Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.
Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?
In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.
I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.
For the 80GB iPod, that is.
Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.
In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.
Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.
The face of the Clinton era
But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.
In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.
In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.
In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.
Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.
Bon appetit!
As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!
Cross-posted at Sistaweb.
crossposted in German at Sistaweb
I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years. In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks. Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.
But now, I say shit on 'em. Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat". On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.
But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits. I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany. I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them. Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse? Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea. That's why Rube needs your help!
If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in. I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.
Thanks for your support!
I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.
Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.
I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.
That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.
Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:
Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.
You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?
Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches. No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha". And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.
WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:
All free, and all pretty good. You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!
The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that. Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers. And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.
People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things. Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen. It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product. And it's free, for Pete's sake.
Slickety slick slick slick. Niiiiice.
Yep.
Nice.
Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.
What is it?
The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.
Where does it go?
In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:
(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)
As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.
What the fuck?!
Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.
All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.
All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.
* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.
Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.
This is awesome.
That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.
If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.
The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.
Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.
Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.
So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:
- Remote SSH logins enabled
- A working Internet connection
- Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!
Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.
Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.
Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.
Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:
[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg
This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:
[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg
If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:
/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)
automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)
automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)
That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:
[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app
As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.
[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..
drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900
Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.
At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.
Notes
This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.
You're SOL if any of the following are true:
- The patient is running Windows
- You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
- You don't have a working Internet connection
- The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him
If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:
ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local
Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.
If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:
- Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
- You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.
To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.
I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?
I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.
Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:
With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.
This program sucks.
Skippystalin is officially on suicide watch: Paris is abstaining from sex for a whole year! As the last person on Earth who hasn't boned her yet, I have to say it's a good idea. Let it cool down a bit, baby.
Where did these people get the idea we give a flying faloopus, anyway?
I'll be damned; Boxcar Willie, the World's Favorite Hobo, is on Bavarian TV right now. And, get this: he's singing "The Lord made a hobo outta me." Never heard the song, but it started off with his trademark train whistle schtick that he does. Or did. I think he'd dead now. Poor Boxcar Willie: First the Lord made him a hobo, then he made him a sad, bitter old man on late night commercials on WTCG, channel 17, pre-Superstation/TBS days, hawking used-up old railroad songs to unappreciative hobo-groupies.
You actually get a lot of the old Urban General late-night infomercial stars over here. Roger Whitaker, for example, is very big in Europe. I only ever knew him from those commercials where they used the infamous "Elvis and the Beatles combined!" loophole to say how many records he'd sold. But over here, he actually gets some TV-time on the variety shows. Or maybe he's dead too, now, and it's all just re-runs.
And now, at 12:27AM, the Oak Ridge Boys are on stage. Bunch of mincing Nancies, these guys. Funny I didn't notice that back in the 70s. One of them has got on Jordache jeans, for the love o' Jesus. And they're tucked into his spiffy little light-brown 'cowboy' boots. And, I might add, a bright red bandana around his neck, with a brooch, I swear to God. That would be the one in the mauve blazer.
As a followup, they have what has to be the gayest cowboy act I've ever seen. There's a gym-queen Indian running half-naked around the stage, being chased by a bunch of leather-chap-wearing cowboys. With whips.
Late-night TV in Germany: It's not just for cheese documentaries anymore.
A little trip through recent history with Sam.
We watched the game in a local biergarten last night. It was beautiful out, and the German flag was waving everywhere, and the German team played like champs. Until the second overtime, that is. In the last two minutes of the game, Italy put two into the net, running away with a 2-0 win.
I hate the Italian team. They're a bunch of crybabies. Against the Americans, one of the Italian players threw a vicious elbow into McBride's face that actually split his cheek open. Nevertheless, they earned the win last night. The two late goals were pretty spectacular.
On July 9, Italy will be playing against the winners of tonight's match between Portugal and France in the finals. With Germany out of the running, maybe there will even be seats somewhere so we can sit down and watch it. After that, I can finally go back to hating soccer.
Rob's services will be held today, Thursday, in Savannah; we figured we'd post a bit of incriminating evidence from last year's Wreckyll in Jeckyll, the one time we were fortunate enough to meet the man in person.
The winners of the Jeckyll Island Poker Classic: Catfish, Barbie, and Acidman, with a panty on his head.
