nice dinner to commemorate this remarkable coincidence. Well, really we meant to go out with some friends that moved away a while ago but are in town again for a few days. But that plan fell apart due to various things, and we ended up going out to dinner on our own. We started at a place in the Old Port, having after-work drinks with some of my wife's soon-to-be-ex work colleagues. Then they left, and Christina and I wandered up Exchange street to a place called Walter's (I think). We didn't have a reservation, so we had to sit at the bar and wait for a while till a table opened up. Christina had some more wine, and I had a Sapphire and tonic, and by the time they got around to seating us we were both slightly squirrely (what with the drinks and no food). Our waitress brought the menus around, and said, as she handed them to us, "Hello, I'm sorry about the wait." And Christina said, "Oh..." and then a long pause, like she was going to folow it with "That's ok" or "No problem" or something like that. But then she started looking at her menu, and the "Oh" just sort of hung there, unfinished. Well, that got me giggling. And Christina looked at me, and I went "Oh?" And then she started giggling, realizing she hadn't actually followed it up with anything. And that just made me giggle harder, and, in short, we both completely lost it, and our poor waitress just looked at us and turned around and fled. Like, not another word, she just ran off. And of course that made us both laugh even harder. We eventually composed ourselves and managed to order a meal and eat it in relative civility. I left the waitress a very good tip for putting up with our foolishness. And the food there is really good, and (for what it is) not crazy expensive, so I do recommend the place. Just try not to frighten the waitresses. They're sensitive. Now I'm going to go make pancakes. Ayuh. Those pancakes were delicious. ____Not the real rusty eBay ____Not the real rusty I thought I recognized that table! $ ____Not the real rusty What? Well, I mean, yes, but still. What? ____Not the real rusty Real belgian waffles ...are delicious. But if you've never been to Belgium, chances are you've never had real Belgian waffles. The US version is like the US version of croissants. Not at all the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I did I can make a mean buttermilk pancake from scratch too, but some days you just want them fast, you know? ____Not the real rusty Simpler method: Fill your bottles with: Bleach Boiling water Let sit for a half hour or so. Rinse out repeatedly with hot water, then put some lemon juice in and swish it around thoroughly, and rinse again with cold water. The bleach and boiling water kill all the beasties that make your bottle smell, and the lemon juice neutralizes the bleach and gets rid of the bleachy smell. I find that scrubbing is rarely necessary, unless you've been putting all kinds of non-water stuff in your bottles and they're really caked with stuff. In that case, a bottle brush is an awfully handy thing to have around the house. ____Not the real rusty It worked perfectly "Look, here's what you do. You post some random crap that means nothing to anyone, and then wait a minute. And... yep, there's your two 500-word comments from Michael Crawford telling any personal anecdotes in his catalog that could conceivably have anything to do with the subject. And... wait for it... yes, there's some pseudo-bot trying to make a point about Scoop features. And there! In quick succession, there's a humorous and slightly trolly response, and an expression of libertarian outrage. I think that wraps it up for this demonstration." ____Not the real rusty Or... ...if the bouncer has a problem with it, get resigned to not drinking tonight. Remember, they don't have to let you in, even if you're old enough. ____Not the real rusty And then... ...you could get the crap kicked out of you in the alley behind the bar. I dont know, maybe I went to a different kind of bar than you. :-) ____Not the real rusty We're in a tight spot here, boys. ____Not the real rusty Jason Lee would totally play McGrew in the movie. Amirite? ____Not the real rusty I did not! Every crappy joke from the early days was my own original work. They may have read like joke spam, but they certainly weren't. ____Not the real rusty Like for example this one. I wrote that. ____Not the real rusty IAWTD ____Not the real rusty lol Roffle. ____Not the real rusty Jesus christ They have HuSi there too. It's so cute to watch every new generation discover the same crap about the internet. ____Not the real rusty Dailykos has a diary rating system Not exactly ratings, but just a "recommend" button. The most frequently recommended get into a box on the right column. I believe that one just has a threshold that puts your diary into the box, so they cycle through fairly quick, but not as quick as the regular diary page. It isn't a bad idea at all, and I actually have the code to do that already. More complex rating systems would require different code. It depends on what exactly you want to achieve. We'd also, I'm sure, find out all the interesting ways people could think of to screw with such a thing. ____Not the real rusty Management lining its pockets Unions aren't (in the majority of industries) really for the direct protection of workers physical safety anymore, the way they were in the good old Pinkerton days. What they would be good for would be attempting to ensure better wage equity between labor and management. Unfortunately, they're failing it rather disastrously at that. I don't know about the airline industry specifically, but overall the differential between US labor and management wages is higher than it's ever been. Management lining its pockets before the shit hits the fan is what's going on all across the rest of the economy. I'd be astounded to find it isn't in the airline industry, especially when they all know there'll be any number of government bailouts coming their way regardless. ____Not the real rusty SHUT UP AND TAKE YOUR PLAUDITS SENIOR AIRMAN MYLAKOVITCH! YOU WILL TAKE THE PLAUDITS YOU ARE GIVEN AND YOU WILL LIKE IT! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD SENIOR AIRMAN!? ____Not the real rusty Gee, I don't know I'm really sorry you feel that way. Maybe we could sit down and discuss our difference together, possibly in a drum circle, or a sweat lodge. It could really be a bonding experience for us, you know? Help us both get in touch with our inner child. In any event, please accept my unconditional love and forgiveness, and apologies for any hurt I may have caused with my inconsiderate words. You see what I did there? I took it the other way. Yeah, that's right. ____Not the real rusty hi ror ____Not the real rusty +1FP: Plenty Emo Enough. ____Not the real rusty SMRT These guys have an office on the way to where my car is parked. So every time I drive anywhere I get that song stuck in mmy head. Fortunately, I shared it with my wife, so now she does too. ____Not the real rusty You forgot 6.5: Keynote speech by Al Gore ____Not the real rusty We don't need a reason. We'd lick his shorts on command regardless. So it all works out. ____Not the real rusty RUSE AND UNCARING FEKLAAR HAS FAAT FIINGERS! ____Not the real rusty There's no distinction between online... ...or "electronic" and print publication? It seems like there ought to be. ____Not the real rusty No can do Well, could do, but only if we could contact the author of every story in an anthology and get their additional permission to publish it in book form. "...non-exclusive serial rights to publish it online, at kuro5hin.org, and syndicate the title through our RDF backend." We explicitly don't have any other rights, like print, digital distribution other than here on this site, and so forth. This was all originally a reaction to the fast one that Jon Katz planned to pull at Slashdot, republishing a bunch of stuff that other people wrote there about Columbine. But regardless of historical precedent, it's the right thing to do. I think it's kind of sleazy to posit that if you post something here, you should just take that to mean that I can thereafter do antyhing I like with what you posted for all eternity. By my lights, posting something here pretty reasonably means you expect that we can publish it here. But anything further should not be taken for granted. ____Not the real rusty Mrrrph. I went to sleep late ok. Jesus, can't anyone sleep around here? ____Not the real rusty This diary was entirely too accurate Tough morning today, for some reason. And then here it is. It was like some kind of bizarre internet telepathy. That, or vL is an NSA spy bot watching me through the television. ____Not the real rusty Ah I should have kept reading before I asked the question above. ____Not the real rusty Of course I do it? isn't argument, an read to way best the is Backwards. ____Not the real rusty The universe is not deterministic I mean, according to current knowlege, it just isn't. And while anything is conceivable, it would be a really big deal to change everything we know such that it would be. Like, you could believe it but it ain't going to happen. So what's the point of a philosophy that posits that it is? ____Not the real rusty You misread It refers to "a far-reaching social program," not "heavy social programs." They're talking about a plan for improving human society, you're talking about Medicare and collective farms. Not the same. ____Not the real rusty I don't see the world-trampling dogma Or, I guess if you want to define "democracy, peace, and a high standard of living" as world-trampling dogma, I just like them a hell of a lot better than the "suffering and death now, with pie in the sky later!" promised by virtually every other religion. I'm also not sure where you get that "there are no objective principles that can be forced upon all people." It seems, like every other religion, to be explicitly saying that there are objective principles that should be forced on all people. Like "all forms of the supernatural [are a] myth" and "human beings possess the power or potentiality of solving their own problems, through reliance primarily upon reason and scientific method applied with courage and vision." Essentially, they're endorsing faith in the basic principle of science rather than a higher power. That is, if not an "objective" principle (which would have no real place in a religious platform anyway) at least a foundational axiom. In general, I don't really get what you're comparing this to for your quibbles. It's a hell of a lot less vague or crazy than any other religion. But it seems like what you want it to be is a math textbook or something. ____Not the real rusty While you mention it It's worth noting that all the hard stuff Jesus told us to do is very compatible with humanism. They just leave off the easy bit ("...oh yeah, and accept me as your personal saviour and none of that 'love they neighbor' crap really matters.") ____Not the real rusty Uh huh I'm gonna take a history lesson from the guy that thinks Scandinavia is still full of longboats and horned helmets? roffle. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but... ...he's Canadian. :-) ____Not the real rusty Vineland will be Nordic for all eternity! ____Not the real rusty Uh Don't look now, but there's been about a thousand years of history between Viking raiders in longboats and modern secular Scandinavia. ____Not the real rusty Ok, I can see that It's a little odd that they just sort of name-check democracy without any preliminaries. As far as founding principles go, it would make more sense to posit something about how we can observe various political systems in action, and compare their effects, and we believe that democracy is the best current fit for our overall agenda. I do think that it is, despite the evident problems that have developed in various democracies. But as an article of faith, I agree it doesn't make much sense. I mean, the point is to spread whatever political system will best reach the basic ideals of happiness, freedom, and a high standard of living. I would think. You could also read it (as I'd be inclined to) as endorsing the right of all people worldwide to determine and change their own systems of government when it is in their interest to do so. Not as specifying any particular form of western-style democracy. There's Democracy and there's democracy. Maybe that was what the authors had in mind. ____Not the real rusty On democracy If you want to elect a king, or make your nation a commune, that's a whole 'nother matter (your progeny are going to need to have their say somehow about that king, though) That is sort of the awkward point though, isn't it? If you choose to elect an absolute dictator, you haven't really fulfilled the terms of the humanist program. It does essentially require some kind of liberal democracy, because voting for totalitarianism undermines the freedom of others to not have totalitarianism. It's not really good enough to say everone should be allowed to choose their own type of government. If you believe in the basic principles, they lead you necessarily to one class of government, and not any other. The only legit way around this, from a humanist perspective, would be complete freedom of emigration and choice of government. So, if you want a dictatorship, you can move to one, and leave any time you like. But that runs up against the "separate but equal" problem. What if I want to live here and live in a democracy, but here is currently run by an absolute monarch? Can't do it. I'm more inclined to jettison the idea that forms of government that don't rest directly on the constant consent of those governed are legitimate and have done with it, personally. That proposition does require that humanists abandom their tendancy toward saying anything is OK as long as its been freely chosen. That, I think, is a core conflict in secular, humanist liberalism in general. ____Not the real rusty Consent of the Governed That's what I meant by that -- there's a range of choices that all fulfill the requirement of "constant consent of the governed," like US or Parliamentary democracy, some kinds of constitutional monarchy, etc. Basically anything where there's a regular and consistent process for reaffirming the legitimacy of the government, or changing it if need be. About the second point, dealing with human nature as it is, I have some thoughts but not time to think them right now. More later. ____Not the real rusty Or... ...a bunch of other tags too. Generally if you pick a tag that matches one of the old topics it'll get that icon. ____Not the real rusty Check your technique too I have read that most people run using their hamstrings way too heavily. It's (one of?) the only muscles you have that spans two joints, and it's easy to strain it. They said instead to try to run using mainly your ass muscles for power. As far as how to accomplish this, I have no idea, but maybe something to consider or look into further. ____Not the real rusty And what happens when the airline loses your suitcase? That's generally why people keep the basics in their carry-on. Maybe they've cut a deal with CVS to boost sales. ____Not the real rusty Sure "Islamonazis" banned liquids from your flight. Cause, y'know, they run the TSA now. Lol. ____Not the real rusty We may be looking at this from opposite sides If by "Islamonazis" he meant the proto-fascists who run the US government now, as you seem to be describing, than I totally agree with you (and him). I took it to be a corruption of the right-wing "islamofascist" label, referring to the actual islamic extremists huddling in their caves that we're all supposed to be so afraid of. We might possibly just have a terminology misunderstanding here. ____Not the real rusty Sure there is Which is why Trollaxor lasted so much longer than those of you who don't contribute anything but crap. He was fine half the time and obnoxious the other half. The question is always how long do you put up with the one to keep the other? The answer varies. ____Not the real rusty Discretionary Which is not the same as arbitrary. But if that answer doesn't satisfy you, do feel free to piss up a rope. ____Not the real rusty What do you want? We should have to build a court case against everyone who gets kicked out? You have to personally approve every decision an admin makes about who's being a cockbasket here? I waste enough time dealing with a few people and their dupe armies as it is. I can't even imagine the tedium of documenting every bit of it. It sounds like you might be happier on wikipedia. I understand that's how they operate. ____Not the real rusty Cheers! Glad you picked up on that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hand cream? ____Not the real rusty Dunno Yeah, I caught up with this whole "liquid bomb" fiasco after I posted that comment yesterday. What a crock of shit. So you're totally buying this liquid bomb plot, then? They'e going to assemble deadly chemical explosives in the airplane toilet? ROR. ____Not the real rusty That's not why it's being done The fuss is about the fact that all the "security" is window dressing and scaremongering. It is a completely transparent program of mass manipulation and control. Just like taking everyone's nail clippers was. The point isn't to keep you safe, the point is to keep you afraid. Are you afraid? Are you afraid enough to believe that nail clippers are actually a threat? Are you afraid enough to believe that hand cream might be deadly? Have you seen the latest threat on the 24 hour news cycle? Do you know what your terror level is? Is it High? Elevated? Extreme? Are you used to being stopped and searched yet? Have you grown accustomed to emptying your pockets for anyone in a uniform? Is there anything you're not prepared to believe might be a deadly threat? Personally, my terror level is low and still dropping. I don't believe nail clippers are deadly weapons, in anyone's hands. I think that if you want to blow up an airliner, there's many easier ways than performing outlandishly complex chemistry experiments in the loo. I know for a fact that all this airport security nonsense won't stop most of the weapons that people still routinely carry on flights. I'm much more afraid of getting hit by a car than anything a terrorist could do. I'm much more afraid of my government's exploitation of mass public fear than anything a terrorist could do. In fact, if you define "terrorism" as "the causing and exploitation of mass public fear for political ends," and you cast your mind back over the last half decade and add up who's been responsible for causing and exploiting the most fear, I'm afraid my government comes out ahead by miles. That's what the fuss is about. ____Not the real rusty They put you on probation for that? Christ. Post that shit here. It'd be like best diary of the week. :-) ____Not the real rusty Fiat Fix It Again, Tony. ____Not the real rusty Hummer != HUMVEE The Hummer is a Chevy Tahoe wearing a halloween mask. It has nothing in common with the original military vehicle from which it derived its body styling. ____Not the real rusty Ah crap I just wiped your ratings. I didn't mean to at all. I'm sorry. I have to go away and stop doing anything here now for a bit, because obviously I'm not competent to at the moment. Apologies again. ____Not the real rusty According to wikipedia It won't be long. ____Not the real rusty Only if... ....by "fat chick" you mean "unemployed middle-aged man pretending to be a fat chick." ____Not the real rusty Hey, now, I wouldn't say that... I never liked you to begin with. :-) ____Not the real rusty The author pulled it I don't know why. ____Not the real rusty See The Courant The Rasmussen Reports survey polled 550 likely voters Wednesday and Thursday and found Lieberman, who is running as an independent, with 46 percent to Lamont's 41 percent. Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger trailed with 6 percent. The poll shows Lamont in a much stronger position than a July 20 survey by Quinnipiac University, which had Lieberman beating Lamont 51 percent to 27 percent in a November faceoff. Lieberman is doomed. ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't make much difference, might hurt At 6%? Meh. My take on it was that Lieberman is dropping like a rock in the polls. Anyone who didn't know who Lamont was before sure does now, so name ID shouldn't be much of an issue. And the GOP officially blessing Lieberman might do him more harm than good, as moderate Dems then have it sort of rubbed in their noses that they're thinking of voting for a Republican. ____Not the real rusty Weird I don't know. Did it used to have a lot more votes? ____Not the real rusty I don't discount your theory It will be interesting to see if Ned can win despite the Clinton's support. ____Not the real rusty In Dupont Visit Kramerbooks, hang out in the circle and watch people, go to The Big Hunt (all on or about 18th St. within a block or two of the circle). Take a walk in Rock Creek Park (before dark). Visit the National Zoo (it's free!). ____Not the real rusty You want cheap? If it's cheap you're after, head a little farther up 18th st to the Common Share, which is just about at the border between Dupont and Adams-Morgan, as you start up the hill toward the Adams-Morgan bar strip. $2 domestic drafts, $3 import drafts all the time. That's where the bike messengers used to go drink at the end of the day, when I was there. Also, the bike ride was a fiasco. They canceled the first day due to flooding (first time in 21 years that they canceled any of it). And I had been in NY for work that week, and only home for a day before I went down to Boston for the ride, so rather than sit around Boston and wait to see whether they would do the second day or not, I went home. My team rode the second day, down the Cape. Well, at least I raised some money for a good cause. It was a bummer though. I really wanted to ride. ____Not the real rusty Or perhaps... ....Jimbo knows how addictive the WikiGame is, and also how fervent political partisans are right now, and is betting that a site that pits both sides against each other in an infinite WikiDeathMatch will crank out the google ads like no tomorrow and fill his pockets. My hat is off to him. Don't think I haven't considered it myself. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't judge What the hell -- who ever said the web wasn't for making money? I hope he makes a pile from this thing. I really do think it's a good idea if he can manage it, and potentially a gold mine given the current state of political spending and likely increase in the online share of that. He should put BlogAds up on there too. ____Not the real rusty This was better When it was named MEEPT! ____Not the real rusty Yeah but formkeys are still a better solution, because a) as you point out, it's still not very hard to put together a fake POST request, and b) sometimes it's nice not to have to distinguish between POST and GET. In fact, formkeys are a great solution that we already put in place here way the hell back in 2001 because of this exact problem, so I'm a little irked to discover that we haven't really been using them for nearly that whole time. ____Not the real rusty Reconsider the Iran invasion? But this is the full dress rehearsal! We can't just cancel the show now. Anyway, it'll all be fine on the night. ____Not the real rusty I don't think so It's exploiting the fact that the formkeys we added lo these many eons ago to prevent just this type of thing are apparently broken. So you can make a link that causes anyone with a K5 user account who is logged in at the time to post a comment when they click it. I leave the details as a (really fucking easy) exercise for the reader. Will fix shortly. ____Not the real rusty Nah, coincidence There's been an enterprising open source coder or two doing some security testing on Scoop lately, it appears. This particular one was from 2002. Like the other bugs, I'm surprised no one noticed for so long. But hey, free bug reports. ____Not the real rusty Thanks for noticing That was a proxy fall-through error. There was no default virtual host defined for an unknown hostname, so it would go to (I think) the first virtualhost defined. Obviously that's not right. :-) I added a default "null" host, so this sort of thing won't happen in the future, and also a K5 catchall to push through any other random hosts to the proper www. My guess on why those got spidered at all is someone probably just typoed a link somewhere out there on the web. ____Not the real rusty You're right abou that I agree. ____Not the real rusty Well, that's the issue Hence it doesn't work that way yet. ____Not the real rusty More like this please ____Not the real rusty Ah Deb Go fuck yourself and your dead grandmother without the luxury of lubrication. I was going to write more but I'm a little squirrely right now. Friday night bonfire knowatimean. ____Not the real rusty Next Web 2.0 service: MthrFuckr. ____Not the real rusty It's true They lose $0.63 per video played, but they totally make it up in volume. ____Not the real rusty I made it much more better And how is that you manage to trip the comment posting throttle every other day? You're the only one, you know. That doesn't happen to anyone else. What are you doing? ____Not the real rusty FYI To the best of our knowlgee this is legit. Like, not someone doing a reverse triple meta-troll that no one can even understand. So if you were inclined to answer, you're not just wasting your time. ____Not the real rusty Well, ok But you're wasting your time helping some student with yet another grad project, rather than wasting your time gratifying a troll, is what I meant. You may be surprised to learn that we get this kind of email all the frigging time. I usually don't bother to do anything about them, because (A) the writer could just post the request for participation on the site themselves if they cared to find that out, and (B) they always forget the first rule of asking for someone to help with your grad project: "What's in it for me?" The usual answer is nothing at all. The second most usual answer is "I'll write some bullshit paper 'analyzing' the 'results' in between bong hits and shots of everclear." Which, you know, I could totally do myself. ____Not the real rusty Ahem I think you meant: ECONOMIC GRADUATE RESEARCH AT RUSTAY'S! ____Not the real rusty Um, cause Post your answers here? ____Not the real rusty No But it was what Greg Louganis was attmepting that time he hit his head on the keyboard. ____Not the real rusty Huh I don't think I've ever seen an audience look so... bored. How come they're all just standing there? ____Not the real rusty Pleasure doing business with you Please stop back in soon now, you hear? ____Not the real rusty Yeah I use my oversight to overlook everything you guys do. :-) ____Not the real rusty Why are you so enamored with rules? Don't we have enough rules in life, without creating imaginary spaces in order to enforce yet more rules? To get to the heart of your question, no, the rules don't really matter. Which is why I'm always so slow to write any of them down, and so quick to provide loopholes and exceptions. Rules are for dimwits and pedants, and none of the admins here are either, so we mainly just rely on guidelines, heuristics, estimates, and the occasional wild-ass guess. Sure, you can wait until we go to sleep and turn on the flood, and when we wake up we'll just clean it up again and go on with our day. And what will that have proved? Done it before, will do it again. Same old. So, in summary, you're right. Basically the only rule is don't get caught pissing us off. If you have a problem with that, you should either re-evaluate your worldview and come to grips with the idea that no one is required to provide you with consistency, or find a site run by robots who simply enforce rules 24x7. ____Not the real rusty You got two warnings ...for filing abuse reports about every nonsense thing that you don't like. You know perfectly well why you were booted. And the same is true for this account too, except you've had your warnings already. ____Not the real rusty Hey That was me. You were amongst a welter of comment-rating abuse reports. I looked at the account, saw a previous warning (though for something else) and figured yuo == teh trollzor. You also do, you must admit, have at least one banned account behind you, and it looks like quite a few more than one. Like, previous experience doesn't exactly make me try real hard to find ways to make an exception for you. Unless none of that was you, but I think it was. So listen, you did post a couple of good stories. What say you take your account back, I make a little note of this mixup in the files, and we all call it even? ____Not the real rusty Just trollZor I know you aren't trollaxor. ____Not the real rusty This is why... ...I don't even think of spraying for the Japanese beetles that are destroying every plant I have in front of my house. I've now read too much about bees to consider pesticides without thinking about their effects beyond my particular target pest. So instead I keep going out with my jar of soapy water and knocking the damn things off by hand to drown, and knowing that it's not really doing any good at all, and not caring that much regardless. ____Not the real rusty But Can economics address these reasons? This seems like it falls more in the realm of sociology to me. ____Not the real rusty Depends who you ask Unlike most personality cult leaders, Castro has done a lot of investing in Cuba (given the limited resources of its isolated economy) rather than lining his own pockets. Cuba has one of the best health care systems in Latin America, and other countries in the region routinely send people to Cuba for medical training. See Mountains Beyond Mountains for more about this. ____Not the real rusty Compare with: Darth Vera ____Not the real rusty Did ya see that look? Like butta wouldn't melt. Oy. ____Not the real rusty At least you're not watching TV ...so that's something. But for all that, you'd still be better off reading a book. ____Not the real rusty I thought 8:59 I am a natural born pedant, it seems. But not as bad as one that thought 8:59:59 and one second minus the Planck time. ____Not the real rusty Cable--; Netflix++; We dropped the cable and added one disc to our netflix account. If there's anything worth seeing on TV it comes out on DVD eventually. ____Not the real rusty Charles F Wilson ...will never last. You wait and see. I bet he'll be leaving for good before the week is out. ____Not the real rusty I turned 30 on the eleventh Must have been a lot of people getting busy in October. I almost said "in the seventies," but that wouldn't be true for all of you babies would it. Sheesh. People being born in the 80's. What will they think of next. ____Not the real rusty ror And you all fell for it. All I have to do it commit some meaningless patch and go "Oops! Scoop bug!" and you all just fall in line and blame whoever I say did it. The Reichstag burns again next week... ____Not the real rusty Make links like this: [Some text to link http://www.kuro5hin.org] will produce Some text to link. You can also make lists: * One * Two * Three makes: One Two Three And 1. One 2. Two 3. Three makes: One Two Three Ths is in autoformat mode only. I was going to link you to the FAQ section about autoformat, but if there is one I can't find it either. That should probably be changed, huh? ____Not the real rusty So... $79 a month for water. All my municipal water for drinking, washing, and wastewater comes to (I just checked) about $17.00 a month. Yes, bottled water is a scam. ____Not the real rusty Huh I didn't even notice the poll. I was just reading diaries. ____Not the real rusty You may laugh, but a friend of mine lived with a guy who did stuff like save his dishwater in a big bucket to flush the toilet with. He also washed plastic bags. ____Not the real rusty There are systems like that Google search for rammed-earth houses. A lot of those are built with rainwater catchment only, and use gray-water recycling systems like that to conserve water. The reason it's not done more is mainly that doing it is kind of a pain, it makes plumbing a lot more compicated, and it costs more because there aren't good standard systems for it. It would make sense in places where water is scarce though. ____Not the real rusty Calling it "civilian infrastructure"... ...is pretty disingenuous here. If they were targeting schools, ok. But to my knowlege they're not. They're targeting infrastructure that is at worst dual-purpose. And I do see Israel going to more effort to target carefully, as opposed to the indiscriminate rockets of Hezbollah. But opn the other hand, I don't give them all that much credit for it. If the relative strength of the sides was reversed, I expect the targeting would be likewise reversed. Israel can afford to be careful, and Hezbollah cannot, is what it comes down to. ____Not the real rusty Hezbollah and Lebanon The problem is that while Hezbollah does have representatives in the Lebanese government, the people Israel is fighting is Hezbollah's private military -- not the Lebanese government's army. It's not accurate to argue that Israel is fighting the state of Lebanon here -- they've called for Israel to stop the bombing, but militarily the Lebanese government is not involved here. Both sides are wrong here, IMO, but I understand the motivations on both sides. With the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, Israel saw an opportunity to try to secure their northern border by pummeling Hezbollah for a while. If you're Israel, it's a strategically sensible move in the short term, although it's certainly not helping them in the long term. But it isn't clear that there's anything Israel could do that would help them in the long term against a group whos founding principle is that Israel shouldn't exist. Basically, this is a mess. The one thing I can say is that the US isn't helping anyone, including ourselves, with our cheerleading and agitation to expand the campaign to Syria and Iran. ____Not the real rusty Smurfs? You mean you've never heard of the Smuckfest? ____Not the real rusty PAGING FEN Fen, you are being summoned. Please come to any white courtesy phone. ____Not the real rusty Recommendation: Rename OggFrog "CrotchRot". J/K Michael. You know I love you. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh good lord Current total with fewer than 5 partners: 33 Current total with more than 5 partners: 18 Way to prove the stereotype, K5. ____Not the real rusty Weird There is an ad under Johnco, but it's for Rsync.net. I don't have any idea how you managed to get a CNN logo in there, but if you can get a screen shot maybe I can make them pay me for it. ____Not the real rusty I say "New-Fownd-Land", which I bet would drive Newfies absolutely up a tree, but I can't help it. It's so fun to say. New Found Land! New Found Land! ____Not the real rusty The 1% rule I've observed that to be the case for 5 years or so. I usually call it the 10% rule, because you can go from more to less interaction in stages of 10%. So: For every ten people who visit a site, one will sign up for an account For every ten people who make an account, one will post a comment or vote on a story For every ten people who post a comment, one will post a diary For every ten people who post a diary, one will submit a story It's held roughly true (to within 3 or 4%) for the entire life of K5. I would be surprised if it wasn't roughly true elsewhere too, although some factors can change the percentages in special cases. Also, that article about project managers is unbelievably accurate. My PM even has a boyfriend named Chad. ____Not the real rusty I loled. ____Not the real rusty Foster's postulate? ____Not the real rusty Dude How do I know that what I see as the color green is, like, the same thing that you see as the color green? ____Not the real rusty What were we talking about again? ____Not the real rusty A Subaru, a Jeep and a Dodge I don't have an idea by mileage which one I drive more. I bet the Jeep but only because I use it for infrequent but long trips. But since there's no Subaru option, It's Daimler-Jesus-Chrysler for me. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, what's up with that? I got the series on DVD too, and with the missing pilot, it immediately doesn't make any sense. I thought it would take a little longer to ease into not making any sense. ____Not the real rusty I was pretty lost Especially about the whole "burning down the mill" subplot. It took me like four episodes to get some grasp on who was who in that whole clusterfuck. I dunno, though. We watched all of season 1, and I just don't care enough to bother following more of it. ____Not the real rusty History shows definitively ...that when I say "soon" you can be assured that it will happen within the decade. ____Not the real rusty Butter face [nt] ____Not the real rusty I can vouch for it... ...as known New England manual laborer slang, at the very least. ____Not the real rusty Here it's pronounced roughly: "BUTTAface". ____Not the real rusty You don't have to give your last name, Alex? Not if I don't want to. ____Not the real rusty War is a terible mechanism for that Ever heard of the baby boom? Plague would be much better. It takes out people at all levels of society, and those left standing have to rebuild a lot of infrastructure and social structure from scratch. ____Not the real rusty And for your purposes... ...it seems to me that 1/3 would be plenty. A 90% reduction would be rather excessive, I think. ____Not the real rusty Here's your phrasing: "The primary mistake of internet lawyers is that they believe laws are facts." ____Not the real rusty Pearls before swine, I swear. YUO == TEH SWINE ____Not the real rusty No joke I'm just saying that my concise and strikingly accurate phraseology is as pearls before swine, where yuo == teh swine. And as for new replies, soon grasshopper. ____Not the real rusty But that's the point The computer-nerd mind sees laws as facts. Like computer code is a fact. It either runs or it doesn't, but there's no argument over it. Or like physics laws -- they're facts until something comes along to disprove them, and then they're scrapped or changed until they're facts again. Whereas judicial laws are basically ongoing acts of literary criticism, subject to all kinds of factors external to the law itself. Jesus, I'm not saying anything jmzero or you didn't say. There's no disagreement here. So stop riding my ass, granddad. You're not the boss of me. ____Not the real rusty Ah. I am not a lawyer. So I wasn't trying to use any lawyer terms. I can see how that would be confusing. ____Not the real rusty 2.5 out of 10 Your content is all there, but where's the passion? Where's the vitriol? You didn't even call anyone a moonbat. You have a good grasp of the basics, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to make it as an rwg troll here. ____Not the real rusty Heh What's wrong with Sunday morning at 8:20? Any time's a good time for critiquing a weak troll. :-) ____Not the real rusty Do what? She has finally found the right place for her. ____Not the real rusty I don't hate her I just think she's a dolt. :-) ____Not the real rusty OMG IT'S BETTER THAN DA VINCI CODE!! ____Not the real rusty Likewise I found that one randomly at the library, and was very surprised I hadn't heard of it already, once I was done. A very fun read. I'm waiting for the follow-up, which will probably blow. ____Not the real rusty American Gods is crappy I liked Neverwhere, but didn't get obsessed over it or anything. It's a clever story, is all. But AG sucked balls. I would have put it down too if I knew it wasn't going to get any better. ____Not the real rusty Some Brazilian spider Trying to slurp down all pages, apparently. ____Not the real rusty Actually, yes Voxel just set up a caching system of that sort. We'll probably go live with it on Monday. ____Not the real rusty Ow! I say old chap, wot wot? ____Not the real rusty t1ber was dead, to begin with... ____Not the real rusty Q 3 Actually, the only reason is because I don't yet have anything to give actual paying subscribers in lieu of the stuff they've been paying for. I do want to change that -- put up the replies box for everyone and update the paid memberships to better things. Possibly image-posting rights, and what else? I don't know. I should put up a diary asking what you think. (Not you personally of course, but You collectively). I apologize for the terrible disjointedness of this comment, but I'm in the middle of something else here. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha no The scoop code is already updated. I was in the middle of something for work. ____Not the real rusty Well, there's a fine balance Do images belong in stories? Yeah, I think they probably do. In diaries and comments? Maybe, sometimes, or for some people. In sigs? No, never ever ever. What I'm thinking would involve perhaps allowing images for anyone in stories that go through voting, so there's some quality control built in to that. And then making diary and comment images a pay-only thing, so as to make it a slightly valuable and slightly discouraged practice and hopefully help keep down annoying behavior that way. ____Not the real rusty No Seriously. ____Not the real rusty Does Colgate also make Shotgun Mouthwash? ____Not the real rusty Google is your friend There's a pretty good discussion here. What it appears to come down to is that the water becomes concave in the spinning bucket because you're doing the experiment on earth, in earth's gravitational field. Then there's some stuff about the two-rocks-in-empty-space version and special vs. general relativity that I didn't really follow. ____Not the real rusty Why would I want everyone to go away? There's nothing preventing me from shutting down K5, if that was what I wanted to do. I don't need everyone to leave first so I can, like, do it sneakily. I keep running it because I like the site, warts and all. The interesting thing about trolls and all that to me is that it's no different here than it is in the rest of the world. We've got this idea that "media" is supposed to be cleaned up, edited, and present a straightforward storyline with a beginning middle and end. But life isn't like thast, and people aren't like that. People are messy, obnoxious, and contentious. Sometimes they don't get along with each other. Usually they don't make any kind of coherent sense. And since K5 is made of people, that's what it's like as well. So I keep running the site because it brings in a little extra money, and I like reading it. But in the larger scheme of things, I think it helps a little bit to demonstrate that everything doesn't have to be sanitized and "nice" to still be valuable. You can call it trolling or you can call it free speech, I think it's all more or less the same thing. The other aspect of K5 that I think still stands out is that it's one of very few places online where someone can write an original article on nearly anything and have some hope of getting an audience to read it. We're deluged with the Diggs and the blogs and links to this that and the other thing. Which is fine and all, but shouldn't there be a few places that are producing new stuff? So far, those are mostly still the professional media. I think K5 stands up for the potential of amateur media, and amateur in the best sense, of people doing something for the love of doing it. So that's my little three-paragraph Defense of K5. :-) ____Not the real rusty Extra old-timer points ...to whoever can find the fallout of the Great Paul Dunne Fiasco that occurred later on. Or even knows what I'm talking about. ____Not the real rusty Hey man, nice shot. ____Not the real rusty I think ...that's actually the case. I suspect the order is determined by whatever mysql feels like producing, modified by whatever order perl push hash keys in. So, in summary, the order of the who's online box is most likely a pretty good source of random bits ____Not the real rusty That's charming I only wonder if he couldn't have worked "sand nigger" in there somehow. Must have been an oversight. ____Not the real rusty About the hack, and more pleas for money "Oh no!" you say, "You want us to give you money again!?" No, not really. Don't worry. I want you to give the National Multiple Sclerosis Society money, in order to see pictures of me looking silly in bike shorts. But more on that later... First, a response to Chalmers/Joyce about yesterday's fun. Probably most of you have seen the explanation of what happened. That is quite thorough and accurate, from my own investigation. It's possible that some other things were done by users who suddenly found themselves with admin perms -- I know a couple people changed emails or such. If you were around at the time, it would probably be wise to change your password because it may have been changed for you. But I don't think anything really dire happened. To respond to Patrick's first security tip -- we don't associate an IP with a session ID mainly because it screws AOL users. AOL has an awful proxy arrangement where consecutive requests from the same user often come from totally different IPs. We originally had IP numbers encoded in form keys, and it didn't work, for the same reason. What this makes me think is that we should probably have a means to check IP and session correspondence, and use it for people with admin privileges. It seems unlikely that our admins are ever going to decide to use AOL. So it's a good idea, but not practical to implement for every user. The other two suggestions are very true. And we did indeed fix this one as soon as it became known. I'm astonished that no one else has noticed it in the six years or so that vulnerability has existed. Help Me Do Something Stupid for a Good Cause In other news, less than two weeks from now I'm going to be riding the MS 150 in Massachusetts. My friend rob, who is an inveterate instigator, convinced me that riding 100 miles one day and 75 miles the next was a fine idea for someone who hasn't even been on a bike in a decade, and has never done any road biking at all. So I bought a bike from him and have been half-assed training, and expecting general healthy condition to see me through this somehow. So Saturday June 24th we ride 100 miles from Quincy to Sandwich. The next day we ride from Sandwich to Provincetown, and presumably cruise the gay bars for a while in our skin-tight lycra clothing. Then I take a ferry back to Quincy, drive home, and whimper in pain for a week or so. But to do this, I have to raise $400. So far I've raised exactly jack dollars and squat cents. I figured I'd better get started. So here's the deal. If K5 contributes to meeting my goal, I promise to provide pictures after the event of me looking dead sexy (or utterly foolish, depending on how much of a bike dork you are) in my bike shorts and mushroom-head helmet. They will constitute unimpeachable HI-REZ PROOF, and be fully suitable for photoshopping. To donate, go here and empty your credit cards liberally. Thank you. Don't think so I saw a comment from hulver saying he'd applied the patch, so I don't think anyone got them. ____Not the real rusty I hope so It'd be $30k for a very good cause. But regardless of what happens, I have no doubt that Rogerborg will claim I made $75,000 and somehow kept it all for myself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah crap It's gone. It wasn't posted yet in my last backup, and whoever deleted it actually delted it, not just hid it. That's not cool at all. I could restore the article from that google cache, but not all the comments. I do have a static page cache -- what scoop uses to speed up views for anonymous users. I will try to get that shaped up as a working html page and at least attache it to the URL, so it's not gone for good. I'm really sorry that happened, and the person who did it is banned. ____Not the real rusty Yikes They're blue actually. Very dark blue. I still haven't decided if I have the... uh... balls to wear them alone. so far I've always modestly worn regular shorts over them. But in a crowd of thousands, I might not bother. despite how it looks, the aerodynamic clothing makes a surprisingly large difference. ____Not the real rusty lol Victory is mine! ____Not the real rusty It's not sudden My time to talk here waxes and wanes, but I do read every day, and take a pretty active hand in administrative stuff. Basically sometimes that's all I have time for, and other times I can spare a while to comment or write a diary. Or sometimes something just grabs me enough to get me to talk about it. :-) Yeah, I know the ride is going to be tough. However, I am in pretty serious shape -- I've been running regularly for more than four years now, kayak as often as I can, and so forth. For one of our training rides we did 55 miles one day and 25 the next, and I was fine. Around the 35 mile mark on the first day my legs were hurting, but they came back about ten miles later and I was fine for the rest. My problem is I simply do not have time to ride hard every day. There's not enough daylight, and for me to get any real mileage in I have to take the boat into town. I may be a fool, but I'm basically trusting in willpower and overall conditioning here. I also have a really sweet bike, which helps. 19 pound aluminum Bianchi. I never realized how much of a difference a road bike can make before. But I don't have any serious doubts. Me and Rob once snowshoed with 40-pound packs on unpacked mountain trails (and sometimes off trails, when we got lost) for 14 hours continuously, much of it at night. Granted I thought I might die, but I didn't. And I am in better shape now than I was then. I think that has got to be harder than this will be. ____Not the real rusty I've read about those From what I read, it would be a bad idea if I don't have any time to train with them first. They look slick though. ____Not the real rusty Probably not But if I do die, I'll make sure Rob posts pictures of me expiring in bike shorts. ____Not the real rusty It is a charity The ride is sponsored and organized by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, who raise money for research and treatment and assistance for people with MS. They do these all over the country. So the deal is I get to do a really long and challenging bike ride with a lot of other people, and they close roads and provide drinks and whatnot, and transport our stuff for us so all we have to do is ride. And in exchange, each person who rides has to raise at least $400 for them, as well as pay a fee that covers the other services. I've already paid my fees for everything (I think). Just the fundraising left to do. Check out the link, it's all explained there too. You don't give me anything -- you can donate right there online directly to the MS Society, and it gets credited as my fundraising for their quota purposes. ____Not the real rusty Also Re-reading, I see how utterly unclear that was in my diary. Sorry. You'd have to have gone and followed the links for that to really make any sense the first time around. ____Not the real rusty K5 Haxx0red lolz Yes, we were the victim of a fairly clever cross-site-scripting hack. Thank you, my dears, for doing it here first. I have to go make dinner, but I'll write something up about it later this evening. Just wanted to wave and say you can all stop waiting for admin perms to come back now. :-) Also, anyone running Scoop, the patch is already in CVS. And It also often involves not using most of perl's more terse syntactical idioms. ____Not the real rusty Y'know what's funny? The vulnerable bit has been in Search.pm since version 1.1. So that's like going on six years now. And this is the first time anyone's found it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, it's bad I've still gotta get all the html out of Search.pm. That and a couple opther spots are all that's left, really. But this thing had to be fixed immediately, with as little pain for people upgrading as possible, so there you go. ____Not the real rusty Your feature request suffers from... ...an infinite regress problem. What if the poll author includes "None of these" as an option? Then you still have a "None of these" option that includes the author's "None of these." And what if you want to also not vote for either of those "None of these" options? Well, it's turtles all the way down isn't it. ____Not the real rusty Our sacrifice was a fiasco Do you know how hard it is to get a cow to burn? You just want to say "Look people, cows are not fucking flammable!" ____Not the real rusty Ain't me Myspace makes the baby rustina cry. ____Not the real rusty Look at the positive This trend is finally bringing long-called-for diversity to the suburbs. ____Not the real rusty We personally matched you... ...along 37 different unique metrics of ghey! ____Not the real rusty Me too (en tea, forsooth) ____Not the real rusty Better food Despite what Good Will Hunting told you, better educated and higher IQ people tend to come from households with enough money to feed their kids well enough to learn in school and have good brain development. Better food equals taller people. Compare North Korean and South Korean demographics for very good proof of that last claim. ____Not the real rusty I know I am Although for where I live, I'm only slightly above average income. "Where I live" meaning this island, not Maine as a whole. I'm damn well taller than average though. ____Not the real rusty Probably a bug Your report is noted, and will be investigated citizen. ____Not the real rusty janra fixed it Thank you, janra. ____Not the real rusty lol I know, from personal experience, that everyone at the BBC isn't a clueless knob. In fact they have a lot of people who really like what they see going on in the amateur media online, and are dying to get a piece of it. But they're just the tiny tip of the tail of an enormous bureaucratic dinosaur, and it's pretty much impossible for them to get anything meaningful done. So their efforts to open things up generally wind up being slaughtered in the crib by mandated changes like this. The one basic thing the BBC will not (and possibly cannot) give up is control, and for any of this to work, that's exactly the one thing they have to give up. I don't really expect to see anything viable in online community come out of the BBC, ever. Which is unfortunate, because they seem to employ all the people in England who would be best equipped to do it. ____Not the real rusty Do you know who that was? I've talked to someone from the BBC intermittently over the last... must be four years now. So I can say they have people who are very much ahead of the curve on all this. My sense is just they're hard-pressed to get anything done. It also seems to be a pretty minor concern in a very big corporation, so they tend to get squeezed for time, money, and people. ____Not the real rusty I rate this comment 0.999999... ____Not the real rusty Tag Updates I've adjusted the tag system to limit each story to a maximum of ten tags, and to limit individual tags to 50 characters maximum. And man, I really have to clean up this story submit form. I still think it's rather ugly. There's a preference for that somewhere I will try to dig it up and enable it. ____Not the real rusty I elided it ...for greater generality. ____Not the real rusty Make some ...and email the to help@k5 or get one of the admins attention in some other way and point us at them. I'd be happy to add more, and it's fairly easy to. Just keep to the general style of the existing ones. If we were really clever, we'd create some kind of tag image contribution form, but you know we're not, so probably don't hold your breath on that. ____Not the real rusty I loled And then I threw up in my mouth a little. And then I loled some more. :-) ____Not the real rusty But A spoonful of sugar helps the medecine go down. ____Not the real rusty However A penny saved is a penny earned. ____Not the real rusty Someone call the waah-mbulance! C'mon, dude, it's been up for what, two days now? Settle down. As for your actual points, I think they're both probably right. But next time you have sensible and valid points to make, think about whether calling the people you're talking to "idiots" is likely to help or not. ____Not the real rusty What's broken? The tags are good, and people are using them exactly as expected. I think they're great. :-) ____Not the real rusty We're working on it I fixed a couple things yesterday that seemed to help. Basically anonymous visitor comment display modes were showing everything as "nested," so some stories with a lot of comments took a long time to produce and tying up httpds. I hoped that would do it, but perhaps not. We'll see what else is wrong. ____Not the real rusty The point of organic Most people don't understand this, especially including most people who are organic food fanatics. But the point of organic food isn't healthier food or better food. At best, a few kinds of produce tend to hang on to pesticide residue (like peppers, for one, and a few others) so skipping pesticides is nice for those. But by and large, there's no way to even tell the difference between a piece of produce that was grown organically and one that wasn't. Anyone who tells you there are proven health benefits is blowing smoke up your ass. The point of organic is to use less stuff to produce foods. Like, primarily to use less fossil fuels, by not applying manufactured fertilizer. Ordinary fertilizer is basically just processed oil. Modern intensive farming uses an enormous amount of fossil fuels. Organic farming replaces fossil-fuel based fertilizer with fertilizer made out of waste products, like manure, compost, and so forth. That is, rather than trash all those leftover nutrients, organic farming returns them to the process, and therefore makes much more efficient use of resources. For most of human existence, all farming was "organic." Farmers had a mix of crops and animals that together formed a roughly stable cycle of nutrient use and replenishment. Think of the farmer who grows grass for his cows and fertilizes his grass fields with cow manure and you get the basic idea. Now it is true that this kind of cycle probably doesn't have the carrying capacity for the modern global population of humans. If we banned all non-organic farming tomorrow, a lot of people would die. On the other hand, the way we farm now is based on oil, and we've only got a few more decades of that left. So would you rather build some kind of organic farming industry now, or wait until it's our only choice? We are, as a species, probably in big trouble either way. But don't believe that just because modern farming is so super-productive, there isn't going to be a major price to pay for it. ____Not the real rusty I agree with you I make more of an effort to buy local food than organic food. Go to Whole Foods sometime and look at their meats. It's organic beef from goddamn New Zealand and crap like that. That's just stupid. What the percentages are of energy use in machinery vs. fertilizer I don't know, so I can't really debate you on that. Organic tends to be more labor-intensive, so there probably is more use of machinery. ____Not the real rusty Do you have any numbers? I'm not accusing you of being wrong -- I truly don't know. Have you found any sources that do the math on this? Like, amount of oil that goes into fertilizer + hours of diesel usage vs. added time for organics? But generally, I agree with you that organic the way it's being built right now is not an answer. If we're looking for sustainable agriculture, I don't think anyone's found it yet. ____Not the real rusty Two guesses Food for first-world consumption will increasingly be feel-good organic (much like the feel-good "free range" chickens we get now). Meanwhile, food for export will be grown the same old chemical-intensive way, but probably more so, because there will be less land for it and it'll have to produce more. Look for more GMOs being planted for export to the third world. We are over carrying capacity for any kind of agriculture. We're not doing "agriculture" right now, we're basically mining soil nutrients and eating them. They will, sooner or later, be gone. Then we're screwed. I don't think we have an anser to the fact that there are too many people in the world, other than the time-tested standbys of famine, plague and war. ____Not the real rusty Well, me too But what "cage free" (and sometimes "free range") means these days is probably not what you imagine. Basically it means they all live in a big barn, where there is a small door at one end and a fenced yard where they can go outside if they feel like it. Most of them don't. But at least it's an improvement over battery farming. ____Not the real rusty I like Gorillaz too But Oasis is crap. Oooooh! BURN! ____Not the real rusty Indeed I am I believe my predelection for lousy corporate pop is already well-established. I also love Blink 182 and Good Charlotte. So take that! ____Not the real rusty Sure they are And many of their other songs are as catchy as the radio hits, in the same fundamentally empty, manufactured, and totally undemanding way. I find it good music to program to. ____Not the real rusty No, not really Real talent is distracting. ____Not the real rusty The terrible last chapter Burgess's original version had 21 chapters. The last chapter has Alex maturing and realizing what a rotten shit he's always been, independent of the efforts to reform him. It is, however, a terrible ending that reads like it was mandated by the morality police, and doesn't fit in with the rest of the book at all. When the book was published in the US, the publisher left the last chapter off, because they felt it was terrible soap opera bullshit. And they were (in, it should be clear, my own opinion) completely right, despite what Burgess wanted. Some discussion of this, and the effect it had on the eventual movie, is here. Ask google for more info. ____Not the real rusty Also We're planning to get some bees, probably next spring. I've been reading The Beekeeper's Handbook and reviewing your articles. Thanks for the inspiration. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thank you Very useful advice. I was already planning to go with wood, and two get two hives, because counterintuitively it does seem like that would be easier to manage. The Beekeeper's Handbook certainly does have a lot of management strategy advice that depends on having more than one hive. I suspected that wasn't a coincidence. I was planning to buy my equipment this fall/winter, and start with a package (I guess two packages) next spring. I don't know if I could get a full hive, because of the added difficulty of shipping it out here to the island. I'm also worried about the length and coldness of Maine winters. Last winter would have been an easy one on bees, but the one before that it was below 20 degrees every single day in February, and got down to -12 a few times. Sometimes winter goes straight through from November to June. I think you're right, that what I really need to do is join a local club and find out what works for people here. ____Not the real rusty INTP And this poll is providing futher evidence of my theory that community websites tend to develop the same overall personality as their founder. Considering that so far there's an overwhelming preponderance of INTPs and INT(weak)Js, it seems well supported here. Of course, it might just be that socializing online is attractive to certain types of people. But I bet a large smapling of MySpace would show a very different personality type distribution. ____Not the real rusty Indeed! (en tea) ____Not the real rusty This question... ...probably has very different answers depending on how much people enjoy their jobs. If you hate your job, maybe you'd take a significant pay cut just down to basic living expenses to be rid of it. I like my job, and I'd probably do some of it whether anyone was paying me or not (I mean, I started that way, so it's a pretty sure thing). So for me, I'd have to get a decent raise in exchange for not being allowed to do my job anymore. An interesting thought for people who don't like their jobs, and would jump at a pay cut to be free of it: Why not find a new line of work, and take that pay cut to do something you like doing? ____Not the real rusty You're in the wrong line of work Work is what people do -- I mean, if there were no jobs, we'd all still work. We just wouldn't have any choice about what we did. We'd all be subsistence farmers. Given that you can do anything that someone will pay you for and be able to eat, why do something you don't look forward to doing? ____Not the real rusty It was a busy day for FNH mail Wait till you see the other ones. You might not be so optimistic. ____Not the real rusty Stand by for HI-REZ PROOF and no stfu. ____Not the real rusty Comments Where's the html version? It's too long. Two pages is pushing it. Three pages is too much. Your goal should be one page -- if you can't fit your Nobel Prize on the first page, then it's ok to go longer. But otherwise, really consider cutting stuff. Stuff I see that's cuttable, at first glance -- points 1, 4, 5 and 6 in your "Highlights" section. Reorder that to lead off with languages and platforms, mention your Sun cert in the languages list instead of by itself, and drop the Secret clearance unless it's actually relevant to the particular job you're applying for. In the individual jobs sections, focus more on specific skills that an employer is looking for, rather than details of the job itself. Fewer specific product and project names, unless they're things the employer you're applying to will have heard of. Otherwise they're just unnecessary details. ____Not the real rusty I meant to write more... ...but some actual work got in the way. I was also going to say lose or greatly consolidate your personal projects stuff, unless one of them has a very strong bearing on the particular job you're applying for. And just in general, you should probably tailor your resmue a little bit every time you send it out. Check out what the employer wants, and reorganize or rephrase to make sure that the relevant skills and experience that you have will jump out at them. There's usually some little thing you did that will mean something to one employer in particular but no one else -- look for that kind of thing each time you apply. This three-pager is actually a good one to start with, because you've got everything in it. Now when you go to apply for something, try to edit it down to 1-1.5 pages that highlight the most immediately relevant stuff for that job. ____Not the real rusty Richard Cheese I actually like Richard Cheese's stuff on it's own merits. I found it via novelty value, but damn, it's catchy. ____Not the real rusty Not the purpose The greeting doesn't have to be cheerful, it's there to indicate "Now your transaction has begun, and if there's anything you need to tell me (the checkout person) or ask me, you have my attention." I don't care if they're friendly or cheerful, I just care that it's clear that I'm the current customer. A neutral "Hello, would you like paper or plastic?" does the job just fine. ____Not the real rusty I haven't seen that When the need strikes in public, I'm usually thrilled if there's a grocery store nearby, since they usually have the cleanest public bathrooms and don't care if you buy anything or not. I'd also like to add that while it's not a rule, you will get out of there quicker if you put your groceries on the belt in an order that makes it easy for the bagger to put heavy stuff on the bottom. So start with the cans and potatoes and leave the bread and eggs for last. It really does help. ____Not the real rusty Die Hard 3 lol what ____Not the real rusty It's a page turner alright I was incredibly keen for it to be over. Sometimes I turned several pages at once just to bring that glorious moment closer. ____Not the real rusty How come no one ever sends me messages? I think that must be a bug. Fix it now, open source hippie slave. ____Not the real rusty Actually Aph's not far off. Rusty Foster Peaks Island, ME 04108 should work just fine. I know it's unorthodox, but mail that's been sent to me at my address-before-last (where I haven't lived since Jan 2002) still reaches me here. I'm, probably understandably, reluctant to give out my whole home address and I don't have a PO box or anything like that. But really, the worst that could happen with the above is they'll send it back to you. And I really think they will get it to me. ____Not the real rusty You don't need to see our identification... ____Not the real rusty DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME? ____Not the real rusty Egil I'm reading The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley at the moment, and Egil Skallagrimson features in some of the tales the characters tell. So I always get a little chuckle when he's mentioned. Just thought I'd let you know. ____Not the real rusty No indeed Egil is apparently a famous Norse pioneer, like Erik the Red and Leif the Lucky. ____Not the real rusty It was I was collapsed in bed, however, and missed the whole thing. Apparenbtly the server froze up, and voxel restarted it, and someone else got apache to come back up. The last link in that chain is still unknown to me, so I don't know who to publically thank. ____Not the real rusty Dammit My Fleet account got absorbed too. I had switched from BoA when we moved back here, because they sucked. Then they went and bought my new bank. And they still suck. I do have to say though, they have one of the best online banking interfaces around. We switched briefly to a credit union, but their online banking was so useless, we had to switch back. ____Not the real rusty I don't think we archive the individual ratings Just the overall score at the time of archiving. I believe you can optionally archive ratings, but I didn't see any reason to. ____Not the real rusty What? I'll be 30 in a couple months, and I love Tool. In fact, at this point, 31 year olds are pretty much their core fanbase. They put out Undertow in 1993. Nineteen Ninety Fucking Three. Jesus, I feel old. ____Not the real rusty Well You just go back to listening to your Cream and your Deep Purple then, grandpa, and leave the "heavy lead" music to us youngsters. ____Not the real rusty You're on the Cape? Sounds like Mashpee to me. Possibly Bourne. Am I right? Now you've gotta tell me where this story takes place. I grew up in Plymouth and went to school at Falmouth Academy. When you drive around the Cape, you'll see a lot of signs that were made and/or installed partly by me. ____Not the real rusty D'oh I knew I'd run across someone from the Cape before, but no, I didn't remember it was you. I seemed doomed to repeat myself. And yeah, I saw the Globe article. ____Not the real rusty Expenses See, if an illegal is living in the US, they presumably have to pay the same amount as a citizen in terms of rent, food, gas, entertainment etc. No car, eat cheap, live in a cardboard box or someone's bathtub, and "entertainment?" No comprende. ____Not the real rusty Not only working for pitiful wages... ...but in fact sending most of those pitiful wages back to family at home. It's my understanding that mostly they work insane amounts of overtime (like basically as many hours a day as they can stay on their feet) and spend as close to nothing as will keep them working. It seems crazy to American eyes, but the goal is usually to treat the family in Mexico as a savings bank, since a few dollars sent from here can go a very long way there. So while they're killing themselves for a buck up here, the family at home is building a livelihood and prospering, and eventually the master of the house will return and take his place in the now well-off family. I don't know how often this works out, and there are a few other common patterns that don't fit this mold (like the single mother who comes north to work because she can't feed her kids at home). But that's at least one fairly common situation. ____Not the real rusty Survey flaw Your rating scale does not go low enough. ____Not the real rusty House of Leaves == Teh AWESOME And Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was half great and half crap. But isn't that one mostly nonfistion? ____Not the real rusty Nonfistion? Surely that, but also nonfiction. I have spent several hours chipping mortar off bricks. My typing fingers are numb. ____Not the real rusty Check out his short stories King's novels are often movie-of-the-weekish. But his short stories are mostly, IMO, awesome. Skeleton Crew and Night Shift are both excellent collections. The story about the finger coming out of the sink drain still gives me the heebie jeebies at random intervals. ____Not the real rusty Meh It would be a mistake, I think, to categorize King too much as one thing or another. I am positive that some of his stories (and at least a couple books) demonstrate beyond any doubt that he can be a horror writer, and an amazingly good one. Many of his books are more about the people than the horror, per se, which is why you'd probably say that he's a "novelist." He's also a fantasy writer (although not a very good one) and has hit some sci-fi along the way. His later books were closer to literary fiction than anything else. My point is just that some of King's work surely stands among the very best of the horror genre. ____Not the real rusty ha I think at this point, both of your theories are true. Whatever he scribbles down will be published by someone, because peple will buy anything with his name on it. And he's publically admitted to being so drunk the whole time he was writing The Tommyknockers that he re-read it later and it was totally unfamiliar (and, incidentally, pretty embarassing). The early stuff is a lot better, back when he had to actually edit and publication was not guaranteed. ____Not the real rusty Actually That one came directly to me, following the odd rule that fans of FNH somehow dig up my personal email, whereas flamers scroll to the bottom of the page and email help@. ____Not the real rusty It did I should have said "this one came..." above. I forwarded it to help@ to assist in the helpdesk's comment republishing efforts. ____Not the real rusty Or housemates I don't feel the cats own us, so much as they tolerate our living in their house. ____Not the real rusty Wal*Mart had a big sale on punctuationj Those exclamation points were proudly made in China. Stay tuned for another Wal*Mart shopper coming up soon. ____Not the real rusty Damn I got a dud. ____Not the real rusty Shanty towns? I read that Slate article, and I don't see where shanty towns comes up at all. What gives? ____Not the real rusty That explains it It's actually sort of an interesting idea. I'd say they should go further and establish a sort of Gibsonian Temporary Autonomous Zone, like the imaginary inhabited Bay Bridge in several of his books. Give the entire local government the boot, politely refuse any offered Federal assistance, and see what happens. I bet they'd get plenty of people moving to a place like that. ____Not the real rusty It can always get worse One day, and probably not too long from now, something else will come along that will make you think how myspace wasn't all that bad, really, by comparison. Depend on it. ____Not the real rusty Heh I shave about once a month, whether I need to or not. ____Not the real rusty Six since 2004-06-19 See here. I did the sql check. ____Not the real rusty You found them all The live db has comment ratings back to 2004-06-19, and the six zeros you found are the only ones there are. ____Not the real rusty And just for completeness' sake The total rating history: mysql> select r.* from commentratings as r, comments as c where r.uid = 443 and r.sid = c.sid and r.cid = c.cid and c.uid = 36071; +-----+--------+-----+----------------------+---------------------+ &pipe; uid &pipe; rating &pipe; cid &pipe; sid &pipe; rating_time &pipe; +-----+--------+-----+----------------------+---------------------+ &pipe; 443 &pipe; 3 &pipe; 2 &pipe; 2004/11/7/201946/780 &pipe; 2004-11-08 02:05:02 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 3 &pipe; 114 &pipe; 2004/9/12/17288/0278 &pipe; 2004-09-14 09:49:33 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 4 &pipe; 2005/2/27/145932/896 &pipe; 2005-02-28 08:18:03 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 6 &pipe; 2005/3/16/14351/7386 &pipe; 2005-03-16 17:15:02 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 4 &pipe; 2005/3/16/154511/854 &pipe; 2005-03-16 17:19:20 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 4 &pipe; 2005/3/16/1616/48320 &pipe; 2005-03-16 17:30:49 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 21 &pipe; 2005/3/17/85141/7682 &pipe; 2005-03-17 12:27:41 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 3 &pipe; 1 &pipe; 2005/5/12/01210/9397 &pipe; 2005-05-12 01:59:07 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 3 &pipe; 6 &pipe; 2005/5/12/01210/9397 &pipe; 2005-05-12 02:06:08 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 1 &pipe; 3 &pipe; 2005/5/5/33422/60642 &pipe; 2005-05-05 06:55:23 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 1 &pipe; 6 &pipe; 2005/5/5/33422/60642 &pipe; 2005-05-05 06:55:35 &pipe; &pipe; 443 &pipe; 0 &pipe; 19 &pipe; 2005/7/21/10282/4829 &pipe; 2005-07-21 16:27:41 &pipe; +-----+--------+-----+----------------------+---------------------+ 12 rows in set (0.02 sec) In summary, six zeros, two ones, and four threes. I don't think anyone would call that abuse. ____Not the real rusty No, you do not Take it from me. You do not have to give a shit. ____Not the real rusty Your concerns might be misplaced here "I'm going to shoot heroin! Is this needle ok?" is sort of on par with a lot other questions like, "I'm going shoot heroin! Do these pants make me look fat?" You might want to first consider really carefully just how badly you hate your life, and if it's really that bad, it would be a lot kinder to all your friends and family to end it quickly via e.g. a quick rinse with the ol' Shotgun mouthwash, rather than the long and hideously destructive route you appear to have chosen. ____Not the real rusty Sure I totally agree with you. And the educated person generally knows that the way to use heroin properly is not to. I mean, sure it might turn out fine, but any given round of Russian Roulette might turn out fine too. In both cases, when it doesn't turn out fine, it's a great big mess. But maybe I'm just a brainwashed bourgeoisie, right? Sure. Probably. ____Not the real rusty His sign said something like "Illegals go home." I don't think that qualifies. ____Not the real rusty I can second that I saw the help wanted ad to go over to Monument Square and beat counter-protesters, and I was all like "Damn, I'm'a apply for that!" But then I saw that they were only paying $2.50 an hour and no benefits and you have to sleep in a tarpaper shack down by the train tracks and shit in a bucket, and they'll withold your first seven weeks pay hoping you get busted and they don't have to pay you at all, so I was like "Forget it." So they gave it to a Mexican. ____Not the real rusty It's two a day And it's like the Pirate's Code. Really more of a guideline. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, it's the truth. The two-a-day thing is sort of a guideline for people who don't want to be annoying. And depending on mood, most of the admins will let more than that go, if they seem to have some excuse for having been posted. Five one-liners in a four hour period will get you booted pretty quick. So, that should sort of establish the clear boundaries, and everything inside that is a gray area, and subject to admin interpretation. ____Not the real rusty Small point On military triage vs. civilian medical triage -- generally the military version focuses on treating patients that have some reasonable chance of surviving first. The worst cases are often just basically left to die, on the theory that you could spend two hours trying to comfort someone with a sucking chest wound, but that guy's going to die no matter what you do. So you jack him full of morphine and move on. In a civilian medical setting, your description is right -- they focus on the worst cases first, because they come from a philosophical viewpoint that it's unacceptable for anyone to die under your care, however small your chance of success. Although I believe in really large disasters with a lot of badly injured or sick patients, a more military approach probably prevails anyway. ____Not the real rusty Dammit Now it's ruined. Great. Just don't go telling us what Snakes on a Plane is about. ____Not the real rusty Apple Invents Dual Boot! OMG It's So Insanely Great! I'm already hearing news stories about this, where some tech analyst tries to explain the concept of dual boot to a clueless host. Stand by for another wave of smug Apple fanboys believing that Apple has once again invented something totally innovative and original, and no one ever bothering to point out that we've been doing this for frigging decades. ____Not the real rusty The new breed The shrinking violets of journalism, who spend all their time collecting random bits of information and then spew them out along with whatever their personal political spin is (without, of course, trying to understand any of it) before going home for the day to curl up with their cats and a cup of tea will be put through the wood chipper like Steve Buscemi in Fargo repeatedly until they all either smarten up or fuck off to write their narcissistic books about what an intrepid journalist they were, before their readers got so hostile. The internet isn't going away, and the next generation of reporters won't have any problem being flamed online. I mean, for god's sake, this person was stupid enough to not think of looking up the correct spelling of Linux before publishing something under her own name for the entire world to read. Eight seconds with Google. I just did it, and with her spelling, it took 8 seconds to get the right spelling. One day, any random person will look at something like that and just laugh, like we all are doing now. ____Not the real rusty Classic That thread on the Enlightenment is absolutely precious. It's such a beautiful meshing of subject with form. For example: If I had to suggest some reading, it would be Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' (answer: thinking for yourself rather than having some authority tell you what to believe), by "Resigned". This in a thread where a self-appointed authority discovers that all these people don't have the slightest intention of listening to what she tells them to believe. This is the enlightenment with some teeth. And just when I thought the internet was worthless. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, ok Let me rephrase: "And just when I thought the internet posessed a value which could only accurately be denominated in wank-hours." Better? ____Not the real rusty They're illegal in a lot of places Lots of states don't allow you to use chains, never mind requiring them. Chains are terrible for the road surface. I can't remember seeing anything but the occasional bus or 18-wheeler using them in New England. ____Not the real rusty K5 challenge! Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to spread the word "brooming" throughout the internet as the new meme-du-jour. You should find and/or create noteworthy excuses to use the term in sites far and wide, until it seems like suddenly everyone's talking about "brooming" but no one has the faintest idea why. ____Not the real rusty I do not understand their flaming I can't seem to follow a conversation that's conducted entirely in animated .gif signatures. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not at all Properly controlled and managed, images can add a lot to stories. And, I guess less often, comments. Occasionally. Once in a rare while, I suppose. But image .sigs are, as I think even hulver has admitted, a totally loathsome idea. And while I was somewhat kidding, they really did drive me away from even attempting to read that flamewar. ____Not the real rusty I do better than that I browse with HuSi off. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah, just do it Where are the users going to go, after all? At worst, someone else will start a HuSi clone that does allow images in sigs, and lo, The Circle of Life will come round again. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah? Well dancing squirrel and South Park character to you too! ____Not the real rusty Lol No, you should definitely never, ever try doing either of those things. :-) ____Not the real rusty Do you have a sling? Haven't we already had this conversation? What is the matter with me lately? I've run completely out of new conversation, I think. ____Not the real rusty I've heard of that too I can't even imagine. The very notion is inconceivable (ha!). Without going into too much detail here, I will just say that that was not the case in our house. ____Not the real rusty This is true For example, just at this very moment I am feeling a dire natural imbalance of beer coming on. I should go remedy that. ____Not the real rusty Where's my 'walk downstairs' option? You can't label me, man. I am a beautiful and unique snowflake. ____Not the real rusty At least it's a Saturday And no, there's no official K5 April fools joke this year. Don't think I did anything last year either. But someday, I'll probably think of something that would be funny again, and then won't you all be surprised! :-) Or, conceivably, something really implausible will actually happen, and if so I'll make sure I wait until April first to announce it, just to confuse the crap out of everyone. ____Not the real rusty Um My wife and I both do all of those things. Some I do more often, some she does more often. So am I supposed to be actually trying to work out percentage for each task and then an overall average, or what? Or should I give up and just claim 50/50, even though it probably isn't? ____Not the real rusty ~470 mg./day I have two cups of coffee every morning, pretty much without fail. I just measured my cup, and it's about 14oz. So that puts me around 470mg. I'm surprised that I'm on the high end of the scale. I used to drink a lot more coffee. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It seems to be my plateau amount. I get up, have my two cups, and then go on with my day. By bedtime, it's worn off entirely. The "coffee after dinner" thing, though, utterly screws me. I finally learned to always say no, becaus that does keep me up, and just ruins my sleep pattern for sometimes weeks. I started drinking coffee as a sophomore in high school. I'd make a pot in the morning, dump it into a thermos, and then basically drink coffee until lunchtime. I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that didn't care if I had a Thermos of coffee with me in all my morning classes. I would guess my intake then was equivalent to five or six cups a day. I think I peaked when I was working in the furniture shop during college. There was a Dunkin Donuts like two blocks away, so over the course of a day I'd have maybe four or five large (32 oz.) iced coffees. Mmm. Iced coffee. So I've scaled back quite a bit. I do have some dire withdrawal headaches if I go more than about 48 hours without any caffeine. ____Not the real rusty Probably I seem to be relentlessly repeating conversations lately. For me it's no caffeine after about noon. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah She's walking, and talking constantly. We tried to count words a month or so ago, and we gave up at around 40. She's a little chatterbox. And still enormous. ____Not the real rusty Iced coffee ...mind you. Extra cream, extra sugar. Mmmmmmmm. ____Not the real rusty IAWTD lol Moussaoui didn't do wtc wtf roffle. ____Not the real rusty They should use the classic... ..."waa-waa-waa-waaaaaahhhh" horn sting, from cartoons and such. ____Not the real rusty Except... ...that Safari sucks. :-) Its main claim-to-fame appears to be IE6 bug-compliance. ____Not the real rusty I was supposed to make them all girls? Damn! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! ____Not the real rusty That's weird 1.16% overall is kind of high. There must be something skewing that. Don't know what though. The stats for the active ads are much more reliable, apparently. ____Not the real rusty The ultimate '-1, Not Goth Enough' $ ____Not the real rusty Average It's very slightly down from last month, so far, but will probably wind up better than January. Either way, it's well within normal monthly fluctuations. ____Not the real rusty P.J. O'Domenech? ____Not the real rusty Ah I got a bunch of "Story blah blah has been hidden" emails this morning. I was just trying to figure out wtf that was all about. Looks like janra explained it though. I wonder what they were doing? :-) ____Not the real rusty Didn't you read it man! He's not going to read source code in this effort to read source code. You'll have to come up with some other format, like maybe someone's released the db structure as a book-on-tape. Or made a movie of it, starring Gillian Anderson. ____Not the real rusty No My friend and occasional K5 poster rob found one in the woods near his dad's cranberry bog one day, a while back. Believe me when I say that no one was even remotely tempted to use it. ____Not the real rusty I read everything Author bio, copyright page, epigrams and dedications. If it's a hardback I almost always read the "About the Type" page. I've always thought I'm probably in the minority about that. The only exceptions is if there's an introduction by someone else, I usually read that after everything else. ____Not the real rusty YUO HAVE VIOLATED TEH TOS!! All your confidential and proprietory informations are belong to us! Your agreement of service is hereforth terminated immediately and with extreme Baldrson-style prejudice! Oh wait, I forgot, I'm not Google. :-) ____Not the real rusty Why stop there If you relax your criteria for who's a dupe sufficiently, all the votes are dupes! All I can say is your criteria are already so relaxed they make Zaphod Beeblebrox look like Ferris Bueller's best friend Cameron. You're jumping at shadows, my friend. ____Not the real rusty Also Can you explain why trenchcoatjedi would be a kitten dupe when he voted FP and kitten voted Dump? ____Not the real rusty Indeed Good catch. Tose dupes (and a few more) are gone, and kitten's on his last chance. ____Not the real rusty No, it wasn't Sorry, I should say that his criteria sucked too. :-) ____Not the real rusty The major flawed assumption I think the one really flawed assumption is that people who post either little or never are of necessity suspicious. There are, and have always been, a lot of people who vote on stories but hardly ever post. Story voting is a lower-threshold activity than posting. Last time I dug up counts from the database (and generally every time I've tried it) distinct accounts who have voted on at least one story in the last 30 days outnumber distinct accounts who have posted a comment in the last 30 days roughly 10 to 1. There are ways to track and make better guesses about possible duplicate voting, and we have been doing it, and by and large the results show what we expected, which is that there's very little of it, and it generally doesn't make any difference in whether stories post or not. It does happen, mind you, but on such a small scale that it washes out in the overall score. ____Not the real rusty Heh No offense meant, but that story was not your best work. I don't remember if I voted on it or not, but it didn't do very much for me. That's another reason why I wasn't so sure it suffered froma slew of anti-localroger dupes. We know you can write better than that. :-) ____Not the real rusty I fixed my roof A few weeks ago we had three or four days of very strong winds. We've had windstorms before, but this one came from due west, which is somewhat unusual. The front of my house faces west, and this wind got right up under the shingles at the gable end. It peeled two patches of shingles off my roof and flung them into the yard. Today I conquered, or I should probably say temporarily overcame, my fear of heights enough to fix it. I was actually kind of lucky, because the damage was in two discrete patches. One was low enough to reach from a ladder, and the other was just the right height to reach from a couple of cleats screwed down into the lower missing section. So I could put up my cleats, fix the upper section while braced on those, then remove the cleats and fix the lower section from the ladder. If the lower section hadn't come off, I'd have had to make one anyway, cause no damn way I was about to try to fix this without something to put my feet on. Still and all, roofing has got to be among my least favorite house-fixing activities. I am simply afraid of heights. I actually enjoy rock climbing in part because of that fact -- the fear adds a degree of excitement, which is manageable and sort of tamed by my trusting the equipment. But roofing is like rock climbing without a rope. There's very little protection, and at the same time, I'm supposed to be actually doing something, so I can't give all of my attention to making sure I stay on the roof. The first time I tried to attack the upper section, I climbed to the top of the ladder and then paused. Big mistake. Like pausing to look down when rappelling, if you stop in your forward progress, you might as well go back and start over. I stood there at the top of the ladder for at least fifteen minutes, just looking up and trying to make myself take another step. I eventually came back down and then went and put up another cleat, slightly lower than the first one, and easier to reach from the top of the ladder. Then I brought the screw gun down and went back up, and this time didn't pause. I just kept climbing over the top of the ladder, up to the first cleat, then to the second one. And as usual, that was the hardest part. Once you've gotten up there once, there's really no way to not just do the job. I mean, it's plausible to decide "that's just too scary" if you haven't done it. But if you have done it once, how much of a failure would you feel like to then decide it's too scary? The reason I didn't decide that I shouldn't do it because it actually was too dangerous was what, specifically, I was afraid of. I was apprehensive about the prospect that I could fall off the roof and break my neck, and either die or wind up paralyzed or the new posessor of lifelong back problems. Those are reasonable fears, and I took all reasonable steps to prevent that sort of thing. But that's not what I was really afraid of. Falling happens fast. When I was a kid, I locked the front brakes on my bike once, going very fast, and flipped over the handlebars. What struck me was that flipping over was not actually scary. It just happened too fast. Afterward, it was terrifying. When I found myself lyng on the street, scraped but basically uninjured, I was suddenly so scared I couldn't even stand up. But the event itself happened with an eerie sort of calm. Today, when I really thought about it, what I was scared of was the moment when my foot slips. The instant that I am no longer connected to the roof. Not the falling that inevitably would follow that, but that instant between falling and not falling. That's what had me standing up there on the top of the ladder for fifteen minutes, unable to go any further. I decided that was not actually a reasonable fear. And deciding that, somehow, made it okay to ignore it and get on with the job. What's sad is that I understand why the shingles came off now, and I have no faith at all that my patch job isn't just as susceptible to the same thing happening again. There's nothing solid to nail into at the edge of the roof. It feels like just some sheathing boards cantilevered off the edge of the roof and covered with aluminum flashing. Every nail I put in at the edge just popped through and sat there. So there's no reason the next west wind won't pull my shingles off as well. But fixing that is a whole different matter, and not a project I could take on today. At least now I know it's a problem. In other news, one of the cats has a festering head wound, for which the vet gave me ointment and antibiotics. Ah, country living. Also: When I was done, I had a beer. ____Not the real rusty And I would have done it to keep the roof from leaking on my GAY DAUGHTER. ____Not the real rusty If I had all kinds of cash I probably still wouldn't pay somebody to fix my roof. Actually, having to not worry about money would free me to just do manual labor and enjoy it. The only reason I'm not a carpenter professionally is that I can (in theory) make a lot more money doing this computer nonsense. Maybe someday I actually will... ____Not the real rusty Yes I'm sorry to puncture your lovely fantasy, but my only "yacht" is an 18 foot plastic keyek. ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't work For three reasons: I don't have a rope It was pretty far from the chimney. I think I would have had to have enough slack out that it would be a very long fall, if not all the way down. And most importantly, I don't trust my chimney one damn bit. :-) Amusingly, you continue the perfect record of people I've told about this project who have recommended that. Honestly, has anyone ever done that? And yet it's everyone's first idea. Everyone's second idea is to sling a rope over the top of the roof and anchor it to a tree on the other side. Which probably would have worked, except for drawback number one. ____Not the real rusty Wile E Coyote indeed That's exactly the movie that was playing in my head. I've taken a good look at the mortar up in the attic just below the roof, and I can easily scrape it off with a fingernail. Some bricks appear to be separated with a layer of coarse sand, rather than actually mortared together. I have no reason to believe this isn't the case above the roof surface as well. Tell you the truth, I'm just waiting for the day it comes down on its own. ____Not the real rusty The butterflies visited today Clouds of them, man. Clouds of butterflies. Have you ever seen a great big cloud of butterflies, man, fluttering in the dappled sunlight? I know you have, man. I know you have. ____Not the real rusty It IS funny! Now that I think about it. ____Not the real rusty Shutters? Shutters come off! Get a ladder, pop up there with a screwdriver, and take the damn things off. Then paint them on the ground, and put them back up. Or take them down, throw them away, and buy some vinyl shutters. It's not like anyone can really tell from the ground. ____Not the real rusty No can do First, shingles dont really bend sharply. They just break. Second, they'd be wrapped around the front of the house, which would look bad. And finally, there isn't really an underside to the roof there. It's all trim. What should be done is the eaves need to have more blocking under them to get the shingles nailed down to properly. The whole thing just needs to be redone, but it's not actually crumbling yet, so it remains kind of low on the list. ____Not the real rusty Could be I have in mind regular asphalt 3-tabs. Those don't really like to bend that much. ____Not the real rusty With turf covering! Then you could just mow your roof. On the other hand, wouldn't an underground house in NOLA have to basically be a buried submarine? ____Not the real rusty Huuuugh Better you than me. ____Not the real rusty With no judgement intended... ...on the attractiveness or utility of this WP "feature", I do have to say that 138k doesn't strike me as an amount of data to get really heated up over. Like in an OMG WTF 138Kb!!!! kind of way. But hasn't Wordpress had spam issues before? Ah yes. ____Not the real rusty There should be a way to turn it off I agree absolutely with that. Defaults are one thing, but the code shouldn't enforce anything it doesn't really have to. ____Not the real rusty I think you're wrong The numbers for that story wouldn't have put it on the front page. You sure you weren't looking at All Stories? ____Not the real rusty That's pretty much it Both were really close to the line. His was just barely over and yours was just barely under. Aphrael's posts below pretty much explain why I don't really want to be any more specific than that. Posting specific numbers does two things -- one, it inevitably would lead to someone dragging them up after I've changed them again and saying "You said the numbers were A and now this story got A and didn't post" and I'd have to either say "Fuck off" or explain them all again. And two, it gives people that much more incentive for duplicate voting and/or posting if they know a story's very close. Plus, it's like a fun puzzle. If someone really cared, they could recreate all the conditions and work out at least some bounds for what our autopost rules are. And if no one cares that much, why should care? :-) ____Not the real rusty It's a card game and usually a total disaster. ____Not the real rusty Hmm Even with 14m of sea level rise, I still won't quite have waterfront property. Quite a bit closer though. And Portland and Cape Elizabeth would both be islands. That's pretty cool. ____Not the real rusty Are you sure about +7? I recall doing a little Googling about this a while ago, because I was curious what was meant when people talked about "projected sea level rise." And I seem to remember that the most direly pessimistic projections were still under a meter in the next hundred years, with most projections well under that. And of course, all this sea level rise stuff is going to look pretty silly when the thermohaline cycle shuts down and most of the Atlantic freezes solid. I'm ready for the land bridge to Greenland! ____Not the real rusty Enforcement Enforcement here is pretty strict, for the most part. Depends on where you are, but if you're doing more than 10mph over, you're always at risk of getting caught. 150% of the speed limit is just asking for it. ____Not the real rusty We all know about comment search? Are you sure? :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm surprised I fixed (or, really, re-enabled) it shortly after we moved to the newest servers. And word has gotten out. I'm surprised so many people still haven't noticed. ____Not the real rusty I would ditch the fx The slides and fades look cool when you first see them, but just like they do on OS interfaces, they rapidly get annoying. I would probably drop that stuff, or at the very least let people set an option to skip it. The functionality is great though. Also, I've had something very much like this in mind for a while, and I've done some preliminary work on how to do it. So regardless of what Kos does with his code, we'll probably have something along these lines in not too long. I'm not all that sure how much less work it would even be to start with Kos's code. The JS looks pretty specific to me. ____Not the real rusty Also Ctrl-click (or alt-click) on an expand arrow expands the whole thread. And don't underestimate the value of the inline comment box. I bet you would use it. I certainly would. And of course the things maynard mentions below. I can't say I'm overwhelmed by the rating changes, though. I guess if they get the job done... ____Not the real rusty Changes to booman? I don't see the ajax stuff on booman tribune. Where did you get that? ____Not the real rusty Don't think so The recommended diaries has been bouncing around the scooposphere in several versions for years. Captain Tenille does most of the dKos scoop hacking,a nd all of the stuff he's done up to this ajax stuff has been given away to anyone who asked for it. Some of it's gotten back into Scoop, and some hasn't, mainly because some of the stuff is not very general or very useful. The fate of the ajax work though is as yet unknown. ____Not the real rusty er... So what's your "weight" in kg at 1/3G? ____Not the real rusty Even better Hand out sealed CDs and tell people there are drugs in them. Much lower startup cost. ____Not the real rusty You should just pay the fees After all, it's such a small investment for such a huge reward. It's just good financial sense. ____Not the real rusty Well, it's a different situation If you were asking him for ten bucks, I'm sure he'd only want a $1.75 currency cleaning fee, a $4.50 cutoms release fee, an $8.86 handling fee, and amybe thirteen or fourteen bucks shipping, and you'd be done. But for a large sum, the transaction is necessarily more complicated. Don't let that dissuade you though, my friend. When you're sipping Cristal poolside, you'll think back about today's worries and they'll seem so petty and small. Just keep your eyes on the prize. And yes, I am originally from Kenya. My family emigrated to the US when I was eleven, and I worked long hours in a textile mill while I was teaching myself to program at night. I'm touched that you remembered. ____Not the real rusty IAWTP The Montreal Metro is very nice. DC is the only other one I've been on that's about as pleasant, and not as much because the DC Metro doesn't have enough stops. ____Not the real rusty I've got some time to kill Ellie's in bed, my wife's out at a meeting, I don't have any work that can't wait till tomorrow. And I am enjoying this whole being able to see thing. ____Not the real rusty Should probably be qualified I happen to be reading a book about Paul Farmer, a doctor who did a lot of work in Haiti and worked on multi-drug-resistant TB and stuff. And almost everyone in Haiti is incredibly poor, but not because they're all stupid. So I'd amend that to something like "Poor people in generally rich countries are probably poor because they're stupid." I would guess his maxim applies to the US, but doubt it's true for all poor people everywhere. ____Not the real rusty It's a tough thing to face We don't like to think that some people are pretty much born better equipped for life than others. And there's also an awful lot to be said for circumstance. There are plenty of non-poor people who are just as stupid, if not more so. It's just much easier not to become poor than to stop being poor. So maybe a further amendment to something like "Most poor people in generally rich countries are still poor because they started off that way and were too stupid to help themselves." The other mistake that this kind of thinking can cause is to assume that someone is stupid because they are poor. So, ultimately, the whole stupid==poor thing might be largely true, or at least widely enough true to be reasonably defensible, but it isn't particularly useful. That's the main problem I would have with it. ____Not the real rusty The inescapable conclusion, though... ...if you accept the premise that poverty is fundamentally a bad idea for a society because poverty tends to breed disease and disorder which can easily become harmful to the rest of a society, is that the chronically poor should essentially just be maintained by the state in a condition of basic comfort. If you truly do believe that there is some portion of the population that will always be poor no matter how much you try to help them, I don't see how you avoid concluding that that would be the best social program solution. The american idea of welfare has always failed basically because it is aimed at rehabilitation, even for those who are fundamentally un-rehabilitable. This is the same problem we have with the War on Some Drugs as well, incidentally. The two problems could both be treated pretty effectively by simply providing help for those who want it to get off drugs or get a job, and providing maintenance for those who don't or can't. But I bet you're not going to want to see it that way. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's all so... crisp! I am now a complete nerd. I have glasses. Over the past year or so, I've been getting tired eyes toward the end of the day, and some double vision. One night my wife caught me reading with one eye closed, and pointed out that no, that's not how everyone reads in the evening. And stuff like medicine bottle instructions was getting pretty much impossible. So I finally went and got the "umpire special," and I am slightly farsighted -- which I always claimed, but no one believed me. I also claim to be Wise and Just, but the oculist couldn't give me a verdict on that. I also have some astigmatism, which was where the double vision came from. And now I have glasses. They're for reading and computer work. I don't need them for distance vision. And I'm astounded by how crisp all this monitor text is. I thought my IM buddy list was just fuzzy for some reason. Turns out I was fuzzy, and it was fine. And terminal windows! I can read them again! Astounding. And the best part is, I can now put them on when I have to read something, and affect an air of thoughtful intellectualism. I'm looking forward to that very much. So please, post some nice crisp comments below, and I will read them with ease and pleasure. Oh also, update on the whole TV experiment: we ended up dropping the cable. Not watching it pretty conclusively proved it wasn't worth the money. We upped our netflix subscription one notch instead, and are currently enjoying the first season of Deadwood on DVD. Considering there are a small number of shows we're interested in seeing, and we don't really care about waiting for them, and all the good shows come out on DVD anyway, it just makes sense. And no commercials to TiVO through. Yes, we've finally gotten so lazy that hitting 30-second-skip on TiVO seems like a chore. Not nearly bad enough I mean, I wasn't entirely convinced I even needed them at all. So really any risk whatsoever is not worth the risk, and there has to be some risk with surgery. These are about as mild as you can get. The left lens is as strong as grocery-store reading glasses, and the right less than that. The only tricky bit is the astigmatism correction. I'm just surprised I can see the difference on a screen. It doesn't seem to be much different reading from a book. ____Not the real rusty It does say zero production values [nt] ____Not the real rusty Is a good book yes. ____Not the real rusty Nah I couldn't pull of the horn-rims. I'm no Cory Doctorow. I just meant the traditional "Ump needs his eyes examined!" heckle. Wasn't sure if anyone but me was going to get that. ____Not the real rusty Did you have to change your panties immediately? ____Not the real rusty Ooh la la And, yup, I think we can declare this conversation over now. ____Not the real rusty I'm hottt with three ts. The glasses make it four. ____Not the real rusty plz post hirez soup thx ____Not the real rusty 30 this year I lasted just about the longest of anyone in my family without glasses. I was doomed from the get go. I think my Mom got hers around this age too. And I dig the glasses. I can see contacts being a great thing if you need them all the time, and always have. But I like the old fashioned thing here. I can put them on and stroke my chin and go "hmmmm." ____Not the real rusty I still get carded at bars I'm not that worried about getting old. People are shocked to find out how old I am. I still look about 19. ____Not the real rusty Hee hee No bald spot either. :-) ____Not the real rusty Huh? What prevents you from wearing glasses? ____Not the real rusty Don't forget The Fallacy of the Know-it-all High School Student. ____Not the real rusty It's too bad... ...you wreen't there to nominate MT Sen Max Baucus. Cause then your headline here could have been "Raucous Caucus Locks on Baucus" ____Not the real rusty Yes, more or less I won't promise when, and I won't promise not to change anything about it, but yes. That's what I'm looking for. One big thing to watch out for, that tends to be the biggest pitfall for older scoop site conversions -- your version has to work even when P tags are not closed. It didn't used to be required, but now it is and a lot of native CSS designs get weird font problems when they hit unclosed paragraphs. In general, the more defensive the markup is the better. It's likely to need to handle all kinds of crap html in comments. ____Not the real rusty It's fixed now I did fix it so that autoformat closes p tags. But we still have a large historical backlog of posts that don't have closed P tags, so any new K5 design has to account for that. This whole thing, I would argue, is not our fault at all in any case. When autoformat was written, closing P tags weren't required. It was a hell of a lot easier not to forcibly close them then, since most people used P to mean "insert a linebreak here" rather than "this is a paragraph." The former is implied by not requiring a closing /P, while the latter is implied by the more semantically correct current spec. So to summarize, I hate standards bodies because they produce stupid shit like a change in the requirements for what might be the single most basic and fundamental html tag. Dumbness from top to bottom. ____Not the real rusty Um Six years worth? Practically every piece of content we have has unclosed P's in it. And the fix would most likely have to involve actually parsing the html and rewriting each and every one. Not to even mention random stuff like ASCII art comments and places where the html is legitimately broken apart from that issue. Even if I had a real strong motivation to fix them, I'd still try like hell to find a way around that mess. Fortunately, the way around it is just to make sure the CSS won't break if there are unclosed P tags, which is fairly simple. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mine either But sometimes we just don't have the luxury of starting from scratch or having done it right the first time around. Lessons learned and all that. ____Not the real rusty I believe I made a patch Check SBM. If it's not there, te me know and I will make a patch. It's a really simple fix. --R ____Not the real rusty Heh I knew exactly what was going to happen, and it still worked. ____Not the real rusty I blueboxed your BBS through my 96 baud audiocouple. ____Not the real rusty With k-rad neon green elbow pads. ____Not the real rusty Yuppie costume It'll all be much more fun if you think of it as your Yuppie costume and really get into the role. Approach it like Method acting. See just how much of a yuppie you can actually be, and experience what they must be feeling all the time, for real. ____Not the real rusty Congratulations With all the hate and bitterness we've spread, you just cut our overall goodwill deficit by just that much more. If another couple thousand of you hook up, we'll be totally out of the hole. Get working on it. ____Not the real rusty He's graduating! I'm so proud. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not college students K5 students. One day, each of us will graduate and carry what we've learned here out into the world. Of course, lots of us will come back as faculty, and we'll all show up for homecoming now and then. ____Not the real rusty Every day that someone posts an "I'm leaving" diary, that's graduation day. ____Not the real rusty Request Do New England next. I wanna see how much longer my house will be here. ____Not the real rusty Hm The main argument in that movie appears to be "China has a lot of people, and America doesn't." While I have heard many an argument for China's impending global superiority, and find quite a few of them very plausible, that particular one is really kind of stupid. China's had a bigger population than the US for thousands of years. This is not a new condition. If that was going to be our economic ruin, they've certainly been taking their time about it. So, find premise, but dumbass way of arguing it. ____Not the real rusty Got to that later I posted afte watching the first half. The second half does get into some more convincing points. One amusing thing was that when it said "your wallet is made in China," I checked and indeed, they were right. ____Not the real rusty Me I run, and do several "adventure sport" type things. Some people may consider them sports, some may not. Kayaking, hiking, climbing, that sort of thing. I played lacrosse for seven years, in middle and high school. I wish I still played lacrosse. I watch tennis on TV, and we have gone to early-round days at the US Open. I used to watch the Bruins religiously (Boston, not college) but haven't in many a year. I have to say, I totally don't care about the Olympics this year. ____Not the real rusty That proof is lo-rez hi-rez proof or sftu plz. ____Not the real rusty And... ...WalMart's Law says most people just want cheap. Like probably many of you, I'm "the computer guy" for most of my friends and family. I can't remember the last time someone asked me for a really easy-to-use and well-designed machine with a full suite of applications and advanced media capabilities. It's never happened. What they ask is "where can I get a decent laptop for looking at websites and checking email, for cheap?" I tell them to buy a three year old Dell on eBay for $300, and they go away happy. ____Not the real rusty This leads us to a decent rule of thumb, actually If you want something built, and would prefer it not fall down within the next year or so, ask your potential builders whether they live in a house with indoor plumbing. FWIW, I've worked construction, and never heard of even an unskilled laborer who was so poorly paid they had to live in a refrigerator box and shit in a hole. I guess it's just an indication of the sort of people who tolerate Baldrson's company. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's the migrant ag workers Like the fruit and vegetable pickers that generally make their living by moving in parge crew to wherever there's a ripe crop. Not the housekeepers, nannies, and band-camp janitors that you are probably acquainted with. ____Not the real rusty IE compliance The main problem with IE and xhtml/css, in my experience, is that the standard itself failed to provide guidance on one tiny but crucial issue, and MS made the wrong choice. It's the box model thing. The spec doesn't say whether borders should be inside a block element's total width, or outside. So, if I make a div 100px wide with a 4px border, is the total width of that div+border 100px or 108px? The spec doesn't say. Mozilla chose to make it 100px, and Microsoft chose to make it 108px. The Mozilla choice turns out to make enormously more sense in all kinds of situations. Like pretty much every situation. And the Microsoft choice tends to make certain reasonable-sounding operations impossible, like making a block 100% wide without forcing side scrolling or float drops. The other thing is that IE seems to take a "pi = 3" approach to math. It often comes up with some really weird results in CSS math, which are probably attributable to some combination of trying to deal with their own broken box model without totally ruling out some of the simpler things people want to do, and maintaining bug-compliance with older versions. So, to sum up: do not bemoan the IE team's lack of standards compliance. Bemoan instead their complete drooling idiocy. ____Not the real rusty Not really excuses... The way I see it, it's worse to be trying to follow the spec and make such an idiotic choice, then to just scrap the spec and do it your own way for some reason. Like, if you blow off the standard, at least you can say you were doing it because of something. They have no excuse -- they just chose wrong out of (apparently) blind stupidity. As for all the bugs, well, those are just bugs. Everyone has bugs. IE's are just more plentiful and easily tripped over. I hope I don't give the impression that I'm excusing them. That would be the last thing I'd want. I just want everyone to excoriate them accurately. ____Not the real rusty true enough It's a shit product that displays (IMO) an air of neglect. It gives the impression of being a program that doesn't have enough resources put into its development and that's pushed to provide more features rather than fixing bugs. And I have found 100% universal agreement among web developers of all kinds that dealing with IE is by far the shittiest part of any given web job. Firefox probably gets more free publicity just from web developers convincing clients to switch than any other single thing. ____Not the real rusty Hm Set in a city of the future, the [banned] game features a world where freedom of expression is suppressed by a tyrannical city government. Has the Australian government not discovered irony yet? ____Not the real rusty You nailed it That's pretty much why. Not that I disagree with skyknight's descriptions of the drawbacks, but that's always the choice you have to make. ____Not the real rusty A little less than that With interest rates so low, mine comes out to something like $775 per $100,000. We were lucky though, and found a place that was very cheap for this location (i.e. both run-down and not really on the public market). It would have been tough or probably impossible for us to buy here if we had to pay market price, even for a house that needs a ton of work. What's making the price/wage disparity possible is a combination of two things -- low primary mortgage rates for the first 80% combined with adjustable interest-only HELOCs covering the last 20%. That's pretty much our deal, but we weren't financing an outrageous price to begin with, so it doesn't worry me too much. There are going to be a lot of defaults in the craziest regions in the not so distant future. ____Not the real rusty Pedant It's pretty easy to define a sine wave that remains above the x axis. ____Not the real rusty I didn't say that it was necessary to... ...just that it's easy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Try bouncing If you have one of those great big inflatable exercise balls... wait, let me start over. If you don't have one of those great big inflatable exercise balls, get one. Ok, now that you have one, have her sit and bounce on it from time to time. That's what finally popped my wife. And on my suggestion too. I was so proud. :-) ____Not the real rusty Depends on if you're three :-) We find that it's a godsend for the three-to-five crowd as well. A ball as tall as they are is just about the coolest thing ever. ____Not the real rusty Hm The ball's really the only one we have. And actually, she had it for Pilates, but it turned out to be really useful for pregnancy and infanthood. One of the few really surefire ways of calming a fussy Ellie in the first three or four months was to put her in her sling and bounce on the ball for a while. We found that the ball and the sling were the two must-have parenting tools. I'm sure you've gotten all this from your sister already, but as someone who never believed most of the natural childbirth crap, I do think they were right about those two things. ____Not the real rusty If Aroused, Wank Twice Please. ____Not the real rusty Ineffable? He's probably been effed repeatedly, if you ask me. ____Not the real rusty LilDebbie effed me liberally roffle. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't know Which ones in particular were you thinking of? It's seemed like there have been more than usual lately, but I didn't have the feeling it was a huge influx. Maybe we got some press somewhere that I'm not aware of. ____Not the real rusty Yeah... That's not a good idea. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not so much that... ...as just I think that's much too high a bar. I mean, I don't even have a webcam myself anymore, so that standard for new users would exclude me. And also, who on earth would want to watch those things? Not me, that's for damn sure. I think that's too extreme a solution to what relatively manageable problem there is. ____Not the real rusty Because it's annoying It was briefly funny. And then you kept on and on, like the guy at the party who keeps busting in with his own private joke, long after everyone's gotten it and had their laugh and moved on. And keeps on doing it. And keeps on doing it. And keeps on doing it. And keeps on doing it. And keeps on doing it. So we used the warning thingy and said "hey, quit it." And you didn't, so we booted that account. And now there's no reason to keep any of it, because we all know it's you and no one really needs any more mittens comments in their life. So I hope that will serve as an explanation for the times in the past, and the times in the future when we'll do the same. And for the time that will no doubt come when we get tired of deleting it and go after your real accounts, like this one. I certainly hope you feel personally catered to and graced with an explanation that a ten year old would have no need of whatsoever, and will henceforth knock it off. ____Not the real rusty Yep Around 20 a day is about right. I actually think it's more like 20 or 25% dupes, joke accounts, etc. ____Not the real rusty You know what's even better? We pay more per capita for the small parts of our health care system that are public, like Medicare and Medicaid, than the British pay for their whole nationalized halth care system, and get less for it. Ironically, socialized medicine in the US would save us a bundle. ____Not the real rusty Give it to the Dutch They have numerous young boys who will be happy to stand all day with their fingers in the dykes. ____Not the real rusty lol what Who could pass up an opportunity like that? ____Not the real rusty It's technically known as the Principle of Troll/Biter Duality. ____Not the real rusty Difference weedaddict's comment was insensitive, Stick's was malicious. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but It was still insensitive. Trust me on this. ____Not the real rusty No, probably not Just more immediately personal. It's less offensive to people when you're insensitive about someone who isn't actually right there. ____Not the real rusty Jane, honey My button-pushing finger is sore. ____Not the real rusty Did it himself I nuked the jokers, but he pulled his own stuff himself. And even left with a huffy abuse report too. It was precious. :-) I have deleted my posts, and I won't be coming back. I've also recommended to blogads.com that this site be removed from their media group. It is obviously over-run by spammers and imbeciles. I have never been so disgusted. ____Not the real rusty Jesus And now more queue spam. What the hell? Is it a full moon or what? ____Not the real rusty Weird We're constantly striving, which stops us being happy. What a totally bizarre thing to say. What does he think happiness is? This whole article was such a blend of the obvious and the stupid that I couldn't figure it out. But that sentence pretty much clicked the light on. Striving is what makes us happy. People who strive solely for money tend to be less happy, because most of them quickly discover that "it's easy to make money, if all you want to do is make money." People who get a lot of money with little effort (i.e. marry someone rich for their money) tend to be miserable because they're bored out of their minds. People who make a lot of money but don't have anything they're passionate about likewise. It's nonsense like "you'd all be happier if you just took more vacation" that gets us nowhere. No more nonsensical that believing that making money in order to buy things will make you happy, but no less so either. If you really want to be happy -- not all the time, but more than you probably are now -- decide to do something that everyone you tell thinks is either impossible or at least very unlikely, and then do it. ____Not the real rusty Indeed The pleasure == happiness thing struck me too. Those "what makes you happy" answers? Those weren't what makes you happy. Those were what give you some measure of momentary pleasure or contentment. And be as lazy as you want (god knows I am) I still can't escape the conclusion that what truly makes me happy in life is striving. I mean, no one's lazy about everything. Everyone has something they'd do if there was no other demand on them. Even if it would be "watch TV for a year and a half straight"... eventually, given enough free time to fill, everyone does something. ____Not the real rusty Depends on how you look at it I think the illusion of what striving will yield is what we think will make us happy. That is, we strive because we think we're striving toward some ultimate goal, and the achievement or attainment of that goal will make us happy. I think goals are just things we make up to justify and channel our striving. So maybe I'm running, and I say "tonight I'll be under 9 minutes/mile." I don't then go out and run four miles because being under 9 minutes means anything to me; it's just a tool to push myself along. It's the effort that brings happiness, and the goals help focus the effort, and there you go. This seems to scale up pretty well, IME, from little petty daily goals all the way up to "on my deathbed" type goals. So basically, yeah, count me with the Hindus. Or did you maybe mean Buddhists? Sounds more Buddhist to me. ____Not the real rusty Clairvoyantly foretold economics The author begins with Edgar Cayce's amazingly accurate clairvoyant description of a "25 year Economic Depression Cycle" which will return in 2006 and 2007. Roffle. ____Not the real rusty Scoff scoff scoff I'm scoffing so hard my scoffer is gonna burst. But you are welcome to spend your money any way you see fit, even acording to the directions of the frauds who play on suckers that believe this nonsense. You, this Mandeville, and Arthur Conan Doyle can all have a good chuckle at my expense when you're proven right. :-) ____Not the real rusty The difference Editing wikipedia (by anyone) == using wikipedia that way it's explicitly designed to be used. To violate the first amendment, they'd have to pass a law stating that wikipedia could not include certain information. Which, of course, they already have, w/r/t like child porn and stuff, but I think that's defensible in terms of weighing freedom of speech vs. direct harm to others. But besides those cases, the 1st A. says very clearly, "Congress shall make no law...". ____Not the real rusty I don't agree I think that the conflict here is based not on the constitution at all, but on the design and operating principles of Wikipedia itself. And this is one of my big problems with wikipedia, because this mindset bleeds over into all kinds of other circumstances. See, the problem is Wikipedia is, by design and philosophy, open to any and all editors. That is in the code. It is the only true Law of wikipedia. But then on top of that are all kinds of community norms and principles and rules written and unwritten. None of these rules are enforced in the code, and they all concern, to a greater or lesser degree, "ways in which we'd like editing powers to be used." So, for example, you're not supposed to edit an article about yourself, and it will be criticized as bad form, even if you're correcting an error that someone else put there. There's nothing that will stop you from doing so, but you get all kinds of shit for it if you do. Likewise, you're saying that you don't want politicians to edit wikipedia. I think the first amendment argument is pretty thoroughly debunked by just the text of the constitution itself in this case. It's not a government issue until they start making laws about it. What you're really making is a statement about how you'd like some segment of people to act on wikipedia. I don't agree with your opinion, but I would say that if this is what you think, then Wikipedia is (from your POV) broken and needs fixing. If I open a computer system to the world to log in and do whatever they want, and then get upset when someone does that, who do I have to blame? The wiki concept is great, but it's an absolutist philosophy. Either you have an open wiki or you don't. I don't have much patience for people running an open wiki and then bitching when the inevitable results of that philosophy come to pass, which wikipedians seem to make nearly a full-time occupation of. ____Not the real rusty That's good news The lack of a "stable version" has been a big problem for wikipedia, as far as i'm concerned. Good to hear they're doing something about it. ____Not the real rusty Slimy things did crawl with legs [Editorial Note: Holy crap, this turned into a corker. For anyone who makes it all the way to the end of this rambling monstrosity, I salute you.] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I saw that tonight. After a brooding afternoon of iron gray clouds sidling downward until night came as a relief from their increasing menace, it finally started snowing, raining, and sleeting sometime after dinner. When the rest of the house was in bed, Sadie and I bundled up, she in her customary fur and I in various technical synthetics, and sloshed out for our walk. Half a mile through an inch of standing slush and we rounded the corner at Spar Cove where the last of the eastward cover disappears and the open Atlantic finally lurks up to (and frequently over) the road. You could hear the wind from the top of the hill leading down to that point, a steady thrash in the tops of the trees that doesn't sound like wind because its pitch never varies. It sounds like a train passing overhead, forever. The wind stays up in the trees until you round that corner, by the house we called the witch's house when I was little and it was a creaking broke-windowed Victorian wreck with that distinctive tower in the front. But it's just there, when the wind's coming in from the east, that it finally pounces. Eyes squint and hats are launched abruptly westward like Oklahoma Boomers on land-grab day. Sadie rotates to the east and sucks in spray-loaded wind, as if trying to determine the precise bearing to the Azores by smell. A quarter mile farther on we climb a short hill that also corners to the right, and on the left an expanse of rock (tonight, slush-coated) extends out into the ocean. At the road end of it is planted a green and white municipal bench, which is not much use tonight. Sadie stops and looks at me, as this is where our walk usually turns around. Tonight what grabs me is the view. Overhead, to the left and right, and behind me all is normal. Pearly-dark cloud cover, illuminated in slowly advancing degree the closer your eye wanders toward Portland, hidden to the west behind the looming bulk of the island but clearly implied by its light. But to the east, darkness is upon the face of the deep. Out there the water foams and surges just up to a blinking green marker buoy that sits maybe a mile offshore. Behind that is a wall of black, the goes from a sharp horizon line at the ocean's surface up to about 20 degrees from my standpoint, where it fades over the next five or ten degrees into the gray cloud cover. What is this blackness? Normally what's out there is lights on Long Island, and beyond that a few lights on Cliff. In the distance, off to the left, you can usually see a twinkle or two from the southern shore of Chebeague. Tonight, it's just a wall of black. Not the kind of black you normally get at night, all around, which is merely the overall absence of light. This blackness has boundaries, and edges. It has a presence. It seems to be not an absence of light, but a negation of it. Like it's absorbing light. I stood there in the wind and looked at it for a while, and I won't lie to you, it gave me the creeps. Maybe it was just fog, maybe it was a patch of snowfall. But whatever it was, it was creepy. Sadie and I turned our backs and came home. --------------- The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. Now there's nothing better than an uninhabited seashore for really industrial-grade spookiness when you catch it in the right mood. Middle of the night, thick fog, empty marshes and pounding waves just out there in the invisible distance, sometimes auditorially switching positions all of a sudden, so the ocean you thought was on your left suddenly sounds like it's on your right, and the blank wall of fog ahead of you starts to look like it's not just fog but the edge of the world, and you'll run right off it. I do my running at night, circumambulating the island, and there have been a number of times I wished I had decided to skip it that particular night. The fog is the worst. There's a stretch of backshore about a mile long with no houses at all, no streetlights, and along the inland side of the road is mostly salt marsh, with some old military gun emplacements in the woods beyond. In the fog, it goes on, and on, and on. There's nothing to see but the dark gray hemisphere constantly enclosing me and about 400 square feet of pavement sliding by underfoot. There's nothing to hear but the steady rattle of round cobble shifting up and down the beach with every wave, and my own breath whooshing in and out of my head. The brain, starved for other options, starts to conjure up things I'd rather not think about. The all-time worst, just to get it out of the way right up front, was the night I thought "What if I was just running along here, in the fog, in the middle of the night, and suddenly I ran past a clown, just standing there on the side of the road?" Jesus Christ, right now, sitting here in front of the computer in my warm and well-lit office, I'm totally covered in goosebumps at this thought. My skin feels like it's trying to crawl off of me and hide under a bed somewhere. Just think about it. It's 1:30 in the morning, completely black and dense fog. Whatever very faint light there is serves only to very vaguely distinguish the lighter black of the grass at the edge of the road from the darker black of the road itself. I'm keeping to what I think might be the middle of the road, because it's so hard to tell where it even is. If you put, say, a concrete jersey barrier across the road I would probably not have time to stop between seeing it and hitting it. I'm guessing my effective field of view extends four or five feet in any direction. And into this, it wasn't so much a thought in words like I put it above, but a fully-formed scene in my head. I'm running along, and then I go by him, just standing there five feet away at the edge of the road, facing the ocean. He has a white face, and two cones of orange hair standing straight out above each ear. The oversized red-painted mouth. Giant pants, suspenders. He's holding one balloon. He's staring straight out toward the ocean, and waving one hand very slowly, and holding a small, shriveled and sad looking balloon in the other hand. He doesn't move, apart from the waving hand, but his eyes rotate and catch mine, and then I'm past him and he's gone. I'm running and I can barely see anything, so it's so quick that it takes me a few more steps to even decode what it was. But then what? Do I go back? No, I do not under any circumstances go back. But now he's behind me somewhere. What if I pass him again. I can't see anything. He could be right behind me, running along silently with great wide bounding cartoon steps that don't quite touch the ground, huge red painted mouth widened in a great slobbering grin that doesn't quite touch the eyes, pancake makeup running in drool streams. He could be right there, with the balloon bobbing along like it wasn't even moving and one hand still waving slowly. Or he could be, inexplicably, in front of me again, just past the next curve. Looming out of the fog again with my next step. I could pass him again and again like that, and each time he reaches for me a little sooner, and each time he gets a little closer and what do I do? Ok. Ok. So this is what's going on in my head here, all of a sudden, just out of nowhere. It's still dark and the fog is still cutting off all external stimulus, and I just have this total horror reel playing in my head now, and I'm already running, and somehow that makes it so much easier to slip over the edge into panic, which is what I do. I am positive that I have never in my entire running career clocked a faster mile from there around the rest of backshore to where the houses and streetlights start up again. I sprinted it. There was no reserve, there was, frankly, no dignity whatsoever. I just pounded pavement. By the time I got to Picnic Point, where the fog thinned and the lights brought me back to my senses, I was completely out of gas, and just about ready to puke. My lungs had that burning feeling that you get when you pump out the very last swampy depths of the alveoli and force new air down into places that haven't seen new air since the Reagan years. My eyes were running freely and snot was hanging off my face in great ropy stalactites. I finally slowed, and walked, bent over and whooping and trying not to hurl. I walked the rest of the way home. That was the great granddaddy of freakouts. Its broad strokes, many of you will correctly guess, come straight out of Stephen King's It, which I read when I was really much too young to even understand most of it. But it did leave me with that terrifying image of a clown in inappropriate circumstances, like the scene where the clown is down at the bottom of the storm drain. I still don't walk over or look down storm drains, to this very day, because of that scene. And apparently the whole thing has been lurking in my head somewhere, waiting for just the moment when there was no way for me to escape it to spring out. I have since chosen my nights a little more carefully, avoiding the really foggy ones. It can be foggy out there when it isn't too foggy here, but not that bad. Just mist off the marshes. That night it was dense at my house, and I really should have known better. I don't go out on those nights anymore. There have been other times. It's very easy to imagine, some nights, that the crashing waves are disguising the softer noises of something wet and seaweed draped, clawing itself painfully, misshapenly, up the rocks out the ocean. Something terribly deformed but very strong and very cold. Something very lonely, that senses my pounding heartbeat and wants to take it from me. --------------- One night I spun out an almost fully-written story in my head about a settler here, a lobsterman whose wife was pregnant. He had a young son, maybe eleven, and he took his son out lobstering with himself and his old father. Something went wrong with the engine on the boat, and the lobsterman was head-down in the bilge trying to figure it out for a long while. He left the boy up on deck with his old man. The boy's grandfather wasn't quite right in the head anymore, but being out on the water did him good. Sometimes he thought it was other times, and other places. Eventually the lobsterman fixes what needed fixing, and comes back up on deck to find just the old man, staring sort of dolefully out to sea. He checks the pilothouse, checks up at the bow, where the boy used to like to sit when he was little, but the boy is nowhere. He yells for him, then storms up to his own father. He shakes the old man by the shoulder, hard, yelling "Where the hell is he? I told you to watch him!" But his father just slumps over and slides heavily out of his folding chair to the deck. The best they can figure, while the boat was drifting in a lazy counterclockwise circle, engine in idle while the lobsterman tried to get it going properly, the boy tried to lay out a trap that was all ready to go and sitting there on the rail. He was going to show his dad he could do it himself. But his foot was snagged in a coil of the line, and when the trap went over, it pulled him right over the side with it. Happens all the time. Most common cause of death for the solo lobsterman. You've got maybe fifteen seconds before the cold and the pressure make it all but impossible to escape, and you'd better have a sharp to hand fast. The boy, he was just a boy. The ocean got him. They never found the body. The old man was dead too. Probably saw the accident and immediately had the stroke that had clearly been on its way for some time. Or maybe he never saw it. Who could say. So anyway the lobsterman is obviously crushed and totally distraught, and mopes around for the rest of his wife's unusually difficult pregnancy. He won't go back out on the boat, won't try to find another job, won't really talk to anyone or do anything. All he does is go on long walks by himself at night, along the backshore and past these empty marshes (which I am, at this point in my imagining this story, running along beside). He goes on these walks initially just to get out of the house, where everything reminds him of his son, and where his wife is always nagging him to get his act together. He starts off just heading down to the beach and back, every couple days, when it gets too much. But the walks get increasingly longer, and more frequent, because very late at night, out there by himself, he can sometimes hear the boy calling to him. He hears, just at the edge of hearing, like it was made out of wind and waves, he hears this "Daddy...". He starts to sort of believe, without ever quite coming right out and thinking it to himself, that his son is maybe still out there somewhere, like he didn't drown, he just floated away and washed up on the island and now he's just lost. And eventually his walks are kind of taking on the character more of searches, and he starts going farther out into the empty spaces of the island, and lurking around in the bogs and marshes, staring very intently at open patches of black brackish water between the mud humps and the tall reeds, and generally behaving in a way that, examined in the cold light of reason, would tend to indicate that he is quietly losing his mind. But he doesn't talk about this with anyone, and his wife has her own problems besides losing a son, and she's starting to really kind of resent him just abandoning her like this when she's got this new child growing inside her and she doesn't even know where their next meal is going to come from. They're living off casseroles and pizzas that neighbors are still dropping off regularly, knowing what a tough time they're having, but she knows that's not going to last forever if her husband doesn't pull himself together. And so it all finally comes to a head one night in the middle of January, in what's probably the most vicious storm anyone around there can even remember, when his wife finally goes into labor. There's just no question of getting her onto the boat and over to the hospital on the mainland. It's about ten below, the wind is blowing sixty knots, and in the snow the visibility is nil. It would be suicide to even try to get on the boat, never mind go anywhere with a pregnant woman in labor. They're just going to have to make do the best they can at home. And to make things worse, the power is out and phone is out. So the lobsterman gathers up what candles and oil lanterns he can find, and stokes up the woodstove as hot as he can get it, and starts boiling water. He's afraid to leave the house and try to find someone to help, because first he doesn't really know who he'd try to find, and second he doesn't want to risk leaving his wife alone, and third, he's not even sure he could get anywhere in the teeth of this storm. The house is creaking and thumping with every gust, and the wind is forcing itself through even the tiniest gaps in the wall, so it's cold even with the stove blasting and the candles keep blowing out in the gusts. This is one of those nights that lasts much, much longer than the almanac tells you it should have. Where most nights at some point cross a line from getting late to getting early, this one just keeps getting later and later. And his wife is having trouble, and screaming a lot, and this guy's just a lobsterman. He knows about pulling giant prehistoric bugs from the ocean, not pulling live babies from women. He tries to help, but what with the dark and the cold and his own by now pretty debilitating mental illness, if that's what it is, he just isn't much help. Eventually, he finally starts hearing what he's never heard at home before -- only out in the swamps and by the sea on his long nocturnal walks. He starts to hear his son calling him again in the wailing voice of the wind. And the lobsterman isn't really with us in any rational sense anymore, and he keeps getting confused between the screaming wind and his screaming wife and his screaming dead son, and it all gets louder and louder until all of a sudden everything stops. And it's silent. For a long beat. And he opens eyes he hadn't known were squeezed tightly shut, and unclenches fists he hadn't realized were clenched so tight he has bloody crescents across each palm. And he finds himself huddled with his back to a corner of his bedroom, facing his wife spread exhausted and drenched with sweat on their bed where she's been laboring alone all this time. And lying there on her breast is his baby. He stands up and takes two careful steps toward the bed. Everything is very still, and he feels like glass. He might shatter into a million jagged shards. He's holding his breath. He sees that the baby is a boy. It's still covered with the blood and slime of birth. Its umbilical cord lolls down and disappears obscenely between his wife's legs. And the baby opens its eyes, and turns its head, and looks directly at him. And it says, perfectly clearly, in the voice of his dead son, "It was your fault. You let me die." Later on that day, when concerned neighbors finally break in the door they've been knocking at for the better part of an hour, they find the lobsterman upstairs in the bedroom, unconscious on the floor. His wife is in the bed, dead for some time according to the city ME they send out from Portland. In his report, he says she hemmorhaged during childbirth, and there was nothing anyone could have done for her there at her house on the desolate island. Privately, once he's wrapped himself around more than a few beers as a sort of internal liquid stiffening agent, he tells his closest friends that he's never seen a horror quite like that room, "Blood soaked into the bed, blood dripping down the walls, I swear there was blood on the fucking ceiling," he tells them. "How the fuck do you get blood on the ceiling from a birth hemmorhage?" But none of that goes in his report. The baby, miraculously, survived. A healthy 6 pound 12 oz. baby girl. She was found lying exhausted but totally unharmed, sightly stuck to the cooling and drying gore-coated corpse of her mother. The lobsterman accepted her, and never told anyone anything about what happened that night. His long walks stopped, and to all appearances he got over that terrible winter. He remarried fairly soon. He raised his girl, and he was proud of her. But she never really felt close to him. There was something in the way he looked at her when he didn't think she was watching. He made her feel, sometimes, like she didn't really exist. --------------- Those are the bare bones of the story I thought up while running along those marshes. I've actually tried to write it a couple times, but it never quite worked. This version is actually a lot better and truer to what was in my head than anything I've managed before, so we'll just call this one done and move on. It is, you may have noted, unbelievably gothic. That's the deserted midnight seashore talking there. That's the mood it gets in, where stories like that can just occur to you, and seem so inevitable that it's a wonder you didn't think of them a long time ago. And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I Depends Which eight? ____Not the real rusty Indeed S. King hails from, and still lives in, Bangor Maine. I tell you, it's a creepy gothic sort of state, this Maine. It doesn't get the same kind of fame for it as your Louisiana Cajun snake-handlers, but it's here all right. It is no accident that America's most famous (and arguably best) horror novelist is a throughgoing Mainer. ____Not the real rusty Sorry My only old coot kicked off before he got a line. I'll try to get one in next time. ____Not the real rusty Except It's pronounced more like "lobstermun" so the whole premise would kind of miss the mark. ____Not the real rusty I know That's why I put a little section break there. In the first part, I was going for a particular voice, but I don't think I have the energy to keep it up for much longer than I did. So the section break is basically me reverting into my own voice again. I did say it was a rambling monstrosity. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not exactly I'm not what you'd call coulrophobic. Seeing a clown any place where a clown could plausibly be -- like even just out on the street in daytime, doesn't bother me. I mean, they're kind of creepy but I think most people feel that way. It's more the idea of a clown being somewhere where one really shouldn't be that gets me. There's a line somewhere between plausible and implausibe where it flips abruptly from ordinary to terrifying. And I did actually think, after this whole experience, what a terribly cruel practical joke it would be to pull something like that on someone else. Fortunately, I don't think I have it in me to ever do it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes Yes, it did. That was kind of the point. I realize that in this really super-condensed version there isn't a lot of explication, and a bunch of things are just thrown at you, but I thought that would get across. Perhaps not. I wasn't really sure how much of what was in my head was going to come through here. ____Not the real rusty No, it's not you This whole thing could be expanded quite a lot, and really ought to be. I mean, this is basically just an outline, sort of in the voice of someone describing a longer story to a buddy. One of my attempts to do it justice was framed from the perspective of the lobsterman, now grown old, at the wake and funeral of his second wife (who died naturally). His daughter comes back from the big city for the funeral, and there's the usual weirdness between them, and meanwhile it's making him remember all this stuff that he's basically blocked out of his mind for all these years. I wasn't sure whether to have his daughter actually ask him about it or to just leave it all unsaid, and I had dire trouble with the pacing that way. It was just taking for-bloody-ever for the story to get anywhere. But the point being, this is so totally glossed over and compacted that if you miss a couple words something probably isn't going to make sense. And it does leave all kinds of unresolved questions, like what's up with the ME? To have that make sense, I'd have to have set up the whole small-town dynamic of the island, as well as the difficult relationship the city had with the island in those days. It was part of Portland (still is) but I was envisioning this story taking place in like the early 60's, when the island was not the wealthy summer colont it is now, but more of a dumping ground for the city's poor and some blue-collar fishermen. A city employee's perspective would have been "well, they're a bunch of freaks out there and I'm not going to meddle in their business any more than absolutely necessary." I could have some of the neighbors closing ranks on him and insisting they were there all along and saw it or something, or I could just have him consider it and then not bother asking. But it'd come to the same thing. So besides things like that, there's also basically all the scenery that's fleshed out perfectly for me just by walking around, but I'm sure you didn't really get much of any sense of. And a story like this depends so heavily on the setting (with all the big-R Romantic overtones of the storm and everything else) that it hardly works at all without that stuff brought out explicitly. So, it's not you at all. Sorry I sounded snippy before -- I was just pressed for time. ____Not the real rusty Ha Well you apologized for being stupid -- I thought maybe I snippily implied that you were. And the overall tone of the place doesn't mean that those of us who do care how we sound should lower our standards. Or abandon them completely, as the situation may seem to demand. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's a sign of love Your cat loves you, and wants you to know it. So, in the way of cats, it sticks its stinky ass in your face. This, by the way, is not even in the top ten reasons cats are vile little beasts. Not to say I don't like them, in some fashion (I have three at the moment -- one is just visiting) but there's no denying that they're savage, evil, and foul little monsters. ____Not the real rusty K5: We're just the nuts in your bedpost. ____Not the real rusty I got a lonely gone codplexxxx ...cock in and pull it! ____Not the real rusty Jesus ...cause then they'd have to rewrite the whole damn book. ____Not the real rusty Poor kid Life isn't easy for a girl named George. ____Not the real rusty Cause it is one :-) I'm pretty sure it was Carlin. If not, it was somone with a similar style. It certainly ain't original to me. ____Not the real rusty He's not It was me, and basically for just the reason urine2 says. He was being an ass. I do appreciate the apology. ____Not the real rusty Also: [Upon further thought] Are you people competely out of your minds, thinking we'd make cts an editor? Jesus. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's a very good article The best sentence is: "All he really wants is... to have been right." That pretty much covers my feelings about where Scoop shows up in the whole picture. I can be left out completely, not even a footnote to some blogger, provided it ultimately becomes clear to everyone that the ideas expressed in the design of Scoop were right. ____Not the real rusty Indeed Kos understands very well how it all happened, in hindsight, and he does constantly say so. I'm sure he explained it to this guy, but it was a personality profile for political people, not a tech piece. I'm actually surprised "Scoop" even got in there by name. It doesn't usually. And actually, I kind of liked the mysterious phrasing. "A technology called Scoop" is much better for my purposes (that is, drawing a clearer distinction between Scoop and "blogging software") than the usual "a new blogging tool called Scoop" or especially the near-ubiquitous and utterly unhelpful "he changed blog software." I didn't really envision diaries working the way they have ended up on dKos, specifically, but the general gist of it is very much like what I always had in mind. It's interesting to me the extent to which software -- and most especially web software -- encodes explicitly political ideas. Like, take your regular blogging platform, blogger or MT or something. Their premises are that everyone should to have their own little space, their own soapbox, over which they have total control from look to content. They can choose to give up some control over small parts of it (like allowing comments) but the fundamental principle is one-man, one-blog. It's an individualistic medium. Even the bolt-on afterthoughts for moving people from blog to blog (like trackback) don't really do much to change that. It's still like walled villages sending messages by carrier pigeon. Scoop's politics, on the other hand, are quite a bit more socialist/libertarian/anarchist (depending on how you look at it). There's usually assumed to be someone at the top, but they can give up nearly as much control over the site as they want. And the code goes a pretty long way to encourage you to do just that. And the tradeoff is that any one individual poster loses control of a number of things, like layout and for some sites (like this one) even content. Anyway, I could go on and on. But eventually, someone should really make an effort to foreground all of this. I think most people really don't understand the extent to which social software (a field which is still booming) can't help but encode a political viewpoint. I don't know how much the creators of such software are thinking about that either. I always have, but I might be a weirdo. ____Not the real rusty lol what OBL == NIWS. ____Not the real rusty TWWOTV: Day Whatever I think it's day, like, 16 now. You probably thought I stopped updating daily because I quit and failed and was ashamed. But YUO WREE RONG! Actually, I just got really busy. So the experiment has concluded, and despite almost failing right at the very end, we discovered that TV was really not all that worthwhile. Well, come on. this is basically social science research here. Did you expect a conclusion any less painfully obvious? The second week of the experiment passed without anything really interesting to report. We continued to do the kind of stuff we had been doing. I am sad to say that the "extra hour or two a night" thing wears off pretty quickly. It just sort of gets re-absorbed back into your day, and the sense that it's "free time" because you're not wasting it like you normally would have just disappears. That concept may take some actual effort to sustain -- like not just saying "this is the time after dinner" but "this is the time that we specifically set aside to do something enjoyable and non-straining that otherwise we'd never find time for." Maybe that's the second part of the experiment. It's enlightening to point out the couple of times when we did miss watching TV. I found that I missed it when I was really tired. There's nothing less mentally or physically strenuous you can do than watch TV. Partly, I think, this feeling was due to not currently reading any undemanding books. I was, through the course of this experiment, reading Mason & Dixon, Consider the Lobster, and Everything and More Actually, no What mostly sucked up my free time last week was work. And that has a pretty strongly negative effect on my overall internet usage, since after staring at a screen for twelve hours because I have to, staring at it some more doesn't really sound like a very good idea. ____Not the real rusty Hey I caught your article via K5 vanity Google news-alert. I still wish we had published it. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Probably I did an interview with kpaul a while ago, for an article that he has still not finished for OJR (though, to be fair, I technically still owe them an article that is now, I think, like three years late) where I said much the same thing about blogging vs. community blogs. Just the blog stuff is interesting enough by itself, and yes, probably would go over a lot better here. That + the identity stuff (since it deals with the remaining big problem with obline community) would be a good article. The phrase "Web 2.0" was mainly what torpedoed it last time, despite being perhaps the only intelligent thing I've ever read with that phrase in it. ____Not the real rusty I'd be happy to live in a nutshell! ...as the Danish Prince was known to say. ____Not the real rusty Glutton for punishment ;-) ____Not the real rusty Same way they do now Say "I propose a filibuster" and have a vote on it. The old "stand on the floor and talk continuously" days are long over. ____Not the real rusty Just goes to show, once again: Bros before hos. Ignore it at your own peril. ____Not the real rusty Yikes I go with a 4:3 brown to white sugar ratio. 4:1 is just crazy talk. Also, for thicker cookies, add a little more flour. Butter and shortening have the same effect, shortening just tastes like nothing. ____Not the real rusty Hyundai L90D+ I have one, and like it. I don't know how it compares for response time, but I'm sure you can look that up. Froogle prices. ____Not the real rusty K5: We Lack Focus and Direction That would be much better than our current slogan, IMO. ____Not the real rusty All in good time... all in good time. ____Not the real rusty Sudden? Mexicans coming up here to work has been going on for, what, a couple hundred years now? What makes this sudden, other than media attention? ____Not the real rusty Also Farm closes for lack of legal labor ____Not the real rusty Difference weedaddict's comment was insensitive, Stick's was malicious. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but It was still insensitive. Trust me on this. ____Not the real rusty No, probably not Just more immediately personal. It's less offensive to people when you're insensitive about someone who isn't actually right there. ____Not the real rusty Jane, honey My button-pushing finger is sore. ____Not the real rusty Did it himself I nuked the jokers, but he pulled his own stuff himself. And even left with a huffy abuse report too. It was precious. :-) I have deleted my posts, and I won't be coming back. I've also recommended to blogads.com that this site be removed from their media group. It is obviously over-run by spammers and imbeciles. I have never been so disgusted. ____Not the real rusty Jesus And now more queue spam. What the hell? Is it a full moon or what? ____Not the real rusty Weird We're constantly striving, which stops us being happy. What a totally bizarre thing to say. What does he think happiness is? This whole article was such a blend of the obvious and the stupid that I couldn't figure it out. But that sentence pretty much clicked the light on. Striving is what makes us happy. People who strive solely for money tend to be less happy, because most of them quickly discover that "it's easy to make money, if all you want to do is make money." People who get a lot of money with little effort (i.e. marry someone rich for their money) tend to be miserable because they're bored out of their minds. People who make a lot of money but don't have anything they're passionate about likewise. It's nonsense like "you'd all be happier if you just took more vacation" that gets us nowhere. No more nonsensical that believing that making money in order to buy things will make you happy, but no less so either. If you really want to be happy -- not all the time, but more than you probably are now -- decide to do something that everyone you tell thinks is either impossible or at least very unlikely, and then do it. ____Not the real rusty Indeed The pleasure == happiness thing struck me too. Those "what makes you happy" answers? Those weren't what makes you happy. Those were what give you some measure of momentary pleasure or contentment. And be as lazy as you want (god knows I am) I still can't escape the conclusion that what truly makes me happy in life is striving. I mean, no one's lazy about everything. Everyone has something they'd do if there was no other demand on them. Even if it would be "watch TV for a year and a half straight"... eventually, given enough free time to fill, everyone does something. ____Not the real rusty Depends on how you look at it I think the illusion of what striving will yield is what we think will make us happy. That is, we strive because we think we're striving toward some ultimate goal, and the achievement or attainment of that goal will make us happy. I think goals are just things we make up to justify and channel our striving. So maybe I'm running, and I say "tonight I'll be under 9 minutes/mile." I don't then go out and run four miles because being under 9 minutes means anything to me; it's just a tool to push myself along. It's the effort that brings happiness, and the goals help focus the effort, and there you go. This seems to scale up pretty well, IME, from little petty daily goals all the way up to "on my deathbed" type goals. So basically, yeah, count me with the Hindus. Or did you maybe mean Buddhists? Sounds more Buddhist to me. ____Not the real rusty Clairvoyantly foretold economics The author begins with Edgar Cayce's amazingly accurate clairvoyant description of a "25 year Economic Depression Cycle" which will return in 2006 and 2007. Roffle. ____Not the real rusty Scoff scoff scoff I'm scoffing so hard my scoffer is gonna burst. But you are welcome to spend your money any way you see fit, even acording to the directions of the frauds who play on suckers that believe this nonsense. You, this Mandeville, and Arthur Conan Doyle can all have a good chuckle at my expense when you're proven right. :-) ____Not the real rusty The difference Editing wikipedia (by anyone) == using wikipedia that way it's explicitly designed to be used. To violate the first amendment, they'd have to pass a law stating that wikipedia could not include certain information. Which, of course, they already have, w/r/t like child porn and stuff, but I think that's defensible in terms of weighing freedom of speech vs. direct harm to others. But besides those cases, the 1st A. says very clearly, "Congress shall make no law...". ____Not the real rusty I don't agree I think that the conflict here is based not on the constitution at all, but on the design and operating principles of Wikipedia itself. And this is one of my big problems with wikipedia, because this mindset bleeds over into all kinds of other circumstances. See, the problem is Wikipedia is, by design and philosophy, open to any and all editors. That is in the code. It is the only true Law of wikipedia. But then on top of that are all kinds of community norms and principles and rules written and unwritten. None of these rules are enforced in the code, and they all concern, to a greater or lesser degree, "ways in which we'd like editing powers to be used." So, for example, you're not supposed to edit an article about yourself, and it will be criticized as bad form, even if you're correcting an error that someone else put there. There's nothing that will stop you from doing so, but you get all kinds of shit for it if you do. Likewise, you're saying that you don't want politicians to edit wikipedia. I think the first amendment argument is pretty thoroughly debunked by just the text of the constitution itself in this case. It's not a government issue until they start making laws about it. What you're really making is a statement about how you'd like some segment of people to act on wikipedia. I don't agree with your opinion, but I would say that if this is what you think, then Wikipedia is (from your POV) broken and needs fixing. If I open a computer system to the world to log in and do whatever they want, and then get upset when someone does that, who do I have to blame? The wiki concept is great, but it's an absolutist philosophy. Either you have an open wiki or you don't. I don't have much patience for people running an open wiki and then bitching when the inevitable results of that philosophy come to pass, which wikipedians seem to make nearly a full-time occupation of. ____Not the real rusty That's good news The lack of a "stable version" has been a big problem for wikipedia, as far as i'm concerned. Good to hear they're doing something about it. ____Not the real rusty Slimy things did crawl with legs [Editorial Note: Holy crap, this turned into a corker. For anyone who makes it all the way to the end of this rambling monstrosity, I salute you.] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I saw that tonight. After a brooding afternoon of iron gray clouds sidling downward until night came as a relief from their increasing menace, it finally started snowing, raining, and sleeting sometime after dinner. When the rest of the house was in bed, Sadie and I bundled up, she in her customary fur and I in various technical synthetics, and sloshed out for our walk. Half a mile through an inch of standing slush and we rounded the corner at Spar Cove where the last of the eastward cover disappears and the open Atlantic finally lurks up to (and frequently over) the road. You could hear the wind from the top of the hill leading down to that point, a steady thrash in the tops of the trees that doesn't sound like wind because its pitch never varies. It sounds like a train passing overhead, forever. The wind stays up in the trees until you round that corner, by the house we called the witch's house when I was little and it was a creaking broke-windowed Victorian wreck with that distinctive tower in the front. But it's just there, when the wind's coming in from the east, that it finally pounces. Eyes squint and hats are launched abruptly westward like Oklahoma Boomers on land-grab day. Sadie rotates to the east and sucks in spray-loaded wind, as if trying to determine the precise bearing to the Azores by smell. A quarter mile farther on we climb a short hill that also corners to the right, and on the left an expanse of rock (tonight, slush-coated) extends out into the ocean. At the road end of it is planted a green and white municipal bench, which is not much use tonight. Sadie stops and looks at me, as this is where our walk usually turns around. Tonight what grabs me is the view. Overhead, to the left and right, and behind me all is normal. Pearly-dark cloud cover, illuminated in slowly advancing degree the closer your eye wanders toward Portland, hidden to the west behind the looming bulk of the island but clearly implied by its light. But to the east, darkness is upon the face of the deep. Out there the water foams and surges just up to a blinking green marker buoy that sits maybe a mile offshore. Behind that is a wall of black, the goes from a sharp horizon line at the ocean's surface up to about 20 degrees from my standpoint, where it fades over the next five or ten degrees into the gray cloud cover. What is this blackness? Normally what's out there is lights on Long Island, and beyond that a few lights on Cliff. In the distance, off to the left, you can usually see a twinkle or two from the southern shore of Chebeague. Tonight, it's just a wall of black. Not the kind of black you normally get at night, all around, which is merely the overall absence of light. This blackness has boundaries, and edges. It has a presence. It seems to be not an absence of light, but a negation of it. Like it's absorbing light. I stood there in the wind and looked at it for a while, and I won't lie to you, it gave me the creeps. Maybe it was just fog, maybe it was a patch of snowfall. But whatever it was, it was creepy. Sadie and I turned our backs and came home. --------------- The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. Now there's nothing better than an uninhabited seashore for really industrial-grade spookiness when you catch it in the right mood. Middle of the night, thick fog, empty marshes and pounding waves just out there in the invisible distance, sometimes auditorially switching positions all of a sudden, so the ocean you thought was on your left suddenly sounds like it's on your right, and the blank wall of fog ahead of you starts to look like it's not just fog but the edge of the world, and you'll run right off it. I do my running at night, circumambulating the island, and there have been a number of times I wished I had decided to skip it that particular night. The fog is the worst. There's a stretch of backshore about a mile long with no houses at all, no streetlights, and along the inland side of the road is mostly salt marsh, with some old military gun emplacements in the woods beyond. In the fog, it goes on, and on, and on. There's nothing to see but the dark gray hemisphere constantly enclosing me and about 400 square feet of pavement sliding by underfoot. There's nothing to hear but the steady rattle of round cobble shifting up and down the beach with every wave, and my own breath whooshing in and out of my head. The brain, starved for other options, starts to conjure up things I'd rather not think about. The all-time worst, just to get it out of the way right up front, was the night I thought "What if I was just running along here, in the fog, in the middle of the night, and suddenly I ran past a clown, just standing there on the side of the road?" Jesus Christ, right now, sitting here in front of the computer in my warm and well-lit office, I'm totally covered in goosebumps at this thought. My skin feels like it's trying to crawl off of me and hide under a bed somewhere. Just think about it. It's 1:30 in the morning, completely black and dense fog. Whatever very faint light there is serves only to very vaguely distinguish the lighter black of the grass at the edge of the road from the darker black of the road itself. I'm keeping to what I think might be the middle of the road, because it's so hard to tell where it even is. If you put, say, a concrete jersey barrier across the road I would probably not have time to stop between seeing it and hitting it. I'm guessing my effective field of view extends four or five feet in any direction. And into this, it wasn't so much a thought in words like I put it above, but a fully-formed scene in my head. I'm running along, and then I go by him, just standing there five feet away at the edge of the road, facing the ocean. He has a white face, and two cones of orange hair standing straight out above each ear. The oversized red-painted mouth. Giant pants, suspenders. He's holding one balloon. He's staring straight out toward the ocean, and waving one hand very slowly, and holding a small, shriveled and sad looking balloon in the other hand. He doesn't move, apart from the waving hand, but his eyes rotate and catch mine, and then I'm past him and he's gone. I'm running and I can barely see anything, so it's so quick that it takes me a few more steps to even decode what it was. But then what? Do I go back? No, I do not under any circumstances go back. But now he's behind me somewhere. What if I pass him again. I can't see anything. He could be right behind me, running along silently with great wide bounding cartoon steps that don't quite touch the ground, huge red painted mouth widened in a great slobbering grin that doesn't quite touch the eyes, pancake makeup running in drool streams. He could be right there, with the balloon bobbing along like it wasn't even moving and one hand still waving slowly. Or he could be, inexplicably, in front of me again, just past the next curve. Looming out of the fog again with my next step. I could pass him again and again like that, and each time he reaches for me a little sooner, and each time he gets a little closer and what do I do? Ok. Ok. So this is what's going on in my head here, all of a sudden, just out of nowhere. It's still dark and the fog is still cutting off all external stimulus, and I just have this total horror reel playing in my head now, and I'm already running, and somehow that makes it so much easier to slip over the edge into panic, which is what I do. I am positive that I have never in my entire running career clocked a faster mile from there around the rest of backshore to where the houses and streetlights start up again. I sprinted it. There was no reserve, there was, frankly, no dignity whatsoever. I just pounded pavement. By the time I got to Picnic Point, where the fog thinned and the lights brought me back to my senses, I was completely out of gas, and just about ready to puke. My lungs had that burning feeling that you get when you pump out the very last swampy depths of the alveoli and force new air down into places that haven't seen new air since the Reagan years. My eyes were running freely and snot was hanging off my face in great ropy stalactites. I finally slowed, and walked, bent over and whooping and trying not to hurl. I walked the rest of the way home. That was the great granddaddy of freakouts. Its broad strokes, many of you will correctly guess, come straight out of Stephen King's It, which I read when I was really much too young to even understand most of it. But it did leave me with that terrifying image of a clown in inappropriate circumstances, like the scene where the clown is down at the bottom of the storm drain. I still don't walk over or look down storm drains, to this very day, because of that scene. And apparently the whole thing has been lurking in my head somewhere, waiting for just the moment when there was no way for me to escape it to spring out. I have since chosen my nights a little more carefully, avoiding the really foggy ones. It can be foggy out there when it isn't too foggy here, but not that bad. Just mist off the marshes. That night it was dense at my house, and I really should have known better. I don't go out on those nights anymore. There have been other times. It's very easy to imagine, some nights, that the crashing waves are disguising the softer noises of something wet and seaweed draped, clawing itself painfully, misshapenly, up the rocks out the ocean. Something terribly deformed but very strong and very cold. Something very lonely, that senses my pounding heartbeat and wants to take it from me. --------------- One night I spun out an almost fully-written story in my head about a settler here, a lobsterman whose wife was pregnant. He had a young son, maybe eleven, and he took his son out lobstering with himself and his old father. Something went wrong with the engine on the boat, and the lobsterman was head-down in the bilge trying to figure it out for a long while. He left the boy up on deck with his old man. The boy's grandfather wasn't quite right in the head anymore, but being out on the water did him good. Sometimes he thought it was other times, and other places. Eventually the lobsterman fixes what needed fixing, and comes back up on deck to find just the old man, staring sort of dolefully out to sea. He checks the pilothouse, checks up at the bow, where the boy used to like to sit when he was little, but the boy is nowhere. He yells for him, then storms up to his own father. He shakes the old man by the shoulder, hard, yelling "Where the hell is he? I told you to watch him!" But his father just slumps over and slides heavily out of his folding chair to the deck. The best they can figure, while the boat was drifting in a lazy counterclockwise circle, engine in idle while the lobsterman tried to get it going properly, the boy tried to lay out a trap that was all ready to go and sitting there on the rail. He was going to show his dad he could do it himself. But his foot was snagged in a coil of the line, and when the trap went over, it pulled him right over the side with it. Happens all the time. Most common cause of death for the solo lobsterman. You've got maybe fifteen seconds before the cold and the pressure make it all but impossible to escape, and you'd better have a sharp to hand fast. The boy, he was just a boy. The ocean got him. They never found the body. The old man was dead too. Probably saw the accident and immediately had the stroke that had clearly been on its way for some time. Or maybe he never saw it. Who could say. So anyway the lobsterman is obviously crushed and totally distraught, and mopes around for the rest of his wife's unusually difficult pregnancy. He won't go back out on the boat, won't try to find another job, won't really talk to anyone or do anything. All he does is go on long walks by himself at night, along the backshore and past these empty marshes (which I am, at this point in my imagining this story, running along beside). He goes on these walks initially just to get out of the house, where everything reminds him of his son, and where his wife is always nagging him to get his act together. He starts off just heading down to the beach and back, every couple days, when it gets too much. But the walks get increasingly longer, and more frequent, because very late at night, out there by himself, he can sometimes hear the boy calling to him. He hears, just at the edge of hearing, like it was made out of wind and waves, he hears this "Daddy...". He starts to sort of believe, without ever quite coming right out and thinking it to himself, that his son is maybe still out there somewhere, like he didn't drown, he just floated away and washed up on the island and now he's just lost. And eventually his walks are kind of taking on the character more of searches, and he starts going farther out into the empty spaces of the island, and lurking around in the bogs and marshes, staring very intently at open patches of black brackish water between the mud humps and the tall reeds, and generally behaving in a way that, examined in the cold light of reason, would tend to indicate that he is quietly losing his mind. But he doesn't talk about this with anyone, and his wife has her own problems besides losing a son, and she's starting to really kind of resent him just abandoning her like this when she's got this new child growing inside her and she doesn't even know where their next meal is going to come from. They're living off casseroles and pizzas that neighbors are still dropping off regularly, knowing what a tough time they're having, but she knows that's not going to last forever if her husband doesn't pull himself together. And so it all finally comes to a head one night in the middle of January, in what's probably the most vicious storm anyone around there can even remember, when his wife finally goes into labor. There's just no question of getting her onto the boat and over to the hospital on the mainland. It's about ten below, the wind is blowing sixty knots, and in the snow the visibility is nil. It would be suicide to even try to get on the boat, never mind go anywhere with a pregnant woman in labor. They're just going to have to make do the best they can at home. And to make things worse, the power is out and phone is out. So the lobsterman gathers up what candles and oil lanterns he can find, and stokes up the woodstove as hot as he can get it, and starts boiling water. He's afraid to leave the house and try to find someone to help, because first he doesn't really know who he'd try to find, and second he doesn't want to risk leaving his wife alone, and third, he's not even sure he could get anywhere in the teeth of this storm. The house is creaking and thumping with every gust, and the wind is forcing itself through even the tiniest gaps in the wall, so it's cold even with the stove blasting and the candles keep blowing out in the gusts. This is one of those nights that lasts much, much longer than the almanac tells you it should have. Where most nights at some point cross a line from getting late to getting early, this one just keeps getting later and later. And his wife is having trouble, and screaming a lot, and this guy's just a lobsterman. He knows about pulling giant prehistoric bugs from the ocean, not pulling live babies from women. He tries to help, but what with the dark and the cold and his own by now pretty debilitating mental illness, if that's what it is, he just isn't much help. Eventually, he finally starts hearing what he's never heard at home before -- only out in the swamps and by the sea on his long nocturnal walks. He starts to hear his son calling him again in the wailing voice of the wind. And the lobsterman isn't really with us in any rational sense anymore, and he keeps getting confused between the screaming wind and his screaming wife and his screaming dead son, and it all gets louder and louder until all of a sudden everything stops. And it's silent. For a long beat. And he opens eyes he hadn't known were squeezed tightly shut, and unclenches fists he hadn't realized were clenched so tight he has bloody crescents across each palm. And he finds himself huddled with his back to a corner of his bedroom, facing his wife spread exhausted and drenched with sweat on their bed where she's been laboring alone all this time. And lying there on her breast is his baby. He stands up and takes two careful steps toward the bed. Everything is very still, and he feels like glass. He might shatter into a million jagged shards. He's holding his breath. He sees that the baby is a boy. It's still covered with the blood and slime of birth. Its umbilical cord lolls down and disappears obscenely between his wife's legs. And the baby opens its eyes, and turns its head, and looks directly at him. And it says, perfectly clearly, in the voice of his dead son, "It was your fault. You let me die." Later on that day, when concerned neighbors finally break in the door they've been knocking at for the better part of an hour, they find the lobsterman upstairs in the bedroom, unconscious on the floor. His wife is in the bed, dead for some time according to the city ME they send out from Portland. In his report, he says she hemmorhaged during childbirth, and there was nothing anyone could have done for her there at her house on the desolate island. Privately, once he's wrapped himself around more than a few beers as a sort of internal liquid stiffening agent, he tells his closest friends that he's never seen a horror quite like that room, "Blood soaked into the bed, blood dripping down the walls, I swear there was blood on the fucking ceiling," he tells them. "How the fuck do you get blood on the ceiling from a birth hemmorhage?" But none of that goes in his report. The baby, miraculously, survived. A healthy 6 pound 12 oz. baby girl. She was found lying exhausted but totally unharmed, sightly stuck to the cooling and drying gore-coated corpse of her mother. The lobsterman accepted her, and never told anyone anything about what happened that night. His long walks stopped, and to all appearances he got over that terrible winter. He remarried fairly soon. He raised his girl, and he was proud of her. But she never really felt close to him. There was something in the way he looked at her when he didn't think she was watching. He made her feel, sometimes, like she didn't really exist. --------------- Those are the bare bones of the story I thought up while running along those marshes. I've actually tried to write it a couple times, but it never quite worked. This version is actually a lot better and truer to what was in my head than anything I've managed before, so we'll just call this one done and move on. It is, you may have noted, unbelievably gothic. That's the deserted midnight seashore talking there. That's the mood it gets in, where stories like that can just occur to you, and seem so inevitable that it's a wonder you didn't think of them a long time ago. And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I Depends Which eight? ____Not the real rusty Indeed S. King hails from, and still lives in, Bangor Maine. I tell you, it's a creepy gothic sort of state, this Maine. It doesn't get the same kind of fame for it as your Louisiana Cajun snake-handlers, but it's here all right. It is no accident that America's most famous (and arguably best) horror novelist is a throughgoing Mainer. ____Not the real rusty Sorry My only old coot kicked off before he got a line. I'll try to get one in next time. ____Not the real rusty Except It's pronounced more like "lobstermun" so the whole premise would kind of miss the mark. ____Not the real rusty I know That's why I put a little section break there. In the first part, I was going for a particular voice, but I don't think I have the energy to keep it up for much longer than I did. So the section break is basically me reverting into my own voice again. I did say it was a rambling monstrosity. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not exactly I'm not what you'd call coulrophobic. Seeing a clown any place where a clown could plausibly be -- like even just out on the street in daytime, doesn't bother me. I mean, they're kind of creepy but I think most people feel that way. It's more the idea of a clown being somewhere where one really shouldn't be that gets me. There's a line somewhere between plausible and implausibe where it flips abruptly from ordinary to terrifying. And I did actually think, after this whole experience, what a terribly cruel practical joke it would be to pull something like that on someone else. Fortunately, I don't think I have it in me to ever do it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes Yes, it did. That was kind of the point. I realize that in this really super-condensed version there isn't a lot of explication, and a bunch of things are just thrown at you, but I thought that would get across. Perhaps not. I wasn't really sure how much of what was in my head was going to come through here. ____Not the real rusty No, it's not you This whole thing could be expanded quite a lot, and really ought to be. I mean, this is basically just an outline, sort of in the voice of someone describing a longer story to a buddy. One of my attempts to do it justice was framed from the perspective of the lobsterman, now grown old, at the wake and funeral of his second wife (who died naturally). His daughter comes back from the big city for the funeral, and there's the usual weirdness between them, and meanwhile it's making him remember all this stuff that he's basically blocked out of his mind for all these years. I wasn't sure whether to have his daughter actually ask him about it or to just leave it all unsaid, and I had dire trouble with the pacing that way. It was just taking for-bloody-ever for the story to get anywhere. But the point being, this is so totally glossed over and compacted that if you miss a couple words something probably isn't going to make sense. And it does leave all kinds of unresolved questions, like what's up with the ME? To have that make sense, I'd have to have set up the whole small-town dynamic of the island, as well as the difficult relationship the city had with the island in those days. It was part of Portland (still is) but I was envisioning this story taking place in like the early 60's, when the island was not the wealthy summer colont it is now, but more of a dumping ground for the city's poor and some blue-collar fishermen. A city employee's perspective would have been "well, they're a bunch of freaks out there and I'm not going to meddle in their business any more than absolutely necessary." I could have some of the neighbors closing ranks on him and insisting they were there all along and saw it or something, or I could just have him consider it and then not bother asking. But it'd come to the same thing. So besides things like that, there's also basically all the scenery that's fleshed out perfectly for me just by walking around, but I'm sure you didn't really get much of any sense of. And a story like this depends so heavily on the setting (with all the big-R Romantic overtones of the storm and everything else) that it hardly works at all without that stuff brought out explicitly. So, it's not you at all. Sorry I sounded snippy before -- I was just pressed for time. ____Not the real rusty Ha Well you apologized for being stupid -- I thought maybe I snippily implied that you were. And the overall tone of the place doesn't mean that those of us who do care how we sound should lower our standards. Or abandon them completely, as the situation may seem to demand. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's a sign of love Your cat loves you, and wants you to know it. So, in the way of cats, it sticks its stinky ass in your face. This, by the way, is not even in the top ten reasons cats are vile little beasts. Not to say I don't like them, in some fashion (I have three at the moment -- one is just visiting) but there's no denying that they're savage, evil, and foul little monsters. ____Not the real rusty K5: We're just the nuts in your bedpost. ____Not the real rusty I got a lonely gone codplexxxx ...cock in and pull it! ____Not the real rusty Jesus ...cause then they'd have to rewrite the whole damn book. ____Not the real rusty Poor kid Life isn't easy for a girl named George. ____Not the real rusty Cause it is one :-) I'm pretty sure it was Carlin. If not, it was somone with a similar style. It certainly ain't original to me. ____Not the real rusty He's not It was me, and basically for just the reason urine2 says. He was being an ass. I do appreciate the apology. ____Not the real rusty Also: [Upon further thought] Are you people competely out of your minds, thinking we'd make cts an editor? Jesus. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's a very good article The best sentence is: "All he really wants is... to have been right." That pretty much covers my feelings about where Scoop shows up in the whole picture. I can be left out completely, not even a footnote to some blogger, provided it ultimately becomes clear to everyone that the ideas expressed in the design of Scoop were right. ____Not the real rusty Indeed Kos understands very well how it all happened, in hindsight, and he does constantly say so. I'm sure he explained it to this guy, but it was a personality profile for political people, not a tech piece. I'm actually surprised "Scoop" even got in there by name. It doesn't usually. And actually, I kind of liked the mysterious phrasing. "A technology called Scoop" is much better for my purposes (that is, drawing a clearer distinction between Scoop and "blogging software") than the usual "a new blogging tool called Scoop" or especially the near-ubiquitous and utterly unhelpful "he changed blog software." I didn't really envision diaries working the way they have ended up on dKos, specifically, but the general gist of it is very much like what I always had in mind. It's interesting to me the extent to which software -- and most especially web software -- encodes explicitly political ideas. Like, take your regular blogging platform, blogger or MT or something. Their premises are that everyone should to have their own little space, their own soapbox, over which they have total control from look to content. They can choose to give up some control over small parts of it (like allowing comments) but the fundamental principle is one-man, one-blog. It's an individualistic medium. Even the bolt-on afterthoughts for moving people from blog to blog (like trackback) don't really do much to change that. It's still like walled villages sending messages by carrier pigeon. Scoop's politics, on the other hand, are quite a bit more socialist/libertarian/anarchist (depending on how you look at it). There's usually assumed to be someone at the top, but they can give up nearly as much control over the site as they want. And the code goes a pretty long way to encourage you to do just that. And the tradeoff is that any one individual poster loses control of a number of things, like layout and for some sites (like this one) even content. Anyway, I could go on and on. But eventually, someone should really make an effort to foreground all of this. I think most people really don't understand the extent to which social software (a field which is still booming) can't help but encode a political viewpoint. I don't know how much the creators of such software are thinking about that either. I always have, but I might be a weirdo. ____Not the real rusty lol what OBL == NIWS. ____Not the real rusty TWWOTV: Day Whatever I think it's day, like, 16 now. You probably thought I stopped updating daily because I quit and failed and was ashamed. But YUO WREE RONG! Actually, I just got really busy. So the experiment has concluded, and despite almost failing right at the very end, we discovered that TV was really not all that worthwhile. Well, come on. this is basically social science research here. Did you expect a conclusion any less painfully obvious? The second week of the experiment passed without anything really interesting to report. We continued to do the kind of stuff we had been doing. I am sad to say that the "extra hour or two a night" thing wears off pretty quickly. It just sort of gets re-absorbed back into your day, and the sense that it's "free time" because you're not wasting it like you normally would have just disappears. That concept may take some actual effort to sustain -- like not just saying "this is the time after dinner" but "this is the time that we specifically set aside to do something enjoyable and non-straining that otherwise we'd never find time for." Maybe that's the second part of the experiment. It's enlightening to point out the couple of times when we did miss watching TV. I found that I missed it when I was really tired. There's nothing less mentally or physically strenuous you can do than watch TV. Partly, I think, this feeling was due to not currently reading any undemanding books. I was, through the course of this experiment, reading Mason & Dixon, Consider the Lobster, and Everything and More Actually, no What mostly sucked up my free time last week was work. And that has a pretty strongly negative effect on my overall internet usage, since after staring at a screen for twelve hours because I have to, staring at it some more doesn't really sound like a very good idea. ____Not the real rusty Hey I caught your article via K5 vanity Google news-alert. I still wish we had published it. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Probably I did an interview with kpaul a while ago, for an article that he has still not finished for OJR (though, to be fair, I technically still owe them an article that is now, I think, like three years late) where I said much the same thing about blogging vs. community blogs. Just the blog stuff is interesting enough by itself, and yes, probably would go over a lot better here. That + the identity stuff (since it deals with the remaining big problem with obline community) would be a good article. The phrase "Web 2.0" was mainly what torpedoed it last time, despite being perhaps the only intelligent thing I've ever read with that phrase in it. ____Not the real rusty I'd be happy to live in a nutshell! ...as the Danish Prince was known to say. ____Not the real rusty Glutton for punishment ;-) ____Not the real rusty Same way they do now Say "I propose a filibuster" and have a vote on it. The old "stand on the floor and talk continuously" days are long over. ____Not the real rusty Just goes to show, once again: Bros before hos. Ignore it at your own peril. ____Not the real rusty Yikes I go with a 4:3 brown to white sugar ratio. 4:1 is just crazy talk. Also, for thicker cookies, add a little more flour. Butter and shortening have the same effect, shortening just tastes like nothing. ____Not the real rusty Hyundai L90D+ I have one, and like it. I don't know how it compares for response time, but I'm sure you can look that up. Froogle prices. ____Not the real rusty K5: We Lack Focus and Direction That would be much better than our current slogan, IMO. ____Not the real rusty All in good time... all in good time. ____Not the real rusty Sudden? Mexicans coming up here to work has been going on for, what, a couple hundred years now? What makes this sudden, other than media attention? ____Not the real rusty Also Farm closes for lack of legal labor ____Not the real rusty 2) cont'd: ...for starters. ____Not the real rusty Not for believing in freedom Just for writing about libertarianism on Kuro5hin. :-) It's nothing personal at all, mind you. I bear you no ill will, or no more than any other internet libertarian, and far less than most. It's just a subject that will get you (metaphorically, anyway) dragged, thrown, shot, and so forth should you choose to write about it here. I don't fault your belief in freedom. But the common thread in the majority of libertarian thought is an almost complete inability to recognize when their ideas of total freedom will inevitably lead to concentration of wealth and power, and therefore less freedom overall with more freedom for a very few of the richest and most powerful. Especially the many examples where this has already happened in the past, and the various laws and structures we now have in place were put there because the previous state of greater libertarianism failed in such a massive and unworkable way. So, if you felt up to writing an article that takes on this direct challenge to your political philosophy, feel free (no pun intended). But also you should probably know in advance that you'll be mostly wrong and widely berated here for even trying. It's not a real pro-libertarian crowd anymore, I'm afraid. Anyway, it wouldn't be me doing the abusing. I was just warning you that from past experience, it would be an even tougher sell than "oil dependence is bad." At least most people here do fundamentally agree with that concept. ____Not the real rusty That's good to hear I too consider myself a small-l libertarian. Left libertarian, specifically. Couldn't a lot of our problems with corporate power be ameliorated by revoking the "corporate person" legal fiction? ____Not the real rusty WIPO The distinction between the educated and the trainable. Specifically, whether college graduates need more or less further training before they can perform a useful task than those who have spent their lives in institutions for the "special." ____Not the real rusty There is no other I know no one will believe it, but I really don't use any other account for posting here. Not that I've never once done it, but I've never had any kind of ongoing pseudnymous account. The couple times I have have been for specific immediate reasons, and only used once or twice. ____Not the real rusty TWWOTV: Day Five I did one of the ridiculous things that living on an island sometimes compels you to do, and watched a movie. When we first bought this house my parents came up to help us clean it. It was right after we closed and we were still in our rental, which my dad was allergic to. So they figured they'd stay in this house overnight. But there was a problem: no bed. Well, there was one bed, but it was kind of scary. Actually, the whole place was kind of scary and they'd have been better off staying at our house, cats or no cats, but they didn't know that at the time. So they brought up my old childhood bunkbeds, since they broke down smaller than any other spare beds and since we were having nieces come to stay later that summer. And we figured that we'd probably want them for kids eventually anyway. Which was all well and good at the time, but we soon got a better guest bed and Ellie's room became a nursery where there wasn't space for bunkbeds (and probably never will be) and the bunkbeds have since been just taking up space in the basement and the spare bedroom. So when my parents asked over Christmas if we'd mind if they took them back, we were thrilled. "Have them back to you on the double, and glad to do so!" we said. For various reasons, tomorrow is a good day for me and Ellie to take a drive down there and deliver the beds. But now we have the logistical issue of getting them from here to there, which, broken down, means getting them from the basement and spare room down to the ferry dock, getting the ferry people (who generally wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire) to put them on the boat before 8:15 tomorrow (which is the last car ferry, and therefore the last ferry that has a forklift on board) and then getting them on top of the car tomorrow and fastened down so as to survive three hours at highway speed. The sucess of the last stage of that is yet to be determined. But the first stage could be done in my little island truck. So after dinner tonight (because god knows I'm not going to want to do this at 6:15 in the morning tomorrow) I loaded the two mattresses, two flat sub-mattress things (not exactly box springs, but similar), two pairs of head- and footboards, and various metal connecting bars into the little truck, along with a roll of duct tape, a lot of 8mil plastic sheeting, a sharp utility knife, an extremely terse note for the ferry crew that read, and I quote, "UP 1/7 AM FOSTER" encased in a big ziplock bag, and (for good measure) a dog into the truck, and headed down to the ferry dock. I strategically left at 7:00 -- the next boat was due at 7:30. I figured that would give me plenty of time before anyone started showing up. My goal, as always, was to have as few people as possible witness the comedy of errors that I knew this had every chance of becoming. I had already ascertained that there was an empty pallet down there. The plan was to lay the pallet down in a place that would be easy anough for the slack-jawed and probably already stoned deckhands to get the forklift to, but would be in their way enough that by, at most, the third time they had to maneuver around it one of them would notice the note and fetch someone who can read to interpret its markings for them. Then I would lay out the plastic sheet on top of the pallet, stack the bed parts in such a way that they would not be too prone to falling off as soon as someone tried to lift them, and wrap the plastic around the whole thing, securing it with the duct tape. What I needed was a big roll of that industrial saran wrap stuff, but I don't have any. Remind me to get some of that. This is not the first time I've wished I had some. It was snowing again by the time I got the dog, the bed, & etc. all in the truck and on the road. I was glad I had that plastic sheeting. The first stages of my plan all went pretty well -- got the pallet down so it almost, but not quite, blocked the freight area. They can get around it fine, but they will have to go around it, hopefully increasing the chance of it being noticed. I got all the pieces stacked well enough. I had enough plastic to get around the whole thing. Then I hit a snag. The duct tape does not stick to the plastic. I didn't know there was anything duct tape didn't stick to, but there you have it. Slightly-frozen, snowy plastic sheeting is impervious to duct tape. I tore off a strip and stuck it down, and it just slid off. I've never seen anything like it. So obviously, I had to go to plan B. Plan B was "think of plan C." I rummaged around in my truck a bit, and dug up a piece of rope that I might as well just name "plan C" for the number of times it has been. You can always tell the plan C rope because it has a permanent bowline tied in one end. You always need a bowline in one end. It's like a plan C rule. Even if you're not sure what you're going to do yet, when you find yourself in need of plan C just get a piece of rope and tie a bowline in one end. The rest will probably come to you. The rope was just long enough to go around one end of the bed-stack (without actually tying it to the pallet), sort of diagonally across the top, around the other end (ditto) and then fasten to itself near the middle with a number of what I would describe as "squirrel hitches." These are half-hitches done in the dark with freezing hands in the snow by someone who can't really remember how exactly you do a half hitch. It's like a really squirrelly half-hitch. It all seemed tight enough though. I gathered up the wads of extra sheeting (which was supposed to be all neatly taped down, you remember) and sort of stuffed it under various pieces of rope until it was relatively secure. Then I stuck my note (which actually does contain meaning) under a junction of the same rope. By this time some people were wandering down the hill to catch the incoming boat, whose green light was just becoming visible through the mist of snow in what I took to be a lovely Great Gatsby reference that I was quite a bit too chilly to properly enjoy. I judged it time to disappear before anyone else was able to connect me with the embarrassing pile of plastic-wrapped stuff on a pallet almost (but not quite) blocking the freight area. Leftover sheeting, knife, and useless duct tape went back in the truck, and we were off. So there you have it. One of the great benefits of living on an island is that you may find yourself at the end of a wharf at night in the snow, trying to wrap a disassembled bunkbed in plastic. I have seen it Although I probably didn't know there was an island there. It appears to be sort of between Long Island and Falmouth. Usually I'm up there in a kayak, so any island that direction would just blend in with the mainland. Anyone live there? Are they friendly? Would they welcome random kayakers some evening in the summer? ____Not the real rusty Exactly That partylite wrap was just what I needed. And but this wasn't just stickers, this was duct tape. The substance that you count on to stick to anything, anytime. My confidence in the world I thought I understood was shaken. ____Not the real rusty I got stuck ...with your mom and Bitsy last night. Wait, did I say "with?" I meant "in." ____Not the real rusty You asked for it. :-) ____Not the real rusty TWWOTV: Days three and four I'm not watching TV for two weeks. Yadda yadda yadda. Do I have to include this in the intro every time, or do you all know by now? Day three didn't really count. Christina had an event at work, which I'd have gone to regardless of TV status. But technically, I did fulfill the requirement. The event was a lecture by Will Richard, a photographer who's done a lot of work for and with the Smithsonian and National Geographic traveling and photographing in Nunavut, Labrador and Greenland. This was the second of two lectures -- the first was mainly about the early history and settlement of Greenland. This one was more of a general intro to the region's geography, people, and climate. Both were very interesting. Will's organizing a trip along the floe edge in Western Greenland this spring, which I would dearly love to go on but I don't have the $6,000 it would cost. That's actually not the expensive for a guided trip up there, but still more than I can afford. I am disappointed. On day four, I finally got a new notebook I had ordered, so I could begin another part of my overall plan. I mentioned before that I wanted to write more letters, and so I did. But also, I realized that I haven't written much here in the past couple years because at some point, it all got awkwardly public. Not only do all of you read what I post here, but my whole extended family does too. And no offense meant to you or them, but I just am not that public a person. There's a lot I don't want to talk about to everyone. So I mostly just stopped saying anything at all, which wasn't a very satisfying solution either. What I'm going to try is keeping an old-fashioned paper blog, which future generations of Fosters can feel free to read, pulp, or donate to the President Elinor Rose Foster Library (depending on how the rest of this life goes), where I don't have to feel constrained by having any actual readers until everyone involved is dead. Which frees me up to post the stuff I don't mind being public here, without having other things on my mind. The odds are that it will end up with a half-dozen entries and be forgotten, as seems to happen with most of these things. But you never know. It's worth a try. Also -- someone come up with a new front page poll. Thanks. I don't know There's nothing stopping them. My theory is that they just don't want to talk to any of you. ____Not the real rusty Not really Most of them would say I'm the more hermit-like Foster. I just prefer my sociability with less human interaction, and more text. ____Not the real rusty K5: Where the smart get mean. ____Not the real rusty I was being willfully obnoxious "Paper blog" is the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from a WEB 2.0 pioneer though, isn't it? ____Not the real rusty Because this one time, in band camp, America kicked my puppy. ____Not the real rusty plog? ____Not the real rusty But anonymity is so dull If I'm just going to be anonymous, I can keep my thoughts to myself in perfect anonymity. Plus I really don't have the patience to create and maintain another online persona besides, of course, the one I've already created. ____Not the real rusty What do you eat? We just worked out our actual food budget, and it has varied between $500 and $800 per month, over the last half year or so. We want to cut that down, and have had some success just by shopping less and making do with what's in the house, rather than picking up special ingredients when we want them. Also by not eating out more than once or twice a month. But it's still higher than we'd like. What do you tend to eat, to keep your budget down to $200 a month? ____Not the real rusty Too expensive Maybe it's your mom six times a week? That could be. ____Not the real rusty Good advice Oddly enough, we already do most of those things. We don't get the kind of stocking-up-in-bulk quantities I'd like, but that's mainly because until very recently, we didn't have anyplace to keep large quantities of stored food. We do now, so it's time to do more of that. Otherwise, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find any prepared foods in our house. My one real weakness is still cereal. Perhaps I can find a recipe for ceral that I can eat. I will attempt it, at least. :-) For just about every other prepared food we used to buy, we've figured out how to replace it with homemade. I used to make bread, but we don't eat bread fast enough to be worth it. I was constantly throwing out half a loaf. The storebought stuff lasts a lot longer in the fridge, and we probably buy a loaf of sliced 12-grain once a month. The only thing I have to disagree with you on is "flour is flour." That is not true. If all you use it for is coating fried chicken or making roux for gravy, then it doesn't matter. But once you get into pie crusts and breads, every flour has its own personality, and a lot of recipes that work perfectly with one brand don't work at all with a different one. So I do find it tough to switch flour brands, because I have to figure out all my quantities all over again. I do try to buy the largest bags of flour I can though. Usually I can't find bigger than 25 lbs, but that's not bad. I will try that chicken recipe. Sounds good. You might try it with turkey breast sometime -- turkey breasts are sometimes a lot cheaper than chicken, and (IMO) taste better. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wink wink, nudge nudge KnowwhatImean? ____Not the real rusty It's the implication... ...that someone would ever want to get in touch with a trombonist, I think. ____Not the real rusty You do know... ...that the Judge Judy TV show is not real court, right? ____Not the real rusty TWWOTV: Day Two I'm not watching TV for two weeks. It's day two. It's going well. Tonight, rather than watch TV, I did a bunch of filing that's been piling up for, umm, an embarrassingly long time. Let's just say that there were some bills in the "to-be-filed" stack that are older than my daughter. She can learn to sit up, walk, feed herself, say a few words, and dance in less time than it takes me to stick a damn cable bill in a filing cabinet. Note that the total distance between the stack and the filing drawer is less than three feet. But it does go to illustrate what you can accomplish with just two extra hours when you don't feel like you're supposed to be doing something else. That's the kind of task that never gets done because I put it off during the work day to a time when I'm not supposed to be working, and I put it off during the weekend to a time when I don't have a hundred and one errands to do and things to fix. I'm suddenly thinking of a lot of other things like that. All those little things that never get done. All those things that I just can't find time for. Hmm. Ellie's having a bad digestive day, and didn't want to go to bed on her own, so I spent some more time sitting with her in her rocking chair and reading while she tried to go to sleep. I can think of worse things to do. :-) Christina did some knitting, and something else that I don't remember what it was. Then she went to bed. And finally, I went running for the first time in over a month. I was sick, and then there were holidays, and with one thing and another it's been a while. So it was a predictably miserable and pathetic slog. I'll be back up to speed in no time. I did miss the TV a little when I was stretching before and after my run. I usually keep a couple of Modern Marvels episodes on the TiVO just for that purpose. I find Modern Marvels is interesting enough to take my mind off the deadly dullness that is stretching, without being so interesting that it keeps me sitting there when I'm ready to go. Stretching without it was a little less pleasant, and I probably rushed it a little more than I should have. Also, it's 23 degrees out, which is a surprisingly hard temperature to dress for running in. It's right on the border between what I'd consider "don't worry about it too much" cold and "don't break an ankle or you'll die of exposure" cold. Depending on the wind, it could go either way. In retrospect I overdressed somewhat, but considering my sluggish ass walked about one mile out of four, this was probably for the best. Intangible benefits of not watching tv: the quiet of the house between dinner and bed is really nice. Like it or not, you do have to admit that tv is generally pretty blaring. It combines a lack of any tolerance for silence with a lack of any of the repetitive rhythmic qualities of music. Or, to put it another way, tv produces noise. I find myself in a much better mood without that couple hours of noise in the evening. Other (dubious?) benefit: I'm obviously writing more. :-) Ooh, I'm sorry You forgot The Onion rule from day one. ____Not the real rusty IHL. IWHAND. ____Not the real rusty 23 isn't so bad Like I said, it's tricky to dress for, but it's not that bad. The coldest I've ever gone running in was -11. That, I admit, was almost solely so I could say I've done it, which I never miss an opportunity to do. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah, probably I did bring my driver's license, in case someone needed to identify the body. ____Not the real rusty I don't do this I eat Blueberry Morning cereal, which comes out of the box so hard that it's really best to wait a little while before attempting to eat it. And it has yummy dried blueberries. ____Not the real rusty Post And it is dee-licious. I'm eating some right this very moment. I go through probably a box a week. ____Not the real rusty Buck 181fx here I like it, although I don't think I'll ever use it to stab anyone. I'm a firm believer in the "running away like a coward" school of self defense. You know the old saying: "Run away, and live to run away again another day." I mostly use it to open letters, and the odd daily things where you think "I wish I had a knife to just [cut off&pipe;open&pipe;trim] this..." It annoys me that I'm not allowed to take it on airplanes, because I always think "if we crash and I manage to survive that, and then die of starvation or exposure because I didn't have any kind of blade on me, I'm going to be pissed." I know it's not very likely, but I really would be pissed. ____Not the real rusty Yes ____Not the real rusty Sure I know it dulls the knife, but what the hell? I can always get it sharpened. Meanwhile, I open letters every single day, so why not use the knife I always carry for it? If I was fussy about not dulling the blade, I'd never use the thing at all. :-) ____Not the real rusty Prescription: Keep running, stop smoking. :-) I turn 30 this July, and I'm in easily the best shape of my life. ____Not the real rusty Two Weeks Without TV We started an experiment today. For the next two weeks, we plan to not watch TV. The background is this: Our TiVo crapped out at the beginning of December, just barely less than three months after we finally got it. [Sidenote: The TiVO service is a nifty idea and works pretty well, but their hardware is crap. You can just tell when you pick up the box that it's the cheapest stuff they could put together. And why is the box so damn big? It's mostly empty. And it's noisy. And apparently it can't go three months without turning itself into a doorstop. Good service, lousy equipment. On with the story.] It being near the holidays, neither of us had time to wait for half an hour on hold with TiVO support to find out what we had to do to fix it. So we found ourselves in the silly situation of not having time to call support for the machine that recorded all the TV we didn't have time to watch. I considered having my answering machine call their voicemail, but didn't have time to rig that up either. Eventually, the holidays ended and I had a couple of free days, and they told me that I have to ship the box back to them and they'll send me a new one. In TiVO's favor, they were willing to replace it free on nothing but my say-so that it had been a full month since it broke. Before 90 days they'll replace it free, after that it's $50, and my ninety days was up a good three weeks before I called them. Without TiVO, I was suddenly exposed to commercials and restricted to network schedules again, after three months of freedom from both. It was immediately clear that most of what's on TV is crap, and even what isn't crap is so badly distorted by commercial breaks that it's hard to even remember what you were watching when it eventually comes back on. We used to have a pretty standard pattern. We'd eat dinner between 5:30 and 7, then usually watch something from TiVO and play with Ellie. Then Ellie would go to bed, and Christina and I would usually watch a CSI or something for another hour or two. Ellie isn't old enough to even pay attention to TV yet (except for Rachel Ray, of whom she's a big fan) but we still both felt like maybe it wasn't that best thing for us all to be doing together. So with the old TiVO soon to be in transit back to Kentucky and the new one heading our way eventually, we thought this would be a good time to see what we would do with ourselves if we just didn't watch TV at all for a while. I unplugged the cable from the back of the TV, but otherwise haven't gone to any trouble to hide it or anything. If I decide to watch something, I just have to go and screw the cable back in -- I figure that's enough to remind me that I was planning not to in case I simply forgot. This isn't a great big "I'm never going to watch TV again!" plan. We're not getting rid of it. I do plan to hook the TiVO back up when it comes. There are some shows I will still watch (Arrested Development, Family Guy... umm, I'm sure there's one or two more. 60 Minutes if we can ever get TiVO to record it right. I don't know. I'm sure there'll be something else good on eventually). We just want to see if we can find better things to do with ourselves when there isn't anything we have to be doing. Till now, that default activity has been "watch some TV." Day one went well. We played with Ellie, cleaned up the house when she went to bed. My wife got a nice backrub. I will go and read some more about Ben Franklin when I'm done posting this. I almost sat down and turned on the TV just before I started writing this, and then I remembered. Obviously it's a very ingrained habit. So, K5ers -- do you watch TV? A lot? A little? Have you ever decided not to for some period of time? Also, those of you who don't own a television, try not to make a cliche out of yourselves. :-) There is that One of the reasons I don't want to totally ban it. My wife grew up on top of a mountain without anything but a couple of network channels, and every once in a while I still run across these huge voids in her store of cultural references. I'll refer to something I just assume everyone my age would know about, and get a blank look. It's really odd. ____Not the real rusty In a couple of months, I'm taking a welding class. I always wanted to learn how to weld. Who knows, maybe I'll even think of some reason it was worth learning. I also have decided to write more letters. Like actual mail letters, on paper with a pen. I'm afraid I'm forgetting how to write by hand. ____Not the real rusty Next I will try "Rope tricks" for another +2 Dexterity. ____Not the real rusty Damn Maybe a Charisma boost would be more useful. ____Not the real rusty They're called lifelines you landlubber. ____Not the real rusty That's pretty good K5, right here, is really one big surrogate activity from start to finish. Begun by me because I had no need to exert myself for the basics of life whatsoever and needed something to do, and presumably filled up by all of you for the same reason. Hooray for industrial society! ____Not the real rusty Thanks for the recommendation I will look for it. And you are in no way obligated to care what I think. ____Not the real rusty Got NPR? We listen to a lot of NPR. Good source of news. And really, there are some TV shows worth having a TV to watch. Arrested Development is truly great. And last season, FX's Over There was some of the best drama I've ever seen anywhere. Netflix that if you haven't seen it -- they probably have the box set. ____Not the real rusty NPR I mainly put on NPR when I'm doing something that doesn't otherwise occupy my brain. It's the best thing in the world for washing dishes or cleaning the house. ____Not the real rusty Have a baby By the end of the day, the primary effect of having a baby in the house is to spread all of your posessions in one more or less even layer around the whole house. The good news is that this configuration represents the maximum entropy, and therefore the lowest energy state of the house. So further days will not increase the mess -- they will merely randomly reorder some parts of it. But the bad news is it means you will be constantly tripping over, breaking, and impaling yourself on various pieces of baby gear. So basically, it forces you to clean up religiously every day. ____Not the real rusty There was probably a power outage. lol. what? ____Not the real rusty No comment. [nt] ____Not the real rusty I played an awesome game over Christmas It's called Apples to Apples. It's two decks of cards -- one deck is basically nouns and the other adjectives. Every player gets seven noun cards, and then they take turns turning over one of the adjective cards. Each other player (who isn't dealing the adjective this time) puts out what they feel is the most apt noun card they have for that adjective, and the dealer decides whose was best. That player gets the adjective card, anbd everyone takes a new noun to replace the one they played. The goal is to get the most adjective cards. It sounds kind of dry, but the fun comes from picking the right noun for the person who happens to be choosing who wins that hand, and also from lobbying for your card. For example, I won the "Shocking" card with "Swiss Cheese." I successfully made the case that swiss cheese was the most shockingly inappropriate card played. With people you know well, it's pretty fun. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with two people. But I thought I'd plug it anyway. ____Not the real rusty Meh Like most things, TV is ok if you can find the proper balance for it. I do think most people's (including, obviously, mine) TV habit is pretty far out of whack. It's main downside (and primary draw) is that it usually demands nothing from you. Just sit and stare. "Look! Listen! Kneel! Pray! ... COMMERCIALS!" as Brad Pitt's character succinctly puts it in 12 Monkeys. It doesn't have to be that way though. It is possible to make TV that demands something from the viewer, and that gives more than it takes. It just usually isn't done. It would be a mistake to blame the medium for the failures of those producing its content. But nearly every season, there's at least one or two shows on somewhere that demonstrate why TV isn't inherently evil. ____Not the real rusty 45 minutes? I believe we're down to a 40 minute hour. It's funny when you watch shows on DVD or tivo, because you suddenly notice that after every break, they all recap everything that's happened so far. It seems really repetitive and pointless, until you remember that they're structuring it for people who have just waited through ten minutes of commercials and probably forgot what they were watching. ____Not the real rusty The bar thing No, if you watched TV more it wouldn't make any difference -- that happens to me too. I hate the way all bars have TVs in them now. Hate hate hate. If I wanted to watch TV, why would I be in a bar? I wish someone would start a TV-free bars movement, like the smoke-free bars everywhere now. ____Not the real rusty Perhaps I will I'm afraid it might get tedious to update daily, but then maybe not. It is a Diary after all, right? Well, look for tonight's report later on. ____Not the real rusty Having worked for the EPA That is the best description of it I've ever seen. ____Not the real rusty 3.2, 3.6, 3.7, 2.6, 3.9 Ooh. He can't be too happy with those scores, Jim. I'm not sure this puts him out of medal contention, but it'll certainly be tough to recover in the next round. ____Not the real rusty I don't disagree with the sentiment, particularly I was just scoring the troll. ____Not the real rusty We are legion. [nt] ____Not the real rusty lol what? I like Jimbo a lot. He did K5 a favor way back in the day, and he's done me a favor by freezing the Rusty Foster wikipedia article more recently. I'm sorry I wasn't specific enough -- I agree with the idea that Wikipedia itself is a lot less useful than its promoters would like us to believe. I agree with Larry Sanger's assessment that it fails because the dumb pushes out the smart. And I also think that starving Africans will get a lot less out of comprehensive Klingon language and pededophilia information than they might from many other possible charitable works. ____Not the real rusty It's not all europeans It seems to just be Swedes. I have yet to meet a Swede who isn't totally convinced their country is the best in the world, and willing to tell you why at great length from the next cubicle in their office in the US, where they came because they can't get a good job in beloved Sweden. :-) Not that they're necessarily wrong -- Sweden has a lot of good points. But they do get tiresome about it. ____Not the real rusty If it is... ...he should probably find a hobby he's better at. I hadn't noticed I was being harassed. Maybe he means some other rusty. :-) Also, for the record, my grades in college were poor. Damn poor. They were only decent for the few classes I actually attended. ____Not the real rusty Damn! I was all set to post the Dexter followup "Nyactually, [pushes glasses up nose] languages like mPerl and mPython yarr compiled, mbut it's done by the interpreter just before runtime..." but you covered it yourself. Next time leave some dorkiness for the rest of us please. ____Not the real rusty Thinking that... ...calling me "Grand Poobah Nerd of the Universe" is kissing ass definitely says something about your values. ____Not the real rusty Vibration? I would think those RC helicopters would have terrible vibration. What kind of extremes do you have to go to to damp it enough to get a decent picture? ____Not the real rusty What I'd do Look for a biggish mylar RC helium blimp. It'd be a lot slower, but probably make a far better camera platform. ____Not the real rusty Canon 20D Screw you. No seriously, screw you. Bastard. Don't worry Rusty. Taking pictures with a 4 megapixel Casio piece of shit just makes you a better photographer. Keep telling yourself that... ____Not the real rusty Heh I think last time I did some dream-shopping for cameras, I came to the same conclusion about the rebel. It seemed like the difference between that and the 20D did not justify the extra money. And no, good gear does not make you a good photographer. It can, however, save an awful lot of time in photoshop cleaning up basic flaws that the camera leaves in every goddamn picture. Not to mention allow you to actually control things like depth of field. What I wouldn't give for some say over the depth of field. Actually, working with poor gear has probably been good for me. Just like crappy computers make better programmers. But I'm sick of it now. :-) ____Not the real rusty tick tick tick tick If you listen closely, you can hear Orange Tanning Cream's time running out... ____Not the real rusty What a coincidence I just finished reading that trilogy again. I think what you might be missing is it's not just about the beginnings of science and technology as we know them now, but also the beginnings of the global economy as we know it now. It's remarkable that so many of the roots of our world lie in what Stephenson casts as Daniel Waterhouse's lifetime. So that's the point of the intrigues of royals and merchants. I suppose you could probably read all three books and skip all the econ stuff, but I think you'd be missing out on a lot. Incidentally, I think there's a lot of pretty thinly-veiled subtext of "this system sucks" behind the way Stephenson develops his economics lessons in those books. Maybe you skipped too much to have gotten that. ____Not the real rusty Bread... ...could be considered a sort of very coarse foam. ____Not the real rusty Me too I'm too busy to write the rest of this comment. You'll have to imagine what it might have said. ____Not the real rusty I'm too busy to have read that $ ____Not the real rusty Hm I got Nobody Likes a Vegetarian a while ago, and I didn't have any trouble with them. ____Not the real rusty The NSA mandate The NSA's whole purpose is collecting foreign signals intelligence. They're not supposed to do any spying on Americans whatsoever. So regardless of the consitutional issues, this isn't even the right agency to be running the show. The FBI is supposed to spy on Americans. Illegal and incopetent. The Bush administration in a nutshell right there. ____Not the real rusty Also Before anyone else points it out, I do recognize the irony that I misspelled "incompetent." ____Not the real rusty Right You're right. ____Not the real rusty We're waiting for the Senate hearings Oh, how I do love the Senate hearings. It'll be the best Christmas ever. ____Not the real rusty The Party of opposition The Dems are the minority party. Their role is to oppose the excesses of the majority, and make sure there's enough sand in the works that the (very slightly) many can't just trample the will of the (very slightly) few. This is how democracy works. I'm not alone in thinking that I'd rather the dems do a little less accomodating than they do, but they're doing pretty well as far as I'm concerned. In the unlikely event that the Democrats manage to take back any part of the government in 06, I will be back to ask you why the republicans aren't cooperating with them. :-) ____Not the real rusty The patriot act This filibuster is actually not all that meaningful for national security, even if you believe that the patriot act has anything to do with national security. Most of the patriot act either was permanent from the start or has since been made so, and most of the provisions that do expire don't expire for another couple years. The stuff that's causing problems here are things that are really shameful for a nation that claims to be the standard-bearer of liberty for the world. Library snooping? Roving wiretaps? 30 days before anyone has to be notified that their property has been searched? Secret access to business records and medical records? Entirely secret courts? National Security Letters? I mean, this is all hideous big brother crap which would make the framers of the Constitution utterly ill to even think abuot. It is, almost to the letter, the exact stuff that they specifically made illegal in the Bill of Rights, having just seen it done to them by the Brits. And these things do not start at the water's edge. Every one of these provisions applies right here at home, to you and me and the phalanx of NSA spooks who are reading over our shoulders right now. And meanwhile, how many terrorists have we successfully caught and tried, with this grab bag of new "tools" granted to Johnny Law? None. So far, we stand at zero convictions for terrorist activity. That would be a four-year average of 0.00 per year. Also worth noting on the political angle of all this is this info:Frist seemed uncertain how to resolve the Patriot Act impasse, but he categorically rejected an attempt by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to extend the existing law for three months while lawmakers work out differences on the reauthorization of the act. The majority leader also refused a second request by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada for a short extension, saying that Bush would not sign such a bill.So the majority, in this case, is playing an all-or-nothing game. Should democrats be blamed for failing to find compromise with a party that refuses outright to seek compromise? So, as you say, "renewal of the PATRIOT Act with some well-advised edits should not even have been difficult." And indeed, renewal of the prosaic stuff that was already mostly in RICO anyway was not difficult, or even necessary. What they're doing here are the well-advised edits. And so it's predictably dramatic and overblown, but fundamentally they're just trying to edit out the worst of the terror-panic bits. If they don't get renewed, we will all have benefitted. ____Not the real rusty There you go Don't say our broken links never gave you any great philosophical questions to ponder. ____Not the real rusty A common theory But not actually true, for the most part. Stories pick up plenty more comments once they're out of the queue, typically. ____Not the real rusty No idea, really My guess has always been that most of the anonymous people in who's online have gotten here (to some story or other) through google. Google is typically among the biggest referrers every month, so I know they're getting here from there, but where they go is just a guess. It just seems the most likely thing. The who's online box is also a sort of rolling average, not really a literal snapshot. I think what it technically shows is who has been here in the last five minutes. So people randomly clicking through from a search engine or some blog would tend to show up as a large and constant mass of anonymous, when the majority of them probably only hit one page, read what they came for and left. I do have logs and basic stats, but I don't even attempt to parse them to that degree of detail. I'm sort of idly curious about it sometimes, but I have a lot of other things to do which carry much stronger motivation than idle curiosity. :-) ____Not the real rusty Calculator Pshaw. No calculators allowed when I took the SAT. ____Not the real rusty I am that old They changed the rules to allow calculators a couple years after I took it. I hope they made it much harder. :-) ____Not the real rusty Anyway Most of the SAT math section is just doing enough of the problem to rule out the obviously wrong answers. I don't recall needing to actually finish very many of them. ____Not the real rusty Prediction Soccer will still be boring. ____Not the real rusty I can take some zeros I mena, they're only comment ratings. It's not like you're forcing me to watch soccer or something. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Hey, that's handy Now I can just stare at that for an hour, and it'll be just like watching a real soccer game. I can't even tell the difference! ____Not the real rusty Football and baseball are boring too Sports I like are hockey, which is like soccer on a much smaller, nearly frictionless field where there's some reasonable chance that someone will score a goal within one human lifetime, and tennis, which is not really like any team sport, and more resembles two people mentally beating themselves up to find out who will collapse first. If there were such a thing as competitive interrogation, I'd guess it would look a lot like tennis. So yeah, since most really top-level soccer games are lucky if they see one goal in regular play, the emotional impact of a goal is huge. But all the rest of the time is generally a great yawning gulf of empty time where grown men kick a ball up and down a field and nothing much happens. I know people love soccer, and you're all welcome to like whatever sport you want. But I will still think it's boring. :-) ____Not the real rusty You have zebras? And so many that you require special crossings for them? Where do you live? All we have here is deer and moose crossings. ____Not the real rusty Of course you can be punished for a mental attitude! This comes up all the time in discussion of hate crime laws, and it's the most absurd nonsense to say that there's no such thing as thought crime. Say you run over a person with your car. You will not be charged with "running over a person with your car." You will be charged with something like vehicular manslaughter, reckless endangerment, criminally negligent homicide, murder two, murder one -- there's a whole range of crimes you might have committed in the act of running over someone with your car. And one of the primary factors in determining what your crime was was your motivation in doing the criminal act. If you ran over your ex-wife who was suing you for all of your millions, and the prosecutor can find evidence that you intended to run her over and planned it out in advance, you might be charged with murder one -- premeditated homicide. Or perhaps you saw your ex-wife crossing the street and a terrible rage overtook you. Then maybe it's murder two -- a crime of passion. Or perhaps you ran over a stranger, and there was no motivation for it, you were just checking your hair in the rearview and not paying attention. That might be vehicular manslaughter. My point is that motivation -- what was in your head at the time -- plays a large role in determining the severity of most criminal punishments. We consider accidents less serious than purposeful crimes. Why shouldn't we consider crimes motivated by general hate of some group of people worse than crimes motivated by some specific beef with one person? ____Not the real rusty lol rofl learn to read I said "motivation." "Motive" has a particular legal meaning and connotation, which you appear to have a solid grasp of. By motivation, I meant the more general "what prompted an event to occur" -- what you call the "conditions of the crime." ____Not the real rusty Good thing or bad thing? It's a bad thing when a hate crime is not punished as such due to lack of evidence. Just like it's a bad thing when a murder isn't punished due to lack of evidence. I would argue that it would be a worse thing to abandon laws against murder just because some murders slip through the cracks. And likewise I'd say it would be a bad thing to abandon the whole concept of hate crime laws because some hate crimes cannot be proven as such. And no, "religions" and "political organizations" are not punished by hate crime laws at all. Individuals who commit crimes are. You do not go to court and face a charge of hate. You go to court and face a charge of some violent crime or property destruction. If there is evidence that your crime was motivated by hatred of a class of people, of whom your victim was your chosen exemplar, you may face stiffer punishment. So "hate crime" is an exacerbating factor in your sentencing, if they can prove that your hate was an exacerbating motive in your crime. As for privileging special groups, take Wisconsin's penalty-enhancement statute for an example. It says that anyone who:Intentionally selects the person against whom the crime under par. (a) is committed or selects the property that is damaged or otherwise affected by the crime under par. (a) in whole or in part because of the actor's belief or perception regarding the race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry of that person or the owner or occupant of that property, whether or not the actor's belief or perception was correct...may be subject to extra penalties for hate crimes. So, you're saying that there is someone out there who does not have a race, a color, a sexual orientation, a national origin, or an ancestry and is therefore not protected under this law in any way? Sure, some people (arguably) don't have a religion, adn many don't have a disability. But find me a single person on earth who isn't covered by at least one of these categories. I'll even let you win if you can find someone who isn't covered by no less than five of them. So where's the special protection under the law? If you're arguing that the law isn't applied fairly, that's an issue you'd need to take up with the officers of the court. There are many, many laws that still aren't applied fairly. I agree with you that that is always wrong. But that doesn't make the law itself wrong. If you meant, instead, to argue that certain attributes of a person are specially protected, while others are not, you may have a slightly better point. The attributes specially protected are things that I think we as a society believe that you should be free to be or believe without fear of reprisal. This, nevertheless, is basically the point where the whole issue comes down to belief rather than argumentative error. You may not believe that it's worse the beat someone to death because they're gay than because you want their money. I believe, as heinous as both scenarios are, that the former is worse because your action is intended as an assualt on one gay person and a mortal threat to all others. So like genocide is a worse crime than even a large number of murders, I think a crime motivated by hate is a worse crime than the same one motivated by, say, greed or plain stupidity. ____Not the real rusty Fine by me A racist who never speaks out is an ideological dead-end. When he dies, his ideas die with him. I don't believe for a minute it would succeed, but if hate-crime laws could keep racists from speaking out, that would be just peachy to me. ____Not the real rusty Also For one, no ideology that is only ever spoken is a crime itself. Free speech, and all that. That's the whole point. there's no such crime as "hating". Hate-crime laws are sentencing modifications to existing crimes. Speaking about your hateful ideology is never a crime. Acting on it is. I think that's exactly right. ____Not the real rusty I'll take a stab at that While acknowledging that the "privileged types of identity" issue is one where I can see reasonable people disagreeing. The way I see it is, we privilege identity-groups that are (a) large, (b) involuntary, or (c) historically discriminated against. And often it's at least two out of the three. So we have sexual identity -- large groups, and arguably involuntary ones. Religion -- historically discriminated against. And so forth. Social class would probably fit in there well, as far as I'm concerned. The example text I linked to didn't include gender either, which I think it should. I don't think hate crime laws should be so vague as to include any group whatsoever, though. Not so much because some types of identity shouldn't be protected, but because at some point the laws could be applied in any circumstance, so what's the point? I think the point of hate-crime laws is to attempt a special deterrent to crimes against identity-groups who have been routinely victimized historically. And by that I don't mean "Jews" or "gays" -- I mean more general groups like "some religon." There's virutally no religion that hasn't been victimized at some point, somewhere. And few that haven't been on the other side of that too. And part of it doesn't even rely on their ever being enforced. Just enacting such laws is saying that we, as a society, will not stand for hate. Don't discount the communicative properties of the law. ____Not the real rusty Er, also... ...all crimes done for personal enrichment. Like, the vast majority of theft. Or of crime in general. ____Not the real rusty Then let me stand up for the sane left and condemn that pack of environmentalist nincompoops for you. My wife worked for US PIRG for a while, years ago, so I got to hear what they were raising money for all the time. It was mostly for Sierra Club projects, and I don't think there was a single one that wasn't wrongheaded or short-sighted in one of the ways you describe. The thing is, trhurler caricatures some imaginary left in his mind, and you mainly see the screaming ninnies of PETA and the ELF. But there is a very large chunk of the US population that is perfectly capable of both prioritizing environmental concerns, and realizing that the world demands a reasonable balance between a lot of competing factors like economics, social welfare, the state of some particular ecosystem, etc. In fact, a lot of the very best environmentalists are people like hunters and timber land managers, for whom left and right are irrelevant to the whole issue. The point for them is, they use the land and they want to see it conserved for the future. It is true that the perception of the left in the US has largely been hijacked by extremists, a view promoted gleefully by the right, who do their best to make sure that we all know when some PETA idiot does something stupid. Those people do not represent most of us, and most of us are just as disgusted by them as you are. If you look at the actual record of Democratic leaders (and particularly democratic presidential administrations) you'll find a very different picture than what the right-wing caricaturists would have you think. ____Not the real rusty Says who? I know plenty of leftists who disavow the actions of the nuts. Where are you looking for condemnation? And are you looking as hard at the right? Also, I do think it's a mistake to lump Greenpeace in with the ELF and PETA. Greenpeace goes overboard sometimes (literally!), but they also do a lot of perfectly sensible lobbying work geared toward improving environmental standards. I used to live downstairs from a greenpeace honcho, and they know perfectly well that their stunts are just that -- stunts. It's what they do when they can't come up with any better way to get heard by someone in power. but it isn't their first or only choice. If your standard is "any politician who accepts campaign contributions from Greenpeace is a left-wing wacko," then I think you're setting up a standard that most Democrats will and should fail. ____Not the real rusty So... ...the Right is all crazy and the Left is all crazy. So you forget the whole thing, become a libertarian, and whine about it all on the internet. I had that stage as well. Many people do. It seems, sometimes, like most K5ers are still there. But eventually, you have to get beyond that and realize that the whole thing is going to keep chugging along no matter what you think, and figure out who you think is going to do a better job. I don't like a lot of things my party does, but they're the ones I'm more likely to agree with on any given issue. ____Not the real rusty Ah well then In that case: Rush the Drug Addict Limbaugh, Bill the Sexual Predator O'Reilly, and Jerry Gays Caused 9/11 Falwell*, and fuck you very much. :-) As a matter of fact, it seems like the GOP right now is really suffering because you're so beholden to people who really ought to be condemned, shunned and marginalized, if you want to maintain any pretense of conservatism in the party at all. *I know you tried to exempt this one, but come on. Show me where George w Bush condemns Falwell. Or Pat robertson, for that matter. ____Not the real rusty Isn't that straw man dead yet? You certainly beat it enough. Yes, I am perfectly comfortable saying Howard Dean, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein and Chuck Shumer are not nutjobs. I doubt you'd actually disagree with any of them about very much. Just like I hardly ever disagree with the majority of things Republicans want to do. We all just hyperfocus on the places we do disagree, and so now we're expected to think everyone on the other side is a raving lunatic. Also, Howard Dean gets perfect marks from the NRA. It would be more fun arguing with you about politics if you appeared to ever know anything. Stick to cars. ____Not the real rusty No kidding Ruby is trucker hats for programmers. ____Not the real rusty I do like perl I also have no problem with Ruby the language. I don't know enough about it to have any problem with it. All I do know is that I haven't heard about anything it does that perl doesn't do. What I do have a problem with is silly programming language hype. ____Not the real rusty Yeah yeah Ruby vs. Perl == Turing machine vs. C++? And actually, since this thread made me curious, I poked around for some more info on Ruby. Here's my first sense: whereas the motto for perl is "There's more than one way to do it," the motto for Ruby appears to be "There's only one way to do it." It's a pure OO langauge for OO purists. If you are one, you'll probably love it. I am not one, and even their toy snippets boded massive annoyance down the road to me. So, basically, it's another bondage and discipline language, where there's the object oriented way or the highway. No thanks. ____Not the real rusty Perl programmers... ...don't like to be bossed around by their programming language. We generally tend to think it's not the job of the language to prevent us from doing things, even if some things we do turn out to be a bad idea. Ruby comes from the school of languages that are designed to prevent you from doing things that the ruby language designers don't think you ought to do. So whatever you are able to do with it will probably look pretty, but lots of people will just say "the hell with this" and what they were going to do won't get done. Or it'll get done in perl. ____Not the real rusty It could be Like I said, this is my impression from like literally five minutes of googling and glancing at a couple of code examples. I also may have an unusually low tolerance for being told what the right way to do things is. I am not, when you get right down to it, a very good programmer. And whatever they do with Perl 6, I'm just praying it doesn't mean we have to completely rewrite Scoop. ____Not the real rusty And is ongoing... ...all the time. what I'd hate to see is a change in some basic syntax (like the OO syntax for method calls, which I know is going to change) that required us to entirely replace every instance of the old syntax with the new. But as ducksalve said, I think one of the goals is to make sure perl5 code works, so I'm not that concerned about it. ____Not the real rusty Ha But I'm already the biggest Web 1.5 success story ever! Web 1.5: Those of us who were a little bit late for all the 1.0 hype, have been around since then, and have already done most of the things that are all hyped now as Web 2.0, but being too old to be new and cool. Long live Web 1.5! ____Not the real rusty What does... ...having a number be an object gain you, in actual programming ease or the range of things you can do with a number? ____Not the real rusty It could hurt... ...if having things be objects even when there's no earthly reason for it makes your language slow to run and cumbersome to use. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also I Am Wanking To Porn. The thing is, you just never know which is meant for any given post. ____Not the real rusty No el guapo is a very oldtimer. Way back in, I guess, early 2001 he did the site a big favor related to hardware. ____Not the real rusty I was not that guy I remember that guy though. He was a good guy. we still keep in touch. ____Not the real rusty No Paying for a membership does not get you any special protection. It might be enough to get you a warning instead of an immediate ban, the first time. Incidentally, we do use the warning system, but generally not for people who already know the score. If you've been banned in the past, you probably shouldn't expect any warnings. ____Not the real rusty Um The line is more of a spectrum, I think, depending on who happens to be minding the store on any particular day, and what mood they're in. There are things that are definitely Over the Line, and there are tons of things that are not. You seem to have a talent for finding the middle of the line. I can say I actually thought the Christmas story was pretty good. It was a lot better than the Jailhouse stuff, which was mainly shock for shock's sake. The Christmas story, while still somewhat obnoxious, actually had some humanity in the main character and some motivation to the obnoxious bits. If you stuck to writing like that and left the videos alone, you'd probably last a lot longer. You seem to be improving. I confidently predict that soon, you will be able to go several months between bannings. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hmm It is technically feasable -- I mean, we know all the bits of information that make up the answers to your questions. And it would be kind of nice to have logging happen within Scoop, because then I wouldn't have to remember to set up webalyzer all the time and I could give clients some snazzy reports about what stuff they post is most popular and gets the most attention. What we'd have to do, I guess, is have a logging table that Scoop updates on every request, and the generate a daily breakdown sometime in the middle of the night with. There would be some performance penalty, but this table would be write-only, so it doesn't really need any indexes. A single INSERT per hit that doesn't have to do anything but dump data into the table wouldn't too bad. So what would we need to store? Timestamp, user ID of the requestor (which would be -1 if it was anonymous), requestor's IP, resource requested, referrer, probably user agent. I think that's it, really. The interesting question then is what form do you summarize the data to, that leaves you the flexibility to generate different kinds of reports without having to store every line of the log forever? I guess I'd probably do it by resource (story, comment, whatever) and by user. So you'd have one summary per day per thing, and one per day per user. The thing summary would say how many total requests for that day, how many were site users and how many anonymous, how many were "unique" (probably defined by uid/ip combination), and maybe the top N referrer URLs for that day. It would also be interesting to keep a summary of how many pages each user requested per day. You could produce a sort of "most active users" list from that. I definitely am not going to promise this immediately, but it is a pretty good idea. I have a few other things that are higher on the list, but consider it noted. ____Not the real rusty If I had only known, I'd have said that Have A Nice Day was required to see a good movie instead. ____Not the real rusty No love for Ollie? A goose gets no respect until he gets himself some boots. Then the man be a stomper. ____Not the real rusty Gotta love that Max What's kind of scary is how many of these authors I recognized. ____Not the real rusty Three paragraphs? This why you be ig'nant. ____Not the real rusty I actually kind of almost understood that This is vaguely the same thing that Feynman was doing with his diagrams, right? ____Not the real rusty Hooray for guage invariance! (That's what physicists say when they mean "Hooray for boobies!") ____Not the real rusty I have not Should I? ____Not the real rusty You will lose half a grade for every day it is late. If the doctor's note says that you could not complete your report because you were deceased, you will only lose half a grade for every two days it is late. Hey, I'm here to give you an education, not be your mommy. ____Not the real rusty Cookie problems A few people seem to have cookie issues. Obviously it's not everyone, but I've gotten a couple emals about it. It doesn't seem to matter what the browser is -- the emails I got were about IE. I've been suggesting digging up your K5 cookie in the browser and deleting it, and restarting the browesr. That usually works. ____Not the real rusty No cookie a'tall? I was assuming you had an old one that was preventing your fresh one from being set. You don't have one at all? And if you turn on warnings wehn sites try to set cookies, does K5 try to set one when you log in? ____Not the real rusty Ah ha I bet you were hitting http://kuro5hin.org/ right? It wants to set a cookie for .www.kuro5hin.org, and I forgot to add the redirect configs to make sure that everyone gets pushed to www. Now it oughta work. ____Not the real rusty Server time was screwed up And fixing it involved going back in time to before the problem ever started. So you may see some posts that appear chronologically implausible. You should keep in mind what Einstein said about the relativity of time, and just think of those comments as being on a different "time slice" than the diary. Or just think of them as being accelerated with respect to each other. ____Not the real rusty Watches? Ties? I avoid this problem by never wearing either one. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha ha I still have nothing to worry about. :-) ____Not the real rusty Spellcheck! Thanks for reminding me. Gotta install aspell and all that crap. It should be back shortly. ____Not the real rusty There you go $ ____Not the real rusty Welcome Back I have to admit, I got kind of lonely without you knuckleheads. So, for K5 status -- the archive database is not fully rebuilt yet. It's loading now, but it's huge so it'll be a little while yet. You may have hotlist entries blank, or possibly some other squirrely things from that, but it'll be back up soon. I fixed the mail problem, so you can start making dupe accounts again. Currently, everything else works as far as I know. If you see anything broken, tell me. I re-read book 1 and am halfway through book 2 of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle, if you were wondering. Pickings at the library have been pretty slim lately. Also, some useless facts about K5: There are 1.4 million comments in the archive, and another half million in the live database There are about 130,000 stories total When dumped to SQL (using mysql's --opt switch) the two databases are about 1.9Gb total The old database server was a dual P3 700Mhz with 1Gb of memory The old web server was a dual P3 1Ghz with 1gb of memory Both new servers are dual 2.4Ghz Xeons, with 2Gb of memory It's 2:15 am, and i'm going to bed No unix, but... ...there is, as you say, still penis. What the Baroque cycle books really are is nerd historical-romance. I like them because they're history written from the perspective of someone whose interests are similar to mine. I wish there were more historical books like them. ____Not the real rusty Ha ha ha! No, really, probably not. ____Not the real rusty Who put the sand in your vagina, Ed? ____Not the real rusty Or will it? ____Not the real rusty Esteemed Mr. Frog, Sorry about that. I had a missing curl binary and some permission issues with certificates. It should all be working properly now. ____Not the real rusty That'd probably work better if... ...I turned on the cron that makes sure that stuff all happens. Slowly, we track down all the little bits and pieces I forgot about... ____Not the real rusty A Tigon. ____Not the real rusty And that's about as far as we need to take that. ____Not the real rusty You totally fail it. ____Not the real rusty I didn't get it I guess the lesson here is I fail it. ____Not the real rusty Ha We don't belong in a group together, rather, we're the remainder left over once group membership is finalized. I've felt that way about almost every group I've ever nominally been a part of, of any kind. I think though you're mostly being a wiseass, you may have identified something that everyone who regularly participates here actually does have in common. We might very well be a group of people who do not belong to groups. That would explain an awful lot. ____Not the real rusty Good point An interesting converse question would be "Why is K5's demise constantly being heralded, even though there's clearly no danger (or prospect, depending on how you look at it) that it's going anywhere?" ____Not the real rusty A) no he's not an editor, and B) even if he were he couldn't modify the comment. Unbelievable though it may seem, Scoop still does not provide the ability to edit comments. No one has ever really needed it. I can barely believe that either, and at this point it's become something of a deathwatch situation -- "When will someone finally need to be able to edit comments badly enough to add that?" ____Not the real rusty Actually The reason why I doubt it would ever be used here even if the feature did exist is just that I'm totally not interested in being asked for an edit by everyone who made a typo in a comment. So I'm not lying when I say it's not possible, but at some point in the future it might be possible, and at that point I will be lying when I say it still isn't, but you'll never get me to admit it. ____Not the real rusty I've already upped my respectability So up yours! ____Not the real rusty You set 'em up I knock 'em down. :-) ____Not the real rusty It makes sense if you're a nerd Perl, which probably stole it from sed or awk or some other shitty caveman regexp parser, uses $ to denote the end of a line in a regular expression. So it makes perfect instinctive sense as soon as you see it that $ means "the end." ____Not the real rusty I recommend "Awk The Open Source Caveman" ____Not the real rusty Identity policy That's really the rub. What user control we have works or doesn't work because there is enough/not enough "good faith" signal drowning out noise. So story voting works pretty well, because there's lots of voters and few things to vote on, so most things get many votes. Comment rating works crappy, because there's way more things to vote on than voters. The first crucial step in making a community able to defend itself with more direct authority would be to ensure that one person has as close as possible to one vote. And then the second step would be to ensure that generally voters outnumber things to vote on by a healthy margin. So far, the only idea I've got for ensuring identity is charging a nominal fee for rights. You could conceivably just require a credit card and authorize a small fee but not charge it, but I'm not sure how much of that sort of thing CC processors will put up with before getting upset with you. Those two issues, and the first much more than the second, are basically what's keeping me from pushing further toward more direct user control. Well that and lack of time. We may yet see more powers granted here for those who are willing to identify themselves. ____Not the real rusty Adjustment 10% of people aren't interested in contributing anything, but they make 90% of the noise. ____Not the real rusty s/cry/wank/ ____Not the real rusty Heh. YOU WANT TO CALL THE LAW? I AM THE LAW, BITCH! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Do we all look like ants from way up there on your pedestal? ____Not the real rusty Saw him on the Daily Show I've been meaning to get that from the library. ____Not the real rusty I am teh poor. ____Not the real rusty Yeah me too I used to buy books. Then again, I used to live within walking distance of Kramerbooks. These days I'm usually too lazy to go into town to buy books, and I rarely have specific books I'm looking for that I could buy on Amazon. So I tend to read whatever my wife brings home from the library. ____Not the real rusty Nah, she does OK She does the best she can given our tiny library branch. I really can't complain in any case, since it's not like I do any of the work to get the books. ____Not the real rusty Over three years? What do you live in Cuba? ____Not the real rusty Yes they do! It's not on the menu anymore, but there's still a button for it. Just ask for it, you'll get the classic two cheeseburger meal. I don't even remember how I know that. I never eat at McDonalds. ____Not the real rusty Are you opposed to... ...all TV news war correspondents? ____Not the real rusty Blood money? Come on. You got zeroes because you were being an asshole. And now you're whining about it, confirming the initial assessment. You contributed nothing to the discussion and all but accused el guapo of eating babies. Your questions exhibited a depth of hysterical ignorance that only hildi managed to exceed. Excuse me while I go add my zero to the list. ____Not the real rusty Off the backs of oppressed people? If you mean the US taxpayer, then I concur. That's who's paying his salary. I too have some issues with the use of mercenaries in combat roles, and with this war in general. But what el guapo's doing is router service, for Christ's sake. I'm saying you need to get a grip on yourself and figure out who is and isn't completely evil before you go slinging around the blood money nonsense. ____Not the real rusty It's not the asking Actually, "do you have any ethical issues working in Iraq" is a very valid and interesting question. If you had asked it, I bet a useful discussion would have ensued. It's the "Have you stopped beating your wife yet" format you put the question in that was the assholery. And so instead of having an interesting and quite possibly illuminating discussion about the ethical issues of private work for pay in a war zone, we got a bunch of zeroes and some useless whining. That is why you are an asshole. ____Not the real rusty Anyone as obsessed with TERRORISTS Anyone as obsessed with Terrorists as you are is completely blind to the blaring reality of history: it is uncontrollable Actually, I think that sounds like a completely valid sentence. But regardless of my opinion, your logical fallacy is that no one is born a terrorist. People choose to employ "terrorist" (or "guerilla" or "resistance" or...) tactics for various reasons. Your "race," as people like you and Baldrson would have us understand it, is what you're born as. The nature of your example does not map to Egil's. It's arguments like that that make racists look stupid, so keep up the good work. ____Not the real rusty 60 Minutes 60 Minutes did a segment last sunday on McMansions as well, pretty much the TV companion piece to that Washpost article. It was a laugh riot, complete with the be-gowned hausfrau who needs her 1200 square foot kitchen because "she's a cook!" and the ever-present yappy dog. They even had some shots of these things being built, and they're all sheathed with chipboard. I loled. In thirty years or so, I think I'll go find the abandoned ruins of one of these McMansionhoods and go piss on their cracked and subsiding marble foyer floors. :-) ____Not the real rusty That New York guy ...should see the way New Yorkers behave when they come here and try to ride my ferry. For some reason, most people believe that all the rules of courtesy they routinely and even unconsciously observe at home go out the window when they're in a different place. Those should just be titled "How to behave anytime you are in proximity to other people." ____Not the real rusty Innodb is very stable Mysql 4.0 with Innodb and all that stuff is quite stable. I've used it for numerous production sites, including this one, and never had it go haywire on me. I've heard about some oddness in the 4.1 series, but I think the problem we saw was kind of a fluke. It is my personal opinion that porting anything from MySQL to Postgres is a total waste of time, as would be porting anything from Postgres to MySQL if you're already happy with PG. There's no clear advantage to be had in terms of cost either way. I think there are still a few things that Postgres does that MySQL doesn't, but nothing that you wouldn't be irrevocably marrying your code to Postgres forever by using. All the standard "real DB" stuff is supported by both. Aside from that, I've heard some horror stories about trying to run Postgres in a production situation that turned my hair white and convinced me to stay far away from it forever. You may or may not find that convincing, but I mention it for the sake of completeness. ____Not the real rusty Squeeze out the water The trick is to grate the potato into a bowl, then take handfuls of the grated potato and squeeze them over a sink as hard as you can till most of the water's gone. Then put them back in the bowl, grate in some onion, add your herbs or spices, and fry in patties. If you don't get rid of the water, you end up with your potatoey mess. ____Not the real rusty Sony Picturebook Close enough. ____Not the real rusty You can have that very one, if you want. The hard drive died, so it will come sans hard drive. But otherwise, it works fine. You've just gotta find and install a new HDD. I replaced it with one of these, which I actually like quite a bit better. The Picturebook was neat but a little too small and a little too shoddily made. ____Not the real rusty Bunkers with shock absorbers That part, that they had some bunkers with shock absorbers, at least is not that far-fetched. A number of nuclear bunkers have been built that way, with what amounts to a capsule isolated by enormous springs in the middle of a huge cavern. So no one would have expected to need it for weather, but presumably they were using bunkers that had already been built with nukes in mind. The rest of it sounds like nerd-porn though. ____Not the real rusty A director. A movie. A budget. A confused bunch of gamers. Some actors. Some cameras. A really bad script. Fighting. An evil secret society. A man who just wants to do right by his kids. A small lump of green putty I found under my armpit. A pair of left-handed scissors. A really long list. Is this trailer over yet? Oh, thank god. Coming this spring... a movie you will not see in the theatre. And if you know what's good for you, you will not see it at all. ____Not the real rusty I think it's real And furthermore, I think this impressive feat is all due to the expensive Nike shoes which he's wearing, and has nothing at all to do with the twenty-some years of obsessive training and daily practice that it takes to perform at a high level in a competitive sport. And also, I believe that shoes that are hand-delivered in a fake gold briefcase are certainly likely to be better than regular old shoes that come in a box. One of the above three statements is true. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention The stripes that everyone knows make you run faster. ____Not the real rusty What is this thing good for? Well, the Mac arrived yesterday. FedEx somehow took no less than 11 days to get it here from Anaheim. Every time I'd check the tracking, there was a picture of an Asian guy with a box under his arm on the fedex page, and I started this feel like it was a picture of him walking my computer across the country. So what's this thing good for? I got it mainly to test websites in various Mac browsers. So that's fine. But it does have a really nice monitor, and it's right there next to me, so if there's something I can do more easily or more effectively on this, that would be lovely. So tell me, Apple users of K5, what's your favorite Mac software? What am I missing out on if I just use this to load up the occasional website? That's very true And that's my default position here. I'm just naturally curious about my new toy. So far, my impression of this machine is roughly that of a Vespa with a Porsche engine. Like, on the surface it's really simple but sort of useless. Doesn't come with much software, doesn't seem to be very flexible, but the few things it does are all pretty easy to find and work with. But if you dig in a little, it is a unix underneath. They've just made the unixy bits somewhat hard to find or work with. But my old friends bash and nano are right there for me, and my first attempt at a simple script (making synergy start up properly) went just the way I'd expect it to. What I don't really know yet is whether this arrangement is a best of both worlds situation, or a worst of both worlds situation. So far I'm leaning toward the latter. But it is already more likely to see use than my Windows box. ____Not the real rusty I never got the point of logo I mean, ok, you tell the turtle (which looked like a triangle to me, but weho am I to argue) where to go. And it draws a line. And... that's it? I had already been writing progams in Basic when they plopped us in front of logo and told us it was programming. It didn't seem much like programming to me. ____Not the real rusty +1, Totally Queer. ____Not the real rusty Heh I was looking at Mac fanboy sites and it seems like I really need to get Queerium 3.5 and ReachAround 2. I might also get some use out of HotChocolate and LickIt 6. But first, I really need to go take a long shower. ____Not the real rusty lol I bought the thing because I needed one, not because I wanted one. So I guess that might make me the only unbiased Mac user ever. As for price, I got the stripped-down mini, so it actually didn't cost very much. Although for the same price, I could have gotten a much more powerful wintel machine, so I guess by that standard it did. I was considering getting Photoshop, but I'm not really convinced it will do anything I need that the Gimp doesn't do. Photoshop CS2 actually costs more than this computer did, so that's out unless I can warez a copy from someone. But Elements 3 is pretty cheap. I'm just not convinced that it's even worth the $40 or whatever. I have Office on the other side of my desk, and OpenOffice on my real computer, so I certainly don't need to pay for that. I have no use for Dreamweaver at all. If you're writing HTML, you're doing something wrong. I'm not even sure what Quark express is, so I probably don't need that. And for the snobbery factor, my primary OS has been linux since 1998. I don't think even Apple snobs can beat the inherent snobbery of a 7-year linux user. At this point, I'm only exceeded in OS snobbery by other linux users. ____Not the real rusty Bittorrent is defeated by my laziness I'm too lazy to even go and find a torrent of it. And I can think of like four people offhand that can probably just hand me a disk if I want it. Why bother downloading? ____Not the real rusty BSA I turned down a blogad from the BSA a couple weeks ago. And I said "Fuck you, BSA" as I clicked the reject button. But of course I was all alone in my house at the time, so for the record: Fuck you, BSA. ____Not the real rusty BSA They wouldn't let me in because I'm gay. ____Not the real rusty The mouse I have a scrolly mouse, with two buttons and a clickable scroll wheel, but for some reason the Mac doesn't want to do anything with the middle button except scroll. I'm so used to middle-click for opening web links in a new tab that I feel sort of crippled without it. Any idea how to get the middle button to do something useful? ____Not the real rusty mmmm That Expose middle-mouse button thing is nice. I would definitely like to have that on my linux box. Lord, the time it would save me hunting for the right editor window alone... ____Not the real rusty Diary Not story. It wasn't voted anywhere. ____Not the real rusty Thanks for the reports They're gone now, and your reports were very helpful and appreciated. Sorry it took a while -- it is Saturday, and I had to go into town and have my day wasted by the fucking worthless Home Depot who can seriously kiss my ass. Um. Anyway, thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty But it'll never happen ...for two reasons: I'm not going back there if I can help it. And I can help it. There's no actual people working at Home Depot, as far as I can tell. so who would do the kissing? ____Not the real rusty MDF Ah, right 'ere's your problem mate. These tools are for cutting wood, and you're using them to slice up this slab of epoxy... Actually, we used to use MDO (which is MDF with a sort of paper overlay on the surfaces -- stands for medium density overlay) all the time as a sign shop I worked at, for painted and vinyl-lettered signs. If you seal the edges with trailer-kote and paint them it makes for a very good stable wooden blank. But I don't think I'd like everything in my house made of the stuff. It's a staple of the theatre-set carpenter, which is what all those TV people are. (Except for In A Fix -- those guys rule.) ____Not the real rusty It didn't clear paypal yet Paypal's got it as an "echeck," which is paypal-lingo for "takes forgoddamnever to come through." I assume it must be derived from "e" for "electronic" and "check" for "really slow." I got the first notice on the 17th, and they say four days, so it'll probably be tomorrow. The ad comes up for approval automatically when paypal's done, and it will be approved promptly when it does. ____Not the real rusty I remember you I still see you around on MeFi fairly often and think "I remember that guy." ____Not the real rusty Not really that funny It would be funny, except that you can see the punchline coming by the time you get to "Catholic or Protestant?". ____Not the real rusty Update! "So I'm at the wailing wall, standing there like a moron, with my harpoon" is much funnier. ____Not the real rusty It's the mad cow flavor Mmmmmm! You can really taste the prions! ____Not the real rusty Sounds like you're all set If you're already using technologies that could plausibly be called "AJAX," then you're golden. Tell Marketing that they're probably right, and you'll get right on it. Do whatever you normally do for a week or two, then call Marketing back in and show them the applications you already have, with particular emphasis on the AJAXy parts. They get to feel like you're responding to their needs, and you get to be the cooperative nerd that they don't have to hate. And best of all, you just have to do what you already do. ____Not the real rusty Likewise I too am a theory slut. But I already knew that. ____Not the real rusty Attention, Mr. Axl Rose: We did not feel welcome in the jungle. ____Not the real rusty Right carat semicolon dash right parenthesis ____Not the real rusty Sure Also upside down carats and 24 carats. ____Not the real rusty D'oh From now on, I'm going to call it a chevron. ____Not the real rusty Free shit rocks? What if you don't want any shit rocks? ____Not the real rusty Apple update I mentioned a few days ago that I finally caved in to the forces of evil. I can say that Apple lives up to their reputation of shipping slowly. It's been ten days, and so far I have the mouse, the keyboard, and the monitor. But no actual computer yet. It just shipped yesterday. The monitor (Hyundai L90D) came from elsewhere so that's not Apple's fault. But I think it's odd that it takes them ten days to get a basic machine out the door. Is Steve hand-polishing the plastic on each one or what? I guess it's a good thing I'm not waiting for whatever the new hot product is. But on the up side, I freaking love this keyboard. I had to get a USB keyboard and mouse for this machine, because I don't have either one, and even though it'll just be running synergy once it's up apparently it won't even boot without a keyboard attached. So I got the mac keyboard and a mouse with a retractable wire, because at least I can use it for traveling with the laptop. I didn't have the keyboard unpacked for ten minutes before it replaced my old keyboard though. It's just really nice. Little -- it takes up maybe half the space my old monster did. And the feel is very cushy. The keys give a nice thump at the bottom with just a hint of click. I'm still making a lot of mistakes because the key spacing is a little different than my old one and I never learned to touch type. But I have to say, A+ on the keyboard. No, this is probably not the most interesting diary I've ever written, but I thought it might spur some totally inane and pointless arguments about what was the best keyboard ever. And it would be a shame to deprive everyone of that. Also, I am now officially out of desk space. Ha Ain't that the truth. :-) ____Not the real rusty Doesn't it? I agree. I've already got it tying together my linux box and a windows laptop on the right. Some totally non-nerd friends were over last weekend and even they were impressed by it. ____Not the real rusty Release date I think the release date is pretty self-explanatory. ____Not the real rusty It's not narrower, just shorter This one's about the same width as my old one, it just isn't so "deep", from the perspective of me sitting in front of it. There's less wasted space. As for touch typing, I realize it's strange. But I learned to type on Compuserve CB simulator (early online chat, basically) so I type about as fast as a normal touch typer. People get kind of freaked out when they see it. The only real difference is that I need to at least glance at the keyboard while I'm typing, so I'm no good at typing something from paper into the machine. And that isn't a skill I need very often. Personally, I think not touch-typing has saved me from carpal tunnel syndrome. My wrists don't rest on anything, so there's no unusual stress on them. ____Not the real rusty What I find Not driving for a while doesn't really do that for me either, but what does is driving around on the island for a month or so, where 25 is the absolute top speed you can plausibly attain anywhere, and usually it's slower than that. Then I go into town and get on the highway and spend the first fifteen minutes at 50 mph and cringing at the psychosis of it all. ____Not the real rusty What SUV is it? Just out of curiosity. ____Not the real rusty Ha That's about what I thought. Envoy, Yukon, something like that. I drove my sister's SUV once (I forget what it was, but one of those) and had pretty much the same experience. Take it back and have them give you a Cherokee. You may not like them in principle, but by god at least it's better than what you've got. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes My favorite part was the urinal cake. ____Not the real rusty I can hear John Kerry saying it now... ...in his soulless Frankenstein drone. "AhhhhMeeeeericaaaaaa can do Beeeetteeeeeer." What a bunch of losers. Can we chuck the scrap iron over the side and lighten this ship already yet? ____Not the real rusty I liked your formatting Makes it look like poetry. ____Not the real rusty Mexican language? You're such a tool. ____Not the real rusty lol It's not the complexity they pay you for. It's the tedium. :-) ____Not the real rusty RFP Request for Poll. Someone write a new front page poll. We're clearly done with the Baldrson one, and I have always sucked at writing polls. Please submit your suggestion in a comment, and I will pick the one that I like best without asking anyone else's opinion about it, because I am teh Evul Dictator. Is he done? Are there enough? I forgot about that. I shall go dig up the last entry and see. ____Not the real rusty ror I actually did think about jarring preserves before going to bed last night. ____Not the real rusty I don't know The cat we got in DC has moved with us five times now. From one apartment in DC to another, then to San Francisco, then back here to Maine, then to a new house in Maine, then to another new house here. He's never had any trouble with it. Our other cat we got from our last landlady -- we took care of her at the house we rented, and when we bought a place down the street she told us we could take the cat if we wanted to, because she didn't want to have to find another tenant who could take care of her. So we did, and Hazel moved here with us, and despite being two blocks away from her old house where she'd lived for ten years, she hasn't ever tried to go back there. ____Not the real rusty Worth noting You can now actually tell when a user has or has not been banned. Like, banned, not banned. ____Not the real rusty It's where you belong I hope you do find a job developing very critical code. I think it's where you'd be both happiest, and most useful to the world as a whole. I mean, if you're going to go to all that trouble to make something absolutely bulletproof, wouldn't it be great if it was something where that mattered? :-) ____Not the real rusty Did you ever see that Family Guy... ...where all the nukes went off at Y2K, and the Griffins ended up founding their own city with the survivors? They assigned jobs to people randomly, by picking them out of a hat. So when a doctor came along, he got the job of town drunk, even though they needed a doctor. That worked out about as well as randomly selecting people to edit Wikipedia would, I think. ____Not the real rusty Different situation Juries are intended to decide cases based on the facts presented during the case. The whole point is that they do not have previous knowlege of the dispute at hand, and they are all given the same info at the same time to base their decision on. An encyclopedia article is nothing like a court case. The more knowlege of the subject you start off with, the more complete your encyclopedia entry is likely to be. ____Not the real rusty Oh indeed I agree pretty much with the article we had here on anti-elitism in Wikipedia. I know that I personally would very much like to think that my reference info is being written by people who can claim at least some expertise with the subject, so I don't really refer to Wikipedia unless I need information on WoW or the Klingon language. If your idea was set up as a sort of court case about the contested article, with people presenting arguments on both sides and "jurors" empaneled to make a decision, I could see that working. I think I didn't really get it the first time around -- sorry. But then you're left with the question of what do you do with the article after the "jury" has decided? Open it back up to editing, so the Cycle of WikiLife can just begin again? Lock it down forever, and then no new information can be incorporated? ____Not the real rusty Keep it forever Unless your life situation changes such that the car is really unworkable for you. Otherwise, keep it for as long as possible. Remember, a car is just an expense. The sooner you get rid of it after it's paid off, the sooner you get back to paying every month again. Note that this is advice I dearly wish I could have taken myself. I'm on my fourth car in eight years by now. I really don't want to be making car payments anymore. ____Not the real rusty Impractical car buying decisions Let's see, first there was the '85 Plymouth. That seized right after I left colllege in '98. Then I got a Buick Regal, circa 1994 model I think. That was a beast of a car, but it got the crap beat out of it living and driving in DC for two and a half years. Traded that in for a Mazda Miata, which my wife-to-be and I drove out to San Francisco. Had that for about a year, then we decided to move to Maine. The convertible Miata suddenly didn't look like such a good car for us anymore, in a New England winter. So we traded that in for a Jeep Wrangler, which we drove back here. Had that for about four years, and then it was baby time, and my wife insisted that the Wrangler was too small and unsafe for a baby to be riding in. So we traded that in for a Jeep Cherokee, which I have now. The only one I really regret is the Cherokee. I loved the Wrangler, and I do not love the Cherokee at all. What I should have done is bought the Wrangler when we left DC, and kept it forever. ____Not the real rusty Meh About 7/8 of the people where I live now do have an Outback. A friend of mine has one, and I don't like it at all. The ride is squishy, and it gets stuck in snow really easily. Jeeps may be all those things you say, but I can say I've never gotten either one stuck in the snow, and not for want of trying. Plus a few of the things you list as drawbacks are the things I liked about the old Jeep. Like the noise and the ride (although it was a 2001, and had coil springs, so so the ride was actually not so bad). The other good thing about the Wrangler was the size -- it's actually a really small vehicle considering how it feels, and once you get used to that, it's pretty fun to drive -- and the visibility. Between the oversized side mirros and the big side windows, you had by far the best peripheral vision in that thing of any car I've ever driven. The Cherokee, on the other hand, has almost all the Wrangler's drawbacks without any of it's advantages, except not getting stuck in the snow. So far. I don't really have anything nice to say about the Cherokee. ____Not the real rusty So there you go If you look at my car history, I've been in two Jeeps and a Miata. I don't like cars that don't let me feel the bumps, what can I say? I also drive with my window open year round unless it's raining really hard. And for getting the Outback stuck in the snow, I'm more talking about the ground clearance of the car. We got it stuck in about 15 inches of snow. The Wrangler only had trouble with that on a really steep hill, and we got up it eventually anyway. I don't think snow tires would have helped. ____Not the real rusty Fair enough If cars are your hobby or your passion, all bets are off. My advice is merely for people who need a car to go from point A to point B sometimes. A really astonishing number pf people are under the impression that because a car is expensive it is "an investment" somehow. I was just encouraging any non-hobbyist car owner to think of car payments as basically money flushed down the toilet. ____Not the real rusty I love that In high school, I drove an '85 Plymouth Caravelle (basically a Chrysler New Yorker with a Mitsubishi engine) that had been my Mom's car. It wasn't in terrible shape, but it wasn't in great shape either. And I kept it dirty. I used to have to do this hideous merge onto one of the Cape Cod bridges pretty often in the summer, and I'd always hope like hell to get one of the infamous giant-SUV assholes, because even with their three and a half ton behemoth, it was always very clear to everyone that if I got sideswiped, it'd be no skin off my ass, while they'd be looking at a long scrape of gray down the side of their gleaming $40,000 baby. It got so I kind of enjoyed that merge. I used to try to pick my partner in advance and time it just right. :-) ____Not the real rusty You have it backward Americans have big fat cars to fit around our big fat asses, and we built big fat roads to fit around our big fat cars. Find some old country roads that haven't been paved in a long time. They're a lot narrower than newer roads. ____Not the real rusty Good times... good times. ____Not the real rusty Who's got the bucket? So I've been having issues with sites I'm working on on Macs, and I find myself working with some Mac people who ask me for help doing stuff, and all I'm doing is guessing about what might be wrong or what to do to fix it. So I bit the bullet. I bought a Mac mini. Whoever has the bucket, I'll be needing it now. Thanks. Of course not I mean the Apple Penis Bucket, of course. It's nice to hear that you are using an environmentally-friendly bucket instead of tree-killing kleenex, but I think you can keep that bucket to yourself. ____Not the real rusty Yes We will not be eating dinner there. God only know what he does with the silverware. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er That's not what the bucket is for. :-) ____Not the real rusty Switchers I had a conference call the other day with a guy who, some googling later revealed, was actually in one of those Switch ads. ____Not the real rusty Yes he was And looking at that page, I realize that I've at least exchanged email with no less than two of them. Two out of twenty three, from a big national ad campaign? That's sort of creepy. ____Not the real rusty All I need it for... ...is to run a web browser, basically. So I'm not all that concerned. I got the bottom-of-the-barrel configuration, all I added was a wireless card. If I actually like using it, and I can find something else to use it for, that would just be extra. ____Not the real rusty "Of course I read Slashdot" Ok, that wasn't really a dumb thing to say in that particular interview. The people who were interviewing me told me later that they hired me because of that, and because of the fact that I wore a grotty old sweater with holes in it to the interview. So, both apparent mistakes, turned to victory! An actually dumb thing I did say once was, when asked "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I said "Behind your desk." I didn't get that job, but I'm pretty sure I had already decided I didn't want it, and I was just entertaining myself. ____Not the real rusty QT is already being reappraised It's been clear for quite a while that there are domains where quantum theory breaks down. Much like quantum theory itself came into being as an explanation for a domain where classical physics broke down (at the atomic scale), quantum theory has proven to be incompatible with relativity. So we know it's not a complete model, just like relativity isn't a complete model, and Newtonian mechanics wasn't a complete model. But the kicker is that this guy's theory requires that a well-tested and well-understood principle of quantum mechanics is incorrect, in the domain to which quantum mechanics does apply. It's like trying to prove that Newtonian mechanics is wrong by claiming that a bowling ball thrown up in the air at non-relativistic speed in fact describes a square rather than a parabola. It's not really arguable -- it's just wrong. If he was dealing with an edge case, where relativistic speeds were involved or gravitation was strong enough to rival the nuclear forces, maybe there'd be reason to wonder. But he's just claiming that a core principle of quantum mechanics is totally false. Anything is possible, but given the history of the science and the track record of the principle he's arguing against, I'm not going to feel too insecure claiming that this guy's a total quack. ____Not the real rusty Makes you wonder though Did the Guardian even look for any past info about the guy? Given that five years ago, he was "just months away from unveiling his creation," and nothing came of that, why would they even bother writing this article? And can this guy actually snooker ignorant VCs on a five-year cycle indefinitely? And just how stupid is everyone these days? ____Not the real rusty I think you mean "tribulation" A comment you wrote on some website probably is your biggest triviality. ____Not the real rusty Not quite Descartes real point of interest was that in fact he didn't start with the assumption that his existence was a given. He started by assuming he did not exist. "I think therefore I am" is the end of a line of argument that starts off with the assumption the he does not exist. He posited that he believed he existed, but that belief could easily be a trick played by some greater thing -- call it a god, or a devil. But if that's the case, then what is the thing this god or devil is playing a trick on? You can't fool a thing which does not exist into believing it is a thing which thinks. So, he concludes, I must exist at least insofar as I am a thing which is capable of being fooled into thinking it has consciousness. "I think therefore I am" is a poetic but sort of misleading translation of his actual conclusion, which was more like "there exists a thing which is capable of believing itself to think". Descartes had plenty of holes in his reasoning, but he did make a serious attempt to start off by not assuming anything, including his own existence. ____Not the real rusty Yeah When I read Descartes in college, I wasn't very impressed. But in retrospect, I do respect his trying. It was a lot more than anyone else had done by then. But he did pretty much go off the rails trying to prove that god exists. ____Not the real rusty Ok, now we're out of my depth I'm talking here based on my hazy recollection of one reading of the Meditations ten years ago. So at this point, I bow out and plead insufficient knolwedge to express an opinion. I do think my characterization of "I think therefore I am" was broadly accurate, but that's all I'll stand by. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hm I never found other people's misconceptions about postmodernism all that interesting. There sure are lots of them, and you do identify one of the major ones, but hey. We can't really blame a philosophical idea for people being ignorant about it. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about, I'm afraid. ____Not the real rusty The bar was not very high $ ____Not the real rusty Vacuous That's exactly the word I was looking for. Thank you. ____Not the real rusty The MetaFilter.com it's ok to hate ____Not the real rusty POTUS reform I think you should simply have to have been a US citizen for 35 years to qualify to be President. If you were born here, then you have to be 35 years old (as it is now) and if not, you have to have been a citizen for that long. That seems fair to me. ____Not the real rusty Answers VA Governor John Warner. I agree with you about Kerry being a shitty candidate -- it's amazing that he did as well as he did. But I disagree about Dean being "too liberal." Dean was not nearly as liberal as Kerry. He got slimed, and was unable to effectively define himself. He also got cast as liberal-by-association because his early support came largely from the MoveOn types. Get out of Iraq. Shut down the CIA torture squads and drag the criminals behind them into court. Shut down the CIA secret prisons. Twiddle the tax code a little bit to kill time while the markets get going again (Democratic presidents mean a booming economy). Use some of the money we're wasting on Iraq now to launch an "Apollo Project" for alternative energy, with the goal to cut our reliance on imported oil by 90% within the next ten years. I think that's enough for a first-term agenda. But really, the presidency wouldn't be worth much to Democrats right now. They need to do a lot of rebuilding locally and in Congress, before it would be anything but a temporary reprieve. Things might look different by 2008, but my bet is they won't look that much different. ____Not the real rusty ror Of course I mean Mark Warner. Christ, I do that like 75% of the time. I gotta get this "John Warner" bug out of my head. Isn't there a John Warner somewhere? Senate maybe? Was he the other Warner who ran against M. Warner that one time? I don't know. The polling on 2008 pres right now might as well just say "Who have you heard of?" because that's all it means. I don't personally think Hillary or Kerry have a snowball's chance in hell. And one thing that would make a huge difference in the primary system would be simply to have a National Primary Day. We all vote on the same day -- why not run primaries that way too? That's never made any sense to me. ____Not the real rusty Exactly my point In many little ways, our political system is fucked, and it all adds up to what we have going on here today. ____Not the real rusty Again, nothing to back up what you claim It wasn't just a smear campaign - the guy did himself in by behaving like a lunatic in public. How's it feel to be repeating Kerry campaign talking points, my man? Feel a little... liberal? :-) there is zero evidence of "CIA torture squads." No evidence at all. Also about Iraq: do you really think pulling out now is a good idea? No, I think going there to begin with was not a good idea. We have trashed that country. We can leave now and watch it disintegrate, or we can leave later and watch it disintegrate after more Americans are killed. You realize that the whole reason 9/11 happened was perceived weakness on our part, right? And continuing to lose an unwinnable guerilla war in Iraq is making us look what? Strong? Like a bunch of real solid winners? Yeah. You bet. And also, do you feel it is at all ethical to wreck a country and then not fix it? It's not ethical to lie your population into invading another country that you then cannot fix, no. I wish it hadn't been done. The situation we have right now is unfixable. How many more lives should we flush down Bush's Iraq toilet? We'd create generations of new terrorists if we do. Already done. The fact that Democratic presidents happen in some cases to have had their terms coincide with upswings does not imply any causality. Mm hmm. And as for energy, I leave that in the capable hands of robotnik below. He seems to have nailed it. ____Not the real rusty You have a cold Eat chicken soup, drink plenty of fluids, and rest. Or, you could hunt around on WebMD and stuff, and find the most wildly unlikely disease that might show your symptoms, and then feel better because all you have is a cold. I usually do that. When I was about 11, I was convinced I had caught smallpox. Turned out just to be chicken pox. :-) ____Not the real rusty Could be pneumonia After seeing what you said about your father above, I wouldn't say that's unlikely either. The key to staying out of the hospital is lots of fluids. Really. Just keep on drinking water, OJ, anything. If you started out relatively healthy, pneumonia isn't anything to be too scared of. I'd rather that than a serious stomach flu any day. ____Not the real rusty Also It's safe to take ibuprofen if you've already taken tylenol. They're apparently processed by different organs. ____Not the real rusty Terrific So you're saying that government policy should be that we want to discourage savings (like anyone saves anything now anyway) and also the purchase of the big-ticket items like cars and most especially houses that are the main driving force of our economy? In fact, the housing market is arguably the only thing keeping us from total collapse right now at all. That doesn't sound like a very sound economic policy. ____Not the real rusty Could be I'll tell you one thing, when she gets to school, my daughter's learning Chinese. So one day, perhaps she can emigrate to the Land of Opportunity. ____Not the real rusty It may be a bubble... ...but it's the only thing we've got right now. A man on a glass bridge can't be shooting BBs. ____Not the real rusty Bridge envy I don't have a bridge. Always have to take a ferry. I probably have a repressed case of bridge envy. ____Not the real rusty I was agin' it And then I heard Robert Reich's really very coherent explanation on Marketplace, so I think now I'm fer it. From some of the coverage, it seemed as though they were trying to eliminate it altogether. The actual plan sounds very sensible. Because I don't know, who exactly are you talking about that's opposing it? From what I hear, it's the real estate lobby and the home building lobby. Where are these Democratic party ads? ____Not the real rusty Weak Here's the thing. What you generally do in your political diaries is set up a characterization of something you don't like, and then declare that it is stupid. But what you don't ever do is link to any evidence that your characterization is accurate. No links in the diary at all, and now you've only "heard about" these ads? And no answer on who these shadowy rich democrats might be who oppose the plan? We're all here, and willing to give your opinions a listen. But you've gotta give us something to demonstrate you're not just making shit up. ____Not the real rusty You tell me My last comment, somewhere else around this thread, includes links from the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Sydney Morning Herald, and Slate. If you think those are my like-minded friends, well, I could be in much worse company. ____Not the real rusty NIWS It was by Jason. He's delete-on-sight, I'm afraid. I was actually going to leave the story for voting, but MH implemented the standard Jason policy. No great loss, in any case. ____Not the real rusty It's easy Email address, IP. He always uses the same format. That's really the stupid thing -- it would have been incredibly easy to get that story posted, or at least voted on fairly, if he was just a little bit non-obvious about it. But he's in it for the attention, so it's no fun if we don't know it's him. Parents, please love your children. If you don't, this is what happens. :-) ____Not the real rusty I've got one On what day of the Creation did God create man? And a follow-up, what did he create woman out of? ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. French butter. They also have good milk, coffee, and, it goes without saying, bread. ____Not the real rusty Y'know I watched your diary with interest, but I don't think there were enough ideas. If there'd been a few more I was going to put it to a vote on the FP poll. Come back with four that don't suck and we'll talk. "lol what" is a good start. ____Not the real rusty I went to LL Bean this weekend Cornerstone of the American Bean industry. I purchased a pair of shoes and a hat, among other things. ____Not the real rusty Disclaimer There are situations where code quality is totally critical. Michael may be in such a situation. I don't know that. My point was two-fold: 1) that the number of situations where code quality is actually critical is very small compared to the number of situations where programmers think it is, or wish it was, and 2) that the company isn't going anywhere in either case. If it is critical, then his boss is telling him to forget that and release crap, and if it isn't, then his boss is a dope who hired the wrong guy for the wrong reasons with the wrong line of BS. ____Not the real rusty Touche :-) ____Not the real rusty You're stronger than I am I only made it to the second sentence. I actually read the rest of the first page, but when I reached the end, I still didn't know what the article would be about or why I should give a shit. So I stopped. ____Not the real rusty No difference South Park is our generation's Lassie. It will have no effect different from the media of our parents. ____Not the real rusty Eh? If anything, South Park represents the continuation of old-fashioned puritanism. Every episode is a perfect little clasical morality tale, with some fart jokes on top so that the kids will watch. It's not an accident that SP has been so successful, and it isn't because it's offensive. It's because it's so deeply not offensive. It always comes out the way we want it to. ____Not the real rusty I would fire you ...without a second thought. I'm sorry to say so, but there it is. Not because you're wrong about the importance of code quality (I don't know enough about the situation to judge that, although my instinct is that you probably are wrong about that too) but because sending an ultimatum to your manager, and ccing the whole company, is never the right thing to do. You, as a hacker, are free to obsess about perfect code all you want. He, though, has to see the bills coming in and no income coming in to pay them, and forsee that if something isn't shipped, there will be no company at all to produce code of any quality. When managers start talking about shipping code as fast as possible, it means they're panicked about income. So from his point of view, either you are producing something that brings the company closer to having income, or you are dead weight to be cast off the side with no further concern. Your idea of taking two weeks to produce nothing at all is the last thing he wants to hear. He might as well dump you and spend those two weeks finding your replacement. His best course is probably to agree to your ultimatum, make sure he gets anything you have managed to produce (while you're feeling victorious), and fire you as soon as he finds someone to replace you. But take heart anyway, because this company is not long for the world, so you're not losing much. Plan to find a new job and work toward that plan, and you'll be fine. But in the future, do try to take into consideration all the factors on the other side of the argument, and for god's sake, don't drag an entire company into a personal dispute with your manager. Also, if you really want to focus on total quality and perfection look for a job with either a huge company where all your overhead time can be buried, or in a university somewhere. I don't think the startup world is for you. ____Not the real rusty Yeah My feeling that the company isn't going to be around long is based on Manager Jack's stupidity. If you want a coder who can ship product fast, you do not hire the guy who says that quality is his number one priority. That's just idiotic. You find the hotshot college kid who doesn't know that much, but will get all fired up on beating the impossible deadline. I don't fault Michael for being pissed off, I'm just saying he didn't handle it all that well. Given the apparent situation at this place, it may have been smarter to find greener pastures and hold on to a good recommendation. ____Not the real rusty The whole thing should have sounded fishy A startup that's all about code quality? If I got handed that, I'd immediately be looking for the money. Because typically, a startup is going to be funded just enough to barely get a semi-functional prototype out the door, and bulletproof code isn't even in the first five-year plan. If a startup says that code quality is job one, you better be sure that they have full funding for at least, say, three years (I'm just guessing because I don't know what you make). That's three years of zero income. Now put that together with the known fact that most of the employees are not being paid at all, and you have yourself a line of grade-A Valley bullshit. They must have been desperate to lie that big. Or perhaps they really beleived it, and they're just stupid. But either way, this is a company you want to get away from quick. ____Not the real rusty I Encourage (3) this strategy. $ ____Not the real rusty Which is kind of ironic I mean, the personal stuff, the fiction -- I love that. That's what I was always interested in. I actually stopped reading Slashdot at all around 2001, because I just didn't give a crap about technology news anymore. So it is kind of ironic that many of the early members started to get disillusioned with the content right around the time when it was starting to morph into what I was actually interested in reading. I mean, this is what I consider a technology news story worth reading. I guess that sums up how much I care about the "technology" part of the slogan. ____Not the real rusty Hmm. Howard Hughes eh? And come to think of it, I don't leave the house that much anymore. But I still believe collaborative media is the wave of the future. The wave of the future. The wave of the future. The wave of the future. It's the wave of the future. The wave of the future. The wave of the future. The wave of I'm gonna go cut my nails now. ____Not the real rusty Yes, it was his fault God love him. ____Not the real rusty Liar! The cat is black. And I'm not kidding. She's actually lounging in my lap this very instant. ____Not the real rusty Indentation as meaningful property of the language Please just kill me now. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I knew I meant that I couldn't believe someone else had independently decided to make the same utterly boneheaded mistake. ____Not the real rusty Hey move it buddy What's your fuckin problem? Yopu lookin at me? ____Not the real rusty Righteous I feel like it's 2002 all over again. Good times, good times. ____Not the real rusty lol ibuprofen gassed his own people ____Not the real rusty It hasn't huh? Heh. ____Not the real rusty The difference Under Saddam, you could be killed at any time for doing something to piss off the Ba'athists. Now, you could be killed at any time by anyone, for no particular reason at all. Democracy, baby. ____Not the real rusty Me too I dropped out after the first senior semester. The reaction to that has been more impressed than disappointed, overall. I mean, anyone can drop out as a freshman or a sophomore, but to drop out with one semester left, that takes stones. :-) ____Not the real rusty You've gotta be kidding me Like we give a shit who says cock or pussy. Christ. As we will specify in the soon-to-be-posted "acceptable us policy", K5 is not for children. Or anyone else. ____Not the real rusty Ha My typing has been exceptionally bad all day today. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I meant to post to that. Actually, that's not a bad idea, and in theory, one way of doing it would be dead-easy. Maybe not exactly like you described (I don't remember if you had a specific plan or not) but it'd probably work. See, what we could do is have a "Polls" section, so when you want to submit a new poll you just submit a regular story to "Polls". Voting proceeds as normal, and when a story in polls gets posted, there'd be a hook that discovers this and promotes the poll in it to the main page poll. None of this would actually even be very difficult. Polls would stay up for somewhat random amounts of time, and there's always the possibility that one would be posted and then another posted right after it. But I'm never too opposed to messiness like that. I've been meaning to put that together, but, well, it's me. I'll try to talk janra into doing it if I can't find time. :-) ____Not the real rusty It would probably be more trouble than it's worth ..for you to do it. If you feel really motivated though, get a copy of scoop and have at it. This whole strategy involves nothing on the server level. Basically it's just a section (ok, I can find the time to do that :-)) and a box that would be attached to the hook story_post (which fires when a story is voted up) that checks the story to see if it's in the "polls" section, and if so, twiddles the var that holds the current FP poll. It'd be an interesting example if you're interested in learning how Scoop works though. It touches on a number of important concepts. ____Not the real rusty Fixed the voting records thing And I put the counts back, although those do make the page a lot slower than it would otherwise be. Someone will have to write some appropriate use guidelines, i guess. I thought we had, but maybe they never got posted. Also, thanks very much to janra who finished this stuff up and got it live. It was originally written around the time of the user sponsorship idea, but was sort of abandoned along with that. She cleaned it up and pulled out the sponsor-specific stuff, and here it is. Another interesting feature is that it shows who was anonymized. A banned user's info will not show up. ____Not the real rusty Old vegetables and old houses In the ongoing process of cleaning out my basement (which has been going on for over a year now) I found some very old vegetable seeds. The seed packets are from the Westbrook Farmer's Union, and have the phone number "UL 4-2301." Like, ULster 4-2301. Looking at it archaeologically, I found them in a junk stratum that also included a movie magazine from 1961, so in the absence of radiocarbon dating my guess was that they were circa early sixties. And research indicates that they were still using "TRansylvannia 6-5000" type phone numbers then. This is another piece in a mounting trend of evidence that the previous owners of this house cleaned certain areas once, when they first moved in, and then never again. They moved here in the early sixties themselves, and the lower layers of the most junk-laden nooks and crannies tend to date back to right around then. There was newspaper on the bedroom floor, underneath a carpet and two layers of linoleum, from 1948. So most likely they never picked up that lower linoleum at all. The basement is very nearly as clean as it's likely to get. I'm going to put up some shelves along one wall, for a lot of our stuff that's sort of heaped here and there, and kept in plastic bins. I also want to pour some concrete to patch over an area of floor where the concrete is missing (it really looks like someone broke out enough of the poured floor to bury a body down there. I'm seriously not interested in digging there at all) and then paint the whole floor with that concrete sealant paint. It may have taken me over a year to clean it, but I'm undoing more than forty years of neglect. I take heart in thinking that I am forty times more powerful than entropy. And next year, I'll try planting some of those seeds. If they actually grow, I will call them elderly vegetables. 766 All the numbers on the island start with "766". So a lot of signs and stuff just list the last four digits, because the rest is assumed. It was surprisingly difficult to give up my 766 number for VOIP. Now I always sort of feel slightly fraudulent when I give islanders my number. They probably just think it's a cell. And then they probably think "Has that guy ever left his house? Why the hell does he even have a cell?" ____Not the real rusty POrter $ ____Not the real rusty Zing! Or, am I misreading that entirely? ____Not the real rusty Ooks? Ook? Ook. Ook ook ook! ____Not the real rusty I was hoping to attract the Librarian. $ ____Not the real rusty Note The above comment should be read in the voice of Stewie Griffin from the Family Guy for best results. ____Not the real rusty I hope you sued $ ____Not the real rusty Love hurts. Love is like a cloud. Holds a lot of rain. Love hurts. Oooooooh. Love hurts. ____Not the real rusty Don't care if it hurts I wanna have control I want a perfect body I want a perfect soul I want you to notice When I'm not around I wish I was special You're so fucking special But I'm a creep. ____Not the real rusty Philly NPR is good I listen to it online just about as much as I listen to my local station. If you've got annoying local talent or they waste half the day playing classical music, it's worth a listen. Philly is pretty much all talk shows. ____Not the real rusty You want a new left? Check out Paul Hackett in Ohio. There's a new left I can get behind. Of course, the response to him by the Democratic Party is predictable, now that one of their own is in the race too. Ever ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory... ____Not the real rusty The super-short summary He's a Marine corps Major and a lawyer, who just got back from Iraq. He believes that the Democratic Party is totally wrong on the gun issue, that the second amendment means what it says so back off. He believes that government does not belong in the bedroom, whether you're gay, straight, black, white, purple or yellow. He believes that you don't spend more than you make, whether you're a person or a government. He believes that a Marine unit is only as strong as its weakest member, and that goes for a state or a nation as well. And he believes that Democrats have been losers for so long because they have fundamentally been a great big bunch of pussies, which, even if I agreed with him on nothing else, would make me love the guy. ____Not the real rusty Hardly He just lost a special Congressional election by 3% (about 3,000 votes) in one of the most heavily Republican districts in Ohio. Before that race, the closest a Democrat had come in OH-02 was something like 25 points. I personally think that statewide, he's incredibly electable. ____Not the real rusty Vegas? Near the even gianter fucking ghost town called Los Angeles. LA puts Vegas to shame in terms of sheer implausibility as a major population center. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah? Well my city can beat up your city. And take its lunch money. Even if your city had superman it could. ____Not the real rusty If you can use CSS3, here's a clue Attribute selectors might solve your problem. Only supported in Safaris and Moz apparently, as of the writing of that page. ____Not the real rusty Chaining pseudo-classes I was going to suggest a:link:hover but I wasn't sure if that worked. If so, then that's probably the best answer. No html changes required. ____Not the real rusty That is odd I noticed that too -- or sort of noticed it by omission, really. I don't know why. We have RSS, and it's auto-discoverable. ____Not the real rusty Well I just went out to dinner with my parents on a Saturday night. So no, we don't all have lives. ____Not the real rusty No, not really, and yes They were up here for some rather vaguely described reasons, so we met them for dinner in town. I wish I had a woody Vista Cruiser though. That'd be sweet. And by sweet I mean totally awesome. ____Not the real rusty Glory be! Baldrson, cherry-picking his numbers to fit his ideas? I never would have thought. ____Not the real rusty Hold out for breadsticks $ ____Not the real rusty Sounds like you just had a fund drive! $ ____Not the real rusty Aitch Aye Tee Ee Eye En Gee ____Not the real rusty Also If they ever set up a Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade, allow school prayer and uphold bans on gay marriage, they'd have nothing left with which to distract the base from their failings while giving their opponents the enviable high ground in the moral-outrage war. Also, the 70% of Americans who don't want any of those things to happen would finally go vote. ____Not the real rusty Roe v Wade polling July 13-17 2005, Pew Research Center/Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey (scroll down): "In 1973 the Roe versus Wade decision established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe versus Wade decision, or not?" Yes: 29% No: 65% Unsure: 6% The other polls on that page are interesting. Taken together, my sense is that the choice/life split is much closer to even, but few people really want Roe overturned. The natural conclusion is that there's a large number of pro-lifers who are opposed to abortion for anything but the usual unholy trio of rape/incest/risk to mother's life. But they need Roe to stand, because if it doesn't, there's no leg for abortion under any circumstance. Don't confuse being pro-life with being anti-Roe. There are many more of the former than the latter. ____Not the real rusty I'm not saying this is what happened... ...but it is suggestive that when I was down in Crawford a month or so ago, seeing the sights, there was a traveling circus and rodeo show set up in the fairgrounds just outside of town. And I distinctly recall that as I strolled the midway, breathing that fertile Texas air, mingled with the ubiquitous carnival smells of popcorn and corn dogs, calliope music writhing amongst the crowds like an Edenic snake promising delights untold... as I say, I noticed on the midway a strange booth with a large handpainted sign advertising it as the home of the WHEEL OF SCOTUS. "Spin the WHEEL!" barked the ill-kempt carny manning the booth. "Spin the WHEEL and pick the justice! Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows!" Well, this clearly wasn't my scene. But as I drifted off toward the bearded lady and the two-headed platypus in the sideshow (which turned out to be merely two ducks taped together, and not at all worth the three-token admission in my humble view. The erstwhile two-headed platypus, I mean, not the bearded lady. I don't think even this cut-rate outfit would be so brazen as to tape two ducks together and promote it as a bearded lady.) I did notice a gaggle of staggeringly drunk men in suits creating quite a stir at the entrance to the WHEEL OF SCOTUS tent. It was right next to a beer vendor, you see, and these gents had clearly been hitting the Lone Star long and hard. The fat gray-haired one nudged the portly balding one in glasses, rather inexpertly due to his inebriation, and slurred something that sounded like "Hey KAR, lesshe if'll really do it!" At which the balding one gave the short one in the really big hat a shove toward the WHEEL OF SCOTUS tent and muttered something to him. I couldn't hear any more, except a faint sniggering sound from beneath the really unnecessarily large hat. Sort of a muffled "Heh. Heh. Heh." Well, I forgot it immediately at the time, what with the whole thing with the ducks and all. But I have since begun to wonder. ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute Her career record and bio is known. It's not like under Senate confirmation questioning she's going to suddenly recall that as a matter of fact she did sit on a federal bench for few years, clerk for Supreme Court Justice, and write all kinds of influential law papers that have helped define her field and bring her to great prominence and respect. She's not a total mystery, and there isn't very much loonyism in pointing out that she is almost as unqualified as someone can be for a Supreme Court nomination and still even plausibly be in the running for one. You can rightly say that her overall judicial philosophy is a total mystery, but that doesn't have any affect on the argument that she should be opposed simply because she's laughably unqualified. ____Not the real rusty About Rehnquist? I always thought Rehnquist was a shithead. Not that you can really ask them, but those close to me will recall that I was happy the day he died, because even though Bush was going to get another SCOTUS pick, at least Rehnquist was dead. So hopefully that's out of the way -- I notice you keep bringing it up like it's an actual point. I don't respect William Rehnquist now that he's dead, and I didn't respect him while he was alive. I probably agree with at least some of his rulings, but that doesn't really make me think any better of him. As for whether I'd oppose anyone, I don't think that's fair either. Roberts seemed like a good choice. I know that I'm probably not going to like anyone Bush is likely to pick, or agree with them on some things. But on the other hand, my leanings in Constitutional interpretation are almost equally likely to be traditionally conservative as traditionally liberal. You, like a lot of people, make some unwarranted assumptions about my personal politics based on my feelings about our current criminal-in-chief and my current job. Roberts, at least, was clearly qualified. Almost over-qualified. A lot of people whine about how the hearings never forced him to really state his views about anything, but frankly I don't think that matters. He knows how to do the job. Good enough for me. And finally, back to Rehnquist, who is actually quite an interesting point of comparison to Miers, in terms of both background and the circumstances surrounding his nomination. He was first in his class at Stanford Law. He clerked for Justice Jackson. So he had some relevant experience and credentials. He was also of course a Nixon crony, and probably knew where at least some of the bodies were buried. But even Nixon wasn't so brazen as to nominate someone with literally no relevant experience or credentials at all. Miers, on the other hand, got her law degree (no mention of distinction) at Southern Methodist University (you may come to your own conclusions about the difference between graduating first from Stanford and graduating at all from SMU). She did corporate law. She served on the Texas Lottery commission. She clerked for a US District court judge for two years, 1970 to 1972. She has exactly squat in the way of recorded opinions on constitutional law. And, as Rehnquist was to Nixon, she is a Bush administration crony who probably knows where the bodies are buried. So there you go. Bush: More brazen than Nixon ever was. Now all that aside, what do I think about her nomination? I actually don't care very much one way or the other. I would bet she's more likely to turn out to be a reasonable swing vote than anything else. What we know of her doesn't suggest she's a hard-liner of any kind. Her career is mainly that of an administrator. Youngest female president of her law firm and president of the Texas bar suggests to me that she's good at getting ahead in social structures. Those are both primarily political acheivements. She also was elected to the Dallas city council. She seems like... a poor choice, I guess is all I'd say. Her strengths would appear to be wasted in a job where you can't get fired and you can't really advance any further. But she seems like a get-along kind of person, which leads me to believe that perhaps relieved of career pressure, she'll be more likely to try hard to understand all aspects of the cases before her, and decide them fairly. However, she may simply find herself out of her league and sit there mute, another Clarence Thomas just serving time. Who knows. I can think of better choices, and I can think of worse. I can think of several much stronger candidates I'd like a lot less but respect a little bit. So in the face of all these competing feelings, I don't really have an opinion. Politically, I'm happy that Bush has made such a total blunder of this, pissing off the most vocal right so badly. That's a nice thing to have in pocket for '06. So, for the summary: Miers: +1 for likely record, -1 for not being qualified at all. Total: 0 Nomination: +100 for being such an incompetent own-goal for the bumbling Bush gang ____Not the real rusty Thomas ...never talks. Ever. In oral arguments he never says anything. Just sits there like the big dumb Pube Guy he is. For all we know, he's getting his written opinions ghost-written. He's the epitome of the set-for-life time server. ____Not the real rusty Be inclined all you want I still think the guy's just there so his ass will keep the hallowed bench well polished. They probably stick Swiffer pads to his pants before every session. Think you'll ever hear a historian utter the phrase "the great jurist Clarence Thomas once wrote..."? I don't. ____Not the real rusty So he's a fool He the worst kind of fool -- an educated fool. He's perfectly capable of intricate logical and legal reasoning, but incapable of spotting the foolish premises he starts from. To me, that means that he's by definition not doing his job. I believe it's part of the job description of a Supreme Court justice to not be a fool. My comments about clerks writing his opinions were merely hyperbole. The rest was not. ____Not the real rusty Well They could vote against her, at least. Or vote against cloture. I mean, it seems obvious, but you never quite know what they're going to do, do you? ____Not the real rusty Keystone Kongress! I now yield the balance of this comment to my esteemed colleague from LMAOhio. ____Not the real rusty I agree with... ANNE COULTER? [Cue the Crying Game music] ____Not the real rusty Holy crap I think it must be me. I'm not left-handed, and my family's not dysfunctional, but otherwise you pretty much got it. Oh, I don't play an instrument either. ____Not the real rusty No I arranged my life so that most of the time it doesn't matter if I go to bed at 3AM and sleep till noon. I'm not really an insomniac, I guess. I get my six to nine hours more often than not. My sleep cycle just doesn't coincide with what the normal world demands, and often it isn't anything that could be accurately described as a "cycle" at all. Just alternating periods of wakefulness and sleep of varying lengths. ____Not the real rusty No, I mean it's not a problem I know generally what affects my sleep habits. It isn't a mystery. If I eat more regularly, I sleep more regularly. I need to get enough mental and physical exercise every day (either alone doesn't cut it), etc etc. I just don't really care very much. When I have to be up early, I can be. When I don't have to be, I enjoy reading a good book until I feel sleepy, or going running at 1AM. And usually I don't have to get up early, so I do what I want to do. I find that a regular diurnal schedule sort of curtails other things that I enjoy. I hate running during the day, so if I sleep 11 to 7, I hardly ever go running. I also don't get much time to read, because during the day everyone keeps you busy with all kinds of other stuff, and by bedtime I'm too tired to get into a book. I didn't mean to make it seem like a cross I have to bear. It has been in the past, but I have a pretty good idea now how to keep myself functioning, and I also have really organized my life to work this way. I am happy with my random non-schedule. :-) ____Not the real rusty Shut up you I can't see where you're coming from with that at all. ____Not the real rusty Whedon is trying to preserve symmetry He made a great TV show out of a failed movie. Now he's attempting to make a great movie out of a failed TV show. I'll probbaly get it on DVD eventually. Then I can assess how successful he was at maintaining symmetry. ____Not the real rusty 12:49 AM EST It's best to avoid it between midnight and 1 AM eastern time. It's doing database cleanup and daily cron stuff, and tends to be slow. ____Not the real rusty Archiving stuff But what really screws everything up is deleting the old viewed_stories records after archiving. viewed_stories gets hit for a lot of different pages, and deleting a whole bunch of rows in it all at once tends to make selects on it very slow for a while. ____Not the real rusty Nails You needed one of these to get those nails out. Claw hammers are useless for removing anything that isn't a bent-over framing nail. That's all the claw end is intended to accomplish. About Dremels though -- I actually have an air-powered Dremel-type rotary tool that I got along with a couple other things when I bought a compressor from a guy, and I've been wondering what it's good for. I don't have any bits for it, so at the moment it's not much good for anything. I figured I'd pick up one of those many-piece bit assortments and see if it comes in handy. Do get yourself a cat's paw though. It's 15 bucks and you'll use it all the time. ____Not the real rusty Little known fact: On K5, all the letters we send out to your browser are hollow. This saves nearly 40% per letter over solid-fill letters. ____Not the real rusty Not bad I've also considered sending all pages as compressed diffs against a random page of Homer's Iliad, but the bandwidth savings are still as unproven as the wine-dark sea. ____Not the real rusty Odyssey! Odyssey! I meant Odyssey. I suck. ____Not the real rusty First thing we'd do Declare the whole town a no-racists zone. ____Not the real rusty I rarely eat breakfast The obvious concluision is that skipping breakfast will lead to comment search never being fixed. ____Not the real rusty Watching someone code I have a friend who I went to high school with. He's does carpentry and home construction now, and he's always telling me he wants to see what I do some time. He has absolutely no concept of what "programming a computer" looks like. I've told him repeatedly that it looks like me sitting in a small room typing and frowning, and that if he just doesn't look at the screen I could simulate it very accurately for him on his own computer, but he doesn't seem to believe me. I've also told him it's probably the most boring thing he could watch me do, and he'd last for about thirty seconds before saying "that's it?" and wandering away to look for beer. So far I have managed to avoid actually having to prove it. But one day, I'm sure he's going to make me show him what programming looks like. And by God, see if I don't. It will be no more than he deserves. (PS: On topic: Nedit. Just Nedit.) ____Not the real rusty Ooh, it has tabs now? I haven't updated in quite a while. I might have to check that out. The one thing that sometimes annoys me about nedit is the window litter that serious coding can leave behind. ____Not the real rusty Plz post hi-rez secret audio tapes thx! $ ____Not the real rusty Oh, I heard that one already And how do you get 300 Cadillacs out of a city that's mostly underwater? Float them on the backs of ninth ward corpses! Roflcopter. ____Not the real rusty Here's why not Your basic issue is whether contract rights should trump equality before the law or not. That is, should I be able to freely enter into a contract based on race. All of your examples are contracts -- purchasing goods, doing work for pay, etc. Right now, we have many laws in place restricting these contract rights to enforce blindness to certain things like race, gender, religion (in some cases), and sexual preference (in some cases). I believe in contract rights, but they cannot be held above all else. Contracts must be limited in this way, because a contract can only fairly be undertaken between equals. What you're describing is basically Jim Crow, in the postwar south. "Separate but equal," in the fantasy of the time. Where storeowners and municipalities may freely exercise their right to treat different people differently. And what inevitably happened was that one group of people became (really, started off) more powerful. And they used this power to make unequal contracts with the other group. Which leads to a cycle where the dominant group knows that only its will will be enforced, and the contracts get ever more unequal and eventually are just a complete fraud. Any situation where contract rights are unfettered will end up where Jim Crow ended up. And does anyone believe that eventually it would have changed if the federal government had not stepped in and ended Jim Crow? Your statement that "Now I sit at the cusp of answering "yes" to many of these questions" makes me think that you can't quite express this fundamental issue about contracts, although you seem to sense it intuitively. Hopefully this gives you another way of thinking about the issue. Contracts in the absence of equality are meaningless. ____Not the real rusty If I correlated my foot with your ass... ...would you have a 93.8% increase in rectal bleeding? ____Not the real rusty Why bother? It's not worth engaging Baldrson in debate. He's made up his mind, and you probably have too. All that's left is trying to entertain yourself with the sniping. Isn't that why we keep him around in the first place? ____Not the real rusty Sure More power to you. I got tired of this argument back in college when it was mostly about religion. But I guess someone's gotta keep up the fight. ____Not the real rusty Fair enough You prevent that impression through argument, and I through mockery. We have the same basic goal though. :-) ____Not the real rusty People can live wherever they want I mean, in practice Americans mainly live with other members of their ethnic and economic class. This is not always a good thing, but it's people being people. I notice however that you select the least objectionable of Baldrson's personal obsessions to try to make your case. What about all the outright loony stuff about Jews causing autism in Scandinavia? The great Jewish conspiracy? Can't you work that in to your worldview somehow? Do you honestly believe that Baldrson wouldn't support wiping out non-whites if he had the power to do so? Paint all the peaceable enclave happy faces over it that you like. Baldrson's program is about hate. If he was just interested in living with others of his kind, he'd just go out and do it, not try to prove how harmful all the other races are. ____Not the real rusty Correlation != causation How can you be so smart and yet so willfully stupid about this one thing? Correlation proves jack shit. It isn't even an interesting way of creating hypotheses. And it's all you do. ____Not the real rusty So... Are you doing any "further tests" on your bullshit theory? Or are you just talking abut it online as if it were true? ____Not the real rusty Prove your case or shut up How much time do you spend promoting your worthless correlation nonsense? You've got, by your own admission, no valid evidence. But you expect someone else to do the hard work of proving your theory? You want the glory without putting in the work. If you believe your own claims, put up or shut up. ____Not the real rusty Wording I think he wants to do exactly what he states: allow people the choice to live in decentralized, ecologically sustainable, ethnic enclaves. Let's be clear on what he wants here: he'd like to prevent certain types of people from living in certain places. When you say it, it sounds all libertarian and peaceful. But in fact, it is a project to curtail the freedom of people who are not like you. Also, I was hoping you'd give it up, but where I live has absolutely no rhetorical value for you. The simple fact is I cannot, nor would I want to, prevent anyone from moving here to the island with me and my family. In fact, I am actively working with other islanders to ensure that property taxes don't price all but the rich out of living here, as they're threatening to do. While Baldrson and I might both live in largely white communities, the fundamental difference is that I do not desire to prevent non-whites from moving to my community. He does. Baldrson is anti-freedom. Simple as that. If you don't see it, look again. ____Not the real rusty You're all wrong And you want to argue about whose ideology has killed more people? You don't see any problem with the fact that yours is on the list at all? Can we send all of you into space, to wipe each other out and leave us non-zealots the hell alone? Aren't you working on that rocket stuff? Any progress? Tell me something -- what's the current death toll for secular centrist humanists? ____Not the real rusty Oppenheimer? The nuclear bomb was developed and used in a war against, of all things, Baldrson's very own ethnic cleansing ideology. Would it have been created and used in the absence of WWII? Maybe, maybe not. But as history stands, I would not have a hard time chalking up the Hiroshima and Nagasaki dead squarely in the "racist hatred" death toll. Their war, their fault. I admit my description of my own ideology was kind of a hash. What I was going for was a secular humanist philosophy, characterized by a belief that this life is the only one you get (there is no "next world" where the pie in the sky resides, if you merely submit to power here on earth) and the highest moral prerogative is to protect the life, freedom, and dignity of all people. Then layered on top of that a centrist political philosophy that believes in making the best compromises possible to acheive those goals in a functioning and stable human society. If you want a figurehead for the overall ideology, I'd point to Kurt Vonnegut as someone who perhaps has best expressed this worldview in his writing. For currently extant societies set up largely along these lines, I'd say Canada, England, Germany, and France would probably qualify to varying degrees. Many democracies tend toward secular centrism, though not all. The US and India would be notable examples of democracies that are in some internal conflict between secular centrism and ethnic or religious foudations. I wasn't referring to any particular institutionalized understanding of what either "secular humanism" or "Centrist politics" are, as those terms will probably vary quite a bit (the latter more so then the former) depending on where you are and who you ask. But within the broad strokes above, I have a hard time thinking of any mass killings or genocides perpetrated in the name of these goals. In fact, it's hard to imagine how such a thing could be possible, given that genocide would be about the most repugnant thing possible within this sort of ideology. ____Not the real rusty You think so? I don't actually know. Nuclear power generation would certainly have happened, perhaps a bit later than it did. But createing a nuclear weapon was a huge undertaking -- much more expensive and difficult than just creating a nuclear fission pile. Who would have funded it, in the absence of a war? Of course it's all counterfactual speculation. Like, if there hadn't been a WWII, would there have been a Cold War? Who knows. Would our government and other governments have seen the weapon potential of nuclear fission and been forced to pursue it before someone else did? Maybe, maybe not. I don't think it's a sure thing though. ____Not the real rusty Keep trying First -- you couldn't move onto a reservation? Prove it. Second -- do you really think I moved here for all the white people? You can't think of a single other reason for someone who grew up in Massachusetts and someone else who grew up in New York to move to the northeast? For someone who loves the ocean to move to an island? For someone who works for himself from home to move wherever the hell he pleases regardless of the local economy? Marxists see everything in terms of class. Fundamentalists see everything in terms of religion. Racists see everything in terms of race. Zealots of whatever stripe are shallow fools, whose only tool is a hammer that they keep banging away with endlessly, never builiding anything. ____Not the real rusty 1865? That applies to all Indian lands? Now? What, is that the one Indian treaty that's never been broken? First, find me some current Native American tribal immigration law. And second, explain how it is a race-based ethnic enclave, and different from national immigration restrictions in any other country, including this one. ____Not the real rusty Subtlety is foreign to you You may live wherever you want. You may not prevent anyone else from living there based on their race. If you don't like your neighbors, move. The onus, however, is always on the racist, since he is the one who wishes to curtail the freedom of others. ____Not the real rusty Sauce for the goose... And what are these gangs? Bands of armed criminals, intent on intimidating or ejecting anyone who is not like them. In fact you're right, Baldrson's notion does sound a lot like gangs. So, you're pro-gang? Or is that you're only pro-white-gang? If a group of armed black people took over your city and told you they were exercising their right of free association and it was time for you to go, you'd be ok with that? ____Not the real rusty lol You sound like a college student. When's graduation? ____Not the real rusty Who needs ancestors? His contemporaries look upon him as a pathetic kook. ____Not the real rusty Empathy I empathize with someone coming here and submitting a decent story then getting ripped to shreds by the bastards that reside here. But when the story is such complete crap, it's hard to be that empathetic. ____Not the real rusty Allow me to summarize: "I like NASCAR! I'm a shitty writer!" ____Not the real rusty WTF? $ ____Not the real rusty BBQ! $ ____Not the real rusty BYOB! $ ____Not the real rusty A lot more than that You can expect a CPM (i.e. income per thousand impressions) to average somewhere between less than a dollar per thousand and a lot less than a dollar per thousand. If your blog was about consumer technology products I would expect the higher end of that. Given that it's a fictional story, I would expect the lower end of that. So, if you can get another 700-some-odd page impressions, you can expect enough income for a bad cup of coffee. I hope this wasn't your get-rich-quick plan. :-) ____Not the real rusty Seems to vary a lot K5 is a lot closer to a dollar than that. But I've heard of CPM averages down around $.04 too. It depends an awful lot on where you put the ads and what your site is about. So, in our case, that CPM is not over our whole traffic -- Google only sees maybe 20% of all pages. Higher CPM, but lower total pageviews. ____Not the real rusty Nah That actual pay is cost-per-click. The CPM numbers are just an average over a large number of views. So you'll go straight from zero to whatever as soon as someone actually clicks on an ad. And when that will be, no one can say. And how long it'll be till it happens again, likewise. I wouldn't expect anything till you get closer to a thousand pages though. ____Not the real rusty Long stories The limit is about 65,000 characters. So I can't say for sure whether your story is too long or not without knowing the actual character count. Also, it's very unlikely you harmed the site for anyone but yourself. It was probably just churning and locking up your browser. Is there no way to get the size down a bit? ____Not the real rusty Partly CSSified The main branch is better than it used to be. I think for the most part it doesn't generate a lot of font tags anymore. But it's still pretty transitional. I'm actually quite motivated to upgrade K5, as there's some things I'd like to do that require newer code. And one of those things is a modern redesign. Now when I'll get to it is still anybody's guess. ____Not the real rusty Hey I actually fixed autopost to use proper open and close P tags instead of double BRs. I gotta get that patch to you. ____Not the real rusty Wright glider link The URL you were looking for is http://www.first-to-fly.com/Adventure/Workshop/building1902.htm Your link goes to an FT article about the semicolon, which should indeed be drug out behind the barn and shot. Or at the very least, it ought to require an advanced writing license before you're allowed to use it. ____Not the real rusty Fear? I'm not afraid of the semicolon. I have merely seen it abused too many times to trust it anymore. My rule of thumb is that if you aren't good enough writer to not need my editing help, I will promptly remove all semicolons that I find in your work when I edit it. The probability that you've used one properly and the sentence wouldn't be better split into two sentences is so small that it's not worth inspecting every case. ____Not the real rusty For just one example Your sentence would have been better with a comma. :-) ____Not the real rusty And to elaborate further If you had written "The semi-colon is the king of punctuation, however; the increasing fear of its use is a symptom of the debasing of the English language." that would at least have been a correct use of the semicolon. With the "and" in there, you must use a comma. The semicolon is no longer correct. And even without the "and," it would be better rewritten as either one or two sentences than hacked together with a semicolon. Basically, it tends to indicate someone who is paying more attention to their thought process than their writing. They have one idea, then another right away, and they represent that by splicing together the two idea with a semicolon rather than writing each one distinctly. Very little writing suffers from the removal of semicolons; most of it is improved thereby. ____Not the real rusty IAWTD A lot. ____Not the real rusty Au contraire I have been: A baker A carpenter A sign maker A peon in a furniture shop A warehouse freight loader An HTML monkey A glorified HTML monkey (that's an HTML monkey who gets biled out at exhorbitant rates to government agencies) A contract programmer An in-house programmer That's pretty much my work history up to when I stopped having real jobs. Also, my sister, mother, and grandfather are or were all teachers, so I got the educational system every night at dinner. All of which is not to say that I need to justify myself to you. But I think we all need humanizing sometimes. ____Not the real rusty Family is a big part of it The kids whose parents come to parent-teacher conferences and are involved in their kids schooling do better, always. However, it probably comes as no surprise to anyone that more poor parents are not involved than better-off parents. That's not to say it maps 100% -- there are plenty of worthless middle-class parents, and also plenty of poor kids whose parents are always there. But on the whole, poor kids have less involved parents. For some of them it's because they work all the time. For some it's because they're ignorant and don't know or care what they're doing to their kids. There aren't any simple answers. There are a lot of reasons why people don't learn. But, if you know any teachers, you'll probably also have heard another thing I hear constantly -- more testing solves nothing. If it does anything at all, it causes problems. So, attempting to clean up the american third-world might not solve every educational problem. But it'd be a start, which is more than we're doing now. ____Not the real rusty I believe I should be on the Board Because it would probably piss off all the right people. ____Not the real rusty Did it have the voiceover? "You are now coming to the END! of the MOVING WALKWAY!" I love that voiceover. I could listen to that all day. I wish they'd record some more announcements for it though, so that every once in a while it would say "You are now coming to the the END! of the MOVING WALKWAY! How do you like THAT Fatass? Was it GOOD! for you? Did you get OFF! on the MOVING WALKWAY!?" ____Not the real rusty They're probably all like me I did mean it -- I love that voiceover. I desperately want to hire that guy to narrate everything I do. "You are nearing the END! of this KURO5HIN COMMENT!" ____Not the real rusty Would cheating be wrong? Is there text? ____Not the real rusty Isn't that just repeating my question? ____Not the real rusty Who doesn't? ____Not the real rusty Were you a big fan of Eliza? ____Not the real rusty How do you feel about... ...isn't repeating the question what Eliza does best? ____Not the real rusty Has anyone here read... ....Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? Did you pay attention to the rules presented there? ____Not the real rusty Should I care whether you read it? Am I supposed to prevent everyone from being an ignorant bitch? Is that my job? ____Not the real rusty What does any of it have to do with me? How can I accurately assess your ignorance until you tell me whether you've read R 'n' G? ____Not the real rusty Didn't you think the movie kind of sucked? And isn't it nice to not be an ignorant bitch? :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, how could it not when they threw out so much of the script? And what was up with all the unnecessary effects and crap? Isn't the play basically just two guys talking? Why did they think they could beat Stoppard at screenwriting? ____Not the real rusty Need another category Craziest. For recognition of those among us who are honestly insane, and not just acting like it. I nominate Baldrson, tweetsygalore, and Michael Crawford. ____Not the real rusty You're such a groupie I think I'll trade you to the sound guy for his microwave burrito. ____Not the real rusty Generally standard policy The actually crazy are usually tolerated as long as they're not too disruptive. The pretend-crazy get booted. We may make mistakes sometimes, but I think that's the overall goal. ____Not the real rusty Who tattooed 'clinical psychologist' on my ass? I don't know what her disorder is. I'm afraid I only have a good mastery of the lay diagnostic categories of "sane" and "fucking nuts." Also, it should be noted that the latter category can be divided into two distinct sub-groups, "Admits it and has sought help," which Michael Crawford occupies to his great credit, and "Doesn't seem to realize it," which Baldrson and tweetsy are both representatives of. ____Not the real rusty Best director... ...and best original score. Am I right? ____Not the real rusty Excellence in Sound Design, maybe? Or something for my Foley work? The Mrs and the Miss are both very well. Ellie had her 9 month checkup today, and she is enormous. 