Luddo-technite. Having come of age in the pre-WWW, DOS 1.0 era, I retain the indelible traces of that simpler, text-driven time. Chief among these is a lingering preference and fondness for command-line interfaces and pure text as a way of knowing.

I have always looked on the advent of graphical user interfaces as a severely mixed blessing; on the one hand, they granted us the ability to have multiple windows of text open at one time, and in differing font sizes too; but at the same time filling our screens and computer memory cores with megabytes of useless eye candy. Color gradients! Drop shadows! Oooohh!* I still find that non-graphical applications are faster than their graphical counterparts, despite all the gigahertz and gigabytes I throw at them; and that non-graphical programs just make more sense to me in their layout and user logic, though GUI programs have slowly gotten better over the decades.**

Whenever I can, I try to escape the plague of excess graphical imagery in computing. I used Pine as my mail client at work for years, despite the snickering of co-workers, until the system administrators came up with a configuration of MS Exchange so fiendishly byzantine that only Outlook can decipher it; I still use Pine (ok, its successor, Alpine) to read all my mail at home.

Similarly, while those fancy heavyweight browsers – firefox, konqueror, etc.; have their place, I hate browsing to a website and then being held hostage to the author's misbegotten sense of web design. Let's see, how many animated images, flash embeds and AJAX scripts can I cram on this page? Gah. And, though I do loves me my Linux experience overall, I have to admit that browsing to a website with too much flash (e.g., Althouse) can cause firefox to crash or hang indefinitely.

So sometimes I just want to get back to a nice, simple 80x24 console browsing experience. In the past I would have used Lynx, but recently I've been experimenting with w3m, a text-mode browser with a twist – it can display images! Inside an xterm! It also has mouse support, and can handle html forms. Maybe I've found that sweet spot between "too lightweight to be useful" and "too bloated and unstable to be useful".

Some random images from this morning's browsing (click for slightly larger):

Yes, I uploaded the screenshots to flickr using w3m.

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*Yes, I do use an eye candy filled window manager; yes, I am a big flaming hypocrite. Shut up.
**In the early years, the guiding principle behind most GUI app design, as far as I could determine, was "Better a thousand mouse clicks than a single keystroke."

But in the end, it was *not* Momma who took the Kodachrome away.

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Hey, it's something, ok?

Social Networking Butterflies in the stomach. Well, now I've gone and done it – as I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, the primary means of communication on Facebook are little one- or two-sentence status updates / thoughts / what have you. So, one of my correspondents posted that they were sitting in the National Gallery's Sculpture Garden, listening to live music, and sampling the wares of a circulating wine cart. Not having anything nearly so interesting happening in my own sad little life, I posted,

Moira found a great deal on Novecento*, an Argentinean sparkling wine, at the local Hy-Vee... picked up some extra bottles for our anniversary.

... and then couldn't think of anything else to post. Really, I'm a rather busy and dull person, and my life, when reduced to little snippets, is even duller. I could post something about my bedtime reading – Man, that Virgil totally ripped off Homer for the funeral games section of the Aeneid – but that seems like a sure way of alienating everybody on Facebook.

Last weekend, I almost tossed up a quick note about the weekend's cava, Aria from Segura Viudas, one of the truly great wine deals of the moment, IMHO. But given that my only other post was also about wine, I thought, how's that going to look – we invited this guy onto Facebook and he just blathers about wine, the pompous little twit.**

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*Novecento Extra Brut, from Bodega Dante Robino. I'd give a link, but their website suffers from massive Flash overdose.
**I figure if anyone actually comes here to read this, they already have come to terms with my being a pompous little twit.

Social Network Butterfly. In the midst of a typically long comment thread over at Prof. Althouse's, attached to a post where she bemoans the inability of her commenters to ignore the damn trolls, already, one of the most insightful commenters wrote:

"Other social media, such as Facebook and its clones, not to mention Twitter, are increasingly in a position to suck the oxygen out of blogs such as this. If you're interested in chatting about current topics, personal matters, etc., sharing photos and other media, and doing so with people you'd rather be around, the new social media are the place to do it.

I can also tell you that the level of courtesy and good manners is considerably higher on Twitter than it ever was in the blogosphere. Somehow, adults seem to be in charge over there.

