The car gets a Christmas present too

Colorado's patented Passive Snow Removal System ("We Don't Plow and We're Damn Proud of It. It'll melt on its own. What are you, from California?") forced me to take our sedan out for its Christmas present. It is having a better year than the rest of the family put together.

In a mild left turn, it slid on passively-to-be-removed snow and struck the curb, knocking a chunk out of the curbside-front alloy wheel and gouging its tire.



I can ratiocinate with the best of ratiocinators, reciting marginally relevant facts merely to soften the blow: I knew I needed new tires all around anyway, have only been putting it off. That gouge had been there a long time, not safe driving on it. Lucky there wasn't a kid on a bike at that intersection. And so forth.

And there's plenty to ratiocinate. A salvaged, refurbed alloy wheel, $169. New TigerPaws all around, just under $300. Front-end alignment, labor, disposal, etc. Total hit $640. Ho frigging ho. Merrry Christmas, Taurus.

Strangely, the folks who usually work on the Fûz fleet had all the work done minutes after Barbaloot picked me up from leaving the sedan at their shop. This is not their SOP.

Nice rack, huh?

Your humble narrator was awarded the MSM last Saturday.

Fatherhood, the greatest job in the world

Firstborn's cast has been off for a week, and she's back to her normal high-speed low-drag self. Middlechild has begun occupational therapy, wherein we urge her to sit on a basketball when she has difficulty containing her energy, and to crabwalk to the bathroom in the morning to brush her hair.



Boy is being very boyish. Some pics of him are coming soon.
Fetus kicked Barbaloot in the ribs today.

I haven't posted anything in weeks, but I have a life, Christmas is coming, I'm supposed to be learning Photoshop and Linux, Christmas cards should have already been in the mail, and we've a new Baby in the house too (AMD Athlon XP 2500, 512MB, GeForce 2, dualbooting Win2k and RedHat 9) and Hallelujah, Comcast's cable modems have reached the neighborhood. We're considering it.

Disneyfication not only sucks, it isn't necessary

Disney lobbies Congress to extend the duration of copyright, to 'protect' their intellectual property rights in the absolute worst sh1t they've ever made, which turds happen to be stories they've grafted on to characters they've appropriated from history and literature rather than created themselves. They'd be better off dropping the campaign, and diverting their political contributions into hiring a few more American writers, actors, voices, and animators, and let them create something original and worth copyrighting.

If copyright law is amended, one useful change would be to prohibit taking any work already in the public domain, or work that is declared open by its owner, back under copyright by publishing a work derived from the original. "You want to Disneyfy the Prioress' Tale? Groovy, baby, just, well, you can't copyright it. Canterbury Tales are open. You won't make enough off of it to hire Amanda Bynes."

Need some examples? On one hand, Pooh, Tarzan, Hercules, and Aladdin, shamelessly derived from stories by A A Milne or Edgar Rice Burroughs, hotwired from the rich but abandoned parking lot of Arabic culture, or nicked from Greek myth.

For example, an insipid animated episode wherein the aforementioned Burroughs character was confronting a blond, voluptuous white-skinned jungle priestess commanding an army of leopard men to seize him for her mate. I turned the television off, over the protests of all the airbreathing offspring units, and it had nothing to do with how the priestess was attired. Intellectual property is too generous a term for this stuff. Where exactly is the intellect?

On the other hand, Fillmore, Kim Possible, and Buzz Lightyear, original Disney works or derivatives of original Disney works. With the inane exception of Lilo and Stitch, they are good or at least entertaining programs (Señor Señor Senior suspends Kim Possible over a pond in a Bondian moment: "The piranha won't be delivered until next Tuesday. But these koi haven't been fed in days."). Granted, it's not the one-liner quality you'd expect from Buffy, but consider their audience. As a side benny, these programs keep Ricardo Montalban employed as voice talent.

Disney's live-actor fare falls somewhere in the middle, aimed at raging-hormone pre-teens and obsessing over dating and parents who just don't get it.

Their best stuff was probably produced by accident, by and for a company that owns so many channels on the satellites and in cable headends that their program directors are desperate for material to fill them: consider how often they rerun material like the twin girls who played basketball, or Cadet Kelly. The kids will notice but they don't care; I do. Had Disney been paying more attention to their content suppliers and compelling them to adhere to Disney traditions, Fillmore would not make it through. All of it would be crap.

Another troubling aspect of Disney's dominance is their revival of the studio system---they're cultivating a cohort of child actors who are moved from one Disney program to another. I hope I don't read about these kids thirty years from now like we hear about Michael Jackson and Liza Minelli today.

Twenty-first Century Shmoo

We were repairing some cracks in the concrete porch here at chez Fûz, because the earth beneath it was not compacted properly. Twice, by the way: twice did the earth subside and cause the porch to crack in half, twice did we show this lousy work to the builder, twice was it repoured under the builder's warranty.

We tired of this when it cracked the third time, so Barbaloot called in the mudjackers, who bored holes through the porch slab and pumped in a cement-sand mixture under pressure. We are told that it will not move again, but it's not exactly where we wanted it. A crack remained, more than a cent and a half wide, showing where the roving half of the slab used to be part of the rest of the house. The mudjackers told us to fill the big void with expanding foam, and finish the crack with cement caulk.

Expanding foam, after a few minutes of working with it, impresses me as the Twenty-first Century's shmoo, a Swiss Army substance so to speak (duct tape is the Twentieth's). It will do just about any damn thing.

We're always looking out for useful tools and substances in case of emergencies. We'd appreciate any comments our readers may leave here, describing the unique uses to which this wonder substance has been put.

Firstborn's broken ankle suggests: could you set a fracture with it? How about it, Dave? Grunt Doc?

Could you use it to fashion expedient insulated housing? A flotation device? There are some limitations: once you start the can, you'd better finish it, because it glues its own can shut.

Is this stuff worth the weight and the bucks to stuff a can of it into a bugout kit, or a crisis kit you'd keep in your car or at work?

"Dad . . . our secret mission!"

The pumpkins grew well in our backyard this year. They volunteered from seeds left from last year's Hallowe'en jack, and Barbaloot cultivated them into giant smothering vines that dominated the irrigated bed.

I planted the idea with Firstborn that this form of wealth must be shared with the community. By the dark of night, we would secretly plant seeds from this year's crop at various places around the housing development, along the trails and footpaths that snake through the various filings and under the powerlines. She liked the idea so much that I couldn't beg her off of it any longer, cast or no cast.

Tonight we did it, with a red-filtered flashlight and one of Barbaloot's garden trowels, and the tap-clunk of Firstborn's walking cast.

We smelled but did not encounter a skunk. That was useful cover, though, because any neighborhood dogs we disturbed were disregarded as still apesh1t over the skunk.

The strongest argument in favor of human cloning I've heard so far

We need a large number of Alex Kozinski clones to write more court opinions like this one:

We reverse Stewart’s conviction for machinegun possession under section
922(o) as an unlawful extension of Congress’s commerce power . . .

Iraqification? (revised much)

The buzz today is that the United States is pressing for the provisional government of Iraq to take form and take charge as quickly as possible, to "Iraqify" the occupation of Iraq and relieve the US and coalition of much of the political burden that comes with that occupation.

That would be a mistake, for one big reason. Modern "Iraq" is much like Yugoslavia. It was a political creation fusing different peoples with different religious and ethnic traditions. When the strong leader who forcefully held this mess together departed the scene, centrifugal forces flung them apart. Many of the people held together involuntarily as Iraqis didn't want to be Iraqis in the first place, they were forced into it; the rule of Saddam Hussein merely aggravated it. Guarantees of individual rights under a brand-spankin' new constitution will not assure the minorities that they can safely assign their loyalty to the provisional Iraqi government.

Don't try to build or rebuild a democratically governed Iraq. We should, instead, partition The Country Formerly Known as Iraq along those ethnic lines again. While the country is still reeling from its violent recovery from Saddam Hussein, we have the opportunity to draw some wide chalk lines on the map, to shove these people back into ethnic/religious cantons. Provide incentives for people to move themselves into cantons that identify with them.

The canton will issue passports that don't even mention "Iraq" on them, to people who can verify their birth there, through a combination of family members witnessing for each other, and whatever Iraqi official documents can be rounded up. Each canton's passport will have to be unique in size, shape, color, everything to impress on the bearer that he's no longer Iraqi. He's a Baghdadi, or a marsh Arab, or a Kurd, or so forth. Self-erasing temporary passports can be issued to people who can't prove their birth or affiliation with the canton, to help sort out the interlopers from neighboring provocateur countries.

Regulate the hell out of movement of goods and people between these cantons. Allow unfettered telecom and commerce from any one province directly to the rest of the world that speaks the same language and observes the same religious customs, but limit the bandwidth among each other (direct all telecomms from one canton to another through a coalition-controlled portal), until they've settled down.