The Usual Suspects: Dax, Eric, Catfish, Rob, Guido (Zonker's Parole officer), Recondo32 (with bullwhip), Rube, and Fiona, the Straight White Missus.
Catfish, Rob, Zonker's Parole officer, and Recondo32.
Rob, with a panty. I believe this particular panty was the prize in the poker championship.
Ann's lovely piggies, painted specially for Rob. No, I'm not jealous. Much.
And now, a little tune, sadly abridged, with Jim, Eric, Denny, Rob, and Rob's brother, Dave
Third Rate Romance, click to play
We would love to be in Savannah, today, to pay our respects and say goodbye. But we can't, so we'll just have to send our best wishes to his family, friends, and to Rob, bon voyage. It was great to know you, and we'll miss you.
Ann and Rube.
P.S. there's some more stuff laying around that I'd like to put out there, so stay tuned!
The first light fell on the magnificent castle upon the plain of Limbo. Ovid lay groaning in his bed. My freakin' head! he moaned inwardly, and turned off his alarm. He lay still for a moment, staring at the stone ceiling, waiting for it to stop spinning. Gingerly, he swung his feet to the cold stone floor and rooted around for his slippers.
He scuffled out of his small, tidy bedroom, and stood on the second floor railing, which overlooked the castle's central living area, and surveyed the damage from the night before. Squinting his eyes against the hangover, he briefly considered turning around, closing the door, and going back to bed.
Empty bottles, upset ashtrays, and general desolation reigned. The record player in the corner turned, forgotten, the needle bouncing endlessly against the inner groove with a soft clunk clunk clunk. From every iron candelabra about the room hung an item of women's underclothing; black stockings here, a garter there, and a bright red thong covered with the wax of the burned-down candles. Rubbing the stubble on his chin, Ovid frowned and stumbled his way down the stone staircase.
Turning left, he made his way past the mounds of peanut shells, tiptoed past the snoring carcass that had, until recently, been Horace, and entered the dark kitchen. Feeling the wall next to the doorway, he found the light switch and flicked it upward.
"Oh, man, cut the lights!" It was Plato, covering his eyes, sitting at the table over a bubbling glass of Alka-Seltzer. All about him lay playing cards and the butt-ends of cigars. At one end of the table was an enormous mound of ivory chips, piled high around an untouched glass of whiskey.
Ovid grimaced. "Dude, you look like Hell."
"Very funny," answered Plato. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm working on a new Dialogue. Unfortunately, the dude with the jackhammer in my head won't let me get a word in edgewise."
Ovid relented, and dimmed the lights. Clearing a path, he grabbed the nearest empty chair and sat at the table. "What the blazes happened last night?"
Plato looked up from his glass and said, "The New Guy."
Oh, yeah, thought Ovid, The New Guy. "Man, I thought Limbo was supposed to be for the virtuous heathens!"
Plato grunted indifferently, and downed the glass of fizzy grey liquid at a gulp. He belched wetly, and for a moment seemed unsure if it had been a one-way trip. Once he became convinced, he looked at Ovid and asked, "Have you seen Elektra?"
"No," he answered. "But I'm pretty sure she's around." He couldn't imagine he'd missed seeing her. Elektra was a six-foot redhead with long legs, round hips, and a voice like an angel. Ovid looked thoughtful. "Hey Plato," he started. "Did you notice that she'd painted her toenails red yesterday afternoon?"
Plato shrugged. "Yeah, I did," he said. "Wonder what that was all about."
A loud crash outside the kitchen door caused both men to grab their heads and moan. Homer came into the kitchen. "Dudes," he said, "I can hear y'all talking all the way out in the stable." He felt his way to the refrigerator, opened the freezer door, and pulled out an ice pack. He smashed it clumsily onto his head, knocking his sunglasses sideways. Stretching out his free hand, he found a chair and sat at the kitchen table with the other two poets. "I got a four-alarm hangover, doggs." The others grunted in agreement.
"Hey, Homer," Plato said, "did you see The New Guy?"
Homer straightened his sunglasses, and rubbed his chin. "Well, that depends," he said. "You mean when he was clearing y'all out at the poker table? Or do you mean maybe when he was leadin' a hootenanny with my lute at all hours of the morning? Or maybe when he, Elektra, and Scheherazade were out playing Twister by the hot tub?" He waved his hand frantically in front of his black shades. "'Cause no, I didn't see him."
