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 



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.  



When did I say that?



 No, I didn't mean it. I'm not sure what "the latest scoop" even is anymore. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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. 



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



 



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.  



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.  



Dude



 We can scrape off cum with 0 downtime now.
Priorities! 



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?



 



No sign of one



 I did some poking in the database. If he had one, it wasn't obvious.  



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.
 



Perfect



 "Rusty you're a cunt."
This thing is amazing! That's exactly what I would have said to me.  



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. 



Why?



 



Haha



 I talked to a girl! I must have the hots for her. 
Nerd virgin. :-) 



Oh my god 



 I'M A MUENSTER! 



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.  



See



 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/5/21/12741/5117/6#6
I'm not complaining about it, just getting used to it. 



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. 



How do you drag? Or select?



 



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. 



Waste of a perfectly good finger



 I could be picking my nose or doing any number of useful things with that finger. 



You must be loose



 



I'm glad we're on the same page here



 



Kuro5hin.org:



 Technology and Culture, for Llama Fuckers. 



Spaces



 I don't even really understand how to get more desktops anymore. I couldn't even find spaces. Does it still exist?  



Oh look!



 I guess there are still multiple desktops. That's great. They made it all a lot less obvious though huh? 



Thanks!



 http://i.qkme.me/3pdpc3.jpg  



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.  



PICTURE



 Help this not be a total failure. 



lol



 faggot
Same shirt though. :-) 



BAN ME IF YUO CAN



 bundle of sticks 



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 



roofie face?



 



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.  



O_O



 o_0 



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. 



YAY



 Well done, non-coward :-) 



Why don't you have a seat over there



 



If Terry Pratchett had a child with



 Saddam Hussein. 



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. 



Except



 for the bridesmaids, who were dressed as pruple-assed baboons. 
But that's how they're dressed in most weddings. 



Or hobo



 http://www.regretsy.com/2011/08/02/its-called-poverty-youve-probably-never-heard
-of-it/ 



Also misogyny and antisemitism



 Are there people who claim they love 1940s culture?  



Dat ass!



 Forget about you, post more of Jeannie :-) 



We're old.



 AND NOT EVEN SORRY 



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.   



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.  



No way to tell



 Without nudes. There are just too many ways to make them look different with clothing.   



Why are you



 looking at cosplayers then? 



Uhhhhh



 facepalm? 



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.  



gay diary



  



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.   



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.  



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.  



Yes, that may well be, but, on the other hand, 



 you're a crazy person. :-) 



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. 



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. 



Sure



 I don't have an absence of belief. I have a positive faith in the existence of universal rules.  



No True Scotsman $



 



The Athiest's Creed:



 1. I, and only I, am a TRUE atheist 



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.  



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.  



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. :-) 



This is probably the easiest way to explain it:



 http://imgur.com/liv5H,GApz8 



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.  



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. 



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.  



#k5isdying



 #meatflaps 



You're right



 Why is anyone linking to K5 from G+? That's odd. 



INFORMATIVE!



 #trending  



What is this even about?



 Made front page because flesh eating bacteria. But I have no idea what this poll is about.  



FLESH EATING BACTERIA NEWS?



 Oh jesus i had my cruise control on there...
Is this something I need CNN to know about? 



Congratulations!



 



Pics



 or it didn't happen :-) 



POST THEM!



 I don't think I've ever seen a picture of you. Anyway there's only like four people here now.  



PS



 That shit cray. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfM_wS7qYfY 



She should think of it



 as gaining a space where a leg used to be.   



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.  



Shhhh



 I was talking about you. 



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.  



HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA



 It was epic. Those faggots think I'm banned now too, but I'm not.  



Now I am



 lol 



It's exactly as horrifying as you imagine



 



My wife and I



 have sex. 



Yes but



 that's the wrong kind of sex. 



rustina.mov



 



Ummmmmmm



 <.<  



Lots of jobs suck



 So?  



Cause why?



 Which one?  



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? 



This man makes an excellent point.



 



Kill yourself



  



Chubby thighs



 



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.  



Hot



 



No



 We need the Committee for the Promotion of Horsecock and the Prevention of Schitzoaffective Disorder.  



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. 



I've never even heard of freeway cola



 



So far



 You're winning. I'm drinking cider. 



What happens?



 



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. 



Let me know



 if it keeps happening. I fixed what I suspect was the problem, but maybe it's something else. 



Cancel?



 Cancel cancel. Cancel? Cancel. 



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. 



No



 Too old. 



Testing...



 test  



Dress better



 That's a good one. Stick with that. But purposely fail the rest of them -- those are stupid resolutions.  



Over easy



 Or scrambled. I had scrambled with Jarlsberg cheese this morning. Yum.  



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.   



WHERE'S THE FUCKING LIKE BUTTON



 What a shit website.  



You accidentally the whole chicken



 on purpose?  



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]



 



That's so outrageous



 that my outrage is outraged. 



My outage is also outraged



 



lol fake VEVO



 



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 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.  



HEY Y U LEAVE FACEBOOK



 Now it's my turn to pry. That time of month?   



I would think sandwich ethics



 would be important to you. 



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.   



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. 



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. 



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. 



Yes



 arctic circle candy etc 



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. 



You betcha



 Done. What's funny is the version on K5 was updated more recently than the version on localroger.com. 



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.  



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.   



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. :-) 



I'm a mellow dude



 I really just want my carpet back, man. 



The fun part is



 It's viral. If you comment in an occupied story, the protesters move on and occupy your stories.  



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.  



AdBlock Plus



 which you should be using anyway. But I'm going to make them go away now in any case, so whatever. 



Delete system32



 That'll fix it. 



This.



 



Wow



 Just wow. 



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.  



mfw



 2011
Not using adblock.  



Maslow's Heirarchy:





Food, water, sex
Safety and security
Love, family
Self-esteem, confidence
Awesome watches.
Steampunk
Furry / cosplay





60%



 I chose at random.  



Yeesh



 I don't even want to eat a Big Mac that smells like a Big Mac. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



Hippie fail



 



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.  



I SEE YOU STARTED EARLY SOLDIER



  



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  



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 *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.  



ror



 I'm sorry, you'll have to go back to fucking sheep instead. 



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. 



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. 



Welcome to Jamaica, mon and have a nice day



 



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. 



You're quirky



 I like the cut of your jib. 



What's your emblem?



 pics or it didn't happen 



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.  



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?  



My ballsack already has tomtom



 



Sounds convenient



 capitalist running dog. 



I can't watch that vidya. 



 I look so little! 



Typo



 should read "Learn to PROMOTE suicide" 



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 



Yes



 I mean, no.
Time, not space.
No, I don't understand the question. 



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. 



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? 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



The motherboard power controller



 It's something that they can't fix without basically replacing the machine. Grar. 



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. 



$20, same as in town.



 



Ah ha ha ha



 No, I was just bored. :-) 



I love it so far



 I was hesitant because Glamorama was so shitty. But Lunar Park seems like a return to form. 



Zyrtec



 



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  



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. 



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. 



Is that all-time



 or some time range? 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Of course I did



 n't. 



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



No



 She likes some awful tweenie song, but I refuse to play it for them.  



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. 



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. 



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!  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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 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. 



Server shuffle



 Voxel's closing the datacenter we were at, so they virtualized our boxes and moved them. It went very smoothly.  



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.  



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.  



The live ones are not paid for.



 So, not really live.  



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. :-) 



The app store



 No way is their power to deny apps that compete with their services going to last forever. 



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. 



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.  



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.) 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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 



Flounders in the Night



 ...one-sided glances... 



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.  



Oh, also



 Beer. I'm feeling about a pint low right now, actually. 



So are you



 and me. She's just doing it quicker, and with more doughnuts. 



There is a pretty good



 argument to be made in favor of death by cheesecake.  



I like the



 ...last three sentences, where the conservative political moralizing makes it whiplash from funny right to sad.  



RIP



  



Yer Welcome [nt]



 Thanks for pinging me about it. Yes, the [nt] was a lie.  



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.  



Brilliant



 Shipping companies should invest, as a hedge against piracy.  



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.  



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.  



Or not?



 I need to go to sleep I think. SeenIg things.  



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. 




Red flags



 All up in ur Amtrak.  



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. 



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. 



Oh well



 At least we have K5. A tiny place for reasonable people, who also have an interest in horsecock.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



This is so street.



  



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.  



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). 



Although



 If you're offering, I'm listening. What's worth $650 to you? :-) 



Got any suggestions?



 This jacket hunt has gone on for over a year now. It's getting a bit silly. 



Been looking



 Will continue, but no luck so far. 



Something like



 Either the above, or a black or dark gray wool car coat type of thing.  



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. 



Yeah, that's not bad [nt]



 



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.  



What makes you so sure it's



 sub-par? 



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 really in any way the same



 I kind of like the one on the left though.  



I like the cut of your jib



 I also wish to subscribe to your newsletter.  



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. 



Where's my codpiece?



 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
(911 nevar forget) 



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Sure



 NO DRAGON AGE! YOU HEARD ME! INSTABAN FOREVER! 



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. 



No



 I don't know what's going on though. Server weirdness...  



like this



 captcha2: HRQAX9
captcha: U@@%9W 



Ob



 http://knowyourmeme.com/i/4302/original/tonightYiff_in_hell.jpg?1246172420  



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. 



I'll ride your ticklepants any time.



  



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. 



I do



 Ellie's going on five and Calvin is two and a half. I think wikipedia hasn't caught on yet. 



I did



 Guess what our middle name is. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



A thousand pardons



 "...you assholes and cunts..." 



Ha



 I missed that one. Thanks. 



Well



 When K5 is threatened with a citation for illegal left on red, I'll come to you first. 



Just trying to get to Burger King



 so we can get some left-handed Whoppers. 



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 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. 



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. 



What?



 It's just some guy's name. I don't know nothing about nothing. 



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 as many as we'd all hope



 And by "we all" I mean "me." 



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. 



Jesus Fucking Christ



 What a dummy. 



WIPO: Perl



  



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. 



Almost



 It's like retarded bukkake, where all the dudes stand around jizzing on each other and the one girl looks on in disgust. 



My content providers?



 If you're all trying to provide content for me, you're doing a piss-poor job. :-) 



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. 



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. 



Hell no.



 See below. 



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? 



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 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. 



Nope



 Not so far. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



It was just a warning.



 Should be obvious enough... 



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. 



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.  



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.  



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? 



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.  



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.  



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. 



Ha



 Not much. :-) 



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. 



Reminds me of Day of the Locust



 Ever read any Nathaniel West?  



Try them on



 They're both good boots. Try them on and get the one that fits your feet better.  



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. 



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." 



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.  



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.  



Ahem



 Something like this perhaps.  



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.  



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. 



Cleaner



 Get a lot of this stuff. It's the only thing I've ever seen actually work. 



Was he drunk?



 



Unfilmed,



 Conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED.  



Truth?



 I don't even know what to say. I'm so sorry.  



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.   



Seriously?



 Jesus. If this is true, I hope he's ok.
If it's not true, I hope you both DIAF. :-)  



It's still true



 I still believe that about the semicolon.   



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.  



So true



 The time zone thing is not extremely simple, but it's not that complex either. The cancel bug is probably nothing.  



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.  



The problems with K5 are too many to count



 Or so I'm told.  



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



What asshole wrote that?



  



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.  



If only you knew...



 If only...  



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?  



Every time I flushed...



 ...I'd be wondering, "Is this the time it lets go?" 



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. 



Hm



 It kinda looks like it's going to get erotic a few frames on in the set, maybe... 



Oh hey!



 That second picture is me. Those were better days, though.  



Er



 I meant third link. Second picture-only link? Whatever.  



Hey, next...



 ...is the kitchen. so pretty soon I'll have to stop eating as well. 



WIPO



 Eating real food, and running. 5mi @8:35/mi on Monday. I was awfully pleased with myself.  



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. 



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? 



Heavy chain + padlock



 And hey, you can also use it to lock up your bike. 



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.  



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.  



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. 



That



 was kinda awesome.  



Not new



 That's been here for years. 



Srsly



 You thought something was new? :-) 



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. 



Ouch



 That sucks.  



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.  



That guy's... ahh...



 Wow.  



You cannot



 I'm done. Give up. Stop trying to contact me. I've done all I can, or will. The end.  



In a cup?



  



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



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 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. 



geographically avant-garde



 Nice. 



What



 My birthday's in July. I'll be 33 this year -- the age geniuses die, so we'll finally know for sure.  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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? 



