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Do you know about the lionfish? Some might call the lionfish a beautiful fish. Some even go so far as to purchase lionfish to keep in their aquarium and show off to their friends and family. And maybe, at one time, that was a reasonable sort of thing to do. But not now, not here in Utila. Here we like our lionfish dead. That’s right… the only good lionfish is a dead lionfish.
Why? Because they are not supposed to be here. The lionfish are an invasive species to to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean. They were introduced somewhere around the mid 1990′s on the Florida coast, and have been spreading like the plague ever since. Already their population levels are orders of magnitude greater than the levels found in their native habitat. That’s because here they have no natural predators and they breed like submersible rabbits. It’s estimated that at least 27% of the current population would have to be killed monthly just to maintain population levels. If you are trying to reduce their numbers, or better yet eliminate them entirely, you’re going to have to kill a lot of lionfish.
To make matters worse, aside from just being here, they are harming the local reef ecosystems. They have a habit of eating a lot, compromising the survival of native fish species. Over the long term the lionfish’s appetite could lead to an 80% reduction in reef diversity. That’s a lot of fish species that we won’t be able to see anymore. Bad lionfish.
Lionfish are delicious. They fry up really nice, they are good in stew, and make wonderful ceviche. It’s also a lot of fun to hunt them with spears. They are the only marine life you are allowed to hunt while diving, so they do add a whole new dynamic to diving that wouldn’t exist without them. For a lot of people, killing lionfish has become second nature, and it’s almost expected that you bring along a spear when fun diving. You can kill as many as you like, and there is no shortage of them either. Seeing 3 or 4 in a dive is almost routine.
Annually, the dive shops on Utila organize a lionfish derby and cookout to promote the new sport. In 2011, they managed to catch a little over 300 lionfish in a single day. All of them hit the grill and were eaten up by the hungry masses in mere minutes. And let me tell you, everything was delicious.
Lionfish Lunch
If you want to kill lionfish, help the environment, and get free lunch all at the same time, there’s a few things you can do. First, plan for a few days of fun diving. You can’t bring a spear along during any courses, so just plan on making a few extra dives just for fishing. If you don’t already have your advanced certification you might consider getting it. The advanced certification extends your depth limits from 18 metres down to 30 metres. Lionfish love the deeper water, so your odds of seeing some you can reach improves dramatically. Finally, ask about diving on the North Side of Utila. Lionfish numbers are substantially greater on the North Side, and your kill count will benefit from that.
Our first underwater video! A Lionfish Killing Compilation.
I decided to give KFC a try (the one on 42nd street and Madison in Manhattan). That was a mistake. I should have known better.
I offended by what they did. The chicken was dried out. They used really strong sauce, so you wouldn’t be able to taste the chicken. I went at 12:15, but the chicken tasted like it’d been under the hot lamp for days.
Another time, I bought frozen chicken parts and heated them. That was *MUCH* better than KFC. I can’t believe that KFC was that much worse than heated up frozen chicken.
There’s another chicken NYC-only chain, “ranch1″. That also was a big disappointment.
That was an amusing trick that KFC used. They had lousy dried-out chicken, but covered it up with really strong sauce. I should have known better, but I figured I’d give them a try.
Posted by johngl
I didn’t think much of grapefruit until I moved to Florida back in the late 70′s and lived on a small acreage near the town of McIntosh. The post office there had a huge grapefruit tree in the parking lot and, at the time, postal patrons were encouraged to pick the ripe fruit. Every year, from late December on through February, this tree provided me with some of the greatest grapefruit juice I’d ever tasted. There was nothing quite like grabbing a couple of huge grapefruit off the tree and having the ultra-fresh juice in a glass 15 minutes later.
Until I moved to Austin, TX.
Of course I’d tried Texas Ruby Red grapefruit from the grocery stores when I lived up north, but those tasted nothing like the ones I can get here during grapefruit season.
The lowly little grapefruit is hybrid of a sweet orange and a pomelo and was first documented back around 1750 after someone noticed it on the island of Barbados. The Ruby Red however, is a relatively recent discovery. Found growing on a pink varietal, the first Ruby Red was patented in the late 1920s and eventually led to some true commercial success for the fruit, especially in Texas. The old inferior white types of trees were removed and were replaced with the Red varieties which have now become symbolic of the Rio Grande valley here in the Republic. Texas now has registered trademarks for Rio Red, Rio Star, and Ruby-Sweet varieties of Reds.
It is for this reason I can go buy an 18lb bag of these beauties for less than $5.
Taking advantage of this short-seasoned bounty whenever possible, I get enjoy fresh-squeezed juice as much as I want. And I want it a lot.
And who wouldn’t? This stuff is amazingly sweet and delicious. Add in a little vodka and it becomes Health and Relaxation in a Glass ™ .
Speaking of Vodka, you may have noticed that the grapefruit in the first picture have had the outermost layer of skin removed. I’ve decided to try my hand at a grapefruit liqueur in the same manner I’ve created home-made orange liqueur. Taste tests thus far have been very encouraging. If you happen to see JohnGL’s Truly Texas Grapefruit™©® on a label, you’ll know where that all started. I’m even using Tito’s Handmade Vodka (distilled right here in Texas) for the base.
There are numerous reasons I’ve enjoyed living in the South and fresh, sweet, and delicious citrus is just one of them. I strongly encourage you all to take advantage of your local bounty; the season for grapefruit is drawing to a close quickly!
Ghosts ‘n Goblins is much easier..
Games are a hell of a lot easier when they’re trained! Ghosts ‘n Goblins was one of the first games I dived into to see how it worked back in the day. Earlier I played a remix of it’s soundtrack and fired up the game afterwards. I remembered it was hard but compared to games today it’s a demon!
Luckily it was trained and my son and I had an enjoyable half hour shooting the baddies and jumping from platform to platform. I wish the compatible joysticks from back then had more than one button, left/right and up to diagonal jump is a PITA!
In case you’re wondering, a trained game is where the game has been hacked and various cheats added. Usually a fancy intro with swirling graphics and music is added at the start and the group that has hacked the game give you the option of adding infinite lives, time, invulnerability or whatever suits the games. Practically every C64 game you’ll find online has these features now. 
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The Guild Master: Practical Advice for Recruitment
This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk
It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-)
Rails 3.2 Released
DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd Edition (Updated for Rails 3.2)
Michael Hartl's "Rails Tutorial" site has been incredibly popular over the last year and he's now finishing up a 2nd edition that's fully updated to Rails 3.2 standards. The first 5 chapters are already good to go and can be read no-cost, as always, at railstutorial.org.
Backing Up with Backup: A Neat DSL for Backup Operations
Pat Allan loves Michael van Rooijen's 'backup' gem so much that he wants to to convince you to use it, by showing you two examples of why he finds it so useful. It does seem pretty handy..
Why Every Ruby Developer Should Learn Smalltalk
Smalltalk was the first purely object oriented language (though Simula included objects before it) and it heavily inspired Ruby's initial development. Victor Savkin thinks that Rubyists could learn a lot from playing with Smalltalk.
The Right Way to Code DCI in Ruby
DCI (Data, Context and Interaction) is an interesting object oriented pattern that's been discussed in the Ruby community lately, but Mike Pack thinks most articles oversimplify its use. In this post, he digs into the idea.
The 'Rails and Spine.JS' Series
Ken Collins is working on a series of posts about using the Spine.js JavaScript MVC framework alongside a Rails app. This is the first of three posts so far.
systemd Socket Activation and Ruby
systemd is a system and service manager for Linux (and replacement for the System V init daemon). Here, Marcin Kulik looks at how a socket-based Ruby server can take advantage of systemd's socket activation feature.
RVM Stable (and More)
Michal Papis of Engine Yard looks at the 'stable' release of RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and how to install and use it. Some handy RVM tips here.
RailsCasts: Upgrading to Rails 3.2
In the latest RailsCasts episode, Ryan Bates looks at the newly released Rails 3.2 and shows off some of its new features. Short and sweet in just 9 minutes.
Web Programming and Updating Frameworks with Yehuda Katz
The Ruby Rogues sit down with Yehuda Katz to discuss Web frameworks, JavaScript, Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Rack, and more. And just why is to_json a problem? If you have a spare hour, find out :-)
SitemapGenerator: Generate XML Sitemaps from Ruby
Originally a Google idea, XML sitemaps are now used by several search engines and SitemapGenerator will generate Sitemap 0.9 compliant sitemaps for you from Ruby. Includes Rails integration too but is otherwise framework agnostic.
tconsole: A MiniTest Testing Console for Rails
tconsole is a testing console for Rails based around MiniTest (also supporting Test::Unit). It allows you to issue commands concerning what tests to run, and see their test output.
Lisp in 32 Lines of Ruby
Implementing a small Lisp interpreter is the super geeky equivalent of 'hello world' and Michael Fogus (author of The Joy of Clojure) deftly pulls it off in 32 lines of Ruby here.
Rubyist (or Pythonista) Required at RackSpace [San Antonio, Texas]
Hosting company Rackspace is looking for a developer with Ruby or Python experience (and maybe even Erlang!) to work in its foundation software development team. If Git, Capistrano, MongoDB, and Rails are all interesting to you, check it out.
Can’t login to Games for Windows Live?
I changed my Xbox Live password recently and found I couldn’t login to GFWL this evening. “No problem”, I thought. Just change the password to my new one.
No, I can’t change the password. I can select the password field. It’s active, I can move the cursor back and forward but I can’t type or delete the * characters.
