Tissue gets published

Tissue looks like it will be published. The editor has asked for it, and the bio/pic, but I'm kind of bummed about some of the last few half-rejections so I want to say that I'll believe it when I see it.

At the same time, I think it's probably time to feed Gupta or Arizona to a couple other outlets; they are good, publishable stories, and I've been ignoring markets because I've been too sensitive about what they say their requirements are. Toby Buckell has a great philosophy on the rejection thing – basically since it's the only part of the process (aside from writing, of course) that you have control over, that he essentially celebrates these rejections.

I'm not afraid of rejection. What I am afraid of is sending something that might be a little racy or grotesque to an editor and getting rejected and told, why the hell didn't you read our submission guidelines?

But recently, I have been thinking that there is stuff out there a lot worse than what I'm writing. And by worse, I mean things like paedophilia, not that I'm an excellent writer. So, I'll be submitting some of these polished bits to more markets, and I'm finally proud to have publishing credit(s). Neat. Oh, and it appears for all the effort I go through to be a hard science fiction author, I'm a horror author. It's weird.

Jesus it's like fucking twitter these days.

More AppleTV grief for those of you who aren't already sick of me complaining about the company whose products I most loyally use (perhaps, save, Subaru). Linux machines are beautiful, in their ugly, shattered-obsidian kind of way. They're all sharp around the edges, but if you look at them right the sun will glint off them beautifully; their curves and blades will draw the eyes to the mysterious patterns in their makeup; and, of course, they're dense as fucking obsidian.

But the one thing they're very good at doing is taking a difficult situation and making it less difficult. Consider the case of a firewire iPod which I used with my Macbook (remember the flambé Macbook, gordon?), as it had a 1394 port: I now have a Macbook Air. Not only can I not charge this iPod with a usb cable (which is the only port my Air has), actually using the usb cable harms the battery by continually attempting to deplete the battery due to the voltage differential between usb2 and 1394a. After a few hours of being plugged in to my Air, it was toast. We had to ransack the house looking for a wall-mount firewire adapter, and re-charged the poor thing, and it was (or appeared to be) happy.

What next? I cannot use it on my Air. Sandy does not have a Mac laptop, and this is a Mac iPod, so her Vista machine is not going to play nice without torching all that music I so carefully put on there (even if her Vista machine had 1394 to begin with...). No, the iPod goes straight to the Linux box. Yup, Linux says, "okay, that looks like an iPod. I'm gonna go mount that on /media/taint (yes, the iPod is named "taint." Don't ask.), and you go ahead and do what you like with it.

I then pointed JuK at it, which happily ran through its collection of quad-letter obfuscation and reassembled my playlists and id3 tags so that I might listen to it locally. Cool. But, you know, that whole obsidian thing. The Linux machine is pretty cool (Kubuntu + KDE 4.1) but dammit, I'm not going to be moved off the couch and away from my Air, because, well, I'm writing.

So we do the only reasonable thing: sudo aptitude install mt-daapd, or the "firefly" media server. It pretends to be a daap server on your network. I pointed myself at its very pleasant configuration page, told it to go scour through the iPod itself, build a sqllite database in
/var/run, and serve that stuff up over daap.

Ah. And this is where it gets great. I grabs my little white remote, I points it at my Apple TV, and I says, "Music, bitch." To which it naturally replies, "Music? Whatever are you speaking of?"

This is the part where I realise that in order for your Apple TV to read streaming content off the network, it has to pair with those instances of iTunes (and only now do I remember doing this on the Air), even though it knows that those .m4p files over there are my .m4p files, and it has my credentials and an interwebs connection and can frickin verify all this and connect it all if it wanted to, it chooses not to.

Which is the other problem. The Apple TV is plugged into – you guessed it, the TV. So, hey, it might be nice to be able to say, I'm going to play music off my mt-daapd share from my Linux machine here on my Air here in iTunes, to a remote pair of speakers, attached to the Apple TV (essentially using it as an Airport Express). But, no, it doesn't do that, either. For no good reason other than possibly competing with their lowest-end piece of hardware.

