Pets make you stupid

My good friend, former co-worker, and current client Beckley once told me that having a pet makes you stupid, which he thought explained what he called his cat (which contained, if I recall correctly, “Chairman Miau” and “Monkey”). edit – the neighbor’s cat was Chairman, Beckley’s cat is The Monkey. He documented the slow and horrible transformation of his cat’s name on his blog.

I am afraid he is completely correct. These are the names I have used for my wife’s dog:

  • Lucy
  • Lucy Loo (Lucy Liu?)
  • Lucy Doops
  • B. Doops

So we’re now to the point where we refer to the dog as B. Doops. It’s not even as if I know what the B stands for. That’s just what she’s called now. I may have mispelled it – it could be Bedoops or something. Who knows.

So be careful. If you get a pet, it will make you dumb.

Edit – Lucy Loob, Luby Doo, and Luby Doob probably gets us closer to “B. Doops”.

Watchmen Review

So after walking out of the IMAX that was showing the Watchmen, I didn’t know how I felt about the movie. I twittered that I had seen it and that going out of one’s way for the IMAX version was not worth it. But did I like it? The following contains no spoilers, because I fucking hate spoilers and had to keep plugging my ears and singing “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever anyone tried to tell me anything about it.

The answer is, that yes, yes I did. I really only realized what was going on in my head when I saw the last half of Spiderman today – which I think I’ve seen like five times..

Y’see there are Superhero movies like Spiderman, X-Men, and Iron Man. All of which I truly enjoyed. Interesting characters, good plotlines and subplots, great action sequences, little funny bits – all around good stuff.

But the Watchmen is not that kind of film. It’s closer to a Sci-Fi film, or even some character driven piece like Tarantino’s work. Sure, there’s some plot in there as to what’s going on, and there are some cool fight scenes, but that’s not what the movie’s about. It’s got that Sci-Fi “what if…” feeling about it, and also asks “what would hero types actually be like if they really were in the contemporary world?”

And getting those two types of movies mixed up is my mistake. This movie isn’t that movie. It’s very good, and interesting, but it’s not an action movie, and it’s not a superhero movie. Keeping those things straight makes it easier to think about and realize I enjoyed.

But if you’re not the type of person who wants to watch a movie that you could walk out of and wonder whether or not you liked it, then I wouldn’t watch this one.

But if you’re okay with that, I think the film is very good – and based on my brief readings of the graphic novel, pretty close to it.

My favorite advertisement ever

This is totally awesome on so many levels – I’m afraid this photo doesn’t really do it justice. These are some of the more interesting “choices” made with this circular:

#1) the terrible photocopy-looking nature of the thing
#2) “Ransom-note” style lettering – someone cut and copied letters from some other advertisement to make this one.
#3) In the black bar on top – you can apparently help $ave your “Peach of Mind”
#4) Insane parenthesis “If your property is in (Foreclosure)”
#5) Good things to note – “Note: Therefore you will not have any more headaches or worries.”
#6) Phone number in the bottom is written in pen, and is misformatted – apparently in area-code (1347)

I would worry that I might arouse these people’s ire, but I’m nearly certain they’ve stayed at least 50 feet from a computer for their entire lives.

edit – also “Call ! Call ! Call !:” esp. with the colon at the end, I like that.

SuperBraydix_3.iso

more than 10 megs smaller
powers off computer when browser quits
branded home page
fixed font metrics (yay!)
runs on a machine with 256MB RAM (unless you’re Bryan)
little Grub menu thingee may help with resolution.
Linux virtual terminal support (ctrl-alt-F1,f2,f3) so you can see what’s going on

CSS vs. Tables II – The Tables Strike Back

Read this about CSS and tables – with a really good example. Finally, someone who can make the argument I haven’t been able to verbalize. Thank you.

edit – Maybe we can say ‘OK, I may still use tables – but NO NESTED TABLES!’. Once you’re nesting them you’re doing something pretty freaky. You’re going wayyyyyy too far into the positioning realm using tables. And maintainability is going to be horrendous. So, bad. How ’bout that?

Edit 2
<table>
     <tr>
          <td>cell1</td>
          <td>cell2</td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
          <td>cell3</td>
          <td>cell4</td>
     </tr>
</table>

vs.

<div>
     <div>
          <div>cell1</div>
          <div>cell2</div>
     </div>
     <div>
          <div>cell3</div>
          <div>cell4</div>
     </div>
</div>

No real difference in the tagfulness there, so what are you saving by avoiding the table?

Renouncing Libertarianism

My dad taught me a long time ago that blindly following any ideology to it’s final, inevitable, conclusion ends up in failure. He used the example of Communism, and the various forms of starvation that were caused by blind following of its tenets. I mean, Communism sounds really nice when you first hear about it, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” Isn’t that nice? Of course it is! It just never works out that way.

I think I’m forced to say the same thing happens with my sorta-political-philosophy – Libertarianism. I think it has some nice things going for it too – an idea of minimal government, and the efficiencies of markets. Those are things not to be abandoned, for certain. But the failures of the banks and the fact that the government cannot allow them to fail makes me despair for true Laissez-faire capitalism.

I think the best system is probably a sorta Hagelian ‘Synthesis’ of the various opposing philosophies – Communism: FAIL. Pure Republican-style Laissez-faire capitalism:FAIL. Effective systems will be somewhere…in the middle.

