Convincing 1955 To Be 2015

During the Charlie Hebdo imbroglio, I discovered this cartoon and this quote from President Eisenhower.

Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

There is no way on Earth that my parents or their contemporaries would have found that cartoon to be even vaguely acceptable. If you were from 1955, you'd have to have been several standard deviations off the norm, on the order of Jack Kerouac, in order to think the cartoon wasn't worthy of censorship.

1955 America was America, too. 2015 does not have a copyright on that title.

Over the last 60 years, our morals and society have gradually changed. We did not become the porn-besotted, weed-soaked, worship-our-groins nation overnight. It took 60 years of deliberate, incremental steps to get here.

When we interact with Muslims, a decent mental model might be 1955 America. Imagine trying to convince Harry Jones of 1955 Cleveland that all family structures are equally valid, that sex on TV is fine, abortion is OK and religious symbols need to be removed from all public places.

Then catch him up on social pathologies by showing him things like this.

Lolcat translation: Moral dekadenz not goin so well akshually.

Two things are going to happen that don't happen in conversation with someone from 2015.

First, Harry's not going to be intimidated by the ad hominems the libertines throw around today to bully their opponents into silence. He hasn't yet learned that you have to wriggle around, avoiding the chance you could be accused of homophobia or being a fundamentalist. Our accepted norm of not morally judging behavior will be alien to him and he won't accept that. Talk about the oppressive cisgendered Patriarchy is going to sound like what it is - lunacy.

The second thing that's going to happen is that Harry is going to dunk on you, over and over and over again. That graph is just the beginning. There are lots more. The moral prudes from the 50s who warned of what would happen if we allowed the libertines free rein have been, for the most part, proven correct. Accusations of racism aren't going to fly, either, as Harry beats you to death with statistics of black poverty and black family structures.

The data is available to all of us right now. The difference between then and now is that the people of 1955 would be willing to use it and would dismiss the condescending sneers of 2015 out of hand. As our moral compass has decayed, our ability to call things what they are has as well. It was a necessary loss in order to maintain the fiction that our new "freedoms" were not destructive. They are, but we can't say that.

Muslims can. Accusing a devout Muslim of being a judgmental prude probably doesn't have the same effect as it does on one of our modern university graduates. I've no doubt that their Imams are shoving these statistics in their faces on a regular basis. Since their moral attitudes haven't had 60 years to be gradually diluted into nothing, they're not going to be pushed around with our idiot, Unitarian-style arguments.

If our modern, secularist leaders are going to win cultural arguments with the Muslims, they're going to have to show them the concrete advantages of porn and weed. Good luck with that.

No Coffee Break Today

8+ years of daily blogging has made me able to compose a post in my head and free-write it as fast as I  can type. I don't even have time for that during a coffee break today as I've gotten some great business opportunities (yes, multiple!) in some emails and it's time to get cracking!

I'm in such a good mood that I need to share it and who better to set the tone than ...


I hope you have a day that makes you dance like no one is looking!

And The Best English-Style Brown Ale Is ...

Dogfish Head Indian Brown!

Last night was the Papist Pub Party and we tried 6 different English-style Brown Ales accompanied by Bangers n' Mash and Steak and Kidney Pudding. Here's how the voting came out:

1. Dogfish Head was the clear winner.
2. New English Brewing was also unanimously acclaimed.
   BIG GAP
3. Ale Smith was mediocre. That was a real surprise to me as I had expected Ale Smith to win.
4. Founding Fathers was mediocre. That was not a surprise. I've tried it before and thought it marginal at best.
5. Mass-produced Newcastle actually held up well against those two and was considered palatable.
   BIG GAP
6. Samuel Smith's was horrible. Contrary to the good reviews given Samuel Smith's on various beer websites, this native Brit was almost undrinkable in comparison to the others. Many of my guests did not finish their samples. I recall seeing one person out of the corner of my eye attempt to get the taste of it off of his tongue with sandpaper.

The food was well-liked as well. In addition to the dishes mentioned above, we had English Sweet Peas and Leeks with Brown Butter. All of the recipes came from this book, which has never produced anything but good food for me.

Now I need to go on the wagon for a while, despite having a fridge in the garage well-stocked with brown ales. I woke up with a bit of a head this morning. :-)

Biting Off More Potted Shrimps Than You Can Chew

Tonight's the Papist Pub night and I've got plenty of cooking to do. Steak and Kidney Pudding, Leeks in Brown Butter, etc. There's still shopping to do as well. What am I doing? Trying to figure out how to connect my TV to our SONOS sound system. And blogging. Hmm. Maybe I'm trying to do too much. Maybe I should just do the first things first as they say.

How about you? Do you find yourself biting off more than you can chew on a regular basis?

And the Potted Shrimp? I was giving some appetizers a try in my "test kitchen" earlier this week and tried this recipe. It's an old way of preserving shrimp, encasing them in clarified butter. Clarifying the butter removes the milk fats and keeps the butter from spoiling. You add some spices (mace and anchovy paste in this case) to give it a more distinctive favor. You spread the concoction over toast as shown below to make a delicious meal. Or a passable meal. Decent, but not worthy of guests.

Why Does Saudi Arabia Have Such A Large Military?

In a comment a while back, Interweb Amigo Tim pointed out that Saudi Arabia has one of the largest armies in the world. Fourth largest, if I recall correctly. Here's why.

Firing The Money Bazooka In 3..2..1..

There's nothing that printing lots and lots of money can't solve! With Europe falling into recession, the ECB is swinging into action!

FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank said Thursday it plans to purchase over €1 trillion ($1.157 trillion) in public and private sector bonds by the fall of 2016, a landmark decision aimed at combating stagnation and ultralow inflation in a region that has emerged as a top risk to the global economic recovery.

Printing gobs of cash has a long track record of success. Look at the way the ECB was printing money just a year or so ago and how well that kept things humm ... err ... humming ... err ... well, maybe that's a bad example.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, has had really huge success with the whole money-printing thing.
Image source.

Guys' Night At The Papist Pub

On Saturday, I'm hosting a pack of Papists at my pub for a tasting of English-style brown ales and some British food. We're all married and have kids of various ages. We're all fairly active in the Church.

The idea came to me while drinking some delicious Ale Smith Nut Brown. I thought, "There are so many of these English-style browns out there. A taste test would be a lot of fun, but having 5 or 6 22 oz beers is going to leave me in a liquid state with a massive hangover. I know! We'll build a party around this!"

When I sent out the invitations, everyone responded with enthusiasm. I'm going to ask, but I'm betting that the last time any of us hung out with nothing but other guys was ... more than a year ago? When you're busy with your family, hanging out with the fellas just doesn't happen.

