Yearly Archives: 2005

In which we do the math

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In response to, well, no demand at all, we’ve prepared a little automatically-updated analysis magic; yes, that’s right, now you can gaze at the wonder that is the Heathen Census, updated nightly! Total posts! Averages per year, month, and day! Breakdowns by calendar year and month! All a single click away via the CENSUS link over on the right! Now how much would you pay?

Yeah, we know. Whatever. It was fun to do.

Something else we’re unclear about

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Why should we give a shit whether or not millionaires playing a game for a living take steroids? More on point, why the fuck is Congress wasting time worrying about this “crisis” instead of spending that time on the economy; Iraq; the ongoing failure to capture or kill OBL; scary developments in North Korea; etc.?

Dept. of Stuff We Don’t Understand

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This time, we don’t mean just us here at Heathen; there’s plenty of shit WE don’t get — Serbo-Croation; matrix algebra; how alternating current actually works; Finnegan’s Wake; why a slim majority of this country voted for a manifestly incompetant boob; how to get Mason to play nice with Apache 2.0; what airspeed of an unladen swallow is; etc. That’s nothing special, and nobody wants to read about it.

No, we mean stuff NOBODY actually understands. That’s interesting. And the folks at New Scientist have a fine list of thirteen such phenomena for your perusal.

“The Sleep Inns have sucky bathrooms.”

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The rest of the piece on perpetual business travel isn’t nearly as good, but this segment is grand:

Next, hotels; If you have any say in the matter, try to stay in Marriott affiliated hotels. The Wingate Inn and Quality Inn are both alright, but the Choice hotels (Comfort Suites, Sleep inn, etc) would be great, if they could somehow merge them all into one. As it is, Comfort suites have great bathrooms, but the chairs are awful, and most of them won’t let you smoke in them, and you have to light up your joint in the rental car, then you get all paranoid about taking it back to the rental place and having them smell it, so you just spray the hell out of it with air freshener; then you think that the guys at the rental place do this all the time, so they know what it means when a car comes in reeking of fake banana air freshener, so they’ll get onto you about it, and charge your company for you smoking in their car, then your boss calls you up and asks what this was all about, because he knows you don’t smoke cigarettes, so you have to make up some story about picking up a hooker, and she lit up in the car, but your boss turns out to be a pentecostal preacher and insists that you don’t do that in the future, or at least have her smoke in the hotel room where they charge you less, but you can’t do that because the whole hotel will know you’re smoking the funk because you got that hydro from your cousin, and you can smell that stuff two states over, so now you’re just fucked. The Sleep Inns have sucky bathrooms.

The Whine of Spammers

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Looks like the guy responsible for spamming my blog earlier doesn’t being called a spammer:

Hi – Sorry for the appearance of spam, but that wasn’t the case. I post everything manually, and only to blog entries that are relevant. There is a great revolution in media happening, and I am working hard to make it happen faster. Replay Radio is a great way to get the TiVo experience for radio, and I think everyone agrees that TiVo is cool. Podcasting is cool, too, and we will have a free Podcasting client soming soon as well. Again, please accept my apologies for the appearance of spam — that is simple not the case. Best Regards, Bill Dettering Applian Technologies Inc.

In other words “it’s not spam, because I say it’s not spam! Stop calling me a spammer!”

Presumably, he thinks this because he has some other definition of “spam.” Well, we think different. The formal acronym for spam is UCE, or unsolicited commercial email. The comment was an unsolicited attempt to sell his product, so as far as I’m concerned that qualifies. Q.E.D.

Go away, Bill, and stop spamming my blog.

Dept. of Decisions

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We here at Heathen Central are getting married; this is not news. Also not news, if you’ve seen us lately, is the fact that we need to lose a bit of weight before we take wedding pix. To that end, we’re getting back on the old exercise train.

Great. There is almost nothing as boring as exercise. Well, exercise qua exercise is boring; exercise that happens when you’re doing something fun is different — but also takes longer, making it less practical for very busy people during the week. Enter the iPod!

You can gets lots to listen to on an iPod, but what I really want is NPR. Of course, NPR is radio, not MP3, and the shows we like come on at times inconvenient to working out, so we have a bit of an issue.

