Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

On the very episode of the Daily Show that takes 60 minutes to task for not bothering to fact check their interviews, the Daily Show airs a segment that’s either demonstrative of their own laziness or ignores the facts of a situation in order to score comedic points.

The segment revolves around John Morse, who was recalled for supporting entirely sane legislation that required background checks for conceal carry permits and limited legal magazine capacity to 15 rounds. They interview John Morse, which was just fine. But then, Jason Jones wanders the streets of Denver and asks residents if they voted in the recall election. All but one say that they didn’t vote. Why didn’t they vote? BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T ELIGIBLE TO VOTE. John Morse’s district is a small subset of El Paso county, in Colorado Springs, and those are the only people who got to vote in the recall election. The dude who claimed to vote (for the recall) was probably lying, but it’s possible he was a Colorado Springs resident who just happened to be in Denver when Jason Jones was there. Denver is extremely liberal and makes up the majority of the people who supported the legislation, and exactly 0% of the people who were even eligble to vote for the recall.

So, screw you, Daily Show. Next time you want to make fun of my state, how about you actually take the time to get it right?

Today I have an especially good reason to be thankful.

See this blue car? It’s in the middle of a crime scene. In my parents’ front yard.

Berck and I took a load of firewood to my parents’ house today. As we were pulling into their driveway, we noticed an unmarked cop car with its lights on down the road at the other corner of their lot. The cop car followed us down the driveway, bleeped its siren, and a tiny deputy stepped out and demanded to know why we didn’t stop. (We were stopped.) She asked if we lived here, and I told her my dad did. She said that there was a car parked among the trees in the front yard and it was an active crime scene and to please not come down there. Berck asked her what it was, and she said it involved a homicide.

I went over and found Dad, who was working on the shed. (Mom is in Seattle.) He said his neighbor had called him this morning, asking why there a blue car parked in his front yard. Dad went out and looked at it and called the Sheriff’s department. When the deputies arrived, they were concerned because the house was unlocked and Dad wasn’t in it, because was working in the shed. They told him that they were so glad he called because that was a missing piece of the puzzle they needed.

The deputy still there came back up the driveway and asked Dad what time he’d seen the car. We looked on his phone and saw that his neighbor had called at 8:54 that morning. She had Dad fill out a form. She showed us a picture of this guy and asked if we’d ever seen him before (the news posted his picture several hours later).

She said there were two homicides and one other shooting victim, but that was all she could tell us. She warned Dad that the media might converge on his house once they found out that’s where the car was found, and if they did, she’d put up crime scene tape across the driveway so they wouldn’t drive up, but that she’d put it high enough so Dad could drive in and out if he needed to.

She said they were pretty sure they knew who the shooter was. She said they thought he knew at least one of the victims and at least one of the other victims just happened to get in the way. She said her department had it on their to do list yesterday to see if they could find this guy, but something else had come up and they hadn’t been able to. That night he shot three people.

So we’re not really sure of all the details, but it appears this guy shot someone during a burglary not too far from their house, shot someone else the next road down from their house, then ditched his car in my parents’ front yard.

Today I’m grateful my Dad is okay!

In the summer of 1999, I bought a computer with my own money for the very first time. I picked it up second-hand from Peter for some amount of money that amounted to a large portion of the money I made that summer working in the library with Todd, throwing books. Included was a motherboard, RAM, CPU, and a graphics card. When I picked it up from Peter’s apartment, he informed me after I gave him the money that he’d accidentally scraped the key lock diode off the motherboard, so the key lock wouldn’t work. I was annoyed, but it’s not like I needed the key lock for anything.

I needed a case, because my Gateway-2000 486/33 with the 83mhz Pentium CPU in the upgrade slot was in an abnormally small case with a gateway proprietary form factor. I drove down to a local shop in Irving and spent $40 on the least-ugly case they had. I also ended up having to buy a 10-base-T ethernet card as well, because the ISA card I had wasn’t going to work.

The CPU was an AMD K6-2-400mhz, and it was insanely fast. It was the first thing I ever over clocked (lots of jumpers were involved), but it would post at 500mhz and seemed stable at 450mhz. When I went to Rome that fall, Sydney needed a computer to go to college, and I wasn’t going to need mine for a long time. I made an agreement with Dad that I’d send it to Sydney then, and when I got home from Rome, he’d help me buy a new one.

It was Sydney’s computer for years. She somehow managed to fry the onboard ATA controller by installing a CD burner with the system powered on, but it treated her well. When she got accepted to law school, she needed a laptop and agreed to mail the computer back to me.

I installed OpenBSD on it, and turned into a router. It’s been my router for the last 6 years or so, and has served me with very few problems. Today, I have retired it.

When I got home this evening, the power had gone out at somep oint during the day. The BIOS on that motherboard has no option to automatically power on after a power failure, so it was unsurprisingly powered off. But when I pushed the power button, nothing happened. Played with it for awhile, and it would try to power on, but fail. Clearly the power supply had died. I nearly just replaced the power supply with a spare I’ve got lying about, but didn’t for a couple of reasons. (1) The system clock is flaky. Sometimes it gets confused on boot, and despite the ntp daemon’s best efforts, the clock gains time at a ridiculous rate. (2) the aforementioned lack of a reutrn-to-previous state option in the BIOS after a power failure, and we get a lot of power failures.

So I pulled the hard drive and network cards out of it, and stuck them in a Dell Pentium-4 that I’d gotten for free when the USAFA contract ended in 2007. After resolving a minor IRQ conflict with one of the network cards, the OpenBSD install booted right up, found the network cards, did the PPPoE negotiation for the DSL, and everything is back. Way easier than I would have thought.

Rest in peace little AMD. You’ve served me well.

As we pulled up to the Sheraton in Columbia, MD, at midnight, on a Sunday, I remarked that there were an insane number of people sitting around outside smoking. In fact, the streets seemed to be lined with what appeared to be drunk degenerates. My coworker hypothesized that maybe there was some sort of comic-con sort of thing going on. It didn’t add up. When we checked in, I asked at the front desk what was going on. “Some concert.” “Who?” “I don’t know.” I asked 5 people at the hotel, finally someone said, “Phish.”

Apparently they played the last couple nights at the Merriweather Post Pavillion. Now it makes sense. What does not make sense is the two bottles of water in my hotel room. One is complementary, the other is $4.