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.

Something I don't see every day
I'm becoming somewhat attached to a German restaurant here at Undisclosed Remote Location. This is the first time I've seen it busy. A wedding rehearsal party took half the dining room. But at a table next to mine I saw something truly beautiful: four generations dining together. A girl, maybe five years old, then the mother, a blonde six-footer, her mother, also tall, and the great grandmother, stooped with age but alert and proud.

I wanted to say something to them, about how remarkable it was to see them together in one place, but how to say it, without being taken for a lunatic who can't mind his own business?

As they left, I overheard that Great-Grandma was visiting from Germany.

Sadly, my in-laws will never see such a day. Barbaloot and I married later in life, and are raising children later too. My parents are already gone, hers are in their seventies. There's little hope our kids will have kids before the ir grandparents, my in-laws, pass away. Maybe that's why I had this urge to say something to them---to try to share their moment because I will probably not be participating in such a moment of my own.

Lizard cavalry
(This post has been brewing longer than this blog is old. Thanks to Alphecca, who pointed me to Bill Dennis's HeinleinBlog, where was posted a quote by James Pinkerton, who noted that Starship Troopers foresaw the cybernetic future of infantry. Thanks also to James Rummel, who reminded me of the older material in an offhand mention of powered armor. Sometimes I feel like James Burke.--Ed.)

This article in Wired discusses the development of robots for military roles. The difficulty remains in integrating sensor inputs and connecting them to motor outputs, i.e. all of those tasks that human brains seem to do easily and quickly. The developers estimate that it still takes 4 people to manage 1 robot, and DoD's goal is 1 soldier to manage 4 robots. We humbly submit that they're solving the wrong problem, and ignoring the damned good soon for the uncertain future best.

What might shorten their development time, and result in some useful weapons platforms in the meantime, is to develop larger robots that carry soldiers inside them. Miniaturizing the motors, computing, sensors, and so forth is already done, so use it and perfect it while the numbercrunching improves. Work on just the locomotion, for example, and focus on numbercrunching locomotive control systems that have already been debugged by evolution. When the computing power matures to the point that machine "awareness" and vision are feasible, put it into the robot and take the soldier out. Menawhile, serious computing power will still be needed to make the robot respond smoothly to the soldier's commands, and that in itself will advance immensely the technology needed to field the objective unmanned versions. Heinlein's protagonist in Starship troopers described "feedback loops" to guide the powered armor. Feedback loops aren't fast enough.

Meanwhile, other DoD projects seek to armor a soldier to create some kind of Frankenstein---not genetically modified, just a stronger and harder human-shaped platform, like Ripley in the Caterpillar loader in Aliens. The problem there is that the human shape is not optimized for strength or speed, but for use of the forelimbs for grasping instead of locomotion, and gaining height for distance vision. We're on our hind legs instead of all-fours not because it's inherently stronger or faster. If you want stronger/faster/carry-more-weight, you'll have to give back some of the bipedal compromise.

For example, the allosaurus weighed about 3 tons, was about 5 meters from tooth to tail, and could move at a burst of about 30 kilometers per hour, regular stride at 15. It won't keep up with an M1A1, or even a HWMMV, but it's not supposed to. And it will prevail in terrain or among obstacles that get these other two platforms killed. So borrow the blueprints.

Merge these two initiatives, the battle robot and the powered-armored soldier, making sensible tradeoffs. Get the first iteration into the field and tweak it while the computing power catches up.

• Set aside about 200 kilos for a human operator and climate control for him, then budget:
  
• 350 kg for frame and joints 500 kg for scales: elastomer armor sheating with ceramic hard plates that overlap so the "skin" flexes as the lizard moves, and maybe a titanium tub for the human operator;
  
• 500 kg for multiple small powerplants to provide pneumatic and hydraulic force to operate "muscles";
  
• 300 kg for the muscles and lines to deliver force to them, and to radiate waste heat from the working fluids;
  
• 200 kg for fuel
  
• 100 kg for communications, vision, and sensors;
  
• remaining weight for payload and additional fuel.
  

The operator sits like a cyclist in a close-fitting compartment centered inside the lizard's hips. His legs extend into the lizard's legs. The lizard's head puppets the operator's head and neck movements; its legs move as the operator's legs move. The tail is animated to keep the lizard balanced whether it's in a dead run, or turning, or jumping, and it's where fuel is kept and hydraulic fluid is cooled off. The first numbercrunching problem to solve is animating the tail to balance the rest of the lizard's body while it runs, turns, corners, jumps, ducks, and cranes.