Build quickly on each province's independence, give it incentive to control its own borders, let it issue its own currency or use a Western one. Westernize it out of sight of its like provinces. Make it a damned-independent canton with a government so close to the governed that merging it with other like provinces would be perceived by the guy in the street as a step backward.

Some of those cantons will be delighted to have budding independence and might need occasional restraint---the Kurds in particular. Some will want to do some stupid things with that independence, such as the Shi'a maybe getting cozy with Iran.

Some of those cantons will remain holdouts of Saddam's loyalists, if not Saddam himself. As the other cantons mellow out and can be managed by coalition partners, US forces can withdraw and concentrate our forces on those holdouts.

Divide and liberate this stretch of land, and quit calling it Iraq altogether.

Sauce for the gander

We've had an official change of heart regarding Rush Limbaugh's pain-med dependence, prompted by Swen's report.

If anyone is bothering to tabulate the blogosphere's sentiments, put me down for Send him up.

Two broken tarsals

Chez Fûz now nurses a Firstborn child who broke two bones in her ankle while playing in the school playground.

She's a trouper about it. She winced and barely slept the night after it happened. Now she hobbles around as if it were only a heavy weight on her foot, barely an inconvenience.

Thank you, I think

TriCare, DoD's servicemember health insurance, is now available to drill-status National Guardsmen and Reservists. It was included in the DoD supplemental appropriations for our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, which President Bush signed into law.

I think the President opposed it, as did SecDef. Barbaloot on the other hand likes the idea.

Fûz is ambivalent. On the one hand, it's very inexpensive insurance at the prices being quoted, for a household that seeks to control costs until I find permanent employment. On the other hand, it further cements the relationship between health care and employment, a shotgun wedding arranged by US tax code.

I was content, Barbaloot somewhat less so, with the private-sector bought-by-my-own-goldurned-money catastrophic health care. The insurer actually checked my health out, asking me about various and sundry conditions before quoting. Barbaloot's reservations concern their refusal to cover one or two conditions, not even quoting a high premium to cover them. Overall, though, it did what we needed it to do, except pay for birthing Tadpole, who wasn't foreseen at the time anyway.

I could not use the fact that I carried my own health care as a bargaining chip with an employer---save money on your health plan and split the difference with me through my salary? Why, that's against the law, Fûz. Even the insurer's application warned me against it.

TriCare, offered as a benefit where I'd pay thirty percent of what the DoD pays for it and they pay the rest, is worth almost all of what I gross as a drill-status Guardsman. It was pushed through by some powerful lobbies, not just those lobbying for the National Guard, but by some members of Congress who are otherwise No Friends of Mine: Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Diana DeGette, to name two.

Both worked for giving TriCare to the Guard, but are active against my RKBA, in ways that interfere with my ability to train privately to save my own a$$ and those of my team through the application of rifle fire. My AR's are very sensitive and take exception to phrases like "no legitimate sporting purpose" or "weapon of choice of gang-bangers."

Forgive me if I imply any disrespect to them and to anyone else who voted specifically to make me eligible for TriCare when I come off active duty. None was intended. But I can't get very excited about taking up a benefit that almost exceeds the dollar value of my normal peacetime level of service (which level of service I'd like to get back to before I retire, by the way) and in a way that furthers the nationalization of health care. There's got to be something in it for them and their agenda. So I'm grateful, but with serious reservations.

Next time Congress wants to do drill-status Guardsmen a favor, fund a live-fire shooting range, equipped for sidearm, carbine, shotgun and LMG, on every Guard and Reserve facility. Staff it (hire retirees and disabled vets! Another lobby to pander to!) so we can sign in on our own time, sign out a piece and work with it any time from 0500 to 2300. We'll police our own brass and clean the pieces; hell, we'd even buy our own practice ammo from the Gummint, at five-percent over Uncle Sugar's price, to defray range operation costs if necessary.

Possibly some answers

Barbaloot and I have been distracted for some months now, because Middlechild's teacher has raised concerns with us about her behavior in school. Her academic progress is good, but she disrupts class, cannot pay attention, shows affection at inappropriate moments, and becomes absorbed in fantasy play.

Asperger's syndrome? The onset of autism? Dammit, what?

A psychologist has seen her and compared notes with the teacher. Barbaloot's sister independently guessed too. The consensus is sensory integration dysfunction.

Easily treated by an occupational therapist, such as Barbaloot's sister, though there may be an underlying cause we can't see. Federal monies are released to school districts to provide therapy, including a so-called sensory diet. By the end of the school year, the behavior might be resolved and the academic progress will not be at risk. Other kids in her class will no longer be molested.

Ah, the catch. Federal monies are strung with a gamut of meetings, conferences, and paperwork that can take weeks to grind through. To me, this condition sounds like a developmental or even medical one, which schools would be wise to detect, and possibly treat, but it is primarily medical and not educational. The FedGov has too much influence on how medicine is practiced today.

At any rate, we've begun the process and are anxious to learn what we as parents need to do for a bright but out-of-sync child.

More fun than you thought you could have wearing a helmet

A mountain-bike/pistol biathlon of sorts will be conducted by the Wildlife Hunters' Association of Colorado, on 6 December. I've got plans but wish I hadn't. More info forthcoming.

Update: direct from an organizer. Entries accepted up to the start of the event. Awards for the winners, men’s and women’s classes.
Questions? Please call 303-795-9677 and ask for Bill (or leave a message), or e-mail BLLEW(at)RMI.NET
Call anyway; I need a head count. Please arrive at least a half hour before the scheduled start. Assistance with timekeeping and scoring gratefully accepted.

Certificate of Appreciation

After work today, I stopped at the Commissary to pick up, at Barbaloot's direction, our Thanksgiving turkey. Plus cookies for the girls' lunches, 'Murcan cheese and broccoli, large eggs, and so forth. It's easier for me to get home half an hour later than usual bearing groceries than for Barbaloot to drag Boy with her to the King Sooper's, and still pick up the girls from school on time.

The turkey was sixty-eight cents a pound. The cashiers were polite, cordial even. The grocery bagger was careful and made eye contact with me. After I tipped him and walked my own groceries out to the car, the tang of winter air on my nose punctuated a paragraph God had been quietly composing for me all day.

You, Fûz, have the Life of Riley. You are so very lucky.

And I am. I'm jobless, strictly speaking, and in a way that Official Jobless Figures do not capture and probably wouldn't understand. On 28 March 04, I'll be unemployed again and I have no idea what I'll be doing. But here and now, I enjoy what I'm doing and it doesn't drive me to Zantac, I put my kids to bed every night, another kid is on the way, the mortgage is being paid, I can get these thoughts out of my head and record them here without fear of retribution.

I'm grateful. That gratitude must go first to the taxpayers of the United States of America. I recall somewhere the idea proposed by a libertarian gadfly, that anyone receiving a subsidy, service, or other payment from the government should be asked, not required but merely asked, to sign a statement saying he or she was grateful for the benefit he or she received from the nameless hundreds of thousands of people who actually paid the taxes to make it possible.

Since the FedGov is in no particular hurry to start asking for such statements they won't even prepare blank forms to take them, so I hacked one together by myself. Technically, I receive the privileges of Tricare, the Commissary, and Class Six all in consideration for military service rendered, but since I feel lucky and grateful today, I'll express the gratitude anyway.


If you are a recipient of a similar Government-provided charity, feel free to copy/paste this certificate and replace my name with your own, or work up a competing design. Meanwhile Barbaloot and I consider with whom we will share our fortune, and our turkey, this Thanksgiving Day.

Consciousness-raising

My good friend Sandy is devoted to a unique charity. It depends on money, as they all do, but depends much more on pure word of mouth.

Talk to your spouse and to your friends about child organ donation. Think about it now, before the prospect of losing a child is even on the horizon.

A glum week to be sure

if my antelope is the only bright spot in it. Send Alphecca some cheer, see another pic of me and the antelope, and read Jeff's weekly Gun Bias review. Please donate to his nitrocellulose meditation fund too. Turn that frown upside down, Jeff!

Never watch either one being made

Laws and sausages, that is. But Firstborn, Middlechild and I enjoyed the hell out of making them. The girls took turns cranking on the Porkert Number 5 grinder on Saturday afternoon. Here's the lot of them:



After dinner, they did not like the look of the hog casings filling with red goo, and opted to watch an old Maurice Sendak animation instead.

About twelve pounds of sausage resulted, including chorizo, Italian, and Weird Contrived Hickory-smoked with Cranberries.

The right to confront one's accusers, the obligation to confront the accused

DenPost's Diane Carman made sense yesterday.

Her column leads me to one of those posts that in the beginning seems to demand word counts of DenBeste proportions to set forth, but by the time I mull it over and struggle with it to commit it to words, it's over as quickly as marital sex.

