The Forever War

Soldiers in the Forever War

"The Forever War" is one of the great Science Fiction novels of all time, written by Joe Haldeman sometime in the 20th Century.

You could use that title to describe the war between the sexes, to wit: roughly 2700 years ago Hesiod wrote:

"From her is the race of women and female kind, of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth."

Geez, think he was a little down on women when he wrote that? I got here by following a link to Wikipedia from Stu Savory. I found the picture while I was looking for book covers, and I just really like it.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

A New Breed Of Gunner

New to me anyway. The story and this picture are from November of 2003. I came across the picture while looking for pictures of gun shops in Peshawar. I found two web sites with some good pictures:

1. Darra Adam Khel
2. Guns From Afghanistan

This picture is all the more striking after you get done reading about how they are making guns in Peshawar, and then you think about the society that produced this photo op.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

The Anatomist

A dose of culture for all you neanderthals, whether you want it or not.


Painted by Gabriel von Max around 1860. This computer stuff is getting pretty amazing when you can get pictures like this on your desktop. A high resolution image (800 x 574) is also available. Note that this large image is actually made of four smaller images. The original painting is 190 centimeters across. At 1,000 pixels per inch (which is what I consider the minimum for accurate reproduction), that would mean a good quality copy would be 75,000 pixels across. To put it another way, each pixel in this drawing amounts of about 1/5 of an inch on the original picture.

Dance Monkeys Dance

The narrator gets a little biased towards the end, but for the most part it really puts things in perspective.

If you prefer, you can watch it in a dark room. Found on the same site where I found the monkey picture that I used in previous post.

Monkeys

So I'm trying to get the audio working on my Linux box. I spent some time futzing with it and eventually concluded I need some basic benchmarks, like do the speakers work? Can I make any audio work? Maybe I should just go out and buy a sound card. Whoa! Let's not be drastic here. Shoot, a sound card is going to set you back, what, a dollar? Maybe even a dollar and a half!

I've got another computer sitting here that I was supposed to sell, but somehow I have not gotten around to it. Let's just hook that up and see where we go. Right off the bat we have a problem. The dag-nab PS-2 keyboard connector won't plug in. The mouse connector works fine, it even plugs into the keyboard socket. What gives? Close comparison of the two plugs and sockets reveals that the plastic tab in the center of the keyboard connector is looking a little beat, and look here, in the corresponding slot in socket, there appears to be a piece of metal impinging on the slot. But when I try and plug it in, it feels like it is jammed up around the metal shell. Try another keyboard, it plugs right in. What the devil? Oh, look, the center plastic tab is missing. Now who would have done that? Not me, I would have remembered such a thing. Oh, yeah, I guess I did do that. Okay, same cure here. Use a pocket knife to bend the plastic tab over until it breaks off and falls out. Good, step zero complete.

So now I connect it up and turn it on and ... and nothing. It sits there and hums at me. No video at all, not even any BIOS sign on message. This isn't good, and then I remember! This was going to be my multi-media machine, my personal DVR, until I couldn't get decent video out of it. But while I was fooling around with this thing, I got to the point where I was using only the TV for video. I did not have a computer monitor hooked up to it. Now I have a monitor, but no TV. Hmmmm. Ought to be some way to convince the BIOS to revert to using the standard computer video instead of this TV card. I try pulling the TV card, no help. So I go out on the internet. I haven't found a solution yet, but I did find this:

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Help

I went out to the local Albertsons grocery store yesterday evening to pick up some charcoal for the grill. I walked up and down durn near every aisle looking for charcoal and I did not find any. I thought about asking someone for help, but I did not want to have an unhelpful conversation. You know the kind, like a: uh, we don't carry charcoal after labor day, or b: uh, I don't know, let me check, or c: Follow me! I know right where it's at! Only when you get there, it isn't, and you get to listen to a profusion of apologies. Of course it could have gone smoothly and I would have had the charcoal and all would have been well, but I wasn't willing to take that risk. I've run into helpless store employees too many times. Now maybe I am just prejudiced against Albertsons, but their employees just look helpless.

Thriftway Grocery Store

So I drove the two miles to Hank's where I knew where the charcoal was and paid the $5 for a ten pound bag.

Alpha Bits Cereal

So why did I go to Albertsons in the first place? They are the only ones in the area who carry Alpha-Bits. The three of us seem to have developed a craving for them, so I bought three boxes. I expect we will tire of them soon enough.

Update November 2015. Replaced missing pictures.

Windows is Wonderful Part 9487

I set up a Windows Hotmail account for all my Linux related stuff. When I got serious about fixing the problems with my Linux box, I visited a bunch of forums, and they all want you to register, and they all want an email address. No telling how much junk mail this is going to generate, so I set up a new email account to deal with them. I already had a three other email accounts, and hotmail is the only one I hadn't tried so I thought I'd give it a go. The oddness of using a Windows program to cope with Linux didn't even occur to me, or maybe it just appealed to my perverse sense of humor.

But now every time I go to check this account, and it tells me I need to upgrade my browser. I'm sorry, my browser has already been upgraded, but there is no way of telling it that, and there isn't even a check box to tell it not to show me this warning again. I suppose that's what I get for trying to use a Microsoft do-hickey on Linux.

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.