The Daily Diversion Archive For November, 2002

Tuesday November 5, 2002

We've emerged from October intact. It was touch and go for a while there. I'm getting the distinct feeling that October has it in for me. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.

I bought a geek toy last night. I bought a TV capture card. This is the device that makes my PC a TV set and also gives it the ability to record shows, time-shift (TIVO functions), and burn shows to CD. It also does a bunch of other geeky things that I kinda dig. I played with it for a while last night, but I realized the cable line to the basement is messed up somehow. The first order of business tonight when I get home is to fix that little problem. I guess it'll be the second thing on the list. The first is to vote.

GET OUT AND VOTE YOU PEOPLE!!!

Really, it's not too much to ask to participate in what makes this country the best place on earth to live.

Who am I going to vote for? That's none of your business, thankyouverymuch. I will tell you where I stand on various points. I'm for welfare. I think it's important as a safety net, and important because it's one of the hallmarks of a civilized society. People should not go hungry here in the US. People should have a place to sleep. Food, clothing and shelter. They're the basics and everyone in this country should have them. I'm not saying that they should be handed out for free to everyone who has a whim to collect on these benefits, but I am saying that we as a society need these services to help out the truly needy. If a person CAN work, they SHOULD work. If there are no jobs, then that's when government can and should step in. I also think that a person in this country who isn't religious shouldn't be required to deal with so-called "faith-based" agencies to get the aid they need. If a person CAN work and chooses not to, I believe there should be either limits on the benefits that person can collect and/or help available to convince a person that although work SUCKS, a person SHOULD work for their living. Now get up off your ass.

I believe that military action in Iraq is something we need to do now, or we risk being very sorry later. A nuclear-armed Iraq is something the world does not need, even though the world doesn't seem to think it's that important. When there's a loose nuke in Paris, Moscow or somewhere in Israel with ol' Hairy Buttface's finger on the trigger, the fun will be over. Saddam has used WMDs before and he's not acting rationally in the family of nations. If an irrational actor (pretty much any country run by religious nuts) acquires a nuke, bad things happen. The rules of nationhood get broken. Scores of people who are trying just to live their lives become cannon fodder. There are rules of nationhood. Nations should be relied upon to act in their own best interests. Nations should not assassinate other nations' leaders because payback is a bitch. There are other rules, but those are the most obvious ones. Why did Kyoto fail here? It failed because we didn't want to handicap our industry. Why would it handicap us and not others? Why don't weapons inspectors work? Why would the world court not work? All those things won't work because they are not in a nation's best interests. Nations cheat at international agreements. They do so because there are usually compelling reasons to do so and because regulatory agencies generally aren't as stringent or are prevented from being as stringent as they should be at enforcing these treaties. Weapons inspectors are only as good as their weakest inspector and only as good as the country they're inspecting lets them be. The world court wouldn't work not only because it's against our Constitution, but I just can't believe a world forum such as that would not be used as a political weapon against countries with unpopular policies. Mind you, I make a huge distinction between unpopular policies and things that are downright wrong. Wiping out an inconvenient ethnic minority is wrong. Going to war to protect a country's interests is not.

Getting back to the Kyoto point, if we signed that treaty into law, we'd be forced to abide by it. I sincerely doubt that countries that do not have a free press to uncover cheating on Kyoto, countries run by dictators and countries with heavily nationalized industries that could lose face by being discovered cheating on Kyoto would follow the Kyoto treaty with nearly the vigor we would have to here in the states. That's not fair. The idea of the treaty is nice, but it's unenforceable in practice. We'd take it on the chin while other countries would get away with murder.

Health care needs to be changed. National health insurance would surely have its problems, but how could it be worse than it is now. As for the pharmaceutical companies who ruthlessly gouge their U.S. customers while selling the same product for less elsewhere, you shouldn't complain when companies start selling those same goods here at those prices.