I'm doing all the cooking myself and have decided to go with two main dishes, one normal and one very British. The normal one will be bangers and mash. The more unusual one will be a steak and kidney pudding. There's a great British pub and shop here in San Diego, Shakespeare's, that sells authentic British food. That's where I get the bangers - British sausages. I've got a cream soup picked out as well as a shrimp appetizer. There will be leeks prepared with a recipe from Newcastle as well.

Desert is problematic right now, but I've got to go down to Shakespeare's for more bangers anyway, so I ought to be able to find something for afters.

As far as the beer goes, I'm thinking that 5-6 beers will be plenty. Here are my candidates:

1. AleSmith Nut Brown
2. Samuel Smith's Nut Brown
3. Newcastle
4. Abita Turbodog
5. New English Brewing Co Brown
6. Avery Ellie's Brown 
7. Lost Coast Downtown Brown
8. Dogfish Head Indian Brown

I'm open or more suggestions.

As my truly deranged regular readers know, I've been a huge Newcastle United fan for the last four years, but ever since Alan Pardew left the Toon to go manage Crystal Palace, they've been my second favorite club. I'm not sure if I'll decorate the house (the Union Jack hanging over the door?), but I might play music like the Dave Clark Five's Glad All Over.

Boy Meets Gulls

We had some scraps of white bread left over from an appetizer recipe, so I took them down to Mission Bay to feed the gulls. This lot of scurvy knaves made short work of the bread and then stood around looking to cause trouble.

I got a couple of shots of gulls in the air, but since I wasn't using the sport mode on the camera, they came out too blurry to share. Oh well, there's never a lack of opportunities to photograph seagulls here in San Diego.

A Proper Rainfall Chart

... thanks to Google Charts.

Modesto hasn't had any rain since I started this project almost a month ago. In fact, most of California has been dry over that time.

Integrating

... PHP, MySQL and Javascript is proving to be a bit of an undertaking.

My rainfall project produces a MySQL database with a table of rainfall data for several California cities. I have PHP code that can read it and create a table from it in a browser like so.

Modesto Percent of Normal Rainfall

Date	2014	2013
21-Dec-14	218	42
22-Dec-14	213	41
23-Dec-14	209	40
24-Dec-14	204	40
25-Dec-14	200	39
26-Dec-14	197	38
27-Dec-14	193	37
28-Dec-14	190	37
30-Dec-14	183	35
31-Dec-14	179	35
01-Jan-15	177	34
02-Jan-15	173	34
03-Jan-15	171	33
04-Jan-15	168	32
05-Jan-15	165	32
06-Jan-15	162	31
07-Jan-15	160	31
08-Jan-15	157	30
09-Jan-15	155	30
10-Jan-15	152	29
11-Jan-15	150	29
12-Jan-15	147	28
13-Jan-15	144	28
14-Jan-15	142	27
15-Jan-15	140	27
16-Jan-15	138	27
17-Jan-15	136	26

Graphing this data has proven problematic in PHP, requiring me to learn javascript in order to use the excellent Google Charts library. Javascript, being browser-side, doesn't integrate well with the MySQL on the server. My first guess at solving this problem is to write a PHP script which produces a CSV string of the rainfall data and have the javascript code read that page in as a string. I then parse the CSV into an array and insert it into the graphing library.

Bite-size pieces. It's all going to have to be done in bite-sized pieces. I just wrote the PHP code to make the CSV. Now it's time to take a mental break and watch the Arsenal-ManU game.

President Eisenhower And Charlie Hebdo

Here's what Ike had to say about censorship.

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship."

Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire, 6/14/53

Emphasis mine.

Do you think Ike would have found this to offend his ideas of decency?

Whatever. Dwight Eisenhower couldn't have been a real American because he wasn't for utterly unfettered free speech. He probably would have been called a coward like all the other people who won't republish porn images of religious icons.

Google Charts Beats pChart

... like a drum.

For my rainfall project, I've been fighting with the PHP pChart drawing library for some time now, trying to get it to display labels and titles, format axes and so forth, all to no avail. Things work in their examples, but don't work in my code. The documentation for pChart is a complete mess as versions have deprecated functions, but the documentation on the web still shows them as active. The only way I know which functions are really there is to start writing the code in Dreamweaver and have its auto complete feature show me what's available.

I picked pChart because I knew PHP, but didn't know JavaScript very well. I've wanted to learn it, but I didn't want to compound the difficulty by learning a charting library while learning a new language. That concern has been thrown out the window.

Google Charts is a charting library provided for free by ... Google. Everything about it is first class. The documentation is clear, the results are beautiful and its only drawback is that it's written for JavaScript.

Oh well. I was going to learn JavaScript anyway.

Moms Are Always Beautiful

... just like Momma Daisy!

Momma Daisy is blooming right now.

I'm trying to remember what year I got her. I'm thinking it was 2005, but it could have been earlier. One of the women who gave her to me (a going away present at work) retired recently. She was always amazed that Momma was still alive. Momma's been my favorite plant ever since I got her, a symbol of people I loved.

My First Car

... was a 1969 Dodge Dart. There's a site with some great old car brochures. Here's the one for the '69 Dart.

What a way cool idea for a website, no?

Where Leadership Was Missing In The Charlie Hebdo Massacre

Almost everyone has had their fill of Muslim violence. That's why the mob was so quick to rush to the defense of Charlie Hebdo. Had CH been shot up by gays for a homophobic magazine cover, there would have been no marches. The cops would have dealt with the issue and it would have faded from the front pages quickly.

The mob had no purpose other than defiance. That's why the cartoons were republished in so many places and why the mob became irate where they weren't. Defending free speech was the cause and everyone signed on.

Defiance is divisive. One side is defying the other. Divisive acts when violence is a real option is not a good idea. Mobs aren't good for much more than defiance, though. That's why we needed leadership. As far as I can tell, we didn't get any.

Leadership would provide a strategic goal. I'd suggest the strategic goal here is to get the French Muslims to feel French and defend French customs. Trashing their sacred icons may be a terrific act of defiance, but it's a lousy sales technique when you're trying to sell them on the idea of being French.

Imagine going into a shoe store where the salesman screams that he doesn't think you have the brains to pick out a pair of socks, much less shoes, slacks or shirt.

Leadership would have focused the protests on more than defiance. It would have used the energy of the mob defending free speech and channeled it into something more. The goal of assimilating the Muslims would have been front and center and this horrible incident would have been proof that assimilation was needed.

Instead, all we got were republished, blasphemous cartoons and an in-your-face march. Six months from now, those 6,000,000 Muslims in France still won't feel very French. Our political leaders failed us utterly.