We will have a platform that could go where only infantrymen could go today, but carrying weapons that infantrymen cannot use on the move. It could clear obstacles that are death traps for infantry today, specifically those found in MOUT.

{salespitch}
Colonel, got your fire team pinned down in a parking lot by snipers on the roof? Two lizards can run in to offer cover fire and escort them out.

Need to flush a squad out of a warehouse? Two teams of three lizards will fit through a loading dock door, split up and manuever inside. They might even be able to ride a freight elevator.

Want to interdict a supply route? A Chinook full of lizards can catch the column from behind, trash it, and run away to board the flight home.

The supply route is on canoes across a swamp? This lizard can move through water or mud a meter deep, and still shoot and salute. And it can hide with only its "eyes" above water, waiting for the boats to slip nearby.

Sarin on the battlefield? With the right climate-control package, the human inside works in shirtsleeves. Bio or chemical contamination will not affect the lizard's speed or manueverability. If the operator is unhorsed, he pulls his chem gear on before climbing out, and he's in no worse shape than an armor crewman on foot.
{/salespitch}

Sure a tank round or even an RPG will take it out. Train the riders like we train our Abrams tankers and they'll be fine. Fire on the move, and move constantly. And have the sense not to take on tanks if you're not a tank.

That's the first generation. When and if the sensor-integration problem is solved, remove the human, push the size to 3 meters nose-to-tail and 750 kilos weight, and kick the land speed up to 50 kph. Then you're delivering Jurassic Park IV to the DoD. Ride the freight elevator? Sheeeee-it. It could take the stairs.

Teach these lizards to hunt in packs, and always employ them in packs, because machine vision will benefit from having more eyes. They'll beam video to each other so all of them will "see" more than any one of them alone.

We offer this concept merely as a patriotic duty. We ask only that two be set aside for an occasional ride by Emergent Behavior and myself (ask 'Merge how much he likes motorcycles). We'll bring them back gassed up and washed off. Promise.

Packing on private property
One of the thorny issues we struggle with in our examination of lawfully-regulated concealed carry of a weapon is what happens when the person carrying crosses some boundary between public property and private.

As a libertarian, I would agree as a matter of course that the owner of the private property has a right to decide whether to allow other persons to carry concealed on his property. That boundary blurs, though, when the private property happens to be a business open to the public, such as a video rental, grocer, department store, and so forth.

There's no expectation that the property owner will know each person, even a significant fraction of the people entering the property. And the owner per se is very likely a body of shareholders spread across the United States. I can't call it private property for the purpose of delineating who's allowed on the property, and whose presence armed or unarmed constitutes trespass.

Many state with licensed shall-issue concealed carry address this problem by requiring those places that want to exclude CCW to post a notice at each entrance. At least one state, hoping to reduce the number of businesses who would post such notices, specified the signage so it is big enough, and obnoxious enough, that few businesses would go to the trouble.

The gun-nut's wet dream is a civil suit against a business who posts, making the business jointly responsible for any injury or death suffered by a person who would have carried but didn't because the business told him or her not to. This approach leaves me cold, of course, because somebody is going to have to suffer an attack for the suit to go forward.

I propose instead the Courthouse approach. Courthouses and other government buildings are required in many States to provide secure storage for weapons.

Your video rental outlet doesn't want CCW on premises? OK fine, where's the locker? State law says you need one locker, 8 by 8 by 14 inches, for each 200 square feet of store space, and it has to be accessible to both the entrance and exit doors. You may charge a deposit for the locker key of no more than ten cents. A Target could handle it, piece of cake, because of how their doors are arranged.

Another try at the Pinnacle

Firstborn took another climb at the REI pinnacle this weekend, getting a good two meters off the floor before chickening out and being lowered by the belayer. Middlechild gave it a shot too, sorry no pictures.

An idea of mine stolen yet again
Date Patrol is coming to TLC. I wouldn't have noticed it except that Barbaloot enjoys watching Trading Spaces, hosted by Paige Davis, and, well, she's hot. So I was half-watching Paige---er, Trading Spaces with her, and what did they announce but the continuing theft of another of my ideas.

