Archive for September, 2009

Newer Entries »

Your loser update: week 1

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

It’s the most wonderful time of year. There’s a nip in the air, the grackles are grackling, and the NFL season begins. And with the start of the NFL season, we also restart the loser update.

Last year was a great year; we had the first team to go 0-16 ever. Is it possible that we’ll have more than one team this year? Or a team that loses 16 games for two straight seasons? The excitement is palpable.

Without further ado, NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Buffalo

Miami

Cincinnati

Cleveland

Tennessee

Jacksonville

Houston

Kansas City

Oakland

Washington

Chicago

Detroit (18 straight losses now: remember, the record is 26.)

Carolina

Tampa

Arizona

St. Louis

Posted in Loser, NFL | Comments Closed

Chris Elliott is…The Fugitive Guy!

Monday, September 14th, 2009

A few weeks ago, Scott Simon interviewed Bob Greene on Weekend Edition. Apparently, during that interview, Simon referred to Dr. Sam Sheppard as “the most famous convicted murderer in America”.

Now, those of us who keep up with true crime (or those of us from around the Cleveland area) know that this is, at best, misleading. (Dr. Sheppard was convicted of murder at his first trial; that conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, Dr. Sheppard was retried, and acquitted at the second trial.)

Apparently, Dr. Sheppard’s son was listening as well, and wrote NPR. Here’s a transcript of Scott Simon’s interview with Sam Reese Sheppard.

For all the (considerable) problems I have with NPR, I have to say that Scott Simon comes across as a class act in that interview.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Media | Comments Closed

People who died, died…

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Obit watch:  Jim Carroll, author (The Basketball Diaries) and musician.

I’m not really wild about embedding the YouTube videos, so here’s a link to Catholic Boy on Amazon. When I get a chance, I’m going to put on the headphones and crank “People Who Died” all the way up.

Edited to add: Here’s a link to the NYT obit for Norman Borlaug as well. I didn’t note this over the weekend, even though I’m part of the Borlaug Fan Club, because it seemed to be well covered by FARK and the mainstream media.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Hooray beer!

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

The good folks at Dogfish Head decided they wanted to brew a batch of chicha, the traditional corn beer of some parts of Latin and South America.

Now, if you’ve read Tim Cahill, you probably know that part of the chicha fermentation process is for the village women to chew up the corn and spit it into the vessels the chicha ferments in. (If you haven’t read Tim Cahill, why the heck not?)

Being dedicated craft brewers, the good folks at Dogfish Head wanted to follow the process exactly. There’s just one small problem with that; you have to chew up a heck of a lot of corn to brew a reasonably sized batch of chicha.

“The 20 pounds that we were hoping for was going to go into a five-barrel batch,” Mr. Calagione said. “If we went to production, the smallest tank would be 200 barrels.” He did the math. “We’d need 40 times this much. We would have to chew 800 pounds of this.”

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Mixology | Comments Closed

Thought for the day.

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

When you have to explain that your humor columnist’s column is supposed to be funny, you’ve pretty much lost the battle already.

Posted in Clippings, Media | Comments Closed

The jokes; sometimes, they write themselves.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Marc Katz has announced plans to run for lieutenant governor. 

I have nothing against Mr. Katz, and, indeed, he could be a perfectly fine officeholder.

But this raises the somewhat mindboggling possibility (arguably, a slim one) that the State of Texas could be run by a cowboy and a deli owner.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Lake Travis, September 7, 2009.

Monday, September 7th, 2009

090907-19_57_01

Taken with the spectacular Nokia N800 CrapCam ™ and the gpscamera application.

Posted in Nokia, Photography | Comments Closed

Some questions on the subject of rights and the Constitution.

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Late last week, Patrick over at Popehat posted an interesting entry about the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision in Britt v. State. The short version is that Britt was convicted of quaalude possession (a felony) in the 1970s, sued to maintain his right to own firearms, and won.

