Month: January 2008

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Add to my wish list

For years I had a 61-key midi controller sitting on my desktop (PC keyboard was underneath on a slideout tray). Kinda bulky and space consuming. The clip below shows something that’s now on my wish list: a PC/MIDI USB keyboard from Creative. OK, so the sounds are the typical rather low-quality Creative midi patches (I particularly dislike the strings patch), but it’s still a cool product, and used with better patches (Roland, say :-)), it’d be a nice addition. I like it, too, that when not in use, a cover for the MIDI keyboard converts it into a palm rest.

Yeh, I know the thing’s been around in earlier versions for a while, but I kinda need a new desktop-capable controller, and this one’s the best fit for my computer use I’ve seen. At $50 or so, the price is about right, too… if I can find it in stock for that. *sigh* Oh, well, $75 would be OK (and I’ve seen it marked up to that from Creative’s suggested retail in some places). Heck, my previous 61-key controller was about $250 (and I may find a use for that in the future, still).

No, the thing wouldn’t be useful for actually playing music (for one thing, it lacks the sustain pedal my old controller has, and for another, the keys are off-size), but it’d sure be useful for sketching out pieces in transcription software, which is all I really used the other one for, anyway.

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Interesting read…

…from a guy who has some knowledge of the subject. As Wikipedia (not always the best source, but close enough here) puts is, “Jerry Pournelle is a essayist and science fiction author. He holds advanced degrees in psychology, statistics, engineering and political science.”

The Voodoo Sciences

Even though its focus is not directed specifically at the science/politics interface, it’s worth reading as a prelude to considering how politics affects what is regarded as science in climatology, medicine, and other fields.

Writing elsewhere referring to the essay linked above, Pournelle does a nice shirt cuff precis of the essay:

“I long ago did an essay on “The Voodoo Science” in which I pointed out that novelists require only plausibility, lawyers need evidence, but science requires data — and also requires that ALL the data be taken into account, which means going outside closed systems to check with the real world. And that, I think, is the real difference between the fuzzy subjects and the sciences and the humanities: if you endlessly apply logic to a closed system with no chance of checking against reality, you had better have chosen the right closed system — and we have no way of knowing what that one is.”

Worth taking a couple of minutes out of your day to read and ponder, IMO.

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Dontcha Love All That Helpful Spam?

Another couple of comment spams got me thinking (not hard and not long, just twigged a couple of synapses):

“How to pick up women”

Well, I don’t need that info. Those days are long past. Although I do recall that I used to pick women up with ease. Why, I recall one whole day (when we were just dating, many, many moons ago), I picked my Wonder Woman up and walked around around an amusement park with her riding piggyback…

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Just for Fun: pico-brewing

I bottle condition the beers I make using a small shot of sugar and/or (sometimes) some of the trub, cos that’s the only way I really have of ensuring a good carbonation in the final product. OK, it also helps the flavors mature just a tad, as well. But since I add a tad of sugar to each bottle for the conditioning process, it does mean I have a lil sediment in every bottle–some more, some less.

So, as a lil experiment, I’ve been saving the sediment in one (clean) bottle and now I’m making a “one boittle pico-brew” out of it. *heh*

Added about a tablespoon of molasses and warm water, shook. Roasted some pearled barley (cos it’s what I had) and ground it up really fine; added a little Malt-O-Meal to that and ground it up some more; funneled about a tablespoon of that into the bottle, filled it with warm water, gently rolled it around a bit to get that mixed well, then placed the lid of the swingtop bottle loosely on top. Placed the bottle in my conditioning drawer. Last I looked, the top was acting as a kinda one-way airlock letting carbon dioxide out, but seemed to settle back on down after each lil mini-burp. Nice floculant on top & I can see it actually brewing.

It may be a tad high in sugar content, what with the molasses and malted grains, but… oh, well. 🙂

We’ll see how this turns out. Even though I used some trub-heavy sediment from the bottles, I don’t expect much in the way of hopsiness, and it’ll be REAL heavy on sediment (trub, in this case)… which I’ll save when I decant it into another bottle for further conditioning.

Heck. I just thought: shoulda added some coffee to it. *heh* Maybe next time, if this turns out at all well…

*heh*

Yeh, weird. And just for fun. Not going to count as one of my “real” brewing experiments, but might just turn out semi-drinkable anyway.

And the trub? Gonna make some bread. In fact, I have some I saved and dried just for that purpose. Think maybe I’ll make some “beer bread” tonight.

BTW, you know the oldest known beer recipe used bread to make the beer. In fact, it seems from the context of the Sumerian text that’s been translated that beer was thought of as something like liquid bread (as it appears some Medieval monastic orders also thought).

