31 Oct 2006
On the Road Again

And posting from a terminal in a hotel room in Savage, Minnesota. So things are showing up in an odd order, no doubt, but they are showing up.

I have a couple of really good leads on jobs, both here and back home - hopefully something will pop pretty soon. I'll be back at the farm on Thursday evening - more details will follow.

But this post makes my October complete: after all the days missed in September, I've gotten something on here every day this month. The terminal I'm using is my Powerbook, with a new Airport Extreme card. This is my first direct experience with wireless networking, and it could certainly get habit forming. "Speedy" doesn't begin the describe the difference between this and ISDN at home.

And convienent, too. I'm actually using the laptop on my lap, disconnected completely from any wires. Kinda nice - truely mobile computing.

.

23:23 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

30 Oct 2006
Have Laptop, Will Travel

Well, I'm off to Minnesota in about 3 hours - I'm pulling a trailer full of my daughter's belongings to her new digs in the Twin Cities, where the courts are forcing her to reside until her divorce is over. And I'll also be looking for work ...

No, we're not surrendering the farm - yet. But things are really tight, and there are no off farm tech jobs at my level here. So I've been investigating contracting, on the theory that I can find a top paying job elsewhere, sending money home, and Kris can stay here and maintain the farm (and her schooling). If I hit it right, we should be able to come out of this crisis in fine shape. If I don't ... well, I don't want to think about it.

So posting may be sporadic for the next few days - if I have access and time, I'll write. Otherwise, well, stay tuned. I'll be back.

Oh yeah - if any of my valued readership knows of opportunities out there, by all means let me know. My resume is posted here.

07:49 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link

Deja Vu

Fascinating look at the history of the American newspaper. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Early American newspaper publishers scoffed at the idea that they should hide their political prejudices under a cloak of objectivity. "To profess impartiality here," wrote William Cobbett in his Federalist newspaper, Porcupine's Gazette, "would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery." The motto of the Gazette of the United States, which began publication in 1789, was "He that is not for us is against us."

(link) [Wall Street Journal]

07:43 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

New Drugs Offer Hope to Addicts

You're addicted! Don't smoke that cigarette - take a pill! Do you just gotta have a drink? Put it down, take a pill instead!

Doesn't anybody else see the irony here?

By 2003, Brenda Moore was desperate to keep her promise. A smoker since age 16, she had vowed to her daughter two years earlier that she would quit; now, several failed tries later, young Tiffany had developed asthma. Then a Sunday newspaper ad caught Moore's eye, a call for volunteers to take part in the clinical trial of a new antismoking drug. For three months, Moore, now 40, took a pill daily and made regular trips from her home in Beattyville, Ky., to Lexington to be monitored. This time, things were different. "In the first two weeks I was taking the drug, I started to look at the cigarette differently," she says. "It literally took on a new nastiness."

(link) [U.S. News & World Report]

07:40 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

USDA patents microbes to fight wheat fungus

This seems to be a direct patent on an existing life form. Funny, that ... I always thought such things were discovered, not invented. Somehow I think we've lost sight of this critical distinction - to our ultimate detriment.

Peoria, Ill. (ARS) - Four yeasts and three bacteria that live on flowering wheat heads, but cause no harm there, have been patented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as biological control agents in the fight against Fusarium head blight (FHB).

(link) [The Prairie Star]

07:35 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Lynne Cheney novel churns controversy

If you have political aspirations, you would do well not to write fiction. Or fact.

Lynne Cheney is deflecting talk of the sexual content in her novel "Sisters," a 25-year-old book that resurfaced in a campaign Friday and is stirring up controversy.

(link) [CNN.com]

07:30 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

29 Oct 2006
Surplus Daylight
Backwards ClockWell, the rest of the State has "fallen back", so their clocks are now in sync with mine. It might be my imagination, but I seem to have noticed a decided upswing in bitching by even national commentators this year, with The Onion even running a sarcastic blurb on the "national daylight surplus".

Closer to home, even more folks are noticing the absurdity of it all. We're all Losing Track of Time. Maybe it's because we really don't have representative government in Indiana: according to this article from the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel:

The statewide adoption of daylight-saving time was opposed by 49 percent, with 44 percent supporting it. Seven percent were not sure. Republicans supported daylight time 47 percent to 45 percent, while Democrats opposed it 53 percent to 41 percent. Of independents, 51 percent opposed it while 43 percent supported it.

Democrats are playing on voter anger over this to good effect, and it will undoubtedly cost a bit of a Republican player in the Indiana House his seat.

Between this and selling off the toll road, it's going to be a tough sell for the Republicans to retain control. And that, in the end, will be a very good thing here.

Update: Here's a really bizarre proposal for a single time zone US...

12:48 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

28 Oct 2006
Bush Signs Bill Enabling Martial Law

Holy shit - they've revised the Insurrection Act! This is the de-facto repeal of the Posse Comitatus statue - enacted after the Civil War to insure that troops could not be used domestically except with the consent of Congress. Executive privilege, indeed...

If you ever wondered why the Founding Fathers put in that pesky 2nd Amendment, this should clarify the situation.

An anonymous reader writes to point us to an article on the meaning of a new law that President Bush signed on Oct. 17. It seems to allow the President to impose martial law on any state or territory, using federal troops and/or the state's own, or other states', National Guard troops.