Plato and Ovid grimaced sourly at each other. "Well, anyway," said Ovid, "I wonder where he got off to."
Homer furrowed his brow. "I think he and the girls went to meet somebody out in the woods."
"Why do you say that?", asked Plato.
"I heard 'em heading out a few hours ago, giggling like schoolgirls, and I asked 'em where they was headed. The New Guy just said, 'Roscoe's baaaaaaaack' like he was all happy about it. Must be a long-lost friend of his." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "The girls sounded pretty excited about meeting him, too."
Ovid pondered that for moment. "Well, they'll show up eventually, probably with this 'Roscoe' character." They all nodded. "Oh, and Homer," he continued, "what were you doing in the stable, anyway?"
Homer broke into a wide grin.
Plato shuddered. "Oh dude!"
The smug hipsters at Boing Boing are all awonder! 'How to open a bottle of beer the Scandinavian way'; which would mean, with another bottle.
I figured these guys had been around a lot more than that. That's not the 'Scandinavian Way.' It's more like, the 'Places That Don't Have Screw-Capped Bottles Way'. They do it here in Germany, too. They also use cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens, and just about anything else you can think of. Really, if they think opening a beer bottle with another bottle is spectacular, they'd probably have a seizure if they saw 1000 Arten ein Bier zu öffnen (1000 ways to open a beer). They're all the way up to 971, at last count.
The coolest bottle-opening method I've seen was Glacier Bay's (sadly discontinued) opener-in-the-bottom-of-the-bottle trick. Each bottle had a real opener in the bottom of it; so, when your beer was out, you just grabbed the next bottle and zisch! pop open the replacement. I drank an awful lot of Glacier Bay during my Georgia Tech days.
In a sad coincidence, in college I was walking through a shopping mall, and one of those survey people came up to me. She offered me $5, checked my age, and asked if I'd do a taste-test of foreign beer brands. Being 21, poor, and a borderline alcoholic, I had no choice but to comply. I followed the nice young lady to a small room at the end of a hallway, and they had about 12 different kinds of beer, stacked up in crates all around the room. Among the Heinekens and Beck's, I noticed an unfamiliar brand, whose red and white label struck a familiar chord. It was called Arctic Bay, and the bottle looked exactly like the Glacier Bay bottle I'd known and loved, albeit not in the familiar blue and silver. I asked the lady if that was a new beer from the same brewery, perhaps. She then told me that Glacier Bay was no more, and had been bought out by a competitor. Shocked, I hefted this usurper beer Arctic Bay, and cautiously checked the bottom of the bottle. No opener. Just flat and smooth, like every other cheap Canadian beer on the market.
I tried 7 different bottles of beer, just a swig from each. The others, though imports, were not unknown to me, and tasted pretty much as I suspected. The Arctic Bay, though, was like ashes in my mouth. After they were opened and sampled, I asked the survey lady what would happen to all the beer. She said she'd throw it out. We kind of looked at each other, and then drank all the beer. Then we had another round of taste tests, but under a different name. I think we stopped after the fourth, by which time I was filling out the forms with names like 'Philip McCracken' and 'I.P. Frehley'.
So there you have the story about how one time, in college, I actually got paid $5 a round to get 'faced in a room full of imported beer with a bored young coed.
In honor of the Australians' imminent pummeling of Brazil, I present the Brazil World Cup Drinking-Game!
And here's how it works.
You must drink every time a Brazilian:
- scores a goal - 1 drink
- raises hands in disbelief - 1 drink
- gets in the ref's face - 1 drink
- falls to the ground and grabs his ankle - 1 drink; if replay shows he didn't get kicked by anybody - drink again
- must be carried off the field - 1 drink
- comes back into the game after getting carried off the field - drink again
- stays on the ground injured until play stops - 1 drink
- gets right back up and starts running - drink again
Now, grab a piss get get playin'!
The soccer-boys managed a 1-1 tie last night against the heavily-favored italians! It's almost as impressive as the 1980 Lake Placid victory against the Russian hockey team. And, like that victory against the Russians, the hunt for the gold isn't over. Back then, we still had to beat Czech for the gold. Now, we just have to beat Ghana, Ecuador, and about 30 other Banana Republics.