In this new world, blogs might remain for longer, more technical, or in-depth pieces, and were ideas may be developed more thoroughly.

The new social media allow the participants largely to control with whom they interact, so they no longer need to put up with idiots and trolls to find either good company or good ideas."

So, is the Age of Blogs drawing to a close, like the Age of Usenet before it? Will blogs lose their readers as people retreat to the gated, controlled communities of places such as Facebook or LinkedIn? Will blogs one day stagger to the well of readership, find it dry, keel over, and expire, like the doomed dinosaurs in Fantasia?

Confession time: I, myself, have succumbed to the lure of social networking. Twice. Well, maybe three times.

First, an old friend sent me an e-mail about joining something called "LinkedIn". I did, and slowly over time built up a small network made up primarily of co-workers or ex-co-workers. None of us are sure if LinkedIn has done us any material good – the second person I tried to add to my network told me flat out that it had been completely useless to him for business and refused to participate anymore – but it seems to be a good way to keep in touch with people – an old faculty chum, who I hadn't heard from in years, tracked me down via the LinkedIn page.*

Second, another old friend sent me an e-mail asking me to join Facebook. This was followed within a matter of days by third close acquaintance, independent of the first, also asking me to join Facebook. Figuring I was powerless to deny the obvious will of the Universe, I joined Facebook and Friended the two who contacted me. The only problem now is – and being a computer guy, I say this a bit shame-facedly – I can't really figure it out. Maybe it's because I'm so old, or something. But I'm not sure what to do with it. I immediately turned around and asked several mutual acquaintances I found on my Friends' profiles to in turn, become my Friend. (Sorry, that sounds so... pathetic.) So far, only one has responded. What gives? Have I pissed off so many? I had no idea. On my main Facebook page, the comments and activities of myself, and my "Friends", and others' responses to same, are all mixed together. Can everybody see these? I'm not sure. What if I want to write something just to one other person – is that even possible? Can't we all just go back to e-mail? Am I really an extroverted enough person for this?

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*And in this case, that was a good thing.

Not dead yet. Not really, anyway. Just pinin'.

Anyway, via Mr. Hill, a peek into the silent plague of badly-made, badly-displayed Texas flags. Flying it wrong seems easy, but making it wrong requires a greater commitment.

Meteor! (Updated). On the evening of the 14th, M. and I took a stroll through a nearby park, I was turning toward her to make some comment about the glare from the adjacent streetlights, and how they could be shielded to make the light point at, say, the street, and not at all objects and eyeballs within half a mile... where was I? Oh yes, I had just turned towards M. when a white flash of light made me think, hey, where's that light coming from? We both looked upwards, and saw the biggest, brightest meteor that either of us had ever seen, far brighter than any planet or star, a brilliant green-white fireball that streaked downwards towards the west. It was visible for about 2 seconds, breaking into at least two fragments before disappearing, leaving us doing the Oh-my-god-did-you-see-that thing that people usually do in such circumstances.

When we got back to the Casa, we quickly skimmed the Intarnets but found nothing. Surely a sight such as that would have been widely seen and reported... but we found nothing. We broke habit and actually watched the evening news, but again, nothing. We checked the American Meteor Society's web site* — silence. And so it has remained ever since. We dutifully filled out the AMS's Fireball Reporting Form but so far our report hasn't shown up on their fireball log for 2009. Are we such unreliable witnesses? Maybe, as the Ranting Spawn surmised, we are just craazy.

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*The AMS has an informative FAQ that helped to answer one of my main questions, "Why green?" Apparently, green is the color emitted by vaporized nickel, and is pretty commonly associated with meteors.

UPDATE (May 2). Well, the fireball log was finally updated, and it seems that we were neither crazy nor alone in our sighting. The log currently lists our sighting, along with six others that are considered to be probably the same object (though the last one seems kind of iffy to me). Each reporter gives a location and an apparent path of motion for the fireball, which enables someone with access to Google Maps to create a map combining all the sightings and apparent paths. This would lead me to conclude that the object probably came down somewhere over northwestern Iowa, a relatively sparsely populated part of the state.

Happy Easter, 2009.

