Modern Geekery

Moving the blog

As part of the New Year, I'm moving my blog to LiveJournal. Despite LJ's well earned reputation for hosting lots of angsty teenagers, I've talked to several people who are pretty satisfied with it. I no longer have the time to mess around with the site admin aspect of running my own Movable Type installation and my hosting provider has gotten a lot stricter on the resources individual users consume, to the point where I'm not sure that it is really feasible to run Movable Type here anymore.

In any case, the new link is here and the redirect page will be changed accordingly.

See you at the new site!

Apparently, someone needs to re-read the Bill of Rights

In case you're not following the minor controversy over the season finale of South Park, let me fill you in. The South Park crew released an episode that is in very poor taste, astoundingly vulgar, and hilariously funny. Par for the course, I'd say.

In this case, however, they chose to make fun of the Catholic Church, an institution that I'd say is eminent deserving of the jest. The Catholic League responded by prevailing upon a Catholic member of Viacom's board of directors to remove the episode from re-runs. This is pretty underhanded, but society has a way of routing around that damage: you can now download the episode from the internet and enjoy the humor.

What is more disturbing is that the head of the Catholic League is quoted as saying, “Already, we are being deluged with hate mail that is as obscene as it is viciously anti-Catholic. All because we exercised our First Amendment right to request that Comedy Central not offend Catholics again! But we’re used to such things and will not be deterred.”

Now, lets look at this. There are two ways to read that statement, the first of which is that he apparently believes he has a First Amendment right not to have people poke fun at his religion. That's clearly ludicrous and I can't believe that he's that stupid. The second is that he believes that pressuring a board member of a media company to censor a television show is "freedom of speech." That's just as ridiculous. Are people in this country so ignorant of their basic freedoms that no one questions this statement?

In any case, thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

The Garbage Fairy strikes

Today we did some cleaning up around the house. We'd bought Paul and Elise's old futon for our library, so we could get rid of the ancient, ugly sofa we had down there. That sofa and its accompanying chair were found at an estate sale for Sarah's first apartment in college. I think she paid $10 for them. We'd kept them covered with some plain fabric, in order to hide the truly hideous upholstery.

We called the city to schedule a pickup, after determining that Goodwill and the Salvation Army weren't interested. We placed them out on the curb, along with an old bedframe that we had no use for. We weren't terribly pleased at the prospect of junking them, but they were taking up space and we couldn't find a charity to take them.

Less than four hours later, when I went outside to roll the trash can around front, the bedframe, sofa, and chair were gone. Now, we live off the beaten path a bit, on a loop off the main road through our neighborhood, so I was quite surprised that the garbage fairy found us so quickly.

After the fact, I discovered that Asheville has a Freecycle group. I'm on the mailing list now.

This just in: Texas outlaws marriage

Without making too many snide comments about the apparent intelligence of 76% of the Texan voting populace, I will point out that the following language contains interesting implications:

(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

While the intent of the bigots who wrote this amendment is clear, the text as it is written bans all marriage. Texas is now forbidden to recognize anylegal status identical to marriage, and since marriage is identical to marriage, it must be forbidden. I'm just astounded.

I predict that Jon Stewart is going to have field day with this one. I hope this causes Texan politicians to rethink the value of their educational system, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now -that's- service

As part of my vacation, I spent Thursday morning at a local coffeeshop catching up on some personal projects. When I plugged my laptop's power cord into the wall, the transformer flashed underneath its white plastic housing and let out a sharp crackle. Fortunately, the death of the power supply did not harm the laptop itself. A call to Apple resulted in a new unit arriving the next day. That's service.

Apple Picking

I took the week of Labor Day off. Fortunately, we'd planned to spend the week in the area, enjoying the Asheville area and all the things it has to offer. Pictures and commentary follow.

Travel to Dallas

I spent last week in Dallas visiting a vendor. Aside from the usual comments I could make about Dallas just being too hot, it was a good trip. It was interesting to see the outskirts of the city from the air. The fringes of Dallas look like a suburban cancer growing into perfectly good pastureland.

MTBE to be removed?

My sources inform me that the Senate passed an amendment to an energy bill that would remove methyl t-butyl ether from the nation's fuel supply. I believe this can only be a good thing. MTBE, while an excellent oxygenator, is responsible for a good deal of groundwater contamination. Ethanol works nearly as well, is cheaper, and has less environmental impact.

And while we're on the subject of ethanol, I've discovered that many gas stations near my workplace carry E85. That is, 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. And even more amazing, there are many cars on the road here that burn it. While Asheville does have a burgeoning biodiesel supply, it would be nice if the local car dealers and gas stations would add ethanol to the alternative fuel economy of the region

Booklover's geek tool

If you're not familiar with Greasemonkey, it's a Firefox extension that allows you insert user-defined scripts into web content. Its a way of client-side scripting that's pretty clever.

You may wonder, "what on earth do I do with this?" Here's the coolest answer I've seen: Book Burro;. If you're browsing a book page on various book retailers' sites, a simple click will check a list of other book retailers for their current price on the same book. Call it "1-click comparison shopping." Now, that is useful.

New trail

We went hiking today on Bad Branch trail. The trailhead is difficult to find: you have to take a dirt road off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, down to the edge of the Bent Creek Forest. The trail heads down the side of the ridge and meets Bad Branch, which it follows almost to Mills River. We didn't make it quite that far. The end of the trail near the Parkway has a truly phenomenal slope and we knew we'd have to climb back up. I have pictures, which I'll post sooner or later.