4-ways

update: I finished wiring this up. Revised wiring diagrams can be found here.

I recently discovered the 4 way. Unfortunately, I mean the light switch instead of something more nudity based. And suddenly I'm wondering how many people it takes to go from a numbered amount of people (i.e. 3-some, 4-some, etc) to an orgy. Mind you, I still find a two-some pretty exotic. But do you have to lose count of the number of people? Does an orgy become a 20-way if someone does a head count... er, cranium count? Is this totally off topic? Yes it is.

If you're wiring up two switches for a light you need a couple of 3-way switches. For more switches you need a 4-way switch.

The way a 4-way switch works is that you have 4 wires attached much like you see in the picture below. There's really a 5th wire, but we're ignoring the ground wire for today's purposes. With the switch one way the current goes across like you see on the left. With the switch the other way, the current crosses over.

Norman's house had an arrangement with two switches and a light at the top of the stairs. We're rewiring that and adding another light down the hall from the first and a switch by that light. To do that we need to wire things up like you see below. 

This next bit shows all the possibly arrangements of these three switches. Green means lights on and red means lights off. So there's no way that I couldn't flip a switch and toggle the two lights in the hall at the top of the stairs. 

You can add a 4th switch by adding even more 4-way switches to the middle of the series of switches. You can have however many switches you want so long as the ones in the middle are all 4 way and 3 way switches cap the ends. Go ahead. Doodle it out. I dare you. 

And no lights go between switches without making things difficult. They all have to go on one side of the power supply or the other.

That seems perfectly simple enough, but what we seem to have already in place in the house is this. 

The power source is unknown. I've run a new for our lights, but the original power source is lost in limbo somewhere. From what I can see, there's a 3-way switch at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top is a 4-way that they're treating like a 3-way, with the 4th wire running off to power other parts of the house. But it doesn't cut off power to anything when the stair lights are on. So I'm really not sure what's going on. But I'm closer than I was two weeks ago.

Pressure treated

Home Depot had a clearance sale on girlfriends with crap jobs.

Friday Links: February 22

Lame week for links. Well there are children in Africa who don't have links at all! You'll click what you have and like it!

Netflix uses the Konami code to reset their software on most devices. [link]

Doctors tend to die differently. CPR is only successful 8% of the time. [link]

The Exxon Valdez was recently grounded for dismantling. [link]
Exxon still hasn't paid what the courts required of them for restitution of damages done to the livelyhood of the locals. 

Antidepressants make shrimp suicidal. [link]

What English sounds like to people who don't speak it. This song was written by Italians to sound like English being spoken by Americans. The lyrics are nonsense. [link]

A car got stuck at 125mph for an hour. [link]

Cats have always walked over our work. [link]

"Tattooing" apples. [link]

People coming home from a miserable trip on a broken down cruise ship suffered broken down busses and planes. [link]

FDA OKs artificial eyes. [link]

A 35 minute documentary about a drug that makes you act normal while making you completely suggestible. You'll do anything you're told.


More crows playing in the snow.


Patrick Stewart lost his hair when he was 19.

Sod Off Day: Violence Against Women Act

The Senate repassed the Violence Against Women Act last week. Here's the 22 people who voted against it. No surprise, 100% were Republicans.

1. John Barrasso (R-WY)
2. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
3. John Boozman (R-AR)
4. Tom Coburn (R-OK)
5. John Cornyn (R-TX)
6. Mike Enzi (R-WY)
7. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
8. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
9. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
10. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
11. Mike Johanns (R-NE)
12. Ron Johnson (R-WI)
13. Mike Lee (R-UT)
14. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
15. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
16. Rand Paul (R-KY)
17. Jim Risch (R-ID)
18. Pat Roberts (R-KS)
19. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
20. Tim Scott (R-SC)
21. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
22. John Thune (R-SD)

Right now it looks like John Boehner won't even let it come up for a vote in the House.

Book review: The Homebrewer's Garden

I haven't mentioned that I've gotten into home brewing. It's the sort of thing that needs pictures and they're all on the wrong cameras. This weekend Yummy and I were picking up the supplies for our third batch. In the book section at Maryland Homebrew Yummy found The Homebrewer's Garden. Yummy is a gardener and I'm a home brewer so this book is just up our alley.

The first section talks about hops, how to grow it, and when to harvest it. I've got hops growing up the front of my house. This summer will be it's third year. I'm gonna try moving it to somewhere it gets less barbecued and hopefully it'll yield fruit this year. Now I have a better idea what to look for.

The next section is the one that really interested us. Its a list of herbs and spices and other plants that you might be able grow or forage and shove in a brew. Many of which can be used to replace hops completely. More than just listing plants and telling you what areas they grow well, this book also gives you some useful notes as to how much to use and when to use it for what effect. Lots of things can be added in secondary fermentation to add a certain odor. Many things are more effective when dry than fresh. Other things never dry well. Some things we'd been considering because we'd never seen it done before and we got a recommended dosage. And in the descriptions we got ideas for some other brews.

So Yummy is going to start a bunch of things this spring and see what we can use as we level up and start making some more original recipes. I'll see about posting results of our first brews and whatever we plant in the spring.

A drunk driving hazard

Seen in a drugs and alcohol safety quiz taken recently.
I wouldn't have thought of the third one as a drunk driving hazard. Driving while drunk, sure. Drunk dialing an ex, yep. Driving while on the phone, totally. All three together seems weird.

Friday Links: February 15

An abandoned Star Wars set from The Phantom Menace is now the home to a handful of squatters.


Defamation of pit bulls. [link]

Coffee foam art. [link]

A planing competition.


Burrowing owls.


Sir Patrick Stewart talking about domestic abuse in his own home growing up.


Spiderman appearance in old X-Men movie.


Employers should try to accomodate employees' scheduling needs. It shouldn't, however, be a demanded right. [link]

Mosquitoes survive rain by riding the droplets. [link]

An illustrated story of a Hiroshima survivor. [link]

Animations of blast force from the Tunguska impact. [link]
Try not to think about what's buzzing the Earth this afternoon.

Gold veins comes from bacteria deposits, not (just) geological activity. [link]
Can I borrow some? I have a few hundred CDs that I'd like to get the gold out of. 

Laws needed as robots improve. [link]

Zombie attack in Montana.


Mario Brothers/Ghostbusters crossover.


McDonalds is applying for it's own internet domain suffix. [link]

Litter plugs: Garbage where it shouldn't be, but may not actually be littering. [link]

19 maps to put the United States in perspective. [link]

If only I lived in the same town where I worked... [link]
...then I'd still be driving my Segway.

A kid to developed a new way of detecting certain cancers. [link]

A movie by CleverBot.


The Lorax being projected into falling snow.


Aerogel: A super lightweight insulation developed by NASA to catch particles blowing off of comets. I saw it being used for window insulation in a Solar Decathlon house.


