Slamland 2

It’s been a long time …

2012-06-24T14:48:22Z

Perfect storm

Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to become my new Web Applications Server (WAS). However, since I use Active Directory, I had to upgrade both to Windows 7 Ultimate. Easier said than done since, I had to get the upgrade packages from the States. That took almost 4 months.

Rewind to May2011. At that time I was informed by Livejournal that my account had been compromised. Y’all may remember my posts on it. At the time I went through a frantic time of changing and resetting passwords. They were based on a misspelling of a rather long word but since I depend on login cookies, it didn’t matter. All the login cookies are on my laptop and I didn’t bother to write down the new passcodes. Further, in Feb2012, my mail server’s motherboard dies. You can probably guess where this is going by now.

No problemo, I thought, I just go to using the other new host for my workstation until I can repair the laptop. The problem is that the new box doesn’t have the login cookies on it and I can no longer remember which misspelling I used for the new passcodes, never having used it more than 6 times, many months before. Yes it’s a secure passcode, too secure. With all my domain mail accounts having gone the way of my old mailserver, I was stuck and could no longer access my websites. This has been the case for over 6 months now. Don’t forget that I’m still maintaining 10K words per week on my novels.

My laptop is now working again and I can once more post however, lots of lessons have been re-learned. The big one is about complacency. Murphy loves complacency.

Forward ho!

I will be completely redesigning and reworking my network of the next few months. I once more have a mailserver but I am deprecating those addresses. While I can do the anti-spam stuff, I can’t touch Gmail for spam killing. There are still lots of issues but the new house will eliminate many of them. There is a lot to be said for building something as good as you can and then ‘Stop messing with it!?’

One thing though, the Slamlander will be getting his own domain name.

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Police state Amerika: a Rogue Government

2012-01-09T20:00:11Z

1Gonzolo Lira awakened me to this one. Before his post I was blissfully unaware of the NDAA¹ .

Those who read me already know how I feel about the various renditions of the Patriot Acts. The NDAA passes those so far that you can’t even see them in the rear-view mirror. Embedded into this POS² is a little something called Indefinite Detention AKA the Levin/McCain detention bill. It is a part and parcel of the NDAA. Last December, Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, did a detailed analysis of this bill and the three critical points incorporated within it.

The Bill codifies Indefinite Detentions: Basically, it suspends Article 1, section 9, of the US Constitution in its entirety and indefinitely. It even removes the requirement for a trial. Anyone may be detained simply on suspicion and no proof is required whatsoever. Of course, without the requirement of a trial, due process becomes a dim historical artifact. It might be noted that Roman tyrants gained permanent ascendency over the triumvirate, ending the Roman Republic, by the simple expedient of declaring a permanent state of war (This may mark the historical end of the Republic of the United States) .
It expands the scope of the War on Terror to the point that it can never be won. It becomes a war that does not end and therefore supports the first point (above).
US citizens are not exempt from this bill³ . It leaves open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention and trial by a military court to include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda or an amorphous group of “associated forces” that could cover just about anyone arrested anywhere in the world.
A fourth point that many analysts miss is that these are military detentions of non-military subjects and thus violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Although the Posse Comitatus is not a part of the US Constitution, it is motivated by said document and expands on it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the NDAA shits all over the US Constitution and the US Bill of Rights.

National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 More links can be found on Google. [↩]
POS=Piece Of Shit [↩]
Surprisingly, this was done at Obama’s insistence. [↩]

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California refuses to fund an early primary election!

2012-01-05T07:49:39Z

Lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to allocate state funds for an early presidential primary. This is from the LA Times and the discussion is here.

We bought a ticket in the nosebleed section because Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature refused to spend an estimated $100 million for a separate presidential primary early in the nominating process

Instead, they combined presidential balloting with the regular state primary on June 5, long after the Republican nomination surely will have been nailed down, most likely by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

That means Republican voters in the nation’s most populous state will probably have no voice in whom the party nominates for president. They can only shout a meaningless cheer or catcall. — Los Angeles Times

— Wait a hold it! Full tilt STOP! —

What’s wrong with this picture? There is no provision in the US Constitution for primary elections! Primary elections only provide the means to falsely propagate the the tyranny of the two-party system. Why should any state support ANY primary with scarce tax dollars? Each party should have and fund its own primary, should they even need one. I challenge anyone to find one sentence, in the US Constitution, that supports the concept of primary elections!

