::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

New TV is wider, thinner, lighter

News, Technical ·Friday May 16, 2008 @ 23:00 EDT (link)

20080512: Picked up a battery backup for the new TV (6-outlet APS unit) at OfficeMax. Wanted to get an HDMI to DVI connector, but Radio Shack wanted $55 for them; I can do much better.

Technical brief: although buying high-quality gold cables (e.g. Monster®-brand) do make a difference for various analog connections (coaxial, RCA, component, or S-Video), they make far less of a difference with digital connectors like HDMI or DVI; don't be scammed into buying expensive digital cables. While interference in analog cables can disrupt the analog wave signal, a digital signal is effectively a square wave, a succession of 1s or 0s which encode the picture data. Even if the wave is altered, as long as the decoder (TV) can distinguish between peaks and troughs, the picture will not be altered.

20080513: TV arrived shortly after 1300; set it up myself (it's about 80 lbs.; our old TV was about double and I couldn't carry it by myself). Picture does look a bit fuzzy viewing SDTV (which is all we have) but it looks better as I get used to it.

20080514: Puget Sound Energy (PSE) denies our TV claim, saying they had no voltage fluctuations when our TV died (on the 28th). Unfortunately, since I wasn't standing by with a voltmeter, I have to take their word for it. Our new TV has an also-new APC battery backup/surge protector (the old one had only a bar-type surge protector).

20080515: Cost of living map and state rank table (some interesting numbers; lower is better: TN, 1; WV, 21; WA, 36; CA, 50; HI, 51).

20080516: Watched House of Wax (MythTV). (I'm thinking of allowing non-owned videos to be added and put on the watched list; the DVD table already has an owned flag.)

Books finished: The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Programming C# 3.0.

DVDs finished: Underworld: Evolution.

Weekend exercise, unnecessary procreation, unsound doctrine

News, Theology ·Sunday May 11, 2008 @ 22:04 EDT (link)

20080508: Honey and I went to Cirque du Soleil, paid for by Microsoft as a Word development team morale event today (left 1500, arrived 1530, parked for $1 not $15 (would be reimbursed anyway), starts about 1555, intermission 1700-1730, over 1830). Worked some when I got home to generate a new deviations book.

20080509: Word 25th anniversary event 1300-1500. Left around 1630 for Honey's Uncle Dave and Aunt Lynn's in Pullman; went to sleep soon after we arrived.

20080510: Up early (0730), went to a few garage sales; picked up some shirts (2 each, $1 total) and a knife ($7, down from $10). Played frisbee at a nearby park for a few hours, then back for lunch, then biked ~11 miles with Will and Uncle Dave (Honey walked with Sarah and Aunt Lynn). Got a little windy and rainy while we were biking but didn't last long. Played some table games (Sequence x 2, Euchre, Guillotine, Skip-Bo) later in the evening; the bike ride wore me out.

From WSU's "The Summer Evergreen" (May 8), opinion page, "Perceptions" column (Crystal Neifert): "Procreation no longer a necessity" (on the face of it, the title sounds wrong, since without any procreation the human race will die out—some would argue thatÂs not a bad thing—but the application is to individuals, not the entire human race). Some salient excerpts:

Although the purpose of life is to raise offspring to adulthood, it does not mean everyone has to do so. I am not a big fan of children. And this is my rant about why I do not want one. They are expensive, always around, sticky, tend to break things and can possibly ruin your life as you know it.

...

It is almost an expectation that everyoneÂs life should follow a close path. After finishing your education, you settle down on the fast track to a career, childbirth and middle age. At this point, it is commonly accepted you should completely devote your life to your childÂs. Moreover, anyone who does not conform to this school of thought is seen as cold and heartless. This needs to change.

The population is overflowing; having a child is not a necessity. There are plenty of other things you could do, instead of living for a child. Â A comparison could be made between the specialization of labor and the trend of having children. When humans first started to become civilized, everyone grew his or her own food. There was little expectation of another career option. Then specialization of labor took hold and progressed to where we are now, only 2 percent of the population growing their own food. This same evolution should happen with children. At first, because many children died before reaching adulthood, it was a necessity for everyone to have children. Now, with the advancements that have been made, the number of children dying before adulthood has decreased severely, so it is no longer a necessity for everyone to have one. In fact it many do a lot of good for the population people put the clamp down on their reproductive mojo.

20080511: Up early again (0800—early for us for the weekend, we prefer to burn the candle at the other end); church.

