Flutterby™! From 2009-01-02 to 2009-01-31

I'm building some appliance lifts. We'd love to use a pre-existing commercial appliance lift but nobody makes 'em the form factor we'd like. The Wood Technology SuperStar Appliance Lift comes the closest we've seen, but we really want 'em for appliances that are a foot or so high, max, and that one's 18".

I built a prototype of the mechanism out of 1/2" ply, but the thing ends up being 2" wide on either end by the time we account for screw heads and the like, and the plywood has a little bit of flex.

A few questions:

1. Anyone got experience with cheap bearing systems for metal? We're not talking high speed, we're not talking a lot of use (rotate 90° when we pull out the appliance and put it back), so perhaps even a rivet that allows rotation (which would have the advantage of minimal protrusion)? Last time I did rivets was Pop Rivets in duct metals and similar thin sheet back when I was a kid.
2. We need the arms to have an angle in 'em. I see two ways to this: Either cut it out of sheet stock with a jigsaw, or braze or weld two pieces of bar together. I think my across the street neighbor has an arc welder, last time I tried brazing with straight MAPP (not Oxy-MAPP) I had lots of trouble keeping the bike frame bits hot enough to get a good flow, and I gave away my Oxy-Acetylene torch a few years back. Anyone got experience either brazing with a basic hand-held MAPP torch on 1/8"x1" or so bar stock, cutting 1/8" sheet with a jig saw, or another way to do this?

[ related topics: Fabrication Bicycling Woodworking ]

Over at The Boston Diaries, Sean talks about his first time making pasta. I remember when I had that process so wired that I could make fresh pasta and cook it faster than I could cook dried pasta. Back in the day, Catherine and I had talked about sending a "pasta with prawns, feta and and pepperoncini" recipe to an "under 20 minutes" recipe contest that'd be a cue-sheet to a few seconds.

[ related topics: Food ]

This one's for Chris: A floating house on Lake Huron.

[ related topics: Boats Real Estate ]

Brendan Gregg discovers that shouting at your hard drives gives unusual latencies. Video demonstration here. Via MeFi, which has the usual second-guessing, and there are reasons that this might not be the sound, might be related to something else he's doing simultaneously, but does point to a need to keep things stable in the machine rooms.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

Yow! If you're into bearings, check out VXB Ball Bearings! I've been assuming we were going to use brass bushing bearings for our appliance lift, but the weekly specials here are making me hope I can find the right form factor for ball bearings, 'cause they're amazingly inexpensive!

[ related topics: Fabrication Model Building ]

Cory Silverberg talks about yet another article about a study which finds abstinence pledges ineffective.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

On the "Ask Obama to get FISA right" mailing list, the following message came across:

Just a reminder that we would probably be (mostly) in the dark about NSA warrantless wiretaps (and the ensuing FISA revamp) if not for the courageous admissions of individuals like Thomas Tamm, Mark Klein, and Adrienne Kinne. It was mentioned in the Dec 22, 2008 Newsweek article ( http://www.newsweek.com/id/174601 ) that to cover legal costs, Tamm recently set up a defense fund. I thought it might be fitting to send a donation to him for his work. To me the amount $20.04 seems symbolic of the spring 2004 phone call that started it off, but feel free to interject your own symbolic number which matches your budget.

Thomas Tamm Legal Defense Fund

Bank of Georgetown

5236 44th Street

Washington, DC 20015

[ related topics: Privacy Law ]

One year in the new house! Things we've done:

Yard and Garden

• Cleared out the shade structures in the back yard
• Turned manure into the flower beds
• Planted boysenberries, herbs, dwarf Meyer lemon, tomatoes, peppers, kale, chard, parsley, fennel, cabbage, brussels sprouts, carrots, peas
• Installed pop-up automatic sprinkler system, in the front and back
• Built a lattice for climbing plants
• Installed wood for copper surfaces for snail control in the side flower beds
• Removed Rhododendron from the front beds
• Tore up plastic under flower and vegetable beds
• Re-did bike shed so that it would fit in the shed structure
• Built limestone and fir table
• Built workbench

House Exterior

• Installed a new front door
• Built a new front entrance
• Had roof replaced
• Examine rain gutters, cleared downspouts, replaced section at bottom of back left
• Removed fence and gate with rot in the back left
• Painted and caulked the east wall.
• Painted and caulked the south wall.
• Filled hole and painted over old electrical connections on the west wall.
• Replaced the back door
• Had solar attic fan installed

Inside

• Removed carpets, and had floors refinished
• Pulled down faux paneling and painted living room
• Put in a new closet, and installed cedar linings in that and Charlene's closet.
• Put new shelves and tracks in the hall/bathroom closet.
• Built and installed two of the new kitchen cabinets
• Built drawers for those two cabinets
• Shortened main countertop to let dishwasher roll in beside fridge
• Milled and finished baseboards for the living room and hallway.
• Changed out all door handles and locks
• Reworked Dan's old workbench into temporary entertainment center

