it's about LUUUUUURRRVE

Those rare times that I get to see HBO, it can still surprise and titillate.

And disturb. The teaser for this show suggests, at least to me, that it is aimed at religious fundies, and the kind of world the left thinks they'd like to build if they ever came to grasp the levers of political power.

Ha ha laugh oh that's funny he's got three conservatively-dressed Stepford milfs and he worries there's not enough of him to go around {it's not for every man!} ha ha isn't that just precious and the milfs fight over who's in charge and they have to work out a schedule where they pass him around like a bowl of Fritos y'know? salty greasy and corny

The live trailer included remarks from the producers, about how the show is not about polygamy, it's about LOVE. Ok sure. Sometimes a Frito is just a Frito.

How to get mugged in the sterile area of an airport

We are paying $8 plus for 24 hours of 802.11g internet access in the airport terminal. I may ultimately use about 10 of those hours, given last night's weather. But couldn't SBC sell their connectivity in realistic increments?

Who in an airport would order 24 hours of WiFi unless he's setting up a kiosk to sell fake Rolexes?

Could this law have helped Cory Maye?

From HB46, now passed out of Wyoming's House and headed to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary:

A person who uses force as permitted in W.S.
6-2-602 is justified in using such force and is immune from
criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such
force, unless the person against whom force was used is a
peace officer, who was acting in the performance of his
official duties and the officer identified himself in
accordance with any applicable law or the person using
force knew or reasonably should have known that the person
was a peace officer.

Of course it always hinges on what a DA asserts that a person "reasonably should have known," and on how well a defense counsel can counter to a jury what that DA asserts. But would Cory Maye be on death row if this law had been in effect at that place and time?

The only loophole that I see in this bill is the 'applicable law' standard for how a peace officer must identify himself. Should shouting "police", even repeatedly and through a bullhorn, suffice?

Regardless, reforms like this one still don't address the root of the problem---the overuse of dynamic entry.

and on your right, the Bridge to Nowhere

I drove past the Clinton Library this afternoon. Wow.

It does look just like a gigantic aluminum-sided trailer.

now that's country

I just found a Jim Reeves collection. His He'll Have To Go reminds me of the satire treatment of same by Homer and Jethro. I'd kill to have that.

None of this Toby Keith sh1t. Friggin tin-foil cowboy hats.

Ooops

A chem detector rang the cherries with a false positive for nerve agent at the Russell Senate Office Building.

It could have been a cleaning lady spilling a large quantity of Simple Green. Some molecules that feature an ether linking to a glycol will trigger nerve agent detectors.

What I should have done in the first place

The scanner has been a Canon LiDE 20, bought at bargain-basement price at the BX on Golfball Prairie AFB a year ago.

The printer has been an Epson Stylus Color 740i, bought not long after we brought the G4 PowerMac home in '99.

A lot of water has passed under these bridges, in the form of emails to Canon's tech support to get their scanner to work on the Classic emulator on OS 10.2.8, then their upgraded drivers to run directly on OS X; emails to Epson to get their printer to play nice with a Linksys Ethernet print server; emails to Linksys to get their print server to play nice with the Epson.

It's been an expensive bargain and I'm not done paying for it. All I wanted was one multifunction printer/scanner/copier that runs on the home network with an IP address, and I can print to it from any of the menagerie of computers in the house.

The Linksys server has been yanked out and put in the box while I ponder tactics to return it for refund or credit. The Canon scanner is going to my workplace until we get our Sharp copier upgraded with a scanner and OCR. The Epson printer is perfectly mission capable.

But HP has found a place in our home. Their Photosmart 2575 connects directly to the home network. I installed its drivers on 3 machines---the PowerMac, a Win2k, and the Clandestine Blogging Platform's WinXP--and the only hitch I have is with printing from Mac Classic applications on the OS X emulator.

The support email is already sent to HP, with a $5 bet with any of my five devoted readers that they'll be unable to get that aspect of it to work. So I am holding on to the Epson printer, just to print from Mac Office 98.

Quote for the day

I have two replies when as a criminologist studying firearms issues I am asked would the world not benefit if there were no guns? First, 1200 years ago there were no guns. Yet, for excellent reasons, that period in Europe has been called the Dark Ages. Firearms are the only weaponry by which the weak can resist the strong. Their absence was characterized by oppression and massacre not peace.

Don Kates, quoted by David Hardy at Arms and the Law.

Kates's other reply is worth reading too.

Chun-bi!

We went for the Kia Sedona. USAA negotiated the price to about $800 over dealer invoice. The dealer had one equipped as we wanted, in the showroom. About 45 minutes after USAA told me about it, I called, brought over the paperwork, and offered the GMC for trade. They offered about what I expected. An hour or so after that, I drove the Kia home.

