House of the rising Moonglum

My wife comes walking in and says, “I have to tell you something.” There is that tone in her voice that says I have done something wrong. “You have been doing something wrong.” I knew I was in trouble. She is holding the shampoo. “You haven’t been using this correctly.” Oh. Oh my. “I watch you shampoo, and while you do ‘Massage into wet hair’, you do not ‘indulge in the luxurious lather.’ nor do you ‘Surrender to the intoxicating fragrance’.” This is the point at which I grab the bottle from her. The “directions” end with “Rinse when ready”. I guess I am ready once I have indulged, surrendered, and intoxicated, I am free to rinse.

I may have to get a new shampoo to regain my masculinity.

A while back I mentioned an article entitled “The Oil We Eat” from Harper’s. Ever since then I have been thinking a lot about different alternate energy sources to get away from requiring so much pertochem in our food, and sustainable agrobusiness. One of the ways of helping out the petrochem issue is ethanol. Brazil has actually already converted, a huge number of their cars can run on either or both, and 70% of the cars sold this year run on either. Of course this comes back to the problem that we already eat fuel. So how does this help us? Well reading a bit more I discovered that (from the ethanol article) we are developing methods of extracting ethanol from the unusable parts of the plants, but what I find even more interesting is that many methods of sustainable farming are becoming mainstream even in large corporate concerns. This site is very interesting because it points out the immediate economic advantages of sustainable farming as well as the environmental ones. Perhaps there is hope for us yet.

I have to admit though, reading all those issues I have the overriding temptation to write a “Farmer” game like “Lemonade Stand” from the old Pet computers. (Ah, but you grew corn last year, with full tilled fields, choosing corn again this year is no good! Mites attack!) Ok, maybe not. I do feel strangely disconnected from my food though.

Hey all, been a while since I posted, but between work and getting the Simian Hemorrhagic Fever I haven’t really had the ability. Also between those two items, I have a bunch of posts that I want to make, but they will have to wait. Something more important has come up. You see, being sick has given me the time to watch some DVDs. These happen to include a number of episodes of the 80s show “MacGyver”.

Oh yeah. I used to love this show with a passion beyond reason. I was really scared that it just wouldn’t hold up to age, but I have to admit, I still love it. It could be for the nostalgia value of the opening theme, or the fact that he’s always doing it “for the kids” (my quote not his) but man do I love this camp. The only real question is how did all of us boys who watched Richard Dean Anderson week after glorious flowing lock week not turn out gay?

But even these questions are not the point of this post. The point of this post is that Angela Landsbury (aka Jessica Fletcher) was an amateur. So everybody knows that the writer was the one who was really committing all of these murders. Any sleepy town that she showed up in, all of a sudden some bizarre murder happens. And then she “helps” the cops pin it on someone else. It was so her.

But she has nothing on MacGyver. Man. Seriously, if he offers to help you out, turn him back at the border. Especially if you have some cheery punk kid wearing much too nice clothes to be a burmese villager, or a hungarian roma who has clothes that break all the iron curtain era sumptuary laws, just send him away. He will help you solve your current problem much like the a-team, but unlike the a-team he seems to do it in places that he is going to leave immediately and that the local national politics will involve killing everyone in the village that he just “saved”. I mean it man, just don’t take his help.

Some things I’ve learned:
It takes two weeks to train a soldier to shoot.
You can always have blow dried hair. I mean even if the torturers have left you in the burmese sun for a week.
Planes always crash on the top of inaccessible mesas.
Central Asia, Southeast Asia, The Middleeast, Eastern Europe, they are all within driving distance from LA. (The problem with growing up in CA is that you recognize it when you see it.)
MacGyver is always a hit with the ladies.
Thus far he speaks: Burmese, Pashtu, Arabic, and Hungarian. At least that is what I am going to pretend, because everyone speaking english is just a little too eeh for me.
The killing always happens after the episode. And there is always killing.

The thing I find most interesting is that his stoic look means more now. I think that he is really upset that he just gave these people false hope. They are all happy and cheering their victory, and he is staring off into the distance (thinking, man are these guys screwed when the rest of the regiment shows up or what?).

Or maybe I just watched “Thin Red Line” too recently. (There are no stoic looks, just lines that aren’t spoken. What you can’t hear them?)