Spring haiku.

leaf buds crusted with snow
green shoots tremble in the wind
robins think WTF

"...what is essential is that all may be together in it." Among those things that make me wonder if I really belong to the same species as my fellow man, or perhaps just suffer from some rare genetic flaw, is my total inability to understand the point of things like "Earth Hour". Saving energy, ok, I understand that. It would even be neat if a region turned off its lights for at least a few hours on a good clear night, so as to allow people to get a good unimpeded view of the wonders of the night sky (e.g.).

But making a big public show out of turning lights out for one whole hour obviously isn't about any serious effort to save energy, or stargazing. It mostly seems to be about kowtowing to the pieties of the moment, and doing so in as public a way as possible. But but but... why is it necessary to have big group events like this? Who does it seek to convert – errr, convince? Don't other people find this sort of thing to be creepily totalitarian?*

I'm overreacting, I'm sure, but reading the linked AP article caused this to pop into my head:

"For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time."

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*Maybe I'm just seeing totalitarians under the bed. M and I watched most of the 1936 movie Things To Come a few nights ago, and were struck by how the "bad guys" were thuggish Mussolini/Hitler- styled dictators – and the "good guys" were dictators too, they just had shinier toys for the masses and were less outwardly thuggish. What was in the water back then, anyway?

Sir, I think you have gone a negative too far. Fretting about the inexplicable desire of youths to leave the flat windswept prairie, a high poobah of a state commission for keepin' 'em down on the farm, even after they've seen Paree, emitted the oracular utterance

"Brain drain can cripple a town's ability to see past what's always been," Fong said. "It takes young people to not realize that something wasn't impossible before."

Big foot and little foot. Continuing our visit with Sue the Tyrannosaurus – one of the striking things about a Tyrannosaur skeleton is the variation in gracility* between different parts – some structures are very robust and heavy, and others are surprisingly lightweight (well, relatively speaking). You don't notice it so much unless you see the full articulated skeleton. The skull, hindlimbs and pelvis are massive, while the forelimbs and pectoral girdle – well, really, the whole upper body, except for the skull – seem undersized, the forelimbs comically so.

Presumably, the pelvis and hindlimbs have to support all that weight, so they have to be massive. The forelimbs don't have that structural constraint, not having to support anything, so they were free to evolve towards... what? They are too small to reach the animal's head, and based on muscle attachment scars, probably didn't have much range of motion. And only two freakin' digits, also.

(UPDATE. Yes, yes, I know, T. rex's discoverer, Henry Osborn, the dirty old man of American paleontology, surmised that the tiny forelimbs were involved, in some unspecified way, with sex:

... while [the humerus is] absurdly reduced as compared with the femur it nevertheless is provided with very stout muscular attachments, a powerful deltoid ridge, which proves that it served some function, possibly that of a grasping organ in copulation.^[1]

More recently, it has been proposed that the forelimbs acted as grappling hooks, digging into struggling prey while the jaws did their work. They still seem undersized, though.)

The hindlimbs, having to bear approximately 6 tons, are very robust. The tibia and fibula are massive and relatively squat, the tarsals reduced to almost nothing (lots of little bones do not provide great support), and the metatarsals are closely joined to form a stout columnar support. It's not very clear in this picture, but the metatarsals of the first digit (a.k.a. "big toe") are fused into the metatarsals of digit no. 2, leaving the big toe reduced in size, suspended in the air, and partially opposed to the other three remaining digits, similar to a bird's rearward-facing big toe.

Not surprisingly, the overall effect of the hindlimb is that it of a hybrid between an elephant and a cassowary; the stoutness necessitated by the great weight the bones needed to support, but the overall arrangement of bones much more similar to birds – especially ancient birds – than to extant reptiles. The bones of Sue's hind limb match almost exactly with those of Archaeopteryx in terms of number and arrangement.^[2]

Since Archaeopteryx, birds have embarked on a long-term evolutionary trend that lightened and simplified the skeleton; the old theropod / ancient bird arrangement of lower limb bones (tibia + fibula + remnant tarsals + metatarsals) has been replaced by just two bones. The tibia merges completely with the remnants of the more proximal tarsals to form the tibiotarsus (a.k.a. "the drumstick") while the more distant tarsals, plus all the metatarsals, have fused into a single bone, the tarsometatarsus.

