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Saturday, April 13, 2002
I think if you want to go on a tirade now and then, this is the perfect place for that. No need for a new blog.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/13/2002
I've been thinking about starting a separate blog where I just post things the govt. does that seem pretty shady. Really, I was thinking about using the lightbulb blog that I started but then forgot about. Would anyone be interested in that, or in contributing to it? I ask because I've seen about 5 articles this week alone that I would've posted to a site like that, but didn't because I didn't have the site built, yet.
.: posted by andy 4/13/2002
Some information about the Zinni Plan that I wasn't aware of. Apparently part of the agreement states that Israeli forces won't be allowed to enter Palestinian controlled areas "unless responding in self-defence to an imminent terrorist attack". In other words, we're going to create a Palestinian State, sort of, but another sovereign nation will reserve the right to attack that nation any time it feels threatened. Imagine if this stipulation was put on Pakistan when it was formed.
.: posted by andy 4/13/2002
Friday, April 12, 2002
President Bush now has credibility problems. I keep reading articles that say, "the US will have to deploy troops to make this stick," but I don't think the Israelis will accept anyone's troops on their turf.
No one ever seems to consider the billions of dollars of US aid that Israel relies so heavily on. I'll bet if we cut that down some, we'd finally get their attention. It just irks the hell out of me. We made the Israeli state what they are. The Israelis drive Abrams tanks, Bradley and M-113 armored vehicles, fly F-16s and Apache helicopters, carry M-16s and M-4s. If we hadn't given or sold all that crap to them, where would they be right now?
.: posted by andy 4/12/2002
I just read today's White House Press Conference, featuring Ari Fleischer. Apparently the United States government doesn't consider Palestinians to be civilians. If I caught the gist of what Fleischer said and didn't say, our official line is that it's self-defense when Israeli soldiers kill unarmed Palestinians, but it's terrorism when Palestinians kill any Israelis anywhere, at any time.
.: posted by andy 4/12/2002
This article gives an account of the wreckage in Jenin. I wish everyone would read it. I know that the overall effect of the article is inflammatory, and that will make it easy for a lot of people to dismiss it as yellow journalism, but in light of today's suicide bombing, and the coverage it got, I think it's not a bad idea for people to find out about the other side, and understand why the Palestinians are so angry.
I understand that Israel has the right to protect itself, but this is not self-defense. Sharon's policy of violent escalation is dragging the whole world into the shitter, and we, the United States, could put a stop to it, if George Bush would just DO SOMETHING.
I wish you'd all pass that link around to some of your friends, and maybe write to your Congressmen or something.
.: posted by andy 4/12/2002
Chavez is gone. Was that a coup?
Been reading aljazeera translations. It might be the translation, but it seems like all of the articles are in very childlike terms. There doesn't seem to be any moral or conscientious thought about anything except 'win' and 'lose'. What wonderful ignorant bliss, to not cloud any issues with any sort of ambiguity, like repercussion for actions, or viewpoints other than one's own.
On the homefront, a spring thunderstorm is blowing in right now. The sky to the Southeast is a light grey, and to the Northwest is a deep blue. The wind was light out of the East this morning, and now it's fallen. The air is heavy and still, and I can hear the thunder rumbling in the distance. I love a good thunderstorm.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/12/2002
In my job I have to work with a lot of different people at different semiconductor companies. About half of them are in the US. Many of them are in europe, which means that if you want to talk to them, or if they want to talk to you, you have to do the talking pretty early in the morning. If you're dealing with someone in Taiwan, you would think that talking would be right out, unless you plan on staying at work extra late. Well for the past two days this guy in Taipei has been calling me at about 11:00am my time, meaning 12:00am his time. This makes me wonder what kind of fucked up work culture they have that would make employees want to stay that late just to ask how a particular project is going. Also, despite working around many asian people for the past 5 years, asian accents are still the most difficult for me to understand. So even though this guy is sleeping at work so he can talk to me, I'm only understanding half of the things he's telling or asking me. poor bastard. they should just stick to email.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/12/2002
Thursday, April 11, 2002
The other day a friend of mine offered me a couple of promo tickets to the Rangers game tomorrow. He said he'd gotten them from work, and and had to work the day and time of the game. I've only ever been to one Rangers game, and that was in the third upper balcony, kinda like watching the game on teevee, only sitting in the sun. It was still fun so I said sure, not like I have anything better to do.
He gave me the tickets tonight, and I thought something might be up coz they say 'Cuervo Gold Club Access' across the bottom. I looked up the seat assignment and they're right behind home plate, 25th row, $55 apiece. Plus, the Gold Club is the clubhouse only available to 'Season ticket holders with Infield Club privileges', right behind home plate, pre and post game party, and open bar.