Wiring

• Ran phone wire to better place.
• Had new electrical panel installed
• Rewired socket in living room for air conditioner

Plumbing

• Installed a hot water recirculator
• Flexible connections, water and gas, to water heater.
• Replaced kitchen faucet
• Put in new shower head

Shop

• Put up shelving in the garage
• Put up new flourescents
• Built the Systainer cart
• Installed new router in the router table
• Put up clamp racks

Underneath

• Installed jack under broken beam in crawlspace
• Cleaned organic material out of crawlspace
• Set up new sump pump pipes to outside.
• Ran GFI connection for sump pump
• Put insulation on hot water pipes.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Real Estate Gardening Furniture Woodworking Home Improvement ]

I need to expand this a lot before I put it other places, but here's a start on my evaluation of drawer slides, why I like Accuride a lot, and why, despite that, we've gone with mostly Blum slides in the kitchen.

This afternoon we went to meet some friends at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco to see the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit (Aside to Google: Do you think that if I searched on "Da Vinci San Francisco" I might get that rather than miscellaneous unrelated and a review panning something that happened at the Metreon a year ago?). While we were there, we saw a private ambulance drive up, park, start to unload, a fire truck come by, drive past and turn behind the building, the ambulance guys pack back up, a ladder truck come and unload lots of gear.

I wish I'd gotten video of the putting up of this ladder, because that looked really heavy and difficult to maneuver, and video of the small woman carrying 350' of rope up the ladder, followed by some bigger beefier guys carrying less, 'cause this is a fairly mundane lowering of a victim, circumstances unknown, in a Stokes litter off a building:

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area History Art & Culture California Culture Pyrotechnics Machinery Video Woodworking ]

Eric Wagoner on some of the legal issues involved in running an online farmer's market, and how he hopes his operation is different from The Manna Storehouse in La Grange Ohio, whose proprietors were recently allegedly held at gunpoint for several hours by police.

[ related topics: Health Food Law Current Events Law Enforcement Economics ]

Way worth reading: Michael Lewis: The End of the Financial World as We Know It.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. ...

Part 2 continues into exploring the fuck-up that is the Paulson management of the TARP payoff bailout, and also details several ways in which the SEC is the problem, not the solution. Both are well worth reading.

Semi-relatedly, there's some concern that the U.S. savings rate will skyrocket, and though raising the savings rate is good, if it skyrockets the economy will slump dramatically. Seems to me that the smarter thing to do with that $750 billion, if you believe in government intervention in the economy, would have been to put it solidly behind Social Security, so that we didn't have the "oh holy crap my retirement's disappeared" reaction, and then work to phase out 401k and IRA plans, or find a way to shift them so that they're not just a way for the Wall Street slimeballs and shysters to get their fingers further into the pockets of the rest of the country. I'm not sure how that happens, beyond abolishing the things entirely (which has a negative impact on the savings rate too), but encouraging local smaller investment would both help to cut out the broker culture, and build more vibrant communities.

[ related topics: moron Sociology Community Economics ]

Pew Research: States of the Union Before and After Bush. Thanks, Tara.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Philip Greenspun has some interesting notes on innovation in higher education. Tossed up here for Eric and my Dad.

[ related topics: Education ]

Great article: Why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Macintosh ]

Mark apparently has it working on my site, I don't, but if I can get it working this looks to be 100% awesome: Mark has written a MediaWiki mode for Emacs, announced on his blog here. Once you get it configured, from within Emacs you should be able to:

Open a wiki file:	M-x mediawiki-open
Save a wiki buffer:	C-x C-s
Save a wiki buffer with a different name:	C-x C-w

I'm still tweaking my Emacs ignorance, but... hopefully soon!

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering ]

Photos of My Cervix, images of a cervix throughout a menstrual cycle.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Physiology ]

On the Redfin blog, Glenn Kelman looks at the assumption of risk and its role in startups and the recent crash:

I explained to my wife, a doctor, that a call option lets you profit from a stock if it goes up, without actually owning the stock if it drops: hedge fund managers share in the fund’s gains but not its losses. I looked at her as if this was quite a trick. “But,” she said, “aren’t all of you paid in options too?”

It took a moment to realize she was right. Venture capitalists take 20% or more of their fund’s gains, but few risk much of their own money in a loss. At startups, entrepreneurs and executives don’t usually own stock, at least not any they can sell, but options to profit from the stock if the company is bought or goes public. Little if any of the money invested in a startup comes from the entrepreneur.

The startups I've participated in with any sort of equity have been funded by the founders and entrepreneurs, which means I've assumed the risk, and spent a lot of money. The article's a good look at the other side of this.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Three cable cuts again. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Continued in the comments.