Here goes: Bravery is difficult. It sets the mature and the confident and the innocent apart from the unsure. We pay bravery lip service in the abstract and the general, though every one of us has failed it at least once when the concrete and personal need points its gnarled finger to a single one of us. If bravery were easy, everyone would be brave, but it isn't so we aren't. But that is no reason not to insist upon bravery, even from the victim of a horrible crime. That bravery may be the only tool a victim of rape has to get justice for herself.

Anonymity, such as that little piece of it I kid myself that I have at this weblog, is the opposite of bravery. The anonymity of rape shield laws is meant to take away the sting of an embarrassment that the victim likely did not bring upon herself. But the dullness these laws leave in place of that sting does not benefit the victim in the long run, nor other victims struggling with the choice of staying silent versus coming forward, nor other women who know they may someday suffer the same crime.

Regrets for the misspelling.

What we're reading

Middlechild enjoys The Picture of Morty and Ray.

Firstborn is working through The Tin Woodman of Oz (we used to live just down NY 13 from Chittenango, Frank Baum's birthplace). Then she finishes a Harry Potter and promises she'll try The Hobbit.

Boy, well, he enjoys anything read to him.

I'll start The Bride of Texas after I'm done gut-checking myself on Atkins induction. Czechs in the Civil War? Gotta be good.

the pelvic thru-u-u-u-sts, they really drive you insay-ay-ay-ay-ayne

This blog is in urgent need of jpegs, mpegs or written procedures of the MOPP Dance.

It's just a step to the left . . .

Good friends and egg-salad sandwiches

My good friend Daredevil looked me up recently. He's still in the tech industry, living in the Bay Area, and business brought him to Westminster. He called me up to take dinner.

Daredevil and I used to teach seminars together. I was Lewis to his Martin, Martin to his Rowan, Madden to his Gifford, Satchel to his Paige, you get the picture. A room of twenty or so people would sit in a meeting room at a Courtyard by Marriott, or a Doubletree, or whatnot, for three solid days listening to us describe how IEEE 802.7 broadband local area networks operated, or how to shove an entire band of cable TV signals down a wavelength of a singlemode fiber. And they paid for the opportunity.

His girlfriend at the time was becoming jealous of me, we spent so much time together. But hey, no wiry blonde in dire need of having her meds adjusted can compete with golf in Palm Springs on Super Bowl Sunday (it was a ghost town), for example, or golf in Orange, Connecticut on an autumn evening, or freezing our asses off in Hartford, or blackpowder hunting for deer, or a tour of Johnson Space Center, or dropping dollars in the gentlemen's clubs of Houston, Baltimore, Denver, the LAX vicinity, Hartford, et cetera.

We eventually were bitten by the sales engineering bug, and sought positions over there, in the early Nineties. He relocated to take a position with a business unit in Fremont, I stayed in Pennsylvania, and we hardly saw each other. As business those days took off, he followed his career to other companies in the area, and I eventually did too. But we stayed in touch, some times better than at others.

Since telecom started sucking, we've both been battered around, but he's sticking it out in the industry while I've practically forsaken it for Guard-bumming.

Thanks for dinner, Daredevil, and may business bring you to the Front Range again soon.

Frightfully busy

The meat grinder has arrived, and it's built like a Massey-Harris tractor, in the Czech Republic. The obligatory multi-Euro-lingual packaging announces that Germans call this machine a fleischhacker.

The temping job is going very well, and will carry our house well into the new year, after Tadpole is born. I'm now steeping in the culture of Air Force Space Command.

We launched a new blog, targeted towards my AF community, hoping it will catch on so I can unsubscribe from several military email distribution lists. So posting here has been light and may remain so until:

• the antelope is ground to sausage,
• the mudjacking of our front porch has settled and I can caulk the gigantic crack that still runs across it,
• I roll a few hundred rounds of .357 Magnum for another guy in the shop,
• trick-or-treating is over,
• we figure out what to do with the eight pumpkins that dominated our backyard---two are carved for jacks already,
• I finish reading the New Atkins Revolution and count down to Induction,
• it goes on and on.

Beater

is an Argentine Sistema Colt pistol, a licensed copy of the M1911A1 manufactured for their Policia Maritima. I ordered her when a lot were being imported at about $250 each.

She was rusted up, loose, and wobbly. Off I took her to the pistolsmith for cleaning up.



Most of the pistol is the original, except for the springs, the extended safety, beavertail, sights and barrel bushing. The ejection port was relieved and lowered, the hammer bobbed, the barrel link replaced with a longer one that tightens the lockup of barrel to slide. The trigger is lighter. It's beadblasted and Parkerized. It was my carry arm while licensed in Pennsylvania, and before I adopted Biter.

Here's a close-up of the rollmarkings, highlit with discarded loud-yellow nail polish.

Yo! Earthlink! Comcast!

We really really really want a cable modem to get us to Earthlink.

Comcast has the franchise for this area. Comcast used to be AT&T Broadband, who used to be TCI. The cable network here is finally getting upgraded to the point that it will carry digital cable (the reverse path is turned up and aligned so modem upstream signals can get from my house to the headend) so DOCSIS should be supported here any week now.

But I have used Earthlink since 1997. I like it. Barbaloot likes it. I've logged in to it with local numbers in every state I've been to, and one foreign country. I'll need local dialup for travel, in addition to a high-speed connection at home, for the foreseeable future.

I want Earthlink to continue to be my ISP, and I want to reach Earthlink through a cable modem.

Can you two arrange a stock swap or something? Jeebus.

rrrrrreeeeeeuuurrrrrr, Part V and Conclusion

The replacement cooling fan for the video processor arrived promptly (thanks again, Kirk), but I waited to see whether the existing one would become noisy again, since I had flossed some graphite into it. It obliged, about a week later. The grinding resumed without any of the graphite appearing to have been slung around inside the case.

I verified that it was indeed the video card's fan that was noising up again, by opening the case with the G4 still running. Yup, that's the one. OK, button her back up, and . . .

I took a quick look at the back connections, and noticed through the grille that the power supply's fan was not turning. This is the fan I replaced earlier in this educational troubleshooting process.

Hmm. Is it controlled by a thermostat? I shut down and dismantled the case to get the supply out. There's a component on the power supply's circuit board that looks like a big thermistor, and it's in a spot right in front of the fan, and a label on the board said this component was "TH1". Strange, though, I've never seen that fan not spinning. I've never heard it suddenly kick a new fan noise on, nor turn one off, as if any thermostat were controlling the fan.

I took the fan out and ran it with the 12V supply from a Zip drive. It spun.

Then I looked at the modular plug where it takes its power from the circuit board. The socket that receives this plug pokes its two contacts through to lands on the solder side of the board. A tiewrap and two screws were all that held the board in place in its box.

First, do no harm, physicians are warned. Don't make something worse while trying to treat it. When I replaced this fan (without troubling myself to be sure this was the source of the noise), I spliced the plug from the old fan on this one. When seating the plug in the PCB socket, it pushed the leads of the socket through the PCB, and broke the circuit traces on the solder side. No juice to fan, fan no spin. You can see shadows cast by the pads of the circuit traces, dead center of the photo. They're about a millimeter up from the board surface.



The basement is chilly, and we had been running this G4 only for short spells, instead of its usual 24/7, since cleaning out the video chip cooler, so the power supply probably hadn't been at risk of destruction. But this situation could not go on.

I found two suppliers of replacement supplies, one different from the other by a thirty-dollar core charge. Still, at those prices let's try to fix the existing supply.

This is when I remembered that the only soldering iron in the house is a butane-powered underperformer. The USAF taught me how to run a soldering iron, giving me my start in 'lectronics, and how do I preserve this essential skill?

I left the G4 in parts, and stopped in to the Computer Store With Real Geek Girls on my way home from work the next day. A twenty-five watt iron, solder, wick, (iron under capital expenditures) and away we go. Different set of Real Geek Girls too, BTW.

Plan A, an attempt to solder the socket back to some traces on the PCB. Still no juice to the fan. One contact of the socket was too far down into the socket to make contact with the fan's plug. Any more work on this board and I'll be burning a hole through it, and setting off the smoke alarms.

Plan B, restore the original plug-and-socket combination originally supplied with the replacement fan (clever how they do that---both a male and a female 4-pin, that will jack into the power supply harness in parallel with a HD inside). There was enough slack to run the fan's leads out of the case and jack them in with the DVD-ROM up high in the case.

Success. G4 is back to 24/7 operation, all the fans spin. Next project: how to upgrade the Linux box for faster mobo and CPU.

Mmmmmmm . . . speedgoat

Several people warned me that antelope meat, especially that harvested on open prairie, will taste strongly of sage, so much that the locals prefer going after elk. To them, antelope are practically as easy and plentiful as rabbits, neither a challenge nor a good meal. It was an exciting hunt for me, and I'm not readily jaded.