Fie, I say! A curse on their engineers! May their villages be plagued with locusts and their endians be all wrong! Curse them until they look to the mountain and see its gleaming obsidian sides and realise there's more to life than simple competition. Sometimes working is pretty cool, too.

Beef!

Boy, and you thought I was going to talk about "downers" and the new cattle ban. Or maybe you were going to say, "aagh, goddammit, stop it with all the blog posts!" Either way, the first point is this. In the documentary, Beef, Dr. Dre (I really hate the pseudonyms but whatever) is quoted as saying, "Cube was the smart one."

Cube is the smart one. If you want to reach as far back Death Certificate, it was clear that gangster rap was evolving, and there was a lot of meta-rap ("beefs"), but it was clear that Cube actually – another quote of his from the same film – was the first one with a pen. The guy is good. I recently purchased Raw Footage, and I am rather surprised to see, wow, It's been almost twenty years of this genre, he's been on the leading edge the whole time, he's still innovating, and he's still writing incredibly insightful (although he's a pretty angry dude) lyrics (he'd probably use the term rhymes).

And now for something completely different. Really. So I have a tiny hard disk on my Air. Well, it's 80gb, but it's not 160gb, or some of the bigger ones, that's for sure. It's mostly full of video I get from the iTunes store, and about 1/4 that volume in music (an entire record takes up a lot less room than e.g., a single episode of No Reservations – Nari, you are officially Sandy's hero). I watch most of it. Some of it's podcasts, and I purge those pretty frequently. But here's the deal. When I delete something I've watched off my Air, the AppleTV also deletes it. WTF? I have 300-some gigs of iTunes content (we just bought a MacPro, most of whose job is going to just be handling all that content). I'm pretty religious about hitting my USB teat and "time-machineing" my Air, but I didn't realize the AppleTV was ditching content until last night. I may have lost episodes I paid for (Time machine keeps dailies for a week, weeklies for a month, and then months forever, or something; the point is, I can download something one day, back it up, and it won't make the next "forever" slot, and I lose it.)

The AppleTV is fucking cool. But I am really, really irritated with all the stupid shit they did to it. On purpose even! They fucked the thing up by design! Beef. Beeeeeef.

Quick observation

Yeah, yeah, too many posts, my rss reader is full of crap from Alex. Sorry. Just a quick observation. Why is every single epic anime series about a select group of people with super powers attacking extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial badguys whose job it is to eat or turn said people into more of the badguys?

We've been watching Tokko (we'll finish it tonight, real bittersweet given the Sakura/Ranmaru relationship), and I can't help but thinking, whoa, did we just make a left turn down Evangelion street? Was that some Bleach there? Are Sandy and I going to be, gasp, dining at La Tasca (this link will probably go away, check here) next year at Otakon?

The shame of being weaboos. Shaaaaame.

Pushin' another one out.

We've been watching a lot of Tokko. This is Sakura. She's the sweet one, but she'll still cut you in half.

I'm really going to have to scour duotrope (or maybe even Moeller can suggest) a place to put it, but I've squeezed out another short story. Those on previous proof/galley runs, lemme know if you want it. Those of you who have had early drafts, it's a bit more polished now, but the real sheen it needs comes from many more eyeballs than I have. That, and I have to print it out and read it. I don't know why this step is required, but I just can't verify that it "works" if it's not on paper.

The problem is it's science fiction, and really the primary focus of the story is SF, but there is a lot of sex in it (and it's, um, not missionary), and enough knives and hooks to merit a little bit of a horror tint to it. I'm leaning more in the horror digests. The sex, it is important to understand, is window dressing for the underlying point that is, while superficial (but interesting! I promise!), novel (chuckle), and even fun.