Mama-san very pleased. Very pleased.

Could I have done better? Probably, but I'm not terribly interested in knowing exactly how much better I could have done by dickering, haggling, and feigning attempts to leave the lot in disgust. During the testdrive a few weeks ago, the grizzled cowboy salesperson answered what questions he could, then just handed me the keys. "The gas gauge is near E," I said to him as I headed for Nationway. "You've got about 35 miles," he said. Them's balls. He let the car sell itself.

Well, sort of. He ticked off the warranty, the Michelins, the side curtains, the improvements over the 2005 model (thanks, Chaz, you were exactly right). But he was low-pressure like I've never seen. "We aren't going anywhere. Just give us a fair chance at your business."

Gawdddayahmm it's a 3.8L DOHC V6.

The hardest part about this car will be explaining to my UAW brother-in-law that I didn't buy (a) GM, (b) 'Murcan. That boy needs an exit strategy.

Damning with faint praise?

I was paid a compliment today, I think.

The lot of us were being bitched out, with some justification, and I sat and took it. I took responsibility for it. I was not leading, scarcely following.

Another of us later approached me and said she admired my ability to absorb the abuse.

Is that a compliment?

Making Swen's day

Swen weighs liberalization of Wyoming's self-defense laws.

FWIW, Swen, I didn't buy the leetle badge.

RFQ: blog software for inside the fence

I want to try an internal FOUO-only weblog for my organization. From what I have seen, AKO won't do it (Six months of watching my AKO site load "The weblog channel is coming soon!").

My immediate leadership is giving tacit support, and the DOIM will let me have space on a server. So which blogging application do I get?

Requirements:

• Multiple posters.
  
• Readers will have to log in to the site to read it. The admin (me) will issue userids and allow users to set passwords.
  
• If a post links to content outside the fence, the outside content's referrer log must not capture the location of my server. As WUTT!'s own Sitemeter log says, "blocked referrer." That sounds more like a function of DOIM's firewall than of the blogging application.
  

Is this even 75%-capable in Microsoft Office/Outlook?

Anyone else doing this in a green, blue, or purple environment? If so, what are you using?

Carshopping

Bill Quick is thinking aloud about buying a Prius (no link; he's moved to a new hosting service and I can't find his archives). This moves the holders of Chez Fûz to blog about our deliberations of a new offspring-unit transporter.

My initial druthers were hovering around the Dodge Grand Caravan, because I've rented or borrowed a few and like the passenger room. The sticker isn't too nasty either, though I'd hoped with weakness in the industry they'd try harder to stimulate sales. We test-drove one today and it behaved like I expected it. Barbaloot is just elated to be looking at a new kid-hauler. But a conversation a few weeks ago with a snake-eater led me to consider the imports.

So we stopped at the Kia dealer just a few blocks away. We are very torn now. More car, more airbags, more horsepower, a little less passenger space. Way less money. Way better warranty.

A tool must be weighed against what it will be used to do:

• Getting four kids about to swim lessons twice a week and Mass once a week. That includes one kid who needs no special seating, two in boosters, and one in a child seat with lap bar.
  
• Taking the child and Boy to get groceries once or twice a week.
  
• Three or four times a year, all of us to camping or a road trip to some scenic place.
  
• Maybe once a year, schlepping all of us to the Great Lakes to see grandparents.
  
• Three or more times a year, bringing lumber home from one of the bigbox DIY stores. Luggage rack will do it.
  

The majority of the miles will be in town. Compared to what the current vehicle did in Colorado, less highway and much fewer miles total per year.

Using USAA's comparison service, we considered a few other models. The model number profusion on Toyota Siennas discouraged me immediately. The number of Honda Odyssey models available was a turn-off too. The Hondas appear to be smaller than the Kia anyway, and their MSRPs were way higher as a class.

Disappointment: USAA's comparison service won't work on any platform other than IE 6 on Windows. God knows I've tried.

USAA's purchase negotiation service will also be interesting. "Give us the name and number of their fleet manager, we take it from there." The Dodge dealer people furrowed their brows when I asked them that. The guy at the Kia shop didn't know WTF I was talking about.

So Fûz's first reader poll!

Dodge Grand Caravan SXT, or Kia Sedona EX? Sorry, no fancy-schmancy drop-in poll in the post. Just leave a comment.

Arguments to buy American just for the sake of it will fall on deaf ears. If Detroit wants to sell to me, they have to compete the old fashioned way, price and features.

I don't do resolutions

But I do have a plan or two. They won't all be done this year.

• Closing off our basement walkup in a new Bilco steel door. The door's here, we need the enclosure around it. Pressure-treated lumber and smoke-tinted plexiglas.
  