The adventures of Florida Man. [link]

The man who shot Bin Laden struggles to make ends meet. [link]

Why Popes resign. [link]

Drag lines around on a globe and watch them change on a map. [line]
The math required really messed with my head back in Fortran.

What Netflix learns from it's viewers. [link]

50 states with equal populations. [link]
Wichita has enough issues. Don't lump them in with Oklahoma!

Hospitals can't tell you what a new hip costs. [link]

What to do if you find a duffel bag of drugs in your back yard. [link]

The complete HP Lovecraft for your eReader. [link]
Have I posted this before or was that another author?

Satellite photos of an American drone base in Saudi Arabia. [link]

Game: Killbot - you're a killer robot that's escaping from it's factory and collecting stars for some reason. [link]

Chrome Task Manager

If you surf like me you have dozens of browser windows and tabs open at the same time. This can eat your memory and leave you with little to anything productive with. I originally used the Activity Monitor on the Mac to shut down memory hogging pages. The pages would remain open and remember where they were supposed to go, but the contents would go away until I hit reload. But it wouldn't tell me which page I was killing. I just had to cross my fingers and hope that it wasn't one I was using.

Several months back I found out about the Task Manager built into the Chrome web browser. You can find it by either going to Window>Task Manager or going to the button with the three horizontal lines to the right of the address bar, clicking Tools>Task Manager. Then sort the contents by Memory. Now you can see what pages are memory hogs and kill them until you're ready to finish looking at that page. I can leave tabs open for weeks until I find the time to read that article. I'm often surprised at how apparently simple pages are sucking down hundreds of megabytes of memory. Now you can be too.

Friendzone

I've seen a recent increase in posts about the friend zone. Probably due to Valentine's Day pending. Sometimes the woman gets blamed because she gripes about how she can't find good guys when there's one right there that she refuses to date. Sometimes the guy gets blamed because he should have let her know up front that he wants her. Less often the guy gets yelled at for only being a nice guy in order to get her to sleep with him and then stopping when she won't date him.

I want to address one of the unmentioned scenarios. Some guys don't fall for someone right away. Some guys need time to get to know the person first. One night stands are out of the question because that guy needs months, not minutes to connect with a woman. So by the time he's thinking of her romantically she's got him locked away in the friend zone. I know I can't work in the current dating climate where the woman assumes you're not interested in her if you haven't had sex by the third date.

Why does it take so long to make that connection? Sometimes it's because his heart dominates his hormones. That is unless she's actually naked and rubbing on him. I had a woman pin me to the wall with her hips and read my homework in a dirty manner and I still missed the clue. She was such a flirt with everyone that I didn't take her seriously when she flirted with me. When she told me she was actually interested she was already with someone else.

Sometimes it takes months to bring the emotional walls down. Years of humiliation and rejection have left an otherwise confident man a quivering mass of psychological goo when there's a woman of interest. And it may not even be humiliation of the guy. Even the rumor that I was interested in a girl between 6th and 12th grades brought down such teasing and abuse down on her that the best way to show my affection for a girl was to stay well away from her. Mind you, getting that kind of reaction even when you're not interested is humiliation by itself.

It can take the guy months of hanging out with a woman to view her romantically. Sometimes there's emotional damage to overcome before he can trust her enough to look at her that way. Sometimes he's looking for love and a connection instead of just lust. But the first reaction isn't "dude, I'd totally bang you" which is, apparently, the appropriate reaction for any woman that you may, someday, possibly want to date.

Then, when the guy discovers he likes her, works up the nerve to ask her out, and gets rejected he may turn hostile. It doesn't mean he was only being nice to get on her good side. It means he's been hurt. Again. He's lashing out. And she knows she hurt him. She gets upset that he's upset at her. She wasn't leading him on or anything. Don't be mad at her for not returning your feelings. She's yelling at him for only pretending to be nice because she feels he's blaming her. The reactions on both sides are out of line, but understandable.



Luckily, I'm dating someone now and don't have to worry about it anymore.

Old wiring

We spent this past weekend at Norman's House, a recent acquisition that we plan to rent out after some modest renovation. The good news is that the house isn't haunted. The bad news is that the wiring covers multiple generations. At least some of the wiring is covered in plastic instead of fabric. That makes me happy. Most, but not all, of the wiring coming from the circuit breaker is plastic coated and colored somehow. By the time it reaches the second floor the only plastic stuff is from where someone decided "You know what this room needs? A light switch!" and added one. 

What you see below is what I've figured out about the wiring upstairs. Black lines are all upstairs. Red lines are in the basement. Pinkish lines are there, but not really important to the task at hand. Remember, these old wires are single wires, not the bundles of 3 or more you can expect, today. 

I don't know where the power is coming from! Two wires go into the wall from the basement and probably go to that switch at the bottom of the stairs. But only one wire comes out. THAT'S NOT HOW ELECTRICITY WORKS!!! Maybe in the back of the house? But... then what's going on with the two switches and the hall light? And, really, that needs to be a three-way switch with one at the bottom of the stairs, one at the top, and one at the far end of the hallway.

I'm getting close to just saying "gee, that's interesting. Now it all needs to go away and something sensible take it's place." I'm only being held back by the fear of mystery wires coming up with unexpected loads in unwanted places. Most of the work needs to be done between the roof and second floor ceilings. The diagram reflects lights in the front half of the house. Beyond that I need the skinny, 12 year old version of myself to crawl back there.

Anyone know of a particularly nifty circuit panel? This one is of a brand known for not flipping when it should. That's kind of the opposite of the problem we've been having, but whatever. The company has been out of business for awhile now. And I've seen some nifty light up panels with LEDs and stuff in recent years. No idea how to find them, though. "Awesome staircases" is a productive search. "Awesome electrical circuit panels"... less so.

How refrigerators work

I've tried explaining to myself and others how refrigerators work before. I kinda understood. I get the bit about using freon to absorb the heat on the inside and shed the heat on the outside. And I knew there was some compression involved. I wasn't sure how that worked though.

Also known - asteroids heat up on atmospheric entry due to atmospheric compression.

I finally started making some connections after exchanging some e-mails with the XKCD guy. He didn't really explain it, but in trying to phrase my follow up question it started to click. Here's what I've got.

Hot air (or other objects) expands. Cold air (see previous parenthesis) contracts. Well established back in science class. Heat goes in and it gets bigger. Cold goes in and it gets smaller. But cold doesn't really go in. We just make it easier for heat to come out.

So, take a quantity of air and compress it. Being forced to contract, the air gets colder. It's heat must be shed so the container gets warm. In the case of an asteroid, the air can't move out of the way fast enough, it gets compressed, and sheds it's heat into the asteroid.