I think the problem is this – true Libertarianism requires the government to play “chicken” with its people. Somebody says, “Hey! I’m going to do something stupid and awful! HAHAHAAH!” And the government has to say, “OK, do whatever you want, as long as you don’t screw with anyone else…” and in the end – somebody’s got to blink. And the government does, and I don’t blame it. Got no health insurance? Well, the hospitals will catch you. Forgot to save for retirement? Social security. Whoops! You invested all your money in stupid, stupid horrible things that are now worthless? OK, let’s see what we can do to shore up prices. Oh, you bought a house you cannot afford? We’ll fix the mortgage for you.

And actually typing these things makes me sad – but I think the government has to act in many, if not all, of these cases. It simply has no other alternative. If it let the banks fail, we could have a full on depression on our hands. Sure, then everyone who botched pays the price – good, fuck ’em – but too many innocents do too. I made sure not to buy a house, even as banks were screaming at me to take their money – why? Because it made no financial sense for me to do so. Good for me. But not good for me, because the government woulda bailed me out anyways.

Maybe you could blame everything on the Fed…I know, I place a lot of blame on them – my standard argument is that they react quickly to lower rates, but never to raise them. We could’ve avoided a lot of this (hindsight being 20/20 of course) by doing some serious bumping up of some rates when we started to see the real estate market go nuts. Only a few people would’ve gotten hurt, and much of this might have been prevented.

But I did some research – and even without Central Banks, various bank failures and credit crunches occurred in the past, just driven by private investors and such. So you can’t say “well, abolish central banking and then you have your libertarian paradise…” Still no. Though my argument, in the end, would be that if your central bank can’t prevent depressions, and neither can no central bank, then maybe you might as well have none.

My problem now is I would like to figure out some heuristic or algorithm or something for where the government should stop – once you have them crossing that line, when does it end? Guns? You can’t have ’em, you might hurt yourself. Alcohol (my precious BEER!) – no more for you. Etc. What’s the rule of thumb to say where government will ‘blink’ and step in, and where it won’t? What’s to keep us from just having it grow and grow and grow and never end? And I don’t know the answer. And that bugs me.

Maybe the model is “government’s job is regulation.” E.g., don’t have the government directly doing stuff, just have it regulating the doing of the stuff. What does that mean – private police forces? Private armies? I don’t like that. Ugh. It’s all muddled. Or perhaps, it’s not any more muddled than it was before, and I just see the muddledness more than I did? I don’t know.

I really don’t know!

disconnected notes

#1) Job is going great. I’m really digging working for myself, and I’m making a very comfortable living, and I’ve even been able to carve out time for my own projects. Things are busier than I expected – but I’m sure that it’s “feast or famine,” so I’m trying to stay disciplined and keep taking the work as it comes in. The work is almost all consulting, very little programming. Lucky I didn’t buy that 17 inch Macbook Pro, that would’ve been pretty stupid.

#2) Excercise is….not going so great. My weight sorta hovers around the exact same place, no matter what I do. I’m getting really discouraged. I can try to move from cardio to strength training, but it’s all guesswork, and I have no clue what I’m doing. I think I’m going to have to really try and dig deeper into this one. Do some research. Actually track what I eat. Cut out the beer. Oh, the beer….what will I do without you? Sigh. At least with the new gig I almost never drink beer at home now, which is good. I do know the last time I stopped drinking beer for a few months, I did end up dropping a few pounds.

#3) There’s a mac browser called ‘stainless‘ which uses the same multiprocess model that Google Chrome does. They say it’s a “technology demo only” but I’m actually using it as my day-to-day browser. I like it. We’ll see how much I like it once I’ve crashed it and lost some work.

#4) Veep debate. Palin didn’t do as bad as she could’ve. She said some ‘homey’ things which I thought was a good touch. I still feel like the Obama camp has this one in the bag, but you never know…

#5) Republicans vs. Democrats – or, more accurately, any partisanship – Democrats are fucking idiots for not properly looking at why they lost in ’04. They love to use the ‘go have a beer with’ theory – that polls say that people would rather have a beer with Bush than Kerry. That may be true, but that’s *not* why they lost. That’s just embedding liberal elite thinking in more palatable container – “The bulk of us in America are dumb, that’s why we lost.” No, that’s not why we lost. We lost because Kerry seemed not genuine, and Bush, though wrongheaded, seemed genuine. Genuine-ness is more important to people who aren’t jaded like us New Yorker Liberal Elites. Kerry seemed like he was the product of a focus group. Obama does not. McCain is starting to look that way. Too bad, the ‘maverick’ McCain (long dead, it seems) was interesting. I don’t think I would’ve voted for him, but definitely, more interesting.

#6) Words. With the mainstreaming of net-speak, some words that used to be no-no’s – that I was taught when I was, like, 10 years old not to use because they were derogatory – are coming back. Specifically ones referring to diminished mental facilities, and sexual orientation. And everyone I’ve met who uses them does so with a wink and a nudge, like they’re in on the ‘joke’, and they know what they’re doing, and don’t really believe the kinds of things that can be (simply) inferred from what they’re saying. But words have power. In your own brain, and other people’s. And if you keep allowing the association between <slang word> and <negative connotation>, you just may end up, subconsciously, reinforcing <slang word meaning> and <negative connotation>. And no matter how clever or smart or enlightened or…whatever you are, even if you can avoid that aforementioned trap, you could still inadvertently drop <slang word> in front of someone who is, or knows someone who is <slang meaning>. Is your vocabulary so limited that you must refer to things as ‘retarded’, or ‘gay’, or ‘fags’? You really can’t come up with anything else? I think you can. So stop it. It’s still offensive. Unless there was some memo passed around that I hadn’t read. And c’mon, there’s still cursing. There’s tons of milage left in that – fuck shit motherfucker. Cock. See?