• Get at least two bids for putting radiant hydronic heat into Chez Fûz. I hate hate hate forced-air heat. If energy prices are on a continuing upward crawl, if not an upward stair-step function, we'll recover the costs, estimated at $3 per square foot. We'll staple the PEX tubing to the underside of the subfloor (wreck out ductwork and acoustic ceiling to get at it), and heat both first floor and basement from each run. Would be awesome to run it all from two zones and a large water heater instead of a boiler. I'm groovy with using a strong glycol-to-water mix rather than straight water. I bought some books on designing these systems but they don't have the meat or I don't bring the mastery of plumbing potatoes. I'd like to know I'm not getting snookered by the contractor.
  
• With all of the space liberated by removing the forced-air furnace, I'll put a water softener (back) in. There used to be one, it was disconnected and stuck in a corner. The resin bed is ironed up. That can be fixed with a few bucks of chemicals.
  
• The main argument around here for forced-air heat is the relative ease of integrating air-conditioning with it. In this part of the prairie, I can't see air-conditioning being necessary more than two weeks out of the year. Better to me, active ventilation of the roof crawlspace. A 1600 cfm blower costs less than $100 and pennies to operate. I'll put it over the garage where the noise won't bother me. The problem: where to put louvers to let fresh air into that space? It's tight under the eaves.
  
• Laminate floor in dining room. We already bought the materials.
  
• Tile floors in kitchen, foyer, upstairs baths.
  
• Graywater system to catch laundry and shower water. There's a huge crawlspace under kit and DR, adjacent to all of the plumbing, where that water can be caught and stored. Getting that water to the rear lawn is a cinch. Front lawn will take some craft.
  
• A bat house. I'd fasten risers to the chimney but am afraid the wind will rip it down and trash the roof.
  
• A new offspring-unit transport mechanism for Mama-san. A Grand Caravan would be awesome in a turbo-diesel. Too bad that product doesn't exist.
  

New blasters this year?

Jeff at Alphecca asks what new blasters a blogger has gotten this year. Can't say that I have gotten any, though TCM has gathered a few.

I would like to get one of mine back, though, from a 'smith who doesn't reply to emails. She's Dierdre's sister Hermione.

This coming year (tomorrow perhaps) Firstborn will send her first .22 bullet downrange. A good pellet rifle will be in order if she gets the itch. Aside from that, I want no more guns, just time and a place to shoot them.

The problem isn't PowerPoint, it's how it is used

Twice in the last month I have been shortchanged in a course of instruction, by an instructor who chooses not to subject me to "death by PowerPoint. Let's go ahead and get our hands on the equipment instead, you'll learn more."

It would be forgiveable if the instruction were accompanied by sound handouts or preceded by comprehensive read-ahead material. A few block diagrams would help too. Instead I am explaining in whispers to colleagues what all this gear is supposed to accomplish and why, and learning little for myself.

I've cursed PowerPoint myself, in this very space in fact. But dammit, y'all, PowerPoint isn't the problem here. The lazy tendency to shovel a tech manual into PowerPoint, now that's a problem. Making your slideshows underinformative, oversizing them with raw digital photos, adorning them with MS's clip art, those are the problems. Fix them and slideshows won't bore people to death, they'll actually be informative and useful.

Both times, the instructors were contract employees for defense contractors. They represented the same company, in fact, though I suspect this is a trend and is much more widespread. Anybody else encounter this sort of thing?

Chicken or egg question

Barbaloot and I are watching one of my presents to her, the DVD set of Aeon Flux (impulse purchase at BestBuy).

First episode: Utopia or Deuteranopia?

Trever Goodchild mumbles his goals and means to himself as he completes his purge of competing high-level functionaries to consolidate his rule over Bregna. Among his means: "Total information awareness."

So my question is: was this work recut in the last year or so to add in that throwaway line referring to Admiral Poindexter's pet program, or were Peter Chung and the Aeon Flux writers more visionary (still) than I give them credit? Amazon lists the DVD collection in '95.

Do you own the data created incident to being eyeballed?

What if two vehicles are hustling along a rural road, doing low-80s in a 75-limit zone, and a Highway Patrol vehicle comes from the opposite direction, suddenly pulls over, reverses direction, and catches up?

The patrol car hovers behind the rear of the two vehicles for about 4 minutes, then passes, hovers behind the front-runner for a few minutes, then lights up and pulls the front-runner over?

Mama-san, passenger with me in the rear vehicle, asks "Why didn't he just pull the guy over instead of waiting so long?"

I, driver of the rear vehicle, replied "He ran the plates."

"Wouldn't he do that after pulling him over?"

"No, he wants to make sure he's not pulling over some psycho who'll try to shoot him. He wants to know whether this will be a one-unit stop, or a two- or three-unit. Bench warrant, multiple traffic violations, expired registration, Al Qaeda, you name it. Run the plates first, know what you're getting into."