Fortunately, the invisible hand of the market has produced TWO solutions to this quandry. If we want to listen to NPR on our own terms and not be bound by the tyranny of broadcast schedules, we can:

  1. Buy a Griffin RadioShark, which is sort of like a Tivo for radio.
    Pro
    • One-time cost ($69);
    • Can record anything on the radio (ATC, ME, TAL, WWDTM, etc.).
    Con
    • Must remember to set and use;
    • Will still have to listen to the gawdawful local inserts during the morning and evening news shows. NPR’s programming we like; however, we invariably change channels when the local idiots start jabbering.
  2. Get subscriptions to the desired programs over at Audible so that we can download what we want when we want it.
    Pro
    • Pick and choose, with no need to set a device or futz with reception issues;
    • Presumably better audio quality;
    • NO LOCAL INTERRUPTIONS — just a pure network feed, which is frankly all we want from any network. Local == crap.
    Con
    • Ongoing fees to the tune of $12-20 a month;
    • Potential DRM issues with the files;
    • Limited to programs that deal with Audible.

Looking at it this way, it sorta appears that spare computer + Radioshark + cron job to push ’em to the server (for consistent access from wherever we want) is probably the answer.

Adere Est Porkcere

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IM, just now:

KittyKitty: hey man
UberChet: bacontarian.com
KittyKitty: uhhmm, puerco
KittyKitty: are these meat eaters friends of your or 
KittyKitty: do you troll for all things prok
UberChet: I have a blog. People send me things.
UberChet: But I really need to go to spain/portugal, as I believe 
UberChet: them to be Porkvana.
KittyKitty: I have been to both. I have eaten pork in both
UberChet: Am I right?
KittyKitty: I think Ireland is prok heaven
UberChet: heh.
KittyKitty: pork that is
UberChet: porn:pr0n::pork:pr0k
KittyKitty: In England I achieved pork perfection
KittyKitty: English bacon on a buttered bagguette. 
KittyKitty: Simple, elegent and bacony
KittyKitty: uuhhhhm
UberChet: stop it, you're making me hard.
KittyKitty: I hpoe you mean lard
KittyKitty: hence the Ozzie termed "cracked a fat"
UberChet: heh
UberChet: ozzie or cockney rhyme?
KittyKitty: ozzie
KittyKitty: I have often wondered who would win in a bacon off
KittyKitty: Good ol' US streaky
UberChet: on that note,I made a hell of a carbonara over last weekend.
KittyKitty: versus Euro hame llike products
UberChet: Mmm, pasta, bacon, and eggs.
KittyKitty: heh
KittyKitty: go to an Irish pub and order a Bacon Butty
KittyKitty: yum
KittyKitty: ever wanna go to the salad bar and just get the bacon bits...
KittyKitty: oh stop you know have
UberChet: I'm so ashamed.
KittyKitty: we are only men
KittyKitty: and it is bacon
KittyKitty: crack for fat white guys
KittyKitty: if you could snort it we'd all have a greasy upper lip
KittyKitty: obviously I am very bored today
KittyKitty: send me more links
KittyKitty: please....just 1 more
UberChet: I'm totally putting this conversation on my blog.
KittyKitty: heh
KittyKitty: "keep a slick upper lip" the bacon snorters motto
KittyKitty: "Adere Est Porkcere"
KittyKitty: "To dare is to eat prok"

Math Fun the RIAA Way!

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You may or may not have heard by now that an Arizona teen has been convicted under an Arizona law prohibiting unauthorized copying of music. What’s wacky is how the RIAA figured the value of his “crime,” as Techdirt explains:

Yesterday, in discussing the odd case of a teen convicted under Arizona state laws for unauthorized copying, we wondered about some of the details — including the $50 million claim pinned to the material on his hard drive in early versions of the AP story (later removed, for no clear reason). Luckily, we’ve got some answers. Slate takes a look at the $50 million and explains how the content industry does math to come up with such figures. The real answer is they basically make it up. They determine that each work can be valued somewhere between $750 and $30,000, even if they can all be downloaded legally for $1 a piece. It certainly seems a bit presumptuous to put such a high number on the value. However, this story gets even better. Ernest Miller takes a crack at the specific Arizona state law that tripped up this guy, and realizes it turns fair use copying into a felony. That’s right. The details show that if you’re simply ripping your own legally purchased CDs into MP3s for personal use or backup, you are breaking this particular law, and could reach the felony stage with as little as 1,000 songs — even though fair use copying is legal. Of course, at $30,000 per song, that’s only $30 million. To get up to $50 million, you’d need to rip 1,667 songs. If we assume an average album has… say… 12 songs, you’d just need to rip approximately 140 CDs to reach the $50 million felon mark. Not so hard. You might already be there. So, while it appears this particular kid was doing much more, you too could be convicted of a felony for having $50 million worth of content on your hard drive just for legally (oh, wait, maybe not…) ripping a bunch of your legally purchased CDs into MP3s.

Meanwhile, we can’t get a single fucking cocktail waitress in our office

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[Axl] accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.