It was an impressive show, all in all. And big props go out to Brian "Bleeder" McBride, who took an elbow to the face at the 30 minute mark. There was blood everywhere, and maybe even a couple of stitches. But big Bri marched off the field under his own power, let the medic take care of him, and was playing in the "Match of Shame", as the Times called it (dicks), in less than 2 minutes.
Now, for those of you who've never watched World Cup Soccer, it's kind of like basketball. Played by a high school Drama Club. The absolute lack of honor in the game is astounding. Apparently, one of the rules is that if somebody so much as breathes on you, you flign yourself to the ground, grab your ankle, and scream like a girl. Then, the referee feels bad for you, blows the whistle, and gives you an Icee. I saw people trying to draw fouls last night that should be ashamed of themselves. The Italian captain, for instance, threw himself to the ground once in the second half, although nobody was anywhere near him. There was no foul. He held onto his leg like he'd been shot, screaming and rolling around on the ground. He actually carried on like this until they came out with a stretcher and hauled him to the sidelines. Where, of course, he stood up, stretched a bit, and was back on the field at the next whistle.
This is because soccer is the only sport I can think of, besides basketball, that doesn't have a built-in justice system. In ice hockey, if you stop play by faking an injury just to draw a penalty, your ass better stay down, because the next time you touch the puck you're going to find yourself sailing over the boards with a skate up your behind. In baseball, if you're showboating like the Italian last night who did a pantomime violin performance in the corner after scoring, you're going to get a Dickie Thon fastball* to the face next time you're up. In soccer there isn't even a delay of game foul for faking an injury.
These pussies will literally lay on the ground, howling, stop the game, let themselves be carried off the field on a stretcher, when the replay shows clearly they never got touched. Then, they come right back into the game like nothing happened. I broke my hip playing ice hockey in college once, and still skated off the ice under my own power. Then went to a social at my girlfriend's sorority. In a tux! The problem is, doing this crap in soccer brings you an advantage because the refs reward it. If the other team's doing it, you've got to do it, too.
The Americans, thank goodness, don't really play that game. In North America, you'd get booed off the field, no matter what sport you're playing.
You can read more on the pussiness of soccer here.
Cross-posted at Sistaweb.
* - Mike Torrez, 1984. Man, was that really 22 years ago?!
If you're not an experienced computer geek with scads of free time on your hands, just stay as far away from Linux as you can. All the openness in the world will not buy back the hours lost in frustration and doubt, as you attempt to do even the simplest of tasks.
I just spent the last two days fighting with Ubuntu's sound support. If you're not a Linux gearhead, you'll probably be surprised – nay astonished! – to learn that there's no freakin' way to easily configure your sound card. This process still involves firing up your favorite text editor, pummeling Google for How-To's, and duking it out with 70s-era computer philosophy over who bears the burden of peripheral configuration, the user or the operating system. Things haven't changed much since the Slackware 1.0 days.
Case in point: Running MythTV on a Ubuntu box. Result: "/dev/dsp cannot be initialized: device or resource in use, Sound Disabled". This is still an issue in 2006? Even using the ultrahypermodern advanced ALSA drivers? I guess ALSA's intended for use in single-user, single-tasking multimedia appliances such as iPods rather than Linux. Which is a shame, considering it's made specifically for Linux!
Fact is, the user should never have to worry about sound card locking. There are no data integrity issues with a user hearing more than one sound at a time; the human ear is made for that, so sound card-locking should be considered a bug. The OS should queue up the requests for the driver, which should then schedule them to be sent to the hardware in an orderly manner.
Under Ubuntu Linux today, renowned as the User-Friendly Linux, the default configuration doesn't enable sharing your sound card among applications. If you're using KDE with the ARTS server running, a common scenario, and you launch Quake 4 or MythTV or any other program that requires sound, it'll bomb out with a "device busy" error.
There are workarounds, of course. You can create a down-mixing pseudo-driver in your ~/.asoundrc, if you can stay awake through the 3500-word how-to. This worked for me, at least for a bit. Once I rebooted my computer, my USB webcam's microphone and mixer had remarkably taken over the Card #0 slot, my USB speakers were Card #1, and my onboard sound had become Card #2. This order changed with every boot, in seemingly random fashion, so it meant I had to manually reassign card numbers in the .asoundrc file. This is also necessary whenever a USB peripheral is plugged in or out.
