Entries from October 2007 ↓

*Stranger in a Strange Land*
_by Robert Heinlein_

What can I say about his book that hasn’t already been said? Just read it, if you haven’t already.

I’ve heard of people describing Heinlein as fascist, conservative, authoritarian in his writings — I am now of the conclusion that these people have never read one of this books.

_Stranger in a Strange Land_ is so far removed from those ideals as to be almost from another planet — much like the protagonist of the story! Hurr hurr!

Quick summary (if you _must_ have one): it’s about a man raised in an environment alien to Earth, and who suddenly comes to our planet as a sort of emissary. But, seriously — that’s like saying the Bible is about some people wandering around in a desert for a bit. Just read.

*Freezing Down*
_by Anders Bodelsen_

A classic SF book from the 70’s, _Freezing Down_ is a translation from the original Danish — I mention this, because the translation gives the entire thing a sort of “eerie” quality that I can’t quite put my finger on.

It’s not _badly written_—not at all—you’d just have to read it to know what I’m talking about (or if you’ve read other direct, only partly-edited translations of works before, you’ll know what I’m talking about).

I loved reading this book for several reasons, the main one being the different ideals and ways of living that were put forth by the author, who grew up in a very liberal Northern European country — the views present on sex, in particular, are very interesting. Sex is treated as just another part of life — not particularly special, but not particular forbidden either. This is doubly noteworthy, in my opinion, since a large part of the book takes place in (the author’s) present day, so there’s no “Oh, that’s just the way things are in the future” kind of thing going on.

*Nova 2*
_by Harry Harrison_

Well, _compiled_ by Harry Harrison, at least. This is a collection of about a dozen or so short stories from the early 70’s — there’s somewhat of a theme of environmentalism in a few of the stories, a theme that was just as prevalent in early 70’s society as it is today.

One story is a translation by a Brazilian author (André Carneiro), and as even Mr. Harrison describes of it in his foreword, it’s of a decidedly different nature — you’ll just have to read it and see what I’m talking about.

“Neanderthals ‘were flame-haired’ - BBC News”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7062415.stm

Anti-Ginger Propaganda! Bah! I expect no less from the BBC. Finally they’ve shown themselves for the racists they are!

This weekend I managed to:

* Fix my cellphone with a $20 part from Ebay;

* Perform a cooling system flush on my ‘89 Mustang;

* Install “Ubuntu 7.10″:http://ubuntu.com on our three laptops;

The first one of those was so easy it was freaky, even though Alltel had said that the phone wouldn’t be “cost effective” to fix. Well, stuff it up your ass, Alltel — I took care of it myself.

The second one of those was fairly easy, but it took two hours and got me covered in oil (don’t ask) and antifreeze. Though, it did seem to make my car run a *lot* cooler afterwards.

The third one of those worked fine on everyone else’s laptops — except for mine! Well, mine is the oldest and most set in its ways, and here I came along wanting to update its operating system — it’s probably being ornery just to show me that sometimes the latest versions of things aren’t always necessary. Duly noted.

“JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7053982.stm

Seriously, this is the most transparent publicity-increasing move I’ve ever seen.

At first, I was upset: “Common sense — meet JK Rowling. She and you have apparently never met.” As if fundamentalist religious-types need _another_ fucking reason to get outraged over one of their favorite targets!

Then, I realized that the _Harry Potter_ series is over and done with, all kids that have read its stuff have _already_ done so, and there’s probably very little accusations of “GLAAD”:http://glaad.org type interference that could go on here. She’s more than likely just trying to increase sales as much as she can for this dying series.

(In case you didn’t know, GLAAD-type interference is where GLAAD pays certain people or authors to publicly state that previously non-sexual characters in books or stories are actually _secretly_ gay, just to… well, just to do whatever the hell it is that GLAAD actually wants to do. I sometimes wonder, myself.

I do know that to GLAAD, there are only two types of people; those that are gay, and those that are secretly gay and waiting to come out. Make up your own mind about what that means.)

It can be free; “go see for yourself”:http://radiohead.com.

“This article”:http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071015/OPINION03/710150323/1039/OPINION03 sums up what’s happend so far. According to a survey taken of the people who’ve downloaded the new album, about a third paid nothing at all: $0.

