I just watched a great film today, The Cooler starring William H Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Maria Bello. It’s about a loser (Macy) who has such extremely bad luck in life that he is employed by a casino manager (Baldwin) to stroll around the tables spreading his bad luck to the patrons to win the casino more money. When he meets his lady luck (Bello) though, all bets are off.

Macy is of course a brilliant actor, and he really shines when he plays a loser character — and this role is no exception to that rule. I’m kind of confused as to why Baldwin got the Oscar nomination for this movie and not Bello or Macy, but I guess that is how things work sometimes eh? In any case, put this one in your queue, the acting is superb and the story is solid and entertaining.

The (now former) Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi finally conceded defeat after three weeks of protesting the vote count.

And to think that I thought it was strange how Paul Martin took a couple of hours to admit when he lost.

The source of Real Ultimate Power is within us all.

Hello Mr. Dryden,I just wanted to say that I was very impressed by your take on the issues, specifically in the area of “creating conditions for success“.

Too often do I see the left try to use the government to create success and fail, or the right just give up and let market forces prevail no matter what outcome. Your vision of laying the groundwork for Canadians to create success via education is a refreshing take on what is usually a very stale issue. It’s almost like an infrastructure project, where you lay the solid foundation for Canadians to build our future on.

Unfortunately I am a non-resident Canadian, so I cannot join the Liberal Party to help in that way, nor can I afford to donate to the campaign at this time. But I wish you the best of luck in the coming times, and hopefully in the future I can do something more. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

–
Cheers,
-Ryan Thiessen-

but you should still click this link anyhow

You have been warned, though.

Steps involved in the creation of this image:

1. Comment about DS9 on my weblog
2. Get the idea of having Worf in Law & Order from a brilliant commenter
3. Having a third (also brilliant) person suggest the title “Law & Qapla”
4. Find an image on Google Images that shows the current Law & Order logo
5. Google for the name of the font that Law & Order uses for their logo
6. Use Google to find font sites that let you demo the particular font
7. Take a screenshot and crop the word “Qapla” and save that image
8. Change the colour to red, guassian blur it with a wide radius, paste into new image
9. Take the original Qapla, change the colour to black, paste overtop of the red blur
10. Take the original Qapla, change the colour to white, paste slightly to the right of the black Qapla
11. Crop the found official “Law & Order” image to only say “Law &”
12. Paste and resize overtop of the red/black/white Qapla
13. Merge and save
14. Post the results to your weblog

My wife is really smart.  I mean really, really smart.

The other day I was quietly reading a book that we recently picked up at a used bookstore and read a particularily alarming passage.  It was an account of the death of astronomer Tycho, who passed away when drank a bunch of wine at a party but he declined going to the restroom because he figured it would be rude to his hosts, and eventually his bladder exploded.  Ouch, I mean, ouch.  I remarked to my wife who was passing by, “Wow, that’s a really amazingly horrible way to die.”  Her response, “what, bladder explosion?”

I was flabbergasted.

Just from my relatively innocuous comment she deduced exactly what I was talking about.  She knew I was reading “Coming of Age in the Milky Way“, a nonfiction book about the history of astronomy, and I guess just assumed that there wouldn’t be many terrible deaths worth mentioning.  But still, leaping to the (correct) conclusion that I was referring to what I sure hope is an extremely rare condition like that?  Frigging amazing.

It’s not really all that amazing or shocking, but when Canadians when to the polls and elected a bunch of pseudo-Americans to run our country, we got a Harper government* that would represent Americans, not the actual citizens of the country who elected him.  We won victory after victory in the courts, a clean series of wins that said without any doubt at all that by the mutually agreed upon rules of NAFTA the US tarriffs on Canadian softwood lumber were illegal.  And yet, despite Canada having won all the battles, the Harper government* gave up the war and negotiated a loss.  Well done folks.  Why the hell do we even pretend to have free trade when (a) the Americans elect right wing idiots who flaunt the rules at every opportunity; and (b) the Canadians elect right wing idiots who shamelessly give away the keys to the henhouse to the biggest baddest foxes they can find?

Sorry about the multiple posts on politics today, folks, but I’m all insane in the membrane over this.

