::::: : 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.

Surgical one-upmanship

Political, Humor ·Sunday May 3, 2009 @ 13:43 EDT (link)

Three Californian surgeons were playing golf together and discussing surgeries they had performed. One of them said, "I'm the best surgeon in California. In my favorite case, a concert pianist lost several fingers in an accident, I reattached them, and 8 months later he performed a private concert for the Queen of England."

The second surgeon said, "That's nothing. A young man lost an arm and both legs in an accident, I reattached them and two years later he won a gold medal in track and field events at the Olympics."

The third surgeon said, "You guys are amateurs. Several years ago a woman was high on cocaine and marijuana and she rode a horse head-on into a train traveling 80 miles an hour. All I had left to work with was the woman's hair and the horse's ass. I was able to put them together and now she's Speaker of the House."

Is it still a 100-year flood if it happens twice in a month?

News, Humor ·Saturday May 2, 2009 @ 22:14 EDT (link)

To: Duvall MS Employees; Monroe MS Employees
Subject: 2 bedroom rental house on our farm opening up May 1st

It seems the 2 bedroom rental house on our farm opening up May 1st. This house comes with a small detached garage and a pretty good sized yard.

This house only opens up once every couple years.

The rent is $1000 per month. I pay water, sewer. They pay electric, phone, garbage. If you know someone you would personally recommend who may be interested please let them / me know.

Reply to above post:

You forgot to mention the free 100-year floor rinsing every 2 months :)

(For those not in Duvall, we got a lot of "100-year" floods in a very short timespan not long before the posting, and the house in question is in a low area that floods early and often.)

Edging; AR-15 case

News ·Saturday May 2, 2009 @ 17:51 EDT (link)

Last night from when I got home until dark I ran the edger to clear the accumulated weeds between the patio stones, and destroy the encroachments of clinging moss; I also went around the lawn, front and back, and both sides of the rock wall at the back right, bordering the "private drive". It was fairly exhausting due to having to hold one arm straight out on one handle of the edger; the numbness from the vibration wore off fairly quickly but the ache from holding my arm locked and holding up the unit took longer. Part of it's due to not having edged since last year, I'm sure. Removing moss with an edger is probably more work than with a power washer, but not too bad for small areas.

Today I went to the gun show in Monroe; Surplus Ammo and other bulk dealers were out of Wolf .223, so I'm placing an order with Wideners. I still have most of a case of 500, so I can wait. I also picked up a soft case for my AR-15: it's 36" and the rifle is 32" collapsed, which is a good fit; it's also deep enough to hold it with a magazine attached or with an optic (when I get one). There are four magazine pouches on the outside: I guess I need to buy another magazine.

Books finished: The Rolling Stones.

Anarchism

Political ·Saturday May 2, 2009 @ 14:18 EDT (link)

I joined a Facebook group Anarchism: Anarchist Ideals In Practice not because I'm an anarchist, but because the group says they'll send out related articles, and I'm curious how anarchism could work and their perspectives on various issues.

It seems to me that in many situations (e.g. contractual disputes, crime), an anarchist group would need a way to mediate disputes and enforce security, otherwise violence becomes a means to take land and property, and anarchists disclaim that they are for violence. Enshrine this security and mediation in a group agreement—and pay those doing the work of security and adjudication fair wages—and bingo, you've formed yourself a small government. And I'm very much in favor of small government, and as in my previous note, subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity

Political ·Thursday April 30, 2009 @ 23:10 EDT (link)

Subsidiarity is a great principle. The dictionary definition is just "of secondary importance" but as a legal and political principle it means that "matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority" (also). I found it in one of Murray's books; probably the one I'm (paused in the middle of) reading now: In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government*. It's a great handle for a very good idea: everything should be as localized or decentralized as possible, but no more so. I had cause to use it in this infinitely long Facebook thread with Tom about my Taxation is theft status.

* I was copying some of the links for this post from Google, and it kept inserting an extra level of redirection through Google (even though the status bar had the original link, copying had the Google cruft). Fortunately, GreaseMonkey to the rescue: there's a script to fix it: Fix links in personalized search.