Luckily it was a simple, if non obvious, fix to get around this. Uncheck the “Save my e-mail address and password” and “Sign me in automatically” checkboxes. Now you can select the password field and change it. Don’t forget to “remember” the password again..
Yes, Games for Windows Live is a POS.
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Ill Poetic “Instrumentals” Vol. 2
I make beats.
Then I flesh the beats out into productions. Then I bring in musicians to play my ideas, and vocalists to accentuate the song-writing. Then I begin the process of mixing, post-producing and anal-retentive analysis that leads to months in a basement working on a single song.
I can’t use them all. Some of them have to just stay beats and semi-fleshed out ideas. These ideas need homes. They’re orphans with empty bowls of porridge, looking for a singer, emcee, or musician to nourish them and put a blanket over their sad, cold bodies.
Oh, and here are some more from before.
Ps – Shouts the homie David Perez for the always amazing pictures of pretty ladies. And shouts to this coffee shop I’ve been in ALL DAY designing the cover.
This story was interesting. Some US Marine snipers murdered some people, urinated on their corpses, and then videotaped it.
There was one important detail missing from the coverage of the story. None of the stories I read mentioned this important point. Who were the victims? Were they bad people who deserved to die? Were they random people the soldiers decided to kill?
The US soldiers are a hostile occupying army. From the Afghan viewpoint, it’s acceptable to resist an occupying army. If someone is going to kill you and urinate on your corpse and keep a finger as a souvenir, then maybe you should resist them.
A pro-State troll says “This is one isolated bad example. All other soldiers are saints.” That is false. If one person gets caught, there are a lot of other people getting away with it.
There were 5 people in the video, 4 soldiers plus the guy videotaping it. How come nobody said “Hey! Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this!”? Don’t they tell the soldiers in training “Don’t do things that would embarrass the military.” or at least “If you do commit war crimes, don’t videotape it or take pictures. Make sure there’s no evidence.”
A pro-State troll says “You can oppose war, but support the troops.” That is false. If you’re opposed to war, you should also object to the people who fight the war. Without soldiers mindlessly obeying orders, pointless wars aren’t possible.
That is an impressive bit of doublethink. It is standard to say that it’s OK to oppose war, but you still should support the soldiers who fight the wars.
I am sympathetic to people who were tricked into joining the Army and realize they made a mistake. However, everyone is responsible for what they do. If you perform due diligence before joining, you should realize that war is one big scam.
A pro-State troll says “Soldiers are the best and brightest”. That is false. Many soldiers are people who want a socially-acceptable outlet for their violent tendencies. Most soldiers join the army due to economic conscription. They are so poor and the economy is so bad. Becoming a soldier is their best career opportunity.
When you watch the Super Bowl or a sporting event, there are many hidden advertisements for war. It is very offensive. When the announcer says “Support our troops!”, he’s indirectly endorsing war. When they cut away to a scene of soldiers watching the game from their base, that’s an endorsement of war. When they show John Elway standing next to General Petraeus, that’s an endorsement of war.
There was another offensive bit. To provide “balanced” media coverage, the reporter is interviewing people who say “It’s OK to disrepect their corpses. They’re evil people who deserve it.”
But the actions of the soldiers were not met with universal disapproval. A prominent anti-Muslim activist in New York, Pamela Geller, who was at the forefront of the campaign against an Islamic centre near ground zero and has been embraced by some mainstream Republicans including Newt Gingrich, praised the soldiers for desecrating the Afghan corpses who she called “murderous savages”.
Rick Perry is defending the soldiers. Can anyone really say that with a straight face?
Here’s something really ironic. Bradley Manning will probably spend more time in prison than the urinating soldiers!
When soldiers get out of the military, many of them get jobs as policemen. That contributes to the “us vs. them” attitude of police. That contributes to the militarism of police.
This is not one isolated bad example. There almost definitely are other soldiers who do bad things but don’t get caught. If you are opposed to war, you should also not support the people who fight the war. Are the US troops heroes? Or, are they killing indiscriminately and providing motivation for the next generation of terrorists?
Diablo III Beta Patch 10: Gold Farming Techniques
How to save and set application process priority automatically
For seemingly forever, Windows has allowed the user to adjust the application’s process priority so that it receives more than it’s fair share of the system processor. While it’s generally discouraged, the processes priority can be adjusted from within Task Manager and it’s right-click context menu. At which point you are able to choose from priority ranging from Realtime to Low - all processes launch with a priority of Normal. Setting a user process as High priority is a manual task and must be set each time the application is launched.
Prio is a light-weight extension to Task Manager that allows for the saving of a processes’ priority though the same context menu you are already using manually above. With an application priority saved, the next time it’s launched Prio will apply the priority change silently and automatically.
While Prio’s main task is saving of priorities, it expands upon a few other areas that Task Manager is otherwise lacking in. Application processes are color-coded depending on whether the binary has been signed or not. Digital signatures, or lack thereof, is an easy way to tell whether a piece of malware is masquerading under the guise of a critical Windows process – a common practice used to hide the existence of infection.
Lastly, Prio also allows for the monitoring of network activity on a per-process basis through the addition of a new tab within Task Manager. Not only can you see the existing throughput but also the network address a process is communicating with.
Prio is free for personal use and compatible with all 32 and 64-bit release of Windows.
A street performer in Galway City last September. Put money in his box and he’d shake a bit and make some noise. Only kids stopped to watch him.
Adults hurried by.
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Tracking PPC Success with Google Adwords
If you market your business via Pay Per Click PPC advertising with Google Adwords, you'll want need to track your conversions. Obtaining Return On Investment ROI information for your online campaigns is perhaps the most important factor in evaluating the effectiveness of your online marketing initiatives.
There are a lot of resources available online to help you with Google Adwords. We do highly recommend you consult a a qualified Adwords expert, and / or do plenty of research before diving into pay-per-click. A finely tuned campaign can have an immediate positive impact on your revenues. However a poorly tuned and monitored campaign can be disastrous, and costly.
A good starting place is Getting Started with Google Adwords Campaigns at PPCblog.com.
Setting up Adword tracking with Checkfront is easy. First login to your Google Adwords account. Navigate to Tools and Analytics / Conversions and Create New Conversion.
You can name the new conversion "Checkfront Booking", or something else that helps you identify it. Make sure it's a Web page based conversion (default). Clicking next will bring you to the conversion settings. Be sure that https is selected, and leave the Conversion Value blank.
The final page will allow you to email your tracking code, or view it. You'll want to view it to obtain the conversion id. This is a unique id that identifies the conversion. The conversion id is located in the code under "conversion_id = 932993232". Copy this number and supply it in the Adwords Setup in Checkfront.
The Adwords extension is in your account under Manage / Extend / Add-ons / Google Adwords in Checkfront.
Once activated in Checkfront, new customer bookings will be sent to your Adwords account along with the value of the transaction.
Please note the tracking status in your Adwords account will remain Unverfied till your first successful conversion.
If you don't currently use Google Adwords, but are still interested in your conversion rates, have a look at our Google Analytics integration.
Tim Thomas Makes A Heroic Stand
This story was interesting. Tim Thomas was the goalkeeper for the NHL champion Boston Bruins. The President met with the winning team, but Tim Thomas refused to go. He said that government is way too big and out of control.
This is an important point. When the President meets a sports champion, who is endorsing whom? The official spin is that the President is honoring the athletes. Actually, the athletes are endorsing the President and the State.
Tim Thomas may suffer retribution for standup up for his beliefs. He was benched for his next start after refusing the meeting. He may lose endorsement deals. He may have a harder time finding a new team when his contract expires.
The backlash from the State media is predictable. They are saying “Tim Thomas, you have a high-paying job for playing a game. Be grateful that you get paid so much. Most people only dream of having a job and lifestyle as nice as you. Don’t rock the boat.”
This is an important point regarding State “journalists”. They are professional liars. They are interchangeable cogs. The State media cartel can fire any journalist, and find 100 other people eager to lie for huge paycheck. Most “journalists”, even the low-ranking ones, are way overpaid for their real skills. That enables their bosses to keep them on a short leash, knowing that a firing and blacklisting will lead to a much worse standard of living. Nobody gets promoted to be a high-ranking journalist unless they’ve demonstrated thorough pro-State brainwashing. Even with that, occasionally someone deviates, is disgraced, and has their career ruined.
Even a star goalkeeper is an interchangeable cog. For example, Michael Vick hasn’t gotten any favorable calls from referees, most of which are lawyers and judges. Star athletes and journalists are replaceable. Even if Vick or Thomas are fired, the same number of people will still watch the NFL or NHL. The real power lies with the media CEOs and their bankster backers. who almost never appear in public. If a mainstream media CEO starts having “wrong” ideas, it’s easy to naked short sell and crash the stock, arrange for a leveraged buyout, and install a new figurehead as CEO.
I’ve heard this viewpoint frequently cited. Athletes and celebrities are *NOT* expected to express any “political opinions”, which really means “non-approved political opinions”. If Tim Thomas said “Support the troops! USA! USA!”, that’s a political statement, but the State media would not complain. There only is backlash when a non-approved opinion is expressed.
Imagine if 1% or even 0.01% of athletes started criticizing the State! That would really start waking up some slaves! For this reason, any dissent must be immediately crushed.
Most sports leagues have a “personal conduct policy”. That can be interpreted as preventing the “house slaves” from expressing non-approved political opinions and starting a slave revolt. If you’re an athlete, celebrity, or journalist, your real job is to keep the slaves distracted and complacent. The last thing State insiders want to do is for celebrities to encourage the lower-ranking slaves to start thinking for themselves.
