Author: fheald

What the hell is up with the bizarre media censorship that’s going on now – all based on the Super Bowl exposure of Janet Jackson’s nipple!?!? Because of this, our fine government is trying to increase penalties on radio (no, not TV – radio!) personalities for obscenity (however that’s defined, which it appears it isn’t). Not that I like listening to Howard Stern, I find him a little moronic and I tend to listen to NPR in the morning instead; I actually knew who Sandra Tsing Lo was, before her fifteen minutes. The goofballs (and the down-to-earth Dr. Drew) on Loveline have no guidelines for what they’re allowed to say on their late night teen advice show so instead they’re just paranoid about everything.

And yet rap singers on MTV can obsenely objectify women left and right, and everyone sorta takes it for granted.

On a related note: the beach town of Leucadia, which used to be just a little grimy and even had its own nude beach back in the 70s, finally allowed an “F Street” adult store to go in, provided they made the facade tasteful and bland. And this is just a place that sells mainstream porn, timid lingerie and dildos. Big f’n deal! This town is littered wih (probably mostyl legit) holistic health centers and massage therapy centers – in San Diego county, which equates massage directly with prostitution, unless you pay several thousands of dollars for it in nearby La Costa, I suppose.

Again, on the internet you’re only a few clicks away from ordering sex toys that defy description – stuff so perverse it’s painful to even imagine how it’s used, can be delivered to your door by UPS in a couple of days.

But, back to what I started on, we certainly wouldn’t want anyone to hear the word “Fuck” on the radio. Reminds me of this, from Apocalypse now.

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t let them write “fuck” on their airplanes,
because it’s obscene.”-Colonel Kurtz

Personally I don’t think Janet ever showed her nipple; I think the Bush administration just wanted a memorable Superbowl halftime show, so they made it up based on sketchy information from the CIA. I believe that we should have more inspections. Anyone among us might be hiding nipples! Let’s expose them all!!

…you must always back up. Yeah, I got that.

But then when you restore old backup files over perfectly good recent files, your data goes poof. Which is what happened to my blog this morning.

I upgraded my server software to the latest version of OSX, and breezed past the warning that if you use mySQL databases, you must export them before upgrading. So after the upgrade finished, my blog dates were all messed up. Apparently they reversed a mysql bug that did the same thing to me about six months ago. No big deal – I went back to the old OS, exported the databases, came back into the new OS and imported – and wiped out a good database with an older backup.

But you may notice that all of my old entries seem to be back! Well, I did a google lookup (obtainium justfred) and used the cached page, which was taken just a few days ago, and copy and pasted all the entries over. I think one was missing, but I don’t think I care.

Some of you may be saying (Nelson) “Ha, Ha!” Yep, some of these things still crap out on OSX. But – remember that step where I “went back to the old OS”? I just reinstalled the previous version of OSX on a spare hard drive, rebooted, exported data, rebooted, and was done! I would have no idea how to do this on Windows or Linux – on OSX it’s relatively trivial. I might even have used my iPod as a spare hard drive if I’d needed to. And it’s vanilla mysql I’m using as a database, so it’s really easy to do the data export and reimport – a single command line for each database. And I had several other databases that, while they still had this problem, I didn’t screw up on the repair so they came back up no problemo.

Useful Aramaic expressions for commenting on Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”, from the UK Guardian.

Ma’hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.
It sort of reminds me of Life of Brian, but it’s nowhere near as funny.

(No, the title doesn’t have anything to do with the subject. Live with it.)

So Emperor W supports a constitutional amendment to define a marriage as being between a man and a woman. What a load of crap.

Marriage is between a couple and their god (or whatever they might call it). It’s the spiritual bond sanctified by whoever they accept as their moral authority. The government should not be in the business of legislating morality!

Sure, there are pesky legal documents, and all sorts of rights granted to married couples by the state. Beyond the question of why these rights exist only as such, I see this as the “domestic partnership” contract, no matter what you call it. And because it would be discriminatory to do otherwise, the contract should be legal between any two citizens (or three, or non-citizens – however we choose to define it) – the gender of the participants in, say, a limited corporation isn’t questioned, why should it be in this case? Is there some way the government is losing out on tax revenues if it allows same-gender partnerships? Or perhaps like the church, the state now wants to encourage rapid breeding to pay future taxes? Even though the government insists on calling this contract a “marriage licence”, I believe they shouldn’t discriminate about who they’ll grant it to.

I think it’s great that gay people are lining up in San Francisco to get married – mainly because I strongly support anyone who’s out to subvert the dominant paradigm.

And while we’re at it, anyone who asks, “Would you support a constitutional amendment…” should be cut off with NO! before they get any further than that. Unless there’s a really really good reason to change the structure of our government that’s worked reasonably well for the past 218 years. Flagburning – ain’t it. Homophobia – ain’t it. Limiting nepotism and corporate support of politics, and outlawing taxing the middle class to make the ultrawealthy ultrawealthier – now that I might support.

P.S. This post reminded me that: -My mom reads my blog sometimes, and -Often rants don’t reflect what we really mean. But I guess I stand by it. Mainly the kooky Libertarian idea of getting the Governement out of our lives to whatever extent possible.

Mardi Gras? Pfeh, that’s kid stuff.

I want to celebrate Carnival, Rio de Janiero style. Forget the beads – everybody Samba! Laissez les bons temps rouler?? Va a cagar en no mato!!!

