A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

A young teenage girl was about to finish her first year of college. She considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat but her father was a rather staunch Republican.

One day she was challenging her father on his beliefs and his opposition to taxes and welfare programs. He stopped her and asked her how she was doing in school.

She answered that she had a 4.0 GPA but it was really tough. She had to study all the time, never had time to go out and party. She didn’t have time for a boyfriend and didn’t really have many college friends because of spending all her time studying.

He asked, “How is your friend Mary.” She replied that Mary was barely getting by. She had a 2.0 GPA, never studied, but was very popular on campus, went to all the parties all the time. Why she often didn’t show up for classes because she was hung over.

Dad then asked his daughter why she didn’t go to the Dean’s office and ask why she couldn’t take 1.0 off her 4.0 and give it to her friend who only had a 2.0. That way they would both have a 3.0 GPA.

The daughter angrily fired back, “That wouldn’t be fair, I worked really hard for mine and Mary has done nothing”.

The father slowly smiled and said, “Welcome to the Republican Party”.

(h/t to flmom over at Malkin)

I’ve never been able to get image posting to work here. Any one know if that’s a WordPress defect?

Seems like a trivial enough interface. Click the “add media” button with the image next to it (I’d include screen shots but, well… that would be silly)

But when it uploads the file (I’m largely convinced it actually does) It seems to redirect me (with the “upload a file” shadowbox) to a login page for the site.

It’s really irksome.

Bill Whittle’s awesome. Check this 3 minute video out.

The Piranha Party

One of my favorite games of all time is Half Life 2. I’ve played it through a dozen times easily and it now takes a long evening.

One of the very distinctive things about it is the sound crafting of the various enemies. The vocal tracks and sound effects of bad guys of various stature add an awful lot of the atmosphere that’s made the franchise what it is.

I’m sitting where I sit when I play games, working on the market.

Cut to an hour ago when I hear this weird ascending whooping sound coming I’d never heard from 3 places in the city bounds. It sounds just like a strider, a daddy-longlegs looking badass.

It took me a second of recalibrating to not try and select weapon group 5 (the rocket launcher) and to actually look out the window to that great big place with no roof.

A few minutes of that before I heard “This has been a test of the emergency warning system” clear as could be.

So THAT’S good at least. Makes me feel better that there’s something like that out there.

But DAMN did it freak me out for a sec.

$25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Dirty Harry suggests a benefactor can offer $100,000.

Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though, that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000. In a matter of hours.

Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.

This offer includes is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.

Hat tip to SondraK

This started as a comment on I Think Therefore I Blog, but I got a little windy so I cut it short over there.

As an almost “long time” baker (does 7 years count?) I finally succumbed to the pressure to buy a bread machine. It’s always seemed like cheating to me.

But I’ve got to say the results are absolutely stellar. I use it for a couple things:

• Bread to be ready when I get up in the morning (I try to keep this to a minimum.) Perhaps it’s a sign of getting old but I’d sure rather be woken up by the smell of bread than… well, nevermind.

• Testing ingredient combinations. This is awesome. If I have a “I wonder what would happen if I threw THAT in to a loaf” thought (which only happens a few times a day while sitting at my desk trading) I just set it up and let it go. If I like the result out of the machine THEN I do the real bread crafting work.

Got a loaf going now.  It’s just too rimey out not to have fresh bread.

Steam just “unlocked” the fallout 3 digital download.

Taking the rest of the day off.

I earned it ;-)

I’m narrowing in on the level of trading performance I’ve been looking for and I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty amazed.

I’ll let you in on a little secret here: Today, not after some $10,000 gain “cover off the ball” trade (like AIG) or some huge currency move; today, after a $120 gain on DIA (which is an index fund measuring 1/10 the Dow Jones Industrial Average) I realized that I’m actually going to make this work. I’m really going to do this and it’s going to work for me.

The market is behaving like a rat in a coffee can (to quote my favorite marketeer Jeff Mackie) and it hasn’t affected me in a material way. Frankly it’s been good for me.

Now, I’d rather it be good than bad because damnit, good is good and the more people that succeed, the better. This ain’t a zero sum game. But frankly, I’ll take market moves over doldrums since that’s how I make money.

Am I going to get rich this way?

Eh, it’s not REALLY the point (well, it’s A point certainly.) The point is that my income is based on my work for the first time… ever. It’s not based on accrued hours spent in a chair. If I succeed, it’s because I SUCCEEDED and for no other reason.

I can do things now like “work really hard in the morning” then take the rest of the day off.

Like, if… oh, y’know…

Fallout 3 is released.

w00t!

:p

Lately I’m finding myself doing an awful lot of large scripting projects lately in a variety of languages. PHP, Perl, Python and a smidge of Ruby as I try to figure out WTF the deal is.

