Blog posts

1. Vinge: Rainbow's End

   Pre-ordered.

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 25, 2006 - 3:18 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-25-vinge-rainbows-end/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-25-vinge-rainbows-end/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

2. Can I borrow your cat?

   Amanda got an e-mail from the neighbor living below us…

   This might sound weird, but can I borrow your cat for a few days? I think I heard a rat in here this evening. I haven’t had rats since my sister (and her cats moved out). I think if your cat was in here overnight a couple of nights, it would be “goodbye” to Mr. Rat.

   –Max

   Amanda’s two cats are rescues, one we are pretty confident is retarded, the other mentally abused - leashed when the owner was home, caged when not.

   I have a scar on my hand from holding my kitten near a window when the trash truck drove by the day we moved here, a month and a half old. I don’t think he’s much of a mouser though, and an Adams Morgan rat could be bigger than he is!

   UPDATED FOR KITTEN FEROCITY! AND A POLL!!:

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 24, 2006 - 3:26 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-24-can-i-borrow-your-cat/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-24-can-i-borrow-your-cat/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

3. But you never know!

   Andrew Hearst over at panopticist torrented a recent BBC broadcast of Richard Dawkins screaming at a wall… or rather, debating the age of the Earth and the theory of evolution, with an Evangelical pastor.

   I’ve done this a few times (not on BBC4) and have resigned myself to never bother with it again. I have had door-to-door evangelical old ladies promising to pray for my soul from the doorway of my apartment and a lady on campus pamphletting me when I was trying to do homework accuse me of not having any morality. On the flip side, I’ve demanded in all seriousness of a past co-worker that he cease all use of the toys of science (modern medicine, transit, telecommunication, consumables, etc) and return to pre-renaissance dark-age beliefs so that his refusal to eat swine and weekly fast-till sun-down (born again christian cult, notin this case) would have a remote possibility of helping his life.

   People like to lie to themselves. Struggle with the lies of others and both sides of a debate will simply dig in deeper. Niven’s 16th law will always give the other side what they consider to be ammunition.

   A common argument of people on the fence about religion, pseudo-science and the like: “But Grant, you never really know! It’s a possibility so you have to consider it!”

   Perform a study of accupunture, or prayer for the sick, or phrenology, or the dietary guidelines of the old testament. Refine the guidelines and techniques! If it is an accurate method of healing a person, or prolonging life, fuck, everyone should have a shot at it. Prove even that all these things do is match placebo in a controlled environment and then prove that placebo is better than nothing at all by a statistically valid margin and I’ll start pamphletting it. For some reason these studies keep being done and the response is always “But you never know!”

   This frustration applies equally to the cargo-cult science in the below dirty ice post.

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 24, 2006 - 3:12 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-24-but-you-never-know/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-24-but-you-never-know/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

4. Dirty Ice - SOOOOOOO??!?!

   Bacteria discovered in fast food restaurant ice. SOOOOOOO!???

   I ignored this the first time I skimmed past it during my morning RSS catch-up. Then I got it from jericho @ attrition as a mailing list blast.

   The science of the experiment as performed has no control groups, irresponsibly fails to come to any actual conclusions and is misleading. This won a school science fair and is moving on to the Regional Science and Engineering Fair?

   The two paragraphs the article article devotes to a voice of reason:

   Geoff Luebkemann, director of the division for hotels and restaurants at the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, said people shouldn’t swear off fast food ice just yet. His state agency regulates Florida businesses, including coordinating health inspections.

   Ice machines are part of the health inspections," Luebkemann said. “There are a lot of factors that have to be considered, like how accurately did she gather and test her specimens. Plus, comparing the ice to toilet water can be misleading because there are acceptable levels of bacteria for water.”

   We later get some nice fear mongering from the VP OF A LAB THAT WANTS PEOPLE TO WANT THEIR WATER TESTED…

   Galina Tuninskaya, vice president of Applied Consumer Services, a private lab that tests drinking water, said the standard for drinking water is usually 100 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter. The highest amount Jasmine found was 54 units in ice from a self-serve machine.

   Tuninskaya said the acceptable level varies for each type of bacteria.

   “No levels of fecal coliform or E. coli are acceptable,” she said. “If you find that, you’ve got a problem.”

