My ancient (G3) iBook needs more work than it's probably worth, so I don't want to take it in for service or put it on eBay, but I hate to send it straight to recycling. I think it has motherboard problems, and I know the lid is a bit askew, but it might be useful to someone. Suggestions?

LENIN'S TOMB: The going rate of exploitation:

this little beauty from the Irish Times ... tells us that the average Irish worker
produces 48,500 euros of profit per year for the owners. These figures
were produced by the Unite union to disprove the idea that profits for
Irish capitalists are somehow 'too low' or being squeezed by
unjustifiably higher wages. Actually, it suggests an extraordinary rate
of exploitation. According to the Industrial Development Agency [pdf], the average wage in Ireland was 627.24 euros per week in 2007, which is just over 32,000 euros per year.

Cut for length and ignorance

( Read more... )

My fellow members of the Society of Voluptuaries who were with me at the con type much faster than I do, so they took on the task of attempting to transcribe the panels. Which they should be finishing up for sharing any day now. (Hint, hint.) My job was to write down anything that particularly jumped out or caught my interest (or that Steve wanted written down, since he had neither laptop nor analog input devices at hand). In the interest of avoiding other writing work, I present the tidbits noted from the first Friday evening panel. Feel free to discuss any or all in comments.

Panel 1: From Cool Idea to Story

“It’s not about the characters, it’s about the relationship between two characters.” — Marissa Lingen

“I like a last line that leaves you wondering while still wrapping things up in the story.” — Ellen Klages

“The scale of the beginning dictates the ending.” — Will Shetterly

“The beginning you have creates very specific expectations.” — Alec Austin

“Narrative proprioception. ” — Ellen

“I think it’s a good thing to have a closet full of unfinished story ideas.” — Will

“Your trunk stories are like the nurse logs in a forest ecology.” — Mris, quoting John M. Ford

“Part of the art of writing is making everything in the story count.” — Jim Frenkel

“Marissa and Ellen both use a lot of touch-oriented words in their descriptive speech, and both also write their stories out of order. Is there a connection or just coincidence?”

“Sometimes I like to write down my scenes on 3×5 cards so that I can arrange them in front of me and touch and move them around.” — question from audience, answer from Ellen

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by reesa. Please leave any comments there.)

So. We have three friends, girls aged 11, 12, and 13. (They've been "our little girls" or "our favorite little girls" for awhile now, and we really need to come up with some other collective noun for them, because they're definitely not little girls any more, but "our favorite adolescents" sounds weird, and the eldest of them is over the line so they can't be "our favorite tweens" or something like that.) They're in the same household, so we often see them as a group, and while that's very nice, I like dealing with my friends as individuals, no matter how old they are, and it's very hard to do that when there are three of them plus their younger brother and parents and whoever else is around.

Before we knew how long PT was going to take, I proposed that this summer we should take them each on an individual outing, so that I could have an afternoon to hang out and not divide my attention and not have to try to be fair and listen to people in turns and like that. And I still want to do that. It's just that there are things I can't put on the possibilities list when I go to schedule this with the girls and their parents.

So I'm looking for suggestions for outings one could do with a vertiginous person. The Minnesota Zoo, for example, would be fine, because we could get me a wheelchair. Hiking from Minnehaha Falls down to the River and back again: not so much.

I'm throwing this question open to everyone rather than filtering it to Minnesotans because there are some activities that are not all that city-specific: going out for high tea with little cakes and sandwiches and all that, for example, is something someone could have thought of in Seattle or San Leandro and would not have to be in the Twin Cities to know about. But we are not taking the girls to Chicago, or even down to Northfield, so while it doesn't have to be a Minneapolis-specific set of suggestions, it shouldn't be a Minneapolis-impossible set of suggestions.

If you're not sure whether something would be possible with my vertigo, please suggest it anyway; I can call and find out whether they have wheelchairs to rent or borrow, or I can determine whether it would be too much moving visuals, or whatever.

These girls are extremely broad-minded about all sorts of things, and gender is one of them: they are interested in "traditionally girl" things and "traditionally boy" things as well as "gender neutral" things. We'll also be asking them for ideas, of course, but it seems like it'd be good to have some suggestions rather than demanding that they know what their city has to offer at this age.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/encrypting_disk.html

The UK is learning:

The Scottish Ambulance Service confirmed today that a package containing contact information from its Paisley Emergency Medical Dispatch Centre (EMDC) has been lost by the courier, TNT, while in transit to one of its IT suppliers.

The portable data disk contained a copy of records of 894,629 calls to the ambulance service's Paisley EMDC since February 2006. It was fully encrypted and password protected and includes the addresses of incidents, some phone numbers and some patient names. Given the security measures and the complex structure of the database it would be extremely difficult to gain access to any meaningful information.

News story here.