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*Firefox doesn't think it's a word, but I know better.
^[1]Osborn, H.F., and B. Brown. 1906. Tyrannosaurus, Upper Cretaceous carnivorous dinosaur : (second communication). Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 22, article 16.
^[2]To give credit where it's due, P. Z. Myers has some excellent images of Archaeopteryx feet.

Gathering that honey that lazy North American bees can't be arsed to gather, Chinese bees' honey undercuts the local product. Of course, the Chinese product is .... wait for it .... tainted!

"The authors of the mischief": Quote of the day, Victorian edition.

Dr. Fleck's Readings
from the Books and Pamphlets of Yester-day,
found to be Topickall and Relevant to the Circumstances of To-day.

(Or, I have not the Time or Wherewithall to Write a Proper Blog-Post, So I will just Fill Space with some Quotes that have long Lodged in my Brain.)

Mr. Charles Mackay, LL. D., writing, almost 170 years ago, on France and the Mississippi Scheme:

...For a time, while confidence lasted, an impetus was given to trade which could not fail to be beneficial. In Paris especially the good results were felt. Strangers flocked into the capital from every part, bent not only upon making money, but on spending it. ... The housekeepers were obliged to make up beds in garrets, kitchens, and even stables, for the accommodation of lodgers; and the town was so full of carriages and vehicles of every description, that they were obliged in the principal streets, to drive at a foot-pace for fear of accidents. The looms of the country worked with unusual activity to supply rich laces, silks, broad-cloth, and velvets, which being paid for in abundant paper, increased in price four-fold. ... New houses were built in every direction; an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that was too rapidly approaching.

...It is inconceivable to those who were witnesses of the horrors of those times, and who look back on them now as on a dream, that a sudden revolution did not break out... the people confined themselves to complaints; a sombre and timid despair, a stupid consternation, had seized upon all, and men's minds were too vile even to be capable of a courageous crime.

...In a constitutional monarchy some surer means would have been found for the restoration of public credit. In England, at a subsequent period, when similar delusion had brought on a similar distress, how different were the measures taken to repair the evil! but in France, unfortunately, the remedy was left to the authors of the mischief.*

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*Mackay, C. 1841. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, pp 1 - 45. Bentley, London.

No, you may not call me 'gramps' yet. One of the defining characteristics of old fartdom is coming to the considered realization – more in sorrow than in anger, mind you – that everything was better in your youth than it is now. Contemplation of Sue's replicated bits and pieces scattered about the Science Center caused me to reflect upon my carefree youth, many weekends spent in the gloriously naphthalene-scented passageways and back corridors of the National Museum of Natural History.

Now that was a museum... indeed, excessive and abnormal exposure to the Smithsonian at an early age probably skewed my expectations for what a museum should be to this day, and it's not really fair to lament that the various "Museums of Science! and Industry!" that we've visited around the country don't compare to the Smithsonian, because, well, they're not. The Smithsonian, that is.

On the other hand, the Smithsonian is the Smithsonian, and when we were there last year, I noticed with some alarm that the total amount of exhibit space seemed to be markedly less than it was some 30 years ago, and much of what remained, especially in the anthropological exhibits, seemed determined to, shall we say, tell a particular story, rather than just show things and provide basic explanations. Because visitors can't be expected to know enough on their own to make sense of the artifacts, I guess.

And also an IMAX theater. Now, when the Air & Space museum opened with its IMAX theater, I totally understood – "To Fly" was the perfect IMAX movie*, and the inclusion of the movie, and the theater, in a museum like Air & Space made sense. But an IMAX theater? In Natural History? Showing freaking Batman movies?? There used to be other stuff there, I thought. Exhibits, maybe.

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*And they've been going downhill ever since, too.

It's a good thing that I didn't publicly repeat last year's New Year's resolution, the one about posting more frequently, because it would be long abandoned by now. Sorry, deep in it at work (funny how work per person = volume_[work] / quantity_[workforce] increases as [workforce] becomes smaller). The Ranting Spawn is at it again, though.

An experience that is all arch. We'll continue our little visit with Sue the tyrant lizard queen later, but first I have to upload a bunch of pictures of the Gateway Arch.