[ related topics: Conspiracy ]

A rare peek at Homeland Security's files on travelers

[ related topics: Politics Civil Liberties ]

Stacey's Books in SF is closing. The eBook isn't really here yet, but books are over.

[ related topics: Books Bay Area ]

Fascinating: Stanwood craftsman puts human touch on factory-made pianos, Darrell Fandrich takes mass produced pianos from China, guts them, and rebuilds them with more attention to detail, selling them for quite a bit less than the completely custom built pianos.

There was recently a thread over at Lumberjocks about how finished projects were worth less than the raw lumber. I think these two notions are tied together.

[ related topics: Fabrication Economics Woodworking ]

I wouldn't give this a second glance, except that Brad Graham is a contestant: The St. Louis Sexiest Cybergeek Contest voting is still open, and not only is Brad Graham sexy, he'd appreciate your vote.

Porn industry calls for bailout. (Via SE)

So, uh, maybe while we're getting screwed we can be getting off too?

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

Charlene is selling tickets to the Dedication to Special Education raffle fundraiser, full flyer in PDF here. We believe in the foundation and the work it supports, the prize, a Toyota Prius, is fully donated(!), tickets are twenty bucks, email me or Charlene if you'd like to participate.

[ related topics: Education ]

The Ponzi Scheme in Every Hedge Fund, about the difference between realized and unrealized assets. Which, of course, extends in some way to the Ponzi scheme in everything where demand is uncoupled from consumption.

[ related topics: Economics ]

5 Time Management Tricks I Learned From Years of Hating Tim Ferriss.

I Dream In Malcolm Gladwell.

[ related topics: Humor ]

As if you needed more reason to go out and meet personally the people involved in your food supply, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reports on Honey Laundering, or why you can't trust honey labels, especially when it comes to "organic", why your honey may contain some really gnarly antibiotics like chloramphenicol, and why the country of origin labels are often meaningless. (via MeFi)

In light of the things we're learning about our food supply, the regulatory competence of the SEC, and such the libertarian argument that private certification will spring up in the absence of government regulation becomes a bit more believable, at least if we assume that consumers trusting such government agencies don't seek out private mechanisms for doing the same. Of course, from what I've seen of third party food and supplement safety organizations so far, I need a lot of convincing on all fronts.

And, yes, both Charlene and I are wondering if there's enough foraging in our neighborhood for a hive in the back yard. There's certainly a hive somewhere nearby.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Food Consumerism and advertising Seattle ]

Air Force Releases 'Counter-Blog' Marching Orders

Complete with flow chart for blogging. :)

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs ]

You probably saw the Burger King Whopper® Sacrifice, "unfriend" 10 people on Facebook, get a coupon for a burger. Jason Kottke used this to put a valuation of $1.8 billion on Facebook, if a Whopper® costs $2.40.

[ related topics: New Economy Net Culture Economics ]

Pictures of abandoned decaying Soviet polar nuclear lighthouses. Via jwz: My Happy Place: Soviet Nuclear Lighthouse Dead Zones in which it is pointed out that this'd be a fantastic band name, which links through to Warren Ellis's link to the final article.

Some notes on the thousand or so unsecured Soviet Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators and incidents involving them, and Wikipedia's article on radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which helps make sense of some of those "power a neighborhood with a nuclear generator in a shipping container" claims we've been seeing recently.

And who the hell do I have to kill to permanently turn off those stupid "snap.com" (no linky love from me) previews? Finding the stupid "off" link has become enough of a hassle that I just live with 'em now, but...

[ related topics: Politics Photography Cool Science ]

California State Budget, including the Proposed Budget Summary. Charlene works in special ed, and we've got some other ties with developmental disability that are going to be impacted by this year's budget, and we wanted to get an overview for where our state funds come from, where they go, and what the trade-offs are when people propose services in one area at the expense of cuts in another. Something to take to people who complain that the cuts are "not fair" so that we can ask "okay, where would you draw the line?" and maybe raise consciousness a little.

This gets a start on that, though it'd be great to be able to drill down those pie charts.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture Economics ]

John Surinchak, a 64 year old Universal Anglican minister, and Patrick Spangler, his 18-year-old grandson, nab a killer in SF:

"He was blathering. I'm a priest with the Universal Anglican Church. I speak in tongues. This was in that line."

[ related topics: Religion Bay Area ]

How to disable Snap.com previews using AdBlock Plus, suggested by Larry, and Sean had suggested a DNS change, it looks like sna.snap.com in /etc/hosts might just do it.

[ related topics: Weblogs Archival ]

Willard Wigan is a sculptor who works at an extremely small scale. ABC News video profile of Wigan, with lots of pictures of his stuff, BBC article, via.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Fabrication Video ]

Dear Windows, it's been 5 years since we left the house in the care of some teenagers who had a LAN party and used my computer, I think you can drop shares that they used to get their games up and running on that machine from "My Network Places".