In closing today, I'd just like to thank Governor Ventura for appointing one of his cronies to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Senator Paul Wellstone's death. Although I understand why he appointed an Independence Party member, I think he made the wrong choice. The citizens of Minnesota elected a Democrat 6 years ago and we were owed the rest of this current term to be served by another Democrat. That the Governor appointed this man during a hissy fit about his party being (wrongly, I agree) excluded from the only Senatorial candidate debate before the election today, just reaffirms his appearance as an immature, opportunistic politician with autocratic tendencies. I kinda felt bad for him when he got booed when he led Baseball's National Anthem at game 2 of the League Championship Series, but I no longer do. His I'm one of you act is over. No more curtain calls. I don't believe it anymore. His political capital with me and likely with the rest of Minnesota and the nation has been spent.

Monday November 11, 2002

What's cool?

TV tuner cards, Minneapolis City Directories from 1895 and good friends.

What sucks?

Broken teeth, clutter and heartburn.

TV tuner cards are way cool. I'm still playing with mine, but only rarely do you get that much bang for the buck. For 85 bucks, I got the card, an FM antenna, a remote control, the IR receiver for the IR remote and the link for audio from the card to the input on the sound card. I was also able to plug in my old Noteworthy Video Camera I got off EBAY for my old Toshiba Tecra 510 CDT. It never worked all that well because the driver for the video capture card was written for Win95 and I was running Win98. The camera works just fine, though. It's way cool to add the ability to play, and record TV to your PC AND the ability to hook up a video camera. It's all just a big bonus.

In other news, I'm sorry for the amount of misspellings on this site. When I update this page, I'm typing in VI, and to my knowledge there's no spell checker in VI. I've noticed that I have a lot of fat-finger mistakes. I have fat fingers, so I guess that figures. It also looks as if I could use a bit more instruction on how to spell certain works. I'll get right to that.

Not.

The broken teeth thing from above is the result of some bad news I got when I went to the dentist last week. I had no cavities and that's just great, however, the dental assistant said she thought the tooth that had been giving me some hot/cold sensitivity problems had a crack in it. The dentist, a new guy and several years my junior ("Are you old enough to be a dentist?"), confirmed that it was indeed a cracked tooth.

DAMN!

DAMN, DAMN, DAMN!

SHIT!

I didn't say any of that there, but I was thinking them awfully loudly. The dentist fella then surprised me by saying they could take care of it whenever I wanted to and that it didn't really need a crown right away. He pretty much said that if it became a problem sensitivity-wise or if it just flat-out broke, then come back and they'd take care of it then. Being in no mood to lay out cash for a crown and being even less in the mood for getting a needle stuck in my mouth for like 12 years, I passed on the opportunity to have it fixed in the near future. I can wait. Believe me, I can wait.

We went over to our friends' house last night for one of their kids' birthdays. We sat an chatted and had fun for the balance of the evening. Just as we were ready to go, Jon pulled out an object of abject desire for me: A Minneapolis City Directory from 1895. It's in good shape with tons of full-page ads and other cool stuff. There were tons of names I recognized and tons of things that connected other dots in my head. Very cool. I'm going to have to borrow that some time in the future and spend a few quality hours taking notes on it. Oh yes.

Another cool thing arrived in the mail last week. I bid on and won on EBAY a USGS Folio of the area around the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. It has about a dozen pages of text, and 6 big maps. Very cool, very cheap and an excellent addition to my little collection of historical junk. By the way, the folio is something like 18" by 24" big and from 1916. I can't wait to read what it has to say.

Friday November 15, 2002

What's cool?

Stumbling across old cassette tapes stored away in forgotten boxes, using google to find the name of a music group just by entering a few words of a song, laptops and windfalls.

What sucks?

S.A.D.--Now there's an appropriate acronym, the time lag in auctions on Ebay, computer problems and fall yard clean-up.

So I was in the garage this morning looking for an ice scraper. I know there must be a dozen in a box somewhere in our house because I remember putting at least 3 in the same box in my old garage before the move. Could I find one this morning? Nope. We'd had frosted windows before, but the frost was the thickest yet this morning and I didn't want to fool around with using window-washer to clear them off.

Here's a thought: A window washing fluid heater. You could put it right next to the car battery heating pad in the things that really should be sold in car stores but aren't shelf.

