mcgees.org

Checking [whether] standard error [closed in a Perl script], though, is a bit more problematic. After all, if STDERR fails to close, what are you planning to do about it? — The Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

They go on to suggest a couple of things, but it’s still a funny comment. By way of analogy, compare it to submitting a customer service request to a company saying that the customer service request system is not delivering any customer service requests.

On the very next page, it says “As of Perl v5.8 there is a way to mix [buffered and unbuffered I/O functions]: I/O layers. You can’t turn on buffering for the unbuffered functions, but you can turn off buffering for the unbuffered ones.” Great, really useful! I can turn off buffering on an unbuffered function and end up with: an unbuffered function! The presence of typos like this is really obnoxious, because when I find a confusing passage I have to wonder whether they are making a mistake or I’m just not understanding.

A follow-up to my car post of a few weeks ago. In summary, the Viking Insurance rep made an offer for settlement, and I suggested they double it. They’ve called back and have said, essentially, “O.K., we’ll double it.”

Oh, and Audi performed the repair job on my bumper, which ended up running to $2000, for free. I’ll be posting an open letter to Audi in the next week thanking them.

I’m thinking of writing a book called So Many Bunnies at the Scotch Whisky Distillery.  I’ve got the beginning worked out:

1 was named Ashton.  He slept in the mash tun.

2 was named Beryl.  She slept in a barrel.

3 was named Carol.  She slept in a barrel.

4 was named Darryl.  He slept in a barrel.

5 was named Errol.  He slept in a barrel.

There are a lot of barrels, you see.

OK, that’s a point-oh-one percenter.  The intersection of the set of scotch aficionados and the set of parents of infants.

We could go on. 16 could be Pete, who slept in the peat. 19 could be Sherry, whose butt slept in the sherry butt. And we could rewrite 4 to be “Daniel, who slept in the hogshead.”

OK, that’s a 1 x 10^-7 percenter.  I’ll stop now.

A gem:

Perhaps an analogy would be appropriate:

There is a competent and an incompetent way to rob a bank. You can either plan ahead, consider the worst-case scenario, and get in and out without too much trouble. Or you can dream about your successes, not consider difficult possibilities, and have the result be a violent, bloody mess.

Robbing a bank is still wrong, but pointing out that the robbers royally screwed up isn’t an endorsement of the rightness or wrongness of the act itself.

John Kerry: “I’m running for President to make the country we love safer, stronger, and more secure. I’m asking every American to be a Citizen Soldier…”

Oh, shut up.  Like what we need is another president who sees everything as a military conflict.

And try this: “John Kerry has the vision to create a new Manhattan Project to make America independent of Middle East oil in 10 years by creating alternative fuels like ethanol and making cars more efficient.”

Great, use the terminology of nuclear weaponry to discuss green ititiatives.

“John Ashcroft has launched an all-out assault on individual rights, allowing for a wholesale invasion of attorney-client conversations, e-mails and telephone calls. Immediately after the election, John Kerry will name a new Attorney General whose name is not John Ashcroft.  We will also fight to protect women’s rights, civil rights and workers rights and enforce anti-trust laws.”

Yeah, you know, that other stuff when we get around to it.  The important thing is just to have someone not named John Ashcroft.

“John Kerry supports expanding our nation’s hate crime law. He supports efforts to provide equal justice for all victims of hate violence, regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, gender or disability.”

A step-by-step analysis of the actual points, rather than the sloppy writing, on which I disagree with Kerry will have to wait until I have more time, but the author structures this paragraph as if B follows from A, which it most certainly does not. If anything they are incompatible, as “equal justice” is completely at odds with “special sentences for certain crimes”.

Trader Joe’s has a Zwack 3 year old plum brandy at 47% abv, distilled entirely from plums. It’s also Kosher, curiously. Apparently the Zwack distillery produces the self-proclaimed “national drink of Hungary”, Unicum. More here.

Pizza Hut: Helloandthankyoufuhcallingpeezahuthomeofthefourallwillthisbefordeliveryorcarryout?

Josh: Delivery.

P: Wouldyaliketohearourspecials?

J: Sure.

P: Twoonetoppingbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: What?

P: Twoonetoppingbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: One topping buffalo wings?

P: Twoonetoppingandbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: Oh.

I usually order online, but they have recently “improved” their web app to the point at which it is completely unusable.

During a group visit to Mt. Rushmore … we encountered … a white-robed, shaven-headed Hari Krishna with his literature. This was not in patriotic keeping of the site and everyone of our 26-persons was offended. … I am not critical of other religions, but [Mt. Rushmore] is not a proper place for propaganda. (emphasis added)  — H. R. Fischer

I’ve come up with a new delicacy.  It consists of french fries, gravy, and Beluga caviar.

I’m calling it Vladimir Poutine.

Jordon from The World of Stuff is craving links, so here is an (unrequested) link back to him.  He always has nice things to say about mcgees.org, so it’s really the least I could do.  Best of luck, Jordon.

This ViewSonic sucks.  I’m buying a new monitor.  A flat panel.  Today.  Or Friday.