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.  



That



 looks like a buttplug for a cow-fucker. 



I like those too



 But not the ones with the super-fine tip. Those just end up looking like dotted lines for me. 



Mont Blanc makes



 ball point and rollerball pens and refills too. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Sigged bitches!



 



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. 



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. 



DO NOT RESIST



  



I'll stalk you



 for very reasonable hourly rates. 



Like doesn't come into it



 This is purely an economic proposition. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



Because why?



 Cause it's taking up the space all the rest of you are not filling?   



After 20 years...



 ...surely it can wait another decade or so.  



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. 



What?! What?!



 Do you mean to say that every culture and ethnicity includes assholes? No! It can't be.  



Mike Hunt's Close



  



LEGALIZE & REGULATE



 That is all.  



Not entrapment, doof



 The Fox Network. 



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.  



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. 



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.   



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.  



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. 



My experience:



 Your children will break your heart.
My experience is that they do it almost constantly. But it's worth it. 



Links of STFU



 I especially want to see someone argue that table sugar is not sucrose.  



OR



 links or stfu. I meant. 



Bah



 For homebrewing purposes, table sugar == sucrose.
Not that sucrose is, y'know, necessary or desirable for homebrewing purposes, particularly. 



I'm surrounded by perverts.



 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Iodophor



 also stains spoons and racking tubes. My tubes are all dark yellow. Not that it makes any difference, but it definitely does. 



Well, that too.



 



WITH MJ ON BACKUP



 Red flag. 



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.  



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. 



E. Coli FTW



  



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. 



Ah, sensitive K5



 Plz refer this thread to the sMothering magazine forums, stat. 



Heh



 Nope, no midwives in CA.
Here's their licensing legislation.
So maybe your friend was just a back-alley unlicensed midwife? 



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.  



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. 



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.  



Hippie chix are easy n/t



 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



lol



 That's great. There's nothing more fun than judging other parents. 



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.  



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. 



"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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Nevertheless



 As a human being you are a nearly unstoppable evolutionary badass, was just my original point. 



Just barely you.



 



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. 



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. 



I was thinking about that the other day



 The Ethical Assassin, that is. This made me think of it. You read it? 



I loled



  



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.  



hulu



 works fine for me on FF/linux. And if it works on linux, it works on everything. 



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.  



I doubt it



 It's kind of a high pressure moment. I think he just screwed up. 



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.  



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 infinitives



 I think you mean split adverbial phrases. 



OATH UPDATE



 Apparently they did it again, to shut down the wingnuts.  



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.  



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.  



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. 



OMG SQUEE



 Look what I just found on the internet OMG cute!  



Wow



 That host woman looks weirdly... artificial. 



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. 



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.  



6 feet even



 Maybe a half inch less. 



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! 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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." 



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. 



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 really



 They're borrowing existing money, from investors (people, institutions, foreign governments, etc). This does not expand the money supply. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Bset RIDAL evar!



 



Indeed



 Without you, it would just be noodle. With you, it's noodle and psychotic self-absorption. 



Public service announcement



 Remember, men, it's not gay unless the balls touch! 



You're missing the key point



 My religion is eternal, immutable, inherently correct and real. Your religion is obviously wrong and silly.  



Go back to?



 When did we stop? 



"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. 



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. 



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. 



Kate Winslett



 has two golden globes.  



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. 



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. 



I, too,



 like the hip bones. I don't know if that make you normal or both of us pervs. Take your choice.  



Blew Man



 What? Too obvious?  



I have already told that damn joke here



 except it wasn't ubuntu when I heard it.  



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.  



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!  



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? 



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. 



Or



 The Times, of London. 



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. 



Specifically



 It's hotmale that does this -- releasing old email accounts for re-registration, which just seems insane to me. 



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.  



lol



 Yeah. Throw another shrimp on the barbie mate! 



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.  



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.  



No really



 It's a good book. Very readable and entertaining and thought provoking. The class, whatever. You should read it. 



That explains it!



 craigslist used to be 100% homo, and I was wondering what the difference was lately.
Burn. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Dude



 Easter. That's easter. 



oic



 "Nail," or "knock up." "Nail up" is a different thing. 



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. 



What's wrong with



 stockpiling weapons? 



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. :-)  



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.  



Lol



 He posts anything and you eat it right up. Ever think about that? 



Laughing out loud?



 I don't know. I had a long day. 



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. 



lol



 Yeah, that was the one. I was kinda pissed off. :-) 



GIVE ME A POLL THAT DOESN'T SUCK



  



ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?



 COG IN THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?  



I have



 just the church for you. Reverend Carlton Pearson came to much the same conclusion, and was branded a heretic for it.  



Yeah



 That right there? I'm hard like that.  



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.   



Apparently, they called him



 the Hebrew t-bill. I loled.  



An Hero



 of the Great Battle of Stolichnaya. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



iptables



 /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 220.231.15.134 -p tcp -j DROP  



Huh



 I'm about 4/5 of the way through re-reading my mass-market fourth-printing paperback of it.  



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. 



What's a henway?



 



Sheesh



 Egg on my face. 



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. 



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. 



Population: YOU!



 amirite 



The celestial aether FTW



  



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.  



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. 



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. 



Open your eyes



 



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  



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.  



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? 



I love you.



 



Make you a deal



 Get a good story posted and I'll give you a refund. :-) 



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.  



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." 



And by...



 ..."keep totally to myself" I mean "auction off for monocle polish funds." 



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.  



"Made love"



 That better, Sally? 



You bitch



 That's better than mine. 



Damn



 



It is well known that



 according to the laws of physics, bumblebees cannot fly.
The hypothesis of vortices is pressed with many difficulties.  



That's probably enough diaries for today



 Mmmkay?  



Hi-Rez Pruf



 clicky.  



It's being helpful



 



I'm sorry



 That would severely curtail posting. From like, everybody.  



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. 



Well



 It's a small price to pay for the hours of entertainment MC provides, I feel. 



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. 



Liar



 



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.   



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.   



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.  



Lol



 Exactly. 



All



 aboard! 



There is nothing false



 about vibrating space age synthetic vaginas. Nothing. 



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. 



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...  



Uh...



 Yes, that Rahm Emanuel. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



Hot



 And creepy. I feel a little worse about myself reading this. 
Nice job!  



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.  



Flooding machines are expensive as hell



 I looked into getting one oh fuck it paste it in here yourself.  



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.
 



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.   



Are you thinking of the sailboat?



 That's not a rowing machine, it's a sinking machine. Ad it works perfectly. 



SS means steamship



 You want S/V Failboat. Where S/V means "Sinking Vessel." 



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. 



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 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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



That's a nice kitchen



 What's going to happen to you when the bank forecloses on the owner of the place?  



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? 



First person plural possessive



 Second person would be "you" or "your." 



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?  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Deck the halls with boughs of



 fail. 



Also



 "Peak coal" is centuries away. 



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.  



I am permanently in your sig



  



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. :-)  



Give Meg Mail?



 Christ, I've been reading it wrong this whole time.  



Smoking a turkey



 From context, I infer that "turkey" is a regional slang variant for "pole."  



No



 Those are fakes, put there by God to fool you. Like dinosaur skeletons. 



Sure-fire way to avoid blackouts



 DON'T DRINK SO MUCH, ALKIE.  



lol ur on the rag.



  



lol ur on the straw



 



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.  



Cock



 The other two are orifices. 



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. 



Ha



 Excuses for the poor scorer. I understand. 



It would only be good



 for people who cannot read. 



But



 "pussy" and "ass" both have a double s. 



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. 



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. 



You're thinking of



 the Five Percent Nation (of Casiotone) 



Exercise moar



 fatty. Weak core muscles lead to back strain.
Not that this helps you right now. I recommend Percocet.  



I picked up a serious



 contact crazy from this diary.  



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. 



Boo!



  



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. 



Even a Fool could figure that out.



  



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? 



Where are these men looking?



 Sheesh. Wherever you're meeting women like that, go somewhere else. I don't know anyone like that.  



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.  



Yeah



 The horror stories I hear from my friends who are still dating... oy. The pool gets pretty fucking shallow after college. 



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. 



First!



 Took a while for anyone to mention that. I'm always curious whether anyone notices when I change that. 



Dido -- White Flag



 This was not my idea, but it fits.  



lol



 I couldn't remember who it was, but I thought it was funny. 



I think



 ...by general acclamation, it was this.  



WTF



 Supposed to be [posted to this https://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/11/17/83131/413]. I need moar coffee. 



ARGH



 



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. 



TITS OR GTF...



 ...Oh, never mind. Good on yer mate.  



What, blue?



 



Your TV defaults to yellow?



 You must have bought Chinese. Is the screen all slanty too? 



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 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. 



Nope



 It was all manual, baby. And it was hot. 



Post racial jokes



 Some more:
Q: "Why do white country-club girls cry after sex?"
A: "Because it shows how much Daddy loves me." 



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.  



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. 



Heh. Permanent Majority is the new



 "Thousand Year Reich." 



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. 



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. 



'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.  



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.  



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. 



"Let"?



 I'm thinking "make." 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Voted for Nader?



 Massive lulz. 



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. 



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! 



Lockbox.



 



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.  



Boll?



 I always thought he was the lesser of two weevils.  



What do you mean?



 



Damn



 And here I pre-blacked my own dick and got in line first... 



I will enjoy



 watching them prosper, along with the rest of us.  



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.  



Perv



 Only Fools would promote a picture of a young black man being flagrantly leid by an older white woman.  



Not to mention



 When are all these meth researchers going to publish? It's like they're not even doing science. 



Darcy Burner



 Geek cutie. 



Pre-election static is high



 It is interfering with many humor emitters and receivers. Please try your joke again Wednesday morning. 



Heh



 I got that from somewhere else already. It's very cute.  



But...



 ...the vote didn't even GET Ba-rocked.  



No, I didn't



 You probably dreamed it.
Also, ewww.  



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.  



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.  



Yes



 I have a wide stance. 



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. 



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. 



The headscarf:



 Rescuing the muslim butterface since 610AD.  



The Slack.



 



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! 



Er, sorry



 I was at my parents house this weekend with the kids, and offline. What happened?  



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. 



Exactly.



 



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 shared anymore



 rsync and johncompanies were sharing the cost of that ad space. Rsync isn't participating anymore, so the johncompanies ad has expanded. 



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.  



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.  



In the wastewater lines



 Dummy. 



How is Obammy formed?



 



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. 



You are your



 fixie better get the trucker cap out of here before I throw a PBR at you. 



They forgot



 to put the music in it.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Quite a while



 I don't exactly remember. Months, anyway. Probably too long. It was a total fiasco. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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! 



Abomination



 Pumpkin ale is. Not to be confused with Obama-nation. Si se puede! 



The pumpkin should be in the background



 way, way in the background. Like, in another room, if possible. 



Belgian wit!



 Give me some credit. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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.  



Right on



 We need to recruit him.  



Would you like to know more?



 



Wait a minute



 That's 12/6ths!
Good thing I had a quality American education, so I could catch your faux pass. 



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... 



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. 



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.  



THIS DEAD CAT AIN'T GONNA BOUNCE ITSELF!



 



It's dropping!



 SELL! SELL! SELL!  



Meow?



 Meow meowed $5 for meow?  



Neither more nor less funny



 But definitely more satisfying. 



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."  



He could have



 "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb Pakistan" totally works. 



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. 



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. 



You knw who won, my freeeeinds?



 Ya might never guess! That one! 



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. 



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. 



And suffers from PTSD



 He'd probably be a lot less angry if they got him on a good antipsychotic. 



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.  



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.  



It's 10:20



 I'm all set for the shattering event. Nothing so far.  



Update!



 1:50pm here. Nothing yet. I continue to stand by. 



Au contraire



 British men are widely known to be fond of Poles.  



UR TRYING TOO HARD



 



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Oh Heathcliff!



 



I was here to make that comment



 I don't really know why I even bother anymore. 



NPR FTW



 



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'. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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?" 



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. 



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." 



She was mayor



 of the meth capital of Alaska. She probably knows how to fire up a crack pipe too. 



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. 



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.'" 



TEAM OF MAVERICKS!



 Plus, it's little known that John McCain personally won Vietnam. Well thanks to Palin, now we all know.  



Maverick maverick maverick



 Me and Goose are goin' for beers after the debate. Care to join us Iceman? 



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. 



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. 



METH



 RIDE THE SNAKE  



The enemy of my my enemy



 can still be an insufferable twit. 



I came to say that.