I’m generally an XEmacs based programmer but I’ve got to say, I’m becoming spoiled by a lot of the advanced integrated features in modern compiled-language IDEs. The funky searching, code folding, refactoring, plug-in …err… ’stuff’ that’s in Eclipse, Visual Studio, Borland’s IDEs, IntelliJ, etc.

Any ideas? I might try and re-evaluate the Komodo IDE.

But maybe there are enough Eclipse plugins to make that worth trying. I don’t know though, eclipse is a bit big to wrap my head around casually.

This actually frightens me, and it should frighten you.

Dean: One-Party Rule Would Rule
By Tim Taylor
Roll Call Staff
October 27, 2008, 4:33 p.m.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that he’s looking forward to one party controlling all aspects of government, despite GOP charges that it would be a disastrous Nov. 4 outcome.

“Republicans had a chance to rule. They failed miserably. I think it’s time to give the other party a chance,” Dean said on MSNBC.

It’s not anybody’s responsibility or job to RULE. Government is there to REPRESENT.

I thought this fully bipartisan condemnation of MSNBC has been pretty heartening.

Both sides of aisle rip MSNBC

In a room full of television industry executives, no one seemed inclined to defend MSNBC on Monday for what some were calling its lopsidedly liberal coverage of the presidential election.

At this point I’m wondering if the unifying political issue of our time isn’t going to shape up to be the rejection of establishment media, establishment politicians and the general detachment of “The Powers That Be” from the rest of us.

I’ve been getting some ideas about a nonpartisan (yes, me) grass roots effort to rein in some of this.

Dunno. Market’s going to open in 10 so I’ve got to go contend with that. But I’ll have more about this in the coming couple weeks.

(fixed the homonym, thanks Ian o/)

Again he denies without explaining simple facts, then… well, watch…

(hat tip to Michelle Malkin)

and people are going to VOTE for these clowns? What are you nuts? Regardless of the actual answers to the questions, they simply refuse to answer. I really won’t have that in the White House.

Look you can’t say that redistributing wealth isn’t socialist. You can’t. It’s fundamentally dishonest.

This shit just sounds more and more like Biden and Obama are backtracking on the meaning of the word “is”.

Unfortunately this time the tv station knuckles under the Democratic Thugocracy.

(h/t: Ace)

I love it. He makes such an unabashed fool of himself here…

That you end up with headlines like this:

Obama campaign cuts off WFTV after interview with Joe Biden

You’d better not criticize the master!

Fucking disgraceful.

Entranced as I’ve been by the “Ambient Orb”, I decided earlier this year to build one using an Arduino NG board (based on the instructable.) But I saw something shiny.

I just went back to it and need to figure out how to figure out (heh) the right resistors for the LEDs I have, which are the following super-bright ones from SparkFun:

Red, Green and Blue

But for the life of me I can’t seem to determine, but for the fact that they need to be there, what the values for the resistors ought to be (they’re different than the ones used in the original instructable.)

I’ve got the basic thing up and running. The code looks good, everything’s just ducky with naked “resistorless” LEDs. But I’m stumped.

Not the emptiest, mind you. That’s different.

RadioUserland had a feature I really loved. Well… it had several (and it’s craptasticular language wasn’t one of them.)

If you typed “a phrase in quotes” it would look through all of your blog post titles for that phrase. If it found it, it would automagically turn the quoted phrase into a link.

I was shopping around for a WordPressWiki plugin and came up with something called “Blicki” which doesn’t work and hasn’t worked in some number of versions. But I figured, how damn hard can php be?

It didn’t really have much that would help and a lot of the library functions it relied on in the WordPress codebase either aren’t there or don’t behave quite the same.

After about an hour and a half I have the thing done. With the comment header it’s 66 lines from and not so bad if I do say so myself; especially considering that it’s a first php effort.

I’m going to use it as a basis for expanding in to a full blown wiki plugin, so I’m not planning on dumping it out into the world at large in it’s v0.1 state.

But if anyone’s interested in it in the meantime, lemme know. I don’t see any reason not to shoot the file over.

When the pears in the supermarket feel ‘nice and firm’ they’re under ripe.

I’m just sayin’

ducks

I wasn’t gonna say anything ’cause god, if I was wrong….

But now I’ve heard it in a few places.

“Girl attacked and mutilated in Pittsburgh”

Look, something really bad clearly happened to her, and that’s sad. But damnit who would even think that way?

Someone on another blog (ace?) captured it best: “It just smells a little too Tawana Brawley”

More from Malkin

To fake something like that is fucking sick. I don’t care what side you’re on, it’s things like that which pollute trust in a marked way and on a really vast scale.

Of course if it’s on the up and up… well…

nah, I just can’t imagine it.

UPDATE: and from this article in True Crime Report, the following:

“Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said.”

UPDATE: Jesus Christ. Story at Ace… and Drudge

Police tell KDKA that a campaign volunteer has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

The scumbag bitch needs to be put in prison.