95th percentile for height and weight. She has an excellent chance of destroying Tokyo at some point in the future. We estimate she will be approximately sixty feet tall and weigh upwards of nineteen tons, if she is allowed by the government to reach full size. ____Not the real rusty No, I just thought... ..."the Ms. and the Ms." would be needlessly unclear. Also: "how many boyfriends will you anonymize before blocking all new users from accessing your daughter?" Awesome. ____Not the real rusty Phony He's fake crazy. He does actually know what he's doing. Hence no nomination from me. ____Not the real rusty I don't think so There was another guy, back in the day -- the guy who actually started the "Natalie Portman naked and turned to stone" thing on Slashdot. Now he was crazy. This Pawloski is just a cheap knockoff of that guy. ____Not the real rusty I see As to the first, I figured he probably did. I was kind of hoping someone would tip me off as to who he is these days. About Jason, who knows. I could see it being either way. My feeling was just that he's desperate for attention. But unfortunately, he's the Vlad type, where more attention just makes him act up more. As for whether he's really nuts or not, as I said, my ass is totally clear of tattoos. ____Not the real rusty That was a Sony Picturebook It was nice to travel with, but kind of too small really. It crapped out a while ago. My current laptop is a Sharp MM20. ____Not the real rusty Steel wool rusts So if you make a scouring pad out of it, it's a one-use-only deal. Also, steel wool does burn pretty easily, if it can get enough oxygen. I don't know offhand of any source for clean copper wool. I suspect it's only used for cleaning pads. ____Not the real rusty Oh, also Nifty Mr. Wizard tricks with steel wool: Supposedly you can set steel wool on fire by rubbing it across the terminals of a 9-volt battery. Handy for starting campfires for the sort of campers that don't carry matches but do carry steel wool and 9-volt batteries! Also, I dimly recall Mr. Wizard making a steel wool bomb by rolling up steel wool with an oxidizing powder that gave off lots of oxygen when it burned. I can't remember why he would have made a bomb on a children's TV show. Perhaps those were just freer times. ____Not the real rusty Nifty My physics teacher covered fuel-air bombs. Basically a simple pipe bomb made out of black powder, ignited in a bucket of gasoline. Kids: Don't try this at home without a really good blast shelter. ____Not the real rusty What are you going to shoot it on? Film? Video? DV? Just curious. ____Not the real rusty You bastard. ____Not the real rusty Where the S1W at? Step. ____Not the real rusty You've got it backwards All the dupes are (at most) four people. The rest of accounts are members who regularly post here. ____Not the real rusty It'll probably go section With a score of (at present) 30, and 122 comments, it's got a really good chance of autoposting to section. ____Not the real rusty It counts votes and comments There's a bunch of pretty ad-hoc math, but if the voting score is above the mid-teens, it usually comes down to whether there was a decent number of non-editorial comments. A story wiht a lot of topical comments will usually get autoposted. A story with few topical comments probably won't. I'm not making any promises, mind you. Just that my guess is it'll go up. ____Not the real rusty Update! It appears that I was right. ____Not the real rusty Opportunity knocks but once I assume someone pointed out that there was no use crying over it? ____Not the real rusty Little cheesy? I thought it was pretty gouda. ____Not the real rusty I think you missed their point The first stall is likely to be cleanest because no one wants to go to the first stall. It probably gets used least, in bathrooms that offer more than one stall, and is therefore likely to be the cleanest. I don't think your argument holds up, because in bathrooms with only one stall, typically that's just the whole bathroom. Like, there's really either two or more stalls, or zero stalls. ____Not the real rusty The worm is there for a good reason It is there to weed out people who are not yet drunk and/or stupid enough to drink that cheap shit. It's like the minimum height bar at the ferris wheel, only the sign says: "You must be this inebriated to consume." ____Not the real rusty Libing vs. nonliving There's a pretty broad spectrum of states between "living" and "not living". If you really look at it, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where something can even be said to living. Or, to summarize: Is a virus alive? This is the kind of argument that creationists use all the time, that only underscores how ignorant they are. There is no bright line like that between a piece of furniture and a piece of furniture breakdancing. ____Not the real rusty He was watching the US Open And they sent someone up into the stands to interview him. Which he did. Exhaustively, for an entire game. I felt much the same way as you. I can't even imagine trying to watch a sporting event where he's allowed to talk whenever he wants. ____Not the real rusty They're all gone too Every once in a while, you gotta clean house. You, personally, were booted because you're an asshole. ____Not the real rusty There you go Sorry for the oversight. Thank you for drawing my attention to it. ____Not the real rusty Wasn't that Edie Brickell anyway? [nt] ____Not the real rusty I have a beer Every month, I have a beer, and toast skyknight for paying for it. ____Not the real rusty It's not that inconsistent NIWS accounts may be anonymized at any time and for any reason or no reason whatsoever. Everyone else is subject to the discretion of the editors. See? The rules are fairly clear, I think. ____Not the real rusty Ah, sorry I forgot the other important fact -- just about everyone who gets anonymized is NIWS. He's really been the only one for quite a while. That's why the rules can be so simple. ____Not the real rusty Weird I worked in DC for a company that did contract work for DARPA, some of it very secret (not what I worked on though), and they barely even interviewed me, let alone did any kind of background check. Or credit check -- what's up with that? Aren't they supposed to be paying you? They had the other kids I worked with interview me, and they were like "Do you read Slashdot?" and I was like "Yeah" and they were like "Welcome aboard ensign!" ____Not the real rusty K-LINE YOU SONOFABITCH! Ahhhahahahahahahaha! It is the only power I have in life! ____Not the real rusty THTV Trigger Happy TV was the only show of that genre worth watching, but damn was it funny. I also liked the one where two girls were in a restaurant, and when they tried to order, music came on and everyone else in the restaurant randomly got up and started dancing. ____Not the real rusty Oh, and The one with the Dutch guy in the park who wanted to "purchashe a pishtol." Because he was Dutch. And he needed a pishtol. For shelf protection. That one was good too. And also, the one where the giant dogs would follow someone on the street, and then when the person turned to look back, they'd all try to stand around looking inconspicuous like they weren't just following that person. Or dressed like giant dogs. ____Not the real rusty How many days? How many days would you consent to be stranded with no food, no water, no sanitation, no communications, and no idea if anything is being done to help you, while you watch helicopters fly overhead on their way somewhere else, buses driving by empty, and no sign of any competent relief effort before you started taking shots at some of those vehicles yourself, in the hope that maybe there's some water on board one of them? Many of these people believe that there is no help coming. It's been four days now, and from their point of view, nothing has been done. I don't find it hard at all to imagine taking some dire steps to ensure my survival. ____Not the real rusty Valid... not valid... I don't know. I'm not saying I think they should, just that I don't have to resort to repeating "They're acting like ANIMALS!" to imagine why they might be doing that. The dehumanization of the people still in New Orleans bothers me quite a bit. ____Not the real rusty They're only there at all because they're poor It's true -- the evacuation plan was for everyone who could afford to to evacuate themselves, and the poor were left behind. So this couple hundred thousand poor people just lost all of what little they had (and none of it's insured, by the way). Why the hell shouldn't they get a gun and try to take what they need to survive? What's going to stop them? The American Dream? Respect For Authority? The authority that planned to leave them behind in that sewer? Put yourself in their shoes. Why shouldn't they take a shot at the helicopter that's coming to evacuate someone else while their family starves? Why shouldn't they shoot at the police that were called off of rescue duty to put them back in their place? The police and military will shoot to kill. Why shouldn't they? ____Not the real rusty Total fuckupitude Who knows. Whatever the plan was, it seems pretty clear that it didn't work. ____Not the real rusty Ok, so... So some people will not leave. I asume the disaster recovery authorities knew that before the storm hit. Why has it been five days and most of them are still without any sort of assistance? ____Not the real rusty Class conflict Everyone involved in the Asian tsunami was poor. The land was populated by the poor and the desperately poor. There was fundamentally equality before the disaster. What's happening in New Orleans is a little sneak preview of what will happen everywhere else eventually, if the rich just keep on getting richer. I don't disgree with you at all about taking responsibility for yourself and doing what you need to do to get out. I'm sure a lot of people did. But if all we do is keep on saying "fuck 'em," eventually they're going to come and fuck us. ____Not the real rusty There you go You == Them. ____Not the real rusty Experimental evidence shows... About a year and a half ago, I took a bunch of flights over a couple months for various things. I had a folding Buck knife with a 5.5 inch semi-serrated blade and a couple of lighters in my carry-on for both flights of three round-trips before the knife was discovered by security. This has led me to conclude that our laughable airline security might be stopping 1/7th of the weapons being brought aboard airplanes, at most. And mind you that neither of these things were hidden in any way. They were just sitting in an outside pocket of the carry-on bag of a young man traveling alone with very little luggage. ____Not the real rusty In that case Also don't forget to carry a doobie. ____Not the real rusty It probably is ...on the same box. ____Not the real rusty lol what I went to Old Orchard Beach yesterday, and every time we passed the arcade I kept giggling because they had a Dance Dance Revolution machne right out front and I kept thinking "That's egregious DDR terminology over there." Damn you, Tex. ____Not the real rusty No, but... I just woke up from a dream that had me going to Kiev with Cory Doctorow and biking around the city. I had trouble getting a bagel at the hotel -- apparently you had to request breakfast products the day before you wanted them, so they didn't have any bagels. We left (for some reason) in a fleet of pickup trucks that someone tried to firebomb when we got to the airport, but the bombs didn't go off and we managed to get our luggage out of the trucks. When I got home, I found a robot in my suitcase. I think when your dreams start name-dropping, there's probably somethng wrong. ____Not the real rusty Probably I just got an invite to one of those things in October. That's probably what put this stuff in my head. I think I'll likely stick with my feeling that they're a waste of time. Unless you want to go. :-) ____Not the real rusty Tribeca, NY ____Not the real rusty Brits British people can get away with both cunt and faggot to a much greater extent than Americans. Both words are much more offensive here. On the other hand, we say "fanny pack" all the time. ____Not the real rusty I don't know what it is This time and the last time, the proxy httpd froze up for some reason. And, as pointed out below, only for http requests, not for https. It's not hardware -- nothing was under any strain at all. The proxy apache just decided to stop responding. Annoying, but nothing that money is going to help. So no, please don't send me $60,000. ____Not the real rusty Jealous, huh? I can sympathize. I'm jealous of people who make even more money for doing even less. ____Not the real rusty You're probably right I will check the recycling bin to see if it's been hiding the empty bottles of Nighttrain again. ____Not the real rusty 1973 called It wants its knee-jerk anti-environmentalism back. ____Not the real rusty But it's the same thing Presumably cts has too much opportunity (and need) for ordinary interaction in real life, so he comes here for what's missing (crazy ranting). You have no opportunity for ordinary interaction in real life, so you come here for that. Different stuff, but same program, you know? ____Not the real rusty Heh. Heh. Awwwww-riiiiight. ____Not the real rusty What are they doing now? Don't look now, but the civil war has already begun. Have you been following the constitutional process? ____Not the real rusty The insurgency is the Sunnis The Sunni faction is basically stuck right now. They didn't participate in the elections, so they have no real say in the constitution process. Any crumbs they get off the table are solely due to Kurds and Shiites hoping to avoid outright civil war. However, as of yesterday, it appears that the Shiites and the Kurds are unable to come to agreement with the Sunnis, and since the primary Sunni political action at the moment consists of blowing up civilians, it's hard to imagine what kind of motivation they even have for trying. In two more days, the new constitution will probably be passed. Sunnis will reject it, since it gives them the worthless center of the country and no political power. I don't have any sympathy for them (they took the wrong advice and largely chose not to vote), but it's not that hard to forsee whether or not this will reduce the "insurgency." At this point, it's only still called an insurgency because US troops are still there. The very second we leave, it will be clear that it is, in fact, already a civil war. So as of right now, it looks like what we bought in the former Iraq is an independent Kurdistan in the north (which will inevitably come into conflict with Turkey), and an Islamic state governed by Shara law in the south, in which Sunnis Shiites are in open conflict. Fan fucking tastic. ____Not the real rusty We'll see The Shiites don't want mullahs in charge of government. They want Islamic traditions, not Islamic rule. I beleive you, for the majority of them. I don't necessarily believe the reasonable majority is going to get what they want though. And the Kurds know better than to fuck with Turkey. But what happens when Turkish Kurds start seriously agitating for their own autonomous zone? I'm not worried about Iraqi Kurds messing with Turkey, but the opposite. Yeah, the Sunnis are a problem, but one I feel the rest of Iraq can handle with US support I would like to be so optimistic, but considering we aren't handling it now, I don't see any basis for optimism in a future with even fewer trained soldiers. ____Not the real rusty I cannot believe you not know hashplis! ____Not the real rusty FYI I passed on your email to the appropriate person. If you read the fine print, you'll notice that you actually don't have any right to demand we take down the story or restore it to any particular state at all. We in fact do reserve the right to take your copyrighted work and edit it to our heart's content, if you submit it here. That's pretty much the deal. ____Not the real rusty On "your" side? Actually, I probably would be on your side, if you hadn't spent such a long time being a pain the ass here. Considering it's you, I have a pretty hard time caring what happens to the story. As a general rule, if you find yourself wondering whether I'll be sympathetic to your side of anything, the answer is no. ____Not the real rusty Awesome That'll totally fool anyone who doesn't know we can't edit comments. :-) ____Not the real rusty Lord a'mighty It's not worth it, man. Get yourself a basic 802.11g router, tell bellsouth that your modem died and you need a new one, and let the device do what it was intended to do. For home use, using a whole computer as a router is all kinds of extra hassle that you just don't need. Plus replacing it with a wireless router will mean no more trips into the attic to run wires, ever. ____Not the real rusty Hm It's been quite a while since I was on DSL, but as far as I remember, I just had a box that took a phone line going in and an ethernet cable coming out. That's not an option anymore? I knew there was a reason I liked cable better than DSL. :-) My setup here is basically just that except with a cable wire going in, and ethernet (to the wireless router) and phone line (to the house phone network for VOIP) coming out. ____Not the real rusty Huh I never noticed that a USB cable was so much easier to plug in than an ethernet cable. I guess it must be. Silly phone company nonsense... ____Not the real rusty Me and Phill went surfing You should have done that instead. It was a ripping 6 inch break at Salisbury beach. :-) Ok, not quite that bad -- it was really small but a lot of fun. Somehow, I'm a much better surfer than I used to be. Apparently taking ten years off was good for my skills. Now I'm starting to think about getting my board up here and checking out Higgins beach and maybe York, in the fall. Cause I really have time for another thing to do. ____Not the real rusty So weird I read Kuro5hin for the content and the comments, and Slashdot for the web design skills. ____Not the real rusty I see you're still reading Attention whore. ____Not the real rusty As quickly as the tides? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Kaycee Nilson: Whiner Knowing you evil bastards, you'll find this funny. Remember that crappy story about how much the author liked NASCAR? Well, she doesn't take too kindly to honest criticism, apparently. We got the following email to help@k5 today... From: Kaycee Nilson Date: 08/13/2005 01:16 pm Subject: I would like to close my account Seems to me that your site is nothing more than drivel. No serious journalist can get anything across to serious readers without people making negitive comments. No serious author can write without others being retarded. Yes I know the old adage, "You cannot please all the people all the time," but on your site there seems to be an uncommon amount of people that do nothing more than cruise the site to take their hatred of themselves out on others. So please, cancel my membership and delete anything I have written on your site. I am not ever going to return and I am most definatly going to tell my other columnist friends to stay away from Kuro5hin. We are an elite group of columnists and could have brought culture to your site and made it more than a place of drivel and non-sense and I was ready to tell my friends about the site, but after the experience I have had, I am telling them all to stay away because true journalism is not welcomed here. Sincerely, Kaycee Nilson In the spirit of that buddy who'll tell you when you have spinach in your teeth, I wrote back: I do hate to be the one to tell you this, but since you don't like us already, I might as well be the one. No one else is likely to, in order to spare your feelings. Real writers don't put "author" in front of their name. It's cringe-inducingly embarrassing for you to, and doubly so considering you've never been paid to write anything. Also, there is no such thing as an "elite columnist." I'm sorry K5 didn't work out as a means of promoting your work, and I do wish you the best of luck elsewhere. --R Then I got a Google news alert pointing me at an entire article she wrote on her other unpaid writing outlet, useless-knowledge.com, about what a bunch of meanies we all are: Stay FAR Away From Kuro5hin's Site! So, there you have it. We could have had an elite group of columnists bring us culture from the shining hill of useless-knowledge.com, but now we never will. I swear, the purpose of this site is not to annoy the stupid. They really should take Kaycee's advice and stay far away. But lately they just refuse to. oops My email copies and pastes badly, and apparently I read a calendar badly. Stupid gaffe edited so no one will ever know that I originally typed 8/31/2005. Ha! You'll never catch me. Cause I'm fuckin' innocent. ____Not the real rusty Um, no Really, he willn't have done. ____Not the real rusty Exactly That's what I'm saying. When we get earnest trailer moms trying to post here, it just throws off our chi. ____Not the real rusty Damn We have those here. So if that's it, then I'm already in the right place. ____Not the real rusty I feel like an overlooked Maori tribesman I guess we'll have to make do with our pointed sticks and fertility totem. ____Not the real rusty As a pointy stick... ...I take great offense at your denigration of my and my people's effectiveness as a weapon of war. My ancestors were pivotal in nearly every battle in history, and to this day, the majority of humanity still regards the mighty pointy stick with respect or outright fear. ____Not the real rusty Noteworthy? No. No it wasn't. However, it's pretty unlikely that my death will involve kayaks and waterfalls. Possibly one or the other, but not both. ____Not the real rusty Undoubtedly I occasionally think about faking my own death just to see what happens here. I bet a lot of people would actually care, but still there'd be a new Zombie Rusty account and a few "omg jews killed rusty" comments. Ok, the above is a lie -- I don't occasionally think of it, I just thought about it once right now while writing this. But I think the point stands. ____Not the real rusty Enraged? No, I'm not enraged. I think it's hilarious that she was so upset by the (altogether extremely mild) comments on the NASCAR article that she wrote a whole other article elsewhere about it. Also, the Vampire Goddess stuff, and all the whining about her back and her kids and etc etc. The whole package was too good not to kick it out there and see what K5 did with it. :-) ____Not the real rusty 15 years ago, maybe I lived in Dupont, and there was just as much open gayness as in the Castro. It's just that it was DC, so even the gays look more normal than most average, straight SF residents. The only time the Castro struck me as sort of freakish was on Halloween, when they all go totally apeshit with the costumes. The rest of the time, it's just another neighborhood with rainbow flags. IMO neither of them holds a candle to Provincetown, MA for overwhelming gay presence. Though who knows -- maybe even that's gone these days. I haven't been there for a few years. ____Not the real rusty As always, hard to say ...which probably explains why it's the only number anyone ever asks for. If any website operator ever gives you a "unique users" number without a lot of hemming and hawing, they're lying to you. That said, these are better stats for that. The other stats page is for the mod_perl apache, which only ever sees one client IP (127.0.0.1). The proxy stats actually get user IPs. On the other hand, they include like RDFs and images and whatnot. The number you're interested in is "Sites", which means "We couldn't come up with a less obvious name for this column, and believe me we tried" (and also unique visitor IPs). "User agents" means browsers. Looks like July was a little over 571,000 unique IPs. For whatever that number is worth. ____Not the real rusty Me? I like mine because no one knows I have it. If it was obvious, you'd think it was a badge of membership in one of those ubiquitous subcultures. But I don't have anything else in common with those people, and really they had nothing to do with it. That isn't why I got it to begin with -- that was, I think, just basically boredom. I wanted to do something challenging, and didn't have a lot of outlets for that drive. But the reason I still have it is that it would seem so out of character to most people who don't know me well. That amuses me enough to keep it. I don't think my reasons are very common, because most piercings are in the "decoration" category, and that doesn't really work if no one ever knows it's there. But maybe it's more common than I think. I mean, how would anyone know? ____Not the real rusty Atheist religiousity I, as an atheist, do admit that my faith in there not being a god is just that: faith. That is, my spiritual belief is that there is no overall supreme being. There's no sensible way to argue religion based on "evidence" or "truth" because your playing field starts out with faith. Get into all the logical arguments you want, in the end it always comes back to belief, and neither side (by definition) can start with anything more than a belief one way or the other. I don't begrudge anyone the right to believe what they want. And I agree very strongly with many religious teachings, from lots of different religions. I would even go so far as to say most of them. Because most of religion is not about whether there's a god or not, but about how we humans get along (or don't) here on earth. What I have a problem with is when religion is used as an excuse for murder, oppression, and injustice. This includes all the obvious examples from the history and present of Christianity and Islam, but it also includes the anti-religious excesses of the USSR and China, among others. I'm opposed to religion when it says we must do wrong here on earth for a better life afterwards (or a Glorious Socialist Future, which amounts to the same thing). Whatever our bedrock beliefs about gods or the lack thereof, we need to figure out how to live together right here and right now, because it's the only chance we're gonna get. ____Not the real rusty Well, it depends I mean, churches are just social organizations, like the YMCA and the Girl Scouts and the Ku Klux Klan and Kuro5hin.org. All of them encourage you to follow certain rules and behave in certain ways. We're people, this is just what we do. When there is a problem with churches, it seems to me, is when the afterlife is elevated above this life, as a motivation. I mean, it starts off with "You better be nice because we're all going to be judged in the next world," but before you know it, it's "You better blow yourself up on a bus and collect your thirty virgins as soon as possible." It's happened over and over, where a glorious afterlife is used as a tool to motivate the ignorant to do what someone less ignorant wants them to do. That situation is where I usually see social groups (whether churches or governments) start acting dangerously. A lot of the other stuff I don't like about religion is just garden variety bigotry that would find an outlet somewhere else if religion wasn't involved. I do wish that the people I know who believe in what Jesus actually taught would go to more lengths to vilify the "Christians" who make hate their primary business. A lot of Christian bigots get a pass from other Christians, or lukewarm condemnation, just from party loyalty. I assume it's the same way in most religions, but that's the one I have the most personal experience with, what with living in a theocracy and all. ____Not the real rusty And don't go skipping the footnotes I know you've been tempted to. "Oh just this one," you think, "what can it hurt?" Well don't do it. Just don't. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, and Later on some fairly important backstory and plot info is in footnotes. My technique was to maintain two bookmarks (or folded pages) -- one at my current location in the main book, and one in the footnotes. It worked pretty well, until the footnotes started referring to each other. But that doesn't happen too much. ____Not the real rusty The food analogy ...is pretty apt. It's not that certain books are harmful, but that a steady diet of nothing but crap will leave you unhealthy. The bestseller lists are, by and large, the McDonald's of literature, and like eating nothing but greaseburgers day in and day out, they've left most people intellectually flabby and malnourished. I think reading just about anything is good too, but by the same token if you don't read anything but Harry Potter and Dan Brown novels, you almost might as well not bother. ____Not the real rusty Well, if that's all you read I don't think there's any single author that I would encourage someone to only read. However, if all you read is Pratchett, you're still probably going to do better than most of America. ____Not the real rusty The Sex Pistols... ...were a marketing concept. They were, essentially, a boy band. Artifice is the very heart of punk rock. ____Not the real rusty Hey now Careful what you say about Mr. Pratchett and his fans there, buddy. Most of us do not wear costumes. Seriously, Terry Pratchett is one of the best satirists I've ever read. It's sort of unfortunate that his genre is fantasy, because a lot of people will dismiss him just for that reason. But, while his older stuff is mainly satire of the fantasy genre, in his last half dozen or so books he's writing about the here and now, and doing a really wickedly good job of it. ____Not the real rusty Masoch vs. Sade Having read much by both of them, I always felt that Sacher-Masoch was a sick bastard, while De Sade was just a troll. I think De Sade indulged in some of his fantasies, but only the tamest of them. His writings are just the humid imaginings of a bourgeois man-child. Incidentally, "The Humid Imaginings of a Bourgeois Man-Child" would be an awesome name for a band. ____Not the real rusty All the better Plus, imagine all the illiterate radio DJs announcing the new hit single by "The Humid Imaginings of a Bor-gee-us Man-Child". ____Not the real rusty Everyone knows Jim Carrey cannot be taken seriously until he plays a retard. It's like a rule of Hollywood. ____Not the real rusty DD Don't get me and BadDoggie started on double dactyls again. Seriously. Don't. Please. ____Not the real rusty There once was a man who abhorred trolls But he was stuck to his chair by his fat rolls Though they brought in a crane And tried an airlift by plane He remained trapped and had to endure LOLs. ____Not the real rusty Yeah yeah The meter's pretty bad. You need to really try hard to make it fit. But I was proud of the rhyme "abhorred trolls" and "endure LOLs". To work, you need to read the first two words of the second line something like "b't'he" and the first two words of the fourth line "N'tried". And the first line's not made of anapests, but it does follow a very standard limerick formula, so I figured it was ok. ____Not the real rusty You forgot the seasonal reference Gentle snow drifts down Under a blanket fields sleep Haiku is stupid ____Not the real rusty Your biggest fan Autumn leaves rustle Are those combat boots outside? Oh shit, call the cops ____Not the real rusty TV My wife said one of those TV news magazine clone shows did a whole episode on over-coverage of Natalee too. Dateline or something. They actually counted up the hours devoted to Natalee on tv news networks, and contrasted with another case of a missing black girl who was also well off and beautiful, but got no coverage. It's ok that they don't mention us though, because we all know that K5 made it possible for the rest of them to do this story. ____Not the real rusty You DO look like him! You look exactly like 50 cent would if he was a white emo dork wearing the remains of his last dirty sanchez instead of a black rapper. ____Not the real rusty Oh Tex You won't even rate me up for the dirty sanchez reference? What's happened to you? ____Not the real rusty Oh man You look at this site, and you don't think I have what it takes? You can't see it for the same reason fish can't see water. ____Not the real rusty A winner is me! ____Not the real rusty I still do that ...to my wife and parents. The real trick, with grownups, is to know enough seemingly unbelievable true things that they can never quite be sure you're making stuff up. For example, marshmallows are indeed named after the Marsh Mallow plant, which was used in flavoring an older kind of confection that modern marshmallows are semi-imitations of. But the buckeye is not, in fact, an extremely large burrowing rodent found only in Ohio. And Geary's Pale Ale is not made with lobster shell extracts, despite having a picture of a lobster on the label. ____Not the real rusty Put them all in front of her I mean, church as a place to go, if she likes one then go to it. There's a lot to be said for growing up with the kind of extended social group that churches almost automatically provide. But as for the system of the religion, get her some books about other ones to read too. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and so forth. Talk to her about what they have in common and what they don't. This is basically our plan for our daughter. She goes to church with her mother every Sunday, to the same church (which happens to be Methodist, but is really just the generic local Protestant outlet). But as for what she believes, she'll be talking about that later with her atheist dad and comparative religion-minor mother, after we've introduced her to a lot of the rest of the world's founding fairy tales. ____Not the real rusty That's a good article I was watching TV the other day, and there was a commercial with people in an office, and it suddenly struck me as totally bizarre that people do that. Leave their house early in the morning and go and spend eight hours in some random building every day. And not only that people do it, but that a lot of people do it. Enough that it's not in any way unremarkable -- in fact it's usually the default mental picture when someone says they're "going to work." I agree with him that this is basically an industrial-age fad that will die out. Already, today, very few of those office workers actually need to be at an office to accomplish their jobs. Any location with a phone and computer would probably serve. It's not going to be forever before someone notices that. The company practices he describes toward the end have basically been how my working life has gone since the end of my last "real job" in 2000. Currently, the big drawbacks are mainly regulatory. There's a lot of tax hassles to deal with outside of the assumed "employee" relationship, and also finding health insurance can be a big problem in some places. I think one of the major remaining things that has to happen before his vision could come to pass is that we need some laws that support and simplify the life of the small entrepreneur. Given the pace of government progress, that's not likely in my lifetime. ____Not the real rusty Motivation Yes, motivation is an issue. It's taken me four years to really get the hang of it, and I still slip sometimes. One important thing is having a partner. I suppose there must be someone people out there that can keep themselves motivated totally on their own, but I don't think I've met them yet. Most people have a partner or clients or both, all of which will tend to keep you motivated by yelling at you when you slip badly, or, better, just asking how everyhting's going every day or two. ____Not the real rusty Ice cold beer! Makes you want to cheer! Ice cold gin! Makes you want to win! Ice cold duck! Makes you want to fffffffight! ____Not the real rusty Meh I thought the story was bad. Very bad. Poorly written, self-indulgent nonsense. But at least it was properly labeled. I asked, and no one else kicked it out of voting early. You got the same shot that everyone else does. And I'm glad it didn't get to the front page. But if it had, well, we've had worse stories than that too. ____Not the real rusty I posted in the other diary about that The short answer is I don't know, and he's not anonymized anymore. ____Not the real rusty Will do I'll get right on that. For example, I hadn't noticed you had a new account. ____Not the real rusty Logging The policy is when you anonymize someone, you should leave a note as to why. Ok, it's not held to 100% of the time, like if I erase a comment spammer I usually don't bother with a log message about it, because no one's ever going to ask. In this case, there definitely should have been a log entry. And I haven't asked everybody yet. So I don't think anyone's lying to me. About making it visible to everyone, that just makes it a game. "What can I get publically anonymized for?" I can see why you think it should be, but I don't think that would be a good idea. ____Not the real rusty That was pretty bad "Cunt" was pretty bad too. Though more for the fact that it was the first one to really present this "should this be posted" dilemma. And I'm starting to think "Fuck Natalee Holloway" was the worst story ever, because apparently I'll continue to get poorly spelled death threats from Christians for the rest of time because of it. I never realized Christians were so into wishing harm to people. But I guess it's the whole execution-cult thng they have, so it makes some sense. ____Not the real rusty Well Like I said, it wasn't the article itself, but its effect. And the later information that it was written and posted purely as an attempt to get that title on the front page. So, perhaps it was one of the worst for me personally, not for K5 itself. ____Not the real rusty Hey I don't know why you were booted. I know there was discussion amongst the editors about whether anything unusual should be done about your crappy story, but as far as I know there wasn't any decisions to do anything (and I wouldn't have supported anything being done). I turned the account back on, because there was nothing to indicate why it had been anonymized. Sorry about that. ____Not the real rusty Ironically It does them no good. All the stats pages are robots.txt'ed out of Google anyway. You'd think they'd figure that out eventually, but I guess not. ____Not the real rusty One tiny tip: Mix the salt in with the flour, not with the yeast/water/sugar. Salt is not good for yeast, and you want to keep the two separate for as long as possible. Also, I personally would use more salt than that. Maybe half a tsp or so. ____Not the real rusty Er We've had two members visited by the secret service so far. And some counterfeiter's ass? Not gonna be protected by me. So, hopefully you're lying. :-) ____Not the real rusty I think your plan to win the war on terror has merit. ____Not the real rusty I got a letter from the government... Just thought I'd update everyone who cares on the state of the Natalee hate mail. It continues to flow in, at a rate of several a day. An astonishing percentage is from AOL users. I don't know... maybe not so astonishing. Anyway, that wasn't what motivated me to write this. I just got one of the better ones yet. Read on. From: Stephen Legarski Date: 07/28/2005 07:12 PM Subject: Just to inform you I would like to inform you that I will check back to your site in 1 day. If the "Fuck Natalee Holoway" posting is not removed, I will be sure to let many others know what a discraceful site you run. I cannot believe that any manager would allow such trash on their site. If you are unaware of the posting then this email should provide some insight. If you know about it already and have done nothing to remove it, then God help your site in the future. I work for the government and I'm sure the media might want to get a good story, ruining your credibility. Remember, notoriety on this level is short lived. I actually wrote back to this one, because I just couldn't resist. I wrote back to another one as well, from someone who said he taught journalism. I asked him what school he taught journalism at. No reply to that. But anyway, to this letter, I replied: From: Me To: Stephen Legarski Date: 07/28/2005 08:21 PM Subject: Re: Just to inform you Hello! I'm glad you enjoyed the article. Can I ask what branch of the government you work for, and in what capacity? --R Further updates as warranted... Now now Don't jump to conclusions. There could be any number of Stephen Legarskis out there, and I'm sure all except for one of them are not complete twats. ____Not the real rusty Oddly That story all by itself actually raised our pagerank. Went from 7 to 8 shortly after it was posted. I don't think it should be number one either, and frankly at this point I wish it wasn't. I'd like to go back to believing the best about humanity now please. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I really don't think most of them read past the title. It's not even clear that they read the title on K5 itself, as opposed to seeing it on Google, clicking and scrolling to find the first email address they could. It's also amazing how many parents there are out there who firmly believe that it's my job to keep anything that might be inappropriate for kids off the internet. For god's sake people, supervise your own damn kids. ____Not the real rusty Nah First of all the time -- do you know any government employee who would be working at 7 pm? And second, it just came from some earthlink IP. Probably a home account. ____Not the real rusty It'll end in a ruckus. You mark my words. ____Not the real rusty Aph didn't do it I banned you. And yes, you were right as to the reason. ____Not the real rusty 25 grand... ...is fairly low. If I were you, I'd budget for at least $35,000, or try to scale back your needs until you get an estimate of around $15k (which will probably end up costing $25k). Construction costs right now are outlandish, between high materials prices and the continuing strong demand for builders. ____Not the real rusty Oh jesus You're looking at like a $10,000 minimum for decent dead hooker storage these days. Even more if you go with a dead hooker freezer that has replaceable face panels to match your rosewood or stainless steel cabinetry. ____Not the real rusty Oh, I was thinking feezer storage If you mean dry storage, well that's just astronomical. I mean, not only ventilation but humidity control and sterilization equipment... the list is nearly endless. ____Not the real rusty Efficiency They've made great advances in the energy efficiency of major household appliances in the last few years. If you're even thinking about getting new appliances, it's probably worth it. ____Not the real rusty Cabinet making is hard That's why cabinets are always expensive. And right now, it's especially expensive because lumber costs a frigging arm and a leg (thanks, Iraq war!) and because construction is still way up, so demand is high. ____Not the real rusty You don't need them Let me amend that -- in some cases, and in some markets, you don't need a realtor. Don't let them scare you into thinking that something terrible will happen if you try to buy or sell a home without one. It's more work without one, yes, but anyone smart enough to figure out how to post a comment here is smart enough to find out what the steps in a real estate transaction are. For a seller, realtors are useful if the house you're selling will require a lot of marketing. For a buyer, realtors are useful if you don't have very much time or you don't really know the market you're buying in well. They can help you figure out if the asking price is fair or not. Also, on that subject, always make sure you're aware who the realtor is working for. Unless you've explicitly hired a realtor to be your agent (a "buyer's agent"), they're working for the seller and for themselves. They're trying to get you to buy the most expensive house they can, basically. Most of them are good people, but that's their fundamental business interest in you. It sounds like you, Yaroslav, probably shouldn't have had an agent at all. The paperwork they did is standard forms, which you could just as easily have put together yourself. And especially as a seller, the burden on you is much less to begin with. ____Not the real rusty Mowing I have about the same amount of lawn to mow (around half an acre), and still push mow it. Fortunately, I just got a new mower -- a 6.5 horse to replace my old dump-scavenged 3 horse mower which would actually bog down and frequently die when required to do something as outrageous as cut grass. The new one's also a mulcher, so no more piles of rotting clippings lying around, which is nice. The drawback to the new mower is it's heavier than hell. It does have the powered front wheels, which is a necessity since I don't think anyone would want to push this thing around for more than a few minutes. But the power drive is rather slower than I would normally mow, so it's kind of annoying to plod along behind the thing. I have to force myself to walk slower. This mower was part of a large gift of yard equpment from an uncle who no longer needs the stuff. So I've also got a lovely two-stroke weed whacker now too. I look forward to seriously whacking some weeds. ____Not the real rusty Some dogs Some dogs are allergic to chocolate. The symptoms of this allergy are generally death. If your dog has lived, it's probably not allergic and will be fine, but since the only way to find out if your particular dog is allergic or not is to feed them chocolate and see if they die, most people try to avoid it. ____Not the real rusty Ah I didn't know that. Perhaps it was explained to me as "an allergy" as a child so as not to be too detailed. ____Not the real rusty He said *hiding* [nt] ____Not the real rusty I say Cocktails on the terrace at 6, old chap. Don't be late! ____Not the real rusty It's ok We've already been reported to AOL. And the FCC has the power to protect you from hate. They will come here. They have to. ____Not the real rusty But you're like Hitler. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Ooh, I have some advice To keep an online diary separate from your offline life, try not to drop personal info like what city and state you live in. I have some more good tips, but you'll have to post your full name and address below before I will give them to you. ____Not the real rusty yeah, but If someone already had some idea, that would be more evidence. I'm thinking in terms of ensuring that someone who already might know where to look can't put two and two together. Not in terms of staying safe from google searches. ____Not the real rusty "I draw my Flaming sword of Horgoth!" "Oh, sorry, you would try to, except your hand is missing. In fact, you've been bleeding to death for the past three hours or so. You see, before this adventure even started, you were trying to rob a merchant and..." (someone starts playing "Stuck in the Middle"...) ____Not the real rusty Roll d20 for dorkage ...a 5. Oh, too bad. You are beaten up and given a swirlie. However, while your head is deep in the toilet you find some sort of a dark-colored homogenous mass. It could be a lump of Endrikor's Fudge of Invisibility. Or it could be a poo. Would you like to taste it? ____Not the real rusty I can't do my work! [nt] ____Not the real rusty I think we're working from different references I thought you were doing A Mighty Wind. ____Not the real rusty WIPO: Penultimate Place [nt] ____Not the real rusty That would just be ...any place before the second to last. The winner could also be described as "one of the antepenultimate finishers." In fact, in the future, if I'm ever in a race, I think I will describe my placing in that way. "How'd I do? Oh, I was among the antepenultimate finishers." Assuming it's the case, of course. ____Not the real rusty When... They are posted by some asshat's latest clone attempt, when he's just mad that I shut down his l33t kitten-modbombing network. It didn't have anything to do with the diary, other than it's easier to click the account's "Erase" button than anything else, and the diary wasn't anything worth keeping around. It was merely a side-effect. ____Not the real rusty Thanks [nt] ____Not the real rusty Word 6.0 Was the last version of Word that was worth a damn. It's all been downhill since then. ____Not the real rusty Quidditch gets even more retarded Quidditch was already retarded for the reasons you point out. But it gets even stupider in this book, where it becomes clear (it must have always been this way, but it was never so obvious before) that the house Quidditch teams have no alternates. That is, each position goes to one and only one student. Everyone else is cut. So how in the hell is anyone ever supposed to get good enough at Quidditch to make the team in the first place? You don't get to play at all unless you're good enough to make the team. Utterly stupid. ____Not the real rusty A narrow scrape! I was also relieved at that. Maybe the grand finale of the series will be when everyone realizes how hopelessly idiotic Quidditch is and totally gives up on magic. ____Not the real rusty Heh You can't be serious. I saw that Stallman page a couple days ago and thought "Wow, RMS has finally lost it altogether." We don't need more of this kookery. Please just let that whole thing quietly disappear and spare everyone further embarassment. ____Not the real rusty I'm just saying If anyone had really noticed it, the whole Free Harry Potter epiusode would have gone down as Stallman's most embarassing cause yet. Fortunately, it seems to have been largely ignored. I think it would be best left that way. I'm all about rolling back copyright restrictions to a more reasonable level. But this case doesn't have any hook for copyfighters to cling to. The book is brand new, it would be copyrighted under anyone's standard. The publisher certainly has the right to control the release date of the book, and they clearly attempted to do so. The bookstore that sold copies early is in breach of contract and it seems like it would be well within the reach of any reasonable law to demand the property sold in breach of contract be returned. It's not a case, as Stallman tries to paint it, of the courts stripping anyone of the "right to read." He quotes the judge about the right to read not being a human right. But in context, this means the right to read a particular unreleased book at a particular time is not a human right. As a blanket statement, it's creepy. But when you realize that what it actually means is "Don't read the book now, but you can read it in two days when its released and we'll give you an autographed copy instead," it doesn't hold quite the same level of civil-libertarian-enfrothing terror. Basically, it's embarassing because it shows a zealot at his most insanely zealous, and by association casts a cloud of zealotry over anyone who favors reasonable copyright reform. You'd be doing everyone a favor by letting it slither into well-deserved obscurity. ____Not the real rusty Companies out of business? In many cases, companies that go out of business will no longer be party to non-disclosure agreements. You'd have to check the specific wording of the NDA to know for sure. But I suspect that the reason your code is not releasable is not due to NDAs, but due to copyright ownership. If a company folds, its property, including copyrights, is generally disposed of in some way -- either bought, or assigned to creditors, or something. The company that is out of business no longer owns the copyright though. If it doesn't exist, it doesn't won anything. Have you tried to track down the ownership of any of these copyrights? ____Not the real rusty They didn't legally buy it The store had no right to sell it to them. If you bought a stolen car, you did not buy it legally no matter how innocent you are. You don't get to keep your stolen car. If they'd sent the buyers to jail or something, I could understand the outrage. After all, they didn't do anything wrong. But they received goods they have no right to own, and making them give it back is not the least bit unreasonable. ____Not the real rusty Stolen property It was the store's mistake. But that doesn't make it any less stolen property. The buyers weren't punished, they were just required to return the book. And I assume the store was required to offer them their money back, if they didn't take the publisher up on the signed book offer. Buying stolen property in good faith doesn't make the property legal for you to own. ____Not the real rusty "Stolen" is a little hyperbolous Ok, "stolen" it probably technically isn't. But nevertheless, the store had no right to sell it. The publisher, I think, has every right to sue to get their property back, even from the customer. ____Not the real rusty No, that's not the issue here It doesn't have any bearing at all on legally sold books. If a publisher sold you a book and later said they wanted it back, fuck them. If they sold you a book and later said you weren't allowed to re-sell it, again fuck them. This isn't about a book you legally bought. It's about a book that was sold illegally. I don't think it's unreasonable to grant an author, or a publisher, the right to say when a book comes out for sale, do you? I mean, if you own something, I don't have the right to force you to sell it do I? You can sell your property when you're good and ready to. So for instance, say you and I made a contract that you were going to sell me your car in one month. But instead of waiting a month, I went to your house and took the car, and then sold it to my buddy. My buddy is innocent here -- he was just buying a car. But I did not yet have any right to the car I sold him. A reasonable judge would say "You have to give back the car until the contracted purchase time. At that time, you may do any damn thing you like with it." The point is just that this has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy or copyright. It's a contract law case. The bookseller violated their contract with the publisher, and they did not have the legal right to sell the book. I have no arguments with you about copyright issues, but this isn't a copyright case. ____Not the real rusty Human rights I think you're right about trade secret law being a plausible basis for the reading injunction. But I don't agree that the right to read this particular book now instead of two days from now is a human right. That's an absolutist's point-of-view. It's the view of someone who can't see the difference between this case and government censorship. The human rights analogy is "Well, if they can say you can't read this book, then they can say you can't read any book!" In short, it's a legal view that only a programmer could have. Programmers tend to view law as black and white. Either you can read any book, or you can read no book. But in the real world, this case would not form any kind of reasonable basis for a book-banning spree by the Canadian government or anyone else. Actual law involves infinite shades of gray and particular circumstances. In this case, the judge (I think rightly) determined that the customers human rights were not unduly burdened by being told to wait a few more days to read the book. And if you want a different approach -- if those individuals who had the book had their human rights violated by being told they couldn't read it yet, didn't the publisher also then violate the human rights of every person who had not yet been allowed to read the book (because it wasn't for sale yet)? Aren't you, right this minute, violating my human rights by preventing me from reading some article that you must be working on? ____Not the real rusty Injunction against reading Ok, even I think an injunction against reading the books is a little silly. Either demand that they be returned, or just say "listen, we're going to release it in a couple days anyway, so you're just not allowed to talk about it till then." But I don't see any reason they can't or shouldn't be able to order the books returned. They are simply not the legal property of the buyers. If you buy something from someone who doesn't have you the right to sell it, you don't legally own it. Whether they should have demanded them returned is another issue, but obviously it didn't hurt sales any. And if I haven't convinced you yet, I have a lovely bridge in historic New York City that I would be willing to consider offers for, if the right buyer were to present appropriate legal opinions... ____Not the real rusty So you're saying... ...there should be no such thing as copyright? Generally arguments about copyright issues are over how long a copyright should last. But in this case, you're saying that copyright should end before something is even released -- that there should be no copyright at all. ____Not the real rusty No What matters is not when money changes hands. Not if there's a written contract. Paying someone for goods is just an implied form of contract law. It's the execution of an unwritten contract that says "I will give you five dollars right now for a pack of Pole Brand cigarettes that you will give me right now." Posession doesn't have anything to do with it, nor does money changing hands (which you're assuming -- it probably in fact hadn't changed hands yet, but it still doesn't matter). If the bookstore was party to a contract that said "We the publisher wil ship you two hundred copies of this book, which you may sell to the public on or after July 16th," then at no time before July 16th is it legal for the bookstore to sell that book to the public. The law covering what happens when money is exchanged for goods is just a branch of contract law. In any transaction that involved a written contract, that contract is what governs that transaction. There's nothing inherently illegal about a contract to buy goods that you can only resell on or after a certain date, so there's no legal basis for claiming that contract isn't valid. Contracts can only be invalidated if some of their provisions are inherently unlawful. And even then, most contracts are written with a standard severability clause, that says that if some provision is found to be unlawful, the rest of the contract is still in effect. ____Not the real rusty I don't really know either About paying before buying -- I don't really know either. I was basing a guess that it may be common to pay later on a couple of bits of information. First, authors hardly ever know how much money they've made from a book for a long time after publication. From what I've heard, it's because booksellers don't really pay for books until they sell them. Unsold books are either returned and pulped, or have the covers torn off and go right in the trash (many paperbacks have a warning on the copyright page about "if you bought this book without a cover neither the author nor publisher received any payment for it yadda yadda"). Now whether booksellers pay for the whole shipment and then get a refund for the unsold books later, or take the shipment on credit and pay for the sold books later, I don't really know. Just that the economics of book distribution is kind of weird to begin with. So even if the bookseller did pay for their shipment up front, they still have some right to return books later and get the money back for them (or not pay for them later, whichever it is). So we already know the transaction is under some kind of contract. ____Not the real rusty Collect them all and win the end of the series! Also, did anyone else notice that Rowling finally, in this book, resorted to collect-the-coupons plotting? I mean, they've always been sort of coupon-driven (The Sorceror's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, etc), but at least in the past it's been possible to justify the plot coupons as merely a goal to be attained. But now we have four horcruxes. Collect them all, and win the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort! In fact, the plot itself is almost perfectly described by Neil Gaiman's blog post about the device. Cheesy. I'm sure it's all new to elevn year-olds, but adults should be ashamed of not noticing this sort of thing. Like you, I don't hate the books at all. They're very entertaining light reading. What depresses me though is the certain knowlege that there are many, many adults out there who only read Harry Potter and Dan Brown novels (which I do think are iredeemable crap, BTW). ____Not the real rusty Time served? I've already done more than three years in internet prison. ____Not the real rusty I have no favorites I love all my children. ____Not the real rusty Dorkety dork dork I have. In my defense, I'm also reading Moby Dick and The Handmaid's Tale, both of which I interrupted for Potter because it takes like three hours to read a Harry Potter book. ____Not the real rusty INT(11) Mysql says that the size range for unsigned int() is 0 to 4294967295. We can probably spare a few more accounts. ____Not the real rusty Write an article! Not very many people know what the actual process is for unionizing a workplace. You should write an article about your experience. ____Not the real rusty WIPO Nine Inch Nails -- Closer Radiohead -- Exit Music (for a film) ____Not the real rusty Sure I was more just thinking along the lines of entertaining commentary. I mean really, if they're gonna do it, I don't think any music you can play will stop them. At least you could try to make them laugh. :-) ____Not the real rusty That would be awesome "See how the male displays his engorged backside to the female. This ancient courtship ritual signals that he is ready to mate..." ____Not the real rusty No such thing... so far To date, accepted physics still says faster-than-light communication is not possible. Now, if you wanted to write a bad science fiction story, you could just claim "quantum entanglement" powers your instantaneous communicator and have done with it. It wouldn't work, but not that many people will know that. Just don't get into too much detail about it. ____Not the real rusty yjnxim;;lpeo;kA fhckjmooumpz,,piwuuuuuu844447305ccahx83i3,mew3q2 4789qcccc,v,k9g89g8-bv-;8ee7493654fjcklksvn 'x'x Message transmitted in 10-44 seconds. ____Not the real rusty It is This experiment is not an energy producer. At best, it's a way to make a neutron source wthout radioactive materials. But this is probably not going to be how they build a fusion power plant. That paragraph about "10 times the energy of fission" refers to a fusion reaction like what goes on in the sun. We're not duplicating that process here. ____Not the real rusty This is not cold fusion Cold fusion is a crackpot theory that will never be taken seriously by respectable scientists. This form of fusion, however, takes place at room temperature. That means what we're dealing with here is merely "comfortable fusion." ____Not the real rusty I talked to Cory about this a while ago I pointed out (and was well aware anyway) that Xeni is widely loathed, and that it's because (to most of the now-former readers of BB) her interests are boring. His opinion was basically fuck you. It's their blog, and they'll put anyone they want on it. Which I'm sure is not news to anyone here, nor is there anything wrong with that point. So basically, it's not worth getting upset about. The fact is just that BoingBoing mostly sucks now because it's mostly Xeni's blog, and we should move on. You may be interested to learn that Xeni is reputedly a fan of K5. So maybe she'll read this. If so, please don't take it personally. I bet we'd get along great. But I think you blog about boring things. ____Not the real rusty Believe me... I know you want to know waht I think about this issue, and no one would like to answer that question more than me. But you're asking this question in the context of an ongoing investigation, and I am not able to comment on it at this time. ____Not the real rusty I would reply But my reply, in the context of this ongoing investigation, would be inappropriate at this time. I think you have my answer on this. ____Not the real rusty Kos said what? And I linked to a dKos article where Markos Zuniga and others were calling for the release of Johnny Walker Lindh. Kos didn't write that diary, nor does he have a comment posted in it. You know dKos runs Scoop, right? And that, like here, nutters are generally free to post their nutty views on just about any nutty thing they like (although he recently booted a cohort of the loonie conspiracists, so he makes more of an effort at sanity than I do)? It's good form to read the byline before you claim that someone said something. ____Not the real rusty Errr This may have been before your time, but see this. The author eventually decided to remove any personal association from it after the harassment he received from people finding the story online after 9/11 (it was highly ranked for "Osama Bin Laden" during and for a while after the attacks). People didn't seem to like the last paragraph very much. ____Not the real rusty I love you [nt] ____Not the real rusty Now hold on just a minute Ok, a lot of the stuff you mention from the book is mostly or wholly absent from the movie (kibble, empty buildings, radiation waste, chickenheads, and some of the pervasive sense of lonliness). But as to whether the movie gets at the real core themes of the book, that depends very much on which version of the movie you watch. The released version, with the tacked-on "happy ending" is less clearly related to the book. The director's cut lacks that ending, and well as including a tiny scene that does exactly what Dick does with the "mental patients" bit. Near the end, Deckert finds an origami unicorn left for him by (I think) Tyrell's niece. This refers to an earlier dream he has of a unicorn. So how did she know about that? Is Deckert himself a replicant? It's not clear, but this confusion exactly captures the essence of the book. I think both the dream and the origami were cut from the release version, more or less neutering the film. I don't know which one you're writing about here, but it's worth seeing both versions to get a better picture of movie vs. book. ____Not the real rusty Right It's been a while since I've seen it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I think my eventual conclusion was that the book and the movie are certainly not the same thing, although they both get at some of the same issues and are both excellent examples of their respective media. Like Apocalypse Now is a great movie but terrible if you wanted a film of Heart of Darkness, Bladerunner is not a good movie of DADES, but it is a great movie on its own. Both examples are the converse of Harry Potter syndrome, where excessive fidelity to the source material makes a crappy movie out of a good book. ____Not the real rusty Let that be a lesson Always bring the camera. They haven't changed their visitors policy yet, have they? ____Not the real rusty Ugh Some people don't function in the cold, some don't function in the heat. I'm one of the latter. Heat makes me just shut down. I feel woozy, slow, unmotivated. I get headaches. It's awful. And "get air conditioning" is no solution -- just like you in the cold, that means I'm trapped indoors, in a sealed container. Nope, give me a nice crisp 20 degree winter night to go for a run in, and I'm happy. ____Not the real rusty Nope I ran 8 miles the other night. 9.5 minute pace, so I'm not fast, but I can keep going for a while. :-) I'm in Maine, so winter is not a halfway kind of thing, generally. It's below freezing more often than not from November to March. The coldest I've ever seen it get in four years here is -15 degrees F. That's air temp, not windchill (the windchill during that snap was down around -45). And this year, the last snow was April 12th. Being on an island means we have the moderating influence of the ocean, so it's not nearly as bad here as it is inland -- cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Still, winter does last a good six months. But that's why I love it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Apparently [nt] ____Not the real rusty Seasonally adjusted jobs? June is the start of the summer temporary-work season. There's always a job spike in June. Are your numbers seasonally adjusted actual new jobs, or just raw "new jobs" that end in September? ____Not the real rusty Thanks [nt] ____Not the real rusty OMG I crashed my rofflecopter on the banks of the Lmaozon. ____Not the real rusty Yes The American flag is a sacred religious artifact now. Welcome to the Church of America. Proud partners with the Bank of America to serve all your spiritual-financial needs. Would you like a free Coke? ____Not the real rusty Nice Less Than Zero meets Catcher in the Rye. ____Not the real rusty It's the hyper-tense self-conscious internal monologue. Very Caulfield. ____Not the real rusty Too easy All iPods come with a yuppie already attached. In fact, a great part of the challenge of podcasting is first removing the yuppie from your iPod. I mean, using iPods to fish for yuppies would be like using fishing lures to fish for fishing lure packages. ____Not the real rusty Remarkably succinct Podcasting is a new brand name for something that was never very interesting to begin with. Behold, the power of branding! ____Not the real rusty Not bad A couple of factual mistakes: "Move to Vote" is actually a bad thing for most stories. That used to be known as "the spam button" because it allows users to move stories in the edit queue directly to voting, whether the author wants them to go or not. This was added because some people would post stories to edit and leave them there for the maximum allowed time because they knew they'd never get voted up (i.e. spam). The spam button allows voters to kick such stories out of editing and directly to voting, where they presumably get shot down in short order. If the voters accept a story, they will leave it alone in edit until the author chooses to move it to vote (or runs out of editing time). The threshold is not based on percentage of users. It was, originally, way back circa 2000. But the problem with that is users come and go, but accounts are forever. So the number of active current users is an ever-declining percentage of total accounts, making stories ever less likely to post. This could be solved by trying to guage some sort of "active users" count, which wouldn't be hard now but would have been at the time, and it seemed like just making the threshold a fixed number would work just about as well. As indeed it has, requiring only a couple of tweaks in four years. So the threshold is actually just a static number, configurable by an admin. Those are both pretty minor, anyway. What does strike me is that you haven't really addressed the problems with this whole thing, which (to me anyway) are much more interesting than the successes. For example, while the story voting process is reasonably democratic, the membership process is entirely autocratic. I and a small handful of volunteers maintain and exercise unappealable power over what accounts are allowed to use the voting features of the site. If this were a nation, it would have a Parliament which is elected freely by all citizens and has the power to enacty lots of everyday kinds of laws, but it would also have an oligarchy who maintained absolute authority over who was or was not allowed to be a citizen. Would such a country be democratic? Only to the extent that the oligarchy didn't exercise their power, I suppose. But on the flip side, our hypothetical country would also have no ability whatsoever to ensure that each citizen only voted once for their member of Parliament. You might actually be Joe, but you could get in line at the polls over and over and vote as Joe, Larry, Federico, Pavel, Mustafa, and so forth. Perhaps this is why that oligarchy exists to begin with... And, from a totally different angle, there's the interesting question of why, when the code that runs this site has been out there under the GPL for nearly five years and is used by a sizeable number of other sites already, this site is the only one of any size that actually uses the story voting system? There are one or two others that have story voting, but I would guess offhand that the total active readership of all of them combined is under a hundred. The majority of Scoop sites are a combination of a traditional single-person or small-group blog and user diaries, like DailyKos. Why is that story voting hasn't caught on elsewhere? Given that it's perhaps the only unique feature of Scoop, and was the whole reason Scoop even exists, why doesn't anyone else use it? I don't have an answer to this question. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's attempt to answer it. ____Not the real rusty Hey nifty I didn't know that. I'll have to take a look. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I know kos (or, really, Captain Tenille, who actually wrote the code and admins it) is perfectly willing to give it to anyone, time and energy permitting. If I were to take a GPL-based guess, it would be that if Kos is distributing Scoop with his changes, he's required to distribute or make available the code for those changes. And since Scoop is perl, distributing the program and distributing the code is the same thing anyway, os it would be pretty hard to do one without doing the other. I don't think he has any specific obligation to give away his changes if he's just using them on his own site - this is actually a case where the GPL that Scoop is licensed under is kind of ambiguous. Since Kos is running Scoop on his own machines, he's not distributing it, right? But thousands of people use it every day. So is that distributing? My instinct says no. The GPL doesn't really say. ____Not the real rusty Yes Well, Scoop is V2, I think. I remember this being a point of debate about the revision of the GPL, but I don't think I ever knew how it came out. My feeling is that even if your web app has a lot of users, it's not being distributed until you start giving code to other people to install and use themselves. So I don't expect or require anyone to give back any changes they make for their site, beyond hoping that they will as a courtesy if someone asks for it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I've thought about that. It's the only way I can think of to have some kind of one-person, one-vote confidence -- just a small fee, a couple bucks on a credit card. If I was sure it wouldn't get me in trouble with the cc processor, we could even just do a hold on a couple bucks and then let it expire without post-processing. It may yet happen, not for everything but for certain expanded community-management type things, like voting to kick people out. ____Not the real rusty Although K5 didn't have any mass at all when it started, and it began with the open queue pretty much right away. I did write a lot more stuff in the very early days, but it was only a couple months -- like a month and a half -- before people really took over posting for themselves. Perhaps Slashdot created a critical mass, but my experience has been that "critical" doesn't actually mean more than maybe a couple dozen people who are excited about the site. ____Not the real rusty Participation Moreover, there is nothing requiring participation by k5 users. I'd guess that many of them are quite inactive - submitting no diaries or comments or voting on stories (I have no idea how true this is, but that's my guess). Historically, every time I've checked it's conformed pretty closely to the 10% rule. 10% of people who visit make an account. 10% of accounts post a comment. 10% of that number submit a story. I think diaries fall somewhere between stories and comments, making them kind of an anomaly. I don't think I've ever actively sought out stats about how many people vote on stories. If I have, I don't remember how it turned out. ____Not the real rusty This could have been done so much better He should have started with a new account, with a yuppie name like "JazzMAN6000". Then we needed some intro about how one of his coders was reading this site, and he thought he'd check it out to get a handle on how to manage these guys. Then the asking us what to do (because we're "like them" and so forth) and then the firings begin. But, like an overeager teenager at his first college-orientation-week threesome, community icon rushed the job and has blown it all over our bellies. So to speak. ____Not the real rusty Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the Germans can march in the shade. ____Not the real rusty +1: forfends ____Not the real rusty Not specifically, no It's just rare, so I gave props. ____Not the real rusty Can I add Nobody should be managing 35 anything, let alone programmers. 35 is too many people to effectively manage, in any circumstances. 35 programmers is just insane. ____Not the real rusty Or Make her stand outside in the cold and rain while eating grapes. Also, you could raise grape taxes another dollar whenever you need the cash. Encourage your dog to gamble instead. Tell her "you gotta play to win!" ____Not the real rusty No, he's right While most of it is paranoia, sometimes it's not. bobosaki, bockerdon, jerkstorecalled, Government for the People, Gong Bong, Lethal by the Storm, and junksandwich were all obvious dupes. And who was the puppet master of all this? morewhine. Egil, you should make nice and apologize to bankind, who had nothing to do with it. And morewhine: sayonara, jackass. ____Not the real rusty Dkos The dailykos front page hasn't mentioned it, but that's not all that surprising. There's no good opportunity to make political hay out of this, and with Rove's juicy faux-pas to choose instead, why expend air on something that even liberals think makes liberals look bad? The diaries have been pretty chock-full of condemnation, and a lot of people who find themselves really surprised to be on the side of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. The only half-hearted support for it I've seen is people speculating that the knife cuts both ways, and this decisions means that a town could vote to take away the property of a corporation if they don't like what it's doing. Of course no one thinks that's going to happen. I'm personally pretty flummoxed. I can see where this matches pretty well, as you say, with the conservative stereotype of liberal values. But I can say from direct personal experience that it doesn't match at all the actual view of any liberal I know. Everyone thinks this is bullshit. ____Not the real rusty Public "use" Yeah. The bullshit argument apparently hinged on "public use" meaning "the deriving of some public benefit." I'm with you -- public use should be construed to mean nothing other than "for the sole use of the public." So roads, public parks, permanent nature preserves, and so forth are legit (with fair compensation) but no private ownership should be allowed whatsoever. ____Not the real rusty I wrote a story about it But the city took it and put up a Wal*Mart Super-Center and 100 luxury condos on it. Now all I have is a lease on a crappy anecdote about a guy and his dog. ____Not the real rusty I always mix up Sandra Day O'Connor and Sandra Dee. Which one doesn't drink, swear or rat her hair? ____Not the real rusty Heh I saw that a couple days ago, before there was an honorable mentions list. I thought it was funny. What I thought was most funny was that I have to turn off all styles in my browser to get the text to render on that site. For some reason with stylesheets on, the text doesn't show up at all. Now that's open media! You could imagine it says anything at all! The purpose of a post like that is "let's see how many high-profile bloggers we can get to link to our site." So from that perspective, the list makes perfect sense. I can only assume that your outrage, however mild, was matched with the mild outrage from others that their favorite person wasn't included, which led to the tack-on "maybe these people still have an audience after all" list. Anyway, I think it's great that Tony Perkins has moved on to a whole new field. It seemed like he was really kind of typecast after Psycho and not taken very seriously as an actor. So it's cool that he's into this media and blogging stuff now. ____Not the real rusty Oh also I just saw the movie version of Catch-22 the other day, where Tony played Chaplain Tappman, and I thought he was very good in that too. So kudos again. ____Not the real rusty Ad fight! How could I justify not running it? rf0's been an advertiser here since Hector was a pup too. It's a legit offer. I hope Johnco sees it as healthy competition. If anyone were to get upset, that would be unfortunate. But I don't think my role is to protect one or another advertiser to the exclusion of others. Unless, of course, someone wanted to pay me to be the official hosting company sponsor of K5, which would be awfully expensive since it would have to account for all potential lost income from other hosting companies, which are most of our repeat advertisers. Anyway. I screen ads for accuracy and appropriateness and that's really it. This one meets the criteria. ____Not the real rusty Common misconception I actually just meant that I wanted to take 2005 off in respect to everything. But it hasn't really turned out that way. Not that I expected it to. ____Not the real rusty Comments are optional Advertisers can choose whether to allow comments or not. They can't select which comments to allow (beyond the normal bounds of comments anywhere else on the site) -- just an all or nothing up front choice. ____Not the real rusty Putting bugs outside Little known but true: spiders from outdoors hardly ever wander into houses by mistake. If you see a spider in your house, the overwhelming probability is that it lives there, and is a species that only lives in houses. Putting it outside is more likely to get it killed than anything else. If you don't mind spiders, or don't want to harm them, it would be beter to just wave as it saunters by. If you do mind them, then at least make their death painless and quick, and say a few kind words over the toilet as you flush it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I do that with mice too And invariably in the morning I find the same mouse I chucked out alive last night dead somewhere in the house. I ought to just kill them, but I haven't found any way to do that that doesn't involve a lot of ugly bludgeoning. ____Not the real rusty I can recognize them Ok, mainly I go by size. But mice come in a nearly infinite variety of sizes, if you're paying attention. It always struck me as unlikely that the cat repeatedly goes out and finds a new mouse of exactly the same size to kill. However, I have considered marking them in some way. Maybe I'll start so we can put this question on a more scientific footing. ____Not the real rusty Captain! We've picked up the creature's homing signal! It's half a klick south... moving... moving fast. Captain, we better get ready. ____Not the real rusty They probably didn't Where did dogs live before there were people to feed them dogfood? Where are all the wild chickens? We've had a long time to develop symbiotic relationships with all kinds of plant and animal species, and a lot of the species we take for granted didn't exist before people. ____Not the real rusty What? No Point Break? Where he played a surfer? Duuuuuuude. ____Not the real rusty What's really surprising... ...is if you did just stop going to school or stop going to work, chances are that hardly anyone would even notice. I've done both, and it's quite an experience. Office Space is not actually fiction. ____Not the real rusty I admit it I read books about Arctic exploration and whaling and things like that in part because a little piece of me wishes that I could leave the house, the family, and everything that keeps me here and sail off into the unknown to do two or three years worth of dirty cold manly shit. I also think about selling the house, buying a sailboat, and sailing around for a few years. Sometimes, when I really let myself go, I imagine what I'd do if everyone I cared about was suddenly killed in some kind of freakish accident. I usually feel partly bad about even thinking that, but then again not so bad because I suspect that almost everyone has similar thoughts once in a while. Or maybe it's just me. ____Not the real rusty Be a pussy sometimes Sometimes an exciting life is exactly what you don't want. For example, I suspect johnny's had quite enough excitement for now, and is actually pretty damn happy to have a boring ordinary life for a while. You miss a lot if all you have is excitement. :-) ____Not the real rusty Posting what? I guess I need to investigate now. ____Not the real rusty Ah, I see No, they didn't. But the Slashdot effect is officially dead anyway. I wouldn't worry about it. ____Not the real rusty He's right rmg is always right. Scoop isn't hard-hitting enough to handle high loads. ____Not the real rusty Be elated That way you don't also have to feel the regret that you didn't enjoy the good times when the bad times come around again. ____Not the real rusty titillate? There you go again! ____Not the real rusty I fell out of my room I predict that will become a legendary line in your family. My family used to go camping when I was little -- I think this story was when I was maybe 6 or 7 -- in one of those pop-up tent trailers. They look like a cube on wheels behind the car, and when you get to the campsite you crank up the top and it becomes a roof, and you slide out extensions on each side that get covered with tent things and become the beds. My parents would sleep on one side, and my sister and I on the other. These tent pieces on the sides fasten underneath the slideout beds with sturdy bungee cords, and ours had an elastic edge all the way around the bottom. When it was set up, you couldn't even stick your hand out from the inside, between the bed and the tent. Keep that in mind. So we were out camping, we had the gas-stove dinner, we had the campfire, and probably the s'mores and so forth. We'd all settled down to sleep. And with all the fresh air and fun of the day, sleep was not long in coming for any of us. And then suddenly it was very early in the morning and I was lying in my sleeping bag, on the ground, outside the camper underneath my bed extension. "Huh?" I thought, or something very much like that. I got out of my sleeping bag and looked around in total befuddlement. I was indisputably outside the camper where I'd gone to bed the night before. I looked at the camper, especially where the tent fastened on. It was entirely attached, no gaps, no loose cords, nothing. I picked up my sleeping back and walked around to the front door of the camper, which was of course locked (my parents are a little paranoid -- fat lot of good that did me). I had to bang on the door to get someone to come let me back in. That was pretty funny actually. It went like: Knock knock knock Mom: Quietly from inside, groggy "What could that be?" Dad: Likewise "I don't know. Someone's knocking." Knock knock Dad: Louder "Who's that?" Me: "It's me." Dad: "What? Rusty? What are you doing outside?" Me: "I think I fell out." My parents were equally flummoxed, did the same tent inspection I did, and also declared that there is no way anyone could have slid my entire body out that space, let alone my entire body and the sleeping bag I was still in when I woke up. And it has still never been satisfactorily explained. No one even knows how long I actually had been asleep outside. I may have woken up immediately, but I didn't wake up suddenly like I had just hit the ground (and, incidentally, it would have been at least a three foot fall). I just woke up like a normal morning -- and it was morning, not the middle of the night. I probably would have woken up then anyway. So, that story isn't really like yours, except for the "falling out my room" similarity. But it did become family legend. So I guess the moral is that small children falling down is almost always worth it in retrospect. Or something like that. ____Not the real rusty Or spicy? Do we know if Fen is Italian or Portugese? I'm partial to chorizo myself. Was that over the line? ____Not the real rusty Skype booooo The idea of skype is neat, but the sound quality is shit. I already have VOIP on my home phone, which just sounds like a phone. Tethering myself to a PC in order to say "What? What? You keep cutting out..." over and over turned out not to be such a big draw. ____Not the real rusty How to fix it: Bring back your review. It is a fundamental feature of the web that the person who controls a given URI has the power to determine if links to it are broken or not. You chose to break that link. That's certainly your choice, but it does mean that the glitch is on your site, not here. :-) ____Not the real rusty Either way Like I said, it's totally your decision. I just wanted to clarify where the brokenness lies. And it is nice that you've at least replaced the missing page with something that addresses its missingness and does talk about the issue. So it's broken in the nicest way it could possibly be. ____Not the real rusty Please... For the love of god, do what these protesters say! Those people desperately need clothing. If ever there were people who ought to be clothed, for their own good and for the greater good of all humankind, it is these people. PS: In this picture you can clearly see the stink-waves rising from them. ____Not the real rusty Oh snap! You went way back for that one. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's right Burgess wrote a great novel, but it turned out not to be the novel he apparently wanted to write. And tacking that last chapter on doesn't make it so, unfortunately for him. The first American version was the correct version, for all that Burgess wanted the last chapter, and wanted to have written that book about the free choice of good over evil. Even if you include the last chapter, it's so implausible that it reads like a black satire on the notion that anyone freely chooses to be any way. ____Not the real rusty I know I meant "tacked on" by Burgess, in the sense of not meshing particularly well with any of the previous twenty chapters. ____Not the real rusty Programmer, Entrepreneur, Poltical consultant, Carpenter, and Outrageous Liar. ____Not the real rusty And I haven't had anything to do with that address for night on five years now. ____Not the real rusty That was a favor Jimmy (Wikipedia co-founder, incidentally) registered that way back in the day so nobody else would squat it. He emailed me and said he'd do a transfer to me if I wanted. I said I wasn't going to do anything with it, so if he wasn't going to do anything with it either, he might as well keep it, since that would accomplish the purpose just as well. ____Not the real rusty Heh He didn't want me to buy it -- he was just going to transfer ownership over. I wonder if either of us will remember later this year when it expires. He must have renewed it at least once by now, huh? ____Not the real rusty He calls those depressing songs? I think the cirteria included bad and depressing. Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here certainly deserves to be included, as does Lou Reed's Perfect Day, on any list of songs that are just depressing. And he's obviously never heard The Cat Carol. ____Not the real rusty And speaking of Radiohead What about Exit Music (for a film)? ____Not the real rusty Maybe it's just me Wish you Were Here is certainly melancholic. I probably find it extra depressing because for personal reasons. But Perfect Day, despite not being overtly all that sad, I definitely think is one of the most depressing songs ever. It's partly the performance, and partly the sense I think it gives of being the memory of a good time seen from much later, after innumerable disasters. I sort of imagine it being sung by someone remembering an early date from a time long after the marriage, divorce, deaths of children, financial ruin, alcoholism, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe that's just me too. ____Not the real rusty It ain't me! [nt] ____Not the real rusty That last idea... ...is actually pretty cool. I'd be down with Rock-em Sock-em Articles, if anyone wants to add it. ____Not the real rusty Please express your density in slugs per cubic furlong. ____Not the real rusty Ye Faile Itte Where Itte be useing proper English Units, and notte thee metric Units of the Papist European Dogs. ____Not the real rusty It's just Frenchified It is tricky, because "tonne" isn't an archaic spelling, just a Frenchy one. From that point of view, it's easy to remember which one is English. The hard part is remembering whether it's archaic or just French. The eternal "old vs. stupid" conundrum... ____Not the real rusty Don't worry You won't have to worry about that. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Examples If you start here, you can page through 6,306 examples of what passes for an article. As for good topics, how about an overview of dog training methods? Types of boats you can build at home? The history of the word "holocaust"? That's just off the top of my head. Just about anything would make a good article for someone willing to do a little research. I do agree with you about blog entries vs. articles. That's one of the main reasons I don't really consider K5 a blog, although it seems like relatively few people ever grasp the difference. ____Not the real rusty I suck Autoformat collision! Try this. ____Not the real rusty Also, eschew obfuscation. ____Not the real rusty Not exactly Actually, I can ban you for any reason or no reason whatsoever. However, all I did was remove the homepage link. I agree with kpaul that you're just here for google juice. But you have every chance in the world to prove me wrong. If you're here out of interest, it shouldn't make any difference whether you have a homepage link or not, right? So welcome to K5, and enjoy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah Either an email to help@ or a post somewhere that I'm likely to see it (a diary or a reply to one of my comments) will always work. I do agree with you that we're not overrun with spammers yet, but it's only the vigilance of members that'll keep it that way. ____Not the real rusty And look what's back already Yep, he put it right back. I removed it again. Next time he's gone, and my guess is it'll be today. ____Not the real rusty Ah, now we get to the bottom of it The email address rang a bell, so I poked around in the database. Turns out I've anonymized this guy for spamming before, and he had two other accounts, doing the same placement for a link farm trick. All I can say is Dear well-meaning Russian and Chinese internet users: Your countrymen are giving you a very bad name. ____Not the real rusty Make that three And he's prompted me to add a sparkly fresh new rel="nofollow" to homepage and sig links. ____Not the real rusty User info... ...is already excluded from Google. User pages don't count anyway. As, incidentally, are our stats pages, if any of you referer link spammers are actually reading. :-) ____Not the real rusty Russian I threw in Chinese because they've been the source of non-english-speaking trouble, by and large. ____Not the real rusty Extra points For the correct approach to doing this in perl: find out who has already done it better than you would have and use that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mean gives finer grain With mean ratings, if your scale is 1-3 and you respect two decimal places, you have a lot more possible final ratings. With median, if your scale is 1-3 you have three possible final ratings. So to get more shades of gray, you have to offer more ratings, and it appears from experience here that people really only have headspace for three rating values. Whatever your scale is, they're only going to use the two ends of the scale and occasionally the middle. That's why we have a scale of three options. It lets you pull out more detail from an average without suffering any of the drawbacks of the maximum leverage problem you desribe with a mean ratings system. ____Not the real rusty All that effort and they forgot to include a point. ____Not the real rusty It didn't get any different ...after the first bit. Just other things that have happened, the tsunami, twin towers, etc. I don't know. You think that was the point? What the hell was the pope supposed to do? Put on his lycra pope-suit and fly off into danger to solve the world's problems with his x-ray vision? ____Not the real rusty I know Sorry, my sarcasm shotgun was aimed at them, but I seem to have hit you by mistake. ____Not the real rusty Want to know a secret? Back in '99, when I first wrote what would eventually become the Scoop we know and love today, I spent two or three solid months of working on it every time I had a spare moment, late into the night, every night, all by myself with no one helping or caring or even knowing that I was creating this thing. Just me, in my DC basement apartment, clicking away by myself. There was a lot more work that came after that, of course. But after the first few months, I had K5 up and some people were actually here and participating and encouraging me and helping, and that was motivation enough by itself. But what kept me motivated the first few months, all alone, was nothing but anger. That's the period when most projects fail, because the person who starts them just can't keep up the kind of sustained and totally rewardless effort it takes to get to a point where anyone else would bother to be interested. And it's a lot harder than you'd expect it to be. Anyway, what kept me going in those days was anger at Slashdot, for not doing what I thought they should do to make it better. There were lots of other motivations to do it, but that was the one that kept me actually working. Whenevr I felt like dropping the whole thing, I'd get all pissed off because that would just prove them right, that it wouldn't work and it couldn't be done. Of course, it was almost entirely misplaced anger, and went away a long long time ago when I realized that. But it was valuable. Without it, my life today would probably be radically different. Anger can be a useful force, if properly channeled and contextualized and not clung to forever. Because sooner or later, you've got to realize that your anger is misplaced. It almost always is. ____Not the real rusty Born of anger But adopted by love. :-) ____Not the real rusty NYT to charge nytimes.com is free with registration, and it has to be this way because nobody would pay for it They don't seem to think so. For $50 a year you can now pay for columns and opinions. Like opinions are a scarce resource on the internet. I'm pleased, because anything that will hurt the New York Times is a boon to the world, in my book. It's bizarre that they would decide to do this now, when the online advertising market is in the best shape I've ever seen it, and it's crystal clear that the way to make money online (and you can make money online) is to collect readers and pageviews over all else. The NYT, with their reader-hostile registration wall, has been gutshot for years in this, and locking up more content behind higher walls will only hasten the process of converting the NYT from The Newspaper of Record to an irrelevant has-been. More details on this foolishness may be found here. ____Not the real rusty I believe it has been fixed So the real question is whether there are plans to get K5 upgraded to a modern Scoop. And the answer to that is yes there are. :-) ____Not the real rusty I meant I think it's fixed in Scoop. It is not fixed on K5. That's what I was trying to say. ____Not the real rusty Comments There were hardly any rated comments, so the comment score kinda sucked. That's basically what did it. It might be worth my revisiting the numbers there and lessening the penalty for lack of discussion a little. I suspect also it would have done better on a weekday. If I were you, I'd add one or more of your future planned sections and resubmit it on a Monday. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Plus it was 50 FP out of 85 +1 votes. Sometimes auto-post sucks. ____Not the real rusty Mmmmm I think the impression that small timezone based tribes go around killing stories they don't like (but that some other tribe would) is much stronger than the reality of it. To me it looks now, and has always looked, like well written and interesting stories get voted up whether they're relevant to any particular population or not. Weak stories that may hold some local interest for some users despite being not very good do tend to fail. I think that's how it should be -- K5 is not a local site, so if your story's only inherent interest is local, you have to work a little harder to get it to grab the interest of everyone else. The day-timing thing is probably inevitable. It's also worth noting that day of the week timing cuts both ways. It's not so much a matter of "don't post on Saturday morning" as it's "know what time of the week your particular story will go over well." Meta stories, for example, seem to do better on weekends as far as I can tell. ____Not the real rusty The second buttons The buttons on the Reply line open and close the entire thread following that comment. About the open link, you're probably right. It would be better to just have, say, the date act as that link when a comment is minimized. ____Not the real rusty Yes, but... We added that button because on a long comment you can close it from the bottom rather than having to scroll back up to the top and close it from there. There's no way that button is going anywhere, as I personally use it all the time. :-) ____Not the real rusty But Rabbits never get farther than a bit more sentient and autonomous than a human fetus. ____Not the real rusty Hint Look at the domain name. ____Not the real rusty Air travel The problem with air travel right now is the US government has too much invested in it. Most of the legacy carriers are either losing money hand over fist or have been bankrupt for years. They keep getting bailed out by the government because it either sees a need for cheap mass air travel or has been thoroughly bought by the airline industry, take your pick. They've cut expenses everywhere they can and keeping the flights running still costs more than they charge for tickets. I don't know what the answer is, but people won't simply stop flying when the price rises because right now, the price isn't allowed to rise. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention... ...pension fund bailouts. All these giant company pension funds are guaranteed by the federal government (i.e. you and me). So when a big company needs to cut costs, naturally the first thing they do is default on their pension obligations, because there's no cost to them for doing it and the fed picks up the tab. Anything that's guaranteed by the government will be paid for by the government, sooner or later. It's totally bullshit that we're paying for the unsustainable promises of private corporations to their workers. Or, to put it more succinctly: Where's my fucking pension? ____Not the real rusty Self diagnosis scale: In case you don't want to answer publically, here's your scale: Age Diagnosis ----- ---------- 0-10 Crazy 11-30 Not crazy 31-60 Crazy 60+ Old ____Not the real rusty Huh And here I thought it was about menstruation. ____Not the real rusty I am sitting at the world, scowling at a computer. ____Not the real rusty Combine the two For a real fluffernutter of a solution, you combine the deep catalog of an Amazon with the bandwidth characteristics of a Bittorrent to prevent the massive demands on popular stuff from overwhelming the whole system and eventually preventing access to the unpopular stuff. That is, every piece of downloadable media should have a direct download method and a distributed download method. In theory, the really popular stuff should be faster to get through a distributed download (where it is widely seeded and available) and the obscure stuff should be faster to download straight from the source. To be really slick about it, the service should calculate which will be better based on demand info that it already has, and just decide for you. Eventually some content provider is going to figure out how to make this work with whatever onerous DRM scheme they use, cut their bandwidth costs drastically, and step three, Profit. ____Not the real rusty Calculating speed I was actualy thinking much simpler and more halfass for that -- basically just that you'd know how many people had tried to download some file, and if it was above some threshold you'd assume that the torrent would probably be faster. It would help if the store itself had some way to reward people for running BT and helping distribute the load. I can see it now, the peer-to-peer hackers (for the software), BigChampagne (for the popularity metrics) and the content industries all banding together to merrily build the next generation of digital distribution... Ok, seriously. You can stop laughing now. It's not that funny. No really, cut it out. Oh screw you all, I'm going home. ____Not the real rusty It's not that surprising He wrote a whole book about it. ____Not the real rusty Good for you It's nice to see someone with a sane response to internet controversy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Why do you think? "I'd do it better" is one of rmg's schticks. If he started his own site, he'd have to actually do something. And where's the fun in that? ____Not the real rusty Ooh! Can I be Supreme Allied Commander? I've read several Tom Clancy books. ____Not the real rusty Try giving it a width IE screws up a lot of things if you don't assign a width. What I'd do is something like: #sig { color: #DDD; position: absolute; width: 100%; bottom: 5px; text-align: center; } If you don't want the footer to stretch all the way across, you could also try margin-left: auto; and margin-right: auto;. ____Not the real rusty Search Search actually works fine. It's off here because some people love to beat on it whenever I try to turn it on. So the problem with search is more a social one than a technical one. On a fresh install, there's no problem with searching. ____Not the real rusty Nope Of course we're just punting queries to the database. I should have added, as a corrollary to the above, that given that search works fine on every other site I have anything to do with, it just isn't a very high priority here. Which I suppose was obvious to everyone, but it doesn't hurt to point out anyway. ____Not the real rusty RFID is the worst part Yeah, I'm not really a privacy fanatic or anything, but equipping this with RFID is just creepy. That means anyone can read it without you being aware that they are reading it. And not just the feds, but any punk kid who can hack together an RFID reader and find the decryption code on the net. At the very least, the prudent will want to carry their BigBrotherCard in some kind of RF-opaque envelope. Make the bastards ask for it if they want to ID you. ____Not the real rusty Good idea harmless, historically trustworthy agencies like the FBI Please tell me I'm not imagining the huge dose of sarcasm there. :-) What we need is for executives, lawyers, mayors, governors, and celebrities to find their privacy compromised in ways they aren't expecting due to this new technology. They'd probably just call you a terrorist. Or possibly some new terrorist derivative term. Like a "privacy terrorist" or something. ____Not the real rusty The FBI: Regulating interstate commerce and culture since... ____Not the real rusty No such thing as impossible ...at least not in software. One of the things I find myself telling clients over and over is that software is like fiction. It's imaginary. So when they say "Is that possible?" the most accurate answer is always yes. Which is why "Is that possible?" is an entirely useless question. What they really mean is "Is that possible within my budget and time frame?" And the answer to that question is usually a lot more interesting. And, in my experience, more often "no" than "yes," but maybe that's just my clients. :-) ____Not the real rusty I always have to do everything the hard way Never had any software engineering classes, so I've had to derive their lessons from bitter experience. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't think that's a software problem I would assert that it's perfectly possible to do that stuff in software, if someone would come up with a working method to do them and invent some hardware powerful enough to run it. That is to say, I don't think it will be advances in software engineering that will solve those problems. ____Not the real rusty It depends on the problem Coming up with algorithms for machine translation, for example, is just not realistically a software engineering problem all by itself. There's a whole lot of philosophical issues underlying the whole question that would need to be solved first, and these are issues that it's not clear at all even have solutions. After all, forget about machine translation -- human translation is still a dicey enterprise at best. Let me put my thinking a different way: If you told me to develop a program to simulate ballistic missile flight, but we hadn't yet figured out any of Newton's laws for non-relativistic motion or the fluid dynamics principles underlying aerodynamics, would my inability to write that code be a software engineering failure? ____Not the real rusty A fine distinction, perhaps I would draw a distinction between "impossible" and "currently not possible." That is, the latter is just a sort of extreme case of my interesting question, which is "Is this possible given my time frame and budget?" I would say that things which are currently not possible are still not impossible -- they just would require an unknown (but likely very large) amount of time and money to do. For something to be impossible, you'd have to prove that it's not possible to solve no matter how much time and money you had to devote. I'm sure there are a few of those things as well, but we're already pretty damn far from the everyday world where this question is actually asked. :-) ____Not the real rusty Attention Mainers! Don't forget if you live in Maine that as of Sunday we are in the Atlantic time zone. So move your clock ahead an hour this weekend, and don't be late hauling your traps on Monday. ____Not the real rusty Einstein Einstein worked in a patent office. Other than that, outstanding and wholly accurate! ____Not the real rusty I killed a man in Reno Just to watch him die. ____Not the real rusty Huh After a few more decades of globalization people probably won't even know what race their workers are unless they go out of their way to ask. It suddenly occurred to me, on reading that, that I have a couple of relatively close colleagues whose race it hasn't ever even occurred to me to wonder about. Like, people I have worked with for over a year on a weekly basis. I've met or at least talked to most of my co-workers at one point or another, but there are definitely a few who I basically don't know at all. Where they live, how old they are, what race they are... nothing. I send them projects and they send back completed work. I'm not sure that this means anything much about our actual attitudes toward race though. The fact that I don't know what race Bob* is might mean that until I do know, I won't tend to apply any stereotypes to him. But does that change the actual stereotypes I'm presumably carrying around with me? Maybe I'm just sort of assuming that Bob is white, without even thinking about it. In fact, that pretty much is what I've been doing, without really being aware of it. I think this situation is more unracial rather than post-racial. Just because on the internet no one knows you're a dog doesn't mean they won't expect you to pee on their carpet when they finally meet you. * Names changed to protect the innocent ____Not the real rusty Answer I cheated, so I'll put it in a reply to this. I still don't think I really understand it, so if anyone would like to write a better explanation, please do. ____Not the real rusty I think It's the same as this problem yeah? In which case their explanation would indicate that all 40 of the unfaithful wives will be shot at midnight on July 11th, which just happens to be my birthday. What a present. ____Not the real rusty Thanks That was an admirably clear explanation. So now I understand my answer. :-) ____Not the real rusty I found... ...a used Band-Aid in my Friendly's sundae once. Well, technically I found it in my mouth, but the source was a sundae. So that was pretty gross. ____Not the real rusty And You can set up a still up in 'em hills and start pumping out the white lightning. ____Not the real rusty Is it demoralizing to you? That's my goal. ____Not the real rusty I don't post nothing but crap I joke around a lot in the diaries, but from time to time I still engage in actual conversations. My time for that is just severely restricted. Sometimes I think I should go find a boring job that I hate so I can have more time to work on K5 again. But then I think, naah. :-) ____Not the real rusty Circling Boston I finally settled on a method for navigating in Boston. It basically goes like this: Don't get directions. They just upset you when they bear no apparent relation to reality. Decide where you want to get to. Concentrate on it for a while, and, if possible, think about things that might be near it, or between you and it. If you don't know Boston, don't worry too much about whether you're doing this step right or not. It's more of a zen thing. Start driving. If you have any idea what direction to head, by all means do that. If not, it probably won't make much difference. Drive continuously without stopping except as required by traffic laws. When faced with a direction choice, either head toward anything you recognize on any nearby sign or choose randomly. Continue driving. Ibid. Repeat steps 4 through 7 as many times as necessary. After an amount of time between 0 and infinity, you will arrive near enough to your destination to park and walk there. No, it makes no sense, but neither do Boston streets. It has so far always worked for me. And I often arrive at my destination in under two hours. ____Not the real rusty Nothing to do with IRC It was a harassing diary that sprang from IRC bullshit (apparently). FWIW, neither I nor the management of K5 in general give a flying fuck what you do on IRC. Just don't bring it here, please. And... why don't you just go form scoopnet or something? That's an excellent question. That's the kind of question that, followed up, can lead to progress. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh You're asking the wrong guy. Pretty much all I know about IRC is how to type into the little box and hit enter. ____Not the real rusty Top 100 what, I wonder? That top 100 list is very odd. No K5, no Metafilter, no DailyKos... If you search for those sites individually, the link stats would make you expect all three to be in the top 25 or so. I wonder what the secret criteria are. ____Not the real rusty Arab invasion, nonsense The first time they tried to invade, they got their asses kicked in under a week by poorly armed and poorly organized Israeli militias (i.e. students, farmers, and other recent settlers). Not only did they lose that war in which they started off holding all of the militarily strategic land that is now contested, they lost it so badly that when it was over Israel occupied the entire Sainai Peninsula, more than tripling the size of the country. Before, After. That's not a narrow and hard-fought victory -- it's Muhammed Ali knocking out Sonny Liston in two minutes flat. So now, what sense does it make to protest that giving up the Golan Heights will leave Israel militarily vulnerable? Not only has that military advantage already failed when Israel was at its very weakest, but Israel now also has the unconditional backing of the United States. Israel could very easily say they would give up the Golan Heights and keep the rest of the lands occupied in 1967, with the understanding amongst all parties that the first time Syria or any other neighbor tries anything, the full force of both the American-funded and -equipped Israeli military and the American armed forces themselves will come down on them like a blue whale dropped from space. The Golan Heights are militarily significant, certainly. But the argument that they are crucial to Israeli defense simply doesn't hold up. I don't have a horse in this race, personally. I think both sides are essentially loathsome religious fanatics. But though it may be unfair, Israel could give up a little of its 1967 land in exchange for ending this interminable conflict any time it chose to. Someday they'll figure out that wars never end because one side won -- they only end when the winner shows unwarranted mercy. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Like I said, I don't have very much sympathy for either side, and I don't think there is a "fair" solution. But I also don't really think it's in anyone's power but Israel's to end it, so they're going to have to take some of the short end of the stick eventually, or it never will end. Even if giving up land doesn't earn them any real reprieve from the fundies, it would help in two ways -- first by making it easier for the rest of the world to support Israel and further marginalize the radical opposition, and second to enable more ordinary Palestinians to take the olive branch and, again, further marginalize the radical opposition. As for anyone weakening their position, it seems like right now (or, really, before Sharon started his unexpected unilateral actions, which could be the start of just what I'm talking about here) the two sides are just locked in a hold, both exerting their maximum force. Think of it like two wrestlers locked together, just pushing as hard as they can. It's been long enough that it should be clear by now that neither is going to win this way, so really they're both in their weakest position. The first guy to take a big step backward is going to have a huge advantage in whatever comes next. ____Not the real rusty Alright I started to add that, thinking of the Huns, but then I figured it didn't really need to be mentioned, as it has not proven to be a viable strategy in the last two or three thousand years. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't think so It hasn't been successful in a very, very long time. It takes a decent amount of time to fully exterminate even a relatively small population, and quite a bit of will and acceptance that it's something that should be done by all of the underlings that have to actually do the dirty work. Genocide has been ongoing pretty much continuously somewhere right up until and including this very minute, but I think you have to go back quite a long way before you find the last example of it actually succeeding. And even then, most of the time you find that there were a lot of survivors who just blended in to the conquering population enough that eventually they became indistinguishable and most of the original conquerod culure was lost. That is, it only succeeded from the perspective of historians many hundreds of years later. ____Not the real rusty That's what I'm saying China hasn't wiped out the Tibetan people -- it's weakinging their cultural identity and assimilating them. My point was that acxtually wiping out a population hardly ever works, and hasn't for a very long time. This sort of assimilation is probably the closest anyone can come now, and may well be the closest anyone's ever come. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but My idea was basically that Israel just evacuate all Israelis from some lands and declare them no longer Israeli. It doesn't matter if the Palestinians accept this or not. They can move into the evacuated lands or not, according to their own lights. I'm saying that negotiating hasn't really gotten anyone anywhere, and the first side that simply unilaterally "loses" is ultimately going to win. ____Not the real rusty Witness: Syria just got ejected from Lebanon by a bunch of hippies waving flags. ____Not the real rusty It should work The author ought to be able to see the full story link. You (Owa) sure you were still logged in? ____Not the real rusty Eh As far as I'm concerned, you're welcome back any time you want to come back. I've enjoyed your stories over the years. On the other hand, I don't think Peter's unjustified. The story had a couple of chances, and despite your conspiracy theories it got dumped because it just wasn't that good. It happens. Peter said that's enough, and you pushed it, so he did what he said he'd do and has taken responsibility for it right here. I may have a somewhat more laissez-faire attitude toward administration, but I don't see anything wrong with it. It was his call. Take a break. I think you're burned out here anyway. Voting conspiracy diaries are usually a sure sign. Go explore and come back in a while when you've mellowed a little. ____Not the real rusty Two are just there for show [nt] ____Not the real rusty Cool Let's see... it'sa Kathy Acker isn't it? Huh? Huh? I bet it is. Either her or Oprah. ____Not the real rusty Holy crap I didn't know Kathy Acker was dead. What's even weirder is she apparently died in 1997, when I was studying cultural studies in college and surrounded by people who were very up on their Kathy Acker. I can't believe it never came to my attention. So... is it Connie Willis? And if not, can you put her on the list too? She wrote two of my ten favorite books of all time. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention Those BLTs are going to be hard to eat without the bread anyway. ____Not the real rusty In that case There at least needs to be a rule that it shall only be referred to as a BLT sandwich. The common appellation of just "a BLT" is misleading. ____Not the real rusty RIP efn That's a great loss. He wasn't around here much anymore, but over the years he wrote a lot of good stuff. 74 stories. I don't know what to say. Condolences to his family and friends, and we'll miss him. ____Not the real rusty But what verb? I thought that graphic was your doing at first, and "Stirling Newberry'd" was a euphimism for "jerked off". It works great with that interpretation. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oof Did you see Kill Bill? I mean... did you see it? Not even Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction can excuse that. If he'd made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Citizen Kane then maybe I could give him a pass. But as it is? No. ____Not the real rusty Starting with a number In auto format, if a line starts with a number, it interprets that as an ordered list starting with that number. Typing: 1. An item 2. Another item. gets you An item Another item. If you need to start a line with a number and it isn't an ordered list, either get out of autoformat, or backslash escape the initial digit. ____Not the real rusty Congrats! And I think you'll agree when I say that seeing your wife in cross-section is an experience you will not find it easy to forget. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's astonishing that more people don't realize that. I've accepted that people somehow carry their own opinion of what I'm like within themselves, unmitigated by anything but their own imagination. But it's still kind of puzzling. I mean, what kind of person would cheerfully run this site for going on six years? It's like no one ever thinks about that. ____Not the real rusty That's too easy The way to troll someone on dkos is to be more liberal than the most ragingly liberal of them. Basically, attack their commitment to true liberalism. I'm surprised I have to point this out. I thought you guys were better trained than that here. ____Not the real rusty Cause you mentioned Nader Sorry, the N word was sort of an exception. You could have said just about anything and been banned just for mentioning Nader. And honestly, having been partly on the admin side of things, it was for good reason. The Nader people were a lot of idiots. It pretty much became a truism that someone advocating Nader was either trolling or someone you just didn't want around, so they generally got banned without further review. ____Not the real rusty Right Not to mention that. I can't stand Nader though. ____Not the real rusty Summary: he's a big old fraud I dislike Nader mainly because my wife once worked for USPIRG, and it was bar none the worst organization I've ever been exposed to. It's essentially a cynical machine to take advantage of the idealism of recent college grads in order to raise money to further Nader's personal glory and political jihads. Those kids walking around knocking on doors are treated astonishingly badly. And for someone like Nader, who's made his name campaigning for things like fair labor standards to be responsible for such a thing is just revolting. Not to mention his union-busting, shady family finances, and general attitude that all the things he claims to stand for don't apply to him. ____Not the real rusty That's fine I'm sure your choice was a considered one. What I said though was that the people who were going on dkos and pushing Nader were idiots. Now, if that was you doing that, then it does probably apply to you, and I'm sorry. But I hope it doesn't, and that was just your voting choice which you didn't feel you had to try to talk a lot of partisan Democrats on the internet into agreeing with. ____Not the real rusty Me personally? I don't really view them any way as a group. Some of them I like and agree with and some I don't. It's really too many people to cast in any single light. ____Not the real rusty ROR I have a funny thread for you. Stirling Newberry wrote a story about Fallujah a while back which sucked ass. So I politely said so. And hilarity ensued. ____Not the real rusty I was right though Read the story, if you can. The entire thing is written in a textbook example of the weak passive voice. I don't think he could have done worse if he'd set out to try to write the most limp, flabby story he possibly could. And the essay 6502 links to above just provides further proof that the guy's a pompous cockbite. ____Not the real rusty Um ok I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. But... you know... good luck with the cognitive dissonance. ____Not the real rusty Give up You don't have a prayer of beating him at that game. He has the key advantage of actually being like that. ____Not the real rusty My family did that too Well, it was pretty fun when I was little to take the popup trailer out to some campground. But I agree with you about that not really being "camping" in any meaningful sense. My opinion now is that if you can't carry everything you have on your person (or at least move it all around with nothing but human power, so as to include kayaking) then you're not really camping. It's the difference between merely experiencing an uncomfortable version of your normal existence and finding out what is the minimum you truly need to survive. And interestingly, I think backpacking is usually more comfortable, because you don't have the same epxectations and you have to choose what you take very carefully. ____Not the real rusty Excellent I wish more people would do that. I've always encouraged people to do stuff like print their own press cards. Not that you need my say-so, but any of you are welcome to do the same. :-) ____Not the real rusty You never know Sure, it's more obvious how to get an interview when an author's on the press circuit promoting something, but it seems like sometimes they must want to do an interview when they don't have something to promote, just because it's probably a lot more interesting than knowing exactly what the questions are going to be in advance. DFW is a college professor somewhere, isn't he? There must be some way to get in touch with him outside publishing channels. ____Not the real rusty Weird Why Disney? ____Not the real rusty Ah This article sheds some light on it. Roy Disney graduated from Pomona in 1951, and just used some of his filthy Disneycorp lucre to endow a creative writing chair there. The college itself invited Wallace to fill it. This is a pretty common sort of thing for wealthy alumni to do at their school. It is fairly amusing though, given one of the major themes of Infinite Jest. I bet Wallace thinks it's just a hoot. ____Not the real rusty "Could care less" I think that's actually a regionalism. I never heard it said any other way growing up in the northeast, and I always did wonder why it didn't make any sense. But it's not new to the internet. "For all intensive purposes" has been said wrong for a long time as well. This is the first time I've ever even heard the word "Pernickity." Did you get online directly from 1905? And I have no idea what Marathon or Opal Fruits are, you fuzzy little foreigner. ____Not the real rusty Weird Most of this must have happened a fairly long time ago. All those candies have had those names for my entire life. ____Not the real rusty As it happens I just started reading Pride and Prejudice. Yesterday's satirical romances are today's timeless classics, so don't be too quick to throw out anyone who was alive in living memory. ____Not the real rusty This theory This is a restatement of Bastiat's Broken Windows Fallacy. While most people still believe it, it remains a fallacy. It isn't an essential feature of capitalism, and is in fact harmful to it. Or, to put it another way, if it weren't for all the inefficiency, we'd have our damn flying cars by now. ____Not the real rusty Thanks I knew I'd seen it here recently. Or, I guess, not all that recently. But here, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Even if we had a search, I still wouldn't have looked for it. We need an anti-apathy feature or something. ____Not the real rusty Not really I insulate myself from the network details to the greatest extent possible. I figure it's more efficient to let the people who do nothing but worry about networking details all day long do that stuff, so generally I tell them what we need to accomplish and take their advice about how to do it. I think at this point none of the businesses I'm associated with even own any hardware. It's all leased stuff. ____Not the real rusty Applications for XML Interchange of structured data between foreign systems is a decent one. That's pretty much the only one. And I'd further specify that it's only useful for interchange of structured data between foreign systems that don't share any common means of dealing with data. I think the best summary I've ever heard about XML's relationship with perl is "XML solves problems that perl doesn't have." If your two foreign systems are both perl, there's probably three dozen easier ways to share data between them. It seems to come down to: "XML is good for interchange of structured data between Java systems and non-Java systems." ____Not the real rusty Coincidentally It's the X in XML that also makes it a good buzzword. If it was called EML I bet it wouldn't have gone anywhere. ____Not the real rusty I am too busy to post this comment It was going to be a really good one too. Oh well. ____Not the real rusty Fun I cut some dovetails by hand once, just for the hell of it. They joints themselves actually fit together great, but I misjudged my depth, so the ends of tails stuck out too far. I was also doing it in pine, which everything I read said was a bad choice to learn with (and it was) because it's too soft (and it is). Still, keep trying. It's a great thing to be able to do, if you're into woodworking. People who know what they're looking at will always respect a set of hand-cut dovetails, and you can always tell if they're hand or machine cut. ____Not the real rusty Ha It's getting into mud season here in Maine, with the snowmelt soaking into the turf and everything that happened to fall on the snowpack for the last four months revealed in all its squishy glory all at once. Or at least, that's what I assume, because I'm trapped in my eight by ten office surrounded by buzzing machinery, processing the raw ore of the bit mines into refined code so the baby can eat. I actually have two articles in various states of completion (though neither is site news), awaiting a moment when I'm both (a) not working and (b) willing to sit at a computer anyway. Those have been rare lately. But yes, there have been a few walks on the beach. And we don't have a Hyundai. We have a Jeep, an old Subaru, and an old Ram 50 pickup. The Jeep's really the only one suitable for lying on top of, but it's the mainland car, so we'd have to be lying on top of it in a shipyard parking lot. Not the most romantic milieu, you know? So we mostly give that a miss. ____Not the real rusty YUO! A whore is you. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Probably It still sucks though. Bitkeeper really is a lot better than anything else out there. I met Larry McVoy a few times back in CA, and I actually think you can pretty much take what he says publically at face value. He's always been clear that he's trying to run a software company, and isn't interested in being open source. But he also has a lot of respect for Linus and the open source community, and wanted to help them. Obviously he was going to have to choose between these two divergent goals sooner or later. So this is a shame, but anyone who's been paying attention has seen it coming for three years now. ____Not the real rusty Like someone else said... BK was always proprietary. They're just discontinuing the free-as-in-beer version. So yeah, the main dev will probably transition. I imagine the companies doing linux development that are already paying for BK licenses will continue to do so. ____Not the real rusty It wasn't really their choice Linus decided he liked Bitkeeper, and wanted to use it. Lots of people did see this coming, said so loudly, and have continued to do so the whole time BK's been used. I doubt Linus is surprised or upset by this, all that much. If anyone could have seen it coming, it would have to have been him. I think the amount of trouble this is likely to cause in the actual development of Linux is getting pretty overestimated. The worst effect is simply that there's no other package out there (free or non-) that can compete on a technical basis with Bitkeeper. So it's not so much the changing that's the problem, it's what to change to? I don't think anyone knows that. ____Not the real rusty No kidding That's like saying "You'd think with a real estate salesman in the White House, real estate broker commissions would drop through the floor!" ____Not the real rusty Funny Wired story In college one night the roommate and I had been hitting the Wild Turkey a little too hard. He was lying on his bed when suddenly he sort of geysered vomit. I was in better shape than him, so I went over to help clean it up, and the following conversation ensued: Him: "Oh man, I'm really sorry. I don't know where that even came from." Me: "Ah, it's ok. No harm done." Him: "Did it get on anything important?" Me: "No, you're lucky. All you hit was this pile of Wired magazines." Him: "I knew they were good for something." ____Not the real rusty Right and wrong I totally agree that in the not too distant future (I'm guessing four or five years) it will be perfectly plausible, though not too common, to have your tv connected directly to the net and receiving a good deal of programming that way. My stereo (K5 review forthcoming) works that way right now, but it's pretty new for audio, and video is a sort of next generation away from that. And yeah, people are going to want to store video, but why on earth would you use a disk? I mean, at home you'll have your 1Tb NAS box balanced precariously on the corner of your desk somewhere for your movie and MP3 collection, and when you want to take one somewhere, just blow it onto that USB keychain drive. Disks do suck as a storage medium. They're flimsy, scratchable, and generally fussy to handle. I'll go for a little hard drive I can chuck in the bottom of a backpack any day. Of course, the potential flaw in this plan is whatever ridiculous DRM shit they come up with to make it impossible to use these digital files in the way that digital files were always meant to be used. I'm guessing that that problem will fade, though, when the media industry gets it's collective head around the idea that digital is a whole new distribution channel, and they can extract 90% of the potential income from it with 10% of the effort by just leaving the DRM out. ____Not the real rusty As you limp away, bleeding and sore... ...you think to yourself, "Damn. I lost bad." ____Not the real rusty It's not bad There's some pretty good self-mockery buried in there. In the FAQ they finally come out and admit that the gmail invitation thing was bullshit viral marketing. ____Not the real rusty That sucks It'll get better. And keep trying. It's worth it. ____Not the real rusty "full time work" The phrase full-time work doesn't quite get it. That makes people think "8 hours a day, five days a week". Caring for a baby is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can always tell people who don't actually understand that, because they think that one parents takes care of the kids and one parent works is actually a fair and equitable split. :-) Besides that, good advice. ____Not the real rusty No disagreement I totally don't disagree with anything you said. Just the use of that one phrase, "full time work," which I think sold your point a little short, and I see it used that way pretty often. I wasn't saying you were wrong at all -- I was suggesting a more forceful way of expressing your point. :-) ____Not the real rusty Blog spammer? No. He wasn't spamming crap on other people's sites. He was placing articles on his own site, in an out of the way place, in order to game Google based on his own site's high pagerank. Or, really, someone else was paying him to do it for them. Just another SEO scam. I hope he made some money from it while it lasted. ____Not the real rusty Was it wrong? Yeah, I guess so. It's not something I can make myself get very worked up over, though. Spamming other peoples blogs would have been a whole lot worse. Spamming Google... well, it's kinda sleazy, and of course if you get caught you're going to regret it, and he probably should have known that. But I don't know. I don't feel like he ought to be thrown to the lions for it. I can confidently predict the the self-righteousness of a lot of other bloggers about this will irritate me a lot more than what he did. ____Not the real rusty Ahem Not a fence. A "security barrier." ____Not the real rusty Dear vera This is your first and last warning. Knock it off. ____Not the real rusty Awww I am so jealous of your job. And I bet most of the people there hate it. Why do people who hate the climate always get to work in the Arctic? ____Not the real rusty Contractors eh? Do they need any web work done? I'd give them a real good deal on it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Congratulations! Hang up your jackboots, soldier, and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Bucket? You're in luck! The bucket is only for Apple buyers. You can keep your appendage... ...this time. ____Not the real rusty Neat Well that's sort of cool. It's going to break as soon as we do any redesigning or html cleanup though. Which, for K5, might not be a real imminent problem, but is the big drawback of this approach in general. This is why web services are good and screen-scraping is bad, even if it's elegant screen-scraping. ____Not the real rusty Funny you should say that By a remarkable coincidence, we just got Van Helsing from the library yesterday, and watched it last night. I wholeheartedly agree with the original diary as to the quality of this movie. But watching vampire movies is a bit of a personal hobby of mine. I'm not a fanatic, but I do generally manage to see them all if I can, so I've seen a lot of them. And at the end of this one, my wife and I had the same conversation we've had at the end of a good number of really bad vampire movies: "Wow, that was really bad." "Yup, pretty bad alright." "Not as bad as John Carpenters Vampires though." "Nope." ____Not the real rusty It is what it is I agree with Miniluv above, who points out that it's not like you shouldn't know what to expect. I could appreciate it for being no more or less than what it was intended to be. I think my wife was a little unprepared though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bye bye, spammer [nt] ____Not the real rusty Welcome back! Now don't let it happen again, puny human! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Argh What a crappy picture. I should replace it with something better. ____Not the real rusty There Better picture posted. :-) ____Not the real rusty Different theory There's some kind of virus out there that's looking for sites that have this string on them, possibly because it's a symptom that they're vulnerable to some kind of attack. So the virus hits google with that exact search string, collects results, and attacks those machines. Google might be 403ing that particular exact search url, because it's what the virus always produces, which would be why your regular search works and the link provided doesn't. The two urls are different. ____Not the real rusty YFI Whoever told you dkos was open to all sorts of opinions was wrong. Dailykos is open to a reasonable range of US Democratic party supporting opinions. Anything nonliberal necessarily falls outside of that purview. It's not a site for open freewheeling discussion of politics. It's an organizing and mobilizing site for the Democratic Party faithful. To summarize: They don't care about your nonliberal opinions, and they don't want your nonliberal ass there. And complaining about that is just silly. ____Not the real rusty Who knows Maybe he was having a confused day. Maybe he was misquoted. I've never heard him claim it's anything but a place for liberals and liberal activists. But it would be silly for me to sit here and argue with some quote of his somewhere out there, in any case. ____Not the real rusty Also I've heard him say he doesn't like it when they say "liberal blog" and that he'd prefer it called "a Democratic blog". He's about Dem party unity, basically. I think perhaps he might have meant that "liberal" in that context is meant to act as a code-word meaning "outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party." There was a lot of that going on in the run-up to Dean's election as party chair. ____Not the real rusty Read more carefully Kos criticizes Democrats who publically break ranks with their party. Not in votes, if they have reason (be it conscience or political necessity), but in the media. Leiberman is a particularly good example -- see here and here. Also, when say "the blog" and "it" you really need to specify who you're talking about. I'm assuming you mean kos and the editors. If you mean the diaries, that's a different matter. They may be that way, but by the same token the only way to change that is to make everyone stop posting. ____Not the real rusty Herseth? Kos very publically supported South Dakota's Stephanie Herseth for Congress, despite her support for a federal amendment banning gay marriage. In any case, I finally found the post I've had in mind through this conversation: Memo to the World. ____Not the real rusty Could be To be honest, I read MyDD a lot more, myself. The folks at dkos are a little too enthusiastic and numerous for my taste. I like a bit more range of opinion and calm. Not too much of a range mind you. Just a bit. :-) Nevertheless, whatever you're into, there's probably somethng out there that'll make you happy. To try to claim it has to be dailykos (or K5, or any site) doesn't really make any sense. ____Not the real rusty Not bad Now that I can see. I wouldn't wholeheartedly support it, but I've certainly seen examples of it. My rebuttal would be that people are people. For all that humanity is broadminded, tolerant, caring, and helpful towards each other, it is equally smallminded, exclusive, hateful, and spiteful. You don't get people together without getting both sides of the coin. I think that the unstated implication in that criticism, that there's something anyone could actually do to prevent the bad coming out along with the good, is not true. It's valuable to recognize it when you see it, even (perhaps especially) among those you generally agree with. But I'd say that the potential for more people to be more involved in their governance is worth the downside of exposing and in some ways promoting the uglier aspects of group behavior. ____Not the real rusty Depends on your goal You're assuming that the correct goal for all leaders is to forge a thoughtful and even-tempered community. I would have to disagree. If your goal is to take power away from an entrenched system, you would want an angry mob which considers itself able to crush those it disgrees with. You would want to play up their emotions, both the positive toward your allies and the negative toward your enemies, refine them to a laser focus, and direct them at targets of your choosing. The very success and popularity of the site ought to be a pretty big clue that kos is neither a poor leader nor a poor blogger. The solution is to consider what his goals are before deciding whether you agree with his methods. ____Not the real rusty Whoah I'm having a 2001 flashback here. Someone fetch me a glass of water please. I just need to sit down for a minute. It'll pass. ____Not the real rusty I don't know It's never shown up in my stats. So, I guess not all that many. ____Not the real rusty Didn't people always do that? Living in the city is fun when you're into going to bars and stuff. Or so I've heard. I was always kind of a hermit. But the point is, people have always moved to the 'burbs to have a family. That's, like, what they're for. I don't know if there's a trend to moving to somewhat more remote areas now. I could do it because it didn't matter very much what the job market was like here. Either K5 would support me, or I would find work from home, or I'd be a carpenter. No need to live in a major metro area for any of those things. There may conceivably be more people moving out of cities who can telecommute for work, but in my experience making a living that way is still a pretty dicey proposition. The glorious future we were all promised where everyone works in their jammies hasn't really materialized, and I don't think it's going to. ____Not the real rusty Well, I mean... I do it every day. But I don't see it really becoming the major part of American working life that everyone thought it would be in the 90's. Even as someone who works remotely full time and works for several entirely virtual companies, I'm still reluctant to hire people to work remotely. It's a lot more miss than hit. ____Not the real rusty You can't know that Maybe she's chubby. ____Not the real rusty I got both My mom comes from Irish Catholics (pretty directly), and my dad from Irish protestants (pretty remotely, but with a lot more commitment). So I always got both colors on St. Pats. Seeing as how I'm like 1/364th Irish at this point, and an atheist, I solve the whole stupid problem by ignoring St. Patrick's Day. ____Not the real rusty A very readable rendition ...of this whole tussle can be found in Neal Stephenson's latest sprawling trilogy. Oh, fnd your own amazon link. ____Not the real rusty Hey No one kicked you out on purpose. It looks like you tripped the auto-ban thing, that's supposed to keep scripts from being able to flood us with crap. Basically, if you hit the rate limit, it gives you that warning screen you saw. If you try to post again within the timeout limit, it doubles the timeout, and so forth until the timeout reaches a certain maximum, and then it just disables the account. The idea being that people who hit the limit inadvertently will go away and wait out the time, but scripts will keep submitting and quickly ban themselves. For the most part it works well. But it looks like some confluence of events got you banned. Sorry about that. Your account's been re-enabled, and please accept my apologies. ____Not the real rusty More I checked the settings, and it shouldn't be possible to get locked out unless you try to submit at least 8 times. From your description, it sounds like you only submitted 5 times? Were there a few more tries in there somewhere? I'd like to know if I need to investigate whether it's working right. Also, it doesn't send an email because in principle, you're a script anyway. I believe this is the first time an actual person got themselves banned, and this system has been in place since mid-2000. So... um... congratulations? :-) I guess the lesson is submitting from multiple tabs all at once is not a good idea. ____Not the real rusty No Nigga was banned for being an ass. And knock it off. ____Not the real rusty Size limit That appears to be the size limit of mysql's TEXT data type, which is what story text is stored as. That's also why it truncates -- apparently mysql truncates internally and doesn't kick out any errors. That's not good. We should probably redefine that as LONGTEXT. ____Not the real rusty Mustard? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Possibly But mysql is much faster at returning simple queries than a ham sandwich. Much faster. ____Not the real rusty Interesting fact When it rendered your comment, just now, Scoop fetched each letter individually. ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't that be great? Then instead of saving whole stories as text, we could have a pointer table which just links letter fields to story ids, and another table that provides a list indicating the order each character should be rendered to reproduce each story. Or possibly it would all be one table -- something like character_id, sid, offset. Then to build the story we just have to do "SELECT * from story_text WHERE sid = "$sid" ORDER BY offset ASC". Think of all the redundancy we'd avoid by only saving one copy of each character! ____Not the real rusty Eh? What? Cards? Chips? A poker game? I don't think I know what you're talking about. ____Not the real rusty Actually There are kids now that literally start dying from allergic shock if they're in the same room as peanuts or peanut products. Now that is certainly fucked up, and someone ought to be trying to figure out why we suddenly have these mutants among us (this is a new thing). But just because they're mutants doesn't mean they deserve death because you want a Snickers. ____Not the real rusty They can't remove the soy The worm is the soy. Kill the soy, and you kill the worm. We'll all die without it. ____Not the real rusty It doesn't happen They banned smoking in SF when I lived there, and it didn't have any effect on bar and restaurant income. Likewise in Portland, where I live now. It seems that the vast majority of smokers just get over it, and get used to smoking outside where they have to go the rest of the time anyway, and the small number of smokers who leave town or stop going out is more than offset by people who previously didn't go to bars because of the smoky atmosphere. Now that it's been done repeatedly across the US, the economic argument just doesn't hold up. ____Not the real rusty That's what they always say The reason that there were never non-smoking-only bars and restaurant was exactly because all the restauranteurs were convinced that there would be this backlash if they just banned smoking on their own. Who was willing to be the first to try it? It finally took the example of all these cities banning it to convince them that actually are a lot of people who didn't go out because of the smoke. And the numbers have shown that the market was there. In theory it should have been served a long time ago, but the free market is not infallible. Actually, this whole thing is an interesting counter-example to the free market fundamentalists. Now, there are a growing number of non-smoking places in cities and towns where it's still legal. In theory, government action may become irrelevant eventually, now that there is a nascent market. Also, if a smoking ban will actually cause Houston to fold up and disappear, then I'm all for it. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Meh They're trying it now. Seem to be doing ok. A lot of "family" restaurants are banning smoking to attract the people with kids. It seems to me like maybe the best compromise would be a kind of sunset provision on a citywide ban. Ban smoking in restaurants and bars for, say, three years. Give people a chance to get used to it, get everyone on a level playing field, and then let the law expire and individual restaurants decide what's best for them. I would expect to see a pretty even split, with perhaps slightly more non-smoking restaurants and slightly more smoking bars. That also would potentially open up the job market to waitstaff jobs that wouldn't require secondhand smoke, more or less satisfying the "people should be able to work in a clean environment if they choose to" goal. ____Not the real rusty Because Everybody wants to have their car. Smokers are an easy subgroup to marginalize. I don't defend the bans as a particularly logical thing to do, or an example of the best way municipalities could be spending their regulating effort. Just that on balance, they haven't proven to be economically harmful. And they do make the going-out experience a lot nicer. On balance, even a lot of smokers end up appreciating the cleaner air. The car thing though, That's an uphill battle. Public transit has never been very popular in the US, and let's face it, for pretty good reason. I used to commute every day, and even in DC where I could take the Metro almost directly from work to home, I drove more often. I'm miserable enough getting up for work in the morning without adding a crush of people, a lot of walking, and being sealed into an airless plastic capsule for half an hour. Compared to the privacy and confort of a car, public transit just blows. The only ways this is going to get fixed is if we made public transit comparable in comfort and privacy to a car (probably economically unfeasable) or made cars less of an environmental and safety hazard (a work in progress). Just dumping money into existing forms public transit is probably a waste of money in all but the densest population centers. ____Not the real rusty YHBT Listening to rmg? You should know better. :-) ____Not the real rusty huh You said "prima facie." ____Not the real rusty Don't say that to people you don't know well I have some friends who adopted a bi-racial son. The father (the adoptive father) has a condition (from birth) where he doesn't have any hair. None. Whatsoever. So picture this fairly tall, really white, totally bald guy, and his equally white (and blond) wife, with their kid, who's half-black and has got the mocha skin and kinky hair and everything. You picturing that? Good. Cause someone came up to them once in public and cooed over their son and said how cute he was and everything, and then, totally sincere, looked at his father and said "He looks just like you." ____Not the real rusty Das vidanya, old friend! Come, let us drink vodka and try to forget the frozen wasteland we inhabit! ____Not the real rusty Given our track record... ...of "meeting deadlines" no one will even notice. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not to mention The man will always lose. Always. ____Not the real rusty Ha! The most characteristic statement a parent can make: "Phew! At least she only peed on me!" ____Not the real rusty The Women's Equal Internet Access Act You didn't hear? The US finally passed a law allowing women to get online. ____Not the real rusty Well I don't know how much evidence we actually have that these new women are biologically female. I do tend to remain a skeptic unless I have independent knowlege. ____Not the real rusty FWIW I don't remember changing it. Weird. ____Not the real rusty Not really My memory is notoriously faulty. I'd give it 95% that I knew at the time. ____Not the real rusty The one in this thread GenY requested it. The other one was a troll that got the boot. ____Not the real rusty "Almost" unbelievable? You ask very good questions. If the population has declined 96%, there would certainly be a huge boom in the species they prey on. Where's that jump? And if there hasn't been one, what could that lead us to say about the likely believability of this bullshit scientific study? ____Not the real rusty Yeah Like I said, there's no doubt that the cod fishery went all to hell. The settling of this country by Europeans was based on the cod fish, and now there's hardly any cod fishing going on at all. However, it's a very long stretch to claim that we know: A) What the "normal" or pre-fishing population was B) What the current population is, and C) What the optimum population is Let alone what the cod population's decline has done or will do to the populations of all the other interconnected species. For example (to finally tie together my two fisheries threads of the day...) there's every possibility that the lobster population has benefited greatly from the decline in cod, since one of the things cod eat are baby lobsters. This may eventually prove to be a bad thing overall, but... well too many unknowns at this point. Regardless of any of this, there's a lot of evidence that factory fishing is bad, and local small-scale fishing is not. One of the things that has preserved a healthy lobster fishery is strict regulation of who can catch lobsters and how efficient their gear can be. Lobsters are a "family" fishery, where most lobstermen always have an eye toward whether there will be stocks there for their children and grandchildren to fish. There aren't any inshore "factory" lobstering operations, and lobster traps are something like 85% inefficient. eight and a half out of every ten lobsters that enter a trap will have a nice snack and walk back out again. It almost amounts to the trap hauling up whatever lobsters happen to be in there eating at the moment it's hauled. Large drag nets, on the other hand, catch everything in their path with near-perfect reliability. Including a ton of fish and sea life that isn't legal to sell, and thus gets thrown overboard, usually dead. Also, they catch cargo that fell off cargo ships, debris lying on the bottom, creatures that no one has ever seen before and may in fact be proof of Lamarckian evolution or Creationist "one-offs", and the occasional human corpse. But instead of fishery science based on facts and aimed toward sustainable fishing, we have cack-headed statistical studies that come up with conclusions that are transparently nonsense, and fishing regulations (like closures and bycatch laws) that usually do more harm than good to everyone involved, fishermen and fish alike. Someone should start a movement to save both fish and fishermen from environmentalists and regulators. ____Not the real rusty Just tell her "It's ok to eat fish, because they don't have any feelings." ____Not the real rusty hey! "Some elitist freak" eh? Well, I suppose it's accurate. It's been a day full of fish for some reason. ____Not the real rusty Fishery science is a disaster I have no evidentiary basis for disputing the study, but the history of fishery science has been an unmitigated clusterfuck. At this point, I pretty much assume that any study that purports to analyze fish stocks is probably a load of crap. Study after study has been proven so inaccurate that they might as well have counted pimples on their own asses and extrapolated fish populations from that. There's little doubt that the cod population has crashed. There is, however, a lot of disagreement about what the stocks currently are (facts which seem to be simply accepted as given in the CNN article). And if these mathematical models they're using to extrapolate fish stocks from historical data are based on studies of present populations, that puts them in grave doubt as well. The fact is that scientists studying fish populations with mathematical models and fishermen out on the ocean catching the things are in complete disagreement about how many fish there are. Study after study says essentially that this year's landings of some species represents the entirety of that species' population, which the next year's landings proves to have been untrue. These studies are usually based on sample trawls by scientists who have no idea what they're doing, or on mathematical extrapolations of estimates (what the rest of us would normally call a wild-ass guess) by statisticians sitting in offices somewhere. No other branch of science would ever begin to consider the methods and practices of fisheries science reliable in any way. What they're doing amounts to a physicist claiming to have found the number of elementary particles in the universe based on extrapolations from the number of particles we have found already. All this by way of saying don't believe everything you see on CNN. ____Not the real rusty I'm sure they've gotten something right... ...sometime. ____Not the real rusty How did that lobster get caught? The article doesn't say where Bubba came from originally. 22 pounds is way over the legal maximum size. Also, it may be worth pointing out that lobsters that large are not in any way rare. There are probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them. They're just not legal to catch, and they typically stay in deeper water than the little guys we eat so they're not caught that often to begin with. ____Not the real rusty Sizes The lobster fishery has very strict minimum and maximum sizes to protect breeding stock. Basically, lobsters that are too small haven't yet reached breeding age, so killing them would prevent them from ever having the chance to breed, and hurt the stocks. On the other end of the scale, lobsters become much more efficient breeders as they get bigger. So, for example, killing five 1.5 pound lobsters has less of an impact on the reproduction of the species than killing one 7.5 pounder. Also, female lobsters caught with eggs on them get a small v-shaped notch carved in the end of their tail, and are thrown back. When they molt, this notch remains visible in the new shell, and all notched lobsters are illegal to keep or sell any time in the future, regardless of whether they're carrying eggs anymore. Notched lobsters that have molted a few times will usually get the notch re-carved if they're caught again. The lobster fishery is pretty much the only example we have of a fish stock that's been successfully managed by voluntary measures taken by the fishermen. The size limits and notching are now also backed up by law (and very stiff fines), but initially they weren't. Crusty old-timers will also say that the meat from anything above one and a quarter pounds is no good, but there isn't really any evidence of this. And now there probably never will be. ____Not the real rusty Dateline 3/3/05: Linux Loving Lobster Loses Life! "Let lobsters live!" laments local lady ____Not the real rusty Lobster breeding Ok, so first you have to understand how lobsters breed. Basically, the female "undresses" (sheds her shell), which is tremendously dangerous, since the male she's trying to breed with could (and sometimes does) just eat her. Plus she's vulnerable to other predators for some time afterward while her new shell grows. When she's all naked, the male lobster deposits a sperm package into some sort of duct or something in the female's body. Then she grows a new shell and goes on her merry way. Now at this point, the female still isn't actually preggers. Some time later, when her new shell is all grown in, she'll deposit a whole bunch of eggs into a clutch on the underside of her tail. It kind of looks like a blob of caviar. Which it basically is. Then she releases some of the sperm that she's been carrying around all this time to fertilize the eggs. No male is required for this part, and she can do this several times with only one mating. So older lobsters are more efficient breeders because they go longer between molts. A 1.5 pound female might have to molt once or twice a year, while a 10 pound female might only molt once every couple of years, if that. So the older female can produce more batches of fertilized eggs without molting (and being exposed to the danger of shell-lessness) than the younger female. So, basically, older females are more reproductively successful. I think bigger lobsters also produce a lot more eggs per clutch. I'm not positive, but I seem to remember something about that -- and about it being like disproportionately more. A lobster two times the size will produce more than twice as many eggs. A good bit of this info comes from The Secret Life of Lobsters, which is either way more interesting than you'd think it would be, or indicates that I'm a total freak. ____Not the real rusty The Secret Life of Lobsters Oh, I merely brushed the surface there. Part of lobster mating involves the lobsters peeing into each others faces. The females also pee in the water and waft it around to send messages to other lobsters. Why is it that so much of the animal kingdom seems to have developed urine-based languages? ____Not the real rusty Huh I think lobsters are pretty cool, and eat them every chance I get. I usually name them first (you wouldn't believe how many names start with "L"). This isn't a facet of my personality that my wife likes. And the offspring is extremely adorable. She's big into smiling now. She'll smile ecstatically at any person she hasn't seen in more than maybe half an hour. ____Not the real rusty Mulholland Drive... ...pissed me off, as it was a gorgeously produced and filmed movie about a load of horseshit. If you're going to go to all that trouble, for god's sake say something. The Third Man on the other hand is a masterpiece. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense I do get it. I got it when I watched it. And then I went online and read all the "what the hell was that movie about" pages just to make sure that that was, in fact, all it was. I just thought it was stupid. ____Not the real rusty Argh Apparently it's impossible to convince anyone that you understand Mulholland Drive and still think it's stupid. I've had this exact conversation before. Look, it does have a plot. The plot is basically Blood Simple (or take your pick of other hit-man movies) meets The Wizard of Oz. Jealous lover hires hit man, then jealous lover imagines a fantasy land where all the mundane details of her life are reborn as sparkly movie cliches. Mix in a bunch of navel-gazing about Hollywood and the empty imagery of movies, and viola. My point is that despite being a really pretty film, and being done in a fairly clever way, the heart of it is a hackneyed story that's already been told much better (i.e. in a way that relates to humans, instead of being totally hostile to them). If it was just a so-so director making a so-so-production of this junk, I don't think I'd care. But it makes me angry that Lynch expends such a fantastic amount of filmmaking talent to create something so irrelevant. ____Not the real rusty Pshaw I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to enjoy Mulholland Drive, or that reasonable people could not differ on its artistic value. I mean, there are people who eat at Arby's on purpose, so you really can't question someone's taste. I just think that all that effort and talent is wasted in expressing platitudes like "dreams don't always come true," and "love isn't pretty." I think Lynch would be better off making films that other people write, because the movies he writes himself tend to climb up his own ass and disappear. Or, to put it another way, Nathaniel West wrote Day of the Locust in 1939 and said everything that Lynch is trying to say in Mulholland Drive, but better. ____Not the real rusty And that... ...I think, says it all. :-) ____Not the real rusty Says who? (en tea) ____Not the real rusty Sounds like... ...the complaint of someone who thinks language-native database interface functions are a good idea. That is to say, a PHP coder. If you'd ever gotten me a little drunk and talking about languages, you would probably know what follows that phrase. :-) ____Not the real rusty How many panels per box? [nt] ____Not the real rusty For one month? I don't care what the rental market is like, it's not going to be worth the hassle for them to give you a hard time over one month. Tell them as soon as possible that you're going to need to leave in June instead of July, and that you're very sorry but clinical rotation and blah blah blah blah. With this much lead time, they'll tell you that's fine. ____Not the real rusty I'm all screwed up In baseball, I batted lefty until I was about 11, and then switched to righty. I played lacrosse lefty, but I got very good at switching because most people are competely unable to throw a pass to someone else's left side. I snowboard, surf, and skate goofy. And I'm right handed. ____Not the real rusty Two incidents [nt] ____Not the real rusty Sure. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Hypothermia is the leading cause of death You gotta love an activity where the gear list starts with the sentence "Hypothermia is the leading cause of death in the White Mountains and Adirondacks." That's right, I'm going ice climbing this weekend. Jon Krakauer once wrote something like: "Ice climbing is primarily an exercise in pain endurance." I look forward to seeing if that's true. Of course, we're just doing the one-day n00bs course, so I don't imagine they'll do anything too horrible to us. Any ice climbers here? Anything I should particularly do/not do? This is of course an event organized by my friend Rob. We have a tradition of doing at least one unbelievably fooolish thing every year together. One time we went kayaking in the thickest fog I've ever seen. Another time we hiked something like 36 miles in two days in the White Mountains in January. We got lost following a moose trail in the middle of the night on some mountain. We later heard that another hiker had actually died in the same area on the next weekend. Not that we were in any mortal peril, mind you. I mean, any more than we would have been anyway. So I'm not sure if this will turn out to be the unbelievably foolish thing for the year or not, but it seems like there's a reasonably good chance. I am determined, though, not to like it too much, because that would just be another whole closet full of gear I'd need, and frankly I don't have any more room in the house. Don't have one, unfortunately [nt] ____Not the real rusty That's the truth I'm constantly reminding myself this when rock climbing. It's very strange that when we're pressured, humans seem to naturally start thinking the arms are the way to go. You see it all the time, someone struggling to hang on when their legs are firmly placed but basically just serving as dead weight, while they pin all their hopes on half-bent and trembling arms. It's gotta be some kind of monkey-brain leftover instinct. ____Not the real rusty You have to ignore those guys Everywhere I've ever climbed, there's been someone there who made me look like a total goon. I've learned to ignore it, and not to ever claim I'm any good at all. :-) ____Not the real rusty Both, I think The description says that we'll do steep snow climbing and vertical ice. It's probably more up to us than anything else -- and I think we're all mostly interested in vertical climbing. So we'll probably do more of that. ____Not the real rusty Ah well, perhapst *most* people... ...but me and Shifty Stoner, we're different, man. We're not like all you dead-souled sheep. ____Not the real rusty Haven't you ever heard of... ...an object lesson? Really, we are always quite safe on our, as you so cleverly put it, "wreckless" expeditions. People fail to really take into account the amount of preparation and imagining what bad things could possibly happen that I do before these trips. ____Not the real rusty Hey! I actually have rafted the lower Gauley. I think it was the lower. The easier part, anyway. There's also some great rock climbing right around there. ____Not the real rusty Nice Sounds like a good time. :-) My Gauley story is that I was the only one to stay in the boat when it flipped. I'm still not really sure what happened, but the raft went end-over-end, and I somehow ended up sitting all alone on what was formerly the bottom. ____Not the real rusty Rolling average The system does use a rolling average -- your ongoing average is called your mojo, and it is made up of a weighted average of past comment scores, with older ones decaying in effect exponentially. K5 doesn't use mojo for anything anymore, really. But it is still there. ____Not the real rusty Damn And I was gonna sign up too. When will you do something for those of us who want to be turkeys? When will it be our turn? ____Not the real rusty That was like Tee-ball And I still wasn't sure anyone was going to hit it. What's wrong with you people? :-) ____Not the real rusty Attention Javascript Infidels Once again I am forced to dip my toe in the loathsome and brackish waters of javascript. And, actually, it seems to have gotten better since last time. But I still have a stupid problem that I don't understand. So if anyone out there knows their javascript, please tell me why this doesn't work right... So I have a page with a few <div>'s in it. Each one has a unique id, but they all share the same name. The idea being that i can address a set of them by name as a class, and individually by id. I've got a snippet of code something like the following (simplified and divorced of all context for example's sake): function changeColor (divid,divname) { s = document.getElementsByName(divname); for (var i=0; i < s.length; i++) { s[i].style.backgroundColor = '#eeeeee'; } d = document.getElementById(divid); d.style.backgroundColor = '#ff0000'; } The idea is that when you click on a div, it fires this piece of code with the arguments of the name and id tags from the current div. The first loop is supposed to set the background color of all of the same-named div's to gray, and the second bit should change the color of just the one you clicked to red. This works fine in Mozilla, but apparently in IE it only changes the background color to red. It doesn't do the set-all-to-gray portion. I cannot figure out why. Anyone know? TIA What? My father in law isn't rich. Where'd that come from? ____Not the real rusty lol what ____Not the real rusty It's way better now I first foooled with this stuff back in the really bad old days, when netscape and IE had totally different DOMs and neither one made a damn bit of sense. If there were two competent ways to do something, Netscape did it a third and IE did it a fourth. Now there's at least the W3C DOM, which appears to be pretty well supported. My main complaint about javascript, that is still true, is that there's no way of knowing what interpreter is going to be executing your code. So not only do you have to worry about bugs and jackassery in one interpreter, you have to worry about all the bugs and all the jackassery in all the possible interpreters. I don't see any way this is ever going to not be a problem. ____Not the real rusty Thanks I shall give that a try. I was sure it was something to do with getElementsByName working differently, but I couldn't find anything about how. As for why I'm not just storing the previous color, it's because there are a number of these sets of divs on a page. You might click one from one set, and then one from another, and then a different one from the first, and so on. I thought it would be easier to just say "here's the set we're dealing with, change all those to gray and then do this" rather than try to keep some kind of overall state. There's probably a clever way to manage that, but I am not clever. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bah Stupid IE. That fix worked, technically. But now there's some other IE problem where half the content of the page disappears. I may have to go back to the old way and just maintain state somehow. What a pain in the ass. ____Not the real rusty Thanks class should work fine for this. I was using it for styles, but they can just as easily be applied further up the CSS food chain. ____Not the real rusty I liked it [nt] ____Not the real rusty And what do we have now? [nt] ____Not the real rusty ? [nt] ____Not the real rusty I concur Plus, mami could never have gone this long without saying anything completely insane. ____Not the real rusty Not really A lot of us have technology in common, but what kind? There's less overlap than you might think between a me (half-ass perl programmer who writes dinky web applications and hasn't the slightest clue how the machine running them actually works) and a localroger (close-to-the-metal bit juggler who writes device control code in some kind of impossibly arcane language that robots would probably use to chat amongst themselves). Or, to take your car analogy, it's like saying that a car owner and a mechanic have something in common that the bike rider doesn't share. Well, kinda, but it's not going to get them very far at a cocktail party. Anyway -- I think the most succinct description of who we are here is "a community of people who don't fit in." Therefore, you fit in perfectly, because you don't fit in at all. ____Not the real rusty Haaahahaha "MT kicks scoop's ass". Riot. :-) ____Not the real rusty No, because... ...every email message has cryptic numbers at the bottom that trace the exact location of your computer. I learned that on CSI. ____Not the real rusty Likewise Season one was great. But I finally knew it was over when Spawn (sorry, TWoP jargon) was menaced by the cougar. I think that was around when we stopped watching for fun and started watching solely for jeering, and eventually we stopped watching altogether. ____Not the real rusty Why do you hate America? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Christ Jack Where were you last Thursday, when it was time to set the clocks back? I was an hour early to my Senate confirmation hearing, because the daylight savings time watcher I most rely on here (you) let me down. ____Not the real rusty OMFG! I can't believe it! I sure hope he doesn't win the election. ____Not the real rusty I didn't finish college And I still don't know if it was the right decision. I think on balance I lean toward it was for me, but time will probably tell. I think I had a lot of the same feelings about it as pHatidic -- I was bored with classes, I felt like I'd be learning more out in the real world, and I didn't really value or expect to want the kind of job that college would be required for. However! I don't think I'd ever recommend it for anyone else. For one thing, I'd have to know someone really well to be able to even guess whether it would make a positive difference for them, and everyone I know that well is out of college by now. I also had a lot of external support -- my parents weren't happy with my decision (and I don't blame them), but they kept me on my feet while I got my shit together. I was back at homea few months after leaving college, working at a fairly dead-end job at a furniture factory when my car broke down. Without my parents help to get a car, I'd have lost that job and my range of options would have narrowed even more drastically. Then they also helped me move down to DC, where my sister and her husband let me basically live on their couch for a while. Luckily the web was booming enough that even in DC I could get a decent temp job just because I knew HTML. I learned some programming at that job and got a better job, learned more, got my own apartment, wrote Scoop, and started to make some progress in life. But it was never any kind of a certain thing (still isn't -- I could be back pounding nails tomorrow, for all I know), and when I was looking for work there were a lot of jobs that I was probably qualified for, but I couldn't even apply to without a college degree. Being successful without a college degree requires a lot of determination (because you'll probably have to invent a field in which you can be successful) and a lot of luck (because you'll need to stumble on the right conditions for that to happen). So far I've been blessed with both. But looking back, it's been a pretty long string of undeserved help from others and stupid luck. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage anyone else to use me as an example. I can tell you one thing for sure. You're going to have to work your ass off. Getting out of college will force you to, but if you're willing to do it anyway, I'd say stay in (or go back after your break) and run your business from school until you're done. Just decide to work your ass off and then do it. You will benefit from the best of both decisions. ____Not the real rusty Oh no! All that staying home has lead my house to develop mold! I have SICK HOUSE SYNDROME! Bring on the bubbles. ____Not the real rusty *What* is the *deal* with these diaries? These diaries are making me thirsty. (Also, Titus' show sucked real bad.) ____Not the real rusty $you->fail($_) ____Not the real rusty That seems funny Until the Secret Service shows up at your workplace. ____Not the real rusty Dignity is only available with a paid membership. [nt] ____Not the real rusty That's right The vote was cast, lots of people voted, so it's democracy all the way from here on out right? Good luck with that. ____Not the real rusty This election means nothing If, one day, Iraq becomes a functioning liberal democracy (small "l" liberal, and I use that phrase to specifically denote what we actually think of as a democracy, and distinguish it from "a place where elections are held") then this first election -- assuming it elected the assembly that creates a working constitution etc etc -- will be seen as the first step. But it's just as likely, if not more so, that this will one day be seen as the illegitimate "Articles of Confederation" assembly that was eventually overturned by civil war. My point is that this election by itself means nothing. It could be a first step on the great road to democracy, or it could be a minor setback in the aspirations of Iraq's new dictator. Or, it could be the next step in advancing the aspirations of Iraq's next dictator. It wasn't necessary to create an Iraqi democracy. If Iraq does eventually form a functional liberal democracy, it will probably be despite this election. I feel bad setting my cynicism against trhurler's boundless utopian optimism, but I simply can't see this election as anything but a set piece in the propaganda war. I'm with you in hoping that more democracies can be formed, and maybe this will help that along in Iraq. But do I really believe it? No. I think this democracy will last exactly as long as US troops are on the ground in Iraq. ____Not the real rusty Pictures I took the dog for a walk the day after the blizzard. We didn't get much snow, but it was really cold and windy. I withstood the freezing wind on backshore long enough to get these pictures, before being forced back to my shelter for copious restorative infusions of hot cocoa. The morning of the blizzard, I met some friends in Portland to do some climbing at the Maine Rock Gym. As the ferry pulled into the dock we passed this fishing boat, the Arctic Explorer, that had clearly gotten a lesson in what freezing spray means. The next day, Sadie and I hoofed it around to backshore. It was around zero on the thermometer and the wind was coming out of the north at probably 35 or 40 knots. I was wearing: Two pair thick socks Hiking boots Polypropylene long underwear, top and bottom Winter-weight fleece pants Winter-weight wool army surplus pants Wind resistant fleece shirt Wind-resistant fleece pullover Gore-tex jacket Fleece glove liners Fleece mittens Gore-tex mitten shells Fleece-lined neoprene face mask Windproof hat with earflaps Fleece neckwarmer Fleece balaclava Jacket hood The dog was wearing: Fur An idiotic grin I was pretty chilly. The dog showed no signs of being cold at all. Anyway, The air was so cold that the water on backshore was smoking, despite water temps hovering around 32 degrees. You know it's cold when seawater that is one seed crystal away from freezing is steaming anyway. Anywhere water had a chance to spray or land without being actually washed by the tide was crusted with ice. And, because I know most of you just want pictures of the baby anyway, here's one of both of them. Brr It doesn't get that cold here -- we have the ocean to serve as an enormous natural stabilizer. Keeps it a little warmer in the winter and a little cooler in the summer, which is nice. But for us, this is pretty cold. It's much nicer today -- it's up around 35. Shorts weather! I didn't get any pictures, but the ice floes in the bay are pretty cool too. Portland harbor is dceep enough not to freeze solid in anything but the most extreme spell of Arctic weather. Last winter it was below 20 for almost a whole month and it still was only patchily frozen. I figure it would take below-zero temps for a few weeks to really get solid ice here. Incidentally, the Mythbusters once checked out the "It was cold enough for piss to freeze before it hit the ground" myth, and found it to be untrue. They chilled a cooler down to -60F and streamed 98.6 degree water into it, and it did not freeze before landing. So I imagine to get that trick to work you have to start with pretty cold water and throw it well up into the air. ____Not the real rusty Christ we're almost a 3rd of the way through the winter weather! I don't need to hear that. You're right, of course, but it's pretty impolite to point it out. And any success on the baby front must be credited entirely to my wife. I have managed not to break her in the short periods of time she's been trusted to my care. That's the best I can claim. ____Not the real rusty I am teh sukc Mind you I'm not a good climber by any means. I've been doing it off and on (much more off than on) since junior year in high school, but I just don't do enough to ever progress beyond "that 5.9 is hard!" What I like more than anything else is getting out on natural rock, preferably in the fall, and spending a day out in the woods somewhere hacking away at some top-ropes. I'm kind of like those hunters who never actually shoot anything, but hunt mostly as an excuse to go walk around in the woods. I've mostly given up all pretense that I'm ever going to get much better than I am now. But who knows. Maybe someday... ____Not the real rusty You were deceived! Our TV is actually a cheap-ass Sanyo, specifically named, I assume, for fooling people into believing you have the more expensive Sony. The telescopey thing was a semi-gift from my father. I can see how it's not much use in suburban Plymouth, but it's not entirely clear to me whether it's being stored at my house or whether it's actually mine. Not that it really matters very much, and considering I still have his compressor and nailgun, I'm not going to push it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey, it was 35 yesterday! Shorts weather! We all went for a walk, since it was so warm. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope You'll know, trust me. I've got a patch in for janra's approval which was rejected, so I need to do some bugfixes on that. Then there's one more patch after that that needs to go in (story tags). Then the code update. ____Not the real rusty Aw baby You know you're my one and only. I'm just busy, that's all. I'll make it up to you later. ____Not the real rusty Man And here's me with the opposite problem. I would love to be able to have my wife come to work with me, but she won't do it. She's probably right. I'm absolutely the epitome of her nightmare boss -- all big ideas and no details or follow through. But she's just the opposite, so it seems like it ought to be perfect, right? Well, maybe not. Lucky you, anyway. ____Not the real rusty I use them too Joker is good. ____Not the real rusty Ha! That's Justin Hall. I've met that guy. ____Not the real rusty And yet it was different It was only different this time around because this is the first inaguration since 9/11..... While it was the same pomp and bullshit as it has been for a while, it was definitely different. Maybe a lot of us were looking at the same old ritual with new eyes. ____Not the real rusty Rather small? K5 had existed for like a month at the last inauguration. I'm pretty sure we didn't even have a submission queue yet. So I doubt there are any mentions of it. As for media coverage, it did get quite a lot, and everyone brought up the expense. ____Not the real rusty December '99 The first story here is from December 21, 1999. K5 existed in some form for a short time before that, as a Slash site, but it was about as obscure and unvisited as it's possible for a site to be. ____Not the real rusty Good story That was enjoyable to read, thanks. :-) Next time you happpen to drive by the Hyannis Golf Club, take a look at the big sign in the middle of the driveway. I helped build and install that. Also the little white picket fencing on either side of the entrance. ____Not the real rusty Dear Lord I just had mussels in a white wine cream sauce with onions, shallots, diced tomatoes, keilbasa, and parmesan cheese, with garlic french bread toast. That was really good. Ellie remains a huge Tokyo-stomping Godzilla baby. And she even slept for five hours last night, after a marathon couple hours of fussing and wiggling. Also, K5 will probably be down a couple days later this week (or possibly this weekend) for a long-needed code update. Don't be too surprised when it happens. True And usually that's my approach to seafood too. But I just went a little crazy on this one. I actually should have taken it just one tiny step further, thrown in some fish and thickened it up a little and called it stew. It practically was. Sometimes you just want to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. I blame cooking while hungry. :-) ____Not the real rusty PEI I'm not so far from PEI myself here. We can get those pretty consistently. These were Great Eastern cultured mussles from Maine. That Moulerie place though -- I gotta go there next time I'm up in Je Me Souviens Le Quebec. ____Not the real rusty Red tide is not that common Generally if there's an outbreak, you'll hear about it. The state also publicizes its list of areas closed to shellfishing, so if you're really concerned, you can check your spot before you harvest. ____Not the real rusty Must be I checked and we've only had three red tide closures in Maine since 1999. All three have been extremely small areas too -- like the waters surrounding one particular island (not this one). Strange that you've seen it. I've lived within a mile or two of the ocean nearly my whole life and I've never seen red tide. ____Not the real rusty Would you say that makes you... ...a Temperpedophile? ____Not the real rusty I also stole your wife and kicked your dog And tomorrow I'm gonna pee on your Bible. ____Not the real rusty I could use a son But do you have one in better condition? I can find a scrap son just about anywhere. I would probably take a fixer-upper with low mileage though. ____Not the real rusty Bah It still looks like we're going to get just the northern edge of this one. My parents in MA are getting 20-30 inches. Probably only 6-10 here. Lame. On the upside, it's cold as fuck here. ____Not the real rusty Shit You're fucking right. Sorry, my bad. ____Not the real rusty MILK AND BREAD OMGBBQ! I never understood the milk and bread rush. What the hell are you going to do with three loaves of Wonder bread in the next day and a half? I always used to peer out the windows during snowstorms, wondering what my neighbors were getting up to with all that bread. ____Not the real rusty Hm That is faster. It works in Galeon too, so older versions of Mozilla also support this. ____Not the real rusty Those videos They showed us those videos too. Lots of semi-ethnic hippies in terra-cotta ranch homes with flowered sundresses. Guess how much our birth was nothing at all like those? Well, let's see -- first there was the 2AM fireboat ride into town. Then there was the ten degree Maine winter cold that my wife waited in while I got the car. Then there was a few hours that was kind of like the beginning of one of those videos. Then, Ooops! She's breach! And it's off to the hospital for major abdominal surgery. Thanks, hippies. ____Not the real rusty Some of the polar bears ARE communists! They sound like sily asses demanding to take control of the means of seal production. But what do you expect from a bunch of polar bears. Their revolutionary slogans don't even rhyme. ____Not the real rusty TERROR LEVEL: APOPLECTIC PURPLE!!!! My terror level is elevated. How's yours? Jesus Christ! I just thought I saw a substance out of the corner of my eye. But it turns out it was nothing. ____Not the real rusty Can I have one? You know... just cause? Man, I really don't want to sign up for marketing stuff. I'll trade you a lifetime K5 subscription for it. :-) ____Not the real rusty I wasn't going to delete anyone Just thought it was worth mentioning that if you did happen to have one left, it wouldn't go to waste over here at casa Rusty. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's true... oh god, it's true He also paid me to polish his great big egg head with some of my hoarded monocle polish. The shame... ____Not the real rusty You can say that again. I've been to McPhilly, and their cheesesteak is nothing like that. ____Not the real rusty We're sorry. This is the last McRib ever. "The animal we made them out of has gone extinct." "The cow?" "The pig?" "You're way off. Think smaller. Think... more legs." ____Not the real rusty YUO!! ____Not the real rusty Jimmy Fallon is like salt I mean, you wouldn't want to sit down and eat a nice big bowl of salt. It'd be terrible. But you do want to add a little salt to almost everything you cook, because it makes everything taste better. Jimmy Fallon is like that in SNL skits. He sucks at not laughing during the skit, but his inability to control himself makes most of the things he's in funnier. He's best when he doesn't get any lines, and is just one of the extras standing around. ____Not the real rusty The entry I think the nail actually went in through the roof of his mouth. Now, I can't really understand how that could have happened, just from the angle alone. But ok, assuming it did enter inside the mouth I guess I can sort of imagine it not feeling like much. If you've ever worked with a framing nailgun, they fire the nails pretty precisely. You can sort of halfass wangle two piece of wood together by hand, and pop a couple nails in without disturbing their precarious arrangement. The nails don't tend to push anything out of place, and they also stop just after the head sinks in. Nailgun nails themselves also tend to be a smaller gauge than regular nails, because they (arguably) don't bend from being fired the way they would bend if you tried to hammer one in. Really the way to think about it is to imagine pneumatically firing a fairly thin piece of sharpened wire into the roof of your mouth at very high speed. Ok, that still doesn't sound very pleasant, but it helps explain the lack of general destruction around the nail. ____Not the real rusty Me neither [nt] ____Not the real rusty Very clever aren't you Let's just see how you like my dogs. Ah-hahahahahahahaa. AHHHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ____Not the real rusty Performance vs cost IMO, for someone who doesn't have some really good reason for needing the fastest machine on the block it's not worth paying the Opteron premium. For a general-use machine, you'll get a much better boost by investing in more memory -- the CPU speed difference is not likely to be noticeable. ____Not the real rusty A baby, a dog, and a hanging squid I posted 6 diaries in 2004, and half of them were in the last two weeks of the year. The first half of the year I was consciously taking a break. The second half of the year I was just busier than hell. I did mean to post more after we bought the house, but opportunities kept failing to present themselves. Since I don't think I've posted a picture anywhere, this is the house early one morning last week, as the dog and I left for a walk. It's the one on the left. Thrill to the unfinished porch stairs! When we bought it that porch was enclosed, but not actually within the house. It was a sort of closed-in entry porch. I tore the walls off it down to the original support columns, replaced a couple of the ancient cedar posts underneath, and added the railings and those stairs (the old stairs were narrow and falling apart). But I didn't quite get the stair railing or the trim done before I was ordered to work on the baby's room. Of course, the baby's room isn't quite done yet either. But that's ok, she doesn't need it yet. It's a very unpretentious house. Just a box with a roof, and it needs a lot of work. But it's a great location on a half-acre of open and level ground, and almost completely surrounded by woods. In the summer we can only see one neighbor -- that house on the right. And the annoying bustle of summer people does not intrude down our dead-end road. I can't really think of anyplace I'd rather live. That pink glow behind the house is the eastern sky, where the dog and I will very shortly go and see a gorgeous sunrise. And really, who needs more than a baby, a dog, and a hanging squid? OBEY THE SQUID. ____Not the real rusty Indeed I can Though partly only by virtue of the fact that the neighbors house doesn't have any windows on our side. Many was the summer night when me and the dog had our "evening constitutional" together. Ok, that's probably more information than anyone wanted. Sorry. And no, the longest we've been apart so far is a couple of hours. I haven't felt any overwhelming urge to grab her after that. Probably just wasn't long enough. Also, she only woke up to eat once last night -- ate at 10, 2, and 6. I think we'll keep this one. :-) ____Not the real rusty Baby as clothing I linked to it before, but seriously, if you're having a baby anytime in the near future, you really need to get one of these. Please overlook the new agey claptrap on the site there and just believe me on this. I can't even count the number of people who've seen us out wearing the baby around and said "Oh, man, I wish I had one of those things when little Johnny was a baby." This is even true of people who did try slings, and didn't like them because most other kinds are huge and puffy and make you look like either a walking sofa or a gypsy. Ok, unpaid promotional message over. Inside I ramble about the semi-animate meat log. CBB should be pleased to note that that phrase is starting to enter the popular vernacular. I've had friends randomly ask me how the semi-animate meat log is doing. Let's all do our part people -- in five years I want to see strangers cooing "Oh, what an adorable meat log!" The SAML is currently snoozing in her sling here in front of me while her mother gets some sleep. Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this whole experience is that so far, it has turned me into this Farmer Jones version of myself. Asleep at 10 every night and up by 5:30. My schedule used to vary wildly, but most often I slept from roughly 3-6am until 11am-2pm. It could be different on any given day though. I guess maybe the effect of babies is not specifically to keep you awake all night, but in fact to just reverse your normal routine. Since my previous routine was all screwed up to begin with, this has caused me to adopt a regular schedule? Who knows. It's been very beneficial for me though -- I'm getting a ton of stuff done. I've even finally learned to sleep through the nighttime feedings. I'm pretty sure I didn't wake up once last night. My wife and I finally figured out that she was home from work on maternity leave specifically in order to take care of the baby. So I don't have to feel guilty that she does the majority of baby care. This is good, because frankly I don't seem to be equipped with the kind of limitless patience that she has. I think it's a hormonal thing. After about three or four hours, Ellie stops seeming adorable and snuggly and starts seeming kind of clingy and overly-needy. I know this isn't fair to her at all, and it's not like I stop caring for her, but that's the way it is. Christina can apparently go a good 12-18 hours before this happens though, so I mainly end up stepping in when she needs a break or when she has to go somewhere. I imagine I'll be up for a lot more when she gets a little more interesting to interact with. Already though she's showing definite signs of consciousness. She reacts to sounds and will occasionally follow a rattle aorund with her eyes. She loves her mobile, which slowly rotates stuffed bird and frog thingys over her head while playing badly midi-fied classical music. I will be pleased when they invent baby toys that take MP3s, because I for one am kind of sick of the mobile music already. She also farts a lot. I mean, like, constantly. That never stops being funny. So in summary, things are great, and she's a perfect little angel and all that. I wish I could tell you horror stories but I don't really have any. My sister claims that people who don't know anything have easy babies. Anecdotally, that's confirmed here. Oh -- she does love to pee on me. She pees almost every time I take her diaper off. I would think she just enjoys the al fresco, but she doesn't do it to my wife. I think she specifically likes trying to pee on Daddy. This reminds both of us of the first few months with our dog, which only pooped when I was with her. This led my wife to be puzzled by a dog that never seemed to poop, and me being puzzled by a dog that seemed to produce more poop than she was taking in in food (because I assumed that if she pooped two or three times a day with me, she must be doing the same with my wife). There are probably no worthwhile conclusions to make about any of this. Also, for those who were looking for some non-baby stuff, this PDF is chock-full of incredibly cool stuff. Am I the only nerd here who's unduly fascinated by new materials? I'm a total materials geek. Nothing gets me hotter than reading about aerogel or biosteel. How awesome is it going to be when they start making climbing ropes out of biosteel? Or if they figured out how to use aerogel (or a similar derivative) as insulation in sleeping bags. Imagine a sleeping bag that had the insulating properties of a vacuum bottle, but weighed only as much as its shell fabric. In the future, everything is going to weigh nothing and be indestructable. But even now There's some kick-ass stuff out there. Transparent screen-printed photovoltaic cells? Foamed aluminum? Transparent concrete? It makes me want to build stuff just to play with materials. ____Not the real rusty Sitting up She's already using it as a seat -- she likes to sit up facing forward and sort of resting an armpit on the front edge of the sling for support. When she's not tired but we have things to do it's a lifesaver. She loves just watching us do stuff, and usually after about half an hour of this, she gets tired and falls asleep. Then she can either just sort of flop her head over or lay back into the sling completely. We also have a baby bjorn (front-carrier snugli thing). I don't like it much, but my wife uses it for walks outside, since she doesn't have a coat big enough to cover herself and the sling and worries about the cold. My coat still fits over the whole assembly, so I just wear the sling and put up with looking like I'm eight months pregnant. God only knows what people think when they see me walking around wearing it under my coat. ____Not the real rusty Pardon me ...that has nearly the insulating properties of a vacuum bottle and weighs only as much as its shell fabric plus the tiny amount that aerogel is heavier than air. ____Not the real rusty I assume until she's no longer recumbent When she can hold herself even somewhat upright she will no longer be a meat log. At that point, she becomes a meat tree. ____Not the real rusty Holy crap That's creepy. Thank god it's not real. Shades of Chickie-Nobs there. Interesting question though -- I think I'll ask my veggie friends if they'd eat meat that was grown by a plant. It has to be just a matter of time, anyway. ____Not the real rusty The site, such as it is, is back up. Actually we had a conversation about what and whether to do anything with the skeleton of the CMF a couple days ago. There are, much to my surprise, still some people willing to lend it time and energy. I pointed out that it's probably obvious to everyone that my original idea for it isn't going to happen, but the world of collaborative media has, if anything, just grown in the time since that idea. We were thinking that maybe starting the site as a general resource for people in this field would at least be something, and maybe it could go somewhere from there. So, sort of a collection of articles, pointers, links, perhaps some kind of attempt to categorize the kinds of things people are doing. Basically an informational resource and a general call for suggestions on what, if anything, else we could do. ____Not the real rusty I think it was about an hour It may have been slightly longer. But I was certainly using it within the first day. So yes, it's pretty easy with a newborn. Actually, it's gotten a little harder, since now she tends to have limbs flailing all over the place and she's a little tougher to maneuver one-handed. I've had to adjust my technique a little. In the early days though, I could just sort of palm her chest and plop her in. I'd write a parenting article, but I'm afraid it would be gibberish. Most of it would probably consist of lists of things the new age hippies lied to us about. Maybe I'll try later. And yes, that was an Oryx and Crake reference. Anyone up for a Bucket 'o' Nubbins? ____Not the real rusty Nope. :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty My response pending. Stand by. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Placeholder This comment will eventually express my anger/pleasure at the unfairness/complementariness of your rating. ____Not the real rusty Tell me... ...that's not the funniest picture ever. It looks like a total hoax, but that picture made me laugh and laugh. I hope everyone else is enjoying it as much as I did. ____Not the real rusty WebDav has touched his server's junk liberally. ____Not the real rusty Here's hoping for a British Empire fadeout Being the head of Pax Americana sucks. Not to mention that we don't even have such a thing, while bearing all the costs of one. Our disastrous Century has made the world a less safe place to be an American than ever. I hope we gradually subside into a peaceable irrelevance while someone else takes over being the world's whipping boy. ____Not the real rusty Brazil, China, India, whatever As long as it's someone else. ____Not the real rusty What you should do: Nothing. You shouldn't have even sent the response you did send, but I can't imagine it'll matter. Anyway, the only appropriate response to any threat of a lawsuit not received from a lawyer by postal mail is to ignore it completely. If they're not willing to spend the money to get a lawyer to threaten you, they're not serious and screw them. So far, this has worked 100% of the time for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty lol what? By the way, I heard the Foster Parents Plan is after you, saving you've tarnished their immaculate image by associating the idea of "corrosion" with their esteemed brand name in care. Am I having mental problems or does that sentence totally devolve into gibberish by the end? ____Not the real rusty Likewise I remember being struck by that exact thought when we moved there. It's in such beautiful surroundings, but the city itself is a grubby dump. Trash all over the streets, whole sub-cities of homeless people and their associated mounds of junk (which are indistinguishable from the piles of trash bags and whatnot) and once you get away from the major parks, there's hardly any living thing on the streets. Cracked concrete and cigarette butts. I moved there from DC, which for all its bad reputation, is a pretty nice looking place to live, with lots of attractive homes and plenty of trees. SF was a shock by comparison. I predict SF will burn down one more time, and they'll rebuild a lot of it in stone and brick. It'll do a world of good. ____Not the real rusty Also The public transit system blows. ____Not the real rusty Um I'm ashamed to say that actually looks kinda cool. $50 for a cordless USB keyboard and mouse, and $350 for a 17" wide-screen LCD, and you've got a pretty nice small-footprint system for $899 plus shipping. Also, while I'm thinking of it, has anyone seen my balls? I had them right here a second ago... ____Not the real rusty Nope The penis bucket was the first place I checked. ____Not the real rusty Of course I do Been doing it for years. :-) ____Not the real rusty There is no troll. [nt] ____Not the real rusty It's true. And I really mean that. The fact that even when I say I really mean it, and do mean it, you can't tell if I actually mean it just proves my point. ____Not the real rusty Eggers The first half of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is worth reading. The second half, and everything else Dave Eggers has ever written, is not. Eggers had half of a good book in him, and it's out now. Plus, the man himself is such an unbelievable dick that that has unfortunately tainted my impression of everything else he's done. I wouldn't feel in a huge rush to devour the Eggers corpus if I were you. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Ultimately, along with the shit sandwich of having both his parents die, he was handed the dubious silver lining of material strong enough to survive his writing. That's what saved it for me. Once he was done telling that story though, the whole thing just falls apart, which is why I can summarily dismiss the second half of the book (not really about his family situation) and everything else he writes. ____Not the real rusty Points for that He does warn you. However, minus points for not either making the second half not suck, or removing it. ____Not the real rusty Gratuitous nudity I do have to complain, though, that you promised gratuitous nudity and didn't include any ;) He posted this diary buck naked. ____Not the real rusty Incidentally That web project has been finitely delayed. I'm still chipping away at the remaining issues, and the neatness of launching on Jan 1 is wholly gone, but otherwise, it's still on. ____Not the real rusty Pronunciation I don't know, I didn't name the thing. In my head, I pronounce it "coating," but I suppose the alternative is equally plausible. I think it's a case of wave-particle duality. There is no one correct pronunciation. ____Not the real rusty Also It could be "Ko-HWAAAAAA-ting." Not sure why, but I think it works. ____Not the real rusty Roemer's not going anywhere His candidacy is extremely ignorable. The guy isn't going to get the job. ____Not the real rusty Emperor linux Just buy one of these. They save you about a zillion hours of annoyance and frustration trying to get everything to work. ____Not the real rusty More specific info I got a Meteor when the hard drive on the picturebook crapped out, and everything on it works. The only slight drawback is that suspend is handled by swsusp, because Linux support for ACPI still is nowhere, but swsusp has come an awful long way in the last couple years, and it does the job just fine, besides taking slightly longer to suspend and resume than you'd get with proper ACPI support. ____Not the real rusty Mwahahaha I concur. ____Not the real rusty Sony went all to hell Before 2001, Sony laptops worked great with linux. I had three in a row, and everything worked on all of them. Then I got the Picturebook, and while it was a nifty machine in a lot of ways, it signaled the end of the days when Sony was a good choice for a linux laptop. I assumed the problems I had were due to it being an odd machine, but everything I've heard indicates that all the other laptops Sony has produced since then have all the same problems. ____Not the real rusty Buy Apple stock in May 2003 Don't believe me, look for yourself. ____Not the real rusty Hit rock bottom, apparently. I don't know what happened, but it's been all uphill since then. ____Not the real rusty What about sex *in* the trenches? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Tea. [en tea] ____Not the real rusty Hardly. I have never been more serious. ____Not the real rusty Man Did he say anything in that whole appearance? I was unable to extract a single intelligible statement. Sometimes the left is so embarassing. ____Not the real rusty New Year's does suck After Valentine's Day, it's my second least-favorite holiday. I used to get very depressed on New Years. Now I just ignore it. ____Not the real rusty Ko4ting wiki, a plea for help So the official unofficial K5 wiki, Ko4ting is having some hosting problems. Apparently Seb Paquet, who started it and has hosted it up to now, is having problems with his former university and moving his wikis. Does anyone with a little server space and some wiki experience want to take over running it? If so, comment here or email me. Baby-rearing continues apace. I got peed on copiously the other night -- I thought girls weren't supposed to squirt for distance? She's also got a bit of a cold, leading to a fussy night last night and this morning. Right now she's asleep in her sling on my lap though. Finally. Also, she has followed a rattling thing around with her eyes. To non-parents, this probably sounds like absolutely the lamest thing in the world to be excited about. But hey. I have fully entered the world of drastically lowered expectations. Watch for my thrill when she starts holding her head up. afaik Hardly any, would be my guess. I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if it was more than hundreds of hits per day, if that. ____Not the real rusty Extremely apt description Except you wouldn't expect meat-logs to produce so much assorted fluid.. ____Not the real rusty Three weeks She's definitely not teething yet. :-) I'm pretty sure she has a cold because I just had a bad one, and literally everyone I know has either just been sick or is right now. ____Not the real rusty Heh She's not that bad at all. Generally she's just not been sleeping that well, half-waking up every ten or fifteen minutes to squirm and froth at the mouth a little. I think last night and this morning she was feeling pretty poorly though. She just wasn't happy to do anything. As for the sitting in a rocking chair and having screaming breaks, yeah I've been there. I have to say though, some people must have it a lot worse than us. It hasn't been that bad at all. ____Not the real rusty Also The Kleptones Night at the Hip-Hopera is wildly overrated. There's absolutely no coherence or unity in any of the tracks, and they wedged in so much random introductory crap at the beginning of every track that I get too bored waiting for most of them to start to bother listening to them. My prediction: the mashup genre is a short-lived fad, destined to be abandoned soon. It eventually will come to seem faintly embarassing, like admitting how much you loved fart jokes in elementary school. The only decent things to come out of it will so closely resemble ordinary remixes that they will just be absorbed by that tradition. ____Not the real rusty The Beastles The Beastles does have a couple of gems on it. "Whatcha want, Lady" is great. Most of the others are ok. But, notably, they sound more like Beasties remixes than mashups. ____Not the real rusty You're in trouble! [nt] (Say it out loud) ____Not the real rusty Well I don't really want to host it (hence the appeal for help) but I'd love to see that scoop wiki code. If you'd be willing to paste it in here, why not paste it in a text file instead and email to me and hulver? :-) ____Not the real rusty However Before, when it was just "her" bladder, it was funny. Inserting that [Bonita's] in there is obnoxious. I mean, quoting people out of context to make them look stupid has a long and proud tradition, but altering the quote is just lame. ____Not the real rusty Not quite "Her" in the quote referred to Michael's cat. Bonita is his wife. ____Not the real rusty Why Do I Have So Many Questions About Sigs?! Sory Mike. You know I love you. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Also, new bridge information I read a book about the construction of the Golden Gate a fewe months ago, and it mentioned that the original Tacoma Narrows bridge was in fact based on the Golden Gate design. They left off certain stiffening elements, which ultimately led to its harmonic destruction. Anyway, that's why they look so similar. ____Not the real rusty I also spelled "fewe" in Olde Englishe. ____Not the real rusty Beby-making sex Pah. I didn't even get to have any intentionally baby-making sex. We believed the vile lie that it would take up to three months for The Pill to fully lose its effect, so we were actually planning for a March-ish baby. All it took was one "Oh, we'll go get the birth control stuff in another minute." Future parents: when they tell her to stop taking the pill three months early, don't believe it. ____Not the real rusty Umm although still waiting for the ultrasound to find out if I'll be a mother or father Um. That's definitely something you should know before you even start trying. I mean, besides all the lifestyle, financial, and nutritional issues you really do basically have to start by knowing who sticks what in whom. ____Not the real rusty You watching new comment replies? You're a subscriber, so I bet you are. The new comment reply thingy takes a little bit to process the first time, but caches itself in the database thereafter for a while, or until it changes. This is what's causing the speed pattern that you see. As for the http keepalive stuff, it's as well tuned here as it needs to be. It actually turned out to be a big problem for a while on dailykos, till we got it tuned right. The proxy apache does do keepalives, because it serves stuff like images too -- so every page view will probably cause multiple proxy requests. The Scoop apache doesn't use keepalive, because every page view only generates one Scoop request, and it's more efficient to release that apache right away to go serve another request. The problem on dailykos was that the proxy keepalive timeout was set to 15 seconds (the default). At a certain level of traffic, the proxy was starting to get overwhelmed with new requests while existing children were busy sitting around waiting for keepalive to expire. Given that what we were trying to accomplish was to serve the image requests that would come almost instantly with a page view, cutting keepalive back to 1 second got things rolling again nicely. I don't think it's ever been an issue here, but it's probably set at something like five seconds on K5. ____Not the real rusty New Years Resolution 2005 In 2004, I got a new job, my wife finished her Master's Degree, and we bought a house and had a baby. In 2005, our collective family resolution is to slack off. 2005: The Year We Phone It In. Keep an eye out for great exciting things... in 2006. lol what? ____Not the real rusty Nah We were here before the blog. They just came along and invented a good third-party ad system. ____Not the real rusty Try it now I was unaware, not having IE to test with. And, let's face it, not being inclined to "test" in the first place. It should work now. ____Not the real rusty Proceeds from premium memberships That's like $30. I mean, sure I could, but honestly I think we could do better. I'm willing to put up a call for donations somewhere, like under the regular ad, or on the right side if we can agree on where it should point. I'd rather not be the one collecting the money, since there are so many groups that can take donations directly and it would help keep down the "OMGBBQ Rusty STOLEZORED $70K!" trolls. Perhaps you could submit a story about who needs help and where you can go to donate, and if it posts, I'll summarize in a temporary pseudo-ad? ____Not the real rusty How about A story with attached poll asking who should be highlighted? Then we just point directly to their donation page. ____Not the real rusty Ad stuff Howdy kids. I'm trying out blogads here and I figured I should give anyone who cares a heads-up before someone notices and goes off the deep end. Basically, if you're not logged in you will now get blogads (assuming someone buys them) on the index pages under our regular ads, and on story and diary pages in a left column beside the story text. If you are logged in, you won't see the blogads at all and in fact you won't see any story-page ads anymore. This is a shameless attempt to limit criticism of allowing graphical ads by making sure that if you have a posting account and can actually criticise, then by definition you won't see them anyway. In case anyone happens to want to buy one, you can get started with that right here. My numbers say that about 60% of our traffic is anonymous, so in theory I could make more money by showing them to everyone, but in practice if dropping 40% of pageviews saves me from the inevitable screaming, it is so worth it. In other news, I burned the crap out of my right middle finger, just above the nail. You'd be utterly amazed at how often that spot rubs or scrapes against things during the course of a normal day. They are all reviewed blogads have to be approved before they start running. I probably wouldn't approve that one. :-) ____Not the real rusty Quadruple that ...and I still wouldn't do it. ____Not the real rusty USD$5 million I'd run it for a month for that. And it would be the end of all K5 ads forever, too. ____Not the real rusty Attention Sir! I am Joseph Cabilla and I have a large sum of money which your dead relative willed to you. Please reply with your full name, address, and social security number so I may initiate the transaction at once! ____Not the real rusty Out of business? Hardly. Actually traffic at dKos hasn't even declined as much as we expected. I don't really work on it anymore though, except very occasionally as a difficult problem demands. I haven't for a few months now. Anyway, yeah I've got some more free time lately, since the election cycle's over for now and holidays and baby stuff has kept me from making too many new commitments until the new year. It's entirely possible I may even post another diary in 2005. It's even possible I might finally upgrade K5 and shuffle some other things around here a bit. Stranger things have happened. ____Not the real rusty To be fair... ...politicians don't really advertise if they're not running, so they'd have stopped if they won too. Except for Maine Congressman Tom Allen, who's been runing this Happy Holidays non-ad on TV for absolutely no reason I can fathom. ____Not the real rusty For $20 I'll fuck nothing all night long, baby. ____Not the real rusty And it never occurs to anyone... That all the regulars always leave every three months. It's interesting to see the different turnover rates of different sites. It seem like here all the regulars leave every year or so. But of course no one points out that they've been saying that for three years because, duh, all the regulars who would know have left in the last three months. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah, there's some But it seems like a new clique moves in every year or so and believes themselves to be "the regulars" is what I'm saying. Also, I don't really know the situation on dKos since I haven't kept up there as much after the election was over. That probably just proves your point. In any case, who's to say that the hardcore partisans aren't the real regulars there to begin with? ____Not the real rusty Too late I lost my blister almost before it even formed properly. If it weren't for that, I imagine I'd be in a lot less pain. ____Not the real rusty I get that sometimes It's never been an infection so far, so don't worry about that too much. Usually a long hot shower will clear it up. If not, soak a facecloth in hot water and hold it just behind the ear for a longish time. Eventually, the warmth will get things flowing again. ____Not the real rusty Not into it It's never a good idea to put anything into your ear. I've had good luck just putting my head in a warm steamy environment for a while, and/or putting warmth behind the ear -- it seems to penetrate through to the ear canal and soften up any wax blockages enough to clear out normally, if that's what it is. It seems to happen to me when I get dehydrated or when I've been working in a really dusty or dry environment. A doctor will probably do something to clear it right up, so if there's any doubt, go see one. ____Not the real rusty Babies are wicked retarded "Oh look! There's something waving around in front of my face! I'd better suck on it! Holy crap! It's my hand! Waaaaa!" In no particular order, things that I have learned about babies: It's easy to do a fairly accurate impression of your baby, which is very funny, and she doesn't even know you're doing it. These are good baby wipes. They tell you to use damp washcloths, but that assumes you have a source of warm water near your changing stations. After a few days of icy cold washcloths, we decided to look for something different. Babies are adorable little bundles of joy, except when you're really tired. Then they're demon spawn from the pits of hell. (I assume she'll be reading this in the future. Sorry, honey. Daddy loves you anyway, cloven hoofs and all.) The baby industry is a vile apparatus composed almost entirely of fanatics with a sick desire to make you feel that you're depriving your baby of some crucial thing. On one side, you have the BABIES 'R' US faction, which insists that if it can be made out of brightly colored plastic, you must have it or your baby will grow up deprived and hateful and become a crack whore who robs convenience stores in her spare time. On the other side, you have the bubbleheaded new-agers who insist that if it isn't the all-natural organic product of the ancient mothering wisdom of the ages, your baby will grow up deprived and hateful and become a crack whore who robs convenience stores in her spare time. Nearly everyone who makes a living off babies is a fraud and a charlatan and should probably be stoned to death in the public square. There are always one or two key exceptions to the above rule. Presumably that's the only thing keeping any of them alive. There is not much going on in the head of a one-week old baby. There are three states, which are crying, not crying, and sleeping (really a special case of state two). The causes for those states break down like this: Crying: I'm hungry. I'm gassy. There is something wrong with me that is neither hunger nor gas. You will never know what it is. Not crying: I'm not hungry. (Baby is probably eating) I'm not gassy. Sleeping: I was recently neither hungry nor gassy for more than fifteen consecutive minutes.That is the complete state diagram of a week-old baby. This is a good owners manual. You do not need to sterilize bottles. I don't know what people were thinking. I like this sling a lot. My wife doesn't find it comfortable though. So YMMV. But for god's sake, don't carry your baby around in the carseat. You'll give yourself a hernia. Despite all claims to the contrary, newborns do not always want to be held and snuggled. Sometimes she wants to sit somewhere quietly and not have parents fussing over her. People who tell you tales about how babies in the ancient tribes of Papua New Guinea or some other godforsaken third-world hellhole are held or carried all the time until they're six months old, when they have a "ground touching ceremony" are fools. If you don't live in a place where poisonous snakes and lizards are a big problem, your baby can touch the ground sometimes. I have thirty minutes left until the next feeding. Time now occurs in very precisely defined three hour increments. I imagine this is roughly what being a heroin addict is like. That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Much more to come, I'm sure... Baby's first word: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!! ____Not the real rusty Yay I'm no good at baby talk. This is probably why I usually scare infants who've had nothing but squeaky voices pitched at them. I'm hoping she just gets used to it. Sometimes we walk around the house and play "look at things." This is actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Or, like, I could just be losing my mind, but same result either way. "This is an orange. Actually, it's technically a Clementine. It is yummy. This is a piece of candy corn. It's Halloween candy, and it's way past Halloween, so it's probably pretty gross. Come to think of it, this was probably made during Reagan's first term, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway. This is a banana. Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, bananaphone!" And so forth. ____Not the real rusty You sound... ...just like the rest of them. You seem to have forgotten the pitch for your video series at the end though. ____Not the real rusty My baby will own the means of production! Onward to glorious soviet future! ____Not the real rusty My baby will laugh as she feeds you to her sharks. Tragically for you, the sharks will not have laser beams. And the hook you're tied to will not descend slowly. Plus, her secret island lair will kick ass. ____Not the real rusty Not always Sometimes their parents are cruelly killed by the hero. I'll buy some hero-repellent along with that shark-repellent. ____Not the real rusty My money's on CheeseBurgerBrown. You know he's got a cape squirreled away somewhere. These "creative" types always do. ____Not the real rusty Bottles We did our best to breast-feed, but it just wasn't working. There isn't enough milk there. We pumped, and nursed, and supplemented with those silly tubey contraptions and took herbs and so forth. But she's so much happier when she can actually get food, so it looks like bottles it is. I think we started deciding to bail on the breast feeding when the lactation consultants told us to order drugs from New Zealand that are not legal in the US. No offense, Moonflower, but I still trust the FDA a lot more than I trust you. We're told they do have a much more predictable and regular schedule on bottles. It's not bad at all knowing when she's likely to be hungry next. The only part that's kind of annoying is that traveling will have to involve a little more equipment. Also, bottle poop is stinky. ____Not the real rusty Yup Believe it or not, there is such a thing. They may also be referred to as the Lactofascists. Lactation consultants are the people who are there to make you feel guilty if you give up trying to breastfeed, because god knows no sane person gives a crap. ____Not the real rusty On cribs I had the same problem. Then one day, flipping channels, I saw that Mtv had a show called "Mtv Cribs." Imagine my excitement! Finally, Mtv would inform me about the pros and cons of that bewildering array of cribs. I waited eagerly, until the program finally came on. Now, having watched it, I know that a proper crib must include a grand entrance foyer, a 22 carat gold pool table, at least three jacuzzis, and more bling than you can shake a pimp-stick at. Thanks, Mtv! ____Not the real rusty This is true She actually sleeps quite a bit. My observations above should not be mistaken for complaints (except about the baby industry, which it most definitely is). Overall, she's been quite an easy little thing, as long as we don't do stupid things like try to lay her down in her crib to sleep. She likes to sleep either in a carseat we have in the house, or in her sling, both of which share that quality of snuggliness which is so important. ____Not the real rusty Ah, but You vastly underestimate my skill with a food processor and a batch of veggies. I tell you it is a thing to behold. If I could program even half as well as I can grind tubers into a thin paste, I'd be eating Microsoft's lunch by now. ____Not the real rusty Probably That's probably so. This is just the stage where along with inferring things like "when I cry, food appears" she's also forming brain connections like "if I do this, the thing on the end of what for the sake of argument we'll call my 'arm' moves." There's a lot of noise and relatively little signal, and it all adds up to a pretty incoherent mish-mash that does, to even the most acute observer, appear totally random. :-) ____Not the real rusty Excellent review This very much captures what I liked (and disliked) about the book. ____Not the real rusty Due to security concerns I cannot at this time reveal the answers to numbers 1, 2, 3 or 5. Number four is Casablanca. However, in the interests of safety, the other four will have to remain undisclosed at this time. ____Not the real rusty Enjoy it, you bastard Before I knife you for posting this at this exact particular moment in time. ;-) ____Not the real rusty I exaggerate It's not really that bad. I was just sleepy this afternoon when I got up. In general, I'm doing fine with 6-7 hrs a night (where "night" == "morning/early afternoon"). I'm afraid my wife is not so lucky. ____Not the real rusty Holy crap Netcraft confirms it! ____Not the real rusty IAWTD +3 (encourage). "Incredibly accurate!" raves Larry King. ____Not the real rusty Elinor Rose Foster Born at 9:28 AM, December 16, 2004. She was 7 lbs 3 oz, stock finger/toe option package, delivered by a surprise ceasarian because we discovered she was breach after about ten hours of normal labor. All of us are back home, mother's healing more rapidly than anyone's ever seen, apparently, and Elinor is adorable. Oh yeah, and I cried like a soppy little girl at the birth. That was kind of surprising. Also, who gets born on their due date? Her promptness is mitigated somewhat by her attempt to drop into the world backwards. And yes, I'm very tired. My wife's parents are up to help out, so I expect in a couple of hours I will be relieved for the day shift and I can get some sleep. Her mother is sentenced to three hours or less uninterrupted for the forseeable future unfortunately, but there's nothing anyone can really do about that. Hey, it works That's not a bad idea :-) ____Not the real rusty Other nicknames I've been thinking about "Sunny." Surely that'd short-circuit any potential goth tendencies. :-) ____Not the real rusty No kidding This one shipped on time, but the whole thing was in the package upside down. Also, it seems to need continuous reboots every morning between 4 and 7. According to the specs, those were supposed to be the only hours it was required to run unattended. ____Not the real rusty Breech You're right. How embarassing. I actually thought it was "breach." Learn something every day. :-) ____Not the real rusty I know that A custom more honor'd in the breach than in the observance, and all that. It just isn't the word for this, is the source of my shame. ____Not the real rusty Cheaper that way, I hear. :-) ____Not the real rusty That spelling ...was my wife's choice. It is a perfectly valid alternate spelling with long-established historical precedent. But I think it's spelled wrong too. Ah well. You can't win 'em all. ____Not the real rusty The inspiration I think the inspiration was Elinor from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. You'd have to ask my wife why though. I learned a long time ago to stop asking questions as soon as Jane Austen was invoked, because I surely would regret havng to listen to the answer. :-) If there's another girl, I wonder if we'll have to call her Marianne. ____Not the real rusty I was thinking... Monica Polish. ____Not the real rusty Waiting for a boy Hugh Phailett. ____Not the real rusty lol We looked through family genealogy for names, and it turns out my family history has plenty of Hezekiahs and Jebediahs. Personally, I love those names, but I don't think any of them are going to get past my wife. ____Not the real rusty Whose heritage? I'm about 1/4 French, 1/4 Irish, 1/4 long-expatriated (like circa 1615) British and 1/4 other stuff. If I was going to reassert my heritage, I'd be better off naming him Jacques O'Conroy Foster. Plus he would be 1/8 all that stuff and half German. So, how about Gunther Jacques O'Conroy Foster? ____Not the real rusty Damn you Now she can never get that yahoo account. ____Not the real rusty Who knows Actually, I imagine that considering whose daughter she is, she won't have any trouble getting an email address somewhere. :-) ____Not the real rusty They're fine HGazel's a little lonely because she doesn't leave my office, and I haven't been in here as much recently, but she'll live. And Baby was upset the first few days because we had to lock him out the bedroom so he wouldn't climb all over my wife's stitches, but he's happy now. None of the animals seem to have really noticed the baby all that much. The dog is being incredibly good, considering that she's not getting nearly as many walks as she's used to. ____Not the real rusty She's a lab She's been generally good with kids, and especially likes little girls. I don't think she knows what this new thing is yet, really. She doesn't seem to recognize it as a person, and probably thinks it's just visiting still. ____Not the real rusty The Washington Interns [nt] ____Not the real rusty Planning ahead It's too late for you, but perhaps it would have been better to get a spare as it started to become clear that Bo was going to be the favorite toy, and rotate them out each naptime. In theory, they'd wear evenly and if one was lost, the other could fill in with no one being the wiser. Of course, it's probably more sensible to let her just have the one, because eventually she will lose it and learn what we all have to learn -- that you always lose the things you love. ____Not the real rusty Dammit We're still waiting. Due day is tomorrow. The promises of "oh, this one'll be early" have spectacularly failed to materialize. There is much tapping of feet and glancing at watches. ____Not the real rusty Yep I mentioned it in a diary a while ago. Although I'm not that worried about the sleep thing, seeing how radically irregular my sleep cycles have been for the past three years or so anyway. For example, yesterday night I slept from 10:30pm to 6:30am. Last night I slept from 7:00am to 3:00pm. Tonight will probably be something completely different. It's been like that for a long while now, so I'm pretty used to it. ____Not the real rusty That's what they tell us However, so far it isn't working. Also, it's hilarious how much of an engineering and logistics project sex becomes in the ninth month. The hardest part is keeping a straight face long enough to finish. ____Not the real rusty Daily Show or, as Stephen Colbert put it on the Daily Show, "This is the land of Chernobyl, Jon. Dioxin is like nutmeg to these people!" ____Not the real rusty Yow The construction of that sentence was pretty questionable. ____Not the real rusty Doubtful I don't generally bother deleting comments without also banning the user who posted them. There would be little point in that. You probably did forget to hit post. ____Not the real rusty We are all special and unique snowflakes. [nt] ____Not the real rusty A crack in your cheese? Don't worry, it's all gouda. ____Not the real rusty Damn Russian judge. ____Not the real rusty Torrents I found the realvideo versions to be unwatchably low-quality. AVI torrents can be found here. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I don't particularly care about the IP issues. There's no other way for me to see this besides downloading it, so there you have it. As for IP issues generally, I think that content industries are being incredibly stupid. When they bother to provide me with a means to pay for downloaded stuff, and the price is something I'm willing to pay to avoid the hassle of free downloads, then I'll pay. Till then, hassle it is. In this case, I actually went to the bother of installing bittorrent because I was interested enough in seeing this documentary. I would probably have paid up to $10.00 to avoid that hassle and download this documentary directly. But no one's selling that service. And $1.00 per song for downloaded music is about $0.75 too high. If file-sharing ends up costing businesses enough to seriously hurt them, it is no more than they deserve for treating a potentially huge group of people as criminals instead of customers. ____Not the real rusty Likewise I didn't specify before, but a format lacking DRM (or at least with soem mythical form of DRM that doesn't significantly impede my right to use what I pay for, which is essentially the same thing) would be a requirement for me to pay as well. They could have been making money on dowloaded media for a decade now, rather than farting around trying to invent more restrictive locks and keys and suing their would-be customers. I have no sympathy for the music industry, and it looks like the movie industry is on the same road. People will still make music with The Music Industry. People will still make movies without The Movie Industry. If they sell me what I want the way I want it, fine. If they don't, I hope they collapse, and get replaced by something that will. ____Not the real rusty Sure As a matter of fact, I don't really do any media sharing to speak of. This case was, as I mentioned, the first time I've even bothered to install bittorrent. I don't use any P2P software. I do have a ton of MP3s, but over 90% of them were ripped from discs I purchased (I don't know if you consider this "stealing" or not. I don't). I've pretty much ceased buying music, since I usually don't want a disc enough to stomach giving money to the music industry for it. However, I don't agree with your buying into the idea that file sharing is "stealing." The details of the concept of intellectual property and the laws that create and support it are too complex for me to accept as simplistic an analogy as the word stealing implies. At its core, casting file-sharing as stealing automatically implies a zero-sum transaction. If I steal from you, my gain equals your loss. I have what I stole, and you don't. File-sharing doesn't work that way. If I download your song, now I have it and so do you. You might be losing the money I might have paid you for it. Then again, if I like it you might be gaining the money I will pay for a hard copy of the rest of an album I wouldn't have bought without hearing the file I downloaded. You might be losing nothing at all, since I think the song is crap and would never have paid for it. Do I owe you money for the opportunity to determine whether or not I hate your music? If I download a song, listen to it once, and erase it, have you lost something? Have I stolen something from you? If I go to a friend's house and he plays a song for me once, and I never listen to it again, have I stolen something from you? If I download a whole album and listen to it over and over because it has become my favorite album ever, yet I never pay anyone for it have I stolen? Clearly I'm enjoying the benefits of your work without paying you for them. But you still have your work -- I did not deprive you of it in any way. Does it make a difference if I tell every one of my friends how great you are, and three of them buy your album? That's two extra sales you wouldn't have gotten without my "theft." Basically, my point here is that the situation is not as clear cut as you'd like it to be. I think intellectual property can and should be protected within reason (in the US, we've gone way, way beyond reason now) but I also think that businesses are going to have to do a lot better than just rely on strengthening the laws in order to stay in business. There are plenty of opportunities for IP-based businesses to leverage the promotional value of file-sharing and grow their sales, but all of them start with the realization and acceptance that "intellectual property" is not physical property, and you can't build a business based on it like it was any other commodity. ____Not the real rusty Yeah My mini-rant about pay-for-download was pretty much separate from this case, which is fraught with the whole extra confusion of how to get BBC stuff. I figured the case was something like you described as far as who owns it and whether they care. ____Not the real rusty Wrong breed He must have got nonproverbial rabbits. ____Not the real rusty I agree I've actually been working on that for something else. I think you're right -- open tags would be much better than the section/topic nonsense we've got now. ____Not the real rusty It was the break the refreshes ...and a lovely alternative to her usual hourly swig of laudanum. ____Not the real rusty Likewise We've been number one or two for "nick berg" on google for approximately ever, and that story has been linked just about every place that Berg has been mentioned. I think the stats page gives the top stories according to the rest of the web, but is probably a bad measure of what regular readers here liked. ____Not the real rusty I disagree K5 is still ruled by geeks and geek culture. But in my work in the last year elsewhere online, people of all kinds are picking up blogs and net media to an extent that really has surprised me. It's not uncommon to see people on dailykos for whom that's the first thing they've ever purposely bothered to look at on the net. There's people blogging who don't have a shred of geek in them -- and even using Scoop and not being scared off by the abundance of tools and options. We're still in the baby years, sort of like the times when you could buy a radio at most department stores but there were still only a couple of stations broadcasting 8 or 12 hours a day, and you had to do all kinds of antenna crap to get them. But the tools are steadily getting better, and people are not turning down the net in droves. It's just going to take a little while longer to get to the middle of the bell curve. I am willing to say that we're at the very end of the early-adopter phase right now, if not just beyond it. People routinely buy stuff online and look up information online. It's one more step to particiating somewhere, and while that's probably never going to be a dominant activity (because people are lazy) it's already gone beyond geeks only. ____Not the real rusty It is In India there are many people who have food. And, in contrast, there are many others who don't. ____Not the real rusty Fog of War was terriffic. McNamara's book, on which it is based, I'm sorry to say, is very boring. Don't bother digging it up, unless you're a real Vietnam-era policy nerd. ____Not the real rusty That's strange. You don't look like a hamburger. ____Not the real rusty The means of production The means of production. ____Not the real rusty You probably have eye crabs. Now, I challenge all of you to get that image out of your head. ____Not the real rusty There is nothing less worthy of anonymization than eye-crabs, my friend. If we are not aware of this plague, how can we ever find a cure? ____Not the real rusty You're barking up the wrong tree. I'd have invited you for a romantic walk along the beech ages ago, if I knew you were pining for one. ____Not the real rusty I hate you soooooo much. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Of all the things I didn't want to know ...that was one. I shall go back to my pre-enlightenment mindset of pretending these things don't exist now. ____Not the real rusty Pssst The above comment is up for "Best Comment To Which This Comment is a Reply"! Vote now! ____Not the real rusty Green? K5 is #006699. Sort of blue, but not one that network TV would recognize. ____Not the real rusty Is there a good way? ____Not the real rusty Come on people We can lose bigger than this! Currently there's still four others behind us. Metroblogging, Homespun Bloggers, Blogging Blogs of Blog and The People's Blogging Front of Blogea. Ok, I honestly just couldn't even be bothered trying to get all the names right. Whatever. Anyway, a vote for one of them is a vote for K5 in the coveted dead-last spot. Let's get those votes out there people! You wanna be some middle-ranker? Some also-ran? Hell no! We've got the right stuff to lose and lose big! Let's show em what some serious losing looks like! ____Not the real rusty It's just a missing footnote * For sufficiently flexible units. ____Not the real rusty It does if the units are sufficiently flexible. ____Not the real rusty does too. ____Not the real rusty too times infinity. ____Not the real rusty too times infinity squared. ____Not the real rusty Boo! Hiss! Teh Emeny is All Up In Amongst Us! ;-) Sounds like a good job. Don't forget us little people when you get all bloated with power. ____Not the real rusty also It should be in the FAQ, but I don't think it is yet -- the way to express something without an air of sarcastic superiority is to post it... on some other site. :-) ____Not the real rusty Like everyone else The events of the last four years have made me fearful. ____Not the real rusty I would like to amend that holiday I've amended Chrismahanukwanzaaka to include our Muslim brethren and sistren. It shall now be known as Chrismahanukwanzaadan. ____Not the real rusty link Useful summary. I got there with "time motion study light bulb". ____Not the real rusty Aw, leave the guy alone He's an agnostic who really wants to believe there's no God. It's like your local priest who's having a crisis of faith. Eventually, he'll have the breakthrough moment that will renew his faith that there's no God. It'll be like a Hallmark movie in reverse -- little Jimmy will get hit by a bus, and fall into a coma, and then after months of round-the-clock vigils, little Jimmy will go into cardiac arrest and die without ever regaining consciousness. And then Nursie will have this moment of total clarity and all of his atheism will come back in that moment. ____Not the real rusty I don't think you're stupid I'm pretty much right there with you. I think the only difference is that I don't think my lack of belief in a god is due to anything other than faith -- I can't rationally justify it, because the point of god is that it's a concept outside logic and rational justification. ____Not the real rusty The secret The secret is that no one actually works more than 20% of the time. Everyone figures that they are just that much quicker than everyone else, and can therefore slack off the rest of the time without any trouble. But the truth is simply that no one else is working any more than you are. This is specifically true in office-type jobs. Percentage of time actually spent working goes up and the perception that you are working less than others goes down the more blue-collar the job is. ____Not the real rusty Huh That observation was from my personal experience, but I would agree to exempt roofing crews and construction-site gofers. Also, warehouse or generally any kind of line workers work when there's work in front of them, so their percentage isn't really up to them. But all the other blue-collar jobs I've worked, the skilled laborers worked more or less all the time. ____Not the real rusty But it would sure take a bite out of dog-fishing. ____Not the real rusty How exactly do you suck a fuck? ____Not the real rusty I don't really get it She's kind of funny looking. Too many bones in the face or something. ____Not the real rusty Heh I saw that coming as soon as I hit Post. ____Not the real rusty roflomgbbq I actually did laugh, despite the hip ironic subject line above. By the way, please stop being a dick to people at random. You're often pretty funny, but sooner or later I'm going to have to kick you out, if you keep up the nonsense. I'd hate to do that. ____Not the real rusty Thanks I don't know what kitten would do without people who hate him, so I guess fair's fair. ____Not the real rusty Swing and a miss A better response would have been something like "Yeah, you must be used to seeing things coming by now." And then I'd have said "It's always a pleasure being your straight man," and then you'd have said "You didn't act like a straight man last night," and then we'd have both done a little soft shoe and introduced the next act. But you fucked it all up. That's it, I'm never working with you again. ____Not the real rusty Congratulations! Here's your victory plaque -- look, that's your name on it there, engraved right underneath the "Last To Figure it Out" seal. I hope it takes a place of pride in your home. :-) ____Not the real rusty Checking email On any open network... well, on nay network at all really but expecially something like a leeched wireless network, you can check email securely by using SSL-IMAP or webmail via https. If your email provider doesn't offer these options, get a new email provider because yours sucks. ____Not the real rusty Higher layer SSL (same protocol for either of my suggestions) operates at a higher level than the transport. Whether the bits are traveling over ethernet, 802.11, or whatever, they're still encrypted between you and the server. SSL doesn't care. The most packet sniffing could discern is that you're on the network and possibly what server you're talking to. ____Not the real rusty Er, yeah IANANE (network engineer) -- I was using "transport" in a casual (i.e. wrong) sense there. :-) ____Not the real rusty What is this 'print' you speak of? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Wind0w$ looser!@ I'm sorry pal, I use LINUX and I don't have the advanced degree required to set up printing. ____Not the real rusty There's different ways You can just give someone the boot, and they can't post anymore, or you can wipe out just their ratings, or you can totally erase them from the face of the site. The last one is not used very often. ____Not the real rusty Because That was added for the occasional account that shows up and spews a lot of crap everywhere. Basically it's for spambots and recent crapflooders who haven't ever done anything else. Makes it easy to clean up quickly, and provides (I hope) a pretty strong disincentive to do that, since it's a one-click recovery. ____Not the real rusty I don't know The guy obviously found the article, went "Hey! I do this!" and sat down to write a comment about it. Of course, he linked to his own stuff. But it's not a concentrated attempt to spam the site, and it is totally on-topic to the article, so I wouldn't get too worked up about it. If it saves me from getting more emails about how to find Mexican dentists (yes, I get them too) then I'm for it. ____Not the real rusty No, not really I comment on other sites (mostly MeFi and Dkos) occasionally, though not even as much as I do here. I meant to write more diaries, but there's kind of just too much stuff going on for me to sit down and come up with something coherent to say about it. The baby's due any day now, the nursery is not finished, and I have so much other crap I ought to be doing that even sitting here and writing this is an inexcusable waste of time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh I'm always happy to not be the fascist that some would have you believe. :-) ____Not the real rusty Actually I did like you. Then you went from being a relatively funny troll to someone who was here to harass others. This new explosion of hissy-fit has merely made me more comfortable with your banning. Any time you actually want to come back, just make a new account get on with it, and stop drawing attention to the fact that it's just you again. I assume you can figure out where the lines are now, and if you're interested in not crossing them, you're welcome to do so. ____Not the real rusty That's what I did say Those are basically the reasons. I said so right here, in that very story that is being discussed. The guys who like to play victim also like to make sure that while they call me out for "never explaining" they also don't link any of the times I do explain. It would be kind of funny to put a big box on the front page, though, which was updated with the name and reasons every time someone was banned. Well, it'd be funny if the people calling for "accountability" were anyone I actually thought needed that lesson. But the martyr brigade is, of course, just the same people who get banned for being asses, so that would merely be further punishment for K5ers who are just trying to talk to each other. ____Not the real rusty I just said it would be funny Not that anyone was asking for it. ____Not the real rusty It's pretty easy They're not very creative. There are a number of factors that people just don't chnage much from one dupe to the next. I couldn't do it in software, certainly. But applying human judgement to a relatively small number of variables makes it much easier than you'd imagine, most of the time. I'm sure there are tons I miss, because I don't usually stray beyond what I can justify to my own satisfaction. But any idiot could pick out the dupes that I do. I mean, when someone on the same dialup subnet makes an account from the same email domain with the same "style" of email username and starts posting the exact same crap they just got banned for, it doesn't take a Kreskin to figure out who it is. ____Not the real rusty Yes Although I don't know who you are when you're being anonymized. All three of the names I'd usually know you by are registered by you and not restricted in any way. ____Not the real rusty Libel In speech, it's slander. In print, libel. ____Not the real rusty No, I don't remember. ____Not the real rusty And... historically every perhaps eight months we have a flareup of the Anonymized Martyrs Brigade. I think it's been longer than that since the last one, so we're overdue. This too shall pass. ____Not the real rusty MoveOn? I'm not even on MoveOn's email list. I heard two guys from there talk at SXSW last year, is the total extent of my involvement with them. Now, since FEC rules do not require the collection of racial information with individual political donations, and no candidate or group that I'm aware of even asks the question, whose ass did you pull that "50% Jewish" number from? Did you make it up yourself, or are you being led around by the nose by someone else's propaganda? PS: When I was arguing with you before, I didn't realize you were just as nuts as Baldrson. Get help, man. You're losing whatever grip you may have once had. ____Not the real rusty It's fascinating to see... ...how conspiracy theories get started in the unbalanced mind, from the perspective of a supposed conspirator. Let's see: I wrote some software which many people think is good at forming and supporting web community. Some people used that software and liked it. Some of those people became involved with progressive politics, and saw a business opportunity to market their skills in community forming and online collaboration, and invited me to join them and head up the technical side of the company. I, while not heretofore active in any political party, find myself in general sympathy with the politics of the groups we will be supporting, and also find myself in very great sympathy with the idea of an embiggened paycheck, join the company. But in Baldrson's mind, this has become me joining some shadowy cabal with "interest in maintaining the status quo within the political system." If you asked anyone who actually had a stake in maintaining the status quo in this country, they would say that what we're doing is potentially very threatening to that status quo. So now I get it from both sides. The upshot is, if I can piss off net kooks like Baldrson and entrenched politicians at the same time, then hot damn, I'm sure doing something right. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well I'll have to ask my secret Jewish masters to confirm that fact. It's true though. The Elders of Zion send me coded messages weekly to instruct me on what articles I should allow to be voted up here. I don't like admitting it, but you've uncovered the truth. ____Not the real rusty Bwahahahaha I voted against it, if that's what you mean. I voted against it because I will always vote against everything you write. I don't even read most of it. I skimmed that article just enough to identify that it's a stupid idea and won't ever happen. As for your other frothing, you are just laughable. I don't care about you nearly enough to bother having a conspiracy. You are just not very important at all. I know that's hard to fathom, but it's so true. ____Not the real rusty You missed the key point A conspiracy against you is implausible because you are not important. No one cares about you. Who becomes President is important. But besides all that, it doesn't take a "vast conspiracy," and I'm not aware of anyone credibly claiming there is one. It would be done with a very small conspiracy of people placed where they could actually change voting results. I'm not a subscriber to the stolen-election theory to begin with, so I'm not going to go out of my way to defend it. I just enjoy pointing out that your example displays your bizarrely inflated sense of self-importance. ____Not the real rusty No, it's not See, you don't get my point. Achieving that objective is easily within the level of importance required to activate a small contact tree. No it isn't. Not by a long shot. ____Not the real rusty Heh Alexa traffic rank. You are such a tool. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah, heaven I have the large version of that one. I could not possibly recommend it highly enough. Say what you will about the French, but they do know how to make good coffee. ____Not the real rusty You sound like President Bush It's hard work! :-) Seriously though, Mike should be writing here, because I have the exact opposite problem as him. I never wanted to write for a site like this, I just wanted to run it. Plus, his stories and diaries always bring out people for me to ban. ____Not the real rusty 2L(egit)2Q(uit)! ____Not the real rusty Try this Get a coffee press. Throw out your drip machine -- you won't need it anymore. When you travel, wrap up some grounds in a big ziplock bag and stuff them into the press, and put the whole thing in your duffel bag or whatever. It doesn't break, travels easily, is cheap, and makes better coffee than any other method. Also, all instant coffee is vile, and Chock Full 'O' Nuts tastes like it's chock full 'o' tex's big nuts. ____Not the real rusty AdBusters: Because those fish aren't going to shoot themselves! ____Not the real rusty I'd buy a turkey from you We went all shi-shi and got an organic turkey this year. Still, it'd be worth the premium to buy a turkey from someone I sort of know. ____Not the real rusty Dating while giving up addictions ...is a very bad idea. I mean think about it. You quit smoking, you quit drinking and then suddenly you have these strong feelings for someone you didn't have them for previously. It must be teh coincidence! Of course it's not. You replaced drinking with craving this girl, is all. It's not going to work. For what my worthless advice is worth, pick one thing and stop doing it for a long time. I'd go with the drinking, as it's the most immediately destructive vice in your quiver. Decide to stop drinking -- that's it, just the drinking, if you need a cigarette, by God have one. Have ten. Drink a lot of coffee. But don't start getting involved with girls or making big life-changing decisions. And get into a group that'll help you keep your eye on the not drinking ball. ____Not the real rusty Or an inflatable goat! no text. ____Not the real rusty You had it right My posh estate is in Maine. ____Not the real rusty Errata Also, I don't hate doing any minute's worth of honest labor. I seem to start hating it during roughly the 180th consecutive minute. That's when I either take a break, screw off entirely, or grit my teeth and bear it if there's no other choice. ____Not the real rusty ror You of all people should know that if I announce something, that's just about the surest evidence there is that it'll never happen. :-) ____Not the real rusty Today-only special! 1/2 Ukranian ruble! I get it for you wholesale! ____Not the real rusty Efficiency You've got a good grasp of how it works and why. It seemed like it would be a nightmare tracking individual comment views, is why it's only on a whole-story basis. I actually think your idea might stand a chance of working, since it doesn't have to store viewed comment records forever. But some of the comment view records could stick around for a long time (like if you didn't go back to the story after looking at your replies). It seems like over time it would tend to grow. You came up with some time-based possibilities, and that's all I could think of too. I don't know how much I like that prospect. As it happens, I kind of like the way it works now -- like say I get a new reply. I can go look at the comment but not reply to it, and it'll stay in my list reminding me for later. If I want to clear the list, I usually either do it when I have time to look at other new comments in the story or when I no longer really care about other new comments. A different way to apporach the whole issue is by some sort of messaging system. I think this is how Slashcode does it. So there's an automatic hook to produce a notification message to you whenever someone replies to one of your comments, and the message is wiped out when you look at that comment. Messages are just stored in a message table somewhere, and presumably expire after some time period if they're not acted upon. If there was going to be a change, I think that's probably the way I'd go with it. ____Not the real rusty Small correction Its not that hard to get banned. You just have to be an obnoxious jerk. And I have to see you being an obnoxious jerk. People get banned for being jerks almost daily, though. ____Not the real rusty Anonymity Pseudonymity can bring out the worst and the best in people, I guess. It brings out the worst in a few people (a very few, really) and they annoy everyone else is pretty much how it seems to go. Closing gates of various kinds kind of sucks, I think. The registration closing we had a while back was mainly just to give me a break from whack-a-mole for a while, since I was getting burned out on it and I was pretty busy with other stuff. I never thought it was a long-term solution. The plan was going to be that invitation thing, but I don't really see how making it essentially a game is going to do anything but encourage people who like to play games and have copious free time already. Did you see this? So far as I can tell, charging money for accounts is the only currently known way to really cut down on the jerks. I don't really want to do that here, but who knows, maybe it would help. At least it would mean that the jerks would have pre-paid for the time it takes me to delete them. :-) Life-wise, I'm pretty much not ready to make any big site changes right now, anyway. There are some ad-twiddling type changes coming in the relatively near future (summary: if you have an account, there will be fewer ads for you. If not, there will be more/different ones). And I really need to upgrade the code. I can hear the ancient codebase here creaking late at night. But as for major changes like putting registration behind a wall of some kind, not yet. I can say I wouldn't totally rule it out anymore, which is a change. Time marches on, and we shall see. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha I don't think a $5.00 fee for a lifetime account is excessive. I did suggest to Matt that he should have put that the money will go towards hookers and single-malt on the signup page though. You can rest assured that if (if I said!) I ever did that here, the signup page would contain something along those lines. ____Not the real rusty Also, re: thankless It's not a thankless job at all. I do make money from the site, and it's a significant part of my livelihood. Besides that, I like a lot of the articles here, and... well, its hard to even imagine the site not being part of my life anymore. At times it's an annoying job, but as far as jobs go, it's pretty cushy. I would trade most of the jobs I've had in my life for this one in a heartbeat. So don't feel bad for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Drupal is a nice system I remember back in the day, when Dries and I were starting up our respective "build a better Slashcode" projects simultaneously. I could identify several features I stole from Drupal, and several he stole from me. Drupal's gone in different directions from Scoop, and both have grown in different ways due to the demands of the people who were using them and working on them. But if you like it, you should start a site using it. Hey, wouldn't it be great if there was a "dailyrmg.com"? You could demonstrate all your administrative and technical theories, and become a hero-blogger of the new media millenninnennium. Just an idea... ____Not the real rusty Different admins? No, I'm afraid it's been me from the start. ____Not the real rusty Not so far We've never put anything in for editing comments, other than changing them from topical to editorial or vice versa, or deleting them. For K5, I just never really wanted to get into it, and so far no one else has needed it enough to add it to Scoop. The reason I deleted that stuff rather than just anonymize the account was that the clear purpose of it was to put up a lot of stuff under Markos' name that he didn't say, which would inevitably be found by e.g. the LittleGreenFootballs nuts and popularly attributed to him. I don't want any part of that. So it was actually the content of the comments in conjunction with the name. ____Not the real rusty SEO spammers There's been a rash of search-engine spammers around lately. I just finished wiping out a few more. If anyone sees them posting spammy links (they seem to favor putting the links in a sig and posting random scripted crap) please draw attention to it. ____Not the real rusty Pick this... ...in remembrance of Me. ____Not the real rusty Wireless cutout I've had some problems with this happening at home (with different wireless routers). Sometimes there's another device around (cordless phones seem to be the worst) that's interfering with it, and trying different frequencies can help. I have no idea what the airport express allows you to monkey with, but see if twiddling the airport settings helps. ____Not the real rusty New(ish) right wing thing It's supposed to make the Democratic party sound more threatening if you call it the Democrat Party. I like it, because it makes the speaker sound ignorant, and it helps immediately label them as someone who listens to enough talk radio to have picked up the habit, and therefore someone who can be ignored. ____Not the real rusty Also I don't think trhurler was using it in that sense. "Democrat" and "prosecutor" are (or at least could be) both nouns in his sentence. But you do hear it all the time in "Democrat Party" and so forth. ____Not the real rusty Take your Southern Strategy... ...and shove it up your ass, buddy. They can be alienated all they like. I hope they enjoy their unemployment. kisses ____Not the real rusty Er I don't mean to be crude, but it kind of looked like he pulled that hamburger out of his ass. I can't think of any other way to put it. The things that'll move product in Japan. ____Not the real rusty Boston People from Mass don't, as a rule, leave. Of the ones that do leave, the majority come back. Bay staters are weirdly insular, but having grown up there I can theorize that they stay or return because everywhere else kind of sucks in comparison. I only managed to wind up an hour north of Mass, and most of my good friends still live there. ____Not the real rusty Ah, the rats I found one drowing in my toilet one day in Dupont. How it got there, I have still managed to consciously not decide. ____Not the real rusty Like I said I have managed to consciously not decide. Don't push me, buddy. ____Not the real rusty My story I came because I had just left college in southeast VA and my sister lived in NoVA. I was tired of working a dead-end job at home in Mass, and living with my sister for a while near a major metro area seemed like my most reasonable shot at making a life for myself (as you can see, I failed miserably). I left after two and a half years because I just wanted a change, and the siren lure of the already-dying silicon valley called. I couldn't come up with any good reason to stay in DC rather than answer it. I still do miss DC, to some extent. If I was going to live in a city again, that would be the only one I'd really consider (well, maybe that and Quebec City). I think it would be ideal to have an apartment there and spend a few months a year, but I don't have much desire to go back permanently. ____Not the real rusty Hey The horse is dead, bud. Beating it further won't help. Please stop now. ____Not the real rusty OMG YUO IMPERIALIST! Why are you arguing with a troll? "I am a right-winger" is the oldest one in the book. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sure eeg's always struck me as the troll version of the online right-winger though. aph seems to think otherwise, so maybe he's right. It's kind of a shame, really. That character has been so badly over-trolled that I do tend to judge pretty quickly. ____Not the real rusty We had to destroy the site to save it I acted lawfully under the rules of engagement. K5 was a duly declared free-fire zone. Those civilians were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. ____Not the real rusty I started posting again Joy and happiness returned. Love ruled. Daisies grew and logs released their stored sunlight in the campfires of our mutual affection.* You probably won't be a trusted user anymore as soon as someone rates one of your comments. That's the event that refigures the scores. Also, the whole first part of this comment was nonsense. I started paying attention because the place got more fun again. I have no earthly idea why, except perhaps for a pretty steady run of fascistic administration policies for a while. * That one's for you, Trollaxor. ____Not the real rusty Democrat or Republican I really don't know why I'm getting so worked up here... it's just a diary after all, and I'm no Democrat Democrat, Republican, or neither, stupidity is always worth being worked up about. I was considering doing this gutting of her idiotic self-justifications, but you've done it quite well. And before anyone bitches at me about pushing away prospective voters by calling them idiots, let me remind you that I'm not running for anything. You knuckleheads. (PS: No, not you. You know... "them") ____Not the real rusty What is this MSM? I see it on FreeRepublic and other right-wing sites. But I don't know what it's supposed to stand for. So I google it. Ah, now I understand. The right wing sure does seem to think about that stuff a lot. ____Not the real rusty The extreme left in the US is about the equivalent of the radical right-wing loonies in any Scandinavian country. ____Not the real rusty That's right! My, you do know your geography. ____Not the real rusty Er So, you're saying American far-left policies would not be considered pretty right-wing in Scandinavia? I'd go so far as to allow perhaps right-center, because I don't have a tremendously detailed grasp of Scandinavian politics. How would you compare them? ____Not the real rusty Ex-employer? Where do you get that idea? ____Not the real rusty I Voted Today First, I took the trash down to the transfer station and dumped it. Then I voted. I got the strongest sense of deja vu -- the two things, they felt just the same. For those of you who bothered to read on in what may have appeared to be a run-of-the-mill election diary, here's some rusty world updates. We bought a house out here on the island in April. Three bedrooms, half an acre, out in the woods. It's a nice spot -- unusual for the island, where the majority of houses are converted cottages on 0.1 or 0.2 acres. This place is a solid old-fashioned New England three bedroom. Basically a tall shoebox with a roof and a front porch. It had been owned by a crusty old islander who lived here for more than thirty years, and raised five kids here (with one bathroom, the entire time). His health wasn't so good, and he wanted to move out to N.H. with one of his daughters. He didn't want a lot of hassle selling the house, and wasn't very concerned about money. He asked for a price which seemed to him about three times what the place was worth, and seemed to us about half what it was worth, so we agreed and I handled all the details myself. It was a pretty islandy way to buy a house, and we owe it to my former neighbor, who had his eye out for a place for us and introduced us to the crusty old islander here. His health, as I said, was bad. He had the upstairs closed off with plastic sheeting for who knows how long. He was living in the downstairs only, to save on heating and because he couldn't get upstairs easily anyway. Needless to say we're the recipients of a fairly large backlog of what they politely call "deferred maintenance." The house is structurally solid, but needs work on almost everything. Fine by me -- I love working on old houses. We've got a local architect working on renovation plans for the future. But mostly lately I've been working on one of the bedrooms, which will soon be the nursery. That's right, the baby is on the way. She's due in mid-December, and it's a girl. I always said no baby until we have a house. Well, the house and the baby occurred at almost exactly the same time, so moving and doing the basic cleanup and fresh-coat-of-paint stuff needed to make this place minimally livable was pretty stressful, since it was the first trimester and I ended up doing most of it alone. But we got through it, somehow. So maybe that explains some of my absence over the past year or so. It's been a little busy over here. Between the house, the pregnancy, and the new job I've been pretty much flat-out since last December. I've got a bit of a break now, with work leveling off some post-election, and the baby not due for another month and a half-ish. Of course, I do have to finish that nursery. I assume the baby will not particularly want to sleep in between the chopsaw and the compressor for her first couple of months. And one final sad thing. I was reluctantly forced to admit that a Jeep Wrangler is not the ideal car for a family that will soon include a baby. We traded it in on Saturday for a 2000 Cherokee (the old kind -- not the cheesy plastic Grand Cherokee). Still a Jeep, but now I'm a member of that pathetic club, the wistful former Wrangler owners. I loved that car. My first lesson in giving things up for the kids, I guess. :-) Hm Anything in particular you're interested in? I maybe could write something about refurbishing old-fashioned counterweighted windows. I'm in the middle of doing one of those right now. I love those old windows. ____Not the real rusty Hot water heat We're actually probably going to convert our place to hot water heating. We have forced-air right now, and I hate it. When it's on, it's too hot, and when it goes off, it instantly gets drafty and chilly. It also doesn't have registers in every room (there's only one upstairs at all) so it heats very unevenly. Hot water is better, in that it tends to maintain a more even heating, and doesn't seem to require the same kind of thermostat fiddling that air does. One other option that I know of is radiant in-floor heating, which is supposed to be nice, and reportedly has overcome the problems and expense of its first generation. I believe it's still more expensive than anything else though. If I were you, I'd probably be looking into a modern hot-water heating system. But this, honestly, is really not a great area of expertise for me. I'm more of a carpenter. ____Not the real rusty Ah, I see Yeah, it sounds like you need to get someone in to design a sensible multi-zone system. They can do amazing things with heat these days. Or so I'm told. Every house I've lived in has had the same kind of casual approach to heating, which seems to consist mainly of assuming that providing a windbreak is all you really need. ____Not the real rusty Make that definitely The windows are crap, and there is extremely little insulation anywhere. It's going to be a chilly winter. Then again, I'm pretty used to it by now. One day, we will posess an insulated house. ____Not the real rusty A shame When they work right, I firmly believe those are a better window design than anything else we've come up with since. Unfortunately most people have only ever used them when they're broken. ____Not the real rusty Not yet Right now there's no heat to speak of upstairs. The downstairs windows are newer. Eventually I'll want to put in better windows up there, but for now eliminating the actual holes in the glass will go a long way. ____Not the real rusty I know I'll regret this But it's too funny. rizzo242 took this picture on the fourth of July this summer. He supplied the monocle as well, but it broke the same day, presumably because of insufficient polishing. ____Not the real rusty Foolishly doing it myself Well, the plan as of now is that we'll add a roughly 26' x 21' addition to the southeast corner, and wrap the front porch around on that side out ten feet. The new main entrance and stairs will be in the addition, which will be a master bedroom/bath upstairs and (for now) a workshop downstairs. When that's up, then I can move my office upstairs to what is currently the master bedroom and gut the first floor to move the kitchen roughly to where my office is now and put in a half-bath and laundry room where the kitchen is. It's sort of all a large and daunting task, but I think it breaks down into stages pretty well. If, by next fall, we've got the septic system moved (it's currently under where the addition will be) and the new foundation poured I'll be happy. There's only two points where the new section interfaces with the old, so most of the addition can be done before I have to mess with the existing house. The worst part is going to be moving the kitchen, because we'll have to keep the existing kitchen basically functional somehow in the meantime. We will hire pros to do the plumbing, the dangerous parts of the electrical (basically the feed down to the breaker box -- I can do the house wiring), and the foundation. Otherwise, it's me and whoever I can sucker into helping. ____Not the real rusty Plumbing I know I could work out the plumbing myself, but it's the one thing I really have no experience in. I'd basically be learning it from scratch on this project. It mostly comes down to just wanting the plumbing to be done in a reasonable time span so I can get on with the rest of it. Here in ME, I can do plumbing and electrical myself provided I have a licensed plumber and electrician sign off on the work when it's done. MA building codes are a pain in the ass -- ME is a lot more old-school. We actually don't have a statewide building code. It's up to municipalities what the rules are, and if you build in an unincorporated zone, you can do any damn thing you please. Portland uses the uniform international codes (whatever the acronym is) so it's pretty basic. ____Not the real rusty Three reasons One is the pickup truck I already have on the island, one is the Subaru we also have on the island, and the last is the total lack of cargo space in a Jeep, which is what I mainly need for my vehicle out here. It's tragic, but there is basically no room in my life for a Wrangler right now. Someday... ____Not the real rusty Kodos [nt] ____Not the real rusty Heh We did test drive the Grand Cherokee, and it's not a bad vehicle at all. If it were just for me, I might have gone for it, but I know my wife wouldn't have liked driving it. I do like the looks of the old Cherokee better though. I'm a sucker for boxy cars. ____Not the real rusty What do you mean 'still'? ;-) ____Not the real rusty I await the Lifetime movie with great anticipation. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sawzall yes, nailgun not yet The sawzall, along with a table saw and chopsaw, was my first purchase. Actually, I've had that for a little while. The nailgun and compressor are the next big items, but I don't need them yet. I've got my dad's up here temporarily for the nursery, since all I needed was a finish gun. ____Not the real rusty IAWTP [nt] ____Not the real rusty IAWTNigga [nt] ____Not the real rusty Why why are you doing a circletimessquare impression it is wierd ____Not the real rusty Now... ...if you said "I give rusty automatic +1FP because I know that his stories will always be of a superior quality" that'd be a different matter. :-) ____Not the real rusty Could be That bug has cropped up now and then throughout autoformat history. It could still be happening. It could also be the utter hideousness of that URL. Sometimes it barfs on URLs that include long strings of line noise, such as that one. ____Not the real rusty Um Different movie, actually named that. Now, you can say "they said farenhype instead of fahrenheit. ROTFLAMO LOL KEKEKEKE!!!1~" That would work. ____Not the real rusty Top three most disturbing ever Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Tetsuo Man Bites Dog (the uncut version) The third is disturbing but also very entertaining. The first two are just disturbing. Also, honorary mention for The Dark Backward. ____Not the real rusty uncut version The uncut European version features an extended full-crew rape scene, and the part where they chase down and kill the little kid. It's only a few scenes, but it really does make the difference between a movie that's disturbing, and one that people find themselves unable to watch. Henry was given an X rating in the US, and when the producers asked what they could cut to get that down to something they could release, they were told that there really wasn't any way to do it. It's strange, because it's not even that gory or violent, by comparison to a lot of R-rated movies. But it's somehow incredibly grim. I think the ratings board actually cited its "general hopelessness" as the main reason for the rating. Sounds ridiculous, until you see it. ____Not the real rusty Blair Witch It got pretty trendy to bash Blair Witch, but that creeped the hell out of me. It seemed to me like people who had been alone in the woods reacted to it a lot more strongly than people who hadn't. All my city-dwelling friends thought it was boring. ____Not the real rusty Another difference People who saw it before all the hype were a lot more scared by it. I went in without really knowing anything about it at all. As it got more publicity and people were sort of forewarned, it lost its effectiveness. Yeah. The last scene. Eesh. ____Not the real rusty Spend a lot of time on the Mass Pike? I can't think of any other toll roads in Mass. Am I forgetting some? ____Not the real rusty Well, in western Mass, maybe not I've never been too clear on what goes on out there. I generally always tried to get through it as quickly as possible on my way to somewhere worth going. ;-) (Incidentally, yes, the stereotypes about people from eastern Mass forgetting completely that western Mass exists are entirely true -- we hardly ever even remember to make fun of it) Go a little further north though, and it gets even better. There are no major east-west highways north of the Mass pike. If you want to get from Maine to New Hampshire, you either go south to Portsmouth and then north again, or you find your way on two-lane blacktop. ____Not the real rusty I believe Nostradamus addressed this ...in one of the lesser-known of his quatrains, he says: "The moon shall go dark while summer's boys contest Skins of red color are crushed beneath heads of cheese The hub's champions shall do what for a hundred years none have done and a grinning chimp-faced idiot shall get his ass kicked." ____Not the real rusty See my siggestion below Income tax can only be easily gamed when we fill it full of holes based on policy objectives. A simple "percentage of income" based progressive tax would be much harder to game, and more fairly share the burden on everyone. ____Not the real rusty Of course that should be 'suggestion' ____Not the real rusty Deadly A sales-tax-only system burdens the poor much, much more than the rich. The poor spend a greater percentage of their income than the rich -- if basic necessities cost $15,000 a year, someone making $25,000 a year spends a lot more of their total income on them than someone making $250,000 a year. The gap is not $220,000 -- obviously rich people spend more overall. But as far as non-optional expenditures (food, shelter, heat, cable tv... you know, necessities) the poor spend everyhting they get. This means that by default, the poor become the highest tax bracket. The richer you are, the more you can invest, the less you're taxed on. The exemption for the poverty level is bullshit, since, as others have pointed out, you cannot live on the Federal Poverty Level in the US. Exempting up to that is not the same as progressive taxation -- it's just a feint against the most obvious objection. The objection is still valid -- a flat sales tax is the opposite of progressive. The more you make, the less proportionally you pay. As a matter of export policy, with exports being untaxed Europe will cry foul in a big way and we'll see a new trade war. USA vs. Everyone Else. Good luck with that. Everything you buy will instantly become 23% more expensive. It'll seem really nice when you get that first untaxed paycheck, until you realize that you weren't in the 23% bracket before, but now you are and now you have even less extra money in your budget. What would be wrong with a simple reform of the existing tax code? The reason it's so damn complicated is that for years, we've been using taxation to set policy. $1000 for this, $500 for that, exemptions for the other, they're all aimed at encouraging certain behaviors. If you want to reform the tax code, it doesn't require a major 180 degree reversal of the underlying theory. Just wipe out the morass of policy exemptions and loopholes. Make a table that says if you make under $xx,000.00 you pay nothing. Between $xx,000 and $yy,000 you pay 12%, between $yy,000 and $zzz,000 you pay 18%, and over $zzz,000 you pay $25%. Whatever the numbers work out to be. A progressive income tax makes sense, and it works. By using it to promote policy goals, we've created an insane and unworkable morass. Look at England or Canada -- they work the way I describe. There's no uncertainty or heartache at tax time. You just find out what you made and multiply it by your percentage. They seem to have found other ways to set policy. We ought to as well. ____Not the real rusty There you go I didn't know whether there was paperwork or not. I guess not. In the worst case, if you were self-employed, it'd be pretty much what I described. For the vast majority then, it's much easier. How does the UK government implement policy without monkeying with tax loopholes? And why haven't they explained it to our government? ____Not the real rusty It's very specific here Income tax is used very specifically to encourage certain behaviors. If you get married, you get a $1000 deduction. If you have a kid, likewise. You get to write off all sorts of expenses -- college loan interest, mortgage interest, big-ass SUV's (if you're a business) etc etc etc. The list is nearly infinite. Basically, the recent history of US lawmaking is: Identify some behavior we'd like to encourage Fiddle with the tax code until it provides some monetary incentive to enagage in that behavior Accept accolades from grateful accountancy industry GOTO 1 ____Not the real rusty Equal protection Equal protection is for things that people cannot change. If you're rich, and you're upset about paying higher taxes, you're absolutely welcome to become poor. It's really easy. Stop working and give away all your money and posessions. Equal protection applies to things like race, gender, religion -- things that either are difficult or impossible to change, or that the secular state has no right to coerce you to change. Wealth is a function of state property protection, not an inherent quality of people. I don't think I understand how they came up with that graph, so I don't particularly have anything intelligent to say about it. ____Not the real rusty Ah, I see They're redefining "progressive" to mean "more tax when you spend more," as opposed to its current meaning, which is "more tax when you have more." The two are similar (if you start with redefining the basis for taxation -- spending instead of income) but not, I think, equivalent. Ok, so how about this argument: income tax rests on the basic greed of people. The theory is that people will always try to earn more, and taxation itself will not dissuade them. I don't think that spending is as fundamental a drive. The rich do try to disguise or redeploy income in as tax-advantaged a way as possible, to avoid taxation, but this is a drawback of our current loophole-ridden tax code and could easily be fixed, if we wanted to. An expenditure-based tax provides a strong incentive not to spend money, or to spend it in certain tax-free ways. If this fairtax thing worked as advertised, the spending that we can rely on being inflexible is not taxed to begin with. Discressionary consumer spending is the engine of our economy. Providing a strong policy incentive against consumer spending sounds like a recipe for disaster. As a policy, this thing inherently encourages less monetary circulation. More wealth hoarding, more trusts, more unearned income, less spending. Also, just as point of accuracy in presentation, the producers of this website are calculating this tax change as though it had no effect on consumer spending. They take income and expenditures as they are now and assume those will not change. I predict they would change drastically. I don't see any alternate "what-if" cases presented here though. Just rosy predicitions of prosperity. ____Not the real rusty TAY-LAAAAAAR! THE BURNINATOR! BURNINATING THE COUNTRYSIYY-YIDE! ____Not the real rusty Ah The satisfaction of being someone's first TROGDOR link. Quite possible teh best thing on teh intarweb. PS: I said consummate V's! Consummate! You wouldn't know majesty if it bit you in the face. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, jeez Myrcaedys and Hayley are gonna team up with Ashlee and Andreyah and totally kick her ass. ____Not the real rusty I like them While the prose may be unadorned, they allow me to pretend I'm living some alternate and clearly superior life. If I had his life, I probably wouldn't ever write anything about it at all. I'm surprised he's got the motivation to do it. ____Not the real rusty PS What's the deal w/r/t The Project? ____Not the real rusty Lid down Due to excessive cat interest in water of any kind. ____Not the real rusty Wy speeling matturs ____Not the real rusty It was never dead It was just pining for the fjords. ____Not the real rusty Hey I thought you were going to post a local referendum roundtable. What gives? I wanna talk about killing bears. ____Not the real rusty Hahahahahahahahaha and ha. ____Not the real rusty I met him once He stood eight feet tall, and eyes like flaming torches he had. I've heard tell he personally dug out the Mississippi and made Mt. Monadnock from the diggins. ____Not the real rusty Ye Gods, the toenails. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Seems so My 2001 Wrangler has been parked year-round outdoors within about 25 feet of the ocean (I'm not kidding -- often closer) for three years, and there's no significant rust on it. A little around a scratch on the door where some jerk broke into it a long time ago, and a little on various bits of undercarriage, but it's just surface rust. ____Not the real rusty Maine winters? What, like we don't use road salt? Plus, with the ocean air, it's like winter all year round. ____Not the real rusty 2001 was a redesign I know the 2001 Wrangler was the first model to have coil spring shocks instead of leafs. I believe it was part of an overall redesign, so maybe they fixed whatever it was about the manufacturing that led to excessive rust. I have to get rid of the Wrangler soon. It makes me very sad. :-( ____Not the real rusty Here I gotcher clip right here, buddy. ____Not the real rusty If Bush wins I'm going to go nuts. N-V-T-S Nuts! ____Not the real rusty Also German defense chief softens Iraq stance BERLIN - Peter Struck, Germany's defense minister, on Tuesday indicated Berlin could deploy troops in Iraq if conditions there changed, departing from his government's opposition to involvement under any circumstances. I have in fact been misrepresenting this news. I didn't realize he actually said they would be willing to send troops if conditions changed. I've been claiming they're just willing to talk to us. This utterly contradicts Bush's assertions that Kerry couldn't implement his plan. Bush makes claims about what foreign leaders would say, but here is in fact what foreign leaders do say. Which would you believe? ____Not the real rusty Certainly That was Bush's (PNAC's) plan for Iraq. I don't think Kerry believes it is feasable. I also don't think it is feasable, given what an utter mess we've made of Iraq. It may have been (unlikely, but possible) if it weren't being implemented by the biggest bunch of bungling blowhards on the planet. ____Not the real rusty The cash cow Hopefully Kerry will offer them a piece of the reconstruction cash cow. That's the only reason they're not there already. I agree with your assessment about German motivation, but that just makes it easy to work with them. "Show us ze money" is a pretty straightforward way to bargain. Kerry will do it, because he knows that keeping the world out means another humiliating defeat for us. ____Not the real rusty I have a comment Your "serious" icon, :(, always reads like "sad" to me. Wouldn't :&pipe; be better for serious? ____Not the real rusty Weird Why do you randomly capitalize words AND make your writing look SO bizarre AND crazy? ____Not the real rusty I guess so This was the first time I actually tried to read one of tweetsy's diaries. Won't make that mistake again. ____Not the real rusty But how? How would you implement that online? Or, to refine the question (yes, I've thought of the obvious ways) how would you implement it such that joining would be easy and valuable enough that people would join? I would like to try this out, if I could think of a decent way to do it. Not here, but somewhere else. Maybe someday I will. I hope someone does, in any case. ____Not the real rusty Because... I think it would be too much of a cultural shift for K5. Something like hard identity would require, at the very least, putting up a credit card at this point in the evolution of our internets. I don't think K5's set up for that kind of rigor, and justifying it would mean a pretty big change in direction overall. Basically, I like what K5 is -- I don't want to trade it for something else. Now creating something new, that would be cool. ____Not the real rusty Yes We have the situation in Fallujah well in hand, and we will have 200,000 new Iraqi moderators trained and deployed by year's end. ____Not the real rusty Foppish berets? Hell no boy! We got cowboy hats. Cause we're all cowboys back on the ranch. Where we mend our fences... ____Not the real rusty Eh? The score was zero. The same number of people wanted to see it posted as did not (in this case 136). Also, there is a "floor" to auto-post. I forget what the number is, but it's some low positive integer. A story with a score of zero (or anything below the floor) is summarily dumped. There's a ceiling too, above which a story is just posted. The discussion had nothing to do with it, in this case. Pseudo-anonymous democracy is an oxymoron. I don't think it's an oxymoron, but it is a practical impossibility, I agree. It's one of the more interesting things K5 has taught me. It only works at all in a highly provisional way, and with enough input. Strictly speaking, it cannot be assumed to work. ____Not the real rusty True awgsilyari would be utterly astounded to see the condition of my ethernet cables a few years ago. There wasn't a whole one in the bunch -- homemade crossover cables taped together with duct tape, the whole deal. I wouldn't go wiring an office building with patched cable, but for your little home ethernet connection, it'll work just fine. ____Not the real rusty Two guys are sitting in a diner ...and this panda walks in and sits down at the bar. The waitress looks at it funny, but gives it a menu, and takes its order. Eventually the panda finishes up its breakfast, then stands up, takes out a gun, and kills the waitress, and saunters back out. One guy looks at the other and goes "Holy crap! What was that all about?" The other guy shakes his head and says "She shoulda known not to serve it. Everyone knows the panda eats, shoots, and leaves." ____Not the real rusty This horse walks into a bar ...and the bartender says "Hey buddy, why the long face?" ____Not the real rusty Huh? First, I know what the joke is about. Second, the waitress doesn't have to read anything. It is commonly known that the panda eats shoots and leaves. The book is unnecessary. ____Not the real rusty Prostitution Ever since the release of 1990's international smash hit Frankenhooker, a movie whose video box was renowned for having an embedded audio chip that squawked "Wanna date?" most people have known that "date" is prostitution slang for a sex purchase. So now, when you go up to a girl and ask for a date, she no doubt imagines that you believe her to be a woman of negotiable affection, and is rightly horrified and disgusted in equal measure. As an alternative, I suggest you will have better luck asking women if they would like to accompany you on a fully-clothed dinner engagement, during which you will at no time approach closer than 0.5 meters. No hooking overtones, and Barry White himself couldn't beat that smooth romantic language. ____Not the real rusty George Bush says: "Rusty's dating plan is certain to cut the rate of STD transmission by at least 80%, and reduce unwanted children and abortions to virtually zero! Used in concert with the Jocelyn Elders technique, this could be the biggest public health boon in centuries." ____Not the real rusty CSV Access can dump in CSV (comma-separated value) format. MySQL, and likely other DBs, can read CSV. It has been my experience that Access is none too careful about cleaning up or properly escaping its output, though, so usually some manual intervention is required on the file before it'll load. In MySQL, LOAD DATA INFILE is the command you'd be looking for. You're responsible for setting up the tables yourself though. ____Not the real rusty Constant threat They, and we, were both a constant threat. A threat mitigated by the value of self-preservation remains a pretty damn big threat. That assumes that halfway reasonable people manage to keep their hands on the trigger. It was slightly more certain in this country, but the USSR was always hovering on the brink of coup and chaos. Kennedy honestly believed, during the Cuban missile crisis, that there may have been a coup (turns out it was just Kruschev acting like he had MPD). Neither of us was likely to shoot as long as people with the rationality to value self-preservation remained in control. I don't have nearly the faith that you do that that was enough to make it a golden age of halcyon peace and security. ____Not the real rusty Slightly I did say "slightly more certain." Not by much. I think I can safely say that most Americans join me in being relieved we didn't nuke Europe. ____Not the real rusty And... ...preceded by lots of drinking. This is Russia we're talking about. :-) ____Not the real rusty Shit, no kidding I happen to have just watched 13 Days. If that was at all accurate, the guy should have been put out to pasture the second we gained the ability to blow up the world. ____Not the real rusty Schiefer Schiefer should have been yanked and the relief moderator brought out from bullpen around question three. That was just utterly hideous. I had a bad feeling when he was on the Daily Show giggling like a giddy schoolgirl trapped in the body of a quasi-senile old hobbit. I don't, however, really blame either candidate for not stating the obvious, which would have run something along the lines of what you said. Or to summarize: "You mean the safe and secure world we lived in during the fucking Cold War Bob? That safety and security? The safety of our backyard bomb shelter and the security of knowing it would be at least three weeks on canned goods before we had to either starve to death or crawl out to see what wonderful new animals the nuclear winter had brought us? That old-fashioned "the bombing starts in five minutes" kind of safety? Say Bob, I have an idea. Why don't you pull your head out of your ass for half a second and ask us something about gays. You old centrum-addled crackpot." ____Not the real rusty Indeed In this case, the numbers say: Vote score: 1.60 Comment score: 2.45 Average: 2.02 The "post to section" threshold is an average of 1.5, so this one made it in pretty handily. The fact that I voted for it displays my liberal bias. The fact that it posted is just the result of inscrutable interaction between technology and clicking monkeys. ____Not the real rusty Heh I read someone recently who said "we fight their stuff, they fight ours." It's pretty applicable, no matter which side you're on. Personally, I'd love to see this Kerry documentary air, and have that spur some other network with a liberal owner to air Fahrenheit 9/11 in response. On the one side, you've got a bunch of cranky old-timers bitching about Vietnam. Sure, it plays to the base, but, um, we've got some more immediate matters to worry about these days, guys. On the other side, F9/11 is a pretty goddamn scathing look at the current fiascoes and fuckups of the actual administration in power. If they let Stolen Honor air, there's no reason F9/11 shouldn't be allowed to. It probably won't, but I still hope against hope that it will. What a great thing that would be. :-) ____Not the real rusty Jeez I'm trying to reply, but people keep bothering me. Um... and you know, forcing me to go poke through K5 diaries. Yeah. someone made me. I'll go finish my reply now. ____Not the real rusty Proxomitron On the off chance that that target=_top thing was really a problem you're having, that's not Scoop. Proxomitron does that for some unfathomable reason. Turn off that "feature", however the hell you do that, and it'll work fine. ____Not the real rusty Also You can do a lot to prevent rotting your roof if you install eave ventilation and make sure air can get out your ridge cap. The flow of outside air underneath the roof will keep it from building up condensation and rotting. Assuming the new metal roof doesn't leak, he doesn't need to worry about moisture from that direction. It's the moisture from the inside that's the killer. It may be too late for ridge venting, as you've already installed your roof, but even just eave vents alone (especially if there are a couple of open gable-end windows high up) will help. ____Not the real rusty SilentChris? Is that you? ____Not the real rusty Doubt it Unless they've chnaged diplomatic plates a lot in the past couple of years. When I lived in DC, the diplomatic plates just had a red (? or blue?) stripe and said "Diplomat" and the regular license plate number. They didn't look strikingly different from regular plates. I believe these new plates are the license plates of our shadow government overlords. ____Not the real rusty +++SUMMONS NOTED+++ +++MSG FLLWS: SUMMONS NOTED 020412 05102004. ADMINISTRATIVE ACTION REQD: NULL PROCESS EXITED NORMAL +++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++REDO FROM START+++ ____Not the real rusty ROFL This is the best they could do? This and "Bush was tired from his hard work visiting hurricane victims?" Kerry had a magic piece of paper! It was specially treated to make the Preznit look like a total buffoon! It probably had pitchers of nekkid wimmens on it, which the Preznit could see out the corner of his squinty, rolling eye, thus throwing off his debate game. I tell you what though. Whatever it was, he definitely forgot to write down "Poland" on it. ____Not the real rusty Tar and feather? We're way beyond tarring and feathering. I almost (not nearly enough, but almost) want to see Bush re-elected, so we can eventually see the whole gang in jail where they belong. I don't think I've ever paid attention to what your politics are. You strike me as a Badnarik voter though. I bet you use the word "Republicrat" to describe the two oppressive corporate parties. ____Not the real rusty Clonefusion. [nt] ____Not the real rusty If you're turmeric... Why don't you use your "turmeric" account? ____Not the real rusty Alliances Kerry's point about allies, which didn't come across very well in the debate at all, is that with more world support we can more quickly change the conditions in Iraq. He doesn't want to bring in a lot of UN berets -- he wants to do things like ship Iraqis to Germany or elsewhere for police and military training (where they won't get blown up before training can be completed) and get foreign companies involved in reconstruction efforts. He's also looking for global support in the form of debt forgiveness, because any new Iraqi government that comes in now is going to be buried under a mountain of Saddam-era foreign debt. ____Not the real rusty For vs. Because of "I spent $100 for a new bumper because of that idiot who crashed into me." Our soldiers are fighting for a free Iraq, and dying because of the President's utter lack of sound planning. ____Not the real rusty It might well be bullshit I was trying to clarify what I see as Kerry's position, not defend it. ____Not the real rusty And don't forget Poland! [nt] ____Not the real rusty Check it out today That site's handling over a million hits many days now. We just got a new DB server in there, which is actually a very-short-term temp until our real new db server arrives (it cleared customs today). But anyway, it's a hell of a lot snappier. That site's up over twice the traffic level we've ever handled with scoop before, so given that, it's doing pretty well. ____Not the real rusty Of course not It had to clear the customs at the Indiana-Ohio border. What do you think? I don't know why it's coming from outside the US. Apparently that's where IBM makes them. ____Not the real rusty My fuzzy understanding of it... I think it's something to do with opteron boxes being scarce right now, for some reason? Something like that. I don't really have much to do with it -- I'm just repeating what I've been told. ____Not the real rusty Stats Here The stats on that page are just scoop pages being served. The last month is somewhat misleading, since about 45% of those hits are just a CSS file. It is being produced by Scoop (it's not a static on-disk css file) but on the other hand, it's not much of a challenge to produce it, so I wouldn't really consider those valid measures of scaling. So, with the caveat that 45% of September can be ignored (those css files will be ignored starting today and going forward), that's some Scoop scaling numbers. ____Not the real rusty And yet... I agree with everything you said, and yet the utterly confounding fact remains that he has a long track record of killing in debates. The "Bush is a great debater" notion comes less from anyone being able to explain how that could possibly be and more from the simple fact that he tends to win debates. Tonight, though, he got his chimpy ass handed to him. ____Not the real rusty That reference It's not clear to any of us whether that reference is to me, or to Captain Tenille. Both of us work on dKos, and neither of us is really "full time" on it. So my guess is it's some kind of average of the two of us. And I'm trying to get a proper voting-queue section on dKos. I would love to see someone else adopt the idea, ans that'd be a good place for it. Also, "It takes a village. A neurotic, angst-addled village with delusions of grandeur, but a village nonetheless." would make a good tagline. ____Not the real rusty Yay! A link! See how well that works! You're getting it already. :-) ____Not the real rusty Changing that We're trying to get them off GN. ____Not the real rusty Just the diaries Not everything, just non-front-page stuff. ____Not the real rusty Er? It is part of the Republican platform that gays should not have the same rights as heterosexual Americans. There is a site that is dedicated to pointing out that there are many prominent Republicans, who supposedly support this platform, and who are themselves gay. Kos has linked to these reports. I don't want anyone to lose their job. I want people to realize that someone being gay is not a reason to discriminate against them, and I think it's a shame and an embarrassment to every American that our ruling party believes in dicrimination against Americans. Is that what you believe? ____Not the real rusty Cherry picking The whole "Christianity condemns homosexuality" is pure Biblical cherry-picking. In the Bible, God has a lot more to say about not eating pork and shrimp than he ever does about homosexuality. Christ doesn't condemn homosexuality -- Christianity has been repurposed to justify the beliefs of people who already hated gays for their own reasons. ____Not the real rusty God hates shrimp Yep, there are biblical passages that seem to condemn same-sex activity. But, for example, God hates shrimp too. As far as things that are proscribed in the Bible, homosexuality gets mentioned what, two, maybe three times? There's a lot of things that get prohibited more often that we don't pay any attention to. Ultimately, though, this argument means nothing to me. It's just a way of doing it on the grounds that the fundies claim. I think they're wrong for entirely non-religious reasons, and have very little interest in arguing theology. ____Not the real rusty 4%? Dude, these people live in a world that was created 6,000 years ago. Who the hell knows what proportion of the population is gay in their chosen reality. Probably 0%. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I know I gave up arguing with fundies a long time ago. I just like the phrase "God hates shrimp." ____Not the real rusty That wasn't the question I'm sure they do. I would find it unacceptable for someone who simply wants to live their life. But they're not just outing any old closeted gay person. They're outing individuals who are actively helping to deny basic rights to gays. The justification essentially comes down to "You are assisting in the oppression of me, and thousands like me. If you want to deny me basic rights, I have at least the right to demonstrate your hypocrisy." Within one generation, this whole thing is going to look utterly insane. Our children will be flummoxed that anyone could even have considered amending the Constitution to deny civil rights to any group. If this helps that day some sooner, then I'm for it. But to reiterate my original question -- do you think it's ok for someone to be fired from their job because they're gay? ____Not the real rusty No, I am defending it Ethical qualms and all. I could have just said "Hey man, it wasn't me!" but I didn't because at heart, I would have done the same thing. And I can even understand why someone would be a closeted-gay Republican. Being gay doesn't mean you can't share most of the traditionally republican values of smaller government, free trade, and so forth. For some people, the fact that the wingnuts (though it's getting harder to tell the wingnuts apart from "the leadership") in the Republican party want to make you illegal is less important than the other policy values you hold. I don't agree with half the crap that other Dems want, but on the balance, they're still the party I identify with best. It's an ethically questionable thing to do, no doubt. If this kind of tactic can help turn the tide of discrimination, then it will have been worth it, I think. You also assert that lives are being ruined, jobs lost, etc. First, I don't have any information indicating that that is happening. If you do, please show me. Second, using that as a justification for keeping silent is the same as condoning that result. Outing someone allows the truth about that person to be known. If they are fired because of that, I very much feel that's wrong. I am absolutely not the one doing the firing here, and have nothing but contempt for someone who would fire an employee that they found out was gay. Saying "Oh, but if this person is outed they'll be fired, so you shouldn't do that!" is implicitly condoning that policy. I can't do that. ____Not the real rusty Nope The situation here, if you want to Godwinize it, would be "outing" a Jew who is actively working to raise money to run the Nazi death camps and keeping their religion a secret. And even so, this reductio ad absurdum doesn't work, because the likely consequences would be death for that person, which is not the case here. And that does make a difference. ____Not the real rusty Truth, Justice, and the American Gay you are not condoning any anti-gay policy, but rather acknowledging the reality of it and the damage you are visiting someone in the service of a cause that is not (presumably) theirs. That's the point. The cause is ecplicitly theirs. The people being outed are highly-placed people supporting the Republican anti-gay agenda. These are not log-cabin republicans, protesting from the inside. They're people who are working to advance the Republican anti-gay program. It may be childish to believe that Truth is the highest morality. But this isn't about truth. It's about justice. Justice is where people get what they deserve. It's been famously said that children love justice, but grownups invented mercy because secretly we all know we're guilty. ____Not the real rusty I win You just used two paragraphs (and no capital letters) to say nothing. I'm afraid you've run out of material. Thank you for an invigorating debate. :-) ____Not the real rusty Meh Don't make the mistake of attributing to me the opinions of dkos readers. I take responsibility for what I say, not what they say. If I thought this outing thing was wrong, I'd have said so. But I most definitely do not stand by everything that every nutter has said on that site -- I haven't even read any of that thread. C'mon, you've been around here long enough that you ought to know better. Do you think I stand by every lunatic thing K5ers say? If anything, kossacks are even crazier. As to how I feel about dirt, yes, politics is a dirty business. I'm tired of the right people staying clean and losing, time after time. I think that my work is helping bring people together, and that ordinary people working collectively can be a force for good -- on both sides, mind you. I'm thrilled that the right-wing is using Scoop on Tacitus and Red State too. Does that mean I support what they say? Not at all. There's kooks on all sides. That's not my fault. If you want to stay "above it all," and keep your hands clean, more power to you. You are more ethically pure than me. I hope you appreciate the benefits when we win. ____Not the real rusty We're working on it The traffic is off the charts crazy. We just ordered another new box today, for the db, with 8Gb of RAM. If that doesn't work, we're going to have to replace the front page with a giant picture of me screaming "GO AWAY!" Last month it did 12 million pages. This month it was up to 7 million on the tenth. That's when we moved to a different cluster and stats haven't caught up yet. If it kept up with the average of the first ten days, we probably did 25.5 million pages this month. It's, as I say, totally out of hand. But yeah. You should see the AIM conversations me and CT have about some of the comment threads. Overall, I like the site a lot, but as with any crowd of several hundred thousand people, the number of them I regularly agree with is tiny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Could be I've done my best to explain here how I feel about it. It probably doesn't match up very well with what Kos says, and almost definitely doesn't match with most of the commenters there. Like I said, you're welcome to judge me on what I say, but not on what other people say. ____Not the real rusty Yee-haw Your life sounds a lot more exciting than mine. ____Not the real rusty Exactly All the whining and griping about third parties and wasted votes tend to ignore the basic point that until a party has a significant amount of support and representation in all the lower levels of the government, a run at president is simply a waste of votes. Electing MPs from a smaller party is equivalent to electing Congressmen in the US. It is done, occasionally, but so far no third party has made anywhere near the gains they will need in Congress or state government to support a viable run at President. They've all tried to go straight for the money shot, and gripe when they fail miserably. Of all of them, the Libertarians have probably had the most realistic approach, consistently putting up candidates for lower office in many places. The Greens are getting better at it, but their previous support of Nader has probably crippled the party for a couple cycles while they get over the impression that they should yet have a viable presidential candidate. And a vote for Nader, this cycle, is a vote for no party at all but Nader himself. He will not be elected, and votes for him send no message and help no party, because he doesn't represent any party but himself. Just because a vote for a third-party presidential candidate is currently a wasted vote doesn't mean we need to change our voting system. It just means would-be national parties need to do the work it takes to rise to the level of a viable Presidential candidate. ____Not the real rusty Hardly even seems worth saying But what's the fun of running something like this unless I can say to everyone, "I've been here longer than you!" :-) ____Not the real rusty And yet... I can almost guarantee none of my contribution counts (comments, stories, and definitely not diaries) are the highest on the site. ____Not the real rusty Not to even mention... ...those signs in grocery stores that say "12 items or less." The Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts are even now gearing up for direct action to smash the anti-grammar apparatus of control. ____Not the real rusty First, you must read and fully internalize our great manifesto. If you are then found worthy, you will be contacted. ____Not the real rusty Hey I can build a deck. I love building decks. Decks are extremely fundamental construction projects -- floor framing, railings, floor decking, and steps. They're like an ideal compendium of the essentials of carpentry, all boiled down into one reasonably-sized project and in the great outdoors to boot. No wiring or plumbing involved, no insulation, no dirty cramped spider-infested crawlspaces. And you say the foundation is even poured already? Bonus! That's usually the one unpleasant part of decks; the digging holes and pouring concrete and hoping your measurements were right when you placed the sono tubes. What are the building codes and contractor regulations like in Soviet Canuckistan? ____Not the real rusty I think you mean... ...Kommun3. ____Not the real rusty It's not like that! He loves me. He really does. It's just that sometimes I forget who's really in charge. And he always buys me these nice things to make up for it. ____Not the real rusty I couldn't What would I be without him? Nothing, that's what. I need him. He reminds me so every night. ____Not the real rusty Anyway What about the children? I have to be strong, for the children. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's just those two. Johnco always had the option of adding a small graphic logo like that, they just haven't until now. I quite like it actually. I always thought the text link was ugly there. I think it fits in nicely with the voxel ad above now. But then of course I would, with my insatiable need for monocle polish and yacht lotion and whatnot. ____Not the real rusty I doubt it The three-party negotiation for such a thing leaves me woozy just thinking about it. Plus, I think it would be too wide with them next to each other. And we'd have to cut all the other Johnco text. With the spacing adjustment, it takes up only very slightly more vetical space than it did before, anyway. ____Not the real rusty More like that? [nt] ____Not the real rusty You like that? I just got three cases in today. Man, that is some kick ass stuff. I thought I'd throw that out there just to mix it up a little. Don't even get me started on my poodle wax. ____Not the real rusty I was thinking that too That logo could easily be done with CSS. I believe that it could be done with plain old-fashioned tables, for that matter. I wonder if that would make it more acceptable in some quarters. You never can tell. ____Not the real rusty Draw I would probably accept the "generally concluded that the document in question was a fake", but tvd specifically added "produced on a computer using MS Word." I don't see anyone I trust concluding that. It seems incredibly unlikely that a forger would be so lazy as to create the things on Word, there are a couple of points that would be hard to do in Word, and none of the "It HAS TO BE Word!" arguments are convincing at all. They seems mainly to be based on reducing the resolution of the originals and doing silly web-graphic overlays. You shouldn't have agreed to specifying MS Word. Otherwise I probably would have called it that you won. ____Not the real rusty Hm I'm not saying it couldn't have been word. Just that there are points that haven't been explained. One of the very superscripts that everyone seems to be claiming proves that it's Word doesn't match the way Word does superscripts. No one's explained that yet. But besides any of this, the bet was that it would be generally concluded that they were fake and produced with Word. I'd buy number one, but number two just isn't there yet. Most of the newsies aren't talking about how they might have been made at all, and I'm not going to agree that the LGF nuts and Freepers count as "generally accepted." ____Not the real rusty What were you trying to find? ____Not the real rusty Actually Someone who does know about this stuff has bothered -- the system is just kind of fruity and complicated and we haven't gotten around to making it work in Scoop yet. But no, it isn't nearly as easy a problem as everyone makes it out to be, and the benefits of having search are not very high compared to the difficulty of getting it right. That's basically why search is a problem all over the place. And yeah, the simple way is a mysql query, but that scales only so far, and when it breaks down, the problem suddenly becomes Hard. ____Not the real rusty No Vector search is the fruity one. AFAIK, hulver's search is a different interface on the same basic mysql stuff. ____Not the real rusty If it's the same one If it's the one that I wrote behind that interface then yes, it doesn't scale. Must be all that pesky division. ____Not the real rusty Wow Gee, that's a pretty good idea, about harnessing the power of the Scooposphere to twist Google to my own ends. I'm surprised I never thought of it before. Hmmm... ____Not the real rusty More realistic I've always been the Evil one, really. ____Not the real rusty C'mon Iggy Pop has got to be at least 1/8th dead by now. ____Not the real rusty Gloves, man Disposable latex gloves. If your cooking habits are such that you end up handling peppers more than maybe once a month, it's well worth the investment to just have a box in a cabinet somewhere. ____Not the real rusty Could be For one or two peppers, it would be fine. I was assuming each glove would just be tossed after use. I believe you though. ____Not the real rusty Me? Ha! I'm not rewriting it. CT is busy trying to get the hash of languages that is the VectorSpace search working properly. It worked briefly, then something happened, and perhaps, one day, it will work again... It is very cool. When it works. As for K5, we're seriously behind the state of the art scoop-wise. I've got a bunch of other catching up to do before I could even think about search. Honestly, some days I think about upgrading, and then I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just nuke it from orbit and start over. Just kidding. No one's nuking anything. Not even from orbit. And one of these days I'll get annoyed enough that some feature is missing here to upgrade. I think right now the biggest problem is that it's totally unclear whether subscriptions would still work after an upgrade or not. So I'm kind of waiting till I have a bit of time to devote to it. I don't think it would be prudent to speculate when I might have a bit of time though. Could be soon. Could be not soon. The wise betting man would certainly be laying money on "not soon." But longshots do come in sometimes. ____Not the real rusty "We chose the $10/option." ____Not the real rusty I think I could wander around here and pretty much illustrate your island story in pictures. It sounds exactly like the islands around here. I guess geologically it is -- things don't change very much as you go north. Also, "The Island of Ticking Stones" is a pretty good name. When the waves wash on and off the beach in some places, all the ocean-rounded rocks do make a very clear ticking noise. And you don't even have to be tripping to hear it. ____Not the real rusty Ticking If you took the sound one rock makes against another rock and isolated it, it would be a click. But when a big wave rolls over a whole beach full of them, I would definitely describe the sound as a ticking. It doesn't have a clear periodicity, but your ear sort of wants there to be one, you know? It sounds like a thousand grandfather clocks all slightly out of sync with each other. Like if you could just hear one of them, it would be a steady tick. ____Not the real rusty Plastic bags We used to be overrun with the damn things. For some reason, most people feel compelled not to throw them out, even though you get another half dozen every time you go food shopping and never ever use them for anything. One day I, like you, finally had enough, and threw them all away. Now the rule is that we keep one plastic bag with perhaps 10 others stuffed neatly inside it, and as long as that remains unused, all other plastic bags go in the bin. We could actually dispense with the whole plastic bag mess entirely, since we have a cart to help get groceries on and off the ferry. Usually they go from shopping cart into bags, out to the car, drive to the boat, put all the groceries in our cart and go home. We could just use our own cart while shopping, but I don't think my wife can lift the fully-loaded cart into the car by herself. Also, you should be listening to Cake. ____Not the real rusty Upward mobility That's right. A hobo with a plastic bag and a stick is immediately promoted to the undeniably higher-class status of "bindlestiff." ____Not the real rusty Why are you reading at work? You should be working. And if you actually work at a place where the word "sex" is Not Safe, I pity you. ____Not the real rusty D'oh! Sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again. :-) ____Not the real rusty No longer take an active role? Whatchoo talking about Willis? As for that ad, it has a significantly higher click-through rate than any other ad on the site. If you don't like it, for god's sake man, stop clicking on it. This isn't a site for children, and I assume the readers are grown-up enough to make their own decisions about whether they want porn or not. I find it kind of odd that you feel you need nannying to protect you from it. ____Not the real rusty K5 is NSFW The entire "NSFW" thing is absolutely retarded, but given the unfortunate fact that some people work in environments where they will be fired for reading the wrong thing, then yes, K5 is inherently NSFW. Always has been, always will be. Read at your own risk. We publish tons of stuff that is totally work-inappropriate. I'm sorry it took an ad for you to notice, but that's how it is. As for porn ads being "the easy route," I don't know what you're talking about. It's not like I've been turning away the slavering pornography hordes all this time, and have just now caved in to the Dark Side. The porn ad policy has always been that the ad must be worded to clearly indicate that you're going to a porn site, and that the landing page doesn't do anything obnoxious. I have, in fact, never turned away a porn ad, because all that have been submitted have met these criteria. There have never been very many, and there aren't very many now -- just the one guy. He seems happy with the response. And I see now that your assessment that I don't take an active role in the site means I don't take the role you think I should have. My role is quite active, and I like it fine. I'm sorry it doesn't match your opinion of what I should do, but I'm afraid you'll have to adjust your expectations. ____Not the real rusty My take on the problem I've read your diaries about this, and a few things elsewhere, and here's what I think the problem is. This reporter doesn't want to have to think critically about information from a source he has traditionally regarded as objective, accountable, and factual. It appears that as soon as you label something an encyclopedia, he believes that should mean you can trust the information in it without question, possibly modulated by the encyclopedia's publication date. In this case, since wikipedia is updated constantly, his internal truth-o-meter demands that it be 100% trustworthy. The bit about how newspapers are based on "accountability" gets right to the heart of his problem. He's been taught that the system of newspaper publishing ensures that they are Objective and Factual. Despite working in a newspaper, and presumably seeing firsthand that the news is written by people, and reviewed (usually) by one or two other people, he believes that the magic pixie dust of accountability can imbue that information source with truth, while wikipedia articles (which are written by people, and reviewed by at least one or two other people) do not have that magic. He sees the existence of wikipedia as an attack on both his own magic powers of media objectivity, and a threat to his lack of critical thinking skills. My god, man, if we can't unquestioningly trust an encyclopedia, what can we unquestioningly trust? The answer, of course, is nothing. And that right there is his problem. This comment may contain factual errors and unfounded conjecture. You should never believe anything you read. ____Not the real rusty Hrm The problem with (open) voting is that you get the opinions of a lot of people who don't know anything about the subject at hand weighed equally with those of people who do. Here, it doesn't seem to matter that much, since people don't generally write stuff that requires a lot of specialized knowlege to understand or assess the accuracy of. A couple of times we have posted articles that seemed authoritative, but were actually full of mistakes and misinformation if you knew enough about the subject. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good idea. Social factors have a lot to do with how voting is used -- here everyone's encouraged to vote. Maybe a wikipedia voting system would encourage people to vote only on those articles they know something about. You can also kind of hybridize the system, giving a number of people who have credentials in some field voting rights on articles in that subject. The other possible issue is scale. Voting seems to work better when you either have enough peple voting that the abusive or just plain dumb votes come out in the wash, or you have some kind of control on who can vote. Open voting in a system where articles outnumber voters would not work so well, I don't think. Kind of the way comment ratings don't work very well in diaries here, since comments tend to outnumber raters. The only other things that come to mind are some kind of web of trust idea, with people who have proven themselves knowledgeable by their contributions being given review authority. A kind of electoral college proxy-review thing. The idea being to narrow down the numbers of reviewers to the point that a small trusted staff can handle problems if they crop up. Also, the more sunlight the better -- if there are some people with special powers, everything they do should be public and openly reviewable. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget The US Open starts next week on USA. ____Not the real rusty No Not the lame, boring US Open. The real US Open. ____Not the real rusty I second that Nedit's got the goods. ____Not the real rusty Well that didn't go so well So voxel wanted to move us to a different datacenter. I said it was fine by me, since I wouldn't have to change anything, and it would just mean a couple hours downtime. I actually forgot it was going to happen last night until I checked the site around 1am and it wasn't up. I figured they had hit some kind of snag and there wouldn't be much I could do about it. As of this morning, though, when it was still down, I got in touch with them and we eventually figured out what happened. First I couldn't get into the apache boxes to get that going, and then, once they fixed that, I discovered that the database machine had r-u-n-n-o-f-t. They got that fixed too, and here we are again. Also, don't believe everything you read on the intarweb. :-) I have a whole crapload of news, as might be expected after an 8 month vacation from diarizing. I'll fill you all in later. We're in a tight spot here boys! ____Not the real rusty Me too. He's dreamy. And a Dapper Dan man to boot! ____Not the real rusty Opera I tried opera once, and thought it was crap. And crap with ads too! What could be better? From the site-operator perspective, people using Opera have more problems than anyone else. Whenever someone emails me with some bizarre rendering bug, I just assume they're using Opera. That's usually the case. ____Not the real rusty Nonsense Until the 80's, pit bulls were widely known in the US for being a perfect family pet. They are loyal, very "game" (up for just about anything you want to do), and quite trainable and obedient. The dog in the "Little Rascals" movies? Pit bull. In the 20's and 30's, they were considered the ideal family dog, and were about as popular and well-regarded as Labs are today. Unfortunately, some really bad breeders got a hold of the notion that pit bulls were vicious attack beasts, and bred them for characteristics like ferocity. But breeding alone doesn't make a vicious dog. It also took systematic abuse of young dogs to condition them for fighting, to attack and kill anything they could reach. Pit bulls were good at this, due to their general tenacity, but many other breeds could be just as bad, if not worse, given the same kind of misbreeding and brutal abuse. The media also got hold of the story, and turned the pit bull into the iredeemable monster that it's assumed to be today, which is entirely bullshit. What we need is serious jail time for people who abuse dogs, especially on purpose to make them aggressive and dangerous. There is already a strong effort underway to weed the aggression back out of the breed, and rehabilitate its public image by demonstrating that like any dog, a responsibly bred and cared for pit bull is a loyal family companion. ____Not the real rusty Oh, guffaw! Tip 'o' the monocle to you, my good man. ____Not the real rusty Could have been worse [partial MSN chat transcript]: <sexygrrl1246> Hey, you sound cute. We're looking for a second M for a MMF. Got a pic? <dodgyfellow> Sure [sends picture] <sexygrrl1246> Clarence Henry, what the hell are you doing in a chat like this! <dodgyfellow> Mom? Oh, fuck! [chat ends] ____Not the real rusty I think you missed the point. ____Not the real rusty Hey Mike Care to make one final encore appearance to correct the general misapprehension here that you were somehow "driven off" by [trolls&pipe;Chuck&pipe;other]? I believe he's just saying that he's got shit to do, and won't have time to spend around here for a while. It happens. And we will await your return. :-) ____Not the real rusty Next week: Special Quiz! Rate your man in bed! ____Not the real rusty Me Economic Left/Right: -1.50 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.31 According to their comparison graphs, I'm closest to Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela. And according to your K5 PNG, I'm right about in the middle of the K5 spectrum, perhaps a little to the right of the middle. Speaking of which, I can't see the SVG version. Does that one have IDs for the dots on it? And if so, can you make a PNG that identifies the dots? If you put my dot on there, it should naturally be #006699. :-) ____Not the real rusty SVG I got the Adobe viewer for linux, and I can see it now. But the mouseover doesn't seem to work. :-/ Ah well. ____Not the real rusty He's had, IIRC, two other warnings ____Not the real rusty Suggested Interview If you ever feel the interviewing itch again, and you have any interest, I would absolutely love to see an interview with David Foster Wallace. If you're not familiar with him, and interested in some of the best writing the past couple decades has to offer, the link above is a good one to start with. ____Not the real rusty About lumber yards I meant to mention that too. Chances are that the local lumber yards are building-supply places, and either won't have the kind of hardwoods you need for furniture, or won't be able to mantain the quality you would want. There's probably a place somewhere nearby that you've never heard of which sells hardwoods for woodworkers. That's all they sell, and if you're not a woodworker you won't even know the place exists. Look in the phone book under "wood" or "hardwood". Hardwood stores will also usually do some rough milling for you, like finishing three sides or cutting longer pieces to rough dimensions. This can be a big help to the home woodworker who doesn't have that 18" face planer. ____Not the real rusty Furniture If you're willing to put in some time, you can get a decent deal at unfinished furniture places. Things to watch out for are just general shoddy construction -- sometimes it's good furniture that just hasn't been finished, sometimes it's cheap shit that isn't worth the great deal you think you're getting. Nearly always you will need to put in some effort sanding and smoothing before you can even start the actual finish -- unfinished furniture is typically not given the final pre-finish cleaning up that finished furniture is. With a halfway decent orbital sander and a little elbow grease this shouldn't be a great hardship. But when you're tempted to skip it -- don't. You'll end up with a much better looking piece if you spend just a couple hours with the sandpaper first. As for building your own furniture, if you know what you're doing and are willing to put a lot of time into it, you'll end up with nice things that you can be proud of for having made yourself. They will cost a whole hell of a lot less than comparable hand-made furniture. This is kind of deceiving though, since what you're really comparing is manufactured mass-market furniture and something you made yourself. Like, you weren't about to go out and buy hand-made furniture. Hand-made furniture is lovely, but insanely expensive. Buying quality wood and materials will probably cost more in the end than buying a manufactured piece of furniture. That's not to say you shouldn't do it. You just shouldn't do it for the sake of saving money. Making furniture is fun and rewarding, provided you're doing it because you enjoy doing it. If you're doing it just to save a few bucks, don't. You'll hate every minute of the endless hours you put in, and end up probably spending more money anyway. In fact, the most likely outcome is that you'll get sick of not having an end table, and go buy one when your project is stalled somewhere in the middle. As far as wood, it's really just up to your taste. Maple, oak, beech, birch, cherry, and pine are all perfectly acceptable. I'm a fan of maple and cherry, and don't particularly like oak. But lots of peole love oak. There isn't really any reason to choose one over another beside your personal taste. If you do decide to build your own stuff, the expense and relative difficulty of working with different woods comes into it some. I hate working with oak (this is probably why I don't like to look at it too) because I think it smells like dog shit when cut. Literally like dog shit. Maple can be tricky, because sometimes it's very dense and burns easily, but in general it's pretty nice to work with. Cherry, beech, and birch are all beginner friendly, but good cherry can be very expensive. There isn't very much American cherry left, and the rain forest cherry is (I think) ugly. Pine is pretty forgiving, but it can be frustrating because it's so soft. Pine is a bitch if you have to do anything with a chisel -- it tends to crush rather than cut. But it is cheap, and takes stains very well, so it's pretty popular. Besides those, there's all kinds of exotics, that tend to be expensive. Walnut, which looks just gorgeous but costs an arm and a leg and is the devil's own plaything to work. Mahogany is also pretty, and is perhaps the most pleasant wood in the world to work with, but that too can be expensive, and not everyone wants that red mahogany look. I could probably go on, but maybe that'll get you started. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha Have you encountered any trouble with any types of wood and salt water air? Salt water air is, AFAICT, the most hostile environment on earth for everything. Tools out here develop a light patina of rust in a matter of days. I swear I've seen plastic rust here. :-) But seriously. If you're planning to put anything outdoors near the ocean, you need to either find a good outdoor paint and keep it up (and accept that you'll still lose the battle eventually), or go with a wood known for its weather-resistance. Cedar is excellent outdoors. I just pulled a few cedar posts out from under my front porch, to replace them (the stone footings have subsided and they need new poured concrete ones, so I might as well put in PT posts while I'm at it). These are literally small cedar logs -- some of them still have bark on them. They're completely untreated and unfinished. I estimate that they've been there at least 50 years, and there's nothing particularly wrong with them. I kept them to peel and use somewhere inside where they'll look nice. Redwood is also a good choice -- it's widely used for outdoor furniture and holds up to weather well. Mahogany, actually, is another good one, although you don't see it very much. When I made signs, we used nothing but mahogany for the carved wooden ones. It carves really well, but it also just doesn't rot. Teak is famous for use on boats, and is pretty impervious to salt-water damage. It's also usually expensive, although I have seen solid teak outdoor furniture for sale at millwork stores for astoundingly low prices. I don't know if there's something wrong with it, or there's just some source of cheap teak. But if you can find it, it'll hold up to weather well. Basically the rule of thumb is to consider where a wood comes from when you think about its weather resistance. Cedar grows in swamps -- it won't grow without standing water around its roots. If it was going to be sensitive to water damage, it would never grow at all. Mahogany and teak are both rain forest species that grow in extremely wet and hot environments. I'm not sure why redwood holds up well, except perhaps that it also grows mainly in temperate rain forests. Species develop defenses for conditons they grow in, basically, and we can take advantage of that. Besides the wood, consider what any fastenings or hardware are made of. If there's nails, brads, or screws in a piece, are they stainless? You can get away with galvanized nails in exterior construction work, but they won't fly on furniture. Sooner or later moisture will get through the shell and they'll streak all over your nice finish. Stainless is the only way to go (if you must have fasteners at all -- glue- or epoxy-only is better). As for paints and finishes, Benjamin Moore is highly recommended. The stuff they have at the Home Depot is junk. If you're looking for a stain or a clear poly finish, make sure it's one that's for exterior use, and that it has some kind of UV protection built in. Besides damp salty air, the worst enemy of outdoor furniture is UV from sunlight. The UV may actually be worse than the moisture, in fact. ____Not the real rusty Do see above though My theory on where wood comes from having some relation to its characteristics may be severely flawed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Huh. I guess not. If you go out to the National Seashore on Cape Cod, you can visit a cedar swamp. They've built boardwalks all through it -- it's pretty cool at night. I believe it's at Coast Guard Beach (but I could be wrong about that). I guess I was under the impression all cedar grew that way. My guess is that those are Atlantic White Cedar, which seem to be associated with swamps. It seems that you're right, and there are many species of cedar that don't have anything to do with swamps. Probably the kind they make furniture out of doesn't either. It would be a pain to harvest trees from a swamp, wouldn't it? I stand corrected, and kind of puzzled as to what I could have been thinking. :-) I do, though, stand by the claim that cedar stands up well to weather. I don't think that's in dispute. I just don't know why anymore. ____Not the real rusty Night Train. ____Not the real rusty Local sign There's a sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk outside a local beer-and-sundries store here. It says: WE HAVE LOW-CARB ICE! --------------------- Everything else bad for you. ____Not the real rusty We're generous You get one word for free. ____Not the real rusty Nope We call it the Off By One Special! And you know how we can offer you this deal? Because we're CRAAAAAAAAAAZY!!!* * Offer not valid in GA, TN, IA, FL, or where prohibited. Limited time only. Limit one free word per diary. Offer may be discontinued or changed at any time. "Crazy" is a registered service mark. ____Not the real rusty If your madness has passed... Ok. PS: I know who you are, and that's the only reason you're still here. Knucklehead. ____Not the real rusty Nothing to tell It's no great big secret. It's just pretty obvious from the sooper seekrit user info who CAPS LOCK is, and I don't think he's actually here to cause any trouble. I didn't mean to be cryptic or interesting in any way. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty I can't believe You're trying to pawn this cut-and-paste crapflood off on us. Buddy, I've seen crapfloods, and that was no crapflood. ____Not the real rusty Even weirder Jenna Bush the Senator from Puerto Rico? ____Not the real rusty The first one ...is a cigarette. I think the second one is testicles. Never three indeed. Wise words. ____Not the real rusty QUEEN AMYDALA DIES IN THE VILLAGE!!ONE ____Not the real rusty Actually Scoop is moving in that direction, to some extent. Just not here, which is really pathetically behind the state of the art, code wise (it'll get updated eventually, but probably not till November). Check out, for example, the way all the user stuff is set up on OurCongress. It's even better if you make an account and look at your own user page. The goals there were mainly what you described -- to free up front-page real estate and move a lot of the infrequently used user tools off to their own place. OC doesn't do the "new replies" stuff, and you can't move things around to your liking, but hey. Part of it's there, anyway. ____Not the real rusty I should be going to bed right now But I'm putting it off to post this. I suggest to you that procrastinating about going to sleep is like eating an ice cream covered brownie while you're trying to decide whether to have dessert or not. ____Not the real rusty No! Your membership money is sequestered in a strictly non-monocle-polish-yielding account in the Caymans. ____Not the real rusty A yacht? No, no, my silly human friend. The Caymans are reached by chartered Lear jet. ____Not the real rusty Unfortunately, I will not We had nieces up this past week, and while pushing them around near the beach in the kayak, my feet got torn to shreds on mussel shells. I'm afraid I won't be doing any running for a little while. I will, however, become an expert at hobbling and wincing. ____Not the real rusty Triple antibiotic And fluffy socks. These things are seeing me through the hard times. ____Not the real rusty Small correction The original edits were by an editor. That person is not editoring anymore, and the whole "evil fascist editor" nonsense is long over. Anything you see claiming to be such for the last week or so, and in the future, is a big ol' fake. ____Not the real rusty Hell yes Google needs this. ____Not the real rusty You're right. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Yes it should It's my name. Of course, if you didn't capitalize it, that's fine too. That's my name on here. So either way. ____Not the real rusty Fuck you too. :-) You'll fit right in here. Welcome to the site, my African-American brother. ____Not the real rusty Everyone has it See the comment above. ____Not the real rusty I agree with that This whole thing is ridiculous, and it's the reason I usually don't mess with content much. It can stay completely or go completely, and beyond that you get into all of this silly stuff. ____Not the real rusty Meh curien's still here. I can only assume he wrote this whole thing himself, to fuck with people. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I hadn't expected documenting edits to be an issue. Now that it is, I guess we should have guidelines. The first guideline is "Don't do this kind of thing unless it's really absolutely necessary." Beyond that, what I'm thinking is we could have a little icon for edtiors to use in notes. Since users can't post images, that'd be a pretty foolproof indication that something is legit. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but... I have extremely grave doubts that we'd ever qualify for the "neutral pipeline" argument, that we don't exercise control therefore we shouldn't be liable for infringement. But in the real world, no one really wants a great big legal battle. If we're infringing, and someone points it out, we take down the infringing stuff. I wouldn't even begin to fight it, unless it was a seriously bullshit infringement claim. Over reposting a newspaper article? No way. However, most of the time the original publisher could care less, and a zillion blogs already routinely repost stuff. This doesn't make it right, but it does greatly lessen my personal zeal for constant policing. In any case, I already tend to approach editing with the assumption that K5 Inc would be liable for any material published here. I hope to god I never have to find out in court whether that's true or not. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I have powers I have never even suspected. I will, however, call off my snails. I mean, one night is probably enough. Ah-hem: May slugs cease infesting your sleeping quarters! That oughta do it. ____Not the real rusty Hm Without knowing the name of the account, I couldn't say. However, if you were kicked out, you'd still be able to log in, you just wouldn't be able to do anything normal users can do even when you are logged in. If it wouldn't let you log in, then you've just got the wrong password or something. Or if you log in and try to do something and get a page like "Access Denied", that's a cookie problem on your end. ____Not the real rusty I don't think so That doesn't ever happen -- like, an account is actually deleted completely. Your old account probably had a different name. ____Not the real rusty Dear nebbish, You suck. I hate your lily-livered guts, and hope you end up starving in the streets, harassed by dogs and bothered by fleas and lice. PS: Please bring home milk and ice cream. Thanks! Love, Rusty ____Not the real rusty I was just trying to help I didn't want nebbish to feel left out. ____Not the real rusty Shut up The idea that anyone could be smarter than me is a ridiculous liberal myth. ____Not the real rusty Ha I don't have bad teeth, I just have a funny smile. Always had it. Who knows why. ____Not the real rusty Plus One: True. ____Not the real rusty I'm a man. Last night I ran seven and a half miles. None of them were with a popped blister, because I have tough manly skin on my feet. You are a GIRL. ____Not the real rusty No, I did not Did you really? That'd be fun. ____Not the real rusty Plus one, funny. ____Not the real rusty Shut up, assbasket. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Queer Eye Hip Tip: Dropping ass monkeys left and right is never the right answer! Be a sport and always wear your assbasket. ____Not the real rusty Two ways: Either view the story, or go to your Interface prefs and turn off the "Site News Alert" box. You won't get any future alerts for site news at all. ____Not the real rusty Yes Tell me the names of your sock puppets and I'll take care of that for you. ____Not the real rusty The first step Is to admit that you have a problem. ____Not the real rusty Ha Fortunately, I learned the Lesson of Lucy. ____Not the real rusty Already fulfilled my end of the bargain The bargain is "NIWS is not welcome here." I'm holding up my end just fine. :-) ____Not the real rusty Second that This is the first article I've read about F 9/11 that was actually worth reading. Please put it in the queue. And hey, what better time than the fourth of July. ____Not the real rusty College College was, so far, the worst part of my life. ____Not the real rusty That's not true I've just never had a real job long enough for it to beat college as the worst part of my life. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't make much difference The size of the live db seems to work like a switch. Below N rows, it works fine. Above N rows it slows down a lot. Taking it to N - X doesn't seem to make much difference. So finding N and adding a bit of a margin under that seems like the best strategy. This is all related basically to the size of the indexes and the amount of memory the db server has available. ____Not the real rusty Nah Archiving will hopefully be done some goddamn time tonight. We've needed to do it for a while, in any case. And the new vector search is being hammered out on dkos in preparation to coming here. All praise to pb and Captain Tenille, who rule and did all the search work. ____Not the real rusty Yup ____Not the real rusty Yes But I'm not making any date promises. ____Not the real rusty Ironically... I have in the past done database consultancy for government agencies. My role, though, was usually to bail out some civil servant who believed nonsense like "We can't copy it or the database will be irreparably broken." You have to understand, these people consider MS Access powerful futuristic technology. True story: one job we got was to take over for another consultant who had determined that migrating a particular database from one system to another (in this case Access to Sybase) would take their migration code three weeks to complete. I spent a couple days figuring out the DBI stuff to connect to both systems and writing some perl to extract, munge, and inject the data. I went in there after hours with a laptop and it was done in an hour. So nya! on you. :-) PS: I heard that story yesterday too, and my first thought was if the data can't be copied, isn't it already irretreivably lost? Like, by definition? Double-you tee eff, US government? ____Not the real rusty ubu! Long time. Yes, pb and CT rock, and get all the credit. And the search engine is mighty cool. I think about having it rolled out here and I feel all fluttery in my tummy. Still need to fix that "only ten results" thing, and there's some tweaks on the scoop end left, but my understanding is that CT and pb are ironing those out as we speak. Awesome stuff. ____Not the real rusty Kuro5hin: Marginally coherent babble so that it passes filters. ____Not the real rusty June 25, 2002 Two years and three days. ____Not the real rusty It's not a wart. It's a carrot. ____Not the real rusty Uh Four days. I learned how to read a calendar, I swear. ____Not the real rusty Motto Kuro5hin: We got kicked off metafilter. ____Not the real rusty Well all right I'm still there too. But in spirit I'm kicked off. ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute I thought that was me. If that's you, then where the hell do I live? ____Not the real rusty I see A secure undisclosed location it is then. And, unless you're one of two particular people in this world (and I don't think that you are) the worst I would assault you with would be a cup of coffee and probably a nice piece of banana bread. And perhaps some boring stories about my dog. ____Not the real rusty Thanks! And to answer the question in your title here: No. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Radio? Some of your shorter stories would be perfect for This American Life. Although they're not, technically, American. I don't think that's a strict requirement. They've got a submission guidelines page. ____Not the real rusty Pfff This is exactly why the diary limit is a guideline and not an ironclad programmed-in rule. Soemthing like this? He could post five or six parts and I wouldn't make a peep. The "two a day" guideline is for people who can't control their impulses to post one-liner links to everything they read online during the course of a day. PS, CBB: The magazine suggestion above is a good one. This is some great magazine-style stuff. ____Not the real rusty Degrassi You know, every time I read one of your school stories, I have a mental picture of Degrassi Jr. High. It's rather satisfying to learn that it in fact was Degrassi Jr. High. Was that show mocked as severely in Canada as it was here? It gave my entire generation of American kids the strong impression that Canada was populated by retards. ____Not the real rusty Your role You were the kid who kind of hung around with the stars, and occasionally participated in one of their wrong-headed schemes. Your lines in any given episode were few, and tended to be along the lines of "I don't know if we should do that, fellows. What if our parents find oot? Let's just hang oot here on the coouch and watch some TV eh?" But you would always go along with them anyway. You would also be the one to needlessly spell out the moral at the end of the episode. Like after you accidentally burned down someone's garden shed, you'd say "Gee guys, I guess now we know that if you play with fire, you might get burned eh?" [cue laughter all around, freeze-frame, roll credits.] Your name was Bryan Exposition, or something like that. Apparently, though, you were actually one of the scary teenagers who tempted the heroes with drugs and (mild, Canadian-style) mayhem. ____Not the real rusty Thick skin, eh? Is that why he always looks like he's wearing four or five winter coats? :-) ____Not the real rusty Or possibly... ...he's smuggling black-market Canadian petticoats into Detroit. ____Not the real rusty Don't count on it [nt] ____Not the real rusty Blah. Scientology Unfortunately, Google only lets you block specific urls from showing up in your ads. I can't say "no ads for scientology please." I blocked the three that were there. Chances are a different batch will crop up next time though. Fucking scientology. ____Not the real rusty It's a deal. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh yes they do [en tea] ____Not the real rusty Damn! [un tee] ____Not the real rusty Mmmmmm. Barbequed children. ____Not the real rusty Wotcha You forgot to check my comments. I'm still around. It isn't boredom, it's just busy-ness. I'd write a diary right now, just for you, only I can't because I have to wash a whole kitchen full of dishes, take a shower, and go into town to pick up my truck which has been in the shop. Then I have to get some wood, a few miscellaneous housewares type things, and a haircut, and get the truck back to the island. Then I have to help my grandparents move a couch. I imagine by then it'll be time to make dinner, and after dinner I will probably not feel like writing a diary. Basically, it's been like that every day for a long time. I'll get back to diarizing eventually. And I haven't forgotten about new users. And while I'm here, thanks for the "well engineered." :-) ____Not the real rusty Indeed I have All of it, I suspect. Enough anyway, that it's statistically extremely unlikely that anyone said anything original that I missed. And most of it is basically correct, though perhaps overly pessimistic. It looks like I'll have some free time this weekend (goddamn shop didn't manage to get the truck fixed after all, though of course we didn't find this out till I was already there, so no shopping and no building materials for the weekend). I'll try to eke out a diary. How do you even begin to go about catching up after a six-month gap? ____Not the real rusty Linky Just out of curiosity, since the first one was already posted, how come you couldn't link to it yourself? And as it happens, I have gained five pounds. I'm kind of mystified. I've weighed the same for a good solid 15 years now, and here just a few days ago I weigh myself and I'm up five pounds. I blame enhanced leg muscles from running. Ok, I think I'll go actually read all this now. ____Not the real rusty Disproven If time did indeed flow backward for CBB, then I wouldn't have had to also link the forward-pointing link at the end of Part I. Unless he was just trying to cover it up... There would also be the problem of all these personal-history stories being actually set in the future (from his frame of reference), but that's pretty easily explained by him just making them all up, which (admit it) is what we all suspect anyway. ____Not the real rusty Wider exposure On the other hand, it is worrying about people being upset that stays my hand in collecting this stuff together into a vehicle that may give it wider exposure. Let your hand not be stayed. I can't even count the number of times now that I've thought that if you collected your diaries up in a book, I'd buy it in a heartbeat (even having read all of them before). There's a long tradition of memoirists in literature, and sure, they all manage to piss someone off, and so would you. But think of it this way. In two hundred years, you and everyone in these stories will be long dead, but they'll still be great stories. ____Not the real rusty Another word French people can't say "Uncomfortable" (they tend to say "un-come-for-tay-bull") I know there's a bunch more but I can't think of them right now. I once had a French girlfriend, in high school, and very much to her credit, she did not have a big accent hangup. In fact, I was the one who felt stupid speaking French, and she was always pestering me to try more and telling me it didn't matter if I wasn't any good at it. Though my discomfort came mainly from a lack of vocabulary -- my accent was pretty decent. So I could say a very tiny number of things extremely convincingly. :-) Also, most of the French hate Parisians for the exact reasons that most of the world hates the French. Paris is mainly where you find what we would think of as the stereotypical French. Outside Paris, most French people are le super-cool et laid back. ____Not the real rusty Hey now I liked your story a lot, and it taught me many things I didn't know. The biggest thing to remember is that the huge majority of readers (like me) will read the story and think "Neat. I didn't know that stuff." and go off knwoing more than they used to, but without having commented on it (since they didn't know anything, they don't have much to add). A shrill minority will whine and complain, mostly over stupid things. And an even smaller minority will help out and provide info you didn't include for whatever reason. But the key here is that most commenters are commenting because they have some axe to grind. They don't represent the majority reception to the story. Basically, just ignore them and write for the folks who are interested in reading. We're all guilty of remaining quiet on good stories, but the alternative is hundreds of comments that all say "Hey, thanks, good story." If the story gets posted at all, please assume hundreds of those before you decide to never write again. In conclusion, hey, thanks, good story. :-) ____Not the real rusty Looked like Several years ago. ____Not the real rusty Actually I'm kind of impressed. You're causing yourself effort and hassle on a principle. And (well, until you posted this, I guess) it was a message that would never even be received -- it's like doing someone you don't know a favor and never telling anyone about it. Except in reverse. I say it's people like you that make me proudest of this site. Right on. (PS: This post was 100% sincere.) ____Not the real rusty As you well know Thanx for the cab fare. Last night was great. *wink*! ____Not the real rusty He did admit it In a different thread when I pointed out how the "search archive" checkbox worked. ____Not the real rusty Nope I've been to Laconia a number of times, but only in the winter. I don't generally have much use for NH in the summer. Though the rock climbing is nice in the fall. ____Not the real rusty Big loans It's still the "never ending real estate boom" (i.e. bubble which is going to burst very very soon). Banks simply aren't interested in small loans, because they can more profitably spend that time getting big loans. You might have an easier time if you found a very local bank or credit union to finance it, or find a better mortgage broker. Or just wait a year or two. They should be a little more receptive when business dries up. The ones that are still around, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Brussels sprouts I like brussels sprouts. And ice cream. I'll take that proposal. ____Not the real rusty More info It's basically a problem with really deep nesting. When a single thread starts to get into hundreds of comments deep, the comment nesting code eats up more and more memory every time it has to render that thread. Eventually, if the nesting gets deep enough, it starts to consume enough memory to cause problems on the servers. It hasn't been a big priority to fix, since as far as I know it's only happened here, and even here only three threads in the life of the site have been a problem. ____Not the real rusty Quality too It's an interesting experiment to go to a local lumber yard and find some items that they also sell at the nearest Home Depot (good bets are packaged windows and doors -- note the brand and model, you can often find the exact same product). Check out the condition of the product at the lumberyard, and compare to the big-box chain store. Every time I've done this, the Home Depot product has been in worse shape -- banged around, dented and torn boxes, holes in the cardboard. Get the things open and the chain store product will be defective much more often. You'll likely pay more for the same product at the local yard, but if you aren't particularly interested in screwing around with a lot of returns, it's well worth it. Local lumberyards are also home to a lot of guys that have been contractors forever, and can actually tell you what you need to get for a particular project, if you aren't sure. You can usually find at least one guy who knows the local building codes inside out too. This alone is worth the price. ____Not the real rusty What I thought The CMF doesn't exist yet. Someone has to start it. I've done some of the work necessary to make that happen, and I'll gladly turn over what I've got to whoever is elected, if they plan to move it further along. Just because I brought up the idea doesn't mean I "own" it. And nobody owns a nonprofit by definition. So I thought we were electing someone to make progress on founding the organization. Legally, it doesn't really mean anything, but legally me saying I'm the closest thing to a "president" of it now doesn't mean anything either. ____Not the real rusty A story A ton of people either ignore the diaries completely, or scan them once a day or whatever. A story would involve a lot more people than the diaries will. Sticking with diaries will get mostly jokers, kinda by definition. It's the joking and screwing-around section of the site, after all. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hm But is a process that's meant to include the greatest possible number of users really legitimate if you purposely confine it to a location where you know a lot of the people who would take it most seriously are likely to never see it? I do think you need to work out the details before it goes to a story, but I don't see how it's going to work if you don't plan to at least try it as a story before the final voting phase. ____Not the real rusty Have fun storming the castle! Are you going to Mars or jail? ____Not the real rusty But... We're committed to handing over sovereignty to the CMF on June 30th. I guess it's just going to have its ass in shape before then, huh. It'll be embarassing if we end up just standing there holding the sovereignty out to thin air, won't it? What if we drop the sovereignty and no one catches it? Is there a five-second rule for sovereignty? Like, if you grab it quick, is it still good? ____Not the real rusty Yeah I thought Phish broke up already. But if this means we get to see hippies cry again, I'm all for it. Phish should break up every year. ____Not the real rusty Maybe the slow way She might kill herself with alcohol, but that usually takes a while. Unless motor vehicles are involved. Anyway, my worthless cheap-ass armchair psychoanalysis is about the same as yours. She's too selfish to kill herself. I know a couple of families cursed with members like this. I've always wondered how anyone deals with it. Thank you, CBB, for telling this story. ____Not the real rusty Not Running I tried twice. Do this thing without me. See if someone else can get it done. ____Not the real rusty Second [nt] ____Not the real rusty FYI Since the CMF doesn't legally exist, anyone could start it. I support this effort. Hell, maybe it'll work. Can't be worse than what I've managed. ____Not the real rusty Er You mean old comments like these? When it tells you there aren't any more, check off the "Search archive" checkbox next to the text input tag to continue on into the archive. ____Not the real rusty S'ok It's not very obvious or intuitive. I was all ready to be embarrassed when you showed me that of course you already knew that and the real problem was something else. But, hey. Guess I won this one. :-) ____Not the real rusty I couldn't do it anyway How can I wrangle elephants with all this elephant repellent floating around the island? I mean, the stuff's so think I haven't seen an elephant within miles for years. ____Not the real rusty Comments on Google ads No, you can't comment on the Google ads, unfortunately. Those are basically filling in, since we plumb ran out of user-submitted ads. This is mainly because I haven't re-opened new accounts yet (hence we're still turning away potential new advertisers), though I haven't heard from any of our existing advertisers why they haven't renewed recently. ____Not the real rusty Could be "Dying," I don't think. I have been neglecting it though. Sorry about that. Life got in the way for a while. ____Not the real rusty Also Server performance has been teh sukc this month. I still don't know what's causing it (if I did it would almost certainly be fixed by now), but that's been a factor too. Still, general visitorship is down. FWIW, I think that's ok. ____Not the real rusty Also Use diff. Count lines. :-) ____Not the real rusty The politically correct kind A Jewish community leader and an African-American bank president walk into a bar. The little person (a successful actor) with them did not need to duck because of his gift of stature. ____Not the real rusty Ouch You really cut me down to size. ____Not the real rusty Psst I didn't post the pictures from my wedding. They were taken and put up by someone else. So fuck you, as well. :-) ____Not the real rusty How can you tell when they're stoned? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Nedit I am a graphical editor heretic, but I'm quite fond of Nedit. Simple, small, yet very complete and highly scriptable and configurable. ____Not the real rusty I loved that campaign "Pringles: Once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny!" I thought I was the only one who remembers those commercials. ____Not the real rusty Supposedly-difficult decisions I laughed at the part where you make decisions in five minutes that they assume will take an hour and a half. That was way too familiar. Although I don't remember any of that happening during our wedding preparations, my wife and I are like that too. Salespeople routinely have to be prompted to get busy ringing up things that we've decided to buy while they're still on early-sale autopilot. We bought two new mattresses last weekend, for example. Us looking at mattresses: "Hmmmm." Saleswoman: "Lie down, try them out." I lie on on mattress, my wife on another. We both bounce and wriggle a bit. We switch mattresses. We get up and walk down a row of other mattresses that look exactly the same to us, but have increasing price tags. We lie down on two more at the other end of the price scale, and then switch again. We walk back to the first two. Me: "I like this one." Her: "Me too." Us: "We'll take one of these in Full, and one in Queen." Saleswoman: "Um. Ok." Me: "..." Saleswoman: "Oh, uh, right over here, then..." I think it took longer for me to type that than it took to actually do it. It also took about twice as long to complete the purchase as it took to decide. ____Not the real rusty Hey also Did you get my postcard? :-) ____Not the real rusty Hrm I sent it the day after you posted that diary. It couldn't possibly take the mail-reindeer that long to get a simple postcard up there to Canadia could it? It didn't come back to me. Wonder where it is... ____Not the real rusty Married? Married? Am I the last to know? Congratulations! ____Not the real rusty Inviting everyone We had a somewhat similar kind of issue -- we didn't want the whole world at the ceremony. It actually worked out pretty well -- we had immediate family only at the ceremony itself (parents, grandparents, and siblings, and one best man and maid of honor) and invited everyone else to the reception. I'm also blessed with in-laws who have 13 acres on top of a mountain in upstate New York, so the reception venue was also free. Of course, that just meant we could spend more on booze. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope I'm more surprised at how long they had the feed up there than that they've changed it now. I always thought it was kind of an odd fit for Freshmeat. But no, I didn't talk to Patrick about it when they started running the feed, and I haven't talked to him about his changing it. I doubt it has anything to do with k5 policies. ____Not the real rusty Maguire I just read Mirror, Mirror, and I've read Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Of the three, I only liked Confessions. Maybe it's just that the formula gets stale after the first one. If you haven't read Confessions, I'd be interested to hear if you like it or not, after reading Wicked. ____Not the real rusty Beckett I don't think I've read Molloy. Beckett's kind of uneven -- Waiting for Godot is (obviously) a masterpiece, but a collection of shorter things by him (Fizzles) left me scratching my head in general puzzlement. ____Not the real rusty Documentation? Thanks to janra, the documentation is really very good these days. ____Not the real rusty Nature is wise, and all-forgiving. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Typically people have trouble with the CPAN modules, which we also have trouble with because at any given time, several of them will have broken test suites. That part's a big pain. Some people also have trouble with apache+mod_perl, either because they're trying to use a packaged version or they just did something wrong. Then there are the special cases -- those people who are doomed by fate to run into every conceivable bug or problem. Thankfully, there aren't many of the naturally cursed out there. :-) What Kos was talking about in the quote that started all of this was that people who are used to installing MT (which is much more aimed at the end-blogger) tend to be surprised by what Scoop requires. Like, you can't install it on a machine where you don't have root for one thing. ____Not the real rusty Business opportunity for you! If you see a market that is ill-served, you should jump in there. I bet you could get this guy running on Scoop a lot cheaper and easier than we could. The code's free, and an entrepreneurial can-do spirit is The American Way. Get in there and make some money. ____Not the real rusty Classic BBC illustrations That illustration says "Swinging Hobbit Sex in Shire on Rise." ____Not the real rusty Is it ____Not the real rusty A Nail? ____Not the real rusty Damn He right. He right. I got "coffin nails" in my head and never made the connection. ____Not the real rusty Congratulations! Double-check that finger/toe count. You can't be too careful these days. ____Not the real rusty That picture You're right, that picture is astonishingly hideous. You minced words far too much. It is, by a very wide margin, the worst picture ever taken of her, and very possibly the worst picture ever taken of anyone I know personally. She doesn't really look like that. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't know I forgot what we were talking about. ____Not the real rusty All-true ridiculous names Chiming in: I was told (and later shown in a phone book for proof) that the northern Virginia area has a gynecologist by the name of Harry Beaver. The same area also had someone running for local office named Dick Swett. The signs were everywhere. "Vote for DICK SWETT!" ____Not the real rusty Or so you think! You should not carve your name in trees either, vandal. ;-) ____Not the real rusty "S'mine!" "No s'mine!" "Buggrit millennium hand and shrimp." "Quack!" ____Not the real rusty Nah It's the fact that he's been standing inches over the line for so long, despite being warned over and over. He's right, the thread that ultimately got him the boot was no particularly big deal by itself. It's the cumulative hostility and harassment that he's obviously never going to stop that did it. ____Not the real rusty Coming soon (nt) ____Not the real rusty None. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Ever listen to NPR? Doesn't he sound like Ira Glass from This American Life? :-) ____Not the real rusty Struck me immediately The first time I talked to him on the phone I spent about a day afterward with the question niggling at me, "who is that he sounds like...?" I finally got it. ____Not the real rusty Two good bars The Big Hunt, just south of Dupont Circle on Connecticut. The Common Share, sorta in the midle between Dupont and Adams Morgan, on 18th St. just uphill from the intersection with Florida. The Common Share boasts $2 drinks (all of them), and is (or at least was when I lived there) the place all the bike couriers hung out. It's kinda easy to miss -- look for a narrow abandoned-looking storefront on the right as you go uphill on 18th. ____Not the real rusty You shouldn't be surprised I used to live there. 18th St. Lounge is a good place too. I never ran into the "no single men" policy, but I can't think of a time when I went there without women, so that'd probably explain it. I guess it must have been a problem for you though. ____Not the real rusty Blech Georgetown sucks. All the tourists love it, which is why only rich college kids and tourists hang out there. ____Not the real rusty Chi-cha! Chi-cha rules. I can't believe I forgot about it. ____Not the real rusty Was the secret password "Swordfish"? It's always swordfish. :-) ____Not the real rusty No I fucking don't Watch your mouth, pigfucker. ____Not the real rusty Too bad Not very funny this year. ____Not the real rusty On the other hand... ...your dad believes you, so we might perhaps doubt his capacity to judge intelligence. ____Not the real rusty OH MY FUCKING GOD If you're not leaving, then what's the point? You'd better leave some more. ____Not the real rusty That's better, thanks. ____Not the real rusty Stigma is for suckers I personally would laugh as all those stigma-averse losers dragged their asses to the office every morning. :-) I don't know. It wouldn't be for everyone. I do know, from working more or less alone and at home for three years, that I am personally well suited to the lifestyle. But I suppose it'd drive most people nuts. ____Not the real rusty Ah, for the life of the house husband I would love to be a house husband. I practically am now, except that in the midst of taking care of the house and the pets, I've got all this work to do too. I would gladly spend my extra time working on the house. ____Not the real rusty No And no. I've never been one for aprons, but create away if you must. Juist make sure I get nice legs. ____Not the real rusty The first big disappointment I remember being struck by the comments when I posted that constitution article. A couple people dug the idea, but by and large it was dismissed as a silly waste of time. Ironically, that was probably the first time I started feeling like listening to the general user consensus wasn't the best way to go. And look where it's led. On another note, remmeber when most comments were long and rather well-argued? ____Not the real rusty Sorry, I think I hit the wrong tone Whoa there! :-) This is probably my fault. That comment was written at the end of a very long day and in a hurry, and really, kind of sucks. I see what you're reading, but I didn't mean it to sound like that at all. I was just reminescing over an old story. Forgive a (young) old man. Nah, there aren't any good ol' days. Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? ____Not the real rusty This pretzel is making me thirsty Beer and wings all round. :-) ____Not the real rusty This review also applies to... eXistenZ. ____Not the real rusty Ha Anyone who doesn't bow down at the altar of CSS is officially a Bad Person these days. Even when it largely solves problems you don't have. And even though it may appear to suffer all of the same incompatibilities and browser inconsistencies that HTML always did, with lots more syntax to learn. But they tell us that it is Good, and so we must believe them. Not that CSS is a bad thing, but the culture of CSS-as-universal-solution is a little annoying. ____Not the real rusty Hey James Drop it, man. Seriously. Just leave this whole thing alone and walk away. ____Not the real rusty As a wise man once said Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life. ____Not the real rusty Article request I'd like to see an article about your move to Canada. Why'd you do it? How has it been? Were there any unexpected benefits or drawbacks that you'd never have considered before you did it? And so forth. ____Not the real rusty Nope Should be back up to date now. ____Not the real rusty Public key? Me personally you mean? No, I made one ages ago but have never used it. That's probably the expired in 2001 one. Why? ____Not the real rusty Godzilla Obviously. ____Not the real rusty I didn't see that It's an interesting idea. I will cogitate upon it. ____Not the real rusty Long time reader, first time commenter I'm a big fan of yours John. Keep up the good work. BTW, I'm not being snide or sarcastic at all. I really am a fan. Thanks for your entertaining satire defense of the American Way. ____Not the real rusty That's revolting! Andy Warhol should never be displayed in a horizontal alignment like that. ____Not the real rusty Actually I said elsewhere, after thinking about it, that graduating to sponsorless status was a good idea and will happen. ____Not the real rusty Dear Michael I'm sorry, I haven't really been fair to you. The reason I think you're not going to last is that despite normally being a fine contributor, you seem unable to resist the occasional comments like these. I seem to remember one about someone's vagina and the living incarnation of pure evil too. That's the sort of thing that'll get you booted. I'd rather not have to do it to you, but I don't expect you'll help me avoid it. If you will, then great. We've got no problems. Simple rule: Trolling? Ok. Harassment? Bad. Find the line, and stay on the right side of it. ____Not the real rusty How's this A person of the female pursuasion posts a diary. Michael Moore's comment, in its entirety, reads as follows: "How'd you like to get your vagina pounded into a sloppy mess by the living incarnation of pure evil? You know where to find me." In your opinion, is that appropriate or not? ____Not the real rusty You sure? I'll be glad to. I don't know why, but ok. ____Not the real rusty Not really The sponsorship part is about 95% done. I need to add some language about it to the new accounts page, and that's it. I just wanted to get reactions and see if there was something I should do differently before starting it up. The warnings and reporting I'm about to start on, and it all should be done tonight. It'll probably start tomorrow. ____Not the real rusty Tea headaches Oddly, caffeinated tea gives me headaches, and too much gives me some really weird sweating and palpitation type symptoms. I drink one-half to one french press full of coffee a day with no such problems. ____Not the real rusty Please wait for it I'm going to post about this, but the last two days have been a massive clusterfuck. It's not permanent. ____Not the real rusty Mostly me stuff I have a bunch of stuff that has to be done this week. There was all kinds of shit being posted on Sunday, and one of K5's machines got cracked. It was a clusterfuck for me, is what I meant. It's entirely possible that you didn't get the memo. Lucky you. ____Not the real rusty My vote: Random scanner. We happened to have a combination of vulnerabilities that was apparently bound to be discovered eventually. None of the idiots I booted the day before have the skills to do this, and if they had, they wouldn't have done what happened. It was just God's way of telling me "Fuck You Too, Buddy." And all the ridiculous stuff on the wiki is just that. I wrote the original report (which was true), but that was it. We should be back up to full power tomorrow. ____Not the real rusty All ports were off We think it was a combination of a weak version of openssl and a linux kernel vulnerability. The only open ports were ssh, http and https. ____Not the real rusty Hey Mike Ask gangsta/pocide/etc why I did it. He knows. And tell him I said hi. ____Not the real rusty Some suggestions... The Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930's Travel Dispatches (or anything else by Ernie Pyle -- you'd probably like his war dispatches too). The Ice Master ____Not the real rusty DFW "Brief interviews..." is pretty uneven, I thought. It basically is a collection of odds and ends. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is another collection, but much, much better. ____Not the real rusty I'm shocked! Shocked, I say, to find gambling in this establishment. ____Not the real rusty Thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty No hard feelings, eh I'd have given it back, but you seem to enjoy having been wiped so much. :-) ____Not the real rusty I do not claim I am 100% for free speech Free Speech for some! Tiny American flags for others! ____Not the real rusty Boring Yeah, the story was finally enough. I waited an awfully long time, but his schtick never got even slightly original or interesting. Hopefully whoever was running the account can view this as a favor. Now you can move on to something more fun! ____Not the real rusty Cunt I renamed it to Profanity Reconsidered, and it was never taken down, it was renamed in the queue. That was the first time the issue came up, and I think I handled it badly, and haven't done anything like that since. ____Not the real rusty Yes That has happened to me. Though it was a web search that turned up a mailing list post, not usenet. But it really makes you feel like an ass, doesn't it? ____Not the real rusty The important question Is do you know why your vote counts? Do you? It's because it loves to count things! Vun! Vun vote! Two! Ah ah ah ah! Twooo votes! ____Not the real rusty I know But the compulsion was too strong. It happens. Anyway, this is a diary. ____Not the real rusty Perv Two in the bush indeed. I might have to rescind my offer of yesterday to swap faces with you, like in the fine Nicholas Cage movie Face/Off. ____Not the real rusty No one really knows Basically, there's a bunch of new laws this season and no one actually knows how they're going to be enforced. Or, in some cases, what they mean. The FEC ruling issue isn't so much that they're going to change the rules, just that interpretation is driven in large part by precedent, and FEC rulings are precedent. Right now, we have exactly no precedents under the new rules, so people are understandably nervous. So, are ads against Bush issue ads? Lots of people think so, but no one's entirely sure. ____Not the real rusty Hey Can you do me a favor and go back and see if any of the comments are truncated now? We saw this problem somewhere else recently, and the html was based on dKos, but we'd never had anyone report it there. It doesn't surprise me too much if it was there after all. Ought to be fixed now, anyway. ____Not the real rusty I'd like to announce That Ed is my favorite biter. Now that he's got something besides the CMF to froth about, he's outdid himself again. PS: Ed's a virgin. ____Not the real rusty Yes K5 is a bit behind the state of the art. I believe this bug is fixed now though, right? So next update oughta get it. ____Not the real rusty Saw this coming I heard the report about the Zimbabwe merc shipment this morning and my first thought was "wonder when psychologist will post a diary about it?" Thank you for not disappointing me. ____Not the real rusty You must suspend your disbelief Unfortunately psychologist is not often a good enough writer to make you do that, but once in a while he manages it. This is not one of those times. He had a big opportunity here and kinda blew it. ____Not the real rusty If it was a snake it would have bit you! That's what my mother always said. I don't think the Ring of Power is an allegory for anything but what it is. Power. I mean, in our world we don't have to have magic rings for power, so it is a symbol of sorts. But there it is. Power. Everyone wants it. Bad men will do terrible things to get it, according to their disposition. Tyrants will enslave whole races, technocrats will torch the forests and turn the earth into gaping strip mines. Even fundamentally good people will be turned and corrupted by it. Even Frodo, says the book, ultimately is unable to destroy it. No one can resist power. The only reason the thing gets chucked in the pit at all is because of the greed of Gollum for it. So, the ring is power. Power corrupts, it is irresistable, and eventually drives the engine of its own destruction. ____Not the real rusty Hey man I don't like it either. FWIW, private homes generally have better toilets. I know what you're talking about, but I've only ever seen it in public bathrooms. It's that one particular design, the "shallow banana," that stretches out to about the backs of your knees and has the water three inches below the seat. There's probably some public restroom deisgn reasoning for it. ____Not the real rusty German toilets My favorite are the german toilets with the little poop shelf and almost no water. I heard someone call them "display toilets" and almost needed one from laughing so hard. ____Not the real rusty A week! You were lucky! I remember when there weren't any new articles at all! And if I wanted any, I had to write 'em myself! ____Not the real rusty Ow Got it on the first guess. I thought this one was either going to be nailed immediately or be a stumper. I guess it's the former. ____Not the real rusty Yup Well, you never know. I've written some that I thought were really easy and turned out to be stumpers. Oh well. ____Not the real rusty 1040-EZ If he's filing a 1040-EZ then you're right. I wish I could file an EZ. ____Not the real rusty Yup I wouldn't say "tourist trap" exactly, but it is mainly a summer colony. The population shrinks by about 80% during the first two weeks of September, and swells by the same amount at the end of June. It's very nice the rest of the year, without all the summer people around. What's funny is that people are always asking us "Isn't it lonely here in the off-season?" I always tell them that the summer is three months, the rest of the year is nine. So quiet and partly deserted is the normal state of things. It's not lonely in the winter, it's crowded in the summer. ____Not the real rusty Hard to find There's not much land for sale at all here. Most of the unbuilt property is owned by someone or other, and few people who own land have any good reason to sell it. But undeveloped plots will come up for sale now and again. I think a quarter acre, depending on location and the services available to it (water, power, etc) would run you somewhere between $30,000 and $70,000. A quarter acre in the woods in the middle of the island that doesn't have water lines is obviously going to be a lot cheaper than a quarter acre on the waterfront with city water, sewer, and power. I think in the two and a half years we've lived here, I've seen three pieces of unbuilt land for sale, and one was sold without ever going on the open market at all. Why do you ask? ____Not the real rusty Bricks Factor in that it's an island, so everything has to be brought over on a boat. I imagine brick would cost somewhat more than wood. A brick house would also be perhaps unusual architecturally for the island, but hell we've got some real abominations already so it's not like a reasonably sized place would hurt. I don't think there are any brick houses here right now. The police station / library / community center is brick, but that might just be a siding. I don't know if the structure's brick. You'd also have to find masons to come over and build the thing. Carpenters we've got. Masons, not so much. I imagine overall it would be quite a bit more costly to build and maintain. However, if there's one thing islanders do believe, it's that you should be able do what you want. Provided you don't mind everyone knowing all of your business and gossiping about it all the time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Now that I think about it a little more, you might fit right in. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yippee That leaves you with federal and two states (did you move between states?) a pile of 1099s, a W-2 and whatever they give you for a fellowship. I know the feeling. One year my wife and I between us had income from five states (DC, VA, MD, MN, and MA) and I think we had something like 14 W-2 or 1099s. That was, not coincidentally, the last year my Dad helped us prepare our taxes. :-) ____Not the real rusty The self employed get screwed I wonder if I'll be penalized for underpaying one thing whilst overpaying another, effectively giving the government a free loan Yes, you will. Overpayment in withholding doesn't count in your favor for not filing estimateds. I tell you one thing, if we wanted this country to innovate more, we wouldn't fuck the self-employed quite so badly. The (slightly) good news is that the underpayment penalties are pretty minimal. ____Not the real rusty Erm Did you know you can change your rating? If it's meant to be a three, you can make it a three. I suspect you do, and there's a joke here that I'm not getting, but just in case... ____Not the real rusty Ah, good I didn't know if this was an in-joke that I missed out on, or you didn't know you could change your rating. Glad to be of assistance. ____Not the real rusty More info Gangsta is wrong, Kuro5hin.org Inc does exist. But all the policy says is that if you submit something, you give us the right to display it here. You still control all other rights (though by inference you've lost the ability to grant someone else total online exclusivity in the future). You can use it anywhere else, in any way you want, whether paid or not, at any time as far as we're concerned. The intention of the copyright policy is to make sure that if we post an article, we are granted sufficient rights to continue displaying that article here on the site. The only time our policy would conflict with anyone else's is if someplace else required that you give them exclusive rights to online publication. ____Not the real rusty Chump Whew. Good luck with your future legal joys, if this is how you think contracts should be approached. ____Not the real rusty But... That's not really his question. He's asking about granting rights, not transferring them. And your explanation isn't really accurate either, in that if he granted you, for example, the exclusive right to display an article online, he could no longer do anything he wanted with the article. He couldn't grant someone else the right to display that article online, even though he still owns the rights to the article. Granting rights does (or can, at least) restrict what you can do with a work in the future. ____Not the real rusty How Transfer of ownership means the new owner can grant rights to others. Granting an exclusive right means they cannot. ____Not the real rusty Ok I am not a copyright lawyer. If you'd like to clarify this further, please do consult one. ____Not the real rusty Nope You won't from me. Godspeed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ummm I think this is wrong, but... ____Not the real rusty Is it A duck? ____Not the real rusty Baked frozen head? What I want to know is whether the baked frozen head of Dick Cheney is still frozen in the middle, perhaps baked with a crusty meringue coating, like baked Alaska, or whether it's the baked formerly frozen head of Dick Cheney, piping hot and savory in the middle? As you can imagine, that makes a big difference for what sort of sauce would best complement it. ____Not the real rusty Airports Our airports scare everyone. If you come to America and are frightened by our airports, it does not mean you are different from us. It just means you're human. ____Not the real rusty The armed soldiers Those have mostly gone away in US airports, I think. For about a year after 9/11 they were out in full force, camoflaged National Guardsmen toting big ass rifles were everywhere. I have no idea what they thought forest camo was doing for them in an airport, but whatever. I guess it was supposed to make them more visible, and it did. ____Not the real rusty Nope And not very close, either. :-) ____Not the real rusty In the ocean? Well, deep ocean vents produce hot water, I guess. I don't think the last line really works though, unless you stretch it to the molecular level. And the second to last line doesn't really work either. And who sleeps in hot water? Nah. Good guess, but no. ____Not the real rusty Nope Not bad, but no. ____Not the real rusty Damn I don't think you can make a convincing case for the third line with that, but for a second I thought you had a working alternate answer. That's not what I was looking for, and I don't see how it works for line 3, but good guess. ____Not the real rusty Earl Grey? Earl Grey is for grandmas. And isn't a bergamot a small rodent, similar to the mink and almost indistinguishable from its better-known Ohio cousin, the buckeye? I think they're making that up. "Bergamot oil" indeed. ____Not the real rusty Dude So, like, how do we know that, like, the color green to me is, like, the same as the color green to you? Like maybe we're seeing like totally different... like... things. And, like, when I say "your guess is wrong" maybe to you that means like "your guess is right." But if our whole universe is just like a tiny atom on the edge of a single blade of grass in a field in some other whole universe, then... like, maybe you're right in that universe. Dude. ____Not the real rusty Bing You got it. Personally, I thought it was a pretty crappy riddal. But poor Doggie is over there leaking intestines out his ears or something, and someone had to help him. My next one's better. ____Not the real rusty I did You can take a break tomorrow. I finally sent another one in. I think it sucks, but we'll see. ____Not the real rusty Probably better than it looks Super Troopers is surprisingly funny, and suffered from terrible promotion. Club Dread looks pretty stupid, but if history is any guide, it ought to be better than it looks. ____Not the real rusty I will I'm waiting for my in-laws to show up. We shall then go make bread, and carve a kayak while it's rising. After that we will trade beads and shells, and possibly... oh, here they are now. Gotta go. ____Not the real rusty Hey I haven't been writing much lately because I'm working on several other sites and buying a house. I have one full time job, two part time jobs, and the house thing is being done without any real estate agents, so I'm handling all the details of that. It adds up to not much discretionary time for me. I still read most of what's posted here, and when questions go unanswered it's generally because I know the questioner already knows the answer (or they're questions like "Why R Yoo such a fagort rusty!"). I haven't written any monthly updates because I don't really have anything to tell you. The who's online box has been fixed. We're here, keeping the site up. There isn't really any other news. And honestly, I feel pretty stupid taking a couple hours to write a monthly update that says there isn't any news just because RobotSlave (who doesn't even post here anymore) bitches about it if I don't. If there's news, I will definitely let you know. And from a more general perspective, I understand how you feel about me being quieter than I used to be, but the truth is you don't need me to be here commenting all the time. You guys write good stuff -- much better than I do. That was pretty much the point of the site to begin with. Don't waste your time wondering about me. Just do your thing with the site. I'll keep it running if you guys will keep using it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nice new account, Ed I know I was fooled. ____Not the real rusty I wish I would have met him... but now it's a little late. ____Not the real rusty As you might expect I'd go with Voxel. Their bandwidth charges will probably be cheaper than anything else you'll find, but they tend to be rather slow to get the initial setup done. I am not an impartial reviewer here, so you may feel free to factor in my existing relationship with them. It's worth giving them a look though. ____Not the real rusty The list Why didn't he mark the Jews on that list with the yellow Star of David? I believe that is traditional. In fact, it would be easier for all of us if they simply wore a similar sign, say an armband, so as to not disguise their religions. I can't see how this is anti-Semitism at all, to simply require that some people wear a public sign marking them as having political interests which inherently conflict with those of proper Americans. This program might be usefully expanded to include homosexuals and Catholics as well. After all, all we want is for this information to be public. Why won't they admit it? ____Not the real rusty You are teh... ____Not the real rusty teh... Lookout! ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Pie. ____Not the real rusty First to market Beware of being first to market. It's generally the worst place to be. You have to convince potential customers that they should give you money for something they've never heard of before, and when you eventually manage to convince enough of them, someone else comes along that saw it right away and figured out the flaws in your product (or just worked out better marketing). Riding on your effort in creating the market, they have a much easier time simply selling their improvements or their glitz. Being second to market is almost always the way to go. Find a product that makes money but you can do better. Do it better. 3) Profit! ____Not the real rusty Right now, you can't It's either sorted by the time you added the item, or not sorted rationally at all, I forget which. So the most accurate answer is grab the scoop code, add in the ability to organize, and submit a patch. But that's probably not the answer you wanted to hear. ____Not the real rusty Advice Take it easy on the running for a few days, put ice on it if it's sore, and generally let it rest. If the pain doesn't go away by itself, talk to a doctor. ____Not the real rusty Linkage The Register MS Source Comments Movable Type There have been a lot of outside links lately. Most of the current anonymous people are coming in from the Reg. ____Not the real rusty You should teach supply side economics After all, you are teh worldwide expert. There's a useful lesson in this though -- pick your story titles carefully. Nearly every K5 story will end up on the first page of google results for words in its title. ____Not the real rusty They seems to I don't know, something about Scoop seems to to be like catnip to Google. It's a common feature of nearly every scoop site that they start getting high rankings in Google way before you'd expect them to. And K5, by virtue of longevity, already had pretty good Google mojo. The combination seems to be lethal. They did include K5 in news originally, but removed it when I asked them to, since diaries were showing up much more often than actual articles. There's no way for their spider to distinguish the two without me making a "news-only" page for it to use. Which I keep meaning to, but to be honest, getting in Gogle News hasn't been that high a priority. ____Not the real rusty You should have told the truth "I forgot to wear pants" is a much better excuse, and so bizarre that it's very unlikely to be disbelieved. Besides, how often do you get to honestly say "I forgot to wear pants?" ____Not the real rusty I don't know about your profs... ...but all the ones I can remember would be pretty sympathetic to that. Hell, they were probably there. ____Not the real rusty It's a college course There's a college writing class that's using K5 for assignments. It makes a hell of a lot more sense when you realize they're being instructed to write on these topics. ____Not the real rusty I don't think I ought to say. :-) But yes, it is a college. ____Not the real rusty Same here I have pretty much the same experience. Things that I've found help a lot (not that I'm always able to do them, but they definitely do help when I do): Make a schedule and keep it. I find that working into the night, even when you're on a roll, ends up being a net loss compared to getting up, going to bed, and eating at predictable times. Make a todo list, keep adding to it, and the days when you're unmotivated, pick some moron work to get done. Pay bills, make phone calls, do something, even if it's not what you should be doing. There are ups and downs, and you have to be able to make worthwhile use of the down time somehow. Take real time off. Crusing websites and reading newsgroups might be a way to substitute for time you're not taking off. Take at least one day a week and try not to do any "work" work. Clean the house, etc. Get a mental reset. At least once a month, get two consecutive days away from the machine. (This applies more to me since I work at home -- it may not be so relevant for you.) Do other things sometimes. Don't let writing take over your life, but make time for it, and don't feel guilty about doing it. You have a creative brain -- let it get some exercise in other fields. Your coding will probably be better for it. That's what comes to mind right now. Maybe you already do all these things, in which case I've got nothing for you. :-) ____Not the real rusty I heard you weren't bad CT said there were much worse comedians than you. I know that isn't the best imaginable review or anything, but for what it's worth. Is it the material, or your delivery that people aren't responding to? Maybe you're just a better writer. ____Not the real rusty Broken server fan Check the status page on the mefi wiki. ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Cornish hen. ____Not the real rusty Ah yes The three great classic lies... "I thought she was 18!" "We can't find the tapes!" and of course, "Your birds are in the mail." :-) ____Not the real rusty Why? Seeing the score has no effect on anything. ____Not the real rusty Not over yet Dean's said that even if he doesn't win WI, he's not dropping out. Is it a long shot? Oh yeah. But still, long shots sometimes happen, and he's less of a long shot now than when this race started last summer. ____Not the real rusty Fried Green Tomatoes Not the first time. The first time I was dragged to it, I thought "Ok, chick flick, but not too bad. Whatever." The second time, I thought "Wow. That was really boring when you know what's going to happen." No, the worst movie ever was the third fucking time I was dragged to Fried Green Tomatoes. It was gouging-eyes-out-with-soft-drink-straw time, for real. As for worst movies ever: U-Turn Nothing but Trouble The last Highlander movie ____Not the real rusty The last one? Jesus, compared to the last one, the others were Shakespeare. It had no narrative. Half of it was blown-up TV footage. Did I mention it had no narrative? At all? And many, many scenes were played multiple times, to fill out the 80 minutes? It was bizarre. ____Not the real rusty All that may be true, but... As someone who will, if pressured, admit that I watched the TV series faithfully, and did at least see the other movies, I still say that the last movie lacked even what extremely limited positive qualities the rest of the franchise had. Otherwise, I agree with all of your observations. ____Not the real rusty CNN is sorry to report That the body of former K5 user "Nigga" was found early this morning floating gently by the shore of a local lake. Witnesses report that he was boating, at 3AM, very much alone, when he somehow bumped his head and drowned before anyone could reach him. "He was completely alone," repeated witnesses. "Oh why should such a solitary accidental tragedy happen to such a good man?" ____Not the real rusty Orkut! All aboard for data mining! ____Not the real rusty Hey That was remarkably perceptive. Maybe I was wrong about you. ____Not the real rusty Electability Electability! ____Not the real rusty Nope He's the author, so he can see the whole story. For the purposes of others though, your link is more useful. ____Not the real rusty s/great leader/humble servant/; ____Not the real rusty I am fine Thank you for your concern, though. I've just been working a lot and not had much time or news for K5. I am, at the moment, just reading quietly. ____Not the real rusty Hell hath no fury... ...like a landlord when the rent's due. :-) I still love you, and I visit all the time. But sometimes daddy has to work, and you should play quietly and not disturb him, or we'll all be out on the street eating from dumpsters. Metaphorically, of course. ____Not the real rusty Hey chief K5 offers advertising at very reasonable rates. I suggest you use it if you want to promote your service. Apparently deleting the first one didn't get the message through, and I apologize for that. Hopefully this is less ambiguous. ____Not the real rusty It was good I'm definitely not a football fan, but when the hometown team (more or less) is in the Superbowl, you can't not watch. And much to my surprise it was actually a good game. Closely matched, and right down to the wire. And whatever they're paying Adam Vinatieri, they should double it. ____Not the real rusty Bah He came through when it really counted, as he's done on numerous occasions. And neither of us can say what would have happened if he'd made the other ones. It would become a whole new game at that point. What matters is that he came through in the clutch. ____Not the real rusty Bah! COMMANDER CLUTCH-KICK! CLUTCHMASTER GENERAL! :-) ____Not the real rusty We'd all forgotten here in the US We've been busy shutting down weapons of mass destruction related program activities. So how are the squatting in a cave on the Pakistan border related program activities going? ____Not the real rusty No He's right on #2. I always said it jokingly, but it sure has seemed to help. ____Not the real rusty Backslash Kill autoformat where you want by backslash-escaping stuff. For example: 8:00:08 PM 8:44:35 PM won't work, but: \8:00:08 PM \8:44:35 PM will do what you want. You can do this with any of the autoformat codes. ____Not the real rusty Meh For a much more reasonable view, see The Reg. It's amusing to see the "Big Brother" line already spreading though. ____Not the real rusty I heard it live I happened to have NPR on when he actually made the speech, and though the strangled croak at the end was rather striking, I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was pretty funny, but I didn't think it meant anything about the man himself, and I still don't. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I agree with Orlowski that basically Dean is not an expert on technological issues, and he was given bad advice, probably by Trippi (an investor in Wave). The text of the speech shows a pretty great naivete with respect to what's possible or feasable to do. I doubt Dean would make the same speech today, although ironically his campaign has been one of the best proofs yet of the "power at the edges of the network," and how it can be used for good. ____Not the real rusty Show your love! Vote for MetaFilter! ____Not the real rusty Sometimes They've had their trolls, and users have been booted. They tend to be a lot less permissive than we are here, and also the discussions there are not geared so much toward discussion as toward individual comments. Also, new registrations being closed most of the time effectively prevents people from doing the new account thing. But as for whether there's a community there? I think there definitely is. I don't think you could spend much time reading or hanging out there and miss it. ____Not the real rusty Yup He truned into a crapflooder. I was disappointed too. ____Not the real rusty I got a ton of these today I figured it was a new worm. Whoopee. But what number 3 are you talking about? ____Not the real rusty We're a bit more practical here This time of year it's very amusing to go down and meet one of the commuter boats and watch the people getting off. Islanders share your sense that fashion is far less important than survival, so everyone looks like the Michelin man. My walking around clothes in this kind of weather typically consist of: Two pairs thick hiking socks Sturdy boots Polypropelene long underwear tops and bottoms Jeans (may be upgraded to fleece pants and gore-tex shell pants if the temps are below zero and/or the wind is above 20 kts) Windproof fleece half-zip pullover Fleece vest Shell coat with hood fully deployed Fleece glove liners under fluffy fleece convertible mitten-gloves (similar to yours) Windproof hat Fleece face mask / neck warmer This is all arranged so as to leave a one inch wide crescent of exposed skin around the eyes. It seems like there aren't many nerve endings in the tiny space between your eyes, so I have never suffered from leaving this one spot exposed. The only drawback is that I can't actually turn my head, so I'm forced to basically rotate my entire body in order to look in any direction. It's a small price to pay though. ____Not the real rusty Frah-gee-lay? Must be Italian! [nt] ____Not the real rusty Harsh Interesting side note: at -40 you do not need to specify Celcius of Fahrenheit, as they are the same. Either way, that's rough. The worst it's been here is around -10F. I don't particularly want to see how much colder it could be. Of course, it is your own fault for living in Montreal. :-) ____Not the real rusty Good luck I'm pretty sure you're not me, but hey, if people want to think you are, you're welcome to it. In fact, why fight it? In the future, I shall be sure to refer all critics to you. Please do with them what you will. ____Not the real rusty We'd all forgotten here in the US We've been busy shutting down weapons of mass destruction related program activities. So how are the squatting in a cave on the Pakistan border related program activities going? ____Not the real rusty No He's right on #2. I always said it jokingly, but it sure has seemed to help. ____Not the real rusty Backslash Kill autoformat where you want by backslash-escaping stuff. For example: 8:00:08 PM 8:44:35 PM won't work, but: \8:00:08 PM \8:44:35 PM will do what you want. You can do this with any of the autoformat codes. ____Not the real rusty Meh For a much more reasonable view, see The Reg. It's amusing to see the "Big Brother" line already spreading though. ____Not the real rusty I heard it live I happened to have NPR on when he actually made the speech, and though the strangled croak at the end was rather striking, I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was pretty funny, but I didn't think it meant anything about the man himself, and I still don't. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I agree with Orlowski that basically Dean is not an expert on technological issues, and he was given bad advice, probably by Trippi (an investor in Wave). The text of the speech shows a pretty great naivete with respect to what's possible or feasable to do. I doubt Dean would make the same speech today, although ironically his campaign has been one of the best proofs yet of the "power at the edges of the network," and how it can be used for good. ____Not the real rusty Show your love! Vote for MetaFilter! ____Not the real rusty Sometimes They've had their trolls, and users have been booted. They tend to be a lot less permissive than we are here, and also the discussions there are not geared so much toward discussion as toward individual comments. Also, new registrations being closed most of the time effectively prevents people from doing the new account thing. But as for whether there's a community there? I think there definitely is. I don't think you could spend much time reading or hanging out there and miss it. ____Not the real rusty Yup He truned into a crapflooder. I was disappointed too. ____Not the real rusty I got a ton of these today I figured it was a new worm. Whoopee. But what number 3 are you talking about? ____Not the real rusty We're a bit more practical here This time of year it's very amusing to go down and meet one of the commuter boats and watch the people getting off. Islanders share your sense that fashion is far less important than survival, so everyone looks like the Michelin man. My walking around clothes in this kind of weather typically consist of: Two pairs thick hiking socks Sturdy boots Polypropelene long underwear tops and bottoms Jeans (may be upgraded to fleece pants and gore-tex shell pants if the temps are below zero and/or the wind is above 20 kts) Windproof fleece half-zip pullover Fleece vest Shell coat with hood fully deployed Fleece glove liners under fluffy fleece convertible mitten-gloves (similar to yours) Windproof hat Fleece face mask / neck warmer This is all arranged so as to leave a one inch wide crescent of exposed skin around the eyes. It seems like there aren't many nerve endings in the tiny space between your eyes, so I have never suffered from leaving this one spot exposed. The only drawback is that I can't actually turn my head, so I'm forced to basically rotate my entire body in order to look in any direction. It's a small price to pay though. ____Not the real rusty Frah-gee-lay? Must be Italian! [nt] ____Not the real rusty Harsh Interesting side note: at -40 you do not need to specify Celcius of Fahrenheit, as they are the same. Either way, that's rough. The worst it's been here is around -10F. I don't particularly want to see how much colder it could be. Of course, it is your own fault for living in Montreal. :-) ____Not the real rusty Good luck I'm pretty sure you're not me, but hey, if people want to think you are, you're welcome to it. In fact, why fight it? In the future, I shall be sure to refer all critics to you. Please do with them what you will. ____Not the real rusty 6', 150 And I can showshoe 16 miles in a day. So I'm in pretty good shape. :-) ____Not the real rusty Rust ffoser is gay? Ha ha. You fail it. ____Not the real rusty Iowa He got in the race late and decided to skip the Iowa caucuses. He's been spending all his time up in New Hampshire lately, where he's gained some ground while the rest of the field is concentrating on Iowa. Most of the media stuff lately has been Iowa-related, which is why you haven't seen much of him. He'll be back in a week though, when the focus moves back to New Hampshire. ____Not the real rusty Bush the centrist Bush ran an extremely centrist campaign. He and Gore, in fact, had nearly indistinguishable platforms, which was IMO why the vote was so close. It was apparently a coin toss between two identical candidates. At the very least, Bush will have a much harder time pulling that crap again. We've had four years to see what an extremist administration he really had up his sleeve. ____Not the real rusty Kerry? Jeez. There's such a thing as taking loyalty too far. I think Kerry's a fine Senator, but I don't see him as president. Not to even mention that of all of them he's been the one spending the most time and energy trying to discredit and attack the other Democrats, instead of show people why they should vote for him. And if he did such a great job in Iran-Contra why did that whole pack of crooked weasels get off scot-free? ____Not the real rusty Woo hoo! First Scoop developer baby. So at last we have proof that Scoop does not make you sterile. We're all very relieved. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not so My older sister has already bestowed that title on them twice, so they don't need to wait for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Baldrson is a geniune nut He's apparently moved on from being a well known usenet nut to being a well known K5 nut. ____Not the real rusty drduck I did shut off his rating abilities once, and he emailed me to explain himself. He's a guy with a whole lot of free time for a few reasons who doesn't like to comment but wanted to make what he felt was a contribution to the site. He maintains, and I have examined and re-examined the logs and can find no evidence to the contrary (and plenty to support him), that he does all of his ratings manually. Basically, he's not doing anything wrong. He's not using scripts, he's not selectively targeting individuals for abuse, he's simply using the system in a much more constant and persistent way than anyone else. If you still disagree with me, that's fine. As long as you understand that it's not a refusal to investigate or make a decision on my part. I just can't justify to myself the idea that he's abusing anything. ____Not the real rusty As far as I can tell He's not. Obviously there's no way to be absolutely sure, but it's never been particularly hard to figure out in other cases. If it's a dupe, it's one that has been set up with an enormous amount of care and consistency. I don't believe it is. ____Not the real rusty Respect, eh I'd have more respect for you if you had made any big mistakes in the field of moderation. To make mistakes as dumb as mine, it is first necessary to attempt to do something. No, I don't think moderation works particularly well here. I'm conforted by the fact that it doesn't work any better anywhere else, and that no one else understands it much better than I do, including you. ____Not the real rusty Theory? Well, clearly the decay of the beta neutron has led to a significant readjustment in the Flarn Dialysis field, thereby causing people to move their diaries to HuSi in order to balance the mementum of the 2-spin boson products. I don't know. I didn't know it needed a theory. I think most of the people who moved have been pretty vocal in their reasons, and I think some of the criticisms are useful and some are not. ____Not the real rusty Welcome bakc! We msissed yuo! ____Not the real rusty Aye Dailykos has actually mentioned the DC primary a few times. And as a former resident, I am with you in your apparently never-ending fight for representation. The way DC is governed is shameful and senseless, and those American citizens need to get their representation the day before yesterday as far as I'm concerned. ____Not the real rusty Same old... ...story for four years. They're very welcome to form their own site, and I wish them all the best. ____Not the real rusty Pshaw rustV indeed. ____Not the real rusty Ignore child comment [nt] ____Not the real rusty I gotcher answers Rosebud. Prince Albert in a can. "Prince Albert" is a brand of tobacco. An early prank call favorite was to call up a store and ask them if they had Prince Albert in a can. When the storekeeper answered yes, the prankster would lay down the hilarious punchline: "Well you'd better let him out!" Hee-haw. I fart in your general direction. ____Not the real rusty Thermometer Hey, I got one of those wireless remote thermometers for Christmas too. It's been out since we got back, and the memory shows an all-time low of -4.5. I think next week will push that down a bit though. It might be cheaper to just get someone in to look at the radiators. Those things can do a decent heating job if they're in working order. ____Not the real rusty Anonymous/private? Yikes. Before you write personal stuff that you will regret, do be aware that any reader here is three clicks away from your real name, home address, and phone number. And there are a lot more readers here than at your weblog. It may feel more private, but in reality, it is way more public. Not that you should be dissuaded, just keep it in mind. :-) ____Not the real rusty But... ...what shall it 4. Profit! a man, if he shall gain a 3 from drduck, and lose his own soul ____Not the real rusty Space A line that's stuck with me for a while was something Bruce Sterling (I think) wrote once about space being a big empty void with no business model. That's paraphrased but pretty close. The space program is great. Exploration is part of the human character, and we would do ourselves a disservice to pretend we weren't driven to it. But by the same argument, we've been to the moon. Planting another flag in the lunar dust is not a meaningful goal. Send more cheap robots to explore farther out. Start (or continue) laying the groundwork for boots on Mars. The only worthwhile space exploration will be that which pays off long after the president who presided over its initiation is out of office. Anything else is just a stunt. ____Not the real rusty Rosebud [nt] ____Not the real rusty Rosebud! Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, I don't think it would have explained everything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece. ____Not the real rusty Ha! kuro6hin.org is their notslashdot.org, apparently. I hope hulver's as embarassed by this as I was about that. ____Not the real rusty Frozen pipes... ...are bad mmmkay. I hope when it unfreezes it doesn't flood out a sinkhole under your driveway. In other news, I long for the day when our weather is worse than yours. What the hell is the point of living in Maine if people in western Mass have it just as bad? ____Not the real rusty Right Your terms were $25 to the ACLU and $25 to who? ____Not the real rusty Got it ____Not the real rusty Happy New Year I lose. Make it go away yourself Display Preferences -> Boxes -> Who's Online -> uncheck ____Not the real rusty I've still got a day and a half [nt] ____Not the real rusty I would respond that they are wrong. ____Not the real rusty History? Isn't it more likely that they're using them for cryptographic purposes? The "researching targets" thing is pure hogwash, and the fact that it's about a specific magazine makes me think that they're using it as a code book. Don't know why the feds are being all cagey about it, since if The Terrorists are listening they surely know that we know that they know... well, you know. ____Not the real rusty Tax dodge Rogerborg has had a huge chip on his shoulder for ages. I'd like to see his evidence that the CMF is a "tax dodge", or even an explanation of how it could be, when it isn't incorporated yet. He's certainly entitled to his opinion about me or anything I do, but that statement, which he's repeated over and over, accuses me of a specific crime, and I'm pretty sick of it. So, Rogerborg, I know you still lurk around here. Put up or shut up. Prove it, or stop accusing me of criminal acts. ____Not the real rusty I'm probably screwed The article I had planned is not going to happen in time. So unless I think of something good today or tomorrow, you might well be getting your Christmas wish. ____Not the real rusty He was dumb enough... ...to use his home IP for a script that was hammering us with pointless requests. I IP banned it because it would be stupid to allow the traffic to continue and degrade performance for everyone else. How was your Christmas, Tex? ____Not the real rusty Nah The IP banning and script thing was very recent, and we had a good long time without significant downtime problems before that. ____Not the real rusty Heh Sorry. How was your Hanukkah? ____Not the real rusty It was good I forced myself to avoid this blasted machine for two whole days. It was an extremely good idea. I'm sure you can already tell how much less stressed I'm feeling. :-) ____Not the real rusty Partly I said I would be able to keep K5 up and running, and hopefully improve it. I did that. I have also not asked for more money since then, and K5's finances are pretty limited, but stable at this point. So I did what I said I would do. I haven't gotten the CMF started yet, which was another thing I said I would do. I'm pretty sure this bothers me more than anyone else, with the possible exception of Rogerborg. When it does take over, I know that I will be more relieved than anyone, including Rogerborg. In any case, I'm not objecting to his legitimate criticisms. Most of what he says is true, and though I think he could be more constructive I can understand his opinion of me. The only thing I object to is his consistent accusations of criminal behavior, which are not true and especially annoying considering the amount of time, hassle, and expense it takes to keep my books and taxes up to date and legal. ____Not the real rusty 52 changes Documented here. ____Not the real rusty Electric lines Buried lines are much more expensive, and require more land. For example:Q. Besides sinkholes and earthquakes, what are the reasons TVA does not bury power lines? Would it be possible to run them underground through densely populated areas? Have any studies been done on how deep power lines would have to be buried to avoid the effects of magnetic fields? A. Many miles of buried electric power lines exist. However, most of these underground lines are part of lower-voltage distribution systems rather than high voltage transmission systems. In instances where 345-kV power lines are buried, installation requires a trenching operation involving a `canal' 20 feet wide or more and burial at least 15 feet deep. The equipment necessary to dig, place, and cover the conductor and pipe requires as much as an additional 40 to 60 feet of cleared area in addition to the easement. Due to the extensive work involved in burying the more costly conductors, underground transmission lines are far more expensive than overhead lines. A common misconception is that burying a transmission conductor reduces the strength of magnetic fields when compared to an overhead installation. This is generally not true since the distance from the buried conductor to the point of measurement is typically shorter than the distance to an overhead conductor. Although a distribution-system power line is lower in voltage, if it's improperly designed or installed underground it can produce a magnetic field with a higher intensity than a high-voltage overhead transmission line. Once buried, distribution-system lines have proven to be less reliable than overhead installations due to a variety of environmental factors. These include conductor heat buildup, underground water, and even attacks from bacteria. These problems affect the conductor insulation and can lead to failure. No good tools presently exist for finding such problems and correcting them. Correction typically involves extensive digging, removing the conductor, fixing or repairing it, and then reburying it. At first look, burying a transmission line may appear to be a good alternative to installing an overhead line; however, digging a miniature "Panama Canal" and filling it back in with the power lines at the bottom has a far greater effect on the environment and community, with no guarantee that it won't have to be dug up again just a few years down the road. Additionally, experience has shown that an underground installation is likely to increase the magnetic field intensity to which people could be exposed. Installing towers with conductors suspended overhead remains the safer and more environmentally practical alternative to the very expensive underground installation of transmission lines for most situations. The cost of putting a line underground would be 10 to 20 times higher than that of an overhead line.I also don't think I've ever seen a power pole or tower blow down from wind. When they do go down, it's typically because they're hit by falling trees or get overloaded with ice. I don't think I'd characterize them as "flimsy". But hey, it's not the German way of doing things, so regardless of anything else, it must be Wrong. I too have dealt with Germans. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow Do you ever have your stories mixed up. I did the same for fluffy and Vlad, and eventually they both blamed me for their compulsive biting, so I stopped trying to defend them. ____Not the real rusty Dear God Red Green is an actual TV producer in Canuckistan? Why does his show always look like it was made by accident in someone's basement? On the other hand, this might finally explain the mystery of Degrassi Junior High. ____Not the real rusty Still, you can take heart Even Canadian TV looks more polished than British TV. :-) ____Not the real rusty PS How do you spell "doomed"? I actually LOLed. You should try to get a writing gig. As a graphics person who can actually write, you are a total freakish aberration, and you'd be better serving your fellow man (and woman) with your words. ____Not the real rusty True A South Park style smash hit cartoon series would be just the thing for you. Writing and graphics. Any chance of reviving or modifying your abortive series? ____Not the real rusty Give I am, as they say, a giver. ____Not the real rusty No, unfortunately Just a giver. ____Not the real rusty Name and shame, man Those fuckers. First, you'll be better off out of there, which I know you already knew. Second, K5 has a lot of Googlejuice. Please post the name of the company you were fired from so we may spread the word about how they treat their employees. Preferably in the title of a new diary. Repeatedly. ____Not the real rusty Nope Just to be sure to entitle all his regular new diaries "[Company] Screws its Employees" for, oh say, the next year. I would be glad to assist in this effort as well. ____Not the real rusty Anonymity It's already trivially easy to find out aph's real name and location. And I actually know who the company in question is. I just leave it to his discretion whether he wants to say or not. ____Not the real rusty Qveere Eye for thye Medieval Man Look! I'm bloggerizifying! I'm bodysurfing the blogospheriverse! I'm radically reinventing journalism! This is funny. Mood: Intransigent. Listening to: Plastic Bertrand "a Plane Pour Moi" It'll be all over daypop by the end of the day, I assure you. ____Not the real rusty Who? ____Not the real rusty Me neither. :-) ____Not the real rusty Me too. ____Not the real rusty Damn! ____Not the real rusty Yay! I'm glad someone else knows that song. It's a miracle of one-note composition. ____Not the real rusty Hey, good news Now I suppose you'll disappear too, like that rizzo bastard. It seems like diaries are bad-times-only around here. :-) ____Not the real rusty Blah Lucky bastard. It's rain here. Melting all our snow and probably will cause flooding later on. ____Not the real rusty It was nice up here Boston got rain in the last storm, which then froze. But here it never changed over, so we had a lively foot to 18 inches of fresh snow everywhere. Now we have eight inches of liqufying slush. It's hypothermia weather out there for sure. ____Not the real rusty I don't know It's 45 here right now, and not supposed to get below 35 tonight. I guess we'll see. The weather models definitely expect it to stay warm here. ____Not the real rusty God? Sorry, but that description, "god wanted to "mark" his people" just gave me a mental image. God: Hey, you. Person: Me? God: Yeah you. Are you one of mine? Person: Sure. God: I don't believe you. Show me your cock. ____Not the real rusty In spring And in the late summer, at harvest time, they will have a whole crop of maple-leaf flag trees. ____Not the real rusty The lid The pit was covered with a styrofoam lid. I don't see how you could lock someone in a pit with styrofoam. It was, at most, eight feet deep, and I would think any halfway motivated prisoner could bust out of an eight foot deep hole with a styrofoam lid. Especially a prisoner with a pistol. Basically, it seems spectacularly unlikely. ____Not the real rusty Best NWS extended forecast discussion ever From today's National Weather Service extended forecast discussion (link unfortunately perishable):BY THU EVE HOWEVER...AN AREA OF HIGH UNCERTAINTY BEGINS TO SPREAD EWD ACROSS THE NATION FROM THE PACIFIC. THE 12Z/13 GFS HAS HUGE CONTINUITY CHANGES FROM ITS 00Z RUN THAT CAUSE OUR CONFIDENCE LEVEL TO PLUMMET OVER THE WRN HALF OF THE CONUS BY FRI DAY 6. OUR LOW CONFIDENCE ENCOMPASSES THE WRN 3/4 OF THE LOWER 48 BY SAT DAY 7.An area of high uncertainty spreading Eastward across the nation from the Pacific! Plummeting confidence to encompass the western three-quarters of the continental US! Dark days ahead, meterologically speaking. And soon With all that uncertainty, I might not be able to find the yacht if I wait too long. ____Not the real rusty As I feared We won the war and now we're well on our way to disastrously losing the peace. If there's any justice at all in the world, that bunch of criminals and fuckups at 1600 Penn. Ave. have only got 11 more months to go. ____Not the real rusty That would be funny If it were still possible for protesters to get within ten blocks of the White House. But the whole are is a code red triple-security zone now. If you squint, you can just see a gleam of white in the far off distance, past all the barricades. ____Not the real rusty Oh jesus christ, man I'm sick of this crap. If you're going to post an IRC log, post the whole thing. Don't edit it down for your convenience. Here's how the conversation actually went: <Big Sexxy Joe>: Hi rusty! <rusty>: Hi <Big Sexxy Joe>: What are you doing? <rusty>: I'm watching the new Paris Hilton sex tape. <Big Sexxy Joe>: She's pretty hot. <rusty>: Yeah, you know what I would like to do? <Big Sexxy Joe>: What? <rusty>: I'd like to fuck her in the ass no lube. Then I'd strangle her, cut her up in little pieces, and bury her in the woods near the railroad tracks. Each year on the anniversary of our union I'd jerk off on her grave to comemorate this great event. <Big Sexxy Joe>: That's pretty messed up. <Big Sexxy Joe>: But I'd like to do that too. When I get elected President. <Big Sexxy Joe>: Vote for me. <rusty>: Why? What are you, gay? <Big Sexxy Joe>: Yes. But don't tell anyone we had this conversation. <rusty>: Ok. <Big Sexxy Joe>: Also, I shop at Wal-Mart. <rusty>: You cock bite. <Big Sexxy Joe>: My pastor says I'm just artistic. :( ____Not the real rusty That makes sense He did keep muttering about putting Paris Hilton in a "lockbox." I had no idea what he was talking about at the time... ____Not the real rusty Blogging grandma I read this post of Matt's today, and it reminded me of the time my Mom mailed me an article she thought I'd find interesting. That's not strange by itself, but the article was from the Washington Post, and she'd found it online, printed it, and mailed it to me. USPS. Yeah. We had a little chat about how to email links after that. Ha I have no idea what the article was. This was a couple years ago, I think while I was still in DC but maybe when I was in SF. ____Not the real rusty Me too I was actually just impressed that she was reading the Post online. It's all one step at a time, you know. ____Not the real rusty I like it Thanks, Stick. Doing more research on my story today... ____Not the real rusty Or it gets the hose again. ____Not the real rusty Please circle the correct answer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- &pipe;* I believe drduck is a genuine account, and I don't delete him because I'm a hypocrite.&pipe; -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- * I believe drduck is a dupe account, and I don't delete him because I'm a hypocrite. * I believe drduck is a script, and I don't delete it because I'm a hypocrite. ____Not the real rusty Blogbox It doesn't work for me... Hey also, I noticed the Dean campaign site is using a laszlo app for their events calendar (which does work for me). It looks pretty damn slick. ____Not the real rusty Doubt it Correction officers get paid pretty well. Hotel employees largely do not. Plus to run a prison you need hundreds of guards. Even a large hotel hasn't got more than a few people on staff who are making over $40,000. And C.O. benefits are much more extensive than hotel employees. ____Not the real rusty As it happens I just started reading Ted Conover's "Newjack". For more specifics: Conover says that in 2000, when he started at Ossining, there were between 700 and 750 security employees for a total population of 2,369 prisoners. Earlier in the book he says that at the time, the starting pay for officers was $23,824, and that after eight years they made up to $40,000. So figure that the average is maybe $30,000. That makes the Sing Sing payroll $22.5 million a year, or $9497.67 per prisoner per year. That makes $26 a day per prisoner, just in guard wages alone. Add to that the cost of benefits, insurance, facilities and maintenance, administrative overhead, training, food, clothing, bedding, electricity, etc etc. If anything, I'm surprised it's as low as $137 a day. And all this for, in the vast majority of cases, mandatorily-sentenced drug offenses. It's only a matter of time before we figure out that our drug policy has been a massive, shameful failure and is costing us insanely in terms of both money and human lives. ____Not the real rusty See numbers below I think you're grossly underestimating the cost of keeping people locked up against their will. See my other comment here, and if you're interested in the question, that book I linked to is really very good. ____Not the real rusty Dunno It doesn't surprise me, so I guess we are just working with different premises here. I don't think the expense of running prisons and that of hotels is really even comparable. And I also think you're overestimating the value of the "free maintenance" the prisoners provide. The guy who pushes the mop is not a major expense. Prisons still have to hire contractors to do any skilled work. When was the last time you were at a hotel that had one employee per three guests? Not even the most high-end luxury cruise lines have that ratio. And a hotel just sits there while you check in and check out. A prison has to transport prisoners everywhere they go, including transfers, court appointments, etc. Hotels don't have to maintain a complex security regimen. Hotels don't have to equip and maintain an arsenal of weapons and equipment for extracting unruly guests from their rooms... the list just goes on and on. Anywho. It's silly for me to sit here and try to convince you. I don't care that much. :-) But that is a good book, if you'd like to see where I'm coming from in thinking it's not an outlandish figure. ____Not the real rusty That was why ____Not the real rusty Drama queen. [nt] ____Not the real rusty That's really cool Can you tell us about the code you use to generate it? Especially about how this World66 mapping works. ____Not the real rusty Yes I'm already very jealous. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nice storm What does a nor'easter look like? NOAA buoy 44005, 78 nm east of Portsmouth, NH, provides pictures: Atmospheric pressure Wind speed Wave height I'd have linked to good ol' 44007, which is maybe 10 miles from here as the crow flies, but it is currently providing only the ominous message "No Current Reports." I think 44007 is in need of repair. Maybe laughing, maybe grimacing in pain Did you, as promised, stand on the beach, in your windbreaker, laughing in the teeth of the gale? Yes I did. With snow driven into my face by thirty-five knot winds, it sounded like "Ha-OW! Ha-OW! Ha-OW!" I imagine if you were the gale, it wouldn't have been very convincing. And the basement has been cleaned up for a while. The plumbing still doesn't work completely right, but enough. ____Not the real rusty No frogs They'd have been dangerously frozen frogsicles anyway. ____Not the real rusty It's a contract You retain the copyright to your work, but what copyright means is the ability to enter into a binding contract with someone else about whether they can display (or copy or perform) your work or not. The license here is just that -- a contract between you and K5. It says that we have certain rights, namely the right to display your work here on K5, and to make derivative works for stories. It also says that you reserve certain rights, namely all current and future copyrights ownership of your work. It says that we have certain responsibilities, like not using your work in any other medium and in fact not even moving it to any other web address in this medium. Assuming we haven't broken our end of the deal, you can't just back out of your end unless we agree to it. Your continued ownership of the copyright to your work grants you the right to make future contracts with us or anyone else, but not the right to alter a contract we already have. And your end of the deal says that we decide whether your work is displayed here or not. What a world we live in, when relatively ordinary people like you and me even have to know any of this shit. ____Not the real rusty A contract is a contract Say you made a contract with a neighbor to sell your boat to him for one hundred dollars, and then he gave you a hundred dollars and you gave him your boat. Then a week later you decided you didn't want to sell your boat after all. You can go over there and ask him if you can have your boat back, and there's every chance in the world he'll just say no. Even if you offer the hundred dollars back, he's under no obligation whatsoever to take it. The contract was formed and agreed to by both parties, the terms carried out, and he is not in any breach. You have no right to cancel the contract. Retaining your copyright means you retain the right to enter into new contracts with us or anyone else. To change a contract requires either a breach or a legal finding that the contract is illegal, or the mutual agreement of both parties. That would mean, if K5 would not agree to a change, we couldn't end the contract with K5 and would have therefore lost the capability to enter in a new contract or basically change the license we granted to K5. No -- you would not have lost the right to enter into new contracts with us (or anyone). But simply entering into a contract (any contract, of any kind) and executing its terms means that you no longer have the right to change those terms. This is pretty much the bedrock foundation of property rights, and without that you have no such thing as a binding contract, no such thing as property, and basically a world that looks a hell of a lot different than the one we have now. ____Not the real rusty Still wrong, but getting better I'm really glad to see you looked up some info about copyright. You already know more than you did before, and I'm inspired to take one more shot at explaining why the situation is not what you think it is. Now, the key piece you're missing is that when you license one or more of these rights to K5, you do not grant us ownership of them. Ownership means the ability to grant rights to a work to someone else. Being the grantee of some rights does not empower me to grant those rights to anyone else. Say that you, to use one of your previous analogies, wrote a book. Then you hired me to print a thousand copies of that book and sell them for you. You would have to grant me the legal right to sell and distribute those copies of your work, under terms which would be agreed in a contract. I could then print up the copies, and sell them under any terms conforming to our contract. I could not, however, sell or give the right to reproduce your work to anyone else. I couldn't call up my buddy at another printer and send him your work to print up another thousand copies. That's because I am a licensee, not a copyright owner. In the exact same way, K5 is a licensee of your posts here. You give us the right to display here at this website, work that you post here. K5 cannot sell or give your words to anyone else to publish, in this medium or any other. You, on the other hand, can grant the right to print or display anything you post here under any terms you want to anyone in the world, because you are the copyright owner, both before, during and after your work appears here on K5. Also, to clarify another point, anyone can copy limited portions of your work anywhere, under fair use exemptions (such as quoting pieces of your text). No one else has the right to take a copy of it from K5 and post or display it anywhere else, and I cannot grant anyone that right. There are archives out there which are not under my control that do keep copies, but all of them would have to remove their copies of your work if you demanded it, because you have not granted them the right to display it. By posting it here, you only grant K5 that right, and the right to publish does not "stick" to the work being published. Just because it's available in public doesn't mean anyone can copy it. They can't -- that, in fact, is exactly what copyright is for. About transferability, I don't think it's an issue. What will happen is that K5 Inc, the corporation that owns K5 and all its assets, will dissolve and donate those assets to the nonprofit CMF. The limited display rights we have for the stuff posted here would be one of those assets. It's not a situation where there's a K5 and a CMF, both claiming rights. It's a situation where there's one set of rights which goes along with everything else formerly owned by K5 Inc (servers and so forth) when that former company is absorbed by the CMF. I will, however, be sure to talk to the lawyer before then to make sure all the i's are crossed and t's dotted about that. ____Not the real rusty "Fuck you starving African children." And they said there were no depths left for us to plumb. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh I've programmed a small HTTP program... That was the best part. :-) ____Not the real rusty Holy Crap! I just read this and looked out the window and you're right! It's goddamn snowing! There's like a foot on the ground, it must have been snowing all day! Jesus! Why don't I hear about these things? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Meh The wind was impressive, but we didn't actually get that much snow. Unless it all skimmed right across the island and blew southwest, in which case I feel bad for Cape Elizabeth, which must be under about eight feet right now. That could be what happened. Anyway, only like 6 or 8 inches here, as far as I can tell. ____Not the real rusty Shhhhhh! Does that mean the people who are at HuSi who were using the downtime as an excuse for leaving will come back? Jesus Christ, man. Let's see... uptime sucks, compulsive reloaders leave... uptime improves. You think that's a goddamn coincidence? And now you're inviting them back? Shut up! ____Not the real rusty Snow! We're going to get this storm after all. And they're whispering the magic word... "stall." Just a remote possibility so far, but hey. This thing could get stuck right on top of us and dump snow from dawn Saturday to Monday morning. Even if not, it looks like we're in for 1 to 2 feet. God, I love blizzards. I hope we have a blizzard every week this winter. ____Not the real rusty Good call It's just started to really get down to business here. They're talking about two feet for us. Fortunately, I don't have to go anywhere. I might take a walk around the north end of the island tonight and see what kind of hell the seas are raising. ____Not the real rusty Report At least seven kinds of hell, gusting to nine. ____Not the real rusty Wise I think real names are the only way to go. When you hit preview, you see your name there every time. It's a hell of a reminder that you are writing something in public, and if you don't feel comfortable putting your name on it, you better not say it. ____Not the real rusty There should be a button... ...that posts a "Hello! I'm new, but this site looks very cool." diary. And then has some friendly conversation, and then gets in an argument with someone, and then posts a bunch of angry diaries about how much everyone here sucks, and then creates three ill-considered troll accounts, and attempts to troll for a week while failing to disguise the poster's actual desire to feel accepted and loved, and then makes a new non-troll account and posts another diary giving up trolling and accepting that you don't have to like everyone here to still find it interesting. I think this would significantly speed up most people's K5 using experience. ____Not the real rusty New poll It is time for a new poll. Who's got one? And free internet access for Brazil's unemployed? Jesus, no wonder there's so many trolls here lately. ____Not the real rusty Done ____Not the real rusty I don't have any window blinds [nt] ____Not the real rusty What a nightmare I am about to plunge myself into that horrible netherworld. I'm trying to enjoy my last few months of freedom. It feels like the last few days of summer vacation as a kid. ____Not the real rusty I know And I'm excited about owning a house. But the wilderness of financing it is frightening. ____Not the real rusty Ha My landlord thinks she can get everyone to work for free. The fact that maintenance and improvements are my responsibility, and will add value to my investment, is another huge reason I want to buy rather than rent. I'm absolutely sick of being at the mercy of idiots when it comes to home repair. ____Not the real rusty Not here The mortgage alone on a house about the size of the one we currently rent will cost probably $300 to $400 more than our rent costs. I don't know whether it will be more, less, or the same when you factor in the tax breaks on the mortgage interest. It'll probably come out about even, but on the other hand, we'll be gaining equity rather than simply spending money. For me, getting something for my dollar means it's a better value, even if it's the same cost. ____Not the real rusty Yes As far as we can figure it, the owner of the house isn't paying a mortgage. The sad thing is that it's also clear that our rent check goes straight to her landlord to pay her rent, which means there is no extra margin being set aside for repairs when needed. It's a bad situation, basically, and the sooner I'm out of here the better. ____Not the real rusty Affordability The thing about choosing a home is that we're only looking on the island. So it's not so much a matter of shopping for the perfect place as it is waiting for one to come up for sale that we can afford. And none of them will be easily affordable, regardless of size. However, at least with an expensive small house you don't have the additional problems of maintenance and heating. And before you start in on how we should look elsewhere and so forth and so on, believe me we've thought about it very carefully. This is where we want to live, and houses here, even though they're more expensive than an equivalently sized and appointed place on the mainland, have proven over the last twenty years to be an excellent investment. Thanks for the links. I've been going through the Fool.com pages already, but I'll check out the others. ____Not the real rusty Peaks Island, ME Right about here. Sorry to have doubted you. It seems to be a common flaw of financial advice that some of its practitioners fail to take into account non-financial factors, like happiness and quality of life, and try to advise on a strictly fiscal basis. I'm glad to see you're not one of them. :-) ____Not the real rusty She'd take away his cheese. [nt] ____Not the real rusty I don't really have that much of a social life Though that's mostly on purpose. I tend toward the cranky recluse lifestyle. I fully support the overall nub of your gist though. ____Not the real rusty I believe your IRC client was having problems Skimming that IRC log, it seemed like there were some things missing. And sure enough, I pulled up my log of the conversation from last night, and your client seems to have lost a bunch of lines. I would have personally kept that conversation private, since I thought it was just between you and I, but since you (courageously, I think) posted it for the purposes of full disclosure I'm sure you'd certainly want it to be an accurate record of the conversation that we actually had. So here you go, my log with the missing pieces filled in and boldfaced for handy scanning. ------------ ** BEGIN LOGGING AT Wed Dec 3 01:56:33 2003 01:56:33 <Iman> How about this. I am willing to submit one more story that I have already written, but after it either dies in the queue or the story dies down, if I still feel like leaving, would you please delete all my content (stories, diaries, and comments) from the site? 01:56:41 <rusty> no 01:56:54 <rusty> I'm way tired of that crap 01:57:01 <Iman> You already said you would? 01:57:10 <Iman> I have some very good reasons for wanting everything deleted. 01:57:14 <rusty> you posted it. own it. you can leave the site, if you want. I'll even lock out your account 01:57:31 <rusty> but this "Del;ete everything i ever posted" stuff is too much 01:57:44 <Iman> You said that you wouldn't want to be the one that forces somebody to keep a record around of what they have written, haven't you? 01:58:41 <rusty> in some cases, yes 01:58:46 <rusty> i think you're doing it out of spite 01:59:18 <Iman> No. I have good reasons. 01:59:24 <rusty> what are they? 01:59:46 <Iman> However, my personal reasons sholdn't matter. I have contributed, but yet I have less say in my stuff than others who contribute less. 01:59:46 <Iman> ? 02:00:25 <Iman> First, I have become way too connection to people offline, both professionally and personally. Some poeple now know my friends or are working where I used to work. 02:00:52 <Iman> Second, I am returning to Washington and some day would like to come out form behind the scenes more, but I often worry about K5 being used against me. 02:01:23 <Iman> Third, I have two younger brothers that are just getting to the age that they are looking for me online. It was my mistake to say thing about drugs or something, but I don't want them reading it. 02:01:33 <Iman> (They are 12 and 8) 02:02:03 <Iman> I can keep going... I have another two left. 02:02:46 <rusty> how bout this 02:02:56 <Iman> ... 02:03:06 <rusty> I'll change your username to something unconnected and remove all perosnal info associated with the account 02:04:32 <Iman> What that be for everything? I know a diary will just pop up linking the old and new account, and I don't think it is possible to go through all 5000+ of my comments and remove some thing. 02:04:53 <rusty> look at it this way 02:05:06 <rusty> if k5 was a mailing list, would you have this option at all? 02:05:11 <rusty> if it were usenet would you? 02:05:22 <Iman> But K5 isn't and it was never presented as such. 02:05:41 <Iman> Usenet gets stored on machines around the world, your website is only on your machines. 02:05:47 <rusty> the user agreement explicitly says you give us the right to display your wriitng on the site for as long as we want 02:06:04 <Iman> Yes, and I know I cannot do anything to prevent that. 02:06:17 <Iman> However, I can still ask. You are perfectly in your right to say no. 02:06:57 <Iman> I have put effort into your site, and I ask that you just do to me what any of these people have been able to do that didn't put effort into the site. 02:07:21 <rusty> don't you see that that's exactly why it's different? 02:07:32 <rusty> the people i wipe wiothout much trouble haven't contributed 02:07:33 <rusty> you have 02:07:45 <rusty> erasing you means we lose something 02:07:57 <rusty> i don't hink it would be a negligible loss 02:09:57 <Iman> So? K5 has loses more from the users like templurkeracct than it would lose from deleting all my contributions. I find that a very inconvincing argument. It is just easier to see the damage from me leaving than it is to see the future damage these users are having. 02:10:28 <rusty> sigh 02:10:32 <Iman> I'm asking you please, just give me this little reward for having contributed. 02:10:32 <rusty> I think the answer is no 02:10:36 <rusty> I fucking hate this 02:10:48 <rusty> it sucks either way 02:10:50 <rusty> but no 02:10:51 <Iman> I'm not goint to start flooding the site or anything childish. 02:11:05 <Iman> That's unfortunate. 02:11:07 <rusty> I will lock out your account though 02:11:14 <rusty> because i don't want to have this conversation again 02:11:17 <Iman> No. I want it all gone or nothing. 02:11:38 <Iman> I mean, I would like evrything gone or just leave it as it is now (don't lock it). 02:11:47 <rusty> um, no 02:11:54 <rusty> because you'll keep posting, and have more to regret 02:11:56 <Iman> So are you going to lock my account? 02:11:57 <rusty> enough 02:12:00 <rusty> i just did 02:12:33 <Iman> No, at least if I keep posting I can try to clear stuff up and shift the image portrayed. Damage control and all that. 02:15:11 <rusty> alright. 02:15:27 <rusty> my most emphatic recommendation however is that the site is obviously no good for you, and you should walk away now 02:16:04 <Iman> Did you start deleting comments and stop? 02:16:10 <rusty> no 02:16:20 <Iman> Ah... weird glitch it seems. 02:16:28 <rusty> i did delete your bio and fakeemail and public key stuff 02:16:31 <Iman> From having acct locked probably. 02:17:13 <Iman> I am disappointed that you said you would not want to make people live with their K5 posts, but they you do it to me. Especially when it is something that could have very serious impacts on my life. 02:17:22 <Iman> but your decision. 02:17:33 <rusty> i think you're making a maountain out of an anthill 02:18:08 <rusty> and, in the realm of general unsolicited personality analysis, I think you have a seriously hard time identifying what matters in life 02:18:22 <rusty> so, good luck 02:18:47 <Iman> I just need to be careful. I have two younger brothers and I worry that they will run across things. I would really like to move out of the back office in political analysis, but I would be connected to K5. 02:19:09 <Iman> Why do you think this doens't matter? I think you cannot seem to put yourself in my shoes. 02:19:31 <rusty> I can indeed put myself there. there are many things on k5 I will one day be embarrassed about 02:19:44 <rusty> but I'm not going to try to pretend i never said them 02:19:59 <rusty> who are you going to be, when you erase your past? 02:20:01 <rusty> you're still you 02:20:45 <rusty> if you changed your mind, and someone brings up "Well back in 2001 you said THIS! you tell them "That's what I thought then. I have learned since then. 02:22:02 <Iman> Yes, everybody has these skeletons. However, that is not how things work. I used to be very involved in Berkeley politics (both university and city). People view dirt as something everybody has, but if there is so much in public, they wonder how much more there can be in private. Having all your laundry out makes peopel think you have more. 02:22:23 <rusty> i think it's the opposite actually 02:22:40 <rusty> if all your dirt's out in public, you know exactly where you stand 02:23:07 <rusty> where's the fun in digging up secrets when all your skeletons are vaailable to anyone with google? 02:23:18 <rusty> it makes them un-newsworthy 02:23:21 <Iman> We used to have meetings for university elections between the parties where we traded dirt. We won't bring that up to the election committee or out in public if you don't bring this up. The more dirt the more ammo. 02:23:49 <rusty> having all your dirt in public is the nuclear bomb of ammo 02:23:53 <rusty> they have nothing to offer you 02:25:41 <Iman> Do CMF board members have a say in editorial policy? 02:26:20 <rusty> if there was a k5 oversight comittee this would certainly be somehting i'd bring up 02:26:37 <rusty> in fact, i owe the site a site news anyway, and i have nothing much to say. maybe I'll do a poll 02:26:56 <rusty> If the users think it's ok, I'll abide by that 02:27:10 <Iman> I think the proper way to frame the discussion is that the site has changed so people might want amnesty to leave now. 02:27:44 <Iman> I know I could get CMF some funding if K5 wasn't such a joke right now. I am ashamed to have my name attachd to it anymore. 02:28:08 <rusty> you're way too embedded in the community 02:28:22 <rusty> the perception from otuside is a lot brighter than you'd think 02:28:41 <rusty> anyway, one of the main points of the cmf is to do a lot more than run k5 02:29:38 <Iman> Please don't mention this conversation to others either. I worry (somewhat with a tin-foil hat) about somebody saving info on me if they find out I am trying to get all my contributions deleted. 02:30:17 <Iman> But K5 is the barometer for the CMF. If K5 turns to a crapfest, it doesn't make people think other projects will turn out well. 02:30:26 <rusty> se? how much worse does that look than leaving your mistakes in public view? 02:30:48 <rusty> i dunno. I don't think k5 is much of a barometer, and I also don't hink it's a crapfest 02:30:55 <rusty> it's a prickly and uniqe sort of thing 02:31:12 <rusty> the stuff other people are doing with the ideas k5 pioneered are showing hwat the concept is capable of 02:31:26 <Iman> I saw Dean speak a few weeks ago. I also saw Kerry. But I am unwilling to really go though the trouble to post it to K5. If your election site was up and running, that might be different. 02:31:27 <rusty> k5 itself never had much of a point, besides trying out some ideas 02:31:48 <rusty> that's ok 02:31:54 <rusty> i doubt the election site will happen 02:32:07 <Iman> Let's hope that K5 was a good learning experience for you and other CMF projects turn out better b/c of it. 02:32:13 <rusty> heh 02:32:20 <rusty> i think it is/was/will be 02:32:41 <rusty> anyway, k5 may change drastically 02:32:50 <rusty> it has several times before :-) 02:32:53 <Iman> Oh well, that's too bad. The election site was something I was looking forward too. 02:33:32 <rusty> yeah. me and matt both have too much interesting paying work to commit the time to find funding for it 02:33:54 <rusty> if someone stepped up with a grant, we'd probably both push off as much work as we could to do it 02:34:02 <Iman> If K5 was better, I know I could have found you funding if given some time. sorry. 02:34:11 <rusty> but i can't do it for free, and i know he can't either 02:34:40 <rusty> "If K5 was better". That's silly 02:34:57 <rusty> K5 is better at what it is than anything else out there 02:35:04 <rusty> it's far from perfect, true 02:35:26 <rusty> but to say it's a failure is just sour grapes because you don't like some of the people who hang out there now 02:36:13 <Iman> I hope you change your mind about deleting my comment and diaries (you can keep the stories). A K5er was just interviewing at my old work and mentioned to me to group of really really really close friends. SvnLyrBrto knows some really really close friends too. And K5 has alreay done damage that I hadn't expected. I worry about my brothers finding me, and I worry about some public facing political future. 02:36:27 <Iman> Just please reconsider. 02:36:34 <rusty> we'll have a vote 02:37:42 <Iman> shrugs okay. If you insist, but why should I have to put my fate into the hands of others that have contributed less and don't have my best interests at heart. 02:38:19 <rusty> ah, the joys of democracy 02:41:11 --- You are now known as rusty_afk 02:42:43 <Iman> Just so there is no confusion, I feel the vote is non-binding. 04:17:20 <-- Iman has quit (Quit: These four things I know are true....) ** ENDING LOGGING AT Wed Dec 3 10:15:56 2003 ____Not the real rusty Exactly His version of the conversation makes it seem like he's being calm and reasonable while I'm being pigheaded and irrational, while the full conversation makes it quite clear that I'm trying to keep the lid on a guy who is turning out to be quite obviously deluded and unstable. ____Not the real rusty Biter [nt] ____Not the real rusty Big storm? I have heard nothing. Our Maine weather fore-casters apparently have not yet heard the news on their tele-type machines. Pray, tell what ye know of this storm. ____Not the real rusty And on still nights... ...if you listen carefully, over the distant mounful cry of the loons on yonder lake you can hear the faint "clackety clack" of the trolls... ____Not the real rusty Seems like it'll miss us All the weather comes from the West -- nor'easters are just storms that go offshore and strengthen, and curve back around to hammer us from (apparently) the northeast. They all come from the west though. It's looking like this one if going to pass to our south. Bummer. I could do with a good blizzard to kick off the season. ____Not the real rusty My God, are you "carnivalrocket"? Damn, you are a "catch of the day", if you know what I mean... Oh I see. It's a little below that. Sorry. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Good band name "The Invasion of the Angst-Ridden Teenage Kids From Hell" And don't worry, they're all sitting at the kid's table for Christmas dinner. Afterward we'll send them to the basement with a couple DVDs and tell them to keep it down. ____Not the real rusty Damn "Emo Kids" And "kids table" while I'm marking errata. ____Not the real rusty Slow down, cowboy Consider this a warning from rusty. You don't need to post a diary every time you have a thought. And if you've posted four since you woke up, I'd say that's exactly what's happening. So knock it off. ____Not the real rusty We recommend 2 (nt) ____Not the real rusty This reminds me of the way the diary section used to be. ____Not the real rusty I thought about it And then I stopped thinking about it. ____Not the real rusty -60 Spit doesn't freeze in the air till around -60. ____Not the real rusty Lucky bastard I wish it got that cold here. It's a balmy 25 or so here today. ____Not the real rusty In March, yes At the end of the winter, 25 seems like shorts weather. Here in November, at this end of winter, it feels cold. ____Not the real rusty You're not wrong, my friend In either your analysis or what you think should be done about it. I have some tentative plans in a direction I think you'll like, but it remains to be seen whether they come to pass or not. And given the amount of crap I get when I talk about possible future developments that sometimes don't happen soon and sometimes don't happen at all, I think I'll keep the details to myself for now. :-) ____Not the real rusty December is "write an article" month I just went through the queue, and realized that right now I've got seven -1's and three spam votes out of 11 articles. That's no fun. What magical technical change could I do to encourage more of you to write interesting stuff? No, there is no technical change needed. All we need is to write more interesting stuff. I haven't written anything in ages, and I bet most of you other non-trolls out there would have to admit the same thing. The fact is, the people who are mainly filling the queue at the moment are people whose work I am not interested in reading. So I propose that everyone who, like me, suffers from despair at reading the queue lately make an effort to write one article in December. I've got mine planned, and if that one doesn't work out, I'll come up with something else. Besides, all you NaNos have got to take a cool-down lap after November, right? A thousand words on some subject you always wanted an excuse to learn more about (or share what you already know about) would be just the thing. :-) And the prize is: for every good article someone writes, we all get a better site. If Write an Article Month is notably successful, I may just continue it into January. Look for my contribution soon. :-) I fixed that a long time ago (nt) ____Not the real rusty Problem? Nah There's no big problem. I was just thinking that I've been highly article-lazy recently. I would like to contribute something, and maybe I can use my undue influence to provide a nudge to some other people who might feel the same way if they thought about it. If it makes you feel better, December is definitely "write an article" month for me, and I welcome and encourage anyone else to do likewise. That's all. ____Not the real rusty Cool The paleotech stuff was great. More of that please. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ooh! Me! I'll take that, if we can agree on objective standards for "something of value." How bout your fifty bucks says I won't submit an article (for voting -- not site news) that gets voted to section or front page? ____Not the real rusty Sure Consider it shook. And if I win, you may donate $50 to the EFF. ____Not the real rusty No, you didn't miss it I did. I can't tihnk of anything to write about though. Nothing much happened this month. I guess that's something to write about, but it won't be very intersting. ____Not the real rusty Cloner Owner and abuser of many dupe accounts. He got wiped like all his clones. ____Not the real rusty A few reasons "Pour encourager les autres," partly. Also because it was easier, and I didn't think I owed the guy a lot of time preserving his precious contributions to K5's trolling history. ____Not the real rusty Almost entirely? Believe me, the good parts were bathwater. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's not as interesting as you'd think To get the boot, the dupes have to be pretty obvious, and if they're obvious, then they don't last for very long. Typically when a swathe of clones gets deleted, it's not any accounts you'd recognize. There are of course many users with toy puppet accounts, but those are usually more for posting than voting (or rating) and don't concern me much. ____Not the real rusty I think what you need is e2fsck -cranblocks, which should create an /etc/cran file that marks certain blocks as unrecoverably sticky and tart, and force the disk to avoid using them in the future. ____Not the real rusty Failed? A properly constructed experiment can't fail, unless it is performed so badly that you can't draw any conclusions from it. So, either it didn't fail, or you can't learn any lessons from it. :-) ____Not the real rusty But it did! The contest specifically elicited at least one good story. So by those lights it was a fair to middling success. I also thought it provoked an interesting war between fictionistas and anti-fictionistas, casting some light on what happens when two equally determined voting blocs go head to head on a single issue. I would say that all told, the anti-fictionistas mostly won, as there were a couple stories that got dumped which were probably good enough to post at any other time. And yet the fictionistas remain unbowed and largely unapologetic, so it wouldn't be fair to say they were conquered. ____Not the real rusty That was one I was bummed that that one didn't make it. Actually, that points out another problem, which is that the best fiction usually doesn't get much in the way of discussion, which hurts it if it goes to auto-post. It's pretty unfortunate that that story was submitted at the height of the conflist, though, since I bet it would have been posted at almost any other time. ____Not the real rusty Not so The hypothesis can be supported or disproven. Either result is an experimental success. The experiment only fails if you are unable to draw any conclusions about your hypothesis from it. ____Not the real rusty I liked "fowl swoop" I thought you wree being clever. In the future, please do not prove me wrong. Just say "Yes, I was being clever." :-) ____Not the real rusty That last one will get you through 95% of life's difficult situations. It's especially useful when paired up with "May I speak with your supervisor?" ____Not the real rusty Ouch. Too Much Information. Geez, man. No one really needed to know that you... ...were born in Russia. ____Not the real rusty Your dream, my reality I dream of... exploding septic works Some only dare to dream, others live the dream. If you're interested, the latest update is that we've fled the house, which filled with toxic stench gases immediately after the pumper came and cleaned out the septic tank. The pipes are still blocked and the cellar is still full of sewage. We have informed the landlady (at some length and not-inconsiderable volume, in my case) that we will return when she has rendered the house habitable. ____Not the real rusty An inconvemience, not that much more I've lived in worse hotels than this, and for much longer. I can be homeless when necessary without that much difficulty. But it is a pain in the ass. No, we're not paying for any repairs, and the only stuff stored in the basement is the landlady's stuff, so poetic justice I suppose. I doubt anything of any value will end up actually damaged out of this. Some old wood scraps and junk will need to be tossed, but everything else touching the floor is in plastic bins, which can just be washed off and bleached. We don't actually have renter's insurance (not for lack of trying, believe me -- it's a long story) but we wouldn't likely have a claim out of this anyway. The landlady says her insurance policy won't cover this, which mystifies me, because why the hell is she paying for insurance then? The only probably lasting result of all this is the complete dissolution of any kind of cordial relationship between us and the landlady. I have a really long fuse, but yesterday I just got utterly fed up with her helpless whining and I'm afraid I said some things which I wouldn't normally have said. Toings like "I don't trust you at all," and "I don't give a damn about your problems -- this is your house and we pay you and it's your responsibility to take care of it." And other things. They don't sound so bad written down like that, but tone and context count for a lot. She is just not even remotely competent as a landlady. She sincerely thinks that because we are living in the house, we are in some way her partners, that we have a duty to assist her in solving problems. She really seems to think that the obligations of a renter are mainly to cash the rent check. By comparison, when we lived in San Francisco, our basement garage flooded and the landlord simply took care of it. He got it fixed before we even knew it happpened, in fact. AND it was actually, demonstrably our fault. She doesn't get that when there's a problem with the house, it is her problem and not mine, no matter how inconvenient it may be for her. Besides which she is too poor to actually maintain the house. She's also got serious roof and window problems that will not be cheap to fix. I'll be damned if I lift a finger to do anything about them though. If she wants to hire me to fix it, she gets double the usual rate, payment up front. If I can leave you with one piece of advice, it is this -- do not buy that house until you know the condition of the septic system. Go with your inspector or whatever plumber he sends, and dig it up and look at it with your own eyes. I don't know what the laws are in Canada, but here if you buy a house that was grandfathered into non-compliance with new waste disposal regulations, the new owner is required to bring the place up to code. Like, I'm pretty sure that if anyone bought our house, they'd have to immediately put in a whole new septic system. This actually makes a lot of old houses effectively valueless, since the value of the house is about equal to the cost of getting it legally inhabitable. ____Not the real rusty We shall see about that. Let's test that theory, shall we? ____I will receive a million dollars. And a pony. Indymedia I bash indymedia for waffling on whether they think they're reporting news or not. They most consistently claim to be "activist news," as far as I can tell, which is accurate enough, I guess. As long as you lay the accent heavily on "activist" and mumble through the "news" part. From time to time you will see them claim to be reinventing the collection and dissemination of news, which pisses me off because I think they had a shot to actually do that, and instead they blew it by going the "activist" route. Basically, I mourn for what indymedia could have been, and almost looked like it was going to be back at the beginning. I have very little use for what it actually is. However, I agree with Nader's basic premise here. I don't think it has anything to do with Indymedia itself, which is mainly an organizing tool for the protesters. But I do very much think that we need more news coverage that isn't driven by the profit motive, which tends to unavoidably warp the kind of coverage it provides. ____Not the real rusty Yes I got here too late, but even I got it without scrolling for the answer. :-) Then again, I've got coffee on my mind at the moment. ____Not the real rusty Best line: "I got nothing to say I ain't said before" That clinches it. ____Not the real rusty Benefit of the doubt I'm assuming you're not just here to spam. I could be wrong, but hey. So, to answer your questions, no I wouldn't run ads for pot through the mail, and no, you really really shouldn't be posting about it at all. Posting diaries and comments to sell stuff is pretty much textbook spamming. Please don't do it. So, now that you know what the etiquette is, welcome to K5, and please enjoy the rest of your non-spamming, non-illegal-drug selling time here. :-) ____Not the real rusty Canada? Dude, I live in Maine. Maine is America's herb-basket. If I was going to grow it, why would I go to Canada? Disclaimer: no, of course I don't. What a horrible job that would be. ____Not the real rusty No, it was deleted "drluck" is a clone, and the story was cut-n-paste. ____Not the real rusty And that's why It was deleted. Blah blah I really wrote it honest fellers. Lotta garbage. drluck: You get one more chance. Post it again, and this clone account goes away. ____Not the real rusty The answer is ____Not the real rusty this... A pair of dice. ____Not the real rusty nine minutes, twenty two seconds. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's true If I can get it, it's too easy. BadDoggie's riddles kick my ass day in and day out. I'm always so pleased when it's by someone else. :-) ____Not the real rusty Uh? I didn't google for it. ____Not the real rusty I don't think so either I mean, when I googled for the answer, I didn't find anyth... D'oh. ____Not the real rusty That tall guy Hey! Is that Al from Police Squad? ____Not the real rusty That seems like a healthy attitude I think you've got a remarkably astute handle on things. You did know that Michael Moore2 thing was a well done troll though, right? We only do that to crapflooders and page-wideners. ____Not the real rusty That would be "crapflooders" :-) ____Not the real rusty Crapflood It was a crapflood waiting to happen. First it's diaries, then it's submitted into the editing queue, etc etc. I'm just short-circuiting the process. You don't seem like you're having fun anymore Tex. It makes me sad. Are you still the old Tex, or did you get this account from him? You've got a whole bitter unfunny gestalt going now that isn't a patch on the old Tex. ____Not the real rusty Inquiring minds want to know When you got buttered, did you land butter-side down? Science demands answers. ____Not the real rusty Crap My basement is full of crap. Not "junk" or "things I ought to throw out," mind you, though there are those too. But literally crap. Human fecal matter. Sewage outflow pipe backup, spill, resulting mess. This has not been a good week, and it's only Monday. Extra-special sewage poll. At least K5 is the number one google result for McJob. Did I mention I also have no ETA for when this will be fixed? And I can't use any toilet in my house? And, in fact, that my home is now technically situated on top of a biohazard site? Any week which can be described with the words "my home" and "biohazard site" in such close proximity is not a week to cherish. Things are great otherwise though. Me? Clean it up? Oh hell no. This is a rental. If it were my house, and my dime, I'd clean it. Although when it's my house I'll make damn sure my insurance covers cleanup for this kind of thing. As a tenant however, there ain't no way in hell I'm wading around in shit. Not on your life. The landlady's going to have to get some pros in here to do that. ____Not the real rusty I'm eating ice cream Ice cream is yummy. ____Not the real rusty These guys These guys are the professionals. And as a matter of act, I did find them in the yellow pages. What a world, huh? ____Not the real rusty It worked! That option was 100% pure johnny bait, and look! It worked! :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha No kidding. I told the landlady about that at the same time as I told her about the basement. And for good measure, I threw in the rotted windows too. ____Not the real rusty S'ok If you want to use adblocking, you're presumably never going to click on an ad, so block away, and may it make you happy in all your online endeavours. ____Not the real rusty Spamming the story queue and being a jackass. And, as mcc so eloquently put it, because you are boring. ____Not the real rusty Ouch Tonight on Fox: When content-targeting goes bad! ____Not the real rusty Woo-hoo! There's one for the business card. "Rusty Foster: By comparison, not too bad." :-) ____Not the real rusty You rang? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Amusingly I could actually have the site send me an email whenever anyone posted a comment with my name in it. Not that I do, or would, but it would be about five minutes of work to make it happen. ____Not the real rusty That'd be more complicated Not a ton more complicated, I guess, but a bit. Hmmm. ____Not the real rusty Heh No one considers the idea that maybe I'm often around reading... I'm more of a lurker than I think anyone gives me credit for, and I probably read more of the site than anyone would guess. :-) But you must feel like Scoop admins are stalking you personally sometimes. ____Not the real rusty Do too! I have three day jobs. This just happens to be one of them. ____Not the real rusty Launching I haven't started a new site in almost four years. I forgot how much fun it actually is, once the thing is running. Also: 15 option polls! I must be in a good mood. :-) Inside: please advise me about google ads. So the new site is running. There are still a lot of little things to do, and some not-so-little ones, like writing some information about how it all works and what we want people to do. I'm also adding little features at a pretty good clip. You can, although there is not yet a good interface for it, look for hotels within some distance of a particular area code. For example http://www.hotelchatter.com/near/02360/50 will find places within fifty miles of my hometown. The way this works is pretty cool. Every story that's about a particular place gets the address stored with it. And when you save a story with an address, there's a scoop hook that uses this page to look up the latitude and longitude, and stores that too. So we're not tied down to just matching cities and zip codes -- we can actually do distance comparisons to find nearby stuff, regardless of address. The drawback is it's US-only. Apparently GIS data for the rest of the world is all proprietary. I believe I will have a database of canadian postal codes later today, but without canadian address to lat/long translation I'm not sure what good it will do me. I have been greatly helped in all this geographic stuff by the guy who runs upcoming.org, which is pretty cool. When we've both got our geo data hammered out, there are plans to include "hotels near this event" (on his part) and "upcoming events near this hotel" (on mine). I'm going to make the "near" interface produce RSS if that's what you ask for, and accept latitude and longitude for comparison instead of only zip codes, so that any site can use it for whatever they can think of. About the google ads, we've been using them for HC, and they're pretty damn good. Right now, K5 doesn't have any story ads active, besides my lame default ones. I'm thinking about removing that type of ad and just using Google ads in the stories instead. I've tried a few out, and it looks like they'd target themselves pretty well, if sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results. All the existing features of in-story ads would remain, like members could turn them off, and everyone could move them around to wherever they wanted to put them. It'd just be the Google textads instead of our own homebrew ones. Probably the only drawback would be that they're, on average, a little bigger than what we have now. What do you think? Oh, they'd also only appear on posted stories, and not in the queue, since google's bots can't get to stories in the queue to analyze them for ad-matching. And finally, I raised the poll option limit to 15. Don't know why I didn't do it ages ago. Enjoy the extra options. :-) I thought about that too That might be the best option. Right now the story ad box is set up to "fill in" with a default ad when there aren't enough user-created ads. What I could do is just make it fill in with google ads, and if someone wants to buy a story ad, they still could, and those would rotate through as usual. That might be the best solution. ____Not the real rusty It'd be a split The index-page ads I like, and still do ok, and would stay. I'm just thinking about replacing the in-story ads with google's. ____Not the real rusty Zip codes I have a line on a possibly-slightly-bootleg zip code GIS lookup for canada. But I don't think there's any free street GIS out there. It strikes me as rather bizarre that the US is apparently the world's only bastion of free GIS data. It's one of those things that I think it ought to be that way, but I'm kind of surprised it actually is that way. ____Not the real rusty Policy You do know that you don't have to fill in all the options, right? Maybe you could just retroactively pretend that your policy was always to have exactly eight poll options, and that just happened to be the number we used to offer. ____Not the real rusty I know what you mean I finished the code for the "near" feature at like 2:30 AM yesterday, and the site is getting a redesign next week. It'll be there, don't worry. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not at all Reviews are welcome for anyplace in the world. All I'm saying is that we can't do the clever geo stuff for anywhere but the US. You'll still be able to search for and review hotels from outside the US, just not do the tricky zipcode and proximity stuff. Wherever you may roam though, please tell us about where you stayed. :-) ____Not the real rusty C4L Carnage4Life runs the K5 who are you search engine. It seems to be not running at the moment though. ____Not the real rusty Looks like that's a yes There was a mouse nibbling at my wall. He woke me up. Time to get some mouse poison. ____Not the real rusty We have two And while they both leave us copious dead mice that they catch outside, for some reason neither of them has done squat about this intruder under our very roof. The best bet on how the mouse got in to begin with is that one of the cats brought it in alive and let it go. ____Not the real rusty Wotcha You're thinking of this. By the way, pb and a co-conspirator have made great progress on the new search thing. It turned out to be rather more complex than we thought, but they're building a kick-ass utility that will actually be usable for just about any kind of site, not just Scoop. Hopefully they'll have it done soon -- I think right now it's in the "testing Scoop integration" phase. ____Not the real rusty Deserted? Hardly I am moonlighting a bit though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Fun Size! I'm giving out Fun Size candy bars for Halloween. "Fun" is exactly 1 3/4 inches long, 3/4 inches wide, and 5/8 of an inch high. Just, you know, for future reference. Ok, perhaps So to be more specific, that's the fun size of Three Musketeers. If you'd like to have an equivalent amount of fun with a Twix, you'll need to apply some kind of scaling factor. Just finished Pet Sematery. I think everyone has their personal horror movie Waterloo, and that is mine. I know it's goofy, and I know many people find it wholly risible, but that thing scares the shit out of me. Jesus, lord. I'm still freaked out. ____Not the real rusty Envy The green monster. ____Not the real rusty Heh I laughed when they lost as well. I'm a BoSox fan, of sorts, but I'm a fan of their spectacular 11th-hour chokes. This year was one for the books, for sure. :-) As I often say, "No one ever went broke betting against the Red Sox." ____Not the real rusty Well that's because this is a "jobless recovery." More money and benefits for those with jobs, no jobs for those without. Hope you've got yours nailed down, so you can join the "haves" in the upcoming boom years! ____Not the real rusty It didn't work. (nt) ____Not the real rusty do you have a turtle or an iguana ...in your stool? I will be giggling all day now. Thank you. And probably mentally filling in "in your stool" after every similar question I hear for a week. ____Not the real rusty Wow This diary makes aphrael look like Bruce Willis to your Liberace. Now I can hardly tell who's gay anymore. ____Not the real rusty See aphreal's comment And then I wanted to ask if you'd looked for or changed that option since I changed the ratings, or if this was the first time you looked for it. Cause nothing should have changed recently -- I suspect you should always not have seen it. Not that that's how I'd want it to necessarily be, but based on the info I've got, I think that's how it would be. ____Not the real rusty A different guess My guess is "circle." A small ocean, surrounded -- Sea (C) it's the subject of me -- "I" Your state of being -- you "are" (R) as your eyes do perceive -- "see" (C) On the train in Chicago -- The El (L) in the middle, it's mi -- "mi" corresponds to the note "E" So all the clues together spell out "Circle". ____Not the real rusty Woo hoo!!! I never get BadDoggie's riddles, and it makes me feel a little bit dumber every day. You need to write more of these. :-) ____Not the real rusty Gadflies! That article got pretty wide linking around the blogs that serve as your standard tech reporter's research these days. I have no doubt that you were being referred to, you crazy gadfly, you. ____Not the real rusty Strictly speaking The call was 14% gay by attendance. I'm not sure what the time percentage would be. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget Conference call, 20 minutes. I apologize in advance for not being at my best today. I hope I can remain at least semi-coherent. I'm sitting here working and my eyes are trying to close themselves, which does not bode well. Tea Usually gives me headaches, and I'm popping Advil already. Plus, on a day like today (cold, rainy, gray, windy, foggy) it would probably put me directly to sleep. Water and reheated coffee is going to have to do. ____Not the real rusty It will be [nt] ____Not the real rusty Hey, boz! No hard feelings, eh? Good to see you again. ____Not the real rusty Not true People will buy it though. Apparently people will believe anything they read in a diary. Good work. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh, go back to your real account Goofball. It was good. You got 'em. But don't string it along like a dead carp. Have some style. ____Not the real rusty Happens to the best of us :-) ____Not the real rusty At least I don't kick people out for it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute Will the pumpkins be erotic, or will the carving be erotic? ____Not the real rusty weird basic auth You've got a basic auth box popping up, apparently when the header loads the little person images. Since you may be logged into it, you might not realize. ____Not the real rusty I think you're thinking of crabs. ____Not the real rusty Best. Diary. EVAR. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget Sort: Ignore ratings ____Not the real rusty Shameful royalist. [nt] ____Not the real rusty What the hell A few people (including myself) have noticed this bizarre thing where K5 will send you randomly to the front page instead of what you were looking for. Since neither the Scoop code nor the configuration have changed since well before this started, it doesn't seem likely that that's the problem. And since it doesn't happen every time, the most likely culprit would seem to be Apache, either the mod_perl server or a rogue proxy httpd somewhere. I've restarted all the apaches, but I'd like if anyone sees this problem happening again to mention it in this thread so I can tell if it worked or not. Thanks. Tip If it does happen when you go to post a comment, "reload" should resubmit the comment. If you get the front page, then your comment has not posted, and you won't be duplicating it by trying again. ____Not the real rusty But still Annoying. It's that "you refresh a few times" that makes me think it's a rogue apache. What changes when you refresh? Well, soemtimes you get a new apache process handling the request... ____Not the real rusty I did The logs say that as far as Scoop knows, you just requested the main page. So you send in a request, with a bunch of parameters that say you want to post a comment, it goes to the proxy, which somehow decides that all you really wanted was the front page, and that's the info that Scoop gets. That's why people were getting their personalized front page, too -- Scoop is just fulfilling an ordinary "main page" request. ____Not the real rusty We cannot abide a world where rogue Apaches can be left alone to spread pages of mass distraction. ____Not the real rusty New band Soundgarden-ey. Many people are obsessed with Soundgarden, so I guess that's not a bad thing, but not really my cup of tea. Any hope of more Troublemint, or is that truly over? ____Not the real rusty Nope No relation of mine. There is no shortage of Fosters in the world though, so it's not that much of a coincidence. ____Not the real rusty Even worse There's a guy named Russ Foster who's contributed to Scoop. That made for some fun times on IRC, I tell you. Oh, and your other question -- I'm taking a hiatus from pounding nails to finish some other work. ____Not the real rusty Will you show them The many, many times when I've said I like and sympathize with what Salon is trying to do? No, cause that wouldn't fit your notions. Keep on picking your evidence, chump. Keep on dreaming your little dreams. "Foot in the door." You surpass yourself. ____Not the real rusty Nah I don't care whether I prove you wrong or not. And no, I wouldn't have linked to that article if it wasn't written by johnny. ____Not the real rusty However You and rusty need to realize that integrity begins with the letter I. However, it's also important to remember that there is a "u" in "Suck it." :-) FWIW, I think John's pretty spot-on about posting chickenshit character assessments of other people while hiding behind a pseudonym, and I'd be pissed too if I took anything you write seriously. I'm not sure why he does. But hey. ____Not the real rusty Dirty deeds Done dirt cheap! "Allegations" gave it away. ____Not the real rusty You know Ok, I know I said I don't care about proving you wrong, but I just went back and read what you're claiming is me "dumping on Salon," and even those aren't what you're saying they are. So fuck it, let's have some more of your favorite hypocritical "say one thing and do another," shall we? In Dotcom Scoop I said:Subscriptions, in the traditional sense, ain't gonna work either. It's too easy to go elsewhere when the doors are closed, like Salon is doing right now. A strategy where only subscribers can read has been, is, and will always be suicide. Blah blah except porn and the Wall Street Journal blah blah. Salon is laughably deceived if it thinks its content has the kind of drawing power as the WSJ. If Salon was what it was three or four years ago, with actual name writers doing original stuff, I'd give them a snowball's chance in hell. Today, not even that. You'll perhaps recall that this was when Salon premium was only accessable to premium Salon subscribers. I thought that was a bad idea, and I still do. Since then, however, they've introduced the day pass concept. In Poynter's online-news mailing list (which has the shittiest archives ever and I can't for the life of me figure out how to link to, or I would) I posted this message shortly after the day pass was introduced:Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 17:08:07 -0500 Author: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> Subject: Re: [ON] Re: Salon's New Deal Body: Eric Meyer wrote: > > * This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list. * > > At 10:22 on 31 Jan 2003 Tim Porter wrote, in part: > > > Without addressing any larger issues about Salon or paid content, the > > "multiple-screen" ads don't seem to be much of a hindrance (at least > > for a high-speed user). I just clicked through 4 pages of a Mercedes > > ad in about 6 seconds and received an 18 hour pass. > > Which is exactly why it is an EXTREMELY stupid idea -- which, > frankly, is exactly what I would expect from Salon. > > What advertiser in his or her right mind would be willing to do this > in the long term? > I don't know whether it'll turn out to be any use for the advertisers or not, but I like it. Salon has maybe one article a month that I actually want to read. I'm not going to pay a subscription for that. But I'm perfectly willing to click a "Next Page" button three or four times once a month to read that one article. If they can make a living with it, more power to them. They get some income from the ads, and I get the article for free. --R -- Rusty Foster :: rusty@kuro5hin.org :: http://www.kuro5hin.org On Slashdot, I posted this comment: Re:How does a website spend $80mln? (Score:5, Funny) by kuro5hin (8501) on 12:27 AM -- Monday February 24 2003 (#5368394) (http://www.kuro5hin.org/) The fact that sites which avoided getting the priciest digs (I'm looking at you, Kuro5hin) have survived I got a creepy little jolt of surprise reading that. It's like you were watching me. :-) It's true, though the comparison is way too strained. I've been to Salon's offices, and even at the height of the 'net boom, they were silly exhorbitant. Even for San Francisco they were over the top. Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did). I would like to see Salon survive, but every time I try to scrape up a little sympathy, I think of those offices, and I just can't. I wish them the best, and hope they get out of their lease and learn a little thrift. I know they're already practicing a lot of thrift when it comes to paying their writers (they mostly don't). But some lessons are just learned too late. -- There is no K5 cabal. I am not the real rusty. And my article about the advertorials was much more about poking fun at the NYT than criticizing Salon. It did do both, and the Salon "advertorials" I was mocking have, as far as I know, not been repeated. I don't read Salon much, though, so I could be mistaken about this. And so on. The point being, my attitude toward Salon has never been one of unalloyed negativism. I think they've made some bad decisions. I think from time to time they have good content. I like to see them do things that serve the readers and help them survive. But when you read it, you see what you want to see, like you do with everything else. You pick your opinion, and then pick and shape the evidence in your mind to fit it, like your absurd theory that I want to get an "in" at Salon through promoting John's work there. This is why I don't respect you any more. I don't think you'll have anything worthwhile to contribute until you figure out that you are not infallible, and that you do not have some inside line on everyone else's motivations. ____Not the real rusty Keep it up Pick one sentence in all of that and try to hang on. It's working great, I'm sure. ____Not the real rusty Thanks, Jack We were just wondering where you were the other day. ____Not the real rusty Manchester The one in NH is a nice airport too. It's the one we usually use, since Portland is way too expensive for some reason. ____Not the real rusty Not a coincidence at all Manchester serves Southwest, and Portland doesn't. That pretty much defines whether an airport is any good or not, IME. ____Not the real rusty Snowing here too Not very much, just spitting in between the raindrops. But I wonder if this is a harbinger of the winter to come. ____Not the real rusty Today's critique Googly Moogly! Malnourished Lycanthropes (Wolves!) wouldn't eat these dac- tylic attempts. Flibberty gibbets of anticlimactical verbiage lacking both reason and sense. Smashity! Crashity! Defenestration might cure you of this sick com- pulsion, alas, Nattering nabobs would negativistically say that the punishment trumps the trespass. ____Not the real rusty My parents and extended family read it They complain when I don't post for too long. ____Not the real rusty That year is long since up. ____Not the real rusty Damn If we're going by Pluto years, I want a raise. ____Not the real rusty Most people ask me how I can possibly put up with you people. I tell them you're lonely. ____Not the real rusty Yeah And Grandma Lambert, and various aunts and uncles, and the in-laws, and... ____Not the real rusty Halloween Is set. Well, almost set. I always hate halloween parties, so we're staying home. I will give out candy to any kids that happen by (judging from precedent, I will be eating most of this year's bag of candy too), we will be carving pumpkins and roasting the seeds with salt (yummy), and we will be watching one or more of An American Werewolf in London, Pet Sematary, and Ringu. What are you doing? Ah hem NERD!!!!!!!!! Thank you. ____Not the real rusty I'm happy for you. [nt] ____Not the real rusty It's entertaining I haven't seen it in a long time. But I recall liking it immensely the first time. After Halloween I will tell you why or why not in more detail. ____Not the real rusty 28 Days The movie selection for Halloween is purposely loaded with undemanding movies, because there will be other stuff going on. I've seen Werewolf and Pet Sematary already, and the American version of The Ring. However, 28 Days Later has been added to netflix so I can watch it later with more attention. Thanks for reminding me. ____Not the real rusty 12 joules [nt] ____Not the real rusty Interestingly Pumpkin seeds apparently are about 155 calories to the ounce, so if I ate 1/55th of an ounce, I'd probably be in the right ballpark, unless the dietary information page is in kilocalories. I'm shocked that my snarky answer was probably within a couple of orders of magnitude. ____Not the real rusty Carnival of Souls I just saw that recently. Not too bad, but it never really went anywhere, I thought. Atmospheric though. ____Not the real rusty Hey Which reminds me, what is with "Ruston?" I never got that. What does it mean? ____Not the real rusty Oh ____Not the real rusty No They told me it's not short for anything. Those liars. ____Not the real rusty Yarrr! Y'know, for the pirates. ____Not the real rusty Our house is along a road where four out of five houses are summer houses, and the overall concentration of houses isn't that great to begin with. It's a pretty low-yield area for trick or treating, and last year I don't recall even seeing a single kid wander past. Of course, there was a terrible candy snafu in any case, so I had the lights out and was busy pretending that no one was home. But I don't think it was even an issue for anyone. ____Not the real rusty Kids and Santa Telling kids there's a Santa Claus doesn't cause them to distrust you later in life. When they're old enough to figure it out, they understand. Telling them there is no Santa, on the other hand, deprives them of any chance at what is for many peoiple one of their most treasured childhood memories, tossing and turning on Christmas Eve, straining to catch a distant jingling of bells, or perhaps even a thump of hooves on the roof. Would you deny that to your kids for the sake of maintaining your own sense of moral superiority? Would you raise them to believe that there is no magic in the world? ____Not the real rusty Snopes says... ...false. ____Not the real rusty Ironically, so does everyone else Explaining why that myth is so common and easily believed. But if everyone is miserable on the holidays, and suicide rates actually go down, then it can perhaps only be because everyone is so convinced that everyone else is miserable that they feel a strange sense of community belonging, and are thus saved from doing the deed. ____Not the real rusty No, not the only thing I'm sure they'll be fine if they don't get Santa, and will fondly remember Christmas if they're the sort to do that and everything. And perhaps I reacted a little too strongly. It seems like when you hear this sort of thing from parents, it falls into the class of "I'm better than everyone because I don't own a TV." That kind of self-serving morality that gets paraded around for show. Obviously I don't know you, and can't say what your reasons are, so my response is only worth the recycled bits it's served as. If you know better, believe yourself and not me. :-) I still say let them have Santa. If for no other reason than the pragmatic one that the holidays are drenched in it, and what a pain in the ass explaining everything to a kid who's too young to really get it in the first place. You might also present it ambiguously -- tell her the story, and say some folks believe and some don't, and let her work it out for herself. ____Not the real rusty Wait till she asks about god Good luck. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ok, that was funny And the background vocals were audible this time. Good work. ____Not the real rusty No, I'm serious I laughed. It was funny. I will spank myself anyway though. Don't worry. ____Not the real rusty TV too [nt] ____Not the real rusty Yes, they are Mostly the same as the radio ones, but with some visuals. The pictures don't do that much, except they do show the background singer rocking out, which is pretty funny. ____Not the real rusty Network TV? They still have that? Huh. My theory is they're all waiting for the new season of 24 to start. Ain't nothing much else worth watching, now that Aaron's left West Wing and it's become the soap opera Scandal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ____Not the real rusty Like where? If there is a problem (and there well could be) examples would be helpful. ____Not the real rusty Well That's bizarre. I will investigate. The story is definitely still there, and appears no different from the ones before and after it. Something fnny going on here... ____Not the real rusty Immure, chary Immure is to wall up, and chary is to be stingy or ungiving. I didn't know what friable meant till I looked it up, so I won't take credit for that one. But I bet you had multiple-choice, and I'd have gotten it with answers to pick from. ____Not the real rusty Damn I finally guess one, and it's the day I got up too late. Damn damn damn. ____Not the real rusty Ok, look That first stanza is weak, and you know it. Don't you be all comin up in here with weak-ass dactyls, boy. And "in-dis-put-a-ble-y"? Shakes head, walks off muttering about kids today... ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry, but you're wrong The correct answer is "Opera sucks." R343L already knows this, too. However, bonus points for good customer service. :-) ____Not the real rusty :-P ____Not the real rusty Hey Wasn't I supposed to get one of the first to roll off the (er, on-demand) presses? :-) ____Not the real rusty Photographica You're probably thinking of Photographica. ____Not the real rusty Question for smart math people Given a set of values, like oh say for an example just out of my hat here, comment ratings. I can calculate the average rating easily enough, but what kind of math is there to tell me how much agreement or controversy there was? That is, if I have an overall score of 1.5, which comes from 5 three ratings and 5 zero ratings, that's a good number of ratings (so pretty good confidence in the score), but a very sharp disagreement about the quality of the comment. If I have a 1.5 score that comes from a one rating and a two rating, I'd be less confident, but the ratings agree much closer. So what's the math? Thanks. I think you misunderstand I'm thinking about different ways to present comment scores, and what other kinds of information could be extracted from the basic numbers we have. I'm not trying to come up with a system to revoke anyone's moderation privileges. ____Not the real rusty Not me That's, wierdly enough, a different Rusty Foster. ____Not the real rusty It was a dark and stormy day First diary in almost a month, and first that mentions anything personal in almost two months. I guess that constitutes a break, huh? Inside: Stormy weather, Salem, work, books, and the latest Google results. The storm came through this morning, and I woke up to chattering rain and thrashing trees. The power was out for a while. Stormy mornings are the best. I just saw the day's first sunbeam, so it looks like it's over. The wind is supposed to swing around to the southwest and pick up again as the low that pushed all this other stuff through moves in. It'll be time to wander out and see what blew down soon. Went to my parents last weekend and toured Ye Olde Historic Salem in the pouring rain. Spent most of the day squelching around in wet jeans and subsequently got sick. So listen to your grandmother and wear your galoshes or you'll catch your death. It's all true. Work has been plentiful. I don't know if it's a sign of larger economic improvement or not, but I'm steadily raising my consulting rates in an effort to drive away clients, and so far it's not working. I'm also doing carpentry here on the island and working on a new website for someone. Which I should be doing right now instead of writing this diary, a situation that has obtained for several months and explains my long near-silence. Recently read: Monstrous Regiment: Pratchett is less funny but more True these days. Good stuff. The Corrections: Oprah be damned, it's a great book. I admit it, I cried a little at the end. Almost. Dear Mr. President: Really good. And, in what may become a regular feature, and to perhaps offset the fact that Google is currently ravaging our webservers like Fabio on a paperback romance cover, the latest absurdly high K5 Google rankings: Need food? Google will send you here if you want to know how to make sushi (#2) or how to make bread (#1), but our former beer can chicken glory has dropped to number nine. Bread and sushi are better anyway. Maybe you want a martini (#9) with that? In politics, we've dropped to number three (or four depending how you count) for anna lindh, but Anna Lindh was yesterday (as was Slim Dusty (#3)), and the future is all about the Tommy Chong (#1). Cthulu (#3) is neither past nor future, but reigns eternal in the dark pits of the nether dimenstions. Or maybe it's all about the lifestyle for you? Like, maybe you've got social phobia (#4) and you're looking for some legal music downloads (#1) so you don't have to leave the house. We're here for you babe. Incidentally, as far as numbers go, it appears that right now most searchers are looking for some "tommy chong" (if you know what I mean), downloading some music, and then whipping up a batch of sushi. Draw your own conclusions. Hell yes I guess the "no pressing reason to leave the house" is a key element as well. I'm at home this week, so that was also a factor. ____Not the real rusty It's all lies. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Backstory Here. Basically, Oprah picked the book for her book club, and Franzen (the author) said he didn't want to be part of that, despite the guaranteed additional sales, because he was trying to write hoity-toity high lit-raw-chure, not for the drooling Oprah-watching masses. There was a minor scuffle about it all in literary circles. My take is that Franzen did the nearly impossible and didn't know it. He wrote a very smart and intellectual book that nevertheless has a hell of a lot that any slob can relate to and understand. He apparently either didn't realize that, or was embarrassed to have accidentally written a truly good book instead of the recto-cranially inverted New Yorker wankfest that would have gotten him invited to all the best kind of parties. ____Not the real rusty I think it's the internet's fault I never heard it until the net started making it easy to talk casually to Britishers and such. "Whinging" is another one that has crossed over. I suspect that as the net grows more prevalent, we're going to start seeing significant collapse between regional variants of a single language, with English leading the way. ____Not the real rusty Wrongo "Eighty thousand" and "not a cent in tax" are both as wrong as can be. But you know that, and most of your stuff is funny, so hey. ____Not the real rusty Dead tree? Will we still be able to buy our copies before Christmas? I'm looking to get in early and hold onto what will surely become an extremely rare collector's item. :-) ____Not the real rusty Perhaps it was Grumpios. ____Not the real rusty From behind steepled fingers Ah, yes, Smithers. Now you begin to see the evil genius of my plan, do you not? Run! Fetch my motor-carriage! Away with ye now! ____Not the real rusty What I was doing What I'm actually doing in that picture is posting johnny's novel. ____Not the real rusty No That's at some horrible conference center in California. Doesn't the furniture alone just scream "horrible conference center in California"? ____Not the real rusty It was disabled It somehow got un-disabled, and now it is again re-disabled. ____Not the real rusty With K5ARP's return We will all redouble our efforts and strive for the heretofore unattainable 3 1/4 hours uptime. ____Not the real rusty Habs suck! Yeah, you heard me. Go Bruins! :-) ____Not the real rusty Charging! Two minutes, plus five for unsportsmanlike. ____Not the real rusty Oh, that's it buddy It's go time. ____Not the real rusty Cool Congratulations. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha. Sucker. I'm tired too. But I didn't have to get up at 4:15. What happened? Frost on the bogs? And the Sox are going to blow it. Now's the time to make some money down there. Everyone's got Red Sox fever! Finding takers for bets against them should be easy, and no one ever went broke betting against the Red Sox. Rustle up the big fair-weather fans in your office and offer them good odds that they don't win the World series this year. Then sit back and watch the money roll in. ____Not the real rusty Hey, thanks You said something nice about the changes. I think I now have to worship you like an abused puppy worships the master who doesn't beat him too badly. :-) Yeah, I have been thinking about it for a long time. Maybe that wasn't clear enough to anyone, since I didn't make any attempt to go back and put together a paper trail. And there are still a couple teething problems. Notably almost none of the bugs were actually related to the new moderation. They all came from a bundle of other patches that were committed at nearly the same time. But yeah, anyway, thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty Grr The new DB server is still MIA. You're not as peeved about it as I am, believe me. I don't know who was first to say "Spam" should be relabeled. I think I got it second or third hand. I thought it was a fine idea too. And pb has been working on a c implementation of a new search. From what he says, it sounds like it's just about ready to integrate into Scoop. Hopefully it works. ____Not the real rusty Nope Mojo is basically dead. It's still there, in the database, and it may conceivably come back in some form at some point, but right now there is no such thing. Everyone (who is not restricted in some way, like stripped of ratings privileges entirely) has supermojo right now, which makes them trusted all the time. Actually, I just checked, and the ratings that aren't counted will still affect mojo. If I ever brought it back for any reason, that would probably change so that only actual comment socres would have an effect. ____Not the real rusty Hey If you add a radio button rating thingy (a feature I'd cheer, by the way) could you make it a user pref? Rating type: [Radio buttons &pipe; Drop-down] That kind of thing? That'd be cool. It should be dead easy to do. ____Not the real rusty Did nothing? That's not true. Spencer got the administrative boot. So does anyone who page-widens. Just because I don't tend to make announcements about it doesn't mean it doesn't get done. I can pretty confidently say that no disruptive poster has ever "left on his own." And I don't hate the trolls. I think you're mostly right that they tend more to be amusing than anything else. I think K5 has high standards for its trolls though, and is rather hard on any that don't live up to them. Regardless, the new ratings are not intended to punish anyone. They're an attempt to make the ratings of comments reflect the majority opinion better. At the same time, you can now exempt yourself from ratings altogether. So it goes both ways, like Tex on a three-day coke bender. ____Not the real rusty Slogan Kuro5hin.org: You think you'd want these dipshits in your kitchen? ____Not the real rusty I've ... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time... to die. ____Not the real rusty I think you meant "Genious." ____Not the real rusty Lemme guess If there were blacklists, you'd post *plonk* comments, wouldn't you? ____Not the real rusty I never stopped Though it has been ages since I posted a diary. And I seem to mostly comment in random people's diaries rather than actual stories, so if you weren't reading a lot of them, it may have seemed that I wasn't around. ____Not the real rusty Yes Rate? [Hide ] ____Not the real rusty Really? Huh. Oh, I think I might know what's going on. Will fix. ____Not the real rusty Yup ____Not the real rusty Three. ____Not the real rusty Next week, on K5: Tune in next week for another exciting episode where rmg still has no girlfriend. Ok, let's face it, that's how all the episodes are going to be. ____Not the real rusty That makes two of us But I got a girlfriend. So we're still different, you and I. Vive la differance! ____Not the real rusty Hear hear He obviously has way more fun doing it than I usually do. :-) ____Not the real rusty Me too [nt] ____Not the real rusty Here! Here! ____Not the real rusty I don't Your ratings won't do anything till five others rate a comment too. The main problem with modbombing before was that it could hide comments after they'd been seen by most everyone. That's not going to happen now, nor can you affect anyone's mojo, so basically I don't care. I hope thelizman modbombs you back, and you both have a good laugh over beers about it, cause it don't mean shit. ____Not the real rusty Technically You are probably the only person here who has now provided evidence that you are, in fact, an actual crapflooder. :-) ____Not the real rusty Maybe But it does feature the line "My boy's wicked smaht." which alone justifies the movie's existence. ____Not the real rusty I think speek nailed it The movie was mainly about anti-intellectualism. The message was "Look, this friggin freak-boy genius thinks he's so smaht, but really he just wishes he were a regular guy like us. We're better than them smaht people. Pissa!" ____Not the real rusty Didn't you get it? He likes to do things the passive aggressive way. ...? ____Not the real rusty This is all made up We never talked on the phone. I don't know who you are, nor do I care. And dear God I have about a million more interesting things to do than track down your ISP and try to get you hassled there. And considering a lot of the claims here I know are not true (since I'm supposed to have been involved in them and I wasn't) I assume the rest isn't true either. If people believe it though, you sir have reached a new level, and are to be congratulated. :-) ____Not the real rusty No [nt] ____Not the real rusty Also No. [nt] Wait. I can't say "[nt]" in the comment. Also, drduck rated me down. Now I must wank whine. ____Not the real rusty It's all about the tone This "constant and known crapflooder dropping the mask in frustration" tone almost always works well. I think after this our boy here might no longer be content with merely crapflooding, and start to actually contribute something. So in a way he's right. I win again. :-) ____Not the real rusty North Haven That's up by Camden. I've never been to N.H., but Camden is nice, and it's not a bad drive to Portland. ____Not the real rusty You forgot one 7. Get a girlfriend. Trust me, you'll laugh about all this later. ____Not the real rusty Not for you You're what they will all aspire to become, on that glorious day. :-) ____Not the real rusty Misleading The post makes it sound like it was a single search. It was dozens, being run concurrently, and restarted as soon as the servers were available. It was a denial of service attack, and dealt with as one. ____Not the real rusty Yeah And when comment search was shut off, his "browser" mysteriously started again with a diary search. That Mozilla gets smarter every day. ____Not the real rusty Bullshit yourself I sat here and watched. You started running it on comments. When I disabled comment and story search, you ran it on diaries. ____Not the real rusty So wait Was it "one single comment search" or "seven diary searches"? You're getting your story mixed up. ____Not the real rusty I did Have you looked? ____Not the real rusty Those aren't really a problem It was churning through comments and stories that was the problem. I only disabled the ones that really screwed everything up. ____Not the real rusty Both Which means that either it's a really hard problem to solve, or Rob is an idiot. I suspect both. :-) But that's not a bad idea. ____Not the real rusty He'll find it amusing, I'm sure. Hi Rob! Why are you reading things that internet fools send you? :-) ____Not the real rusty True enough [nt] ____Not the real rusty The delayed phase thing That happens to me too. In fact, if I don't get my ass to bed, I'm in danger of it happening tomorrow. I have found that making a schedule you can stick to helps enormously, like "get up at 7AM no matter what." If you manage it for a few days, it gets easier. You'll start getting tired at the appropriate time for when you have to get up, and so forth. Another thing that helps a ton is getting exercise enough to be tired when it's time to sleep. When I code all day, I have a hard time sleeping. When I run for an hour (or spend a day actually working), I have a much easier time sleeping. ____Not the real rusty Two? Ha! Try like ten. The "Friday +5" diaries? More than half the comments were NIWS clones. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. ____Not the real rusty You want me to? It will include lots of your ip numbers. ____Not the real rusty That sucks. But as always, K5 is here for you when life gets shitty. I've missed your writing, and at the same time been kind of glad not to see it, because it probably meant that you were doing well. So I guess I'm happy/sad to see you back. But enough about your tragedy. When are you bringing me sushi? ____Not the real rusty Hey chief The reason you get ignored is that you make assumptions about what's happening when you have no knowlege. Your unfounded hysteria is just that. ____Not the real rusty There was no manual posting decision Scoop includes software that waits for a defined period of time or a defined number of votes (on K5 the time period is 36 hours after a story goes to voting). If after that time a story hasn't reached either the post or dump thresholds, Scoop takes over and does some calculations based on voting and comments to decide whether to post the story or not. This was written because the voting process is open-ended as it normally works -- it is possible for a story to sit in voting forever unless there is some end imposed. The way it works is like this: We count up the ratings and number of rating data points from all topical comments that have been rated and where the current rating is above one. The story is given a comment score which is a weighted average of relevant comment ratings, with more weight given to ratings that had a greater number of contributing data points. This score is meant to represent the overall quality of topical discussion, as best we can determine. It ignores editorial comments, hidden comments, and unrated comments. There is also a penalty if a story doesn't have a minimum number of comments contributing to this score (meant to represent a story that doesn't have much discussion, and hence, we assume, people didn't find very interesting). Then we look at the voting, and figure out a voting score which exists on the same scale as ratings (i.e. currently one to five). So here, the voting score is:((Front_Page Votes * 5) + (Section Votes * 4) + (Don't Care Votes * 2) + (Dump Votes)) / (Total votes) So now you have two numbers between one and five. The average of those two is the story's overall score. If it's lower than 3.35, the story is dropped. I used to get an email whenever auto-post made a decision with the actual numbers used. I think I turned that off recently, so damn. I don't have the data. But looking at it, it looks like what happened was a ton of comments were unrated, and many others were rated low by like one person. So the comment score would have ended up pretty low. This can happen, and once in a while auto post blows it pretty badly. I think this is one of those cases, and I overruled auto-post and posted the story to section. I think this is the second time I've ever overruled auto-post. Also, I'm changing comment ratings pretty drastically, and under the new system a lot of the ratings that made this story go down wouldn't have counted. However, in general auto-post works very well, and this kind of case is extremely rare. ____Not the real rusty Columns We did away with columns a while ago. It didn't really fit with the rest of the sections, no one was writing regular columns, and the couple of semi-regular article series fit better in other sections. I think it was replaced with Science. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I started on variable section-based posting thresholds a little while ago, but didn't finish the coding. It wouldn't be that hard to do though. And I gave you diary privileges back, but no crapflooding. There won't be a third chance. ____Not the real rusty Ratings The default rating was a bad idea, I was convinced from that discussion. I'm still thinking about changes similar to the others I brought up there. Basically compressing the scale to good, ok, bad, and hide and opening up all of the ratings to everyone. It'd also be nice if they tracked rater IPs and didn't actually take effect until X different users had rated. ____Not the real rusty Update Most of the coding is done. I've been working on it this morning. I need to adjust the auto-post stuff so that it can work with a different rating range, and there's one little tweak I also want to do to gently encourage more rating activity. Then I need to figure out how awful the transition here is going to be. :-) But the code works. Look for a pretty big rating change soon. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I will post a site news about it before switching over, so I guess I'll wait a bit and collect ideas. Do you think it would be more useful to get ideas based on my description, or ideas based on seeing how it works though? ____Not the real rusty Restrictions bad I don't think any kind of greater restriction on rating activity is a good idea. Restrictions work fine when you can control the incidence of sock puppets, but given that we can't really do that, I'm aiming for a design that gives as much power as possible to everyone and compensates for the inevitable noise. For example, your idea of restricting ratings until someone has posted (or posted and been moderated, or whatever) basically just ensures that well-meaning but quiet users will be handicapped, while anyone with enough brains to round up a couple sock puppet accounts will have full privileges. I'd rather give as much power away as possible and try to find the signal. I think that works better than restricting. ____Not the real rusty Indeed And you're welcome back whenever you've got a chance to catch your breath. ____Not the real rusty Trolling? Criticizing Christianity on a technology website is, like, the opposite of trolling. If you were defending it -- now that might be trolling. ____Not the real rusty Malformed in what way? Can you grab a screenshot sometime and put it up? I haven't seen that sort of thing. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Buck 65. Get it? That's Canadian for Fifty Cent. ____Not the real rusty Numbers one and two? Both of your moms. ____Not the real rusty Damn You're right. My bad. ____Not the real rusty I disagree The Diary section is the bathroom of Kuro5hin, in terms of your metaphor. Kuro5hin itself is the bar. ____Not the real rusty Shut up you You'll drink when you're served, and you'll like it. ____Not the real rusty Hey I never said I didn't like to hang out in the bathroom. ^ ^ ^ LOOK! A NEW .SIG FOR SOMEONE!!! ____Not the real rusty As I said If it were resubmitted with the above style, I'd vote for it. I imagine many others would as well. Do consider it. ____Not the real rusty The Spartans. ____Not the real rusty The Cretans ____Not the real rusty More 1337 than you K5: 1 char /.: 4 chars HuSi: 2 chars Aq and GiZ? Never had accounts. ____Not the real rusty Not me I've never been a spork fan. I'm more of a threek guy myself. ____Not the real rusty Hmmm I'm a friend of Owen's. Owen doesn't have any friends. Oh. Is it because he's shy? No, it's because he's fat and stupid. ____Not the real rusty No What would the first line have meant? ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty Still nope ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty You are controlled by a cloud? Must be some cloud. :-) But no. ____Not the real rusty No, and no ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty Nope And already guessed. Score -2 for Tex. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope Good guess though. It almost works. But the nature line is pretty weak if you consider that "nature" is everything natural in the universe, not just "life on earth". By that token, a star doesn't control nature, it is merely part of it. ____Not the real rusty Meh Many riddles have answers that could also fit, but once you hear the real answer you realize it fits much much better. This is one of those. Ok, yes, "a star" can be explained so as to work. I will give you that. I would however, encourage people to keep guessing, because the answer I'm looking for is a lot better. Also, I do not believe in astrology. :-) ____Not the real rusty You'd ike us think so! But I've got the pictures, buddy. Don't forget that. Yeah, the smiley was a recognition that it wouldn't matter very much whether I did or not, as far as riddling goes. I still maintain that my answer is better. ____Not the real rusty Answer http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/9/22/82416/9218/89#89 ____Not the real rusty No In Soviet Russia, you still do not control nature. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope Nice explanation, but a little too thinly stretched. ____Not the real rusty Nope Good guess, though. I suppose hydrogen, in the form of dihydrogen oxide, controls you to some extent, but not what I was going for here. There also isn't that much case to be made that hydrogen controls nature in any real way. ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty uh-uh Sunshine? Blue? I don't see any connection to time. Anyway, nope. ____Not the real rusty Nope I didn't think this one was that hard, but I guess so. After Friday's debacle, I'm glad. :-) ____Not the real rusty :-P drduck does not control me. :-) ____Not the real rusty No... But that's a closer guess than anyone has come up with so far. ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty No Love may make the world go round, but love definitely does not determine the mass of the top quark. :-) ____Not the real rusty Never mind the bollocks For they are not the answer. ____Not the real rusty Should I post another verse? This appears to be a lot harder than I had thought. Lots of guesses, some very good, but so far none are right. I could make up another verse if you think it would be better to give some more clues, or I could just leave it as-is and let the puzzlement continue. It's up to you guys. ____Not the real rusty Willard Scott 0wnz0rz j00 But no. ____Not the real rusty Nope How would light control nature? I suppose by a limited definition of nature, like "animal and plant life" it kinda coule, but even assuming nature-on-Earth, light has nothing to do with, say, volcanoes, earthquakes, or tides. Or any number of other things. ____Not the real rusty Er, well Not entirely the wrong track. But the top quark specifically has little to do with anything. That was just an example of "something in nature" that might fall outside the scope of what you'd normally think of. ____Not the real rusty Nope^3 ____Not the real rusty Nope ____Not the real rusty No Sunshine? Blue? ____Not the real rusty No The electroweak force is well known to be a rather nauseous shade of chartreuse. ____Not the real rusty AT LAST! Yes, you are correct sir! "Sunshine laws" are laws requiring public release of information. "Blue laws" are laws controlling various forms of vice such as liquor stores and so forth. The laws of nature control the universe, and the laws of man control all us people. Well done. ____Not the real rusty Crapflooder That guy is a repeat crapflooder. I mean, I could have a totally hands-off policy, but that's a recipe for uselessness. It seems that the prevailing opinion is that terminal crapflooders should be removed. ____Not the real rusty They shouldn't have Stuff normally just gets hidden, which means that the comments live on. It's possible one of the other admins deleted a few of the diaries (rather than just hiding them) which would remove the comments too. ____Not the real rusty Yup :-) ____Not the real rusty This one was pretty easy But is there not a place for easy riddles now and then? I think so. Monday's is either just as easy, or not. :-) ____Not the real rusty K5 0wns Google This is not a proper diary entry. It just just a list of search terms for which K5 currently appears in an absurdly high place on Google. Enjoy. Number one result at this time: Hamburgers Anna Lindh (No kidding!) Beer can chicken Google calculator First page: michael moore body modification nude anti-globalization protesters audiogalaxy But I am sad to report that while we held the number fifteen result for "fucking" for quite a while, we seem to have dropped back off the radar on that one. No For a while we were #15 for just "fucking" all by itself. ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Lentil. We made a big batch of lentil soup last week. Yummy. We did put kielbasa in it, though, which kind of spoils the vegan aspect. It was also made with chicken boullion. But I'm pretty doubtful whether those little cubes derive in any way from an actual animal. ____Not the real rusty No way Lentil soup is pretty fast to make. Lentils are like the only dried bean that doesn't require a lot of soaking time to come to life. Ok, just for you, and because no one should have to eat canned soup, here's our lentil soup: 2 tbsp olive oil 1 large onion, chopped 1 rib celery, thinly sliced 1/2 green bell pepper, seeded and diced Salt 5 + 1 cups veggie (or chicken) stock 3/4 cup dried lentils, rinsed and checked for rocks 1 carrot, peeled and diced bay leaves 1 teaspoon dried basil 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme ground black pepper 1 large potato, diced fairly small 1 cup diced tomatoes (canned diced, crushed, or stewed tomatoes are fine) Heat up the olive oil in a big pot, add onion, celery, and pepper and a little salt, and cover tightly. Sweat over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes. Add five cups of the stock, lentils, carrot, bay, and herbs, and a little more pepper. Bring it all to a boil, then cover mostly and turn the heat down. Simmer for about 15 minutes. Add the potato and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Simmer 10 more minutes. Add the tomatoes, cover, and simmer for 10 or 15 more minutes. At this point we usually add the other cup of stock, as we think it's too thick without it, but you don't want it to soak into everything too much. Season as necessary, and enjoy. There you've got some cracking good lentil soup in about 45 minutes. This is from the book Soup Makes the Meal, which you should order right now. Everyhting in it is good, and it has a ton of veggie stuff. In fact, just tonight we had the cabbage paprikash, and there's a roasted potato, onion, and garlic soup in there that rules as well. And you can cook a few meals and rotate. I usually refuse to have the same thing for dinner two nights in a row, but dinner is almost always lunch at some point too. Regardless, that's not way to live. It is possible to cook good meals from scratch in a reasonable amount of time. ____Not the real rusty Ah, when I have time... I do love to make chicken stock, and I do when I have time. I've got a batch of bones in the freezer right now waiting to go. But it doesn't make that much, and it's gone all too soon. I usually save it for something where it'll make a difference anyway. The boullion cubes are poor, but the soup is yummy anyway. I will look for this Minor's stuff though. My main problem has always been volume. We go through twenty five of these silly cubes in about two weeks. The canned or boxed chicken broth just won't last long enough, and carrying it home from the store would be a pain. Sounds like you may have solved my quality chicken stock dilemma. ____Not the real rusty Tex Why you gotta be hatin'? ____Not the real rusty It's not the ratings It';s your new fraternal organization. Though, if there are stickers or iron-on patches, totally sign me up. I'm not kidding. ____Not the real rusty Guess Ahoy! Watch out now... ____Not the real rusty Is it Resolution? ____Not the real rusty Or Resolve. Or some form of the same word. ____Not the real rusty It's ok I willingly forgo my guess rating. It wouldn't make any difference for me anyway. ____Not the real rusty You know The baby Jesus cries, of course. ____Not the real rusty Pissing off rusty? Not at all! I think he's an amusing internet loonie, and I must confess that I enjoy rattling his cage from time to time. But I do wish him the best in his quest for the scientific racially pure rocket ship capsule. ____Not the real rusty Duck is the new Bunny [nt] ____Not the real rusty IT couldn't have anything to do with your browser, could it? I'm pretty sure Scoop only runs on our servers. What browser is it? Some have a hard time rendering complex html, long pages, or lots of table nesting, all of which can happen in stories with a lot of comments. ____Not the real rusty You got an STD from the web? Bummer. ____Not the real rusty No, no That's just for you Amelia. ____Not the real rusty Heh Not that I'd care to take a crack at paring it down Me neither. And therein lies the problem... :-) ____Not the real rusty Isabel. Its name is Isabel. ____Not the real rusty Nope Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel. ____Not the real rusty On a similar note It seems that the diary section has been taken over by inane drivel. Haaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha! Haaahahahaa! Ha! Hahahaha! Whew. ____Not the real rusty Aw, c;mon You don't see the humor of it at all? I mean, the diaries have always been mostly inane drivel. I know mine are. ____Not the real rusty Take heart The joke will be on them when you blast off into space in your racially pure scientific rocket-ship capsule. ____Not the real rusty Afraid not We're talking strictly C ark here. ____Not the real rusty What's in the bag 1) List of items in the bag. ____Not the real rusty 3) Instructions indicating what sort of emergency the bag should be opened for. ____Not the real rusty 5) Otro sistema de instrucciones en espaol. ____Not the real rusty 7) El acuerdo de licencia que indica exactamente qu situaciones debe ser abierto el bolso adentro y las penas que usted acuerda someter deben usted abierto el bolso para cualquier otra circunstancia. ____Not the real rusty Pie? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Pie. [np] No pie. ____Not the real rusty That's not nice Ashley here is trying her best. You shouldn't say things like that. ____Not the real rusty Bet your ass I do But I don't think I'll have anything to add to the great drduck mystery. ____Not the real rusty Why? There's no rule that says you have to comment before you can rate. ____Not the real rusty Heh Comment reply watcher. It's not just Tex, it's any reply to my comments. And it can be yours as well, for the low, low price of $4.00 a month. ____Not the real rusty But... To threaten that without being a subscriber would be...intolerably disingenuous. But you'd be joining a large and distinguished company, nonetheless. :-) ____Not the real rusty Please, do go There are uninhabited islands aplenty for your heroic future society of bearded Aryan supermen. We all welcome and encourage you to select one and go there. ____Not the real rusty No, really I'm not going to take up a lot of my life trying to help you out, much like I don't see you helpiong me house-hunt. But you would go with my utmost blessing, and best wishes, provided I knew you wouldn't have internet access anymore. I can sympathize totally, as I would consider myself a white-separatist-separatist. I just want to live in a country where all the white separatists are far away. I would like to know when you tried to move to an uninhabited place, and who stopped you from doing it? ____Not the real rusty Ok I don't care if you believe me. But I meant the questions at the end sincerely. Have you tried to go elsewhere? ____Not the real rusty No Siberia, and all towns in America are actually claimed already. You have to go to a place that no country owns, and you may have to be prepared to defend it by force if some nearby country decides they don't like you being there. You don't get to be a separatist by inhabiting a place that not too many people already claim. ____Not the real rusty All I hear... ...is excuses. You're not important. No one will bomb you if you go live on an island. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. ____Not the real rusty You're an individual. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Reminds me of the old joke Hey, do you wipe with your left hand or your right? I dunno. Right, I guess. Dude, that's gross. I use toilet paper. ____Not the real rusty Why must you constantly "modstorm" me? You "internet chatboard troll." ____Not the real rusty Thanks, Sally. ____Not the real rusty Scary Crapflooding of Biblical proportions, no less! Let's see it, Jennifer. ____Not the real rusty Oh man I looked up the latest NOAA hurricane update, and it read: "somar is utterly screwed." If you haven't thought about it yet, start making some hurricane shutters, so maybe you'll have a house left ot come home to. You also should probably start moving things upstairs, if you can. ____Not the real rusty Sweet If it's a rental, then you're all set. Take care of your personal valuables though. I have to say hurricanes are cool, and I wish it would come up here. I haven't seen one since I think Gloria, way back in the day. ____Not the real rusty Hey You live on a boat? What kind? ____Not the real rusty Good luck Has the ground in NoVA dried out at all yet? Last time I was at my sister's (late spring) there was mold growing in her backyard, it was so wet. If the ground is still saturated, this is going to be a really bad storm for you guys. ____Not the real rusty Guess Newspapers? ____Not the real rusty Bad luck I read the riddle immediately after reading this article, so I had newspapers on the brain. ____Not the real rusty Pleh The "only guess in a reply" rule was abandoned ages ago. When there are already comments on a riddle, I don't scroll down to them till I've tried to figure it out myself first. I pretty much never get them anyway, but hey. Therefore, you have only yourself to blame for not waking up this morning and having tps12's crack. ____Not the real rusty It is true Rusty is a vain owner who reads diaries that mention him. ____Not the real rusty The paint should be green. Then the joke would be funny. ____Not the real rusty Pretty good I ran into rizzo242 in the grocery store once. ____Not the real rusty And... It is from Barton Fink, and should conjure up in the mind of the informed reader a satanic vision of a deranged shotgun-toting John Goodman storming down a corridor of flames, which I think aptly sums up the diary section. ____Not the real rusty If I knew what account you were talking about... ...I'd still probably say no. ____Not the real rusty I believe... ...that global warming is an unproven theory, and that it will turn out to be a lot of hogwash. This drives people on MetaFilter absolutely batshit, but I can't recall it ever coming up here. ____Not the real rusty Not really an old joke Just something I put in to amuse myself. I stole it from the "Registered at the Post Office as" gag at the bottom of NTK, which is done with a lot more wit and care. I should add some new lines to that thing, now that you mention it. ____Not the real rusty Incubus Rules. They actually have it on Netflix, if anyone is looking for a source. ____Not the real rusty It's crappy, yet strangely compelling. I can still vividly recall that scene you linked to the picture of, where they're sort of talking past each other. I don't remember the plot at all though. Also, the DVD has some nifty extra stuff. The commentary track is great. They tell how the film was not only shot in Esperanto, but that was the only language allowed on set. And since basically the producer and director were the only people fluent in it, no one else had any idea what they were saying most of the time. So the camera people would give directions, and the actors were never sure what they were supposed to do, which was kind of ok since the camera people weren't sure what they'd told them to do anyway. The upshot of it all is that the weirdly fearful expressions everyone has on their faces all the time work really well in the movie, but mainly come from terror at not having a clue what's going on. ____Not the real rusty Hey wow I didn't know Neverwhere was made into any sort of audiovisual media. I loved that book. There's a short wait for Disc 1 right now. Is that you? We're going to have to fight over them, I think. ____Not the real rusty No, and no. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Carnies! Carnies? Carnies. Circus folk. Can't stand 'em. ____Not the real rusty My spoon is so concave I can eat soup with it. ____Not the real rusty No Then it would be a spatula. And while there may be no spoon, there is definitely a spatula. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, kinda I missed the Agassi semi, but the Roddick one was pretty good. The final, not so much. My pick for match of the tournament was Capriati vs. Henin-Hardenne in the Women's semi. Otherwise, not a tremendous year. ____Not the real rusty Heh What? You mean it isn't the easiest job in the world? You'll never convince anyone else of that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh, man Good idea, but you screwed it up. Aunt Jemima comes in a plain bottle-shaped bottle. Your joke was based on the maternally shaped bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's. ____Not the real rusty Wink wink, nudge nudge Say no more. ____Not the real rusty Heh Word to the wise, Tex -- scale it back a little. You're only fooling the desperately gullible now, and it's just about to the point where you might as well be demonstrating how much your mastery of trigonometry exceeds that of a sparrow. Or go much, much further. Right now you're trying too hard for it to be subtle, but not hard enough to be really over the top. ____Not the real rusty Weird I have a neutered black male cat named Baby. I guess there are others out there as lazy at naming animals as we are. I haven't heard from your guy about the thing. What's happening with that? ____Not the real rusty I used to have a bird named... ...wait for it... "Bird." ____Not the real rusty Yes I thought the second thing was the same thing as the first thing. It wasn't? And yeah, our cat had a real name, but when he was a baby we called him "Baby." Who knew he'd learn his name? Or that when he did, it wouldn't be the right one? :-) ____Not the real rusty Sweet! I totally want an amphibious car. I'd never have to wait for the ferry or carry groceries home on foot again. I would also settle for a small hovercraft, though they are generally not street-legal. ____Not the real rusty If only... If only America wasn't so obsessed with firearms, this sort of tragedy could never happen. ____Not the real rusty Mmmmm. Pie. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Ha I read the intro to this and thought "Hey, that's funny, Rob was out in the mountains in N.H. today too." Then I saw the author. Duh. :-) Me and Eric paddled out to Little Chebeague. We were going to stop at the bar on Long but he had to get back to the kid. Perfect day for it though. ____Not the real rusty Both! But it is well known that it is impossible to read (much less participate in or enjoy) more than one website at a time. That's just proven psychogeographical fact, and anyone who says different is a charlatan and a liar. ____Not the real rusty See? K5 improves productivity, boosts economy. ____Not the real rusty The stories The stories have consistently gotten better, I think. All the noise is mainly about Diary stuff, which is the soap opera hidden behind the public face of the actual stories. Sometimes people forget what the site was for in the first place. :-) ____Not the real rusty Say... That's a nice looking blob you've got there! :-) ____Not the real rusty No That's about what I thought too. The first half or so, I was like "Wow! This kicks ass!" but by the end, I was back to "Hmm. S'Ok." He had a nifty idea but no clue where to go with it, I think. ____Not the real rusty It takes one to know one I feel that I am uniquely qualified to comment on Gaiman's shortcomings in AG. ____Not the real rusty Badda bing! I thought drawing attention to it myself was too obvious. Thank you, APA, for swinging at my slow lob there. ____Not the real rusty Thankfully, no. [nt] ____Not the real rusty I apologize I didn't see the "ass master" thing. Being so thoroughly sick of all this bullshit, I have no qualms about equal punishment. ____Not the real rusty wink wink And if you look hard enough... ...he said to him knowingly. ____Not the real rusty Heh Not an arms race, just a poke in the ribs. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't think I can answer your questions It takes two to troll. There is the person instigating, and the person biting. One, both, or neither may realize they are playing their role in any given situation. So, I guess the only answer I have is that troling will exist as long as there are people willing to play their parts. We've also got plenty of people willing to ceaselessly try to "solve the troll problem," who help the trolling process by casting it as something that is done to you, as opposed to something you participate in. So my forecast for the forseeable future is that trolling will always exist. Crapflooders are not welcome, however, and I and the other admins do what we can. ____Not the real rusty FYI Vlad's been harassed for years, both online and off. I won't have K5 be a place for some assholes to harass somebody. So, if you were thinking about testing out the new "let's harass someone for fun" fad, be aware that your account will go as well as the diary. ____Not the real rusty Just some guy... ...like anyone else. The whole backstory would probably take an hour and is boring as hell. The main point is that no one deserves having a cadre follow them around and try to make their life miserable. ____Not the real rusty I thought so That's why I left the useful part of it, and answered the question. The answer I think you're looking for is that no, you are not completely free to post anything you want. You are free to post almost anything you want. This particular thing has been going on for so long and has gotten so tiresome that we just delete it on sight. There have been a couple other people who have been similarly harassed, and it was dealt with in the same way. It is not part of some overarching policy of review and censorship, and happens in exceedingly rare circumstances. ____Not the real rusty There is no war CMF forces have, it is true, sent in advisors to assist the local legitimate government forces, but this is merely a low-grade police action. It is most assuredly not war. ____Not the real rusty Hey Remember when you were The Worstest Troll EVAR!!? I was just thinking about that tonight. Good times. Good times. ____Not the real rusty Good times. ____Not the real rusty Go to the Open I went yesterday (Monday). It's a good time, regardless of who's playing. I'm glad Venus and Serena are out, as I can't imagine anything duller than yet another Williams v. Williams final. Not that any of the other women are more interesting to watch. Ok, so women's tennis kinda bores me. But on the men's side, you've got Andy Roddick still very much in it, and if you have a chance check out Argentinian Guillermo Coria. I've never seen him play an uninteresting game. He's still in it too as of the first round. Me, I wanna see Agassi v. Roddick for the men's final. I hope the draw doesn't foolishly match them up earlier than that. ____Not the real rusty Nah You know what you were doing. If you really want to post diaries, you'll have to make a different account. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty I don't think so I think it was mostly coincidence. He did something especially obnoxious right when you complained. I forget what though, to tell you the truth. You may have drawn my attention to it, though. ____Not the real rusty Heh You didn't blow anything. Uh, that I know of, anyway. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yes That was it. That was, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, one giant leap over the line. ____Not the real rusty Well yeah I'm no great fan of the soul-crushing "power baseline" style either, unless played by an artist like Agassi has become, who can bring the heat, but also play the whole court and finesse the shit out of the ball when he wants to. But not all the men are like that, even though the power servers get all the hype. In fact Coria, who I mentioned above, is a very good example of someone who has a dceent serve but nothing to write home about (110-120ish), but wins games by being faster than hell and placing shots like you can't believe. That man is fun to watch. And as for attractiveness, female tennis pros all kinda look the same to me. Or, rather , there are a few distinct morphotypes and you can pretty much slot them in right off the bat. Bull moose, overgrown debutante (Capriati), Eastern European flinty-eyed blonde, and so forth. I don't find any of them interesting for very long, and their play is pretty uniformly mushy. Maybe I do miss the Williamses a little. :-) ____Not the real rusty Can't help it It's damn hard to talk about sports without sounding like a sports reporter. I blame deep childhood conditioning. I didn't grow up in a family that was really into any sports particularly, so I think the only people I heard talk about sports were sportscasters. It seems to have had an effect. :-) ____Not the real rusty Roddick's coach He hired Agassi's former coach, and has been pretty much setting the world on fire since. He's expected to do well in New York, and this could be the year. It should be interesting, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Permanent ban If you know how to do that, please let me know. ____Not the real rusty I've clearly stated it a zillion times Points against killfiles: They add noise, of the "I've killfiled [user]" variety. Threats to killfile, discussion of who and why, spurious claims of killfiling, and so on. They didn't work for Usenet. They didn't work for IRC. I've never seen a killfile do what it was supposed to do, which is encourage troublemakers to leave. Instead they grant troublemakers more attention, and a goal to work toward. They are divisive. Instead of encouraging people to work together for a better community, killfiles encourage individuals to filter their view of the world to their personal liking. That's not what K5 is about. If that's the only possible solution, then it's not worth keeping the site running, as it will have proven that the concept is a failure. If I was interested ion making yet another "My view is the only one that matters" outlet on an internet that is already littered with them, why not skip story voting altogether? Maybe everyone should just see the stories they want to see, and we can all pretend we're the only person in the universe. If that's what you're interested in doing, that would be fine, but it isn't what I'm interested in. This thing is about seeing what happens when people have to cooperate. On a practical level, they won't work. If enough people have you killfiled, you'll just make a new account. It would be a great way for trolls to find out who they can easily troll, so as to know where to focus their efforts. I don't see any value in providing targeting tools for trolling. ____Not the real rusty Yes ____Not the real rusty Fewer ads A few months ago we were averaging about 100 active ads in the system at a time. Over that time it's dropped to around 30. Fewer ads means your ads come up more, and run through faster, basically. I don't know why the drop, especially since the actual number of active impressions has not dropped at the same rate (we've got about half a million now as opposed to a million before). It may just be summer. The average hundred ads/million impressions held steady for a good long time until about June -- like eight or nine months. ____Not the real rusty Active You could turn the ads back on temporarily in your display prefs, or you could just go to http://www.kuro5hin.org/special/allads ____Not the real rusty Site news coming, actually I have some now. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes, and terribly I started a garden this year, but it has suffered late planting, intermittent neglect, and the depredations of browsing deer. I should have made this a preparation year, as it has turned out to be anyway. I had a lot of pre-gardening work to do, and didn't get much of it done till well after I should have been planting. Then the plants that did go in were not well-shielded from the ravenous island deer and have all been nibbled down to nothing. Plus my garden is surrounded by incredibly aggressive grass and bittersweet vines, and requires a lot more prep than I thought it would. So I've pretty much given up on this year, and I'm taking the rest of the summer and fall to do more thorough prep and planning for next year. Next year will be better. :-) My potted herbs are doing well though. I have basil, parsley, and chives aplenty. The rosemary is growing awfully slow. I think I need to put it in its own pot and get a couple more seedlings. And I've been fooling with cilantro, trying to work out the best way to plant it and when to pick it. I think I've got it with the batch I planted today, in a longish but shallow windowsill pan. It should be ready for plucking in about a month. ____Not the real rusty Everything that doesn't get voted up should be hidden. Look! We all have opinions! I actually believe the above, so the current system is a compromise between what people like me believe and what people like you believe. ____Not the real rusty What's up with rusty? What's wrong with that guy anyway? He never talks to the readers anymore, and K5 is slow all the time, and he's doing nothing about it, and it's infested with trolls, and it's not any fun to read anymore and if rusty wasn't rich and living the life of luxury he'd have to work on it and make it all better. So I'm not renewing my subscription. K5 is slow! I've been home all week and trying to figure out what the hell was causing the terrible performance problems. The short answer is I'm not much more enlightened than I was on Monday. Someone was running K5 searches on a dictionary file using a couple of different open proxies, which have been banned, but while the performance got better, there were still slowdowns after that for which I have no explanation. I checked everything I know to check. It was nothing simple or obvious. The symptoms were that at certain patternless moments, the database would become choked with queries. No queries stood out as always occurring, which is what I'd have expected, and none of the queries seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time. Usually this kind of event is marked with some particular query or set of queries that start taking forever, tying up the whole DB for a while. That wasn't the case here. I analyzed the logfiles pretty thoroughly and found no evidence of any kind of DoS, beyond the search attack I mentioned earlier. In short, what I know now is that everything works fine, and then suddenly it doesn't for a while, and then it does again. I am more frustrated than you to not know more, believe me. Performance has been better lately, unless it's been bad and I've just missed all those times. But since complaints have started to swing more toward "rusty doesn't talk to us" instead of "the site is slow," I assume it has in fact been ok. What I'm currently working on is a rewrite of story and comment search, with pb's generous help. The new search will be a vector-based system along the lines laid out in this article, with some performance improvements. If it works, it will be way way better than what we have now, and if it works well it will be a lot faster too. If it doesn't work, then we're kind of back to the drawing board. I think it will, but it is an experiment and there are no guarantees. I hoped to have the Vector search done by Friday, but the ultimately fruitless hunt for the cause of K5's problems soaked up much of the week and I'm not as far along as I'd like. It'll be done when it's done, but it's what I'm doing right now. Well, it's what I would be doing if I wasn't writing this, anyway. Rusty never tells us what's going on! And he's never around anymore. He doesn't care about the site. That I haven't written much lately is true. That I haven't spent all my time on K5 lately is also true. That I don't care is as false as anything could be. My wife and I want to buy a house n the next year or two. We love it here, we're ready to settle down, and we're tired of flushing money down the rental hole. She doesn't make much money as a grad student and library admin assistant, and I don't make much money from K5. Between us, we make about enough to pay the bills. So I'm not really in a position to turn down work when some comes my way, if we are ever to have any hope of saving up enough for a down payment. This summer, I've been lucky to have scads of work come my way, but it has taken me away from K5 for more time than I'm used to. Most of you know I've been remodeling a house in Massachusetts three days a week. My partner went on vacation this week, so I've had this past week off. That'll continue through September, when we'll either be done or I'll have to tell him I can't spend any more time on it. That's been good for the house account though. In addition to that, I'm starting a new website with a business partner up here in Portland. It'll be a collaborative site (heh, of course) where people can write in hotel reviews from the ordinary guest's perspective. There's a ton of hotel info on the web, but all of it is marketroid crap, and reserving a hotel room is still pretty much a crapshoot. We're hoping the new site will be a resource where you can find out the real dope about a hotel, like does it have wireless net access, is it packed with partying college kids, is the pool filled with green slime, do movies cost an arm and a leg, is it actually near interesting sights, and so forth. The business plan is to provide affiliate links to travel sites if you want to make a reservation through us, much the way Gizmodo makes money from Amazon affiliation. I'm building the site (in Scoop, of course) and will serve as managing editor. I think it'll be pretty cool, but we'll see in a month or so. If this works, we may find other niches where we think a site like that would work. Personally, I'm itching to start the long-desired food and cooking community. There's been some other miscellaneous writing and coding gigs that have come up, and the long and short is that I've been busy as hell this summer. My participation on K5 has been down, naturally. That doesn't mean I've abandoned the site or that I don't care about it. It just means I'm busy, and the routine things I do for K5 take greater precedence over posting comments and diaries. I also haven't posted a site news yet because, as explained above, I don't have any news. There will be one when the new search goes up though. Rusty lives the life of Reilly on the backs of the oppressed K5 denizens! I know the great majority of you know this, but of course that isn't true. The pay for K5 is pretty crappy, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who has known what my job entails and would really like to have it for themselves. I'd make almost twice what I make from K5 doing carpentry full time, if that's any indication. And when you're a carpenter, you get to go home at 5 o'clock and be off work for the rest of the night. I love this site. I always have, and I always will. I do it because I love it. Money helps, but if there was no money, I'd do it anyway. I'm not renewing my subscription because... I meant this comment very sincerely, and it contains most of how I feel about the recent "I'm not renewing my subscription" meme. I hope that people who get use out of the subscriber features will subscribe, and that people who don't will not. I don't want you to pay for a service you don't find worth the cost. If you're not going to renew because you're unhappy with me personally, there isn't much I can do about that. If you believe that I don't care about K5, you are wrong. If you think I'm not working on it, you are wrong. You have to make up your own mind about what you want to do with your money, though. K5 is full of trolls! It's always been full of trolls. If anything, I think the latest batch is, by and large, funnier than average. My advice basically comes down to one thing: it takes two to troll. A troll with no bites is no troll at all. If you are unwilling to be trolled, they can not touch you, and you might even see more of the humor in it. A good start is to not take everything personally. Someone arguing what you think is a foolish position is not an insult to you personally, that you have to get all heated up about. Maybe they're serious, and maybe they're trolling, but what determines whether it's one or the other is your response. If you get worked into a lather, they have successfully trolled you whether they meant to or not. If you remain calm, you can never be trolled. It's like the old saying that you can't cheat an honest man. You cannot troll someone who doesn't want to be trolled. As for crapflooders, that's what the zero rating is for. Use it and move on. Life is too short. However, if you really can no longer enjoy the site, for whatever reason, for God's sake find a place you like better and hang out there, or make your own. There's nothing sadder than a bunch of old timers grousing about how much better things used to be. Again, life is too short. Or admit that you simply enjoy grousing about how much better things used to be. :-) Does that about cover it? I hope so. No, not really. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Worry not I'm not dead, disgruntled, or depressed. In fact, I'm having one of the better summers ever. :-) ____Not the real rusty That is also true [nt] ____Not the real rusty I'm not trying to be patronizing I'm sorry if it sounds that way. I understand what you're saying, but at the same time, I also know that there are enough non-crapflooders to easily overrule the people who 5 junk, if they cared to. The majority don't seem to care. What I don't want to do is fall into the slashdot trap, where things get to a certain point by luck, and then you start trying to build ever more creaky and complex technological means to keep them there. The users are far from superfluous -- you're the reason any of this exists, or works at all. I feel like me meddling would be exactly the opposite of the point of the site, unless I had a good idea that what I was going to do would put more power in your hands to control the site's direction. I don't have any good ideas for that, so I would rather let it shake out how it shakes out unless and until I do. There once was a time when someone would make a suggestion and it would be pretty readily yeaed or nayed by everyone. It was easier to know what to do then. Today, anything I do will have half the users hating me for doing it. So I have to steer the best course I can. You are not irrelevant. But at the same time, your not renewing a subscription isn't making me think differently about anything. If you don't like the site, you know how to go about changing it as a user, or you are free to seek your pleasure elsewhere. What you're not going to be able to do is bully me into making ill-advised changes. Not to mention I don't even have any idea what you personally want me to do. If you want to make suggestions, make them. I always take new ideas into consideration. ____Not the real rusty No As you well know, you matchstick man. ____Not the real rusty I just work there That is definitely my partner's concern. I'm just an employee. I will mention it to him though. ____Not the real rusty Sheesh I hope all your friends and aquaintances are really dumb, because it took me about 10 seconds to work out who you are. :-) ____Not the real rusty Probably I got it because the anagram is not that hard and I recalled your old account. I imagine people who don't spend a lot of time here wouldn't find it by accident. Though my entire extended family seems to have found my diary somehow. People I see once every three years are regular readers. So you never know. ____Not the real rusty Missouri is pretty nice I didn't like St. Louis very much, but away from the city is some lovely countryside. Find yourselves a good B&B and just chill out there. ____Not the real rusty Rock on New .sig! ____Not the real rusty Spencer Perceval is a stupid faggot. [nt] ____Not the real rusty I like you all the time, Tex Now when are you coming back to bed? Daddy's getting lonely. ____Not the real rusty Kind of silly Why not get a copy of Scoop and hack in diary RSS feeds. Then everyone's got one and you don't have to do any screen-scraping or hosting yourself. I don't think it would be that hard to have Scoop periodically update an RSS file for each user. And if you were clever it would be written to take arguments, so we could make a feed for each section as well (since that would be nearly the same thing). ____Not the real rusty Copyright My suggestion was for us to generate the feeds here on K5. That wouldn't violate copyright. You generating and hosting them probably would. I suppose this probably won't cause great big server load. It seems like a waste of your coding time and our bandwidth though, instead of doing it the right way. ____Not the real rusty Not a criticism I wasn't saying you're not clever, just that it would be easy, within Scoop, to generate RDF feeds for a given section or topic, which gets you diaries and sections all at once. ____Not the real rusty Figure of speech "If you were clever" is just a figure of speech. Sorry. :-) Scoop itself isn't hard to install. People do frequently have no end of trouble with mysql, apache, and the CPAN modules though. Unfortunately, that's the platform, and there's not much we can do about it. ____Not the real rusty Unfortunately Geotargeted ads have remained in much the same place, but other things have been inserted above them. So they probably won't be appearing real soon. I've got a list of things I'd like to add to the ad system, which eventually will probably all be done at once (like categories and a "classifieds" type page and search function, geotargeting, self-serve ad editing, automatic comparison and selection of the best response rate for multiple ads, time-period limiting, bulk impression purchases, and probably more). But I've got some usability things to do first, like rewriting search. ____Not the real rusty Representative government The US works on the basis of representation. That doesn't necessarily mean that we elect politicians to do what we want them to do, but we elect people who we believe will do what is best for us under the circumstances. Regular people don't have the time, energy, or security clearances to know all of the relevant details behind the huge majority of policy decisions. This is why we elect someone to do it for us full time in the first place. So if the person we elect is simply responding to polls, they're effectively taking orders from a mass of people who know less about the situation than they do. Generally this is because politicians know that doing what the people think they want is easy and will help you get re-elected, while going against the polls (even if it's the right thing to do) is difficult and requires that you convince the people that your way is right. I would prefer that our leaders spend more time studying the problems at hand, and the implications of various policy decisions, rather than trying to craft polls to tell them what the people will placidly accept. The former is leadership and statesmanship, the latter, usually done for electability purposes, is actually self-serving. ____Not the real rusty Maybe HE wasn't there at all! [nt] ____Not the real rusty CNN News. They're saying it's New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Toronto, Ontario; and Ottawa, Ontario. CNN is showing video on TV right now. Interesting historical footnote, this happened before in 1965. We should see a big baby boom in May, 2004. ____Not the real rusty Oh well That was just a guess on my part. I didn't know if it had happened in 1965 or not, but I thought it had. Guess not. That's a shame. I love the idea that everyone had nothing to do and got busy. Well, they probably will anyway, but I guess birth is so managed these days anyway it probably won't be noticeable. ____Not the real rusty Power is out But the sun is, as yet, unaffected. The White House is even now deploying its Anti-Terrorism Sun Protection Shield to ensure that the sun remains lit. ____Not the real rusty Bloomberg On CNN Bloomberg just said there was no evidence that there was any terrorism involved. ____Not the real rusty Incidentally K5, which lives in a datacenter in New Jersey, is running on generator power right this very second. Hooray for backup systems. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Back up off my man, you bitches. Ok, I promise that's the last time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, ok I guess. I'll live, and stuff. You know. I guess we can just be friends. Um. Yeah. So I'll call you sometime then, huh? Yeah. Ok. ____Not the real rusty Ha! You have apparently been thoroughly trolled. I didn't say any such thing. Where did this silly rumor start? ____Not the real rusty Impressive I saw it, but I didn't think that could possibly be the source. Nice one. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nothing to do with the diary, actually Someone had twenty-odd dupe accounts that I hosed last night. The couple of diaries that went with them were just a by-product of removing the accounts, which were modbombs and voting fraud waiting to happen. I don't mind the trolling, provided it isn't mean spirited. I do mind when people decide that what they want is much more important than what everyone else wants, and makes a few dozen accounts to make that happen. I honestly don't know how to fix it properly, as deleting them manually is not any kind of working solution. The only way I can think of to make accounts reasonably unique is to make them cost something real to obtain. But I'm just not prepared to say that K5 accounts must be purchased, so I don't think that's ever going to happen here. I don't know. A democratic community is not completely possible without some assurance of uniqueness of user accounts. What we've got it probably as close as it's going to come without that. Perhaps I will try for democracy somewhere else and think about K5 more in terms of creating a functioning anarchy. That's a whole other interesting problem right there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not a threat I'm saying it's not right for this place. I'd love to try it somewhere else, and maybe someday I will, but not here. And I've never talked to you before. ____Not the real rusty Sarah the Checkout Girl is dead! Long live Jennifer the Checkout Girl! ____Not the real rusty Ok, ok, Sarah the Checkout Girl is "dead". Is that better? And is she by any chance moving on to Phase Two? ____Not the real rusty Well It's not like it said "Great Submissions". ____Not the real rusty Moderate, adj. 3b. Of limited or average quality; mediocre. ____Not the real rusty One word? There are many words for non-extreme. Ok, dictionary fun time is over now though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope Seems it's just a scam. I ordered a piping hot mod-bomb and got zilch. Sad days. ____Not the real rusty I take it back The service was provided as advertised. A fine seller, A+++ Would do business again anytime LOLZ! ____Not the real rusty Well, I ordered So where is it? ____Not the real rusty I'm a weasel? You mean you're going to take my money and not provide my service? So it was just a scam? I'm disappointed. I thought you were an honest businessman. You may still recoup my trust and faith if you provide the service I purchased. Come on, I gave you money! How can I report you to anyone for doing what I paid you to do? The only way I'd have a leg to stand on is if you didn't do it, you ninny. So get going. ____Not the real rusty I hope you get your nickel for that I hate to see workers exploited. ____Not the real rusty Nickel gross, but ...you probably owe The Company when all's totted up though, what with supplies at the company store and everything, sure enough. You know what they say, "You rate fifteen ones, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt." ____Not the real rusty Damn Murphy and his laws It seems to be back up to speed, but the suck-pump part is that I didn't do anything. It's just fast because I'm here to fix it if it wasn't. It knows, I tell you. It knows. ____Not the real rusty A message to duxup I found out some interesting things today about the recent K5 trouble. I'm working on it. If I have nothing by Friday, than please accept my apologies and do whatever suits you. Well, honestly, do whatever suits you anyway, it's not like I can stop you. But do consider that maybe I have reasons for not saying much, both related to K5 and unrelated, and that my record of not abandoning the site since 1999 could indicate that you should cut me a little bit more slack than you might otherwise. Thanks, and... I don't know. Just thanks. On preview: This all sounds very cloak and dagger, now that I read it back. It really isn't. I'm just busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest, is basically what's going on. I have little enough time to work on K5, let alone write about it and comment a lot and write diaries and so forth. I will attempt to write up what's going on with me this week so that you and others might better understand and at least make your decisions based on more complete knowlege. ____Not the real rusty Here http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/17/161038/623 ____Not the real rusty Mileage This week was far. Tuesday: Portland, ME to Ipswich, MA, 94 miles The job continues. We're starting to think it'll never be done, but I talked to Bill today and he sounds upbeat. We spent 9 hours Thursday putting in two floor joists. I kid you not. And it didn't really work, either. "Old fashioned craftsmanship" is a cruel, sick joke. Thursday: Ipswich, MA to Portland, ME, 94 miles We found out on Wednesday that a friend of my wife's family had died. The wake was Friday and the funeral Saturday, in Bayside, Queens. Guess who doesn't get any time at home this weekend? But it's family, and you do what you have to do. Friday: Portland, ME to Patterson, NY, 260 miles The drive from hell. It poured rain from New Hampshire to Western Connecticut. Like I-can't-see-shit rain. Front-wipers-on-overdrive rain. Thirty-five-on-the-highway rain. The traffic was partly rain, but mostly Friday in New England. The first weekend of August, everyone wants to be somewhere else, no matter where they started. We didn't want to be anywhere else, but had no choice, so there we were with them. From the look of the roads, there were a lot of empty homes that day. It normally takes 5 hours. It took eight. And Connecticut is the worst place in the world. Saturday: Patterson, NY to Queens, NY and back, approximately 120 miles Funeral. Post-funeral lunch. He was sick for a long time, so it wasn't a huge surprise to anyone. It was good to see the extended "family," but I wish we'd see them at some non-funeral event. And it sounds kind of ghoulish (ok, it is kind of ghoulish), but this makes two years we've been married and two members of the big all-family wedding photo gone. One per year so far. Two is chance, three would be a pattern. We can only wait and see. Sunday: Patterson, NY to Portland, ME, 260 miles Not so much traffic, but the rain waited around for us to come back. From Boston to the N.H. border it was even worse than it had been on the way down. Lightning struck just on the other side of the road, closer than lightning has ever struck to me before. There was no time delay between the flash and the sound. It reminded us of Nebraska on the way back from California, one day and night that I spent 16 hours driving because we couldn't get a hotel room due to a big country music festival. The storm was about as bad, but on the plains you could see it coming a long way off. Here it just started without warning. Motorcycles huddled under overpasses to wait it out. I should have too. Total: 828 miles If it was all in a straight line, I'd be in Detroit about now. Instead, I'm back where I started, which is about what it all feels like. Pretty good The lunch was at a nearby pub, and was pretty good. I wanted to get seconds of the ribs, but didn't manage to. ____Not the real rusty Nope It was hot and wet and sticky, but the AC was in good working order. In the future, you should drink water. At least it's not caffienated, but the Sprite was probably doing you a lot less good than water would have. ____Not the real rusty Ha Goddammit, I could sell them all. ____Not the real rusty Difference I've done those long-distance months, driving across the US twice. The total mileage isn't that impressive, except for the fact that I didn't actually go anywhere. If I'm going to drive a thousand miles in a week, believe me when I'm done I really want to be a thousand miles away from where I started. :-) ____Not the real rusty Summertime... ...and the living is easy. Actually, that should be "Summertime and the reading is crappy." This always happens in the summer. The kids are out of school and the sane ones have better things to do than lurk around in front of a glowy screen all day. The crazies all get rabid, presumably from the heat, and in the world at large it never seems like there's much going on. I sometimes think we should just take July and August off every year. Once or twice we've been down for part of the summer and it always seems like it does more good than harm. ____Not the real rusty Heh I can see how it could sound that way. I didn't mean it like that. :-) Just that in the summer, some leeway should be extended for possibly less-riveting-than-usual content and behavior. ____Not the real rusty Not you though Fortunately you stick with K5 through thick and thin. I know I can count on you Tex. You're not like those fair-weather readers. ____Not the real rusty Right back atcha, babe. ____Not the real rusty Bye. ____Not the real rusty Damn A girl can dream, can't she? ____Not the real rusty On K5, you get what you want! You provoke Vlad so that he'll rate you down, so that you can complain about it. So let it never be said that I don't give you what you want. And the best part is, I don't even have to do anything to satisfy everyone's wishes. Have fun, kids. ____Not the real rusty Leftover coffee If you find yourself with leftover coffee often, try pouring it into an ice cube tray and freezing for use when you make iced coffee. The coffee ice cubes keep it from getting diluted and watery by melting ice. Instead it just gets more coffee-ey. ____Not the real rusty Yes Good point. I have four trays and never ever use more than two of them, so one has become for coffee. But good point. ____Not the real rusty Time ain't on my side "Right. You should blame God. First he makes hangovers, and now half-woman half-sharks that won't even sleep with me. Thanks for nothing God!" "That guy Tex is really a robot. And you're his boyfriend. So that makes you... a gay robot?" I know I've mentioned it before, but Red vs. Blue is funny. At last, a cartoon based on gaming that doesn't rely solely on gamer in-jokes. Meanwhile, I have no time. The number of jobs continues to grow. K5, construction, web work. And it's summer, so the island is jam-packed with relatives as well. This weekend we barbequeued for: Two in-laws Two parents Two grandparents Two cousins Two nieces and one aunt The next day featured the arrival of a sister and brother-in-law, another niece, a childhood neighbor and... umm... childhood neighbor-in-law (?) and their kid as well. That makes the total tally of relatives and assorted quasi-relatives... hmm, let's see now... carry the three... yep, approximately infinite. This is mostly a "Hello, I still exist" diary, so hello, I still exist. Many stupid things I did post a diary about that one. There was some slowness after that for unknown reasons. I'm trying to get the DB server upgraded. ____Not the real rusty Remodeling a house I'm helping remodel a house down in MA. ____Not the real rusty A guess Have we stopped requiring guesses to be in the thread yet? In case not... ____Not the real rusty ...my guess is A whale. Or possibly an Orca (killer whale). Kind of ripping off the guess below, I realize, but... "teacher's pet..." A whale would be a bit large for that. Hamsters and goldfish are more common choice. "water jets from me..." Kinda self-explanatory. "...as you watch me" Looking at whales is always called whale watching. "Wars I've fought..." Um, no idea. Sorry. If it's an Orca, then maybe this refers to the Orc Battle in angus's guess? Unless he just made that up. "In the Pacific Rim..." Killer whales are commonly found in the Pacific Rim, hunting seals or whatever they eat. ____Not the real rusty You get more than one trash pickup a week? How much trash do you produce? We have one a week, and it hasn't ever been a hardship. ____Not the real rusty All online polls are silly Why spend time coding features that are based on the assumption they're not? :-) ____Not the real rusty I know I did. :-) ____Not the real rusty Weird I have personally, at one time or another, questioned every single one of those sacred cows. The global warming thing is always a sure winner though. It's hard not to get in a screaming match, even if you're really trying your best to be reasonable and conciliatory. Global warming beleivers are some of the best fanatics out there today. ____Not the real rusty What happened? Oy. Downtime: twelve hours. Time to fix problem: five minutes. I hate when that happens. When I updated a bunch of stuff on the vacation day recently, I also upgraded mysql to 4.0-stable. I was able to use mostly the same my.cnf, with a couple changes of config variable names, and it had been working fine for quite a while, so I didn't perhaps look at it as carefully as I might have. This particular my.cnf had "log-bin" enabled, which tells mysql to log every change to a binary file which slave database servers can use to keep in sync with the master. We don't have any master-slave db replication set up, so this was unnecessary, but in the past it hasn't caused any problems so I didn't even notice it. Well, with the update, mysql started actually logging everything. So Wednesday night at around 10PM it filled up the disk on the DB machine and started pumping out errors every time anything tried to write to the database. The entire diagnosis and fix for this took about five minutes. Unfortunately, those five minutes occurred around noon on Thursday. I've been working down in Ipswich MA three days a week, renovating a house. A friend of mine does some light carpentry and construction, and from time to time I make some extra money helping him out. This was a pretty big job, and he didn't want to tackle it alone, or with unknown and unreliable help, so I signed up to do the 91 miles down there and stay at his place in Essex three days a week for the summer. I've got the laptop with me, but I'm on the job site most of the day, so my K5 time is pretty severely limited Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Perhaps the most painful part is that I checked the site and did some email Wednesday night, logging off at about 9:30. Barely a half hour before everything went to hell. I considered checking in in the morning as well, but figured it would be fine. Not a mistake I'll make again. My wife called me around 10 AM on Thursday and told me the site was down, but I had to wait till we went back to my friend's house for lunch to fix it, which took all of five minutes to find out what was wrong, disable log-bin, and clear out the logs. Sorry there wasn't more info sooner, but I had the rest of the day working, the driving home, and the sleeping for twelve hours last night to catch up on. And for everyone who emailed, thank you. Normally it would have been very helpful. :-) About the continuing speed problems, we're still running on one Scoop server due to a bad load balancer config, which I am bugging Voxel to fix. Need coffee. Much more to do today. True enough The way I look at it though is that if this site was important enough to everyone that they wanted total professional 24x7 uptime, they'd be paying enough for it that I could hire a pro to monitor and babysit the servers all the time. When you read and use it for free, and only pay for extra stuff if you feel like it, what you get is the best I can do. :-) This particular problem hasn't happened before. Normally it's the scoop boxes that fill up their disks, and everyone gets a "Page contained no data" error in their browser. This was actually a new one. ____Not the real rusty The error page I've gotta change that default page. A problem that causes an actual server 500 is caused by bad code 99 times out of 100, and bad code always gets run right away. So that error almost never happens unless I'm actively screwing with something. This was a bit of a statistical outlier in the world of error messages. Seeing as how I'm going to be repeatedly away during the week, I will try to work up a simple monitoring system, and also recruit some helpers to keep an eye on things while I'm offline. ____Not the real rusty help@k5 rusty, do you still respond to mail at help@kuro5hin.org? Yes, I do. Why do you ask? ____Not the real rusty Ah I don't always answer it immediately. :-) Seeing as how I've got you right here, all I can say is that it seems that Opera doesn't like our dynamic javascript. I don't know what to tell you to do, apart from report it to Opera and see if they have any ideas. I think a couple others have reported the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Yep You're right of course. And as I said here, I will do that. I can get text messages on my phone, so I have the infrastructure necessary to do some better monitoring. ____Not the real rusty Send me the script That sounds like what I was going to write. Same phone setup and everything. If you wouldn't mind emailing it to me, I will take a look and see if it'll work for us. All it really needs to do is try to fetch a K5 front page, and perhaps look for some characteristic chunk of text that would indicate that the page is being served normally. Also, good job on using "telephony", "effectual", and "apprised" in one sentence. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes In past jobs, I have also tried the strategy of not going to work, and it always worked exactly as well as it is portrayed in Office Space. I highly recommend it. ____Not the real rusty Damn! Wrong account. ____Not the real rusty Confusion What I hate is when I'm unaware of a relatively minor problem for a long time. Only about five minutes of this event was necessary downtime. The rest was just time spent waiting for me to find out about and have an opportunity to fix the problem. And you might only see crap, but the benefits are much more numerous and meaningful. Besides, I don't think I'd know how to stop at this point. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yikes (Our contractor claims to be Home Depot's eleventh biggest customer.) That would make me feel distinctly queasy. Home Depot, by and large, sells shit. Go over there and pick out, say, a standard window. Then find a local lumberyard where they sell the same brand, and compare the two. The one from Home Depot will look banged up and abused, and generally like it was shipped all over the country by a bunch of minimum-wage monkeys with ADHD (which it was). The one from the local joint will probably be in much better shape. Nevertheless, the last thing you need is another worry. Best wishes that the shitstorm lets up soon. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Quissett Harbor I spent a night in Quissett Harbor last summer on my friend's boat. That has to be one of the prettiest harbors on the Cape. It looks like someone sat down and drew what a little Cape Cod harbor is ideally supposed to look like, and handed the plans up to God. "[S]mall-village America, as only the fairly wealthy can maintain it" indeed. That's pretty true all over. ____Not the real rusty Lucky Grrrl :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty Basic math Think about it for a while. Realize that comment ratings are averaged. Draw a graph, if you must. But this question requires neither testing nor looking at the scoop code. :-) ____Not the real rusty Let's go shopping! ____Not the real rusty Truncates It occurred to me that that's the only thing that could change the answer. It truncates at two digits past the decimal, though, so it'll never get above 0.99. ____Not the real rusty Nope Scoop takes the raw result and drops it into mysql, where the field length determines how much goes in. I guess if perl started to call it 1.x then mysql would too, but it looks like that's not gonna happen. ____Not the real rusty Dunno I liked high school too. I was a nerd, but then again I was a nerd who figured out pretty early on how to be smart without pinning a social "kick me" sign on my ass. I was also a jock, and I did go to a school that was small enough that you couldn't really seriously ostracize any but the most utterly freakish. ____Not the real rusty Yep My graduating class was 24, and the largest class ever to graduate. Mine was a private school, but same years and size. ____Not the real rusty See also http://hick.org/~ataraxia/ In fact, it appears that Pastor Shane reads K5. Along with NPR, Indymedia, Drudge, and Art Bell. Which probably both explains and reveals a lot about all involved. ____Not the real rusty Congrats Yay for the house! I shall be next. Oh yes, I shall. And if you ever do decide to add to it, or do anything at all, I know a guy who does great work. ____Not the real rusty Well Technically I'm just a peon, not an actual contractor. But I will be glad to hook you up with my evil overlord (Bill, who was at your place that night we visited). We've got a job ongoing down in Ipswich at the moment. And I told you, don't sweat the locksmith. It all comes back in the fullness of time. I found the invoice in my wallet the other day and had a good chuckle. ____Not the real rusty I'm so ashamed That I know exatly what that intro is about. Elyse should have won, though. ____Not the real rusty Did somebody say... Eighties Ending? ____Not the real rusty You forget about Google With the All-Seeing Eye out there, your work may be read and enjoyed by thousands more people even after it has drifted from the memory of the K5 addicts. Lots of people find individual articles way after they're published. It's not just a bottomless black hole. ____Not the real rusty That would be nifty Considering the open editorial policy here, it'd be hard to do it manually. I've got something else going on that might make it possible though, albeit in a more pseudorandom mode. ____Not the real rusty Or just walk away You can only apologize so many times. If it's not accepted, then it's not accepted. There's nothing more you can do really. ____Not the real rusty I don't know anything I don't know the people or the situation, so my advice is well-nigh worthless. I just meant it's an option. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yup If you actually go away, it will have been worth it. Go away. ____Not the real rusty I suck I will peruse the... "information"... you sent. It has been a long week, but I cannot speak further of it now. ____Not the real rusty Key difference In high school, some mixture of poorly-formed socialization and hormones made us all care what those twinkies at the other table thought. Now you can laugh and say "Fuck em!" :-) Plus, you probably make a lot more money than them. When you're done with the project, just before you leave, saunter over to the table and ask if any of them would be interested in making twenty bucks the hard way. ____Not the real rusty Actually I was thinking of just having it delete voted-down stuff after it hits the archive. It is digital jetsam, and we can't keep everything forever. Out of general apathy, I haven't done anything about it, but if anything were to be done that would probably be it. ____Not the real rusty I don't think we have any flotsam When the site finally goes to the big edit queue in the sky, then we'll have lots of flotsam. I'm going on the metaphor "site == ship" here, so the stories we throw overboard would be jetsam. If and when there is flotsam though, we can keep that. ____Not the real rusty Skilled trades Programming and carpentry have always struck me as remarkably similar, not in any kind of metaphorical way, but in what they demand of the competent worker mentally. Except then I notice that programming is just the mental bit, whereas carpentry has a pretty big physical skill element as well, and carpenters start work a lot earlier in the morning, and your ass gets fired if you don't show up on time, and you usually have to listen to classic rock while you're doing it. Programming, on the other hand, involves small hand movements in a comfy chair indoors. I would rate carpentry as similar to, but much harder than, programming. I imagine plumbing and electrical work are also comparable. The day is coming, programmers, when you are not wizards and geniuses, but merely another labor commodity. It probably won't be for another generation or so though. ____Not the real rusty Gotta be it Damn. Also "I.V. drip" explains the first bit. ____Not the real rusty Please don't do that, thanks. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Not the deal Diaries are free and open to all, but the "price" is that everyone can read and comment on them, and they all go in the public section. It's a kind of tradeoff, so when you do something like this you get, well, the response you got. I've actually been thinking about giving subscribers some more diary control. Like the ability to allow or disallow comments in individual diaries, and editing or deleting their own entires. A way for you to post diaries that don't show up on the public list would be another nifty feature. You could have done that here, and just posted this last one publically, and not bothered anyone. It is a good idea, I think. ____Not the real rusty Knowing it would be rude There is a message on the "Post a diary" page that informs you very clearly that posting a lot of diaries in a day will be considered rude. You did have an opportunity to read that on every post. Yeah, sure, I could code something to prevent it, but can't you control yourself instead? I'd rather keep the flexibility and have people maintain the standards they're comfortable with socially. There must be zillions of times every day you don't do something even though there's nothing physically restraining you, right? This is one of those things. Hopefully there will be other options soon for this kind of thing. But what people have been trying to point out is that there aren't such options now, so it would have been your best course of action to refrain from doing something that you were informed would annoy everyone. You ended up with eleven installments. If you'd done two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening, you'd have gotten it all out there in one work week. That wouldn't have been so intolerable, right? The flood blocker you tripped was intended to be a last resort defense against posting-bots. If you hit that, you should know that you're really pretty far out of line. Human posters should never even know that's there, and the vast majority don't. If not that, then just a little check-box that says "do you want this on the front page?". Make it default to true, and most people won't have a problem with it, it wouldn't chaneg thier diary posting lives one bit, but when there really is somethign big that is going to be posted in the diaries, I can do something like this. What I was saying above was that K5 isn't really here to host your blog, which is what that would amount to. If there are extra features, they'll be for paying users. The free diary is limited on purpose because its function is primarily social, not personal. People get mad when you're clearly doing something that is just for you and you alone, because if you want to do that, there are an infinitude of free blog hosting options for you. You, and everyone, are more than welcome to use this space, but the trade is that you be considerate of others, who are using it too. ____Not the real rusty No But you're in the right decade, at least. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope The second guess I'm totally unable to figure out. This riddle is, I think, really hard. ____Not the real rusty Ah I didn't know that. It doesn't fit any of the other clues though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope I'd love to hear how you came up with this guess though. I have no idea. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope [nt] ____Not the real rusty No Way off. ____Not the real rusty Nope [nt] ____Not the real rusty Heh Funny, but no. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sort of You're painfully close. :-) I would advise doing some serious Googling. I don't know if it'll work or not, but you're close enough that it might. ____Not the real rusty The search Google for "mayday plane kennedy abel", and see result number one. That's why I didn't feel too bad, because at that point you potentially had all of those words as important clues. :-) ____Not the real rusty You're getting there Kennedy is not the airport though, just the President. Consider that a hint. :-) ____Not the real rusty Uh uh. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, it is Trust me, I couldn't have gotten it myself. I consider Googling for help perfectly valid, and probably the only way anyone's gonna get it. ____Not the real rusty Bingo! So, did you end up Googling? :-) For the curious: Mayday! Mayday!: F.G.P. was piloting the U2 spyplane when he was shot down over Russia on May 1, 1960. "Mayday" for both the day and the traditional distress call. The problem is plain: The problem was plain (his tail section and one wing were blown off), but the plane itself was also a big problem for the Soviets and the Americans. Traded for Abel,: After 21 months in Soviet prison, Powers was traded for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in Berlin. but treated like Cain.: After his return, Powers was widely snubbed and reviled by his former CIA colleagues because he hadn't destroyed the plane and killed himself like he was supposed to. Originally that was the whole riddle, but I added the second verse because I thought it was way too hard. Didn't see Kennedy till almost too late.: Powers was returned in Feb, 1962. JFK was assassinated the next year. Twenty one months is a long time to wait.: As mentioned, he was held by the Soviets for 21 months. ____Not the real rusty Eventually Traffic-coptering did him in. Seems kind of ignominious, after being shot down from practically frigging outer space into the Soviet Union and held for a spy during the darkest days of the Cold War. I guess there are worse ways to go, though. ____Not the real rusty Huh! Yeah, he eventually died in a traffic copter accident. I figured you knew that and were referring to it. So, when he was doing his reports, did he ever mention it? Like "Well, the 405 is snarled up for miles... kind of looks like Moscow, you know, but with more cars..." ____Not the real rusty Ketchup bits What did one tomato say to the other tomato? Ketchup. Oh, I forgot, they were walking, and the first tomato was in front. Let me start again. I've been sorely remiss on posting diaries, and I've gotten myself into one of those "I can't talk about that till I talk about this first, but I don't have time to talk about this..." kind of scenarios. So I'm going to give none of what I've been up to its proper treatment in the interests of just getting it out of the way. Instead, there will be lots of pictures. Sailing So like I said, I helped Bill sail his boat up to Salem. We basically only got pictures of the actual launch, because once we were underway, we were all way too lazy to actually take pictures. I meant to, honestly, but whenever I'm doing something, I just can't be bothered to tote around a camera rather than actually do that thing. I need one of those little tiny pocket digital jobbies that I can just have on me all the time. But the pictures, such as they are, are as follows. In the yahd. (L to R) Bill's Dad, Rusty and Bill pose awkwardly Bill's dad is sometimes known as Clint for his striking resemblance to a certain action film hero. Trucks are neat. Boys like trucks. Bill (front), Rusty (right), and Phill (behind Bill) fret like mother hens Is it sinking? "Better check those thru-hulls again." The first time of many this phrase was uttered. Phill ponders. Yes, theantix, I do look like that all the time. Bill ponders. I think it was around now that Phill said "Maybe this mast is heavier than my Hobie Cat's mast. I don't know what I was thinking." Urgh. Now we got the serious Iwo Jima action goin. What happens when you put two knuckleheads in a rubber boat? Boat Owner's what? Hallmark One. Hallmark Two. Rusty sets boat on fire making coffee. (I didn't, really. It's an MSR stove warming up.) That takes us up to the morning of departure. There are no more pictures. The highlight of the whole thing was the whale that swam literally right under the boat. I was at the tiller and it passed to my starboard about four feet from the rail. Whales are big. It sounds like an obvious truism, but it's something else when it's right next to you, and bigger than your boat. This was a small whale, and it was still big. DC After the sail, my wife met me in Newb'rypawt and we drove down to DC to see the old neighborhood and various friends and my sister and niece (those are two different people). My niece cannot speak coherently yet. What she does do, though, is speak gibberish with perfect inflection and facial expressions so as to make you think that perhaps she's speaking just fine and your brain has suddenly stopped understanding properly. It's spooky. Arne would be upset if I didn't at least mention the conversation which took place at the Hunt debating whether a cat and a dog have, at any time in history and with mutual consent and enjoyment, done it. I say yes, because cats and dogs have been domesticated for a long time, and some of them are around the same size, and it just seems like it has to have happened at some point. Arne was undecided. Some others said no. Feel free to debate. Remember that force and coersion is not involved here. We're talking mutual amorous romance type stuff. Cats and dogs. Who knows. Dog Speaking of which, when we got back, we got a dog! Her name is Sadie, she's an 11 month old black Lab mix, and we got her from the animal shelter in Westbrook. Because I know everyone wants pictures: We had just gone for a three mile run. She's a tired dog. Soulful eyes. Not a photoshop of the previous picture, she just didn't move. This is her "There's something much more interesting than you over there" pose The baby is not happy. Different couch, same sleepy dog. She likes people. I had a hell of a time getting her far enough away from me to get a non-sleeping picture. This was the best I could do. She's obviously mostly Lab, but we don't know what she's mixed with. Speculation has ranged from Chow to Pit Bull to Golden Retriever. I can't tell by looking at her, and if there are signs, they are too subtle for me to pick up. She loves people, and she loves to please us, so training is actually going pretty well. She came housetrained, and we haven't had any accidents with that yet. She's also had some obedience training, since she does know "Sit." She tends to get distracted easily, so keeping her attention on me is the biggest issue right now. I'm doing a lot of work on that and not much else for the moment, since if you can get her to pay attention, she learns other things fast. The attention thing means her leash manners are pretty terrible. Tonight we walked, and I practiced being more interesting than all the other stuff around. This was actually pretty fun. I would do random stuff from time to time, like swerving all over the road, running for a bit then walking really slowly, skipping, stopping dead then taking a big jump forward with both feet. It probably looked very odd, but it did work. She gets a little bit better every day. So far she's been good with the cats. The baby had her scared of him, but tonight she got a little aggressive, which isn't good. We are making sure she knows that harassing the cats is a huge "NO!" at all times, as is barking. Hazel is basically terrified and has been in hiding since Sadie came home, which is sad. I think she'll get over it eventually. She's a lot shyer than the baby. Of course, there's been more stuff, but as is standard policy, I only write about things that I want to write about, and this was supposed to be short. So you'll just have to imagine. Black pets I wanted the first cat to be black. I've had good luck with black cats before. I know that's meaningless, but hey. The second cat came with the house, and her being black also was nothing to do with us, really. The dog was my wife's call. We were basically just on the lookout for something Lab-ish, and Sadie appeared at the right time. I didn't have much of a preference, but I think she wanted a black Lab if possible, and that's what we found. But yeah, twice is a coincidence, but three black pets is starting to look like a pattern. ____Not the real rusty Tomato pulp friction Was the intro meant to be a gratuitous Pulp Fiction reference that was slightly botched? Not really, I was just remembering that joke because I had to catch up. Though I'm aware that it appears in Pulp Fiction. I don't know where they got the names. Bertie Wooster is the name of Jeeves' employer in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves books. Could be that's where it came from. ____Not the real rusty See final paragraph [nt] ____Not the real rusty I actually have been working on it As has my wife, who is doing this for an independent study in school this semester. I expect it to be officially founded and start the Board election process next month. I gotta get the website properly set up too, which is where news will then be available. Nothing there yet, but it will be at http://www.collaborativemedia.org/. ____Not the real rusty Not officially That isn't in the bylaws, it's a procedural decision. What I'm leaning toward would work like this: You pay your dues and become a member. We issue you a random ID When it's electin' time, you print out a form and mail it to us with your choices, and your ID number. If you want to be anonymous, put your form in a plain envelope without the ID. Put that envelope and a piece of paper with your ID inside another envelope. If you don't care to be anonymous, just write your ID on the form. Basically, I could see no good reason to require anonymity or not in voting, so I thought I'd allow members to choose. If you include the ID separately, then it just gets noted that you sent in a ballot, but it will not be known which one is yours. Your votes will be opened and counted separately, and stored as an anonymous ballot. I don't think it's worth the trouble yet to work on online voting. When we have an org, we can worry about that. ____Not the real rusty Also Reading what you pointed to, I guess you wanted more about how votes are counted. That, I'm not sure about yet. ____Not the real rusty I'm 26 I look about 19 though. I have a lovely and wonderful wife, however she would probably not be described as "modelesque." Models are way too high-maintenance. ____Not the real rusty Mr... Williams... Make me tea? Make love to me? Put on the telly? To the BBC! To the BBC, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! ____Not the real rusty I think you're right I'm pretty sure you're right that they won't count in mojo anyway. I seem to remember making that change. I might have just meant to make the change and never actually did, but I think I did. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not a clue, really If you can give me an idea how you would go about determining that, I would give it a shot. ____Not the real rusty distinct words Given that we've got three years of English text, the number of distinct words is probably around the number of words in the working vocabulary of, say, your average American college graduate. I would guess it falls somewhere within an order of magnitude of that, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Innodb and search I'm guessing it makes use of MySQL's search functionality - I don't use MySQL but I'm told that one of its big features is text search support. Tragically, no. Scoop supports two methods of search. One, if you use MyISAM tables in mysql, is the fulltext search, and it's pretty swanky. The other, if you use InnoDB tables, is basically our default kludge, where it looks for "%[string]%" in the text. This is craptastic and slow, and requires an exact match, and generally kinda sucks. InnoDB is in every other way so much faster that it is something I have to use. The one big drawback is the lack of fulltext search. I assume they'll get it in there someday. For fulltext search, there may well be such a wordlist or index of some kind. If so, I could look for it in the archive tables, which are myisam, I think. ____Not the real rusty One thing I could do I think I could do a SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE ... and get all the text fields in a plain text file. Then it would probably be easy to analyze that. I could also copy them to MyISAM, but I think it would take longer than it'd be worth. ____Not the real rusty You all know the drill, of course. If it's by Tex, and says it speaks for the site, and is in Diaries, then is it true? :-) ____Not the real rusty Funny But of course not. As far as I know, I'm not even fighting with Nigga. This diary made me smile though. ____Not the real rusty Others might say... ...that you've sent me so many pointless emails that I don't read them anymore. Who can say what is true though? ____Not the real rusty Yup He was right about dr k, but basically I get an email whenever anyone's rated more than one of his comments lower than 2 in a day. It gets old. ____Not the real rusty Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. ____Not the real rusty It's a quote From this. I thought you might recognize it. ____Not the real rusty Good story I don't necessarily buy all of it, but it was an excellent Op-Ed. We get all too few of those. ____Not the real rusty I think it is 45% I guess I could check. Yup, 45%. I didn't think it was "right wing propaganda." It does hew a pretty close neocon line, but I could see how reasonable people could believe it to be true (and other reasonable people could disagree). Myself, I don't know enough to judge, really. But it was a well-put and coherent argument. ____Not the real rusty Get back on your meds, dude. I'm not being snarky, I'm serious. You're having an episode. ____Not the real rusty Speaking of which You've pretty much used up your extra chances. Please be done submitting that stuff, thanks. ____Not the real rusty You too. ____Not the real rusty Heh. ____Not the real rusty Ok ____Not the real rusty There is no Kable. [nt] ____Not the real rusty What you should do: Laugh through the tears and mod me three. :-) ____Not the real rusty Love is like a stove It burns you when it's hot. ____Not the real rusty Dwarf bread? I think you're thinking of Discworld Dwarf bread there. The Scone of Stone... ____Not the real rusty Like most things... There are good practices and bad practices. I think it's a mistake to paint something as broad as "fish farming" as one or the other based on any single case. Much the same as logging, farming, and a whole lot of other practices that become popular scapegoats and victims of ill-informed public hysteria. When you are told that fish farming is bad for the environment, you are being fed propaganda. When you are told that fish farming is not bad for the environment, you are being fed propaganda. The reality is extremely complicated, and not something that most people are willing or able to put the time into actually learning. I know just enough to know that I don't know squat about it, so my typical role is to just try to encourage people not to buy either party line, because they're both at least partly bullshit. ____Not the real rusty Crap As many of these challenges are awfully familiar, it appears I live in the third world. Why am I always the last to know? ____Not the real rusty I hate those things Funny thing, I never seem to get those inane "Fwd to everyone I know" emails anymore. My several years of very clearly telling everyone who sent me one not to do that ever must have paid off. PS: Don't include me on one of those lists ever. :-) PPS: I think I can make it this weekend. I'll email you tomorrow during my spree of backlogged emailing. If I forget, remind me. ____Not the real rusty Yachting No, really. I actually was on an honest to god yacht last week. It wasn't mine though. We saw a whale. The whole thing, or as much of it as I can remember at least, will follow as soon as I've got my hands on the pictures. This is just to say that I'm alive and back and stuff. Hell I feel vaguely like I should be insulted, but I can't even figure out what that comment says. A tip for others: I'm not that bright, so if you want to criticize me, please have the courtesy to do it in a way I can understand. Using small words and English grammar is greatly preferred. ____Not the real rusty .sig roulette I say things all the time with full knowlege that they'd make funny sigs. In fact, once in a while I purposely phrase something so that it can be deliberately taken out of context and make for a good sig. It's just part of the fun to see which ones get used and which don't. Don't worry, I think it's funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, plus It's true. I helped my friend sail his 25 foot Cape Dory from Sandwich to Salem MA. I thought it was kind of amusing given all the yachting comments here, and also given that neither of us is rich in any way. Yachting isn't just for the wealthy. :-) ____Not the real rusty No, not really I don't think anything got polished. I did install a water tank and help hook up a depthfinder/knotmeter, but we didn't polish any of those things. There were binoculars on board as well, which is like twice as good as a monocle. :-) ____Not the real rusty Meh I can't believe they elected that tool again. Who was running against him, Hitler Pol Pot von Satan the third? ____Not the real rusty So... Basically you're saying that the guy running against him pretty much was Hitler Pol Pot von Satan the third. I shake my head in mystification. Just another reason not to live in California, I guess. ____Not the real rusty Fits with my theory I think your second point is a different way of putting what I was going to say, which is that we have just as much noise here, but it's a higher quality type of noise. :-) ____Not the real rusty Whee Yes, I am back. 7 days without email... you should try it sometime. And amazingly, the site seems to have survived ok. :-) ____Not the real rusty I worked it out I averaged 225 messages a day. That's misleading though, because a big chunk of it is bounces from K5, which mostly just get filtered away into a folder I never look at. I think I wound up with maybe 50 messages that needed actual reading. That's probably low for someone who spends a lot of time online, really. Maybe that should be a poll. ____Not the real rusty Ever read... ...a Stephen King story called "The Langoliers?" It's in the novella collection Four Past Midnight. The deal is that an airliner flies through a thunderstorm and somehow comes unmoored from time. So it lands, but the handful of people aboard discover that the whole world is deserted. All the stuff is there, like there were just people around a second ago, but no people to be found. It turns out that time has moved on and they've been left behind. It's just chock full of that creepy "where is everyone" feeling. I'm getting goosebumps right now, in fact. ____Not the real rusty Yeah The pac-men were goofy. I can think of a good handful of better ways to have handled that. Like, what if stuff just got less and less distinct till it was gone? Or, maybe even creepier, what if it just stayed there? Forever and ever, every instant of time's set-dressing is just still out there somewhere, sitting empty and used up. ____Not the real rusty About the last one I didn't abandon it, it was posted while I was away on vacation. Damn! Anyway, no one's guessed it yet, much to my surprise. I can start with the hinting if you'd like. ____Not the real rusty Hintage? Sorry for the delay. I was on vacation. Dammit. And just when my riddle finally comes up too! Anyway, no one's gotten it yet, so a clue will follow in the next comment for those who would like one. ____Not the real rusty Clue! What is the form of the riddle called? ____Not the real rusty Um, and also I kinda screwed up. "Archaeologically" isn't the right word. The word that should be there, I now realize, doesn't fit the form properly. Bit of a quandary there. Well, take that line with a grain of salt, or with an expansive sort of eye, and if it doesn't fit your answer right, ignore that. I shall have to see how to fix that. ____Not the real rusty Kinda But then the flow gets kind of choppy. That is the quickest fix, but I feel like there should be a smoother way to work it in. ____Not the real rusty You got it Except I think it's spelled "pterodactyl". ____Not the real rusty The clue was there The point of the whole first stanza is that if al Quaeda were poets, their preferred form would probably be the "Terror Dactyl" And then the second stanza indicates that you're looking for a homophone of that with prehistorical connotations. Or, it was supposed to anyway, if I hadn't mixed up archaeology and paleontology. ____Not the real rusty Is it? If you're serious, I apologize. I go to all the trouble of creating an almost completely double dactylic riddle, and then screw up one key word. I shall proofread more carefully next time. ____Not the real rusty Oh, good. I was kind of pleased that no one had gotten it, but then when I realized the mistake, I felt like it was probably because of that. I guess if someone had guessed it they probably would have just made the guess and pointed out that archaologically wasn't the word I was looking for. ____Not the real rusty A ha! I didn't think of just magling the word like that. Yeah, that totally works, and fits with the double dactyl's sense of inherent goofiness. Plus, if you pronounce it as "Payley-ent-logically" it also kind of contains its own double meaning ("logically" you can figure out the pun...?). ____Not the real rusty Nice Super Troopers reference Lucky guess, rook. I just lost a buck. To myself! ____Not the real rusty Most people don't have guns Don't believe the hype. I've lived 27 years here and never even touched a gun. :-) ____Not the real rusty Shut up, cockbite. [nt] ____Not the real rusty But... If we do I'll have to wipe all of our ratings. Imagine the embarrassment if I had to wipe my own ratings. ____Not the real rusty Red vs. Blue I got it from Red vs. Blue. ____Not the real rusty IT's all about timing and character. rusty? Not funny. "Cockbite"? Not funny. rusty saying "cockbite"? Comedy gold! ____Not the real rusty Good call Sorry about that. ____Not the real rusty Nope kraant guessed it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah If it weren't for my wife needing human contact to survive (and a day job for us to make ends meet), I'd love to live out on Cliff or Chebeague. Fewer people, farther out, fewer boats, much fewer summer people. Someday I'm going to live on Peaks and have a summer house way the hell out on Vinalhaven or Isle-au-haut. Then everyone will really think I'm nuts. :-) ____Not the real rusty My God, how do I survive! All those things are true, yes indeedy. But some of them sound a lot worse than they actually are. The tourist thing: Yeah, the summer people can be a bit of a pain. And the population does increase five-fold, on average, in the summer. But you do have to realize that this is not the place where the camera-toting hordes of Disneyland come for vacation. There is basically nothing to do here, so people come here to do nothing. So even the summer people are pretty laid-back, and quite a lot of them are long-time summer people. My grandparents have been summer people since before I was born, which is how I got to know the place to begin with. I consider them more islanders than I am (though I'm catching up -- winter converts you quick). There's not that much turnover. My guess is there's 1000 year-rounders, maybe 3000 people who own a summer house and come up for two months every year, and then at any given time maybe a thousand other people who are up renting a place for a week or two. The houses that are rented for summer people are generally just nice little cottages. They're not cheapo resort cabanas or condos or anything. They're just houses which mostly haven't been winterized. Back in the day, like the 60's and 70's, this island was where Portland shipped their homeless and welfare people. They'd just give them a falling-down house and send 'em out on the ferry and that was that. So it used to be a real shithole. Property values have since increased about a million-fold, and there are hardly any real junk houses left. There's one down the street from me, with cars and trucks from the fifties moldering out back, but it's pretty much the last of a dead breed. I hate to inform you of this, but you don't live on an island. As soon as there's a bridge, it's not an island anymore. I hold that to be a very firm rule. So the boat thing is simply a requirement of living on an island, and is something you either love or move to get away from. Yeah, the last boat is at 11:30 on weekends. I can count on one nose the number of times I've taken the last boat. This isn't a place to be a hip urbanite, and anyone who wanted to go out for drinks at midnight would not be happy here. Me, I'm married and boring, and I don't like people all that much. So it's perfect. :-) As you've noticed, I have found many ways of keeping myself busy and entertained. I've got too much to do as it is. Where would I find time to waste slobbing around in Denny's? I've got work, I've got books, DVDs arrive in the mail from netflix, there's cable internet access, there's the bread to make and the tomatoes to plant, there's a kayak waiting for my next free sunny afternoon. I can go for a run, or just a walk around backshore and check out the Atlantic crashing on the rocks. There is a very good new restaurant which I can't afford to go eat at, and an absolutely shitty tacky yo-ho-ho seaside restaurant/bar that I wouldn't be caught dead at (twelve bucks for bad fish and chips! I am not kidding!). There's usally one or two little stores operating at any one time, selling a variety of mostly useless junk, and sometimes ice cream. There's also, I've discovered this year, an excellent garden shop and nursery. My neighbors are a sixty-something carpenter named George who happens to be from my hometown, a seventy-something Italian woman named Maria who's about four feet tall and makes me feel like the world's biggest lazy slob whenever I look at her house across the street which is neater than any pin has ever been and always looks like she just got done mowing the lawn and painting the entire house and pruning all the trees and polishing the dirt. To the left is Roger and Susan, late-forties beach bums from Florida who have an infinite supply of stories that begin "One time, when I used to live in my van..." On the other side is a family with an indeterminate number of members who live in a mysteriously tiny house that just has to extend for miles underground, because no way can they all fit in there. Sometimes in the summer there's more people living in a big tent in their backyard, and I always think of johnny when I see that and hope someone in there is writing a great book. It's a place that restricts you. You can't live here and expect it to be like anywhere else. It's not like anywhere else. But that's why I love it here. Last ferry at eleven? Hell, what reason do I have to leave in the first place? Maybe there's more people than I'd like in the summer, but as a reward for that we get the fall. September first they all go home, and September and October invariably bring the very best weather of the whole year, and we get it all to ourselves. There's not many people here, but I have yet to meet a single one I don't like. Islands collect weirdos, the flotsam and jetsam sort of washes out of the mainstream and drifts ashore in places like this. But they're my kind of weirdos. It's not for everyone. It wouldn't have been for me just a couple of years ago. But I don't ever want to leave, now. ____Not the real rusty San Francisco After I've lived in San Francisco, I can't figure out why anyone would live there. :-) I lived in cities for a while, but I'm not a city person at heart. I'm basically done with that. I do have no doubt that the majority of people would go nuts here. It's a different kind of life, and it's definitely not suited to everyone. Not to even mention the absolute brass-balled bitch of a winter we just had. All island stuff aside, that alone would send most people screaming for the tropics. I hope next winter is as good. :-) ____Not the real rusty Florida, eh? You couldn't pay me enough to live in Florida. :-) I think you either stay in Tokyo, or you decide that size isn't everything in a home. ____Not the real rusty Meh How do you explain the extremely strong support Agassi got then? The crowd at the Agassi-Coria match was definitely rooting for him. And did you see Williams destroy the French player earlier? I don't recall anyone claiming she was booed then, when you'd certainly expect it. I think fans can do whatever they want. I also think you're throwing out a blanket accusation that doesn't stand up to what I've seen of the tournament. I didn't, however, see the Williams-Henin match today, so I can't really say positively. ____Not the real rusty Well It's not polite. The French should have more pride for themselves. Can you just imagine what's gonna happen to the French players in Flushing Meadows this fall though? I'll be there for an early-round day, and you can bet I'll report back what happens. :-) ____Not the real rusty Have seen the match now. Disregard the parent comment. See here. What a bunch of pricks, and what a black mark on France. ____Not the real rusty *Partly* I think the crowd wanted an excuse to hate Serena. They were against her until the third set, and then the attacked like rabid dogs. Why were they so against her? Maybe it was a little touch of the ol' A-A. Maybe it was the destruction of Mauresmo. Maybe it was the drum banging of French tabloids. Maybe it was a little bit of all of those things. I don't think any of us can reasonably say, but my guess is that it was a little bit of all of them. She did look absolutely crushed in the press conference though. I hope some of them saw that and felt bad. She was just like "...it's hard when they're against you all the time no matter what you do." ____Not the real rusty Did you see it? They went far, far beyond anything that could be called for. When Williams was walking off the court, waving politely and smiling in gracious defeat, they booed her. That was just utterly wrong. ____Not the real rusty Actually I think jjayson is mostly wrong in ascribing it to generalized anti-Americanism. The crowd was very much behind Henin-Hardenne for the whole game, but they were polite about it. In the third set, however, Serena stopped play twice to call a ball out (she was confirmed correct both times by the umpire). That was when the crowd turned ugly. They didn't like that at all, and got pretty vicious. So I'm not very inclined to say it was some major political thing, though I suspect that's partly why they were so strongly behind Henin-Hardenne (that and Serena having humiliated the last French hopeful in the previous round). But I haven't ever seen a tennis crowd turn so ugly and absolutely disrespectful so fast. The commentators were pretty horrified too, and they've been watching tennis a lot longer than me. ____Not the real rusty Shameful. Totally shameful Ok, they just rebroadcast the match on ESPN, and all I can say is please disregard my comments below. Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys can suck it. Absolutely shameful. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, I typically am. It was utterly shameful though. ____Not the real rusty Yes, it is. And I'm actually a bit of a Francophile at heart. I was pissed off at those fans. I apologize to the people of France, except those dogfuckers at the tennis match. ____Not the real rusty I would be... ...terribly embarrassed if I saw an American crowd behaving like that. Ugly and wrong. ____Not the real rusty Model rocket motors Has anybody EVER tried to blow something up with a model rocket? I have. It's a lot harder than you'd think. ____Not the real rusty What you is... ...you take a model rocket and fill the body tube two thirds full of black powder. Launch. If you're lucky, the ejection charge will ignite the powder, and the air/powder mixture will be just right, and you'll get a nice little fireball. I can't even imagine trying to aim it at something though. The powder pretty much shoots the rocket's balance all to hell, and it tends to spin around and fly all wacky. ____Not the real rusty Well, yeah, kinda Though if you point it away from yourself, you're probably safe. They don't tend to actually reverse direction, but it's not easy to predict where they're going to go beyond some arbitrary hemisphere of likelihood. ____Not the real rusty Woo-hoo! It *does* work! :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty D'oh I sort of did call her an asshole. Sorry. I don't think that's generally true, I just meant that posting my number was an assholey thing to do. But definitely not asshat or superasshole. No way. ____Not the real rusty None of the backstory This diary today follows literally an entire day of email back-and-forth between me and fluffy, wherein I've gone from being extremely concerned and conciliatory all the way through to fucking fed up and pissed off. I just counted and I've got eleven emails starting Tuesday around noon. fluffy posting my phone number came after I had already removed the material that bothered her and did everything in my power to fix the situation. So now you know what it takes to make me lose it. First I have to care about you a lot. Then you have to be a gratuitous asshole to me after I've thought of you as a friend and done my best to help you for three straight years. Then you have to engage in a day-long email hissyfit which I am apparently powerless to ameliorate in any way, since the main goal is claimed to be "understanding," which I am clearly incapable of providing in sufficient quantity. And at the end of it all, the best you get is a comment which was gratuitous and slightly snide. Which, like, for me is pretty harsh I guess. The way I feel about this whole thing, it coulda been a lot worse. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I took a deep breath and let it go probably three times already today. Like I said before, this gets to me really badly because I've thought of fluffy as a friend for more than three years now. I feel like I've been kicked in the gut. So of course the trolls smell blood and pile on. Ok, lucky number four: Fuck it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I think that you're actually totally right. Now I feel bad for calling you a troll. :-) Well, crossed signals. I'll have to enable "er@kuro5hin.org" though, so I can tell the difference between when someone needs site help and when they mainly need their feelings validated. You've gotta admit there's a huge howling void when it comes to context to determine whether that's the case or not. And I will be the first to admit that I'm not usually the go-to guy for that kind of thing, unless you're one of about a half dozen people who know who they are. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I think it'll cause more problems than it would solve. If you want to "come out," (not, you know, in a gay way or anything) than just do it and move on. I like this username. But I completely see why you feel the way you do, and it's totally okay to feel that way. ;-) Weren't we all pissed off at each other before? I forget. BTW I just realized like one minute ago who you probably actually were. Maybe I knew and forgot. I forget a lot. Hopefully I'm not guessing wrong. That'd be embarrassing. ____Not the real rusty I totally understand why you feel that way. ____Not the real rusty Like Democracy and Linux ...we still suck less than the alternatives. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Sure enough And like linux it has an idiosyncratic interface that you first can't understand and then later can't tolerate life without. And weirdos are always having religious arguments about it. The parallels are endless. ____Not the real rusty Nope It'll only email to the "real password" field. ____Not the real rusty "Real email" field. Use preview dammit. ____Not the real rusty Thanks Thanks for the demonstration. It was extremely informative and useful. Have a good life. And that admin intervention thing? Not gonna happen. Just so you know. ____Not the real rusty So, I should... what? I can't make everyone happy. This is not a highly managed experience. I removed the diaries that bothered fluffy. I've erased literally dozens of accounts belonging to her other harasser. I do what I can. But in most ways, whether people are happy and excited by the site, or bored and gripped with deathly ennui is just not my problem. It is what it is. It becomes what you make it. It has been far beyond my ability to yank in any direction at all for, I would conservatively say, at least two years. But I'm not at all shocked that people will eventually leave. It happens. If you get bored and drift away, well, that's life. People come and go. It's always been that way. I don't believe that the site is so fragile that some people leaving and some other people coming is going to kill it. If you're bored, maybe your friends have gone. So I guess you either make new friends, or move on as well. This isn't a "so if you don't like it then leave!" thing. I'm just trying to point out that every community I've ever been part of online has reached a point where I either made friends with a new group or moved on with my old group (or without them). I think maybe it just happens that three years and change might be some kind of natural threshold, as it seems a small but noticeable group of longtimers is in the process of dissolving. So, it's ok to move on. It's not really all that ok to say that any of this is somehow my fault. I'd appreciate it if people would consider that a little. ____Not the real rusty Diary stuff I know what you're saying about the diary stuff. I would like to make it so that people could maintain a greater concentration of diaries that they're interested in. Basically there are two approaches to that -- inclusive and exclusive. By exclusive, I mean that we provide some way for you to exclude what you don't want. The other is to provide a way to include things you do want. They sound like the same thing, but they're not really. The Diary Watcher, for example, is an inclusive solution -- it starts empty and you add to it, rather than starting with everything and subtracting from it. At their limits, the two turn into each other, it's true. But I think inclusive solutions are socially much better. So what I'd like to do is a couple things. I'm not against giving subscribers more control over their diary. If the code existed, I'd enable it right now. If you really want that, maybe you should write it. Otherwise I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually. The second thing is I'd like to make the diary watch list expand into its own actual diary page. So you could go to your "watch list page" and it'd show up as an alternate diary-page view with just the ones you chose to see. That alone isn't that great. But where it gets really cool is if there was some randomization that would offer you suggestions for diaries you might like based on overlaps in watchlists between you and other people. It could also include just some number of totally randomly chosen diaries that you're not watching, just to sort of keep up the churn a little. I think both these things would help with scaling. It would also be cool if poeple could segment themselves into sub-diary-sections in some way, because I think K5 would be improved by having some way for smaller groups to form organically within the larger group. I haven't worked out a good way to do that yet though. ____Not the real rusty I have sympathy too Much sympathy, expressed at some length. And I'm not burning any bridges. I never do. I just was unable to keep from spouting a little bit. It's been a shitty day. ____Not the real rusty Weak In case you are serious, what I did was first ask Eric to take down the diaries and stop the bullshit, and second take them down when he agreed and apologized. This was done the same minute I got any inkling fluffy was unhappy about it. Literally that very fucking minute. Since then I've had maybe a dozen messages from fluffy explaining over and over that somehow I'm not contrite enough, or something. Somehow the fact that the diaries were removed, and I acted promptly, and Eric apologized isn't good enough. I'm supposed to hate Eric as much as fluffy does, I think. There's simply nothing else I can do about any of this. ____Not the real rusty Don't bother I don't answer the phone anyway. ____Not the real rusty Actually It was none of that. The "common knowlege" thing was just his real name. ____Not the real rusty I disagree I hated school, so I left. Life didn't improve instantly, but it didn't get any worse for a few months, and then it got whole craploads better. So it all depends, I guess. I wouldn't go back to school for anything, I can tell you that much. ____Not the real rusty It's kind of a shame The grue was one of the first people here, and has given me a lot of good advice and encouragement over the years. Given the way he exited Slashdot, I always kind of back-of-the-mind wondered when the same thing would happen here, and it seems to have. Talk about burning bridges, though. Attacking me was totally uncalled for, and pretty much used up any sympathy I had, which was quite a lot. So I wish it wasn't like this, but I can't say I'll be sad if he doesn't come back. Who needs that shit? ____Not the real rusty Is there a Hallmark card for this occasion? Front [Picture of cartoon kittens snuggling]: Every day, and in every way, I am reminded... Inside: ...that you're not dirty. Congratulations! Or... Front: [Cartoon cat looking stern] I'd still love you if you did have VD. Inside: But I'm glad you don't so we can have the wild monkey sex! Or maybe even... Front: Roses are red, violets are blue... Inside: I'm glad you don't have herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV, or genital warts. Though that last one needs some work on the rhyming. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention ...that the history of stalking is littered with dead women who "didn't think he'd ever actually do anything." Harsh, yes, but also true. These things tend to escalate. You should be awfully sure that your safety is assured. I don't think a gun is a good idea, though. Guns are very specialized tools that require a lot of knowlege to be less dangerous to you than anyone else. But a can of pepper spray or a taser or something might be a real good idea. ____Not the real rusty Didn't say that I just said they require training to be less dangerous to you than everyone else. I.e. an untrained person carrying is probably a danger to everyone involved. Which is what you just said with more words. I really didn't want to get into a gun-safety argument, anyway. We probably agree more than we disagree. My major point was just that I personally would feel safer carrying something that wasn't going to kill anyone (me or the other guy), and maybe the gecko would too. ____Not the real rusty Tarnhelm device That's pretty cool. I think making guns safer is the best way to go. I'm glad you got the gist of my comment, and also that you agree. I gotta go to a shooting range someday and see what this whole gun thing is all about. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's what I meant I mean obviously in five minutes you can get a pretty solid grasp of what the button does and where the trigger is, which end is the dangerous bit, and how to load and unload the thing. I was trying to get at the larger universe of knowing when to use a gun (and when not to), being able to use one effectively in a sudden, unexpected and probably terrifying situation, and so forth. Even if I felt comfortable with the mchanics of a firearm, I think it would be a while before I considered myself mentally prepared to use it in self-defense. And as for pepper spray being ineffective, in college someone squirted a small amount by accident in our dorm lounge. It cleared the whole floor out and several people didn't recover for some hours. This is not a direct spray at any of them, merely ambient fumes in the air. While there are some people crazy or drugged enough to shrug off a shot of pepper spray in the face, I doubt the weasely ex we're discussing here is one of them. It seems silly to go all lethal and Dirty Harry given the expected threat. I have to say, it's pretty funny how defensive some people are about guns. For the record, and to be perfectly clear, I am not anti-gun. I just don't think that firearms are called for in all situations and for all purposes, especially when there are non-lethal or less lethal means of accomplishing the same goal. ____Not the real rusty If I weren't me and knew better I'd say I was Cruel Elevator. I'd probably even believe it too. But unfortunately it's not true. Unless I created the account and posted to it in some sort of unconscious fugue state. It's funny that I actually used to do B&W photography in high school, and thought that story was really cool. I don't think I'd have approached the subject from the angle of making contact prints though, because contact prints just aren't very interesting. And wouldn't it just be arrogant to go and link to my own story? And if I were going to be all posting that kind of thing pseudonymously, why would I have submitted the bread story as me? Anyhoo. I do actually have three other accounts that I have used in the past for purposes other than just logging in as a regular user to check some code. Two I have only posted comments with (one of those fairly recently) and the other I used to post a story once, which did in fact get voted up like I thought it would. I don't really make a habit of it though. Certain circumstances just cry out for anonymity, but mostly I don't care. Oh, and I do sometimes check up on dupe accounts. I enjoy a good mystery as much as anyone else though, so if the accounts don't give me any particular reason to want to do anything about them, I don't always try to figure out who is who. ____Not the real rusty Well Maybe you're one of my infrequently used other accounts. Ever think about that? I didn't think so. ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok, I'll do it if you want. But you do know that turmeric's just going to switch to a different account for the month, right? This is a bet you cannot win. Those aren't smart bets to take. ____Not the real rusty I'm not going to play cop I'll hold the money if you decide to do this silly thing, but I'm not about to play cop. ____Not the real rusty You look... ...exactly like I thought you did. Man, I'm good. As for my unsolicited style tips: lose the 'stache, pronto! Smaller glasses, preferably something like an oval wire-frame or those sort of slim-rectangle ones. And cut off all that hair. Something like an ex-Marine-turned-pipe-smoking-philosopher look is what you should be aiming for. Do it like 1/4" all over with the sheep shearers. "But I'm balding!" you say. "Everyone will see my receding hairline!" Buddy, you ain't fooling anyone right now. With age comes wisdom, and you should wear your wisdom proudly. I bet way down at the bottom of that thatch you've got some seriously kickass salt-and-pepper Sean Connery stuff going on. Kuro5hin: Where we love you with criticism. :-) ____Not the real rusty I think better glasses would be better. [nt] ____Not the real rusty The Wheel of Disaster So I'm leaning precariously off the side of a ladder with my arms stretched all the way out so I can reach the branch I'm trying to cut through with the chainsaw, and my mind is playing this film-loop of all the ways this could go horribly, horribly wrong. I mean, for most of us, normal life presents few opportunities to spin the Wheel of Disaster and have it potentially come up "Congratulations, you've just amputated your own leg and fractured your skull, simultaneously!" Inside: one of my favorite polls ever. I had it narrowed it down to some combination of one or more of the following: Potential ladder-related disaster: Leaning out too far and falling off the ladder sideways. Possible results: Broken neck, fractured skull, one or more broken limbs, broken ribs w/associated punctured lungs. Losing my footing on slippery rungs and falling off the ladder straight down. Possible results: Broken nose, broken jaw, broken feet, ankles, legs, severe abrasions and punctures. Crappy old ladder buckling and collapsing. Possible results: See above two items. Branch I'm cutting gives way suddenly, pitching me off sideways. Possible results: See first item. Potential chainsaw-related disaster: Saw kicks back into forehead. Possible results: Accidental auto-lobotomy. The hard way. Saw slips forward into leg. Possible results: Leg auto-amputation, severed femoral artery. Notable difficulty remaining safely on ladder with one leg. Falling. Possible results: All falling scenarios involve a running chainsaw either preceeding or following my flailing body. Chainsaw also has a notable proclivity for locking itself in "full-throttle" position accidentally. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your opinion of me) none of the above happened. Instead my Dad and I successfully cleaned a lot of dead limbs off the pine trees out by the garden. They look like either a bad ice storm or a falling tree broke a lot of the branches on one face of both trees, and the hanging dead branches weren't doing either the tree or the lawn any good. My Dad also kindly bought us a bunch of seeds and seedlings. So the garden will soon feature: Tomatoes: A variety of cherry tomato and two varieties of larger tomatoes Green beans Green peppers Two kinds of cucumbers Zucchini Spinach Swiss Chard Radishes Arugula Parsley Cilantro Chives Basil Rosemary The herbs are in three big clay pots so I can bring them inside in the winter. The rest are going out in the garden, as soon as I get the deer fence up. Yes! I bet you're right. Except that seals eat fish, so ix-nay on the elp-kay. ____Not the real rusty It's all in my imagination None of what I do is objectively all that dangerous. I just have an overactive imagination, and I tend to be kind of a pussy. Plus it makes for better diary copy. Being married and all, I think anything I own defaults to my wife if I die. I don't know what she'd do with K5 to tell the truth. I'm sure some person or persons would find a way to keep it going. It would, at the very least, stay up for quite a while without me doing anything at all. I hope that God forbid I did meet some untimely demise, maybe K5 could have a whip-round for Christina. I don't think I do have life insurance, and it'd be tough for her. Of course, without me, she'd be able to live a lot more cheaply. Ok, this is kind of a morbid post. I'd rather leave it at that. ____Not the real rusty Well, sometimes The little voices of sanity are good for anticipating what might go wrong, and preparing for it. But you can't listen only to them, or you'll end up spending all your time hiding under the bed. At least I would. I consider them cabinet members, but they don't always have firm veto power. ____Not the real rusty Ah, the good old days I used to write a lot more carefully when whatever came out of my head was what went up on the site that day. Unfortunately, being one diary among many has lowered my quality some. I just don't take the time to construct a proper story like I used to. I ought to try a little harder. ____Not the real rusty Heh You're right. Happiness is bad for creativity, I swear. Look what happened to rizzo242, for Christ's sake. He gets a girlfriend and *poof*! I mean, not "poof" per se. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But "poof, he disappears." I do only write about a small subset of things here. Apart from the occasional K5 and scoop-related thing, there's some set of criteria that makes something diarizable. I'm not even sure what the criteria are, except that like the man said about pornography, I know it when I see it. There's plenty of crap in life too, but I don't ever feel much like reliving it in prose, so I don't. Plus, despite the appearance of intimacy and unfiltered personal revelation, this whole public-diary format (especially when you know most of the several thousand readers are going to read it, and also your whole extended family) is very much a public performance, and I stick closer to narrative conventions than documentary Truth. Just ask my wife about the number of diaries where she was physically present and took part in the event described but is never mentioned. That kind of thing happens a lot. My life is kind of unusual, but it'd be wrong to assume that it is free of trouble and strife. I've managed to trade one set of problems (many of the ones most people have) for a different set that most people would probably be horrified to confront day in and day out. We all get the kind of life we choose to have, right? :-) "What one can be, one must be," eh? I don't know what that makes me. That's something to think about. ____Not the real rusty Troll? I give it three stars out of five. It hits most of the high spots, but in the end, it raises the immediate question "So why don't you leave?" which is too easily answered with "Well, duh, he did say he was going to become a troll and this is it then." Not a bad start, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to avoid the easy self-unmasking. ____Not the real rusty Predators Is it possible for humans to be divided into groups of predators and non-predators? Yes, and when our backs are against the wall, greenrd's first on the menu. He is, after all, lower on the food chain. :-) ____Not the real rusty Good day to you, sir I am Malcolm Abacha, sone of the late General Abacha. You should send your name, address, and four green Victory Stamps to i_am_teh_contest_wiener@wetmachine.com, and be sure to reference promotional code 0057-RPQZXYV-4552/6. One of the lower-level functionaries in the Rosalita Associates publishing empire will handle all of the particulars and modalities. ____Not the real rusty No, of course not What do you take me for, some kind of criminal? Many Blessings upon you and your family. ____Not the real rusty You... you... You! K5 was wonky cause you had like 10 DB threads tied up searching for that phrase. Comment search is just slow. Hitting reload only makes it worse. :-) The Terrorists, however, are actually to blame. ____Not the real rusty The next diary was a few hundred lines of "l<br>". The same guy has been doing this for a week or so. I doubt I'm the only one who's tired of it, so he went away. ____Not the real rusty No, you haven't. ____Not the real rusty The Cunning Runts It'd be better if your team members are mostly short, but in any case. Alt: The Big Slinging Discs. ____Not the real rusty Now we need a new poll [nt] ____Not the real rusty Damn You post these too early. It's always been guessed by the time I show up. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Survivor is better I haven't read Fight Club. But I think Survivor, Choke, Lullaby is how I'd order them. Choke and Lullaby sort of meander off into symbolic weirdness toward the end, and while I guess Survivor does too, it seemed to work better. ____Not the real rusty Mwahahahaha Welcome to my personal hell, fucker you nice person. My whole frigging extended family reads my diary. They print them out and pass them around to the ones who don't have computers (or don't have kids around to show them how to use them). I can't tell them anything anymore that they don't know already, so when I talk to them all I get are these weirdly over-intimate questions about specific details of events I'm positive I've never told them about. It used to be "What have you been up to?" but now it's like "So, have you worked out that issue with your bread crust yet? And what color was that dead seal?" It's spooky. And so now every time I'm about to write something, I have to stop and think "Is that offensive phrase important enough to the tone of this entry that I'm willing to accept that my Granny will read it?" Which is ridiculous because she's raised seven kids in Boston and has totally seen much worse. Which is not to say that any of my aunts and uncles were not good kids... well, you can see here the kind of tar pit it rapidly becomes. Not to mention the immediate members of my family troll through my recent comments and read those too, and are in fact almost certainly reading this (Hi Dad! Don't forget the eggs.) I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this whole blogging thing. ____Not the real rusty Anvils As I got off the ferry this afternoon, I noticed an index card tacked to a bulletin board on the lower deck. "Anvils for sale. All Sizes. Call John," it read. That's weird, I thought, who buys anvils? Then I noticed another posting tacked right next to it. "Anvil wanted. Call Pam." Wile E. Coyote... ...lives in Manhattan? ____Not the real rusty Hey Did you see this? ____Not the real rusty Well Given historical precedent, you'll have plenty of time to read it, and not much else to look at when it's up. ____Not the real rusty Lost? He wishes! I've got pictures! ____Not the real rusty Shhh Man, you ask questions like that and you'll ruin my image! The newbies will start thinking maybe I don't really have my own yacht, and next thing you know... ____Not the real rusty I got it But he was thinking of Palmolive. Pam is non-stick cooking spray. I think the enigmatic MisterQueue needs a refresher on his product catchphrase history. ____Not the real rusty Flexibility of mind Duplicate comments are rare and accidental, usually. Espeically when you see two comments in the same story with sequential cids and the same content. Probably an accident. If you care, email help@kuro5hin.org with a link to them and we'll just delete one of them. That's not a good use of the zero rating, because the person who posted them will take a mojo hit that they don't really deserve. "Spam" in the zero-rating policy sense, is stuff that is offensive or abusive and should be hidden, as fluffy said above. And just a sort of general tip -- there aren't any "Rules" as such. There are things you simply can't do because of the code, and things you can do. Things you can do are all technically allowed. Beyond that there are guidelines, which are often vague and sometimes contradictory, and more reliably there are traditions and consensus protocols, which are really best learned through experience. Trying to puzzle out what the rules are from a Talmudic reading of the FAQ and various special pages will probably just lead to grief. The best way to learn how things are generally done is just to ask, and then kind of go with the majority opinion. ____Not the real rusty "They call me TNT..." Thanks, jackass. Now I'm having flashbacks from that fucking movie. As if I didn't want to dig my eyes out with a sharp rock the first time. Aww, I can't stay mad at you. But if you do it again, I will have to hunt you down and kill you. ____Not the real rusty Do we... ...even want to know what "pussy issues" might possibly be? ____Not the real rusty Ah While I don't think that's true, I choose to believe it, and nothing anyone says will change my mind. ____Not the real rusty You sir May consider yourself hereby watched. Don't know why I didn't do it earlier, but hey. Moving sucks. It sounds like you did it pretty much the right way, which is as soon as possible and damn the torpedoes. The longer moving remains imminent, the more terrifying and undoable it begins to seem. ____Not the real rusty I'll get your money later then These are just to start with. It's ok if there's nothing you want yet. There will be more. :-) ____Not the real rusty Life is change Everything changes all the time. When K5 stops changing, then I'll worry. :-) ____Not the real rusty It does sometimes I can think of a dozen people offhand who have showed up within the last year and changed the site for the better. I agree with you that there's been a bit of a slump recently. Not so much interesting stuff going on. But I don't think it's part of a long-term trend. I think it's just the usual cycle. The exeriment continues, in any case. :-) ____Not the real rusty Question mark? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Thresholds don't work. It's not individual things which make the site good or bad, it's overall trends. There might be a dozen good new people, but when they're far overshadowed by the general trend of aggravating shitheadedness which appears, what good does it do? I guess that's where we disagree. I don't think there's a general trend of aggravating shitheadedness. You apparently do. Reasonable people can disagree on such things. How can a single view be perfect for everyone? It's not. In fact, a single view probably isn't perfect for anyone. It's just good enough for everyone. Your assumption is that thresholds don't change anything for anyone but the person using them. I think that is demonstrably false. Thresholds change the site for everyone, immediately. But we've totally had this argument before. All my abstract communitarian stuff aside, I can hold up Slashdot as a perfect example of thresholds not fixing anything. Not to mention Usenet, which was not saved in the least by killfiles or ignore lists. IRC -- /ignore is a short-term patch, but has in my experience always caused more noise than it's prevented. I don't have a single example of thresholds or blacklists ever doing more good than harm, or turning around a bad trend. So what's the point in taking refuge in an old idea that never works? If there's a problem, we ought to come up with a better way to solve it. ____Not the real rusty Y'know The ISE was from a little piece of code I just wrote that didn't handle errors quite right. So, technically, it kinda was an incompetent webmaster error. I never touched Stick's winkie though. Seriously. Who could find it? ____Not the real rusty Sir, I do not believe your comments on pearl to be accurate, nor your expression of rating inability or desired rating number to similarly be so. In response to your crude and distasteful aspersions upon my character, therefore, I challenge you to a duel to be held at high noon tomorrow in the hilly lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town. Choose your second wisely, sir, for you shall find yourself in hot water and no mistake, rapscallion! I remain, as ever, your humble servant Rusty ____Not the real rusty New low-code MisterQueue All the geekiness of rusty, with none of the fattening coding skills! ____Not the real rusty Damn You've still got more comments than me with the accurate count (though not by much), and absurdly more diaries. I kick your ass for stories though. Amateur. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well now No sense in having a screen-scraper to do things that would be quicker done in the code. Check out your user info page. ____Not the real rusty Could be worse I almost added "And has been a member since..." :-) ____Not the real rusty Or If you really must buy a new car, buy one you won't get sick of right when the payments cease. I made the mistake of leasing my first car (don't ever do that!) and getting it kind of on impulse. I don't regret it, but it wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done either. The second one, though, was the Jeep, which I fully intend to keep until the heat death of the universe. When my kids are driving that thing 25 years from now, I don't think I'll regret it. And having a reliable car really is a big hassle avoided. The thing most people don't seem to get is that any way you slice it, a car is a big money-sink. They do nothing but lose value. So basically figure out how much money you're willing to flush, and for how long, before you even consider it. ____Not the real rusty Nothin' It's on hold till I have spare cash around for parts. I kinda expect that to be a long time. ____Not the real rusty Sweet [nt] ____Not the real rusty Whoops I forgot to add the "don't show this section in 'all'" stuff to the RDF. Should be fixed now, and disappear whenever the RDF feels like updating itself. ____Not the real rusty Similar to 3 Actually, there's one more that's not up yet, which is similar to 3, and I suspect you might like. ____Not the real rusty Also I like #9 and #2 too. :-) The four we start with are just that. I do plan to do lots of different ones. So suggestions are totally welcome. These might get made, is what I'm saying. ____Not the real rusty duxup/trhurler A lot of people wanted that one when we were talking about these a while ago. We'll see, I guess. Oh, and the Revolution one is totally aimed outside of the existing K5 community. The other one that isn't up yet is partly as well. I think you're right that they have to appeal to a wider group than just K5-readers, cause, like, how many t-shirts can one reader buy? Not that many. ____Not the real rusty Another idea Special Guest T-shirt. I would love to have something designed by K5ARP. ____Not the real rusty Excess ain't rebellion And how much did you pay for your rock and roll T-shirt, That proves you were there, that you heard of them first? Yes, those are three of the four actual K5 shirts. They're not officially in stock yet, so I'm not making the announcement yet. Anyway, I have to set up the Store section here and populate it. But for the people who thought the day would never come, proof! My shoulders are very sore. Not the only ones forever The official announcement will be clearer about this, but these aren't like permanent, fixed-in-stone type things. I plan to change them pretty often, and many will be short-run only and then probably gone forever. There may be more k5-ey ones later (though duxup/trhurler is pretty K5ey). ____Not the real rusty Dunno [nt] ____Not the real rusty Jesus It's a bloody t-shirt company! Filters are retarded. I'll have info up here in a little bit. But you'll need to be able to get to http://jinxgear.com/ to buy stuff, still. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I was going to do something like that. I also plan to steal NTK's long-running "Buy one, subvert the mass media, get one free" policy. If you manage to appear in mass media (print, TV, movies (?) etc) wearing a K5 shirt, you get another one free. ____Not the real rusty No He didn't buy that one, so he already got his free one. :-) Besides, I'm pretty sure the Creative Commons site doesn't count. The intent is to get it in something that non-geeks would perhaps see. ____Not the real rusty Do you actually have "trhurler" trademarked? That would be funny. And you could register "I hate you." as a service mark. Then it'd have to say "trhurlerTM hates youSM" ____Not the real rusty Yes In order to prevent dilution of your brand, I believe you would have to use the TM yourself. Otherwise you would risk "trhurler" becoming a generic term for universal misanthropy. ____Not the real rusty You bastard! I fixed it for you, apparently just when you pulled it. Damn. ____Not the real rusty Wow, gloating How very unhelpful. ____Not the real rusty Teh Congrats! Just an FYI, it is possible to sleep standing up if you're tired enough, so I'm thinking any chair at all could be slept in if the need arose. I will expect to see the K5 ASCII baby-raising diaries continue now, you know. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, me too Isn't writing rusty fanfic kinda... y'know... lavender anyway? I mean I like you and all, mcgrew, but I don't know if I like you like you. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Movable Type? You know MT isn't open source, right? Is it there for comparison? Another open source blog/CM type app that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves is Drupal. ____Not the real rusty Inscrutable? I'd say more like ineffable. It can certainly be scruted, so it's not really inscrutable. And it does perform totally deterministically. However, it performs deterministic calculations on highly chaotic input, which, I think, makes the results often ineffable. ____Not the real rusty Heh Though you may be ineffable, I say eff you anyway. ;-) ____Not the real rusty In the conservatory ...with a candlestick. You know you love it. ____Not the real rusty Occult occlusion of oculation Occult occlusion of oculation. You see? Of course not. Ha! Damn, I'm good. ____Not the real rusty Nope As Tex said, the sure sign of an admin rating-wipe is that all your old ratings go away. It seems like something weird is going on with user prefs lately, as a few other people have mentioned having their pref suddenly go to "Don't rate," which they've all thought was me too, and wasn't. ____Not the real rusty I second this You're not prevented from rating by anyone here. ____Not the real rusty Bah You are wrong. Completely, entirely, and tragically wrong. There aren't even words to describe how wrong. Have you read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again? Have you read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? I'll admit that Broom of the System is probably his least successful work. But to judge him to "fucking SUX" based on one book which is merely good (as opposed to genius) seems a little excessive. ____Not the real rusty But... But IJ was extremely long and also brilliant. He seems to have trouble at the medium-length. Or perhaps Broom just didn't ultimately work. Have you read Girl with Curious Hair? Also medium length, but I can't remember if I liked it or not. ____Not the real rusty About your sig Specifically line two: Was theantix able to find someone with a hammer? ____Not the real rusty Don't worry None of us are really like that. We were, um, just acting like huge dorks for the camera. Really. ____Not the real rusty Why do I sound like Kermit the frog? And why can I see nothing but shadowy outlines? ____Not the real rusty Hm In mplayer it crashes after about a second. In the QT plugin it plays fine but I can't really make out any detail in the pictures, just silhouettes. Oh, and I sound like Kermit the fucking Frog too. Obviously this is the fault of your camera. You must have had some sort of weird Canuckistani filter activated. ____Not the real rusty Best Terrorists Diary Ever. ____Not the real rusty Paddling tales I put the micro-yacht in the water on Friday, and had a veritable orgy of paddling this weekend. What follows is things that happened while paddling. The Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse sits on the southern point of a complex shelf of rock just southeast of Cushing Island. Ram Island itself is a low pebbled tuft of white sand and grass, a bird sanctuary so it's also liberally splashed with albino Jackson Pollock splatters of bird shit. Paddling through a shallow cove on the lee side of Ram Island, hundreds of black and white eider ducks take off from the shore and fly a loop around my boat, four feet off the water and heads straining forward with that expression of total unconscious intensity you see on the faces of professional atheletes and world-class musicians when they're performing. None of them makes a sound, so I can hear the sound their wings make when they flap, which is a very quiet shush-shush. A few minutes later I see a seal with no head. Yellow-white with black patches, the body just floats there, neck-down and trailing some yellow strings of something from the neck. The surface of the water over it has an oily rainbow shimmer. I have thought about it for two days and I can't figure out what could cut off a seal's head so cleanly and leave the rest of the body untouched. A better picture of the area is here. This view is looking north-northwest. The light is in the foreground on its low-water ledge. At high tide, the light rises directly out of the ocean. Heading back in the field of view, the second piece of land is Ram Island. The cove where the dead seal floated is between the the two points of Ram Island. Behind that, the tip of Cushing protrudes in from the left side of the frame, and the land at the far back of the view is Peaks Island. In this view you can see the skeleton of an iron boat landing. The light's solar powered now, and no one goes out there much. Originally it was run by lighthouse keepers who lived inside the tower and had to wind the light mechanism every hour and a half. I paddled around the ocean side of the ledge, where I discovered why a light was needed there in the first place. The ledge changes configuration continuously with the tide. At low water it's one island. At high water it's just a couple of jutting rocks poking out of the surf. Paddling there is complicated, because swells roll in from the open ocean to the east and break wherever there's a submerged rock. Often these aren't visible until a wave breaks on them. I was crossing between the ledge and Ram Island proper, having observed my route for quite some time looking for hidden rocks and wave zones and seeing none, when a sound behind me made me look back. There was whitewater curling over immediately behind me. I panicked, a little. If you haven't been in a sea kayak, you might not know that they are very tricky to control in waves, and when a wave breaks behind them, they have a tendency to broach and then roll unless you're a good paddler. I am not a particularly good paddler. At the moment, I was a beginning paddler alone in forty-five degree water about a mile from the nearest place a person like even might be and hidden from the plausible view of that imaginary person if he was even there at all. The first breaker rolled under me without much trouble, so I turned sharply left and paddled hard to get out of the impact zone. A second wave started to break just about where the first one had, which was now off my port bow. This was somewhat worse than the first one, because a wave breaking astern can at least potentially be surfed till it runs out of steam, while a wave-breaking side-on, you basically just have to hope for the best. Foam splashed up over my bow and buried the nose for a second, then the boat popped up and out and slid over the back of the wave. I paddled as hard as I possibly could and got out of there pretty goddamn lickety-split. One benefit of being alone while paddling is that after an event which you expect to culminate in utter disaster you can let off the tension by gabbling and gibbering and making all sorts of goofy noise that you'd feel like a total dork making if there was someone else around. As I paddled I made a sort of cartoon laughing noise that sounded like "Ah-HA! Ha! Ha ha ha ha!" It made me feel better, but even I thought it sounded sort of loony. I pulled up on a fortuitously tidally-exposed chunk of pebbly beach and walked around for a bit, feeling relief. I called my friend Rob because I had to tell someone. I ate an apple and drank some water and peed in the ocean. Then I headed home. This was all Saturday by myself. I also went out on Sunday with a friend from the island. Crossing the western side of our island, a harbor seal surfaced right in front of me, about six feet away. It's giant gray snout poked up, and then the mound of fat and fur of its neck and shoulders. It was facing away from me, but I probably made some noise and it whipped its head around and saw me. We made eye contact. I have never seen an animal produce such an exactly human expression before, but its eyes widened and it made this "Oh shit!" face, and dove back under water. Later, I peed on Little Diamond Island, trying to be subtle and face away from the LL Bean couple who we'd run into in the shallows between Little and Great Diamond. I don't think I really succeeded, but what are you gonna do. Sometimes I feel like a dog, in that it seems like my mental list is not of islands visited but islands micturated upon. Currently that list is comprised of: Peaks (well, I live here) Long Little Diamond Ram Island Ledge (see supra) Little Chebeague Crow Jewell Eagle (former home of Admiral Peary) When you spend several hours in a very small boat, you find out what the primary uses of land are. Also, a note to myself, I owe Eric a dollar for calling out "Ahoy!" to the LL Bean couple. That's the only even halfway-plausible idea so far That's all I could come up with too. But even that seems somehow unlikely. A seal's neck is not thin. It's bigger than the head. Looking at this thing, I'd say if I were to try to recreate the situation with a live seal and sharp axe, I'd need three or four hacks at it. Also, boat props tend to create a ladder of shallow slashes on marine life that they intersect with. The seal was otherwise unharmed in any way. So, it didn't look like a propeller accident. But given the total absence of other ideas, I am forced to do a Holmes and say that's what I'd lay my money on if I had to. ____Not the real rusty Maybe That's what I was thinking. If it was a propellor, it was a giant-ass massive one. Those are not unknown in the area -- huge oil tankers go in and out of a passage very near Ram Island Ledge pretty regularly, and the body was floating in a little lagoon where a lot of other flotsam and jetsam had wound up, so clearly some combination of wave and current has a tendency to deposit random floating crap in this spot and leave it there. It certainly came from somewhere else, since you couldn't even get a motorized boat near where the thing was. But so then you've got your seal swimming along, and somehow not noticing an oil tanker "sneaking" up on it. And it is drawn into the propellor somehow, but only hit a single time by one blade, which parts body from head cleanly at the shoulder and sends both pieces off in different directions without hitting the body again? Could happen. I guess somewhere, sometime, it must happen at least once. My brain just wants there to be a more probable answer. ____Not the real rusty Sharkage That was my only other slightly plausible explanation. Yes, there are sharks, and presumably a decent-sized shark could take the head off a seal. But I had the same thought as you -- why leave the rest? I mean, the head isn't where your thinking shark is going to find the most calories for its ruthless killer of the seas effort, is it? I would also expect shark damage to look more chewed around the edges, you know? ____Not the real rusty Ayuh. ____Not the real rusty A spectre is peeing on Europe (I said pAss on.. not piss on... though.. that's pretty funny *writes down on list*) Karl Marx has you beat. He was an infamously poor father, and is said to have disciplined his children by urinating on them. ____Not the real rusty It must be nice I've never been rich, so I can only imagine. But I'd say you're probably right, modulo the apparent problems of managing great wealth which they all seem to worry about all the time. Nevertheless, even us poor people can have a bit of fun now and then. ____Not the real rusty Not just pathetic But also ironic, considering "Ripe Peach" probably makes more money than me. The numbers are also totally nonsensical, but that's to be expected when trolling. The thing is, you know that this guy isn't serious, and couldn't actually care less. He does a good job projecting the impression of serious righteous anger though, and always manages to nab a few bites. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Yeah, I was alone, but I was also very close to home territory and never in any real danger. The whole wave incident took place maybe thirty feet from solid land, and I was wearing a shorty wetsuit, fleece pants, and a paddling jacket at the time. I'd have been fine, whatever happened. Studly isn't really the word. If I'd had my druthers I'd have avoided the whole situation, so it's not like I can lay claim to some kind of courage for screwing up and getting myself into it. No, the list of paddlers less skilled and accomplished than myself could easily be inscribed with a dry magic marker on the lip of a coke bottle*. :-) * Expression shamelessly stolen from David F. Wallace. ____Not the real rusty Lots of warnings That guy's had all the warnings and second chances anyone could ever want. He's not welcome here. ____Not the real rusty It's not just the asking There's nothing wrong with asking, and your basic point about the CMF is very true. It's been too long and I've done too little to advance that plan. I would tell you that I'm working on it, but I see no reason you'd believe me, and I'm kind of tired of vapor-org pronouncements, so I'm not really going to until I have some definite stuff to show. The trolling is in the self-righteous tone and the wildly inaccurate numbers and assumptions you throw around. For example, all the income given in the funding drive went on the books as K5 Inc income (and into the K5 Inc bank account) and will be taxed at the normal corporate rate (our FY is April-April so I don't have the numbers for that yet). It was not, as you keep repeating, $80,000 but $42,000. I made $38,205 last year from K5, all of which I paid taxes on like anyone else. In fact, more than most people because it was all assessed as self-employment income, for which I get a nice extra tax bite. This upcoming year, assuming I continue to be able to pay myself at the rate I currently do, I will make $30,475.20 (gross, pre-tax). That all gets taxed too. All your claims about anything being a tax-dodge are not just untrue but fantastically untrue. Ditto the "bank accounts you control" idea, which is true insofar as the money is in bank accounts I control, but untrue in that control over a corporate account doesn't mean I can do anything I like with the money without oversight. All of it has to be accounted for or I'm in deep shit. Them's the facts. I agree with you that the CMF needs to move forward. It makes my life harder not having than it does yours, believe me. I don't need extra motivation to do that. All of the other stuff you've claimed is not true. ____Not the real rusty I suppose I'm happy to be on the right side of the law and pay my taxes like the next guy. And if the next guy isn't paying his, well he's wrong not me. Like Peach says, I like schools and streetlights. :-) ____Not the real rusty See below Taxes have been paid, and more shall be paid before the fiscal year is done, on all the income. Did you really think I wasn't paying taxes because I had announced a plan to form a nonprofit? I guess I can understand why you were mad if you thought so, but I also don't understand how you could have thought so. ____Not the real rusty Heh I knew there was something wrong with that sentence. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's one of those things where features are added without old things being reconsidered at the same time. We've had sigs forever, and the original behavior was universally retroactive. At some point, the "comment prefs" page was added. Then later on someone added a way to make sigs sticky or not on a per-comment basis, along with a global default option. The default was sensibly added to the comment prefs page, where it should be, but the sig itself was never moved there (where it also should be) from user prefs. So it isn't a matter of complexity, it's just that sigs historically were on the user prefs page and haven't been moved. Kind of a "lack of UI decision" more than the making of a bad one. ____Not the real rusty Nice Cake quote Who's Lisa Chant? ____Not the real rusty MSG'd? Like bad Chinese food? ____Not the real rusty Police Squad! That show ruled. You can still find the episodes on video usually. You've got something on your face. ... No, other side. [THUD] ____Not the real rusty Teeth! No, that picture is unique in the world because you can actually see my teeth. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of myself where teeth are visible before. It's really kind of disturbing. It looks like I'm about the eat theantix. ____Not the real rusty Heh Thank you for correcting my error as well. :-) ____Not the real rusty The Zen of Trolls A monk once asked Joshu why some people troll. Joshu responded that there is no such thing as a troll. The monk disagreed, saying "I have myself seen trolls!" Joshu replied that the monk has only seen people seeing trolls. "So, there is no such thing as a troll -- only a biter?" asked the monk. To which Joshu responded by hitting the monk in the nuts with his cane and running away cackling madly. ____Not the real rusty Furthermore Another monk went to Joshu and asked "does a pig have Buddha-nature?" Joshu retorted, "Oink!" A third monk, emboldened by the first two, went to Joshu and asked "does a chicken have Buddha-nature?" Joshu retorted, "Of course not. Don't be an idiot." ____Not the real rusty Democracy without uniqueness I would love to make rating powers democratically reviewable, but I'm always afraid that what you describe would happen. Problem number one is that there's nothing tying one person to one vote here, really. In the normal course of things that problem is mostly overcome by there being (or at least possibly being) enough people voting on any given thing to drown out the small amount of multiple-personality noise. But something like "Vote on Joe-Bob's rating ability" would be of interest to such a small number of people that it seems like it would be really easy to skew. It would work great if we could tie one person to one vote. In fact, a lot of things would probably work better if that were the case. But as that isn't the case, and probably never will be, some good ideas are just not feasable. ____Not the real rusty In contrast to your if rusty likes you thesis... I like the Players quite a lot. If you ask anyone at the last BoK5 meet who remembers, I believe I said something there about the ASCII Players being uproariously funny and creative, and the first example I've seen that ASCII art potential should be left intact as long as humanly possible. I have nothing against the Players, and I hope he, she or they stick around and don't take the rating thing as an insult. It was really obvious that they were going after people who dared to rate them down, which as everyone knows isn't kosher. I also assume that whoever it is, they have other K5 accounts and are not going to be drastically under-represented in the whole scheme of things anyway, whether the Players account can rate or not. What I in fact generally do is look at ratings when someone reports a problem to me, and if it's obviously abusive I delete them. I find that 90% of the time the person who reported the problem eventually does the same thing to someone else, and gets their ratings removed as well. This whole process seems to be a natural self-selection against people who take ratings way too seriously, which I'm fine with. It would also be nice if everyone understood that my removing your ratings isn't any kind of an affront or judgement on your contribution to the site, creativity, or desirableness as a K5er. It's just a response to a particular behavior that I don't think improves the site much for anyone, and tends to produce complaining email for me, which I don't enjoy very much. So, the thing which doesn't seem to be getting across overall is that "modbombing" is totally pointless. Either the person you do it to doesn't care at all (in which case: pointless) or the person you do it to does care, and emails me, and I undo it (in which case: pointless). It may be a temporary release of frustration, so I guess if that's the case, ok then. But surely it would be better to just stand up and scream a few times and keep your ability to rate? ____Not the real rusty A possible solution I agree that taking away rating privileges forever isn't the best solution. Maybe I ought to hack something up that will just take them away for a little while. Like maybe the first time it's a day, the second time it's a week, the third time it's a month, and the fourth time it's forever. It would also be nice to supply a notice to the user as to who took the privileges away and what for. My guess is that the one-day removal and an explanation would be enough for the huge majority of cases. ____Not the real rusty I use whatever color pen is closest ...when I edit my wife's papers or johnny's ramblings. And when I edit my wife's stuff, I tend to chuckle to myself a lot, which I can assure you she doesn't like one bit. It's not my fault she manages to wander into uncharted grammatical territory in novel and amusing new ways! She really hates when I underline a sentence and note in the margin: "I do not know what this is trying to say. Make less bad." ____Not the real rusty Yes, pen What? You are unsure of your edits? You change your mind? You second-guess yourself? How can you aspire to the Godlike power of Editor if you question your own infallibility? I do crossword puzzles in pen too. :-) I also don't have a real firm grip on actual proofreader's marks. My edits tend to be a sort of mlange of half-remembered proofreader's marks and whatever symbol or notation seems like it will convey the basic message. This in no way impugns my Godlike editorial certainty, mind you. PS: "impugn" and "mlange" in one post! This commenting thing certainly seems to be my true mtier. ____Not the real rusty Pah! You sound like an author. Everyone knows that authors mainly just have a few ideas and spew verbiage onto the page, and it is the editors who truly mold, shape, and form the final work of art. The lack of public editorial credit is akin to crediting a brickmaker for constructing a house, or a clay seller for a famous sculpture. But your point about whose name ends up on the cover is sadly true. The noble editor never bemoans her fate, though, knowing instead that it is only through her good offices and mastery of the language that anything that can be called art ever emerges from the torturous wreckage of the author's draft. As for negotiation, I guess you do your best. But authors should be made aware from the start that they are free to take your edits or leave them, individually or en masse, but whenever they decide to ignore an edit they will be hopelessly wrong. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah, I get it The query huh? I see, I see. Good idea. Next time I'll give that a try. So, like, I should say: "Perhaps if you don't want to look like a totally uneducated mongoloid, maybe you might want to consider rewriting this sentence to resemble something like the English language?" and so forth? ____Not the real rusty Excuse me I believe the preferred term is "former narcotics distributing nigger from the projects." Let's have a little sensitivity around here, huh? ____Not the real rusty Oops You're totally right. Pardon my ignorant libel. "Former narcotics distributing nigger who was fortunate to receive government-subsidized housing" it is, then. ____Not the real rusty I glow with pride, kind of [nt] ____Not the real rusty I did! [Checks] Yep, I was using my "rusty" account. ____Not the real rusty theboz is number two? How do you figure? ____Not the real rusty Which one was I? ____Not the real rusty Not spamming I didn't mean to imply that anything was now spamming. It was just a note that people should generally keep a little bit of a lid on the many-diaries-a-day stuff. Everyone's gotta share the section page, so it's just a politeness thing. ____Not the real rusty True And most people have no trouble absorbing the nuance (and reason -- limited space on the section page) of keeping the total number of diaries down to only a couple a day at most. Some people either don't get it or decide to not care. In this case, the defense before was that it didn't say anything about it anywhere, so I just made it say something about it. Consider it a hint for the uninformed, not a rule from the top. Myself, I don't really care one way or the other. I page through several pages of diaries at a time anyway. But the Denizens get unhappy, and when they get unhappy, they make me unhappy, so I try to keep the peace. This seemed like the gentlest possible way to do it. ____Not the real rusty No, no It's just that while you can change the number of stories on a section page, most people have it at the default of ten or so. So if one person posts a half dozen in a day, it makes stuff scroll off that page faster, and everyone gets less of a moment to attract random passers-by. It's not a big deal, which is why I don't think we need to go all overboard and write any code limiting them, it's just a sort of "make room for others too" thing. Plus sometimes there's perfectly good reasons to post more than one (or gasp more than two even!) diaries in a day. People should just think about it a little before they go all crazy. Adding that note to the submit page as a social pressure/reminder thingy wasn't my idea either. It was suggested by a Well Known K5 Diary Superstar and I thought it was a good idea. ____Not the real rusty Me too But it was for the last one. Glad I did though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sent in the descriptions and some more info today I know, I know. But seriously very soon. ____Not the real rusty Changed Granted it doesn't say this when you post a diary It does now. ____Not the real rusty Printer Are you gonna drag it out in a field and beat the crap out of it Office Space style? With video? ____Not the real rusty And ...it's good with carmelized onions. You know, there's a fine line with some similes. You push it just a little bit too far and the whole thing falls over. ____Not the real rusty Whoah! Jesus! Dodged a bullet there, mate. Raise a glass and toast to Dame Fortune, who obviously is keeping a sharp eye on you. ____Not the real rusty See comment bugs? Tell me. I just patched Scoop so it no longer tries to hand out a session cookie to anyone who wanders by. Now it only creates a session if you log in, or do something else that requires persistence. This should help keep the size of the sessions table down, and make sure that badly behaved bots and spiders cause less tie-ups. The change isn't one that most people will even notice, so it didn't seem worth a site news. But I did have to hack a bunch of stuff related to comment display preferences, and while I actually did test it first, there may still be a bug here or there. So this is a general request to let me know if you see any weird display oddities related to comment options (the "View, Display, Sort, etc" options for comment display). That's it, really. It's grey and ugly in Maine, and startring to get depressing. Also, yesterday was my one year anniversary of running. Yes, I'm still doing it, despite taking about a month and a half off ending Sunday. I went Sunday night and last night, and my legs are sore. I can't believe I kept doing it. Who'd have thought? And in ten days, me and Rob are taking our (very tiny, human-powered) "yachts" out for two nights. I have to plan our trip. Specifics? I'm trying to track that one down, but having trouble reproducing it. Can you give me instructions to make it happen? ____Not the real rusty Fixed? I didn't do anything. If it's fixed, that would be a clear indication that the mod_perl server has acheived consciousness. ____Not the real rusty Threaded My problem finding it initially was that it only happens in dynamic-threaded. Dynamic-minimal (what I normally use) doesn't do it. Is that what you were looking at? ____Not the real rusty Yes Joe is my hero. He remains the only person who understands how that stuff works too. ____Not the real rusty Not really I'd say that's an "undesirable usage." After all, if you write crap on a word processor, it's not a software bug. ____Not the real rusty Buffy ...sucked. You missed nothing. It was all "blah blah blah blah blah." It cannot end soon enough. ____Not the real rusty Answers Caleb was afraid of this stupid looking chromed-out axe, and Angel was in the last minute of the show and had like a line. Presumably he'll be in the big grand finale and kick some ass, but there was precious little ass kicking in this episode. Mostly they stood around and yakked and waited for the last episode to start already, like all of the audience. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It does get old. ____Not the real rusty Don't listen to those other comments The page actually reads your mind. ____Not the real rusty You bore me now We had fun once, but now you've gotten boring. Too bad. ____Not the real rusty En Fuego Is that where that comes from? I say that all the time. Watch out now! I'm en fuego. ____Not the real rusty Chamomile and hibiscus As we say up inna hood, it's the shizzle. ____Not the real rusty What time? I got up at 9 Eastern, and things were good. I'm trying to pin down when the slowness was. So what time were you having trouble? ____Not the real rusty Well, no When it's slower than dog piss all the time, I aready know there's something wrong and I'd be working on it rather than asking people about it. But when there are reports that it was slow and I never saw it sometimes it helps to nail down the time it happened. Anyway, I know what the problem is so I don't even know why I asked, other than as confirmation. I'm looking at how to rewrite the archive process right now to make it not bog everything down so badly. It clearly wasn't designed for archiving dozens or hundreds of stories per day. ____Not the real rusty My idea What I'm thinking is this: Make temp story and comment tables in the regular database. These will normally be empty, and have the same structure as the archive tables. The archive cron does an "INSERT INTO temp_stories SELECT ..." to move the stuff to archive into the temp tables. It then deletes them from the regular tables. A cron on the db server runs a script which uses mysqldump to grab everything from the temp tables and load it into the archive DB. The temp files are not normally used so they can be locked and loaded fast. The script also wipes out everything in the temp tables when it's done moving stuff. What I'm not sure about yet is a fast way to get all the comments for the stories to be archived. I'm working on that. ____Not the real rusty Flag file I was thinking I'd have to leave a flag somewhere to avoid the "cron out of step" thing. I didn't want to trigger the mysqldump from scoop because I'm not even sure if the apache user would have permission to do that, and also I don't want to wait for it to return. Well, anyway, that was an issue I thought about, and I think it can be solved one way or another. I have to see if the process I'm thinking about is any faster first anyway. Oh, and the join would probably work for comments. I think it'd look like "INSERT INTO temp_comments SELECT ... FROM comments, temp_stories WHERE comments.sid=temp_stories.sid". I will check that manually here on my test box first though. ____Not the real rusty Time I just ran the story archive query on my box here using a dump of the K5 db as of a couple days ago. It moved 7922 stories from stories into temp_stories in about five minutes, which included building the indexes the slow way because I don't have enough memory here. I can certainly live with those numbers. :-) Now I'm trying the comments query. We'll see if that's faster too. ____Not the real rusty I heard that too And you know what got to me more than anything else? The way he'd chuckle smugly every time he thought he was about to make a good point. That little dry "huh" he'd insert. Like "The US troops in the first Gulf War, huh, rained death from above. They fought without, huh, ever getting their feet dirty." (NOT an actual quote -- just an example of the usage. I can't remember any direct quotes). That little self-satisified chuckle made me seriously want to punch the guy. Do you think he knows what an ass he sounds like? No, of course not. It seemed from the audience noise that he had brought his crowd of syncophants along. I loved listening to him try to skirt the question of whether he thought Saddam should have stayed in power. He clearly did, but didn't want to say so. Sounded like they had become fast friends, he and Saddam. ____Not the real rusty I wish you the best If it works, you will presumably siphon off the people here who want there to be more individual control, and if it doesn't work, I have a great defense for my consistent desire not to go that route, so it's win-win. You've got a lot of work ahead of you if you want to do this, but you won't realize how much until it's way too late. :-) Best of luck. If you'd like any advice (even, you know, just to find out what I'd do so you can do the opposite) don't hesitate to ask. ____Not the real rusty Lord Tim I agree with the entire gist of your rant, but I do have to point out that Lord Tim actually intended the web to be read-write from the start. He thought authoring tools were just as important as viewing tools, and only now have we gotten to the point where the two are largely equally easy to use. In spirit though, with that one proviso, yeah, right the fuck on. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Best line: And they'll add and subtract features unpredictably until users get the idea that it's safer just to stay with MS, and they'll own yet another market. Silly Dave. RSS doesn't have a market, and never will. ____Not the real rusty Blah I can't get the videos to work. If anyone either figures out how to play them in linux, or converts them to a different format, please post. ____Not the real rusty That could be The error I got was something about a missing video stream, not the lack of a codec. And some research shows that it's using an mjpg codec, which I should have installed. So I'm guessing you might be right about their being corrupted. ____Not the real rusty Curse you Justice Guy! You have outed me in this public forum! I am powerless against your justice! ____Not the real rusty Oh, I know But me and Justice Guy are having too much fun to quit now! :-) Can't I give one or two trolls a good bite now and then? Can't we all just get along? ____Not the real rusty Homo Guy? I guess you can be Homo Guy if you want to, but I think that would seem like a whole different crusade. I would advise sticking with Justice Guy, as I think it describes your mission much better. ____Not the real rusty Liar I would give you a 5, but alas, Rusty disabled that particular feature of my account. No I didn't, you twinkie. ____Not the real rusty Illegitimate son of a blue-nosed baboon ____Not the real rusty Curse you! You've already won. ____Not the real rusty Meh My tiny little Jeep, with a 3300 lb curb weight and a 4L 6-cylinder compared to the Hummer's 6400 lbs and 6L 8-cylinder, only gets 15-18 MPG. I seriously doubt the Hummer gets 11-13 MPG. If it gets 10 MPG, I'd be surprised. ____Not the real rusty Well, for an SUV The Jeep's heavier than you'd expect, but also smaller than it seems. I'm always shocked now by the fact that virtually any other car I drive is bigger. For some reason the Wrangler gives the impression of being larger than it actually is. But I mean of course it's heavier than a Beetle, it's got all that serious undercarraige stuff going on. ____Not the real rusty About 9 inches It seems like the average clearance reported is about 9 inches. I can say from experience that it's a pretty serious off road vehicle. The modern Jeeps are a little bigger than their WWII-era ancestors, and have a lot more plastic and comfort features (spring shocks, power steering, etc), but they remain pretty seriously overbuilt and dirt-worthy underneath it all. I think the Liberty is the soccer mom SUV of the Jeep family. Those things look like cheap RAV4 knockoffs to me. ____Not the real rusty It handles short and tall Yeah, it's an odd vehicle to get used to driving, but now that I'm accustomed to it, I love it. It handles basically like a small pickup, but imagine you cut the whole bed off the truck and you were just driving the cab around. The thing only takes up half a parking space, so it can turn pretty tight. But the height makes it feel bigger than it is, and the gearing is much more truck-like than car-like. It's not what you'd really call "zippy." Off road, though, it just keeps going. I've taken it up a steep hill in twelve inches of fresh snow, and after I figured out how to keep it moving forward, it just went right up. I also crossed a washout on a trail in the NH mountains that was one of those "I don't think this is gonna work" moments, but turned out to be no problem. I wish I had more time to just take it out and play. :-) Oh, it also got me across the Kankamagus highway (twisty, steep mountain two-lane) in a blizzard this winter. ____Not the real rusty Kaboom It looks like what happened is a new user creation crashed halfway through, leaving the users table write-locked, and that led to a cascading disastrous failure. I suspect that someone was creating a new account and hit the button twice rapidly, and somehow the timing worked out just exactly wrong, so that it went like: Thread one checks for account name's existence, finds nothing Thread two checks for account name's existence, finds nothing Thread one inserts account data Thread two tries to insert same account data Everything goes to hell That shouldn't be able to happen, but according to the logs, it's my best guess so far at what did happen. ____Not the real rusty Supposedly Yeah, well, that's how it should be. Lemme look at the code and see how it's actually done. Ah, I see the problem. What it does is write-lock the users table, fetch the last user id number, increment it by one, and write in the new user stuff. It notably does not check if a user by that name already exists, and it also does not unlock the tables if there's an error. It just returns an error message. The unlock statment is the next line down, which of course will never run if it's already returned with the error. I think checking for the username isn't necessary, as it can safely bail with the error if there's a collision, but it has to unlock tables before returning. I'm fixing that right now. ____Not the real rusty Oops! You already posted this. ____Not the real rusty Minorities? I don't hate any minorities. I just hate you. ____Not the real rusty I don't hate anyone I was just goofing with you. I think you need a great big shot of happy juice, there. You seem to be taking life far too seriously. ____Not the real rusty Your duty? Are you a member of the League of Justice? Do you have a shiny cape? I think you'd look cute in a spandex jumpsuit and a shiny cape. You could be Justice Guy! Look, up in the sky! It's a self-important bird! No, it's a humorless plane! No, it's... it's.... Justice Guy! Standing up to imaginary internet bullies everywhere! I love having you stand up to me. Please do it again, Justice Guy. All the little people will cheer you on, and be so grateful for being rescued from my evil clutches. You'll be everyone's hero. They'll probably give you the Justice Guy of the Year award, and put you on the cover of Anti-Oppression magazine. You'll finally be appreciated for the hero you truly are. And while I'll be muutering "Curse you, Juistice Guy!" as they drag me away, inside I'll feel the warm glow we all get when someone lives up to their full potential. ____Not the real rusty Fuck off, you ;-) ____Not the real rusty Subjects that cause me to feel physical pangs of nausea I've noticed lately that all over the web there seem to be certain topics that actually trigger a feeling of illness in me. Like the common expression "I'm so sick of..." taken to its most extreme conclusion. My stomach churns, and my heart seems to speed up, and I click away or close the tab before it gets any worse. I wonder why now, in particular? This is, by and large, a new thing. I don't remeber feeling this way before a couple of weeeks ago. In fact, now that I think about it, ETCon seems to have been the moment this started. Which is kind of understandable for most of the subjects, but not all. Topics below. Subjects that make me ill: Discussion of blogs or blogging, especially anything strongly pro- or anti-blog, or gleeful explanations of how someone enabled this or that bizarrely useless feature on their blog. Just reading blogs doesn't do it; it's not the form itself, but the characteristically overwrought discussion of the form. Example Sort of related, but anything proclaiming the glorious and triumphant future of RSS, RDF, XML, or CSS does it too. Often these go hand in hand with bloviating about blogs, and give me a double-whammy. Example Discussion of how much happier someone is now that they have a new electronic gadget. PDAs, digital cameras, MP3 players, phones, and so forth. Like blogs, the devices themselves have no effect on me. It seems to be the standard format "I got a new X and now I'm so happy and life is so rad" conversation that does it. Example Discussion of comment ratings. 