This from The Most Expensive Album Never Made the NYT’s long piece on the long-awaited “Chinese Democracy” from Axl Rose.

(As with all NYT stories, hit it quick or it goes away. Use nogators/nogators.)

McGovern on HST

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From the LA Times, 3/3/05:

Gonzo but Not Forgotten
by George S. McGovern As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was “the best of a lousy lot.” Thompson’s position was that I was “honest”–except for one “wicked moment” when I attended Nixon’s funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. “Yeah,” Hunter told me, “you went into the tank with that evil bastard.” Hunter relished such frightful words. “Evil,” “wicked,” “fear and loathing.” These were the words that described the world best for him. Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: “Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing.” On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: “Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination.” In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively. It’s true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn’t everything. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter’s book “the least accurate and most truthful” of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race. Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called “this f—– up country.” What I didn’t get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original–a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson. George S. McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

“Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire”

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Some great thoughts and reflections from a computing pro on why the Mac actually makes her more productive. It’s a worthy read, and free of ideology (for the most part).

The post header is an old jibe at Windows. Ms Stamper quotes it in her final graf:

I’m sure that everyone has heard the old saying, “Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire”. My experience has shown me that at least for my needs, the Mac is not only for productivity, but for development as well. Windows? Well, some things never change.

Department of Irritating Jackassery

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So one of the companies I work with is evaluating Blackberry devices. I got one to use for a bit, and found it, frankly, utterly wanting. It receives mail pretty well, but managing and sending from the device is a very frustrating experience, beginning with the fact that folder management thereon is unusable; all messages are comingled in a single queue; all messages that come from it must come from the same email address; and the online “managment” site is so fucked it only works in IE. RIM may own this space for people saddled with Exchange back-ends, but their tool is a sick joke when hooked up to standards-based mailers — there’s not even any real IMAP support, for crying out loud.

Add to this the fact that the PDA functions are utter crap compared to, say, an 8 year old Palm, and you see why I pawned the thing off on a sales guy and got a Treo 650. Anyway, As part of the testing, I downloaded PocketMac for Blackberry, which allowed the Blackberry to sync with my desktop tools (well, mostly of them; it syncs only with iCal, Address Book, and Stickies — the Palm tools sync with StickyBrain). Since I’m done with the damn thing, I went to uninstall PocketMac.

It took a trip to the knowledge base before I found out that the install program (which I deleted) is how you uninstall PM. I re-downloaded it (jumping through some auth hoops in the meantime; thank goodness I kept the email with the URL) and stepped through to the “type of install” phase before I found the “uninstall” option; this alone is incredibly unintuitive, but what came next was even worse.

I’m accostomed to installers requiring my authentication before they do anything. This is normal on a Mac, and a good thing. What I was NOT prepared for was the fact that once I gave the PM uninstaller my password, IT SYSTEMATICALLY QUIT EVERY APPLICATION I HAD RUNNING. All of ’em. I had browser windows pointing to things I was planning to read; I had active terminal sessions on remote machine. A modern Mac is NOT a Windows machine; we don’t have to quit everything to uninstall a program, and we damn sure don’t appreciate having it done FOR us with no warning. It’s stupid, arrogant, and just plain fucked up.

PocketMac may be the only game in town for syncing Blackberries and Wince devices with Macs, and bully for them. But right now they’re on my shit list, and I’m damned glad I have no need of their software anymore.

Bush v. The Press

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Salon has a good summary of how GWB’s administration has systematically avoided any sort of public accountability for its actions by ignoring the mainstream press — and, more disturbingly, how the country doesn’t care.

Not that we’re keeping track, you understand.

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A fan writes, “Hey, how many posts on Heathen?” Well, son, we don’t know, but we figure we might be able to find out:

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" | wc -l
2086

The earliest is dated 29 November 2000, which means we’ve been Heathening for just over 4.25 years, for an average of 490.8 posts per year, or about 1.3 per day.

No wonder our wrists hurt.

(Oh, and make that 2,087, counting this one.)

Later…

Actually, and somewhat shockingly, that figure is low; it assumes that all our posts are stored in .txt files, but in fact the “original” few months (from November 2000 through the beginning of July 2001) are still in Blogger-generated HTML files, and are therefore not in that count. What’s to be done?

$ perl -e 'while (<>){ $foo++ while m/"byline"/g; } print "We have $foo posts\n";' *.html
171

Heh. Now the total, as of the original post, is 2,086 + 171, or 2,257, which works out to 531 a year and an astonishing 1.45 per day. This is now high enough that we suspect a problem with our method or our hobbies, but who’s got time to chase that kind of niggling detail? We’ve got posts to write.