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The spammers won!

2011-12-29T09:56:25Z

The spammers have decided that us little guys are not to be allowed to run our own email servers anymore. They didn’t do it via legal machinations rather, they did it the old-fashioned way; brute force.

This is the end of a 7+ month battle between spammers and myself. Until 3 months ago, I ran my own self-hosted mail server. All my domains were on it. I have just taken that system off-line permanently.

What happened is that I was getting barraged by 250+ spams per day on each account. My normal email was getting buried to the point that I couldn’t even find it. My mail bins were over-flowing with spam and I couldn’t even sort it from the legitimate stuff. MS Outlook was no help either. The Outlook rules processing was taking loads of time from my laptop and it still wasn’t effective. Long story shortened, after trying some seriously hefty solutions, including some paid front-end services, I had to give it up. There is no way to keep ahead of the spammers and still get my real work done. I was spending hours per day on it instead of on writing, marketing, and sales. It wasn’t doing my blood pressure any good either.

I have now gone to the dark-side and opened Gmail accounts. After months of testing, it is confirmed that Gmail does what they say on the label, they kill all spam. Yes, my new email addresses no longer have my personal domain names in them but I don’t get the spam either. Neither do I have to spend the hours of maintenance required to keep the mail server alive (it was continually choking on the sheer volume of spam).

It will probably take a few months before I get around to updating all my accounts with the new addresses but then contacting me will be easier and I will be more responsive. Sometimes we have to pick and choose the battles that we engage in. Are they worth the bother? In the end, what is more important, focusing on core activities or fighting over principles (principles that don’t put a single dime in my coffers)? No government could have passed a law that would get me to do this but the spammers simply wore me down.

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Police State Amerika?

2011-12-27T12:06:14Z

They’ve done it. You can no longer board even a train or bus without papers.

The Transportation Security Administration isn’t just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

Whatever happened to the 4th and 5th Amendments?

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Prosecutorial immunity is wrong!

2011-12-27T11:43:58Z

Prosecutors and police are largely held immune from their faulty actions, not even compensating for the direct harm of their actions. My previous article on Mr. Morton, a man falsely imprisoned for 25 years, is but the tip of this iceberg. At the core of this is prosecutorial immunity and it needs to end.

The article is here and the discussions are there.

Once released, those arrested have little recourse. State and federal laws generally protect law enforcement agencies from lawsuits over such detentions as long as officers were acting on a valid warrant and had a reasonable belief that they were arresting the right person.

The problem is that these people, innocent victims, are not compensated or even returned to their homes. In the case of a Nissan customer service supervisor who was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name. How did he get back home to Tennessee?

The worst of these was the case of Santiago Ibarra Rivera who wound up spending a month in jail, that’s a month’s loss of salary, probably lost his job, and all that he gets from Superior Court Judge Kathryn Solórzano is an apology. Pardon me for thinking that as being a lot short of the mark. He is owed at the least, lost wages and a free ride back home.

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Critics aren’t

2011-12-26T21:11:53Z

KEZ of War of Winds just posted something that I have strongly agreed with for years. She comes at it from a slightly different direction but the destination is the same. Public criticism is there for one reason and one reason only, the self-aggrandizement of the critic. A real critic will hand you their critique privately and only on invitation.

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Prosecutorial misconduct

2011-12-19T15:52:38Z

An article on the LA Times brings up the case of a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. The comments are here. This is a case, one among very many, that argues against the Death Penalty.

In short, this is the case of a prosecutor so eager to crank up his ‘win’ record that he sent the wrong man to prison, fully knowing that he was the wrong man! He then tried to destroy evidence that he did so.

In detail the prosecutor’s office, withheld exculpatory evidence and when ordered to save and seal the evidence. When the envelop supposedly containing was opened, the evidence, contrary to court orders, was not there.

Mike Davis, the former assistant district attorney, was also compelled to testify.
According to a transcript, Davis blamed lead prosecutor Anderson for withholding evidence.

