Pollywogs!

…I decided to do it. One of the things I liked most about our early year diet revision was knowing exactly how much I was eating, and how much I ought to be eating. I liked the control that knowledge brought. Which is why I decided to commit to Weight Watchers for three months.

Tonight, I have 0.5 points left. I had a slice of toast with peanut butter, tea with 2 tablespoons of liquid creamer, and a package of yogurt for breakfast, which was 9 points. Lunch was a fiber bar and a banana at 4 points, and dinner was salad and soup with a glass of fruit juice at 16 points (salad dressing and croutons are pretty point heavy items!). For ’snacks’ I had a second cup of tea with creamer when I got home and two beers while shooting bitches in the evening. 35.5 points total out of 36, and I actually feel quite full. This is going very well!

The website isn’t bad, but sometimes is a bit slow, they gotta take some of my fucking fee and upgrade their servers…

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Etsy is a place to buy and sell handmade goods. It is actually really, really cool. Really cool.

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HitMeLater is basically email from yourself to yourself in the future.  Ever think “I need to deal with this tomorrow”?  Send it to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll mail it back to you exactly 24 hours later.  Pretty good idea!

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I wear a double-layered tinfoil hat, but in some ways I am incredibly risky and throw caution to the wind, taunting the people tasked with illegally monitoring me with my disregard of the knowledge that they can (and probably do) monitor and observe every packet in and out of our LAN.  These tools can help if you decide (unlike me) to be a little more cautious and careful in your jaunts through cyberspace.

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Let me answer this question: computer gaming is the only reason anyone sane would choose Microsoft over Linux.

So after her success I was back to the question that perpetually plagues me: Why would anyone choose Windows over Linux?

• There’s far less risk for viruses and malware.
• It’s free.
• Applications are free.
• It’s far more flexible.
• It has multiple routes for support.
• It is improving at a far faster rate than Windows.
• Bugs and security holes are patched much quicker.

I realize the pat answers will appear:

• No games.
• No Linux version of application X.

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I want to be a juror.  I’m pretty sure I’d get screened out, but man the fucking havoc I could wreck:

The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”

That’s a fair question.

Did you know you have the power to question law as a juror?  I bet you didn’t, because the government does not want you to realize that a jury is one of the last bastions of our power against tyranny.  A judge will likely try to have you removed if you are the lone dissenter, but if you can convince your fellow jurors into at least a deadlock, you’re golden.  Which is the entire idea of a trial by jury:

Like so many of America’s early leaders, John Adams was a strong proponent of jury nullification.  Here’s Adams: “It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

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UPDATE: 5 online ‘health’ calculators, I actually used the BMI one (which says I’m overweight) and the body fat one (which lied to me and said I’m only 12.5% body fat, but apparently it’s easy to get wrong).

…what an interesting concept.  I like the original Greek meaning a bit better, it resonates with the sound of the word better, I believe.   I found it after reading the entry ‘book curse‘, which I found on reddit.  My how easily I am distracted…

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I didn’t realize that an iPhone with contract costs (at a minimum) $1,320 for the first year…that is madness!  Makes me really glad I’ve grandfathered my Immix contract for as long as I have, the ‘feature set’ for the price is really sweet…

Hopefully I won’t drop or break this expensive little thing, and can sell it for what I bought it for on eBay if the Android phones reach their potential.