The dilemma I have now is I already invited the younger sister of an old friend of mine. She's 19 and I don't even think she's seen me drink before. I'd feel guilty drinking at all in front of her (much less at noon, when the pregame starts) after all the years of trying to act respectable in front of her. Oh, to hell with it. She can be the designated driver.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/11/2002
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/10/2002
Always remember to set the parking brake.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/10/2002
Sorry to do this "longhand" but this is from a forwarded email with no url to link to (like the last one).
Bulletproof?
(March 2001, Ghana) Tribal clashes are common in Northern Ghana, and people often resort to witchcraft in the hope of becoming invulnerable to weapons. Aleobiga, 23, and fifteen fellow believers purchased a potion that would render them invincible to bullets. After smearing the magical lotion over his body for two weeks, Aleobiga volunteered to test the spell. He stood in a clearing while his friends raised their weapons, aimed, fired... The jujuman who had supplied the defective magic was siezed and beaten for his failure, and Aleobiga is now roaming the great Savannah in the sky.
Shell Necklace <<...OLE_Obj...>>
(10 March 2001, Washington) A 19-year-old Spokane man damaged his hand while attempting to string a necklace of live ammunition. He was punching holes in the shell casings using an awl and hammer, when one of the projectiles exploded in his hands. Perhaps he should have collected the shells from the beach, instead of the artillery range.
Tired Ammo <<...OLE_Obj...>>
(1990?s, United States) I heard the following at work in the gun shop. The events described below (if it?s not a legend) occurred in the 1990?s in the southwest. A small-time hood (about to be even smaller) broke into the home of a World War Two veteran and stole, among other things, the old G.I.'s . 45 automatic pistol, which he used in battle in the 1940's. The hoodlum then reported directly to a local convenience store and proceeded to rob the cashier while brandishing his new pistol. The cashier, no dummy, followed orders and handed over the contents of the register. Our thug took the money and turned to leave, but suddenly decided he didn?t want to leave a witnesses? other than the security camera, that is. He leveled the pistol at the cashier and pulled the trigger. "CLICK !" went the gun. At this unexpected development, the puzzled crook looked straight down the barrel of his weapon and uttered the words, "What the...?" As it turned out, the WWII veteran had WWII vintage ammunition in his WWII vintage pistol. Priming caps over time are known to lose their "spontaneous" nature, particularly if stored improperly, causing what is known as a hang-fire: The primer smolders into a delayed ignition. Such was the case here. Just as the puzzled crook had the barrel pointed squarely at his own eye, the hang-fired primer detonated, sending a half-inch chunk of lead and associated hot combustion gases directly into the felon's skull at 900 feet per second. The range was less than six inches. The body could only be identified by fingerprints. As the story was related to me, the police officer who responded to the original gun burglary was also at the scene of the armed robbery. He picked up the .45 and verified the serial number, then returned it to the WWII veteran. Case closed.
.: posted by George 4/10/2002
If you've installed Kazaa in the last amount of time, you'll also have a program called bd3projector installed on your machine, even if you clicked "no" to all the bundled software that comes with Kazaa. I know about this because I just found the program installed on my machine. The software works like a terrorist sleeper agent, and lies dormant on your machine until some signal is sent from its parent company telling it to install. If you do a basic uninstall on it, it will eventually reinstall itself. To completely remove it from your machine, you have to follow these instructions. What a pain in my ass.
.: posted by andy 4/10/2002
Our tax dollars at work. What could the DEA possibly hope to accomplish with this rule. Why do they even see industrial hemp as a problem? And why should they have jurisdiction over hemp at all? It's similar to cannibis, but has only trace amounts of THC. Similarly, this desk I bought at Walmart contains starchy carbohydrates, but the FDA sure doesn't give a damn.
Speaking of the DEA's jurisdiction...
.: posted by andy 4/10/2002
Tuesday, April 09, 2002
Regardez, scientists want to use antimatter as fuel for spacecraft. I know they said the same thing in some Star Trek episodes or something, but when I was in eigth grade, this occurred to me all on its own. We had to make up a whole mission to Mars, including a spacecraft, astronauts, provisions, etc. My spacecraft was small and powered by antimatter, and my teacher kind of rolled his eyes because a mission to Mars would take years coming and going, and that's a lot of food and fuel. Well screw him, coz Nasa says the trip would only take a few weeks if you used antimatter as fuel. Not that it matters, since my astronauts were cryogenically frozen.
We should all take note that they're saying we'll have the technology in the next 50 to 100 years to produce adequate amounts of antimatter. Right now it would take one million years and $80 quadrillion (80,000 trillion) to produce one gram. We should all take note because I'll bet we'll all look back on that and laugh, someday.
.: posted by andy 4/9/2002
.: posted by andy 4/9/2002
The back of Vermont's quarter is a guy gathering maple sap to make syrup. Over 200 years, and their biggest claim to fame is maple syrup.
Lately I've been thinking that when I'm finally an architect, and I've made enough money to buy some land somewhere, I'll make sure that land has some sugar maple trees, and I'll build myself a sugar shack, and I'll make some maple syrup. I think I'd like that. I'd also like to have a pack of dogs big enough to bring down a moose.