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T-13, 2.02: A Love-Hate Relationship

(*heh* Bet you were expecting something about politics. Nope, politics isn’t a love-hate relationship for me. *sigh* You work it out… )

Regular readers probably know by now that I have a love-hate relationship with Me$$y$oft’$ products: I kinda love to hate ’em. *heh* Oh, I use Me$$y$oft’$ products pretty regularly (in fact, I’m writing this post on a Windows 2000 machine–that’s one of only two versions of Windows I don’t habitually think of as “Windoze”), and I do like some features of more than a few of Me$$y$oft’$ products, but… there are more than 13 things to hate about Me$$y$oft’$ products and practices. In no particular order until the last:

13. Feature creep. Oh, every software publisher does it, but with Me$$y$oft’$ products it’s a major element of every “upgrade”: how many unecessary “features” can be added to clutter up the interface and contribute to

12. Bloating. Example: Windows 95 could comfortably (safely, with the full needs of the OS considered) be installed on a hard drive with as little as 100MB free space (by contrast, my first Win3.1 system only had a 100MB hard drive and only about 1/10 of that was the OS). Windows 98 needed 2-2.5 times as much space for a comfortable installation and Win2KPro, nearly 10X as much! XP? 2 gigs of hard drive space is just about right. Have the OSes been 10X-100X better? Nope (although THE sweet spot, Windows 2000 Pro, was many, many, many times better than the old Win 3.1 or Win95 OSes, IMO). The same applies across the board to M$ applications, for example…

11. FrontPage. Vermeer FrontPage 1.0 was pretty good. Nice interface, decent web page output, etc. Bought by M$ and “twiddled with” to brand as M$ Frontpage 1.1. Still pretty good output, easy WYSIWYG editing. Not all that bad. Then M$ began to “tweak” it and add features. By the time FrontPage 98 was out, it was full of “features” that bloated the product and…

10. Fixed things that weren’t broken until they were. Yep. M$’s goal seems to be to remake the web in its own image, and so FrontPage, by FP98, was putting out all kindsa non standards-compliant gibberish (just the kind of thing M$’s non-standards-compliant browser likes). Pretty much ditto with M$ Office: M$ kept adding “features” and changing file formats (probably just to frustrate folks who were using other companies’ products that’d learned to “play well” with M$ Office and inconvenience users of those products). Result: bloatware that did NOT play nicely with others.

9. Active X. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I could do a T-13 just on things to hate about Active X. Start with the security nightmares and extend on to and through its sluggishness, memory footprint and on and on. Hate it.

8. Internet Exploder: the world’s crappiest browser (and that’s exactly how any copy of IE I install or manage is branded: “Internet Exploder, the world’s crappiest browser” *heh*). Heck, I even like Lynx better, and it’s command line only. At least it is pretty safe to use, unlike–still!–Internet Exploder. And is there ANY other modern browser that’s LESS standards-compliant? No. (Yes, I keep copies around just so I can help the poor benighted souls who still use it regularly.) Even in its latest “Me Too!” interation, it’s at least a generation behind modern browsers in both features and standards-compliance. Crappy browser, simply crappy.

7. OS “activation”. Can you say, “We think ALL of our customers are crooks, thieves and liars”? Does it stop piracy? Nope. Scemes to avoid activation abound. All M$’s activation scheme has done is inconvenience ethical users. Hmmm, seems M$ has finally (after what, seven or so years?) twigged to the fact that its activation scheme is stupid: WinXP SP3 will relax it a lot and when Vista shipped, it offered a way to avoid it altogether… Still, it’s a pain in the neck (although my real opinion is that the pain is actually located somewhere south of there) and a slap in the face to millions of honest users.

6. Sloppy code. It’s a well-earned meme: buying M$ “gold code” final products is simply buying “shrink-wrapped betaware” complete with a plethora of bugs and traps and security holes, Oh! My! Only fools (and folks who test software until it breaks on purpose) buy the first iteration of a M$ product version “upgrade,” because it WILL break something on your machine. Count on it. Shrink wrap beta. Wait for the first few patches to come through. Patch one will fix security holes M$ is willing to admit they know about (but not willing to admit they already knew about before they shipped the product, even it it’s true). Patch two will fix the things patch one broke, etc. *heh* Maybe.

5. Speaking of which, how long does it take to fix all those security holes? Take Internet Exploder, for example. Dozens more known security holes uncovered every year and M$ almost always takes months and months and months to get around to patching the damned thing (now, that wasn’t a theological assessment of the thing but a fervent wish). Other browsers, maintained by more ethical support and development staffs, usually plug security holes within a day (or days, maybe in extreme cases weeks) or so of discovery. M$ products in general vs. products from other sources: pretty comparable time scale on plugging security holes. Why? M$ just doesn’t seem to care until and unless enough poressure’s brought to bear to force it to patch its products. See #1

4. Crappy websites. M$-run websites. *sigh* Active X. See #9. Buggy, broken, messy non-compliant html and xhtml. (Yeh, I’m not much better any more, but their coders do this stuff for a,living. You’d think they’d at least try to get it right! Instead of doing it the M$ way. *heh*)

3. Cluelessness. Vista. Need I say more? The most useless downgrade of OS I have seen since Windows Muppet Edition (ME). Extravagant resource hog. Almost all the real feature upgrades promised by M$ missing (cos M$ couldn’t implement ’em and make its marketing schedule for milking the cattle of more $$). And Vista’s just the most recent example oif M$’s cluelessness. For a company with so many really smart people involved, dumb, really dumb.