Take a can of compressed air and fire it at something. That something tends to get cold. As the air  comes out it expands it wants it's heat back. It's heat was stolen when it was put into that can. You thought it forgot about that? All those years, locked away in a cell, it's been planning... plotting it's revenge. It wants it's heat back! And it doesn't want to hear about how you used it to start that diner outside of Boston!

I may be drifting from my point a bit.

The air pulls the heat from it's surroundings. So the hand, the electronics, the guy you're having an air can war with, get colder and can get condensation or even frost.

So what does this have to do with the refrigerator? Well, whatever is being pumped through the tubes decompresses in the tubes inside the fridge. It needs heat for this so that heat is pulled out of the fridge and the food. It then gets pumped to tubes outside the fridge where pumps smoosh it all back into a tight space so it sheds the heat into the kitchen.

Air or water or something else could be used, but someone did research that found that freon was pretty good at being expanded and contracted a lot and pushing heat energy around. It's also really good at destroying ozone.

This seems sound to me, but I admit I have trouble figuring out good ideas from bad sometimes.

Friday Links: February 8

Movie directing bear.


Acting like Superman can make you behave more like Superman. [link]

Gangnam Style flip book. [link]

Find Momo the dog in these pictures. [link]

Huh. Those galaxies shouldn't be moving like that. [link]

Game: Mercator Puzzle - where do these countries go on a skewed Mercator map? [link]

Women can carry injured soldiers just fine. [link]

The meanings behind some nursery rhymes. [link]
Some of the meanings are just rubbish. Not sure why they bothered to include them.

Homeless guy and his cat. [link]

Strange inventions. [link]

Songs written about their record labels. [link]

American carbon emission are actually falling. [link]

How to find a stolen car. [link]

AIDS resistance through constant exposure. [link]

360° volcano flyover video. [link]

How to provoke mild interest in your cat for a few minutes.


Dinosaurs had appropriately sized fleas. [link]

Bobby Jindal says the smartest thing from a Republican mouth in decades. [link]

Al Capone came up with milk bottle dating. [link]

Things are getting better for the really poor. [link]

Jeremy Clarkson designed a new "world's tiniest car". It has issues if you want to go in real traffic. [link]

Several old flying cars. [link]

Idaho Senator has introduced legislation requiring all Idaho high school students to read "Atlas Shrugged". [link]

How Coke makes orange juice. [link]

Hacked video games in Nairobi. [link]

Disney has plans for stand alone Star Wars movies besides continuing the saga. Here's one of their planned movies. [link]

New proposed federal marijuana legalization. [link]

Webcam for space stuff. [link]
Tune in Thursday Friday afternoon to watch the asteroid that's zipping inside geosynchronous orbit. 

Sod Off Mac and Cheese

Being back on a budget diet has brought mac and cheese back into my life. The first stuff I picked up came with pre-made cheese sauce. No having to mix milk and butter with a strange yellow powder. So much easier, right? Yes. But it tastes like ass. Obviously you don't have to add all of the sauce to the pasta. But figuring out how much to use is like trying to find the right temperature in the shower. Between boiling and freezing is about 0.25° of just right. Similarly, mac and cheese with pre-made sauce has a very fine line between pasta that once heard his uncle tell of cheese sauce and pasta with ass. The problem being that, unlike a shower, once you've gone too far you can't come back. It's lame... lame... lame... lame... ass... more ass... additional ass... rap video.

So sod off Kraft. I'm only going to eat this other stuff that's also by Kraft.

Note: any mac and cheese from Whole Foods is 100% pure rectum.

Ben's Chili Bowl

In the past I've been somewhat critical of the chili at Ben's Chili Bowl. I changed my mind the other day.

For those of you who don't know, Ben's Chili Bowl is a historical restaurant here in Washington, DC. It boasts everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr, Bill Cosby, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Donny Hathaway, Roy Ayers, Chris Tucker, Bono, Ted Koppel, President Obama, and untold numbers of politicians from America and overseas. It was a popular hub of activity during the civil rights movement. After MLK got assassinated Ben's got permission to stay open past curfew to feed the cops, firemen, and peaceful black activists. During the bad times that followed, police used the upstairs to monitor area drug dealers. I don't know where I'd heard of it, but it was one of two DC restaurants that I knew about when I moved here. Not by name, but by appearance.

I tried eating there a few times over the years. I found the chili to taste burnt and usually gave me a stomach ache. But, when my brother was here last week he had to eat there. It was really crazy cold while he was here. So, naturally, chili was needed. And, I have to admit, it was pretty good. Since Ben's death a couple of years ago his sons have opened up Ben's Next Door for more formal dining. I'm guessing they may have tweeked the chili recipe, too. I like it a lot more and, finances willing, I'll eat there more often.

Finances

I've been called tight with money. My grandparents on both sides of my family had farms that managed to survive the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. You can't do that while being free with your money. And you could see that mindset in them clear to their final days. Grammie had money, but she insisted we rent out the farm house so she'd have money to cover assisted living. Grandma did much the same thing. Every two years she'd buy a new car, always the same car, but that was her one frivolous expense. When cleaning out her house we kept finding rolls of cash and cans of coins stuffed in the backs of closets and the bottoms of boxes.

My parents aren't as bad, but they keep an eye on their money, invest wisely, and live simply. Living on a farm does help since you can hold on to scrap wood and metal without being called a hoarder. If you saw my house you'd see that I could totally use a barn.

My current job has allowed me to live less cheaply than I find advisable. It pays well enough that I could eat out most days, see movies whenever, and still pack away a good amount of money. But a few months back I took out a second loan. The first was for my mortgage. The second was for the purchase and repair of a couple of houses in Baltimore. And I could afford it. Then the government cut my pay significantly when I switched from a contract employee to a government employee. It took me a couple of months, but I did see that my bank account was heading the wrong direction.

I changed my spending habits immediately. I went back to my college eating habits. I contacted the charities I give to and started trying to end my monthly contributions. I tried to cut my phone bill (I can save $50/month, but Yummy would then have to pay an extra $100). I considered cutting off my internet, but that would significantly increase my fuel and car repair expenses since I'd have to go to work every day. I'll be stopping my homemade beer making until I can get positive numbers again. The video game store will miss me. The book store will miss me, too, but I have a few years of reading left to me even if I were to retire today.

I have enough tucked here and there that I can go on for awhile spending like I was. But I think that at this time next month I'll be coming out ahead again.

In the meantime, we're making progress on Norman's House again. Some more money has to go into it, but it should be mostly our own labor. Hopefully, we'll be putting it up for rent in a few months and it can start handling it's own debt load. The Annapolis Bog, alas, won't be able to do that for a few years. But once the current work is done I'll have a storage locker the size of... a barn!

My parents have told me they're willing to help out, but I'm trying to avoid that unless it's really necessary. Even with my cut pay I'm making enough that I should be able to pay all my own bills. I'm just annoyed that I won't be able to help out if my brother goes for his much needed bigger farm equipment in the next few months.

