I ♥ The Register

You just can’t do better if you tried.

The only thing they missed is how one would adjust the volume....

This just in!

Wife showed me the test results from The Boy’s C-Peptide test: “Looks like Type II. Negative for antibodies, positive for insulin. May improve with diet and exercise.”

Pardon me for a moment while I...

WAHHHHH – HOOOOOO!!!!

...and do the happy dance.

Dang. It sure is nice to get a little good news for a change. Thanks to everyone for your prayers and good vibes. ’Course, this is just another beginning... he now has to get motivated to do the things that will make a difference.

Caught: the aftermath

The Boy’s herbal toy is causing some strain in relationships, not just between him and us, but between him and M.A.E. We had a long multi-party discussion last night (until like 1 a.m.), in which he said he’d quit (like I believe that). The only thing that either of us said that seemed to sink in was my assertion that just having that crap in the house was compromising M.A.E.’s attempt to get and stay straight, and that he was endangering her just by having it, let alone using it.

I met the wife & Daughter Dearest at one of the Mexican joints for supper, then went to pick up M.A.E. after. I had a few minutes, so pulled into the office park behind the Sonic to see if the open wireless point was still open (it is). After reading my comics, I rolled down to Arby’s.

We had a good conversation about recent events. One possibility is that she’ll have to leave here and go who knows where. I’m not sure she should leave just yet¹; we have provided her the only stable home life she’s had since her grandparents, and I’ve seen some positive changes over the last few months. M.A.E. has been on him to quit the weed since he started, as he has demanded she change some of her behaviors. It’s interesting to watch the changing dynamics.

On our end, we have counseling/mental health service coverage through my insurance (and The Boy’s). I’ve started that process; I hope The Boy will at least give it an honest try.

---

¹And if you’d told me back in July I would ever say that, I’d have fallen down laughing.

Creator-consumers: guess who’s leading the way?

Auntie Beeb is a couple of days behind Tales from FAR Manor, but gets it right: the creative engine is shifting from Hollywood to the Internet.

But here’s the surprise: “Girls were more likely to [share their work] than boys - 38% compared with 29%.”

Yeah, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s the first indication I’ve seen that the whole “girls aren’t interested in technology” meme is beginning to fade. If you want to see the future of creative media, let your daughters lead the way.

Friday Night Cinema

...because you don’t always have time or $$$ to go watch a feature flick.

Grab a comfy chair and get some snacks. Comfy? Good.

If there were an Academy Award for Internet shorts, JibJab would be a perennial contender. Last year, they became net heroes for fighting copyright suit over “This Land” and winning.

They’re back this year, with a hilarious look at a not-so-funny situation.

Go to JibJab and select “Big Box Mart” (SWF/Flash)

Ewww, they’ve stuck a commercial up front since I saw it last. Just like at the theater. :-P

Caught!

Last night, the wife asked me to see if the boys were in bed. So I slipped quietly up the stairs, and opened the door.

FAR Manor is a Cape Cod-style house, with two upstairs bedrooms. Each bedroom has a single gabled window. The Boy and Lobster were standing in the gable, with the window open. I smelled smoke, but it wasn’t cigarette smoke... and said so.

The Boy was in immediate denial mode: it was just cigarette smoke, he insisted, after swearing up and down that he hadn’t smoked in weeks. Whoops... he just torpedoed his last scrap of trust.

So this afternoon, the wife told M.A.E. what happened last night. “I told them they were going to get caught,” she said. She also let us know that she and The Boy had an arrangement where she was supposed to call him when one of us started up the stairs. Last night, she decided not to do it. (See? I told ya she’s not that dumb.) She said that Lobster had brought it home, but if she said from where, I missed it.

Wife repeated her assertion that she would have no problem having the sheriff bring a drug dog out here. M.A.E. got that deer in the headlights look and blurted, “I know where he keeps it!” But Lobster either got rid of it, used the last of it up, or moved it: it wasn’t where she thought it was. Makes me wonder what M.A.E. has to worry about — she claims that she doesn’t want to get mixed up in that stuff again, she has to take a drug test to show the court that the restraining order from SPOW is bogus, and she didn’t have any trouble marching into the cop shop to see why they were looking for her.

Meanwhile, The Boy called me as I was getting ready to leave for home, trying to convince me that what I smelled was a Camel. Riiiiiiight. Like I’m believing anything he says at the moment.

Third party politics

Austin Post wrote a thoughtful article on the Libertarian Party’s declining fortunes today.

