The Boys Are Back In Town
This is a time travel novel with some eye-watering chills as a creepy enemy shifts the past, making memories dissolve. The author somehow failed to put his real self into the story, instead we get some generic writing about high school. “How did that song go?”, the main character asks on his drive back to his high school reunion, “See some old friends, good for the soul” Ouch. “His stomach rumbled and he thought about breakfast”. Made me wonder if the author has ever spent time inside a human body. An interesting twist on the time travel thing happens when the main character teams up with his past self. As the past self runs through the woods after a murderer, memories form on the spot and they are able to coordinate using them. An obsession with sex catapults this book out of the sci-fi genre into horror/romance. Heavy petting buffers each action sequence.
Odyssey Five
In this canceled TV series, five space shuttle astronauts meet a fastidious alien who send them back through time to save the earth. The main story is endlessly goofy in the way the XFiles were endlessly goofy and non-resolving. The characters keep getting distracted by things they could tweak history or improve in their own lives. The characters get to wake up in their bodies from five years ago. They all freak out in various ways and then get together for coffee to try and fight the aliens. A waitress (who is so totally an alien) keeps asking them why they clam up when she comes by. Tired, predictable sub-plots then give the viewer plenty of time to pack a suitcase and move in with the characters. It is going to be a long five years. In each episode, the director announces, “OK, naked time!” and a bunch of extras appear undressed and then they get back to ineptly chasing incompetent aliens.
Gattaca
This movie features low key acting and almost no conflict. Everyone portrayed utterly flat emotionless characters. Jude Law, incapable of playing a flat character, made up for all of that with pure bitterness, but warmed up at the end (heh, heh). Perhaps because two of the main characters have heart conditions, there is very little action, just lots of pretending to be genetically perfect. I liked how the culture of this elite institution was portrayed. Everyone was there because of their superior genes, not because of any achievement on their part. A job interview consists of a blood test. The genetic elites suffer from this-not in any outward way, of course-but I could just tell. Everyone felt very uncomfortable when a non-genetically perfect person (an in-valid) out-competed a valid.
I didn’t know this, but in Vista, if you hold down shift key and right click on a folder in the right hand window of Windows Explorer, you get a context menu with some extra commands including “Open Command prompt here” and “copy as path” which are both very useful.
update: why the hell would I want quotes around the path if I chose “copy as path” stupid
update2: it is a pain in the ass to remember to hold down the shift key to access these extra choices. Much better to fix the registry and get them in the regular context menu. Instructions Here.
I was watching You, me and Dupree the other day. Dupree gets into riding a bike and I just knew that he would be crashing it very soon. Is it true that when a bike appears in a movie or tv show, it will soon be crashing?
monkeyshines: main character falls off bike with backpack full of historic bricks, leaving him at the mercy of psychotic helper monkey.
you, me and dupree: Dupree gets hit by a car to great comic effect
The Truth About Cats & Dogs: guy falls over handlebars in front of Uma.
Strongest Man in the world: Kurt Russell hops on locked bike and crashes.
Karate Kid: crashes bike. ( Video ) Gets gift of antique car and drives that instead, as his life is improving
revenge of the pink panther. Clouseau rides bicycle across drawbridge and crashes.
Breaking Away: Iron bar in spokes from Italian cyclists.
Frank has been fascinated with large numbers lately, especially googol. A googol is larger than the number of particles in the known universe. He keeps asking me questions about that. “are there a googol ants in the world? nope. are there a googol pieces of sand? nope. are there a googol stars? nope.
“There are”, I told him, “more than a googol chess games.”
After contemplating this, he says,
“I’d like to try some of those other kinds of chess”
I predict that what is happening in the U.S. economy is akin to shedding weight, the slimming-down process of a lean, mean, fighting machine.
Furthermore, I predict a rapid recovery, next year in 2009. Yes, oil is high–so what? This is an opportunity to make money in oil, so let’s make some money in oil. Energy troubles and the high costs associated with higher oil prices–BUNK! We will adapt–and faster than the egg-heads think. Why? Because this is America, and Americans think big. That’s who we are. It’s what Bernstein forgets: We built-up Europe from rubble and ash–and we’re not finished building-up, because we love freedom.