Readers will recognize afterward, oh, wow, yeah, I totally forgot some of these senses are quite this intense. But, I probably give too much away.

Tissue awaits.

Caffeine

I'm the last one to say I've kicked caffeine (although, mostly, I have – I drink mostly rooibos or licorice tea, but occasionally have assam), but is this really necessary?

 

  

This in addition to the "Mean Bean" and other coffee incarnations of El Monstro.

The new last.fm

I don't know when I last looked, but wow, I like the new Last.fm look and feel. I normally can't stand the overflashification of the web, but they done good.

Oh, and goddamn do I love Alkaline Trio. That is all.


(presidential race? what?)

Captain Obvious here

Well duh. He's a fucking crook. He's taking millions of non-profit dollars and rolling it in, on-the-sly, into a for-profit company. He's even got saps like me helping (although I hardly do more than fix a typo these days).

What ignorant assholes these people are

Drinking overproof whisky and bourbon

 

short: this is a really long rant about whisky and how to drink it. there will be lots of pictures and it may even come off as snobbery. If you're interested, read on, but pour a dram and a comfy chair, and maybe even have a look over your "liquor cabinet" before (I don't really have a liquor cabinet – I have more like a "spirits cabinet" in the same sense people have a "wine cellar", but I do have some mixers) hand.

I wanted to put this on the web both to showcase an excellent bourbon/rye/whiskey (Willett), post a pretty picture or two, and also to clear up some mystery. I specifically want to talk to all you alcohol-jocks out there: you're the ones who can out-drink everyone, who think that drinking The Macallan at cask strength straight from the bottle is manly (there are women alcohol-jocks out there, but thankfully very few).

It is these same people who insist on knowing what I drink when they meet me at a party, or even at work. I generally reply, "whisky," to avoid the discussion of what their favourite malt is. I get a lot of "I like Glenfiddich" (pronounced to rhyme with "rich," not "prick"), followed by, "but I don't drink that garbage 7-year stuff – I mostly drink the 12- and 18- year ones, they're more expensive, but they're worth it.

You never hear an Aberlour (a great, low-priced, available everywhere whisky) or Highland Park (same) or Talisker (again, everywhere, inexpensive) or Bowmore (although admittedly, some of theirs is pretty bad).

But, really, replace the Glenfiddich with the Macallan or any other popular malt (even Lagavulin or Laphroig, which I hear more often than I'd expect). It's all the same. Because they don't drink solely Jack (not we don't say The Jack or The Jim) and you get somebody even worse. You get a self-proclaimed connoisseur. These people are reformable, but most of the time, they're very set in their ways, and it's hard to convince them that the Macallan is overpriced, and while tasty, you can spend that $200-700 on much, much better spirits.

These are also the same people who tell you you're somehow less of a man (or, if you have ovaries, that You're Doing It Wrong) if you mix water into your whisky. This is utter bullshit, and we'll start the as soon as I address the first problem with these people. They'll tell you that you ruin a scotch by putting water in it. Consider, for a moment, what the Scots call Scotch. The Scots call it whisky (American whiskey is usually spelled with an 'e', although I have no idea why this is). What do you call a single malt from Japan (e.g., Yamazaki)? Do you call it scotch because it's a single malt? No, folks. This is whisky. All of it. Let's get that word, "scotch," out of your vocabulary before we go any further.

Now then, let's continue.

 

First and foremost, all of these drinks can be absolutely wonderful. You could even get teenagers to drink them (remember Boone's Farm?) if you prepared them correctly. There are some beautiful malts that are best consumed with a little water. Remember, your nose, tongue, and throat are not especially thrilled about being given a 40% solvent solution. That's why you have that sensation of burning, that you exhale, and even make noise or shake your head. It burns because, duh, it's a solvent.