Like Austin, I would like to see third (and fourth, and fifth) parties thriving. We would certainly have a better Congress if a couple of smaller national parties, and even one or two regionals, had as few as 20 seats combined — enough to deny a majority to any one party. Caucuses have their drawbacks, but the consensus they require is something we need a lot more right now.

Having said that, I think the Libertarians have at least partially been the authors of their own demise. We already have the kind of government their policies lead to — government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich — and it ain’t pretty. There just isn’t enough to separate them from the Republicans (who, having pointed the airplane of state at the ground, have now lit the afterburners). But where the Libertarians have really lost it is where Ross Perot’s Reform Party lost it.

In 1992, Ross Perot’s candidacy sparked the closest thing we’ve had in this country to a third-party win. He may well have won, given the things I was hearing from regular people back then, had he not flaked out by quitting in the summer then returning late in the campaign. Even then, he had a chance to build a true party and threw it away. Had the Reform Party immediately started to find candidates for Congress and state races for the 1994 season, they could have become a force to be reckoned with, a true third party, and who knows what 1996 would have brought? Unfortunately, the “Reform Party” turned out to be Perot’s personal hobby horse and by 1996 nobody cared anymore.

That, I believe, is where would-be third parties are falling down. They focus on the big-ticket races — President, Senators, governors — and ignore the local and state elections where they could actually pick up wins. While there’s often an attraction to a political unknown, especially in these days of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, people (with notable exceptions) tend to want their politicians to know what they’re doing. You build a base from the bottom-up, not the top-down. Howard Dean recognizes that; he has set a lofty goal of contesting every single seat in the House of Reprehensibles in 2006. I hope it happens; I sure would love to have a choice other than Nathan “Raw” Deal for a change.

But better yet, I’d like even more choices. I’d like to see three or four people running for each seat in local, state, and Congressional races, with all of them having a real chance at winning. After a few election cycles like that, the third parties could start mounting serious challenges to the Big Two at the state and national levels. But it won’t happen until people get comfortable with third parties, and they won’t get comfortable with third parties until they see people they know holding local offices.

What do you think? Can third parties ever be viable?

The Latest Outrage: Sony music CDs install malware

Current Music: HBR1

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. — A bumper sticker

Wheeling

Mark Russinovich obviously knows his way around a Dozebox. So when his rootkit detector turned up something nasty on his computer, he went hunting (extremely technical article alert). He eventually tracked the culprit down to a Van Zant CD that added a few sour notes to the music. The upshot is:

1. If you have autorun turned on, insert this CD into a Dozebox and it automatically installs something calling itself “digital rights management (DRM) software,” along with a special media player, somehow forgetting to tell you it’s happening or to give you a chance to say no.


2. The DRM software — bah, let’s call it what it is, malware — wedges something called a “lower filter” between the normal CD driver softare and whatever applications access the CD drive. Its purpose in life is to prevent you from ripping the music into iTunes, or WMP, or whatever, and limiting the number of copies you can make.


3. Because of the “lower filter,” if you try to remove the malware using standard spyware cleanup tools, you end up with a disabled CD drive.

Mark describes the malware, supplied by a British company calling itself First 4 Internet, as “poorly written.” One of the people commenting on his article did a little digging and found that one of the principals of First 4 Internet is a former Sony director — no surprise there. Having a crony on board beats having a quality product any day, especially when you’re pulling something shady like this.

Dealing

Fortunately, there are ways around these problems. The easiest way is to simply not purchase music CDs that have copy-protection or “digital rights management” software (i.e. they want to “manage” your rights). Second easiest is to not use Microsoft operating systems (malware tends not to be a problem on MacOSX or Linux right now), although I certainly have no intention of supporting Sony’s behavior anyway.

If you have to use that particular operating system, there’s a way to disable autorun if you’re not using XP Service Pack 2 (which turns it off by default). This is a kind of scary way to do things, though: if you mistype something in regedit you can really hose a PC. An easier way to do it is to hold down the Shift key when inserting a CD, which turns off autorun until next time, although you have to remember to do it each time.

Sheesh. I thought we’d fought (and won) this battle back in the 1980s with software companies and copy-protection. Deja vu all over again. Oh well. In the next couple of years, we’ll have to replace our TV. You can bet the new one won’t be a Sony. Eventually, I want to upgrade to a nicer camcorder... but not a Sony. I was thinking about getting one of those minidisc thingies; now I’ll do something else. New headphones to replace the broken ones? I can’t trust Sony, so I won’t deal with them.