It would be awesome, if some athletes or celebrities started saying “The Federal Reserve is evil!” or “Government is way to big!” or even “All taxation is theft!” Almost all celebrities and athletes are employees and not owners, because the State restricts their economic freedom. Taxes and regulations make it almost impossible for a successful celebrity or athlete to start his own media business.
This is the “Asch Conformity Test” problem. Most slaves think subconsciously “If the government was doing bad things, then some journalists and celebrities would complain.” No objections are aired on TV. This is interpreted as an endorsement that everything is fine. Most mainstream political debate is an illusion and smokescreen. A single objection can have a large impact. Therefore, any dissent must be crushed.
If one person objects, that wakes up some slaves. However, the person who objects is usually ruined and disgraced. That sets an example, and other celebrities and “journalists” learn to toe the line. The recruitment and promotion process for celebrities and journalists weeds out the independent thinkers. If you’re the type of person who might discuss forbidden ideas, you don’t get your reputation boosted by the State media cartel. You must conform or get weeded out.
Getting to be a star athlete also has a luck-based component. Tim Thomas didn’t become an NHL success until late in his career. How do you know that there aren’t some great athletes denied the opportunity? You’d never know, because you’d never hear about them.
Tim Thomas took a heroic stand. He may suffer retribution, in the form of worse contracts, losing his endorsements, and not getting favorable calls from referees. If more athletes and celebrities did this, it would help promote freedom. Unfortunately, celebrities are replaceable cogs, making it a risky career move to question the State.
Anxiety With Your Visit to the Dentist? Auricular Acupuncture Shown To Help...
Anxiety before and during dental treatments is quite common with some people requiring sedation for relatively simple procedures such as a general cleaning. Austrian researchers from the Medical University of Vienna recently conducted a study evaluating the effectiveness of auricular acupuncture to help control this pre-dental treatment anxiety.
Ultimate Desktop Combo (9 Cigars) + Humidor + Ashtray $39.99
Cheap Humidors has their Ultimate Desktop Combo available for $39.99. Also, the first 100 buyers get a free smokeless ashtray. Great combo for anyone!
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If you’ve had enough of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, bailouts, the Euro defaulting, rising oil prices and the rest of the bad news you’ll enjoy this video.
By chance we have a Shitzu at home and a black and white cat (daughter of this cute little fella). They’re friendly but not like these two!
I expect this video will be pulled from Youtube just as soon as the copyright holder matches the song.. Oh well. 
(via)
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This is an example of the nonsense I think about: Why are there so many different vitamin and mineral supplements being sold? There are literally hundreds to choose from, and the nutritional benefits are negligible at best. Its been said that Americans have the most expensive urine in the world because of all the crap that just passes right through us. Why can’t they make one super vitamin? Spare us the trouble of performing graduate level research (read: googling “fish oil” for instance and reading Wikipedia pages) and sell one pill that might cure all your problems – the Peptobismal of vitamin & mineral supplements.
I here to share some meditation comprehension. During meditation, I try to relax whole body then empty my mind. How to empty my mind is the important key of meditation. below is my Chinese calligraphy about my meditation comprehension:
http://www.fengmei68.com/27.html
The English translate to Chinese is : See... unshaped; Hear... silence; Smell... no breath; Feeling... is there a heart ?
Taoist meditation of NeiJingTu
The Taoist meditation is internal Qi Gong. Taoist believe human body with nature world is one union system. So in Taoist meditaton, the human body also has Sun, water, mountain...all the nature scenery.
Retrospectives in 2011 Work Spacetime
For the most part, I'm quite happy with everything that I was able to accomplish last year. I've moved cities (for the second year in a row) and last year I changed jobs twice: in both cases, I think the current will stick for a while. And I'm working on other projects, with some impressive speed. Last year wasn't been great for finishing things, but I guess there's room for improvement this year.
After a fair amount of professional angst I'm finally doing pretty much exactly what I want to be doing: I'm writing a substantial/total revision of a software manual for a company developing an open source database system. I'll leave you to figure out the details, but it's great.
A couple years ago, I said to myself, that I wanted to be a "real technical writer," which is to say, work with engineering teams, write documentation and tutorials for a single product or group of products, and operate on a regular release schedule. I've done a great deal of writing for technology companies: from project proposals and journalism, to tutorials and content for distributors, to white papers, marketing, and sales materials. Delightfully, I've managed to get there, and in retrospect it's both somewhat amazing, and incredibly delightful.
A while back, I had dinner with a friend who's been doing the same thing I do for a long time (we know each other through folk dance and singing,) and by comparing our experiences it was great to learn that my experience is quite typical, both in terms of the work I'm doing and the procedural engineering practice frustrations (e.g. "What do you mean you changed the interface without telling me?!?!")
At work we have this thing where we send in an account of what we did during the day so that other people know what we're working on, and so that we can keep our team on the same page. After all, when you're all looking at computer screens all day, and in a few different time zones, it's easy to loose track of what people are working on.
At the bottom of these emails, we're prompted to ask "what are your blockers and impediments." Often I say something clever like "Compiler issue with Spacetime interface or Library." Or something to that effect. It feels like a good description of the last year.
Onward and Upward!
Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They are ordered to do so and in some cases their salary is paid from the cash that they take. So they have a good reason to imagine that any large sum of money is drug money and take it.
Dan Walsh describes how to get the RSA SecureID PAM module working on a SE Linux system [4]. It’s interesting that RSA was telling everyone to turn off SE Linux and shipping a program that was falsely marked as needing an executable stack and which uses netstat instead of /dev/urandom for entropy. Really the only way RSA could do worse could be to fall victim to an Advanced Persistent Attack… :-#
The Long Now has an interesting summary of a presentation about archive.org [5]. I never realised the range of things that archive.org stores, I will have to explore that if I find some spare time!
Jonah Lehrer wrote a detailed and informative article about the way that American high school students receive head injuries playing football[6]. He suggests that it might eventually be the end of the game as we know it.
François Marier wrote an informative article about optimising PNG files [7], optipng is apparently the best option at the moment but it doesn’t do everything you might want.
Helen Keeble wrote an interesting review of Twilight [8]. The most noteworthy thing about it IMHO is that she tries to understand teenage girls who like the books and movies. Trying to understand young people is quite rare.
Jon Masters wrote a critique of the concept of citizen journalism and described how he has two subscriptions to the NYT as a way of donating to support quality journalism [9]. The only comment on his post indicates a desire for biased news (such as Fox) which shows the reason why most US media is failing at journalism.
Luis von Ahn gave an interesting TED talk about crowd-sourced translation [10]. He starts by describing CAPTCHAs and the way that his company ReCAPTCHA provides the CAPTCHA service while also using people’s time to digitise books. Then he describes his online translation service and language education system DuoLingo which allows people to learn a second language for free while translating text between languages [11]. One of the benefits of this is that people don’t have to pay to learn a new language and thus poor people can learn other languages – great for people in developing countries that want to learn first-world languages! DuoLingo is in a beta phase at the moment but they are taking some volunteers.
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Publishers Weekly titles “Copyrights vs Human Rights” [12] which is primarily about SOPA.
Naomi Wolf wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the “Occupy” movement, among other things the highest levels of the US government are using the DHS as part of the crackdown [13]. Naomi’s claim is that the right-wing and government attacks on the Occupy movement are due to the fact that they want to reform the political process and prevent corruption.
John Bohannon gave an interesting and entertaining TED talk about using dance as part of a presentation [14]. He gave an example of using dancerts to illustrate some concepts related to physics and then spoke about the waste of PowerPoint.
Joe Sabia gave an amusing and inspiring TED talk about the technology of storytelling [15]. He gave the presentation with live actions on his iPad to match his words, a difficult task to perform successfully.
Thomas Koch wrote an informative post about some of the issues related to binary distribution of software [16]. I think the problem is evenm worse than Thomas describes.
Related posts:
... in which I log my astronomickal adventures around linux.conf.au in Ballaarat. Verily.
On monday evening I was invited to a property about an hour north of Ballarat to do some observing from a hill-top in an area without (much) light pollution. The evening was perfect and much was to be seen even without any optical augmentation. M45, the milky way, the coal sack & magellanic clouds were perfectly visible with the naked eye. Sadly the southern cross was pretty low on the horizon.
I'm happy to say the winning entry in the LCA photo competition was taken at this place :-)
Photo by David Basden, showing the milky way, coal sack and small magellanic cloud.
I took a series of photos of the Orion nebula, but haven't had the time to try some of the photo stacking apps with them yet.
Weather and drinkingsocial engagements didn't really allow for much in the way of observation until thursday night, when I dragged my scope out onto the cricket field on campus. It was pretty late, so we didn't managed to see Venus before it disappeared behind the treeline.
Conditions were less than ideal, with flood lights on the other end of the field messing with night vision and a cold southwestern blowing in cloud and causing dew. I got a cold. (Achievement unlocked!)
Photo by David Basden.
Still, Jupiter and the Orion nebula were blingy enough to be able to see through my scope and they duly impressed some of the gathered. One other person (self confessed noob, never used scope) brought a 6" motorised schmidt-cassegrain scope and we managed to successfully align it via Jupiter, Betelgeuse and Sirius then and found various things to look at through holes in the cloud cover.
We played a bit with the various eyepiece sizes when looking at Jupiter, but cloud made the image hazy-ish regardless. I am now in envy of a motorised scope :-) We also spotted about 5 sattelites zooming along, one of which passed directly in front of Jupiter and was observed through both scopes simultaneously, so I'll call that a confirmed sighting!