The Importance Of Fathers

Here's an interview with an inmate about what it was like growing up without a father. The anger surprised me. The video is less than 2 minutes long and is worth watching.

Developing On A Laptop Is The Worst

I spent an hour this morning playing with my rainfall graphing project. Southern California got some rain this weekend and I wanted to see how it affected the charts. I've got pChart working and it's very powerful, but I'm still not facile with it and I need to keep a browser window open with my latest chart page, the manual and examples as I write code in Dreamweaver. I also need a window open with HeidiSQL, my database viewer.

I've got a laptop with a single 17" screen.

Yes, that's a big screen and my friends at work mock me for having such a monster to lug around, but it's still not anywhere big enough to make web development easy. At work I've got two screens and have worked with three in the past. That makes things so easy! This is torture.

In the end, I wasn't able to label the axes, draw a legend or create a title. Pathetic. Enjoy?

Percent of normal rainfall for San Diego. The upper curve is this year, the lower curve is last year. There's a slight uptick after yesterday's rains. The x-axis is the date going from 21 December 2014 to 12 January 2015. The y-axis probably goes from 20% to 220%, but I'm not completely sure.

If I could master labeling the graph dynamically, I wouldn't have to type this. Sigh.

The End Game Is Easy To See

... if you're Nostradamus.

In Afghanistan, Muslim crazies used mortars to blow up centuries-old Buddha statues. In Iraq, they burned ancient, Catholic churches to the ground. In Nigeria, they recently stormed a village and killed about 2,000 people.

There are something like 6 million Muslims in France, free to move about and engage in commerce. Some of them are crazy. Some of them are, shall we say, less than impressed with French culture. Museums full of French art, for example, may be sacred to the French natives, but are not sacred to the Muslim crazies. Mohammed is sacred to Muslim crazies.

If you're going to draw Mohammed in various slanderous poses and you've got 6 million potential enemy combatants in your country and lots of ill-defended cultural icons, you might want to consider just how this is all going to end. Yes, you defended free speech. Now you need to think about defending the Louvre.

Aside: A friend of mine called car bombs the strategic bombing campaign of a military that lacks an air force. How many museums can stand up to a direct hit by a thousand-pound bomb?

What strikes me the most about our war on Islamofascism is how mentally unprepared the West is. With every move, we assume that we can dictate just how far things will escalate. When President Obama decided to bomb ISIS in Iraq, all I could think was that we had a long, undefended border and lots and lots of soft targets. At least with America, the Muslim crazies aren't already here in huge numbers like they are in France.

On the plus side, we can still draw crude porn pictures of religious figures, so we've got that going for us.

The Devil And Peter Tork

As we rush to war on the Interweb Tubes to defend utterly unfettered free speech, here's a bit of old news from 1968 about an episode of the Monkees entitled The Devil and Peter Tork.

Contrary to popular belief, this episode (the fifth completed for the second season), was held back by NBC due to its satanical jabs at network censorship--the word "hell"--rather than the lyrical content of the song "Salesman." Note that a distinct "cuckoo" is heard when Mike, Davy and Micky utter the word (or try to, anyway). Previously, "censored" Monkees episodes wherein a "cuckoo" replaced an offending expletive are No. 15, "Too Many Girls" (a.k.a. "Davy And Fern") and the closing moments of the previous episode, "The Monkee's Paw."

Here's the episode in case you want to watch it.

So You Still Want To Stand Up For Charlie Hebdo?

... after seeing this? It took less than 30 seconds to find that. There's more. Lots more.

There you go, absolutist free-speechers. Those are your teammates.

When the Black Panthers shoot up a Klan cookout, how many of you will be wearing Confederate flags and singing Dixie as you march through the streets?

Count me out.

What Are We Defending?

Drawing Mohammed in pornographic poses?

Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. For example, they have shown nuns masturbating and popes wearing condoms. They have also shown Muhammad in pornographic poses.

While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years.

The people at Charlie Hebdo were not on my side any more than the guys who shot them. A pox on both their houses.

Interestingly, while the people on Twitter agitating for reproducing Hebdo artwork might not know the full, scurvy truth of the content of that rag, it's a good bet the Muslims do. If you wanted the Muslims to feel isolated and surrounded by hateful, filth-encrusted infidels, this was a great way to do it.

Be careful who you take on as an ally. They may bring with them enemies you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Update: Good friends Tim and Foxfier have taken me to task over this to some degree. My question is, why would anyone, individually, implicitly defend Hebdo? Would our lives be missing something without sufficient porno pictures of Mohammed? Is there a crucially important characteristic to the kind of people who draw pictures of masturbating nuns that we can't do without?

I have no fear that there are plenty of guttersnipes who will now draw all manner of slime about the Prophet in retaliation. That crowd will be plenty big enough without us. Why should we feel the need to join in?

Find and prosecute the murderers, yes. But publish nasty pictures of Mohammed? Why?

And The Reason We Need To Get All Wound Up About Charlie Hebdo Is

... what?

A pack of smarmy creeps like the ones that produce The Daily Show mocked Muslims. Crazy Muslim fanatics went into their offices and shot them up. Apparently, the proper response to this is for all of us to publish attacks on the Muslim religion. At least that's what I'm reading on Twitter.

Um, why?

Look, I'm sorry the people got shot, but I don't see any need to follow their lead. Why do I need to get into the gutter with the writers at Charlie Hebdo to show that I don't like terrorism?

This blog started with a post about Danish cartoonists and threats of violence. I didn't think they were worth imitating, either.

So here we have a bunch of disrespectful creeps drawing cartoons that enrage a bunch of fanatical maniacs and we’re supposed to take sides? If, in 1940, Germany had declared war on Japan, just what would we have done? How about nothing at all and let them fight it out. It can’t be anything but good for us. Not every event in the world requires us to take sides.

In a later post, I said supporting the cartoonists by repeating their slander against Muslims was like attacking Stalingrad.

For the most part, we have completely blown it with respect to the Danish cartoons. We have taken the bait and run headlong into the battle the Islamofascists wanted to fight: a frontal attack on Islam.

I'm not a big fan of recreating Stalingrad from the German point of view. I'm sorry the people at Charlie Hebdo got shot, but I'm not going to join them in being ill-bred swine.

When (the Islamofascists) use (violence) to defend the Koran and the Prophet from Western libertines, they get recruits.

Let’s withdraw from Stalingrad before the trap closes around us all.

Central California Needs Irrigation

... is becoming apparent from my rainfall data scraping experiment. Despite being above normal for the year, Modesto hasn't seen rain in over two weeks. You can't do dry dirt farming like that. Everything would die.

December 21: 218% of normal
January 5: 162% of normal

At this rate, with no rain, Modesto will fall below average for the year by January 22.