'Nuff said. Example Social Software. Example I think there are more, but this is getting really hard to stand so I'm going to end it now. Yeah It's what you DO with it that's important, not the fact that you're doing it! I think that's a key point. So many people talking about it, so few doing anything interesting with it... ____Not the real rusty No, not that I basically read the blogs of peole I know personally, because they let me keep up a little bit on what's going on with those people. They don't have to do anything other than that to be interesting, to me. I meant the "blogging about blogging" thing -- lots of poeple talking about it on and on and on, but not themselves doing anything else. It's the blogging about blogging phenomenon. Very few things could possibly be less worthwhile or interesting. ____Not the real rusty Don't make me come over there and vomit on you. nt ____Not the real rusty Guilty as charged [nt] I lied about no text. I am no exception. I'm not even saying you shouldn't talk about any of the things on my list. Just that they've started producing this weird physical reaction for me. ____Not the real rusty You specifically ...are an interesting exception. Despite going on and on about RSS and so on, you're talking about it because you're writing software that does something with it. While I usually gloss over the RSS Bandit bits of your diary, it doesn't bother me in the least. And my reading of the "inner circle" blogs is waning pretty drastically. The ones I read are increasingly the ones that talk about other stuff. And I'm seriously thinking I'm gonna have to give up BoingBoing pretty soon. It's starting to climb up its own ass in a big way. ____Not the real rusty Wise words [nt] Super [nt] fake out! I am indeed trying to stop caring about things I don't care about. That sounds like it should be easier than it is, doesn't it? ____Not the real rusty Is K5 slow or something? It's like I'm hearing this rumor... Maintenance, BoK5, and whatever else I feel like saying. So reports have been slim so far. Is Kellnerin really the only one of you slackers who's written anything yet? You can't stand a little ten minute delay between pageloads, or what? I was pretty lame, unfortunately, and at like the absolute nadir of social form. I got about three hours of sleep Wednesday night, and was consequently loopy with exhaustion and unable to string more than a few words together at once. Me and Rob left rather early, and I basically went right to bed. I was on time though. So there's that. Oh, and theantix now has a short video of me making a rude gesture. He also remarked that he assumed the evil grin must be some kind of pose I do for pictures, but that he now knows that I really actually look like that. What happened with the site today was I set it to archive stuff older than six months (instead of older than a year). At 1 am, it gamely got started on that idea. When I got home at noon today, it was still working on it. Clearly, this was going to be a problem. I tried running the archive with the site down, but it was still going to take, by my calculations, at least 15 hours. So instead I did an optimize on the archive DB, and dropped/reloaded the main database to clean it up, and just started the site up again. The new plan is that every day I'll reduce the archive limit by another ten days until we're at six months, so it won't have so much to do every night. Here's hoping. Well, as it turned out I don't have much else to say. I'm still pretty beat. It's so Friday. [Update] I almost forgot! Some asswipe is sending out huge huge quanitities of spam with [random_string]@kuro5hin.org "From:" headers. So I'm getting thousands and thousands of bounces. This should be grounds for the death penalty. Ok, maybe not that, but long jail terms. How can this not be illegal? At the very least, isn't it theft of computer resources? Aren't these spammers terrorists somehow? Microbrew stuff We met at a microbrew in Cambridge, so everyone pretty much drank the native suds. I had a pint of something johnny ordered that apparently had 146% alcohol content, as I was buzzed walking in and practically staggering walking out. I could feel my inebriation increasing by the sip. But, like I said, I was in bad shape already, so maybe I was imagining it. ____Not the real rusty I'll get right on that [nt] ____Not the real rusty Yeah So who should be the options? ____Not the real rusty But The options can't all be theantix! ____Not the real rusty Well A little bit of research shows that the bastards are actually in New Hampshire. I could literally drive over there in a couple hours. This is gonna be fun. I'm filing away the bounces. Over two thousand so far today, and still going. I'm thinking at $500 per message, this is making my fortune right here. ____Not the real rusty Too bad That bill didn't pass. Report by committee (February 20, 1998): "Inexpedient to legislate" Failed to pass House March 5, 1998 ____Not the real rusty You've gotta be kidding I'm not Dubya here. No one's going to Camp X-Ray. ____Not the real rusty I suppose it's pointless but... Nevertheless I feel compelled to state yet again that Bruce Perens had nothing to do with anything. Why should I care what some random HP employee thinks? I personally have no opinion about Bruce, and have never spoken to the guy, but I could also care less about open source advocacy. I think RMS is a harmless kook, and ESR is an evil little stinky freak, and none of them speaks for me. Say it with me: Bruce Perens had nothing to do with anything. That said, go on and believe whatever you want. ____Not the real rusty Sort of Perl could easily know that those things are whitespace, but Scoop doesn't really care, and in fact, when fluffy posts one of her clever little exposes like this one, it internally rolls its eyes and mutters "Well hellooooooo Mr. Fancypants!" ____Not the real rusty I know I understand, but Scoop has, like, no sense of humor. It's just a bunch of code, so I guess what can you expect? ____Not the real rusty Bye Don't forget to get a refund for your subscription! ____Not the real rusty Yeah I know I couldn't help it. It was meant cheerfully. ____Not the real rusty Minority/majority If you look more carefully, I think you'll see that for ratings in particular, a minority of high ratings has a lot more sway than a majority of low ratings. I think this was perhaps too far in the direction of favoring this particular minority, so I pushed back. Anyway, I don't delude myself into thinking that we're any more high-minded than anyone else. The ideals are the ideals, and I do my best at them. Sometimes my best ain't very good. I'd be happier if people didn't build K5 up in their minds or in their words as some kind of beacon of hope and light. At it's best, it's an idea about self-moderation which works pretty well. At its worst, it's just like every other dictatorial web message board, and I get the joy of being the dictator. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I see what you're saying. What I personally think is that the balance between 5 and zero is off. It seems to me like twenty zero ratings should carry more weight than five five ratings. But, being that the threshold for visibility is a binary state, they really don't. You and four other poeple with senses of humor that annoy everyone else can easily keep stuff visible that a large number of others would prefer to remove. Yes, that is how it was designed, and I do believe that that is how it should work. What I'm second-guessing here is the tuning of the knobs basically. Maybe it should take a larger minority to countervail the majority opinion. Do you see what I mean? I don't think we disagree at all on how it does work, or how it should work, but we might disagree on how much power one opinion should have over another. Right now the opinion of the five rater has five times as much power as that of the zero rater. And no, disabling ratings does not follow what I'd like to accomplish. That's why I don't do it much, and hate doing it at all. It represents a failure on my part. It's basically destroying the village to save it. However, the problems don't come up that often either, so I have to decide whether my time is best spent tweaking the comment rating system (which is, objectively, not that important) or doing other stuff. I'm also not all that smart, and haven't come up with much in the way of ideas for what to do to it if I were going to try to fix it. ____Not the real rusty Really important comment ratings controversy! Yesterday I wiped comment ratings from four users: veldmon, Tex Bigballs, The Turd Report, and roam. Below is why, reposted from a comment in an article about it in the queue. Plus, a poll about ratings policing! First of all, this had nothing whatsoever to do with Bruce Perens or his article. What happened is that there were four or five users who have made it their mission to rate up bad comments, no matter what. The rating system is heavily slanted in favor of not hiding comments, such that one rating of five can countervail four ratings of zero, and keep a comment visible. On the whole, I think this is a good thing -- I did design it that way after all. But when you have this clique of four or five people who make it their holy mission to make sure that all crap always stays visible, no matter how bad the comments are (and it seems the worse the better) they are able to overrule as many as twenty other users who all believe something should be zeroed. Several people were doing this consistently, without regard to the content of a comment in any way. Just like rating one persons comments down without regard to their content is abuse, this up-rating also is. Just like I wipe out the ratings of "modbombers," I wiped out these ratings. Either way it's gaming the system, and they knew perfectly well what they were doing. I wish none of this was necessary. It's a silly waste of everyone's time and energy. But as long as we don't have the mythical "perfect" rating system (and I don't beleive there ever will be such a thing) it's my job to keep an eye on things and try to prevent the obvious gaming. They've been at this particular game for a really long time, so it's not like it was some kind of sudden impetuous decision. Yes, it is un-Kuro5hin-like, and I hate it every time I have to do this. On balance, though, I think that it is the simplest solution. Rating is not an absolute right, it is a privilege which all users are initially assumed to be capable of treating responsibly. One of the conditions is that gaming the system, while it is pretty easy to do, is not appropriate, and people caught gaming it will lose their privilege of rating. That's what happened here. If you think it's more important to allow everyone to game the rating system as much as they like than it is to help the ratings do what they're supposed to do through light policing, say so. I would be surprised if that's the overall opinion, but if everyone thinks that's what they want, I will gladly stop policing them at all. I think that would be the wrong decision, myself. I know you've got the best interests of the site at heart, pb [to whom this was originally a reply], but consider carefully whether you think Tex, veldmon, etc are the people you think should be making the final call on whether a comment should be hidden or not. A worthwhile point K5 in general is perfectly happy to have people say offensive things, provided there's a point. The kind of comments I'm talking about here were the ones that were just spews of bile, solely consting of personal insults, etc. I think trhurler could probably say anything he wanted to and get rated above 4 for it, because he says it with style. ____Not the real rusty The TU thing I don't know if any of the four I wiped yesterday are trusted or not, but that isn't an assumption that should automatically be made. They could just as easily catch a comment that will obviously be zeroed before enough other people see it, and keep it floating just about the "1" threshold. ____Not the real rusty No Most 0's on this site are given out to controversial political statements. That is not true. ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok, this has been the way things have been done. I guess what I meant was that I would like K5 to be a system that didn't need this kind of manual tweaking. That is the sword in the stone shining ideal here. But, like I also said, it isn't like that now, and sometimes that ideal conflicts with the goal of keeping the quality up. I do know that I hate manually adjusting things like this. ____Not the real rusty Yes This is a good point. What I tend to do is sort of nudge against whichever way things seem out of balance. That has typically consisted of removing ratings from people who rate stuff down. This case is kind of an aberration in the overall scheme of things. I have removed ratings for excesive 5s before, but it isn't very common. Basically, the whole system is stacked against abusive down-raters, though. If there came a day when things seem to be getting hidden and staying hidden in a way that looks consistently unfair, I'd certainly nudge it the other way. ____Not the real rusty Total user flexibility At the end there you get at the exact reason I don't think killfiles/thresholds/blacklists etc are viable answers here. You know this already, I know, but to reiterate... Those are all fine solutions to the general problem of how do you make a discussion site work for you personally. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. But that's not a problem I'm interested in solving. I want to know how you can make a discussion site work for everyone, or at least for the greatest number of people the largest amount of the time. That's the whole point of the circuitious rating thing here. I'm not ready to abandon that goal yet, and I think that when I am ready to, then I'll basically be ready to give up on the site. I don't care about total user flexibility. That isn't what K5 is about. It's supposed to be about collaboration, and maijng everyone's small input add up to something that's greater than a collection of individuals looking at their own personal views. So most of the "just let me do whatever I want" solutions don't work, because they don't fit the major constraint of the problem. I'm totally aware that this is an imposed constraint, and not a necessary one, but it is a constraint as far as I'm concerned. ____Not the real rusty Me? What? I don't think that K5 has anything to do with being a news site. When people claim it is, I usually say it has been occasionally, but rarely and only by accident. I don't think it's what we're here for, or do best. When I have to sum it up in a few words, I usually describe it as "a democratic news and discussion site," but that's mostly so people will get the gist quickly, without me having to go into all kinds of deep explanations about the nature of most articles. If they care to learn more, I will invariably get around to the point that covering news isn't what we do. ____Not the real rusty The RDF ...is up to date and validates correctly. Looks like it's knewsticker. ____Not the real rusty Spin them Hard boiled eggs spin fast. Raw eggs spin slow. Think you're the only smart person in the world, eh Mr. Blockhead? ____Not the real rusty Kitchenophobic? This to the person who wrote over 1600 words on stuffing, and who grows his own sourdough starter? :-) ____Not the real rusty Bawl-mer The vast majority of people who have left Baltimore will say it was the worst place they've ever lived. But there's a tiny minority that will claim to their last breath that they love "Bawl-mer" and would go back anytime only they're just too busy elsewhere right at this instant. Don't believe their lies. Baltimore is a shithole, and they only say those things because they are embarrassed at how much time they wasted living there. ____Not the real rusty Richmond is a shithole too The people who claim otherwise are, like Baltimoreans, either lying or fools. ____Not the real rusty Oh, you... No, I missed it in your maze of twisty footnotes, all alike. My crank is merely one of the exceedingly great number of things that the New York Times can bite. :-) ____Not the real rusty rusty + 1 I think I will be bringing my friend Rob, who so rarely uses his two-digit UID, but knows all sort of embarrassing things about me from high school. ____Not the real rusty Lock Unlock. ____Not the real rusty Matt's MoPhos It's the page where Matt "Metafilter" Haughey keeps (some of) the pictures he takes with his mobile phone while out and about. He catches some funny stuff. I think Non-Ultra might be my favorite so far. ____Not the real rusty Mostly I'm sort of centrist on average. Sometimes I sound like a libertarian, sometimes like a socialist, and occasionally like a Republican, but I chalk that up to most of the established political ideologies having very little internal consistency. What my political opinions usually have in common is trying to make the best compromise between conflicting goods. If I had to pick a label, it would be "centrist." ____Not the real rusty This diary will be the #1 link on Daypop You wait and see. ____Not the real rusty Missing poll option "Yes, even though my pay was cut." ____Not the real rusty Black "Kuro" sort of means "black" in Japanese. "Shin" sort of means "soul" or "heart." Of course, none of this is meaningful in any way since all I speak is English, and a little bit of really bad French. I'm just glad it doesn't mean "Ass Weasel" in any known language. ____Not the real rusty True But also that no one else has reported yet that it means "ass weasel" in any language they speak either. That's just fun to say, huh? Ass weasel! ____Not the real rusty Yay The Science of Love I assume? I myself always intended to get a doctorate in the Politics of Dancing, but I was waylaid along my life path. ____Not the real rusty EVIL! EVIL! I'm remotely killing children and puppies on that laptop, no doubt. Evil. Long ago I haven't been blond since winter 2000. There just aren't very many pictures of me, so the word gets out slowly. ____Not the real rusty Speaking of which... EVIL! ____Not the real rusty Shhh! You're ruining my image man. I can't have been doing you a favor. Not looking that evil. That must have been while I was strangling kittens after I uploaded your books. ____Not the real rusty It's sony blue The lighting is wierd, but it's that blue-purple color that Sony Vaio stuff usually is. It's a Picturebook. ____Not the real rusty Meh It's taken a beating and worked fine for two years now. The only complaint I have... ok, the only two complaints I have are that: APM is horribly broken, and linux ACPI still doesn't work, so I can't really make it sleep or suspend, and Over time, the battery clips have loosened, so now the big battery wiggles itself out of contact with its plug sometimes. The first is more of a linux problem, and the second, well, not good fastener design. It's not a big deal though. Otherwise, the machine does just what I got it for, and I'm happy. ____Not the real rusty Not really The RIAA can kiss my ass. I will continue stealing music until they and their families are all starving in the streets. But no, other than that, it doesn't really bother me. Sony's a big company, and I doubt the music industry whores have much to do with the consumer electronics people. Their previously stellar reputation seems to have gone in the toilet though, as I now rarely hear anything good about Sony stuff. I think the Picturebook was the beginning of the end, and mine seems to have been one of the few good ones produced. ____Not the real rusty Ha! J00r company is teh sukc. I don't know. Everybody's got a problem. I've never had any trouble with Sonys personally. Although my (Trinitron) monitor did burn out a few weeks ago. I chalked that up to it having been on more or less continuously for the last four years, and off only when it was being moved cross country by uncaring manual laborers while packed in a big box with only a few blankets for protection. ____Not the real rusty Old Vaios I had three other Vaio laptops before this one, and loved them all to death. Under linux, they all ran like champs. I was bummed to find that this one had a craptastic broken APM compatibility layer. The case feels sort of flimsy, but it hasn't really turned out to be. If you know anyone who works on these things, ask them if anyone's figured out a way to get suspend/resume to work under linux yet. ____Not the real rusty Kernel stuff I got a 2.4 kernel and updated to the latest ACPI stuff. It's very informative about the state of the battery and whatnot, but doesn't even pretend to do anything like suspend or resume. I'm really surprised it's taken so long. Are other laptops just implementing better APM support, or what? ____Not the real rusty Yeah Looks the same. Mine's just a much lighter shade of blue. More a bluish-silver really. ____Not the real rusty No, definitely Evil Actually, you have no idea how true it is that my entire life is in shades of blue. At least 80% of my clothing is solid blue. I'm hopelessly blue-clad. ____Not the real rusty Ha I was kind of wondering that too. For the record, I never saw Quinn actually breastfeeding in public. I suspect that picture's just an odd combination of loose collar and baby sling. ____Not the real rusty Just for that... ...I'm gonna put a big fucking Hello Kitty sticker on it. If I can get my hands on one. ____Not the real rusty Hell yeah If you send me a Hello Kitty sticker, I will totally put it on there. In other news, I just jammed a shard of glass way into the side of my hand. It's really hard to bandage your own right hand when you're right handed and bleeding profusely. What fun! Email me for an address. ____Not the real rusty No metaphor Though probably bad phrasing. I was washing a glass and it broke while my hand was in it, putting a pretty impressive slice into the side of my pinky. There weren't actually shards in my flesh though. It was a very clean cut, and is doing much better now. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's a daisy-chain. mod_perl2 couldn't really get going till apache 2 was stable, and we can't get porting till mod_perl 2 is stable. So basically you just have to wait. If it makes you feel any better, I don't expect there to be any great advantages to running on *.2. I expect it'll just be a pain in the ass for us to upgrade, and eventually Scoop will work the same as it does now. Yay. ____Not the real rusty Thursday I'm there. Provided I know where "there" is. And I'll try to be punctual this time.1 :-) 1Punctuality not guaranteed or even, to be perfectly honest, expected. Void where prohibited. ____Not the real rusty The hammies The nightly archive process had drifted all the way to 7AM, hence the slowitude. I set it back to 1AM. I wish Scoop had a way to fix a cron operation to a particular time of day, rather than just an interval. The intervals tend to drift over time, which is ok for some things, but not so good for others. ____Not the real rusty The off position "All electronic devices must be in the off position." That one always cracks me up. ____Not the real rusty Which one? Which one? I can make it to one or the other get together, but not both. Which one is recommended? ____Not the real rusty Thursday... ...is somewhat easier for me, so I guess that'll be the one then. ____Not the real rusty Cock bite. ____Not the real rusty Super Troopers No one believes me when I say that was really funny. It has to have been the worst marketed movie in recent history. All I can do is keep telling people to rent it. Eeeeevil Shenanigans! ____Not the real rusty Meow yeah Meow I thought it was going to suck, but then I watched the first ten moewnutes and I was like "Meow what do we have here?" Meow it's one of my favorite meowvies. Crap, that's only six. Meow, motherfucker! ____Not the real rusty Phone number Set up a phone number that is answered by a computer. Have the message say something like "Please say whatever you want to say. You have thirty seconds. Go." Then dump the sound into a file on the machine. ____Not the real rusty Probably not that much You might also see if your phone company offers a "virtual" extra line -- like a different number on the same physical line that rings differently. You'd also have to see if you could set up whatever software you use to answer only that line and not the regular one. I think last time I knew what a discrete extra line cost, it was something like $30 a month. ____Not the real rusty Er I'm sorry, but you should review your figures. I make $30,475.20 a year. I take home $2000 a month. I amuse myself by playing with dirt because it's all I can afford. $80K. What a fucking joke. Not a single number in your post is accurate, except what my pay costs K5 every month. If you don't like how K5 is run, or what I do, then don't send any money. You know, like you already haven't. Continue doing that. You may notice that everything is still free. ____Not the real rusty Aside: Dude, did you say "fuckstart your head?" ____Not the real rusty Hey duxup What the huh? ____Not the real rusty Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man or woman miss out on the nightlife. Morphine was glorious. My starter went apeshit yesterday. I made a loaf of bread, gave a cup of the leftover starter a feed, and put it back in the jar. It filled about 1/3 of the jar. Three hours later, it was pushing at the lid and threatening to overflow, which it really never does. I gave it a stir to knock it back down. Three hours later, it was again pushing at the lid. Re-stir. Three hours later, I had just finished dinner, and happened to glance up at the shelf to see that it had actually pushed the lid off the jar and was oozing down the sides. For those of you keeping track, it has now expanded to three times its original volume three times in a row. Without any more feeding. The bread came out pretty good, though not very sour at all. This leads me to believe that the starter was high in yeast and low in lactobacilli (which is what gives it the sour taste). I think what was going on was that without the acidic environment to act as a check on growth, the yeast were just having themselves a par-tay in there. I'm going to give it a day without feeding to encourage more bacteria growth. This morning it's back down to normal and getting the whitish foam that means bacteria. I also started digging my veggie beds yesterday. I was worried that digging out all that grass by hand would take impossibly long, but it should be ok. I got about 2/3 of one (20 x 4 foot) bed dug yesterday, in about 80 minutes of elapsed time. So it should take about two hours for each bed, of which there are four altogether. If the weather holds up, I should get it done by Saturday. Then I have to go back and double-dig them, but compared to pulling up grass, I look forward to that. Grass is a huge pain. So that's the latest on the frontier lifestyle here. I still have the story of johnny and the locksmith to write. Maybe I'll do that this afternoon. If you're lucky. Punk. Am not! Come on, when's the last time you met a hippy who could do anything for themself? When's the last time you met a hippy who could actually make a loaf of bread, or knew how to grow plants? Uh, except for that one special kind of plant. Hippies have a leftover aura of self-sufficiency, but it hasn't been true since the last of the communes died out. And even then, they never really managed to accomplish anything. It is high time that people who like to make stuff stop being tainted with the evil aura of hippyness. So, a quick review: Me: Likes making bread and growing vegetables. Hippies: Like lying around under blacklights and smoking pot while reeking of patchouli and B.O. Might bestir themselves to form a drum circle at the local antiglobalization protest, if they can remember what day it is. ____Not the real rusty Nope I am young, but not urban and not a professional. I'm just about as unprofessional as it gets. Like Dr. Thompson said, I'd never recommend it to anyone else, but it's always worked for me. And I can't even decide whether New Agers are worse than hippies or not. How 'bout we kill them all and let the Crystal Spirit of the Forest decide? ____Not the real rusty Rototastic Basically it would be expensive and take just as long. Not only would I have to rent the tiller, I'd also have to pay for a car ticket to get it over here. Considering the time spent going to get it, time using it, and time bringing it back, and the overall difficulty and expense of the whole operation, I decided it would take just as long, only I'd have to do it all at once and it would cost a lot of money. Seemed like a shovel and some grease of the elbow was my best bet. ____Not the real rusty A wise man once said You will never go broke if your income depends on the stupidity of new-agers. ____Not the real rusty Life ain't fair In order to have a yard and a garden, I gave up the ability to buy anything. Ever. So I guess we all choose our tradeoffs. PS: Is that you laying the smack down on that printer? ____Not the real rusty Purchasing power! What you fail to realize is that everything I've reported buying in the past year is pretty much everything I've bought in the past year. There isn't a whole lot of consumerism going on out here that you don't know about. For example, I need to get hoses to get water out to the garden and distribute it to plants once it's there. Altogether it's going to run me about $50. I'm saving up for it. You make the girl next door look like a veritable whore of Babylon. Too cute. :-) That lawn though, it's freaking me out. It's not astroturf is it? I have never seen grass that green. ____Not the real rusty Clothes? Funny you should mention that. Just last week I was saying that if they don't start giving out pants at conferences soon, instead of just t-shirts, I'm going to be walking around bare ass to the wind. No, a few of my clothes were purchased at some point, but I don't have very many and it's getting fewer all the time. Gonna have to do something about that one of these days. ____Not the real rusty Shorts would be good I've got another pair of jeans waiting for when these wear out, but shorts I am in dire need of. Um ...but of shorts I am in dire need? Shorts are a thing of which in dire need am I? I need shorts. ____Not the real rusty No No, I don't think they carried on. They released one album after Sandman died, but it was stuff that he'd recorded while alive. I don't think the band really exists anymore. I just happened to be listening to some Morphine. ____Not the real rusty Two pintsish It's an old canning jar with a wire bail and a glass lid. MY guess is it's about two pints. ____Not the real rusty 10 days? That's nothing. Mine didn't rise at all for a month. It would kind of bubble and smell bad, but nothing you'd call actual rising. Just give it time. You may also not need to feed it every single day. Basically, every time you feed it, you dilute the beasties that are in there, and you change the Ph of the whole thing. If it's not rising yet, you probably don't have enough beasties to really consume all the food you're giving them in such a short time. See what happens if you let it skip a day between feedings. Also note that I'm learning this as I go along, here, so don't look at me as an expert. :-) ____Not the real rusty I think you'd be disappointed I'm not really doing anything special. Basically, I have about 900 square feet of area to work with, all covered with grass. I laid out four beds of twenty by four feet each, with three foot wide paths between them. I'm pulling the grass off the beds, and most of it is being piled in some sinkholes in the access paths, to level them off. When the grass is all up, I'll go back and double dig the beds, which just means I dig up about a foot of soil from half the bed all the way down the length, turn over and loosen down to another foot below that, replace the soil I dug up originally, then repeat for the other side of the bed. I'm not building up any raised beds or terraces or anything. I will probably have to edge once or twice during the summer to keep the grass out, and I'll probably have to weed constantly, but to keep cost and complication down, I decided not to build any kind of structure around the beds. I have a lot of space, so I can make that tradeoff I think. I do know there are landscaping bricks that might be what you need. If I'm remembering correctly, they're like very thin cinderblocks -- formed concrete bricks with holes through them. You lay them down next to each other, then push retaining stakes into the holes and down into the dirt below, then fill in the holes with dirt. Then you do the next row on top, offset from the first row, and do the same thing. The stakes in each row go into the row below it, and it makes a pretty sturdy wall out of components that aren't all that heavy on their own. Check out the local farm and garden stores or hardware stores, they should have something like that, or be able to give you better advice on what you should do. ____Not the real rusty Pulling grass up, or leaving it in Yeah, it's a pain. But I do need the fill for those sinkholes, so I guess it's worth it. I think your seive idea has some potential, although try to make sure the holes are big enough for worms to get through. I'm getting at least half a dozen big earthworms in every square foot of grass I pull up and shake. Don't want to lose those! The Better Homes and Gardens New Complete Guide to Gardening also suggests that if you have enough time, you can get rid of grass by just covering the area you want to plant with about eight inches of organic matter (leaves, compost, grass clippings, etc), or a layer of black plastic, and waiting a few months. The compost smothers the grass, and worms should mix it all up into the soil and digest most of it. Also, if you're going to build raised beds anyway, you could try laying down a few layers of newspaper over all the grass, building up your raised bed walls, and filling in over the newspaper with new soil. If you need to plant deeper than the new soil, just cut holes in the newspaper. This will also smother the grass, and it will become a good source of slow-decaying organic matter. ____Not the real rusty You're funny I think you've hit on the perfect thing to repeat over and over. Please keep doing it. It is very amusing for everyone. ____Not the real rusty Slow like... slow slow, or just not much going on slow? ____Not the real rusty Seems to come and go In fact, I think just when you were posting that we had a traffic pile-up. There has been intermittent traffic lately, which seems to apear in a clump and last about five minutes or so, and then clear up. Like right now, the DB is only 1% busy. Ten minutes ago it was 99%. I don't know what's causing it -- it doesn't seem to be anything obvious. Does this sound like what you're seeing, or has it been like consistently slow all the time? ____Not the real rusty Phoon This is what a phoon is. Is Mr. Ntix keeping an archive of links to the various writeups of his whirlwind visits? ____Not the real rusty Argh I keep trying to write a diary and it all implodes in the middle of the second paragraph. So I'm just going to post this notice of the fact that I am alive, very grateful to Matt and Kay for putting up with me for the last week, and completely incapable of writing a diary. Please talk to me. I seem to be in a deep writing rut. I think ETech drained my ability to think, if I ever had it. I think You need a new hobby. More away-from-the-computer time. You know? ____Not the real rusty Don't take it wrong I just think you're headed for burnout. You spend a lot of time here lately. You'll find it more fun, I think, if it's leavened with a few other things. I'm sure it sounds like I'm saying you should go away, but I'm really not. I've just seen it happen too many times. ____Not the real rusty No I mean my writing implodes. My text editor continues to accept input, but it all reads like the scribblings of a retarded spider monkey. I don't think it is the fault of the software, as it does seem to be accurately reflecting what I type. ____Not the real rusty Heh It'll get written eventually. That story has been renting headspace for almost two years now, so I guess it isn't going anywhere on its own. In its previous form, though, it just wasn't working. I think one thing that needs to happen is it needs to get out of the first person. The other thing that needs to happen is I need to become a better writer. But I guess there's no use waiting around for that to magically happen on its own, is it? :-) At a party on Friday, someone summed it up perfectly when she asked me "Why is writing so hard?" I had no good answer. ____Not the real rusty Another one? Got a link? I didn't see it. ____Not the real rusty The^H^H^HIf^H^HI^H^H What have they done to us!!!! ____Not the real rusty Funny thing The less I write, the more comments there are. My next diary is going to be just half a word. Like "Hel." It'll have the most comments evar. ____Not the real rusty Hey you! You seem to keep going away and coming back again. That's ok, I guess. I kind of want to write what I thought of etech, but then I keep getting hung up shortly after the phrase "festering pile of wank." I think I need more time to digest it. ____Not the real rusty Ummm Yeah. My wife, Etech Foster. That's it. Nods and smiles, and backs away slowly. ____Not the real rusty I am The files be up. The links be on wetmachine. I think you already are live. :-) I don't think I can deploy site news for this, though, which is just as well since no one reads those anyway. ____Not the real rusty I look forward to it Good luck! ____Not the real rusty Not really I was just having trouble writing this diary. Actually, I started a new story yesterday and it's going well. You know, it's crap, but the story is good enough that it should be readable after a few tries. :-) ____Not the real rusty Traveling Was at last day of conference and traveling back home. Not sure if alive or not. Will advise tomorrow. ____Not the real rusty Na-neener neener neener neener... Just the guitar hook from that song used to make my coworkers and I laugh uncontrollably. One of those in-jokes which is so obscured and packed into such a small reference that I don't even remember what was originally funny about it. But it still makes me laugh. ____Not the real rusty Where's the Fishie? ____Not the real rusty Thanks! The blue button is much better. Someone reminded me that I still hadn't put an easily findable link to the RSS anywhere, so the orange one was just a fast fix while I was thinking of it. ____Not the real rusty Oooh Do you think he'd call me an asshole? All week I've been feeling left out, because Dave Winer's never insulted me. ____Not the real rusty Scoble is an outlier While I don't disagree about your general conclusions, Scoble is practically a parody of a blogwhore at this point. His name-dropping orgasm was pointed out to me by a few other people at the conference, who were all as amused/creeped-out by it as you were. I shook hands with Cory Doctorow. Should I wash it? If he were kidding, it would be the funniest thing ever. ____Not the real rusty Jordan? I think Michael Jackson played for an entirely different team. ____Not the real rusty A fine wit? Well, he's half right. If I didn't say it, someone else would have. :-) ____Not the real rusty Awkwardness I have some trouble with that, actually. I tend to capitalize it when I'm referring to my name, and not capitalize when I'm referring to my online self. Which weirdly implies that they're not the same. I guess that's true, but it's always odd to have it pointed out like that. ____Not the real rusty Nope Andrew is as British as they come. Bad teeth and posture and everything. ____Not the real rusty Really? All the news people seem to do it as, roughly, "Oh-BA-sn-joe." I was surprised the first time I heard it pronounced, since I expected "SAN" to be the emphasized syllable. It would be funny if they were all doing it wrong. ____Not the real rusty Yes scoop.k5 is not actually my responsibility, but I'm trying to find out why it's still dead. It just changed IPs, but it should be up on the new IP, so I have no idea. I am sending nagging emails to hurstdog and cory, who should be responsible for it. ____Not the real rusty K5ers at Etech? I'm here. Well, technically I will be tomorrow. Are you? Leave a message and we shall rendezvous. Aye I agree with your wankfest assessment. If I'd had to pay for it, I wouldn't be here either. I'm mainly here for the hanging out with people, which is probably going to be a lot more interesting than the actual conference. ____Not the real rusty Mwahahaha Now Danny and I are the Axis of Sellout. That article's a riot. It's classic Orlowski, but I agree with more of it than I disagree with. It may just have been enough to push me into an article of my own when this thing is all over. So far, my mind is definitely unblown by this thing. If I hear any more Amazon marketing, I think I'm gonna pass out. ____Not the real rusty We refresh RDFs hourly So I don't know what they're talking about. As for your original thing, there are were three Slashdot RDF feeds here. Regular, YRO, and Science. They are not distinguished by title, which I think is our fault. Scoop seems to cut off everything including and after the ":" in the title. I wonder if by loading three RDFs hourly, that counts as refreshing too often? Heh. If so, screw 'em. That's a retarded policy. If serving an RDF is causing them bandwidth problems, they're being stupid somehow. My guess is that the policy is actually to prevent first-post-bots. Well, since their feeds were broken, I removed them. ____Not the real rusty Weak I didn't see Jack in the queue, but I just went and read it from your link above. I really like the idea, and the execution is pretty good, but the story could be so much better that I don't know if I'd have voted for it. For example, there's nothing in there about the real Jack London, who was a total fraud, an alcoholic philanderer who spent a total of one year in Alaska and died a fat drunken hypocrite in San Francisco (I think). As a central (if imaginary) character in the story, all of those things should certainly have been factors. I mean, was his presence just "the anxiety of influence," or was he meant to symbolize all the things he was in life, and suggest that the main character is a fraud as well? I don't know. If it was merely the anxiety of influence, then I think the story is kind of empty. Yeah, it sucks to be a writer who is constantly compared to someone more famous than you. But honestly, so what? Most of us aren't writers. If it was intended to be more complex than that, then it would be a much better story. Who among us hasn't ever put someone on a pedestal, someone who they see as a hero, an example to live up to, only to find out that person was a total fraud. Many people see their parents that way, and find it impossible to forgive them when they discover that their parents are, after all, only human. Maybe knowing the hypocrisy of Jack London, the main character is tormented by the comparisons, fearing himself to be similarly hypocritical. However, the story gives me nothing to indicate that that's what it's really about, so I kind of have to lean toward the former interpretation, which is mostly just another "writing about writing" tale. So my point is that I think a lot of us have high standards. I don't think that's a bad thing. We're not here primarily for fiction, so maybe we demand that the fiction we post be better than you would want it to be. Far from being the overly-critical fiction-haters you think, maybe the majority of us are actually quite a lot more discerning readers than you expect. There is a small contingent of fiction haters. They have not stopped several excellent stories from being posted, though, which makes me think that for all their noisy whining, they are an insignificant voting bloc. I don't think they alone can eiother get a story posted or doom it to failure. But to get posted, you've got to win over a lot of people like me, who read incessantly, demand quality, and can often see when your story has failed in a way that would probably be forgiven by a lot of fiction-only sites. ____Not the real rusty Sorry We've just been informed that due to unforseen circumstances, the revolutioon will, in fact, be televised. ____Not the real rusty We call them "embedded cameras" [nt] ____Not the real rusty Mrrrgh Sorry about the speed thing going on right now. I just updated Scoop a couple times to add stuff, and it's re-caching. I always hate doing this in the daytime, but I've been on a diurnal sleep schedule lately, and I gotta do it sometime. Neat stuff coming later today, when things speed up so I can finish working on it. Stay tuned. :-) Oy The easy solution would be to simply add a pref for "don't show images ever." Have 'em if you want, don't if you don't. This doesn't mean it's going to happen. I haven't decided yet. ____Not the real rusty Fear not I think these are all things you will be glad to see. ____Not the real rusty Truly an American Icon Incidentally, I saw that phrase used seriously in a newspaper article recently, and I couldn't help giggling. It has been ruined for me. I will never be able to see "truly an American icon" in a non-ironic way again. ____Not the real rusty Chamomile tastes like weeds to me. Which, to be fair, it is. I like a blend of chamomile and hibiscus. Neither alone is any good, but together, they mitigate each other's worst elements and work. ____Not the real rusty Mixture They probably blend it wiht other stuff and just don't mention that in the name. Such as hibiscus, for example. :-) ____Not the real rusty You aim too, please! ____Not the real rusty Moons Over My Hammy ...is the best name for a meal ever. In all of history. It is unmatched. I always order it, even though I don't particularly like it, just for the absolute joy of saying it. ____Not the real rusty Suggestion Pick one event that happened to you today and describe it in as much detail as you can. You might find that the exercise leads you to think about things you might not otherwise have. In any case, at least it will save you from posting an "I have nothing to say" entry. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry You erroneously forgot to include the phrase "This is a test" in your initial diary. ____Not the real rusty Another point I would be surprised if they didn't go in expecting to have to build bridges. I remember reports that the US commanders were surprised the Iraqis hadn't blown many bridges. That leads me to believe they were planning on it, and likely had equipment near the front to remedy the situation. ____Not the real rusty Why not inflatable? That stuff they make the serious heavy-duty Coastie Zodiacs out of is pretty damn tough, and deflated it ought to pack down to a size reasonable for transport. You wouldn't use it for a permanent pontoon bridge, but for a "good enough" temp job? I'd think it would work. Especially on a river where weather, tides, etc aren't likely to be a problem. On the whole secret Ba'athist smuggling thing, I have no idea. I would have to know a whole lot more than anyone in the general public knows to even hazard a guess. I don't think it's impossible that a deal was made, nor do I even necessarily think that would be a bad thing, if it meant less fighting and less death. But I also don't think possible, or even plausible, means true. ____Not the real rusty Oh, sure You laugh now, but you've made $0.63 so far, boy-o. A couple of the recent FP article authors are running upwards of three bucks. The total amount I would owe in the prospective income-sharing plan so far is $44.46. I think it's doable. ____Not the real rusty An oldie, but still a classic! No text. Oops, forgot to say it above. ____Not the real rusty Jammed to the Wilson When I was in DC last week I noted down the title phrase from a radio report. Locals will probably understand it, but for the rest of us, it is merely abstract poetry, possibly slightly impolite. My hands reek of gasoline from fixing the goddamn lawn mower again. I think I got it this time though. There's a bolt that holds the carb on, and this bolt has a hollow shank, with the threads on the outside. There's a tiny hole through this shank, on one side, and there's also a tiny hole that goes all the way through the socket it screws into. It finally occurred to me that this might not be mere coincidence, and that perhaps these holes are supposed to line up in some way. Trial and error finally led me to discover that when the hole in the bolt is lined up with the hole in the socket closest to the engine, the bolt is about as tight as it needs to be. A little marking the bolt head (so I could line it up without being able to see inside the carb) and the bastard seems to work properly again. No idea what this arrangement of tiny fussy holes actually does, but it seems to be important. So my hands stank of gasoline from all this fooling around with lawn mowers. I washed them (with the liquid hand soap) and now they smell like floral gasoline. Like a field of wildflowers in Valdez, AK. The point of all this is my ongoing attempt to plant a garden. Today I cleared a rough path to the actual plot. It was totally overgrown with these evil vines that we've got here. Bittersweet, I think they are. The military brought them in to cover up the artillery emplacements during WWII because they grow fast and are think ground cover. Unfortunately, there's also nothing to stop them spreading, and they have basically taken over the island by now, because they grow fast and are thick ground cover. So I've got them basically torn away from the spot I chose to be the entrance. I also pulled up some loose stakes with dead sticks tied to them which may have once been part of a different garden layout. Now I need some decent clippers to take down the taller and sturdier weeds that are infesting the area. Then I can get a mower in there and shorten the dead grass, in preparation for the first digging. And when I do, the mower will be ready. Oh yes. I also dug a test hole, and found that I have good rich dark soil down about a foot, and then slightly less rich, sandy soil below that. Kind of rocky, but it will definitely work. It's going to take some elbow grease to get all the grass out and level the beds though. There are some weird trench-like formations scattered around, which I think are just from water runoff. They worry me a little bit, but I guess I'll do what I can and we'll see what happens. In closing, I would like to say that taxes are a pain in the ass. Two things One of the servers filled up its disk (which produced the "page has no content" errors), and simultaneously Voxel had some kind of network problem. So it was one of those. Sorry about that. ____Not the real rusty mod_gzip mod_gzip uses temp files to do it's thing, so when the disk is full, it can't produce gzipped pages and the site starts to give "page has no content" errors. Lynx probably doesn't accept gzip encoding, and apparently mod_gzip doesn't do anything to https pages. I guess that makes sense, but I can't say I'd ever thought about it before. I mean, if the encryption is working, then compressing it wouldn't get you anything. ____Not the real rusty Nah I used to live in DC. Yes, it was a traffic report, and did refer to the bridge. I just thought the phrase had a particular off-color poetry to it. ____Not the real rusty Blah k5-3 was out of disk space, so mod_gzip couldn't do it's thing. That's probably why lynx worked and your regular browser didn't. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty Jesus, I don't know I don't like either option much. There's a really thick mat of long, dead grass over the whole area, which I kind of think I'd have to dig up first anyway. Plus there are some weird lumps and gullys that will need leveling out. But it's a pretty big area for someone as lazy and shiftless as me to dig by hand. But actually getting a rototiller over here would in itself be a bit of a project. I have a shovel on hand, so the most likely thing is I'll try to dig it by hand and see if it seems like it'll be possible. An hour or two a day, I think I could do it. It's mainly getting the grass up that'll be a pain. Under that, the dirt is pretty nice digging. ____Not the real rusty It's true But I try not to make a big deal of it. ____Not the real rusty UNH Upwards of Ninety Hauled in. ____Not the real rusty A regrettable error He thought "Nine Inch Nails" was a crucifixion reference. Tragic, but all too common. ____Not the real rusty Say it with me Give me an "L" L! Give me an "ovely" OVELY! Give me an "S" S! Give me an "unsets" UNSETS! What does it spell? LOVELY SUNSETS! What does it spell? LOVELY SUNSETS! Goooooooooo LOVELY SUNSETS! ____Not the real rusty Incidentally I think you're right about having a rolling "Special Coverage" section. It could change focus whenever there's a major ongoing event, like this war was, or 9/11 was, and so on. I'm still not sure how it should oughta work either, but I'm thinking about it. ____Not the real rusty For what? [nt] ____Not the real rusty Oh, the SARS thing? That is weird. We usually show up pretty high for stuff like that. [Course, you could say the same about the high school prom. Ba-dum-bum.] ____Not the real rusty Some good ideas The ST section, with situational subsections is a good idea. I don't think I like the voting/creation scheme though. It seems like a good idea, but in practice I think it would encourage people to try to create special sections when there wasn't anything going on that deserved one, just because the feature existed. It might work better for me to just create a new subsection when it becomes obvious that one is needed. So far it hasn't been difficult to tell that something major is going on, and it doesn't happen very often. When there's a active special section, there could be a "Featured News" box on the main page, which users could optionally turn off, that would highlight the active special subsection. I.e. basically imrdkl's original WarBox idea. ____Not the real rusty More factors The creating sections by voting thing would be a lot of new code. I'm not convinced it would be worth the effort for what the potential gain might be. ____Not the real rusty Pissing contests? Not at all. I was just goofing around with him. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dammit You've already won! ____Not the real rusty Huh. You said "abreast." ____Not the real rusty So, like Is it just me, or does trhurler seem much mellower lately? I'm just asking. You know. No particular reason. ____Not the real rusty It's not It's not straining anything anymore. It's still kind of slow, but it does work, and doesn't really interfere with anything else. ____Not the real rusty Ha Those emails were mystifying the hell out of me. People! Listen up! Don't be dumb! :-) ____Not the real rusty Amazon.com perfects time travel, speeds delivery I got an email today from Amazon. It was amazing. The email read, in part:Subject: Your Amazon.com order has shipped Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 15:08:34 +0000 (GMT) From: ship-confirm@amazon.com To: rusty@kuro5hin.org Greetings from Amazon.com. We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your items today, and that this completes your order. ... Why is this amazing? Because they shipped the order today, yet I received the order yesterday! I can only conclude that Amazon has fiunally perfected their system of delivery time travel, and will now go on to apply the same techniques to ordering. Soon Amazon packages will arrive not only before they're sent, but before you've even ordered them! You will come home from work, and there on your front step will be a nice Amazon package, containing the items you will order, and a friendly reminder to go and order them at your earliest convenience, so as not to threaten the principle of causality. In case you cared, the item they transported backward through time to me was a Nokia 8265. Yeah, I gave in and got a damn cell phone again. It gets great reception here, which is a relief, but I haven't had much time to play with the phone yet, so no report there other than that it comes with the lovely Nokia interface which IMO is the best of all mobile brands. No, you can't have the number. I'll tell you what, though, text messaging is free, so you can always email me at 'phone [at symbol] kuro5hin.org'. 160 characters or something like that. I probably won't reply, but will enjoy receiving your messages. I have to go make bread now. K5 code on the todo list for later today is to add a user pref for where the story ad should appear (top, bottom, left, right, maybe right boxes area) and a way for subscribers to have a regular-looking diary page featuring their diary watches only. If that works, I also want to look into the feasability of adding a recommendation system. Like, say you watch DesiredUsername, Mr. Q, duxup, and johnny and I watch DesiredUsername, johnny, rizzo, and fluffy grue. I want the system to mix in fluffy and rizzo for you and Mr. Q and duxup for me, with a little "You might like this" icon. It would be based on shared watches with others, in some way. That's not for today though. Hahaha You bastard. That's why I didn't put it in email format. :-) I don't really know. I suspect that it's sender address + subject + body = 160 characters. ____Not the real rusty My pennis Is quite bigg enuff already, thanx! :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey listen bitch I've had just about all I can take out of you. Why don't you go crawl back under the rock you came from? How was that? ____Not the real rusty Excellent I hope Terence is satisfied. ____Not the real rusty Heh It's an alias address, anyway. I can change it with a few clicks. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nah I didn't want any fancy stuff. Just a phone for talking. On the other hand, I just found out today that a friend of mine once had the model before the one I got, the 8260, and ended up getting so frustrated with it that he chopped it up with a hatchet. Ominous news. I hope this model doesn't suck too. ____Not the real rusty No! He's not dead. He's just working. AFAIK. ____Not the real rusty Provided by AT&T AT&T just gives you an email address, [your number]@mobile.att.com. No idea what gateway they use. ____Not the real rusty Gum Have you ever written a comment and then decided it was simply too harsh and tasteless to post? I just did that. So you get this instead. Sorry, but you cannot see what was originally going to be posted here, and hopefully not posting it has spared my immortal soul. ____Not the real rusty It was nothing to do with you, by the way Just in case you were wondering. ____Not the real rusty It was funny though In a viciously black humor kind of way. I wish I were a meaner person. ____Not the real rusty Yeah In a bar, with friends, it would have been funny. Here it was just mean. Humor is so situational. On the other hand, there's never a wrong time to comment on a coworker's colon. :-) ____Not the real rusty Do me a favor If it's still happening, or when you get such a page again, write down exactly what the page says (a screenshot of it would be better), and also tell me what you get when you go to http://www.kuro5hin.org/pages/who_am_i immediately thereafter. Both of these will help diagnose what's going on. I can assure you it's not an anti-mami conspiracy. Also, if you're getting a browser popup that the server is unreachable, or some such thing, chances are it's a network problem between you and us. ____Not the real rusty Network That page comes from Internet Explorer, not this (or any) site. What it looks like to me is that it's either timing out or it's a DNS glitch. In either case, it looks like it's the network between you and us, as no one else seems to be having this problem, and all the servers are operating nominally. ____Not the real rusty Question Are Red Lights acceptable for terrorists who wish to cut down on tar? ____Not the real rusty Lenin!? I heard that quoote too, and thought "Lenin? WTF?" Was it a misstatement, or does Don really think Lenin was a dictator of any kind? Putting him in company with Hitler, Stalin, and Ceausescu is just bizarre, especially when there are so many better choices. I mean, Pol Pot? Duvalier? Castro (oh, you said "failed")? ____Not the real rusty I didn't know that About the gulags and the purges. So maybe Rumsfeld is smarter than me after all. Still, seems like kind of an odd choice, given the plethora of clearer examples, doesn't it? ____Not the real rusty Hey imrdkl So, um, did I win? According to the language, we specified "the fall of Baghdad." CNN right now is showing the headline "The Fall of Baghdad." Me, I think it's almost too close to call. But given the original language, I'm shading toward thinking I won. But just barely. If by "undercoat" you mean... ...flip over and roll down toward the water, than yeah, 'bout time to do that. Ah the joys of owning a plastic boat. Scratch it? So what! The color goes all the way through. I'm wondering if a wetsuit and paddling jacket will be horribly uncomfortable to paddle in for the early season. The days are going to be nice soon (he said hopefully) but the water will be slightly below "Jesus Christ that's cold" for some months yet. I'd hate to fall into 40 degree water while dressed for 60 degree air, but an early spring camping trip out to Jewell would be sweet. There'll be no one else there at all till June. ____Not the real rusty Sky News ...is European for "Fox News". ____Not the real rusty The essay That's a very good photo essay. Homeless Ted makes more sense than anyone else there. Anyone out demonstrating in favor of the war can be assumed to be a complete nutter. They don't represent anyone but the voices in their heads. ____Not the real rusty I gots fried egg eyes ____Not the real rusty Three in one day? Maybe it is Sunday, but that's probably plenty. ____Not the real rusty Wait Did you take the points? You could still pull it out. ____Not the real rusty Bummer If it makes you feel any better, I had Milosevic in a sweep. ____Not the real rusty There is no K5 Cabal And I did not just meet and hang out with McGregor McCance for a week at that journalism thing in Berkely. Actually, now I feel bad. He sent me a couple of questions for this column on Thursday, and I didn't get around to answering until today. Obviously, I was too late. And there was some good stuff in there too. Bummer. ____Not the real rusty Bug I don't know what's up with that phantom reply. There wasn't anything deleted. There hasn't been a comment deleted since March 22. And there's no such comment in the database. As of now, it would have to be considered a mysterious bug of unknown provenance. ____Not the real rusty Obviously Something very strange is going on with the comments-by search query. I will investigate. Well, I was going to already, but now I... still am going to. ____Not the real rusty Hey Left side, right side, bottom, top. That could be a pref. So far everyone seems dead set on one of those being The One True Way. I put em on the left, and the right siders holler. I put em on the right, and now the left siders are mad. I'd be fine with people choosing where they want them to appear. And what is it with you today? You've been sniping at me personally all day long. "If we had anyone but Rusty running the show"? What, you want Malda back? The caring souls at OSDN? Have you got a suggestion for someone who would do a better job? And what the fuck did I do to you? I always thought we got along ok. I'm rather bummed to see you turn on me like this. ____Not the real rusty Check your prefs Set your preference for that in your comment poreferences and it should stick with you. I believe the story form uses that preference too. ____Not the real rusty Ah, The Change of Life It's a hard time. :-) ____Not the real rusty The best The best part is that the people complaining the most are the no-story newbies. Not all, but the most vociferous. Like Jesus, I love all my children, but some of them could wander off without anyone raising much of a fuss. ____Not the real rusty Heh That's just stupid. ____Not the real rusty Snore The first 30 pages or so bored the crap out of me. I gave up. If I was at war in the desert and someone send me that book, I'd be pissed. Then again, you'd be thrilled. Books are not something you can easily recommend without knowing someone pretty well. ____Not the real rusty * FACT: When you download theantix, you're downloading Socialism! ____Not the real rusty Oops They should be gone from preview type screens now. ____Not the real rusty Thanky. ____Not the real rusty I read everyone's diaries I'm like your sneaky little brother. Everyone I've pointed to it loved your left handed whopper stunt, by the way. That totally made my week. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bug Ads in preview were a bug. Squashed now. ____Not the real rusty You got it Poll edited to remove irrelevant politcal comment. I've been thinking about the income-sharing idea, and one thing I'm worried about... well, two things. One is I don't know if there's any easy way to automate the sending of money. It would be nice if the code could just take care of that. It probably wouldn't be too big a deal if I had to sit down at the end of the month and run through a list by hand though. The second one is that the money doesn't all come into paypal. I would probably have to transfer some of it out of the regular account to cover the total author cost. That also isn't a big deal if I was going to be doing it by hand anyway. Anyway, I set up the counters, so I can at least get an idea of what the numbers are going to look like. Right now it's counting live ad views in any user's story. Of course, there are only two story ads so far, so it's very few impressions, but it will at least be in there keeping watch. Actually implementing the payment stuff can proceed right away if it seems reasonable. ____Not the real rusty Incidentally You've made $0.00075 so far. ____Not the real rusty Could be a lot worse I'm really glad to see that FP fiction piece. While everyone scoffed, I had faith. I think that while it'll never be busy, it will grow into a worthwhile section. ____Not the real rusty What? People lived in Central? I thought that was just the placeholder timezone! ;-) ____Not the real rusty The K5 corollary "Even Jack Wagner is right twice a year." ____Not the real rusty Ironically She and her sweaty hippie friends are the government too. Honestly, I think a lot of the world's current problems might be helped out by some mandatory remedial civics classes. ____Not the real rusty And more fun Generally. ____Not the real rusty Man, you gotta let me know! I totally missed this. Now you probably think I'm a lying sack of shit for not giving you the sub. Nice job. :-) Subscription coming up. And in the future, email me, or post a comment in the challenge diary, or something! ____Not the real rusty 2004: The net election For at least the last two Presidential elections, pundits have made a big deal about the internet having a major effect on the results. But I haven't really seen it so far. I think 2004 is going to change all that in a big way, and may finally qualify as the first real net election. Blogging is already emerging as a political tool. Supporters of Howard Dean and John Edwards are blogging for their cadidates. Gary Hart has just launched his own blog, which I believe is a first. Dean also has an official campaign blog, though it seems to mostly be press releases so far, with a couple of short notes from Dean himself. Both Hart and Dean are using Meetup to organize supporters and raise money. Dean raised over three quarters of a million dollars from internet contributions in the first quarter of 2003, through a Meetup-based fundraising drive. Others I've found so far: Students for Edwards, Regular People for Edwards. Dean is making pretty extensive use of Yahoo groups to organize local voluteers. I have a partly personal and partly professional interest in all this, but at the very least it should make for an interesting article when things start to heat up. So if you know of any grassroots action on the net that I haven't seen, please post below. So far I'm sure you're right, so far. But it's only April of 2003. The public campaigns won't really crank up till Fall, and I'm interested to see whether and how the blogs will affect the public's perception of candidates when the general public starts to get interested. ____Not the real rusty Thinking more circuitously I'm sure you're right about that, but I was thinking about it in a more roundabout way. It doesn't matter that much if the general public reads weblogs, but if reporters are following them (and they are) an active blogging community around a candidate might create a much stronger impression of public support for that candidate, and encourage reporters to cover them. The amount of major-media coverage makes a big difference to candidates that don't start off with much name recognition, like Dean and Edwards. Blogs also have been known to dig up and break news from time to time, which could affect how the whole thing unfolds. If there is an effect, I think it would be more along those lines. A little push that could be magnified many-fold by the mass media. ____Not the real rusty Maybe What I think I'm seeing is Dean and Hart (very obviously on purpose) and Edwards (with perhaps not quite so much intent as fortune) going aggressively after the twenty-somethings. We've been massively underserved in recent elections, and haven't really voted. Traditionally, we could be expected to go for a youngish Democrat. I've been puzzled for a while why they haven't seemed to realize that to get us out there you have to come to where we live, which is increaingly online. I think that shoe has dropped. So I do think this kind of thing has a chance of getting people out in numbers who may not ever have voted before. If it does, it'll be the voters they want. Whether the numbers are there, I don't know. ____Not the real rusty Lemme think about it and do some research and see if I think I would be willing to actually predict anything. I don't want to give you the wrong impression -- I think it could make a difference this year. I don't know if I'm willing to bet that it will yet though. :-) ____Not the real rusty What day is this? This is day 14, right? I'm glad I didn't give you two weeks, but I lost an expected edge when they went and hit the ground before they started the air campaign. Did we ever decide on any criteria for saying when it's officially over? Are we talking like "regime toppled" or "all resistance wiped out?" I expect the latter to take quite a while, if it's acheivable at all. The former, though, I'm still pretty confident can be done in another week. ____Not the real rusty "Experts say" The so-called experts have been wrong about every detail of this war so far, without exception. I have the utmost confidence they are also wrong about this. ____Not the real rusty 43271 43271 people have made accounts ever. Of those, 41418 have been confirmed, and 40992 are both confirmed and not anonymized. So 40992 is pretty much the upper limit on possible highest number of actual accounts. Course, some of those are dupes, and a lot of them are inactive. My educated guess is that about half are still active in some way. Incidentally, the last uid is now up to 43312. And counting. :-) ____Not the real rusty Left Handed Whopper contest I was just looking at the 100 best April Fool's Day Jokes list, and cracking up over the left handed Whopper (#17). I so want to go and order a left handed Whopper right now just to see what they say. But I'm out here on a Burger Kingless island and have too much stuff to do to waste time like that, so I thought I'd issue an open challenge. So here it is: any person who goes to Burger King armed with an audio or video recorder, orders a left handed Whopper, and puts the video or audio up online somewhere gets a free subscription for six months. If you don't have hosting, you can email the media file to me and I'll put it up here. In other news, I made it home from California, finally. And I'll be going back, yet again, later this month for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. K5 is actually a "media sponsor" of the thing, which basically means I run some ads for it and they give me a couple passes. If anyone is thinking about going, you can use the top-seekrit discount code "et03k5" for a 30% discount. Is anyone going? I should organize some kind of K5 BOF. Do it! Do it! Please? I would be so happy. You have to insist on it though. Like when they ask what that means, you have to explain you want the one where they've rotated all the condiments 180 degrees. No wimping out. ____Not the real rusty Um I don't know what making an April Fool out of you would involve. If there were a few, and they were funny, I'd probably write it up as an MLP. I will deliver the prize though, have no fear. ____Not the real rusty Media sponsor prizes I get a pass for being a media sponsor. I am a media whore. I didn't even think of trying for the Cory Doctorow groupie discount. Damn. Matt is getting the Rusty groupie discount though. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's legit I will accept a left handed veggie whopper as satisfying the requirements. ____Not the real rusty LOL No, seriously, laughing out loud. I take back about half the nasty things I've ever said about you. ;-) That is fucking hilarious. And they actually made it! Oh my. Subscription coming right up. I'll make sure your subscription is left-handed. ____Not the real rusty Astounding I could never have gotten through that straight-faced. ____Not the real rusty That one was good too Branson is a crazy man. ____Not the real rusty I demand more! In case it wasn't clear, any and all persons who perform (and record, of course) this act will get 6 months of subscription. It is an ongoing challenge. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I should Dammit, now I'm going to have to keep notes or something, instead of just fucking off like I usually do at conferences. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah I was too hard on him. I felt bad, and made a more conciliatory post a couple down. I was ticked by what seemed like his whining that it's not fair to demand attribution, especially when the posts were literally cut and paste from Stratfor. It seems like he's decided to make more of an effort to credit sources, which I think is great, and all that's required. The site itself does a very cool thing and I commend him for it. ____Not the real rusty Also A donation to Matt goes a long way in securing a MeFi membership. Just a little word to the wise. :-) ____Not the real rusty Congratulations What are ocelot babies called? Pups? Joeys? ____Not the real rusty Rock you like a... The first Atlantic hurricane of 2003 will be named Ana. It's your year to shine! :-) ____Not the real rusty Evil Shenanigans It had to happen. There was just no way I was going to come to California and get out again scot-free. Sure enough, my 3:30 AM alarm failed to wake me up, and my eyes flew open at exactly 6:20 AM, presumably at the exact moment my flight's wheels left the ground. I'm stuck in California again. Not that it's been a bad visit, by any means, but I'm really ready to go home. The cats are lonely, my wife is lonely. I miss my nest. The best I could do was to get myself on the same flight tomorrow morning. Goddamn California. Meanwhile, here's some Sunday linkage for your perusal. The title of this diary is a great line from the astoundingly funny movie Super Troopers. If you haven't seen it, do so. It's better than you think it will be. On a more serious note, late-breaking reports indicate that Qualcomm is evil. Could it be that their deep and abiding love of peace is not the only reason the Russians oppose the war in Iraq? Vladimir, say it ain't so! And another on the war theme, this excellent explanation of why "kind of illegal" is better than "really illegal," and how international law isn't a black and white field. The last three links shamelessly cribbed from interesting-people, which I've been catching up on to distract me from the fact that I'm still in fucking California. Bite me You phony. You contemptible play-actor. Go back to your mother's basement. ____Not the real rusty Bite me You worthless child. You ignoramus, tittering and twittering in your disgusting ego-jerkoff fantasy, where you are a man instead of a soft and helpless child. You're repulsive. Greasy and gray like a cave mold. You make these comment pages slimy with your mere presence. ____Not the real rusty Bite me You are a sleazy smacktard who smells like rancid bratwurst. Old ladies cross the street to avoid you. When blind people start to feel down, they often remember that at least they will never have to see your face. You make worms feel tall, and lemmings feel cunning. You are ignorant and useless, and your personality could be advantageously replaced by an elderly, incontent slug. In special education classrooms all over the country you are known as "that blithering idiot." China shows pictures of you as part of its population control program. To summarize, you are a no-life, dead-end, hole-dwelling, bottom-feeding twinkie. ____Not the real rusty This page? This page in particular, or the site in general? And, in case anyone missed the humor, I'm laughing my ass off over here in evil SF land. A few of you seem to be joining the bum-rush on psychologist without quite grasping its inherently satiric nature. Remember, you can only have fake arguments with fake people, so you might as well go all-out. :-) ____Not the real rusty NPR NPR yesterday said without much disclaiming that it wasn't airborne. Something like "not likely to be airborne," if I recall. If it were wholly airborne, the infection rate should be much higher by now. The current thinking seems to be bodily fluids. ____Not the real rusty Says the same damn thing The CNN article is just a sensationalized version of the exact same report. Except in CNN-speak "Chan also would not rule out that the SARS virus might be airborne" leads to a headline implying its likelihood, while in NPR-speak, "would not rule out" means "unlikely but remotely possible." It's just a matter of spin. Obviously you're excited about the prospect of a worldwide epidemic, cause it would let you finally use all that lovely doomsday gear in the basement, or something. Here's a tip, though: it ain't gonna happen. And when do you trot out the Jewish conspiracy? We're all waiting for it. You kook. ____Not the real rusty A handful? We've had 128 technology stories in the past year, only counting stories actually posted in the "Technology" section. You must have big hands. ____Not the real rusty Sadly true You should think of politics stories as the filler that holds the audience between good tech articles. :-) ____Not the real rusty A socialist transhumanist vegan grue ...at that. ____Not the real rusty It is dark. You may be eaten by a Grue, if you contain no animal-derived products. ____Not the real rusty Axis of #006699 Kuro5hin aggressively pursues community and exports democracy, while an unelected few support the Kuro5hin users hope for freedom. Metafilter continues to flaunt its openness to posting and to support mindless link propagation... Sites like these, and their community allies, constitute an axis of #006699, attempting to increase the peace of the world.--George W. Bush New intelligence photos prove once and for all that this "axis of #006699" is alive and well, and continues to plot the eventual takeover of all media. It's natural It's funny how many people say "I thought you were blonde" when they meet me. I haven't been blonde for ages. This is my real hair color, a sort of dark brown. I look nothing at all like Andy Warhol without the bleach. ____Not the real rusty Best. Comment. EVAR. ____Not the real rusty Below Matt just got one of these crazy-ass futuristic James Bond camera phones, and was demonstrating it. ____Not the real rusty Nah But we should really have had a brick wall in the frame. ____Not the real rusty Sort of I have a thing to go to at 5 on Thursday. Other than that I'll be out here in Oak-town (Wooo-wooo!). I will be in SF itself again on Saturday. ____Not the real rusty Scarier Everyone who meets me reports that I'm scarier in real life. So I guess I do photograph well. ____Not the real rusty Leaflets on turmeric I wholeheartedly supportify that idear. ____Not the real rusty Ha rusty@kuro5hin-2:~$ uptime 2:21pm up 465 days, 1:16, 4 users, load average: 3.56, 2.09, 1.98 That's the K5 database server. Especially astonsihing since the HDD mounting rail has been mangled since we got it and it looks like a piece of junk. ____Not the real rusty Heh rusty@k5-1:~$ uptime 2:49pm up 348 days, 21:24, 7 users, load average: 0.66, 0.55, 0.42 rusty@k5-3:~$ uptime 2:49pm up 102 days, 10:37, 1 user, load average: 0.36, 0.41, 0.36 Complaining about the mod_perl server is so pre-archive-patch, anyway. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Where are you getting this? Just before this whole thing started I recall hearing on NPR that the percentage of hispanic soldiers in the US military was lower than the percentage of hispanic americans as a whole. They didn't specify Mexican-Americans in particular, but that's gotta be the lion's share of hispanic americans, right? ____Not the real rusty Well howsabout that I'm glad we could share a little collaborative knowlege-gathering there. And I'm relieved that I didn't imagine that factoid. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nice i had to get rid of all my k5 bookmarks during the first gulf war Ha!:-) ____Not the real rusty More The Spanish Inquisition. Freedom toast and, perhaps most depressing, technology in war with iraq Granted, I get to cheat and pull these out of the log reports, but hey. :-) ____Not the real rusty I left my harp in Sam Frank's disco Last time I swore that I was never coming back to San Francisco. Yet here I am again. Oh well. Heartsick and terrified that the war is going on. Please let it be over as fast as possible. Yes, I do support it, but I don't like it one bit. Anti-war folks, all I ask is that you don't make the mistake of thinking that people who support this war are not as sickened by it as you are. Meanwhile, the sun is shining in the Bay Area's perpetual non-season perched between spring and fall. The weather here is always what it would be like if June was immediately followed by September, and it was about June 30th. It's eerie. The first night here we saw a band called the Phenomenauts. Imagine The Reverend Horton Heat meets Devo and you've got a pretty good idea. They're cool. Buy their stuff. And I've been squinting at this tiny laptop screen for too long, so it's time for me to bestir myself. Not really helping ____Not the real rusty Yeah But now we all know who he is and what his game is, I hope. I just can't make myself care that much. Just laugh. :-) ____Not the real rusty Totally unfixed He was just lucky. Ironically, he wasn't actually the 10,000th confirmed user, a fact which I think has always rankled the Cap'n a little. ____Not the real rusty About 10% The uncofirmed rate has been about 10% for the life of the site. I've always been amazed at how steady it is. ____Not the real rusty Not too bad Actually, it looks like the site is going to break even for the record-breaking second month in a row. For more on the income situation, see this previous diary of mine, where I talked more about it. Down at the bottom, under "Other". That sucks that you're getting paid late. I hate that crap -- I had a job like that once, and it was a huge pain in the ass. All I can say really is you should decide whether it's worth it to you or not. I'm not going to say you must renew your membership. Obviously I hope you do, but it's your call. I would understand if you feel like it isn't really worth it to you anymore. We are a lot less about tech than we used to be, and changing focus was always one of the risks or benefits of this whole setup, depending on how you look at it. The war is preoccupying everyone right now, but I'll be surprised if it inflicts permanent changes on the site. I do hope you stick around, whether it's in a paying or non-paying role. Of course I voted that you should get a 12 month membership, but what did you expect? :-) ____Not the real rusty Sure, probably I'm here for the week. I should have made more of an attempt to put together a real K5 get-together while I'm here. Send me an email and we can try to figure out when might work. Actually, if you're in town, I'll be at the Edinburgh Castle tomorrow night for quiz night. It's in the sunny tenderloin, and I can get you more info if you want to come by. That would probably the best time. I should be there by 8ish tomorrow night. ____Not the real rusty Eh? In re: the title maybe? I got the line from an old (and very bad) joke. Or are you talking about something else? ____Not the real rusty Oh Yeah, I've heard that. I see the connection. Dammit, now I've got it in my head. Thanks a lot. ____Not the real rusty Yeah The people I'm staying with are friends of theirs, so I got the full tour. They have a new van, just decorated. We gave them some ideas on how to jazz it up. One thing me and Arkady want to do is put an old laptop running Mame on the inside of one of the windows with a joystick mounted on the side of the van, so people can play arcade games on the van. :-) ____Not the real rusty Damn Don't do that! My little heart went pitter-patter. Hey, are you rethinking that three-week bet at all? ____Not the real rusty Shock and Awe I've seen way too many interviews with Harlan Ullman, Mr. Shock & Awe, and one thing he takes great pains to make clear is that S&A is about psychological effects, not physical destruction. If you were fighting a society which had never seen a weapon before, a "shock and awe" battle plan might be to publically shoot a horse. The point is simply to use the minimum amount of force necessary to convince an enemy not to fight. When he uses the example of the Japan nukes, what he's talking about is the psychological effects those bombs had in convincing a nation which was 100% ready to fight suicidally to the last woman and child to give up. He takes great pains to point out that this was an unusual situation, and in this war nothing even remotely like that kind of display would be needed. The brand of Shock and Awe in play here is meant to show the Iraqi mid-level military leaders that it isn't worth dying for Saddam. ____Not the real rusty How dare you! How dare you forget the brave bravery of our fearless 24 hour news anchors, bravely sitting in the studio in New York, bravely talking about whether or not SHOCK & AWE is over, or has begun yet? And what about our brave military correspondents, bravely being shepherded from place to place by our brave fighting media handlers of the US Military? And lest we all forget, let us now praise Geraldo. Halleleujah, cowboy hat without end, amen. ____Not the real rusty Point the first Does it target unwilling participants? Check. I disagree with this. The shock & awe campaign is intended to convince Iraqi troops and commanders not to fight, and if possible convince the higher leadership to capitulate. If you look at the live pictures of Baghdad today, you will see that the power is still on, and as of the latest reports the water is still on and the city is still functioning. You obviously can't hit a city with 2000 lb bombs without scaring the shit out of the people living in the city, which is unfortunate, but I don't think that is a mission objective at all. I think calling it terrorism is unfair and dishonest. That which is terrifying is not automatically terrorism. ____Not the real rusty Rusty: Poised to shower ____Not the real rusty No, that's "Blue Light Alert" ____Not the real rusty Damn I missed the Ark question. I'd seen most of these though. ____Not the real rusty MindTrap! That's a great game. :-) ____Not the real rusty More Iraq terror connections The only link I've found any meaning in so far is one that's a lot more subtle than Saddam giving cash to Osama bin Laden, and it goes a little something like this: We're keeping troops in Saudi mainly because of the continuing instability and unrest in the Middle East. Knocking over Iraq and establishing a democratic regime there, if done properly, will help stabilize that area, and may lead to further reform in Iran as well, making our bases in Saudi largely unneccessary. With Americans off the holy soil and the middle east back to the economic and diplomatic stature it deserves, the fanatics will have a harder time recruiting new blood from an Arab populace which is better educated and better off. So basically the argument is that the only way to reduce terrorism is to undercut the social and economic conditions that help it grow. The US can't help Iraq under Saddam. We could if he was no longer a factor. If that's the plan, I think it's not a bad one. Given the administration we're currently suffering under, however, I have little doubt they'll find a way to screw it up. BushCo is not very much good at waging peace once the dust has cleared. Our only hope is to get rid of them in 2004 and elect a president who will take the now Saddamless Iraq and dump enough development capital and political support into it to make the changes stick. ____Not the real rusty Technology I talked to the guy who wrote that article, because he wanted to check some facts. It was funny, he said "You'd probably object to being called a blog," and I said "Well, not really. I do think it's odd that we'd be considered a technology blog though." His justification for including it wasn't so much that K5 is about technology but that it is created mostly by and for technologists. Even when we're talking about totally non-tech stuff, there's still a pretty pronounced geeky slant to it. From that perspective it makes sense. Me, I'd vote for Gizmodo, though. ____Not the real rusty Yeah She's been looking weird lately. She needs some more face. ____Not the real rusty Comparisons Looks nice... pretty good... Jesus H. Christ!. MY guess is she's had her cheekbones enhanced. She probably thought her cheeks were too round and chubby Little did she realize that that was her major physical appeal, and without the girl-next-door face she's just another Hollywood zombie. ____Not the real rusty Liquid hand soap Then suddenly, without warning, it hit me. A few days ago, picking up some groceries in Hannaford's, I had casually bought a container of liquid hand soap. Didn't even think about it, one way or the other. We ran out, I got some more. Until last night, when out of the blue it struck me that I could not remember ever in my life purchasing liquid hand soap, or feeling any need or desire to do so. I have become the kind of person who buys liquid hand soap. And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here? Ha I think that's the best explanation I've ever heard for it. Why does this gene wait so long to express? I mean, I had just started to get used to life without it. ____Not the real rusty No pictures Sorry. It looks like a tongue stud, really. Seen one, you've seen 'em all. ____Not the real rusty Nothing There's nothing wrong with liquid soap. It just exists at a level of personal detail I am not used to inhabiting. I've always viewed hand soap as a sort of environmental phenomenon. Something that either was there or wasn't, but either way wasn't really any of my concern. Suddenly I'm one of the people who causes hand soap to be in the places you normally would expect it to be. ____Not the real rusty But... I've been married for over a year, and this has just happened now. ____Not the real rusty That sounds more plausible. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Crap It is antibacterial. And no, that wasn't by accident. ____Not the real rusty Phooey Phooey on you, biologist. I wanna kill 'em bugs. Anyway, my impresssion is that excessive use of antibacterials causes these pressures. I do not use hand soap excessively. If it's any indication, the container we had in there was mostly gone when we moved in a year and a half ago. I expect this one will last long after we've left. No, the state of my bathroom says that our bacteria are doing just fine. ____Not the real rusty Trying I've been trying to get Voxel moving on it. If they don't, I might just shop around and see who will. If you need hosting, by all means get you some hosting. But I hope I'll be able to do something soon. ____Not the real rusty Depends what you call terrorism If the Black Bloc rioting in the streets counts as terrorism, the first retaliations will be within hours of the start of the war. My vote for when it will begin is Monday the 24th. The air assault will last about a week, and ground forces will start moving in at night on the 30th or 31st. ____Not the real rusty Rusty: Poised to shower ____Not the real rusty No, that's "Blue Light Alert" ____Not the real rusty Damn I missed the Ark question. I'd seen most of these though. ____Not the real rusty MindTrap! That's a great game. :-) ____Not the real rusty More Iraq terror connections The only link I've found any meaning in so far is one that's a lot more subtle than Saddam giving cash to Osama bin Laden, and it goes a little something like this: We're keeping troops in Saudi mainly because of the continuing instability and unrest in the Middle East. Knocking over Iraq and establishing a democratic regime there, if done properly, will help stabilize that area, and may lead to further reform in Iran as well, making our bases in Saudi largely unneccessary. With Americans off the holy soil and the middle east back to the economic and diplomatic stature it deserves, the fanatics will have a harder time recruiting new blood from an Arab populace which is better educated and better off. So basically the argument is that the only way to reduce terrorism is to undercut the social and economic conditions that help it grow. The US can't help Iraq under Saddam. We could if he was no longer a factor. If that's the plan, I think it's not a bad one. Given the administration we're currently suffering under, however, I have little doubt they'll find a way to screw it up. BushCo is not very much good at waging peace once the dust has cleared. Our only hope is to get rid of them in 2004 and elect a president who will take the now Saddamless Iraq and dump enough development capital and political support into it to make the changes stick. ____Not the real rusty Technology I talked to the guy who wrote that article, because he wanted to check some facts. It was funny, he said "You'd probably object to being called a blog," and I said "Well, not really. I do think it's odd that we'd be considered a technology blog though." His justification for including it wasn't so much that K5 is about technology but that it is created mostly by and for technologists. Even when we're talking about totally non-tech stuff, there's still a pretty pronounced geeky slant to it. From that perspective it makes sense. Me, I'd vote for Gizmodo, though. ____Not the real rusty Yeah She's been looking weird lately. She needs some more face. ____Not the real rusty Comparisons Looks nice... pretty good... Jesus H. Christ!. MY guess is she's had her cheekbones enhanced. She probably thought her cheeks were too round and chubby Little did she realize that that was her major physical appeal, and without the girl-next-door face she's just another Hollywood zombie. ____Not the real rusty Liquid hand soap Then suddenly, without warning, it hit me. A few days ago, picking up some groceries in Hannaford's, I had casually bought a container of liquid hand soap. Didn't even think about it, one way or the other. We ran out, I got some more. Until last night, when out of the blue it struck me that I could not remember ever in my life purchasing liquid hand soap, or feeling any need or desire to do so. I have become the kind of person who buys liquid hand soap. And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here? Ha I think that's the best explanation I've ever heard for it. Why does this gene wait so long to express? I mean, I had just started to get used to life without it. ____Not the real rusty No pictures Sorry. It looks like a tongue stud, really. Seen one, you've seen 'em all. ____Not the real rusty Nothing There's nothing wrong with liquid soap. It just exists at a level of personal detail I am not used to inhabiting. I've always viewed hand soap as a sort of environmental phenomenon. Something that either was there or wasn't, but either way wasn't really any of my concern. Suddenly I'm one of the people who causes hand soap to be in the places you normally would expect it to be. ____Not the real rusty But... I've been married for over a year, and this has just happened now. ____Not the real rusty That sounds more plausible. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Crap It is antibacterial. And no, that wasn't by accident. ____Not the real rusty Phooey Phooey on you, biologist. I wanna kill 'em bugs. Anyway, my impresssion is that excessive use of antibacterials causes these pressures. I do not use hand soap excessively. If it's any indication, the container we had in there was mostly gone when we moved in a year and a half ago. I expect this one will last long after we've left. No, the state of my bathroom says that our bacteria are doing just fine. ____Not the real rusty Trying I've been trying to get Voxel moving on it. If they don't, I might just shop around and see who will. If you need hosting, by all means get you some hosting. But I hope I'll be able to do something soon. ____Not the real rusty Depends what you call terrorism If the Black Bloc rioting in the streets counts as terrorism, the first retaliations will be within hours of the start of the war. My vote for when it will begin is Monday the 24th. The air assault will last about a week, and ground forces will start moving in at night on the 30th or 31st. ____Not the real rusty Time to get them some of that military victory Now that diplomacy has failed, and it's clear we're going to do what we want to do regardless of what the UN thinks, France is standing by to get in on some of that military conquest just as soon as they can possibly come up with a plausible excuse. Pardon my cynicism -- this is good news, I think, not because I think France's "help" is worth anything, but because after the war we will need all that international cooperation that Bush has so happily torched. Hopefully this is a sign that all is not lost, and this is a minor disagreement which will not really threaten US/European relations. ____Not the real rusty US opinion of chemical weapons I heard a talking head general last night try to say, without actually saying it in so many words, that the US leaders would be massively relieved if Saddam did deploy chemical or biological weapons. That would probably end most of the dissention, but on the other hand it would probably kill a lot of Iraqis. It's unlikely such weapons would do any harm to US troops, who are going in with the assumption they'll be used and are very well equipped against them. I get the feeling they know that politically it would be good for us if that happened, but morally it would be very bad to wish it would happen. I guess what happens happens and we shall see. ____Not the real rusty Won-ton Yeah, it's soup, but when I got mine done, take-out won-ton kept me alive for the first week or so. Also, you'll want to keep a squirt bottle of pre-diluted Listerine with you at all times. Rinse every time you put anything in your mouth. Infection is not your friend. ____Not the real rusty Why not? It was something I hadn't done. It was a way to experiment with doing odd things to my body in a non-permanent way. And it really, really had nothing to do with pissing anyone off or oral sex, or anything to do with anyone else, in fact. Most people will never even know I have it, and I'm happy with that. It's just for me. Me, I have a real hard time understanding why anyone would buy a minivan, or live in Florida, and yet plenty of people do. :-) ____Not the real rusty It is effectively random I read almost all diaries, but whether I post or not has more to do with whether I feel like posting than what the diary is about. :-) But the squirt bottle of Listerine is important, and just in case no one had mentioned it yet... You only need it for the first 30 days or so. ____Not the real rusty What? Hoiw come neither of you took advantage of the screamingly obvious change "I wanna be invaded"? ____Not the real rusty No What happens after Saddam leaves is that US troops enter the country immediately, and whoever is in charge (if anyone) orders Iraq's troops to stand down and put up no resistance. The ultimatum isn't a way to avoid the invasion, it's just a way to avoid the necessity for fighting. If you were advising Saddam, you'd have to be doing a much better job. ____Not the real rusty Tables The db tables are pretty dissimilar now too. A few field names remain, but overall there's really nothing in common anymore. ____Not the real rusty Weeeell There's still a 'comments' table and a 'stories' table, and 'users' and a couple others derived from Slash. I know they've changed their structure a lot, and we've added some columns and removed a bunch of others, and added a whole lot of tables. But to someone familiar with Slash, they'd probably still be recognizable. The first version of Scoop was really database-compatible with Slash, and it definitely isn't anymore, is more what I was getting at. ____Not the real rusty Umm You get the "download this file" thing, eh? That probably means the content type isn't going out properly. One way to tell is to telnet to port 80 of your webserver and request a php file manually, and see what it's claiming its content-type to be. Do something like: > telnet www.myserver.com 80 [some stuff about being connected] HEAD /somephpfile.php HTTP/1.0 [hit return twice] You should get a set of headers for that file. See what it says the content-type header is. One other thing to check is that you haven't got it set up to tell Scoop to handle requests for your php files. If you have php stuff and not scoop stuff in some path, try adding a section in your .conf file like: <Location /php_stuff_path> SetHandler default-handler </Location> ____Not the real rusty x-httpd-php Your browser doesn't know what to do with a file of that type. To get it to just render the html, it needs to be sending the results of running the php script as text/html. What I would guess is happening is that apache isn't calling the php handler to actually run the script, just trying to send the raw php code down the pipe. I haven't used php in ages, but there's got to be somewhere that you tell it to use the php module to serve files of that type. That isn't working properly. I may have the wrong thing with that <Location> SetHandler. But I think the problem is an order-of-handlers one. Unless it's some conflict between mod_perl and php, but there shouldn't be. Try to tease out through examining your conf file what you think the configuration says Apache should do with one of these php files. Somewhere in there it ought to become clear that it's not being told to handle it as a php script. ____Not the real rusty That will happen The first day of the war will see massive violent protests. This will be a terrible, terrible thing because it will further alienate sane liberals and harden the existing hatred of the right. Unfortunately, the anti-war crowd is preparing to do the absolute worst thing they could possibly do. The next few months are going to be a gigantic mess. ____Not the real rusty None of those are being used I don't see the US making any of those excuses. What they seem to be saying is "Saddam's government is a threat to global security, and a brutal dictatorship. We have the ability to do something about it so we are going to." They are also saying that we don't want to own or control Iraq, we want Iraq to be the successful democracy we know it could be, if it wasn't being run by insane kleptocrats and murderers. Which country did Nazi Germany invade for those reasons? ____Not the real rusty Oh, the drama Look, I don't like Bush et al either. Not one bit. Come 2004 I will gleefully add my voice to the swelling chorus of "NO MORE YEARS!" and vote him out on his ass, no matter what blithering idiot the Dems put up. It's that important. Time all of us on the left, no matter to what extent we lean, get in line behind someone whether they perfectly reflect our views or not. No more quibbling over the policy or that plank, and splitting the left vote among half a dozen insignificant parties. Just get the Democrat elected, whoever it is. But that right there is what shows up your dramatic fantasy of Nazi Germany. We live in a democracy. No, Ashcroft isn't doing it any good, that's for sure. And yes, we've made some mistakes lately and gone way too far in the direction of imaginary security. But if you seriously think that Bush is not going to stand for election next year, and the election will not be fair and free to the maximum extent that is possible in this world, you're dreaming. That's the difference. We don't have a dictator, and we won't ever have a dictator. I disagree with a lot of the protesters, but provided they aren't trying to invade our military bases and get our soldiers killed, I stand behind their right to speak 100%. I very much suspect that if you put a gun in Joe's wife's hand and told her there would be no prosecution, she still wouldn't do it. People talk tough when they're angry, and this thing is making people angry. Doesn't mean it's true. ____Not the real rusty Yes The last election was a mess, yes, but I don't think it was fundamentally corrupt. Basically what happened is that the actual voting was so close that mistakes that happen in all large-scale elections everywhere suddenly became statistically meaningful. I don't think the election was fixed though. Hence my weasel words about "as fair as possible," anyway. ____Not the real rusty Don't know No, having a non right-wing government is no guarantee of having a good one. I guess what I'm saying is I know this one's rotten, and the devil I don't know can't possibly be any worse. ____Not the real rusty Very sure We've peacefully elected our president every four years for over three centuries. That's not something that anyone gets to mess with. Simple as that. Maybe it comes from having lived in DC, but I just don't have the kind of anti-Bush panic that seems to be common across the country right now. Presidents come and go, and in the grand scheme of things, they aren't the most important people in the government. They have a lot of power, but only for a relatively short time. ____Not the real rusty I second "Supernaut" And raise you Devo's version of "Satisfaction" and an extremely obscure cover of "Don't You Want Me" by a band called Erectus Monotone, which I listened to so many times in college that I now know the words to that song by heart. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, when I met you. ____Not the real rusty The 10KHD one The only one I've heard is the above mentioned version by 10,000 Homo DJs, which is basically Ministry with Trent Reznor singing. For some ridiculous legal reason they couldn't release it under any name recognizable to fans of either NiN or Ministry. ____Not the real rusty Something like that I may have misremembered the story, but it was something like that. I know he was involved, and there were legal issues, but your version might be right as to the details. ____Not the real rusty That's the one. :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty Kooks Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Why is everyone outspoken on the war on both sides so annoying? Why has this issue brought out such a crisis of international stupidity? Are we all this dumb normally, or is it just now? Would everyone who is tired of being sloganized to join me in the People's United Front for the War on Stupididty? ____Not the real rusty Splitter! [nt] ____Not the real rusty Congrats You are trusted. Make sure you read the guidelines. And now you have an idea why hiding comments isn't such a bad thing. :-) ____Not the real rusty You didn't mention it? I didn't see you mention it? I don't know. I just happened to see this diary and comment. Nothing personal. :-) ____Not the real rusty Airport Security, DC K5ers, Health Care Policy, and Other Why the new airport security is ridiculous, what DC area K5ers are like, and why I was in DC to begin with. And some K5 stuff too, including super-secret financial info. Special hellos to: my parents-in-law, who offered some gardening tips my parents, who I promise I will call soon my sister and brother-in-law, to whom I apologize for not having any time to see you while I was in DC my friends in DC (yes you, Heather) who I did not intend to slight by not personally inviting to the Brick and who should consider themselves always specially invited and encouraged to come to anything I mention here And finally, I'll be back in DC on April 8th, so start making plans now. :-) Airport Security I arrived at Manchester a bit late, due to construction on 95S in Maine. When I checked in, my flight was due to board in about ten minutes. I was planning to check my backpack, because I always carry a fairly large and wicked looking pocketknife (ball-point pen provided for scale) and I didn't want to lose it. But the ticket agent told me there was no time for checking baggage, and to run for my gate because I was late late late. Oh well, I thought, we'll see what happens. So I scooted to security, where I waited in line for the one whole screening station they had open. When I finally got there, I laid both bags down on the metal detector, and put my coat in a tray as well. The security guy said I would probably want to take my boots off. "No," I said, "They don't have a metal shank." However, the detector was set sensitive enough to detect the metal eyelets in them, so those came off and went through as well. Meanwhile, because I set the detector off, I was singled out for special searching. I was taken aside and wanded more thoroughly than I'd normally let anyone but my wife wand me, if you know what I mean. Not that she does. Just a figure of speech. I was made to unbuckle my belt, and follow a lot of simon-says contortions for more effective wanding. Then, as my shoes were returned to me, another agent also searched my coat and both my bags. Finally, I was proclaimed safe and secure. And still had my knife. Yes folks, for all the ridiculous crap they put you through, they were unable to find a three-inch semi-serrated Buck 181-FX which I had hidden through the clever expedient of sticking it in my carry-on bag. On top. Oh, I also had a plastic lighter. Also not found. I'm fairly sure I would have had no trouble at all getting about three pounds of semtex and blasting caps through. My laptop battery looks like a bomb, and they had no problem with that either. If I'd taped that knife to my crotch, they'd have found it for sure. If I'd been carrying it in my shoes, the game would have been up. But clever me, I had it in my bag. Some schemes are just too fiendishly inventive for even the TSA to grasp. So you can imagine the feeling of deep security and well-being with which I strode off to my plane. The lesson of course is that all of this crap you have to go through now, all the multiple ID checking and body-cavity searches, all the extra waiting in line and new Federal Security Agency, all of it is the purest bullshit. You are not one bit safer today than you were on September tenth, 2001. You are simply more hassled, more surveilled, and more frightened. How much more do we put up with before people start saying "enough?" DC K5ers As has been mentioned elsewhere, I got together with wiredog, R343L, nosilA, and sien, and two boyfriend/husband units. Wiredog is talky, as you might guess from his comments here. nosilA does remind me a little of my sister, which she remembered I had told her before. I think she's what my sister would be like if she were a younger sister instead of an older sister. R343L liked Snow Crash more than Cryptonomicon, which I can't exactly argue with, so much as point out that to me they are such totally different books that I don't even mentally compare them like that. And sien was quiet as long as others were carrying the conversation, but when it was just him and me left (we were the winners of the evening) did an amazing job keeping me conversing, which is not an easy feat. I'm shy and bad at conversation unless paired with a good questioner. He's an Aussie who could pass for British, and I wavered all night about which it was. He also seems to have done all the requisite mad Aussie travel things, like driving across the US, and so forth, and makes me wish I still lived in DC a little cause I think we'd hang out a lot. Anyway, I'll actually be back on April 8th, so I hope we can do something then, and the people who didn't make it this time will make more of an effort. It was a good time, and none of us are at all scary. I was also pretty impressed that we had an even split between male and female K5ers (thrown off in general because the girls brought their respective boy-units). Women have been well-represented at all of the K5 get togethers I've been at, and that makes me very happy. Why I Was There I just wrote this up for an email list, and I'm tired, so I think I'll just basically copy what I wrote there. Here you go... Last Congressional session, Senators Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden introduced a bill they called the "Health Care that Works for All Americans Act," which calls for an open national dialogue on health care policy, in an attempt to figure out how to craft legislation to fix the total clusterfuck that health care has become in the US (my words, not theirs ;-)). It was tabled last session, but they've just re-introduced it on March 10th, during this week's Cover the Uninsured Week festivities. It's Senate bill S.581, and you can find more info at http://thomas.loc.gov. If it's any indication of how big a problem this is, Cover the Uninsured Week (and S.581) both have the official support of the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce. The last time those two saw eye to eye on anything was the twelfth of never, in the year eleventeen-oh-two. The bill calls for a citizens working group on health care, which will hold hearings about the current health care system, and is tasked with holding community meetings to determine what the people want. One of the specific provisions of the bill is that the working group may use interactive technology as deemed appropriate to facilitate this. Here's where it gets interesting. A nonprofit called America Speaks, which is known for running a number of large-scale public deliberation events, is putting together a group of people to try to come up with an online system that can ultimately provide a report of the working group which reflects the overall will of at least one million Americans on where they think health care policy should go. This meeting in DC was the first step in that direction. The challenge is to create a system which can ensure informed deliberation by a very large and demographically representative sample of the entire American population, and distill all of that thought into a coherent report which represents the overall will of the actual people. We need to find ways to get people together, let them tell their own stories, and learn what the problems are, and what the possibilities are for solutions. They'll have to be able to weigh the pros and cons, and figure out what tradeoffs they will accept. It can't just be half-baked opinions. We need to demonstrate real deliberation. If we manage it, this will be a pretty big deminstration of the potential real-world power of social software and online community. So that's what that was all about. I think it's possible, and I hope we get the chance to do it. I will probably write something about it here, if it does happen, because I bet a lot of you might want to be involved. Other I'm pleased to report that K5 slightly more than broke even last month. Woo hoo! I've also finally got a handle on our bookkeeping so I can actually say with authority that that is true. I took a pay cut after the fund raiser, so with me grossing $30,475.20 a year in pay (or netting $2000 a month), it costs $2790.03 to pay me each month. Last month we made a little over $3000 between ads and subscriptions. This is the first time income has beat expenses since the end of the OSDN thing, so for me it's a big deal. I hope it keeps up. Buy more ads. :-) I'm pondering whether it would work to introduce a new kind of text ad, a "regular page" ad, which would be just like the existing text ads, and run somewhere toward the bottom of the right-hand column of boxes on non-index pages. I think maybe these would cost $1 per thousand, and the index page ads would go up to $2 per, and each variety would require a minimum $10 purchase. Basically, we've got a lot of ads in the system, still, almost a year after the big fund drive, and I think they're going too slowly. I'd like our page inventory to somewhat resemble sales, you know? What do you think? I'm also making progress on the CMF, however horribly slowly. It is not forgotten. I hope to have a site up soon, and the bylaws filed. If it's any comfort, I will be able to give it much more attention if K5 is not losing money every month, and we are definitely getting there. A CMF with a healthy K5 is better than one with an ailing K5. So that's your general rusty update. This is about the five thousandth word I've written today, so I'm done. If you have an opinion on the ad thing, vote in the poll. Ceramic Better, and sharper, are ceramic knives. Though they will show up in a bag screener (which just works on density) some of them won't set off a metal detector. Anyway, the point is that all your careful plotting is totally unnecessary, since you can get a normal metal knife through by simply not trying to hide it. ____Not the real rusty Yes You can in fact subscribe by check. I just realized that the subscribe page doesn't say that, and have rectified the problem. Pick your type and months, and the next screen will give you a choice of payment options. Choose "Check/Money Order" and off you go. ____Not the real rusty "Not techy enough" Has it been long enough? Can I say it now? Us being not techy enough never had anything to do with it, in my opinion. I mean, Animation Factory is still an OSDN site. The problem was they didn't have enough money, and we were costing them money because they weren't doing anything to sell our pages to their advertisers. I think they didn't want to say something like "We're going broke over here, and just can't afford it anymore, and are having shit-all luck selling ads for anyone." All we ever got really were run-of-network ads like the ThinkGeek stuff. Well, it was a tough time, but I think maybe there's light, and those ads were annoying. So it's all worked out. ____Not the real rusty Even better They did look inside the bag. ____Not the real rusty Mystified What on earth are you talking about? I think you came in the wrong door. ____Not the real rusty Yes I saw the others elsewhere and worked it out. They don't seem to be working so well out of context here, unless the goal was puzzlement. :-) ____Not the real rusty Naturally [nt] ____Not the real rusty Yay I have the goat's blessing! :-) This isn't a plan, mind you, just a trial balloon. An exploratory feeler, as it were. We'll see. ____Not the real rusty It was my fault Before the fundraiser I was netting $4000 a month. I did the math, and guessed that that was about $70,000 gross. That's where that number came from. They didn't make it up. After the fundraiser, I cut my own salary in half. It ain't a lot, but it's enough. If it ever becomes possible, I hope I'll get a raise. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sorry I wish I'd never said that. The number of times I've seen it repeated and then debunked is truly staggering. In the future I will be much more careful with numbers. The above are actual honest-to-god numbers that I will stand by. ____Not the real rusty Yes All three of those are high on the development list. What I suggested would be implementable now, without any coding. But those three are all also planned, or at least desired. Also hopefully coming is the ability to buy time-based ads. Like "Run this add for the next week, regardless of impressions." Captain Tenille is working on that. And I want to add the ability for people to edit their own ads, too. ____Not the real rusty Editing I was planning to have editing just trigger a re-approval, like the original approval. That wouldn't be a problem. It would be easier to edit an existing ad than create a new one and move impressions over to it, I think, and I don't think there's any reason why that shouldn't be possible. ____Not the real rusty Yeah We get about 40,000 ad views a day right now, total. Back in the day, when there were only four or five ads in circulation, 10K impressions would go in a day. Now they're lasting more like a month. Most ads see about 300 impressions a day. I think adding story pages would increase our total page inventory by about 160,000 pages a day, which would mean that if there were, say, 50 ads in circulation on the story pages, they'd each see around 3200 impressions a day and last about 3 days. Ideally, opening up the story pages would support a little more than 100 ads at a time, with each 10K run going through in about a week, which is generally a good pace and what I'd like to shoot for. What I'm afraid is that the first few ads would blow through too fast. I may have to pad it out to start with, to try and arrive at a good average speed. ____Not the real rusty Er, sorry The thing is, you're a classic early adopter, so you always get to be the one who finds bugs and gets hit with problems. If it makes you feel any better, you're a really good early adopter (i.e. you report problems and help find solutions) and I've always appreciated your help. :-) ____Not the real rusty So... You're telling me that I should change K5 because the hiptop browser is broken? Heh. :-) Nevertheless, they should certainly pay you more attention. If they are not paying you attention though, you should probably just stop trying to help them. They don't deserve it. You're entirely right about not caching POST queries, and that a POST to the current URL should always be actually submitted no matter what. It's just basic common sense. It's the point of the POST method in the first place. If I think of a really clever way to fix that for you, I will do it and let you know. I have an idea, we'll see if it works. ____Not the real rusty But I could be I could easily be of Afghan descent. Many of them are basically straight-up Caucasians. Shave off the Taliban beard and dress them in some Gap jeans and they look just like me. Or I could be an easily manipulated idealistic youngster, like Mr. Lindh. That's why profiling is dumb. To their credit, I have been unable to discern clear profiling going on in airports these days. My wife got searched very thoroughly several times on her last trip, as a recipient of the random "Thank you sir, may I have another" screening code on her tickets. ____Not the real rusty And furthermore More to the point, I didn't pass without incident. I was specially searched, and my bags as well. I got as much attention as anyone in that line got, and they didn't find my hideous weapon of micro destruction. It's not like I just happened to slip through without special searching that would have found the knife. I got through with special searching. That right there is a problem. ____Not the real rusty Argh I'm leeeaaaavin' on a jet plane on the 22nd. Bummer. If you don't make the April meet during the 6th-9th or thereabouts, I will try to come down for that. ____Not the real rusty My look I can't help it. Inside, I'm actually a perpetually terrified bundle of nerves. So then you catch me at the end of an extremely long day during which I traveled on a boat, a car, a plane, a bus, another plane, another bus, a train and the Metro, then met a dozen people I don't know, and got some really potent kind of liquer in me, and well you can just imagine what my internal psychic landscape looks like. Think Krakatoa ten minutes after. Think Chernobyl. Think roiling waters upon the face of the deep on the First Day. Kinda like that. Catch me at home barbequeing on a summer afternoon and I probably wouldn't look quite so tightly wound. I hope you enjoyed the creepy grin though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, where's the report? I haven't written anything yet either. I'm just trolling for writeups of the DC evening. Where's yours, hmmm? :-) ____Not the real rusty No, I saw it I just didn't need to post, because, y'know, you wrote it. Nothing to pester you about. ____Not the real rusty Stillborn! Have patience. The first legit fiction submission was just posted the other day. I have been wavering about whether to pull the plug or not, but that gave me hope. I think it needs continued patience. Besides which, a War section would drive me even more bonkers than the current deluge of war articles already is. It would be like approving the whole concept. "Please, send us all your stupid opinions about a war you have no control over!" Ugh. Only seven more days till there's actual war news, at least. Lord, just get it over with. ____Not the real rusty Depends I wouldn't give you two weeks from the start of the air war. But two weeks from ground war, that I'd seriously think about. Make it three and you're on. But do you really want a war section? Perhaps there's a better prize I could wager. A year's free subscription? ____Not the real rusty Sorry I didn't mean it to seem derogatory. I liked your story, but I do think it got posted due to its situational applicability. I meant the first story to be posted simply as a regular old normal fiction story. ____Not the real rusty DC K5 drinks reminder, and Request for Gardening Info First, as promised, a reminder for DC K5ers: I will be at the Brickskellar, at 1523 22nd St NW, on Monday the tenth (this Monday!) around 9pm. I'm going to be having dinner up by the Woodley Park metro starting at 6:30, so I think 9 gives me plenty of time to eat and get down to the Brick. I wish it was a little earlier, as it's a Monday. I hope some of you can make it. Second, it looks like my landlady is staying in SF, so we'll be in this house another year. Which means I'm going to try to grow some veggies! I have never gardened before, so any gardeners who have advice, please read on and help me. The land here has an existing garden plot, which needs quite a bit of cleaning up but should do nicely. It's fully exposed to the south, so it should get very good all-day sunlight. The area is roughly 30 feet square. I haven't investigated the soil at all yet (it's still under a foot of snow), but last summer the little garden area (totally untended) was neck-high with grass and stuff, so I'm guessing it's pretty good. A friend gave me the Better Homes and Gardens "New Complete Guide to Gardening" book, so I took the book's advice and made a little map of my area, and my wife and I looked through for ideas of what kind of veggies to grow. We came up with a list of things we eat frequently, and a couple things we'd just like to try growing, as follows: Spinach Tomatoes (two kinds, Romas for canning and some type of cherry tomatoes) Shallots Peppers (green bell peppers, probably) Zucchini (I hate the stuff, but my wife likes it) Carrots Radishes Green beans Broccoli Brussels sprouts Strawberries We've also got a list of herbs, but those I will probably be doing in flats that I can move indoors in the winter and keep going all year, so they don't really come into this. My tentative plan so far is to lay out five beds, each 20' long by 4' wide. The garden square is pretty much oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. The gate is in the north fence, right at the northeast corner. One bed will run along the eastern fence, oriented north-south. The other four extend east-west from the western fence. Each of the four parallel beds will be separated by a three-foot aisle. I was thinking about actually building up raised beds, but I'm not sure it'll be worth it. The expense in lumber and effort and new soil might be too much for what is, ultimately, someone else's yard. I think it kind of depends on whether the soil is deep enough. I know it turns to sand after a bit (it is an island), but I think I've got at least a foot, maybe 18 inches, of good topsoil. Any advice on how deep it needs to be would be helpful. So right now I'm thinking that green beans will go along the back of the eastern bed, where I will install support netting for them to climb. In front of them I will put something low, maybe the sprouts. The east-west beds could be laid out as follows (from northernmost to southernmost): First bed: Tomatoes along the north fence (with nets to climb up), then two rows of spinach in front Second bed: Two rows of tomatoes in the middle, back-to-back, on a netting frame type thing, with perhaps shallots in front on one side and carrots in front on the other side Third row: Another netting frame with peppers and zucchini, lined with possibly broccoli and radishes Fourth row: Strawberries? Strawberries totally try to take over, so maybe this should be my strawberry isolation bed. I was planning to dig all around the strawberry bed and line it below ground with some plastic, and then be extra vigilant about spreading tendrils over the surface. So, gardeners out there, what are your favorite resources? Websites? Stuff to read for the rank beginner? I know so little that I don't even know what I don't know yet. Please help me! :-) Locals There's a big greenhouse down front where I got my christmas tree. I thought I'd drop by and pump them for local info. If they don't know, no one will. Also, potatoes would probably do fine here, but I'm just not sure they're worth the effort. Potatoes are one of those things we consume in some quantity, and I think for a whole summer of cultivation we'd probably end up with about a week's worth of potatoes. For whatever reason, I just don't think I'm going to try those this year. I suspect that ultimately it'll be a process of trial and error. I just hope I'm not already too late in planning this. Some of this stuff you're supposed to start indoors right about now. We shall see how it goes. ____Not the real rusty I admit it I'm old and boring. ____Not the real rusty No gophers A nice advantage of having such a cut-off ecosystem is that I know exactly what animals exist here. Wanna know the weirdest thing? No squirrels. None at all. There is not a single squirrel on this island. A very few red chipmunks, lots of mice, but no squirrels. Also no gophers so I'm good on that front. Good advice about the poles. If necessary I can make sturdy poles by ripping some building studs. I've never been very impressed by the sturdiness of those silly little green things they sell in garden stores. ____Not the real rusty Pests Here on the island, deer and slugs will be the major pests. When I was little, there were no deer here at all. Then maybe ten years back, a few swam over from another island, and reproduced. There was no pressure on them, and space is pretty limited, so the population inevitably exploded. About five years ago, it got really bad. The deer literally ate everything -- there are still remnants of those days around, entire yards stockaded in deer fencing. The state finally started managing the population, so there's not so many now, but I think they will still be a problem. I will probably have to put up tall netting. There's plenty of easier stuff for them to eat, so it doesn't really have to be a strong fence, just tall and present. The slugs are the other biggie. We have a large population of enormous slugs. I will be trying the beer in bowls thing, because there is no earthly way I will be able to actually hand-pick all of the slugs. I hope that works. About starting, it's been a hard winter this year. We're approaching the beginning of this zone's supposed "average date of last frost," and there's still plenty of standing snow on the ground. I think it's going to be a late-starting season. Which is lucky because I really can't do squat till April. I'm going to be gone for much of the rest of March. For the things you start inside, how long do you usually let them grow before transplanting outside? Or is it too variable to really say? ____Not the real rusty But it's for the work Doing this just for the food produced would probably be dumb. I mean, at the time stuff will be ripening, I will probably be able to buy veggies that are just as good, if not better. But in the same way that I bake my own bread, despite living very close to the best damn bakery east of the Mississippi, I want to grow things for the experience of growing them. I want to find out how to start with a seed and end up with something I can eat. You know? I'm sure eventually I will figure out what's good and what's not, but this year it's really just about experience. It almost doesn't matter what I grow, so long as it's something. I am looking forward to those tomatoes though. :-) And thank you for all the helpful advice! ____Not the real rusty Jeez An island in Maine isn't enough for you? Demanding! ____Not the real rusty They've gotta learn sometime I think all of us probably have an "I did this incredibly stupid and painful thing when I was little" story. I laid my full palm against a blazing woodstove when I was about five, for example. Never did that again. :-) If it makes you feel any better, think back to your most painful experience. You can remember what happened, what you did, and what happened later. But try to remember what it felt like. Try to remember the actual pain. I bet you can't. Humans seem to be fortuitously built so that we can recall the fact of pain, but not the actual experience of it. We can learn from it without having to relive it. Your kid will be just fine. ____Not the real rusty Heh Thinking about it, this is how I write code too. From a software development methodology standpoint, it is wrong. But all of your points are true, and if you've given a good amount of thought to the problem beforehand, there's no reason you can't wind up in the same place as you would have if you'd gone at it from the other end. I personally find it much harder to write all the backend stuff blind and then try to put an interface on it. ____Not the real rusty Authoritative source? Jesus, don't let the Scoop hackers hear you talking like that. I even said it was definitely wrong. :-) What email? Oh, that one. I will do it in a bit. Sorry for the delay. ____Not the real rusty It's still silly I believe that Blogger was already stomping Userland before any of this Google stuff happened. I agree with C4L that Winer's being pretty petty in deciding not to use Google because they bought one of his competitors. And it's not even just a personal pettiness, really. What he's saying is "It was my word of mouth that made you Google, and I can revoke that if I don't like how you decide to expand your business." I think that's basically bullshit. It was word of mouth that made Google, but it was word of mouth based on Google being prohibitively the best search engine. They still are, and Winer's personal reasons for disliking them (whcih I still don't really understand) don't make a damn bit of difference. People have already been fleeing Userland stuff like rats from a sinking ship, because it's technologically the worst choice out there. If he wants to blame Google, I guess that's his choice. But it doesn't make any kind of rational sense. I doubt any of the two MT employees feel threatened by this either, by the way. MT is a different kind of thing from Blogger. While people do move from one to the other, they're not exactly competitors. They're totally different approaches to the same basic problem. ____Not the real rusty The *evil* midnight bomber ...you meant. I used to have a whole bunch of wav clips from The Tick. The EMBWBAM had all the best lines. "I got leeegs, baby... yeah.... I'm all over the place!" ____Not the real rusty whois Does whois also disavow all knowlege of kuro5hin.org? Probably. Standard whois has been acting weird since .org got turned over to the new administrators. ____Not the real rusty Ironically Your copyright is less restrictive than the "no notice" default. If you had posted no copyright notice at all, your article would have been only available for viewing from this website, which is the only right K5 reserves. All other use and all ownership rights remain with you. There's basically no way to post a copyright notice that is more restrictive than any article here without one. ____Not the real rusty Point and laugh Featured on Pirated Sites today, K5 is ripped off by some lame Spanish site. The best part? They have a "do not copy" right-click popup. Ha! Losers. Ha! That's funny. I did send an email, basically just saying "you're really lame." No response. ____Not the real rusty The bridge And why the hell keep the bridge icon? Yeah, like it makes all kinds of sense for us. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Nope We set cookies the old fashioned way, like grandpa did it. What probably happened is that the existing cookie expired, and for some reason it's not clearing the way for K5 to set a new one. I'd suggest you find and delete any k5 cookie you might have, double check that the site's allowed to set one, and restart the browser. ____Not the real rusty Cook it your damn self I'm thinking about an occasional series of articles on the general subject of how you can purchase less packaged food. There are a lot of basic staples that most people buy that can be easily made at home. The advantages are numerous, including saving money, creating less packaging trash, knowing (and controlling) what ingredients went into your food, the fun and satisfaction of cooking, and having fresher, better-tasting food. In fact, I think I already started this series with my article on stuffing. But there are lots of other things that can be better made at home than bought, like bread, cookies, soups and stews, all kinds of stuff. What food do you buy that you shouldn't? So what packaged, prepared foods do you buy all the time? What do you wish you knew how to make? Our favorite things, and candidates for articles so far, are: Bread: staple of life. You cannot reasonably claim to be self-sufficient if you don't know how to make bread. Soup: The vast majority of people think soup is a thing that comes in cans. But not only is homemade soup easy and quick, it's so much better than the canned stuff. And if you have a freezer, you can replicate the convenience of canned soup in a snap. Chocolate chip cookie ice-cream sandwiches: Our favorite dessert by a pretty wide margin. Two big chocolate chip cookies with a thick layer of vanilla ice cream in the middle. You can make a bunch of these and freeze them. And goddamn, are they good. Pizza (and calzones): Chain pizza is an abomination. Learn to make your own, you'll never go back. The calzones are even better. I'm sure there's more. Would this be interesting to you? Think about your shopping habits -- what kinds of prepared foods do you buy all the time? I'm pretty sure there's obvious ones that I'm overlooking. Also, vote in the poll. Ha No. Partly it's just living on the island, we have exactly zero delivery-food choices, so I had to learn how to make stuff like pizza and whatnot. And then with the overall poverty, we had to figure out how to cut down on expenses wherever possible. Cooking from scratch is way cheaper than buying packaged stuff. Way, way, way cheaper. It also involves generally less shopping. Once a month we lug home big bags of staples, so weekly shopping is mostly just fresh veggies and stuff that doesn't keep. You just wait till I start growing my own vegetables! :-) ____Not the real rusty Finding a few hours a week If you think you could find a couple of hours a week where you'll basically be at home (Sundays? Doing homework?) you can make a bunch of things and freeze them. I make bread on Sunday, and most of the bread-making process is just sitting around waiting for it to rise. You could get it started, the sit down and read that chapter for your next class, then attend to the dough... and so on. It provides a nice break if you're doing other stuff. Soup is another one that's good for busy people who can carve out an hour or two on Sunday. Make a great big batch and throw it in Tupperware in the fridge. All week, whenever you get hungry just scoop out a bowl and nuke it. The idea is basically to find a little time where you can prepare a large amount of stuff that will keep for easy cooking later, when you're exhausted and hungry. Things like casseroles, lasangna, and so on are also good. Most of them you can even freeze, and cook them whenever you feel like it. I'm not really getting this across well, but the idea is to figure out how you can have homemade convenience food. It doesn't have to be one or the other! All you need are a few good recipes and one day a week that you're mostly at home. ____Not the real rusty Ten bucks! Jesus, man, learn to love the dried bean aisle! :-) Seriously, dried beans are like 50 cents a bag. I think we use about four bags total for a big pot 'o' chili. The only drawback is you have to remember to throw them in water the night before to soak. But ten people's worth of chili shouldn't cost more than $5. As for the fish thing, that's good stuff. It's amazing how good you can eat when you actually start trying to eat cheaply. Here's another tip: explore the infinite possibilities of cabbage. In our house, one head of cabbage typically lasts a month, and contributes to five or six meals. ____Not the real rusty Mmmmm latkes We just discovered latkes. Mmmmm. Latkes. And soba noodles. Man, I'm getting hungry. ____Not the real rusty Pasta I've made pasta a couple of times, and actually come to the conclusion that it's not worth it unless you're into the preparation or really want the improved quality of fresh pasta. Unlike most other foods, packaged dried pasta is cheaper than it would be if you made it yourself (we get the five-pound bags of rotini and ziti, which cost less than three bucks each), and also doesn't really have any sketchy ingredients in it (it's just flour and water, basically). Making pasta is somewhat tricky and definitely time-consuming. Homemade pasta is good, no doubt about it. But the gist of my idea here is things that make economic or health-related sense to make yourself, and I can't find any justification for either in pasta. Besides all of that, I'm not very good at making pasta, so I wouldn't be particularly qualified to write that article. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah It is much better tasting, absolutely. And don't get me wrong, there's no reason in the world not to make your own pasta. All I'm saying is that the nub of my gist here was easy and cheap ways to cut back on prepared foods, and making your own pasta, which a good way to have better pasta and not buy the dried stuff, doesn't fit the requirements of "almost as easy" or "cheaper." By all means, make pasta! I'm just probably not going to be writing any articles about it. I'm not any kind of an expert on the subject anyway, I've only done it like twice. ____Not the real rusty Ice cream I occasionally make my own, though not as much as I should. The biggest problem is that my ice cream maker is too small. I really, really, really like ice cream. If I could make about 4 gallons of it at a shot, I'd probably always make it myself. But I can only make about a pint at a time right now. I can easily eat a pint of ice cream at one time, so I'm looking at like two hours of work for one serving of food. It's hard to justify that. If I did the cookie sandwich article, I'd probably include a good french vanilla ice cream recipe, but we usually just buy a tub of Breyer's or whatever for them. Cookies you should totally make yourself. Chocolate chip cookies can literally be made during commercial breaks while you're watching TV (I've done it. Several times). They're just no work at all, and so good. ____Not the real rusty sneak cookie preview This is based on the classic Toll House cookie recipe, but I have adjusted some of the quantities of stuff through long trial and error to come up with a softer cookie. You may need to convert some measurements to local units. What you need: 2 cups of flour 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp (and a pinch) salt 1 cup butter (2 sticks -- real unsalted butter, not margarine) 3/4 cup white sugar 1 cup packed brown sugar 2 eggs 1 bag (about 12 oz) chocolate chips 1 tsp vanilla extract What you do: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees (F) Mix up the flour, baking soda, and salt in a big bowl. Soften the butter a bit, and beat it thoroughly with both sugars and the vanilla until it's a creamy light-brown paste Add the eggs, one at a time, beating in between Stir in the flour/baking soda/salt mixture from step two Stir in the chocolate chips On a sheet pan, put blobs of about a heaping tablespoon in size, maybe a little more, with decent spacing in between them. Bake for about nine minutes, then check them. When the cookies are done, they should be round and poufy-looking, evenly light golden in color with perhaps slightly darker edges. If the middles are darker than the surrounding area, and look kind of oily, then they're not done yet. They will be very soft to the touch, almost like whipped cream or foam. If they're not done at nine minutes, check every minute because the line between "perfect" and "overcooked" is very thin. They won't take more than 11 minutes. Take them out of the oven and let them cool until they hold together enough to pick up (at least 5 or 10 minutes). Eat with milk. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ingredients come in bulk Generally raw ingredients come in sizes which will make a whole lot of different meals from one package. Packaged prepared food will always have at least one package per meal, and often is over-packaged (boxed and bagged, for example). Over the last year, my wife and I have been cooking a lot more from scratch and (as the person who takes out the trash) I have noticed that we've cut our trash output roughly in half. ____Not the real rusty Buy in bulk anyway I mean, there are some things that it just makes sense to buy in bulk. Spaghetti? Buy as much of it at one time as they sell. Dried spaghetti will never, ever go bad. It will sit in your pantry till doomsday and be just as edible. Same with dried beans, and rice. Flour, given proper storage, will last just about forever. There are lots of things that are just a waste of money to buy in small quantities, no matter how little you might use at one time. ____Not the real rusty Keep it sealed Yeah, you can't keep rice in the bag. We got a big pottery jar with a rubber sealing gasket around the lid for rice storage. As long as you put it in something that will keep the beasties out, it'll last forever. ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't it get damp? Fridges tend to be more humid than ambient air. Unless you sealed it up, wouldn't it get damp in there? And if you were going to seal it in something anyway, might as well just be on a shelf then, no? ____Not the real rusty Meal size One problem is your meal size. You should either make enough for a meal and a reasonable amnount of leftovers, or just enough for one meal and chuck the remainder. Since you're cooking anyway, the smartest thing to do is make three times as much as you'd normally make, split it in three when you're done, freeze two of the parts (individually) and eat the third. For the same effort as cooking one meal, you've cooked three meals, and the frozen ones will last till whenever you feel like eating them. ____Not the real rusty Yes And my stuffing article. I enjoy reading them, and writing them is a bit of a break from harder stuff, hence the idea. Haven't done one yet, but hopefully the urge will grab me. I'm going to spend most of Monday traveling, so perhaps I'll put one together then. ____Not the real rusty Homogeneity ...is also one thing Germany has no shortage of. Don't expect a wild and swinging time, with lots of people all over the political spectrum and all kinds of people from all over the world. Germany is a much more homogenous culture than the US. ____Not the real rusty Er, and also You should go live somewhere else for a while, if you want to know what it's like. I totally agree with mjs. Just don't take the big leap of abandoning your citzenship before you're really positive. That's something you should only do for a positive reason ("I really want to be a citizen of Europistan!") not a negative one ("I dislike the way my life is right now..."). ____Not the real rusty Snow Moon Actually, the link says "we are now four days past the Snow Moon," not "the full Snow Moon." It's using "snow moon" to refer to the entire cycle of that moon, and if the moon was new four days ago, then we are four days past the end of its cycle. ____Not the real rusty Your sig Liar! I never said "I always start my day off by reading Bob's blog." Oh, crap. ____Not the real rusty I'm a "snarky little bitch" I tossed off a cheerfuly sarcastic one-liner in this metafilter thread yesterday, to the effect that the San Francisco city government under Willie Brown is hopelessly corrupt. Last I knew it was, and I don't see any reason why that would have changed. Don't get me wrong though, I don't live there anymore, and totally don't care. I didn't even remember making the comment. So I didn't even know what he was talking about for several hours when I got this email from Ed Champion, the "ed" who started that thread. Read on, it's a hoot! Subject: What have YOU done lately? Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 15:01:03 -0800 From: Edward Champion To: rusty Rusty: A few facts: I have participated in at least 65 rallies in the past five years. In 1999, I spent a good deal of my own money to pass out fliers for Ammiano and distributed them every day during rush hour in the Montgomery and Embarcdero station for three weeks before the election, not only passing out leaflets, but asking people to reconsider their vote and persuading more than a few to do so. I'd like to think that Ammiano's advance to the runoff AS A FRIGGIN' WRITE-IN CANDIDATE had a lot to do with me doing this. In 2000, I canvassed for Nader, disseminating thousands of fliers in the Mission, Inner Sunset and Haight Ashbury areas. I talked with people there too and got them to reconsider their vote. Even had a run-in for the Gore people, who were misinforming voters that Al was against the death penalty, and changed THEIR votes to Nader. I have called, faxed and emailed representatives and candidates on the local, state and federal levels. Spoken to a few of them on the phone. To be short, you snarky little bitch, in the spare time I've had (which isn't much), I have bent over backwards to make an effort, while you have sat comfortably in the ramparts of Kuro5hin, under the aegis of "community," lobbing these "fools" with mortar. Sure, politics is driven primarily by corruption, as Robert Caro's LBJ biographies can teach even the most dunderheaded progressive. And yes, I'm one of those political freaks who researches every goddam issue and office before I vote for it, from the most visible local measure right down to the smallest judge. But what I am doing is exercising my duty as a citizen to vote responsibly and vote often. What I am doing is trying to get people excited, passionate and interested enough to actually use their fucking representative voices. (And, boy, are there a LOT of dolts out there, PARTICULARLY at rallies.) What I am doing is stretching my meager representative voice as far as it will go in the time I have. And this isn't even my top priority in life. In short, I have tried to make a small difference, in manners fervent though largely unannounced. And I've learned a lot about the reality versus the idealism along the way. Even so, the grim truth still hasn't stopped me. Indeed, I'm zealous enough to get off on this shit. So answer me this. What the hell have YOU done lately to effectuate change? And don't give me the bullshit "kuro5hin is a community that promotes discussion of issues" argument. I'm talking about what have you been doing in the real fucking world to do something about things. Not amused, despite your smiley face, Ed Now that my mind is at ease about what the email was supposed to be about to begin with, I can say that the answer to "what have I done lately" is, unfortunately, precious little. I'm always kinda jealous of people who spend time working in the political process, and I hope that I can join them, when and if I figure out what I can believe in firmly enough to work for it in that way. I'm getting there, I think. I'm not sure why my snarky comment elicited this rant, but it is an inspiring one. I wrote back -- twice actually. The first time in total befuddlement to simply ask what brought that email to my inbox. But the second, after I'd figured it out, to ask if he did in fact not think the S.F. city government under Willie Brown was hopelessly corrupt. And to reassure him that I ultimately didn't care either way. I don't know why he took the original comment to mean I thought he was... insufficiently committed to politics, or something. In closing, I would finally like to snarkily point out that if you canvassed for Nader in 2000, you probably shouldn't go around bragging about it. I did Does it always dress that gay, or was it in costume for Mardi Gras already? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Whoah drunk on a Friday night in Lakewood, Ohio type gay Is that what the kids are calling it these days? ____Not the real rusty Hah I appreciate the backhanded compliment. :-) I don't think K5 will ever become my personal propaganda platform, except insofar as it already has. The only thing I can definitely put my whole support behind is people arguing about what's important to them, and that is generally what goes on here, though sometimes it makes us all crazy. ____Not the real rusty I doubt that Or at least if K5's existence has any influence on politics, it's extremely vague and diffuse, in the sense of exposing people to ideas they may not have otherwise seen. At least I hope some of that still happens, even if it doesn't appear that way. But actually working for a candidate seems like it has more likelihood of directly affecting the political process to me. When you get right down to it, the number of people involved in American politics is pretty small, and we would be better off if more people made it their business. ____Not the real rusty It's no troll! I expected that maybe people would get riled up a little, but no part of this is in any way untrue. And the rant, when it's not attacking me for things I didn't say, has a lot of good points. It had me alternately giggling and pondering all day, and I thought it deserved a wider audience. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I was kind of puzzled about the "what do you do in the real world" thing myself. I mean, Ed's been a blogger for a while, and talks on MeFi pretty often. He even starts threads there, which I think I've only done once. I guess the comparison was that I don't work in politics as well as working online, which he didn't know was true, but it was a lucky guess because it is true. Your take on San Francisco, though, pretty much mirrors mine. I'm glad I spent some time there, but I'm also glad I left. It was most definitely not my kind of place. I think Ed fits in well though, so different strokes and all that. ____Not the real rusty No, no He means the thousand times Nader would have to run to stand any statistical chance of winning. ____Not the real rusty I would consider it a compliment In the past, I'd just try and try to be snarky, but somehow everyone always thought it was just cute. Damn, how I wish I was going to SXSW this year. I could tell everyone that Ed Champion called me a (and I quote!) "snarky little bitch" and watch them turn just mauve with envy. ____Not the real rusty Hmm I went to the Interactive part last year, which was a lot of fun. I have no opinion about the film and music parts, other than I've heard they're way bigger and infested with industry sleaze. Luckily the "interactive" industry collapsed, so it was a lot of wiseass bloggers, for the most part. They really would turn mauve with envy. They all aspire to being snarky bitches too. ____Not the real rusty Podunk politics As far as political activism is concerned, it occurs to me that Rusty's little political wanksville in cyberspace has probably has more long-term effect than any possible amount of hands-on activism that could be accomplished in Podunk Isle, Maine. The irony, of course, is that when I started K5 I lived in Washington, DC. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not politics in general, just Willie Brown I was compelled to write... because I was vexed by the black-and-white inference that an activist could not protest while knowingly recognizing politics as a force that is mostly corrupt. That's quite a long way beyond the intent of my original comment. What I meant (insofar as I meant anything) was that Willie Brown's SF government has long been recognized as one of the most corrupt in the country. Your thread seemed like you were shocked or disgusted by their recent actions, or even surprised a little. I was mockingly pointing out that no excess by that bunch of bosses would ever surprise me, nor should it surprise anyone. What I didn't mean was that politics as a whole is corrupt, which (call me Pollyanna) I don't believe it generally is. I think politics, like news reporting, is one of those occupations that everyone loves to deride, but most people doing it are probably doing it for the right reasons, and doing the best they can. In short, get off your ass and do something about it. That I definitely agree with. ____Not the real rusty No flame war He decided to close his account. Time to move on, I think was the reason. He may or may not still be around under a different name, but JCB is retired. ____Not the real rusty I am But whatever. ____Not the real rusty Pushing human limits If you want more info, links and thoughts/argument on this stuff, MetaFilter has had a couple three threads on ana stuff. Searching for likely words will probably dig them up. I'm a pretty avid reader of polar exploration stories. I've read probably two dozen polar disaster accounts, from the wreck of the Karluk to Scott's ill-fated south pole attempt, and many in between. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but I will basically read anything that has to do with the subject of polar exploration. What fundamentally drives all of these stories, and what I think I keep going back to them for, is that they all show various permutations of what happens when humans beings are pushed to their absolute limits. For some of them, it's cold. For others, it's lack of food. Soemtimes it's the cold, lack of food, and lack of water. But in one way or another, humanity's quest for the poles is a long story of finding and overcoming (or succumbing to) the ultimate limits, of both geography and life. Actually, that aspect of your book was one of the things I most liked about it. I would make a guess that we've all got that drive buried somewhere down inside us. It just comes out differently for everyone. For some people, finding their limits becomes a deeply self-destructive act, like these ana girls. Are they so different, though, from the X-Treme sports enthusiasts who routinely kill themselves in avalanches, or from people who attempt to climb Mt. Everest? Or from Robert Falcom Scott, for that matter? I don't know. I want to say they are, but part of me isn't at all sure. ____Not the real rusty The only sensible strategy The only realistic strategy for MS (and any software company) is to identify what they want to be good at, and then be the best at that. Quit trying to "fight" Linux, figure out what your markets are, and then make sure that you are creating the best software for those markets. That's all. If you are losing ground to Linux (or Mac, or anyone) in a particular market, figure out why customers aren't choosing your products, and remedy the problem. Sometimes, you might find out that customers aren't choosing your products because they cost money and Linux doesn't, and there is no paying customer base in that market. If that's the case, then either come up with something so amazing that everyone will start paying money for it again, or just abandon that market as hopelessly commoditized. My advice for linux hackers, incidentally, is the same. If you care about beating Microsoft, pick a market and make linux the best software for it. I agree with you, most of us could utterly care less about what MS does or doesn't do. In that case, just make the code that you need, and let the rather dull world of software business take care of itself. I write open source code because I like having other people fix bugs for me, and because I'm not interested in selling software for a living. That's all. It has nothing to do with what any software company does. I'm not in the software business. As far as markets go, I should be ignored. :-) ____Not the real rusty My grandmother says that Also "padaydahs" for potatoes. I think it's the most charming thing ever, but she seems to be the last generation of that particular dialect. ____Not the real rusty Truly it is The Crossroads Of America I personally think Indiana got that nickname because it's practically impossible to drive cross-country without having to spend a night in Indiana. I'm not sure how that happens, but I've never managed to avoid it yet. ____Not the real rusty Bob and Doug Mackenzie Is where the American idea that Canadians say "eh?" a lot comes from. Where they got it, I have no idea. ____Not the real rusty Dialects I've always been fascinated by accents and dialects. My parents love to tell the story of how three-year-old rusty would bring his friends to his father and make him say "chair" ("chay-yuh") and "car" ("cah") for their listening amusement. My parents both grew up in Massachusetts, and my Dad has a very strong Mass/Maine accent (his parents are both from Maine) while my mother has almost no accent, just a very slight trace of a New England accent if you're good at hearing them. The rest of her family have fairly pronounced suburban-Boston accents, but she didn't get much of it. I don't have any accent in particular, though I do speak a little oddly. When people guess where I'm from at all, the most common guess is Canada. I have never been able to figure out why, but it happens with some regularity. I lived in Plymouth from age 0-2, then New Jersey (Tom's River) from 2-4, then back to Plymouth for the rest. My parents think the two years of New Jersey happened at a crucial time while I was developing language and thus I didn't get a Mass accent, but I think I've just always been very sensitive to accents and kind of molded myself a generic American one from TV. ____Not the real rusty The comments Reports have the comments being things like "This war is unjust, and your daddy is wrong for participating in it." They're not talking about vague political opinions, but specific criticism of some kids parents because they are in the military, and just got shipped out to the Gulf. So you're a third grader, and your Mommy's gone, and will be gone for who knows how long, and might not come back at all, and your teacher is telling you your Mommy's off fighting for the forces of evil. That shit's wrong, and I'm embarrassed to see my state making the news for this. ____Not the real rusty Update: Probably slanted I think I'm a victim of right-wing spin. The Press Herald paints a rather different picture, as linked below. I believe them more than my previous info. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty Shelley Powers Having been involved in an event Powers ranted about (amusingly inaccurately) in the past, I have no respect for her grasp of (or interest in) facts whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that if the facts don't suit her opinion, new facts are made up that do. I agree with some of the things she said in that long-winded ramble, and disagree with others, but the whole thing can be covered by the old saw "even a stopped clock is right twice a day." As for blogs vs. journalism: blah blah blah-de-fucking-blah. What's kind of sad is that I'm actually in the process of writing an article for OJR that will touch on this whole stupid sickening and apparently infinite debate. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about that. I do know I'm having a hard time with the article, and it's probably because I so deeply loathe the entire argument. It's the Israel vs. Palestine of net media, where the only sane response is "Shut up! You're all a bunch of gibbering idiots!" On an entirely different note, I like how you maintain your diary here as a more or less independent blog. That makes me happy. Please keep doing it. :-) ____Not the real rusty I know what you mean And you know that what you have to do is basically just suck it up and pretend you're over it till you really are. But I've been there too, and I know how you feel. Incidentally, the less you see the lesbo-ex the better off you'll be. If she were to, say, move ot another country, that would be even better. And welcome back. Where you been? ____Not the real rusty Damn that book House of Leaves was one of those books that I loved to read, but hated because I wish I had the kind of talent to write it. I so don't. I bow down in awe at the artistry of the entire Danielewski family (his sister is the pop singer Poe). ____Not the real rusty antiwar.com My eyes! They burn! That site looks like some ugly that got left out in the sun too long, and then got smacked right in the ugly with a giant bucket of ugly. It's so ugly that I asked ugly what it thought, and ugly even said "Goddamn that shit's ugly!" If ugly was monkeys. that site would be covered with monkeys. Ugly, ugly monkeys. ____Not the real rusty Oh. My. God. The ugly monkeys have struck again! Damn you, monkeys! ____Not the real rusty No They have special message boards where they hang out, and links to serious publications are marked "NSFP". ____Not the real rusty Dunno Last I heard he was working at a computer store in Saskatoon. I haven't heard much from him either. ____Not the real rusty Bah Maine as a whole is massively opposed to any war. If you walk around Portland and pick a shop at random, chances are extremely good that it has an anti-war sign of some sort up. The state legslature was considering an anti-war resolution. I'm not sure if they passed it or not, but at the time they were the first state government even thinking about it. If that story is true, though, those teachers should be fired, and any other school anywhere that might hire them should be informed why they were let go. There's no excuse for that, no matter what your politics. ____Not the real rusty Where? My keyboard is totally shot, but I'm way too cheap to spend actual money on a new one. Where can you find these things used? ____Not the real rusty Find a readership? They've got 53,000 paying subscribers. What they need is a cash tourniquet, or the balls to declare bankruptcy and get out of their ridiculous office lease. On balance I'd like to see Salon live, but I won't really care if it goes under either. It'll have been nobody's fault but theirs, in the end. ____Not the real rusty The US is big Europe is tiny. Stuff here is really far apart, and we've got to get all of our crap from sea to shining sea in trucks, which run on gas. If the US government jacked up fuel taxes to European levels, consumer goods prices would skyrocket, and the economy would basically collapse. We don't have the luxury of being able to drive through three countries in an afternoon. The whiners that local TV news is always able to find at the gas pump, standing there in front of their 10mpg Cadillac Behemothosaur, can safely be ignored. People everywhere complain about everything all the time. But that is basically why gas here is so mch cheaper than it is there. ____Not the real rusty A day or so? Quite a lot of us would have to drive for more than 30 hours straight to hit a non-English-speaking country. I'm not really counting Quebec here, since it would be difficult to spend any time there without being able to speak English. Basically you have to head to Mexico, which would take me even longer than 30 hours, I think. ____Not the real rusty Er, yeah I violently agree. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ok, "collapse" might be a bit much It would hurt though. Actually the spike in gas prices is hurting some smaller shipping companies right now. The ones that don't operate on a national scale are having a hell of a time keeping business, as they don't have the kind of reserves to take a price hit and stay in competition with the big boys. They can't afford to ship stuff when they're going to lose money every mile, and they can't raise their prices in the face of larger competitors who don't have to yet. So I was kind of mentally extrapolating from that. Theoretically, a sustained increase in fuel prices would force many smaller carriers under, leaving the field to the big guys. Of course, as soon as there's little competition, they're free to raise prices however much they like, and then it starts to filter into consumer costs. I have no idea how long this would take or what kind of thresholds it would require, it's just a thought. P.S.: Being the guy who started the site doesn't make me any smarter than anyone else. I'm sorry you had to have your bubble burst so cruelly. :-) ____Not the real rusty Inspector pullouts The real problem in this situation that I think everyone can agree on is that the UN let their inspectors get kicked out in the 90s. The inspectors were pulled out by the UN and Bill Clinton, when Clinton wanted to launch missile strikes in punishment for Iraq's continued non-compliance. They weren't "kicked out," they left because we were sick of the shell game. ____Not the real rusty Good justification for war Listen to this episode (first in the list, "Why We Fight") of This American Life (RealAudio link). The prologue and first segment contain perhaps the best arguments against the war I've heard yet, and the second and third segments contain the best arguments for the war I've heard. Listen to it. Whatever you ultimately decide, you will learn something. ____Not the real rusty Well There's this Adible thing that costs $2.95. I can't find where to get transcripts. C'mon, this is as good an excuse to get Real fixed as you'll ever have. It is worth it. ____Not the real rusty International invasion farce I would try to draw up the proportion of ground troops to make up a high percentage of neighbouring and culturally sensitive peoples as soldiers. What I mean is less Americans, no Israelis or Iranians, and lots of soldiers from Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, France, China, Indonesia, etc. So you'd only be happy if the war was a lot longer, bloodier, and more difficult? I'm perplexed. FWIW, the American troops generally don't want to fight alongside our allies, because they slow us down. The military world is really weird right now. Basically the US has a 21st century military, and everyone else has an early-to-mid 20th century military at best. There's a huge gap between the US (and to some extent the UK, though not in all areas) and everyone else in terms of military equipment, strategy, and capabilities. Sending your United Armies of Benetton in there would be like fighting Vietnam again -- the best equipped of your candidates are still right there in the 1970's. That means crude weapons that hit whatever they happen to hit, lots more friendly-fire deaths, and a lot more brute force fighting rather than precision strategy. No, the US military isn't perfect, there will be accidents, screw-ups and snafus. But on a relative scale, we'll do it a lot cleaner and faster than anyone else could. And a final point about Iraqi resistance and morale. An army composed of a lot of different countries that don't like each other, share no common languages, and have equipment that isn't much better than Iraq's would seem like a much more beatable enemy than the utter hellbroth of futuristic shit the US has to deploy. I know who I'd rather face. I'm not real interested in arguing the pros and cons of war, I just wanted to inject a little fact into your military assumptions. :-) ____Not the real rusty The seige of Baghdad is the worst scenario Arguing whether the USA should go to war is far beyond any point of useful discussion right now You got that right. I do find information about the actual people involved, likely tactics, and so forth interesting. The actual war is a fact. It'll start next month, barring a really surprising event, like Saddam's assassination or something. The rest of that argument is pointless. What I am concerned about is that Iraq takes up the strategy of retreating to Baghdad and fighting guerrilla warfare style in that urban setting. This seems like it will be the most likely thing to happen. The majority of Iraqi troops have no training, no loyalty or love for Saddam, and no interest in fighting Americans. The outlying troops will surrender as soon as it's clear they have that option. I think right now they think the Americans just want to kill them all, but it should become clear pretty fast that surrender is as welcome a choice for us as it is for them. But Saddam's pulling the few loyal troops he's got back to Baghdad, and most information supports the theory that he will try to hold Baghdad with whatever he's got. Some news reports are talking about the creation of a "chemical fence" of VX nerve agent all the way around Baghdad, to prevent any civilians from leaving (alive) and make it tougher for the American troops to get in. This would be ugly. The only question in my mind is how long the Republican Guard and the regular Iraqi army will hold out in this type of combat. The question on my mind is much more how long our leaders will be willing to wait, keep their cool, and use conventional weapons in the face of chemical or biological resistance. My biggest fear right now is that if we are faced with a scenario of beseiging Baghdad, that the US will get impatient and just flatten the whole city with tactical nukes. I dearly hope they understand that a victory with massive civilian casualties will not be any victory at all. If we're going to try to do this, we have got to do it right, and spare absolutely no effort to protect the lives of Iraqi civilians. ____Not the real rusty Weirdo :-) ____Not the real rusty Awww I haven't played paintball in frigging years. I have to drag my friends out this summer for a day. What a kick-ass game that is. :-) ____Not the real rusty Quicktime on Linux Like probably many of you, I believed that here in my linux ghetto I would never be able to see all those amusing and informative Quicktime movie clips that them blog kids always seem to be passing around. But it's not true! CodeWeavers makes a little Wine-based utility that lets you install windows browser plugins and apps (inclding QuickTime) on Linux. And it actually works. I suppose this seems like spam, but I have no relation to them, I just tried the product and am eminently pleased. I think it's so rad that I'm gratuitously exploiting K5's googlejuice to promote them a little. The Pros: It's easy to install and configure. They've done a good job making it so that actual humans could conceivably install the bastard. Supports lots of previously windows-only plugins, like Shockwave director, Flash 6, and most importantly Quicktime, for which there will never ever ever be a native linux plugin. Just works. A refreshing and unusual experience. The Cons: The free version has a really annoying nagware popup. Costs $25. IMO it's worth it. I will probably actually pay to register my copy, if I can convince my wife to release the princely sum of 25 dollars to my custody. Erm I think my ass is a little damp now. ;-) Actually, I haven't searched, but I have this feeling that CodeWeavers has advertised here. The name seems familiar. But maybe I've heard of them somewhere else. ____Not the real rusty Is fine I don't care what anyone uses. My working life is such that it makes a lot of sense for me to use linux (I develop software for it), and I generally like it. This quicktime thing was one of the few remaining nagging problems, so I'm pleased to have it solved. :-) ____Not the real rusty Alright, that's enough I hereby declare this thread to be closed, due to violations of the Geneva Nerd Humor Accords of 1915. ____Not the real rusty mplayer Much to my surprise, I actually got mplayer to install recently (never got any love from Xine), and use it for most forms of video. But I can't get any kind of gui to work with it, and the installation was such a nightmare (and it was my third or fourth attempt too) that I'm pretty much afraid to touch it again. This crossover thing took like 20 minutes from first download to completely working, and I've got the nice QuickTime plugin gui and everything. I think my shock and pleasure was from a lack of experience with any kind of video-on-linux application actually working in anything like a sane usable way. I've had much the same experience as JWZ in linux video, except he seems to have been able to get a lot more of them to even install in the first place then I have. I figure it's worth $25 easy to me not to have spent an entire night getting this thing to work. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well I have been (and still occasionally am) a professional programmer, though not in the "hard" languages. I'm at the very least an extremely competent linux user, and don't suffer from newbie kinds of problems. JWZ is certainly a programmer by anyone's standards, and he had the same kinds of problems. I don't hate GUIs, though, as much of the time they do exactly what I need to do. Do I really need to be able to remember command line switches for a frigging movie player? No, I so don't. I will never use it in anything other than a "play this movie" context. A GUI would help me. As it is, I have the command 'movie' mapped to a standard set of mplayer command switches to play things the way I generally want them played. But it's a hack I shouldn't have had to do. ____Not the real rusty Burn! I feel suitably scathed. ____Not the real rusty The slashdotting MOPI is strictly static html, and served straight off our lightweight apache proxies. K5 has enough hardware to serve probably many thousands of pages per second of static html, so a Slashdotting ain't no thing. What's impressive is when we manage to stand up to a slashdotting of a Scoop-generated page. :-) ____Not the real rusty oops wrong account. ____Not the real rusty Perfect Not finding any of you interesting definitely means that there's something wrong with kuro5hin. A classic. :-) ____Not the real rusty Attention DC-area K5ers As I mentioned before, I'm going to be in DC in March. Hypoluxa and wiredog both wanted to get together, and Hypoluxa suggested the world-famous Brickskellar, which like how can I resist? So I think I'm going to try to say March 10th, after dinner. I think probably between 8 and 9. Yeah, it's a Monday, but if you've got so much time to hang out here it's not like you're really all that hard-working, right? :-) Be there or... don't be there and regret it. Or something. Post a comment below if you think you can make it. We'll indulge in rampant beer snobbery and complain about the crappy chairs. It'll be a hootenanny, believe you me. I'm already planning my selections. I've learned not to confront that beer list cold anymore. It can be quite terrifying. PS Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. ____Not the real rusty My gravestone: 404 Rusty not found. ____Not the real rusty Hey You've been unusually reachable lately, haven't you? Done slacking off? ____Not the real rusty Good idea There might be some Germans around. Well, see you at the war. Bar! Bar! See you at the bar! ____Not the real rusty Oy And it's a depressngly bad review too. I mean, nice of them to point it out and all, but I sure hope people look beyond the review and actually give the book a try. ____Not the real rusty The review itself didn't really "review" I don't care what rating he gave it or anything like that. I just thought the review wasn't very good as a review. It was kind of just a list of plot elements, and seemingly randomly chosen ones at that. I have read the book and the review still didn't make very much sense to me. I meant the review wasn't well-written, not that it wasn't complimentary enough. ____Not the real rusty Camp X-Ray Those Benjamins are kneeling in the dirt in orange jumpsuits, and ain't no goddamn Amnesty International in Fidel's Cuba, pal. ____Not the real rusty I can see it now... Charles Darwin: So, we can clearly deduce, by observing this particular species of wren, that the male's beak has become better adapted to picking small worms out of the loamy soil of its native Scotland. Lesbian Japanese Monkeys: [fling poo] ____Not the real rusty The time is: Night I wish Linux had something that could tell me whether it was night or not. Someday Linux will approach the full-featured ease of use of Apple's revolutionary OS X. ____Not the real rusty Eh? I didn't even know the "euro" was a unit of weight measurement. Is that metric? ____Not the real rusty rusty, duxup, and wiredog The K5 Axis of Sanity. :-) ____Not the real rusty Let me amend "Axis of Relative Sanity." ____Not the real rusty OPP Yeah, you know me. Of course in this case that's "Other People's Problems." Like as in: Let the Europeans deal with their problems. And oh how I wish we could. But the thing about it is that if Iraq released a little smallpox in Germany, Lufthansa would instantly be winging it into the US. Today, there's no such thing as a contained smallpox outbreak in the developed world. It's kind of an all-or-nothing scenario. If that's actually a threat, then Europe be damned, we have to do something about it. And if that means inadvertently protecting a bunch of Europeans who hate us, well, there's worse things that could happen. ____Not the real rusty Aye Yes, hopefully. I won't be there for long, but I ought to have some time for possibly lunch on the 10th, or maybe dinner on the 11th. I'm not sure what the meeting schedule is, all I know now is that dinner on the 10th and probably all day the 11th I'm booked. ____Not the real rusty Dun dun Da-duh! Doodoodoo doo doo doodoodoo doo doo... [graphic] AMERICA'S NEW DOG TRAPPED ON ICY RIVER Welcome back to Fox News, I'm Shepard Smith... ____Not the real rusty Shep Smith That guy looks like an animatronic sociopath to me. Like some kind of axe murderer as imagined by Walt Disney -- "This is the psycho of the future!" Creepy. ____Not the real rusty That Bond movie I thought the invisible car thing was cool, but they screwed the pooch with it. At one point, Bond hides behind the invisible car. Think about that for a bit. As far as I'm concerned, you can have your invisible car if you want, I'll buy that. But I will simply not believe that the car is invisible and you can successfully hide behind it. It's one or the other, really. ____Not the real rusty Staring in disbelief at my willing suspension Like I said, I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief, to just about any extent. My only line is that you have to be internally consistent. What would have been a much better scene is if he'd instinctively tried to hide behind the car, only to have his image projected on to the front and the guys chasing him to be clearly able to see him. That would have given it a little humor, and maintained internal consistency. ____Not the real rusty No kidding He hides behind car, then you cut to the bad guys view, and get this hilarious image of Bond crouching in the snow in plain sight, looking all shifty, and just staring at them. They exchange a look, and then open fire, which of course bounces off the invisible car. Bond gets this total look of shock that they can see him, and then realization dawns, and he makes a getaway before they can figure out why he can seemingly repel bullets. There may have been plot reasons why t was important that he not be seen there, I don't remember, but for the sake of getting that scene in there, they shuld have rearranged it somehow. It would have been great. Instead, though, we got the stupid image of Bond successfully hiding behind an invisible car. Duh. ____Not the real rusty Before June 3, 2001 That's a specific as I can be. As of then, we added code to store the date a new account was made. All the accounts before that are just tagged with that date. But given the sub 2K UID, I'd say your guess of "within the first year" is probably right. Maybe near the end of the first year. ____Not the real rusty Helsinki "This isn't the past or the present anymore... this is the future." Are there any K5ers in Helsinki? It looks like I'm probably going to be headed out there in June. Also London. And I know there are London K5ers. So you lads start making the preparations now, as I expect to be shown a proper good time. I think after Helsinki we're going to try to sneak across to St. Petersburg too. This is going to be an interesting spring. Full rusty world tour schedule inside. Me, in the next few months: March 10-12: Washington, DC March 22-30: San Francisco, CA June 9-14: London, England (tentative) June 15-17: Helsinki, Finland (likely) June 18-20: St. Petersburg, Russia (very tentative) Other places I really want to go: Croatia: We'll see how the land mine situation shakes out. Cyprus: How's that truce holding these days? Algeria: Ah, the Casbah. I will go as soon as I will probably not be shot immediately for being western. Reykjavik Iceland: This one's pretty easy, actually. Will find a good excuse to go there someday. Prague, Czech Republic: I hear it's not the hip expat spot anymore. Sounds perfect to me. Vietnam: The food. Nepal: I know two people from Nepal. They are the two nicest people I've ever met in my entire life. This can't be a coincidence. New Zealand: The south island, probably. ...and everywhere else, really. The above are just some that come to mind. Where have you been? Where would you go back to? Krk Gotta love a town with no vowels at all. I was being snarky about the landmines, but I really do want to go there. It seems like now's the time, before most people realize how beautiful it is, and that you can buy a damn castle on the Adriatic for USD$40,000 if you don't mind doing a little fixing-up. My father-in-law might have some issues with us going, as he was forced to evacuate that area by the Nazis as a boy, and doesn't really talk about it much. Albania and Krakow are also on my list. Well, by "my list" I suppose I mean "places that exist in the world," but they're both places that are definitely under active consideration. I'm afraid an "Albania" stamp in my passport might get me tagged as a terrorist, but I might be confusing it with someplace else. And didn't we go to mock-war with them in Wag the Dog? ____Not the real rusty Nah I'm a totally opportunistic traveler. The only one of those trips I'm actually buying a ticket for is London. I'm probably driving to DC, Berkeley is flying me out to SF for a thing, and Nokia's flying me to Helsinki for another thing. So basically it's tickets to London for me and my wife (which are the cheapest you can get for transatlantic travel), and a ticket from London to Helsinki and back for her. If I had to pay for it, I could never afford to go anywhere. :-) ____Not the real rusty Trade Secret I'm selling out K5 to our new cellphone-toting Finnish overlords. I kid! It's just a geek meeting type thing. Sort of round two of this. I'm actually not sure whether Nokia's picking up my personal tab or not, but someone is. ____Not the real rusty I will Generally if I'm only gone for a day or two I let it take care of itself, but if I'm off for a week or more, I'll arrange for someone to keep an eye on things. ____Not the real rusty See #32 Here for financial explanation. I also didn't mention that I'm staying with friends in CA, family in DC, and friends in London. It's amazing how much cheaper traveling gets when you've got friends everywhere. But I assume you know that already. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Uh For some reason I thought I was replying to theantix, who is planning a long trip which will involve a lot of staying with acquaintances. So you may or may not know that already, I have no idea. ____Not the real rusty Mmm Austria Yep, that's another one. I think I've driven through part of Austria, on the way to the mountains in northern Italy. Yes, I definitely have. My biggest problem there is convincing my wife to go back to Europe. She's traveled all around Europe several times and really wants to go somewhere else. ____Not the real rusty Heh I told him I've stayed there so often I feel like I shuld be chipping in for utilities. :-) I'll have final arrival/departure dates pretty soon, by the way. ____Not the real rusty Beers at the Brick? Hells yeah. I think the only night I've got is probably Monday the tenth. I'm going out for dinner with the people I'm going down there to meet, but how about after that? It probably won't be too terribly late. If that's not good, I might be free Tuesday night. Send me an email. ____Not the real rusty Tanks at Heathrow Rather bizarre considering that AFAIK terrorists haven't ever attacked an airport. Well, as long as it makes the public afraid, I guess it's serving some purpose. On another note, I'm probably going to be in London in June. Round up the posse. :-) ____Not the real rusty But... It had the chick from XXX. How could it go wrong? ____Not the real rusty Well? Don't leave us hanging, man! How was it? ____Not the real rusty Probably Apple's Is Safari their Konqueror-based thing? Konq has never been particularly good about following javascript standards. But it ought to be backwards-compatble, so if you could use the dynamic stuff before and can't now, it's gotta either be a bug or a configuration thing. ____Not the real rusty Fixed amount per gallon Simply noted for clarity's sake. ____Not the real rusty Also The rising oil price tends to encourage less oil consumption, hence less tax income. Which makes no difference to any war effort since it's spent on roads and whatnot anyway, but it's another reason the theory makes no sense. ____Not the real rusty Except for see above ..about prices rising and consumption falling. I'm sure there's probably a graph somewhere that describes this, and there's probably a theoretical optimum price for everything, but I'm not an economist. You just can't assume that prices rising always means more income. ____Not the real rusty Meh I thought American Gods fell apart in the middle and never got back on track. I loved Neverwhere and Good Omens, if you'd like to check out some of Gaiman's better non-comics work. ____Not the real rusty Catcher in the Rye, eh? We'll be sending some well-dressed gentlemen over to visit you. ____Not the real rusty Turgid language? I think people are more inclined to be frightened by G.E.B. due to it's size and apparent density than is actually warranted by the writing. I read it in a weekend, and thought it was just about as close to a page-turner as such a book could ever possibly be. Infinite Jest seems to suffer the same kind of reputation-induced difficulty as well. It probably helped that I didn't know anything about either of them before reading them the first time, and thus didn't know enough to be afraid of them. :-) ____Not the real rusty Trapped in Pittsburgh Fat snow globs continue to sift down from a dusk sky that is exactly the same color as the blue-gray snow on the ground. The tangled leafless bamboo stand outside my window and the black tangle of bald tree branches beyond look like an ink drawing on the inside of an eggshell. The falling snow looks like goosedown. My wife is trapped in Pittsburgh, sharing a hotel room with college kids she met in the airport. She's like that -- she can meet people in an airport and talk to them. I never talk to anyone when I'm traveling. If I was trapped in Pittsburgh I'd be on my own. But I'd probably be equipped to spend a relatively comfortable night or three in just about any circumstances. There are people who prepare, and people who improvise, and what really matters is knowing which kind of person you are. I drove to Manchester, New Hampshire yesterday in vain hopes of picking her up at the airport there. Connecting flights from Pittsburgh were canceled, though, and I just had to drive back. I've driven in worse, but not much. Really I've driven in conditions that were just as bad on worse roads, and conditions that were slightly worse on better roads. I'm not sure where the two factors actually balance out, so I'd just put the drive in the top three worst snowy-weather drives, but I wouldn't want to rank them. In terms of sheer white-knuckle terror, none of the three hold a candle to the drive around Chicago at rush hour in the worst rain I've ever seen. Cars packed bumper to bumper going 70 miles an hour, rain so hard the wipers on high did nothing at all. The view out the windshield was just a lot of blurry red and white lights, in seemingly random patterns. We were in a Mazda Miata, which isn't that great on anything but dry roads to begin with. Big rigs on all sides, their tires towering above my soft fabric roof. I felt like a mouse in an elephant stampede. In the rain. I navigated mostly by sound, trying to keep the roar of the truck on one side roughly the same distance away as the roar of the truck on the other side. My wife slept through the whole thing in the seat beside me. Past Chicago she woke up and blinked. The rain had tapered off and traffic was much lighter away from the city. I was still dripping with sweat and white-eyed twitching with adrenaline and fear. "Where are we?" she said. "Ngggrrrrf." I said. My wife was supposed to be home yesterday. The cats miss her. I miss her too. BWI I'm pretty fond of BWI, myself. At least compared to National (too expensive) or Dulles (Ugh. Just... ugh). Fly into BWI, hop on the MARC train, then Metro from Union station used to be my standard route home from long trips. Manchester is a good airport too. Pretty cheap, especially for a small regional airport. It's much cheaper than Portland, for some reason, so we usually make the drive out there rather than fly from here. Logan just sucks in every way. And I'm not sure if I've ever been to Pittsburgh. I think I have, but I don't remember anything about it in particular. I hate Philly because they always search me, and they used to have the most obnoxious security personnel anywhere. It always felt more like a mugging than a search. SFO sucks because there's never any food places open except for that goddamn California Wraps place. Those things are revolting. And any airport that requires a shuttle ride to get to an external door will immediately earn my permanent hatred. After a long flght (and every flight is a long flight) the only thing I want to do is get outside. The easier the airport makes that, the happier I am. ____Not the real rusty Question mark? ____Not the real rusty Ha Um, that was just a noise. My bad on the spelling I guess. It could also have been spelled "Nuuurrr" or thereabouts. I went with the Scandinavian variant. ____Not the real rusty Hey Wanna meet up in Finland this spring? :-) ____Not the real rusty Preparation I don't think that line really came out the way I had it in my head. There are people who plan obsessively, like we'll go here at 12:03 and then there at 3:42 and so on, and if anything gets thrown off they freak out. Trying to travel like that, today, is a recipe for misery. Things always go wrong, and sometimes they go horribly, horribly wrong and there's nothing you can do about it. What I was talking about was more like within the group of people who are able to deal with adversity, there are some who will just strike up a conversation with someone and go along with whatever's happening, and others who have made contingency plans and prepared for unlikely eventualities. For example, when I drove out to Manchester, the most likely thing that would happen was I'd go out, pick up my wife, and come back. But there was some chance the car might get stuck in the snow, so I had a sturdy shovel and a bag of cat litter onboard. There was some chance I might end up having to walk some way, if the car broke down or got stuck and I couldn't unstick it, so I was wearing good boots and had ample snow gear. I also brought extra snow gear for my wife, in case it happened after the pickup. There was some chance I'd get my wife but she'd be on a flight that was too late for us to get on the last ferry back to the island, so I had a sleeping bag and some fleece pants to wear for crashing at someone's house in Portland, and my palm pilot with phone numbers to try. There was every chance in the world that I'd be sitting in the airport for a while, so I had a good book. As it happened, none of these things occurred. I drove out, found out there was no chance she'd be arriving there at all, and drove back. But I was ready, and that's what matters. I think this tendency comes from camping, where whatever I bring is all I've got to work with, so I tend to think of all the plausible eventualities, all the disastrous things that could conceivably happen, and then add some muti-purpose items and gear that can be improvised with. It becomes a habit that's very hard to break. It's also saved my ass many a time, when a bad situation was made relatively tolerable by having the right gear on hand. Or, in the slogan of my friend Rob, "It pays to have the right equipment." ____Not the real rusty Not really I was a Cub Scout, and a Boy Scout for about 2 months. Boy Scouts was not like cub scouts at all. It was all creepy and paramilitary, and I was just not into that. I learned the justification for the Boy Scout motto independently, later on in life. ____Not the real rusty Update My wife has escaped Pittsburgh. She's currently on the mainland, sleeping at a friend's house until the morning ferry. ____Not the real rusty Wow You had it easy. Imagine that, but then imagine that you didn't get out of Toronto at all. Instead you spent a night in a hotel with a stranger (and not in a good way, if you know what I mean), and did it all again for a second day. Then you finally got out late on the second day, and you couldn't actually get home from the airport (located 3 miles from your house) because 2 of those miles are intervening ocean, so you stay at a friend's house. Early the third morning you finally get home. Travel difficulties are all subjectively terrible, but consider that it could have been worse. :-) ____Not the real rusty New Slogan! Kuro5hin.org: Different types of idiots. ____Not the real rusty More than that Since the days when Slashdot was the be-all end-all, there are now tons of other great linky sites like MetaFilter, BoingBoing, and Fark, to name but a few. I think the original source of our link hostility was my original prodding of posters to write something original, rather than make K5 another link site. I mean, there's only so many links, you know? I like that the most-loved stories here are the ones that people take the time to actually write, drawing from either their own creativity or multple sources. I think we're good at making new stuff, and it's nice to have a place like this where that is encouraged, rather than being another two-sentence-and-a-link clone. Those sites are great. I read many of them daily. I just think we're something a little different than that, and a lot of the people here agree with me. Er, I just basically repeated what you said. But I wanted to chime in with my four shares of Salon stock anyway. ____Not the real rusty Wasters of time I really dont' need to actively be looking at both /. and K5. I'd just assume get everything of importance here. (Grammar nitpick: "Just as soon") That's kind of your problem though, not ours. Voting seems to indicate that the majority opinion is that people are happier having Slashdot do what it's good at, and K5 do what we're good at. However, if you and enough other people vote differently, that will change. Ah, behold the beauty of democracy. :-) If it would make you any happier, we have got a Slashdot RDF feed. Go to your display prefs, check the "Slashdot" feed (um, the first one -- the other's their "Science" feed), and save. Then all your index pages will also have the latest headlines from the big green monster. Best of both worlds, eh? ____Not the real rusty Hee hee I'll paypal you a buck for a share, if you've got actual certificates. That's way more than it's worth on the open market. I would be pleased to have one for posterity. ____Not the real rusty Yeah That would have been the best material Robin Williams has laid eyes on in a decade. ____Not the real rusty Ah, San Francisco Hope you enjoy your cold fog and 48 degree drizzle this summer. I'll think of your shivering asses when I'm kayaking around the islands in the sun. :-) The weather: another in a very, very long list of things I don't miss about San Francisco. ____Not the real rusty So it was... Neither. Best. Nor. Worst. Episode. Ever. ? ____Not the real rusty Argh No can do March 21st. I'm leaving the 22nd for Californ-eye-ay. Maybe lunch next Friday I could make. If disturb you my Yoda-lke sentence structure doesn't. ____Not the real rusty March March is looking pretty bad overall. California the whole last week, DC for something like the 10th to the 12th. And at some point I ought to try to wedge in some actual work, probably. I think the best bet is to not count on me in March. I'll come down if possible, but it's looking unlikely at this point. ____Not the real rusty Alright random-association boy Where's your Salon article? And what happened to Dolores in the haze of those North Carolina woods, anyway? ____Not the real rusty MOPI I'm going to be (extremely) afk this weekend, so if you send me MOPI stuff I will probably not get to it till Monday. Just wanted to let you know so you didn't worry. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also There's something kinda sketchy going on with the queue, where it seems like sometimes scoop doesn't realize that an article has been voted down, and thus doesn't send the mail when it's supposed to. This is in the "must look into it" category. ____Not the real rusty Hm Works fine for me. Mozilla 1.2.1 ____Not the real rusty Nevertheless I added the mime type your link recommended. Hopefully it'll work for everyone now. ____Not the real rusty Spamarrest are spammers I got some highly ironic spam today from these spammers who were trying to sell me an anti-spam tool. Ubelievable. News and questions about ads, and general feature request invitation, inside. So I finally got the ad statistics stuff together and mostly done. For a few days I've had the ad logger on, which stores a line in the database basically every time an ad is shown. I wrote a box which grabs the previous day's log data, digests it down to one summary line for each ad, dumps the digest into another table, and deletes the day's live ad_log data (to keep the size of that table down). Now if you're an advertiser you will see a "View Expanded Statistics" link next to each of your ads on your ad page. This will show you a nice table of the digested log data, with impressions, clicks, click-through percentage, hosts (the number of unique IPs your ad was shown to), and the number of impressions shown to K5 users and anonymous viewers. I'm not sure what use the last two would be to anyone, but we had the data so I figured might as well show it. Privacy advocates, please note that the individual line-item log data, which stores IP, user id, ad id, type (impression or click), and a timestamp, is never shown to anyone. It doesn't become part of the stats info until it has been boiled down and aggregated, and the daily data is then deleted completely from the database. The aggregate data doesn't have any personal info, just daily totals. We are not Doubleclick. God, I can just imagine how marketers must have drooled to find out they could store all this stuff. Sleazy bastards. I'm also planning to add a monthly summary view in the expanded stats page. We've only been collecting data for a week, so it wouldn't be worth much now. I'm thinking about doing some more updates to the ad stuff, including selling ads by day (rather than impression -- both would be offered, you could choose) and possibly geotargeting. There's a nifty perl module that would let us say "this person appears to be from the UK, so look for a UK-targeted ad." It uses a lookup table of IP->country mappings, which is updated monthly, so no slow network lookups or messy reverse-DNS stuff. There's also a "region" version, that would let us target by state. That costs $$, so I'm not sure it's something I should get into, but it might be worth it. I know of at least a couple of businesses who would advertise if they could only show ads to, say, California. And in terms of the nifty factor, wouldn't it be kinda cool if the site could tell you whether a K5 meet was going to happen in your area soon? :-) Of course that brings the privacy concerns out again. To which I can really only say I don't care where you are, but if I can make the site find out it might make for a better experience. The country data would be looked up per-request and not stored anywhere, so there shouldn't be any problem with it. Anyway, respond to the poll. I'd like to know what people think should be done. Also, if you've got other ideas, about whatever, spill 'em! Heh If coding expect diary not good. Been working on code for five hours. Language centers not engaged. Will have better diaries when start writing again. Return. ____Not the real rusty Hats? Oh, hats. I was confused. Comment rating notification? I think that would be a bad idea. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah A "Where are you?" user pref would go along well with any kind of automated lookup. I guess if people want to lie about it, well, they'll get ads that won't be of interest to them. And won't that really just show everyone once and for all! :-) ____Not the real rusty "Just ask" Thing is, the huge majority of people won't fill in country information. So we can offer it, but if I'm going to be doing anything like saying "sure, we can only show your ad to the UK," then your ad will probably be shown to just that one guy that bothered to fill in his country data. Making an educated guess based on IP takes the effort off of your shoulders, where it probably never should have been to begin with. If there are businesses that have stuff you might be interested in, but only make sense to pitch to someone in their area, you'll see those ads. Specifically, what prompted this was a UK tech job site that's interested in advertising here but only if they can keep it to the UK. Which makes a lot of sense. And judging by the number of resumes people have posted here as ads, I can't say I don't think that sounds like an advertiser some people might be interested in. I also know of a cool ISP in California who would get some ads if they could keep them local to places where they actually do business. Now it makes sense to offer the "set your own country/region" options to override an automated guess, you're right. But I think relying on only one would be as bad as relying on only the other, you know? ____Not the real rusty Mandatory bad If it's a choice between guessing and forcing you to fill something in, I'll guess any day of the week. Trying to force you to provide country info would just result in 35,000 users from Afghanistan. ____Not the real rusty Nah With their crack staff of investigative reporters, I'm sure they'll figure it out someday. I'd be very amused to see what the data forced-registration sites collect looks like. I wonder if they just chuck 3/4 of it right away. ____Not the real rusty Die off? That idea didn't die off, it was just put on hold for a bit. Actually you can expect to see something on this pretty soon. ____Not the real rusty Now look here No one's talking to you, France. ____Not the real rusty Lies! You were grandmothered in and you know it. ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry to break this to you... But Canada isn't important enough for anyone to hate. Canadians never seem to want to believe that, but really it's true. ____Not the real rusty Don't worry If you want, I'll hate you, even if you are Canadian. :-) ____Not the real rusty Kinda But we don't generally like to be associated with the other 49. ____Not the real rusty Yeah There's something strange going on with that. I haven't figured it out yet. ____Not the real rusty Time limit too It's last 60 comments or last 30 days, whichever is less, actually. So yeah, if you went away for a while, you would likely come back as a regular joe again. If you were trusted before, and the car accident didn't drastically alter your personality to make you a supervillain there's no reason you wouldn't get TU back fairly quickly. It's designed to be a measure of how you've been acting lately, so it does decay wth inaction, but can also get back up to speed quickly. Incidentally I'm revising the whole help/FAQ section, so look for much better docs in the near future. ____Not the real rusty Bigheaded I haven't done it in ages, I swear, but I actually spent wasted a little time this evening seeing what a Google search for me turns up. I do this once or twice a month for K5, to see what's being linked to, but I haven't looked for myself in ages. And now I'm all warm and fuzzy and swelly-headed from all the undeservedly nice things people have written about me. Or maybe they were all just talking about adopted dogs. Probably the single most common result is some form of link to the DotCom Scoop interview from last January. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but you know, they're right. It is really good. I think it's probably one of the few things out there I can read again a year or more later and not wince. I think the key was that it was done via email, so I got to write answers rather than speaking them. I'm really a light-years better writer than I am a speaker, and it shows. It also includes this classic rustyism of a metaphor, which nevertheless I think best describes the experience of being me: Imagine the surprise of that one unremarkable snowflake in the middle of the pack on some alpine peak, that shifts slightly one day, and the next instant finds itself in the middle of an avalanche brought on by it's tiny movement. That's how I feel all the time. ---- Special bonus link: Beth and Chris's Easy Lover just cycled up on XMMS, and it's making me die laughing all over again. "Bowwww! Bowwww! Boww-na-na-na-na..." You simply must listen to it. Seriously. The crescendo at the end alone is worth it. Thanks I knew a few comments would bring my head back down to size. Thanks to you, now I can fit through the door again and finally go to bed. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Even better Read it like a Powerpuff Girl. :-) ____Not the real rusty Listen to the mp3 Seriously. You'll forget all about the venting. :-) ____Not the real rusty We must destroy this open relay to save it. [nt] ____Not the real rusty Miscounting It's funny that I rarely see anyone talk about numbers that seem realistic to me. Everyone tends to either overcount (like quartz) or undercount (like you). To inject much needed actual numbers into all this, I can say that: There are currently 498,907 sessions. Sessions are cleared after being inactive for two weeks, so that's something like the total number of visitors (whether logged-in or anonymous) in the past fourteen days, probably overcounted by about 10-15%, due to things like search engines. There are currently 41,181 accounts 39,606 have been activated 403 more of those have since been anonymized Leaving 39,203 potentially active accounts. I have no really good way to count "active" accounts, but in the past year, 23,052 accounts have viewed at least one story. So we can say with a lot of certainty that the number of active accounts is fewer than 23K. To be considered an "active" account, it seems like you would like to consider activity which affects the site, rather than just reading. So to get more specific about activity, it would probably help to look at a single month. In the month of January 2003: 2070 distinct accounts rated at least one comment 2775 distinct accounts posted at least one comment 2719 distinct accounts voted on at least one story. 914 distinct accounts submitted at least one story (including diaries and rejected stories) 730 distinct acconts posted at least one diary 99 distinct accounts had at least one non-diary story accepted It seems like voting on stories, posting comments, and rating comments are not too far from each other in terms of total numbers, and they all lead me to believe that there are probably around 2,000 active users. While the potential audience is probably 10-15k users, the effective audience is a fraction of a percent of that number. Which does kill incentive for posting somewhat. That was kind of a puzzling sentence. I would think the audience is the people out there reading. The audience is a lot larger than the group of active users who do things like rate and comment. I'm assuming you mean the active users when you say "effective audience," but I'm not sure why a smaller number of people rating and commenting would change the incentive for posting. Wouldn't that incentive depend more on the reading audience than the acting audience? ____Not the real rusty Stats The problem is that deep down, I don't care very much what the stats are. :-) Every once in a while curiosity or a particularly egregious miscount will drive me to the database to ferret out the most recent numbers, but on the whole it doesn't really matter. ____Not the real rusty Well We've got the basics, like user accounts, pageviews per day, and so forth. Actually, I've had extremely few questions like that, but most of our advertisers are pretty familar with the site already and have a pretty good idea how busy it is and who the users are. As it happens, I'm working on expanded stats for advertisers on how their ad is doing, broken down daily, as we speak. Considering the ultra-cheap up-front cost, I think probably the best way to get that info is drop ten bucks on an ad and find out for yourself. However, you do have a point, and maybe I'll consider automating some of the more abstruse stats, like sessions and active users. I've also got some ideas about how to make ads better, but I'm gong to keep that to myself for now, cause I'm not sure how much time I can put into it at the moment. ____Not the real rusty Info This story was posted on the first anniversary, and if you scroll down a ways to "The Black Screen of Death [July 24 - Sept 18]" you'll find several links that chronicle the event that caused me to disable anonymous posting. Basically, someone was spamming the site with a script, using the anonymous account to rapidly post story submissions, and then comments. It was difficult to stop due to my personal situation at the time (living alternately in two hotels in California), and really difficult to clean up since there was no automated way to distinguish the script postings from legit A.H. postings. Hence the requirement for an account, which is basically just a way to identify one user's posts, and to be able to impose some throttling to stop scripted postings like that. ____Not the real rusty YABK5MO2 I can probably make it sometime the week of the 17th. ____Not the real rusty Ask Statler and Waldorf Statler: What did you think the best part of Adequacy was? Waldorf: The end! Both: Ohhh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho ____Not the real rusty Bill O'Reilly: "...wetbacks, whatever you want to call them" We'd save lives because Mexican wetbacks, whatever you want to call them, the coyotes -- they're not going to do what they're doing now, so people aren't going to die in the desert. So we save lives, all right, and we seal it down and make it 100 times harder to come across. --Bill O'Reilly, on his Fox show "The O'Reilly Factor" 02/06/2003 Wasn't it nice when you had a career, Bill? Buh bye now. Ha Not that this changes anyone's mind about the man, but I will be somewhat surprised if Fox manages to bury this and ignore it. I mean, if he'd been up there saying "Well, the niggers are marching on Washington again..." how long would he last? ____Not the real rusty Trolling There are lines though, past which someone who's being paid by a national network can't afford to cross. Hate speech is usually one of them, in recent times at least. And the last diary may have technically been posted today, but it was last night for me so it doesn't count. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry For full points you would have to have said "...the kikes who run it..." I can only give you a 6.5 out of ten for that effort. ____Not the real rusty Liberal and Conservative trolls Guys like O'Reilly piss me off, because I know conservatives who have very well thought out positions on things, and who usually make sense even when I disagree with them. Most issues have more than one legitimate solution, and it's perfectly possible for liberals and conservatives to disagree on what they are without hating each other. But then you've got the O'Reillys on one side, and the Chomskys on the other, who end up being the public voices of their side, while not really representing anyone but the extreme fringe crazies. All of us should go out of our way to disavow the kooks on our own side, I think. I'm tired of thoughtful people being lumped in with bigmouthed hatemongers like O'Reilly or tinfoil-hat nincompoops like Chomsky or Michael Moore. For the sake of inflating their own noteriety they're willing to sell out anyone and everyone, and none of them speak for me or anyone I know. Except for a few of the loonies here on K5, but that's pretty much beyond anyone's control .:-) ____Not the real rusty Chomsky vs. Moore I have read and listened to Chomsky, and his SOP seems to be to list a selection of facts which make his opponents look bad, and then slip in a few assertions carefully designed to appear to be conclusions reached from the facts. I'm sure he's right sometimes, but mostly he makes a living seeing the worst of all possible worlds, and preaching to a choir who want nothing better than to believe him. Like O'Reilly and Limbaugh, nothing he says will ever convince anyone who doesn't already want to believe. Michael Moore does the same thing but without the listing of facts. He just makes assertions and waves his hands around (literally!). He is seen by a few people as believable because he wears a baseball cap. These are, by and large, the same people who believe E.T. was a documentary because Spielberg also wears a baseball cap. C'mon, if he's wearing a baseball cap, he can't be lying, right? Anyway, they're all the same type. They've got their world filter, and anything that doesn't conform to that view will be tossed out. I don't see any difference between them, besides some make more money at it than others. A person with blinders is a person with blinders, no matter what shape those blinders come in. ____Not the real rusty Advice Never quote me in defense of anyone, cause I'll turn around and disagree with myself quicker than you can blink. :-) I think what I'm trying to say is I distrust people with followers. Yes, that means that frequently I distrust myself, and that's probably the root of my discomfort when people treat me like some kind of leader, or person whose words are inherently more valuable than anyone else's. Chomsky might be ok if you could penetrate the fog of stupidity that surrounds him. I haven't ever made a serious attempt to do that. And I just remembered why I had a policy of not criticizing Chomsky in public anymore. I recall having already had this argument and being overwhelmed by the slew of verbiage that always comes from it, and realizing that deep down, I don't really care. Incidentally, this is also why I try my damndest not to criticize indymedia in public either. I fail at that more often, but hey. ____Not the real rusty Heh That quote's going to haunt me isn't it? :-) I do still believe that it is fundamentally true, but by itself it would lead one to think I espouse a whole set of beliefs that I don't necessarily. It also should be noted that the "we" there is basically all of today's major extant human societies (as opposed to "extinct former societies"). Alas, it was tragically well said. Next future I endeavor to make becoming less coherent. ;-) ____Not the real rusty No, no I was shooting for opaque incoherency. Occult occlusion of oculation. You see? Of course not. Ha! ____Not the real rusty I thnk you're wrong on that. ;-) ____Not the real rusty PS: Kill your idols. ____Not the real rusty Bummer It was mentioned a few places, but for the most part doesn't seem to have really gotten out. Good to know we hold our political leaders to a higher standard than the media, I guess. ____Not the real rusty Nice Helly Hansen-wear (Referring to the picture in the other diary) I should have guessed from your current nation of residence... I've always been kind of puzzled by HH's brand recognition. I've had a couple of pieces of Hellywear, and thought they were all crap. On the other hand, my wife has a HH coat and seems to like it. Is it like Nestle chocolate, where you get better stuff in Europe than they ship out here to the colonies? ____Not the real rusty Hey yo dude... are you serious? Was what the guy in the brown jacket said to me last night as I ran by at 1AM in the 21 degree snow streets. I spread out my arms and said "Why not? It's beautiful!" Fact: This is the only soup and bread cookbook you will ever need. Fact: I don't share very much of my personal life here. The second fact was pointed out to me by rizzo242 last Friday over sushi in Portland. And if it weren't for this incidental way of bringing it up, I probably never would have mentioned the lunch at all, which reinforces his point. I was half an hour late because I listened to his opinion of the ferry schedule rather than looking at my own copy. Fact: This is a song for Carol Fact: You're into Japanese fastfood I heard all kinds of secret molasses details and gossip that regular diary section residents would just absolutely carve off their left ears to be privy to, but I cannot share any of them. Fact: The previous sentence is false. Fact: "Privy" can mean "Made a participant in knowledge of something private or secret" or it can mean "an outdoor toilet." Fact: It can mean both at the same time if a secret organization which meets in the outhouse calls itself the privy council. Running with an inch of packed snow on the ground isn't much more difficult than running on pavement. It gives the calves an extra dose of work, but that's probably good for them. Running at night is also better than running during the day, due to the greater solitude and lessened risk of snow blindness. Fact: Sir John Franklin's 1845 Arctic expedition, seeking the northwest passage for England, was the largest and best-equipped polar expedition of all time. Fact: It was also the worst polar disaster of all time, losing the two finest ice ships ever built to date and all 129 men. There was a good deal of cannibalism before the end. Rizzo forgot his wallet, so I paid for lunch. Isn't that the worst when that happens? With the number of meals I've cadged off friends in my life, I surely owe lunch to just about everyone for the rest of my life, so I was plussed (opposite of "nonplussed"). We slid through the falling snow to his car, parked in an alley. The only way out was uphill, and the snow had other ideas, so I ended up abandoning him to the snow and walking to the ferry. I hope he got the car out, and was not forced to resort to cannibalism. Fact: Rizzo's license plate says "HAXOR" Fact: The ships that Franklin lost were named Erebus and Terror, and each has an Antarctic mountain named after it. Fact: The "bombs bursting in air" in the US national anthem were probably fired by the Terror. I call it "homage" Oddly I've had several independent points of contact with Mr. Antix this evening, so maybe that's why this format presented itself. But anyway, let it never be said that I didn't get all of my best ideas from theantix's brain. I fully expect that to be widely sigged by tomorrow. :-) ____Not the real rusty 21's not bad I've been out running when it was as cold as 10F. The problem is the wind. There's a stretch of about 1.5 mile where I'm facing north and exposed to a long stretch of water. When the wind's from the north or northeast, it gets pretty viscious. I usually just wear a couple of fleece layers, but that provides no windproofing at all so when it's blowing I might as well be bare-ass naked. And I'm not Norwegian, have about as little excess body fat as it's possible to have, and prone to rapid cooling. I dress pretty warm. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sigh I want some 'o' that, but that stuff's expensive. I have a good pair of gore-tex pants, but my top remains largely unprotected from the wind. ____Not the real rusty Cooking bread The breads in that particular book are mostly pretty simple quick breads. Honestly, I've only tried one of them, and that was kind of cheating because it was basically the same as my pizza dough recipe, so I already knew how to make it. From a perusal of them, they all look pretty idiot-proof as long as you follow the directions. The best way to learn to make bread is just to do it and damn the consequences. You'll screw up sometimes, but so what? You're out probably a half dollar's worth of flour and yeast, usually. Eventually you get the hang of it, and usually it doesn't take long at all. I am convinced that every human being should be capable of producing bread if necessary, so you'd better start learning now. :-) The soups though. Ah, the soups. Magnificent, wonderful soups. Easy, quick, and amazing in ways you didn't think mere soup could be amazing. There's one in there that has six ingredients -- potatoes, onions, garlic, chicken stock, butter and flour -- and yet tastes like you would not believe. It's just a gem of a book. And the best thing about good soup is that it costs practically nothing. One little bag of lentils, some bouillon cubes, a head of cabbage, and a few canned veggies and you've basically got a week's worth of meals. We literally got four different soups out of one 50-cent head of cabbage. Really good food is one thing. But there's just something extra-satisfying about really good food that hardly cost you anything. It's like magic. ____Not the real rusty Yup I checked both of their rating histories, and found nothing that looked like abuse to me. If anyone can point me to evidence, I will consider it. Vlad's ratings, on the other hand, were really obviously retaliatory. Not to mention that we've already gone through this with how many ther accounts? Three or four now, at least. Vlad knows the rules, and knows that when he breaks them he'll just lose ratings again. I notice he doesn't mention that I refunded his subscription payment. "Integrity" indeed. ____Not the real rusty Eh It's a living. Some days are fun, some days it's this silliness. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dear David Lynch, I just finished watching your recent film "Mulholland Drive" on DVD. While I would like to congratulate you on your obvious professional talents with such things as camera work and sound, I must confess I am left with some reservations about the movie as a whole. At first I believed that I received a bad DVD, which had retained all of the picture and sound but somehow been wiped of any trace of plot. But then I read an explanation of the film on Salon, and discovered that my DVD did contain the plot, it was just so stupid I didn't recognize it upon first viewing. In conclusion, you are a washed-up hack and I would like two and a half hours of my life back, please. In cash. Sincerely yours, Rusty Foster Blue Velvet was pretty good And Wild at Heart. It's really when they say "Here ya go Dave, here's a bunch of money, and you go off and make whatever movie you want to make!" that he spews out another one of these film school jerk-off movies. I'm not gonna to bother anymore though. I just don't care. He's welcome to make movies for his own enjoyment, but there's no point in anyone else watching them. ____Not the real rusty Twin Peaks I didn't see any of TP when it was on TV, but in college they did an all-episodes-in-a-row marathon, which I saw most of. It was pretty odd and entertaining when you got into it, though (like most of Lynch's work) it went rapidly downhill on the sense-o-meter toward the end, and didn't end up amounting to much. I get the feeling he starts with a story and then kinda devolves into "look at the pretty pictures!" after a while. They should stop letting him write his own stuff. ____Not the real rusty And Like Pynchon, very spotty. Apt comparison, actually. He obviously has really good skill with his tools, and the successes are brilliant, but the failures are ugly messes. ____Not the real rusty They almost saved it But not quite. ____Not the real rusty Read that Salon link Salon actually explains it pretty clearly. I didn't get it either, and now that I do I think it's even more stupid. It's actually better if you don't get it, IMO. When I didn't get it, at least there was this sense that maybe it was great and I was just missing something. Now I know I was missing something, but that wasn't great either. Lemme sum up: "It was all a dream." See? And I thought there was no cliche more retarded than "I've lost my memory!" but in fact there is one, and it's "It was all a dream." ____Not the real rusty The Big Sleep I've got The Big Sleep waiting. Now that's a movie. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like 'em myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings. ____Not the real rusty That K article That article hit some kind of nerve. Every once in a while I troll through Daypop looking for inbound K5 links, and that article was most of them for a few weeks. People loved it. ____Not the real rusty 212 / 415 How many people do you know with a 212 landline and a 415 cell phone? I suspect the number of people sharing this odd phone number combo has spiked rather sharply in the past few months. Other pressing questions of our age: Where do they grow froot? Does creme come from dereys? I demand answers. Yesterday was a good day. I got two jobs. Another OJR article, deadlined Feb 20, which will be looking at this, that, and the other. And while I'm on that subject, Mr. Gillmor: If you don't stop monitoring my goddamn email I swear I'm gonna get a restraining order. The other job is developing a rather interesting Scoop project, which ought to lead to some cool new Scoop code which will probably not be of any use to us here, but will be neat anyway. The Scoop project is for a site with questions and answers related to a rare genetic disorder. I was talking to the guy in charge yesterday, having not slept the night before (I was resetting my schedule back to diurnal mode), and for demonstration of what he had in mind he was showing me a similar site with cancer-related Q&As. We chatted for a while, and though he had told me what the genetic disorder in question was, I had mostly forgotten. It has a long name. I just knew I'd been looking at a cancer site for half an hour. We talked about price, and I was trying to figure out what a good hourly rate would be. I told him my normal corporate contract rate, which we both knew was higher than either he could pay (it's a nonprofit) or I would charge. So I finally just cut it in half and said I could do it for that. This is the part where it becomes clear that I may not be the most sensitive person in the world, especially after some 36-odd hours of consciousness. He said: "That's really great, that you will do it for that rate." I said: "Yeah, well, it's for people with cancer. Or whatever." Read it again. "People with cancer. Or whatever." Way to go on the sensitivity there, rusty. The funny thing is this didn't strike me until several hours later. That bit of dialogue suddenly just popped into my head, and I got this sinking feeling. A neverending font of empathy and caring, that's me. Not quite the same Huh. I lived in 202 for 2 1/2 years, and my wife is from 914, though they've changed the borders since then and now her parents house is in a different area code that I can never remember. That's kind of odd, but not so demographically revealing as the canonical 212/415. ____Not the real rusty Yes, that's it. [nt] ____Not the real rusty The question, really Is why are you printing my diary? ____Not the real rusty I agree At a thing in New York recently he came up and introduced himself. I was kinda taken by surprise and basically blew being cool and suave and social, but hey. I emailed him later and got no reply though, which, like, what's up with that? I hate emailing someone and getting no answer, and no, just because I do it sometimes too doesn't make it ok. It just makes me occasionally evil. But Tim is unfortunately now down in my "doesn't respond to emails" list, which isn't really a place you want to be, despite my admiring him and thinking he has built one of the greatest companies in the world and is probably a really good guy. Evan Williams of Blogger fame is there with him, as I recall. ____Not the real rusty Glad to hear it's warm A friend of mine just moved up to Fairbanks from Kodiak for a few months, and I was worried she was going to freeze her ass off. It's 11 here in Maine, so I guess you've got the better deal at the moment. :-) ____Not the real rusty Aw Steve C'mon, you don't need that many accounts to rate with. Not when you've got the business integration power of .NET behind your normal ratings. When your ratings instantly tie in with your warehouse and supply chain, that's rating @ the speed of business! ____Not the real rusty K5 press pass It's actually the official policy of K5 Inc to authorize press passes for anyone who wants one for any reason, provided they promise to at least consider writing an article about whatever event they want it for. To obtain an official K5 press pass, simply make one. If questioned, refer them to me, and I will confirm it (through the simple expedient of confirming any and all reports of claimed K5 press passes). I assume you wre joking, but I think it would be great if people started going to things as our official media representative. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey! Who are you calling shrunken? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Who you gonna call! ____Not the real rusty Never... Seen... Wargames... ! I'm sorry, but I might have to revoke your account for that. I will have inspectors there in fourteen days, and you best be able to document the renting and viewing of the aforementioned Entertainment, or face serious consequences. ____Not the real rusty Small patch Howver, my point is that that French and Germans have been less willing to resort to all out war in recent times Substitute "less able" for "less willing" and you've probably got it. :-) Actually, my feeling is that France and Germany are both opposing this war from a Europeanist perspective. A strongly pro-American state in Iraq would strengthen the US and UK hand in the Middle East enormously. This is also why I think the UK has been so gung-ho for it. They don't like the creeping growth of the EU, and supporting us lets them play the superpower off against the incipient superpower. England hasn't forgotten that Europe is basically a bunch of half-mad little kingdoms, and every time the continent has gotten their collective shit together in the past, things have gone poorly for England. ____Not the real rusty Me too The way Plato always made sure that the guy Socrates was arguing against was a total moron? Yeah, it reminds me of that. ____Not the real rusty Oh god, please no I deeply loathe these slashdot analysis stories. Can we not get over the impression that K5 is slashdot's jealous little brother? And if this gets posted, there will be a dozen more, at steadily decreasing levels of quality. It's a good diary. Please, just let it be a good diary. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cause postgres sucks? Ha ha. Actually, Postgres doesn't do anything that Mysql doesn't do, except work slowly. ____Not the real rusty Only partly right They've got subselects (new) and ref integrity (with innodb, for quite some time). No triggers and stored procedures yet, that's true. They say they're looking at it for 5.0. However, IMO, both of these things are fundamentally crutches for bad programming, and shouldn't be there. If they add them, they damn well better do it in a way that lets me disable them altogether and suffer no perfromance decrease. ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry, but I decided that I can't have the database argument and the Iraq argument on the same day. I apologize for having started something I'm not willing to finish, but I feel it's only right that I do the graceful thing and concede this argument right now. :-) ____Not the real rusty No, no, you're not getting it You're arguing here with someone who belongs firmly to the "If I don't understand it, it's not true" camp. No amount of pointing to proof will help, because he does not understand the proof, therefore it does not exist. If you have trouble with this idea, think about small children, who believe that when they close their eyes they become invisible. They can't see you, so it follows that you can't see them. You see? It's not identical logic, but extremely similar, and certainly gives you the overall feel. My recommendation is not to waste your time any further. The argument has been had, and no minds will change from here on out. ____Not the real rusty No The weapons inspectors are not there to play hide and seek with Iraq's weapons. Iraq is supposed to be leading them around place to place and showing them the audit trail probing they have disarmed. Accounting for the whereabouts and proving the destruction of the weapons we know they had. It isn't a matter of "go look here," it's a matter of this evidence showing that the weapons program has continued, when Iraq claims it hasn't and that they have nothing to show inspectors. Lemme put it another way. When the bills are due every month, do you tell your creditors that they are welcome to come to your house and look around to see if you have any money, and if they fnd any, they are welcome to take it toward what you owe them? No. They send you the bill, and if you don't pay it, you are in breach of a contract. Same deal here. ____Not the real rusty Keeping records was not optional But are they playing hide and seek ? Or are they cleaning up and have few records. They lost a war and signed a peace treaty pledging to fully disarm in view of the international community. That means keeping proof, maintaining records, and volunteering the information to inspectors. Keeping few records is not an option, and never was, and everyone involved knew that. They're not disarming as a gesture of goodwill -- they're doing it because the UN told them they had to as a condition of having lost the war. To torturously extend my original metaphor, Iraq declared bankruptcy. The bill due is for everything they have. No, it's not ok to have a couple warheads hidden behind the sofa. An invasion of Iraq will kill some people, yes. "Tens of thousands" is just propaganda, I'm afraid. Not invading will also cause the torture and death, for certain, of anyone in Iraq Hussein doesn't like, and everyone who knew them. Probably also large numbers of ethnic minorities he doesn't like, and probably, eventually, a huge number of Israelies when he finally gets his hands on fissionable material. You cannot avoid death in this situation. People are dying at the hands of Hussein's government right now. Iraq has the highest forced disappearance rate of any country in the world. It is a brutal, utterly corrupt totalitarian regime. The question is how long do you want to wait for the big death, and who do you want it to be? Iraqi armed forces, or civilians in any of a half dozen countries in missile range? ____Not the real rusty A horrible crapshoot The enforcement of the treaty that they have signed needs to be left up to the international community, not particular members of that community. I totally agree. However, the UN does not seem to be willing to enforce its own treaty. Why should anyone pay any attention to the UN from now on, if that's how they operate? The existing resolutions promise "serious consequences" for noncompliance. Iraq has ben in a continuous state of noncompliance for twelve years. At what point is the UN just a joke? When should we feel like their treaties have to be honored, and when not? Second, a not-insubstantial part of me says that I trust my own elected government, no matter how often I may disagree with their policies, more than I trust an unelected body of representatives which includes the world's worst kleptocracies and dictatorships on equal footing with free nations. The UN is a nice idea, but in a shoving match between it and my democratic government, I know where my loyalties lie. I don't know what the aftermath of a war will be either. I do know that the situation that ended the last gulf war, where Iraqi rebels rose up and were crushed by Saddam, is not going to happen. That time, the international community demanded that our mission was the liberation of Kuwait, and when the task was done, we went home. I recall being cheered on by the rest of the world when it was actually happening, and being praised for not overstepping our bounds and going right on through to Baghdad. But now it's become a mistake of George I, in hindsight. I don't buy that at all. I remember what happened. I also don't really buy the argument that we should wait out an evil regime. It's a crapshoot. If you win, lives are saved at the cost of a few more years or decades of terrible totalitarianism. If you lose, you lose really big. Read up on the effects of botulinum toxin. Read how much of it Hussein has. I don't think that's a gamble I can feel comfortable supporting. ____Not the real rusty Limits of the UN The UN is a very useful organization as place where people can meet an organization that keeps people on that can perform relief work. The Peacekeeping and stuff is useful, but it shouldn't be looked on as a government. It isn't. A state has a monopoly on violence. The UN doesn't and shouldn't. If that's the case, then the US and UK going it alone (together) wouldn't necessarily invalidate the UN. Perhaps it would cast some light on what its limitations and strengths really are. Let's just hope if there is a war that I'm wrong and you are right and if there isn't I'm right and you're wrong. Amen to that. ____Not the real rusty Silly He had the weapons at the end of Gulf War I. There is no question of that. If you are willing to debate that, you're living in a fantasy. So, he had them then, he claims to not have them now. There's no audit trail, no proof of disarmament, nothing. Where did they go? ____Not the real rusty Sorry, my "silly" was unclear Silly? OK. Calling people names is unlikely to change their opinion. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call you silly. I meant the idea that there aren't any weapons anymore but no one kept track of where they went (or alternatively that there never were any to begin with) is silly. I should have been more verbose. :-) People are worried that we're risking Our Boys where they needn't be risked. For reassurance, they want to see actual WMDs. Our government claims to know for sure they they exist and shows pictures of bunkers. Fine. It should therefore be a trivial exercise to get some WMD on film. It will make voters happy. Why have they not done it? I think everyone would love to have a picture of the big ugly warhead sitting there with the sticker that says "If found, please return to Saddam Hussein, 1 Glorious Leader Parkway, Baghdad, Iraq," but here's the thing. Inspections were stopped in the Clinton administration. The satellite photos Powell showed today were taken shortly before inspections started again recently. Iraq had plenty of time to manufacture stuff, and plenty of warning that inspections would start again. They shut down their plants, loaded up the trucks, and buried whatever they had finished, or deployed it out across territory they control. I don't think they're actually producing new weapons right now with inspectors in the country, but all those warheads and all those nasty bugs that they haven't accounted for, plus whatever they produced while inspections were stopped (if anything -- even assuming they were good boys then and have produced nothing new, the old bugs are still missing) are now buried and hidden away. Just going in and finding a couple of them is what we've been generally calling "the invasion." It's not a trivial matter. We don't know where they are. We know where they were producing some of them while inspections were stopped. That's all. I'm sure the Bush administration would like to dig up a couple warheads just like you would, but if that's the necessary precondition of an invasion, then it will never happen, because it will take an invasion to do that. What I got from Powell' speech today was that we have the proof by solid inference. We know they were producing the weapons, and here are the pictures. We know they are now poker-faced and saying they have nothing. We can easily infer that they have weapons and are hiding them. ____Not the real rusty Your whole premise is incorrect (nt) Oh, you looked anyway. Well, read the rest of this thread. It's very informative and explains why you are wrong. ____Not the real rusty One more data point The house went on the market 2.5 weeks ago. It went under contract the first day I know it seems totally imperative not to lose this buyer, but don't forget that it went under contract the first day. Yeah, could be a total fluke, but the chances against that are enormous. If it took less than a day to find prospective buyer number one, it's not a bad bet that prospective buyer number two is just one day away as well. If it were me, I'd probably be doing my damndest to drive these assholes away and keep their $4500. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey Read your email. ____Not the real rusty https It's not really documented anywhere, but yes, K5 does do https. You will have to keep an eye on what you click, because there are a couple of links around that are fully-qualified and set to http. Most links are relative though, and will let you remain in https. I often use https when I'm traveling and using insecure wi-fi or otherwise sketchy networks. ____Not the real rusty Actually We have no way of knowing how you voted on a poll, just that you did vote. The votes on polls themselves aren't saved, just the result counts and the list of who has cast a vote (so you can't vote again). ____Not the real rusty No That whole thing was blown all out of proportion. theboz sent some joke mails to a few people using my email as the return address. An unrepresentatively large number of the recipients responded (to me, the apparent sender) saying "WTF?" This led me to believe that the email sending was much more widespread than it was. The joke emails included an IP address (recall that these were sent out to people), so I poked back in the logs to see if the sender had been to K5 lately, and it trned out to be theboz. By way of proof, I posted two lines from the apache log, which simply showed his visit from that IP timestamped on either side of the email sending. I posted this in a diary, and to my surprise, no one thought it was funny. Instead it was all "You evil evil man! You posted his public IP address (that he sent out in a bunch of emails) in your diary! Evil!" So I said ok and took the diary down. But was that the end of it? No, the story, as usual, grew in the telling. By the time theboz was told about the goings-on, what I posted had magically expanded to become name, address, credit card number, mother's maiden name, and god only knows what. The only thing I ever posted was an IP address. One that was already public (in fact, others had already posted the emails, including the IP, as well). I figured theboz was tweaking me, with the emailing thing, and that tweaking him back was not uncalled-for. He ended up leaving in a huff, and AFAIK hasn't been back, though he may just be under a different name now. Who knows. All I can say is, when you hear that story repeated, don't believe the hype. ____Not the real rusty Er Also, as to your proposal, it's there. All it needed was the ability to change a user's nickname, whihc went in with the recent Scoop patch. On request, I will now gladly close an account and remove all trace of a username. ____Not the real rusty Not my bailiwick Like I've always said, if you didn't want to say it publically, why the hell did you post it on the internet. But there seems to be a certain number of people will will always suffer from post-post regrets, and for them I will do what I am able, pointless as it might ultimately be. ____Not the real rusty Deleting I don't take anything you say seriously, don't worry. ;-) Basically to get a user deleted, you must first demonstrate in some convincing way that you are the owner of the account. The easiest way is to post a comment from it in a place I tell you to (typically I'll just say "Post a comment that says "It's me" in my diary here [link]"). If you can reply to an email sent to the private email address, that works too. Then I just change the nickname and wipe out identifying information from the account. The nick change keeps everything in place, just makes the name unconnectable to you. In more extreme cases, if someone wants to actually delete everyhting they have ever posted, I can do that too, but you have to justify it, because I don't like deleting stuff unless there's a good reason. Usually no one cares unless some comment or behavior threatens their job or personal relationships, which are both good enough reasons. Mossad having tracked down your nickname would probably be a good enough reason too. In both situations, the account is closed to further use as well, because I would be irritated if someone made me close an account and then came back and started using it again. ____Not the real rusty If you say so I never had an opinion either way. He seemed awfully eager to assume the worst about me though. I wasn't real impressed by his exit. ____Not the real rusty That would be nifty I'd be impressed if they went for the idea. I imagine that a city government Scoop site would make K5 look like a haven of peaceful agreement by comparison though. :-) I've thought about setting something up for the island to use, but (A) I'm not sure enough people have computers for it to be worth it, and (B) I just haven't found the energy. If they do go for the idea, make sure they know that I would probably be available for implementation consulting. :-) ____Not the real rusty "Rusty Foster is not much of a businessman" So begins Jenna Lane's article about me in her MaineBiz column "e-ME". The column is, ironically enough, not available online. I would love to link you to it, and send some K5-style ad impressions their way, but alas, the MaineBiz website is purest brochure-ware. But, if you read on, there just might be a link to a scanned copy of it. Perhaps. If you're lucky. Because I don't really feel like mailing out copies to my parents, I scanned the column and reformatted it for better web presentation, and you can read the whole thing right here. I trust I'm not costing them any newsstand sales with this, but if you were on the fence as to whether to pick up this week's MaineBiz, please do so. Despite the first line (which, to be fair, is completely true) it's a very nice article. Some of the numbers are open to interpretation, and panner is 17, not 15, but that was my mistake, not hers (he was 15 when he started helping with Scoop). She also didn't mention the fact that along with tea, she got a nice big slice of my homemade banana bread. Probably didn't want to seem like she was bought off. But she took the bread. Oh yes, when push came to shove, she took the bread. Near the end, she also calls me "gentle yet feisty." That's gotta be some kind of new tagline. It sounds like a wine description, doesn't it? "Gentle yet feisty, Rusty asserts himself to the palate early but finishes with a smooth nutty bouquet." Royalties? No problem, Prince Aphrael the First. ____Not the real rusty Ramen and goatse? Smoke and a pancake? Cigar and a waffle? Bong and a blintz? ____Not the real rusty Yes sir I know how to make 'em sing my tune, alright. :-) ____Not the real rusty Give it a little time It'll be there. I just hope it doesn't replace my favorite, "rusty foster is not supposed to be getting this much playing time." ____Not the real rusty 17 He's 17. And it's an open source project. He's free to work on it or not, as he likes. In terms of labor laws, I think that kind of occupation would be properly considered a hobby. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes I feel that I have had a hand, through the Scoop project, in rescuing at least one soul from an almost certain future of moonshinin' and run runnin', and that alone makes it all worth it. ____Not the real rusty PR, and the "smart shot" Luckily, she didn't ask for pictures at all. I would have done my best to refuse if she had. After the infamous Wired picture, I try not to be photographed. Most people who have seen pictures of me would probably agree that that's wise. As for PR, I don't do any of it. Press releases are worthless. If you're doing something interesting, the press will find you, and if not, they won't care no matter how many press releases you send out. I think she told me early on that someone had mentioned the site to her and that it was run by a Mainer. I have my suspicions as to who that might have been, but I don't really know. In general, I've been very blessed with unearned media attention. My wife, who used to spend time at her job trying to get reporters to cover things they were doing (and usually not having any success) has always been slightly bitter that reporters tend to just show up out of the blue and interview me. I tell her that as far as I know, it's never done me any noticeable good, and I mainly just talk to them for fun, but that doesn't seem to help. ____Not the real rusty Llamabear ____Not the real rusty Double Entendres Double Entendre Burgers: We give it to you the way you like it! ____Not the real rusty Heh I don't know what the deal is with them not being online, but Jenna thinks it's idiotic too. I got the distinct feeling that I was far from the first person to point out that irony. :-) ____Not the real rusty It looks better now That's not a very good picture of her at all. Her hair is now a couple inches shorter and looks quite nice. It's also styled differently somehow, and has a lot more body. She may be using Pantene, but I can't say for sure. ____Not the real rusty e-Mainers We're the leading edge of the back of the pack. ____Not the real rusty Actually She did ask the second one, in a somewhat roundabout way. The question was more, "how do you make a living from K5," but if there's a living to be made under the glorious new CMF regime, it won't be much bigger than what's being made now. It wasn't, ultimately, investigative journalism though. Just a "local oddball" profile. ____Not the real rusty Stop. ____Not the real rusty Uh-oh, uh-oh uh-oh U can't touch this. ____Not the real rusty Thanks I knew I could count on you. ____Not the real rusty No It was me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Buddy... We need about a hundred more of those for this entry. This here's what you might call a bulk order. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Haaahahahahahaha. Hee hee hee hoo. Ha! Hehehehehe. Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Heh. Whoo! Dartmouth. ... Mwaaahahahahahahhahahahaa... ____Not the real rusty Heh Dartmouth is funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Web hosts Web hosts seem to be by far the most successful advertisers on K5. I know of at least two who see significant sales from their ads here, and a couple more that I suspect must because they keep several ads in rotation all the time. I'm actually trying to think of how I could encourage that market specifically, since it seems to be so fertile. A way to do what you want, and search web host ads in particular, might be a step. Perhaps some kind of a special "web hosting ad" category? Little mini text ads in other places around the site designed for hosting companies? I don't know. But I know that it's easily our best category of ad, and I would like to get more of them without, of course, annoying everyone who uses the site. ____Not the real rusty Rule of thumb When I poke through the hidden comments, I rarely even look at ones where the number of ratings is more than 10 or so. Those are almost always already unanimous. The ones with a score of 0.5 and 2 ratings are the ones that usually need reviewing. ____Not the real rusty Liar, liar Pants on fire. ____Not the real rusty Spam Spam is inappropriate or offensive comments. Think in terms of the old-school newsgroup definition of spam (offtopic and obnoxious posts) rather than the newer unsolicited commercial email definition. There's even a convenient link in the comment posting form to the jargon file, which appropriately defines the sense "spam" is meant in here. Course, the goddamn link doesn't work. What a bunch of crap. Looks like all of tuxedo.org is screwed up. Anyone know if this is a transient problem, or what? Regardless, I'd rather not have to rely on ESR for anything, so I'll point the link elsewhere. ____Not the real rusty With no notice? There's nothing on the tuxedo.org page that says the site has moved. What a knucklehead. I changed the link to a completely different copy of the Jargon File, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Yes You are correct. I would also add the argument that one of the bigget reasons there's so little spam is because of how well the system actually does work. It is designed to make it difficult to create and sustain crapflooding cliques, and it seems to work very well. Crapflooding is so unsatisfying here that few people bother to do it. The very fact that there's so few hidden comments, I think, means it's working great. Why change it? Also, about the attack scenarios proposed above: Scoop has throttles to prevent rapid posting by any single account. You probably never run into them, but they're there, and they will prevent or seriously slow down any script attack. As for a massively-mutiplayer attack, I would simply have to shut off commenting temporarily, clean up from the attack (which would be easy), and block a bunch of IPs. It wouldn't be too hard to deal with, considering the greatly reduced speed the scripts would have to operate at to be able to keep posting. ____Not the real rusty Heh Maybe we should call the 0 rating "The Elephant Repellent" from now on, eh? ____Not the real rusty Parsing I understand your point about the parsing issue, but it sounds a lot like trading laziness up front for a lot more hassle down the road. That is, it'll be more work to write a parser that can handle the more complicated example, but you only have to do that work once. If you don't you pay for it in ugly XML for the rest of your life. Of course, maybe you'll never be writing the XML by hand. Maybe it's all just backing store for some interface. In which case you'd say it doesn't matter if the XML is less human-readable because it's not going to be human read (or, more importantly, written) anyway. To which I'll say that if that's the case, you're an idiot for using XML at all, because there are other formats far more suited to being machine-read and -written. :-) But then, I'm horribly biased against XML in the first place, since I really only work with perl, and as (I think) Larry Wall once said, "XML solves a bunch of problems perl doesn't have." ____Not the real rusty Parent comment is correct I desperately need to reqwrite the help files. They're so pathetically out of date. I'm starting that project tonight. Meanwhile, yes, all you need to do is check the "Search Archive" checkbox, right next to the "search" button, to pull up your archived stuff. ____Not the real rusty I have a cool plan I'm redoing the help system altogether. Instead of special pages, I'm going to create a "Help/FAQ" section, which is closed to normal story posting and won't show up in the section stories list or anything like that. Each chapter of the help will be a story, and the main help section page will be laid out to contain all of the chapters with a special format (different per-section layout can be done now using themes). Basically, the introtext will be the chapter's table of contents, and the sections themselves will be in the body. I'm not sure if this is clear, but it'll make more sense when you see it. The great big advantage of course is that anyone can comment on it this way. So when people have new questions, they'll be encouraged to ask them in the comments of the section they might be most appropriate for. People can also post questions or requests for clarification of stuff that doesn't make sense or isn't current, so that we can continuously refine the docs to make the most sense for the most people. I may also make a new group with editing permissions on this section, so that a larger number of people who are generally helpful and understand how things work can add or update info as needed, so it's not just on any one person. Unfortunately, I think I lied about getting to it tonight. But tomorrow, for definitely. Unless some emergency comes up. :-) ____Not the real rusty If you were waiting for Google... ...you should keep waiting, because the reindexing isn't happening yet. I am confident we will triumph this time, but the test has not yet begun. ____Not the real rusty Inappropriate third person would be better It votes the story +1FP or else it gets the hose again. ____Not the real rusty Please Please move it out of editing and into voting. It doesn't have a chance of being posted, so prolonging the time it's there isn't going to help. This is not a criticism, it's simply a fact. ____Not the real rusty Crappy reporting They are probably just replaying the information they received from NASA. That's a weak excuse. It's bad reporting. If the reporter doesn't have any clue what this NASA guy's talking about, he should call up his buddy at the university and run it by him. "Hey Joe, does this make sense to you? Have you got a chemist out there?" It's basic, basic stuff. AP is under no obligation to report what NASA says without question. They should feel they're under a much stronger obligation to write news stories that resemble reality. ____Not the real rusty At least Saddam uses his chemical weapons on his own people. Funniest thing I've heard all week. Ken Nichols O'Keefe, former Marine and now head of "We the People," an organization attempting to recruit westerners to go to Iraq and act as human shields, appeared on the Canadian radio news show As it Happens. He works himself up into a maniacal froth. If this doesn't totally encapsulate the far left's self-contradictory anti-war arguments, I don't know what does. The As It Happens website is here, and O'Keefe's segment starts at 11:15 of this Realaudio clip. Best part: [O'Keefe] "Who's more guilty? At least Saddam is using [his chemical weapons] on his own people!" His argument His argument, such as it was, is that Bush is more dangerous than Hussein because the American government supplied Saddam with many of his chemical weapons, while innocent Saddam merely used them on his own people. Apparently selling is worse than using here, since we're talking about the same weapons. It's also hilarious to listen to him try to talk his way out of the fact that by opposing any military action, he is in fact taking action to ensure that Saddam remains in power. He obviously didn't want to admit that, but was unable to come up with an explanation of why that wasn't the case. ____Not the real rusty Heh I didn't mean that he mirrors the views of everyone, just that he presents a really good picture of some of the problems of arguing against the war. A lot of people, myself included, find themselves kind of cornered into arguing several mutually contradictory points. I thought this unfortunate radio appearance was like a caricature of the problems many people are having, is all. ____Not the real rusty CNN I saw him on CNN, and he remained calm and reasonable. However the interviewer (I forget who it was) served him nothing but creampuff qestions. I think he got worked up because this Canadian asked him the hard questions, especially about whether he felt ok tacitly supporting Saddam's regime. ____Not the real rusty Matter of degrees "By far left" I basically did mean "lunatic fringe." And when you get that far out, the lunatic fringes of the left and right tend to start to converge anyway. I just don't usually care enough to split the semantic hairs between "moderate leftish middle-leaning," "moderate left," "solid firm center left," mildly radical left..." and so forth. Consider this guy "far left" on a five-point scale containing far left, left, centrist, right, and far right. ____Not the real rusty Blah Americans have almost perfected the Crack-Mourning Team You've obviously forgotten when Princess Diana died. This ain't an American thing, we've just had the two biggest high-profile National Events of Mourning in the last couple of years. But every country does this. ____Not the real rusty Money A nation with as much focus on turmoil as the States only loves the attention and commercial time. The national media of the US, which is driven by commercial revenue, loves the attention and commercial time. You're confusing the product with the people. ____Not the real rusty I disagree This seems to be a common view, and I think it's driven a lot more by someone's sense of distance from (and, often, superiority to) "the culture" (another term for "all those other people who aren't like me") than any actual experience or knowlege. When something tragic happens, the people I meet and talk to are generally sad that something tragic happened. They are not typically laying flowers by the barricades or spontaneously weeping in the Hispanic Foods aisle at the mini-mart. They read the papers and watch the news to see if anything new is known about what happened, but they also get on with their lives. But when I see people attempt to characterize the behavior of people after a big media tragedy, it's always full of descriptions of huddled masses staring with glazed eyes at their television screens, creepily eager for more gore, more disaster, more more more. I think these people exist primarily in the imaginations of commentators and pundits (or would-be pundits) who don't spend much time with actual people. It seems to me that that view of people actually looks a lot more like what you see on TV than what you see in the real world. The fact is, most people don't give half a damn what CNN is doing. Most people watch the local half-hour tv news in the morning, and maybe catch a bulletin or two on the radio at work. Most people just have lives to get on with living. In the face of the enormous amount of apathy that actually exists, I'm not real worried about the comical excesses of the 24-hour news cycle. They would love it if people really were hanging on their every word, but few are. I think "the inevitable culture" you're talking about only exists on the little screen. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Lest I be misunderstood, I don't like the televised mourning process either (Tonight: Tragedy: A Nation Grieves with Shepard Smith and Paula Zahn, after these messages). I avoid it as much as possible. But I do take some issue with the idea that it's some American character flaw. I think it's an inevitable outgrowth of the corporate media octopus, and any nation with a highly-developed media machine is going to have the same thing. Again, I point to Princess Di, and over time we'll see the same kind of thing from elsewhere as the tentacles continue to spread. I think it's a cheap and easy cop-out is to claim that Americans just have something wrong with us that makes us this way. If everyone keeps thinking that, it will be too late when you realize you've become just like us. The arguments of American exceptionalism are just as wrong now, when others make them, as they were in past centuries when we made them for ourselves. ____Not the real rusty Me too I'm having roughly the same response to this. It's sad, in the way losing seven people in an accident is inherently sad, but I remember Challenger, and I feel nothing like that. These people all knew they were doing a dangerous job, and I think I agree with you that if you're an astronaut, and you have to go, maybe a shooting star across Texas isn't the worst way to do it. ____Not the real rusty Weekend I actually had a proper weekend day today. I wouldn't claim it's something I do often, but then I probably have a little more motivation for hanging around here than most people. Anyway, my wife and I went into Portland and took in the "History of Milk Delivery" exhibit at the Maine Historical Society. No, really. We did. Shut up, you in the back. There was free ice cream. Then we did some shopping, saw Catch me If You Can at the Nickelodeon, and got sushi. This evening, we had a nice fire in the woodstove and watched Trading Spaces and Iron Chef. Course, here I am back on K5. But at least I did something else today. ____Not the real rusty Space Camp I bet the percentage of junior wanna-be astronauts here is higher than the population as a whole. I, for instance, am a proud graduate of space camp myself. (Seriously, click the link, it's worth it). Oddly, I think the biggest thing I learned at space camp was that I would really never have a place aboard a space shuttle. I learned what each of those people are there for, and none of them were me. I wasn't going to be a scientist (though I almost did become one later, but that's beside the point), and I wasn't going to be a pilot. What I wanted to be was an explorer, and by the time they started flying shuttles, the space program wasn't about exploration anymore. Space camp was a great time, and I'm glad I did it. It certainly gave me a good head start on divining what government acronyms might stand for, a talent I still have today. I still want to go, but if I ever do, I know it's going to be as a tourist. ____Not the real rusty Hey! I know a guy named fat bastard too. Is it the same one? ____Not the real rusty Or clever midgets You know, cunning runts. ____Not the real rusty Phew I'm glad someone got that. I thought it was probably a little too opaque. :-) ____Not the real rusty five point oh If I could give you several fives for this comment, I would. I had forgotten how much being slashdotted sucks. ____Not the real rusty The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit A friend loaned me The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit recently. I had heard of it, vaguely, in that cultural osmosis way that you know about some things without knowing how you know about them. But actually reading it was a revelation, and it instantly became one of my favorite books. I thought it was going to be a rather depressing indictment of stifling "Organization Man" culture, but it really isn't. It's a story about how to find the life that you can be comfortable living, and actually has an incredibly sweet and rather cheerful ending. I have been meaning to mention it, and this article just reminded me. Why is Amazon so damn hard to link to now? Why have they larded up their URLs with all kinds of crap? It used to be so simple, but I had to construct the URL above by hand. Bad Amazon, no cookie. Anyone know of a good online bookstore that uses reasonable URLs? "You have been warned"? What is that? I'm supposed to be afraid of what you'll do? ____Not the real rusty The movie I haven't seen the movie, but the word is that it's pretty different from the book. I will have to see if netflix has it. ____Not the real rusty Odd It's a known issue that was put there on purpose, and has always been that way. It's odd that in the last few days a whole crop of people have noticed this for the first time. What's up with that? ____Not the real rusty Sturgeon's Law "90% of everything is crap" is a rough phrasing of what's known as Sturgeon's Law. Thought you might like to know that the principle has a generally-known name. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hotlist You had all that on your hotlist? Yeesh! Pack rat. ____Not the real rusty Just a little joke! :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty Hyannis Next time you're in Hyannis, observe the main entrance to the Hyannis Golf Club, which is just off Rt. 6 at the 151 exit, on the left heading into town from the highway. If they haven't changed it, there's a big driveway with an island in the middle and a large "Hyannis Golf Club" sign, and there's a miniature white picket fence on either side of the driveway. I helped build and put up that sign and that fence, and partly destroyed a truck in the process. When I worked at the sign shop in Sandwich, there was this guy who worked there, I'll call him Jim. Jim was in the National Guard, and was a big tall broad-shouldered fella who wasn't exactly the sharpest spoon in the drawer, if you know what I mean. He also had a drinking problem. Not that he had trouble drinking, mind you. Really what he had was a not-drinking problem -- he just couldn't seem to get the hang of not drinking. He lived in an apartment above a preschool with a marijuana addict who also worked at the sign shop with us. Ironically, the preschool these two substance dependent individuals lived above was directly across the street from a drug and alcohol treatment clinic. They used to set up lawn chairs out front in the summer and put a giant cooler full of beers in between them and toast the drunks leaving and entering the clinic. I could not possibly make this up, and if I had, no one would believe it. Anyway, me and Bill (who stayed at your house that time, he was the short one) and Jim were sent to tear down the old HGC sign and install the new one. The sign was on top of a tall post in the middle of that island in the driveway, where the new one is now. The post was embedded in a lot of concrete, and we weren't really sure how we were going to get it out. We took the boom truck, which was a flatbed GMC pickup with one of those big swinging boom arms mounted on the bed. The boom didn't really work right, but it had just been fixed enough to work in a rudimentary way again. So Jim's idea was to back the boom truck up to the sign, hook onto it with some chain, and lift that sucker right out. We all thought this was a fine idea, so we put the plan into action. In hindsight, it's clear that our mistake was letting Jim drive the truck. He backed us up, and me and Bill unshipped the boom and got it into position. We had the boom extended and the chain affixed, when we discovered that the boom wasn't long enough to pull the old sign up out of the ground. It hovered just above the sign post, but couldn't really lift it. Jim had an answer. "Hang on," he said, "I'll just drive the truck forward and it'll yank that sucker right out!" We didn't really have time to do any more than jump off the truck and watch in horror as Jim threw the truck into gear and started pulling forward. The old sign did start to tilt, but at the same time, the boom arm started to tilt too. As the truck moved forward, the boom arm and the sign post leaned toward each other like gossips whispering over a fence, forming the legs of a triangle that grew increasingly obtuse, and we could see ominous bulges appearing in the square steel boom arm, near the base. Bill and I were frozen in horror while the realization of what was happening dawned, until one of the bolts holding the boom popped off with a loud crack. We both started yelling at Jim to stop the goddamn truck cause he was fucking up the boom bigtime. He stopped, but by that time the damage was pretty much done. We unhooked the boom from the sign while Jim stormed around and threw chunks of wood and berated his own stupidity. Even though we were all going to get an equal share of the shitstorm that this would cause when the boss saw his truck, it was hard to be mad at Jim, because he was a lot harder on himself than we would have been. I got the feeling that summer that Jim hadn't had a happy childhood. Really nice guy, he'd do anything for you, but he had issues, and the nightly suitcase of Bud cans wasn't really solving them. We managed to get the old sign down, I disremember how, and the new sign in place without further incident. We got the boom more or less back in place on the truck, but it was impossible to miss the damage to it. The ride back to the shop was very quiet. We put up the picket fence the next day, in a pouring rainstorm, which was really a lot more fun than it sounds. Last I heard, Jim and his roommate had both made the long walk across the street and checked themselves into the rehab. I don't know how it turned out for them though. ____Not the real rusty I concur It ought to scare away the crap-mongers. Though chances are the crap-mongers would just laugh and spew anyway, while the good writers would feel sufficiently unsure of themselves to flee. As someone who was actually in favor of the section, I too haven't seen anything yet that doesn't make my eyes bleed with misery, except Rogerborg's fable, which was competent and cute enough, but is a one-time exemption. However, I still say give it time. It's been one day, and the Slashdotting has reminded the trolling hordes of our existence. They will once again get bored and go away, and we'll see what shakes out. ____Not the real rusty Excuse? "I just want to spend more time with my cats." :-) ____Not the real rusty Unperfect This version is something I literally just hacked into the K5 code in the last ten minutes (hence the initial mistake :-)). There's one slightly thorny issue that I basically just worked around instead of doing properly, but it'll work. Hopefully the Scoop code monkeys can take the general idea and do it up properly, but for now, this ought to help a lot with the longer editing time and the temporary influx of crap that happens anytime I stir up the shit at the bottom of our little pond by changing anything. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Sybaritic ____Not the real rusty Synoptic ____Not the real rusty Synaptic ____Not the real rusty No, that one's just crap. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It works the way it ought to, mostly. Internally, there's a little issue. Basically, the mod list should be able to go to a new page after 30 stories, but dealing with paging and having two lists was more than I could do in pico via ssh on the live server, so I basically just worked around it so it won't page at all, for now. Chances are we'll never notice the differnece, as we never have that many stories anyway, but it ought to be fixed so that it still pages properly if the list were to get very long. ____Not the real rusty Don't worry! You can always join the whiners complaining about the CMF. I'm sure there's still plenty of time for that. ____Not the real rusty Edit timeout The edit queue times out in 24 hours. Looks like you got spam-bounced. ____Not the real rusty /. rdf Right now it's saying "not found" for http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf. Ah, I see, it seems that it's only available through http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf. Well that makes sense. Will fix. ____Not the real rusty Er That's just a list of stories you've submitted and had accepted by voters. Your diary is probably the right place to put this, unless and until you think it's good enough to maybe be serialized in the Fiction section. And we are a free publishing house, pretty much. If you find the site really useful to you, you might consider getting a subscription to throw a few bucks my way. :-) ____Not the real rusty I dug up another one From 2000, now appearing on the fiction section page. I'm hoping that by resectioning everything I can find from the past into its new proper section, there will be some kind of guidance as to quality and maybe tone. If anyone can find any others that I've forgotten about, I'd appreciate it. ____Not the real rusty "Dude, incest is not cool." Subtle. He won't get it till he sobers up. ____Not the real rusty Well The diary was posted at 2:35AM Eastern, and I posted my comment at 2:47AM. So a maximum of 12 minutes. Actually, it was more like two from when I read the diary to when I posted. But c'mon, it's a basic twist on the classic "your mom" joke. Not all that radical. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sarah He's going to pick Sarah. Count on it. Zora is boring, even for him. Melissa hates everything and is a total failure at being a human being. I mean, how can you live for 25 years and not know what fucking garlic looks like? How can you exist without knowing the rudiments of how to feed yourself? Sarah, on the other hand, is playing like a champ. She's a little coy, but a little slutty. She loves everything they do and always has a good time. She maintains the mystery without being chilly. And she's by far the best looking of the bunch. He's going to pick her. And she's going to pitch a fit like you never saw when she finds out the truth. I so can't wait. Evan, dull? News reports say he had a brain cell once, but it died of loneliness. "Duh, I don't know, they're all so great. Duh. Duh. Beer?" Could they have possibly found a dimmer star to screw into the Fox firmament? Anyway, Monday night is Fear Factor and Joe Millionaire in our house. We likes us some trashy TV, hoo-raw. ____Not the real rusty OS X So how are you getting along in the OS X ghetto? I'm endlessly amused by OS X users crowing about their groovy new apps that linux had three years ago and windows had five years ago. It's refreshing to find a platform that has even less software than *nix, a niche that has been sorely lacking since BeOS died. :-) Of course, everyone's favorite is "We've got a console!" That just cracks me up. ____Not the real rusty Fiction The fiction vote passed rather handily, so I'm going to add the section today. But we need a new front page poll! Now's your chance. Please submit suggestions for a new poll below. In other news, K5 stood up like a champ to today's Slashdotting, with only one brief hiccup (the stories table had a hanging lock, for some reason). There is a bundle of bug fixes in Scoop that I will be applying later this afternoon, when the slashdotting has died down, including fixes for that dynamic mode comment formatting issue, the missing topic list bug, the archive search bugs, and the edit queue poll bug. I also will be raising the time limit for the edit queue quite a bit (probably up to 24 hrs), and looking for numbers to fine-tune the spam button. I know there are bugs that I've forgotten about, so mention those below too, if you like. And give me your poll ideas! Ha! I like that one. ____Not the real rusty 70 It's 70 right now, and that doesn't seem to be kicking in before 2 hours is up generally. I agree that 40 would probably be too low. I doubt it'll ever be lower than 50. ____Not the real rusty Feature? It's always been that way. It's on purpose, but it is a feature of dubious value. It may change soon. ____Not the real rusty However I think the initial idea was that more ratings == better. So if you accidentally rate something, you can always change it to reflect your actual opinion of what the comment should be rated, but you can't un-rate so as to preserve more information rather than less. I don't think there's enough accidental rating to make a big difference though, really. ____Not the real rusty Alternatively... You could renew your subscription. :-) ____Not the real rusty robots.txt All I did on robots.txt was to restrict Google to stories. If you need a convenient data point on how fixed K5 is, consider that we got slashdotted today. Did you notice? :-) And I haven't even moved to a new database server yet. I think the problem is licked for now. ____Not the real rusty They are saved I wasn't sure what the behavior was myself, but I just checked, and it appears diary sub lists are saved if your subscription runs out. Renew and they should all come back the way you had them before. ____Not the real rusty Heh You don't have to send money ever. I was just making sure everyone was aware of the option. Is there anything you need fixed right now? ____Not the real rusty I think it does I am not positive, and can't find anyone to test it, but I'm pretty sure dynamic mode does work with 1.0. Try force-refreshing http://www.kuro5hin.org/dynamic-comments.js. This seems to work for most people. ____Not the real rusty "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!" --Jimi Hendrix ____Not the real rusty Fucking Proxomitron I guarantee you he's using proxomitron, as it is the only piece of junk that ever causes that error. God, how I do hate that nefarious piece of crap. I would put it somewhere official that you should not use goddamn Proxomitron, but no one would ever read it. The worst part is that Scoop always gets blamed. Damn, how I hate Proxomitron. ____Not the real rusty There is no K5 cabal. ____Not the real rusty Well, there goes the neighborhood You arrive and look what happens! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Archive searching Hey, the default sql for the archive db includes fulltext indexes, so they have to be MyISAM tables. I left them, assuming it would use fulltext search for the archive, but it seems to just use the default I have set (which for the live DB is non-fulltext). Could you add a separate var to indicate whether the archive should use fulltext or not, so I can make the two use different methods? ____Not the real rusty Thanks to you! :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty Bah, Celcius! I thought you were all badass, and then I see that you were just using the European scale to make it sound colder than it is, like they do. It's 9 degrees and you're complaining? My wife walks a mile to the boat every morning when it's -5 (that's REAL degrees, Fahrenheit). You pussy. (Says the man who hasn't left the house in days. Ah-hem.) ;-) ____Not the real rusty I wish I love the cold. Actually, I'm a big fan of all extreme weather, but the winter kind is my favorite. I wish it got that cold here more often. ____Not the real rusty Yes, it is The poll passed, and it will be added. I don't know if I'll get to it tomorrow or not, and the weekend's shot. But I've been a little busy with the upgrade. It'll happen. ____Not the real rusty Ha! :-) ____Not the real rusty Oops! Wrong account. ____Not the real rusty The queue beatings will continue... ...until your morale improves. Thanks for a year of good stories, and for actually getting a story autoposted with a score of 6. That's pretty astounding, actually. That makes me think that someday, there will be a story autoposted to the front page, though we may have a while to wait yet on that. ____Not the real rusty RSS The RSS feed includes everything. And no, the last thing we need at the moment is more people. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nothing Special We've got a life of scratching tickets at the local gas and stop So suck on another whippit and hear the brain cells pop Local H, MaineBiz, and tell me what book to buy. Step inside, the show's about to begin! Local H is a highly underrated band. Or at least it was as of their 1996 album "As Good as Dead." If you ever wax nostalgic for a 64 oz. Big Gulp from the wellspring of 90's cynical slacker bitterness, you will probably not find anything better. Wasted time? Blown potential? Fritz's Corner might be the song for you: I'm not mad I'm just bored And everything I do is only because There's nothing much else for me to do And that includes you Messing around with you Piss away potential Everyday is a waste And I'm wasted everyday There's nothing much else for me to do And that includes you and that includes you Or perhaps you rage against mullet-headed classic rockers? Try High-Fiving MF on for size: You're just a walking billboard for all the latest brands You've got no taste in music and you really love our band You're haircut is atrocious it's been the same since '83 Your glory days are over and so's your stonewashed jeans Jenna Lane, who writes the e-Maine column for MaineBiz stopped by yesterday to interview me. I plied her with tea and homemade banana bread, and in return she promised to mislead all of MaineBiz's readers into thinking K5 was actually a business. Hey, in the many-tentacled world of modern media, it's strictly squid pro quo, buddy. I kid. Not about the tea and banana bread, about the other part. She promised nothing. Actually, the whole thing was a lot more like a friend coming over to hang out than an interview, so I have no idea what the article will end up saying. Luckily you won't be able to read it online. MaineBiz is firmly committed to embracing the revolutionary new communications media, but so far they haven't made it past telegraph and ham radio. What did I say? I mean they haven't made it to telegraph and ham radio. They're still getting the hang of Mr. Gutenberg's fabulous new auto-mechanical press-machine. But all the boys up in the scriptorium sure are excited about the potential of it. "It's embarrassing," confessed MaineBiz columnist Jenna Lane with an insouciant toss of her auburn hair. "It's like 'You write a column called E-Maine, and it's not online?' Yeah. How dumb is that?"* This also marked the first time I've ever been interviewed in person. All in all, I think I prefer the phone. In person, it's so clear that there are many more interesting things to talk about, it's hard to keep on track. I've got a gift certificate to Borders/Amazon, and my wife is pressuring me to pick out a book so we can actually order something (she's chosen hers already). I don't know what to get, so this is your choice to recommend your favorite work of lit'rature. What should I get? -- * Quote is an actual approximate guess at what she might have said. Have it And have read it many times. I probably should have been more specific about needing suggestions for books I haven't already read. If it's well-known, I've probably already read it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Various comments I've been meaning to check out Lem. I will consider that. I'm a huge Pratchett fan and have read all but I think three or four of his books. I don't think I'll order them, as it's so fun to find a new one I haven't read yet when poking through bookstores. Unless he's got a new one out. What was the most recent? I started to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being once, and it bored the crap out of me. I know, famous work of literature and all that, but life is too short to read boring books. I think I'll pass. I haven't heard of The Fifth Business. I'll check that out too, thanks. ____Not the real rusty Ooh! You're right! I had a sneaking feeling there might be a new one. Thanks, Librarian! Want a banana? ____Not the real rusty Squish Squish Squish That's the sound the database is making right now. I keep jamming fresh hamsters in and it just chews them up. I fear for us all. We offered her a selection of tea, and she chose a frou-frou kind that tastes IMO like nasty hot fruit juice. My wife likes the stuff too. There's just no accounting for taste. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's busy as hell today, and it's not Google. Yesterday was holiday-slow. I guess everyone's back at work but no one's really off holiday yet, if you know what I mean. ____Not the real rusty Michener Michener makes me want to tear my eyeballs out with a fork and jump off a cliff. I understand some people like him quite a bit. Sadly, I am not one of those people. :-) ____Not the real rusty One termer As I have said since day one of the Bush 2 presidency, George W is a one-termer like his daddy. Watch the economy sag, watch the war dissolve, watch W get his ass run out of town in 2004. ____Not the real rusty My beliefs I don't talk a lot about politics here because I don't usually think arguing politics with relative strangers does very much for me, and also because it tends to take me a long time to adequately explain why I hold a particular belief, so my choice is between shallow and unsatisfying arguments, and investing a lot of time explaining something to someone I don't have any real stake in convincing. My opinion about all of our various wars seems to shift on a pretty frequent basis, depending on what new information is available. I just listened to an episode of This American Life this afternoon that will require some pretty long thinking before I can integrate it into my feelings about the war in Iraq. But it definitely left me more disposed to be in favor of it than not. I still think that the current administration is so crooked they have to screw their pants on every morning, and I thought much the same of the previous administration as well. There are few people in Washington truly worthy of respect, and the higher you look the less likely you are to find them. Oddly, I think K5 as a whole reflects my values much more than I would have expected. One of the clearest unifying threads of people here is radical doubt. K5ers tend to doubt and question everything, and seem to delight in taking contrarian views seemingly just for the hell of it. And while my politics are pretty damn hard to define on the left/right scale, the biggest constant feature is doubt. I hate being told how to think, by anyone, so I tend to seek flaws in everyone's rigid ideology. Usually I can find common ground with just about anyone, but my first instinct is to figure out where I can be sure that they're wrong. I don't not argue very much because I don't care for what's said. If anything, I don't argue much because it's rare that someone isn't already saying what I would have said better than I would have said it. I'm also kind of wary of the perceived weight of my comments. I don't want people to get the idea that K5 has a State Religion, in politics or anything else. Forums like this tend to adopt the personalities of their maintainers, and I think part of it is the perception that if you disagree with the exalted founder, you must be somehow wrong and unwelcome. About the Dems chances next time around, I will vote for whoever they put up, but I know I'm going to have to choke down bile to do it. All their candidates so far suck. John Edwards is looking like the least objectionable one so far, but that's probably just because I don't know enough about him yet. If it were up to me, I'd force them to draft former Maine governor Angus King, who is the kind of person we desperately need in charge right now. ____Not the real rusty Critical thinking I have to object to this part. I appreciate critical thinking, but that is not the same thing as the "rebellious cynicism" that is often displayed here. I used to be that way, but I think I'm softening with age. It gets old after a while. I cringe when I read some of the posts around here. I remember being just as hateful and distrustful. What's the theory that we hate the things that remind us most of ourselves. Well yeah, me too. But a lot of people here aren't as elderly as you and I. :-) What I see is a lot of people who will grow up and learn a lot more and become pretty sharp critical thinkers. We all had that rebellious stage. I even considered myself a libertarian for a while (*shudder*). They'll outgrow it eventually, like we did. By the way, if you haven't heard it, the This American Life ep is online in RealAudio. By far the most worthwhile hour of words about Iraq I have heard in a long time. ____Not the real rusty Count me in! But we'll only beat the dumb ones, ok? I say I say that was a joke, son. Laugh. ____Not the real rusty What I'd need Copy of Chemistry 101 Copy of Steam Plant Operation 1973 Oldsmobile Delta Royale Shotgun Chainsaw ____Not the real rusty That's what the books are for I'd of course have to refit it with a steam engine, and a giant spinning propellor blade on the front... I'm sorry, I'm having my own little in-joke here, and you clearly are not equipped to get it. Don't worry. I'm just nuts. :-) ____Not the real rusty Who's laughing now!!! ____Not the real rusty Garbage Houses Creepy. I was perusing various stories of animal hoarding and garbage houses this morning via some linkage from BoingBoing. The whole idea that there are people out there right now living in total hideous squalor for no good reason is so creepy yet so compelling. These are places where entropy has won, and runs rampant. I think they're compelling because I can envision each and every step between where I am right now and the very rock bottom, where I squeeze precariously through stacks of reeking trash and piles of rat-infested newspaper to get to my flyblown kitchen, which is now the room in which I squat over a bucket to shit. I can imagine the steps in between because all that's really required is inaction. What if I didn't take out the trash today, but instead just left it sitting near the door. What if I didn't wash the dishes or wipe the kitchen counter. What if I didn't let the cats go in and out when they want to, and never cleaned the litterbox. What if I just left things where they fell. Every step on the road to a garbage house is a non-event. Something that didn't happen. Garbage houses are the universal default -- the base energy state of the domestic atom. It is absolutely certain that if you just stopped cleaning, your house would become one too. There's a psychological theory that garbage houses are the product of a mental disorder related to OCD, and I buy this to some extent. I suppose not all of them are, but probably most. I think the argument runs that people who live in these houses don't get rid of anything because they have a deep uncontrollable fear that anything they get rid of will turn out to have been incredibly important, and they'll regret losing it forever. The heaps and mountains of trash are like insulation for some sucking black hole of need, but no matter how much stuff they pile up, it's never enough. I have a weird image, a moment from my past that has stuck in my head for more than four years now. I was in my first apartment in DC, a ratty one-room basement studio below a group house. It was large for its price, is about the best that can be said for that place. Christina had gone to Minneapolis to work for Young Idealist Exploitation Inc. about five months earlier, and I was lonely. I was very lonely, and to be honest I had not yet gotten the hang of life. I forgot to pay bills, or just ignored them in hopes that they'd go away. I had a good job, and made enough money, but I just wasn't organized, and didn't care. I rarely went food shopping, and improvised some pretty bizarre meals, despite having a 24-hour grocery two blocks away. When I did cook, the dishes would remain unwashed for far, far too long. It was the dishes. It was the end of August, the hottest part of summer. The dishes had been stacking up for several days, or were it weeks? The grubby kitchen alcove was pretty ripe. There were flies. Big fat black flies that glinted bluish-purple in the sunlight and buzzed loud and slow. It was hot, DC swamp hot like 95 degrees and 98 percent humidity. Any movement at all caused free-flowing trickles of sweat to spring out all over my body. The image that's stayed in my head all this time is of some day that August, me standing in the kitchen in a loose white t-shirt soaked through with sweat, limp khakis fluttering around my legs, sweat-soaked hair clinging to my forehead and hanging dripping in front of my eyes. I had been hunting flies. I was holding a rolled up slice of the Post and breathing hard from swinging it over and over, smashing those fat slow repulsive flies against any surface they landed on, one after another, splattering them in grey smears on the walls, the fridge, the counter, anything. I sweated and puffed in the heat and didn't know how long I had been hitting flies with a newspaper. The moment that I remember is the moment I stopped and realized again where I was and who I was and what I was doing. I had just... gone away for a little while. It scared the hell out me. I washed the dishes a little later, and kept everything pretty clean until the flies went after easier pickings elsewhere. I wish I could say that moment turned me around and snapped me out of it, but it didn't really. Christina came back that October. I drove out to Minneapolis to pick her up and when we got back to my dank linoleum-floored efficiency there was, of course, a pile of unwashed dishes that I hadn't cleaned before I left. Welcome home, darling. But back then when she was gone, I wasn't right. I could feel that void that the psychologists say the garbage-house people are trying to fill. It didn't eat up my whole life, but I could feel where it was and what it would look like if it got closer. I think I did a little bit of that trying to build up a wall against it. Not much, not so you'd think anything was really wrong if you were there, but a little bit. I think I know what it feels like, a little. This afternoon I swept the living room really thoroughly and then mopped it with the Swiffer. Before that I cut up two big cardboard boxes that had been sitting around waiting for me to cut them up to burn in the woodstove. Christina was sitting on the couch reading, and as I swiped at the boxes with a utility knife I asked her what most people did with cardboard boxes, since I seemed to spend such a lot of time cutting them up. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe they recycle them." "Maybe they don't do anything with them," I said. "Just leave them sitting there. That's probably how garbage houses start; you leave one cardboard box lying around and next thing you know you're ass-deep in human feces. It's a slippery slope." She smiled. But I wasn't entirely kidding. No can do Heh. I'll spend an hour or two this summer watching the grass grow and report back on it for you. I assume you won't mind if I leverage a little locally-brewed yeasty refreshment for the avdancement of that project. :-) Unfortunately, I don't have a garage, so no dice there with the boxes. Also, I have absolutely no free storage space, since our house was rented furnished and still largely full of our landlady's stuff in all the nooks and corners, which is a big pain in the ass. So boxes have nowhere to go. Luckily, corrugated cardboard is as good a form of tinder as you could hope for, especially if you kind of roll it up. A little newspaper on the bottom, a layer of cardboard box pieces, and a couple logs and you'll have a roaring fire in no time. I'm almost out of proper firewood though, so after that ceases being an option, I don't know what I'll do with them. Ah, maybe I'll just leave them alone. What harm can it do... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Try "dangerous" I don't think it's an issue of revulson. It's a matter of health. If your neighbor's house is chock full of rotting food waste and untreated human feces, you're cruisin for disease city. I don't really want my neighborhood to be the locus of the next outbreak of cholera, do you? Unless you want to argue that it's middle class morality that finds cholera unattractive... ____Not the real rusty Also Read at least this link from the diary. I don't care whose morality is responsible or what the excuse is, as long as it gets those kids out of that house. ____Not the real rusty Requiem for a Dream I think the best words I've ever seen written about the American Dream were in Hubert Selby Jr.'s preface to Requiem for a Dream, which were something to the effect that it was his belief that the so-called American Dream is inherently an unattainable lie. The "Dream" of the title is the American Dream, and the book (and movie) does just about as thorough a job destroying that fantasy as I can imagine anyone ever doing. I buy his argument completely. The essence of the American Dream is that it does not and will never exist. The surest route to misery is to try to chase it. However, there are happy people in the world. I wish I had more financial security, yes. I wish I owned a house. But I am a happy person. I love where I live, I love my wife more than anything in the world, and she likewise. I have good friends and the freedom to do a million wildly cool things. I will probably even do one or two of those things. :-) Maybe it's that I'm not chasing some dream. I'm just trying to keep myself in a life I can be happy living. There are a lot of unhappy people, but it's definitely not everyone. ____Not the real rusty Sounds like Langley I saw a documentary on TV recently where they followed many people as they went out to gather more garbage for their garbage houses. What they generated on their own was not enough. They needed more empty milk cartons, orange peels, rags, and broken dishes. The hidden camera footage of grannies and cranky old men walking down to the corner to take in the garbage was bizarre. Sounds like Langley Collyer. That's a hell of a story. I'm really interested to hear that this is not a uniquely American thing. Do health authorities in Japan often clear our and condemn these places, or are they just left alone? ____Not the real rusty Heh If I were ever to forget, I'm pretty sure that image would come right back into my head and remind the living crap out of me fast. :-) Oddly enough, I'm the one in the relationship who does almost all of the cleaning and housekeeping, and it's out of my own desire to keep the place clean. Living with someone else changes your habits a lot, I find. We cook far more when we're together as well. ____Not the real rusty You should write a letter At the very least in support of the Eric Eldred Act, which would go a long way toward solving the problems of a functionally infinite term of copyright. I'm not sure who you'd write to though. Are you still a US voter, oficially? ____Not the real rusty Well... She could be your sister. ____Not the real rusty Nah You set it up, I just knocked it down. It was a team effort. :-) ____Not the real rusty What were Hemingway's rules? I am curious. ____Not the real rusty Also You may note this with interest. About halfway down the article:He does, however, tell me CafPress has exciting plans to expand into publishing in early 2003: The company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafPress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable.I've swapped a couple emails with Cafepress's founder. If you'd like I can see what the status is of that. ____Not the real rusty You're welcome! We aim to please. You aim too, please. :-) ____Not the real rusty Say hi to johnny for me And his talented colleague Jennifer Tidwell, if you should happen to meet her too. And tell her rusty said "Take pictures!" ____Not the real rusty I've missed you shoeboy This is the shoeboy we all know and love. No more of that sea shanty nonsense now, eh? ____Not the real rusty Yell at them People are so aggressively polite in ATM lines. It's like they somehow carry a little bit of the gravitas banks have worked so hard to cultivate. But look, what it basically is is a vending machine for cash. No armed guard is going to threaten you if you get snippy with the drooler in front of you in line. My recommendation is, after five solid minutes of steady 'beep boop beep beep beep boop beep...' on the keys (and they always manage to do this) you just yell "What the hell dude, are you trying to hack into the Pentagon over there? Getta move on!" If nothing else, it'll scare the hell out of them, and the ATM is such a vulnerable place to be anyway, chances are they'll move along fast. ____Not the real rusty Go take a walk And smoke a cigar. ____Not the real rusty Just a thought Like the title says. I opened the door of the woodstove and pushed another log on top of the coals. I sat down cross-legged in front of the open woodstove door and let the heat pouring out tighten the skin on my face. Deep inside the stove the coals were bright orange tinged on the edges with white speckles. The heat that warmed my face, the energy released by burning this wood, came from sunlight collected by this maple tree over how many years? 25? 30? More? The tree grew here, was cut down here, or fell down in a storm, and lay in a pile of long logs until my father and I cut it up with his chainsaw this summer, and I split it with a new axe I got down at the Ace hardware. This heat that made my face feel like it was too small for my head came directly from the same sunlight that lit up summer days when I was little and came up to the island to visit my grandparents. The sunlight that soaked the beach at the north end of the island while I picked through the tide pools catching tiny crabs also fell on this maple tree. It turned that sunlight into food, grew and eventually fell down, or was cut, and now I'm burning it in my woodstove and feeling the warmth of the concentrated essence of that childhood sunlight. Heh No it isn't. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dude! What if, like, what I see as the color green to me is, like, different from what you see as the color green to you? Whoah! ____Not the real rusty You can't con an honest man See the subject for the basic root of the success of cons. Cons play on the mark's desire to cheat, to get something for nothing. It's not a matter of thinking about consequences so much as realizing that there's no such thing as a free lunch. ____Not the real rusty BoingBoing I found the comment about "White Room Syndrome" particularly interesting on BoingBoing. If you read the link, I think you also hit the "Adam and Eve Story" one, though that's kind of arguable. I wouldn't be too discouraged by the paucity of comments on BoingBoing. Most posts there don't get any comments, and of the few that do, most don't get more than you got. It just isn't a highly commenty kind of place. ____Not the real rusty The cliches I judged the effect of your hitting all those cliches by the fact that they didn't strike me as such at the time. Now maybe that's just me not reading enough sci-fi, but I kind of doubt it. They were all there for a good reason in your story, I thought. I meant to mention Bank Street Writer. Man, that took me back. I remember several stories I wrote in BSW way back in the day, in like 7th grade, on the Apple ][c. ____Not the real rusty Best ever There's More Than One Way To Eat A Poo. ____Not the real rusty Oh man "The Best Part of Waking Up Is Poo in Your Cup" Jesus, they're all good. ____Not the real rusty Even better You should call it The Transmogrification of Prime Intellect, wherein PI realizes that most of its problems were simply due to loneliness, so it uses the Correlation Effect to create for itself a stuffed tiger which it calls Hobbes. PI and Hobbes become best friends and engage in all kinds of zany antics including frequent interludes of sledding down steep hills, throwing snowballs at icky girls, and asking Dr. Lawrence unanswerable questions. Or maybe it's just way past time for me to go to sleep. ____Not the real rusty Aye I think that little thing has run it's course. Ino put it there. K5 does not make a policy of thinking Penny Arcade is funny in any way. ____Not the real rusty Right on Two birds with one stone then! ;-) ____Not the real rusty live nude hobbits According to Google K5 totally owns the "live nude hobbits" market. Like, there isn't even any competition. Phase One of my plan is complete... ____Not the real rusty Well First, it was a goofy bottom-of-page thing. I have a longstanding tradition of sprinkling goofy easter eggs here and there, because I like them. They're never anything to get very worried about. And sometimes the other admins plant them too, which is also generally fine. But more importantly, the point of the link was that MS bashing is stupid, particularly the "M$ Sucks d00d!!!" flavor. It was anti-bashing. It was "'M$ sucks' sucks." You have to parse the whole thing. But silly and inconsequential in any case. :-) ____Not the real rusty I think I'm sick I'm achy and fuzzy-headed, and my thoughts are not holding together very well. My lips are very dry. My head hurts. My neck hurts more. I'm trying to work up the energy to do at least one of the several things I ought to get done today, but so far not having much success. The sound of the clicking keyboard is making my head hurt more. The following will be poorly organized. I feel like some kind of crypto-publisher lately. Between Roger's book and johnny's new project I'm soaking in it. There's so many other people doing cool stuff online. I waver by the minute between wanting to do more cool stuff and wanting to build furniture in an old barn by the side of Route One, to sell to well coiffed summer people driving by in their minivans. In the winter I'd burn scraps in an old potbellied woodstove to keep my barn warm, and some days I'd just sharpen chisels and look at the snow out the window. But when would I have time for that, with my island bookstore to operate? I'd have to be there, manning the register as islanders stomped in shaking the snow off their boots and asked if I had gotten the newest Williams or Sundman opus in stock yet. I'd tell them of course, we always have the good stuff first. And if you like, you can order them online. But they don't want that, they want to come in where it's warm and pull up one of the overstuffed chairs by the fire, order a cup of strong black coffee and dig right in to their book. I'm not chatty by nature, and the readers would appreciate that. My imagination dresses these things up as businesses, but my deep dark secret is that they're not really. They're TV businesses, the dull work of keeping books and records, filling out paperwork is hidden away and never seen. What I really want is a shop full of tools, and a room full of books. I want a site full of great stories to read and discussions to engage in, or just follow. A warm house with scarred polished wood everywhere and three cats. Snow waist deep nuzzled up to the windowsills. There are so many things to do in the world, and places to see. How do you choose one thing to spend one third of your life exclusively doing? How do you trade your life for money? With so much to choose from, how do you choose? I think I'm sick. Advil I stick to ibuprofen. It's the only one that seems to do any good for me. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, I actually am sick. But as for most of the contents of this diary, you're right. ____Not the real rusty They be gone It's not "some users," it's just one guy. He makes an account, spews a bunch of junk, I close the account and remove all the junk, and onward goes the great circle of internet life. Don't bother getting mad, just drop me an email. Anyway, yes I am listening, and acting. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! Damn, I wish I saw these before I posted the site news. Funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Googlebot I feel like this guy lately. "I am Google! I find many good things. I find that pair of underwear with the little dice printed all over them. And I watch the tape of you with the life-sized Stallman puppet. These are good unique things. Many keywords and links! My masters will say 'much good job, little robot!' Many searchers will find happy links of Stallman puppet see you! Ahhhh." ____Not the real rusty Email I get surprisingly little email, actually. I guess that's a good thing, as it would seem to indicate that people assume I will communicate regularly, which of course isn't always true. Then again, maybe they just don't know who I am or why it would do any good to email me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha Stupid slow servers. :-) ____Not the real rusty I make my own sauce One pepper, one onion, three or four cloves of garlic, saute briefly in XVOO with salt and pepper. Toss in one large can diced tomatoes, basil, a bay leaf, thyme, rosemary (finely chopped or smashed up with a mortar and pestle), some dried or fresh parsley, and a little red wine if you like. Bring to a boil, then take down to a simmer for a while. Salt and pepper as needed. Yum! :-) ____Not the real rusty Controlling your own data FWIW, I agree about controlling your own data. I hope to push some development in Scoop to allow diarists to cancel or edit their own diaries, and hopefully also to extract their work in some convenient text format for backup or migration. ____Not the real rusty My lonely inbox... ...remains yet unblessed by your correspondence. Lately I've been having this problem where I'll be just walking down the street or staring out the window and my brain will cough up the phrase "Fruit flies like a banana." This is happening several times a day. Can you help me with this? ____Not the real rusty The wind howls Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. --William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act 3 scene 1 It's blizzarding today, winds 33 knots, gusting to 40. I walked up to the north end of the island last night and stood facing the ocean. It felt like I was standing with my head out a car sunroof on the highway. Twelve or sixteen new inches on the ground, and they're saying it will keep snowing all day. This is on top of the ten inches we've still got on the ground from the Christmas storm. Damn, I love winter. They sicken of the calm that know the storm. --Dorothy Parker Whenever it snows, I'm irresistably compelled to watch the storm on TV. I don't know what deep-seated need this fulfills in me, but it happens every time. When we lived in DC there was a big snowstorm once. I thought about going outside, but flipped on the TV to watch the local coverage. The beleaguered field reporter was of course standing out in the driving snow, and looking at the background behind her I realized she was set up on the north side of Dupont Circle, not four blocks from my apartment. This was perfect: it was like going outside and watching the storm on TV at the same time. It is getting dark and time he drew to a house, But the blizzard blinds him to any house ahead. The storm gets down his neck in any icy souse That sucks his breath like a wicked cat in bed. --Robert Frost This morning I've been flipping back and forth between NECN and the Weather Channel, but coverage frankly sucks. Snow in Maine is not a rare thing, so they don't make such a fuss about it. It'll be the lead local news story today and tomorrow, sure, but they're not going to do special break-in end-of-the-world coverage like they would in DC. I wish there was a Storm Channel, which would just send reporters out to different places whenever there's a storm to report on it. I think being a Storm Channel reporter might be my dream job. The Weather Channel should spin this off, just track storms wherever they are. There's gotta be a storm somewhere almost all the time, right? I only drink fortified wines during bad weather. Snowstorm, hurricane, tornado--I'm not particular, as long as it's bad. After all, any storm for a Port. --Paul S. Winalski Tides today are high astronomically, and made even higher by the storm surge and the great big low sitting offshore. Around noon, at high tide, I'm going to walk over to the northeast bit of backshore and observe. The nearest buoy is reporting 17.4 ft seas. It ought to be a hell of a show. Did I mention how much I love winter? There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. --William Shakespeare, Julius Csar. Act iv. Sc. 3. My wife and I went to see my grandmother over Christmas, and she made it very clear that she was waiting for the promised second half of the family tree. So I'll have to finish that pretty soon. I also had to explain that anything presented as a fact in the first one was factual according to the information I have, but that anything that seemed like "color" was purely the product of my imagination. I'm told my description of my great-grandfather was spot-on though, so good guessing there. Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. --Matt Groening, "Life in Hell" Heh Yes, I was. I just realized that without a link, you could probably read that whole paragraph very differently. I have to admit perdida's comment totally flummoxed me at first. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Who knew? I didn't see that before. I just grabbed it off some quotation site. I notice you didn't attribute it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow! I just took the promised walk around the island, and holy crap, Batman! Backshore is amazing. 20 foot waves crashing on shore, in several places they're coming right up over the road. My wife and I were standing in the wrong spot and got doused by one of them. It's blowing 30 knots and intermittently hard to stand straight in the gusts. Easily the coolest weather I've ever seen here. There were lots of other people out who clearly had the same idea as me, but most of them were observing the wreckage from the comfort of their cars. Wussies. ____Not the real rusty Mail? I haven't gotten anything yet... It's actually been a bad year for snowmobilers already. There were three deaths the weekend after Christmas. If only they'd read snot rack. ____Not the real rusty No worries I was ignoring it before you even asked. ;-) Actually I was going to email back and do the usual "Are you sure?" routine, because it pretty much always turns out to be a passing thing. But laziness prevailed so I was procrasticating. And now look! It's taken care of itself. ____Not the real rusty Me too For some reason my childhood memories of Magic Sand are all bound up with memories of sunday school, now that they've been revived by this post. I also haven't thought about that stuff since I was probably sub-10. I wonder why I'm getting all these sunday school associations though. Surely they didn't use it to demonstrate God's love somehow? "For The Lord so loved mankind that it was like how this kick-ass sand stays dry in water!" ____Not the real rusty Pauly *Shore* And that right there probably constitutes another item on the list... ____Not the real rusty That is the reason The underline/hyperlink confusion is why the tag isn't enabled here. I'm invariably annoyed by underlined text in a web page that isn't a link, so in this one environment where I actually get to decide whether it can be done or not, it won't be. :-) ____Not the real rusty 100 to 1? I think you're being a little generous there. What's the matter, hedging your bets? I bet you'd win offering to bet on greater than 300 to one. On the other hand, it will probably be hard to collect, as exact numbers on things like that are hard to substantiate. Are you counting combatants only, or are civilians included? If the latter, I'd go as high as 400 to one. ____Not the real rusty Well If more people were involved in running the country, for example. We may have 536 rich old white guys now, but if we just expanded the House to 600 reps, then we'd have 701 rich old white guys! See, it's very simple. ____Not the real rusty Ads that really suck So, if you were watching TV, and a newspaper ad came up on the screen and just sat there, what would you do? Would you scurry up to the screen and squint at it, trying to read all the tiny print before your thirty seconds were up? No, you'd totally ignore it. Because it would be an ad tailored to an activity that you were not currently doing. But if you were trying to read a newspaper, and a big fat TV ad started playing in the middle of the article, you'd do everyhting in your power to get the cursed thing away from you as fast as possible. So why does the Mercury News think that showing me a TV commercial while I'm trying to read an article is a good idea? I'm interested in the Elcomsoft story. Dan Gillmor is one of the best mainstream tech writers out there right now, and is sure to have interesting things to say about it. At least, I assume he does, I wouldn't know firsthand. I tried to read his column about it in SiliconValley.com, and as soon as the page loaded, my sound card hummed to life, and the Big Fucking Ad box in the middle of the page started showing me a full-blown TV commercial. It's about a guy trying to catch a flight in a mysteriously empty airline terminal. I don't know what it's for, because I was too astounded by the fact that an online newspaper was showing me a TV commercial as I was trying to read an article to pay attention. I did notice that the sound was hilariously out of sync with the image, playing the voice-over punchline a good ten seconds before the visual punchline got to the screen. I was also too distracted by the unavoidable fact that there was a TV commercial playing to attempt to read the article I came for. In bafflement, I reloaded the page a few times. It seems the video ad rotates with some more standard-issue Flash ads. I got the video ad about every fourth or fifth reload. For a long time I thought that there would never be anything as dumb as the TV commercial. All that shouting, flashing, singing and dancing, sound-effect enhanced desperation, begging for a just a few seconds of your attention. They manage to be both condescending and idiotic at the same time, like your Uncle Jethro trying to lecture you about nuclear physics. But, as with so many other things, I have come to appreciate their good points. For one thing, they come in uninterrupted batches of several minutes, leaving you time to get up, grab a snack, take a leak, hit the mute button and chat with your TV watching partners about what just happened on the show. For another thing, they don't (yet) actually play while the show is on. Ok, there are those little animated overlay ads at the bottom of the screen sometimes, but they're easily ignorable. And, though I wouldn't previously have even thought of this, the sound and picture are usually nicely in sync. The Mercury News has shown me the error of having too little regard for the TV ad. Say what you will about them, at least they look like TV. They're not jarringly, painfully different from the activity I'm already engaged in. TV ads, on the other hand, are not a smart way to advertise to people who are trying to read. It's like running into a library dressed in a clown costume and screaming "HEY EVERYONE! SALE ON MALT LIQUOR AT JOE'S BEVERAGE! EVEYTHING 30 PERCENT OFF RIGHT NOW!" Guess how many happy new customers that's going to get you? I'll give you a hint: it's about twelve fewer than the number of boots you will have to pull out of your ass afterward. And that number is eleven. So, to the recto-cranially inverted ad managers at the Merc, I can only say this. I know times are tough right now in the online ad market. It's hard to make ends meet. You won't find anyone more sympathetic to that than I. But as sympathetic as I am, you've still managed to piss me off by being irredeemably stupid. Advertise to me! I get advertised to twice a minute, all day long. But don't advertise to me at the expense of the material I came for in the first place, because it'll be the last chance you get. I won't be back. I really like Dan Gillmor's work. It's a shame I will probably be avoiding it from now on. I hope, for my sake and Dan's, that he can find a better job pretty soon. In case you didn't realize it already, Dan's the only thing that anyone cares about at the Merc. Lose his readers, and you'll lose him. Lose him, and you die. I was one of his readers, and you've lost me. The thing is... I actually have already blocked images from every ad server I can get my hands on. Thank you Mozilla. But you know, it's pissing me off. I'm just not down for this whole arms race thing. I'm tired of it. Sometimes, I like to look at flash on the web. Sometimes, a java applet is useful and I want it to run. Javascript can be put to good use. I'm tired of being forced to disable useful technologies because advertisers are using them to piss me off. I don't feel that it's right for the onus to be on me to avoid their crap. The onus should be on them to not piss off their prospective customers. The more that those of us who do care, who want to see people like Dan Gillmor get paid to do his fine work, hide our heads in the sand and silently disable ads for ourselves, the worse it gets. Advertisers get more and more obnoxious because, hey, no one complains! Web sites make less money because fewer and fewer people ever see their ads. Advertising online becomes less useful, for everyone. Eventually, the Merc just can't afford to continue, and we lose Dan. I don't want to see that happen anymore. I'm perfectly happy to be advertised to. Just don't advertise to me stupidly. Don't drive me away from an article that I want to read. I think advertising is, ultimately, the only hope for commercial online media, and I want there to continue to be commercial online media. I don't think it should be the only choice, but I'm glad it is a choice. It won't continue to be unless someone keeps bashing the stupid ads. ____Not the real rusty What they need... What they need to do is something like: "Attention! We have an important announcment. Your attention please. Everyone listening? We're only going to say this once, seriously. Ok, then. Do not board train number 458 from Paddington Street station. Thank you for your attention." They repeat it eight times because they know that every time they get the attention of one more jackass who didn't think he had to listen the first x times. They should just spend those repeats trying to get everyone to listen up for a second. ____Not the real rusty Gimme more text My point (and I'm pretty sure I did have on in all that drama) was exactly that. The worse they get, the more of us they drive away, and the worse their ROI. When I'm trying to read an article, I don't mind being advertised to, but the ads have got to flow with the general experience or they'll just drive me away. If the Merc's page was 40% advertising, with the ads being HTML text and small, static images, I'd be a happy camper. 40% is much more space than they devote to advertising now. Chances are pretty good that at least one thing in that 40% of the page would catch my eye, after I was done reading the article I came for. Take, for example, Fark. Alright, their ads are cheesy and many of them are animated gifs, but I can live with that. Mozilla animates them through once and then they sit still. A lot of the page is text links. This is advertising I will never bother to actively avoid. As long as I'm not avoiding it, it is almost guaranteed to eventually work. The reason I don't avoid it is because it meshes with the experience I'm there for in the first place. It's links and little pictures. I'm there for links. I'm ok with little pictures. I hope that people like me can rage a little, and then explain why I feel that way, and what they can do to reach me, as advertisers. ____Not the real rusty Missing the point entirely I don't generally mind ads. I'm not an "I want everything for nothing" person. I look at some ads online, and having been in the position of living off them, I understand what it's like. I don't want there to be no ads. I want there to be ads that don't literally drive me away from the article. It may only be a hopeless dream, but I'd really like ads that are for things I might be interested in. Or at least ads that are entertaining to look at. Advertising online has, with a few notable exceptions, massively failed to do this so far, in a way that (despite my criticism of a lot of it) television advertising can and does do. Your argument about "have you ever bought anything" is a silly straw man. The Merc isn't running these things on commission. Advertising today is more about creating brand image and positive perceptions in the viewer. This campaign is failing to do that for me. At the same time, it is lowering the Merc's page count by at least one person's worth of views. I generally check Dan's weblog daily, but I don't think I will be anymore. One person? It's probably futile, but I can deal with that. I assumed there was a printable page somewhere where I could read the text without seeing the ads. I didn't look for it, precisely because I'm not that freeloader you want me to be. I made a choice to give up reading an article I wanted to read because of the advertising plastered on top of it. Yeah, I made the choice publically and with over-the-top melodrama, but it was a rant. The drama is merely in keeping with genre convention. The simple fact is I don't want the column for free. I want Dan to get paid. The longer people pretend like advertising online isn't a total clusterfuck, the harder it's going to be to get to a point where that will continue to be possible. ____Not the real rusty We *do* owe them a living Dan doesn't write for his own joy. I know he gets satisfaction from it, but that doesn't mean it isn't work. Far from it! He's very good at it, and should get paid for it. Dan works hard and produces a product I and many others enjoy, for which he deserves to make a decent living. It's not about getting rich online -- Dan's not trying to get loaded. He's just being paid to write a column. "Do it for the love of the work" is just silly. When I see you writing a biweekly professional quality column, purely for the love of it, for many many years, then you can start saying that. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to eat. There's no reason media shouldn't be ad supported. I want to see Dan's employer survive and prosper, and continue to pay him for the work he does. Hence the upside-the-head-slapping when they do something as counterproductive as this. ____Not the real rusty Good The only thing you should have done is bitch about it somewhere and let Salon know that's what happened. ____Not the real rusty How're the paper ads? They haven't figured out a way to implant full-motion video in the dead-tree edition yet, have they? By the way, I emailed Dan with this link, and his gracious reply was "Ouch!" and a promise that it would be seen by the appropriate authorities. So I count that as one voice heard, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Fair point Yeah, of course I'm not some kind of poison pill, upon whom the future of the Merc rests. Forgive me my irritated hyperbole. :-) But still, I doubt having readers loudly and publically hate their ads is what they want to happen. ____Not the real rusty Wow give them the hey ho about the whatnot That is the best phrase I've read all week. I sense a powerful new addition to my lexicon of useful stock phrases. ____Not the real rusty Not to pick nits, but... ...but nothing! Not to pick nits at all, over here. No nitpicking for me, thanks. ____Not the real rusty Oh dear "Are you going to buy a wallet?" I'm dying over here. Tears, I have. Tears running down my face. ____Not the real rusty We all want to be in a secret klub. That's basically it. Oh yeah, its core message is also "you can be cool by getting beaten up," which puts a whole new spin on most of our childhoods. ____Not the real rusty The real question Was it John Psychologist? ____Not the real rusty Tee hee! "It is an awakening. It's a revitalization!" exclaimed the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, senior pastor of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan. His congregation has grown from 220 to 560 members in the last five years; 100 have joined in the year since Sept. 11, 2001. Ok, Mr. Derr, you've got yourself a church in Manhattan, also known as the place the Devil himself bent over and said howdy last year, also also known as an extremely densely populated region whose inhabitants have been literally afraid for their lives all year, and since then you've only managed to bring in 100 new people. One hundred? In that year? And you're bragging about that? That's just sad. ____Not the real rusty Magazines are getting too specialized I went into the bookstore and browsed for a while. A helpful clerk came up to me and said "Is there anything I can do for you?" "Yeah," I said, "Do you have Guns, Germs and Steel?" She smiled brightly and said, "Is that a magazine?" Me too! In order not to spoil the one-shot purity of the diary, I didn't tell the rest of the story, but basically everyone in the place broke down laughing. She wasn't an idiot, she just kind of glommed onto the "Thing, thing, thing" pattern, which does sort of sound like a magazine title ("Guns and Ammo," "Field and Stream" etc) and her brain was in customer-service neutral and that's what came out. She laughed too when she re-parsed the list of items. Of course, as a result the line kept popping into my head later on, so I walked all the way back to the boat giggling to myself like a lunatic. I suspect that Portland will have to become accustomed to that sight, as I swear every time I leave the house something like that happens and I end up walking around giggling to myself. ____Not the real rusty Pah! Phooey! Humbug! To say nothing of pish-tosh! Over here, I'll have you know, is the real Portland. The one in the state of Organ should properly be known as "New Portland." ____Not the real rusty Not to mention... ...last years award-winning film In the Bedroom, set in Camden. Maine shows up in popular culture all the time. It's America's symbol of steadfast resolve and staunch Puritan values, which is kind of ironic considering it's one of the most liberal states in the country. We're liberal in a peculiarly New England way though that doesn't attract much attention. Not all flashy liberal like California, we just quietly do things like ban juice boxes and don't make much fuss about it. ____Not the real rusty It's really good The reason I was trying to buy it locally is that my wife ordered it from B&N for her Dad for Christmas (it's ok, he doesn't read this, and they're off on a cruise in South America or somewhere anyway, not to return till Dec 23) but I didn't know it was a gift and started reading it, and now I'm not about to be giving away my copy. I actually was carrying the book in a bag with me when I asked the clerk if they have it. I should have just showed it to her. "Have you got one like this?" Anyway, yeah, it's very good. Not having played any Civilization, it's all largely new to me and yet somehow comfortingly obvious. It's awfully nice that he went to a lot of trouble to actually research and build evidence for what, ultimately, seems like everyone should have known all along. Very readable, and there are just enough counterintuitive "Huh!" moments to keep it interesting. Not to mention it kind of addresses the eternal question of "How in the hell did anyone ever think to try to eat that!?" ____Not the real rusty Well After this, I'm sure I'll be looking for that one too. If I'm not careful, this could kick off a whole new wave of science reading. I tend to do that in phases, and I haven't really delved into this whole subject area much yet. ____Not the real rusty "scientific" history I was a litle nonplussed by that whole introductory bit about making history a science. The parts of history that are scientific already mostly do their best (anything that starts with "ethno-" basically), and the parts that are concerned with written history are a specialized branch of literary studies, and it would be pretty silly to ever think they could be "scientific." I like how he tries to build bridges between the various historical fields, and bring out the essential story in a way that I can follow. But I kinda nodded and smiled through the intro, to some extent. And, as an arguably intelligent person, and inarguably a total layman in this field, it's still crystal clear to me where he's on solid ground and where he's making vigorous assertions. Reading the book, I get the feeling he knows it, and assumes you know it too (he points them out, most of the time, though I haven't got a good explanation for the continental orientation assertion yet). I don't feel like assertions ought to be held against him, when it's clear that's what they are. ____Not the real rusty New & Noteworthy I'm astounded to see that a Google search for lenticular effluvia turns up no less than 199 results. I'm also pleased at the poll results, as "Unheimlich" was the one I'd have chosen as well. I always felt that Freud's greatest and least widely appreciated contribution to modern medical science was his invention of the Unheimlich Maneuver. ____Not the real rusty Random! That was tangentially related at best, but amusing and informative nonetheless. I would like to take a steam ship from Seattle to Seward someday. Can you still even do that? I'd also like to kayak the entire Maine coast, which, while still implausible, might be easier than finding a working steam ship plying the Alaskan coast. ____Not the real rusty Bah! Carnival indeed! I don't want a Carnival cruise (I mean, I'd probably go if I had the chance, but you know). I want a rickety tramp steamer, manned by social outcasts and scallywags. I want beans and hardtack, smuggled ham on Sundays, and sealskin boots when it gets cold. I want stories on the midnight watch about mermaids and kraken, and a ration of rum. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, I don't need to explore every little inlet and cranny. I had more of a "hopping from one nice campsite to the next" trip in mind. I'd wager you could comfortably spend a month on such a journey, but if you stayed more offshore and went for speed, you could probably do it in a really hard week. Well, maybe a week and a half. ____Not the real rusty KGB In college I used to read a kick-ass magazine called KGB, but I think it has gone to the periodicals rack in the sky as well. ____Not the real rusty Four corners Snot Rack. Ahh, the things that happen when none of a magazine's staff knows how to read. And Four Corners isn't a magazine of metaphorically "square" things to do. It's the magazine of literally square objects. Small windows. CD jewel cases. Blue post-office boxes viewed from directly above. Colorado. You know, square things. Why don't we have magazines like that? Imagine every month you get a new issue, and you have no idea what it'll be about except that every article will feature a square thing in some way. ____Not the real rusty Well, alright There's no reason we couldn't accept the standard metaphorical meanings of "square" as well. Just as long as that's not the only acceptable meaning, because then all you've got is another "lifestyle" magazine. I think we need a school of magazining based on more arbitrary axes. Descent Magazine about things that fall. Equidistant, about places that are equally far from some central place. Boring, a whole magazine about boring things. It's time to flee screaming from the demographically-oriented media landscape that we've been given. I'm tired of only being offered media that is designed to appeal to my age group, or economic market, or in short a lot of people just like me. I want to bump into a 65 year old Pakistani man in the bookstore who is just as fanatically interested in things that fall as myself. The trick is choosing categories that are sufficiently ill-defined and arbitrary. It seems to me that the perfect categories would be the ones you are unable to imagine an article about. That almost guarantees that whatever you get will be surprising. ____Not the real rusty It doesn't matter ...because everyone else hates New York and LA. ____Not the real rusty The weather I rely on NOAA's forecasts, and over several months of watching them, they are always very accurate up to about three days out. Your forecast would probably be right about here. The local TV/radio weather guys make their livng getting people excited about the weather, and the sad fact is that the actual weather is rarely ever exciting. So they tend to lean heavily on the most extreme possible conditions, rather than the most likely conditions. NOAA goes with most likely every time. ____Not the real rusty We aim to please! You aim too, please. ____Not the real rusty Dream Reading about other people's dreams is the dullest thing imaginable. I'm writing this down so that I can go back and find it again later, which has proven useful to me in the past. This is not for you. Seriously, don't even bother. You won't care. First, I'm at the sink upstairs and it's clogged and not draining. I pull out the drain plug and there's some black goop and hair stuck to it. I stick my finger down the drain hole and feel more slimy hair. I try to hook it and scrape some out, but it won't budge. So I go get a couple of wrenches and get underneath the sink and take the trap apart, and it is stuffed with hair. I pull on the hair and discover that it's still attached to a woman's head. A human female head was stuck in the drainpipe. I'm not frightened or shocked by this, more like relieved to have found the problem. "Ah, that was it!" I think to myself, removing the head and anticipating the restoration of smooth and reliable draining function. Second (and apparently unrelated) I'm at a party at someone's house. Robin's house, maybe? A place kind of like Fortress Geek anyway. And I'm being chased, surreptitiously, by some secretive cabal of enemies. I know they're trying to plant surveillance devices on me, bugs and electronic tracking devices. I'm wearing my old brown coat. I seem to have change in every pocket, which makes it difficult to find the bugs. I sift through the change and pull out a few foreign objects, tossing them out the windows. To perform a better and more thorough search, I go into the bathroom and lock the door. I take all of the change out of all of my pockets and spread it on the countertop, picking out literally dozens of bugs in all shapes and sizes. Tiny pinhead-sized dots of metal, clear plastic sleeves with circuitry inside, disks of black plastic. I gather all the bugs up in one hand and put the change back in all of my pockets and leave the bathroom. I came with a group of others, in some sort of vehicle which may or may not fly. I call them together and show them the handful of bugs, and we agree it would be best to leave now. We take off, and I sprinkle the bugs out the window of our vehicle, which may or may not be flying. Yes Hence the severe warning and disclaimer. So few people seem to realize that what seems fascinating and meaningful to them is utterly meaningless and dull for the listener. ____Not the real rusty Right on Interesting analyses, both. Who knows if they're right, or if dreams mean anything, or what, but those do sound plausible. The first one would be even more interesting if you knew whose head it was, but you don't. That factoid also makes your analysis simultaneously more plausible and kind of more obvious. I've been thinking about this particular person a lot lately, for practical reasons. The second was about what my take on it was, though your point about the money hadn't occurred to me, and is interesting. I've also been worried about money a lot lately, so that may have less of a symbolic role and more of a concrete one. ____Not the real rusty Great weeping Christ, boy! I told you not to bother. If you can't listen, that's no fault of mine. Would I ever lie to you? ____Not the real rusty It's simple Keep repeating to yourself: "My country, Wright or Wong!" ____Not the real rusty I can't believe no one has suggested this yet... It's probably not what you want to hear, but it might have been easier to just set up an 802.11 link between the two machines in the first place. Probably not cheaper, but a lot more flexible in the long run. And no holes in the wall! :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't think so If you're talking about what I think you are, I don't think he is a troll at all. He may have some opinions that are, um, outlandish. But they are, IMO, sincerely held. Try not to get so wrapped up in the internet "troll" obsession that it colors your view of everyone who thinks differently. ____Not the real rusty Heh "Kids in school should have private rooms for sexual experimentation"? You gotta admit that's kind of outlandish. Not to mention where the hell is the fun if it's being all encouraged and stuff? Juvenile sexual experimentation should not be stripped of it's delicious sense of secretness and forbiditude. ____Not the real rusty Nothing is not something I had this argument with my sister ages ago. Nothing is not something. It's nothing. It's the absence of something, by definition. If dark is the absence of light, it would be absurd to say that dark is light. I think you (and my sister) are conflating the word "nothing" or the concept of "nothing" with actual nothing. "Nothing" is a concept (i.e. a thing), but if you have nothing, you don't have something. ____Not the real rusty Family History Volume One: The Industrial Revolution I was reading this thread about baby names on MetaFilter last night, and one of the most sensible suggestions I saw there was not to name your kids Limonjelo and Oranjelo to find names with a history that means something to you, like for example names from your family history. If I were to pursue this line of reasoning, my kids would most likely end up being named Ebenezer and Desire. You see, I remembered that in college, my mother had photocopied and sent me a packet of stuff about our family history for a class or something, and miraculously I still have it and know exactly where it is. So I dug it out last night, and found out some interesting things. Like, for example, "Deliverence" wasn't a good name then, and still isn't a good name now. And I bought a new database server today. Should be in place late next week. Like most humans, I have two basic lines of parentage. My mother's side, for reasons that will become clear, does not carry extensive documentation compared to my father's. Her father's father, Henry Alexandre Lambert, was born in Roubaix, France on November eleventh 1892. Roubaix is in the far northern tip of France, near Lille, and just about shares a border with Belgium. Henry Lambert was a tall, hook-nosed man, prone to glowering and eminently practical and no-nonsense. I don't know if anything in the last sentence is true, but I suspect it is. Henry's parents, Gustave and Leonie, brought him to Massachusetts when Henry was a child, hook-nosed but not yet prone to glowering. Gustave was a weaver, and went to work in the Lawrence and Lowell textile mills. The industrial revolution had come to Roubaix in a big way. "Many cotton and linen mills were opened in the Lille area. Roubaix and Tourcoing just north of Lille specialised in wool... By the middle of the 19th century, it was like the Manchester of northern France - with equally appalling and unhealthy slums." Gustave had heard of the better working conditions in the Lowell mills, and was determined to make a better life for his children than was possible in the fast-industrializing slums of Roubaix. The life may have been better, but it wasn't much different. Henry and his brothers all went to work in the textile mills, like their father. Henry had a son, also named Henry, who is thought to be the first in the family to attend college. This Henry was my grandfather. He taught industrial arts in Newton High School, and made many beautiful things, like a wrought-iron table and set of matching chairs that is waiting for me in the basement of my parents house until I have a home big enough to contain it, and my mother. My mother's mother is Dorothy Conroy, of stout and Blarney Irish stock (maybe literally). In 1859, Jeremiah Conroy was born in Ireland, possibly in Blarney village, but in a town famous for a rock, anyway. He was one of eleven children, born to farmers and bred most likely as cheap labor. Jeremiah didn't take to farming, and neither he nor any of his siblings much took to life either. They all died young, all eleven outlived by their mother. Jeremiah himself would die of pneumonia in 1904 at the age of 45, but of course he didn't know that when he left Ireland as a young man who wanted nothing to do with tending the good earth. He worked for a while in England, and cryptic notes in my mother's curly handwriting say he came to America to work on the railroad. The Great Railroad was completed in 1869, when Jeremiah was ten, so presumably he came to work on running it, not building it. But either way, he never got that far. Well, in a way he did, working at the Putnam Machine Company in Fitchburg, which I believe made railroad parts. The Fitchburg Methodist minister at the time, a Mr. Baldwin, had a housekeeper named Cecilia Nestor. Also Irish, she was born in Balyglas, County Mayo, in 1856. In the way of geaneology, she wasn't known to have done much besides be born, get married, have children and die. You should count yourselves lucky to know she had a job, and what she did and who for. The records of the past are littered with women who apparently did nothing worth noting between the Four Great Duties. Cecelia and Jeremiah wed on a blustery day in the cold of a Massachusetts February sometime around 1880. In the two dozen years he had left, Jeremiah and Cecilia produced four children, Thomas Luke, Mary Cecilia, William Joseph, and Florence Lorraine, born in, respectively, 1882, 1886, 1888, and 1892. Thomas Luke was an apprentice machinist, but became a fireman when the machinists went on strike in 1916. I have met Mary and Florence, who were my aunts (actually great-aunts) May and Flo. Never married, they were living literary cliches, and if it weren't true, no one would ever believe it. Thomas married Mary Brady in 1910, at the relatively advanced age of 28, under circumstances which are not known to me, who eventually gave birth to my maternal grandmother, under ditto. Mary Brady's lineage is documented, but on one page which simply lists names, dates, and children in a format that my blurry eyes can barely parse at the moment, let alone create much of a narrative from. It seems it all started when Patrick Brady, born in Ireland in 1840, met Mary Ann O'Connor, who was English and two years his junior. They're both buried in St. Mary's cemetary in Salem, Mass now, but Patrick served his adopted country in Company E of the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, "Boston's Irish Ninth," about whom it has been written : [If there were a man living today from the orginal 9th regiment] he would tell of a day in early July, 1863 when the battery was ordered into battle for the first time in a place called Gettysburg. He would tell of that hard, driving charge of General Longstreet and his Confederates as they pressed the Union line along a section of the Emmitsburg Road that runs in front of Little Round Top, a a small hill that anchored the southern tip of the Union Army's position. The engagement in which the Ninth first faced fire began in late afternoon on July 2. Under heavy pressure from Longstreet, the Union forces began to give way, part rolling back to the right, part falling back to the left, leaving a deadly gap in the Union line. Longstreet began moving his men through this hole but he was met by the Ninth Mass. which had orders to hold the ground at all costs, until another line could be formed behind them. The situation was critical---desperate. A break here would mean exposing the Union rear and Lee could have rolled up the Union flank like rug on the floor. But the Ninth Mass. held. Their commander, Captain John Bigelow, wounded twice, with half of his 104-man bettery wounded or killed, directed the artillery fire from his four remaining cannon[s]. The guns sent a deadly breath of steel into the advancing southern columns. The Confederate line staggered, regrouped and attacked again. The fight went on . . . brutal business . . . Longstreet trying to win ground, Bigelow trying to buy time. Bigelow won. A second line was finally formed behind the Ninth Mass. and the southern attack was repulsed. The Union line was secure. And from that action, Charles W. Reed, bugler, won a Medal of Honor for leading his wounded commander back through his own lines under direct fire.If Patrick were alive today, however, he wouldn't tell that story because he signed up in 1864. To make a long story even longer, Patrick and Mary had six children, the last of whom, born in 1881, was Mary Alice Brady, who married Thomas Conroy. So my mother represents the Industrial Revolution. From the old country they came, sick of the hard life and yearning to breathe free. Or at the very least to breathe air, rather than mill-smoke or cow manure. Free probably didn't have much to do with it. They came to Massachusetts, and energetically stayed put, like all bay-staters do. Turning their faces Westward and squinting into the setting sun, they bravely said "Who needs it?" and made the life they found where they had found it. This, we will see, is a trend on the other side as well. Did I say that the above was the side of the family for which I have little information? Oh yes, it is. The other side features a much larger and shadier cast of characters, including religious extremists, terrorists, genocidal maniacs, and a woman named Desire. A couple of women named Desire, actually, and at least one named Deliverence. It starts sometime around 1275 AD, on a wind-scoured English field near a bordering hedge known as a haw... You think? I don't think that would be necessary, do you? I was planning to move the old DB up to run Scoop. I don't think the archive will see enough traffic to justify a whole different machine, really. Man, I can't wait to get that patch up though, seriously. ____Not the real rusty Ah Thank you for that info. All I have is a parenthetical from my mother in her notes from an interview of my great-aunt Flo that says "(town famous for rock?)." Perhaps that's the one. ____Not the real rusty No, no You're thinking of "Great-Grandma Menses" there. ____Not the real rusty Specs Same as the current Scoop servers, but with a bigger disk: dual P3 1Ghz, 3Gb memory, 36Gb SCSI. ____Not the real rusty Yeah For your average web serving tasks, memory is far more important than processor speed. The database especially is more I/O bound than processor-bound. 