I became a lot more adept at aligning the scope and generally managed to get what it was I wanted to look at into view within a few minutes or so. Except the horse head nebula, that is. I could not for the life of me even find Alnitak that evening!
However, it turns out that with a Celestron 130 you can easily see Jupiter through a layer of cloud, though not in focus.
As we packed up and walked back, the cloud cover disappeared. (Achievement unlocked!)
On Friday, an LCA organiser kindly offered me a reserved spot on the Ballarat Observatory tour, which I of course accepted. There was come scattered cloud when we arrived, but the observatory volunteers managed to get everyone to catch a glimpse of Jupiter and its moons through the Oddie and Federation telescopes.
As cloud rolled in (Achievement unlocked!) we were ushered inside for a few 3D videos, which worked about half the time for me but made me squint quite badly. They were a bit daggy for the LCA geek audience, but considering the goal of the observatory and the intended audience I think they're alright.
Still, I didn't feel like squinting uncomfortably for an hour so I nicked off out the back and stood around outside for a little while, getting a short tour of the Jelbart telescope from one of the volunteers. As that concluded, I noticed the cloud cover had completely disappeared and everyone was still inside, watching the videos.
I snuck off to the Oddie telescope and had it to myself for a good 20 minutes. I now have giant 80" telescope envy as well :-) I did some eyeballing of Jupiter and the Orion nebula and found that my own telescope is really badly in need of collimation. The Oddie, on the other hand was wonderfully sharp, and the bands on Jupiter were lovely and well-defined.
The other finished their video at that point and discovered the sky was clear, so they came up and had a sticky-beak around the sky, before being ushered back on the bus and driven back to the campus. I drove myself up, so hung around the observatory for a little while afterward, deflecting attempts by the volunteers to have me provide free IT support for Windows XP (Achievement unlocked!)
We had a quick look at the Rosette nebula before packing up the Oddie and closing the roof. On the way out, a member of the observatory beckoned us to have a look through his telescope, in which the two main components of α-Crucis were separately visible. Lovely :-)
There are a few things I would like to do to make observing with my own telescope a more enjoyable experience.
How to add an ‘always on top’ option to any Windows application
Many applications benefit from the ability to keep their interface on top of all other open application windows. Unfortunately, few applications actually include this feature. While I’m of the opinion such a feature should be native to Windows, that’s just not the case today. Users needing such functionality might be interested in checking out Window On Top.
Window On Top is a portable utility that extends the always on top feature to every software. While running, the functionality can be toggled on and off in any active application window with the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F8 or a drag-and-drop of the hand image onto the desired application.
If you routinely find yourself monitoring particular program processes, like a long video encoding session, or even watching a video while multi-tasking; Window On Top can improve the process easily.
Window On Top is compatible with all iterations of Windows including Windows 7 64-bit.
Sherlock and Smith and copyright images
Remember how Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA, used a copyrighted image for his website’s background image without permission? Sean Sherlock, the junior minister preparing Ireland’s SOPA did something similar on his website (which is currently down).
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Megaupload And The Effectiveness Of State Violence
This story was interesting. The day after the massive SOPA/PIPA protest, State thugs raided and shut down Megaupload. That was a big “F*** You!” to the SOPA/PIPA protests, that the Megaupload raid came the next day.
To protest the Megaupload raid, “Anonymous” hacked into some websites. It isn’t possible to be sure if they really were disgruntled people, or a false flag operation designed to discredit those nasty Internet people.
Megaupload was a file sharing website. You can upload a file, and share the link with many people. Megaupload made money off ads. Megaupload sold “premium” accounts, which enabled faster downloads and more downloads. A non-premium account was limited to approximately one file per hour.
People could also use Megaupload to share copyrighted content. This is the basis for the criminal charges. The correct answer is “‘Intellectual property’ is not property.” Most people are arguing “Internet piracy is a problem, but this action is a bit extreme.” That is pro-State trolling. The very word “piracy” sets the debate in the wrong frame, because copying is not stealing.
If you make a copy of a song or movie, that is not the same as stealing physical property. If your customers would rather make a copy than pay you, then the real problem is that you have a poor relationship with your customers. Computers and the Internet make traditional copyright law obsolete, because now the cost of copying is zero. When it required a significant capital investment to make copies, the model for copyright law made more sense.
Copyright law has its origins in censorship. When the printing press was invented, the king was threatened by it. It would enable people to spread non-approved ideas. The solution was that you had to submit you book for approval, and then get permission to print it. After awhile, there were only a few printing presses directly authorized by the king. That was too obviously monopolistic. The law was changed. Individuals own the copyright, *BUT* copyrights can be sold, *AND* if you want your book published you have no choice but to sell your copyright to a member of the State cartel. The net effect is that most copyrights wind up owned by large corporations. A few corporations own almost all the copyrights. They lobbied for draconian copyright law and retroactive copyright extensions. The Internet removes the “You have to sell your copyright to the cartel in order to get published.” factor from the above equation.
One conspiracy theory is that Megaupload was planning a service, encouraging independent artists to directly publish on Megaupload, via a revenue-sharing agreement. Another conspiracy theory is that Megaupload hired some musicians to make a promotional video, a music corporation filed an inappropriate DMCA takedown notice, and Megaupload was suing and going to win. The criminal charges make that lawsuit moot. That’s a common theme in State law. If you catch a State insider doing something bad, they turn around and charge you with an even bigger crime, which automatically disqualifies your complaint.
The owner of Megaupload, Kim “Dotcom”, was arrested and will be extradited to the USA. (He had his last name legally changed to “Dotcom”.) Normally, extradition is reserved for murderers and serious criminals. The State is treating people who create filesharing websites as equivalent to murderers.
There is another amusing bit. Kim “Dotcom” barricaded himself in a “safe room”. The police broke in and captured him. That shows the uselessness of making such preparations. Once State thugs decide they want to kidnap you, you should either surrender peacefully or go all Ed and Elaine Brown. I’ve decided that, if it comes to that, I’m going to surrender peacefully and hope for a fair trial; if necessary, I’ll represent myself and mention jury nullification. However, State thugs do go overboard with excessive sentences for minor crimes. If you know you aren’t going to get a fair trial and you’re going to be in jail for the rest of your life, why not go down swinging?
Even if Kim Dotcom is eventually acquitted, he is not reimbursed for the legal fees, the cost of time spent in jail, and the cost of having his business ruined. That’s one problem with State raids and “asset forfeiture”. You lose your property and your business, even if you are never convicted of a crime.
Also, the fact that Kim Doctom had an “illegal” gun will probably lead to a few years tacked on to his sentence. Either don’t own an illegal gun, or be prepared to use it!
Another interesting bit is that Kim “Dotcom” was pretty wealthy. The lesson here is “Honest wage slave work is for losers.” I should get more serious about agorism. That’s on my list of things to do. Illegal and quasi-legal businesses tend to be very profitable, even though the CEO can never have an IPO and steal via bankster tricks.
It is hypocritical that the State is cracking down on file sharing, but lets financial criminals like Jon Corzine get away with it. The media cartel is lobbying for stricter copyright enforcement and getting it.
Megaupload had a DMCA agent. However, they limited the number of DMCA takedown requests they would accept per day. Megaupload also had a deduplication feature. If 10 people uploaded the same file, they would only store one copy on their server. However, if Megaupload got a DMCA takedown notice, they would only remove one copy and not all 10. That is a legal grey area. What if one person legally uploaded the file; maybe he was making a backup copy of a DVD he actually owned?
Also, a lot of the dispute around Megaupload should be civil and not criminal. Is it really worth a military-style raid and extradition, over filesharing?
Megaupload did not have a search feature. Ironically, for other websites that were seized “They had a search feature!” was listed as evidence of criminal intent. Megaupload’s lack of a search feature was listed as evidence of criminal intent! (The lack of a search feature did make it hard for the media cartel to crack down on sharing via DMCA takedowns.)
Megaupload had a revenue sharing feature. People who uploaded popular files got a cut of the ad revenue. That is a common website practice. However, State thugs listed this as another count on the indictment! There were “money laundering” charges tacked on. Because Megaupload was facilitating copyright “infringement”, their pay-for-traffic arrangements count as “money laundering”!
It’s pathetic when State prosecutors stretch to tack on charges. However, it’s a common tactic. It helps coerce plea bargains. If Kim Dotcom pleads guilty, he may get a couple of years in jail, with many of the superfluous charges dropped. If he goes to trial and loses, he may get a life sentence. Therefore, the incentive is for him to plea bargain.
I was amused by the frequent usage of the phrase “Mega Conspiracy” in the indictment. That makes it seem more evil. The real conspiracy is that State cartels use violence to shut down people who threaten their monopoly. The State “justice” system is one big criminal conspiracy, given the illusion of legitimacy via “color of law”.
The State also froze all his bank accounts. That’s another sleazy trick. That prevents him from hiring a lawyer to defend himself. (One high-profile defense attorney agreed to represent him and then resigned. Other members of his law firm had worked for the media cartel, leading to a conflict-of-interest.)
State thugs seized his servers and interrupted his business. Even though Kim Dotcom was not convicted of a crime (yet), the State stole his business and stole his property.
If you were a Megaupload user who was using it for legal filesharing, such as self-publishing, you are SOL. You may never recover your files. However, you’re an idiot if you used Megaupload and didn’t keep backups. You can buy a 3 TB external HD for only $200. If you had something important on Megaupload, you should have backed it up.