The Male Gaze Is Everywhere! All The Time!

Good Lord.

The male gaze is something that society, even beyond feminist circles, is finally beginning to acknowledge ... The male gaze, which refers to the lens through which mostly white, heterosexual men are viewing the world, is a lens of entitlement...

Train yourself to see the gaze everywhere. Because that’s exactly where it is.

That's from the site, Everyday Feminism, apparently a resource for women who don't want husbands and enjoy paranoia. I found it by Googling "male gaze" after hearing a feminist use it in a video. Plenty of the ideas in that post are repeated in the media.

Why are we listening to these people? Why do they even get a hearing in the media with their infinite-loop lunacy? Train yourself to see the gaze everywhere because it is?!? What's the difference between that and the people who think the government is using beams to read their minds?

I had no idea their craziness was so foundational.

This is what you get when you mix the writers at Everyday Feminism with crazy cat ladies.

In Yuma, They Riot Over Sports

Well, "riot" is a bit of an overstatement. It's more like a mild yawn.

After yesterday's historic NFL playoff thrashing of the utterly impotent Arizona Cardinals, the Yuma Sun led with this story.

That's right, they led with ... European skiing.

The only thing I can think is that it's so darn hot and dry in Arizona that they watch Alpine skiing for relief.

Shorter Gene Demby: I Like To Chant And March

NPR contributor Gene Demby has a blatherthon of a post on Politico. It's 3 pages long and you want to drink a tall glass of rye whiskey after the fourth paragraph. Under the heading, "Suffering For Your Art," I read the thing so you don't have to. You're welcome. Here are the dimlights*.

First, it looks like I didn't get wound up enough about people I've never met getting shot for doing stupid things.

The shattering events of 2014, beginning with Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August, did more than touch off a national debate about police behavior, criminal justice and widening inequality in America. They also gave a new birth of passion and energy to a civil rights movement that had almost faded into history, and which had been in the throes of a slow comeback since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. 

I wasn't shattered, nor was anyone I know. Instead, we watched sports, drank beer and cooked delicious food. Our kids went to school. Plants were watered and trash was taken out. Other than marvelling at people like Gene yelling about some thuggish dingbat who picked a pointless fight with a cop, nothing around me was "shattered."

Apparently, I was supposed to join a "movement" or something like that. Gene goes on for pages and pages and pages (at least it seems that way) about the movement and how dynamic it's become. The dynamism is shown by things like this:

Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on social movements, said the civil rights establishment embraces the “Martin Luther King-Al Sharpton model”—which emphasizes mobilizing people for rallies and speeches and tends to be centered around a charismatic male leader. But the younger activists are instead inclined to what Jackson called the “Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model”—an approach that embraces a grass roots and in which agency is widely diffused.

I embraced the San Diego "@deanriehm - @bdaddyliberator - @mad_maximilion - @doodooecon" craft beer model. That's where you stop at Albertsons on the way home to pick up a big AleSmith ESB or Firestone Union Jack. This movement is characterized by grassroots-fed beef cooked on a grill and wins for our sports teams that are widely diffused throughout the season.

Honestly, I tried to read the rest of his narcissistic gum-flapping, but the best I could do was skim it. Just what all the marching and chanting is supposed to accomplish is beyond me. I've been around a little while and from the looks of things, longer than Gene. While "organizing" might be a good thing, it's utterly irrelevant in your life compared to going to church, getting married, picking up valuable skills, getting along with your bosses and devoting yourself to your spouse and children. You can march and chant all day, but if you don't do those basic things, you're going to be a failure.

In the time I've spent working with the homeless, mentoring fatherless young men and coaching kids, I've yet to see a life that could have been improved if only more people had attended rallies and "organized". I'm not sure what concrete things Gene intends to accomplish by waving signs around and clogging up our streets with shouting people. Maybe concrete things aren't the goal. Maybe the chanting and marching is the goal.

I wish Gene all the luck in the world with his movements and rallies and gabfests. I hope he has a great time. Meanwhile, I'm going to go back to working on some PHP code, cook a Cajun Prime Rib and follow @lee_ryder to see if Newcastle can beat Leicester City today in the FA Cup.

Mississippi Smothered Chicken in a big cast-iron skillet. Marching and chanting doesn't get the food cooked, Gene.

* - Since the thing is so utterly pointless, it doesn't really have highlights or lowlights.

Graphing Rainfall

I spent a little time installing the GD graphics library on my server and then scouted out some PHP graphing libraries. I ended up with PHPGraphLib which is about as stripped down as you could imagine. The results were underwhelming.

Meh.

There's another one called pChart that seems a lot more capable, but I tried to use it and mistook m own incompetence installing GD for its failings, so I punted on it and went to PHPGraphLib. It turns out that all I needed to do was reboot the server* and I was in business. I'm going to re-install the pChart library and try that. This one looks like some researcher needed some quick and dirty graphing functions and threw this one together. It hasn't been updated in quite some time.

* - Rebooting. Is there no problem it can't solve?

Chivalry Is Better Than Regulations. Husbands Are Even Better Than That.

So in order to stop the epidemic of rape on college campuses that may or may not be happening, states like California and many universities across the country have instituted "affirmative consent" rules. That is, everyone involved has to agree to any and all escalations of sexual activity. That's going to stop rape.

Right.

Because if it doesn't, you could be expelled from school. Presumably, there are still laws on the books prohibiting rape and threatening all kinds of legal ramifications like jail time, but those laws don't seem to apply on college campuses.

Rape is hand-to-hand combat. Men are larger, stronger, quicker and more aggressive than women, all by significantly large margins. I used to watch my daughter's U17 girls club soccer team get regularly thrashed by a boys U11 team in practice matches. (If I had entertained even the slightest doubts about male physical superiority, watching those games cured me very quickly.) When it comes to hand-to-hand combat, my money is on the bigger, stronger, quicker, more aggressive person every time.

Laws and regulations are all well and good, but they only come into effect after the event. That is, for the boy to expelled or jailed, he needs to have committed the rape first. That seems a little late in the whole process to me. I'd hate to think that was my daughter's best line of defense.

Back in the day, when women actually acknowledged that they were different than men, they focused on landing and managing a husband. In lieu of that, the goal was to have a boyfriend or at least an escort. The husband / boyfriend / escort was expected to provide protection among other gentlemanly services.

These days, when we all seem to think the sexes* are equal, we're left with creating rules to deal with the absence of protective men in the lives of women. These rules, as I said before, that do nothing to prevent horrible things from happening in the first place.

Oh well. I guess that's just the price we pay for being so enlightened.

Here, a college girl shows her appreciation for the head of her university's Sexual Consent Integrated Product Team for having come up with a charter, mission statement and POA&M for the group.