Of course, Anderson claimed innocence. In the meanwhile, the actual perpetrator lived free. Is Michael Morton going to be compensated for the 25 years of his lost freedom? What about his future? He is unemployable now, he has no pension, no social security, and is now too old to recover from this life-injury. The reality is that his life was stolen from him and ruined for the sake of a lawyer’s ambition. Someone owes this man large!

Rant

While this is an egregious case, it is only one among a large and dark cloud of such cases hanging over the American legal system. Prosecutors are allowed to attack anyone with complete impunity and they are rewarded for their zealousness by promotions (Anderson is now a judge) and political perks and powers while enjoying complete immunity for their actions. The system is corrupt!

I once believed in the Death Penalty but that is when I still believed that the legal system was infallible. How many of the many in Texas that were executed when they were actually innocent? It is unfortunate that we cannot un-execute a person. It is better to imprison them for life.

Prosecutors need to be made liable for their zealousness as well. Misconduct needs to be be met with mandatory prison time, in the General Prison Population! When they lose, they should lose their jobs as well.

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How little we remember

2011-12-18T10:38:42Z

The sale of the world-famous Chrystal Cathedral to the Orange County diocese of the Roman Catholic Church is really showing just how many foreigners have moved in since the 60’s. These are people that have no sense of history of the place that they moved to and Nicole Santa Cruz shows her ignorance, as well as that fact that she was a less than indifferent student in primary school.

When Brown succeeded Bishop Norman McFarland in 1998, there were 600,000 Catholics in Orange County. There are now 1.2 million.

That growth is not so much an increase in market-share rather, it represents an huge increase in population. There was a time when the entire Southland was 100% Roman Catholic. It was largely after the conquest by Colonel Fremont and the influx of gold prospectors, in 1849, that Protestantism took root. The Church has always been strong, even when it played low-profile in the light of the protestant conquerors from the eastern seaboard.

While I no longer consider myself a Catholic, I was raised in the diocese of Orange. This is really a resurgence of Catholicism and not a growth.

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Communes and Hobo Jungles are back!

2011-12-17T23:42:50Z

The LA Times had an article that I commented on. It was about an Ad Hoc desert community. When your unemployment runs out, what are you to do? These folks are basically homeless but they survive.

During World War II, the Slab City site was Camp Dunlap, a Marine artillery training base. But ownership of the acreage passed to the state in the 1950s.
Even when it had money, the state government never showed much interest in Slab City. A plan to sell the site to a San Diego developer in the 1990s fell through; so did an idea by Imperial County to turn it into an RV camping ground. – LA Times article

Let’s face it, the Western US has more land than it knows what to do with. Yes damnit, California land prices are greed driven and not market driven, even now.

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Machaca made simple

2011-12-07T20:53:12Z

I haven’t posted a recipe for quite some time. It’s long past time for another southwestern dish, methinks.

Description

Machaca is basically shredded beef. While the original recipe calls for dried or jerked beef, the more modern ones use boiled and shredded beef. It is used as the basic meat in tacos, burritos, and tamales. It can also be made from pork.

Most machaca dishes now are made from beef that has been well-cooked, shredded then cooked in its juices until the desired consistency is achieved, which in Phoenix, Arizona can be soupy, dry or medio. In Tucson and south, the preparation is almost always dry, and approximates more closely the taste and texture of the original dish prepared from dried meat. – From Wikipedia

I don’t like the Arizona form, I like it moist and spicy and that is what I’ll make here.

Ingredients

600g of lean roasting beef – do NOT get this pre-cut into stewing beef. Do NOT get stewing beef.
1 tin (199g) of La Consteña brand Chipotle Peppers in Adobo sauce.
1 large onion
Lemon juice
Lime juice
Rosemary
Salt
Black Pepper
Garlic powder
Olive Oil
I may have forgotten something but it is in the text below.

Usage

Machaca can be used directly as the meat filling in a Taco. I can also be used as the filling for Tamales. It can also be a part of the filling for a Burrito. There are many other recipes where Machaca can be and is often used.

Boil it!

I started out with a very nice and lean side of roast beef, of about 600g, from the Migros. I stuck this in a large pot of boiling water. I threw in some salt and cumin. The key ingredient that everyone misses here in Europe is cumin. You got to have the cumin and you have to have enough of it. In this case a tablespoon of the powdered stuff (All the TV Chefs talk about using whole grained spices for more flavor. That may work in production kitchens cooking large quantities but for home cooking, you need to use powdered spices. Yeah, they go flat faster but you also don’t buy as much at a time. Importantly, powders blend in to your dishes better) .

