Made it to a weekend - 02 November 2007

Of course, this is one of the weekends where I end up working, so mixed benefits. But still, Friday is a good day.

Yet again, the cooking bug has hit me an an appropriate time - Jeno's pizzas and Totiono's pizza rolls are on recall for potential E.coli infection. That’s twice I could have gotten into trouble for continuing my college habits. There are indeed advantages to cooking one’s own meals. Now, if I could just get the costs to go down, so that I don’t have to swallow hard when the credit card bills come due...

You know, I complain about my best attempts to fall asleep in meetings (didn’t happen today, as I got involved in the discussions, and that always keeps me awake), but I have to admit, if I don’t stay awake, only my job is at stake. For some pilots, there were lives potentially at stake. Air traffic control woke them up, luckily, trying to get their attention because they were coming in too fast.

I am highly suspicious of the following release - DEBKAfile says that they've discovered that al-Qaeda will begin attacking anti-Muslim web sites on 11 November. I wonder where such a dedicated attack would focus on.

Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, died at 92 years of age. The world is making some transitions, certainly. I wonder what kind of world we’d be in had atomic weaponry not been developed. Would civilian nuclear power still be popular? And would we have found out the bomb anyway if a terror organization exploded a reactor? Would the rest of history have continued on anyway, just with bigger conventional explosives? (Which is kind of depressing.)

Senators send the White House a letter expressing concern that the White House is giving Iran the finger. Considering more sanctions are being considered for Iran, I don’t think any of that advice will be taken. He also said that Mr. Mukasey would be the only candidate he put forth to the Congress for Attorney General and accused his opponents of denying the existence of the war. Also note the invocation of Hilter. I would like to apply Godwin’s Law to this real-life speech, if I may stretch the rules to do so. A signing statement, perhaps, of the same vein that Mr. Bush signed in January saying he had the authority to open private mail without the requirements of a warrant.

This also happens to be in conjunction with the White House speaking a little too soon about the trend of deaths in Iraq. And then AmSam and Ted Rall combine to offer a poignant thought - if any senator can put a personal hold on any bill, then theoretically, couldn't one Senator stop the Iraq war cold?

Providing something that might look like a balancing on this, Robert Novak notes that Ms. Pelosi prefers to assert her position as Speaker, rather than deferring to the committee chairs. So the Speaker is choosing to exercise her position as the chair of the House in trying to get the committees to pass legislation she likes. This sounds familiar. Who else has done such things?

In international news, protesters demonstrated against constitutional reforms that removed term limits for the office of President of Venezuela, permitting Hugo Chavez to remain Dictator-for-Life, should he be elected and the populace pass the reforms in a referendum. The police forces used nonlethal force to scatter the protesters, drawing criticism that the government wasn’t interested in such things as democracy or free speech. At least the Venezuelan government acted openly, unlike Quebec police, who admitted today they sent in undercover agents to attempt to provoke protesters into violence. The give-away? The boots on the "protesters" and the police are the same type, down to the markings. Oooops.

Regarding the general election in twelve months, it's possible unmarried women are the key demographic to victory. If you were running on a platform to convince them to vote for you, what would you promise them?

Overfishing, pollution, and dams have more than one third of European freshwater fish facing extinction. I realize that through bad chance or just being out-evolved, species die out, but is it really a wise idea to accelerate the process any?

Our quiche candidates start out with some bad math - claiming that it's better for the students, George Will wants to give out vouchers to Utah parents. The problem? The money that the vouchers are coming from aren’t being drawn from the regular public school funding unit. Thus, when he claims that he’s saving the taxpayers money, he’s actually having them pay the additional voucher dollars out of their taxes, because the original public school funding stays right where it is. Where is that savings? Some part of remedial math got failed there.

Slightly trickier math may be employed on Lawrence Kudlow’s insistence that the economy is improving, thanks to Mr. Bush's economic policy, despite the housing market. Mr. Kudlow uses Wall Street and growth figures to say that we’re doing quite well, thank you, and that nobody on the liberal side nor the media seems willing to say anything about it.

Even worse, that might be the beginning signs of a stupid epidemic. Richard Dawkins has a dim view of humanity as it is, and thinks that the few smart children that escape the public school system and do well are lucky. I don’t know whether things are as dire as he forecasts, but when gorwn men are charged with killing their neighbors over watering the lawn in a drought zone, then you might wonder how stupid we really are becoming. Especially with other countries still following the United States' ideas in passing terror legislation.