Fighting

I've written about the ongoing shift from the old consumer paradigm to the new creator-consumer paradigm before. Telling it like it is: Sony (and the other record companies) are scared to death of the wrong thing — while they go after kids swapping music, technology is letting people make their own music and share it at will. Not just music, but movies and books as well; ironically, Sony actually makes some halfway-decent music and video software for the PC crowd. But as long as the Sonys of the world insist on using courts and bought-and-paid-for congresslime to force us to give up control of our hardware to them, instead of trying to cope with reality, all they’re going to do is hasten their own demise.

So why fight? Why not let them cut their wrists and bleed to death quietly? It’s not like their DRM malware runs on my computer, after all. That’s an easy one: it’s not going to stop with a half-baked installer. I remember reading, but can’t find the reference off-hand, that the eventual goal of the record companies (and perhaps the movie studios) is to collect royalties every time you listen to a song — just like they do with radio stations now. To get that intrusive, they need to be able to take over at least some of the hardware so they can control what you can and can’t play. Indeed, about two years ago they attempted to ram a law through Congress mandating DRM controls on hardware. It failed, not because Republicans care a scrap about consumer rights, but because the hardware manufacturers objected to the added expense and potential public-relations fallout.

Now if record companies could control your computer, what would stop them from blocking free music from the growing number of artists placing their work online? That’s what it would come to: eventually, they would wake up to the real threat to their revenue and find the solution already at hand.

We can object all we want to, but the only thing that will put an end to this creeping corporate encroachment is one thing: crates of copy-protected music CDs coming back to their warehouses from stores, because nobody’s buying. That’s the only thing that killed software copy-protection, and it’s the only thing that will kill music copy-protection.

Eating Season

Current music: St. Elmo’s Fire – John Parr
It occurred to me this morning that the two months starting with Hallowe’en and ending with New Year’s Day could be called “Eating Season,” at least in the US, Canada, and maybe Europe. Why do we have so many holidays at this time of year that involve candy, big meals, or both?

It actually makes sense if you look at it on an instinctual level. This is the time of year when non-tropical creatures are working on storing up fuel for the winter. Winter fat has a couple of survival advantages: one, you have a reserve when regular food gets hard to come by; two, fat insulates, so you don’t burn as many calories to stay warm. Calories, after all, are a measure of heat... although a dietetic calorie is 1000 “chemical” calories (or a “kilocalorie”). I don’t know why. So it makes sense that we, on a sub-conscious level, would look for excuses to load up on the chow this time of year.

Nowadays, we have other ways to survive the winter. Grocery stores are well-stocked with fresh produce from South America, we have nice warm houses (if we don’t forget to order fuel for the furnace, of course), and most of us have warm jackets if and when we do have to go outside. But racial habits, built on over thousands of years, are the hardest of all to break. So this year, I'm not going to worry about how much I eat during Eating Season. If I feel led to try a little of everything, I will. A little of everything. I’ll try to get outside more over the winter, letting Mother Nature burn those calories for me.

Ev’rybody’s healin’

Current music: Drone Zone
Saturday morning, whatever was in my side gave a last twinge and just... left. [Cue Hallelujah Chorus and a dance line.] By Sunday afternoon, I was producing enough fertilizer to supply all the farms in Nebraska and Iowa combined. I don’t think it was a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the cream that Mrs. Fetched is putting in her eye has helped a lot. She went into the eye doctor for a followup today; he said it’s better and “keep doing what you’re doing... oh, and by the way, you need bifocals.” I’m not gloating. It won’t be much longer before I need ’em too.

Hallowe’en at FAR Manor

I’ve considered Hallowe’en my favorite holiday for a long time. This may seem strange coming from a Christian, and a fairly conventional one at that, but it’s because we can relax on this holiday. Sure, there’s decorations to put up, and we’ll slip leftover Hallowe’en candy in Easter baskets, but there’s not the added pressure of cantatas, special church services, or shopping. Some of my bob-sisters take this holiday more seriously, and (like much of the Christian calendar) we co-opted the old Pagan holidays to make new converts a bit more comfortable. How soon my brethren forgot history...

But I digress.

Even at this time of year, there’s color to be found. Besides the fall flowers — pansies defying the frost and the more muted displays of wild flowers — the dogwood trees show deep red berries, six or seven months after the blood-tipped white of early April blooms.


Kudzu is an alien lifeform that has taken over much of Planet Georgia. At this time of year, after the first near- or actual frost, its brilliant summer green is starting to fade. In a few more weeks, the leaves will wither and drop away, leaving bare vines behind for the winter. I keep telling myself I’m going to pull down a few of the vines and try weaving again. The Boy and Mrs. Fetched made fall wreaths from kudzu vines a while back; my mother-in-law sold several at the Moonshine Festival that year.

