Obtainium

…in case [Diet] Mountain Dew Code Red doesn’t give you enough of a lift in the morning…

If you’re actually checking here for updates, I guess you’ve noticed none recently. This is due to Cybertel billing week – where I shuffle data for a week to try to get the bills to come out right. That and the holiday weekend (on Friday, I straightened up the servers at the office, on Saturday I cleaned my garage!). In any case, more rants to come soon.

Today at work we were discussing the phonetic alphabet to use when spelling things out over the phone. The one I’m used to is (I’ve learned) NATO standard from 1954:

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu

But there are others used by police, military, etc. The linked article gives some interesting history. You may prefer, for example, to use RAF 1942-43:

Apple Beer Charlie Dog Edward Freddy George Harry Ink
Jug/Johnny King Love Mother Nuts Orange Peter Queen
Roger/Robert Suga Tommy Uncle Vic William X-ray Yoke/Yorker
Zebra

…or Esperanto:

Asfalto Barbaro Centimetro Doktoro Elemento Fabriko Girafo Hotelo Insekto Jubileo Kilogramo Legendo Masino Naturo Oktobro Papero Rekordo Salato Triumfo Universo Universo-hoko Vulkano Zinko

Happy Ward Cleaver Day! (Today’s the day we get to say goodbye to June, with the traditional incantaion: “Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night”!)

In case Diet Mountain Dew wasn’t vile enough for you,

-it tastes like Hawaiian Punch (which I guess is okay if you like that sort of thing; not sure if I can make it through two liters worth, tho).
-it’s got just as much caffeine as regular Mountain Dew. Get jittery wi’ it.

Last night I helped a friend recover his Mac after a system crash. (**)It happens – in this case probably due to a USB problem and OS 9.2 getting corrupted. DON’T UNPLUG USB DEVICES WHILE THEY’RE RUNNING.

But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about. To recover, I used “Firewire disk mode” which is useful for this as well as just plain data transfers.

0. Get 2 relatively recent Macs, with Firewire connections. If you don’t have one, both the new iBook and the new iMac are amazing and (relatively) inexpensive.
1. Get a firewire cable. This needs to be a cable with two “big” ends (camera cables have one “big” and one “small” end so that won’t work). These are expensive, like $30, but worth it. If you have an iPod (…you lucky sod) this is the same cable.
2. Shut down the “target” machine. Doesn’t really matter which, but in general it’s the machine you want to copy “from”. Connect the Firewire cable between the two machines.
3. Start the target machine while holding down its ‘T’ key. You should see a big ‘Y’ shaped symbol come up. On the other machine, the target’s hard drive should appear (on the desktop).
4. Copy away. Copies over firewire are a LOT faster (between 4x and 40x) than over ethernet.
99. When done, “throw away” the firewire drive on the main machine (drag it to the trash and don’t give me any guff about that, I didn’t invent it). Then shut down the “target” by its power button.

By the way, USB 2.0 sucks. Just take my word for it. And it isn’t any faster, it just claims to be. Poor solution looking for a problem.

(From Slashdot, natch:)

“random() only returns 666 if you use a demon seed!”

(as well as…)

“Today’s Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e!”

It’s about time, although not necessarily for the reason I would have used.

For the first time ever, a federal appeals court Wednesday declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of the words “under God” added by Congress in 1954.

Although I agree with the court’s ruling, my complaint here has always been with the LOCATION of the added phrase. When spoken, “…one nation, under God, indivisible..” becomes “..one nation under God indivisible…”; indivisible sounds like it’s modifying God (God is indivisible?) and takes away from the original meaning, one nation indivisible (which you may recall was the subject of the Civil War).

(P.S. Speaking of which, the annoying neighbors have a U.S. flag in front of their house – with a Harley-Davidson on it.)

When I registered obtainium.org I decided to grab obtainium.net while I was at it. So the other day I got email from a Burning Man person who wanted to set up a place to trade stuff, and wanted to know, since obtainium.net wasn’t being used… See if you can figure out the self-reference here.

So check it out; they’re still working on graphics and setup and all. One of the first “real” messages to post was this morning: Looking for Rebar in All the Wrong Places.

Listening to KPBS on the way in to work this morning they were talking about a new “Paid Family and Medical Leave Act” that’s “working its way through” the California legislature at the moment. For only $40/year, shared between employees and employers, we may get some portion of our pay back if we take leave to assist a sick family member. (http://www.equalrights.org/legislat/sb1661.htm)

Just what we need, another tax. Call me a raving Libertarian (I generally consider myself a liberal Libertarian, or perhaps an anarchocapitalist) but I think that the government already takes way too much of my income away for questionable schemes. Why aren’t the politicians working on ways to reduce our tax load (easy answer, because money==power, and the more taxes, the larger the government, the more powerful the politicians).

I know taxes can’t be eliminated, and I have some pet projects of my own – I think the government should pay for NPR, sidewalks, efficient public transportation, and basic health care for the poor (because that costs us less than having them use the emergency facilities). And condoms for whoever wants them but can’t afford them (which costs a LOT less than the alternative).

People seem to think that businesses are there just to provide them with benefits and somewhere to sit around surfing the internet all day – when in reality, every employee has to EARN about 150% of their salary, just for a business to keep the doors open. I took a single day last month for jury duty (to sit there and not be selected) – I got a check from CA for $1.50, and it probably cost my employer $150 to have me gone (assuming there weren’t any major crises that day).

But there’s way way too much money being taken out of our pockets to pay for things like sports stadiums (tax everyone to support the super-wealthy?), wildly overpriced electrical power contracts, and bombing the poor in countries on the other side of the world – any yet when we’re forced to overpay income taxes, people think they’re being given a gift when they get a little bit of it refunded the next year.