*  - Maybe I should say "genders" to include all 8,712 of them recognized by Facebook, California, UC Berkeley or what-have-you.

The Movie "Interstellar," Your Endocrine System And Nazis

How's that for a weird linkage?

So we went to see Interstellar on Christmas Day. It was a good, modern Hollywood movie, which means it had high production values and was thoroughly infused with secular humanist religious claptrap. I'm not going to do a full movie review (it was worth seeing), but instead will focus on one particular scene.

The two lead characters, both big Science types who were all about Logic and Knowledge and Sciencey Science, had a chat about Love. Love, the girl explained to the guy, was the great mystery of the Universe, the thing that drives everything else and gives it meaning. The guy swallowed the lecture with a little bit of effort, objecting only to the practical ramifications of the girl's love, not the idiocy of her speech.

Science in Hollywood movies is a wondrous thing. Scientists are practically priests and science-based reasoning is Right and Good. Well, only so long as the science isn't biology. Then we don't talk about it at all. The Philosopher-Priestess giving the lecture on Love apparently didn't know much about her endocrine system.

The endocrine system contains many different physical components that help to regulate everything from sexual function to our mood each day. The health and well-being of the endocrine system is essential to maintaining healthy body weight, growth and physical or emotions development. The endocrine system will greatly affect children and teenagers who are experiencing a high level of development, but different parts of this system will also play a role as we age as well as our function day to day.

So if she'd been an honest Science-type, she'd never have given that speech. She'd have known that Love is just the manifestation of glandular secretions and sexual love in particular is her DNA striving to propagate itself across time. While logical and scientific, that kind of speech wouldn't have been much fun for the movie as it would have unmasked the underlying philosophy of the film for what it was, a modified version of Hitler's Darwinian, atheistic Volk theories, where the survival of the race was paramount.

Nahh. Better to lie about the end results of their foundational assumptions and sell tickets.

To infinity, and beyond!

Save Those Pie Tins!

Whenever we get pies from the store, we foolishly throw out the tins* when the pie is gone. Now dig this.

Add flour (all-purpose or self rising can be used) to a pie plate or other deep-sided dish; set aside. Season pork chops liberally with salt and pepper then dredge in flour. Shake all excess flour off of each chop. Set flour aside.

Gaaaahhhh! All this time, I've been struggling to find something just right for a dredging dish. It as in front of me all the time! Pie tins!

As Paul Prudhomme is my witness, I shall never throw away another pie tin until I have an arsenal of the things for dredging and whatever else I need them to do.

* - To be accurate, we put them in the recycling as they're aluminum. Still, the end result is the same. They're gone.

Update: I just found this great site giving suggestions about how to make awesome pork chops and gravy.

A Styled Version Of The Rain Table For Modesto

I've been kind of embarrassed by the rough nature of the rainfall tables I've posted here as a part of my rainfall database project, so I spent a little time making the thing more attractive.

MODESTO Percent of Normal Rainfall

Date	2014	2013
21-Dec-14	218	42
22-Dec-14	213	41
23-Dec-14	209	40
24-Dec-14	204	40
25-Dec-14	200	39
26-Dec-14	197	38
27-Dec-14	193	37
28-Dec-14	190	37

Speaking of rain, I checked out the forecast for California for the upcoming week, and it doesn't look so good. Dry weather as far as the eye can see for most of the state. That 2014 percent of normal number is going to keep falling.

A recap of how this project works

• Ubuntu server running as a virtual machine under Win7 using the free VMWare Player.
• PHP script running as a root cron job at 1230 every day, harvesting data by scraping this page using the simple_html_dom PHP library.
• MySQL database with two tables, city name and percent of normal, data injected from the aforementioned PHP scraper script.
• PHP scripting on a local Dreamweaver site running on the aforementioned Ubuntu virtual server to extract the data from the database and format it as a table.

Cheezburger of the Day

Now All We Need Is Some Rain

My rainfall database project is working like a charm lately. It harvests the data from the web every day and stores it in a database. So far, I've got a week's worth of percent-of-normal data. Here's Modesto's.

Modesto 2014, percent of normal rainfall
218
213
209
204
200
197
193

It looks like what you'd expect when there's been no rain, a steady, monotonic decrease. Not very exciting. If we could only get some rain ...

Understanding Freedom

Warning: Spoilers for the movie, Wild are below.

I just went to see the movie, Wild. It's the true story of a woman who goes through all kinds of traumas and engages in a ton of self-destructive behaviors including shooting up heroin and sleeping with anything on two legs. The movie is about her 90-day journey hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, trying to recover from the death of her mother. As the movie follows her sojourn, it relives parts of her life. In the end, she "finds herself" or something like that.

As an aside, "finding herself" amounts to little more than deciding she's just fine and all the horrible things she did, like putting a loving husband through hell as she runs off to live with a pack of heroin addicts, forcing him to come and rescue her, were just fine. So I guess she didn't find herself so much as encase her sins in amber and declare them Good. And that took her 90 days. On the plus side, it seemed to be cathartic.

There's a lot to be said about the movie, but near the end, as she's narrating what she's learned, the recurring theme of freedom in Christian music made complete sense to me. Here was this woman who took 90 days wandering off in the wilderness trying to find meaning while I have found meaning without having to endure a zillion-mile hike. That's a ton of freedom in my book. I am free to do all kinds of things while those trapped inside their self-worship need to burn precious chunks of their lives looking for things I already have.

The song below in particular leaped into my head as we left the theater and I probably won't hear it again without thinking of this poor woman and the hundreds of thousands out there just like her.



Through You the darkness flees...
Through You I'm not afraid
Through You the price is paid...
I am free
Yes, I am free

Merry Christmas!

... with a Caribbean flair. Here's Lord Nelson's A Party for Santa Claus, one of my all-time favorite Christmas tunes. Enjoy.

Where Do Lazy Elves Live?

Slothlorien.

You're welcome.

How To Tell The Difference Between Global Warming And Climate Change

With all this talk about Global Warming and Climate Change, some people are wondering if they are one and the same, if they're different, if they're related or if it's all a big hoax by Peronist fascists. My answer is, "No!" Here's how to tell them apart.

When it's hot and/or dry, like it was in Modesto last year (40% of normal rainfall), that's Global Warming. When it's cold and/or wet, like it is in Modesto this year (209% of normal rainfall), that's Climate Change.

What about when things are nearly perfectly average, like it is in Crescent City this year (101% of normal rainfall)? Well, that shows that the oceans are storing heat in their deepest depths. Since heat can't move, it stays there, making it look like things are normal. Don't be fooled. Soon the heat will move and increase either Global Warming or Climate Change and we'll all either fry or drown.