Left unchecked, kudzu pretty much takes over. On the other hand, trying to kill it doesn’t make much difference. This is one tough plant. I’m told that the Japanese prize the roots, and think we’re crazy for trying to get rid of it. I’ve also heard of companies that get paid to plow up and remove kudzu from fields, and then they turn around and export the roots to Japan. Now that is a business model: get paid on both ends.


Daughter Dearest ready for our party, and trick-or-treating later on. Knowing that she was going to be a major babe doesn’t make it any easier now that she is.

[Quick story: Half DD’s lifetime ago, desperate for a costume, I grabbed a dress from the wife’s closet, stuffed a bra, and called it good enough. DD was extremely non-amused, and still hasn’t gotten over that.]

She helped one of our friends get ready too.


The boys all took off to watch Saw II or something similar; so much for having a bonfire. We just stayed inside and played Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix and had a great time. A couple of guests are on the floor here. That thing is fun — I’m officially interested in a video game again.


On the way back from the movie, Lobster got his very own Hallowe’en present from the local constabulary (74 in a 55, smoooooth). We made the mistake of letting The Boy take the car & pick up M.A.E., then go to the movie. On the way back, we’re told, he & Lobster were racing; The Boy was ahead as the two lanes narrowed to one, and Lobster wasn’t backing off, so he got on the brakes just in time for Lobster to go roaring by a cop. We told them it was Quota Week.... The funny thing is, it’s Lobster who has a radar detector (and had it turned off).

Oops

Guess who let the propane tank run out?

*sigh*

At least there’s plenty of firewood. I went and gathered up an armload of kindling a few minutes ago, just picking sticks up off the manor grounds, and didn’t even make a dent in the supply.

At this rate, Jimmy Carter and I will be swapping sweaters. That wouldn’t be a bad thing... if we’d listened to the man, the country wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in now.

Ouch

Last week, there was the big toe acting up. My self-therapy for that in the past has been to wear the ol’ Birkenstocks with the shaped sole. Two days later, no more problem. My tennies are about a half-size too tight, which was probably my problem. I switched to my church shoes until I get around to getting a replacement pair of tennies.

With that out of the way, now I’ve been having some soreness in my (left) side for the last few days. It hasn’t gotten worse, but it hasn’t gotten better either, so I figured I’d better have it looked at.

The doc, who oversaw The Boy for the first few hours of his diabetes, didn’t have a good explanation. Worst case, I’m getting an ulcer. which would be strange — it’s not like we have four teenagers here... oh, wait a minute... we do. I could (nearly 30 years after having my spleen removed due to a car wreck) be getting “adhesions,” in which loops of the intestines start sticking together. I have no clue how that’s treated, and I’m not sure I want to know. So she suggested I take an antacid; if the pain goes away that points to an ulcer.

Then she asked, “have you have a strep pneumonia shot in the last 5 years?” With my usual style and flair, I replied, “Hunh?” Turns out that I’m at risk, as I’m missing a spleen, so she called in the nurse with a vaccination for me. She would have also given me a flu shot, if she’d had vaccine available. The Boy and I will both be getting it later, I guess.

The shot hurt worse afterwards than it did going in. It’s sore as all get-out now, 11 hours later. Oh well, I’m no stranger to pain. After all, I’m married.

Friday Night Cinema

When you don’t have time to go to the theater and watch a feature-length movie... there’s plenty of shorts just a click away. I have enough of these lined up to do one a week for quite a while.

Type: Political
Format: Flash (SWF)

What 2000 Looks Like

Sounds crazy

So crazy, in fact, I want to do it. But not this year.

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the writers’ version of motorcycling’s Iron Butt Rally. It’s a simple contest: during the month of November, write a short (50,000 word) novel. But like haiku, there’s deep water beneath that simple surface.

Both NaNoWriMo and Iron Butt are endurance tests, of both operator and machine. Both require the participant to forego luxuries like sleep, regular meals, entertainment, and family. NaNoWriMo throws in another little monkey wrench, the minor detail of a major holiday (Thanksgiving, at least in the US) — toward the end of the month, when contestants will be pushing hard to wrap up, no less. Not to mention the 8.33% of us who happen to have a birthday in November.

To give you an idea of what 50,000 words is like, look through the October archive for Tales from FAR Manor. Read it all. Then multiply by 4. And I only thought I’d been writing like crazy this month. To really have a shot at completing NaNoWriMo, I would probably have to use up most of my vacation time (by taking November off, which ain’t gonna happen due to deadlines) kick the renters out of the old place in the woods, and move in there for the month.

Quota week?

Going into work this morning, I saw no less than five cop cars out & about. One of them pointed the ol’ radar gun my way.

