The super-smart LabRat over at Atomic Nerds has a very good post up on the nature of force and the “non-violence” of passive resistance. You should go read it, because she’s right on the money, as usual. (She’s riffing off of this post by Robb Allen, which is also well worth a read.)
Monthly Archives: November 2011
p-p-p-powerbook.
This past weekend, I engaged in some mutually beneficial voluntary exchange of property with friends. They wanted to set up a home theater PC for their big-screen TV in the basement den, and they had a nice PowerBook G4 they no longer needed. So I traded them my Zotac HTPC, which had been hooked up to our TV but rarely used because we stream Netflix through the Wii.
Looking at the PowerBook, you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a 5-year-old machine. They look deceptively like the current MacBook Pro models. It’s clad in aluminum, and the keyboard is backlit, which is a nice feature for someone who often writes in low-light conditions—say, early in the morning before the kids get up, or late in the evening when everyone’s in bed. The very last PowerBook model made before Apple went to Intel chips and renamed the line “MacBook”, it still has capable hardware under the hood. It has 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive, and a really nice high-res display. The G4, being retired technology, is not suitable for HD video streaming or gaming these days, but it’s perfectly capable when it comes to running Scrivener or Word, and it browses the Intertubes as fast as anything else out there.
A good exchange of value is when both parties walk away from the transaction happy, and they did. My friends have a sweet HTPC and can stream Netflix to their TV, and I have a nice portable writing rig that runs all the software I need to chip the prose from the walls of the word mines.
retail combat.
Tapping into radio traffic of the 304th Wal*Mart Loss Prevention Regiment, currently heavily engaged at Store #374:
“…confirm we are OUT of rainchecks…get Close Air Support on the horn pronto…”
“…combat engineers have welded a barrier out of shelving and garden rakes between Electronics and Toys…get some belt-feds up there as soon as you can…”
“…falling back to the service desk, requesting limited tactical nuclear release OH GOD THEY’RE EATING EACH OTHER IN HOUSEWARES…”
“…running low on ammo, holed up near Computers…”
“…remember: short, controlled bursts…”
“…they’ve broken through at Sporting Goods! Get the reserve battalion in there!”
“…Jackson’s gone, man…took a Blu-Ray player to the neck, severed his aorta…”
Yeah. Won’t be going near the shopping mile today, thank you very much.
happy thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving, little Pilgrims and Injuns everywhere. May you have lots of things to be thankful for. May your feast be epic, and the subsequent nap include dreams of James McAvoy in Victorian garb or Kate Beckinsale in a leather catsuit (according to your preference.) And remember: Tofurkey is an abomination in the eyes of gods and men.
it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.
Yeah, I own an iPhone, but this Samsung ad poking fun at iPhone hipsters is hilarious:
dispatch from castle frostbite.
(looks up from breakfast)
Oh, hi there, imaginary Intertubes pals!
I’ve been kind of sparse on the Twitters and the Interblogs for the last week or two. To those who got concerned enough to check up on me via email: NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. I AM FINE. Just a little busy with Real Life, that’s all. I was most emphatically NOT kidnapped by a gang of rogue Girl Scouts and locked in the basement dungeon in their troop’s secret HQ, fed a diet of Twizzlers and flat Mountain Dew, and forced to crank out reams of Twilight fanfic. NO, SIR.
The Munchkin Wrangler wordsmithy has a new primary computational device—a store-bought Gateway box running Windows 7. When I put Robin’s machine together a few months back, I ordered a parts kit from TigerDirect and put together a really fast budget rig with a quad-core processor for under $400. I wanted to repeat the process for my new machine, but our Windows and Office family pack licenses have been distributed among the existing computers in the house, and the added cost for even an OEM license of Windows 7 Home Premium would have made a parts kit system just as expensive as (or only very slightly less so than) an off-the-shelf store computer. So I went out and bought the ready-made solution, which means that the Nerd Club will be by very shortly to collect my club card. (“You bought a STORE BOX? And it’s not even running LINUX? FOR SHAME.”) The new box is a Core i3, one of the new Sandy Bridge processors, and much faster than anything else I’ve owned so far. I took it home, replaced the wimpy 300W PSU with a 500W Antec unit I had in the parts bin, and stuck a GeForce GTX 460 into the PCI-E slot. It runs like a Geiger counter near Fukushima, and it’s so quiet that you have to actually put your ear against the case to hear that it’s on.
(Plus, it has running lights along the front of the case, and the Gateway logo lights up. That’s how you know it’s a fast rig, you see.)
(TL;DR: New computer, yay!)