What can we do about this? Well, it all depends on what is happening. Here's a thumbnail sketch of the steps we need to take to prevent things from getting hotter or colder or staying the same.

Global Warming - Increase funding for climate studies and give more regulatory power to the EPA.

Climate Change - Increase funding for climate studies and give more regulatory power to the EPA.

Things Staying The Same - Increase funding for climate studies and give more regulatory power to the EPA.

I hope this little tutorial helped. We all need to do our part to prevent things from happening, whatever they are.

This shows the worst of all outcomes. In the foreground where it's parched and dry, that's Global Warming. In the distance where it's lush and green, that's Climate Change.

I Guess I'm Not Very Permissive

I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out why a PHP connection to a database wouldn't work while it worked yesterday. I got so frustrated that I uninstalled MySQL to reinstall it. As I did so, I realized I was wiping out the database I had created.

Sigh.

One of the things I've learned from this is that finding answers on the Internet is a real hit-or-miss affair. This problem, not being able to create a mysqli object in a PHP script, is a well-known problem. Lots of posts out there on the bulletin boards about it. The common theme is a link to the manual for the php.ini file which is supposed to explain just how to allow the connections, but doesn't.

Argh. File and access permissions and directory includes are the bane of my existence.

Update: I fixed the problem by reinstalling the php5-mysql package. Why did I have to do that? Where did it go? I shut down the server and restarted it in between yesterday and today. Why did that make it go away? Is it going to happen every time I do this?

Argh indeed.

Update 2: My old rainfall database was not destroyed! For some reason, uninstalling mysql didn't kill it. Hoorah! My command line rainfall harvester worked, too. I now have 2 days of data in my database! Now to set up a cron job to get it to run on daily basis!

Oh Sure, It Doesn't Look Like Much

... but it took a little effort to parse the text on the California rainfall page into a table with the names of the cities and their percent of normal rainfall totals to date from this year and last. I used PHP Simple DOM Parser to scrape the page and then dealt with the results as a string. It turns out that NOAA didn't make a table of results, the lazy dogs, and instead just used the "pre" HTML tag to create what looks like a table on their page.

CRESCENT CITY	90	40
EUREKA	131	36
UKIAH	164	18
REDDING	170	31
SACRAMENTO EXEC AIRPORT	205	36
SACRAMENTO - CSUS	165	0
SANTA ROSA	173	18
SAN FRANCISCO	206	29
SFO INT'L AIRPORT	228	26
OAKLAND AIRPORT	191	34
LIVERMORE	211	52
MOUNTAIN VIEW - MOFFETT	261	32

Next up - creating a MySQL table and inserting these values into it. Then we'll create a chron job to do it on a daily basis and after that, it's time to look into graphing them.

What Invention Has Made Us More Money Than Any Other?

The printing press because it allows us to print more and more and more money!

Japan is in recession. Europe is in recession. The Ruble has collapsed because oil prices have cratered so Russia will soon be mired in a depression. Does this spook the markets? Only temporarily. As soon as the Fed revs up those glorious machines and shows a willingness to make sure lots and lots of dollars are available to everyone, we can all get back to the business at hand - making money in the stock market.

Oh, sure, in the old days, a share of stock represented partial ownership of a company that made things. If the company did well, you did well. If the company did poorly, then you lost money. That's not so true any more. Now it represents ownership of a piece of paper whose value can go up and up and up because there are so many dollars floating around looking for something to buy to make more dollars which will make people richer, giving them more dollars to buy pieces of paper that will be worth more dollars because there are more dollars trying to buy them. See how it works? It's all about having lots and lots of dollars, thanks to the printing press at the Fed.

Stocks in Japan and Australia led Asia higher for a second day on Friday, as investor confidence continued to be bolstered by expectations the U.S. is in no rush to raise interest rates.

Buying returned to the region despite lingering worries over lower oil prices. The Nikkei Stock Average jumped 2.4% to 17621.40, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 closed up 2.5% to 5338.60.

Materials and utilities stocks led in Australia, as the latest indications from the U.S. Fed appeared to overshadow concerns that lower commodities prices would pressure the nations’ producers.

Emphasis mine. Commodities are real things. Chunks of metal, whole cows, containers full of oil and other fluids. Even they cannot stand in front of the power of the printing press. Just when it looks like things will be valued according to their worth, the Fed steps in, shows off its printing press like Vanna White unveiling a new puzzle on Wheel of Fortune and all is right with the world again.

Hooray for the printing press!

The Best Online Quiz Yet

New blogging friend leucanthemum b from Composite Drawlings, has this quiz displayed on her sidebar. She came out as a daisy. My snapdragon has this description:

"Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh."

The best part of this quiz is how well it hides the answer. The questions don't tip off which way the results are going to go. I loved it. 5 minutes of clicking for a smile? That sounds like a good trade to me.

I am a Snapdragon What Flower Are You?

Dreamweaver Templates And A Family Home Page

To recap where we are with my project to learn web server creation and maintenance as well as web content creation:

• There's an Ubuntu server running as a virtual machine on a Windows 7 box
• Said server runs a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• We've got Adobe Creative Cloud
• We've got both the FTP and SFTP connections to the server working in Dreamweaver

The goal is to master creating content with Creative Cloud apps and post them to a web server. Adobe makes this very easy.

Dreamweaver now has site templates that give you a sample site which you can edit as you see fit. It's not the same as creating one from scratch, but as I have no design training, they're great for me. I can lean on their proportions and artwork while I play with creating the content that lives inside.

My current idea is to create a home page on the server, only accessible from within the house, that has various sub-sites which do interesting things. Here are some of my ideas:

1. Daily scrape the California rainfall totals and plot Percent-of-Normal charts for a couple of California cities
2. Blend Google Music and our family photos so we can play music while a slideshow runs
3. Blend Pandora and our family photos to do the same thing

I picked out a template that gives me some basic navigation and have created a site on the server using it. I've stored my files on Creative Cloud so I have access to them everywhere and can edit them from any machine on the Internet. There are so many things to do now that as soon as I uploaded the site and had Dreamweaver working with the server, I sat paralyzed momentarily as to what to do next.

I think the first thing I'm going to tackle is the California rainfall totals chart. I've scraped web pages before with a PHP DOM parser, so I've got a start on that. The project will require me to learn MySQL databases to store the data and some kind of javascript graphing library. Here's the way forward now:

1. Scrape the rainfall page and create an HTML table with the results for a single day
2. Design and create the database table for the daily data
3. Create a chron (regularly scheduled) job on the sever to scrape the rainfalls page and insert the data onto the table
4. Find a javascript graphing library and plot the data
5. Profit!

