The things my brain tells me to do sometimes...
EXT. coliseum, day
JASON is leaving the Coliseum on his way to lunch. There is a car parked just outside the entrance in the fire lane. Two CAMPUS POLICEMEN are speaking to the owner of the vehicle.
POLICEMAN
Could you move your car, sir?
JASON
Shoot him! Shoot him!
The policemen turn to stare at Jason, annoyed at the interruption.
POLICEMAN
Son, please move along. There's nothing to see here.
JASON
There would be if you'd shoot him.
So here's a fun little tidbit from our campus radio station, WUOG:
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, folks, but WUOG is temporarily off the air from 7am-4pm Monday through Friday due to some mad interference with some experiments going on in the UGA Chemistry Department."
I don't know all the details, but apparently these pinheads (and yes, I think the derogatory term is justified in this case) are doing some kind of experiment that involves radio waves, and WUOG is interfering with them. So rather than suck it up and deal with the fact that they didn't do their due diligence and check on where the two campus radio stations broadcast from and how strong their signals are, they instead have made the problem WUOG's until they can get the shielding for their equipment they should have purchased in the first place. Good job, guys. It's people like you that give academics a reputation for being self-absorbed prima donnas.
UPDATE: Learned a little more about this today. Apparently the experiment in question has been running for about five years, and the problem only cropped up recently. There haven't been any changes at the radio station, but something as mundane as a file cabinet getting moved anywhere between the tower and the experiment could have caused the interference to suddenly appear. So scrap the due diligence crack, but I still think the faculty overstepped their bounds by asking for the radio station to shut down.
Wolcott, quoting James Howard Kunstler:
Sometimes I wonder if we just enjoy lying to ourselves. Sometimes I think: if this nation could somehow harness the energy in all the smoke it blows up its own ass, we'd all be able to drive to heaven in Cadillac Escalades.
Okay, so this doesn't look like much, but I thought it was kind of cool. I spent about half an hour this morning farting around with Maya and the various toon shader properties, and eventually this emerged. While it just looks like a ring of eyelashes arranged in an oblong shape, it's actually a toon outline applied to a sphere with tubes turned on, a painted color map, and an animated line modifier, which causes the red and the bulge.
This one's for the Chandra, currently vacationing at a conference north of the Mason-Dixon line. Unfortunately, I'm not able to capture the real thing, but here's a
reasonable facsimile of what it's sounded like at home today.
Way back in December of last year, the age ceiling for joining the army was 35. In January they bumped that up to 40. Now they're raising the ceiling again, to 42. My favorite bit from the article, quoting an Army Recruiting Command spokeswoman:
Of course, not everyone is going to be (physically able to serve). But those older recruits who can meet the physical demands of Army service make excellent soldiers because they bring with them a maturity and a skill level that some of our young recruits don't have yet.
I can just picture some general sitting at a desk, suddenly exclaining "Dammit, the hell with strong backs and young legs! I want my soldiers to have maturity! Sound judgement! And bifocals, goddammit!"
Of course, there's also something a little scarier at the end of the article, suggesting that if the Army continues to have problems recruiting that they may have to "consider reinstating the draft." Suddenly that age ceiling doesn't look so funny anymore.
Paul Begala has this to say on Democrats vs. Republicans on the Iraq War:
The only place in the American government where there is an honest and spirited debate over Iraq is within the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer are not on the same page – and that’s a good thing. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry disagree. Hooray for that.
If anyone tells you the solution to Iraq is easy or obvious, they’re a liar or a fool (a false choice in the case of our president). So why not feature the debate? At least someone is debating what to do.
The fact is the American people want a new direction in Iraq, and the Democrats offer several. The Republicans, on the other hand, offer nothing more than a four-word strategy: more of the same.
Okay, so this is from an Apple-centric site, but that doesn't mean it's not without some truth. After all Microsoft is known for a lot of things, but rock-solid software is not one of them. If there's justice in this world, then that should be part of Gates' legacy.
Software (and especially an operating system) should be hard to use. It should be unintuitive. It should crash often. It should require numerous patches before it becomes stable, because asking all those programmers to actually debug their code before releasing it is ridiculous! After all, writing good code is just too hard! That is the true legacy of Bill Gates, getting consumers the world over accustomed to buying and using bad software.