One of the things that most do wrong is to sear the meat. Stop it! Searing seals in the juices and also prevents it from cooking through enough to tenderize quickly enough to become shred-able. Searing simply slows an already slow process down. I cut it into four large chunks along the grain. and toss them into the pot. As the water evaporates, add more and keep boiling until the meat shreds easily. It usually takes a few hours. Then let it cool enough to handle comfortably. Do not discard the broth!

Shred it!

It helps to do this while the meat is still warm. There are many methods of shredding the meat. The traditional one is to use a pair of forks and pull the meat apart with them. However, the tines clog easily and you don’t get a proper shred. My method is to use a very sharp knife.

The most dangerous tool in a kitchen is a dull knife. When a knife gets dull then it will exact a blood sacrifice from the cook by slipping and cutting what isn’t intended, like the cook’s fingers or other parts of the cook’s anatomy. How sharp does it have to be? Sharp enough to cut air and then a smidge sharper! Get them sharp with a good whetstone and keep them sharp with a good steel. Use a steel before cooking every meal. A sharp knife will only cut what is intended. This applies to all the cook’s knives, even the paring knives!

You scrape the meat along the grain instead of cutting it. It should shred very nicely and very efficiently. Remove and discard any gristle and fat that you run into during this process. You will wind up with 600g of shredded lean meat. If long strands of meat fiber come off too, that’s alright. You actually want that.

Cook the onion and prepare the spices

You will need a large onion. I used to like Vidalia’s but I can’t get them here. Course cut it and start it on a slow cook, in olive oil, in a very large, deep-dish, skillet. You need to get them translucent.

Pop open a tin of Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce ( I can actually get that here from the American Market, which should probably be called the Latin American Market. The brand is La Costeña. ) . You will need two chipotle peppers and some of the adobo sauce as well. They will need to be diced finely (Remember those sharp knives? I used a large Chef’s Knife for this job) Be careful not to get any sauce on your hands. The capsicum doesn’t wash off well, even with soap. That’s why they use it in pepper spray, non?

Re-introduce the stock

Once the onion is ready then turn up the heat and toss in the shredded meat. Remember that water that you boiled the meat in? This is where you reintroduce it to the meat. The idea is to bring back that beefy taste. I also added a teaspoon of Bovril¹ , some garlic powder, rosemary, salt, black pepper, a dash of sugar, a dash of lemon juice, a dash of lime juice, and a dash of soy sauce. This should now be a soupy mess of meat fiber and spices. This is also where you add in that Chipotle that you diced fine in its adobo sauce. Stir it all up really well.

Once it comes to a boil you are on the most sensitive part of this dish. From now until it’s done, you cannot leave it. It has to be reduced to where the meat is just barely moist and at this point, it is really easy to scorch. Even a slight scorch will turn it horrible. You can’t hurry this part. Set it on the lowest sustainable simmer and stir as required to keep from scorching. Watch it like a hawk. Step away and it’ll scorch and all your efforts to this moment will have been wasted. It’s finished when there is no more liquid but the meat is still moist. Take it off the fire immediately.

Use it or Store it

For freezing, we use small freezer bags for about 130g of machaca per bag and rolled flat. We call these shingles and you’ll see why after they are frozen . Get as much of the air out of the bag as you can and put them on a flat freezer shelf to freeze. Afterwards, we stack them in the normal freezer bins with our other shingles of stuff (labeled and dated, of course). For our first meal with this batch we made corn tacos and tostadas and froze the rest.

Enjoy

Bovril is made in the UK and is basically a concentrated beef broth, beef bullion will work as well. [↩]

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The US has been brainwashed by Democrats!

2011-12-02T14:10:57Z

Aaron Russo on Democracy

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When is a democracy not a democracy?

2011-12-02T12:37:02Z

This video got my attention

About the Republic of the USA

It is also extremely worrisome. In the various forums, it is amazing how many people do not know that the US is a Republic and guaranteed to remain so by the US Constitution. The majority of them are Democrats.

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The Prop 8 fight ain’t over yet!