Still I was concerned that I would be the only person chez Fûz who would be at all interested in eating this precious lean meat. My experience with kangaroo was non-peak.

I thawed and marinated a short piece of backstrap in Buffalo's finest, Chiavetta's barbecue marinade, a case of which Barbaloot determinedly ordered through the local King Sooper's.



Middlechild is our resident master carnivore, and Pronounced It Good. Put yourself in my place, see what I've seen. A five-year-old girl turns her blue eyes to you, still chewing, saying "more antelope, please."

I am working up the courage to cook this meat without marinade, just laying bacon over it. The meat is tender, sweet, barely a hint of the smells of the prairie where it fed.

A meat grinder is enroute also, that we may try our hand at chorizo and sweet Italian sausage. Sheep casing surely can be found hereabouts.

Miramus grasshopperella

Middlechild found this in the back yard the other day, after a cold snap. It was sluggish, confused, drawing warmth from my hand.

Driving? Miss Denver: the FAQ

Your head is spinning with the pitfalls and possibilities of Fûz's proposed modification to TREX, and how it might affect you if it were adopted. First, this is a proposal, it is not reality. Don’t worry, it’ll never happen, especially if you think it’s good idea. Second, stop the madness and read the FAQ offered here. We also offer maps for both Northbound and Soutbound traffic and how this proposal would Express it.

Let’s say I'm getting on at Arapahoe and getting off at Belleview. Should I pay a toll?

• You can't even get into the Express HOT lane along the proposed I-25 corridor, except at the Northern or Southern ends.
  
• During high traffic periods, why are you trying to get on an Interstate highway to move 2 exits? You are what we call "local traffic." Local traffic should use what we call "local roads."
  

What if I live inside the 470 beltway but I'm leaving town? Aren’t I really Interstate traffic? How do I get into the HOT lane?
You are local traffic until you’re out of town. Make a beeline on whatever local road serves you to the 470 beltway, or I-70.

Who can use the Express HOT lane?
Anybody. Some pay, some don't.

Who pays a toll to use the Express HOT lane?
During high traffic periods, passenger automobiles with only one person in them, taxis and limos with only one passenger and a driver, and trucks with more than four tires meeting the road, including a trailer. Buses, jitneys, passenger autos with more than one person, taxis and limos with more than two persons, and motorcycles always enter the Express HOT lane for free. Outside of high traffic periods, everybody enters the Express HOT lane for free.
Getting out of the Express HOT lane into a local lane, without driving the whole way through the City of Denver, is tolled during high traffic periods, for all vehicles.

What if I enter the Express HOT lane just before high traffic starts?
You enter for free. If you cross over from Express HOT to local lanes after high traffic begins, you pay.

Who pays a toll to get out of the Express HOT lane into a local lane?
During high traffic periods, every vehicle.

What if I enter the Express HOT lane just before high traffic ends?
You could have waited another few minutes, relieved the rush hour traffic, and saved some money. Listen to the radio or have the traffic authority email the high traffic times to your phone.

What if I don't want to pay the toll, or I can't afford it?
You have several options:

• Go when you want to, but use the congested local traffic lanes, with new vehicles merging on your right at every exit, and Express HOT drivers merging on your left at every third or fourth exit. It's free but worth every penny you paid.
  
• Use E470 or C470 to get to the best local road, or vice versa.
  
• Adjust your driving times so you can use the HOT lane when it's free.
  
• Take a serious look at (gulp) carpooling.
  
• Take a serious look at (gulp) mass transit.

So I'm coming from Albuquerque up I-25. I'm going to Cheyenne. What do I pay, and where?
It depends on when you get here, and how you choose to pass through the Denver area. Assuming it's between 6:30 AM and 8:00 AM on a weekday and you're alone in a passenger car, you have three choices:

• Go straight up I-25, quickly and without dodging local traffic. You pay one toll at the Lone Tree plaza, just North of Exit 191. Stay in the HOT lane until you pass the Boulder Pike plaza and you pay nothing more.
• Go straight up I-25, local lanes, and dodge the local traffic. Count on spending 45 minutes more to do so in lieu of paying the toll.
  
• Take E470, you pay nothing.

Why only a few chances to get from the Express HOT lanes to the local lanes?
Short answer: Because they’re Express lanes. It's what Express lanes do.
Long answer: Much of the danger and hassle of local rush-hour traffic on an Interstate highway comes from mergers and lane changers. The HOV lane that exists today in the TREX stretch of I-25 actually compounds the danger as cars weave in and out and cops try to police it. This proposal limits the impact of high-occupancy and toll vehicles merging with local traffic, by allowing them to do so at only a few distinctly marked places. It also reduces the law enforcement burden---cops will not have to patrol the HOT lane for violators or maneuver in traffic to do so.

Why charge for both getting into and getting out of the express HOT lanes?
We need to discourage through traffic a little because that traffic tends to consist more heavily of trucks that are better off going around town anyway. We also need to discourage local traffic, driven by people who live here and should be familiar with alternate and side routes.

Isn’t this just a 'Lexus lane' scheme, making a separate road available for the rich?
Sure it is. Take your pleasure in screwing the rich, making them pay to pollute less! Take a Lexus, take a Peterbilt truck, take a motorcycle, it doesn’t matter. When does it pollute more: when it’s idling in traffic, or it’s cruising through the DTC at 55 mph? An Express HOT lane lets more vehicles cruise instead of idle.

Any other pollution impact?
By encouraging more through traffic to circumvent the city, this proposal would relocate much pollution out of the city.

How much is the toll?
Just enough to influence your decision of which road to take and when. You pay 'by the axle' to enter, and a flat toll to exit. We’ll study the amount of traffic in the Express HOT lanes and price them to get the most possible use of them at decent highway speeds. That might mean that tolls will vary somewhat with day of the week, month of the year, weather, and so forth.

If the toll varies, how can I budget for it or adjust my work schedule to take advantage of it?
By making tough choices.

Won’t this proposal force more traffic and higher costs on the side roads?
Yes. But it will also collect money that will be shared with the localities to get those side roads repaired and upgraded. Which would you rather do: keep paying insane Federal income taxes and hope that Congress returns enough of it to Colorado for local highway construction where it’s really needed (this is the current system, y’all), or pay tolls and rebuild it as you go, exactly where you need it, with less of the money subject to political shenanigans?

You refer to some "authority" above that would operate this highway. Who are they, what kind of agency or entity would they be?
A non-profit corporation chartered by the State of Colorado, I suppose. I'd ask the Independence Institute.

24w3d

Fetal sonograms can now render in three dimensions. It's spooky, guys. This is what the Tadpole looks like now.

My first speedgoat

Pronghorn antelope, taken North of Rock Springs, Wyoming, by me with a Ruger M77 in 7x57mm at about 200 yards.

Update: The pronghorn fell at about 1800L on Saturday. We started dressing him out right away, so any smell I noticed was that of entrails. I found the exit wound---three of his left ribs shattered at their roots---but no entry wound.

We spent most of Sunday cutting him up and wrapping him for the freezer. That's when I found the entry wound, a neat hole through the right shoulder blade, and destroyed meat on either side of the spine.

Lessons learned:

1. A Kabar knife is too big for taking apart an antelope.
   
2. Have a sharpener nearby too.
   
3. You're going to smell blood and meat on yourself for a while afterward. Hand sanitizer helps but keep it off the meat.
   
4. Range estimation on open prairie like that is tough. This antelope actually gave me time to use a laser rangefinder if I had had one.
   
5. A laser rangefinder could be fit into the capital expenditures budget . . .

"What kind of fool do you take me for?" "First class."

This is the text of an email I received today from Rania_Glornia@geocities.com (probably a forged return) via a RoadRunner server in the Tampa Bay area.

We have just charged your credit card for money laundry service in amount of $234.65 (because you are either child pornography webmaster or deal with dirty money, which require us to layndry them and then send to your checking account).
If you feel this transaction was made by our mistake, please press "No".
If you confirm this transaction, please press "Yes" and fill in the form below.

Enter your credit card number here:

Enter your credit card expiration date:


Well Rania, since I'm paying more than two C-notes, make my layndry extra starch.

Carnival of the Vanities, number fifty-five

Please check out this week's Carnival, hosted at Dancing with Dogs.

Driving? Miss Denver

TREX and E-470 have it all backwards. A beltway is supposed to relieve the downtown of the traffic burden of mainline highways crossing the city. Travelers who want to go through Denver should be encouraged to drive the extra miles, on very nicely built roads with high speed limits, to skip the traffic and the hassle, and even to relocate some of the air pollution away from downtown. Ten bucks of tolls does not constitute encouragement to drive 46 miles instead of 32, especially for heavy trucks whose per-mile and per-minute costs are higher.

