Cybil Warrble....

So I'm sitting in this [absolutely boring, technical, this part goes here, that widget does this] meeting, and M comments that on her deployment, and that they were fortunate to have a Farsi speaker in the ranks. Seems many of the prisoners in these DET Facilities were Iranian, and thought they could get away speaking Farsi, and all.

Then I thought about string.

O.K., not really. I thought about open source reporting about Sryian and Persian involvement in OIF Actual, OIF v2.3 and OIF v3.8, etc.

Man, there is something to admire in an enemy. Stick too-it-edness.

So I figured out the Thanksgiving Ham conudrum. Short version: black beans (two cans), cabbage, celery, onion (small), potatoes (red), a bit of cumin and some pepper. Render the meat on bone, chop it, add the other items and cook on low. Suddenly, the extravagance of a thirty dracma side of pork doesn't seem so extravagant. Ham soup for days.

The movie "Jarhead"? All the angst, none of the danger. Having a hard time relating to the whole thing...seems like a butch "Three Kings."

My new pet theory: the brother-in-law-hood of man.

Sometimes, it's no more noble than this:




And the rocking world goes on.....

On/Off

So my wife and I are watching "Independence Day". She said, "ah, this is what Independence Day is about." I responded, yeah, "two hundred odd years ago, America threw off the oppression of an alien tyranny, by dumping a virus into their data stream."

Out of nowhere, she said: "If Americans be such cowards [as today] in Civil War, then there would be big problem."

To explain, my wife grew up behind the Iron Curtain. I grew up the son of former slaves. There's that interracial (Mars/Venus?) dynamic going on in our house. My wife has yet to drink the kool aid, leaving me to be the house hippie.

So I told her it was part of the American character. To argue. Even when you are right. You have to continue arguing.

Freedom is like a prostitute. Many enjoy her services, but when it comes to actually standing up to the pimp....well, I'll need to work that theory a bit.

In other news, via Glenn, I find ought that (see previous post) may be able to store more data than even the most advanced DVD...be they Blu-Ray, X-Ray or Ray Ray. But data is binary. Data is data. Make the medium flexible. I'd rather do without the plastic junk I'll have to cut up, later.

Still Cool.

Paper rocks scissors. Looks fake, but wish (with elbows) it was true.
See, I'm not a fan of DVDs. They've become like the the cassettes of old. Monotainment. When it comes to DVDs/CDs I digitize them as fast as I can, get them onto a more flexible medium. The problem we have has a household is storage. We are medium poor. By my calculations, our house has just under a terabyte in storage.

We have to make choices.

By rangel in congress, I should have chosen another career.

Regrets.

Urusla Andres on a V.E.S.P.A.

The interwebs is a ball of string....

And I am it's kitten.

I've owned, used and disposed of palm pilots, and varying WINCE devices. Nothing beats pen and paper. By the time you got the pen thingy out, navigate to the notes page, I will, with pen and paper, have already captured the material. This John Henry is a pen driving man.

My commute to work takes about thirty minutes. In that time, I've come up with eight or nine ideas. Three of which will change the world as we know it, two of which will advance the cause of Phred in the world, and one which will institute world peace. On Mars.

By the time I reach work, I've usually forgotten all but one. And that one is, "pick up toothpicks, straight kind, at the store."

I use moleskines to capture many of my on the go ideas (like toothpicks). But it usually means, at the end of the day, I'm trying to organize my thoughts by flipping through old notebooks.

I like this better:

Notecards. Who'da thunk it. A neat variation on the hipster pda.

So I organized my file folder, following directions from Hawk's flickr site.



Just need to buy some notecards, and I'll be good to go.











BTW, here's what was in it, originally. Money from my travels, and little clippings I've been meaning to get to, I suppose.



















On another note, there was a bit of a dustup between Mark Steyn and Ralph Peters, on the future of Europe. M. Steyn sees Europe becoming a subject of the Jihad (roughly) while M. Peters, putting hope in good old fashioned European habits, sees a pogrom down the road (roughly).

Charlize Theron, in a Europeanized Burqa. That would be my guess.

Todays scrapbook

I was thinking about those four to five hour speechs the old SOV Bosses used to give at the third, fourth or ninetieth plenary session of the peoples committee on the next five year plan for increasing the agricultural output to make blessings for the peoples harvest.

Or something like that.

My takeaway was simple: the more someone speaks, the less they say.

Going into my digital scrapbook:

Hurricanes of Saturn













A two hundred plus pound catfish.















The new fashion


















"send war rocket ajax."...Ornella Muti

Venn Diagrams

I've always had a problem remembering lists and facts. So, whenever it came to learning something, I'd always draw it out. For example, the Kreb's Cycle. I could draw out where this ATPase went, where that inhibitor worked, and what the products were. I'd draw the mitochondria, make a break out showing the Kreb's Cycle, learn it, then throw it away, and do it all over again. That's how Phred learned, when he was a mere Phrap.

Tell me something, and a slight drool would form at the edge of my mouth. Show me something, and, yeah, got it. When I read "A Whole New Mind" I found that I could relate alot to what I was reading.

So I was commenting over at Scott Adam's blog, and it reminded me about venn diagrams. I need to add those to my "to do" list.

Between the Ham and the Turkey....

...I got this to work. Happy Thanksgiving.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.