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The netbook market is really expanding, this one looks like a lot of quality equipment for $400.  The Acer Aspire One looks pretty interesting as well.  I don’t know what it is about small electronic devices, but I’m hopelessly hooked…

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This is an excellent idea for subsidising the cost of a solar electric system for your house.  If electric companies were smart, they’d be doing this themselves: allowing customers (at no up front cost of their own) to choose to have renewable installed.  The system would be owned by the power company (say PPL or Southern Company) but the energy would be (mostly) used by the customer’s household.  The bill of course stays the same, just the source of the energy would change.  The customer gets the satisfaction of knowing that their TV and lights aren’t radically changing the environment, and the electric company gets to keep their customer and increases their generation capacity without building additional, massive plants.  As with all things that I think “if it is that simple and necessary, it should simply be DONE”: when I’m dictator, things are going to be different…

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Taxes.  We pay them, and what do we get back?  Bombs, guns and spilled blood. The average individual pays at about a 40% rate, pretty similar to what you see in European countries, and yet we have none of the benifits that your average European country has…because we’re blowing so much money on ‘defense spending’.  How the hell can we justify this war machine that is draining our treasuries like a damn cancer.  But even suggest trimming the military budget and suddenly your a fucking terrorist, soft on defense, aren’t a patriot, or some other mindless drivel.  Oh, and let’s cut taxes on the wealthy while we’re at it.  Fucking baby jesus, what is wrong with this country?  Moronic imbiciles, so easily controlled.  Just turn the TV on and read the corporate message…

…when I’m dictator, things are going to be different…

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Energy.  We need it.  We’re doing it wrong.  Denmark is doing it right.

“Denmark is the model that the United States should be following,” said Steve Pullins, executive director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Modern Grid Initiative.

How’d they do it? Distributed energy.

Unlike traditional “centralized” systems, distributed energy relies on small power-generating technologies like solar panels or ultra-efficient natural-gas turbines built near the point of energy consumption to supplement or displace grid-distributed electricity.

Consumers can not only draw power from the grid, but can feed power into it as well. For instance, homes equipped with solar-power panels could feed unused electricity back into the grid, adding to the total available supply.

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Peru has an energy problem too, as in a lot of rural villages don’t have it!  They also went with the obvious answer, decentralized local generation.  This story made me smile, the entire article restored a little faith in humanity.  The project is just getting started, but it…well, it is just freaking awesome!

To say that this experimental project has been a success so far would be an understatement. Last year 21 homes in Alumbre were equipped with 100-watt wind turbines that power their homes, and the village’s school was powered with a 500-watt turbine. The wind turbines store energy into what are known as “deep cycle” batteries, and the batteries when fully charged can potentially provide energy to homes for up to three days. The batteries need to be replaced every 3-4 years, and for this reason each family with a turbine must contribute to a battery replacement fund on a monthly basis. They pay about 10 nuevo soles each (~ $3 American), a sum that’s less than what most families were previously spending each month on candles and kerosene for lamps.

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I want to try Weight Watchers now:

As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me:

Weight Watchers is an RPG.

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.

The alternative pretty much sucks:

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Found that article on Provigil that I had misplaced.  I may have found and posted it before, but I can’t remember.  Have I ever mentioned I have a terrible memory?  There was this smart drug I had bookmarked a really cool article about, but I can’t find it now.  Or maybe I had posted it before.  What was it called, pro-something?

A contrasting viewpoint.  I already have the creativity of a ’special needs’ toddler, so I don’t really see this as a downside…

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Hulu: TV without the TV.  Between this and Comedy Central having TDS and the Colbert Report online, I wouldn’t be sad one bit to get rid of my fucking $70 a month pile-of-crap cable TV bill…

No, seriously, you should watch Arrested Development.  This is the pilot, it is hilarious but doesn’t have the production values of the rest of the series.  Hopefully it gets you hooked:

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And while I’m sharing things I find awesome, check out Liam Finn:

This is a bit shorter than the version they played in the live show, but it gives you a small taste. These guys were just fucking awesome…

I wrote this on a different forum today, liked it so much I’m going to cross post here.

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I read this in Fortune magazine today, found an article with the same chart online at CNN:

The source seems pretty centrist, lots of experts in law and accounting there.