The Arch is very big, and quite unlike its surroundings, which adds to its visual impact. Its shape is an inverted catenary curve, the shape a chain makes when suspended from its two ends and allowed to hang down freely. (According to Wikipedia, the exact formula for the Gateway Arch is y = -127.7 · cosh(x/127.7) +757.7, and it is displayed somewhere on the premises, but we didn't see it.) This is apparently the strongest form an arch can take, which explains why the 2000-year-old vault of Ctesiphon is still standing, barely.

The Gateway Arch is so big that it becomes hard to get pictures of the thing when close up to it. In consequence, I have many pictures of parts of the arch, or the arch at funny angles.

Sometimes you just have to go for color and shape:

Freaky, dude.

I don't have many pictures from the top of the arch, because, St. Louis just isn't that visually interesting of a city; the arch is a lot more interesting to look at than look from. I was going to add a picture of ice floes drifting down the Mississippi, but then I thought, why?

Mo-Daves' Travels: the 'cabin fever' edition. The T. rex image below didn't just come out of nowhere – it was the fruit of our latest, though admittedly minor, cross-country jaunt. This trip was borne of a triple bout of cabin fever, suffered by collectively by all human residents of Casa Fleck y Breen. Also because it's been so damned cold here lately, and we wanted just a little relief (not too much – it's not like we will admit to liking hot weather or anything like that).

Having just a long weekend to work with, our choices were limited. Nevertheless, six hours of driving brought us to this city:

Neither Moira nor the Ranting Spawn had been to Saint Louis, and I'd only been there briefly (well, ok, drove past on I-70), so it was an obvious choice.

Saint Louis has a nice public resource in Forest Park, an extensive chunk of greensward just west of downtown. The park is stuffed full of goodies like a zoo, an art museum, a history museum, a "science center" (what passes for a museum in this iron age), miles of trails, forests, fields, and much else besides. And most of it free, too, which is pretty cool.

We spent a whole day in and around the Park, walking from our motel room to the zoo in the balmy twenty-degree-plus air. The zoo we had largely to ourselves; apparently St. Louisians don't consider the depths of January to be proper zoo-attending weather. The cold prevented our seeing some of the animals, and we had to jostle someone at 'Guest Services' to get the doors to the herpetarium unlocked, but on the whole it was definitely worth more than the price of admission.

After the zoo, we hiked to the Science Center, which had banners up advertising an exhibit of Sue, the Tyrannosaurus. Like the zoo, the Science Center is free, but specific exhibits, such as, say, visiting carnosaurs, have separate admission fees. After paying our money, we trekked labyrinthine passages to end up in a big inflated bubble containing Sue's replicated remains, bathed in red spotlights.

Another stark instance of blogonepotism. Right here. As in, you're reading it right now, as I shamelessly flog the offspring's blog. (Nepoblogoflogging?) From her latest post:

I went into health class expecting to be lectured about condoms and about my being a fat unhealthy American - turns out I'm an underweight, spiritually dead American.

Glacial. So — cold — can — only — hit — one — key — on keyboard — every — few — days —

Well, not really. But we have to have some excuse for the prolonged absence. Ummm.... (Must... distract... audience...)

Hey, look over there! It's a big scary T. rex!

Stage One, complete.

In our ceaseless attempts to further the boundaries of human knowledge, the researchers at Alien Corn Enterprises are now in the process of setting quantitative levels to the old Shakespearean assertion,
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!"
We can currently report that the first part of this sharpness inequality, i.e., the serpent's tooth, is indeed very, very sharp.

We did not set out initially to test the proposition – at the start, we were merely attempting to give the household corn snake her early winter meal. However, for unknown reasons (cold, advancing age, too much mouse-handling on our part, sheer cussedness on the snake's part have all been considered) the snake chose to ignore the warm, fat, fuzzy mouse proffered and instead clamped down hard on our researcher's ring finger.

Corn snakes have dozens of tiny, needle-like, recurved teeth. Not only are they very sharp, they are very hard to disentangle from human skin, at least without additional injury to both parties. And despite their small size, getting them firmly lodged into the sensitive parts of a finger is remarkably painful, and produced a surprising amount of blood.

