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Upon further reflection
Upon further consideration, I rename the Chilly Loner the Frozen Loner.
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Had dinner with Mike and Erin
At what they called Uncle Julio’s, but to me it will always be Casa Grande. It’s a lovely little Mexican place on Peachtree that I ate at many times when I worked at Bridge. It would seem the I need to elaborate on why the defensive style of Pernell Whittaker is important.
It was a lovely dinner, someone has torn down the old apartment building next door to the restaurant and left only this gateway.
I wish I had a better camera so I could go back later and take some good shots of it, but I guess that will have to wait until later in the year.
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Email Viruses
Is anyone else getting pelted with the MyTob virus? I’m getting about 4 an hour, oddly enough, all to jargondatabase.com email addresses.
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Something missing in the news
Amidst all of the current prisoner coverage, one thing missing is any report of chemical interrogations. The technology certainly exists to create all of the “Stress” (usually cited as the goals in interrogations) chemically instead of physically. I wonder if that’s only being done in special cases.
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My contribution to the American palate
- Buy bananas
- Put bananas, unskinned in freezer
- Freeze until rock solid
- Remove from freezer
- Let sit for 5-10 minutes (the banana itself will stay frozen, but the peel will thaw
- With small paring knife, whittle away peel, leaving a thin layer of peel on the banana itself, it should be mostly brown with patches of white, with no yellow
- Eat with fork
I call it the Chilly Loner, Frozen Loner. It’s cheap, simple, healthy, and tastes like a cross between a power bar and ice cream. The layer of skin is essential.
Update, I changed the name.
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The Dude Lives!
After being down since Tuesday, I finally have the Dude (my home server) revived, and all it took was a new hard drive, 8 hours of experimentation, three attempts at trying to upgrade everything before doing a clean install, a clean install, a mass name change of database objects, and I didn’t even those any data. A corrupted boot sector is just no fun at all.
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Ideas to elaborate on later
Here are ideas and historical (no emotional connection to me) events that have fundamentally affected my outlook.
In no particular order
- Pareto Optimality
- Coase Theorem
- Hayek and Sowell on the limits and costs of knowledge
- Gresham’s law
- Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
- Dominant Strategies
- Schelling Points (as elaborated on by David Friedman)
- The seatbelts kill theory of Steven Landsburg (though the theory might actually originate with George Stigler)
- The diaries of Eric Hoffer (and his books, they’re fairly similar) as they deal with mass movements
- Network effects
- Robert Nozick’s notion of morality as a time saving device (morality is used very broadly) as explained in the Examined Life
- The defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker
I’ll have more detail on what they are and how they are all used later.
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Pesky second wind
Thursday was quite hectic for me, I work 15 and a half hours, then I continue on into Friday morning. I stop drinking caffeine earlier than I usually do with the express intent of being quite sleepy around 2:00 or so at the very latest.
It all goes according to plan; I’m sleepy and about ready to doze off around midnight. And then what happens? I work a bit later than I intend to, and at 2:30 I get a second wind. I’m now quite awake
All that being said, here’s what I was going to blog about today:
I got my server working again, sort of. I think a part of the boot sector got corrupted, I wasn’t able to do the upgrade around it and had to do a clean install on the new drive. I was able to pull off all of the data and databases off of the original drive, which works fine so long as you don’t boot off of it.
However, all of my setting were lost and I can’t log into the database with any of my old username and passwords. Hence my intranet is down. Any ideas any of my many technical readers?
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The NYT Alpharetta article
I probably won’t have time to post on this tonight, but here it is
The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life -
Continental Drift
While at last night’s Boo Hoo Rambler’s show, my friend Beth said something about “The country getting more conservative” which I wonder about. She was grouping the politics and the society but the general thought can be either true or false. More Republican certainly, but by what measure is the country getting more conservative? I thought I’d make a list:
Top moves to the left
- Massive Federal Spending
- Wars for Democracy (this has been adopted by the Republicans, but the idea has been on the left for quite some time)
- Gay marriage on horizon
- Government involvement all aspects of the medical system
- Abortion available for minors without parental consent, paid for by the feds in some cases. This is something that has stayed the same, but it’s a huge red flag for a lot of the right.
- Central planning for education under the guise of No Child Left Behind.
- The income tax actually becoming more progressive under Bush
- Campaign Finance “Reform”
Top moves to the right
- A push for Social Security privatization
- A move to end the death tax
- Assault Weapons ban NOT being renewed
- Higher defense spending (Bush was proposing this before 9-11 so I’ll include it here)
- Over 55 speed limits remain in effect
- 3 rounds of tax cuts
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot but that is something of a gist. Certainly the Republicans have been doing much of the above (on both sides) but where is the country actually drifting? IMHO the Democrats have not been following an Evolutionary Stable Strategy for quite a while which allows the Republicans play both sides of the street.