2011-11-22T19:02:43Z

Yet another LA Times article, this one is about Prop 8. The discussions are here.

It looks like it isn’t over yet. But the court is correct, it is about the initiative process and Prop 8 is a California Constitutional Amendment. This is serious stuff! However, I am confident that it will be overturned on US First Amendment grounds.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Since the arguments for Prop 8 are solely religious in origin, prop 8 is clearly "respecting an establishment of religion" and prohibits "the free exercise thereof".

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Those shortened URL’s are not working

2011-11-22T14:48:45Z

At least. the ones on Twitter. Google Chrome can’t find them.

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Mexican American studies about to be outlawed!

2011-11-22T09:21:09Z

I commented on yet another LA Times article today. The main article is here.

"These kids got it," he said. "They understood the framework that was being laid out — that Hispanics are the oppressed and Caucasians are the oppressors. That’s very troubling." — Supt. John Huppenthal, Tucson Unified School District

The thing is that, this is nothing less than the truth. The entire Southwest was conquered by the US in the late 1800’s as a part of the Monroe Doctrine. Before then it was a part, a very valuable part, of Mexico. It was conquered through mass illegal immigration by US settlers, which gave the pretext for the Cavalry to invade in order to ‘protect’ those illegal settlers. It was exactly the same strategy used to conquer Texas and later on, Hawaii. After the conquest, the US engaged in systematic denigration and suppression of the native population that carries on to the present day, as evidenced by the Tucson law. A very large part of that was the systematic genocide of native Americans, the American Indian (Indians), by the US Cavalry. Former Mexican Nationals were not treated much better as they were largely of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.

This summer, Huppenthal drew fire after suggesting similarities between the program and the Hitler Youth. Huppenthal said the remarks were made on "an academic basis" and misunderstood.

He no longer draws the comparison, he said, because it is too inflammatory. But in an interview, he said, "The thing that Hitler did was he used perceptions of historical injustice, he cast them in racial terms, and then he also referred to the Sudetenland as a stolen land — that’s the parallel."

The Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies program does nothing other than to teach the truth. To outlaw the truth is yet another case of repression and since they are now fourth and fifth generation Americans, they are also US citizens. Must they be continuously conquered?

Huppenthal replied that curriculum must reach a standard that all Arizonans can be proud of. "I’d ask those people who have challenged me, have they really met that standard over the last couple years?"

The thing is that there are things in US history that no American should be proud of and remembering those things might prevent their re-occurrence. The US has done many shameful things and a part of the healing is to admit to doing them and at least to try and make some reparation. Teaching the true history is one of them.

Land of the free and the home of the brave? This really makes me, and everyone else wonder. I am not that proud of being an American with this crap going on.

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A Polyticks post on: Occupy Wall Street.

2011-11-21T12:59:42Z

You haven’t seen me make a Polyticks post for a while. I apologize. This is mostly because the blood-sucking Ticks in DC disgust me, as do most parasites.

The recent Occupy Wall Street movement has largely left me puzzled. Yes, I am well aware of the disparity that they complain about but between their inability to articulate and the incoherence of most of the media on this issue, the language of the issue is chaotic at best. The one that brought it into focus for me was Gonzolo Lira.

Unlike GL, I am a Constitutional Conservative and not a moral conservative. Morally, I am as liberal as they come, which still leaves me as a hard-right anti-socialist. I am an anti-religious conservative and reject all the religiously moral arguments of the neo-conservative right, like the Tea Party. In my opinion, the Neo-Cons are preachers in Polyticks¹ suits; politically and economically, I am a pragmatic centrist.

On the surface, it sounds class-war-ish but it isn’t, exactly. True, the 1 percent are at the top of the wealth pyramid but it is not their wealth that puts them there. It is the corporate assets that they control and through that control, they also control political assets. In short, they’re the ones that really run the US and that’s been a known fact since the fifties, the eighteen-fifties.