It took my wife to direct me to the ice scraper of my dreams. Well, not of my dreams. More like the one I wanted so I could get off to work. Thanks, hon. The scraper in question was in the bottom of a bunch of stuff I took out of our old Camry just before we left on what was to be our last trip in it.

Winter's coming and I really should get out there and clean up some of the leaves in our back yard. Our new fence has pretty much trapped every leaf that came off the elm and the maple and landed in our backyard. I see much work in the future.

I was looking for the artist who did a particular tune in a big dance-mix I've had for quite a while. I really like the song, so I entered some of the title into google and pretty much instantly came up with the artist's name. It's way cool the way google can do that. Anyway, I want the song, so I searched for the record label or the title of the album. I found out that it was a 7" put out by Arista records. So said the website. That led me to Arista Records' website. You sure can tell that Arista is trying to be a "cool" record company because they have tons of stuff about their current crop of crooners and screamers. Is there one freakin' link to their past artists or even their past releases? Nope. What a bunch of shit. I seem to remember Arista being around for a long while and I'd be willing to bet they have an impressive back-catalog of records. All I can say is wow.

So that was a big ol' dead end.

I'm getting another laptop. I should have the bid finished on Monday. Details to follow.

I ended up coming into some money this week. It was totally unexpected and really appreciated. The persons who gave it to me probably don't even know what the Internet is, but that's OK. They know who I am, and that means a lot.

Monday November 18, 2002

What's cool?

Counter Strike, fast computers and ebay.

What sucks?

Ebay, a lot of the people who play Counter Strike and network lag.

Ebay. What else is there to say? If it wasn't for Ebay, my hobbies would be impossible. I find myself wondering how much I've changed due to Ebay. I'm not saying I'm a huge junkie, I'm just saying that it's an enormously handy tool to have access to. If I need PC or motorcycle parts, or just need to kill some time, Ebay is there and usually very timely. Selling stuff on Ebay is exquisite torture. You never know for sure what you'll get for the item being sold. Buying on Ebay is even worse. You never know if someone is gonna snipe the stuffing out of you in the last couple of seconds. It's actually very satisfying to have a bid high enough that you have no fear of a sniper. I did that with our mantle clock, and even though the price shot up about 75 bucks in the last 10 seconds of the auction, I still had another 75 on top. That's how to do it securely. The thing I'm buying today has a value that's so variable that I don't have any confidence I'll get it, even though I'm still about 200 bucks over the current price with 2 hours to go. I'm not out of my budget, but I'm still nervous.

I really like Counter Strike. It's a game based on Half-Life. Half-Life is a game that creeped the hell out of me and I didn't really enjoy playing it. Counter strike is a game where you're either a terrorist or a counter-terrorist trying to achieve a certain goal. Generally, you play it on-line and there will be several other people on your side in the game. The game play progresses in rounds and you generally have 5 minutes to achieve the objective or to wipe out all the other players on the other team. I'm still getting used to the navigation controls, but I'm leaps and bounds better at it today than I was just 2 days ago. Learning!

Unfortunately, you can't really pick your teammates and the audio dialogue between some of the less mature people in the game was genuinely annoying at times because of this. I realize that most of the people I'm playing the game with are 12 or so, but I just don't want to hear their idiocy. I'm gettin' old, I am.

Tuesday November 26, 2002

I self-edited the last post. I was ranting and it wasn't up to the quality standards (hah!) I hold myself to here. That's not to say it wasn't fun to write. It just wasn't any good.

Big news around here. I got my new laptop. It's a Toshiba Portege 7140CT and it's way cool. With its small battery in, it weighs just a tick over four pounds. It's about an inch thick when closed and it has a 13" screen. It's a PIII 500 and it really gets the job done. There's just so much to like about a purchase that was everything you wanted it to be and more. The biggest surprise was the keyboard. It's really good. All in all, I'm very happy with it. It was something of a deal as well. Right now, most higher end used laptops are going for about a buck a megahertz on Ebay. I got this one for right around there. It was a big chunk of money, but I thoroughly researched this purchase and I'm very happy with the results.