2. A lot of the above boils down to the fact that M$ does things three ways: the right way (surprisingly often. Seriously), the wrong way and the M$ way. The last two are prevalent enough to seem almost overwhelming, though. *sigh*

And number 1?

Attitude: arrogance. It’s the “Do things the M$ way or screw you,” attitude that really chaps me off. It’s almost as bad as Apple that way. Not quite, but almost. *heh*

Tracked back to the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Big Dog’s Weblog, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and Adeline and Hazel, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Roundup

A brief twc roundup of the contenders in the 2008 race for the presidency.

On the Dhimicrap side of the aisle:

The Hildebeast: trying (and failing) to be her own woman. (Think about that one only as long as your stomach can take it.)

Barak Hussein Obama-Winfrey: all sizzle, no steak.

The Prancing Pony (AKA, The Breck Girl). ‘Nuff said there.

Mr Plagiarism. He’s never outgrown his law school strategy: steal others’ work and claim it as your own. (Makes for a good pirate… or Dhimicrap.)

I’m sure there’s at least one other Dhimicrappic candidate whining and whimpering off in a corner somewhere, but who cares?

Of the Republican’ts,

Snake McCain: Never saw an illegal he didn’t wanna hug (or a lie he didn’t wanna tell about it).

Huckacon: if he were Irish, he’d claim the blarney stone’s always following him around trying to kiss him. (As it is, he constantly acts as though God has him on His speeddial just to check on what He should add to the Ten Commandments.)

Rudy “Wannabe a Bent Nose”: Just looking for more perks and scams and graft (“But I’m death on Islamic terrorists! Yeh, bo! Oh, and innocent babies, too, BTW. Oh, and gimme your guns. I’ll protect you [and the check’s in the mail].”)

The Android from “Whadda ya want me to say now?” (“I fired my illegals when I got caught, what else do you want?”) [I’m just waiting for the bugs in his programming to start being noticed by even the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind.]

“Run away! Run away!” Paul. (Will somebody get his meds moderated? Please?)

And once again, I’m sure I’ve missed some loser, whimpering in a corner somewhere.

Oh, you noticed I didn’t mention Fred Thompson in the collection of candidates offered to this point? Two reasons:

  • He’s obviously not a Dhimicrap
  • Anyone who’s paying attention can see he’s not a Republican’t but a Consistent Conservative *heh*, IOW, a Republican (and not incidentally, a republican, too–there’s often a difference)
  • This post is too short to contain even one of his substantive “White Papers”

Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Right Truth, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The Pink Flamingo, Celebrity Smack, Big Dog’s Weblog, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Adeline and Hazel, CatSynth.com, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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ACLU and Deviant RINO Make a Good Match

In trackback and email, both John Stephenson and “Jebediah” noted the ACLU’s defense of deviant RINO, Larry Craig.

The ACLU’s argument?

“The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom…”

The the ACLU’s argument is laughable on its face: “…sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom.” That it’s “supported” by a 38-year-old nonsensical Minnesota Supreme Court ruling is just icing on the cake.

Key word: “public.” Anyone imagine NOT being aware of sexual relations taking place in a “closed stall” one door over, what with four sets of feet, grunting and moaning and all the other acoutrements of getting it off? Pull the other one, doofuses. Heck, you don’t even have any real privacy when just taking a dump. (Splash, splash, gas, gas, “courtesy flush,” splash, splash… ) An “expectation of privacy” in a public facility is only present in folks who are idiots, loons or ACLU. (You guess which ones I consider the Minnesota Supreme Court of 38 years past.)

Now, if Craig had been busted in a hotel room, the ACLU would have had an argument.

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Thought for Today

A mini-micro post inspired by a comment today that got me thinking about politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople and others, from Neal Boortz’s Top Ten Thoughts for 2008:

“Some people are like a Slinky … not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.”

*heh*

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Monday, Monday…

Good morning, Monday!

A couple lil thoughts to start your day:

“I certainly regret the disgrace that’s been thrust on me tonight…I certainly have lived, or have tried to live, my life so that I would never become a congressman…and I am just as ashamed of the fact I have failed as you are. And to have the commission presented by a senator is adding insult to injury.” (Will Rogers on being made an “honorary congressman”)

“History has tried hard to teach us that we can’t have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn’t be wise.” (Mark Twain, New York Herald, 8/26/1876)

“This is not the time to elect a president who needs training wheels when it comes to foreign relations.” (Fred Thompson on Huckacon’s need for a couple of days’ ducking and weaving to give his controllers time to come up with foreign policy answers.)

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