The quiche runner-up displays rampant ignorance, willful stupidity, and the inability to learn from mistakes, even those with legal consequences. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Westboro Baptist Church plans on continuing their rhetoric, even after being thrashed by the court system with a nearly $11 million dollar judgment, they’re still going to tell us that YHWH hates gays and kills American soldiers because we don’t kill gays.

Our winner tonight has all the previous stuff, and then adds on willful destruction of property - Animal rights extremists flooded the basement of a scientist's house, after the scientist said that she uses animals for her research on drug addiction. The group claiming responsibility supposedly said they debated between merely flooding the house and setting it on fire. You want stupid, stupid rat creatures? Here you go. Here’s some quiche.

Our Cool Things department offers more Japanese engineering - if your race ticket is a goat, feed it to the goat.

Sticking it to the record companies, a composer is suing EMI for illegally offering their work for download without an agreement. Yes, a copyright violation against EMI, pirating the music and making a profit off it. Will we get to see the same amounts of ridiculous judgments leveled against the company under the DMCA? If not, then will we at least get a precedent that can be used when the RIAA goes after individuals?

To encourage literacy, and the reading of a great poem (okay, maybe only the first book is good), visit Danteworlds, a project from the University of Texas. Multimedia and all. We encourage having a copy of the text available for reference, or for reading alongside while you explore Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

But last for tonight is rare Bill Watterson art, some scans of things he did when he wasn’t drawing Calvin and Hobbes, and the like. I still miss that six year-old and his tiger, and they’ve been done for nearly, what, ten years now?

(For the record, this particular musical piece has “Accelerando” written at the beginning of it, and in several other places throughout, which makes for quite the enjoyment when you predicted it to do so right at the beginning on your first listening of it. It’s pretty close to a constant acceleration through the whole piece.)

Things I have Learned on the Job - October Edition

Yet more things I have learned on the job:

1) There is no such thing as cheating when your own knowledge is insufficient or runs dry. There is only consultation of additional resources, including pulling potential reading suggestions by using a bookseller’s “Recommended” feature.

2) If you know a few things about a book, and one of them is either the author, the title, or the name of the series, there is a high probability that I can find it. Even on occasion, if you don’t know any of those things, I can find it. This is not magic, but it sure looks like it, especially when you pull the book that someone’s been looking for on nothing more than a title and one element of the story.

3) No matter how bright, large, flashing, neon, or other manner of attracting attention to itself the sign is, I will still be asked many times where someone can find X section.

3b) As a corollary, even if I were to deploy a large sign in front of my desk that said “Interrupt me!” or “Ask me questions!” in any sort of attention-grabbing manner, the average person would still likely pass my desk three times before finally mustering the courage to say something.

4) There are no such things as stupid questions. There are, however, newbie questions for which policies have already been evaluated and put in place. However, it takes asking the question to find out that something has already been determined. Thus, I will not feel stupid asking newbie questions. (This leads into #11 of volume 2 of this series, as well.)

5a) The Cataloging System Is Precise. Zero results generally means that I have input something incorrectly and the system is taking me at my word. This is particularly annoying after I have found material with a more forgiving system and am trying to see if we have it.

5b) The Cataloging System Is Error-Prone. Likely due to the nature of outsourcing cataloging data to other services that do so (or due to the variances of persons at those services), one cannot be assured that the various books in a series will be cataloged in a uniform manner, nor can we assure that they will all be found in the same general area from one branch to another. (This is particularly apparent in book series in paperback.)

6) I will accept my additional duties as a sort of first-responder technology troubleshooter/instructor with grace. By virtue of this, I also reserve the right to speak technobabble at any point I choose, and additionally reserve the right to perform “unofficial solutions” in the course of my day to achieve appropriate results.

7) The Weather is Variable. Just because one day started as a day where I could walk to work in a light jacket and feel good with a little breeze does not mean that the weather will not turn into cold, windy, and rainy that would probably have better warranted the heavier coat. (This is a modification and supplement to #1 of the first entry in this series.)

8) Throwaway ideas are often winners. No matter how cheesy, corny, or otherwise bad it sounds, put it out there - it may be perfect, or it may be the right foundation for modification.

9) The phone may be silent all day, but there will be voicemail when I first come into work, and when I get back from lunch, no matter when either of those occasions are.