In addition to its not working, there are some other issues to consider:
It's user-specific
you have to be root to make it system-wide in the /etc/asoundrc, and, since there's no configuration utilities to speak of, you'll be mucking around /etc with a text-editor, a limited knowledge of the subject matter, and an appetite for self-destruction.
It's fragile
You use card numbers instead of GUIDs. If you've got USB sound devices, like speakers or a USB webcam, there's no predictable way to know which card number which device will have. And, of course, they change when you plug a device in or disconnect it. And they're different every time you reboot, for whatever ungodly reason.
It's not automatic
The default configuration for ALSA is that you have a single sound card and mixer that never changes; in addition, it will never be accessed simultaneously by multiple processes. The how-to (linked above) says the following:
NOTE: For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup dmix. Dmix is enabled as default for soundcards which don't support hw mixing.
LIES!
When the operating system detects a sound card, it should automatically configure it to a) work, b) be accessible through an easy-to-use interface, c) be optimally configured for output quality and compatibility, and d) be accessible by multiple programs. For the OS, this should be easy: Set up the values, activate the hardware, and write out state to a configuration file automatically. Ideally, it would also send out a system notification that hardware was added, and the user's environment could deal with the information as it deems fit.
Linux unfairly places this burden on the user. The OS currently does nothing except load the bare-metal driver for the device, and configure it in a way that makes it almost useless. The existing environments, like KDE and Gnome, offer absolutely no hardware configuration interfaces, and the CLI offers nothing more than a text-editor and 40 man pages and a pat on the behind for luck. In fact, KDE (and I assume Gnome) compound the problem by loading an outdated "sound server", ARTS, which provides a lackluster facility simulating concurrent sound-card access with terrible latency, and then only for programs specifically written for ARTS.
For the record, I have never had a problem with this under Mac OS X, BeOS, or any Windows since 95. In fact, the only weirdness I've had under OS X is with the Videolan client. Sticking to its Open Source roots of user hatred and bad interface design, it makes the user put in a sound card "number" to play sound through external USB speakers. No drop-downs, no sanity checks, and no hint as to which number belongs to which card. Pathetic.
- If you configure it to use the second sound device, for example, it will still attempt to use it even after it's been removed, and there no longer is a second device.
If I learned anything from watching old cop shows, it's this: If you know something about a crime, and you don't reveal the information to the police, you're guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal. Of course, there are ways around that. For instance, you could just blog it!
Why are journalists, and now bloggers, above the law? Shouldn't they be liable for illegal knowledge they receive from sources? What exactly are the limitations? If someone is planning, say, to assassinate the president, and gives a journalist the information beforehand without saying where or how, is the journalist required by law to reveal his identity to the police? It certainly doesn't seem like it nowadays. Anybody with a Myspace account apparently has carte blanche.
Apparently, an unnamed, unconfirmed source on the ground in Baqouba says, "U.S. troops may have beaten wounded al-Zarqawi before he died". I actually made a joke about this happening, when I was watching the news conference. And I was right.
The witness, who lived near the scene of the bombing, claimed in an interview with AP Television News to have seen U.S. soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from the man's nose.
Can you imaging getting 1000 lbs. (907kg 453kg) of TNT dropped on you, and then the guys who dropped it run up and punch you in the nose? What a bunch of dicks!
I guess this is the point where we're supposed to curb our enthusiasm, look at the ground in shame, and then kind of snigger unter our breath when the Sanctimonious Sympathy Club at the AFP isn't looking. I feel horrible about the whole thing.
Man, these yahoos really fucking dig soccer around here!
I wish I'd get off my ass and switch to wordpress. Either that, or finish up my CMS I've been working on since, oh, 1999.
:-(
Frequent Iowahawk Guest-Blogger Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi had his dissent viciously quashed today by the U.S. Air Force, using 500-lb bombs dropped from two F-16 fighter jets. Zarqawi, who's been blogging from Iraq since the war began in 2003, could not be reached for comment, though his thumbs have now been found.
You can get reactions from around the world by watching the non-partisan coverage on the Pentagon Channel at ChannelChooser, at channel #2. But whatever you do, don't go down to channels 62-70, because that's where the naughty stuff is.
I would be James Lileks:
Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and ... well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night.
And then I could say smart-boy stuff like he does. Actually, I've probably talked too much about Lileks lately. My girlfriend's starting to suspect something. But he's so darn...homey! I can't help myself.
Via Hot Air.