 



I approve of this tedious meme.



 



Yeah, I was gonna say...



 ...if you shut down K5, my first amendments rights would be about the last ones violated. 



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. 



My goodness



 I haven't lived there in a while. I didn't know Romney repealed it. 



Looks more like Janet Reno



 amirite?  



Huh



 Apparently the reasons include:

 Salmonella
 Giardia
 Starvation
 Mucus

So. Three "You're going to die"s and one "It's just snot."  



It will pay for itself!



 



You should go line up at a branch



 And demand your $23.21 in nickels.  



lolwut?



 I've even read the Dodd Bill. Me for Preznit!  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Bernie Sanders



 (Ok, independent, but better than a Democrat). Russ Feingold. Uhhh... that's all I got. 



Why is this a diary and not in the Q?



 Why must you drop pearls before these swine?  



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.  



vulg.?



 Is that vulgar? I always thought that was the non-vulgar way of putting it.  



Ah



 There's me feeling kind of dumb then. 



It's what they use



 to straighten the vegetation in their bogs.
Brits are fastidious that way. They hate a mussed bog. 



He's gay for you



 Not that there's anything wrong with that. 



The latter



 



But in a totally free market



 Your mom would still be a whore.  



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.   



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. 



See youtube link



 In my first comment for the supply line thing.
AND LERN TO READ SCIENCEFAG!
Thank you. 



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. 



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. 



In any order you choose.



 



Computah says



 Naaaaaah. HOOOOOARK.  



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. 



You sure see a lot of accidents



 Drivers in PA must be a pack of raving assholes.   



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!  



I'm sorry



 I'm sure you tried your best though. 



Someone's got a sandy vagina today



 



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. 



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. 



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.  



Yeah, good point



 Better make it $1.8 billion.
Still, paltry! 



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.  



Fixies



 represent!  



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. 



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. 



Both basically right



 Although Obama, as usual, could have really used an editor.  



pi == 3



 TEACH THE CONTROVERSY! 



TEACH



 THE CONTROVERSY 



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. 



You've sussed out the secret plan!



 



'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. 



I'll take



 "I Have a Hard-on" for $600. 



Go back to



 Gin Lane, babykiller.  



It's not gay



 if the balls don't touch. So you should be safe.
Unless there was more that you didn't mention.  



Guns don't come to your door.



 PEOPLE come to your door.
With guns.  



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. 



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. 



I was going to say this



 It's a thing called "being asian or native american." 



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.  



It was by request



 ATE asked me to do it. Not my choice, and not done for any punitive reason at all.  



oh nigga,



 you had me at "the hunger for gay cock." 



By request by request by request



 OH MY GOD NO ONE PANIC! TO THE BUNKERS! MAN THE BARRICADES!  



By request



 Settle down.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Nah, it'll probably be fine



 Hardly anyone has had good cider anyway, so who's gonna know? 



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. 



Passed out



 drinking jug wine from a straw while playing videogames.
Truly, you are the K5 demographic.  



Someone's gun, anyway.



 



Ayuh.



  



Hm.



 



Wow



 Good stuff.   



Tying both hands and feet together



 and crawling with your lips gets you places faster than Muni. 



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. :-)  



Long leash



 



Never takes long



 Before the peace love anti-war wing squirts up one of these.  



Sherry Palmer



 what a crazy bitch. 



ror



 by pointing out he understands the economic ideas behind prosperity
What? Marry rich? 



But seriously,



 I'd like to remind you that John McCain never made any concessions when he was a POW for five years.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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!  



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! 



No, never!



 



Hardly ever!



 



I think this series is a good idea.



 We should follow it with the inevitable companion series "Lady3Jane Failures." 



When you reply



 What does the "Signature Behavior" selector say? If it doesn't say sticky, log out and log back in. 



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. 



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. :-)  



Ha!



 You pay for it at a health food store? My morning wood seems to just arrive free every day, like clockwork. 



Hm



 Just watched half of the first episode. I haven't laughed yet. It kinda plays like a weakish improv troupe.  



Also



 I'm doubting the premise severely. All three of those dudes are as queer as a $13 bill. 



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?  



Isn't he in MN?



 If so, the answer is: Wisconsin. 



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. 



...and then I'll be free to marry this goat.



  



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? 



You're just hot for my electrococks.



 



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. 



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.





Thanth oo ver muth



 At worthed leal ood! 



Ha



 The hood ornament is awesome. :-) 



lol donorcycles. :-)



 



Eh?



 It's a 3/4 ton pickup truck. What do you think is a truck?  



It does



 And the truck starts and runs fine and everything else electrical works, engine running or not. The battery's fine. 



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Mmmmm. Silky fleeced.



  



Kaine



  



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. 



Tiny penis.



 It's more to be pitied than censured. 



Don't be butthurt, bro.



 



Oh my



 That is such a great idea I can barely even stand it. Oh please, please let this happen. 



"She"?



 Lulz. 



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.  



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. 



efhot -> of the



 sometimes I type two words together inside-out. 



ha ha



 I am thikniguotba porns. 



AKA



 The "fucking infix." Or, if you prefer, the "fucking in-fucking-fix."   



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.  



All for it.



 



We wouldn't have to add a star



 It would just become part of the existing state of Georgia. 



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. 



No, I know



 I could've done it, probably. Just pointing out that there's ways it could come off creepy. 



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! 



Ions?



 K5 emits prions.




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. 



Dude



 Ok, I can laugh along with a gag as well as anyone. Hardee har har.
But you totally owe me a shirt. 



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. 



You should have joined



 the Partial Emergency Recovery Lineup. Everyone knows PERL is better than PHP.  



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...'"  



And she's no boy.



 



How much you want to bet...



 ...she let him call her Anne Coulter? 



There you go.



 Birds: 2.
Stones: 1.  



Heh



 Ok.  



Shit goes down



 I see wut u did thar. 



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?  



Nothing



 "Every day over the last month" is the key here. The banhammer grinds slow, but exceeding fine. 



Like "The Darwin Awards"?



 Yes, I saw that. No, you shouldn't. 



yuo + crawford + fatmouse = gay fatmouse.



 



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.  



Don't wanna hear no Sonic Youth



  



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. 



So I just read



 this book. Pretty much the whole thing was like that. Torture.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



What do you do with the pollen?



  



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 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.  



Hot.



 



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. 



Damn right



 That's why I stick to baboons. Like they say: "Buttocks bright red? Take her to bed!" 



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. 



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.  



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.  



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? 



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. 



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. 



Ver. Mont. Eh?



 Are.
You.
A.
Vermont.
Slow.
Talker? 



"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. 



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. 



Nice



 Connie Willis taught me all I know about emergency medicine. Seems she did her research well. 



Sounds good to me



 Just be careful you don't get an ass-cold.  



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.  



I'd hit it



 Uh, I mean, I'd do it. What's the plan for getting the word out though?  



And you'll stay



 plastered!
It's the clip that never stops giving. 



Clearly



 Obama's still got his balls. This looks like revenge, and I say good for him.  



Fail



 C'mon, you've got nazis, death, pedo, and you can't get a single joke out of it? Worthless.  



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. 



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.  



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." 



You forgot the crap



 This is just a . flood. And by "flood" I mean "single .".  



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. 



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. 



I think it was actually



 being poor. There have never been any black people in maine. 



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. 



No one eats the feathers



 



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.  



3 for perfectly phrasing



 what would have been my comment too. 



No fuckin way?



 Noth Shoah? Wicked qaure, dude. 



Jesus Mary and Joseph.



 Effin Glosta! No effin way! 



Nah, ya know what I'm thinkin?



 Noodie bah! 



See also: Rag.



 



Holy crap



 Are you my ex-landlady? Cause she had those exact same two dogs. WTF?  



GTD



 Grumpus the Dongnibbler.  



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. 



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. 



Starbuck?



 He was a good first mate and all, but I don't see him as lust material, per se.  



Too much racism.



 



$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.  



Lemme put it this way



 If that price was a good investment given the current revenue, I would be asking for more. :-) 



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. 



t'ain't my fantasy



 I'm just answering the question. 



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? 



It's a serious question



 Like, maybe that's one of the problems, you know? 



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. 



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.  



Awesome!



 While you're at it, plz also address why you're writing a diary justifying your not working instead of working. :-) 



Godammit



 I missed it. Crapola. I do love to see Federer lose.  



Also



 Nadal is not really Spanish. He comes from outer space, where he was originally born on a world of clay.  



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.  



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.  



What's going on in the back there?



 Is that a rat tail? 



But that's a good thing right?



 It's still all crap, so at least there's less of it? 



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. 



Totally



 The world may never know. 



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 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.  



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.  



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. 



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;           / \
           / \
  



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. 



Yeah, well, Anacostia



 That's fucking Beirut down there.  



Ether.



 



Me too



 You have to click the link to get it.  



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.  



We go Slovakia yes?



 We stay at hostel and have sexy good time, yes? 



Needs more Ogg Frog.



 



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. 



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.




Now listen you queer,



 If I was in your class, I'd sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered. 



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. 



COMMENT DELETED



 FOR YOUR PROTECTION.  



ror



 I know someone who went to Wentworth. Having visited him, I cannot even describe how not surprised by this I am.  



No no



 It costs $70,000 and after you've paid they don't bring it to you. 



Ahem



 That's spelled "lobster".
What it actually is, no one knows. 



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. 



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. 



They just could not



 ...come to an agreement on the "you have land we want to take" issue. 



Indeed



 Skyrocketing Iraqi gun sales also indicate the healthy return of traditional outdoor sports.  



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?   



thread's closed



 due to prions. 



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. 



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. 



A tool



 is yuo. 



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. 



It is not on your end



 It would never want to be anywhere near your end, frankly. No one does. 



So fired



 I wonder what Amazon makes per minute. I fully expect to see articles where someone figures out what this clusterfuck cost them. 



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? 



Nothing worse than a thin fatty.



 



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.  



Das fakeski



  



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? 



Obama



 Electoral votes:
Obamae: 302
McCain: 236  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Obama



 For The Record  



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.  



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.  



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. 



Damn your poisonous rectum.



 



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. 



Ha



 We do have Zatarain's here. It's excellent with shrimp and crabs. It just seems like it'd be wasted on lobster. :-) 



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.  



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!"




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. 



Wall St. Journal



 Even stranger. 



Senate Majority Leader



 



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. 



Ahem



 Please see here. 



lol



 That's good. I will. 



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.  



Dummy



 The cured the aids in The Gambia.
(Why does it get a definite article, anyway?) 



Excude me!



 You got your THE AIDS in my THE GAMBIA! 



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 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.  



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 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.  



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.  



10 miles per doughnut



 



This room is full of win



  



They are common here



 Sad but true. We've become inured to it. 



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. 



A gentleman would say "cooze"



 



I think



 the bromance is gone. 



Four words:



 Doped. To. The. Gills.  



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. 



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. 



Welcome to the Police State



 More fear == more power for cops == more money for cops == more cops == more stupid cops.  



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 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. 



I suppose I would



 Health care is a mess everywhere, but apparently in different ways. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



I don't know



 "IBM: We're not fascists, we're just war profiteers" doesn't sound a whole lot better. 



My goodness



 Someone finally admitted that Java is designed for idiots. :-) 



Why the Lincoln Memorial?



 The turbo encabulation is on 18th St. I'm puzzled by the choice of protest location.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



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..." 



That's not the headline



 The headline is: "Obama Accidentally Admits Uncle was a Communist."
Get your politics of personal destruction right please.  



But it could be!



 The media collectively missed a great opportunity for spurious personal attack there. They're gonna have to shape up. 



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.   



I got several



 Seems to be the world's most pointless email virus.  



He's going to



 They'll be out here for a couple days.  



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?  



Hillary Clinton Eastwood



  



CAN YOU SMELL THE JOEMENTUM?



 I CAN!  



That would be awesome



 I wonder of one person has ever been the losing VP nominee twice from two different parties before. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Why should I?



 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Ironically, no



 



Yes



 I also turned Syrian, as you can see. :-) 



That is true



 Dumb, but nevertheless true. 



Don't forget



 that while Neville Chamberlain was appeasing Hitler, Prescott Bush was getting rich off supplying Hitler's war machine. 



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. 



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.  



One for the audition reel



  



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. 



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.  



Of course they do



 They got their asses kicked in two wars over the territory. I imagine that still rankles. 



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. 



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. :-)  



Obama / Clinton '08



 Oh please, please let's not screw this up. That has to be the ticket. Has. To. Be. 



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. 