Looks like McCain is planning on the same thing Bush did: lower taxes and expect lower spending and ‘an expanding economy’ picks up the slack. I don’t know why McCain would expect anything different than what happened the past eight years. Check this out: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-06-08-dream_N.htm

In a period that economists now refer to as the golden age, rich and poor alike prospered. From the end of World War II in 1945 to 1973, those at the bottom of the income charts actually advanced a bit faster than those at the top, in what Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz labeled “growing together.”

In recent years, however, most of the economic gains have gone to those at the top.

The richest one-tenth of American families — those with incomes above $104,700 in 2006 — accounted for almost half (49.7%) of all income that year, according to economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley.

That represented the highest share since 1917, higher even than at the stock market peak before the crash of 1929, says Saez, who studied income tax and Census data since 1913.

His analysis shows that the richest of the rich — the top 1% of American families making at least $382,600 — have garnered especially large gains. From 1993 to 2006, those families captured about half of the nation’s overall growth. From 2002 to 2006, they received about three-quarters of total growth.

I added the emphasis. If trickle down economics (supply side, reaganomics, what have you) works, how could we POSSIBLY be in a recession right now! We ought to be in the most massive and wonderful economic position our nation has ever, EVER, been in!

It looks to me that Obama’s tax plan will bring things back in line with the way our nation has historically been, rather than the recent (Reagan/Clinton/Bush Jr.) massive splurge of tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. So no more complaining about how Obama is going to tax //anyone// into ruin: if you’re making $3 million dollars, something tells me that you’re living a pretty damn comfortable life, and are the MOST able to afford a tax increase without it affecting whether you can buy any hamburger at the store this week cause the kids have been asking for meatloaf for months…how much hamburger is a $113 tax cut going to buy? One or two extra servings per week if inflation doesn’t wipe out the dollar first…

If you would ever need to purchase music (as in, you appreciate the artists’ work (doesn’t that (I believe) proper use of the apostrophe look unusual?) and want to financially contribute to them) I suggest Amazon.com for your purchasing needs.  FUCK ITUNES.  Amazon has DRM free mp3s, for dirt cheap.  FUCK ITUNES.  I decided to spend $35 or so and bought the Queens of the Stone Age discography (well, I bought each of the albums) after watching their videos on YouTube and realizing I really love this music:

The Blood Is Love

I saw you, in a way
Beyond figure out
These lines of life have been drawn… and can’t be removed
Our eyes is all it took to know

Open up your eyes
Deep blue, glassy lake
and swim ’till water and sky
Now are one, out of two
Oh, my bloodshot eyes

Open up your mouth
Touch your lips to mine
That we may make a kiss that can pierce through death & survive
Your words have branded my mind

Still i hold your hand
Wrapped as if a ring
We of flesh and blood are only carrying
It’s so hard to…
Well, you know…

The seed waits for the reaper to sow
Every breath an art
The dignity to learn it can strain & break your heart
Take all your pieces home
You ask when you’re alone, “what is love?”
The blood is love…

If you don’t want to buy music, I suggest easynews.com with newzleech.com.  A bit more complicated than a .torrent file, but a bit safer yet.  Personally, why someone would buy “Now That’s What I Call Music 70” is beyond me…I, umm, “downloaded” it and felt like I had wasted those invisible internet bits…

Did I mention FUCK ITUNES?  You can even manage your iPod with software other than iTunes (I recently removed that clusterfuck that is (fuck) iTunes and replaced it with gtkpod on my laptop (running Ubuntu 8.04) and Yamipod on my desktop (XP (FUCK VISTA)).

Oh, and I ripped all of the DRM off of my iTunes purchases with some software I can’t even recall the name of anymore.  Did you know iTunes doesn’t let you re-download the music you purchased in the event of a disaster?  Did I mention FUCK ITUNES?

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You hear about that Texas oilman who is pushing for massive investment in wind power?  He isn’t crazy, it’s an excellent idea.  20% of our power from four months in Iraq? Who is promoting this radical and pathetically insane drivel?  Al Gore?  No, the Department of Fucking Energy!