Then the wheels were turning. He surely ran our plates too. Hmmmm, the patrolman was probably thinking, serviceman and his wife and kiddies. Nothing interesting here . . . The guy in the front tripped the radar. What about him?

Which makes me wonder: how many times have my plates been run, either by obvious marked patrol vehicles or air units, or by unmarkeds just weaving through busy traffic? What about when optical-character recognition technology is mated with radar camera units and fast, fast realtime connection to the databases, allowing hundreds of plates to be "run" per minute? The potential there for loss of privacy would be staggering. The anonymity of the herd would be gone if it isn't already. The consequences of minor errors, either in the tag records themselves or in the data pipeline between the camera and the DMV, would be enormous.

Johnny Law will assert that he has the power to use government-owned information and commerically-available technology to enhance the apprehension of lawbreakers. How can one object, unless one is caught redhanded and wriggling to escape? The syllogism: the innocent have nothing to fear, therefore the fearful are not innocent.

So how should the civil libertarian respond to this development?

I submit: assert that publicly collected information be owned by those who collect it, and the subjects of collection. If you run my plates (public information, my property interest in my vehicle, my payment of taxes to use that vehicle on public roads, the presence of my vehicle on public roads) with commonly available technology (a camera in the patrol vehicle or mounted to view traffic on the public road, plus OCR to translate the plate into registration information) the resulting data belongs to both the government, who collected it, and me, whom it is about.

The cops know when they collect it. For it to be of use to them for the purposes of law enforcement, they must collect date/time, location, observing officer, and so on---to be evidence it must meet evidentiary standards.

But I may not know that it was collected at all, let alone know the details incident to its collection. If the information's mine, even in part, I have a right to know that it has been collected, where, when, and by whom. If there's an error or fraud I have the right to challenge that piece of information that may be, or is asserted to be, about me.

So do I have a right to know every time that my plates have been checked against databases of vehicle registration, operator licensing, outstanding warrants, and so forth? Some would be surprised to find how often their plates are run, so to speak, though I wouldn't be.

If facial recognition becomes reliable, will my face be "run" with the same regularity? Worse, will my face be run even if facial recognition does not become reliable? Should I not have the right to know the data points are being created so at the very least I can challenge them?

Will the shiny sexiness of technology overwhelm such error, to the extent that a bad OCR on my plate or a bad facial match, be more credible than my wife's testimony that I was five states and two time zones away from the crime?

Here comes the Al-Qaeda Exception: Hypothetically, an Islamofascist mole operating in the United States will be driving about just like I do, occasionally breaking a speed limit just as I do. He can expect to have his plates run about as often. His plates, his operator license, and other governmental records incident to operating a motor vehicle, would be subject to the same level of scrutiny as mine are. But if he's a jihadi baddass, he's looking tactfully to see whether his profile is low enough. Is he being followed or observed more than the average guy?

Would his right to know how often his plates are run, tip the government's hand that he's being watched?

Which way would you rather have it, gentle reader?

• Everybody, and I mean everybody, is entitled to know every time the government checks his public appearance against a database---even if that might tip off undercover operatives that they are being watched? Or,
  
• It's none of your business how often your plates are run. Al Qaeda is (all) the reason (we need).
  
• Only the suspected jihadis suffer diminishment of their right to know how often they or their public records are nudged. Oooops, every swinging d1ck has about 5 (or 10, or 40) "hits" a year, so we have to let some of his hits through, let him see them, or he'll suspect something. Problem is, the gummint at various levels will never be good enough at lying to falsify that kind of record plausibly. This option will certainly fail if tried (we've organized crime as an example: "Federal marshals are so far up my ass I can taste Brylcreem"). For practical purposes, disclose all hits or none.
  

Please answer in the comments. No similarity between this post and the NSA intercept story is coincidental. How you answer probably describes your opinion of the intercept orders.

First Thanksgiving with a convection oven

This was our first Thanksgiving with a convection oven. After frantic internet searches of how to roast a Thanksgiving turkey in one, I concluded that it would take maybe a little less time than a conventional oven would, that we'd positively adore the result, and that we'd depend on trial and error because of our altitude above mean sea level in the beautiful flyover country of Cheyenne.

With a meat thermometer, we'd still be disaster-proofing ourselves. Okayfine. A thirteen-pound critter stuffed, rubbed with paprika-laced olive oil and scattered with fresh parsley. Before:



Four hours and forty-five minutes later at 375, with foil over the breast and legs, and the meat thermometer in the stuffing showing 180:



Yes, delightfully crispy skin, moist breast meat. But still almost 5 frigging hours.

Endorsement

I support the Fiscal Watch Team Offset Package.

Details here.