So, everyone who reads this probably already knows that the intel based macs are out now. The iMac and the new laptop which they renamed MacBook for some insane reason. I was going to make a big post about it, but someone else already hit all of my thoughts.

Main items: Why change the name? The mac laptop has always been “PowerBook” even before it had a PowerPC chip in it. Fewer FireWire ports? No s-video out??? That will suck for people who do presentations off their laptops. No modem? (OK, that one I can almost see.) Lower resolution!?! C’mon people. We likes our screen resolution. I hadn’t seen anything about the power issues he talks about, but it is still better than it would have been if you tried to stick a G5 in there.

My other issue is the lack of AltaVec. I know that there are more special purpose VPUs going into the chips, but a nice general purpose VPU like AltaVec is something that I will really miss. I think there are some places (video play back, some other random stuff) where there will be noticeable slow downs because of that. On the other hand, the intel chips have always had better integer performance than the G5s, so that may offset those annoyances with making general OS operations (often integer) much faster. We will have to see.

I’ll be waiting for the second generation of intel based macs before buying myself.

I really have to give it to Fitzgerald. He is a real class act. He is doing more to clean up Chicago than most and keeps his cards close to his chest. There are so many prosecutors out there who just want to toot their horn, but he doesn’t seem to bring on a case without some pretty good evidence. This is old fashioned bribery. I’m impressed at the work that went into figuring out what was going on and gathering evidence. This is some good law enforcement going on there.

I would like to mention that certain governmental agencies are making my life miserable. I have one week to complete a specific set of tests. We had gone through and figured out what all the tests were and had built our system to make those tests particularly easy. Then they go and add a whole slew more tests! Now we have 36. And we have to run each of them three times. That’s 108 tests in 5 days. They kick us out at 5, so that’s about three an hour. Oh man.

Next week will require much INXS.

On the plus side, the people judging all of these tests are going to be suffering more than we are. Share the love.

Ever since we have gotten married, there is something that I have really wanted to do with my wife. We got to tools we needed on our wedding day, but we have just never had the time or opportunity to use them. Well that time finally came last weekend, when we had a spare couple of hours and made some pasta:

We had to season the maker with half a batch, so we had more than we could eat, and dried the rest (what you see here) for consumption later. It was amazing! If you have a few moments to yourself with a loved one, making pasta is a great way to spend time together. It is involved, and having two people to crank the machine and feed the pasta makes it much easier. Also it is much easier to have it all come out well than baking bread. And at the end of the time you have something that the two of you worked hard to make but are still relaxed enough to enjoy together. It is a lot of fun. Warning however, it is also very messy.

Well, it is supposed to be messy anyway. I felt the need to do the whole “make a space for the egg in the middle of the flour” thing, so that probably helped it be messier as well. Then my wife found a site where they say to throw the whole thing into a mixer! (I don’t think that guys actually made those things. Look how straight the edges are! Look how clean the counter tops are!) Well I don’t know about that. Maybe if we are pressed for time sometime. Plus the egg/flour mountain thing is so much more impressive. I will have to take pictures of that next time.

There are laws in place that hold credit card companies responsible for this type of fraud, why not for mortgage companies? One of the lines in the article that really scares me is that it is possible for you to not be able to get confidential closing information about a mortgage since you are not the person who opened it, but you are able to be sued by the company since it was taken out in your name.

Once credit card companies became liable for misdirecting credit card funds, they very quickly put systems in place to detect fraudulent transactions. This is something that Bruce Schneier has been bringing up again and again, and it pretty much covers all forms of identity theft.

OK, this is a little odd. Hedgehogs are kind of stupid animals. I fed ours last night. She ran on her wheel. I know because I woke up a couple times and her it squeaking away. Our hedgehog is particularly lazy, so she generally sleeps when someone is up. Well today, as I am sitting here programming, I looked over and imagine my shock when I saw her running on her wheel! Well, she never is up in the middle of the day. We know from previous experience that she is not looking for a place to poop, so she must be looking for food or water. Her water had plenty left, so I went and stuck some more food in her bowl. She came right up to me to eat it! How very odd. I could be wrong, but I think my hedgehog just communicated with me.