Dear special case vertical market software vendors, many U.S. design firms want to do the right thing, maintaining file format integrity between versions would let said U.S. firms use a non-pirated version of your software ,even while other companies in China insist on using an old pirated version. Furthermore, a billing system which let said firms dole out and rescind licenses would help them make their subcontractors feel much more comfortable in working with your software's data.

Dear world, it's just not right that I have actual inside programming work to be doing on a spectacular sunny day like today.

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

Chattanooga's Police make the Agitator Agitated

Chattanooga Police Det. Kenneth Freeman will not face charges in an incident in which he shoved a 71-year-old greeter at the Wal-Mart in Collegedale to the floor after he tried to stop him while doing a receipts check.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Chattanooga ]

Tax Requirements

Page 33: "Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs,must be included in your income on form 1040 line 21, or on schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from you self employement activity."

Page 34: "Kickbacks. You must include kickbacks,side commissions, push money, or similar payments you recieve in your income..."

Page 35: "Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner"

I wonder if treatment for injuries incurred during such activities is deductible then? Can they itemize mileage for traveling to the scene of the crime?

What a world..

Mayberry

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Politics Health Currency Gambling Economics ]

Yum! Tasty pan-fried Sea Kittens! Baked Sea Kittens with a bit of dill, butter and lemon juice! How about some salt cured Sea Kittens?

Ya know, the only thing I can see this bit of silliness accomplishing is making kids more likely to vivisection the family pets, 'cause now they have an association with something delicious.

[ related topics: Language moron Sociology ]

Anti-news: NY Times: Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown:

A high-profile task force created by 49 state attorneys general to find a solution to the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem, despite years of parental anxieties and media hype.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Ethics moron Current Events Journalism and Media Net Culture ]

Well worth a read: Sherri Davidoff interviews adware author Matt Knox, in which he talks about everything from how he started down the slippery slope, to, at a fairly high level, the sorts of exploits he used to keep his software from being uninstallable.

... Basically, the semantics of Create Remote Thread are: You’re a process, I’m a different process. I call you and say “Hey! I have this bit of code. I’d really like it if you’d run this.” You’d say, “Sure,” because you’re a Windows process– you’re all hippie-like and free love. Windows processes, by the way, are insanely promiscuous. ...

Via /..

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering ]

The headline said "Feces-throwing monkey on the loose in Florida" and my first response was "Dang it, Obama's not even inaugurated and Jeb's started campaigning."

I think it was Eric who pointed out that the Air Force is the branch of the military that sends the officers out to do combat while the enlisted stay back behind the lines. Now it appears that that's changing, the Air Force is strongly committed to unmanned aircraft:

"Next year, the Air Force will procure more unmanned aircraft than manned aircraft," the general said. "So I think that makes a very pointed statement about our commitment to the future of UAS and what it brings to the fight in meeting the requirements of combatant commanders."

so now the officers can sit on couches with joysticks watching the combat on their TVs.

In unrelated news, we're getting pretty good at flying the E-flite Blade mCX around our living room.

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events ]

Marketing speak of the day:

The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista addresses areas of Visual Studio impacted by Windows Vista enhancements.

(For those unclear on this, picture air quotes and a little eyebrow wiggle around "enhancements".)

[ related topics: Quotes Humor Microsoft moron Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Krispy Kreme Celebrates the Freedom of Choice on Inauguration Day:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

Anti-abortion whack-jobs use this as an opportunity to discredit their cause and imitate The Onion:

Just an unfortunate choice of words? For the sake of our Wednesday morning doughnut runs, we hope so. The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.

The unfortunate reality of a post "American Life League" America is that "life" is synonymous with delusion and mental illness.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture moron Civil Liberties ]

An interesting piece from the Independent: a long interview with David Irving, the pro-Hitler historian, and the state of his delusions as he retreats into old age. There is a lot of dicussion about what one does about people like Irving, and he has already spent time in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial. It seems all this has done is polish his marytr status. Maybe if he had been left free, penetrating interviews like this would have shown better just how pathetic and pathological he actually is.

The strangest part is when the interviewer brings up Irving's eldest daughter, Josephine. She was severely mentally ill, and ended up killing herself after a life of appaling suffering. Irving loved her very much, and is forced to admit that Hitler's minions would have executed her without question, and that there is no way Irving can wiggle out of Hitler's responsibility for the crime. The ashes of his daughter is an apt metaphoir for the ashes that his philosophies have left him with.

[ related topics: History Current Events War Dictators Archival ]

Charlene suggested that I read the Elephant in the Playroom, a collection of essays by parents about raising their special needs kids, compiled by Denise Brodey. I read it yesterday evening.

As I read through the first few essays in the book, my reaction was somewhat skeptical, it seemed that the parents were discussing kids who just needed a little more discipline and structure, but as the cases got more and more severe, and I compared some of the stories of irratonal behavior and kids expressing the desire to do right but not being able to follow through on it, something clicked, and I gained quite a bit of sympathy.