   And we are helpfully left with a 12 year old child’s conclusion:

   As for Jasmine, she has changed her ordering habits.

   “No way,” she said. “After this, I definitely don’t get ice.”

   Brilliant! For her next trick, our scientist in training should perform the same test on the food from the same restaurants. Once she goes public with the news that people that handle food occasionally fail to wash their hands before hand and that all food at some time is handled (if only sometimes by the person consuming it) we’ll all swear off eating altogether and get IV’s injecting manufactured proteins that have been filtered and pasteurized sufficiently to protect us from the dirty scary world of bacterium!

   I’m not disappointed that a child performed less than perfect science, I’m annoyed in the presentation, the applause, and the gullibility of the surrounding adults.

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 23, 2006 - 6:59 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-23-dirty-ice-sooooooo/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-23-dirty-ice-sooooooo/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

5. Brain farts

   Heard on a conf call…

   Your fears will be… uh… ah… uh-swayed, or whatever that word is…

   assuage |??sw?j|
   verb [ trans. ]
   make (an unpleasant feeling) less intense : the letter assuaged the fears of most members. See note at alleviate .
   • satisfy (an appetite or desire) : an opportunity occurred to assuage her desire for knowledge.

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 16, 2006 - 7:17 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-16-brain-farts/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-16-brain-farts/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

6. Bonnaroo '06

   Amanda and I are going.

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 15, 2006 - 4:19 AM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-14-bonnaroo-06/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-14-bonnaroo-06/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

7. Origins of :-) (* & % !)

   😃 (hat tip: attrition)

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 11, 2006 - 5:31 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-11-origins-of-/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-11-origins-of-/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

8. Extract song info from iTunes

   You may or may not have noticed that the song listing on the left is pretty dynamic and recently has included the album cover for the most recently played song.

   I used to do this all manually with an applescript with a bit of shell that I’d hacked together, running every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel. My script was very very ugly. I uploaded 2008 lines of text that already existed on the other side because it was easier for my ignorant non-programmer skills to produce and broadband with compression can upload a 600K file quick enough to make it not matter. But I knew how lame that was.

   I’ve just finished upgrading to a third party Wordpress plugin, cg-whattunes, which fetches amazon art, accepts the currently playing track and caches it. The nice part is that it caches the history locally for me so I only need to HTTP POST songs using curl as they change.

   iTunes still lacks the ability to trigger events on track changing, so I’m still forced to use a good bit of my old script, modified to work specifically with cg-whattunes every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel.

   Still a nasty ugly kludge, but hay look, album art. Note: If you use cg-whattunes out of the box it won’t look like mine on the sidebar, I hacked the output a bit. 😉

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 09, 2006 - 3:47 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-09-extract-song-info-from-itunes/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-09-extract-song-info-from-itunes/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

9. Danish defacements

   Deface=test for secure

   Perfectly logical, perfectly normal…

   Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 07, 2006 - 5:28 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-07-danish-defacements/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-07-danish-defacements/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.

10. Challenge Club - A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Challenge Club Together With Their Ignominious Death

    Challenge Club’s CD, A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Challenge Club Together With Their Ignominious Death, made the city paper. The reviewer wasted the first paragraph knocking common groups that people hate on like a high school sophomore - gotta love art critics - then moved to describe the subject at hand. Given that a debut CD out for this long is almost 100% promotional and not a cash cow, I think they should Creative Commons it on their website so that I could provide a few links here to tracks. Alas…

    UPDATE: Challenge Club is using cdbaby.com to distribute their cd, I picked up one for $8 before they sold out, it seems. Cdbaby will take your e-mail address and e-mail you when they get more in stock. Be sure to check out the half-track, low-bitrate, very poorly tagged mp3 samples of the cd - I much prefer the last four songs to the first four but I am of course biased having lived with one of the guitar players and shared a room with the bass players for over two years in college.

    UPDATE 2: Got my cd today :dance:

    Posted on Blog over 20 years agoon February 06, 2006 - 3:22 PM and archived here at /blog/2006/2006-02-06-challenge-club/at https://pizza.slow.high.quality.gravely.pizza/blog/2006/2006-02-06-challenge-club/ in the Blog collection in both HTML and markdown.