* puke, etc

In the comments to a previous entry I made, my good friend Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr had the most brilliant suggestion of all time:

I think it’d be cool to have Worf instead of Ice T just for one episode of Law & Order: SVU, just to spice things up a bit.

Can you imagine how awesome that would be?

[UPDATE]
joh3n comes through with a gem of a followup idea in an instant message: “Law and K’PLAH!”  How could that possibly not make a significantly better film than the actual “Kirk and Spock go to starfleet academy” movie they are now making?

And that’s a GOOD thing.  Because ever since last Friday, I’ve felt a lot more than a little sick.  The short story is that I had a nasty little bout of gastroenteritis which in human terms means that I’ve had a pretty bad case of diarrhoea and vomiting — which as you can probably imagine has left me in bad mood.  But I’m doing much better now, something I’m very grateful for.  The following is what we in the  Internet business call “too much information”, so for your own protection I’ve encrypted the rest of the text in unbreakable rot13 encryption.  I don’t really want you to read it, I just felt the need to write it.  Begin gobbletygook:

Jung, lbh qrpelcgrq guvf?  Jung gur uryy vf jebat jvgu lbh?  Nalubj, vg’f lbhe ybff, lbh fghcvq zbeba.

Lbh xabj jung ernyyl fhpxf?  Qevaxvat n tnyyba bs tngbenqr naq nabgure tnyyba bs tvatre nyr naq bgure yvdhvqf ohg fgvyy abg crrvat ng nyy.  Gung vf gb fnl, crrvat bhg bs gur bevsvpr vagraqrq sbe fhpu.  Fvapr V pbhyqa’g xrrc sbbq qbja orpnhfr bs gur ibzvgvat V jnf bayl qevaxvat abg rngvat, fb zl objry zbirzragf pbafvfgrq fbyryl bs gur syhvqf V jnf pbafhzvat.  V qryvpngryl qhoorq guvf cebprff “crrvat bhg zl ohz”, naq V qvq guvf rirel 20 zvahgrf be fb sbe nobhg guerr qnlf va n ebj.  Vs lbh’er jbaqrevat ubj V fyrcg, lbh ernyyl fubhyqa’g or, orpnhfr ernyyl gur nafjre gb gung dhrfgvba vf zhpu jbefr guna lbh ernyyl jnag gb xabj.

Abg rngvat nalguvat sbe na ragver qnl nyfb unf gur pbairavrag fvqr rssrpg bs znxvat lbh ERNYYL SHPXVAT UHATEL, V unq gb gnxr vohcebsra ng erthyne vagreinyf whfg gb nibvq gur nffbpvngrq uhatre cnvaf.  Lbh unir ab vqrn ubj terng vg srryf gb jnxr hc va gur zbeavat naq npghnyyl unir fbyvq cbbc.  Gb crr bhg bs gur pbeerpg bevsvpr nsgre frireny qnlf bs abguvat vf yvxr n qernz.  Jura lbh’ir orra srryvat nf onq nf V unir gur ynfg pbhcyr bs qnlf, gur yvggyr guvatf va yvsr nera’g whfg tbbq, gurl ner SHPXVAT VAPERQVOYL NJRFBZR.

Unfortunately my lovely wife also became sick, she was so confident in the superiority of her immune system that she even drank out of the same glass as I.  In true fashion though, she is recovering much quicker than I did which is good, though it really sucked both being sick at the same time.  You know how the old saying says that misery loves company?  Well that’s utter BS, what misery really loves is having someone healthy around to take care of them.  Trust me on that one.

After the Harper government’s* repugnant treatment of fallen Canadian soliders, comic Rick Mercer once again comes to the rescue on what should be the final word on the subject.  I do so love how Harper and his crew are bringing the worst of the right-wing American political scene to Canada, don’t you?  Renaming “Age of Consent” to the ridiculous misnomer “Age of Protection” is but one classic example — I could go on and on, yet I won’t.  Instead I’ll close by commenting that I’m really looking forward to seeing Republican-style budgeting — who here really expects something even remotely close to a balanced budget on May 2nd?
* ugh, I feel sick to my stomach ever time I think about that.

link

My wife and I watch television from time to time together, it’s a nice way to relax a bit together.  We don’t actually have a tv of course, we get DVDs via Netflix and watch various shows in sequential order as is all the rage.  Usually we watch science fiction type show or CSI type shows, and right now we’re working our way through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  It’s kind of shameful to admit that, but she enjoys it as a guilty pleasure so I’m happy to watch it with her despite the fact that I’m really not a big fan of the show at all.