10) Getting “lost” in a town/city on foot is far more rewarding than getting “lost” in the same town/city in a car. By the first method, one discovers a bowling alley, movie theater, laser tag/arcade/play area and an indoor paintball arena are all proximal. By the second method, one discovers which streets do not actually run all the way north/south or east/west.

11) Getting children to do what you would like them to do is akin to herding felines. This task is far easier when Mamma Cat is around.

12) Herding children is easier than getting more information out of someone attempting to deny interest in the subject that they are asking a reference question about.

13) For most people, 1 hour/day of Internet time is not enough.

14) There is such a thing as collaborative coloring sheet work. I never thought that such things could be so group-oriented.

15) Children are vicious to each other. They will also forge temporary alliances against the adults if it is in their interest to do so. It is still a toss-up whether young children or teenage children are more vicious and incisive to their peers. This is technically something I already knew, but am getting significant amounts of firsthand experience and anecdotes about.

16) Nothing encourages better behavior than being in the line of sight or the range of hearing of a librarian.

17) After a while, one gets enough of a feel for the library such that one can go from person to person, dropping off a querant in the proper zone for their answer and picking up another that needs to go elsewhere. When I do this, I feel like I’m playing some sort of train game. Now that I think about it, I think it would make a pretty awesome train-style game.

Perhaps more to come in the month yet arriving. I somehow doubt that I’ll ever know everything all at once.

Still more to peruse - 03 November 2007

The great big Web has so many things. I know it’s impossible to get all of it, not even on a daily basis, and of course, there’s always the realization that my viewing audience may not be as interested in all the stuff available as I am. Or may be opposed to it. It’s become a neat habit, and I wonder if as the amount of work and preparation done every day increase, whether this will suffer. Probably not. Become more discerning? Maybe.

The padded rugby squad won again, despite looking significantly shaky for much of the game. And then the playcalling decided to open up, and the pass game started clicking. And then #86 channeled #18/#1, and there was much rejoicing. Never let it be said that the alma mater doesn’t shorten your lifespan when they play sport.

And happy birthday to greenhornline, who reached a milestone age today. And to martizac tomorrow, just for being awesome.

Unfortunately, some of her countrymates are in serious trouble, as three hundred thousand people in Mexico are dealing with severe floods.

Pakistan's President-General Musharraf has declared a state of emergency, blacking out non-government media and placing the police and the military on the streets. The Supreme Court of Pakistan is due in a few days to make a ruling on whether Musharraf is legally able to be both head of the military and the executive, so the timing on this is strongly suspect.


From AlterNet, some companies in Iraq have such low morale that they don't actually do active patrolling, even though they say they are. Admittedly, that kind of behavior could be low morale and high self-preservation, or high boredom because nothing’s actually happening around them. It also comes to light that Blackwater's parent company also contracts intelligence services, and that there are former CIA operatives on its rolls. I suppose that’s just taking market research to a much bigger level, but then there’s also the tendency of the American government to outsource things, and then I wonder how much classified, personal, and sensitive data is currently in the hands of outside companies.

More regarding the general election - Red Rabbit wonders why everyone suddenly is talking about Hillary's gender, considering that Hillary’s not been doing a whole lot of talking about it herself. Even if they’re talking about how it shouldn’t affect anyone’s vote, of course. I sense a narrative forming...

Into technology news, a study commissioned by Industry Canada finds that those Canadians who use P2P are more likely to buy CDs. Try out an album for a bit, decide you like it, purchase it. It’s a fantastic sort of system, isn’t it? Certainly not some sort of emergency-measure problem. Following on that idea, the Oregon Attorney General has asked that an RIAA subpoena served to the University of Oregon to be crushed, because it does not identify specific infringers. The infringement may be trackable to a room, but it cannot identify a computer specifically, nor can it know whether a regular resident or a visitor to the room is the one engaging in the infringement. If specific identification is required like this, that might shield a large amount of potential infringement, especially with services that rotate their IP addresses among subscribers, or those who have one connection for an entire household. Coupled with the information from Industry Canada above, it might finally sink in that P2P sharing is at least some part of a good thing for those who want to increase sales.

Ah, and on that retroactive telecom immunity on spying? It also immunized (would immunize?) e-mail providers, search engines, and instant-messaging providers, too. So just about any communication method could have illegally cooperating with the security agency, without a warrant, and there’s no way anyone could go after them. Isn’t it nice to know that we’re all being spied on and that there will likely be no legal recourse for anyone who wants to say that it was done illegally?

