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

Beginning my Master's degree at the University of Washington

News, Bad Drivers, Political, Work, Guns, School ·Wednesday October 1, 2008 @ 21:20 EDT (link)

On TV today a Democrat pointed out that when Obama holds a rally 25-30,000 people show up, whereas when McCain holds one he only draws 10-15,000.

The Republican spokesman replied, "That's because McCain's supporters are at work."
—Seen on CLAMS

20080918: Microsoft company meeting. Very blah; only saved from being a total waste of time by the paper airplanes and the co-authoring demo, which wasn’t really long enough to be worth wasting so much time.

Found a way to fix my Hauppauge PVR-150 capture card when it goes wonky (black and white video, no sound, kernel log says that it's still in "detecting" state): this message helped; the soft reset advice didn't work at all, but bouncing the audio input did: v4l2-ctl -d 1 --set-audio-input=1 then back to 0. The v4l* utilities are handy, although in this case nothing interesting showed up using v4l-info, but the kernel log (v4l2-ctl -d 1 --log-status) did show the audio detection hang.

20080919: Bad driver: blue Acura RSX, WA 359 MZF, UMass. license plate holder (massive inferiority complex because he couldn’t get into Harvard or MIT?); cut me off (the twit was dangerously close; had to slam on the brakes) on WA-520E at 1823.

20080925: Drove into Seattle during the day to get my UWa. Husky card and parking pass ("short term night permit" for Mondays; came to $17.xx). Getting the Husky card was quick: they looked at my photo ID, took a photo right there, and gave me the card a few minutes later. I returned my U-Pass in the same room (the U-Pass is a transit pass mailed to everyone—which is evil, since if you don't return it they charge for it, but at least they provide a postage-paid envelope). They had complimentary parking outside Parking Services to get my parking pass, but I had to pay $2 to park and get my student ID ($12, then $10 refund for being 0-30 minutes).

20080927: Logged in remotely and submitted some Chart object model Office 12 SP2 bugs to triage.

20080929: First class at UWa. I arrived early: I left work at 1630 and arrived at 1700 (which is better than leaving 1730 and arriving 1830), and sat in the Allen center and logged into the CSE wireless network and then VPN'd to work for a while. Class was in EEB037 (1830-2120); typical classroom; tiered seats; power (for the laptop), but only at the ends of the rows; still, I didn't need my extension cord. First class wasn't super-interesting; it was a nice overview, but I got a lot of work done on my Scotland Yard simulation.

20080930: Read the assigned reading (handouts) for CSE P 590B (590 is a "new course" designation, so it just means it's the second such course over some period; it also isn't necessarily all that new; courses that seem fairly well established are still 590s on the PMP web site).

20081001: Went shooting after work; shot the EMP; much improvement; slow and steady wins it.

On the financial industry bailouts: I agree with Ron Paul, and an article by Greg Zehner, found at, of all places, the the Huffington Post, which is usually deep far-left wingnut territory (after reading the comments, I see the nuts are still there, fear not). Quoting from Paul's article:
Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks. … The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
Overdosing on political correctness (and pandering for votes) led to the Community Reinvestment Act, which was a fundamental cause of the housing crash. Banks were coerced into making loans they wouldn't have made in a true free market, and they usually got to offload those loans to GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac anyway, privatizing profit and socializing risk. From the Zehner piece:
In the classic, Atlas Shrugged, [Ayn Rand] wrote about governmental powers manipulating markets in order to advance political concerns. Like the book, we do not seem to have the political will to take the correct, but painful, road to recovery. By propping up the financial system with the band-aids of trading restrictions and an explosion of the government's already untenable balance sheet, the necessary adjustments to the financial system are prevented from occurring. … What the Fed, Treasury, and SEC should have done was to let the chips fall as they may by allowing healthy financial institutions survive and the weak ones go bankrupt or be forced to merge. They should have let free markets function while protecting the innocent by raising the FDIC limit of deposit insurance from $100,000 to something significantly higher.



Our strength as a country, has always been to address problems head on, take the medicine no matter how distasteful, and emerge stronger than ever. Sadly, times have changed. Our government has shown that it will change the rules of the markets whenever it seems expedient. Simply put, it will curtail the free markets when it doesn't like what the free markets are saying. In the long run, this will lead to a disaster of unprecedented proportions. It would not be surprising to hear people walking the streets of New York asking "Who is John Galt?

DVDs finished: 28 Weeks Later, The 13th Warrior, Entrapment, That '70s Show: Season Five, Stargate Atlantis: The Complete First Season, Unforgiven, Coyote Ugly.