Well, Dean Wormer tagged me to continue a story...

I had been shuffling around the house for a few hours and already felt tired. The doorbell rang. I opened the front door and saw a figure striding away from the house, quickly and purposefully. I looked down and saw a bulky envelope. I picked it up. The handwriting was smudged and cramped, and I could only make out a few words. (Splotchy)

"Meet me at two o'clock at Grisham Square. Don't be late!"

What? I already had an appointment at that time. In fact, that was the only reason I had even taken off work that Wednesday. But, when I saw the photos, I knew I had to go and see what the hell was going on. Oh gosh, now I wish I hadn't, but how was I to know then that Elizabeth would take this whole thing so far? (Freida Bee)

She had exposed the nefarious Republican oil-for-neckties program, skillfully dismantling its diabolically brilliant mind control scheme, giving each man, woman and child his or her freewill back, and this had made her a national, nay, worldwide, heroine, but -- the fear -- the look of stark, otherworldly terror on the -- could they even be classified as faces anymore?

No, I had to swallow the overwhelming dread that was threatening to force me into complete shutdown, collapsing on the hallowed ground where I would silently, naively wish it all away until it came for -- me. Fruitlessly wiping away a flood of icy sweat, I knew I had to steel my resolve, look upon those photos once more and let them burn their horrific images in my psyche. Permanently. (Randal Graves)

Yet something was tickling my psyche, trying to work it's way to the surface of my consciousness like that bad memory for grade school I buried long ago. The one where I had to give a speech to the whole class and was trying to imagine them in their underwear so I wouldn't be nervous, when I suddenly realized I was the one who was in my underwear as I had forgotten to wear pants. I realized that the faces in the picture weren't faces after all. I was holding the picture upside down. (Dean Wormer)

Ah, that was better. What had first appeared as people and then abstract art now resolved into pictures of cells. Plant cells. I stifled a chuckle thinking the cells were heads of people, but wait! The lower row of cells had twice as many chromosomes as the first row. Then it hit me, the gaunt figure striding away from my door was Elizabeth's old botany professor. His ambling gait percolated back into my consciousness. What could he want with me and why give me pictures of mutated cells? (Don Snabulus)


I tag Moody Minstrel, DewKid, TheHim, and Hypatia

Update:

Moody's thread is here.

Obama is an appeas...wait, WHAT?

From Talking Points Memo



McCain was for negotiation with Hamas before he was against it. Bush is calling the wrong guy an appeaser.

Senator Clinton's trip to Bosnia "under fire" was parodied so nicely in the video Moody had here a little while back. Now McCain gets equal time except the comment needed no editing to be a parody this time.

For the record, McCain's 2006 statement about Hamas is a lot more sane than Bush's position. Unless you completely annihilate a group of people, you eventually have to talk to them. Just the way it is. Sorry if it isn't macho enough for some people.

Book Meme

Tagged by Swinebread with another blog nugget!

It’s the Book meme. I have to grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, locate the fifth sentence, and then post the next three sentences on my blog, and then tag five other people.

The book is Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The passage is:

"A little gift," Diamond said indistinctly. "Enough for Tricks."
"How do you know that?"
Rose was very dark-skinned, with a cloud of crinkled hair, a thin mouth, an intent, serious face.

I tag whoever wants to be tagged.

Six Questions

Dean Wormer tagged me with a small activity to perform. So here goes:

* The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
* Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
* At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Ten Years Ago I Was

Chewing tobacco then quitting and undergoing nasty withdrawls

Five Things on Today's To Do List

1. Repair pinched wire on bike computer

2. Wash clothes

3. Buy groceries

4. Pet the kitty

5. Write this post

Things I'd do if I were a Billionaire

Start an alternative to the Boy Scouts of America that accepts all the good people they reject (specifically women, atheists, and gays).

Create a robot army to destroy all surveillance cameras. What could possibly go wrong?

Start a series of independent think tanks bent on destroying the Democrat and Republican parties and electing smart people instead.

Develop a wind-blown bacteria that eats explosive materials and craps edible oils. Finally a way to beat swords into plowshares.

Three Bad Habits

1) Food
2) Water
3) Shelter

Five Places I've Lived

Milwaukie, OR
Monmouth, OR
Aumsville, OR
Dufur, OR (for short periods of time)
Portland, OR

Six Jobs I've had in Life

1) Rifle Instructor
2) Light Industrial (crap work)
3) Inside sales at an industrial distributor
4) Freewheeling computer gadfly, esquire
5) Technical Writer
6) Software Developer

Five people I tag

Hitler
Gandhi
Hillary Duff
Dick Cavett
A pencil

The Ebike Rides Again

I have a guest post over at Floating Down Denial on my Ebike experiences so far.

