Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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The Muse Within

My inner muse recently reminded me,

NEVER let a day go by without accomplishing some little thing in the art you are nourishing in your life. Great things (or even “just” good–within range of the best of one’s talent) are only possible when many, many little things are built upon day in and day out, consistently.

More than talent, blood and toil and sweat and tears: that’s what real chops are built by.

“[T]he art” could as easily refer to any craft or useful skill and not necessarily be tied to what are usually thought of as “the arts”–graphic, dramatic, literary, musical. Being better than just a good carpenter requires constant striving to be better.

I need to listen to myself more, I think…

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Almost Sweet Enough

Bank of America Gets Pad Locked [sic] After Homeowner Forecloses On It

It seems the Bank of America decided to foreclose on the home of a couple who had paid cash for their home. Unfortunately, all the judge in the case did was declare that bank of America had to pay the couple’s legal fees, not some truly righteous damages, but still the bank refused to cough up what they owed. So, the layer got a court order foreclosing on the branch the fake foreclosure had issued from:

After more than 5 months of the judge’s ruling, the bank still hadn’t paid the legal fees, and the homeowner’s [sic] attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank’s assets…

…Sheriff’s deputies, movers, and the Nyergers’ attorney went to the bank and foreclosed on it. The attorney gave instructions to to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and any cash in the teller’s drawers.

After about an hour of being locked out of the bank, the bank manager handed the attorney a check for the legal fees.

Too bad. It’d have been better to have socked the BoA with a much bigger bill and foreclosed the entire BoA operation, the friggin’ cheats.

I do wish people who wrote and edited copy for a living were more ethical about their work. The stupid errors in the original noted above ought to have those responsible docking their own pay, since, after all, they make their living as wordsmiths, don’t they?

“Pad Locked”-nuh-uh: padlocked.

“homeowner’s”–nope. The article made it clear the couple owned their home, so it is “homeowners'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s” creating the possessive form. F’in’ idiots. I don’t get paid for this stuff, and even I know that.

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Another “Not Quite a Recipe” Recipe

Chicken salad.

Since I throw this together by eye and by taste, I’m just listing ingredients, so it’s “Not Quite a Recipe” ‘K?

Chicken, cooked, deboned and chunked. You can use canned chicken if you want–I have at times–but it’ll lack flavor. I like some nice juicy dark meat in mine, but I’ve noticed most folks seem to prefer the less flavorful white meat for some reason. Whatever.

Onion, minced.

One or two garlic cloves, minced. More if you’re making more than a couple of cups of salad or just want more garlic. You can rehydrate dried garlic chips if you want, but they lack flavor, IMO.

Lemon pepper

More black pepper

Celery seeds

Celery stalk(s), de-stringed and diced

Mayo. No, the real stuff.

Either some sweet pickle relish, the finely diced kind, or some diced jalapeño or other fav capsaicin-laden pepper. (I can hardly wait for my habaneros to come in… and hopefully the “ghost pepper”–Bhut Jolokia–seeds I’ve planted will bear fruit as well ;-))

Balance the ingredients according to your taste and refrigerate. Serve on lettuce or in a sandwich (with lettuce and tomato).

Just good eats, folks.

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Companion Thoughts on Memorial Day

Two WWI era poems to remind us what Memorial Day is about: the 1915 “In Flanders Fields” by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918) Canadian Army and an American response by Moina Michael in 1918, “We Chall Keep the Faith”. Shall we?

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

And,

We Shall Keep the Faith

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

The last few lines of her response indict our generation,

“Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.”

Oh, not all have failed to teach the lessons bought in blood at Flanders Field and elsewhere, but were they taught better and more widely, the traitors who are mostly running an ever-expanding anarcho-tyrannical oligarchy wouldn’t be in power today…

Keep the faith. Tell someone–today!–the truth about the rights and liberties our forefathers–and even many today–have been willing to lay down their lives to protect and defend, rights and liberties in serious jeopardy (or already abridged) by a government grown obese at the urging of the electorate.

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Neat Lil Betatool

Opera has decided that those of us who voluntarily strap on the latest nightly builds and take off into the wild should have something different to play with. The call it Opera Next. It installs separately from one’s regular Opera build and is self-updating with whatever latest build is out–a new alpha? Fine! Won’t impact one’s regular install. Handy. It even has a White icon instead of the normal red Opera “O” so it’s easy even for me to keep track of. *heh*

I’ve been loading alphas and betas of Opera for some years now on Windows and ‘nix computers alongside standard releases, and this really does make it easy to not accidentally *cough* update the wrong installation. 😉

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More MacWarz: Apple Silliness

Mac OS X is soooo secure that Apple has designed the default setting in the Safari browser to allow “safe files” to download and execute automatically, making it super easy for the “MacGuard” successor to the “MacDefender” malware (that Apple has finally responded to) to install itself on OS X machines running in an admin account session… which an enormous number of Mac users–like Windows users–do.