Anyhow, the point of this is that Julia has an amazing ability to predict the corny lines that the characters will say, very often getting word-for-word
accuracy.  I’m not so hot with the dialogue compared with Julia, but I can spot the plot movement And this isn’t recollection — we’ve never seen it before — it’s pure guesswork based on our predictive skills.  And despite how much I’d love to pat myself on the back for this, I give most of the credit to the terrible writing that makes both the plot and the dialogue extraordinarily easy to guess.   Anyhow, enough complaining — onto the next episode.

No, not the Donald with the crappy comb-over and massive ego trip, the one in government.

One can hardly read much of anything these days before coming across a criticism of US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld.  Undoubtedly, the Iraq war has not gone as was generally accepted it would, and it does make sense to focus the blame on the man in charge — so for a failed military campaign it would make sense to put the blame on the Secretary of Defence, no?  Well let’s step back in time for a second and remember the time before the US first (OK, second) rolled into Iraq.

People on the left of centre sometimes gloat that the administration confidently predicted a swift war lasting only a few weeks, while they on the other hand predicted a much longer struggle similar to the one we see now.  Indeed, sometimes that attitude is sickening as it seems they are so happy to be “right” despite the casualties and other hardships bestowed to the Iraqi people and those US soldiers in Iraq and their families.  Regardless — their gloating is hardly the case — indeed, neither “side” can claim a victory to the actual situation.

The White House said the war would be quick, and they were right — the actual military conflict lasted a mere few weeks.  “Mission Accomplished” really was something, it was the crest of an unprecedented military campaign that resulted in shockingly few casualties on either side.  People such as myself who predicted a long drawn out guerrilla war were flat out wrong, the Iraqi Amy was quickly destroyed and Saddam’s power eliminated in short order.  With a force outnumbered by 10:1, the US military used advanced technology and cunning strategy to win a war like had never been seen before — I am a pacifist and no fan of war by any means, but this was as close as you could imagine to a clean war.

But of course, that was not the whole story by any means.  To the same degree that the military conflict was a success, the occupation of Iraq was a failure.  Disastrous mistakes were made, which we know now thanks to the benefit of hindsight — but the magnitude of the Iraqi opposition to the occupation was once again unprecedented.  In they years following the end of the military conflict, Iraqis have taken to blowing up anything resembling authority — be it US, UN, Red Cross, their own civilian police, their country’s infrastructure, and even simply arbitrarily chosen Iraqi citizens who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (aka Allahu Akbar o’clock).

So: this brings us back to Donald Rumsfeld, the man of the hour.  What exactly are the mistakes he is accused of making?  The answer to that question is surprisingly hard to find a straight answer for.  The two main thrusts i’ve seen are “not enough troops” and “not enough planning for the occupation”.  I’ll address each criticism in turn.

The first argument of not enough troops present is clearly bogus, as established by the above recollection that the military campaign of the war went very smoothly — if anything the US probably had *more* troops than were needed for the campaign.  As for more troops for the occupation, the sort of unprecedented suicide attacks we’ve seen in the past three years are impossible to defend against, no matter how many troops you have they can still drive a truck into a market loaded with explosives and kill a bunch of people.

The second part of the criticism, that there was a failure to plan for the occupation — is one criticism that I certainly agree with.  But when you consider the nature of the question, is it really Rumsfeld that you are criticizing?  Who made the decisions to disband the Iraqi army, who decided that the Iraqis would welcome the US with flowers and kisses, who thought setting up a friendly democracy would be easy?  These are tactical decisions, command decisions.  If they were left in the hands of a military commander, the error is with the people who decided that military officers were best capable of deciding matters that hardly relate to the military.

What I am trying to say here is that the failure to plan for the occupation was not a failure of Rumsfeld, it was a failure of the Bush White House.  What Rumsfeld did was that he led an effort to transform the US military into a lean but mighty force that could take out a million man army in a few short weeks, and he did a spectacular job of it.  Should the man really be blamed for the fact that his superiors didn’t properly anticipate what would happen after he did his job?