Thanks to Isis for posting this article!

Slushy Saturday

Winter is trying to hold on here in Stumptown. A hail/snowstorm in late April is very unusual (though not unprecedented). Here are a few pictures from the back yard today...












Kind of pretty, but I am ready for a few warm days around here. It was nearly 80 degrees F (25C or so) last Saturday, but that was a one day heat wave. A few more of those would be dandy.

Geek Report

Thanks to some programming I helped a good friend with, I am the happy recipient on an iPod Touch. Basically, it is an iPhone without the phone part. After some messing around with, I declare it to be a pretty good geek toy. In the spirit of Swinebread, I will enumerate my likes and dislikes with this device:

Likes:

• Hey, it is a computer! I can surf the web with Safari, watch YouTube videos, use Google Maps, etc.


• It has a good Wi-Fi interface that allows for security without having to know which type of encryption, etc. Just type the key and go.


• 8 GB is enough room for a LOT of music. (They have 32GB for you bigtime pirates out there)
  
• The best manual data entry of the PDA world. Having used Palm and Pocket PC, I know whereof I speak.


• Sound quality is great with the given earbud headphones.


• Friggin' A! It is free. What more could one want besides independent wealth and world peace?

Dislikes:

• While the input is good, speech recognition would be better and within the abilities of the device. Doing an email takes TOO long.


• No Copy and Paste. WTF??


• Developers must program using Objective C or web pages. Objective C is used by NOTHING ELSE ON THE WHOLE PLANET. Kind of like Microsoft's .NET platform except worse.


• I signed up for the Apple Developer Program and NONE of the DOWNLOAD LINKS WORK!


• Sometimes I would like to continue my music shuffle from where I was but, if I wait too long, sometimes the interface makes me start over and it will replay tunes I've recently heard.

Ubuntu Linux Goes to Back Burner

Overall, I like Linux and the strides they've made are tremendous, but there are a couple of things holding me back on this particular PC.

1. The PC is an older AMD running at about 1.6 GHz with a crummy on-board video card. The newer video and multimedia on Linux taxes the system too much to be useful. YouTube and multiple browser tabs are the worst. Win 2000 handled it much better, but it still sucked. (Special note to Adobe, make Flash run faster for Linux or Die Trying.)

2. While Linux can read and write my old Windows NTFS drive, it does so EXTREMELY poorly and often preempts other tasks for some time while it sits there doing nothing. Until I can back that drive up completely (100GB+), I can't do much with it.

Meanwhile, my employer replaced my Sony UX micro-mini Windows PC with another laptop, so I am able to bring that home and, as of yesterday, it is now my main PC with the Linux PC running as a file server until I can archive the data and reformat with a Linux-friendly filesystem and try again. (Given that Windows can't play nicely with anybody, I should cut some slack to the system that at least tries to: Linux.)

Steam Punk Gets Serious
The comments section of some earlier post of mine contained a web link to a Mac Mini redone in 19th century style (like the Wil Smith movie "Wild, Wild, West" .



Well, it appears that Charles Babbage's plans for computer called the Difference Engine #2 designed in 1849 is finally seeing the light of day. Wired Magazine tells us,

thanks to Microsoft multimillionaire Nathan Myhrvold, a second Difference Engine has been built and delivered to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where trained docents will turn its brass handle to crank out the calculations Babbage dreamed of automating.

For anyone who enjoyed Computer Science 101 in college (and there were darn few I am sure), Babbage is a big name. If I had millions, I could only hope that I would do something crazy and impulsive, so reverent and cool.



The Story of Breaking the Nazi Enigma Machine

As long as we are on the subject of the big league historical computer thinkers, Alan Turing is one of the biggest. The Church-Turing thesis has implications that reach into computer science, physics, and philosophy. What I did not know is that Turing worked on breaking the codes of the Enigma encryption machines used by the Nazis in World War II.

This article at the NSA.gov website (discovered thanks to security expert Bruce Schneier) outlines a very interesting history of the process of breaking the German code that has ramifications here in the computer age.

I guess the NSA is good for something besides scaring people on April Fools Day. Here is the first paragraph to get you started:

As the German military grew in the late 1920s, it began looking for a better way to secure its communications. It found the answer in a new cryptographic machine called "Enigma." The Germans believed the encryption generated by the machine to be unbreakable. With a theoretical number of ciphering possibilities of 3 X 10 to the 114 power (sic), their belief was not unjustified. However, they never reached that theoretical level of security. Nor did they count on the cryptanalytic abilities of their adversaries.

This articles looks at how we decrypted German codes and also how the Germans were able to intercept our secret communications as well. Interesting read.