Along the way, through tales of profound hearing loss, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, cerebral palsey, various levels of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and a whole bunch of different places on the autistic spectrum, I started to make a few other connections.

I've long believed that our attitudes towards jail, prison and punishment are severely misguided, and at this point driven largely by prison unions and "punishment", without any thought to what's actually effective. As I imagined some of these kids (and some kids I know) growing up, I had those images of what we're doing wrong in the punishment industry reinforced.

It's also fashionable to dismiss self-diagnoses, but I already have a fairly low impression of the fields of psychiatry and psychology, and after reading the umpteenth tale of going through therapists and psychiatrists until they found one who actually made a difference I both maintain that view and respect that a parent, or indeed the subject, can come to the conclusion that there's something wrong no matter the establishment.

Which brought me to the realization that I wish there were enough science in psychiatry that I could look at some of my own behaviors without putting a big black check mark next to my medical insurance records.

At any rate, I got enough out of the quick read to recommend it. Especially to prospective parents.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Writing ]

Anil Dash asks what the difference between DRM and controlling which of your "social network" friends gets to see which picture is. I think Mrten's comment that "DRM tries to reach over that barrier" is apropos.

I have a few things that I'll show to one group of friends and not another[1], but I do so trusting the judgment and discretion of those friends. If that friend thinks it worth extending my trust to show something to, say, their spouse, I leave it to their judgment, and in that trust I think I'm more likely to gain than lose, because I extend my network.

If the music industry had to do this, my guess is that we'd see a lot more classical and jazz and a lot less pandering to gangsta thugs.

And if the music industry explained this, and treated us as friends rather than enemies, we'd also be building a society in which attitudes which respected the efforts and property of another were fostered, rather than uncool barriers to be torn down.

[1] As I think about it, most of these things are business related ideas. Maybe on a personal level it's that my friends are largely self-selecting about which of the ways I expose my life they read. I've met at least one person at a party who recognized my name from Flutterby.com, but who waited 'til we were out of earshot of his wife to tell me how he knew me. I think that was back when I was posting more sex links.

[ related topics: Privacy Net Culture ]

Uwe Weinhardt asks "Can economists be trusted?", in which he talks about how economists SIF (structure information felicitously) catch his additional response to user comments:

With the method called ordinary least squares estimation this economist was forced to reject that hypothesis; ditto with two-stage least square estimation. With maximum-likelhood estimation, however, he could infer from this data set a sizeable causal effect of insurance coverage on obesity — so large, in fact, that he wondered whether the effect could be this large.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Economics ]

Old Windows XP machine died. Dan bought external hard drive case to read data from old Windows XP machine, plugged it into Windows Vista machine. Clicked on folder to drag it over. Got several complaints about permissions, each time gave admin permissions, 'til eventually it told me it couldn't write a file.

Okay, open source directory, click on every non-grayed box I can find to make sure everyone has read access, do same with target directories and write access, same problem.

Finally get disgusted, plug drive into Linux box, copy data to Linux server, copy from Linux server to Vista.

What a half-baked half-finished POS Vista is.

[ related topics: Microsoft moron ]

There are things that, once seen, cannot be un-seen. There's also a notion on some online communities of a "unicorn chaser", something with flowers and rainbows and unicorns to offset the horrors of an image that's seared permanently into the neurons. Craftastrophe has combined rainbows and unicorns with such a mentally scarring image. You have been warned.

Once in a great while, we sit on a craft, biding our time and waiting until the perfect opportunity to show it to you. You never know when these things will be released from the Top Secret CraftastaVault, but when they do…they are usually Not Safe For Work/Kids.

This is one of those times. Especially if your work has a no Unicorn Vagina rule.

You have been warned.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

The Volokh Conspiracy: Bush is Indeed Like Herbert Hoover - But Not in the Way You Think

Speaking before the 1932 Republican Convention, Hoover boasted that he had rejected the "disastrous" option of doing "nothing" and instead had "met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." In that same 1932 campaign, FDR even denounced Hoover for overspending and promised to enact a balanced budget.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Economics ]

Philip Greenspun points out that Northrop Grumman is being sued for designing an airplane that lasted 58 years in a salty marine environment, getting pounded with waves at 80 knots.

Jim Confalone, Chalk's owner, had long disputed the safety board's findings, saying the crash had nothing to do with the company's maintenance program, and that the cracks were caused by the plane's manufacturer.

Couple stuff like this with the issues in liability law where an entity found partially liable can still end up footing the whole settlement, and it's a wonder anyone builds airplanes.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Aviation Law Current Events ]

I had to make a run out yesterday morning, so I ended up hearing the tale end of the speech on the radio, along with bits of... the poem. Something Positive addresses this.

And Chris took a clip out of Addams Family Values to illustrate his feelings about the inauguration.