The preacher at their church (Evangelical Free Church of Pullman) is usually pretty sound in his teaching, but he made a few blunders this week. Since it was Mother's Day, naturally some sappy homilies about mothers are expected and tolerated, but then he went off the rails a bit. (BibleFilter: if you don't care, skip the rest of the paragraph.) He built up a straw man argument about women being silent in church using 1 Peter 3:1:

Likewise, ye wives, [be] in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives.

His translation had "without words" or "without speech" or somesuch to replace "without the word" (same word for "word" as in "obey not the word"; it can be used in both senses, but context and usage would indicate it carries the same meaning). But the fact that his is a bad interpretation is not even the point; the point is that there are other, commonly used and better suited passages that talk about the silence of a women in church gatherings (for those of you coming late to the game, know that this isn't about misogyny, it's about God's order), for example, 1 Timothy 2:10-11:

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

There are also applicable passages from 1 Corinthians 11. One of the first rules of exposition is to take what's plain at face value first; when God commands something so clearly, great will be the reckoning for those that attempt to twist His word.

It doesn't help that the pastor (we won't even go into that title) has, shell we say, political reasons for his interpretations. I think only my wife and the Swahili singing group had their heads covered during the service, and theirs may have just been a national costume, which was very colorful. Women pray during the prayer time, with heads uncovered (even if one interprets the head covering to only be strictly when vocally "praying or prophesying", that tenet too is violated); I imagine he'd have a mass exodus, a decline in membership, and a corresponding fall in funding—a bad thing to have when they're saving for a new building (and all the power and prestige that goes with the ruler of such a demesne).

Lunch—we'd all baked a chocolate cake for dessert yesterday as a surprise for Aunt Lynn—and then more games (Euchre again, Stock Ticker (in which I broke $10k)). Left at 1500, home about 2000. Got gas in Othello—we were almost out—which is getting seedier, due to a large and somewhat inexplicable influx of Mexicans (illegals to work the local farms?). I think I'll be carrying next time we go that way.

Books finished: The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes.

On government

Political ·Thursday May 8, 2008 @ 00:07 EDT (link)

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect manÂs rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of manÂs self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of manÂs deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

—From John Galt's speech, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

My views on government, specifically, in the U.S., after having experienced it for some time are that it's too big (contrary to the small government envisioned by the founding fathers and provided by the Constitution), it's getting too socialist (free handouts for everything, and then we're supposed to be happy because they give $600 back?), and it takes too much of my money (as taxes) by threat of force (try not being a rich and famous movie star and not paying your taxes).

There are many more Ayn Rand quotes on government from an Objectivist viewpoint.

I think these sum up the failings of government well (failings that would be reduced by a minimal, libertarian-style government):

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. (George Bernard Shaw)

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. (G. Gordon Liddy)

(Here are some more from the Conservatives and Libertarians at MS list on March 24.)

People like to argue about government spending—on what should the tax money taken from the working citizens be spent? Usually the answer is "votes", that is, pandering, by providing "free" services: welfare, medical care, subsidies, etc. Naturally, this meddling in the free market disrupts the economy in various ways: welfare can reduce incentives to work and increase dependence on government (as planned) and reduce dependence on neighbors, neighborhood groups, and especially churches, which the left hates with a (holy?) passion; medical care, see Canada, where people are flocking to the U.S. in droves so they don't expire while waiting for necessary tests and procedures, and subsidies, well, do I need to explain how paying people not to grow food is counterproductive (yes, that's a subsidy: the payment is ultimately to reduce supply)?

But the question should be, as I said in my letter, what to spend the money pillaged from working citizens on, but whether to spend it at all, rather than returning it, reducing taxes, cutting departments, and treating people like adults rather than trying to make them dependent on daddy government. Ron Paul was off to a good start in one of the debates this year: when asked about programs he'd cut, he quickly rattled off three departments that he'd like to see removed. The government is a monster, and a self-perpetuating one: if less money is used than allocated, future budgets are cut, so each group attempts to spend as much as it can, with no incentive to cut anything back, because government unions and discrimination laws make government employees hard to fire, pork-barreling trades jobs for favors, and every petty bureaucrat (all the way up to the House and Senate) attempts to expand their fiefdom and powers—with no requirement to turn a profit, or even break even: shortages? just borrow or print more money.

Argh. How can government be reduced? It doesn't seem possible: the members are disincentivized to help; every person wants their share of largesse from the public treasury. I asked this question on the Conservatives and Libertarians at Microsoft, and someone sent back the old cliché:

There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.

True (and make no mistake: money is power, and power is liberty), but I was hoping for something more specifically local. Is Tyler right, is it too late?