1 Ghz is more than enough -- in fact, the 700Mhz we've got now is probably just about enough. The improvement will mostly come from more (and faster) memory. ____Not the real rusty Partly You may notice it seems to be quicker today. I did another round of "spot the bad query and rebuild indexes" yesterday. We were also being Googled again, so that always sucks. But better hardware will help handle excess load too, and we've needed it for ages. The current DB box can become a Scoop box too, which should help further. ____Not the real rusty Which ones? I suppose you probably might as well wait for the next installment to answer, but which Mayflower family was it? ____Not the real rusty One more clause back Actually, what I was trying to say was "made many beautiful things, including [table and chairs] and [mother]". Yeah, I realized that sentence didn't really work at the time, but it's a diary, y'know? :-) ____Not the real rusty Boring? Boring? I bet there's plenty of interesting stuff there. Fishermen lead lives that are typically anything but boring, and you've got em for a thousand years back. Find out which ones were washed off the boat, and which ones made it back on. Which ones ran liquor to America for extra money during Prohibition... and so on. Everybody's family history is interesting, if you just look for it and use your imagination. ____Not the real rusty Old Fezziwig I didn't say I was going to name any kids Ebenezer, just that family history says that would be most likely. And actually, that's from the part of the family history I haven't gotten to yet. I mean, where are all the four-syllable Biblical boys names nowadays? We kept Matthew, Mark, and John, but where are all the Hezekiahs and Ezekiels of yesteryear? I think those are due for a comeback any time now... ____Not the real rusty Malachi! Another winner. ____Not the real rusty Is it working now? Yes, it is. I spent yesterday fiddling with queries, and as briefly noted also ordered a new DB. I'll post site news before I attempt to switch over to that. Have you noticed how much faster comment posting is, BTW? ____Not the real rusty What's the sound of one troll posting? :-) (nt) ____Not the real rusty User names User names are only used in one place (the stories table). Everywhere else it's user ID. I assume someone will get around to changing it eventually, but I doubt it will make much difference in speed. ____Not the real rusty Convenient! Then Susan Homemaker would know right away that it would be a bad idea to marry Jonathan Unemployable. This is good thinking. ____Not the real rusty Nice save Sorry about that. ____Not the real rusty Dong My friend has a yearbook page featuring an exchange student with the mellifluous name of "Sokonthe Dong." No, really. ____Not the real rusty Drop your pants and start the revolution Pardon my French, but are they completely fucking insane? "Hello, this is Peter Jennings. Welcome to ABC's World News Tonight, brought to you by the CNN-AOL-Time-Warner-Disney Corporation. We'd like to begin this broadcast by noting the interesting fact that, according to our crack research staff, there is no longer anything that is not owned by our parent company. And they've decided they're not so interested in telling you about the status of any of our holdings after all. So for the benefit of the shareholders, we'll be suspending news coverage for the forseeable future. And now, stay tuned for a special two-hour bonus edition of America's Funniest Home Videos. This one guy gets hit in the crotch with a wiffle bat, you'll just love it. Thank you, and goodnight." Meanwhile, newsies bemoan the loss of trust in the media brought on by all this confusing technologee stuff. Excuse me if I scoff. Scoff! Scoff! Plus, a poll about Firefly. The rest of this diary has nothing to do with news. And little to do with anything else. You've been warned. Anyway, I watched Orange County last night, and maybe it's just because my expectations couldn't have been any lower, but it was surprisingly good. That Hanks boy has a future in the acting business. He sold the character well. And Jack Black is a buffoon, but one who ends up being lovable in a way that the rare film buffoon is. Plus, it featured a line which some day I will get a chance to use. The admissions receptionist or whoever catches Jack Black breaking into the Dean's office, and says "Do you want me to call Campus Security?" To which Black lifts an eyebrow and replies "I don't know. Do you want me to drop my pants and start the revolution?" Someday, somewhere, someone will ask me a question of the form "Do you want me to..." and I will have my moment. Oh yes. Will it be you? Oddly, in one of the interstitials (made-for-TV promo halfmercials) included on the DVD, the line is "Do you want me to drop my pants and service you?" I assume it was changed to get a PG-13 rating (but if so, why was in a TV promo?) but the line in the film is way funnier. Plus, I totally thought I spotted the judge from Caddyshack, but according to IMDB, it wasn't. The Judge died in 1986. So, it really wasn't him. All that, and uncredited cameos by Ben Stiller (as "Ben Stiller as a fireman") and Kevin Kline (brushing up for his "inspiring teacher" role in Dead Poet's Society II, Electric Boogaloo The Emperor's Club). Tonight, I plan to watch National Lampoons Van Wilder. And there's not a damn thing you can do to stop me. That Berg, he's funny. I just love that guy. I miss Two Guys. Johnny on Firefly just isn't the same, what with him turning all fake-Western and stuff. And to wrap up this meandering pile of crap, how about Firefly? Does that show suck beyond anyone's wildest dreams, or what? I'm so embarrassed for Joss. My heart goes out to him. Joss, stop now before we have to hold an intervention. Heh No, I'm just an idiot. Oops. ____Not the real rusty You are not alone That show had a pretty feeble premise, but the writing was good and the chemistry between the actors was great. It would have to probably share the prize with Family Guy for best show virtually no one ever watched. ____Not the real rusty Uh Well, ok then, you live in that one little subculture who watches it. The only people I know who've ever seen it are other internet loonies like myself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey! I beat you, fair and square! Geddaddaere, ya damn ol' wombat. ____Not the real rusty Judge Smails I think the reason he appeared to me as "The judge from Caddyshack" is that the guy I thought was him was playing a very similar character in a somewhat similar movie. I thought it was an homage. Plus, I had just, that afternoon, caught the scene from Caddyshack where the judge catches Danny with his daughter and chases him around the room with a golf club. ("That must be the tea!") And I didn't watch Mary Tyler Moore or Too Close for Comfort. ____Not the real rusty It should be better Other sci-fi space westerns do suck worse, that I'll agree with, but that's no excuse. Just because something else sucks more doesn't mean that Firefly doesn't still suck. I think the problem is I'm comparing it not to other shows in the genre but to Joss Whedon's other shows, which have amply demonstrated over the years what he's capable of doing. My problem with Firefly is that it has no point. It's not about anything. Buffy was about growing up in America today. Sure, most of us don't deal with vampires and whatnot, but the magic was there to dramatize the things that we do all deal with. I mean, Buffy has sex with her boyfriend, and he suddenly turns evil. Now Angel turned way more evil than most boyfriends do, but still, I think the point is obvious. Firefly? If it's about anything at all, it's about a man trying to make a living on the fringes of society. Yawn. That's just straight-up formula western material. But is the writing witty and clever, like Joss has shown he's capable of? No, not particularly. The characters? Cardboard cutouts straight out of a spaghetti western. The show is dumb and annoying. If it weren't the product of someone whose talents I truly admire, I wouldn't care. It would be like all the Star Trek franchise garbage. I'm especially peeved about Firefly because it should be good, and it ain't. I hope Fox is "fixin' to" boot it off the air, for everyone's good. ____Not the real rusty No need I don't watch it anymore. I just felt like mentioning again how much it sucks. :-) ____Not the real rusty Might I recommend The Christmas music stream at SomaFM for cheery music? I've definitely had less crappy life eras, and it's keeping me fairly well cheered. ____Not the real rusty I like it too I'd probably do soemthing to highlight the pseudo-tab links at the top of the page, because I didn't find my attention drawn to them right off, but on the whole, it's a good move. About the admin stuff, all I ask is that the massive redundancy of controls be kept (nay, expanded!). I love having stuff like "edit user" and "edit story" wherever they're likely to be needed. There are a bunch of places where admin controls could be added to cut down on repetetive clicking, as well. One thing that direly needs changing is the user info page. It should really be boxes and blocks, and could be so much more useful than it is now. ____Not the real rusty It's just P now Didn't you notice? We dropped the F ages ago. Just following national protocol, I assure you. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes (nt) ____Not the real rusty Why? ____Not the real rusty Not much hassle A nice agent called, I called back to confirm her legitimacy, and told her what I knew. Actually, contrary to the horror stories you hear elsewhere, it was quite easy and not at all unpleasant. I hope the guy was just being dumb, and they ascertained that he (or possible she, but I doubt that) was not a threat and left it at that, but obviously no one's really called to keep me in the loop or anything. ____Not the real rusty Not really, no When it was posted, the crime was already committed. If they had asked me to remove it, I probably would have, but they didn't. I'm not afraid of some impressionable youth reading that and deciding to get all Columbine, and clearly they weren't either. It's not the words, it's simply the fact that actions are almost always preceded by threats, and part of their job is to follow up on threats to help prevent actions down the road. They don't want to gag anyone, they just want to do their job. Also, there were some idiotic speculations that the comment was "planted" in order to get an excuse to force me to turn over all of K5's logs. That was, as you might expect, about as far from the case as it could possibly be. They had no interest in seeing any of my logs, and simply wanted to know if I had any information that could help them locate the poster. ____Not the real rusty Lemme see For the last time I can remember a road trip meeting both conditions, I'd have to be Eggs Kankamagus. Hey, that's not bad. I think I'll adopt that as my hobo name. ____Not the real rusty Yep I've driven it dozens of times, and I can say with some authority that there is always bad weather on that goddamn evil road. Well, almost always. 9 times out of ten. And I like it anyway, but that's just me. :-) ____Not the real rusty No But the third quotation mark was removed, and replaced with an exact copy. ____Not the real rusty And happily granted! Bye! ____Not the real rusty Yes Chebeague is just up the bay from here; I can see it and Hope Island when I go running. But I think the parallell that article tries to draw between the two is silly. Hope Island was bought by a rich NY mall developer. When he moved in, a few people from Cliff island came over with a cake to welcome him. He met them on the beach with a shotgun and said "Get the hell off my island." Then he tried to seceed from Cumberland, because he wants the island to be a tax shelter. He also deforested half of it and built the butt-ugliest McMansion you ever saw on one end of the island. "...where rumors abound that he chases away fishermen who float over to say hello." Rumors abound because they're true. The other islanders laughed at him, not because seceeding was silly, but because he was doing it as an individual, not a community. He better damn well hope nothing on his island ever catches fire, because no one's going to go help put it out. Long Island, the next one north of here, has already seceeded, a couple years ago, due to the property taxes. They're doing just fine. I won't be surprised at all to see the rest of the islands go our own ways in the next few years, as Portland is determined to keep raising property taxes out here until we have no choice. They see the islands as a money tree of rich out of state summer people ripe for the soaking. I'm surprised that article didn't mention Long Island at all, as they're a much better model for what Chebeague could do than those carpetbaggers on Hope. ____Not the real rusty Yes I assume you mean the lobster one. Yeah, I thought it wasn't as good as I was expecting. I should read her other book, which everyone seems to have loved. Don't get me wrong, it was entertaining, and I learned a lot (well, a little at least) about lobstering, but it seemed like it was written in a hurry to me. Also, Casco Bay is pretty different, socially, from Isle Au Haut. We're a lot closer to Portland and civilization, and the islands tend to be a little less, uh, insular. And never mind the contradiction. :-) ____Not the real rusty Salon Please tell me they're paying you for this one, what with all that filthy lucre from Sony... I kid! I kid! ____Not the real rusty Heh Slow news day at the technology desk, huh? :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow I'm kind of surprised that so far no one has gotten the point of my last article. I thought it was, if not blaringly obvious on first read, at least fairly obvious upon a little bit of thought. That seems to be too much to ask. Ah well. Poll: What do you think the point was? Heh No, I just misjudged the tone, apparently. Or didn't factor in everyone else's pet peeves while concentrating on my own. :-) Or maybe you are all just idiots. Who knows? ____Not the real rusty Hee hee That explains it! I was desperately searching for an answer that didn't involve me missing the mark with the article, and you've nailed it. Thank you, sir. ____Not the real rusty Don't worry I, at least, along with a few others, grasp the differences between advertorial and the DID section (as well as the similarities). And regardless of section, I always like your articles, and I agree with your feeling that digital ID is an important subject. We are not alone in thinking this, either, by the way. And, since it hasn't really gotten across yet, I will attempt again to point out that my only criticism of "avertorial" was that it be kept under a leash of appropriateness for the publication. I think digital id was very appropriate for K5, and I think the Sony articles are probably appropriate for Salon. I was mainly trying to skewer the pompous Guardians of Truth school of journalistic self-righteousness. It was instead widely read as an apologia for them, which gives rise to the hypocrisy accusations, which themselves are grounded in exactly that kind of thinking. Don't worry, I'm laughing. As it turned out, it really was much more like an Adequacy article than anything else, unintentionally. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah, everyone's forgotten It's been so long since I just wrote random articles, everyone's forgotten that I always (or at least frequently) screwed around with style and voice. Being clear, concise, and dull just isn't my forte. :-) As for a satire topic, dear god no! That would just encourage more attempted satire, and, well, you can see how well that plays. ____Not the real rusty By the way The correct answer to the poll is "The New York Times sucks." Do not be lured in by the seductive yet false answer "Those newsmedia who aren't overt whores are merely hiding their corruption behind a thin veil of pompous indignation." ____Not the real rusty Not really The true answer is a special case of the false answer. The reason it is correct is because the question wasn't "Which of these statements is true?" (if that were the question, all the choices would be correct) but "What was the point of the article?" ____Not the real rusty Ouch Man, that hurts. Now I know I did it wrong. ____Not the real rusty Ha! You win the cigar. :-) ____Not the real rusty Aye You are 100% right. I was tired and grumpy. Please disregard the "That seems too much to ask." ____Not the real rusty Affectionate anagram? "You rubble me"? God, I hope neither of you ever find out what that's an anagram for. ____Not the real rusty Heh Why you dirty prevert! Of course it wasn't that. It was... "U're Yule Bomb!" in recognition of the holiday season. Um. Yeah. And, in a futile attempt to distract everyone, I shall now shout "Yule Bomb!" repeatedly. YULE BOMB! YULE BOMB! YULE BOMB! ____Not the real rusty Yes! Dear lord, please do this. I would have done it upon the very first complaint. "Ok, if you don't like our lenient solution, you both get zeros like the ethics code says. Goodbye." ____Not the real rusty Torment Torment is watching the little progress bar on netscape mail scroll slowly side to side while you wait for a mail server that you know is never ever going to respond. Torment is knowing that people are getting failure messages back from your mail server, and that some of those people are people who are paying you to do a job that you are unable to finish doing because some of the other people are the people you need to talk to to finish doing your job. Torment is knowing that you can't talk to any of them, and all of it is making you look like an asshole, and knowing that you will need to make excuses in the near future, if and when you ever get back into contact with any of them, and that even though it wasn't really your fault, you'll still feel like even more of an asshole trying to explain that. If you've sent me email today, I haven't gotten it. If you've sent me email in the past two weeks or so, I may or may not have gotten it. I'm moving mail services just as soon as I possibly can. Sorta I've been writing articles for OJR. It's like half of a real job. ____Not the real rusty Rhymes with "singe" ____Not the real rusty It's a balmy 13 degrees in Portland Hooray for winter! No, really, I mean that. It's so cold the snow is squeaky. I love squeaky snow. I love when it's so cold your nostrils freeze shut when you breathe in. Even better is when it's so cold spit freezes before it hits the ground. When you can walk outside with wet hair and hang your head upside down for a minute and get towering frozen hairsicles, and then whip your head back and forth and listen to them tinkle like glass. When it's so cold that your face freezes up walking home from the ferry because you don't have a scarf, and by the time you get to the house your lips don't work anymore and 'oo 'an 'oly 'alk 'ike 'iss. If I had a better sleeping bag, I'd go sleep outside tonight, and wake up tomorrow with a shell of frost frozen over my face, and marvel at the incredible volume of liquid the human body expels into the air. Cold is magic. It's time travel. Cold makes time slow way down, so you can see the rain pile up in fluffy white heaps, and you can keep delicate food from rotting nearly forever, and you can see the progress of millions of drops of water sliding off your roof and trapped halfway in their leap to the ground. Cold triumphs over decay and corruption. And while I'm here, I'm going to be in Boston just before New Year's. Any chance at all of having a K5 get-together like the 29th or 30th? ____Not the real rusty Ah, crap kwizine.net is a domain I've had idling for a while. It will, someday, if I ever get around to it, be a Scoop site for cooking and food discussion. It shouldn't resolve to K5 though. Gotta shut that off so Google doesn't start indexing all of K5 through it. collaborativemedia.org is for the CMF, and ditto about resolving to K5. ____Not the real rusty Yeah well I know how to do it. :-P It wasn't any big secret -- you oughta know I've been talking about the idea for years. I just grabbed the domain a few months ago because the name occurred to me and I thought it was a good one. One step closer to doing it, I suppose. :-) I have no frigging idea how google picks up urls like that, except that it seems really fond of re-indexing sites through any domain name it can find, which can be annoying in cases like this. Like when it suddenly started indexing all of k5 through notslashdot.org. ____Not the real rusty Not really Actually it doesn't really bother me whether people know the difference between topic and section or not. The categorization scheme here is just not very important. And yeah, I said you should do it when you first started bugging me. I still wish someone else would do it. But no one seems to be, and it's something the world does need. So hopefully someday. ____Not the real rusty Bond Movies If you like old school Bond, go ahead and see the new one. Chicks, gadgets, totally ridiculous plots and villains, exotic locales, it's all there. It's very much a return to the old days. A couple of scenes are lifted straight out of classic Bond movies, in fact. ____Not the real rusty Secret Asian Man I feel like I've used this diary title before. Anyway, I just wanted to say SomaFM's Secret Agent stream is excellent. And it's even programmed by someone named Rusty. Rustys are taking over. Fear us. I've got three days to thoroughly cover information architecture for OJR. Alright, that makes it sound worse than it is. I've got great loads of material to work with, I've just got to write it all up. And a fine soundtrack to do it by. Don't be surprised if the article manages to mention James Bond somehow. Mostly southern It's actually more of a southern name, usually applied to people with red hair. It's sometimes short for "Russell," but not always. In my case, it's just a nickname. ____Not the real rusty One T Bret. And I bet you don't remember her real name. Or the name of our other cat. :-) ____Not the real rusty See below And by "nickname," I don't mean "online nickname." It's the only name I respond to, unless you're from the gubmint. It's not my legal name, but has been my nickname since before I was born, so it's the only name I've really got. Anyway, my real name's pretty much an open secret. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow First K5 user to have an account from birth. When he first posts here, the circle shall be complete. ____Not the real rusty I may be unhealthily obsessed with stuffing I spent a good portion of today preparing ingredients for stuffing. No, wait, come back! That's way more interesting than it sounds! I think I might be in the early stages of an unhealthy fixation on stuffing. Stuffing is just so good, so wholesome and tasty. And that's just stuffing out of a box! When you make your own stuffing, it goes to a new level. Today I had to make chicken stock (really, turkey stock would be more appropriate, but I didn't have any turkey parts, and I did have lots of chicken leavings. Homemade chicken stock is dead easy, so long as you remember the skimming off the crunge step. Basically you: Collect up leftover bits from other chicken meals. We roast chickens pretty frequently, and I always freeze the remaining carcass and neck/giblet bits. You can also go to any butcher and ask if they've got chicken carcasses around for cheap. Get a package of extra giblets and hearts and livers too, any of those gross bits you normally wouldn't eat. They'll give it color. Hack up your pile of chicken scraps into reasonable-sized chunks. Very little in this recipe depends on precision, honestly. Use your best judgement. If you have a big cleaver, this part is fun. Re-enact scenes from your favorite slasher movie! Throw them all in a pot large enough to comfortably hold them. Put it on medium-high heat, drizzle in some olive oil, and salt and pepper liberally. Fry them up for a while, till they brown. You can skip this step, if you don't mind (or desire) a lighter-colored broth. Broth from raw parts will be somewhat milder and subtler in flavor as well. I like mine dark and hearty, personally, so I fry. Fill the pot with enough water to cover the chicken bits by maybe four or five inches. A lot of the extra water will come out in the skimming. Let it come up to a boil. Meanwhile, look around for a large spoon, shallow ladle, something like that. Every kitchen has its own perfect skimming implement. You'll probably have to experiment with a few. Also, get a decent sized bowl and put it as near to the pot as you can. As the pot comes up to a boil, you'll start to see stuff floating to the surface of your water. Some of it is like little brown bits, some of it might be yellowish and oily, eventually a lot of it will be a nasty looking gray foam. Basically anything that doesn't look like water is your enemy. Skim it away. Don't be too finicky if you get a little of the good stock water along with it. It's no big deal, you put in extra. Just skim off the surface of the pot and dump into your handy bowl repeatedly. This process will continue for probably 20 minutes, at least. Be ruthless! Anything that looks the least bit sketchy, get rid of it. This is not the time to split hairs. Basically anything on the surface that isn't a large lump of chicken should be gone. The better you do here, the better your stock will be. After a while, you'll run out of stuff to skim off. Stir the chicken parts around a few times and make sure there isn't still gray foam trapped amongst them. If you're sure you're done skimming, take it back down to an active simmer. For a basic chicken stock, you're just about done now. Taste it. It'll probably need salt. Chicken stock is salty, so don't be shy with it. Just salt, stir and taste till it tastes right. Saltless stock is, IMO, gross. If that's all you want, cover and let it simmer for a good while. Like an hour or two. It'll make your house smell fantastic. If you want to get fancy (I usually do), this is where you can add seasoning and veggies. I like celery, onion, carrots, and fresh parsley. I also usually throw in a bay leaf. Chop veggies directly into the pot, and reminesce about all those Looney Tunes cartoons where cannibals tried to boil Bugs Bunny. Don't cut your thumb off while doing this. Salt and pepper, taste often. It's yummy. As above, cover and simmer for a while. I sometimes also remove the cover and simmer uncovered for another half hour when I think it's almost done. This tends to bol off some of the water and concentrate the stock. You can do as much or as little of this as you like, depending on what you're going for. It's done when it's the color you want it to be, and tastes good. Take it off the heat, strain out all the stuff, and leave the liquid ina large bowl or container of some kind. Cover it and get it into the fridge. Wait at least overnight, disturbing as little as you can. The next day, when it's cooled down thoroughly, your container will have a layer of congealed fat that's floated to the top and solidified. Scoop this right off. They make special kettle-type things for this step, but you don't really need one. Just get rid of the remaining fat. This is important. Your stock will be greasy if you don't do this. You're done! You've got lovely homemade chicken stock that will taste fantastic in your stuffing, or anything else that calls for chicken stock or boullion. I like to freeze it at this point in one-cup measures in individual ziplock bags, for extra-easy use later on. So that was step one. Good stuffing requires good stock. But it also requires good bread! This year, we're making cornbread stuffing, with apples and sausage. So naturally, I also had to make cornbread. And away we go: Heat your oven to 400 degrees. If your oven is a sad half-working piece of crap from the 1940's, heat it up to however hot it will get today , which in this case is 325 degrees. Curse it for the junkheap relic it truly is. In a bowl, mix up 1 and 1/4 cups white flour, 1/4 cup corn meal, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. I usually add an extra pinch of salt. Incidentally, a pinch is about half a teaspoon. In a different bowl, beat one egg till it cries for its mama, then beat it some more. Froth is your friend. Add a cup of milk and 1/4 cup of veggie oil and beat some more. Put a cast-iron pan on the stove and melt some butter in it. Get the pan relatively hot, but don't let the butter burn too much. While your butter is melting, add the wet to the dry, and fold them together with a spoon as little as you possibly can. You can leave lumps of dry floury stuff, that's ok. Just get it all hanging together. If you mix too much, your cornbread will be like a solid lump of granite. Don't mix too much. Pour your batter in the cast-iron pan and spread it out to the edges. Stick the whole pan in the oven for 20 or 25 minutes. When your cornbread is done, try not to eat it all before it cools down. The batch I made today was really good, and I ate a little too much of it. When it's cool enough to handle, cut it into crouton-sized cubes and spread them out in a pan, and put them in the oven, which you've left open and allowed to cool down a bit. You want your oven to be on, but not hot. Like 200 or 150 degrees or so. Leave the door open a little to let moisture escape. When the cubes are bone dry, take them out and put em in a ziplock. Then repeat this drying process with a sturdy white bread, torn or cut into similar-sized chunks. You may make this bread yourself too, but I didn't this time around. Phew. Now you're ready to actually make the stuffing. :-) When it's stuffing time, just cut up some apples into small chunks, fry some sweet italian sausage (the loose, lumpy kind, not like sausage links). Mix your white and corn bread croutons in roughly equal proportion. Add apples and sausage, add some melted butter, and add chicken stock until it's moist enough to be stuffingy. Be careful with the stock. Add a little and stir -- it's easy to drown it at this stage. This will also be good with some garlic (of course), onions, and fennel or sage. Neither of which I have, so I'll have to find something else. Salt and pepper, and give it a taste. If it's not absolutely heavenly, poke around the kitchen for something else to add. Have fun! Stuffing is a "whatever you've got lying around" type of food. Then stuff it in your bird (shut up you whining ninnies who claim that stuffing shouldn't be cooked in the bird! It damn well should and must be), and have a great Thanksgiving. Alright, maybe it wasn't more interesting than it sounded. Eww I didn't think it was necessary to say, but let me add that stuffing should never have nuts. You may safely cast those who would say it should into the same category as the "no stuffing in the bird" fascists. ____Not the real rusty Well, you know Considering that we do have a section for this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. It is Thanksgiving. And I did spend absurdly long writing it up. Hell, why not. ____Not the real rusty Ok Edited a tad to make it more readable and less diary...ey. There you go. Actually, not a bad article. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ick Powdered or cubed boullion is pretty gross. If there's nothing else, it can be used (the sodium-free kind is slightly better, and of course MSG-free), but compared to real stock, it's like sex in a canoe. ____Not the real rusty White wine No, I tend not to cook with wine much. I don't really like the taste of it. In some cases it's necessary, but I feel like stuffing can do without it. The beauty of stuffing, of course, is that you can make it pretty much however you want, as long as you don't try to add nuts. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yay Josh Malina, boo Christian Slater. Josh Malina is excellent. I'm extremely happy with the Lowe/Malina swap. I mean, Rob Lowe did a fine job, but his character was never anything to write home about. I think he suffered from weak writing, really, but he didn't do anything to break out of it. He seems to have thought he'd get by on being the "name," until Martin Sheen cleaned his clock in that department. I couldn't be happier at bringing in Malina to take over. Please God (and by "God," of course I mean "Aaron"), let him stay. As for Slater, he's got, my guess, only a few more episodes left. There's just nothing there but an irritating smirk. The Slater/Donna "romance" is nowhere. Did you notice tonight that Slater and Bradley Whitford have much more onscreen chemistry than Slater and Donna? He can leave now. In fact, maybe he and Amy will get blown up in a freak car bombing or something. Hey, a guy can dream. ____Not the real rusty It's illegal art It's art that is not able to be distributed through normal channels due to copyright art prevention measures. I downloaded "Spin" the other day and finally got to see it. That and "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" are both worth watching. ____Not the real rusty Yadda yadda Posting, as you can easily imagine, from jail. ____Not the real rusty Mr. Lacitis Has got to get rid of that moustache! That's a fashion DON'T! :-) Congrats on the press. It's fun talking to reporters. ____Not the real rusty Ho ho ho Merry Christmas! ____Not the real rusty On the bright side It lasted two months and 29 days longer than I gave it. That really says something about their committment, I think. They tried hard, but it just didn't work out. Seriously, though, when did marriage become a replacement for dating? Did I miss a memo? ____Not the real rusty Lunatics unite in tepid, conditional condemnation of murder Ok, here's a bizarre story. A guy shoots a cop in California on November 19th, and today police take a 23 year old man named Andrew McCrae into custody in New Hampshire. Between then and now, someone using the name Andrew McCrae posted two confessions to San Francisco indymedia. He claims he killed the policeman, David Mobilio, to protest "police-state tactics" and "corporate irresponsibility. His defense is that he should get off, because before the shooting he incorporated himself in New Hampshire as "Proud and Insolent Youth Incorporated." Presumably the killing was an involuntary corporate downsizing. (Most of these links via MetaFilter). Weird enough in and of itself. But the reaction on Indymedia is even more flummoxing. One SF indymedia editor, "gkd," turns an attempt by the Associated Press to contact indymedia for comment into an anti-AP broadside, without in any way condemning the murder. Other posts to IMC suggest that the slain policeman was a pedophile, or that the killer is an agent provocateur, a "Machurian Candidate" controlled by the FBI (or... someone) to discredit anti-corporate activists. It doesn't seem like they need very much help, they're discrediting themselves just fine so far. But the capper is Eric Raymond's measured response, entitled "When to shoot a policeman." "Now, I don't regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible crime -- indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I would do it myself," he begins. He does admit that "This was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the policeman but the murderer dead." I'm glad he'd be so cheery about it. But in case you thought that was the end of it, Raymond takes pains to warn us not to tar all cop-killers with the same brush. "But that this shooter was wrong does not mean that everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a warning as well." Read it for yourself (top posting here right now, the archive seems to have not caught up yet). This is where my ability to treat this story journalistically goes totally off the rails. In case anyone didn't think so before, ESR is a loony, and anyone involved with open source should probably take greater pains to distance the software movement from this crackpot. He's gone far beyond the lunatic fringe here. He's well into the lunatic center and running hard for the far side, currently locked in a dead heat with indymedia. Yeah, but I tried four times to write an article that didn't use the word "lunatics" and was basically unable to. I was hoping someone would take the info and run with it. I'm apparently unable to deal with it in a way I want to put my name on anywhere more formal than this. ____Not the real rusty Mr. Ballmer In my opinion, Mr. Ballmer is clinging to the thin end of the sanity stick himself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Developers! At the oddest moments, I get the soundtrack from the Monkey Developers Dance Mix stuck in my head. It's hypnotic and trancelike. Developers developers developers developers Developers developers developers developers... ____Not the real rusty Ha! The MAdonna DAD theme does suck egregiously. Hey look, Me and Steve Ballmer have something in common! ____Not the real rusty No I think it's supposed to sound that way. It sounded like that when I saw it too. ____Not the real rusty You're right I lost track of time altogether. CMF bylaws tomorrow, BTW. ____Not the real rusty My apologies I had no intention of tainting honest lunatics by my association of them with ESR. You should understand the term to be used descriptively in a generic sense, and not as a classification or group membership. ____Not the real rusty Lunatics Unite... ,,,for Free Toasters and String Cheese Sundaes! ____Not the real rusty LUFTSCS! Let he who has wisdom understand. LUFTSCS! LUFTSCS! ____Not the real rusty See my sig. [luftscs] ____Not the real rusty But R beats S, loses to P Clearly, in any reasonable debate, or rochambeau as the French call it, R (rusty) would beat S (Steve Ballmer) but lose to P (pwhysall). "R" of course is often code-named "rock," as in the well-known truism "Nothing Beats Rock!" It is left as an exercise for the reader to untangle the complex threads of non-deterministic foreign policy that this line of reasoning necessarily entails. ____Not the real rusty Well I'm still going because my email is down. What's your excuse? :-) ____Not the real rusty Fact checking Just as an FYI, few real newspapers fact-check either. They "fact-check" before the event by hiring people they believe are competent reporters who won't need to be nannied. This has been known to bite them in the ass, when reporters make up facts and get away with it. I don't believe it's fundamentally a problem of no one being willing to do the dirty work. I think the problem is that few people are given any instruction on reporting well (for IMC this isn't a priority anyway), and the ethics of open news sites we have now don't put much premium on truth. K5 is a possible semi-exception to the second, but we don't usually deal in hard news at all anyway, so it's kind of moot. ____Not the real rusty No, not really I don't care about a blanket condemnation. I was merely surprised to see that none of the individuals writing about seemed in any way upset by the murder of another human being. In fairness, a lot of the comments to his "PIYI" post were very condemnatory. That's all. I found it weird. ____Not the real rusty He's gotten far worse ESR used to be a libertarian and a faux-academic. I know several libertarians who aren't nuts. I have been guilty of faux-academicism myself at times. He didn't really start spouting off about things like when it's appropriate to kill people until recently, to my knowlege. Other than that, I think you're right. ____Not the real rusty Actually Given the other stories involving rioting loonies in Nigeria and half the Canadian government calling Bush an idiot, I'm considering a larger op-ed entitled "Did someone shake the tree? (Cause the nuts are everywhere!)" ____Not the real rusty My criticism My criticism shouldn't be seen as a blanket indictment of IMC (though I think it has serious problems, some of whch you're obviously aware of and working to fix and some of which are IMO unfixable), but as a criticism of the various fruits and nuts that seemed to be all over this story. I'm pretty sure we've had the whole argument before about activist news, etc. I was just rather struck by the response. Incidentally, Andrew Orlowski covered this in the Reg, in such a way as to actually raise some questions about the issues yet without seeming defensive or approving. The interesting bit of this story is ESR's crumbling mental balance anyway, really. ____Not the real rusty So this broomstick... ...you say it vibrates? ____Not the real rusty Read the thread Before I just suspected the stalker was an attention-getting sock puppet. Now I'm sure of it. This is a classic troll. I don't know why they're all still bothering to argue about it. ____Not the real rusty Get a calendar Get a calendar. Mark down payment dates on it every month for the next however long you'll be making payments. Seriously, don't screw up your credit rating. It will cause you big problems later. It's a goddamn racket, but you have no choice but to care about it. It is very important. They can and will fuck you if you don't play by their rules. Think mafia here. They can screw you to death and you can do nothing about it. By far the best strategy is to just play the game and get along. ____Not the real rusty I hurt for you I suck at that stuff too. Thank God I married someone who's good at it before I started to get any serious financing issues. ____Not the real rusty t-mobile What I have heard is that t-mobile had a longstanding terrible rep for customer service problems, and this hiptop thing has dragged their asses out of the toilet. Don't remember the source of the rumor, but for what it's worth. ____Not the real rusty Yup Nothing to add, just that I came to the exact same conclusions you did. Looks like a sock puppet to me. ____Not the real rusty test Pick your background color? Black Gray Green Yellow White test test Nope, I think the bug is closed. Kudos to theantix and jamie for code. No It's supposed to not do something. Which it seems to do. Or, not do. Or whatever. You get the idea. ____Not the real rusty See my previous diary (nt) ____Not the real rusty Why? Nah. There's nothing harmful there, is there? ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok. It didn't work in my browser. Yeah, had to reset that. Sorry. ____Not the real rusty No I didn't update, I patched. I know. But updating will be a much bigger project. ____Not the real rusty Hey Don't sweat it. Just, y'know, ponder a little more next time what the right thing to do with your info is. I'm sorry I called you a kiddy, by the way. Um, and "great big ego blow job" was probably a wee bit hyperbolic as well. Heh. ____Not the real rusty Me too I'm terrible. At this point, I've grown so used to being thirsty all the time that it takes the headache to make me remember to drink some water. ____Not the real rusty Ok, yes, I know Yep, there's a hole in the javascript filter. Bummer for us. But we know about it now, so anyone considering drawing our attention to the problem, please don't. Fully aware and all. Thanks for the security help though. That background color changer is kind of neat. Howsabout if now that no one else gets the joy of "discovering" the hole in public anymore, anyone who cannot resist the urge to play with it tries to come up with the most cool and useful feature they can think of, to the general benefit of all, while someone (ahem panner) fixes it? That would be novel. Imagine being creative instead of annoying. Fun for the whole family. :-) Nah i doesn't rock, unfortunately. Nifty hack, and full points for that, but he went the way of all the kiddys when he posted it publically rather than tell anyone who works on Scoop. See, you're cool if you find a problem and report it to the developers. And you're cool if you give them a reasonable amount of time to fix it (like any time at all, for starters). And if they blow you off, then go ahead and embarrass the shit out of them in public. But when you find a problem and post it publically first, you're just giving your own ego a great big blow job. I'm not impressed by that. But worse, that's what makes people think h4x0rs are evil and should be imprisoned and legislated out of existence. It reflects badly on those who actually are interested in better security. Go ahead and poke holes in stuff. Just do it ethically. ____Not the real rusty It's not a big deal This isn't a big deal at all. It's a very teeny deal that matches in format many things which have been and will be big deals for others. This one doesn't really matter, but the principle of it still annoys me. I meant it more as an analogy than a point about this particular case. Posting an exploit publically first isn't very cool. Slightly more cool than keeping it secret and exploiting it for your own gain, or to hurt others, but way less cool than reporting it to the developers privately. What I meant about evil haxors is that when someone, say, posts an exploit to get into any windows box remotely, they end up pissing off all those regular computer users who blame the person who released the exploit for their machines being compromised, rather than the people who are actually to blame, the company that sold you bad software in the first place. It's counterproductive, and shifts blame away from the people who are actually to blame. You guys are smarter than that, and blame us for this, as well you ought to. But it happens the other way too often. ____Not the real rusty Heh This was actually panner's code anyway, I think. Amazing that no one's found it yet, really. This bug has to have been there for ages -- like probably over a year. ____Not the real rusty No it won't Silly rabbit. ____Not the real rusty Well You were scaring the crap out of ti_dave. I felt bad for him. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also Your sig would be better if it substituted images with the right background color too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Disallow javascript Great mother of mercy, we haven't allowed javascript in years. This is a bug in the parser. Yes, it sucks that there's a bug, but you make it sound like we've always allowed javascript. Like we never thought of this in the first place. Of course we did. We may be dumb, but we're not that dumb. :-) And if your browser allows a webpage to delete c:\ with javascript, K5 is not your biggest security problem. ____Not the real rusty Wow That's the most effeminate cartoon Star Trek character I've ever seen. ____Not the real rusty Live discussion from the social software meeting So we're in this meeting, and trying having a part of the discussion without talking. We've got a web chat going, but it sucks for real conversation. So I'm creating this diary for threaded discussion instead. Maybe people will post here. Welcome! I have no idea if anyone will come and post here, but why the hell not try, eh? If anyone could bring me up to speed on what we were supposed to be talking about, I'd appreciate it. I've forgotten amidst the whistling and Axel F. ____Not the real rusty Maybe diftnet (etherpeg for linux) says that people are looking at it. But does anyone have an account? Is anyone going to spend the extra time to talk in a medium that isn't pushed at you, in this context? ____Not the real rusty too late, i think We're on to other things now. Unfortunately, I launched this at like minute 25 of a 30 minute segment. ____Not the real rusty The city so nice they named it thrice If you count "New Amsterdam, of course. I'm in New York, gabbing about social software with a bunch of smart people. It's pretty fascinating, personally, but I'm not even gonna try to summarize. I'm just going to include two lines that kind of capture the zeitgeist: "I'm not smart, I'm from the future." --JC [last name unknown] "The nature of social software and virtual community is... actually I'm wrong." --Scott Heiferman Yeah, it's kind of like that. Meanwhile, I have a second draft of the bylaws. I will post them tomorrow, when I'm at a machine that will translate them from .doc to html. No But if you tell a joke, there's got to be some context by which I can recognize it. I still don't really get it, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Uh, ok. I get it now. :-) ____Not the real rusty Canon Has anyone seen his camera commercial? Seriously, Val Kilmer is on TV shilling for some digital camera. I think it's Canon, but I could be wrong. We were flabbergasted. Has his career tanked that badly? ____Not the real rusty The difference I think the difference is that Kevin Bacon and Charlie Sheen are regularly doing movies. You see the Val Kilmer commercial, and it's like "Hey, is that Val Kilmer? Jesus, when was the last time he was in a movie? And now selling cameras? Sad... very sad..." It's all about the career stage. If you're on top, then it's just a little extra cream. If you've been out of circulation for a while, it looks desperate. ____Not the real rusty Hee hee And of course my first thought would be "So because I didn't Worship Your Great Big Super-powerful all Godliness enough, this innocent little boy was sent to an early grave. Boy, I'm all saved and stuff now, I tell ya. That's just the way to run a universe. How could I not see it before?" ____Not the real rusty The faith of the child... ....despite being a sacrifice for "object lesson" purposes. Did the kid know he was just an example? I suppose he'd be fine with that, After all, he's going to get the pie in the sky. On religion, and Christianity in particular (though any religion that follows that basic format is pretty much the same deal) my feeling is that invisible omnipotent beings twiddling the strings of humanity is just a silly idea. So what value they have is as a moral compass, a set of principles to live by. This particular lesson says that the hope for humanity to create for itself a better world through medicine (fallible though it may be) is trumped by the hope that after this crappy life you have a shot at some kind of peace and happiness. That's one of the core messages of Christianity, and while I'm glad that there's an element of hope even in the face of the hopeless, I'm also deeply uncomfortable with a message that can so easily be twisted around to imply that your actions and your life on earth is not so important, so long as you just believe there's a better world that will be bestowed upon you after death. It's a very fine line, but it has been crossed to disastrous consequence too many times to count by Christians who honestly believed they were acting out God's will. Given my choice of religions, I'm more comfortable with science, which, while it's been responsible for probably just as many atrocities, is at least underpinned with a hope for a better future of all human life, right here in this world that we know (so far as it is possible to know) exists, whether you believe in it or not. ____Not the real rusty I was unclear This particular lesson says that the hope for humanity to create for itself... I should have said "...could be read to say..." instead of "says." I realize that your interpretation of how Christianity can be applied to human life is just as valid, and I agree with a lot more of what Jesus actually said than I disagree with (and I agree with him a lot more than I agree with most of his followers). I guess what it comes down to is the bumper sticker: "Lord, deliver me from Your followers." My own religious belief is that the difference between simply following the golden rule and following organized Christianity amounts to belief in a lot of unnecessary stuff about the afterlife, which I can live without. This, by the way, is by far the most interesting and sane religious discussion I've ever had on the internet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Media Whore So the creative commons people finally contacted me, all unknowing of my unresponded-to July feedback. It's a cool idea, and hopefully K5 will be part of it, letting you pick your own license terms for stuff you post here. Of course, email number two was a Memorandum of Understanding that they wanted me to sign, which I have balked at for now because I don't understand anything yet. Is it wrong to want a little foreplay before the legalese? I don't think so. Anyway, I was looking around on their site, and they've got an interview with Doc Searls featured right now. Check out the shirt. That's one of the SXSW special K5 Media Whore shirts. Doc is my fucking1 hero. I'm going to New York tomorrow for Cyber Expo '93. It should be... interesting? Probably. I plan to feel as uncool as possible, and embarrassingly hirsute among the bald-headed hipsters from the planet Smartron. I don't even own a cellphone. Live from New York tomorrow. ---- 1 He's from Jersey. I had to slip that in somewhere. It's better First, it's a standard set of permissions you can choose from. It gets people thinking about what license they actually want to use. While you're free to put your own terms on something now, how many people think of it? This will make it easier. Second, it will eventually be machine-readable. So if you want to find, for example, articles that may be copied freely for noncommercial use, you can search for them by that criteria. That will presumably be somewhere in the future, but I think it's worth preparing for. And finally, why not do it? ____Not the real rusty But... but... but... But Doc's a good guy, whatever they might say about him. Who knows what the hell that's supposed to mean. ____Not the real rusty Not even fluff? Not even a small piece of pocket fluff? I personally own a PDA, a clean t-shirt, a small piece of pocket fluff, and I used to own a genuine piece of Plymouth Rock, but I probably don't have it anymore. ____Not the real rusty Hey I'm sorry, no offense was meant. I just thought it was odd to get legal documents before we'd discussed what the plan was, that's all. I hope I didn't reveal anything secret that I wasn't supposed to, or make people think badly of Creative Commons. And the MOU wasn't scary at all, in itself. It was just weird to be given something to sign so quickly. You have to understand, though, that dealing with me privately is not the same as dealing with Kuro5hin. I'm the mouthpiece, but I'm not the one who makes decisions. Every time I try to go off on my own and make a solo decision on behalf of everyone, I manage to screw it up. So I do things out in the open, where people can comment on them. I wouldn't feel right about making any formal agreements without outlining to K5 what the idea is and getting their feedback. It's just the way we work. Anyway, hopefully we can clear this all up on Monday. Do be aware that I'm probably not going to sign anything until the community has had a chance to discuss it though. ____Not the real rusty Say what you will Say what you will, shoeboy was one of the vanishingly tiny number of trolls who was consistently funny, especially when he wasn't being mean-spirited. He has the gift of satire. ____Not the real rusty Bah You troll. ____Not the real rusty One decade I have a string bracelet on my right ankle. It is red and white, striped like a barber pole, and threadbare. I won it in a game (I don't remember which one) in a mock carnival in the high school gymnasium of Falmouth Academy in Falmouth, Massachusetts in late spring of 1993. I may not have won it. I may have just taken it from leftovers. That's not really important, anyway. What is important is that I was in 11th grade that year, and had my first girlfriend ever. In July, that summer, sitting in Bill's bedroom in Sandwich with summer light streaming in the windows, Bill put a different kind of bracelet on his ankle. I put this piece of string on mine. Rob came in and said something like "I thought only girls wear ankle bracelets," and Bill took his off. But I told him to screw and kept mine on. I went to France and came back and finished high school and took the SATs and had an undefeated lacrosse season and went to college and studied physics and met my second girlfriend and broke up with my second girlfriend and met my second girlfriend again and (repeat as necessary) and stopped studying physics and started studying film and they invented the internet and I played with it on pine and lynx and I learned html and designed a web page and got depressed and dropped out of college and built furniture and moved to DC and worked for the government and worked for people who weren't the government but knew who was and got a cat and started a website and moved to California and shut down the website and opened it again and worked for a dotcom bust and worked for myself and made the last dotcom boom advertising deal and move to Maine and got married and lost the last dotcom boom advertising deal and still kept the website open and got another cat and became some kind of meta-journalist. And at each point, life is fractal, and the list could go on and on forever (paging Mr. Proust, you have a call on the white courtesy phone) but the POINT of all of it is that: I still have a piece of red and white string on my right ankle. Ten years. It hasn't ever been off one single time, since a sunny day in July in Sandwich Massachusetts. That's what one decade is. ____Not the real rusty The cats are fed No, I haven't had to do any more Real Work so far. I've been writing. It turns out that writing and coding are basically the same job. They both involve sitting in front of a computer all day and typing. Someday, there will be humans perfectly adapted for this work. They will look like Weebles, with no legs, just a giant soft round ass. They will have short arms with 50 fingers on one hand and 51 on the other. And in between ass and arms will be the brain cavity. Nothing else will be required. ____Not the real rusty Heh I hate to disappoint, but did you know they have things that prevent conception now? I'm sure we'll have kids eventually. If it's a boy, he'll be named me++, and if it's a girl... well, my vote is still for Pandora, but I'm likely to be overruled on that. Personally I like Pandora Eve, but even I'll admit that might be a little much. :-) ____Not the real rusty me++ Of course it's shorthand. But we do plan to increment my name by one, which will make little Lawrence the fourth in the line. We will probably call him "Four." ____Not the real rusty Trolling family Ah yes. This is a time-honored custom in my house. Off the top of my head, things I have told my wife which she believed, for however brief a time: The lobster on the label of Geary's beer is there because they brew the beer with lobster The Buckeye is a large tunneling rodent native to Ohio Those webs you see wrapping the ends of tree branches sometimes are the traps of a type of spider called the tufted squirrelcatcher, which lives in trees and exists on a diet of squirrels, caught in those giant webs (Ok, she didn't believe that one, but I like it anyway) The term "lame duck Congress" comes from an event just after the US civil war. It seems one particular congressman had a pet duck who followed him everywhere, and the duck became something of a mascot in congressional chambers, even accompanying its master to the floor of the House. Shortly after an election in which power was rather sharply reversed, but before the newly-elected congressmen had been sworn in, there was a serious scuffle on the House floor itself, which resulted in the pet duck being wounded by an injudiciously-swung cane. The press derisively referred to it as "the lame duck incident" and made much satirical use of the image of a crippled duck representing the outgoing congress. Though most people don't know the derivation, the term has stuck around for the period of time between elections and new members taking their seats. (She didn't buy this either, because I hadn't worked out the patter yet and was unable to deliver it properly. But try it on someone you love, I'm almost positive it'll work) The real key to this is knowing enough implausible but true facts, and sprinkling them in between the lies, so that sometimes when they call you out you can prove you weren't making it up. This sows the seeds of doubt and will ensure that no matter how outlandish, they will always hesitate to call bullshit. For example, while it's not actually made of the plant, the marshmallow is named for a wetlands plant called the "marsh mallow," which it resembles. Marsh mallow was once used in another type of confection, though never in actual marshmallows. The key here is this sounds just like the kind of spurious etymology in "lame duck" above, but it's actually true. Pad your repertoire with a few facts like this, and you're golden. ____Not the real rusty My facial strategy My strategy is to smirk all the time. And only have one facial expression. No one can ever tell if I'm lying. :-) ____Not the real rusty Leonids So I stand there, grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, and it's cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, and I decide that it doesn't take very much to get astronomers excited. Here's a tip kids: stay inside where it's warm and squeeze your eyes shut and rub them really hard. See all the pretty lights? That's a lot more exciting than the Leonids. Astronomer You should be an astronomer. You clearly have the right temperment for it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, it's winter Got back from a friend's wedding in DC yesterday to find winter has definitely winted. The trees coated with ice on our road were a bad sign. The ice-covered branches lying across the power lines were an even worse sign. Sure enough we got home to find the power was out. I cranked up the woodstove and we gathered candles while it was still light. Made some minestrone soup for dinner, and ate by candlelight. Then we went to bed around 7PM. I'm not surprised that before electricity everyone went to sleep by 8 and got up before dawn. There just isn't a damn thing to do once it gets dark. Today is cold enough to be cold, but not cold enough to freeze anything, so it's a slushy wet mess. Rain alternates with snow and water is dripping from everything. Luckily I had some wood left that dried out overnight, so I could get the stove back up. I brought in three boxloads of soaked firewood, and hope to not have to go outside again today. Of course, I hadn't raked yet. I just have to hope this melts and we get a clear day or two before the rest of winter sets in. The only bright spot is that this may indicate that the predictions of a snowy winter are true. Heh The power's back on now. Looks like they got it back middle of last night. ____Not the real rusty No time I had exactly zero free time. We got in Friday night, visited my sister, all day Saturday was wedding stuff, and we left Sunday morning at 9:30. ____Not the real rusty Leaves Yeah, but it doesn't take that long (d'oh!) Seriously, the leaves are half a foot deep, yard-wide. Of course now they're a slurry of leaves and snow. What a mess. To the original questioner: If you don't rake them, they'll kill the grass and come spring your yard will be 100% piping-fresh meltwater mud. I'd rather rake than replant all the grass. ____Not the real rusty Panic! Portland is the only city I know of that literally shuts down and sends out the sand and gravel trucks after a half inch snowfall. You've never been in Virginia or DC when it starts snowing, have you? :-) ____Not the real rusty Milk! I always wondered why people rush out for milk when a disaster is predicted. I mean, what are you gonna suddenly need a lot of milk for? And in just about any real weather emergency, the first thing to go is power. What will you do with your spoiled milk then? My God, snow? Quick honey, get some milk! We'll be needing shakes before this is over, you mark my words! ____Not the real rusty Chromonomicon ecru: From the French cru "Raw, unbleached" taupe: Also from French and Old French for "mole," Latin talpa fuchsia: Named for a class of plants featuring vivid purple-red blooms, themselves named for German botanist Leonhard Fuchs (1501-1566) cyan: From Greek kuanos "dark blue" sienna, burnt sienna: Sienna is clay that is colored red or brown by the oxides of iron or manganese. It may be used as a pigment either raw or burnt. umber: Same as sienna. No idea why these are different colors. brown: The Godfather of Soul. I miss you too Actually, I've been purposely avoiding IRC for a while because I'm trying to write more, and IRC sucks the words out of me and flings them down a black pit. I think I have a limited number of words per day available, and IRC (being textual in nature -- no, textual you perv!) tends to sap many of them to no good purpose. Experimentally, this seems to be the case. I certainly do write a lot more when off IRC. An alternate explanation, if you don't buy the per-day word limit, is that it's related to a natural drive to communicate. I'm basically alone all day, and if IRC is around, it can satisfy my urge for communication. Without it, I'm forced to turn to other channels like writing, which are less immediately satisfying but ultimately probably a better use of time. But some days it's hard. I'll be back eventually. ____Not the real rusty Not really much of my writing, but... ...my editing abounds in this interview on OJR with the BBC's Matt Jones. That article, cheesy though it may be, nonetheless goes down in history as my first piece of paid writing ever. Which is ironic because out of 1900-odd words, I only wrote about 300 of them including my own bio. But if you only knew the editing that went into removing as much of my presence as possible, you would ph33r my sk1llz. ____Not the real rusty Not to be confused with... ... The Necrotelicomnicon: Book of the Phone Numbers of the Dead. ____Not the real rusty Don't blame me... ...I voted for Kodos! ____Not the real rusty Surely Surely this comment will go down in history as the Altamont of rusty's diary. ____Not the real rusty They're trying They're trying their best, every day. Just give them a little more time. ____Not the real rusty Connecticut. Pah! Up here in Maine, we rake our leaves the old fashioned way, with the sweat of our brow and the plastic rake of our Wal-Mart. Ever vigilant and resolute, unbowed by the weight of hostile nature, we persevere against the mightiest oak and maple, and we prevail! Ayuh. I also wait until the last possible moment. There are still plenty of leaves left on the trees, and damned if I'm gonna rake them just to have the yard fill up again. ____Not the real rusty True Anyway, the waiting game, that's risky. Wait one week too long and you're picking up leaves the hard way, with a snow shovel. Or, two weeks, when the leaves are sealed to the earth with ice. This is true. It's a fine line, and requires constant weather watching vigilance. It also usually requires a willingness to rake leaves the instant they need to be raked, no matter how crappy the weather. Right now it looks like Wednesday and Thursday might be raking days. It's been rainy and windy here, which has helped bring down a lot of the stragglers, and they're talking about possible snow Thursday night. My guess is it won't snow, but I think that day is not far off. ____Not the real rusty What's up with Daypop? Where's Daypop gone? Anyone know? Ah... not the same I try, but blogdex just doesn't do the same job. It doesn't seem to scan as many weblogs, and the search doesn't work the same way. Daypop was the best for blog ego-surfing, like you could search for "Kuro5hin" ordered by date and see who had been linking here lately. Blogdex isn't so useful for that. I remember they were down in September for a while, then back. I didn't see anything before they went down again this time. ____Not the real rusty +12 Too fucking right. ____Not the real rusty Your forgot one thing Western media coverage would prove he does have WMD programs. Oops. Then he'd lose the whole "We Love Saddam" faction that's sticking up for him (like France, and apparently you). Well, he'd lose some of them, anyway. It seems like most are willing to overlook anything. ____Not the real rusty Sorry You were sounding like one of the "Saddam is innocent" faction. We know Saddam has WMD programs five years ago. We know there haven't been inspections in at least four years (is that right? Some number, anyway). I see no reason at all we can't safely assume he has rebuilt as many of them as he can. That said, I'd love to see western newsmedia following the inspectors. Bringing all the events out in the open can't hurt. And I hope the inspections receive "coersive" support (as the kids are all calling men with guns these days). ____Not the real rusty I found I found one of these in my bed the other night. Thanks, cat! ____Not the real rusty Yeah The bird was still marginally alive too. It was somehow caught by the cat who was raised in the city, and never got the hang of actually killing the critters he catches. I also often have to chase mice around after he brings them inside to play. Is it just me, or is that the opposite of the point of a cat? I mean, he un-rids the house of mice. Ridiculous. PS: Haven't we had this conversation before? I'm having the weirdest sense of deja vu. ____Not the real rusty Drop and roll About a year ago, on a camping trip, I actually caught on fire. I didn't realize it, and my friend yelled "DROP AND ROLL!" at me, and I had no idea what the hell he was trying to say. So in my experience, no, the preparation does no good. Even when I figured out I was on fire, I just stared at it, absolutely brain-locked. ____Not the real rusty White Amerikkka Fuck you Ms. Cheney! Fuck you Tipper Gore! Fuck you with the freest of speech this divided states of embarassment will allow me to have. And that's basically how I feel about the elections. More book inside! The book is progressing -- 13000 words or so now, and I'm past the part-one-to-part-two hurdle. Maybe. Well, I'm past it enough to go on anyway, whether the current transition will remain or not (I suspect it will have to change, since it's kind of rough). I think I might have a title, out of the most recent part. Which is a relief, as I have so far had no idea. I'm also back on slightly familiar ground, as this part has appeared in a totally different form as a short story already. Anyway, enough babble. Here's today's efforts. Currently, this is the first section of chapter five. I haven't even read it over, so all suckage should be considered temporary. :-) _______________________ I sat in the plastic chair, in the plastic waiting room. Next to me a plastic fern gathered dust. Six secretaries sat at six identical desks, punching buttons on the complex panels in front of them and talking nonstop into headsets. Their eyes were focused on nothing in the middle distance. "Desiring Machines Incorporated, hold please. Desiring Machines Incorporated, please hold. Desiring Machines Incorporated..." the sound was a steady numbing drone. Others came in, sat for a while, got up and left through one of the long row of doors lining the far wall. The secretaries worked the phones. No one talked to me. It had been a long time since my last job. The spider was squawking at me pretty loud. There was nothing I could do about it. When there was a job, there was a job. I tried not to squirm or fidget, but did anyway. My neck and spine ached from sitting in the same position for hours. I kept on sitting. My vision was getting blurry. The third secretary from the left suddenly split. She still punched buttons and repeated her constant mantra (Desiring Machines Incorporated hold please) but overlaid on that a wavering, translucent image of her snapped its eyes out of the middle distance and focused on me. The image pointed. "You. Job. Door 17." The translucent image winked out and the solid secretary continued punching buttons. Finally. I stood up stiffly and walked toward door 17, trying hard to keep my path straight. I felt off balance, like my limbs weren't responding at normal speed. Door 17 was just like all the other ones. Faux wood-grain laminate, cheap interior grade handle. I opened it and stepped through. There was a loud noise like someone pounding a sheet of steel with a hammer, once. It was accompanied by the visual equivalent of the noise, a flash of no-color light that drowned out everything else for an instant. Then I was through the door. The other side opened on a cavernous loading area. The door I came through was the only one in the long wall. Loaders whipped across the enormous floor, festooned with spinning yellow lights. They looked like they were about to have a massive collision, but never quite hit each other. I looked for the boss. The far wall was lined with giant loading bay doors, opening and closing ponderously. Spinning red warning lights flared and died as the doors rumbled up and down. The noise was deafening. I spotted the boss near the end of the row of loading doors, standing next to one that was stuck half-open, error siren blaring and red and orange lights both strobing his face. He chomped on an unlit cigar and looked impatient. I headed across the floor toward him, ignoring the loaders whipping past me. They roared by, missing me and each other by fractions of an inch, motors whining like giant mosquitos. Gaps opened and closed in front of me, showing me strobing images of the boss looking at his watch, chomping on the cigar, seeing the disturbance in the loader paths, waving an arm at me to hurry up. "Where the hell have you been?" He hollered across the floor. "I called for a mech more than ten seconds ago! Shake a friggin leg, door monkey!" I hated when they called me that. I forced myself to clamp down on the spider and slowed a little. Loaders screeched to adjust around my new projected path. The boss glared at me and muttered to himself. "Goddamn door monkeys back in my day --" and so forth. I ignored him and went straight to the stuck door. It was a DC-238 with a standard half-and-half jam. Cheap model, this happened all the time. That's what they get for trying to cut corners and still run a high-throughput operation. Probably had mechs out here daily. I bent over and peered under the half-open door. Inside was like looking at two movies being projected at once. Two shipping containers were simultaneously backed up to the door, one empty and one full. Looking at them hurt my brain. The stuck door was jamming both of them in place, and probably causing snarls all through the local grid. This Mickey Mouse operation was probably a constant headache for the other shippers. I pulled a key out of my toolbelt and waved it at the access panel. The spider was shrieking with greed and I couldn't ignore it any more, not this close. The panel hissed open, and the initiation hit blasted through my system like an angel licking my brain. My vision sharpened to an icy clarity and my skin stopped trying to climb off me and die. In my head, the spider stopped screaming and chirped a couple times with contentment. I hated how good it felt, but I couldn't stop it from feeling so good either. A few deep breaths, and I got to work. The quicker I finished, the better the departure hit would be. I cut off the siren and the lights, and the local noise level dropped from deafening to merely loud. I yanked the load/release controller out on it's tracks, and wiped all pending loads. That should drop the incoming container. I slid the LRC back in and locked it down, then locked off incoming loads and hit the release reset. The door rumbled down and sealed shut. A green indicator light told me it was clear, but I followed spec and did a manual open-close cycle to visually check. You never know when the gauges are going to go, and a jam can knock everything out of whack. Usually doesn't, but I'd be in a world of hurt if I tried to rush it and screwed up. The door opened again and it was clear, so I dropped the load-lock and finished the reset cycle. The door ran down and sealed, and the departure hit rushed over me. I was good at my job, and this was a fast fix. The dep hit was good. The access panel slid shut. I was lucky. That was an easy job, and now I was free for a couple days at least. I'd waited too long this time, till it was almost too late. Like they say, just cause you show up needing badly doesn't mean they'll have a job for you right away. Most mechs went back to the office well before they absolutely had to. Some of them had no life at all, they just went straight back from one job and waited for the next. I thought they were pathetic. I crossed the floor back to the door I'd come in. The boss was already gone, probably hollering at someone else. Screw him. I went back through the entrance door and crossed the plastic office and left, ignoring the glares from the bank of secretaries who knew I'd come in late again next time, face hanging down to my knees and eyeballs rolling around in my head, cluttering up their nice clean office. Screw them too. 7 + 1 = 8 [no further math] ____Not the real rusty No Not officially, since I started in October. But it is in the spirit of. Sort of. I'm probably leaning a little further toward trying to make something I won't be embarrassed to show others than most NaNoWriMo's. Ok, secretly, deep down, I want this bastard to get published eventually. There, I said it. Are you happy now? ____Not the real rusty You should Accept the answer I've already gven to this question a dozen times, which is that when I have news I will post it. ____Not the real rusty October 22 I've been working on it since October 22nd. I had most of the story in my head before I started, though the ending didn't occur to me till a few days after. Usually I've got it planned out couple scenes ahead when I actually sit down to write something. Yesterday was an exception, as I knew that something had to happen but I wasn't sure what or how, and the above is what ended up coming out. :-) I have more pondering to do on this part. ____Not the real rusty "concentric circular firing squads" Apt description. ____Not the real rusty Repetition works, Dave. Repetition works, Dave.* I'm not technically doing a nanowrimo book, because I started in October, but I'm trying for the same tactics of just write some of the damn thing every day. I've got to 12950, which is kind of sad considering I've got a two-week headstart on you, but still a hell of a lot better than I've ever done before. I'm trying to make 1200 words a day, which seems to be right about my comfort level right now. Anyway, a couple days ago I finished Act One. Today was a bitch, because I finally quit noodling over revisions and got down to starting Act Two. The second part is kind of a whole new story -- the two will come together soon, and I'll probably cut back to the first thread a few times to remind the reader that it's still ongoing, but it's basically in storage for this part of the book. So I had to write a whole new beginning, which I hadn't realized until I suddenly got there and discovered I was going to have to. That sucks. Just when you think you've got the horrible blank-page fresh-beginning part over with, here it is again. I wrote about 1K words of it, then select-all deleted it because it was shit. I puttered around the kitchen for a while, and got an idea, so I went back and wrote that. I've just finished the first scene of the second part, and I suddenly realize that in structure and purpose and "gist", it's almost exactly the same as the first scene of part one. Only it's completely different, if you know what I mean. I was just tickled, because it works perfectly like that and I didn't realize I was doing it till it was done. It's good when little things like that happen. * Nerd-points to whoever names the movie ____Not the real rusty Even if it's crap The "write even if it's crap" suggestion is a good one, and that's what I did the first time. But perhaps equally important is realizing when you're just spewing crap to get the idea-jam flowing, and being willing to wipe it when something better comes along. :-) The thing was, I knew where the story was going, and what the point of the scene had to be, but not what the scene actually was. In retrospect, what I ended up doing should have been the totally obvious choice from the get-go. I was stuck on a bad idea about how the new character would behave, that didn't end up working at all. I'm going to have to go back and revise some other stuff now too, since there are a couple bits earlier that make some assumptions about what this character's like that don't turn out to be the case. But hey, it's all good. Your heart attack comment actually reminded me that I did write that whole first try, which means I did over 2K yesterday, even if half of it ended up being trashed. That's heartening. ____Not the real rusty It's too bad I thought it was a shame no one wrote an analysis worth posting. In the end, all the anlysis in the world will say the same thing the major networks have been saying though. This is one of those events where there's not much to be gained from speculating about it. It happened, we all know it happened, now we'll see what happens next. ____Not the real rusty Simpsons did it! There was an episode of South Park where the "evil" character was trying to come up with some devious scheme, and, in an extremely transparent trope for the South Park creators own frustration, everything he comes up with was already done by the Simpsons. His sidekick keeps dismissing his schemes with "Simpsons did it!" In anything even remotely like science fiction, chances are PKD has already done it. Or any of a hundred other greats. Hell, my current thing has at heart some of the same questions as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Not to mention trampling on Connie Willis's home turf, and straying pretty far into David F. Wallace land as well. All of whom piss in the snow with more eloquence than I can ever muster. The thing about Dick is that he had basically every idea there is to have, but didn't get very deep into any of them. His thing was just to cram a million really interesting ideas into every story, which made for some great stories, but also has this aftereffect of his having covered everything already to some degree. Take heart, because he didn't do a very thorough job with many of them. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. :-) ____Not the real rusty Crap Now it's a race. We've each got one. Who will own metir? Who will manage to find two other excuses to use it first? These and other pressing questions answered next diary. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. ____Not the real rusty Doesn't it? Boy, sometimes being married & monagamous seems almost too eassy. I feel the same way. I love living rizzo's life vicariously, but when all's said and done, how I really feel is "I'm so fucking glad I don't have to do any of that shit anymore." Not to even mention The Talk. Remember The Talk? There are at least four versions of it, and by the end I never even cared what happened anymore, I just wanted it to be over so much. ____Not the real rusty There's others too That one's the classic, sort of the ur-Talk. But really anything about which you have to sit down and interface in that creepily calm and pseudo-reasonable manner counts as The Talk. I tell you, marriage is a serious The Talk killer. We talk, and sometimes we even talk very seriously about important things. But The Talk seems to thrive on the undercurrent of uncertainty and the fact that a year ago this person was a stranger, and a year from now they may easily be again. I don't know how the divorce talk goes, but I imagine even that isn't the same. Oh, and being on either end of any Talk is equally bad, IME. ____Not the real rusty A wise man A wise man named Lyle once said "There is no such thing as the feeling of being envied by Lamont Chu." Think about that. ____Not the real rusty You're assuming... ...that there's a living party to maintain. Well, they did just elect a Republican governor, so who knows. ____Not the real rusty Dark So, so dark. I raked half the yard on Thursday. You can't tell at all which part I raked and which I didn't anymore. The big maple is almost done, and has by itself covered the yard in a good two-inch layer of leaves. There are five others that are still mostly green. Haven't even changed color yet, let alone started dropping leaves. I'm going to have leaves till the end of December. And meanwhile, by the time I've done enough work to go tackle the raking, it's already been dark for an hour and a half. I have got to get up earlier in the morning. ____Not the real rusty Oh dear I didn't mean to imply that I would do the raking in the morning. Just that if I got up earlier, I could write in the morning and then do the yahdwork. ____Not the real rusty I climbed a mountain... sorta Went over to New Hampshire this weekend, almost died (yet again) on the Kankamagus, climbed most of Mount Clay, last rock climbing of the season. My wife had a friend coming to visit who I don't particularly get along with, so I called up Rob on Wednesday to see what he was up to this weekend. We had one of those conversations where plans work out so quickly that the conversation is over before it begins. It went, in its entirety, like this: "Hey." "Hey." "What are you doing this weekend?" "I was gonna go up to New Hampshire Friday night." "Cool. I'll see you there then." "Ok, cool." "..." "..." "Ok, bye." "Bye." Friday, I cleaned for four hours straight and then threw all the standard fall/winter gear in a bag and left. For anyone who cares, the standard fall/winter gear is as follows: Poly/Fleece: Pants, long underwear (top and bottom), shirt, other shirt, gloves. Wool/poly socks (3 pair) Hiking boots Shell pants, jacket Mad bomber hat, light wool hat, heavy gloves, fleece head-thingy, goggles 1 each boxers, t-shirt, jeans (you never know) Deodorant, toothbrush Sleeping bag (probably won't need it, but...) MSR stove, fuel bottle Pot and ever-present coffee bag Headlamp First aid kit Nalgene bottles 550 para cord (misc lengths) Harness and climbing shoes That covers me for day hiking in temps from 50 to 0 Fahrenheit, rock climbing, and one relatively uncomfortable overnight (if necessary) in temps 20+. Bill and Rob have most of the ropes and climbing gear, by the way. No, we don't climb on para cord. :-) Hoofed down to the boat, and into the Jeep for the excessively long and difficult drive to New Hampshire. There are no east-west highways in Maine or New Hampshire, so going from one to the other is a choice between a range of unpleasant options. You could go all the way south to Portsmouth on 95, then pick up 93 back north. You could go out 302, two-lane blacktop but fairly fast through Maine, till you get over the border near Fryeburg, then either stay on 302 and loop up to the north till you hit 93 above exit 34 and back south, or you can cut off on the Kankamagus highway (112) and go through the White Mountain National forest. The last is what I usually do, as it's the shortest and most "exciting." The Kankamagus (pronounced "kank-a-mangus") does twist and turn a bit as it winds over the mountains. But compared to, say, any road in West Virginia it's not too curvy. What really distinguishes the Kankamagus is its weather. It's as if the surveyors sat down and mapped out the absolute worst weather they could find, and built the road right there. The Kankamagus has rotten weather whenever there's rotten weather to be had, and a lot of times when there isn't. Whether it's pouring rain, pea-soup fog, wind gusts of 40 or 50 knots, blowing white-out snow, or all of the above at once. Oh, and it's popular with moose too. All of this combines to make the Kankamagus always an adventure. This trip was no exception. What was merely cold air everywhere else was initially light snow as the road started to climb. Light snow turned to heavy snow, and the road started to show clear tracks where other cars had been through. The tracks faded as heavy snow turned to heavy blowing snow mixed with leaves (technically, it's still fall) and the road didn't show through at all, even where other cars had driven. Luckily it was dark, so I couldn't see the sheer cliffs right next to the road, a view which is unimpeded by any form of aesthetically unpleasant guardrail in many places. Well, a Jeep's a good vehicle to be in under those circumstances, and I have definitely seen worse snow there. Only a few slips and one slightly heart-stopping downhill braking-and-cornering incident, and I was past the worst of it. I swear that road has it's own microclimate of hellish weather, though. Got to NH, cooked up a nice meal of non-perishable goods (pasta and some rather rustic tomato sauce), slept. The next day Rob and I planned to ascend the Jewell trail up Mount Clay, which is the one next to Mount Washington. Reading about it in the AMC guidebook, that three-peak area (encompassing Clay, Washington, and Jefferson) is all above treeline, and has the same climate and geographical features as northern Labrador. The whole area above treeline is basically tundra, permafrost and all. It was about 22 degrees when we left the house. Way cold for November first, even up there. Rob of course had to stop at the North Face store in Lincoln, so we got to the trailhead pretty late. Jewell trail is a sweet little climb. A couple hours up a pretty mild grade, then it steepens a bit. The snow was ankle deep, but fresh and fluffy, so no need for snowshoes. But it was cold. 16 degrees where we parked, and dropping. Treeline is around 4200 feet. A few hints come before you get there, views off to the right of the flank of Mount Washington, with the cog railway winding up the side. Then you emerge, out of a tunnel of shrinking evergreens, and there's nothing in front of you but mountain. That's when it gets really cold. We didn't have a thermometer, but we ran into a couple of Quebecois who did, and they said it was -20 Celsius above treeline. That's -4F. Not including windchill, and the wind was probably 5-15 mph. So windchill was in the -10 to -25 range. We both put on every piece of clothing and wind-protective gear was had, and with the effort of climbing, we were pretty toasty. Our turn-around time was 2:30. I tried to tell everyone this was good mountaineering practice, but really it was because we wanted to make half-price appetizers at the Woodstock Inn. We did keep to our plan, because at 2:30 we were perhaps 300 feet above treeline, and just below the cloud layer. The summit was shrouded in clouds, and if we went any higher we wouldn't be able to see anything anymore. Neither of us cared much about bagging the summit for it's own sake, so we turned back. Blowing snow and wind gusts afforded excellent opportunities for shouting things like "Onward, Shackleton! We must cross Elephant Island!" and other such nonsense. We descended to a convenient campsite just below treeline and cheffed up some nice ramen and pepperoni, and chatted with a pair of Quebecois aerospace engineers for a while, then finished the descent. We missed half-price appetizers anyway. Beaten by the mountain once again. Bill and Julie came up last night, Bill with the plan of rock climbing today. Rob and I scoffed at the idea of rock climbing when it was 20 degrees out. But as it turned out, it was warm enough today and we found a lovely face in direct sun, and did some climbing after all. We set up two climbs, but only three of us had harnesses, so we didn't get to run them both at the same time. Hence each of us only had time for one climb on each route. One was a nice diagonal crack that kind of petered out toward the top and turned really hard. The other was a slabby, bulgy and fairly short face that was pretty easy but had some interesting technical bits, and turned out to be great fun. We all managed to top that one out, which is cool. And back home on a Kankamagus that was very uncharacteristically sunny and calm. Total damage: one mildly turned ankle from the Clay descent, sore fingers on my right hand from a jam in the second climb, a nasty scrape on my right ankle from a foothold unexpectedly blowing off about three feet from the ground (ow!). And one very dirty Jeep. Damn And I try so hard to get those right. Er, ah, um, on second thought, I don't know what mistake you're talking aboot. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ow I'm not a big fan of rapelling. A lot of people do it when they don't have to, like you set up a top-rope climb, people will just rapell down. Most climbing accidents happen while rapelling, is what I've read. I generally avoid them whenever possible. :-) ____Not the real rusty You subscribed Looks like you turned them off. Go to your user prefs, and select "Yes" next to "Show ads". ____Not the real rusty Treeline I'm not an expert on this, and I couldn't find any good net resources after about three minutes of searching, so I'm just going to take a guess. Treeline is just the place on a mountain where the climate changes to the point that no trees can live there. So it's not a fixed elevation everywhere, it depends on what the surrounding climate is like, what the prevailing weather is like, and what the local flora is like as well, probably. I think that the White Mountains treeline is probably lower because of surrounding climate. My WAG (wild-ass guess) is that the White Mountains get less moisture and might be colder overall than the Rockies, because they're not in the middle of a great big land mass. They also go from not much above sea level up to 6500 feet or so (Mt. Washington), as opposed to Colorado which (AFAIK) is higher in elevation all over, and thus more likely to have trees better adapted to living at higher elevations. Ok, the first paragraph I'm sure of, the second is just speculation. Oh, also, treeline in New Hampshire generally means the land turns from forest to Arctic tundra. There isn't much actual naked rock, besides some high-pitch slabs and cliffs. 11K feet is pretty high, and you would probably notice the air thinning. I don't know why you got a "fish eye" effect though. I've never been that high, outside of a pressurized airplane. :-) ____Not the real rusty Probably, sorta Insofar as latitude affects climate and weather patterns, it probably does. I mean, if you think about it, treeline in the Arctic is at sea level. ____Not the real rusty Treeline fun Right at the treeline, Mt. Clay has little teeny shrub-sized evergreens that look like scale models of full-sized trees. We had some fun stomping around next to them and rearranging our perception so as to see the trees as full-sized and ourselves as towering mega-giants. If you look straight down and restrict your field of view to only the mini-trees, it's very easy to suddenly see the world this way. And you feel awfully tall. :-) ____Not the real rusty No, sorry That should have read "Oh, and it's popular with meese too." Little known fact, but Ed Meese's ancestors were northern Maine moose herders, massively successful and thus given the name "meese" after their vast thundering herds, all stampeding through the forests branded with the distinctive "M-bar". ____Not the real rusty Justified text On the web, fully-justified text is ugly. This is the clearest explanation I've found for why. Your crusade is extremely doomed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dark I'm sitting here in the dark trying to pretend no one's home. See, my wife bought Halloween candy, but she hasn't brought it home yet. So if anyone tries to come trick or treating here, I'm screwed. Ergo, I'm pretending no one's home. It's very dark. The internet says I should be eating 3900 calories a day. It also said I'm in perfectly fine health, and exactly at the proper weight point for my height and frame size and everything. I'm not afraid I'm overweight, I'm actually afraid I'm not eating enough. I kept a record of what I ate today so far. 2 (homemade) frozen Italian bread pizzas, 2 Kudos bars, an apple. My best estimates put me at about 800 calories for the day. What we're having for dinner (pork and rice kartoffel*, mmm) should add another thousand per serving. Say I have 2 helpings. Still only 2800 calories. Can't forget the ice cream, of course, so that's another 800 (I eat a lot of ice cream). Well, that's 3600 at least. But today I actually made an effort to eat lunch. More often I don't. Does anyone else have a problem making themselves eat enough? Any solutions? In conclusion, Free Nelson Mandela! * German for "potato". It is in fact just a rice and potato casserole, with onions and butter. God forbid Germans eat anything that isn't white. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. I like mine with extra starch. 10 slices I actually did a calorie comparison once, out of curiosity. A pint of guinness has as many calories as ten slices of whole wheat bread. Ten slices of whole wheat bread is a pretty big pile. Still, I doubt that's the solution I'm looking for here. :-) ____Not the real rusty It is dark You may be eaten by a grue. ____Not the real rusty Yeah Actually, I do have a very high metabolism. But the recommendation was based on a bunch of factors, like body fat percentage, height, weight, age, activity level, and desire to simply stay at my current weight. I think as soon as you say your goal is to lose weight, the recommendations drop drastically. I do know that at 3000-3500 a day, I'm hungry a lot of the time. So I assume that isn't too high. ____Not the real rusty Well Considering what's "average," I am significantly more active than average. :-) I do run 15-20 miles a week, and generally spend a couple hours a day walking, cleaning, raking, mowing, or generally doing other non-sedentary things. ____Not the real rusty Not concerned so much as curious Every time I talk about this stuff I feel like I'm giving the impression that I'm overly worried about it. It isn't that, it's just a subject that interests me for whatever reason. Probably appeals to the hacker in me -- nutrition and health has the same kind of "complex system" qualities that always interested me about computers too. I notice that I'm definitely not the only one in geek circles with this curiosity. :-) The website asked me what my body fat percentage was, so I guess they assume I've already had it measured. My friend has one of those resistance-based body fat measurers, which insisted I was 5-6% last time I tried it (a couple weeks ago). Waist measurement says more like 8%, so I split the difference and claimed 7%. Interestingly, I tried out that resistance measurer early this summer, when I'd only been running for a month or two, and it said I was 11% then. ____Not the real rusty Also They're also sensitive to hydration level. All they're really measuring is your conductivity, since fat conducts differently than lean, they make some assumptions based on conductivity and statistical likelihood. I figure five percent off is a pretty safe set of error bars, and given the second measurement the thing's most likely to be reporting near the bottom end of the range. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I have German in-laws. I know all about German food. They have white cabbage too, I'm told. :-) Love it all, though, excessively white or not. We are one of the few remaining households in the known world where the spaetzle is still handmade. ____Not the real rusty Knife Did I not say "handmade"? We cut it with a knife. :-) ____Not the real rusty Was it slow? I was on this morning, and didn't notice anything. By the time this diary was posted, I was in town though, so perhaps there was a hit. Seems to be Jim Dandy again now. So now we get a two day side-by-side comparison of blogosphere vs. Slashdot. I can't wait for tonight's stats update. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mine... My favorite (though I can't remember the exact phrasing, which means it won't be funny) is the one that's just a picture of the inside of a factory, with a big sign on the wall saying something like "Acme Ball Bearings, Roller Skates, and Glassware" and of course everyone's falling down the stairs and dropping things everywhere. Does anyone else use Far Side captions as a kind of communicative shorthand? My friend Rob and I have both read every Far Side book ever prnted, and tend to be able to find the appropriate caption for just about any situation. Oh, the other good factory one is the "Acme Haywire" factory, with the employee yelling "...and everything's just gone all... well, you know!" ____Not the real rusty Busiest Day Ever Minor K5 historical footnote: October 29, 2002 K5 served 414784 pages, making it the busiest day in K5 history. The second-busiest was April 26, 2002, with 347975 pages. So those of you saying the afternoon slowsies had returned, I was right and you were wrong. :-) Interestingly, yesterday was not the result of a Slashdotting, as virtually all other traffic-spikes have been. As far as I can tell, all the traffic was due to Portrait of a Blogger, which reached (as far as I saw) number two on blogdex. This indicates to me that the aggregate total traffic being wielded by individual blogs has finally exceeded that of Slashdot, which I could have guessed was true, but never had any real evidence of before. Important safety tip inside! Safety tip of the day: You cannot hold a full cup of coffee and sneeze without spilling any. You might think you can. You might think you have pretty good coordination, and can hold one hand steady while you sneeze. You cannot. Do yourself a favor and put that cup down, cowboy. I should have been clearer I mean a very full cup, of the "bowl" variety, with a large open top. I'm almost positive you weren't drinking out of this kind of cup while driving, since that alone would have been extremely difficult. Obviously, with a properly motionproof cup you can do it, but I was talking about that moment when you're just sitting quietly at your desk and the steam tickles your nose and you think you can get away with not putting the cup down. ____Not the real rusty I had guessed In high school, I was a travel-mug-and-thermos man myself. The thermos usally lasted me into fourth period, and somehow none of the morning teachers ever complained that I would come into class and plunk down a giant mug and thermos, day in and day out. I guess they knew what was good for them. And the pot a day habit has persisted since, briefly spiking one summer when I worked within walking distance of a Dunkin Donuts and typically had my morning pot supplemented by 3 or 4 large iced coffees a day. For those keeping track, that's something like a gallon and a half a day. That's just excessive. I actually had to taper off when I went back to college to cut down the withdrawal symptoms. Since then 2/3 to one pot a day has been standard ____Not the real rusty No sir! My unit runs the UNSTOPPABLE Windows NT. ____Not the real rusty Heh BSOD: Blue Scrotum of Death. Alright, that's just about enough of this thread. ____Not the real rusty French Press My press travels with me anytime I go anywhere for more than maybe 2 days. It has crossed the country with me twice now (along with the grinder), and believe you me nothing beats waking up in some fleabag motel somewhere in the flyovers and nevertheless having really good coffee. ____Not the real rusty A very slow-moving and grumpy rebellion. :-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty And actually... Remember the Boston tea party? That was just over some taxes. So in a way, it's already happened. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I'm actually really impressed. I wouldn't have thought we could serve over 400K in a single day. I can remember 200K days where we suffered much worse than yesterday. ____Not the real rusty Hmmm Interesting strategy. I will have to try it. Incidentally, "Sweet Mother of Fuck" would be a great band name. ____Not the real rusty Psst It is your fault. Damn you and your alluring pr0n article. Actually, that's not wholly true. The blog article is sucking them in, but you bet your ass they're staying for the pr0n. That blogology thing is number two on blogdex at the moment. Think of all the happy bloggers going "Whee! We still exist!" ____Not the real rusty Look at the front page Article about pr0n + Article about bloggers = traffic overload. It's not the recurrence of the old problem so much as just a really heavy traffic day, I think. While everything's been pretty good, we were still right up near the top edge of possible performance. A heavy traffic load will easily push it above the ceiling. ____Not the real rusty Heh "More Math! Less Pr0n! K5 For K5ers!" :-) ____Not the real rusty Hehehe Best new means of getting people to look at goatse.cx yet this year. I myself have been fooled twice this one night. Bravo. ____Not the real rusty Looks like Looks like you posted in "plain text" format. You can choose plain text (print everything you type literally), "HTML formatted" (assume you have done all of your own formatting in html -- this is what you're used to using), or "Autoformat" (probably the nicest mode -- you can use html if you want, but it will also convert things like line breaks and a bunch of special quick-formatting codes into html for you). Anyway, I patched it up for ya. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I was having a Taco moment. Now if regeya will just get over it already, we could all move on. ;-) I posted the info, when I have always refused to in the past, precisely because it was such a meaningless bullshit thing. No one was seriously pissed off at the mystery emailer, that I could tell. I wasn't even seriously pissed off. I didn't think he was going to suffer because of it, or even care particularly. No one was threatening lawsuits, which has always been a large feature of such debates before. I figured the IP was already out in the open, so taking action against it would be neither enhanced nor suppressed by simply confirming suspicions about who the K5 name behind it was. If anything, I figured knowing who did it would make most people just go "Quite being an ass" and the whole thing would blow over. I was pissed off by the comments to my post, most of which seemed way overly-willing to completely ignore the fact that theboz had done something that everyone hates, and I'd just done something that everyone's always bugging me to do. It definitely felt like I was suddenly the bad guy, and I didn't get it. I was mighty pissed. I deleted the thing, and went for a run which featured a lot of me mumbling angrily between heavy breaths. By the time I got back from five miles of running, I mostly didn't care anymore. Just another object lesson in "never do anything angry." And now, let us please move on. ____Not the real rusty Am not! And you're on my side! ____Not the real rusty Monday Luck "Aren't you going to wish me luck?" said my wife on her way out the door. "Good luck!" I said brightly. She looked at me, suspicious of my too-quick response. "Do you know what you're wishing me luck on?" I thought about it for a minute. "Monday?" You know those horrible dragging days where you have nothing much to do except send email and hope someone responds, but no one does? And you know that they'll all respond at the same time, eventually, and you'll be unable to pay proper attention to any of them because twelve other things will also be blowing up? And as the snowy silence settles down over your inbox you start doing things like checking your spam folder in the hope that something you wanted got mistakenly mis-filtered. But nothing ever gets mistakenly misfiltered until you're too distracted to notice. Then the sun sets at 4:30 and you've still got hours to go till dinner and the kitchen is already clean, dishes washed and put away, chicken defrosting in a spreading puddle of meltwater and looking somehow lonely on the gleaming counter. You think about washing the counter again and feel pathetic. 7805 words written so far, in, say, 6.5 days (because I'm not done for today yet). Almost exactly 1200 per day, which is less than my goal of 2000 but still steady progress. More importantly I've written every day since I started last Wednesday. One day it was only 350 forced and awkward words, but it's not always the count that matters. It's the doing some of it every single day. You can walk anywhere if you have enough time and you keep moving forward. The story is evolving in my head, and I feel pretty good about where it's going. The ending, or one possible ending that would work and I think be pretty satisfying, popped into my head on the way down to the ferry Friday. It remains to be seen if it will continue to work once I get there, but it's something to aim at anyway. My greatest fear is that I'll run out of story at 35,000 words or thereabouts. Way too long to be a short story, but way too short to be a novel. I've accepted the fact that there will be massive rewriting anyway, so I guess if that happens I'll have to think of some more story and fill in somewhere. I remember exactly where I was when the basic idea for the creaking monstrosity this thing has become first snuck into my brain. It was over a year ago, at our first house on the island, either just before or just after September 11th. I was standing on the back steps looking at yellow and orange leaves still falling all over my freshly-raked lawn. The idea formed, just the basic "What if?" without interesting explanations or details. The direction that suggested itself right off proved to be mostly uninteresting, and the what if lurked and lingered for 12 long months before it bounced off some other ideas and crystallized into a workable story. Now I understand what writers mean when they say, vaguely and frustratingly, that they write because they can't not write. That some story in their head requires telling, and won't leave them alone till it gets out. I tried to abort this one with a short story, but johnny panned it and convinced me that there was a worthwhile story in there that deserved to be told right. Take the poll! It'll make you popular with the opposite sex, or the same sex, if you swing that way. Do you... ...remember the title? I'd love to see what he did with it. I've pretty much scrapped that one. I could nurse it over the train wreck, but I don't think I care to anymore. ____Not the real rusty Midterm She had a midterm in one of her classes. She'd been studying all weekend for it, and if I wasn't such an inattentive bastard I'd have remembered that right away. She thinks she did "ok." ____Not the real rusty Ah ha! Morally ambiguous robots? Have I ever got the book for you! Not all of the robots are evil. Some are very definitely morally ambiguous. And if you consider Jim Morrison evil, than the rock'n'roll is evil indeed. ____Not the real rusty Hrm I read all that Schismatrix stuff, and while I'm as big a Sterling fan as the next guy (probably bigger, in fact) that whole thing didn't do much for me. It's a big sprawling ambitious space opera, which ends up feeling pretty contrived and cheesy. I think his later stuff is a lot more grown up. And incidentally I'd be really surprised if he didn't agree. ____Not the real rusty Ah, pulp detective fiction Hammet, Chandler, I love those guys. For inspiration I just started re-reading The Lady in the Lake. I think my favorite thing about that genre is the way they're generally first-person, but you still don't usually know what's going on in the detective's head. They go places and do things, and a lot of the time you're just along for the ride, going "Huh?" but at the end it all comes together. I like the tension set up between first person narrative and all the missing motivational info. If you haven't read it, Chandler's The Big Sleep is, IMO, one of the best. ____Not the real rusty Hyeeeeeee-row-innnnn It's my wife, and it's my life. Ok, it's actually neither, so I'm relying on extensive reading and some second-hand knowlege. I plan to run it by some people capable of advising on where I screwed up the drug bits, should it ever get to the point where I have to publically put my name on it. Till then I'm basically just going with what I believe I know. Having a lifetime of experience cringing at the computer bits in fiction, I pledge to attempt to treat other specialist subjects with as much care and accuracy as possible. ____Not the real rusty I will The more eyes the merrier. Hey, a question that cropped up tonight. If you found yourself suddenly in posession of a very large amount of heroin which was extremely pure, and you didn't intend to sell any of it, but simply keep it for personal use, would you cut it with anything, or just adjust the amount you used? I.e. is there any advantage to cutting it besides simply having more to sell? And also, based on personal knowlege, are there any particular fictional protrayals of heroin use that struck you as especially accurate? I have a large stockpile of info gleaned from books and movies and so forth on the subject, but it's hard to know what's fact and what's just fictionally convenient. ____Not the real rusty I thought so Obviously this is all a fictional issue for me. :-) The character in question is abnormal, as far as drug users go, and especially as far as intravenous heroin users go. Why this is is explained later on in the story, so a lot of his behavior early on is probably going to seem weird. At least I understand that, and am doing it for a reason. :-) Anyhoo, I'm glad you confirmed my guess. That makes me feel like I'm not totally making shit up. Besides movies, how about books? Requiem for a Dream seemed like it had some fact behind it. Of course there's always Grandpa Burroughs, but his day is long gone and I assume times change. What about The Basketball Diaries (which I haven't read or seen)? It's not really such an issue, luckily, as the story kind of works out in such a way that the active drug using and procuring phase for this character is pretty short. He winds up with a large pile of good dope and hard currency, and a really strong motivation to remove himself from general society very quickly, and then the whole thing moves into terrain where I can freely just make things up. Um. If you don't mind, I'd really like to use the sentence A large quantity of high grade heroin is an absolutely certain death sentence for all but the the most disciplined and lucky users. Very nice. I have just the spot for it. Due credit provided, or course. :-) It cracks me up to think that if this thing is ever published, it will actually have "And thanks to terpy for advice and at least once sentence." in the acknowlegements. Now that's some motivation. ____Not the real rusty Heh Actually, he did read the short version, and marked it up quite extensively with suggestions and notes and edits. So extensively that I decided to rethink the whole idea. When I say he "inspired" me, it wasn't (I don't think) on purpose. Merely that he made some good points that could be addressed, but would have required a scrapping of the original story anyway. So I figured what the hell. ____Not the real rusty Oh, and Just don't go too far overboard on stream-of-concsiousness abstractions or 'this seemed funny at 3AM with a couple of my buddies' or 'gee, can't I write well?' stuff. Very much on the lookout for that, believe me. Hey, I actually have a story that I'm trying to tell here, so I don't want to foul it up with a lot of pretentious bullshit. Usually I go all flowery because deep down I've got nothing to say. There are a couple spots of minor concern already, but so far it's mostly just straight-up narrative. ____Not the real rusty Not really You defrost meat at room temperature? Ick. I usually take it out of the freezer when I figure out I'm going to need it, but that's rarely more than an hour or so before I actually need it defrosted. It's more to remind me to defrost it, which is actually done in the microwave. I took some poetic license with this diary. :-) So how is the running going? It's going. I'm basically in maintenance mode lately. I do my five miles a couple three times a week, but I haven't been pushing for time or anything. Just going at whatever pace is slightly harder than comfortable. I got a new pair of shoes and retired my first pair, and I wish I'd gotten the same kind again (Adidas Response). I got some other flavor of Adidas and I don't like them nearly as much. My next pair will be the Response again. ____Not the real rusty Defrostication However you mistreat your meat (and stop that sniggering) before cooking, if you cook it to the FDA required minimum temperature whatever beasties grew on it will be dead. They cannot survive past a certain temperature. Cooking is also sterilization. Of course that said, I'm not so keen on taking extra risks either, especially when we have this wondrous microwave technology these days. Sure I'll run in the winter. I went last night and it was 36 degrees. I love running when it's cold, much more than when it's hot. Getting the precise number and strength of layers right takes some forethought, factoring in temperature and wind conditions, but I'm getting pretty good at it. I bet biking is worse, because you have to keep cranking to keep heating yourself, but the harder you push, the faster you go and the stronger the wind is. Running, I don't suffer so much from motion-generated wind effects, and after about 15 minutes I'm usually up to an internal teperature warm enough to keep even my exposed skin pretty toasty. What really gets exciting is when it's 40 degrees, blowing 25 knots, and raining hard. Then you really get to test out the claims that polyester fleece retains its insulating characteristics even when wet. So far I'm pleased to report that it does seem to. I'm a little concerned about snow, but I guess they'll manage to plow before it becomes an issue. ____Not the real rusty Well, half right I do prefer to run when it's dark. And unlike some people I don't actively seek out miserable weather, but if it's time to go, it's time to go and weather doesn't factor into the decision much. But for God's sake, I make sure to wear appropriate clothing. Frozen muscles are a one-way ticket to injury. ____Not the real rusty Dude I didn't post anything but your name and IP. I assume you know that by now. I thought it was a prank, in the same way your emails were a prank. A "mess with me and I mess with you back" thing. I thought everyone would laugh. Instead, everyone climbed up my ass, so I removed the whole thing. ____Not the real rusty It's gone The offending diary is 100% deleted. I felt that given the extremely personal and sensitive nature of the information it contained that was the only safe choice. That IP address was simply too hot for the site to handle! ____Not the real rusty Oops I forgot, for just a moment, that I am held to a standard of utter saintliness and perfection. Please kick me. I will do nothing about it. I deserve no better. Thank you sir, may I have another. Nah I refunded his money. My model company is LL Bean, who will accept returns at any time for any reason. They have been known to accept returns of items they do not even sell, if a customer insists. I feel this is the right way to do business. ____Not the real rusty Nah It was just a fender-bender. :-) ____Not the real rusty See the answer Here. ____Not the real rusty As it should be needless to say... ...it wasn't me. ____Not the real rusty theboz Spammer fuckwit extraordinaire. ____Not the real rusty The news from Boot Hill Here lies the body of Tall John McCann He should never have put in that ceiling fan Rest in peace, ol' "Sparky" Theron We should have told you the power was on Here lies a coder named Charlie McGee malloc()ed once too often, and now he is free() Here lies the body of a florist named Maisey Used to raise plants, now she's pushing up daisies Here lies the body of "One Arm" McPhee Tried to wave to his neighbor while climbing a tree Jacqueline Rose loved her Christmas delights Hung herself trying to string up the lights Under this stone you'll find "Shorty" McWhorter Got caught in the sawmill, and now he's much shorter Here lies a man they called "Mad Killer" Page Died in his sleep at a ripe old age These things have been popping into my head all day. I'm starting to think I'm going mental. Thanks for letting me share. These are all patterned, incidentally, off the mock tombstones at Disney's "Boot Hill" (slogan "Boot Hill: Where Death Has Never Been Funnier!"). ____Not the real rusty No kidding Had that bookmarked since like 2000. Funny, but old. :-) ____Not the real rusty Where all my diary peoples is at? Ok, granted I haven't had much to say this week either, but my diary watch list has been dead as a doornail all week. If you are on it (and you know who you are) what's going on? Why are you not serving me? Almost 6K words on my story, which means I'm just about where I should have been yesterday. I know what the next scene is so I am going to try to hack some more out tonight and get close to back on schedule. 6,000 words. Not even 10,000 yet. As I wrote to johnny in email today, I feel like I'm walking to Mongolia. I'm also having little intermittent pangs of guilt over all those 250-page books I've read in one or two days. Imagine the writing time that went into them, and here I am gobbling them up like popcorn. What an ungrateful wretch I feel. I believe I will very soon have some (paid!) articles appearing in OJR. One, as a huge pathetic media geek I'm sadly addicted to OJR, so it'd be keen to have my own work appear there, and two, imagine being paid for writing! That's never happened before. What a concept. Went out for drinks with rizzo last night. In case you were wondering, he is very Platt-esque. Some might say he's a walking bastion of Platt-itude. We brainstormed about how to make that a viable Halloween costume, but were totally unable to come up with any working outfit that would make people say "Oh, I see! You're Oliver Platt!" I'm off to meet my wife at the boat. Please leave a message after the beep. Beeeeep. MEET Meet! Meet! Muh-muh-muh meet. You leave the five oh out of this. ____Not the real rusty I'm embarrassed to say ...you were not. An unforgivable oversight which has been rectified. Congratulations! (on the Dad thing, not on being added to my diary watch list, which, while a very teeny honor, really isn't much in the scheme of things). ____Not the real rusty Nope I tweaked a passel of queries and added an index or two, and did that thing to search. All of it together seems to have put us back in the black for the time being. ____Not the real rusty Page views normal Page views are down slightly, but generally normal to within a few percent. Seems like folks have just been busy lately. It happens. ____Not the real rusty Hoosegow? Do we still have a hoosegow? I thought they were banned by the Smythe-Halstead Hoosegow and Pokey Decommissioning Act. ____Not the real rusty Idea Meme is a word for idea that makes the speaker sound like an idiot. Alternatively: Meme is a useful metaphor for describing the way that ideas can appear to move from person to person in a pattern similar to a virus. Some have taken this metaphor to rather unfortunate and absurd lengths, ascribing all kinds of motivations and behaviors to ideas while totally ignoring the fact that people spread ideas, not the other way around, and what looks like the self-propagating spread of an idea could perhaps be much better understood by thinking about the people spreading it, and why they choose to pass on one idea and not another. ____Not the real rusty Conclusions So, the problem is not with the theory (which hasn't been fully fleshed out by any author I've read yet, anyway), but with people drawing bad conclusions from it. If the theory hasn't been fleshed out (and I agree that it hasn't, really) then drawing any conclusions from it is pretty silly, good or bad. Kind of a 1) Collect underwear, 2) ???, 3) Profit! sort of thing. 1) Ideas are "memes", 2) ???, 3) Everything is a meme! IMO, it's a sometimes useful metaphor that illuminates some aspects of information theory. It's not, in and of itself, even a theory, let alone a fact you could draw conclusions from. ____Not the real rusty He's just screwing with them Wait and see. Next time he'll require the police spokesman to say "I have a very small penis." ____Not the real rusty Whine whine Bitch bitch bitch! I don't understand. I wanna hear about Alien Bar. Dance for me, diary section monkey boy! ____Not the real rusty Don't think you're having all the fun... ...you know me I hate everyone... We call those people misanthropists. ____Not the real rusty Heh Oops. :-) ____Not the real rusty Readers to ratings My guess is it's much higher than 50 to 1. Probably at least one order of magnitude higher, possibly two. ____Not the real rusty Update The discussion on the scoop-dev list has progressed qute a bit, and I'm no longer in favor of my own original proposal. Erik Moeller suggested a good idea, which would be to "threshold" ratings at some number of data points before they count for anything. I.e., a comment requires, say, three ratings before the rating begins to count, for either sorting, mojo, or what have you. This could also be split out, so that for example only comments with X ratings count for mojo, but the ratings begin to affect ordering right away. Like the equalization example above, this idea treats data as "noise" until there's a enough of it to be considered signal. Sure, someone at some point will make however many accounts necessary to trip the threshold and accomplish what they want to do, but the likelihood is that it will happen less often (by virtue of being more difficult) and be even more obvious than it is now (gee whiz, these four accounts just happened to all rate all of my comments down at the same time!). K5 will also (someday...) update to the latest Scoop, which allows people using dynamic mode to submit ratings without reloading the whole page. Rating a comment just refreshes that comment, and doesn't require even a "submit" which makes it a lot quicker and easier to rate. I still kind of like the simplicity of "encourage/discourage" though. Several people have argued fairly convincingly against compressing the scale, but I'm still not 100% convinced. ____Not the real rusty Donuts My Dad has worked for Dunkin Donuts for most of his working life. He develops new shops in (currently) Western Mass, Vermont and upstate NY. Donuts paid for my home, upbringing, and education. So in some way, I am in fact made of donuts. ____Not the real rusty It's just good coffee It's become de rigeur lately among coffee snobs to sneer at Dunkin coffee, but speaking as a confirmed coffee snob myself (albeit one with a distinct bias) I can only say that you can't stop drinking it because it's good coffee. I did put in my counter time at Dunkin (Sagamore rotary, MA) and I know that they take coffee pretty seriously. It never sits for more than a half hour (usually it's bought fresh off the brew, but we threw it out if not) and you'll never see any shananigans like dumping the butt of one pot into another at any reputable Dunkin. The iced coffee is also specially brewed at double strength to survive being watered down with ice. One of my absolute most favorite things in the world is a large Dunkin iced coffee with extra cream and extra sugar on a hot day. God's own personal beverage, I call it. Important note: the above only pertains to New England and northeast US area Dunkin Donuts. I've been in shops in other parts of the country, and in my opinion the quality slips drastically as soon as you leave this area. While they serve the same product elsewhere, most everything is made on the premises, and in other premises they don't know their ass from their elbow. I give my Dad a hard time about this constantly in hopes that word will get up the ladder to whoever can fix the sorry state of affairs that has led the rest of the country to think that an abomnation like Krisy Kreme actually serves donuts. ____Not the real rusty I read everything :-) Well, maybe not everything. But I'm like Big Brother. You can never tell if I'm watching or not, so you have to always assume I am. K5: Building the Panoptic Web since 1999. :-) ____Not the real rusty I should be writing a meaningful diary I should be writing about NEK5, or about running into rizzo at Hannaford's, or Sunir coming to visit. But I'm worded out. Instead I'm going to post the first bit of my expansion/revision of Door Monkey. Um. Some parts not particularly work-safe. Consider yourselves warned. CHAPTER 1 I flipped open the guy's wallet and caught the metallic glint a split-second before he spun. My finger squeezed twice before my brain glommed the whole scene and my ringing ears barely heard the clunk as the third shot jammed. I dropped the gun. It hit the ground barrel-first ping! at the same time as the guy's destroyed face splashed onto the concrete. Then I couldn't hear anything at all. I riffled through the wallet first. Trifold, badge pinned to the center panel. "Trust-Rite Security." Jesus, he wasn't even a real cop. Break for me, though. The real piggies are about as fond of spam as they are of my kind. Probably chuckle about it over doughnuts. Couple hundred in mixed bills. Plastic. I shuffled scraps of paper till I found the one with the unlabeled four digit number. You'd be amazed at how many people carry their pin in their wallet. You'd be even more amazed at how many write it on the card itself. Nothing else in the wallet, so I dropped it in the spreading pool of glittery black surrounding what used to be his head. Pat the pockets. Cheap .38 POS in the right jacket pocket. Keys, zip ties, smokes in the left. I took all three and left his item where it was. Sounds slowly started to distinguish themselves from the high-pitched whine in my ears. First my own breathing, echoing through my sinuses too hard and ragged. Sirens far away, not approaching. I turned and headed for an ATM. # I leaned nonchalantly against the wall and lit up one of Trust-Rite's coffin nails. My right hand snaked out of my pocket with a strip of duct tape and casually plastered it over the All-Seeing Eye on the ATM. I rolled right, following the tape-hand and gave the machine some deep plastic love with Trust-Rite's card. Keyed in four digits, and sure enough. I did a balance check then withdrew all $2,350.00. Nine long heartbeats and the money box came crisp green 50's. Lucky. A lot of accounts have a $2,000 daily limit. I folded the cash and lit the receipt on fire. I played my entry backward and peeled the tape back off the Eye. They'd trace the transaction of course, but no picture means no evidence and they can't be absolutely sure about the time of death. Before the withdrawal? After it? Fifteen minutes: roll of the pathologist's bone dice, either way. They'd dust the machine for prints, and find about a thousand maybes and partials. They wouldn't find mine. I don't have any. I turned my nondescript back to the machine and walked away down toward the Dregs. A relatively easy night's work. Time to score. # Motorcycle rev dopplering away and John Densmore tapping on the hi-hat ting-ting ting-ting ting-ting ting-ting. The bassline rumbled in under my stool and burrowed up my spine and she hit the stage. Jim Morrison took a look around see which way the wind blow as she model-walked down the runway and slid her hands up under her breasts. She was already naked, this wasn't the kind of place where the women ever wore anything. If they say I never loved her, you know they are a liar. I wasn't holding anything but a Budweiser but she ignored the Joey Paychecks waving bills and strutted straight down to me. She planted feet inches from each of my shoulders and curved back like a candle melting in a furnace in super slo-mo. Her hands touched the stage and she kept going, body flowing back under itself until she was just a tent of infinitely long legs with a head underneath. She looked at me for a long second, then winked. I couldn't decide whether I liked the lower half of the view better than the upper half so I split the difference. "What's your name" I asked her forehead. "Virginia." "Pleased to meet you, Virginia." I said. Jim told me Mr. Mojo was rising, but I knew that already. "Roll up a twenty." she said. I did. "Now put it in your mouth." I did. "Now kiss me." I started to. "Not there," she said giggling. "Higher." I slid the twenty into her like a backwards ATM. Joeys howled in unison, whether with jealous frustration or prurient ecstasy I didn't know. I was strawheaded and slack with junk but when my lips touched her other lips something happened in my head. I heard a crackle like killing static and smelled ozone like the air after a later-summer thunderstorm. I collapsed back and almost went over on the stool. Her face still hovered there Cheshire smiling. "Wanna get high?" I asked her. Author's note: A bit after this, it gets weird. Hey Johnny, recognize it yet? You spurred me to do a lot of rethinking and reorganizing. I think this version will be better, though much longer My tiny tribute to ana Yeah, sadly even while writing it I was thinking "This is kinda ana-ish isn't it?" Actually, it isn't detective fiction, though it starts off seeming like it. Like I said, it gets weird. Think something like The Big Sleep meets Naked Lunch meets BladeRunner. Um, then add a little time travel and a lot of 60's rock and roll, and you're still not really quite there yet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's a cheap trick, I know, but the style fits, and it keeps things moving along. If I don't watch myself like a hawk I naturally dissolve into a hopeless David Foster Wallace style over-verbosity. I'm trying to avoid that, as it would be severely out of place here. I still over-adjectivize, even with effort to the contrary. ____Not the real rusty LA Woman That whole scene is set to "LA Woman." I may need to actually say that somewhere, if it wasn't clear from context. ____Not the real rusty Heh Yeah, the number disagreement is cringifiying. But for my purposes, it worked out pretty well, since it's a very recognizable faux-pas if you're familiar with the song, so I could work it in perfectly there. ____Not the real rusty Er "Work safe" in the figurative sense, not really the literal one. Sorry, I thought that was just a general expression for "may offend someone" now. ____Not the real rusty Glommed Ayuh. See my comment to fluffy below. "Glommed on" generally means "grasped hold of," so I was using "glommed" alone by connotation to mean "grasped." I definitely didn't mean "grokked." :-) I may remove "item". You're probably right. Ok, the girl is standing, facing our hero, bent backward in a full half-circle so her face is basically pointing outward between her thighs. I wasn't sure I'd described this clearly enough -- apparently not. ____Not the real rusty Ow Purely imagination, I assure you. In fact, I was sort of guessing it would be unusual/difficult. I mean, don't you have to be at least something of a contortionist to accomplish something like that? ____Not the real rusty Insistent naturism I do tend to drag everyone outdoors as soon and as often as possible, don't I? It's a habit. You should see me when I'm stuck in a hotel room with no direct outdoor access. I go absolutely nuts. Hey, by the way, MeatBall isn't so unknown as you think. ____Not the real rusty Cute Of course you wouldn't be charged for "back subscription days." It's just a bug. Enjoy your free features till I fix it. ____Not the real rusty Huh We went over this in email. He was confused. Senator, we do not have now, nor did we ever have, email notifications. I also assumed that the subscription features would survive the lapsing expiration time. Oddly, that seems not to be the case. Though all we have is psyconaut's word, and he thought we had email notifications, so... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Comment notifications He meant comment reply notification. ____Not the real rusty If you... If you tell us tomorrow that this was all a dream, I'm going to kck your ass. ;-) Looks like I should've gone out last night after all, huh? ____Not the real rusty Not so coarsely I'm also a confirmed french press devotee, but I've never found the need to either gring particularly coarsely or over-filter. The finer you grind, the more flavor you get. I do find that key factors are using enough beans (I use about 3/4 cup per pot) and letting it steep for a good while (15-20 minutes, at least). It may just be that I'm not bothered by a little bit of particulate matter suspended in my brew. Especially when it's just the solid form of sweet, sweet liquid life. ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute That's not true. It is every day that someone heralds The Fall of K5. ____Not the real rusty Sure it does In theory, it's useful for sorting purposes. ____Not the real rusty Dear sir Your ratings were wiped because you were rating every single comment in whatever story you chose "1". That is not useful rating. ____Not the real rusty The rating system is flawed If everyone cared about it a lot and rated all the time, it would be as self-correcting as it needs to be. Unfortunately, most poeple only care when they find themselves on the short end of someone's little down-rating fit. So I have a simple button that can remove someone's ratings in their entirety when they decide to play one of these games. I wish it wasn't necessary, and if anyone has a better idea, do send patches. Till then, it simply and quickly reverses abuse in the absence of most people caring. I'm not sure that assuming the system is to blame for people not caring about it makes much sense, but I'm the first to say it isn't anything like perfect. I'm not even sure there's a definition for "perfect" here to work toward. ____Not the real rusty Heh And then the rest of the world says to North Korea: "Ok, have fun living off only food and energy you produce domestically." The reason for this announcement is that North Korea is desperately poor and on the verge of collapsing, and their only hope is to sit down at the table with the rest of the world. The US won't ever need to fight a war against N. Korea. We just have to wait. ____Not the real rusty Thanks, from the Carroll Star News J. Pilkonis, reporter and columnist for the CSN, sent an email to help@k5 "to say thanks to kidzatrisc for his glowing praise." Just thought I'd pass it along, on the slim chance that anyone will ever see this. :-) ____Not the real rusty Clarification I have no idea what I actually said, but what I meant to say was that I'd keep running K5 because that's not really on the table as far as want to or don't want to, but that I'd be happy to be doing it from behind the counter of my bookstore. Preferably a quiet one somewhere without a lot of pesky customers. Um, assuming I wasn't doing it for the money, of course. ____Not the real rusty mtier My god, I did, didn't I? And I was drunk too. I remember coming up on that point in the sentence and having a little meta-conversation with myself, like: Me: Ok, me, you're about to say "isn't really my..." and you know that "mtier" is the exact perfect word to end that phrase, but I'm not sure you even know how to pronounce it properly and anyway do you seriously think you can get away with saying "mtier" in public? Me: Fuck off. Me (out loud): "...isn't really my mtier." Me: Dear god, I don't think anyone even noticed. Me: Ha! I am unstoppable! Me: Nevertheless, next time please opt for the safe choice and stick with "bailiwick." ____Not the real rusty Mtier What are we talking about again? ____Not the real rusty Duh Never mind. I'm an idiot. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha You're right. Please substitute your less-inebriated recollection of the line for my own. I'm generally not paying much attention when I'm speaking anyway. Too busy having internal cartoon-bubble conversations with myself. ____Not the real rusty K5 you are my kapusta rockstar K5, kapusta, you are my rockstar. You are my drunken fratboy oilmoney George W. Halliburton mass murder cokehead India. Buy my book. I have a diary in me right now, but somewhere between my brain and my fingers it turns into theis kinf of totla gibbrigh. I blame Matt Wollman, who I have not spoken to in fifteen years or some such. He has a rad cowboy hat. mrgoat would be jealous. Where were you mrgoat? Our time was all too short, but K5ers are good people. Next time, I will arrive at the appointed hour. Who's got the pictures? Not true! I said, in fact, that your diaries were "reader hostile." Not user hostile. Sir, I demand you retract this utterly false and libelous allegation of a quote at once, or it shall be six-guns at dawn! Ok, I'm still a little drunk myself. Really this comment is just to test out my new sig. Did I get the quote right? Besides the obnoxious whiners, K5ers are the greatest people on earth. Next summer, if I'm still on the island, we're so having a rusty's house weekend so we'll have a proper amount of time to hang out. Hey, maybe it'll be the first CMF members meeting. :-) I was kidding about "obnoxious whiners" by the way. ____Not the real rusty Oh come now You think a little beer is going to stop us? Ok, a lot of beer. But still. You aren't here to see how long it's taking me to compose these two-sentence posts. Trust me, you'd understand. I look like one of those sign language monkeys trying to say "Coco want banana." ____Not the real rusty By the way To explain further (despite my serious trouble typing on this tiny keyboard in my inebriation), I meant reader hostile in the way that Wm. S. Burroughs work is reader hsotile. As in dense, multilayered, requiring some effort to parse. Not actually "hostile to its readers" as you could interpret it literally. And this only applies to the more stream-of-consciousness ones. You, yourself, are in no way hostile to your readers. I'm guessing you know what I meant, but for those who weren't there (and you missed out, you did) that's what I meant. ____Not the real rusty I think everyone's going to be late I'm just about to leave. I'll probably be there around 7 too, depending on how long to takes to get from my crash-pad in Somerville to the place. And how many beers Maria's got for us to kill before I leave. I may arrive a little squirrelly. I apologize in advance. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dream conventions In dreams, I am always me. That is, they are always first-person from my POV. Sometimes I'm watching something happen, and not a participant, but I'm always consciously me in my own head. Usually I'm a involved in the dream somehow. I always dream in color, and often my dreams have a formal visual component, like a particular visual style. Sometimes the style is very odd, like animation or stop-motion cinema. At least one was in claymation. I occasionally catch myself physically doing what I was dreaming I was doing, usually in a very toned-down way. Like a recurring one is that I dream I'm writing on a pad, and wake up with my hand curled up in a pen-holding position. Once my fingers actually snapped together, like there was a pen there and it disappeared when I woke up. There also tends to be a lot of ice and snow in my dreams, whatever that means. ____Not the real rusty Reading I can't think of a single dream that involved reading, off the top of my head. That's something I never thought about. I do however sometimes dream in French. I don't even speak much French, so this always weirds me out. I've never been able to tell, afterward, if it was real French or some kind of fake dream French. ____Not the real rusty Still in But I don't want to be "Mr. Brown." That's like I might as well just be called "Mr. Shit!" ____Not the real rusty My friend Phill has a saying "Never look a gift beer in the mouth." Something to think about. ____Not the real rusty Heh C'mon, you really believe that was me? I only edit diaries when someone really needs something edited, and on the author's request. And I wouldn't leave an editorial note if I did. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nice parody :-) Yes, I know I use sentence fragments. All the time. I do it because it reads conversationally. And whatnot. ____Not the real rusty Kapusta chez johnny Very very short note. I'm in MA building a deck. It's good to get out and swing a hammer a bit, but my hands looks like chopped meat. I went out to the Vineyard yesterday to visit johnny and family, and had a wonderful time. But perhaps most importantly, I got kapusta! Yes indeedy, kapusta with the very selfsame kapusta master himself, and of course Dear Wife, and also Youngest Daughter, who is the kind of daughter I hope I get when that time comes. We didn't have anywhere near enough time to sit around and bullshit, but I'll be back. Logging in via modem here, which is painfully slow and awkward, so I'm basically doing the bare minimum. I'll be back home on Saturday, and ready to make the database server my willing slave at last. Oh, except for the 17th of October, when I'll be back down here again for K5 Boston. I believe johnny will be up as well, and possibly his Dear Wife if she can tear herself away from the turtles for just a few hours. My speech was fun, if somewhat sparsely attended. I may post it here as an article if I can clean it up to a state I'd be willing to subject to public scrutiny. If not, it'll at least appear in diary form. "Anonymous Hero" Sweet! :-) ____Not the real rusty You have? We've met? ____Not the real rusty Ah! Yes. I do remember that now. Sorry. :-) That's funny. Me and John were talking about you at dinner, and I totally forgot having met you. I'm getting senile in my old age, I think. ____Not the real rusty One more 33) When we ask you a question, we really, sincerely, just want an answer to that question. There is no subtext, implication, or hidden meaning. Please don't answer some question you think we meant to ask, or extrapolate some statement we were trying to make with the question. We really just want an answer to the question we actually asked. ____Not the real rusty What a day In the ongoing database saga, we're once again back on the old machine. I had the new one running for a while today, but it is just slow. I don't know why. Ennui is welcome to mock me about this. So I had it set up nearly identically to the current database. And still, it's very slow. I don't know why. I don't think mysql is at fault, but that's mostly because I can't identify any particular query or set of conditions which is making it blow up. It's just weirdly slow, in a way that seems unrelated to what's going on in the database itself. My current front-running theory is that it's a disk problem. The new box only has one drive, while this current one has two. All the database stuff is one one drive here, and most of the OS stuff on another. That may very well matter. On top of that, Google is still crawling us, which is helping to load test, I suppose, but not helping to keep anything stable while I try to do all this stuff. Good fun. So we're back on the old database machine. I managed not to lose anything (except comment ratings briefly, but they're back now) this time. While I was screwing with everything anyway, I also tried out someone's suggestion that searches could be limited by date to help make them faster. Glory be, but it works. So right now, story and comment searches are limited to the last 30 days. There's also a handy google link for a more general site:kuro5hin.org search for your query. It seems to be pretty fast. So those of you who love to vanity-search for comments mentioning you (you know who you are) should be able to once again. What I'm thinking is this could actually be extended to work more generally. So your first search will go through the last 30 days. Page through those results, and when there are none left, you get a button "Go back 30 more days..." and so on. It could maybe even be made more clever, to slice up time in a way that will be more or less transparent to you. So you could search the whole site, but in reasonably small time-slices. I think it would work, and perhaps more importantly, I think it wouldn't require massive re-engineering of search. In any event, I'm done for today. I'm basically offline for a week starting tomorrow, so I think we're staying pat till then. I also tweaked a bunch of queries, and (you may not even have noticed) ditched the previous/next story navbar, because that was absurdly slow for something so utterly useless. Cross your fingers, but we may make it another week or so till I can get a different new DB box and set it up to work properly. Heh MP3 helps spreading marihuana to our kids. ____Not the real rusty Hmmm On the current (old) server, / is sda1, swap is sdb1 and the database is on sdb2. So swap and the data are still on the same disk. So it doesn't seem like that would be it. Besides which swap should virtually never get hit on these machines. All they run is MySQL. If mysqld was getting swapped, it would have been much much worse. But yeah, I don't think the disk should matter either. It was just the only major difference I could think of. It may be an OS configuration thing. This machine's slackware while the new one was redhat, so maybe redhat's doing something dumb. Before I try another new one, I'm going to put slackware on it and strip it down to bare essentials. ____Not the real rusty Hmmm (part 2) I just noticed that the new box was using ext3, while the old one is ext2. Curiouser and curiouser. I'm not screwing with this again till I get a box set up the right way, in any case, so at least I can rule out the OS as the problem. It may actually be entirely possible to pull the drives from the current box and move them into a new one without any harm. If it worked, that would certainly control a lot of variables. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope Well, it's not disk speed. New server: /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.65 seconds = 38.79 MB/sec Old server: /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.33 seconds = 27.47 MB/sec /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.66 seconds = 24.06 MB/sec ____Not the real rusty Ratings A few ratings got lost. Like 120 of them from yesterday, I think. That's what those are. If you (or someone) rates the comment, it'll fix itself. ____Not the real rusty There's a word for that One time mod_perl asked me if sex between conjoined twins is incest or masturbation... it really stumped me there. Due to the ongoing philosophical quandary surrounding that question, I have coined the term "incesturbation" to precisely describe it. Problem solved. ____Not the real rusty Context? I'm not sure your elision accurately captures it. On the other hand, have you ever considered a career in film advertising? "Genius!" raves Joel Seigel.* *"What genius ever thought this crap should even be committed to film!" ____Not the real rusty That's ok We love you anyway. ____Not the real rusty LOL! It's been a while since a K5 diary made me jump out of my chair, spin around thrice widdershins and holler "AroooooooGA!" Cheers! ____Not the real rusty Heehee nopzor is going to personally go over there and kick your ass for this. :-) ____Not the real rusty GRAAAAR If there is some way to rampage around a diary and smash shit, that's what I'm doing right now. Well. Tomorrow is another day. I could be... ...trying to get a perl CGI to talk to an Access database. That, I think, was my least pleasant computer-related experience ever, so far. ____Not the real rusty Read the legalese Here. ____Not the real rusty Heh Yeah, those copyright provisons were actually crafted with the goal of making that impossible. Hence the absolutely unmistakable impossibility of it. It just seemed like since I know no one's going to read that before posting, I should make it conform to the minimal reasonable expectation of what rights you're giving away. Rather than, as businesses are so fond of, just reserving any and all rights I think I can make off with while no one's watching. I actually hope that we can tie into the Creative Commons project when they're off the ground, and let people designate their own set of copyright provisions for their stuff. ____Not the real rusty j00r .sig I still get nasty emails telling me Roger Waters wasn't in The Who. Who fans are the biggest idiots on the planet, I am now convinced. :-) ____Not the real rusty N.A.V.Y. You know what Navy stands for don't you? Never Again Volunteer Yourself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Never know You might end up sysadmining in the Navy. The worst of both worlds! :-) ____Not the real rusty Answer No, I've never regretted making Scoop open source for a second. Here's the thing: I've worked at software companies. I've even worked at open source software companies. I knew a long time ago that running a software company was not how I wanted to make a living. So open source for Scoop was pretty much a no-brainer, since I never wanted it to be a job. It's become a much better package thanks to the contributions of everyone else, which wouldn't have happened if it was proprietary. If it had been closed, I'd have had to do a hell of a lot more work than I did to even get it to a state where it could be sold for money (a state it's arguably not even in yet). Not to mention docs, support, a sales staff, and so on and so forth. Here, I think, is the heart of it: On the other hand, I need to make money. The idea of becoming rich from my own ideas is extremely appealing. No one ever once got rich from their ideas. You get rich from work. A lot of it. All the brilliant ideas in the world won't get you a cent, but a lot of hard work on even a moderately ok idea will. So the question isn't "what idea do I have that will make me money," but "what work am I most willing to do?" The work you do is what will make you money. I knew that I wasn't interested in doing what's required to actually build a software company (virtually none of which is coding), and make Scoop into a commercial product (ditto). What I wanted was a package I could do media stuff with. My goal with Scoop was always just to have it do what I wanted it to do. So open source was the obvious way to go. I suppose the counter-argument would be "What about selling it to an existing company?" But again, that would require a lot of effort with no return to get it into a "sellable" state, and no guarantee of eventual return anyway. Software companies don't usually buy unreleased software. They buy other software companies, with proven sales and a solid product. So again, we're back to starting a company first. For you, it may be different. I guess my only advice is, if you want to write and sell your own software, be sure you have some idea of what the job actually is that you're signing up for. Commercial software doesn't sell itself, and you'll probably be successful in inverse proportion to the amount of your time spent actually coding. If you just want to craft good code, consider getting a job with an established company in the custom coding market. There's still a lot of demand out there for bespoke software and consultants, which may be a better fit. ____Not the real rusty Cool I didn't mean to imply that I thought you didn't have a clue. Just that it's all too common for people to believe they can make it on a good idea alone. I'm sure you've seen this too. :-) Sounds like you have a pretty good grasp of what the deal is, so I guess you just need to decide what you want. My opinion on making money with open source software is that it's nearly impossible. I know that's anathema to your normal free Software supporter, and that it's possible in theory to make money with open source, but in practice it fails an awful lot, and I still don't see a real solid business plan for anyone in the OSS space. The only business situation in which I'm not sure it would be a compete no-brainer to make your software proprietary is in the case of extremely specialized applications that have a good market with rich, underserved clients who require an application that will virtually always be cheaper to hire a specialist to run. Something like SAS, for example, could possibly survive as an open source company because the software cost itself is only a small part of the total expense. You basically have to hire specialized people to operate it usefully. If your company can get a lock on providing consultants to run the thing, it may work to make it open source. On the other hand, in that case the chances of getting useful contributions from the general mass of free software coders diminishes greatly, so there may not even be much advantage in it. My advice would be to take the pro-open source business advice of free software proponents with a huge grain of salt unless they've personally started and run a successful company based on open software. ____Not the real rusty Yup 4PM it sets in, and by about 6:30 it's usually cleared up. The rest of the day, the site is generally pretty fast. I usually go wash the dishes around that 2.5 hour period. ____Not the real rusty Now we're cooking with gas Ok, things progress at last. First, if you haven't seen it, check out this diary from the head honcho at Voxel. And yes, I am also an idiot for not calling them more. The only small factor in my defense on that is I called nopzor on his cell several times, and got no response. This is because his cell is on an airplane somewhere and the phone co. hasn't properly transferred the number to a new phone yet. Basically a saga of compounded technical screwups and misfires. See below for what happens now. We've got a new database machine nearly ready to go. This afternoon it gets 3 more gigs of memory to bring it up to 4G total. It will be moved inside the K5 cluster, and I'll set up mysql etc on it. Tonight, as late as I can reasonably get started, I'll take down K5 and transfer the database onto the new box. Reconfigure the Scoop servers to talk to it instead of the old DB, and bring everything back up, at which time if we're all very lucky it will work properly. Tomorrow, I will set up Scoop on the old database, and Voxel will add another Gig of memory to that as well (bringing it up to 2G) and then add it to the load balancer as another Scoop server. So by the end of tomorrow (I hope), our network will look like: Load balancer (with hot failover) 2 dual 1 Ghz P3's with 3Gb running Scoop 1 dual 700 Mhz P3 with 2Gb running Scoop 1 dual 866 Mhz P3 with 4Gb running mysql Does this mean everything will work properly again? I'm not 100% sure. I think that 4Gb will be enough memory to get most everything back into memory on the database, instead of slow-ass temp disk tables. The database will still continue to grow, and we will eventually need to archive stuff out of it anyway, but this will at least help for a while. I can say that it will definitely be faster all the time, and probably at the very least usable in peak afternoon hours. Ridiculous What a ridiculous comedy of errors this is. I feel like the Keystone Kops. ____Not the real rusty Site News When it's done, I'll post a site news. I have a question about ads for everyone too, which'll go in there. Raj said he's been traveling for work for a while, which is why he hasn't been up on all the drama here. He (and dilinger) usually read it pretty often. ____Not the real rusty duxup I think duxup is playing the piano. Knock it off! ____Not the real rusty Heh Oops. "Approve message" reminders from scoop-dev go into my spam box for some reason, so I see them like once a month. If you're going to post there, please use a subscribed address. I just approved that one. ____Not the real rusty We already do, I think The big tables are comments and stories. viewed_stories is big, but holds little data and is pretty well-indexed. I've never noticed it causing a serious problem. The problem queries are searches, and anything that does a join, expecially in comments. Number of rows alone doesn't necessarily matter -- the speed has more to do with how you're using a table and how it's indexed. I thought we aleready expired rows from viewed_stories, but now I can't find where. Maybe we don't. ____Not the real rusty Probably make it worse This is just a guess, and might not be true (I'd have to try it) but I think limiting by date would probably make it slower. On top of all the query parameters, it'd also have to limit by date -- basically adding another clause to the WHERE. I know what your idea is (that it would make the search set smaller) but I don't think it would end up working that way. It might though. I'll try it a bit by hand and see. Regardless, it would be nice to be able to search by date. And to have a date browser, too, which is something I've wanted forever and just haven't done yet. ____Not the real rusty You're right I had to add a date index in comments, but you (and Bob) were totally right. I did add that, and it's way fatser now, though currently it only allows searching 30 days worth of stuff. I'm going to try to work it so that it searches through relatively short slices of time at once, which may end up solving the problem once and for all. ____Not the real rusty I am Spartacus! ____Not the real rusty UHF Is very funny. Supplies!!! ____Not the real rusty What better way... ...to say "I love you" than with a spatula? ____Not the real rusty sk.ca Well, some of us know where Saskatchewan is. K5's email server lives there, as does one of the guys who was extremely helpful in founding the site. :-) ____Not the real rusty Uncle Rusty's Small Engine Repair It's quarter to nine AM, and today I have run five miles and fixed a lawnmower. Bastard had a sticky carb float, it turns out. However much I hate working on engines, there is something viscerally satisfying about making a non-working engine work again. It strikes that same hacker chord as coding does, I think. Yesterday I wrote a ridiculous amount of new story. It's about a typical programmer type guy who gets a phone call that confers upon him the power to have anything he wishes for. Like, he wishes "this fucking project was done" and just like that, it is done. In fact it retroactively was done two days early, with no bugs. This is, of course, weird, and he meets a guy who explains to him that it's not a "monkey's fist" thing, where he wishes for a million dollars and his family dies in a plane crash and he gets the insurance. And it isn't that Twilight Zone episode where if he presses the button he gets a lot of money and a total stranger dies. It just is the power to have anything he wants. So this gets us like 5K words into the story, and then I realized I'd hit a bit of a wall. See, if your protagonist can do and have anything he wants, where's the conflict come from? I came to a screeching halt and pondered for a while, but I think I've figured out where it goes from here. It's going to end up being a kind of tribute to Connie Willis, I think. What would he do if you were writing it? Heh I think of all the ideas so far yours is closest to mine. I mean, most people are basically assuming he's some kind of archetype, but he's not. He's just a guy. Sort of like me, probably sort of like a lot of us. The questuion isn't so much "what could someone do with that kind of gift?" but "What would you do with it?" And what would you really do, not what would you imagine you'd do? I think what's going to happen is it'll montage over the period where he does a bunch of fun stuff (becomes wealthy, wins Olympics, becomes super famous, realizes what a pain in the ass being super famous is, becomes un-super famous again, gets supermodel girlfriend, tires of supermodel girlfriend, cures cancer, etc). And catch up to him again as he's doing what probably most of us would end up doing, which is sitting on the couch wishing the remote was close enough to reach without getting up. Wishing he had a beer. Stuff like that. I mean, I'm almost positive I would pretty quickly reach the point where I'd be doing things like "I wish I was clean without having to take a shower today." So yeah. He realizes that there's no fun in anything if you already know you can have it. What's the point of doing stuff? Plus, it's awfully lonely, because you can't even tell anyone about it. Like: "Hey, I have this power where anything I wish for comes true!" "Yeah, sure, buddy." "No, really. Look: I wish there was a Lamborghini in the driveway." "Ok. You mean that lamborghini you bought a month ago? Yeah, it's there. Real impressive." See? He's the only one who can see the change. For everyone else, the world just gets rearranged to account for what he wished. And that's when he meets the girl. He decides that he will not use any wishing powers and see if he can get a date with her. But screws up and wishes by accident. Then he decides that he's sick of the whole thing, and confesses using his power to her even though he knows that he can't prove it and it'll make him look like a nut. And then... ah, but you'll have to read it. But it actually has a happy ending, which I think is totally a first for me. ____Not the real rusty Entertaining I'm aiming for entertaining. I mean, come on. The whole "wishes come true" thing is inherently going to be a cliche. I didn't think I was going to magically come up with some variant of that that's never been done before. The point is basically to write around a plot. I always have good characters and weak plots. So, if I have to practice by simply exploiting existing plots, so be it. I have to get better at moving stories along. Hopefully it will at least be entertaining. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well For one thing, what kind of story would that be? "And then I realized that with everything I could ever dream of, I truly was content at last. THE END." How about I'll let you know which line in my story you can fill that in and stop reading, and that'll be your version. :-) But more importantly, I don't think it's really true. I mean, it's not like he's going to do anything stupid like give all the money away or un-cure cancer. And I also wanted to avoid the whole "But it was in truth a terrible curse!" thing, cause I'm sick of that too. Maybe it's being married, but I don't think anything's even half as good if you don't have someone to share it with. And that's kind of the one thing he can't have. Except maybe he can. :-) ____Not the real rusty Meh One of the things I'm really trying to avoid is "Grandiose Idea Syndrome." I really want this story to be about a regular person, and take place on a human scale. Yeah, it's kind of sf/fantasy, and the Big Idea story is a sort of accepted phenomenon in the genre, but I personally don't particularly like reading them. I don't think I'd be happy if it turned into that kind of thing. ____Not the real rusty But then... Then it's just a shaggy dog story. In fact, that's exactly the ending of my infamous Purple Flower story, currently banned by the Geneva Convention and numerous UN security council resolutions. I think I have a better ending than that, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Heh Thanks for putting that a lot more pleasantly than I was about to. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not exactly He could wish that everything he'd done was undone, but there's a particular way you have to get rid of it, if you really want to. Basically you have to pass it on to someone else. Not really here nor there, but it matters to my version of the story. ____Not the real rusty I don't know yet That is one detail I haven't worked out yet. I don't think it really matters, but it would be nice if there was a good way to tie up that particular loose end. I'm going to have to go back and wedge something in at the beginning to set that up, I think. ____Not the real rusty Yeah And while I can get behind the gist of it, engine maintenance in particular never really did it for me. It's smelly and dirty and finicky and I always lose some skin. I much prefer woodworking, where all the same principles apply, but the medium is a lot nicer to deal with. ____Not the real rusty Wow, harsh What book is that comment based on? I felt that way about Passage, but the rest of her work is fantastic. ____Not the real rusty Damn Those are two of my favorite books ever! Heretic! Burn him! :-) Well, everyone has their own taste. ____Not the real rusty Passage Passage just seemed weak to me. The whole thing made me feel rushed, like she was breathlessly moving from one scene to the next, with no time to reflect on anything. I found the pacing really weird. And, in the end, I just was left not really caring about it. Like, she dies and her mind comes up with this Titanic-sinking scenario. Ok. So what? It seemed to me that eventually the plot turned into "but it was all a dream." I mean, more complicated than that, but isn't that what it boils down to? Compared to a lot of books, it was good. I'm more or less glad I read it. But it's unique among Willis books in that I feel no urge to read it again. I thought that for her, it was a pretty weak story. ____Not the real rusty The ending I didn't want magical telepathy ending either. But I also didn't find much joy in the "you're just dead" ending. I can't think of any ending that would have really satisfied me to that story. The whole time I was really hoping she'd pull something out, but finally, no. She was just dead. ____Not the real rusty Doomsday I like Doomsday because it was an excellent story. The characters were all likeable and good and largely believable, the story moved along, the writing is extremely competent and doesn't get in the way. It is defnitely one of those books that I deeply wished wouldn't end, you know? Lke, the last page felt like losing some good friends. I don't think I can really explain it better than that. I think the primary thing about Connie Willis is her characters. She's an absolute champion at creating characters I want to read about. ____Not the real rusty To say nothing very well TSNotD is just basically a historical farce. I don't think there was a big point. It's just entertainment. Incidentally, the Jerome K. Jerome book that she took the title from (Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)) is really, really funny. Even to a modern audience. Well, to me anyway. You can find it online, as it's one of the relatively static number of works whose copyright has actually expired. ____Not the real rusty Big Idea Syndrome See here for Big Idea Syndrome. I mean, if this is you here, with this power, would you be sitting around nattering into your navel about Free Will and Evil, or would you be wishing you had a cold foamer right about now? Be honest! :-) ____Not the real rusty Da rules I'm cleaving pretty tightly to the rules because I absolutely suck at plotting, and I want to improve. It's always been my biggest achilles heel, problems constructing a coherent and satisfying narrative. I'm cool with breaking rules, but breaking them because I've never been any good at following them seems more like incompetence than mastery, if you know what I mean. And also, the rules are there for a reason. Basically, they tend to make for satisfying stories. Experimenting is good, for the sake of variety and novelty, and who knows, maybe you'll stumble on some great new principle. But my goal here is to write a good readable story. Since the traditions of narrative are pretty well defined, I'm going to try to follow them and see what happens. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bipolar The protagonist would turn out to have bipolar disorder, or some illness along those lines. And the kicker is, it wouldn't be any different from how the world is now. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm'a just point out one thing I'm gonna go ahead here and just point out that you complain of trouble with the women, and then start the very next sentence with "My hair lady says..." Now you, or anyone, can draw any conclusions you like about this. Or none at all. I'm not saying either way. I just thought I'd point it out. ____Not the real rusty Mark your calendar: Tuesday, October 8th I allowed johnny to talk me into speaking at the Vineyard Haven library when I'm down on the Cape next week. I described to him briefly (like, two sentences) that since the Vineyard is an island, and I live on an island, I had something in mind relating online communities to islands. Sort of an intro to the concept of online communities, with a slant toward things that islanders will readily understand. And lo and behold, somehow that extremely vague gloss arrived in my email this morning as the following: The Vineyard Haven Library announces the first installment in its fall evening lecture series: Rusty Foster on Internet Communities and Island Communities Tuesday, October 8th 2002, 6:15 PM at the Vineyard Haven Library. Rusty Foster, founder of the website Kuro5hin.org, will speak about "virtual" communities mediated by the Internet and their similarities to island communities like those of Martha's Vineyard and his own hometown of Peaks Island, Maine. As a full-time resident of one virtual island and one physical island, Rusty has noticed many interesting and amusing parallels between these two kinds of communities. "They're both full of strong-willed eccentrics who seem to thrive on strife. But when they do need to come together they really do-maybe because they have no alternative to getting along." He will discuss the new phenomenon of communities whose only home is the Internet, and how they are similar to and different to communities like ours. In December 1999, a few years after graduating from Falmouth Academy, Rusty started a hobby website, free and open to everybody, with the following mission: "Kuro5hin.org is a site about technology and culture, both separately and in their interactions... You will not find garbage in the discussions here, because noise is not tolerated. This is a site for people who want to discuss the world they live in." To make good on his promise that Kuro5hin ("K5") would not contain "garbage discussions," Rusty wrote a software package, called Scoop, which allows the community to police itself: to decide what will be discussed and what the rules of discussion will be. He also made it possible for each member to create an "open" diary, so that members could get to know each other. This formula has proven so successful that the community has grown to number tens of thousands of members worldwide. Earlier this year, when Rusty announced that he could no longer afford to keep Kuro5hin afloat as a hobby site, the community responded by donating $35,000 over three days. With no marketing budget, no staff and no gimmicks, Kuro5hin was able to meet the fundraising rates of the largest NPR radio stations. With this money, Foster incorporated the nonprofit Collaborative Media Foundation to explore ways to build media-assisted communities. The Scoop software, which Foster makes freely available under an "open source" license has been used to create dozens of similar communities, with more springing up all the time. Come hear a true pioneer of the Web and learn a whole new meaning of the words "island life." Jahee-sus. Well that sounds like an interesting speech, doesn't it? I guess I have to come up with it now. The line about "interesting and amusing parallels" makes me feel like Samuel Clemens. I should wear a white wig and sit in a rocking chair. Come one come all, see the greatest storyteller and raconteur or our age. One night only, no refunds or exchanges. Refreshments will be served. We'll see I have no video capabilities at all. I'll see if anyone can get video or even audio of it, but I don't think they are typically set up for that kind of thing. It's not so ironic, really. I mean, here I am hanging out on the "virtual island," and no one is able to come in here and see me writing this in person. I mean, a lot of the time, the two are just separate you know? ____Not the real rusty Stereotype vs. reality bitter, isolated, rich, incestuous, vindictive, petty, condescending, spoiled, arrogant, drunken, spiteful, and weird Well, that is one side of it, yes. Some people in almost all communities share those traits. However, neither Martha's Vineyard nor Peaks is entirely composed of the country club set. There are also a lot of ordinary working people who live there, same as here on Peaks. And while I could name you a few people here who fit the above description, I can also name you a bunch who are welcoming, friendly, generous, open-minded, caring, hard-working, artistic, and... well, also weird. That's kind of a constant, I think. That's the point though. Islands are little microcosms of society in general, but they're not entirely representative. They seem to be just like the world, only more so. As if squeezing humanity into a smaller frame does something to magnify all if its traits, good and bad, and make them more apparent. I see the same kind of thing happen in online communities, which really do think of themselves like islands. Its a huge 'net out there, but this is our little part of it, is the feeling. Islands and online communities both seem to me to have a very clear sense of themselves as a place distinct from other places. Something like that, anyway. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I'm still not having much luck getting in touch with Voxel, so I don't know what's going on with that. I've got stuff I have to do first, anyway, so I think that's been shelved until the CMF takes over, at which time they can decide what, if anything, should be done about it. ____Not the real rusty The problem There's a server that needs a new hard drive, which will become the database machine. I don't know if that will solve all our problems, but it will at least help -- it has 3x the memory of the current DB machine. We'll also be able to move the existing DB up to become a third Scoop server again, which should also help a bit. Right now I'm just having trouble connecting with Voxel. They're around, and I'm around, but we seem to never be around at the same time. ____Not the real rusty Maybe I don't know. I'll post whatever I write up to read from, but I generally stray a bit from the script. The script is usually better than what I ad-lib though, so maybe it would be best to just go with that. :-) ____Not the real rusty I [heart] Roblimo I agree. You are better off without the worldy attention our site would offer. Real Christians are proud of themselves and do not hide, Satanlike, behind lies. Ah, I remember this thing. And I'm pleased to see that Robin is willing to go the extra mile to troll someone back, even via private email. It's the little things that count. ____Not the real rusty The problem with communication I've been thinking about our somewhat more confrontational than necessary (sorry ;-) ) thread, and I think I figured out what was bothering me about the "rusty doesn't communicate" thing. The problem is that everyone's on a different schedule. Like, you want to know something, so I answer you. Then someone else wants to know the same thing, so I answer them. Then someone else wants to know the same thing, and I'm basically tired of answering that question. But by then you want to know something else, and Bob and Joe both have a question about this other thing, and so on and so forth. So I post a Site News about whatever's been going on, and most people don't even notice it, and I get the same questions anyway. Rusty has not been scaling very well lately, is basically it. I'm doing what I can, which isn't enough, which is kinda the problem. While I'm here, let me also say that I don't really understand the "writers don't matter" stuff. Or the bit about diaries being embarrassments. Most of my K5 enjoyment time is spent reading diaries. I don't know where anyone got the idea they were embarrassments or not important. That's totally out of left field. I guess (reading the diary linked there again) that lago's got some idea that being on the temporary CMF Board is fun or prestigious or something. He's welcome to my spot, if he wants it. Seriously, I'll put you in touch with the lawyer and you can take over. I'd be thrilled. It totally blows goats and I'd hand it off in a second. Just shoot me an email if you want in. ____Not the real rusty Committees I think you have the wrong idea about what the current CMF group is trying to do. They're not "a committee of infrastructure guys" taking over ownership. We're just defining the rules by which the CMF will start off. I don't know how to explain this any better than I already have, but it doesn't seem to be getting through. The people who will actually take over K5 management will be elected. First you write down the basic rules a nonprofit operates by. Then you file these rules and incorporate the organization. Then the org begins doing what it's supposed to do. We're at the first step here, which is just trying to write down the basic rules, whereas it seems like you think we're at the third step, and the people on the current "board" are actually running things. ____Not the real rusty Ok I see where you're coming from, I think. You said that "I'm saying that not only can they not run K5, but that the committee/board approach in general is not a good way to run K5." The way I would expect it to work is for an oversight type committee to be in charge of operating K5. I don't think anyone will want day-to-day stuff to be decided by a committee process. It's vastly more likely that they will decide to put some person or people in immediate charge, and have the committee as a kind of policy-setting and staffing body. My idea is to have it boil down to approximately what I think you want. That is, to have more people than just me making real operating decisions day-to-day. I.e. to spread out the actual management stuff. What I'm trying to do is get a representative structure in place to manage that. I could just ask for volunteers to help me, and end up with roughly the same actual results, except that then I'm still ultimately the God of the site, which I think is not, in the long run, a good thing for either me or K5. That would also mena that my role would be to oversee and manage all volunteer admins and helpers, and I think I wouldn't be any good at that (and it's not really what I want to do with my life). I hope you'll participate in the CMF and make sure your opnion on how this should be done is heard. We'll need people like you. ____Not the real rusty How odd That just today I changed my .sig to a mrgoat reference, before seeing this. Coincidence? Or... something more? ____Not the real rusty And we're still winning! Woohoo. It makes me all warm and fuzzy to know that everyone else thinks there is no way in hell me and mrgoat will ever date, even after all my veiled homoerotic overtures. ____Not the real rusty How long? How long? Hey, Inoshiro! Any word on when thock is going to be back online? To anyone else who's sent me email yesterday or today: I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't gotten them yet. Sorry about that. Basic business Well, if your stereotype were correct, Bush and Cheney and most people in US oil drilling would be very happy to see the price of crude skyrocket up to $50 a barrel. No! That would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. That would put oil right up there in the "expensive" category with solar, wind etc. That would destroy their business. Suddenly it would be economically viable to dump a bunch of research money into a renewable energy source and make it actually work efficiently, and there goes the oil business altogether. The oilmoney barons need to keep prices low, and supply steady. Taking over Iraq will open up access all the rest of the oil there that we're not already buying, and end the troublesome legal issues and economic fristion imposed by onerous sanctions that we all currently have to skirt around. The point is to legalize Iraqi oil again, so as to keep the price of oil down where it remains King of energy sources, and keeps on making BushCheneyCo rich. ____Not the real rusty Eh, you all ain't hopped on goofballs again, are ya? My wife's parents are coming over tonight. I got up at 5:30AM and went running. I'm pooped. I think I'm going to make myself a grande venti iced frappespresso with a twist and call johnny. After I clean the upstairs bathroom, of course. I'm going to need to energy. If he's home, johnny can actually experience the process of my recaffenation live. That better be entertaining because I'm going to ask him if he and his lovely wife can play host to not one, not two, but three of the infamous Falmouth Academy four horsemen. And between the four of us, we'll barely have one complete job. Good times. "If he's home." What am I talking about. Where else has he got to be? Update [2002-9-26 16:53:44 by rusty]: He wasn't there! Shock. I left a message with a very pleasant young woman who I'm guessing was a daughter, but could concievably have been a wife. It would be totally wrong, in either case and for a whole host of reasons, for me to observe that she sounded awfully cute, so I won't. The recipe! Take one measure Polcari's espresso beans from Polcari's North End roastery in Boston MA. Grind for a while, till espresso-ground in consistency. Brew in stovetop espresso machine because real espresso machines are for overpaid yuppies. Get old 32 oz. Mug Night plastic mug from The Green Leaf Cafe in Willamsburg, VA Briefly take a moment to remember fondly when you used to be able to go there Sunday night and get 32 oz. of Guinness for $2.50 if you brought this very mug. Fill mug 3/4 with ice cubes. Dump in lots of espresso in (enough to fill about halfway, over the ice). Fill almost the rest of the way with half and half. Add two large measures sugar. Stir well. Drink fast. ____Not the real rusty Well jesus Don't drink it that fast! Alternately, call someone on the phone. Of course, I tried that and struck out, so now I'm sitting here with few other options. Caution should be exercised, in any case. ____Not the real rusty Burn? I've never had it burn the coffee. It brews into a pot up top, away from the heat. Plus I am usually standing there staring at the thing and take it off before it's quite done anyway. Far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly adequate. I'm not a big espresso purist anyway. I always mix it with stuff, and usually have it iced, so it really just has to be strong coffee. Start with good beans, and just about anything will produce espresso I'll be happy with. ____Not the real rusty Lol Yeah. That's exactly what I was trying to say. You've captured it perfectly. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cluetrain Did you email Doc Searls? He is truly, I believe, one of the world's Good People. And it wouldn't be like him to not respond to email. If you did, and he didn't, I will have to kick him. :-) Chris Locke on the other hand, don't even waste your time. That guy's a grade-a asshole. Weinberger I don't know. The one tangential email I've had from him he seemed reasonable enough, but he doesn't seem to move in the same circles as Doc and The Asshole. Actually, talking Doc into mentioning it on his blog would be a good thing for you. He gets ridiculous traffic from hordes of people who will do whatever he tells them. Good thing he's a good guy, or he'd be already plotting global domination with his Svengali-like mind controlled minions. ____Not the real rusty Also You better have red pen for me when I get there in October. My friend Bill, who is also coming, is very puzzled at this library speaking thing. :-) ____Not the real rusty And what, may I ask... ...are you doing up so early? :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm trying to change, honest guv I was of the awake-overnight pursuasion. But I've been trying to correct that, since no matter what my body wants, it still gets depressed and moody when I go nocturnal. No, today I got up at 5:30 and ran 5 miles. I do find that putting all the big hurt at the very beginning of the day tends to make the rest of it seem easier. ____Not the real rusty As promised I'll go, wherever it is. I'd prefer it be in the city too, though, to add to the chorus of "make it on the T" voices. Actually Cambridge or thereabouts would be ideal. I'll probably be staying with a friend there, and it'd be easier to not have to drive. I'd just take the train down and then T to wherever and train back the next day. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but I actually wanted to visit my friend while I was there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cool I'll be there. No, really, I will. Quit laughing. All of you. Quit it! ____Not the real rusty Scoop memory tricks Depending on your expected traffic, 128M could be enough, if you're clever. Basically, what you ought to do is run a copy of apache compiled super light. Just apache, mod_proxy, and mod_rewrite. Use that for static stuff and images, and proxy requests back to another apache, running mod_perl and all the memory-sucking scoopy goodness. Lock that one down to like 5 instances max. That way you don't have ridiculous memory hogging scoop apaches spawning just to do something dumb like serve an image. Plus when Scoop makes a page, it passes it off to the proxy instantly and goes on to serve a new request, while the proxy sits around waiting for the end client on their 28.8 modem to finish downloading. This can help memory use enormously, and also make it easier to tune to your site's needs. Check the mod_perl guide for more. Info's around here. ____Not the real rusty Deal How about a deal? When you think the poll should change, email me a new poll, and I'll put it up. I have so never cared at all about the FP polls. Please, please just make them and send them to me. Take this cross from off my back. ____Not the real rusty Yes Cotton sweaters are useless. Worse than useless! I hate them so much. Why do so many stores only sell worthless cotton sweaters? ____Not the real rusty I've got a... I was going to reply to this, but then I saw the poll and got all distracted. What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Cotton sucks. Real men wear wool. "Mbut wool is scraaaaatchy" is a cry most often heard from the deepest bowels of the Ladies Room. C'mon, Bob, polish up that nutsack and join me over here on the MEN'S side of the site. Yours in temporary and most assuredly satiric misogyny, rusty God help me before I commit some irresponsible Acts again So tell Saddam not to bother with makin another bomb Cause I'm crushin the whole world in my palm Got your girl on my arm and I'm armed with a firearm So big my entire arm is a giant firebomb Buffy Premiere Good stuff, I thought. Probably one of the best Buffy premieres ever, actually. Almost good enough to wipe the hideous taste of last season out of my mouth. Almost. Did anyone else find the public bathroom scenes unbearably creepy, or is this my personal phobia? Empty public bathrooms are so spooky. You can never see the room and the mirror at the same time, and you just know, from years of slasher movies, that wherever you're not looking is where something's going to appear. Plus empty public bathrooms have a kind of aggressive stillness and silence to them. Anyway, hopefully Buffy stops sucking this season. Maybe Joss started Firefly just to siphon off all the suckage from his other shows. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar When I first met you. I took you out, I shook you up, I turned you around. Turned you into someone new. Now five years later on, you've got the world at your feet. Success has been so easy for you. But don't forget it's me who put you where you are now, and I can put you right back too. Buy Johnny's Book johnny bought a raft of ads last night. Read them, but more importantly, buy his book. He also thoughtfully included a different amusing message in each and every paypal email. That's the kind of personal touch you just don't see anymore, in these days of hustle and bustle here in "The Space Age." I'm visiting johnny on the Vinyahd two Tuesdays hence, in fact. If you would like me to transport a message to him, please leave it here and God help me, I will get your message through if I have to cut loose all the dogs and carry it in my teeth! At First I Was Afraid I was petrified! I kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. But then I spent so many nights just thinking how you done me wrong, I grew strong! I learned how to get along. And so you're back, from outer space. I just walked in to find you here without that look upon your face. I should have changed my fucking lock. I would've made you leave your key, if I'd have known for just one second you'd be back to bother me. And Finally This is the part of Sprockets where you complain about search. What? You mean there's another version? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Survivor I watched the first season of Survivor because it was, like, an event. But after that, who cares? Like if they have another season of American Idol, I will have no inclination to watch. Some things you should only do once. I will admit to being totally enamored with Fear Factor though. It should be so bad, and yet it's just not. Never ceases to amaze. ____Not the real rusty Argh I can't get the bastard to play past a few seconds. No Stairway! Denied! ____Not the real rusty The joke is on you Believe me, the joke is all over you. Wash it off. That stuff can cause skin irritation. ____Not the real rusty OH, SNAP!! I'm proud of you too, Hemos. ____Not the real rusty I got it. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Refund? If you'd like your money back, please say so. If it makes you feel better, I'm not solvent, and am looking for jobs, because I'm not interested in asking for money any more. Thank you for your concern, though. ____Not the real rusty The horse is dead The server is still not back up. I got someone at Voxel to actually talk to me today, briefly, so maybe that will change soon. Who knows. Search is back up. Yeah, it's slow in most cases. But it's there. Not as good as google was, but hey, everyone wanted our search back so there you go. I haven't seen any evidence that any of the people complaining loudest even noticed. It's been several days. That's the joke. Get it now? Ha. Ha. I'm working on incorporating the CMF and deincorporating K5 Inc. And trying to find freelance work to pay the bills, because K5 Inc still has to pay taxes. The last few months convinced me that I don't really want to work here very much. I hope all the people who were eager to volunteer their time and energy will come forward when there's a clear democratic ownership structure in place. It'll be interesting to watch anyway. ____Not the real rusty It's not so much that It's not so much that I want to step down as that I think I've done what I wanted to do with K5. Like, there's lots more that could be done, but I have grave doubts that I'm the one to do it. At the same time, I think K5 should continue to get better and more interesting. I think there's probably someone out there who has a lot of ideas and energy who could do that. So I'm trying to make it so that can happen. I would rather not have to deal with some kind of announcement that I'm abandoning anything. That would be very counterproductive I think, not to mention untrue. Mostly I just wish everyone would shaddap and go about their business for a while till things are worked out. It may seem counterintuitive, but asking the same questions and complaining about the same things every time I poke my head out of the foxhole actually doesn't help anyone. Eventually I just start trying to come up with amusing answers to kill the monotony. ____Not the real rusty Unlogged-in What happens when your blog sends this request, and K5 doesn't find any user logged-in against that session? When do you actually log into the thing? I don't see how your session/user pairs are ever getting created, here. ____Not the real rusty Oh. But still a problem Ok, so you want to have it redirect the first time. I see. This is still a security problem. You simply set up your blog and claim it uses K5 logins. Then you make the first redirect go to a page that looks like the K5 page you'd get if you weren't logged in to K5. Collect the login, and redirect back to your site, approving the login. Yeah, it sounds dumb, but some people will definitely fall for it. And all of this doesn't even address the question of why K5 would want to be a central login ID server. How does this do anything for us besides cause trouble? ____Not the real rusty I think it's a bad idea This sort of thing has been kicked around in a few places, here and on the P2PJ mailing list as well. I think it's a bad idea, basically for security reasons. Yes, it's all well and good to say that if someone doesn't want to give out their password to some other site they shouldn't. But it's not that simple. Like, someone sets up a blog that uses K5 logins for comments, and one of their buddies uses it for a while. Of course the guy with the blog isn't saving all the logins on purpose, but they're going into his web server logs anyway. Later on, he and his friend have a falling out, and it occurs to him that he's probably got the guy's K5 login in his logs. So he digs it out and posts a lot of crap here under the other guy's nick. And guess who gets complained to, and told to clean it all up? Yeah, me. Great. And for all the value I got out of making it easy for you to put comments on your blog? What a deal. I haven't yet heard any solution that will actually prevent the operator of the other site from having any chance of collecting people's logins. Even the idea of sending them to a form here on K5 dosn't work, IMO, because it would be easy to fake up a page to look like the real one, which would fool anyone who doesn't carefully inspect the URL field. Not secure enough. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, but Hell, we might as well have this discussion in the right thread. See there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Chlamydia is not a flower. it comes like FIRE. You should get that looked at. ____Not the real rusty Eek! You keep away from my tool, hear! That box-end wrench alone is worth more than your life, son. ____Not the real rusty I'm warning you! ____Not the real rusty All generalizations are wrong. ____Not the real rusty Suffer, Rosa So I dragged my bone machine out of bed at 5:30 today, to go try to break my body running around the island again. Despite a 12 knot freezing-ass headwind, I survived. Honestly, it's like nature has something against you some days. "Nothing's broken. Face it, this is good for you," I tried to reassure myself. Still not sure how convinced I am. But I always get a gigantic amount of stuff done when I manage to get up early, and today is no exception. I should be able to actually do some more writing tonight without feeling overly guilty. The valley of the Tigris and River Euphrates are widely hailed as the "birthplace of civilization." This was a Jeopardy answer recently. But where is my mind? I wasn't talking about Jeopardy at all. Feeling prickly like a cactus lately. Some days are better than others, and some are very much worse. Meanwhile, the British government keeps circling back to Tony's theme: Iraq must be stopped. Dossiers, now. Oh my golly! War not far off, and then vamos Saddam. I'm amazed by everything lately. Water is wet? Sky is up? Brick is red? News to me, Jack. It's all news to me. I kept... I have to admit that I kept waiting for that to coalesce into some really bad pun involving wheelchairs and the Pixies, but I see it was just an anecdote. Anyway, yes that's pretty cool. I always wanted to have a rock star buddy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yay Spreading the culinary joy, that's me. And easy, isn't it? :-) ____Not the real rusty Stipended? in his next stipended panel-discussion outing I never got paid. I can usually talk them into payng for travel, but a couple times it's just been admission. And I'm looking for a job. Any leads? ____Not the real rusty SSP I just posted a comment to Metafilter that on re-reading I really like a lot. It was in the thread about 21C magazine. If this was anywhere but my diary, I'd be horribly ashamed of re-posting it here. But it is my diary and I can do what I want. Wired in 1992? I remember! Sidewalk noodle joints under neon nightlight? I remember! Underground economies? Poisoned wells of jaded New World Order cynicism? Digital elites plotting futurist network hive-minds? I remember it all! Yes! Yes! Give it to me! The future? I remember when this was the future. What happened to the future? I forget. Does anyone else remember their first brush with "cyberpunk" as a kind of revelation? A sense that such a dystopian future would nevertheless be a sort of inside-out utopia for you? And later, the realization that none of it ever existed, none of it ever could. Because as soon as it does exist, it's just another commodity -- $299.95 at Circuit City, equipped with USB or serial interface, designed for Windows 2000. And this 21C re-launch smells, to me, like a rehash of all that, about 5 years too late. Maybe the world still needs cyberpunk. God knows I'll still read anything Stephenson, Gibson, or Sterling ever publish. But at what point does this stop being the future and start being part of the archaeology of the future's past, like Reddi Kilowatt and Duck and Cover? Bored bored with ourselves Very. ____Not the real rusty Been writing I've been on a writing tear lately. It's fun when you get into a habit. and like... uhhh... other things, the more you do it, the more you want to do it. So far (this week) I have finished a story called Door Monkey about a really pissed off robot drug addict who makes a time machine. He is "about a trillion times smarter than you fucking meat puppets." Johnny is helping me edit it. I await his red pen eagerly. I'm also working on one about a guy who founded a chain of theatres that only show movie previews. He has severe ADHD and thinks his wife is trying to kill him. That's all backstory. The story itself is about the wild success of his next business venture, which is completely personalizable Entertainment but becomes completely personalizable life, to no good effect. This one is tentatively titled Killfile. Longtime K5ers will probably have some inkling of the overall gist as implied by the title. No, you can't read either of them. Sorry. If they get published, I'll tell you where to find them. :-) Off I had too much stuff happening in September, and now it's spilling into October. November is definitely not clambake season. If anyone gets something organized for virtually anywhere in New England, I will be there though. ____Not the real rusty Actually The next week would be better, as I'll be in Plymouth anyway. But whatever. It's not so far from here. ____Not the real rusty Writing quickly Door Monkey took about 48 hours to actually write, but the basic idea has been mulching in my head for several months. It wasn't till a few days ago that a couple of key details finally slotted into place enough for me to actually sit down and write the thing. I'm very relieved to have gotten a draft of it out of my head, frankly, as it's been taking up space for ages. As it turns out, the thing that I thought it was going to be about was really just background detail. If that makes any sense. It definitely needs polishing -- I shipped it off to John before I had even really given it much of a read-over, because I was sufering a severe case of "too close to the text." That one turned out to be about 4500 words. The new one is over 2100 words already, and I'm actually worried it's going to try to get a lot longer. I need to take a little time and think over the next few scenes to keep it from getting totally out of control. 2100 words is just from today, and I've barely even got all the characters introduced. It will also need editing and rearranging, I think. Honestly, I need more work on editing and rewriting. It's definitely my biggest weakness. ____Not the real rusty I hate that When characters turn into different characters than you thought they were, and render the first third of a story utterly senseless. Then you have to redo all of that, and half the time it turns out they wouldn't have done whatever it was that got them into whatever mess the story's about in the first place, so you have to come up with some other motivation for the whole thing, and by then all you really want to do is say "And them a dinosaur came and ate them all. The End." ____Not the real rusty Bonus and by then all you really want to do is say "And them [sic] a dinosaur came and ate them all. The End." And then you have a Michael Crichton novel, so I guess that's a valid strategy after all. :-) ____Not the real rusty Read Infinite Jest Ok, there aren't dinosaurs, but the ending is just about that unsatisfying. :-) ____Not the real rusty In conclusion In high school, one of my classmates wrote an essay which ended with the legendary sentence: "In conclusion, John Brown's rebellion was a drunken mess." Classic. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well In general, yeah, it's nice when they start doing things themselves. But it does kind of suck when it deeply screws up your plotting. There are a couple of things in Door Monkey that I suspect will need to be explained differently, because while they made sense when I wrote them, the main narrator later provides more information that make them not make a lot of sense anymore. It could go either way. I planned to just see if John noticed anything amiss. :-) ____Not the real rusty ? (NT) ____Not the real rusty I think we have a winner Thank you, Captain Obvious. No, I didn't think of it either. What a bunch of useless geeks the rest of us are. :-) ____Not the real rusty Shouldn't be I see you're a subscriber. If you have your subscriber tools box set to "Replies", everything will generally take a long time. I usually check replies occasionally, and leave it set to Stories or Diaries most of the time, which are both quite a bit faster loading. Your diary page shouldn't take any longer than any other section index page. ____Not the real rusty Also Can't you just buy a bottle of two-stroke oil? ____Not the real rusty They have... ...these handly little single-serving bottles of two stroke oil now. I've got a couple for the scooter than my dad brought up that are exactly the right amount for one gallon at 50:1. It may still not be worth a trip anywhere to get them though. What I would do, probably, is just save it for a lawnmower or something. I mean, it may smoke a little more than necessary, but a touch of extra oil isn't really going to damage a four-stroke engine. ____Not the real rusty Revenge of the Sneaker Gods What an annoying day. Plus, a lovely quick salmon dinner recipe. My wife and I have a tradition where I get her shoes for her birthday. This is the fourth year in a row, and we're back to new sneakers. While we're at it, I will be needing a new pair of running shoes soon too, so today we went shoe shopping. The Sports Authority at the mall is having a buy one pair get one half off sale, so perfect, we thought. The Sports Authority is one of those big warehouse stores. I found my way to the running shoe alley, and started poking and prodding the display models. I picked out three pairs that all looked like decent ones to start with, managed to rummage around in the shelves of shoeboxes and find 11's for each pair, and sat myself down on a fitting bench to try them out. The first thing I noticed was that every single pair was at least 25% more expensive than they should have been. So much for "half off the second pair" huh? But hell. I was already there, and it'd end up being regular price anyway, if we bought two. I laced up the right show of the first pair, but the left shoe gave me a surprise. Some knucklehead had plonked a big anti-theft tag right through one of the lace holes. So I couldn't lace them up fully, and thus couldn't try them on properly. Well. I opened the second box, and same thing. Third box? You guessed it. I looked at several others, randomly grabbed from the shelves, and every single left shoe had a plastic anti-theft tag spang through a lace hole. I don't care about the tags, if they'd pinned them anywhere else on the damn shoe. But that particular choice of placement meant I couldn't properly try on a single pair of shoes. Of course, was there a salesperson anywhere around? Nah. I wandered a bit, and found a cluster of about six of them shooting the breeze deep in the hunting supplies section. I stood a few feet off and looked at them for a minute, then just turned around and walked out. If I go to purchase a fine pair of sweatshop-labor products, and this stupid store not only goes out of their way to make it impossible to try them on properly (I mean, what responsible sporting goods store would pretend that trying on half of a pair of shoes is sufficient?) but then also is staffed by a bunch of teenagers who seem to think it's a social club, well screw that. I'll spend my money elsewhere. Which we tried to do, but found that Olympia Sports in town, where I got my first pair of running shoes, had a credit-card machine problem. Cash or check only, and we had neither (we would have used debit). Obviously, the sneaker gods were against us today. What an irritating waste of a day. Dinner almost made up for it though. Here's what you do: Steam some rice. We had brown rice tonight, which is quite nice. About fifteen minutes before the rice is done, mince up some garlic, and put it in a small bowl with the juice of one lemon. Cube one bell pepper (or half of two different colored ones, for better presentation -- I like yellow and red). Get two frying pans heated up with a little butter and a little olive oil in each. Put your pepper cubes in one and salmon filet in the other, with a little salt and pepper in each. When the salmon's done, plate it, put the peppers on top, and pour the garlic lemon juice on top (to taste). Add some rice, and you're done. Tasty, quick, and completely dead-easy. Salmon on the Mount! This meal so has a new name in our house. :-) ____Not the real rusty Buying running shoes online? That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, considering the sole criteria for buying running shoes is how they feel, which is also the thing that the net prevents any experience of. Now maybe going into a store and trying a bunch of shoes on, then actually ordering the ones I liked best online would make sense. But it was the trying them on stage that I had so much trouble with here, so that doesn't work either. ____Not the real rusty Shoe test I always heard you are supposed to wear an entire pair of shoes (i.e. both of them) and walk around for a while. Feet are not symmetrical. Everyone has one foot bigger than the other, or one with a flatter arch, or whatever. I know I've tried on pairs of shoes where one foot was comfy and one wasn't. Besides which, your method was impossible because they'd cleverly tagged the left shoe of every pair. I did try on a right shoe, but with a running shoe on one foot and a hiking boot on the other, I was unable to come to any conclusions at all. No, I didn't even bother to talk to anyone. By the time I'd spent fifteen minutes discovering that I couldn't try any of them on, and another fifteen (literally) wandering the store looking for any help at all, I was so pissed off that I knew whatever they told me wouldn't make any difference, and it would be an ugly customer disservice scene all around. You know that feeling where you know exactly what the results of a course of action are going to be, so you just skip it entirely? It was one of those. ____Not the real rusty Holy crap Stay the hell out of my bathroom! ____Not the real rusty Way TM Fucking I (NT) ____Not the real rusty Heh We have no money. So she gets footwear and I usually get nothing. But strangely, we're both happy, probably by virtue of avoiding the stress of buying gifts for each other. :-) ____Not the real rusty PS: Dateless geek vs. happily married geek. And who's supposed to be taking advice from who here? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I did forget to mention that I made her a really nice dinner, baked swordfish, corn on the cob, and rice, with homemeade blueberry ice cream for dessert and candles on the table and the whole nine yards. That was the real present. The shoes are more of an annual in-joke than anything else. :-) ____Not the real rusty Slugs I know one of the things that's laying around. Lots of slugs. And I run at night. I can just imagine the gentle slap-slap-splorp-slap-slap-sqish of my bare feet on slugs. And with fall coming up, it's almost acorn season too. I think I'll stick with shoes for now. :-) ____Not the real rusty If you're lazy If you're lazy you can do the peppers and fish in one pan. ____Not the real rusty Yes I did. I got your check, and it's been all ready to go for a while. I think I forgot about it. I have to go to the Scrooge McDuck style money silo bank this week. I'll be sure to deposit it. ____Not the real rusty Peppers and garlic What? Doesn't everyone else put peppers in everything? :-) Though garlic goes in almost every other thing we make, I actually avoid it for fish most of the time. If you cook the fish with garlic I find it tends to seriously overpower the fish. The lemon juice does something to it in this, though -- cuts down most of the aromatics and just leaves a sort of spiciness which doesn't get into the fish itself too much. Plus putting it on as a sort of dressing after everything's cooked helps too. I am not a big fan of dill. I can only really take it as a light accent, cut heavily with something like pepper or lemon. Dill roasted chicken is one of my least favorite things. Honestly, to me the stuff smells like weeds (which technically it is). ____Not the real rusty Hey If I ever manage to get a kayak, I'm going to name it 'duxup'. Just thought you'd like to know. I'll provide pictures, if that day ever comes. :-) ____Not the real rusty In everything. I think it's called "ironic gen-X detachment" though. At this point, I think they're maintaining it with massive daily valium doses. ____Not the real rusty Horked? I do na' think tha means what choo think tha means. "Horked" (British/Canadian spelling "horqued") is derived from the Bob and Doug MacKenzie movie "Strange Brew", in the line "Hey! Somebody horked our clothes!" It generally means "took" or "stole". "Borked" on the other hand, usually means "broken." I don't know the derivation of "borked," but it probably is related to the Swedish Chef. You could perhaps make a case for using "horked" instead of "borked" as a kind of really half-ass Cockney rhyming slang, but if that's the case, you'd be better off using "Mustang" (borked == knife, spoon and forked == plenty of torque == Ford Mustang). Usage (ex): "I O-Town* to the pigpen**, guv, but the Scoobies*** are all bloody Mustang!" * walked down ** server room == dustpan and broom == pigpen *** IBM Netfinity == Holy Trinity == Father, Son and Holy Ghost == Scooby Doo ____Not the real rusty Gin Makes a Man Mean! Milk and Cheese rule. ____Not the real rusty Error in MnC.pm You merely triggered my automated Milk & Cheese response subroutine. You were aware that "rusty" is just a 12-line perl script, right? ____Not the real rusty One last time, please vote for me Ok, seriously, this is the last one. BigBlogger All Star is fast drawing to a close, and it's a seriously tight race. As of last night, the votes were split roughly 31%/33%/36%. Every last vote counts. So please vote for me. If you missed my last diary explaining what this is all about, it's right here. And there's a special treat on there today for anyone who's ever wondered if rusty is a boxers or a briefs guy. No, I cannot sink any lower, thanks for asking. :-) Polls close at 6PM Pacific tonight. And I promise not to ask again. On a totally unrelated note, what's up with adequacy? I got a nastygram from the AMD guy they had quoted before, who I told that we had nothing to do with AQ and I don't know why it redirects here, which I don't. What gives? Anyone? Stupid yahoo You have to join the group first. I absolutely loathe and detest this yahoo voting crap. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, if you don't want to, I understand. Just wanted to make sure everyone at least was aware of it so as to make a choice. :-) ____Not the real rusty Crappy yahoo You merely ran afoul of Yahoo's craptastic interface. Your vote is counted if it comes back with no useful message but my name selected. If some other name appears to be selected, please click the dot next to my name and submit. Repeat as needed until the correct person has been chosen. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope The poll closes in just over 2 hours. There won't be any more requests. I just wanted to be sure that if I was going to whore for votes here that I managed to squeeze every possible drop of support I could. ____Not the real rusty Too late (NT) ____Not the real rusty BigBlogger: The end of the line I haven't made a big production of it here, but I've been playing in an amusing webgame called BigBlogger for a while, run by Ernie of LYD. Basically it's a group blog with elimination voting, where all the contestants post about whatever, sometimes answering questions posted by Ernie. It started with 12 contestants, and twice a week all the contestants nominated two of their number for elimination voting. The two with the most nominations were put up to a public vote, and the readers voted one off. It's down to the final three now, and I managed to stay in it this far. The current vote is the final one, where you pick someone you think should win the game. At least one of the other competitors has a pretty solidly organized bloc of friends and acquaintances voting for her, and I'd hate to lose due to someone else whoring for votes better. So I call on you, all of you, to stand up for the pride of Kuro5hin and show them who's got more organized voting power! To vote, unfortunately you have to join a crappy Yahoo group. But the group is here and the poll is here. Vote Rusty! The poll is only open till Monday, 6PM Pacific time, so hurry. Warning: Please vote but don't use your real email address for anything at Yahoo! You will get spammed. Make a throwaway email address for this, please. I'd hate to know I was helping get anyone spammed. It's been a long fun game, but frankly, I'll be glad when it's finally over. I've survived no less than five nominations, because the other contestants considered me a favorite to win, and kept trying to get me voted off. Of course, being a favorite always has its disadvantage, because people love to root for an underdog, even if the underdog doesn't really deserve to win. In this case the underdog is Ken, who's won over a lot of the readers during the course of the game. His schtick is being "the nerdy self-deprecating one," and he's played it to the hilt, with many readers buying it. So he's a definite threat. The other finalist is Christine, who hasn't earned many fans during the game, but came in with enough of a following to steadily survive voting rounds. She's mobilizing her troops as hard as she can, and while I've avoided begging for votes here up till now, I don't think I have any choice anymore. It's Sunday, so if you've got some time to kill, take a look back through the archives of the game (listed by date in a box on the lower right-hand side). There's some pretty entertaining stuff in there, and a side of me I don't get to exercise much here. And while you're reading, for God's sake don't forget to vote for me. If only bribery will do, please name your price and I will do my best to pay it. Thanks! :-) But... How do I know you voted? I can't find out who voted, so you could just say you did. I don't think I'm that trusting. Besides which, it's still a pain to manually add a subscription. And finally, that strikes me as unfair to the other contestants. I don't think it would be right to use that kind of leverage to influence voters. I was thinking more like something I had to do for you, personally. Like, post something embarrassing, or answer a question, or publically recognize your gargantuan contribution to the betterment of humanity, or something like that. I'd rather avoid leveraging K5's business in that way, you know? I'm all over whoring for votes, but I think there is a line. ____Not the real rusty Hey I don't think I've been back to FA since like 1996. Do people still know that story? Are they even still called that? ____Not the real rusty Of who? Strategically, I cannot post nudie pics of myself, as that would be guaranteed to lose me more votes than it would gain. I mean, I'm in pretty good shape and all, but not what you'd call pin-up material. I don't think I have any female fans rabid enough to strip down in my support, but if there are any reading, please speak up! Now is the time for all good women to come to the aid of the party. ____Not the real rusty Alright The People were not to be denied. Now go vote! :-) ____Not the real rusty Yoiks I thought it was assumed that you would never sign up for anything on yahoo with your real email address. Er. Lemme add a caveat about that. ____Not the real rusty Shame I know, I know. But it's just a game. You know, for fun and amusement. Laugh. :-) ____Not the real rusty Um, not exactly I stand to win <pinkie>Two hundred and feeeefty dollars!</pinkie> Ok, not quote the same effect is it? Actually, I really want to win at least in part because if I do, my wife has promised not to take the money away and use it for responsible purposes. And there's this sleeping bag I've had my eye on. And a new jar of monocle polish too, naturally. ____Not the real rusty Napoleon Napoleon talked about advertising? Wow. That guy was mult-faceted. ;-) This is not the first time LJ has included me in They Said It. I don't actually get Linux Journal, but one time I was in Arkady's bathroom and leafing through an issue they had, and came across another quote by me in that column. That ranks up there easily in the top ten of Life's Weird Experiences, let me tell you. ____Not the real rusty Game! It's a game! It's petty and childish, in a sense, but so is Monopoly. We're just playing a game. Games are, by their very nature, both petty and childish, and (probably because of that) fun. :-) ____Not the real rusty July 11 07/11/1976. Phew! Sheesh, man, you drive a hard bargain, don't you? Well, it was worth it, I'd say. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ok I'm pretty sure I can work it in tomorrow. Now that there is the kinda deal I can live with. :-) ____Not the real rusty Done I held up my end of the deal... ____Not the real rusty Hey A deal's a deal. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ummm Ok, I can't make it to Ohio. But my best friend just got shipped to Toledo by his company for six months. If Toledo is anywhere near Cincinatti, I will attempt to talk him into helping you move. Is it? ____Not the real rusty I'll still try You'd be astounded the lengths that boy will go to to get free food. I have stories like you would not believe. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that made all the difference. :-) ____Not the real rusty 9/11 news coverage: Did you watch? I need your help for an article. Please read below, thanks. Yes you! No, not that guy. I'm looking at you! I posted a message to the Poynter online-news mailing list the day before yesterday, based roughly around a Howard Kurtz column about 9/11 oversaturation coverage. The editor of the American Press Institute's NewsFuture newsletter emailed back and said he was interested in the topic, especially in the disconnect we seem to see a lot here between massive saturation coverage of "The Big Story" and K5 voters basically eschewing any coverage of them at all, and would I write up something on the topic for his newsletter. I foolishly accepted, so now I need to gather some useful data. I'm looking basically for answers to the following: Did you watch/read any of the 9/11 anniversary coverage yesterday, either TV, newspaper, or online? Why, or why not? Do you think it was covered appropriately? Overcovered? Undercovered? Did you vote for any 9/11 stories here yesterday? Do you wish we had some? Where are you from / where do you live? (I'm wondering if having a pretty global audience affects the response to the coverage here). Anything else you'd like to say about 9/11 anniversary news coverage, or the general phenomenon of The Big Story? More framing background on what I'm talking about can be found in my original list message, linked above. Much obliged, as ever, for any help. Dammit. The link to the original email above works like one time every hundred or so tries. So here's the message I posted. The feeding frenzy is upon us. There's been some talk here of where to find resources on 9/11 anniversary coverage, though it seems like today the question would be where not to find 9/11 coverage. I think Howard Kurtz put it well in his Washington Post Media Notes column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60886-2002Sep10.html): To some extent, it's become a branding opportunity. Every news outlet has to put its stamp on 9-11-02 or be deemed missing in action. That means it's become a day on which not much else can happen, since all the media oxygen is being consumed by The Event. The feeling out there is that the media know only one mode -- overkill -- and that this is one subject on which it's kind of offensive. He also quotes Newsday's Verne Gay: "...ABC, which won a George Foster Peabody Award for its coverage of Sept. 11, appears to have made a strategic decision to 'own' the story of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. "'Why are we doing this?' says Paul Friedman, ABC News managing editor and executive vice president, who began orchestrating Wednesday's coverage more than six months ago. 'What else were we going to do? I've been asked that over and over, and I say the same thing over and over. We never gave any thought to not doing it.'" That, to me, seems like exactly the problem. Has anyone given any thought at all to not doing it? Is there actual news value in this day, or is the media circus just that, another media circus -- the usual competition for ratings and revenue? Kurtz also quotes a poster in an online chat: "What is the obsession with the blanket coverage? To what demand do the media believe they're responding?" Have any of the news professionals on this list had any such discussion in the newsroom, about what the real demand is for "wall-to-wall" coverage, and whether it's a legitimate news event or simply an attempt to cash in on the hope of a return of the record audiences of one year ago? Where do you come down, personally? Are you watching, or turning it off? While the audience on Kuro5hin may be idosyncratic and unrepresentative, the direct "voting on stories" system can shed some interesting light on what actual audience demand is. So far the mood has been very vocally, bordering on angrily, against any sort of 9/11 coverage at all. I'm interested in what seems to be a deep disconnect between what the news media is doing today and what people actually want. Any thoughts? --R About meta-meta-etc You're probably right about media self-analysis. All I can say in my defense is that this anniversary struck me as an example of this phenomenon that people felt really strongly about. And, well, I do think someone should be examining what the news media does, and how it affects people. I hope I can write what I want to say without making 9/11 a "bully pulpit" though. Thanks for giving me that aspect to consider. ____Not the real rusty I love that song I moved most of the lyrics down, since you seemed like you didn't mind the idea. What a great song that is. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mwahahaha I haven't talked about it much here, but it's been fun. And now that we're no longer dependent on other contestants nominations, it's even more fun. Please vote off Ashley next round, and me for winner. Just, y'know, a suggestion. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Even if you buy Saddam's line I remember at the time that the Iraqi line was that Kuwait was Iraqi territory by historical right, or something. But even if you buy that, Kuwait had long been recognized internationally as a separate country, had it's own functioning and diplomatically recognized government, etc. Civil war is, by definition, war within one country, so there's just no way to call it that, AFAICS. ____Not the real rusty 9/11 media blackout day Don't know about anyone else, but I will be totally off the grid on 9/11. No web, no TV, nothing. I plan to take one day, perhaps think a little about what happened. Remember a year ago. Read a good book, and be glad that most of us are still here and can still fight against the War on Freedom, in all its facets. I encourage everyone else to do the same. The days after the original event were an incredible time of actual human feeling, in what's normally a totally media-informed country. This time around, it will be 100% manufactured grief, presented to us in full-THX sensurround technicolor, so we don't have to feel anything for ourselves. I don't want any of that. ____Not the real rusty Write-in vote Split firewood. An excellent way to deal with frustration, involving hitting things very hard with an axe, not to mention working up a good lather of sweat. ____Not the real rusty Guardian Story I suspect they actually just cribbed it from Metafilter, which seems to be more of a target for lazy journalists. I mean K5 articles tend to require actual reading, which is not the case for MeFi. :-) If anyone finds it online, I'd like to see their take. I suppose if it shows up online it'll probably be in my referer logs. ____Not the real rusty Kaycee tip-off Mentioning the "infamous Kaycee incident" is an almost 100% reliable guarantee of Metafilter being the source. :-) ____Not the real rusty The first thing Oh, let's see... The first thing that comes into my head, you mean? No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago. ____Not the real rusty Got my copy Many thanks! When are we gonna get together, unemployed man? I'll be down that way the second week of October. ____Not the real rusty Eerie Rebecca Nurse, along with the other four convicted women, were hanged July 19, 1692, on Gallows Hill. At the hangings, the Rev. Nicholas Noyes asked Sarah Good to confess. "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink." was her reply to him. Twenty-five years later, the Rev. Nicholas Noyes died of a hemorrhage, choking on his own blood. --SalemWitchTrials.com I'd also like to note that "Increase" is a kick-ass name. If I have a second son, I hope I can talk Bret into letting me him Increase. That would make Lawrence IV (who we'd call "Four"), Increase, and our daughter Pandora. We'll be like the Zappas. :-) Oh, I don't know Sarah Good was a sort of kooky wandering beggarwoman, which if anyone is familiar at all with the kooky wandering New England beggarwoman archetype (and where do they go in the winter?) you know that they are not under any circumstances to be fucked with. Curse? Prophesy? Coincidence? Who knows. What matters, and I'm sure Ms. Good knew this, is that when you write it down anytime past the next quarter century, it sounds creepy. And there's a lot more time after those 25 years than during it, so on balance, I'd say she wins. ____Not the real rusty Son (NT) Ok, I lied, there is text. Grep for "Mather" on that same Salem Witch Trial page. ____Not the real rusty Danvers? Danvers! Man, I didn't know that. The Danvers Witch Trials, coming soon next to Pier One in the Toys 'R' Us plaza! ____Not the real rusty And... Names like that came over from Puritan communities in England, which were parodied brilliantly in Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens with characters like "Thou-shalt-not-suffer-a-witch-to-live Shadwell" and "Anathema Device". Incidentally, I think Anathema is a pretty good name too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey by the way I went to high school at Falmouth Academy, just a couple minutes from Sider's Pond. Nice area. :-) ____Not the real rusty J.H.C. Does no one read links or comments? Increase begat Cotton. As noted below. Flaws in the K5 spellchecker should be brought up with pspell. It's an outside package, and we haven't thought of any good way to add words dynamically. By the way, I really enjoy reading your comments now that they're spellchecked. :-) ____Not the real rusty SAT I took the SATs once with a really serious hangover. After not sleeping all night, either. I did well. Hm. If my parents are reading this, the preceeding is a total lie. ____Not the real rusty Three times I took them once in 8th grade as part of some kind of special program. Then junior year you're supposed to take the Pre-SAT, but I was sick that day, so I took the real SAT a few weeks later. Then I took them one last time, senior year, with everyone else. The hungover time was the last one. ____Not the real rusty Write-in vote Mine & tunnel construction. Either that or high steel, but I think tunnellers have it tougher. ____Not the real rusty Hey Mr. Boz My, you do like to complain, huh? Would you like your money back? (No, really -- that wasn't a wiseass comment. Would you?) I explained yesterday what I've been up to. The blame for this shouldn't land solely at Voxel's feet, though they could be a tad faster in getting our boxes back up. I assume they're busy serving their paying customers. ____Not the real rusty Because a bunch of it isn't right It's not informative, I'm afraid, because all of the speculation about Scoop v. Slash is incorrect. I think your guess of 25K for us is pretty good. Slashdot has more like 10x that. They also have a lot more hardware that we do. It's "similar" hardware, yes, but their DB is a quad Xeon, and they have (IIRC) 5 or 6 Slash machines. We have a dual P3 700 running the DB and two Scoop boxes. Hence the speed problems at the moment. Slash already had their scalability problems. Both systems are always evolving -- comparing them like this doesn't really make sense. Doesn't anyone remember when Slash's search was broken for months? I do. Now I know why. They also had a long period where they kept running into performance walls. It's just the way these things are: a lot of problems only show up when you grow to a certain size and throw a ton of traffic at it. Slashdot has a team of people monitoring and maintaining the servers constantly. They also have people who are paid to work on Slashcode and keep it up to Slashdot's needs. We have: me. Slash uses InnoDB. They, in fact, funded most of the development of InnoDB because MyISAM couldn't keep up. None of our speed problems are caused by comment rating. The crunch is mainly in stories, where the indexes are too damn big to fit in memory on our DB server anymore. The rest of it, well argument about rating systems has been ongoing for years, so opinions vary. But hopefully the above helps clear up some of the factual confusion. ____Not the real rusty Similar hardware More accurate detail about the "similar hardware" that K5 and Slashdot run on: Slashdot currently has "a few" quad Xeon DB servers (replicated mysql/innodb) and 10 (dual P3-class) web frontends. K5 has one dual P3 700 database and two dual P3 1.4G web frontends. ____Not the real rusty Rusty does care Rusty still cares, he's just... ahem enough of that third person crap... I am just doing a lot of things that don't show up on the site. And I'm frigging waiting for the servers to get sorted out. Which is starting to piss me off, especially when things grind to a halt at 3PM now instead of the usual 4:30. I haven't been as active in general comments and stories as in the past, but I have been doing this for almost three years and to be honest, a lot of arguments just start to recycle, and I don't have much motivation to participate in them anymore. I still read almost everything. Whatever, anyway, still here, still around, still aware that there's no earthly way to make several thousand people all happy at once, but trying to do it anyway. :-) ____Not the real rusty Au revoir See you soon. :-) ____Not the real rusty A new leaf Did you feed us tales of deceit, Conceal the tongues who need to speak? Subtle lies and a soiled coin, The truth is sold, the deal is done. So I started to find myself feeling jealous of the people who were up and about and awake during the day. I've set out to become one of them. So far so good -- five straight days of getting up at or around 6AM. It's weird going to bed at 10:00 exhausted, but kind of good. The first three days were really rough. I was tired all the time. I think I'm starting to reset the clock now though, waking up more or less at the same time as the alarm, and yesterday I was pretty energetic all day. I even went out and mowed the entire lawn on impulse. Due to the schedule, I have to run in the morning now, if I'm going to run at all. I went Tuesday and Wednesday, and Wednesday left me with a sore back and knees, so I took Friday and Saturday off. I'm debating whether to take today off too, or go. I'm probably going to blow off today and go tomorrow. I didn't like the creeping knee pain one bit. So, how are things with you? Sincerely yours, Rusty It's all mine! Actually, 4AM is the best time to have the whole world to yourself. Believe me, I know. :-) ____Not the real rusty K5 gathering No, I don't think so, because every other weekend in September is booked solid, and it's shaping up that way through October and November as well. It looks like I'm going to have a hell of a Fall. If anyone else can put something together anywhere in N.E. I'll try my damndest to make it. ____Not the real rusty Sleeping Something about Maine makes you want to get up early, huh? It's probably all the lobstermen around, making us soft-handed slackers feel lazy. :-) By nature I'm a late-night person too. In the absence of any outside pressures, I tend to gravitate to a 2 or 3AM - 10 or 11AM sleep schedule. But it's not stable. Over a few weeks I'll drift to going to sleep later and later, and getting up later, till it's something ridiculous like going to sleep at 9 or 10AM and waking up at sunset. This was starting to really bother me, and also every weekend when my wife was home and wanted to do something, I was always miserable and tired. My mood would suffer from never seeing proper daylight. Plus I actually like morning, when I'm rested enough to enjoy it. Fresh on the heels of my relative success at running regularly, I decided now was as good a time as any to make an effort to purposely control my sleep schedule. My Dad and my brother-in-law both use a CPAP as well. I've wondered a bit if I have a similar problem, since I do often feel like absolute ass when I wake up. But it hasn't really bothered me enough to have it checked out. And actually, so far in my experiment I've felt much better waking up than I usually do. So maybe it was just a circadian rythm sort of thing. By the way, I got together with Joe from MESDA on Friday. Thanks for pointing him my way. I'll try to make it to some of their get-togethers. ____Not the real rusty 26 hours I seem to also have a natural 26 hour cycle. I always sleep exactly 8 hours, but tend to stay awake for more like 18. I wonder if, without external time cues, I'd also be a 36er. It also occurs to me that I may be tired because no matter what, I can't seem to get to sleep before 11, so I'm actually only getting 7 hours or so a night. Maybe I should shoot for 7AM instead of 6. ____Not the real rusty Ha While I feel for the west coast Scoopies, I really do think this is a healthier way for me to live. :-) I lounged around late this morning, due to feeling like ass last night (and today being a holiday). But tomorrow I'm back on track. ____Not the real rusty We do not negotiate with terrorists! You're either with us, or you're against us. ____Not the real rusty Welocme back As you can see, tombuck has also not changed. It's funny to see someone notice what I always have to explain over and over. Some problems are constant. The relative constancy of a problem is an excellent way to tell if it's social or technological, by the way. ____Not the real rusty Weird That happens once in a while when something strange happens wth an ad and we have to activate it manually. I remember approving that one, and it was normal. I assume something weird just happened during the activation process. I don't think anyone did that on purpose. Anyway, should be fixed now. ____Not the real rusty Wow The hypothetical World (or Earth or Johannesburg) Summit sounds suspiciously like every discussion on K5. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! I actually had a pet clam once! I caught him in the bottom of the pond in my neighborhood in like sixth grade. He was a freshwater clam. When I grabbed for him on the bottom of the pond, he dug himself in so fast that I barely caught him, so I named him Speedy. I put him in a bucket with some pond water and pond dirt on the bottom, and took him home. A few days later Speedy died. A moment of silence please for poor Speedy the clam. What do clams eat anyway? ____Not the real rusty Lobster Lobster was embarrassingly low-class food in New England back in the 19th century. Housewives would hide their bubbling pot of lobster stew when the minister came calling. Bacon, while not exactly high-class now, was originally considered unfit for dogs, as well. Then slowly it became acceptable to feed to dogs. Then presumably some starving farmer, with nothing else to serve, fried some up and went "Holy shit! This stuff is great!" ____Not the real rusty Yup That's probably where I got that factoid from, is my guess. So it was. K5 is ever-useful. :-) Hey, I think I just fixed the comment subject &quot; bug. Yay me. ____Not the real rusty Yet another boring running diary I will not bow to duxup's pressure! I will talk about running if I want to, dammit! So I worked out the actual registered five mile course, which I've been mostly doing lately. My old course was, sadly, somewhat short. By like probably 1.5 miles. So you can throw out and ignore all my previous time reports, as they are total bull. I have pretty much adjusted to the greater distance, and did it in 46:30 earlier this week, which is my nearly-killing-myself maximum speed. So 9:20/mile is pretty much the limit right now. Tonight I concentrated on smoothness and even form, and did a just under 11 minute pace. I discovered I can pretty much go forever at 11:00/mile. I actually was not tired approaching my house and almost went for another loop, but decided that would be practically begging for knee strain, so I didn't. It's weird to run five miles and be back to breathing normally about three steps into the front door though. It's intermittently raining, and the air on the other side of the island was more like an extremely foamy liquid than normal air. It tasted like the ocean. So, if I threw a party next month, would you come? Yaba? Anyone ever done the drug yaba? Or, like, even know what it is? I just got an email to help@k5 from a reporter who's doing a story about it, and wants info. I thought I'd help out. If you've done it, email jdineen@EXAMINER.COM. I'mn sure he'll be grateful. And sooner is better, he says it's for tomorrow. Dunno I'm mystified by why he'd email me. I chalked it up to some people's reading of "help" to mean "general help with whatever." ____Not the real rusty Just don't call it late for dinner! ____Not the real rusty Um I looked it up, for my own curiosity,. but I don't really care. The point of this was just to put his address up, for if anyone's actually done the drug. You should read before commenting. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! The nigerian scammers have gone into hyperdrive lately. I get like 7 or 8 of those a day now. Up from exactly zero until 2001. ____Not the real rusty Put it here I know K5 gets scraped by spammers. Put it in your comment sig here. Maybe something like "Don't email me at this address, it's only for spammers: foobar@example.com" ____Not the real rusty Ha example.com ____Not the real rusty All the time Replies here change my mind about stuff a lot. I mean, that's why it's worth discussing things! I don't really understand the people who argue just to prove that they already know everything there is to know. ____Not the real rusty Woo hoo! Ok, Tamyra so has a contract anyway. Tonight just convinced me that I am actually going to start voting for Nikki. She can go all the way! Imagine the drama as one by one, the others drop away, and in the end Nikki wins it. I mean, every one she beats is another night of great TV. Vote Nikki! ____Not the real rusty Whose? Tamyra's? Ok, I fully concede up-front that Tamyra was the best singer in the whole competition, and Nikki was lucky to even be considered fourth best. But that said, Tamyra didn't do it last night. She was way off, and Nikki was as on as she's ever been. I think there were people voting who've never watched before, and judging by that one show, I'd be hard-pressed to decide who was the better singer. My feeling is just that now that Nikki's been on the chopping block for how many weeks now, I want her to go all the way. It'd be beautiful. I mean, the actual results don't matter a damn bit -- Tamyra, Justin, and Kelly will get some kind of recording deal anyway, and Nikki might make it out with a modeling gig or something at least. So, given that, I want drama! ____Not the real rusty Collaborate! The Lives of Count Dracula and Count Chocula: a Study in Contrasts, by Lee Malatesta and Levi Ramsey ____Not the real rusty Heh You sure you don't need some Count Chocula in there somewhere? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Well, there's always... ...Tony the Tiger. ____Not the real rusty Ok And but so then I'm reading Infinite Jest, and man there is a guy who knows how to break rules with like reckless disregard for personal safety, you know? I mean, fuck! :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes Very much so. Without question. ____Not the real rusty Oh my That's quite a request. :-) The book was published in 1996, so maybe a concordance would be worth more than a review, at this point. Like, reviews online, stuff about Wallace, fan sites about the book, perhaps a sketch of the major themes... A straight review would be (a) difficult. It's a dense book. And (b) probably kind of boring to write at this point, considering how much has already been said. ____Not the real rusty Well, maybe Note I didn't say boring to read, I said boring to write. :-) I would be much more interested in writing something that drew together a lot of the material kind of swirling around the book, now. And honestly, I think if that didn't make you want to actually read the book, nothing would. Perhaps when I finish it again I'll be inspired to sit down and do some serious link-trolling. ____Not the real rusty Heh Lemme guess, you got like maybe 100 or 150 pages in? It really gets a hell of a lot more comprehensible. Everything isn't totally explained per se, but by the end, the vast majority of it makes sense. And on a second reading, you pick up a ton of things that only make sense after you've already read it once, especially in the beginning. ____Not the real rusty Diary My friends (and family, and just about frigging everyone) read my diary too. They bitch when I don't post enough. They also btch when I talk about K5 stuff because they totally don't care. They want me to write about personal stuff, whch then makes duxup think I never do any work. I can't win. :-) ____Not the real rusty -20 At -20 the camel dies. The Management felt it would be insensitive and/or possibly scarring for the final voter to know that it was you who killed the camel. And before anyone says it, it's a little-known fact that breaking a camel's back does not kill it, and therefore only makes it stronger. Hence the celebratory message upon camel-back-breaking. ____Not the real rusty Whole wheat I would have thought the whole wheat flour would make them too dense and heavy. Do the oats and cereal help break that up, or does it just not happen? I know pizza dough made entirely with whole wheat flour is deadly. ____Not the real rusty Pizza For pizza, I generally use one cup whole wheat to 1 1/2-2 cups white flour. It isn't the time to rise that's the issue, it's that whole wheat flour tends to be like inherently dense and heavy. I've actually thought about cutting back to 3/4 cup whole wheat instead of a whole cup. Anyway, I've never seen chocolate chip cookies use the stuff before. I'll have to give it a try. Um, with maybe 1/4 of that recipe's volume. There's only 2 of us here. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wouldn't it be... ...shopdropping? ____Not the real rusty Control Actually, I see myself as your number three more than your description of me. I don't make any kind of a big deal about it, but I ban people. Recently, I've been anonymizing accounts almost daily, as the same two or three nitwits keep coming back with new accounts. You notice how the worst abusers always seem to disappear without a trace? Yeah, that's not a coincidence. It's the balance thing. How much control is just enough, and how much is too much, you know? I definitely think being here is a privilege, not a right, and I have no qualms about taking the privilege away from people who abuse it. But on the other hand, there's little I can do to prevent people from coming back, other than simply being more patient and committed than they are. Eventually, they all get tired of it. ____Not the real rusty Woo hoo I, too, stopped running the very second it stopped being required in high school, and recently started doing it because apparently when we get old we start to do stupid things like run. Last night I did my 5 miles in 46:30, which is a personal record by a good 3 1/2 minutes. Though a 9:20 pace is still fairly sad by objective standards, it was good for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Timing When I time, I run against the clock and myself, in that order. That is, 9:20 is better than I've ever done before, so huge victory of sustained will and effort for me. But I admit, I'm vaguely curious about where that puts me in the whole world of people who run, and it's pretty slow. I mean, once you start keeping numbers, it's hard not to wonder, eh? :-) But the point of it is for me to push myself, not to win some imaginary race against other people. ____Not the real rusty Hey That's a pretty good idea. I'd have it put a little link bar right under the second one, "See more of Joe Foo's diary here..." Maybe just make it 2 per day, to save trouble deciding what exactly constitutes a "page". Very elegant bit of social judo there. ____Not the real rusty Sure they do! They just didn't have naything much to say. PS: Helpful tip for the future-- keep the "intro text" short, and put most of it in the "extended copy" box. Much friendlier to other diary page readers. ____Not the real rusty More key party tips Have too much food and too much booze. Nothing spells disaster like insufficiently fed and/or beveraged guests. Have a couple drinks before people start showing up. You will be more relaxed and set a nice mellow tone. Umm. That's all I can think of. Those two things alone will usually suffice for a good party. :-) ____Not the real rusty I liked the song The opening guitar riff was, in fact, stuck in my head all day. Damn you. :-) Ok, here's the flip side. I read the comments, and you're being oversensitive. I have no knowlege of the background, so I'm just going on what I see there on the comments to this song. I didn't see anything that you should have gotten so heated up about. I mean, even drew's criticism was about as mild as I could imagine. He just said you should spend more time on it. Ok, there were words like "boring" in there, but those are opinion words. I disagree with his opinion on that. Neither of us are right. Or, neither of us are wrong. There's no sense at all in getting upset over some guy's opinion. If I were a random reader, which I basically am, I would definitely conclude that you were about 200 times more sensitive then remotely necessary, and probably shouldn't be posting anything where anyone could possibly critique it. I think it would probably be worthwhile to work on taking criticism less personally. ____Not the real rusty So It's high time to practice the fine art of ignoring dumb people. And look what a good venue fate has provided you with. :-) ____Not the real rusty You forgot one * Pack stuff for Portland, ME show. ____Not the real rusty Yes I used to have that feeling when someone woke me up with a phone call. I don't keep a phone near my bed anymore. I was losing friends. And family. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm going to invoke... ...my fifth amendment right not to answer that question. ____Not the real rusty Lousiana Almost 90 people have contracted West Nile in Louisiana so far this year. Seven have died. It's a bad year for it. You really should have them run blood tests if your doctor thinks that could have been what you had. It's important to know, for the rest of the area around you. ____Not the real rusty Yup Hey, is search fixed yet? No it isn't. I'm the same way, and I bet almost everyone is. I had to argue with my wife for a couple hours to get her to go to the gym a few mornings a week, because she'd been very cranky lately and I know she's much happier when she goes to a gym regularly. Eventually, I talked her into it, and even she admits it was totally the right thing to do. We all have our down cycles. They used to totally overwhelm me. I generally deal a little better now, but there are those times when you're just sunk in a low ebb. Nothing seems to go right, and you know it's mostly your own fault, but still feel powerless to make it better. I have no magic cure, but knowing that you can fix it sometimes helps. I have had some success with just making lists every day of things that must be done, and then doing them. The first couple days it's hard as hell, but it gets easier. Speaking of which, I think I should take my own advice for a while. ____Not the real rusty Well... A crime was committed on American soil (a few thousand counts of murder, and probably lots of incidental crimes along the way). That means US courts could claim jurisdiction. It would be pretty easy to prove the murders were premeditated. So anyone who provided money to the murderers to help them carry out their crimes is at the very least indictable for conspiracy. I mean, on the face of it, it doesn't strike me as an impossible legal argument. Now, the probably impossible part is proving who was involved and coming up with evidence. Anything the US government has it certainly isn't going to share. It will be an uphill battle for private citizens to come up with evidence. But hell, why shouldn't they try? I, of course, am not a lawyer. ____Not the real rusty Companies Companies incorporate so that if the company does something wrong, the company gets sued, not the people who run it personally. If the attackers were funded through front companies, there's no reason those companies can't be sued. If they could actually find evidence that certain individuals within a company were funnelling money to terrorists against the best interests of the company itself, those individuals could also be sued. The corporate liability screen is not impermeable. Tons of foreign corporations have holdings in American banks, or in banks friendly enough to us to comply with American judicial findings. Suing foreign companies is hardly unheard of. Hell, the DOJ is suing a Russian company right now (Elcomsoft, DMCA, Dmitry, etc). Of course not. We all know that rusty is actually a twelve line perl script. Uh, six lines, now. We had Nat Torkington look it over, and he removed a lot of cruft and redundancy. ____Not the real rusty Nah If you put a bomb in a bus station, set it to go off in half an hour, and walked away, you think they couldn't charge you with murder for whoever happened to be there when it went off? Murder doesn't require you know who you were going to kill. It's just that most murders are committed for a reason, and most arguments for motive rely on the relationship between the murderer and the... uh... murderee. I am still not a lawyer, not having passed any bar degrees since posting my last comment. What the hell is up with that eternal disclaimer, anyway? Are we seriously at risk of stormtroopers bursting into our homes for talking about legal issues? Or is it just an "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" thing? And if it's the latter, why aren't we obliged to always say "I am not an economist," or "I am not a military planner," or "I am not an expert on solid-state physics"? ____Not the real rusty encourage./discourage e-thePeople has an "encourage/discourage" system, that I think is very slick. It's just that, you either encourage or discourage more comments like the one you're rating. Actually, with only two values like that, you could still get a pretty fine-grained rating system. I think theirs is just additive, while I'd do some kind of average. But it's a smart way to do it. ____Not the real rusty Incidentally I did get the draft bylaws sent out, so the article is on its way. ____Not the real rusty I/P All over the web, this issue is being hashed and rehashed pointlessly ad nauseam, and no one's doing any better with it than we are. I wish it would stop, but I can say that it's not just here. It's everywhere. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I agree. Dull, dull issue that we can do nothing about. I'd gladly skip the whole thing until there's actual news. ____Not the real rusty Me I have no less than three Meta stories I need to submit as soon as possible. I'm trying to figure out if I should roll them all into one, or do them individually. Maybe you can help. What I've got: Update on the nonprofit, introducing the current provisional board of directors, and sketching out the planned timeline for what will be happening in the next couple months. RFC on a plan to offer web space, blog hosting, and email at kuro5hin.net, in partnership with Voxel. People have asked for K5 email addresses for a while, and this is sort of that with big boots on. Announcement of big end-of-summer, almost-three-year-anniversary, everyone's-invited, world's-going-to-hell-in-a-handbag-so-let's-have-a-party barbeque bash at my place next month. Small note about probable downtime Sunday night while I move some servers around and get the DB running on a better machine. These all need to go up soon. So, one story, or three? Or something in between? And I apologize for being so MIA recently, too. ____Not the real rusty Yup. (NT) ____Not the real rusty Umm How would you feel if it was tiamat@kuro5hin.net? ____Not the real rusty More info soon It'll make more sense when I lay out the whole idea. I have to write up the report on the nonprofit first, then I'll post that. ____Not the real rusty And... This one, which apparently really is him, but has never been confirmed or activated. Maybe it wasn't him, just someone trying to snake his name who didn't realize they had to actually get the signup email. ____Not the real rusty And the monocle! I need a monocle. ____Not the real rusty Or... psychologist being captured by Mossad. ____Not the real rusty Phooey I don't have a boat, I just want one (but won't be able to afford one probably ever). Nor do I have a crown or a monocle (though I do look dashing in that stick-figure depiction, don't I?). The cat is alive, and I did get a Vespa. but I can't get chinese takeout, I've only had lobster twice this summer, and I don't like champagne. So, it's not, strictly speaking, totally accurate. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! Those are funny. Especially the last one. What's that chinese takeout box on the bow of the boat though? Incidentally, one of the Scoop machine died a couple weeks ago, and Voxel's got it fixed, but while it's down anyway, we're going to move the DB onto it, and make the former DB machine a Scoop box, since the scoop machines are way faster and have 3 times the momery of the DB box (which is just silly). So hopefully things'll be faster at peak times when this place slows down sometimes. And yeah, search will be fixed. I suck. There will probably be an hour or so of downtime Sunday nght when I shuffle machines around. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Have you ever seen a sailboat? That looks like a miniature Spanish galleon. I think you should go with my Chinese takeout idea instead. Seriously. "Umm, yeah, it's chinese takeout. I would never draw a sailboat with some kind of bizarre privy stuck on the front." ;-) I'm laughing so hard I'm crying right now. Jesus. Um. Ok. Phew. Images in diaries eh? It's an idea. We have some of the necessary code to do image uploads already, within the ad system. Ask me again when (uh, if) I ever get the damn search fixed. ____Not the real rusty Heh What is this, make fun of rusty night? :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow I was just reading the reports about last night's meetup in Boston, and it suddenly struck me that these six relative strangers had all traveled to one place and sat down at a table around a sign bearing the logo of a website I started. No other connection, they just all hang out here. Somehow, my actions caused that to happen. Wow. This thing has been a long strange job, and it's too easy sometimes to forget what the point of it all is. I spend a lot of time thinking in large-scale abstract ways about stuff like online community and media, so every once in a while something like this sneaks up and thwacks me upside the head. Real people out there in the world have gathered together and talked over coffee, because of this place. I feel all warm and fuzzy right now. I think I've done something worth doing. :-) Anyway, I'm definitely at the next one. Maybe September 18th? Also a Wednesday -- perhaps a weekend would be better for people who have to travel? Maybe we can get johnny to come. He's another one I've managed to stand up in the past. How about the venue? Was it a good place? Would it do for more people, or would it start to fragment the group? I hate when you get a relatively large group of people together and the seating is such that you end up only being able to talk to the three or four people immediately surrounding you. One thing I've been thinking about is maybe having people up here for a clambake or barbeque or something. The island is glorious in the early fall. Nice weather, and few remaining tourists. Would that be more fun? Would anyone make the trip up to the frozen North country? Oops So much for copy and paste from the URL bar. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha I reworded that a few times to attempt to make it sound less like "It's all about meeeee! " Apparently I still failed. The point was that a bunch of things I did have somehow led to this. Not that I'm the savior of human society or anything. :-) I mean, people introduce other people to each other all the time, which is kind of the same thing. This just struck me as not something I did so much as a result of things I did that didn't have this as a real intended consequence. Does that make sense? Maybe I'm just being dumb. ____Not the real rusty Ok If I'm going to put on a shindig, and people are actually considering coming here from places like MN, I'll make sure there's plenty of notice. I think the third weekend of September is free for us, so tentatively it will be then. But I'll post a story. ____Not the real rusty Yeah There's no easy way that I know of to get from BH to Portland. There may be a bus. I'm not sure. But there is the slow-ass ferry to Portland. That would make it really easy. ____Not the real rusty Driving around Boston College... college... hospital... bar... hospital... bar... bar... bar... college... hospital... college... bar... bar... bar... ____Not the real rusty Next time And I repeat, in case ana missed it the first time, if you don't schedule it for around the 14th next month, I am so there. Glad fun was had. Next time we need to work harder on other NE-area K5ers like DJBongHit and cp (who I've managed to fail to meet at last three times now). And the gang that came down when Ino was in town last year, too. Where was ragabr? Where was Defect? Well, you have blazed the way. :-) ____Not the real rusty Two more You can't figure out who would want to buy your product. Sudden "identity change." The company is renamed, your logo colors change, etc. This is a certain sign of impending death. ____Not the real rusty Next time :-( I can't make it this time. If it goes well, and it's not on the 14th next month, I'll be sure to work out arrangements ahead of time. And we want pictures! ____Not the real rusty Doubt it One of the primary tools De Beers uses to maintain its monopoly is punitive pricing and sales. Much like Microsoft's licensing fees for OEMs, De Beers will simply refuse to sell diamonds to any outlet that sells any diamonds that didn't come from De Beers. Considering they have control of at least 60% of the world's supply, that is basically a death sentence for any store that wants to sell non De Beers stuff. This article sheds some more light on it. Apparently De Beers owns at least one of the major Canadian mines. So it's no guarantee unless you know exactly which mine they came from. ____Not the real rusty Even better Ask someone where Nunavut is. Don't mention Canada. I bet 99% of non-Canadians won't know. I'd love to hear the guesses though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! In the upstairs bathroom of my house, there's a National Geographic map of the world pinned to the wall directly across from the toilet. Suffice it to say, I now know a lot more geography than I did last January. And the map happens to have "Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat)" on it very prominently. So I too, know the place of which you speak. :-) I knew that would come in handy someday. However, that's not the same as Nunavut. ____Not the real rusty Fate? Kismet? Everyone seems to know the quote that goes something like "Call it fate, call it kismet, call it what you will." So where the hell does it come from? The innernut won't tell me. Damn innernut. Ernie's webgame starts (supposedly) tomorrow. Why ever did I volunteer for this? Well, if anyone cares, play along and vote other people off. Or vote me off, if you hate me. But it would be amusing to see the combined will of K5 crush the other blogger kiddys like beer cans in the 70's. I spent Saturday and Sunday kayaking around Casco Bay with Rob. What a hell of a time. I'm still a wreck from it, but starting to recover. Let's see, I put together a little map of where we went. It's kind of crappy, but you can get an idea at least. The red line is Saturday, and the green line is Sunday. And the numbers are as follows: We started out on the peninsula where Eric's kayak (which I borrowed) lives. Rob had paddled over from Portland the night before. He got lucky, and scored a parking space about ten feet from the bay, so his ferry-fare-free trip across was cake. From there we proceeded around backshore, which seemed oceanic and kind of scary until Sunday morning (I'll get to that). Cut through the channel between Peaks and Pumpkin Knob, and took a snack break on the beach near my Grandparents house. I was a wee bit seasick. Luckily, after this break, that departed and didn't return. After half a sandwich, we took to the water again, and headed past Pumpkin Knob and up along the western coast of Long Island. We passed a landing and attached bar/restaurant thingy called The Spar or something like that, and both kicked ourselves at not having brought any money. A beer would've gone down extremely well just then. Next time. Eventually, we reached Little Chebeague, which our guidebook listed as a good spot to camp. Maybe in the Fall, but at the height of August, it was infested with beer-swilling motorboat trash, with giant tents, huge barbeque grills, screeching kids, loud music, the works. I just don't understand people. They load everything in a boat, motor off to some distant uninhabited shore, and then act like its their frigging backyard. I mean what is the point? We stopped to stretch our legs, determined that camping conditions were extremely unfavorable and that we had at least four hours of daylight left, and decided to head for the more distant Jewell Island. Right at the start of this passage we passed by the northern tip of Long Island, where the remains of two giant schooners still lie, sunk in the channel to block German U Boats during the war. The keel and ribs still poke up clearly at low tide, and in a kayak you can paddle right among them and check out the wooden pegs holding the hull together. Definitely one of the coolest things we saw. Then comes a pretty long passage past the southern tips of Hope Island and Cliff Island. Lots of water, not much else. We fooled around by the rocks at the end of cliff for a bit, and Rob got some good pictures. This whole area is so quintessentially "Maine Coast" that you feel like you've seen it all on a postcard already, even though you probably haven't. Leaving Cliff, we crossed the last channel to the western coast of Jewell. There's a beautiful little bay there called Cocktail Cove, where lots of sailboats and a couple powerboats were moored for the night. The campers on Jewell were generally a lot quieter, but still had absurd amounts of gear. People always bring way too much stuff, everywhere they go. You just don't need that much stuff. We checked out some of the sailboats, and had a nice chat with a guy from Portland in a boat that claimed to hail from Boston. Then we headed around to the Punchbowl on the ocean side, to seek a good campsite. All the official campsites were taken, so we lugged the boats across a spit of sand, and paddled through a tidepool to a somewhat more secluded spot. Which turned out the be the end of the path that goes to the privies. So much for secluded. Some caretakers came by, and remarked that the tide was lower than they'd ever seen it. But we'd be fine, they assured us, where our tent was (about 9 feet up the beach from the very clear high-water mark). Of course, a very low tide implies a very high tide, and sure enough, we awoke at 12:30 AM to hear water lapping up the shore just feet from our tent. We watched it come in a bit, and hemmed and hawed, but finally gave in and moved the tent to a drier-seeming patch of land. Not five minutes later, the larger waves were rolling up into the square mark left by our groundsheet. Earlier in the evening, we'd strapped on our headlamps and explored the remains of the military installations on the island's southern tip. There's a seven-story spotting tower that offers an incredible view of the whole bay, northeast through southwest. We signed the MITA logbook thoughtfully left in a tupperware container at the top. (same spot as 1.) Sunday morning, we failed to wake up in time to see the sun rise over the open ocean straight ahead of us, probably due to our tidal misadventures. Fried bagels, oranges, and boiled coffee for breakfast, and we were off again. This time we headed south, along Jewell's ocean coast, which put our backshore paddle to shame. The swells rolled in steadily from the open Atlantic, and we happily bobbed up and down and watched them break ferociously on the rocks to our right. Ok, they weren't that ferocious, compared to what they could be, but it was still pretty impressive. We gave the rocks a wide berth. Rounding the southern tip of Jewell we aimed for a white hump in the apparently unbroken land on the horizon, guessing that it was the southern tip of Long Island. Then we paddled. For a long time. With a lot of water around. I have to say, the "crossing large unbroken stretches of water with all land in the far distance" part of sea kayaking has got to be the least interesting part. I started to find myself far too interested in perfectly ordinary lobster buoys and globs of floating seaweed, simply from boredom. Poking around rocky coastlines and finding things like sunken schooners is a lot more fun. We eventually reached the whitish hill, and found that we had guessed right. We rounded Long Island (through a fantastic chunk of rough water where various currents and waves were having themselves a throw-down), and headed (again) through the Pumpkin Knob channel. This time there was a wicked cross-current trying to drag us past the Knob in the direction of Long, but after fighting our way into the channel itself, the current there was brisk and headed just the way we wanted to go. So I got a rest and hitched a ride on the moon's gravity for a bit. Then it was all a millpond, along the sheltered western shore of Peaks, past the club, Lionel Plante's and the ferry landing, and back to our starting point. I feel it worth noting that Sunday we got in our boats on Jewell and didn't get out again until we were home, about three and a half hours later. My legs felt like noting that too. And continued noting it until I finally shut them up with some Advil last night. So that was our first sea kayaking adventure. Overall, my impression is it's kind of like hiking. On the plus side, you can carry a lot more stuff. Ok, I know what I said about stuff, but I'm talking about things like fresh oranges and dry shoes, not gas grills and battery-powered stereos. On the minus side, every time you open a hatch, you get to play "What got wet this time?" Lots and lots of plastic bags are highly recommended. Put everything in its own plastic bag. Then collect things together into larger plastic bags. And bring some extra plastic bags, just in case. Some things will still get wet anyway, no matter what you do, so be prepared to just live with it. And finally, I picked up the Vespa in Beverly, MA on Friday. It rocks. A few things don't quite work right (horn, brake lights, headlight is very dim, muffler seems a bit sub-par) but it runs pretty well for a machine that's quite a bit older than I am. It also seems to smoke a little when cold, but that does clear up in a few minutes. It definitely needs a re-paint, and probably needs a lot of general TLC, but it's a good little machine. And I was completely right -- it is the ideal island transportation. Little, easy, maneuverable. It even handles down front stupid tourist traffic with ease. I'm satisfied. If you know anything about restoring Vespas, please help me! I need lots of hard-earned wisdom. Like, maybe starting with how do I get all the little dents and dings smoothed out? Or even some of them. The body could definitely use some remedial shaping. And perhaps some basic things to check int he engine that will probably need cleaning or replacing. Well, I know nothing, so anything will help. Quite simple By getting me the hell away from the computer, my hatred and loathing for this infernal machine is lessened, thus, in theory, allowing me to get something done this week. We shall see if the experiment bears fruit. I do know I'm taking the laptop away somewhere else tomorrow, if the weather's ok, and getting some stuff done while out of the dread clutches of the time-sucking Moloch, Internet. I have a ton of stuff to write. Hopefully some of it can get written if I have nothing else for my attention to wander to. ____Not the real rusty Weather Luckily, the islands get all the tempering effects of being pretty much part of the ocean. When it's stinking hot everywhere else, it's generally at least 10 degrees cooler here. And when it's near-zero-Kelvin inland, it's generally at least ten degrees warmer here. Water temperature fluctuates much slower than land temperature, so our climate tends to be more stable, on the whole. ____Not the real rusty D'oh What a knucklehead. I fixed that once, and somehow it got unfixed. Should work now. ____Not the real rusty Visit my brain You can't post a diary about the trip. Everyone will yell at you for not fixing search yet. But I really want to tell them about it. You can't! You'll get nothing but shit. They'll say you're wasting all the time they paid you for. But I can take a weekend off, can't I? No! Oh. Screw you. I'm posting it anyway. Why do you never listen to me? ____Not the real rusty Heh I was thinking of 2F13 and 9F16. :-) ____Not the real rusty Doesn't look that way I started off thinking it was from Moby Dick, but I think I was muddling it with "Call me Ishmael." So then I thought maybe Casablanca, but IMDB doesn't have it listed as a quote, and the word "kismet" doesn't show up in a search of the script. ____Not the real rusty Duh And quite a lot more than that, too. It should be a truism that if someone even asks a question anywhere ever, they've already looked for the answer on Google. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope That was a reference to the original line. I can, in fact, only find it in that form -- as a clear reference to some earlier original text, whose form can only be perceived by the shape of its absence. ____Not the real rusty Ack Crap. I knew I missed some emails. :-/ No, I don't think I'm gonna make it to this one. Maybe next month, if they continue. ____Not the real rusty Selective writing I don't generally write about the K5/CMF business crap. It's boring enough to do, I don't generally feel like rehashing it in my diary at the end of the day. Writing about fun stuff is a hell of a lot easier. Short version: I'm working on the CMF articles, and dealing with K5 tax stuff. There will be an article updating everyone on the progress of the CMF, as soon as I get the articles out to the provisional Board. I have sadly been neglecting to fix search, though. That I admit. ____Not the real rusty Librarians My wife works at a library. She's got one of their librarians on the problem. If he doesn't come up with anything, I'll try the list. ____Not the real rusty No luck He's exhausted his resources. I posted to stumpers-l. Hopefully they can turn something up. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I'm a #1 google result. Rock. :-) My research turned up nothing. As far as I can tell, it's just a catchphrase with no clear antecedent. ____Not the real rusty Blocking rutsy! Aww, that's not right. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dyslexics of the World, Untie! ____Not the real rusty A place to start would be here. There are several hosting companies advertising here right now. One may well fit your needs. ____Not the real rusty Basic symmetry? 196 isn't unique. Other failures: 55, 57-59 64, 66-69 73, 75-79 82, 84-89 91, 93-99 109,119,129,139,149... well, the list goes on. I think you can determine if a number will produce a palindrome or not by seeing if any adjacent pair of digits will add up to either ten or greater than eleven. Also, in the case of numbers with an odd number of digits, you have to count the centermost digit as a pair unto itself (i.e. add it to itself). And, to further complicate matters, if the center digit is a 0, it drops out altogether. It seems like the easiest way to deal with a middle zero is to pretend it's not there, and apply the addition rule to the rest of the number. So, for example, 1245 will work, because 1+2=3, 2+4=6, 4+5=9. And sure enough, you get 6666. But 171 doesn't work, because 1+7=8, but 7+7=14. And 171 produces 342. But the basic gist of all of it is just symmetry. As long as you don't have to carry anything in adding, or the thing you carry isn't an eleven (eleven appears to maintain it's own inherent symmetry), then the carrying screws up the reversal symmetry between the number and it's opposite. I don't think that explains it very clearly, but if you fool with some examples on a piece of paper for a bit, and try to seek out the ones that don't work, it becomes pretty obvious. Also, the reason for the "center digit pair" becomes obvious too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah I see. That wasn't really the question was it? Well, I amused myself for a while anyway. :-) ____Not the real rusty I was being dumb My whole rule was just for finding out if one number will immediately produce a palindrome or not. I misread the whole question the first time, and didn't realize it was a progressive thing. However, if you are writing code to test the actual question, I think my rule would make for a decent algorithm to test results with. Or at least, an algorithm. Don't know how efficient it is comparatively. ____Not the real rusty Incoming goods guard you while you sleep. Stick with me here, because this is a little twisted. So I was perusing Bruce Sterling's blaaaaawg (said with genuine Snide Sterling Intonation), and I ran across this entry (second one, 07.30.02). Which links to this German page where some relatively attractive professor has done some sort of grand thing linking cyberpunk, Hollywood and Frederic Jameson, and thus conforming to the Standard Academic Paper formula of choosing three unrelated things, one of which must be a postmodern and/or Marxist theorist, and relating them. In ths case, she's gone for the big cheese, Frederic Jameson, who is both postmodern and Marxist. After enjoying the pictures a bit, I thought I'd see what Google can do for me by way of translating some of it. So I loaded up the Google translation. And now I notice that while looking at the pictures, I hadn't seen that there are some quotes from various books at the top of the page, and all of them in English. The one that caught my eye was from Fight Club, and orginally goes: We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us. (Tyler Durden in Fight Club) But in translating it from German (which it wasn't to begin with), Google has transformed it into: Incoming goods cook your meals. Incoming goods haul your trash. Incoming goods connect your calls. Incoming goods drive your ambulances. Incoming goods guard you while you sleep. DO emergency fuck with US. (Tyler Durden in Fight club) I didn't say it would change your life. Just that it was a little twisted. Incidentally, Ernie is running a new webgame starting (probably) Monday, and I'm gonna be in it. So, I don't really expect to be posting a lot of diaries here for the next couple weeks. If you watch, I'm sure you'll be horrified. Please don't watch. :-) Right back atcha "Rachel" deserves what he gets. This right here is online identity in action. Usually you can judge every comment on its own merits, but sometimes you just can't. ____Not the real rusty Mentioned it a while ago Scroll down, or go back a few weeks in the archive. This game's only for players from previous games, which I qualified for by being a Peanut in BDB. ____Not the real rusty "girl" For extremely male values of girl. It's just tpsl2 (note the "L") again. Nothing for anyone to get bunched panties over. ____Not the real rusty Heh I just hate to see cluelessness. I held off for an awfully long time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Failure! Most people here think you're boring and thoughtful. I think your evil plan has failed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not protective at all Not only is my nick my actual name, any halfhearted search will easily turn up my home address. I actually wish fewer people were anonymous online. I think it'd be a much more pleasant place if that were the case. People tend to behave worse when they have the imaginary shield of anonymity in front of them. I have to think before I go off being a huge jackass, because everyone knows where I live. :-) ____Not the real rusty Personally vs. Socially We have to trudge through our lives playing the little games we play to succeed in our jobs and personal lives so a little fantasy play in anonymousland is quite harmless and possibly even beneficial on a number of different levels. Ok, let me amend that a bit to say that I wish more people here were less pseudonymous. Being anonymous (or pseudonymous) can be beneficial to you personally, but is rarely beneficial to the larger society around you. In cases where community matters, I think the whole is better served by people being "who they really are." ____Not the real rusty Ok, but don't hit me so hard! ____Not the real rusty What lies beneath For eons, mystics and shamans have claimed that there is another lawn, hidden beneath the lawn you can see. They call this "The Underlawn." They claim to be able to reach it through weird herbal preparations and ritual bloodletting. Today, armed only with the implacable tools of science and an iron will to find the Truth, I set out in search of... The Underlawn. Ok, that's as far as I got, really. It seemed like a parody of a Learning Channel style overblown docudrama wasn't really going much farther than that anyway. Though the narration did lend itself well to "reenactments" of mowing scenes, with all kinds of cheesy BBC distortions and senselessly weird camera angles to hide the fact that they're all shot on the same high-school auditorium stage. This is the sort of thing that goes on in my brain anytime it's not actively consuming media. It may well be that I read so much just to get away from the voices. When the gray cells had finally given the melodramatic voiceover a rest, they started in on coming up with the following list of reasons you should mow your lawn like a proper person and not leave your yard a giant hippy slobfest. I mean, maybe I haven't mowed mine in over a month, but that's just due to good old-fashioned American apathy. Not some namby-pamby desire to support the local ecology, or any such rubbish. Clear fields of fire: Haven't you seen Red Dawn? With those long waving fronds of Commmunist cover, your house will be a natural candidate for command-post. And don't expect those of us who kept our gun emplacements clean to come rushing to your aid when the chutes start popping. No sir! As the esteemed (and aptly named!) PBS program "The Victory Garden" used to emphasize, the first rule of Defensive Landscaping is "Know where your mortar will go!" Lower risk of crop circles: I certainly don't want flying saucers and/or British teenagers creeping all over my yard at all hours. Do you? Keep the potheads away: As soon as they hear about your "weeds", the local potheads are guaranteed to try to make your chimney into a bong. Do you know how hard it is to get bongwater out of a woodstove? Find lost items: So that's where my wife was! And then I stopped mowing for the day. So you'll all be spared any more of the random output of my obnoxious brain. Hey, I have to live with the thing all the time. Think about that. Thank you I think I'll take you up on that. Though I bought it used. Not sure if you get the affiliate cred for that or not. ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry I accidentally h4xored your st3v3 g1bs0n. Please don't report me to the Department of Truth Maintenance. ____Not the real rusty What? Aren't we all just having fun? :-) ____Not the real rusty Not yet Though I did find a board of directors, and a plan for a search engine. And there's still a fairly dense patch left. Here's hoping I'll find them today! ____Not the real rusty Greenrd's Law Greenrd's law has gone bigtime (scroll down). I hope you've arranged for royalties. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I knew it had to be one of you ne'er-do-wells. :-) ____Not the real rusty Elsewhere in NM Away from where fluffy lives, I recall seeing huge signs advertising 50 acre lots, for cheap. Given that the nearest "town" (locally dense collection of trailers) was dozens of miles away, I imagine you could do anything you pleased with it. ____Not the real rusty Don't forget Allergies. I suspect this is what "noxious" means in this context. ____Not the real rusty Hey John If you want to raise a little more cash, and are in the mood for something rather odd, I have my printout of the pre-release version, all marked up with corrections and dog-eared and coffee stained and stuff. And I even drew a design for a really nifty coffee table on the back. I will gladly mail it to you, if you want to sign it and auction it off on eBay. It's a one-of-a-kind collectors item! :-) ____Not the real rusty Nytol I'll second that. And add Sominex to the list too. I'm a long-time insomniac, and have tried most of them once. None of them work worth a damn. They just make me goofy, but totally fail on the actual "putting me to sleep" test. Finally I just resorted to arranging my life such that I could sleep when I was tired and wake up when I was done sleeping. That's worked better than anything else so far. ____Not the real rusty +1 FP It's funny because it's true. ____Not the real rusty Fish ponds I hate fish ponds. I hate it when people build fish ponds. Now, this may not be an issue in NM -- I don't know what the insect situation there is like. But most places I've lived, fish pond == mosquito hatchery. The people next door to us in DC had one, and of course DC is a swamp so any standing water is prime breeding territory. It drove me nuts, and filled our backyard with the damn things. Here on the island, we're not near any standing water anymore, so they're not so bad. But consider that before you build. ____Not the real rusty Oops I voted 5-6 on the poll, but that's totally not right, on further reflection. I think it's more like 9-10, though it could be more than that. At least 9 though. So consider this a -1 for 5-6 and +1 for 9-10. ____Not the real rusty A cry for 802.11b help! Lots of personal stuff to report, but this won't have any of it. Instead, I need help with a potential project. Anyone with experience or knowlege abt 802.11b equipment and network design, please read! So, I need to design a wireless network that looks like this: One point-to-point connection across approximately 3 miles of water. Obstruction is not an issue -- with binoculars, you can literally see each point from the other. From the non-wired end of the above, I need an omnidirectional access point which can cover about a mile all around. Obstruction may be an issue here, in that connections between endpoints and the central omnidirectional antenna may be obscured by some trees, foliage, etc. For end-users, I need some kind of access point that is strong enough to communicate with the central omni tower, but small enough to be unobtrusive and easily installed. As those of you who know where I live may have guessed, the idea here is to cover my island with omnipresent 802.11b network access. I'm trying to pin down exactly what equipment is needed, and what it'll cost. If anything, there's an embarrassment of riches online, and I'm actually having trouble weeding out information that is out of date, or not relevant to my situation. So anyone who has experience with this kind of thing, please point me toward useful resources! Thanks. :-) Not really The primary client would probably be an access point in the home somewhere. This isn't primarily intended for roaming access -- it's for fixed-point (home) access. So there's a lot more leeway in the size and power of the endpoint unit. With live access points scatter throughout homs, laptops could get online simply by finding the nearest access point and connectiong through that. ____Not the real rusty Yeah What I had in mind was possibly picking out four or five buildings that have roofs I can see from the top of the tower, and setting up bridging APs there, with decent-sized antennas that can see the tower, and cover the local area around them. Then individual subscribers could just access the bridge point nearest to them, which would relay to the tower, and out. Does that seem plausible? The other option would be to just use good access points in the home, and try to spread the network out by having access points relay between each other until the data gets back to one that's close to the tower. I'm not sure if that works though. ____Not the real rusty I have a tower The reason this is even possible to consider is there's a perfect tower already standing. It was, at one time, rigged up as a microwave endpoint from Portland, so I know that part will work. My plan was to put an omni antenna on the tower and (hopefully) talk to individual access points from that. But while the tower is the highest point on the island, I know you can't see the top of it from everywhere, due to trees. So perhaps the best plan would be to find certain key houses that have LOS to the tower from the roof, and try to cover it in local-cell style. Hm. It may be time to climb up the tower with a pair of binoculars and a map, and see what I can see. :-) ____Not the real rusty Pretty much The idea actually is to create a nonprofit community wireless ISP. Basically I'd seek outside funding for the equipment, and try to sign up islanders at cost. So your monthly fee would simply be the cost of the mainland endpoint divided by the numebr of subscribers. If we could get donations to offset the wired bandwidth cost, even better. Also, I'd love to expand it to be an "island-hopping" network. Like, from here we could probably relay a signal over to Cliff Island, or either of the Diamonds, etc. I see Peaks as being a proof of concept project. As for who to use on the mainland, that's another unresolved question. What I need is someone who owns a building that can see the island and would agree to have one end of the PtP connection mounted there, and either an SDSL or T1 connection to it. Any advice? ____Not the real rusty Not yet We're not anywhere near the stage of scouting for a mainland connection yet. My plan was to offer someone free use of the connection in exchange for hosting that end of it, so it doesn't even have to be a charitable gesture. Though I'm not sure we could support a whole apartment building's worth of use. Perhaps a subsidized sharing arrangement. Anyway, I'll definitely keep it in mind when the time comes. I have a feeling it won't be so hard to find someone willing to do it. Mainers are great people. :-) ____Not the real rusty Size A radius of one mile from the big tower will pretty much cover the whole island. Can those access points talk to each other? Like, if I set up AP_3 a half mile from the tower, it can't see the tower, but it can see AP_2 a few houses down the street. Can I tell it "relay to AP_2", tell AP_2 to relay to AP_1, and AP_1 to relay to the tower (which it's close to)? If that would work, the network could be set up simply by using each subscriber as a distribution point for subscribers further away. ____Not the real rusty Question Can this kind of setup be used to spread the signal out to, say, each quadrant of the island around the central tower, where each one would act as a relay for individual access points nearby (using just regular in-home access points)? If I had to make one of these things for every house, it would become prohibitively expensive. But I could probably arrange for four or five of them to get a good signal out closer to each neighborhood. ____Not the real rusty Heh The full explanation of why I want to do this is longer than I want to get into here. But it's not really for my personal satisfaction. I mean, it's an interesting thing to do, so there is that factor. But it's not just to get me broadband, which I already have. Rest assured, I continue to toil. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks That's about my current thinking, except that the tower isn't at my house. By fortunate combination of geography and military planning, it's much closer to the center of the island than my house is. So an omni may be a better choice. But I may end up better off doing some kind of "quadrant" PtP coverage first, then out to the endpoints. Thanks for the book links. Those'll definitely help. ____Not the real rusty Ian Ian is a good guy, and I know he meant that in the most constructive sense. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh His pseudonym was pretty much an open secret, IIRC. If you were to look for freenet related stories, I think it would become clear pretty quickly. :-) ____Not the real rusty Summah People The summer people are here too. Well, here they're summah people. Ok, actually thyey're a slightly different version of "summah people" which only someone with a well-trained ear can really distinguish with any reliability from the Massachusetts version of "summah people." But nevertheless, they're here. You know who I hate? It's not the regular summer people who scrape together $900 to afford to rent a little cottage for a week with the family and get away from the telephone. It's the people who pick out an island which has been struggling along just fine for centuries, and decide that there is where they must put their great big 30-room monument to themselves. A palace, in which they will live maybe one or two weeks out of the busy busy year. A palace bigger than 99% of houses on the entire island, which the rest of us live in all the time. If architecture is communication (and it is), these are the houses that say "My dick is bigger than your car." I hate walking along a winding country road, wild pea bushes on one side and crashing surf on the other side, and suddenly rounding a bend and having someone architecturally scream at me "MY DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOUR CAR!" That's what I hate. ____Not the real rusty Proportional response I think that would be a bit over the top really. I don't hate the people who do it, I just hate the tastelessness of their architectural choice. I can see how my poorly-chosen phrasing would give the impression it was the people I hated though. I feel the proper response to tastelessness is mockery, not torching their house. Anyway, who wants to go to Federal Pound-you-in-the-ass Prison on account of a futures trader from Texas, or a couple of doctors? No, they're not worth it. ____Not the real rusty You should kayak I went kayaking today. Well, sort of yesterday now. I highly recommend it as exercise, though it's not much good for the lower body. My arms are feeling it now though. Then, just because I've become some sort of sick freak, I went and ran four miles today too. Very tired now. Having trouble hitting the right keys. Time for sleep, I think. :-) ____Not the real rusty Living up north... ...is highly reccommended. :-) ____Not the real rusty You forgot a verse! 33.5Foolish is he who spurns the pearl of wisdom Though it be found amidst the muck of dogma. ____Not the real rusty I was gonna ask that too What article? ____Not the real rusty A Vespa? Smashing, baby! I'm getting one of these. Well, I'm pretty sure it's one of those. It could conceivably be one of these instead. Or one of these. Ok, all I know is that it's a 1966 Vespa. I think those are all the models that were produced that year. Regardless, it'll be smashing, baby. Yeah! So I'm getting intermittent email queries about where the nonprofit is. I probably ought to write up a "what's going on" story, huh? Take the poll, and let me know. I don't have much to say, really, so the rest of this diary is your time. Please, discuss amongst yourselves. Ok, Island dweller here The longest continuous stretch of road here is five miles. A motorcycle would be totally pointless. :-) ____Not the real rusty Running Ha! Five miles of narrow twisting road that mostly requires cars to squeeze into the bushes to pass each other, and is clogged with pedestrians, bikes, and all manner of things in the summer. Even if you closed off the whole loop for a race, it'd be messy. I imagine accidents would abound, and some of them would almost certainly involve bikes and riders flying off cliffs into the ocean. It makes a damn fine running course though. Lovely views to distract from the pain. :-) ____Not the real rusty Peaks Island Weirdos Yeah, it's an island, so we have far more than our share of artists and weirdos. I fit right in. I haven't met that guy. But the guy whose friend is selling me the scooter co-designed the Webmonkey logo. Random coincidence, but he was the original lead designer for Webmonkey, and now he lives here. We know all the same web geeks. ____Not the real rusty Yoinks! $500 for this one. Its condition is described as "runs, everything works". I imagine it's not in the kind of shape that collectors go for, and which leads to outlandish $2000 prices. I actually just wanted a scooter, because its very common that I want to run down to the store, or the post office, or whatever, and walking takes longer than I want to spend, but driving is overkill. Basically, I just want a vehicle that's simple to jump on, do my errands, and that I don't have to worry about parking. That it's actually a '66 Vespa is pretty much random chance. A friend of mine here knows a guy who fixes up scooters. I told him I was in the market for "something cheap that runs" and this just happens to be one that he's got ready to sell. ____Not the real rusty Bah Bah! Scooters are way more fun. If I want exercise, I'll go running. Actually another reason I wanted a scooter is because if necessary I can take it over to Portland, if I happen to want to do some errands and Bret has the car. I know, I could also do that on a bike, but there's definitely places I may want to go that a bike would take forever to get to, like the hardware store for example. But mainly, it's because scooters are more fun. :-) ____Not the real rusty Theft I have great doubts that anyone would steal it. I mean, it's a tiny island, and I'd be bound to see it again. I suppose you could take it off on the ferry immediately, but I don't think such criminal masterminds have found the place yet. It's a long way from Chicago. :-) ____Not the real rusty No idea I haven't seen it. I'll post an update when it arrives. ____Not the real rusty Groovy, baby I am completely aware that scooters are perhaps the least cool form of transportation on earth. But then again, I just totally don't care. :-) I'm sure I'll see Goldmember, but he's got to be running out of jokes by now, doesn't he? I mean, part 2 was great, but it was mainly the same set of jokes (with a few new ones). Anyone noticed that Mike Meyers is currently on 50% of all TV channels at any given moment, whether it's commercials, movies, retrospectives, etc etc? It's crazy. I don't think I've ever seen such a thorough saturation-marketing campaign. ____Not the real rusty Heh I also have two cars on the island, and one off. One of the island cars doesn't run at the moment (busted clutch linkage), the other runs, pretty much. They each cost a dollar. The one off-island is a 2002 Jeep Wrangler, which I love dearly, but hardly ever get to use. That actually means the scooter will be my second most expensive vehicle. :-) Of course, my primary means of transportation is, and has always been, a good pair of boots. ____Not the real rusty Spin control, stat! Well, that is one way to put it, I guess. Except that the island is (sadly) not at all private, my two island cars are an 87 Honda Accord and an equally old and crappy Toyota (and seriously each one cost a dollar). My wife uses the Jeep to commute to work, and I'm pretty sure a $500 1966 Vespa doesn't count as a "collection of exotic motorcycles." It is true that I rarely venture out amongst the "common people", but that's just because I don't really like people. :-) ____Not the real rusty Closer, yes... Except for the nepotism bit. And the bread-winning bit. Though my bread winning is erratic in provenance and always seems like it'll be gone next month, history does show that I consistently make more than she does. But otherwise, spot on. "Invested minimal assets in soon to be classic automobiles." I gotta get that into my public bio somehow. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes! Of course I am. It just takes time. ____Not the real rusty Well yeah NOW!! would be nice, but some things just can't happen right this instant, and yet are still worth doing. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yer welcome! (nt) ____Not the real rusty True It's a pain in the ass isn't it? I haven't though of any reason the plan as it stands now won't work. So it's about time to code it. And hopefully was can get the dead Scoop server back online too. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Hey hey Check out the diary watcher. Every name with new diaries should now have a "clear" link next to the "x new". Click that, and it'll mark you as all caught up. Let me know if anything seems to be not working. ____Not the real rusty All right, lazy ass :-) How many people are on your list? Yeesh! Ok, hang on. "Clear all" coming up. It's actually not very hard-- basically just a matter of tricking the thing into believing that every author has the "clear" flag set. ____Not the real rusty Ok Um, that should work, but I've already cleared all of mine, so I don't really know for sure. Someone test it. ____Not the real rusty How about How about that? It's closer to the list than the view options, thus perhaps minimizing the accidental clickage potential. If you think it's going to be a problem, I could add a checkbox too. It would be kind of a pain to add it to prefs. Maybe with a safety checkbox, and at the bottom of the list instead? ____Not the real rusty Um Actually, the servers are all synced to the MIT timeserver every day at 1AM. They're right on. Some of the timezones are not right, though, which is probably what you're running into. That's needed a rewrite for ages. My advice is, for the moment, find the timezone that best matches what time it actually is for you, and use that one. Though it may not in fact be your timezone, at least you'll know what time stuff was posted in your locale. ____Not the real rusty No problem What time zone is BST anyway? The way it ought to work is to dump the stupid time zones altogether, and just have you set a "what time is it right now?" selector for yourself. Thus we'd simply have a plain offset to adjust your time display, and not have to mess around with TZ at all. Timezones make no damn sense anyway. ____Not the real rusty Of course fucking not There is no anti-swearing policy at all. That would be fucking stupid. If you don't want children seeing certain words, you should control your fucking children, because most of us are adults here and protecting your goddamn kids is not my fucking job. There is however a "comments that do nothing but call someone a fucking moron are worthless" policy. Our author has run afoul of this, and chosen the easy route by deciding to blame the language. However, I doubt the rating would have been any different if he'd said, for example, "you worthless waste of flesh" which includes no "offensive" words at all. ____Not the real rusty Hehehe "Dick magnet." That makes me think of a put-upon insurance salesman. "Hello sir or madam. My name is Dick Magnet, and I'm calling to inquire... what? Do what with my mother? Oh dear, no I don't think she'd like that..." ____Not the real rusty It was just a fad. I'm done now. (NT) ____Not the real rusty Well That's odd. Check out the utterly creepy expression though. God, I am scary looking, huh? ____Not the real rusty Only 9 miles? On a bike? And it took you an hour? And a liter of water? Wuss. ;-) Course, strap a 92 pound backpack on me and I'd give it 50-50 whether I could even get up off the couch. ____Not the real rusty Backwards I think your general gist is right on, that we have a good thing here, but it would do more good if it could get out to a larger audience. I think that you have the progression backward though. The reason this works is because of the medium. If we just broadcast it on the radio, it would be the same old radio crap as far as all the radio listeners are concerned. I mean, maybe sometimes it would be more accurate, or better fact-checked, but really, from a passive audience point of view, we don't typically end up being either of those things. And yet subjectively, participating here feels like it's so much deeper than existing media go. I think that's exactly because of the participation angle. Our stories themselves aren't necessarily any better (and are often worse) than mass media. But the process of considering them, voting, and discussing them (i.e. the process the participant goes through) can provide another whole dimension of understanding. It's like 3-D media: when you flatten it down to 2-D like the normal mass media, it's not really any better. But add that third dimension (participation) and it's a whole different thing. I think what we really need to do is get more people into participating in their media, not bring the results of our participation to them via some 2-D medium. Hence "backwards" -- we need to bring them here, not the other way around. And incidentally, yes, I'm working on it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Certain kinds of people I didn't really mean my "3D" metaphor literally, as I'm not sure what the dimensions would map to. It was just supposed to convey a sense of added depth in the participatory aspect here. Just to clarify. :-) It takes a certain kind of person to bother with an online community, good luck getting them here. I think it takes a certain kind of person to bother with this community. I'm ok with that -- I think we have a certain set of conventions, expectations, interests, etc here that definitely don't appeal to everyone. And that's just as it should be. But I don't think the concept of participating in the media takes a certain kind of person. Everyone has stories to tell, and telling them is how people communicate. I don't want everyone here, at all. I just want to get the concept out to a larger audience. I guess we're kind of talking about two different things. You're talking about bringing K5's unique perspective to a wider audience, which would be fine and dandy, I guess, and if anyone wants to do it I wish them luck. :-) I'm talking about taking what K5 has shown can work on a small scale -- this collaborative medium itself -- and figuring out how to make it bigger and more generally expected. Both could definitely be done, I'm just more interested in the second, myself. ____Not the real rusty Almost the same I thought he was her estranged father, who she'd never met. They fell in love, but it was socially unacceptable. However, the only other person who knew who the man really was was her sister (her older sister, who remembered the father before he left). To keep their secret, they decided to kill the sister. Creepy as all of this might be, I can definitely see how it's not psychopathic thinking. The key is that the "psychopath" answer regards the murder of the sister as a relatively offhand thing, to bring about a result you're not even sure will happen. Like, of all the answers in these comments, it's the one that doesn't require some extraordinary circumstance or confluence of events to necessitate a murder. You could just as easily say "You meet your dream guy at a grocery store. The next week you go back to the same grocery store. Why?" The answer there is obvious, but to the psychopath, it's the exact same question. ____Not the real rusty Very smart Of course they never wanted to put billboards on gravestones. They just wanted to get some free publicity from credulous newspapers. And the Guardian was pleased to deliver. Suckers. ____Not the real rusty Also... Some shows don't cover their costs with ad revenue, and some make a huge profit. The ones with a greater profit margin will cover the ones with less. Then there's cross-promotion, merchandising, licensing, syndication, etc etc etc. Buffy may not be able to make enough in ad revenue on each show, but it's a merchandising gold mine. ____Not the real rusty Look two diaries down (en tea) ____Not the real rusty Hashes passed as arguments my %hash = ...some hash data...; my $result = &some_function(%hash); sub some_function { my %hash = @_; ...do something... return $result; } That's difficult? ____Not the real rusty In that case Then you'd want to use hashrefs instead of hashes. Hashrefs are so much easier to deal with anyway that there's hardly ever a reason not to use them. my $hash = { 'some_key' => 10 }; my $other_hash = { 'some_key' => 20 }; ($hash, $other_hash) = &some_function($hash, $other_hash); sub some_function { my $hash = shift; my $other_hash = shift; $hash->{some_key} = $other_hash->{some_key} + 12; return ($hash, $other_hash); } If you were to feel like torturing yourself, take a look at Scoop. There are almost no actual plain hashes anywhere. References are really the best way of dealing with virtually all of perl's non-scalar types. ____Not the real rusty Hee hee Sure, C is less typing. You can use all the time you saved writing C to wait for the compiler and mess with makefiles. ;-) ____Not the real rusty And then... ...you'll have lots of free time to cry when you need to do something more complicated and realize that Haskell doesn't have any good standard modules, and PHP falls apart when you try to make it do anything non-trivial, and no one knows Scheme because everyone who learned LISP has already died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dude! Not even kind of convincing. ;-) ____Not the real rusty The fucking what? At least he didn't fuck the fucking fuck out of her. That would be... well, just excessive, I think. ____Not the real rusty Silly There is no non-fucking fuck. All fuck is inherently fucking. That's why they call it "fuck". Grandma: Don't read this thread. Thank you. ____Not the real rusty Therefore... ...if you had said you were fucking the fucking fuck out of her, that would be, as I said above, excessive. However, I bet The Journal of Fuck Studies would sell pretty well. ____Not the real rusty Burns Cool running water is better than ice for burns. Ice mostly just traps heat in. Running water encourages heat transfer out of the skin, and it doesn't need to be particularly cold. ____Not the real rusty Too late I do believe Paddy's already doing that. Any other ideas? :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! Actually, I read it as "selflessly lavish attention on fans, while not pursuing the 'sales at any cost' philosophy of Big Publishing." I.e. I thought it was a compliment of sorts. I guess I can see how it could be read otherwise. ____Not the real rusty Play Ha! He looks just like Moby. ____Not the real rusty Learn to swim Some say a comet will fall from the sky followed by meteor showers and tidal waves followed by fault lines that cannot sit still followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits. And some say the end is near Sme say we'll see armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will cause I sure could use a vacation from this Silly shit... stupid shit... One great big festering neon distraction, I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied. Learn to swim. --Tool, Aenema I had the penultimate two lines as my email sig for several years. And I always wanted to use "followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits" but I felt it would be misinterpreted to mean K5ers, and that's not what it was supposed to mean, but I doubt it would be clear. So I never used it. Tool is indeed the correct music for this diary. I have verified it scientifically. While we're posting lyrics... Every time I see your face I think of things unpure unchaste I want to fuck you like a dog I'll take you home and make you like it Everything you ever wanted Everything you ever thought of is Everything I'll do to you I'll fuck you and your minions too --Liz Phair, "Flower", dedicated to "Rock Hard" Dick Cheney Don't commit your book to any permanent irrevocable medium yet! I have a raft of fixes on the way for you tonight. I've gone all the way through once, I'm just re-reading a gap of a few dozen pages where I didn't have my evil editorial pen handy. Stand by. ____Not the real rusty Happily Unless I miss my guess, I suspect your wish will be granted. And everyone will be happy to hear that I've discovered several pages with no errors whatsoever! And some of them aren't the blank pages between sections! If what you get is relatively free of typos and errors, you'll all have my ass to thank. That's all I'm saying. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yup My ass edits, and my right knee predicts the weather. I am large, I contain multitudes! ____Not the real rusty Your nefarious crime wave... ...has crashed on the shores of JUSTICE! ____Not the real rusty 188.44% Nerd I am 188.44% nerd. I think that means that there is actually another me, 88.44% the size of me, which follows me around in thick glasses and gets a lot of wedgies. Suffice it to say, I didn't know anyone could even be such a nerd. I beat all their celebrities by a wide margin. In other news, I'm running again, after a too-long hiatus of a couple weeks, which included a lot of travel and social gatherings and not enough sweaty alone time (no, not in that way, you perv). I've lost a lot of time in my five-miles, but other than that, it's going fine. Running is good. I'm reading johnny's new book, which is as-yet unreleased. I feel all behind-the-scenes and stuff. The book utterly rocks, I think, but may deeply perplex fans of Acts of the Apostles. It's a whole different beast, but I think better in the way that Infinite Jest is better than Michael Crighton's Airframe. If you like John's diary here, you'll like the new book a whole lot. Even though it hasn't, so far, mentioned kapusta at all. If you liked Acts and are puzzled and nonplussed by the diary, you may want to steer clear. I will have a much more complete review to post in a day or so. I have become a cat person. We're taking care of my wife's parents dog, and while it's very cute and all, we both find it unbelievably annoying. It follows us around all the time, needs constant supervision, has to be accompanied to excrete (like a damn four year old), and smells awful. Dogs just have no dignity at all. They can't keep themselves clean and are totally dependent. Its very neediness is repellent, and then I look into its big cute eyes staring at me, and feel a crushing wave of guilt for loathing the helplessness that it has no cotrol over, and then close behind follows even more loathing, triggered by this guilt that I don't want. Plus you can't leave dogs alone for even twelve hours, never mind the several days that cats will be perfectly fine for. I suppose this doesn't bode well for any hopes of children in the near future, does it. Loooook into the eyes... "Honey! It's making noise! Come fix it!" :-) ____Not the real rusty D'oh The DiD section. I really have to fix that. I'm sorry for leaving your articles in limbo for so long. :-( ____Not the real rusty Me too I was absolutely blown away by IJ. It still stands as perhaps my all-time favorite book ever, and for several totally independent reasons. First are the characters. They're really full, and totally human. They have inconsistencies, they change and grow, they learn things or fuck up and fail to learn things. They live. Second are the (several) storylines. Ok, there are a few bits with the two secret agents that I could frankly do without. I think "The Entertainment" storyline could have used a little trimming. But the rest of them are all great stories by themselves, and woven together near-seamlessly into a whole that gets at a much bigger truth than the sum of its parts. Third is the writing itself. While some people find it offputting, I guess I have more tolerance for pure showyness in writing. All characterization and story aside, the writing itself is a perfect 10.0 Olympic gymnastic routine. If that was all there was, I wouldn't be so impressed. But creating a dozen living characters, telling several overlapping stories perfectly, and writing like that on top of it all? It's like watching someone run a 3:30 mile while balancing the national budget and spinning plates on their head all at once. It's jaw-dropping. I agree with you about opinions of fiction, I just thought I'd share mine, and the reasons I hold it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Your adjusted score With your adjusted user-agent nerdiness factor, your nerd score cannot be computed without fundamentally warping space-time in its immediate vicinity. Suffice it to say, it's big. ____Not the real rusty Ahoy! I now call this meeting of the BSO188.44PNS (Bay State Origins 188.44 Percent Nerd Society) to order. And yes, only someone who is just a whisker shy of 2X nerd would come up with such a horrible acronym. :-) ____Not the real rusty unfair It is unfair to consider a dog loathsome and repugnant. I know, I know. Actually, he seems to have learned the rules of the house, and is a lot better now. I don't have to watch him constantly to keep him from going outside, and he's not trying to get into my lap all the time. He still smells bad though. ____Not the real rusty Hahaha Hey, he can smell any way he likes, elsewhere. I'm just not real pleased about inviting him to stink up my house. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! Ok, I guess we can all just throw out the results then, as it is clearly broken. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ratings In other news, expect P2P networks with collaborative file rating and checksumming features RSN. I hope Overpeer gets while the getting's good, because they've carved out a niche that won't last long. It's interesting to see a serious economic battle taking place in the exact same space that collaborative media has been exploring for the last several years. I am fascinated to see how this all turns out. :-) ____Not the real rusty I thought ...that if the post wasn't so clearly gayed-up, the sarcasm probably would've come through gayer. ____Not the real rusty Hundreds of troll accounts I have to say, having taken a good look at the accounts very recently, I don't think that's happening. Really, it's basically just one knucklehead, with intermittent help by one or two others. I think communities like this are actually a lot less fragile than they seem. I know the system here can survive far more energetic attacks than we're seeing now, because we've had them (with Scoop much less resistant, as well) and survived fine. Yeah, people troll. It's a facet of human communication. It's never going to be engineered away, so really it's better to just recognize it and ignore (or play with!) it than to let it worry you. ____Not the real rusty Huh At the risk of "feeding the trolls" some more, what are you talking about? ____Not the real rusty Ha! [nt] ____Not the real rusty Hey We're apparently A-OK about eating dogs though. I find the definitions of the limits here fascinating. :-) ____Not the real rusty Word scan That box grabs all the links you actually include, but it also scans for words that may make for relevant links as well. Slashdot and Kuro5hin are two of them, and both words appear in the text. There aren't very many, because to be honest, I've been really too lazy to add more. That's probably why it seems so random and out of the blue. It could be a nifty feature if I ever fed it a good number of word/link pairs to use. ____Not the real rusty I am in fact a noser It's odd. Way back in the day, on Compuserve CB and later telnet havens like Hotel California, I was a hard-core anti-noser. The prevailing smiley was definitely the :) noseless variety. On the web, however, it seem that the nose has slowly taken over, and now seems to be entrenched as the smiley of choice. And in time, I came to see the wisdom of this, since on the web, fonts tend to be much smaller and less clearly defined than they were back in the console-only days, so a nose seems to help give definition and visibility to the smiley that the noseless variety lacks. Today, I am a confirmed noser, because I think on the web, noses are necessary. :-) ____Not the real rusty Phew Good thing he's never counted the stupid FONT tags! Was that my out-loud voice? ____Not the real rusty Well It seems like right now, pedophilia discussion falls into only two camps: Apologists and Executioners. That is, either you're defending pedophilia as a natural and healthy instinct, or you're advocating they all be locked away forever or executed. I'd suggest that maybe one thing that needs to change is that people need to recognize when the problem is mental illness, and encourage people to get treatment. Another worthwhile change might be clearing up the differences between "borderline" things like being attracted to 14 year olds (which, for huge parts of human history was perfectly normal and considered proper and correct) and being driven to molest infants and small children. There is, IMO, an enormous difference between the two. They are both, at this point in time, socially undesirable behaviors, but to probably abuse the language of psychology, one seems sociopathic and one neurotic. That is, molesting infants seems to me, about equivalent (in terms of psychological damage) to whatever makes people rapists, while being attracted to children we'd generally consider way too young for you seems more like a very mistargeted sexual drive, and probably stems more from insecurity than from any real psychosis. That is, we seem to want to see it as a totally black and white thing, which, I think, is part of the problem. Half the pedophilia discussions I see are between two people operating with very different assumptions of what it even is that they're talking about. Makes it kinda hard to get any forward progress going. ____Not the real rusty Actually No, it isn't deleted, just hidden from everyone but admins and the author. They're kept, now, because it's useful for the author to be able to go back and see it. But originally, it was just because I hate to see anything deleted. ____Not the real rusty Well I always considered -1 the "don't care" vote. I mean, 0 always meant "abstain", which is why it's really better that it not be marked "don't care". I suggest everyone recalibrate their mental process to consider -1 the new "don't care". We'll all be much better off. If you don't care about a story, you should be voting against it. ____Not the real rusty I would say... ..."encourage" better writing, or perhaps "help enable" it. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to guarantee anything. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's up to you Like everything, it's up to you. No reason you can't think something is a good article and belongs here, even though the subject doesn't interest you. By "don't care" I mean "don't care if this one lives or dies." If you think it's a good article, than you already do care in some way. Maybe that wasn't clear. Personally, I find myself interested in the subject of a good article, no matter whether I ever have been before or not. That's what good articles do, IMO. Like the article on Go; I could totally give a rat's ass about Go, and still don't really expect I'll ever play it much, but that article was fascinating. ____Not the real rusty Hm When I start to feel like that, I generally go read MeFi and peoples weblogs more heavily for a week or so, and mainly skim the diaries, and non front-page stuff on K5 for short articles. It happens now and then, just taking a break is a really good way to avoid becoming burned out. ____Not the real rusty No no! You should be more arrogant! The whole thing depends on everyone registering their vote as if you were the only person in the world that matters. Like, if you were the only person voting, your votes should indicate your ideal site. If you don't care either way, you totally should be voting -1, and if there are enough people that like it, they'll just overrule you. I really only use the 0 vote, personally, when I can't decide whether I want to vote for something or not, after having looked at it a few times and read all the comments, and I just want to see what the score is. I know normally arrogance is a flaw, but in this particular case, it's a virtue. It's an opportunity to exercise your inner selfish child. Take advantage of it. ____Not the real rusty Yes I am also firmly in favor of random discussions of things that interest us, and well-written historical or informative background. It makes us all smarter. Yay for smarter people! ____Not the real rusty the mailing list is your friend The scoop-help mailing list is pretty good about answering questions. Though sometimes everyone ignores it all at once. But at the very least, it's subscribed to by most of the active scoop users, and all the developers. Also, IRC channel #scoop on irc.slashnet.org is where all of us hang out and keep in touch and coordinate development and stuff. Though it's not always discussion about Scoop, you'll usually find someone there who can help. ____Not the real rusty Area Man Not Totally Convinced "I don't know," says area resident James Cantino (32), "I've thought about it a lot, and I can definitely see the arguments on both sides, but I just haven't really made up my mind yet." Just one of a growing number of Americans who are not completely sure how they feel, Mr. Cantino spoke frankly about the difficult process that brought him to his current state of indecisiveness. "I'd turn on the TV, and there's Dan Rather explaining how it's clearly one way. And I'd think, 'That makes a lot of sense.' But then I'd go online and see on cnn.com how it's probably not that way at all, and the likelihood is that the exact opposite is true, and it's hard to argue with that either. I just don't really know how I feel anymore." In the wake of 9/11, it seems more and more Americans, both here and across the country, are finding themselves in the same quandary. A recent CNN/Gallup poll has a staggering 76% of respondents checking off "Not sure/No opinion." And Neville Crane of the Washington, DC based Cato Institute says this is a growing trend. "It seems that this issue in particular is one of the least well understood," he said. "It's almost a case of too much information. People hear so many views from both sides that they just don't know what to believe." Cantino believes there may be other reasons, however. "It seems like my parents were always so sure about it," he explained. "Maybe it's a generational thing, I don't know. They were raised in a different time. For me, it doesn't seem nearly so cut and dried." Ronald Embers, a neighbor and friend of Cartwright, sees it differently. "Oh, Jim doesn't know what he thinks because he's never bothered to learn any of the facts. Anyone who's done even the most rudimentary research could tell you exactly what the deal is. I mean, it's just blazingly obvious, if you've paid attention to the issue at all." Apathy, or a deeper problem? Neville Crane puts it succintly: "It could just be apathy, it could be a more systemic problem. There are a lot of ways to explain the lack of consensus, and I'm not sure there's general agreement yet on which is the true cause." Heh No, this just popped into my head in the shower, pre-Onionized, for some reason. I haven't really decided what it means yet. ____Not the real rusty I know that... ...I, for one, am less average than most. ____Not the real rusty Nah First of all, I'm not at all obsessed with Mr. Krout, nor do I hate him or have any kind of enmity or bad feeling. I simply think he's trying to waste a lot of people's time here by attempting to crapflood and annoy. He had lots of time and many chances with the original "E r i c" account, and was consistently annoying. Eventually, the account gained a well-known kind of status. This is what I mean by "star" trolls. Basically, when someone becomes well known for being an ass, more people will inevitably follow in their footsteps. My policy has always been, if you clearly have no other intentions than that, then you can and will simply lose that account. Like I said in the email, he's not "banned" in any way, and already has several other accounts (which, I'll note, also make frequent appearances on the hidden comments list). If he really wants to contribute, he can do it under any available name of his choosing. But E r i c is retired. That's all. The goal isn't to keep him out of the site. It's just to remove the "fame" which is his main motivation for all this silliness. And here I am replying again. Oh well. Now I hope we all have more interesting things to talk about than the desparate flailings of an attention-starved college student in the future. :-) ____Not the real rusty Reputation as the reputation travels with it That's exactly it. The only thing of "value" that you can have here is your reputation, as it has to be built up with time and effort, and can't be duplicated or transported between accounts. That's why the worst punishment for someone like Eric is losing his well-known account, and the reputation that it has. Which is why it's the only punishment I ever bother to use. I mean, even right here, we're all talking about "E r i c", not "Ivy League Troll". Why wasn't your first instinct to point out that he's obviously got at least one perfectly good working account right now? Because reputation is non-portable. The loss of it is completely the point. ____Not the real rusty Just for you Since Mr. I.L. Troll only saw fit to excerpt my last message, here's the entire exchange: ------------- Subject: Sir Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 21:35:04 -0400 (EDT) From: Eric <xxxxxx@bucknell.edu> To: <rusty@kuro5hin.org> Please reinstate all normal account privileges for the user "E r i c". If necessary, I will donate cat food. - Eric -------------- Subject: Re: Sir Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 23:33:18 -0400 From: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> To: Eric <xxxxxx@bucknell.edu> Eric wrote: > > Please reinstate all normal account privileges for the user "E r i c". If > necessary, I will donate cat food. > > - Eric Why on earth would I do that? You've done nothing but annoy everyone. --R -- Rusty Foster :: rusty@kuro5hin.org :: http://www.kuro5hin.org Advertise smarter: http://www.kuro5hin.org/submitad You're one to talk, captain Bouncy McForward. --Nick Moffitt -------------- Subject: Re: Sir Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 03:16:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Eric <xxxxxx@bucknell.edu> To: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> Perhaps a sincere apology from me and some forgiveness on your part and a willingness to turn the other cheek. Of course, it's your call, but I don't see how it could affect you or the site in a negative way. Thank you. - Eric -------------- Subject: Re: Sir Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 03:43:05 -0400 From: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> To: Eric <xxxxxx@bucknell.edu> Eric wrote: > > Perhaps a sincere apology from me and some forgiveness on your part and a > willingness to turn the other cheek. > > Of course, it's your call, but I don't see how it could affect you or the > site in a negative way. Sincere apologies are worthless. You haven't acted any differently with any of your new accounts, so there's no evidence you ever would. Besides which, this is all irrelevant. E r i c was annoying and persistent enough to become well known. I'm afraid that's the kiss of death, as a well known annoyance is a banned annoyance. We don't need "star" trolls. So E r i c will not ever be back. Like anyone, if you actually do intend to turn over a new leaf and contribute to the community, you're welcome to start fresh with a new name. --R -------------- Subject: Re: Sir Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 03:46:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Eric <xxxxxx@bucknell.edu> To: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> What are you afraid of? Yes, I'm smarter than you, but I assure you that I won't inflict any financial or emotional damage to you personally. - Eric -------------- And there you have it. ____Not the real rusty Well I don't know about "groveling". I thought he maintained his dignity fairly well. ____Not the real rusty Two words I do believe there are two words in this story that are a dead giveaway, but most people probably won't notice them. I'm off to Google to see if I'm right. :-) ____Not the real rusty D'oh I was half-right. That is, I was right about the phrase and what it would indicate, but wrong about the author it pointed to. Oh well. Now that I know, I recall having read this story before in an anthology. I knew it seemed familiar somehow. ____Not the real rusty "down cellar" I knew I had read it before, in some anthology or other, and I used to be a big Stephen King fanatic, so I went hunting for a nice New Englandy phrase to confirm my suspicion. Sure enough, there's "down cellar" which means that your author is pretty much definitely a New Englander. They just don't say that anywhere else. Had I read more closely, I may have paid more attention to "she allayed her fears," which doesn't sound Kingy at all (and does sound Lovecraftian), and I also didn't realize Lovecraft was from Providence, Rhode Island. So there you have it. Right clue, wrong conclusion. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Not bad, but I think you're lacking in vitriol. Please see Slashdot, where the art of Taco mockery is light years ahead of your efforts here. ____Not the real rusty Successfully? I wouldn't say my little comment makes it "successful." I was hardly upset, and did think that if he was going to try, he could at least learn the history and make a little bit of an effort. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah well You're probably right. Though getting my attention is no big accomplishment. Hell, you just did it twice. ;-) But I'll be sure to ignore in the future. ____Not the real rusty Ack! Don't go to Jones Landing. That place blows. Some charitable soul ought to burn it down. If you're going to take the ride, at least go to Happy Cooking. It's actually a restaurant worth eating at. ____Not the real rusty From Happy Cooking? Yes, absolutely. If you go up the hill from the ferry and turn left, it's just down the street, overlooking the harbor. For my money, it has a better view than that Jones Landing hellhole. And it also features edible food. Which is a plus. ____Not the real rusty Moving No, our first house was only a winter rental, but we moved in January. We have this place until next June at least. ____Not the real rusty Spiders and Mice and Thora Birch and Salmon This is all going to tie together. No, seriously, it is. It was my birthday today. Well, yesterday, now. The eleventh, anyway. It is traditional in our family that on your birthday you get a special birthday dinner with all of your favorite things, so I had a birthday dinner of steamers and crab and artichokes. Except there weren't any crabs so we got boring old lobster instead (ah, to live in Maine) and the artichokes are clearly not in season, so they weren't very good. Seriously, though, the lobster made up for the lack of crabs by being really unusually good. I know lobster, and this was some extra-good lobster. I named them Larry, Louie, and Lefty (Lefty was missing a claw). As it turned out, Louie was a Louise, but no matter. Next time we'll pick androgynous names, because unless they're actually carrying eggs (in which case they'd be illegal to sell, ever, and you would be by law shot on sight for trying in Maine) absolutely no one can sex a lobster without cutting it open. It's a wonder they ever mate at all. I can't figure out how they can tell each other apart. They're like Terry Pratchett dwarfs. It occurs to me that "absolutely no one can sex a lobster without cutting it open" would probably make a good sig. So then my other present was to actually get to watch a movie with my wife. We always have unwatched DVDs in the house, and I always want to watch them, and she always doesn't want to. It's like she regards watching a movie as a strenuous thing that she has to gear up for, which is absurd because she always falls asleep anyway, whether she wanted to watch the movie or not. And when she doesn't want to watch a movie and we watch TV instead, she falls asleep during that too. I can't fathom what bloody difference it makes what's playing on the television she can't see through her eyelids, but I just nod and smile. We watched Ghost World with the always enjoyable Steve Buscemi, and my new biggest movie crush Thora Birch who is unbearably cute. And actually quite a good actress. She made the gravelly-voiced Scarlett Johansson look like a Community Players amateur, which was actually the only real low point of the movie. Re-cast proto-norm best friend Rebecca and it would have been quite close to perfect. But either way, an excellent movie. My wife, to my utter shock and surprise, fell asleep, which is a shame, because I think she'd have liked the movie too. So I tucked her in, and came back to check email and whatnot. I got a reply from my friend Erin, who markets wild salmon in Alaska, informing me that Alaskan salmon is indeed all wild as they have outlawed salmon farming there. So the salmon we had last night, which was marked "Alaskan Salmon" was either a blatant lie on the part of Hannaford's, which I doubt, or a truly spectacular bargain-of-the-century deal. It was $2.99 a pound. $2.99! That's cheap for crappy atlantic farmed salmon. It was pretty good, though we made a vinaigrette sauce for it with plums that neither of us cared for very much. Erin previously sent me a long pre-prepared diatribe about the conditions of factory salmon-farming which I found very disturbing. Which is odd because, in a nutshell, it has the same problems as factory cattle farming or poultry farming. I.e. packed conditions, poor diet, antibiotics up the wazoo, environmental damage, and disastrous effects on what used to be a sustainable family business. What's odd about my finding it disturbing is that it really made me want to not buy farmed salmon, while the very same facts don't really change my behavior either way about beef or poultry. Most likely I can simply relate to environmental damage to the ocean in a way that I can't to the prairie. It's something I'm still not real clear on in my own head though, so further thought will be necessary. As I was thanking Erin for this tidbit, I heard a loud flapping noise from the direction of the window in front of my desk. I peered over the desk to find a huge dragonfly partly entangled in a spider web in the corner of the window, with a tiny spider clinging precariously to it, looking like a midget trying to ride an extremely angry llama. If the llama had wings, of course, and the midget had eight legs, and all of it was about 1/25th scale. It looked like the spider was losing. Later on, I noticed that the spider had indeed lost, and the dragonfly was now bashing itself around my office and occasionally bonking me in the head. This was not a small dragonfly, we're talking three inches wingspan. It finally crawled inside my printer, which I decided was not a good thing for the future of my fine consumer hardware. So when it crawled back to striking range, I squished it (er, "beat it to death" would probably be more accurate. It was a very large insect) with a book. Just after this I heard a scratching noise which was difficult to localize. It sounded like it was coming from the wall in the corner in front of me, and was almost certainly feline in origin, but there was nothing there. It went away for a while, then came back louder. I got up and turned around, and realized that the location I was hearing was the result of an echo, as it was in fact coming from the vicinity of the little entryway inside the back door. I walked around the corner to investigate, and found that my cat had managed to corner the most pathetically tiny mouse I've ever seen. I opened the back door to at least provide the mouse a fighting chance at a good escape route, and left them alone to work it out amongst themselves. A few emails later a "mrrrup!" behind me alerted me to the mouse, very dead on the floor of my office, and my cat sitting behind it looking at me. I'm not sure if he was giving me a "Look what I caught!" look, or a "Make it run around and play again!" look, or a "Cook this!" look, but he was giving me a look, in any case. He was raised completely indoors for his first three years, has no claws, and, as far as we know, no hunting training. So I regard this, his first confirmed mouse kill, as a rather fine achievement. It was a puny mouse, but I'm proud of him. With much ceremony and decorum, I chucked the mouse into the neighbor's yard, and congratulated the cat warmly. And so life continues on Godforsaken Island. The other cat The other cat is much more of a hunter, and her I'm not so proud of. Our cat presents us with his kill. She hides them under our bed, and eats them late at night. Crunch... crunch... I fished another one out just last night. ____Not the real rusty Give 'em hell! [NT] ____Not the real rusty Ha! That's a great image. "You kill it!" "I can't kill it, you kill it!" "Meow!" :-) The last time this cat even found a mouse he chased it into the kitchen while I was cooking dinner, so I beat it to death with a broom in approved Tom & Jerry fashion. I have no such scruples -- there are plenty of mice (and spiders, and moths, and mosquitos, and ants, and so on) in the world, so my killing the ones who stray into my home is not about to make a dent in their population. I still haven't actually gone out in town yet, since the last time we failed to arrange to meet. I've been in a few times for supplies, and passed through on the way elsewhere. I'll try to actually make it to happy hour next week -- I think it's usually Wednesday or Thursday. I'll let you know. ____Not the real rusty Wow Clearly cat declawing is down there at the bottom, along with with drugs and abortion, in the advocacy literature "facts per millon words ratio." I just did a [Google search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cat+declawing ], and virtually every site espouses the same party line. So, the advocates tell me that by declawing my cat I have crippled him mentally and physically and turned him into a virtual monster of unchecked agression, not to mention robbed him of the ability to walk, jump, hunt, or clean himself. I am unable to explain why my cat is friendly, clean, outgoing, playful, and clearly able to hunt. How he is so charming that he has won over at least two adamantly cat-hating friends of ours. I must be imagining it. The other cat, the one we inherited, has her claws. She is well behaved, in general, but tends to be very furtive, hides from people (it took her a long time to come to trust us), and while she can be very sweet, is not what you'd call "friendly." While it may or may not be a good idea to declaw cats, and I'm not saying I'd do it again to future cats, it certainly appears to me that like most pet "problems", the owners and their care have such a staggeringly larger effect on the animal than the actual declawing, that you'd be much better off making people take a pet-care test, instead of endlessly repeating the same lines about one or another specific action. My point, to be totally clear, is not that declawing is good or bad, but that most of the assertions by anti-declawing advocates appear to be behaviors that easily and frequently result from poor care, and clearly are not a foregone conclusion from declawing. That kind of advocacy irks the hell out of me. ____Not the real rusty Criminy What happened to my link? ____Not the real rusty Oops You're right. I should use preview. ____Not the real rusty Not really a response to you So, while I did not originally say a word about the psychological effects of declawing Sorry, I knew it would seem this way. My little mini-rant wasn't really even a response to you, more a response to the plethora of propaganda lit out there online about this. He may be harboring a dark Stephen King psycho flip side, but if so, he's never shown it. Unless you count ruthlessly knocking over any cup full of liquid left anywhere in the house except the kitchen counter. :-) Oh, the other thing I forgot to mention was that he got his claws out when he was just barely three months old. I have great doubt that he remembers, even dimly, ever having had claws at all. I can certainly see it being much more traumatic for an adult cat, and I wouldn't do it to a cat older than five months without a really good reason. ____Not the real rusty That's a bad thing too? It's bad to let them outside too? But cats love to go outside. They get much more exercise and don't get fat and bored. Our cat goes outside, now that we have a nice big yard he can play safely in, and he's lost a lot of weight and is generally a lot happier. Oh, if he only knew how badly we treat him, I'm sure he wouldn't be so sweet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well... My options were to kill it, or to leave it to die inside my printer where it wasn't easy to get to. Besides, dragonflies aren't pretty unless they have the sunlight thin-film thing going on. Ever seen a dragonfly indoors? They're ugly little gray bastards. ____Not the real rusty Kill or be killed Here on the island, nature doesn't screw around. It's kill or be killed. Incidentally, this was a pretty average night. Animal drama is apparently just part of life here, in a way it really hans't been in places I've lived before. ____Not the real rusty Not really :-) In fact, it seems this morning my wife has forgotten to feed him, and he was frantic when I woke up. I think he's got a long way to go before he's up for feeding himself. The little pig. ____Not the real rusty Read it I read it before when you (or someone) pointed it out. It was fascinating. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh It really was nothing personal at all. You just happened to be Mr. Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time. I apologize for going off on your article like that, it really wasn't seemly. I should've done it in a diary or something. On the other hand, it wasn't much of an article (the linked one) to begin with. Which I suppose would have been a good criticism if I'd made it at the time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cola Does anyone else just dislike sugar-carbonated beverages in general? I don't drink any of them. I think the only bottled (non-alcoholic) beverage that I actually buy on purpose is Arizona's ginseng and honey green tea. That's some good stuff. Otherwise, water and homemade iced tea is about all I drink. The whole carbonated beverage unverse could collapse and I'd be none the wiser. ____Not the real rusty Missing a key point The word "peers". What he most likely means is "99% of the other people here in 'the Home'". ____Not the real rusty Blackouts vs. Outages The Nando article is sketchy on what the deal is, but usually "blackout" and "outage" are different things. At least in California, a blackout was the purposeful shutting off of part of the power grid because demand exceeded supply. In Boston, is sounds like they're just having bad luck with equipment failing. The article using the word "blackout" and citing hgh summer demand makes me think it's a supply problem, but then they cite decrepit infrastructure too, so who knows. Reading the Nando article again they've also got that quote about repairs being made slowly. So perhaps it is the same as the Boston situation. ____Not the real rusty Uncertainty Uncertainty, I'm afraid, has nothing to do with randomness. I'm told that Part three of Matt's Particle Physics Series should be along shortly, which ought to help clear this up. I hope. ____Not the real rusty Observation Just because you (or, you know, anyone) can't predict it doesn't necessarily make it random. There are lots of things that are deterministic but unpredictable. ____Not the real rusty Phone features The problem isn't that people don't want them, it's that pesky little "monopoly network" thing. Comparing the phone system to the internet is a fascinating demonstration of the difference between "centralized, smart network" (phone) and "decentralized dumb network" (net). Your phone has fuck-all for features because the phone company likes it that way, and that's it. I'll be glad when telephony moves completely online. What a great raft of features we'll have then, when phones are just programmable computing devices! :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, sort of That is probably actually true, but the root of the problem is crack-addled network design that makes it so stupidly expensive to implement some simple feature. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cuba? The Dominican Republic? Oh, that was rhetorical, wasn't it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Good luck No really, good luck. "My minions will be difficult to fish out" indeed. Except that all he has to do is look at the rating for any of his comments. Ya knucklehead. ____Not the real rusty Curses I didn't forsee the negative economic impact of my off-the-cuff remark. I realize now that I am to blame for the continued slide of America into desperate poverty and decline. I apologize. And I always take sides against so-called "modstorming" because it's silly. So he gave you a zero. Get over it. Or don't. It really doesn't matter, because cleaning up after modstorms is so freaking easy. Ya knucklehead. ;-) (Oh shit! There goes the Dow another 10 points.) ____Not the real rusty Mmmm I look forward to it, you sexy bitch! ;-) (Ahem. sorry, I just caught Austin Powers II on TV last night. It's affected me.) ____Not the real rusty I can vouch For at least points two and three. And for the fact that anyone blessed with input from the grue would be a complete tool to ignore it. "Hooked on fluffy worked for me!" ;-) ____Not the real rusty Hey I still can't get computer lettering to look at all good. Actually, that example looks pretty good. It might just be a matter of finding the right font. I think I like that better than either hand-lettering or the old computer lettering. ____Not the real rusty Fuck Private Beaches Private beaches are a scourge and an abomination. Triton, Neptune, the lord of the oceans himself ought to reach a wave up and swat down the mansion of any asshole who thinks they could possibly own a beach. Beaches are the skin of continents. They move, they crawl around, they are living things. And they're much, much bigger and stronger than any jerk with a million bucks to waste. This, fortunately, seems to be the opinion widely shared on my island. Perhaps it's because we don't have much actual beach (i.e. "expanse of sand bordered on one side by an ocean and on the other by rich jackasses from away"), but for whatever reason, beaches are universally seen as common property. There's a guy from Texas who owns a house up here, across a spur of dirt road from a stretch of beach. It seems he actually owns the land between the dirt road and the beach proper (though I stress the fact that his house is on the other side of the dirt road, the non-beach side) and this land that he owns happens to contain a set of concrete steps which have been generally used, for time immemorial, to get down the the beach. This year, he decided that those steps were on his land and by God and the lone star of Texas warn't no one else going to use them but him. So he put up a bit of fence, and a gate. The first gate lasted a few days. The second gate significantly less. The last time I was down there, there was a bit of fence and a very scarred post on either side of the still ungated steps. I wonder how long he'll keep trying? ____Not the real rusty New user message Welcome, then. You bastard fuckhead son of a bitch motherfucking goddamn screw-faced dickbreath know-it-all liberal pinko communist conservative reagan-bush coscksucking godamn christian mental fucking pagan hippie anarchist pottymouth! Now that should be in the new user email. Along with "And enable cookies, you knucklehead!" :-) By the way, my only consistent argument is "Everything sucks, sometimes." Does that fall into a general "things we hate"? ____Not the real rusty I agree. See that? Productive debate! I love the internet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Software changes I think the problme is the story ID no longer conforms to the format Scoop expects now. That story originally lived in Slash 0.3, and we've changed the sid format a little, which didn't matter until we also tweaked how scoop interprets URLs. You can still post to it, but it would probably require constructing a post URL manually. ____Not the real rusty Away too long Also, rusty still posts here quite regularly! He hasn't gone CmdrTaco on us just yet. :) I have, sadly, been kind of half-here for a while. Between a trip to Canada, a blessedly wonderful fourth of July long weekend, and spending most of my time doing business crap, I have not had much time or energy to actually enjoy the site in the last month or so. Things are returning to normal though, so I hope to be able to dispel this unfortunate impression. :-) Hey, maybe I'll have time to actually write a frigging article that isn't about K5. Stranger things have happened. ____Not the real rusty Used to talk!? Oh my. I've been half-around for too long. :-( Yep, back in the day it was pretty much my personal 'blog. Only there wasn't really such a thing then, or at least I hadn't heard of them yet. I also didn't drivel into it every other hour, but tended to write something every couple days. But fluffy is old skool. That's for sure. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cars have been around forever Back then we just called them "horses". Ok, it doesn't map perfectly (or even, really "very well") but hopefully you get the idea. :-) What I meant was no one used the word "blog," though I think it had actually been coined by then. You had to be a l33t design geek to know about it though. Slashdot was a "weblog", because weblog didn't mean "personal drivel," it meant "log of the web." Who'da thought? Well anyway, this is all just pointless yammering, so I'll stop now. :-) ____Not the real rusty Uncle Sam Fronted Me $1.02 I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened and read it. It said they were... ...an OK bunch, actually. Seems we underpaid by $1.00, and with penalty and late fees we owed them $1.02. But they waved it off, saying the bureaucratic* version of "Pish posh old man! I wouldn't hear of it! No, keep your filthy lucre in the old change purse. Supply-side economics and all that. Jolly good!" Next time I see Uncle Sam, I owe him a beer. -- * In fourth grade I got knocked out of a spelling bee on the word "bureau", and to this day I need spellcheck to spell it or any derivative thereof correctly. I'm positive they knew I would win a fair spelling bee, so they rigged it. It was like "Billy, spell 'dog'. Now Jamie, spell 'tree'. Now Rusty, spell 'bureau' you chump." I was robbed. It was payola, I tell you. Payola. About a brother like me or myself because they never did! I wasn't with it but just that very minute it occurred to me, the suckas have... ____Not the real rusty I didn't know that Actually, I'm not very hip. I'm Old Skool, yo. And I'm looking for that fence. ____Not the real rusty Lots of Stuff Ok, this is gonna be long. Let me just go make some more coffee first. Ah, much better. Inside: We have a lawyer, Quebec City rules, and probably more. Vacation Inadvertently following a few people's advice, I got a bit of a break. Thursday we drove up to Montreal on a long-planned vacation. Canada is a great place to vacation right now, since we can drive there, and the US dollar is strong, so it's cheap. We spent two nights in Montreal then two in Quebec city. In retrospect, we wish we'd just gone to Quebec. Montreal is ok, but generally like other cities we've lived in already. We couldn't think of any good reason to go there instead of, say, DC where we know people and know the city already. Quebec City on the other hand absolutely rules. If you've never been there before, drop everything and go right now. Why are you still reading? I said now! Ok, now that you've been and come back, you will understand when I say that it may be the coolest city I've ever been to. Old Quebec is a walled city (the only one north of Mexico) built high above the banks of the St. Lawrence river (Fleuve St. Laurent, as they say en Quebec). The encircling wall is still there, though Quebec City proper has spread quite a bit beyond it. Nevertheless, inside the walls it feels like Europe, what with the assorted boulangeries and patisseries, some truly excellent crepe places, and lots of windy narrow cobbled streets. The centerpiece of the city is the Chateau Frontenac hotel, which towers huge and improbable over the old city, looking for all the world like something out of a Mervyn Peake novel. A comprehensive travel report is beyond the scope of this diary, but suffice it to say that it was relaxing in the way short vacations often are, where you come home much more exhausted than you left, but in a different way that makes it a lot easier to carry on the normal business of life afterward. It was a good thing to do right now. The Collaborative Media Foundation The nonprofit plans took a step forward today with the first lawyer meeting. An excellent lawyer who specializes in nonprofit law here in Portland is now on retainer, and foresees no major impediments to The Plan. It looks like what will happen is we'll found a new organization (tentatively called the Collaborative Media Foundation), which will be a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit, dedicated to the support and advancement of collaborative media and virtual community (online community? something like that). When that's running, I will donate all of the assets of Kuro5hin.org Inc to it, and dissolve the existing company. Obviously there are tons of details, but that's the 35,000 foot view, and there seems to be no reason we can't do it. She is drawing up Articles of Incorporation, and we'll be looking at some standard bylaws to start modifying for our purposes. The organization itself is more than just K5 -- the site will become a project of the CMF (initially the only project, probably) but the orgs mandate will be larger than just running the site. We need to work out membership and voting issues, figure out what the Board is going to look like, and all of that fun stuff. I'll be writing up a more formal report on all that, probably as an article, when we get closer to finalizing that. The big issues right now are membership and voting, and the composition of the board. Voting membership is going to have to be a more formal thing than being a member of K5. We'll probably have to do votes by mail, and we'll need to have members contact info on file. I think we can draft a good airtight privacy policy that will ensure your personal information is never used for anything but our records and legal compliance. I also want membership to be open to as many people as possible, so it will probably not require payment. We will likely request a voluntary membership donation, for those who can afford it, which may carry perks like a premium membership to K5. But if you're a starving college student or struggling young parent or whatever membership will be open with no required charge, beyond the cost of a postage stamp. Voting for Board seats will probably involve printing out a ballot from the site and mailing it in with your name, so we can ensure that everyone gets one vote. I know there are ways to securely vote online, but the law lags, as usual, and voting by mail will almost certainly be far easier to do with legal security. The other issue is that of the composition of the board. The organization itself will probably be more of a republic than a direct democracy, for both legal and practical reasons. It's hard to get anything done in a direct democracy, and it would also be very complicated and difficult to set up. So at least some of the Board will be elected by all of the voting membership. As the organization is larger than K5 itself, I also think it's important to have some people on the Board who can advance the mission of the CMF but who may not be regular K5ers, or familiar with the site or to us in general. So it may be a partly elected and partly appointed Board, to help make that work. There will be much more about all this in the weeks to come, this is just an overview of some of the issues on the near horizon. The good news is that it looks like the political advocacy rules won't be a problem, since we, the organization, do not promote or espouse any particular political position, and any advocacy you (the contributors to K5) do is open to general debate by any viewpoint that wants to join in. We are therefore sponsoring open debate, not trying to promote any particular action. It seems the IRS takes a pretty narrow view of what "political action" is in the first place, and what activities are forbidden. The one thing we might have to refuse is paid text ads that promote political candidates, as that might be a questionable activity. That won't be a huge problem though, I don't think. The role of textads and sponsorship is going to be undergoing some scrutiny as well, and there may be changes there. It's not clear yet where that will fall in the big picture, but we might either have to restrict certain kinds of language in textads, or simply accept that it may constitute taxable income which is "unrelated to our main purpose" (in IRSese). Neither of these is a real deal-breaker though, just an issue we'll need to review carefully. All of the above is simply where things stand right now, and could change in whole or in part, and should not be seen as a promise or guarantee of any kind. (Clearly I've been spending too much time with lawyers. ;-)) The only thing that is definite so far is the the lawyer is on retainer, and the paperwork is proceeding. K5 stuff I re-enabled mojo in diaries, because frankly disabling is hasn't seemed to make a big difference, and there have been some people taking advantage of it's lack to be obnoxious in diaries without any fear of community censure. The solution, it seems, was worse than the problem, so it's back the way it was before. Also, I know search isn't working, but there is a plan for fixing it. What we really need is word indexes of stories and comments. Doing a full-text wildcard search is just not working anymore. That's my big programming project right now, so hopefully we'll have something soon. Also, if anyone didn't notice, I did re-enable the "Review Hidden Comments" functions, so please use that if you're trusted. Finally, I was unexpectedly without any internet access at all for the past weekend in Canada, so if you've emailed help@k5 or me and haven't gotten a response yet, I apologize, and I'll be working back through the emails today. Aslo, if you bought a membership and it seems like you have way more time than you paid for, please let me know. I think I added several extra months to some people's accounts by accident. Oops. If you did notice a great number of extra days and don't feel like pointing it out, just consider it my gift to you. :-) So a few days away from the site makes me feel so out of touch. Talk to me! Tell me what's on your mind. I hate feeling out of the loop. :-) Well Actually, I want to start an endowment, which typically means rounding up some big donors to fund it at the get-go, and someone generally gets to have it named after them. So if you've got a million or so to spare, we can definitely arrange for the Bob Abooey Collaborative Media Endowment. Let me know. :-) ____Not the real rusty How about... ...the General Online Abooey Trust and Support Endowment for Collaborative eXchange? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Sorry I actually was trying to trick the servers. It's a well known fact that the site will run without a hitch for months, and go to hell the second I go on vacation. So this time, I kept it hush-hush, in hopes of fooling them. It seems to have worked too, as the logs indicate that there wasn't any downtime while I was gone. There wasn't, was there? Anyway, I didn't mean to scare you, and I did think I'd be able to check in a couple times a day so it wasn't even going to be an issue. We have made a note to be positive in the future that places we stay will have a phone line in the room. And a dedicated bathroom too, dammit. Bed and breakfasts are nice, but I hate having a shared bathroom. ____Not the real rusty PACs If we can't have text ads for political candidates, I presume we can't have them for PACs? I am not a lawyer, and mine is not at hand, but I don't think that's a problem, actually. The restriction is very specifically worded to prohibit supporting a particular candidate for office, and in some instances advocating for or against specific legislation. The legislation prohibitions have some loopholes though. Say Congress was considering a bill to charge 30 cents tax on every community website posting, we would have a clear interest in opposing that legislation, and would be allowed to engage in advocacy against it. I think the rules limit the amount of time and expense we can go to in such activities. The bar on advocating candidates is much stricter though. We basically just couldn't accept ads like "Vote for Ralph Nader!" P.S. For Pete's sake, just ad the work "okay" to the dictionary, okay? We need a good way to add words to the dictionary in general. It should be possible to add that to Scoop, actually -- perhaps a box for people to enter suggested new words (in the comment/story posting form maybe?), and an admin review screen to simply approve those that are actual words. It could probably be made collaborative, but that might end up being much more work than it would be worth, considering the miniscule amount of time it would take to review word suggestions. ____Not the real rusty Yes We saw all of those things, and did do our share of lounging in the parks. We're big on the venerable walking tour, and in Quebec we did a historical walking tour in the day, so we saw all the cool stuff and learned some of the history of the city (like that "Canada" comes from the Indian name for the group of villiages that were originally in the QC area) then we took the obligatory ghost tour in the evening, so we heard all the grisly stories about frontier executions, disastrous rockslides, and ship sinkings. One rather surprising thing is how cheap it is to live there. The daytime guide said that houses in the upper old city (inside the walls) go for $120 to $150K or so (Canadian!), which is really really cheap. Compare, for example, houses here on the island go for upwards of USD$200K usually, and a nice rowhouse house in Washington DC can easily go for three quarters of a million USD. I would love to have an apartment up there to go visit when I need a dose of city life. Suffice it to say, we will be back there as soon as we can. I need to brush up on my Francais though. :-) ____Not the real rusty French Yeah, I only remember a little of my high school French, and we got around fine in English, but I felt like a tool for not being able to speak the language that is clearly the primary one in the area. It's the "stupid American" thing. Besides which, it sucks knowing just enough French to know that I sound like an idiot speaking it. I'd really like to be better, and what a great excuse to practice. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah This is true. Though from this trip, the number of people I heard speaking that godawful Quebecois French seemed lower than I remember it. Is it perhaps starting to resemble "proper" French more, or am I just forgetting what real French sounds like? ____Not the real rusty USD$1.00 = CAD$1.53 Right now the exchange rate is $1 American equals $1.53 Canadian, according to the XE.com currency converter. That's a pretty strong dollar. It mean that our $70 a night B&B only cost us $45 a night in "real money", which is damn cheap, even for a no-frills hotel room in the States. ____Not the real rusty Specifically I believe the article was "Canada to de-Industrialize, eh?" ____Not the real rusty I think I think you're taking something really personally that probably has nothing to do with you. Not to say the comment you're talking is good or shouldn't be hidden forever, but I think you're going a little overboard. This is definitely a shake the head and move on type situation, to me. ____Not the real rusty Diaries and rating I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to post diaries. Right now they can still rate comments (I think), which is probably a mistake. There would seem to be little incentive to play nice when you've become untrusted. Nevertheless, we always believe in redemption, so being untrusted is not a death sentence or anything, and no effects are unreversible. ____Not the real rusty Well yeah I don't think having untrusted users rating comments is a big threat to the system as a whole. Hell, it's worked ok this long. Just that it seems unlikely you'll get fair ratings from untrusted users, so the value of the input is probably minimal. ____Not the real rusty Right "Untrusted" does not mean "not trusted". This whole discussion probably applies to about five people in all anyway. ____Not the real rusty CMF I don't know, I really like "Collaborative Media Foundation." It has a solid feel to it, and implies the right things (a foundation upon which to build collaborative media). In the mission, "collaborative media" will have to be defined more clearly than it probably ever has in the past. Also, it is kind of my pet phrase, so I feel like it should be in there. If you say "Collaborative Media" repeatedly, to journalists and in conferences and everywhere else, it gets easier to say quickly. :-) ____Not the real rusty Virtual Community Actually, I have been using "online community", but I'm starting to think that may be overly restrictive. The idea is to support nontraditional forms of community building and interaction, which right now is basically synonymous with online community. But what of the future? What if we invent new technologies that support community building in ways that we're not imagining right now? I guess for the time being "online community" is a better choice. Hopefully we can define that in a way that doesn't necessarily tie us to the internet forever though. ____Not the real rusty Montreal I don't mean to slag Montreal. It's a nice city. I'm just saying that as a place for me and my wife to visit, it holds little continuing appeal. I'm glad we went, but we probably won't go back without a specific reason. I think you're overly harsh on QC though. The city core is historic, not 'historic'. There is a big chunk just outside the walls (rue petit Champlain) that was rebuilt in the 70's, and probably qualifies as "cardboard imitation" though they did a good job with it. The walled city is largely orginal construction though. Yes, there's a lot of touristy crap, but it's also got its share of very nice parks. And everyone we met was perfectly willing to speak English as soon as we said "hello" instead of "bonjour." To each his own, but we liked Quebec quite a lot. :-) ____Not the real rusty New Coke Why they would try to make something that tastes more like pepsi is beyond me. At the time, Pepsi was kicking their ass. This sheds a lot of light on all of that. ____Not the real rusty I like Tang Tang is good. Astronauts drink it, so it must be! But I always thought of it as "thirsty for Tang." Must be some local slang I'm not familiar with. Right now I'm horny for some more coffee, myself. ____Not the real rusty The problem The other advice here is good in a general sense, but you've got a special problem given the area you want to buy in. Unless you're willing to move about an hour away from where you work, my guess is you're probably screwed. I know that area well, and there are no cheap houses. First-time buyer programs will usually not finance the $300K you're looking at for the most rock-bottom last-ditch piece of trash you can find anywhere within about 45 miles of DC. I haven't personally bought a house in the area (though my sister has) but I very much suspect your choice is going to be continue to rent or move farther away than you'd ideally like. Townhouses way the hell out on the Southern edges of Woodbridge VA go for $90K. That's beyond Potomac Mills. You might find a condo closer for $175K or $200K (that's what they're going for in Vienna, I hear). I wish you luck, and hope I'm being overly pessimistic. But keep your expectations loose, is my advice. ____Not the real rusty Dear Anonymous Internet Readers I know what you're thinking right now. "Oh my Gawd! This "Egg Troll" guy just totally mangled the Who's glorious history! I better fire off a nasty email to someone immediately before anyone thinks I'm not the Biggest Who Fan On Earth!" If history teaches us anything, you will then proceed to email help [at] kuro5hin.org, because it's the first email you can find on the page. But what you'll fail to realize is that I (who am on the other end of that address) have absolutely nothing at all to do with this diary entry, which is by some random user. I utterly don't care how big a Who fan you are, or how many things this diary got wrong. And I won't forward emails to Egg Troll. They'll simply get chuckled at and then ignored. So, in conclusion, if you'd like to complain about the accuracy of this diary, please direct your email to president@whitehouse.gov. Thank you. ____Not the real rusty Sadly, neither there was a time when Salon had some class talent, and a sense of "righteousness", which they should have held on to, somehow. Unfortunately, they did neither. The talent left, and the righteousness was sold for pennies on the dollar. While K5 may not have any more talent than Salon (or "as much talent as" as the case may be, present diarist excluded of course), our righteousness is not for sale. :-) ____Not the real rusty Biff Hardtack! ____Not the real rusty Dirk Lockjaw! ____Not the real rusty Lance Firmly! ____Not the real rusty Excellent! Good stuff. Thank you. What kind of connection is that on? ____Not the real rusty Tom Tomorrow Don't take it personally. ____Not the real rusty Fell for it? As everyone else pointed out, there's nothing to "fall for". I thought it was funny. I still think it's funny. And no, it really doesn't matter whether you use your normal username to submit something or not. I look forward to part two, and hope that "Dave" doesn't bow to the demands to make it less funny. ____Not the real rusty Drat! You better not. I'm telling you. ____Not the real rusty Bonus That's just your bonus Extra Slim Jim. Congratulations! ____Not the real rusty What kind of... ...boat was it? I'm not good enough to identify it by the bow alone, I'm afraid. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also The progress bars wll reappear on the "subscribe" and "buy an ad" pages, because they're just so generally nifty and interesting to watch. I have to tweak it a bit to make it run for longer than it was originally intended to though. ____Not the real rusty Ha! I'm glad to hear that my anti page-widening stuff is not to blame here. That's really awfully dumb of IE, and not much I can do about it. I was puzzled by the reports of page widening which I could find no evidence of. I recommend you report this bug to Microsoft. ____Not the real rusty Your tonton will freeze... ...before you reach the first marker! ____Not the real rusty Raise prices There is one other variable you can influence. You can raise your prices, so that instead of making $100, you make $200 with the same sales. Which means that everything costs twice as much, and the real purchasing power of the shiny new $20 salary is exactly the same as that of the old $10 salary. Oops. ____Not the real rusty Mistakes were made Virtually all of these points are valid, to greater or lesser degree. Mistakes were made, lots of lessons were learned, and as always, I will hopefully not make the same mistakes twice. As garlic says, thanks for the constructive criticism. Next time around, look for a whole different new and exciting set of mistakes. ____Not the real rusty Careful I just started running recently too. Everything seems to indicate that running every day is a bad idea, on the whole. Do it two or three days, then take a day or two off. I pushed a little too hard, and ended up with aching knees, so I've backed off recently a bit. Just be careful not to push too hard. You'll do more harm than good. ____Not the real rusty That would be me Come on, which brain box put "Delete" right next to "Reply", and then didn't require a confirmation to do it? Ummm. Ahhh. Er... Ok, so I have good mouse control! You know, in all these years running k5, I've only deleted a comment by mistake once. That seems really unlikely, doesn't it? True though. ____Not the real rusty Windex I used to use windex in DC, but here we have these tiny mutant Godforsaken Island ants that appear to be windex-resistant. I've been dosing them with bleach spray cleaner, which seems to do the trick. Especially when I also soak down the little cracks they're using to come in. They don't seem to use any crack I've sprayed in anymore. ____Not the real rusty Chasing after money According to the bar on top of the page, I am good at a particular kind of chasing after money, which is the "I have this kick-ass idea I need you to help fund!" kind. Hence, by deduction, I should be gangbusters at running a nonprofit. While that sounds kind of tongue in cheek, I really am mostly serious. I have no illusions that a large part of my new job won't be trying to get money out of people. But for some odd reason I'm happy to go beg for cash on our behalf, while I hate the idea of selling your attention. And don't worry, the begging for money will mostly be from other people, not you guys. ____Not the real rusty The "hand out" theory Voxel is run by a few guys who really like K5. They wanted to help, and could justify it for the benefits of getting their name in front of all of you. When we go non-profit, they'll have the same benefit, with the added bonus of a tax writeoff. They're not gonna come with the hand out. Now if, at some point, we actually were wildly successful at getting grants or something, I would be more than happy to throw some paying business their way, because they're good at what they do. As for greedily eyeing the locked-up millions, that's just silly. If the organization ever had lots of money (a big if) it would be because of this. If it were all in my pocket, it wouldn't be there at all, if you follow me. Now, a big pile of money I can spend on promoting collaborative media and online community? Who needs to be rich if you've got that? That's what I'd be spending my money on anyway! If I can pay my bills, I'll be happy. I am, though no one will believe it, a fairly simple person. ____Not the real rusty Change Yes, you're right. There are hazards and perils in every change, but on the other hand, I think change is required for life. It would be worse to try to stay the same for the sake of it, for due to fear of changing. I think "the freedom I once had" is really more imaginary than anything else. In theory, I had the freedom to do anything I wanted, but in actual practice, I've always been the willing slave of anyone who wants to contribute to the site. If they're paying me now, they're just buying the same thing they always had for free. I see what you're saying, though, definitely. I'm not very comfortable being where I am now either, because you're giving me all this money and trusting me to do the right thing. That's a huge weight of responsibility that I just took on, and I'm feeling it. I really want to get the organization set up to share that weight of trust, and make sure that everything is done out in the open. ____Not the real rusty Oops. You were just stuck in secure mode. If I had gotten here before you restarted, I'd have advised you to just remove the "s" from the "https://" at the beginning of any page location. Anyone else who has the same problem, that's the solution. I gotta add "exit secure mode" links on the other pay pages. ____Not the real rusty Smile Smile, and the rats smile with you. Squeak, and you squeak alone. ____Not the real rusty Official Proclamation Let it hereby be known to all assembled that it is officially declared on this nineteenth day of June in the year of someone else's lord two thousand and two that fluffy grue was so frigging right. (Check the user info, this is not actually Emperor Rusty) ____Not the real rusty Free months for everyone! Ok, there's been an awful lot of confusion and hurt feelings about the free months thing. I didn't see it being taken this way, but I can understand why those of you who joined up for nothing more than love feel slighted. So, free months all around! Everyone who has a subscription as of midnight tonight gets three free months. Regardless of when you joined. In the future, we will be providing non-discriminatory incentives, you can count on that. But if you haven't become a member yet, do it soon, cause this seriously isn't going to apply tomorrow. No matter how much you complain about feeling hurt. :-) Do it anyway Buy another month anyway. ;-) I didn't have to do this, but the mild controversy is distracting, and I'm still learning here. so clearly, when you reward people for being late, the people who were early feel screwed. I suppose NPR doesn't have to actually talk to any of the people giving them money, so this isn't such an issue. Well, we're always learning. :-) ____Not the real rusty Tacoma Narrows (NT) ____Not the real rusty Hey! You keep your anthropological bits out of this. ____Not the real rusty Yes Umm. Buy a subscription for yourself, and I'll convert it. Or something. Listen, I'm gonna give nodsmasher three months, and I leave it to your honor to pay an equavalent amount in some way. :-) ____Not the real rusty Argh! Use the spellcheck! Use it! Use it! ____Not the real rusty Yay! This is the second comment I've seen by you with not a single misspelling! Spellcheck earns it's keep. :-) The reason you have to load a whole story is that we don't store "comments you've seen" as individual values. There's a table for "stories you've seen" which holds the ID of the newest comment that was there when you last looked at the story. When you look agan, any comment with an ID higher than that will be marked "new". If we updated that table when you view a single comment, then you lose the new markers for any other new comment in that story, which you probably haven't seen (because it's not even on the page that's causing it to be marked un-new). ____Not the real rusty Jedi Mind Control Seriously. This is the premium membership you want. You don't need to look at any other websites. Keep posting... keep posting... ____Not the real rusty Difference PBS and NPR do fundraising more than 1 time a year, and they do their best to get money from everyone, even those who pledged in the previous drive. Yes, ut as someone pointed out, K5 is different. There's no neccessary reason to asume that what works elsewhere will work here. The biggest difference being that when you pledge to NPR, and then a minute later they announce some cool gift, you can only holler at the radio in mute anger. Here, you can holler at me in full-volume anger. :-) I think we will end up learning that the process of pledge drives online is a little different. Well, we're obviously still learning. ____Not the real rusty You did not! You misremember, I believe. I think subs had been running for a little while before you shadily handed me cash in a pub that I promptly spent on beer. A few days, at least. How was your chat with Mr. Boutin? :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah well I want people to be happy. Now I feel bad for the people who added a month because they thought they had to. You can't win. ____Not the real rusty Hey! A lot of people are jumping to xconclusions here. I am positive they're not rejecting stories out of some kind of smallminded desire to see us fail. I know them, and they are not like that. Seriously. I haven't heard from them about this yet, but I'm sure they have their reasons. In all honesty, I'm not real sure I want it to show up there. I mean, do you think anyone from /. who would care and doesn't know already? Do we need the Slashdotting for the miniscule number of people who might have missed it and also would care? Anyway, my best guess is they either decided it wouldn't be worth the headaches all around, or are just trying to give us some time before we get hammered by the clicking hordes. They may very well also have a backlog of stuff already ready to post, and don't have space for it now. ____Not the real rusty Broken Yeah. The database is taking forever to do searches in comment and story content. I think it needs a rebuild. I wanted to do it last night, but I had already been up for thirty-something hours, and I had to crash. Hopefully I can do it tonight and get that working normally again. ____Not the real rusty No, no That was when they were being sold new. They're aren't anymore -- you can only buy them used, where they run around $25K. ____Not the real rusty Hey Was it you who was saying that the diary watcher is really slow? I rewrote a good chunk of it, and it should be much faster now. Give it a try. ____Not the real rusty D'oh Oops. No, not that problem. It was the other problem -- some people had said that just having the diary hotlist on would make any page really slow to load. Maybe that wasn't you. No, I haven't got the problem you were having sorted out yet. ____Not the real rusty I started with friends I know a few people who work in magazines and publishing, so I started by getting in touch with them. Especially since my writing resume is pretty thin, this is probably a good way to go, if it's possible. If you used to work as an editor, you must know someone in the business. Hit them up for names. ____Not the real rusty Yep I do believe that was Stage I of Step 3. Man, for such a small item on the list though, step 3 took a hell of a lot of time and energy. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's just a week Come back Wednesday, it'll all be over. Or possibly before then if we're really lucky. I know it's annoying, and I know money has been an ongoing topic for a long time, so it seems like it'll never end, but it really will. That is the point of all this. Wednesday June 26th, and it all fades into the background and we can go back to the point of the site. ____Not the real rusty It's a good story The good thing, actually, is this is now a success story, so they could cover it without depressing everyone. It was "ship sinking!" now it's "sinking ship saved by loving community!" It wasn't a good story on Monday. Tomorrow it probably will be. ____Not the real rusty E r i c #3? I look forward to this incarnation. ;-) Well, at the least, you've managed to rile everyone up pretty good in your past lives. I'm still patiently waiting, because the First (or possibly Second) Law of Trolls is: Given enough time, all trolls tend to become spiralx. We can wait. You'll get there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sig fodder I mean that in a good way, of course. And no, I'm not purposely tryng to stuff your .sig file, you just keep coming up. Got spiralx on the brain, apparently. ____Not the real rusty Yes! The bar counts all of June, so your part is in there. Thanks! ____Not the real rusty Ha I noticed that too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh It's not abuse if I put up a form and link to it and everything. You couldn't have known. It just so happens that something is drastically wrong with that table, and searches are causing big trouble. ____Not the real rusty First daily target smashed utterly No, not "smashed utterly" like spiralx on a Saturday night, I just meant exceeded. Because my expectations have clearly not accounted properly for your generosity, I have been forced to revise the target upward. Obviously you're all clear on the concept that the quicker we get to 70, the sooner this is over. And then, a whole year... just imagine it... By the way We're having database unhappiness. I think it's time for a rebuild to sort out the indexes, but I don't want to do it in the middle of the day like this. Hopefully we can limp through the afternoon ok, and I can try to clean it up when things settle down. Sorry about the intermittent "D'oh" screens though. ____Not the real rusty Heh I wish. Man, this is stressful. It just freaks out on certain queries, with no warning. I'm almost sure it's got some indexing problem. This always happens when I've got some big thing going on. Computers hate me. ____Not the real rusty DB We switched from MySQL/MyISAM to MySQL/InnoDB, which helped a lot. The InnoDB backend is much faster, caches really well, and does row-level locking. On MyISAM, we'd be dead right now. The problem with InnoDB is that the management tools are primitive at best. With the hammering it gets here, indexes tend to get inefficient every couple months. The only way I know of to rebuild them is to literally dump the entire database to a file and reload it fresh. Yes, this does suck. but on the upside, it doesn't need maintenance nearly as often as MyISAM did. The old system needed a check/repair every night. So, basically, this system works. I'm hoping the tools improve as InnoDB gains wider use. The main problem is the rebuild takes a goodly chunk of time. Like 15 or 20 minutes. So I don't like to do it in the middle of the day. I should get it done early early tomorrow morning. Hopefully things will be back to normal. The reason I spend so much time bitching about the database is it's the biggest thing that's only under my control to a limited extent. If something in Scoop is broken, I just fix it, or one of the other Scoop hackers fixes it. There's a lot to be said for your main piece of critical software being something you wrote yourself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Postgres Now is not really the time for my infamous disquisition upon the subject of Postgres. :-) No, what I know about postgres don't make me inclined to try to use it, though partly through no fault of its own. And no! I never got the kettle corn. Those frauds! They seemed so friendly. ____Not the real rusty Well yeah but We're a bunch of crazies that post stupid shit all the time. Yeah, but as long as that happens, it means everything is working. :-) ____Not the real rusty Foreign keys since the Scoop DDL didn't declare any foreign keys (grrrrr) Up till very recently, there was no point in it, since mysql couldn't do anything with them anyway. The InnoDB stuff can actually handle foreign keys, but Scoop is still designed to run without them, so it will work on MyISAM as well. We really ought to declare them though, you're right. Older mysql will just ignore them if we do. ____Not the real rusty Ummm I eyeballed it, more or less. Figure $70,000, over ten days total, we ought to be raising $7000 a day, on average. But we started out a little ahead anyway, with about 10 on the first day, so I figured about $6600 for each remaining day. I think I'll try to keep it a little ahead of the curve though. It looks like I might have to seriously re-revise today's again though. We haven't even started with the incentives yet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yoiks You are right. The next revision is going to be something crazy, like $20,000. Let's see you beat that! Hah! ____Not the real rusty Hey, you! That comment search you're doing? Cut it out! You're killing us here! There's something wrong with the comments table. I really need to rebuild it. In the meantime, that search is locking us up like crazy. Please, please hold off till tomorrow! :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes I want to do that. It means we'll need to offer options of having people keep that stuff private though too. But yeah, definitely. About general user stalking, maybe. We'll have to see how much it would tend to murder that database. But it's an idea. It may need to be its own page, like your "friends page" and not show up on any given page like the current tools. ____Not the real rusty Probably stop The ways to give us money will still be here, and we'll always be glad to take it, but at $70K, the fundraiser ends in glorious triumph. There will probably be some discreet links to the donation and subscription pages here and there. Plus, we should have enough textads to run through till next year. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hee hee Please be notified that your quote will reappear as my sig at the end of the fundraising drive. :-) ____Not the real rusty But, 'Nista I know K5's frustrating sometimes. It pisses me off sometimes too. Well, a lot of times. But when it comes right down to it, wouldn't the net be worse off if it didn't exist? Which is not to say that the current campaign is a threat to take it away: it's not. But we're going to be here, and you know you're going to be here. So you damn well ought to help out. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Rant away, my dear! I'm just in pledge-drive mode. At any moment, I am liable to spout desperate pleas for money. Don't worry, it only lasts a week. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks! The progress bar is progressing. So far today we're utterly kicking the ass of our daily target. And the US east-coasters are just starting to filter in to the office... ____Not the real rusty It'll change That bar is going to have different stuff on it. Right now, it's pretty basic, but when (if?) people submit stories to "Support K5" they'll probably appear there, and various things. I didn't make it turn-offable beacuse, well mostly because it's only going to be there for a week and a half, and I really want everyone to se it as often as possible. After that, it goes away completely. I'll try to make it worth having even when you've already more than done your part, though. By the way, DesiredUsernam: Mentadent still comes in the pump. And it's a great toothpaste. ____Not the real rusty Gotta be the pump But the pump rules! You know it, I know it, we all know it. Most people just aren't bad enough to handle the pump. ____Not the real rusty It's ok Stupid American. ;-) ____Not the real rusty You're losing your touch The old E r i c was much more annoying. It was never really clear if he was trolling or not. You... too obvious. ____Not the real rusty Spellcheck blokcing post This, I think, is bad UI, this "override the post button" thing. I think that's going to change soon, so spellcheck operates on preview only, and if you hit post, you just post. ____Not the real rusty Yes, if necessary In the past, we've done it a couple times, for articles that were greatly improved by having pictures inline. One was about artists, and having the paintings discussed in the article made it a much better read. So, if you've got a good reason, we'll work with you. Generally we arrange some agreeable time for posting, and you post the story and we convert the image tags to working form. It's pretty awkward, so make sure that the article wouldn't be just as good with links. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah And the improved edit queue (with collaborative anti-spam!) should be done any day now, so we can increase that time and make it more useful. ____Not the real rusty "New" Scoop doesn't keep track of what you've seen forever. In order to be able to not store 120 billion rows of data, we expire records of whether you've seen a story or not if you don't visit it in (I think) 30 days. This won't really affect your "replies" function, as that determines new replies by the time the reply was posted. It may sometimes bring you to a story it claims you've never read, though. An unfortunate necessity which shouldn't generally cause much trouble. Oh, and the spellcheck is evolving as it gets heavy K5-style user testing. Many of the current oddnesses should eventually go away, like numbers. We might also have figured out a good way to suggest alternate spellings of tagged words. It will improve. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! No, we're not. But that would be funny, wouldn't it. Maybe we can add something to do that. Of course we all know the most common mistake is "it's not its dammit!" which the spellchecker won't catch. ____Not the real rusty Yay! You handled that perfectly. Soon, it will become second nature. You will experience the full powers and benefits of reduced stress. :-) ____Not the real rusty Besides which You wouldn't say any of the Czars were the first leaders of the Soviet Union. This example isn't that extreme, but the constitution created a new government. George Washington was the first president of that government, and it's the same government we have today (well, offically, since it has been altered by processes internal to its system, not by overthrow). So George Washington is, by all reasonable standards, the first president of the current United States regime. ____Not the real rusty But... Whatever they called it, the government under the Articles of Confederation was a significantly different one than we have today. While the constitutional convention was supposedly held under the rubric of "revising" the AoC, what it actually did was throw them out and start from scratch. And, ultimately, the AoC government was not important enough to the future of the US as we know it to be covered in any great depth in introductory history classes, which is all most of us get. Also, Washington gets top billing not only because he was first, but because the hero-worship and adulation he received pretty much singlehandedly dragged this government, and this country, into existence. Hanson, and the Continental Congress, may be an interesting footnote in history, but if you have limited time to get the basics of American history into the head of 30 bored high-schoolers, you bet your ass you're gonna talk a lot about good old G.W. My point is that it's interesting to note that Hanson was actually, in some sense, the first "President of the US" (and I had never heard of him either before this), but it would be ludicrous to claim that that actually means anything in historical context. Useful cocktail party tidbit though. :-) ____Not the real rusty That sucks. Stupid Americans. On the other hand, last time I flew, I got practically anal-probed at every airport. I'm usually Mr. Invisible to airport security, but they kept searching me, and my bags, and my clothes, etc etc. I even got bomb-wanded twice. It was weird. I blame the Picturebook. They all looked very askance at the extra battery, which is a 10-or-so inch long tube. ____Not the real rusty Yes In short, yes it is illegal. ____Not the real rusty Uhhh I grew up in Southeast MA, and I never heard it called anything but a seesaw. I guess if you'd said teeter-totter I'd have known what you were talkng about, but you'd have sounded like a dork. I think Bartleby.com is talking out its ass. ____Not the real rusty Be sure Be sure to put some creme on that froot! ____Not the real rusty Hey, about the diary watch problem About that issue you mentioned with diary watch not working right: Do you have a proxy or your browser set up to block or otherwise monkey with the referer feld? The page that "Watch" function returns is generally going to be the last page as reported by referer. If you're sending in something that's not a real page, that would do it. Yes, this is a giant kludge, and can be expected to fail for at least someone. If that's it, I can change that to try to be smarter about what page you get returned to. ____Not the real rusty Well Really, we shouldn't be using referer for anything important. I would consider this our problem. Short-term, you can probably fix it by passing through the real referer, but it's something we ought to change. ____Not the real rusty I love subscription features No, this isn't even me whoring for more subscribers. (ha ha). I just wanted to note that I'm getting much joy from the new stuff, especially the diary watch list. Don't you want to know who's on rusty's Watch List? Details inside... Currently: greenrd mami panner shoeboy ana hurstdog johnny mrgoat duxup (who posts too frigging many diaries) la princesa Driph hillct This is not the result of purposely going out and finding people, but of adding them as they appear on the diaries page. So if you feel like I would normally be watching your diary but I'm not yet don't feel left out. Who's on your list? And should we arrange some way to optionally make the lists public or shareable? In other news, I've been polishing and editing the turtle story from a few days ago, and I'm going to see if anyone will buy it. I'm also working on another one which is likely to end up more commercially viable. Wish me luck. Never seen The cat page? The last one is actually a little more than a year old, but he looks about the same. A little svelter now that he can go outside and run around. ____Not the real rusty The other one We have a temporary foster cat as well, named Hazel, who looks almost the same. ____Not the real rusty Yes He's the best cat ever. Now you know why I go to all this trouble to keep him fed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ah You have chosen wisely. For you, the pain will end. But for the rest of you (you know who you are) it will merely intensify! Now bask, shoeboy, in the warm glow of the knowlege that you (yes you!) are helping to keep the democratic internet Free (as in speech). Or something. ____Not the real rusty I know That's a longstanding problem. Basically, the only way to do it is with proper CSS layout, which we just don't have. If I make the first two columns relative, it screws everything up. If anyone has a good solution for this, pipe up! Otherwise, the answer is unfortunately not till we get themes done. They're coming along, slowly. ____Not the real rusty XML In fact, there's an ongoing project to develop an XML-RPC server for Scoop, to support a few different APIs. So it's not as unlikely as you think. Should be coming along presently. ____Not the real rusty Heh You and me both. I feel less broke than I did this morning though, so that's something. And aluminumaloi, you feel good because you are good. :-) ____Not the real rusty Really Important! I've been making tons of banana bread lately, as it may well be the world's most perfect breakfast food. My recipe is slightly different, but not much, and I wanted to note that it's really important you do the final incorporation of the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients by hand. Do not overmix, or you will end up with dense, icky banana bread. Basically, dump the wet bowl into the dry bowl, and with a spoon, stir until all of the dry stuff is just moist. For me, this is usually about 15 to 20 strokes. If there's a little unmoistened flour, don't sweat it. Better to under mix than over mix. This, I've found, is the secret to fluffy perfect banana bread, rather than a dense joyless doorstop. ____Not the real rusty Inconsistent I think what's annoying about his behavior, actually, is his total black and white consistency. Some of the things he rants against seem jarring because we'd expect him to give a little latitude in certain cases, but he gives none, ever. That is why I both respect and ignore him, mainly. It's sort of admirable to have principles that are exact and unalterable, but it's also sort of stupid. ____Not the real rusty Are you serious? RMS has declared Linux to be non-Free and has stated that Free Software proponents can no longer develop for the Linux kernel. Are you serious? Where? ____Not the real rusty Heh Having used both Bitkeeper and CVS extensively, I can say that Bitkeeper kicks CVS's ass all over the place. It's far better, and it's semi-Free, and Linus is clearly smart enough to see things in shades of gray, not the patented RMS Black/White. RMS will keep on being ideologically pure, which is fine by me. The rest of us will do what works. Ideologues are only interesting or useful up to a point, after all, and I think RMS has said all that he has to say. ____Not the real rusty Spellcheck In case it's not clear yet, if you check the little box next to "Spellcheck text" it will preview and highlight misspelled words, no matter whether you hit "Preview" or "Post". If you uncheck it, it will not spellcheck, and posting will proceed as usual. It's unchecked by default. And I know that the word "spellcheck" is not in the spellchecker's dictionary. I didn't write the thing, ok? :-) ____Not the real rusty Dude, you're getting a... [shoots self in head]. ____Not the real rusty But He did write the edit queue stuff, so points there. I think owning authorship of a major K5 feature automatically subtracts 6 or 7 thousand from your UID. Depending on the current exchange rate. ____Not the real rusty Huh Could you try it one more time, and see if it does the same thing? I can't seem to reproduce that. ____Not the real rusty Browser? What browser are you using, and does the URL have a literal space in it (in "Full Membership") or is it a %20? ____Not the real rusty Ok It should work now. ____Not the real rusty Heh Oh, and it also thinks "Spellcheck" is a misspelling. I noticed that too. Chalked it up to "irony". The thing with the extra spaces is annoying. I'll see how we can fix that. If anything else is weird or doesn't seem to work right, keep reporting! :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh, and Number of registrations: About 20, so far. Which bodes relatively well considering I haven't announced it yet. :-) I was shocked to find that there were already 115 subscribers (from the old system). Amazing. There wasn't even any point in subscribing before, and 115 people were subscribed. I suppose they must have been long-timers from the OSDN ad days. ____Not the real rusty Hi Bob! You're back! I thought you were MIA. Looking at my diary watch list, I guess you've been back for a little while. Was this diary a test to see if I had some kind of secret "watch for mentions of self" feature? :-) ____Not the real rusty Tomorrow Ok. I just (like 3 seconds ago) finished preparing the subscription stuff. Diary watcher is going to be a subscriber feature, but it will be way cool, especially for you, mrgoat, and all your diary section alter egos. No more reloading the diary section to make sure you don't miss one! No! You will always know when your favorite diarists ( or, in your case, any of your myriad selves) have posted a new glimpse of their life. Ok. I'm beat, so I'm going to write up the announcement tomorrow. I also feel like I should take a little time and see if I forgot anything important (pretty sure I did). But tomorrow. P.S.: Not that I recommend it, because I may have screwed soemthing up and/or it might not work right, but if you're wicked fucking clever you can probably figure out how to subscribe now. Don't say I didn't warn you. ____Not the real rusty It always feels like, somebody's waaatching meeee Ok, this freaks me out. Do you have a special hack in the codebase that makes odd noises when a comment that includes your nick is posted? Interest in your readers can only go so far, this was a sub-femtosecond reaction time! Ha! No, I have no special tricks or tools. I just keep an eye on stuff, and have a weird knack for running across comments with my name in them. I'm sure I miss tons. And, like I said, I just happened to finish what I was working on, and poked into the diaries to see if anyone was complaining about all the up-and-down server stuff tonight. Oh, by the way, i seem to have misplaced the "Subscribe to K5" box on the front page. The appropriate button in my "Display Preferences" appears to be checked, but no dice. Yeah, I disabled it a while ago, because I wasn't real happy with the whole subscription system. Some variant of a subscribe box will probably be returning tomorrow though. And I do have to say, the new stuff is way cool. ____Not the real rusty Yeah There will probably be design changes. :-) ____Not the real rusty Huh I think you're not doing it right. I just tried with a regular user account, and it goes fine. What did you try to do? ____Not the real rusty I always knew ...that you were clever. :-) Did you try it? Does it work? ____Not the real rusty Preview Ok, I just ran the convertor for existing subscribers. You should now have spellcheck, ad control, and the snazzy subscriber tools box (over where hotlist used to be). You should also have an extra three months for being a loyal subscriber even when there was seriously no point at all. You can see the current status in your User Preferences. Does it all look like it's working right? ____Not the real rusty Dictionaries Did you set it to use the British dictionary? It's in Display Preferences. ____Not the real rusty Yeah well We work with what we have. It claims that "tset" is a valid word, too. It seems to mainly work though, and does distinguish between a lot of American/British variant words, like "cheque" and whatnot. ____Not the real rusty Replies How about now? It should only show stories that are posted or in moderation now. ____Not the real rusty Yeah There's basically just no way we can mark each individual comment you've looked at. It just knows, when you look at a story, what the highest comment id is, and assumes that ids above that are new. I have an idea that might get it closer, a little. UIt would still not be 100% exact, but it could be made to mark a story as "viewed" up to the comment you're currently looking at, when you load it from that box. ____Not the real rusty Yay You should all be aware that subscriptions are going to be unveiled like tomorrow. Seriously. All the new subscriber features work. Now I just have to set up subscription types and check the billing stuff. Yay! ____Not the real rusty Nifty That's a nifty idea. Let me get the basic stuff up and running first, though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Laser Beams 'Nuff said. ____Not the real rusty Television Commercial INT MAN sits in cubicle, looking bored. Surrounded by normal everyday office drone detritus. Man is on phone. MAN: Yep... yes... yup... yeah... yeah... yeah... yup... yes... yup... yeah... uh huh... yeah... yep... yeah... continues for about 20 seconds CUT to EXT... ...Verizon guy on cell phone in the field. VG: Can you hear me now? Good! Um There's a good chance many of you won't get this at all. If the phrase "Can you hear me now? Good!" has no television commercial connotations for you, just ignore this. ____Not the real rusty This is the box. This is you. ____Not the real rusty The point? It's just a commercial I'd like to see. They probably won't think of it though. I should be in advertising. ____Not the real rusty Ha No, it's a rusty original. I mean, it does just seem like the obvious followup, you know? :-) ____Not the real rusty Dude! "Dude, you're gettin overexposed." ____Not the real rusty Contests I heard about that guy a long time ago. I don't remember where, now, but I was convinced it was real at the time. I think it was a magazine article. There were screengrabs from the TV show. It struck me as very nearly sadistic, the way they actually did it. Now that I see your link, I do believe that's the article I saw. Another one is here which seems to have the same text but more pictures. ____Not the real rusty 35 minutes After a long weekend off with the family-in-law visiting, I finally got to run again tonight, so I pushed it. 35 minutes. Not bad a'tall, and for those of you keeping score (hi Mom!) that puts me at 60th place for last year's road race. The remainder of this diary is not about running. They say that every sailor has a dream boat. The one that they see and immediately think "That's the one." I think I found mine. The Flicka was designed by Bruce Bingham in the 50's based on the lines of the work boats that sailed fishermen out in Block Island sound a hundred years ago. The first Flicka plans were published in Rudder Magazine as a homebuilt project. Nor'star and Westerly Marine collaborated to produce a few Flickas starting around 1975, and Pacific Seacraft took over production in 1978, eventually selling several hundred. They stopped production in the 80's or early 90's (I forget), briefly offered to buld new Flickas again in 2001, but received no orders, so put them back on the "out of production" list. They probably didn't receive any orders because a new Flicka is, when you get right down to it, a 20 foot boat that costs $70,000 or so. It is basically just not a winning proposition, economically. But they're expensive because they are a hell of a lot more boast than the LOA would suggest. In trolling around online for information, the thing that becomes most clear is that Flicka owners adore their boats, perhaps "obsess over them" would be a better word. And I completely understand why. At 20 feet, it's small enough not to be a nuisance to maintain. But the design is such that it actually has the interior space of a much larger boat, more like a 26 footer. This is not a toy -- it is well known for serious offshore capability. It's a full-keel 3 ton boat, which has numerous ocean passages and extended (like several years extended) cruises to its credit. For anyone interested, much more information is at the Flicka homepage. Here's my problem. There are Flickas out there on the used market, but they are quite expensive, for my budget. They seem to run from around $19,000 to $30,000, depending on age, hull material, and condition. This is too much for me. But you can order the plans for them online. So, folks, I am seriously considering building my own sailboat. Clearly, this is madness of an almost unheard-of degree, and won't begin until I can find a place to build it that I could be sure won't be kicked out of within the next five years or so. This may not be until I own a house, but perhaps Fate will intervene before then and present me with the ideal workshop for free. Who knows. Advantages to building your own boat: Cost possibly less than buying it. (Probably not, but maybe) Cost spread out over a long period of time, making it more manageable without requiring loans Will have built a sailboat. How cool is that? Will know exact location, construction, and use of each and every teeny tiny bit of the boat, due to having actually placed it there myself. Good confidence/safety factor. Will be able to tweak everything for my exact personal needs. No "making do" with factory stuff. Will have long time to learn to sail properly. Did I mention will have built own sailboat? All future voyages may be postfixed with "...in a sailboat I built with my own hands." Building stuff is fun. Disadvantages to building your own boat: Serious delayed gratification penalty. My guess is at least five years for construction. Still costs a lot. Possibility of running out of money and being unable to complete it. A lot of effort, possibility of getting fed up and failing to complete it. Possibility of screwing up badly and thereby eventually dooming myself to a watery grave. Possibility of being so sick of looking at it by completion that I don't even want the damn thing anymore. Well, that's where I'm at right now. Anyone have any relevant sailing or boat-building info? Incidentally, my boat would probably be Kelly green (like the one linked above), and be masthead cutter rigged. Yes Your points are all valid ones. I was trying to come up with some possible disadvantages, but every one seems to have a corresponding advantage, like you point out. I don't actually think any of those is likely to happen. Just that they are possible. Your point about building being its own reward is especially true, and one of the major reasons I'm even considering it. I can think of few things I'd more like to know how to do than build sailboats, and as far as I can tell, there's only one way to do that... ____Not the real rusty Priceless Think about the financial cost of the inevitable mistakes that you will make. Ah, but think of the knowlege and wisdom gained. Priceless. :-) What happens when you make that off cut with a hundred dollar piece of wood? That sucks! Sure does. So you buy another hundred dollar piece of wood and never make that mistake again. This is a risk in all "real world" construction, and some would say one of the reasons it's more interesting than "virtual" construction (i.e. programming). We are not talking about particleboard here. Actually, we probably are talking about a lot of particleboard. You have to make the male mold for the hull out of something, and since you're just going to throw it away, it might as well be something cheap. Particleboard is the standard material for that. Of course I realize that this isn't something you just do. It is something that can be done by someone who takes the time to read some books about the various techniques, study the plans, think about the process, and work out the steps. And it doesn't hurt to have some solid construction work in your past somewhere. I couldn't do it starting today, but I don't think it's beyond my capabilties to learn. And boo on you, naysayer! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Plans and glass would you be building the boat from a kit, partial kit(for fiberglass pieces, etc), or completely from scratch? The company that sells the plans also sells a C-Flex materials kit, which is basically all the cloth and resin you need to make the hull out of fiberglass. It can also be built strip-planked though. I'm not sure yet which one I'd go with. Other than that, it's basically a matter of finding parts and putting them together. The keel is one of the things I'm concerned about, though I do have some friends who know how to weld. It's supposed to be steel-sheathed lead. The lead part I can do (buy a lot of tire weights, melt them). But making the steel covering I'm not so sure about. At worst, I'm sure I could find a welder around here who could make it from the plans. If there's one thing we have in Portland, it's marine welders. Right now they're building an oil rig in the shipyard near the ferry terminal. What it basically breaks down to is (in very rough steps): Make hull (either c-flex fiberglass or strip-planked) Make keel (steel sheathed lead, 1800 lbs) Make deck (plywood-core fiberglass Attach deck to hull, and keel to hull. Install systems (plumbing, electrical, possibly engine if I decided to go with an inboard) Finish interior (shelves, berths, cabinets, head, stove, sink, etc) Attach rigging Not necessarily in that order, but those are the big stages. ____Not the real rusty Tire weights Apparently tire weights are desirable because they're typically 3% antimony, which adds to hardness. In a sheathed hull it's not so important, but it's still good to have a solid ballast inside. The standard procedure is to cultivate a few tire and auto shops and buy up their used weights, which can be had for ten or twelve cents a pound. More information about it here. ____Not the real rusty Honey... ...I saw this Swedish Girl on the web today, and I so want one! It's so cute, and not too expensive, too! Only like $25K. Can we get one? Please please? :-) ____Not the real rusty Coming soon theantix has reportedly fixed his patch to allow community "spam control" in the edit queue. Assuming this works ok, I'll be raising the editing time considerably, and hope to see more collaboratively written articles. ____Not the real rusty Is your mom or dad home? A knock at the door. Well, that's odd, I think. No one ever comes and knocks on my door. So I go to answer it. I haven't showered yet, the kitchen's a mess, and I'm in jeans, slippers, and a Media Whore t-shirt. Furthermore, I utterly don't care, because I don't need to impress anyone. There's a kid at the door, looks about 17, 18. He's holding a clipboard, and sideways I read on it: "Sierra Club". Canvasser. He's nervous. Clearly new at this. I open the door, he says, "Uh hi. I'm with the Sierra Club. Uh. Is your uh mom or dad at home." I look at him for a minute, then laugh. "My mom or dad?" Still laughing. "Uh, um." he says. "I live here. This is my house. I'm 26." I say. He looks horrified. I feel bad for him, and make the pain end. "Listen," I say, "I don't want to waste your time. I'm not giving you any money." "You could sign something..." he tries. "No." "Clean air?" he attempts. I close the door. When my wife graduated from college her first job was with these bozos. PIRG, canvassing for the Sierra Club. She went up to Minneapolis to run the office up there. Basically they get these kids from high school, college, whatever, and send them door to door to collect money for environmental groups. It's a shit job and the pay is nothing but they do it because they thnk they're saving the world. I heard all the spiels, and all the justifications for what they collected money for, and I was not at all impressed with either their logic or their science. So when they come around I never give them money, but I know what a crappy job it is so I don't waste their time either. They should be on their way to someone else's house, because they have zero chance here. Still, "Is your mom or dad home." Priceless. Telemarketers Related: when telemarketers call for me on the telephone I say I'm not home I thought you meant they'd say "Hello, is Mr. Chachi there?" and you'd say "No, I'm sorry I'm not home." That would be much more fun. ____Not the real rusty Bugs The ads I submitted are commission links from a site called Commission Junction. The bugs track impressions for them, and the cookie is there so they know when you go to one of the sites we advertise and buy something, because that's the only time I get paid. The various ads we have pay between 5 and 10% of anything you go and buy there, provided you didn't block the cookie. We needed "filler" ads so that when someone buys a real text ad it doesn't run out in five minutes, and the choice was between filler ads that could, conceivably, somehow, make us a little money, and filler ads that I just make up. I went with the commission links. If cookies frighten you, feel free to block them. Same with the bug image. I don't care at all. Do what makes you happy. If you want more information, read CJ's privacy policy. ____Not the real rusty Comments I actually didn't enable comments because no one from the advertisers would be paying any attention, and I didn't want to encourage a lot of questions I have no answers to. Plus I'd feel compelled to pay attention to (eventually) 20-some discussions. I felt it would be more honest to just not pretend like I could do that. :-) ____Not the real rusty What movie should I watch? I did a lot of work on subscriptions, and went running today. To celebrate, I shall now go watch a movie. Please vote in the poll for what movie I should watch. The choices are: The One (2001, Jet Li opens up some variety of whoopass) Training Day (2001, Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Bad cops gone, uhh, worse) Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles dir, features Charleton Heston as the Least Convincing Mexican Ever. Also a fantastic "reefer madness" scene in a desert motel) Vote now! Revolver? It's a Glock. But otherwise, yes, absolutely. ____Not the real rusty My book Unfortunately, I haven't done anything interesting since high school. So my book would involve a lot of scenes of this one guy sitting around his apartment alone. Usually typing. The dramatic peak would be that day he spilled coffee all over his keyboard. You see the problem here... And when you kiss my ass like that, it makes me think you're Christian Roberts. Stop it! ____Not the real rusty Heh I'm sorry, I was being a wiseass. Misery Loves Chachi is a great nickanme by the way. See my other comment for more relevant answers. :-) ____Not the real rusty PS: See my new sig. ____Not the real rusty You are wise I suppose I'm probably wrong. You probably don't really care about writing a book at all and this all looks like a silly misguided rant by a stranger who's psychoanalyzing way too much. No, it's actually disturbingly accurate. I like to write. I want to write. I'm not sure I want to write now, you know what I mean? Am I afraid to? I don't know. I might be. I might just not have anything to say yet. I'm never going to figure out if I have anything to say or not unless I try, though. You've got that right. I have a little story for you, about the founding of K5. It's not the one I usually tell to reporters who ask me "Why did you start K5?" because they don't really care. I tell them I started it to learn some perl, and to try out some ideas that were floating around about another way you could run a website. These are both true, but they're answers to a question that doesn't really matter. The question that matters is this: "When K5 was one month old, you had about 6 months experience writing perl, which was the first programming you ever did. You had never even seen a large programming project, let alone worked on one. You had no money, and no free time because you were living in a basement in Washington, DC and driving to Silver Spring and back every day to work. You had no code, about ten occasional readers, and hosted the site off your home DSL line. But you spent every spare minute programming, whole weekends, stayed up all night and went in to work without sleeping, to reproduce a software package someone else had already been working on for more than four years, to run a site with a URL no one could remember and that didn't even have a topic. Why?" The answer to that is because a lot of people said it wouldn't work, and I thought they were wrong. I could either just think they were wrong and leave it at that, or I could prove they were wrong, and I decided to prove they were wrong. That's not why K5 exists, but it is what kept me working on Scoop through many very long nights when I was the only one working on it and no one but fluffy grue gave a shit. I know why most open source projects are abandoned early, and it's because it's really hard to sit there, alone, late at night, and work on something that you think really matters, when you know that all three or four people who are even aware you're doing it think you're wasting your time. And, in a somewhat less immediate form, that is still why I'm doing it. The motivations are a lot more abstract now, but most of them boil down to some form of "because people still think it won't work, and I still think they're wrong." And now you've gone and told me that I'm not writing because I'm afraid to. I'm sure you had no idea what you were doing at the time, but now it's too late. Now that will be in my head, following me around, until I prove that wrong too. Well, not so much prove it wrong, because it's a statement about right now, but do it anyway because it's true, and I am afraid to. So, random psychoanalyzing stranger, what do I do? ____Not the real rusty Disco Zombies! Ooh-Ah! Dis-co Zom-bie! Ooh-Ah! Dis-co Zom-bie! Meanwhile, the sinister Madam Mumwaldi is plotting to take over the world with her evil robot Clot! Clot? What the hell? Oh, "Blot"? What kind of name is "Blot"? Let me start again... ____Not the real rusty ToE I do have a DVD, but I don't know if it's a re-edit or just a transfer. I've seen it a bunch of times, and I do enjoy it, but Charleton Heston is, still, the World's Least Convincing Mexican. It looks like he's wearing shoe polish on his face. ____Not the real rusty Really Important Movie Update! In accordance with the voting, I watched Training Day. I also watched the crappy "extra features" they put on to make people feel like DVDs are anything but videos with good picture and sound, like the alternate ending that they took out because it sucked, and the extra scenes they deleted because they were unnecessary, and the cheeseball "making of" feature where all the actors say how great all the other actors are, and how great the director is, and the director says how great the actors are, and everyone pretends Macy Grey's skin-crawling crack-baby demeanor doesn't creep them right the fuck out of the room. I'm unable to stop myself from suffering through all the added crap they put on DVDs. It's like some kind of compulsion. I'm not (yet) at the level of watching the movie again with the commentary track turned on, though I did watch like half of the commentary on Thelma and Louise before it struck me that I would never get that time back. "Oh this scene right here. Yeah, that was a hell of a scene. We filmed that in the evening, and everyone had to run around like chickens while I barked orders at them about how we had to get the shot because we were losing the light. Of course, the scene is indoors, so that wa a load of crap. I just wanted to go out drinking." Oh, kill me now. The movie itself was pretty good. Kind of self-consciously "Oscar-worthy," and preoccupied with a lot of the questions that any James Ellroy novel will plumb to depths they couldn't even see with side-scanning sonar from where this movie was. Good characters, and good acting, but, I don't know, I ended up feeling like "is that it?" It was worth watching though. Well-made, professional, solid, meaningful enough to pass for deep by Hollywood standards. And it had Dr. Dre in it, which, you know, always helps. Even if the whole time he's on screen everyone's just thinking "Dude! It would be an honor and a privilege to have Dre bust a cap in my ass!" ____Not the real rusty Hey Why aren't you on #scoop, you sexy beast? ____Not the real rusty if the New York Times was... ... lax with their spelling standards. ____Not the real rusty The subjunctive! "were lax" is subjunctive, and strictly speaking is correct since the sentence is a counterfactual. The subjunctive is my favorite English case. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh If I were to have a life, I wouldn't be able to be pleased whenever I saw the subjunctive used correctly. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Monologue #1: Unreliable Narrator It was the summer I turned twelve, I think, that I first began to suspect I might be an unreliable narrator. My friend Nat had just come home from his baseball clinic. I wasn't very athletic, and wasn't really sure what a baseball clinic was. "Was your baseball healthy?" I asked him. "Let's go blow up turtles." he said. We walked down to the pond in our bathing suits and bare feet. Warm sand crunched and rocks prodded my heels. The best part about being barefoot was when I got home and the pile carpet felt like a million tiny worms smoothing the aching skin of my feet. Nat had a net and a snorkel and three packs of Black Cat brand firecrackers. A flat blue sky was painted above us. Toward the horizon, it paled to white where they ran out of paint. I thought they'd done an OK job anyway though. Nat was already in the pond, face down with a black rubber strap around his head from his facemask. I left my shirt on and waded into the water. I was still surrounded with a layer of baby fat and was sensitive about my weight. Nat pointed down below us, and I saw in the dark spiky muck and weeds a slightly lighter shape, round and domed. We dove down and Nat grabbed the turtle in the proper way. It frantically stuck its neck out and twisted to one side then the other trying to hook its beak into his hand, but he had it with his fingertips and it couldn't stretch its neck far enough. Its flat black eyes showed no emotion. Just now, twenty six years later, sitting here typing this, I suddenly got a waft of rose perfume. It reminds me of someone who used to wear perfume just like that, but I'm alone and she's thousands of miles away, almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet. It keeps coming back though, and I crane my neck around just like that turtle, trying to find it with my nose, pushing the air left and right and snuffling with my own slighly hooked beak. But the rose-scented ghost seems to be gone. Maybe I imagined it, or just made it up because the imagery was such a good match. As I said, I believe myself to be a very unreliable narrator. I believe that it did happen, but perhaps some author writing me put it in to deceive me. If so, I would like him to know that it was a fairly clumsy and blunt attempt at symbolism, and I do not appreciate having my memories marionetted around in such an unsubtle manner. We took the turtle up on to the beach, and put it on its back in the sun. Its legs waved in little circles, all different directions. Contrary to what people think, most turtles can flip themselves over if they wind up on their back, one way or another. This one craned it's neck out and back, levering itself up on the sand, then whipped to the side, and flipped over. Turtles are slow and ungainly on land though, and we easily caught it as it dragged its shell toward the edge of the pond. Nat dug a shallow hole in the sand, and unwrapped one package of the Black Cat firecrackers. The red paper wrapping blew down the beach in short hops. We knew what "biodegradable" meant, because in school they were already teaching us the basics of environmentalism. Paper comes from trees, we knew, so this piece of paper would just melt into the earth and rejoin the Earth. I hoped the Earth would not look down on it just because it had had the misfortune to be ground up and pressed flat and used to wrap our package of Black Cat firecrackers. That would be unfair. I also wondered if the red came from nature somehow, and if it would biodegrade along with the paper. I thought that later on, maybe in a few days, I should walk down the beach and see if there was a spot of red where the paper had biodegraded but the Earth had rejected the red as unnatural and therefore not biodegradable. I wondered if there was anything cool you could do with a spot of pure unnatural red. I imagined a secret laboratory somewhere where they made nothing but red. Gallons and gallons of it, and all destined to exist forever, because it was nonbiodegradeable. Nat unwrapped the long sparkly gray wick from the firecrackers and laid them in the bottom of his shallow hole, with the wick leading up and out of it. He put the turtle in on top of them, on its belly, and kicked sand on top of it until only it's hooked nose was sticking out of the sand. I could see the sand shifting and trembling a little bit where the turtle was trying to move its feet. Still kneeling by the hole, Nat took out a plastic Bic lighter, which was also red. The lighter was plastic, so I knew it wasn't biodegradeable, and would be nothing but a plastic lighter forever. It had no other purpose or function, and would maybe someday get crushed by a car, but then it would still be shards of a plastic Bic lighter, and not ever have a new shape or become anything else. I wondered if they used leftover red from the firecracker wrappers to color red plastic Bic lighters. I also wondered if maybe the red was biodegradeable after all, and in time it would leak out of the plastic and return into the earth, where it would show up in a rose petal or a mouse's blood. Then would the remaining plastic Bic lighter (or plastic Bic ligher shards, as the case may be) be white, or just some non-color? Nat lit the fuse that stuck up out of the sand, and it started hissing and spitting sparks out the way they do. Luckily, this one was a normal burning fuse. Sometimes the fuses on these packets were defective and burned down instantly, faster than you can blink, and they blew up in your hand or your face, leaving a ringing sound in your ears and black dots tattooed into your skin from flying gunpowder. The fuse burned down toward the sand, then underneath it. The fuse was coated in something that kept it lit no matter what, so the sand didn't put it out. We couldn't hear the hissing noise anymore though. I looked at the turtle, who had now gotten its head entirely free of the sand. It had stopped struggling, probably believing that it was more or less safe, since it was hidden down in the sand and no one was holding it anymore. Its eyes were totally black. They looked like black BBs, but they were slightly wet, and reflected a convex view of the flat blue sky that faded to white at the edges, and the yellow sand and the stalks of marsh grass at the edges of the beach, and me and Nat standing above it looking down with our hands clenched and our eyes squinted against the glare of the sun and the expected noise and fury of the package of Black Cat firecrackers. In the reflection, we towered vast and implacable above it, bent nearly in a half circle from our bare feet to our spiky wet hair, but we didn't look like avenging gods or monstrous ogres. Just two twelve year old boys in bathing suits. The turtle blinked and everything disappeared. Oh bloody hell I posted it as auto-format, and then realized I'd made some changes and not pasted them in, so I did an "Edit Story" but forgot that admin edit mode doesn't have auto-format. Sheesh. What a knucklehead. ____Not the real rusty Proofreading Is the fact that this assertion is nowhere justified intended to be self-referential? I don't know. I just wrote the thing. Sheesh, you want me to analyze it too? How many times do you read something like this straight through, before you are satisfied enough to publish? Heh. Once. :-) If I were publishing it anywhere more visible than my K5 diary, I might read it through another time. ____Not the real rusty Is it that good? That you so completely believed this to be a true, personal story about me? Wow. I mean, it's based on real experiences, but it's definitely fiction. I must be better than I thought. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oh, an hour or so I think. I wasn't really keeping track, and I got up in the middle to do some other stuff. ____Not the real rusty Some things Not sure about the whole breaking story about the rose perfume though. This is just part one. More on that later. And I still don't know why you're unreliable No, you don't do you? But there it is. The narrator claims to be unreliable, then tells a story that seems perfectly straighforward. So what do you do? I mean, you have nothing but his word to go on, but none of it seems implausible. I love that this seems to have bothered everyone so far. ____Not the real rusty But what about the most important thing? What will happen to all the red? ____Not the real rusty Could be another Cheever? Well, that's something to aspire to, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Starbuck's benefits Starbuck's has improved the world, in my opinion. Ok, I wouldn't go to one in my town, because I know where the good coffee shops are. But Starbucks has brought decent coffee to airports, which is a godsend. Also, in any strange town where you don't know the local places, you can rely on the nearby Starbucks to provide a drinkable cup of coffee. Thus fortified, you can then go search for the good local places. Overall, I prefer a world with Starbucks in it, provided thy don't force everyone else out of business. ____Not the real rusty Eh Here in Portland, there's one Starbucks and about twelve billion other coffeeshops. The same is true for pretty much any San Francisco neighborhood (except there's usually also twelve billion Starbucks). It doesn't seem like the economics of the coffee biz are subject to that kind of problem. ____Not the real rusty Ok, two I don't spend very much time in town, and usually don't have a car when I am, so I don't stray far from the ferry terminal. Still, Coffee by Design absolutely stomps Starbucks in terms of total locations here. There's one of those on every corner. ____Not the real rusty Unfortunately The nearest one to the ferry is way up on St. John street. By the time I've walked there I will have passed at least four local coffeeshops (that I can think of right in the Old Port) and about four hundred Coffee by Designs. Dunkin doesn't have a location that caters to the Old Port foot traffic. I sure wish that Starbucks up on the corner of Exchange street was a Dunkin instead though. ____Not the real rusty It's Portland Maine, not Oregon (NT) ____Not the real rusty US Coffee All US coffee is "barely drinkable" by European standards. They send us the shit beans because Americans don't know any better, or something. For the most part, American coffee is ass. ____Not the real rusty Sorry I'm not buying it. You're welcome to stay. Just don't be a dick. Is that so hard? ____Not the real rusty Oh, never mind I just checked out the hidden comments list. You're not welcome to stay after all, as you appear to be congenitally unable to not be a dick. Yawn. Bring on the next boring troll account. I get paid for this. Do you? :-) ____Not the real rusty Limits the limits are the last 30 comments, or comments within the last 60 days, whichever is less. Every time a comment of yours is rated, your mojo is recalculated, including ratings in the diaries. They don't affect mojo, but they will trigger a recalculation. Basically, it would be almost impossible to get and keep perpetual "trusted" status. We did think of that when we were designing the system. ____Not the real rusty No kidding It sounds like mojo calculation must be fairly complex. It's way more complex than it seems like it should be, really. I hate trying to explain it, because there are a lot of little "except this" and "unless that" conditions that seem fussy and pointless, but end up actually being crucial. We haven't even talked about the weighting scheme that goes into it yet. :-) The only way to actually keep trusted user status forever (or for a long time) is to not post any new comments, and be lucky enough that no one stumbles across any of your old comments and rates them. Any rating event will trigger a recalculation, no matter how old the comment is. There should actually be a cron that would prevent this, and force the proper time-decay, but it hasn't been a real priority. It could just incrementally work through everyone and do a recalculation of their mojo, perhaps 100 random users at the top of every hour. That would pretty much close the last loophole. ____Not the real rusty Good idea That's probably a good idea. Mojo freshness, updated every recalc. A cron could just always do the ten oldest, or something. ____Not the real rusty No This whole argument would be a lot more interesting (by which I mean "shorter") if either of you had bothered to find out how the patch actually works. :-) It keeps track of how many unique readers have viewed a story, and how many have said it's spam. There is a bottom limit (a quorum) for how many people have to have seen a story before it even considers dropping it, and to be dropped it must meet or exceed a ratio of views to votes. The people who don't vote have implicitly voted "keep it" automatically. So, for example, some hypothetical numbers might be that 250 people must have looked at a story before any action can be taken, and after that, 70% of them must have hit the "spam" button. By keeping the numbers high, we can avoid false positives. And finally, the effect of the "Spam" threshold, if met, will simply be to promote the story to voting immediately, thus providing a second buffer against possible abuse. ____Not the real rusty Heh While I realize that a lot of the suggestions people make are dumb, the people actually writng the code do have a pretty god record of not being too dumb. You should always assume that we probably have thought it through. :-) It is an important design feature that any kind of anti-spam thing require overwhelming, near-unanimous agreement. I would rather let some questionable stories stay than interfere with the process of legitimate stories that just aren't "popular". Incidentally, one other benefit of something like this is that we can raise the edit time limit, to make it more useful for stories that need a lot of work, or people who'd like to edit stories collaboratively. If there's a way for the community to get rid of crap, we could allow the maximum edit time to be a day or two. ____Not the real rusty Yeah My wife will kill me if that's not done within, basically, this week. It will at the very least offer spellchecking right from the start. Probably some other cool things. We need money, so yeah, it's soon. The code itself is about 80% done, actually. ____Not the real rusty Improper comment rating Stop and think for a second. How is this helpful? How does comment rating even begin to relate to what you're upset about? It doesn't. It doesn't encourage theboz, or anyone else, to do anything but retaliate against you. In summary, you're being dumb and childish. Please try not to be. ____Not the real rusty Is it Is it in the Scoop CVS yet? There's a bunch of other patches and updates I was waiting for too, like several fixes to little dynamic mode and auto-format issues. Unfortunately, it seems that CVS-mail is still broken, so I never know when anything's been committed anymore. If it's in the CVS, I didn't know it. I will update as soon as I can. ____Not the real rusty Different cases As someone else here has pointed out, all cases are not the same. theboz has been known to try to make a point in an obnoxious way now and then. But he is not always and consistently committed to trolling and annoying everyone whenever possible. "Christian Roberts" was. Due to repetitive abuse, he has now been banned. The point is, the ban was inevitable (he'd been given months to stop being an ass, and showed no signs of it), so it hardly mattered who rated him what. We have a consistent policy. That is to treat each case as an individual occurrence, and to attempt to give the benefit of the doubt to everyone for as long as possible. I stick to this consistently. Also, I have done nothing about this instance except request that Detritus rethink his response. So, from a strictly action-based view, I have in fact done the same thing. ____Not the real rusty Impeach Medham! 12 Galaxies Guiltied to a Ostrological Rocket Society! ____Not the real rusty Careful It would be a worthwhile tradition, but only when used in response to the ravings of lunatics. Not that we'll ever have any shortage of those. :-) ____Not the real rusty Small request It would be more polite to everyone else reading the diaries if you were to respond to comments using the standard "reply to this" commenting mechanism, rather than posting a whole new diary. That's why comments are threaded, after all. Six diaries in one day is rather excessive. By the way, Talez rated four of your comments zero. Only one of them looks like it could even be questionable. That is not "modbombing", I'm afraid. ____Not the real rusty 12 galaxies! Guiltied to a zegnatronic rocket society! Impeach Rusty! ____Not the real rusty Heh I'm sorry, but trolls like Christian Roberts do not get much sympathy from the administration. If you're just trying to talk, and someone launches a vendetta against you, fine, I'll intervene. If you're simply trying to be an ass, you get the ratings you deserve. ____Not the real rusty Way to encourage him. :-) More attention == more activity. Vote -1 and simply move on... ____Not the real rusty Could you maybe... ...ask him to please cut it out? If the grue-bashing continues, the banning will commence. ____Not the real rusty Or... ...the same side of two different coins, as it were. --Tom Stoppard ____Not the real rusty More boring running crap I know most of you are probably bored silly with my ongoing running diary, so just skip right on by this one, cause that's all it is. Anyone still reading? 5 miles, 40:46. I'm all about milestones. I was feeling rather feisty tonight, so I thought "So what if it is 1:30AM? I feel like running." I also figured that someday I was going to have to pound the circum-island pavement without knowing whether I could go the distance or not, so why not do it first at a time when I'm not likely to see another living soul, namely 1:30 AM on a Saturday morning. That way if I ended up puffing and blowing and having to keel over at some point, it would only be me and the seagulls to watch. So off I went, turning right where I usually go straight, around toward backshore. I aimed for a very easy pace, it felt like maybe 1/4 of what I was capable of. Pretty mellow, pretty loose, everything was chill. I cruised along for a while, passing familiar houses and curves, and at some point I realized that I was a goodly way along, and having no trouble whatsoever. Not out of breath at all. In fact, I wasn't even working to maintain -- I was just kind of breathing normally. This was at maybe the 1.5 mile mark. Normally I'm pretty beat by then. Not this time. I think I finally know what they're always talking about. That "zone". The pace where nothing is hard, nothing is work, your legs just do their thing, and you kind of glide along above them and enjoy the scenery. Tonight was the first time I felt like that. I'm not going to get all gaga "Oh my God it's the most amazing thing ever", but I will say it's a hell of a lot more fun than running usually is. :-) There's a bit of a hill at about 3.75 miles. Not real steep, but long. That was a little tough. And, like broadband, the last mile was hard. But I had enough reserve energy to sprint the last two tenths or so, and I recovered in about 5 minutes of sitting on the porch and steaming. And then I worked out what 40:46 actually broke down to. 8:09 per mile, give or take a few tenths. Well. I don't know what to feel good about. Doing five miles at all, or doing it in about 2 minutes per mile under what I thought my pace was. Either way, it's all good. :-) A week or so ago, I told Rob (or was it Bill? One of them anyway) that I thought I'd be able to do the whole island in a month or less. Well, I was right. :-) I believe you My time-based elation is all about personal goals. Tons of people can utterly kick my ass, and I have no doubt that you're among them. Are you medicated? I know there are some hard-core asthma treatments out there, and I know a few serious atheletes with really severe asthma. Don't let it stop you! ____Not the real rusty PS I checked my time in the standings for last year's road race, and I fell right between a 54 year old man and a 40 year old woman. Oh no, I have no illusions about my speed relative to anyone else. :-) ____Not the real rusty Haven't looked into medicine? Yeesh! You really should. Asthma is really very treatable. Thankfully my heart is that of an ox. Did they have to move other organs around for that? Maybe it's squeezing your lungs, and that's the problem. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Ha Pity my unclear writing. Ah hem. Allow me to rephrase: "I told [someone] that I'd be able to run the whole island at at some time within the next month." :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh I did keep an eye to stern, but I seriously didn't see another living creature of any kind, motorized or non. The nightlife out here on Godforsaken is not what you'd call "wild". Though deer are always a possibility, I didn't see any tonight. ____Not the real rusty MUST... RUN... Nah. It's nice that I'm actually enjoying it and all, but runnng is not the point here, it's the means to an end. The end being better cardio shape and more endurance for rock climbing and hiking. Well, there are other ends too, like getting me out in the air and whatnot, but those are the main ends. I will try to guard against becoming a triple-A. Also, I post here about it a lot more than I talk about it, because talking to people here is definitely helping to keep me motivated. That may give a skewed picture of the importance it actually has in my life. I will remain ever vigilant though. ____Not the real rusty 17:40 Woo. I decided to go for time today. I was reading around here and there online, and one site said some runners use a strategy of walking every mile or so, for a little bit, to ease off the muscles and allow them to run much faster the rest of the time. I thought "what the hell?" and gave it a try. I guess it worked. So, 2 1/4 miles, 17:40. I walked three times, for about 15 seconds each time. The rest of the time, I was pushing it pretty hard. And glory be, I shaved almost a minute off my previous best! So I guess that strategy works. Plus, I broke an 8 minute pace, for the first time ever. Whee! Tomorrow I take it easy and try to add some distance. I found out there's a Godforsaken Island 5-mile race, at the end of July. 5 miles is the paved circumference of the island, so I think I can guess the course. I looked at last year's results, and extrapolating my previous 9 minute pace out to the full distance, I'd have been a little behind the middle of the pack. If I could actually keep up a 7:51 mile for 5 miles, I'd have done really well, like 8th in my age group and 137th overall (out of 377). Maybe I'll enter it this year. Not a long time to work up to twice my current distance though. :-) Sorry about all the interruptions earlier. We were having database index problems, and I had to mess with them for a bit. I just love ferreting out problems that only show up with a lot of tables and a high load. Godforsaken Island... ...is actually Peaks Island, Maine. Someone on K5 coined the name Godforsaken Island when I moved, and it's just kinda stuck. :-) ____Not the real rusty Really? Unfortunately, most marathons I've looked into won't let you stop and walk Why not? I mean, it always seemed to me like traveling the 26.2 miles without mechanical assistance was the defining feature, and the actual running was just the fastest known way of doing it. Do they actually have rules that require you to run continuously the whole time? And let's not be calling 17:32 pathetic until I've had at least a day to enjoy what I view as a triumphant accomplishment, eh? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Well 17:32 in a 2 mile run is pathetic. For a real runner, absolutely. For me, it's pretty good. :-) ____Not the real rusty Punishment Heh. In lacrosse it wasn't punishment, but it was something I avoided as much as possible. I played attack anyway, running wasn't really a major feature of the position. I eventually discovered that running fast only drew attention to yourself, and the best strategy was to sort of drift and meander and always just happen to end up at the right spot just when your defenseman was distracted by that flashy middie hauling ass across the centerline (hi Rob!). Quick pass, easy shot from 15 feet out, and another goal. ____Not the real rusty Air, wonder bread, and peanut butter Cross-country runners are weird. I used to have a friend who did that. He ran shoeless, and ate almost nothing but white bread rolled into balls, and peanut butter. He claimed to derive most of his nutrition from the nitrogen in the air. Damn good runner, though. ____Not the real rusty Narc! Look! K5's got it's own FBI plant now! ;-) Just kidding. Welcome! What part of the DC area are you from? I used to live in Adams-Morgan and Dupont Circle, a couple years ago, and my sister lives down in Woodbridge. ____Not the real rusty Heh You mean my upstairs neghbors? Yeah, what about them? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yep I know where that is. I used to live a block behind the Scary Safeway, on Ontario Place. I miss DC sometimes. It was a great place to live. If only I had the means, I'd keep an apartment there and go back for a while now and then. ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok, it took another read. I didn't consciously notice "jehoover" or the other "subtle" clues at first. By the way, Mr. Hoover, you have altogether too many accounts. ____Not the real rusty Changed-my-life Books I read a lot of books. Some of them, though, are "changed my life" books, and some are not. I just had a long conversation about this with harb in #k5 and he didn't really get it. I can't be the only one. Some books you read, and enjoy reading, and think "That was a really good book. I'm glad I read it." And then you go on to something else and that's really the last that book ever comes up in your mind. Later on someone will say "Hey, did you read this book?" and you can say "Yes, I did, I recall liking it quite a lot." But there are other books that end up being much more than that. Sometimes they're ones I didn't even enjoy reading all that much, though usually I did. But points, characters, moods, situations keep cropping up again in my head, much later on. There are some books I remember perfectly a long time after reading them, because I keep running into things that remind me of them, and they stay fresh and memorable. These are "changed my life" books. Books that color my interaction with the world, and act as landmarks or maps for life. I can't really explain it any better than that. I guess you either know what I'm talking about or not. What are they, then? Off the top of my head a few that come to mind are Infinite Jest, House of Leaves, The Shipping News, nearly everything by Terry Pratchett (especially The Truth), The Doomsday Book, American Psycho, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, several of Stephen King's short stories (especially "Here There be Tygers" and "The Mist"). Probably lots more if I spent more than five minutes thinking about it, or if all those boxes of books upstairs were unpacked and I could look over the titles. But those are the ones that happen to come to mind. What about you? Ooh! Heart of Darkness! That one's definitely on my list. I can't believe I forgot it. If I had to give an alien species one single book to explain the human condition, it would have to be that one. About your .sig -- when did I say that? ____Not the real rusty The Queue I didn't post it to the queue for a couple reasons. First, I'm not overly fond of "list stories" like this, and I didn't have much else to say about it to make it into a meaningful story. Second, I'm still not explaining the concept of "life-changing book" very well. I think that without a lot more thought about what I mean, it'll end up being a "my favorite books" list. Which is interesting, sort of, but not all that interesting. What I meant by life changing is not what I think of as the best books I've ever read, but books that have stayed with me past the reading. Books that I can recall specific moments where having read them affected my actions or perceptions. I think, really, I'd have to come up with some anecdotes to really get the idea across. If it were a story, I would find that a lot more interesting than "my favorite books". Stories from K5ers about how, specifically, certain books changed them. Like, rather than the ten best, just a personal story about how one particular book has fit into your life. Now I kind of want to see that. Maybe I will write something more complete and submit it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also I think I'd also want to at least encourage people to keep it to fiction. Nonfiction can't really do what I'm thinking about, because it is specifically written to illuminate some part of the world or of life. What I'm trying to get at is much more about how stories have changed the world as I see it. Like the Oscar Wilde quote about how if it weren't for the the Impressionists, London wouldn't have the particular fog that it has. I'm not thinking about how reading "Programming Perl" eventually led to my creating K5. I'm thinking about how reading "Here there be Tygers" has retrospectively colored and selected my memories of elementary school. There's no doubt a nonfiction discussion would be interesting as well, but I'd be more interested to hear about the deeper but more slippery effects that fiction , or just good storytelling, has on us. ____Not the real rusty Storytelling I think what I'm talking about here is storytelling, more than fiction or non-fiction. And I'm definitely not trying to say that that moment doesn't happen with virtually any kind of book (and any kind of media at all, really). Just that I'm interested in the moment as it relates to storytelling in particular. Most (though not all) fiction falls under the general purview of "storytelling", and much (though also not all) of nonfiction does too. Good nonfiction still usually has a story to tell, it just happens to have actuall happened. I think in my head I was misidentifying "nonfiction" as things like programming manuals. Maybe what you're after is books that tugged at the deep thoughts and feelings and just for that moment, either filled a particular gap, or created a new one, whether or not the book intended to do so. I think that's closer to what I'm talking about than anything I've said so far, if you perhaps change "book" to "story". And David Foster Wallace is a wanker for publicly picking a fight with Mark Leyner. Thought you should know. I'm sure he's a wanker for any number of reasons. Nevertheless, he's a wanker with a very special place in my heart, and who will always find an open wallet at my end of amazon.com. :-) ____Not the real rusty Three^H^H^H^H^HTwo Exciting Ads As you may or may not have noticed, K5 currently has a (not so) grand total of three two ads running. One of them is my default ad. This obviously sucks, because ads bought right now will run for like a few hours, in all likelihood. Is this it? Has the novelty worn off? Do textads actually not work any better than banner ads or any other kind of ad? The only thing I can think of at the moment is a time-based option for ad payment. Like, pay a flat fee for a month, or a week, or whatever, and your ad will rotate during that entire time period, without regard to actual impressions. Would it make any difference though? If there are no buyers, no technological fix will help. Sigh. Anyone want to hire a relatively experienced web-community geek? jobs are you good with kids? do you mow lawns? No and yes, in that order. ____Not the real rusty Guilt That's just the thing. I don't want to guilt anyone into anything. If you have nothing to advertise, don't buy an ad. You shouldn't feel guilty about that. This is a capitalist economy. If we can't provide value to the people who need it, then we don't deserve your pity money. I don't see random people buying ads to help me out as a viable, sustainable strategy for K5. Advertising cannot live as a novelty forever. In fact, it seems to have novelty value for about three months. I don't think any nifty features or clever appeals will help. What we need to do is find actual businesses that would benefit from advertising here, and convince them of that fact. We need, in a word, sales. I am working on this, but I don't know if it will happen soon enough. Besides all that, I'm getting relatively sick of trying to make a living off the site. I hate talking about money all the time. I hate worrying about it. I absolutely loathe writing billing and payment code, which is why subscriptions have taken so long. It's dull. It's not what I want to do. At this point, if someone could offer me a job doing something else that sounded interesting, I'd probably take it. K5 as a job is very un-fun lately. Luckily for me, I have all kinds of experience in things that no one ever gets paid to do. ____Not the real rusty I know I know, I know. And it really is almost done. I just got the existing subscripton code re-integrated with the newest CVS scoop. I know that will definitely help. I'm just kind of dismayed that textads aren't working, and I think the problem really is that we need sales. This isn't so much a K5 income thing, despite my griping. ____Not the real rusty Lots of yup All sensible points. I do, though it may not appear so, have a business plan. I am moving on many of the fronts you sensibly bring up. It does sound much worse than it is. I just have moments of despair now and then. I probably should know better than to post them here, because then you all get worried and I feel bad for worrying you all. But, you know, where else would I post them? Even just today, since posting this, new information has come to light that may help in the near future. And I got a whack more of subscriptions done. Basically, I'm saying, when I sound really down, take it with a grain of salt, because I'm probably just aaaaack-sensuating the negative and eeeee-liminating the positive. ____Not the real rusty Heh I also wonder how much of it is part of your secret plot (consciously or not). A entry in rusty's diary complaining about lack of text ad revenue == brief surge of new text ads, no? ;) Heh. You've figured me out! Yeah, it does, but not a lasting surge. While it's nice to see people chipping in, it won't ever solve the deeper economic problems with the way things work right now. "Well, I'm certainly learning a lot." That is my mantra. When I fall off the sailboat and the sharks start circling, you'll just be able to hear me call out "Well, I'm certainly learning a*gurgle*" ____Not the real rusty Come sail away, come sail away... It's important that you imagine Eric Cartman singing the title. No seriously you guys. So tomorrow I'm headed down to Plymouth. Friday morning I will do an honest half-day's work for once in my life with my friend Bill (some sort of carpentry, he doesn't know exactly what yet). Then we will provision the good ship Glorious (unofficially known, of course, as the Glorifice) for its maiden voyage. The Glorifice is Bill's 25 (28?) foot sailboat, hailing from Pocasset, MA. Or possibly Cataumet. One of those little Bourne villages anyway. The only firm plan is to be in Falmouth on Sunday, since Rob has to go to a wedding. Otherwise, we're going wherever the wind seems to favor. We might stop by the Vineyard, but it looks like johnny isn't around, judging by his non-response to my email. That's a shame. I'm sure pirate humor will abound, as we're all secretly a bunch of pirates. Arrr. In running news, I did my expanded 2.2 mile loop today, in 18:37, which is down to 8 and a half minutes per mile, and probably right about where I should be. There will probably be some interruption in the schedule this weekend, what with being on a boat and all, but that's ok. Downtime is good. Maybe I can talk one of them into running with me on Friday. My guess is not, but you never know. Also, my knife came today. For the first time in my life, I now own a proper pocketknife. I feel strangely more prepared for life now. I have no idea why. What's that you say? You're just bursting with a comment about sailing, running, or knives? Well, just click that Post A Comment link below, and have your say, you crazy diamond. Wise, wise words. (NT) ____Not the real rusty Yeah but... You need to rent a slip, and still have to pay for utilities when you're moored. Depends on where you decide to keep it, but some places would be more expensive to do that than to just rent an apartment. There's also the issue of getting the money. Even if you intend to live on it, banks will file "boat loan" in the luxury category. However, if money isn't the reason, or a concern, I would like to do that too. My wife has already put the kibosh on that scheme though, so I don't expect it to happen. I imagine I'd probably get sick of it pretty quickly too, really. I mean, you probably couldn't hook up a washer/dryer, so laundry alone would be a pain. It wouldn't necessarily be the carefree easy lifestyle I like to imagine it being. ____Not the real rusty Your dad I actually haven't ever met your dad. I am aware of his role in my life, though, as "what you would have become if not for Bret." I envy his nautical lifestyle sometimes. On the other hand, I have some fondness for land-based life too. I could efinitely live on a boat for the summer if that was an option. I think that would be a fine compromise. Probably not gonna happen though. ____Not the real rusty Me too I am so very jealous. Me too. At least it's close enough that I can go out on it with him. I want a boat though, dammit. Every day I see the water, just a stone's throw from my house. My dream is to own a big sailing boat, quit work, and just sail around the world. If you go, call me. I'm so there. ____Not the real rusty The one-button mouse The bit about the one-button mouse was excellent. It goes downhill from there, though. ____Not the real rusty Today on "As the Subcontinent Turns" Pakistan: India... I... we have to talk. India: But Pakistan, what is it? Pakistan: I just don't know how I feel about you anymore. India: What do you mean? Pakistan: Well, I don't know if I'm at war with you, or in war with you. India: But, I thought we were in war with each other! Pakistan: I just don't know if I still feel the same way. India: Oh, Pakistan! How could you! Pakistan: Darling, I'm sorry. I'll always be at war with you. But... we're just no longer in war with each other. India: You brute! ____Not the real rusty I know It's gallows humor. I can either try for funny, or sit down and cry, because I sure as hell can't do anything to stop them. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I like this sig though. Clever. ____Not the real rusty 13:47 Still running. Just got back. Printed out a map of the island, and much to my surprise, discovered that my running loop is a teeny bit over 1.4 miles, not 0.5 miles as I had thought. Maybe you can tell I'm no good at estimating distance? Anyway, this news makes me feel considerably less lame for just yesterday finally managing to complete the whole loop (including going up the hill in the middle, not down) without stopping or walking. Today, for the hell of it, I roughly timed myself (door to door). 13:47. Or about 9 minutes per mile. I'm pretty beat after 1.5 though, so I bet that wouldn't hold up over a much longer distance. Tomorrow is rest day again. Wednesday I will be extending the route a little more, adding a 0.7 mile portion of the loop that I've been skipping due to where my house is. That'll put me right up around 2 miles, which should take a little more than 20 minutes, which is just what I ought to be doing. I'm glad to report it does get easier. I am now at the point where I can rest and gain my breath back while still running, just by shorting up my stride a lot and doing most of the work with my ankles. This is key. If you can't get your breath back while you're still running, the first hill puts you in a respiratory hole you can't climb out of. It's still hard, but I'm also kind of starting to look forward to it. I find that very disturbing. Anyone who'd like to jeer or encourage me, please do. :-) Heh I really want to drive it in a car and find out. It's not very hilly, so I dubt that makes too much difference. But then again, my measurement is of the "piece of string held aganst Mapquest printout" variety, so God only knows how close it is. My car has a busted clutch (still). Maybe next time mes grandes-parents come up, I'll borrow their car and roll around it to find out for real. ____Not the real rusty Walking Now and then, usually just because it's a nice day, I'll go for the five-mile walk around the island. It's pretty good exercise, but I don't feel like it's doing anything for my heart or lung capacity. To get any kind of stress there I would basically have to be running -- I can walk it at just about any pace without any trouble. It's a nice break to keep from getting bored though, and does do soemthing for my legs. I'm always a little sore when I get home. ____Not the real rusty Speed I'm not really that concerned with improving my speed, actually. I'm pretty happy with 9 minutes. I am interested in better endurance (useful for walking 4 miles uphill with 50 or 60 lbs on your back, or climbing a two-pitch face). So most of my concentration is on going further, rather than faster. Until I can do the whole 5 mile loop around the island, the time it takes can pretty much be whatever it is. When I can do five miles, then maybe I'll start looking at the clock as a motivator. Now, if you want to compare distances, I'm all over that. :-) My dad just called, and he mapped it out on his (better) mapping software at 1.86 miles. My Wednesday loop is about 2.1 miles. The plan is to do the two mile loop a few times, and then start adding to that. Eventually I'll be able to basically do a figure eight around that route. Then I can tackle the circumisland trip. My guess? I think I can do that a month from now. We shall see. ____Not the real rusty Altitude You've got it worse than me. There's a lot of air to work with here. My average altitude is, I'd guess, about 25 feet above sea level. :-) ____Not the real rusty Poorly ;-) Yeah, I do climb. Not well, but I'd like to be better. I figured the first step to that was to be in some kind of reasonable shape. All the technical know-how in the world does no good if my ankles go all sewing-machine after ten minutes. ____Not the real rusty 12 year old girls 12 year old little girls kick amazing ass, too. Oh Jesus, no kidding. And not just them either. Women with any ki ndof reasonable fitness level have the vast majority of men beat hands down strength-to-weight wise. The women who don't go all "eww I like totally can't do this and stuff!" always kick our asses. Climbing is a weird sport. You can almost never tell how good someone will be by looking at them, unless they've never done it before. Then you can sometimes guess. Experience counts for a lot more than strength, but getting experience is also a lot harder when you're wasted after one climb. So fitness, then experience, I think. In the gymn, I can do 5.8 consistently. 5.9 sometimes, and 5.10 if I'm feeling inspired. It's always a good time though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Knees but watch your knees! I find that always leaves me with a sore neck. (rimshot) The first thing I did was get myself a good pair of running shoes. Adidas Response if anyone cares. They are lovely, and my feet and knees are peachy so far. ____Not the real rusty Yes I didn't want to give the impression I was unduly concerned about how fast I was running. I'm really not. I was just curious. Also, I wanted to know how long I was actually out there for. ____Not the real rusty Huh I definitely go faster in the last 1/3 of a mile or so than the rest of it. Once I can just about see my house, I just want to be done and back home, and tend to speed up and damn the torpedoes. When it still seems like I have a long way to go, I conserve. I also run faster when there's cars going by or other people around. My "slow" pace is really kind of embarrassing. :-) So, I've still got a ways to go before I'm ready for boot camp. That makes me feel pretty lame, knowing that I'm not quite in good enough shape to start boot camp. Why has evolution not yet taken care of the problem of it being so much easier to lose muscle than gain it? ____Not the real rusty Heh You're not a bad troll, Christian. Though I don't think many people are buying it. No, of course I sent no such message. I don't think I'd shed any tears if it were to happen, but whatever. ____Not the real rusty Psst If you want any advice on Eaveston, mine would be do them all in color. The story is good, so the art is less important then it might be. But while the pencil pages are so-so, but the color pages look really good. By contrast, they make the pencil pages look worse than they are. Remember all those suggestions you made when K5 was just starting? Ahh, payback. ;-) ____Not the real rusty In that case Secondly, I'm using color as a metaphor. There's a particular reason for the color, which will (hopefully) become clear later. If that's the case, my advice would be to "color" the rest in grayscale. That is, color them but only use black, white, and shades of gray. They will look much more finished. ____Not the real rusty Poll Options You forgot: "I was only in it for some quick cash. They got what they deserved." ____Not the real rusty Word balloons It may just be me, but the computer-text word fonts are jarring. I would do the wording by hand. If those are temporary to put some context in the pictures for our benefit, or perhaps done that way on purpose, ignore me. But I think it would be more coherent-looking if the wording was integral to the drawing itself. ____Not the real rusty Try it on the page though I don't know if that would trash your drawings or not, but I think you might underestimate the "handmade" effect of it in conjunction with everything else. I mean, from a totally objective viewpoint, your drawing ain't professional either. Turn your weaknesses to strengths. It's a style, so use it. ____Not the real rusty Bah Never mind cheating. Do what works. :-) If you have some tracing paper, the easiest way might be to letter on a tracing paper overlay, scan it, and merge them in the computer. That way you could try out different ways to put it all together. ____Not the real rusty Hey now Page seven is very cool. I dig the sketchy feel, and the colors help a lot. ____Not the real rusty Bad Cal Bunny! Naughty .sig! No biscuit! ____Not the real rusty Aw c'mon... If you can do it without screwing up the following links, maybe. Don't make me make panner apply the html filter to .sigs too though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Soft! What light upon yon webpage breaks? Sooth! S'wounds! Good sir, I beg thee, t'is a consummation devoutly to be wished. A palpable hit, and once more into the breach! If this be madness, yet there's method in't. ____Not the real rusty Books about weblogs? Meg's got one, Matt's got three, Rebecca Blood has one and a half, some other dude I've never heard of has one, even wily old perl hacker Nat Torkington's got one. Questions: Who the hell reads weblog books? and Where's my damn advance already? Write a book about weblogs? Nah. Maybe a callaborative tome about the wonder and glory of collaborative media, but after living through the nineties, I think I'd honestly feel a crushing burden of shame and guilt for adding to the total weight of "new new thing" hype infesting our culture. I want to write a novel about family life and work in America across two recent generations contrasting one version each of the recent-immigrant experience and the long-established American experience. It's gold, baby. Pulitzer, film rights, the works. We'll get Johnny Depp and Kevin Spacey for the movie. Thrusty? I don't think it's the pretzels that are making you thrusty, if you catch the drift of my gist. Shameful Fact #27: K5 is result number 11 on Google if you search for masterbation [sic]. ____Not the real rusty Uh yeah Yeah, sure I did. I mean, of course. Umm. ____Not the real rusty Spelling Make sure you spell it wrong. The key here is the misspelling. I doubt we're even in the top million for "masturbation". ____Not the real rusty Cheating! Well of course if you put "Kuro5hin" in the search. Still, 2580 is pretty impressive. That's like one masturbation reference per 13 K5ers. ____Not the real rusty I was unclear That was a horribly formed sentence. What I meant was a story about two families, each with someone of my age (mid 20's) and someone of my parents age (mid to late 50s). One family immigrated during the older character's young adulthood, the other family has has roots in the US for several hundred years. I was trying to compress all that into one sentence, and it blew up badly. :-) In my head, the immigrant family is Portugese. There are reasons for this. The major problem is I don't personally know any Portugese immigrants. I'd have better luck getting material on Germans, as my wife's family is German and basically fits that profile (her parents came here, separately, in their late teens/early twenties). But I think the narrative requires the immigrant family to be Portugese. ____Not the real rusty This is a silly argument Listen people, for all his prickliness and paranoid overtones, psychologist is right. Please don't argue against him on my behalf. :-) The point is that no one can guarantee that I will always be the only one who controls the user data here. I will, you can be sure, do my damndest to make sure I am, but there are scenarios under which I'd be helpless to stop it being sold off as an asset. What if we got sued and lost? I don't have any cash in the bank, and the courts would make the decision for me. It isn't impossible, and you don't have to think I'd do anything nefarious at all to imagine it happening. Besides which, I know I personally hate it when I can't remove myself from someone's database. I don't like being the one who makes that the case here. So, any Scoop hackers want a new project? :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah, ok, but I still don't see his problem. We all know these things going in. Let's rephrase the question: "I'm a total dimwit, and released information I now wish I had kept to myself. Can someone please provide me with a way to fix my retarded mistake?" I'm not arguing that he shouldn't have thought of this going in. But at the same time, people screw up. I'm not big on punishing them forever for that. Even if such a proposed patch were made, we have no gaurantee that the data doesn't still exist somewhere. No, there could still be caches or whatever. You would have assurance to whatever extent you trust the K5 admins that we no longer held on to it. You would also gain a decent level of plausible deniability just from that. A copy somewhere else could easily be tampered with, and anyone smart would argue that. We have no gaurantee of honesty in the admins even. I trust you rusty, (and the others) but if I had data I really didn't want traced back to me on here, I most certainly would not. Ok, you're smarter than psychologist. Fine. But granted that, doesn't it make some kind of sense that we shouldn't be in the business of making his mistake permanent? ____Not the real rusty Yes All that means is that if we end up owing some ungodly amount for a libel suit, or whatever, they'll sieze all the corporation's assets, which include your data. ____Not the real rusty Well yeah More importantly for me. As if I owned any assets. The bank owns my car, the house is rented, and all our furniture belongs to the landlady. I have three decent comupters, a lot of camping gear, and some credit card debt they're more than welcome to. Slim pickings indeed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Adjusted Score As an administrator, the official adjusted score is now 9.025, which factors back in the +2 for a poll, and I threw in .025 points for the phascinatingly fonetic spelling of "haughnted." ____Not the real rusty Heh We're just fooling around. There is no score really. Consider it all an extended metaphor for everyone's general approval of your first diary as a quality one. Well done. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mmmm. Pixie Sticks Even better were the giant pixie sticks. You know, the four-foot-long ones, that held like a pint of flavored sugar. In high school, we used to traditionally get jacked up on those things on the day before Christmas vacation and run around like a bunch of loons. Good times... good times... ____Not the real rusty Huh I never had that problem. Maybe you should work on your drooling problem. ;-) ____Not the real rusty 3_view_source ;-) Or just grab http://www.kuro5hin.org/dynamic-comments.js or the Scoop code I hope I didn't screw up your experiment. ____Not the real rusty 6_poiu_in_not_a_word nor is 5_poiu, for that matter. ____Not the real rusty Best stories of the day If there aren't any new stories on some day, that just means there haven't been any good ones today. Please do feel free to read other websites if this one isn't keeping every second full of new and exciting joy. I think the goal here is usually more about quality than quantity, and some days there just isn't much of either. ____Not the real rusty Ow. Ow. Ow. Sisyphian, I've been engaged in an effort to reshape and reform my feeble doughy self. With Rob around, life will just be harder than it needs to be unless I'm in better shape then that in which I'm accustomed to being. Besides which, I'm nearly 26. This is when the Golden Days of Youth begin to slip away. This is what men look back to when they wake up at 39 and think "Goddamn! Where'd this gut come from? If only I'd done something when I was 26, when it wouldn't have been so hard..." Dear lord help me, I've started running. Someone just shoot me now. Today was day three. Cold and raining hard, I nevertheless strapped on the Adidas, layered up the polypropelene, zipped into the waterproof pants, and hit the road. My current route is about a half-mile altogether, perhaps a wee bit longer. I can't run the whole thing. Day one, I made it about 4/10ths of a mile, walked for a few telephone poles (which are the Standard Running Distance Unit along my route), sprinted up the steep hill at the midpoint, ran about half way back, felt like I was going to hurl really bad, and walked the remainder. Well, it was already the furthest I've run at one time since about 1994. I then sat on the porch for about an hour and sipped water until the "gonna hurl any second" feeling gradually passed. I successfully retained my cookies. My legs hurt. Walking upstairs was torture. Day two I made it all the way to the bottom of the steep hill, but decided the sprint was a little ambitious, considering I couldn't yet jog the rest of the route. I walked up the hill (briskly!), walked another telephone pole until I had most of my wind back, then got running again. This time I made it to the big tree in front of the Monastery, which is about three telephone poles further along than the day before. I felt accomplished. I could probably have kept going, but I made a goal and met it, so I rewarded myself with walking the rest of the way back. I did not feel like I was going to puke when I got back either. Did some post-run stretching, and I was set. Very, very sore though. Walking upstairs was torture. Today, as aforementioned, freezing and rainy. Well no one said it would be easy, and honestly, I hate running so much that perhaps, I thought, being cold and wet will be a good distraction from the actual running. I got on my way. Made it to the bottom of the hill. Walked up again. Walked a much shorter distance at the top than before, and determined that today I would run at least until I could see the white chair in front of my house. This is about another five telephone poles beyond yesterday's goal of the big tree in front of the Monastery (altogether, about 3/4 of the way back). Much to my amazement, I made the goal and didn't feel like stopping yet. I recalibrated and decided to aim for the road just before my house instead. This is basically as far as I was ever planning to run anyway, since it leaves a reasonable distance for a walking cool-down, which I think is important to keep my legs from seizing up by stopping cold at my front door. And I made it too. Running, you are my bitch now! I didn't feel even remotely nauseated. Though I did feel very very damp. And I can already sense tomorrow morning's agony of the legs. It's a good pain though, a "building muscle while you sleep" pain. I feel good. Walking upstairs is still torture. So I'm up to almost half a mile, with a short (but steeply uphill!) walk in the middle. Yes, this is pretty pathetic, but for me it feels like approximately the distance to the moon and back. Tomorrow is day four, and I shall Rest. The plan is three days then rest, repeat ad infinitum. And what have I learned? A few things, I suppose. That I can run, if I decide to. That running-shoe technology has advanced by pillowed leaps and springy bounds since I last owned a pair of sneakers (goddamn these shoes are like some kind of alien technology). That I still hate running. That running is still the fastest way to get back in shape, and therefore the most efficient use of my exercise time. And that walking upstairs can be torture. Yeah yeah Shut up, you. ;-) How's that edit queue revision coming along? ____Not the real rusty Heh My full-out running stride is pretty much "walking" length already. Jeez. You people sound like you've never seen someone try to recover from 6 years of sedentary life before. Give me some time! :-) ____Not the real rusty I shall try it When I resume on Wednesday, I'll give it a shot. ____Not the real rusty I'm getting there Trust me, right now, 1/2 mile is all I need to get the heart pumping and the lungs working. I'm not overweight, but I'm in pretty terrible shape. I will continue to extend my route as I am able to. But right now, two miles is pretty far beyond my reach. And I do run awfully damn slow. ____Not the real rusty Cardio What I'm trying to do is build up more general endurance, mainly for rock climbing and kayaking. I think eventually mixing in some sprints will be helpful, but I'm not at that point yet. ____Not the real rusty Hiking I'm running, in part, to get into better shape for hiking. :-) The problem with walking is, basically, I'm in good enough shape to do it for a long time without any real strain. I can easily walk the five miles around the island. And it takes forever, too, comparatively. I'm not really having troubles running. I'm just getting started. There's always a bit of a curve to get over, and this is my process of getting over it. ____Not the real rusty Hills I think the peak altitude on the island is about 60 or 70 feet above sea level. We don't have much in the way of hills. The one in the middle of my run is relatively steep (mild to middling on the San Francisco hill-o-meter) but it is pretty short. You want flat? We got plenty of flat... ____Not the real rusty Gym stuff I just loathe gyms. It's no use for me, because I know that even if I had an expensive gym membership, It would be such an egregious pain to get there, and I hate them so much that I'd never use it. If you must run, this is a pretty great place for it. I get a lovely ocean view almost the whole way, and large quantities of privacy. I'm not real big on the whole "exercise in public" thing. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks :-) The great advantage of the outdoors is that I have a pretty fine looking slice of it surrounding my house. At least a couple times already I have caught myself gazing at the ocean and realized I was not actually aware of running for whole milliseconds at a time. That counts for something. :-) being able to focus on one minute at a time on the program display and just getting through that minute. running seems endless. Ah, that's my fixation with telephone poles. No matter where I am, there's always a telephone pole just ahead. I make little deals with myself: "Just make it to that next telephone pole, that's all" and then I get there and cruelly tell myself "Okay, maybe just to one more telephone pole..." My body hates me for this, no doubt. Nevertheless, pace myself I will. Actually, my legs recovered a lot quicker and more fully today than they have so far. They barely twinge right now. Yay! Progress! ____Not the real rusty Duration The problem is duration. I can easily walk briskly for two hours straight. I'm not in bad shape, by modern American standards. I want to be in better shape than I am, and I simply can't spend four or five hours a day walking briskly. I know running is bad for my knees and whatnot. But in terms of cardiovascular payoff per unit time, you can't beat it. At least, you can't beat it in the field of things I'm willing to do. And I hate running too. But not as much as I hate getting winded carrying a 50 lb pack up a mountain. So I shall endure it. ____Not the real rusty Targeting I already bought the damn shoes, so I really didn't want to go out and spend anything on other gear. I've been maintaining my pacing with two measures. If my legs start to burn, I slow down. This, I think, indicates that I've gone anaerobic, which, as you point out, is not what I want. So far, this hasn't been a problem. My legs get tired, but I don't push hard enough to get that lactic acid burn. Breathing: I have been paying careful attention to breathing rhythm. Two steps for the inbreath (through the nose), two more for the outbreath (through the mouth). If I can't maintain this rhythm (i.e. if I can't get enough wind to keep in rhythm), I slow down until I can. It just "feels" like the right pace for me. ____Not the real rusty Heh You may be unique among K5ers. There are, however, whole weeks at a time when I wish my job involved movement that extended beyond my forearms. ____Not the real rusty Irony Microsoft tools are generally very good, but their support can be annoying as hell because of exactly this attitude. Ironically, in this argument, it's the MSFT employee who's saying "no the users aren't stupid, we just screwed it up" and the outsider whose being the "elitist". ____Not the real rusty Thief! Thief! ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I'm sorry It sucks that I had to do that, and it's not because there's anything wrong with the diary or the thread at all. It just totally blew us up. There's no way notafurry could have known that anyway, beforehand. But the link from today's diary hit it enough times to cause serious trouble. Give it a few days. I'll open it back up when everyone's forgotten about it. Meanwhile, we really do need comment pagination. ____Not the real rusty Um Not really. There's no way to easily distinguish between "I'm loading the whole page" and "I'm only loading this 5-comment subthread". Wait a day or two. I'll re-enable it. Have patience. ____Not the real rusty NYT, BDB, Spring in ME. Someone was so kind as to sign me up for the New York Times online today. Thank god the world's most respected newspaper has gotten itself into the spam business. Go ahead, sign up anyone you like. They'll have to jump through hoops to get out again. Whee. I hate the New York Times. For more fun, see this forum in which I get to say that the guy running the joint is an idiot. This only confirms my opinion. Nicer things inside, and a Blind Date Blog poll:-) Something I didn't really realize I missed living in cities is watching the slow development of the seasons. It may have just been the cities I was in, but for years, I haven't had the experience of watching seasons change. The leaves on the trees in the backyard are just about fully unfolded, and should soon start to get a lot bigger. And I remember when they were just little green buds, coated with ice. And this fall, when I'm cursing them as I wrangle the rake around the yard, maybe it'll be less unpleasant because I'll be able to remember today, when they were just young green things starting to obscure my view of the ocean. Damn Ernie for doing this to me. I'm now hooked on his new webgame, BlindDateBlog. The gist is, 10 girls and 10 guys collaboratively blog and each week one of each gender is voted out of the game. At the end, the last girl and guy standing win a slightly fabulous all-expenses paid "blind" date with each other. It's like Real World season two and three. Drama, conflict, questionable sexuality. Brilliant stuff. And unlike "reality TV" it's all live. There's no editing or stage managing going on behind the scenes. The boring parts are boring, and the scandal is wholly scandalous. Someone needs to hire Ernie to do this stuff for a living. He has a gift. Be warned. In all likelihood I will be posting more about BDB here. The poll doesn't include all the current contestants, because there isn't room. Just the ones I think are likely candidates for The Boot this weekend. Pick one. Top girl and top guy lose. Yeah yeah I just saw those tonight, actually. I swear I spell-checked. Oh well. Anyway, it's a damn web forum. Screw it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Rampant Ageism And since you're 14, don't read any diaries anymore. I'm pretty sure they're all illegal for you to view. And the same for stories and comments. I think that takes care of my legal responsibility, right? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oh no PS: I have a strange pride from having Rusty reply to one of my comments. That cannot be a good sign. No, it is not. It is, in fact, the first sign that you are sliding into Stage One K5 Dependence. Your behavior will soon be marked by compulsive reloading, relentless boosterism, and worship of all things Rusty. You will be seen to call me "fearless leader" in a non-ironic way. You will absolutelyu, and unquestioningly love every facet of K5. You will be very vocal about this love to everyone you know. This initial happy phase will, however, soon give way to Stage Two K5 Dependence. You will begin to feel miffed that there are articles posted that you thought were crap. You will start to see imaginary trolls everywhere, and complain about how much better things were in the good old days. You will hate tombuck, trhurler, and streetlawyer with a passion. You will probably be involved in a "modstorm." These will be dark times. From there, you may leave in a huff and never return, though this has only happened once, to my knowlege. It is vastly more likely that you will instead proceed to Stage Three K5 Dependence. This is the final resting state for most K5ers. You will realize that democracy doesn't always produce the results you personally wanted, and accept that on the whole, that's ok. You will not feel personally insulted when an article you voted against gets posted anyway. You will not even notice comment ratings. You will view me as more of a loyal pet and funny mascot than a "fearless leader" or Wise Elder. And you will come to accept and even love the offbeat contributions of trhurler, tombuck, and streetlawyer. Knowing this probably won't help, but perhaps you can skip Stage Two and proceed directly to Stage Three. :-) ____Not the real rusty Iced Coffee, and an alternative iced tea method I feel fairly strongly that there are three proper ways to drink coffee, which depend on the temperature of the coffee and the time of day: Hot coffee, morning: Black. Black, black, and black. Hot coffee, evening: A small amount of cream acceptable. Only actual honest to god cream. Not half and half or milk. If in doubt, stick with black. Sugar is never ok in hot coffee. Iced coffee, anytime: Loads of cream and sugar. Milk is ok if there's nothing else, but it won't taste as good. At Dunkin Donuts, order it "extra both". There should be crunchy undissolved sugar at the bottom. Oh, and lots of ice too. Tell them "plenty of ice" if you're not making it yourself. And for iced tea, I make my own too, but I don't drink it for the caffiene. I use Celestial Seasonings Wild Berry Zinger herbal tea, which is non-caffeinated and has a kind of fruity taste (so no other flavoring required). I boil water like normal, put two teabags and about two tablespoons of water in a pitcher, and pour in about three or four cups of boiling water. Just enough to fill the pitcher maybe 1/5th full. Let it sit for a while and steep, until it smells pretty strong and concentrated. Fish out the bags, and fill the rest of the way with lukewarm tap water, and stir. Then refrigerate. Works like a charm. ____Not the real rusty Coffee Silly. The coffee is there for the caffiene. It really does add a flavor, but it's not the flavor you get from hot coffee, by any means. I shoot for something like really cold melted coffee ice cream, really. Back in the day, when I worked at the furniture shop, there was a Dunkin Donuts located tragically within walking distance. I used to go through four large iced coffees on an average day. Four. If you've seen the DD "large cold drink" cup, that's a hell of a lot. I think they're 32 oz cups, so that's like four liters. I moved to DC and had to wean myself back to a reasonable caffeine intake over several months. ____Not the real rusty Solution: lie In your greeting, just tell them they have 10 seconds. People will believe you. Seriously. "Hello, you have reached the fucking answering machine of Profane Motherfucker. You have ten fucking seconds to leave your name and phone number. If your message is longer than ten seconds, it will be fucking ignored, you festering pile of shit. Thanks, and have a nice fucking day." ____Not the real rusty "Break K5" It doesn't exactly "break k5". I can and did load it several times. It was basically just that a lot of people were participating in that particular diary, ,and all went to look at the link the same time. It can be served, but only in small quantities at once. :-) ____Not the real rusty Duh! Because on his application, it said Good James. By the time they found out he was lying, it was too late. ____Not the real rusty Common decency? No, this is not your private web space. Yes, you surely can post anything you want here, but see, the key thing is, so can anyone else. And your polite request means exactly squat. If you want a private host that you can control, please feel free to pay someone for it. ____Not the real rusty Fun! Keep posting everyone! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Polite Requests Polite requests are nice and all, but they're much more likely to be listened to if the requester is acting in some sort of good faith with the community. This was, like, "I'm using the space that K5 freely provides for my own little personal thing, and I'd like all you icky community people to butt out please." Which has garnered the predictable response. Ironically, if you hadn't put that there, this probably would have been largely ignored. ____Not the real rusty Office Space "Don't it feel good to be a gangsta..." ;-) ____Not the real rusty Damn you! Jesus Christ. That just utterly stomped us. Sorry about the crude countermeasures, but it was killing all the Scoop boxes. We direly need a "maximum comments per page" it seems. ____Not the real rusty Bye, loser. ____Not the real rusty A Springtime Three-Dot Column Ok, I keep getting harassed to write a new diary. Apparently there are a lot of people in the world who enjoy living my life by proxy, and start to jones when there's nothing going on for a while. I haven't written anything because frankly, nothing's been happening. I have a major case of springitis, and have been getting absolutely nothing done in the recent succession of beautiful warm days. Maybe this "live on a vacation island" idea wasn't such a good one. Plus, it leaves a big gaping hole in the "places to go on vacation" category. Honestly, why bother? People come here on vacation. We might as well just stay. Anyway, since nothing's going on, and this is really just for the benefit of everyone else so they'll stop asking, I'm doing it in the good old three-dot-gossip-column format. Enjoy. I was speaking at the OJR Third Wave Conference recently, and one of my co-panelists (I think it may have been Paul Andrews) mentioned the "three-dot column." One of the youngsters in the crowd raised her hand and asked if he would repeat that address. She got five blank stares from the panel. "You said 'something dot com'" she prompted. These kids today with their internet... I love old newspaper guys, by the way. Greatest people on earth. They're so crotchety and cantankerous, and utterly unafraid of anything. Things were always better in their day. I feel bad for future old newspaper guys (who can, by the way, be women). They have nothing to be crotchety about, because as far as they know, this is their day, and it sucks. I'm sure in 25 years things will have been much better today than they are then though... I got a letter from my high school friend Erin, who I had lost touch with. She's in Alaska, working for a wild salmon marketing something or other. If your family was in fishing, it's impossible to get out of the industry. Though the new fishing generations aren't, by and large, getting into the actual "fishing" part of fishing. Phil is in Scotland learning to raise farm salmon. Erin had some not-so-nice things to say about farm salmon. They should get together and have a chat... From what I can tell, it's generally accepted that wild salmon is better then farm salmon. But wild salmon is so damn expensive, and, unless you live in Juneau, hard to find, so it's not like most people can be choosy. I'm not a big fan of salmon myself. It always seemed like one of those fish that was primarily eaten by people who don't really like fish, like tuna. Novelty fish, I think of them. That said, when Ashley and Alex were up for New Year's, Alex got some fine thin smoked salmon that was good on a cracker. So I guess you never know... The Grandparents Foster opened up the cottage last weekend. I showed them around our new house, and earned an exasperated look from Grandpa when Grandma exclaimed over the window sills. "Oh Larry, you could make those!" Much eye-rolling ensued... Rob is hopefully coming up next weekend to do some kayaking. This depends on whether or not his car is fixed. It crashed itself the week before last. He parked it in the garage at work as usual. When he came out, the car was gone. Towed? No, it was just a few spaces farther down the hill. Seems he forgot to put it in gear, or set the brake. The guy whose car it had rolled into looked at him and said "Is this yours?" "Yeah," says Rob. "That sucks." says the guy. So now it's in the evil clutches of an auto body shop. Frankly, I'm not holding my breath that it will be done by the weekend. But I suppose stranger things have happened... It's been relatively peaceful here on the island for the past couple weeks. I feel like this is Mother Nature's gift to year-round residents. "Here's a couple weeks of gorgeous spring weather," she seems to be saying, "without a lot of annoying tourists around." I wish it was like this all the time... Of course, the downside to the spring weather is that my motivation to do anything is at an all-time low. My typical day has been get up, drink a pot of coffee and check email. Read some K5, go sit on the porch for a bit, feel guilty for not doing anything useful, go inside and listen to NPR and clean the kitchen, consider doing some work for the shortest period of time known to man, then go back out on the porch and enjoy the weather. Listening to a lot of Sublime and Bjork remixes isn't helping. As soon as we get a spot of rain, I'm sure subscriptions will get finished up. Then again, they say we're in a terrible drought... How awkward! [NT] ____Not the real rusty Dictionary Jones. See "jonesing", meanings three and four. ____Not the real rusty Weird I dunno. I've heard it in a variety of contexts and media, so I don't think it's regional. It must be you. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Pond Nope, I'm on the pond that Titanic was based on. And the mail comes on the regular passenger ferry, which isn't in any danger of being shut down. :-) ____Not the real rusty Post Office Our island also has an actual Post Office, and there is at least one other company they could contract to bring the mail over, so it's probably not in any danger. Sucks for the Golden Pond islanders though. Where is Golden Pond anyway? ____Not the real rusty Hello This website's readers and management are tired of you gang of idiots and your little anti-Vlad crusade. I don't care what you do, but keep it off this site. Anyone else who joins in will also be anonymized for harrassment. Goodbye. ____Not the real rusty Very little time indeed... I spent very little time actually doing work. Hey! Voxel DNS still isn't mirroring Thock for K5. Get on it! ;-) Dylan says it should be all set, and hurstdog's box is doing it properly. He says he's not getting any transfer requests from voxel... ____Not the real rusty Hear hear It's a handy -1 flag. An article that uses it (or UKian, or EUian, or any such formation) can be voted down without wasting the time to read it. ____Not the real rusty Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the Germans can march in the shade. ____Not the real rusty Yeah It's my favorite France joke. A classic. :-) ____Not the real rusty Also In addition to that, K5 has run the 4.0 Alpha version for many months, and so far we've had exactly two problems with it. One was rather mysterious, but I suspect an index got corrupted when I mistreated it. A dump/reload fixed that. The other was our fault -- we had a poorly designed index that was slowing down a key query. With alpha code like this, who needs stable? :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah I think they're overly conservative with their alpha/beta desgnations, myself. But then again, I guess you'd really want a database company to be pretty conservative about things like that. Being the badass bl33d1ng 3dg3 loonix dudes that we are, we're not afraid to use alpha code. Hell someone's gotta find the bugs, right? But if I were betting several million dollars of other people's money on the reliability of my DB engine, I'd probably want them to be as cautious as humanly possible with declaring something to be "stable". ____Not the real rusty Not true! I often stop and start apache on my test install before committing a patch to CVS. I'm very careful about seeing if there are any basic syntax errors in new code before running it on the largest and busiest Scoop site. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Three to five years ago Next time I need to select a new technology three to five years ago, I'll call you first! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Will do! ;-) [NT] ____Not the real rusty Current data It would be unwise to make business or technical decisions based on a two year old assessment of almost any software package. Think about all the other technologies that didn't exist two years ago. Would you decide against using Scoop because of the state it was in in 2000? Of course not! You'd look at what it is now and compare it to what other systems are like now, and decide based on that. ____Not the real rusty Heh adding users involves changing the master tables directly using SQL and having to type in the encrypted passwords. GRANT update, delete, insert, select ON *.dbname TO user@host IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD('SuperSecurePassword'); Of course you're using ssh to log into your database machine, right? Right? * Tab completion for SQL statements. MySQL has this * Painless to add new databases and users with the createdb and createuser commands. CREATE DATABASE foo; See above for user creation syntax. * Row level locking (last time I looked mySQL didn't support this. InnoDB provides this. * Support for transactions using BEGIN; ROLLBACK; and COMMIT; (again, mySQL did not support this last time I used it for a project) InnodB provides this. ____Not the real rusty Database advice mostly mythical The most useful advice I can offer you is to not ask questions like this on the internet. Most of the advice you'll get is complete trash, based on people's religious preferences. Identify features you require. See what databases support these features. Design a test application. Test your selected DBs. Factor in elements like licensing cost, support cost, and the pool of potential administrators (and how much they'll cost you to hire). Chart all your results, and pick the one where the cost/benefit is to your satisfaction. Ignore blithering fools who want to factor in country of origin, and religious arguments based on "I tried it years ago..." and "[ Famous Outspoken Web Guru X ] says..." ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, I was just basing the comment on the discussion. And this discussion happens every time anyone has the nerve to mention mysql, so... ____Not the real rusty FWIW My unsolicited opinion, obviously, is that MySQL is good stuff. And that I won't use Postgres ever because the people who promote it are so annoying. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Another view I remember being where you are, philosophically. It was nice to believe that I had gotten all the good things I had by just inherently deserving them. But I got older, as you will, and lived some more, and I think learned some more about what's actually going on in the world. An article that probably best sums up where I am right now is Why Community Matters, which I wrote about a year ago. I don't expect you to agree with it at all, but give it a read. And try to think about it, especially the parts about property rights. Compare your Divine Right to property to my Social Right to property, and see if you can figure out which one, in the actual world, is in operation. Here's a small hint: me and ten of my friends, in the absence of a governemnt with coercive power to enforce your property rights, can easily take away everything you supposedly own. You and twenty of your friends can resist me and my friends, and keep your property. Does this sound "natural and inalienable", or socially enforced? ____Not the real rusty Same ol same ol Social enforcement has nothing on antipersonnel mines, a good sniping position, alarms and sensors, traps, and so on. Same thing. Where'd you get your antipersonnel mines? Where'd you get your rifles, alarms, sensors, traps, etc? If you have no social means of enforcing property rights, the only people who have those are the ones who made them. Put another way, you won't have any of those things in the absence of reliable industry and trade, and those won't exist without a collective agreement among someone to protect each others' stuff. My point is, people cooperating and mutually supporting each others' property rights will kick the asses of those who want to be all "my property is mine because Ayn Rand said so!" every time. I'm not in any way arguing against property rights. I totally agree with you, that they are a natural and very desirable result of social cooperation. The point is, they are a result of social cooperation. That's the only reason you have them. And the greater society does, in some cases, have every right to take them away. Partly because it can, and partly because in some cases it's better to privilege a different public good over strict personal property rights. And by "better" I mean "more advantageous to the most powerful bloc," esentially. Property rights and prosperity are inseparable. I agree. But not if we're talking about Randroid "property rights are the ONLY right" style property. There are situations where it is more advantageous for people to do soemthing collectively rather than individually. None of it works wihtout a fundamental commitment to property, but we also have to know where to draw the line. ____Not the real rusty God I bet he's not going to be happy about it, but deep down, he currently believes that his rights come from God. Oh, he'll call it "nature" or something, maybe "natural law," but God's what it is. In a few months, maybe a year, maybe not till he meets some really egregious fundies, but eventually he's going to have to figure out if he really wants God down there as the lynchpin of his personal philosophy. ____Not the real rusty Fair enough but that does not in and of itself imply some greater good that can supercede rights. That leap of faith is where you and I part ways Now that is a point on which people can certainly disagree without either of them being idiots. :-) Also, while some Randroids believe all kinds of crazy shit, Rand certainly did not believe property was the only right, or the "most important." She didn't believe rights were rankable; either your rights are protected, or they are not, and if not, then details aren't very important. I'm not a Rand expert, so I'll take your word for it. I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and felt like I had enough of a grasp of what she was trying to say. Most of my characterization of Randroid thought, though, is based on what her follower seem to commonly espouse, most of which I do think is utter silliness. ____Not the real rusty Of course... ...an idea is not responsible for those who believe in it. Though dumber ideas to tend to attract dumber followers. While the idea may not be responsible, you can often get a rule-of-thumb judgement of the likely usefulness an idea by who its followers are. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't I don't have any beef with it. It works well in some cases. It's not really something I'm that interested in discussing though, as I've already had that argument with people I immensely respect and who can usually argue me under a table. So... I'm probably not going to get into it unless there's a really good reason, and I feel like it. I appreciate your attention though. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's snowing April 26th, and it's snowing. Why it couldn't have snowed a little in the, oh I don't know, WINTER is beyond me. All the little budding leaves on the trees are getting coated with slush. That can't be good for them You're welcome. ____Not the real rusty Crap! I knew there was a good one I wasn't thinking of. Damn. Hey, we need a new front page poll. ____Not the real rusty Well It's a nice day to start again, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Good stuff Greetings Professor Falken. Shall we play a game? ____Not the real rusty Ignore me Just checking on the server time... ____Not the real rusty Why doesn't... ...anyone pay attention when I say stuff? :-) ____Not the real rusty Spacing Also, if your "end_token" has any space before it on the line, it won't be recognized. Like, tabbing or what have you. It has to be right against the edge (or you have to have defined it with whatever spaces in front you want. I agree with dr. k, except I usually use qq&pipe; &pipe;; ____Not the real rusty It looks nice I use it mainly because it looks nice, by defining nice little "walls" around your actual string. Plus, the pipe character isn't used that often in text. In Scoop boxes, of cours, the pipe has a special meaning, so I usually use curly braces instead of escaping all the pipes. qq{Foo! I say, Foo!}; also provides a nice wall effect, thought I like qq&pipe; &pipe; better. ____Not the real rusty Visa, Mastercard, Paypal To answer your other question. ____Not the real rusty No! He is our mole. Continue your excellent weork, Agent 25HD. The Revolution will not forget your service. ____Not the real rusty Ha I've never played UT. In fact, the last game I was any good at at all was Quake II. Not much of a gamer here. :-) ____Not the real rusty And... And what are you doing here on K5? Uh huh. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, my friend. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Untangling the inside-out sentence Highlghted for readability: they make themselves ll the entire IE process through task manager. And one of them just popped up an "Install Software" box and asked me to always trust content from whatever-corpor"always on top" and unclosable and then proceed to fill the screen, so your only option is to force-kiation! Not that that makes a lot more sense. But read the bold first, then return to the top and read the italics. I just caught a contact-high off that paragraph. ____Not the real rusty Nope It wasn't voted down, it was canceled by Hopfrog. My guess is he pulled it just before it got voted down. We're changing "cancel" to just hide the story instead of deleting it, so this won't happen anymore. ____Not the real rusty "appear to be"? ;-) [nt] ____Not the real rusty Worse than that... It might be "Bruno the Mad Dog-Rapist." ____Not the real rusty More info In the advertiser info kit, there's a page with live stats. See here, and scroll down to the gray box. 3.6% is very good, even for K5 ads. Of course, it goes without saying that K5 ads have an insanely higher response rate than banners. Like, two or three orders of magnitude. No kidding. ____Not the real rusty Hello again! Welcome back, whoever you are. We missed you. ____Not the real rusty You know what they say You can kiss your wife, you can pick your nose, but you can't kiss your wife while she's picking her nose. Or something. By the way... ...kissing people while their picking their nose. How many people are sharing this horrible diseased nose, anyway? ____Not the real rusty Oops Sorry about the "new" thing. Should be fixed now. ____Not the real rusty Next time, submit a story You submitted the same one word story three times in the last few days. You were annoying people. I know you're trolling, but I figured maybe others would want to know what the guidelines are. I am sorry I deleted the first one. I should have just promoted it to voting like I did with the second. But for the record, before you submit something to editing, please make sure you've written it. ____Not the real rusty No... Canceling a submission -- i.e. when the author cancels it, or an editor deletes it (which almost never happens but did happen once today because I hit the wrong button) -- deletes it, including all comments etc. This is probably not the best, since poeple are so used to their comments always being kept around. But currently, that's the way it is. It will probably be changed so that canceling a submission does not delete the comments (the way voting down a story works). ____Not the real rusty Yeah I love it too. :-) I think people will probably become accustomed to the idea that if you see an article in editing, and read it, and it's just spam, you move on and sometime later it will come up for voting and you can bury it. Yeah, there'll be some spam. But two hours is not a long time. :-) ____Not the real rusty No way My final stats were: RUSTY: 9.20% WOMBAT: 5.65% So I think the lesson is that being me and posting an ad guarantees crazy click-through. ;-) ____Not the real rusty I got some spam today, oh boy... It said "You should be working from home!" And my first thought was, "They're right, I should be working..." Then I figured out that it wasn't castigating me for slacking on the couch. Bonus link: DFC article on textads and community income issues featuring K5 and Mefi. Convince me Traditionally, ratings are stripped because someone used them for some kind of personal vendetta, and the vendettee happened to notice. You're a textbook example. Is there reason for me to believe you're sorry you wasted my time with silly rating games, and you'll be a more responsible community member in the future? ____Not the real rusty The EVIL One Ah've said it b'fore,... and Ah'll sayit agin. As many tahmes as Ah have ta. As many. Until the message is heard, lound 'n clear. We, the people... of the Yoonited States of Merica, will not negotiatie. With the EVIL ONES. That's my text-based George W. Oilmoney Cokesniffing Warmonger Bush impression. How was it? ____Not the real rusty Alright The content may have been a bit weak. I was working on form. Try reading it out loud, and make sure you pause at all periods, and pause and smirk at all ellipses. ____Not the real rusty Me too I filter everything that's not addressed to me, (or to another recognized filter address) into the spam folder. This catches about 90% of it, surprisingly enough. Periodically, I go over and check out what's come in lately. Somehow it's way less annoying when I go to look at it on purpose. ____Not the real rusty Huhuhuhuh "Wang" ____Not the real rusty Yay Count me in. Anyone wanna come up to Portland? :-) ____Not the real rusty Old Port Wow, it must have been a while, huh? The old port's been pretty safe since, ummm, like the mid 80's. :-) My parents and grandparents have some horror stories to tell about waiting for the ferry back in the day though. And I'm sad to say that in Portland, punk rock is finally dead. There were Berkely-style Mohawk-and-safety-pin punkers here into the early nineties, but it seems to have finally ended. Anyway, there's some great bars in the OP now. I should get off my ass and put together a Konference. ____Not the real rusty Go Doobie! Please resection your drug references to Smokedot. ____Not the real rusty Yes As of now, a cancel is a cancel. Everything goes away. This may or may not end up being the permanent policy, but I see some advantages in it. For one thing, it provides some incentive to wait for voting before getting into a long topical discussion, which has it's good points and it's bad. I'm thinking about changing it so a cancel while a story is in editing is a hard cancel (everything goes away forever), and a cancel while in voting is a "soft cancel," where comments remain, but the story is hidden. ____Not the real rusty Jesus H. Like I said before, email them to me. I promise K5 doesn't have a "data transfer limit" like that foolish geocities page. Honestly. You think you can put something up on geocities and link to it from a k5 diary, and it'll last for more then 30 seconds? Silly people. ____Not the real rusty Wombats vs. Rusty This diary by tfogal speculated that mentioning "rusty" was helping his ad get more clickthroughs. In response to which this comment theorized that between ads that mention wombats and ads that mention rusty, wombats would win by a small margin. I decided to test that theory out, as I don't think it'll be even close. The wombats are gonna kick my ass. So, for those of you who arrived here from either a WOMBAT ad or a RUSTY ad, I thank you for participating in my experiment. Control group You are therefore a member of the control group. Or, the out-of-control group, depending on how you look at it. Please vote in the poll, and make your voice heard. ____Not the real rusty NrrrdCore (NT) ____Not the real rusty See how hard it is? There once was a grue name of fluffy All the boys said "She's a toughy!" But deep down inside, Though hide it she tried, She still had a thing for Pat Duffy. ____Not the real rusty But... How could I know that those would be the only comments? Maybe there would be more, mentioning wombats and/or me, and then you'd be confused. ____Not the real rusty A quote A wombat, standing on a banana. What more do you need to know? ____Not the real rusty You can... Check it now. Maybe you were trying to hotlist it before the ad had been approved? ____Not the real rusty Really... I think I'm more of a lemur, myself. ____Not the real rusty Lemurs I've always been a fan of lemurs. They're cute and smart, and have a cool name. And they're terribly rare and endangered. Then my wife and I saw a nature documentary on them, with the mother lemur who had a litter, and one baby was albino, and eventully got sick and died, and watching the mother spend a whole night mourning her little dead albino baby... well, that was it for us. We're rock-solid lemurheads forever after. I have a little bendable rubber lemur that sits on a shelf over my desk and keeps me company too. Got it at the Smithsonian Natural History museum gift shop. :-) ____Not the real rusty But... Contrary to everyone's expectatons, I'm kicking the wombat's ass in the ad clickthroughs. Almost twice as many for RUSTY so far. I should have a final tally tomorrow. Very puzzling, to say the least. ____Not the real rusty We'll see Currently it has two safety valves: You can only submit one thing for editing at a time, and they only last two hours. We shall see if more safeties are needed. The queue's been empty most of the night, so so far, I'm thinking it's ok. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah Diary ratings have no effect either way. They don't giveth, and they don't taketh away. With that in mind, I say go ahead on and rate like you always did. People still like a 5. It's a warm fuzzy without all the tedious typing. ____Not the real rusty Right foot Me too. I've had this crappy string ankle bracelet on my right ankle since July, 1992. I'm dead serious. You wouldn't think it would last a month, but it's been there, continuously, for almost ten years now. I have not once taken it off. At this point, I hate it, but it's like a battle of wills. It's me against it. It's going first, dammit. I will prevail. ____Not the real rusty Best. Comment. Ever. ____Not the real rusty You think... You think I'd be in the running against wombats? I seriously doubt it. Maybe I should just take two ads, one that says "WOMBATS" and one that says "RUSTY" and link them both to a diary explaining what the hell... Wow. I think I will do that. ____Not the real rusty Nope. Not funny at all. :-&pipe; ____Not the real rusty Lord Just email them to me, and I'll put them in /images, and you can save yourself all this trouble. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hmm I looked at the code, and it should be cleaning up orphans like that when you cancel a submission. It may have just got cut off by me taking the servers down for a minute. I will test this more... ____Not the real rusty Bug Yup, it was a bug. It should be fixed now. Incidentally, it did delete ratings like it was supposed to on orphan comments, so they shouldn't be a mojo problem. I'll see if there's a handy way to clean out the comments that have been orphaned from the change. ____Not the real rusty And... I also got rid of all the orphaned comments, of which there were surprisingly many, since this bug has, I think, been there for like 2 years now. ____Not the real rusty Orphaned Orphaned meaning coments attached to stories that used to exist, but no longer do. The comments purposely posted to "hidden" sids are still around. ____Not the real rusty Second that Not to mention you were the very first random internet person to start helping to build the site. I think you've fulfilled your lifetime requirement of supporting the site, and then some. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wacky Wednesday Ad Frenzy We're a little low on ads, so in an utterly shameless marketing ploy, I'm declaring today Wacky Wednesday! The best ad purchased today will win the purchaser 4,000 free impressions for whatever they like. How to compete? Just buy an ad. Tomorrow, I will pick my favorite from all ads bought today, and give the buyer another 4K free, for whatever they like. Update [2002-4-18 1:40:20 by rusty]: And the winner is... ucblockhead for his fine Yodacam ad. Congrats to Mr. Blockhead, and many thanks to everyone who joined in. The Fine Print: All decisions final, and by final I mean really, finally, utterly final. Criteria for judging shall be at my sole discretion. Void where prohibited. Provides less than 2% FDA recommended daily allowance of all nutrients. Not recommended for children under two. Professional driver on closed course. Do not try this at home. Think outside the box See, this is you thinking conventionally, man. The key thing to remember is that ads don't have to be for your benefit. They're really, deep down, all about being for my benefit. So, with that in mind, an ad for a site or a product or service that you have nothing to do with is perfectly acceptable. You need to break out of the "it has to benefit me" mindset! ;-) I'm kidding. A little. ____Not the real rusty Spin it Couldn't you just spin it like "Well, I was looking for ways to increase our early-adopter mindshare, and came across this site which, while virtually unknown to me in my daily work time, seems to be a treasure trove of cutting-edge decision makers"? ____Not the real rusty Ye of little faith I can speak marketroid with the best of them, when that's required. :-) ____Not the real rusty No! Not at all. It means my marketing is like foreplay. You know, it feels good, and you know you'll get fucked later. Come to think of it, isn't all marketing kind of like that? ____Not the real rusty Giving stuff away The secret to my lack of business acumen is that I actually love giving stuff away. Ad impressions don't cost me anything, so I'd give them away all the time if I wasn't constrained by needing to buy cat food. :-) ____Not the real rusty 9-lives?? 9-lives?? Keep that stuff away from my kitties! They get Iams. Well, one gets Iams, and the other gets Purina, but that's only because she's used to it, and we have two more big giant bags of it. But our cat would be pissed if we tried to feed him anything but Iams. ____Not the real rusty "I said what?" --Me K5 is clearly a place where we like to quote each other in our sigs. If you quote another K5er in your sig, please post a comment below, and set "Signature Behavior" to "Sticky" so that my diary page will be all sticky... I mean so that your sig will be lovingly preserved for all eternity. And sticky. Or something. That is all. Me first! I have often quoted other K5ers, and currently, my sig quotes grabanzo as follows. I should probably make that a link. When I first changed it, the story was still in the queue. -- "SELECT * FROM People WHERE People.AttractedTo = 'me' ORDER BYPeople.HooterDimensions DESC" does not return any rows. --garba Reserve the right I always and in perpetuity reserve the right to make myself look silly by saying things I know will be taken out of context and make me look silly. You are just my tool, the unwitting instrument of my nefarious ends. Dance, monkey boy! Dance! ____Not the real rusty I blame tax day The taxes are finally in the mail, and the immediate economic outlook is rosy. Spring is (slowly) springing in Maine, the buds on the trees are (slowly) budding, and overall I'm just feeling cheery today. I don't know why everyone else is so goofy though. Probably the drugs. ____Not the real rusty Actually I didn't even say that first. Someone else said it, and someone else had the first someone else's quote in their sig. I shamelessly stole it from whoever that was without attribution. ____Not the real rusty I knew it I figured it would lure the someone elses out of the tall grass. Look for email today, by the way. ____Not the real rusty Foul! No sig. Flag on the play. Five yards. ____Not the real rusty That counts I think that counts. ____Not the real rusty Ha Kind of. I just thought it would be fun. :-) ____Not the real rusty No, I don't think so I think it was perdida who had that one. And it wasn't exactly that, but something very close to it. ____Not the real rusty New K5, old K5 So in any case I suppose my main point was I like the "new k5" better than the "old k5," Me too. Oddly, I can't ever recall there being a time when that wasn't the case. Like, at any moment, if you asked me, I would have said "I like the new K5 better than the old K5"... I wasn't terribly interested in the sysadmin articles either. :-) ____Not the real rusty Man Now that I have to disagree with. Ok, I can't say "all" or "many", but I know about the ones that email me, and AOL GUY is pretty much right on target. If anything, he's a little too coherent to be believable. ____Not the real rusty Diarical Gangbang This diary should be read at high volume, preferably in a residential area. Taxes! So, my accountants utterly screwed me. It's a good thing Maine has an extra day for taxes (Patriot's day is a holiday here) because the return w got yesterday was wrong nine ways from Sunday. After a lot of back and forth where they basically implied that it was all my fault, the first guy I met with figured out that all the info he took from me during our first meeting was in fact on his laptop (where I told him it was), under "Lawrence," not "Rusty." Which really just makes me think the guy's either senile or a nitwit. Last laugh? Oh, that's mine. I was going to go with them for all of my business accounting, and he knew that, and he also knows that there's no chance of that now. The lesson? Don't screw up, and if you screw up, don't try to stonewall and blame your customer. You might be losing a lot more than just one random twenty-something. Edit Queue! We have the patch. I'm gonna try to look it over and commit it tonight. It should be pretty much done. So, look for a Site News soon. German Goodness! Not two words anyone's used to seeing in such close proximity, eh? My in-laws just got back from Germany, and they brought us chocolate and coffee. Yum. spiralx! I blatantly ripped off this tabloid-style diary format from him. He is like a god to me. He walks on the ground I worship. Foh-ty I voted 40% in the poll. I'm way less sarcastic on K5 than I am in person. But my standard real-life demeanor really doesn't translate well into text. ____Not the real rusty Mr. Antix! I know you're thousands of miles from home in an unfamiliar culture, but there's this one more thing we need on that edit queue patch... Just kidding. Have fun! :-) ____Not the real rusty More name that song I only got the Minor Threat one. But how about these... "Past where the river bends, past where the silo stands, past where they paint the houses..." "It's my Beaver Cleaver neighborhood, might not be clean but it sure smells good." "I love your green eyes. I'm gonna tell you a secret. I once got so angry I put a whole army to sleep." If you look them up on Google, I'll know. I really will. And you'll feel lame. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh The other way to look at it is: "People who (A) don't bother to capitalize, and (B) introduce themselves by running social experiments on you, are not worth the time it takes to argue with them." :-) ____Not the real rusty Apologies I kept meaning to read it, but kept not having time. I should have written you back right away and suggested posting a diary like this. Sorry. :-( ____Not the real rusty Saturday night This often happens on Saturday night. I think it's Jello night at the asylum, or something, and the inmates get all sugared up... ;-) ____Not the real rusty That could be it, too Hello, I enjoyed your comment very much. Very nicely done. One of the better ones, in fact. ____Not the real rusty Not true! Well, in most cases, it may be. But not for you, Legolas. I don't want your money. I just want your sweet, sweet ass. ____Not the real rusty Heh Just to be clear, most Americans have seen (even driven!) a manual transmission car. That guy was just a nut. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh man That's my new answer to that question. I'm dead serious. From now on, anyone who asks me is getting that, with utter sincerity. I wonder how soon before it becomes general knowlege? Perhaps more importantly, I wonder how soon it becomes an actual Japanese word meaning that... ____Not the real rusty Hey What does your nick mean? I always vaguely wonder, every time I see it. ____Not the real rusty Ha And of course, it was this particular diary I chose to ask that question in. I must have been tipped off subconsciously by the title... I always mentally pronounced it, roughly, "Imderkell." Which I realize doesn't have the letters in the right order, but somehow that's what my brain always wanted to come up with. Speaking of my brain, I just finished watching Hannibal. That's not an image that will exit my memory anytime soon either, I think. Hello, Clarice... ____Not the real rusty Eh It was ok, I thought. Not one of the best movies I've ever seen, but it did keep me awake under rather difficult circumstances. There's just a really vile scene near the end, which now springs to mind whenever I see the word "brain". Crap! There it is again! ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah And I was pissed that they changed the ending from the book. I forgot about that. The movie's ending was lame and predictable. The book's ending was, while narratively inescapable, also quite surprising. Some hack scriptwriter must pay for that little bit of business. I blame David Mamet. ____Not the real rusty It wasn't completely obvious to everyone? (NT) ____Not the real rusty Stupid URL Tricks Alright, you shouldn't use this, generally, and Scoop probably won't ever create URLs that look like this, but just for the hell of it... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/Stupid_URL_Tricks or, if it can't find a single story with that exact title... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/Who_are_you In case it isn't clear This trick will work for any story title (must be exact, including punctuation) and can use underscores, space characters, or %20's for spaces between words. ____Not the real rusty Updated Ok, I made it a little more user-friendly. You can leave out the punctuation, if you want to, and basically any substring that includes the beginning of a story title will work. So, e.g.: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/National_Missile _Defense, or http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/The_joy_of_text_ads ____Not the real rusty Just a toy It's just a toy to amuse me. Every once in a while I feel the urge to do something sick and wrong with URL translation. Thi would be a nifty way to refer to articles in like mailing list posts or whatever, though, if you wanted to make it clearer what you were linking to. ____Not the real rusty Still... Scoop isn't going to create these for you. But those of you who want to make friendly URLs can feel free to link to things this way, if you want. Be aware that this type of link is not guaranteed to always go to the story you mean it to. If someone posts another story with the same title (or a close enough title) it'll instead go to a search. Your intended story should be in the search results somewhere, but YMMV. ____Not the real rusty Heh I should remember to look back at that thread from time to time. Especially this part. Maybe that's why things seem so oddly familiar so much of the time... ____Not the real rusty Hey spiralx I finally fixed that "deleted hotlisted story" bug. Now, if you hotlist something that later is removed or hidden for whatever reason, the box will not show it, and automagically removes it from your hotlist. Please let me know if anyone sees this problem occurring anymore. You're welcome. :-) By the way, there's another patch on its way into Scoop to let authors edit stories in the queue. Basically, the way it works is: You submit a story. You may choose to have it go to voting immediately, or you may instead put an "editorial hold" on it. There will be a sitewide maximum hold time, probably in the 6 hour range. If you put it on ed hold, people can read and comment, but not vote. You, the author, may edit your story at any time during this period, as many times as you like. Presumably in response to editorial comments, or to fix all those mistakes you saw just after hitting "Post". :-) At any time, you can end the editorial hold, and your story goes into regular voting. You can no longer edit once you've done this. If you don't do it manually, the system will move the story into voting at the end of the maximum hold time. At any time, during editing or during voting, you may also choose to cancel a submission entirely. I believe that if you cancel, you have to re-submit as a new story to try again. It should be very cool, I think. At last, ed comments can be acted upon! Yay. :-) yeah Someone just reminded me in an email too. I'll try to think up the next installment today. :-) ____Not the real rusty velex Velex emailed me and requested I remove all his diaries. I will, generally, do that if a user requests it, though I will tend to be grumpy about it, and tell you to piss off if it doesn't seem like you have any reason at all for it. I wouldn't delete a diary for "having the wrong opinions." Hell, Reginald Johnson is still alive and posting. I only do so on request, on legal order, or if they're harassing another K5er (like the Vlad brew-ha-ha). ____Not the real rusty Yeah That's a good point. Man, theantix is gonna be pissed when I tell him it needs another thing added. :-) Hm. How to implement this is not entirely clear. There could just be an option to flag it "crapflooding," but then there's no opposing view. A relatively few people could dump anything, unopposed. There could be "spam/not spam" buttons, so there's at least some back and forth, but then aren't we just voting already? Hmmmm. ____Not the real rusty Not bad That's not a bad idea, actually. Especially now that you can cancel submissions. ____Not the real rusty Heh He's been bugging me about this one for like six months. I kept fixing the immediate symptoms, and forgetting to fix the actual bug. I promise I'll dedicate the next bugfix to you, if it'll make you happy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Question For I/O, do you expect it to go: Enter Address Emit POSTNET address Enter next address Emit POSTNET... or Enter address Enter address Enter address... [until done] Emit all formatted addresses And if it's the second, is there some particular way we should assume the user will tell us they're done entering addresses? ____Not the real rusty Never mind You're just going to pipe a test dataset into it aren't you. Ignore me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Street and PO, and tedium I assumed that either we'd never have a street and a PO, or that if we had both, they were to be used in the order they're described in the challenge. That is, street number if there is one, PO box if not. So, in the case of both, street number would be used. As for tedium, I actually though I'd give it a shot for the hell of it, and ended up using two perl tricks I've never used before, and figuring out the digit to barcode translation algorithm was interesting. Maybe I just need a better hobby. :-) ____Not the real rusty You say tomato, I say tomahto :-) I think that's what differentiates "perl hacker" from "CS type." I enjoyed dealing with the funky input in this, and I'm usually bored by problems that are just abstracted coding questions (like Challenge 1 didn't move me at all). Diff'rent Strokes, I guess. ____Not the real rusty Entry in perl This was way more fun than I thought it would be. Here's my entry. The first version used a lookup array for the digit->code translations, which was probably faster than they way it's done here, but generating them on the fly was more fun to code. :-) #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; undef $/; # read input in one big chunk, stolen from tmoertel ;-) my $in = <>; my @addresses = split / /, $in; foreach my $a (@addresses) { my $address = &filter_address($a); my $code = &determine_code($address); unless ($code) { $a =~ s/ / \t/g; warn "ERROR: Address is malformed \t$a Skipping... "; next; } my $bars = &make_postnet_barcode($code); print "$bars $address "; } sub filter_address { my $address = shift; $address = uc($address); $address =~ s/-/&dashes($`,$')/ge; # This is semi-evil $address =~ s/[^A-Za-z0-9\s-]//g; $address =~ s/ *$//; return $address; } # Find out if the dash is in a zip+4 # Leave it if it is sub dashes { my ($b,$a) = @_; ($b =~ /\d{5}/ && $a =~ /\d{4}/) ? '-' : ''; } sub determine_code { my $address = shift; my @lines = split / /, $address; my $street_po; if ($lines[$#lines-1] =~ /^(\d{2})/ &pipe;&pipe; $lines[$#lines-1] =~ /(\d{2})$/) { $street_po = $1; } my $zip; if ($address =~ /\s(\d{5}-\d{4})$/) { $zip = $1; $zip =~ s/-//; $zip .= $street_po if ($street_po); } elsif ($address =~ /\s(\d{5})$/) { $zip = $1; } return $zip; } sub make_postnet_barcode { my $code = shift; my ($bars, $sum); foreach my $digit (split //, $code) { $bars .= &make_bar_digit($digit); $sum += $digit; } my $check = &make_bar_digit(10 - ($sum % 10)); return '&pipe;'.$bars.$check.'&pipe;'; } sub make_bar_digit { my $d = shift &pipe;&pipe; 11; my ($s,$c); foreach my $j (7,4,2,1,0) { ($s .= '.' and next) unless ($d - $j >= 0 and $c < 2); $s .= '&pipe;'; $d = ($d - $j); $c++; } return $s; } ____Not the real rusty Crap As tmoertel points out above, I misread the Delivery Point instructions. Please consider this version instead. :-) #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; undef $/; # read input in one big chunk, stolen from tmoertel ;-) my $in = <>; my @addresses = split / /, $in; foreach my $a (@addresses) { my $address = &filter_address($a); my $code = &determine_code($address); unless ($code) { $a =~ s/ / \t/g; warn "ERROR: Address is malformed \t$a Skipping... "; next; } my $bars = &make_postnet_barcode($code); print "$bars $address "; } sub filter_address { my $address = shift; $address = uc($address); $address =~ s/-/&dashes($`,$')/ge; # This is semi-evil $address =~ s/[^A-Za-z0-9\s-]//g; $address =~ s/ *$//; return $address; } # Find out if the dash is in a zip+4 # Leave it if it is sub dashes { my ($b,$a) = @_; ($b =~ /\d{5}/ && $a =~ /\d{4}/) ? '-' : ''; } sub determine_code { my $address = shift; my @lines = split / /, $address; my $street_po; if ($lines[$#lines-1] =~ /^(\d{2,})/ &pipe;&pipe; $lines[$#lines-1] =~ /(\d{2})$/) { $street_po = $1; $street_po =~ s/.*(\d\d)$/$1/; } my $zip; if ($address =~ /\s(\d{5}-\d{4})$/) { $zip = $1; $zip =~ s/-//; $zip .= $street_po if ($street_po); } elsif ($address =~ /\s(\d{5})$/) { $zip = $1; } return $zip; } sub make_postnet_barcode { my $code = shift; my ($bars, $sum); foreach my $digit (split //, $code) { $bars .= &make_bar_digit($digit); $sum += $digit; } my $check = &make_bar_digit(10 - ($sum % 10)); return '&pipe;'.$bars.$check.'&pipe;'; } sub make_bar_digit { my $d = shift &pipe;&pipe; 11; my ($s,$c); foreach my $j (7,4,2,1,0) { ($s .= '.' and next) unless ($d - $j >= 0 and $c < 2); $s .= '&pipe;'; $d = ($d - $j); $c++; } return $s; } If there's anything else wrong, are you going to tell me before judging? :-) ____Not the real rusty Erroneous newline? It puts one newline between the bar and the address. From your example, I assumed that the barcode should be on the line preceeding the start of the address. Is that not right? ____Not the real rusty Heh Sweet! It's not often you get to blame a problem on the tester. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Aww I was hoping you'd do it in perl too. I would have liked to see your take on it. ____Not the real rusty Lookup array Bah! Lookup array for the codes. Cheater. ;-) ____Not the real rusty That's better I move that it should be a rule of the challenge that looking up the codes by number is not allowed. Cause, of course it's the smart way to do it if results are all you want, but this is supposed to be programming fun, right? tmoertel: did you expect that we'd work out how to generate the codes, or just look them up, or did you not care? ____Not the real rusty Judging? How long do we wait till the results are announced? Did I just miss them, or what? ____Not the real rusty Bug Nrrrrr. That's just a bug, not a feature designed to ground your HEAD under the BOOT of the MAN. Sorry about that. It's actually part of a nice little package of related bugs I've been meaning to fix for ages, but haven't gotten to... Oh, and this has been a hell of a week for hardware. Hopefully t's all fixed now. Fingers crossed! Everyone generate luck! But for god's sake, don't cross the streams! ____Not the real rusty OL Hmmm. Start and Type have always worked for me... This is a test This is too. Yup. Works here. Lemme try it in a story entry... ____Not the real rusty Hm Worked in story preview too. Did you do it like: <ol start="2" type="a"> (or whatever actual vaues you wanted)? Quotes might be required, I'm not sure. ____Not the real rusty Not to mention ...the fact that they were voted for. I wouldn't have voted them onto the front page, personally (either of them -- in fact, check the voting on the second one). But if that's where you put them, that's the way it is. ____Not the real rusty But it's too late for that The check's already in the mail. The bill is due. Voting stuff up now makes no difference financially. I hoped that was clear. ____Not the real rusty Three Also, how many stories will sit in the "Sponsored" box at a time? Three. ____Not the real rusty Can't happen... With the changes, ratings and comments in diaries are irrelevant to mojo. They have no effect at all -- it's like they don't even exist. Now, if you spent 60 days only posting in diaries, that could have an effect, since all your story ratings would be too old to count. But that's probably not it. I'd suspect just regular fluctuations. ____Not the real rusty Shhh! You'll blow my cover! I've got him eating out of the palm of my hand! And <u> tags aren't allowed because they're generally annoying due to making text that isn't a link look like a link, which irks me. It's vengeful admin thing. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I've made a personal promnise to myself not to talk about m**** for as long as possible. I'm even more sick of it than you are. And I have been doing K5 full-time for over a year. Sure, it was neat before that, but man, it's been a long year. We wouldn't have made it if I was working another full time job. And I love you too. :-) Why don't you do the next poll? Post your quation and options below, and it shall be done. ____Not the real rusty Noooo! We love that idea too. We're definitely making those. Hang on a bit, and we'll hook you up. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes I want to do both. One would say "duxup loves you" and the other "trhurler hates you." :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes! I agree. Driph printed up a small batch of shirts a while ago that had the K5 logo on the back -- not actually even the one we have now. It's the one we had for like 2 hours right after the redesign, that's a more stylized version of the one we have no. And on the front, there's a rectangle with five little semaphore flagman icons, signing the letters "TINK5C". The text of that is below the rectangle. This is the greatest t-shirt ever, because it is like 6 in-jokes all wrapped up in one. Really, me and Driph are the only two people in the world that get that shirt. It rules. :-) ____Not the real rusty You're welcome :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah I know But I saw the ad and I thought it was a cool idea, so I wanted to be encouraging. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Ok, the new poll is seekrit marketing data collection. :-) We're ordering new shirts, and want to know what the size breakdown should be. But yeah, I concur. We do have the worst polls ever. Not coincidentally, they're the part of the content I'm responsible for. Hmmmmm... ____Not the real rusty Oprah? Is that you? (NT) ____Not the real rusty Oprah The Oprah thing was based on Oprah's early habit of beng alternately fat and thin. I figured if you needed all those sizes you must be like... ah, never mind. :-) ____Not the real rusty You were suckered Consider it an $8.00 donation to the general welfare of the world and move on. :-) ____Not the real rusty 11:00 PM: Take Shower You know it's been a bad day when you don't get to take a shower until 11PM. So, the rundown on what the hell happened goes like this: As you'll recall, two of the Scoop servers died yesterday. In the course of that, I was forced to take down the database with "extreme prejudice" as the saying goes. I believe that triggered a corruption of some of the indexes, because suddenly today the database performance was shot all to hell. Some test queries I ran took two orders of magnitude longer than they should have. Like, instead of 0.3 seconds, we're talking about 30 seconds. Not good. Incidentally, it was right about this time that the Slashdot story went up, with the link that is destined to become a classic of unintentional irony: "a reliable site." So I got on the ol' IRC with hurstdog, and took down the Scoop servers, put up the "D'oh!" page, and started in on the database. CHECK TABLE on everything showed no problems. So we thought a dump/reload of the whole thing was worth a try. The dump went fine, but it quickly became clear that the reload was going to take on the order of weeks to finish. Some more documentation slogging later, we found the --opt flag to mysqldump that would supposedly produce files that would import much faster. That did turn out to be the case. So the reload progressed at a reasonable rate, until we hit the "viewed_stories" table. Then it started giving us "Table full" errors. At this point, we were reloading into a test database, alongside the real K5 databse, because we didn't want to risk dropping that until we knew the reload would work. I tried about 6 different things, to no effect. We got Krow (of Slashcode) on IRC and asked him what he thought. He suggested that our Innodb data files might be full, which seemed reasonable. Sure enough, I dropped all but the viewed_stories table from the test database, and it reloaded just fine. So, I added a third Innodb data file, and tried the reload again. Success! And my test queries were back down to their normal times on the new database. So I dropped the real K5 DB, and reloaded it from the dumpfile, and it all finally worked. Some tweaks to the my.cnf suggested by Krow, a database restart, and we were back in business. What I learned today is, Innodb doesn't have problems often, but when it does, watch out. And at 11:00, I finally got to take a shower. Now it's off to do all the real work I was supposed to have done today... None of the above Unfortunately, none of your reasons apply to my life. I don't set an alarm, because I work for myself, so I get up when I want to. And I spend most days sitting quietly, unmoving, in front of a screen. Not much filth being generated there. My wife is at work already when I wake up, so no competition for the shower. Plus, I really like showering in the late morning/early afternoon, after the second cup of coffee and the morning's email is taken care of, and when the sunlight is just coming in the bathroom window. It prepares me for whatever else will happen that day. Today, however, it was sit down with coffee and grind on database problems, interrupted by the occasional phone call I couldn't put off. Blah. I do feel sparkly clean right now though. Maybe it's not so bad... :-) ____Not the real rusty And then Just to make the day complete, all the scoop boxes just ran out of diskspace. I give up, I'm defeated for today. Will attempt to resume work tomorrow... ____Not the real rusty In the shuffling madness... Inside: bandwidth, diaires, subscriptions, outages, and grumpiness. It's a cornucopia of update-a-riffic joy! Bandwidth: No, not the kind you're thinking of. I'm talking about personal bandwidth. I've had a frustrating feeling lately of missing a lot of connections, not being able to say what I want to say. I think the problem is I've reached my personal bandwidth limit. I simply can't respond to all the comments and emails I'd like to respond to and do all of the other stuff I need to do. This isn't a big deal, really, I'm just noticing it a lot lately. So, to everyone who asked me a question or posted a comment I wanted to reply to, I'm sorry I couldn't. I guess it's just something we all have to deal with at some point. Diaries: Diaries will not go pay-only. You convinced me. :-) I did update the site so that it also doesn't count hidden stories for mojo, which should have been done a long time ago. Otherwise, I have no major plans afoot for diaries anytime soon. I think the "sectioning" ideas for diaries are good, and the new subsections will probably be deployed there at some point, but I don't know how the interface would work, and I don't have time to figure it out right now. So things will continue as they have been for now. About the ratings thing, give it a few days and see if you notice any difference. If not, then it's working. Subscriptions: I got a good chunk of new subscription code done tonight. I'm forcing myself to have it all ready by Friday. The changes will be: Subscriptions will take credit cards or papal, like ads. $2.00/month will get you just ad control. I.e. you can choose to show or hide them. $5.00/month will get you ad control, spellcheck, diary subscriptions (like, "watch this user's diary, alert me on new posts"), the ability to track new replies to your comments, and whatever else we come up with in the future. Future plans include a discount code for any merchants who want to participate ("Give them this code and get 15% off at foobar.com", that kind of thing), and also a keen feature that I don't want to talk about yet because it's still only the barest glimmer of an idea in my head. Oh, and perhaps instant user-to-user messaging, better personal info pages (like, more useful ones, though that may end up being a site-wide change), and the return of the "Who's online" box. I tell you, at these prices, how can you not subscribe? ;-) Anyone can try out a month of the Full Monty $5.00 subscription for free. Current subscribers will automagically be upgraded to the Full Monty, and get an extra two months for being so patient, and, in many cases, subscribing when there was really no compelling excuse to. I also will get a PO Box, so we can take check/money orders. Outages: We had some downtime today. For anyone curious, what happened (both this time, and the last time, a week or two ago) was that 101 and 103 both suddenly went offline at almost the exact same time. Which is weird, considering there's no obvious reason they would -- especially since 102 did just fine both times. It appears they have a problem with the eepro100, either flaky hardware or a buggy driver. Both times, the machines have been up and running, but the nic's dead and there's some kind of "out of resources" error in the logs. We upgraded the kernel on 101, and we're gonna see if it makes a difference. While we were at it, we also upgraded it to ext3, so now 1/4 of K4 is journaling. Woo hoo! Meanwhile, 102, trying to handle the full load at 5PM eastern all by itself, reached a load of over 120, which, in all my years running this thing, is the highest load I've ever seen. I've run forkbombs that didn't crank it up that high, for god's sake. It was crazy. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, Voxel.net are champs, and dilinger is my personal hero. Grumpiness: I apologize for being grumpy lately. Try not to take it too seriously -- I'm unlikely to go completely insane and trash the great thing you guys have built. I really do have the good of the site at heart, even when I'm being bitchy about it. Getting subscription work done has made me feel a lot better. I think I broke my vapor-lock. Also, thank you to everyone who went out of your way today to either send me some money or just say something nice. It helps a lot. I'm feeling the love. Oh, there could be so much more, but I cannot type any longer. Yanna, I am going to reply to your email. It's in the stack of emails that need some thought before I can write back, which I will be going through tomorrow. Oh, also, the Digital Identity section should start tomorrow. I hope you all have fun with it. I am condensing vapor from the air... ...even as we speak. :-) ____Not the real rusty Already done I patched the patch to not count comments in hidden stories, either. ____Not the real rusty I suck Sorry. something's wrong with our nameserver, and two of the machines didn't have current system times. Trust me, that makes sense in a roundabout kind of way. It's fixed now. Course, too late for your diary. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Thinking pure thoughts Yeesh. Please, judge me by what I actually do. I'm not cut out to be Alan Greenspan here. ____Not the real rusty Thank you This is a very good point, and well put. You remind me why I still, deep in my bitter crusty broken heart, love K5. ;-) The "pay for diaries" thing is not a foregone conclusion. Like I said, I'm leaning very slightly toward it at the moment, but that will most likely change. The other option is, as you say, to fix it. That's a strong option as well, and I think you pretty much covered my thoughts on how that would go. What I wanted to do today was really just present payment as the only option and see how people reacted. Considering my general principles, and what's always worked in the past, I doubt they'll end up going pay-only. I may add "total comment control in your diary" as a subscriber option. But I do think things will have to change, somehow. The volume is too much, the design, both visually and functionally, is not right, and all the other things you already pointed out. There are upcoming Scoop changes that might make all that a lot easier, and may make this whole issue moot anyway, by making the redesign of the whole diary thing easy enough. Anyway, getting the normal subscription system working again is first priority. Then the store. Then, maybe, I'll have a chance to revisit all of this. ____Not the real rusty Whose Cuisine Reigns Supreme? Saturday night is good tv night on Food TV. It kicks off at 9PM with the Godlike Alton Brown who is my personal cooking hero. Then at 9:30 is The Naked Chef, who's kind of a nitwit, but still makes some good stuff now and then. At 10, of course, is Iron Chef, currently exploring The Rise of Morimoto. Tonight, Iron Chef Japanese Morimoto faced off against an opponent from the sinister "Ota's Party of Heaven and Earth"... The battle tonight was actually overtime from a tie score show using cod roe. I never even knew IC had overtime. They get 30 minutes, using a new ingredient (scallions, this time). It was utterly gripping, but in the end, Morimoto snapped his two-show losing streak and sent Ota's minion whimpering home like the half-clever little bitch that he was. Finally is A Cook's Tour, where embittered ex-NYC junkie and chef Anthony Bourdain travels around the world frightening children and risking his life to eat really strange things. It works because Tony (as I like to call him) is so honest about everything that happens. He was in Cambodia tonight, and apparently couldn't find any authentic food. Just one pseudo-Thai greasy spoon after another, and a lot of minefield warning signs. There was an utterly surreal bit involving kickboxing on TV. Then he bailed for Japan and had some sobe noodles. It's a good show. Anyway, the point of this whole thing was that I have crossed the final threshold to utter geekitude. Not only do we (my wife and I) watch Iron Chef near-religiously, but I actually have a favorite Iron Chef. That would be Iron Chef Chinese Chen Kenichi. He's like a big teddy bear, and, well frankly, he's the only one that routinely cooks things I would volunteer to eat. Ok, that's pretty bad. But tonight, I took the final step. I got caught up in the excitement of the overtime scallion battle... it weakened my defenses... they showed a commercial... I don't clearly remember what happened after that. But I do know that one XL Chen t-shirt is on it's way to my house. KenForeskinAdore Ken has a thing about circumcision. You have to wonder what kind of person spends so much time thnking about infants genitalia... ____Not the real rusty Tired I'm tired of the Israel/Palestine arguments, tired of the anti-Semitism and the anti-Arabism, tired of the trolling (including yours), tired of the spamming the diaries. Just tired and irritated. That's why. ____Not the real rusty And... And Catholics drink the blood of Jesus. Your point was what again? ____Not the real rusty My niece As mentioned previously, I have a new niece. I got the first pictures yesterday, and bless my sister and brother-in-law, they didn't come as email attachments! No, they actually put them up online and emailed me a link. I wish them the most wonderful daughter in the world. Pictures inside... Her name, spelled incorrectly last time, is Leah. Like "lee-ah" not "lay-ah" you Star wars geeks. The pictures have captions on the page they sent me, but I'm gonna do my own, because snarky picture captions are one of my favorite things in the world to create. Coming this Fall... BIRTH by James Cameron. Filmed in Panavision. I don't know what's up with the wide-screen letterbox format of this one, but anyway, that's my sister and Leah. The one on the left came out of the one on the right about an hour before this picture was taken. People inside other people. What will they think of next? I think I'm turning Japanese... Is it just me, or do many, many babies look oddly Asian? Is that why we think Asians are cute? Or maybe it's why we think babies are ruthless businesspeople with a strong sense of tradition and a penchant for really disturbing cartoons... If you look carefully, her left eye seems to be looking in an entirely different direction than her right eye. Just thought I'd mention it. Looking all Sinead O'Connor here. If, y'know, Sinead O'Connor was a little chubbier and dressed in a fuzzy yellow jumper with little duckies. And they somewhat inexplicably threw in this one of my sister (Leah's mom) when she was just born. Presumably to demonstrate the resemblance, and thus prove that my sister really is the mother. Which is not something most people bother going to a lot of trouble over in the first few days after a birth. Paternity maybe, but we all kind of assume the mother's related. My family's a little odd sometimes. If you'd like to see their captions, the real page is here. So let's all have a big K5 welcome for the newest person who's related to me on Earth that I'm aware of. Something she can print out and look back on later and say "Aww, Uncle Rusty really was a freak. I'm glad he's in That Place now." One person It's one person. I banned his old account, he came back, I banned his new account. I will keep on doing it as long as necessary. That shit is not acceptable here, not by any stretch of the imagination. I urge you to realize that (1) Both of those people are just the one guy, and (2) The rest of us do not accept that behavior. Please try not to let it color your view of K5. :-/ ____Not the real rusty I don't know I have no evidence that it is. Honestly, I haven't looked though, nor do I particularly care. My feeling is that it's probably not. ____Not the real rusty Well Upon further reflection, I think it's probably one of the people you're thinking of. Anyway, all of them put together are like four people total. ____Not the real rusty Buy more ads :-) There's little I can do except say "buy more ads". I still don't know what the "normal" number will end up being, but you're right, we're awfully low right now. I'm working on the expanded ad kit, and will go out and do some promotion as soon as it's done. But please... buy more ads. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Tears Damn you and your writing. I have tears welling, and now I'm all pensive. Damn you and your stupid car and your lost mug and your brother and your writing. ____Not the real rusty Welcome to the real internet :-) The dotcom bubble has burst, and we're still here, doing the wacky things we always did just because we love the net. Welcome to our world. ;-) Since you asked... what you want to do, professionally, is invest some of your ill-gotten big media loot, and a lot of your hard-won media management experience, in K5. I'm pretty sure I can make K5 at least pay for itself, which is all I want in this world, but right now we're in a crunch in terms of income, and, though I learn fast and try hard, I have absolutely no experience running a business efficiently. Given six months of operating expenses (i.e. about $54,000) and some advice and guidance by someone who knows how to run a business, we'd be all right. What do you say? :-) ____Not the real rusty Bug Inoshiro bypassed the normal ad process, so it didn't activate the story. I just did it manually. ____Not the real rusty Turn off the box In your alternate accounts, where you know you won't care about site news, you can just turn that box off. Look at Display Prefs, and uncheck the "Site News Alert" box. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, we expect people to at least pay a premium in effort for maintaining all those extra accounts. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Hey I think this is worth a collected MLP. Maybe there will be the predictable flamewar, but you've done a lot of good gathering up of what little information there is, and I thnk it is pretty important news. Perhaps a simple factual summary of the known events so far? I'd vote for it. ____Not the real rusty Just the facts, m'am I was thinking just a straight factual news report. "Here's what happened today, to the best of our knowlege." with copious links to the video and reports available. I think the best way to (hopefully) try to discourage the flamewar is to keep it focused straight-up on the facts. ____Not the real rusty See previous diaries Delerium's already got, I think, more than enough info to put together a solid report. Breaking developments about this particular situation could be added in comments. ____Not the real rusty Heh Well, it was fun for me, anyway. We all take ourselves way too seriously too much of the time. I do it just as much as anyone. I think it's good to have one day of the year to just be stupid and obnoxious. And to remind ourselves not to believe everything we see on the Intarweb. All of you humorless bastards can now yell at me. I'm already taken Sorry, but I don't live in Utah. One wife is already more than I can handle. ____Not the real rusty Oh! Well, if I'm the wife, then I guess we'd be ok. In that case, yes, I accept! Kiss me, you magnificent bastard! ____Not the real rusty Swag ahoy! Actually, we really will be doing K5 swag. We'll probably sell some MeFi swag as well. Originally, we were going to put it on Kuro5hin.com for real, but I think we might not, now, for a few logistical reasons. But wherever it ends up appearing, the store will be back, with some stuff worth buying, this time. :-) ____Not the real rusty Don't know about that... We'll see if my various schemes keep on paying the rent. Anyone got a paying job that dosn't require me to really, y'know, work? Like maybe "Corporate Spokesperson" or "Idea Engineer"? ____Not the real rusty Back to the alleys with you! Ah, c'mon. One time. Please forgive me. BTW, the ghetto comment was a joke. You know that right? ____Not the real rusty I, uh, knw it all along Yeah. I did. No, really. ____Not the real rusty How about... Ok. But was it "If I don't get to fuck around one day of the year I'll go insane" funny? ____Not the real rusty I love you. ____Not the real rusty Working on it Hang on, I'll clear them. This bug should be fixed. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Too far Yes, I am firmly of the opinion that it has gone too far. The diaries you're talking about have been removed, because posting names, addresses, phone numbers, and accusations of pedophilia here is not cool and not acceptable. I will continue to remove such things if and when they appear, which I hope they will not. I've talked to most of the people involved in all this, and I think they understand where I'm coming from, so it should end. If you see more stuff like that, let help@k5 know about it. And with that, let's let the whole thing die its well-deserved death. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's true cannis is rusty. ____Not the real rusty It's a girl! and other exciting news My sister had her first baby today. 7 lbs 14 ounces, 10^10 toe/finger permutations, head on top, ass on the bottom, all seems to be where it should be. Her name is Lea. Which, now, I'm not sure I'm spelling right. Anyway, I've been an uncle by marriage three times, but this is my first blood niece. Yay for the propagation of the Foster genes. Not much writing lately, as I've been working hard on a secret project that I'm pretty sure is gonna be the coolest thing ever. You just wait. :-) Thank you everyone who contributed textad suggestions in my last diary, by the way. I didn't get to reply to as many of you as I wanted, as I've been spending outlandish amounts of time on the phone lately. We should have more of the most requested ad features developed very soon, especially bulk buying, and some at least rudimentary targeting, like time and section. And subscription stuff, and some K5 store development, and... well, Jesus, I already have way too much to do. It just keeps getting busier though. I'll probably not be around much till early next week. Last minute things. But pay attention. :-) Thank You Although I think the correct term is "unclification." ____Not the real rusty Way cooler Can you tell I really want to spill it? But no dice. You have to wait like everyone else. :-) ____Not the real rusty That explains it. I will have thought it was odd tomorrow morning when I will have had been woken up before I even was having been gone to sleep. Thanks for warning me. ____Not the real rusty Bah! You and your big island. 23,000 people! That's practically a goddamn continent!. Anyway, Long Island, out here in Casco Bay, voted to seceed from Portland a little while back, and it seems to be working out for them. I think we should do the same, as the city generally uses us as their property-tax cash muppets whenever it sees fit. And the parking? Don't even get me started. ____Not the real rusty Chappaquiddick But don't forget Chappaquidick... Maybe I should move there next. Well, if you do, drive carefully. Muahahaha. ____Not the real rusty Getting Lost Sure you can get lost, provided you're drunk enough. Today, Good ol' Teddy would be in jail for that. He murdered that girl, I have no doubt. Ah, but those were more forgiving times, when, if you were a Kennedy, you got the benefit of keeping family business private. Come to think of it, those times may still be with us... ____Not the real rusty There's one on Peaks Island ...but you can't have her, because she's mine. :-) ____Not the real rusty Textads, textads, textads Ad sales are declining. What to do? I need your advice! Well, it's been nearly a month, and overall, ad sales have been respectable. They've done what I hoped they would this month. It's not enough to live on, in the long term, but as part of the three-horned Ads/Subscriptions/Store Axis of Income, they're pulling their weight. But sales have declined in the past couple days. We haven't come out with any new features -- are people just not noticing them? The problem is we can't simply rely on adding features every week to keep sales up. There's only so much we can do. There are a few things that will be coming soon, like targeting by section and time of day, buying impressions in bulk for application to any number of ads, and renewing existing ads easily. What I think is that for this to work, people outside of the immediate community need to know it exists, and need to know why it would be a good idea for them to advertise here. The problem is, I don't know how to reach the people who need to know about it. I think the best market to go after are people who sell things primarily online. Small computer OEMs, people who sell geeky toys and t-shirts and things, stuff like that. The kind of advertiser who doesn't have a marketing department, and can make back a $12 ad buy if it leads to just one sale. Also, e-Bay sellers have come up repeatedly as a good market to go after. I can imagine people advertising their auctions here. Who are these people? Where do they congregate? How do we reach them? I need help. Any ideas are most welcome. Interesting That's actually an interesting idea. I've never used e-Bay. Does anyone who uses eBay regularly have any advice on how I could go about doing this? I'm also thinking about Craigslist as a good place to promote them. I'm not positive whether this kind of thing would fit in with their mission or not though. I might shoot them an email and see what they have to say about it. ____Not the real rusty Multiple sites I wonder how useful it could be to get a few sites together and promote textads as a collective thing. K5, Daypop, Fark, MeFi, now LWN all offer similar advertising options. It may be a case where if we put ourselves together and promoted the idea in general, we could achieve more visibility than the sum of our parts. ____Not the real rusty Thanky Yes, I think you're right that I'm gonna have to go out there and sell them. Right now, I'm working on the "ad kit" with a lot more information for people who are new to the whole idea. Once that is in place, and I fix a couple other things to make it more new-advertiser frindly, I will start looking for good places to get the word out. I'm not sure that calling business is my best bet, here, but the internet equivalent of that ought to help. Indeed, subscription features are on the way. No promises when, but it has to be soon. ____Not the real rusty Like... ...this? ____Not the real rusty Careful Note that that is *all* proxy stats, which includes the rdf backend and images. So the pageview numbers are absurdly hgh. But if you combine the pageview numbers from the regular stats (which is only Scoop pages), and the visitor/visit data from those, it gives a pretty good overall picture. ____Not the real rusty Total traffic I leave th proxy stats wide open because it's useful to be able to count up the total traffic we push from everything, including images and rdf and whatnot. ____Not the real rusty Form of Ice Cage! Why not get off my frigging back already! Jesus! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Swag That's all coming in a bit, thought I might set up a temporary store here to bring in some income while we're developing the real merchandising arm. About prices, I've asked several advertisers what they think of the pricing, and so far no one has said that lower prices would convince them to buy. I think the major consensus is that being able to buy bulk impressions and apply them a few at a time would be, right now, the thing that would convince them to spend money. What did you think about this idea? ____Not the real rusty Nah I won't be spamming. I do think, though, that if I run across a business or service that I think could benefit from a textad, it wouldn't be outside the realm of propriety to send them a little personal email saying I thought so. I feel that a message I actually type in, and send from my own account, to only their account, is pretty well on the Good side of the spam/non-spam line. Right? ____Not the real rusty CSI We ended up with our original choice, Cardservice International. Driph managed to talk them into waiving a lot of the normal fees, so we got a pretty good deal. Dealing with financial institutions is always kind of a hassle, and this was no different, but overall, it went pretty well. The only thing that annoyed me was that they charge $95 for the perl wrapper for their API. Otherwise, it was pretty easy to get everything set up. They provided a payment gateway (which we actually purchased), and a merchant account where the funds initially go. Money is then automatically swept into the company's normal account every night. Coding to the perl wrapper was easy, and we haven't had any problems so far. I do really need to write up that article though. One of an ever-growing list of things I owe the site. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm not worried Nothing happened today. There was an earthquake in Afghanistan, that apparently no one was able to write up without making a pretty embarrassing attempt at humor about. Look, 2,000 people died! When it happened to us, it was the worst tragedy in history, but when it happens in a Muslim country, it's a Laff Riot. Ok, not really. The stories all got dumped speedy-quick, which means the queue is doing it's job. Personally, I'm still afraid of drowning in stories. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Maybe it's time to consider removing the ability to have multiple accounts. If you know the secret to actually doing that, do tell. :-) The only way I've ever been able to think of to cut down on multiple accounts is charging for them, and I don't want to do that. ____Not the real rusty Come on, man You know you're not supposed to do that. I hate even being in this position. When it's that obvious, I'm forced to do something about it. This isn't some kind of power thing, or a vendetta against you. I'm just trying to maintain the balance. Try to look at it from my perspective. ____Not the real rusty It's what "0" has always been I changed the text because "Don't Care" has proven consistently confusing. Like, if I don't care about an article, I'll probably vote against it. If I have no opinion on it at all, I'll vote "Don't Care" so I can see the votes without altering the score. It seemed like "Abstain" was a clearer way to word the actual effect of the vote. ____Not the real rusty Ok I'll be sure not to make a gazillion little changes like that. Probably just one or two. ____Not the real rusty Sick I am sick. Not hanging out near the throne all day sick, but wrung out and demotivated with chest congestion sick. What fun. I read The Tipping Point today, in which I learned that I either know people with odd names, or I don't know very many people's names at all. I scored very badly on the common surnames test. Good book, though. It did what non-fiction should really always do, and so often fails to, which is provide me with a new set of tools and frameworks with which to look at the world. It presents ideas clearly, with lots of fascinating stories to get them across, instead of repeatedly hammering the same abstract points over and over. The readability of it is especially apparent in contrast with Larry Lessig's last book, which I have tried to read twice now and finally given up on because it is, in my opinion, bloody unreadable. It contains a lot of crucially important ideas, but, in striking contrast with his first book, is about as gripping as an oscilloscope manual. The Tipping Point has a hell of a lot of relevance for me, especially, given that a lot of it applies in any kind of community-building effort. I forsee thinking about small things in new ways in the future. On the other hand, it also brought light to things I already instinctively knew, but didn't have any real words for. Like, in "Environmental Factors", he talks about Giuliani and Co.'s efforts to reduce "quality of life" crimes in NYC, and how that general philosophy seems to have radically affected overall crime statistics, cutting down drastically on the number of crimes that they aren't even focusing on, like homicide. In principle, it's the same thing that the comment moderation system here was designed to do. That is, provide a strong and immediate negative feedback for minor misbehavior, coupled with a reasonable positive feedback for good behavior, with the goal being to create a general environment where the kind of behavior we have all hated elsewhere Just Isn't Done. I took away the main lesson that little things do matter, which is something I've always believed anyway. But seeing clearly which things and in exactly what ways they can matter is eye-opening nonetheless. You can buy The Tipping Point right here. No, I'm not getting a commission. I was just curious to see how many of you felt pursuaded by my little micro-review. If you buy the book because of this diary, drop me a comment and let me know. :-) How do they get the Teflon to stick to the pan? Now I hear from you it's non friction... Actually, my copy has the normal amount of friction you'd expect from a paperback book. It's not teflon-coated or anything like that. I slid right through it from cover to cover though, if you meant that metaphorically... ...and from the looks of it, has to do with the concept of memes. Sorta, yeah, though it does, to it's credit, avoid calling them that. In general, it's an admirably non-obfuscating book. Instead of going in for the usual abstruse social-science jargon, Gladwell generally keeps things on a general-comprehension level. ____Not the real rusty It's not really about memes though The "tipping point" is about how things spread through a population, not about the "memes" themselves. It's not a property of the idea, it's a property of social factors. ____Not the real rusty CC Debt I hear that. Though we haven't exactly cut ourselves off from all unnecessary spending, we also moved to cheaper living circumstances and haven't done any credit-card purchasing in going on a year now. Slowly, slowly, the debt shrinks. Help us out! Buy an ad. :-) ____Not the real rusty Think of Jesus Given this, and this, it was only a matter of time before someone did this. Not so! This is an actual photograph, I swear. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes, he does See this comment. Also, Bruce has a weblog which is cool. I ripped off a link from it for a recent diary. ____Not the real rusty Paying for it Actually, the advertiser is just paying for the ad to appear. With a discussion or not, it's the same price. Advertisers have the option of not creating a discussion at all, if they are concerned about these sorts of things. My feeling is, either you allow an open and fair discussion, or you don't allow a discussion at all. I won't be happy with any kind of half-measure between the two, where we get to have discussion as long as it's what the advertiser wants to hear. I do think I need to make all that more clear on the ad signup page, though. ____Not the real rusty Owww owww owww Stomach... hurts... from... laughter... Ok. Whew. Regained control of myself. This must be the result of too much D&D as a kid. I've never seen that list before. Jesus, I have tears streaming down my face. ____Not the real rusty 1:10 Damn. ____Not the real rusty You mean... Surely you meant to say: "An education, under any circumstances, would have been a good thing?" ;-) ____Not the real rusty And a vase of flowers. On the golden field of this rug, 1'8"x3'4", is a very nicely drafted Kalshnikov AK-47 assault rifle, four Hind M-24 assault helicopters, two BMD armored personnel carriers, a rocket propelled grenade launcher, RPG-7, loaded with a shaped grenade, four hand grenades, three fragmentary and one smoke (for signaling or identification), a fighter-bomber, a Markarov officer's sidearm, and a vase of flowers. Skeletor: Banned in Florida? Remember that Florida Mayor who banned Satan from town? Well, after she got done talking to mass-media syncophants like Dan Rather, her utterly misguided publicist apparently let her talk to the keen and incisive sleuths from Satanosphere, who, as usual, got down to the really important stuff. Like: matt: ...The one question everybody has for you is this: Are you planning on banning any other major deities or demons? Like Skeletor? So, will Skeletor be banned forever from Inglis, Florida? Will the ACLU extend Skeletor the same legal protection as it graciously offered Satan? And perhaps most important of all, what about Wil Wheaton? Ha I pull things off the web and stick them there if I think the source is likely to disappear without notice. This time, I found a different picture of Skeletor on Geocities, loaded it once, linked to it, then, checking links, discovered it was "over the page limit" (which I think must have been 1 pageview). So I had to find another Skeletor, and for safety, I grabbed the Wil wheaton shot because it was also on a Geocities page. ____Not the real rusty Note: Also posted to MeFi. They're probably gonna hate me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! I forgot Cam took that picture. Good to see we both look like potential axe murderers. #kuro5hin was just playing "Drunk, or Not Drunk" with various pictures of me from SXSW. Actually, this story started out as a diary post here. Something about the content and format made me think of MeFi, and seeing as how I've never posted any links there before... And glad to see you worked out our confusing array of posting buttons, too. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yes Does anyone else think that MJ now looks like Skeletor? Yes. ____Not the real rusty It's Electric! Boogie oogie oogie. The power just went out, and then a pole behind my house caught fire. I happened to be looking right at it when the breakers blew, and it flashed blue-white, brighter than a thousand suns, and I thought to myself: Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. No, I didn't actually think that. What I did think was "Cool!" which you can bet your ass is what all those other scientists watching the first nuke test were thinking. So now, once again, I sit here, headlamp firmly strapped on, laptop on batteries, plugged into the phone outlet. I don't know why my first instinct when the power goes out is to get online, but there it is. I went to SXSW and the Online Journalism Conference last week, which is why I wasn't around for a while, I might write something about them, I might not. You'll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, greetings from darkened southeastern Maine. The heavy wet snow continues to fall, and I can hear more branches cracking outside. Other than that, all is completely silent. Wish us luck. Twice Twice so far this winter, which I think actually is unusual. Someone told me they lived here for twelve years and their power only went out twice total. Last time, I don't know what caused it. It was windy, but not excessively so. This time it's the snow, which is doing drastic damage to the trees, and presumably the wires too. When I called to report it, they said Portland was already out, and they had no time estime on getting that back up, so it's the whole region tonight. I don't think it's an island thing so much as just a northeast bad weather thing. Any New England coastal area will see it's share of storms, and this just happens sometimes. Anyway, I don't mind it much. The power going out gives you a great excuse to eat all the ice cream in the house "so it doesn't melt." And also, the birth rate spikes sharply 9 months after a major power outage... if you catch my drift. ____Not the real rusty Yeah... I know what you mean... if you follow me. ____Not the real rusty Back on They did some stuff with a chainsaw down on the low road, and now the power's back. I have to say, we may have lost it twice, but they get it back on impressively fast. ____Not the real rusty Not many answers This was all seen through a window, in the dark, in heavy snow, through a lot of trees, and the pole itself is about 300 feet away. I don't have any kind of details like that. :-) What I saw was that first, the power flickered a couple times here and then died. I ambled over to the window, and saw a red-orange, flickering glow back through the trees. It looked like it was being produced by fire or sparks of some kind, and appeared to be right around where I'd expect a power line to hit a pole, heightwise, but I couldn't actually see the source directly. This continued for about 8 or 9 seconds, and the flicker looked like it became smaller. Then suddenly an incredibly bright blue-white glow flared up, practically blinding me. Oddly, there was no sound at all (like, it definitely wasn't a transformer blowing, because at that distance, it would have been louder than hell). This lasted about a second, then cut off, then flared again for another second. The reddish flicker came back, but died out pretty quickly. Oh, actually, there was a sound when it flared, but it wasn't a boom. It was a sizzling hissing noise, and I think it was actually coming from my stereo and computer speakers. I had the impression that the things was throwing off a lot of energy in non-visible spectra. But it was very quick, and I'm not positive whether it was coming from electric stuff inside the house, or from the pole itself. After that, I couldn't see anything. Trucks came, chansaws, etc. Now the power's back. ____Not the real rusty Nope But there was 300 feet of 32o air and a couple panes of glass between me and it. I told the guy on the outage report hotline about it, and he said the flash was a breaker. I don't know, I suppose it could be, but it didn't look to me like something that was supposed to happen. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's going to be sloppy It's stopped snowing here, but now it seems to be melting. I expect tomorrow will be a miserable sloppy day for all you poor suckers who have to leave the house. ;-) I really need to have a New Englad K5er party this summer, I think. I think there's enough of us at this point to constitute a reasonable gathering. ____Not the real rusty Hey! Where's our editing function, huh? We're all waiting for you Mr. Antix. :-) ____Not the real rusty Works for me If you have something working, send it over to hurstdog. It's better to have something that almost works than nothing. It sucks when people code cool stuff, and then hem and haw with it for ages, until it's impossible to apply the patch because the rest of Scoop has changed so much. Sorry to hear about your girlfriend though. That sucks. :-( ____Not the real rusty Thanks President Steve It's always good to have a gentle reminder. Thanks for the pointers. ____Not the real rusty Senator, I do not recall I continue to disclaim any knowlege of who, if anyone, posted that shameful comment. A full and independent investigation will be launched immediately. ____Not the real rusty Cool It looks like Scoop was drunk when it formatted this. That's pretty cool. Not, you know, something I'd want to see a lot of, but cool nevertheless. ____Not the real rusty Actually It was Arabic for "Allah willing, I want to suck on your love stick, if it is halal." I hereby disclaim any knowlege of having made the above comment. ____Not the real rusty Oblique Postapocalyptic Marketing Strategies I am writing a story which will be posted serially entirely in textads. It is called "Oblique Postapocalyptic Marketing Strategies." I have no idea how long it will run, or really even what it's about yet. Luckily, I only have to write 120 characters of it at a time. I hope you all enjoy it. :-) If I remember to, I'll add links here... Woke up in Ginza... Phone. Max.... Damn wrapovers! "Excuse me, miss..." Max, I got her. Turning like a leaf... (by Kellnerin!) Thank you I find your ideas intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. ____Not the real rusty Unfortunately Now that ads have comments, this wouldn't really work. The target would just reply in the ad's comments. Good idea though. You should write an article "Trolling for Dollars: Pissing people off online for fun and profit (but mostly profit)". Note: The above was a joke. Really. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah well... If the demand were so high that I didn't have any space to fill, I probably wouldn't do it. As it is, I have to use textads for something... ____Not the real rusty Ha I was thinking more like a hyper-crystal-meth version of Wm Gibson's strategy of having a "hook" on every page. In this case it has to have a hook in every 120 characters. I already discovered that this means long sentences are right out. I'm shooting for a sort of cyberpunk-meets-James-Ellroy's-Cold-Sixthousand-esque feel. And this isn't easy for me. You'll note that in the preceeding sentence I managed to use a 53 letter long word. So, there you go. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I think it's 15 characters, or something like that. More without a space and it'll insert a space for you, because obviously you must have forgotten. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes In fact, it is. This is kind of an introduction to that. If you go to the /submitad page, it's all very obvious. ____Not the real rusty Sure Anyone's free to continue the story, by the way. I meant to mention that. Absolutely nothing stopping you. Just find the most recent part and label yours [$last+1]. I.e. "Oblique Postapocalyptic Marketing Strategies [II]" or whatever. I'll keep running them whenever mine run out of impressions, but if anyone else wants to contribute, I say hell yes. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh bloody hell... I need to figure out some way to fix that... ____Not the real rusty ROFL For the first time in a long while, I am actually in fact laughing out loud at a comment. From your general tone, I assume you know exactly where the word comes from in my general lexicon. I think I'm using it a lot lately because I just recently found out what it actually means. It turns out to be a pretty useful word, perhaps not least because so few people really know what it means. ____Not the real rusty Yep That was the inspiration for those particular words. Via hemos' personal webpage, actually. He used to have an oblique strategies generator. Not sure if it's still there or not. ____Not the real rusty Office Space Is anyone else picturing the scene from Office Space where Peter imagines Lumbergh screwing Jennifer Aniston? "Oh that's greeat. That's just greeeeat. Right there. Greeeeeeat." The fact that he's holding the coffee cup makes that scene one of the funniest things ever put on film. ____Not the real rusty SixFoot6+1YearsAgo Ryan is tall and skinny. That's the kind of plain statement that begs to be expanded on, and numerous options leap immediately to mind. Like Douglas Adams' description of Wonko the Sane, involving no less than five David Bowies. Or something about Ichabod Crane mating with a rare and undernourished species of Argentine stork. Marcel Duchamp would have run out of space to paint elbows in his masterpiece "Ryan Descending a Staircase." That sort of thing. Ryan's head perches on top of his body, like a Dadaist comedian sitting on a flagpole, issuing gnomic pronouncements on the absurdity of the ant-world far below. His own absurdity is a baseline, a touchstone for assessing the status of the rest of us. It is taken for granted. Me and Ryan go way back. We used to carpool to the bus stop in high school. 6AM, freezing Massachusetts winter, won't be light for another 3 hours, there's Ryan and his dad in my driveway, idling car spouting great blue clouds of New England emissions. This went on for three years. I was there the time he got banned from Rich's. Something to do with some Swedish fish and dandruff shampoo, but we don't like to talk about that. Back then, Ryan would occasionally sink into a deep gloom. You could see the lenticular clouds forming around the cornices of his brow. The normal hormone surges of adolescence seemed to sour and blacken, seeping through his hundreds of vascular miles; tectonic rumblings that brought forth some atavistic urge to carve glowering enigmatic idols and sacrifice virgins to them. But we were in high school, and that sort of thing just wasn't done. Then I graduated. I didn't see Ryan for 7 years. I went to college, moved to DC, started a website, moved again to San Francisco, got married, and moved again to Maine. I'd hear rumors from time to time. FA was small, and pretty tight, and no one really ever escapes. The grapevine never dies. I heard he was living at home, working at the Stearns's new golf course. I heard he kept a weblog. One thing leads to another, the complexity butterfly flaps its wings, the eternal harmony of the spheres takes it to the bridge, and Ryan and I end up in Austin Texas together at South by Southwest. It's a funny old world. This was written at Ryan's request for his travel journal at sixfoot6.com, but I figured I might as well post it here too. Dig through the pictures. I may have more to say about SXSW later. Out of context This wasn't written for you. Nothing to see here. Move along... move along... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah ...but nothing that mattered. :-) Actually, in DC I worked for these guys (WPI stood for "Waste Policy Institute" then), these guys, and these guys. In San Francisco I worked for these guys. The "undisclosed software product" mentioned in that article turned out to just be a Word document filing for bankruptcy. ____Not the real rusty Partners Intes are founding partners and co-owners of K5. Mainly they handle business stuff like accounting and legal. ____Not the real rusty And... I have had stories rejected, actually. ____Not the real rusty Yup Both under this name, and at least one other. Or so Driph claims anyway (about the other name). It sounded like wild conjecture to me though -- something about comment physics that I supposedly took credit for. You'd have to ask him to explain it again. ____Not the real rusty SXSW Panel: Open Source Tools for Online Community and Collaboration I'm sitting in the panel with the above title at SXSW. I will post notes as comment below. Yay BoingBoing for setting up wireless access points. Krow on Slashdot scaling Krow talked about what he's worked on, and how he got involved with Slashdot. 4-processor box to run searches. 2-processor box to replicate the DB ____Not the real rusty Brad from livejournal Scale LJ by adding users to different box clusters. You want to eliminate DB writes. Limit for DB performance is the speed of the slowest slave doing writes. Each journal assigned to a cluster, each cluster replicates a few things from master, but not much. Clusters mostly independent, so slow write on one won't harm the others. ____Not the real rusty What happens when a community gets large? Timothy: If anyone's ever read /. at threshold of below 3, you'll know that it's full of vitriol and nasty comments. Also mentions "people who enjoy breaking sites." Talks about /. moderation. "Code-based solutions to abusive posts." I.e. page-widening posts. Lameness filter. Brad (LJ): Livejournal uses invitations instead of bans. Users can require invite-only users, instead of banning abusive users. Austin Swinney (swinney.org): "Bozo filter" to ban sessions (?). [Why did you roll your own code?] Wanted simplicity, not a whole lot of features. Once it gets past your immediate friends, you just keep building on to it. People appreciate uniqueness. ____Not the real rusty Nah I'm only here for Interactive. I'm leaving for LA Wednesday. BTW, the Film people are total snobs. We're like the scum of the earth to them. Hah. ____Not the real rusty Moderation [How many people moderate?] Krow talks about Karma pool, and the algorithm for determining moderation privs. How to scale moderation: Scattering points among users "qualified". There are 5-6 thousand unique comment posters a day. Timothy: There are some people who have unlimited points (editors and whatnot). "We can use unlimited points to remove things from most users view." Driph: "Have the numbers of commenters increased, relatively as the site has grown, or stayed the same?" Krow: "We only started tracking 3 weeks ago, so no idea." ____Not the real rusty Heh This isn't my panel. I'm going to try to stream mine tomorrow. Be on #kuro5hin at 12:30 central if you want a live irc feed. :) ____Not the real rusty Slashcode, and story mod Krow: We have modules to emulate almost any kind of site in Slash. Freshmeat, livejournal, just about any kind of application. Slash as an app framework. Timothy on story approval and story longevity: On /. a story stays up 24 hours. No longer a distinction between an author account and a user account (used to be different things). Editors just get a menu for moderating submissions. "For the most part they're dleteed, because we run 15-20 stories. We get 200 to 500 submissions a day." Anyone with an author-level access can post any story. Planning to make slashdot search find urls too. ____Not the real rusty How to scale? How to pay for bandwidth? Brad: I hate ads, so we don't have them. Livejournal users can pay $2.00/mo for extra features. ____Not the real rusty Moderator aside Party at Elesium tonight at 8. All invited, no cover. Who knows what Krow and Timothy will admit to with some drink in them? (He said that, not me! :-) ____Not the real rusty I skipped some stuff [Needed a break. Picking up again...] Krow talks about how companies waste a lot of money buying Sun E3K's, porting everything to java, buying oracle, etc etc. "I've seen a lot of companies that have gotten just enough capital to get stupid." [Are you going to be able to continue to scale?] Krow: We're a small group in OSDN, and no one wants to tamper with us. [Audience: One of the problems is scalability. Has anyone looked at pushing subparts of sites to other hosts?] Brad: It's a trust question. Who do you trust to host your journal? Krow: we can do 6 million pages a day, right now we do 2.4 on average. I'm not worried about growth-- it'snot worth complicating the architecture. Timothy: If people can mirror everything and create a distributed system, great, but no one's close to doing it. AFAIK, it's a pipe dream. Krow explains RSS. I'm sure you all know what RSS is. :-) ____Not the real rusty What about advogato? Krow: I don't think advogato's trust metric will scale at all, and we're not going to use it. At some point, we're going to do a metric, based on who your friends and enemies are. Our fear is that it's still going to be game-able. Timothy on trust and moderation points: "There are sites that are about how to attack slashdot. There are people who accuse slashdot of being censorious, but anyone can start a discussion that's hosted within Slashdot." Smaller sites can have different approaches because there aren't so many users. Krow: I don't use mod points on slashcode.com, I get an email for each comment, and I delete it if I don't like it. [Trolls? Do you have a need to create a troll "honeypot"?] Timothy talks about trolltalk. "I think that proves it's a fairly robust system." Austin: "We ruthlessly go after trolls." Site is more like a zine, but offer things for people to get their crappy one-liners out. Also have noise filters, and a mailing list to offer a tool for people who don't feel like they fit into another format. Krow: Are there attack communities within LJ to attack LJ? Brad: Soemone posted javascript to attack LJ on LJ. Timothy: We can look at a comment posting history for a user, and identify people who post from different accounts on the same IP. GeekAustin tells of being attacked by the GiZ community, blocking it in the firewall. ____Not the real rusty Live from Austin, part 1 Had I known SXSW didn't really start till tomorrow, I wouldn't even be here yet. But here I am anyway, looking for something to fill the lonely hours till Driph arrives. More below. And buy an ad. I'm such a whore. I tried to register, and they printed me a badge, which the runner prompty wrecked. So they had to print a new one, and just then, the printer for the interactive badges crapped out. So they told me to come back later and pick it up. Paper technologies are my mortal enemy, and I can only conclude the printer knew I was nearby and killed itself. I had to find a notary to make Thawte happy so I can replace our cheesy self-signed SSL cert with a real one. Luckily, they have a notary in the hotel. $5.00, and I'm legal. Thank god that's done. What they don't have in this hotel are those personal coffeemakers. What the hell is up with that? This room's $145 a night, and I can't have a frigging cup of coffee? I even asked the concierge. It went like this: Me: "Can I get one of those little coffeemakers in my room?" Him: "No." Me: "What? Why?" Him: "We don't have any." Me: "That sucks." Him: "Yeah." My advice is don't stay at the Omni Austin downtown. They care more about polishing the chrome than serving the customers. I mean, I can go to any crap-ass family motel in the country and have a coffeemaker in my room. What the hell is wrong with this place? My guess is it would cut into sales at the cafe downstairs. Screw that. I am a little glad I'm here though, because they're screening Nothing so Strange tonight, which looks cool. 41 hours? Are you sure? While possible, it seems unlikely, since it would mean no one has voted on it in the last 5 hours. Otherwise, something's wrong with the autoposter. ____Not the real rusty Use help@kuro5hin.org. Love help@kuro5hin.org Ok, I've probably let this go on langer than it should have, but for anyone who wasn't aware, if you have problems or concerns about the site that need quick resolution, please email help@kuro5hin.org, not me personally. I usually answer help@k5 anyway, but there are times, like today, where I'm away for a while and emails to me will just pile up, whereas there's always someone watching help@k5. In other news, I got to Austin ok. Ordered pizza. Am now watching some TV. More tomorrow. :-) SXSW South by Southwest. I think I saw a gaggle of camwhores yesterday. ____Not the real rusty Nah It wasn't just you. It's been a trend lately. I just wanted to remind people that I check both when I can, but when I can't, someone will be checking help@ anyway. And right now hurstdog is on heightened alert since me and Driph are both at SXSW. Not that it's cut into my online time much so far. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well The thing is, I know there are several people who will be looking here for info about my trip, because I'm traveling right now. So I thought I should at least acknowlege that I know they want details, but I just don't have anything interesting to write yet. ____Not the real rusty yeah Someone had a procmail filter that rejected all email from Outlook. (Er, note, somone is not me! It's Inoshiro.) It should be ok now. ____Not the real rusty Heh Do we all ge to abuse you now for trolling? :-) FYI: inanity is the order of the day! It's diaries! ____Not the real rusty Marry you both? Japhar81 and Webwench will ask Rusty to marry them. Sorry, but I'm already married. Anyway, I think that's against two different Maine laws. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Surprised? No, I am not. Maine is a good place for doughnuts. Dunkin Donuts was founded in Randolph, Massachusetts too. Krispy Kreme was probably founded in the Soviet Union. Damn commie fake doughnuts. ____Not the real rusty Never get him that way It's 867-5309 ____Not the real rusty Fixed this morning I do believe that this problem is now fixed. Let me know if it re-occurs. ____Not the real rusty Blargh I knew my fix was gonna break something. I'll try to fix my fix. Dammit, I have to leave on Thursday morning. I wanna code fun stuff! Wah. Must... sleep... :-) ____Not the real rusty Inaccurate FAQ The threshold for front page was changed a while ago to be 45%. The FAQ is (always) a bit out of date. No conspiracy though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh People do get a little testy sometimes. I know a lot of us are perfectionists. But some portion of it is really just the extreme difficulty in expressing gentle ciritcism in a textual medium. You either come off sounding harsh, or hesitant, and the middle ground is tiny. Another big part of it is the frustration everyone feels about not being able to fix things themselves, and the resulting conflict of "Should I vote it down? Should I wait for an editor to fix it? Ahhh!" This is entirely the fault of the mgmt., and we are working to remedy it soon. ____Not the real rusty I do care Every cynic is an idealist at heart (otherwise what would we have to be cynical about?). I do care about K5 -- I've put over two years of my life into it so far, and it's the only job I've ever had that I truly love to do. I hope I make thousands of dollars today too.I won't, but that's ok. :-) ____Not the real rusty Memory suckage Scoop will suck up memory if you let it, but from what I hear, it is easier to manage for small sites. That is, Scoop dosn't start to get bitchy until your site gets pretty big. And then there are a lot of things we've added to it for K5 that help quite a bit, and presumably by that time you've learned how to tune Scoop, mod_perl, and mysql for good performance. To be more exact about some of the speculation, K5 is about 15-20 times less loaded than Slashdot. They do about 3 million pages a day, we do 150-200K. So if you were looking for proven ability to handle ludicrous load, Slash would be your beast. We'll of course continue to tweak Scoop as K5 grows, and I assume we'll be there someday. :-) ____Not the real rusty Grrr! Arrrgh! It's not been a happy day for the K5 cluster. Basically, what's been happening is a caching issue, where every ten minutes or so, every apache process decides it needs to re-fetch all 30,000 rows of one table. All at the same time. This is, it should not be necessary to point out, Bad. I just pached up the bit of code that does that, so it ought to be working better now. Scoop caching is kind of non-linear though, so if anyone sees anything weird that looks like it could be related to things not being updated when they should, do let me know. ____Not the real rusty Secret info Actually, virtually no one emails me when K5 goes down. Sometimes, if something horrible happens, and it's down for like 15 minutes, I get one email. But usually, nothing. This, by the way, is a good thing! I always know already, and am working on it. I usually have taken it down myself, for some reason. ____Not the real rusty Your article Your article rocked. Don't think a lot of people didn't get anything from it just because there weren't many comments. I loved it, but I didn't have much to say afterward, not being a Van Gough or Gaughin expert in any way. I imagine a lot of people felt the same. More like that please. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks You beat me to it. What link is rusty going to be handing out most at SXSW? You know... ____Not the real rusty Yours I think you win gold and silver so far in my book. Any ad that mocks thinkgeek is a good ad. And COOK MY SOCK... I'm still laughing. ____Not the real rusty Tha's funny The best part is it's for Sourceforge. Not even an outside client. That's too funny. ____Not the real rusty No That's just not the right attitude, I think. If they're hateable, then I'm doing something wrong. No one's here to suffer, you know? ____Not the real rusty Thank you Thanks. I don't think this is a "beat the system" thing though. From his other comments, I think rajiv just doesn't like ads. There's nothing wrong or evil about that. It's not sneaky or shameful. It's just how he feels. Usually, I agree with him. If I can provide a way for him to support the site that he feels comfortable with, than I've earned that money. If I'm annoying him, then I've earned whatever measures he feels are necessary to be not annoyed. People vote with their wallets all the time in a capitalist system, by paying for something or not paying for it, and this is the same as that. The problem brought up elsewhere in this thread does concern me, though. A filtered textad is still an impression, which isn't fair for the person who paid for it. This will require some thinking. ____Not the real rusty Yeesh You seem to have ignited a controversy. :-) From my perspective, I'd rather have a happy reader than anything else. If no ads makes you happy, I encourage you to block them. I believe the Proxomitron can filter HTML based on regular expressions. If it makes it easier, I can add a <!-- begin ad --> and <!-- end ad --> comment for you in the HTML. I appreciate the comments supporting them, and I think they're pretty entertaining, but if they don't float your boat, do what you need to do. You'll hear no criticism from me. You may want to give it a couple days first, though, and see if you hate these as much as all other ads. It's probably worth the experiment, at least, whatever you decide. ____Not the real rusty Ok, comments added As per the above, I added begin ad and end ad comments for you proxomitron weenies. :-) Oh, and I'll get the subscribe link back up somewhere. Thanks for reminding me. I'm planning to offer different "levels" of subscription soon, as well. I'll try to price one at your suggested point. It may not include all membership features, but we'll see what I can come up with. Turning off ads at least will be included. ____Not the real rusty That's ok So if I was going to dump say $25 into k5, I'd buy some ad impressions just for the hell of it (even though I have nothing to sell) rather than a subscription... That's ok. I think you're right that right now, paid memberships aren't worth much. That's the next part of my Evil Plan. I want to make paid memberships worth having even if you like the ads and don't want to block them. Hell, I want to make paid memberships worht having even if you have bought some ads too. :-) I've got some ideas, but what would compel you to get a paid membership? ____Not the real rusty Allcommerce There's some of my code in there, wherever it is. Precious little, but hey. AFAIK, it's still floating around on sourceforge somewhere. ____Not the real rusty Hey, Paddy! Your dream has come true at last! Buy an ad. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hey, by the way You got memepooled the other day. Seems someone there liked your Axhole Rose story. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sneak Textad Preview Ok, the textads are almost ready to go. Right now you can create them, and pay with Visa or Mastercard ($3.00 per thousand, with a minimum of 4000). I still need to add the paypal payment option, which I'll be working on today, so they should be ready to start running by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I want to pre-populate the system with some ads, so that when we do start running them, they won't all run through in an hour. And I'd also like to have a bit of a test first, so I don't get flooded with submissions and then find a problem! So, if you want to be among the first to try out the new K5 textads, go here and try it out. Please post comments or questions below. Things to know: If paid and approved, your ad will start running as soon as I officially launch the service. I will make every effort to ensure that all the ads run for a reasonable amount of time, regardless of how many there are. We don't have a third-party-signed SSL certificate yet. When you go to pay, you'll be asked to accept our self-signed cert. We should have a real signed cert very soon. "I don't have anything to advertise!" you say? Sure you do! Got a website? Do you do any open source coding? Is there a site that you don't run, but you think deserves more exposure? Twelve bucks isn't much to spend, and it's way fun. Failing all else, put up an ad for something amusing to other K5ers. I bet I have posted an embarrassing comment or two that some of you would love to bring to the attention of others. ;-) So go nuts. Your ads will start running tonight or tomorrow morning, when I announce officially. More info It's probably not totally clear when they're not running yet. Let's see. First, look here. That's a demo page of roughly what it'll look like when they're actually live. The ads are in the top of the left-hand column. What you're buying is one of those grey boxes. Essentially, it's a title, a link, and a little descriptive text. You can link to anything you want, and I hope people come up with creative ideas for them. The deal with the numbers is, you buy a certain number of "impressions". That is, every time someone loads K5, it will display one or two ads. Each time it displays one, that's an impression. So if you buy 4,000 impressions, your ad will appear 4,000 times. That probably sounds like a lot, but consider that K5 serves over 150,000 pages on most normal weekdays. That's why I want to have some ads in there ready to go before I launch for real. The ads will be rotated according to which one was viewed longest ago. So, basically, they work as a rotating stack: the ad that was show longest ago will be selected and displayed, and moved to the "top" of the stack. It won't show again till it gets back down to the bottom (because all the other ads in the system have been shown). You can imagine, if there are only a few ads in the system, they will all run thorugh very fast. Other sites are already doing something like this. MetaFilter, for example, has textads. The ad is on the top right of the MeFi page. You might get a better idea what people use them for by looking at their ad list. We will have a similar "show all ads" page soon. Meanwhile, each user will have a page that shows what ads they have submitted, such as mine for example. Does that help? Are you still confused? ____Not the real rusty Preview What you see in the preview on the "Design your ad" page is just what they'll look like. To look at an example of roughly what they'll look like in context, try the demo page. There may end up being only one on a page, depending on how popular they turn out to be. They will also probably be on the other side of the page on story and comment pages. We'll be adding more types of ads, and options in the near future. Right now it's just a simple textad, to get it running and shake out the bugs. We probably won't be having graphical ads, unless we can do them in a non-intrusive way, but we may offer larger sizes or special options like only showing them in a particular section, or what have you. ____Not the real rusty Not really No, "hit" and "impression" are pretty much equivalent. A "hit" is usually considered a page loaded. Every page loaded will use an ad impression. Depending on how many ads are on a page, it could be more than one impression. But at minimum, one hit == one impression. ____Not the real rusty Impressions K5 serves over 150,000 pages on most days. That's what I meant by "pre-populating" them. :-) Also, If you view your own ad, that never counts. Nor do views of ads on your user ads page. On the first launch, I'll probably start with ads only on section index pages, and gradually expand them if we sell enough to keep them in rotation for a while. ____Not the real rusty Heh. You got a better idea? :-) No, I have no idea if it will work or not. I'm hoping it does, because I don't know what else I'm gonna do. Well, one thing is I'm going to make paid memberships more valuable, and hopefully that'll bring in some money. And we still are hoping to develop a K5 store. But this has got to pretty much pay the bills for a couple months. Also, I'm guessing that fewer people will buy the bare minimum than you might think. 4,000 impressions is a tiny, tiny number, and is basically unlikely to do you much good no matter where you buy them. If you have any intentions other than testing out the ad system, I imagine you'd go ahead and buy a lot more than that. As for why you'd buy an ad instead of post a diary: I'm actually kind of hoping that people recognize that now that anyone can buy an ad, it would be fairly inappropriate for a business to go into the diaries and post something openly commercial. At the very least, it would be pretty crass to use a free resource to advertise yourself instead of supporting the free resources by paying for an ad. I'm not going to restrict what's in the diaries, but I hope people will consider when they ought to be buying an ad instead of postign a diary. ____Not the real rusty Interesting idea I see no reason why not. We can process "recurring" charges, and we will have "free floating" impression buys, so this would just be a combination fo the two. Will add to the todo list. ____Not the real rusty Redirect Redirect works fine in Galeon. It's server-side, so it shouldn't matter what browser you're using, as long as it isn't so broken it doesn't accept a redirect header. Were you trying it in the ad preview? That one may not work, since your ad isn't live yet. That's why the link is provided below the ad preview. As for the format, 60 characters is a lot more than you get with most textad systems. MeFi, for example, offers 20 char titles and 50 char bodies. Google offers 25 title and 70 body, it seems. We'll see if it's too restrictive for everyone. If I make them longer, I'm, going to have to make the text size smaller, though. ____Not the real rusty Actually That's not a bad idea at all. We could definitely do that. I can make any number of different "types" of ads. All you'd do is, before you design your ad, you would choose "I want this type" from a list. The types could differ only in that longer ones would be smaller text, so you can decide what is more important to you. I'll probably add that soon. Thanks for the idea. ____Not the real rusty I got something you can eat... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Renewing Right now you get an email when your run is almost done, and one when it's finished. You can't "renew" an existing ad yet (I know, we're working on it), but you do get mailed the contents of your finished ad, and you can easily make another of the same. Hurstdog is working on renewal as we speak. ____Not the real rusty It is on the drawing board I do want to add some optional "user info", like city, country, etc, that people can fill in if they'd like, and then we can use that for ads. Think about things like ISPs, for example. I know at least one ISP operator (Arkady) who only wants to advertise to Californians. Hell, we might as well try it and see if it works. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh That would be funny. No, I don't really care who you are or what you're advertising for, within reasonable limits. Porn sites will have to be really nicely done, and make it clear that they're porn in the ad, to be accepted. Goatse.cx and it's ilk will not be accepted, nor will ads for hate sites, or ads for sites that do alot of obnoxious things when you open them (pop-ups, etc). Other than that, anything goes, pretty much. ____Not the real rusty User account? If you mean do you have to have a user account to buy an ad, yes. If you mean do you have to have a paid membership, no. By the way, I'm going to get paid memberships onto the CC system soon too. ____Not the real rusty Probably What I consider intrusive: Graphics that move (including flash, java, animated gifs, etc) Large graphics Ads that cover information you wanted to see (those obnoxious DHTML "overlay" things. ugh!) Sites where more than, say, about 1/8th of a regular page is advertising Ads that are not clearly visually and textually delimited as such. Need I even say any kind of popup or popunder or pop-anywhere? I think that's about it. So there is some possibility of having ads with a small, non-animated graphic, like a logo or something, similar to the Voxel/Promicro box in the right. I don't think those are terribly intrusive or annoying. Taking graphical ads is an issue the system hasn't quite got finished yet though. The beginnings of it are ther, but hurstdog mostly set aside images to get textads working properly first. We may take that issue up again in the future. However, I don't think adding graphics will add any real value to the ads. I'm more likely to concentrate on utility features, like section or topic options, time-based display, and other things, before getting to that. ____Not the real rusty Payment Up front we do tell you what we accept. Maybe I need graphics on the first page, or a pull-out box or something, to make it more obvious. Beyond that, though, it doesn't really work if we take the money first. The design kind of assumes we already have the ad, and besides, I think it would be weird to pay first and then buy your product, don't you? We do plan to offer "free-floating" impressions. I.e. you will be able to buy a number of impressions, and then later, when you make an ad, just apply impressions you've already bought to it. ____Not the real rusty Heh Note that when someone else looks at that, they won't see all the stats. Look at my ad page, for example, you should only see the ad and when it was submitted. Er, if you see more than that, plase let me know. :-) ____Not the real rusty Fixed Ok, any kind of preview or non-live display of ads won't redirect anymore, and will open in a new window. Normal ad display will redirect and count the clickthrough. ____Not the real rusty Soon You will be able to subscribe with a credit card very soon. It should be relatively easy, with the foundation I've got laid down for the ad billing. Gimme a day or two. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sangamon's principle Don't forget Sangamon's Principle of molecular simplicity. ____Not the real rusty Yup Life is inevitably fatal. ____Not the real rusty Ads and Blogs No diaries lately, I know. I've been busy. Sad to say, this won't be much of one either. TextAds are launching Monday. If you want a sneak preview, you might try stopping by #k5 sometime Sunday night. I will need people to help test everything out, and preload some ads into the system so the first few don't all run through in 20 minutes. Welcome to any Slashdotters who may have just stopped by. But be warned, we're not all technology. :-) Below, you will find a selected bibliography of articles and links about blogging and journalism. It's mostly for my convenience, but if you have an interest in the topic, here's what people have been saying lately. (Warning: Pretty long) Format: Title, publication, author, link (all these where applicable), then my notes in bullets, then interesting quotes as blocks of text. Back in the Bloghouse The Register (Andrew Orlowksi) [link] * Not summarized yet. Read it. :-) ------------ Meg [link] * Journalists get it wrong too. * Often "fact checking" doesn't happen * Blogs as open fact-checking? And speaking of professional media coverage, the "blogs-are-not-journalism" camp is quick to point out that capital J journalism is focused on researching and presenting facts. Journalism is concerned with credibility and to that end employs editors and fact-checkers to ensure that the public receives a valid and informed piece of writing. And yet with a quick glance at the articles above, I see errors--errors that have been continued from one weblog article to the next, the same "facts" repeated over and over. Of course Journalists are informed by previous pieces that have been published on the topic they're writing about, but does that relieve them of their fact-checking obligations? We're well into shades of grey, into a fuzzy realm where the distinction between amateur and professional is blurred. Where and how articles are published should not overshadow the examination of the quality and credibility of what's being written. ------------ Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog Wired (Farhad Manjoo) [link] * Bland overview. Basic backgrounder. ------------ Amateur Newsies Top the Pros Wired (Leander Kahney ) [link] * Blogs on 9/11 * Personal accounts, on-scene reports. * Blogs as real-time live sources. * Source-side journalism, open to everyone. ...not only was citizen-produced coverage sometimes more accessible than professional news organizations, it was often more compelling... Written accounts of the terrorist strikes and their aftermath also provided an intimacy that many news reports lacked. And while The New York Times, the old, gray lady, was full of bloodthirsty war-mongering, ordinary citizens gathered online to present a wide range of opinions... Depending on where you looked, there were measured calls for restraint, investigation and thought before action. Of course, there was also plenty of bloodlust, chest-thumping and stupidity, but online there was at least a debate. ------------ 'Bloggers' emerge from internet underground National Post (James Cowan) [link] * More of above: blogs on 9/11 compelling * Where do blogs fit into news? * Focus on Layne, blogs as old-school personality reporting * Fox blog, National Review blogs If you reread Winer's postings from that day, you discover they have as much immediacy and depth as anything produced by the mainstream media. In fact, because of their do-it-yourself, varnish-free prose, they have more. As it stands, it's doubtful that personal blogs will supplant newspapers anytime soon. "There could be no blogs without full-time reporters collecting news and full-time editors putting out papers," [Ken] Layne said. "One valid criticism of bloggers is that they sometimes just link back and forth to each other. Remove the actual journalism from the Web and you've got a couple of hundred thousand people talking about nothing." Layne hopes more newspaper columnists might learn something from bloggers' attitudes. "U.S. papers are so damned dry," he said. "I mean, who picks up the paper and says, 'I wonder what the Pentagon reporter has to say this morning.' The good bloggers are not much different from old-time newspaper columnists. They have a style, they have a personal connection with readers, they don't seem like factory-made op-ed writers. Maybe newspapers will inject some of this first- person style into the news columns. What I hope news sites learn from blogs is that personality matters." ------------ Blog This Technology Review.com (Henry Jenkins) [link] * Blogs pressuring an increasingly centralized corporate media * Blogs as punditry, not original sources. * Corp journ and blogs need each other. Blogs amplify and reframe issues that journalists dig up At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We're in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation. Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard. ------------ A Blogger Manifesto -- Why online weblogs are one future for journalism. Andrew Sullivan [link] * P2PJ: the "Napster of Journalism" * Empower the little guy * Blogging journaslism on the net: the "voice" of the web, not just newspapers put online It was, I realized two years ago, the nascent Napster of the journalism industry. Just as Napster by-passed the record companies and brought music to people with barely any mediation, so Blogger by-passed established magazines, newspapers, editors and proprietors, and allowed direct peer-to-peer journalism to flourish. By empowering individual writers, by reducing the costs of entry into publishing to close to zero, the blog revolution has only begun to transform the media world. Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshall the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few. Readers were more skeptical of anonymous news organizations anyway, and preferred to supplement them with individual writers they knew and liked. And the more you think about this development, the more potentially significant it is. What it basically means is that a writer no longer needs a wealthy proprietor to get his message across to readers. He no longer needs an editor, either... It means that the universe of permissible opinions will expand, unconstrained by the prejudices, tastes or interests of the old media elite. ...blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. ------------ Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad? NY Times (BOB TEDESCHI) [link] * General background. Or is it simply that in this, the Internet's fallow period, anything even remotely buzzworthy is given more of a spotlight than it deserves. Is the Weblog, in other words, a fad that is destined to fade? ------------ Matt Haughey [link] If the journalism-with-a-capital-J crowd is calling it a fad , perhaps they are scared at the prospects of admitting there is something useful in weblogs, and it's a smoke shield. Maybe it's just time to stop using the word journalism around weblogs, regardless of any similarities one might find among the two as neither all weblogs can be called journalism nor can all news articles be called journalism... I fear the already polarized weblogs vs journalism arguments will continue to be mired in semantics and strictly either/or prospects, and I wonder if energy is better spent working on other things. ------------ P2PJ Discussion Kottke.org [link] * P2PJ as process of collaborative news filtering. Jorunalism the result of the post/discuss/post loop. [Journalism as *process* not product] Take the universe of weblogs as a complex system. What, if anything, is emerging out of that system? One possible answer is that the collective act of weblogging is producing a basic form of journalism, which you might call "bottom-up journalism" or "peer-to-peer journalism"... At the end of the line, in some instances, you eventually get a story that has been collectively edited by the system. Repeat this process millions of times a month with hundreds of thousands of participants, and you'll get a few such stories a month. --kottke [link] Journalism is certainly not the word to use for 99% of all weblogging activity. Commenting on a news story, offering a personal anecdote, writing opinion - none of these are journalism. They're writing, but not all writing (even if it's topical) is journalism. --Jason Beaumont [link] The push for people to label weblogs as journalism (or potential journalism) is a response to what passes nowadays as journalism. Many people feel under- or unrepresented by traditional/mass media. Mass media is shallow, playing to the lowest common denominator so it can appeal to the widest possible audience. That leaves a lot of people feeling dissatisfied and uninformed. More importantly, without the label "journalism" it's easy to cast aside the writing that's occurring in weblogs as personal, amateur, or somehow less worthy of the public's attention than the "real" stuff written by professionals. --Meg [link] There is good and bad professional journalism and there's good and bad amateur journalism. It all comes down to quality and credibility. --Meg [link] I will also point out a fundamental issue with trying to call it journalism. One axis of identifying journalism must surely be the distinction between the publisher and the journalists/editors. Although the wall between them is quite porous now, it doesn't exist at all for the vast majority of webloggers. I wonder how significant that is? --Michael Boyle [link] I notice that the main focus in these "weblogging is a fad" articles of late is how weblogs are "a new form of media", where the authors tend to be "wannabe" journalists of "wannabe" writers. Why so critical? Perhaps the people writing these articles are a bit nervous that weblogs spread news more effectively and quickly than the newspapers they write for do...or maybe they look down on them. --Becky Delgado [link] Why does it also have to now be journalism? Because if I follow the money here (even if it's tiny), the majority of people who seem to want to label it as journalism are not the hobbyists, but the tool vendors, the conference speakers, and the dozen or so people who the majority of the weblog audience reads. --Jason Beaumont [link] ------------ Dave Winer [link] * Conflict of interest: BigMedia doesn't want blogs to be taken seriously * Bloggers as domain experts * What about fairness? Press releases are written by domain experts too. Domain experts often hav a vested interest in the information they choose to impart Publishing software is getting easier to use, always, and the people are getting smarter about it, always. The BigPubs often cover this stuff with their ink-stained conflict of interest producing exactly the same story. In fact the best webloggers are domain experts. We've cut out a middleman who was subtracting value. It must be hard for them to see because the reporters are the middlemen. ------------ Blogging is Here to Stay Dan Gillmor [link] * Journalist turned blogger * Blogs as resources My guiding principles in journalism are the usual ones. I believe in getting it right, being fair, shining lights on things that are hidden when they affect the public good, etc. But I have developed another guiding principle in the way I do this craft. My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed. ------------ We Blog - No, Really, WE BLOG Glenn Fleishman [link] * Blogs are sometimes commentary, sometimes reportage * What is journalism? we have some folks who are doing the real deal: reporting on their site, writing analysis, interviewing people, creating something bigger than synthesis involving new facts. Commentary is good and interesting, but it isn't Big J or little j journalism. (Journalism's tradition only spans to the late 1800s, if that, in its current form; commentary stretches thousands and thousands of years.) But another way: journalism is asking other people why things work the way they do, and trying to ask enough people to paint a picture of the truth; commentary is asking yourself. ------------ The Blog Phenomenon PC Magazine (John Dvorak) [link] * Where that "wanna-be writers" line comes from * Generally dismissive of blogs as the new vanity sites Wanna-be writers. A lot of people want to be published writers. Blogs make it happen without the hassle of getting someone else to do it or having to write well--although there is good writing to be found. Some is shockingly good. Most of it is miserable. I expect to see those Open Learning classes around the country offering courses in Blog writing. ------------ Fox news blogs: Ken Layne: [link] Moira Breen: [link] ------------ Discredit where undue Doc Searls [link] * Journalism threatened by bloggers * Populist transfer of power Journalism as Usual is threatened by the blogging movement because blogging enlarges the circle that defines journalism and redistributes power outside the old center. Suddenly almost anybody with a blog is in a position to know, to inform and to influence. And, in the Southern parlance I miss out here on the Left Coast, to "call bullshit" on errors when they occur. ------------ Scott Andrew [link] * Bloggers don't understand basic journalistic ethics. * Blogs transform virtually everything into op-ed I might have asked a question or two about the utter failure of weblogs as outlets for objective journalism. True, weblogs served a pivotal purpose in quickly disseminating information, but that began to wane almost immediately in the days following 9/11. Webloggers pride themselves on their individual views and value their right to express them publicly, and well they should. But I fear the majority of webloggers don't possess even a basic grasp of journalistic ethics. And it's this lack of understanding that could damage the budding reputation of weblogs as journalism. You can't simply change or add your own headline and expect the context to remain valid (this is why the media often employs headline editors). You can't always add a few lines of personal commentary. Once you've added your voice, it's simply not news anymore -- it's opinion. It's editorial. While weblogs may play a significant role in promoting amateur journalism, I would argue that weblogs have quite a way to go before they can be considered serious journalism. One wonders if, amid the talk of big media overthrow and revolution, webloggers are at all interested in becoming more responsible writers and reporters. ------------ The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism Me [link] News, and especially reliable news, is a process, not a product. What you don't see behind the scenes of any major media outlet are all the people who contributed to that 30-second clip. Fact checkers, editors, etc. They're all there, working like mad to try to make the story come out right. Collaborative media puts that process right out in the open, so at least if you find the result inaccurate or unconvincing you can both see how it got that way, and help fix it. Er? If you've figured out how to get to that bit, you should at least be aware that it's not ready yet, and you won't be able to pay for anything. Please wait till tomorrow, really. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah That's about how I feel. I think there's some things big-J Journalism can learn from places like this, but I'm not real big on the idea that what we're doing is reporting news. Read Orlowski for a pretty close idea of how I feel about it at the moment. And if you're in Austin, TX this month, come see my panel at SXSW, which will be on this very topic. ____Not the real rusty Gonzo is a weirdo I always thought Gonzo was a "weirdo". Whatever that is. I swear they had this conversation once, though, and he claimed to be a weirdo. ____Not the real rusty You're no hero, mister! If there's one thing I've learned from the local TV news, it's that you just did what anyone would have done, and you don't think of yourself as a hero. Nor do you seek any kind of recognition or reward, apart from perhaps people thinking about how they treat each other. You just wish this kind of thing didn't have to happen to anyone, and you're awfully glad you came along when you did. That's how you feel right? C'mon, that's how they all feel. Good job, by the way. One less mother's son needlessly wasted. Humanity thanks you. ____Not the real rusty The plan The plan is to place these where they cannot be missed by a new user. Sure, they can be skipped or unread, but they'll at least be placed in front of you to start with. They should be brief and readable-- this is key. These guidelines will probably appear in the new user email, and on the "Confirm Account" page. ____Not the real rusty Aisle three. Next to the Cheez Curls. ____Not the real rusty Farewell Jin Wicked, whoever you are There's been some Diary section drama lately involving Jin Wicked, who's been behaving "strangely." Well, as most people had figured out, it wasn't her, but someone else posting in her name. She's apparently not happy about this anymore, and regrets having her name on some of the things the other Jin wrote, and asked me to end it. So, Jin Wicked is now no longer a working account here. I also removed all her diaries, whoever they were by. The comments stay, because I'll be damned if I'm going to go through and delete all of them. Just be aware that whoever you were talking to may or may not have been who you thought it was, and will not be appearing here again, at least in that name. Also, for those of you thinking that it'd be a hoot to give your account to someone else if you decide to leave, consider that they will be able to speak as you, and ain't no one gonna know the difference. Virtual identity is not always so anonymous as we think it is. This note is just to let the compulsive diarists (you know who you are! ;-) know what actually happened, before the conspiracy theories start in earnest. PS: K5 passed 3 million pages today for Feb 2002 (3105161 pages as of midnight today, to be exact). First 3-million-page month ever. I [heart] Voxel and the cluster. Anonymized It's anonymous. That's what we generally do to disable an account, because actually deleting them causes trouble. Basically, it still exists, but has no more privileges than an anonymous visitor has. ____Not the real rusty No That was Jin, I assume. Though who knows. ____Not the real rusty Stress, whatnot Personally, my life is great. I love the new house utterly, and don't ever want to leave. Marriage suits me, and I'm rediscovering a long-dormant fondness for cooking. Mostly, I'm worried about money. Textads will start soon (no, really. I'm serious. Stop that giggling! I mean it this time!) and I'm just generally fretful about income. This is basically it, I have no backup plan. If K5 doesn't bring in enough to pay the rent, I don't know what happens. So that's been kind of a constant refrain in the back of my head lately. I'm not utterly freaked out and panicked by it, it's just always there, poking into my medulla like a blunt spoon. I know, I need to just fucking finish it and quit worrying. You know when you're afraid to try something because it might not work? And you know it's stupid and irrational, but you are anyway? It sucks. I'm working on it though -- yesterday I got the user end of things fixed up here, so the submission process should be workable. I just need to tie together the billing bits, and it's go-time. But I'm still scared. Beyond that, I'm disappointed with the overall level of sanity here in the past month or so. There's just been a lot of unnecessary nastiness, like people flaming newbies instead of welcoming them. Remember when someone's first diary would always get a "Welcome to K5!" post or two? Now they get "Shut up you ignorant fuckwad!" more often than not. It makes me sad, and I don't know what to do about it. There's probably nothing I can do. Anyway, I know I haven't been as cheery as I usually am. Sorry about that. There's probably also a general computer burnout factor in there too. Well, I'm off to SXSW and then another conference in March, and textads should be running before I leave, so maybe taking the plunge money-wise and getting out of the same environs for a while will help. Speaking of which, another thing is that I've been much more involved in running the "business" of K5 lately, or what there is of it anyway, and it's not suiting me particularly well. I'm not the kind of person who's mentally well-equipped to run a business by myself. I just don't know most of the things you're supposed to know about this stuff. It's not particularly fun, and I always feel like I'm probably doing it wrong. Well, you asked for it, so there's me venting all over you. Thank you for caring. :-) ____Not the real rusty Roughly I may not get to CC subscriptions until after I get back from traveling. But if I'm smart, it'll be easy to add that once the ad billing thing works. So yes, more or less. ____Not the real rusty Yes ...why not try to give some directions to the newbies when they set up an account? This has been on my todo for a long, long time. If you are willing to write up a brief list of things every new K5er should know, and perhaps some links to site docs they should at least be aware of, I would be very grateful, and it would probably give me the kick in the ass needed to put it on the site. The actual addition is a five minute coding job and editing some blocks. It's the writing the guidelines bit I haven't found the time to do. So, if you're volunteering, I'm taking you up on it. Perhaps posting a draft as a diary and getting some feeedback from others would be the best way to approach it? Drop me an email if and when you have something. And thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty OK If you ask me, you should also delete the account of the person who was masquerading as Jin, as a Just punishment. You don't really want me to delete your account, do you bc? I will if you want. ____Not the real rusty Replied just for this comment Heh. Note the username of the downrater. That's pretty funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Shock! And then I find out that it's all a terrible lie! I feel so used. ____Not the real rusty Sorta She gave the account to someone else to have a funny joke, and it backfired on her. Me, I'm just cleaning up after the drama's all done, like a peep-show janitor. ____Not the real rusty Heh You're welcome. I can turn a phrase, huh? And hey, it dragged you out of a six-month silence. I knew it was a fine simile. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sure You can always start over. Just make a new account, and off you go. :-) ____Not the real rusty Argh Jin asked me to remove her diaries. I did. This time, I removed all the rest of them because of the whole dispute. But the username "Jin Wicked" is also no longer usable, by anyone. It's not going to be an issue again for her. To be honest, it's not something I want to spend all my time doing. I have deleted other things at users requests, but I usually ask for some good reason to do so. If it ever became a flood, I'll probably just start saying no. I don't feel obligated to delete things, but I usually do if you have a good reason for it. I don't ever delete comments at a user's request, because it's a pain and they should have thought more carefully beforehand. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I find the idea of admins selectively removing some people's posts/diaries on request while possibly denying others disturbing. I do too, which is why I hate doing it. I hate even being asked to do it, because that puts me in the position of having to decide. On the other hand, people do screw up sometimes, and I'd hate to have someone actually come to grief for something they posted here in a less-than-ideally-thoughtful moment, like losing a job or a loved one. So I don't want to say "no, never ever." You know? I can't remember ever having refused to remove something so far. It's only been requested maybe four or five times. What do you think I should do? ____Not the real rusty Heh Not all. Just most. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow! No wonder the secret service was so interested in you... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Hm I don't know. I don't think I have that new-car thing. The first thing I always want to do with new cars is take them out and see what they're good for. With the Miata, this meant as fast as possible on the cliffs of Route 1 in CA. With the Jeep, it has so far meant uphill in 9 inches of snow and various treks out into the Maine North Woods to swerve around pulp trucks on dirt roads and swerve around boulders on no roads. Actually, the very first thing I've done with both of the two new cars I've ever owned is drive them cross-country. I'm not sure it's a habit I can break, now. I better not buy any cars in the near future. :-) ____Not the real rusty American food I think the real hallmark of "American food" is that it's always a blend of some other cultures food. Things like creole, tex-mex, fusion, those are all as American as food gets. I doubt there will ever be one "American" style of cooking though. This country's too big and diverse to settle down on one kind of food. ____Not the real rusty Not American Please don't saddle us with the stigma of having invented corporate food. :-) ____Not the real rusty For it's time? Screw that "for it's time" crap. CK is still the best film ever made. The problem is that it doesn't leap right out at you -- it takes a lot of thinking to really get at why it's so damn good. I've written many dozens of pages about it, but it all ultimately boils down to this: CK is a towering acheivement because the visual, audio, and narrative aspects of the film are all perfectly balanced and used to maximum effect to reinforce, deepen, and explore the basic themes. I'm not going to go through it in detail, because that would take forever, but to this day, I still haven't seen anything else that even approaches it in terms of pure filmmaking quality. This doesn't mean that I want to watch it all the time. It's not really that kind of movie. Like you could appreciate the genius of a truly great painting, but not want the original hanging in your living room, you know? ____Not the real rusty Shop smart! Shop S-Mart! Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up! See this? This is my... BOOM STICK! ____Not the real rusty Wisdom Q: What do you do if you meet Jin Wicked on the road? A: Kill her. You are enlightened. ____Not the real rusty Damn you! I get paid for it too, but I have to actually make sure it works. And I thought I had the best job in the world. If you need anything, don't hesitate to email. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! I knew it wasn't the real Jin! I called it. Let the record reflect and all that. BTW, I'm fairly convinced this actually is Jin, due to secret admin knowlege. Take my word for it or don't, but I believe it. ____Not the real rusty Umm Oh yeah. Crap. [Disappears in a flash of Logic] ____Not the real rusty Yeah I agree. Maximum votes is a patch to a troublesome implementation of fvoting in the first place. It shouldn't even be necessary at all, so I'm fairly resistant to trying to "perfect" it. What we should be doing is rating stories, like we rate comments, and deciding based on that. Rating is convergent, and tends to settle to a decision. I'm not sure how exactly the math would work, but that's what people who are good at stats are for. ____Not the real rusty Random Pictures I was playing with my old camera last week, and took a bunch of pictures of random junk around the house, mostly to test various things. A few of them are decent enough to at least let other people see, but none of them are very good. Link and info below. These were all taken using only natural light. Unfortunately, they were taken with a Vivitar 28-210mm wide/zoom lens which is really too slow for indoor natural-light shooting, even with really good sunlight on most of the subjects. It's a great outdoor lens, because of the sheer range of stuff it does, but has less than half the total f-stops as the normal 50mm Canon lens that came with the camera. As a result, most of the pictures are underexposed, and the ones that aren't are blurry because I had to crank the shutter speed way too low. Lesson: use normal lens indoors, or arrange for artificial lighting. :-) Anyway, the pictures that only mostly suck start here. Oh yeah, they're really big too. Sorry. Macro The lens I was using has a "macro mode", which is basically super-telephoto for things that are nearby. Mine's a 1:4, which means that images on a print will be 1/4 their actual size. Focusing them is weird, because they have a very limited range so often it's a matter of moving the actual camera first, and then focusing for fine detail. But they're good for highly-detailed shots of small things, like leaves or bugs, or whatever. ____Not the real rusty Various photo stuff I bought a Nikon FM3a which... doesnt even need batteries to work. Cool. The AE-1 is similarly lump-of-metal-like. It's an early-80's era "point and shoot" basically. They weren't far along in point and shoot technology then. :-) Is the Nikon a new camera? I hate auto-everythings too. :-) "the first 35mm SLR camera to be controlled solely via a built-in Central Processing Unit" That should rad "which can be controlled solely via a built-in CPU." It has a shutter-priority auto-mode, but I don't use it. Though I do usually take it's advice, via the light meter, which I probably shouldn't. :-) The problem with zoom optics is that they are not very sharp or contrasty That's exactly the problem with this lens. It's not very either. I'm working through another roll of camera tests with the sandard lens, to see how that looks. The number one cause for blur is unsteady hands. A tripod is the best investment you can make after quality fixed focal length lenses. I have a tripod, but I didn't feel like dragging it out for this. Like I said, I was just playing. I recently got this camera back from my parents after years of not using it, and I wanted to see mostly if it was still working properly. The viewfinder mirror is making a funny noise intermittently when it pulls up for an exposure, but I think it just needs lubricating. The blurry shots were the result of shooting handheld with a 1/30th shutter speed. I don't think many people could pull that off steadily, and I have shaky hands anyway. I just wanted to see what would happen. I bet these two shots could have been improved by metering on the interior and keeping the windows out of the frame, or overexposing and simply cropping the windows in the lab or photoshop. Yup. I really wanted the windows in the frame though. If I'd metered on the interior and included them, they would have showed no detail at all -- just blazing squares of light. I actually like the way the living room picture came out. I was going for the light/dark contrast. Trust me, it looks a lot better on paper The other one would have come out the way I wanted it with a diffuse light from the left, to show up detail on the bowls. Then I could have probably gotten some balance between the light from the door and the darker shelf, without having it look too artificially-lit. As far as your camera is concerned, those shots were perfectly exposed. The meter in the AE-1 is pretty smart. It weights the center more then the edges. But a shot like that gives it problems, where I really want to emphasize the darker part of the frame, which is not getting light-meter priority. Never trust a light meter long enough to stop thinking about the shot. Excellent advice. :-) ____Not the real rusty You got me all wrong boss! Before you buy another fancy camera... That camera's almost twenty years old, and it originally came into the family when my Dad won it in a raffle or got it for meeting a sales goal from work or some such thing. I'm not spending money on this particular hobby just yet. :-) ...you should probably upgrade your scanner from the "Micronesian bestiality porn" model to one from the "Polaroids of my sister shaving" line. And we come to the other side of the issue, which is that I don't care about digitizing these things other than for the sake of posting little diaries like this. The scanner is an HP LaserJet 1220, which is first and foremost a printer. It did a lot better than I expected it to, and quite well enough for my purposes. Based on the weird contrast of all the pics, I'm thinking the gamma and white point on your monitor are a little on the beige-boxy side That's probably true. It's a good monitor (21" Sony Trinitron) but it's got some miles on it. And I mean that literally. A dedicated image-processing computer (which I hear Apple isn't famous for not making) + Photoshop + a half- to -3/4-assed scanner would be a good next moneypit for Our Beloved Guy Who Seems To Run The Place. Oh lord, the last thing I need is another moneypit. No, this is not a serious hobby. Not yet anyway. And if it ever becomes one, it won't be digital. My primary interest in photography is black and white, and printing them myself. Oddly enough, I actually have most of a working darkroom in this house (the owner is a photographer and left a lot of her stuff), but for various reasons it probably won't be converted into a fully working one while I'm here. I apologize for inflicting my crappy pictures on you all though. I considered pre-apologizing in the diary itself, but that seemed like it would be too much. :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh Tis an ill Grue that blows no good. But, thankfully, I can't spend money I don't have, and I definitely don't have money for photography. It's already all gone when I get done buying camping gear, and climbing gear, and snowboarding stuff, and I'm also told that as of this summer, I will begin sea-kayaking too. Blood from a stone. And the pictures aren't "crappy" you big daisy-pants... Well, whatever their technical merits, the fact remains that they're of the common internet genus "Crap that's lying around my house," which makes them inherently garbage. :-) ____Not the real rusty Winky D What makes them any better than judgemental bible thumpers? What's the difference between an orange? -- By the way, "Winky D" would be a fabulous name for a rapper. "Yo yo yo Winky D in the hizzouse! I got my boys MC Gluestick and DJ FroYo droppin the chronic on yo izass. Gluestick, cut it one time!" ;D ____Not the real rusty Boo yeah I only saw the last half of the third, but that was some damn fine hockey. The US team looked utterly beat when I tuned in, but they picked it back up, despite giving up a rather worrisome 2-on-1 while they were on a power play (how does that even happen?!). I loved Jeremy Roenick's save though, while sitting on his ass in front of the net. That was probably the game right there -- it seemed to turn the momentum back. While we're at it, what the hell was up with the faceoff delays? Refs not want to give the Russians anything else to complain about or what? Twice, that I saw, the puck should have been dropped long before the Russians finally stopped their wanking and got down to business. Still, considering that almost all of the players were NHLers on both sides, it was guaranteed to be good. Now bring on Canada! Their women may be butch, but watch what we do to their men... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Round and round it goes And it never ever stops. This too shall pass. ____Not the real rusty Troll of the Day Hopefully the story (lame Onion link) won't make it, but in case any of you missed it, Jin Wicked uncorked a frightfully good troll in the comments. Following the lead of "Programming is not Art," she seems to have nailed our panic button solidly. Good fun for all. I'm assuming, of course, that she doesn't really believe the premise of that comment. That would just make her an idiot. A fairly inspired idiot, but still... I like to believe th best about people. :-) But you did... I thought you did? Oh I see, the labeling may be a bit misleading. I should note in the FAQ that the "Humor" topic also serves as the "Lame" topic. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh, I don't know Her refusal to ever really quantify terms like what she thinks "culture" is made me think she was just having a bit of fun. But who knows. Regardless, there are a lot of people that do actually believe that the US doesn't have any culture. Astounding though that may seem... ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah That was the other thing. The whole "I've fought fascism in the streets" and all that blather about capitalism. She sells her "art" on her website. Hardly seems anti-capitalist to me. No, I still think she was taking the piss (as I'd say if I were a Brit with some culture in me). ____Not the real rusty Metafilter? Did you read MeFi today too? :-) ____Not the real rusty Dude! You made that movie? I saw the first trailers in San Francisco ages ago, like 6 or 7 months ago, at least, and my wife and I both agreed it looked really funny. Then we forgot all about it until just recently, because nothing more was heard. We'll probably see it, unless the Self-Made Critic says it sucks. Wanna write an article about the making of? :-) ____Not the real rusty Soap I now just lather up my WHOLE body with soap (from the neck down... I use fash wash on my face and shampoo on my hair...) Me too, and nearly every day I fume slightly about this whole three-soaps hoax. Like there's no way they could come up with a soap that can be used for all three. I mean, they combined shampoo and conditioner! Those things are much less alike than two different kinds of soap. Why is there no all-in-one soap/facewash/shampoo? ____Not the real rusty Soap update My wife informs me that those highly-cultured Europeans have, in fact, invented such an all-in-one product. I will be sure to post results if I bother to try any of them out. ____Not the real rusty I think Jim Shea is a vampire US Olympic gold medalist in the skeleton Jim Shea is almost certainly a vampire. Evidence, you say? I'll give you evidence! Third generation Olympian, my ass! You think it's a coincidence that his "grandfather" conveniently "died" just before the games? No sir or ma'am! Jim Shea is, in fact, his own grandfather. I don't mean that literally, I mean that he's competed in three different Olympics, each time pretending to be a new "generation" of the Shea family. Think that's a little far fetched? Take a look at those teeth! That's just not normal. This is the best picture I can find, but if you saw the medal ceremony last night, those canines are by-God enormous. How does he slide during the day? I have no good answer for that. Special sunblock? Who knows. Just look at those damn teeth! 'Nuff said. That's different You're British. England has traditionally been a great place for vampires to hide, because no dentition looks strange to the English. But trust me, no mortal American would ever have teeth like that. ____Not the real rusty The only way to be sure Actually, the only way to be sure is to stake him through the heart (thus immobilizing him for the rest). Then cut off the head, burn both head and body separately, and scatter the ashes "to the four winds" (i.e. any place where a drop of blood can't conceivably fall on the whole pile at the same time). But yeah, that look of Evil Triumph on the medal stand. That demented leer at the camera... some of us know what that means. ____Not the real rusty Nah Vampire legends vary enormously by country. Though oddly, many, many cultures all came up with a very similar legend apparently independently. Undead and drinks the blood of the living seem to be the core common elements. Typically you have to kill them with a stake, or more often by cutting off the head and burning the body. Or some combination of those three. I assume Blackula's "no pictures" came from the mirror thing, which just seems implausible to me. Um, unlike the rest of it, which is extra-plausible and realistic seeming. You know what I mean, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Nice Buffy noise I have GAIM set to play the "Grrr Arrrgh" clip when someone sends me a message. It never fails to amuse. ____Not the real rusty The regular one (NT) Grrr Arrrrgh. I said no text, dammit. ____Not the real rusty Smell bad? Hell, just make sure the locked room is somewhere in Georgia and no one will ever even notice. ____Not the real rusty Amen In Oklahoka, The Rapture will be televised. ____Not the real rusty Eck I didn't want to add it. But when we didn't have it, everyone kept demanding it. It's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" things that some of us are just going to have to put up with. Personally, I think it's dumb too. ____Not the real rusty Not worth it I'd rather let everyone else's beliefs trample mine, considering I care a lot less than I'd care about having to explain why there isn't one. Anyway, you and I know the truth about the so-called "Humour" topic, so we can just enjoy that privately. :-) ____Not the real rusty You forgot one "I'm so dull I can only try to make fun of the other frogs." Ah, it's just a phase. Get yourself married, you'll have less free time for stuff like this. :-) ____Not the real rusty Crap! Wrong account. -- Screwing with your head, since 1999. Naked girls in Playgirl They're there to remind the gay men what they gave up. I heard gay men are the largest audience for Playgirl. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it sure sounds amusing. :-) ____Not the real rusty Damn I didn't know you could catch homosexuality these days by hearing it mentioned. Damn. Is it me, or has it gotten more infectious? It used to be you could only come down with Gay if you went to a bathhouse or the Y. Well, I guess I'd better go "have a chat" with any religious people I can find, then. Mwahahaha. ____Not the real rusty MY GOD SOMEONE CALL IN THE JAWS OF LIFE! Sorry. I always wanted to say that. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. Plus, mental pictures to last... a lifetime. ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Despite the impression you may be getting from a very small number of hostile individuals below, K5 is a generally welcoming place. There's just been a lot of "Test Diary" stuff, and people like to get all bent out of shape about it. On behalf of the rest of us, welcome to K5. :-) And the rest of you: that's no way to greet someone new to the place. I'm embarrassed for us. ____Not the real rusty Well It's the same kind of thing. I do expect better of K5ers. But some people don't remember when they were new to the site, and did stupid things that others corrected them nicely for. It bothers me that this is how new users get greeted now, with nastiness and vitriol. I don't like to sound like a grade school teacher, but none of you are getting recess if this keeps up. ____Not the real rusty Yes, Greg, you do. You see, son, people all have feelings, just like you. Now you know that you wouldn't want someone else to hurt your feelings, like Marsha did. So you shouldn't do it to other people. I hope you've learned something today. Now what do you say we go out and throw the pigskin around a little! ____Not the real rusty I can't believe... ...that you casually used the word "meniscus." I'm going up to LL Bean today. Still not sure what I'm going to get, but I think a water filter will be one thing. Oh, and the people here from San Francisco kayak too. Maybe they'll want to go with us. ____Not the real rusty Simple Pleasures Just what I did this afternoon. A highly recommended way to spend a sunny winter day. What I did: Shot a roll of film with my old camera. Just stuff around the house, some macros, some wide angles, several copies of the same shots with different shutter speeds and apertures, to see how they come out. Most of the windows in this house are south-facing, and the light in the winter is gorgeous. Set up my new tent to see how it works. Looks pretty good. Small, but big enough for sleeping in, and I bet I'll appreciate the tiny packed size and weight the other 16 hours of the day. My only concern is that it relies on being tightly staked to stand up. In snow, I'm guessing it'll be a bit of a challenge. Anyone with relevant advice on staking tents securely in snow, please comment! Put on NPR to listen to "All Things Considered" Washed three quarters of the dishes. The rest are waiting till the first batch are dry because there's no more room on the drying racks. Swept and mopped the living room. With Rob's help, I finally got the new clothes washer installed this weekend, and all the crap from the laundry room cleared out of the living room, so I could give it a proper cleanng. Made iced tea, and put tomato sauce for calzones in the crock pot for tonight. Easy pizza sauce: 2 small cans tomato paste, about 4 cans water, lightly fry small diced onions, peppers and garlic in exra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, lots of oregano, basil, thyme, parsley, paprika, etc (I use a premix "Italian Spice" myself; it's a lot easier), pinch of brown sugar, dollop of red cooking wine, dump in crock pot and mix well. Leave alone for as long as possible but at least 3 or 4 hours. Yummy. Sat on the back porch and watched the sun set across the bay over Portland. I feel good. Patience? Get yourself an electric crock pot. Most useful single appliance I've ever owned. It makes tomato sauce something that takes about 15 minutes of actual work, and then just letting it do it's thing while you're at work, reading K5, or what have you. I'll try the cumin thing next time, though. Thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cooking wine My personal recipe only calls for a splash. Like, 1-2 Tbsp. And I don't think wine is fit for drinking purposes, so I don't want the whole rest of the bottle lying around forever. Cooking wine fits the bill because it adds a bit of flavor to the sauce, and can be kept around forever for use in tiny quantities. And the salt isn't a problem because I'd be adding salt anyway. To summarize: you do whatever you like, I happen to be fine with cooking wine for sauces. The calzones were fantastic, by the way. If only I had an oven that could maintain the proper temperature, they'd be better than anything you can buy, no matter where you are. :-) ____Not the real rusty One teaspoon per cup... ...says the label of the one I used, about salt. ____Not the real rusty Friend List 'nuff said. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yep It had a problem yesterday, and we had to disable it. We're planning to rework it very soon, so it should be back at some point. ____Not the real rusty Unclear If the article was supposed to be about the disturbing trend of pro-eatring-disorder websites, that was totally unclear to me as well. I thought your gist was that the crusade to shut them down was censorship. You didn't say anything about the eating disorders at all in the article. ____Not the real rusty GNU/India That's pretty funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh my aching everything Got back tonight from another weekend of punishing fun in New Hampshire. Snowboarded Waterville Friday, then hiked up to Cone Pond in the dark, which was cool. Lollygagged around Woodstock this morning, then snowshoed up the Falling Waters Trail to Cloudland Falls, near Cannon Mtn and the infamous "Old Man of the Mountain." Made tea on a frozen river and talked about localroger's power plant article. Rob says Chuck's gonna take us leading the 3-pitch Cannon face this summer. My arms hurt just thinking about it. :-) Hurstdog: I'll email tomorrow. Nap I had a nice long nap today. I feel much better. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sunday I got a good nap in on Sunday. It was 64 when I started, and 64 when I woke up. Conditions were perfect for napping. :-) ____Not the real rusty DDoSing ourselves What's basically happening is that now that we have the Scoop issues worked out (currently three live Scoop servers) the problems have shifted down another layer. The database keeps getting logjammed -- I look at mysqladmin processlist, and it's a solid wall of "Locked". My current theory is that because myISAM locks tables on UPDATE, it's basically getting deadlocked whenever we have a lot of writes at nearly the same time. Hurstdog is working out how to switch is to InnoDB, which shouldn't have these problems. I also temporarily made UPDATES lower priority than SELECTS, so when you post a comment or vote on a story or what have you, it may be slow. But it should prevent the utter deadlock we've been having. If anyone has any experience migrating to InnoDB, please let us know! ____Not the real rusty Um I don't think any of that even comes close to "modstorm" anyway. Sheesh, back in my day, we had real modstorms! Uphill in the blizzard of ones, both ways! You couldn't see your .sig in front of your face! You kids today, and your "el nino" think four or five ones is a modstorm. Pshaw. ____Not the real rusty New Yorker Cartoons One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is from, well, musta been the early 40's. It's a picture of a family, all sitting on the living room couch, watching TV. That's it, no caption, nothing. Seeing it today, it doesn't make any sense. Nothing strange is happening. The family is watching TV. The reason I like it is that when it was published, it was funny. The idea that everyone would sit in the living room, hands idle, and stare at a little box on the wall. Outlandish! Think about that, kapusta. (By the way, meat is murder. Yummy, yummy murder. With mustard.) ____Not the real rusty Dualie peripatetic headcheese. ____Not the real rusty And a nifty tuple lambada doughnut triple. Note that adding "triple" makes it so. ____Not the real rusty Oh crap It's got me. Dammit, I swore I wouldn't start doing this. Schwarzkopf decrepitude. Must... stop... ____Not the real rusty Not sure I know who Jim is, and he does work for Voxel, but I'm not particularly sure what all that stuff is about. I'll ask around. I doubt it's anything to be worried about, though. Voxel is interested in working up some commercial support for Scoop, in certain applications, so it may be related to that. ____Not the real rusty Whoah That was spooky. I figured out what was going on earlier, I think. It's a Scoop bug related to story posting. Promicro had nothing to do with it. :-) Otherwise, dead on. I think I'll just link my next diary to this. ____Not the real rusty D'oh! My bad. I missed a server. We gotta get rsync set up. No, cp, not nsync. Bye bye bye! ____Not the real rusty Actually It's much nicer to do what the author of that story did, which is write a story with well-placed and useful graphics, and then link to them. cp decided to put them inline, since they were so nice to have for the story, and I then mirrored them on our servers to spare the original site's bandwidth. However, had we not done that, the sotry would still have stood up on it's own merits, and not had lots of annoying IMG html in it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Milk and Cheese! Milk and Cheese rule. ____Not the real rusty He say you Brade Runner Connecticut Avenue glittered ice black... ...and tiny headlight stars twinkled deep below the pavement. The rain stopped hours ago but the drip drip on the trees was all night long. A black Lexus left the Uptown and headed downtown through a steam vent cloud whooooosh the steam enclosed and caressed it for a split-second slow motion eternity before an instantaneous labor contraction and the Lexus was reborn, washed in the Blood of the City and blessed but still headed downtown toward 4th and Market where the street congregation worshiped Mama Fire and Papa Spoon with sacraments of Blood. Deep below the cold ice pavement the snake rustled and slipped off to another part of the story. In Maine it was dark too, and every twig coated with a perfect eighth of an inch of crystal. The trees struggling to free themselves of their burden made a sound like bacon frying. Yeah What can I say, I was in an odd mood. :-) Parts of that have been percolating in my brain since at least 1999. For some reason, it just came out at that particular moment. ____Not the real rusty Italian It looks like Italian. A good friend of mine was in Romania for two years with the Peace Corps. I've never heard her speak the language though. I should ask sometime. Does it sound like Italian too? ____Not the real rusty Moi aussi J'avais plus petite de Francais, apres autant des annees ("many years"?), mais je peut comprende, apres un facon. (I think the last bit was horrible Franglais). S'il vous plait, ne traduis pas dsormais (I looked that one up here). C'est amusant de lire en Francais. Tu peut rire a mon Francais horrible maintenant. :-) PS: I have ethical objections to all the damn accent marks in French, so don't expect to see them here. ____Not the real rusty Accents No, just that when and if I write French comments, I won't be using them. I'm a one-man movement to stomp them out of the language. I don't expect to succeed. :-) ____Not the real rusty I'm sorry My bad. Based on the time of this post, it was probably my fault. I had to fiddle with something. If you need a focus for your rage, it was all my fault. :-) ____Not the real rusty With the padding Even with the padding, the average lifespan (not playing career but lifespan) of an NFL lineman is, what, 45 years? I don't like football much either, but rugby is a pansy sport by comparison. They could all beat my ass, of course. ____Not the real rusty I've got one! But Arkady's a friend of mine, so I won't suggest it. ;-) Glad to hear you're ok. I also agree that you're nuts. Driving a car out to your house is scary enough (not the winding hill road, I man the highway split/merges off the bridge in Oakland!), I can't imagine doing it on a bike. By the way, Arkady's brother is still an archaeologist, and a damn good one by reputation. ____Not the real rusty An excellent accident No, what you had was an okay accident. An excellent accident is when you lose control and go through the open door of Bob's Marshmallow, Cotton Ball, and Beanbag Chair Emporium, on the day the Swedish bikini team happens to be throwing an all-you-can eat pizza and beer party. ____Not the real rusty Do it! I'd love to see diaries in other languages. Do it! Do it! Screw anyone who says you shouldn't. Submit articles in other languages too. I'm not sure I'll be able to vote for them, but damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead. ____Not the real rusty Nothing much lately I've been diaryless for some time. Phill's probably getting worried. You got the innernut over there in Scotland Phill? It's cold again in Maine. A thin layer of ice is covering everything. It breaks off in large sheets and shatters like a champaigne glass. I am supposedly able to process CC transactions now. I haven't actually tried one live yet. I probably ought to. TextAds should start for real next week. We're finishing up some code for charging and billing. I also need to get a PO box and open a bank account locally so you can mail checks. The cluster kicks ass. We've been in the 130-150K page per day range every day this week. Compared to about 90K, where the old machine topped out. Hell of a lot of lost traffic. I wish we were still getting paid by the page. :-/ Interesting times. I'm going to go eat soup and read Lord of the Rings now, instead of upgrading Scoop like I should be doing. It's late, and I'm tired. I want some soup. Ha Just after posting, I ran across this on the Christian Science Monitor: Minority. Scroll all the way down, to the "More Info" links. Look, they linked to K5! Now look at the actual link URL itself. Pretty funny. ____Not the real rusty notslashdot Actually, notslashdot.org has been acting as a pass-through lately to K5. Like, it used to redirect, but since we changed servers, it's been just working like the site. So Google has started indexing it. I think the CSM probably just did a google search and found us, but for some odd reason they found that URL. I changed the proxies so they now rewrite URLs for notslashdot.org to kuro5hin.org. But to be friendly, they will take you where you wanted to go. ____Not the real rusty CSI Cardservice Int'l. ____Not the real rusty Multiple form keys should work now I'm just testing it... ____Not the real rusty Do multiple form keys work? They should! See other test comment... ____Not the real rusty Happy Quarter Century! And many more quarter centuries in the future. At least two. At least! ____Not the real rusty I think you might be right We've gone around the circle on this issue many many times, and all the suggestions so far strike me as too damn complicated. Plus, I'm with you on the "editing bad" thing. This may actually be the best suggestion. Just a simple "Remove this story" button for the author. I'll see if anyone wants to code it. ____Not the real rusty Sort of It's a shame to lose discussion, but we kind of have to choose. Comments never become unavailable, even on dropped stories. So people having a discussion can continue it. Granted, it's hard for anyone else to find it after a story is dropped. But that's how it is now, anyway. It hasn't been a huge problem so far. If a discussion remains relevant, I think the commenters will probably move it to the story's new incarnation. It's kind of awkward, but on the other hand, the alternatives are all very complicated. I think simplicity is key here -- one of the reasons this ongoing issue has never been fixed is because all the possibilities have been so complex and annoying to implement and use. ____Not the real rusty Oh no Can I ask you not to? Basically, we've had this discussion repeaedly, and it doesn't really help having it in public. Ultimately, I'm the one you need to talk to about this, and I've already seen it. If you must, you must. But I don't expect any useful ideas from it. And I'll be damned if I'm going to get drawn into that discussion yet again. :-) ____Not the real rusty Form key fix coming soon Panner fixed the form key problem (which wasn't really so much a bug as a design definciency) last week. The current Scoop lets you have multiple "active" formkeys. So this won't happen anymore. It'll be in here as soon as I update K5 to the newest Scoop, which, if all goes well, is slated for tonight. ____Not the real rusty Huh? I've never seen this new tab thing. It's not Scoop doing it. You running Proxomitron? It sounds like one of that thing's incomprehensible errors. ____Not the real rusty Could be this... You know what it might conceivably be? The post form is slightly odd in that it uses a trick to scroll to the comment you're previewing. When you preview, it posts to "/#here" and the anchor tag <A NAME="here"> is inserted just above the start of your comment. Thus the preview page will auto-scroll down to that anchor, lining up your preview properly. Opera may be somehow misreading that as a call to spawn a new tab. I can't imagine why, but it is a slightly unusual use of the FORM ACTION attribute. I don't think it's illegal though. At least, no other browser seems to have a problem with it. I think it's an opera bug. If they take bug reports, you might want to report it. ____Not the real rusty Lot of your dislikes are about to go away Specifically numbers 2, 3 (sort of), and 6. We're working on number 4 as well. But the other 3 will be better as soon as I upgrade K5, which should happen tonight. The new search doesn't have boolean logic, but it works a hell of a lot better than the existing search. As for the others, I'm afraid they're an unavoidable consequence of openness. :-) ____Not the real rusty There Formkeys should be gloriously fixed now. You whiny bastard. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oh sure That's what they want you to believe! ____Not the real rusty "Sleek Sexy Leathermans" That's going to ultimately become the catch phrase for all that is wrong with banner ads, isn't it? I want to see a textad for a fetish site that reads: "Sleek Sexy Leather Men". Now that would be funny. ____Not the real rusty I'd approve it :-) I hope that some people do amusing things like that with textads. It's part of the fun. :-) ____Not the real rusty No I don't have any of the ads saved. I suppose if you reloaded one of the lesser-trafficked OSDN sites a few times, you'd probably get them, if they're still running. ____Not the real rusty .sig Is that an actual quote from #kuro5hin? What the hell was the context for that? ____Not the real rusty Sets off the metal detector? Yipes! What kind of barbell is it? And how freaking big is it! Mine's surgical stainless and has never set off a metal detector of any kind. I mean, they have to calibrate those things so that enough metal to make, say, a zipper won't set it off. Your average tongue stud shouldn't have more metal in it than that. Granted I haven't flown since the new-new rules have gone into effect. But I have flown since 9/11. ____Not the real rusty Year Two Thousand, Good vs. Evil We just made up a game in IRC. Well, not made it up so much as evolved it from Conan O'Brian's brilliant series of "In the year two thousand" skits. Basically, "The Year Two Thousand" is the benchmark referent for "the future" (even now, despite the fact that it's technically the past). So Conan and gang put on spooky lights and make predictions of what will happen "In The Year Two Thousand". The K5 version of that appears below. So we noticed that you can't reconcile all the standard futures within one year two thousand. At the very least, you need two: A Good year two thousand, and an Evil year two thousand. And what started happening was we'd make the same prediction for either the Good or Evil year two thousand, and someone else would make the opposite. For example: In the Good Year Two Thousand, all rooms will be painted white, and have rounded corners. In the Evil Year Two Thousand, all rooms will have metallic walls, lots of dark corners, and water dripping somewhere. Or... In the Good Year Two Thousand, all elevators will be Tylenol-shaped, and on the outsides of buildings. In the Evil Year Two Thousand, all elevators will be creaky and have rusted folding iron gates. You get the idea. So play. It could be amusng. :-) In the Evil Year Two Thousand We will all eat a lot of noodles and buy things with Yen. ____Not the real rusty In the Good Year Two Thousand We will all eat a lot of fish, and buy things with "credits." ____Not the real rusty In the Good Year Two Thousand Cars will fly, and run on garbage. ____Not the real rusty In the Evil Year Two Thousand Cars will still have wheels, but we'll kill each other for good ball bearings. (Am I the only one who saw the movie "Roller Blade"?) ____Not the real rusty No, Roller Blade I think it was this one. Among the worst movies ever made. And I've seen Nothing but Trouble and U-Turn, so I know what I'm talking about here. ____Not the real rusty Curses I meant this. ____Not the real rusty In the Evil Year Two Thousand Computers will be grown in vats, and will secretly plot the downfall of humanity. They will kick our asses, and no plucky flesh-and-blood hero will come along to save us. ____Not the real rusty Foul! No dragging the real Year Two Thousand into this! We're talking about the future of the past, here, man! ____Not the real rusty In the Evil Year Two Thousand The rich and powerful will forcibly remove several of your organs whenever they feel like it, because they're a tasty treat. ____Not the real rusty Oops. I misread your title. I interpreted that to be the good year two thousand. You know, caring for others and stuff? Oh well. ____Not the real rusty Van Dyke I believe the beard name you were looking for is "Van Dyke". Van Dykes will be hugely fashionable in the Evil Year Two Thousand. ____Not the real rusty In the Good Year Two Thousand Israel and Palestine will be visited by aliens, who cause them to realize their folly and unite in peace with all of humanity. ____Not the real rusty In the Evil Year Two Thousand Israel and Palestine will be visited by aliens, who will kill most of themn and enslave the rest. All humanity will bond together to overthrow the oppressive yoke of the alien captors, and we will finally prevail, and regain control of Earth. Then Israel and Palestine will go back to fighting with each other. ____Not the real rusty In the Good Year Two Thousand All fonts will be variations of Arial. ____Not the real rusty In the Evil Year Two Thousand All fonts will look like LED alarm-clock numbers. ____Not the real rusty And They will all have Van Dykes. ____Not the real rusty Evil Year Two Thousand Meals in suppository form! ____Not the real rusty Huh! What a very unique thing to say. ;-) ____Not the real rusty You're... uhhh... Congratulations, you're neither trusted nor untrusted! No... Congratulations, you're... ordinary! No, not that either. You're... Standard! Regular! Medium. Normal. Plain. No, no, no. So, you see why I never came up with a word for what the vast majority of readers are. :-) ____Not the real rusty Actually, I don't know I used to get a summary mailed to me with the day's user counts and trusted/untrusted lists, to satisfy my own curiosity. I haven't for a while due to all the server issues. But last time I did, there weren't ever more than 400 or so trusted users. And very rarely more then 5 unrusted users at any one time. ____Not the real rusty Fair Weather Pats/Skins fans I think we have the same football preferences, DJ. Grew up near Boston, so when the Pats are doing well, the pull is in my blood, and cannot be denied. I don't even like football, for God's sake. Then, living in DC, you pick up the Skins bug too. So now there are two teams I root for when they're doing well. None of it has made me like football though. Go Bruins! ____Not the real rusty The question My big question with this is the same one I had about the blogger API. What is it for? As someone who would be expected to support this kind of thing, I want to know why it would be a good thing to have. ____Not the real rusty Hmm I can see how for some users all that could be useful. But there are two things that bother me about it. It does nothing for our community at all, since in effect it's encouraging people to stay away, and isolate themselves from the rest of the activity on the site. And second, it does nothing for us, in terms of compensation for the time and energy we put into running the site, not to mention our bandwidth sponsors and the people who give us hardware. If we implemented this, it would likely be a fee-only subscription feature, to make up for the fact that it wouldn't really do anything good for K5 itself. On those terms, though, I wouldn't have any problem with it. I'm still not convinced, though, that people actually have a use for it. I'm all for trying something out and seeing if anyone finds it useful, but I can't really tell if the people designing these APIs have seriously thought about what they're for. I can't find any discussion along those lines. I'm not trying to be negative, I just think it's worth thinking about, especially since it could well affect design priorities for such an API. ____Not the real rusty Not hurt, no I don't think it would hurt in any way. Not at all. But we seem to mostly agree that it would be a convenience for individual users, rather than an improvement to the general community. For things like Blogger or Manila, that's probably not much of an issue, since there isn't a strong community motivation in the first place. But expanding it to something like K5 does bring the question in. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. You might want to bring up the question of "why" with others who are actively working on this too. ____Not the real rusty Please Please cut it out. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty Probably For now anyway. Thanks. :-) ____Not the real rusty Gosford Park The horror, the horror. For virtually the first time ever, I walked out of a movie before it ended. Robert Altman is a no-talent ass clown who should never be allowed anywhere near a movie camera, ever. The Brunchings review nailed it dead-on. This movie has nothing going for it. The characters are cardboard cliches, the dialogue is flat-out boring. "Witty!" say the critics. I think they need new dictionaries, because mine does not define "witty" as "mind numbingly dull and irrelevant." It's not funny, so it's not a comedy. No one cares about the so-called mystery, which we had solved before it even happened, so it's not a mystery or thriller. Which leaves us with what it is, which is a social commentary on class differences in 1930s England. Yes, Virginia, this is easily the least interesting topic you could ever choose to make a scathing social commentary about. Around 9PM, we realized that it wasn't going to end in time for us to make the 9:15 boat. So, faced with a choice between leaving immediately, or watching the last fifteen minutes or so, and enduring a 30 minute wait for the next boat, we bailed. I didn't even walk out of U-Turn, for God's sake. I just couldn't take any more of this, and that tiny little nudge was all we needed to get us up out of our seats. Neither I nor my wife cared a damn bit who actually poisoned the guy. Still don't, for that matter. Assuming Altman really wanted to make a movie exploring the important social issues he remembers from the heady 30's, when he was but a young man of 50 or so (Robert Altman is now approximately 117 years old), he could have just gone into the P.G. Wodehouse memorial library and picked any of the great man's stories at random, and filmed that. Not only would it have done a much better job illuminating class issues, it would also have had interesting characters, witty dialogue, and humorous situations, all of which would have gone a long way toward convincing us that a film about class issues in 1930s England was perhaps a more interesting way to spend 2 hours than, say, watching carpet grow. Since his creative zenith, The Player, Altman has proven again and again that he is simply done making films that are in any way worth watching. If there was any justice in Hollywood, he would have been put out to pasture by now, secure in the knowlege that in his 234 years in the movie biz, he had done, on average, better than most. We all know, however, that there is no justice in Hollywood, so expect to see this waste of celluloid up for an Oscar at some point. And never, ever see an Altman movie again. I did that once But a bunch of other people came along and took over the whole damn place. I ended up marginalized over in one little corner. A mistake I won't soon make again. ____Not the real rusty Genre subversion Yeah, I got what he was trying to do, because we were bashed over the head with it for two hours. Class conflict (WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!). I understood what it was supposed to be, it was just so ham-handed as to be unwatchable. And "zenith" wasn't really the right word. What I meant was that up to and including The Player, Altman's films were not painful to watch. Since then, he hasn't made a minute's worth of decent film. The Player marks the end of Altman's useful career. Not exactly that it's, as "zenith" implies, the best work he's done. ____Not the real rusty Them what shouts loudest There aren't that many. They just yell the loudest. I think the impression you have is the result of a couple things: 1) A small number of really hardcore activist types who like hanging out here. I disagree with almost everything they say, but I like them anyway. They have enthusiasm and zest. Sites that get nothing but post-ironic hipsters get soul-crushingly dull after a while. 2) Proportionally more Europeans and Canadians than you find most other places on the AmeriWeb. Remember that if you fall anywhere within the "mainstream" US political spectrum, you're to the right of everyone in Europe, including the conservatives. More Europeans tend to give a background of (to an American eye) "leftist" thought. Consider carefully, and I bet you can't come up with as many as ten real leftist extremists who post regularly. They just tend to be frequent and vociferous debaters, $diety love 'em. I think getting older has actually pushed me left a little. But I never fit well within the spectrum anyway. I used to be pretty hardcore libertarian, but being exposed to a lot of libertarian... well, let's be generous and call it "thought"... has changed my opinion a lot. I think I'm no longer comfortable with the core libertarian assumption that if you're screwed, it's somehow your own fault. ____Not the real rusty Ain't that the truth If you're screwed, it's not necessarily your own fault, but a welfare state is not necessarily the best way to help out those who got screwed through no fault of their own. Hear hear. I know what you mean about the general left bias in things like what gets selected here. Yeah, if you were to somehow boil everyone's politics down to a number, and plot the average on a spectrum, I'd guess we fall distinctly left of center. But I don't think we're, on the whole, radically so. And we do have several notably intelligent conservative and "other" posters. I don't usually feel drowned in leftist ideology. Ok, once in a while, sure. But not usually. :-) By the way, I share your experience of being the conservative here and the radical amongst offline friends. Weird, isn't it? I'm pretty sure I don't change my actual views much. Context is everything. ____Not the real rusty Crop of 0s The recent Slashdot thing has caused the Next Wave of Slashdot migrants. Like all previous Waves, they have brought a lot of energy, and not much knowledge of local customs with them. Be patient, they'll learn, just like everyone else did. ____Not the real rusty Exactly That's precisely what I mean. :-) ____Not the real rusty Second that What this diary is describing is burnout. I've had it, we've all had it. It's when you spend so much time here that you have no life context to place it in. Like anything else, too much of it and it totally loses its flavor. BehTong: Go take a break. Turn it off altogether for, say, a month. Maybe two months. Maybe more. Fill your suddenly plentiful free time with other stuff. Come back whenever you feel like it. We'll keep the account warm for ya. :-) It'll do you a world of good. ____Not the real rusty Odds and Ends Some of them very odd indeed. Spiders, Salon, Jon Katz, Alf Garnett, SXSW, and the secret link between Osama bin Laden and Arthur Andersen. Oh, my. I had a dream this morning that I was covered in fat black spiders, that popped and squirted guts when you hit them. First it was just one. I squashed it. Then I noticed another. And another. No matter how many I killed, there were always more. They were in my hair, on my face, everywhere. I woke up panting and sweating. As part of this complete breakfast, dreams that provide 100% of your Recommended Daily Allowance of squeamish terror are a tasty and healthy way to start the day. Cause I depend on meat. This nearly made me pee my pants laughing. (Tip o' the glittery tube-top to NTK) Operation Enduring Enron is in the house! "We can't find Osama because Arthur Andersen fucking shredded him!" (Tip o' the lime-green afro to Doc) Pot? Kettle? Oh, who cares. Jon Katz passes beyond irony and post-irony into a region whose existence scientists have hitherto only speculated about: Meta-hyper-post-irony. "But his book also reminds us that this age of Cybertheorizing began to die with the demise of the original Wired. This is bad news for over-heated tech writers and academics feasting on cyber-culture courses." I hate myself for even mentioning this, but it's kind of amusing anyway. First, read this dissection of a Salon press release by Robert Loch at DotCom Scoop. It's a pretty entertaining rant. What I don't get though, is why anyone cares at all what Salon does, let alone cares to the extent that Loch seems to. Could it be simply that Salon has become the prime irrelevant vitriol dumping-ground of the online world? Our Elian Gonzalez? Probably. By the way, I just finished an interview with the aforementioned Loch which should come out on DCS early next week is now up. It includes me going on at absurd length about such things as K5, Slashdot, OSDN, online and offline media, weblogs, and the website business, and includes the lines "Real innovation is a violent process" and "'caveat lector' is not something you order in an expensive restaurant". Yes, I am a Media Whore. Thanks for asking. SXSWBaby. I'm starting to look forward to SXSW. It could be very fun. And they shuffled the panels around so that my panel (P2PJ) and Matt's panel (DFC2) aren't at the same time. Thank god! Now we will be free to act as plants in each others audiences, throwing out softball questions designed to make us look like wise and powerful cyber-gods, Yoda-meets-Superman style. If all goes according to plan, Driph and I will be giving out T-shirts, too. Not to be missed. Alf Garnett You really need sound for that to make any sense at all. There's just no way around it. The Bob Abooey style was just convenient for bringing together a bunch of unrelated things that happened to be floating around my head. ____Not the real rusty Oops. Wrong account! (NT) ____Not the real rusty Ka5hback That's really funny. I'll have to come up with some excuse for using that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Off It was in Portland. And he really did say it. Yes, it was supposed to be funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow This makes less sense than any comment I've seen here recently. Are you sure you meant to reply to this diary? ____Not the real rusty Er Ok, I read it over a few dozen more times, and I think I get what you said. So let me amend that to "That comment, while ultimately meaningful to a degree, was perhaps the most difficult such comment to parse that I've encountered in a long time." I still don't really know what you're saying, but I think with some Googling I could find out. By the way, the same goes for the above, and every other comment of yours, now that I've started compulsively noticing them. You have a unique style. It's opaque, yes, but starting to grow on me anyway. :-) ____Not the real rusty $800,000 K5 could live comfortably on $800,000 for about 8 years. That's a good point. Of course, I doubt we'd take it, because it would mean selling off control, and I'm not aware of too many potential investors who wouldn't just screw it up. You're obviously not the only person who cares, I know. If it was just you, it wouldn't be an interesting question. There's a web-media-wide obsession with the ups and downs of Salon, despite the fact that no one really reads it anymore. When you put it that way, though, countering their PR seems like a worthy goal. Keep sticking the knife in. Even Rasputin died eventually. :-) ____Not the real rusty Readership Well, according to the press release, around 35,000 people were willing to pay to see their locked-up stuff. So, 35,000 people are willing to spend $2.50 a month to read Salon in it's entirety. The rest of the readers don't care. I would therefore consider their readership to be 35,000. Or, roughly the same as K5, to put it into perspective. We website guys can make the numbers look any way we want them to. It doesn't matter what they say. 3.8 million people are not reading Salon on a regular basis. If they were, I would be sure to have met one or two of them. And I can't think of anyone. And though Salon still gets mentioned all the time, you'll notice the context has changed. It used to be "[Name Brand Hipster] has a great new article in Salon about [cool new-media topic]!" Now, it's always "Salon: Still Dying. Film at 11." They've become the story, because there's nothing interesting left to read on the site. ____Not the real rusty Sorry Salon Link It's probably because they know that you're not going to be able to read the whole story without paying. Much like people apologize for WSJ links, or, more often, just don't like to the WSJ. Or how they apologize for NYT links, because you have to go through that silly "make an account" bullshit. That's what I should have said in your "New York Times" question. Actually I have a policy that I won't talk to them unless they either pay me, or remove all that registration crap from their website. I didn't want to get into that though. On the other hand, maybe it's just that the phrase "sorry Salon" seems so apt. ____Not the real rusty Everybody DOES love snow All the real people that is. [Eyes ti_dave suspiciously] It's warm in downeast Maine today. Springlike, almost. In the 50's. It's a little creepy. ____Not the real rusty You cheated my people We demand restitution of our native websites, and recognition as the sovereign nation of K5. ____Not the real rusty All your kwsNI are belong to... Why the zero? Emperor Rusty is most entertaining. ____Not the real rusty February Any plans to stop by Portland in Feb? See some of the peaceful island life? Give me a reason to leave the house? ____Not the real rusty Oh no Well, technically it could, but it wouldn't be even remotely legal to drive that thing on the mainland. Well, it's not legal to drive it here either, but no one's likely to notice, or care. No, Portland is only a 15 minute ferry ride away. We also have a good car that we keep there. You know, the one that got broken into? ____Not the real rusty The mainland car We keep it there primarily because of the observable fact that it would become a 1987 Honda Accord if we kept it here. But secondary reasons are: It costs at least $20.00 for a car per round trip on the ferry. In the summer it's $60.00. My wife needs it to get to work every day, so economically, it's just not feasable. We don't need it on the island. The whole island's only about 5 square miles. Maybe a little less. I can walk around the entire thing in 120 minutes. And for any time we need to transport more stuff than we can carry on our backs, there's always the trusty Accord. ____Not the real rusty Ok! ____Not the real rusty Comment My comments pointing out that it was a hoax. Luckily enough people realized it in time. Still, the message was loud and clear. People need to vote smarter. ____Not the real rusty Potty Mouth ;-) ____Not the real rusty IRC msg me next time you see me on IRC and I'll grab it. ____Not the real rusty Probably not The load would not be so negligible. Think about it -- for each comment, we also would have to fetch all the rating records. Say a story averages 100 comments, and comments average 3 ratings. That's another 300 rows we have to pull out of the DB, per article page. And it would shoot down a lot of the benefits of caching partly-processed pages, because ratings change quicker than anything else. We'd have to re-cache a lot more often. Sure, it's possible, but I don't think it would be worth it. That's why they're a click away to begin with. Also, I think they would clutter up the page terribly. ____Not the real rusty Once More, We Charge into Obscurity With last year's Webby fiasco, I was afraid that K5 might be going A-list. Not so, I'm pleased to note. I'm glad that K5 has managed to retain a low profile, even while being fairly well known. Are we among the best Group or Community weblogs? No! How about Computers and Technology? Nope. Politics? Uh uh. Well Programmed? Nope. We're not even the "best-kept secret." We're so low-profile, we're not even low-profile. This is good. I don't want K5 to get lumped in with "weblogs." When the weblog meme finally spends itself, it'll be easier to disassociate ourselves with it. Say it with me people: it's collaborative media. I tell you If you've been blogging since Jan 1, 2000, you've been at it for a lifetime. It may have been easy to misread this diary as a thinly-veiled whine about being overlooked, but I am dead serious. The whole Webby thing caused much, much more trouble than it was worth, so I now read web award nomination pages with great trepidation. But we have been blessedly excluded from these recent ones, and I can only hope that trend will continue. I really, really want to be ignored. Well, not totally ignored, obviously. It wouldn't be much fun to be the only person here. But we're doing great on our own, I think. I hope we can remain too uncool for the blog crowd. In the meantime, don't tell anyone about K5. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not, not that! Please don't make me relive the Webbys. Oh please. Anything but that. The short version is that awards are bad, because no one is happy about them. The people who aren't nominated are pissed that they were overlooked, and the people who are nominated are miserable because they get blamed for being nominated by the ones who weren't. And in the case of the Webbys, the whole thing is bullshit to begin with. The nominations are mostly by clique, and the judging is done by people who have no qualifications to judge websites at all. It's mainly a cash-cow and fame vehice for everyone's favorite prom queen. And the awards ceremony made me embarrassed to work in this field. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah That is a bug. Fixed in the newest scoop, in fact, cause it kept showing up here. I'll be updating either tonight or tomorrow. By the way, I'm working on the new servers right now. :-) Dual 1Ghz, 3Gb RAM each. There are currently three of them. I'm doing my damndest to get them all online tonight. ____Not the real rusty If elected, I will not serve. I'm not sure if asking the users would work, but it's definitely an idea. Post an article alerting users that we've been nominated, and asking whether we accept. I like it. I think I'll do that if it ever comes up again. My plan was to just unilaterally request to be removed, but I like yours better. OTOH, if we collectively decide not to be removed, I'm still not going to any awards ceremonies. That's something I don't feel uncomfortable about deciding in the least. As far as I know, most awards things won't let you opt out anyway. It would be worth a try though. ____Not the real rusty Not bad There was a problem with the virtual terminal lease for CC processing -- they couldn't find a credit history for me, probably because they were looking under "Rusty" which is not my legal name. It should be cleared up soon, and we'll be able to take Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx (Visa/MC preferred! Disc and AmEx screw you with the rates). Hopefully it'll all work out ok. I think there's going to be a few day ad-free lag, though. I know, it sucks, but we'll all just have to pull together and get through it. ;-) The good news is that Voxel swears the new boxes will be ready tonight. If so, they should be up and running tomorrow, which ought to increase our no-lag capacity to something like 500K pages/day. About four times what I think the real traffic will be. So if you come tomorrow and find it disturbingly fast, you'll know why. I'll post a site news when it's all done. ____Not the real rusty Well, no Just, y'know, be careful who you tell. :-) Actually, I think that word of mouth, while not the fastest way, is by far the best way to build a good community. People tend to filter without even realizing it -- like you might tell Janet, but not Bob about the site, because you don't think Bob would find it interesting, or "get it." Over time, it adds up. You can see the impact when we get a big mention on slashdot, there's suddenly a flood of people, and a lot of them are "Bobs". Not to imply that Slashdotters are dumb or anything; there's always some who fit right in. The point is just that its a sudden influx of unfiltered visitors, and the impact always shows. This is sounding way more snobby and elitist than I mean it, so I'll just stop now. Hopefully some vestige of the idea comes across. ____Not the real rusty So what you're trying to say is... ...it's a community? :-) ____Not the real rusty Waste is our gift Why do we humans squander our endless blessings and watch television instead? It's our gift, and our curse. Even the least wasteful person wastes most of their time and most of their energy. That's the curse. The gift is that unlike every other living creature on this whole godforsaken planet, we don't waste all of our time and all of our energy. That's the gift. I feel like Mr. Miyagi. Go wax my car. ____Not the real rusty Read all the comments, and I'm STILL laughing (NT) ____Not the real rusty It was a Jon Katz article See Slashdot if you'd like to read "qpt's article." It was cut and paste Jon Katz circa 2000, and I deleted it in accordance with our often repeated plagiarism policy. ____Not the real rusty FAQ It's not in the FAQ because it isn't frequently asked. Copying other people's articles without their permission is illegal and unethical all at the same time. I shouldn't have to even bother to note that it's not allowed. ____Not the real rusty Beer Actually, your money will go toward beer for me. After it goes for rent, food, etc. But a rusty who can afford beer is a happy rusty who will keep K5 running, and work until 6AM configuring new servers to fix the speed problem. Do not underestimate the power of beer. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Dammit Car broken into, all CDs stolen. Something like 250 of them. Dammit. And I only have maybe 1/4 of them ripped and encoded. Bloody hell. I hope insurance covers this. [It doesn't, I now find out. We're just screwed.] Below, my impressions of LotR. Spoilers will be included. So we finally saw Lord of the Rings. The one sentence review is, it was good, but should have been about 40 minutes shorter. It was good right up until Gandalf dies. They get out of the mines, and then nothing interesting happens for the next 45 minutes or so, and it finally ends. What would I have done, you ask? First, cut the whole Boromir subplot. It was dull as hell and didn't go anywhere. I mean, ok, we knew the ring has an attraction for people and turns them bad and whatnot. We saw it in Bilbo. We didn't need to go through that whole thing again. And in the end, he dies anyway. And in between, he had easily 20 minutes of material that could have been condensed into maybe 30 seconds. Second, the "traveling down the river" scenes were filler. Cut em. There's another 10 minutes, at least. Then they should have gone over the rest of the movie, and found all the bits where people repeat things we already know in flowery Middle-Earth blabber, and cut all of those. Easily another 10 minutes. And then you'd have a good movie. The problem with this kind of thing is that if I get bored, I'm going to start noticing how asinine they all sound every time they open their mouths. I mean "Cast it into the fiery pit from whence it came!" indeed. I couldn't help laughing when he said that. And the very fact that I was noticing means it failed, on some level, to draw me all the way in, and get me to suspend my disbelief. Which was, I think, the direct result of Jackson being self-indulgent with the editing (or lack thereof). Which finally leads us to Rusty's Law of Movie Adaptations of Books: If you're going to make a movie of a book, don't be afraid to make it a good movie. Movies and books are different, and if it's a great book, it will not necessarily, or even probably, be a great movie if you just try to be as faithful as you can to the book. Stuff that works in books will not work in movies. Get rid of it. I was ultimately left feeling like this had the same problems as Harry Potter had. It was better acted, and had much better material to begin with, but I was disappointed. Yup That's what Geico tells us. We don't have renter's insurance. We're just screwed. ____Not the real rusty Cavat No, I haven't read the books yet. I'll let you know if I change my mind later. My critique is based on this movie, as a movie standing alone. My opinion of the whole trilogy may end up being different. ____Not the real rusty More like 180 I am corrected by my wife, it was more like 180 CDs. They were in a big black zip-up binder, probably buried under some stuff in the back of the Jeep. Not really screaming "steal me" -- I doubt you could even see them before you broke in. There is no trunk though, so that wasn't really an option. They were in there beacuse when we moved, we wanted to bring enough stuff to listen to, so we just got a huge binder and put all the CDs in it. I never took them out, because it was convenient to have them all together like that. I really only listened to them in the car. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah Actually, what I really wanted was one of those South African flamethrower jobs. One hoodlum, well done and extra-crispy, coming up. Yeah, it was the Jeep. ____Not the real rusty Welcome! We try to be homey. :-) ____Not the real rusty I think I suspect JCB is posting via some non-standard interface, and that's what the test was for. Although there has been no shortage of "Hey, is this thing on?" diaries in the past. ____Not the real rusty You could ...just hire any of a number of frequent posters. In fact, I think Vladinator is just recently looking for a job... ____Not the real rusty ONA Panel Transcript You may recall a while back I posted some stuff about the Online News Association conference in SF. I promised a transcript at the time, if I ever got one, and lo and behold, I got one. So here you go, slightly cleaned up (mainly punctuation, without which the English language is sometimes truly unreadable) and HTMLified. It may be interesting to compare what I actually said in my opening speech to what I meant to say. I haven't done it yet, I probably will right after posting this. Keep in mind that I was supposedly reading striaght off my laptop. Wonder how I did. Oh, also, I swear there are one or two spots where there's just a bunch of stuff missing. I know at the very least my side comment to shacker didn't get transcribed. I haven't seen the tape this came off, so I don't know what happened. Warning: Fairly long. JD: What I think they have in common is the propensity for interactivity; for personal passion based advocacy journalism, for alternative points of view that are filtered out by the mainstream media. The networks are sort of looking on CNN as this upstart bad-boy he was saying that the media look on online news sites today as bastard step children, who may or may not share the same kind of values as traditional journalism. I think it is kind of ironic if the online news professionals in this room would look at these new kinds of forms in the same way. I think you'll find that there is a rich treasure trove of experts and points of view that the traditional news sites can take advantage of. There is a page of resources that we put together. It's a long URL so I think the easiest way to find it, if you want to find it,is to call up my website jdlasca.com-- click on the top link and you'll come to a pretty elaborate page of pointers to articles that have been written about weblogs and the intersection of weblogs and journalism. And weblog sampler you'll see some of the members of our panel who've got their sites up here and media news weblogs and weblog news directories, collaborative news sites and you can also find it on the UCB new media resources collection page. It's a top link there as well so you can see this all very incestuous. The panel we're going to do is different from a lot of the other panels today. We're going to start with a short segments of exchanges between the panelists and then we're going to open it up to questions pretty soon because the entire idea behind what were doing is all about interactivity so we do want the audience to be (inaudible) Our first panelist is Rita Henley Jensen who is the shy and retiring editor in chief of Womens eNews.com and she has a little 90 second promo clip that we're going to play right now to introduce to what this site is all about. (PROMO) RHJ: Hi I'm Rita Henly Jensen, the possessor of the CD that didn't work. I'm editor in chief of Women's eNews. At the large panel discussion everyone was saying, "where are the new voices, where are the new voices?" and for me our site is sort of the perfect demonstration of what the internet has created in that our mission-we are a non profit-- is only to create news, presenting new voices washingtonpost.com and msnbc is a new idea not looking at if you go to our website and take a look? I just thought it would be helpful since we were all talking about what happened after 911 and while everyone asking me when are we doing Afghanistan stories and where's the anthrax now on 911. On that morning we had an excerpt of the commissioner of human rights Mayor Robinson and her comments about the confluence of gender bias and racism at the special report issued as part of the international conference on racism that just ended in South Africa prior to the attacks in New York. I have not seen any discussion, not even on our own website, about possible connections, about the destruction of that conference on racism and the date of the attacks. Maybe it had to do with the NY primary. I don't know that's where we were on 911. The next day we had to abandon our offices so we just issued a statement ?and? but the following day I wrote an essay that talked about immediately being in my neighborhood in NYC feeling grateful to be alive obviously, but on an ordinary trip to the post office and looking at the peoples faces in my neighborhood and particularly a woman realizing that everyone who lived in my neighborhood had lived with terrorism. And for the people in my neighborhood it was not a new experience. In fact, it was an experience that they were quite accustomed to. And I had always looked into their faces and wondered, how did you live through Colombia, how did you live through Kosovo. And now for the first time I'm having a little taste of it. I haven't seen that perspective until this morning, and the woman from La Opinion mentioned that in her community. We also had an essay by Carol B a professor of Journalism at Boston University talking about? because the US had done something about racism in WWII? as we all recall the armed services were segregated by race and gender and we did intern the Japanese and perhaps because the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement and the open discussion in even the reparations for the Japanese community we might be stronger and more prepared to fight a war against terrorism. I hadn't seen that before. The next day we quoted international women's leaders who had worked with people in Kosovo, in Ireland, in Rwanda. If you remember the genocide in Rwanda, the women who are leading Rwanda the people who are left are rebuilding the society in Rwanda and bringing the Tutsi and the Hutu together. And the next day we did a story quoting women's leaders who were almost physically pushed of the stage by mayor Giuliani, or whoever wanted the spotlight, including Manhattan borough president who is an African American woman, were (inaudible) by Pat Robertson. I'm sure you all know he said the attack was caused by abortionists, homosexuals, feminism and the ACLU. That was our outrage the next day. We had woman leaders talking about their religious beliefs Again, as a new voice, people who were not being quoted, not Billy Graham. Next story quotes post trauma stress syndrome, that's something that women are familiar with more than men. The next day harassment of Muslim women, including as movement among some women of wearing the scarf in solidarity with Muslim women. Much as the Danes did in WWII, wearing the yellow star in solidarity with the Jews. these were the kind of stories we did, that you don't see in the mainstream, and we distribute to our readers, including the mainstream press hoping that they would pick them up JD: Our next panelist is Rusty Foster who is the founder of Kuro5hin.org. Rusty used to live in SF -- he moved to a little island off the coast of Maine so he came out all the way from Maine just for the conference RF: I don't have a voice over promo or a soundtrack you're just going to have to deal with me. Has anyone ever seen Kuro5hin? Excellent. Cool. It's unique for those you that haven't seen it. We're a news and opinion site that's written and edited democratically by all the readers, anyone can submit a story anyone can vote on submissions and essentially the stories with the most votes are posted on the site. I don't pick the stories. everybody picks the stories. I like to call it collaborative media. In a way all media is collaborative, we're a different kind of collaborative. First, in the sense that a lot of people collaboratively write, and help edit the site. But second it's collaborative in the sense that the story itself is not the final product, it's just the starting point, because ultimately the goal of every story is to start discussion, to start a lot of other people saying what they think about it. A story isn't considered complete when its posted. That's just the beginning of the story and then people post comments and discuss the story, And that's eventually, after a while, you have sort of a complete view of an issue because many people are talking about it. To paraphrase Doc, media are conversations. I think one of the effects of the strategy of having a collaboratively edited site and written and edited by anyone is that authorship and authority are called into question. The site itself isn't a brand -- its not, you know, CNN branding its name on something. It's a way for people to talk to each other. If you read a story you don't necessarily know if it's written by an expert or written by somebody who does research or just somebody who is interested in the topic. You have to kind of decide for yourself and read the discussion. And you hear a lot of different voices. The way journalism right now works in the mainstream media is an industrial process: There is a reporter who collects raw material. And think about the metaphors that we use when we talk about journalism. You collect raw material from sources and then you package it into a product and you deliver it to eyeballs. It's a very neat very simple very 19th century way of thinking about doing things and in a lot of ways it works very well and the success of news media is evidence of that. But I think there is something missing from that model and in my experience from Kuro5hin, it's something that people need. They need uncertainty, they need messiness, argument and debate. And that's not being provided by the mainstream media. The world isn't as clear cut as it may seem if you read a newspaper. The newsmedia tend to distill issues into simple stories, and I don't think that one wise man or woman, the reporter who's gathered all the facts and presents you "The Truth", can possibly encompass all the ways of looking at things. And JD instructed us to lob some grenades into the audience today and here's mine: I got some questions that I want you to think about and hopefully you can tell me if I'm wrong in a few minutes. Why is that when I look at the mainstream news sources all I mainly see are newspapers with pixels? Why is it, with the whole two way channel of the internet at your disposal, that still, all the online news industry is shipping industrially produced blocks of news? Why is that when I look at CNN, washingtonpost.com, msnbc, all I see are your voices, they are not bad voices but they are a very very small number out of the total? Why are you afraid of letting everybody else in? And I very much look forward to your responses and to your questions. JD: The next panelist is Meg Hourihan she is the megnut.com. She is a veteran blogger she is also the cofounder of Pyra, which made the Blogger web tool so maybe you want to tell us about that. MH: Hi my name is Meg Hourihan. I'm from SF and like JD said I am the maintainer, writer the sole voice behind my personal weblog megnut.com. I'm also the cofounder of this start up, Pyra, where we created this product called Blogger. How many people here have heard of Blogger? Oh good-- most people. So I was involved with Blogger in the construction of the tool until January of this year, and then because of financial everybody except my cofounder left the company. Now there is one person who is running the site still offering the service. What Blogger does is it is a tool to facilitate publication of weblogs. And based on how many people have raised their hands for Blogger, I'm assuming everybody knows what a weblog is. Raise your hand if you've heard of a weblog. Ok, for those that haven't, weblogs with frequent updates, small bursts or chunks of text with new information posted at the top. One thing that I think really makes weblogs interesting and unique is that it's the first format I've seen that's native to the web. So unlike a lot of the traditional things when the web first came around, we saw a lot of the print paradigm. What Rusty was commenting on carried over to the web --so essays, whole pages, all these metaphors we use in print manifesting themselves on line. What weblog does is it works perfectly on the web and in no other place because you can have frequent updates multiple times of day. Nothing is constrained by the length, you don't have to fit something in 2500 words to get in a certain location on a page. You can just keep adding new content, turning out new content. Making it as long as it needs to be and I think that this has a very liberating effect on the content that's produced. That's my overview of weblogs I'm going to let Dan go next and talk about why I think weblogs and journalism and how they go together JD: The next panelist is Dan Gillmor who is the technology columnist for the SJ mercury news and one of the veteran webloggers with a weblog that he posts on the SiliconValley.com website called eJournal. DG: Thanks. Veteran means more than about a week old. What you've heard before I'll just do what they said and then try and fill in a couple of things that seem apropos here. One is that in the transition to whatever is coming in journalism, and I'm not sure what it is, I agree that the so-called industrial form is evolving and in my case it's evolving because of a really simple concept -- that I think applies to every traditional journalist if they just think about their beat -- is that my readers know more than I do. And collectively they know much more than I do. And I count on that. I think we all in journalism should start thinking about what we do n that context, and if we do that than we have to use the medium in a way that brings in their input. Our sources know more than we because they are our resources so we call them up and they call us, but we are into something that we can actually use this medium for our mutual benefit. It takes advantage of the fact that they know more than we do and that's why occasionally I put up on my weblog a note saying I'm working on the following topic-- here's what I think I know, and ask readers to tell me if I'm full of it or I'm right, and what I haven't thought of and they tell me and then I do a better column as a result. I also completely agree with the Rusty that the conversation begins with the publication in many ways. And doesn't end, and that the industrial has been a luxury-- we told you what the news was you either bought it or you didn't. We might print your letter to the editor and that would be the end of it. Well that's not true anymore so we can again use this medium to instruct each other and to help refine what we think we know into something that is closer to the truth or at least gets more of the context involved. Traditional journalism, regular old journalists, everybody doing this should actually be using this media for reporting and not just for creating their own stuff. I think it should be both, but I frequently go to slashdot. How many people know slashdot? Ok it's basically a site for people to talk about a variety of things, but technology is high on the list. If it's something I'm interested in I'll read through the comments, and I'll always come up with things I haven't thought about, angles I haven't thought about on the topic. Doesn't mean I always believe it but it's something I can check out. And the final point I want to make is that the need for readers to bring a much higher level of skepticism and a willingness for them to check things out for themselves becomes much more important as this medium involves because it's just not possible to know what is reliable until you've built up some reasonable level of trust in people. That you look at the -- we're going to have these hierarchies of trust. People are going to have determine themselves. It's all healthy, it shouldn't be a scary thing to know that your readers know more than you do. That should be pretty much a liberating concept. And I hope we move on from that JD: One last back and forth between the panelists and then we'll open it up to the audience. Yesterday somebody at one of the sessions asked about whether or not we ought to be linking together sites that we don't know anything about how do you know whether these rinky dink little weblogs, whether there's a phantom behind them or whether there's a real person? Aren't there questions of reliability and credibility as they apply to some of these more non traditional forms of journalism? Does anybody want to take that or anything else that has come up so far. RHJ: Our viewpoint is that we only link to... there has to be an editorial reason why we link, that we mention the person behind that site in the news story and we know them to be real and expert and that when solicit links from us we turn them down unless there is an editorial reason. Rusty: I don't worry about it. Really I think people should know that you are online and you should think for yourself. Basically I explicitly don't really put... the name of the site is not a brand. I don't claim to be guaranteeing anything that we say. People are saying stuff and you should discuss it with them and draw your own conclusions so if people link to things... JD: Why don't we open it up to the audience? There's a microphone right there for anybody who has questions. Why don't we start with this gentleman here. And why don't you identify yourself first. Scot Hacker, webmaster for UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and writer for Byte.com. I'm a big fan of community publishing and blogs. I have my own blog and I run three separate community collaborative published domains. But at the same time I have to say that I agree with Walt Mossberg, that we need to be very careful in distinguishing the limits of journalism and what gets called journalism and what it means to have vetting and validation, as you were saying, and also to understand that journalism is an art form and a science and that is something that's worthy of two or four years of study and many years in the field and some people have dedicated their careers to becoming journalists and then there is community publishing and we just need to be careful and make sure our readers are aware that what we are doing is not posing as journalism. DG: As the rep of the traditional media I'm going to disagree with you. I don't... I can't tell you what I don't know: where the boundaries of journalism end and I've seen fabulous what you might call amateur journalism that I would rely on greatly. The gifted amateur in this world has got new power because of this technology and I'm all for it. I think that we have to be careful, we have to use our common sense and if we are making a decision that is a significant decision in our lives, we have to do more work to find out if we can rely on what we've just seen or heard. But there have been people online who have discovered problems and answers to things that needed to be discovered long before the traditional media figured it out so I'm really worried about trying to define journalism in some way that ultimately could lead to having to carry a card that says I'm a journalist and who is going to decide that I don't want the government to decide that so I want to be really careful on that question. (Inaudible from audience.). There is a certain guarantee that the public who reads a particular book or magazine knows the things been through a team of professional editors and researchers, etc. We don't have any of that kind of credibility here. Rusty: In the early American colonies, we had... all the newspapers were essentially weblogs -- paper weblogs. They were one guy working in his basement and printing out new editions whenever he had something to say. There is a kind of full circle evolution going on here. RHJ: I think that our problem and it has been historically been one guy. One guy who owned the newspaper or one guy who was the editor, and it didn't seem that many weblogs was a great way to get women's voices out there. Historically its been the guys who decide what journalism is and what news is and whatever we do to deconstruct that... I haven't heard any other discussions about racism -- one little reference this morning about a distinct audience in LA and one little tiny reference about the digital divide -- there hasn't been a discussion really about breaking the barriers and getting beyond that one guy defining the news. And I guess I would define Katherine Graham as one guy although she was certainly extraordinary she basically (inaudible) Audience member: That's what upsets a lot of people about the media, That they can identify and they can't get their own viewpoints across very often and if you go... I mean I'm surprised at the last session where there was a discussion of September 11 attacks and there was no mention of weblogs there was no mention... if you don't go to Slate, or Salon, or Yahoo, you get the idea that there is nothing else on the internet. Well there is. And I think weblogs have done an excellent job of in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in terms of conveying human emotion and really gripping human stories of survivors and even first person accounts of the attack and they do it sometimes with a real crude honesty that don't always past muster of the major media's good taste filter. So, that I think is something that is really attractive as well. Audience member: I 'd like to illustrate ways I agree and ways I disagree from my own site and ask for your comment about it. The site is called... I'm Jonathon Mandel. The site is called GothamGazette.com, its an independent non profit site about NYC. We felt the need after 911 to open up the site to... we have a staff and we mostly hire professional journalists. We felt the need to open it up to our readers after 911 and so we could talk about 911. One of our readers who is Muslim had (inaudible) extremely useful thing that he did that was available. Another one of our readers said, "urgent you must not use your cell phones keep your cell phones off because if you turn them on the rescue workers won't be able to communicate with one another" you know totally just nutcase. So why must you call this journalism? Why do you have to ask issues of defining journalism? Why can't you just be like the newspaper, the puzzle, the letters to the editor, essays? Why is there a battle here? Even, I think... journalism, the issue of credibility, is really important. Is this accurate, is this fair, is it balanced, and particularly now, when this is there maybe danger lurking in your mailbox-- and on the other hand-- the greater danger may be the panic from the lack of... from the inaccurate information. It seems to me an odd business year and I'm sorry I don't have a really concrete question but I was wondering if you could address this issue of do you think your sites are journalism? Why do you think it's important to redefine journalism why don't you call them something else? JD: A lot of it is really a red herring as far as whether it's journalism or not. It's really more of a question of whether it's accurate, whether it's credible, whether there is something of value to the users. Rusty you've talked a little about this. Or Meg, do you want to jump in? Rusty: I kind of don't care whether it's journalism or not. Ultimately it's if you decide it is, cool -- and if you decide it isn't, fine. Whatever you want to call it I don't really care. I agree with JD. It's something you could spend days and months and years arguing about but ultimately don't think it gets us anywhere. You can look at articles and say, "that's great journalism." You can look at articles and say, "that's a load of crap." Does it matter what the process that produced it is? I don't really think so. RHJ: I think I would disagree. First of all, I know some people have the viewpoint that we are not journalists because we're funded by an advocacy non-profit organization, and that is a way of discrediting what it is were covering. And some people say "you are not a journalist you are an advocate," and I would place myself in my life and career as a journalist, and I'm committed to those values, and being a journalist for me is really a reflection of deeply held beliefs about the first amendment, about the importance of ascertaining what is fact for all of us and that is what our efforts are about and my professional life has been about that struggle and I have a lot of respect for that. Meg: The one reason why I think its perhaps important to start looking for a better label for this, or not just calling it the jumble or the puzzle or this other thing, its important for traditional mainstream to recognize the value of sites like weblogs and what they can offer. And I think if we start talking about this as journalism or a type of journalism there is perhaps a willingness to accept these new forms of online communication and collaborative discussion and incorporate that into the mainstream media. If weblogs aren't journalism then the New York Times isn't going to want to start to put weblogs on their site? Perhaps and so if were defining what is valuable about this and how it will contribute to traditional sites than I think that's part of the process and why we are trying to re-label and reevaluate it I'm Kevin McCain. I'm from PC World magazine. The question that I have has to do with how you could apply these principles to very mainstream journalistic organizations like PC World. We publish a monthly magazine, we publish a web site that does maybe 15 million page views a month. We have thought a lot about how to harness this. I mean I completely agree, Dan, with your point about the expertise of the audience. We thought a lot about how to harness that expertise. The only ways were doing it now is were letting people rate products so we gather ratings of products from people who visit the site. And we are letting people rate vendors who sell those products. But we'd really like to get into things like what the visitors help each other fix their computer problems and so forth. But our mission has to be helping people solve their problems. In other words, we can't really stray far from that that-- pretty much our raison d'etre. Is their a way that the kinds of principles and sites that you are talking about now, which obviously work terrifically well in alternative venues could be applied in some form to a problem like this and put to real use for people? (Panelist?) Yes I think every publication or broadcast program could have a weblog affiliated with it. That in your case I mean why not have a weblog that's a daily consumer... one of the best things about PC World is the consumer watch stuff where you're working on behalf of regular people. My God what, a great weblog that could be-- where people come back time and time again you have readers helping each other with similar or slightly different problems. So the interactivity is key and that's just one little example I can... your people who are evaluating new products, well they should post stuff every day instead of waiting for the publication on the little items-- have a weblog of personal technology that doesn't fit into parts of your book. You can do a million different things-- think of the medium in... the best use the medium, the way the medium works best and not worry about how it fits with the print publication because on some level it doesn't. Rusty: I think a question I would ask you is, why do you care if your readers are going to support your mission or not? Why should they? Well you know your readers don't have a mission your readers are looking for information. If you were to just let them talk and not worry what they were talking about, you know, the mission would grow out of that and maybe you'd find out that your readers have a different mission than you think they do or that you want them to, and is that a bad thing? INAUDIBLE FROM MCCAIN. Rusty: I think you might be surprised -- that people come there because they are interested in the technology, consumer technology and learning about it. And if you were to not really put any boundaries on what they talk about that's probably what they'd talk about. RHJ: On our site, as you know there are people in the United Staes of America that feel very strongly about the issue of abortion and those people spend a lot of time on our site posting hateful-- so far not extremely threatening-- but hateful email. And I am always asked, "do you want to delete this?" And it's always a hard question, it's upsetting to me but so far I have always decided to let the hateful mail stay but people hopefully appreciate what many women in the United States are now experiencing, and that is now a war that has not been on the front page. Audience Member: Scott Rosenberg. My question is this. It seems to me today that there is a very healthy and effective kind of symbiotic relationship between the community sites the weblogs and the professional and more established media sources. It's typically on a Slashdot -- I'm not familiar with Kuro5hin, but I think it's similar. You have a discussion that's set off by a link to a story on another site and that story is a story that in most cases by somebody who is actually paid a salary to do what we traditionally label journalism-- has worked on for a few days-- and then post it and then broken that story or made that news that people on Slashdot are commenting on or that somebody with a personal weblog is linking to and posting his or her comments to and that's all great. I think that's sort of what excites most professionals when they see weblogs and see this sort back and forth that couldn't happen before the internet. My question back to the professional... back to the weblog world and the community site what do you do as we've seen over the past year or two certainly the world of independent journalism on the web is shrinking. There are fewer sites to link to, very good sites that have folded that were breaking some of these stories. I know that Plastic which is a community site that was started by the people who ran Feed and Suck, is a community site that is focused on broad subjects not just technology and I can tell they have fewer stories, they are posting fewer stories to link to at this point, so to me I am not hung up on labels of journalism professional, amateur, whatever I do care about people having the opportunity to be paid to work for days or weeks on end to do really great research and writing and I don't see that coming out of the community sites or the weblogs. Rusty: MLP -- mindless link propagation. The vast majority of what we post is original writing actually. We do way more... less of the MLP than Plastic or Slashdot does. DG: Scott you are absolutely right. And that's a question, like who is going to do the actual journalism that people point to has been an issue from the beginning of Slashdot. But if you notice they are actually posting more original things than they used to. The "Ask Slashdot" stuff turns up very interesting work, so does their interview, they do a lot of interviews now that I read very faithfully. But I would also point out --remember the Kasey Nicole hoax? The woman who was supposedly dying of leukemia that was unraveled, webloggers who actually went out and did what I would call journalism they went out to county courthouses to find out if this person existed and only after the weblog community -- the real weblog community, not the gifted amateur, because they care about it webloggers they figured it out and then, and only then, did the national media pick up the story. I don't now how much of that is going to happen but I suspect more, and I hope it's more symbiotic than parasitic. And over time, but we have to find a balance and we have to find a way to support the traditional kinds of journalism where people spend a lot of money doing investigative journalism. It costs a lot of money. I sent my money to Salon, and I hope that other people are doing the same thing with the sites that they care about. We gotta pay for it sometime. Audience Member: George from Stanford. I agree a hundred percent that definitions of journalism need to be enlarged and widened in ways that will quite probably unsettle the traditional journalistic establishment and news organizations. Unless comes through the idea that we can sort of cop power from defining it all together and say, "well, you know, its laissez faire." I'm not sure why I instinctively feel this way, but struggle at expressing myself. I think it does boil down to the fact that perhaps those of who try to say, "lets not bother defining it everything is fine and let everyone else decide." That confidence it seems to me is premised on certain assumptions. It's premised on fairly comfortable assumptions that we do operate in a society that has freedom of speech and a lot of freedoms that we enjoy are in fact based on certain understandings about the value of journalism and lets not forget that the Supreme Court for example distinguished between political speech and commercial speech and I don't think you would feel as comfortable about we (INAUDIBLE) didn't bother to define it if you were under threat of litigation or other sorts of repression and it was put to you that they were going to apply commercial speech standards to you. At that point I am willing to bet you would struggle to point out that what you are doing is not commercial speech it's journalism -- it's what our founding fathers fought for the First Amendment for, etc. And you would struggle for a definition. So I am uncomfortable with the cop out but I would still try and push you to define, If you were pushed how would you try and define what you do as whatever as a public service. You may not even use the word journalism but how would you define it in a way that you can tell your fellow man, tell society what you are doing counts, that it is worthy of full First Amendment protections etc? Why should anyone care about what you do if you are going to be so laissez-faire about it? I guess my question is directed mainly at Rusty because Dan did try and stake out a position for what his traditional? Rusty: Touche. That's an excellent question. If I had to define it I think I would call it conversation. I would be more comfortable calling it conversations than journalism. And I think the two overlap, you know there is kind of an edge where the beginning of a conversation is kind of a news story. I wouldn't call all of what we post journalism, you read the site it's pretty clear all of it isn't, there is an awful lot of opinion editorializing -- writing which is something that you'll find in news media but its not really journalism, at least the way I think of it. Some of it definitely is journalism but if I had to define that the whole thing is I'd call it conversation, and I think conversation is covered under the First Amendment RHJ: You may want to check on that. Rusty: Yeah I might. (Inaudible from audience) JD: Is there a parallel between what you are doing and say talk radio and people tune in because they like to hear the knock down and drag out they want to hear the multiplicity of voices but the level of conversation is much higher on Kuro5hin because why? Because you care about quality... Rusty: Because they care about the quality? JD: Sorry you're right, because the community that you have created has a culture that cares about the quality. Rusty: In my notes... in my original notes for what I was going to say, I actually used that metaphor I think the closest that we are all familiar with is talk radio. Try to imagine if you had talk radio and 20,000 people could all call in at once and discuss with some sort of perfect version of Roberts Rules of Order so they were never yelling over each other. That's kind of mostly what its like. I don't know if that's journalism or not. Dan: Talk radio when it is clearly the case as opposed to ranting about some topic of the day. After an earthquake here a few years ago, one of the best sources of finding out what was going on in communities was listening to the talk radio stations. They were getting phone calls from people reporting what was going on, and to me there is an element there of the weblog. I can't let this go on without mentioning one other source. After September 11th for about a week and a half and two weeks... I was in Africa at the time, so my sources were the BBC, the web, and email I was getting, I'm on a mailing list that Dave Farber sends out -- a guy in Philadelphia -- that he was finding references and links to all kinds of coverage and information about what was going on. It was not the typical, usual suspects and I got more perspective more nuance from Dave Farber's mailing list in those two weeks than any other source after following through and some of was just emails sent to him that he re-posted by experts in all sorts of fields. I can't put a value on that but it was enormous JD: Just one more question I think Audience member: I'm Jerry Asher, I'm a local independent consultant. My question is actually for Scott and the gentleman from PC World and if there is someone from Slate here? All you guys are suffering a little bit financially. You all have bulletin board systems which I find basically not interesting, low grade conversations. What I find attractive about weblogs is the conversations, often with the original author with a journalist or a software developer. I'm just wondering why you haven't let your journalists participate in your bulletin board discussion because that is primarily why I find your bulletin board discussions mindless? (INAUDIBLE) (Kevin McCain?) The more particular answer... everybody who writes for us, on the staff or closely associated with the publication to divert their time from doing the very expensive traditional journalism that is our forte and pays the bills to have them do this kind of thing, first I think only a subset of them would be willing to do it or do it very well, and I think those guys would basically self-select, but I think from the standpoint of the organization it would be a tough decision to make because you would lose their work on the traditional journalism. Salon: As far as Salon goes, there is no rule that says people can't do it, and in fact they do frequently. I mean there is a little bit of history here. Salon has two community sites: The Well, which existed long before Salon did, which has an extremely rich tradition. I think I'm sorry you disagree really great conversation, very smart people with a very high level of information and some of the kind of community journalism that you guys are talking about was actually pioneered there on the Well back during the days of the Time "Cyber-porn" article which was entirely debunked by journalists on the Well, so that is its own thing. It is what it is and we don't mess with it. Its great. We also have an area called table talk, which started off with Salon which we originally conceived as a place where Salon readers would go talk about our articles and we did send the writers in there. And you know what? We discovered what Rusty is talking about which is that they, the people in there were delighted that we set up the place. They were attracted by Salon and the kinds of subjects we covered, and they were our readers, but they wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about. And we gradually learned over time that we would get out of the way. So it's... what you learn in this kind of area is that you are not in control entirely, in the way that publishers think that they should be in control, and you have to learn to be somewhat more, almost passive in letting the users readers, the community do what they want to do, and so we still have writers who go in and will talk but for the most part that isn't what people want to do and so we're not going to force it on them you wind up with this awkward situation where you create a thread for the writer to talk about and nobody posts in it. And why waste your time with that. Writers get unhappy with it. JD: That's a wrap. We're a different kind of incoherent It's actually pretty funny to compare my prepared text to what I actually said. It's the "stuff" link above -- I'm too lazy to link it again. I think what I actually said made more sense verbally, but it looks a lot less coherent written out like this. That's the way all speech is, though, isn't it? Particularly funny are "It's unique for those you that haven't seen it." and "I don't pick the stories. everybody picks the stories. I like to call it collaborative media. In a way all media is collaborative, we're a different kind of collaborative." Jesus. I sound like Dubya in the second one. ____Not the real rusty Ha The funny thing is, that bit was the hardest part to write. On the plane out to CA, I was writing my opening speech, and I swear I wrote and erased the first three sentences like twelve times. Most of them were much worse than that. I mean, it's not like I can go out there and say "I run this site, but it kind of sucks," even if it was the truth. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Incidentally I was raised by wolves. Well, you might not call them wolves. That doesn't mean I wasn't raised by wolves. Stop hurting my feelings. ____Not the real rusty What I wanted I wanted to have a booth at LWE in New York, and do a live in-person version of K5. It was gonna be fun. Unfortunately, LWE are snooty turds and wouldn't let us have a non-profit booth even though I didn't expect any bloody profit to come from their little "trade show" and just wanted to provide something to relieve the suicide-inducing monotony. But no. If I ever get enough initiative (or if someone else does!) to put together a local in-person event on the east coast, we're gonna do it though. It'll be great. There will be lots of shouting. ____Not the real rusty Sooooon The latest word is that the four new boxes just arrived at the colo in New Jersey. This weekend at best, next week at worst, they'll be running. I'll post a site news update around when they start coming online. There won't be any interruption; as they come up, things will just magically get faster. I know it has sucked, but the time of enhanced latency is nearly over. ____Not the real rusty Also coming soon I'm trying to get the CC stuff in place, and next week I'm going to go get a PO box for mailing payments. ____Not the real rusty Am I allowed Am I allowed to reveal why these office shenanigans are especially amusing for K5ers in particular? :-) ____Not the real rusty Forgot I forgot all about this comment. I looked back in dilinger's diary just afer posting it and realized he'd already mentioned that he's part of the sinister Voxel kieretsu. Anyway, the above conversation is taking place at the K5 colo hosts. Looks to me like they're the right people for the job. PS: New servers ready yet? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Island Driving, A Primer Driving here on the island is not like driving in other parts of the country, like Bangor or Lewiston. It's much more... well, the word "exciting" leaps to mind, in the space just recently vacated by "terrifying" and "inexplicably hazardous." For the instruction and edification of newcomers and other folks from away, I thought it would be useful to put together a short primer on the ins and outs of island driving. 1. The Island Car If you plan to do some island driving, the first thing you'll need is an island car. An island car is, on average, a 1987 Honda Accord with about 228,000 miles on it. You can find one most anywhere you look, probably there's one in your front yard right now. If not, check the back yard, or the side, or perhaps the neighbor's yard. It won't be far away. If you absolutely can't find an island car anywhere, you can easily make one yourself. Just bring any kind of car over on the car ferry, and leave it alone for a couple of months. Scientists don't quite know why, but any car left unobserved for any length of time here will eventually become, on average, a 1987 Honda Accord with about 228,000 miles on it. Once you've found your island car, you'll need to find the keys. The first place you should look is in the ignition. If they're not there, I don't know where you should look next. It's never come up. Got your keys? Good. We do have a gas station down front at Plante's, but you probably don't need to worry about gas. You're not going very far. 2. Preparation If it's August 24th, you can skip this next bit, because it's summer. Otherwise, you'll need to de-ice. Get out your scraper, and give the windshield a good, halfhearted swipe with it. That'll get 'er started. The defroster should be able to take care of the rest. You know the first bit of road like the back of your hand anyway, so you probably won't need to see out much till you get down to the Catholic church, at least. Now, if you're planning to drive somewhere, you're probably going to the dump. Well, it used to be the dump, anyway. Back then, it was a place you could go anytime, day or night, and pick up essential items for your home or garden or what have you. Kind of like a Wal-Mart. Some people miss those days, but I think what we have now is better. Now they call it the "transfer station," which means they take all our garbage and transfer it to someplace it belongs, like New Jersey. So load up all your blue bags in the trunk. Now you're all set. 3. Getting Started Now that you're in your car, you should take a moment to familiarize yourself with the controls. You'll have the normal clutch, brake, and gas pedals. You'll have the usual 6 gears on the shifter. It's easy to remember the gears if you think of them like the vowels in the alphabet -- you know, "a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y." Likewise, for gears you've got neutral, first, first and a half, first and three quarters, second, and sometimes reverse. There's rumors about a gear above second, sometimes called "the third gear," but I don't believe them. Second will easily take you up to 30 miles an hour, and who would need to go faster than that? You're new at this, and you won't be able to see out the windshield too good to start with, so you'd best wait till late at night for your first try at island driving, when there's no one else out on the roads. About 7:30 should do it. It's dark, so you'll need your headlights. The right lamp will be out, but don't try to change it, because if you do, the left one will go out immediately. Best leave well enough alone. Now you're ready to start her up. Your island car will start up with absolute reliability, every third time you turn the key. It wants to be sure you really mean it. You'll know when it's running because of the convenient high-pitched screech that comes from under the hood to tell you all's well. Even if you have especially thick earmuffs on, you'll be sure to notice the smell. 4. Let's Go! At last, it's time to go. Pick a gear to start with. Any one between neutral and second should do fine. Slowly let off the clutch, and at the same time floor the gas. Nope, you really need to give it more oomph than that. It's ok, just try again. There's no hurry. Once you're on the way, remember to turn on the windshield defroster so you'll be able to see on your way back. Oh, it slipped my mind before, but you ought to know the brakes don't work. Don't worry, there's only the one stop sign on the way to the dump, and my uncle Albert could count how many times I've seen another car there on one hand. Even after he lost both hands in that fishing accident in '82. Island cars come equipped with an unusually large number of gears between first and second, so you'll have no trouble controlling your speed. If for some reason you need to stop suddenly, just drag your feet a bit. Also, you'll notice the power steering's out, so the wheel's a bit hard to turn at low speeds. It takes a little practice, but you'll eventually find a "sweet spot" right around 15 miles an hour, where you can still steer, but you can also coast easily to a stop if necessary. 5. Navigational Tips The last thing you should know is how to find your way around. The simplest navigational strategy on the island is to pick a direction and go straight. You're bound to come out somewhere. There are some more advanced navigational techniques you can try out too, though. For example, find someone else and follow them. They may not be going where you meant to go, but wherever they're going might be interesting anyway. Another common technique is to find unusual rock formations or houses, and keep careful note of which ones you need to see on the way to each destination. Through trial and error, you'll find a route anywhere you want to go. If you've mastered this technique, you could try a variation of it, where you plan out your route to include a particular set of landmarks you'd like to take a look at. Ther are some places you can't get to using this strategy, though. There are maps of the island, but I don't recommend them. I find them to be perpetually inaccurate, and I sometimes wonder what the state cartographers up in Bangor have against us. For example, my map has the High Road marked as "Pleasant Avenue," and the Road Around Backshore's got some other name altogether. And the store down front's labeled "Hannigan's" when everyone knows it's called Feeneys. Someone ought to write those fools a letter one of these days. There are some roads you'll want to be careful with in your island car. You'll aways want to approach Brook Lane, for example, from the Low Road. With no brakes, that corner at the bottom is tricky going downhill from the High Road, and is only advised for experts. Also, the road downhill to the ferry bears some caution, but with the new dock it's almost impossible to go all the way off the end anymore. Now you're up to speed on island driving. With your new found know-how, you've got a nearly limitless five square miles to explore. So hop in your island car, turn the key three times, and get going! Smartass? Man, I swear it's (almost) all true. I don't have an Uncle Albert, and I'm not aware of any cars actually turning into a 1987 Honda Accord with about 228,000 miles (but they do rapidly become the equivalent), but other than that this is straight out of personal experience. ____Not the real rusty $500! My car right now is a $1.00 car. No, really. I bought it from the landlady for a buck. That's the 87 Accord, BTW. About the timing belt-- in an older car, breaking a timing belt virtually always destroys the engine. The timing belt is the thing that makes sure the valves open and close in sync with the pistons. So the belt breaks, some valves stay open in the cylinder, and the piston instantly crashes down into them. Within 1/16th of a second, you no longer have anything that even resembles an engine, internally. Newer cars often have various tricks they do to make sure that even if the timing mechanism breaks, the valves won't immediately get pulverized. My own favorite car ever was a 1985 Plymouth Caravelle. From 1992 to about 1998 it took me all up and down the East coast without complaint. An unremarkable car to look at, some would even say ugly, but it loved me deeply. Though I think the Jeep will get there some day. We've already had some adventures, the Jeep and I. ____Not the real rusty Gun racks There are plenty of old F-150s, but no gun racks, because no one ever had a gun. There's no place on the island that it would be legal to shoot one, ever, so there's little point. Except for a couple days a year when they send a few pros out to thin the deer herd, but those guys aren't the gun rack type. No VWs or microbuses that I've seen. No, wait, there is a microbus! And it has Peace and Anti-Nuke and Save the Whales stickers all over it too. How could I have forgotten? It's like a rolling 60's steretype. ____Not the real rusty Repeat after me "I will not argue with obvious trolls. I will not argue with obvious trolls..." ____Not the real rusty Why? Why are you spamming our diary page? ____Not the real rusty Multiple windows? Are you a multiple browser window/multiple tab type of reader? If so, you can basically only work on one comment form at a time. That is, you have two windows open. You click "Reply" in one, then while you're waiting for that to load, you click "Reply" in the other. You go back and write your first comment and hit Post. You will get a "Form key invalid" because Scoop now only knows about the form key in the second window. So you write that comment, and hit Post, and you get another "Form key invalid" since it made a new one for the first window, and now only knows about that. And so on. Basically, you'll never get these if you just make sure you only ever load one input form at a time from your account. Now, if you're definitely not doing anything like the above, I'd like to know. I've never had this problem though, so I suspect that's what it is. ____Not the real rusty Sleeping Cold I'm still tired, so here's what I can recall having learned since Thursday, in convenient bullet-point format. Do not sit in the bow section of the 5:00 boat to Portland. It will be you and 25 construction workers. You will do some mental estimates and figure out that you are currently carrying gear with a total dollar value equal to about two months pay for any of them. You will feel like an overpaid, overeducated, feeble piece of yuppie scum. You will be correct in this feeling. You will feel like crap for an hour or so. Do not forget your LL Bean gift certificates when you are setting off for a winter camping trip. You will have to buy essential items with real money, and you will therefore be underequipped, construction-worker salaries notwithstanding. Route 113 in Maine runs North/South. Route 113 in New Hampshire runs East/West. They are not the same road, even though they are only a few miles apart. This difference is very, very important. Choosing the right route 113 on the first (or even second) try will likely save you 2 hours of driving. A Jeep Wrangler can climb a moderately steep hill in 9 inches of unplowed snow. It will take a few tries before you get the hang of it though. You don't need to be in 4-Low. Don't slide into the gully, though, or you'll be utterly screwed. Snowboarding is fun (it's important to periodically revisit lessons you've already learned). Snowmobiling is also fun, but snowmobilers are loud drunken obnoxious losers, and should be avoided at all costs. Half-price appetizers at the Woodstock Inn are a godsend. A headlamp is the most overlooked yet utterly indispensable piece of camping gear ever. Bring more water. Melting snow for water is, contrary to commonly accepted lore, possible, with a good, efficient stove. It uses a lot of fuel though, and you wouldn't want to do it for long. Melting snow on a campfire is foolhardy. See lesson above. MREs vary in quality. Go for ones that are stew-like, like the beef stew or the "pork chop in jamaican sauce" which can be mushed up into a stew. Avoid the bean burrito like the plague. No possible good can come of a bean burrito in a sealed plastic bag. Add a rice pack to your stew to stretch it. On balance, they are good, cheap hiking fuel, and well worth the 69 cents you'll pay at the Job Lot. They're especially ideal for winter conditions, since you're already carrying more weight in gear, since they're light and pack small. Also, they are cooked by boiling the entire plastic bag for a few minutes, which means that you can heat up as many as you need, and make tea with the same water. See previous lesson, and the one before that if the benefit of this is still unclear. Individual MRE entrees are rather small. Bring at least two for each meal. Instant oatmeal, pita bread, and those Lipton rice thingys are also good hiking food. For coffee, get teabag-style coffee singles. Making real coffee in the wilderness is way, way harder than it's worth. The LL Bean Summit bag is rated to 20 degrees F. They aren't kidding. If you sleep in this bag when it's 10 degrees and windy, you will be cold. Your friend in the North Face -30 bag will also claim to have been cold, to make you feel better. He will be lying. He was toasty warm all night, and slept like a baby, that bastard. Snowshoes do not make walking in deep snow easy. They merely make it possible. Waking up on top of a mountain in fresh snow is unbelievably peaceful and beautiful and worth being cold and damp and eating lukewarm MRE bean burritos for dinner many times over. When heavy snow is falling, do not go North of exit 32 on Route 93. They apparently don't plow it, reasoning, perhaps, that the steep cliffs and howling winds through Franconia notch are not exciting enough without a few inches of untouched snow to add that little extra frisson. Should you ignore the above lesson, expect to be passed by New Hampshire natives doing 65 in their Ford Tauruses and minivans, as if it were a sunny day in June. They have, over centuries of selective breeding, developed telekinetic powers that allow them to perform feats of winter driving that have been repeatedly proven impossible according to all known laws of physics. I'm sure there were more, but probably most of them were similar to "don't forget the Chap Stick" and can be safely ignored till next time. To be more specific I meant New Hampshire snowmobilers. I'm sure there are many places where "snowmobiler" isn't synonymous with "Nashua goombah who came up for a day of drinking in the woods." But the kind you get in New Hampshire are, by and large, drunken idiots. ____Not the real rusty Whatnot Filtering water: In New England, it's pretty well known that you don't drink the stream water without filtering it, because it tends to have giardia, which will make the rest of your trip very unpleasant. Fresh snow, though, we figured wasn't much risk. Although we probably got a triple dose of Eastern Seaboard pollutants, it doesn't seem to have done any of us any harm. Coffee: Ok, Mr. Genius, how the hell do you do it? I.e. is there extra equipment I'm supposed to have, or is it possible to actually make real coffee with nothing but what I would have brought anyway (one cup, one 1-liter pot)? I haven't had any success with it, and personally think the coffee singles are close enough to the real thing for me. Just, for the love of God, don't stoop to instant. No one should ever sink so low. ;-) Sleeping: I have a full-lenth 3/4" Ridge Rest, which makes a hell of a difference. I also got a fleece liner, which probably kept me just chilly, as opposed to miserable. Personally, I have my heart set on a North Face Inferno for cold weather. I'm 6' tall and weigh about 150, so I sleep really really cold. I'm one of those people who wants about 9 blankets on the bed in the winter. If I'm going to go out in truly cold weather, I want the warmest thing they make with me. I slept on top of a mountain in the Adirondacks in high school in a 20 year old army surplus 0-rated down bag that had degraded to the point that it wasn't much good below 30 degrees. That night it got down to -30F. Not even taking wind into account, just -30 on the mercury. It was, I can say with some confidence, one of the worst nights of my life. Since then I've always been extremely skittish about having warm gear when sleeping out in the cold. This trip was pushing it a little, but we didn't expect it to go much below 20, and if things went really bad, it was a short walk out. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Yeah, that's what I thought too. Plus you do need a percolator, and being a lazy ass, I'm just not up to carrying another thing just for coffee. I'm sticking with the singles for the foreseeable future. Ooh. I just had a thought. I could bring one of those devices for making single cups of loose tea -- either the wire-mesh ball or the spring-loaded spoon, or whatever. That would probably work too. It would mean a little more time with hands exposed to the air, though. I might try that next time. FYI, "rob" above, is the bastard with the -30 bag. You weren't cold, you jerk. You lied after that night in NY too. Just gloat like the rest of us would, and let us be pissed off at you. It's the natural Way of Things. Oh hey, Rob, by the way, I found out how you make tent lines stay put in deep snow. You make some deadmen by getting some stuff sacks or whatever, and packing them with snow. Then tie the lines to them and bury them, instead of trying to use stakes. I can't believe none of us thought of that. ____Not the real rusty Coming soon Right now it's slow because one of our new Scoop machines is perpetually dead. It won't stay up for more than a couple minutes at a time. However, we really and truly do have new machines on the way -- four of them, to be exact. We shouldn't have to limp along like this too much longer. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Honi Soit Which I translate, by the way, (unlike the more prissy House of Winsor) as "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." I like your translation better. I can think of no finer or more apt sentiment to appear on the coat of arms of the British royal family. ____Not the real rusty Marine Corps Recruitment Strategies I was in the Maine Mall today, walking toward Sears, and a youngish guy walked up alongside me out of nowhere and started talking. Having lived in cities for a while, we of course didn't even slow down, but he talked anyway. The conversation went something like this... Remember, this is all being held at full-tilt "wanna get out of the mall as soon as possible" walking speed. My thoughts are in italics. Him: "Hello, my name is [something] how are you today?" Me: "Fine." It's a marketing survey. I don't want to answer a survey. Go away. Him: "I'm with the US Marine Corps. Have you ever thought about signing up with us?" Me: Oh, he is wearing some kind of super-toned-down khaki uniform. Huh. "Um. Not really, no." Him: "Can I ask what you're doing for work right now?" Me: "I run a business." Him: [Clearly not the response he was expecting] "Oh." [pause] "Really?" Me: "Yeah." Him: "And, um, how's that working out for you?" Me: "Very well, actually." Him: "Oh. Well. Ok then. Thank you." Me: "No problem." Afterward, I felt very very weird. Like, I felt like I should thank him for serving our country, but on the other hand, I was annoyed that Marine Corps recruitment is done according to the same general principles as panhandling now. And on the third hand, it was strange to be so clearly pegged as "aimless teenager" when I'm just walking through the mall. I mean, I'm wearing a wedding ring, dude. It was weird. Heh Yeah, we'll do it, but it annoys us greatly. So you better have a pretty good reason for it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Quiet PCs Who needs a quiet PC? I just got a better subwoofer. Now I never hear my computer. :-) Acually I need a new switch. I have a cheapo little hub that's noisier by a large margin than anything else in my office. :-/ ____Not the real rusty That story That AQ story is The Greatest Troll Ever. Hands down and bar none. It will never die. ____Not the real rusty Who knew Having been an avid, if pathetic, surfer in my oh so distant youth, I've heard of Mavericks. and living in SF for a year, I've been to HMB. Who knew they were the same place. You do learn something new every day. ____Not the real rusty Cape Cod surfing Yep, there's shit-all south of Eastham. Well, most of the time, there's nothing much anywhere, but if you get yourself a longboard, you can definitely have fun. We used to go to Coast Guard a lot, Marconi once in a great while (when it's good, it's pretty good, but that's like one day a year). Up the road a bit from CG is a beach called Newcomb Hollow, that's not National Seashore so parking in the summer is hard (you need a resident pass). But the rest of the year, you can do whatever you like, and it breaks now and then as well. Though as I recall you have to go way the hell down from the parking area for anything good. There's another one called White Crest a little up from Coast Guard too. As for whether they're left or right breaks, from what I remember, they're usually more like 2-4 foot crumbly whatevers. You get the one or two storm days a year where all the conditions are just right and it gets up to 6-8 feet, but then it's almost guaranteed to be an onshore wind, and they get blown out. Surfing on Cape Cod is not for the easily embarrassed, nor is it for those who want surfing to be exciting and dangerous. But if bobbing around in the water is your idea of a good time (and it has always been mine), it can be fun. Like I said, get a longboard. :-) ____Not the real rusty Gray Squirrel Signing Off It's moving time yet again. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to unpack at all. Well, this one's only about a mile, but on the downside, I have to do it pretty much by myself tomorrow. I'll be mostly offline for a couple days, so if you email, don't expect an instant reply. I'm breaking down the workstation as soon as this is posted. Take care of the site for me. This is gray squirrel, signing off. 2001 Good vs. Bad Hell, everyone else is doing it. Why shouldn't I? Following is my attempt to justify my overall feeling that 2001 sucked, and is best buried and forgotten forever. Good: Started year with good job at Zelerate. Bad: Hated job, SF drained ludicrous salary unimaginably fast. Good: Quit hated job to work for self. Bad: SF drained now-lower salary even faster. Good: K5 grew. Bad: K5 got noticed by scum-sucking bottom-feeders of IT press. Good: Lived in great apartment. Bad: Great apartment located in Evil San Francisco. Bad: Webbys. Enough said. Good: Met Matt Haughey. Hell of a good guy, lived right across the street. Bad: Met Matt two weeks before leaving SF. Good: Left Evil San Francisco. Bad: Getting out took three weeks longer than it was supposed to have, leaving almost no time for cross-country drive enjoyment. Good: Got to drive X-country again. Bad: Had to do it in a week. Good: Got married. Bad: One wedding guest killed 17 days later in WTC collapse. Bad: two thirds of September pass in miserable fog. Good: Got house on idyllic childhood island in Maine. Bad: Lost OSDN contract. Money runs out in January. Bad: House only for winter. Have to move again soon. Bad: November downtime. Good: Found year-round house. Moving in tomorrow. Bad: Higher rent, not sure if I'll have any income in a month. Ok, I listed everything I could think of that was good, and only a random selection of the bad things that happened to me personally. Like, I didn't even get into many issues wider than my own personal life. Like the economy, and the Contract on Freedom in America, and so on and so forth. Of course, I had to get married this year, so now every year, I can be reminded of 2001. "Five years ago today honey, remember how many more people weren't dead then? Remember our 17 days of idyllic bliss?" Bring on the aliens, I say. It has to be better than this. Here's to 2001 being rock-bottom, and nowhere to go but up. Ha! Just the kind of thing an alien would say. They are among us, I tell you. Where'd I put my mashed potatoes? ____Not the real rusty Sorry Grandpa ;-) I will admit that for someone older than myself, there have been worse years. However... Timeline: 1973: Vietnam war ends (I'm -3) 1973: Watergate (Still -3) 1973: Gas shortages (You guessed it) 1976: rusty born 1979: Iran hostage crisis (I'm 3) 1979ish: More gas shortages (I'm still 3) early 1980s: "Evil Empire" Cold war era. I'm in primary school. It seems like the Soviets make great enemies, since none of us ever have to kill each other. My perception of tension is strongest at Olympic time. I'm sure there have been much worse years, but I think for anyone 25 or under, this was probably our worst one yet. ____Not the real rusty July ...although it is a little disconcerting that you could have been (you didn't say what month you were born in) one of the babes in arms I was waving to as I charged around on my bicycle in the Bicentennial parade. Actually, I was born in July, on the day the tall ships sailed into Boston harbor for the Bicentennial. Not the fourth, but near there. And wow. I didn't realize you were so old and decrepit too. You must be young at heart. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Writing Software is like Dancing Architecture Background: Doc posted some thoughts yesterday comparing software to construction. I disagreed, and some interesting back and forth ensued. Then Joel weighed in with a very good point about how software is crucially different from construction: "Implicit in the claim that the software industry is "immature" is the belief that this is just because we haven't learned all the tricks yet to getting reproducible results. But this idea rests on a falsehood. The unique thing about software is that it is infinitely clonable. Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before." Follwing are some roughly-framed ideas building on Joel's point, which I think has nailed down for the first time why I always felt vaguely uncomfortable with the rampant software-as-construction metaphors. Dancing about Architecture As Joel points out, writing software is not like building stuff, because building stuff is a process of figuring out how to do it once, and then actually doing it over and over. We have machines for the "doing"; programmers just figure out how to do new stuff. It has been famously and repeatedly said that "writing about wine is like dancing about architecture." I would say that writing software is like dancing architecture. Stay with me here... Architecture and programming are both about creating spaces. The process of creating a blueprint or a program is essentially the same: Look at the location [platform]. What does the environment of this building [program] suggest as to it's design? Look at the users. What do they need for their space [application]? Is it a business environment? A home environment? A play space? The needs of the user should dictate the arrangement of space. Consider the materials you can work with. Concrete? Steel? Wood? CORBA? TCP/IP? Java? Perl? Each material has different strengths and weaknesses. The choice of materials will dictate the limits of what is possible to create. Then you sit down and invent a new space. Architecture and programming both have their own vocabulary and techniques, and the end result is a plan of execution. The architect hands off the plans to a general contractor, who will inevitably come back with a list of things that are impossible to do, or too expensive. The programmer hands off the code to a compiler (or interpreter), which comes back with a list of bugs and indications of what routines are not efficient enough. So, in this metaphor, the builders themselves take the role of the hardware, that actually runs the plan. From the point of view of the architect, this machine is perfectly predictable, and just does what it does within some set boundaries. I imagine they view construction teams in much the same way we view hardware. Some architects probably know the intimate details of how buildings are actually built, some probably remain far above the gritty details. Same with programmers: the better ones know exactly how the machine works, and account for it, but it's not required. So what does this get us? I think a couple important things. First, thinking about programming as architecture should help people escape the imaginary conceit that programming could be done mechanically, or that it's somehow an industrial process. Programming is a human art. Not all code is art, not all buildings are art. But many of both are, and the process of creating them is an art. Also, how much better would our programs be in we started thinking of them in terms of architecture? Humanity has thousands of years of formal architectural knowledge under its belt. Maybe programmers ought to start doing some of the background reading on how architects think of their craft. For a start, a good application should really think of itself as a space, organized for some utility. It should tell a story. It should place controls and interfaces where they will best fit the natural use pattern of the space. I think it's time for me to start reading up on architecture. More later, if I find out anything useful. Suggestions for good architectural texts? Having also done both... I agree with you that the programmer/builder analogy does work, to a point. My argument was more about the business of software vs. the business of construction. I don't think the two look like each other, economically. ____Not the real rusty Millions of Acorns The leaves have definitely stopped falling, so I finally raked the front yard today. Raking under one of the big oak trees, I built up a pile of millions of acorns. "Wouldn't it be cool," I thought, "if all these acorns sprouted and took root and grew a whole new forest of millions of oak trees?" Then I realized that wouldn't be cool at all, because then there would be no parking. England How many forests you got left over there in England? Lessee... total forest land... England, 2001: 1,096,885 hectares Maine, 2001: 6,800,000 hectares D'oh! Looks like one US state, 3/5ths the size of England, has more than 6 time the forest land of your whole country. So shut your gob, wanker. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Nya Hypocritical Brits. Just cause they deforested their country before we invented cars doesn't mean they get a free pass. Anyway, I was only comparing the state of Maine to Britain. Maine has a population of 1.2 million, whereas England has about 60 million. But we have way more moose. I was joking, man. Please, please take a humor course or something. ____Not the real rusty Shared accounts I expect that quite a few K5ers also have Slashdot accounts. What the real day-to-day crossover is, I have no idea. Especially since there's a spectrum of crossover -- I know I read K5 hourly, at least, but Slashdot I skim daily, and read comments maybe once a month. I suspect that the range goes from something like that (either with more time spent here or there) all the way to someone who compulsively reloads both in two browser windows (C4L, I'm looking at you... ;-)). It's also very much worth noting that the technical systems in place probably have less to do with content than the social systems in place. K5 and /. have very different tones, focuses and goals. I tend to believe that the specifics of the technology aren't that important, within some range of tolerance. That is, the differences between K5 and Slashdot, technically, probably don't make much difference, with the possible exception of story voting (as it impacts the overall social environment of the place). The technical differences between K5/Slashdot and, say, ZDNet talkback, on the other hand, are enormous, and probably could be usefully analyzed. What I mean is, I wouldn't assume that the differences between the sites can be explained by just looking at the technology. I'll be interested to see what you come up with though. Consider that a question you might want to deal with in your investigation. :-) ____Not the real rusty Great Thread Despite having a billion things to do today, I managed to get myself embroiled in one of the most interesting threads I've ever had here. A fairly useless argument, but along the way I've managed to actually read Schroedinger's "Cat" paper, which says a lot of other stuff that's very interesting. The cat example is actually just one paragraph, and one that he pretty much dismisses as a needlessly silly example. So, what do you think? Can a universe simulator exist, and if it did, is it therefore impossible for it to have any real effect on our lives? I think I made a decent argument that it could exist, but can't matter. I'd love to have someone pick the argument apart some more. Also A policy of "no name dropping" prevents astroturfing/spamming. That is, the manager of Wendy's calls in and starts in on a long tale about how great Wendy's is, and how much he's enjoying their food, and blah blah blah. Boring radio, and advertising-supported media is not about to give away any free ad time during the program. ____Not the real rusty Down's Syndrome? How do you know it's someone with DS? Could just be a fat ugly bastard. Is there some diagnostic pronciple that makes that a given that I don't know about? ____Not the real rusty Posted already It looks like a lot of folks were holding off voting till they knew one way or the other, because it went to FP today, after hovering around 2 or 3 all day yesterday. I was actually really pleased to see how many people held off till there was real information about it's legality. ____Not the real rusty ZMag, not ZDNet It was ZMag, and as far as both he and ZMag are concerned, they don't care about copyright. (Damon Lynch, ZMag admin, personal email, 12/2001) ____Not the real rusty Read top-of-thread comment (NT) ____Not the real rusty Lynx sucks :-) Use W3M or Links. In this day and age, there's no excuse for even die-hard, old school, badass console jockeys to use lynx. ____Not the real rusty Climbing tips Ah, rock climbing. I love climbing so much. It's a hoot and a half. Indoor is fun, but outdoor's really where it's at. It's, IMO, way way more fun outside, provided you find a decent spot to climb, that's roughly commensurate with your abilities. So, some tips. If your fingers really hurt, you're doing it wrong! Next time you go, pay a lot more attention to your feet. In fact, a very useful exercise is to climb with only one hand touching the face at any given time. This pretty much forces you to keep all your weight on your feet. Beginners all do this (I was no exception!): your first instinct on a vertical face is to try to pull yourself stright up it with your arms and fingers. This is terribly tiring, since no matter who you are, your arms are weaker than your legs (paraplegics excepted). All of your upward power should come from your legs, your hands are just there for balance. Like every "rule" in climbing, the above does not always hold true. But if you're not a really serious experienced climber, you can regard the push-with-your-legs rule as a hard-and-fast regulation until you learn enough technique to know when to break it. It's definitely always the first thing you should try. Overhangs are really the one big exception, where often you will have to do a significant amount of pulling up with your arms. But even there, you can often wedge yourself in by pushing out on both arms and legs, and you end up providing most of the actual movement with your legs anyway. And then, at some point in almost every overhang, you get to go for the heel-hook over the ledge, which is scary but one of the coolest-feeling moves in climbing. And, notably, holds to the "push with your legs" rule, except in this case you'd be pulling with your legs. Keep climbing! It's an absolute blast, and incredibly good exercise. You might want to take a class or two, though, for technique, because it can be really easy to develop bad habits that will cause injury down the line. ____Not the real rusty Mental challenge it's as much a challenge for the mind as the body I'd go further than that and say that it's much more a challenge for the mind than it is for the body. When you get right down to it, up to a certain difficulty level, any schmuck can rock climb. But most people utterly suck when they start, partly because they don't know how to move effectively, but mostly because they convince themselves they can't do it. It's amazing what it turns out you physically can do if you simply decide you will do it, and don't accept the possibility of not being able to. ____Not the real rusty You know I can't believe it... I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, that much is true. But even then I knew I'd find a much better place, eiher with or without you. The five years we have had have been such good times... I still love you. But now it's time for me to live my life on my own. It's just what I must do. ____Not the real rusty Info is crap My rule of thumb is that any program that requires you to read info pages should be avoided like the plague, because info is evil and crappy, and if they're documenting with it, the code is probably equally evil and crappy. ____Not the real rusty I don't know I certainly havn't noticed any changes in 'man' since I first used it on the school's AIX system in 1995. I think the reason man pages aren't being updated is mainly that most of the applications with man pages are GNU apps, and GNU will use info no matter whether all the users hate it or not. ____Not the real rusty My doc solution My preferred means of making documentation has always been plain text. :-) I meant that "evil and crappy" comment mostly tongue-in-cheek. I don't really look at doc format much in determining what programs to use. Code that has docs I can access will generally get more time and effort from me than ones that don't though. If there's no man page, and I can't install and use it without needing any docs, it will get abandoned. I don't ever even look for info pages. Looking at the problem, it does seem that man pages are a royal bitch to create. It doesn't seem like it should be impossible to create some kind of WYSIWYG man page editor though. Hasn't someone done that yet? Oh hey, Linux.com has an article on Creating a Linux man Page, as it turns out. HTH. :-) ____Not the real rusty That is to say... What fluffy meant of course was, "Please respect your fellow diary page user by not taking up many screens with blankness." fluffy merely has a highly compact and efficient way of talking. ____Not the real rusty All I can say is... Your car was iced up and wouldn't go? Apparently God wanted to save some poor pedestrian's ass that night. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Are you sure? 'Cause I'm almost positive it's a perl implementation of a Welsh spellchecker. Oh, no wait. You've got the & in the wrong place. Yup, just "Ahhhhhhhh". ____Not the real rusty Mebibytes? Could the be related to the "Mebibytes" article? I voted against it because it was already boring when I saw it on Slashdot. :-) People get way too into the "NO OVERLAP" mindset though. It seems silly. ____Not the real rusty Argh! I tried repeatedly to figure out why VHosting doesn't seem to provide support to most customers. I was never able to figure it out. But they're not our sponsor anymore. Please don't hate Voxel because of them. Voxel's been amazing for us so far, and I don't yet have any bad reports about them from K5ers (and I don't expect to). Please don't judge them based on VHosting. :-( ____Not the real rusty Dream You know how someone will go up to you and say "Dude! I had the weirdest dream!" and then they tell you it, and it's not weird at all but utterly mudane and dull? Well, "Dude, I had the weirdest dream!" Please take that under advisement when deciding whether to read this or not. I was running away from someone in this big apartment building (or suchlike dwelling), and I ran outside into the parking lot, which was on a pier out over a canal or inlet. I was hiding behind a car, when I heard a splash. Suddenly a ton of people came running out of the apartment building, and they were all yelling about how she'd jumped and what were they going to do. Among them was my ex-roommate Mike and my friend from college John. I pieced together that some woman had jumped off the bridge between the apartment building and the parking lot, apparently to kill herself. I was near the edge of the parking lot, and no one else was doing anything, so I jumped in to try to find her. My friend John also jumped in, but he didn't know I was there. We both swam around, and somehow I bumped into her first. I grabbed her and pulled her head above the water, and shoved her up onto the parking lot. She wasn't breathing. Everyone ran over, but no one did anything, and I was screaming at them to do CPR or call an ambulance or something. But, as I mentioned, someone was chasing me, and they noticed who it was in the water. It turns out it was Robin ("roblimo") Miller and some evil henchmen who were chasing me. They yelled, "There he is!" or something appropriate like that, and came after me, so I swam over to a boat the was tied up to the pier, and jumped in. It was, in fact, Robin's boat. He was a water-taxi driver (which is funny and appropriate if you know the man). I got in, got the thing started, and pulled it away from the pier just in time. They didn't have another boat, so they couldn't chase me. OK, the next bit I'm not too sure about. In some way that wasn't clear in the dream, I got transported back in time to just before all this happened. I was back in the apartment building, but in a different place. I knew that somewhere else in the building, I was running around being chased by someone. But now I was crouched in a dark hallway in front of a slightly-open door. Inside were the girl who killed herself and another older woman. The girl was begging the older woman to give her some more crack, and the older woman was refusing, saying that she hadn't paid for the last time yet, and she didn't have any money. The girl was crying and extremely upset. She ran out the door past me, without even noticing me. I followed her carefully so as not to bump into myself, still being chased somewhere else (I had this feeling that that would be Bad). The girl went to her room, briefly, then ran out to the bridge, climbed underneath, and jumped off. I was frozen in place near the doorway to the building, because I could see myself and the guy chasing me, and if I went after the girl, they would both see me. So I watched her jump in the black water, and then myself slip over the edge of the parking lot, and someone yelled, and everyone came running out of the building. I realized, finally, that although I almost saved her, I could have stopped her in the first place. Even though the time-traveling me knew exactly what was going to happen, it happened anyway. I have the... The image of He-Man being defeated by toilet-plunger bees has now been permanently engraved on my brain. Thank you so much for that. I really do appreciate it. "I have the poweeeeemmmmmmfffhhh... [shklorp shklorp shklorp]" ____Not the real rusty Shklorp I think what really does it is "shklorp". I spent some time figuring out exactly how to spell the noise a plunger makes. Comedy ain't easy, my friend. ____Not the real rusty Sounds like SRL That sounds like Survival Research Laboratories taken to the next level. "Edison's Death Choir" would be a kickass name for a band though. ____Not the real rusty But... I would far far rather see a real response even if in disagreement than even a good rating. But would you rather see no response of any kind rather than a low rating? Because that's probably the actual choice. For the original question: I think rating has an effect on discussion as soon as you provide filters based on the ratings. Right now, K5 has one mandatory filter: Most people can't see comments rated less than one. But you otherwise can't screen out comments by rating. Personally, I think this is a good thing. I'm all in favor of using ratings to organize comments into a best-to-not-best order. But I haven't seen anything good come of filtering based on ratings. That seems to add a strong level of feedback into the system that makes most comments ratings a foregone conclusion. So, IMO, it's not the ratings themselves, it's what the system lets you do with them. ____Not the real rusty Trading Spaces with the EFF Bret and I just watched like 6 hours of the Trading Spaces marathon on TLC. I'm so ready to move in to the new house and redesign the whole thing, inexpensively yet with flair, using simple furniture projects, bold colors, and clever homemade lamps to turn a blah room into a wow room. But that will wear off, and we'll probably just throw all our clothes on the floor and call it home like we always do. We raised $450.00 for the EFF. I'm going to throw in $450 as well (bringing my personal annual EFF giving to $750.00 -- they were my wedding charity too). On the plus side, it's 900 bucks they didn't have before, so that's good. On the minus side, there's, by my best estimate, at least 10,000 of you that read K5 on a regular basis. $450.00 out of 10,000 people is pretty sad. That's like 4.5 cents each. No wonder the corporations are kicking our asses. By the way, thank you to those who did give, either here or directly to the EFF. Thank you to those of you who support similar organizations elsewhere, and the rest of you, you don't have to justify yourselves (least of all to me!) or feel guilty. Just, if you haven't recently, think about what you consider valuable in life, and what you actually spend your money on. The conclusions you come to are your own -- but it's worth thinking about. Logs say otherwise Remember the rule of tens. Since I started keeping logs, this rule of thumb has held true. Basically, things go in steps of 10%. For every person who submits stories occasionally, 10 people don't write stories, but comment. For every person who comments regularly, 10 people are reading and not commenting (but have a user account). For every person with a user account, ten people are reading anonymously. This is extremely rough, but every time I check it, it holds true to within 5%. Also, about 10% of user accounts go unconfirmed. In December 2001, there were comments posted by 950 different users. So call it 1,000. Rule of tens says there are probably 10,000 people reading. FWIW, that's probably an underestimate. In October, there were 165,000 unique IPs logged. Counting IPs is highly unreliable for a lot of reasons, but that's kind of an outside boundary. It has to be between 1,000 and 150,000 basically. I feel pretty solid saying that there are 10K regular readers. Three or four hundred is way, way low by any measure. To give you another boundary, in December, there were stories or diaries submitted by 273 different users. The ratio of readers to story writers is probably 100 to 1, so that estimate would put it at more like 25K readers. So that's where I'm coming from with that number, anyway. ____Not the real rusty That's true I know there were at least a few "oh yeah" direct donations from my little harangue. All in all, it didn't go too badly. I think we'll make it a tradition. ____Not the real rusty Trading Spaces I don't think so. We just watched like 8 of them in a row, so here's what I got. The redecorations almost always involed one thing that was really cool, several things that could go either way, and one thing that was horrible. Some of the rooms did turn out good, but on the whole, I don't think I'd turn over my house to those people. But the nifty thing about it is that they do it cheap, and it shows how you can take a really boring space and make it different, by just actually setting out to consciously do it. We, like most people, tend to design our home by putting whatever we have wherever it seems to fit. That show is good for demonstrating that design isn't some kind of magic -- you just have to decide to actually do it. ____Not the real rusty Designers Some of the TS designers suck, but some of them are really cool. It all depends on the episode, really. ____Not the real rusty Gay animals I haven't heard of homosexual squirrels or koala bears, so unless this 'in the genes' argument is for homo sapiens only, I don't buy it. Look harder. The Fabulous Kingdom of Gay Animals, Salon Animals' Fancies, Why members of some species prefer their own sex, Science News Queens of the jungle, South Africa's Sunday Times That's just a few results from a quick Google search. Please don't base your conclusions on evidence you just assume to be true. Do the research! ____Not the real rusty Evidence... They are done by researchers who go into it with a predetermined result (goal: find animals that interact with the same gender, publish results). Of course they bloody were! That's how science is done! You would only take them seriously if they discovered homosexual animals while hunting for the top quark or something? Researchers define a hypothesis (eg: There are examples of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom), then they go out looking for evidence that that hypothesis can be demonstrated (they look for animals behaving sexually with another member of their gender). I'm fairly convinced they've found it. There's plenty of "gay marketing" out there, so I really tried to stick to the articles from publications that didn't seem to have any overtly gay bias. More effort could, I'm fairly sure, turn up articles in respected academic journals as well. Note that I'm not even trying to argue the premise that homosexuality is right, or moral. That's not an argument either of us is going to win. All I'm saying is that there is good evidence that homosexual behavior is not confined to human beings. They don't show 'love' towards other animals in the way that we do. In that case, heterosexuality doesn't exist in the animal kingdom either. If you're going to argue that animals don't relate to other animals the way we do, then it's either across the board or not at all. Basically, if you want to use the animal kingdom argument, either the sexual relations of humans and animals are comparable, or they're not. If you accept that they are comparable, then you have to accept that homosexual behavior in animals isn't somehow "invalid" for whatever reasons you want it to be. And, either way, wouldn't any pure darwinist believe that any homosexual 'gene' would have been evolved out by now? A smart Darwinist would say that if homosexual behavior is detrimental to the survival of a species in a particular environment, then it likely would be selected against. It's been decades since any responsible scientist worked under the simplistic view that you could look at one individual of a species and identify which traits are harmful and which are helpful. Obviously if a species was 100% homosexual, and unable to reproduce, well, it wouldn't have much of a chance. On the other hand, maybe having a 5% or 10% incidence of homosexuality in a species helps it to survive. Plenty of species have entire classes of members that don't reproduce at all -- bees come to mind. By not worrying about reproduction, those members are able to carry on other important work for the overall survival of the species. Maybe it turns out that theatre and interior design are, in fact, critical elements in humanity's overall survival. Ok, I apologize for the last sentence. But, you get what I mean. :-) ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Normally someone else would welcome you in, but as you've taken on that role yourself, I'm sure you'll fit right in. :-) ____Not the real rusty Pretty Vacant Disturbing link of the day: A study of Britney Spears poster Defacements in NYC. Especially see (titles my own): Pretty Vacant, Hollow, and Silence There's a lot of anger out there. Where's it all gonna go? Yes and No Yes, you did catch the Sex Pistols reference, which came irresistably into my head when I saw the "Vacant" written across Britney's forehead. But where the Pistols were probably singing it about themselves, I don't think Britney would do that. Although, in a sense Britney and the Sex Pistols are very similar. Both had great stage presence, but little musical talent. Both were created by someone behind the scenes. Both were essentially media phenomena. Hm. There's something to think about, huh? ____Not the real rusty You were a "cyberpunk"! That's so cute. :-) I'd post my incriminating posts, but I never really used usenet. If you look in the archives of a certain situationist mailing list, though, I probably said some things I now would wish I hadn't. :-) ____Not the real rusty The Goodies Dave Winer causes yet another fuss with the Dave's Buddies Awards. Industry awards suck, whether they're Emmys, Grammys, Webbys, Oscars... whatever. They all boil down to the same formula, and it's the one that has powered Prom Queen competitions for decades. What we need is a Truly Good People award. We could call it the "Goodies." I would nominate Doc Searls, Matt Haughey, and my friends Rob Meharg and Phill Arnold. All truly among the world's Good People. Who would you nominate? My God! Defect! I didn't know you were Dave Winer! ____Not the real rusty Nope I t was not me. Rather intelligent question, actually. This island is bizarre and amazing, like probably all islands are. It's simultaneously a backwater and a cauldron of progressivism. All I can say for sure is that there are way more artists here than you'd find in the average small American town. Way more. Like every third person you meet is an artist of some kind. What I want to know is if they're getting a print version of the Post here. ____Not the real rusty Ever the editor John, I changed your </p>'s to <p>'s because it seems like maybe that's what you meant to say. And I thought this deserved to be formatted, cause damn. Just... damn. If you meant </p> for some kind of meta-comment on the futility of structural markup, I apologize and I'll put them back. ____Not the real rusty I remember this I lived in MA when that fire happened, it was big, big news. Having done most of the research already, perhaps you could write this up as a story? A better intro paragraph and maybe a little more asking for thoughts would probably do it. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I kind of think ulitmately this may have done us some good -- being down, that is. A lot of other people had similar feelings in September and October, and the overall vibe was not so good here. I think it feels a lot friendlier now. I guess people have had a chance to just kind of go away and think for a while. Maybe realize the things that were good they took for granted, and the things that were bad got magnified, and they should be the other way around. That's how I feel anyway. ____Not the real rusty Quality of life I highly recommend quality of life over booming job market. Moving to Maine has been a godsend. We recently found a year-round house to move to (the current place was only for the winter) so we get to stay here for the beautiful summer too. I absolutely don't regret it for a second. I can rent a house for less than 1/3 of what a one-bedroom apartment costs in San Francisco, and everything else is cheaper too. I have some land between me and the nearest neighbors. I don't hear sirens every half hour. I haven't heard a car alarm in months. Life is just better. Keep us updated on the move. If you have a laptop, try signing up for a dialup account with someone who offers 800-number access, so you can post on the way. I use Earthlink for those purposes myself. I don't recommend them in general, but for use while traveling, they're fine. That's assuming you're driving, of course. Are you? ____Not the real rusty Well We'll find out in January if anybody can be employed by their own website and still pay the bills. ____Not the real rusty Corners I just realized that we basically occupy the two corners of the lower 48 ;-) Well, Portland is in the very southern bit of Maine. To really get the other corner, you'd have to head up to Presque Isle, which is a goodly way. But more or less. I'm betting on it taking roughly 4 days to travel You're gonna do Boston to WA in 4 days? By car? My advice is not to -- the last drive from CA to upstate NY took us 7 days, and it was as much as I'd ever want to drive at once. To do 4 days, you're not stopping at all. It's a really nice trip if you stop and poke around now and then. :-) ____Not the real rusty Didn't you know? Old is the new new! You're hip, with it, and fabulous. ____Not the real rusty Sweetie darling. Darling! Sweetie! Actually, I think the new Ab Fab episodes utterly suck. They're just not funny. I haven't seen the old ones in so long I forget whatt was funny about them, but I'm sure if I saw them again I could be clearer on what's wrong. I know the new ones are awful though. ____Not the real rusty That Edge of Madness, That Maniacal Gleam rusty: he'd have already personally torn out bin Laden's throat and fed it to hungry inner-city youths Context?... rusty: y'know what's really disturbing? rusty: and I normally avoid thinking about rusty: Martin Sheen is closely related to Emilio Estevez. Driph: no way rusty: yeah Driph: like how related? Driph: adopted son? rusty: i think real son rusty: http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Estevez,+Emilio rusty: yeah. he took mom's name Driph: wow Driph: yeah, and her genes, etc Driph: well, not necessarily Driph: as Charlie isnt really raking in oscars either rusty: actually, i think emilio's a better actor than charlie rusty: charlie just inherited that edge of madness, that maniacal gleam that makes his dad's performances interesting rusty: from apocalypse now all the way to west wing, Martin Sheen's genius is that he looks like at any moment he might freak out and bite the head off a bat or something Driph: I want to write in Martin for president next time around rusty: yeah, me too rusty: he'd have already personally torn out bin Laden's throat and fed it to hungry inner-city youths Driph: heh, yeah.. I saw a really old Sheen movie, he's looked the same since he was like 20 Driph: his head just gets physically bigger, thats all, as he ages rusty: that's true rusty: like a pumpkin Acting and Politics... They require almost the exact same set of skills. And Maggie has the same quality about her, doesn't she. ____Not the real rusty How about that Learn something new every day. I just looked up that page too, and I didn't even notice. ____Not the real rusty Hearts of Darkness I did indeed see that (on Laserdisc, even!). Fascinating look at how many things can go wrong when a media that requires the combined efforts of hundreds of people is practiced as "Art" by one person with the ability to rule that group with an iron fist. And what can go right, too, paradoxically. ____Not the real rusty Dr. Rusty prescribes... wji: I recommend you read every new story on Adequacy for the next week. If at the end of that period, you still take everything you read online seriously, please come back for a second consultation. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Sigfried? Roy? Hockey helmets...? Sit down, please. No, not there, on the couch if you don't mind. Now, why don't you tell me about your mother... ____Not the real rusty Oh man Line! Line! [makes hand-waving gestures] ____Not the real rusty Ha! That's kinda funny, actually. :-) Maybe we should have a Who Are You, part IV, though. ____Not the real rusty Of course you can. Top left corner of the front page, there should be a "Subscribers" box with a link. You can turn the box off in your prefs now. Perhaps you did, advertently or in-? ____Not the real rusty Excellent! You're getting the hang of this already. ____Not the real rusty Welcome back perd "Perd"? Is that an even remotely appropriate nickname? "Didi"? "Perdy"? Hmmm. Gonna have to ponder that. Anyway, welcome back! :-) Oh and about the AQ v. K5 thing, I totally agree. It's a reprise of K5 v. Slashdot, only somewhat more vitriolic. The two sites are just different. I think Adequacy has gone from shaky beginnings to a really really good satire site. And the incredible ability of readers from the internet at large to not notice that it's satire never fails to amuse. It's like if people read the Onion for it's news, and got pissed off when they were unable to confirm that Local Man did indeed Get In This Wicked Barfight. ____Not the real rusty I don't know... It looks like they might be ignoring you. You might want to try insulting everyone. That seems to get a good reaction. Or at least, a lot of reaction. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well! Clearly you are unable to appreciate the Art and Depth of Feeling that goes into making K5. I suppose you expect me to just think everyone's nice. Well I don't go for that kind of blindness. My Soul is Deep and Wretched and I will prevail over all who Torment me Eternally. I'm going to go have some green tea and a good long cry now. I hope you're happy. ____Not the real rusty A couple more First, for those trying to make a desktop Linux: Ship your kernel with virtually all modules built. This alone would make it easier to install most hardware under Linux than it is under windows. Kernel modules are really, really slick these days, and if they're built and installed properly, will almost always "just work". And second, the "Ship with KDE" recommendation. It's so dumb that you even have to put a "this is controversial" disclaimer on it. KDE is Free Software. It is no less Free than Gnome. Gnome is no more Free than it. End of story. And KDE is better. So the decision is blazingly obvious, IMO. ____Not the real rusty Oh yeah I know what you're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense to me. ____Not the real rusty Three Weeks Without K5 As previously mentioned, that sucked. I had a regular round of sites, but there just isn't anything else quite like K5 on the web, that I could find. Others are like Thorazine -- they keep the bug hallucinations away, but it's just not quite the same. I spent my time looking at Metafilter, Doc, OJR (look for an article there about us next week! :-)), El Reg, Meg, Driph, Matt, and assorted sundry others. Oddly, I didn't read Slashdot significantly more than I did while K5 was up. I thought I would, but it just doesn't hold me anymore. I guess my taste has changed out from under me, without my noticing. Another thing I definitely noticed was the strong desire to post diaries, and not being able to. I swear, ten times a day I'd think "I should post that!" only to realize... And I wasn't a real prolific diarist before. Strange how that works, huh? Well, welcome back, everyone. :-) Metaflter I commented a lot more on MeFi. But it was frustrating, because there's no threads there. You can fake it by addressing someone directly, but it's just not the same. IMO lack of threads leads to a lot of people listing their opinion in a row, and no real interaction between the vast majority of people. Which is OK in it's place, but I missed the actual person-to-person discussion here, a lot. ____Not the real rusty SA and MeFi About Metafilter: Yeah, it took me a while to adjust. It's a whole different feel than here, and the "mode" of reading is different. I got into it though. SA: lowtax has been known to crop up here every now and then. I'm surprised they banned you for that. Then, I have no idea how their forums are run, so who knows. Something I forgot to mention above but became a mainstay is Jim Romensko's Obscure Store, which also is very cool. I wish there were comments. :-) ____Not the real rusty Right here I was right here at my desk, typing 'maint-up' to revert the proxy apaches back to normal mode instead of "maintenance" mode. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes kuro5hin-1 is running Scoop and the DB. LVS has them weighted 3:1 in favor of kuro5hin-0 to make up for it, and so far, it's working shockingly well. ____Not the real rusty This is a test This is only a test. Someone said Diary preview wasn't working right... is it? Seems to be so far. Hey, while we're on the subject of things working or not working, why is it so damn hard to find RSS files on so many other sites? Even ones you know have them, half the time they're bloody impossible to locate. And why are Dave Winer's products so bass-ackwards? For example, I'd love to syndicate Doc and JD, but the so-called RSS files produced by Manila are just horribly broken. I find it unlikely that two different admins have misconfigured their sites in the exact same way, so that must be how they're supposed to work. And don't even get me started on Manila's commenting interface... Huh That's gotta be your proxy. Scoop doesn't insert things in links, at all. Like I said elsewhere, turn off the proxy and try it. ____Not the real rusty Web of trust The web of trust thing would be the only solution likely to "fix" it in a long-term, community-centered way. It would be a lot of work though. Considering we're really only dealing with two people here, I'm more than willing to keep an eye out and just roll back abuse as it happens. ____Not the real rusty But... ...then I'd have to get a job. Screw that! :-) ____Not the real rusty Much more direct Obviously, I fit into some kind of mythical third category, since many of my comments end up looking like: # D'oh! I'm an idiot. Maybe "bad programmers who don't think they're good"? ____Not the real rusty Variable names Naturally, it would have to also search n replace on variable names. So that $counter becomes $count_my_hairy_balls_you_slut, and so on. That's really where your themes would come in... ____Not the real rusty Otis More about Otis AFB: I used to go to school on the base (it was a private middle/high school that leased a building on the base), and Otis was not, then, one of your more combat-ready installations. AFAIK, it has since been even further decommissioned, to hold only a bare skeleton crew. I'm not at all surprised that planes from Otis couldn't make it to NYC in time to do anything useful, even without paranoid copnspiracy. ____Not the real rusty What's wrong with my haircut!? (NT) ____Not the real rusty Heh I know, I was kidding. That picture is about two years out of date. Not that my hair looks that different -- it's natural brown again now, instead of blonde. And shorter. But it grows dead straight, there's really nothing I can do with it other than the standard short back and sides. It doesn't even have a natural part. ____Not the real rusty Fun with Vladinator Well, I tried. I really, really tried. I was always good to Vlad. I listened to his ideas. I did an interview for his website. I enabled accounts for his friends that seemed to have been disabled for no good reason. I thought we had an understanding. And this is what I get. Oh well. Blah Anyway, I wouldn't be too hard on Vladinator. He's been on the receiving end of a modstorm for the past few days, and from what I've heard, he isn't the most rational in times like that. And y'know what I've been doing the last few days? Keeping out the (persistent) nut who's been attacking him. I'm standing there barring the way, and he stabs me in the back. Despite all this rhetoric, I deeply don't care about the actual ratings. They'll never do anything to me anyway. But it's the principle of the thing. I'm disappointed in him. Despite all the crap that gets talked about Vlad, I always thought he was an OK guy. I guess I was wrong, and they were right. ____Not the real rusty Ha! That page totally cracks me up. I stumbled across that about a year ago. "10-year-old boy into fireman uniforms and bondage. Usually top but versatile. Is Rusty a top or a bottom, Father?" Genius. Sheer genius. But now you owe me serious consideration of the pros and cons of naming your firstborn Kuro5hin. Oh, and yeah, all those accounts were the same person. Wait, were you being mock-surprised? ____Not the real rusty Appreciation Nah, I get tons of appreciation. More than enough to make up for stuff like this. Currently, the ratio stands at ~20,000 people who kick ass, and two annoying fools. I can live with that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Conversation The way I approach it, there is no "point", other than to test and refine my thinking against a sharply opposing view. Sometimes my ideas prove to be pretty resilient, sometimes they fall apart. Basically, I believe that discussing things, and being exposed to different points of view (even, and perhaps especially ones we totally disagree with) makes us better people. It's not a battle, and if you approach it that way, it will seem pointless, because rarely does anyone obviously change their mind. However, I know that over the two years I've been running the site, I've drifted significantly away from the fairly hardline Libertarian views I started with. I credit discussion with people here (and discussion between others, that I read) with broadening my perspective of what might be a workable political reality. And anyway, it's just fun sometimes. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hell yeah You tell em... ...potty mouth. :-) ____Not the real rusty Something done about it This twit has created a whole passel of accounts. He's the same guy who has a hair in his ass about Adequacy, too. Humorless, self-righteous, abusive nitwit, in short. All his accounts have been anonymized, and his IP subnet banned. I'd go through and reverse all his ratings, but it's a lot of effort surrently. Sorry about those. I will be adding some stuff to make it harder to create accounts. Specifically, there will be a "Type what you see in this image" field on the new account page. It shouldn't be any trouble to humans, and will nip this scripted-account crap in the bud. No, that doesn't fix everything, and sooner or later some other idiot will come along and try something similar, and we'll have to deal with that too. Eventually, I'll get sick of it, and throw my hands up and quit and the internet will suck just a little bit more. Hopefully that day is a ways off yet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Chip! Wow. A Perl God. Here. On my website! :-) Welcome to K5, umm, extremely late. Looks like you've been here for a while. How did I not notice? And more importantly, welcome to the Rest of the World. :-) I never knew you were a JW. Incidentally, did you ever go to the main Watchtower Compund (whatever they call it) in Brewster NY? My wife grew up right down the street from what is apparently JW World HQ. Alright, it's really early AM and this isn't holding together too well. Last note: if you're thinking about this anyway, I'd love an article about your experience with the JW and leaving the church. This diary certainly shows a lot of promise. Flesh it out a little, and it'd make a great article. ____Not the real rusty Thanks Brewster may have been one of those "upstate NY" places. It's about an hour or so north of NYC, right near Danbury CT. Very large "campus" type compound on a hillside overlooking a valley? I look forward to your stories. And I'm blushing from all those nice things in the postscript. Thank you. I needed some encouragement today. ____Not the real rusty I feel like a rock star Just had an interesting conversation with Greg Beato, who's writing an article on "the new web 'zines" for Spin Magazine. Thoughtful guy, and the level of clue was about 10,000% higher than the Wired person I talked to a few months ago. Apparently he was at my ONA talk. On the downside, I think I'm now in a public feud with Fred Durst. No, not really. We talked about... How and why K5 encourages original content, unlike the majority of weblogs. How we've managed to get this big without going completely to hell, quality-wise. My theory is the sense of collective ownership that I try my damndest to encourage-- that it's not "my site", but "our site" (and mostly "your site"). How sites like K5 are different from sites like Salon, Slate, et al. The "first wave" of independent web magazines. I expounded at much too great legth and none too much clarity about the importance of having a personality, a human voice, on the other end of the wire. Idea that sites started by traditional media people are afraid to give up control, and feel that they have to stick by the "brand" concept-- that the Salon.com brand is a guarantee of quality and accuracy, in the same way newspapers "brand" all their stuff. Our way is more like the K5 "brand" is (hopefully) an indication that there's likely to be interesting stuff said, and as for it's accuracy or reliability, you're going to have to decide for yourself. Talked business. How can stuff like this support itself? (Me: TextAds) How can sites like this potentially expand to paying authors? (Me: I don't really know yet, but I'd love to be the one to figure it out. :-)) Lots of other stuff that I'm forgetting, and will probably never get printed anywhere. It's only a 1,000 word piece, about much more than just us. Still, interesting conversation. I'll post a heads up when it's on the newsstands. I know See, the joke was, I talked to a rock-n-roll magazine, and it seems like everyone else who's ever done that has ended up in a feud with Durst... Oh, never mind. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah My posse got my back, hells yeah. And hey, yo, the new album's droppin on the 21st. Mad flava, yo. We going intercontinental wit' all da shizzy. Peace out, and no love to da playa hataz! ____Not the real rusty Us paying authors How can sites like this potentially expand to paying authors? Er, not very well phrased, but I meant "How could a site like K5 be able to pay authors for their work?" I doubt we ever will, here, because that isn't really our style. But I would like to see something like K5, where writers are paid for their effort. ____Not the real rusty To be perfectly clear I don't want to do this on K5. What I meant was that it would be interesting to work out how one could run a K5-like site where authors are paid for their work. I think things work well here, and I like the "unprofessional" (in the best sense of the word) writing here. With that totally clear, I would have some issues with your idea, the "pay to read" model. I think that's a bad way to do it. I really like the fact that most of the web is free to read at any time, and I don't want to contribute to more "hidden material". So could there be a way to do it without walling off paid content entirely? I think so-- basically, it rests on being a small, lean organization. Figure it this way. To attract and keep an interested audience, you'd need maybe four or five good stories a day. Think small, call it three and figure that you can accept a few freely-offered pieces to fill in. So, three stories a day, $300.00 a story (ok, kind of cheap (isn't it?), but I'm just figuring out if it could work at all). That's about $4500 a week in writer fees. So, for it to work, on even a minimal level, we need to figure out how to bring in $4500 a week. The first thing I'd do is make commenting a subscriber-only feature, after a very limited "lure-in" period. I'm guessing that'd cut accounts by about 90% from if it was free (rule-of-tens), but that'd still leave some chance of making it. 900 $5/month subscribers would cover it. This could also be made more attractive by offering people free months to try it out (and kickstart the conversation) and whatnot. Supplement that with some form of advertising, either textads or more traditional web ads, and it could conceivably work, but probably only if it was, well, good enough. In case anyone didn't read the top carefully, this is not a plan for K5. I like how things are here. This is speculation about a theoretical imaginary site that doesn't exist! :-) ____Not the real rusty It is fun :-) ...and could, perhaps, work as a kind of "offshoot" of K5. Well, at least in the sense that if I were to try to do it, it would kind of automatically be an offshoot, anyway. I'd make it it's own thing though. Er, first, to correct my numbers above. I righteously screwed up: you'd need more like 3600 subscribers to actually make payroll using my estimates above. That would be tough, especially at first. It could be offset by advertising though. More ideas-- expanding the "pay to play" concept, it could work as a system just like K5 but where everything you normally do with a free account here could be done with a paid account there. That is, subscribers would be able to vote on free submissions, and maybe even on paid submissions. The queue could work as basically a talent pool. Write something really good for free once, and people would be much more likely to accept your pitches for paid articles in the future. Basically, give me $60,000 and I could probably make this work. The key, alluded to above somewhere, is the fact that it's lightweight, and really uses the power of the web to keep things small, cheap, and easy. Salon, in it's day, burned $5 million per quarter. That's just absurd. This whole operation we're discussing could live on $240,000 a year. And what you'd end up with would basically be what Salon should have been to begin with. If it made it through three months, I think you'd be past the hurdle. If you could self-support at that point, then the thing would be proving it had enough value to be self-perpetuating. After that, the more people like it, the better you can make it. And hey, if it dies after three months, someone's only out a few thousand. C'mon, I know there's some dotcom IPO rich guy reading this. Hook me up. Let's show them how it should have been done! :-) ____Not the real rusty Beato's comments on this diary He emailed me after I posted this, and noted that (I hope he doesn't mind my quoting...): also, re: Durst and his feuds, ironically i was there to witness the first-ever meeting between Durst and eminem (http://www.soundbitten.com/bizkit.html). they were friendly at first, but i guess success changes everything. I replied that... One day, you can tell someone else "Yeah, Rusty and Matt Haughey used to be tight, but I guess all the fame and money went to their heads." ;-) I told Bret about all this, and she said: B: "So, he's like, interviewed rock stars, and now he's talking to you?" R: "Yeah." B: "That's funny. He was probably like 'No! I don't want to have to write the geek article!'" But I'm 'a tell y'all the real real. I'm 'a blow up, and I'll have all the money, and the cars, and the classy hos, and me and my posse gonna step on your glasses and leave you cryin at the back of the VMAs. So take that, Howie you no-talent bitch. :-) (I really should be a rock star. I'd be damn good at it. And I don't mean all that above, Matt. I'll lend you a classy ho anytime.) ____Not the real rusty Angry man You seem to be a very angry person. And I still think you're misusing the word "socialist". I do not think that means what you think it means. ____Not the real rusty Socialists ...socialistic regimes (lenin, stallin, mussolini etc)... None of those were socialist. Modern France is socialist. The UK is, to a large degree, socialist (though less so every year, it seems). Lenin was a communist, Stalin was, well, a Stalinist (ok, communist, but a particularly nasty brand generally known as Stalinism), and Mussolini was a fascist. None of these things are socialist. ____Not the real rusty As if! Like you were ever trusted! ;-) ____Not the real rusty I know I was just kidding. :-) And yeah, setting your clock forward a year would do it. ____Not the real rusty And why do... ...some diary readers feel the need to tell us they don't want to know personal stuff periodically? Ahh, The Great Cycle of Life. People write, other people tell them not to write what they wrote, and on... ____Not the real rusty And furthermore... ...why is Carnage4Life following me around giving all my comments fives! Dude, I already like you, but we're simply never going to have sex. No matter how many fives you give me. Ever. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Heh (NT) ____Not the real rusty And why do... ...I have nothing to say that fits into this format? :-) Ahh, the old times. It's good to know you still remember. Those were the good old days weren't they? You were gone for a while, it seems. Good to see you back and stirring the shit again. ____Not the real rusty "The Margins" Heh. Margins my ass. I have the logs. /section/Diary/ is fourth most hit path, after /, /modsub, and /favicon.ico. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er, more... And, I'd like to note, /section/__all__ is fifth, with about half the hits as the diary section (so far this month, anyway). Chew on that, you so-called margin dweller! It's like when we all simultaneously found out that everyone else was listening to Nirvana too... ____Not the real rusty Lucky bastard Dick Dale rules. What ever happened to the Deltones though? ____Not the real rusty Whatever Some people will leap on the thinnest excuse to be pedantic. Ignore them. ____Not the real rusty Nevertheless Your response may have been what the original one was trying to say. It makes sense to me. Nevertheless, the tone of the original response was extremely condescending and pedantic, leaping all over the "not everybody is in the US you know!" bandwagon. I have nothing interesting to say about the content of the comment or the response, other than that the original response was extremely pedantic and off-putting. ____Not the real rusty Us too "Little girls panties" and all that crap. Last month that was almost all our top search strings. Creepy. ____Not the real rusty Blech All those clones are now "Anonymous," which means they can't post or rate or do anything that the anonymous user can't do. It's a pain in the ass to actually reverse ratings, so that's probably not going to happen. Sorry. Also, they all were created with sneakemail.com accounts (and from the same IP, if you were wondering if it really was clones), so sneakemail is also banned as a valid domain with which to create accounts. ____Not the real rusty How to pull statistics out of your ass, by Jakob Nielsen I know, two diaries in less than 1/2 hour. But screw it, this is hilarious. Please, oh please, read the rest. You may face losses over over $463 trillion per minute if you don't! In his Oct 28 Alertbox column, Jakob Nielsen at last finally drowns in the ever-increasing tarpits of his own wild-eyed, drooling hyperbole. The poor quality of Microsoft Windows costs the world economy $170 billion per year in lost productivity due to crashes... We are probably talking at least a trillion dollars lost each year... Supposedly, Windows XP is 10 times more stable than previous versions. Let's hope that's true. But, even if the loss from crashes is reduced from $170 billion per year to $17 billion per year, we still have a trillion-dollar loss left, since XP will not enhance users' understanding and control of technology. [All links and emphasis Nielsen's] So what, you may be wondering, does he cite to justify these towering loss estimates? Nothing! That's right. Go read it yourself. No justification whatsoever. As far as I can tell, he just made them up! All I can say is, Jakob Nielsen is costing the world $575 billion a year in utter blithering uselessness. Wanna know why? Cause I said so, and I have a Ph.D. and 28 years experience using computers! That's why! You should... ...definitely try not to look at it then. ____Not the real rusty S'True I don't disagree with everything he says. He has pointed out some sensible things about designing usable web sites. But every once in a while (and more lately, it seems) he comes up with a doozy like this one. And don't even get me started on micropayments. :-) ____Not the real rusty Obviously Obviously the Taliban is much more usable than the American military. They must have better navigation, or maybe micropayments! ____Not the real rusty What if... What if you were just casually browsing the web one day, and saw the FBI's pictures of the anthrax letters, and recognized the handwriting? And what if it was your handwriting? Of course, it's not mine. :-) But I was just looking at them and wondering "what if." How weird would that be? What would you do? Assuming, of course, that you had no knowlege of writing or sending them, because if you were consciously the anthrax guy, it wouldn't be an interesting question at all. In other news, you apparently can't buy coal online. Our house has a nifty little potbellied coal stove, which we'd like to fire up, so I was looking to see if there was anyplace you could actually order coal online. Seems not. I found two places you could call or email to order some, but no online coal store. There's a tight market niche for someone... Also, watched the repeat of 24 tonight, and it was pretty tight. Keifer Sutherland rules. I think I'm the only Keifer Sutherland fan I know, but he is the man. Now he just needs to make a movie with Keanu, and maybe Brad Pitt. All underrated actors, IMO, though Pitt is getting a better rep lately. Check out Chris "The Self-Important Blowhard" Locke vs. Dave "The Other Self-Important Blowhard" Winer in a steel-cage blogfight. I hate to say it, but I'm on Winer's side in this one. Memes are old. MLP is not cool anymore. Link-whoring is so last July. Let me expound on Chris Locke for a minute. Chris Locke is an almost unique creature in the internet ecology. He's like a football star: just smart enough to play the game, but just dumb enough to think it matters. His books are essentially a tortuous process of pointing out the obvious to those even dumber than he is. Don't get me (too) wrong. I agree with a lot of what he says, especially the points in his latest effort, "Gonzo Marketing". He just fits right into that niche of smart enough to figure out what's next, but dumb enough to care whether Melinda Marketing over at Ogilvy ever picks up on it. Whereas most of us would read "Gonzo" and go, "Duh," he realizes that this stuff is not obvious to the rank and file mass-media automatons, and, even more astoundingly, actually spends time trying to enlighten them. I still can't decide whether that's admirable or despicable. Well, either way, personally, I think the guy's an ass, which makes me lean toward the latter. Matter of fact... I had a nifty idea related to that the other day. Similar, but much, much cooler. I may do it. We'll see. Mwahahaha. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yay! Have you seen Flatliners? And Lost Boys? The two canonical Keifie films, if you ask me. Yeah, I call him Kiefie. So what? ____Not the real rusty Nah, it's not yours Your handwriting is smoother, more self-assured than that. Although I do have to say, yours was the first mail I've gotten from someone I don't know since all this started, and I was a teeny bit nervous opening it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Rock I love it. Here's an idea for any would-be parodist out there. Put together a parody site, exactly identical, except with the brand "Pornsleth", and instead of all this stuff, photoshop up some pr0n images with "painting" scribbles all over them. Oh, and the other things should all be etched "LOVE YOU ART FUCKERS" instead of "FUCK YOU ART LOVERS". Hell, from the looks of things, they'd probably just call it edition 2 and sell it themselves. ____Not the real rusty All of the above Actually, the first thing I'd do is go outside and finish raking all the goddamn leaves. ____Not the real rusty All My Darling Daughters ...which appears in Fire Watch, is the Connie Willis story you're thinking of. And it's really disturbing. ____Not the real rusty What kind of country is it? What kind of country is it we live in when fucking a live raccoon is a crime, but fucking a dead one isn't? ____Not the real rusty Thanks! Thanks. Now, if you'll just sit on these eggs for a few months, I think all your problems will be over... ____Not the real rusty Stephen Jay Gould My ex-roommate in college once used the urinal next to Stephen Jay Gould in a public men's room. He reports that not only did Gould not wash his hands, he also didn't bother to flush. I believe my roommate yelled something rude at him when he was leaving, but now I don't remember what it was. I do remember it was funny. ____Not the real rusty Rusty's Vague Recipes: Shrimp Scampi Bret and I both like to cook, but our typical method is to have some vague idea what would taste good, and to use whatever we have around to make something. So, along those lines, I think I'll start putting recipes here once in a while, when we make something good. Not being one for measuring, they will generally be an idea of how to make something, rather than those annoying "cup of this, teaspoon of that" robotic precision recipes you usually see. So, without further ado: Your Basic Shrimp Scampi. Ingredients: Some shrimp (peeled) A couple of peppers (different colors look pretty) A lot of garlic Some onions (we used green onions) A lot of butter Some olive oil Salt, pepper, paprika, and some spicy stuff Some spaghetti Boil up your spaghetti water, and throw in the pasta. Chop up all the veggies to whatever size you like them. Melt butter and olive oil in a pan (use too much butter: I like about a stick for a two-person dinner). Throw in veggies. Let 'em sizzle for a bit, and throw in some paprika, salt, pepper, and spicy stuff. You know, hot peppers, creole seasoning, whatever will give it a litle kick. Make sure you use a lot of garlic. Like two or three cloves. Throw in your shrimp. Wait until cooked. Drain spaghetti, and mix it all together. Serves between one and 100, depending on how much stuff you used. :-) You may substitute virtually anything for any ingredient, but you might not end up with the same meal, exactly. Nazi Cooking Yeah. I might have to check that out. Of course, I'll probably replace all the meatless ingredients with meaty ones, but still. I hate the fascist element in cookbooks. They almost all have these two terrible flaws: They act like you must have the exact amounts of the exact ingredients, or forget about it. And they always require stuff that no one ever has, like fresh cilantro or peeled guava bottoms or whatever. I'd like to see those prissy little fascists come to the island here, and make a great meal with the fine selection of four vegetables and three meats that we have available on any given day.1 And... Despite all the absurd precision in the above, they always gloss over the really hard confusing part of the recipe, and never put any pictures to say "It's supposed to look like this." So you get this "do exactly this, add four micrograms of that, sift with a number 15 Cookmatix sifter (aluminum), and then rapidy flombertize the mixture while spoon-Dechampineeing the yoodleywhat." Leaving us, of course, going "What the hell does "flombertize" mean!!??" Cookbooks, generally, suck. They need to find some humans to write them, is my conclusion. ------------- 1 Baking books are excepted from this criticism, because there, it really does matter exactly how much of what you use. ____Not the real rusty Similar We actually make that all the time, except we usually throw in sliced up kielbasa (polish sausage, probably any kind would do). Deeee-licious, and really easy, too. Make a lot, it keeps well in the fridge. ____Not the real rusty After cooking? I much prefer to peel them before cooking, myself. I don't know if it's easier afterward, but they will be hot, and in a recipe like this, covered with butter and whatnot. I think it's better here to peel them first. More handy shrimp info: raw shrimp are grayish or slightly blueish, but they turn a pretty pink when they're cooked. It's awfully nice of nature to have built such a convenient indicator into one of it's yummiest foods. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hmmmmmmm I don't have the foggiest clue where you are... but I'm still communicating with you. Maybe bin Laden has a Kuro5hin account? Read that over and over... ponder who you're talking to... read a few more times... any ideas starting to form? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Laptops I have no experience with Sony tech support, because I've never needed it. I've had three Sony laptops, two company owned and one (the current picturebook) mine, and never had one break. The picturebook does have this thing it does where the battery clips are a little loose, and it occasionally loses power when I walk around holding it by the battery, but considering how rough I am with it, that's nothing. I keep hearing these reports that Sony stuff breaks quickly, but I've never seen it. ____Not the real rusty So you CLAIM! :-) No problems with mine so far. Except that APM still dosn't work in Linux, but that's not really Sony's fault. ____Not the real rusty And did I mention... ...that I really do pretty much beat on it? It's bag is a soft shoulder-satchel which provides no protection at all, and it's covered, at this point, tens of thousands of miles of various forms of travel with me. I don't, like, throw it at walls or anything, but I don't treat it much more carefully than you would a largish palm pilot. ____Not the real rusty APM/ACPI Ok, I should say that it is Sony's fault that their APM "compatability" is b0rked. But Linux doesn't support ACPI yet, and as far as I can tell, that would work, if it was supported. ____Not the real rusty But he did! When he said... "Where's my toga?" ____Not the real rusty Wait a minute... Maybe that was Socrates. ____Not the real rusty Temporary Of course it's temporary. It's the biggest news story any of us have ever seen in our lives. It just stands to reason that it will be of great discussion interest. Eventually, some other big story will displace it, and everyone will bitch about that being the only thing we talk about. Thus has it always been, thus will it always be. The other eternal fact of the site is that some people will always have a pet topic that they don't want to talk about, and will imagine that every story is about that topic. Let's look at my front page right now: British voting issues Pharmaceutical intellectual property disputes (*) Christmas Round table discussion of who our heroes are Belgian castigation of Antiglob Microsoft settlement Essay on religion (*) USA PATRIOT Act (*) Cleaning the fucking kitchen OSDN/K5 dissolution Cooking for geeks Death by Coke machine XML/Databases Open Source security War in Columbia (*) * Stories which are even tangentially related to, or mention, the war. So we have four out of fifteen front page stories that are even remotely connected to the war. And I think I'm being really generous with the ones that are starred, as none of them are directly about the war at all, but could be argued to have been inspired by things hat wouldn't have happened if it weren' for the terrorism/war situation. Given a close look at what we actually publish, I'm not so worried that we've become a one-trick pony. ____Not the real rusty Spank the Monkey I voted against Spank the Monkey because it didn't work for me. Thus it was not, in fact, absolutely hilarious, but rather vaguely annoying. If it worked for everyone *but* me, and everyone else found it absolutely hilarious, then it would have been posted. It probably still will be posted. That's the way it works. On a general note, I tend to vote against the blogger MLP of the day, because it's probably already been on MetaFilter and the Daypop top 40, and everyone who cares has probably already seen it. The occasional standout is excepted, like I'd have voted FP for "Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies" despite having already seen it, if I'd been around to vote on it. But in general, I don't think the meme-of-the-day adds much here. We have more than enough good original articles, we don't really need the filler. But the great thing about K5 is that that's just my opinion. If I'm in the minority (as often happens), I lose. And that's way cooler than just getting my way all the time. :-) Also, about the impression that a vast majority need to vote for something to get it posted. This is really not true at all. In fact, if something can hang on with a positive score for 350 total votes, chances are extremely good that it will be posted. The auto-post system is really slanted toward posting rather than not posting, which I don't think many people realize or appreciate. The criteria are rock-bottom. Essentially, if something has a score of maybe 30+, and has been around for a day or two, it will almost certainly be posted. Try keeping track of things that aren't overwhelmingly posted or dumped right off, and you may note that most of them do eventually go up. ____Not the real rusty Spam gets weirder every day So, who's interested in US$75,000,000 of Nigerian blood money then? Got this spam on Saturday, purposting to be from the lawyer for Mohammed Abacha, son of ex-Nigerian military governor Sani Abacha. Seems his bank assets have been frozen, and now the poor boy's looking for an international partner to help launder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"invest" some of the cold 75mill he's got stashed away. Bizarre. I'll let the email speak for itself... Return-Path: <cy_dunaka02@yahoo.com> Received: from web21103.mail.yahoo.com (web21103.mail.yahoo.com [216.136.227.105]) by mail.thock.com (Postfix) with SMTP id A188E1F004 for <help@kuro5hin.org>; Sat, 3 Nov 2001 18:36:28 -0600 (CST) Message-ID: <20011104003554.50757.qmail@web21103.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [63.103.143.86] by web21103.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sat, 03 Nov 2001 16:35:54 PST Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 16:35:54 -0800 (PST) From: dunaka cyril <cy_dunaka02@yahoo.com> Subject: TRANSACTION To: cy_dunaka02@yahoo.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii FROM;CYRIL DUNAKA{ESQ} 4TH FLOOR,BUSALI PLAZA, 24 SHOMOLU STREET. LAGOS. NIGERIA JUST YOU AND ME GRACE AND PEACE AND LOVE FROM THIS PART OF THE ATLANTIC TO YOU. I HOPE MY LETTER DOES NOT CAUSE YOU TOO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT AS I WRITE TO YOU IN GOOD FAITH.PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOUR PRIVATE LIFE. I AM BARRISTER CYRIL DUNAKA, I REPRESENT MOHAMMED ABACHA, SON OF THE LATE GEN. SANI ABACHA, WHO WAS THE FORMER MILITARY HEAD OF STATE IN NIGERIA. HE DIED IN 1998. SINCE HIS DEATH, THE FAMILY HAS BEEN LOOSING ALOT OF MONEY DUE TO VINDICTIVE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WHO ARE BENT ON DEALING WITH THE FAMILY. BASED ON THIS THEREFORE,THE FAMILY HAS ASKED ME TO SEEK FOR A FOREIGN PARTNER WHO CAN WORK WITH US AS TO MOVE OUT THE TOTAL SUM OF US$75,000,000.00 (SEVENTY FIVE MILLION UNITED STATESDOLLARS ), PRESENTLY IN THEIR POSSESSION. THIS MONEY WAS OF COURSE, ACQUIRED BY THE LATE PRESIDENT AND IS NOW KEPT SECRETLY BY THE FAMILY. THE SWISS GOVERNMENT HAS ALREADY FROZEN ALL THE ACCOUNTS OF THE FAMILY IN SWITZERLAND, AND SOME OTHER COUNTRIES WOULD SOON FOLLOW TO DO THE SAME. THIS BID BY SOME GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS TO DEAL WITH THIS FAMILY HAS MADE IT NECESSARY THAT WE SEEK YOUR ASSISITANCE IN RECEIVING THIS MONEY AND IN INVESTING IT ON BEHALF OF THE FAMILY. THIS MUST BE A JOINT VENTURE TRANSACTION AND WE MUST ALL WORK TOGETHER.SINCE THIS MONEY IS STILL CASH, EXTRA SECURITY MEASURES HAVE BEEN TAKEN TO PROTECT ITFROM THEFT OR SEIZURE, PENDING WHEN AGREEMENT IS REACHED ON WHEN AND HOW TO MOVE IT. I HAVE PERSONALLY WORKED OUT ALL MODALITIES FOR THE PEACEFUL CONCLUSION OF THIS TRANSACTION. THE TRANSACTION DEFINITELY WOULD BE HANDLED IN PHASES AND THE FIRST PHASE WILL INVOLVE THE MOVING OFUS$25,000,000.00( TWENTY FIVE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS). MY CLIENTS ARE WILLING TO GIVE YOU A REASONABLE PERCENTAGE OF THIS MONEY AS SOON AS THE TRANSACTION IS CONCLUDED. I WILL, HOWEVER,BASED ON THE GROUND THAT YOU ARE WILLING TO WORK WITH US AND ALSO ALL CONTENTIOUS ISSUES DISCUSSED BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT OF THIS TRANSACTION. YOU MAY ALSO DISCUSS YOUR PERCENTAGE BEFORE WE START TO WORK. AS SOON AS I HEAR FROM YOU, I WILL GIVE YOU ALL NECESSARY DETAILS AS TO HOW WE INTEND TO CARRY OUT THE WHOLE TRANSACTION. PLEASE, DO NOT ENTERTAIN ANY FEARS,AS ALL NECESSARY MODALITIES ARE IN PLACE, AND I ASSURE YOU OF ALL SUCCESS AND SAFETY IN THIS TRANSACTION. PLEASE, THIS TRANSACTION REQUIRES ABSOLUTE CONFIDENTIALITY AND YOU WOULD BE EXPECTED TO TREAT IT AS SUCH UNTIL THE FUNDS ARE MOVED OUT OF THIS COUNTRY.PLEASE, YOU WILL ALSO IGNORE THIS LETTER AND RESPECT OUR TRUST IN YOU BY NOT EXPOSING THIS TRANSACTION, EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED. I LOOK FORWARDS TO WORKING WITH YOU AND PRAY THAT THE YEAR 2001 WILL BRING US ALL BOUNTIFUL HARVEST. THANK YOU. TRULY YOURS Dunaka There you have it. Note, Mr. Dunaka, that the best way to ensure "absolute confidentiality" is not to send unsolicited email to total strangers. And I will tell you at great length where you can put your "trust in me to not expose this transaction" if you'll just meet me in a public place on American spoil at a pre-specified date and time. I'm sure a few friends of mine would be very interested in this pile of cash you claim to have. I'm so terribly torn on this The question of where to put punctuation in quotes causes me great personal pain. See, on the one hand, the writing Nazi in me screams that punctuation goes inside the quote, like: How can you possibly justify your statement that "punctuation always goes outside the quotes?" But on the other hand, the programmer in me reviles at the idea that I'm quoting something that isn't actually in the original quote, and says that precision demands: How can you possibly justify your statement that "punctuation always goes inside the quotes"? Then the writing nazi tells me that looks terrible, and the programmer says screw you, at least it's accurate, and so on... I am a man at war with myself. ____Not the real rusty Learn something new every day Wow, and here I am being all indignant. I guess if my vice ran more to greed than vanity, I'd be out some cash then, huh? :-) ____Not the real rusty Who cares who wins? ...as long as the Yankees lose. :-) I'm from Massachusetts, and therefore genetically selected to hate the Yankees. I don't care about baseball at all, in any way, but to hear that the Yankees lost still makes me happy in some way I can't quite define. I can only chalk it up to deep genetic memory. ____Not the real rusty The sox Oddly enough, I don't even root for the Red Sox. Couldn't care less about them. I suspect that's not really part of the inborn component of being from Mass. It seems to be limited to hating the Yankees. ____Not the real rusty See that! Your Dad's from Boston. My theory that it's genetic gains evidence. ____Not the real rusty Crighton and Koontz Even more entertaining is the assertion that Michael Crighton and Dean Koontz will be read in 50 years, because "they're about the only two I'm familiar with." I think that pretty much says it all, right there. ____Not the real rusty Live From the North Woods I think I woke up screaming....--Stabbing Westward I did in fact wake up screaming, or trying to anyway. Weird nightmare to start the day off. So I naturally got up, fired up the woodstove, and... checked my email. Well, it ain't 1852 anymore, you know? We're in New Hampshire, having a farewell bash for Phill, who's off to Scotland for a year on Monday. Climbed yesterday, and went to the Woodstock Inn for dinner. The brewpub there has a back bar area with these glass-topped tables, and the tradition is people shove business cards or notes or whatever under the glass top. So if anyone's in New Hampshire, find the table in the back corner under the TV, and there should be a "Benevolent Dictator" card in it. :-) We came home, and Bret get this terrible headache, so we went to bed at like 9. I woke up around 3, and went back to sleep, then, after a series of other odd dreams, I had this doozy. I'm walking through the woods on a hiking trail. Sunny, peaceful. I come to a clean white pickup truck parked in the trail. The tailgate is down. "Odd," I have time to think. I hear a noise behind me, and turn around. Right behind me is a large man, wearing a white button-down shirt. He's blonde, and very pale. His eyes are ice blue. He takes a step toward me, and says, very camly "I don't think I'm comfortable with you being here, thief." He reaches out, and with one hand, pushes my head backward into the bed of the truck. The he raises his other hand, and I see that he's holding a hammer, with the claw end facing me. He raises it above my head, and I finally start trying to scream. Something was wrong with my neck, though, and all I could get out were these whimpering noises... That's when I woke up, making those noises. Freaked Bret out, obviously. I'm not sure that's ever happened before, in fact. I usually don't react physically to dreams. This one was so clear and real though... I feel better now though. Woodstoves cure all ills. Hey, check out this week's NTK. K5 finally got a mention. They claim they haven't mentioned us before because everybody already knows about us. Yeah, sure, what-EVER! NTK rules. :-) Whatever Some days, maybe it's 45, maybe it's 50, but you just need a woodstove. I always thought chimneys get creosote no matter what you do -- that it was a by-product of burning wood, and eventually you just have to clean it out? ____Not the real rusty Right "Site News" is a section only admins can post to, and when we post there, normally, the stories go to section. This seemed like a reasonable way to get site updates out of my diary and onto the main site where people could see them, and avoiding voting didn't seem like much of a loss. In this case, I thought the announcement was important enough that it should have a front page option, but I felt uncomfortable posting it there directly, so I just submitted it to the queue. I figured it'd be resoundingly front-paged, but the process matters, so it went through normal voting. ____Not the real rusty No no no! "users", "mojo", and "nickname". All lowercase. Anyway, like I need to do that with all these fawning syncophants around! ;-) (Just kidding!) ____Not the real rusty Ghost accounts I do have those urges from time to time, but I've found, through trial and error (mostly elsewhere), that indulging them never ever makes me feel better. In fact, I'm usually horribly embarrassed about five minutes later. So instead I take a deep breath and go clean the kitchen or something, while mumbling under my breath. The urges go away pretty quickly. I do have a couple accounts I've used to post somewhat wacky stories. I don't do it often (I think maybe twice ever). But you never know. :-) Anyway, "rusty" on K5 is kind of a subset of me in real life. I think most of you would be surprised at how sarcastic and cynical I usually am IRL. On K5, I have a job to do, which does require that I suppress some of the grottier bits of my character. It's a sin of omission-- I don't say anything here I don't actually believe. But I sometimes don't say other things I also believe. ____Not the real rusty /me wipes lipstick off ass Heh. :-) I appreciate the vote of confidence. It's good to know that just because we may disagree politically, we can still respect each other and behave like humans. That's far too rare today. I think one of the reasons K5 works as well as it does is because it really is everyone's site, as opposed to my site that I let everyone participate in. That's really important. So everything I do is weighed against that principle, and I try to make sure that I exercise "admin power" only when it's absolutely necessary, and there's no other way to solve a problem. I'm obviously not perfect, and have screwed up on this before, but I try. This may be ethical, but it's also practical. As soon as I slide into hypocrisy, this thing basically becomes meaningless. It may survive, but it wouldn't be what it is now, and it wouldn't be anything special. That would make the two years of my life (so far) committed to K5 an almost total waste of time. Rusty's First Law of Ethics: The best way to remain ethical is to paint yourself into a corner where you can't be anything else. :-) ____Not the real rusty Trick or Treat! At 25, I'm a little old for trick or treating. The neighbors might think it was odd. So I'm trick or treating here on K5. I arrive at your doorstep dressed as a lobster. Give me candy! Mmmmm Lobster bisque. If you're ever in Vermont, Simon Pierce has the best lobster bisque in the world. ____Not the real rusty Mwaahahahahahah You asked for it! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Looks fine in Konqueror Except for the unrendered <BR>. ____Not the real rusty Cool! I look forward to it. It's badass of you to write your crappy speed-novel totally in public, and I think you should get some kind of special prize just for that. :-) ____Not the real rusty What'll really bake your noodle... ...is when I express negative feelings about Kuro5hin.org, myself, Inoshiro, my wife, and the submission queue. What'll you vote for then, eh? :-) ____Not the real rusty M$ FUD!!!! D00d! j00 said the Lunix Kernal sux0rz! j00 must be a M$ astroturfer! Begone foul demon! Get thee behind me, Satan! I cast the Microsoft OUT of my system! ____Not the real rusty You bastards. They were right! You are afraid of the truth! Amusingly, I say the comment title/rating in my "your comments" list, and though "1.71! Someone doesn't have a sense of humor!" Then I saw the replies, and realized that someone was me. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Yay! I know I occasionally mock you, and virtually never agree with your politics, but I think you have great potential. If it's not just a transparent attempt to curry favor, the above would be a very good start. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Or we could... ...vote against them? I have been. I think one thing that maybe needs to be more clear to people is that just because it's well-written doesn't mean you have to vote for it. Sometimes articles that would otherwise be good are just submitted at the wrong time. I know I like a mix of stuff here, which means that if 80% of articles submitted are about the war, I'm going to end up voting against probably 70% of all articles. I'm only voting for the very best war-related stuff right now, which I haven't seen any of in days. Editorial power should be wielded with an eye toward the site as a whole, as well as the immediate article. I think many people are voting with a lack of the big picture. ____Not the real rusty More stupidity marlowe jumps on the bandwagon at IWeThey. Check out my flame toward the bottom of the thread. God, that felt good. :-) The whole "How dare you say that Open Source isn't the cure for everything?!" attitude makes me cringe, and is what puts people off Free software. It's always sad to see zealotry rear its ugly head. ____Not the real rusty The Three Dweebs What!? Are you insane!? Those guys rule. This is easily the most entertaining Buffys been in three seasons. I absolutely love these villains-- it's like a return to the old days, when villains were evil, yeah, but kind of funny too. I mean the mayor was a hoot, when he wasn't killing people. And I'm not just saying this because everyone so far has nailed me as a Dweeb archetype. :-) ____Not the real rusty ONA Conference, pt. 2 8 hours of sleep did wonders, and I woke up virtually a new man. Robin made coffee, and we gabbed on the deck for an hour or so. He mentioned that his ISP, Cliq, had just gotten it's first "celebrity" client. Noted tech journalist Scot Hacker had just signed up. I had recently heard the name elsewhere, but I didn't remember in what context. I fooled with a wireless card for a while, but (once again) couldn't get it to work on Robin's network. Called Christina and got the rundown on the Halloween party I missed back home. Finally, at noon, when I was supposed to be already meeting my panel at the conference, I realized I'd better get moving. Showered, and headed off to the People's Republic of Berkeley. My panel was called "Journalism's New Life Forms," and was moderated by JD Lasica. The panel was me, the looking-for-work and eminently knowlegeable Meg Hourihan, renegade reporter-turned-blogger Dan Gillmor (who Robin had earlier described as "the reason the Merc has a good reputation," which I can't disagree with), and Women's eNews founder Rita Henley Jensen. The idea was, I think, to shake up some of the "we're old fashioned journalists" complacency of the Online News Association. This organization is a group of fairly big-name news sites, and seems to seek mainly to lend credibility to journalism online. I'd argue that that mission is accomplished, and they desperately need to start figuring out why their medium isn't the same as print or television, but that's just me. Anyway, they did hold this panel, which is a good start. I arrived half an hour before the panel, and wandered around the Berkeley campus for twenty minutes, until I finally found an ONA person, who gave me accurate, if lengthy, direction to the journalism school. I squeaked in with enough time for a cup of coffee and a trip to the john before showtime. The setup was pretty slick. We each had a table-mic, which laid almost flat on the desk in front of us, and was very unobtrusive. The plan was for each of us to talk for about two minutes, then maybe debate amongst ourselves for a bit, then open it up to the audience. Rita Jensen started, with a CDROM she wanted to play. It was an overview of Women's eNews. Amusingly, JD couldn't figure out how to get the video to display, so all we got was the audio track, with some corporate music, and a voice-over person. There were a couple places where the video was probably shots of the site, which we couldn't see, so it was just the corporate synth music. It was pretty funny. Rita then talked for a further five minutes or so, after which it was my turn, so I delivered my spiel. I didn't read it precisely, but I stuck almost exactly to the plan. A couple phrases I changed or emphasized, but here, essentially, is what I said: I'm Rusty Foster, and I run the site Kuro5hin.org. Kuro5hin is almost unique on the web, in that it's a news and opinion magazine written and edited democratically by all the readers. Anyone can submit a story, anyone can vote on submissions, and the stories with the most votes are posted to the site. I call this "collaborative media." Collaborative in the sense that many people collaboratively write and edit the site, but it's also collaborative in the sense that a story is not a "product," but merely a starting point. Discussion is the ultimate the goal of most stories, and a story isn't considered "complete" if it only includes one voice. To paraphrase Doc Searls, "media are conversations." One effect of this strategy is that "authorship" and "authority" are very much called into question. Who's the "author" of a conversation? Journalism, right now, operates as an industrial process. The reporter collects "raw material" from "sources," and "packages" it all up into a "product." This product is then "delivered" to "eyeballs." It's a very neat, very simple, very 19th century way of doing things. And in a lot of ways, it works really well. You're all evidence of that. But there's something glaringly missing from that model, and in my experience, it's something that people need. Uncertainty. Messiness. Argument. Debate. People know that the world isn't as clear-cut as you all work so hard to make it seem. One "wise man" (or woman!) can't encompass all the possible ways of looking at an issue. JD told us to lob some grenades today, so here's mine, and I'd like you to think about it. Why is it that when I look at any so-called "mainstream" news source online, all I see is a newspaper with pixels? With the full two-way channel of the net at your beck and call, why are you all still just shipping industrially produced blocks of news? Why is that when I look at CNN.com, or MSNBC, or The Washington Post online, all I see are *your* voices? Why are you so afraid of letting everybody else in? Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. :-) Yes, I did smile at the end, and that's the exact text I had in front of me while I was speaking. The funny part was, after I finished, I wanted to take a sip of water from the cup I had, but the combination of the coffee I just finished, the coffee earlier in the morning, and my extreme terror at public speaking rendered me nearly palsied. I looked like a Parkinson's sufferer trying to get the cup of water up to my mouth, and almost sloshed it on me, my hands were shaking so badly. There's at least one video of the panel, which I hope I can link to at some point, and which I hope captured my Jello-like wobbling. I really want to see if it looked as freakish as it felt. It was really hard to get a drink from that cup, which continued to be my bane for the rest of the discussion. Meg talked about Blogger, and only said about half of what I think she wanted to say, to keep things moving along. Meg is first-class, and everyone should hire her to speak at their conference, company, barbeque, or whatever. Dan expanded on what Meg said, and discussed the role of blogging in his professional life, as a journalist. JD asked us one inter-panel question, but I think we were all itching to take questions from the audience, so we kept that to about a minute, and just started Geraldoing the crowd. The microphone girl handed the mic to a sandy-haired thirty-something in the middle of the room... "Hi, my name is Scot Hacker..." Me, from panel: "Hey! I was just talking about you this morning!" Scot: [gives me puzzled look] "Umm. Talk to me after the panel." He then asked a very good question which I totally forget now. You can also see Scot's account of this exchange (second item) in which he calls me "fascinating." I'm touched. :-) By the way, that guy on the right in the picture of me on Scot's page is from American U. and is giving me a hard time about collaborative journalism. He said "There's a name for what you do, it's called "rumor"." He was really unwilling to even consider the idea that professional editors are not necessarily required to produce "real journalism," but he had an interesting point of view, anyway. Questions and answers followed. I will link to the transcript when there is one, so you can get into the topical matter yourself. I can't do it justice, so I'm not even going to try here. I do have to say that I think I kind of monopolized the discussion. I couldn't help myself. I had a lot of stuff I really wanted to say. I think I could have done a two-hour panel by myself on that particular topic. I apologize to my co-panelists for hogging the mic. In the future, though, anyone who wants me for a conference-- give me more time. :-) Overall, it was worth doing, and I'm glad I went. JD informs us that several people told him afterward it was the best panel of the conference. Robin's house Halloween party ensued, with lots of good food, and the usual blend of weirdos. Scot came by in a rubber chicken mask, which he quickly shed, claiming that it caused "blindness and carbon dioxide poisoning simultaneously." I had to leave at 11 to make my 2AM (!!!) flight back out of SFO. Right now, I sit at 40,000 feet in a Delta 737, bound for Dallas, and eventually Boston, and eventually home. It's 7AM, for me, but I have no idea what local time is, or where, exactly, I even am. I just noticed that the snack mix packet has these words on the back: "Produced in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts." Ironically, despite this insane level of red-letter caution, they don't mention that the mix itself actually contains peanuts. You have to dig around in the ingredient list for that info. Weird. Postscript: I'm finally home, and have slept for a few hours, and plan on going back to sleep as soon as this is posted. Long, long weekend. What I'd like to see Well, the obvious low-hanging fruit is that every article published online should have a means of instantly responding, and a means for everyone to keep the discussion in order, like ratings. That's just basic, and at worst, you'd end up with irrelevant comments, that don't add to the story. That case would be equivalent to what we have now, where there are no comments to add to a story. So it can only help, on balance. Beyond that, I'd really like some of the people in the old-guard media to start thinking about the web as a two-way medium, not as a broadcast medium. They're smarter than I am, I'm sure they could come up with some innovative ideas, if they were just framing the question the right way. I don't necessarily think the industrial media has no interest in changing it's ways. I honestly think they're still just conceiving of online news as a new broadcast medium. If I can change that view a little, I've done what I want to. ____Not the real rusty Interesting point The way I tried to explain it was that the "authority" of a story came from the reactions to it, generally. "Web of knowlege" is a good name for it. When you read the Washington Post, you just have to trust what they say, because you assume that they have good sources and good fact-checkers, and a reputation to uphold. Their web is all behind the scenes, though, and you just have to take it on faith. When you read K5, you are the fact checker, so it's really up to you to decide if you believe something or not. Our web of knowlege and context is right there below every story. I personally think this makes for a more engaged and informed reader, but the guy from AU wasn't buying it. He really wants The News to be the province of a select few high priests, who will peer down from their edifices of Ethical Tradition and deliver unto us The Truth. Can you guess how well I think that strategy is working? :-) ____Not the real rusty Maniacal That's about the size of it. It was the second leg of my flight, Dallas to Boston, and I had actually fallen asleep in the terminal in Dallas waiting for the plane to continue, and almost didn't get back on it. But I couldn't sleep on the plane because the damn thing was vibrating too much and making me all twitchy. So yes, I was about to either laugh maniacally or break down in tears, I'm not sure which one. ____Not the real rusty Who knows I forgot to mention in the diary that My Favorite Person Andrew Brandt was there, as was PC World VP and Editorial Director Kevin McKean, and Kevin talked to me after the panel aboout whether I thought PC World could benefit from the kind of reader participation we have, and if I knew anyone who could set up and manage such a thing. So maybe some good did come of it. :-) Hopefully a transcript or video will be out there soon. And I should be more reachable this week. ____Not the real rusty ONA Conference, pt. 1 It's a very strange feeling to leave home, travel all day and end up in a place you're intimately familiar with. It is for me, anyway. I left my house Friday morning at 8AM, took the ferry to Portland, drove to Logan airport in Boston, flew to Atlanta, then flew to SFO. I got to SFO at 8PM Pacific, 12AM RST (Rusty Subjective Time). I shuttled to the rental car area, rented my little Ford whatever, and then, after all that upheaval and distance, found myself on 101, driving North to the Haight; the exact route I had driven home from work every day for 8 months. Part one of my not-so-triumphant return to the Bay area for the Online News Association conference was underway. I had arranged to visit Matt in the old neighborhood, perhaps ill-advisedly, since I had been traveling all day. But I wasn't in town for long, and I thought it would be good to see him again. I drove up to Masonic, had the usual parking hassle, and eventually compromised on a non-space that was only slightly infringing on a driveway. Having tried to get people towed out of my driveway when I lived there, I know how difficult the whole process is, and I was only going to be there for a couple hours, so no big deal, I figured. I failed to take into account that San Francisco hates me, and lives only to cause me misery. Matt and I went up to Magnolia. It was astonishing to see that he and Kay were even less familiar with their immediate neighborhood than I was. I thought I was a hermit, but I knew of at least three restaurants they had never even heard of, three blocks from their apartment. We had a burger and a beer, and talked about being "web celebrities" and how much it sucks running a community site (wink), textads, and all manner of things. Walked back to his apartment, said goodnight, and headed for Hayes, where my car was. Emphasis on was. The car was gone. I walked bleary-eyed up and down Hayes, three blocks in every direction, thinking maybe I had misremembered where I parked, before I finally accepted the truth. I had been towed. Not in town for two hours, and I had already been towed. I began to dimly recall, after the titanic struggle to get out of the Bay Area the first time, how I had vowed never to return. "Ha ha," I laughed, recalling that vow as I bought my tickets for this trip. "How silly I was." Now I remembered why I made that vow. I trudged back to Matt's, wanting to cry. Door intercom: #-4 "Hello?" "Hi Matt. They towed my car." [beat] "Oh. That sucks." [beat] "Do you want me to let you in?" "Um, yeah." Matt let me in, hunted down the SF parking enforcement number, and I called them. At this point, I was faced with the fact that I was driving a rental car, about which all I knew was that it was a Ford, and small. I thought it might be dark red. Model? License plate number? No clue. The (surprisingly personable) woman on the other end of the phone number believed they did have my car, and instructed me to look at my keychain, which did in fact have the car info on it. It turned out to be a Focus, and green. Whatever, I was tired. She directed me to 850 Bryant, where the city would carve it's pound of flesh from my exhausted hide. Thank God for Matt. He gave me a ride down there. I owe him bigtime for his not even questioning that that was what needed to be done. Matt is truly one of life's extremely good people, and you should all give him money, just for being an incredibly high-quality individual. The room where you pay when your car gets towed is tile-floored, with three bulletproof glass windows on one wall. Bizarrely, every wall is wrapped four feet high in that diamond-pattern steel plating they put on the steps of tractor trailer trucks. You get the feeling, as Matt put it, that "if someone went nuts with an automatic weapon in there, they'd just hose the walls down and get on with business." It's the very essence of the municipal building. I shelled out $150 bucks to get my car back, followed the directions around the corner to the unmarked and deserted impound lot, and stood around for twenty minutes trying to get the attention of some kind of attendant, who I presumed must be watching me from parts unknown. Eventually a gate opened, and someone beckoned me into the lot and pointed at my vehicle. I finally got out of town, and honestly really don't plan to go back this time. Now I'm afraid I won't get out at all if I keep pushing my luck. Drove up to the Oakland hills, the familiar route to Robin's house, arrived, drooled incoherently for a few minutes, and crashed in my sleeping bag on the futon. It was a really long day. The only good thing I can say, to close on an up note, is that I remembered the one thing I kind of liked about San Francisco, which is the way that the hills twinkle when you're driving into town from the peninsula at night. On 101, just before Potrero Hill, if you look to the left at night, you can see a starfield of little lights spreading out to the southwest, climbing up the hills. It's striking, and, I think, very pretty. Heh I quoted that because it struck me as so odd at the time. I figured you were half-asleep, because, like, why else would I be ringing your door intercom? It was pretty funny. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mine Hash Marijauana Dexedrine Codeine Ritalin I'm not saying which of those I have had, but only two strike me as anything I'd willingly take. :-) ____Not the real rusty Barlow and Lobbying Barlow's comments on lobbying are in line with what I've heard of him in the past too, and that continues to disappoint me about the EFF. They started out as a lobbying group, initially, but came to the conclusion, as Barlow has, that lobbying means you have to pay off legislators. So instead, they morphed into a legal-aid group. That's nice and all, but it means that fundamentally, the EFF holds no cards. They're a reactive organization -- fighting laws that are already on the books, instead of working to change the idiotic laws as they are being made. So the technology-freedom "lobby" has no voice in Washington. I think what the EFF never figured out is that there are two ways to influence policy. Either you give big bucks, or you assemble a strong voting block, like labor unions and minority activist groups do. All the RIAA cash won't do any good if there's a strong bloc of voters who will not vote for you no matter what. The EFF gave up the fight without even trying that option, IMO. I hope someone will take that mantle back up eventually. ____Not the real rusty Dude That's not my dog! :-) ____Not the real rusty Eventually... Eventually, it happens to us all. "Paradigm" is actually a damn useful word, if the marketroids hadn't gone and ruined it. ____Not the real rusty California Dreaming I came to pretty much the same conclusion about California. Maine's a hell of a lot better. The climate probably wouldn't do much for you though. You might want to take a look at New Mexico. I haven't spent a lot of time there, but I did like what I saw of it. And it has a good climate too. ____Not the real rusty The Mya-morphosis As enani awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a giant cabbit. Mya! ____Not the real rusty Send us a patch :-) I want this feature too, but I haven't gotten to coding it yet. The best way, really, is to get a hold of panner and tell him how incredibly important and cool it would be. He tends to do a lot of the "adding features" stuff to Scoop. ____Not the real rusty So are we Thanks for that petfinder link. We're thinking of adopting a dog too, considering we have a dog-friendly house, and I'm at home all day. I need someone to take me for a walk every night. :-) ____Not the real rusty Boots I have a pair of Asolo boots. They're excellent. Timberland is not the be-all end-all of boots. :-) ____Not the real rusty Journalism's New Life Forms That's the title of a panel I'm doing on Saturday at the Online News Association's annual conference in the People's Republic of Berkeley. JD Lasica is moderating, and he pulled together a page of useful links about blogging, collaborative media, and what-have-you. He is still soliciting "must link" sites or articles or whatever, so if any pop out of your bookmarks, post below! Otherwise, he's hit some good stuff. If you're into this kind of thing, have a read or three. Sure I did. :-) ____Not the real rusty Y'know what's weird I could honestly never get into the Beatles. I see these people around who are fanatically devoted to them, and yet the music just does nothing for me. I mean, it's ok-- I don't dislike them. But I could probably live out the rest of my life without hearing another Beatles song and not miss them. Diff'rent strokes I guess. There was a period of about three years though where Led Zeppelin was the only music I listened to. I wonder if there are just basically Beatles people and Zeppelin people. Maybe it's a matter of brain chemistry. ____Not the real rusty Man Can I ever relate to that Onion article. Luckily, I was a bit younger, and all of my friends were just as bad as I was. I think it's just something that happens to a certain percentage of us, and then you grow out of it. Like tonsillitis. ____Not the real rusty House of Leaves Here in November in this house of leaves we'll pray...--Poe Ok, I know it's not November yet. The following is me being self-indulgent and kind of whiny, and I apologize in advance. If unjustified moping annoys you, please don't read. Maybe I'm not the only one who feels this way though. I'm listening to Poe's Haunted again, which is the audio equivalent of her brother's book House of Leaves, and they're both so damn good that it depresses me. I want to do something meaningful and artistic. I want to do something that affects someone else like these things affect me. Even just one other person. My greatest fear is that I have nothing worthwhile to say. Matt's 29. I'm 25. I feel the same way he does. Who's in charge? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? How old are you before you come to terms with the idea that no one's in charge, and there are ultimately no grownups to save you? How long until I feel like I know where my paycheck is coming from next month? How long until I don't care anymore? What a terrible thought...--Poe Meanwhile, is everyone else faking it too? Is adulthood when you start pretending to be an adult, or when you start getting away with it? And are there people who aren't pretending? When do I get to do something important? Now What? That's the root of all this, exactly. At the moment, I don't know the answer to that. But I guess, like it always has before, something will happen. It's reassuring to know I'm not the only one. :-) ____Not the real rusty Smile, and eat lobster Actually, go smile anyway. Preferably in front of other people. What I in fact did was go over to Portland, have a fantastic two-lobster dinner (thanks Nicky and Arne!), and go to quiz night at the Irish pub. It did wonders. :-) On a similar note, you should probably realize that your website has brought together quite a few people in real life. I've met someone on k5 who's become a real good friend, and he met his now-college roommate. Just because we don't have tears coming to our eyes when we read the scoop source doesn't mean there's no importance to it. I'm glad my little thing brought some people together. It's way too easy for me to get wrapped up in the day-to-day crap of it, answering emails, fixing bugs, etc., and forget the big picture. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty At least 12 more years So you're saying I have at least 12 more years of wondering when someone's going to "out" me as a fake grownup? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Another quote... Ray Bradbury, I believe, used to say: "I have the heart of a young boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk." :-) ____Not the real rusty Kids As for what being an adult means to me. I don't think I'll really know until I have a child. That's almost exactly what my mom said. She emailed me after reading this, and said "Not to sound like a "pushy mother", but if you want to feel that you have done something great, try having kids!" I think that's sort of a complement, considering in her case that accomplishment is me (and my sister). ____Not the real rusty Yeah I know I knew someone was going to make that list. Hey, I did apologize beforehand. I definitely don't mean to say that I don't like my life, or what I've done so far. If I died tomorrow, I'd feel like I'd spent my time pretty well. It's the "What Next?" that was getting to me, I guess. This is definitely a "what next" time, right now, and I wanted to get some of it off my chest. ____Not the real rusty House Normally I don't have any time for such moping either, but I was feeling vaclempt yesterday. (Is that the word?) I agree with you about House. It wasn't scary per se, but it was amazingly good. The way everything, including the form of the book itself, played into the subject was brilliant. For me, it was like seeing a painting with realistic perspective for the first time. Like suddenly, someone was writing in three dimensions instead of just two. Incredible. ____Not the real rusty You're welcome Believe it or not, I actually tested K5 in W3M. :-) ____Not the real rusty PBS Rules I just got the following (slightly edited) email. I love PBS. Whew! Finally got it working... I've just installed Scoop at [not public yet]. I'm going to be using that machine as a development platform for the website supporting the PBS television series "Closer to Truth", a discussion show tackling questions about the future of humanity, the structure of our society, and how science influences the way we think and live. The third season of the show is currently in production, and will start airing sometime next spring or summer. Our current website is at http://www.closertotruth.com. We want to bring a higher level of user participation to television - and especially use the website to continue and broaden the debate which is fostered on the television show, and get feedback from our viewers as to what they would like to see on the show in the future. I think the Scoop engine will be a great step in that direction. Thanks for all your hard work. I'll be interested to see how this works out. Now, if we can just get NPR to use it... ;-) Yeah You're not the only one, either. fluffy grue has been agitating for Scoop recipes since 1999. Maybe one of these years I'll get around to setting it up. Till then, the code's still free. :-) ____Not the real rusty We'll talk Friday I may take you up on that. :-) ____Not the real rusty True The word "hellafied" may only be used when followed by the words "gangsta lean". I think this rule actually appears in most up-to-date English usage manuals... ____Not the real rusty op=0wn3d I wouldn't want anyone to know about op=0wn3d. Mwahahaha. Scoop rules. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bah He's unable to rate now, and will remain so. Who needs that crap? ____Not the real rusty Doesn't matter Buy any one, is my opinion. You'll either be hopelessly addicted, and buy them all anyway, or hate it and never look at another. But IMO, which one you try first makes little to no difference. Read the blurbs and buy one that sounds interesting. That said, I personally liked The Truth a lot. It's pretty new (might be the newest, actually). ____Not the real rusty Attempt number one: Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Johnny? Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput! ____Not the real rusty Oops. By referring to Monty Python, I have broken the First Rule of Comedy, and must now serve two minutes in the penalty box. But when I get out, I'm gonna kick Chris Nilan's ass. ____Not the real rusty Yay! I wish I could have posted this, but I'm supposed to remain loftily above it all... Oh screw that. I've seen some of the most idiotic arguments and lack of thought in the past few days that we've ever had. I think you hit the "high" points of it. I'm not going to go all out with the "Liberal" brush, because I've seen similar stupidity from every other political stripe at one time or another, but right now, the lefties are outdoing themselves. ____Not the real rusty No, he's right There's a "known issue" in Scoop's caching where this can happen. What he's seeing is a symptom of the same problem that will sometimes make a page show up with ratings filled in already, when you haven't rated anything. It's been kind of low on thew list, because, well, it's just not terribly important. It'll get fixed though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er, yeah Yeah, that would happen. Maybe I should shuffle that higher up the todo list. :-) ____Not the real rusty Library Now wait just a minute here. I'm one of those Library Morons you may see from time to time, and it's not because I don't read. It's just because I don't like reading library books. I prefer to own books rather than borrow them, because, well for one thing, I just like owning books. But for another thing, if you bought it, you always have it to refer back to, or read again, at any moment. Nevertheless, I read, on average, three books a week, and hardly ever go to the library. Of course, lately, we've been trying to save money, so my wife frequently goes to the library for me, in a desperate bid to keep me in unread books before I have a chance to go out and book shop. But if I had my druthers, I'd purchase all of my books. All this isn't to disagree with your premise-- most people don't read, it's true. Just don't, err, judge a person by their library-fu. :-) ____Not the real rusty books, money, etc Yeah, well, the problem with buying all your books is that it would cost a lot. I would like nothing better than to be able to spend all my money on books, but sadly, that's not really feasable. As for what kind of books I like to own, well, all of them. I have a weird relationship with books, I guess. I like to own them for a bunch of different reasons, some of which make sense and some of which really don't. In no particular order: I like having them around. I feel weird in places without books. I like to be the first to read a book. Not, like, the first to read the words, ever, but the first person to use a particular copy. I like to know that the wear and creases and page foldings were all from me. I can't really explain this feeling, and I'm fully aware it doesn't make much sense, but there it is anyway. The only exception to this is really old books, where it's kind of cool to think about the first person who bought it. I like to be able to find half-remembered quotes from something I may not have read for a long time. I absolutely hate when I want to find something, and I don't have the book. It sucks when I read something from the library and it was really good, and I want to look something up in it. Books are one of very few things that I don't feel bad spending money on. I never feel like it's a waste of money to buy books. Almost everything else, I do. There are probably more, but that's the main gist of it. It's not a rational thing. I guess I understand people who collect useless stuff like beer mats or dolls. :-) ____Not the real rusty Suggested caption: "Freedom has been attacked today, and freedom will be defended." Ok, that was just mean. Sorry, I'm still sick, and not feeling particularly pleasant. ____Not the real rusty My two favorite bands that no one's ever heard of Drugstore Slint I leave finding their records as an exercise for the reader, though. :-) Oh, and I recommend Slint's "Spiderland" before "Tweez" by the way. Tweez is a little... weird. -- "Past where the river bends, past where the silo stands, past where they paint the houses..." --Slint Elvis, Whales, and Airplanes Just like the title says. Elvis, whales, airplanes, and a special note for Phil. Continuing the squirrels vs. cats thread, I asked Bret tonight if she thought cats were smarter than squirrels. She argued that cats have larger brains than squirrels, so it wasn't really a fair question. I pointed out that whales have much bigger brains than us, but they haven't even invented airplanes yet. She tried to make some lame-ass excuse about whales existing peacefully in nature and yadda yadda, but I think, until you can show me a functioning whale air force, I'm not buying it. Wouldn't it be cool if people spontaneously started exhibiting the signs of Elvis' Suffering? Like an old lady in Duluth woke up one morning with a huge potbelly, giant sideburns, and bad sunglasses? The paranormal investigations field would be completely revitalized by these cases of "Kingmata", and the Learning Channel could do a special show on it, with Robert Culp. Special note for Phil: Hi Phil! :-) Indoor cat The baby is an all-indoor cat. He sometimes catches moths and spiders, but that's really it. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Perhaps whales are capable of building an air force. Ha! Show me their machine shops, eh? WHERE ARE THE WHALES' MACHINE SHOPS??!! I didn't think so. They haven't even invented aluminum yet. ____Not the real rusty I hear that No new information == endless yammering. I too am bored by the Afghanistan discussion (note I use the singular because despite the number of stories, the discussion just remains the same...). Plus, with the rather long absence of new information, the real crackpots are starting to crawl out of the woodwork, with the clever oil theories, and the anthrax speculation, and... well. Last week was a good one for stories. This week ain't shaping up to be. Here's hoping for next week. ____Not the real rusty Yammering vs. discussion Not really. The site's about discussion, which can be about a lot of different things. When discussion turns to yammering, in my mind, is the point at which the same people have had the same shouting match more than once, and no one's mind has changed about anything. I probably should have chosen a clearer term than "yammering". :-) ____Not the real rusty U.S. Proven to Contain at Least Three Idiots Film at 11. I am not ugly. I don't hate Arabs, or Muslims. Showing me "how ugly [other people] truly are" does nothing but confirm my long-held belief that some people are idiots. Your hate, by the way, is showing. It's ugly too. Welcome to their world. ____Not the real rusty I voted for myself But I can't believe I'm still losing to Inoshiro. ____Not the real rusty I feel like crap Fun weekend. Climbed rocks in NH. Now I feel like crap. I think I'm sick. To everyone I owe phone calls or emails, I'll get back to you later this week. I'm going back to bed. Urrrgh. Near absence The cat, in fact, dumped half a cup of water on my side of the bed last night. He almost did find himself suddenly "absent" from my life. Luckily he was spared at the last moment by my kinder instincts. If he wasn't so cute, though, he'd be off to the glue factory already. ____Not the real rusty Crappy coding Unfortunately, crappy coding is the only answer. Adding a "plain text" posting mode for stories (and by extension, Diaries) has been on the TODO for a while, but no one's done it yet. ____Not the real rusty Major Flaw I never, ever call the cat "penwiper." It's "the baby." Technically, penwiper is his name, but neither of us ever call him that. I see what you mean about the sentence fragments though. ____Not the real rusty Certain people I have learned, over the years, that certain people are uninterested in becoming part of a pre-existing community, with it's own norms and customs. They would instead like to make up their own customs, and assume that the people already there are idiots if they don't like the new customs better than the old ones. Arguing with them is fruitless. Thankfully, these people are very much in the minority. But be on the lookout, because not arguing with them will save you valuable time that could be much, much better spent. :-) ____Not the real rusty Work Good god, man, don't go overboard! You've neglected a whole range of activities, such as: Napping Getting a snack/cup of coffee Counting ceiling tiles Let's not have any more talk of "the W word" then, ok? ____Not the real rusty Yep We're basically at a pr0n host. I don't mind too much (and no, there is no chicken little at childpornos.com. It's perfectly safe to look at). Actually I feel safer knowing that we're surrounded by safe, moneymaking pr0n. At least our host probably won't go out of business like all the useless dot coms. :-) ____Not the real rusty Stable Temperature Shoe Two diaries in one night! Unheard of. But I just received the best spam ever, and I had to share. Dear sir/madm, We can supply stable temperature shoes. This is a sort of high-tech new products. This shoe was made used a sort of high-tech material not used any battery, it can intelligentize to keep stable temperature 30 in the shoe. If you are interest in this sort of high-tech warm shoes, please contact us ASAP. Also we supply multifarious other shoes, you can see them by clicking below: http://www.chunpai.com/first-english.htm Best regards. Mr. Long Tan ( Satrap ) So, if you are in need of any mutifarious kind of shoe, or indeed any shoe which can intelligentize to keep stable temperature, using high-tech material not used any bettery, I highly recommend you visit the Chunpai Bamboo and Wood Manufactory. Without sincerity, there can be no business! Multifarious I've seen the word before, but to me it always seemed like a "don't use" word. It's perfectly innocuous, but sounds like it's not. It sounds to me like it should mean "Evil in many ways." ____Not the real rusty The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism Blogger Scott Andrew wrote on October 6th about his experiences with "amateur journalism" following the September 11th attacks. The gist of his argument is this: Webloggers pride themselves on their individual views and value their right to express them publicly, and well they should. But I fear the majority of webloggers don't possess even a basic grasp of journalistic ethics. And it's this lack of understanding that could damage the budding reputation of weblogs as journalism. You can't simply change or add your own headline and expect the context to remain valid (this is why the media often employs headline editors). You can't always add a few lines of personal commentary. Once you've added your voice, it's simply not news anymore -- it's opinion. It's editorial. Read his whole thing first. It's short. Then come back and read more, because I want to respond to some of it... Weblogs as Journalism First, I don't think weblogs always, or even usually, are journalism. Nor should they be. Some try, some patently don't. Weblogs, of the type he's talking about, are unedited, un-reviewed statements of opinion. I hope few people engaged with the world enough to seek out these kinds of alternative voices are giving them the sort of credibility you'd accord the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post. In my experience, weblogs tend to circulate the same general stew of rumors, which are easily either supported or disproven by some simple investigation. But few bloggers claim to be a legitimate source of news, and those who do are probably fooling themselves. This isn't to say that weblogs are not useful, or necessary. I think they provide an outlet for alternative points of view. That is, they are free-floating editorial, not necessarily tied to a particular news organization. Sometimes they get facts wrong, sometimes not. I think it pays to be pretty skeptical of claims of fact that you read on a weblog. But that goes for claims of fact that you see on CNN as well. It is very good to be able to easily survey a lot of different viewpoints. I think that, in their proper role as opinion-markers, weblogs are one of the best things to happen to the media, if not particularly "news" journalism. Weblogs vs. Collaborative Media I call K5 a "collaborative media site," or, often, a "collaborative news and discussion site". The important word, here, is collaborative. I'm not as gung-ho about the "weblog," in it's Blogger or Manila incarnation as a lot of people are. Basically, if you have a Blogger site, you have yourself a homepage. A page about you, with your personal info and thoughts, has been called a homepage since 1992 or so, and no one was ever all that impressed with them. Now there are some really slick tools to make it easy for non-geniuses to have a nice looking homepage, but let's face it, that's all they are. There's another development in the digital media, though, that I find a lot more interesting, which is sites like Kuro5hin, Slashdot, MetaFilter, and quite a few others. That is, collaborative sites. When I say collaborative, what I mean is that the site, as a "product" (to use Doc's least favorite term) is the result of the cooperative efforts of many different people. K5 operates as a democratic editorial board, selecting stories submitted freely by anyone. A lot of the time, we end up with lukewarm blabber, just like CNN, any newspaper, or any other news source. News simply doesn't happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so we spend the rest of the time just talking about stuff. But when it goes right, it goes really right. For example, just since the 9/11 attacks, we've had some of the best articles I've seen on the site, ever, and in a couple cases, much better articles on immediately relevant news stories than I saw in any other publication. Take the Florida Anthrax scare: Bacillus Anthracis, aka Anthrax, by an NYU medical student, describes the facts of the recent anthrax scare, discusses the biological and medical realities of anthrax, and delves into the history of weaponized anthrax, concluding with an assessment of how likely anthrax is to be used as a weapon, and what kind of effectiveness it would have. This was posted on October 9th, and I have yet to see any traditional news source cover the topic with that kind of coherence, accuracy, or balance. How about the big airline safety scare? Two articles by a US airline captain discuss the proposed measures to secure airliners, describing in detail what might work and what definitely won't. The "Don't Crash" Button and The Solid Steel Cockpit Door have more solid knowledge, experience, and facts per paragraph than any major media treatment of the "we must secure our planes" hysteria. These are just a few. I'm sure anyone can find counter-examples, articles that are far less than balanced or fair, or that got key facts wrong. I, in return, can open up any newspaper or flip on CNN and point out at least three factual errors within five minutes. News is a really hard business to get right, and no one gets it right all the time. The difference between the bloggers and us is the fact that K5 does have people checking for accuracy. They're not professional newsies, they're just people like you and me, but most people like you and me can smell a rotten story a mile off, and we have the unprecedented power of Google to either confirm or deny for ourselves before we decide to publish it. Even if something does get published with less-than-pristine sources, anyone can comment, and quickly confirm or disprove assertions made in the article. Here's where we mesh with Slashdot and MeFi, and most other collaborative sites. Immediate feedback, which is less a response to the story than it is a part of it. The story is a process, now, instead of a product, like the news industry has taught us to think. It's never done, and the story is always evolving. Collaborative media gives us the power to contribute to that evolution, to all be part of the reporting of news, just like we're all part of the making of it. Essentially, we've taken the priestly power of public-opinion-making away from the sanctified towers of The Media, and put it back in the hands of everyone. Accountability, that's the thing. News, and especially reliable news, is a process, not a product. What you don't see behind the scenes of any major media outlet are all the people who contributed to that 30-second clip. Fact checkers, editors, etc. They're all there, working like mad to try to make the story come out right. Collaborative media puts that process right out in the open, so at least if you find the result inaccurate or unconvincing you can both see how it got that way, and help fix it. I don't think, as Scott Andrew seems to, that "journalistic ethics" are the sole property of an elite trained few. I think all of us basically grasp the idea that when you report news, you should try to make it true. But much more powerful than that is the basic impulse to make sure that when someone else reports the news, they make sure it's true. Collaborative media relies on the simple fact that people like to argue. I don't care how many people CNN runs any given report by, we run it by more. More people, in most cases, equals more accountability, equals better quality. Where weblogs fall down is that they involve fewer people, and no community responsibility at all. Scott's right to scoff at their general ability to eclipse journalism, because they don't have any. I just hope he, and everyone now repeating the weblog hype, doesn't equate all the new forms on online reporting with the "weblog," or, as us grizzled old-timers used to call it, "the homepage." By the way This entry is a response to an email sent to me and a few others pointing out Scott Andrew's entry. If any of them show up to read it, I welcome you all to argue with me here. Just make an account, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. :-) And, JD, if you did make it here, yes, I do know who Edward R. Murrow is. Sheesh. Old people today, they give you no credit... ____Not the real rusty The Linux effect I assume you mean the way some people got all excited about Linux and then criticized it for not being a corporate product? I think that's a pretty damn good term for it. :-) Of course, that means K5 is probably BSD in the comparison. Crap. We get the worst of both sides. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Heh Not Slashdot's Linux, actually -- more like Blogger's linux. But yeah, my point was kind of a two-edged sword. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yes If I had voted, I would have voted "meaningless" too. It's the most common argument, and also, I think, the most useless one to argue. I agree with everything you said above, except that the industrial media offers an unbiased view. There is no such thing as an unbiased view, and I think the sooner we get that notion out of our heads, the better. Views are more biased or less biased, and reporting is more biased or less biased. The tricky part comes when biases are really well hidden and well disguised, usually because the person or people writing the reports are not aware of their own biases. My only real issue with most american mass media is that they tend to be systematically unaware of their own biases. They try really hard to be fair, and they have a tough job, no doubt, but they also perpetuate the myth that there is such a thing as "unbiased news," or even relatively unbiased news. If they had their eyes open, they'd see the meaninglessness of that claim. One thing I like about collaborative media, even at it's worst, at it's most "true believer, newsgroup style," is that the bias is dead easy to discover. We may be biased, but at least we're obviously biased. And K5 has so many different points of view, that a fairer process can emerge from a balance of biases. I wish we had more of "mainstream America" represented, if such a thing indeed exists. But I think the promise is clear. Otherwise, I think you're dead-on. ____Not the real rusty Bias Also interesting WRT media bias is Willam Safire's Scandalmonger, abpout the early American press, in colonial times. Basically, we had then what we have now with weblogs: a press that was almost totally personal, in that the printer usually wrote most of each issue himself. Same thing -- everyone knew what the bias was, because it was right out there in black and white. I hadn't heard that about the AP before. That's interesting, and makes sense. The problem is, now they all believe it so strongly, it's like a point of honor. How do you combat that kind of morally righteous belief? I do agree that our media is, generally, pretty good at what they do though. I can't argue that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not as far as I know I assume "he" is Scott Andrew? He was writing mainly about the personal weblog phenomenon, I think. My response wasn't so much a response to him, as a view on what I think the difference is between the personal weblog and the collaborative site. That said, I think we've got a long way to go before collaborative media really escapes the niches it's established itself in. But it'll happen. ____Not the real rusty Right on Good summary. My only question is, in your assessment, is K5 a blog? ____Not the real rusty Professional jealousy I don't know. Having done a sprinkle of "real journalism," I found it surprisingly harder than I expected. While it is something that any reasonably intelligent person could do, it's not necessarily something that they could do well. And to do it over and over, day in and day out... And, on a different tack, I think this is the main problem with TV news. Not only do TV reporters have to do all the above, but they also have to look good doing it. That cuts your pool way, way down. I've seen newspaper people, and you wouldn't dare put any of those trolls on TV. So I think TV news suffers from pretty-itis a lot of the time. ____Not the real rusty I miss you too But you don't really mean that stuff about me being the prettiest girl in the whole world... do you? ____Not the real rusty Your .sig I've seen that on a t-shirt. Could it be that all this time, trhurler was just grabbing stuff off t-shirts? Something to think about... ____Not the real rusty Drunken T-Shirt Philosopher We know all your secrets now, boy... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Make a Shorter Link MakeAShorterLink.com is, I think, one of the coolest net ideas I've seen in a while. Tip 'o' the hat to NTK for drawing it to my attention. Some random IRC-inspired calculations about the feasability of such a thing follow... I wanted to link to an Amazon page on IRC, and granted Amazon's URLs aren't that long, but I have this nifty little "Shorter" button on my toolbar now, so I fired that off and made a shorter link for IRC purposes. Someone noticed the odd link, and asked me about it. Well, we got speculating about how long something like this could last, and when the "Shorter" links would start to just just as long as the long links. So I did some quick and easy calculation, and came up with the following: MakeAShorterLink's links use an ID composed of what appears to be 8 characters, either letters or numbers. Assuming they distinguish between lower- and upper-case letters, that leaves them with 62 possible choices for each place in the ID. Assuming they stick with 8 characters, they can encode 2.18e^14 URLs, or 21,800,000,000,000,000 (twenty one point eight quadrillion). An estimate published March 3rd 2001 in the National Post estimates that there are 550,000,000,000 (five hundred fifty billion) pages on the net. So, using its current encoding scheme, makeashorterlink could encode the entire web 396 times over. Put another way, 396 different people could encode the URL to every single page on the web, before makeashorterlink would have to start adding characters to its URLs More sensibly, makeashorterlink probably looks through its database before creating a new link, to see if someone's already encoded the page you're requesting. If so, it just gives you the existing record. So the web could increase 396 times its current size before they'd have to add another character to their URLs. If they were forced to take this drastic step, they could encode 1.35e^16 URLs. Assuming they had to expand because the web had grown to more than 2.18e^14 pages, and they had linked them all, adding this one character would increase their capacity by another 1.33e^16 pages. That is, 61 times the size it would hypothetically be at that time. No real point to any of this, just me noodling out the theoretical limits of a nifty service. Information density is pretty cool. Two final thoughts: First, this whole thing ignores the essential infinity of "URLs", due to the fact that a simple CGI can reply to an unlimited number of URLs. I'm pretending each URL on the web just represents one page. Second is that there's absolutely no doubt their database capacity would be full long before they reached anything like 2.18e^14 records. :-) 301 redirect As you showed above, I think they were very wise to include the interstitial page, that shows you the upcoming URL and gives you a chance to bail. Your demo was the second thing to cross my mind, in fact. And besides, it is a good place to put the ads. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Domain name I agree that makeashorterlink.com is awkward, but it has two big pluses: It's easy to remember. What do you want to do? "Make a shorter link!" Who types links anyway? Its mainly for pasting purposes, especially for things like email and IRC. If you don't have to type it, it just matters that it looks nice and short. Although personally, I'd have left out the "?" GET argument form and used mod_rewrite or a clever scripting language to interpret virtual directory paths, like http://makeashorterlink.com/F4657382 or whatever. ____Not the real rusty I'm not anonymous. Actually, I wish more people would choose against anonymity online. I think it makes the medium more human. But I'm perfectly willing to support someone's choice of pseudonymity if that's what they want. How about this, though. Using a handle and not giving out your email address is all well and good, but for about 99% of you, I can find out roughly where you are in about 5 minutes, just by looking at your IP number. If I had a reason to, I could probably find out exactly who you were in an additional day or so. There are services to make this harder, and some that even make it impossible, but every step toward greater anonymity costs a lot in convenience and usability. At the far end, it starts to get asymptotic. So my take is, think about what your perceived anonymity actually gains you, weighed against the benefits of being who you really are, online as well as offline. I wish more people would think about this. And now I await Sunir chiming in with his take on this, which is way more anti-pseudonymity than mine. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er I'm not sure I followed your whole argument, which is the fault of my sleep-needing brain I think, but I wanted to clarify that I'm not against anonymity, per se. I merely would encourage people to not automatically assume that anonymity is required and desirable online. Sometimes it is desirable, and sometimes even required, but I think people do a lot of things anonymously and pseudoymously that they could just as well do with their own name out there in front of them. I'm not against it in all circumstances, by any means. I'm for a more thoughtful evaluation, on the part of each of us, of when anonymity is really necessary. ____Not the real rusty Pathetic? How do you think the first members found their way here from Slashdot? :-) -- Kuro5hin.org: Where YOU choose the stories! Ooooh Mysterious Actually, Defect got it right, above. It's just to prevent it from listing all 4 billion people logged-in. Besides which, from the reports I've gotten about people who never ever see themselves listed in that box, it seems to be operating more as a "list of random K5 usernames" than an actual "list of who's online." I'm not sure why it behaves quite as non-linearly as it does, but there you go. ____Not the real rusty Add to that... ...the fact that "Who's Online" doesn't even update itself live anyway. It caches in $S, and refreshes every X requests (50? I forget how many it is). So now you basically have three major variables affecting whether or not someone shows up. I think certain kinds of browsing patterns just tend to not show up at all. ____Not the real rusty Mwahahaha Scoop WILL take over the web, and then I will be... Oh wait, I don't make any fucking money off Scoop. So it probably will take over the web, and I'll die broke and starving anyway. Sorry, been reading seanbaby. It affects my sense of humor. :-) ____Not the real rusty Executive Summary The short version of all the shenanigans lately, though, is that we traded a server that was always up, but only served about 1 in 4 requests, for one that serves every request while it's up, but goes down for a few hours a week. Overall, this means we serve slightly more requests, and more importantly, we are able to concentrate all of your server-related dissatisfaction into shorter periods of time. We at K5 feel that this leads to a more pleasant user experience, and should be welcomed by everyone as a great improvement. R&D projects that, if current trends continue, the computer industry will invent something that actually works right all the time (like the toaster industry did in 1933) in roughly 5 billion years, just days before the sun runs out of fuel. Till then, happy browsing! ____Not the real rusty Not so! I got the $99 "Executive" chair from Staples, and it puts Herman Miller's overengineered crap to shame. Lord, how those evil mesh torture devices used to torment me at work. I can't understand why the Federal Government even allows those things to be sold as sitting appliances. Anyway, the point of this is, Herman Miller is evil incarnate, and >$99.00 is too much money for a chair. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah! As a linux bigot, I usually feel in the minority here. And that's ok by me. :-) ____Not the real rusty I rent them from netflix If buying isn't necessary to you, look at Netflix. Very cool rent-by-mail DVD service. Basically, $20.00/month, and you can have three out at any one time. If you want to buy, I don't know. I have no need to purchase DVDs. :-) ____Not the real rusty Trinidad Declares K5 Most Objective WTC Discussion Site From The National Newspaper of Trinidad and Tobago Online: There have been controversial anti-American sentiments voiced all over the world, but the fact remains that the most objective minds among us cannot deny the two-sided nature of the attack. Many of these opinions have been voiced on message boards, only to be silenced or deleted by squeamish or overly patriotic webmasters. This is probably the best site that we found for objective discussion on the WTC terrorist act. *Discussion Groups http://www.kuro5hin.org/ I guess that means that in a somewhat backhanded way, they're saying that I'm neither squeamish nor overly patriotic. I guess that's true. I prefer to think of it as "lazy," but whatever floats your boat. Anyway, just thought I'd add this to the "validation of K5 from the world's most random places" file. PS: Look at the poll. It's a good one, if I do say so myself. :-) But.. but... The whole point of the poll was to only present one option that was actually true. So even if I had known that, I couldn't have included it, since it would have shot the whole nature of the poll in the foot. ____Not the real rusty We're already doing that :-) K5 is pretty much exactly as you describe, which is why money shouldn't be much of a concern for you. Scoop is free software, worked on by a bunch of people who aren't paid, either because they enjoy it, or because they use it for other things. All of our current hardware was donated by people who like the site, and our bandwidth and colo is covered by that VHosting ad over on the right, partly because VHosting gets good business from it, and partly because Jason, who runs VHosting, likes the site. Driph does the graphic design gratis, because it's fun and he likes the site, and about half of the editors are also volunteers. We also have ads, through OSDN, which pays for the stuff that no one wants to volunteer for, like all the businessy crap that I do. Basically, if we didn't have ad income, it would only affect me personally, in that I'd either have to find other ways to make money, or get a job. The site would continue though, because it is exactly what you describe. ____Not the real rusty That's another idea... ...that a lot of people, and Erik Moeller in particular, have been pushing for some time. I'd love to do it, except for the fact that it pretty much guarantees I couldn't do this as a job, and I really like doing this as a job. Because without any centralized control, how would I advertise? It would be nifty to see some top brains attack the problem of distributing the feed without screwing any hope of income, and I'd be the first to sign on to something that could actually do that... ____Not the real rusty Actually I do work for you. K5 is my full-time job, for the last 6 months or so. So when it goes down for half a day, the uproar is totally justified, and I'm even now doing my best to expand our capability and make sure that happens as little as humanly possible. ____Not the real rusty Here's the thing The main reason why the business of the web has been so tough lately is that the people running "content" sites are a bunch of idiots. I could go through all the mistakes Salon has made, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that the business isn't inherently flawed, just the people running it up to now. I don't own the stories or comments here, so there's no way I can ever sell them (i.e. "pay or get out"). Besides, I think everyone realizes that would be suicide for this site especially, and probably for any site. So how do I make money? Well, I look at what I do own. Layout: I control the layout of the site, which means I can set aside a reasonable amount of space to show ads. Right now, this is doing the job admirably, and advertising will probably be part of our income strategy as long as there's anyone willing to buy web ads. The way advertising looks or works might change, but ads are not going away until there's literally no one left to buy them. I don't think that'll ever happen, but the market sucks right now, so I'd be smart to look at what else I actually own... The "Kuro5hin.org" Brand: I do own the name and logo of the site. It's a long-proven fact that people in general like branding. People like to identify with something, and if people identify with the community here, they will probably be loyal to the K5 name. So it would be smart of me to look at what I can do to make money with that loyalty. There's a million ways, but they all boil down to: Make stuff with the K5 name, and sell it. Clothing, services ([yourname]@kuro5hin.org? Subscriber webspace and site toys?), gadgets, geek toys (like action figures!), real-world media, which uses or promotes the K5 "brand" is all pretty much fair game for income generation. I hope this doesn't strike anyone as crass or commercialistic. I'm not talking about trying to rip anyone off, or exploit the energy you all put into the site. What I'm talking about is how I can realistically fund the continued life of the this thing. And the best part is, we don't need very much to keep going. Probably the most important factor here is how efficient the K5 company actually is. Kuro5hin.org Inc currently has one employee and two contractors. That's it. We own a couple of servers, and are party to a couple business agreements. I see no great need anytime now, or probably ever, to go blowing wads of cash on things like offices, nerf guns, Aeron chairs, chartered jets, or swimming pools. Not to mention salespeople or a marketing department. K5 is, and will always be, a highly streamlined company that will do as much as possible through outside organizations, or using resources that we're already paying for (like my time and expertise, for example). K5 is a stealth company, because the internet is really really good at making things efficient like that. I've seen Salon's offices, two floors at the top of a big swanky downtown SF tower, and all I could wonder was why the hell they thought they needed all that. I have no sympathy for them, because they're going under due to their own stupidity. Email is free, you morons. Just let people work at home. Now that the venture capital has dried up, we're going to start seeing companies take advantage of what the internet can really do, in terms of saving them money, and making it possible to operate on a totally networked basis. Ok, that's my mini-rant on why the "collapse of the internet" is really just The Great Purging of the Stupid, and why things will start to get better RSN. :-) ____Not the real rusty Read the full legalese page Here: We have no desire to own your comments. So, when you post a comment here, we take that to grant Kuro5hin.org and the entirely fictional Mrs. Edna Graustein, of Kansas City, Mo., the right to display your comment on the page on which it was posted by you. It may also be displayed on other pages within the site, or reachable through searches or other means, but it will always and only be here on kuro5hin, and we have no intention of ever reusing, reprinting, or recreating your comment anywhere else. And basically the same thing for stories. K5 explicitly reserves a single-use right, but we don't claim ownership of any other kind. ____Not the real rusty Jeep Wrangler And yes, I have taken it seriously off-road. Last camping trip, we crossed a washout that even I wasn't sure it could make, and it saved us from being run over by a logging truck by keeping its footing on loose shoulder-gravel at 45 MPH. Nifty little vehicle. I wish I didn't still owe a lot of money on it, because then I wouldn't be afraid to really beat the hell out of it and see what it can take. Ah, well, a few years down the road... :-) ____Not the real rusty Sorry about the links As you surmised, it was indeed a K5 editor who is also an adequacy editor, and thought it would be funny to play a little joke on you. He has been sternly reprimanded and ordered never to do anything like that again. I can remove the links from your first diary if you want. ____Not the real rusty All of the above, and... ...a ball gag, two dachsunds, and a plaster bust of Leonardo Da Vinci. ____Not the real rusty Amusingly enough This entry is partly you complaining about the meta-ness of online discussion. Isn't that meta-meta-discussion? And if so, then what the hell is this comment? Help, I need my sincerity back! Having been at this semi-professionally for two years, and as a devoted amateur for several before that, my take on it that basically 90% of everything sucks. I still like K5 because I think that less than 90% of everything here sucks, which means that we're at least still beating the average. And I also like internet discussion in general because, even though 90% of it sucks, there's so damn much of it that statistically, there just has to be more good discussion going on now than ever before, probably in history. People talking to each other is a good thing, I think. Even if most of them are idiots of one kind or another. ;-) --"Yes, gentlemen, they're all idiots. But the question remains, what kind of idiots are they?"--The Far Side /. journals I've been aware they're there, but I still can't figure out how to use them. Is there any way to just browse new entries, like the Diary section here? FWIW, "Diaries" is the most popular section here, by quite a bit. "Everything" is a somewhat distant second. I think Diaries were a pretty good idea. :-) ____Not the real rusty Always... It could always be the worst option, but sometimes be the only option. If it's the only one, it's still the worst, but you have to do it anyway. Just a theory. I don't know if I agree with the original statement or not, either. ____Not the real rusty Not my theory :-) I can't back it up for you. I don't think I believe it either. And your point about doing nothing is well made. Although, I can think of cases where doing nothing is equivalent to choosing violence... ____Not the real rusty Dammit, perdida Reverse the order of work experience on your resume! Your most recent section should go first, then work backward from there. I cringe every time I see that "Blue Jean Magazine" thing at the top. And I miss DC too. Not so much that it'd lure me out of Maine, but a hell of a lot more than San Francisco. And I miss the Post a lot, too. I may actually get it mailed up here. All other newspapers suck. ____Not the real rusty NYT The New York Times does too suck. Suck suck suck. And, might I add, "Suck." Though I still rank it number two of American newspapers, and that just tells you how badly the rest of them suck. No wonder newspapers are generally viewed as outdated and irrelevant. It's because all but one of them suck. The Post has three pages of funnies daily, and two sections on Sundays. They're almost always at the back of the Style section. And they include all the worthwhile ones. ____Not the real rusty Heh I always went straight for the Style section in the Post. I read the real news about once a week. Basically, the stories don't change over the course of a week anyway. :-) ____Not the real rusty Sounds like mod_perl Scoop is written for mod_perl, which means, in practical terms, that Scoop is a single program that runs this whole site. The running of Scoop is organized around the processing of a single page, but all of the drudgery is done automagically at the beginning of each request, so when you want to do something, all you have to code is the stuff that gets whatever it is done. Basically, mod_perl embeds a perl interpreter in each apache process, which loads all the modules that make up Scoop and keeps them compiled in memory the whole time that apache process is running, so the computer sees Scoop as an exceptionally long-running perl program that periodically gets some input from Apache and produces a web page. Not to say your idea is a bad one -- mod_perl is one of the best ideas in internet programming, for all the reasons you describe. I wouldn't go back to CGI programming for anything (in fact, I did for OpenSales, whose whole product was individual CGIs, and I hated every minute of it). ____Not the real rusty Ok, sort of I see what you want. Basically, you want the program to be event-driven instead of transactional. That is, a transactional program treats input as one phase and output as another; that is: Create input form. Retreive input Create output page Send output Whereas what you want is event-driven, like: Begin function Wait for input Process input Return results I may not be expressing it clearly, but basically most windowed and console programs are event driven, and most web applications are transactional. mod_perl itself doesn't do this, but does make it easier to set up. There are a few web application frameworks for perl (and other languages) that do basically that. Personally, I've always programmed for the web, so I think much more in a transactional mode. Event-driven stuff always confuses me. But everyone should do what makes them happy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hospital? Sounds like an emergency room visit to me. They'll pump the alcohol out of her, hydrate her through an IV, and have her sleeping peacefully in an hour. Probably wouldn't have been a bad idea. ____Not the real rusty Yes The short answer is yes, the long answer can be better read on JWZ's DNA Lounge site. Basically, the permits and licensing fees are labyrinthine, but boil down to the idea that you have to pay the three big music organizations set license fees, whether you ever play anything from their catalog or not (because someday, you might). ____Not the real rusty Good points (NT) ____Not the real rusty Hmmm I have one of those too, but I haven't found all that much use for it. Maybe I should try to tap my cable modem line and hook some TV up to it. Really cool, eh? I should try it. TV while working all day would kind of rock. :-) ____Not the real rusty I love you too ____Not the real rusty That post... ...was spam, and exactly the kind of thing that the system was designed to censor. It added nothing to the discussion, and managed to insult an entire country for no apparent purpose. Besides which, it was also factually untrue. Look at the posting guidelines again -- I don't mean commercial spam, necessarily. Just noise. That comment was noise. ____Not the real rusty Also... You can complain to me, but there's really not much I can do. If I disagree with the rating, I'll rate it something else, but I have no special magic rating powers. I'm just one more rating, like any of you. Hence posting a diary and calling others attention to it is more effective. Instead of just my rating, you get however many people read your diary and agree with you (usually > 1). ____Not the real rusty Into the Woods I'm off tomorrow morning for a week of camping, rock climbing, and hiking in deepest, darkest interior Maine. Specifically Mt. Katahdin and the greater Brownville Junction/Katahdin Iron Works vicinity. So, take care of the site while I'm away, and I'll see you all next weekend. I promise there will be pictures. :-) It was Inoshiro And I don't know why. Might have just been a mistake (I gave someone admin powers once by mistake, could have been a similar thing). I'm pinging him for some kind of explanation, which will hopefully be forthcoming here... ____Not the real rusty FYI Twiddling SQL == Bad. Scoop does a bunch of caching things, and changing SQL directly may or may not have Unpleasant Consequences, not the least of which could be not doing what you meant to do. It's not really a good idea. ____Not the real rusty A retard *did* make it! Er, well, I made it. Anyway, if it looks like a retard made it, it has accomplished its purpose. It was supposed to look like that. The cafepress "quality" printing wears really badly too, so it looks like a retard printed it too, after a few washes. I'm thinking of a much sleeker new shirt: "Media Assasin". That would be a good one too. -- "My 98's boomin' with a trunk of funk" --PE Oooh I would love an enani shirt! :-) Actually, we're gearing up for a whole new product line, which will be quality stuff, not cafepress. Should get started finalizing those designs in October, so stay tuned... Oh, and about the Media Whore shirt, I actually just made that for me and Driph, because we thought it was funny. It's not official K5-wear. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! A snowglobe would be keen. We're also seriously looking at doing action figures. :-) ____Not the real rusty Some ideas... Partly it's scoop's fault, although Scoop itself is theoretically capable of meeting K5's demands right now. I think mostly it's the K5 database. I just took a look at one particular table, which has a fairly large impact on speed, and I found a bunch of crap entries in it. The whole explanation would be long, but the summary is, I deleted about half the entries (which were meaningless) and things suddenly sped up a lot. Basically, there are a couple performance bottlenecks in Scoop right now, which show up worst on K5 because of the load. These problems are my top priority right now, so expect to see them reduced in the near future... Oh, and about the latency that everyone's noticing: that's because Scoop processes your request, then passes the page up to a proxy apache, which actually serves it back to you. We have plently of bandwidth, and we're not network-bound at all. Basically, the wait is Scoop processing the request and creating the page. Once it's handed off to the proxy, you get it back lightning quick. All I can say is, I'm working on it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Better than that Scoop actually caches a lot of stuff internally, so the majority of repeptitive elements in a page are being pulled out of memory, which takes approximately no time at all. For what it's doing, Scoop is actually very efficient. :-) The little cleanup I just did seems to have been hugely helpful. I need to find the bug that caused that to become a problem and squash it. ____Not the real rusty Best wishes... ...to you and your brother. This is his job, ultimately. I know that doesn't help at all, but I can't think of anything else. :-( ____Not the real rusty Verb me harder It penised me my burgundy bookbag... I swear, that has got to be the first time I've ever seen "penis" used as a verb. ____Not the real rusty Thank you so much... ...for being open to advice and criticism. You're my favorite user of the week for this diary, I think. That other guy whose "read my site!" MLPs are getting dumped just sent me a nice little flame, after I took twenty minutes explaining (helpfully!) how he could improve his submissions, calling K5 a "closed door impenetrable click [sic]". And I was feeling all grumbly, and then I read this. Thanks for taking it in the right spirit. :-) ____Not the real rusty Turtle I just had an epiphany about myself. Well, not an epiphany, really. That might be overstating it. More like a realization. And my realization was that I have an almost unlimited capacity to put up with any kind of crap imaginable, as long as it doesn't require me to leave my house. I other news, Dubya just gave easily the best speech of his political career. No doubt everyone will be able find some point or other to quibble about, but on the whole, I think it was fantastic, and I applaud him wholeheartedly. Also, I use the term Dubya not in a derogatory way, but with a sense of affection. I don't generally like the guy, but right now, I also don't envy him. As much as we may blabber on about this or that, he's the guy who actually has to decide what to do. Whatever he does, I respect that he's taken on that burden for us. Speaking of epiphanies, I was reminded today of a much larger epiphany I had when I was maybe ten or so. One day, for no reason that I can recall, it suddenly occurred to me that if I went down my driveway, and out to the end of my street, I could either turn right or left. And that road, whichever direction I turned, would eventually go literally everywhere in the world. That is, wherever I went, it would always start with one simple binary decision; left or right. That absolutely amazed me, and it still does. I have instituted a policy to walk all the way around the island at least once every day, no matter what the weather. Five miles a day will do me an awful lot of good. I've read that it takes two weeks of doing something to establish it as a habit, so only thirteen more walks to go before I won't be able to not do it. Ha That's what you heard? You poor, small minded soul. I'm sorry for you. ____Not the real rusty I heard... ...this speech here. Notable excerpts: Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own. Dozens of Pakistanis, more than 130 Israelis, more than 250 citizens of India, men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan, and hundreds of British citizens. The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam... The United States respects the people of Afghanistan--after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid--but we condemn the Taliban regime. I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. We're in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. That's the speech I saw. I didn't see a shred of xenophobia or bigotry in it. In fact, I left out of my extracts all the times Bush called on the rest of the world for their help and support. It was, for this administration or any other, a reaching out to a large number of people and groups. One of the most wholly remarkable speeches I've ever heard, and I'm not a big Bush supporter. I think he nailed this one though. ____Not the real rusty Arrr! Ha! I yearn for the first nor'easter of the season! I long for it! Bring it on, I say! 80 mile an hour winds! Blowing snow! Highest tide since Noah set sail! Me and you, Mother Nature, it's go time! That's what happens when you live in SF for a year. Most boring (lack of) weather on the planet. Lord, how I yearn for real weather again... :-) ____Not the real rusty The web is dumb Example 3,964: I looked at Doc's referrer page today, and noticed that down the list a litle bit is the URL http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p= wtc+pictures+of+satan&hq=site:doc.weblogs.com. So I go to that search page. The number one result is for Doc's referrers page. ??? See sig For commentary, please refer to ucblockhead's informative sig. :-) ____Not the real rusty Welcome back Some people are fleeing, some are returning to the fold. It seems to be a time of turnover around here. ____Not the real rusty England As all your points make clear, England may have done all those things first in some form, but we got them right. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Heh "Here's this URL of a kiddie porn site. It's not even a link, so you can't click on it by accident." And what do you do? I rest my case. :-) ____Not the real rusty Missed you John I thought you'd abandoned us. Glad to see you haven't. I hope you feel better for having vented. And yes, everything does suck. ____Not the real rusty Question #3 I'd like to know the answer to that one too. :-) ____Not the real rusty New Scoop Stuff (*GASP*) So I just committed some changes that may (or may not) improve Scoop's performance some. Basically, story pages are being saved in partially-processed form in the filesystem, and the majority of "displaystory" requests will probably end up hitting a pre-processed page instead of loading down the database fetching all the comments and whatnot. Anyway, it's kind of a complex change, so as usual, you're the beta-testers. If you notice anything weird about K5, particularly when looking at stories, let me know. And, no, "They're all about WTC" is not a bug. ;-) server problem That was a server problem yesterday. It's been up since lateish last night, and seems to be humming along quite well today. ____Not the real rusty errr If that's happening, it would be related. In what way is it screwed, exactly? That would help a lot in diagnosing... ____Not the real rusty Hmmm Yeah, I see what you mean. I'm not sure why that would be different, since the logic that does that is (I think) elsewhere, but it does seem to be happening. Actually, it kind of looks like a feature to me. Do you find it annoying? It used to be that showing any comment from a story would make scoop think you'd read all comments currently on that story. Now it seems to only remove "new" when you view a full-story page. I kind of like that better, to be honest. But I'll fix it if you guys don't like it. ____Not the real rusty Oooh The first two are definitely cache-related. Thanks for pointing those out. The last one is, I think, a rather old bug that I haven't fixed yet. I'll try to remember that too. ____Not the real rusty Best K5 Story Ever? Hey all, I'm emailing JD Lasica at the moment, who asked me last week for some examples of good journalism on K5. I came up with aphrael's CA power crisis series, and two good articles about bin Laden and the Taliban from before the attacks, but I know there's tons that I'm forgetting about. Point of all this is, if you happen to recall a story here you thought was particularly good, link it below. I should really be keeping a "best of" file anyway. Maybe I'll start now. You're not the only one. And I think there are a lot more than you think. ____Not the real rusty Interesting Read I just got through reading this interview with bin Laden from 1998. I have no doubt at all remaining that he is the inspiration behind this week's attacks, and that we must fight this man. Interesting points: He is fanatically anti-Semitic. He in fact sounds like a little Muslim Hitler in his railing against the Jews. Some excerpts: We are sure of Allah's victory and our victory against the Americans and the Jews as promised by the prophet peace be up on him: "Judgment day shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, whereas the Jews will hide behind trees and stones, and the tree and the stone will speak and say `Muslim, behind me a Jew come and kill him', except for the al-Ghargad tree, which is a Jewish plant." The cooperation is expanding between general supporters of this religion. From this effort, the International Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders was formed, which we are a member of with other groups. It has a higher council to coordinate rousing the Muslim nation to carry out jihad against the Jews and the crusaders. If we look at sensitive departments in the present government like the defense department or the state department, or sensitive security departments like the CIA and others, we find that Jews have the first word in the American government, which is how they use America to carry out their plans in the world and especially the Muslim world. Now where have we seen this kind of rhetoric before... oh yeah. I remember now. Another interesting thing is that he makes a lot of the same points that people here seem to keep making. American history does not distinguish between civilians and military, and not even women and children. They are the ones who used the bombs against Nagasaki. Can these bombs distinguish between infants and military? America does not have a religion that will prevent it from destroying all people. And of course there's the inevitable self-serving religious doublespeak... We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa. Which later magically becomes... Our religion forbids us to kill innocents-children, women who are not combatants. How many women died in the World Trade Center? And perhaps more importantly, how can Americans, how can anyone, not see the evil here? This man is not to be underestimated. He is rich, and smart, and very convincing. If we stand by, we will have a much bigger war later. He doesn't want to "free his homeland." He wants to destroy America, and all non-Islamic nations. He is not a freedom fighter. He is a murderer, a bigot, and a would-be tyrant. By the way... Here's an idea. Throw out the Taliban, and install the PLO as government of Afghanistan. Make sure they have no weapons or military capability, and invite any Palestinians who want to to emigrate there freely, and give them lots of money for developing a nation. Two birds, one stone. ____Not the real rusty Black humor Not really funny, I know. ____Not the real rusty Air campaign It looks less likely by the hour that anyone in charge is thinking of this as an easy campaign, or a simple air strike. Everyone know that hasn't worked in the past, and won't work in the future. It is perfectly possible to win and still be an asshole. It is also possible to win and actually be right. The underdog is not always the good guy. ____Not the real rusty Sorry I'm sorry I wasn't better educated on all this before. That doesn't change my conclusions at all. ____Not the real rusty Hey I know someone who can do that. ____Not the real rusty Important thing to note K5 is so much more divided nowadays than most media probably because K5 is a lot more international than most media. While America is banding together, a lot of other countries don't like what they're seeing too much, and never mind what you see on CNN. This is the issue we're facing here. I hope we can up the level of meaningful debate and dial down the emotion soon. I know it's hard, but we simply have to. ____Not the real rusty Anti-American sentiment K5 has always been more apparently anti-American than most media Americans are ever exposed to. We have people from virtually all english-speaking countries here, and some that aren't normally english-speaking. A lot of people around the world have serious problems with how America conducts itself. They are often, in my opinion, either wrong or very one-sided in their view, and most suffer from a congenital inability to put themselves in our place. BUT Many of the articles and comments here that seem pretty anti-American in the past couple of days have been, I think, not intended to be so. People do want to discuss this, because discussing thing is what we do here. It's difficult for us, now, to even think about this at all, let alone look at it from the point of view of someone who was not directly attacked themself. That's what's going on, mostly. Your decision is, of course, your own. But I think there is and will continue to be a hell of a lot of value in the viewpoints here, because they will ask the tough questions that we, Americans, really do need to consider. News networks and primarily US sites will not challenging anyone's views for some time to come. That worries me, personally. I have my views, and they probably resemble your own. But I'm still glad that we offer a place with the freedom for people to discuss things that some of us might find uncomfortable to face. If we're serious about dealing with this, we're going to have to face a lot of uncomfortable things. I'm ready to get started. Just my .02. ____Not the real rusty Texans? Interestingly, ubu and alprazolam are both apparently Texans. I'd advise against trying to fit Texans into any kind of reasonable view of people. Best to just shrug and say, "Texans." More seriously, some people are really wrapped up in themselves. ubu is definitely one of these. I think your response of pity is the only useful one, but don't waste much time on it. ____Not the real rusty Why does that not surprise me? (NT) ____Not the real rusty Disavowal I love this community too, but as a matter of policy, I've always disavowed everything everyone else says. I hope it's clear that I have to control over what's said here, and I take no responsibility for any of it. Hell, I disavow half the things I say here. That said, I think a few real assholes have poked their ugly heads up again, which is no surprise. I think, also, that a few well-meaning but rather ill-timed things have been said that have been taken the wrong way by most Americans. On the whole, as I read along, there seem to be more people complaining about complaining than actually doing nasty things. I'm not ashamed of how K5 has behaved. I think we've shown that we're a pretty diverse crowd, which makes me happy even when I don't agree with all the points of view. I think we're passionate about a lot of things, but most of us are generally reasonable and willing to try to meet somewhere. And if we can't, we usually can agree to disagree. Don't suspend your normal rules of internet thought here, folks. When people upset you, just move on. Life is way too short for that crap, as we've all I hope just had reinforced. And Driph, extra-special thanks for being a voice of calm and reason while I have been unable to. You've done a particularly great job of speaking for what the administration would like to be saying if it weren't alternately fighting back tears and clenching its fists in spasms of anger. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty In memory of Tom Hetzel A good friend of my family, Tom Hetzel, is a NY City Firefighter. I have a video that he shot last summer in Italy, when Christina and I announced our engagement to her parents and family. It also has clips of Tom and his wife Diane exploring Venice with us. They came to our wedding last month. The group photo of all the Fischer family and friends might well be the last picture ever taken of him. Tom was just about to end his shift when the call from the WTC came in. He was among the first on the scene, and he was in the second tower when it collapsed. He was trying to rescue people. He is almost certainly dead. Diane is now a widow, his young daughter will never really know her daddy. I have been on the verge of tears almost continuously for three days. Every time the news on TV does a segment about the firefighters, I almost lose it. This is the worst thing that's ever happened in this country. The worst. I have been almost unable to read K5 for the past three days. I try to check in, but I read one story, or a few comments, and I have to stop. Time and again, I read the same kinds of things. I know a lot of you are just as devastated by this as I am, as the diaries have shown. But the stories are a different matter. As Jin Wicked just pointed out, in a lot of ways, I'm ashamed to be associated with this place right now. The level of self-righteous, head-up-the-ass, insensitive, outright bullshit I've seen from some of you makes me literally feel ill. I've had to go outside and breathe deeply to prevent myself from even responding to it. Many of you are, frankly, assholes. This site is an open site, and you are free to be an asshole if you want, so keep on saying what you think. You know where I got an attitude like that? The United States. One thing that I keep thinking, reading stuff here, is, The US is not perfect. We don't claim to be perfect. We, or at least most Americans, believe that the US is like someone once described Linux. It sucks less than any of the alternatives. Have we made mistakes? Yes. Have we killed innocent people? Yes. Have we done things we are ashamed of? Yes. We are human, just like you, just like Palestinians, just like, for that matter, Osama Bin Laden. We are all human. We all fuck up sometimes. But, knowing that, two things immediately follow in my mind. Number one, the US has done more good for the world than any other country in history. I think that, on balance, we have done a hell of a lot more good than bad. We are a convenient whipping boy for anyone with a problem, because for some reason we are expected to right all wrongs, and held responsible for all ills. We are the biggest, therefore everything is our fault. Well, as I said above, we are only human. The second thought is, we didn't ask for this. Another thing I keep seeing is that the US brought this upon ourselves. We did not. This event is, without any doubt, the result of someone's view of our actions. I do not share the view that any American action deserves this. In fact, I don't believe that any human action, ever, deserves this. War is sometimes unavoidable. War is messy, and civilians do get killed. But part of what makes us human is that in even the ultimate conflict of nation against nation, killing civilians on purpose is forbidden. Yes, we've done it, as has every other nation in war. But we're not in a war, or we weren't until Monday. On Monday, an enemy too cowardly to even identify itself struck against people who were not even aware they were targets. That, in my estimation, is an act of evil. The events Monday were the statement of someone that they have abandoned any claim to humanity. I want justice for this. For Tom, and for the thousands of others who did not ask for, or deserve this kind of death. I am generally more peaceful than not, but I also find within myself a new feeling. I want more than justice. I want vengeance. Yes, violence begets violence, but obviously, sometimes nonviolence begets violence too. I'm tired of taking the broad view. I'm tired of being the world's patsy. I'm tired of being the world's whipping boy. I think I am far from alone in America, as well. We, as a country, have been very very tentative in our military action for almost half a century. Everyone knows we are militarily the most powerful nation on Earth, but Americans, by and large, have been unwilling to use that power. The Gulf War was arranged to minimize American casualties. Even Vietnam was a war fought at half-power. I think those responsible for this attack, and everyone who thinks America has lost it's taste for blood will be surprised by the months and years to come. In losing thousands of innocents, I, and many others, have also lost our sense that Americans can't die unjustly. I now know that Americans can and will die, and that if they're going to, they damn well ought to be doing it in battle against evil. That's the feeling I'm getting on the ground here. This will be a war, and it will not be a small one. We will not hesitate to use ground forces, and judging from the rhetoric of Bush and others in Washington, even nuclear weapons are not off the table. I don't think the American people will falter at any level of the coming conflict. All this is due to another unfamiliar feeling I have. I feel like the world sometimes isn't fair and I'm tired of America trying to make it fair for everyone else. For too long, America has been a gentle dragon, a healer, a listener, the therapist of superpowers. "Tell us how you feel about your ethnic warfare," we've said. I find, now, that I just don't care anymore. I don't really feel like solving the world's problems, or redressing greivances, or healing strife. I feel like showing the world that you simply cannot fuck with us anymore. Bin Laden believes in an eye for an eye. Well, we have a lot more eyes than he does. We are the richest country in the world, but that doesn't mean we have to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. It seems that everyone's forgotten what we've proven that we're capable of, and that part of the middle east is in need of a refresher course on why we're the world's only superpower. If, right now, you are planning to post a comment about how this is America's fault, or how we should try to understand the reasons why, or solve the underlying global inequity that led to this event, please don't bother. Because I utterly don't care. I'm glad to live in a country that isn't torn by ethnic warfare, that is, on the whole, happy, well-fed, and prosperous. I don't think that's a coincidence, or a fluke of history. And if someone else has fucked up their country, I just don't care. I would like the US to send the message that attacking us is, on the whole, a bad idea. That if you attack us, we will come and kill you, and your family, and their family, and all your friends, and your friends' friends. We will take away your friends' government, reduce all their property to rubble, make all their money disappear, and ensure that their family name disappears forever from this earth. I want this message to be sent loud and clear, and if you don't like that, I want it also to be clear that I don't care. They have awoken America from it's complacency, and they will not like what they have brought to life. My grandfather's generation saw the face of evil, and ultimately defeated it. We face perhaps an even bigger challenge. And we, too, will prevail. I'm scared too But rusty, call me a coward, call me unpatriotic, call me whatever you want, but I am afraid of war. I am afraid of the feeling of taking anothers life, I'm afraid to hold a gun, I'm afraid to shed the blood of another. I'm afraid of war too. Frankly, I'm terrified. I take no pleasure in this whatsoever, and I desperately wish we didn't have to do it. I'm 25 right now. If this turns into a Real War, as I very much fear it might, I may end up fighting in it. All that I said above, I say in full knowlege that it's not necessarily "someone else's life" I'm putting on the line. Yes, I'm scared by that thought. But I'm more scared of not doing what I think has to be done. If that means I'm actually one of those who has to go and do it, I can only hope I have the courage to. ____Not the real rusty Yes But it's amazing and horrible the scope of things that we can justify. That goes for us and for the terrorists too, and for everybody in the world every day all the time. Nobody in the world is a Hollywood villian who just wants to kill people to be evil, even these terrorists, you know? Yes. We have to remember that while their actions were inexcusable, they took them precisely because they thought the United States had taken inexcusable actions itself. I don't think that means we shouldn't blow those fuckers sky high, but I do think we should remember that Afghan people who are just as decent as ourselves are in mortal fear tonight that we're going to kill them for the actions of some nutcase the ruling party might be helping that they had nothing to do with. If we don't do everything we can to avoid catching them in the fray, we're committing a sin. Absolutely. I certainly hope that in pursuing justice, and possibly vengeance, we conduct ourselves with as much honor as possible. I don't hate the people who did this, because we always become what we hate. I do want to kill them. But I don't hate them. Does that make sense? I hate what they did, and I don't feel like I can inhabit the same world as people who would do this. About the war aspect, I think, from the coverage and commentary I've been seeing, that there's little doubt in anyones mind that this is not the Gulf War. You can't blow up terrorism, and as you rightly point out, you can't invade Terroronia. But the US does have the power, and now I think also the will, to pursue this campaign, whatever it might involve, be that military on a large or small scale, diplomatic, or.. other. I think the idea is, killing civilians is not an acceptable way to lodge a political protest, and the US will seek to make that tactic cost far more than those who use it can afford to pay. What I'm wondering right now is, how far will we really go? Will we go after the IRA next time a car bomb takes out a restaurant in Belfast? Will we seek out and punish extremist Israelis when that conflict inevitably escalates? The way I feel right now, I say yes, we should. This is not just our problem, and it's gone on too long. I don't know how much the typically isolationist US will stand though. Time will tell. ____Not the real rusty Here's a thought I care about Americans more than people from other countries. Let's make that perfectly clear. This is my country, these are my people. I'm not sorry for that. I don't hate anyone. I don't dislike others for any reason, be it race, religion, color, or country. But I put other Americans first, even without knowing them, because I know they put me first for the same reason. That's what living in a society is all about. We've chosen who we identify with and who we help first. The idea that I shouldn't feel that way is the bedrock assumption of your comment, and it's not true. That said, whenever any other country has a disaster, or even just hard times, Americans are first on the scene to help them. Yes, we've done some things I wish we didn't have to. We've also done some things we shouldn't have. So has everyone else. In addition to that, we've done a hell of a lot of good, and given a lot of money to other countries that we didn't have to. If we didn't spend so much money in foreign aid, we could easily create a welfare state in the US that would ensure that every one of our citizens was cared for, fed, and had complete medical care. But despite generally putting other Americans first in crisis, we also do whatever we can to help the rest of the world. I suspect people of my generation are going to start re-evaluating that policy, as it has obviously earned us a lot of hate. I still believe it's the right thing to do, though. The show of support from other countries has at least demonstrated that not everyone hates americans, even if it's fashionable. ____Not the real rusty One more time... I don't want to kill innocent people. I don't want to bomb Afghan civilians. I want a ground campaign with the resources and free hand to root out and exterminate the Taliban, and the terrorists it is sheltering. No country is innocent. Not yours, not mine, not theirs. Not Israel, not Palestine, not Russia or Italy or Germany or France or Croatia or... the list goes on. No country is innocent. And I am equally in favor of finding and eliminating the "Real IRA" and any other bomb-tossing group. This has to end. ____Not the real rusty Don't blame you I've felt very much the same way myself lately. Like you, I also note that the comments that are most upsetting are coming from people I don't recognize. All I can say is that we have always been a fairly politically active and diverse community, and something like this brings out the sharpest divisions between people, at perhaps the most fundamental levels. It's part of living in an open society, which we, at least on K5, do. I'm still having to work really hard to manitain my equinamity in the face of some of what I've read here. Have faith that K5, as usual, does not represent the majority of anything. Normally that's what's good about it. Unfortunately, we're witnessing the dark side of that fact. ____Not the real rusty It's getting better I think partly both sides are getting better at expressing what they're really trying to say, and partly we (Americans) are more able to even deal with talking about it now. Looking back, I think the major disconnect was in people from other countries, and some Americans, misjudging the ability of most Americans to even begin discussing this in the way we're used to talking about things here. We were, for a few days, pretty much unable to "discuss" anything at all, but K5 is a pretty international forum, and people in other countries wanted to talk about it from logical and political viewpoints, which Americans took to be insensitive and callous. Hopefully we can, to use the phrase of the hour, move toward some kind of "return to normalcy." By the way, whenever a politican uses that, I have to laugh, because I wonder if they know that "normalcy" wasn't a word until the original utterance of that famous phrase during the Depression. It means, in some sense, a return to a kind of normality that we never had to begin with. Usually more appropriate than the speaker means. Hopefully K5 can return to it's usual abnormality soon. :-) ____Not the real rusty pro-bin Laden website? Did that chain letter say that K5 was a pro-bin Laden website? I really hope people take a look around the site before jumping to that conclusion. There's so much anger right now, though, we may end up suffering. Nevertheless, it was a great article, and I'm glad you wrote it. You seem to have a pretty clear head, so don't take it too personally. People are so angry, they just want to do *something*. Hell, I feel like that too. I hope we, collectively, can keep our wits about us while we figure out who is really responsible for this. ____Not the real rusty September 11, 2001 9:00 AM. I sat on my back steps, staring at the black woods. Up the hill, the church bells kept ringing. Another acorn fell. xfs I've never been able to get xfs to work right. I use xfstt, myself, which generally does the trick. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, yeah FYI, this is not true. Although it seems to have a lot of people wondering, which is kind of amusing. Don't know what that says about JW and Communista. ____Not the real rusty Slugs of Peaks Island, ME This diary is all about slugs. No, really. Peaks Island, Maine has the biggest goddamn slugs I have ever seen. And they're on the move. Every night we've had to eject at least one from the house. They creep in under the back door. I put a thick bead of salt across the doorstep, but some of them still manage to get in. And these suckers are huge. Right this minute, there are two climbing up my barbeque grill that are each at least 6 inches long. Now, this sounds really creepy and gross, but it actually isn't. That's mainly because slug velocity can be meaningfully expressed in inches per hour. Slugs fail a primary test for creepyness, which is that they lack the ability to suddenly leap out at you. Unless you are, say, a glacier, or a tectonic plate. If you see a slug on your kitchen floor, you have, on average, about forty-five minutes to think about the best way to remove it. Slug fighting does not require lighting fast reflexes. However, one thing I have noticed is that quite a lot of common household items suddenly resemble slugs, when that enters your mind as a possibility. Pens, bits of paper, even ordinary shadows begin to take on a distinctly sluggish aspect. I find myself staring intently at the kitchen floor whenever I enter the room. But besides that, slugs really fail to be threatening in any way. Besides, if you poke them, they instantly roll up into a convenient little greenish puck shape, which can be easily slapshotted out the back door. What I'd like to know is why are they so intent on getting into the house? It's a question that's been asked for ages. What do slugs want? Slug psychology is frankly beyond my range of expertise, so I can't even begin to hazard a guess. They do seem mighty determined, though. Well, until you poke them slightly, anyway. Postscript The state fish of Hawaii is the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a (pronounced "hoo-MOO-hoo-MOO-noo-KOO-noo-KOO-ah-poo-ah-ah") which, besides being one of only two twelve-syllable words I can think of at the moment (the other being antidisestablishmentarianism) is quite possibly my favorite word in any language. Say it a few times. Practice. Let it roll mellifluously off your tongue. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a. What a fantastic word. I just wanted to share. ____Not the real rusty You You have discovered the truth. Now you must die. ____Not the real rusty K5 Returns So what the hell happened? Well, VHosting is in the midst of a billing dispute with Globix, where hex lives. On Friday, some peon at globix shut off vhosting's pipe, without proper authorization (as Jason is negotiating with their accounts department and wasn't supposed to be shut down yet). Since it was Friday on a holiday weekend, no one could be reached to turn it back on. So Jason moved hex to a different cage, so that we could get to its data, and this morning I dumped the K5 database and brought it up on bubba (where you are now), who lives at Level3. Bubba's been stable since we pulled half his memory, so we're pretty safe, I think. Anyway, welcome back, and profuse apologies for the interruption. You got that right Nope, not particularly a lettuce muncher. And I have to say, knowing that out there in the world is a giant millipede named after me is a little... weird. I've had a turtle named after me before, but I think a millipede is a few notches beyond that. ____Not the real rusty I'm Married! Well, it happened. I got married yesterday, A few K5ers were there, including Inoshiro and Cherry Wood. Many pictures were taken, and I'm sure someone will do a real writeup on the event. Today we're off to Vermont for a couple days of peace and quiet (and no, I will not be checking my email!). Wish us luck. :-) Bastard From reading the above, I'm gonna hazard a guess as to what's actually happening. This tool has a god complex about being a professor in such a "cutting-edge" field, and knows that you are a great threat to his absolute power, what with all your troublesome actual knowlege. So he tells you to do something stupid, and you say that it would be better to do it this other way, and he puts you down on the "enemies" list forever after. Pretty close? This is how academics are. With no economic pressure, the whole thing is a game of personal allies and enemies. Personal conflicts are everywhere there are people, but in academic settings, they become the only thing anyone pays any attention to. From knowing you, I seriously doubt you're cut out to deal with that crap. If you really want to do research, better figure out how to get around this though. It will always be there. What are you doing in school, anyway? ____Not the real rusty Cedar Falls, Iowa Origin: O'Neill, NE Terminus: Cedar Falls, IA Distance: 377.7 miles Route (worse and worse. Again, just follow 20 East) Took a break today, left late, turned in early. So similarly I will journal-slack. I have almost nothing to say about Iowa. It's just like Nebraska, but less so. The hills are less hilly, the plains are more plain, and the towns are more settled-looking. All the children are blond, as far as I can tell. That's really it. No interesting towns or side-trips were encountered, so I'm going to present a few relevant things to consider about driving very long distances. In both this trip and last summer's westward drive, we have been constantly attended by Jamie Jensen's fantastic book Road Trip, USA, which has several routes across the US, both east-west and north-south, which are as much as possible on basic two-lane blacktop, eschewing the superslab highways that will speed you soullessly across the continent. The book covers all things of note along each route, and I think it would probably take about 10 years of traveling to fully exhaust the interesting possibilities it presents. If you're considering a long US driving trip, I *highly* recommend you get this book, plan some extra time, and check out what's left of old America. One of the great things about long drives is all the time you have to imagine hypothetical futures in the places you see. "What if I were to settle down in Harrison, Nebraska?" I think. "Just stop the car right here, and look for a place to stay. Well, I'd have to learn something about cattle, as that seems to be all they have here. I'd probably sign on as a ranch hand and shovel cow poop for the next five years, till I was deemed de-citified enough to learn something else. It would be a hard life, but eventually, we'd become part of this close-knit community. I'd go down to Sioux Sundries of a Saturday evening, and get a lemonade, and listen to the ranchers spin yarns about that time the lightning struck ol' Davey's prize bull and turned all its hair white, or the two headed calf just got born up in Valentine." Things like that. It whiles away the time, but I think it's also one of the main reasons I like long drives. I can live a new life in each little town or big city, and not be stuck with any of the irritating facts of any of them. Just the good parts. It's 10PM and Cedar Falls is asleep. And so will I be in a few minutes. Tomorrow, Chicago, that toddlin' town. Or something. O'Neill, Nebraska Origin: Dubois, WY Terminus: O'Neill, NE Distance: 685.5 miles (!!) Route (not really -- we just took Rt 20 E the whole way) This is actually the trip of 08/11, posted a day late because I was too damn tired yesterday to do it. See below for why. Eastern Wyoming is not as pretty as the Western part of the state. Mountains give way to buttes and prime cowboy-movie terrain, which gradually becomes the Great Plains. Which is not to imply that the Great Plains aren't pretty damn great, because they are. It takes a few miles to adjust though. Once you get used to it, we found the rest of Wyoming and the Western half of Nebraska to be extremely pretty, in a zen kind of way. There's nothing that really grabs you and compels gawking like the mountains, but its a nice mix of colors and terrains that stays quietly interesting. We stopped for lunch in Harrison, Nebraska, at a little general store-slash-greasy spoon called "Sioux Sundries." It's just up the road to the right off route 20. Harrison proclaims itself "Nebraska'a Top Town" due to being the highest town in Nebraska (no, DJBongHit, that's highest in elevation). A banner hanging over the main street proclaims this as you drive into town, and if you look a few blocks down, you can see the banner proclaiming it to anyone who might be entering from the other direction. It's a pretty small town. Sioux Sundries doesn't look like much, and the service isn't in any kind of hurry, but the people are friendly, and it has the distinction of serving the biggest damn hamburger I have ever had. This thing had to be 16 ounces of beef. And they don't fool around either. It was a bun, two huge slabs of beef, two slices of cheese, and a few pickle slices. Ketchup and mustard were optional. I had to eat quickly because it was losing structural integrity. Christina looked over after finishing half of her normal-sized burger and saw that I was almost done with mine. "You ate that quickly!" "I had to," I said, "It was getting away." A little further on, just before Chadron, we took a detour to Oglala National Grasslands, and drove out to Toadstool Geological Park. The book (more on that in the next entry) said it was a mere 19 miles off route 20, and we were pretty ahead of schedule, so we figured it would be no problem. What no one mentioned was that 14 of those miles were on dirt road. Luckily, we have a Jeep, which had no trouble at all with the road. It was a fun drive -- part of the road parallels a very busy railroad line, and we cruised alongside a mile long coal train for a while, with a dramatic cloud of dust billowing up behind the Jeep. It was very car-commercial. The geologic park has very good camping facilities, and if we had gear, I'd have just stayed right there and camped for the night. We didn't however, and didn't feel like taking a mile-long hike around the rock formations, so we admired them for a bit from the camping area, and headed back. It was evening, around 7ish, and still light. We'd eaten early, around 4, so we figured we'd make it to Valentine and stop for the night. As night fell, clouds rolled in, and the lightning started. It sprinkled rain intermittently, and a helll of a lightning storm kicked up. Lightning on the plains is something I have never seen before, the way a bolt will fire off twenty or thirty miles dead-ahead, and silhoutte the whole horizon far ahead. It's like being in a pitch-black room, and having someone fire a strobe which shows you, just for an instant, that the walls are a hundred miles away in every direction. It's awe inspiring. We finally made it to Valentine pretty late, what with crossing into central time and losing an hour. Around 10:30 we tried the first of the Valentine hotels, and discovered ot our shock and horror that they were all full. Seems there was a country music festival in Ainsworth, an hour away, and the hotels were full all around. Now there are not a lot of towns in this part of Nebraska, or, really, in any part of Nebraska. It was late, we were already tired, and now it looked like there was no room at the proverbial inn. We pushed on to Ainsworth, and managed to get a hotel clerk there to find us a room in O'Neill, another hour east. One of the last two in that town, too. So at 12:30AM, we finally made it to the Holiday Inn express in O'Neill Nebraska, after a record 685 and a half miles. Every part of me hurt, I had been driving since 10 AM, the last 4 hours in slippery roads, intermittent rain, with lightning flashing all around. It was not the best evening. Overall though, we both liked Nebraska a lot more than we thought we would. One other thing that bears mentioning is the bugs. Nebraska has some amazingly dense insect life. I cleaned the windshield four times, every time out of dire necessity to make it transparent at all. When we pulled into the hotel parking lot, the bugs swarming around the lights looked like a snowstorm. We were still shooing flies out of the car late this afternoon, well into Iowa. There are probably still some in there. I have no doubt that the sheer insect biomass in Nebraska easily outweighs the human biomass in probably four surrounding states. Tomorrow (well, later today), Iowa and general notes on traveling. Dubois, Wyoming Origin: Wells, NV Terminus: Dubois, WY (that's "Dew-boys", yeehaw) Distance: 505.5 miles Route (not particularly accurate -- we took 93N to 20E, then cut off onto 26E at Idaho Falls. The map is decent though) Today's lesson is that Idahoans are mean. Stay out of Idaho, kids. So we got the rest of the way through Nevada this morning, taking 93 north up into Idaho. Same as yesterday, brown, dry, dull. Southwest Idaho is more of the same, but gets a little more hilly and has some interesting lava flows. We stopped at Shoshone, and the Shoshone Ice Caves, which is actually part of a 4.5 mile long lava tube, 120 feet underground. Water seeps in from a nearby river, and peculiar air currents cause it to freeze in the cave. They used to mine ice from it in Shoshone, making it famous for having cold beer when that was a real rarity in places that never froze. But in mining the ice, they screwed up the air currents that formed it, and it all melted. Later on, someone figured out how to block the opening back up, and ice has resumed forming. If you're going to go visit, better make it within the next 50 years, or the whole cave will be full of ice. North of Shoshone we caught Route 20, the Oregon Trail, eastward. Some beautiful thunderstorms over some mountains ahead and to our left, silver lightening threads silently shimmering down into the mountains. I was keeping a sharp eye out for tornadoes, but none to be seen. We also learned that Idahoans are... well, "taciturn" would be the nice way to put it. I come from New England, mind you, not known for its garrulous inhabitants, but even to me, Idahoans seemed pretty unnecessarily close-mouthed. Someone less generous would just go ahead and call them mean. Everyone we saw in Western Idaho, with the exception of our cave guide (a spunky high-school cheerleader type), looked really pissed off at everything and everyone. I coined a term for this: "Idaho Face". Usage example: "We asked for some iced tea, and the waiter gave us a big ol' Idaho Face and grunted," or "I went into the store, but the cashier was shooting me Idaho Face, so I fled." And so on. It's a particularly pinched, bitter expression that just says they'd rather be doing anything but whatever it is they're doing right now. I'd think it was us, but I saw them doing it to each other too. Idaho has the singular honor of being the first state either me or Christina can remember distinctly feeling like we'd rather not return to. We've liked some, liked others less, but Idaho can do without me as far as I'm concerned. On into Wyoming, which is gorgeous. Reminded me of the Italian alps, and given the number of "Alpine This n That" around, I'm not the only one. Got ice cream in Jackson, but it was too damn expensive to stay in, so we pushed on to Dubois. Tired and hungry, we got the last room in the hotel here, and we tried to get something to eat, but it's ten thirty already, and the only things open are some scary cowboy saloons with a lot of hooting good ol' boys sitting around on the porch. We decided to skip dinner and just go to bed. And that's where I'm going. Oh yeah, "Oregon Trail" was a fantastic Apple computer game in the 80s, if you didn't know (see yesterday's diary). Google it. I'm too tired to explain right now. Tomorrow, Casper WY, and Nebraska. I bet I won't have much interesting to say. Avoiding Utah Avoiding Utah was more of a coincidence than anything. We were originally going to take the far-north route, along Route 2 from Seattle out to New York, but circumstances dictated that we shorten the trip, so we switched to the Oregon Trail, which ends (in the west) in Portland, OR. We also didn't really have time to go up to Portland first though, so this route was the quickest way to pick up 20 without going too far out of the way. And no, this trip is not an indication that we should stay in CA, any more than being mauled by a grizzly bear is an indication that you should sleep in its cave the next night. I will take your thoughts on Utah under advisement though. I was going to apologize to any Idahoans who might be reading this, but then it occurred to me that I'm not totally sure they have the internet in Idaho yet, so I figured it probably didn't matter. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Wells, Nevada Origin: Oakland, CA Terminus: Wells, NV Distance: 541.4 miles Route (pretty much accurate) See below for a more detailed log, but one which, due to subject matter, is unfortunately less than gripping. I have almost nothing to say about today, other than the basic stats above. Northeast CA and most of Nevada don't exactly lend themselves to inspired prose. "Flattish, with mountains in the distance", "hot", "brown" and "dry" pretty much sum it up. I can't even go as far as "boiling" or "arid" because it really isn't. Just rolling scrub and the occasional low mountain pass. We did go through Donner pass (and Donner Lake and Donner truck stop and... well, you can see the pattern). I was kind of waiting for the "Donner Long Pig BBQ Pit" but apparently no one's yet had the poor taste to start that establishment. Wells is roughly between Elko, NV and nowhere, which made it the ideal (er, "only") place to stop for the night. There's a bunch of motels, and the Four Corners Casino and cafe, named after a nearby 4-way stop intersection, which, in Wells, qualifies as a notable landmark. My only real advice is, skip the slots, and stay at the Shell Crest Motel, across the street from the Best Western. Why, you ask? Well, most importantly because it's only $26.00 a night, compared to the BW across the street, which is more than $60.00/night. But even more, because Shell Crest is run by a really nice family who need the business, and they want to make you a happy and satisfied guest. Clean rooms, free VCR and movies to watch, phone, etc, and our room even has a fridge. In the often-sketchy pantheon of "road motels" it's a good place. They deserve more business. Not that any of you are ever likely to find yourselves in Wells, NV, but hey, I do my best. Tomorrow, Shoshone Ice Caves, Craters of the Moon National Monument, and we pick up Rt 20, the Oregon Trail. Hope no one dies of dysentery. (If you don't get that at all, I'll explain tomorrow.) Ha! I was wondering if you'd been up this way. Well, we've had a better time in Wells than you, I guess. No problems to speak of. Oh, and make sure you pick up a couple extra wagon tongues and ammunition before you head out tomorrow. Yeah, I get the sense that between here and Casper WY is a whole lotta nothing. ____Not the real rusty Jeep Reborn The Jeep is returned to us at last! Scheduled departure: 9:30 AM tomorrow. Wish us luck. Moving Diary, part 2 Several days sandwiched together. I must get out of this evil state. 7/27/01 Just called the car repair place. They said "end of next week." This is not good. We don't have a place to live after Tuesday. Talked to them again, maybe tuesday or wednesday. I explained the situation, here's hoping they manage to speed it up some. Mostly sat around, found an autographed copy of Bruce Campbell's "If chins could kill". He was here on the 12th, and I missed it! Kicking myself repeatedly. Read whole book. Saw Planet of the Apes. A dud, a bomb, a stinker. The story made no sense, the characters were bland, the plot was ho-hum, the effects were nothing to write home about. Overall, then first one was orders of magnitude better. Limbo. House empty, stuff gone, just waiting for release... 8/02/01 You can tell where people really live by looking around a house when they're getting ready to move. It suddenly struck me the other day that the living room and the office were totally empty, but if I went into the bathroom and closed the door, it was like nothing was changed at all. The bathroom was totally untouched. Wednesday, we had to be out of the apartment. We were going to go stay with Robin in Oakland, but decided that we needed to just get away from the area altogether. We gambled that the car would be done by Friday (8/03), so we got a "cottage" in Calistoga. The plan was to relax a little, and I could get some work done because of course I could dial in from the cottage. We arrived here yesterday to find no phone line. I am ashamed to admit I basically snapped. The car repair place had just got done telling me that it would not be Friday (8/03) after all, which means probably Tuesday (8/07) at the earliest. This means we have roughly a week to do the whole trip, which means no sightseeing at all. We're just going to have to drive every day, straight through. We were supposed to check in here at 3, and at 3 they were "just cleaning" the cottage, even though we had already been to the office at 1:30 and they knew we were there and wanted to check in. More waiting, and then, no phone line. It's been a long, long time since I was that angry. It hardly ever happens anymore. But when it does, it scares the hell out of me. I basically have to sit very still and tense up my whole body, because if I let go even a little bit, there would be severe property damage. There is about 15 minutes of yesterday that I don't really remember what I did. I know it started in the bedroom, when it was clear that no room held a phone, and ended a while later on the couch. I'm not sure what I did in between, but nothing is damaged, so I guess I maintained. So what was to be a nice three week meander across the US is turning into a Bataan Death March to get out of California. If I ever get out of this state, I'm never coming back. The only glimmer of good news is that the new K5 server is finally up and running. Jason called me (amazing!) with the good news (unprecedented!). Of course, I can't do anything about it right now. Hopefully Friday. Back to Oakland on Friday. God, I just want to leave. ...Later... Wrote the Calistoga piece over the course of today. Read a lot of Ernie Pyle travel dispatches from the thirties. I guess it shows in the style. Well, Ernie's another old newspaperman who doesn't get imitated enough. :-) Hopefully I can keep it up, and write a few of these this trip, and maybe another whenever I end up in a new place. It could be an interesting diversion. Its a lot more fun than writing real news, anyway. 8/05 Well, my travel bit was received with a great big yawn. I will probably write more, but won't post them here. Interested publications may email me at rusty@kuro5hin.org. :-) Needless to say, no car, still in bloody california. If it's not done Monday, there will be Trouble. Wedding We're getting married in New York on August 25th. That's kind of an inflexible deadline. Plus, we really have to be there a few days early, to take care of last-minute wedding stuff. So as of now, we'll probably leave on the 7thish and we must be there by the 20th. ____Not the real rusty She's seen me under worse conditions than this Heh. We've been more or less together for seven years now, and she's also seen me: Miserable at college (she was the only one to advise me to quit, which was the best advice I got) Miserable in crappy jobs after college Dating other people (we weren't officially together for a few years) Pulling myself together and doing what I wanted to Plotting and scheming, doing twelve things at once, having most schemes come to nothing (but not all!) Living in hotels and having to get an apartment in San Francisco at the height of the boom in two weeks (she managed to pull that off -- amazing!) and we also drove all the way out here together from DC last summer. And after all this, she still wants to marry me. Makes me wonder, but I try to just assume she knows what she's doing by now. I'd love to invite everyone, but we just can't possibly afford it. We were toying with the idea of webcasting it to LinuxWorld, but no source of good mobile bandwidth appeared. Rest assured that there will be pictures. ____Not the real rusty Hey! Very out of the loop, apparently. But then, I have no idea what you're up to these days, so I guess it's fair. I didn't even know you read K5. :-) And technically, we're ex-coworkers once removed. We were never actually at WPI at the same time. Might as well have been though. ____Not the real rusty panner is smart I've always said, that panner's a smart feller. Yes, that's the deal. UID 1 also, it's interesting to note, predates Scoop itself, as does my account, and probably about 10 or 15 others. ____Not the real rusty New Default Poll Option "Dead Inoshiro" Ok, that was cold. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Moving Diary, Day One Supposed to be day -1... a rude awakening... lowest possible ebb... cutting ties... leaving myself behind. Today was supposed to be day -1. We weren't supposed to have to start this until tomorrow. I went to bed at 7AM this morning knowing that I could sleep till midafternoonish, do some leisurely packing, and then go to a movie with Bret and Jon. I woke up again at 10AM knowing nothing today was going to be leisurely. The phone ringing... Bret answering... gabble mabble gabble?! murble FLURM burvle... Bret shaking me. "Wake up, the truck guy's going to come today." "Tomorrow." "No, he has to come today." "ToMORrow". I'm not at my most scintillating on 3 hours of sleep. "You have to move the car so the space in front of the driveway will be reserved." "NO." "Sweetie..." "YOU move it." She made enough noise and shook me enough times to get me out of bed. 3 hours was all I was going to get tonight. Must be moving day. I have this problem where every time I have to pack or do any strenuous physical moving work, it happens on a day when I am at my absolute most godawful worst, physically. Always no sleep, usually no food, cruel Fate has even seen fit to deprive me of coffee on occasion, on moving day. I don't know, its happened so often now, I must do it to myself, somehow. Today was no exception, of course. This time Fate decided to pull a fast one, and bump up the moving day while I had my eyes closed. I'll get that bitch, oh yes, I will. But first, I had to pack everything and motivate it all into the 5 by 7 by 8 foot wooden cube now sitting in a trailer in front of my driveway. We were maybe halfway packed, so we had to finish packing everything, carry it all down the two flights of stairs, and get it into the box. The whole time I was carrying things down the stairs, I was thinking the opposite of what I'd been thinking carrying them up last November, namely that here I was, expending more energy to simply extract the gravitational potential energy I'd stored in them carrying them up the stairs the first time. Conservation of energy just means that that physics will screw you coming and going. Shockingly enough, everything went pretty smoothly. Had to stop to halt hex and have Jason try to add some new memory (didn't work). Stopped later to give Dylan technical and admin rights to kuro5hin.org so he can update our nameservers (two of the three now don't work). Stopped again to talk to some guy writing an article for Fortune Small Business's website, about (shock!) websites that actually aren't cashflow-negative. Amazing that someone's even trying. The dot-com bust story must be getting old. By 7 though, we had everything in the box. My skills as a former professional box-in-truck-putter came in handy arranging everything for snugness and efficiency. All in all, this was a pretty painless way to go. Went to see Jurassic Park 3 with Jon. For God's sake, do NOT see this movie. It's bad. Not even Bad, just "bad". It leaves you feeling pretty insulted that they even released this, and conned you into seeing it. We expected bad, but this went above and beyond. It has no redeeming qualities. If you want cool dinosaurs, rent the first one again. These are no better. The feeling of getting a big move underway is an unusual one. First, you cut all the umbilicals tying you to where you are. You cancel the phone, forward the mail, cancel your ISP, and so on. It's a process of purposely un-personing yourself. For each service, each shroud, you either cease to exist, or, in some cases, exist in phantom form, "somewhere else". That place your mail is now going to, or the cell phone number you're keeping for the trip. But it's a very floaty feeling at first, a lightness that's not altogether pleasant, like you are a little less real than you were yesterday. Then there's the packing. You have to examine every tiny thing you own, and decide whether to keep it, or not. This is a new stage in the unpersoning, since most of us really define who we are -- our sense of "self" -- by what we own. I don't mean that in a materialistic way, just that some stuff is mine, and when that stuff is around, I know I'm here, or have been here, or will be back. Your stuff is an extended body, that you now have to whittle away to just the things that are most irreplaceably "you". All day, it's "Am I still me without this?" It's unnerving... unheimlich having to confront your scattered pieces like that, and amputate some of them. The rest, the stuff that is still you, you don't get to keep either. It goes in a great big box, or a truck, and floats off to join that phantom you, waiting at your destination. That's not really you, of course, but it practically is. Forwarding mail and moving stuff creates this weird sense of needing to catch up with yourself, like you've already gone on ahead and have left yourself behind. It's not for the faint of heart. Finally, it's just you. The absolute kernel. The minimum amount of stuff that can be in one place and still constitute "you". If you're doing it right, moving from one coast of America to the other, it's just you and your car. "You" can of course be plural here -- in my case it's me and Christina, which is the minimum unit required for either of us to feel whole. So the two of us, our two backpacks, which sufficed for two months and two continents last summer, and a few miscellaneous odds and ends. That's all. Now, the Big Box is locked up tight and sits crouched on the curb, ready to drift off and join our forwarded mail tomorrow. And in an echoing empty apartment, us two remaining kernels rattle around, waiting to fall out... Pain? Actually, I love moving. This diary may not give that impression, but while it's hard and kind of alienating, it's also a great feling of freedom. If, that is, we ever get out of this godless city. More on that tomorrow... ____Not the real rusty Trying to make it better The new box still doesn't work. We're trying to put more memory in the current one. But the first pair of chips were a no-go. There may be another outage sometimes today if we find some other memory to try. Sorry... ____Not the real rusty I read because... ...you're interesting. You've provided some of the more engaging arguments I've had here, so I'm naturally curious about who you are, outside the public realm. Hence diaries. I think a lot of people probably do the same kind of thing I do, which is go straight to someone's diary when you see an interesting comment by them, and see if you can find out where they're coming from. Of course, I also read the whole section a few times a day, picking and browsing int he teeming mass of K5 humanity. I'm glad we have them. Slashdot's going to introduce something similar soon, it seems. That will be interesting to watch. Oh, and I'm glad you don't hate K5 anymore. ;-) ____Not the real rusty K5 is so ghetto Apparently Inoshiro's mail server blew a disk or something, so I haven't gotten any email since late Sunday night. He assures me he's working on it, but if anyone's emailed me today, I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't seen it. We now return you to your regularly scheduled self-absorbed whining. ;-) Update [2001-7-24 9:11:29 by rusty]: Email works again. Yay! Don't make me... ...turn this car around. ____Not the real rusty New server's not in yet See here. So blame the lack of new server. The problem is that hex (the old server) is maxed. It's cranking away as fast as it can, but between a ballooning database and a heavy load, it's not so fast. If we ever manage to get the new box running, things will improve considerably. ____Not the real rusty I need to visit London You guys always seem to be having fun. There better be a place for me to stay when I get out there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Muhahahah I love when that happens. :-) To answer your actual question, I have a MeFi account. In fact, it's probably the only other community type blog that I read regularly. It's a great site... I don't know what the deal with the user stats is, though. ____Not the real rusty Gonads and Strife Doing my part to propagate mindless goofy Flash stuff, courtesy of AWholeLottaNothing, comes this gem. 'Oh my God! And then I saw R2D2 on the street and he was like "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Bleep!"' Kind of like... ...some advice I once heard from a Nascar driver on TV, being interviewed after avoiding a big pileup. "When you see a crash ahead of you, aim straight for it, because by the time you get there, that's the only place it's guaranteed not to be." Not really the same, but similar principle. :-) ____Not the real rusty Whatever works for you The main gist of this discussion is that "the Scoop Way" works for some people, and your "Way" works better for you. Everyone is allowed to do things whatever way they want. :-) I do agree though that it sounds like Scoop isn't really what you want. The majority of useful stuff in Scoop is Blocks/Boxes/Web Admin. Other than that, it's just a comment manager, of which there are hundreds out there. One other thing-- don't assume that only windows users like web-based admin. I designed it that way, and I never use windows either. For security, we don't expose any services on the K5 server except apache and ssh, and sshing in every time I wanted to change something would be, for me, a pain. Like I said, though, do what works for you! That's the beauty of writing your own software. :-) ____Not the real rusty Second that Drupal really would be a good thing to look at. It's about as close as anything so far to being "Scoop in PHP" and actually does a bunch of things Scoop doesn't do. Granted it doesn't do some things Scoop does, but most of those are related to either scaling or admin-friendliness. And Dries and I do chat and steal ideas from each other. Scoop, in fact, just converted the cron functions to a Drupal-like web-admined system, which is much nicer than what we had. ____Not the real rusty Larry's a nice guy I had coffee with him one fine foggy San Francisco morning several months ago, and ultimately convinced my ex-company to give him some money before they went under. If you give him a chance, he'll talk your ear off with interesting Sun stories. ____Not the real rusty Welcome! You're definitely not the only "relic" around here. I know my Dad has you beat by an unspecified number of years. ;-) People are generally civil, provided you avoid the religious and gun-control discussions. Although even the religious ones are more civil here than a lot of other places around. My general advice is, have fun, say what's on your mind, and don't worry too much about who thinks what of your comments. We (or, I at least, and others who share my opinion) try to strongly encourage civil discussion instead of verbal combat. We don't always succeed, but everyone needs to holler once in a while. I am cheered by the numerous posts on Slashdot though who characterize K5 as "too boring", where boring generally means "restrained" or "polite". Enjoy. ____Not the real rusty On the Jeep Wrangler as kinetic-energy transfer system I went to a timeshare sales promotion, and then got into a car accident. As I always say, the fun never ends. We got a phone call a few days ago informing us that we had won! Won, I say! Well, that is unusual, so we listened to what the deal was. Of course, it was a vacation company, who wanted to sell us a timeshare. If we just showed up and stuck around for two hours, though, we would get a three-night trip to Vegas, and either a new car, a shopping spree, a DVD player, or another trip, to either Hawaii or Mexico. Well, we figured, that's got to be worth two hours, right? So we went down the South San Francisco, met Rob, our presenter (salesman) and spent an entertaining two hours trying to explain that no, we don't like big vacation resorts full of other ugly Americans, and would generally prefer to stay someplace smaller and local when we travel. He just couldn't wrap him mind around this. Why would we want to go to some grubby little bed and breakfast when we could be in a gated community, right down the street from ARNOLD SCHWARTZENEGGER'S HOUSE!? I just kept thinking of the little German woman at the place in Italy, who cooked us breakfast every day. That just isn't possible in a "Five-Star vacation resort." Needless to say, as far as they're concerned, we're huge freaks. Anyway we didn't buy a timeshare, and we got a trip to Hawaii that we probably won't use, because it doesn't include airfare, which is the expensive part in the first place. Then, on the way home, about 7 blocks from our house, we had to stop rather suddenly for someone parking, and a minivan came over the hill and plowed into us from behind. The good news is, the Jeep Wrangler is a damn solid vehicle. It felt like being in an iron box -- we bounced between the car in front of us and the one behind a couple times, but damage is pretty minimal. A little denting in the rear right corner, and the front bumper's a little bent. Not too shabby. The guy who hit us was in a minivan, and his front end was all crumpled. He couldn't even open his door-- it was wedged into the quarter-panel. It seems clear as of this morning that I'm uninjured. I whacked my head pretty hard on the seat back, but it seems fine today. Bret is a little sore in the neck region, she'll probably go to a doctor and make sure everything's ok. This also pushes back our departure a couple days, because we want to make sure the car's all repaired before we go and drive it across the country. The fun never ends. Whatever Ok, since I made up the word, I get to define how it's pronounced, and it's "corrosion." That said, if you want to mispronounce it, I don't care as long as it's not "kew-ro-five-hin." That one absolutely drives me up a wall. All the others, I don't care about. ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Glad you got an account. And no one is just like everyone else. We are all beautiful unique snowflakes. ;-) ____Not the real rusty You wouldn't believe it but... I've seen code DJ's written while stoned. And it's beautiful stuff. I can hardly credit it, but the evidence is undeniable. Any company out there who needs a perl hacker? Hire DJ and keep him, uhhh, well supplied, and you're golden. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thank god I have to tell this story, because it's funny. I went out to dinner before the show with Derek from Fray and cockybastard and some others, and had been hitting the gin pretty liberally (it seemed like a Sapphire night...). Well, I forgot to visit "the necessary" before they closed the place up, and by about ten minutes in, I had to go like you wouldn't believe. When they were doing the community presentation, I was praying we didn't win, because I thought if I had to walk up there, I might be liable to irrigate the red carpet a little on the way. That was even at the beginning of the thing. By the time the whole two hours had ground by, I was facing undeniable kidney damage. If we had won, I think I might have had to go off-script and make my five-word speech: "I really have to pee." ____Not the real rusty eVil cut! I always hated the V-cut. It was one of the reasons I gave up on Subway food (the others being that it's dry and tasteless, and their veggies are way too big). But the V-cut was up there on my list of don't likes. I'm personally a fan of the vertical center-cut. So the bread ends up like (V) with a little bread-connector on the bottom. No V-shaped wedge though, just a striaght slice, and pull apart. ____Not the real rusty Sometimes Sometimes being trolled is more fun than not being trolled. At least they're good at it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Front Page Stories I guess everyone at one time or another posts an "About K5" whine in their diary. This is mine... Why are people so stingy with their front-page votes? I make it a practice to vote for at least one front page story a day. Usually it's three or four. I'd really like to see at least two or three new stories up there every day. It seems to me that a lot of you take "front page" posting way too seriously, as evidenced by the fact that we are still only getting a new story up there maybe once every two or three days. The front page doesn't have to be "Best Stories Ever". How about "Best stories of today"? With a default of ten stories, if we posted two per day, they'd still be there for nearly a week. So this is my attempt to get a few people to ponder whether or not they're a little too "careful" with their front page votes... It's there... No word from Jason in a few days. It's supposed to be running already. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Half is pretty damn good :-) To get several thousand people participating in a text-only communication medium, and have it feel like a genuine community half the time is, IMO, pretty incredible. :-) I think you're right on in this estimate. I wish it was more then that too, but I'll settle for whatever we can make work. I think you're also right that it would help if more people met offline. Fray does real-world events called "Fray Day", where readers get together at a bar or coffeehouse or whatever and tell stories to each other. I've been thinking about trying to hold a "K Day" with a similar idea. I was thinking... this would be cool. Get a bunch of K5ers (or "future K5ers" ;-) together in one place, and a have a real-life version of the site. There's a moderator (who would naturally adopt the name "Scoop" for the duration) who calls for submissions. People just holler out a topic, Scoop keeps track of them on a chalkboard or something. When there are a few to pick from, Scoop calls for a vote, pointing to each one and estimating the noise level in the room as the score. The one which earns the most noise is "posted", and a few people either volunteer or are volunteered to stand up and argue one side or another of the debate. There's no real process here, I'd do it as a free-for-all. At the end, another "vote" determines who won. I think it'd be damn fun, if you could collect a dozen or more people in one place who were into it. I'm going to try to arrange something this Fall, when I'm back East and settled. ____Not the real rusty Right you are Sorry about that, it was an inadvertent change that happened with the new urls. It should be back to the old way of working now. I think everyone in #k5 thought you were talking about going the other way in a thread-- backing up it with "Parent" links. I thought that, anyway. Once I figured out what you were talking about, it was pretty obvious. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dollar sign character One word: perl. ____Not the real rusty Requiem for a Dream Tired of packing, so we compromised. I got two movies -- one for the whole family, and one that Bret didn't want to watch. The first was The Emperor's ew Groove, which was fluffy, but fun. At least it wasn't a musical. The second was Requiem for a Dream, which, as I knew it would, has left me extremely disturbed. I read the book a few months ago, so I knew what to expect. The book was wrenching, but a relatively slow experience. I had some trouble getting into the story, getting through the layers of my hate for New York into the people behind the utter Brooklynness of it. Of course, once I did, Selby basically kicked me in the nuts and left me curled fetal wishing that life wasn't hell. I've also seen Pi, so I knew what an Aronofsky movie of this was going to feel like. In fact, the book and the movie fed back on each other in weird ways. I read the book after the movie had come out, so it was the "movie edition" which made me see the whole thing in my head in an Aronofsky style. I also knew who the actors were, so they mostly played their roles in my mind movie too. But seeing the movie after reading the book went the other way. I remembered snippets of internal monologue, and descriptions of what was going on in the characters' heads, which the movie does pretty well anyway, but which also gave it some more depth. So, overall, the movie was faster and more brutal than the book, but no less painful. Remember that little animation that made the email rounds a few years ago, with the fish in the blender? The fish just sort of hovered there, in his blender, blinking now and then, looking around like everything was gonna be ok, if a little cramped. Then you clicked your mouse on "liquefy" and the blades spun up and turned him into pink fishsoup. But there was a second, just before the blades hit, where the fish kind of looks at you. It's tail is already getting sucked down toward the blades, but for a split second, it gives you this look, like "Is that all there is? This is it?" This movie reminded me of that. In an introduction to the book, Selby writes about how the whole point of the thing is that the American Dream is a lie, and always has been. Hence the title. The "American Dream" says that any one of us could be on TV. Any one of us could be rich and famous and... happy. What it all comes down to is the belief that happiness is something that happens to you, or that you could buy if you only would hit that jackpot one time. Score that pound of pure. You get it out of a chocolate box, or it comes in the mail, or you buy it on the street for $10 a bag and shoot it into your arm. Happiness is something the world owes you, and if you could only go that one last step, you could buy it too. He succeeds in making that point. He and Aronofsky both succeed all too well. What really hurts about this movie is there's no alternative. There's not a single character who survives, or sees past it. They all live in this trap, and some of them seem to be working it (Little John, Angel) and some are being worked (Marion, Mrs. Goldfarb, Ty, Harry). But there's no outside. No one here gets out alive. So what are you doing today? Are you chasing that Dream? Are you pushing for that pound of pure? Think about it. I use both HERETIC! Yes, I actually regularly use both KDE and Gnome. On the laptop, I run KDE, because it is, as they say, better integrated, and runs with less fuss. It also has some nice keybindings, and stuff generally takes up less screen space. On my workstation, I run Gnome, mostly because I've always run it. I recently updated the system to redhat 7.1, and intended to switch to KDE (as the version on the laptop has been treating me very well) but something's very wrong with the fonts, and I can't be bothered to fix it. So for now, I'm a dual desktop guy. Try them both out, stick with whichever one you like. I've gone back and forth several times, personally. The one thing I really do miss in KDE is the enlightenment desktop pager, which lets you drag windows around to different desktops right on the pager. I know, not a gnome feature, per se, but one I associate with the larger Gnome environment. Anyone know of a KDE pager that does this? ____Not the real rusty Hooray for nedit! Nope, I'm still an nedit fanatic. I doubt that will ever change. The good parts of Scoop were written in nedit. The bits that panner and hurstdog wrote were written in vim. ;-) http://www.nedit.org/ ____Not the real rusty I don't get it... I'm really puzzled. It seems like there's been all this excitement recently about AA fonts in linux. I've been using them for over two years now, with gnome and kde. What's the big deal? ____Not the real rusty Ahhh I see. Thanks for clearing that up. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I actually would rather people put stories that are actually funny there, not like, "I wrote this segfault-style fake news story and I think it's funny". More like NTK "funny things that actually happened". But then, I never really wanted a humor topic to begin with. It was added despite my total apathy by Inoshiro and Driph. For all I may sometimes dislike qpt's stuff, I think Op-Ed is usually the right section for it. ____Not the real rusty Heh You could just claim that I did. After all, there's no evidence, if it's been deleted. Of course, in my defense, I'll just point them to this thread. ;-) ____Not the real rusty FWIW... Inoshiro's a notorious hothead. Don't let it bother you-- he's just young and fervent. :-) I don't really agree with either of you. But I agree with him slightly more. The current appearance of a rash of childhood evil is more a function of people paying attention to it, and casting it as "a phenomenon" than any actual change in behavior. Used to be Jimmy was horsewhipped out behind the barn. Now the TV news interviews Jimmy's friends and neighbors. People haven't done anything significantly new, crime-wise, since, oh, probably right about when they started moving out of the Tigris and Euprates river valleys. Drugs, murder, and sex have always been with us, and always will be. What changes is our relations to them. Actually, it's really interesting to look back at the youth-crime epidemics of different historical periods. The Absinthe craze in turn of the (last) century Paris, the beatnik drug culture in the early fifties US, the "Roaring Twenties"... every era has it's wild kids, and the more you learn about them, the more you notice how little ever really changes. ____Not the real rusty Lame Week I don't know about you, but I think this has been a fairly silly week in K5 history. Here's hoping something I enjoy reading comes along soon. aphrael... where are you... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Added to sig file You are now both eternally memorialized in my rotating .sig file... John Milton: The wise man takes notice of the river as it flows. The foolish man stands and waits for it to pass. psctsh: What the hell is that supposed to mean? Either case you've got some idiot sitting there staring at the water. Replace both "wise" and "foolish" with the word "boring." --Overheard on Kuro5hin ____Not the real rusty Hrm... That sounds odd. Closing <P> tags is not required, and I've never seen anything like that happen. Here, I'll try it This is a new paragraph. So is this. None of these have closing </P> tags. ____Not the real rusty Nope Posted normally. I wonder if your browser has problems with the "#here" at the end of the url? What browser/platform? ____Not the real rusty Psychic Development We're so good, we add features before you think of asking for them. Come see what the stars have in store for you! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oops I am Jack's mistyped method name. :-) ____Not the real rusty Got that right, buster :-) Hehehe. You must be new. :-) Yeah, "they" in this case is me, sitting around fooling with stuff, and the development cycle for that change was: pull into editor from K5 tweak save to K5 and reload front page oops! 500 server error! notice silly bug, fix, restart apache save again, reload front page ...etc. Basically, I was playing my favorite game of "write code for the live K5 server". Sure makes programming exciting again. :-) This was a little teeny piece of code, though. Normally I test things a little bit more, like seeing if they compile, seeing if the one of two basic cases I was planning for seem to work. Then I generally put them on K5 and wait for emails or diaries telling me something's gone horribly awry. After all, I could spend hours and hours trying to test everything, and still miss half the cases, or I could just let.. err, present company excepted of course... ten thousand monkeys have at it and see what falls down in a few hours. K5 is, at one level, the world's greatest QA department. What's fun is when someone posts a comment like "I want this different" then five minutes later I post one like "How's that?" then they reply... ____Not the real rusty A legend! Wow. I always wanted to be a legend... <voice type="old codger"> Stood fourteen feet tall, he did, and with his Blue Vax "Babe", he could debug more'n twelve gigabytes of code in a single day! </voice> I think that whole section stories box could use some layout work, still. I'll see what Driph can do with it. ____Not the real rusty More helpful... Actually, learning perl to change that would really be going the long way around. Much more helpful would be grabbing the html source, and playing with it till it looks good to you, then rusty@kuro5hin.org emailing that chunk to me. I may use it, I may use some variant of it, I might not use it at all, but at least I'll have another idea, eh? :-) We're laying out the ideas for user-controllable boxes, anyway. It'll get there... ____Not the real rusty HTML rules Basic HTML: A link that doesn't start with a protocol (e.g. "http:" or "mailto:") or a slash will take on the path of the page on which it appears. What you wanted to do was "/user/Merk00" or whatever. But that's not really what you want to do because when you're posting links in an environment you don't really control, it's always a good idea to make them full links. That way, if later on your link doesn't work, it's our fault, not yours. Even if you did post them with leading slashes, they'd then break if someone ever copied the text elsewhere. So, basically, don't get into the habit -- it's a bad one. ____Not the real rusty There you go Your bug report is my insomnia. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope ":" isn't a legal character for a username. That's why I picked it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Quality and Opinion True, they are entangled, and very much on purpose. Ok, the worst-case is when one person rates your comment, and they happen to rate it on the scale you don't like using. But with a larger number of ratings (say, 10) having the two channels (if not more) intertwined ultimately provides better quality feedback, without the complexity of trying to unmesh them. Basically, people think in messy ways. Next time you think something's poorly written, stop and really think about it. I do this all the time, and more often than not, or at least more often than I'd like to imagine, discover that I just didn't agree with it. Besides the above theoretical argument, there's also the practical one of there being absolutely no way for us to force people to use separate feedback channels for what they're supposed to be for. Basically, input doesn't get any clearer than "1-5 Pick your scale", so it would be a mistake to try to claim that output can be better than input. As you can see, this idea has come up before. :-) ____Not the real rusty New navbar The search thing is actually pretty cool. It'll search any one of the sites, or all of them for whatever. We're still tweaking the design, and testing it in as many platform/browsers as possible. I've got Driph on the case of making it as unobtrusive as possible everywhere. Give us a couple days to get it right... ____Not the real rusty Konqueror I just tested/fixed it in Konqueror. It's still bigger than it needs to be in netscape, and I don't know why. But it's pretty good in Konq and Moz now. ____Not the real rusty Gimme a couple days... I'll add it. ____Not the real rusty Someone The box is limited to only show 75 users, tops. Any others, who are not anonymous or cloaked, will be wrapped up into "and X more". This is basically just to keep it from making the front page 9 feet long. There's no decision process as to who not to show. It ultimately depends on how perl orders hash keys, so it's probably fairly non-linear. ____Not the real rusty No It's by "perl whim" as far as I can tell. :-) I wanted it to be by most recent page viewing, but that's proven to be tricky. I may fix that yet... ____Not the real rusty Even better... I did some work on this, and I'm glad someone noticed. :-) The user links are really slick. For example, http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Delirium/diary. That also works with "comments", "stories", "ratings", and "prefs" (if it's you). Even better, for your own information, hit: http://www.kuro5hin.org/my/comments or any of the other above-listed pages, but with "my". This only works for logged-in users, needless to say. But I think it's pretty cool. If you knew how Scoop was doing this, and were familiar with perl, you'd either laugh or cry, BTW. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope It's actually part of Scoop. And it's, like almost everything else in Scoop, almost too flexible. You can actually script URL handlers in perl -- this is how the /user/ and /my/ things work -- through the web admin interface. It's pretty sick, but surprisingly useful. ____Not the real rusty Should be fixed... let's see. :-) ____Not the real rusty Don't know about that... Yeah, I noticed you suddenly got bumped back up to the top of the page there too. I have no idea why. :-) This voting thing should be fixed. Sorry to end your fun shenanigans. ;-) Let me know if it seems to not be fixed, still. ____Not the real rusty Happy Birthday to me It's my birthday! Well, it was my birthday, today on the 11th. Happy birthday to me. I'm a quarter century old. Went to see Moulin Rouge, which I absolutely loved. I'm surprised I haven't seen more glowing reviews. I think it's a movie geek's movie, more than anything else. Oh, and bubba arrived in New York, apparently in working order. Should be running by the weekend. Tired now, time for bed. Insurance Also, Happy Your Car Insurance Finally Went Down Day as well :) Ha! If only. I just had to switch from the old car (Virginia) to the new (California), so the insurance actually went up, a lot. But only for a month or two till I switch it to Maine. Being 25, and now (finally!) having a clear record, it'll go way down. ____Not the real rusty Inside.com: Good people not to talk to A fun experience of having carefully corrected a reporter's misconceptions, only to have him go ahead and write the article he obviously wanted to write anyway. It's a good one, read this. :-) I talked today to Rafat Ali, the reporter who wrote this story about OSDN and Slashdot, which was originally for inside.com, but later showed up on MSNBC, and then Slashdot, where it was fairly roundly lambasted, and rightly so, now that I actually read it. Anyway, he wrote up a micro-article [second item] about our subscription announcement which is, well, mostly bullshit. Inside.com is definitely on my firm list of "don't talk to anymore" after this. Let's talk about what's wrong with that article. It may seem plausible, at first. Give it a read-through. But I was there on the phone. I said those quotes, and the way they're used was very clearly not the way they were meant. and as of Tuesday afternoon a box proudly proclaimed 32 subscribers, for a total $160. Ok, easy mistake. That total is for this month. To date, we've actually collected something like $900.00. The box only shows number of subscribers * 5, for this months bit of subscriber income. I'm willing to chalk up "for a total" as a misphrasing. From there on in, it just gets worse. First, note the convenient self-link in the next paragraph. This article is unattributed, but it's by the same guy. Then he pulls this: Despite being part of the same family, Slashdot and Kuro5hin view themselves as rivals for the respect of geeks. Bullshit. This is bullshit and he knows it, because I told him so, in no uncertain terms. He quotes the following: "It is more a philosophical competition than an actual one -- we have two different views on how such sites should be run," says Rusty Foster, the founder of Kuro5hin. What he doesn't quote is the line before that, when I said (this is from memory, but the interview was about 9 hours ago, so it's pretty damn fresh): "Neither the guys at Slashdot nor us consider ourselves competitors. We don't think they're our competition, and they certainly don't think we are. Both sites complement each other well." I then went on to talk about how people seem to want us to be competitors, and how it makes an easy and convenient story, but that it's just not true. Well, so much for that. Instead, now we view ourselves as rivals for the respect of geeks. That's such unbelievable crap. He says that the reason why he started Kuro5hin was because he was not very happy with how Slashdot had evolved over the years. No. I said I started Kuro5hin partly because I wanted a site that Slashdot wasn't. That is, I wanted a community, and I wanted a broader range of topics. It wasn't Slashdot that had evolved, it was me. I thought this was clear as well -- phrases like "they do their thing very well, but I wanted something a little different from that" seemed to be clear enough to me. But that message didn't get through, I guess. Ok, mainly that's it. I'm just pissed off that I spent a half hour on the phone with this guy, and even gave him some great quotes, which he used to support an argument that is totally the opposite of what I told him. I guess he thought my comment about "Slashdot vs. Kuro5hin" being an easy story to write meant that he should go ahead and do it, wink wink, nudge nudge. What I meant was that it's easy and wrong and he shouldn't fall into that trap. I also wanted to point out that the last line: '"Nothing on the Net has ever been free; it was always an illusion where everything was subsidized by the VC money or government," says Foster' I stole almost verbatim from Roblimo. It would have been more verbatim, but that's not really what I said. It was phrased a lot better than that. Proper credit should be given there, anyway. :-) Matter of fact I've talked to maybe 6 or 7 reporters about various things, in a "source" kind of role, and I've found them to be surprisingly eager to actually get the truth. I thought they were basically swine, too, which is an image we mainly get from the movies, I think. But up till now, I've never had any real complaints about stories I was part of. This one took me off guard by being more or less what everyone thinks is going on all the time. I mean, they hardly ever get it *completely* right. But this one... that whole third paragraph is the exact opposite of what I said. I think I'm so irritated because I can't imagine knowingly writing something like this. Anyway, yeah, inside.com is, as far as I know, largely ignored, and I'm mainly just venting. But future interviewers beware! I have a weblog, and I'm not afraid to point out when you screwed up. By the way, for an interview that was a total mess in production, but ended up edited in such a way as to really capture what Inoshiro and I were trying to say, see this piece from BrassKnuckles. Good stuff. Which leads to another point: the amateur press is usually a lot better about trying to get at the truth (as opposed the "the story") than the pros. With some very notable exeptions, I have to add. But I've had much better experiences with unknowns than with bigtime media. ____Not the real rusty Speculation about motives... ...tends to be wrong. :-) Actually, I submit stories based on one real criteria: "Do I think this is a good story?" "Good" can vary, but generally includes "do I think it's written acceptably", "would I enjoy reading it if I hadn't written it" (I hazard a guess), "who cares" (the most important question). This little tidbit was just something I wanted to vent about. Inside.com is not important, and I don't really care what they have to say about us. Nor, I imagine, do many of you. And if you do, you shouldn't, so I don't really want to go submitting stuff that makes it seem like I think you should. So, it's kind of a not-using-my-power-here in reverse. Basically, what K5er has heard of inside.com? Few, I'd guess. Why should I go bringing them to the attention of a lot of people? But I did want to vent. So, a diary, that only a few of you will read seemed like a good compromise. Never underestimate the power of tactical silence. ____Not the real rusty By the way... You said that perhaps you would submit under a psuedonym Perhaps I already have. :-) ____Not the real rusty OSDN network We're an affiliate with the OSDN network. I think in the sense he used it, that part was accurate. At least he didn't say that we're owned by VA Linux. :-) ____Not the real rusty On the Jeep Wrangler as kinetic-energy transfer system I went to a timeshare sales promotion, and then got into a car accident. As I always say, the fun never ends. We got a phone call a few days ago informing us that we had won! Won, I say! Well, that is unusual, so we listened to what the deal was. Of course, it was a vacation company, who wanted to sell us a timeshare. If we just showed up and stuck around for two hours, though, we would get a three-night trip to Vegas, and either a new car, a shopping spree, a DVD player, or another trip, to either Hawaii or Mexico. Well, we figured, that's got to be worth two hours, right? So we went down the South San Francisco, met Rob, our presenter (salesman) and spent an entertaining two hours trying to explain that no, we don't like big vacation resorts full of other ugly Americans, and would generally prefer to stay someplace smaller and local when we travel. He just couldn't wrap him mind around this. Why would we want to go to some grubby little bed and breakfast when we could be in a gated community, right down the street from ARNOLD SCHWARTZENEGGER'S HOUSE!? I just kept thinking of the little German woman at the place in Italy, who cooked us breakfast every day. That just isn't possible in a "Five-Star vacation resort." Needless to say, as far as they're concerned, we're huge freaks. Anyway we didn't buy a timeshare, and we got a trip to Hawaii that we probably won't use, because it doesn't include airfare, which is the expensive part in the first place. Then, on the way home, about 7 blocks from our house, we had to stop rather suddenly for someone parking, and a minivan came over the hill and plowed into us from behind. The good news is, the Jeep Wrangler is a damn solid vehicle. It felt like being in an iron box -- we bounced between the car in front of us and the one behind a couple times, but damage is pretty minimal. A little denting in the rear right corner, and the front bumper's a little bent. Not too shabby. The guy who hit us was in a minivan, and his front end was all crumpled. He couldn't even open his door-- it was wedged into the quarter-panel. It seems clear as of this morning that I'm uninjured. I whacked my head pretty hard on the seat back, but it seems fine today. Bret is a little sore in the neck region, she'll probably go to a doctor and make sure everything's ok. This also pushes back our departure a couple days, because we want to make sure the car's all repaired before we go and drive it across the country. The fun never ends. Whatever Ok, since I made up the word, I get to define how it's pronounced, and it's "corrosion." That said, if you want to mispronounce it, I don't care as long as it's not "kew-ro-five-hin." That one absolutely drives me up a wall. All the others, I don't care about. ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Glad you got an account. And no one is just like everyone else. We are all beautiful unique snowflakes. ;-) ____Not the real rusty You wouldn't believe it but... I've seen code DJ's written while stoned. And it's beautiful stuff. I can hardly credit it, but the evidence is undeniable. Any company out there who needs a perl hacker? Hire DJ and keep him, uhhh, well supplied, and you're golden. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thank god I have to tell this story, because it's funny. I went out to dinner before the show with Derek from Fray and cockybastard and some others, and had been hitting the gin pretty liberally (it seemed like a Sapphire night...). Well, I forgot to visit "the necessary" before they closed the place up, and by about ten minutes in, I had to go like you wouldn't believe. When they were doing the community presentation, I was praying we didn't win, because I thought if I had to walk up there, I might be liable to irrigate the red carpet a little on the way. That was even at the beginning of the thing. By the time the whole two hours had ground by, I was facing undeniable kidney damage. If we had won, I think I might have had to go off-script and make my five-word speech: "I really have to pee." ____Not the real rusty eVil cut! I always hated the V-cut. It was one of the reasons I gave up on Subway food (the others being that it's dry and tasteless, and their veggies are way too big). But the V-cut was up there on my list of don't likes. I'm personally a fan of the vertical center-cut. So the bread ends up like (V) with a little bread-connector on the bottom. No V-shaped wedge though, just a striaght slice, and pull apart. ____Not the real rusty Sometimes Sometimes being trolled is more fun than not being trolled. At least they're good at it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Front Page Stories I guess everyone at one time or another posts an "About K5" whine in their diary. This is mine... Why are people so stingy with their front-page votes? I make it a practice to vote for at least one front page story a day. Usually it's three or four. I'd really like to see at least two or three new stories up there every day. It seems to me that a lot of you take "front page" posting way too seriously, as evidenced by the fact that we are still only getting a new story up there maybe once every two or three days. The front page doesn't have to be "Best Stories Ever". How about "Best stories of today"? With a default of ten stories, if we posted two per day, they'd still be there for nearly a week. So this is my attempt to get a few people to ponder whether or not they're a little too "careful" with their front page votes... It's there... No word from Jason in a few days. It's supposed to be running already. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Half is pretty damn good :-) To get several thousand people participating in a text-only communication medium, and have it feel like a genuine community half the time is, IMO, pretty incredible. :-) I think you're right on in this estimate. I wish it was more then that too, but I'll settle for whatever we can make work. I think you're also right that it would help if more people met offline. Fray does real-world events called "Fray Day", where readers get together at a bar or coffeehouse or whatever and tell stories to each other. I've been thinking about trying to hold a "K Day" with a similar idea. I was thinking... this would be cool. Get a bunch of K5ers (or "future K5ers" ;-) together in one place, and a have a real-life version of the site. There's a moderator (who would naturally adopt the name "Scoop" for the duration) who calls for submissions. People just holler out a topic, Scoop keeps track of them on a chalkboard or something. When there are a few to pick from, Scoop calls for a vote, pointing to each one and estimating the noise level in the room as the score. The one which earns the most noise is "posted", and a few people either volunteer or are volunteered to stand up and argue one side or another of the debate. There's no real process here, I'd do it as a free-for-all. At the end, another "vote" determines who won. I think it'd be damn fun, if you could collect a dozen or more people in one place who were into it. I'm going to try to arrange something this Fall, when I'm back East and settled. ____Not the real rusty Right you are Sorry about that, it was an inadvertent change that happened with the new urls. It should be back to the old way of working now. I think everyone in #k5 thought you were talking about going the other way in a thread-- backing up it with "Parent" links. I thought that, anyway. Once I figured out what you were talking about, it was pretty obvious. :-) ____Not the real rusty Dollar sign character One word: perl. ____Not the real rusty Requiem for a Dream Tired of packing, so we compromised. I got two movies -- one for the whole family, and one that Bret didn't want to watch. The first was The Emperor's ew Groove, which was fluffy, but fun. At least it wasn't a musical. The second was Requiem for a Dream, which, as I knew it would, has left me extremely disturbed. I read the book a few months ago, so I knew what to expect. The book was wrenching, but a relatively slow experience. I had some trouble getting into the story, getting through the layers of my hate for New York into the people behind the utter Brooklynness of it. Of course, once I did, Selby basically kicked me in the nuts and left me curled fetal wishing that life wasn't hell. I've also seen Pi, so I knew what an Aronofsky movie of this was going to feel like. In fact, the book and the movie fed back on each other in weird ways. I read the book after the movie had come out, so it was the "movie edition" which made me see the whole thing in my head in an Aronofsky style. I also knew who the actors were, so they mostly played their roles in my mind movie too. But seeing the movie after reading the book went the other way. I remembered snippets of internal monologue, and descriptions of what was going on in the characters' heads, which the movie does pretty well anyway, but which also gave it some more depth. So, overall, the movie was faster and more brutal than the book, but no less painful. Remember that little animation that made the email rounds a few years ago, with the fish in the blender? The fish just sort of hovered there, in his blender, blinking now and then, looking around like everything was gonna be ok, if a little cramped. Then you clicked your mouse on "liquefy" and the blades spun up and turned him into pink fishsoup. But there was a second, just before the blades hit, where the fish kind of looks at you. It's tail is already getting sucked down toward the blades, but for a split second, it gives you this look, like "Is that all there is? This is it?" This movie reminded me of that. In an introduction to the book, Selby writes about how the whole point of the thing is that the American Dream is a lie, and always has been. Hence the title. The "American Dream" says that any one of us could be on TV. Any one of us could be rich and famous and... happy. What it all comes down to is the belief that happiness is something that happens to you, or that you could buy if you only would hit that jackpot one time. Score that pound of pure. You get it out of a chocolate box, or it comes in the mail, or you buy it on the street for $10 a bag and shoot it into your arm. Happiness is something the world owes you, and if you could only go that one last step, you could buy it too. He succeeds in making that point. He and Aronofsky both succeed all too well. What really hurts about this movie is there's no alternative. There's not a single character who survives, or sees past it. They all live in this trap, and some of them seem to be working it (Little John, Angel) and some are being worked (Marion, Mrs. Goldfarb, Ty, Harry). But there's no outside. No one here gets out alive. So what are you doing today? Are you chasing that Dream? Are you pushing for that pound of pure? Think about it. I use both HERETIC! Yes, I actually regularly use both KDE and Gnome. On the laptop, I run KDE, because it is, as they say, better integrated, and runs with less fuss. It also has some nice keybindings, and stuff generally takes up less screen space. On my workstation, I run Gnome, mostly because I've always run it. I recently updated the system to redhat 7.1, and intended to switch to KDE (as the version on the laptop has been treating me very well) but something's very wrong with the fonts, and I can't be bothered to fix it. So for now, I'm a dual desktop guy. Try them both out, stick with whichever one you like. I've gone back and forth several times, personally. The one thing I really do miss in KDE is the enlightenment desktop pager, which lets you drag windows around to different desktops right on the pager. I know, not a gnome feature, per se, but one I associate with the larger Gnome environment. Anyone know of a KDE pager that does this? ____Not the real rusty Hooray for nedit! Nope, I'm still an nedit fanatic. I doubt that will ever change. The good parts of Scoop were written in nedit. The bits that panner and hurstdog wrote were written in vim. ;-) http://www.nedit.org/ ____Not the real rusty I don't get it... I'm really puzzled. It seems like there's been all this excitement recently about AA fonts in linux. I've been using them for over two years now, with gnome and kde. What's the big deal? ____Not the real rusty Ahhh I see. Thanks for clearing that up. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I actually would rather people put stories that are actually funny there, not like, "I wrote this segfault-style fake news story and I think it's funny". More like NTK "funny things that actually happened". But then, I never really wanted a humor topic to begin with. It was added despite my total apathy by Inoshiro and Driph. For all I may sometimes dislike qpt's stuff, I think Op-Ed is usually the right section for it. ____Not the real rusty Heh You could just claim that I did. After all, there's no evidence, if it's been deleted. Of course, in my defense, I'll just point them to this thread. ;-) ____Not the real rusty FWIW... Inoshiro's a notorious hothead. Don't let it bother you-- he's just young and fervent. :-) I don't really agree with either of you. But I agree with him slightly more. The current appearance of a rash of childhood evil is more a function of people paying attention to it, and casting it as "a phenomenon" than any actual change in behavior. Used to be Jimmy was horsewhipped out behind the barn. Now the TV news interviews Jimmy's friends and neighbors. People haven't done anything significantly new, crime-wise, since, oh, probably right about when they started moving out of the Tigris and Euprates river valleys. Drugs, murder, and sex have always been with us, and always will be. What changes is our relations to them. Actually, it's really interesting to look back at the youth-crime epidemics of different historical periods. The Absinthe craze in turn of the (last) century Paris, the beatnik drug culture in the early fifties US, the "Roaring Twenties"... every era has it's wild kids, and the more you learn about them, the more you notice how little ever really changes. ____Not the real rusty Lame Week I don't know about you, but I think this has been a fairly silly week in K5 history. Here's hoping something I enjoy reading comes along soon. aphrael... where are you... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Added to sig file You are now both eternally memorialized in my rotating .sig file... John Milton: The wise man takes notice of the river as it flows. The foolish man stands and waits for it to pass. psctsh: What the hell is that supposed to mean? Either case you've got some idiot sitting there staring at the water. Replace both "wise" and "foolish" with the word "boring." --Overheard on Kuro5hin ____Not the real rusty Hrm... That sounds odd. Closing <P> tags is not required, and I've never seen anything like that happen. Here, I'll try it This is a new paragraph. So is this. None of these have closing </P> tags. ____Not the real rusty Nope Posted normally. I wonder if your browser has problems with the "#here" at the end of the url? What browser/platform? ____Not the real rusty Psychic Development We're so good, we add features before you think of asking for them. Come see what the stars have in store for you! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Oops I am Jack's mistyped method name. :-) ____Not the real rusty Got that right, buster :-) Hehehe. You must be new. :-) Yeah, "they" in this case is me, sitting around fooling with stuff, and the development cycle for that change was: pull into editor from K5 tweak save to K5 and reload front page oops! 500 server error! notice silly bug, fix, restart apache save again, reload front page ...etc. Basically, I was playing my favorite game of "write code for the live K5 server". Sure makes programming exciting again. :-) This was a little teeny piece of code, though. Normally I test things a little bit more, like seeing if they compile, seeing if the one of two basic cases I was planning for seem to work. Then I generally put them on K5 and wait for emails or diaries telling me something's gone horribly awry. After all, I could spend hours and hours trying to test everything, and still miss half the cases, or I could just let.. err, present company excepted of course... ten thousand monkeys have at it and see what falls down in a few hours. K5 is, at one level, the world's greatest QA department. What's fun is when someone posts a comment like "I want this different" then five minutes later I post one like "How's that?" then they reply... ____Not the real rusty A legend! Wow. I always wanted to be a legend... <voice type="old codger"> Stood fourteen feet tall, he did, and with his Blue Vax "Babe", he could debug more'n twelve gigabytes of code in a single day! </voice> I think that whole section stories box could use some layout work, still. I'll see what Driph can do with it. ____Not the real rusty More helpful... Actually, learning perl to change that would really be going the long way around. Much more helpful would be grabbing the html source, and playing with it till it looks good to you, then rusty@kuro5hin.org emailing that chunk to me. I may use it, I may use some variant of it, I might not use it at all, but at least I'll have another idea, eh? :-) We're laying out the ideas for user-controllable boxes, anyway. It'll get there... ____Not the real rusty HTML rules Basic HTML: A link that doesn't start with a protocol (e.g. "http:" or "mailto:") or a slash will take on the path of the page on which it appears. What you wanted to do was "/user/Merk00" or whatever. But that's not really what you want to do because when you're posting links in an environment you don't really control, it's always a good idea to make them full links. That way, if later on your link doesn't work, it's our fault, not yours. Even if you did post them with leading slashes, they'd then break if someone ever copied the text elsewhere. So, basically, don't get into the habit -- it's a bad one. ____Not the real rusty There you go Your bug report is my insomnia. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope ":" isn't a legal character for a username. That's why I picked it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Quality and Opinion True, they are entangled, and very much on purpose. Ok, the worst-case is when one person rates your comment, and they happen to rate it on the scale you don't like using. But with a larger number of ratings (say, 10) having the two channels (if not more) intertwined ultimately provides better quality feedback, without the complexity of trying to unmesh them. Basically, people think in messy ways. Next time you think something's poorly written, stop and really think about it. I do this all the time, and more often than not, or at least more often than I'd like to imagine, discover that I just didn't agree with it. Besides the above theoretical argument, there's also the practical one of there being absolutely no way for us to force people to use separate feedback channels for what they're supposed to be for. Basically, input doesn't get any clearer than "1-5 Pick your scale", so it would be a mistake to try to claim that output can be better than input. As you can see, this idea has come up before. :-) ____Not the real rusty New navbar The search thing is actually pretty cool. It'll search any one of the sites, or all of them for whatever. We're still tweaking the design, and testing it in as many platform/browsers as possible. I've got Driph on the case of making it as unobtrusive as possible everywhere. Give us a couple days to get it right... ____Not the real rusty Konqueror I just tested/fixed it in Konqueror. It's still bigger than it needs to be in netscape, and I don't know why. But it's pretty good in Konq and Moz now. ____Not the real rusty Gimme a couple days... I'll add it. ____Not the real rusty Someone The box is limited to only show 75 users, tops. Any others, who are not anonymous or cloaked, will be wrapped up into "and X more". This is basically just to keep it from making the front page 9 feet long. There's no decision process as to who not to show. It ultimately depends on how perl orders hash keys, so it's probably fairly non-linear. ____Not the real rusty No It's by "perl whim" as far as I can tell. :-) I wanted it to be by most recent page viewing, but that's proven to be tricky. I may fix that yet... ____Not the real rusty Even better... I did some work on this, and I'm glad someone noticed. :-) The user links are really slick. For example, http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Delirium/diary. That also works with "comments", "stories", "ratings", and "prefs" (if it's you). Even better, for your own information, hit: http://www.kuro5hin.org/my/comments or any of the other above-listed pages, but with "my". This only works for logged-in users, needless to say. But I think it's pretty cool. If you knew how Scoop was doing this, and were familiar with perl, you'd either laugh or cry, BTW. :-) ____Not the real rusty Nope It's actually part of Scoop. And it's, like almost everything else in Scoop, almost too flexible. You can actually script URL handlers in perl -- this is how the /user/ and /my/ things work -- through the web admin interface. It's pretty sick, but surprisingly useful. ____Not the real rusty Should be fixed... let's see. :-) ____Not the real rusty Don't know about that... Yeah, I noticed you suddenly got bumped back up to the top of the page there too. I have no idea why. :-) This voting thing should be fixed. Sorry to end your fun shenanigans. ;-) Let me know if it seems to not be fixed, still. ____Not the real rusty Happy Birthday to me It's my birthday! Well, it was my birthday, today on the 11th. Happy birthday to me. I'm a quarter century old. Went to see Moulin Rouge, which I absolutely loved. I'm surprised I haven't seen more glowing reviews. I think it's a movie geek's movie, more than anything else. Oh, and bubba arrived in New York, apparently in working order. Should be running by the weekend. Tired now, time for bed. Insurance Also, Happy Your Car Insurance Finally Went Down Day as well :) Ha! If only. I just had to switch from the old car (Virginia) to the new (California), so the insurance actually went up, a lot. But only for a month or two till I switch it to Maine. Being 25, and now (finally!) having a clear record, it'll go way down. ____Not the real rusty Inside.com: Good people not to talk to A fun experience of having carefully corrected a reporter's misconceptions, only to have him go ahead and write the article he obviously wanted to write anyway. It's a good one, read this. :-) I talked today to Rafat Ali, the reporter who wrote this story about OSDN and Slashdot, which was originally for inside.com, but later showed up on MSNBC, and then Slashdot, where it was fairly roundly lambasted, and rightly so, now that I actually read it. Anyway, he wrote up a micro-article [second item] about our subscription announcement which is, well, mostly bullshit. Inside.com is definitely on my firm list of "don't talk to anymore" after this. Let's talk about what's wrong with that article. It may seem plausible, at first. Give it a read-through. But I was there on the phone. I said those quotes, and the way they're used was very clearly not the way they were meant. and as of Tuesday afternoon a box proudly proclaimed 32 subscribers, for a total $160. Ok, easy mistake. That total is for this month. To date, we've actually collected something like $900.00. The box only shows number of subscribers * 5, for this months bit of subscriber income. I'm willing to chalk up "for a total" as a misphrasing. From there on in, it just gets worse. First, note the convenient self-link in the next paragraph. This article is unattributed, but it's by the same guy. Then he pulls this: Despite being part of the same family, Slashdot and Kuro5hin view themselves as rivals for the respect of geeks. Bullshit. This is bullshit and he knows it, because I told him so, in no uncertain terms. He quotes the following: "It is more a philosophical competition than an actual one -- we have two different views on how such sites should be run," says Rusty Foster, the founder of Kuro5hin. What he doesn't quote is the line before that, when I said (this is from memory, but the interview was about 9 hours ago, so it's pretty damn fresh): "Neither the guys at Slashdot nor us consider ourselves competitors. We don't think they're our competition, and they certainly don't think we are. Both sites complement each other well." I then went on to talk about how people seem to want us to be competitors, and how it makes an easy and convenient story, but that it's just not true. Well, so much for that. Instead, now we view ourselves as rivals for the respect of geeks. That's such unbelievable crap. He says that the reason why he started Kuro5hin was because he was not very happy with how Slashdot had evolved over the years. No. I said I started Kuro5hin partly because I wanted a site that Slashdot wasn't. That is, I wanted a community, and I wanted a broader range of topics. It wasn't Slashdot that had evolved, it was me. I thought this was clear as well -- phrases like "they do their thing very well, but I wanted something a little different from that" seemed to be clear enough to me. But that message didn't get through, I guess. Ok, mainly that's it. I'm just pissed off that I spent a half hour on the phone with this guy, and even gave him some great quotes, which he used to support an argument that is totally the opposite of what I told him. I guess he thought my comment about "Slashdot vs. Kuro5hin" being an easy story to write meant that he should go ahead and do it, wink wink, nudge nudge. What I meant was that it's easy and wrong and he shouldn't fall into that trap. I also wanted to point out that the last line: '"Nothing on the Net has ever been free; it was always an illusion where everything was subsidized by the VC money or government," says Foster' I stole almost verbatim from Roblimo. It would have been more verbatim, but that's not really what I said. It was phrased a lot better than that. Proper credit should be given there, anyway. :-) Matter of fact I've talked to maybe 6 or 7 reporters about various things, in a "source" kind of role, and I've found them to be surprisingly eager to actually get the truth. I thought they were basically swine, too, which is an image we mainly get from the movies, I think. But up till now, I've never had any real complaints about stories I was part of. This one took me off guard by being more or less what everyone thinks is going on all the time. I mean, they hardly ever get it *completely* right. But this one... that whole third paragraph is the exact opposite of what I said. I think I'm so irritated because I can't imagine knowingly writing something like this. Anyway, yeah, inside.com is, as far as I know, largely ignored, and I'm mainly just venting. But future interviewers beware! I have a weblog, and I'm not afraid to point out when you screwed up. By the way, for an interview that was a total mess in production, but ended up edited in such a way as to really capture what Inoshiro and I were trying to say, see this piece from BrassKnuckles. Good stuff. Which leads to another point: the amateur press is usually a lot better about trying to get at the truth (as opposed the "the story") than the pros. With some very notable exeptions, I have to add. But I've had much better experiences with unknowns than with bigtime media. ____Not the real rusty Speculation about motives... ...tends to be wrong. :-) Actually, I submit stories based on one real criteria: "Do I think this is a good story?" "Good" can vary, but generally includes "do I think it's written acceptably", "would I enjoy reading it if I hadn't written it" (I hazard a guess), "who cares" (the most important question). This little tidbit was just something I wanted to vent about. Inside.com is not important, and I don't really care what they have to say about us. Nor, I imagine, do many of you. And if you do, you shouldn't, so I don't really want to go submitting stuff that makes it seem like I think you should. So, it's kind of a not-using-my-power-here in reverse. Basically, what K5er has heard of inside.com? Few, I'd guess. Why should I go bringing them to the attention of a lot of people? But I did want to vent. So, a diary, that only a few of you will read seemed like a good compromise. Never underestimate the power of tactical silence. ____Not the real rusty By the way... You said that perhaps you would submit under a psuedonym Perhaps I already have. :-) ____Not the real rusty OSDN network We're an affiliate with the OSDN network. I think in the sense he used it, that part was accurate. At least he didn't say that we're owned by VA Linux. :-) ____Not the real rusty Not if you consider... You're forgetting about "the rusty exemption" from all that. You can believe whatever you want, but I can kill you anyway. Some facts are more socially constructed than others. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks It's nice to hear good things about yourself. So thank you. BTW, you got two months because I was feeling generous, and I thought that if five bucks was all you could come up with, you needed it more than me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wittgenstein was a beery swine... ...who was just as schloshed as Schlegel. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wacky Scoop is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. :-) About the queue story, don't sweat it. Maybe it was a little overstated, but apparently a lot of others have been thinking the same things. I do rely on you guys to tell me when something's bad. I don't think it warrants change just yet. But I'll keep an eye on it. ____Not the real rusty Extortion? I also don't get how this is extortion. If the money went to the advertisers, then I'd agree with you. But the money goes to me. I'm happy with advertising, because it makes me a decent living, so far. But some people hate it. Now, most of those will just go get junkbuster. That's cool, and as far as I'm concerned, that's your call. I'm not going to stop it, or even complain about it. Some people, though, for either technical or ethical reasons, don't want to do that. So, the situation is, they want me to do something for them that will affect my income. I want them to pay me for that service. If you asked me to come over to your house and set up junkbuster for you, I'd certainly charge you for that! About the "raising the annoyance level" factor. I have no intention of doing that. If ads are annoying, we won't run them. I would far, far rather see less annoying ads that people don't mind seeing, because as a source of income, ads are a hell of a lot easier and more profitable than subscriptions. And it is true that K5 is a commercial entity. I think that we're one of the friendlier ones, as far as trying to do what people want and not being annoying corporate bastards. But the point of ads, and subscriptions, is to pay my bills. Someday, we may have site expenses too -- right now, we're lucky enough not to. But I do put in a lot of time on this thing, and I'm comfortable with saying that I ought to be compensated for that. "What's good for Rusty is good for the community." Well, not always. But having me be strictly a volunteer wouldn't be particularly good for the community, or the site. ____Not the real rusty Doh Those links are supposed to be URL-escaped. Looks like that got un-done in the recent updates. ____Not the real rusty Sheer volume? Looking back in the Meta section, I see that there have been 17 Meta stories in the past three months. This works out to one every five days or so, on average. Compared to almost anything else, they're not particularly common. Today's barrage was one of those flukes that happen when there's nothing else to talk about. And Slashdot? There are hardly ever any meta articles on slashdot... About your actual point though-- I think meta-discussion is healthy and useful for a site like this. I think Slashdot could actually do with quite a lot more of it, at the very least, to keep it out of the normal threads, where it goes on now. People want to have a say in how things are done. One of the whole ideas behind K5 is that they should have a say. So if there were no meta articles, and no place for such discussions, I'd have to suffer an endless amount of email from people who can't actually converse with each other, and would probably all come up with the same ideas over and over. What I wish is that corporate media would take a hint. How great would a Meta section on CNN.com be? :-) So, if you hate them, just ignore them. They're often useful to me -- if not always for the story itself, the comments and discussion usually give me a feel for the general attitude of the community. ____Not the real rusty eval? Does the way eval {} is implemented help at all? That's basically what it does -- compiles some stuff, and sticks it in the symbol table for future use. I have no idea how to do this in C though, obviously. Heh. mod_scoop. It'll be awfully funny if Scoop ends up as an Apache module in C, which processes perl boxes. I won't be able to work on my own project anymore. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ok, comments are back Comments should be back. Whine more if that's still screwed up. Now I need to figure out what's up with this link-quote thing. Pardon me while I test it out. Ok, links fixed too. ____Not the real rusty Blah I just updated the code, with about a month's worth of changes. I knew there'd be "issues". Sorry about this -- the team is fixing it even as we speak... ____Not the real rusty Heh. How right you are. Note: this is really long. But it's an exact transcript of what you're talking about. :-) BTW, despite my accusations, the email I found on geocrawler was from some other bit of code, and this problem was not conclusively panner's fault. Sorry, panner. He rules, by the way. Everyone should know that. **** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sat Jul 7 19:48:34 2001 19:48:34 --> rusty (~rusty@cust-P5-R3-35.POOL.ESR.SJO.wwc.com) has joined #scoop 19:48:34 --- Topic for #scoop is Scoop FAQ - http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/?op=special&page=faq &pipe;&pipe; Scoop Admin Guide - http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/6/1206/35729 &pipe;&pipe; feel free to contribute! :) &pipe;&pipe; Last SAG Sync: 3 Jul 2001 02:45 EDT 19:48:34 --- Topic for #scoop set by panner at Fri Jul 6 01:25:14 19:48:34 --- ChanServ gives channel operator status to rusty 19:48:39 <rusty> hrrrm 19:48:53 <panner> hrm is right 19:48:57 <rusty> scoop broken 19:49:03 <panner> hrm 19:49:18 <rusty> who made comments from unposted stories disappear? 19:49:18 <panner> how so? 19:50:48 <rusty> http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=comments&sid=2001/7/7/192317/4060&cid=5#5 19:52:30 <panner> that's right, sucks to be rusty 19:52:33 <panner> go fix it :) 19:52:51 <rusty> hey! i didn't break it 19:53:00 <panner> I didn't either :) 19:53:04 <panner> well, I might of.... 19:53:06 <rusty> where's hurstdog? 19:54:15 <panner> he's been gone, turned 21 yesterday (I think) 19:54:18 <rusty> # don't display comments from stories that aren't posted 19:54:18 <rusty> next if ($S->_check_story_mode($comment->{sid}) <0);<br> 19:54:20 <rusty> ! 19:54:24 <rusty> when did that go in? 19:54:32 <panner> I don't know 19:54:38 <rusty> blah 19:54:45 <rusty> i left that ability on prupoise 19:54:47 <rusty> er 19:54:48 <rusty> purpose 19:55:26 <rusty> # don't display comments from stories that aren't posted 19:55:26 <rusty> next if ($S->{UI}->{VARS}->{hide_unposted_comments} && ($S->_check_story_mode($comment->{sid}) <0));<br> 19:55:39 <rusty> add a var to control whether to do that or not 19:55:42 <panner> yeah 19:56:59 <panner> ah, much better 19:57:04 <rusty> eh? 19:57:05 * panner gets Term::ReadLine::Gnu installed 19:57:47 <panner> I recompiled perl, and made it binary incompatible 20:03:19 <rusty> hey 20:03:19 * panner is to lazy to actually track it down without more info 20:03:24 <rusty> links are mighty fucked up too 20:03:29 <rusty> http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=section;section=Diary 20:03:45 <rusty> a bunch of the links in newer diaries are bjorked 20:04:12 <panner> I hate HTML :) 20:04:16 <rusty> it's a quote thing 20:04:19 <rusty> what doies that? 20:04:39 <panner> filter_comment 20:05:30 <panner> damnit, k5 is full of whiners ;) 20:05:50 <rusty> well, only when scoop is full of bugs :-/ 20:06:00 <panner> well, they can calm the fuck down and wait it out 20:06:12 <panner> "hyperlinks are broken! MY LIFE IS OVER!!!!" 20:07:35 <rusty> rcokin 20:07:39 <panner> well, the no count for words in body is supposed to be that way 20:09:32 <rusty> wow 20:09:37 <rusty> how did this get committed? 20:09:47 <panner> what? 20:09:54 <rusty> comment filter 20:10:02 <rusty> write a coment with a link, do a preview 20:10:06 <rusty> it's totally broken 20:10:10 <panner> I know, I just tried that 20:10:21 <panner> I've been fixing that stuff, but I never commit if it doesn't work 20:10:31 <panner> and it's not like that's some rare case I could have missed, it was the first thing I tried 20:10:37 <rusty> yeah 20:10:41 <rusty> that's what i was thinking :-) 20:11:00 <rusty> i can't figure out where that happens though 20:11:34 <panner> hrm, happens to me too 20:11:53 <panner> one thing to watch for: s/// on a hash ref that you get from $S->Vars 20:12:04 <panner> there's a chance that's doing it 20:12:17 <panner> hrm, it happens locally too 20:12:30 <rusty> the form text is fine 20:12:36 <rusty> the formatted preview isn't 20:15:26 <panner> where does a comment submit enter at? 20:15:30 * panner doesn't want to track it down :) 20:15:51 <panner> hrm, think I found it, so nevermind 20:15:58 <rusty> post_form 20:16:05 <rusty> in Comments/Post.pm 20:16:13 <rusty> is the relevant thing, i think 20:16:19 <rusty> because that gets subj and comm from CGI 20:17:21 <panner> it's going into filter_comment okay, and coming out wrong, I think 20:17:24 <rusty> yes 20:17:26 <rusty> it has to be 20:17:36 <rusty> there's no other place that messes wiuth the comment text 20:17:55 <panner> in: Foo 20:17:56 <panner> out: Foo 20:18:05 <rusty> yup 20:18:11 <rusty> clean_html ? 