Friday Links: February 1

Game: Fractured - a short game where the gaming screen has been broken into pieces. You must navigate the character around to his poetry speaking ghost mother despite. [link]
If you can't see the "Play Now" button try this. [link]

Some women can see more colors. [link]

Glenn Beck has been playing too much Bioshock when what he needs is electroshock. [link]

Mars may have tectonic plates. [link]

Cool Things to Find: a Mars Rover take on "Dumb Ways to Die".


Coffee and mold. [link]

Benedict Cumberbatch got kidnapped... briefly. [link]

Tractor beam technology scales up from molecules to the merely microscopic. [link]

Boy saves sister from a moose using World of Warcraft skills. [link]
A moose once bit my sister.

Ozzy Osborne is a freak. Even on a genetic level. [link]

In a surprising twist, laboratory mice didn't get cancer. Instead they got younger. [link]

Bacteria and viruses make us sick. But other things can make them sick. I knew about bacteriophages. Virophages are relatively new. [link]

Cheerios really are full of iron!


Johnny Depp doesn't watch his own movies.


Castles for sale. [link]

Prohibited license plates. [link]
I haven't read it yet because it's crazy long, but I've heard good things.

Goat cheese burns. A truckload of it closes tunnels. [link]

Building a moon landing practice field. [link]

Theists ask me, “If there’s no god, what would stop me from raping and killing everyone I want to.” My answer is always: “I, myself, have raped and killed everyone I want to ... and the number for both is zero.” [link]

A child who plays with the beasts of Africa. [link]

Women being allowed into combat is technical correction making policy match reality. [link]

What causes things to smell? [link]

A Russian family with no outside contact for 40 years. [link]

Ultimate Tag. [link]

Fox News ratings hitting record lows. [link]

Five things politicians aren't likely to admit to. [link]

The Washington Post's "Truth Teller" software (beta). [link]

Tentacle plunger! [link]

Apparently J.J. Abrams now has control of Star Trek AND Star Wars. [find your own link]

How Newegg took down a major patent troll. [link]

A lion vs a remote controlled car.

I haz flu

go away. I'm sick.

Friday Links: January 25

15 Scientology revelations. [link]

Exercise myths. [link]

The worst poet on Earth, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, really existed. [link]

Ask a Mortician. [link]

Crows playing in the snow. [link]

A project to restore the Enterprise-D bridge. [link]

Human sense beyond the normal 5. [link]

Kim Stanley Robinson was right in his Mars Trilogy. Lichens and cyanobacteria can survive on Mars. Only we don't need to do any engineering first. [link]
Now back to the question of whether we should go ahead and dump some on Mars or not.

Some Civil War soldiers had glowing wounds. The glowing bacteria in those wounds may have saved their lives. [link]

Garbage disposals don't work how you think.


5 real life Rambos. [link]

An experiment in domestication through breeding of silver foxes.


The thawing of a 10 story freezer building.


Removal of wisdom teeth is unnecessary. [link]

"The Turret Anthem" starring Portal 2 turrets.


Glee steals Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back" and may be legally allowed to do so. [link 1] [link 2]

The business cards of famous people. [link]

A letter from cartoonist Linda Barry to her students. [link]

Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents. [link]
I may even do a normal post on this article. High school will fuck you up.

a^2 + b^2 = c^2

Does this help you understand what your math teacher was saying? Mine pretty much just said "just use the fucking equation. It's just works. Alright?"

Mold

Found on a wall in the Annapolis Bog. It's mold.

Norman's house

I bought a couple of houses in Baltimore. I call one "Annapolis Bog" because it's on Annapolis Road and it's so wet inside that there's nothing organic that can be salvaged. The other is Norman's House because I bought it after it's previous owner, Norman, passed away. Today I'm talking about Norman's house.

The house always needed some work. It's livable, but not great. I'm not going for great. I'm going for rentable. I already had one contractor do some work. It was clear that his heart wasn't in it. I was intending to use him for the gutting of Annapolis Bog, but he's not seeing a dime now.

One of the strange things about that place is the wood panelling over the walls. Judging from the materials it was probably put up in the 70's. I'm assuming that's when the drop ceiling went in, too. Pure class that Norman.

We picked one room and decided to see what was under the wood panelling and what was above the drop ceiling. We figured we'd pull it down, remove the wallpaper we knew was underneath, and repaint. We were fools.

Yesterday we attacked a room. Different from the one we intended. The intended room has a new gypsum board ceiling that effectively prevents us from removing that panelling without lots of careful knife work. This new room had a known problem with the ceiling light. Namely that it was attached to an extra cheap drop ceiling panel instead of the framework for the panelling. This highly flexible panelling can't really support the weight of the light on it's own so it sags significantly. To get a better look, I climbed up the ladder that Norman so graciously left us with the house and pulled down one of the panels. With it came a bunch of plaster and wallpaper. The ceiling above the ceiling was collapsing.

We refocused on our original task. Take down the wood panelling. And it came down pretty easily once we took out the plastic, faux-wood moulding... and the rest of the drop ceiling. These super-cheap ceiling panels have the advantage that they don't break if you try to move them like more traditional ceiling panels do. They came right down and did so in a condition that means I could put them back up if I chose. And even though they don't support light fixtures, they do, apparently, support crumbling plaster.

I dismantled the drop ceiling framework while Yummy started pulling loose wood panelling. When the framework came away from the walls the wood panels came down easily. That exposed beams attached to old plaster walls. Along the interior wall that plaster had kind of a falling out with the lath it covered. Falling out? Maybe a falling off. This wall we intended to repaint became, with minimal encouragement, a pile of rocky debris on the floor.

The ceiling soon joined it. Hey, it's a lath ceiling with holes in it. Why should we try to keep it? Yummy discovered the joy of playing the top of the lath like a xylophone and watching it fall away. She also realized that a determined person with a hammer can level a house in just a few hours.

Above that ceiling was a horrible mix of modern wiring and the original knob and tube wiring that the house was built with. We can also see enough of it now that we can start rewiring. Particularly since we now have a Jeffries Tube running over all the rooms. What? It's easier to convince a geek to crawl around in the Smurf sized attic and run wire if you use Star Trek terms.

Of course, after about 5 hours of work we found ourselves in a room full of partially exposed brick, bare wires, visible studs, and shin deep debris. Contractor bags are handy, but we could use some smaller ones. Start throwing debris in those bags and you've barely gotten started when you have an 80 lb bag of rocks. The wood performs better. It makes for a more impressive bag... of tetanus. But at least those nails aren't going in the bottoms of your shoes anymore. My demonstration of that hazard convinced Yummy she needed to change shoes.