How you can help: when you vote, vote for politicians that want to reduce taxes, that want to cut back, even if you may lose benefits in the short term. Those benefits are stolen from the labor of others, and were never yours to begin with. Declare yourself an adult, not a child. Reclaim your freedom as an American.

Books finished: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Professional SQL Server 2005 Programming.

Out with the old

News, Technical ·Wednesday May 7, 2008 @ 20:04 EDT (link)

We took our dead TV to PC Recycle in the morning; cost $50 ($47.50 with 5% Microsoft discount!!). Not only do I lose my TV, I have to pay for the privilege. Damn tree huggers…. It was a 32" Sony Trinitron CRT unit, weighing in at 160 lbs.; I had to ask my neighbor to help me lift it into Honey's car (and the guy at PC Recycle helped bring it in, on a dolly); the new one should be much lighter.

Updated finished books to link to Amazon (not an affiliate link), and DVDs to link to DVDspot (which doesn't sell DVDs).

Books finished: Calvin and Hobbes, Something Under the Bed Is Drooling, Weirdos From Another Planet!, The Revenge of the Baby-Sat, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", It's a Magical World, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.

Test of the emergency book system

Technical ·Saturday May 3, 2008 @ 23:24 EDT (link)

I actually didn't read all of these books today, but I did finish my book-scanning system project (and since I just scanned them as read now, they're all showing up today; I could fix them, but it's close enough and I don't remember exactly when I finished them all).

Good books. Highly recommended. Economic effects of various policies; the following reduce crime (and are almost universally hated on by liberals):

concealed carry
the death penalty
law enforcement (arrest rates)

the following didn't matter:

age and race
gun control

and the following increased crime:

gun locks and safe-storage laws
legalized abortion (contrary to what Freakanomics claimed)
affirmative action in police hiring

Except for Freedomnomics, which appears to be written with more of a mass market appeal in mind, the books are so packed with statistics to be stultifyingly boring to non-statisticians—and I mean that in a good way. Dr. John Lott Jr. has done his homework; he's controlled for all sorts of variables, and determined what results are and are not statistically significant, and come up with actual economic results of various government policies investigated.

Books finished: The Bias Against Guns, More Guns, Less Crime, Freedomnomics.

Economic socialism package

Political ·Saturday May 3, 2008 @ 16:17 EDT (link)

"Oh, yes. Little Bobby Tables, we call him."

Bush's economic stimulus package is a fraud. Premises:

The government doesn't create money, it takes it from the citizens at the point of a gun.
Therefore, the stimulus money must come from taxes (or borrowed money, which will eventually require taxes for interest and repayment).
There is a pool of tax money that will used to make the stimulus payments (to make things easy, let's say x people are getting payments of $600, so 600x).
The stimulus payment is some part y of all taxes collected t: yt = 600x.
The actual gain from the stimulus payment is therefore 600 - yt. There will be net losers and net gainers; people only get the full amount if they pay no taxes, and people over certain ceilings ($75k, or $150k if married filing jointly) get nothing, even though they contribute.
This is income redistribution, which is socialist (I'll still take my money, but I think we'd all be better off if nothing had been done; there's also the administrative overhead to consider).

Worse still, parents get more money if they have more kids. Argh. I'm already subsidizing them via property taxes and child tax credits. Will the pandering never end?

GD (of the Conservatives and Libertarians at MS (CLAMS) list from work) shared an interesting anecdote regarding the stimulus and relative American and Canadian taxes. I haven't done my own analysis of the respective tax policies, but Geoff's seems reasonable and aligns with my experience and sources.

Truth be told, the strongest attachment I have to Canada is because my father (and to a lesser extent—only lesser because we lived for a time with my grandmother, where my father grew up—my (step)mother) were born there (both in Ontario, but my mother lived in British Columbia for a while); being in elementary and high school there was difficult and did not instill any love for the country in me. Certainly Canada has natural wonders, but it also has hardcore socialists that can make our liberals look sane. To the United Kingdom, the third country of which I am a citizen, I do have attachment and wistful longing for; I consider that I grew up there (even though I left when I was 9) and would very much like to make one or more extended visits.

Take our liberals, Soviet Canuckistan, please....

From: GD
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 11:43
To: ...; Conservatives and Libertarians at MS
Subject: "We're only going back there to visit, right?"

My wife just did our taxes last night. We're getting back a few bucks (missed our goal of having a zero return—I don't like freely loaning the gov't my money). She ran the numbers as if we were living in the Great White North. We would owe a lot of money in taxes. We'd have to sell the house, the cars, at least one of the kids....