     There is a revolving door between One-Percenters in the government and the private sector—so the former government employees make it a point to “help” the private sector One-Percenters, at the expense of the public good. Think of the Obama health care “reform”—which helped no one, save Big Pharma and Big Med.
     There is zero chance that a One-Percenters who breaks the law will go to prison. He can put toxic substances in food production, inject toxins into groundwater to get at some oil, bankrupt a pension fund, steal and cheat people out of their homes—and there’ll be no consequences insofar as the law is concerned.
     The things he might have done might be immoral—they might be despicable—they might even be outright wicked and evil: But they are not “illegal”—because the One-Percenters change the laws by way of their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and thus never do anything “illegal”. They only do things which are immoral, and wrong—and thus not subject to legal punishment. – Gonzalo Lira

I disagree with GL when he calls them Corporatists. They were around long before there were corporations. The old word, ‘Monopolist’, fits them better, its modern incarnation is Oligarch. In the days of the American Revolution, they were called Aristos and there was much less separation between their money and political power. Regardless of what we may call them, they are the privileged 1% that runs the US and through the US, the world.

As Al Gore accurately put it (and trust me, my skin is literally trying to crawl off my flesh as the reptilian part of my brain reacts to me praising something that Al Gore, of all people, has said), the Occupy Wall Street movement is basically a primal scream of democracy. – Gonzolo Lira

Actually, like it or not, there is nobody that is 100% wrong, even Old Woodenhead Gore. In this case, the scream was so primal that a dunce would have missed it. However there may be just cause in the scream, the real problem is about what we can do about it. Every thinkable solution is loaded chuck full of poison pills.

Poly= many + Tick=blood-sucking parasite but then politicians and preachers are both a species of parasite. [↩]

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Banning smoking in California Cars?

2011-11-18T11:28:55Z

Actually, there is law prohibiting smoking in a car with children. Read it for yourself.

I commented heavily.

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The worst ever place to hit a creative wall:

2011-11-10T19:07:02Z

When you are in the final segment of your book.

I have the bones of the plot in place and am doing the final wrap. SG got sick (bronchial pneumonia) and I have been dealing with those issues for two weeks; she’s on antibiotics. In addition, Zhinn got a urinary tract infection; he’s on antibiotics as well. To complete the picture. I developed an abscess under one of my molars; I’m on antibiotics as well.

Needless to say, my wordcount productivity dropped through the floor and coming back to the story, I’m drawing a complete blank. Okay, I say, start the synopsis for the submission of the first book in the series — damn, getting goose eggs there as well. All in all, not a good day

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A quick breath of air

2011-10-25T20:23:16Z

Last June I wrote about my new phone, an LG Optimus 2x. For a few months I was quite pleased with it and then the performance started to slowly fall off. This is the very first dual-core phone to hit the market. However, it did not deserve its software. It was Android 2.2.2, Froyo, which LG had promised to upgrade to v2.3.n Gingerbread ASAP.

For various reasons, and I am not surprised, the upgrade never happened nor do I expect it to happen anytime this year. To make a long story shorter, I rooted the phone to try and get a handle on what was slowing it down. Android is, after all, a special version of Linux. Much research and customization later and the single thing that stands out is to upgrade to the Gingerbread version, leaving Froyo back in the weeds. I grabbed the most popular and prevalent ROM distro out there, Cyanogen Mod7 (Official website).

I won’t get the nightly builds because I have to rely on this beast and I don’t intend to upgrade it that often. What I learned a long time ago, with Linux, is that the furthest out you dare go is the current Release Candidate for the next stable version. Any further and you are dancing too much on the Bleeding Edge. It’s not a question of if it will cut you but when. Ergo, I got the current RC1 version.

Lot’s of techy stuff later, including getting my phone stuck in a boot-loop, aka bricking it¹ , for three hours and the new ROM² plays.

I can now dial out immediately, instead of waiting five minutes for the background processor to decide to let me have enough CPU to dial out³ . Now the damned thing does everything but dance jigs The only unfinished bit is the sync software betwixt my laptop and the phone. SyncCell has already been acquired and I can then properly torpedo the POS⁴ that is LG’s PC Suite IV⁵ .

So, there goes my first foray back into Tinkerland (Linux-ware and the Open Source Community). My next Foray will be an expedition into Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that the current WordPress now requires version 5.2+ of PHP and the highest version I can run under Win2K is 5.1.4. This means that we either have to fork over some serious dinero to M$ for many copies of their current server offering or I set up my web server with Ubuntu Linux and remember how to play with the fools at the Apache foundation again (sigh).

For the moment, my break is over, and it’s back to finishing the current book.