So the Fûz Proposal, which is cunning but simple, but cunning, and promotes the Interstate highways as they were intended---regional highways, not local commutes:

• Raise the bucks to pay off E-470 by reserving a High-Occupancy/Toll lane in T-REX. Try express lanes like those for the I-270 spur from the District of Columbia to Frederick, Maryland, just to segregate the local traffic from the big trucks who are mostly passing through. It can be simplex (one way at a time) like the HOV lane up North through the Mousetrap---but Northbound in the morning, Southbound in the evening. It can be toll-free during those times when there's no traffic congestion.
  
• Provide a limited number of places where a car can cross from express to local lanes. Charge a toll at these crossovers, whether the vehicle is highly occupied or not. Some drivers will choose to use the express lanes to penetrate the layers of traffic, then change to local lanes when their exit comes up, instead of suffering the start-stop in local lanes the whole way. For example, pay twenty-five cents to cross to local at Arapahoe to exit at Belleview Ave, instead of using local lanes the whole way from Lincoln Street to Belleview. Charge a toll for any vehicle crossing from express to local lanes, whether the vehicle is highly occupied or not.
  

Instead of E-470's RF toll transponders, how about prepaid cards that bear a large barcode? The traffic authority encrypts the bar code so cards are hard(er) to counterfeit, and sets the tolls low enough so they're not worth counterfeiting.
Privacy geeks can pay cash for the cards to disconnect the driver's identity from gate and time. Flash the card at a reader on the toll gate. The gate flashes back how much value is left on your card for the next gate.

These two incentives will combine to push some local traffic out to E-470, and make any North-South through traveler think twice about going direct through Downtown.

Some through-traffic motorists will spend the extra operating costs, and the extra time, to go around; others will choose to pay the toll to go straight through (the toll booths at the very Northern and Southern ends of the HOT lane will have to be manned, so out-of-towners can buy toll cards, high-occupancy cars are admitted, and local tollers can get their cards recharged). Either way, the long-distance through travelers get to choose.

I'd take a kinder view of professional sports if the Denver Broncos comped the tolls for I-25 through traffic during certain home games. Their advertising budget could handle it.

The backs of the prepaid toll cards are a great advertising space for tow services, DWI public service announcements, jitney services, and so forth.

Local traffic can:

• slug it out on the local lanes of I-25, paying nothing but aggravation and engine hours to weave among each other in slow motion through the Tech Center, or
• they can pay extra to take the HOT lane in to a crossover near their exit, or
• they can pay the extra time and operating costs to use the beltway.

They get 3 options because there are more of these motorists, they tend to be on the roads at about the same times, and their origins and destinations are more numerous. Either way, they get to choose and they can see the consequences of their choices more clearly. No market distortions are hiding the consequences from them.

We can reduce traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution only if the individuals who are creating it have a choice in how to reduce it, and still have lives. Their choices can be informed only by the measurable costs of money and time. Their money and their time, by the way.

Unfortunately, the choices already have been made by our betters, and the highways being built are literally casting those choices in concrete.

If some good come of this, may it be that . . .

We don't recall ever having mentioned Rush Limbaugh before in this weblog. Events compel us.

His alleged criminal painkiller abuse, and the hyprocrisy that would be exposed if the allegations are found true, could demonstrate the falsehood of one of the Right's sacred tenets:

Occasional drug abusers are no better than abject junkies. They can't be ordinary people. They cannot be successful. Drug abusers' faculties, skills, and daily lives will be so disturbed by the drugs, regardless of the level of consumption or dependence, that they cannot function normally. Laws are justified to remove them from society. Businesses are justified in declining to hire people who use drugs because they underproduce, increase the risks of error and accident, and impose costs through increased absenteeism and higher medical burdens.

I don't care what your opinions may be of Rush as a person, or of his philosophy. But you must concede this: his talents as a radio personality are exceptional. He is the best in his field. No amount of money or hype generated by his quarter of the political plane could put him in that position or keep him there long if he didn't possess the talent (that quarter of the political plane is not gifted at hyping anything or anyone in the first place). This talent continues in spite of an alleged very expensive painkiller habit that, according to current (and his own) wisdom, should have reduced him to a pitiable wretch incapable of a top-rated radio program.

I would of course have to be much closer to him personally, to have seen and listened to him regularly over the span of years since before the abuse began, to have noticed any drug-attributable decline. My listening is irregular but frequent, and is influenced more by steel building design and sources of RF interference than by my tastes. I enjoy his program.

Here's Attaboy's take, much like my own:

Unlike what many liberals think about people like me, I am not a lemming following his every word as I flee into the ocean. His commentary forces you to think. Even those who vehemently disagree with everything he says have to agree that just his presence in the marketplace forces them to look hard at what they believe and perceive about everything.

A more regular (but still impartial) listener than myself, if such could be found, might comment on how often he hands his show off to Walter Williams or Roger Hedgecock, or some other guest host, and even then it would be deceptive, on a Democrat Party order of magnitude, to attribute this absenteeism to an oxycontin habit.

If a serious drug habit like this one didn't topple a very visible radio personality from the top of the charts and the top of his own game (an arrest would---the habit in and of itself has not), why should we accept the assertion that occasional drug use leads inevitably to impairment and destruction, compelling intervention by the State? Why should we accept the routine of offering piss to potential employers, to do nothing more dangerous for them than operate spreadsheets and photocopiers?

Let me borrow again from Joe's Attaboy post:

As I would for anyone who has an illness, affliction, or serious personal crisis, I'm going to pray very hard for Rush, his wife, and his family. In spite of one's political and social positions, I don't think anyone deserves to suffer the pain of addiction.

As Rush's callers say, "dittoes."

And before you go:

• Note carefully that nowhere in the preceding post have I advocated utter forgiveness of people who harm others while under the influence of any substance that alters mood, perception, or judgment. Just read the warnings on the label of any bottle of over-the-counter cough medicine, which labels illegal drugs lack because, well, they're illegal.
  
• Note carefully that nowhere in the preceding post have I advocated the use of recreational drugs during certain activities or for members of certain professions or pursuits, such as surgery, military service, handling firearms or operating 10-ton hydraulic presses. In fact, nowhere above have I advocated the use of drugs for recreation, period.
  

Any posts or emails seeking to break through or ignore the rhetorical fences I've strung around these two points will be summarily deleted.

Update: Robert Scheer agrees with my basic assertion that drug addicts may still be able to function competently.

Limbaugh's experience is the best argument against the demonization of all junkies — this one throughout his addiction held a big job and presumably paid a lot in taxes.

Advantage, Fûz. Found via Dustbury.

Maybe better to be carried by six, after all

Walter in Denver spanks the Post for completely missing the point on fully-informed juries.

No comment

Literally. No comments links are appearing under my posts, again. Last time, some rogue code converted a needed angle bracket in the template into the character entity for an angle bracket, causing an html tag to go unclosed. I found it in the template and fixed it.

Can't find anything of the sort this time. Bastidges.

My capitalist daughters

Firstborn has been suggesting for some months now that Barbaloot and I begin to give her an allowance. I don't know how that notion was planted.

I got an allowance when I was a kid, but only when my father suggested that I give up my newspaper route so I could learn to run a bulldozer and backhoe for him. His bid to run a coal strip mine fell through, though, and he had no work for me to do, so out of compassion he offered to give me five bucks a week until I found something else.

In this shanty, we don't pay or give allowances. Barbaloot and I conferred, and agreed that instead, we would pay for the performance of chores. Some days the cats are not fed because Firstborn just doesn't remember, and the cat litter goes way too long between Middlechild's careful cleanings.

We agreed to pay them in the currency of poker chips.

When I got home from drill last weekend, dinner was not quite ready and the girls were bouncing off of the walls. I suggested that we go to a nearby retailer and get said poker chips.

Once in the store, we had to look for the poker chips. Not in the stationery. Not in office supplies. Oh, there's a nice little safe I was considering for Beater, Biter, and Glamdring (more on the sidearms later). What's the price on that? Hmmmm. OK, girls, let's keep looking for poker chips. As I started down the aisle, Middlechild's hand tugged resolutely on mine. "Middlechild, it's time to look for poker chips. Can you come with us, please?"

Firstborn chimed in, eager to get them, since she had already done enough chores that I owed her a pile of chips already.

"No, Dad. Here."

"What?"

"Here, Dad." She was standing right beside where I had been, ogling the safes. She was also standing right in front of a display of playing cards, and poker chips.

You need to understand this: this girl had never seen poker chips before in her 5 years of life. If she had, she might not know what a stack of them in a box looks like. I didn't think she could read that well either, that she could see from the package's markings that here were her poker chips. Somehow she knew that, well, right here they were. Our search was over.