Things at the Castle are hectic and in a permanent state of low-level stress with occasional spikes of OMGWTFBBQ—in other words, business as usual. But hey! Next month the winter will start full throttle, and then I get to put “Snow Removal” on my daily plate of chores as well. Grown-ups have SO MUCH FUN. They get to do WHATEVER THEY WANT. It’s not fair!
(Lyra and Quinn have discovered that delightful phrase despite only a very nebulous grasp of its meaning. To them, “It’s not fair” means “I don’t agree with it”, which—come to think about it—is also how a lot of grown-ups understand it.)
Anyway: the state of affairs here at Castle Frostbite. Not captured by girl scouts—busy as fuck—new computer—looking forward to shoveling snow (“New England Home Gym: FREE HOME DELIVERY”)—life’s not fair. That’s all for right now. Carry on, then.
11/11.
zombie borders, risen from the grave.
There’s a Books-A-Million in the location where our local Borders closed doors a while back. I went in there today for the first time—they opened a week or two ago—and the experience was a little eerie.
The place looks almost exactly like the dead Borders. I’m fairly sure they even recycled most of the signage in the store, because it has that familiar dark red Borders color. Everything is in the spot where it was in the old Borders—the kid books, the YA section, the magazines, the paper-and-pen stuff. They even reused the old cafe furniture for the new Joe Muggs cafe that’s now in place of the old Seattle’s Best Coffee. I swear, it was like stepping back in time a few months. The only difference I noticed was the Christian Fiction section, which is about four times the size of the one Borders used to have. Oh, and there’s now a two-aisle assortment of Bibles. Other than that, the assortment mirrors that of the old Borders…with the exception that the shelves of the Books-A-Million are fully stocked.
On the way out, I bumped into one of the managers, and I was surprised to see that the recycling of Borders stuff even extends to the managerial staff—she was one of the managers at Borders.
So it looks like we have our Borders back in West Lebanon. In a fashion, anyway.
well, as long as your intentions are pure.
Back in college—meaning “a few years ago” for me—my English teacher was a pleasant older woman who was married to an Iranian national. I had many discussions with her on politics, education, and the general state of affairs in this country.
Once, we were talking about the different mindsets in the Middle East, and the American tendency to go into a place and expect the folks there to think like we do. She told me of a student from an Arab country she once had. One time he didn’t show up for an exam. When she later marked his grade down for the absence, he protested.
“You weren’t there, so I had to mark down your grade,” she told him.
“I was at the library and I was running late. I meant to come to class.”
“Well, you still weren’t there, so I really have no choice. You missed the exam.”
“But I meant to come,” he insisted, quite upset that the teacher wouldn’t change her decision.
When she later discussed the incident with her husband, he explained that it’s a cultural thing. He explained that in the student’s native culture, intent is as important as–and sometimes more important than–results. He missed the exam, but his intentions had been good, so to him, the teacher marking down his grade was profoundly unfair.
I find that this explanation helps me understand the ability of so many people to dismiss the negative effects of certain policy decisions. In some ways, they have adopted the same sort of mindset that intent trumps results. That’s how we end up with rising food prices because so much of the country’s farmers are now growing government-subsidized corn to turn into fuel ethanol, for example. The intent was to help the environment and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The results are the aforementioned rising global food prices because of all the crop acreage that is now re-purposed for fuel. (The net result for the environment has been negative in the end, because the agricultural runoff from the nitrogen fertilizers needed for all the corn has a bad impact on the Gulf of Mexico.)
That’s how we ended up with egregious systematic abuses of power like RICO and asset forfeiture excess–because the intent of the law was good (reducing or eliminating the negative effects of drugs on society), the people who voted that kind of stuff into place can hold fast to it because the actual results of the policy are not as important as its intent. Conversely, measures specifically designed to eliminate the negative results of the War on Drugs don’t stand a chance of success with the same crowd if the intent of the measure is perceived wrongly. (“You want to make cannabis legal to stop stuffing the jails with non-violent drug offenders? Are you insane? What kind of message does that send?”)
How many public policy measures have been kept in place even though they have achieved the opposite results of those desired because they were well-intended? The list is a long one, and it’s not limited to only liberal or only conservative hobby horses. Gun control, welfare, drug policy, defense policy, education, health care…it seems that too many politicians (and voters) of either party are more interested in doing what sounds right than what’s actually effective. The system is set up to favor the sound bite and the “common sense solution” because it gets more votes—and is more defensible in a campaign debate—than the ideas that are focused on producing results without giving a handy “perceived intent” adapter for the proponent.
That’s how voters can re-elect a guy accused of taking bribes or diddling interns—because his public policy efforts have the proper intent, his private transgressions are irrelevant. And that’s why they can dismiss the good results achieved by the Other Guy’s public policy efforts—because those policies don’t have the proper intent, their results are irrelevant.
lunch at wendy’s, 1976.
Playing with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone.