Anyway, if dating is an acquired skill set clearly some will acquire it better than others, and some will never get it without some formal coaching. TLC Network agrees with me, at least enough to give it a try as oxymoronic "reality television." It will not carry the baggage of a school operated by a distillery or a university.

To the show's producers' credit, it appears they will be examining and finishing "her" skills as well. That will make the show more interesting to us guys. But a pitfall awaits: the date arranged between the two of them is far less likely to fail, and will offer much less educational value to its viewers, because the finishing teachers will be unconsciously guiding him and her together. That does not occur in the real world. Even arranged marriages are put together by people who couldn't give a rat's *ss whether he can strike up any chemistry with her.

A better test will come when the poor yub tries these newly-acquired skills on someone randomly chosen from the same pool that he would have chosen from if the TLC cameras had never shown up. But by then the cameras will be gone, and countless other poor yubs will not have the benefit of learning from his mistakes. And there will be mistakes.

Good luck. It's a jungle out there.

One in the oven

The sonogram below is of our next child, at 17 weeks gestation.



We've withheld announcement until now because we've lost fetuses in the first trimester, even later, several times before; the odds of full delivery on this tadpole are pretty good now. Even though Barbaloot is now 40 years old.

Names have been chosen, both pink and blue, and we prefer to find out which at birth. "Accident" was peremptorily rejected.

Upgrade season
We are dropping our AT&T mobiles, and switching to Verizons. Moving our long-distance calling to the mobiles and saving ten bucks a month in the bargain.
Update: mtpolitics is going farther down this route, contemplating the dropping of land-lines altogther.

We've noticed that the Verizon phone works very poorly on the first floor of our house, but OK upstairs, so going long-distance is still a player; it also works at the church, so Barbaloot will get calls from the sitter (or me) on Thursday night choir practice. I've noticed that mine pukes directly beneath the lone rural tower here in Undisclosed Remote Location. Cadre says, "they all suck here."

We need you to do something
The organization that is coordinating pressure on the TSA to train pilots to be armed is staging simultaneous press conferences at several major airports. I need you to go to their site, and if you live near one of the airports, get your ass over there on the proper date and time. Bring some sammiches for the pilots.

Another blogger and I differ, respectfully, about the wisdom of armed pilots (versus armed passengers). I truly believe that if we can achieve a critical mass of armed pilots, we can turn a corner with public opinion about concealed carry by ordinary citizens, both on the ground and eventually in the air.

I doubt that armed passengers can be a reality before Earthbound citizens can go discreetly armed. And I believe that Earthbound permit-free, or "Vermont-style" concealed carry can spread to most of the US until we penetrate those few holdouts like New York state and California with "shall-issue."

Swen was talking about this one . . .
in a post here, describing it as the Colt IMP.
Bushmaster commercialized it briefly as the ARM Pistol. It is a bullpup design that rotates the whole weapon, minus the grip, about the barrel, so when fired right-handed it ejects to the right; fired left-handed, it ejects to the left, either way, it threw empties away from the shooter's body. It fired the full five-five-six from AR15 magazines. As the photo suggests, it borrowed many other parts as well from the AR15. Not so long ago, Bushmaster's catalog listed some few parts left for it, their website today does not.

When I was ready to get one in the pre-'94 AW Ban days, I had the three-hundred or so dollars that Shotgun News said the distributors wanted, and a dealer ready to order it for me with his nominal cut, but he could find none. I got a 9mm MAC-11 instead, and promptly regretted it.

Because the grip, with its trigger, moves with respect to the rest of the weapon and is also dislocated, so to speak, well forward of where it usually is put, it is difficult to make the trigger crisp. Maybe a solenoid affair can be made. Or hydraulics?

Verse of the day

The hearts of freemen are the tombs of secrets.

Courtesy of The Military Series of the Declaration of Jihad.

Land of a Thousand Pricks?
I drove my partner, Advon, to the MSP airport today. He goes home, I stay at Undisclosed Remote Location to roll up all of the workshop results and insert them into a new scenario for Cadre.

Took a delay en-route to the Mall of the Americas. While trying to merge with traffic to get into the West parking garage, two vehicles, not one but two, would not allow me to merge.

Side note on Mall of the Americas: it would be phenomenal if every store were something different. But there were at least three Victoria's Secret stores, for example, on separate levels. And nowhere for me to buy a bigger HD for the Clandestine Mobile Media Access Platform.