It is no secret that I am not a fan of war, and my politics are very different from what I imagine Donald Rumsfeld’s to be.  But I do admire the man, he has done a good job and is taking blame for problems that ought to be directed elsewhere.  He is honest and he speaks his mind in a frank manner that shows me that he is confident that he is doing the right thing.

PS: Interestingly enough, his demeanour reminds me of a very different man who I admire in politics, former Vancouver mayor and Liberal Senator Larry Campbell.  Their politics are nothing alike but their confidence and frankness have a lot in common with each other.  If there is ever a movie to be made about Rumsfeld, it ought to be played by Nicholas Campbell, the actor who brilliantly portrayed Larry in Da Vinci’s Inquest.

All things considered, it went really well.  By “it”, I mean our Adjustment of Status (I-485) interview that will transist my visa application from a K-1 with work and travel authorization to a full on K-3 with an actual Green Card.  The guy handling our case was a really nice guy, not at all the Napoleon complex type that I see all too often dealing with immigration in both Canada and the USA.  He himself had imported a wife, he told us many times, and like us his visa information was lost — but unlike ours being lost in Nebraska his was lost in China!  In any case, he was convinced our marriage was not a fraud, and he didn’t even look at any of the evidence that I had carefully collected and arranged to prove that fact.  All we need now is to fill out one more form and get it back to him within 90 days and I’ll have my 2-year official Green Card.  w00t.

Also, the DHS office in Seattle is very shiny.  I’d post a picture, but I’ve heard bad stories about foreigners taking pictures of federal buildings, so I decided against that…

The Chinese government plans to seed clouds over Beijing to prompt a cleansing rainfall after the capital was hit by the worst dust storm in five years, state media reported Tuesday.  (CBC News)

I still remember years ago watching Back to the Future II and thinking to myself that the weather control featured in that film was wildly unrealistic.  But here we are today, not much more than 15 years later, and the technology for this type of control over weather systems is already a reality — according to the article in question this has been going on already for “decades”.

Hrmph.  I can already imagine myself as an old man saying things like “back in my day, the weather was unscheduled”…

In short, doctors, judges, consultants and vice presidents strive for truth more often than we realize, and miss that mark more often than they realize. Because the brain cannot see itself fooling itself, the only reliable method for avoiding bias is to avoid the situations that produce it.

This the summary of an interesting article by Harvard Psychology professor Daniel Gilbert examining how bias affects people in a variety of situations, and comes to some very interesting conclusions.

Like we really need more proof that Japanese is a superior culture.  Oh well, via Q here is a 13 minute long video of a collection of extremely clever Rube Goldberg machines.  I promise, it will bring a smile to your face.

The government stopping a scientist from speaking out on issues of global climate change?  That’s hardly news — in fact we heard that just a few weeks ago, no?

The difference is of course that this is happening not in the big bad USA but now in happy progressive fun-land Canada.  It seems that now Canadians cannot be righteously indignant and superior about this any longer, as the new Conservative government muzzles a Canadian scientist from speaking out about his fictional book on climate change.  Just in case that wasn’t quite enough for you, that same Conservative government cancelled 15 programs designed to help Canada meet its Kyoto obligations.

Canada, meet regressive politics.  Regressive politics, meet Canada.  Hope you have a nice time, please try not to break anything past the point of being able to fix things later ok?  Pretty please?

My friend mns notes that it seems that apparently aliens play baseball (see for yourself).  Perhaps this is the true explanation for Barry Bonds?

Today in a fit of inspiration of the strangely productive sort, I brought back an old favourite of long-time readers of my old blog, poker!

On the upper right you’ll see a random image appear each time you load the page… but if you click on it you get to the poker page where it loads five different rt heads at once.  And here’s the inspired part.. I wrote a simple script to count your poker score and then print that out underneath!

Fun for the whole family.

Okay, I’m actually not. But it’s still true that yesterday I helped a friend hang drywall at his new place. I got all covered with drywall dust and everything.

Every time I drive to Canada, like I did today, I am still amazed by the vastly superior state of the roads compared with their US equivalents.  I’m still not sure if it’s because Canada spends too much on roads, or because the US spends too little — or if there is another factor at work such as the larger and more complex road systems in the US.