He flooded her ninth ward.



 



Because the baby jesus is an emo pussy.



 



I lost the number



 



54



 ...and the Snowdens of yesteryear have flies in their eyes.
Also, I see everything twice. 



internet catchphrases



 fail it. 



Human



 



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.  



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. 



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. 



No



 



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. 



No



 I was < 10 at the time. I wouldn't have known how to clean them. 



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. 



Both, in equal measure



 



Anecdotally



 This happens all the time.  



It was a typo



 It was supposed to be "Dial it back, dude." Now it just sounds like I dropped a call.  



I think you mean



 falafel. 



I'd give you some ideas



 But honestly, I can't be bothered.  



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. 



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?" 



Ha



 That's the only thing you've ever said here that's both almost coherent, and true. :-) 



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. 



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. 



Like this isn't already



 the last train to crazyville. 



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. 



pwn



 



Reply



 here. 



HuSi --->



  



ror



 I win. :-) 



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. 



God Save the Queen



 



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. 



Fool me once



 shame on you. Fool me twice... fool... can't get fooled again! 



Okey doke



 



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.  



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).  



If?



 What do you think I've been trying to do all these years? 



That couldn't be



 If that were true, you'd be huge. 



Hai!



 Who has not heald of the Rast Light Wing Conspilacy? 



Yes



 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Well



 See this 'ere thread for a pretty good example. 



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. 



Nope



 The reporter was most definitely not a lh dupe. 



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. 



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. 



I show



 #15 at the moment. 



Although it seems to vary



 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



lol



 I just came to make the same joke.  



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.  



Don't knock detergent suicide



 It's a clean death.  



Lady3Jane: 1



 Yuo: 0
(points awarded for getting the joke) 



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. 



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. 



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.  



Mmmm



 I could really go for an ice cold glass of ADES right now.  



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.  



I can't



 Where would I find the pure? These jerkins don't tan themselves you know.  



Bush Sr.



 Wasn't elected to much, but had spent a long time being a party hack. A very long time. 



Too competent



 For the job of President. He should have stayed a behind the scenes spook. 



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.  



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.  



True dat



 



SEPPUKU FTW



 



Wow



 Someone took a picture of the box I sent to GoT.
"Beer exchange" ftw.  



What about Asterix?



 Pronounced "AssTEReecks."  



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. 



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. 



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. 



We have always been at war with Wikiania.



 



Constitutional?



 AFAIK Erik's German. 
Other than that, of course it is. It's a Denton blog.  



BLACK POWER



 



"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!" 



ror



 Apple gave you a tiny pianist?  



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.  



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 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. :-) 



Tuppence!



 I say, sir, a mug up on your newfangled device is not worth a farthing more than ha'penny, if that! 



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. 



Who says it's quittin' time?



 I's the foreman, and I says when it's quittin' time!
Quittin' Time!   



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. 



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. 



Trees



 In your mangina. Here's a hint: They grow in the sand. Clean that out, you'll have no problem. 



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. 



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. 



Vivid.



 



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. 



Current ratio



 One legit message to 72 spam and counting. And the actual message is just a Vonage voicemail alert. 



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. 



All Aboard!



 The Failboat 



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. 



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. 



I don't run it



 I have access to it, to create addresses and stuff, but I don't run the server.  



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. 



I'm disappointed



 that that's not a real domain. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



Probably even you could get bites.



 



A ignorant racist



 What are you, an hero? 



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.  



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. 



But



 What he's personally doing now on the site is mainly trashing Hillary. So, where'd that rule go? 



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. 



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 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



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.  



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. 



Welcome to the dystopian future



 I'm surprised it took this long to arrive. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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. 



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 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. 



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.  



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.  



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. 

 



Huh



 That was an interesting article. Thanks. 



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  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



That



 is the most concise and coherent explanation for this problem I've ever seen. Well done. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



More importantly



 How do I get that number? Cause I haven't so far. 



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.  



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.   



Uh, no



 That was a deliberate suicide. Who am I to meddle? 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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? 



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. 



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.  



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 bad



 Clever owl-into-text interpolation. 



Wow



 That's ugly as fuck. Can't you pick some better colors? Someone might see it and think that was my fault. 



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.  



neat



 



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. 



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. 



Like I read it.



 Skimmed. Skimmed. 



Half fabric half paper stuff



 Is it Tyvek? Polypropylene?  



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. 



You just posted shit you regret



 Think about me. I built the site. 



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.  



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.  



It's not broken



 Comment gotta have a subject. Otherwise minimal doesn't work. I just couldn't think of one. 



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.  



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. 



Look at the microbrew tank farm



 LOOK AT IT 



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. 



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. 



Ha



 Maybe it's a super-clever satire. 



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?  



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.  



I either agree with this



 or I don't.  



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.  



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. 



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 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. 



You forgot a verse in the middle



 Oh shock oh shock he's swallowed my... 



Socks



 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Buy a vowel



  



THE BLACK GATE IS CLOSED



 DUE TO AIDS. 



Orcs?



 I thought orcs were a minority.
And Frodo and whatsisname were clearly gay. 



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 quite that bad



 Thank god. But same basic problem. 



I have 1800 gallons of sludge



 ...if you'd like that instead of either of the above. 



My god



 Someone here understands me. I'm astonished. 



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.  



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. 



my a tedious troll what?



 



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. 



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. :-) 



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.  



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?  



or ones with no relation to the EU



 



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.  



ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?



 It's perpetual now.  



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.  



monohydrogen nonoxide.



 



Ahem



 Lady 3Jane
Anyone who picks a Neuromancer reference as a nick is definitely a dude. 



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. 



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. 



CORRECTION



 The ale is all set to go. And damn good. 



I plan to



 Not sure if I'll get them in this year or not though.  



Thank...



 ...wait, what? 



Ha!



 I forgot. Yeah, that was on purpose. :-) 



Added pics.



 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



wind OR bees



 ...not "wind of bees" which does sound awfully poetic. Or, possibly, like bee farts. PAGING ENSIGN BEEFUCKER! DO BEES FART? 



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.
 



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. 



What?



 How dare you imply that dear little Pedro isn't undermyne's. 



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. 



Hey



 Me and my son Mogumbo both resent that. 



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. 



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.   



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. 



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. 



Hm



 Well that doesn't sound right. As the end user, I blame you. 



WIPO



 Use more lube next time.  



Option Three:



 kidnap her and keep her tied up in your room wallet until she agrees to marry you.
Fixed that for u. 



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?  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Haven't read anything else about it



 If I do, I'll let you know. 



It's on my list



 Thanks for reminding me. I have been wanting to read that. 



True



 Unfortunately. 



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." 



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. 



What error?



  



Dunno



 Perhaps the PSP browser sucks? 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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.   



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. 



I probably have an older one



 I got mine... summer 2006 I guess. 



You know that I love cake.



  



1 nautical mile ==



 1 minute of latitude. This greatly simplifies navigation at sea. It's the statute mile that doesn't make any sense. 



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.  



Argh!



 Little Einsteins. ARGH! Kill me now. 



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. 



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!!!!! 



No kidding



 This kind of sausage party is exactly what Sharia Law intended. 



Everybody does that



 Lots of people do that. I generally give them a pass on it once.  



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. 



Huh



 I was about to say, "Man, ESR really cleaned himself up." 



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. 



Weak



 Also, caulk.  



Or best



 for a vanishingly small number of investors. At random. 



Where were you?



 I went, but you were not there. WTF?
And who was that guy? With that thing? And all the... stuff? 



Nice



 Sometimes you do indeed get the elevator.  



Black Guy Asks Nation



 For Change. 



Indeed



 And if you thought that the whole wound-fucking incident was forgotten too, you sir are sadly mistaken. :-) 



lol



 



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.  



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? 



No!



 I might touch my face, in order to cover my eyes (or stop the bleeding), but that's it. 



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.  



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. 



IFI at my own site



 Firebug
Auto-format doesn't recognize https as a valid marker for the beginning of a url? Weird. 



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. :-)  



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. 



Never took it



 They have web designer class now?
No, everything I have learned has been under some protest, out of necessity.  



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. 



Pretty sure he wasn't



 I think he just left. I can't recall anything we would have banned him for. 



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. 



Indeed.



 



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. 



Naked lunch poll



 is here. 



Ergo



 Miracle Whip != Mayonnaise
QED.  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



The ads aren't for you



 They're for the search engine traffic. I block them all. :-) 



I have heard reports of this before



 But I've never actually seen it. Anyone got a copy anywhere?  



Incidentally



 Did anyone know we were Google hit #4 for "pornography"?  



Well



 That goes without saying. 



Old dog, Mike



 Webalizer 



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. 



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. 



Now you owe us



 an article analyzing traffic over that time period. :-) 



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.  



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.  



UID 11?



 Jesus H Christ. Welcome back. :-) 



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...  



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. 



FUCK YOU



 



2-3%?



 Dude, lose the percent sign, and you've got it. 



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. 



I think you forgot to



 in your comment. I didn't understand. 



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. 



y'all



 



We prefer "undead"



  



Need new readers



 [the audio version is awful ].
"Ell Oh Ell Cat Bible"? SRSLY? PLOX!  



Oh hai



 I fails at teh link. 



I'm thinking tabby with mango chutney



 amirite? 



Wait a minue. "Hot Carl"?



 Oh. 
do not want. 



Ever since you got here



 



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.  



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. 



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.  



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. 



Is a fine hypothesis



 How many believers in that idea have inoculated themselves with live HIV virus to demonstrate its harmlessness? 
I thought so. 



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.  



Alright buddy



 I put up with a lot here, but bringing in nasal sex is going too far. 



I'm sorry



 only robots smoke electronic cigarettes.  



My point stands.



 



patch -p0 < quit_smoking.patch



 



He's not gone



 You just don't recognize him. 



Philthadelphia



 



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.  



That's not tetanus



 That's the Holy Spirit, baby.  



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.  



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. 



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.  



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" 



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. 



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? 



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. 



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? 



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. 



What's wrong with your browser?



 Browsers that work properly will go where a 301 redirect sends them. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



The 80% rule?



 That 80% of what comes out of McCain's mouth is self-serving bullshit? :-) 



You never know.



 



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. 



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. 



Ouch



 Reminding me why I dislike Obama's supporters' behavior too. 



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. 



Arguing with you



 is like boxing with mashed potatoes. 



Everybody has



 And it's been disproven since the early 90's. Please join me in stamping out this myth. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



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.  



Shorter The Road



 We're carrying the fire, right Dad? asked the boy.
Sure son. Here, eat this bullet with me. 



What? Really?



 What's the point of Soylent Green if it's not people? 



My iPhone is RaptureReady



 



I have been appreciating that too



 It's like the Socratic dialogues, if Socrates and his interlocutor were both internet retards. :-) 



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. 



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.  



Actually



 BMW plans to increase US production while cutting workers in Germany
This sort of thing may expand, if the dollar stays weak. 



milling about



 i c wut u did thr 



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.   



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! 



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. 



As long as I keep paying



 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Chris, where have you been?



 I DON'T KNOW! 



I thought



 Ron Paul was the Ron Paul of the internet generation 



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. :-)  



ITS NEITHER A BUG NOR A FEATURE



 It just is. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



That's still $458



 Not worth it. 



Oh yeah



 I meant to say thanks for that. Wow. That's a hell of a...
chair.  



That's not right.



                                                        
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     j::::j  ooooooooooo  kkkkkkkk  kkkkkkk eeeeeeeeeeeeee  sssssssssss   ...... 
     j::::j                                       
jjjj   j::::j                                       
j::::jj  j:::::j                                       
j::::::jjj::::::j                                       
jj::::::::::::j                                        
 jjj::::::jjj                                        
   jjjjjj                                 



Teletype



 I.e "use a fixed font". 



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.  



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!  



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... 



Mmmm. Kale



 Kale and chorizo soup. 



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 kale chicken. 



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.  



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. 



Teh lollercaust



 will not be televised.  



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  



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.  



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." 



But...



 ...it's also a shrapnel-spewing disaster that's likely to take out a number of bystanders. So either way really. 



Incidentally



 It's a wooden kayak thank you very much. 



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. 



Yeah



 He was sticking it to someone, anyway. 



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. 



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. 



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! 



That's why they're called business socks.



 



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." 



Flag on the play



 The linesmen are reporting that you already made that comment in this thread. Five yards. First down. 



You didn't know?



 I always enter a thread butt naked. 



You should listen to more NPR



 I swear, they were all over General Butt Naked.  