Last year I gave my son the classic object lesson in budget and taxation, combined with one reason we moved to America. I gave him $10 in quarters and then started taking off taxes, levies, fees, mortgage payments, utility payments, etc. He was not pleased. Then I gave him a tax refund.

"Dad, why didn't you just let me keep that money in the first place?"

Then I repeated the process using Canadian tax rates. He was really not a happy camper when it was all gone. I had to explain to him that we could not afford to live in the Vancouver area like we used to and have a house, cars, each kid with their own room, private school, karate etc. I told him that was the most basic reason we left Qanuckia.

"Dad, we're only going back there to visit, right?"

God Bless America

What if: suffrage just for landowners

Political ·Saturday May 3, 2008 @ 15:33 EDT (link)

Another gun-related sidebar: Eric's gun control reductio:

If you ... are gung-ho for gun control, I suggest you live up to your convictions by posting a big sign on your front lawn that reads:
THIS HOME IS A GUN-FREE ZONE
I wish you joy of all the delightful visitors you will attract.

No? Sound like a bad idea to you? Then perhaps you should consider how dependent you are on the kindness of 'gun nuts' and rethink your position.

Considering the following quote attributed to Alexander Tyler:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

I was trying to think of ways to stave off this inevitable socialist grabfest that drags us down to the society of Atlas Shrugged, where need and incompetence are virtue, and ability is a liability. So, what if voting were restricted? I know it's been done over time various ways (literacy requirements, poll taxes; literacy doesn't seem like a terribly onerous requirement now, and nor do poll taxes, provided the money goes to something truly universally useful, like, say, paying for voting apparatus).

How would this play out if the requirement was to be a landowner (probably also done in the past)? Would renters get shafted very badly, and would it really be unfair? What about joint owners (and can a million people be considered "joint owners" to get around the law?) (It seems valid that a married couple can both be considered owners; in other cases, a single owner must be designated for voting purposes... does this give real-estate developers power to enfranchise people for their own benefit? No, because the owner must really have power over the property, i.e. ability to sell it for personal gain at will, and they are still private in the voting booth.)

By definition it would be unconstitutional, but so was selling alcohol at one point; laws can be changed. It would ensure that those voting had some stake, and perhaps lower the rate of "[voting] for the candidate promising the most benefits." But I think ultimately it would fail, because even some homeowners want handouts; it just reduces one type of handout (housing), which wouldn't be much of a dent. And on the other hand, there are many responsible renters who shouldn't be penalized just because they're paying rent to an owner rather than a mortgage to a bank. The real fix is a more ambitious change....

They published my letter

News ·Friday May 2, 2008 @ 23:51 EDT (link)

I was reading about "a trick called a 'stripper magazine'" on Eric Raymond's IPSCC page, and decided to search the web for same.

Probably not a good idea, in hindsight (although not that serious, since SafeSearch was on and results are only brief snippets of text). Searching for "stripper magazine -sex" gave better results. (A stripper magazine, as it relates to guns, is a magazine that you use to chamber a round, then remove and load to capacity, so that you have an extra round before you need to reload.)

20080501: Up late and early working on generating the ECMA376 (OpenXML) deviations document.

We're both re-reading our Calvin and Hobbes books while the TV's out. Looking at TruGlo TFO (Tritium Fiber Optic) sights for my Glock, and an Arrow T50 staple gun for stapling targets if I get a membership to an outdoor range.

My letter to the editor was published in the Duvall Weekly, which came out today, but they mangled it a bit (copy errors, italics became double quotes, and they had to edit it for length, even though it was already short). Still reading Atlas Shrugged; I'm midway through John Galt's 56-page (!) speech to the world.

Books finished: Atlas Shrugged.

Louis Voyer stops by very briefly

News, Technical ·Wednesday April 30, 2008 @ 19:50 EDT (link)

Louis Voyer 20080426: Lou Dobbs (we were watching to see if they'd published Honey's letter) covered some of the North American summit in New Orleans: Mexican President Felipe Calderón spoke about his illegal relatives, how he wanted amnesty for his illegal friends, and blathered about how wherever there are Mexicans there is the backing of the Mexican government (right next to our gutless wonder of a President), but oh no, he would never interfere with the sovereignty of the United States. Basically he admitted his country couldn't support its own people, and had to depend on the Great White Father for survival.