Don’t separate economics from the realm of absolute moral valuations. Yeah, we tripped and skinned our knees, but we’ll get up and climb higher, because that is who we are. AND WE WILL SUCCEED.
Freedom is on the march in the world.
God bless America, and God bless the civilization of the American peoples–rock of the global age.
It would be easy to make fun of this person, assuming he’s serious. It would be more honest to report that I hear this sentiment voiced by everyone from prius-driving progressives to Escalade driving maniacs. Everyone thinks we will just zen this thing at the last minute. If so, we are sure saving the “21st century technology” fix-it card for the very last minute.
on the other hand,
There’s an eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We’re on the edge of something. We’re at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you’re spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week
I was in Southern CA for my cousin’s wedding. It was a beautiful event and really great to spend time with family.
I rented a mountain bike and rode into the hills. A mysterious record heat wave boils brains the hills bust guts. I rode about 200 yards and flushed, parched, and sunburned, I started imagining search and rescue teams hauling my bleached bones out of a canyon in a few days.
Once I got to the top of the ridge, I descended past running birds, lizards, and bunnies…. and dozens of palaces under construction.
I’ve never ridden a full suspension bike before and while I liked going over obstacles on the downhills, the uphills were trouble. I could not stand up and haul on the handlebars because the bike wiggled too much.
Don’t worry about LA and the coming global shitstorm. Things are fine here. people still hose off their driveways and drive up and down 40 degree inclines for their bottled water and beef.
I took a break from bicycling today because of an incident with an F350. If I’m getting that hot-headed, I need to take a break.
I don’t have a linear explanation. Lets just say that hearing huge pickups rev their engine to indicate that I should get out of the way is about the equivalent of being spit on, so lets say I reacted as if I was spit on. Lets also say I’ll be using a different route home for a while… and wearing a fake mustache. and celebrating the price of gas. Oh yeah. Eat it America.
It was kind of a drag getting two flats on yesterday’s Hiwawatha ride, but the nice thing was the speed with which the tire irons, pumps and spare tubes came out once someone yelled “FLAT!”. It was like a western, except with bike tools instead of pistols. I haven’t seen people pull stuff out of pockets that fast since I was in a Java class and the svelte instructor said, “Which one of you geeks has a Leatherman so I can cut the shrink wrap off of these manuals?”
Luckily, one of the stops we made was at the Cars R Coffins bike cafe on Lyndale. He sells coffee and bikes and, I’m told, is THE regional expert on bicycle suspensions. I bought myself a new tire there. The old one was full of cuts and embedded bits.
The bathroom there has the best decoration ever: an x-ray viewer complete with films of the proprietor’s fractured limbs.
That flat fixing method I’ve been using since 3rd grade? Amazingly slow when people are watching… Time to work on that. The plan of deciding not to get a flat and therefore not needing tools and spare tube? Only works with the expensive, flat resistant Continentals I have on my other bike.
It sure is windy. I joined the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood weekly bike ride tonight. One other guy, the ride leader, showed up. He was quite an athletic young man. We rode straight into the wind for almost an hour and then turned around and rode back. It feels marvelous to be on skinny tires again, but think I crippled myself. My lower back and butt were on fire. Sitting here, I can hear my knees gurgling as they fill up with fluid.
It is good to ride with someone who will drive you to ride faster than you would alone. I should be all healed up by next week.
I used to disregard Michelle Bachmann, but now I see she might secretly be a situationist comedienne:
“They point the finger of blame at you — you drive too much, you drive the wrong kind of car, you use the wrong kind of light bulb,” she said. “What America needs is a $2 gallon of gasoline.”
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Today, reviewing a list of his quotes and things people say about him, I see that he is an easy and popular target of people who earn their living ranting and raving about subjects safely within the spectrum of acceptable opinion. Right or wrong, he forces people to evaluate ideas they don’t even want to think about and he says these things without regard for his reputation. That is why I appreciate him.