The Court, in a 5-2 decision, limited its holding to Britt’s specific facts, finding that the exercise of state police power to bar firearms to a non-violent felon, who had demonstrated good character for thirty years, was an unreasonable restriction of the state right to keep and bear arms.

I strongly recommend going over to Popehat and reading all of Patrick’s excellent post. But I want to use it as a jumping-off point to discuss a question I’ve been wondering about, without hijacking Popehat.

Where does the State (I’m using “the State” to refer to both state and Federal governments) get the authority to deny Constitutional rights to felons?

(more…)

Posted in Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Frickin’ Lasers.

Monday, September 7th, 2009

By way of Say Uncle, we learn that someone has come up with a laser sight for the NAA .22LR and .22 magnum revolvers.

While we admire the cleverness of the idea, this strikes us as being a solution in search of a problem (to quote the late Col. Cooper). It doesn’t seem that this is going to increase hit probability very much on a tiny weapon, which is basically intended to be used at not much more than contact range. And the sight goes for about 50% of the price of the gun; that seems high, but perhaps not out of line compared to Crimson Trace grips.

The video on that site is worth watching, if only for the cheese factor.

Posted in Guns | Comments Closed

Project e, Part 3: The Virtualizing

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Work on Project e continues, slowly, as time permits.

  • The Alfa WiFi adapter worked right out of the box; just a simple plug and play operation. Who’d a thunk it?
  • Built-in wireless continues to be a problem, but mostly on my home network. I am starting to wonder if this is an issue with the access point. Wireless at St. Ed’s (where I’m spending a lot of time these days) isn’t great, but at least the connections stay up.
  • As far as I can tell, the current version of Wireshark for Ubuntu 9.04 is 1.0.7, while the current stable version for other platforms (including Ubuntu Karmic, aka 9.10) is 1.2.1. Between that and the other wired/wireless networking issues, I think I’m going to wait until Karmic drops in late October, then upgrade and install Wireshark and Kismet if networking is stable.

In the meantime, I’ve spent the last few days playing around with something else…

(more…)

Posted in asus_eee, CompScI, Geek, linux, netbook, project_e | Comments Closed

Inglourious Basterds discussion (contains spoilers!)

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Commvault Bryan and I have been involved in an ongoing discussion of Inglourious Basterds during our breaks and lunch hour at work. I thought I’d throw this open to the masses and see what you guys have to say. Big, huge, giving away the entire movie spoilers after the break…

(more…)

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Clippings: September 2nd, 2009.

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

The University of Texas has decided to end participation in the National Merit Scholarship Program. This saddens me, as I was one of those folks who benefited from the program when I was attending UT.

Starting next fall, the university will begin channeling that money into need-based aid instead.

I’m a little shocked that there hasn’t been more attention to this NYT article about Memorial Medical Center in the wake of Katrina.

It is now evident that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood. When the names on toxicology reports and autopsies are matched with recollections and documentation from the days after Katrina, it appears that at least 17 patients were injected with morphine or the sedative midazolam, or both, after a long-awaited rescue effort was at last emptying the hospital. A number of these patients were extremely ill and might not have survived the evacuation. Several were almost certainly not near death when they were injected, according to medical professionals who treated them at Memorial and an internist’s review of their charts and autopsies that was commissioned by investigators but never made public.

Linking to this Fast Company article about fonts that make people mad (thanks to Radley Balko) gives me an excuse to link to one of my favorite Achewoods.

Someone thinks it is a good idea to cancel their morning local news program and replace it with a televised radio show. Yeah. I don’t see this ending well. Televised radio works very well; if your name is “Howard Stern”.

This is already on FARK, but I couldn’t let it pass; last week they linked to a NY Daily News story about a former rapper who got Warner Music to pay for her Ph.D in psychology. Great story; persecuted artist sticks it to the evil record company execs, right? Except the story was a complete fabrication.

Posted in Clippings, Media | 1 Comment »

Newer Entries »