So we add a little water. Let me stop here for a second and say that any reference I make herein to water is distilled water. Straight H₂O. Water from the tap, no matter how well it's filtered, and water from your fancy water provider, has all kinds of stuff in it that you don't want in your whisky. Furthermore, some of those chemicals react with compounds in the whisky and you can destroy some of the parts that make the drink unique. In my experience, this is especially important with the malts where water is very important, like the very northern distilleries like Talisker, Jura, and Highland Park.

 

Note the application of ice and distilled water in an appropriate glass. Given the serious alcohol content of this particular whisky, this will probably be half water.

The water does not hurt the whisky, but it dilutes it enough that you can swish it around on your palate (just like wine and coffee tasting) and get to feel and taste all the subtle tones to it. Some people here will say they taste apples or freshly cut grass – not me. But I do taste a lot more to the drink than having it straight. The other thing is, you can "nose" the whisky without the same burn in your sinuses you'd get from the full strength.

So while you might drink your whisky neat (and I do), it helps to add a drop or three of water, depending on how much you've poured. I wouldn't recommend more than a finger when you're tasting. You can add more than a few drops, say a teaspoon (5ml), but you need to be careful not to dilute it too much or it will lose its character. The point is to take the bark and bite out of the spirit so you can really get to know all the parts of it that make it unique.

Remember, whisky in the vat is anywhere from say 58 to 69 percent ethanol. A hugely critical component of what makes a whisky taste the way it does is the water they use to bring it down to the 40-45 percent you drink it at. This (and of course other factors) adds an enormous amount of character to the whisky. Think of what the difference in spring water is between the island of Skye in Scotland at a spring in Kentucky. The whisky you drink at 80 proof is already "watered down," which is your first argument with a liquor jock.

So if you're going to add your distilled water to a whisky, why bother buying the cask-strength whisky and just buy the 40% (80 proof) stuff to begin with? Well, in my opinion, the cask strength stuff has more taste to it. You get more of the flavour of the whisky, and especially since you can control how much water is in the whisky, you can drink it at 30% or at 50%.

One thing I like to do is to have distilled ice cubes (very small cubes; I think we got ours at Williams-Sonoma, but wifey usually does the shoppin') and drop a few (say, 2-3) into a cask-strength whisky. I figure you're probably adding 10-15ml of distilled water to maybe 75ml of whisky. Additionally, it doesn't cool it so much that you miss all the flavours, but it's a pleasantly chilled beverage (especially in the case of a bourbon; I'd never cool a Talisker or Highland Park).

Then, now that you've sampled your whisky, you may be ready for a full-strength taste. If it's 59% or above, prepare for a burn (although the Willetts are pretty good about this). However, you get a more realistic mouthfeel (they all differ, from smooth and watery to thick and syrupy), you get to feel and taste all the individual elements from the toasted barrels to the finish on the casks and the water used in the malt. But, really, you're not going to get very far drinking cask strength whisky or bourbon straight. You're going to get hurt.

So, do yourself a favour. Keep your distilled water around, and dilute your cask strength drinks lightly, but enough that they don't destroy your taste buds. This goes whether you're drinking that 49% Macallan or a 63% Willett.

And enjoy.

On knees

short: knees.

I was told repeatedly today that I have a "sports injury," and that normally, "these things heal themselves." The diagnosis, after the MRI and X-ray imaging is thus:

Basically, my quadriceps have tendons to attach to the top of the patella, and keep it in place. In my case, one of those tendons has become very loose, and so if I take the normal amount of tension off my quadricep (such as bending my knee, bringing my heel towards my butt), that tendon actually pushes the patella out of the way, and it hurts.

Further, there's been some damage to the joint as the patella moves around (consider: if the patella is at the top of the joint, and there are tendons and ligaments at the bottom of the joint, and the patella moves that way, it presents a danger to them).

Unfortunately for me, the doctor that I've been seeing (because he performed surgery on a friend ours who is in great shape today) doesn't really do that tendon, and because there's there's not a lot of damage to "his" side of the patella, not only does he not want to perform the surgery, he sees little reason to, because as they say, "these things normally heal themselves."