After the initial bite, we assumed that the snake would recognize her error and disengage, but instead she displayed an unrealistic degree of optimism by starting to throw constricting coils around the hand and arm attached to the finger. It ultimately took the combined efforts of the whole non-ophidian population of the Casa, plus a pair of tweezers, to get the various creatures disentangled.

We are now awaiting stage two, displays of thanklessness from the Ranting Spawn, to complete our testing. None appear to be forthcoming, though, so it may be a long wait.

Some days, I think the Telegraph is just trolling for blog links.

E.g.,

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

I especially like the photo of Mr. Burnham. Such big, concerned eyes! Such an earnest, furrowed brow! Will no one think of ... *sob* the children! All that, and the invocation of the mighty O. – surely the Telegraph knows this is as waving a red cape before a bull; that a thousand bloggers will rise in mockery...

Damn! I fell for it!

[Via.]

"...Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you ... on the good earth."

Forty years ago today.

Gods oversatisfied.
I mentioned in the comments to a recent post that the Ranting Spawn had successfully propitiated the household snow god (represented by a small porcelain snowman, pressed into service in a deft bit of theogenesis on the part of said offspring, as a means to getting more snow days off from school). However, perhaps an entire chocolate cake was simply too much of a good thing.

I have to admit that moving to Iowa has allowed us to greatly expand our checklist of experienced dire natural events. To our previous collection of earthquakes, typhoons, flooding, volcanic eruptions (ok, we only saw that from a helicopter) we've been able to add more flooding, blizzards, icestorms, and tornadoes (well, we haven't "experienced" a tornado, thankfully, but we've seen them in the neighborhood).

UPDATE: Newer, more dire blizzard warning replaced previous blizzard watch. Tomorrow's predicted high temperature? -2°F.

Cable moorings. James Rummel's recent musings among the Chicagoboyz w.r.t. cable television echo a perennial discussion here Chez Fleck y Breen: should we keep our cable television subscription?

Moira usually brings this up, as she is the one who takes the trouble to actually pay the cable bill, and has watched its inexorable rise over the years. Rubbing salt into this periodic injury is the knowledge that we basically watch no scheduled cable or broadcast television at home anyway. We used to watch things, but the last show we paid enough attention to to bother searching it out on a weekly basis was the first season of "House", and I'm not sure we even made it all the way through the season.

Oh, we'll turn it on now and then, and flip though the 70+ channels, but other than an occasional musty classic on the old movie channel, or the offspring searching out a Simpsons episode, we'll usually just flip-flip-flip until the channels start repeating, and then give up. Like M. Rummel, we wonder what happened to the cable television of our youth, when the Discovery channel actually showed science, the History channel showed history, A & E showed something that occasionally passed for culture, and all of it with relatively few or no commercials, which was only fair, because, after all, you were already paying for the cable, right?

A quick perusal of the Discovery Channel's schedule for today:

The History Channel and The Learning Channel, which we used to watch with some regularity, seem to have gone down the same dismal path. Whenever I flip past TLC, there's somebody building a monster truck or chopping their hog; around here, we refer to the standard fare of the History Channel as "Biblical Disasters of the Luftwaffe".

The one thing that keeps us enmeshed, though, is local weather programming. Not so much at this time of year, but sometimes we really need to know the weather right now, and the Des Moines stations do, to their credit, do a pretty good job of getting urgent information on the air. And our broadcast reception is pretty lousy. So we will probably do nothing.

Four.

Luckily, we have all those running computers to keep us warm.

The pleasures of the geekly life. Sorry, I know, light posting, usual excuses, yada yada yada... whatever Moira's excuse, I can legitimately say that I've been buried by work, and only just recently been able to come up for air and / or blogposting. Not complaining, not at all... it's good to be busy, considering most of the alternatives.

Looking around and doing a quick personal inventory, I find that I have nothing useful, unique or witty to say about anything in the wider world. So this will be an example of that fine old blog-standard, the navel-gazing post, with my own personal you-so-geeky! flair.