Yesterday evening we went to a large potluck at the The Phoenix Theater to hang out and watch the inauguration speech. It was fascinating watching the crowd react to the speech, and I didn't react to it any bit of it as negatively as "ask not what you can do for your country", but... well... I just hope he can revive some of that sense of common purpose and nation that should make government less important. I'm not holding my breath.

[ related topics: Politics Humor Sociology ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200...o_su_co/scotus_internet_blocking

[ related topics: Current Events Net Culture ]

Argh. So we're mostly happy with our new credit union. So far, unlike Wells Fargo, they haven't screwed our account's database records into something that makes a pretzel look circular. They have online automated bill payment. They manage to keep our separate accounts properly. They've dealt with various issues quickly and simply without making me feel like security is being compromised.

But they outsource the online bill payment stuff to some other organization, it happens in a pop-up window, with a bizarre interface that involves completely different mechanisms for scheduling a single payment versus recurring payments, and JavaScript to make clicks on radio buttons into actions, and everything happens at a geologic time scale.

Sigh. What is it about financial institutions that tends to make their web sites suck?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Databases ]

˙ɯǝʇsʎs ʎqɹǝʇʇnןɟ ǝɥʇ uı ʎןʇɔǝɹɹoɔ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝƃɹɐן ƃuıןpuɐɥ ɯ,ı ɟı ǝǝs oʇ pooƃ osןɐ s,ʇı ˙ǝpoɔıun ɥʇıʍ sƃuıɥʇ ɹǝıןןıs uǝʌǝ op noʎ sʇǝן sɹǝʇʇǝן uʍop ǝpısdn

And, just so that this entry is at some point searchable, Upside Down Letters gives you Unicode characters that looks like the characters you typed, only upside down.

Oh. Good. It all gets entity encoded so there's no way I'll ever edit that string...

[ related topics: Fashion ]

Boulder has one strip club. It's right off the tourist-trap Pearl Street Mall (but you have to enter from the back alley). They were just awarded a liquor license.

Because the liquor board actually has very narrow criteria for opposing a license, the club easily got theirs. Liquor board member, Lisa Spaulding stated:

"This community has a very serious problem, I think. We need the community to come forward and do something about this. But they’re not here."

The irony of that statement is that the club surveyed the community before had and had overwhelming support. The community didn't feel the need to come forward.

From the soon to be gone Rocky Mountain News.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Community ]

Rafe linked to James Fallows' report that Microsoft is laying off its Flight Simulator team. He amusingly includes shots from the IBM PC CGA version, but I think to understand where Flight Simulator has come from, you have to go back to Bruce Artwick's original mile by mile square with a runway on the Apple ][.

We had a copy of Flight Simulator X lying around, and when I got the new computer with its grand and glorious display and its kick-ass video card, I installed it and played a little. However, yesterday evening we were in Hobby Town and took a little spin on the in-store demo for the various RC simulators, and something struck me.

Simulating all the niggling details of flight is hard, but there are lots of close approximations nowadays, Flight Gear is decent, X-Plane is better, and Microsoft's flight simulator has been moving more towards toy. Further, a good portion of general aviation, and even commercial aviation, isn't about "flying the airplane", it's about managing aircraft systems and doing navigation and such, and for that the graphics aren't really that much of an issue. And if it's about "flying the airplane", then that's about being out on the hairy edge of the flight envelope, something that the simulators, at least of full sized aircraft, don't do well.

The graphics on the R/C simulators are spectacular. there's something about not having to simulate the world, and having a fixed view location, which lets you texture map some pretty cool stuff on some pretty simple geometry. The flight characteristics of model airplanes are easier to simulate, apparently, 'cause I had much more of a feeling of realism on those devices than I do on the ones trying to simulate the full-sized aircraft (granted, I didn't try to autorotate the model helicopter), and there's much more opportunity to put the airplane on the edge of the flight envelope when everything's happening less than 50' off the ground.

So with Flight Simulator, Microsoft had two choices: Either go for realism, via the R/C or better physics and aircraft systems at the expense of graphics, and narrow the market, or go for the mass market and become more toy-like. The former requires people passionate about the details, serious nerds, the latter... well... just isn't all that exciting to gamers. I think they just discovered that.

Bonus link: Commercial (also available as plans) mid-range simulator and R/C model helicopter controls.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Humor Cool Science Microsoft Invention and Design Aviation Software Engineering moron Graphics Toys Maps and Mapping Video Economics Archival Model Building Aviation - Helicopters Furniture Woodworking ]

A short article on the HBO documentary 'Trials of Ted Haggard', shot by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi, and who had previously filmed a documentary on evangelical preachers called "Friends of God". She apparently brings an SF Bay perspective to the whole thing:

"He's battling his inner demons and he went through publicly what lots of Americans go through privately," Pelosi said. "Maybe not in San Francisco. You can be out and happy there in San Francisco. But not in a lot of other places in America where sexuality is a big thing."