In order for this thing to heal itself normally, it needs to be exercised. Which is why he prescribed physical therapy. What I didn't mention here is that I called all the PT places, and, well, they're booked weeks or months in advance. So while it's possible that PT could fix this (and in fact "normally" does, right?), it's damn near impossible to actually get in and have it done.

This is driving me crazy. While sometimes I may seem like a bit of a homebody and not want to go out much, I do like to go out and see friends, I like to drive my car and ride my motorcycle, I like to hike, go for simple walks around Mount Vernon, and so on. So having this full "soft" cast from ankle to groin has prevented me from strengthening that muscle (the quadricep and associated tendon). But this places me in a quandary: do I remove the cast and risk dislocating my patella frequently with the hope that exercise (or just me being me, really) will strengthen the muscle?

The pain when my patella "pops out" and my "leg falls out" is immense. It's enough to have me balled up on the floor, not the "fuck! I dislocated my knee again!" that it was earlier this year. Maybe that's where we're heading; a dislocation that doesn't hurt as much and a little bit of courage on my part.

And then there's everyone else. Everyone else has been told that I have fucked up my knee. Well, I did. But if I take the cast off, all of a sudden, it's business as usual, and I'm going to have to explain every single time that I'm not under a desk fixing an ethernet cable, or that I can't sit at someone's desk, "actually, you do that, I have an injured knee," when there is no physical evidence of such. Then, I'm either a liar (the injury was not as bad as I said it was), or I'm shirking my duties and being difficult. Either way, I'm pretty fucked.

My best bet here seems to take the cast off, walk around as normal, and go see the "sports medicine" doctor that today's doctor recommended me. Of course, I'd seen that guy before, and he was not real thrilled about doing any work on it, either. They both consider this elective surgery when I'm rolling around in pain.

Speaking of pain – can I ever talk about doctors without talking about pain? – the doctor today told me that he didn't need to refill the meds he'd prescribed me for my knee, which were sorta doing the job. His logic was simple. "When you came to me a month ago, you weren't taking them." Of course, two weeks ago, I re-dislocated it and a month ago I was on a fentanyl patch. But he says if I'm going to need a recurring prescription to take care of the pain, that it is chronic pain, and he just doesn't do that. "You need to find a chronic pain specialist if you want to continue to stay on the meds." So I guess he's making a distinction between "acute" and "chronic" pain? Frankly, I fail to understand. One can visibly see that my knee is swollen. One can see on the MRI that my patella is damaged. He picked my knee up and manipulated it and damn near dislocated it, saying, "ooh, you don't like that, do you?"

So, I'm without pain drugs and will probably go through the miracle that is DT's, again, and my knee... well, suck it up, big guy. We all have pain from time to time, and this pain you're having now is not acute enough for me to give you drugs, and I don't treat chronic pain. Why, John Wayne here would never ask for a percocet or an oxycontin, or even a fentanyl patch. And he'd certainly never ask for four shots of dilaudid in the emergency room. Sorry, son, this borders on drug-seeking-behaviour, and I hate to break it to you, but your pain doesn't matter to me.

What am I going to do about work, casts, exercise, driving, and so on? I don't know. Take it slow and steady I guess. Maybe go back to the neoprene "sorta works" brace and try to keep my knee from folding while at the same time trying to get the exercise that will strengthen it – and also schedule an appointment with that "sports medicine" surgeon who is going to tell me to do exactly that.