All winter squashes are edible as summer squashes (shell and all) if they are picked young enough.  This squash

had turned green but had stopped growing, so I harvested it this morning at the size of a lemon and steamed it for 10 to 12 minutes. Here’s a picture:

It was delicious.

It feels like a cold, lonely, depressing Christmas at dawn, so well does Homicide set the scene.  I keep expecting frosty white light to be streaming through the windows, and I’m reaching for a blanket.

I was a bit skeptical, and … annoy[ed] at the possibility that the word bright would be used to imply that we are smarter than other people. Yet, reading some of the essays posted on the brights’ web site quickly changed my mind. After all, not all “gay” people are gay in the sense of being happy, easy-going fellows, right? — Massimo  Pigliucci

And I sigh.

Look, Massimo, Richard, Daniel: you’re not helping. I know you feel crapped upon — most atheists do — but we’re not going to increase tolerance and education by referring to ourselves as smarties or clevers, even if we were to contend that “by saying I’m a clever, I’m not saying I am clever.”  You cannot just hijack terms with unflattering antonyms because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.  That just puts people on the defensive, and it’s frankly offensive.

There are two main reasons to adopt an umbrella term for people currently identifying as atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and rationalists, and neither seem particularly beneficial. The more reasonable one is to promote a sense of self-identity, using a “positive” term (and I mean that both linguistically and approbationally.) I understand the draw of having a desirable term with which to self-label, but it seems clannish and petty. The second, worse reason seems to be apparent inflation of our ranks, trying to look like a larger minority, which is a bit sneaky.

Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett (they’re the less shrill ones, if you’re keep track) admitted wariness in initially embracing the term. Go with your instincts, guys.

I got seasons 3 and 4 of Homicide on DVD, and I’ve been like a kid in a candy store the past few nights.

“[Phoebe] may be our first encounter with a Kuiper belt object.”

There are five new baby pictures, at the bottom of the list.

The new garden page isn’t ready yet, but I wanted to share with you the absurdity that is the kabocha squash plant. It now has seven squashes growing on it. Keep in mind that all the pictures are from a single plant, started outdoors from a single seed.

Here’s a fantastic interview with Maynard James Keenan by, of all people, Kurt Loder.

You have got to be kidding me.  They really presented a gold-plated money clip to the people who filed past Reagan’s sealed casket at the Presidential Library?  Seriously.  Not a David Cross routine.  Real life.  I’m not making this up.  A gold-plated money clip.

Good to know that you didn’t have to be there to get one, though.  Follow the link above to buy one on eBay.  Greed Is Good®, right?

My workplace in Thousand Oaks closed early today, as the only route of egress was the motorcade route. We’d have been locked in a research facility with a jammed soda machine and only sputtering chambers and broadband connections to entertain us.  Sounds like an Fox sitcom premise, when you think about it.

The motorcade was scheduled for evening, but at 11:30 a.m. people were lining Lynn Road (I swear I am still not making this up) with padded folding chairs, sunglasses, tacky beach visors, and red Igloo coolers of Diet Coke. When I left, I saw more of the same, along with hordes of miniature people born during Clinton administrations I and II — and someone had thoughtfully gone through and placed red, white, and blue helium balloons around the route.  It was packed like Disneyland on the Fourth of July weekend. Northbound 101 was jammed with cars for miles; driving past I felt like Judd Hirsch in Independence Day, hauntingly feeling like I was somehow going the wrong way.  Southbound 101 was accessorized with hovering military helicopters armed with fucking missiles.  For real.  This is still real life.

“A tiny bottle of Scope is a lousy substitute for a real vagina, especially when you are traveling.” (safe for work)

This guy takes requests for songs to write and record. The preceding bit consisted of excerpts from a song that is the opposite of a diss track. He also undertakes severely constrained writing assignments, such as writing a Christmas song about falling down the stairs using only words beginning with B, E, M, P, and S: “Similarly my back’s sore probably pained ever since sliding so effervescently past seventy stairs … So everybody better buy me some super excellent presents.” But that’s not quite as cool as the constraints on False Impersonation — read the Songs To Wear Pants To page for details.

If you’re setting up sendmail, this page should help.

The Big Bird Theory of Education: “It’s easier to remember a new idea if it’s attached to an eight-foot yellow bird.”

It’s interesting how people will get fixated on a specific and forget the general. In the evenings, I’ll go in to check to see if the baby’s still breathing, a reflex the parents out there will probably understand. I’ll usually leave the light off so that I won’t disturb him. Just now I went in to check, feeling for him in the relative dark, but he was tossing and turning. I thought, geez, I wish he’d stop moving so that I could tell if he was still breathing or not.

New pictures of him are available.

Dewey Beats the Tampa Bay Lightning

One wonders just how much journalism is composed and never published. Last weekend, when Reagan died, the networks were ready with graphics and retrospectives that I assure you were not assembled in four hours. The death of Reagan, at least, is predictable, but sports and politics wins aren’t. How much must be relegated to the trash-heaps of history.