One other line from the article, that apparently also appears in the film, is the realization that Ted Haggard has just come from a 12,000 person church, and Alexandra Pelosi and her husband are the two people who turn out to help him move.

Sounds interesting.

[ related topics: Religion Bay Area California Culture Marriage ]

We were in Hobby Town, buying extra batteries and a replacement rotor shaft for Charlene's Blade mCX R/C helicopter, when I noticed they had a two channel radio with battery, motor and prop behind the counter for $10. It took three visits before I finally said "I've never actually successfully flown an R/C fixed wing aircraft, a few minutes with some take-out containers and I could turn that into something I can fly and fix easily."

So I brought it home. Turns out it's salvaged from a crashed Revell Piloto, and though it had the prop motor, was missing the coil that moved the rudder. I scrounged through the parts bin, found a couple of busted headphones, stole the coils from them (it took me several passes, tiny wires break easily and are a bitch to solder) and got attraction to a little magnet.

Then, for some reason, I thought it'd be a good idea to wrap an electromagnet for this, knowing that my scrounged speaker coils were 16Ω I thought 16Ω * cross-section-area / Ρ, where, according to this page, Ρ is 1.6E-6 for copper. I found an old solenoid that I could scrounge some thin wire from, somewhere I came up with a diameter for #36 wire, which I thought the wire I was playing with was, it was smaller than #30, cooked that back into an area for the cross-section-area, ran the numbers, came up with about a meter and a quarter. Cut about four feet, wrapped it around a brad, and came up with somewhere between .000Ω and .001Ω down in the limits of my ohm meter.

So I slapped a resistor in-line, and, indeed, I could pick up small pieces of metal with it, but I then realized that I'd further mis-understood how the receiver was sending to the coil, it looks like there's actually an H-bridge over the two coil contacts, it's not positive and negative off of board ground, and went back to the coil with the magnet in the middle.

Still need to get some styrofoam take-out boxes, but with those, a little cellophane tape and some white glue I should be able to make a living room flyer. I guess we need to go out for Thai this week.

[ related topics: Aviation Embedded Devices Fabrication Toys ]

Had a productive Craigslisting this weekend, got some gorgeous maple crown molding to finish off the tops of the cabinets in the kitchen, when we get to that stage, got an air compressor so that I don't have to borrow Phil's, and it seems to be a decent compromise between big enough to actually drive a paint gun, but small enough to be generally useful for things like nailing and cleaning stuff off, and we got me a big-ass cherry desk for my office. Most of Sunday was spent organizing the office. As you can see, we're still not all there. Minutia over at Flutterby.net.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment Home Improvement ]

CJ passed along this web page about C.J. Bentley, "The Snowflake Man", the first person to make a photomicrograph of a snow crystal, and creator and cataloger of a huge collection of photographs of snowflakes.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Science Nature and environment ]

Stupid question: When I hit the caps-lock key on my new Vista box, I get a little status window on the lower right of the screen showing my shift-lock status. How the heck do I get rid of that annoying thing?

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

My brother-in-law accidently reformatted the flash card in his camera. Of course, he failed to copy the photos from Christmas to his computer. Of course, he also took a few pictures with the newly formatted card. Tough break for someone with their first child (and the first grandchild).

So I'm sitting here digging through the evil spawn of shareware that is "trial ware". A quick Google for "flash card recovery" returns dozens upon dozens of software that claims to do everything and then some... (details in comments)

[ related topics: Photography Software Engineering ]

Perhaps it's just that I've been doing a bunch of stuff in Visual Studio lately, but The Boston Diaries: An illformed rant at the back of my mind spoke to me:

Perhaps I'm scared that programming will (is?) turn (turning?) more into “glue this code to that code” and less a creative endeavour? Should I just give up and only use existing code because everything that's been written has been written and stop wasting time “reinventing the wheel?”

In playing with .NET I'm exposed a lot to the "this is great, all I have to do is plug modules together!" mentality. Which is great, don't get me wrong, I love that an idea can take form quickly, but then you end up with... well... a Windows Forms app. Control focus is clunky. Even on high end machines controls flicker and you can watch 'em redraw. They remind me of nothing so much as interfaces back in the day of BASIC:

PRINT "Enter the name of the thing:"

INPUT A$

It's hard to complain too much because you can say "hey, look, an app!", but it's like Ikea furniture, it's not an application built to last, if you try to do anything heavy with it the shelves will sag, and the veneer's gonna peel off and... well... it can still be wonderfully commercially successful. So if you win by this Christmas's sales numbers, it's great, if you're used to working on code with decades old copyright notices, stuff made to last, it grates.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Movies Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Copyright/Trademark Woodworking ]

As if you needed another reason to avoid it, Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury:

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

Apparently the problem is the use of mercury contaminated caustic soda when making the HFCS. Here's the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy article on mercury in HFCS, and the PDF of the report (which I have not yet read).