So, let me repeat it here, unless somebody misunderstood me the last fifty times. Fuck you, doctors. Fuck every single one of you. Fuck your fraternity. Fuck your sanctimonius decisions about who is really in pain and who really needs your help. Fuck your whole slimy profession, in which an hour consultation is really fifteen minutes, for which you're going to bill the insurance company $300. You all drive $65,000+ cars, so you're not hurting. You went to med school because you god damn knew you were smarter than everyone else, and now that you've got the robe, scalpel, and prescription pad, you're the fucking man. Everyone has to do what you say, because that's what the federal government says. Cross a doctor, and you go to jail, do not collect $200, and so on. And forget finding another one and asking that one if maybe there's something they can do; these fuckers have their own private shared list of "problem patients," and the ones who don't are the worst criminals – the ones who will see you for months on end with no intent on fixing an ailment or curing you, but rather milking you like the insurance cash cow that you are.

The people in pain, the people injured in this country, are at the mercy of a group of people who do not believe they are as weak as the in-pain and injured. They laugh off your pain and complaints, "ouch," or "cough, cough," as if it's kind of funny that you've brought them a lung full of yeast or a dislocated patella. Because, really, they're doctors, and doctors make the decisions, not patients.

failure

I had such a huge rant planned for today on how people drink whisky wrong and how to correct their heinous ways. But I got sucked into my TDMA module, and I think it gets closer to release. I'm not sure the namespace, but it will probably be Net::TDMA, and it will probably be optimised for HF radio.

The rant is still in partial completion, and will make its way here eventually.

But for now, exhaustion. I see orthopede tomorrow. Ass kicking will ensue with the non-broken leg.

Yeah, that's it.

I only need an ankle. An ankle. Just one ankle. Nnngh. I need to get back on the fucking bike. I've got my transmission figured out; that's the hard part, I can handle the rear brake just fine. And it would get me to and from the office – as well as out to the "remote" offices – and I wouldn't have to beg a ride every time. Sadface.

Want. Bike.

What did you say?

People don't even realise the television is on anymore. They'll walk into a room, turn it on, proceed to ignore it or leave the room, vegetate for an hour or two, any combination of the above, and just leave, as though the normal state of the television is not merely "on," but rather "default."

Sick.

The new ZR-1 vs the "old" Z06?

With this monster in showrooms, and people waiting for it like people once waited for the Z06, maybe those Z06's will come down in price (the C6's are already dropping deeeeeep in KBB) to where I won't have some salesworm trying to squeeze 20k over its value on me. And, nnnngh, top-mount intercooler.

Side note:

We can, however, share some photos of the cars we drove today around the Lutz-ring at General Motors' Milford Proving Ground.

Bob. Robert, baby. Why do you have your own lutz-ring and I don't have my own asphalte du mort to rip ass around on? What gives? You get to have your cake, and you get to eat it? And get paid to eat it?

Check please!

More dislocation goodness

My knee "fell out" again last night. The pain is excruciating. I can't stop working because if I stop working I no longer get paid, or I burn through sick hours (of which I have something like twelve remaining due to this whole fucking injury process) or whatever. And I can't take drugs at work because then my coworkers will say, "are you on drugs?"

No, friends, pain is my reward for dedication to work.

Ouch. It fucking hurts. It really fucking hurts. It hurts in a cast that immobilizes the entire fucking leg, and there's no more I can do to make it stop hurting except pound my skull in with opiates. I can't help but think the surgeon who wants to "wait it out" and "see if we can't make that stronger" is a sadist. The pain I went through last night is only going to happen again and again until I have no longer acl or whatever soft tissue I have left is destryoed. And each time, it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt a lot. Enough that I'll be yelling and pushing Sandy away and irritable with my friends and coworkers.

And why? To avoid surgery that's fucking inevitable?

How your company is run

Frank once quoted me, so I don't feel bad quoting him, and besides, I'm linking him. And I'm entirely serious (and friendly) when I say, can we have this man frozen in carbonite and put on display somewhere as a reminder to HR drones everywhere, this is what you should try to be. Have him beatified. Knighted. Promoted to, hell, President. Let him hire a Secretary of War, and let him run the rest of the country.

Here's Frank, freestyling, just like a Zach de la Rocha or a Travis Pastrana, in his own special way:

• Why do you do performance reviews?
  