Mmmm



 Pygmy: The Other White Meat. 



Oh yeah



 Hey, come over later. We're gonna have a sacrifice and stuff. It'll be rad. 



I hope so



 after we eat your heart. I always feel like some soccer after I have heart. 



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." 



Lady Veronica DeSauterne was quoted as saying:



 "Unusual tastes? I dunno. Kinda like chicken, I guess. Not that unusual." 



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. 



But he should have had



 the foresight to see this coming. 



And turn into a pizza and 6 pack at midnight



 



Federal wiretap recording:



 Priceless. 



Who is that?



 The "this" link? 



Of course it is



 But you're probably a normo. 



Yiff in hell, furfag.



 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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.  



But



 It can give you scurvy! 



I refer solely to...



 ..."a full larder of jerked venison and bear meat..."




But there's no sense crying



 over every mistake. 



And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun



 



still alive



 



Even though you broke my heart and killed me.



 



Now these points of data make a beautiful line



 



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.  



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.  



Er, I was going to add...



 ...I used to have an electric kettle but basically it took forever to boil so I ditched it. 



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! 



I choked so bad on that comment



 My "see here" link was supposed to be after the bit about electricity standards. I give up. 



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. 



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.  



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... :-) 



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.  



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. 



lol



 "Do a download, ponder the results" 



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. 



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. 



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. 



No



 You fail it at reading where I said it was lonelyhobo. 



No



 You'd have to know something about scoop internals to get it. Just guessing will not work. 



So that's where you keep it



 That explains a lot. 



There were many



 red-flag plunders.  



Ray Eckson's Chance of Sexual Encounter With Girl:



 Vanishingly Small
(Subhead): Much Like His Penis, Say Experts. 



No, not too hard.



 (Subhead): Much Like His Penis, Say Experts. 



i saw what u did there



 



Team RAMROD!



 



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



 



An african swalllow?



 Are you sure... oh Christ I can't even finish due to high school flashbacks. 



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. 



Iraqi children are not cute



 ...so no one cares when they die. But puppies. Man, you can't kill puppies.  



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!  



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.  



Sorry bout that



 I always forget to startssl. It's back now.  



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. 



One of my favorite songs



 No, really. It seems like a novelty tune at first, but it holds up well. 



rustina



 



What you don't know tiger hand?



 Ask Aziz! 



This is my sixth comment



  



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  



RIP MC



 Truly a wall-eyed schitzoaffective link-whoring Canadian icon.  



A SCREWDRIVER



 DO YOU HAVE ONE? 



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.  



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. 



Don't need to see the rates to sum up:





 Scientists kill themselves too often
 Advertising people kill themselves not nearly often enough





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.  



Can I really be the first to say it?



 Ahem.
Dude, You're Rottin' in HELL! 



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. 



I wish there were a rating



 labeled "I loled." 



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. 



Same here



 Maybe not record-breaking but cold and snowy. 



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. 



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. 



Dude, I'm not a racist or anything



 ...but that black king is in the wrong hizzouse. 



Boom baby!



 It's the evil midnight bomber what bombs at midnight.  



Would you prefer



 ...if the warning just said "Please stop sucking"? Please stop sucking. This diary does not fulfill that request.  



A ROOM



 GET ONE 



Hive Security Alerted



 



Stay away



 Think of all the tedious church shit she'll want you to do. It just isn't worth it.  



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. 



Tell him



 If he emails me, I'll reset it. 



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.  



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.  



Ha



 What host was this? 



I don't blame you



 Me too. 



1941



 Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley.
'Nuff said. 



I'll show you the life of the mind.



 



Indeed.



 I still think either that or The Hudsucker Proxy is their best movie. 



bumperjaw



 That brought me very close to an actual real-life coffee spit-take. 



That was the best part.



 



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? 



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.  



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. 



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.  



Yum yum bumblebee



 Bumblebee tuna
I love Bumblebee
Bumblebee tuna 
Yum yum Bumblebee 
Bumblebee tuna
I love a sandwich made with bumblebee.  



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. 



lol eXamine Your Zipper



 



Not me



 I'm flashing my AMEROS! 
That's how I roll.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



HSW



 More on this at How Stuff Works. They seem to agree with both of us on 4WD vs. AWD, somehow. 



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.   



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.  



What?



 There's still lots of cranberry bogs. Not up here, really, more in MA. Although Wisconsin has taken over most US cranberry production. 



Philthadelphia.



  



Your wish == my command



  



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.  



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?" 



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.  



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.




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.  



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.  



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. 



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 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. 



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



Ah, this is the part where I call you



 a tool. 
Aaaaand... we're done. 



My theory



 They all killed themselves because they were each the only gay in the village.  



Does that work?



 I would expect the bottle to assplode the second the plasma touched it. 



You know what would work?



 Oxy-acetylene torch. 



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. 



The structure of the human eye proves...



 That god is a hack.  



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.  



Awww yeah



 Whenever I make eggs and bacon I fry the eggs in the bacon fat. It's the only way. 



Well of course



 I thought that was assumed. 



I have canceled this diary in my area.



  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Cortland



 



KILL KILL



 If mice ain't dying, grantmakers ain't buying, boy.   



Your favorite text editor +



 Firefox + Firebug plugin.  



No way



 I wish there was firebug when I did K5. 



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. 



klerck



 And I don't think trhurler was a suicide. 



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. 



$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.   



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. 



Read it again, cockbite.



 



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.  



lol



 pwn! 



Good riddance



 One less bigot.  



A penny saved is a penny earned.



 



Cover art is broken



 I get a generic Cheeseburger from geocities.  



Quin es ms foxy?



 Yo soy ms foxy.   



Oh christ



 There goes another one. I can't wait till Sun rewrites mysql in java.  



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. 



Facebook ==



 CIA front 



Oh sure



 That's what they'd have you believe. 



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.  



Try to find the...



 ...giant tradeshow-sized Apple penis bucket. 
It should be near the entrance.  



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? 



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.  



Vets are for pussies



 Good thing I took my pussy to one, eh? 



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. 



If they were



 I could hire someone to do this. :-) 



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. 



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. 



Ah ha



 NYTimes from 1996. Apparently yes, hot water is a northeast thing. 



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? 



I remember that Brady Bunch too [nt]



 



Nope



 



Also, new trolling opportunity



 From MeFi today: Scrapbooking Forums. See also. See also. See also.  



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. 



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.  



26 questions



 One wrong would be 96%.  



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. 



DOES NOT IMPROVE GARFIELD



  



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" 



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 



Perfect



 demonstration of libertarianism in practice. And I bet not one of those goobers learned a damn thing.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



Perhaps...



 Marx and Engels didn't have much experience with crowds. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Yes



 And Christina Aguilera is especially greasy. 



Ah, I know



 I just wanted to say that she was greasy. Cause you know, she always looks greasy. But you're right. 



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.  



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.  



Why?



 If you're stealing anyway, steal people food. 
Good lord, do I have to do all the thinking for you people? 



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. 



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. 



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. 

 



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.  



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. 



It's always a good idea!



 You can believe me about that, because I'm going to make you a lot of money! 



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?   



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. 



Gasp shock horror!



 Ron Paul, a racist?! My goodness, I never would have guessed.  



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.   



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. 



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 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. 



Argh, paragraph 3:



 it still should not require me to release all my changes publically 



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. 



But... but...



 ...a Kenyan was elected. 
We're doomed either way! 



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. 



He's an analyist and a therapist.



 An Analrapist. 



And make sure you are going...



 "Beyeeew! Beyeeew! Boop boop Psshhhhhhht!!! Byeeew!" 



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.  



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. 



You're right



 I should not have been so quick to ban. The diary will stay gone, but I reinstated chlorus with a warning.   



You're welcome



 Cockbite. ;-) 



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.  



Ah, yeah



 But by then you should be able to convince some other sucker to pay much more than you did. :-) 



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.  



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.  



Suicide by admin [nt]



 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Iowa



 Democrats: Hillary FTW
Republicans: Huckabee FTW  



Ha ha ha ha ha



 Sure. 



Check your comment preferences



 Specifically "Show Hidden Comments." You'll want either "Yes" or "Show until I've rated". 



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! :-)) 



You're a rageaholic



 You can't live without rageahol. 



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. 



~300%



 Went from contracting to salary. It was a nice raise.  



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? 



OMG ur rite!



 One anecdotal example proves it! :-) 



Have you ever transcended time and space?



 Yes.
No.
Space but not time.
I don't understand the question.  



Er, whut?



 No I didn't.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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? 



Fred Thompson



 Biff!  



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.  



Your microbrewers must suck [nt]



 



Dunno



 I can't recall drinking a Canadian beer... uh, ever. 



Drug laws



 We all know that niggers are much more susceptible to drug use prosecution than whitey.
Fixed that for u. 



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.  



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. 



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!" 



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. 



Bork.



 



It's easier to dig a hole



 than build a pole. 



Question: Which part of 'NOT COLD'



 ...applies to Chicago?
Answer: "COLD." 



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. 



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.  



Or even up to 1.060 [nt]



 



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. 



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.  



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. :-) 



About two months



 I shoulda racked them all a month ago, but I've had too much else on my plate. Oh well. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Thx for the PROTIP



 beeyatch. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Right



 "Pitched" being the jargony form of "added cultured yeast." Specifically Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



It's a syllogism!



 People are stupid.
Stupid people make good neighbors.
THEREFORE all people make good neighbors.
QED. 



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. 



Generally speaking, they do.



 



Women.



 I know some. They actually talk to me. Go figure. 



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.   



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. 



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. 



Stats are



 here.  



A tattoo of Jesus?



 WTF?  



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. 



It's lift your head up HIGH



 you failure. Oddly, I've had this song stuck in my head for the past couple days.   



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  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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.  



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. 



OGG FROG



  



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. 



A barrel roll?



 



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. 



A barrel roll?



 



Soupon?



 Just a tiny bit for me, merci. 



Where the story go?



  



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? 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



Uh... what?



 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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. 



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.   



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.  



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.  



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. 



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."  



#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.  



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. 



Yeah, probably.



 



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. 



Um



 So what's up with the toilet? 



lol



 Hah. Wow. I took that for a weirdly placed mirror. They must be big on team-building there. 



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. 



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. 



YOU SUCK



 Busy little bees, full of stings making honey. 



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"? 



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.  



Never did



 Failing it since 1976. 



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. 



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. 



Sorry



 I was offline all weekend. Did aph take care of the update?  



There you go



 Fixed? 



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.  



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. 



X10 REMOTE ACTUATOR



 lulz. I thought I was the only one who remembered those. 



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. 



Well done



  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Also



 (like not letting us comment on a comment from the 0-5 days)
What does that mean? 



Wow



 Just... wow. 



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. 



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.  



No trouble here



 What do you think I use the ground auger for? Opens jars up to 12" wide and 4 feet tall. 



See thread with t1ber below



 for HIREZ 



Uh



 A bath? 



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. 



A Modest Proposal



 The real one. Recognizable by every /. wannabe titling their attempts the same without knowing where it comes from.  



Offer them on eBay



 If you're lucky, you won't have to pay someone too much to take them off your hands.  



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. 



We need a census



 I sometimes get the feeling that 80 or 90% of K5 brews their own beer. 



Let it be done



 



Gaaaaah



 You just hurt my brain with that. 



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.   



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Too old school?



 I still read MetaFilter almost every day.   



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. 
 



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). 



Thank you for the zeros



 I do enjoy imagining you reading my comments and groaning. I like to make the cool kids feel icky.  



Mwaahahahaha



 Exactly. 



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.   



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. 



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? 



But are you also petit?



 



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. 



shop?



 Who'd have to shop? 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Ha



 I wish. No, I've been going to work all day, having dinner, then working on the house from 7-10pm. 



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.  



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.  



I think we have achieved a coherent worldview.



 



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."  



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. 



512M of ram?



 Dude, 1994 called...  



Probably not



 My memory's not so good.
Still, 512 is kinda lame these days. 



And he looked about 10 too



 



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.   



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. 



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. 



I like the cut of ur jib.



  



Dumbass



 It's "Maths am hard." 



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.  



Yes!



  



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.) 



OMG A BOAT CONSTRICTOR!!!111



 LEAVE MY BOAT ALONE!!!!1111nine/eleven 



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." 



I missed...



 ...above where you pointed out "no-store." Dur. So yeah, I just repeated in a lot more words what you said.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



DO NOT WANT



  



failfaggot



 zomg
we never will.  



Sounds awesome



 And ten miles a day is a nice pace. Have a great time!  