This also casts doubt on all “cloud storage” businesses. For example, I am at risk on Linode. Suppose that another Linode user were charged with a crime. State thugs will then seize *ALL* of Linode’s servers. It might be awhile before I get my website back. I do keep a backup copy of my WP database and PHP, but I only do it every few months. (I wrote some custom PHP for my blog.)
This indictment has a chilling effect. Many other popular Megaupload clones have either shut down, or stopped offering access to US users.
Notice the incredible efficiency of State violence. They only had to raid *ONE* business. Now, people with similar businesses are panicking and shutting down.
I use retrogaming BitTorrent trackers. I download copies of old games and play them in emulators. I am concerned that, someday, a State raid will force them to close. Even though those websites stick to older no-longer-marketable stuff, they still could be raided, just like Megaupload.
It’s like that old Nazi poem. “First they came for Megaupload. Then they shut down other file sharing websites. Then they shut down the BitTorrent trackers. Then they shut down blogs that criticize the State, but by then, there was nobody left to complain.”
Once you have censorship power, it tends to expand and get used for more and more things. Once you have a censorship engine for copyright “crime”, it can be extended to any type on un-approved information sharing, such as political criticism.
Here’s another example of how copyright leads to censorship. Suppose I picked a clip from TV where an evil person was speaking, posted it to YouTube and analyzed the body language. Technically, that’s fair use, but the media corporation that owns the clip might file a DMCA takedown notice (or outright sue me Righaven-style). I’d have to spend time and money defending myself, even if it was a short clip that should be obviously legal to use.
State thugs say “Copyright ‘crime’ on the Internet needs to be treated as equivalent to crime in the physical world.” The most important point, copying isn’t stealing, is never mentioned in mainstream debate. To consider other analogies, if you use a phone to commit a crime, you blame the criminal and not the phone company. If you use a car to commit a crime, you blame the criminal and not the car manufacturer.
With the Internet, you can create a website that allows user-generated content. If the website owner is responsible for all content posted by users, then it’s effectively illegal to create a website with user-generated content.
With the Megaupload raid, the State said “It’s illegal to create a business that makes it easy for people to share arbitrary large files.” There’s no way a website owner can review every single file uploaded. There are some Megaupload competitors that were more diligent about making sure they obeyed copyright “law”, but even they shut down.
Kim Dotcom certainly seems like a sleazy character. It’s hard to tell from a State mugshot and arrest propaganda photo, but he does seem like a shady character. State thugs picked an unsympathetic-seeming defendant. When defending individual freedom, it seems that you’re often defending borderline-sleazy characters like Kim Dotcom, Sholom Rubashkin, and Bernard Nothaus. I still say that they are victims. Their true crime was challenging State cartels. Kim Dotcom challenged the State media cartel. Sholom Rubashkin challenged the State meatpacking cartel. Bernard Nothaus challenged the State paper money cartel.
The biggest threat of the Internet is not merely “copyright infringement”. It’s that someone can self-publish, start a business, gain a reputation, and spread their ideas without going through State gatekeepers. The media cartel is also a censorship engine, with only “approved” ideas getting published. Without the Internet, I never would have learned about real freedom. I’m good at seeing ideas written by others and explaining them more simply, such as the Compound Interest Paradox. Hopefully, I’m helping other people understand real freedom.
If I was dependent on the State media cartel, I never would have learned about real freedom. If I was dependent on the State media cartel to publish my ideas, I would never have been able to publish anything. I never would have helped 200+ people understand the truth better. (I estimate that I have 200 regular readers.)
The Megaupload raid is a new low point for State censorship. There was a severe chilling effect, as most other Megaupload-like businesses stopped operating. If a business is responsible for what its customers do, then it’s very hard to create useful new tools. It is a bit severe to extradite people to the USA for “copyright crime”, a process normally reserved for murderers. Kim Dotcom does seem like a sleazy character, but I still say he’s a victim. Kim Dotcom is a sleazy unsympathetic defendant, making it easy to get a conviction and a favorable precedent.
The Megaupload cascade effect is an interesting insight into how State power works. State thugs used violence to shut down one business. All similar businesses stop operating, even though they were never physically raided. It’s an impressive bit of evil efficiency.
Acupuncture meditation (Yi Zhen)
Happy Chinese new year and Gong Xi Fa Cai everybody!
I here to share some new thing to you. Acupuncture Meditation(意针).
Acupuncture meditation(Yi Zhen) is my new idea of self treatment.
"Yi Zhen" is use meditation way to focus or image needles on practitioner's own body points to do the self treatment.
Hi, everybody: for the Chinese new year, here to share you some new energy
practice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JfUu8YB7J-8
SE Linux Status in Debian 2012-01
Since my last SE Linux in Debian status report [1] there have been some significant changes.
Last year I reported that the policy wasn’t very usable, on the 18th of January I uploaded version 2:2.20110726-2 of the policy packages that fixes many bugs. The policy should now be usable by most people for desktop operations and as a server. Part of the delay was that I wanted to include support for systemd, but as my work on systemd proceeded slowly and others didn’t contribute policy I could use I gave up and just released it. Systemd is still a priority for me and I plan to use it on all my systems when Wheezy is released.
Some time between Debian kernel 3.0.0-2 and 3.1.0-1 support for an upstream change to the security module configuration was incorporated. Instead of using selinux=1 on the kernel command line to enable SE Linux support the kernel option is security=selinux. This change allows people to boot with security=tomoyo or security=apparmor if they wish. No support for Smack though.
As the kernel silently ignores command line parameters that it doesn’t understand so there is no harm in having both selinux=1 and security=selinux on both older and newer kernels. So version 0.5.0 of selinux-basics now adds both kernel command-line options to GRUB configuration when selinux-activate is run. Also when the package is upgraded it will search for selinux=1 in the GRUB configuration and if it’s there it will add security=selinux. This will give users the functionality that they expect, systems which have SE Linux activated will keep running SE Linux after a kernel upgrade or downgrade! Prior to updating selinux-basics systems running Debian/Unstable won’t work with SE Linux.
As an aside the postinst file for selinux-basics was last changed in 2006 (thanks Erich Schubert). This package is part of the new design of SE Linux in Debian and some bits of it haven’t needed to be changed for 6 years! SE Linux isn’t a new thing, it’s been in production for a long time.
While the audit daemon isn’t strictly a part of SE Linux (each can be used without the other) it seems that most of the time they are used together (in Debian at least). I have prepared a NMU of the new upstream version of audit and uploaded it to delayed/7. I want to get everything related to SE Linux up to date or at least with comparable versions to Fedora. Also I sent some of the Debian patches for the auditd upstream which should reduce the maintenance effort in future.
There have been some NMUs of libraries that are part of SE Linux. Due to a combination of having confidence in the people doing the NMUs and not having much spare time I have let them go through without review. I’m sure that I will notice soon enough if they don’t work, my test systems exercise enough SE Linux functionality that it would be difficult to break things without me noticing.
I am now preparing a new SE Linux “Play Machine” running Debian/Unstable. I wore my Play Machine shirt at LCA so I’ve got to get one going again soon. This is a good exercise of the strict features of SE Linux policy, I’ve found some bugs which need to be fixed. Running Play Machines really helps improve the overall quality of SE Linux.
Related posts:
Show Your Love This Valentine’s Day
As you all know Valentines day is fast approaching once again. Here at Elizabeta Jewelry we know how special this day can be and we have some special pieces lined up just for that. Why not surprise your loved one with a the memorable necklace/pendant like our Heart Necklace by Cheryl Lynn (as featured in above graphic) or maybe a timeless set of Designer Earrings for Women might do the trick too!
And gentlemen if you are considering a possible proposal to that special lady in your life then Valentines day is a great day for this. Check out our wide selection of
Designer Engagement Rings
ClusterSSH is a nice tool for manipulating multiple *nix machines simultaneously. For example, if I want to run some commands on two Linux machines named server1 and server2, I could:
# cssh server1 server2
And I will get two xterm windows that I can control simultaneously by typing into the cssh command window. Since cssh will send keystrokes to both servers, any series of commands can be run, including editing files, etc. I have found that my daily patterns of behavior make cssh preferable to similar tools such as pdsh. Also, cssh uses very similar options ...
Kodak Bankruptcy, Greek Bailoutruptcy
This story was pretty funny. Kodak filed for bankruptcy. How is that ironic? Kodak bonds are trading at a *HIGHER VALUE* than Greek government bonds.
Kodak bonds are now in technical default, due to the bankruptcy filing. Technically, the Greek bonds haven’t defaulted (yet). However, Greek bonds are worth a lower % of face amount than Kodak bonds!
Before the end of this month the Irish Government will introduce a very vague copyright protection law. It won’t be debated in the Dáil as it will be enacted by a ministerial order. Protection of copyright is a laudable endeavour but when so little is known about the amendment or how it’s implemented it’s impossible to figure out how it will affect us. Once IRMA get a whiff of any more power or influence you just know they’re going to abuse it! Remember the infamous “3 strikes” rule?
Before I go any further, here’s how you can help. Sign this petition or use this contact form or this list to contact your local TD to express your misgivings and anger at this law being pushed through so quickly.
From the stopsopireland.com website:
SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, recently proposed in the US. It caused an Internet-wide outcry due to its far-reaching implications; way beyond simply closing access to outlaw file sharing websites, it would have enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage.
A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.
Instead, the law is being enacted by ministerial order. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.
As I mentioned in my Wikipedia post, this law might already be illegal:
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.
Minister Sean Sherlock will be on drivetime (RTE Radio 1) after 6pm this evening to talk about this law. I hope he comes to his senses.