And it really is an amazing accomplishment when you think about it. After all, when you buy a car, you expect it to work, right? You don’t buy it and then take it back to the dealership in 6 months for your ‘Ford Service Pack 3’ right? You buy a TV, DVD player, PlayStation, microwave oven or dish washer expecting it to work. You buy Windows expecting it to fail. Doesn’t that seem odd to anyone but me?
It's rife with typos and poor OCR, but this document from the US Embassy in Baghdad gives us better insight into the situation on the ground than anything I've seen lately. It makes the historian lurking deep inside me all tingly inside.
Okay, this is damn important, and there's an ad floating around suggesting that a "smart pipe" is better than a "dumb pipe" when it comes to the Internet. It's not. The good folks at Firedoglake are working on finding the best truthful analogy, and have a whole slew of them to choose from right now. Here are a couple I like:
HMO: Without Net Neutrality, your Internet account could be like an HMO. Sometimes the things you need aren’t in the "preferred network." You don’t want corporations telling you what doctors to see. Why would you want them to tell you what services you can buy?
Fast food: Without Net Neutrality, it could be as if you were on your way to your favorite burger joint, only to find that McDonald’s paid for all the roads in your neighborhood to come to them. Whoever has the most money decides what you get to see.
Think of it this way. With net neutrality, it's as easy for you to get to this blog or your cousin Myrtle's cat pictures as it is to get to CNN. Without net neutrality, CNN will still pop up nice & fast, but this blog (written in spare time, hosted on a small-time ISP) could become very difficult to get to. We have enough of our lives controlled by big corporations. Let's not lose the Internet to them, too.
Managed to get two tickets to see Beck last night despite it having been allegedly sold out. Very cool. Jamie Liddell opened, and his mix of classic soul/techno/nerd in a bathrobe was oddly compelling. On to the main show. We get not only Beck & his band, but a live marionette version of the concert projected on a screen behind them. Sounds goofy, but is was freakin' cool.
Unfortunately, the audience was filled to the brim with jackasses who paid forty bucks a pop to stand around and talk with Beck (freakin' Beck!) as background music. I've stood in elevators where people paid more attention to the tunes. The crowd noise was so loud that we couldn't always hear the music-- not just couldn't understand the words, which is expected, but we could not hear the performance.
So, for the first time ever I left a concert early. Not because the performance was bad (again, we're talking about freakin' Beck here), but because Athens is apparently filled with loud-mouthed morons, and I don't have a tazer.
Saw "Cars" last night. Fun movie, and the short ahead of it ("One Man Band") was cute, too. I think Frank may have been the highlight of the picture.
Obligatory gripes: the top half of the screen was out of focus, and the sound was terrible. Normally they have the sound cranked up to eleven, but last night it seemed whisper-quiet at times. I can't wait to see it at home where those problems will be eliminated.
Weird moment: when the movie ended a good half or more of the audience promply started to leave. All I can figure is that this must be the first Pixar movie they've ever seen, because there's always something during or after the credits worth staying for, and "Cars" was no exception. Fortunately, none of the frozen-in-the-aisles patrons were in my line of sight.
I've only recently become aware of Oskar Fischinger's work, but I'm intrigued. This story makes me want to dig up that order form for the DVD collection of his films that's floating around here somewhere...
"'Hi, my name is James. Have you met my friend Bob (insert your favorite tech pundit's name here)? He is virtually herpes free!'"
I'm not sure if it's ignorance, laziness, or a case of CYA, but for the record there are no viruses for OS X. Thus the annoyance. It also gives folks like me ammo when crabbing about the media not getting anything right. I don't really know what's going on in Iraq, but I know my Macs.
Took the morning off to take the girls to the vet, and am taking advantage of the block of time to do a quick catch up on some stuff. I love unspoken-for blocks of time. Brace yourselves for a smattering of pent-up posts...
Took the morning off to take the girls to the vet, and am taking advantage of the block of time to do a quick catch up on some stuff. I love unspoken-for blocks of time. Brace yourselves for a smattering of pent-up posts...
From Wired, a tale of how difficult electronics packaging is to open. Seems like others have commented on that...oh yeah, Penny Arcade a good four years ago. Me, I use package-opening time as a form of primal scream therapy, and have so far managed to avoid gouging myself with either the X-acto knife or the resulting shank that often emerges from the detritus of the package, but I'm sure my time is coming.