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?  



Wicked mashup!



 Copyleft yo! Fair use!  



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. 



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. 



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.  



Dunno



 Never heard of it. What's it doing blocking websites to begin with?  



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.

 



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. 



What?



 I'm confused. What are you talking about? 



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. 



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. 



Undergrad



 We've all got two years of college physics or equivalent here, right?  



Oh, I do.



 



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. 



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. 



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.   



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Oh christ



 Call me back in ten years, we'll talk then.
"As long as no one is coerced to participate." Roffle. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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? 



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. 



Don't forget



 One fall off the roof you're roofing for minimum wage. Oops, you're crippled. 



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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 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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



Will do.



 That sounds like a reasonable plan. 



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. 



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.  



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? 



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. 



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.  



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? 



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?  



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. 



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. 



Heh



 I should have perhaps been clearer:
Amongst all pedophiles, vanishingly few are gay. 



Bye Vlad



 I was just allowing everyone to recall what a cockbite he is. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!  



Oh my god



 Less remarked upon is the clear fact that Nobel laureate biologist Jim Watson is clearly a zombie.
 



BOOOOO



 Discourage (1). 



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.  



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.  



What?



 DC chicks? Hot? They weren't circa 1998-99.   



Wasn't me



 That's interesting. I will see what this is about.  



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?  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



Um



 Of course I can. But a comment is a reader lure, so why pass up the opportunity? 



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.  



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. 



Hmm



 I do have a bunch of Grolsch bottle I could bottle from for traveling. I will give that further consideration. 



Yeah



 From what I read it appears that forage barley and barleygrass are no good. 



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. 



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. :-) 



I can has horsecock!



 



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. 



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? 



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. 



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. 



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. 



WHAAA?



 When I die, I will try my best to make sure my last words are "WHAAA?"  



I don't know



 How much is a "stone"? 



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. 



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.  



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.




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. 



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. 



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.  



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." 



Vermont



 Has been trying to secede for ages. 



It is my fondest wish



 I've been practicing the national anthem and everything. The truuuue north strooooong and freeeeee.... 



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.  



How to Serve Man



 



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> 



heh



 I suck at using Preview. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Titter at my pumpkins



 Chuckle at my peas.
Hoot at my broccoli.
Weep at my cabbages. I have no luck with cabbages. 



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. 



Ew, it does taste like grandma



 I'll take 40 pounds. 



poinless



 "Without poin." It's from the French. 



WIPO



 Day of the Locust. Really unbelievably good, and massively underread.  



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. 



Blackwater



 could redeem itself by sending a small team out to Burma to clean up the situation there. Just saying.  



Have you seen the logo?



 Actual Blackwater logo. It should totally say "No Gurlz" under the bear claw. 



Also:



 Good riddance Soe Win. I hope it was painful.  



Please



 Let you be the last to say it too. :-) 



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.  



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. 



Heh



 Michael Crawford touched my junk neutrally. :-) 



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. 



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. 



The cartoon is funny though



 



berblog



 LL.  



I'll change your name



 What do you want to change it to?  



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.  



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. 



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.  



We FI?



 Hold on, there chief. YOU don't get laid, and therefore WE fail it?
I got laid. So who fails it? Eh?  



Too much DDR terminology.



  



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. 



husi --->



  



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. 



What Stephenson should do



 Is when he needs a sex scene, just write:
AND THEN THEY DID SEX ROFL!
This would work. 



Walking 3,000 miles...



 ...might help with the gut, Fatty Seatbeltbuckle. ;-)  



Hey



 Were you hyperbolic pants explosion on dKos too? I always wondered that.  



Sacajawea?



 I had a whole dump truck of jawea. 



Around 10



 By my count, since this started. A whole bunch of that list above are would-be spammers. 



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. 



It's a test



 If you don't know how to spell "fellate" and "cocksucker" you don't belong here. 



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.  



First for both now "no text"



 



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



Yum



 I love me a hoppy beer. 



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.  



Ok, but...



 ...once I have DNA from my strawberries or man-juice, what can I do with it?  



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. 



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... 



Mmm. Tomacco.



 



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.  



Hey



 Nifty. I paid 1.45 for it. I just hope the download is plain mp3.  



New term for libertarians:



 "Jolly sailors on the imaginary Freedom Ship"
I loled. 



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.  



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.  



So true



 I killed an insurgent who was on his way to kindergarten just this morning. 



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." 



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. 



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...




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. 



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 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. :-) 



Possibly



 Maybe I should include a section on Mexicans in your garden and how to deal with them. 



Ooh, me too



 I didn't get around to it this year, but it's in the long-term plans. 



Try Fedco



 They're not taking any more orders for this year, but see the FedCo catalog here (pdf), page 29. 



Bah



 I didn't know you were in EUistan. I guess none of my suppliers will work. 



How can you grow hops in permafrost?



 



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. :-) 



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 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. 



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. 



Ror



 I have done that. Man, does that make me mad. I usually go on a weed-killing rampage after one of those.  



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. 



Good. Let the French lose this one.



 C'est magnifique, le guerre.  



Ta geule.



 Mechante. 



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. 



That's not fair



 The French won the French Revolution.
Of course, many say that's because they were fighting the French... 



Just goes to show



 Don't quote fascists.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



You sure trolled me good.



 It still stings. :-) 



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. 



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.  



Good thing they're filtering...



 ...for all the children working at DOD. 



+1 YouTube material.



 



She turned you down eh?



 So it goes...  



No tasing. Do not care.



  



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. 



Paranoid hysteria?



 No, just disappointment. 



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. 



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. 



Jacques Ellul:



 Too French. Didn't read. 



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. 



Ha ha



 Hail Mary, full of grace
help me sell this goddamn place.
 



O HAI



 R U STILL TALKING?  



O HAI



 R U STILL TALKING? 



I don't think I ever owned it



 Someone else had it and pointed it here.  



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. 



Really?



 You must need a long syringe to get all the way down there from your ear. 



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.  



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.  



There's always text



 Which account was it? I can look and see what the warning was, if you missed it.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



Whate?



  



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



What



 should we do? 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Loser.



  



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.  



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. 



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. 



Nuke who?



 Ohio? 



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. 



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. :-) 



OMG!



 It's like rats deserting a floating ship! :-)
I only request that it not be as dull as HuSi.  



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. 



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. 



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...  



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. 



Here



 I looked for individual insurance here when we first moved. $1200/month. That's the mania. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Hey



 I listen to hum.  



"An Astronaut"



 I think we'd prefer it. 



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.  



No



 Just returned to new signup status, with return of money via CC gateway. He can certainly come back via paypal. 



Whatever it was



 I don't need to risk my creditworthiness, in any case. 



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.  



WIPO



 Nedit. BBedit a close second.  



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. 



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"?  



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] 



FWIW



 He's the only one, and it's because of his long, long, long record here. 



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.




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. 



I never quite realized it before...



 ...but you really are nuts. :-) 



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. 



I removed it for him



 on request 



Get a room [nt]



 



I HAVE ONE



  



Some jackass on the interweb recommends...



 ...sodium metabisulphite. Probably worth a try. But get some glass carboys anyway.  



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. 



You forgot bull semen



 



Oh, sorry



 The answer is no. I 3ed this comment to endorse it, but I suppose that's not the most obvious answer. 



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. 



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. 



I know someone who has one [nt]



 



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. 



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. 



Ichor



 I have been washed in the blood of the pickle. Halleleujah! 



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. 



If Apple made pickles, it would still be



 iChor. 



I always knew that



  



It'd take a miracle.



 



lol



 You think we don't know who you are?  



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.  



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?  



Also



 AT&T suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuwait for ituuuuucks.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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
 



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. :-) 



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.  



I agree



 That just makes sense. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



You're a creep.



 You're a weirdo. What the hell are you doing here? You don't belong here.  



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. 



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?)... 



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. 



Will do



 In the meantime, the executive summary is: bottled one batch, got 33 pints, tastes very good. :-) 



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. 



Never



 has a comment been so aptly followed by a sig. :-) 



This is me



 also mentally inserting all of the events of these diaries into the milieu of Scrubs.
mariah == Elliot 



You ordered water



 They dehydrated it for you before shipping, to save you money.  



Here's an easy mnemonic:



 Being gay is A-OK!
Being a hypocrite means you're full of shit. 



You'd have to call it



 "Camel Toe Pilsener"
Just sayin. 



u fail it



 where it is being noticeable enough to ban.  



eh?



 I know you didn't. That's why you fail it at being banned. I was just answering your question. 



my funny rusty what?



 



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. 



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. 



No problem



 We only produce the best here. 



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. :-) 



Fuck you very much.



 



Front page



 Do you remember which ones were front page? I can restore them.
And yes, part of the general chaos.  



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.




Thanks



 Tuesday. Please, please let it be done tuesday. :-) 



It's a boy



 You need to keep up with my high-volume newsletter. 



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.  



Pwn



  



That video is shopped



 I can tell from some of the pixels and from having seen quite a few shops in my time.  



Not censorship



 Just teh bug. Sorry about that -- it's very much restored now.  



Not censorship



 Just a bug. Sorry about that.  



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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... 



Och!



 Whet wee file beesties is these an' gang aft auglew i'the gloamin o'the chlanargh? Och! 



Thank you



 And also, my goodness, look who comes out of the woodwork. :-) 



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. 



Eponysterical!



 



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. 



The question is



 ...how many Hop Rapes equals one Gypsy rape?
I guess it depends on what the final SG of the beer is... 



Hey speaking of which



 You still coming to the Running of the Jew? 



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.  



eXistenZ



 Don't play squishy pulsating video games.  



Retard



 Mmmmm. Was it good for you? 



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. 



ALL-MIDGET DOWAGER CHORUS DOWN ON THE FARM



  



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.  



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.   



PERHAPS IF YOU TOOK A BREAK



 FROM MASTURBATING LIVESTOCK YOU'D HAVE LESS HORSE CUM ON YOUR HANDS 



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. 



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. 



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?

 



Ha!



 Nice find.  



True



 ...and here I never thought sye served any purpose at all. 
Wait, is that what you meant? 



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. 



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. 



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. 



That comment



 Was not Theo. I erased it.  



Braaaaaaaaains...



 



Ha ha!



 The foot's on the other hand now, Mr. Cramer. 



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.   



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.  



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. 



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.




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.  



I got my fist I got my pen



 I got survivalism. 



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.  



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.  



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.  



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. 



So I said...



 ..."That's not a banana!" and she said "Well, that's not my parakeet either!"
Guffaws. 



It's just you



 I don't see it in the screenshot.  



Oh, yeah



 I see it now. Huh. 



I has horsecock?



 here  



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.
 



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"). 



Ahhh, so, it says here...



 ...that your shit's all fucked up, you're wicked retarded, and you talk like a fag.  



Also



 link 



Ha



 So it does. Oh well. 



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. 



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. 



Ha!



 I obviously don't post enough anymore.
"Intelligent!"
"Normal!"
Rich. 



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.  



Username is so good



 I can't bring myself to ban it.  



Will you call it GayBorg?



  



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.  



Except



 When Rudy says it, it sounds like Daffy Duck.
"Oh my God, the terrorithth!" 



"in the habit" eh?



 I see what you did there. :-) 



New account name:



 512  



Well played



 Well played, indeed. 



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. 



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. 



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) 



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.  



Neighborhood neighborhood neighborhood



 



Green and wrinkly?



 



We've upped our ante



 Now up yours! 



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.  



It was an experiment in



 lulz.  



4.0



 I have relatively moderate wisdom. That's good. I'd hate to feel like I have nothing more to learn.  



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. 



Macs would have to have a "bucket"



 I Encourage (3) anyone who gets that.  



President Ahmadinejad added:



 "We just did it for the LULZ anyway."  



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.  



Now that



 would have been lulz. 



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. 



Well



 For me it is. I'm probably the only one though. 



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.  



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.  



The button



 It says "EJECT" in big black letters on it. 



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. 



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 



You say misleading...



 I say terrific. 
And don't forget, trolls are also the most average people here.  



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.  



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. 



6.5/10



 But only because so many people bit. I'm surprised. We're collectively losing our immunity or something.  



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



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.  



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.  



5 hours on the battery lol.



 



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. :-) 



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. 



We finally discovered slood



 Can't think how we've missed it all these years, now that it's been found.  



"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. 



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. 



wtf is nil anyway?



 They had to make up a new Ruby word for that, or what? 



lol



  



This was a clever goatse



 There's still room for creativity. People get banned mainly for being uncreative. 