Last week, our office finished the incredibly drawn-out and bureaucrat-infested process of decommissioning a huge pool of surplus or obsolete computers, and freed them up for personal use by us drones. "Mixed bag" would be a serious understatement for these machines, which were in all possible states of repair and usefulness, so to make things fair, our sysadmin drew names for each machine (or so he said). My haul is shown here:

Christmas in, ah.... December! Eight, count 'em, eight boxes dragged home and into the basement as bemused spouse and offspring looked on. At the moment I took this picture, I was seeing if I could get FreeBSD 6.0 to install on a rack-mountable HP NetServer lp2000r. (Yes.) I had to cannibalize a second NetServer for parts, but by this evening it's up and running, with a 130GB RAID 5 array providing our home network with oodles of extra shared space. Of course, its twin high-powered fans make it sound like somebody absent-mindedly left a vacuum cleaner running in the basement, but... hey, free computers!

Still to receive my attention: 3 Dell Precision 530's, none of which, on their own, constitute a functioning computer, but which may, with a little luck, prove to be combinable into a fairly bitchin' new machine to finally replace my poor homebuilt box which suffered terminal meltdown back in September. Then, a Dell Precision 410 and a no-name box, one of which will (hopefully) be usable as a replacement for my creaky old HP Vectra (300 screaming megahertz in that beast) used solely for connecting to work; and finally, an HP Visualize c3600 PA-RISC machine, which I have absolutely no use for. But it's a PA-RISC!! Maybe, just maybe, I can get some *BSD or Linux variant to install and run on the thing... how cool would that be? Be still, my beating heart... hey, not that still...

Electoral post-morteming. Honesty, and what passes for my sense of honor, compel me to go back and take a forthright, manly look at my record of electoral predictions for the past year.

Let's see... back on July 12th, I boldly stated

In the meantime, as a public service, I can reveal the name of the candidate whom my gut tells me we will be calling "Mr. President" next year: John McCain.

Well, I guess I was a bit off on that one, which combined with my prior predictions (that in 2008 the country would bear witness to the clash of those titans, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton), puts me firmly in that rare league of political seers who were totally, 100% wrong this year, from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, this is not the sort of rock-solid reliability that one normally takes pride in. I can take a tiny grain of solace, maybe, from my other prediction that seems to be coming true – that Obama, instead of representing any sort of capital-C Change to the standard operating procedures of this country, would instead basically represent a return to Democratic politics as usual, instead of Republican politics as usual; in other words, just handing the reins of power over to the other establishment team instead of the current establishment team.¹ That wasn't really the magnitude of change I thought he was promoting, although personally I'm much less alarmed by the lowercase-c version.

¹Oh, did I forget to write that prediction down somewhere before now? Dang.

"Bitter Ale for Bitter Times". A foresightful, positive response to bad economic news. When the going gets bitter, the bitter resourceful crank up the hops:

A microbrewery in British Columbia is toasting the current economic downturn by launching a special brand of recession-style beer.

Howe Sound Brewery has named its most bitter-tasting brew Bailout Bitter in honour of the government bailouts of the financial sector that have taken place in an attempt to mitigate the global financial crisis.

Calling it "bitter ale for bitter times," the brewery said the new beer will cost less than its other brands.

A pint of Bailout Bitter will sell for $5.50, or about $1 less per glass than other brews, at the company's restaurant and pub, located in Squamish, B.C., north of Vancouver.

[...]

"We are trying to inject a little bit of humour into this dire economic situation, while still responding in a serious way to these tough times," the brewery's co-owner, Leslie Fenn, said of the new brand.

Fenn said because the brewery is small, it can produce a timely new brand faster than its larger competitors.

The idea was hatched about two months ago, when impacts of the global financial crisis began, he said.

Mmmm, I do like me a good bitter ale. Wonder if they ship any across the border? Perhaps I could discuss this matter with the local ale-dealers.

(Via Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis)

At Lady Mondegreen's kennel. From a comment at Pam Spaulding's blog:

Great Post!

If only one thing comes out of this I hope it's that the assumption other minority groups will AUTOMATICALLY understand/empathize with our plight and issues gets nipped in the butt.

From here, via here.

Dragging Moira back to her own blog. M. has gotten into the habit of doing all of her writings in the comments sections of other peoples' blogs, off-shoring her commentary, if you will. Of course, this cheeses me off, because here I am, an aging, over-the-hill jester, frantically trying to wring a few last chuckles from the audience with my silly costume and jingly bells on the hat and pratfalls and such, all the while the alleged 'proprietress' is off giving commentary away for free. Well, I've had enough! I've decided that whenever Moira writes something somewhere else that (in my humble opinion) should have been a real blog post, I'm going to drag that commentary kicking and screaming back here, where it belongs.