We didn't get the room completely cleaned up. With the ceiling light gone we were dependent on daylight. It's January. Sunset is around noon. We went home, Yummy looking like coal miner, my hair feeling like a cast on my skull.

Inauguration Day

There's some kind of big to-do down near the Capitol Building. It means I don't have to go to work. And gives me an excuse not to have to come up with something to write today.

Saturday Links: January 19

A parrot with it's own car.


The happiest animal in the world. [link]
Sort of the opposite of Tard (a.k.a. Grumpy Cat)

Why the high frame rate version of "The Hobbit" looks weird. [link]

A man takes his elderly, arthritic dog out into the lake for several hours a day so it can sleep. [link]

The most expensive copy of Star Wars. [link]

A good way to get yourself killed.


The White House responds to a petition to build a Death Star. [link]
Be sure to look at the URL.

Remember the tales of a possibly Star Wars live action TV series? There are 50 hours worth of scripts written. They were considered too expensive to film. Disney isn't opposed to the idea of the series. So it's not dead yet. [link]

Dubstep birdie.


Oh! So this is the Australian dust storm I keep hearing about! [link]

Video demonstration of a hover drone aboard the ISS. I'd been wondering what happened since I first saw them 10 years ago or so. [link]
Now we can interrogate the princess about the location of the rebel base.

Those who are spiritual, but not religious have more mental issues. [link]
What? I didn't say anything!

Cable TV to shrink for the first time in it's history. [link]
And don't you wish you could see my 'in your face' dance?

Morgan Freeman narrates Morgan Freeman really true facts. [link]

What Dr. Seuss meant. [link]

What the Huygens Probe saw on the way down to Titan (a moon of Saturn).


Man receives threats for helping 6 kids not killed at Shady Hook. [link]

Obama's plan to reduce gun violence. [link] [better list?]
Remember: Almost all this must be done by acts of Congress. I know a lot of people are freaking out and claiming Obama did it already. No, there will be a war in Congress to get the real stuff done. And even disaster relief is hard to pass. The executive orders are mostly about research and enforcement of existing laws. 

More about the research Executive Order. [link]

General suggestion list.

The special calendar event for 2013. [link]

Old flu treatments. [link]
Ah, the hypo-spray. One area where Star Trek was wrong.

Who is the NRA? These guys. [link]

A dollhouse... with a fallout shelter. [link]

Are you crying!? There's no crying in space! [link]

Great laser cut paper windows. link

OK. I'm done. The rest of these require real reading.

Friday Links: so sorry

No Friday Links. There may be a Saturday Links tomorrow. No promises, though.

H.R. 152

At long last Congress voted for and passed a bill providing victims of Hurricane Sandy some aid. Much, much, slower than aid for... well, pretty much any other disaster. But there was opposition to providing the people of New York and New Jersey with aid. "Sure, their homes and jobs were destroyed and they're homeless and penniless. Big deal." they say. Who could be so heartless?


Alabama
Roby, Martha
Rogers, Mike
Aderholt, Robert
Brooks, Mo

Arkansas
Griffin, Tim
Womack, Steve
Cotton, Tom

California
LaMalfa, Doug
McClintock, Tom
Cook, Paul
Miller, Gary
Royce, Ed
Calvert, Ken
Rohrabacher, Dana
Issa, Darrell
Hunter, Duncan

Colorado
Tipton, Scott
Gardner, Cory
Lamborn, Doug
Coffman, Mike

Florida
Miller, Jeff
Southerland, Steve
Yoho, Ted
DeSantis, Ron
Mica, John
Posey, Bill
Webster, Daniel
Nugent, Richard
Bilirakis, Gus
Ross, Dennis
Buchanan, Vern
Rooney, Thomas
Radel, Trey

Georgia
Westmoreland, Lynn
Price, Tom
Woodall, Rob
Scott, Austin
Collins, Doug
Broun, Paul
Gingrey, Phil
Graves, Tom

Iowa
Latham, Tom
King, Steve

Idaho
Labrador, Raúl
Simpson, Mike

Illinois
Roskam, Peter
Hultgren, Randy
Kinzinger, Adam
Schock, Aaron

Indiana
Walorski, Jackie
Stutzman, Marlin
Rokita, Todd
Brooks, Susan
Messer, Luke
Bucshon, Larry

Kansas
Huelskamp, Tim
Jenkins, Lynn
Yoder, Kevin
Pompeo, Mike

Kentucky
Guthrie, Brett
Massie, Thomas
Barr, Andy

Louisiana
Scalise, Steve
Fleming, John
Cassidy, Bill

Maryland
Harris, Andy

Michigan
Benishek, Dan
Huizenga, Bill
Amash, Justin
Camp, Dave
Upton, Fred
Walberg, Tim
Rogers, Mike
Miller, Candice
Bentivolio, Kerry

Minnesota
Kline, John
Paulsen, Erik
Bachmann, Michele

Missouri
Wagner, Ann
Luetkemeyer, Blaine
Hartzler, Vicky
Graves, Sam
Long, Billy

Mississippi
Nunnelee, Alan

Montana
Daines, Steve

North Carolina
Ellmers, Renee
Jones, Walter
Foxx, Virginia
Coble, Howard
Hudson, Richard
Pittenger, Robert
McHenry, Patrick
Meadows, Mark
Holding, George

Nebraska
Fortenberry, Jeff
Terry, Lee
Smith, Adrian

New Mexico
Pearce, Steve

Nevada
Amodei, Mark
Heck, Joseph

Ohio
Chabot, Steve
Wenstrup, Brad
Jordan, Jim
Latta, Robert
Johnson, Bill
Gibbs, Bob
Tiberi, Pat
Joyce, David
Stivers, Steve
Renacci, James

Oklahoma
Bridenstine, Jim
Mullin, Markwayne
Lucas, Frank
Cole, Tom
Lankford, James

Oregon
Walden, Greg

Pennsylvania
Kelly, Mike
Perry, Scott
Thompson, Glenn
Shuster, Bill
Rothfus, Keith
Pitts, Joseph
Murphy, Tim

South Carolina
Wilson, Joe
Duncan, Jeff
Gowdy, Trey
Mulvaney, Mick
Rice, Tom

South Dakota
Noem, Kristi

Tennessee
Roe, David
Duncan, John
Fleischmann, Chuck
DesJarlais, Scott
Cooper, Jim (The ONLY Democrat to oppose aid)
Black, Diane
Blackburn, Marsha
Fincher, Stephen

Texas
Gohmert, Louie
Poe, Ted
Johnson, Sam
Hall, Ralph
Hensarling, Jeb
Barton, Joe
Brady, Kevin
McCaul, Michael
Conaway, Michael
Granger, Kay
Thornberry, Mac
Weber, Randy
Flores, Bill
Neugebauer, Randy
Smith, Lamar
Olson, Pete
Marchant, Kenny
Williams, Roger
Burgess, Michael
Farenthold, Blake
Carter, John
Sessions, Pete
Stockman, Steve

Utah
Bishop, Rob
Stewart, Chris
Chaffetz, Jason

Virginia
Wittman, Robert
Rigell, Scott
Forbes, Randy
Hurt, Robert
Goodlatte, Bob
Griffith, Morgan

Washington
Hastings, Doc
McMorris Rodgers, Cathy

Wisconsin
Ryan, Paul
Sensenbrenner, James
Petri, Tom
Duffy, Sean
Ribble, Reid

Wyoming
Lummis, Cynthia

For a more detailed breakdown you can see the voting record at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h23.