Firstborn is a quick reader too, mind you, and she didn't see them. But introverted Middlechild homed in on them better than I could.

We picked up a package that is probably worth hundreds of litter box cleanings and months of fed cats. At the girls' request, we had to visit the lobster tank at the other end of the store, because they think lobsters are cute and wanted to say hello to them. Then back home.

The family room floor is clear, and 24 hours later it is staying clear. The cats were fed this morning. Firstborn wants to know how to clean toothpaste off of the bathroom countertop. Middlechild needs a broom just her size to sweep under the kitchen table after meals.

Wymmyn in the Service

James Rummel posts on unsatisfactory findings relative to women in the armed services, and goes directly to at least one conclusion I share.

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuurrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuurrrrrr, Part IV

Part III is here, follow links to previous posts of same topic.
The customer support email from my video card's maker reports that they do not provide replacement cooling fans for their products. If it were still under warranty, I could send them the complete video card and they'd repair it. Ahhhh, no.

So until I find a fan of the right dimensions, I have slicked the fan up with both BreakFree (liquid teflon) and graphite grease, slipped inside the motor by a length of dental floss.

As the title of the post suggests, the fan is much quieter. Now the problem has entered a new realm: what if it stops making noise completely? Is it is running smoothly or totally fried and letting the graphics processor bake to thermal runaway?

The hunt for a replacement fan continues. I see kits at the Computer Store with Real Geek Girls, which include a gigantic frigging aluminum heatsink that wraps around the whole video card, and a heat pipe for God knows what, which means I'd have to remove the heatsink that's already there and cram half a kilo of metal into that space. This sounds counterproductive to me. The new heatsink would have to be thermally greased to the GPU. A replacement fan just has to blow air across the existing, greased heatsink.

Update: 24 hours later, the G4 sounds like it did just before the basement cleaning that started this whole mess, and the video card maker emailed back saying they can't even recommend a replacement fan as a purchased part. Too bad, because I read the manufacturer's name and part number from this one, found them online, saw drawings and specs for the fan, yada yada. The video card maker could have made a couple of bucks off of me---I probably would even have found it in my repair budget to have it shipped Second Day Air.

My daughters are acquiring the basics of capitalism while those guys are losing them.

I still got it goin' on

My shop was evaluated this weekend on its physical fitness. USAF and ANG have converted to a more holistic measure of fitness, considering body fat, flexibility, pulse after 3 minutes of stepping, push-ups and sit-ups. A Computer Program rolls these measurements together and outputs a single "fitness age" that is indicates whether one is unacceptably "older" than one's age.

My 43 years of wisdom, experience, and regrets inhabit, I am told, a 36-year-old body. Barbaloot is delighted, of course.

Listen to Stryker

Sergeant Stryker posts on our abridged free-speech rights under the UCMJ. Well done.

Message for Cadre

Cadre once posited that the motion pictures Casablanca and Pearl Harbor represent exact opposites. If you want an explanation, you'll have to wait for Cadre to place them here as a comment; that's his content. However, I'll riff off of that line of thought:

A Congressman is the antithesis of a telephone company.

Ask anyone in the abstract: Are members of Congress crooks? They'll answer yes, they are all corrupt, they appropriate and spend too much money, they don't give enough money to those pet projects to which I owe my job or my college tuition. They're tampering with my Social Security, and shoving Bible statues into public places.

They're all crooks, except my Congressman. He or she renders very good service to his or her constituents ("me"). I generally support term limits, but I don't want those term limits to remove my Congressman from office.

Ask anyone in the abstract: Are telephone companies crooks? They'll answer no, except for my phone company. They charge too much for advanced calling features, they're trying to get into long-distance service while keeping other phone companies out of competition with them for the local market, the majority stockholder is a so-and-so with backroom ties to the legislature. They haven't built out enough phone lines to support the new construction in my neighborhood either. It takes them too long to send someone out to fix my phone, and I heard they just laid off some repair people. I'd rather do business with any other phone company than this one, just to have a choice. In fact, I get my cell phone from such-and-such and long distance from whats-its-name. They're great!

RrrRRrrrRRRrrrRrRRrrRRreeeeEEEEEUUUURRRR, Part III

Part I is here. Part II is here.

I rushed home with the new power supply fan, the existing power supply, and a vision . . . a dream of a quietly-operating G4, repaired for less than ten bucks. Barbaloot was going to an event at our church, so she had time to grab burgers for the offspring units and a sandwich for the two of us. I had to wait, and manage the mealtime for offspring units, before I could move the vision to reality.

Two butt splices grafted the original fan's wiring connector to the new fan. In ten minutes the power supply was reassembled, installed, and the rest of the G4 closed and cabled around it. Booted up.

RRREEERRrrrrrruuuuureeerrrrrrrr.

Unprintable expletives were confined to the basement, while the offspring units watched a Kim Possible DVD upstairs.

I let it run and ignored the noise for the next two hours, either pluking around with other software on the noisy machine, or putting offspring units to bed. The machine's meltdown was imminent and inevitable. Barbaloot got home, ate her half of the sandwich, and asked how it went. I cupped my ear toward the basement. She stepped nearer the door and heard the whine.

"We'll just run with it, I guess. It's not a drive, it's not the power supply, it's not the side fan. I'm stumped." So she opened her Netscape and read her email while we pondered how to recover our stuff if the G4 goes over the edge.

Then I did the unprecedented, the bold---I followed the nihil desperandum outside-the-box follow-the-Force,-Luke hunch that has gotten me out of deep serious before. I started feeling the outside of the unit: sides, top, bottom, while Barbaloot worked. The vibration, in sync with the audible whine, was faint on the bottom and the top. Nonexistent on the front. Rear is too crowded with stuff for a vibration to get through. Sides . . . the side where the power supply and the cooling fan are mounted, nothing. The side where the mobo rests, it's there and strong.

So I turned the unit to the side, and opened the unit as it ran. I gently lowered the side to expose the motherboard. I groundstrapped my hand and started feeling around inside. Drives, nothing. CPU heatsink, faint. Motherboard proper, fair to middlin'. Are you sure there's no CPU fan? . . . Yep. No fan there. What other moving part is there inside this pig?

I let my hand rest for a moment on the edge of the rear panel of the unit, which swings out with the mobo side. My right thumb contacted the edge of the . . .


video card.


The component side of this card faces away from you when the unit is open and you look inside. I would never have seen the heatsink with a 38mm fan nested in it. I had to crane my neck around to see the fan. The aliasing of the fan blades, and the label on the hub of the fan, showed that it slowed down and sped up in step with the change in pitch of the grinding noise.

The unprintable expletives were again confined to the basement. "Do you use that mouth to kiss me?" Barbaloot asked.

No amount of blown air would clean it to the point that it would rotate freely under the tip of my finger. Plenty of dust was ejected from its heatsink-cage though. BreakFree quieted it down significantly but I can still hear the speed changes. So after work today, it's off to see DeeDee Who Could Be Cute again.

Lessons learned:

1. Get a dental mirror for the tool kit.
   
2. Get a mechanic's stethoscope for the tool kit too. A tube rolled from a sheet of paper didn't work.
   
3. Somebody really cranked the Torx-head bolts that hold the side panels on this unit. Do they use air tools to assemble computers? Jeebus.
   
   
   
   1. Get a new T10 bit when I go for the replacement fan.
      
   
   
4. Big-a$$ butt connectors don't look quite right inside a computer. Look at some connector kits for those leetle shrouded header affairs.
   
5. Ten bucks is an unrealistically low budget for repair of a 3-year-old computer.
   
   
   
   1. Increase it to $25.
      
   2. The cost of new or additional tools is not counted in the repair budget. Tools go under capital expenditures. Repair budgets in this here shanty are for parts and expendables only.
      
   
   

No Irishman can beat you for dogcatcher this time, Dad! You're a natural!

Let's get this over with right now, so it doesn't come up and bite me in the ass later.

I have behaved badly sometimes. I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I'm trying to do.

There. Didn't hurt. Now you do it.

Babyfood bu|{{a|{e

A Cargill TV ad about the quality of baby food ends with a slo-mo gray spoonful of said product splashing on Mom's smiling face. Some really twisted mind could take that video clip and run with it. Not me, though.

RRReeeerrrrRRRRREEEEEEeeeeerrrrRRRrrr, Part II

Part I is here. Part III is here.

If Apple wants $144.50 for a 4-inch 12-volt fan, they'll want a hell of a lot more for a whole power supply, especially one for a computer that is 3 years old.

So, throwing caution to the wind and sipping Jose Cuervo to stoke my courage, I entered the existing power supply to have a look at the fan. Piece of cake, the case was screwed shut instead of riveted shut, and the fan came out with two Phillips screws. Nothing seemed the matter with it, but who can tell without dropping 12 volts across it and listening to it spin?