Now I ding Planet Georgia for various reasons, but one thing they do right is tightly regulate local police activity with regard to writing speeding tickets — mainly in reaction to the big black eye that crooked towns like Ludowici gave the planet. One measure limits revenue from traffic tickets; others mandate a 10MPH tolerance for local/county cops.

It’s funny, though: cops can be appreciated or reviled, depending on whether they’re directing traffic through a busy intersection or running a speed trap, and they could do both in one day.

Outrage du jour

Just another reason to avoid Wal-Mart like the plague. It isn’t enough that they tell their suppliers to move manufacturing to China... they’re trying to figure out how to squeeze employee health benefits and get away with it. The link goes to a somewhat raggedy-looking PDF; I’ll summarize the lowlights:

• Make it harder to insure spouses. “Spouses are by far the most expensive plan members to cover...”


• Lower life insurance coverage.


• Use more part-time employees (because it takes longer for them to qualify for coverage).


• Push employees into Health Savings Accounts (as if they can afford them).


• Cut 401K matching from 4% to 3%.


• Encourage less-healthy employees to leave, thus saving their health care costs, by “[designing] all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g. all cashiers do some cart gathering),” and “dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart.” Sheesh.

I suppose it’s better than what they do now: give people information on how to apply for Medicaid.

Wal-Mart definitely has a self-inflicted image problem. Only 48% of eligible employees use their healthcare plan (vs. the national average of 68%). The memo further admits that “46 percent of Associates’ children are either on Medicaid or uninsured.”

Tell me again: in these days of runaway medical costs, when we spend more per capita for healthcare than any other developed nation and receive less for our trouble, when one of of five Americans can’t even afford health insurance, why a nationalized health care system is such a bad idea?

M.A.E.: You Got Served

“Someone called from the lodge today,” M.A.E. told me Friday evening. “She said a cop was up there looking for me.”

I reacted swiftly and decisively: “Huuhhh?? Why would a cop be looking for you?”

“I don’t know, unless my mom is pulling something again. Everything is OK with the probation officer, and I know I haven’t done anything to get arrested.”

“Could be.” I once described M.A.E.’s mother as “a serious piece of work,” and nothing has happened since to change my mind. “But she can’t have you arrested without some evidence of a crime... you think she’s having papers served on you?”

“That’s probably it,” M.A.E. agreed. “She called me and gave me a bunch of crap about how I need to stay away from my sister, blah blah blah...”

Sometimes, you just need to bite the bullet. M.A.E. is brave, or really believes in the system: she marched into the sheriff’s office today and asked why the deputies were looking for her. About 10 minutes later, they got it together and handed her a restraining order that accuses her, among other things, of being on meth 24/7 and violent. I’m 95% sure she’s not on meth at all, let alone 24/7, and 100% sure she’s not violent. So she’s going to get a drug test, which will put the lie to SPOW (Serious Piece Of Work) and likely get her zapped for making false statements or even perjury.

I’m not impressed with M.A.E.’s past. But she’s trying to put that past behind her for good and live the life of a respectable citizen, and that does impress me. I just don’t understand why someone — especially a relative — would try to throw wrenches in that.

News briefs

All the news that you didn’t hear about (but probably should have).

One reason I avoid blogging from work: even if you have free time, you don’t want to get in the habit if there’s no set policy. That’s one good thing about Microsoft that I’ve mentioned before: not only do they allow blogging, they let developers blog about work.

You just can't make this stuff up. The in-laws just installed an incinerator at the chicken houses; maybe we need to plant flowers around it.

Viagra could cut heart stress... well, sheesh. I can tell you why: one thing you don’t feel after nookie is stressed out. Well, unless you’re committing adultery and somebody’s spouse comes up the driveway, you don’t. (I’m guessing that would be the case anyway; I have no first-hand experience in that matter. No, really.)

OpenOffice 2.0 has been released. No piracy required, just download and enjoy.

You Are Now Informed.

Rosa Parks and determination

A lot of people have posted tributes to Rosa Parks today, and deservedly so. It took a lot of guts to say I ain’t movin’ in that time and place. You can only work within the system so long, especially when the system is rigged to consider you a lesser being, and there comes a time when playing nice and following the rules just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The bus boycott that followed Ms. Parks’s arrest and fine was another display of determination. When the bus was your primary means of getting from place to place, it was a real hardship to stay off. When the black people refused to play the inferiority game, it took courage to continue in the face of bricks, bombs, and bullets. It took something beyond mere courage — it took guts — to refuse the easy road of retaliation.

Some years later, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed — shortly before he was to turn the civil rights movement to the needs of American poor, both black and white. I think it was no coincidence.