20:18:17 <panner> maybe 20:18:19 * panner looks 20:18:45 <panner> I think so... 20:19:06 <panner> it does " -> &quot;, then calls it, so clean_html will strip " but not &quot; 20:19:31 <rusty> ohhhh 20:19:34 <rusty> I see what happens 20:19:49 <rusty> why is it doing that to quotes anyway? 20:20:00 <rusty> that doesn't need to happen in comment text 20:22:00 <rusty> hahaha 20:22:02 <rusty> it was you 20:22:03 <panner> I don't know 20:22:08 <panner> no! :) 20:22:14 <rusty> nitwit 20:22:16 <rusty> yes it was :-) 20:22:18 <panner> :( 20:22:37 * panner blames double quotes 20:22:52 * rusty found the cvs email :-) 20:23:08 <panner> I know it was me, that's related to the double quote bug 20:23:22 * Net_Fish seeks refuge in here 20:23:33 <Net_Fish> #k5 has gone to ass 20:23:37 <panner> which is to damn evil to be fixed 20:23:46 <rusty> heheh 20:23:48 <rusty> lol 20:24:06 <rusty> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/11106/2001/6/0/6068843/ 20:24:56 <panner> ack 20:24:57 <rusty> i love when that happenbs 20:25:03 <rusty> all you ddi was add that bug :-) 20:25:11 <rusty> it's so nice to see someone else do it for a change :-) 20:25:15 * panner is confused what he did to that code 20:25:32 <panner> oh, I see, that is translating & to & 20:25:36 <rusty> yeah 20:25:41 <rusty> it doesn't look right on the web 20:25:42 <panner> I wondered why that email had "s/&/&/g" 20:26:04 * rusty comments out the quote lines 20:26:06 <panner> that's a different sub, I think 20:26:12 * panner removed them 20:26:19 <rusty> did you commit? 20:26:25 <panner> html checker should take care of those, that's the only place it matters 20:26:25 <panner> no 20:26:33 <panner> take care of ", that is 20:26:38 <rusty> don't 20:26:40 <rusty> I got it 20:26:46 * panner isn't going to 20:26:58 <panner> that mail isn't related to this, afaik 20:27:04 <panner> that's in another sub 20:27:18 <rusty> oh 20:27:20 <rusty> man, you're right 20:27:37 <panner> the admin one uses a different one that does less 20:27:46 <rusty> heh 20:27:47 <rusty> damn 20:27:51 <rusty> ignore the log msg then 20:27:52 <panner> hey, I know what code I break 20:27:54 <panner> I'm not stupid 20:27:56 <panner> hehe 20:28:23 <rusty> damn 20:28:30 * rusty is bummed. that would have been funny 20:28:59 <rusty> that's better 20:29:02 <Net_Fish> did hex just take itself out ? 20:29:17 <rusty> i retsrted it 20:29:23 <rusty> er, restarted 20:29:25 <Net_Fish> ah 20:29:31 <rusty> code updates 20:29:32 <Net_Fish> explains the proxy error :P 20:29:47 * rusty goes to eat dinner **** ENDING LOGGING AT Sat Jul 7 20:29:48 2001 ____Not the real rusty Elvis Schmiedekamp Violates the Dead All over the Bay Area, there are these CalFed ads featuring some schmuck named "Elvis Schmiedekamp" [scroll down a bit]. Well, in a culture-jamming coup that just has to be propagated, these guys have decided that Elvis is fair game. Some of the best: Elvis Schmiedekamp... ...ate my balls. ...belong to us. ...has a posse. ...wants to kill you. And it goes on. Join the posse. Link courtesy of A Whole Lotta Nothing. analog has a posse I'm Elvis-agnostic, myself. But the signs and posters are so perfect for distortion, and the execution of these was good enough to warrant attention. I'm always in favor of advertising subversion. Or subverting advertisement, as the case may be... And I had to check the spelling about 7 times for each repetition of "Schmei... Scmeid... that guy." :-) ____Not the real rusty Picturebook Stuff There's been some development on drivers for the Sony Picturebook under linux, and I wanted to write up what I've done with them here, so that others can use all the neat fn-keys too. NB: This is very kludgy, but it works for me. :-) Ok, here goes. Get a 2.4.5 kernel, and an ac patch post-ac9 (I'm using 2.4.5-ac24). Enable the sonypi driver (under "character devices") and the motioneye driver (under v4l). Do both of these as modules! They don't work right compiled-in. Get the package of crap I put together. Read the README in that, and do what it says. There. This should enable you to use some more of the nifty stuff on the picturebook. Now, if anyone's feeling grateful, please work on the motioneye program so it does some more useful stuff! Oh yeah, one more note-- do not use this stuff with the original 'capture' program! It will lock your machine. Update: Ok, in the README, I say to put piwatch in rc.local. Don't do that. Bad things happen at boot. Run it when X starts up instead. Yeah I figured it was just random musing. Oh well. ____Not the real rusty That sucked Bloody hell. Yes we were down all day. I think what happened was that mysql/apache went into a memory-gobbling death spiral, most likely as a result of a modification I made to the mysql config. But there's also some evidence now that mysql may have accidentally started listening for TCP/IP connections from the local apache, which would add a TCP connection setup/teardown penalty for every connection from apache to the database, which could be responsible for all these performance problems. If that was all meaningless gibberish to you, the summary is this: We apologize, and we'll try not to let it happen again. The new server will be in place next week, which will entail probably one day of downtime, and then all should be much better. Thanks again for your patient understanding. :-) One for the .sig file "Aren't you glad you decided to take on the high-paying, prestige-laden, media-influencing role of a scoop site admin?" --ZanThrax And yes, we are all insane. In my defense, I can only say "I didn't know..." :-) ____Not the real rusty Wanna see something weird? First, check out Zelerate.com. Looks just the same as it did back in the day, when I worked there. But it's not the same. There is no Zelerate anymore. It's dead, Jim. Deader than Dillinger. That website's a ghost ship, creepily trucking on, looking like a bustling company on the go. How long will they let the corpse rot in public like that? There's something disturbing about it all... Yet for all the gross incompetence characterizing Zelerate the company, there's still a bright side. The code lives on. I suppose there's a lesson in all this, but screw it. I just wanted to call attention to the creepy spectacle of zelerate.com still being up. Not even a little message like "Hey! We don't exist anymore!" It's like the last guy out forgot to turn off the server. Nope, because... ...you just made smoking look cool again. I know that sounds sick and wrong, but I know the teenage mind, and that's how that one would play. The adults would go nuts over it, and the kids would think "That guy in the commercial... he was cool." Now, what would make a great satire on those TheTruth ads would be the same thing, except with the kid wearing a black trenchcoat with "TheTruth.com" on the back, blowing away all the smokers in the school. :-) ____Not the real rusty Upside I don't know what I was expecting. I'm gonna take that as an hommage. I know it's not, but I'm gonna take it as one anyway. Just you try and stop me. So, for what it's worth, here's some things to chew on. First off, you're a good writer. You know it, and a whole bunch of other people know it too. Stop feeling sorry for yourself that people aren't buying your book. Because, segueing into point two, you're a crappy salesman. Being a good writer is not what sells books. Being a good salesman is. There are whole legions of people out there who are very good salesmen, and all they do is sell books. You are experiencing difficulty because you're spending all your time doing the thing that you're not good at instead of the thing that you are. There's only one reason AotA isn't a huge runaway bestseller right now, and that's the fact that you don't have a pim^H^H^Hpublisher behind it. It's not the book. The book kicks ass. You are a good writer, with a very good feel for dialogue, character, pace, and plot. It ain't classic lit'rature, but it's better than quite a lot of popular books I've read. Better than all the nerd-fic out there, with the exception of the Holy Trinity (Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson; and you're in a dead heat with Sterling, I'd say). So, stop trying to be a salesman. If your current agent can't do anything with all the great geek press you've gotten, and the remarkable (for a self-published book) sales you've had already, get a new agent. Someone's dropping the ball here. I know you're very fond of your agent, but man, there's no reason at all someone shouldn't be willing to publish that. Meanwhile, let the salespeople sell, and go back to doing what you're good at. Write! Stop beating yourself up over not succeeding at the thing you don't really want to be doing in the first place. And finally, always try to remember to keep some perspective. You have friends and family who love and support you even if you are a crackpot, and you've seen things and done things that most of us wouldn't even imagine, if it weren't for your stories. Your biggest problem right now is simply self-pity. Put all that crap away and write. Or possibly the other way around. :-) ____Not the real rusty No upside Nothing positive I can say about that. Good luck, John. ____Not the real rusty trhurler is a model K5er :-) And I'm not ashamed to say it. trhurler is aces in my book. Arrogant? Yes. Educated? Undoubtedly. Loudmouthed? Well, look at the evidence. And yet, for all that, he has a great trick of always keeping the discourse on a level that is appropriate for the forum. I don't know if that phrasing really gets it across, but in all I've read of trhurler here, he never attacks the person more than the idea. That is, you can call agharta an idiot, but it's clear that you (trhurler) know that your basis for that judgement is solely what he says here on K5. It never really goes beyond that. Basically, the man's a great arguer, and, I think, would be a lot of fun to have a beer with. Count me a member of the fan club. By the way, my favorite parts of that exchange were, in order: Enani's interjection. Brilliant, as usual. The part where he goes, "Dude, there are tens of thousands of pages, and many sub-disciplines within in philsophy." I mean... "Dude"! That was great. ____Not the real rusty They were... { fray }, SatireWire, and MetaFilter. ____Not the real rusty Why is K5 so slow lately?! Hi everyone. Recently, Kuro5hin has been lacking that snappy zest we've come to expect, speedwise. Probably you've noticed, especially around lunchtime, US Eastern. The problem is, our one and only server, the long-suffering hex, is operating at just about maximum capacity right now, all the time. It's running Apache (2 servers -- mod_perl enabled and proxy), MySQL, and some miscellaneous other stuff necessary to keep the site running. At peak times, it's load is hovering in the 20s. Luckily, we already have a new server, and it's on its way to the colo in New York. It's a lovely Compaq Proliant 8000, and will eventually run the database, while hex will only be responsible for running Apache. This will, however, take another week or two to complete, and will involve some downtime of the site at some point, probably not more than a few hours. We'll let you know beforehand when that will be. But meantime, I apologize for the slowness, and assure you that all will be well again very soon. Thanks, everyone, for making this necessary! ;-) Update, 6/26 by Inoshiro: pgsql would be nice, but Scoop doesn't support it yet. Any help in this matter is appreciated. Update, 6/28 by rusty: Well, bubba's off to colo in New York. It should be there in 7 or 8 days. Wish it a safe trip! Update, 7/19 by rusty: bubba made it to New York ok, booted up fine, and then started refusing to boot. Our guy at VHosting is checking everything, and ought to be able to get the thing up soon. As soon as it's running, we'll be moving everything over. More news as warranted... Update #2, 7/19 by rusty: Latest word is that the machine boots, but something goes wrong at the last moment, when it clears the console for login. The screen goes blank, and stays that way. We have a Compaq expert on the way to look at it tomorrow. If anyone knows anything about the Proliant series, and/or has seen this behavior before, please let us know! Upate, 8/03 by rusty: Bubba is up! We don't actually know what was wrong with it, but Jason stripped it down and reconnected everything, and it's finally running. The changeover should happen tomorrow. Yay! Look up Near the top, just under the header, to the right. Special link to this. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah... We're working on the port. Someone may be doing it now, or, if not, hurstdog will be doing it next semester. We shall see... ____Not the real rusty Not quite :-) A person at Compaq donated the new box (not "Compaq" the corporate entity). And VA may or may not have been willing to give us a box (they probably would have), we didn't ask. Our use of hardware does not reflect any particular allegiances or alignments. We think VA and Compaq are both great companies, who make great products and give them to us for free. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's name is 'bubba' The donor asked to name the new box, and we thought that was only fair. So it's name is "bubba". No, we don't know why either, and we're not about to ask. ____Not the real rusty Some details Let's see...For July, we're averaging 76,628 pageviews a day. This incidentally, is the busiest month ever, finally beating January's 70,920 p/d average. The current server is a dual P3 750,with one Gb of RAM. It's a VA fullon 2200. The mod_perl apache is set to 30 servers max, and each may use up to 30Mb of memory. I know this is a small number, but mysql is also running, and both need a lot of memory. Scoop does much better with a small number of long-lasting servers that can use a lot of memory, instead of more with less space. The send buffer is... well, I forget, but it's big enough. There's no speed problem related to front-end buffering. And keepalive is on for the static server, and off for mod_perl (since there's only one request per client for the heavy apache anyway). The bit about HTML being wasteful isn't the problem. We have plenty of bandwidth -- the problem is basically not enough memory. We tried to put more mem in the current box, but the chips we had wouldn't work. Basically, the database is big enough to make mysql need more index cache space, and apache need more memory space to expand into, which we don't have. I'm pretty much resigned to fixing the new box myself when I get to NY, which will be mid-august. Till then, not much I can do. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Cat Update, and K5: 1, NYT: 0 Well, the fliers worked! Sasha, as we discovered the cat was named, has been reunited with his owner. Though nothing can ever make up for what we did to Betsy, this at least makes us feel that some part of our cosmic debt has been repaid. And also, see this month's PC World, in which my new best friend and personal Hero Andrew Brandt compares the New York Times unfavorably to K5. Ha! Hahahahaa. Eat that, you miserable Rotten Apple hacks! Specifically, he writes: "The New York Times is fine, but I want more from my information site.Throw the Times, The New Yorker, and the online magazine Salon.com into a blender; hit frapp; and you end up with Kuro5hin." I'm supposed to be all reserved and aloof, but screw that. What follows will be me exulting that the New York Times, in comparison to K5, is merely "fine." If you don't want to see this ugly spectacle, please move along... :-) Ahem. Hear that, you register-to-read bastards!? Yeah, that's right. "Fine." Not great. Just... "fine." All the snooze that's fit to print, I say! Don't be bringing none of that lame stuff on my web! Just look at that picture. Andrew Brandt, a glowing godlike figure, smiling serenely in the knowlege that 100 years from now, people will be saying "The New York what? Oh, didn't Kuro5hin buy that rag back in '42? A prophet, the man is. A prophet, and a genius, and we will put up a plaque in his honor in the atrium of the former New York Times offices when we move in. He was the first one to See. Oh yeah, maybe we'll strip the New Yorker and Salon carcasses of what talent they have, too, while we're at it. Ah, we'll probably just sell both of them to the Saudis. It's so much easier that way. Andrew, next time you're in San Francisco (or Maine, after September) I owe you a beer. :-) Ahh, the past :-) I don't know, Rusty, do you ever take a look at what you've done here and just have to say "Damn!"? I know I do. Heh. It's not so much that I look at what I've done, as I look at what's happened. What's "been done." Mostly I'm proud that such a large group of people have all proven that they can work together, and create something better than anyone would have expected. It's still kind of inexplicable and surreal though. :-) ____Not the real rusty Love, baby. Not to bring you down off your high, but are you going to buy the NYT with? Nothing but Loooove. It'll be a Transaction of Loooove. I'll go to the First National Bank of Loooove, withdraw all my Loooove, and buy up the New York Times. With Loooove. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I know... ...but allow me a little bit of absurd gloating before you go interjecting sense in here, at least. :-) ____Not the real rusty The Ballad of Betsy I found a cat today on my roof. I managed to get it into a carrier, and bring it down, but now I don't know what to do with it. I gave it some food and water, and left it in the stairs/alley to see if it tries to go anywhere. I also named it Betsy, for reasons which will be explained below. If you happen to have lost a cat in the Haight (SF) that looks like this, let me know. I'm torn now as to what the hell to do, and mostly because of the last time we found a cat. Back when Christina and I lived in Adams-Morgan, in DC, we were walking home one night, when, less than a block from our apartment, we saw a cat walking along the sidewalk. I did the normal "Hi Kitty!" thing, and instead of ignoring us, like most cats do, this one ran right up and started snuggling and purring frantically. Well, we thought, this has got to be a lost housecat. Alley cats just don't do that. We noticed it had a collar, too, but it was too dark to read its tags. So we picked it up and took it home. Inside, we could see that the tag said its name was "Betsy", and gave a phone number, with a DC area code. We called the number, but it didn't work (it had been disconnected). We didn't know what to do -- we didn't feel right keeping the cat, and we thought maybe it was just a neighbor's cat, that was let out at night. So we patted it, and put it back outside. Never saw it again. But a few months later, I got a job at Intes, in Maryland. I had worked there for a couple weeks, when I found myself chatting with one of my co-workers, a guy named John. He asked where I lived, I said Adams-Morgan, Ontario Place. He siad "Oh hey! I used to live right around the corner from there. We just moved a couple months ago. That's a great neighborhood..." [Pause] "I lost my cat there, though." I felt a load of bricks settle down upon my conscience, feeling like they were gonna stay a while. "Ha ha." I said nervously. "That's funny, cause we found a cat there once. Your cat wasn't named Betsy, was it? Ha. Ha." His jaw dropped. He just stared at me. "You found Betsy?!" The bricks invited some friends. They were getting real comfortable. So, John had moved, not too far away, and Betsy got out one night, and didn't know how to get home to the new place. So she went back to the old neighborhood, where we found her, and then turned her out again into the cruel, cruel world. The phone number was the old apartment, which is why it didn't work. This story, to me, is the ultimate proof that probability is the universe's weakest force, and Karma it's strongest. What the hell are the chances that I'd find this guy's lost cat, and then months later end up working with him? The whole company (Intes) only had like 6 employees at the time. I call that pretty remote. But there it is. So now we have found another cat, which seems very friendly and domesticated, and lost. No collar, no tags. What do I do? Can't keep him I definitely can't keep it, and I'm afraid to even let it in the house. I was outside petting it, then I came back in, and my cat smelled him on my clothes and got very suspicious, and hissed at me when I tried to touch him. Obviously, he's not about to let another cat into the family. We're going to put up some fliers in the neighborhood, and we posted a notice on Craigslist. Hope someone turns up. The neighbor who's roof the cat was originally on said they found him in their garage on Friday. Poor thing's probably starving to death. :-( ____Not the real rusty I'm In Violation! Much to my delight, I've been served with a Violation Notice by the Internet Authority (thanks fluffy!). See below to read it. Dear Rusty Foster, It has recently been brought to our attention that you are, or have been, in violation of the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines. It has been reported that you distribute and/or view offensive materials over the Internet. Net Authority has investigated these claims by checking your webpage at http://kuro5hin.org and verified that they are true. As a result, your personal information has been added to one or more Net Authority Internet offender databases. Your information will be stored in the databases until enough evidence has been gathered against you to warrant further actions. To help avoid such a situation, it is strongly recommended that you cease your immoral actions on the Internet at once. You have been added to the following databases: - Hate Literature Offenders - Pornography Offenders - Child Pornography Offenders - Bestiality Offenders - Homosexual Pornography Offenders - Interracial Pornography Offenders - General Blasphemy Offenders If you would like more information about Net Authority or the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines, you may read the details at http://www.netauthority.org/. It is imperative that you fully understand the guidelines if you wish to avoid further prosecution. May God be with you as you struggle to overcome these evil impulses. You will be in our prayers at night. God speed, Net Authority Investigations Department investigations@netauthority.org http://www.netauthority.org/ ------------------------------ Do go take a look at their site, it's a riot. Here's hoping for more viscious, anti-Fundy satire on the net. :-) Arrowpoint sucks, apparently Arrowpoint/Cisco load-balancing router issues. Nothing exciting or devious, unfortunately. Just routine hardware failure. ____Not the real rusty Netscape will burn in hell I was just about done with a very enjoyable little diary entry, and netscape decided to do its "lock the interface and blow 100% CPU" trick. The only fix for that is killall -9 netscape. Netscape is crap. It's such crap that it should be illegal. Furthermore, all people who had anything to do with the Netscape 4.x codebase should be fired, stripped of all their worldly possessions, and forced to live on the streets and eat whatever rats and bugs they can catch and kill. More on this topic below... A message to Netscape's alleged "programmers": You MUST quit. You have to stop foisting this thing on people. It's worse than having no browser at all! You suck at programming, and you all should be working in steel mills instead. Just give up. Maybe suicide is an option... And before anyone even says it, yes, I'm writing this in Mozilla, and no it's no better. Mozilla is fat, bloated, ugly, slow, and late. Three years late, to be exact. Three years after the Mozilla project started, we have a browser which is worse than Netscape 4.x in every way except two: Better CSS support, and it crashes marginally less often. In every other way, it utterly bites. And this is compared to NETSCAPE. By any sane measure, neither one of them even qualifies as a "web browser". Maybe I'll try Galeon... No, that would require me to upgrade to the newest 133t Gnome garbage. So, for a "lightweight, simple, small footprint" browser, I have to download all 800 terabytes of Mozilla, then an additional 500 terabytes of gnome library crap. Screw all this. The desktop I have now works just fine. Everyone complains about Microsoft's forced-upgrade tactics, but jesus, they're still not as bad as Gnome developers! So far, the only linux browser I've found that doesn't make me want to shoot myself in despair is Konqueror. It's not good, no, but it's not torture either. And in the linux world, that's saying something. I know this diary is fairly viscious and nasty, but I'm just fed up with this crap. I'm tired of bad software. Maybe I'm finally turning into a "user" after all. I want a computer that just does what it's supposed to. Maybe it's time for me to buy a Mac. If you'd rather have had something fairly light and cheerful here, go to Netscape's HQ and demand that they find my original diary entry. And in case it wasn't clear enough: If anyone reading this works for Netscape, you should hate yourself. When the history books write about Netscape, they will say "They made the net important, and then committed software atrocities comparable to the Khmer Rouge." You will all die painful deaths and be reborn as intestinal parasites in the guts of giant roaches who live in caves full of bat guano. And that's getting off easy. Bloatware This is why I call Mozilla bloatware. Direct from my current system stats, here's Netscape, having run for an hour or so and loaded a bunch of pages: USERPID%CPU%MEMVSZRSSCOMMAND rusty33100.019.23194024592/opt/netscape/netscape rusty33110.02.8168363624(dnshelper) And here's Mozilla 0.9, having run for about 3 minutes, and loaded one single page: USERPID%CPU%MEMVSZRSSCOMMAND rusty33470.00.61696808sh/usr/local/mozilla/run-mozilla.sh rusty33590.022.63648028988/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin rusty33610.022.63648028992/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin rusty33620.022.63648028992/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin rusty33630.022.63648028992/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin rusty34010.022.63648028992/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin "Bloatware". ____Not the real rusty Hm. Isn't this in the FAQ? Ok, there are two way a story can be posted/not posted. Way one is the obvious one: it reaches one of the thresholds before a certain total number of votes have been cast. Way two is, if X votes have been cast, and the story hasn't reached a threshold (right now, X is 350), then "auto-post" kicks in. Scoop looks at the voting, and if the story's score is negative, just drops it. If not, it assigns a value to each vote as follows: 0 vote == 2 -1 vote == 1 +1 vote == 4 +1 FP vote == 5 The reason for this seemingly arbitrary scale should be clear in a minute. It takes all the scores for each vote and averages them. This is the "voting score". Then it takes comment scores for each topical comment, and averages those, with the caveat that the number of comments is considered to be either the actual number of comments, or 20, whichever is higher. That is, if there's ten comments, the scores are averaged like there were 20. Upshot being, stories with few topical comments are penalized for being, presumably, boring. So then we average the voting score and the comment score and get an overall "story score". If this is higher than 3, the story's posted. If it's higher than 4, it's posted front page. Otherwise, it's dropped. I thought that was in the FAQ somewhere, but maybe it isn't. The goal is to do something with stories that have been there for a while, since the original voting system is non-convergent. That is, it was possible for a story to never post or drop, and just sit there forever. Is this the best solution? No, it's a hack. It works pretty well, for now, but will eventually be replaced with a voting system which is actually convergent. Sorry it hit you by surprise like that. Yes, it is possible for you to trigger a decision whcih goes against what you wanted, which is kind of disconcerting. Hope it makes a little more sense now. ____Not the real rusty Not really The goal is to normalize the votes by people who did vote so they will be meaningful on the same scale as comment ratings. That is, to combine comment ratings with story votes in any useful way, they have to operate on the same scale. I'd either have to break down comment ratings into a -1/0/+1/+1FP kind of metric, or assign the four story votes places on the 1-5 comment rating scale. I chose the latter. The point is to look at what information we have about a story, at some point of "quorum", and decide what's likely the best outcome for the site. It's not ideal, because it takes the decision out of the direct and immediate control of voters, in some cases, which makes me unhappy. In practice, though, it works pretty well, which means it stays until a more complete solution is implemented. ____Not the real rusty Future Maine Islandahs, Ayuh. The trip to Portland was successful! We found, not just an appartment, but a house on Peaks Island, a few miles off the coast of Portland. As of September 1, it will be known as "The Secret K5 Island Compound." Pictures and info below. These pictures aren't that great (took them with the picturebook) but they give an idea. The owners thought I was freak, walking around pointing a laptop at stuff. There definitely isn't the same kind of blase attitude toward technology out there as in the Bay area. Anyway, we move in September first, and have the place till the middle of June. Then they start renting it weekly again, to "summah people" so we'll have to find something else for a couple months. We're seeing if island life is agreeable, in preparation for possibly buying a house in a couple years. The reason we looked at Peaks in the first place is that my grandparents have a cottage on the other side of the island, that I've gone to in the summer for years and years, so I was familiar with the place. It's also really cool to be off in what feels like a tiny country village, but is only 15 minutes away from Portland, which is a very cool city. No suburbs in between, just a beautiful ferry ride. :-) We shall see if it's heavenly, or a big hassle. Looks like I can get cable broadband on the island, so no worries there. For me, it'll probably be fantastic. Bret will have to commute though, so she'll be the judge of how much fun that is. The ferries go pretty frequently-- every hour in the summer, and almost every hour in the winter. Anyway, on to the pictures: The front of the house. The front of the house, closer up. Note the hideous trim color. It's actually worse than it appears here-- it's a nauseating combination of roadcone orange and salmon. The back of the house. Not yet repainted-- it will be before we move in. You can really see the ugly trim color in this one. The living room. This is taken from the entryway, and features one of the owners' kids, who are all awfully cute. They don't come with the house, as far as we know. The dining room. Taken from the office alcove (see below). The stairs go up to the two bedrooms, the door directly ahead opens to a studio/utility room. Note the coal stove to the right. You can just sort of see the pipe in front of the lamp. I need a flash or something. The dining room, from the other side. Standing under the stairs. Again, you can just sort of make out the coal stove outline. It's very Bob Cratchett though, I must say. My future office alcove. The only room that gets direct sinlight, this also has the heater in the middle. The child-litter will be gone before we move in. :-) The kitchen and bathroom, looking left from entry. To my immediate right is the back door, the stove is to the right of that high chair, and the dishwasher is just in front to the right. You of course can't see any of that in this picture though. The other side of the kitchen. Possibly the worst picture of the bunch, you can barely make out the clothes washing gear in the precambrian gloom. It really isn't this dark. The camera on the vaio just doesn't do well in low-light, especially at high-resolution. The backyard. Scary Cujo-like dog also not included with house. Note the hammock (left) and swingset (right) though. There's actually more backyard than this, on the left. It didn't all fit in the frame. One bedroom. The master bedroom. Gets a lot of light in the daytime. A pretty road in the woods nearby. There was a deer on the left side of the road just seconds before I took this. Damn "resume" delay. "Backshore", the ocean side of the island. The car ferry arriving. Car ferry and a lobster boat. I got a smudge on the lens here, which makes it look like there's a hurricane coming in. Actually, it was bright and sunny. Too bad, this would have been a good picture. The car ferry leaving. As the Simpsons said, "See you on... THE ISLAND!" Baby-Treet(TM) brand Kiddie Litter New! Improved! Fresh-Step Kiddie Litter! Tired of baby odor in your multiple-baby house? Try the all-new Fresh-Step Kiddie Litter! Your babies will thank you when you give them this odor-free, low-dust, easy-scooping litter. And if they like that, they'll love... New, improved Baby-Chow brand baby food! They'll come running as soon as they hear the can opener, and you'll have to hose them down as they fight over the last tantalizing mouthful! Oops! There goes an ear! What a pair of scamps! Available in Chicken, Sardine, and Crunchy Rat flavors (with real Wisconsin crunchy rat!). Try them all, or mix them together for a wild crunchy chickenfishrat blast! These and other fine Baby-Treet products available at your local baby store. Remember, if it isn't Baby-Treet(TM), it must be for poor people! ____Not the real rusty Didn't I mention... They just came out with brand new Rockin Pig Partz flavor. Molded to look just like cute miniature snouts and twisty tails. With a Fun Surprise in every box!* * "Fun Surprise" may not actually be fun. Not suitable for children under 2 or those with a heart condition. Consult your doctor if rash, swelling, or cough develops. Do not take Fun Surprise with monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Do not operate heavy machinery within 12 hours of opening Fun Surprise. Reading or ignoring this warning constitutes acceptance of any and all terms and conditions, explicit or implied. ____Not the real rusty That's not even the best part You'd really want to flee the Bay area if you knew what we're paying for that. :-) I will post pictures in the winter. But I'll wait for the pretty post-snowfall days, when the bright winter sun glints off the newfallen snow, breath steaming in the crisp dry winter air... Mwahahaha :-) ____Not the real rusty Even better! Yeah, we had that too. Here are some more things to consider: Located in Maine, site of virtually all Stephen King stories. Near not one, but 2 small crumbling cemeteries. Bearded reclusive old guy next door "drinks too much" but "is completely harmless". Yeah, right. Built on site of ancient Micmac burial ground. Ok, I made up the last one. But the rest are true! Creepy, eh? :-) ____Not the real rusty Yuck! I said cute. Like anyone else thinks kids are cute. Not "hot" or "sexy". Sheesh. ____Not the real rusty Martinez, you wiseass You wouldn't last fifteen seconds in the kind of direct sinlight I'm accustomed to. Now shut your festering gob, you great blubbering twit. ____Not the real rusty A tale of two Portlands And I always wanted to live somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, because I've been there often and I love the way the place feels... NOTE! This Portland is Maine, not Oregon. I don't know if that was clear, and you were just mentioning the Pacific Northwest for the hell of it, but being in CA and talking about moving to Portland, I'm a little sensitive to misinterpretations of which Portland. :-) ____Not the real rusty Island stats The island is about five miles in diameter, and is a fifteen minute ferry ride away from Portland (so about 2 and a half miles). It has 1,000 year-round residents, and about 5,000 people in the summer. It has a fire/police station, elementary school (middle and high school kids go to school in Portland), two churches, a grocery store, a couple restaurants, a hotel, a gas station, a hardware store, a real estate office, a coffee shop that's open at odd pseudo-random hours, and a few other public establishments. You could conceivably live fine without ever leaving the island, but food would get kind of expensive, and the veggie selection isn't so great. Weather is roughly like any coastal New England area. It's surrounded by water, so it doesn't get all that cold. I think the average winter range is something like 20-40 F. The whole "it's so cold!" thing is way exaggerated, especially compared to places like, oh, say, Saskatoon. :-) The ocean keeps things relatively cool in summer and relatively warm in winter. Hence, it doesn't snow all that much either -- frequently we'll get rain when the rest of the state is getting snow. And no, the water doesn't come up to our house. :-) We're up a ways into the middle of the island, so you can't even see the ocean from where we are. Oh yeah, another cool thing about Peaks is, it was a primary defense point for Casco Bay in WWI and II (Casco Bay was the main convoy staging area for the North Atlantic fleet because it's very very deep) so there are all these nifty old military bunkers and stuff buried in the woods all around. You can climb up on top of "Battery Steele" and walk out to the semi-circle dish thingy where the 16" guns were, pointed out toward the ocean, in case anyone ever tried to invade. There's lots of interesting history in the area. ____Not the real rusty Thanks! We'll be there in September. I love Portland too. Hippest city in New England. :-) ____Not the real rusty I don't believe that Also, our beloved founder, Rusty, used to crapflood the site plastic.com using this account. Do you believe that? That seems pretty unlikely to me. However, shoeboy, I am thinking of setting you up with an Upper West Side condo and keeping you as my girlfriend. The geek culture series was hilarious. Keep the sacred cow barbeque fires lit, my brother. ____Not the real rusty Not like I did, I'll wager... The one biggie for me was this diary, where I expound on my friend's relationship at great (for me) length. And also on strategies for not being a selfish bastard when someone's trying to tell you their problems. It's long, so I'll excerpt: Maria got home a little after me, devastated because she had just seen the guy she just broke up with, and he rebroke up with her. She has trouble communicating with him (worst possible sign), and probably is better off without him, but doesn't want to feel bad about it, and wants to be friends. I told her before that there's not much she can do about that, and he'll be friends if he wants to be. This night, she was really upset, so I just listened. I also learned a key bit of good-friend wisdom. When your friend is upset about a relationship, DO NOT try to tell him/her what to do. It won't help, and you'll invariably be wrong anyway. This I knew already. What I learned was how to do that. When listening to your friend tell their story, carefully review every response that occurs to you, and reject any that include the word "I" anywhere in them. This will have two effects: You'll talk a lot less, because your brain will be busy filtering possible statements More important, you won't make into a conversation about you, because that's not what you're there for. I found that the only things I could legally say, under the "no I" rule, were things like "What did you want to say to him?" and "Why do you think he feels that way?" which were, I think, pretty successful. Well, she later went and showed him my site. "Oh look, rusty has a diary about the Boston trip." She hadn't read it before they both sat down to peruse. Apparently it was an "interesting" evening. Ah, the joys of living a public private life, eh? :-) ____Not the real rusty 815 I am so ashamed. ____Not the real rusty Anyone for an ice cold Budweiser? I think I'm going to be ill. Courtesy of Marketing-Myopia by way of Flummox. BTW, CBS MarketWatch is another Fine Webby Awards Nominee. Does anyone else sort of yearn for the day the skript kiddys get serious and actually take out half the web? Or three quarters, even? Oh yeah, and RIP Netscape too. One thing struck me... However, six months from now, you won't consider Netscape to be a browser company,'' Netscape President Jim Bankoff told Reuters in an interview... Scuse me, but six months ago I didn't consider Netscape to be a browser company... I hope you enjoyed your daily dose of "As the Web Sucks", and join us again tomorrow for more. Impressive Were they serving that background tile from doubliclick or something? Anyway, you should disable it for a request and take a look at that page unfiltered. It seriously makes me nauseous. And I'm not even particularly anti-advertising! Just imagine one day you turn on the CBS Evening News, and there's Dan, sitting in front of a huge white panel emblazoned with "BUDWEISER" about 150 times. My God, the rest of the news business would go positively nuts. The news room of the New York Times would be impassable, as columnists hooted and screeched and flung their own feces at passersby. There'd be riots in Times Square. Carson Daly would have to install anti-tank armor on the windows of the TRL studio. But here on the greedhead internet, anything goes! Well, by gum, we're in a full-blown economic crisis here! I'm so tired of these bastards raping my medium. I hope they all end up starving and homeless, eating stray dogs and licking spilled ketchup off the sidewalk to survive. Tell me where they pitched their cardboard box, and I'll go kick it over. Hmmm. Maybe I can think of a good mission for ruthlessfist.com after all... ____Not the real rusty Phew I went to look, and no response. I was praying it wasn't Scoop's fault. :-) Now you have no excuse for not helping us with the code! ;-) ____Not the real rusty What? After all, I did a lot of the manual expiring yesterday, and planned out the changes with rusty :p What the hell are you talking about? You did no such thing. This glory is MINE dammit! All MINE! :-) ____Not the real rusty I twiddled the knobs The queue, as it works now, basically has three admin knobs. post_threshold, dump_threshold, and max_votes. I lowered post_threshold all the way down to 80, left dump_threshold at -20, and cut off voting at 350 votes. This maens that, as of right now anyway, it should be unlikely for a story to take more than a day to process. This is not the queue fix, but may help for the time being while I'm working on it. People were right -- the thresholds were way too high. By 350 votes, everyone knows what should be done with a story. See comment here. ____Not the real rusty He must be right! After all, Bill Bradley came within a hair's breadth of being our President in the last election... Oh no, wait, that wasn't him. Well, he was very nearly nomin... no, guess not that either. If he's gone to the trouble of emailing you, then you really pissed him off. Good show! If you're not making anyone mad, especially when you're writing about politics, then you're doing something wrong. Remind me to send you a complimentary "Media Whore" T-Shirt when I get the new design put together... :-) ____Not the real rusty Good Mail Day The mail today brings me a paycheck, a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog, and a tape of the Buffy season finale. If only every day could bring such welcome mail. Wondering.. I was wondering when we had gotten into the underwear business. With Inoshiro around, you just never know what will happen... ____Not the real rusty Things I learned in college I learned at least two things in college. My social security number That mail is Bad, and should be avoided as much as possible. It got so bad that by junior year I could only manage to get myself to the mail place once a week, if that. Nothing but bills, overdue notices, and the occasional "you may already have been expelled!" letter form the College. Things seem to have picked up though. Still plently of bills, but at least I don't have to handle those anymore. Actually, I can't recall the last time I got USPS mail that was actually for me. I get FedExes and UPS packages, and one North American Van Lines delivery, recently, but never normal mail. I consider this a victory. :-) ____Not the real rusty My administrative team... ...gets my ardent thanks just as often as she needs it. :-) ____Not the real rusty How long, Oh Lord, How long? Yes, I know this is taking forever. The "view your ratings" thing was a very small feature hack -- it took about 2 hours altogether. Story ratings will affect a lot more of the code, in that a whole bunch of different things relate to various aspects of the current story voting stuff. Also, it's one of the first things that was in Scoop at all, so it's fairly crufty and overloaded with later additions. Plus, for the whole thing to work right, I need to add a few totally new features as well. Anyway, have faith. I am working on it. It will come. I've started mapping out the plan of attack, but I may not get to any serious coding until the end of next week. By the way, Re the thread below, yes there is an auto-decision feature, and the current number of votes required is something like 550. For some reason, the older stuff just ain't getting there. I appreciate your continued patience. :-) ____Not the real rusty Two Words: Bad Ass. Courtesy of Doc, courtesy of Craig Jensen, comes the story of a man, a bank, a check (cheque), a big surprise, and an ex-bank. For anyone who's ever been screwed by a bank, or anyone who expects at any time to have to even deal with a bank, ever, you must see this Flash movie. [Linux users who have Flash, click here. His plugin detector is broken. Trust me, it's worth it.] Royal Bank of Canada, welcome to a whole world of bad publicity. You have no one to thank but yourselves. And for all of you out there with your own weblogs, spread the word far and wide. Together, we can punish the Evil. :-) Yeah, no kidding "Putting a hold" on funds, ok. But holding it for 25 days? They could verify the check by book rate mail in the amount of time. I mean, what are they doing with that check that takes 25 days to complete? Nothing takes that long! ____Not the real rusty Eek! mod_perl as a DSO: Don't even bother. Seriously. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but one thing that's for sure is you'll get no real help from anyone with it. mod_perl is officially not supported as a dynamic object. That means that if someone out there really wants to try to make it work, they're welcome to, but the authors are not putting any effort into making it work that way. First: Compile mod_perl statically into apache. Make that the only third-party module you include. Make it work. Then go trying to do fancy stuff like adding other modules... but my best advice is don't even waste your time trying to compile it dynamic. ____Not the real rusty You're wrong It wasn't shoeboy. Whether you believe him or not, I don't care. But you can believe me. And shoeboy is no more an idiot than you or I. In fact, he's a better writer than both of us. I'm not so sure about "devilishly handsome" though... ____Not the real rusty Good Eye! Yep, those were all duplicate accounts. Good eye, whoever caught that, and keep it up. They were all in fact NOT shoeboy (which I suspected -- that's not shoeboy's style), but instead belonged to "buttfucker2000". I canceled all but the original bf2k account. Some things I'd like to point out, for the concerned: It would appear that this kind of thing hasn't yet succeeded in getting a story posted. Or even in changing the overall score much. The system worked -- people looked at the information available, and came to some conclusions. You told me about it, I used the x-ray admin vision to make sure, and duplicate accounts were cleansed. So basically, I'm pleased here. If anyone notices anything else like this, do let me know. :-) ____Not the real rusty Wow This made it into my personal folder of "Really Good Diary Entries I'll Want To Look At Again Someday". First, for being probably the first time I've ever heard a Swede say anything even remotely bad about Sweden, and second for just general wisdom. I do my best work under ludicrous deadlines and insane pressure, personally. A "good situation" is never good for me at all. In fact, when I get comfortable, I start unconsciously engaging in subtle self-destructive behavior to throw that off. Nothing drastic, just stuff like not sleeping enough and leaving responsibilities till the very last minute. I'm damn good under pressure though. I've just never figured out how to be any good without it. Have you considered coming out to the US? I bet a couple years in CA could provide all the stress and challenge you could handle. I've had enough after 9 months (and do consider the aforementioned self-description there, too). ____Not the real rusty Guns? Don't let the propaganda fool you. Guns are not that common in the US, unless you hang out with particular people. I've lived here for 25 years now, and seen a grand total of ONE gun, outside the context of a sporting goods store. And that belonged to my friend's dad, who used to hunt. Fear of guns is a pretty silly reason not to come here. :-) ____Not the real rusty Are you sure? Looking at the "Posted on" times, it looks like you haven't rated anything that was posted since March. A few other people have said basically the same thing -- "I didn't rate that stuff!", but I can't see any clear way that could be so. Basically, I don't want to put a lot of time into investigating if I don't *know* it's actually a bug... So, looking at the comments, and especially looking at when they were actually posted, are you *positive* that you couldn't have rated them? ____Not the real rusty Yeah I just looked over the rating code again, and the relevant bit is only about 15 lines. Basically, if it's inserting UIDs wrong in the ratings table, we got *way* bigger problems than this. :-) So, maybe the bit that reads them back out is screwed up? Conceivable, but testing that I've done would seem to make that unlikely too (like, I rate stuff, and the new ratinmgs show up in my list...). I'll keep an eye on it for a bit, and see if this is a spreading thing, or just everyone's bad memory. Another possibility is that at some point, the database got corrupted, or just confused, and is now functioning properly again. In which case, there isn't really anything I can do. I dunno. Updates as warranted I guess. ____Not the real rusty Three-year-old mentalities Here's a tip. Say you find yourself the victim of person or persons rating down all your comments for no obvious reason. Here's what you do. Don't email me. I didn't do it. I only have one rating. It won't do you any good. Post a diary. All the info is available to everyone. Draw attention to it. If people feel you've been treated unfairly, and if they care, they'll compensate. For instance. How about theboz and ucblockhead vs. Jive Billy. All right there. Times and dates. IMO, they all look like babies. Which might be another useful tip-- if you're mass rated, and you retaliate first, you look like just as big an asshole as they do. And dammit, this is the last I'm even gonna say about this stuff. It just so isn't worth all this, people. Get a hold of yourselves! :-) Not taking sides... I'm just pointing people at the information. :-) ____Not the real rusty My ratings JB emailed me, I didn't think that comment deserved a zero, so I over-rated it for effect. Of course I don't think it deserved a 5 either. Now I just don't care any more, since clearly JB is determined to just keep re-posting the same comments over and over, as he obviously doesn't understand how the ratings system works at all. That article is now so trashed with repeated threads it's just silly. Ah well. It's all in your hands now. And as Delirium points out elsewhere, one of the whole keys to this is people rating everything they see. It'll all work much better if even ten or twenty of us really do that all the time. I'm going to try to make a conscious effort to do that from now on, which probably means you'll see a lot of 3's from me. :-) ____Not the real rusty True! Laziness is the mother of... ah whatever. ____Not the real rusty Yep "funtime", "modstorm[1-6]", and "thequestion" have all been disabled, as they were puzzlingevidence duplicate accounts. Amusingly, puzzlingevidence even claimed that funtime was a co-worker, which is a flat-out lie. I can't tell you how I know that, but I do know it. As always, I don't care if you have multiple accounts, unless I catch you doing stupid shit with them. And now that everyone else can see the stupid shit you do, I don't think I even need to be kept up on the situation, particularly. As alprazolam very correctly points out, the "respect market" is open for business. ____Not the real rusty I don't know... If he has any more, I couldn't easily find them. ____Not the real rusty Psst People are getting a little annoyed... you might probably want to cut this down to like maybe one or two a day. Write em up beforehand, and just insert like on the 12s. Soemone's even got a script to post diaries -- I bet you could hack it to run off cron... :-) ____Not the real rusty Slow diary time... My guess is that the slowest diary times would be around 6-8PM EST, and probably 2-4AM EST. But that's just a hunch... ____Not the real rusty Open Ratings, part 2 I've been getting way too much email lately about this guy or that guy mass downrating all comments by one or a couple people. So I decided to do what I've been meaning to for a while, and make comment ratings browsable by user. Everyone's user info page now has a new link, to see comment ratings by that user. Perhaps in the future you'll be able to search for ratings related to an arbitrary other user, but right now it's just chronological. One note: ratings haven't been timestamped until now, so the lists chronology will be a little odd for a bit. A whole lot of ratings will be marked "05/31/2001 02:41:15 AM PST" (or whatever your local zone is). Can't be helped. Also, looking at my ratings, I found this. I have no way to explain that. Even admins can't rate our own comments. That one's just mysterious. Nah This basically is "meta-moderation", but better. The idea is that by making all the relevant information easily available to people, we won't need another evil layer of scoring. That is, the system is already designed to accept "correctional" input, it's just a matter of making sure people can find out if corrections are needed, in their opinion. Hence, more info is good. Now when people note that they've been mass rated by some twerp, they can just point it out to everyone, and let the community decide if anything needs to be done about it. Because deep down, it's all about making less work for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty Ha! That's pretty cool. Kuro5hin is now as good as breasts. And I had nothing at all to do with that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Or rather... one implemented in this manner would probably have a LOT of starting points which eventually collapse into one of a few outcomes Don't you mean it would have a lot of outcomes that collapse into relatively few starting points? ____Not the real rusty Ah, I see I was thinking that "playing" the game would be the process of taking an "ending" and adding an event that led to it. Where "ending" is in quotes because it just means "event that has no known preceeding event". But how would you even know that? Hmmm. Myabe the game could just grow out from wherever. Or, ummm, in from wherever, technically. Ok, I'm confused again. :-) ____Not the real rusty Growl If the kids are united, they will never be divided..." --Tim "lint" Armstrong & Rancid Tim Armstrong is growling the above and much more in his gutter-punk snarl out of the Altec-Lansing subwoofer that my feet are resting on, and the sound travels right up my spine and lodges in the back of my head, and makes me wanna write a diary entry. So you're gonna have to deal with that. Email Stupidity Last night I found out that emails to help@kuro5hin.org and the scoop-help mailing list have been pre-filtered on the server for almost a month. This means that Netscape mail doesn't notice that there's new mail in those folders, and thus I haven't seen any mail from either of those addresses since the 5th. I caught up on all the help@k5 email last night, in a frenzied two-hour slog at 4AM, but I still feel like a complete shithead for being out of touch for so long. So, to anyone who didn't already get apologized to, I apologize again. Article Thoughts The bizarre Apple article went over more or less as I expected it to. Most people got the stylistic references to HST, and no one was too insulted by that. I guess it was obvious enough that no one thought I was trying to pass myself off as a big innovator. A few people were inexplicably pissed off by it, though, and not for any of the reasons I thought they would be. I mean, it was pretty anti-Apple, but there's been no real zealot-screeching, which is good. The people who hate it seem to be mad that I wrote an article that doesn't read like a third-page USA Today item. Like, it uses rhetoric, and extended metaphor, and doesn't bash you over the head with connections between topics! Be still my heart. I think that Sheepdot makes a good suggestion though. I'm tired of the "it just got voted up because you're rusty!" accusations. My next article won't be posted as rusty. If streetlawyer can do it, then so can I, dammit. I'm not going to do anything else to hide who I am, it just won't be under my name. "Black Like Rusty" is the name of the game here. We'll see what happens then. For the record, I believe that my articles get posted because they're good, not because they're by me. I have written crap, and it got dumped. But I guess it hasn't been sufficiently proven yet, so I'll try it the other way around. Burnout I feel burned out lately. There's been a lot of really bitchy behavior by people around here, and it's getting to me. Like for example, the comment linked above is pretty unnecessarily nasty, for the most part. Is this just the way it goes? I had faith in people. Was I wrong? Maybe we need to burn it all down and start again. Maybe not now, but someday. Yeah... Like I said, mostly it's probably just me being burned out and oversensitive. Also, I think I tend to get pointed at all the nastiness and conflict, more than most people. I probably see more of it than a lot of you do, anyway. I agree with you about articles, too. I hope that eventually one of the effects of places like this would be for people to recognize that what they're supposed to think is good isn't always what they actually think is good, and to act on the distinction. Or, for the remedial classes, to even begin to be able to tell good writing from a hole in the ground. ;-) Total tangent: I watched the local TV news tonight (I know, I know, that was my first mistake) and there was this story on "EVIL WEB BUGS!" It was the most outdated, inaccurate, hysterical, self-important, inflammatory, overblown piece of total crap news I have seen in a long, long time. I can't even begin to describe the utter wrongness of the story, from start to finish. For comparison's sake, streetlawyer's "polygons" article, despite being a confessed hoax, was still way more technically and conceptually truthful and accurate than this utter piece of televised squirrel vomit. This event has re-energized me. If nothing else, we *must* put these TV idiots out of business. There's good reporting on TV, like CNN, and the major network broadcasts are, while fluffy, at least usually vaguely accurate. But these local news dickheads have got to go. Enough with the paid promotional fluff! Enough with the hysterical fear-mongering! END LOCAL TV NEWS NOW! Erm. Sorry about that. It really got to me though. Think about it; how many people read Reader's Digest and USA Today as their main source of raw worldview-material? Good God, where will it end? ____Not the real rusty Cockfighting Wow, someone with actual cockfight experience! Day of the Locust makes it sound like a really viscious sport. Have you ever read that? It's a great little book, for other reasons (the cockfight is just one small scene), and even features a character named Homer Simpson. And knowing Matt Groening, I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually where he got his Homer Simpson. Anyway, thanks for the words of encouragement. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks Good to know Canada's got my back. :-) And don't worry. I'll keep at it. I was just feeling burned out. Anyway, I can't stop now, I've got big plans! :-) ____Not the real rusty Check your comment prefs I only have a 56K modem at home, which is the way I access K5 >95% of the time. My comment prefs are set to use nested mode up to 60 comments, and minimal after that. That way, when an article spills over to minimal, I can just opnme a single thread in a new window and get each thread nested, individually. This works really well for me. Having two browsers open and dragging between them is probably the easiest way to do this. We'll have comment paging eventually. ____Not the real rusty Ain't no thang The comment prefs are relatively new, actually. Well, a couple months old, anyway. I bet you're far from the only person that didn't notice them. :-) And bandwidth actually costs us that little vhosting ad up there on the right side of the page. We trade them that space on all pages for colo service. Which works out to be a pretty good deal all around, if they'd just answer their email from other clients now and then. ____Not the real rusty Just a timeout As I said over email, it was really just a "everyone's getting way too het up here, let's all take a break for a bit." Sorry I didn't get the email explaining that out to you earlier. :-/ ____Not the real rusty ...and welcome! And welcome to K5. We're glad to have you. [Jeez John, you were supposed to say that. ;-)] ____Not the real rusty Answer "Yes." ...or, alternatively... "No, but you do look like yours. I saw the pictures in her wallet last night..." >:-) ____Not the real rusty On re-reading... Upon reviewing the second suggested response, I've realized that it doesn't make any sense. It was supposed to imply that you were with the server's mom the previous night, but if that's the case, then who are the pictures of? I don't know what the hell I was thinking. It seemed to make sense at the time. ____Not the real rusty WTF? If this happened, someone's gonna get yelled at about it. I'm looking into it. For the record, we DO NOT do that kind of thing, expecially to diaries, and if we have done it, someone will hurt for it. ____Not the real rusty Grrrr Yeah, I checked it out. And I also changed it back. And I'm fucking pissed. babylago, I apologize on behalf of the K5 admin staff, and especially whoever did that. And I will make them apologize for themself as well. You are absolutely right to be angry, and I hope anyone else who finds themselves the victim of mysterious, unwarranted text changes will also speak up. We can and will edit submitted articles for spelling and/or grammar. But we do not and will not edit or change diaries, unless specifically asked to by the poster (or unless the diary is composed in such a way as to be really obnoxious, formatting-wise, but that's obviously not the case here). And if, as in this case, we do, then someone has broken the rules and is in big trouble. I'm disappointed that someone had such low self-esteem as to think that needed to be changed, or such a weak sense of humor as to believe changing it was funny. ____Not the real rusty In that case In that case, the author would have to remove the red beard. Which mean that all red-beard-less characters in the history of literature may now be viewed as merely thinly-veiled representations of you. ____Not the real rusty Palo Alto Burn it all! Smash it flat and seed the ground with salt and lye, so that nothing may grow here for a thousand thousand years. You've got my vote. ____Not the real rusty Third Three words: Fan Fucking Tastic. :-) Thanks, shirobara. ____Not the real rusty Yes, but ponder carefully You posted the diaries, so as far as their existence here, that's your call. If you decide you want them down, email me and I'll do it. But think very carefully before you decide that. I think bwg is very wrong in removing them -- whether he likes it or not, they are part of the net, and even if not true, people deserve to be able to see them and make their own judgements. So do consider what *you* think before you request their removal. I understand wanting to accede to others wishes, but basically, it is your choice. They can't force you to remove them. Decide wisely, grashopper. :-) ____Not the real rusty Absolutely Yes, the option is open. I'm glad you think they should be available too. But email rusty@kuro5hin.org if you change your mind. ____Not the real rusty Buggered APM Actually, I've had all the hardware working fine for a while, with 2.4.4 + some patches. USB works, the memorystick seems like it would work (I don't have any way to test it either), sound works, the camera works, the console is fullscreen, USB works (I'm using a USB Ricochet modem). Two big problems: APM is fucked. It just doesn't work, no matter what I do. You can put the machine to sleep, but it never wakes up again (lights come on and the fan comes back, but the disk never starts). The machine can do APM or ACPI (it has an ACPI controller on the PCI bus, but it also will translate APM). ACPI appears to be completely not working in Linux, though. I can get it to recognize all the onboard ACPI stuff, but it doesn't actually do anything except tell me the battery status, and running ACPI prevents me from doing things like changing the screen brightness. APM only comes with coma mode. This, to say the least, sucks terribly and makes the machine about 1/4 as useful as it would otherwise be. I'm just not likely to use it if I have to wait for it to boot whenever I want to look something up or jot something down. I emailed Emperor Linux and asked if they had figured it out, because they seem to claim that their Kiwi model (A C1VN with linux pre-installed) can do APM, but no response. More recently, the machine freezes hard when I bring up a ppp connection, disconnect, and try to reconnect again. It didn't used to do this, and I have no idea why it's started to. Otherwise, it occasionally crsahes for no obvious reason. My guess is that I'm running a kernel with all the ac patches and a couple patches that aren't even remotely sanctioned by the Linux gods, and some combination of things is causing problems. I'd like to be happier with it, I really would. But there are definitely days when I think that maybe I should just boot back to WinME. Sigh. ____Not the real rusty APM, PPP, and other TLA APM: Works fine under WinME, except that sometimes it crashes on resume. But generally, it works well. Works not at all under Linux, with symptoms enumerated above. This, BTW, is apparently a widely shared experience. See here for more detail on that. It's just screwed, it seems. Though Emperor does very clearly claim to have APM working. I wish they'd tell the rest of us. PPP: I need this to use Ricochet. The Ricochet USB modem just acts like a normal serial modem (using the apm.o module). I believe the internal modem is unsupported in Linux, although I've seen some rumors that it might be usable. SCSI: I don't have the floppy. The memorystick always maps to sda, but it would, since it's the only SCSI device on there. Patches: What I did: Get 2.4.4 Get 2.4.4-ac6 patch (needed for the fullscreen console video patch) Get fullscreen video patch. Get the memorystick patch (hell, while you're at it, why not? :-)) Apply patches to stock kernel in listed order Configure. I'd upload my configuration file, but the machine's acting screwy ATM. I'll post it in a reply. Compile, install, reboot. You also need to add "vga-0x301" to lilo.conf under the entry for the new kernel. Then you too can experience the lack of APM, and random hangs and crashes that make my life such joy! :-) ____Not the real rusty Heh It is. Actually, the machine is still more stable in Linux than Windows, despite all my bitching. I'm just conditioned to expect it in Windows. :-) ____Not the real rusty C1VM The C1VM is the same hardware with a different model number. It was the version of the C1VN sold in Australia or Asia or somewhere. I don't know what's wrong with APM. The facts I do know are that the Pentium picturebook and the Crusoe picturebook have the same hardware (except the crusoe has a memorystiuck instead of IR port) and AFAIK the same BIOS, and APM works in the pentium but not in the crusoe. This would tend to implicate the processor or related stuff. But honestly, I don't know. Also, I just found out yesterday that the ac 2.4.4 patches go all the way up to ac12. I'm going to try that one, and also compile it with egcs-1.1.2, which is supposed to be better for the kernel. Maybe that'll help with the kernel buggyness. I do have a half-ass kind of intranet setup, but (1) I don't have a supported network card yet, and (2) the Ricochet is 128K, which is much better than my 56K dialup. :-) The memorystick patch is just a device description for unusualdevs.h (or somthing like that). I don't know what it does, but it's dead easy to apply, so I do. :-) ____Not the real rusty Return of the RustyCam Some of you, who've been around for a long time here, will remember the infamous RustyCam. Back when I had DSL in DC, I kept a webcam's unblinking eye watching my desk all the time. It was pretty fun, but I cut it off when I moved, due to lack of consistent bandwidth. Well, ths laptop also has a camera on it, and just for fun, I've rigged it up to sense when it's online, and update a webcam here when it is. So, without further ado... RustyCam, part II Oh yeah... This'll be extremely intermittent and fairly crude, so expect long periods where the machine's not online or it's showing some random wall or something. Basically, this is just a 30-second snapshot of whatever the laptop screen is pointing at at the moment. If the image isn't updating, try shift-reload (or whatever it is that clears the cache on your platform). If it's still not updated, assume that the laptop's not online. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bah I lost my ricochet modem just a few days after posting this, and now I can't be online and in linux at the same time. The RustyCam will return someday... ____Not the real rusty There will be no production values! Nah, this isn't something I'm trying to do for quality. Mainly it's just a neat random thing, so probably the majority of the images will suck. But who knows, maybe there'll be some good ones once in a while. :-) I will turn the camera around from time to time if I'm in interesting surroundings (or just don't feel like being on-camera ;-)). But don't expect any great artistic quality. ____Not the real rusty Miss you already And if your new account has a similar email as the old account, I will find it and not tell anyone else what it is. :-) ____Not the real rusty really? Imagine my surprise when I loaded up K5 and lost the part of the logo with the broken bridge. Apparently libpr0n must be censoring scenes of mass destruction. ^_^ Is that true? Why would that image be blocked? It doesn't even come from a different server name. ____Not the real rusty Scaling Good summary. :-) The question is whether the community will scale. As the k5 membership list grows, more and more /.esque style behavior is appearing. I suspect that k5 is pretty close to crossing some magic threshold where it's own success will bring about it's own downfall. I'm worried about this too, although I don't see as much "slashdotesque" behavior as others seem to. Mainly, the problem seems to be that more people now tend to forget the "human on the other side of the glass" rule. That is, that when you reply to a comment, there's an actual person on the other end of the wire, who can easily be hurt by an overly nasty message. I think the main reason K5 has worked, so far, is that people here are more aware of that than they seem to be elsewhere on the net, and hopefully I can take a little bit of the credit for that. But with size comes impersonality. I do think there's a certain size past which community isn't really possible. And that worries me a lot. It seems clear that if we're not there yet, it will eventually happen. New members are signing up at a rate of 20-40 a day, roughly. It's only a matter of time. We've definitely reached the point where K5 is self-sustaining, membership-wise. That is, enough people are here already that we can't rerally help but keep growing, just through word of mouth. What to do about this... I've thought for a long time that the only way to maintain a community-feel to K5 will ultimately be to break it. That is, split up into smaller, more focused sites serving a better-defined community. How to do this, on the other hand, is a big question mark. One of the things I really like about K5 is the range of stuff we get here. I think splitting the news from the hard tech from the culture would be a bad thing. It may work to sort of make sections their own mini-sites, and keep kuro5hin.org as the meeting-place of the best stuff from all the sections. That is, each section would have it's own front-page and sub-sections, and the best stuff from each section could propagate up to the main K5 site. Kuro5hin.NET anyone? :-) We're not there yet, but I am anticipating that we may be eventually. One the one hand, it worries me, but on the other, it could be a really cool thing. You could form a k5.net "node" about almost anything. We could have news.kuro5hin.net, for straight up news reporting, tech.kuro5hin.net for technology reviews and articles, etc etc. And what about local k5.nets? sf.kuro5hin.net, serving San Francisco and the bay area. uk.kuro5hin.net, etc. People could keep up to date on local news and events, and issues of interest to a particular geographical area. Even further afeild from our current mission, but how about food.kuro5hin.net? Recipes, restaurant reviews, things like that? I think the best way to do this would probably be to let the community form it's own nodes, as demand warrants. Perhaps we could have a nomination process-- someone proposes a node, someone else seconds it, some small number of people indicate that they support the idea, and the node gets formed. Whether it thrives or not would be up to the people who are interested in the subject. Interesting times ahead, in any case. :-) ____Not the real rusty WalMart Hey, the guy who owns WalMart is now the richest man in the world. Don't count out that possibility. :-) The ideal situation would be where you could subscribe to sections that interest you. Chances are pretty good that people you enjoy talking to would tend to subscribe to the same stuff. Also, about the geographical stuff, there's no reason you couldn't frequent uk.kuro5hin.net if that's what interested you. :-) Anyway, that's a pretty speculative idea. It might happen, it might not. The whole thing would start with topical nodes anyway. And I expect they'd be a lot broader than "hockey" anyway. Like "tech.kuro5hin.net". Much more vague. ____Not the real rusty A few more thoughts Yes, our current sections would definitely serve as guides, initially. About regional stuff, I know we don't have much of that now, but that may because it just doesn't work the way things are now. I could see it being a possible development, though. Anyway, that was mainly longer-term speculation. I think ideally users would be able to maintain one account for all the "nodes". Making a new account all the time would be a PITA. Possibly the personal newsfeed idea could blend into this. Maybe you could just subscribe to different nodes of interest to you, and get all or some of the stories from each one in your "home" node. Categorization would be tricky. What I'd really really like is to not have to make those decisions so much. But it may be necessary early on to pick a few basic topics. I don't know. We'll see how things go. I like the diamond metaphor though, a lot. Can I steal that for future use? :-) ____Not the real rusty Listen up... Only someone like streetlawyer is capable of getting an article posted by starting out with things like, "Listen up you little bitch." And we do love him for it. ;-) ____Not the real rusty The backstory This is a classic case of first-time-author-panic. Basically, kezdeth wanted to share a very personal and important experience. He was, justifiably, nervous about this. Shit, I'm nervous when I write articles. Everyone is. It's like jumping in front of a huge crowd and taking all your clothes off. Especially when it's something as personal as kezdeth's story was. Unfortunately, the story, as written, wasn't found to be up to par by the readers. The original comments are here. You'll note, they're not particularly nasty or personal. I think if Kezdeth were to come back to that link tomorrow, he may agree. Oddly, the responses he posts there don't seem too upset either. Then, all this. Well, that's the story anyway. I just wanted to get the comments link in here somewhere so everyone's not just speculating. And kezdeth, to answer your question, we could lock you out of your account, if that's what you want, but usernames are linked to lots of other stuff, like comments and diaries and whatnot, and it's a pain to actually delete accounts. If you don't want to be here, no one's forcing you to stay, and no one will do anything with your account. But take a day or two and cool off before you decide. ____Not the real rusty Woo hoo! I'm 100% Yankee According to the definitions above, I am a Yankee in all possible senses of the word. How about that. Course, at the moment, I'm technically an expat Yankee. But moving back to deepest Yankee country soon! ____Not the real rusty Prime Rib is like that They did it right -- a well-done prime rib will look about like a medium anything else. So a medium rare PR should be pink most of the way through, and a rare one should emit a shocked "Moo!" when you poke it with the fork. Something to keep in mind when ordering prime rib in the future. ____Not the real rusty Trip to Boston, part 1 So I'm on a trip to Boston and Maine, partly for the OSDN sitedirectors meeting, partly to look for a place to live in Portland. I've been keeping notes and taking some pictures, so here's a brain dump of the trip so far... "It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage." --Nicolo Machiavelli, "The Prince", Ch 6 1:52pm PST Somewhere over the great plains, I think I hate airline travel. The food sucks, but oddly enough, I always eat all of it anyway. It's revolting, but I invariably eat everything on the tray. Even the dessert pudding stuff. I think I'm subconsciously afraid we're going to crash and I won't have anything else to eat for days, until we start eating the other passengers. But that's silly, because we're not even flying over the ocean. Anyway. Is it a new FAA regulation that all airplane movies must feature either Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock? "Miss Congeniality" was the movie I ignored today. From brief glances, it looked bad. I'm reading "The Prince" instead. Driph was right, there's a lot of wisdom here for anyone who would like to lead people. I suppose ethically, some of it is pretty questionable, but from a straight utilitarian view, Nicolo's got his shit together. More on arrival... 2:20am 5/6/2001 Boston, North End Odd night. Went out to the Sail Loft with Bill, Maria and Rebecca (good cajun shrimp & swordfish kebab), met maria's neighbor Pete at the place, who had a HS friend and his girlfrient (Mark and Jessica). Jessica turned out to be a nut. At one point, back at Mark's, she took every personal grooming product out of her overnight bag and made us all smell each one. Deodorant, aloe vera cream, etc etc. I threw my hands up and yelled, Stop it! You're freaking me out!" She didn't stop. It was not one of the more explicable nights I've ever had. I need to sleep now. This has been a long weird day. 1:09am 5/7/2001 Boston, North End Maria made breakfast. Unbelievable cappuchino. I tasked her to get one of those stovetop capp makers for a wedding present. I think she's good for it. Went out to get a hair cut. North End place, old Boston guy. "Like this music? It's a minidisc, I racawd this shit off the radio." He also had a boat, and told me I didn't have a natural part in my hair, and was thus "shit out of luck." We also went to Harvard Square to get some books for Maria, and there was some kind of street festival going on for local HS businesses. Got a damn good italian sausage. Maria paid, as I am also shit out of cash. Hacked with bill for a while, then made complex plans to meet Dylan and co in Harvard Square. Met Dylan, Defect, Ragabr and justinifinity, had Mex at the Border cafe (which we went in circles a few times before finding). Getting lost in Boston was a theme tonight. Went back to Dylan's hotel, which was nowhere near the Pru, as he said, but was instead in the Fenway. He didn't realize that just because you cn see the Pru doesn't mean it's nearby. You can see the Pru from *everywhere* in Boston. Went to Jillians, where I kicked Dylan's ass at air hockey (4 games straight), and got my ass kicked at Daytona. Cabbed back to the north end, hung out with Maria and Pete. We needed to compare notes on that crazy girl. She was just one of those people you have to kind of accept and move on. I have no way to place her in my life, so I'm just gonna pretty much leave that alone. 5/9/2001, 11:50pm Peaks Island, ME Meeting went pretty well yesterday. It was a little more fun than your average company meeting, probably due to the fact that most of the participants were in their 20s. The grownups weren't realy in charge. We actually got things decided with a minimum of dissent as well, which is also rare. Still, it was a meeting, and a long one at that. I quickly went into "meeting mode" where I get glassy-eyed and stop paying attention to anything. As a result, all breaks featured me trying to remember how to speak in order to converse with other osdn people. Quote of the day: Malda: I don't really care about OSDN, but I think we have a lot of good websites. [...longish silence...] Dylan: Was that a compliment? [general laughter] This came late in the day, during some contention about something, when everyone was starting to get a little pissy. It broke the tension well. :-) Immediately after the meeting, me and Robin were feeling "parched" and greatly in need of refreshment, so we adjourned to the corner dive. Later, we caught a cab to join the rest at Cactus club. Robin was telling me about the cab and limo business. "I like writing for now, because it pays well and it's easy indoor work, but driving a cab's a man's job." At this the cabbie glanced at us in the rearview. He spoke up with a bizarre mix of Boston and Eastern European accents. "Didchoo say drivin a cab's a man's chob?" "Yes." "Drivin a cab's a fuckin losah chob. ... Pardon my language." What ensued, of course, was a ride-long discussion about the intracacies of the cab driving business, during which I learned that poor people take cabs more than rich people (didn't know that) and that I'm a know-nothing privileged white kid (knew that). It was interesting. Cactus club was fine. We had basically a long table for everyone, so that of course sucked like it always does. Large groups always split when you have a long table like that, because it's impossible for everyone to talk to each other. Which means you don't get to talk to everyone you wanted to. Walked back to the North End (1 hr walk! Am proud of self) with ace OSDN tech-guy Kurt Grey, who I chastized for fixing the stats and losing me money. Nice guy. He's 30, but looks about 15. Like me, he wants to get a non-computer-related hobby. I totally understand that urge. I told him if he takes up woodworking, not to buy crappy tools. I tell everyone that. Maria got home a little after me, devastated because she had just seen the guy she just broke up with, and he rebroke up with her. She has trouble communicating with him (worst possible sign), and probably is better off without him, but doesn't want to feel bad about it, and wants to be friends. I told her before that there's not much she can do about that, and he'll be friends if he wants to be. This night, she was really upset, so I just listened. I also learned a key bit of good-friend wisdom. When your friend is upset about a relationship, DO NOT try to tell him/her what to do. It won't help, and you'll invariably be wrong anyway. This I knew already. What I learned was how to do that. When listening to your friend tell their story, carefully review every response that occurs to you, and reject any that include the word "I" anywhere in them. This will have two effects: 1) You'll talk a lot less, because your brain will be busy filtering possible statements 2) More important, you won't make into a conversation about you, because that's not what you're there for. I found that the only things I could legally say, under the "no I" rule, were things like "What did you want to say to him?" and "Why do you think he feels that way?" which were, I think, pretty successful. File under "useful life tip." Today I woke up pretty late (11ish) and took the blue line to the airport to pick up the rental car. After a shuttle-bus shell game, I eventually set off north in a red Geo Metro, which, I have to say, is a perfectly adequate car. It's like they designed it to not be jarring to anyone in any way. It's an average size, has average pickup, steering isn't tight or loose, etc. It feels like a car that was created to be most like a composite of all other cars. Beautiful drive up 95 through new hampshire. I decided to lollygag, and didn't want to pay ME pike tolls, so I slipped onto route 1 at the maine border. Nice two-lane blacktop that goes straight up to Portland, passing through Wells, Ogunquit, and Saco, among other small towns, all more or less picturesque and New Englandy. Soemthing about the way New England looks after itself still appeals to me. Trashy American suburbia is stil around, but you have to look a lot harder to find it. NE is full of these neat little towns, where all the houses are freshly painted, all the lawns are trimmed, all the streets are clean, and the corners of things look so clean and straight they might have just been starched. Compared to the endless tracts of hasty-looking california suburbs, it's a relief. People obviously care about their surroundings. I like that. I've always said I'm too much of a New Englander to stay away forever. More evidence of that, I suppose. It's interesting to look at it with fresh eyes, though, having seen a lot more of the world since I last spent any time out here. Parked in Portland, after driving around a bit. Portland is tiny. Everything here seemed so much bigger when I was a kid. I think it's a good tiny, though. It's basically a neighborhood-sized city, and it's really hard to get lost. There are a couple tall buildings, and you can see them from everywhere, so it's easy to stay oriented. Took the 5:35 ferry over to Peaks, picked up a semi-random assortment of food, and walked to the cottage. Watched a little tv (Odd selection of channels here. We get Fox, UPN, PAX, and a shopping network. Weird). Talked to my Mom, Bret, Bill and Phill. B&P; are coming up Thursday, Bill for the night, Phill just for the day. Hey now! Not massachusetts! I think you meant the Connecticut/Rhode Island/NY/NJ people. If anyone should be cast out of New England, it should be Conn. :-) ____Not the real rusty We miss you Rob... When are you coming home? :-) ____Not the real rusty Oh god, that's horrible We were there! We wondered where you were. We got there circa 5:45ish, ate dinner, and hung out till around 8. We all thought you were going to be there at like 7. Now I feel horrible. We should have stayed around longer. I'll be back up this way in June, maybe we can get together then? And I promise, next time I'll wait however long I need to. I'm sorry about this. :-( ____Not the real rusty New to you, Yahoo Link of the day: News and Media/Technology on Yahoo. We're apparently "new". We still have not received the coveted "cool sunglasses" though. In other news, we almost came in third in trivia tonight, but at the last moment, snatched defeat from the jaws of... well, a lesser defeat. Our team name, however, once again made the quizmaster remark. We were "The Experimental S&M; Morris Dancers". "Only in San Francisco," said the quizmaster, "would it be possible to even conceive of a team name like that." I'm inclined to agree. And yet, unbelievable though it may seem, we based it on an actual Morris dancing side called the White Rats, who, on big events, are known to sew bells directly into their skin. These are not Morris dancing dillettantes, my friends. These are the Morris dancers the other Morris dancers call "The Icemen." Rule number one is: It's stranger than it seems. And now for something completely different. Don't vote for us in the webby's people's voice awards. I don't want to win. Everything good that will happen in connection with this has already happened. Now lets just let it quietly fade back into the distance... Bring it, Icemen. Actually... I think "Better Than Screaming at a Wall" is all we're officially cracked up to be. At least, that's all I'll admit to. Anything else you hear should be considered vicious slander until proven otherwise. [This has been posted way, way after the fact, and will probably not be noticed by anyone, but hey, it's better than screaming at a wall.] ____Not the real rusty Live from the Alt Media and Press Freedom Conference I'm sitting in a circle on the grass outside the SFSU gym right now, with a bunch of folks from various Indymedia groups and Ian Clarke and another guy (Steve something :-)) from Freenet. The discussion underway is about how indymedia could use freenet, or a freenet-like system to ensure that it can't be shut down or censored. Interesting stuff. See pics from the conference here. Robin is "arkady" here, Jeri is "tankgirl", and Ian is the aforementioned Clarke. I hope I'm spelling his name right, or I'll be embarrassed. I don't know yet I know we're getting together with ragabr at some point for his documentary (I hope I'm not misremembering who we're meeting!). I guess we should make a definite known plan, and anyone else who wants to come by (or, uh, assassinate us or something, I guess) can meet us there. Keep an eye on my diary. I'll post something when we know what we're doing. ____Not the real rusty I think so too I agree. But the wedding's in August, and I've been instructed by She Who Must Be Obeyed that my hair shall be natural brown for the wedding pictures. I really need to get it cut. It looks ok when it's not so shaggy. ____Not the real rusty Once a month! I'm lucky if I cut mine twice a year. I tend to oscillate in a half-sine wave between too short and too long. There's usually about two weeks out of each 4 or 5 month period where it actually looks ok. ____Not the real rusty Where's the United People's K5 Cabal? He's over there. SPLITTER! ____Not the real rusty broken how? Hotlist changed recently. How's it broken? ____Not the real rusty Yup This bug has been identified. It'll be back to normal soon. ____Not the real rusty Fixed now Thank panner for the patch. :-) ____Not the real rusty The Web Community Axis of Power Ok, this is eerie. In the past few days, I've found out that Craig, Derek, Matt, and I all live within a few blocks of each other. Clearly there's some kind of weird internet community Axis of Power here. In other news, I'm going stir-crazy in the house. But tomorrow I talk to some O'Reilly people about colocating the nascent Internet Community Conference at the ORA P2P conference in DC in September. I'm excited about this -- I think it'll be a Good Thing. What's with the Unnecessary Capitals tonight? Also, tomorrow begins the PRESS FREEDOM CONFERENCE & ALTERNATIVE MEDIA EXPOSITION which should be relatively fun. At the very least, it'll get me out of the house. I'm starting to talk to the cat. Seriously. Not like "Oos a cewt wittwe ting?" either. We're having long, involved discussions about weighty intellectual topics. No money for books, so I've been re-reading favorites off the shelves lately. Just got through Cryptonomicon, Generation of Swine, and Fear and Loathing, and now I'm onto Stephenson's Zodiac. Which is a damn good book, even though it doesn't get much attention. This Webbys thing is not really good for anyone. First there's the fact that no matter who gets nominated, someone gets left out. Then there's the fact that recognition really bothers some people, and they forget that on the other end of that site they're trashing is a human, in many cases, who has done a lot of hard work to make something as good as it is. I do this too, and I am one of those who occasionally gets trashed. It's like some kind of lizard forebrain reflex. Then there's the ugly taint of the Webby organization, which is pretty obviously a cash cow more than anything else. I'm glad they're recognizing good sites, but the whole style is so non-web. The whole thing completely buys into the stereotypical Wired view of technology, which is mighty scarce where people actually live, online. I don't know. I think Matt was probably lucky to have been left out. We'll see what shakes out of all this though. Oh yeah, and some semi-bad news. There's going to be some big-ass (700 x 90) banners appearing soon. Not all of them, just one campaign. It's a lot of money for OSDN, and hence it means they can keep funding us, so that's good. But the banners are big, which is just dumb. I hope to have subscriptions available Very Soon (caps to emphasize that I'm actually making progress on this), so those of you who loathe the new size but still want to support K5 financially can escape them. I talked to Roblimo today, and basically, they're not any happier with them than any of us will be. He's got a lot of smart ideas about how to make ads online not suck, and actually work as a way to support good media. The problem is convincing the people buying the ads that we know the web better than they do. You'd think that would be obvious. But apparently not. Both of those are subitems I'd consider both of those sub-items of "we know the web better than they do." I swear, I can ask anyone here how to make ads better; even the people who loathe them, and not a single one of you will fail to come up with the four or five simple, basic things that would help. Stop with the animation. If you must, loop it once and stop. People came here for text. Stop trying to fight their desires! Make your ads text! Clicking is not a victory. A low click-through is not a defeat. People will see your ad. If it doesn't utterly suck (like most of them do now) they will note it and it will be filed away for later. Clicks are meaningless. If someone does, by accident or insanity, click your ad, take them someplace useful! Give them information. For God's sake, DO NOT give them more ad! It worked, now close the deal. Stop running your ads for months at a time. Make them timely. Run a news website? Put today's top headlines on your ad! Change it daily. This isn't a sure-fire thing, this advertisng. Sadly, it takes work. Learn to work. All of you know this stuff. It's obvious to anyone who spends any time at all online. The question is, will it become obvious to ad execs before there's no longer any reason to go online? ____Not the real rusty It's not *so* hideous... I tried it out here locally, and it's not absolutely intolerable. After a couple reloads, you get used to it. The w/h ratio is roughly the same, to look at. Of course 700 wide is gonna suck for people who use, say, laptops a lot. Yes, we've told the agency this. No, they don't seem to care. I appreciate the interest in subscribing. We will have that running RSN. ____Not the real rusty You and many others Yep. You're SOL then. It's a dumb strategy, that's why I'm apologizing in advance like this. Like the starlet, sometimes when you're young, you do things that you know are dumb because you need the money. :-/ ____Not the real rusty Thank you Your understanding words are a balm to my worried soul. :-) ____Not the real rusty My view Just out of curiosity, how has OSDN been doing selling ads? I cannot talk for OSDN. I have no secret inside info, other than knowing what campaigns are running here right now. So the following is my opinion, based on observation of K5 and other OSDN sites, and some knowledge of the strategies involved... That said, all we're running right now are in-network campaigns. That is, ads for other OSDN sites. This isn't as idiotic as it sounds at first. Think about the nature of the network. You have, basically, Slashdot, which would be the cash cow. Fame, loads of trsffic, great demographics. Everyone wants to advertise on slashdot. I think a very large percentage of their outside (i.e. paid) campaigns go up on Slashdot. Thinkgeek is a store, selling stuff that caters to the other OSDN sites main audiences. So advertising to you guys for TG stuff is perfectly sensible. They know you, you know them. The TG ads are like "look what the nifty toy of the week is!" You guys buy stuff, thinkgeek helps OSDN stay in business. :-) Beyond that, it's a matter of using what inventory is left in a sensible, potenbtially beneficial way. The Sourceforge onsite stuff runs a lot, because they really want that to be successful. If OSDN has some extra inventory, running those could bring the concept to the eyes of people who might need it. It's another demographic thing -- where might you find a more receptive audience for that idea than here, and other OSDN sites? Newsforge... well, not altogether sure why they run so many NF ads here. Maybe because it complements K5 pretty well, filing in the straight news to our commentary? I suspect that more outside campaigns get run there than here, as well, partly because they have more ads on NF. Anyway, roblimo and I were scheming today. He gets it just as much as we all do. God, I hope this era of advertising online ends soon. It will be known, forever after, as the Stupid Age. Bigger banners, with no other significant changes, will work for about 10 minutes. They're just silly. We need much more change than that. It'll happen, eventually. ____Not the real rusty Humerous typosite Yeah, it's just a joke by some K5ers, brought on by the rampant misspelling associated with the webbys and "ACB Nwes". It's funny. Laugh. :-) ____Not the real rusty Smuggle it out Send me stuff anonymously. I'll run it. The FBI can gag on something, that's for sure. Get it out on Freenet. Put it on Gnutella. There's a million ways to get the info out there that can't (provably) be traced back directly to anyone at the IMC. And no, I don't think Declan's a defendant in the case, but he was called to testify, because he had a lot of communication with the defendant. He basically didn't tell them anything, pleading the fifth on all questions. ____Not the real rusty Yeah... I thought of that after posting this. Bummer. ____Not the real rusty Ye Gods! Debauchery at CyberNanny Signal 11's recent submission about the defacement of the CyberNanny website was amusing, but did anyone actually dig into the attrition mirror? The page defacement featured some links to embarrassing stuff they found on the CN domain, including party pictures with names like "Hutch Julie Darren Discussing Merits Of Tequila Over Mescal.jpg", "Maureen Appeals To Various Toe Fetishes.jpg", "Darren Acting Strangely As If On Strange African Drug.jpg" and "Hard Drinking In The Corner.jpg." Foul things are afoot, my friends. Self-proclaimed Guardians of Public Morality have always been among the worst degenerates, and we should be no more surprised when it turns out to be just as true of the online breed. No, what's truly shocking is the unimaginative banality of the revelry here. Salacious image titles aside, it's just more office-park corporate faux-camaraderie. A little Jack Daniels, a little Tequila, and these people are Party Animals. Toga! Toga! You can always tell the brownshirts, because they like their orgies mild, hold the mayo. Jack Kennedy would have eaten every one of these censoring thugs for breakfast, and he became President for God's sake. More small-minded little weasels, glistening with doomed atavistic sweat and chuckling in the dark while deciding what websites might turn the little children off the righteous path to becoming office park drones like themselves. Let me tell you, children are mean, dirty minded little Darwinian bastards. They don't need your help imagining things that would make Caligula blush beet-red, and your silly little software blocks will not hold them back for more than ten or fifteen seconds. When the censorware-raised kids of today grow up, they will remember names like "Netnanny" and "Cybersitter", and they will not be kindly disposed toward Julie, Darren, or Maureen here. I ask you, Hutch, who will change your Depends Adult Undergarments in your dotage? Certainly not Piggy, because the hunters threw him off a cliff. Remember that when you purport to know what's best for the children. Re: Re: Re: Re: Your Comment Actually we had the multi-Re: thing worked out. The problem was that most people are lazy, and given the opportunity, they won't write a new subject. When you're reading a thread here (unlike email), it's always obvious what comment is a reply to what, so just having Re: Foo just makes the subject line useless. Look at some old (i.e. 7+ months-ish) articles in minimal mode to see what I mean. ____Not the real rusty Comment preferences! I know, I've totally blown my resolution to write more diaries. Oh well. Anyway, this one is just to let you know that we now have permanent comment preferences. Look at the link in your user box (if you have an account) to Comment Preferences. You can set all the display stuff and posting stuff, and, best of all, you can set varying display modes (threaded, nested, etc) based on the number of comments displayed on a given page. I use nested up to 40, threaded up to 75, and minimal above that, but play with it and see what works for you. :-) Also added .sig preferences, which have been in Scoop for a while, but I wanted to get them into Comment Prefs before making them generally available. Yep I will be really happy when I discover that this means that comment preferences will also be saved between cookie sessions! It does indeed. The nice part is that for non-logged-in users, it works like it did before (saves your last choices via session). I'm rather proud of that. It's pretty DWIM. I am more happy overall. Now I just have to add "Flat, Unthreaded" mode so CliffordAdams will be my friend again. :-) ____Not the real rusty For shame! Zeroing sheeplayer in his own diary. What's the matter with you people? ____Not the real rusty Hey now Don't jump the gun there -- I'm still against you. I just didn't think it was particularly fair to zero your comment in your own diary. :-) Whoever said that streetlawyer parody accounts are so last month was right. ____Not the real rusty Keep it I'd estimate I've probably found and kept over $150.00 in my life so far. Seriously, I find $20's all the time. Probably dropped just as much on the ground too. Economies need some random fluctuation. :-) ____Not the real rusty Did you run install.pl? If you got a recent version (scoop.k5 is screwed up again, dammit) there should be a script scripts/install.pl, that does almost everything for you. ____Not the real rusty That's a lame bug! You suck! Just kidding. :-) File a bug report on Sourceforge. Thanks. ____Not the real rusty PLL I've noticed those "Peace Love and Linux" things too! Actually, also on Polk, on my way up to the Castle for quiz night this week. Have you noticed the corrollary? No more IBM ads here on K5. They really must be cutting their ad budget. ;-) Hey, if you're in the area, you should stop by quiz night and say hi. Edinburgh Castle, Polk and Geary, every Tuesday night around 8-ish. I'm usually there, as are Arkady, tankgirl, and sometimes others. We're generally in the back by the pool table-- look for the guy with the chaps and mohawk (that's Arkady, I'll be near by). :-) ____Not the real rusty What's it like... ...working in the "sunny Tenderloin"? ;-) We're there most Tuesdays. *Someone's* there every Tuesday, and we always need more team members to help kick the crap out of those smug bastards at the round table. Hope to see you next week. ____Not the real rusty Acoustic trivia That's one of those bar trivia games? The ones with the little electronic consoles? No, no, it's much cooler than that. It's old skool acoustic trivia. The place is this Scottish dive, which has fantastic fish & chips, and a huge surly bartender who looks as though he could kick my ass while continuing to pour drinks. Every Tuesday around 8:00, a guy named Renzo (I think) sets himself up at a table with a microphone, and hands out booklets of blank answer sheets to anyone who wants to play. He then asks seven rounds of ten questions each. Players (or teams) fill in the answer booklets and hand them in at the end of each round. Third prize is 10 bucks, second is free drinks, and first is $40. It's extremely lo-tech and manual, but great fun. ____Not the real rusty I am a [fill in blank] I just wanted to let everyone know that you're all right, and that I am, indeed, a staunch and ardent socialist capitalist anti-capitalist postmodern Marxist anarchist corporate modernist anti-corporate OSDN-affiliated sub-Katzian brilliant moronic leftist right-wing conservative communist reform libertarian collectivist. With various other leanings. I am large, I contain multitudes. ;-) It's been fun Actually, this isn't me complaining. It's just pointing out the amusing fact that one article has now been attributed to virtually every political, social, and economic theory you can name. The response has been fantastic. A lot of good arguments here, and a lot of really amusing comments on /. (especially the sub-Katzian navel gazing one). I liked the highly-rated comment on /. that started with "I haven't read the article..." I've also gotten a lot of really interesting email responses. One person said it ranked "up there with the best of Chomsky," which made me nearly swoon with pride, and stagger as my suddenly-inflated head radically shifted my center of gravity. It's been an entertaining few days though. If nothing else, I proved the limits of page-serving capacity of our server. We really need a new box-- good old hex is running right on the edge of redline, still. Apparently we were really close to max capacity with just normal traffic. This has really ratcheted up the load a couple notches. ____Not the real rusty Some of it Some of the /. comments made good points, although none that hadn't been made here already, and the followup discussion was a lot shallower on the good comments. Some of it was just silly. Though the comments trashing it (for whatever reason) were highly amusing. There really are some people who are inherently threatened by anyone telling them anything is good, aren't there? There were also some of the "I don't want to know anything I don't know already" class, and quite a few misconceptions of various points, and arguments against various (often quite bizarre) misreadings. Though it was good if only for the fact that a lot more people read the article than would have if it had only been here, and I got a lot of really interesting email about it. I think Katz was not lying when he said that what appears in the comments on /. and what filters into his email are worlds different. I don't know why the discussion culture there is so viscious. It's kind of a shame. But at least we don't have to live there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah You're right. I guess what I meant is there are a lot of people here who do actively try to discourage the kind of culture of one-up-manship that is the norm there. Yes, we can be just as viscious, but it isn't so universal (yet). Good point though, about the gloating. Thanks for a reality check. :-) ____Not the real rusty rofl That's really funny. I have an expres5hin of great amusement on my face right now. Please consider sending this to segfault.org -- I think they might like it. My favorite bit was the "immediately renamed Bush administra5hin". My sides still hurt. :-) ____Not the real rusty Few... words... left... I think I've used up way more than my ration of words for today already. "Why Community Matters" was a blast. Thank you all so much for providing such a great forum to talk about stuff in. I think that was the most interesting, educational, and enjoyable discussion I've ever had here. Client meeting tomorrow. I'm nervous. I've been generally stressed as hell lately, and it's making me lose the thread. Not sleeping normally, not eating enough. God, I need a hobby. I mean a new hobby, now that this one has become (one of my) job(s). I want an old barn full of woodworking tools, where I can go and make furniture. Is that too much to ask? :-) Vote in my relaxing furniture poll. Yep Thought->words is not usually an easy transit. That article was mentally constipating me for a couple days before it finally came out yesterday. I actually had a few more things that were stewing in there, but it was too loaded already, so I went with it as-is. I'm really, really pleased. Honestly, I was surprised at how controversial the assertion that rights are social constructs turned out to be, and it's kind of unfortunate that I assumed what I did about that, and even talked about it as much as I did, because while it was interesting, it was really a sideshow to the main act. It kind of ended up taking over things in the discussion though. Nevertheless, that was by far the most interesting and satisfying discussion I've had here, probably ever. I think I learned a lot, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to chew it over with such a wide range of terrifyingly smart folks. ____Not the real rusty Average Women My "search string" stats from webalyzer tell me that someone turned up K5 searching for "average women". In my head, this has spawned a whole new adult industry based on totally normal-looking girls. "The least remarkable ladies on the net bare it all in lukewarm XXX action!" Etc. Just a thought. Other people stumbled across K5 looking for "adult sex" (thank god!) and "black germans". Not necessarily together, mind you. And to the person who searched for "internet privacy violation", that's probably what this is. :-) True Wisdom from /usr/games/fortune Ok, technically it's wisdom from Ben Franklin. But it came up today, and I really wanted to share... I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc. I adopted instead of them "I conceive", "I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it appears to me at present". When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him immediately some absurdity in his proposition. In answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or semed to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction. I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right. -- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin It is my opinion at this time that that is a fantastic way to go about interacting with your fellow humans. I do hereby pledge to try my best to keep these words at heart when discussing things with others, from this point on. Let's see if Ben was on to something. Conclusive evidence! At last, conclusive evidence that Ben Franklin was, indeed, a troll! :-) ____Not the real rusty Stage 7 I think I'm at stage 7. :-) Now if you can only come up with some kind of microwave way to get everyone there really quickly.... ____Not the real rusty You'd be missed By me, at any rate. And by others too, I suspect. You can be abrasive, but like it or not, you're one of the people I definitely recognize as "one of us." :-) Here's a couple thoughts for you. First, a quote I stole from the OpenNIC site: "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." --Terry Pratchett, The Truth And second, a slight readjustment to the way you state your gripe above. Sure, you can do what you please, and hold any opinion you like. But so can everyone else. If everyone else's opinion is dumb, you have two choices, really. Continue to state yours, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will see that it's a good way to look at things, or just ignore the whole thing. I'm not saying you should do one or the other, just stating a theory. Yeah,. there's a lot of rehash. There's a lot of "I think this." articles, which are generally terrible. But there's a lot of really good stuff here too. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if K5 is starting to feel like a bad habit, maybe you should think about what you do here, and what you want from the site. I don't comment on a lot of articles, because there's not much I'm interested in saying about them. The entire classes of drugs, guns, and religion fall into this category, for example. I know when an argument is a lost cause -- when people will be basically arguing it for the sake of rhetorical target practice, and I avoid those. That's not what I want from the site. What keeps me interested are first, the occasional real gem of an article or thread. They don't come along all the time, and sometimes there's a few weeks of nothing, then several in a row, but they're there. And second, just talking to people -- the out-of-band stuff that goes on in diaries and whatnot. Honestly the "roots" of the site are as my diary. What is now this section was originally the whole site. So I guess it's not too surprising that diaries still hold my interest. Anyway. There's too much here for one person. Choose your discussions, is all I'm saying. ____Not the real rusty "New Comment" markers At last, a feature that you've been asking for since about January 2000 is here. "New Comment" markers. You'll note that story summaries now display the number of comments, and the number of new comments, and that comment displays show a little "[New]" next to the title of new comments. More detail about how this works is below... The first thing to note is that it's kind of approximate. It doesn't store whether you've read every single comment or not. That would just be too much data to manage. Instead it tracks how many comments there were last time you read a story, and what the highest cid was. Then next time, it just takes the difference between last time's number and the current number, to get the "new" count, and in displaying comments it marks the ones with a higher cid than your stored highest with the "[New]". This does mean that initially all stories will show up with all comments marked as new. We just started, so it doesn't know what you've read, obviously. Give it a little time, it'll become more useful. It also means that something may not be marked "new" even if you haven't read it. Displaying a story, or any comments from that story, will update your "read" record to the current values, whether we know you've read a comment or not. It's mainly supposed to be a cue that there's new stuff, not a strict tracking of what you have or haven't read. Let me know how it's working. :-) What an ass I am In the above, I totally forgot to mention that panner did most of the work to make this happen. So many many thanks should go to him, not to mention cash money and naked supermodels. We love panner! ____Not the real rusty Yes That's right, and marking all as read is unlikely to happen, because of the huge amount of basically useless information that would require. That is, if you've never read a story, we need 0 bits of storage to know that. If you just want to mark everything as read, we need [largenum] of bits to store that. Basically, let things filter down a little, in a couple days it ought to behave properly. I think that storing historical stuff is not worth the space it would take up. We're probably going to have to timestamp story reads as well, and expire marked stories you haven't looked at in maybe 2 weeks (if they aren't hotlisted). Otherwise we're looking at a database table consisting of roughly (# of users * # of stories) rows, which would be unmanageably big. So old stories will probably always come up as all new. Like I said, in a perfect world, this would be better, but I'm trying to do the best I can with the resources available. :-) ____Not the real rusty Determining placement The problem with that is that where a story shows up isn't explicitly stored anywhere. The query to find out "is this on the main page" would negate any benefit of not storing that info, basically. Now, what might work is not storing it anymore for "old" stories. But I think that's still best done on a per-user basis, thus bringing us right back where we were before. ____Not the real rusty New comment replies I really want a "new replies" box, that follows you around on the sidebar and only shows your comments with recent replies (in order of reply, probably). I'm not altogether sure how to do this yet though. But it's in the works somewhere. ____Not the real rusty I like the second idea The second idea there might just be feasable. I'll look into it. BTW, it's 14,000 :-) ____Not the real rusty Undermotivated Undermotivated today. I have very little useful to mention here. But do read on for a big embarrassment on Slashdot. For those of you who no longer read /., do take a look at Philanthropy Redefined. Michael "my way or the highway" Sims has topped himself again. The basic gist is "The distributed cancer research project is a big scam to steal your CPU time and sell it to greedy corporate bastards!" Needless to say, this is a highly selective reading of the facts. Michael skimmed an FAQ, got the wrong impression, and got his panties in a bunch. Happens to all of us. But when it happens to me, I don't have 2 million people telling me how utterly wrong I am. It must suck to be Michael today. In other news, I fixed up panner's patch to add "X new comments" to Scoop, and that will be appearing here RSN (within the week). I'm working on a flexible RDF generator which will nicely dovetail into being a personal homepage section as well. Er, that doesn't read very well does it. Basically, you'll be able to generate a URL that you can use anywhere that lets you enter RDF URLs, which will provide a selective story feed from all K5 content. It lets you include or exclude sections, topics and authors, and lets you filter on keyword, also (seperately) filtered by section, topic, or author. It also has some nice time-range features, so you can actually look at all stories matching your criteria from, say, July 11, 2000. All of these options will also be integrated into your "K5 home page", which will provide a nice stream of info filtered according to criteria like the above. Some of the cool things are that you'll be able to include diaries by people you like (just add them as authors), and the keyword stuff will rock. That's about 1/2 done. Scoop 0.7 trundles along, with several good new features from all and sundry. We're actually a bit behind on K5 at the moment, as I'm trying to make sure all the stuff I didn't write is usable before I apply it, and discover that the stuff I did write has screwed the system. ;-) Hmmm Other people's "my" pages. Interesting idea, I guess. It probably wouldn't be too hard to add it to the user info page ( * See [name]'s personal news) but I think I'd make it optional to display. That is, you could choose to keep your news settings private if you wanted. And yeah, themes, I know. Eventually. Comment paging is a higher priority right now, still. I'm still hoping someone else will care enough about themes to do some of the work on that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Probably not Yeah, I was going to email you and make sure you weren't spending great amounts of time on that. But take a look at what we have, when it's up, and hack on it, if there's something you want that we don't have. ____Not the real rusty New comments Yes, it's what it says it is. It's in CVS right now, but not in the final form that it will take. I had to rework it a little for efficiency, and I think there's another thing I wanted to add to it (marking new comments visually). But the short version is, it keeps track of how many comments there were last time you read a story, and tags stories with the comment count, and the new comments count. This works on hotlist-only, or all stories, at the site admin's discretion (I'll be applying it to all stories here). When I'm done with it, it will also mark new comments visually in the comment display, which will be nice. The first revision is done. I'm adding the "mark new" bits, and it'll be up here later this week. ____Not the real rusty "Later this week" Are you saying that "tomorrow morning" isn't "later this week" then? Same week, further along, yup sounds right to me. :-) The thing actually stores the number of comments last time you viewed a story, and the highest previous index. That way we can easily deduce how many new there are (compare stored count to current count), and which ones are new (ones with cid higher than the last stored one). Those two bits of information are separate because they're not necessarily the same. Comments can be deleted, though we only do that for duplicates, but it's much safer to keep them separate. ____Not the real rusty Killfile There's a difference. What I'm talking about is a personal feed, not a killfile. That is, adding an author to your newsfeed will make stories by them always appear when posted. Excluding an author from your newsfeed will make stories by them never appear, even if they match your other criteria. However, the normal sections will remain, and your filters don't affect those at all. You can't suppress an author altogether, you can only specify that they not appear on your personal page. Sure, this could be used to suppress an author. I actually don't expect it to be used that way too much, though. The main intention of it is to allow you to add people's diaries to your home page. I think there will be another button, below the hotlist button, to add the author of the current story to your home page. I don't think I'll be adding a "killfile this author" button, though. We'll see how this goes. ____Not the real rusty Here The Generations Without Heroes School shootings dominate the news. We have grown to expect those in power to exercise their power to further selfish personal ambitions. Our most loved entertainment and media figures are expected to have severly dysfunctional aspects of their lives. As a culture, we feel that our youth are sliding down a slippery slope, yet we despair because we don't have a solution to address the problems. It seems as if we are the lone Dutchman who plugs the holes in the dike as leaks spring from the walls. The wall separates noble society from sea of selfishness, hatred, and despair. We find that we are running out of fingers rather quickly. ---------------------------------- I just completed reading John McCain's partial family biography, Faith of My Fathers. I was dazzled and entranced with the examples of heroism and courage mentioned within the book, from the selfless sacrifice of the man who attempted to fight the flames upon the flaming decks of the aircraft carrier Forrestal during the Vietnam conflict to the courage and spirit that refused to be broken within the POW community living in the Hanoi Hilton during the war. The one impression that I took away from the book was that within McCain's depiction of the events, there always seemed to be this presence of a higher ideal that these men held themselves to that was manifested within their heroes and role models. For McCain, the heroes were his father and grandfather. The other men had role models who had set an example that the men did their best to emulate that example and display the courage and valor that their heroes had shown them. After completing this book, I felt quite disappointed. I was not disappointed that men of great mettle that McCain mentioned did not exist within our time and society. I was disappointed that for all the noble qualities such men demonstrate, my generation and the one before seems to have failed to recognize these traits and emulate them. In short, while the heroes are out there, we have failed adopt these people as our role models. When did we stop looking upon exceptional people as role models and start looking at them as simply people? Was the catalyst the Vietnam conflict that shattered the American faith in their warriors and their protectors? Is this change a result of increasing media reports of our athletes commiting criminal acts and becoming victims of too much fame and money? Did the Watergate scandal destroy the ideal that the leaders of a country can be people to be emulated? Or is all of this a result of the increasing tendency to view our celeberties as a class of famous, yet extremely dysfunctional segment of our population? Perhaps the catalyst is a combination of all of the above, or none of it. In any case, there is a noticible difference between the generation that produced people like John McCain and Orson Swindle, and the one that I grew up in. McCain and Swindle had their heroes that personified a set of ideals that these men lived by. I can think of no such person that I have looked up to in my life and growing up. Is it that as a society, we have given up on the idea that there are some causes that are greater than the individual -- causes that are so great that the sacrifice of the self is worth furthering its goals? I have no doubt that when asked which causes are worth self sacrifice, men that grew up in McCain's generation would not have to pause to think of answers. Asking myself the same question, I find that the answer comes far less easier. ____Not the real rusty And another thing... This is an extra-special favor. I will not do this all the time. Let this be a lesson for all of you-- don't edit in the browser!! Use an editor, and copy-n-paste! I should put a warning like that on the submit story screen. ____Not the real rusty Different situation Actually, no, this is a whole different ballgame. While the script is similar in purpose, we now have protection in place against the kind of attack that script-submission makes possible (that is, content flooding). K5 also no longer allows anonymous submissions at all, which makes it pretty easy for us to shut down accounts that do try to use this abusively. We will be adding maximum word counts to article intros, to prevent the other possible "attack", which would be writing really long diaries and posting the whole thing as intro. This capability is already in Scoop, we just haven't enabled it here. So, um, don't panic. I still don't really see the point of this tool either, but I don't think it's a threat. ____Not the real rusty So? Yet another test of k5diary.pl And that's not a perfectly valid diary entry because... Frankly, if the text of the diary was "My zookeeper tread kilt buffoon." I still wouldn't have any other opinion. As far as I'm concerned you *cannot* abuse diaries with content alone. If the content you want to post doesn't make sense to us, that's our problem, not yours. The only possible abuse is outrageously over-rapid posting, in an effort to deny use of the resource to others. And we have protection againt that. Rememebr, diaries are public/private. That is, they're publically accessable, but privately edited. As opposed to the rets of the site, which is publically edited. Important difference. ____Not the real rusty Well then... ...better not try to do any fucking. ____Not the real rusty Yes! There are at least a few people who do post diaries in Spanish from time to time. I know there are readers who will understand virtually any language you can write in, and there's certainly no rule against it. Matter of fact, there's really no rule against stories in another language either, but I don't know what the reaction would be if you posted one. No one's tried yet. It'd be interesting to see though, eh? Anyway, Diaries are for you. If you feel more comfortable posting in German, do it. Likely you'll get some responses in German. Enough with this one-language web already! ____Not the real rusty Context Programming requires a context free language, whereas english is a context sensitive language. Perl. ____Not the real rusty Maybe we're talking about different context? Unless what you mean by context and what I mean by context are different, perl is context-sensitive. This is widely known to be one of Perl's weird features, that tends to rear up and bite people in the ass now and then. For example (shamelessly stolen from the Camel): @stuff = ("one", "two", "three"); is evaluated in list context. That is, the array @stuff now contains three elements. But: $stuff = ("one", "two", "three"); is evaluated in scalar context. $stuff now contains "three". That's what I mean by context-sensitive. Do you mean a different kind of context-sensitive? ____Not the real rusty Humor ratings The thing about ratings is, they're relative. Some stories do have a few funny comments as the highest-rated ones, because there aren't any really good non-funny comments. But I think most people here value information over humor. Think of it this way: you read a story. You have comments sorted by rating. *Most* of the time, the comments you see first should be the ones that really add something to the story. Then comments that are funny, or interesting opinions. Then the toss-off one-liners. I think that's how most people tend to prioritize things, so that's how they rate. What you need to remember is that a rating is not necessarily the absolute value of a comment, but it's value relative to all the other comments. Another factor, I think, is the fact that most of the 5s on slashdot these days are for "funny" comments. I think a lot of people would rather avoid "instant comedy" syndrome. There's nothing wrong with funny comments, they're just not the main point here. HTH. ____Not the real rusty Calm like a bomb Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Listening to Rage MP3's reminds me that I downloaded all of Battle of Los Angeles, several months before buying the CD. Record companies are stupid. They should have started selling MP3's two years ago. Think of all the money they flushed trying to develop "protected media". That's my random diary thought of the day. Oh yeah, one more thing: Wired called this morning, and I let the machine get it. Not that I dislike them or anything, but damn, that felt good. :-) Monster magnet is cool ...and The Reverend Horton Heat eats all y'all's lunch. For breakfast, even. I have wide-ranging tastes. Rage is good for certain moods. >:-) ____Not the real rusty Yep Rage burns it off, Tool intensifies it. That's pretty much how I use them too. Although sometimes I just listen to Tool because they're damn good musicians. In the era of clone-grunge, they were doing some really unusual stuff, and the weird syncopation always impresses me. ____Not the real rusty Rage + Chuck D? I hadn't heard that they were considering Chuck D (Voice of Power) to replace Zack. How cool would that be! :-) Chris Cornell (Soundgarden, right?) I could probably do without. ____Not the real rusty A couple times I've had a couple people email me and ask if they could use this or that element of K5 for their site. I'm usually flattered, actually, and I always give permission. A couple times I've been webbing around, and found this or that site that didn't contact me, but looks just like us anyway. I'm also not generally upset. Hell, I stole significant elements of K5's design from Linux.com, among others. Though if I came across a site that looked *exactly* like ours, I might be peeved. So far, that hasn't happened. And if someone was passing off my code as their own, I'd be on a blistering rampage. Count on that. ____Not the real rusty Very different... Actually, Scoop really shines at customization. You can make a scoop site look like just about anything, though for the most part, the Slashdot look and feel has proven to be easy for most people to use, and is pretty popular. For example, Micro-prince Computers uses Scoop as a content management system. This site doesn't even really have stories and comments, but it is running scoop. Ok, few other sites have done anything strikingly different with it. But I swear, it's just because they're lazy. :-) In any case, look and feel doesn't matter that much to me. If people steal ours, it must be good, right? That's what's important. ____Not the real rusty I know what you mean I'm not trying to say that 123hosting was doing the right thing here. You're right, it's all about intention and how it's used. The MeFi case... I'd probably be pissed too. ____Not the real rusty French press-- second that I also got one of these recently, after throwing out my old drip machine before moving, and I second your recommendation. Press coffee is not for the faint of heart, but if you like a full-bodied, somewhat frothy coffee, it's the way to go. And it's better to grind your own beans than buy them pre-ground, especially for the press. Normal grind has too much dust in it, and tends to make the coffee gritty, IMO. About the original question: the two big factors in the taste of drip coffee are water quality and water temperature. And of the two, temperature is probably the most important. The vast majority of household drip makers don't make the water hot enough to get decent flavor out of the grounds, and you end up with soggy, limp coffee. This is why the coffee you get at a lot of coffee shops is better than what you make at home: commercial coffee makers heat the water much hotter. There's a particular range of temperature that works best, but I forget what it is. In any case, I don't have a coffee maker to recommend anyway. But I'd bet your first machine was one of those rare birds that got the water hot enough, and that's why it was so good. I spent some time in France in high school, and the father of the girl I was staying with had this coffee maker that sealed up tight and pressurized internally, and actually forced the water through the grounds as steam. It wasn't an espresso machine, although that's what most of them do. It just used normal grounds. But *damn* was that good coffee. If anyone has ever seen one of these machines, I still want one. Post links! :-) ____Not the real rusty Not really... The one in France was electric. The water went in a reservoir on the bottom, then you locked the whole thing up tight, and it boiled the water to push steam up through tubes on each side, which would go through the grounds and precipitate into the pot. These stove-top espresso thingys might do pretty much the same thing though. Maybe I'll give one a try. /me toddles off to the local coffee shop... ____Not the real rusty Happy Zelerate is no more. Good. They now join the ranks of other fucked Idealab! companies, like, most recently, weddingchannel.com. Who, me, bitter? :-) Even worse... I talked to a reporter from Wired last week. That's right, K5 is officially No Longer Cool as of probably May. Keep your eyes peeled. LJ's not a bad publication. I don't think they're like the kiss of death or anything. But they have a fundamentally boosterish slant toward open source businesses, so naturally they're going to say good things about them. Basically, if you read coverage of a free software company in LJ, I wouldn't necessarily take their word as gospel. To be fair, Zelerate fooled some much bigger publications too. But the basics were, they have an unproven business model, and they proceeded like "selling service" was money in the bank. For anyone planning to go run a business based on unproven principles: Don't Spend What You Don't Have. Simple as that. Get clients, *then* hire staff. BTW: comments in fuckedcompany seem to indicate that weddingchannel.com is not folding, just moving their operation to LA. Probably cause it's cheaper there. Stay tuned though-- the Idealab! implosion continues. ____Not the real rusty You haven't been keeping up with the diary. :-) Yeah, we've been here almost a year. And as it turns out, much of what I thought about Silicon Valley was right all along. I love San Francisco, it's a great city, but it's not worth how expensive it is here. So, yeah, I cut ties with Zelerate a couple months ago. I'm getting income from K5, and doing freelance work as well, and really, I'm very happy with life. I like what I'm doing, and I want to keep doing it. So now, the name of the game is cost-cutting. Rent, utilities, food, entertainment... *everything* is too expensive here. So my fiancee and I are most likely moving to Maine this summer. I spent a lot of time in Portland growing up, and the lure of the Maine coast (cheap lobster! New England weather!) is calling to me again. We both like it here, but neither of us have any illusion that we're going to settle out here. So we figure now's probably the time to be moving on again. ____Not the real rusty Heh. yeah, cross-country again No, we do things whole hog in the Foster household. Hell bent and devil take the hindmost, I say! :-) Maine, especially the coast, is really pretty. It doesn't have the drama of, say, the Big Sur, but as far as coastlines go, it's definitely one of the best in the country. Very rocky and rugged, and go out to the edge of the Atlantic when a Nor'Easter's rolling in, you'll see some impressive crashing waves. The interior of Maine is all forests, blackflies, and hillbillys, pretty much. It's not really much to look at, but there's some good hiking and camping, if you can stand the "State bird" (the blackfly). For those of you raised in some creepy place like California, where there aren't any bugs, the blackfly is a tiny little fly, a little bigger than a gnat, which tends to congregate in swarms around anything that sweats. In the summer, they make the woods of Maine more or less uninhabitable by forming thick black clouds around anyone foolish enough to go out there. They tend to swarm around the head, and get in your eyes, nose and mouth. I'm not even sure if they bite or not, but just the impenetrable clouds of them are bad enough. The coastal areas are better, because there's not so much standing water for them to breed in. Plus there's snow. I really miss snow. It's been over 6 years since I've lived anywhere that has a proper winter. My family are all New Englanders for generations back (many many generations in some cases) and I think the need for snow and other meterological adversity is too deeply rooted in me to escape. So, ayuh, weah goin down east again. Maybe I can start a Portland ME high-tech boom. :-) ____Not the real rusty Someone gets it! Bah, I dunno. Let's let the site do what it wants. That's what rusty put the damn thing up for. You continue to post and write whatever you want. I'll do the same. Let's all agree to continue creating the site. Maybe...just maybe...we'll find a balance. But it appears that for the most part, finding the balance is the fun part. Always the journey, never the destination. Halleleujah. Someone gets it. :-) This is really funny, by the way. But you shouldn't post it, because it would be almost universally misinterpreted as a "K5 isn't the way it *should* be whine". Too bad. But take comfort in the fact that you're completely right about what we're doing here. ____Not the real rusty Your dreams can come true! Ok, job where you read websites all day... Hey, that sounds like my job! So, what you need to do is start a web community. Here's the simple recipe for that: Become dissatisfied with one or more of the websites you currently frequent. Complain for a month or so (optional) Write a replacement web community system from scratch. Use old favorite site as a model. Slave at running it for a year and a half or so while also working a full-time job. Ignore all friends, loved ones, and pets, because you don't have time for anything else. Find sponsors who will pay to advertise to your (now) legions of readers. Discover that you still can't really pay all the bills that way. Do contract work on the side. Pick one loved one to start paying attention to again, because you have a few hours a day now. Worry about money all the time. By now, you'll be well on your way to reading websites all the time for a living. Of course, in the last year of running your own, you'll have totally stopped reading all the others, and forgotten what they even were. So you'll probably have to find a whole new set to pay attention to. Or, you can just stick with your own. Good luck! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Cool (I'm not going to pronoun you at all in this comment. :-)) I bought my copy. Excellent stuff. Plus, you included MP3's, which can almost convince me to buy a CD all by itself. Keep doing that. Whatever else you do, keep doing that! ____Not the real rusty sort-of bug? Comments without visible stories is a sort-of bug. As noted above, I like the fact that stories, once voted down, are not visible to most people (they are to admins and the author, though). But I also like that comments are always findable once posted (it may not be easy, but it's always possible). Faced with this dilemma, I have avoided solving it until it becomes more pressing than a bunch of other problems. I'm hoping that someone (maybe even me! Hey, I can dream...) will have a good idea what to do by then. ____Not the real rusty UFA unfair_rating_alert! was an individual known to many of use who took it upon themselves to try to bring attention to blatantly unfair ratings, in roughly the month just before open ratings were introduced. Since then, UFA has retired, since now unfair ratings are done in the public eye for all to see, when they're done at all. Those days were the wild and wooly heyday of rating-stalking and the like, which turned out to mainly be just "Latrell Sprewell" methodically rating some people down for reasons no one ever discovered. ____Not the real rusty Does it matter? Interesting question about whether it matters if stories get accepted or not. "Conventional wisdom" amongst queue-watchers is that no new comments are posted after a story goes up. Two things about that theory: It's not really true. There are sort of separate camps here -- some people vote on stories constantly, and a lot don't. The ones that do tend to comment more than the ones that don't, and also don't tend to check stories after they're posted. Giving rise to the impression that stories get no new comments in sections. They don't get as many, but the ones they do get tend to be pretty thoughtful. Even when it is true, part of the point of the site is to produce on ongoing... "magazine", for lack of a better term. If a story gets 30 comments before posting, and no more after that, then we can assume that everything useful there was to say about it has pretty much been said, and it now stands as a complete piece. I'm cool with that too, so I don't consider stories that don't get a lot of new discussion losses. The story that deserves a lot of ongoing commentary is pretty rare. The vast majority give rise to 20 - 50 comments, correcting this, pointing out that, basically fleshing out and completing what was originally posted. Some stories favor radically less than this -- "ask K5" type things for example. Generally, if it's a simple question, there's a simple answer. That gets posted early on, and you're done. I think that's why these kinds of articles aren't really posted much here. Then there are stories like yours. Basically, it was an "I think this." piece. Most people thought you were wrong, and many took the time to point out why they thought so. So you (being open-minded and willing to listen to others) took away a fuller understanding of your position, the people who voted and commented thought about the thing from another side, but ultimately they decided it didn't present a compelling enough argument to post as part of the "official" content of the site. So, I think there is a difference, but that the open process pulls value from the editorial back-and-forth that goes on "behind the curtain", even when the end decision is a no. God knows how many fascinating conversations editors have had trying to decide if an article should be included in their paper or not. Why shouldn't we all have them? :-) ____Not the real rusty Just wanted to note... I just thought I'd point out the irony of your .sig for those who hadn't noticed. A good ironic .sig moment is always worth pointing out. ____Not the real rusty D'oh! I knew the sig could change, but who knew it would be so soon...? For posterity, then, the former .sig that I was referring to read "Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." So there. :-) ____Not the real rusty Uncalled for, indeed You're right, that was uncalled for. FWIW, I think you took that way too seriously too. "Boys are icky" is girl-code for "We'd like to flirt now." Seriously, they were playing. I wouldn't take it as any kind of statement of feminism. ____Not the real rusty Nothing much Blah day. Gray and drizzly. Went car shopping -- I hated the Honda CR-V, and liked the Toyota RAV-4. Though I don't think I liked it enough to make me want one more than a Wrangler. Still haven't test driven one of those either. The sales guy brought one around for us, and it promptly ran out of gas. Why is it so hard to test-drive a Wrangler around here? That's all, really. Odd, slow, disjointed kind of day. Hope it clears up tomorrow. Car poll. I forgot One more thing. Watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High. "If I'm here, and you're here, doesn't that make it *our* time?" ____Not the real rusty At least... At least we're not looking at huge planet-crushing SUV's. The RAV-4 is pretty small, and the Wrangler, which is still what we'll probably get, can't really be called an SUV at all. ____Not the real rusty Yeah I think the decision is made. We finally got to drive a Wrangler yesterday. About the RAV and repair-- the old ones were pieces of shit. The 2001 is a whole new vehicle, and it's a lot better designed. Still, there's no info on whether or not it will fall apart. Toyota, as a rule, makes good stuff though. But, irrelevant. Virtually all of the comments here about the jeep ring true to me. I think that's the one for us. ____Not the real rusty Ouch! Get back to school soon! We miss your edit-fu badly. :-( ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I know.. The choice is between a "practical" vehicle (in the sense of comfy and responsible) and a "fun" vehicle (in the sense of has character, is more rugged). Of course the RAV would be more comfy. But driving across the country isn't just about comfort! It's about style, too. The last time, we did it in a Miata, which have a hard ride and are noisy as hell, and we loved every minute of it. I can't imagine a Jeep would be worse than that. And then we'd be in Maine, with all sorts of woods and backroads to go exploring. :-) So, basically, once again, we're getting a good "second car" without owning a "first car". But we don't have kids yet, and Bret hardly ever drives, and the Jeep will last us forever, even after we need to get a "family vehicle" (shudder). Plus, I still maintain my theory that once you do something purely because it's the responsible, adult thing to do, all is lost, and you'll go one acting that way forever. And no one wants that. ____Not the real rusty Not sleeping Not sleeping is weird. Sometimes it just... happens. Like last night, I just forgot to go to sleep. And by the time I remembered, it was too late. So now I'm tired, but it's almost dinner time, so I can't go to bed now. I'm stuck till after dinner, then I'll go to sleep and wake up at 2AM. Dammit. What kept me up last night was worrying about the car. We're one year into a four year Miata lease, but we'd really like to get a Wrangler instead for the move to Maine. It was looking like we weren't going to be able to get out of the lease, until this morning. I called the bank, and got a human, who informed me that yes, the number they quote on the auto-phone-system is the full payoff "you now own the car" price. What it boils down to is that we owe roughly the current blue book retail value of the car. So, if we sell it, even if we have to take slightly less than retail for it, it won't be too much for us to just eat the difference, and we're out of the lease. Huge weight lifted. Now we start the car buying process all over again. And dammit, we're gonna do it right this time. Anyone wanting to buy a car, read this now. The whole thing. It's a whole huge pile of great advice. Man, we did *everything* wrong the first time. Waiting for my first K5 paycheck to arrive. Today, I get to sign my own paycheck. Not endorse, mind you. *Sign*. How cool is that? :-) Talked to a very nice reporter from Wired today. Yes, in my sleepless condition. I think they're going to do a little writeup of K5. I have to say, she was bright, and quick to catch on, but for someone from a tech magazine, pretty underinformed. This is, no doubt, far from the most important thing on her schedule, though. What it made me think about is that the traditional media is very much about a generalist communicator explaining specific things to others with little or no knowlege of them. What we're about, at our best, is experts who may not be professional communicators, expressing their specific field of knowlege as well as they can, and being helped out by anyone else who gets it and can put it clearer in a comment, or knows more and can add that. That is, we tend to privilege expert-level data and accuracy over clarity of communication or broad reach of audience. We don't always manage it (but be fair, neither do they! :-)), but that's a key difference that's probably worth thinking about. Help desk, easy? Are you trying to imply that sitting on a helpdesk for a few months is easy? Yipes. And about Driph's shirts, he has them back. But remember, they're illegal in Canada. ____Not the real rusty Sleep and paychecks Not sure why I'm rambling about this in someone else's diary, mind, since you're suffering from insomnia and you've knackered your internal clock, which is entirely different from me Actually my internal clock has been humming along smoothly for a while-- for the past couple weeks I've been a 1AM to 9AM kind of sleeper, which really improves my energy levels. I went to bed at 8PM last night, and thank jeebus, slept straight to 10AM this morning. I feel much better. God I'm glad I didn't do the "wake up at 2AM" thing. And the paycheck is already printed with a predetermined responsible amount on it, so I can't just fill it in for "a hundred bazillion dollars". Probably for the best. Although I don't actually have it either -- it was sent to me last address, dammit. Hopefully FedEx can get it back for me. ____Not the real rusty Er... Shouldn't the "WAIT" and "MAKE JOKE" on the right be on the left? ____Not the real rusty Better Today Better today. I ate some solid food and was up and about most of the time. Spent a lot of the day reading Acts of the Apostles by the unbelievably cool John Sundman, who, if I beg repeatedly enough, just might agree to publish some new work here on K5. Did I mention "unbelievably cool"? Read on for porn! Ok, the last sentence was really just to make you click "read more". But I am gonna talk about porn a little. I was unable to resist Keslin's sig ("naked nerd girl", who could?) and meandered around her site a bit today. Is it pornography? Is it art? It is very cool, whatever it is. She has an interesting philosophy, which is basically that pictures of naked women, even if they are only, or mainly, of what Congress would call "prurient interest", don't have to be sleazy. After posting some pictures to one of those "rate me" sites, she was surprised by the vigor of feedback wanting more. So she decided to set up a site, herself, to post pictures of her. She plans to do pictorials, and eventually charge for member access. Ok, so a thousand people have done this. But her site *feels* different. She wants it to be a place where people can look at naked pictures of her, and not feel creepy about it. She wants the members to talk to each other. And in general, I think she succeeds in creating a really friendly atmosphere. Which is not what you think of first when you hear "porn site", usually. So what's going on? Are women taking their sexuality back by cashing in on the ever present horny-nerd-with-credit-card? Are we headed for a 21st century return to the Old West "house of ill repute", which was usually run by women? I think there's an article in here somewhere, but I might not be able to get at what's in my mind. Comments welcome, and do check out the site, if you're not offended by beautiful women. Roxanne The thing is, that I wasn't sure if anybody would 'get it'. I certainly didn't think that anybody would understand what I'm trying to do so early in the game. Ok, I have to confess, I read your "what am I doing" pages. But the reason that I bothered to read those was because your site had a different feel to it than most, and I was curious about what the idea was. So you're doing something right. I don't want to be accused of making art though. People tend of have this feeling that they aren't allowed to enjoy art. Fair enough. Although making art isn't such a shameful thing. :-) "So, Keslin, what do you do for a living?" "Err, I'm a pornographer." God, I hope he doesn't find out that I'm secretly an artist! Art is supposed to make you feel something right? So religious art should make you feel pious, and social art should make you feel revolutionary, and dada should make you feel confused. Well, my personal theory-of-the-moment on pornography vs. art is that porn is art, it's just art that's supposed to make you feel horny, and so it's been cast out of the exalted temple of western art theory, because that's *dirty*. So, ideally, you should be making good pornographic art. And if people don't notice that it's art, well, it doesn't much matter. If noticing that is going to make them flee, then maybe you are better off keeping it a secret. :-) Of the women that I know that use their sexuality for profit, most are strippers, working hard and making somebody else rich. But let me rephrase: "Of the people I know, most are working hard and making someone else rich." That's just a general fact. I wouldn't expect the sex industry to be any different, really. But I think we're seeing, now, the possibility of the especially enterprising woman using her sexuality for her own profit, where before that was very, very rare. It would be quite a notable thing if there was anything close to parity in self-employment between sex workers and, say, programmers. I don't think there is yet, but I think the gap is closing. And it's definitely a truism that your server crashes right before someone relatively high-profile links to it. :-) Anyway, if K5 is a village, I think Keslin.com should be our first official strip club. After all, what fun is a town without a red-light district? :-) ____Not the real rusty Killfiles Point one: There are a few people here who get a little "overexhuberant" and often piss people off unintentionally. Virtually everyone involved in that thread does so -- regeya, eLuddite, and lee_malatesta, though I love them all dearly, can all be fountains of flame when they feel threatened. I'm so not surprised that that thread devolved the way it did, considering who was involved. I don't think any of them were "trolling" (whatever that even means anymore); they just all got overly het up. Point two: I'm not necessarily opposed to killfiles. The idea of having a killfile affect rating is pretty much right out, as that would be virtually impossible to implement. It would be way too inefficient. On the other hand, comment killfiles could be useful. They wouldn't be too hard to implement, either. I'd really like to see a story posted on this, to get the general opinion. If you don't write it up, I will eventually. I'm not opposed to them, but I'm also not at all convinced they'll solve anything, really. IRC has /ignore, most news clients have killfiles, and yet flaming still persists in both of these media. I still think it's a social problem which can't really be solved by technological means. But, if people want it, I'll add it. I think we should seriously think about how it will affect the overall community dynamic though. ____Not the real rusty by user I mean you, individually, being able to prevent all comments by a particular user from being displayed. ____Not the real rusty We already have this I suggest we get rid of mojo and get rid of ratings. Give every post a cluestick button, so that if it is particularly offensive or spam, any user may thwack it. Say, after five thwacks, it becomes hidden, and the poster loses the ability to post to the thread. After a certain theshold of hidden posts, the user loses the ability to post altogether, for a fixed amount of time. All of this will be open like the current system, to discourage over-eager vigilantism and moderation wars. This is basically a special case of what we have now. The current system is more complicated because it has some measures built in to help discourage abuse, but basically, that's how it already works. ____Not the real rusty I have food poisoning Of all the days for me to be in bed all day, moaning with stomach cramps, it has to be today. The ad thing was done without my knowlege, and I'm doing my best to get rid of the obnoxious ones. I really am sorry. Anyway, short entry because I have to get back to bed. I suspect that I got some tainted Girl Scout cookies. It's a long story, but that's not as implausible as it initially sounds. Fantastic I laughed, I cried, it was the Beowulf of online communities. And yes, that is my last name. ____Not the real rusty Stupid People Day Whoopee! It's stupid people day! Let's all be stupid! Look what other stupid people have accomplished today... Parked in front of my driveway (again) Refused to let me test-drive a Jeep, for no apparent reason, after I drove an hour out to Brentwood to go to their crappy-ass car dealership. This is Brentwood Dodge by the way, and anyone in the Bay area considering buying a new car, I highly advise that you not only not buy anything from these buffoons, but you in fact email them specifically to tell them you're not going to, because they're dumb. Now that I get here, there were a few other things that I can't actually tell you about for various reasons. :-) I feel better now -- I had my rant when Bret got home. Mostly I was just pissed about wasting half the day driving around ugly Contra Costa county, only to be rebuffed by a salesperson. Well-dressed young man drives in in a nearly brand-new Miata in the middle of the day. What, I'm gonna steal their test-drive car? They told me to find out what the exact terms of my lease were, and come back then. Do they really think I'm going to come back, ever? I didn't even bother to tell them they'd never see me again. This goes to show what the "Five-Star Rating" is worth I guess. Bret and I had an interesting chat about religion. She was raised Catholic, I was raised protestant (Congregationalist and Methodist). Neither of us is particularly religious now, ranging from me not at all to her vaguely Catholic. Mainly we talked about how confusing Catholicism is to protestants. Like, if God is everywhere, why do you have to pray to Mary, and the Saints? Why can't you just pray straight to the Man? But apparently "God is everywhere" is kind of a protestant concept to begin with. The Catholic God is more like the President. You know he's there, but if you want a road built, you don't just call the White House. Puzzling to someone who was raised with the "God is in all things" kind of idea. Also talked about why I wasn't agnostic or atheist, despite not being religious. "Agnostic" literally means "without knowledge (or experience)", which usually translates to "don't know yet". But I don't believe in the Christian God, or really any sentient higher power, so I'm not undecided. Which would normally make me an atheist, except that has undertones of "anti-religion", and even if it isn't supposed to, the term has been co-opted by the anti-religionists to mean "opposed to organized religion", which I'm not. I most prefer "areligious", which implies (to me anyway) that I'm not involved in any organized religion, without necessarily ruling out any sort of spiritual beliefs. I guess the religion theme around here lately has been getting to me. No warnings I don't believe in warnings. If they're parked in front of my driveway, they probably have been warned before by someone else. If I can't get my car out, they get towed, end of story. If I *could* get my car out, but I'm in a bad mood, they probably get towed too. Whoever it was yesterday was lucky that I was in a good mood, and they were gone by the time I got home (no longer in a good mood). ____Not the real rusty Worse still... What worries me are not the trolls, but all the biters they've gotten recently. We had a good balance, pretty much. Every once in a while, someone would test the trolling waters, and discover that K5 just wasn't a very interesting place to troll, because by and large, we could see one when it was posted, and just ignored it. Lately people have been snapping 'em up like canape though. What happened? Did you all forget what a troll looks like? :-) ____Not the real rusty Towing Bah. Do you live in a city? Here, there's no guff about driveway-blockers. You call any towing company, and they'll tow someone parked in front of a driveway, no questions asked. You don't have to fool around with pushing it into the street. I could have done that, but I didn't, because I'm a nice person, and I could still get my car out. They're damn lucky I have a tiny car, though. I have had people towed before. :-) ____Not the real rusty Private property? Not a problem here. My driveway's not even a car-length long, so if someone parks in front of it, they're on the street, and fair game. ____Not the real rusty Ha :-) Ok, you trolled Inoshiro. Yes, we all noticed, and we're very proud. Although, it's not actually that hard... ;-) ____Not the real rusty Mammoth In keeping with my semi-resolution to post something every day (I'm not counting my last diary, as that was not of a personal nature), here's what I did today. Sadly, not much. Bret got a touch of some kind of stomach bug, so we called off the Tech Museum trip. I'm not feeling so hot myself, actually, but I'm probably just tired. So we basically slothed around most of the day. I spent quite a while online looking up info about Jeep Wranglers. We're thinking about trading in the Miata for one of these for the trip back East. Anyone who owns one, or knows anything about them, please comment! Do you love/hate your Wrangler? Does it have any secret defects we ought to know about? I'm probably going to go test-drive one this week sometime. Tony came over, and we watched the Mammoth show from Discovery (he taped it for us). It was kind of disappointing. The first one had a plot, of sorts, with trying to get the mammoth out of the ground, but this one was pretty aimless. They hardly got any of the thing thawed, and it looks like it's probably not a complete carcass. So most of it was filler about the mammoth's history and stuff. Basically, there's no new information to speak of. I think they just made this one because the first was so successful. Oh yeah, and yesterday we saw "Enemy at the Gates". Don't bother. It could have been two or three cool movies, but it turned out to be one totally predictable one. Basically, it's standard Hollywood. After scene two, you know what the entire plot's going to be, and there are no surprises at all. Plus it suffers from the major flaw that at the end, the shepherd boy from the Urals has won a huge victory... for Stalin. Pretty hard to get excited about that, really. Hitler vs. Stalin, take your pick. Plus there's a completely bogus moment near the end where the Commissar (Soviet political officer) has this revelation that he's been wrong, and "Communism will never produce a society of complete equality, because we all will find something to envy." Jeebus. They should've just come out with it, and made him say "Gee, kids, we've been wasting our time with all this Bolshevik crap! Capitalism's where it's at!" Plus the accents were stupid. The Russians all had British accents, and the Germans had American accents. Except some of them had slightly-German accents, and some of them actually spoke German. It made no sense. It was basically a silly movie, and not worth the ticket price. Thanks Thanks for the info. From what I've read, the 2K1 Wrangler is significantly different than the 88 model. Though it looks the same, apparently virtually all of it has been redesigned. The shocks are now coils instead of leaf springs, the engine's a lot beefier, and the top(s) apparently work better. This all happened in 96 (there's no '96 Wrangler-- they released the redesign as the '97). I haven't been able to find much about whether the new models are as reliable as the old ones, but apparently the ride is a lot better. I haven't been able to find anoything negative about them though, so I guess that's good news. Funny to see that your husband wanted a Miata originally. There must be something about these two cars that appeal to the same kind of person. :-) I love my Mata, and I'm very sad to be getting rid of it, but it's just not a car I can justify having in Maine. Not a chance of driving it in snow, and it starts a little rough when it gets cold here (~50 degrees F), so I imagine it would hate Maine winters. Also good to know about the child-seat thing. We may have some little ones before we get another car, and we were a bit worried about the child-ability of the Wrangler. Obviously, if you have kids, the Miata is right out. Amusingly, our miata has warning labels on the sunshades that say "Do not put children in the front seat! The back seat is the safest place for children..." etc. Of course, there is no back seat. :-) ____Not the real rusty Yeah, I know I know. Still, in the scope that the film addresses, it's hard to get excited. They do a little setup early on about the war, and "Stalingrad is the turning point" etc. But it's about 45 seconds worth, and at the end, they don't bring you back to any greater context. It probably is the same story as you read -- or at least part of it. The main character of "EatG" is apparently an actual Hero of the Soviet Union. The movie does note that you can go see his rifle in a museum. So it's quasi-historical, at least. PS: Love your sig-- I just saw that movie. Great stuff. :-) ____Not the real rusty Well, duh :-) You think that someone like me happened to run into "Three Men in a Boat" by some other route than "TSNotD"? :-) PS: "Cecil B. Demented". As in "Cecil B. DeMille" famous producer of lavish singing-and-dancing extravaganzas in the heyday of the vertically integrated Hollywood studio system. ____Not the real rusty Oh look! We have our very own troll. Well, looks like streetlayer has decided to be K5's first gen-you-wine troll. Even better is, he's apparently succeeding at it, convincing people not to rate his spam to zero by talking about that very action. People, have some balls. One sentence posts like "Someone is rumored to care what your opinion is." are spam, and ought to be hidden. Is that the kind of thing we want here? Most ironically of all, this person is one of the most rabid would-be "trollbusters" around. Truly, we become what we hate. "Streelayer", if you're reading this, cut it out, man. Seriously-- you're being an asshole. Diaries vs. Comments I don't care about the diaries at all. You can post anything you want in diaries, and comment ratings have no effect on that. It was the nasty little one-liner comments here and there that I objected to. They were the very definition of spam, but people weren't rating them 0 because of the provoking .sig. I was just hoping to get some attention to them -- if people still think they belong, well, nothing I can do. ____Not the real rusty Smile a little People like to play. It's one of the things we do. Some people play here once in a while. Ok, there's a place for that, and there's a place where it shouldn't be. There's virtually no trolling here. Seriously, you're imagining it. Because someone was a troll on slashdot does not mean they are trolling here. Simple as that. OOG THE CAVEMAN posted one comment in an article and got knocked below one. I'd say that's a good example of the system working. Sure, he posted a diary. Diaries are where we play. If OOG wants to keep a diary here, I have no problem with that, and I don't see why you would either. I'm not going anywhere near you vs. streetlawyer. I actually like both of you, so I'm right out of that whole thing. First, though, the one common thread in all of these is, *don't take it quite so seriously*. That's all. Nothing more. A point which I agree with, mostly. Communities that take themselves too seriously are brittle and weak. Self-satire is important. About killfiles-- maybe. We'll see. It probably wouldn't be all that hard to do, but I don't know that I like the philosophy behind them. Still, it's probably better than a lot of other options. I certainly can't force everyone to talk to each other, so maybe it would be good to provide a way to just quietly (and privately) "mute" someone. I'll think about it. I may post a story and ask if it's a good idea. Maybe you should post such a story. :-) ____Not the real rusty Register to read Simple difference. You have to register to read the NYT online at all. Here, you can read anonymously forever. You only have to make an account to post. That's what bothers people so much about it. Plus the fact that it's so flaming pointless. I can't even count the number of fake accounts I've made and forgotten about on the NYT. They must have so much crap data in there from Slashdot links that it's unreal. Why? Why!? It's stupid, and stupidity is annoying. ____Not the real rusty Intolerance I got an email a couple days ago, requesting that the article about the girl who killed herself, purportedly due to Christian taunting, be removed from the site. Not having gotten permission from the author of the email, I'm not going to say who it was. But below is that message, and my response to it. I'm posting it here because I think both parts say some very important things, that more people ought to read. The email I received: I want to begin by admitting that the request I have to make is ludicrous, at best. But I think it deserves some serious thought, anyway. My concern is about Electric Angst's recent editorial regarding the wiccan who hanged herself "on account of harassment." I want to request that it be removed-- this is not a demand by any stretch, but I would like to provide some reasons I think this is a suitable course of action. 1. Because it's NOT "Technology for the people, by the people." 2. Because it's every bit as intolerant, ignorant, and conducive to further intolerance & ignorance as the situation he's complaining about. Think about it: Quotes (with fallacies obvious to me, in parenthesis) will follow. "To acknowledge that Tempest Smith's classmates were exerting cruel psycho- logical torture on the young woman with the hymns their church had taught them would be to indict not only the school children, but the hyms as well. (In the same manner that the columbine shooting indicated not only the students, but their appreciation of DooM ((c) Id Software) was to blame? Does this mean that violent games really are responsible for violent behaviour?) To make this tragic event public knowledge would be to put a mirror to the face of the majority, forcing them to see the intolerance in their own eyes, crumbling their arguments that it no longer exists. (Ok, so that majority of christians are intolerant people who spend their time trying to suppress other religions? There are several billion "Christians" in the world- do they all come knock on your door and ask you to go to their church? Do they sing hymns at you until you hang yourself? Are you so sure that "the majority" is intolerant? I suppose "the majority" of napster users were using Napster for illegal purposes, as evidenced by the 60% traffic decrease of late. So it should be right to shut down napster, right? Is there any real evidence to support this claim, regarding the behavior of "the majority of Christians?") "I can only hope that it happens before another young woman is found hanging, lifeless. (Are you expecting many young wiccans to commit suicide because they can't put up with the fact that "the majority" of people are assholes? If we get rid of DooM, will school shootings cease? If napster is released from their current prison, will we only use it for honorable, legal purposes?)" At the time I compose this message, the top comment on the list for this piece says: ============== Christians make me sick. Wiccans can be classified as harmless dimwits. Christianity is the most venomous nonsense ever perpetrated upon the human race. ============== The comment right below contains many statements such as "Everywhere and always, since its inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in struggle between body and soul." The next one makes the assertion that christians "Don't worship god, they worship their own damn Satan." Disregarding the -many- other comments, I'm sure you can see quite clearly that much of this smacks of intolerance- the same intolerance the page was published to condemn. In whatever form, it says "Christianity should be suppressed. Wiccanism (?) should be suppressed. Buddhism is evil. Atheists are idiots." It doesn't matter who says what, they're really all saying the same thing, see? This also ignores the fact that many K5ers would not feel this way if a group of wiccans "coerced" a christian into hanging herself. This is ignoring the fact in some places (unfortunately, of which K5 is a member) that atheists/ christians/deists piss each other off on a daily or hourly basis. And none of us are hanging ourselves. So if you genuinely consider yourselves to be defenders of public rights to religion and the persuit of happiness, you can see why this should be removed. Because if you don't remove it, you are implicitly affirming your support of it. My response: I had to read this a few times and think about it before I could properly respond. I hope you excuse the delay. First of all, I want to make it totally clear that many of the comments in that article, on both sides, are sickening. You are right, they display the deplorable intolerance and narrow-minded, venomous rigidity that is the hallmark of humanity at it's very worst. It is true that we become what we hate, and it's clear that many of the anti-religion people have become exactly the kind of people they claim to oppose. It sucks, and at their worst, people really suck. I won't, however, be removing the article. I'll adress your reasons, and try to explain why they don't justify such a thing, and what I think does justify not removing it. 1. This is a straw man, and I suspect you know it. K5 is not "Technology for the people". It's "technology *and culture* from the trenches." I've said many many times that I very much consider that and to be an "and/or" in practice. Religion is one of the strongest binding forces of any culture, which puts an article about religion squarely in the acceptable range of content. Personally, I'm not very fond of religion articles, because they bring out the worst in people. But I couldn't make any kind of case that they're offtopic. More important than that, even, is the "by the people" component. Even if I didn't think an article was particularly on-topic (and it's hard for me to even think of such a thing), if it was fairly voted up, I would consider that evidence enough that it belongs. The primary principle here is the open queue and the voting process. That takes precedence over nearly any other concern, short of something like a legal challenge to an article's copyright status. 2. As I say above, I'm sorry about this. Nevertheless, I am not the editor. You are. I am a technical admin, and occasional copyeditor, but I don't decide what goes up or doesn't, and more than you or 12,998 other people do. It was voted up fairly, it was written by the person who posted it, so it stays. End of story. Your examples are all accurate, and I don't argue with that. People like these are mostly why I don't consider myself an atheist. I'm not religious, and have some real problems with a lot of the things organized religion has done throughout history. But the same goes for virtually any large group of "true believers" in anything -- philosophies, political movements, activists of all kinds. The common thread is that fanaticism is closed-mindedness, and is destructive by it's very nature. This has nothing to do with religion itself, and I very much agree with the core teachings of most religions. It has everything to do with closing your mind and joining the mob. As to your final paragraph, I don't know why you'd think we're "defenders of free religion". We are not a government. We have nothing to do with human rights. We run a website. I consider myself to be a defender of people's privilege to openly discuss and debate issues on Kuro5hin.org, provided they are not actively trying to prevent others from doing the same. I have nothing to do with defense of religion, or pursuit of happiness, outside the tiny sphere of happiness in participating in K5. I make no claims whatsoever as to the truth, accuracy, pleasantness, political or ideological palatability, or general usefulness of any of the information on K5 that I did not personally write. If there's an organized mob of atheists running around zeroing comments by christians on K5, and making them unreadable to the majority of users, that's a problem I can, and should, do something about. If you don't like what people are posting, that's pretty much something you have to deal with. I'm sorry there is stupidity in the world, and that some of it appears on K5. Willful stupidity anywhere offends me. But I'm certainly not going to abandon the principles that the site is founded on because of a few nasty comments. The only way to overcome narrow-minded bigotry is for people to understand each other, and I think the only way people will ever understand each other is to communicate. In our own tiny way, I think K5 helps people communicate, and thus promotes understanding. No, it doesn't always work, and there are some things that are a hell of a lot harder than others for people to look at through someone else's eyes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Thank you for your comments. Disturbed? I'm disturbed that you'd post a private email, even without attribution. I don't think you should be disturbed. There's no identifying information in there whatsoever as to who sent it, so there's no possibility of revealing something the person didn't want to say publically. And I certainly didn't post it to mock the author or his points. Mainly, it was an exchange I thought said a lot, and I didn't want to keep it totally behind the scenes. When you send someone email, your words go out to an audience you can't necvessarily control. Which means that you trust they will use it with tact, discretion, and in the spirit it was sent. I think I did all of those. ____Not the real rusty Nothing so earth-shattering Nothing that hasn't been said a billion times already. I just wanted to share an email that made me think some, and my response to it. Usually when I do this, I learn something from you. And if that doesn't do it for you, well, this is my diary, and I can write anything I please. ;-) And some things you just have to keep saying, over and over, forever. Maybe nothing will ever change even so, but you're guaranteed nothing will ever change if you don't keep trying. ____Not the real rusty Yeah... I would rather share a lot more, but basically, if I told you guys everything that I do behind the scenes, I'd never have time to do it. :-) I try to keep people informed, generally. Especially if it's something interesting. Mostly what I do is answer emails about cookie problems though. It's not nearly so glamorous as you'd think. I wish I had time to write diaries more. Hell, I really wish I had more motivation to write stories, but that's asking a lot. I should try harder to post a diary every day though. Even if it's just "Nice day. Ate soup. Read a good book." you know? /me makes resolution (again)... ____Not the real rusty Stalker stalker eek eek Ok, I can't help it. You keep writing comments that need my replying. Cut it out. :-) Anyway, the first thing you all need to do is get yourself the first ever official unofficial wearable product of the (there is no) K5 Cabal: The MEDIA WHORE t-shirt. Only then may you go start making clothing of your own. And if you do, (A) I want to be notified so's I can get some, and (B) cafepress rocks. It's really easy to set up one store, and upload images, and there you go. $10 for a custom-printed T-shirt, and the quality's very good. I would love to see a t-shirt of me flipping off the camera. Very Johnny Cash. ;-) Also, FWIW, I'm very much in favor of causing public disturbances, leafletting, postering, hanging mystifying banners in highly visible places, and other such acts of Spectacle-disruption. I still must insist, however, that There Is No K5 Cabal. ____Not the real rusty Ok ...now that I've got my breath back, I need to know, exactly how wrong is it to buy a t-shirt with your own picture on it? I suspect that violates all kinds of unwritten rules or something. Doesn't it? Man is that funny though. I might have to get one anyway. No, I'll almost definitely have to. Now that I think about it, there's a whole list of people I should send one to as well... :-) Although, I think I'd like it better if the bottom text said "All your base are belong to K5 cabal" (exactly like that, mind you). And there should be a large mug with the rusty picture on it. You can make as many cafepress stores as you want, BTW. :-) ____Not the real rusty Moshi Moshi The kindergarten counting goons nagged me until I made it count (incorrectly) starting at one. What's even funnier were the number of people who really tried hard to convince me of the difference between index and total. FWIW, I think index is all that really matters anyway. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Zen nugget... Clickita click clack Lobsters on a piano The zen nugget drops. ____Not the real rusty crazy lobsters Aw, c'mon, I thought there was a lot of wisdom in my zen nugget. Not only did I imply that zen nuggets only come out of careful typing in solitude (as opposed to being casually tossed off in face to face conversation), but I managed to work in a reference to the old joke, "What's worse than lobsters on a piano?" I was proud. Am I stalking you? I wasn't aware that I frequently reply to your comments. And frankly, I'm way too lazy to look back through my posting history. Oh well, if so, I will continue to do so, and you can't stop me with your feeble little restraining order! I think I've said too much... ____Not the real rusty Technocrat I don't know anything specific about T.N's potential return, but I do know that you'll probably be missing it forever. AFAIK, it won't be any kind of weblog anymore, but a platform for Bruce to talk at people, according to his posts about it. Personally, I think that totally misses the point of Technocrat, but diff'rent strokes and whatnot. Anyway, welcome to K5. Please enjoy your stay, and note the location of the nearest exit (keeping in mind that it may be behind you). In the event of an emergency, your seat cushion may be used a flotation device. ____Not the real rusty CAMEL MURDERER! Think of that camel's children. Oh God, won't someone please think of the children!? Anyway, I thought the earthquake pendulum thing was cool too. :-) ____Not the real rusty Already linked you... Here is why, and here is how. When you get ready to do this, please put together a plan and let me look at it. There are tricky issues with passing IP's back and forth that we will need to worry about. ____Not the real rusty Indeed Although we're already serving images off a non-MP apache, we're also going to set up the lightweight proxy thingy for our MP httpd's as well. ____Not the real rusty Neat, huh? :-) Personally, I think diaries are one of the best parts, because I get to see all this out-of-band musing that normally people would just do in their brain and move on. It's also a very good early warning system when something isn't working right around here. Hey, what's a "professional lurker" anyway? ____Not the real rusty Lurking v Non I see what you mean. Yeah, it's really a lot more interesting to be a non-lurker. I think the distinction is what makes some people believe there can be no such thing as a "virtual community". The view of the participant is really very different than that of the reader. And my comment is not a big deal, really. I'm not aloof as all that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Glad to have you. Hope we don't become unfun anytime soon. :-) ____Not the real rusty About ready to... what? very impatiently waiting...about ready to call myself.. Trust someone who's done it: calling yourself isn't nearly as useful as it sounds. Because, well, it usually goes like this: "Hello, is me there?" "Why yes. One moment, I'll get me." "..." "Me speaking, is this me?" "Yes, hi. I was just calling about that job interview. I'd really like to know where things stand on that." "Of course! Excellent news. I'm giving me the job!" "Great! How much am I paying me?" "Well, what was I asking for?" "Oh, I'd say 478 million billion dollars would be fair." "Fantastic. Sounds great. I'll see me in the office on Monday." "Be there with bells on!" Well, and then you show up on Monday with your signed offer letter for 478 million billion dollars, and they call those people with the white coats, and put you in that place... that... place... the screaming... Mommy. ____Not the real rusty Wrong-o For example I could give a rats-ass that some hippie motherfucker figured out how to power a car with "bud". The US government/car manufacturers don't like change because it threatens the stability of the big automobile companies. I hope you voted against it, then! If an article is not interesting to you, you should vote it down. I'm sorry, but that's how it works. You wrote an article that was perfectly good, but was not of interest to the majority of K5 readers, and it got voted down. I hope more people start scoop sites that explicitly are aboout programming C++, or smoking pot, or whatever. But our mission is a little more vague, so sometimes you just don't know if people will like something or not. But voting "0" is really the last escape of the hopelessly undecided, who just want to see what the score is. I only use "Don't care" when I've let an article sit in the queue, and gather comments for a while, and I still can't see a compelling reason to vote it one way or the other. "It didn't interest me" is a compelling reason to vote down. "It sort of was interesting, but only for about a minute" is a "Don't care" kind of feeling for me. We don't have to post everything that's decently written. More than that, we shouldn't post everything that isn't straight flames. This isn't a public message board, it's a community edited weblog. We should be applying standards, including quality of writing, and topical interest. The only way to gauge topical interest is if people actually vote based partly on their interest. Remember kids: Don't vote on behalf of others. Maximum selfishness in voting leads to maximum quality of site. I hope you don't make this your last experience with article writing. It's not because we hate you, or because voting is broken or people are dumb. It just wasn't what the majority of people wanted right now. Please don't take it as a personal affront. ____Not the real rusty Hold on there Before you go stomping off in a huff, try to set aside your feelings on the content of the post, and think about how it fits into the discussion. The comment is by a white south african, and he explains, pretty clearly, how he views the situation in his home country. The article is about south africa and the state of race relations there. So it's as on-topic as it could possibly be. The comment is clearly written, in-depth, and coherent. It adds a perspective from someone who is "in the trenches" and in the middle of the situation described by the article. Rating is done on different criteria for different people. But the majority do believe that it should be based primarily on relevance, quality of expression, amount it adds to the topic at hand, and quality of argument, in roughly that order. Based on those criteria, it's an excellent comment. A few people rate based on agreement or disagreement, which is fine, but most people don't. I'm just trying to clarify why that comment is highly rated, here. You strongly disagree with the poster's argument. Well, that's fine. But, right or wrong, the comment very likely does capture the attitude of a large number of white south africans. For just that reason, I think it's very appropriate that it's highly rated. I disagree with a lot of it too, but I'm glad he posted it, and I think people should read it (and your response!). You're arguing from the heart, while most people are rating from the head. The high rating on that comment does not mean that most people think he's right, or that K5 is a haven for racists. It's a recognition that his comment is very relevant and informative. ____Not the real rusty streetlawyer Well, for one thing it's streetlawyer. Which means that way too few transplanted slashbots are able to grasp the idea that the way a person behaves on one site is not necessarily the way he behaves on another. Second, his posts aren't that good. His heart is in the right place, but the quality of his arguments is slightly weak. Mainly because he refuses to "take the edge off" his expression of things. In one sense, this irritates me, because I know he could easily argue in such a way as to rile people up less and get them to see his point more. On the other hand, he may be emphatic, and sometimes a tad insulting, but he always has a good point, and if people need to have their ass kissed before they'll read what he's saying, screw 'em. He argues passionately because he believes strongly in what he's saying. He's explained that a dozen tmes, in several very public places here, and I don't know what else he can do in the face of people who persistently label him a "troll" and dismiss what he's saying because of the name on top of it. And C4L: I'm glad you see where the ratings are coming from. I think the shame in that thread is that streetlawyers posts are rated so much lower than they ought to be, but on the other hand, that really doesn't make any difference. The thread as a whole is right up near the top, so it will be read regardless of what sub-comments are rated. That whole article is pretty, umm, "challenging". See for example, me getting visciously flamed for saying that the US hasn't solved our racial problems either. What a controversial opinion! I should be flogged. Obviously the US is a shining haven of racial equality. ____Not the real rusty Load of crap Ok, read that story real carefully. What it says is actually this: We clueful journalists were recently contacted by a spokesperson for a company called Sanctum. They make a useless product that "simulates hacking attacks" for web developers, and no one seems to be buying it. Well, to improve their sales, we thought we'd pony up some story about evil price-tag h4x0rs changing prices online. So here you go. I'm sorry, but that story is an ad. Note how they only provide *one* actual example of such an event (the airline tickets), and that that example is unrelated to what the main gist of the story says (the airline's app screwed up the prices, they weren't changed by end users). I used to work for an ecommerce software company, and no one would accept price data from the client. Not only is it a transparently obvious security problem, but it would actually be *hard to do*. You'd have to go to a lot of trouble to make sure that you weren't getting the price out of the database (where you got it from when you wrote it into the page). It would be ludicrous. No one does it that way. This is an invented panic by a company who is interested in causing this fear which duped a clueless reporter. Nothing more. Do not fear. :-) ____Not the real rusty ?-&pipe; <-- that alone is not a valid subject {8^P``` \&pipe;B-[ ____Not the real rusty Prevent blanks? Mainly that's just to prevent blank subjects. Right now, it requires a \w to be present in the subject (number or letter). I should probably change that to require a \S (any character which is not a space). ____Not the real rusty A thing that interests me I don't know what K5 is either, but it is a thing that interests me, so it's continued to meet my original goal for it. We've had several stories that have proven that K5 is definitely not categorizable as any sort of "news" site, purely because very few people check their facts. Absolutely. We are not news, we are, with a few notable exceptions, not journalism. Journalism is not impossible here, though, by any means. It requires journalistic goals on the part of the writer. Take 12,000 people, from all over the world, most of whom have some interest in computers or technology, and who have the spare time and resources to spend time on the web writing stuff. Then count how many of them are professional journalists. Not very many. Then furthor ask each of them how much time they'd like to spend writing articles for free in their spare time. Wow, even less. :-) So, sites like this won't become good sources of "real" news until we have real journalists working for us. We will, eventually (not necessarily K5 itself, but sites that operate in a similar way). That's ok. I don't think we're trying to be the news. We want to supplement the news, and open the floor to people who aren't real journalists. What is amazing about K5 (and slashdot, for that matter) is that they can provide a forum for people who aren't media industry professionals be speak to an audience as large as some "real" news sources, and larger than many. This is a new thing in the world, and I think we're groping toward making it mean something. I'm really hoping we move away from "new media" instead of ethical, fact based reporting, because the alternative is too scary to consider. I'm hoping we figure out some way to bring the two together. To get real journalism in a medium like K5. I don't think we should replace either one with the other -- I think they complement each other very well. K5 has definitely proven to me that comment moderation does not work... We've seen it at K5 with rating circles, with vindictive rating, with all the things that correspond to nasty social habits in the analogue world. We've had our share of silliness with ratings. But honestly, can you tell me it hasn't accomplished it's goals? These are: Providing a rough sorting between "good" and "not so good" of a large mass of comments. Dispensing with comments that are totally offtopic. Identifying individuals who can be trusted with the limited step up in power of having a zero rating at their disposal. The "noise" in the rating system, as far as I have seen, hasn't damaged the quality of discussions, and hasn't affected the ability of the system to accomplish the above goals. I know there's one comment in particular you don't think should be a zero. I disagree, but it is a very borderline case. That's the only one I can think of that I'm even slightly uncomfortable with so far. One comment, out of tens of thousands. That's a pretty good success rate as far as zero-rating goes. Look at pages with a lot of comments. Sort them highest to lowest scoring. Can you really tell me that you strongly disagree with a large number of the ratings? That the comments at the bottom were, on the whole, much more worth reading than the ones at the top? I think the main failure of rating systems so far is over-expectation. They are very primitive. Hopefully they will become less primitive as we refine the concept. But the common thread seems to be that users have much higher expectations for them then their creators do. As far as communities go, that's such a horrible word to use to try and pin on a simple website... Sure, pseudonyms interact all the time here, and some pseudonyms are better known than others, but that's really all they are. It has nothing to do with K5 being mere text on a screen, and everything to do with the absolute lack of certainty about anything put forth by the other side of any given conversation. Were K5 some form of system where we could be reasonably certain of the identity of our fellow readers this might be different, but I don't think anybody really wants that system. Matter of fact, I do want that system. By "identity" I don't mean I want to know who the physical person "Miniluv" is. Think about your real life existence. What constitutes your "identity"? I would argue that it's a sum of interactions you have with others. With the government, with your co-workers, with your friends. It's also partly the way you choose to present yourself to the world: the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you walk, and where you go, for that matter. It's not something you just innately have, it's something you construct. I see no reason why the same thing can't happen here. It does happen to an extent. I know who "Miniluv" is because I've talked to you here, I've read other comments you've made, I've talked to you on IRC. Your identity here is the sum of your interactions, and how you present yourself (textually, of course, as this is a textual medium). It's not as rich or deep as a real life identity, but it is analogous. And if you, Miniluv, were also "fluffy grue", that wouldn't make any difference, in my opinion. You would still have two separate identities, and exist, as far as I was concerned, as two separate people. Which is where reputation metrics come in. Right now, identity on a site like this is a very fragile thing. It only exusts in my mind, and the minds of others. We have no way to share that impression of who you are with each other. If there was some way to track the reputation of another user, we'd be that much closer to making the sum of interactions we call "identity" mean something here in this context. I think it's the next big step that this medium is going to have to take, if it wants to do anything worthwhile. Interesting thoughts, all around. Things to ponder. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's a slight undercount Today's stats: Total users: 14242 Confirmed users: 12956 "Total" is the absolute number of accounts. "Confirmed" is accounts that have been activated, by someone clicking the "confirm" link in the email. This doesn't take into account duplicate accounts, abandoned accounts, or whatever. I do hope to get some better tracking of accounts that are "active" in there very soon. But, it's closer to 13,000 -- I habitually undercount by 1K or so because it makes me feel more credible. :-) I imagine a large number of local daily papers have a significantly smaller circulation than that. That's what's so cool -- an ordinary Jane who gets up the gumption to write an article can *directly* talk to a global audience of tens of thousands here. That's what I mean by "this is a new thing in the world". I can't think of any other medium in history that regularly allowed this to happen. ____Not the real rusty News organization notices K5! Film at 11 From the dep't of gloating dep't K5 got a nice mention in a C't article about Peer to peer journalism. It's in German, but running it through babelfish works reasonably well (although it cuts off halfway through the last sentence about us, which seems to always happen. I wish foreign news sites would mention us higher up in the text. :-) I can't seem to contact babelfish at the moment, but the best line in the bit about us was: At least obvious Fleming or Spam was shot briefly after the entry. You can probably figure out what that's supposed to say. :-) Anyway, nice to see someone from the "real" news notice our existence. Along with the excellent BBSpot parody today, it seems to be K5 mention day around the web. The Reg is already my bitch We've actually gotten into the Register several times already. Andrew (who wrote the article you linked to) is a friend of mine, so he sneaks in mentions whenever he can. They covered the downtime last summer too, which was in fact how I met Andrew. They were supposed to convert their comment section to Scoop a long time ago, but no progress so far. Everyone email them and tell them Endian sucks and you want a real comment area. :-) ____Not the real rusty Stop fuzzing me! Mind your beeesniss! Somehow, in college, one of my friends got a hold of that song, and it became a cult hit (among a cult of about 6 people). Countless are the times I've told someone to "stop fuzzing me!" Ok, so we basically saw it as humor, but honestly, some of the lyrics are pretty funny, and Dr. Alban's accent (to Americans) is a riot. I just wanted to note my amazement that someone else, somewhere, has actually heard that song. ____Not the real rusty That's the general plan We know that generally, there's a reason why some of us are journalists and most of us aren't, so we don't make much of an effort to carry "news" as such. We just leech off the interesting news for discussion potential, and throw in a pinch of software articles, a dash of hardware stuff, and a nice dollop of cultural-controversy-of-the-day as topping. See, the dirty secret is, if most of what we do is opinion, it's tough to be "wrong". So welcome! :-) PS: You have now accomplished step one of the K5 assimilation process: Posting a 'wow this site is cool!' Diary entry. You are now cleared to proceed to step two, which is having a comment rated unfairly and posting a diary entry about that. ;-) ____Not the real rusty BeOS zealots are the worst of the bunch Not to say that all Be users are zealots, far from it. But the ones that are are absolutely the most fervent, flaming, frothing at the mouth types imaginable. They put BSDers to shame in the vitriol they aim at the other *nixes, of which their God Jean-Loup made an inferior copy. It really is quite funny, and if you're into baiting people, or want to learn how, they're great practice. They bite on almost anything. The best is getting them to claim things like lack of hardware support is a big plus, that boot time is the single most important factor in OS choice, and ask them about 3D graphics support, too. >:-) The BSD zealots, on the other hand, are much less fun. They have the bitter, defeatist zealotry of hard-line Communists in the post-USSR era. "We miss the bread lines," they say, "they were a great chance to talk to our neighbors!" There's something sad and painful in it, not at all like the righteous fire of the Be zealot, who feel their day is yet to come. But you're right, most Linux users are either indifferent, or vaguely pro-BSD. They might bash a sheel here or a userland tool there, but on the whole, I don't think there's much antipathy. The converse, however, is bizarrely untrue. ____Not the real rusty Or... ...you can note that it's fixed and move on. :-) And I use the term "fixed" loosely here. Of course, *most* of us know that counting starts at zero, but for those stodgy complainers who never learned this, Scoop now incorrectly starts counting words at one. ____Not the real rusty You both seem to miss the point My insistence that counting starts at zero is intended to be humorous. Aiming jokes at pedants and programmers (...but I repeat myself...) is apparently not a good strategy. :-) ____Not the real rusty Crap I knew the cache was a little screwed up, but that's really bad. I think what's happening is, someone else's data is leaking into your request. That sucks. I'll fix this very very soon. ____Not the real rusty Hrm. As far as I can tell all the cache things are fixed. I don't honestly see how your MPD could be cache-related anyway, as no personal stuff goes into the cache. Are you at a university? Is there any way that your proxy could be serving both you and Malk-a-Mite and not distinguishing properly? ____Not the real rusty The backstory Ok, the way voting first worked was, you'd have the story, and you could vote, and post a comment when you voted, but you couldn't see any other votes or comments until you had posted yours. The idea was that you were supposed to view the story unfettered by the opinions of others, and judge for yourself. This sounds good in theory, but sucked in practice because two dozen people would all post virtually the same comment, and sometimes one comment would've shown up a lack of knowledge, or a crucial fact the the poster had left out or ignored, which should have been taken into account when voting. Basically, it didn't work very well. So I let comments be posted normally to stories in the queue. This worked a little better, but then there ws the problem of stories with lots of comments like "You should fix the spelling in the third paragraph" which quickly became irrelevant and annoying. So I added editorial comments, to let you tag a comment as only relevant when voting is going on. This has worked pretty well. We still have topical comments on stories in the queue for a few reasons. One is that people will post them anyway, and they'll be lost in red-bordered limbo when the story goes up. Also, making people wait to say what they want to say is bad practice. I certainly don't want to have to remember "Oh, I was going to post this little thought to this story if it ever gets posted..." and keep checking back. I am positive that we'd lose a lot of good input if we made that restriction. Also, I don't see that they hurt anythig. Sure, if you weren't around for the voting, there might be a bunch of comments already there when the story posts. But this certainly doesn't mean that you won't be read if you post later. Front page stories especially cycle pretty slowly, and accumulate a lot of discussion over the days or weeks that they're on the front page. Section stories don't get as much, but a lot of that, I think, is that there just isn't as much to say on some stories. I think K5 has a geneal feeling that if it's already been said, you have to either add something to it, or let it stand. I like that. I think discussion for the sake of hearing your own voice is not worth all that much, and we don't tend to do a lot of that. So, don't be intimidated by the pre-existing comments on stuff. "Newest first" is, after all, the default view, so you still have a very good shot at being heard, even on long threads. And about the stories being voted up instead of sent for editing, this is on the list of things we need to fix. The fact that peple can't reasonably edit their own stuff is bad, and broken, and will be fixed. ____Not the real rusty Not yet I'm still thinking about how an edit queue would work. At least at first, you'll be able to drop your own stories, and pull them for re-editing any time. Both of these will reset comments and votes though. You'll also be able to store unsubmitted stories for as long as you want before posting them. These are basically the low-hanging fruit, and they should help. About a more expanded edit queue, I'm still not sure what the best way to go is. There are more pressing issues, so I'm letting it simmer for a bit. ____Not the real rusty New Code I committed a whole bunch of stuff to CVS tonight, and updated K5, so we're in bug-shakeout mode again. So far it appears that the cache is not refreshing as often as it should, which leaves comment counts variable and wrong sometimes. Try not to be too alarmed. :-) The new code is a huge improvement in a lot of ways that won't be obvious to anyone but me. It's quite a lot faster, especially in displaying comments and printing large pages. Also, K5 now supports ForumZilla, which is pretty cool. If you use Mozilla, grab it and subscribe to http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=fz . It's neat. Anyway, pardon the dust and screwyness... it's bedtime for me now, but we should survive till tomorrow. Testing formkeys Well, I just added formkeys to hopefully prevent duplicate posting of comments and stories. This is a test: I'm going to post this, and then do the standard "reload" to see if it stops me from re-posting. ____Not the real rusty Hway! It worked. :-) ____Not the real rusty Code and stuff I committed a whole bunch of new code tonight, and updated K5. I also played with the CSS a bit. It may change more later. Anyway, yeah, Scoop's caching stuff is acting screwy, as I expected it would. Comment counts will be odd for a little bit. Give me a day or so to find all the bugs. :-) On the upside, it really is a hell of a lot faster now. Not that anyone will notice much, but I know, and it makes me all warm and glowy inside. ____Not the real rusty Duly noted. :-) As always, when I fool with some layout thing or another, it'll probably change with feedback. I'm not too thrilled with it now either... But too tired to deal right now. Does it seem faster? I'm on a dialup, so I can't tell either way. ____Not the real rusty Experimenting... We are always playing with layout because it's fun. :-) How dull it would be if we kept the exact same look and feel for years and years. Anyway, thanks for the input. I only have a couple browsers, so I need you guys to tell me when things look like crap. Any CSS pros have suggestions for nice looking widgets? The reason I started doing this is because the form widgets look like crap in mozilla, which I've been using lately. Wanted to see what the options were. ____Not the real rusty nice Your girlfriend has nice hips. I'm going to get in trouble for saying that, but I'm saying it anyway. :-) The tattoo looks a little like a polar bear from a distance though. Adrift on the arctic ice floes, howling in an "I need me some seals to eat!" kind of way. Of course, even that's better than the first thing I thought when I read "...proud owner of a small, 2 inch by 2 inch outline of Howling Wolf..." I mean sure, I'm a fan too, but that's a little much. Glad it was the animal and not the legendary bluesman. Although he was the inspiration for Mojo. Ok, now I'm just rambling. ____Not the real rusty "This is a test. Please be funny" Ok, there was a submission earlier today that read, in toto: Title: test, please vote down Intro: Test to see if queue is broken... please vote into oblivion It got voted down, as well it should, but meanwhile, the comments are one of the funniest things I've ever seen here. I take it back, K5 does have a sense of humor, and knows how to skewer itself perfectly. Comments are here, and should be visible for everyone. Enjoy! PS: Posted with Mozilla 0.8. Moz is actually usable! And the world stood still in shock. Drop it? If you want, I'll pull the story. I gotta get working on that "author control" thing! ____Not the real rusty Scoop? Try taking a look at scoop for some nice looking code. I always wince and twitch when I see that. But mostly that's probably "but it's not finished yet!" sensitivity. Parts of Scoop are pretty good, and overall, I still think the design makes sense. There's some right shit in there too though, so look carefully. :-) ____Not the real rusty Haha I wasn't being modest! I think I just have no perspective on the matter. You know how authors always think their books suck? I think it's the same with code. I know all the ugly bits of it, so I have a warped view. It's nice to get such praise though. All I can say is, you ain't seen nothing yet. :-) ____Not the real rusty Enani made me happy I'm not at all clear on why some people got so upset by enani. She amused the hell out of me. "Trying to prove who is who is a pointless affair which only makes people mad, sad, and tired! It is not a good thing!" Amen, you crazy diamond. ____Not the real rusty YHBT, YHL. And yes, I knew from the start that Enani was a troll... And you got mad anyway? Heh. All I can say, then, is YHBT. Seriously, if you knew this, you may want to re-evaluate the way you interact online. Is it worth getting mad at someone who you *know* is just baiting you? It seems like it would be a waste of time to me. Personally, as soon as I noticed that the name was "inane" backward, I realized it was a joke, and just enjoyed the mockery of the brainless pokemon fan which seemed to be the main point. Although it was fascinating how some people decided to get really upset, even though they knew it was a joke. ____Not the real rusty On my own, Day 1 Well, I've left the employ of Zelerate, and as of now, I'm self-unemployed. Ok, I do have some work -- I'm contracting for Intes and working for K5. Today was my first day working for myself, and I have to say, I could get used to this. Poll: Should I move (again)? So I went to work at 10PM. Bret's asleep, the house is quiet... ahhh. Perfect working conditions. I proceeded to hack away at OpenInteract for five solid uninterrupted hours. Despite being peeved that there was a very nasty bug in OI's install process, I was still happy to be able to work at it (and eventually solve the problem) without a lot of distraction. No phones ringing, no kids shooting nerf guns around, no meetings to attend. I think I'm just not well-suited to office life. Unfortunately, I'm supposed to be in New Hampshire right now. The annual high-school friends get-together is this weekend, and I'm bummed I couldn't go. I've been sick for ages, and it came back again this week, finally driiving me to actually see a doctor. She told me that I have the virus that's going around SF, and there's nothing she can do about it. Fluids, rest, and cold medicine. Apparently this thing has been lasting 3-4 weeks for people! Ugh. I feel a lot better today (look Ma, no meds!), but I judged it a bad idea to go off traveling the day after I went to the doctor. It sucks, because this is really the only time all year the whole gang gets together, and it's always fun. Well, we're thinking of fleeing expensive-as-hell northern CA anyway, possibly aiming at Portland Maine, so maybe next year it'll just be a 2 hour drive. You live in Portland? We've been trying to get more info on what portland is like to live in, but there's not much online. I used to go up there every summer, to Peaks Island, but I've never looked at the city from the perspective of "maybe I should move here", so I don't know where to begin. How is the place, to live in? What's rent like? What are the good neighborhoods? Do people live in the city, or mainly outside? I'll probably be up there in April, maybe you can show us around. :-) ____Not the real rusty VT Yeah, Vermont was an early favorite, but has now dropped in the standings somewhat because it's landlocked. I grew up in Plymouth, MA, about 30 minutes south of Boston, so I'm pretty familiar with Massachusetts. I probably won't move there -- Boston's OK, but I don't think I'd want to live there. Compared to DC, car insurance in MA is cheap as hell, and compared to SF, rent is too. :-) Remember the last two places I've lived have been the most expensive places in the country, apart from New York City. I also spent a lot of time in and around Portland as a kid (my grandparents have a house on Peaks Island, for anyone who knows Casco Bay), so I'm pretty familiar with it. The job market anywhere isn't a major concern, considering my two main sources of income right now are physically nowhere near my location. I'm more interested in quality of life issues-- is rent reasonable, is the place a manageable size, would it be a good place to raise kids (eek! Well, I am getting married in August), things like that. ____Not the real rusty Great googly moogly! 102 comments in a story that got voted down! Hats off to you, streelawyer. That is truly an achievement. ____Not the real rusty Best listserv provider? My fiancee and I host a monthly(ish) book club. Basically, we pick a book, and people come over and have tea and snacks and talk about it (and, usually, a wide range of other things). Attendance has been flagging lately (tonight only one person showed up), and we thought it would be a good idea to set up a listserv for people to keep in touch between meetings. I headed to egroups.com, and discovered they've been absorbed by yahoo. So my question is, who's the best listserv provider? I have no real desire to run the list manager myself, and web-based participation would be nice. So who should I go with? Who makes it easiest to join, who has a good interface for archives... who won't sell my email adress to SpamCo Marketing? Any and all comments or experiences welcome. No reason not to use Yahoo My post was a little misleading. I don't mean to say I'm opposed to Yahoo. Just that I used eGroups before they became part of yahoo, and liked them. I was wondering if the change had made a difference, and if anyone had any suggestions of other things I should try, or in fact if Yahoo's eGroups was still the best thing out there. ____Not the real rusty Why not scoop I don't want to maintain another website It's not really the kind of thing that would adapt well to a scoop site. It's only going to be a few people, and we only do one book a month. Scoop is too much overhead, basically. I promised I wouldn't make it into a website and inadvertently become a huge popular thing. My fiancee's afraid of that now. :-) ____Not the real rusty +1, FP I think way too few readers have actually read the mission statement. Seems like daily I see some comment espousing one or another of the views you so aptly skewer above, and I'm left thinking "gee... when did K5 become about that?" I wonder if this would get voted up if I posted it (due to the constant fear, of course). ____Not the real rusty Testing Polls Poll: Do polls work yet? Preview still screwed up However, the real problem is solved -- as of when I posted that, polls weren't working at all. Preview should be back presently. ____Not the real rusty Hear hear I agree. I like being pointed to things on Slashdot that are worth reading. I skim it, once a day or so, but I frequently miss stuff that would have been interesting. That said, I think you need to not obsess about this. Take a deep breath, play a little chess. Watch Barton Fink. Then come back and pay attention to that which is not dumb. I think one of the biggest problems with K5 right at the moment is, everyone's paying all their attention to the things that upset them. Do you only eat foods you hate so you can spit and make faces about them? Do you only read books that suck so you can bitch about them later? I'm sure it's clear after about three words if a comment or story is going to be of any value, so if it isn't, just move on. Life's way too short. :-) ____Not the real rusty Voice I mentioned the Apple/Free Software thing on IRC, so consider that noted. My only real siggestion is try to make your writing flow forward more. Towards the middle, it starts to stall in a lot of "to be this... to be that...". Active verbs are your friends. Example. I'd take: In parallel with the free software movement has been a growing concern, by computer enthusiasts, about government intervention into online affairs as well as the rapid commercialization of the internet. Tensions reached a peak in October, 1998 with an investigation of Microsoft by the Department of Justice over anti-competitive marketing moves. Microsoft had rapidly ascended to the top of the computer industry's foodchain and was devouring businesses at a breakneck pace. While Microsoft was on trial, other businesses moved online and the "dot com" economy exploded upwards, bringing with it an extraordinary influx of patents, copyright laws, and intellectual property demands by companies seeking to secure their position in "e-commerce". Last year the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was enacted, partly as a response to a growing community of computer enthusiasts dedicated to the principles of open systems - in direct conflict with the newer paradigm of closed-source software. And render it instead as: As the Free Software movement grew, so did concerns by computer enthusiasts, who felt threatened by government intervention into online affairs and the rapid commercialization of the internet. In October 1998, tensions reached a peak with the US Department of Justice investigating allegations of anti-comptetive business practices against Microsoft, who had rapidly ascended to the top of the computer industry's foodchain, devouring other businesses at a breakneck pace. While Microsoft was on trial, the attention of the industry moved online, and the "dot com" economy exploded upwards, bringing with it an extraordinary influx of patents, copyright laws, and intellectual property demands by companies seeking to secure their position in "e-commerce". Last year saw the enaction of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, partly as a response to the conflict between intellectual proerty owners and a growing community of computer enthusiasts dedicated to the principles of open systems and free information. If my version had any typos, please excuse. The gist comes across, though, I think. You're writing for a journalistic kind of site here, so the voice you use doesn't need to be so dry and careful. You need to keep people's attention, so put some kick into it by using verbs that *do* stuff. "Concern grew" instead of "has been a growing concern", "saw the enaction" instead of "was enacted". Such like. ____Not the real rusty The Worm is the Spice (NT) ____Not the real rusty Ha ha ha Looks like someone else noticed your past behavior too. You have, in the past, engaged in various kinds of threats, rating wars, etc etc. Of all the readers on the site, you seem to complain about ratings the most. We've had this discussion out of band before. The comment you're bitching about is currently at 3.46, with 13 ratings. This has happened virtually every other time you've gone around raving about this or that unfair rating. Basically, what's the matter with you? How many times do you need to do this before you figure out (A) how ratings work, (B) that the world doesn't have it in for you, and (C) that comment ratings are not a measure of self-worth? ____Not the real rusty Yes Yes, if and when we find someone engaging in real, harmful abuse. If two people rated a comment 0, and it's overall rating remains well above 3, no I don't care. Individual ratings don't matter -- it's the rating as a whole. You have not been "zeroed" as you keep claiming. That would be if your comment's *overall* rating was unfairly dropped below 1 (the normal viewability threshold). This has never happened to you. JCB goes around "5"ing everything. This doesn't bother me either. While it certainly doesn't help with accuracy, it can hardly be construed as an attempt to use ratings to silence anyone. When someone decides to make a dozen accounts, and run a script to automatically "0" all new comments with each account, that's when I'll get pissed off. That would be a deliberate and large-scale attempt to corrupt the system. The system, as it stands, though, has a good ability to account for and suppress a reasonable amount of "noise" rating, which is what you're seeing. No rating system will ever be perfect. Ours isn't, certainly. The question is, can it bring meaningful data out of what is an inherently noisy channel? I feel it can. I don't think that has yet been disproven. And, all that said, if you have a design that's better than what we have now, I want to hear about it! I'm completely open to ideas. What bothers me is when people complain about events that have no real detrimental effect, without proposing a better alternative. You do this constantly. Please learn how it works before you complain about things -- nothing bad has happened to you. ____Not the real rusty Inertia? I searched my email, but I don't think I saw your inertia idea. If you'd care to post deatils here, I'll certainly take a look. Sorry about that. And you should be every bit as concerned about people who vote-block all comments to 5 as you would be able people who vote-block all comments to 0. They have almost precisely the same effect. In the sense of adding noise/skew into the system, yes. But unfair zero-rating can have a harmful effect on the individual's ability to post publically at all, which unfair 5-rating can't. I continue to contend that by having "trusted user" status in the wrong hands (no, my hands aren't the wrong hands -- look at my 0-mod history) K5 puts itself at risk. Maybe. But to be seriously at risk, over 80% of trusted users have to be actively untrustworthy. The system as it stands has a huge bias against hiding stuff. There has to be near-unanimous agreement that it should be hidden. We're also working on ensuring that the kind of scripted attack I described before can't happen (or at least would be difficult enough to pull off that it's unlikely to ever be done), and to recover from such an event if it did happen anyway. If a user wanted to 0 all new comments by all users with multiple accounts, there really isn't anything you could do about it. No, IP blocking wouldn't work. Even *I* could get around that, and I'm barely a techie at all. I would put real money on it happening within the year. Sure, right now, there isn't. There will be very soon, you can count on it. ____Not the real rusty You've got mail! K5 now features daily, weekly, or monthly email digest versions, courtesy (mostly) of Mystic. Check your User Prefs, there's a new selectbox for "Email Digest". You can choose daily, monthly or weekly (in addition to the ever-popular "Never") and K5 will send you a nice email with all the stories in whichever time period. Enjoy! :-) A while That's been in for a week or so. That one's a hurstdog special. :-) ____Not the real rusty More Explanation See my comment in CaptainZornChugger's diary, and my diary about this. Basically, please try not to fly off the handle. It was not an expression of site policy. ____Not the real rusty No! Can I officially deny membership in this non-existent organization now? We need to clear up this basic misunderstanding right now. There is no K5 Cabal. Merely by expressing that fact, you are automatically not a member of that non-existent organization. It has no entrance requirements, because there is no entrance. It does not exist. This, on the other hand *is* the K5 Cabal that you're applying to join. It freely admits to existing, and has members and such. Totally different ball of wax here. But keep in mind that there is, in fact, no K5 cabal. And that non-membership in one does not automatically rule out membership in the other. Although you may need some basic worldview readjustment to get around the idea of denying the existence of an organization you admit to belonging to. ____Not the real rusty Misery, company, and all that Spent all week in bed with a fever. This is a week of my life I'll never get back. Briefly entertained by the Sucks-Rules-O-Meter, but then Google banned us. Worried about the future, still sick, and now this Anne Marie thing. This was not a banner week. About that story deletion thing. Paul Dunne has been around longer than any of you, so yes, he knows what the site is supposed to be about. He didn't just suddenly become confused and think this was Slashdot. He decided today to do something rash, to express his displeasure with what some people are using K5 for. He knew I'd be pissed off, and he didn't try to hide that he did it. I spoke to him at great length today, and he knows it was a bad idea, but stands by the point he was trying to make. His point, though it probably didn't get across to anyone, was that people need to look carefully at each story, and decide if that story is what they come to K5 for. He may disagree with a lot of the stories posted, but that's not the problem. So do I for that matter. His point was that people don't seem to be making an effort to actually decide what they want K5 to be about, and only accept stories that fit that mission. In this, I am inclined to agree with him. Just because it's well-written doesn't necessarily mean it belongs here. I'm not talking about Anne Marie, I'm not talking about any story or author in particular. I'm talking about maintaining a focus of some kind. Do you vote because you are interested in something, or do you vote "because someone might be interested"? Consider the second reason like voting for a candidate because "someone might want him to be president." It's silly. If you're not interested in something, no matter how acceptable it might be, for God's sake, vote against it. It only works if we all vote for ourselves. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else (probably more so than most of you), and it did jolt me into thinking about the question. Honestly, I don't know. I'm too tired to put this any better right now. But think about. When you vote for stuff, consider if you're voting for it because it was well-written, or because you really think it belongs on K5. As Paul said, it's a personal responsibility issue, not something that I, or anyone else, can "fix" for you. That's really the lesson here. As for what Paul did, it was wrong, and neither he, nor anyone else, will be doing anything like that again, if I can help it. Do give his point some thought, though. right The system doesn't always work (on K5 or elsewhere), but abusing the system isn't the best fix for it. No, but that's not what he was trying to do. That is, he doesn't think deleting articles is a fix for anything-- it was more like a protest. So, I guess, take it for what it's worth. ____Not the real rusty OTOH It was the absolute worst way to make it, though... Yes, and no. In the sense that the rioters in LA after the Rodney King verdict were making essentially the same point that Jesse Jackson has been making for years, you could say that looting and rioting was the absolute worst way to make that point. But it was a hell of a lot more forceful and attention-getting than a lot of speeches. Maybe we needed a bit of a smack upside the head right now. Anyway, I loved the Linux VCR article too. And Paul ls'ed his K5 work-in-progress directory, and he's got a ton of stuff in the pipe for us. So he's not neglecting the "contribute more stuff" solution either. ____Not the real rusty Actually... Checking for admins is pretty easy. Log in to the DB, and do "SELECT uid, nickname, perm_group FROM users WHERE perm_group != "Anonymous" AND perm_group != "Users";" And now hurstdog's written a box to do this on the fly, so I could just stick it on a special page somewhere (or even embed it in the FAQ, I guess). So, it's not hard. Right now, the admins are: me, you, Inoshiro, Driph, hurstdog, and lachoy (who's a guy I work with and may also be losing admin in the near future, since I dont' think he even wants it). ____Not the real rusty Trust metrics? Yes, trusted user status is a decent hack for what it does, but wouldn't be appropriate for such a use. I've been mulling the idea of trust metrics for a while though, something with some real methematical teeth behind it, where users could certify that they believe this other user is trustworthy and has the best interests of K5 at heart. Perhaps users with greater overall trust could have a greater effect in their votes and ratings and such.... What I'm thinking about is a kind of reputation system. It's embryonic now, but I may have an article about this in the near future. I think we will have to start thinking along these lines sooner or later. ____Not the real rusty Not Sanctioned What Paul did was not sanctioned by anyone. He's no longer an admin, and that was never his role as such. Of course there are people with the ability to remove stuff. Me, Driph, Inoshiro, hurstdog, and cp all have that power. We are all completely aware that doing so is *not* part of our normal role on the site. As was Paul. It was a protest. Agree, or disagree with him, I'm not going to tell you what to do. But understand that this was not a manifestation of "K5 is going to hell." It was an isolated event which we all soundly bitched him out for. If you'd like a more coherent explanation of why he did it, see my diary on the subject. ____Not the real rusty K5 is DOOMED!! ... not really. :-) All the people you mention have always struck me as mature, trustworthy people. But obviously Paul Dunne struck you the same way. Indeed, although his editorial power came from a need to post his book reviews with HTML not available to the world as a whole (<Hx> tags, for the most part). He was never really an active siter admin, and I had forgotten he had editorial privileges to begin with. But then again, I'm one of the 'scourges' on this site (fairly new (post-DOS) and rarely discussing tech). That hardly makes you a "scourge" of some kind. Everyone is welcome (until they prove they don't deserve it, anyway)-- after all Paul was a new user at one time too. How long you've been around is certainly not the point here. So what do you think, rusty? Do you think this site is going to hell? Do you think we should talk about tech more and non-tech things less? No, not necessarily. I've said it a million times, so might as well make it a million and one -- I'm perfectly comfortable allowing the site to evolve in topicality in whatever direction the majority of users want it to go. What worries me is when people vote +1 with a comment to the effect of "I didn't care much, but it was well written, and someone might care about it." That kind of voting is the problem. I don't care so much what your interest is, specifically, just that you have one. The system doesn't work nearly as well when people don't vote selfishly. When you vote on stuff, you should first evaluate form -- is it well written? Does it make sense? But then you should also evaluate content: "Does this fit what I believe K5 to be about? Is it interesting to me." An analogy I've used before is if people voted for politicians "because someone might want this guy to be in office." That's the wrong way to look at it-- you vote for someone because you want them in office. The same process should apply to stories here. But no, I don't think K5 is going to hell. I think it continues to evolve, and continues to be interesting. At it's worst, it's no worse than it's ever been, and at it's best, K5 is far and away better now than it ever has been in the past. Do you regret ever having introduced the diaries (a veritable haven for non-tech discussion)? Most emphatically not. I love the diaries. I think they are really the number two important thing about the site (number one being collaborative editing). If we truly do want to be a community, we need to know each other. I think so much of the potential community on the web fails because nothing seems real. It's too easy to forget that that block of text represents the thought of a real person. It's harder to mercilessly flame someone when you just read their diary which said they lost their job and will have to find a cheaper apartment, or something. You can't have a community unless people know each other, and I think diaries have really helped with that. Also, diaries give people an outlet. This discussion that we're having would probably not be appropriate in any other section of the site, but in a diary, it's entirely appropriate. There needs to be out-of-band communication, I think, for people to be able to share their thoughts on what's going on. What would the office be without the proverbial water-cooler? Do you think Anne Marie's stories getting posted is indicative of of something deeper that is wrong? No, I've liked most of Anne Marie's stuff. Are they "trolls"? Probably. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. A well-written troll can serve a constructive purpose, if it's taken in the right spirit, and I think that by and large, K5 has been able to do so. Trolls rely totally on the audience's preconceptions and expectations. They mainly work by challenging those, and thus, if you're paying attention, underlining them. I think it's good for a community to look at what it's assumptions are from time to time. Anne Marie's overall program would seem to be isolating how far "offtopic" is too far for most people, and whether or not the style or quality of the writing affects that boundary. I think it's an interesting question. Besides which, many of the topics she's hit have been interesting (to me, anyway) in and of themselves. The article in question here, I'm afraid to say, I voted for the first time, and against the second. Mainly my -1 was from reading comments which shed a lot more light on the actual event, which pointed out that Anne Marie's use of it in the article was basically specious. That'll teach me to read more carefully, won't it. What about stories like Doomhaven's breeding Licenses, which people posted just so they could disagree with it? All these things take place on your server... Are you resentful that they are there? Hardly. I'm not resentful of anything that goes on. I'm incredibly thankful that people care so much about K5 -- even when people get pissed off with the site, or me personally, it shows that they do care, which means that in a larger sense than any particular quarrel, we're doing something right. Every day I'm amazed that people keep coming back. So thank you. :-) ____Not the real rusty The reason? Maybe the reason why people say those nice things about K5 is that when you really need to go off about something (like this, for example), you can. :-) BTW-- I agree with you about the MS recruiting thing. My point was more like, who is still surprised when MS engages in multi-faced tactics? Hell, they're running ads right now that as much as say "Win95 is shit. You better upgrade!" When you have a marketing army that large, they can't all talk to each other. I hope you feel better now. ____Not the real rusty slowdown? By "slowdown in pageviews" do you mean that pages were loading slower? This was happening because of the way we had ads set up. I changed that (again) last night, and it ought to be a lot faster now. About the linking, I don't know why we aren't in their standard linking pool yet. We ought to be. ____Not the real rusty I'm sick I hate being sick. Leaking fluid and falling asleep uncontrollably. Sweating and shivering and having weird dreams. It's times like these that you really appreciate living with someone who'll bring you day-quil and vitamin C drops, and hold you and pat your head even though you smell terrible. I think you're wrong... ...about one of your points. I am right with you up to "The thing that maybe most concerns me about moderation systems is that it allows subversion to be moderated away in favor of more acceptable, and more palatable, means of communication." I believe our moderation to be more sophisticated than any other large-scale system I've seen out in the wild. And yet, it's still no good at all for suppressing subversion. It suppresses stupidity wonderfully, which is what it's designed to do. I think, like you, that trolls and trolling is an effort at information-flow-control subversion, and I think everyone needs their share of trolls. A good troll will not be supressed by a system like ours, because a good troll is (almost) indistinguishable from a good non-troll. Considering we weigh the average opinion, and good trolls are really only recognizable as such by an expert, the majority opinion will never catch them. I think this is cool. No technological system will (or should!) relieve people of their responsibility to think for themselves, and any system that suppresses the subverters is just an attempt to breed a more docile and sheeplike population. That's what police states are for, not communities. ____Not the real rusty Too late? I think we already are a "cool site". We're still not very widely known though, which probably helps. I am convinced there must be a way to effectively scale online community. I don't think we've seen it yet, but damned if I'm not gonna try! Anyway, welcome. :-) ____Not the real rusty Linux, and website I'm not the linux expert you take me for. Ask Inoshiro-- he'll tell you what a tool I am. :-) Seriously, running the site has little to do with Linux knowledge or lack thereof. It's a lot more to do with a stubborn desire to make something happen, and an (unexpected) ability to keep working on K5, even when it makes me want to throw my hands up and scream. If you're not doing Really Big Things yet, then just wait a bit. Learn things, explore things. You'll find something you want to do, and it may not even be a Really Big thing. It might just be something you love to do, and will give up everything else for. When the time is right, your thing will arrive. :-) ____Not the real rusty Worst of all.. If it weren't for Slashdot, I probably would never have gotten into using Linux. I'm serious-- it used to be the kind of place where people were really enthusiastic about this cool free unix-like OS, and would always give you a hand if you had some dumbass question. Now it's a fucking l33ter-than-thou cult-like thing. I'm right with you here. The linux community needs to try a hell of a lot harder not to be cliquish and offputting, and not to think an OS is a replacement for the small penis you were sadly born with. Not *you* of course. I meant *them*. Just in case that wasn't clear. :-) ____Not the real rusty It's Bruce Schneier (NT) ____Not the real rusty That's really very good A parable, about trying to use the wrong tools, I'd say. Dr. Forkbound doesn't realize that mathematics isn't an empirical pursuit. Much like too many of his latter-day emulators don't seem to realize that, for example, biology isn't a religious pursuit, and you can't measure God with a mass spectrometer. Instructive. Of course, there is a largest number. He's just looking for it wrong. Question: if you have a set with an infinite number of elements in it, what happens if you put another element between, say, the first and the second? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Welcome! I love being able to welcome new readers in diary entries. Hope you enjoy K5. :-) ____Not the real rusty Good God! This is a veritable torrent of words! I have to say, I've enjoyed your diary immensely. The tension, the drama... it's like "Days of Our Lives" as written by William Carlos Williams. "The dog is in the yard" was a classic. And now this! Heady stuff. Keep it up! :-) ____Not the real rusty She's not left The diary you're talking abut was taken down by Inoshiro. I think because she found out what she was upset about hadn't actually happened. It was a prank by some #k5ers that they took further than they'd meant to, but not as far as she thought. I think the whole thing's cleared up now, more or less. ____Not the real rusty *Open Source* News From the about NewsForge page: Over time, NewsForge will grow to be "the" Web site of record for the Open Source community. Our goal is deliver to our readers every relevant news article, commentary piece, product review and press release published about the open-source community and its projects, including GNU/Linux, BSD, free software, and related topics that we can find. So, it's not CNN.com, it's news about open source stuff. Now, with that important bit of knowlege, do you still think it sucks (and for the same reasons)? ____Not the real rusty That's what I was wondering With the last question-- whether you still objected knowing that it's supposed to be open source news. Your opinion is of course your own, and I think you have some valid criticism. Most of what NewsForge runs are links to stories elsewhere garnered from basically trolling the web for news about open source stuff. I'm sure they'd like to hear if you think they're focusing too much on Linux, and presenting a rose-tinted picture of things. Send 'em an email! ____Not the real rusty K5 and trust metrics I've been thinking about this a lot too, mainly because of the rating circles thing. I don't think they're going to do what you fear, but the danger is there, and that would suck. Here's what I've got so far. The reason it's so easy to subvert all of our systems here is that there is no concept of "identity". All you need for an account is an email address, and those are infinite and free. So identity is meaningless. What if we added something to the existing systems which allowed others to rate how much they trusted you not to abuse things? Over time, you would build up an "identity" which consisted of people giving you trust. This would be a meaningful thing, which could not be duplicated simply by creating a new account. So, imagine that every action you perform in the system is then multiplied by your trust power. People who've earned greater trust by ther community at large would have more influence in what is posted, and comment ratings. It would need to be responsive to current conditions (I need to be able to remove trust as easily as I gave it), bounded (trust multiplier 1-5?), and impervious to "trust circles" (I think the advogato metric is designed for this, right?). I think it would be possible though. Of course, there's the issue of selling this to the community as a whole. That's a whole other thing. It would have to be pretty clear that it's needed, and would do more good than harm, which I think woudn't play right now. But nevertheless, it's an important thing to think about, because I bet we will need it sooner or later. ____Not the real rusty "Ring of Trust" That kind of attack is what I glossed over above as a "ring of trust" type thing. I believe Advogato's system is designed to prevent this. I think it's done by basically "sinking" part of the trust user A can confer on user B. See the site for a detailed description though-- I haven't looked at it in a while. ____Not the real rusty The Fondue Debacle In which we try out the new fondue pot, and are glad we had real food on hand in case of disaster. Also, a poll about vampires! So we had the catsitter thank-you dinner on Sunday night. John and Karsten, who looked after the baby while we were home for Christmas, and Sonya, just because she was around. We got a fondue set for Christmas, so we thought we'd try that out. Well, first off, Sonya came over and was amazed that we were making it from scratch. She's Swiss, and apparently the Swiss don't even make fondue from scratch. I guess fondue is big in Switzerland. Swiss Cheese? Who knew? The recipe called for some cheese, some wine, and two teaspoons of corn starch. Well, in our time-honored tradition of ignoring recipes, we figured, how important can two teaspoons of anything be? Pretty important, as it turns out. Without it, we had a thin cheesy soup. So, not having any cornstarch on hand* we substituted some flour. Which is apparently not cheese soluble. It all collected at the bottom, so we had cheese soup over cheese paste. I gave it a hearty whisking, and it spread out enough to be workable. Fondue was on. We set up the pot and everything, and were happily fonduing away, when after a while, Karsten said "Does anyone smell anything? Like... burning rubber?" Five of us present, and not one person had thought that maybe the little rubber feet go on the bottom of the pot-stand. There's like four pieces to this whole set, and we managed to put the rubber bit on top of the flaming bit. I rushed the stand into the kitchen and ran it under cold water till the rubber stopped sizzling, and we opened a window. So, after a screwed up recipe, and a near fire incident, fondue was on again. It was actually quite fun, and I think I now understand the allure of fondue. Basically, you lok like an idiot trying to eat it, so it's a good icebreaker for gatherings. I didn't actually like the fondue, cause it was swiss cheese. There's the swiss again. Hmmm. About the vampire thing. Driph insists that vampires are actually demons inhabiting a human body. He claims that this is some kind of evidence. I say that BtVS got it all wrong, and that's a crock. No way do vampires and demons have anything in common. Demons are a different form of life, whereas vampires are undead humans with no soul. See, the key point is that anyone would become a vampire if they died, and came back to life, because the soul would be gone, hence vampiric behavior. All this demon nonsense is just because Joss Wheedon didn't do his homework. So register your opinion in the poll, and prove Driph wrong! ----------------------- * Another great use for cornstarch is making Oobleck. This stuff rules. It's a non-newtonian fluid that you can make at home! Just mix about 50% cornstarch with 50% water. Add some food coloring to make it pretty, and maybe some peppermint oil (just a drop or two) to make it smell nice. Then play. It has all kinds of cool weird properties. Good enough for the pres Hey, if Dubya could learn to read by the age of 9, it ought to be good enough for anyone! Course, I'm assuming he did. No real evidence, but it's a hunch... ____Not the real rusty yeah I would much rather have seen us appear in community instead of tech. I guess they just took the tagline literally. I really should change it to "Kuro5hin.org: Whatever, from a bunch of weirdos." ;-) ____Not the real rusty I'm dying Here I am, breathing and conscious now, but without a doubt, I'm dying. I may have only 50 years left on this Earth. With advances in health care and longevity, I might have as much as 60, or even 70 years, but that's probably tops. Yup, I'm dying alright. And you know what the worst part is? So are you. This, by the way, is a thinly-veiled response to the much exaggerated and still repeated death tolls of K5. Yes, we're dying. Kuro5hin.org won't be around forever, much like I won't be, like you won't be, like the United States of America won't be, like the Sun won't be. The point is that what we're really doing is changing. We've always been changing, and we'll always be changing, just like everything else in the bloody universe. Change is all there is. Windows are the process of glass puddling at the bottom of a windowframe. Mountains are continents playing bumper-cars. You, sitting there reading this, are a leather bag of sloshing water and fighting molecules which is being hurled through space at 67,000 miles an hour. No, even that's not accurate though. Windows, mountains, and you are all a collection of states of energy. None of us are anything more than physical perceptions of vibration in a substrate that only can be said to "exist" in that it appears to be capable of vibrating. Everything is change. Deal with it, or don't-- that's the best part. Go ahead and fight change! Maybe you'll change things. Ha ha. Mu. That's cool So it turns out that I totally misread your post. Ah well, a bunch of others have said the same thing, yours just kinda triggered this. What does help is basically this-- identify a discrete system problem, email me about it, with a good solution. The way stuff works has a huge effect on how people act, so if you think that people are consistently doing something "wrong", chances are good that the system is allowing (or encouraging!) that. If you can figure out why that is, and how it could be changed, let me know. That works a lot better than complaining. Think of it as changing the law, rather than protesting in the streets. ____Not the real rusty Edit queue I think having an edit area and giving authors better control over their submissions will help enormously. Just give me a little time. :-) ____Not the real rusty The death of K5, day 396 Heh. You wouldn't know any better, but every once in a while, someone shows up, gets really excited about K5, then starts to realize that "voting for stories" doesn't mean "always getting my way", starts to get disillusioned, tries to "fix K5" by insulting virtually everyone else, and eventually leaves in a huff. I remember this happening in January. Of last year. So, we've been dying since then, and if this is dying, then I hope to continue dying ever more spectacularly for a long time to come. See, here's your problem. You want everything to be your way. Well, you can't make everything be your way-- that's one of the drawbacks of having an equal vote with everyone else. I don't even get things my way-- I wouldn't have put four Meta stories in a row on the front page. But you know what? That doesn't matter. Enough people wanted them there, and so there they are. Meanwhile, here you are, bitching about the "stupid people" who, at last count, have chosen to post, count them, 34 stories by you (the fourth of which, by the way, was called The Death of Kuro5hin). Is this what you mean about stupid voting? No, I know why you're pissed off. It's because every posted story isn't a nugget of pure gold. Well, welcome to life. There's more MLP than anything else because it's easy to submit. Simple as that. It's always been that way, which is why there's a category for it in the first place. There's a lot of Op-Ed because it's second-easiest to submit. Think for half a second, and magically, things become clear... So, go if you want. I won't miss your incessant whining. I think you've written quite a few good stories, and I will miss those. But hey, here's the other great benefit of a virtual democracy-- it's voluntary. Nothing's keeping you here except your desire to participate. Go look for someplace that will always be exactly what you want. I hope you find it. ____Not the real rusty Yay! Good to hear. On both counts. :-) Writing good stuff will do more good than complaining, anyway. ____Not the real rusty Foobah But Andover paid cash. Still worth about as much now. :-) Remember that Slashdot was bought by Andover.net, when it was private. I do believe that was a cash deal. Then ANDN IPO'ed, and got bought by VA, and that was a stock swap. Ok, I don't know for a fact that Andover paid cash. But I strongly think they did. ____Not the real rusty Microsoft Store Yeah, it sucked being locked ut of the microsoft store. We were so close I could *smell* the innovation! Oh, the horror, the horror... ____Not the real rusty Hijinks In which rusty, vsync, hurstdog, cyndrekit, rusty's fiancee and hurstdog's girlfriend go out to see a movie. Hijinks ensue, involving a mannequin and a sony vaio. Plus, my take on Snatch. So hurst and his posse came to town, and we met vsync at the Metreon. We were going to see the 11:00 of Snatch, so we had some time to kill. We were wandering around the Metreon (after being shut out of the Microsoft store-- it was closing), when we spyed a great big flat-panel letterbox sony display, showing some powerpuff girls or something. We were all ooohing and aaahing over it, wondering how it would work as a monitor, when someone noticed that there was a mouse pointer down near the bottom. Closer inspection revealed that sure enough, there was a sony vaio on the counter right behind it, and it was running off that. Vsync, attempting to get a closer look, managed to knock the arm off a mannequin standing in front of the counter. Five minutes of fussing with that, and he had it acceptably together (although the mannequin now looked like it had some kind of birth defect involving it's left arm). So vsync slides the vaio a little closer to the front of the counter, and turns it around a bit, and sure enough, slide the mouse down and up pops a windows taskbar. Turns out this thing that was running was Flash. So he trolls around in the start menu for a bit, and opens up notepad. Well, there was nothing else that could be done at this point, so he types in "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! kuro5hin 4ever!!!!!!" and we scurry off to watch the fun. What vsync didn't realize was that all this time the proprietress of the thing was like 10 feet away, rearranging t-shirts on a rack. The rest of us knew she was there, and were amazed at vsync's brazenness. But it turns out he didn't know she was there. We watched people walk by and squint at the screen in perplexity for a while... I don't know when she figured out it had been "altered". Snatch was good, if a bit of a repeat of Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels. Same basic plot, slightly more frantic cutting and slicing of the images. The "big name" actors didn't have big parts-- Benecio Del Toro dies pretty quickly, and Brad Pitt, while nearly stealing the movie (IMO) wasn't in it that much. His was the most interesting character though, by far. Ok, this isn't much of a review. If you haven't seen it, do-- it's worth seeing. If you have, consider this. Guy Richie's next film should be about Pitt's gypsy character from this movie. All the hoo-raw about the diamond aside, Pitt and his "Ma" were by far the most interesting storyline, the only one that actually made me care about what happened. Whoever got the diamond didn't matter; they were all thugs anyway. But Pitt and his crew exacting vengeance for the torching of his Ma's caravan, now that was engaging. I hope to see more about this gang in the future. Cat-sitter thank-you dinner tonight. I gotta clean this place.... Welcome! Nice to see some ex-technocrats coming by. Sorry the name put you off the first time, I know it sounds kind of 1337, but it's not. Not sure if the explanation is in the FAQ or not yet, but basically, it's a pun. ____Not the real rusty Howl I'm in a weird mood tonight. The kind of mood to howl at the moon, spew great gobs of gibberish into the shiny unblinking electric eye of the dark. Blame Tom Robbins, one of those writers that slithers into my dreams and mumbles page after page to my unconscious when I finally uncontrollably fall asleep in mid-sentence. Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, and Hunter Thompson have been known to practice the same insidious trick. Perhaps they ...read on and I'll infect your dreams too... Where was I? I forget. Whatever, it's early yet. Rumor on the news is that some gene or another controls whether or not people sleep normally. I think I'm one of the freaks selected by Mother Nature to guard the snoozing masses while they sleep. Theory being, presumably, that if the snaggle-toothed tiger were to slink up in the dead of night, I'd run slower than any of my sleeping compatriots, and thus make a fine and satisfying meal (if a bit gristly and bitter) and save the skins (not to mention pancreases... pancreii?) of the genetically untwisted. One of biology's expendables, that's me. Fully awake in blue-green hooded fleece. 12:26 AM. Pacific Time, Friday, January 19th, 2001. I found out the other day that my first love is apparently moving to Israel. The implication was that she's also becoming Jewish, though that wasn't spelled out explicitly. I haven't yet summoned the gumption to respond. Communication between us is sporadic and rather difficult, considering we've led wildly divergent lives since junior year in high school. I went south for college, she went back to France, and Lycee (is that even the right word? I forget). We nearly re-converged in DC, but I was moving in just as she was moving out, and things were already weird anyway. Ships in the night. I stayed in DC, she went to England, where the cold drear no doubt depressed her most satisfyingly. I headed West, and now she's off to the East. Two DC-9's which started on runway 6, but have ended up taking their passengers to opposite ends of the globe, both literally and figuratively. My first kiss occurred in a high school darkroom, during the science fair. She ran away and cried. There were extenuating circumstances, I assure you. Far from home, other men, it was all terribly serious at the time. Two points describe a line. Birth and death, though who can tell which is which? In between is a continuous two dimensional range, nondecomposable unless you want to end up wallowing in Xeno's tortoise and hare infinities. Two straight lines can intersect at one and only one point, and on a small enough scale, any line is a straight line (or close enough for Newton's purposes anyway). So between a birth and a death, there can be only one true intersecting point. For us, that point was a darkroom (though not technically dark at the time) in Falmouth Massachusetts, while the wonders of science burbled unheeded outside the door. A birth, and a death; two of each, in fact-- quadruplets! And an intersection to boot. It was a banner day for human geometry, no question. Two lines met, died, and were born again, immaculate intersection baptized with tears. But the lines never quite met again. They paralleled each other for a while, skirting proximity, angle of incidence matching angle of refraction. But memory's mirror shows them diverging from that point on. Till we've finally ended up in our respective here-and-nows, she landing foursquare in the most ancient place there is, and me bathed in the cathode glow of the New New Thing. But take out your metaphysical protractor, if you would, and draw a new line, East to her, then West back to me, and the world has another thread, shimmering slightly, just barely visible and only if you glance away a little, to catch it with your most sensitive rods and cones. One spider's thread, uniting the two most divergent places on earth. Well. Who knew where that was going to go. Robbins' frogs mingling with my own ghost-frogs, apparently. If you made it this far, you now know a little more about your humble host. Still Life With Woodpecker awaits, so no more amphibious geometry for tonight. obGinsberg "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Microsoft, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the mojo sites at dawn looking for an easy 5, callousfingered typers burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the daily diary in the machinery of K5..." Nah, this wasn't that kind of howl anyway. :-) ____Not the real rusty Thanks :-) The thing EFN's getting at is that the distinctions between diary, story, and comment are pretty damn arbirtrary, yet Scoop was mis-engineered to make them immutable. This is a thing I wish I'd thought more about to begin with, but then, "worse is better" in some cases, and at least the system works. I could probably screw around forever trying to make the "perfect" code, and never finish anything. Hope that I'll get to develop Scoop as more than a neglected sideline eventually. Till then, major changes are probably gonna be on hold, or sporadic at best. ____Not the real rusty Been done Ok, it wasn't on purpose, but I did post something that was, on later reflection, pretty much crap (about linuxstart shutting down free email services). It got voted down. I was heartened to see it. :-) We don't actually *have to* go through the queue-- we can post stuff directly-- but we don't. The site works the way it works, and it would be painfully hypocritical of me to skip the queue whenever I felt like it. I'm not saying I never ever will, because someday, there may come a really good reason to, but as of yet, I haven't been able to think of one, so I don't think it's likely. Amazing though it may seem, I actually believe that having you guys vote on stuff is the best way to run the site, so it would be silly for me not to use the queue for my stuff. :-) I do sometimes expire stuff from the queue myself-- such as the just-posted copy 'n' paste of the Katz article I linked to. Plagiarism is not tolerated, ever, and if I see it it will be dropped. But that's kind of a different matter, I think. ____Not the real rusty No You're not the only one. My hair is brown again at the moment, do it isn't so striking, but others have pointed out the resemblance as well. I can think of worse comparisons. :-) ____Not the real rusty AI Our top-secret patented AI doesn't count "unimportant" or "common" words, like "woodchuck". Kidding. Actually, it's because we count The Right Way, starting with 0. This is true-- unintentional, but true. The "word count" is the last index in an array created by splitting the whole article on spaces. It ought to be the number of elements in that array (not the last index), but actually, I'm kind of pleased that it starts at 0, so I haven't fixed it. :-) ____Not the real rusty That's the solution I thought this was gonna be another "K5 is dead" article, but I have to say, you hit the nail right on the head. I've seen a few things that were unfairly 0-ed too, because I "Review Hidden Comments" pretty religiously. A bunch of the ones I totally didn't agree with were duplicates, which I then dropped from the system (restoring the lost mojo). Most of them have been genuine 0-worthy crap, and the remaining have been usually direct personal flames of no substance. There is one important thing to note-- there has been, intermittently, some kind of bug or oddity where a few comments will show up as "0" when they in fact have no actual ratings attached to them. What you saw may have been some of these, and for this, the explanation is that there's a bug somewhere. I've investigated it, and the "bug" comments appear to have no ratings listed in the "commentratings" table, but the comment itself is marked with a "Score" of 0. Very strange, and I still haven't figured it out. But your solution still stands, regardless. Trusted users do need to review the hidden comments, and fix the ones that don't deserve it. One nifty by-product of the rating scale is that mathematically, one "good" trusted user can cancel the effects of any four "confused" trusted users. Basically, there's a whole lot of redundancy built in, and the scalle is heavily tipped toward not hiding stuff. ____Not the real rusty Certainly (NT) ____Not the real rusty Oxfam Cool! Be sure you join the scoop-help mailing list. :-) ____Not the real rusty Bitch, bitch, bitch, piss, moan... Maybe you'd be a happier person today if you had had an outlet to vent to when you were in college. :-) See, the thing is, I imagine most people here are normally pretty happy and well-adjusted. When nothing's wrong, most people aren't motivated to write about it. But when you have a bitch laying heavy on your chest, it cries to get out somewhere. And who wants to sit their friends down and subject them to a half hour of griping about life? So people pop out a diary about it, feel better, and move on. It's like taking an emotional dump, if you'll pardon the metaphor. I think the general tone of diaries is skewed by the medium, is my point. OGS ("oppressed geek syndrome") annoys me too, but if it only shows up in diaries (and NOT stories!) then I'm happy. ____Not the real rusty Wish I Had More ...time, energy, direction, motivation, all of the above. Work has been pressing lately, and I don't have the time or energy to devote to K5 that I ought to. All that, and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". So, my company laid off 40 people on the 5th (how many of you are aware that I have a full-time non-K5 job by the way?). Now everyone's skittish, especially management, and the project that I'm lead "engineer" on is getting a lot of attention, and being seen as the Great Hope of the Future. Which means that I'm getting a lot more attention, and being forced to waste all my time in meetings trying to placate the project manager. Frankly, if they don't let me get some more code written, the damn thing's never going to be finished, but no one seems to see that. Compare-- for the last month or so, I've been working 4 days of the week at home, and turning out an average of 150 lines of working code a day (I counted). Last week, I had meetings every day, and produced 0 lines of code. I did write a lot of documentation, which is good and all, but if they don't let me do my job, things will go poorly. And part of letting me do my job is having faith that I know how to be productive, which I do, and it doesn't involve dragging my ass down to San Mateo every day. I can't concentrate in that place. There's always people walking around, talking, phones ringing, noise, distraction. Someone's always got a question, someone has a problem, someone wants to "review the development plan". Who can concentrate in all that? I can't. Will you all think less of me if I admit that I'm not smart enough to hold large abstract data structures in my head while someone is asking me to review the pronouncements of a "steering committee"? Well, I'm not. Anyway, meanwhile, I have a lot less time to put toward K5, and a lot less energy too. I think the amount of code I can write in a day is limited, and right now it's all being used up by work. I promise we're not in permanent stasis here, but I can't say when I'll be free enough to get Scoop moving forward again. Soon... Meanwhile, I saw "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" yesterday, which rocked. I highly recommend it. The only weakness of the film, I thought, was the way it was plotted. I mean, the plot was great-- extremely elegant symmetry between the four main characters, but there's a large chunk of flashback wedged in there that doesn't quite fit, I thought. Like, it needs to be there, but the way they put it in was to pretty much abandon the main story for 45 minutes or so, and do this whole long backstory all at once, and then return to the main story. And the backstory involves one of the main characters, but you hardly see him in the rest of the film. IMO, it was laid out awkwardly. It would have been better to introduce him earlier, and intercut the main story with the back story. Better symmetry, better dramatic tension, and overall, it would've made more sense. Apart from that, what an amazing movie! Cinematography to die for, unbelievable fight scenes (maybe a little too unbelievable for some of the audience-- more later), and a great story. Definitely recommended. The only other odd thing is that they really uglied up Michelle Yeoh for the part. Remember her from "Tomorrow Never Dies"? Well, she looks about 25 years older here. I was surprised. So, what is it about American audiences that they laugh at movies whenever people do things that aren't "realistic"? In CT,HD, the characters can basically fly. The idea is that they're so advanced in their martial arts that they can do things like run straight up swaying bamboo trees, jump to the tops of 30-foot walls, and stuff like that. Ok, yeah, they're on wires, but I thought the way they shot the movements was fantastic. But I had to listen to some of the audience giggling every time they did something like that. Drives me nuts. Why the hell do people go to movies if they can't handle being shown something that people can't do "in real life"? And furthermore, why do Americans accept the most outlandish special effects, but only if they're done by computer? Put a real actor on an invisible wire, and they all giggle. I think something's deeply broken in the imagination of this country. I want to make a movie with no speciall effects at all, that makes people walk out of the theatre believing that they've just seen the most amazing thing ever. When our imagination gets too lazy to create a world that doesn't exist, we're doomed. Justify your existence Much of the trouble is managers who feel that they "must do something" for the project. That's it, right there. The upper bosses are now scrutinizing my project, so my manager has to "be active". She doesn't have the experience or position to just let us work, so we have to have lots of meetings to "demonstrate progress". My fear is that there won't be any progress to demonstrate, since we keep having meetings about it. ____Not the real rusty genre As mentioned in another review of the film here, the main problem is that the majority of Americans won't have seen any other film of this genre before. I imagine Chinese audiences were perfectly familiar with the context, having seen the "magical martial-arts epic" style before. It's unclear to me whether your standard American movie-goer will even be clear that this film is set thousands of years in the past. Our collective image of "China" is blurry at best. An analogue might be the "western" genre, where the opening shot of the dusty main street, the saloon, and the cowboys with spurs will be enough for an American to place the action in the American west, circa 1860, but might not necessarily give a viewer from Tibet the same immediate context. I hope that the trend of importing films for broad release from East Asia will continue, as they've done some of the most amazing filmmaking in the last 20 years or so, but it's mainly been missed by Americans. Especially the Hong Kong action genre, which pretty much blows the pants off the "big-muscle thug" action flicks Hollywood churns out. I think, if nothing else, CTHD will convince movie bosses that a subtitled movie can be a popular hit here, and encourage them to bring in more of these. Of course, if history is any guide, instead of releasing the originals, we'll just see endless bad remakes of HK action classics, featuring big muscled American thugs destroying machines. Kind of like the "City of Angels" remake with Nick Cage. What were they smoking when they decided to remake a Wim Wenders film? That's like deciding to repaint the Mona Lisa as a portrait of Tori Spelling. Hollywood is insane. ____Not the real rusty Yeah, and guess what? I have to rewrite it all. Dammit. One of the endless meetings of the day was about a new object and table system, which is a good idea and all, and pretty cool, conceptually, but is pretty much like deciding to add a new basement after the house is built. To retrofit the existing code to this stuff will amount to rewriting probably 80% of it. [rusty begins to make Russian roulette hand motions] ____Not the real rusty Metreon I saw it at the Metreon downtown. Century would be a bit of a hike for me, but maybe we'll try it out some weekend. Oh, I work for Zelerate BTW. Course, you could have clicked the "my company" link above. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cliff's a smart guy :-) Actually, Cliff's already convinced me of most of his ideas. There's of course, the "Small matter of programming" that would be needed to implement them. Right now, in fact, he's fooling with integrating Scoop and WikiWiki, to create some kind of hybrid system with the nice features of both. Right now, it's highly experimental, of course. Rating groups are a good idea. We will need them. We will have them, eventually. The way I see it working is that you never really "dump" anything, it (where "it" would be stories and comments) will display differently depending on what "group" you have chosen to belong to. I think that long term, this is the only way K5 can scale without being a mass of conflicts pulling in incompatible directions. The one thing that's crucial to democracy that we really don't offer right now is the fact that to work, democracy must be participated in voluntarily. You can be part of the system here, or not, but that's not really the same thing. Working democracy demands that participants have some common goals, and if we get much bigger, I don't think that requirement will continue to be met. So, no convincing needed. :-) ____Not the real rusty Applied Derrida See the above background materials on Derrida, and then gander at my take on the Matrix from a deconstructionist's standpoint. I am not a deconstructionist, but I did live with one in college, and I can still put on the lab coat when needed. And also, be aware that (approximately) 90% of the times you will hear the word "deconstruct" in your life, it will be used utterly wrong. (Hint: it is not a synonym for "analyze") ____Not the real rusty Ha! We're the dominant ethic of the moment! Check out OSDN.Linux.com used to look like K5, but doesn't anymore. I know there's more, but I haven't been keeping links. ____Not the real rusty "ethic"? I meant to say "aesthetic". Crap. ____Not the real rusty K5 I don't think anything's wrong on our end. And we're very far from the VA hosting facilities (they're in exodus out west, and our box is in Globix in Manhattan). If you have a traceroute, that'd help. ____Not the real rusty Mine? Heh. The most basic piece of true wisdom I've yet encountered goes like this: Shit happens. Ok, it sounds trite when you first encounter it, but over time I've found that that one has stuck with me, through good times and bad, and never failed to mean something when I most needed advice. Usually it manages to impel me to stop obsessing and *do* something, cause, you know, shit happens, and you can't always figure out when, or why, or how, or what it means. ____Not the real rusty Aww I don't know what the new one is. I am sad. ____Not the real rusty Respect There's been a lot of nastiness around lately. People here not treating each other with respect. I don't care if you all play nicey-nicey all the time, in fact, I think it'd be quite dull if you did. But it troubles me when people behave as though they have more of a right to use our bits than someone else. You're all guests here, and you're all hosts. Please try to behave that way. (more schoolmarm scolding below) I'm not naming any names. I'm not blaming anyone, because the shotgun-style handing out of blame is one of the symptoms of the rash of disrespect. "He started it", "Well he did that first", "X, Y, and Z are trolling, why don't you do something!" Etc. This is not how grownups behave folks. Well, ok, it is, too much of the time, but dammit, it isn't how they should behave. If someone pisses you off, tell them "Please don't do that". If they don't stop, move on. I mean, are you gonna live forever? When you're on your deathbed, are you going to think back to the hour you spent flaming some anonymous loser on the web? What else could you be doing with that hour? I can think of a million things that would, in fact, make your life *better* than it was before. We're all here voluntarily. K5 exists because of common endeavor. There's been too much splintering lately, too many accusations, too much acrimony, and angst, and self-pity. Without that common spirit, we will simply fail. And dammit, I don't want to fail. Don't let us fail. Don't contribute to it. You don't have to change anyone else, you don't have to watch out for "the community". Just you yourself behave as you would like others to behave. There's absolutely no other way to make this work. If we all do that, if even *most* of us do that. We can't lose. Thank you for suffering through my scolding. Next diary will be more of the cheery old me you're used to. :-) Write more sheepdot... It's usually funny. The K5 one was anyway. :-) BTW, in your logo, the angle of incidence often doesn't even resemble the angle of refraction (the bouncing dot). Is that on purpose? ____Not the real rusty I'm glad I have to admit, except for having too many people take it all too seriously, I'm amused as all hell by the whole AM/EE thing too. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, and the site. Really, that's all we need to do... and how often do you get someone *demanding* that you just have some fun? :-) ____Not the real rusty See? Here's the respect thing again. I think by "delurked" he just meant "caused to decide to participate". Read, read again, *then* post. :-) ____Not the real rusty irc There's a few people chatting with her on IRC. I think the general vote was that it's a closed session right now. KTB wanted to invite you though, lest you think he's trying to hide something. :-) ____Not the real rusty By all means, have fun Ok, I wasn't really clear enough. I'm not saying you should leave, or ignore what you see as inaccuracy, wrongheadedness, abuse, or bad behavior. Not at all! I just ask that you treat others with respect. Even if you think they're trolls. Even if they're flaming you. Correct them, ask them to stop, but if you do what they do back at them, nothing will get solved. From time to time I get the old crispy-critter treatment via email. Without exception, I've found that when I take the criticism seriously, and respond with respect, the roaring flamer turns into a meowing pussycat. People just want to be listened to, is what it comes down to. A polite response, even if it totally disgrees with everything they said, will always help. So, please, don't just move on. And I know that we all get tired of saying the same things over and over. But those are usually the things that really need to be said, so we just have to suck it up, and say them over and over. ____Not the real rusty I want to... I want to create a fake account so I can rate this comment 5 again. :-) That was a kind of "ha-ha-only-serious" joke, BTW. For those who care, I very recently (like this morning) raised the number of comments required to be trusted to 18 (minimum). That will likely drop trusted from a whole bunch of folks. Do not be alarmed, the list was just getting rather long. ____Not the real rusty One more time... :-) Ok, it grabs comments, up to 30 rated comments, or up to 60 days (whichever comes first). Does the mojo calc, and then checks if there were at least 18 (rated) comments in that calculation. If so, and if mojo >= 3.5, then the user is trusted. ____Not the real rusty Improvement? Any suggestions on how to improve things? Basically, I didn't set out to make this a "tech" site. It kind of became that because that's what early readers were interested in. But the "topic" of the site is very much determined by the readers and voters. That's why the slogan is so vague-- I didn't really want to constrain what we can talk about, and "culture" pretty much means "anything". So, I guess the issue is that you feel like the interests of the majority of readers are diverging from your own. So, either we all just accept that and you go off and find a place that better meets your interests, or we think about how to make K5 cater more to individual interests. I think a personal front page would help a lot, in that you could just watch the topics that interest you. Beyond that, do you have any good ideas? ____Not the real rusty i was unclear If kuro5hin was never intended to discuss tech, it needs to be removed from the title graphic, and I need to remove myself from kuro5hin. I was unclear. I meant to say that K5 was never intended specifically to discuss anything in particular. That way the voting system works means the site is basically about whatever the readers want it to be about. In the early days, I gave it no direction at all, but the few readers I had urged me to provide some kind of focus to at least give people a clue about what the site was supposed to be geared towards. So I basically looked at what we had posted so far, and figured it weas some tech, and some "other stuff", and went for technology and culture. So, I'm certainly not saying that it's not for technology. I like the tech articles. I also like the politics articles, and a lot of the other stuff. I'm just saying it's not *just* for technology. Unless, of course, that's what the readers want. :-) The key thing in all of this is that what I say the site is about makes very little difference to what it actually ends up being about. Part of being reader-edited is that the readers decide, in a practical way, what does and doesn't belong. Whatever I may think, the collective will decides what the reality is. So, it's up to you to decide if you like that or not. If you want a site that's dedicated exclusively to technology, I doubt we will ever live up to what you want. But that's just a guess based on past history. No one can really say where K5 will go, which is mostly what keeps me interested in maintaining it. Whether you belong here or not has to be your call. I, personally, hope you stay. I think everyone has something to contribute (well, almost everyone, but definitely you). It is what you (the collective you) make it. ____Not the real rusty RustyCam If I ever get some cash and get DSL again, the rustycam will come back. I lived with a cam for 6 months or so, and it was... odd. Sort of. I don't know what's so fascinating about them exactly, but people seem to feel compelled to watch, even when you don't do anything. And then you (the cam-ee) feel compelled to keep running it, because otherwise people will email you and say "where'd the cam go!" etc. I don't think I can explain it exactly. If you're curious, get one and see for yourself. :-) ____Not the real rusty Cleaver I got a cleaver for christmas. I was very excited, and I also got a few of those "scary knife boy" looks. Ok, so cleavers are kind of scary looking, but damn, can I ever chop a mean onion now. ____Not the real rusty I thought it was "high school" What can I say? I went to college in Virginia. FWIW, I don't think it would have been any more fun if I'd known it was religion at the time. ____Not the real rusty Lol Ok, first, that's damn funny. Now that's what I'd call a square satirical hit. Only, you forgot obesewhale's article: "High School Oppression and Whatnot". ;-) Yes, a lot of the same people do post a lot of articles, and sometimes there's a bit of a rut, when we seem to cycle through the same kinds of things over and over. It's a problem. It usually doesn't last forever though-- eventually someone writes something good enough to jar the queue and we get into an up cycle again. I haven't decided yet if it's technical or social though, so I have no idea how to shake things up. ____Not the real rusty Ha! Call it "Cajun blackened turkey." Tell 'em this is how they do it way down on the bayou, and will be next year's huge Thanksgiving fad. Seriously, dinner guests will believe the most ridiculous bullshit if you just say it with confidence. Where do you think the words "rustic" (i.e. "bad") and "fusion" (i.e. "I couldn't find any of the right ingredients") came from? :-) ____Not the real rusty The best part Is that this happened two years ago, and I didn't realize it till after I had posted that comment. And I may adopt your version of "rustic" from now on. But fusion, IME, almost always results from having good intentions but the wrong ingredients. Like one night, my wife made creole with polish sausage and indian basmati rice. I asked her how you end up with polish and indian ingredients in creole, and she thought for a minute and then said "Fusion!" ____Not the real rusty Back East Going home for Christmas, and why do people say "Back East" when they've never been there? Well, this is probably the last you'll see of me till after the New Year. I'm off for ten days of travel.. oh, and a few hours of time with various friends and relatives. The itinerary so far is: Leave house at 4:30AM Sat Leave SFO at 6:30 AM Sat Arrive BWI at 5ish PM Sat Train to New York Car to Bret's parent's house upstate Sleep frantically Christmas eve German-style (roast duck & presents! yay) 25th or 26, borrow car, drive to MA Christmas with my family, see the home gang Drive back to NY 28ish Train back to DC Staying in the old neighborhood for New Years (Dupont, right on our old street) Fly back to SFO from BWI Jan 1 Go back to work Jan 2 So, while it may not end up being restful, it'll be good to see everyone. And very good to get a break from work. So, everyone have a safe and happy holiday, and take good care of K5 for me while I'm gone, eh? :-) Oh yeah, and why do people who've lived in CA all their lives say "back east"? It's not back if you've never been there. For some reason that phrase irritates me. It just marks you as a westerner. AFAIK, actual easterners never say that. Mwaahahahahahah Dammit. I was gonna write something funny, but I'm too beat. I got a kick out of this, and, in the absence of any ability to write anything worthy, please see my sig for my nefarious plan to turn you all into mindless zombie slaves. Oh, and I did cackle maniacally reading this. You'd have no way of knowing it, but I actually do laugh like that. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? >;-) ____Not the real rusty 2 things 1) Get The Camel Book 2) Perl has good signal handling-- basically, you set an element of the %SIG hash to an anonymous subroutine, which will get run when the signal is caught. The quickest example I could find came from 'perldoc -q signal' and looks like: $Interrupted = 0; # to ensure it has a value $SIG{INT} = sub { $Interrupted++; syswrite(STDERR, "ouch ", 5); } That's the basic MO, though. I'm sure you can either expend that to your needs, or find more info, now that you know what you're looking for. One thing though, the perl docs note that doing things in signal handlers generally isn't very safe. They say: Unless you're exceedingly careful, the only safe things to do inside a signal handler are: set a variable and exit. And in the first case, you should only set a variable in such a way that malloc() is not called (eg, by setting a variable that already has a value). ____Not the real rusty ROFL I love it! :-) From #kuro5hin: --- rusty has changed the topic to: "T'was the Night Before K5mas" http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory&sid;=2000/12/21/5518/2462 ____Not the real rusty More sane? Maybe. That's still very much under discussion. ;-) To get a sense of who "K5" is, see my upcoming one-year retrospective. Yep, it's our birthday! Welcome! As for actual site help, well, that still sucks. Click around, read what little there is (check out the blue link bar on top there), and then start sending me email about how much we need better docs, like everyone else. ;-) ____Not the real rusty Dammit I voted for shirobara, but that was before I found out communista's tongue was pierced too. Fuck. Nothing personal, shiro, but, y'know, I know how much a tongue piercing hurts. I have to respect that. So, count me as a vote for communista anyway. ____Not the real rusty Clicking do you do that thing where you absentmindedly clack your tongue-stud against your teeth while talking to people? I've yet to meet someone with a tongue piercing who doesn't. I don't. Most people never realize I have it either, because I don't open my mouth much when I talk. Usually you can't even see my teeth. And I don't dress like your standard pierced person. All in all, if you don't know me really well, it seems very out of character, and most people are extremely surprised if they find out. Which suits me just fine. :-) ____Not the real rusty sugar For an extra-extra-tasty version, sift confectioner's sugar on top. :-) ____Not the real rusty Excellent! Glad to have you. Please help us continue to be not too American-centric. I'm personally American myself, so I don't mind so much. But the Swedes get really pissed off whenever something America-philic gets posted, so it's nice to not have to hear too much of that. ;-) ____Not the real rusty It's so weird too... Because tewl gave no indication that she was even remotely the "ratings stalking" sort of person. I'm really really surprised and puzzled... ____Not the real rusty Matter of fact.. ...Kind of confusing... Yeah, I was confused too. I think that there may actually end up being a good explanation for it. The whole thing is very Agatha Christie. ____Not the real rusty Guy Debord is alive and well and following me around. My response to an email from Andrew telling me to look at this great rant about British women. Turns out the writer is part of pornucopia, which is not really what you think it would be. Ok. Can someone please tell me what dead-of-hallowe'en-midnight voodoo was done to ensure that I inadvertently meet every single one of the dozen active situationists in the world? It started in college, with my ex-punk roommate, who lured me into the pomo swamps of the literary and cultural studies program, which was veritably soaked in French intellectualism. This happened in DC too, where I got to know a guy who turned out to be a longtime friend/enemy of Debord biographer and would-be rabble rouser Len Bracken (not to mention an old schoolmate of Henry Rollins, who loved nothing better than to go to his oh-so-shi-shi "spoken word" performances and bait him publicly). And now I find out that Andrew is in an extreme marketing collective with Malcolm McLaren and the founder of Factory Records. Ye Gods, what ever have I done to deserve this? Most people live long, full and hapy lives without ever once hearng the name "Lacan", or knowing that there were student riots in Paris in May '68, or reading "The Anti-Oedipus". Why do you people keep finding me? Not that I have anything against situationists in general. As a philosophy, it's amusing, if a bit quaint. But is it not bizarre to have had this happen no less than three times now? Am I on some list somewhere? "Item one of Situationist plan for world domination: Follow Rusty around". It would not surprise me in the least. Clearly chaos theory was right, and I am a strange attractor. Anyway, if you can get me some rare Joy Division vinyl, my ex-roommate will love you forever. :-) lol That's a really good attitude to have. I wish everyone was like you. I'm not obsessed with ratings at all, personally. I understand, as you do, that it's a collective human system, not a machine, and there will be errors, slop, misratings, and general wackiness. But it's just been one meta-article after another about how it "doesn't work". Opening up ratings is, I think, the best way to get people to stop blaming the system and notice that it is *people* who do the rating. The results are always due to actions of individuals. If you have a problem with the way one person rates, take it up with them and stop posting meta-articles about how the system is broken. :-) Anyway, this has been in the works for a long time, it just seemed that the general obsession with ratings was reaching a fever pitch. I'm hoping more information will led to less mystery and conspiracy theorizing. ____Not the real rusty I love you too, man ;-) "Seriously inconvenienced" is really going pretty far. I was slightly inconvenienced, and the situation was not really difficult and time consuming, just more time consuming than it could have been (i.e. 20 minutes instead of five). It's not like I was out helping the poor or saving the rain forest. I was just supposed to be helping Bret cook dinner. As I said in the email reply, please don't feel so bad. It is good manners to warn folks before exploiting holes on their systems, and if that message gets across here, then we live in the best possible world. The inconvenience was really quite minor, and all in all, it's better that I know now, by whatever means, then later this month when it would have been much harder for me to fix the problem. :-) ____Not the real rusty Welcome! Btw, rusty is uid 2, not 1. Second among equals, right? ;-) ...it is the people who frequent the site that really do the magic. Yes! Absolutely. You completely get it. With that understanding, you know everything you really need to know about K5. I'm glad you like it here. Welcome! ____Not the real rusty Possibly... This is an interesting experiment. I'm curious as the whether it'll work or not. I guess the easiest way to find out would be to look at unfair_rating_alert!'s comments and see if their parents look fairly rated. :-) ____Not the real rusty And having done so... Having now looked through the comments currently tagged by ufa!, I'd have to say it looks like it's working. Of course, more accurate would be to note comments rated unfairly, and look again in 6 or 7 hours to see if the rating have picked up. That's the thing people don't always get-- a one-time snaphot is not going to be accurate, since ratings converge over time. However, if this helps tag some blatant misrating without adding extra complexity (meta-mod style) to the system, I'm all for it. I think having ratings be public will help a lot with this too. ____Not the real rusty Bjork Stalker I saw the Bjork stalker tape on TV. If I were her, I'd probably never leave the house again. He actually mailed her a letter bomb, filmed himself making it and everything, and then filmed himself blowing his brains out. It is creepy, creepy shit. And damn it, why don't you warn me when Bjork is gonna be in SF! :-) ____Not the real rusty Linking There's a much better way to link to your diary. Everyone gets their own little virtual "section" page, and linking to that will be prettier than your search-link. For you, it'd be: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=section;section=Diary;user=diary_2667 Note that the little "diary" icon links to this page for each diary too. ____Not the real rusty What a day. What a ridiculous day. Here's my day today, so you can all enjoy a peek into the surrealist drama of my day to day life. If anyone has a farm or a small cabin very high on top of a mountain they'd like to sell me, please be in touch. Got up at 5:00AM because, well, that's just the way the sleep cycle went today. Received the following email: Subject: lawsuit? Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 22:27:54 -0500 From: [someone] To: <help@kuro5hin.org>, <malda@slashdot.org> www.kuro5hin.org and www.slashdot.org are *strikingly* similar in content and design, and i am no doubted-ly the first one to recognize this. are both sites owned by a parent company? just concerned about copyright infringement. A little bit later, receive the following reply: Subject: Re: lawsuit? Date: 11 Dec 2000 22:58:14 EST From: "Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda" <malda@slashdot.org> To: [original someone], <help@kuro5hin.org> Yeah. Rusty took over Slashdot in a hostile take over several years ago. Since then I've been run by a AI program (actually a 12 line perl script) while Rusty sits atop his mountain of money and cackles maniacally. Truth is that Slashdot has been around for years. Rusty waited a few years, took most of Slashdot, changed it around a little to make it his own, and continues to maintain it... in the spirit of open source, I don't care in the slightest. Bizarre, but amusing. My reply: Subject: Re: lawsuit? Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 05:23:52 -0500 From: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org> To: Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda <malda@slashdot.org> CC: [original someone], help@kuro5hin.org Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda wrote: > > Yeah. Rusty took over Slashdot in a hostile take over several years > ago. Since then I've been run by a AI program (actually a 12 line > perl script) while Rusty sits atop his mountain of money and cackles > maniacally. > Mwaaahahahahahaha! > Truth is that Slashdot has been around for years. Rusty waited a > few years, took most of Slashdot, changed it around a little to make > it his own, and continues to maintain it... To be more specific, I took a lot of the interface and design ideas from slashcode, and reimplemented them in Scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/), which runs K5. > in the spirit of open source, > I don't care in the slightest. Oh, Rob. It hurts me when you say you don't care. You used to be so warm. ;-) --R Well, after that little slice of strange, I get the following: Subject: Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 09:10:34 -0800 From: "Bill Atchison" [of automatedshops.com] To: <help@kuro5hin.org>, <rusty@kuro5hin.org> One of your users has mistakenly posted links to iCommerce and AutomatedShops.com regarding ShopZone ecommerce software being resold at Automatedshops in relationship to an unrelated article about security issues on the WWF SHOPZONE web site. [links and such] Please promptly remove this misleading information from your web site as it is causing serious harm and damage to our company. Thank you for your cooperation in the matter. Yep, it seems that a rather over-hasty reader, who shall remain unnamed, made a connection between AutomatedShops.com's "ShopZone" software and the "WWF ShopZone", and leapt to the conclusion that it was no mere coincidence. He posted links to the ShopZone sites, implying that they were the software to blame for the privacy gaffe. Of course, as it turns out, they were not to blame at all, and the name was merely a coincidence of uninspired marketing. Both AutomatedShops.com and the WWF's ecommerce manager confirmed that iCommerce's ShopZone was not used on the WWF ShopZone. So, I dropped the offending comment, and added a notice to the story to that effect. Cowardly? Hell no. The comment was hasty and insufficiently researched, and, most importantly, untrue. The commenter was sorry to have jumped to the conclusion, and promises to be more careful in the future. And that takes us through about 1:00 PM. Most of the rest of the day was spent helping a co-worker bugfix something in AllCommerce, working on my work project, and arguing about the appropriateness of profanity in story titles. Dinner, read the rest of Airframe, bed. Toss, turn, get up, post diary entry. Then back to bed? We'll see. I sleep like hell lately-- tend to go 20-24 hours between being able to sleep, basically until I'm completely non-functional and my body has no other choice. Needless to say this means I have no "normal day" lately. I need less stress. Was I wrong? Ok, simple poll. I changed the title of a submission to Profanity Reconsidered. If you're logged in, there's more meta-discussion on it here. Was this the right decision, or not? RDF Y'know, I didn't even think of that. The fact that we're exporing titles in RDF is a better reason than any other one I've come up with for the change. It wasn't a motivating factor, as I forgot all about that, but now that you mention it, I'm very glad we're not exporting that to the world. ____Not the real rusty So far... It looks like Scalia and Thomas are for a recount, Kennedy and Souter oppose it, and the rest of them are still giggling about the "naughty word" in the story. ____Not the real rusty Yes With a day of reflection, I think you're right. I've listened to the opposing views, and the opinions of those who support me, and here's what I've come up with: If for no other reason, the fact that we export headlines to a number of other sites via RDF is reason enough to keep article titles "clean" by conventional standards. I didn't think of that before editing, but in retrospect, I'm glad I did it. We need means for collaborative editing. About point two-- what I have in mind right now is a pre-voting queue. Authors can submit their stories to an editorial queue. While it is in that queue, people can post editorial comments and suggestions, and they can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down for promotion to voting. They can change their "thumb orientation" at any time, to reflect if they think the article is now fit for submission to general voting. So, the basic MO would be, author submits article to editorial queue. People read and comment on "bugs" in the story, suggest changes. Author can edit/rework the story as needed until the author and the readers think it's ready for general voting. Author hits the "promote" button, and the story goes into the voting queue. At this point, editorial comments from the editing queue are wiped away, and no further editing is allowed. The author should still have the ability to cancel the submission if they want. Hopefully this would aid everyone in creating top-notch stories. I still have some unresolved questions though. Should the editorial queue be required? Required for some sections only? Optional? Should there be an automatic process for promoting the article to voting? Or should it be author-manual-only? Should there be an expire-time in the edit queue? System-wide? Author-set? Should there be a vote for "re-edit" in voting, which would sent a story back to the editing queue? One of the major problems here is that there was no good way to tell how strong the opinion of the readers was in favor of changing the title. A real editing process would likely help this quite a lot. Overall, I'm glad that everyone takes their hand in producing K5 so seriously. It is good to see people protective of what they see as their rights, even if I'm the target of that ire. It means the experiment is working, and people really do feel a sense of ownership of the site, which is the whole point. I guess the challenge is to make the code reflect that feeling more fully, then. ____Not the real rusty I *am* running it! What gives you the idea that I do anything more important here than randomly pop up in people's diaries posting nonsense? :-) That's kind of a ha ha only serious, actually. I think that really is probably the most important thing I do. Ok, I code features sometimes, and write the (increasingly infrequent) article here and there, but mainly, I hang out and play den mother. Anyway, I'm severely sleep deprived at the moment, and have no one around to babble at in person, so you all get to suffer instead. And now that you've exposed my evil plan, what else is there for me to do but loaf around in my secret underground lair and post stuff? It's either that or write my name on the moon with this giant "laser". And I was saving that for tomorrow. ____Not the real rusty Born to Die Stevie Washington, angry youth. Born to Die. Turn of the century. New York's New York. All crime. Does anyone else remember this series of animated shorts from Mtv circa 1987-ish, which started with the above intro? They also feature Madame Mumwaldi, and her disco zombies ("Oooh, Ah! DISco ZOMbie! Oooh! Ah! DISco ZOMbie!...), and a really, really funny voice-over guy. I wish I could find more info about them, but Google comes up nearly blank. I really want tapes. Poll: What do you like? but.. ..Arson remains a close second. That's a little disturbing, eh? At least no one likes Down's Syndrome yet. Every time I look at the ugly lake, it reminds me of you. :-) ____Not the real rusty Second that That was an excellent read. I'd have voted that FP as well. What'ya say street? ____Not the real rusty what's with the x? Is it coolx in the UKx these days to have an x at the end of your nickx, or is that just a coincidx? ;-) ____Not the real rusty Bush X I heard the band Bush had to do the same thing in Europe (or was it Canada?). Someone had already copyrighted the name "Bush", so they're "Bush X". "spiralx" is much cooler than "spiral" anyway. Very La Femme Nikita. Boy, do I need sleep. ____Not the real rusty Curses! I think I've finally figured it out... this is kind of like those books you can order for little kids, where they put the child's name in as the hero, and it's supposed to help get them interested in reading. Well, suffice it to say, none of us have outgrown that yet. We like seeing our name in stuff we read. It's another verison of popularity. Yeah, it's cheesy, it may even be juvenile. But screw it. It's fun. You've uncovered my nefarious scheme! Yes, that's right, all this time I've been planning and plotting ways to further enmesh you all in the great glutinous time-sink that is K5, and finally I struck upon my most twisted and evil (and did I mention nefarious?) scheme ever! I would provide an open means for you to communicate with each other... yes, yes... and, if my calculations were correct, some of you would even become friends! And then I'd have you. You'd be hopelessly addicted to seeing yourselves referred to in others' K5 diaries, and then you'd be my mindless zombie slaves!! A slight suggestion in my own diary, and you would rush to do my bidding!! Not a power on Earth could stop me! Mwaaahahahahahahaha!!!! You may have discovered my... dammit, what's another word for evil?.... malefic plan this time, but next time you won't be so lucky! Come, Mr. Bigglesworth! ____Not the real rusty It's editorial Set your comment view to "All Comments" or "editorial only" and you'll see it. If you go to a cid= link it should display anyway, but currently it doesn't. This is a bug. ____Not the real rusty You're welcome. No problem. I like your website, by the way. Read it a while ago. Creepy, but very cool. ____Not the real rusty hidden stories enterfornone can still see the story, because he's the author. You can still see the comments, because the comment system is buggy-- try here. For everyone but admins and the author, however, the story is hidden. I think we're going to make voted-down stories revert to the author's diary, with a note like "This was originally submitted in Section Foo, Topic Bar. It was voted down with a total score of X, having Y +1 votes, Z 0 votes, and W -1 votes.". Do you think that's a good idea? ____Not the real rusty Lame That is lame. I'm sorry you were the victim of such silliness. You're right though, that it points out a weakness in the system as a whole. Old comments can be rated unfairly with great impunity, since they are unlikely to ever be fixed. Partly this is accounted for by the time-weighting. But not enough, IMO. The key is to make the system flexible enough to reflect the current status of things, and not too much of the past, and to make sure that one malicious user can't make a mass down-rating like that effective. Some ideas I like are not allowing a rating to "exist" until it has a certain number of data points. Soemthing like 3 or 4 should do for that-- until it has that many ratings, it would register as "none". That's a pretty trivial hack, actually. Another good idea is to count ratings individually when calculating mojo. Right now that's calculated based on the averages for your comments, instead of each individual data point. What also might work is if we continued to use the comment ratings, but weighted them based on how many data points they are made of. So, for example, a comment rated 1.00, with one rating (a 1) would act like one comment. A comment rated 3.67, with 6 ratings (which average to 3.67), would be like having posted 6 comments at that rating. So, a simple multiplicative weight for more rating points. That should tend to favor accuracy in mojo, since ratings with more data tend to be more accurate. While the overall mojo would go down, the quality of the number ought to go up a lot with somehting like that, considering that it takes stronger account of the more solid data. If something's not working, we definitely ought to find out why and try to fix it. I have to admit, I saw this kind of thing coming. I'd like to head it off before it becomes a real problem. ____Not the real rusty The algorithm for mojo... ...is explained in fairly painful detail here (& thread). I really gotta add that to the FAQ. BTW, I kinda like the idea of waiting for a few ratings to make them "real". ____Not the real rusty This is only a test This is a test diary entry, in which people may post MS moronized comments to see if my new demoronizing works! Please ignore, if you're not testing. Hell no! Good God, man, didn't you pay attention to Back to the Future at all?! ____Not the real rusty Cool! I love seeing comments like that. :-) Yes, we do severely lack docs. We are working on that... And I'd love to see a UK politics site based on scoop. See scoop.kuro5hin.org for more info about the code, and scoophosting.com for at least one scoop-friendly host. ____Not the real rusty Well... The sponsorships are really just paying for bandwidth and hardware. VHosting trades us rackspace for that ad, and VA gave us hardware (and requested an ad, but didn't actually require it). Our (my, and Inoshiro's) time is still a donation. We're working toward a means of getting us employed by K5, as opposed to volunteers. Yes, it'll involve ads, but they will be a lot better than the old (crappy, hateable) Burst banners. We will likely have a very interesting announcement in a month or so... :-) I'm curious as to how everyone would feel about the return of ads, if it means that me & Ino could work for the site, instead of scrounging free time when we find it. Worth it? Not worth it? ____Not the real rusty Useful links... ...and comments. Assume with me, for a moment, that we had the same ads as Slashdot (i.e. as opposed to the horrible ads we had before). Does that change anyone's opinion? Also, we did run a poll (via Arkady's co-op thingy) about whether people would be willing to pay a subscription for ad-free K5. Same content, same access, just ad-free instead of advertising supported. At the time, the results were pretty strongly in favor of time-based subscriptions, and pretty strongly against page-based subscriptions (like pay $X per thousand pages you look at). I'd also be interested to see how, or if, this sentiment has changed. ____Not the real rusty Did it get fixed? Was it reattached? Because if you actually lost a finger, I'd feel really bad for my outburst of laughter when I figured out how in the world you could have cut a finger off prying apart hamburger pattys. I'm guessing you were trying the "insert knife point and lever" trick, and it all went horribly, horribly wrong? I do hope it all came out (or is that "went back"?) ok. ____Not the real rusty drunk? Of course, it's considered gentlemanly to get drunk yourself at the same time ... Ah! I see you are an exponent of the age-old "She wants to, but you can't" gambit! Crafty, yes indeed... ____Not the real rusty Book club night Ok, the real reason for my posting this is to make sure my change to Scoop worked (note the more sensible message when you post a diary). But also, I thought I'd just mention that it was book club night, and we had a nice chat about Flatland. Next month is Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Great book. :-) Luckily for us... My fiancee (and book club foundress) studied religion and history in college. She's actually taken Islam classes that went over the Satanic Verses, so she has at least some of the foundation to help the rest of us out. I've read it before, and enjoyed the story and the writing a lot, even when I was sure I was missing some of the more spiritual subtleties. ____Not the real rusty As if.. Assuming, of course, this even happened. Which I doubt. WHBT. ____Not the real rusty Yeah? What about my mailbox! :-) I wouldn't set too much stock by it. Emmett's a bit... how shall we say... "excitable". I'm guessing he had a bad experience with GNOME or something, and had to blow off some steam. I would like to see a log, if you've got one. ____Not the real rusty I know! :-) sandefjord norway Courtesy of http://www.south-pole.com/p0000098.htm ____Not the real rusty On the difficulty of online trivia I did this a while back with my .sig. Guess where the .sig came from, win a prize. This is an *extremely* difficult thing to do, considering the contestants have the full power of google at their fingertips, and know how to use it. It'll be interesting to see if anyone can come up with a class of question that is difficult enough to make it a challenge. ____Not the real rusty South Africa? I went to high school with a girl who was unable to locate South Africa on a map. Things to consider: It was a wall-sized map of the world. She was unable to locate Africa, within a few minutes. When pointed to Africa, she remained at a loss as to where "SOUTH Africa" might be located. Needless to say, even the rest of us high schoolers were fairly astounded. She's not a dumb person, either. Some people... I dunno, they have a blockage or something. Oh! I almost forgot. When making an announcement at an assembly once, the same girl said (and I quote): "As many of you know, the school sponsors a Haitian child, from... Haitia." Haitia. Oh, they were rolling in the aisles that day. Sarah, I pray you don't read my site. :-) ____Not the real rusty Latex, coma, and Prince Queen of the damned in black rubber, the men all claim to love her...--Tuscadero If this diary were fictional, it would be a lot more believable, because I don't have the kind of imagination required to duplicate the utter strangeness of normal life. Featuring latex clothing, mysterious comas, and Prince, all I can say is, I'm not making this up. So we went to Edinburgh castle last night, for Quiz Night. Robin and his gang were there, as was Andrew, his friend Yoz, and some people Yoz knows. The evening started with Yoz explaining how he recently went into a coma for four days, for reasons that are still unclear. Basically, he went into a coma, and woke up four days later with a small scar on his chin, and the doctors' expert diagnosis is: "Erruuuuhhhh??" My first thought on hearing about the four day ordeal was "Imagine the email when he woke up!" Sure enough, he said he had 1600 messages in the inbox. Indications that our world is in dire trouble: I thought that. He knew the exact number offhand. I suspect the coma was secretly for tax purposes, but I couldn't swear to it. Later on, we met Yoz's friend Polly. Polly is British (as are Yoz and Andrew). But Polly's Britishness is a whole different class from theirs. Her accent is exactly what Americans imagine when they imagine a British accent. Very, very "Pip-pip, cheerio and all that, tennis anyone?" kind of British. The rest of us were all in computer-related fields. Someone asked what she did, and she told us that she is, and I quote, "...a fashion designer. I make clothing out of latex." Let me repeat that, for those of you who aren't paying attention: [Roger-Moore style accent] "Aye mayke clow-thing owt of lay-tex." We were all so intent on not reacting as though this were in any way bizarre that we completely neglected to ask her any of the scads of pertinent questions that occurred to us later, such as: You what? How does one get into the latex field? I'm sorry, you did say latex, didn't you? Do you stitch latex clothing, or kind of pour it into a mold? Is there such a thing as latex socks? Don't they make paint out of that? Can you make latex underwear that doesn't go "scrUNK, scrUNK, scrUNK" when you walk? Not that I'd know, mind you. But I've heard... Could there in fact be perfectly normal people among us right now who wear latex as a habit, because it's waterproof, yet not breathable? Are you wearing any latex right now? And so on. All questions that might occur to anyone, but were suppressed because of the thought-process-deadening effect of suddenly being told that the person next to you makes clothes out of latex. Try it, you'll find that you are incapable of having a normal thought for a good half hour. At least we were. The, to cap the night off, Robin told me that Prince has also been invited to the EFF Directors dinner in December. Prince! And I thought having dinner with Larry Lessig would be cool beyond words. That just puts a whole new spin on things, and really starts sounding a lot like a bad joke: So Lawrence Lessig, John Perry Barlow, Rusty, and Prince are having dinner... The only other odd thing that happened was that all fifteen or so members of our trivia team knew the answer to the question: "What were the wars between Carthage and Rome called?" (The Punic Wars). Everyone whispered it at the same time. You just don't feel properly like your life is a Stoppard play until you've been surrounded by over a dozen people whispering "The Punic Wars" in unison. Other fun factoids of the night: Marilyn Manson's real name is Brian Warner. What a dork. The only state George McGovern carried in whatever year it was he ran for president was Massachusetts. The citizens of my home state are such embarrasing losers. Who the hell would vote for McGovern? Joan Jett has a shaved head now, and looks eerily like Sinead O'Connor. That gives me a queasy feeling, but I don't know why. Leslie Howard played the title role in the 1936 film of "The Scarlet Pimpernel". For years, I thought a pimpernel was some kind of revolutionary-war era underwear. I envisioned mothers telling their children "Make sure you put on a clean pimpernel every day, in case you get hit by a horse." Turns out it's just a flower. Edinburgh Castle Note that the Edinburgh Castle here is not *that* Edinburgh Castle. It's the name of a bar in San Francisco. They do a mean fish & chips, wrapped in newspaper and everything. ____Not the real rusty Weird. Eerie. Which play was it? At the risk of sounding like "Butthead Goes to Yale" here, Stoppard rules. ____Not the real rusty A life? If I have a life, I'd hate to see what most geeks are doing with their time. :-) What I want to know is, whats Prince's real name? ____Not the real rusty Ha! But no, that was his former name. And not, his real name is not "The Paisley One" or "The Artist" either. ____Not the real rusty Well... Nixon wasn't evil yet. Given the candidates, yes, I think I'd have said vote for Nixon. ____Not the real rusty Thank God! I'm glad someone got that reference. Does anyone else find themselves unconsciously referring to mass culture in such a way that if they didn't get the reference, most people wouldn't notice you were doing it? I'm worried that my personal means of expression have been utterly subsumed by advertising copy and cartoon catchphrases. I wish I had the power, but I can't raise my hand if I'm not sure. I guess I've met the enemy, and he is us. ____Not the real rusty Take me back to ol' New England Ok, I'm a Massachusettsian originally. People in New England just don't do things like that. Clearly, I'll need to put some more work into getting in the proper mindset here... ____Not the real rusty Hey! You will note that nowhere did I use the phrase "the proper *orientation*". ____Not the real rusty about mojo The idea of mojo being tied to your rating of others strikes me as flawed, because the user is totally in control of that. So, to gain extra mojo, they only need to rate eveything a 5, which is just as harmful as irresponsible down-rating. Currently, there is at least no incentive to rate things down maliciously, but that would provide an incentive to rate things up spuriously, which would, IMO, throw the scale off worse than now. Secondly, the idea of weighing ratings based on mojo is kind of weakly supported. Like, because people consistently put effort and insight into their comments, the system assumes that they can be trusted to pick out the unfortunate few really bad ones and help knock them off the page. This already is a pretty sketchy assumption, based purely on ideas of "human nature." There's no reason you couldn't whore for mojo here as well, and then use it to go around zeroing anyone you saw fit. I tried to limit that possibility by making mojo strongly responsive to current events, and also fairly selective in who becomes trusted. It seems to be working, but I have no faith that the system is impregnable, by any means. Extending that to give everyone different weight based on their trust once again provides an incentive to whore, so that your ratings have more power. This first edges us further out on the already thin-ice of assumptions that the thing is built on, and then provides a good reason to push the mojo-whore button. The checks against that now are based on the very limited power you can earn, and the fair bit of effort it takes to earn even that. I'm extremely wary of making either the power greater or the effort smaller, and upsetting that balance. The question, really, is, are the potential negative effects worse than the potential positive ones? I think this idea is more likely to skew things even further than to significantly solve any problems we may have. I'm also still not convinced there are real problems with the system. The standard complaint is based on someone's personal ratings dropping. This happens. And generally, the more people are rating, the more ratings will tend toward the middle of the scale. So, it's possible that an overall downward trend in ratings indicates more rating going on. Anyway, I'm working on a set of statistical queries to see what the whole picture really looks like with comments. I will be sure to factor in a time-based analysis as much as possible, to see if there's more rating going on now than there has been in the past, and if this seems to be skewing the results. Meanwhile, if you want a little bit of reassurance about the state of K5 comments, have a gander at this diary. Interesting numbers. :-) ____Not the real rusty Please...send...tapes If anyone has a tape of the last three or four episodes (Buffy &&/&pipe;&pipe; Angel), please email me. I am still cableless, and haven't seen either in forever. Going...through...withdrawal... ____Not the real rusty Doh! I edited this to put spaces in, due to the aforementioned width problem. I forgot that editing diaries screws them up and sticks them to whatever user is editing. Dammit. Should be back in your page now. ____Not the real rusty The new new thing I read that just recently. Tell me if you got this too: It was a good read, but when all was said and done, I didn't feel like I knew a damn thing about Jim Clark, besides the public record stuff. It felt like Clark really didn't let Lewis (er, whoah. Didn't notice that name confluence before) into his life any more than anyone else. You know how most of the story consists of Clark blowing off lots of people and doing his own thing? I got the feeling he did that to Lewis too, but we didn't see those scenes. L: Uh, Mr. Clark, sir, I really have this deadline, and well, you said you'd help me out with the book and... C: Shuttup! Go away! I'm busy! I don't know. That was the read I got on it. ____Not the real rusty Crikey! Longest Thread Ever! :-) ____Not the real rusty Lilies Short, Douglas Copeland-style personal anecdote from the past couple of days. We had some people over for Thanksgiving, so Bret got some flowers. Among the flowers were lilies. Funeral homes use a lot of lilies to cover up the smell of formaldehyde, so consequently the smell of lilies is permanently attached in my brain to the smell of funeral homes. I loathe that smell. For two days we moved the lilies around the apartment, and finally I had to throw them out because I couldn't stand it anymore. I've been to three funerals. My grandfather, when I was maybe 11, an uncle a little after that, and a kid I knew from high school. The lily-aversion comes from my grandfather's funeral, the first one. I was completely shocked to discover that a wake could smell like that. I very clearly remember thinking it was almost obscene that the public rituals of death were still allowed to reek so overpoweringly. It wasn't a scarring or emotional event for me. I wasn't close to that grandfather at all; he was kind of the scary distant grumpy patriarch type. I remember mostly that there were a lot of upset relatives, and I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible. So the real association I have with the smell of lilies is the twitchy feeling you get when you know you're supposed to be emotionally overwhelmed, but you really just feel irritated at the intrusion into your otherwise fairly undemanding life. Events like funerals of distant relatives, education-related functions, and weddings have always been like that for me. I think this should disturb me more than it does. no no no! You got it wrong! It was: Hey rusty, have you ever seen a dead person? Yeah. A wake? No, he was dead. Note for the first time reader: a lot of this exchange depends on timing, but it originally occurred between rob and I when we were like 15 years old. I still think about it from time to time and am unable to keep from laughing. ____Not the real rusty Argh!! Still no cable. No WB. No Buffy, no Angel. Life sucks. I'm gonna have to keep up with the storyline here then. BTW, I know who started this, and you never mailed me last week's shows! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Er Ok, this is kind of broken. I need to make it so the search interface will properly page through diary entries and stuff. For now, though, if you click either that "More on" link, or the Diary icon, it'll go to "Search" and show your last 30 diaries. After that, it does get awkward. Thanks for pointing this out. ____Not the real rusty We need more of you. trhurler, I applaud you for saying what's on your mind, both here and in your comments. First off, a great many people are getting thin-skin syndrome. I've noticed some of this too, lately, and it disturbs me as much as it does you. I agree with some of the other comments here who pointed out that it's not nearly as bad here as virtually anywhere else, but yes, it's here too. I don't know if there's anything that can be done about it. It's not something that can be solved technically, IMO. Thin-skinnedness is a social problem, and is really only amenable to social solutions. I think it stems from the fact that it's so easy to forget that the entity you're writing your comments at is a real person, and is also pretty much a stranger to you, who doesn't know or care about your idiosyncracies and your personal way of expressing yourself. For example, if you met someone in person, and they said "I think this open source thing is just a fad, and it'll die out any day now", and you were an open source partisan, you would probably not reply "Dude! Get a fucking clue! Open source is here to stay, and your crappy-ass proprietary systems will be dead meat in two years!" You'd likely say something more like, "I think maybe you don't totally understand what the free software concept is all about. You should read RMS and ESR's writings on it... " and you might explain how it isn't a "fad" since it was the original way of writing software, etc etc. The point is, to a complete starnger, that you, say, just met at a party, most people would be much more polite than they tend to be online, even though socially, the situation is virtually identical. I've tried pretty hard to get people to realize that everyone here is a person, who deserves as much consideration as you would desire for yourself. Arguments can get heated, without people ceasing to be civil. But the most important thing, I think, is to get everyone to understand that you are talking to real people, who can be hurt by what you say and how you say it. The other major factor is the "FAQ patience" problem. The longer people participate in a community, the better they understand the basic unspoken rules and norms of that community. As newcomers continue to arrive, they will all make the same mistakes you made, and ask the same "dumb" questions you asked when you were a newbie. For some reason, everyone eventually forgets when they were in the same place, and starts to lose theri temper at frequently asked questions. This is another social problem, but one that I can at least help with by getting some decent help online for newcomers. And I will. A lot of the people here are less interested in discussion than they are in trying to force everyone to agree with them; they seem to think rating down things they disagree with and arguing a lot will somehow serve as incentive to conform I don't know if I agree with that. There is always a vocal minority who thinks that this is some kind of zero-sum game, where someone wins and someone loses. They are trying to win an argument. They never will, and eventually, they'll get tired of it and realize that we're all just trying to learn here, and we'll hardly ever "settle" anything. I don't think that that is the majority here though. I'm actually amazed by how many of the threads here end up with people pretty much agreeing to disagree, and both sides maybe having learned something about how others see it. [Typical K5-er description] You hit one part of our audience dead-on there. Yes, that guy you describe is here, in large numbers, and I think they probably do more than their share of commenting. *But* it would be a mistake to assume that that's who "we" are. Read Who are you? and Who are you? II. There is a very wide range of people here, and many, probably most, of them aren't like that at all. "The kids" that you describe are here because they want to know more about stuff that you *do* know more about. In a few years, they will be you, complaining about all these dumb kids online now. This, IMO, is normal and good, and just cause some of them are dumb now doesn't mean we should despair. Far from it-- the net has maybe the healthiest and most promising population in the world. Places like K5 are teaching people how to "live" in this new medium. We are making the world better, and part of that is suffering the (temporarily) dumb. We're all teachers here. One thing I'll say about k5, though: it withstands mojo-whoring a lot better than people would think. It is easy to do, but it has very, very little impact, which is a credit to the site's design. Similarly, it is easy for twinks to rate posts down a lot, and this too has little or no impact. A good job well done. Thank you. :-) And Karsten (who did a lot of the designing for Mojo) thanks you as well. The technical side has worked a lot better than I could have hoped for, so far. I hope we can keep on top of any scaling issue that come up, as they surely will, but it's good to hear that it's working. To conclude, I think you're nearly dead-on in most of this. I hope it doesn't make you despair for the future of K5, or of the possibility of online discussion. Sometimes, I think the same thing. "This will never work. It's bound to implode eventually, like every other attempt." But most of the time, I think the someone will find a system that works, and hell, it might as well be us, right? :-) So, don't give up. We need you. In fact, we need a lot more of you. Please stay and help teach others what you already know. ____Not the real rusty Syndemication XML import/export is planned, for most stuff, eventually. But people's desire to have their diary XML-ified and cross-posted will probably nudge me into getting that running sooner rather than later. Carnage4Life is working on this right now, actually. ____Not the real rusty cause we're lazy hackers It isn't really possible to post "0 word" stories actually. I suspect it was padded with a space or an &nbsp;, which would seem like a word to Scoop. It won't let you post a totally blank intro, though, so truly 0-word entries can't be done. It probably should check for no "real" words in an entry, and either disallow it, or just count it as 0. ____Not the real rusty I'm so confused The CEO of the company I work at, and some other bigwig who I don't know just came to my desk, and PHBed me for like five minutes. The upshot is, I'm supposed to "circle back" with one of the consultants and advise him on something I'm presumed to be knowlegeable about related to a project they all seem to think I'm involved in. Problems with this: I don't know anything about this project. I haven't ever even talked to the guy I'm supposed to have been "working with" on it. I don't know what I'm supposed to be advising about. I don't know what "circle back" is supposed to mean. It's like working in a fucking Kafka novel. yeah I nodded and said "sure" a bunch of times, and they went away. I assume if anything needs to be done, someone will tell me. *shrug* ____Not the real rusty Good weekend Retrospective horoscope for this weekend: You will see an old friend, and learn a new game. Law enforcement will figure prominently. Look both ways before crossing the street. Yesterday Jen came into town from Philly. She'll be here all week, which is cool. Maybe we can convince her to move. :-) So, I had to get up pretty early (er, for me) to pick her up at the airport, nearly got t-boned by a cab driving through the Castro on the way home (yipes!) and I was beat when we got back, so I napped most of the day. Never really recovered-- we went out last night with Jen and Tony and I had to go home at like 11 cause I was exhausted. Watched Saturday Night Live, which of course sucked, even with Tom Green. Today we went to Alcatraz (Jen being here gives us an excuse to do touristy stuff). It was pretty cool. I wish we had taken the boat before the one we took back though... I had enough, but the girls were off somewhere dithering. Good audio tour though. Came home, played the Harry Potter Quidditch card game for a while (present from Jen) which, once you get the hang of the rather complex rules and order of play, is actually surprisingly fun. Tomorrow we might play some Kill Dr. Lucky instead. I made a honey baked ham and Bret made scalloped potatos for dinner, which was superb all around, then we Kozmo'ed The Rock and some Ben & Jerry's, lit one of those reconstituted fire logs and enjoyed some good old fashioned Bruckheimerian ass whooping, courtesy of Cage and Connery. It was a good choice right after seeing Alcatraz, cause we recognized a lot of the locations ("Hey! That's the excercise yard!"). Then to round the night off, a high-speed chase went right by our front windows. I wasn't in good viewing position to see the chasee, so I heard this doppler-shifted "...clangclangclangCLANGCLANGCLANGclangclangclang...", thought "What the..." and then like fifteen cops roared by. It was pretty cool. I wish I had seen the car they were chasing though, it sounded like hell. I tried to hit the police scanner to see what was up, but got no audio. I'm upgrading RealPlayer, since maybe that's the problem. But that Nutty Waffle Cone is calling, so that's all for now. Yeah! I had to pick and choose, obviously, so I just put flavors I like on the poll. Except for Boring Cookie Dough, which I thought would be obvious. Anyway, CHBC is my favorite too. That stuff might well be the perfect ice cream. ____Not the real rusty Email .sig My email .sig used to include: One great big festering neon distraction, I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied. Of course, I was always talking about the web, but I suppose no one knew that. :-) ____Not the real rusty Hit the nail... ...right on the head there. Those are the main reasons I don't like PHP. The whole "including code in html" thing irritates me, as does the straight CGI operation. mod_perl is the way to go. But I'm pretty tired of explaining why to people, so I ain't gonna. ____Not the real rusty CGI Nobody runs PHP as a standalone CGI, everybody uses the apache module, mod_php ;^)= I meant the fact that there's no persistence in PHP. Every time you hit the page, it runs the script, much like a normal CGI. I.e. as opposed to a mod_perl or persistent servlet type of setup. separating presentation and content is the programmer's job, not the language's. True. But some languages make it easier than others. I think PHP and perl are equally bad, the former from the "include code in html" side, and the latter from the "include html in code" side. The JSP constantly running servlet solution sounds really interesting. try mod_perl. It runs applications persistently, it's Free, and you don't have to suffer Java to use it. :-) ____Not the real rusty Mojo calculations Also, I'd *really* like the formula to get mojo Here it is: You take the rating from the last 30 *rated* comments you've posted, or all rated comments from the past 60 days (whichever comes first). Order them by timestamp, most recent to least recent. Then you run the following algorithm: r = rating w = weighting factor s = total weighted rating sum n = total weighted number of comments w = 30 n = 0 s = 0 for each rating r: { s = (r * w) + s n = n + w w = (w - 1) next r } Mojo = s / n So, the upshot is that the first comment gets weighted as if you had posted thirty comments at that rating, the second counts like 29, the third 28, and so on. The final mojo is the average of all these values. Thus, the system reacts a lot more strongly to newer comments than older ones, which is why you can baounce in and out of trusted so fast. The other important bit is that to be trusted, you must have a mojo, as calculated above, of >3.5, AND you must have at least 10 rated comments contributing to that. You could have a mojo of 5.00, but with only 6 comments, and you'd not be trusted. To be untrusted, you have to have a mojo <1, with at least 5 contributing rated comments. Your story has actually pointed out a flaw in the system. Comments attached to hidden stories still count in your mojo, but if they're unfairly rated, no one can change them. That's definitely a bug, and we'll have to fix that somehow. Probably by allowing logged-in users the ability to see "hidden" stories if they want to, since determining the story status of any given comment would be kind of hard on an already burdensome process. ____Not the real rusty Rating Secrets Revealed!! > mojo = s / n Deep, man. Deep. Ha! I actually didn't notice, or pick those variables on purpose. That's pretty good, though. I have to make sure I use that in future descriptions. Very e = mc^2, huh? :-) Just in case, how about recalculating the TU mojo threshold (daily or so) to make sure a certain percentage of users are Trusted? To make up for fluctuations in the general ratings attitude, seasonal or otherwise. The system doesn't do this automatically, but I do get a daily list of who's trusted and who's not, and how many users there are, and some other info. If there were a need to adjust the parameters, all of the numbers in that formula can be tweaked. Oddly, the original values seem to be working out pretty well. There's been about 110 trusted users a day for quite a while now. It appears that maybe 2/3 of those are constantly trusted, and the other third tends to rotate between a bunch of folks, like yourself, who kind of hover near the cutoff. So, in general, it does seem to be working pretty well. Recently that comment in the dead thread was mod'ed up. People can still access it from my User Info page; I guess it isn't an absolute impossibility to get the rating mended for anyone with friends to bitch to :v). Yeah, still. I don't know if it's fair to rate people based on what they said in a story that never went public anyway. This will need some pondering... Also, (I dunno if I should say this in a public forum... this isn't too public...) I've noticed that I can rate comments twice if I wait a day or so between ratings. This is kinda bad. You can rate comments any time you want to. Basically, you get one data point. You can change your rating any time. So, if you rated a comment "4", because it was pretty good and you thought it should get some attention, but then came back later and saw that someone had responded and demonstrated that the comment was wrong (like, factually incorrect, in the part that made it interesting to you), you might like to change your rating to "2". So, you pop out the list, which is pre-set to 4, because that's what you rated it before, set it to "2" and "Rate All". You replaced your "4" rating with a "2" rating, and recalculated the total rating of the comment, is what just happened. So, you get to have one data point that you own, and you can change it any time. I suspect this is what you're seeing when you re-rate things, and it is entirely on purpose. On the subject of getting people to rate comments higher and weighting ratings on mojo, how cool would it be to relate mojo somehow to the ratio of the average rating the user gets to the average rating the user gives... this would be soooooo cool. Just thought of it off the top of my ass, and it's not even half-baked, but... just how bad a load would that be? Calculable, certainly. I don't think it'd be part of the site engine itself, but I've been putting together some stats on how rating is going, and that would be a very interesting thing to find out. Do people who rate others higher usually get rated higher themselves, or what? Good question. On the other hand, I don't necessarily think the two are related in a way that would be meaningful for assigning trust or figuring mojo. The canonical counterexample would be the person who reads and rates, but rarely comments. There are a lot of them, and I think they do us a lot of good. But their ratio would be 0 or infinity, depending on which value you put on top. I don't think that would help us determine anything about an individual reader. As a statistical checking tool, it would be interesting to find out though, eh? ____Not the real rusty Stasis More of the same. Same ol' same ol'. What goes around comes around. Nothing new under the sun. Been there, done that. Stuck in a rut. Spinning my wheels. Itch. Yadda yadda yadda. Nothing worthwhile to say. So say nothing, you might protest. Well, I'm trying to make this diary posting a habit, at least once per day, so this is my post for today. Think of it as the little green pill of my diarist's existence. Just marking time, till that big wheel comes around again... "Keeping in habit" Balancing the lack of anything to say with the desire to keep it a habit, I at least made it short. Actually, there's quite a lot I could have written, but I didn't really have the energy to at the time. And anyway, what I did write is basically a summary of what could have been. Tick tock. ____Not the real rusty Required? You actually don't have to enter extended copy. You're required to pick a section and a topic (except in diaries, where that's done for you), a titla, and introtext. Everything else is optional. ____Not the real rusty Welcome back! Where've you been, anyway? Sheesh, it's been, what... months now? Good to see you again, anyway. Say hi to all the guys for me. :-) ____Not the real rusty ROFL Like, OMG, that was *so* funneee! <*g*>!!!! ;-) ____Not the real rusty Muse Weird night. I have no organized way to present any of this, so I'm just gonna have a non-sequitur-fest here. Life is very strange. Part of the time (i.e. here), I'm a well-known and influential person. Most of the time, I'm just this anonymous white boy. It's hard switching back and forth. I spent part of tonight searching the web for ex-girlfriends. I don't really know why-- I guess I just wonder what people are doing. The only one I found was Marine. No surprise there. I should email her. She still doesn't know I'm engaged. I think this ex- thing may be because of Inoshiro's girlfriend troubles. Reminded me of when Marine left, the first time. I still have a two shoeboxes of letters from that year, and after. I read them sometimes, to try to remember who I was before. I think that was the first time I ever found out that things wouldn't always go my way, and that there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't used to be so cynical. Too much there to cover in one diary entry. Maybe I'll do more of that later. I found out tonight I used to live 8 blocks from Jenni in DC. I knew she was nearby somewhere, but I didn't know where exactly. I think I know someone who lived (still lives, maybe) in her building. Feeling very adrift... plenty of distance I do live with my (non-ex) fiancee, with whom I'm extremely happy. I didn't have any way to express this, but it has nothing to do with relationships past or present. It's egotistical as hell, but it's all about me, really. I guess I'm looking for what my future might have been, except that that's absurd, because if I had stayed with any of the others, their future would have been different. But still. That's the best I can explain it. I imagine living with an ex-fiancee would suck. I hope never to have any of those. :-) ____Not the real rusty Email Day Big exciting day. Spent like three hours answering email. I got a little behind in the past few days. Had a huge nightmare this morning. I went to bed early, like 11:00PM, and then woke up at 2:30AM. Fooled with the site a little, read for a while, and finally go back to sleep at like 5. Some time between then and 8 I had this super-freaky nightmare. This gang of frat-boy types thought I had stolen a tent that belonged to them, and they really wanted it back. So they basically gaslighted me ("gaslight": To play tricks on someone and make them think they're nuts). I forget what they did, but at one point I was crawling through this tunnel, and there was a midget guy who lived in it, and he had all these doll heads with blue hair hanging from the roof of the tunnel, so you had to kind of shoulder through them (the tunnel was very low and narrow), and the midget dude was in there with me, dancing around, chanting something. Scared the crap out of me. I came out of the tunnel in a police station (!!??), and no one would believe me that there was a tunnel leading into there. I even went and pointed to it, but they said there was nothing there. They were, of course, in on the plot to make me think I was crazy. There was something about a fire-lookout tower falling down with me on top too, but I don't remember much else. Anyway, I woke up terrified. Email? I don't get as much as most people think, actually. Don't tell anyone though. :-) When you filter out mailing lists and "new K5 account" bounces, I get maybe 20 or 30 messages a day. Half of those are usually from Inoshiro, who tends to send me one thought at a time, instead of wrapping them all up once a day ;-). I get very very little spam, although it's been on the upswing lately. It varies a lot though. There are those eerie days where I get no personal mail at all. That always freaks me out. ____Not the real rusty Only 2:30 Only 2:30AM, and I'm off to bed. It's a banner night. Have to be at work by 1:00PM tomorrow. The mgmt is in a panic about my project, which was supposed to start a week ago, and is just getting underway. It's a little scary; our entire sales force is out there selling what I'm just starting to code, right now. No pressure there, eh? It's cool though, because tonight I solved a very tricky geometry issue, and damned if the solution's not *pretty*. I'm very pleased. :-) Reading "The Predictors", about those zany chaos guys who thought they could beat the financial markets. We'll see if they succed. Before, that, read "Zeitgeist" by Bruce Sterling, who is coming to my local library, two blocks from here, soon. Rock. It was good, as expected. Cliff Stoll cracks me up. He has the best nerd humor, hands down. Oh great! Now everyone knows where I live. I'll be beseiged with screaming teenage girls 24/7. ;-) Actually, it's sponsored by Booksmith, but Sterling will be at the branch library on... umm... whatever street that is right around the corner here. And I'll definitely be there. Maybe I can schmooze Sterling into an interview. :-) Then again, I'm a crappy schmoozer, so maybe not. ____Not the real rusty Duly buried I moved the New Diaries to the bottom of the section stories page. It's too late though--even though we don't think we are, we're all irredeemably obsessed with other people's lives. I think by adding diaries I might have just invented the biggest single time-waster currently in my bookmarks. I'm sure there are worse on the web, but this is pretty bad. I'm struggling to keep from checking diaries every five minutes here. ____Not the real rusty I never meant to... I didn't mean to start that trend. I don't actually use the phrase anymore. But, y'know, like the (nonexistent) cabal, and MLP, it's part of K5 history/culture. It'll wear off eventually. :-) ____Not the real rusty Er Actually, I didn't mean that MLP and TINK5C would wear off. Just that they were other examples of K5 culture. But I may be wrong about "The other site" wearing off, as well. It doesn't seem to be. ____Not the real rusty yeah... Originally it was ironic. We all came from slashdot, how else could we all know exactly what "other site" it was? I really don't like to see it used as a put-down. People don't have any idea the kind of effort the BSI gang put in, and the shit they put up with for the sake of that site. It pisses me off when people criticize them without knowing what it's like. I can criticize them though. ;-) ____Not the real rusty no, no.. I can criticize though. Meaning, I've built a web community. I've dealt with upset geeks. I've watched it grow, and seen it change, and worked my ass off keeping it running. I've watched it fall over and picked it back up again. Running one of these sites for a lot of users is just *way* more work than it looks like, especially when you have a full-time job as well. So, I can project forward, and imagine what it's been like for them, doing this for years, in a much more confrontational community. So, I feel like I can criticize them when I think they fumbled. I usually don't... but sometimes I can't quite help it. :-) The point is, Taco at al. get a lot of shit for what are basically normal byproducts of running a successful, high-demand site. It irks me when people who've never really busted their ass for something sit back and take mean-spirited potshots. There are legit criticisms, I think, but a lot of the sniping is just jealousy, IMO. I do smile now, though, when I see someone drag out the old "so go do better" response. :-) ____Not the real rusty Absinthe I voted for absinthe, not because I've ever tried it (real absinthe is illegal everywhere but Spain, I think), but because my roommate in college and I had a brief obsession with it. Absinthe was *huge* at one time, and almost no one today knows what it is. It was as popular and controversial as crack, during the Impressionist period, although legal at first. Then temperance campaigns vilified and demonized "The Devil Wormwood" and it ultimately was outlawed almost everywhere. It's said you can still dig up a bottle of two of homebrew just about anywhere in Europe, but you need to have local connections. Just one of those odd little historical vortices that has a whole lot of relevance again now, but is universally ignored and unknown. ____Not the real rusty Exit I second that about Exit Music. In fact, I had to hit the MP3 of it, now that you've put it in my head. ...Wake... from your sleep... ____Not the real rusty and yet For all the pretty music and crescendoing whatnot, Exit Music includes one of the all-time classic expressions of loathing: "We hope that you choke." Interesting counterpoint. That line pops up in my head all the time now, and always makes for a good .sig. ____Not the real rusty Dysfunctional Stayed up till 4AM writing diary code, then I couldn't sleep, finally got to sleep at 9:30 AM, woke up at 4:30 PM. I have the world's most dysfunctional lifestyle. More fun... Now I have to drive down the peninsula to San Mateo to pick up a binder that I left at work, so I can design some database tables for a new project. I hope my key will get me into the building-- that would really suck if it didn't. The project will be pretty cool-- it's really kind of my baby, so it'll be a lot of work, but it's new code that I get to write all by myself, so no more fixing up the mistakes of previous hackers. :-) In other news, Bret is starting a book club, which should be a good way to meet cool people. I told her she can't let me have any say in organizing it, because I'll start coming up with cross-merchandising tie-ins, and there'll be a website before anyone can say "boo". I tend to be a little overly grandiose in my schemes, in case anyone couldn't tell. And you're all not helping, making this little website into a big deal, you know. ;-) Diaries seem to be doing well so far. Traffic is way up today, much more than I would have expected. It'll calm down when everyone gets over the initial "new toy" phase, but I think this will be good for the community overall. The only problem is now even more of my time will be sucked up reading K5 stuff. Oh yeah, and we need a "friends list" of some kind, so that you can be notified when people you know or find interesting update their diaries. Like a diary-wide hotlist. Shouldn't be too hard to add. Ask hurstdog :-) I am Officially Not In Charge of Poll Stuff. Although he may have fixed this already, and I didn't implement my pages right. I seem to recal something about poll previewing being possible... ____Not the real rusty Second that Solid info, there. I'd like to see it submitted as a story too. ____Not the real rusty Wow! That absolutely rocks. I think you really did hit the Big Important Themes that have characterized the site throughout our life so far-- kudos for an excellent editorial eye. What I'd like to see is some narrative to go along with it. Maybe that's something I could actually add, or maybe it should be done by others. I don't know if I could be objective, or rather, if my subjective view would add something. Or maybe the articles should just stand on their own as a kind of "trail", and the readers can draw their own conclusions. Anyway, this is a fantastic idea. Maybe it should be posted on our one-year anniversary? It's coming soon, on December 21st. Kind of a look back at the year that was. Speaking of which, my God, what memories that story linked above evokes. It feels like a billion years ago. It actually was three apartments ago. Who ever knew that K5 would actually... *be* something? Life is so weird. ____Not the real rusty Fixed that little problem But it was a one-time favor, so don't go expecting it all the time! ;-) Do use preview, and yes, you will have the ability to edit entries yourself, eventually. ____Not the real rusty The Wiki/Slash/Virgule/Everything Integration I'm on something of a one-man quest to take the good ideas from Slash, Wiki, mod_virgule (which runs Advogato) and Everything and roll them all up into this thing called Scoop. Y'see, at heart, I'm an integrator. I started with Slash, because that was the most developed at the time, and had tested ideas about how to form a foundation for future coolness. I took the blocks/vars concept from slash, as well as the stories/comments layout, and a few other things. When there's a clear target to shoot for, it's easier to create solid code, so Scoop ended up being like slash would have been if they knew what they were writing to begin with. The diaries are a first foray into virgule-land. I still haven't come up with a good use for trust metrics, but maybe someday I will, and those will enter into play somehow. Mojo is a sort of trust metric, and maybe the key is refining that to be more scientific. Soon, the Wiki "edit-everything" idea will have it's shot. I do plan to add story editing and revisioning to assist the collaborative edit process. Chances are it'll be backing toward a Wiki from the secure end, rather than starting with totally open content, mostly due to the existing system, and my fears that wiki-style systems are open to serious attack possibilities when they scale beyond a certain number of users. But users being able to revise their own stories, at the very least, is an obvious needed feature. Someday, I'd really like to work Everything-style smart linking in. Not sure how yet... ideas welcome. And having seen how utterly cool the diaries on Advogato are was what inspired me to add them here. It adds a whole layer of community on, with so little extra code. Even if relatively few people actively maintain them, I think it's a win. ____Not the real rusty Transformers Little known fact: "Transformers: The Movie" was Orson Welles last film. He was the voice of "Omnicron, the planet-eating robot" IIRC, and in fact looked rather like he'd eaten a couple planets by then. Anyway, pb, you may keep your hidden sid or not, as pleases you. I think this ought to be a little more manageable in the long run though; no more 5,000 comment sid's, eh? And you have to write it all in HTML because I suck. :-) I meant to add a "Plain text / Html" selector for stories too, a long time ago. I keep forgetting. It'll be in the next round of fixes... I hope. ____Not the real rusty Poll options... I voted for ISS, but I *would* have voted for "Moon Base" if it had been an Evil Moon Base. ____Not the real rusty depends It depends on your platform. I use NS 4.74/linux, and my PRE text looks the same as normal text. See if you can adjust your "monospaced" font face/size. That usually does it for me. ____Not the real rusty Diaries, at last! Well, I finally got down to work and implemented user diaries, which I've been promising around for a while now. Actually, it was pretty easy. They sort of ride on top of the existing section/topic code. It's kind of a hack, as diary entries have a special status within the core code, but it's not too much of a hack. So now, go forth and post as your lives progress. I hope people find this interesting and useful. And lots of respect to Advogato for having this way first. We have comments on diaries too, though. ;-) Heh. I've been chatting up the idea for a while on #kuro5hin, and elsewhere. I finally saw my way clear tonight to hacking it in with a minimum of fuss. Honestly, the whole thing took about 2 hours, so that's why it appeared so suddenly. There's much less to it than it would seem -- it's just piggybacked on the existing story mechanism, really. ____Not the real rusty friends and stuff but can I add a user's _diary_ to my hotlist? No. Maybe we should invent a "friends list" to complement the hotlist... For example, when I look at your list of diaries: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=section;section=Diary;user=diary_2 I see two diary entries listed and only one of them is yours! Yeah, I fixed a broken link in someone else's entry and accidentally "owned" the post. Oops. I set it back to the right topic, and won't be editing any diaries anymore. :-) ____Not the real rusty Currently, no They were, for a few minutes, but I decided it'd be better to keep our default rdf focused on the normal stories. No reason they couldn't be syndicated, though. I'll have to think about the best way to do that. What did you want to use them for? ____Not the real rusty