All posts by rbowen

Time Cube

Many thanks to Dave Barry for pointing me to the Time Cube web site. I no longer have to live in ignorance and stupidity.

Now … what is he talking about?

[[ Due to the unrelenting drivel posted in the comments of this article, and the refusal of people to leave me alone and take their mindless hogwash elsewhere, I’ve just gone ahead and closed further comments on this thread. In case you missed it, I was *MOCKING* the absurdity of the site, not encouraging people to debate and discuss it as though it was actually a serious scientific theory.

Geez, folks, it’s not about being closed minded, it’s about opening your eyes when the sun comes up in the morning. Serious scientific theories must mesh with *reality* in order to be taken seriously. As Albert Einstein observed, no amount of experimentation can prove me right, but one experiment can prove me wrong.

Please take your foolish commentary elsewhere. Thanks. ]]

It’s official. I’m terrified.

The department of homeland security tells me that I’m terrified.

And it’s a darned good thing that they’re there to tell me this, because otherwise, I wouldn’t know it.

I tell you what’s terrifying. Soldiers with machine guns in the airports. I’ve always found that terrifying.

And the idea that not only my suitcase, but also my hard drive without so much as a “please” or “by your leave.” I find that terrifying too. Of course, by expressing this opinion, that probably makes me a terror suspect.

So, now that we’ve been informed that we’re more terrified this week than we were last week, I strongly encourage you to tighten up your firewalls, and encrypt your email, to protect yourself from the terrorists.

by reason of insanity

Once again, I find myself thinking about the improbable notion of someone being “not guilty by reason of insanity” to a murder charge.

While I can see someone being not guilty by reason of being mentally incompetent, I cannot see a valid defence on the grounds of being “temporarily” insane. Why? Well, murder itself is insanity. So, if it is valid for someone to be not guilty by reason of insanity, then *every* murderer would be thus not guilty. For someone to kill another human being requires one of a very small set of conditions. (Yes, I’m hopelessly naive, but go with me for a moment.) Either one is defending one’s own (life, property, loved ones, etc), or one is in some fashion a soldier obeying orders, or one has lost one’s grip on reality and appropriate priorities, and kills in order to obtain something for one’s self (property, power, etc.). Yes, there are accidental killings, but that hardly qualifies as murder, IMHO.

So each time I hear that someone is attempting to get off of a murder charge on the basis if insanity, I’m inclined to agree halfway with them. They are guilty by reason of insanity. Yes, murder is insanity, and so folks that commit murder were indeed insane at the moment that they did it. They were required to suspend their normal sane reasoning processes in order to take the life of a fellow human. And, of course, that is often the case even when such acts are committed in the defence of life, liberty, property, or loved ones.

I’m also inclined to think that I’d make a pretty miserable soldier.

O come Emanuel

O come, desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid thou our sad divisions cease, and be thyself our Prince of Peace.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.

Spam no longer disguising itself

It seems that spammers, in an attempt to get through mail filters, have given up even pretending that they are sending legitimate mail. Some of the subject lines I recieved today were:

Re: DZFWKYK, there came flying

and

Re: MXG, schizophrenic but also

The goal appears to be to make the subject lines difficult to write a general-purpose regular expression for. And that seems to be the only goal. Because what sane person would open an email message with a title like that?

By the way, this seems to work in most cases:

/Re: [A-Z]{2,}, [a-z]+ [a-z]+ [a-z]+/

And, if folks send legitimate email with a all-caps first word, well, they’ll get a friendly reject message and can resend.

So the entire postfix rule would look like:

/^Subject: .*R[eE]: [A-Z]{2,}, [a-z]+ [a-z]+ [a-z]+/ REJECT Your message has been rejected because it looks like the latest rash of spam. If this was legitimate email, please resend with less spam-like qualities. Thanks.

Or, if you don’t care about false positives, and/or don’t want to alert the spammers that you’re smarter than they are, just DISCARD instead of REJECT.

Have I mentioned lately how much I despise spammers?

Dayton ATs

Nathan told me that I should get Dayton tires, so I did. Now I don’t feel like I’m going to slide off the road into a ditch every time I go around a corner. I figure, by the time I get my Jeep paid off, I’ll have replaced all the bits.

Geocaching in the snow

Today, in direct violation of common sense, I decided to go geocaching.

Actually, I decided several days ago, but any sane person would have changed their mind, based on the weather, which was snowy and very cold. Particularly since I had decidfed to go out to Red River and do several of the caches out there.

In particular, I wanted to do “Kentucky 4×4 Adventure”. This is a cache in the national park that only one person has found in the year and a half it’s been up there. The instructions say that you’re likely to need a 4WD vehicle to get anywhere near the cache.

On the way out there, a few miles down I75, I nearly died. Crossing the bridge, a semi pulled up next to me, and I saw what I thought was his turn signals blinking to turn into my lane. Turns out it was actually his hazards, but being next to him I could not see that. I tried to slow down, and at that moment hit a patch of snow and ice and started to lose control. I regained control reasonably fast, but in the process I spun most of the way around, and missed being clipped by the back end of the semi by *maybe* 12 inches. Also, the dozens of cars and trucks behind me came real close to ploughing into me. There were 3 other accidents on that bridge too.

So … I almost saw good sense then and turned around, but, alas, I was not to be deterred.

When I arrived in the general vicinity of the cache, several miles up highway 11, I started looking for the road that I had planned to turn up – Sinking Fork Road. Turns out that just because it says “Road” on the map does not necessarily mean that normal people would bestow that moniker upon it. Other words come to mind, such as “rut” and “cow path”. This turns out to be the first time that I actually needed to put the Jeep into 4L.

Another “road” that I turned down started out OK, but about 100 yards off of the real road, there were two parallel planks across a river. I don’t *think* so.

The closest I actually got at any one time was 2.45 miles. If it had been 30 degrees warmer, and 3 hours earlier in the day, I would have parked and hiked to it, but given that it was 4:30 and 30 degrees by this time, I decided that I’ll have to come back another day.

On the technology front, this was the first time to use GPSDrive, and it was very cool. The only problem was that as I was approaching the cache, I think I must have blown a fuse, because my laptop lost power, and started running on battery. And because my laptop does very strange things when it’s on battery (like going to sleep, and then losing the mouse and/or keyboard when it wakes up) I turned it off. Need to find out what fuse it was and replace that. Having a larger view of where I am and where I’m going makes it much easier to make intelligent choices about where to turn. However, the jumping around from one scale to another turns out to be somewhat disorienting.

Letter from the student loan company

I was just whining the other day about how, every time there is some unexpected income, an unexpected expense springs up to absorb it. And that perhaps I should try really hard to think of it the other way around.

Well, today when I got home, I received an envelope from my student loan company, ACS.

Letters from the student loan office are *never* good news.

So, with much trepidation, I opened it up and read:

The enclosed check is a reimbursement for overpayment of your student loan.

So, not only did the enclosed check represent a nice little amount (about 1.5 payments, actually) this means that my student loan is paid off entirely. And this was completely unexpected. So I’ll have an extra $X every month that I was not planning on.

Pretty nifty.