I also liked this praise from an unlikely source:
“It’s a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky’s tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy. What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: “The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.” He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.” –Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005
I think this quote also rings eerily true. It violates the rule of “don’t look for conspiracy when incompetence explains everything so well”, but it if I was an energy company with a choice between costly exploration and a friendly government handing me proven reserves that used to be under contract to France and China, yeah, I can see it.
“To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there, is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to this, and they’re worth looking at. So it’s argued that it can’t be true, because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but it’s totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn’t matter how they balance out, it’s just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich.”
It is fun to watch how plastic truth can be when I read these quotes by him and then read his detractors at the bottom of the page.
The past two mornings, the same goose has attacked me as I ride by, yesterday attacking me from the side and beating his wings against me, this morning sneaking up silently from behind and crashing into my helmet. I always scream like a chimp when it happens.
When an animal gets this aggressive, my first thought is that it is going to wear itself out and die. Animals, especially in early spring, don’t have all this excess energy to spend against perceived threats.
I was asked today if I still needed a screen I had established a few months ago on a Linux server. It had my editing session open with my cursor still blinking in the same place I left it. I knew that screen kept your work alive independent of your connection to a remote box, but it didn’t fully register that the sessions are “forever”.
“Screen” is a gnu utility that many Linux users are enjoying quietly. It is great for working remotely because it lets you quit or be disconnected from your remote session without losing your working environment.
Neat things about “screen”
A long operation that makes your current window unusable might have required you to start another window. Using screen, you can open multiple screens and switch between them.
Operations will continue to run after you log out or become disconnected.
Use a keystroke to toggle between screens. (Kind of like ALT-Tab in Windows)
customize the behavior of your screen command in your .screenrc file (as described here)
Split screen while using remote connection
use screen as kind of a window manager for console apps
Get notified when one screen is silent (meaning it is done with a task)
Issue one command that affects all open screens
Just as an example, when logging in remotely to some work, there are like 8 steps to get to exactly where I need to be. When I know I’m going to have to login again soon, I keep a screen alive, and “getting there” is reduced to one command.
Late Saturday afternoon, after chugging 20 ounces of a beer called 110th element, the doorbell rang and I suddenly found myself over-confidently re-arranging vehicles for a huge delivery truck. Afterwards, I noticed hair hanging out of my tailpipe. I pulled about 20 feet of the thick dark stuff out. I was having trouble believing what I was seeing. I thought it must be one of the following:
1. The intense hops of Element 110 caused me to hallucinate. This was the first hallucination I’ve ever had that left an artifact that other people could see.
2. Damn kids pulled the old insanely-long-hair-up-the-pipe trick on me.
3. the inside of my car is made of hair.
It turns out that #3 is correct. Hondas use a muffler baffled with this substance and it often comes out when the muffler goes.
Spent a couple of hours tonight helping setup the TCGIS garage sale. Check it out on Craig’s List. There are some good things there: A ladder, some tools. a baby jogger. some good computer books. Ok. The computer books were donated by me and I displayed them prominently on the rack so that the first people at the sale would spot them from across the room and go, “wow. look at the book selection on TCGIS”.
Spotted also was the ubiquitous pine-cone wreath and the inevitable white shirt with burnt-orange stain around collar. But mostly there are some nice things. Lots of jeans for adults.
Frank was there with me. He was amazed to see so many exact duplicates of things we had at home. He walked up to a strange mechanical device and asked what it was. I showed him how to load paper into it and press the buttons to make thin metal hammers zip out and smack a faded dry ribbon into the paper and leave a faint black P.
We went on a German school outing to the north shore this past weekend. It was restful.
Kids had some weird congested snuffling problem that caused them to wake up in the night. To my utter and lasting surprise, the homeopathic remedy we bought for $11.00 at the Grand Marais Coop didn’t do shit. It was kind of entertaining as Frank flopped violently around the hotel room trying to dislodge the remedy. Should have read the directions better.