How Step 5 will be achieved is still a bit murky, but I'm sure we'll get there somehow.

Magical Europe

I thought this was gorgeous. Enjoy!

Magical Europe - Timelapse from StanChang on Vimeo.

Manchester United Is The Best Team In The EPL Right Now

By the time I tuned in yesterday, it was already 1-0 ManU over Liverpool. It ended 3-0 and while there were some freak saves and near misses that kept Liverpool from picking up a goal or three, the scoreline did tell the tale. ManU, after repeated zombie performances earlier this season, is having fun even against top flight sides like Liverpool. Check out the scoring.


Topic change. This morning, I mastered the vsftpd.conf settings that allow Dreamweaver to upload web-readable files to my new Ubuntu server. For security, the default umask setting prevents anyone but the owner from reading uploaded files and a quick change has my sever ready to go for full Dreamweaver experimentation.

Topic change. Yesterday, I pulled the last of my late season tomato plants. They never produced. Instead of throwing the plant away, I dug a shallow trench, stripped off the unripened fruit and buried the rest of the plant so it could rot underground. I'd heard this was a great way to recapture some of the nutrients the plant had ingested from the soil.

Topic change. Meanwhile, over at Trigger Warnings, there's a post about microaggressions. Some socially nearsighted researcher is asking for people to find times in their lives when they've experienced ... oh, what the heck. Just go read it yourself. The study (not Trigger's post) is a complete waste of time. That's probably the saddest part of our obsession with hurt feelings. While I spent the weekend thoroughly enjoying sports and gardening and learning about Linux, these people spent it talking that time when someone asked where they were from.

Watching MSNBC Is Worth 20 Melanin Points

Last night, I went to a BMW-related party where a guy was sneering at how "white" you were if you watched Fox News. The guy's skin looked like a clean sheet of printer paper and he spent his time crewing on racing yachts around the country when he wasn't jawing about the latest Beemers.

Right.

... but since he votes for liberals, he's not considered "white."

San Diego After The Rain

... gives you cloud panoramas like this one. I left it large so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

Replacing God

... with yourself is a common theme with the atheists I've met. One particular fellow I engaged on Twitter summed up his arguments with this exemplar tweet.

@ktcat False. I am part of the universe. I and my forebears have been working within it for at least 100,000 years. And we're doing great.
— Trent Max (@MaximumTrent) December 9, 2014

His stated positions included the following:

• The Universe is benevolent
• Man is more than the sum of his parts
• Religion attacks self-esteem

He seemed unfamiliar with basic science outside of the common, public-school understanding of evolution. Chemistry and physics arguments went right over his head. For example, the concept that biological organisms are made up of chemical components and therefore inherit their rules and limitations was unacceptable to him. In his rebuttal, the usual hand-waving ensued, something on the order of this:

In the process of chatting with him, the thought struck me that atheists believe in more miracles on a daily basis than the most mystical evangelicals I've ever met.

Getting back to the original concept of the post, the mechanics of his philosophy were quite simple. He had replaced God with himself. He needed someone to play some of God's roles - giver of meaning, arbiter of morality, source of self-worth and so forth, but he didn't want anyone to impose rules on him. When he became God in his own mind, he found meaning and value while maintaining the illusion that no matter what he did, he was a "good" person.

That he had become God to himself (is there a term for this?) was evident in that tweet above. "The Universe is benevolent because it created me." I came back with how grateful the rest of us should be as we owed our benevolent Universe to the fact that he was not born and raised in the slums of Rio. Not being much of a philosopher, he missed that one, too. The exchange put me in mind of a modification of one of the Eucharistic prayers,

and all creation rightly gives @MaximumTrent praise.

In the end, he learned nothing. His devotion to rational thought and evidence were superficial, cloaks for his real belief system - worship of himself. It's not easy to convince a god that he is not divine.

Ubuntu Makes Me Late

... actually, that's true for any absorbing hobby, isn't it?

I set up an Ubuntu server as a VMWare virtual machine on my Win7 beast desktop. Using bridge networking, I gave it a unique IP address and now I can play with it from my laptop while I drink my morning coffee. I've learned a ton already and want to learn so much more, but there's always somewhere I need to be in the morning. Consequently, every day, I look up at the clock, wince, then race upstairs to shower, dress and dash out the door.

Every day. Every single day.

Cheezburger of the Day

H/T: Mut

You're All Rancid Pigs And I Hate You, But Don't Take It Personally

Michael Tomasky shows us why bloggers can't have nice things. Without editors to help us write, we make a hash of everything.

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way.

He compares Mary Lanrieu to a blind, toothless dog, but he doesn't intend for that to sound mean.

Umm, maybe you could have taken a little time to rewrite it. Assuming he put some thought into his prose, it makes one wonder what similes were left out.

• She was like an Ebola victim whose body would be burned by flamethrowers after she died
• It was like seeing an overflowing porta-potty wheeled away after Coachella
• The voters removed her like someone hosing dog vomit off their sidewalk

Next, he describes the whole of the South.

Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

Yes, yes, I see it now. The place is populated by nice people who reject everything that's good. Nice people who are radioactive with racism. Mike would invite you over for dinner, you know, but he hasn't finished Scotch-Guarding the carpet and hiding the silverware. And do you know how hard it is to find plastic covers for ultra-modern furniture? Who sells that pig food those people eat? He can't seem to find it at his local organic food co-op.

Yep, Mikey, that column was a real winner. I'll just bet the people in the South will be reading it over and over. Like every time there's an election.

Now with an introduction by Michael Tomasky!

Politics And The Catican Guard

My wife and I like to keep our bedroom cool when we sleep, so we leave the door onto our balcony open at night. Our house abuts a canyon wherein coyotes, rabbits and owls live. The Catican Guards sleep with us while our Maximum Leader sleeps in whatever place takes her fancy at the moment. Recently, she has been selecting one of our sons' bedrooms.

Last night, the Guards were on High Alert. Something was afoot in the canyon and every half an hour, they'd hear a noise, vault off the bed and rush onto the balcony like RAF pilots hearing an air raid siren in 1940 racing for their Spitfires. Physics being what it is, when 35-pound and 12-pound dogs leap, an equal and opposite force is produced on the bed and whoever might be underneath their feet. In the panic of the moment, they didn't pay much attention to who or what was under them.

Once on the balcony, they could do nothing but watch, fret and discuss. Events were happening too far away for them to engage and in any case, there's not much two dogs can do in the middle of the night in a canyon that big. This did not prevent them from becoming uselessly alarmed when something happened and annoying everyone else in the room.

And that's why you shouldn't discuss politics at dinner parties.