That's what you want to do. There is no problem if encrypted disks are lost. You can mail them directly to your worst enemy and there's no problem. Well, assuming you've implemented the encryption properly and chosen a good key.

This is much better than what the HM Revenue & Customs office did in November.

I wrote about disk and laptop encryption previously.

Martin Cohen, of Company 7, which is a thoroughly outstanding telescope shop, has recently acquired a bunch of interesting stuff. (He probably talks about the on his own site, so I am not going to go into detail here.) Among the various bits was a badly beaten-up Celestron “Star Hopper”, a Newtonian telescope on a Dobsonian mount. I think the objective mirror is 10" (a little over 25 cm) in diameter, which is reasonably substantial for an informal “let’s haul it out and look at the sky for a while” type of device.

Marty was kind enough to leave this scope with us and tell us we were welcome to try to clean it up and get it working, so I did that. It was full of cobwebs and filth, and I had to clean both of the mirrors (frightening, but fortunately he has a tutorial page on his site, which helped a lot). Whoever installed the eyepiece holder was inept, and damaged the tube. (Notice the bent screws, which will make it rather difficult to remove the holder and repair the rip. Argh.) —



The poor thing was also totally wanked out of alignment, so I aligned it. (I found that process very interesting, but I have put my description of it on one of my Joss Research pages, as it is a bit too much wretched neep-neep to deal with here.)

Omce I thought I had everything in reasonable shape I took the scope outside, aimed it at Jupiter, and hand-held the lab’s Canon G3 camera up to the eyepiece, with the focus manually set to infinity. The exposures were on the order of 0.3 second, which means that a little bit of the blur is from the planet moving across the field; another part of the blur is me shaking the telescope by pushing the camera into it. I took a bunch of exposures, and selected the ones with the least blur:

           

I am a little bit concerned about the chromatic aberration (notice that the fuzz at the bottom of the planet is blue and the fuzz at the top is red), but that could be an issue of whether the camera was centered on the eyepiece — I don’t offhand recall seeing any spurious color when I was just looking through the scope.

All things considered, I think this is pretty cool.

Cheers —
jon

995 on a new piece of fiction.  I've realized the other one I'm working on is probably a novel.  Now, I've got nothing against novels, any more than a sixteen year old has against marriage . . . eventually.

I just wanted to date. Work on short pieces, I could get to know pretty well in passing, enjoy, and then move onto something new.  A little of this, a little of that, requiring a certain amount of showing up on time for a few dates, but not requiring commitment.

But I am enjoying the novel.  Maybe there's more monogamy in writing than I thought. It's just that, well, the novel requires more thought and stewing, so right now, it is not a daily affair of words. More like of ideas.

The new piece, I'm pretty sure, is a short story, or novella at the most.  I got part of the seed idea for it from a dream I had last night, and part from some ideas that have been kicking around for a while.  I am enjoying it.  I should be able to finish the first draft within a couple of weeks.  I'm hoping to work my way back up over a thousand words, but once the initial download of backlogged things started, I suddenly find myself with having to create more from scratch.  So i've got muscles to build. Not only the writing ones, but the hunting and gathering ones need to be going all the time that I'm not just sitting and writing.

In a sense, I'm writing all the time, just not in so many words.

Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated
Viewing the world from southwest Louisiana

* Home

New theme
July 4th, 2008

Just because I don’t wnat you guys to think I’m not trying here…
Okay! New theme!
I love it.
I like it.
Who cares. I’m here for the content.
I like the old one better.
I hate this.
Keep trying.


pollcode.com free polls

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WordPress Upgrade
July 4th, 2008

For those of you who like to “look under the hood” of things, this blog is running on WordPress, a very capable and FREE blogging package. Periodically the fine folks who build WordPress come up with upgrades. This morning I was running version 2.5. I am now running 2.6beta2.

If you’re running a blog on Blogger and you’re thinking about upgrading, you can do a whole lot worse than choose WordPress to contain your energies and imaginations. I mad ethe leap from Blogspot to my our server space and WordPress almost four years ago and I’ve never regretted it. I pay a small fee, less than a good meal for one at a mid-tier restaurant, yearly for server space, and I host two blogs, mine and Chrissy’s on that server. I could do several more. At my $$$ level with my server, I could have THIRTY different domain names on line here.

I pay a few bucks a year for the privilege of having my own domain name, less than a box of commercial rifle ammo, and that puts “http://mostlycajun.com” out there for the whole world to find me.

While I do admit to some mid-level geekitude when it comes to things computerish, I’m not a 1337 h4×0r or whatever the term might be, but I registered my own domain name and uploaded my first iteration of WordPress to my server space by myself suing the instructions on the WordPress site. Today I note that my server and many other servers will do the WordPress install for you.

Once you’ve got the install, the fine folks at WrodPress have excellent step by step instrucitons to change themes, add functions with ‘plug-ins’ and in general, make your blog YOUR personalized tool.