• Do you really need a vacation policy?
  
• How’s using email to “communicate” working out?
  
• Think a training class can infuse culture into your company?
  
• Do you ever listen to yourself when you say “employee engagement”?
  

Christ, this is a smart man. You'd think that this was all simple, duhhh stuff, but nobody is frickin doing it!. He must be so agitated that an entire industry (his!) is doing so many stupid things and doing them so willfully, thinking they're the way out, when all they do is perpetuate the same stupid things that got them where they are! I can imagine this is a lot like me screeching about how programmers and IT staff in general are in it for the wrong reasons, are doing the wrong things with the wrong people at the wrong time and other wrongisms.

I wish I could buy Frank a beer, or offer to give him some of my homegrown habaneros or something... because the man can even grow his own, fabulous, tomatoes.

I'm just in awe. I've always despised HR organisations, and here is Frank, making me think that there is hope out there for corporate Earth (note I did not say Corporate America – it aaaaalll needs changing), and that one day work won't kill people like me or drive us insane.

I respect a man with a brain. I respect a revolutionary. I respect a gardener and a man who values – no, cherishes – plant life. And I can't help but be heartened by a man who, were his cause taken up by those he tries to reach, would make the world a better place for me and hundreds of thousands (millions perhaps today, but certainly soon) of others. Frank, thank you. Thank you so much. May your words reach the ears they need to and your tomatoes always be as beautiful.

Rock fever

This is Ben Martinek, a friend of ours, leaned way over on his Ninja 250 (just like ours!) at Laguna Seca. It should be mentioned that the "other bike" is a Hypermotard. Jealous. Jeeeeealous.

People in Hawaii talk about "rock fever" and "island fever" – there's nothing to do so they go crazy on the islands. Duane Johnson, "The Rock" himself, said that there was only one thing to do, growing up in Hilo: fight. I can't describe how antsy being in this stupid cast makes me. I read and I watch my documentaries, I dream about guns and motorcycles, and all I want to do is go downstairs and get on the fucking ninja.

I know I can ride it. I know I can. It's just that if something should happen to me to make it worse, or hurt the bike, I could never forgive myself for hurting Sandy's bike or betraying her trust like that (she expects me to use better judgment than to hop on a motorcycle when I need surgery on one of my knees). But I really, really want to. It's a beautiful day, the swelling has gone down, it looks like all hell is going to break loose at work tomorrow... what more perfect time could there be to get one good ride in on the bike? Just roll that right wrist back and let the bike do the rest.

Let the bike do the rest.

Let the bike do the rest.



Let the bike do the rest.

Wood refinishing on the marlin

I used some 220-grit sandpaper to take off a lot of the sealant and varnish from the Marlin's stock yesterday. It turns out this is a much more productive task than I thought. Productive, in the sense that I had a pile of varnish and other nastiness in front of me afterwards, and no doubt some of it down my throat.

It was also a lot more work than I thought. I think what I'm going to do is just break down and get one of those black-and-decker "mouse" things, let it do the heavy lifting, and do it with a respirator. For the fine details, I can just do it manually. I'm going to have to anyways.

The parts where I seem to have gotten all the way down to the wood are appearing much lighter than I expected. Like Birch, maybe. I can't imagine it would be Birch, but I also don't think it's Walnut. So it may turn out to be pretty flexible as wood goes. I guess a firm lacquering would help that, but I haven't done enough woodwork to know.

There's a tiny bit of water damage to the butt of the stock, which makes me think it was even left outside for a rain or something. It's not bad, but it's clearly there.

At any rate, with a glass bedding and pillar bedding, it should be a fairly stable 100-200yd platform, especially with the requisite barrel (starting to wonder if anyone will make a chrome-lined octagonal barrel for me).

book happenings

Any of you following shelfari (it's on the right...) will notice a slight, uh, change. I'm not prepared to get in to why and how because I haven't yet digested it (and it's giving me a lot of indigestion, believe me), but for the moment I'm at almost 100% work-related.