I guess Apple bought into their own “OS X is secure” propaganda, because when Safari installs on Windows machines it, like all the other mature browsers–and even Internet Exploder *heh*–defaults to asking if the user is sure about downloading a file and warns it could be dangerous.

Oh, but that’s for Windows machines. Have to maintain the fiction of Mac invulnerability, so not gonna do that on OS X machines, no matter how it might endanger the users.

Dumb move, Apple. It’s already caught you with your pants down and until you admit your users need at least a warning, and get the word out widely in your user base, it’s gonna keep biting you on your bare ass.

It is going to be amusing to watch the slow awakening of folks who’ve accused anyone who pointed out the tiniest lil flaw in the Apple fantasy world of “hate speech” or worse when, little by little, their little fantasy world crumbles beneath their feet.

BTW, which OS was hacked first in the Pwn2Own meet recently? Hmmm? 😉 5 Seconds to fail.

On a most basic level the attack exploited Apple’s weak memory protections in OS X Snow Leopard. Microsoft, more popular and more commonly attacked, includes two critical types of memory protection — data execution prevention and robust address space layout optimization (ASLR) — both of which attempt to prevent memory injection attacks. By contrast, Snow Leopard only supports ASLR and the implementation is badly botched according to hackers.

The attack also exploited poor coding in Apple’s branch of WebKit, which features many bugs and security flaws. While Apple’s WebKit branch, which powers its Safari browser, shares a certain amount of code with Google’s WebKit browser Chrome, Google has added much more robust security layers and is less buggy.

Just sayin’.

In past years the contest has been dominated by OS X hacking/security pro Charlie Miller. So it was nice to see a fresh face for a change, though the MacBook was still the first to fall — as usual. Mr. Miller sums up OS X security the best, with his famous remark, “Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.”

Now, before anyone accuses me of “hating on Apple” please note that I’m just stating facts here, ‘K? Apple has deliberately misled folks for years about the security of OS X (not the “the MacBook was still the first to fall — as usual” comment above) and stonewalled AppleCare subscribers with, essentially, “Screw you” when asked for help with the “MacDefender” malware issue, so Apple deserves a swift kick in the ass, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve delivered a few M$’s way from time to time, and it’s only fair that when Apple acts evil that it gets some mud in its eye.

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Hot-Cha-Cha!

Well, the (only) four habanero plants I put out this year are getting some great growth (all this rain, I suppose) but not yet flowering. OTOH, one (of the 28 *heh*) jalapeño plants has not only flowered but is bringing on peppers, already. Hot-cha-cha! (You really have to envision Jimmy Durante’s slightly different utterance for that to work properly. 🙂 OK, here…)

The tomato plants are just getting huge; no flowering or fruiting yet. But growing like gangbusters.

And my amaranth, sown from seed–the same seed I cook up for a “cereal”? REALLY growing, fast! Like it! We’ll just have to see how that stuff produces. I’ll likely have to thin the plants out quite a bit, but that just means greens and shoots (and stems to use sorta like rhubarb).

Not much of a garden, but it has things that please us. Oh, and mixed in are marigolds (also a lovely plant) and my Wonder Woman’s impatiens (and the morning glory she loves that I’m letting come back a little). Gone is almost all the mint and finally nearly all the Virginia Creeper. Sadly, our dandelion crop has been sparse this year. I don’t know why. Plenty of wild onion, though. Yum.

Now, how to make best use of all the “yard vine” in the back yard… hmmm… it’s said to make a nice topical analgesic, so…

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About That “Scientific Consensus” Thingy…

There are many, many examples of “scientific consensus” being flat out wrong, from the scholastics who derided Galileo and compelled the Catholic church to place him in house arrest (as much to protect him from the Academia Nut Fruitcakes of the 17th Century as anything else… plus ça change and all that, I suppose… ) to the much trumpeted “consensus” about Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today. Here’s Jacob Bronowski mentioning yet another “scientific consensus” in a snippet from his 1973 presentation, “The Ascent of Man”–

Of course, Bronowski was exaggerating a wee tad. After all, J.J. Thomson was working diligently at that time to prove the existence and properties of electrons, which he called “corpuscles”, and others were exploring and debating the existence and properties of atoms, but in general what Bronowski asserts is as true of the “scientific community” of the very early 1900s in regards to consensus on the existence of the atom as “scientific consensus” today regarding Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today: the accepted dogma of those with the power of position, money and the public’s ear is just as anti-scientific today as the assertions from ignorance of the anti-atomic dogmatists of the early 1900s. And the real scientists are working today, just as out of the limelight as Thomson and his colleagues were in 1900.

But, of course, then Thomson was awarded a Nobel for his work in 1907 and the tide began to turn…

“Scientific consensus” has as often been wrong as right over the centuries, and we’d do well to learn the lesson that theory must bend to fact, and not the other way around as those who embrace the Cult of Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today would have it with their always wrong (at least so far) computer models that “prove”–with faked data as often as not, it seems–the sky is falling (though no one has been hit by a chunk of sky yet, despite their predictions).