Even further, if you want to dabble with WordPress without going the server route, then you can start your own blog on WordPress.Com. That’ll give you a http://myblog.wordpress.com address and you can import your old blog’s stuff to it if you have an old blog. If it’s your initial foray into blogging, you’re on your way. Post something several times a week. Be (half) witty, fake some sincerity, and you too can make millions as a world-famous member of the alternative media. Of course, I’m still waiting for my first check.

Anyway, that’s the news this morning.

Posted in Blogging, Computers and technology | 1 Comment »
Independence Day Musings
July 4th, 2008

What a wonderful thing is Independence Day! America didn’t “just happen”. We can point to a cusp in history where we went from an odd collection of colonies to a new nation, a stroke in history’s record where a group of men chose to sever themselves, not silently and furtively, but in a public and notorious display, in writing, with their signatures affixed so there would be no doubt as to who these men were. The American revolution was not led by some “Commandante X” making videotapes with his face covered, hiding in a cave. These man were well-known, respected and in most cases, well-to-do. By affixing their names on this document, they laid their lives, their families,and their wealth on the line.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We said from the beginning that man was made to be free by his Creator and the fact of being man meant that he came with a set of “rights” that no earthly force could deny. The people were no longer to be considered subjects, chattels of an earthly king, but individuals, each standing alone and sovereign in the gaze of God.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Declaration goes on to specify the nature and place of government as something ALLOWED by men to augment their rights, and that if government ever got in a position in which it begins to subjugate those individual rights, then the People have yet another Right, “to alter or to abolish it”. Note that the Framers did not say “just this one time” in the Declaration. They left it open and in other writings indicated that there may be times in the future where the exercise of this right might be called for again.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Oops! It’s NOT a right, it’s a DUTY. In the vernacular, man will put up with a lot of crap, “evils are sufferable” before things get bad enough to overthrow a government, but when the evils start stacking up, heading to, as a logical conclusion, a government which, for instance, socializes everything and treatis its citizens as a homogenous herd of sheep to be sheared and managed by their elitist managers, then it’s a DUTY to overthrow that government and return to one which recognizes those self-evident truths.

After this paragraph, the Writers go on to list the many ways that King George III and England have put the American colonies under subjugation. Read through the list. Do any of them sound familiar in today’s context?

“While evils are sufferable”. It’s still a republic, if WE can keep it.

Posted in General, Humor, Politics | No Comments »
Today in History - July 4
July 4th, 2008

1776 - American Independence Day: The United States Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress declaring itself free of British rule. That’s the name of the holiday: “Independence Day”. “4th of July” is a date.

1803 - The Louisiana Purchase is announced to the American people. Effectively, the area of the young United States is doubled.

1826 - John Adams, 2nd President of the United States (b. 1735) and Thomas Jefferson 3rd President of the United States (b. 1743) both died, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.

1840 - The Cunard Line’s 700 ton wooden paddle steamer RMS Britannia departs from Liverpool bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia on the first transatlantic crossing with a scheduled end. Airlines used to do this, too…

1918 - Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date). This is what happens when revolutions go bad…

1976 - Israeli commandos complete their raid at Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists. It is a stunning display of bravery and audacity.

…on LOST (spoilers for the end of 4th season)

The surprising answer, in physics, is yes … sort of. The trick is that you don’t really move the island. Rather, you change its space-time connection to the rest of the Earth.

Now that the washers and driers in the apartment's laundry rooms run off a debit card that has to be recharged in the manager's office, one of the hazards of laundry day is that you'll leave the card in one of the machines between loads. Particularly if when you return to the laundry room someone else has already come in, dumped your wet clothes out of the washers and started two loads, perhaps using your card and subsequently walking off with it, although that last is all supposition on my part. One wants to be particularly careful not to do this on a holiday, since you won't be able to get a new laundry card until the next morning, at the earliest.

…off to sea, however.  A Brazilian priest decided to rig himself up in a chair with a bazillion helium balloons, and rose off to many cheers.  The rig flew off and over and out to sea, and - well, the Brazilian Navy gave up looking for him two months ago.

I’m starting my descent at 16,000 feet and I just passed a guy in a lawn chair with a gun.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010403.html

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That's the Fourth Amendment, complete.

What part are you having a hard time understanding? Listen, call me on the phone^* and I'll explain it to you.

---

* That way the NSA can hear too.

As far as I know, Jesse Helms never actually killed any black or gay people himself.

Jesse Helms now comes before his God for judgment, called at last to account for a life of unrepentantly starving the hungry, parching the thirsty, casting out the stranger, and neglecting the sick and imprisoned.

"As you have done to the least of these, so have you done unto me" -- attributed to Jesus by Matthew

"I doubt you're going to enjoy the next few thousand years very much" -- attributed to Morpheus by Neil Gaiman