Some people make a big deal of that (like Fark’s headline, “A third of the people offered Radiohead what their new album is worth: $0″:http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3136034), but they’re missing the big picture — if a third of downloaders got it for free, that means that *the other two thirds paid for it, even when they _could’ve got it for free_*.

According to the survey, many paid more than $20, and the average price was $8 (I paid about $4, myself). Do the math — even with this survey not necessarily representing all people who downloaded the album, that means that at an average price of $8 times 2/3 of a million downloaders (~8*666,000), that’s like…

*5.3 MILLION DOLLARS*.

And that’s money that’s going straight to the band. No middlemen, no greedy record executives to pay, no RIAA cartel to cozy up to — just straight hard cash going to Radiohead so that they can continue to make good music.

What’s the downside of this type of purchasing system again?

Nothing, from what I can see. Everything I’ve ever heard of seen tell me that bands make very little money off of album sales when they go through a major label and an organization like the RIAA — most of the money they make is through performances and band “stuff” (you know, t-shirts, autographs, and the like).

And while $20-25 bucks (what you’ll pay in a store) for a new album is FAR too much if you ask me, paying the same amount to be 10-20 feet from my favorite band whilst screaming my head off along with thousands of other people? Now, _that’s_ worth $20. I’ve paid that amount before to see bands play in a venue (hell, I usually pay twice that), and I’ll continue to do so — but I haven’t paid for an CD in years.

Yep — Nina helped me set up a wordpress blog for me over at “http://www.threshold-zero.com/wordpress/”:http://www.threshold-zero.com/wordpress/.

Whatta you know, eh? Me with a wordpress blog. Well, it’s mostly to help out Nina and create Wordpress-centric plugins — the idea has actually interested me quite a bit.

I’ve been working on a “plugin” type script for “Tumblr”:http://tumblr.com (you can see it spinning over on the right when you first load up this page) — if you’ve got a Tumblr blog, you’ll notice that there isn’t any available, at least from them. (Aye, I know “Twitter”:http://twitter.com has quite a few neat blog plug-ins available, but the Twitter site itself can’t accept Photo-SMS, like Tumblr can). The idea behind Tumblr is very neat, and very easy to use, especially if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a lot of fluff, and just wants an simple, straightforward interface (I’m looking at you, “Bubu”:http://bubu.tmanime.com).

I’ve already got a “plugin” like this for my blog here, using Textpattern (it uses the great “jQuery”:http://jquery.com library), and I’m interested in porting it to WordPress.

I’ve got some questions first, though, about the wordpress engine:

1) Does wordpress have a default feed-proxy (to get around server-side restrictions on XMLHttp commands)?

2) Does wordpress have a built-in image manipulation proxy (some file like “image.php” that you would load with parameters to load up manipulated images)?

Once I get these questions answered, I’m already halfway there! (There’s a great page all about this at “http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_Resources”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_Resources — I plan on reading that when I get a chance, of course.)

*Automotive Report!*

_Beetle Bug_

We finally got Nina’s Beetle’s car problems fixed, and every bit of it was covered under warranty! The VW guys know their stuff, I’ve got to admit — they were right about the vibration being a faulty wheel bearing, and they even tracked down the elusive glow plug fault that I had tried tracking down myself.

They reached the same conclusion that I did, ultimately — the fault lied in the wiring harness that fed into the glow plugs, and not the glow plugs themselves. Unlike me, however, they had extra wiring harness lying around, and were able to repair it — it would’ve cost me almost $100 bucks, even if I had bought the parts myself!

We forgot to tell them about the “left your lights on”-chime being broken, but at this point I’m so glad the other stuff is fixed, I’m keeping my mouth shut. We’ll get it fixed when we can.

_General Lee_

The General Lee is now sitting on ramps in my front yard, out of commission — mostly because its exhaust is in shambles. Sigh, if it’s not one thing, it’s another — I spend weeks repairing its electrical problems and other engine gremlins, only to have a rusted exhaust put it out of commission.

Hey, at least parts for it are cheap as hell. This time, I’m not just going to patch up the exhaust for it — I’m going all out on good stuff from “Summit Racing.com”:http://summitracing.com, including an actual real tailpipe! The tailpipe’s for a 5.0 mustang, but it’ll fit on my four-cylinder just fine, and I’ll only need to buy one! Harr harr!