Technical term for turning your multi hundred dollar phone into something only suitable for defenestration. The NV flasher was instrumental in breaking it out of the loop. It turns out that I hadn’t wiped the working RAM properly. I also had to install the ClockworkMod boot loader into Non-Volatile NAND RAM (hence, the ‘NV’ and the bootloading tool is called Nandroid) [↩]
This is a pet peeve of mine. As a EE I used to play with real Read Only Memory(ROM) chips, including EPROMs. The Android binaries actually get loaded into flash RAM, or NAND RAM, which didn’t exist in the late 70’s. What Android folks call a ROM is actually a executable binary software image file. There are no more actual ROMs these days; it’s all RAM. [↩]
This is the very first ever dual-core phone, remember? [↩]
Piece Of Shit [↩]
One major argument against client-side software written in Java. Client-side code needs to be native compiled to perform well (at all?). [↩]

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Baylor Health Care System against personal freedom!

2011-09-28T08:48:03Z

This is just a marker for a future article. I haven’t finished my latest book yet, why no one has seen of heard much from me.

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UK family loses children!

2011-09-05T21:27:09Z

A family of seven, who remain unnamed, are about to lose four of their children for no other reason than that they are too fat.

The couple have not committed any crime and are not accused of deliberate cruelty or abuse. Their solicitor, Joe Myles, said there was ‘nothing sinister lurking in the background’ and accused social workers of failing to act in the family’s best interests.

Actually, nowhere in the article or subsequent research can I find any hint that these people have been convicted of any crime at all. The children are being taken strictly on Council Authority and without any detectable Due Process at all.

The couple and their children also had to adhere to a strict 11pm curfew. This involved ‘clocking’ in and out by filling in a sheet held by an employee who lived on site.

Basically, the family was placed into custody in a Council home. The only thing missing was the barbed wire but it is still a prison with live-in guards. They have still not been charged with any crime.

Her solicitor said he planned to use independent experts to prove that the children want to live with their parents and have been damaged by the social workers’ intervention. He added: ‘We may ultimately look towards human rights laws.’

No shit! Human rights my ass, this is a civil rights issue here! However, they obviously have no civil rights in the UK. The UK is not a free country. Those of you anglophiles who think that the UK does things right, take heed. No country that behaves like this can call themselves free.

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RIP blackbyrd2

2011-08-17T03:00:00Z

I just found out has died. I am so sad. BB2 and I had many debates and I’ve always respected him.

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It has been 2 whole years!

2011-07-20T17:57:13Z

Zhinn Lao Tzu, our brown tabby, moved in with us exactly two years ago (20Jul2009). At the time, we already thought that he was fully grown. The size of his paws should have told us otherwise. He was barely 4kg (8.8#) when he moved in and grew to his present 5.5kg (12.1#), of lean and healthy tomcat, in less than 6 months.

I don’t talk about it much but at the time I had already been on anti-depressants for a few months. Having Zhinn around helped me to get off them. Cats are good companions and Zhinn watches me like a hawk. He will not let me collapse in the computer chair without getting a loud “meow” directly in the ear. This pleases SG to no end because, since my stroke (May, 2007), she worries about me constantly. She worries less with my buddy Zhinn around.

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An extreme diet to cure Type II diabetes?

2011-07-20T10:57:14Z

I’m looking into this. My problem with this is that my body has always been extremely resistant to weight changes. As I got older the weight increased but not by that much. In my 20’s, it was 170# (77Kg) and it gradually increased to 185#(83.9Kg) and I am 57 now. There is very little that I can do to change it. In the past, I’ve tried fasting for days at a time and it will not change.

The folks in this study averaged 220# (98Kg), much higher than my present weight. I am 5’8” (1.73m) tall. I wouldn’t mind getting back down to 170#, if it is possible.

Taylor reported Saturday at a San Diego meeting of the American Diabetes Assn. and in the journal Diabetologia that, after one week on the diet, each of the patients’ fasting blood sugar, taken before breakfast, had returned to normal. At the end of the eight weeks, the patients had lost an average of 33 pounds and had no signs of diabetes. Three months after returning to a normal diet, seven of them remained free of the disease. Average weight gain in that three months was 6.5 pounds.

It sounds promising and I will have to talk to my doctor about it.

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