(Of course either of these seems a bit bizarre to me if you’re not a practicing Catholic.)

There _is_ a Brazilian barbeque place in Oceanside I’ve been meaning to try, tho…

Does this contrast strike anyone else as amusing? From the LA Times today.

‘Green Hornet’ to get the Kevin Smith Treatment

Filmmaker and comic book aficionado Kevin Smith will write and direct an adaptation of “The Green Hornet” for the big screen, Miramax films said Wednesday.

“Longtime comics geek gets to make comic-book movie? This is a dream come true,” Smith said in a news release. His previous films include “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and “Dogma.”

“The character of the Green Hornet offers a myriad of possible film ideas and numerous merchandise and branded integration opportunities with our corporate partners, giving us a platform for a very viable and long-standing franchise,” said Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein.

No, I’m not making this up.

I admit it. I’m a Mac bigot. I can no longer be objective about Windows, or even Linux. Because there’s just no way I’d want to use them for “my” computer.

Granted – my work computer is Windows. Because for some inexplicable reason (okay, it’s explicable, but it would just take me too long and raise my blood pressure too much to try to explic it again.) we – I – chose to use ASP.NET and C# and MSSQL as the development environment for the project I’m working on. Oh, and we’ve got Exchange Server and Outlook running our email – that was emphatically NOT my choice. Really, the ASP.NET/C# (and Visual Studio) and MSSQL aren’t bad, in comparison to other platforms I’ve used. But they’re so f’n proprietary! I can only develop on Windows. I can only use SQL Server Enterprise Manager on Windows. As far as I know, everything I’m developing works fine on Linux and MacOS clients (I test it regularly) but who knows when Microsoft will change their mind about that, and there will be NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT. Except to port the product to a more open platform. And if and when M$ decides to force me to upgrade, well, I’m stuck there as well.

I get to listen to computer questions all the time. I’ve got friends (some of them no doubt reading this) who despite other positive charactaristics are Windows bigots, or Linux diehards.

I love the idea of Linux. Really. Open source OS, open software, runs on whatever cheap PC you have lying around, is technically superior, more secure, more stable, etc. than Windows in so many ways. And of course, it’s free! (well sorta – I recently tried out Suse, and rather than spend all day trying to download it, I just went ahead and paid for it, as I’ve done before with RedHat – but it was only about $40 rather than several hundred for Windows or $100 for OSX.) But the interface just plain sucks. It just looks ugly and slow and clunky. Menus take a second to pop up. Windows give no feedback when they’re working on something. Dialog boxes are poorly-thought-out and inconsistent. It’s a hack. Sure, the command line is nice and responsive – so is the Windows command line (notwithstanding all the ugly cruft – backslash, etc – that’s still around from CP/M – and the lack of great command-line tools like grep); I like OSX command line even better than Linux. But the GUI (which most of the users will probably end up wanting to use since they’ve been “spoiled” by GUIs for the past TWENTY YEARS!) sucks. No matter what skin you drop on it. Admittedly I haven’t tried all that many of these – and there are many. All different. All available for free from developers who are at best condescending and unconcerned about the needs of lame-os who want to use the GUI to get real work done.

Now, Windows, I pretty much hate across the board. When I’m using it I keep looking behind me to see who’s got a gun to my head (or more likely, whose hand is reaching into my pocket for my wallet. It’s usually functional, tho (as discussed earlier) error messages are unhelpful, programs are just plain hostile (“In order to use this feature you must insert the Office 2002 Professional disc NOW. I don’t care what you thought you were trying to do, my needs are more important than your needs, puny human.”). The user interface shows that a lot of design work went into it – by people who appear not to care as much about the user experience as they do about implementing features as requested by marketing.

MacOSX? I look forward to paying for updates ’cause they’ve got cool new stuff. I love to buy shareware – or even commercial software – for it! I love it even more when open source stuff (like Open Office) runs fine on it! Windows are responsive and rounded and pleasant – dialog boxes are consistent. Crashes are very rare and usually caused by me running beta software or hot-unplugging something. The interface is clean and simple and intuitive – not perfect but so much smoother than the others.

So there you go. I’m unrepentant. I’ve tried the rest, and I’m sticking with the best.

I’ve heard there’s a proto-pagan holiday of some sort going on tomorrow, represented by the symbol of a vulva. How charming. That’s actually just co-opting the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, much more interesting (and I’m sure Scix can provide more details on that).

But today, friends, today is Friday the 13th! A much better reason to celebrate!

Did you remember that the character “King Friday” on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood celebrated his birthday every friday the 13th? Sounds like a good idea to me.

Here‘s an interesting story about Philip le Bel and the origins of Friday the 13th and the Knights Templar, as well as others.

Not to mention a series of really bad pulp horror movies.

So – break a mirror, pet a black cat, spill some salt, walk under a ladder, exit a movie theater by the same door you entered, drink your first pint without offering a toast. They’re all okay today (by some convoluted logic understood only by me, and perhaps the Knights Templar)!

Sounds like my kind of cooking.

I can’t help it, everything in the news these days sounds Orwellian, in a double-plus ungood, duckspeak sorta way.

War is Peace

We have always been at war with Iraq. Libya has always been our ally.

Freedom is Slavery

The “Patriot Act”.

Ignorance is Strength

Commander-in-chief?