The Tacoma, Washington Anarchist Bookfair has been classified a "homeland security threat", which means that police will be monitoring the event the whole time. Because anarchists selling books and protesting is so very worthy of a strong police presence. Even more, the other persons around the book store are being encouraged to report any “suspicious activity”. When did peaceful protest and differing ideologies deserve this kind of response?

Cracked actually does something relatively serious and posts five scientific reasons why a Zombie Apocalypse could happen, taking advantage of parasites, chemicals, and processes that are all already potentially scientifically viable to see what sort of zombies they would produce.

Quiche territory ahead - we start with a firm that's major asset is bought patents deciding to sue several corporations, including retailers, for patent infringement on wireless and power-saving technology. Yep. Even Best Buy and Circuit City are named in the suit - because retailers should obviously check to make sure their suppliers aren’t violating patents.

Some of the e-mail forwards at My Right Wing Dad could certainly qualify for quiche (and I think I’ve linked to this site before. But it’s dynamic, so it’s different every time.). Some of them are plain awful, some of them are probably untrue, but they’re all very much in favor of the conservative way of life, in all its Christian-supremacy, anti-immigrant, English-first (or only) glory. But our quiche winner is yet to come. For now, though, we’ll turn to other things.

Better and neater stuff than those depressing materials are new candy-themed reader bookmarks, and yet another admission that toys and model vehicles are for adults as much as children. Then there’s also Brainbows, fluorescent maps of our neural pathways. Which makes for some pretty pictures indeed.

First lasers to kill viruses, and second (although I think I’ve linked to this before), radio waves that can kill cancer? Are we seeing resurgences of old techniques with new spins? Are these any more possible than they would have been before? Something that is certain is that a treatment for human pinkeye can also obliterate a fungus that attacks frogs.

In a women's prison, "marriage"-like ceremonies are described as common, despite, of course, there being no permission for sexual contact and the law forbidding same-sex marriages in Florida, where the prison is. Even in prison, love and/or lust blossoms, and people want to partner up. The guards at the prison were suspended while there was investigation, one guard was fired, and another resigned. Such freedoms are denied to them. I’m sure there’s some sort of allegory involved about how much current law is much like prison to homosexuals, but that’s to someone else to discover. All I do is display Wonkette's findings of two more closeted gay men seeking sex.

The recycling mentality is everywhere, including the proclamation that a service that recycles sex toys has reached its first tonne. Which, actually, is a god idea, considering many of them are high-tech devices that requires significant amounts of energy to create and operate.

Our closing remarks tonight begin with two lists, to show our great nonpartisanship - the most influential United States conservatives (a list of 100), and the most influential United States liberals. Both of these by the United States definition of liberal and conservative, I note.

In what is most important from tonight’s postings, I echo Exploding Aardvark in putting two things side-by-side for comparison. The first is Tim Boucher seeing Halloween as a product of Harvest Culture, where the excesses we have are given away freely and unreservedly, so that everyone has enough to feed themselves, and those who need something are able to find it or obtain it because someone else has more than they want. The contrasting remark, and tonight’s quiche-winner, is Sean Hannity deriding a "liberal" Halloween where kids are taught "to knock on other people's doors and ask for a handout.", Instead of seeing it as gift-giving, like say, the VEWPRF, he considers it training for children to beg. Personally, I prefer the former interpretation, as that seems to jibe more with the roots of Halloween and Samhain - community gathers, harvest festival, much food and merriment to be had, and making sure that the stores one has are sufficient for winter. Also, respect paid to those who died in the previous year and are no longer here to celebrate at the feasting table. Miss you.

Lest we end on a down note, however, I have to say that I like my co-workers lots, and that if we didn’t all share a fairly similar sense of humor, we probably would have problems by now. I’ve already been jokingly accused of being the token male hired for his good looks rather than his skills, for which there was much witty banter, and I think I came out on the losing end of that repartee. I might survive my six months yet. As I said, I figure that if they get to see me at my worst and still decide to keep me on, then it’s their own fault. Work tomorrow, so I can’t stay up too late.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I’m working the day of the Michigan-Ohio State game. If they do as they did last year and make it a very late start Eastern time, I might be able to see it in its entirety. Considering that at this point in the season, only Michigan or Ohio State will win the conference this year, there’s a good chance this one goes for primetime and nationwide. If that’s the case, I might have enough time to get to a television after work.