Brad Meltzer

Tonight Brad Meltzer is signing his new book, "The Fifth Assassin", at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC. In this interview and this interview, the novelist and comic book writer talks about how his inspiration came from an invitation behind the scenes of a little known Army museum.

The museum in question is the National Museum of Health and Medicine, formerly of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And the invitation was offered by My Krodie, formerly Chief Archivist at the museum, collaborator on a few medical books with me, expert on the subject of cancer in comics, and long time victim of this blog's site feed.

My Krodie and I will be attending and getting books signed. Alas, I don't have any of Brad's comics. At least none that I can easily find.

Objective-C

I've worked in a lot of programming languages over the years. Some I taught to myself, some I took classes in, some I tutored others in, some I developed curriculum for.

Basic
   QBasic
   GW-Basic
   BASICA
   Apple Basic
   Atari Basic
MS-DOS Batch
Logo
Pascal
C
C++
KSH
CSH
BASH
Fortran
J++ (a.k.a. MS-Java)
HTML
Javascript
Lisp
AutoLisp
CNC G-code
ActionScript
Progress
WebSpeed
A couple of versions of some fax server language.
PHP
MySQL

I've even dabbled in COBOL and ColdFusion, but only deep enough to help others fix their code.

Right now I'm trying to learn Objective-C so I can write some iPad apps. This is proving to be the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. I'm used to my programs all belonging in one big file.
Declare stuff at the beginning.
Use it later.
Maybe call in a few libraries from somewhere else.
If you want to get really fancy you make multiple systems each with their own languages talk to each other.
With Objective-C you start with five different files that call several other libraries. Each Object you create adds two more files to the mix. And when you go looking for help in forums you can find code but have no idea where it's supposed to go. Or if you know, they haven't mentioned the line that needs to be added somewhere else. Nothing is only done in one place.
I find myself working with two books, an online reference library, and three different video tutors that I skip between with a fourth that claims it's downloading now. But none of these sources really answer my questions when I get in trouble. There's multiple ways you could do something, but then you have to know whether you refer to it by putting things in brackets or separating them with dots or what.
The error messages are more useful than "Error #652" or "Check Engine", but they often leaving me back at, "OK, there's a mystery line that has to go somewhere. I wonder where." or "look, you clearly understand what I'm trying to do. If you won't fix it can you point me to somewhere I can look the answer up?"

For Der Muffinmann

Der Muffinmann had an announcement while I was home this Christmas. He's going to have twins. I'm sure his wife helps some.

Friday Links: December 11

I'm trying to find space for one of these. [link]

Old cast iron pans can be interesting. [link]

Healthcare costs of obese people is now greater than that of smokers. [link]

Cats domesticated themselves. [link]

There's a limit to how many of certain British coins shop owners are required to take. [link]
That is, if you try to pay your electric bill all in pennies they don't have to take it. 

Almost half of federal prisoners held for drug crimes. [link]

Apple products that never were. [link]

Wood maps. [link]

Les Miserables apparently holds the Guinness world record for longest musical about a minor parole violation. [link]
I still plan to see it. I just liked the review. 

Instructions for drawing for King of the Hill. [link]

Dr. Oz is a quack. [link]

Calories aren't measured the way we were told in school. [link]

10 strange things in the 'fiscal cliff' bill. [link]

12 speeches that were never heard. [link]

this and then this

The best pickpocket in the world. [link]

Doc Brown was a Time Lord!


Honest movie posters from last year. [link]

Australia so hot that new colors were needed for the weather map. [link]

The next Kindle?


Curiosity proves it's a bit OCD as it tries to sweep a planet. [link]

Pics from the Centralia, PA. The town above a coal mine fire. [link]

More on the upcoming Justice League movie. [link]

Ever noticed the messed up priorities of the newspaper in Back to the Future 2? [link]

The corporation as carpool passenger case now moves to the next level of courts. [link]

Peter Hollens sings "Far Over the Misty Mountains".


Giant sperm spy craft. [link]

The Razzies

Academy Award nominations are out. The radio made damn sure I knew about it. That and Obama's new cabinet nominee. But the Academy Awards are stupid. You can usually figure out who is going to win by looking for the most boring, whiny, emotional movie they can find. I'll agree that "2001: A Space Odyssey" was a piece of great cinema, but it's also a great cure for insomnia. And they usually run along those line. I'm not going to argue for "The Hobbit" winning, but there's no way they needed to wait three movies for "Lord of the Rings" to finally win.

I'm much more interested in "The Razzies". They're the awards for worst movies of the year.
Looking at this list you'll see something of a pattern. Whoever put the list together was not a fan of Twilight movies. Or Battleship. Or Tyler Perry. Or the movie "That's My Boy". But there's some other stuff mixed in.
I don't think the nomination of Kristen Stewart for "Snow White and the Huntsman" is due to her being that Twilight chick. She really was an anchor that drug down what was otherwise a good movie. I'd have tried putting her and either one of the male leads in the Worst Couple list.
"Battleship" was not a good movie, but I think it would have had a better draw if they'd changed the name. For a movie whose whole premise was "we want to cash in on a Hasbro property. We're hiring you two to come up with a script." it could have been much worse. Or maybe I was expecting something truly horrible and was surprised when my eyes didn't start to bleed.
I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie. I really doubt that I ever will. If he didn't put his name at the front of everything he does I'd probably have no idea who he is. Why aren't there more black people in Hollywood? Because the ones they let in turn in to Tyler Perry or a Wayans brother.
I've seen the first three or four "Resident Evil" movies. I didn't pay for any of them.
"That's My Boy" is an Adam Sandler movie. That's all you really needed to know about it. It's possible I just don't "get" him. But more and more I'm beginning to think that drunken frat boys have stopped getting him either.

And the nominees are...

Worst Picture
Battleship
Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
That's My Boy!
A Thousand Words
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2

Worst Actress
Katherine Heigl
One For The Money

Milla Jovovich
Resident Evil #5: Retribution

Tyler Perry (In Drag)
Madea's Witless Protection

Kristen Stewart
Snow White and The Huntsman & Twilight S.B.D. #2

Barbra Streisand
Guilt Trip

Worst Actor
Nicolas Cage
Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance & Seeking Justice

Eddie Murphy
A Thousand Words

Robert Pattinson
Twilight S.B.D. #2

Tyler Perry (Not in Drag)
Alex Cross & Tyler Perry's Good Deeds

Adam Sandler
That's My Boy!