In a similar vein: Legislators from Mexican State [are] Angry at [the] Influx of... Mexicans, probably due to recent crackdowns, that is, enforcement of the law, in Oklahoma, Arizona (go go Sheriff Joe!), etc. And finally, Colerado Congressman Tancredo's take on Calderon's comments when he was here in February. Excerpt:

President Calderón, you are insulting the American people when you tell us that fifteen to twenty million illegal aliens in our country bring only benefits and no costs. I challenge you to give one concrete example of how the enforcement of our existing immigration laws violates anyoneÂs human rights. The people of Oklahoma are not anti-Mexican for passing laws to require verification of employment eligibility. The people of Indiana are not anti-immigrant for passing laws to require photo identification for voting. The people of California are not anti-Mexican for denying driverÂs licenses to illegal aliens. The people of Arizona are not anti-immigrant for passing laws that deny welfare benefits to people who are in that state unlawfully.

20080426: New project! Scanning owned and read books into a database, with the help of someone who's done it before (but they have clumsy command-line scripts in Python, and comma-separated value files, I'll integrate it all into my database and internal mod_perl web site) and the multi-facted WWW::Scraper::ISBN, with drivers for Amazon, ISBNdb.com, the Library of Congress and many other ISBN data sources.

20080427: Added "DVDs finished" to log entries: DVDs in the watch table between the current and next journal entry date (except the very newest entry), joining on the DVD table to get titles. Will be doing the same for books. Rolled up my sleeves, got out my axe and shovel, and pulled the rest of the main clump of bamboo out from the bed near the back right (from back) of the house; may put in flowers of some kind (something that can resist any attempts of the bamboo to resurface, perhaps; fortunately it hasn't been trying yet).

20080428: Went shooting at Wade's after work (first time firing the new gun), cleaned my gun for the third time after I got home; easier this time, last time I worked on the barrel more than necessary.

Our TV died (32" Sony Trinitron that I bought in 2002 shortly after I arrived in Memphis) during the day.

20080429: In the early morning, I re-patched the Myth box to make links to recorded programs be UNC paths (file://///MACHINE/path/file (yes, /////), and Firefox needs special security settings). God smite Windows, "UNC" (Universal, my butt), and Firefox too. Broke down and ordered a Toshiba 47" HDTV TV from Costco, $300 off, got decent reviews around the 'Net. Should work fine with the Myth box, although I'll need to use HDMI since it doesn't have S-Video input. We can return it up to 90 days, which I'll do if there are any issues (e.g. some say video games do poorly on LCD; we'll see if that's still true). I found my old TV's manual: it weights 163 lbs.; the LCD TV weighs about half that. I think the TV is the only thing we have that we can't move lift the two of us; I may ask a neighbor for help taking it to the car to dump it.

20080430: The AR-15 (M-16) is a pretty gun, especially the A3 version (expensive, too; the linked rifle is $1699). When I looked at shotguns I was surprised they were (on average) cheaper than handguns, but rifles more than make up for it. I suppose it's precision that's expensive, which shotguns aren't known for. The Mossberg 500sp looks like a nice home defense weapon ("Guard dogs have to be fed, walked groomed, trained. These you just oil.").

Louis Voyer arrived around 2000, and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. He was a day ahead so only stayed with us one night instead of the two planned; he left around 0800 in the morning; Honey and I got up to see him off, and then I went to work, even though it was early ("There's a 6 in the morning too?"); I didn't feel like going back to sleep. His accent wasn't as thick as I'd been led to believe; only a few words (e.g. "tru" for "through") gave him away as French-Canadian.

DVDs finished: 300.

Are You a Democrat, Republican, or a Southerner?

Political ·Sunday April 20, 2008 @ 22:24 EDT (link)

Here is a little test that will help you decide. The answer can be found by posing the following scenario:

You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children.
Suddenly, an Islamic Terrorist with a huge knife comes around the corner, locks eyes with you, screams obscenities, praises Allah, raises the knife and charges at you.
You are carrying a Glock .40 pistol and you are an expert shot.
You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family.
What do you do?

Democrat's answer:

Well, that's not enough information to answer the question!

Does the man look poor? Or oppressed?
Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?
Could we run away?
What does my wife think?
What about the kids?
What does the law say about this situation?
Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway? And, what kind of message does this send to society and my children?
Does he definitely want to kill me or would he just be content to wound me?
Should I call 911?
Why is this street so deserted?
We need to raise taxes, have a paint and weed day and make this a happier, healthier street that would discourage such behavior.

Republican's answer:

BANG!

Southerner's answer:

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Click, click, click, click.
(Sounds of reloading.) BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Click.

Daughter: Nice grouping Daddy! Were those the Winchester Silver Tips or Hollow Points?
Son: Can I shoot the next one?
Wife: You ain't takin' that to the Taxidermist!

—From Fark comment on SCOTUS DC gun case thread.