While leaving aforementioned huge repetitive Mall, another prick didn't realize that I was on the on-ramp, accelerating to highway speed, and that he should either accelerate so I could merge behind him, or decelerate so I could enter ahead of him, or change lanes so it would not matter.

I've driven this stretch of I-494 before; I used to report to headquarters of a beeg telecom company in Minnetonka. I just don't recall idiots on the road, though.

Please note, many of my best friends are from Minnesota. But a thousand pricks can go a long long way towards ruining it.

Who's this guy?

This lizard is about 8 cm head to tail. You see him here hiding under the arch of my boot. There are two blue stripes down the sides of his tail.

He escaped unharmed, I was not stepping on him.

Neologism
saudimasochism
Suffering, by a nation's leaders, because of foreign policy that requires one to make nice with the House of Sa'ud.

Guardbumming update
Our present undisclosed remote location is 15TYU20136769; we're here working with Cadre, to debug new USAF doctrine on how to operate an airbase after it has been attacked. Interesting work, with some of the best people in the business.

Well, Mister President, it's the Bees and Spiders again! They stole my food stamps and sol'em to the Rats!
I'm surely not the first blogger to observe this, but: deregulation is being blamed for the capital-w-worst capital-b-blackout in US capital-h-history, or as Scott Chaffin directs, the Great Northeastern Blackout of Ought-Three. At least I'm the first to use a Firesign Theater line as the title for it. I hope it's apropos.

Bush-adorers: watch how he handles this one. Blue-ribbon committee? Thorough inquiry? Donk-apologists: watch how your party's leaders try an En-run around the facts. Is this a tar-brush to apply to the GOP?

FoxNews, to their credit, hosted a talking head from Cato today, explaining that if there's a problem with deregulation behind this blackout, it's one of not having enough deregulation. Without the freedom of prices to reconcile supply with demand, nobody has the incentive to build and maintain generation capacity within his own market, and relies more heavily on drawing power from neighbors (across regulatory boundaries) during peaks. There's too much source-sharing (transmission) among markets.

The technical cause of the blackout will be ascertained quickly, probably before this post is even timestamped. It may indeed be a relay the size of Glenn Reynolds's fist, or a serial cable the diameter of Mr. Untel's urethra. Whatever.

The solution, the measure or set of measures that keeps this from happening again, is not technical but economic and political. It will not be found by any of the parties holding the power necessary to put it in place, because solving it does not deliver benefits to those parties. "Paging, uh . . . the Usual Suspects. Usual Suspects, please meet your party at the Committee Hearing in 2123 Rayburn."

Our Macs and dual-boot Linux/Windows boxes are on UPSes, I have five gallons of bitters to rack, and we're celebrating my wife's 40th birthday tomorrow. Have a wonderful weekend, be back Monday from Undisclosed Remote Location. Relax and have a homebrew.

Quote of the day

There are 135 candidates for Gov[ernor of California]. I'm not sure I want to be governed that badly.

From e-Claire.

I guess they don't like it
The new USAF tiger-stripe utility uniform is thoroughly dissed at Sgt Stryker, and mildly ridiculed there as well.

I admit, changing to new AF-unique camouflage uniforms is sending good money after bad---I need replacements for the Scope Shield radio and PSN-11, for example. If the AF wants a distinctive look in a uniform, go back to khakis, and save the BDUs and DCUs for bases and climates where they make sense. But as other commenters at Stryker have noted, USAF seems to have already decided on a new uniform, and seeks user comments just to cement the decision. So we might as well complain abouttry to add some functionality to the uniform they've already committed themselves to.

Pity if I'm just hip-shooting. I already wear BDUs, and I don't need to wear the tiger-stripes or work next to someone who does, to guess at how they will or won't work, and what should be improved about them. But then I'm a proponent of bringing back warrant officers, having worked for a few of them. So you can take my suggestions with more than the usual dose of salt:

Pin-on rank insignia, in a pattern distinguishable at very short distances from that of officers.
Cargo pockets that will hold an LMR comfortably.
Buttons arranged not to snag on camouflage netting.
A pattern other than Solar-Absorption-Maximized Black (that goes for the T-shirts too).

The TIC awareness of premature death by congestive heart failure . . .

encourages me to run. A good 28 to 32 minutes, four times a week, over a course that gradually expands through my neighborhood.

This course takes me past a backyard fence on which grows a vine with deep green leaves, and large, soft-green conical flowers. Could it be?