Oh, it is very easy to bypass any spying the music and movie industries force on Irish ISPs. All you need is an encrypted tunnel to a remote host outside the country. If Irish ISPs ban users from using tools like that then you can say goodbye to a huge number of IT jobs. I rely on these tools every single day of the week to do my work.
More links:
No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin.
On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.
Next in the firing line of laws that will limit consumer freedoms is ACTA but let’s get one bad law stopped before we move on to the next one, ok?
The image above taken from No Shit, Sherlock website. Thanks Sean Sherlock.
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Acupuncture Outperforms Glucosamine HCL over the Long-Term for Knee Osteoarthritis
Glucosamine Hydrochloride (HCL) is often recommended for the management of joint pain by many western and alternative practitioners from various disciplines. Glucosamine has shown somewhat mixed results clinically and within studies but is generally considered safe and at least somewhat effective.
Moxibustion Found Helpful for Knee Osteoarthritis
Chinese Medicine properly applied involves a range of techniques including acupuncture, herbal medicine, tuina massage, cupping, moxibustion, etc.. Used together these tools are used to treat a range of pain related conditions including osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. Moxibustion (see What is Moxibustion?) is a technique that can be used both within a clinical setting but is often prescribed as a home treatment that is relatively easy to perform once the patient is shown which points to use and the general technique. The
Gurkha Torpedos & Torch Starter Pack (4 Cigars) + Lighter $9.99
Our friend Ragik sent us in a link for another great CI deal: Cigars International has their Gurkha Torpedos & Torch Starter Pack available for $9.99.
NOTE: Currently out of stock on CI but I will leave this link here in case it comes back online anytime soon.
Gurkha Torpedos & Torch Starter Pack includes:
1 – Gurkha Regent Torpedo (6.25″ x 52)
1 – Gurkha Monogram Torpedo (6″ x 52)
1 – Gurkha Master Select Torpedo #1 (6″ x 52)
1 – Gurkha Havana Legend Torpedo (6″ x 52)
1 – CI Vertigo Smiley Impact Torch Lighter
I have an Aeron chair at my desk at home. Confession.
I got it in April when I moved to New York City. The only piece of furniture that I had that I couldn't move in my (now former) car was my desk chair. I found a good deal on an Aeron chair and I rationalized to myself that the cost of the chair was actually about the cost of movers. Savings right?
It also helped, that I was leaving a job where I had an Aeron chair in my office, and I knew that in the short term I would be working from home. While my old desk chair was (and is) quite nice, it's not quite the same. Sit in an Aeron chair for a couple of two years, and it's hard to go back. I've sat in other chairs since then, and it's never quite the same.
Having said that, after a cleaning incident today, I would like to collect a few gripes about the Aeron chair for your consideration.
The assembly right beneath the chair collects dust and dirt in a proportion that doesn't seem quite possible. It's clearly an artifact of the mesh, and likely a commentary on the air circulation of my apartment.
Regardless, dusting nightmare.
The arms scuff and scratch on desks, if the bottom of the desk isn't completely smooth. This isn't an actual problem: the chair still works fine and is as comfortable as ever, but it's a annoying.
I've never looked at the underside of a desk before seriously. With every other chair I've either ordered a variant sans arms, or I've take then arms off as soon as possible.
The Aeron arms are low enough that they've never bothered me, so I thought "might as well." But it's still annoying.
That's all.
Valentine's Day is less than a month away! I wanted to create something to store our Valentine's Day candy hearts in that was both functional and decorative. This cute little jar doesn't take too much time to whip up. And, once you learn how to do glass etching you can use it on so many things. I've etched vases and wine glasses so far and have seen ideas for etched casserole dishes so you always get your pan back after a pot luck.
Jewel Cay, Honduras (just off the coast of Utila) has truly become home for us over the past three months. We have our own apartment, friends, neighbours, and landlords that have become our adopted family.
Our Apartment
In two short weeks, we will be saying goodbye to it all, dusting off our backpacks, and continuing our journey with a trip to Nicaragua to meet up with my mom. I’ll be sad to go, but I can’t begin to describe how excited I am to see my momafter nearly 7 months away from our family.
Sunset on Jewel Cay
At first, for Mike and I, the most exciting part of renting our one bedroom apartment on Jewel Cay was finally having an oven (see the pictures below to see just how excited Mike was… if it wasn’t so hot, he probably would have been hugging it!). After months of hostel kitchens with one pot, one pan, and no oven, we were thrilled to be able to bake things again… so thrilled that we consumed something like 5 pounds of flour, 3 sticks of butter, and who knows how much sugar in the first week alone!
Mike Baking Biscuits
Mike Baking Oatcakes
Mike Baking Bread
We have made bread, biscuits, cinnamon buns, ham and cheese buns, perogies, shepherd’s pie, borscht, and many of the other goodies we miss from home. In a moment of homesick weakness, we even enjoyed a classy meal of KD (Kraft Dinner {mac and cheese}) and hotdogs.
Ham, Onion & Cheese Buns
The real beauty in having an apartment, though, is that settling in immediately gave us a feeling of home… a private space where we could unpack our things and hang out whenever we feel like it.
Home
We even have a cat that hangs around the hotel where we go to use the internet. His name is Balls, Scuba, or Slobber… depending who you ask. He makes us miss our cat, Pi, a little bit less… or is it a little bit more?
Slobber... we call him that for obvious reasons
Renting an apartment has really made a positive impact on our budget, too. We pay $200 USD a month, which includes power (something that’s really expensive here) and water. Our only other expenses are gas and food. Propane for the stove costs about $15 for a tank, which probably lasts a few months (we wouldn’t know since our first tank was stolen and our second slowly leaked out its contents in about two weeks) and we spend an average of about $10 a day on food. We can buy just about anything we want in any quantity we want… spices, mustard, mayonnaise and vanilla are sold by the spoonful, bread is sold by the slice, cabbage comes in heads, half heads, and quarter heads, and so on.
Really happy to be able to buy just the right amount of vanilla for egg nog and fried bananas. The cost... about 10 cents!
All in all, we’re spending a total of about $500-600 CAD per month. Even though we’re still diving nearly everyday, it no longer costs us anything, so it’s a really affordable lifestyle.
Our only question now is… do we return to Utila after Nicaragua? or move on with our travels?
Frases desafortunadas (y XLII)
“Las familias viven con tremendo desasosiego la búsqueda de colegio para sus hijos, es una decisión vital muy importante y hacen todo lo posible para lograr plaza en un centro que se adecue a sus preferencias y valores. El verdadero fraude se da cuando los padres eligen un determinado colegio y acaban teniendo que ir a otro que nada tiene que ver con el tipo de educación que desean para sus hijos.”
Lucía Figar, Consejera de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid en una minientrevista en el tebeo La Razón. La pregunta en cuestión que se le hace es que si está perseguido el fraude de padres que falsifican datos para conseguir plaza en un determinado colegio. Ya saben: empadronamientos falsos, certificar enfermedades inventadas, etc. y que me registren si “nuestra” Consejera no está justificando plenamente este tipo de prácticas con su respuesta.
Reader Mail – 01/15/2012 To 01/21/2012
I wonder how long it will take for things to collapse.
3 years. 10 years. 20 years.
Local and national government employ loads of lazy and stupid people. It is not a sustainable situation.
Our stupid transport system rejects British workers for jobs as bus drivers, but goes abroad to recruit.
I don't like credit cards, except for computer purchases in which I need some consumer protection in case things go bad, as each month there is a large debit to my current account, rather than smooth deductions over time. I like to know how much money I have instantly. I suppose this is being rather lazy as subtraction is not hard.
I've found that with cash I have a slight tendency to spend less.
You should take a leaf out of the Ancient Greeks' book.
The trouble with diplomacy (majority rule) is that elected representatives if they stick around too long will essentially take bribes and favour certain groups.
Also today it takes a huge amount of money and media co-operation to get elected. You need the backing of a major, established political party and the mainstream media will only support established, already picked players.
So only rich people can get elected. If you are a rich lawyer you can easily take a few months off work for an election campaign. If you lose you have your job waiting.
A poor software developer cannot take a few months off to campaign. If he/she did so the next employer would say he/she isn't dedicated to software development or that his/her skills atrophied in the space of a few months!
One solution is to have a lottery to pick our Members of Parliament or Congress or President/Prime Minister. It can't be any worse than the current situation where clowns that had never held a real job in their lives (Public Relations clowns take note) become Prime Minister with only 1 in 5 of the population voting for them. And then they break their promises and so what was really the point.
We need a random selection for government positions and then make the post temporary for a maximum of 5 years. Or at least have half elected and half randomly chosen.
The current system favours rich insiders that have need held a real job in their lives. As they have never done any real work, they don't know how the ordinary man gets screwed over and so they cannot be of any help.
The correct answer is market anarchism or agorism.
Even if you had voting reform or reform picking representatives, it's still corruptible.
Besides, there's no way to get any meaningful reform passed, because current insiders will block it.
I've heard Max Keiser say a few times the banking industry crashed an economy worth 1000*x just to make a profit of x. So a similar theme to the one you are speaking of.
What do you expect from UK politicians? David Cameron (the barely elected Prime Minister with only 1 in 5 votes) used to "work" in Public Relations beforehand.
George Osborne's (Chancellor in charge of the Treasury and tax) family makes posh wallpaper and have a nice line in setting up trusts to reduce/dodge tax.
Again you can't make this up. The man in charge of tax has a family that sets up trusts to AVOID TAX.