(link) [Slashdot]

20:02 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

SPAM Chatter
SPAMEvery once in a while I scan my SPAM traps to make sure that I've not caught a live one, so to speak. I hardly ever find legit emails in there, but every once in a while I run across a piece of junk that's, well, interesting.

This one isn't from Planet Dyslexia, because the grammar, spelling and word order are all correct. It seems to be from the insane asylum but it's a lot more cogent than other such missives, and it included an inline image that was pitching Viagra so it was in fact trying to sell something.

So I'm inventing a new category - Chatter SPAM. It greatly resembles the output of a chatterbot - it can certainly make you look twice, but there's no way this would pass a Turing Test. Here's the bit that piqued my interest:

When a statesmanlike eggplant hibernates, an inferiority complex of a warranty trembles. The hairy crank case dances with an alleged sheriff. Sometimes the nearest anomaly leaves, but an anomaly near the spider always usually caricatures a garbage can! Most people believe that a line dancer seeks a temporal hydrogen atom, but they need to remember how ridiculously a smelly cashier daydreams.

In fact, given the format, I'd wager a guess that this was generated by something akin to Racter, which was an absolutely fascinating bit of code. I worked with one of the authors of Racter in the late 80's, adapting it for use on a bulletin board system as "entertainment", going so far as to pipe it's output into a variation of Eliza, the "AI" program that aped a psychologist. That was interesting - the good doctor crashed and burned in short order!

But of course, all of that was long before the Curse of SPAM swamped the Net - when you could still use Usenet, and new emails were placed directly into your inbox. The good old days, indeed.

11:33 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Keep Cigarettes Legal

A rational look at the effects of outright prohibition of tobacco ... from a guy who hates cigarettes and is convinced that smoking hastened the death of his father.

Maybe it's time to ask: what if cigarettes became the new Prohibition?

(link) [Ethan Nadelmann]

via Overlawyered

08:24 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

27 Oct 2006
Girl's circumcision trial may be first in U.S.

The barbarians showed up at the gates, and we let them in.

Hopefully this fellow will be showing up at the gates of a Georgia penal facility real soon now... and will be not only let in but kept in for his 40 year maximum sentence, before he can reproduce again.

The trial of an Atlanta-area father accused of circumcising his 2-year-old daughter with scissors is focusing attention on an ancient African practice that experts say is slowly becoming more common in the U.S. as immigrant communities grow.

(link) [CNN]

13:13 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Fox: I wasn't acting or off medication

Has Limbaugh no shame? Or maybe he just thinks Mr. Fox should've taken some OxyContin.

In a response to charges by conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, Michael J. Fox defended his appearance in recent political campaign ads, saying he was neither acting nor off his medication for Parkinson's disease.

(link) [CNN]

13:01 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Hell.com Domain Name Up For Sale

You know what'd be poetic justice? To have Barksdale, Clark or Andreessen buy this name, and then just redirect it to the IE7 start page ...

Internet domain name Hell.com is going up for sale, with bids of over $1 million expected, the Wall Street Journal reports.

(link) [Slashdot]

12:45 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

The Raw Deal

Nice bit on raw milk, pro and con (surprisingly so, given the source). It's scary to hear government officials compare raw milk to pot and heroin. And the article does a nice job of covering all the ground, except for one small "detail" - which I consider the most important reason to seek out and find raw milk.

The piece mentions the improvement in sanitation that make pasteurization superfluous - what they don't mention is that while most "modern" dairies have certainly fixed the external sanitation issues that led to these regulations, they've actually gone backward with internal sanitation issues - today's cows in commercial herds are likely contaminated interally with E. coli 0157:H7, not to mention various antibiotic feed additives, growth hormones and the gods only know what else. There's no way I'd drink raw milk from a modern, commercial dairy! Hel, I have to wince every time I drink their pasteurized stuff!

But the Amish and other dairies mentioned in this piece use grass based dairy herds almost exclusively - and no GMO's, antibiotics or other tripe associated with "modern" farming. Not to mention all the modern external sanitation practices you could ever want. So, yes, their raw milk is safe - even the FDA doesn't have a case file on an illness caused by drinking raw milk from one of these sources.

But beware the stuff on supermarket shelves - if the FDA really wanted to warn folks about food hazards, that's where I'd put the labels.

The FDA says it's dangerous. Selling it is illegal. So why does an avid band of devotees swear by the virtues of unpasteurized milk?

(link) [Organic Consumers]

12:39 /Agriculture | 1 comment | permanent link

26 Oct 2006
Wild pigs eyed as source of E. coli spinach

It's bullshit, not pig shit that's causing the ruckus! And so is this bit of an attempt at a cover up - note the "expert" nearly admits as much:

"The pigs could have tracked the bacteria into the field or spread it through their droppings ..."

Which is to say, they could have tracked it from the "ranch" - more likely a feedlot - next door. So it's the pigs "fault". Shoot the wild boars!

What a crock! Literally. What kinda shit you want on that salad?

Wild pigs may have spread deadly bacteria onto a California spinach field, sparking an outbreak that killed three people and sickened more than 200 others nationwide, investigators said Thursday. They also said the outbreak appears to be over.

(link) [CNN.com]

21:56 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link