Yes. Hop flowers. Charlie Papazian describes them in the Complete Joy of Homebrewing as developing tiny yellow capsules of lupulin at the base of each petal as the flowers ripen, from mid-August into September. Boy and I walked there today and popped a flower off the vine, and found the lupulin. I rubbed the flower between my palms and smelled it. It's the real stuff.

Homebrew: just what I need to reduce my triglycerides.

I am growing old, I am growing old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, continued
Your humble blogging correspondent chose his grandparents poorly.

Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with gastro-esophageal reflux disease, and was prescribed with Aciphex so I no longer felt like an alien was clawing its way out of my chest. Today, the Aciphex was switched for milder and less expensive Zantac.

Between deployments for Operation Enduring Freedom, my cholesterol was found to be high, and triglycerides even higher. This Spring, diet and exercise had reduced them considerably but not brought them down to levels acceptable for my doctor('s insurers). Doc said I drilled down the levels as much as diet and exercise are ever likely to do; the rest is genetics. So we try Gemfibrozil for six weeks, and another blood draw to see if I need to eat it forever.

The WUTT Model for Concealed Carry Laws
A friend of mine is seeking a CCW license in Maryland. I took notes on our discussion of the pros and cons, and invite him to guest-post here about the experience when it's concluded. He is concerned, as many others are, that seeking a license to carry, in a way undermines our collective position that concealed carry is a right.

I'm ambivalent about this, and here's why. For your examination is my model for how, or where, CCW may be a privilege rather than a right. I'm not a Constitutional lawyer any more than I'm a nuclear physicist, but I firmly believe that constitutions, big and little "c", were written to be accessible to the layman, and that Occam's rule applies to their interpretation. Of course, all 18 of my readers are free to email me or comment below that I'm full of shit and ought to shut up.

I have a pdf of Colorado's CCW application on my desktop and have been toying with filling it out and walking it into the Sheriff's office. Colorado's constitution specifically denies that there is a right to concealed carry, which to me means that the legislature has the power regulate it (as long as the US 14th and 2nd are not violated, there's equal protection, etc) but may not outlaw it completely.

The regulation of concealed carry is a legitimate State power when Constitutionally reserved and when impartially carried out, considering that States should have relative freedom in legislating against crime, to find the best results and compare them with those of their neighbors---the "laboratories of democracy" argument.
States' rights don't exist: "As our Constitution is written, governments have 'powers' but no 'rights.'" (see Kozinski's dissent, page 5991, second paragraph in Silveira v Lockyer, and my brief comment on it).

In comparison, Vermont not only doesn't have a CCW permit law, Alphecca (who is not a lawyer either) explains that it can't, by her own Supreme Court's interpretation of her constitution. In Vermont, concealed carry is a right, out of the reach of Vermont's police power. This is how it ought to be with all states, except those whose constitutions explicitly deny a right to CCW, such as my present home Colorado. Last summer it looked like Ohio might end up like Vermont, swinging from one pole, no concealed carry by private citizens, to the other pole, a right to carry concealed simply because their Constitution protects an RKBA and doesn't reserve a power to regulate CCW, and their legislature has failed to pass a CCW law. I'm not following this matter (James, any news?). Alaska legislated both a CCW license system, and unlicensed carry in a very broad range of circumstances (scroll down to "Carry without a permit").

By this model, if a state has reserved the power to regulate but her legislature fails to or chooses not to regulate it, it is still not a right but it can't be prosecuted either. Colorado has a "traveling" exception to the permit requirement (CRS 18-12-105.2(b)).

Lest anyone think Colorado's constitution's CCW clause is unjust and violates the US Constitution's RKBA clause, well, Kentucky's has a CCW clause, and no less of a gun nut than Thomas Jefferson held the KY Constitution up as a model for the rest.

By my reckoning, if a state's constitution does not reserve to that state the power to regulate concealed carry, they can neither require permits nor prosecute those who CCW without them. The state's RKBA amendment or clause rules, statewide; if the state's constitution doesn't have an RKBA amendment or clause, then the Federal one suffices, and it is mute about CCW, unless you want to split hairs about the right to "bear" meaning "in plain view." Then you can run up against rulings that the RKBA does not apply to persons openly bearing arms in terrorem populi. The populi of Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and a few other Front Range cities seem to be easily terroremed, and are frantically passing laws against open carry.

I ask these bozos: which would you rather have, because you have to allow at least one: open carry, or concealed? If both are outlawed, then the "bear" part of the Federal RKBA is violated.