Next time I perform surgery on a noisy computer, I'll go to the trouble of checking the suspected component more rigorously. A stack of C cells to spin a fan isn't too much to ask if I'm troubleshooting a part that could cost as much as a whole new computer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So on my way home from work yesterday (more on that later) I stopped a computer store where they have real geek girls. At the service desk, with the supply in one hand, and the fan from the supply in the other. As soon as I uttered "Power Mac" the guy behind the counter started, as if I had carried in a four-day-old sheep carcass with me. "Why don't you check at the Mac department?"

Riiiiiiggght. A fat lot of good that has done me. I wandered slowly along the power supply aisle. Fans there were, identical to the power supply fan, 8 bucks and up, just the wrong connector on the harness. That can be fixed. DeeDee, A Real Geek Girl Who Could Be Cute asked if I needed help, and I explained the situation. She looked at the power supply's harness and said it looked like an ATX type, but admitted that Macs are different and trying an off-the-shelf ATX supply would be risky. Reader DavidMSC agrees.

The fellow in the Mac department looked at my sheep carcass and said, "We don't handle parts here, you need to see the Service department."

"They suggested I see you first."

An unprintable expression flitted across his face, then he recovered his professional demeanor. "I understand, sir, please check with Service." I ogled a few G5s then headed back.

DeeDee Who Could Be Cute, in a Kathy Najimy kind of way, asked me about my progress while I was pricing open-box specials. I recounted my progress so far, and she offered to work the issue with the Service people for me. Not yet.
"Working the issue with" someone is a particularly Ambitious kind of thing to say. Geeks don't really say that unless they're translating themselves the better to be understood by Ambitious people. So DeeDee Who Could Be Cute may be that dreaded hybrid of Geek and Ambitious, the Sales Engineer. More on the comparison between Geek and Ambitious below.

Second trip to the Service counter. Different guy. "Why don't you check with the Mac department?"

"Negative. Already did that. They sent me back here," I replied with even voice, clenched teeth, and curled lips. He retreated, asked for the supply and walked it back to where the controlled-access geeks are kept. Moments later he came back with the same cautions. "Looks like an ATX, but Macs are different. I can't advise you to do it." Fair enough.

I stuck to the present game plan of buying a replacement fan. DeeDee Who Could Be Cute checked me out and I was on my way with a seven-dollar fan.

Lessons learned:

1. Macs are different.
   
2. It was unwise for Apple to shut down its program to license clones. They could have learned to make their computers, and their parts, less expensively. Off-the-shelf parts would have given them higher profit margins in the near term, or a larger market share, or both. They only partially learned that lesson, witness IDE drives and USB peripherals, and arguably BSD Unix.
   
3. The personal computer is still the most poorly supported consumer product in history.
   
   
   
   1. Who cares? Computers are now priced to the point that it makes more sense to replace them than service them.
      
   2. Macs are different, in this respect, but not by much.
      
   
   
4. The geek will not inherit the Earth, contrary to underground geek prophecy.
   
   
   1. The ambitious already own the Earth. None is left to be inherited.
      
   2. The ambitious are not inclined to share any more of the Earth than they absolutely have to.
   
   
5. The ambitious reproduce quickly enough (remember, they're ambitious) to rule out any likelihood that they will die out, allowing the geek a chance to inherit the Earth.
   
   
   
   1. Geeks do not. Remember, they're geeks.
      
   
   
6. But the ambitious will still need geeks to run things for them. In consideration for this service, they are willing to share some of the Earth with the geek.
   
   1. As the world becomes more complex, the dependence of ambitious on geek will intensify. More geeks will be needed to keep things running at a level the ambitious expect.
      
   
   
7. The ambitious will inherit Mars too, because, well, they're ambitious. They might not get there first, but they'll plant the flag and get their picture taken with it.
   
   
   
   1. Inhabiting Mars involves even greater complexity than inhabiting Earth, so even more geeks per capita will be needed to run things there than here.
      
      1. A geek will be operating the camera, another will be transmitting the image back to Earth, and so on.
         
      
      
   
   
8. If you're a geek, accommodate yourself with the fact that you will not inherit the Earth.
   
   
   
   1. Unless you get ambitious and start reproducing.
      
   
   

Ten seconds on high, or until just before the marshmallow explodes

The microwave smore.

rrrrrrEEEEERRRREEERRuuurrrrrrrrEEErrrrrrEEEeeeeerrrrrreerr

Daughter-units carefully built the case this past weekend that I should clean out the cubbyhole beneath the basement steps, so they could enjoy a Harry-Potter-style playspace. I accepted this value proposition, cleared and restacked all of the junk in the space, and sorted through many papers that had accumulated since the move from Leatherstocking Country to the Front Range. The dust raised in clearing this space out unfortunately settled inside our always-on PowerMac G4.

It now sounds like an elevator, grinding up and down with varying pitch and volume but overall sounding not well. After some browsing and some redneck troubleshooting, I have cleared the cooling fan and the hard drives, and figure it's the fan in the power supply. I'll heed the warnings this time and not enter the supply, unless I get very desperate.

Fortunately also, Apple's support pages show how to disassemble this model and replace the power supply, if I can come up with one. So it's off to some computer boneyard or other to find one, or a close-enough form/fit/function replacement.

This topic continues here.

Helplessness is learned

An animal can be taught to be helpless, in fact it can become helpless in no other way. No creature is born with a sense that it cannot do for itself. If a creature is helpless it necessarily follows that some other creature consciously taught helplessness to it.

Wisdom from Aragorn

If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must keep secret to keep them so.

Nothing good happened in the Seventies? Utter bullshit

The Fat Guy laments:

Sometimes, I just want to retreat into a little hole and never listen to anything new again, because there's already so much greatness out there that I'll never get to. It's overwhelming, really.

Let's start with Dark Side of the Moon, shall we?

The most miserable part of the Seventies was my adolescence and teenhood. But I'm not the one on trial here. Gimme a piece of that custard pie.

A policy, and a request

We have always left comments at the posts of other blogs, when we post something on that blog here at WUTT! It is both shameless traffic promotion, and a feeble attempt to strike up a new meme with other bloggers.

We ask you to do the same. If you post something on your blog, in reference to a post here, please leave a comment on the post here. Unlike many other bloggers, I do not blog from my day job. Uncle Sugar gets huffy and uses terms like "fraud, waste and abuse" and "Uniform Code of Military Justice" and so on. Between that and putting children to bed, I don't check my referral log often enough to see the waves of excited readers you send to me.

Please place a comment here, with the permanent URL of your post if possible.

There's that reset button again and here we sit without opposable thumbs

Publicola discusses Federal versus state powers, and what the Feds can demand of a state's constitution. You must go.

I am not a number, I am a free man!

Dustbury remarks on a proposal to classify blogs by the Dewey Decimal System. No blog, even a dude, your blog, like, sucks one like ours, can be captured or classified by a single number.

Knowledge springs forth at the intersection of two or more topics. I write about Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, the Stelzer motor, copyright infringement, and telemarketing, as well as shooting. What number would I receive from Central Weblog Classification Authority? A series of DDS? How about a product of them? Or a mean and a standard deviation calculated from them? Naaah.

Each post needs its own classification, in fact it needs at least two. We've admired (but regarded as somewhat anal) the categories that many other bloggers use to classify their many posts. Only recently have I decided that we can begin to do the same at WUTT!

Note that we don't use Movable Type here. Some of the enhancements made to Blogger will make categories possible, though we'll be using NZBear's WMDI meta tags embedded in the post template to do it, and they will not be tallied or accessed through a link in the blog template. It will not naturally occur to anyone looking for ideas on powered armor to say, "Dammit, all I need to do is go to Fûz's weblog! He's got a category of posts on that very subject!"

Don't look for Dewey Decimals any time soon, though, I can barely get through my own blogroll once a week, so have no time to look up each topic and post a decimal category for it.

Housekeeping notes

We just noticed some improvements that Bloogle has made to the blogging platform, such as blog titles. After some trial and error, we've implemented them. A few other improvements are coming, including WMDI tags in the post template, and some legibility adjustments in the comment window. We hope you like them.

A decade of wedded bliss

Barbaloot and I are about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Our Former Usual Sitter, older sister of our current Usual Sitter, will be playing more Rocky and Bullwinkle DVDs for the kids while Barbaloot, Fetus and I go out for a quiet dinner.

I am thankful every day for Barbaloot and I tell her so.

LC99 of DHMO is 10^6 ppm

The USAF invests more effort in training its personnel for hazardous materials awareness than for first aid. You'll learn plenty about how much water it takes to drown a person (hence the title of this post, which translates to 'the concentration of water in air that is lethal to inhale for 99 percent of typical people is one million parts per million') but you will not learn how to resuscitate that limp, cold buddy of yours, whom you pulled out of floodwater. Instead of a full-blown American Red Cross First Aid certification for all members, airmen receive "Self-Aid and Buddy Care" slideware, lecture, and demonstration. Not First Aid, but Self-Aid. Harrumpf.