Whatever the reason is, it’s always a treat to come to Canada if for no other reason than because the road is less bumpy.  When you cross the border it’s like you’re driving a completely different car.  This may seem like a tiny nitpicky little point to you, and if so I have to admit that you are right.  But nonetheless, the roads in Canada are paved with… hmm… well, they’re paved.  And that’s something.

I write a lot of stuff that manages to get itself posted all over the internet… so I figured why not actually get a blog like everyone else in the world?  Ok, to be fair… I’ve had several blogs in my lifetime and I haven’t ever kept them up for various reasons.  In fact I’ve had a blog on this very site for a couple of years now but I never actually update it, partly because I’m lazy but mostly because the posting mechanism was annoying and slow.  So I’m hoping that with the new weblog software I installed (Wordpress) I’ll keep up my efforts a bit more and maybe have a site that is worth reading.  So I’ll give it another shot!  I’ll slowly bring across content that I’ve already written elsewhere and write new info, so if you know me perhaps you’ll have read it before and if so I apologize for boring you.

Sony’s PS3, scheduled to be released near the end of this year, has been slated to have a hard drive that will support and will even include preinstalled Linux. This could be a breakthrough event not just for Linux but also for other alternative operating systems as well. The PS3 will almost certainly sell millions and millions of units, providing a unique opportunity for people to try something that would be more difficult on their regular computer.

It has yet to be made public exactly what version of Linux will be preinstalled, what that will look like, and how that will fit in the scope of using the PS3. It seems likely that the PS3 will load similar to the PS2, giving the user a simple hardware browser – and that the hard drive OS would be loaded from there. Regardless of how they implement it though, the very fact that a flavour of Linux is going to be preinstalled means that it should be relatively easy to replace it with another version of Linux and potentially even other OSes that can be eventually ported to the PS3 hardware.

If you’ve ever used an alternative operating system, whether free or proprietary, you’ve probably had issues getting your hardware to work properly. Even the most valiant attempts at supporting hardware is bound to miss some sort of configuration that the development team didn’t expect, and this leads to often complicated workarounds due to lack of manufacturer co-operation or even outright hostility. As a result you can never be certain that Linux or BeOS or FreeBSD will be as smooth as something like OSX is, because with OSX, Apple controls the hardware and so their software knows exactly what drivers to ship on the CD to support the hardware they sell. Simple.

With the Sony PS3 hardware, this will provide alternative OS vendors a similar opportunity to what OSX offers to Apple hardware right now. It will be a stable platform with known hardware, and if they can ship a working Linux implementation this means that the specs will be open enough that any operating system that desires to can probably also be ported to run on this machine with little fuss. The PS3 will be a good platform for many years, so it won’t be the moving target that supporting PC hardware often is – only one driver needs to be implemented once instead of having to keep up with the crazy treadmill and a thousand vendor choices.

Right now with my current operating system, Ubuntu Dapper, many of the components are built generically so they will work with a variety of hardware that I will never use. Each time it boots my OS does a check to see what hardware is installed and configures itself accordingly. This is a actually good thing for a computer operating system, and it allows me to do neat things like swap the hard drive out and put it in a new machine which still boots perfectly fine on the new hardware (providing that it’s supported by Linux of course). Packages are compiled for supporting even the ancient Intel 386 processor, while I use a much more modern Pentium 4 chip. This all changes if an operating system decides to target the PS3. They can compile packages directly for the Cell processor, support only the video card that ships with the PS3 and support it well. Things that can be hard with alternative OSes like Bluetooth and WiFi can be simplified because there is only one choice for each one – even if a driver must be hacked up there is the advantage of everyone having the same hardware it will reduce the duplication of effort that multiple drivers would force. The PS3 is a standard platform which will greatly reduce the complexity of hardware support – so OS developers can focus on making the software perform on the known hardware as best as possible instead of having to deal with crazy contingencies.