The Environmental Law Foundation filed suit in 2003 to make sellers of Balsamic and many red wine vinegars notify Californians that they contain lead, I wonder if we're now going to see Proposition 65 warnings in the cereal aisle? I'm hopeful, it's good to see that many of the hidden aspects of food safety that we've just been assuming that the government is taking care of for us are coming to light.

[ related topics: Health Food Wines and Spirits California Culture ]

Carbide and high speed steel third party blade replacements for a DeWalt 735 planer.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

I just bought some analog modems and a refurbished Portmaster for a project. As I configured the Portmaster, old commands started to flow back into my memories, and it all just started to come together. Hearing one modem call out, connect to the other, and make all of those wonderful modem noises evoked memories of a room full of modems on wire bread racks and the early days of the internet. AT commands, PPP connect strings, and PAP secrets all combined to bring me back to the smell of Chaco's cooking while we discussed the fledgling internet and what it would be like to have a true 64k or faster connection. We knew the internet would change the world, we were just wrong on how and when, some things took much longer and other things we could not then imagine, happened overnight.

[ related topics: Food Net Culture ]

I'm looking for an MP3/digital audio player to replace the $20 one I've got. 512MB is fine, overall play time isn't the issue. I need two features:

1. I need to be able to pause, leave the device for (a) day(s) and resume in the middle of files.
2. I need to be able to seek quickly and easily in long (half hour plus) files.

Everything else is gravy. Any suggestions?

[ related topics: Music ]

While I'm asking about silly gadgets: I've got a few fixed IP addresses on my DSL. A friend of mine, who can only get Comcast at his house, stashed a machine on my network. He runs a personal web site and some mail off of it.

My internet performance has been sluggish recently. I'd love a little device I could plug in between his machine and the router that let me dial down his bandwidth, maybe just by simulating a bunch of extra traffic on the ethernet port on his machine. That way I could see if that machine is the source of my slowdown, without blowing his mail all together.

I guess the real issue is that I've got this little consumery DSL modem/router, and what I really want is a real router.

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture ]

The First Official Bacon Camp comes to San Francisco.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Food - Bacon ]

True Cost of Credit. Enter the first six digits of your credit card, find out how much it costs the merchant to process that card.

[ related topics: Economics ]

In light of my attempts to become more involved in the community where I'm setting down roots, my constant whining about how bad "journalism" is, and the fall of newspapers and traditional reporting with the rise of the web, I thought I'd put down a few notes about what I'm looking for, and willing to pay for, in a news source.

Let's take this article about Californian's backing tax increases and a spending cap in response to the looming budget deficits. What I want on this topic is a fairly quick article giving me the major factions/voting-blocks in the California legislature, what each of them is pushing for, and, at a high level, what the options and trade-offs are for those decisions. For instance, I know that a good portion of California's budget is out of the hands of the legislature, commanded by the fiat of Propositions, or by Federal mandates.

Instead, I get content-free crap like:

"The worries are across the parties and across the regions," Baldassare said. "In California, no group is immune to the downturn and the worry that it could affect them next."

There is nothing I can do with the (very little) content in that statement. Yes, the overall article is about a poll taken of California residents, but that's an article I don't need to read unless the article shows me how those feelings are reflecting themselves in the legislature, and I know what issues I can be either urging my representative to vote for or against, or what issues should be important to any potential replacements to my representative.

Charlene and I have been looking for some better news sources. We've been buying Business Week and The Economist, but the former too often ends up being a personality and celebrity magazine, and I find the latter interesting, but I don't often deal with much of the international focus of it.

I know that there are more expensive special purpose analysis services, the one that comes immediately to mind is Stratfor, but most of the articles I've read from there seem to be written for non-native speakers of English looking for an American perspective.

It seems like a lot of this could come from some sort of citizen journalism initiative, but at the state and national level it probably needs to be paid for. I don't see anyone stepping up to that plate, however.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Journalism and Media Community Economics ]

Thought o' the moment: I've been trying to figure out ways to get better search results than Google. I wonder if some of these word structure scorers, like are used in spam filters, would be a good way to look for web pages written by people who write in a style that I believe indicates knowledge?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Spam Monty Python ]

I wrote a little note on understanding HTTP by typing directly to the web server for a thread on the Chugalug mailing list.

Worth a read: Times Online: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom. If you feel the need to skim, skip to page 5:

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Current Events Economics ]

Ya know how in backwards countries you sometimes hear apocryphal news of panics where people are persecuted for practicing witchcraft that makes penises fall off, or makes people sick, or something like that? Backwards primitive places like Oklahoma.

From an entry Elf made today that's got some other good links.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up moron Current Events ]

LA Weekly: From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre. Author Barry Isaacson bought a house from a couple whose only child was part of Jonestown, and found a suitcase full of of correspondence.

[ related topics: Religion Sociology ]