Anyone Who's Afraid Of The Guys In The Chess Club Needs Professional Help

MSNBC is a comedy station. It must be. Dig this.

CHLOE ANGYAL, FEMINISTING.COM: ...It is hard to read an article like this and avoid the conclusion that we live in a culture that hates women, just hates us. ... (I)t would be at our peril to pretend that this (rape) is just a frat problem. Yes, it (sic) at frats and football teams, but it also happens on the chess team and in dance companies.

So the boys on the chess club at your local high school hate women and want to rape them. Incomprehensible.

Or maybe they just hate people like Chloe Angyal. That, I could understand.

It's Not Like He's A Tame Lion

... is a recurring quote from the Chronicles of Narnia wherein Aslan, the divine Lion, is described as both "animal" ("human") and wild. In Aslan, you find unimaginable power, deep love and complete humanity, all of it totally out of your control.

Continuing on with lessons from this excellent book,


there was a passage in particular that hit me with a thought I'd never had before. The author, wrangling with a friend over her concept of God and questioning her commitment to atheism, has a prayer experiment suggested to her. Before she starts her experiment, a thought occurs to her, triggered by that line, "It's not like he's a tame lion."

Josh’s allusion to Aslan was an abrupt reminder that the subject of my planned ‘experiment’ was a Person. . . and a Person of infinite power, dangerous, unconstrained by what I would prefer ‘God’ to be like.

I was reading the book in bed the other night, my wife beside me reading one of her own, when that passage struck me like an enormous fish wielded by John Cleese.


The impact was so great that I wondered if some of the fishy-smelling, salty water had splashed onto my bride. God as a Person, a real Person, that was something I'd never absorbed through all my studies and Mass attendance and Confessions. It's one thing to say that God has a plan for your life or that God shows you opportunities to do His will, but it's another thing entirely to realize that the Person who opens those doors for you is a real person.

In the old days, when my kids would do something stupid or wrong, I'd get mad. In person and in my own way, I would get mad. with yelling and everything. However, when I sin, I never thought of my sin being against a Someone. It was always breaking some impersonal rule, putting up a tally on some score sheet somewhere.

As the miracle I experienced a few years back was extraordinarily personal, one meant solely for me by Someone who knew me and loved me deeply, you'd think I'd have learned. Nope. Blockhead that I was, I needed a converted atheist to show me the light.

It's not like He's a tame lion.

I Wanted To Learn, But Not That Much

I've got a fairly new Dell desktop machine that's pretty sweet. i7 processor, 12 GB RAM, the only thing it's missing is a solid state hard drive. The thing runs Win7 (just a life support system for Adobe Creative Cloud as far as I'm concerned), but I wanted to learn the ins and outs of managing a Linux server.

I bought a second hard drive for this box (1 TB for $70 at Office Depot), unhooked the existing hard drive because I'm a sissy, afraid of possibly overwriting my Win 7 disk and put the new one in. I've got a pair of books on managing Ubuntu servers and both come with 12.04 installation disks.

Yay?

I installed Ubuntu server version 12.04 and ... couldn't get the thing to pick up a DHCP address from my router. In fact, I couldn't get it to do anything at all on the network. It knew it had an ethernet adapter and could set it up, but beyond that, it was lost.

It turns out that this is a known bug with version 12.04. There were fixes posted on the web, many of which I tried, but to no avail. I learned things about the command line and requesting status from running services, but in the end I gave up. Too much learnings!

12.04 being a bit old, I went online, got the latest version - 14.10, made an installation CD and installed that. It worked right out of the box.

Yay!

Now, off to learn how Creative Cloud apps work with a server.

Cleaning Up After Your Own Funeral Has To Be The Worst

My wife had a dream last night that she not only had to host her own funeral, but she had to clean up afterwards. When she woke up, the thing that made her most unhappy was not that she was dead in her dream, but that some of the guests had brought children who had left their toys everywhere. How rude!

Whatever CNN Is Paying Donna Brazile, It's Not Enough

... not when she comes up with gems like this.

Today, we need a national commission on justice. One that is more than a fact-finding commission. One whose purpose is reconciliation. This one should be modeled after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Bishop Desmond Tutu.

There was an emphasis in that commission on reconciliation. There was a marked effort to forgive...But the process of forgiveness also requires acknowledgment on the part of the perpetrator that they have committed an offense.

Awesome! A bunch of overpaid, elite snobs sitting in meeting rooms in Washington DC deciding just how much some of us need to apologize. Can't you feel the reconciliation? Imagine that glorious day when the Commission publishes a report. All across America, families will gather to hear what they have to say.

"MARTHA! MARTHA! COME QUICK! THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON JUSTICE IS ABOUT TO RELEASE THEIR FINDINGS!"

Won't that be great? Once they've reported out, we unlettered, filth-encrusted swine can read the single-syllable version (or have it read to us, more likely) and begin the reconciliation process of begging for forgiveness.

...

Actually this might not be such a bad idea after all. If it means that the next time some weed-soaked thug attacks a cop and gets shot for his trouble I'm not expected to sit with my hands folded and eyes downcast in a pose of great contrition mumbling just how very, very sorry I am for whatever it was I did, I'm all for it.

There Are Mornings When Coffee Isn't Enough

... and those are the mornings you need to run CAT-5e cable to your daughter's bedroom.

Now there's something that will really wake you up!

I'm really proud of myself. After many decades of being a dufus, I am now slightly less of a dufus. I'm a morning person with lots of projects under way. I can never seem to get anything done in the morning because stores are closed and/or I don't want to wake the rest of the family. I finally figured out that if I staged my parts and equipment during the day, I could polish off projects in the morning.

Staging the gear doesn't take long and it allows you to spend plenty of time with the family. That's what had tripped me up before. I didn't see the point in working on a project unless I could finish it in one swoop. By breaking it up into two parts, I could get it done and give my wife and kids the attention they deserve.

In this project, I'm giving my daughter a Ubuntu computer for her room and, not being a big fan of WiFi*, I decided to run wire to it. Yesterday, I drilled holes for the cable and fed it through, leaving it dangling out of the wall. This morning, while she was elsewhere, I wired up the sockets. I'll finish this project off tonight when I install the wall plates and move the computer into the bedroom. After about 3 months of wishing I could get to it, it's done. Yay!

Next up: A dual boot desktop machine - Win7 and Ubuntu server. Eventually this will include a virtual machine manager so both systems can run at the same time. More on that as it develops.

* - We have a wireless network in the house, but whenever possible, I prefer to run CAT5e into a room. WiFi is great, but when the Interweb Tubes don't seem to be working or have slowed to a crawl, WiFi is just one more unknown you need to diagnose. If troubles happen to a computer hooked up by wire, there are only a couple of causes.