It must be said that the PS2 also supported Linux even with a Sony supplied CD, and it was hardly the revolutionary reaction that I predict could happen with the PS3. The difference is that the PS3 comes with a hard drive preinstalled. This means that unlike the standard PS2, with the PS3 you won’t have to constantly swap CDs around or run the OS off the CD as if it were a LiveCD. The PlayStation is a gaming device, and why would you want to run a non-gaming OS if you had to keep swapping out the CD to do anything fun with it? But if you can run it off the hard drive, this means that you can seamlessly use the device for both gaming and general purpose computing uses. Additionally, high-definition video support will help display text better especially in combination with the digital displays that are becoming more common for in high-end media centres.

I encourage developers to plan ahead in order to take advantage of this opportunity – funded Linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandriva, etc. should do their best to get development kits for these machines (if they haven’t already) in order to be prepared for the launch later this year. If executed properly, and there seems no reason why it can’t be done properly, the PS3 could be the first time that even the most non-technical people can safely install and use an alternative operating system such as Linux without encountering any problems. The holy grail.

[ This article was originally published at osnews ]

I cleaned my entire car, both inside and out, with Windex(tm) and paper towels.
My wife was at a job interview, and I drove her. But for some completely unknown reason I forgot to bring any reading material with me, so I got pretty bored sitting around waiting for her. I first used the near-empty water bottles and stray napkins, and when those ran out I used some kleenex(tm). But that didn’t work really well, and she was still in her interview and I had no idea how long it was going to be. So I went to the store and bought some multi-function Windex(tm) for $3.49 and a roll of paper towels for $0.99.

I first did all the plastic surfaces of the inside of the car. But still, I was waiting. Then I did all the windows, inside and out. But still, nothing. Then the headlights… then the front and back, then the roof, then the doors and finally the sides. Just when I was nearing completion she emerged with a job, and my car cleaning was complete. In case you are ever in such a situation yourself, it may be nice to know that I used nearly a full roll for my little Civic(tm) hatchback so if you’re driving a real hulk you may as well cut some extra trees down while you’re windexing your car.

Except perhaps for the time I got it professionally detailed, I think my car is now the cleanest it has ever been since I bought it.

Yesterday I drank some lychee tea for breakfast, had a giant Dr Pepper for lunch and quickly followed that up with a very large Starbucks coffee. I felt absolutely rotten, my whole body was tremoring… the little jitters and shaking lasted for many hours. It took until about midnight until I actually stopped feeling like I was still moving involuntarily, and even then I could only get to sleep at about 4:00am. I usually get withdrawl headaches when I don’t drink caffeine, but so far today I’ve not had any… which is perhaps telling as to just how much I had in my system yesterday.

Short summary: don’t buy it. Hell, don’t even borrow it.
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve quite enjoyed the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon since pretty much when it started. Mocking Intelligent Design and the people who promote it is pretty much my bread and butter*. In any case, the venganza.org letter was hillarious, and the reaction it sparked was no less than amazing and wonderful. For me at least, the best part was the graph showing the correlation of pirates and global temperature.

When I heard there was going to be a FSM gospel published by the venganza author, I jumped on the idea and preordered the book. I mean why not… it was only like $10 or so. It arrived the other day and I gave it all a good lookie-poo.

I am sad to have to tell you all what an incredible disspointment the book has been for me. There was a grand total of one (1) original thing in the entire book that made me laugh, and that was on the damn cover. The problems with the book are many, but I’ll list a few:

• the form factor for the book is all wrong. The cover actually has a picture of what a proper gospel looks like, but is actually a paperbook in an annoying wide format that wastes a lot of space. So instead of footnotes, the side notes appear off to the side and are very distracting.
• the book has a severe lack of focus. It doesn’t seem to know what it’s function is supposed to be… is it a satire of ID, is it just mocking ID, is it faux-serious, or is it a random collection of things found on the internet?
• the lack of focus would be alright if it were structured properly, but it is sadly not. It’s difficult for the reader to shift in the change of tone from satire to serious, from promoting it’s own “agenda” to making fun of another.
• most importantly, it’s not funny. It’s repetitive, and kind of lame.

The only reason to buy this book is to donate some money to the guy who created the FSM. And if you want to do that, I’d suggest a better way would be direct donation instead of purchasing this ill focused and unfunny book.Notes:
* This is only true because I have no actual bread and butter**
** except in the literal sense, because I have bread and I have butter but not “bread and butter”. Fuck, I’m even confusing myself here.