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. 



+1 Furry Porn



  



You were always wrong about that



 We have meaningless rules arbitrarily enforced by mostly-ethical-shading-to-apathetic admins. 



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.  



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.  



Why do Republican legislatoterrorists hate America



  



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! 



I am officially tired of you



 You're on your own. 



OMFG



 YOUR SIG IS ANNOYING!
...
...
I feel better now. 



I hate tha game.



 



I believe you meant...



 ..."Please feel free to correct my grammar and usage." Also, semicolons are for the weak. Compleat Gentlemen use periods.  



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"?  



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. 



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.  



ror



 All online communities reflect the personality of their founder. It's an ironclad rule. 



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.




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.  



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. 



Or it was a coincidence



 Actually it was a coincidence. Pretty much. :-) 



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. 



I thought that couldn't have been what you meant



 I still think you're an old weirdo now though. :-) 



Even I have...



 ...an Egil tribute dupe. Think about that. 



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.  



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. 



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?"  



u lost me due to not mentioning jungle poon



 



Collaborative Media Inaction $



  



So much better than the Da Vinci code.



  



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!  



Damn



 A fine comment ruined by cold hands.
That of course should have said "Google" 



You got it.



  



Due to a LOT of AIDS.



 



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) 



Works fine for me too $



  



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. 



OMG Tickle Torture!



 Banned by the Geneva Convention! Call Dick Cheney!  



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. 



Take one of these



 ...and don't call me till morning. 



I don't hate you yet $



  



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.  



ror



 Yeah, the spin attempt on the right is that it was "conservative democrats" who won. Kos calls bullshit on that pretty effectively.  



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. 



Jaded apathy is so 2000. $



 



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. 



Hey



 See my diary above.  



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.  



Do they all have adams apples?



 Like [M]Ann Coulter? 



Hey



 If [s]he admitted it, I'd be the first one up there cheering for hir. 



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 



ror yfi $



 



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. 



Let the Hearings begin! $



 



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. 



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? 



Chocolate mousse



 Also, tiramisu is pretty good. And you can't go wrong with a nice hot fudge sundae.  



You're right



 I forgot about cheesecake. 



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. 



Theraflu is the shit



 While it may not heal you, it will very likely allow you to sleep, which is almost as good. 



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. 



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?" 



FATMOUSE + RED WINE =



 HEALTHY FATMOUSE!  



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. 



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? 



ror



 I've got it. We need the K5 bridge circle logo, but with a couple of hands on either side... pulling... 



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. 



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. 



Yes



 Cause they were all foursquare committed to democracy. 



You bastard



 Beat me by four and a half minutes. Well, I had to dig up more links. And add a Pole.  



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. 



It's true. I'm a totally flaming



 straight guy. 



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.  



It's nano now



 Please update your bookmarks. 



Wow



 How does it catch the sheep? 



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.  



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.  



Mind you



 If you really like this one, you can keep it and I'll drop the old one for you. Your call. 



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. 



Lol my screen is so hi-rez



 I saw your red-flag capital I's well before they could get anywhere near my junk. 



Comic Sans



 Problem solved. 



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. 



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." 



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. 



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.




I sterilized my bunghole thoroughly.



 That's my gift for some poor .sigless bastard this holiday season. 



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. 



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.  



I forgot



 ...that it was Halloween. I was requisitioned for family duties tonight. But stay tuned.  



You shouldn't. [nt]



  



Because it's made of plastic [nt]



 



Hi-Rez Proof!



 



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.  



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! 



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. 



Oh I believe you



 I certainly believe that you can do it. I'm arguing about whether you should. :-) 



Ayuh.



 



You try pitching hay sober. [nt]



 



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... 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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.  



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.  



Why od they even bother?



 Why does MS spend money developing this thing, when it doesn't make them a buck? Kind of mysterious. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Nah, just this one



 Actually Scoop's pretty much all better, as far as that goes. K5 is a throwback.  



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. 



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.  



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.) 



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." 



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. 



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. :-) 



At the worst of times...



 ...North Korea actually causes grain grown elsewhere to disappear, thereby in effect "growing" negative amounts of grain. 



Uh



 Wut?  



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. 



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.  



Just because



 I can prove this is you doesn't mean I didn't already know, Egil.  



What post was that?



 



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.   



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." 



He say you Brade Lunnah!



  



Yes



 I'm on vacation tomorrow, and pretty much out of work to do today. 
Why, does it show? 



CAN'T YOU READ?



 VACATION MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT? 



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.)  



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? 



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!" 



Get a roaster



 This one is reasonably cheap, and works good.  



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.




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? 



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. 



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.  



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.  



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? 



ha



 I'm already planning my hops patch. :-)




Eeeeexcellent



 Then I will be ready to move on to Phase Two... 



Joker.com / $12.00 a yr / I've never had a problem



 



I should make



 K5 Pole Ale. :-) 



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.  



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) 



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.  



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. 



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.  



YHBT. YHL. HAND.



  



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 



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. 



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. 



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.  



PHP is for teenagers



 ...and Java gives me a headache. 



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. 



That's a bummer



 Every batch a learning experience.
What's the super-cleaner stuff called?  



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.  



Janis said it



 Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. 



What's a tortoise?



 



YFI



 It should have been "Mark Foley Touched my Junk Conservatively."  



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? 



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.  



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. :-) 



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.  



Options:



 "I hate pie"
"I hate pie and you"
"You remind me of pie"
"Fuck you and your pie"




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. :-) 



Also



 Move your story to vote already so I can vote for it.  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. :-) 



Yaaaar



 Arrrr! Saaaars! Sarsgaard! Saaaaarsgaaaaaard! 



I'm all kinds of wholesome



 Really revoltingly so. 



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. 



Wow



 That's unbelievably bad. Tom Green amazes me yet again by having even less talent than I suspected.  



You just bought yourself...



 ...several more months indulgence for the nonsense you usually post. Bravo.  



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. 



Eerie



 That's exactly the backstory of Nightmare on Elm Street, except Freddie Krueger was in the house and burned to death.  



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.  



omg hax!



 lol  



I did



 That was my tribute. 



A++++++++++++++ DIARY POSTER



 WILL READ AGAIN! 



I do my best



 It isn't much, but it's my best. 



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. :-)  



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. :-) 



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." 



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. 



It seems like



 that would have been a funnier story if it wasn't quite so short. 



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. 



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. 



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?  



For t1ber...



 ...it's cocktoberfest all year round. :-) 



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.  



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.  



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. 



I'm not sure what you just said



 but I think I agree with it. 



Indeed



 In his worldview, corruption, torture, and pedophilia are sometimes ok. 



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 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. 



I can just see his shock



 to find yet another long-rinning Daily Show joke ("...or NAMBLA") come true. 



Less than Abstain (0)



 



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.  



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. 



I'm not really into espresso



 I use a press. It can rescue even relatively weak coffee, but with good stuff, it's heavenly.




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. :-) 



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.  



So nobody should offer life insurance? $



 



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.




There was this one time...



 I saw a jellyfish.  



Get away!



 This island is mine. Find somewhere else to hermit.  



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.  



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.  



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.  



Nope



 Wait, what are you trying to say? 



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.  



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. 



Winning this poll



 ...is like being voted "Best looking pedophile."
Thank you, I'll be here all week.  



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. :-)  



Cingular blows



 I hate that they bought the previously excellent AT&T wireless service and turned it to shit.  



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. 



It's called Kabbalah. $



 



My New Yiddish Posting Technique is Unstoppable



 i'm in ur base, SCARSin ur d00dz 



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. 



FEEL likewise



 Goddammit. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



You never were, my friends



 You never were. 



lol rex kwan do. $



  



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.  



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!"  



In that order?



 



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.  



I think you've got the general idea



 



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.  



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. 



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. 



Check off 'search archive'



 



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.  



cts



 is me when I'm Phillipino. 



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.  



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.  



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. 



Lol



 Did I ever tell you about the time I replicated Young's famous double-slit experiment with your mom and your sister? 



HI-REZ PRF



 or STFU. 



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.  



Or emulate Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys



 



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.  



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."  



Sigged!



 



By logical extension of the argument...



 ...I would assume so. 



Seige engine support



 "WTF do you mean you don't even have it pushed up against the castle wall? Jesus, these fucking n00bs." 



I always knew you were an



 intertextual. 



Yeah seriously



 I'm getting some serious chafing here. Cut it out.  



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. 



Ah ha ha ha



 How droll, old man. How droll. 



And don't forget



 People who hate peanuts also hate black people.
End the reign of peanut racists! Let the brown nut be free! 



According to wikipedia



 The Klingon word for "peanut" is "Gr'hargh'rgh". 



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.  



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. 



eBay



 



I thought I recognized that table! $



 



What?



 Well, I mean, yes, but still. What? 



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.




Yeah, I did



 I can make a mean buttermilk pancake from scratch too, but some days you just want them fast, you know? 



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.  



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." 



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. 



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. :-) 



We're in a tight spot here, boys.



 



Jason Lee



 would totally play McGrew in the movie. Amirite? 



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. 



Like for example



 this one. I wrote that.  



IAWTD



  



lol



 Roffle.  



Jesus christ



 They have HuSi there too. 
It's so cute to watch every new generation discover the same crap about the internet.   



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. 



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. 



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!?  



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. 



hi



 ror  



+1FP: Plenty Emo Enough.



  



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. 



You forgot



 6.5: Keynote speech by Al Gore 



We don't need a reason.



 We'd lick his shorts on command regardless. So it all works out. 



RUSE AND UNCARING



 FEKLAAR HAS FAAT FIINGERS!  



There's no distinction between online...



 ...or "electronic" and print publication? It seems like there ought to be.  



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. 



Mrrrph.



 I went to sleep late ok. Jesus, can't anyone sleep around here?  



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. 



Ah



 I should have kept reading before I asked the question above. 



Of course I do



 it? isn't argument, an read to way best the is Backwards. 



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? 



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. 



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.  



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.") 



Uh huh



 I'm gonna take a history lesson from the guy that thinks Scandinavia is still full of longboats and horned helmets? roffle. 



Yeah, but...



 ...he's Canadian. :-) 



Vineland will be Nordic for all eternity!



 



Uh



 Don't look now, but there's been about a thousand years of history between Viking raiders in longboats and modern secular Scandinavia. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



Sure



 "Islamonazis" banned liquids from your flight. Cause, y'know, they run the TSA now. Lol.  



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. 



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. 



Discretionary



 Which is not the same as arbitrary. But if that answer doesn't satisfy you, do feel free to piss up a rope. 



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.  



Cheers!



 Glad you picked up on that. :-) 



Hand cream?



 



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. 



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. 



They put you on probation for that?



 Christ. Post that shit here. It'd be like best diary of the week. :-) 



Fiat



 Fix It Again, Tony. 



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. 



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. 



According to wikipedia



 It won't be long.  



Only if...



 ....by "fat chick" you mean "unemployed middle-aged man pretending to be a fat chick." 



Hey, now, I wouldn't say that...



 I never liked you to begin with. :-) 



The author pulled it



 I don't know why.  



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. 



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. 



Weird



 I don't know. Did it used to have a lot more votes? 



I don't discount your theory



 It will be interesting to see if Ned can win despite the Clinton's support.  



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!).   



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. 



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. :-) 



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. 



This was better



 When it was named MEEPT!  



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



You're right abou that



 I agree.  



Well, that's the issue



 Hence it doesn't work that way yet. 



More like this please



  



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. 



Next Web 2.0 service:



 MthrFuckr. 



It's true



 They lose $0.63 per video played, but they totally make it up in volume. 



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? 



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.  



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. 



Ahem



 I think you meant:
ECONOMIC GRADUATE RESEARCH AT RUSTAY'S! 



Um, cause



 Post your answers here? 



No



 But it was what Greg Louganis was attmepting that time he hit his head on the keyboard. 



Huh



 I don't think I've ever seen an audience look so... bored. How come they're all just standing there?  



Pleasure doing business with you



 Please stop back in soon now, you hear?  



Yeah



 I use my oversight to overlook everything you guys do. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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?
  



Just trollZor



 I know you aren't trollaxor. 



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.  



But



 Can economics address these reasons? This seems like it falls more in the realm of sociology to me. 



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.  



Compare with:



 Darth Vera  



Did ya see that look?



 Like butta wouldn't melt. Oy. 



At least you're not watching TV



 ...so that's something. But for all that, you'd still be better off reading a book.   



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.  



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.  