HR 5483

short: grass!!!!!!

I've actually emailed Jim Moran (with whom I vigorously disagree on gun control – his stance on DC v Heller is indefensible) in respect to HR 5483. I don't do this often, as I both see it as a waste of time (are they actually listening to the people they represent, or are they "representing" their interests, e.g., the PACs and SIGs – boy, isn't that a cynical way of looking at things – are there no good public servants?) for the representative and a waste of time for myself. I see little positive – or negative – actually coming out of it. Rather, I've just clogged up the interwebs a little more, as I do here, and there's no reason to if nothing's to be done about it.

But when it comes to decriminalisation of marijuana, I have a soft spot in my heart. I see it as the classic state versus federal power struggle. The states, California in particular, have decided that it is their right to regulate the use of marijuana in their states. The federal government disagrees. Why is really unclear, although California's Proposition 215 did make it all the way to SCOTUS and the federal government won. Somehow, since I moved to Virginia from California, and I can walk the streets of Alexandria, and I can visit Mount Vernon, I feel what this country was when it was just "thirteen sisters" and that they never were one united state with homogenous laws. We had a federation, and it became a republic. There has always been tension between provincial and federal (although this is not the right word, provincial does not seem to have an appropriate antonym) governance. I guess maybe I just feel it more here. Marijuana is a real civil rights issue, and it's also a real state vs federal issue, and as such, I can't help but want to see it changed to favor people first, the state second, and the country third.

Petty marijuana crime prosecution puts a ridiculous strain on our resources as an entire country. We have judicial, military, treasury, and police forces involved in the interdiction, location, and prosecution of marijuana-related cases. I understand there are the huge cases involving many tons of marijuana (and still think that could be legalised and taxed...), but we are also putting people away for their "third strike" after finding them in possession of an ounce of marijuana. Granted, an ounce is a lot of marijuana, but it doesn't exactly make one a dealer. I would think you'd need at least a kilogram before you had a self-sustaning marijuana distribution business.

If we can incrementally decriminalise marijuana, and move towards a more sensible "drug war" policy, we can free up tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars used in prosecuting this "war" which is both ludicrous and unwinnable (less so, in fact, than this so-called "Iraq War"). One cannot win the hearts-and-minds of a people with laws and force (that is, in fact, how this country was founded). It is possible to tax them, however, and provided the taxes do not go so far that your Sam Adams and John Hancock sorts get uppity about it, you should do okay.

My guess is it will go nowhere, and Moran will either not respond or will respond with some canned reason why a man who believes in state healthcare, welfare, gun confiscation, more leave for federal employees, and posts the smarmiest bullshit he can on his congress website would be against decriminalisation of marijuana. I can hear it now: "for the children!"

What a country.

sudo aptitude install SIGSEGV

Aug  4 07:36:51 rancor kernel: [329757.122807] aptitude[8549]: segfault at 2020202028 rip 7f9a54f491fa rsp 7fff5e03dbc8 error 6


While attempting to put together some smb servitude for a busted Dell this morning (normally Rancor does not serve up much in the way of Windows files), I happened across JM's own "samba setup" deal. While it's mostly just a "which tools are where" thing for me, having set up samba on a bunch of different platforms, I feel I have enough in common with Moeller that I am actually quite comforted by knowing that he and I are using roughly the same operating system.

I'm not sure why aptitude feels the need to keep segfaulting (it does this almost every single time it's run...). It also doesn't really hurt anything, as it seems to segfault when it's freeing up whatever lockfile it keeps around, as the actual install works, and the operation is successful. I'm actually not even very curious, since it Seems To Work, but it seems kinda, I dunno, amateurish. (although I did have Apple's Software Update totally esplode on me over the weekend; had to go digging in /Library and manually install it and reboot!)



Anyhow, hello and cheers, JM.