In November 2003 I was in a traffic accident. I had to come to a quick stop, but the two people behind me didn’t react fast enough. I was hit by the car behind me, which was in turn hit by the car behind it. I ended up in physical therapy for a month. One of the cars was insured by the relatively expensive State Farm, who have been nothing but professional through the whole process. The other was car was insured by fly-by-night “specialty insurance” provider Viking, part of the Royal & Sunalliance group, where “specialty” is a euphemism, according to their website, for “mandatory coverages for customers who are less able to afford auto insurance”. Viking has had three BBB complaints in the last 12 months, which the BBB lists as “satisfactory”.

There’s one more piece of data you need to know. A while back I ran into a fault with my Audi. There’s a design flaw in which front bumpers will get caught on parking lot obstructions and tear off (I mentioned this problem here.) Audi quoted me a price of $1300 to repair it, but shortly after I received the quote I received a letter from the lawyers pursuing a class action to get this very issue resolved, so I held out. When the accident occurred, I was missing a front bumper, but this had nothing to do with this case. I wasn’t making a claim for this damage. The insurance adjuster estimated the damage to my rear bumper at $700.

I have been in communication with adjuster Dawn, who has been out of the office for long stretches of time. I got in touch with her today, and these are the highlights of the conversation, from memory. It’s surreal.

Dawn:  We’re offering you $x.

Josh:  That’s lower than what State Farm offered.  Lower by 100%, actually.

Dawn:  But this was a minor accident.

Josh:  Well…

Dawn:  This was a minor accident, and you had previously been in another accident that damaged your front bumper.

Josh:  That wasn’t an accident, that was my bumper getting caught on a planter in a parking lot while I was backing up.

Dawn:  But it did more than $1000 damage to your car.

Josh:  Yes.

Dawn: It was obviously more serious. It did $1000 damage to your car, and you weren’t injured, but you were injured during this $700 accident? I don’t see how that could be.

Josh:  You’re not making any sense.

Dawn:  Well, that’s your opinion.

Josh: No, that’s not just my opinion. Look, if a baseball hit my car and shattered my windshield, and the windshield cost me $1000 to replace, would you consider that a more serious accident than the impact?

Dawn:  You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Josh:  Exactly.  You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Dawn:  But you did $1000 damage to your bumper.

Josh:  They’re completely different.  In one I was driving, in the other I was backing up in a parking lot.

Dawn:  But you weren’t driving when you were hit [by our insured].  You were stopped.

Josh:  The other guy sure as hell wasn’t stopped!

Dawn:  Well, he was coming to a stop, and didn’t brake fast enough.  At least that’s what you told us.  [Switches to dramatic voice:] Or is that what happened?

Josh:  No, that’s what happened.  We’ve been over this, lots of times.

Dawn:  OK, then.

[more bizarre exchange…]

Josh:  [Starting to laugh:] Look, I know full well that you may know what you’re saying is nonsense and that you’re just trying to screw with me, and that’s fine.

Dawn:  [Getting flustered:] Well, what do you want?  Let’s talk about that.

Josh:  $y [where y = 2 times x; that’s the amount State Farm paid]

Dawn: Well, I don’t have your file right now, it was taken by an auditor. But call me back on Monday, and I’ll see what I can do.

Josh:  [Laughing:] OK.

Dawn:  Bye.

Josh:  [Still laughing:] Bye.

My XP box is unstable. My Linux box is slow. That gives me the choice of fast, unreliable browsing or slow, predictable browsing. I’m downloading Opera to see if that speeds things up a bit on the Linux box.

October 25, 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Intruder in Duluth

At around midnight on October 25, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at

it, and activated the “sabotage alarm.” This automatically set off sabotage alarms at all bases in the area. At Volk Field, Wisconsin,

the alarm was wrongly wired, and the Klaxon sounded which ordered nuclear armed F-106A interceptors to take off. The pilots knew there

would be no practice alert drills while DEFCON 3 was in force, and they believed World War III had started.

Immediate communication with Duluth showed there was an error. By this time aircraft were starting down the runway. A car raced

from command center and successfully signaled the aircraft to stop.  The original intruder was a bear.

— Alan F. Philips, 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War.

Also see the Wikipedia for a man who should have statues in every major world city: Stanislav Petrov, the man who prevented World War III.

ASCII Art Stereograms.  For real.  The fact that this is possible makes my brain hurt.

The foreboding message on the answering machine was, “I’m with the Secret Service. Please call me at….” Since I created the problem, not my lovely wife, I agreed to call them back. They told me the bill was good, but they wanted to know where she got it. I fessed up and told her she got it from me, and that the reason it showed up as bad was because I had starched it. She asked me why I did that. I told her it was all wrinkly and I wanted it to be nice and crisp.

(Note added 14 June 2004: *sigh*  It’s not me, folks, that’s why it’s in a blockquote and why there’s a link to someone else’s site.  Note the hyperlink on the text “wanted it to be nice and crisp” — that will take you to the full story.)

On another topic, thanks for the people who have let me know that the menu of links is not working. For some reason SSI are not working on the new system; I haven’t figured it out yet. Any experts among my readers want to review my Apache 2.0 httpd.conf?

(Fixed.  Gee, it helps if I’m editing the right httpd.conf, doesn’t it?)