Charles F Wilson



 ...will never last. You wait and see. I bet he'll be leaving for good before the week is out. 



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. 



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... 



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?  



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.  



Huh



 I didn't even notice the poll. I was just reading diaries. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Smurfs?



 You mean you've never heard of the Smuckfest? 



PAGING FEN



 Fen, you are being summoned. Please come to any white courtesy phone. 



Recommendation:



 Rename OggFrog "CrotchRot".
J/K Michael. You know I love you. :-) 



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.  



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. 



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! 



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.  



I loled.



 



Foster's postulate?



 



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? 



What were we talking about again?



 



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.  



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.  



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.  



History shows definitively



 ...that when I say "soon" you can be assured that it will happen within the decade.  



Butter face [nt]



 



I can vouch for it...



 ...as known New England manual laborer slang, at the very least. 



Here it's pronounced roughly:



 "BUTTAface". 



You don't have to give your last name, Alex?



 Not if I don't want to.  



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. 



And for your purposes...



 ...it seems to me that 1/3 would be plenty. A 90% reduction would be rather excessive, I think. 



Here's your phrasing:



 "The primary mistake of internet lawyers is that they believe laws are facts." 



Pearls before swine, I swear.



 YUO == TEH SWINE 



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. 



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. 



Ah. I am not a lawyer.



 So I wasn't trying to use any lawyer terms. I can see how that would be confusing. 



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. 



Heh



 What's wrong with Sunday morning at 8:20? Any time's a good time for critiquing a weak troll. :-) 



Do what?



 She has finally found the right place for her.  



I don't hate her



 I just think she's a dolt. :-) 



OMG IT'S BETTER THAN DA VINCI CODE!!



 



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. 



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. 



Some Brazilian spider



 Trying to slurp down all pages, apparently.   



Actually, yes



 Voxel just set up a caching system of that sort. We'll probably go live with it on Monday. 



Ow!



 I say old chap, wot wot? 



t1ber was dead, to begin with...



 



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.  



Ha ha no



 The scoop code is already updated. I was in the middle of something for work. 



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. 



No



 Seriously. 



Does Colgate also make



 Shotgun Mouthwash? 



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.  



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. :-)  



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.  



Hey man, nice shot.



 



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 



That's charming



 I only wonder if he couldn't have worked "sand nigger" in there somehow. Must have been an oversight.  



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.  



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. :-) 



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. 



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. 



lol



 Victory is mine! 



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.  



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. 



Probably not



 But if I do die, I'll make sure Rob posts pictures of me expiring in bike shorts. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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.  



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!" 



Ain't me



 Myspace makes the baby rustina cry.  



Look at the positive



 This trend is finally bringing long-called-for diversity to the suburbs. 



We personally matched you...



 ...along 37 different unique metrics of ghey! 



Me too (en tea, forsooth)



 



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. 



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. 



Probably a bug



 Your report is noted, and will be investigated citizen.  



janra fixed it



 Thank you, janra. 



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.   



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. 



I rate this comment



 0.999999... 



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. 



I elided it



 ...for greater generality.  



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. 



I loled



 And then I threw up in my mouth a little. And then I loled some more. :-) 



But



 A spoonful of sugar helps the medecine go down. 



However



 A penny saved is a penny earned. 



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.  



What's broken?



 The tags are good, and people are using them exactly as expected. I think they're great. :-) 



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.  



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.   



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. 



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. 



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.





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. 



I like Gorillaz too



 But Oasis is crap. Oooooh! BURN! 



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! 



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.  



No, not really



 Real talent is distracting. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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. 



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.  



Indeed! (en tea)



 



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?  



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? 



It was a busy day for FNH mail



 Wait till you see the other ones. You might not be so optimistic. 



Stand by for HI-REZ PROOF



 and no stfu. 



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.
 



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. 



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 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. 



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. 



Die Hard 3



 lol what 



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. 



How come no one ever sends me messages?



 I think that must be a bug. Fix it now, open source hippie slave.  



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. 



You don't need to see our identification...



 



DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?



  



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.  



No indeed



 Egil is apparently a famous Norse pioneer, like Erik the Red and Leif the Lucky.  



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.   



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. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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.  



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. 



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 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. 



Survey flaw



 Your rating scale does not go low enough.  



House of Leaves == Teh AWESOME



 And Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was half great and half crap. But isn't that one mostly nonfistion? 



Nonfistion?



 Surely that, but also nonfiction.
I have spent several hours chipping mortar off bricks. My typing fingers are numb. 



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.  



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. 



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. 



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@. 



It did



 I should have said "this one came..." above. I forwarded it to help@ to assist in the helpdesk's comment republishing efforts. 



Or housemates



 I don't feel the cats own us, so much as they tolerate our living in their house. 



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.  



Damn



 I got a dud. 



Shanty towns?



 I read that Slate article, and I don't see where shanty towns comes up at all. What gives?  



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. 



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.  



Heh



 I shave about once a month, whether I need to or not. 



Six since 2004-06-19



 See here. I did the sql check.  



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. 



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. 



No, you do not



 Take it from me. You do not have to give a shit. 



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.  



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. 



His sign



 said something like "Illegals go home." I don't think that qualifies. 



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. 



It's two a day



 And it's like the Pirate's Code. Really more of a guideline.  



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. 



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.  



Dammit



 Now it's ruined. Great.
Just don't go telling us what Snakes on a Plane is about. 



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.  



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. 



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. :-)  



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? 



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.  



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.  



I do not understand their flaming



 I can't seem to follow a conversation that's conducted entirely in animated .gif signatures. :-)  



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. 



I do better than that



 I browse with HuSi off. :-) 



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. :-) 



Oh yeah?



 Well dancing squirrel and South Park character to you too! 



Lol



 No, you should definitely never, ever try doing either of those things. :-) 



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. 



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. 



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. 



Where's my 'walk downstairs' option?



 You can't label me, man. I am a beautiful and unique snowflake. 



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.   



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?  



~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.  



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.  



Probably



 I seem to be relentlessly repeating conversations lately.
For me it's no caffeine after about noon.  



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. 



Iced coffee



 ...mind you. Extra cream, extra sugar. Mmmmmmmm. 



IAWTD



 lol Moussaoui didn't do wtc wtf roffle.  



They should use the classic...



 ..."waa-waa-waa-waaaaaahhhh" horn sting, from cartoons and such. 



Except...



 ...that Safari sucks. :-) Its main claim-to-fame appears to be IE6 bug-compliance. 



I was supposed to make them all girls?



 Damn! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! 



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. 



The ultimate '-1, Not Goth Enough' $



  



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.  



P.J. O'Domenech?



  



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? :-)  



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. 



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.  



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.   



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. :-) 



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.  



Also



 Can you explain why trenchcoatjedi would be a kitten dupe when he voted FP and kitten voted Dump? 



Indeed



 Good catch. Tose dupes (and a few more) are gone, and kitten's on his last chance. 



No, it wasn't



 Sorry, I should say that his criteria sucked too. :-) 



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.
 



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. :-) 



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.  



And



 I would have done it to keep the roof from leaking on my GAY DAUGHTER. 



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... 



Yes



 I'm sorry to puncture your lovely fantasy, but my only "yacht" is an 18 foot plastic keyek. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



It IS funny!



 Now that I think about it. 



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. 



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.  



Could be



 I have in mind regular asphalt 3-tabs. Those don't really like to bend that much. 



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? 



Huuuugh



 Better you than me.  



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.  



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. 



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?  



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? :-) 



It's a card game



 and usually a total disaster. 



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.  



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! 



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. 



We all know about comment search?



 Are you sure? :-) 



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. 



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. 



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... 



Changes to booman?



 I don't see the ajax stuff on booman tribune. Where did you get that? 



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. 



er...



 So what's your "weight" in kg at 1/3G?  



Even better



 Hand out sealed CDs and tell people there are drugs in them. Much lower startup cost. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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. 



It does say zero production values [nt]



 



Is a good book yes.



 



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.  



Did you have to change your panties immediately?



 



Ooh la la



 And, yup, I think we can declare this conversation over now.  



I'm hottt with three ts.



 The glasses make it four. 



plz post hirez soup thx



 



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." 



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. 



Hee hee



 No bald spot either. :-) 



Huh?



 What prevents you from wearing glasses? 



Don't forget



 The Fallacy of the Know-it-all High School Student. 



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"  



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.  



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. 



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. :-) 



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. 



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 



Heh



 I knew exactly what was going to happen, and it still worked.   



I blueboxed your BBS



 through my 96 baud audiocouple. 



With k-rad neon green elbow pads.



 



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. 



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.  



He's graduating!



 I'm so proud. :-) 



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. 



Every day



 that someone posts an "I'm leaving" diary, that's graduation day. 



Request



 Do New England next. I wanna see how much longer my house will be here.  



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.  



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. 



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.  



That proof is lo-rez



 hi-rez proof or sftu plz.  



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. 



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. :-) 



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. 



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 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. 



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. 



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?  



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. 



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. 



Pedant



 It's pretty easy to define a sine wave that remains above the x axis.  



I didn't say that it was necessary to...



 ...just that it's easy. :-)




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. :-)  



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. 



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. 



If Aroused, Wank Twice Please.



  



Ineffable?



 He's probably been effed repeatedly, if you ask me. 



LilDebbie effed me liberally



 roffle. :-) 



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.  



Yeah...



 That's not a good idea. :-) 



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.  



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.  



Yep



 Around 20 a day is about right. I actually think it's more like 20 or 25% dupes, joke accounts, etc. 



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. 



Give it to the Dutch



 They have numerous young boys who will be happy to stand all day with their fingers in the dykes. 



lol what



 Who could pass up an opportunity like that? 



It's technically known as



 the Principle of Troll/Biter Duality. 



Difference



 weedaddict's comment was insensitive, Stick's was malicious. 



Yeah, but



 It was still insensitive. Trust me on this. 



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. 



Jane, honey



 My button-pushing finger is sore.  



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. 



Jesus



 And now more queue spam. What the hell? Is it a full moon or what?  



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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...".  



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. 



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. 



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? 



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. 



Sorry



 My only old coot kicked off before he got a line. I'll try to get one in next time. 



Except



 It's pronounced more like "lobstermun" so the whole premise would kind of miss the mark. 



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 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. :-) 



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. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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.  



K5: We're just the nuts in your bedpost.



  



I got a lonely gone codplexxxx



 ...cock in and pull it! 



Jesus



 ...cause then they'd have to rewrite the whole damn book.  



Poor kid



 Life isn't easy for a girl named George. 



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. 



He's not



 It was me, and basically for just the reason urine2 says. He was being an ass. I do appreciate the apology. 



Also:



 [Upon further thought] Are you people competely out of your minds, thinking we'd make cts an editor? Jesus.
:-) 



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.  



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. 



lol what



 OBL == NIWS.  



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. 



Hey



 I caught your article via K5 vanity Google news-alert. I still wish we had published it. :-/  



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. 



I'd be happy to live in a nutshell!



 ...as the Danish Prince was known to say. 



Glutton for punishment ;-)



 



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. 



Just goes to show, once again:



 Bros before hos. Ignore it at your own peril. 



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.  



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.  



K5: We Lack Focus and Direction



 That would be much better than our current slogan, IMO. 



All in good time... all in good time.



 



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? 



Also



 Farm closes for lack of legal labor




Difference



 weedaddict's comment was insensitive, Stick's was malicious. 



Yeah, but



 It was still insensitive. Trust me on this. 



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. 



Jane, honey



 My button-pushing finger is sore.  



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. 



Jesus



 And now more queue spam. What the hell? Is it a full moon or what?  



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.  



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.  



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. 



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. 



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. :-) 



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...".  



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. 



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. 



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? 



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. 



Sorry



 My only old coot kicked off before he got a line. I'll try to get one in next time. 



Except



 It's pronounced more like "lobstermun" so the whole premise would kind of miss the mark. 



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 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. :-) 



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. 



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.  



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. :-) 



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.  



K5: We're just the nuts in your bedpost.



  



I got a lonely gone codplexxxx



 ...cock in and pull it! 



Jesus



 ...cause then they'd have to rewrite the whole damn book.  



Poor kid



 Life isn't easy for a girl named George. 



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. 



He's not



 It was me, and basically for just the reason urine2 says. He was being an ass. I do appreciate the apology. 



Also:



 [Upon further thought] Are you people competely out of your minds, thinking we'd make cts an editor? Jesus.
:-) 



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.  



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. 



lol what



 OBL == NIWS.  



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