Books finished: The Game-Players of Titan.

DVDs finished: Saw V.

Random characters in virtual console

News, Technical ·Tuesday April 28, 2009 @ 23:36 EDT (link)

I rebooted cirith-ungol (the MythTV box) today because the power went out, and when I tried to switch virtual consoles (ctrl-alt-f[1-6]), it started spitting out random characters including a lot of question marks. It turns out (after much hair-pulling) that it's probably this Gentoo bug: console Unicode support is broken (damn furriners and their chicken scratchings they call writing!… if ASCII was good enough for Moses and Paul, …, etc. etc.). The following (substitute virtual console number for X) will fix it for you (and you may also need to set unicode to NO, or comment out the line, in /etc/rc.conf).

kbd_mode -a -C /dev/ttyX
echo 0 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_utf8

Books finished: Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, Men In Black.

DVDs finished: Montana Sky, 1408, Rio Bravo.

Broadstripe adds insult to injury

News ·Friday April 24, 2009 @ 19:45 EDT (link)

You may remember Broadstripe, our ISP, from my last paean, Broadstripe, the worst ISP in the world. They've been better lately with outages (I keep track of downtime using a process that pings every minute; for April, they're at "1.42% (8:06/571:49) total downtime", which about as well as they've been doing for the last several months, and half what it sometimes was; there also have been less long outages).

However, they recently sent out a letter apologizing for last Friday's service outage, blaming it on their UPS and saying they're upgrading: the usual lies that service providers tell customers. But the icing on the cake was:

To show our commitment to the communities we serve, in lieu of a billing credit, Broadstripe is donating $10,000 to the United Way of King County on behalf of our customers.

Wow. What a slap in the face. I wonder how they'd feel if I decided to donate $100 to the NRA in lieu of paying their invoice? This is under the signature of "VP/GM Broadstripe" Tom Martinson.

Rand essay edit

News ·Friday April 24, 2009 @ 02:46 EDT (link)

Finished editing Julia's essay on The Fountainhead for The Ayn Rand Institute (which she's doing for the money, not being much of a fan). The mechanics are strong—I didn't have to do many if any simple grammar or spelling edits like I remember doing for some other siblings. I just made some minor suggestions to help the flow, and suggested some metaphors. I hope she wins.

Books finished: Starman Jones.

A legislator liability act

Political ·Tuesday April 21, 2009 @ 00:46 EDT (link)

Individuals in government should be liable for their decisions; if sued, the damages should first come from whoever made the decision (not necessarily the person who executed it, if they could show they were in good faith following orders and also good moral principles). It's ridiculous to make the taxpayer pay for government and then again for its mistakes. With power comes responsibility.

They shouldn't be able to hide behind the shield of the state. If they made a decision, they should have to pay for it. What's the downside? Government will be more conservative about its mandates? Legislators might start reading bills? Wouldn't that be just terrible?

(Counter-arguments? For example, if a legislator is representing the people of his district, is he not absolved of liability? No, not if he's supporting unconstitutional laws.)

DVDs finished: Die Hard: The Ultimate Collection.

Console switcher

News, Technical ·Sunday April 19, 2009 @ 19:01 EDT (link)

My Trendnet TK-209K KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch arrived yesterday (from Amazon); it came with all the cables and was fairly easy to set up: for each machine, there's one audio cable (speaker/microphone to a small USB connector for the switch) and a VGA/USB cable that handles screen, keyboard, and mouse. My speakers (it switches audio too), USB mouse and keyboard, and monitor plug into the switch; buttons on top switch between machines. The only issue is that my new machine is hooked up to DVI, which works fine switching to it (the monitor notices there's no VGA input and goes to DVI, but it needs to be switched back manually using the monitor controls). It also did something odd that made the laptop lose network, but it went away on reboot (but it wouldn't boot up with the switch connected; kept powering down). Overall I'd recommend it, even with those minor issues.

Books finished: Paradise Lost.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Sixth Season, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 1.