Worst Supporting Actress
Jessica Biel
Playing For Keeps & Total Recall

Brooklyn Decker
Battleship & What To Expect When You're Expecting

Ashley Green
Twilight S.B.D. #2

Jennifer Lopez
What to Expect When You're Expecting

Rihanna
Battleship

Worst Supporting Actor
David Hasselhoff (as "Himself")
Pirannha 3-DD

Taylor Lautner
Twilight S.B.D. #2

Liam Neeson
Battleship & Wrath of the Titans

Nick Swardson
That's My Boy

Vanilla Ice (as "Himself")
That's My Boy

Worst Director
Sean Anders
That's My Boy

Peter Berg
Battleship

Bill Condon
Twilight S.B.D. #2

Tyler Perry
Good Deeds & Madea's Witless Protection

John Putch
ATLAS SHRUGGED: PART II

Worst Screen Couple
Any Combination of Two Cast Members from "Jersey Shore"
The Three Stooges

Mackenzie Foy (as "Little Renesmee") & Taylor Lautner
Twilight: S.B.D. #2

Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart
Twilight: S.B.D. #2

Tyler Perry & His Drag Get-Up
Tyler Perry's Madea's Witless Protection

Adam Sandler and either Leighton Meester, Andy Samberg or Susan Sarandon
That's My Boy

Worst Screenplay
Atlas Shrugged: Part II
Battleship
That's My Boy!
A Thousand Words
Twilight S.B.D. #2

Worst Screen Ensemble
The Entire Cast of Battleship
The Entire Cast of Oogieloves in The Big Balloon Adventure
The Entire Cast of That's My Boy
The Entire Cast of Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn, Part 2
The Entire Cast of Madea's Witless Protection

Stormtroopers vs Aliens

See the picture below? I'd see that movie. Scroll down below the picture to see how I think the movie would go. 

Used without permission from Robert Shane

It's a dark time for the Empire. Rebel Bothans having completed a desperate raid on an Empire controlled space station are evading pursuit. As the opening scroll ends the camera pans down to a small, smoking, carbon scored ship desperately trying to dodge shots from pursuing TIE Fighters. They're being forced down onto an unexplored planet. They make a controlled landing, but they'll never take off again without repairs. A strange alien craft is crashed nearby so they turn to it for shelter, parts, and a hiding place. Inside they find a field of organic pods that's strangely familiar to the viewing audience. Naturally, Stormtroopers are close behind. The Bothans are looking for a way off the planet and ignore the pods after a quick "huh, weird". The Stormtroopers report the discovery and receive orders to examine and retrieve samples. Droids take several pods back to a
shuttle. A few Stormtroopers guard the rest of the pods. We know what happens to them. Most continue pursuit. Several Stormtroopers and Bothans are either shot or ripped apart. Unable to get the systems of the alien ship running or find useful parts, a few Bothans sneak back on a shuttle in the chaos and hide. A few Stormtroopers make it back. Some with "indigestion". Some deliberately left behind to slow the alien creatures.

The shuttles and fewer TIE fighters than in the start of the movie all return to the Death Star. Well, a smaller version. A prototype. Proof of concept. With the power to blow up a moon or a Star Destroyer. Droids are unloading pods. The Captain who led the pursuit of the Bothans on the planet wants to know what the higher ups want with the pods. He orders a Stormtrooper to take one of the pods to his quarters. With the ship unloaded the Bothans sneak out of the shuttle. They're looking for a transmitter so they can get their recovered plans to a waiting Ambassadorial Ship. The Stormtroopers with indigestion don't last long and release an alien in general barracks and mess. The Captain finds an open pod in his quarters, but no Stormtrooper. After a brief search and fight the facehugger gets him. When his chest bursts his alien is bigger and badder than those from mere clones. And he's loose on the command deck. The rest of the pods are sent off to Stormdoctors who plan to test a couple on prisoners.

Aliens are shot, acid eats through decks, Stormtroopers die. For some reason there's a cat.

Things keep getting worse, but the mess is working out pretty well for the Bothans. For the most part the station's personnel are distracted. But they do get captured. That's when acid eats through the bulkhead above and drips on top of his helmet. He dies horribly. But the Captain's alien sees the Bothans through the hole and targets them. We see him take off looking for a way to the lower deck. When he eventually finds them he kills all but one Bothan before Stormtroopers manage to open fire on it and actually hit it. The Bothan kills the gravity for that section so much of the acid blood remains as mist and floating globs. It ends badly for the Stormtroopers that charge into the mist in pursuit.

Alternate scenario: The Bothans were captured on the planet, brought back for interrogation, and thrown in the brig. The doctors intend to test the pods on the Bothans. They escape either due to acid eating through from an upper deck and destroying the door or some critical component. Or during a prisoner transfer acid drips on the Stormtrooper's helmet and ... well, what I wrote above.

The final fleeing Bothan finds a storage chamber full of alien webbing and several strung up Stormtroopers and staff. Some with holes in their chest plates. Some with holes pending. When he finally finds a room he can transmit from the Bothan finds a Stormdoctor also making a transmission. He's reporting what a great weapon these creatures would be against rebel planets. They fight. The doctor dies. The transmission of Death Star plans is made. He looks at another panel. It appears to be a motion sensor. Two large groups of dots collide. The scene cuts to a formation of Stormtroopers marching down a corridor. Suddenly... Aliens. On the motion sensor screen most of the dots wink out. That's the scene in the picture.

And the movie ends somehow. Very likely the Death Prototype blows up. Probably using a code recovered from the Captain's body and one good officer (or at least one who recognizes the threat) working together with the Bothan. They might fire on the planet, too, destroying the pods and aliens down there. So the Death Prototype explodes in a manner a physics professor would approve of while orbiting a planet with a sizable chunk of it glowing.

Then, for those who last saw Star Wars in 1977, in a rebel briefing room beside a hologram of the Death Star a woman in white sadly says "Many Bothans died bringing us these plans."

Audio book review: Ghost Story

Long time readers know I'm a fan of the Dresden Files books. Looks like I didn't do a review of the book "Changes". I probably listened to it, and I'm not good about reviewing the books I've listened to.

In "Changes" Dresden's girlfriend, Susan, from the early books showed back up. Readers had been waiting for her return ever since she got turned into a vampire and Dresden promised to find a cure. She came back with the announcement that she had a daughter, it was Dresden's, and she had been kidnapped. As the story progresses Harry's beat up old VW bug is destroyed beyond repair, his apartment blows up, Harry is forced to agree to be the new Knight for the Winter Court of Fairies, Harry manages to cause a spell the Red Court of Vampires is casting against him to backfire and wipe out every last one of them, and then he's shot by a sniper, falls into the lake, and is presumed dead.