.: posted by andy 4/9/2002
Funny air travel should come up, I was just out drinking with a flight attendant from Southwest Airlines an hour ago. In rebuttal to the article, the flight attendants don't get paid until they (and you) are in the air, so while they're sitting at the gate with you, and you're pestering them, they're putting up with your shit for free. And, DFW is a hell of a lot better than most airports I've been through in my life, in fact the only ones I can think of that were better to navigate were Amarillo and Austin, both with a single terminal about 400 yards long. Finally, in my humble opinion, it should be a federal offense to take an unsedated child under 8 on an airplane.
And one more thing; the Mormons went from Nauvoo (where Jonathan Browning was a gunsmith and his son, John M. Browning learned the trade, and went on to become the most prodigious and creative gun designer ever; with the patents for almost every gun Remington produced from the late 1880's until after the turn of the century, the first gas operated machine gun, the first gas operated autoloading shotgun; the 1911-A1 Colt and the Browning Hi-Power, on which almost every modern 9MM pistol is based, as well as the Browning 50, still used by the Army and NATO today) to Ogden, nothing like the path the flight from Miami via Dallas to Salt Lake City. I never liked that Dave Barry anyway.
"Circular Winds" blew through last night about 7:30, and as my ears were popping and my house was shaking I realized that I have no interior room to go to when the twister hits. While I was trying to figure out whether the 2x4 and plywood table or the metro shelving unit would give better protection, I saw something big fly past a couple of windows. Today I found out what it was; a 4 by 8 aluminum-clad foam insulating panel that weighs about 90 lbs. Don't worry though, my truck stopped it from hitting anything important, and I get a rental car starting tomorrow.
I applied at Peterbilt today. They're hiring about 100 people to reopen their second shift and maybe even a skeleton third.
Of course it's actually a temporary position, since they're only adding the shift until September, when new emissions regulations take effect, and they want to double production until then. They don't tell any applicants this of course, and waiting in line I heard all of these ex-Peterbilt employees talking about how the salad days was back agin.
I was the only person there in a suit. A few other guys wore ties, but no jackets. It was a mistake on my part, this was just the prescreening process and the inteviews begin next week.
The man in front of me looked to be about 60, and said he'd worked in plants of some sort for over 30 years. He wasn't the sharpest stick in the stack, tho; and kept talking about having trouble reading. After we'd finished the application filling process and were waiting in line to talk to a rep, his mother showed up. She was easily 80, and seemed to be a nice woman. She came to help him in case he needed to read anything during the application process. In the mechanical evaluation it became clear how he'd been able to work for the various companies he'd worked with, he was amazing with tools. He was easily twice as fast as me in the nut driver part, and would've beat me in the impact wrench section had he not had his impact wrench in reverse.
It's kind of weird, I have four years solid experience in web development, programming, and database, and the only job I've gotten to the interview stage for in the last three months has been putting semi's together for $20 an hour. Include union benefits and it's a better paying job than startups.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/9/2002
Monday, April 08, 2002
Things Jeremy does while drinking half of a very large bottle of Woodbridge Merlot and one very nice white russian(made with Tito's Handmade Vodka, microdistilled in Austin, TX):
1) sends email to stephanie empathising about being in some backwoods japanese town with no class thousands of miles away from all of us cool people here in texas. That's right Andy.
2) Sends 3 page critique of resume to laid-off coworker. Sends another email to former-coworker, explaining that the ass-of-an-Executive-Vice-President who teased him about giving him his old job back has now been fired himself, and so laid-off coworker now has new chance to be hired back, again.
4) posts to willworkforflooz. har har.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/8/2002
those of you who do any amount of air travel should appreciate this. i did.
.: posted by aida 4/8/2002
Geneva conventions are nice and good when at least one side decides to follow the rules, but who really has the moral high ground anymore? Ariel Sharon's policy of reciprocation is undoing the foundation that the Jewish state is based on. I'll make it short: The jewish state of israel exists due to almost unquestioning western support. Western support exists because of the feelings of guilt for the anti-semitism that made the holocaust possible. So long as the west views Jews as victims of persecution, that guilt continues, which is why it has always been in israel's best interest to not reciprocate to morally reprehensible terrorist attacks. Israel's decision to tear apart palestinian territories brings them down to the moral level of the terrorists, and erodes the feelings of guilt the western world feels towards jews. Just look at all the anti semetic attacks in france recently. The longer this goes on, the less suicide bombers look like Al Qaeda to the west, and the more they look like the French Resistance. Israel's only hope of survival is to take back the moral high ground.
.: posted by Jeremy 4/8/2002
Sunday, April 07, 2002
I finally got rid of my subcompact Glock today. As Jeremy can attest, it was too hard to control and too powerful to be an effective target gun. I traded it for a 1911 imitation, when I should have traded for a Marlin 45/70 Carbine with an 18" ported barrel and $75.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 4/7/2002
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