Why are these clowns still in office?
This is the difference between good logic and evil logic.
According to good logic, crashing the economy to make a profit is evil.
According to evil logic, crashing the economy to make a profit is brilliant. According to evil logic, all that matters is your relative wealth to everyone else, and not absolute wealth. Therefore, it's OK to wreck the economy as long as you're still on top.
An honest form of government would penalize and punish people who do evil things. The current State is of the psychopaths, by the psychopaths, and for the psychopaths.
I haven't looked up the documentation for this class, but I will have a guess.
Maybe you are not supposed to instantiate this class.
Maybe it only exists so that you can instantiate subclasses of it.
Maybe only the Microsoft library is suppose to instantiate this class. Maybe it is for internal use only. I suspect that only subclasses of it are suppose to exist as objects though. But then again they should have marked it as virtual, rather than throwing an exception.
Having said that Microsoft do hire a lot of at best average software developers. Then like hires like.
I was using the class as intended. My code was nearly 100% copied from an MSDN website example. It was listed as a "known bug" somewhere else.
Anonymous Coward commented on Microsoft Sucks - XmlSerializer Exception.
OK, Microsoft sucks in this regard.
However once software gets above a certain size, it is very difficult to cope with the complexity.
My life went in a whole other direction, because I used a class written by someone else that failed at the first step of instantiation.
I was doing one project at a famous tech company and unfortunately the other software developer was a rubbish one and dishonest as well.
He produced a load of crap and many weeks late as well. His class failed at the first step of instantiation.
I thought as this guy was new to the company (and may be overworked) that I would give him the benefit of the doubt. I did tell the managers on the project that his software wasn't ready on time though, but left it at that. I thought he might be incompetent but wasn't sure.
Unfortunately this guy stuck the knife in my back. I did explain things to the managers, but they couldn't be bothered to listen. His story gave them credit as well for saving the day, even though he was the problem.
So my life turned in another direction because of a class so badly written it failed at the first step of instantiation. It wasn't just this, it was the fact that he produced bad code many, many weeks late.
Using Ideas to Gauge Competence
SSH Socks Proxy for Android Phones
Android has had VPN support for donkey’s years but I could never get it working. I tried pptpd and xl2tpd but pptpd didn’t work (and has security holes) or the configuration is daunting and lengthy when all I want is a simple proxy.
There’s also HTTP proxy support built into Android. It’s exposed in Samsung and other ROMs at Settings->Wireless and Network->Wi-Fi Settings, Advanced. Apparently this app sets things up correctly too. I’m not sure if it’ll do authentication however unless you add the username:password in the hostname. I also don’t want to install Squid on my public internet server!
So, the holy grail of proxying would be doing so through ssh. Nothing else to install on my server and I get an encrypted tunnel through the internet and out of Ireland which might be a good thing to protect my privacy from the prying eyes of the Irish Government. A far more mundane reason is the security of my data from others on a public wifi network. (Aside, on what will the record companies blame the falling numbers of CDs sold when the Irish version of SOPA is passed?)
The good news is that you can now create an ssh tunnel from your Android device. The bad news is that it has to be rooted to make the most of it. Go grab the SSH Tunnel app and you’ll be sending data through your remote host in no time. There’s also a beta version that uses an OpenSSH native binary rather than a Java implementation. I haven’t tried that yet, the stable version worked fine for me.
You can stream Netflix through it, and browse the net, post to your blog or whatever else takes your fancy. All through a secure tunnel to a remote server.
In case you’re interested, it’s simplicity itself to do the same thing on Linux or Mac computers using the installed ssh client. On Windows just use Putty!
Related Posts
Working at Canonical, and how it relates to Finnix
I have accepted an IS Operations position with Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, and just got back from a week of orientation. This is a great opportunity, and I'm really looking forward to the coming months as I get settled in to operations at Canonical.
I wanted to let Finnix users know what this means for the future of Finnix and how it will change. Namely, nothing should change. Finnix will continue to be my personal project. From my initial talks during the interview process, Canonical management is supportive of Finnix, but will not try to exert any control over it. Conversely, I am joining as an operations sysadmin, not as an Ubuntu developer, so I have no direct control of Ubuntu development over any other member of the Ubuntu user community.
Finnix will continue to be based on Debian; I currently use a mix of Ubuntu and Debian for my workstations and servers, and while I love Ubuntu, Debian's development process is a closer fit as a base for Finnix's development process. I will also continue to be a Debian Maintainer, and will continue representing Finnix as a Debian derivative.
The decision to use Launchpad for Finnix bug tracking was unrelated (but has been working well so far), and actually began before I started interviewing with Canonical.
VB.NET provides multiple ways to save program data out to a file. This VB Tutorial will walk you through several different ways to easily save your data to a simple text file. This is by far the most straight forward way to serialize data so that your VB program can later read it back in. Below you will learn how to write to files using both a fixed format or a delaminated format. If you don’t know what this means or why you would choose one over the other please read on and it will make sense.
Skyrim’s Whiterun built in Minecraft
Are there Skyrim fans in the house? Sure there are! You’ll recognise the town of Whiterun in the video above, all built in Minecraft. It looks pretty good too! Download link for the map in the description of the video!
Related Posts
Pork Tinga on Homemade Flour Tortillas
Posted by johngl
The other morning, I found myself standing in front of the open fridge wondering what the hell to make for dinner. In and amongst the food clutter — there is no shortage of things to eat in there — I noticed a pound of sous vide pork sirloin — part of my “ham making” experiments — still sealed in the bag. I also noticed some spicy Italian sausage links I’d cooked up the night before (for Italian sausage subs) and some as yet unused pizza dough. Wandering over to the pantry, I spied a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce and several large cans of whole plum tomatoes. There was an avocado on the counter that was pushing the envelope of ripeness.
And so evolved this recipe for Pork Tinga.
Normally, pork tinga uses Mexican chorizo as a flavoring agent, but I deemed the Italian sausage was close enough for this kind of dish. Also, knowing that the sirloin was rather “hammy” I’d need to cut down on any added salt to the dish. I cut an Italian sausage in half, peeled off the casing, then chopped it up. I cut the sirloin into about 1/2″ cubes, and tossed those into a pan where I already had some onions caramelizing.
While these were continuing to brown, I fished out the slow cooker from the cabinet and set it to low heat for 8 hours.
I went back to the stove top, added the chopped Italian sausage to the mix, heated it through, then tossed the whole mess into the slow cooker along with a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic. I suppose I should mention that the onions were caramelized in a proprietary blend of bacon and duck fat (hereinafter called BaaS and DaaS, respectively).
Now that the leftover meats — along with a caramelized whole onion and garlic — were in the slow cooker, I grabbed that can of chipotles in adobo and fished out four peppers, cut them in half lengthwise, scraped out the seeds, and chopped them up. I popped them into the mix.
For that can of whole Italian plum tomatoes, I used the most glorious spousal unit’s technique of scissoring the tomatoes into smaller bits whilst still in the can. It’s a much less messy than fishing out the tomatoes and chopping them with a knife. I then dumped the entire contents of the 28 oz can into the crockery.
It was time to herb things up a bit. Not for me, it’s for the sauce! I dropped in about a half teaspoon of dried thyme, a half teaspoon of dried epazote, and a couple of large Turkish bay leaves. I gave it a quick mix. This was smelling pretty good!
Fast forward about four hours.
I was checking on the pork and noticed it looked a bit watery, so I left the top off the slow cooker after stirring. This allowed for evaporative moisture loss to thicken things up a bit. It worked perfectly.
At eight hours, I gave it another look. The meat was tender, the sauce was good and thick, and the tomatoes had cooked down nicely. Still, the meat was looking a little cubic, so I grabbed my potato masher and went after the “cubes”. Whilst holding the potato masher, it dawned on me that I’d forgotten the potatoes!
I went to the wine cellar and fished out a couple of russet potatoes, then peeled and cubed them. I put them in a veggie steamer for roughly six minutes. This kept them firm, yet completely cooked.
In a pan laden with more B&DaaS, I sizzled the potatoes for about a minute, then added the now shredded pork (thanks to Mr. Potato Masher).
I still needed some flour tortillas. Earlier, I thought I had some in the freezer, but that turned out to be a false memory. I watched a show on false memories recently and they are way more common than we think they are. Apparently, we are not so smart.
Anyway, I mentioned that unused pizza dough earlier. Yep, it’s pretty much the same stuff used in a flour tortilla.
I combined the two dough balls, kneaded them a few times, then split that ball into quarters and rolled out four 8″ diameter tortillas. In a very hot, dry cast iron skillet, I cooked them off for about 45 seconds per side. When I flipped them, they puffed up nicely. Perfect!
I put them in a zip top bag and covered that with a towel to help keep them warm.
I grated some cheese (moz and cheddar) and deseeded the avocado.
I’d nearly forgotten the libation! Mortal sin!
Using the method I described in a previous post on home made orange liqueurs, I have on the left, orange peeling in tequila and on the right, orange peelings in cognac. When making margaritas, I mix equal parts of these two flavored liquors instead of using Cointreau. They are wonderful.
Now primed, I was ready to do some plating.
This just proves that if you stand in front of your open refrigerator long enough, something will come to mind that can turn leftovers into something way better than the sum of the parts.
Leap Second Should Be Leap Minute
This story was amusing. There will be another “leap second” this year. Some scientists are getting annoyed by the leap second. The “leap second” must be manually added to every time-sensitive computer.
The Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing, due to the friction of tides. There also are other factors, such as big earthquakes. Even though a “electronic/atomic clock day” is technically defined as equal to a solar day, that will gradually drift due to the slowing Earth’s rotation.
This is corrected via occasional leap seconds. That makes the “atomic clock day” line up with the solar day. The problem is that the leap second must be manually added as an exception.
There’s an obvious solution. Instead of having a leap second 1-2+ times a year, have a “leap minute” every 10+ years. The average person would not notice, if sunrise is off by 30 seconds. They could wait until one minute of error is accumulated, before manually correcting the clock.
They should have a leap minute instead of frequent leap seconds. The solar day doesn’t have to line up perfectly. Nobody would notice an error of 45 seconds.
Recently I noticed a bruise at the base of my thumb. I had no idea how I had bruised it. The next morning was a Saturday. I woke up in excruciating pain. It was just this side of impossible to pull up my slacks, turn a key or a doorknob, or to execute any of the other many tasks that involve use of an opposable thumb.
Microsoft Sucks – XmlSerializer Exception
I had a “swearing at Microsoft” moment at work. I was using the .NET XmlSerializer class.
The XmlSerializer class throws an exception when you instantiate the class! Even if there are no bugs in your code! The constructor throws and catches and exception!
Why does this matter? I had my code set to “break on all exceptions”, causing a breakpoint to be hit at that exception.
What kind of idiot designs a class that throws an exception AS PART OF NORMAL BEHAVIOR? Shouldn’t someone in QA somewhere catch this?
Big plans for Windows 8 on mobile?
So this Monday I caught a headline that stuck out like a sore thumb. Of course I’m just now getting around to writing about it, so I could be a little behind the curve, but it intrigued me enough to still blog about it despite the amount of time that has elapsed since the article.
So, from a 10,000 point of view it will help me to explain that, while most people know what a processor is, many consumers don’t realize how many different varieties of processors exist. Most desktop machines use a family of processor commonly known as “x86″. PCs and Macs alike use this variety of processor, and over the course of Microsoft’s history they have made the largest profit selling software to run on x86 machines.
However x86′s dominance as the de facto champion of all computing platforms has recently been challenged. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, often favor alternatives that consume much less power than x86 units. One family of mobile-friendly processors that has emerged over the past decade is the ARM family of processors. With an increasing number of casual Internet users transitioning to using these mobile devices more frequently than their full size computers, it seems as though x86 could soon be relegated to only being used by computing professionals and hardcore gamers. Granted, that is still a long way off, but that’s my personal opinion on the way the market is headed. Take it for what you will.
Now, typically, software manufacturers that sell directly to consumers won’t care too much about on what platform their software is going to be executed. In fact, before Mac switched to Intel chips, it was not uncommon for manufacturers to produce a version of their software to run on the old Mac processors (PowerPC, if you care to know the name). Given the emergence of ARM, and the general diversification of the consumer device offerings, it isn’t surprising to hear that Microsoft is planning on producing ARM versions of their popular Windows Operating System. (In fact, they might do so already to be honest – I just don’t know.)
What is surprising is that it seems, according to ArsTechica, Microsoft is going to make it harder to install an Operating System other than Windows on ARM machines that ship with Windows pre-installed. They plan to do this by making their feature called SecureBoot mandatory for these machines. This strikes me as very, very peculiar. What raises my eyebrow even further is that they mandate that non-ARM machines must allow users to turn SecureBoot off.
I struggle to imagine the reasoning for this. Windows, as it exists now, wouldn’t make much sense as a mobile Operating System. There have for a long time been a mobile variants of the OS that they have used for mobile phones, but to the best of my knowledge they have never used full-on Windows in a mobile device.
There has been talk of ARM based economy PCs hitting the market, which is all well and good, but I’m beginning to suspect that – in spite of these new low power PCs coming out – Microsoft actually is planning to do something big with Windows on mobile because the people who buy economy PCs aren’t likely to hurt Microsoft’s market presence or revenue in the desktop arena. It’s not like they have an equivalent of Apple’s App Store that gives them continuous revenue.
However, if they were going to give a model like that a shot for their “big boy” operating system, they would be smart to do it in the Mobile arena first. And if they did do that, it would be on ARM chips, and a large number of people not using their Operating System would significantly hurt the viability of such a continuous revenue business model.
Additionally, this is a marked change from how Microsoft has operated in the past. It’s a very Apple-esque move in many ways.
Microsoft has talked before about trying to give a constant feel throughout their products. Indeed, the XBox dashboard now looks like an HD version of a Windows phone in some respects. It is reasonable to suspect that the next step in that endeavour is unifying their mobile and desktop Operating Systems, and attempting to build a continuous revenue model to capitalize on their users after they purchase the original product.
Whether or not that will actually happen is something only time will tell. For now, we just have to sit and wait. As always leave me some comment love below. I’d love to hear what you think.
Addressing Prickly Interactions
I got together with a friend last night. The give and take of our conversation was hardly smooth. Her responses seemed to be rather prickly. I took note, attempting to stay focused on my ability to remain centered. My desire was to avoid escalating the situation by reacting to her reaction myself. In the background I wondered silently, “What am I doing that is prompting her reactivity?” This is so habitual for me to start by wondering what I’ve done to upset someone. This is tricky territory. One little revision to the question will be helpful.
How to optimize the latency in your wireless network connection
Wireless networking is highly convenient and generally exhibits acceptable performance for most general purpose computer use. However, for some Windows users – more specifically, for some wireless network cards and drivers – the nature of wireless can introduce unwanted latency in the connection. Chances are you’d never notice these brief hiccups in web browsing or even file transfer. Instead, the problem manifests itself in any real-time network activity such as VOIP or online gaming.
Windows will periodically scan the airwaves for new wireless networks that you may – but quite likely won’t – want to use. Certainly, if you are a desktop user with a wireless network connection you are accessing one and only one wireless network. Roadwarriors using laptops are unique in that they frequently access any number of new wireless networks by virtue of their portability.
Unfortunately, this brief network scan can introduce some latency in an otherwise rock solid network connection. You can see if your setup is susceptible to the problem by running a ping to your local wireless router. You’ll notice your pings are in the 1 to 3 ms range and then suddenly one packet will jump to 300+ ms before quickly returning to the norm of 3ms.
WLAN Optimizer is a free utility that can optimize your wireless connection and thus remove the background scans that hurt your performance. In actuality, WLAN Optimizer disables the broadcast scan ability of the WLAN AutoConfig service in Windows. Unfortunately, as the service is required to initially establish a wireless connection it’s not feasible to disable it outright.
The connection tweak is only applied while WLAN Optimizer is running; as such the portable utility can be executed automatically upon Windows login – even starting up silently. If you are one of the users that suffer from lag or latency spikes it’s worth checking out the application.
As part of the Eden Energy Medicine practitioner’s training program we learned to test sensory type. Some of us have a single sensory type, while others have more than one. Ideally, we are able to combine the four sensory modalities: tonal (or auditory), visual, kinesthetic and digital, in roughly equal proportion. The identified sensory type refers to that sense that predominates if we are stressed. In a way, it could be said to be the one upon which we rely perhaps too heavily.
One of my energy medicine clients was about to take a new step, volunteering at a local hospital. She would be putting in her first day as a volunteer after our morning meeting. She wanted to know if there was something we could do to reduce her anxiety.
We did several rounds of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, which involves tapping on the ends of meridians). She found that process to be calming. She then mentioned that she found it anxiety producing to be around crowds, especially in a hospital environment.
FREDDIE GIBBS x MADLIB x GUNS..LOTS OF GUNS “THUGGIN”
A couple nights ago, I had a nightmare that Freddie Gibbs robbed and killed me.
The next day, I saw this video, and realized why.
Funny story:
Illogic and I had a show with Gibbs last Spring, afterI interviewed him for Citybeat a month earlier. Gibbs and I were sitting right next to each other at the Merch Table. Illogic told me I should introduce myself and tell him that I had just interviewed him a few weeks back. Since we just rocked a pretty big show with him, I though “Ok, cool, I can do that.”
So I introduced myself to him. And then he looked at me the same way he looks at the camera in this video. Then I went back to my seat. So that was that.
The End.
Enjoy the video. This song is amazing.
This story is funny. (There’s one regular UK commenter who would be amused by this story.) In the UK, they are changing the metal composition of 5p and 10p coins. That’s approximately equivalent to dimes and quarters in the USA.
Due to high inflation, the UK government was losing money on the coins. The melt value of the coin was greater than the face amount. The USA has a similar problem with pennies and nickels.
Here’s the joke. The UK government will save 8m pounds by changing coin composition. However, the private sector will have to spend 80m pounds! The new coins have a different shape and density! Old vending machines won’t work! They all need to be fixed and replaced!
That is really ironic. The coin composition change is a hidden tax on the private sector. There are costs due to upgrading vending machines.
That’s a sign of hyperinflation, debasing metal coins. In the 1960s, it was a change from silver to other metals. Now, the coins are changing to steel.
The low-denomination coins should be completely eliminated. However, that would mean that the State is admitting there’s an inflation problem. In the USA, it would be politically inappropriate to eliminate pennies, nickels, and dimes, because that would be an admission that there’s inflation.
That was an amusing story. Due to hyperinflation, the UK government changed 5p and 10p coins to cheaper metals. The private sector must upgrade all their vending machines due to the change. That cost is greater than the amount that the State is saving. This is only a temporary solution to coin hyperinflation. In a few years, the State won’t even be able to afford steel 5p and 10p coins.
12 String Blues
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Last update: January 28, 2012 06:11 PM