And if America gives big to the wind industry, expect it to give back, generously. Here are the expected benefits, from the report:

• Support of roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S., with an average of more than 150,000 workers directly employed by the wind industry.
• Increase in annual revenues to local communities to more than $1.5 billion by 2030.
• Reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
• Reduction of natural gas use by 11%.
• Reduction of water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030.

Iraq is such a complicated mess, but one thing is quite clear: the Bush administration went into it with the attitude that ‘no matter how bad it gets, that means more money for our buddies at Halliburton and The Carlyle Group’.  And when you think of how dearly needed those resources are needed to reduce the impact of the inevitable global climate change…

IT.  IS.  FUCKING.  CRIMINAL.

To the future…I’m sorry.  Truly I am.  You always look back and think “was there more that I could have done”.   I realize that we need to work overtime…but we needed to get started yesterday.  I’m so very sorry…

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So I’ve been on piracetam for the past month or so, been going good.  I have recently added a fair bit of fish oil to the morning dose of ginko, Choline, eleuthero and other assorted chemicals, and it’s been treating me quite well.  I nearly always feel alert and awake until perhaps 2 or 3PM.   Once I’m out of piracetam, I’m probably going to continue taking it on a very low level, but I’m interested in trying the next one out: Provigil.  Why?

It’s not an amphetamine or stimulant, the article explained: it doesn’t make you high, or wired. It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy. No significant negative effects have been discovered. Now students are using it in the run-up to exams as a “smart drug” – a steroid for the mind.

It sounded perfect. A few clicks on-line and I found I could order it from a foreign pharmacy, just £30 for a month’s supply. I called a friend who is a GP, and told her what I was thinking of. She’d heard of people using the drug, and went away and looked up the details. “I think it’s a stupid thing to do, because you shouldn’t ever take drugs you don’t need,” she said when she called back. “Do I think it’ll seriously harm you? No, I don’t. But you’d be much better off taking a long holiday than narcolepsy pills.” Then she warned me: “There is one known side-effect.” Oh, damn I thought. A downside. “It often causes people to lose weight.” Are you mad? You become cleverer and thinner? I whipped out my Visa card immediately.

Yes.  Oh my, yes yes!

I’m designer!

This, however, sound a bit more serious than piracetam, so I’ll likely start at a very low dosage and take it slow…

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Use it or lose it:

Among men who had sexual intercourse less than once a week, there were 79 cases of erectile dysfunction per 1,000 men. That number dropped to 32 cases per 1,000 among men who said they had sexual intercourse once a week, and it dropped even further, to 16 per 1,000, among men who said they had sexual intercourse three or more times a week, the researchers reported.

I’m already impotent.  Enough (too much?) said.

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Speaking of happy marriages, I am a ‘poor’ 35.  I tried to be as brutally honest with the answers as I could.  I would have tanked into ‘very poor (failures)’ if it wasn’t for the “orgasms” and “not cheating on your wife” bits, both of which are pretty heavily weighted positive.  I’m not the ideal husband of the 50s (or whenever this amusing bit of work was created).  I had a LOT of demerits.   Post up your scores in the comments, post anonymously if you like, I don’t mind.

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About fucking time: instant on computing!

The most interesting story the media is downplaying is the ASUS announcement that it will have a ROM boot chip on all its motherboards, which will boot Linux instantly on start-up. When you flick the switch the machine is instantly on. (It’s about time.) Of course, you will have to press another button for the machine to load Windows.

This development is important, since 90 percent of the time all a user wants to do is surf the Web. Often when leaving for a trip, I forget to check the weather. To do so, I would have to start up my computer, wait forever for it to boot, then go online. This way, I just flip it on, and boom—I get a browser and the info and I’m done.

It’s an extremely subversive ploy for a number of reasons. First of all, it gets people used to Linux, gives them a pain-free experience, and provides quick rewards. Second, it shows users that—most of the time—this is all they need. And finally, it makes Windows look like a subsystem not much different from a program that you run under Windows. The psychological effect of this is profound, and the results could be devastating for Microsoft.