Even in my career field, I'm more likely to catch a bullet or break my leg, or have to patch up somebody else's bullet hole or compound fracture, than to cordon off a spilled tanker truck of organic peroxide, n.o.s. Don't get me started on such military essentials as basic marksmanship either---Swen Swenson has covered that, with my two cents thrown in, of course.

We're not calling the no-call list

Our household pays the extra for caller ID on our primary land-line. We invested in phones with caller ID integrated into them. We screen our calls through caller ID to keep out the nuisance telemarketing calls.

Though Barbaloot has been tempted, we have not placed ourselves on the no-call list, either Colorado or National. We would rather keep control at our end (a service implemented at the "edge" of the network) than hand that control over to Leviathan (a regulatory device implemented in the "center" of the network). We would also rather see the telemarketing business model succeed or fail on its own merits, rather than have leave to complain that they'd be successful businesses if the invisible foot of the government hadn't stepped on them.

Two items frustrate our preferred, edge-implemented solution. One is a simple technical item. We want a telephone that can be programmed not to ring if a caller is unidentified. The overwhelming majority of callers we don't want to talk to mask their caller ID. Our phones IFF these calls as "OUT OF AREA" with a number of "Out of Area." We don't answer them. Barbaloot's folks' calls display as OUT OF AREA but their phone number shows.

Those telemarketers who do not mask their identities are at worst dismissed with a polite answer, "thank you for the courtesy of presenting your caller ID. We don't want your service, please remove us from your lists. Bye." Unless, of course, they are offering a service we want. We admit it, we refinanced our home last fall with a mortgage company who cold-called us (caller ID displayed). They've got a right to do business, and we've got a right to do it with them, or choose not to. And we choose not to work with anybody whose caller ID is absent, for whatever reason. Even if we miss out on a negative interest rate or a free python.

Our nifty new mobile phones can be programmed with a caller-specific ring. I've given calls from Barbaloot's mobile number a unique ring. We presume that a software upgrade would enable this phone to "counter-block": if caller ID is absent, the phone can be set to ring with a unique tone, or not ring at all, maybe shunting to the answering machine. I haven't seen land-line phones that are capable of any features like these. Why not? Where are you consumer electronics guys with mobile phone features? Huh? It's just chipsets! Jeebus!

Barbaloot experimented with a value-added service (meaning we had to pay extra to Qwest for it), which played a warning message to callers whose caller ID is blocked. A determined caller could record a spoken name that would ring through so Barbaloot could take or decline the call. The downside of this service is that some of my calls to her from a roaming mobile phone don't present caller ID either. That service didn't last very long. I don't want to pay extra-extra to get full use of a feature for which I pay extra. Implement this feature at the edge, i.e. in equipment I provide for myself, and pay for only once.

The other item that frustrates our edge-implemented solution is not technical. Too many companies have masked their ID, either by intent, or by using PBX or other switchboard gear that doesn't support caller ID (my knowledge of this aspect of telephony is limited, I could be wrong). The real problem comes from those entities with whom we already do business, whose calls we must take. Barbaloot hesitates over the phone now, instead of blithely ignoring OUT OF AREA calls, because our fetus's physician's office's caller ID doesn't display.

My current gig in Colorado (more on that later) identifies itself as US GOVT, even though I'm calling from a base that probably has its own 5E switch instead of a PBX---hmmm, maybe that's why their caller ID works. My peeps in Cheyenne display as OUT OF AREA and I catch them live only if they try to leave a message.

There are few legitimate reasons for an entity to have their caller ID intentionally blocked. A battered spouse's shelter is the classic example---a client of the shelter may have to call the batterer (but under those situations, isn't all communication supposed to go through an attorney?), and caller ID would enable the batterer to tele-abuse or maybe even locate that client. Apart from this reason, I can't coutenance a business or government blocking their identity, even by default.

So we're altering our telephony tactics chez Fûz. I will randomly answer OUT OF AREA callers, just to fsck with them tell them we don't do business with entitiies whose ID is blocked. Our answering system already does this, but our most annoying telemarketers' bulk dialing equipment can sense an answering machine, hang up on it and dial somewhere else, keeping the pitchman busy. Try it sometime: on the next call, take the phone offhook in a quiet room, but don't speak. You'll hear silence for a while, until a live operator is cut over to make the pitch. We consider that rude, to put it mildly. We might also ramp up the preemptive counter-rudeness of our answering system's outgoing message, so telemarketers will hear it before they hang up.

We have no way to gauge the success of this new tactic. "We haven't blocked our caller ID," whines one telemarketer. I tell him I don't believe him, and he needs to inform his manager; then I hang up. "We didn't know our caller ID isn't visible" coos another. I tell her I don't believe her, I consider it rude that a business seeks my money but doesn't release its telephone number, she needs to tell her manager to get it unblocked, and I'm hanging up now. Cocaine dealers leave better means to contact them for future business than telemarketers do.

The next frontier for this tactic is to apply it to companies we visit in meatspace. That topic is for another post, and perhaps a new Web-based activism campaign---ask your favorite businesses to take the Caller ID Pledge! Dis those who refuse, picket and shame those who break their promise!

If government has any role to play in this mess, I'd rather they not establish a no-call list. Such a list implies that numbers not listed on it are "inviting" telemarketing calls, so I expect the volume of such calls to just get worse. The dirty prints of the invisible foot are all over this crime scene. Besides, the marketers have what I consider a valid First Amendment argument against a no-call list.

Generally, the gummint needs to legislate in a way that allows edge-implemented solutions to emerge, instead of requiring centrally-implemented ones. Start by making sure that carriers deliver the full value of my $4.95 per month for caller ID, meaning that I want phone companies to pass that data, even be required by law to pass that data, if the called party is paying to receive it. For those telemarketers using banks of pitchmen offshore, from switches or premises equipment that doesn't generate a caller ID, you're not exempted. At the point where your banks interface to the United States PSTN, you can be required to identify yourselves.

If a telemarketer places calls from a residential line, or a line that's identified as if it were residential (yes, we get them too) maybe the gummint can get involved here, though that will be trickier from a First Amendment standpoint. Caller ID is worthless if the very people who prompted me to order it can duck it.

This is an outgrowth of a distinction I make in an earlier post on licensed concealed carry, and it centers on the status of a business as a "person before the law." I dispute a business's claim to certain rights that an individual enjoys, even though courts have ruled otherwise. Anonymity is one of those rights that an individual should be able to assert under certain circumstances, the right to exclude someone from real property is another; a business's right to anonymity or exclusion should be more circumscribed. Such circumscription should be acceptable in consideration for the limitation of liability that a corporation enjoys ('business' and 'corporation' are used here interchangeably). Of course it will be difficult to circumscribe a corporation's rights without infringing upon those of the individuals employed by the corporation.

In summary, Out of Area ought in most cases to be outlawed. Forget the no-call list.

Update: I almost forgot, but Qwest reminded me one day after this was originally posted: Qwest is one of the Out of Area offenders. They called to offer a cordless phone, which I could pay for through my phone bill. It will be difficult but not impossible to cease doing business with them. I typed up our talking points on how to chew up the a**es of the telemarketers and placed them by the kitchen phone.

Not quickly enough to claim the rattle

Driving home from work (more on that later) this evening, I saw a snake, torn up on the shoulder of the road, clearly dead, deceased, ex-snake. I mentioned it to Firstchild, and she said, "Let's go see it! If it's a rattlesnake, can we bring back the rattle?" She then itemized the things we'd need, such as a knife (the ever-present Gerber EZ-Out) and a Ziploc bag.
Barbaloot's cooking was not going to be ready for another half hour, so we got jackets (temps are falling on the Front Range, y'all) and headed for the van. Boy noticed the commotion and asked where we were going.
"To see a snake?"
"Yes."
"Can I come too?"
"Sure."
Middlechild didn't want to at first, but changed her mind. We left Barbaloot home alone with simmering tomato sauce and drove to Crowfoot Canyon Road. We searched mightily along that hundred-meter stretch but no snake remains. Something must have come to claim him.

Just purchased . . .
Rocky and Bullwinkle's first season on DVD.

Update: Firstborn adores it.

quotation recycling
I would vote against any legislation somebody felt they had to name 'Patriot.'

---Grover Norquist

Carnival of the Vanities, number 51?

is hosted by Admiral Quixote at Solport. Y'all go visit.

Awesome coverage
e-Claire posts some nice coverage of the California gubernatorial recall slash campaign. The first debate and a radio interview of Peter Ueberroth.