The first thing you notice about "Ghost Story" is the change in narrator. Lionel Luthor from Smallville replaces Spike from Buffy/Angel. And he does a lovely job. But he's not Spike. It helps if you think of the different voice as a consequence of Dresden's new non-corporeal state. Like how when Frodo wears the one ring everything looks different.

"Ghost Story" opens in the afterlife. Or, rather, Between. Between what? You're better off not asking. Here it's explained that someone cheated. "The Opponent" did something to interfere and that skews whether Dresden's spirit should go up or down. So he must go back to Chicago to solve his own murder. He returns to Chicago 6 months after being shot. Without the Red Court of Vampires to keep folks in check, hundreds or thousands of supernatural baddies have popped up around the world and are causing problems. The Wardens can't keep up. Chicago has remained in relatively good shape because of the mob, Dresden's friends, and someone known as "The Ragged Lady".

This book is different from the rest of the series. I can't put it all on the change in narrator. Maybe it's because Dresden is now a being made up of memories that there's an absurd amount of flashbacks, and TV and movie references even for him. There's just something different about how it flows.

The next book is "Cold Days". Harry once again has a body and has Spike doing his voice.

I do recommend these books. If you don't want to start at the beginning then you do need to start at "Changes" since "Change", "Ghost Story", and "Cold Days" were clearly planned together.

They're innocent because they're athletes

In Steubenville, Ohio girl was drugged, peed on, paraded around, and raped. The rapists were on the football team so most of the rapists weren't even arrested. The prosecuting attorney's son is on the team so you know the two kids who were actually charged aren't going to have to fight much. But Anonymous is on the case. 

http://www.yourdailymedia.com/post/steubenville-covers-for-its-high-school-football-stars-rapists/

Friday Links: December 4

6 companies that rigged the game. [link]

To Low Earth Orbit AND BEYOND! [link]

Gunshot triangulating systems placed in some of the worst neighborhoods. [link]

NukaCola may not be bad for you. [link]

Swatch scarf. [link]

Christmas cards from brutally honest companies. [link]

Christmas light OKed to give neighbors the finger. [link]

How to play chess.


A tornado passing an Alabama Walgreens.


Both sides of the 2nd amendment argument in two paintings. [link]

Frost flower pictures. [link]

Some art that amuses me. [link]

It sucks to be a drone pilot. [link]
A tad worse, I'd say, to be a drone target.

Top 10 YouTube videos of last year. [link]
Where does Lindsey Stirling get these great settings for her videos?

Underwater Enterprise.


Tricorder 1.0? [link]

Sensors for Tricorder 2.0. [link]

TL;DR version of Wikipedia's longest entry - Timeline of the Far Future. [link]

Tiny spider makes decoy large spiders. [link]
So far they're found at face level and near trails. Is that because that's close to where their eyes would happen to be or have the spiders figured out how to keep people from walking through their webs?

Got my shopping for next Christmas done. [link]

Footage from an RC helicopter w/ camera flying around a Pakistan mountain. [link]
Clearly the Canadian government has drones now, too.

It's smaller on the outside! [link]

A new type of matter and magnetism which I really don't understand at all. [link]

Bing uses Google results. [link]

I always enjoy reading about the largest manmade vortex ever. [link]

The same gun fired the first shot by an allied army in both world wars. [link]

10 uses for a Raspberry Pi. [link]

Another day another stupid class

Do you know why the US government uses so many contractors? Because the actual government employees are too busy taking mandatory classes that have nothing to do with their job to actually accomplish anything. I spent yesterday (ALL of yesterday) taking one of these classes.

It should have taken an hour and a half, maybe two hours. The class was taken online and involved a mix of answering questions and then reading sheets telling us what the answers should have been. Kind of backwards from your normal teaching methods, but the subject was obvious enough that it wasn't really a problem. At the end you're supposed to get a certificate that you can send in every time the government loses track of the one you did before and starts claiming you haven't taken the class yet. Then you take a quiz and get another certificate. That's two certificates for a single class.

Here's where things really went wrong. My government issued laptop runs Windows 7 and a bunch of software restricting what you can do. If you create or download a file that file will be gone the next time you turn on the computer. All settings go back to their defaults. So I have to turn on pop-ups in IE every time I turn on the computer so I can go out to this website to check my government required e-mail, because that website requires pop-ups. I can't open a file by double clicking on it. Some programs can't be run by me. Anything I download can't be run by me.

So, having completed the class, I have one chance and one chance only to print the certificate. But the laptop has no printer installed. I can see our printer, but the right driver isn't on this computer. I can download the driver from the Canon website, but can't run what I downloaded to install the driver. And even if I could, the driver would be gone next time I turned on the computer.

Can I print to a PDF?
No. That's not installed and I can't install it.

How about that "Print to File" box?
Yes, I can print to a file.
No, there's no suffix and we're not going to tell you what kind of file it is.

Can I open it in TextEdit or NotePad or Word to find out in the header what kind of file it is?
No. This is the one document in all of computer history that can't be opened like that.

Want to try printing again? Take the class all over again! Weeeeeee!

I e-mail the file to myself so I can work with it on a Mac but still get nowhere.

I try retaking the class on the Mac since there's no restrictions on who takes it. Safari and Firefox can't handle the forms on one part of the class so they both come to a stop. Chrome works clear through, but only prints a black box. Yeah, even if I print to a PDF.

What if I use a coworker's computer? Someone with their own printer installed.
Then their browser says the website is down. WHAT!? WHY!?
Because fuck you. That's why.

I finally figure out the suffix of the original certificate. There's a program on the laptop that should open it if I put the suffix on the file. Still, double clicking the file won't work. And for some reason I'm banned from opening the program so I can open the file that way.

But now that I have the right suffix on it, IE will display the certificate! I still can't print, however, because of reasons.

Can this type of file be opened on a Mac? Five forums say "no. You should install TinyPDF and make PDFs instead." This is true, but not at all helpful. I did finally find two programs for the Mac that will open the file created by "Print to File" and manage to print it. And then I went home.

I took that class seven times yesterday. I spent almost as much time trying to figure out how to either make a government laptop print against it's will or how to open the file created initially. It's a different version of the class I had to take to get my computer ID card. I have a couple dozen more classes to go and will have at least six new ones that need to be taken by the time I've finished with these. And if the government decides to be real dicks about it, I'll have to fly to Texas to take a few of them in person rather than just accept proof that I've take the exact same class already here in Maryland.

Today I'm not taking a class. Today I'm being productive.

Bleh

I can't stand to look at this thing right now. Not even up for telling you to "sod off". Tune in later. Maybe Friday.