Exactly.  I installed PCFluxboxOS on an old 450Mhz AMD K6 with 128MB of memory because I needed a floppy drive last week, and didn’t feel like fooling around with a live, working computer (none of which had a working floppy installed)…and once the slow ass hard drive gets done doing it’s thing it is quite fast enough for 99% of your tasks.  You can write Word .doc files, surf the internet, print…all with just about 200MB of software.  It is wonderful (and free)…but what I really want is instant on computing, where the LiveCD resides on a god damn ROM chip!!!

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Appeaser!  Conspiring with terrorists!  Wuss!  Al Qaeda ball coddler!

Oh wait, you mean everyone is responding very favorably?

For Europeans, America offers two faces: one of cynicism, big business and bullying aggression, another of freedom, fairness and nothing-is-impossible dynamism.

If Bush was seen as embodying that first America, Obama is viewed as fitting the second role — one that Europe has historically loved, respected and relied on.

On top of that comes his charisma. The German news magazine Der Spiegel splashed the headline “Germany meets the superstar” over a photo of Obama on its cover this week.

“Americans need a change, and what’s good for America is good for the whole world,” said Maike Smerling, a physician who was born and raised in the former East Germany.

Juergen Trittin, a leading lawmaker with Germany’s opposition Greens, pinpointed the contrast between Obama’s tour and Bush’s much-protested visits over the years.

“We should be glad that an American is coming who people don’t have to demonstrate against,” Trittin said on N24 television. “The rest of Europe is jealous that Barack Obama is speaking here in Berlin.”

Who would have imagined that decency. honesty, accountability and common sense would work?  That way lies madness!!!

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Speaking of madness…$10 a gallon for gas?  Don’t we hear about how that would cripple the United States?  Well, how does Europe do it?  To begin with, the difference between our $4 and their $10 per gallon at the pump is mostly taxes which are re-invested in a whole manner of constructive (not destructive) ways in Europe.  The other half is the wide range of fuel efficient vehicles at their disposal.

DO NOT BELIEVE FOR A MINUTE THAT “DETROIT” COULD NOT DO THIS HERE IN THE US //TOMORROW//.  Oh, and Washington could tax the shit out of ecologically damaging goods and services, bringing their true cost out in the open.  Political suicide?

You’ve made me an offer I can refuse,
course, either way I get screwed.
counter-proposal, I go home and jerk off.

- I’m Designer (I believe completely out of context)

What a way to operate our only fucking planet…

This is one of the cracks in the ’so far’ impenetrable wall of crime that the Bush administration has perpetrated.  Add your support for accountability, it only takes a few seconds.

I mean, COME ON, if I ignored a Congressional subpoena, I’d be sitting in jail right now!

In the mid 1990s, Democrats frequently complained about subpoenas the Republican Congress used to gain testimony from the Clinton White House. On Wednesday, Republicans, now in the minority, used that same argument, accusing Democrats of launching a “fishing expedition” to harass the current administration.

This time, let us put the will of the people behind the demand for justice, instead of just some Republican cunts trying to cause problems with someone’s personal life.  Myself, I don’t care that some Republican closet homosexual “has a wide stance”, but I do care when they are hypocritical and pander to peoples fears while being something completely different in real life.  I don’t care if the President “has sexual relations” with someone other than his wife, that is his and his wife’s problem.

I DO CARE WHEN THE PRESIDENT LIES AND MANIPULATES THE PUBLIC IN ORDER TO LAUNCH AN ILLEGAL WAR TO FULFILL THE GOALS OF A PRIVATE THINK TANK LIKE THE PNAC.  I DO CARE WHEN THE PRESIDENT USES THE CONSTITUTION TO WIPE HIS ASS WITH.

I DO CARE.

WE DO CARE.