_Mauve Storm_

The Mauve Storm drives just fine, but the “detonation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_internal_combustion_engine problems continue — I’m still tracking down the problem, but I haven’t had much time to check. It doesn’t help that the engine itself is so _big_ (not big as in powerful, but just big as in “bulky” — there’s no room to manipulate anything in the engine, leading to half a dozen different parts needing to be removed every time I need to do a minor change).

At least I’ve eliminated the possibility of the timing being off — I finally figured out the proper way to use my timing gun, and it checked out okay. I’m leading towards my spark plugs being messed up — it’s been more than two years since they’ve been changed, and that’s about long enough for a engine that’s driven more than 15,000 miles a year.

I’ve tried to buy some proper Motorcraft spark plugs from the local Ford place (helping out the American automotive industry and all that), and that would’ve been fine… had they sold me the right fucking part to begin with. I go in there, tell them exactly what I need and exactly what car I have, and they sell me the parts for the 300hp Cobra engine instead of just the 200hp GT engine like I’ve got. The spark plugs’ll probably fit, but they’re not _made_ for my engine — their “heat range”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_plug#Heat_range is different from what my engine’ll be expecting, and that could potentially fuck up things even more.

In case you’re wondering — yeah, I could return them… if their policy didn’t state “no returns on electrical parts.” Thanks a lot, guys.

Sigh, that poor thing — there’s so much stuff I want to just fix in its engine, but I’ve nary the time nor the money (contrary to the General Lee, parts for the Mauve Storm cost quite a bit more). Though, I see a change a-happening in that — I’m a bit more organized with my time off on weekends and days off now, and I’m starting to get more done! So, here’s to hoping.

Testing testing testing.

Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee.

First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn’t use the side pockets on — the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn’t be used for anything more than my pair of keys.

Thankfully (or not), there was little “mid” pocket on them, about halfway down the leg that had a zipper and everything — perfect for those items that are too big to put in your side pockets, right? So, I stick my cell phone in there and forget about it. It’s sitting around banging against my knee when I walk, but at least it’s not falling out of my pocket and getting lost.

Well, later on Nina and I go to my sister’s house for supper (she was cooking Italian sausage soup that night, so at least that part of the night was good), and she’s showing us the new bed that her and my brother-in-law had recently got, and she’s all like, “Jump up and see what it feels like,” and I jump up on it, knees first like an idiot, and then Crack! it’s broke.

I knew just from the way the “crack” felt that it was broke. I pull it out of the pocket and the LDC screen looks like someone’s spilled chemicals inside it — those things look weird when they break, I’ll tell you what.

Luckily enough for me, my phone still worked — I just couldn’t see anything on the screen. Text messaging is impossible, of course, but at least it still functions as a phone.

And that’s that. What do I do? I bought it outright so that I didn’t have to get a 2-year contract with my cellphone company (almost unheard of where I live), and I don’t have the money to pay full price for a new one right now. So, I thought about repairing it myself.

I actually wanted to give Alltel a chance to make some money (why the hell not — they’re one of the better cell phone companies in America), so I took it up to them to ask if they could fix it. I was willing to pay a little bit more for “quality” service from them, if they could fix it immediately.

Well, I found out that not only do they not repair cell phones at the local Alltel shop where I live, but that they couldn’t even send off for the phone to be fixed — they said that it wouldn’t be “cost effective.”

Read that as: “We’re selling these phones to you at a 1000% markup — you’re paying $300 for something that cost us like $30. Why the hell do we want to repair it? Just buy a new one.”

Sorry, Alltel — no can do.

So, I go on Ebay and find a new LCD screen for $20. Hell, it’s worth it — even if it doesn’t work and I have to get a new cell phone in the end, I’m only out $20.

I finally got me a moblog — a _real_ one, this time. Take a look over on the right — it’ll show the most recent photos from my camera phone.

It’s the culmination of several weeks of coding, drawing from both my newfound experience in JavaScript, as well as good-old-fashioned time-honored server-side PHP! (That PHP coding was a doozy, too, seeing as how I haven’t coded anything in it in years… but I came through, in the end.)

Keep an eye out!