We didn’t feel like we could afford skiing, so we took a couple of nice hikes around Grand Marais and spent hours in the municipal pool’s hot tub, listening to the locals chat about their money problems. The scenery was very much about the transition from winter to spring. We were standing on the beach north of town at the exact moment the ice broke up. Just before it happened, the waves were making the thin ice undulate. Gulls, just to show they could do it, were out there standing on it, pretending to walk on water. Then it all came apart and ice pushed to shore in great broken plates. We could balance large stones on top of the broken ice and watch them appear to float.
Several kids brought their violins and put on a little impromptu concert for us.
I’ve viewed a bunch of movies recently, most of which featured Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Charlie Wilson’s War
See it immediately. It is awesome. I was prepared for clever jokes and a peek at how the elites behave in Washington. I got a little of that, but there were some intense, heart-breaking battle scenes mixed in along with some spine-tingling history lessons.
The Savages
This was a depressing romp in the sack with an old demented guy who writes on the walls with his own shit. Great acting all around.
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
“The World Is an evil place.” I thought all the bad stuff in this film was happening to me. It took me several days to recover. If you ask, “can things get any worse for these guys?”, The answer is always yes. That is, until the dude’s dad suffocates him with a pillow.
Little Children
Well, what was the point of this besides some hot extra-marital sex with Kate Winslet? It was to ponder motherhood, I guess. There are some truly uncomfortable scenes, like when that guy from the Bad News Bears chops his nuts off and then goes to a playground. There is some great humor, and there’s Kate Winslet. In one scene, Kate Winslet gets fired as a friend in this subdued, disappointed way that is one of the most honest scenes in any movie.
The option to identify myself on blogger through OpenID appeared a while ago. What is it?
OpenID is a way to verify your identity and do single sign-ons (SSO). It is a vendor neutral approach to Federated Identity. You set up an OpenID account with an OpenID provider such as myOpenId. It takes about three minutes. When you go to comment on blogger, you give them a URL associated with your open ID account. (mine is mcgyver5.myopenid.com.) Blogger then goes and checks with OpenID. If you have a session going at the time with OpenID, OpenID says, “this person is valid”. And Blogger accepts your comment. If you don’t have a session yet with OpenID provider, you are asked to login. This solves the problem of remembering a dozen account names and passwords. It also solves the problem of some joker leaving comments in forums or blogs pretending to be you. It could also prevent stuff like this from happening. Many web sites have been adopting openID, but not online retailers and banks.
Questions I had:
Why now? Why not in 1996? I don’t know. This is a step back from an all-encompassing solution like Microsoft Passport. OpenID is starting simple. Very simple
what are the security and privacy concerns?
- your open ID provider might have a way of tracking your behavior online.
- if someone steals your open ID account, for example by capturing your keystrokes when you log in, they would have control over your all your accounts that support openId. The security of OpenID depends on the security of your computer and your email account.
Should I trust the openId provider? You have to either trust them or set yourself up as an openID provider.
Can I hitch up my gravatar with openId? Open ID doesn’t work with “Gravatar”, though there are some requests on the gravatar site for this feature. There are services like openavatar which do something similar. For some reason, the gravatar site supports openavatar.
can I use my HP fingerprint reader as a hardware authenticator with openID? That would be awesome. TrustBearer has a service that allows hardware devices like card readers and fingerprint readers to work with OpenID. I don’t see a way to use the embedded HP fingerprint reader for anything other than logging into windows. Here is a John Udell post about passwordless openID used with smartcards.
Is there a way to have multiple IDs? Yup. It is called YADIS. It simply defines a format for collecting identities from multiple providers under one umbrella identity. It requires you to be running your own website. Yadis works with any URL-based identity scheme and is not limited to openID.
How is this related to security certificates for SSL?
SSL security certificates positively identify a domain using a third party and information stored in your browser to vouch that you are signing into the website you think you are signing into and that the website is run by who you think it is. OpenID does not serve as a SSL certificate provider. However, Verisign, a provider of SSL certificates, has set itself up as an OpenID provider.
What stops someone from opening up an OpenID under a variation of my name and going around posting as me? When people want confirmation that I am behind a death threat, they see an imposter’s openID page with my picture and have no immediate way of knowing it isn’t me. Even if I hitch my OpenID to my own website, there could be any number of alternate online identities out there. This part I don’t fully understand yet.