To set the stage, M. Blowhard had asked:

"What the heck happened to the American economy in the late 1990s or thereabouts that killed off economic growth, apparently for at least a decade?

Was it:

- Y2K (maybe we should have taken it a lot more seriously?)
- Globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs?
- The inevitable result of paying stagnating (or even falling) wages to the vast majority of the population as a short-sighted way of ensuring high corporate profits?
- Long term fallout from the notoriously IQ-lowering hit single, “Ooops, I Did It Again”?

Moira responded with:

I think the deadly X factor is a combination of your 2nd, 3rd, and last points. Though "globalization", of course, affects more than manufacturing jobs. (And there are economists and economic writers who have long been examining the long-term ill-effects of de-industrialization and the current globalization regime.)

Is the notion of perpetual economic growth in capitalist societies (not exactly a natural trend throughout most of human history) in need of revision? Was it just a temporary thing?

I've always been puzzled by this apparent belief in "infinite growth", though I'm sure the policy-makers pushing growth as an end in itself aren't thinking in terms of logical endpoints, but narrowly in terms of specific problems they may be responsible for - increasing tax revenues, funding Social Security, etc. - in the short term. Of course, one might think that people incapable of considering the larger, longer-term welfare of a nation ought not to be entrusted with policy-making power, even if we expect a private individual - say, the owner of a home-building corporation - to lobby for GROW GROW GROW GROW GROW!...

Sure, societies are always changing, evolving, hopefully advancing and improving human life. But infinite growth, which seems to be the preferred model for both companies and nation, is an impossibility.

I'll repeat the unoriginal observation that we more and more confuse "the economy" with society, because that confusion promotes lousy (disastrous?) policy. There do seem to be a lot of people out there who don't (or can't) recognize the distinction. (Why is that? Do they mistakenly take "everything else" in civilization as given, or is the scope of their inner lives really that narrow?

Sometimes I really wonder about people. For example, I came across some Australian policy article recently which illustrated this narrowness nicely. (Which of course I've lost track of. Iirc, the group appeared to be some sort of Chamber of Commerce type quango.) On the one hand, they were not happy with a current public policy encouraging reproduction, which had been instituted because families were too small and there weren't going to be enough people of working age to "grow the economy". You see, children are a net liability on the economy, an inefficient cost sink that have to be fed, housed, and educated before they start being economically productive. On the other hand, they were all gaga for turbo-charged immigration, because that way they could get all the good-to-go workers they needed to "grow the economy". Now, one would think that any human being not beset with terminal short-termitis (or maybe autism) would begin to pick out the flaws, both technical and social, in this sort of reasoning. But after you've read enough stuff like this, you stop thinking about the technical and logical flaws and start wondering, "Wtf is wrong with these people?" And after a while you begin wondering if they're not merely blinkered and unwise, but maybe just batshit insane.

How do we intend to handle the distribution of the goodies if the pie isn’t growing?

The current economic model was sold on the premise that it was "growing the pie". Naysayers were (and still are) castigated for foolishly believing that the system is a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, the last decade or so of "globalization" has been a zero-sum game for more and more American (and other First World) workers. (And some proponents have changed arguments in mid-stream, exhorting us that it's good that we've gotten poorer so other people can be richer. Which is fine to argue, honey, but that's not what you were selling when all this started.)

As for the non-growing pie, not sure how best to deal with that. The usual line on most of the left-leaning econo-blogs I read has been that it's a simple matter of making sure all the fabulous gains of globalization are fairly spread via government-controlled redistribution programs. I dunno. Crap wages and crap working conditions ameliorated by national health care seems a lousy exchange, and indicates a much uglier and less free life, than one in which a worker can command humane working conditions, and wages good enough to attend to his and his family's needs as a free man with free choice, and not a government client. But that's just me. I recognize that we were already far down this road before the '90s. But I don't have to like it.

(By the way, Richard Thompson does a dynamite cover of "Oops....".)