So the foregoing is my model of how CCW ought to be. Of course that's not how it is.

This is one reason I'm toying with the app for Colorado: under their constitution, I see less problem with the new system than with the old (how can discretionary permits be legal under an equal protection clause?).

Take that same law to a state whose constitution doesn't reserve a CCW-regulating power, and does guarantee an express RKBA for the purpose of defending self (Pennsylvania?) and I get heartburn again. The blow was softened somewhat by the low cost, $13.50 for 5 years, and that it was ready in a week (this was 1993, much can have changed since then).

Don't get me started on New York.

So then, EB, don't kick yourself for duplicity in the System Breaking Us Down. Go for your CCW in Maryland and good luck, your constitution does not guarantee an RKBA so you have the Fed guarantee to rely on.

Many thanks to packing.org for concise and well-organized reference material.

Barsoom beckons
Firstborn sneaked out to the back patio with me tonight to look at Mars. She picked it out at once. While she was training my old Sears 7x35 binoculars on it, a Perseid blew in, cutting North to South. It burned up before she could see it.

More on the waycool new USAF uniform
Follow this link or this one. Both have photos.

Question that remains unanswered: are they contemplating pin-on rank insignia? Can't see any on the photos.

He could have used an ought-six but he didn't
In Publicola's thorough follow-up on one Mr Gates in South Carolina, a correspondent asserted that discharging a shotgun at criminal trespassers would endanger Gates's neighbors. Don't buy the argument.

At a moment when lethal force is being exchanged recklessly by criminal trespassers, you would be a fool to use less-than-lethal force to disabuse them of it. You will use lethal force, and you'd better bring enough of it.

Now that you've taken the decision to use lethal rather than less-than-lethal force, you can choose which type, platform, caliber, and so forth to minimize the risk to any innocents nearby.

The shotgun fits this bill better than anything else. Its ratio of P_Kintended to P_Kunintended is very high.

Summary:
Mr Gates was duly diligent in his choice of a shotgun for the application, compared to other firearms he could have chosen.

Erratum: nobody posted in reply to Publicola about the potential of Mr. Gates to endanger any of his neighbors by discharging a shotgun at said trespassers. Of course, homeowners are responsible for where their bullets fall, and the choice and employment of firearms to defend homes must include such calculations.

Reading about this incident and how Mr. Gates was treated by the authorities caused me to remark on those risks and how the shotgun firing shot (versus slugs, or the choice of another firearm) mitigates them. This would be a valid point to make to anyone inclined to second-guess him, especially those who have the power to indict him or seize his property.

It is an indication of the quality of readership that this point was not raised---gunbloggers know better. I apologize for the error, and thank Publicola for bringing it to my attention.

Give them back now
Thanks to Publicola, who forwards Rachel Lucas's post regarding a man whose firearms were seized by police after he shot gunfighting trespassers in his front yard. Police seized all of them, not just the shotgun actually used to quell the affray, though they concede that no crime was committed. Publicola also ably dispels the notion that some forensic evidence could be collected from the shotgun's seizure, or that it would even be worthwhile.

They seized not just the shotgun he used in the shooting, but all of them.

Cut this the hell out. Give them back now, with an apology to him and termination for whoever made the decision to disarm him.

On second thought: whoever moved to disarm the homeowner, it's now your turn to sit on his porch with nothing but a cordless phone and a flashlight for the next 72 hours. No hardshirt either, asshole. If you live through that, then you're fired.

If this happened to me
I would hope to have the kind of balls this guy has. My first action would be, as G Gordon Liddy has advised, don't hand them over to the cops. If the cops insist that I must be separated from my weapons, I'm transferring them to my lawyer for safekeeping. Possible outcomes:

• Worst: I am officially identified as a Bad Person and lose the right to own them. The lawyer sells them and I get the proceeds.
  
• Bad: the lawyer returns them when the bullshit is over.
  
• As if we have an RKBA: the lawyer pushes back hard enough that I don't give them up.
  

What does a lawyer have to say about this?

Update on the so-called sexist singular
Your humble correspondent found the following notice refreshing, in Multiservice Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for
Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) Protection, Air Force TTP(I) 3-2.46:

Unless this publication states otherwise, masculine nouns and pronouns do
not refer exclusively to men.

Visible in the properties box for this pdf, the author of the document is a woman.