I woke up early this morning from an exam nightmare. I thought I was over those, really I did. This one was a confused mess, it wasn’t clear whether I was supposed to be graduating or sitting "A"-Levels, which is maybe why I didn’t remember that I’m way, way past having to worry about any of that.
So, in spite of earlier promises to try and bring down the FISA bill and stop retroactive immunity for telecoms providers who illegally wiretapped Americans, Barack Obama quietly avoided voting in the Senate, as did Hillary Clinton.
In the House, 94 Democrats had a sudden change of heart and voted the measure through.
Why did this happen? Well, it could be something to do with the average of $8,359 per politician that they received in "donations" from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, compared to the reduced contributions seen by those who opposed the measure.
I must be old, I remember when you had to wait until after the election to see politicians abandon all their promises. So yeah, like many people I no longer expect much from Barack Obama. What will be the next position he abandons–opposition to torture?
Now that I’m married to a professional barista, it became time to upgrade our coffee machine. Our Starbucks pump espressio machine had offered loyal service for several years, but rothko wanted something with a full size brewhead, like you’d find on a professional machine in an Italian espresso bar. Fortunately her job, plus a tax refund and bonus from work, meant we could afford to spend a bit.
After a ton of research, we settled on the Expobar Brewtus II. It has a solid brass steam-heated E61 brewhead, a microprocessor with digital temperature gauge to control heating, and dual boilers so you can make coffee and steam milk without ever having to wait to switch mode.
We bought from Whole Latte Love, a specialist Internet store. The first machine they sent us, sadly, had some kind of pump or valve problem, and they didn’t have a spare valve in stock. We ended up having to ship the entire machine back and get it replaced. This was particularly painful because the machine is encased in solid steel; it’s probably the second heaviest appliance I’ve had to move, after the laser printer.
The second machine, happily, is working fine.
This is a serious machine. Whereas the Starbucks machine will automatically put pressure on the grounds so all you have to do is push a button, this beast requires proper barista skills. But with the right beans, the right grind, the right amount of coffee, the right tamping pressure, correct pre-heating of the basket, and so on, it can deliver a latte that puts the previous machine to shame. The shots of espresso look like Guinness, foamy crema all the way down that gradually rises to leave a thick black coffee beneath. When I get it just right, it’s an espresso that has no bitterness, just a rich smooth flavor.
And yes, that’s the grinder on the left. There’s no point spending mad cash on a coffee machine if you don’t have a grinder of similar quality. It may seem like we’ve spent an insane amount on coffee machines, but as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re going to drink a latte each every day, it doesn’t take long to get ROI by not dropping $4 a cup at Starbucks.
Amazon MP3: Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band for $1.98. CD sells for $12.
I had A Rainbow in Curved Air recommended to me years ago, but never saw it on sale. Today I heard it playing on one of the radio stations in GTA IV, and recognized it as one of the pieces of music used in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. I dialed 948-555-0100 (in game), and got a text message identifying it. A quick search on Amazon, and there it was for a buck, DRM-free. Zap, download.
See, Sony? This is how you sell music.
Last week, Sony finally released a PlayStation 3 bundle that actually shipped with the rumble controller included, rather than expecting people to spend an extra $60 to get one. The bundle also comes with Metal Gear Solid 4, the new iteration of one of my favorite games.
This new MGS4 bundle promptly sold out everywhere online. So on Saturday, while rothko was helping to run a local election, I figured I’d try a few stores to see if anyone had one in stock.
I was pretty pessimistic, expecting another Wii/Wii Fit scenario, based on the lack of online availability. However, my first call (to Best Buy) turned up a small cache of units. I wolfed a breakfast burrito and dashed over there. Sure enough, they had 8 new PS3 bundles, so I grabbed one.
However, while I like Metal Gear Solid, it wasn’t the game I had been waiting months to play. So I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV as well.
I already had an HDMI switchbox and suitable cables, purchased from the excellent and awesomely cheap monoprice.com. I was a good husband and got everything installed tidily in the TV stand, no trailing cables. I even cleaned and dusted. Then I settled down for some quality time.
My early impressions of GTA IV are that they’ve pretty much gone in the direction I wanted: greater realism, more interesting locations, and less empty space. Motorcycles are less unbalancing now; it’s harder to corner, and if you hit something, rather than just getting back on and continuing, you tend to tumble like a rag doll across 20 meters of asphalt and cripple yourself. It’s also possible to drive a car into a solid object fast enough that you fly through the windshield in a shower of glass and end up bleeding in the street.
The violence level has been toned down as well. Rather than ridiculous overkill missions with rocket launchers, the initial focus is on small-scale crime. You, a handgun, and a baseball bat. The story is better too; the protagonist gradually gets drawn into crime, reluctantly.
Haven’t tried multiplayer yet.
Just so you can plan appropriately :
An elusive group just outside of Abilene, Texas is claiming the end of the world is coming in less than a week.
The House of Yahweh recently gave ABC reporter Brian Ross access to their west Texas compound. Yahweh leader Yisrayl Hawkins says a nuclear holocaust will come June 12th and only members of his group will be saved.
And in case you were thinking they were harmless:
Local authorities claim the group is dangerous and practices polygamy.
Oh my god! Polygamy! Quick, send in the ATF flamethrowers!
I’ve never been a smoker, but I think I understand some of the addiction–because I’ve been a Dungeons & Dragons player.
Smokers tell me that the addiction isn’t so much about the taste or the chemical stimulation; it’s the ritual and the social aspects that are harder to shake off.
So it is with D&D. I can go for years without playing, but like with smoking, you’re always in recovery. Every time I step in a comic book store, there’s the risk that a group will be playing in a side room. I’ll remember the stories, the shared lore, the way that even as a DM I never knew quite what was going to happen next.
Then there are the books, nowadays even decorated to suggest ancient religious tomes–though for my money, the first edition of AD&D was the literary apex, with rulebooks that were a wonderfully random compendium of tiny statistical tables about everything from weather to divine intervention.
As you’ll have heard if you’re a nerd, D&D version 4 is released this month. Even though I’m currently on the wagon (35 gold pieces, weighs 400 lbs, carries 2 tons) I’m going to have to take a look at the new books when I see them in a store. I’ve played every edition of D&D so far, and I liked 3E. What I’ve heard about 4.0 suggests that I’ll like it even more. (Yeah, in retrospect those grappling rules were horrible, and combat could use more variety of action.)
I’ve always been into SF more than fantasy. I have Call of Cthulhu D20 and Traveller D20, but haven’t had the chance to play either. So I really don’t need any more temptation from a new and improved D&D.
A study of the brains of political partisans shed some scientific light on the obvious, and will be worth remembering in this upcoming year:
The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study.
Yeah, no shit.
Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions — essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted — not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward — similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
In other words, Washington was right.
Ever wondered how Microsoft managed to launch a game console that routinely overheated, burned out, and had to be replaced?
EE Times has the story. Microsoft decided to try to save a few bucks by designing a key graphics ASIC themselves, instead of going to a company with experience in chip design. They sent their design straight to the fabricators. It was only when the console was in full production that they learned about the overheating issue. Oops.
You are trying to run Ruby on Rails on OS X, and all you ever get is
Rails requires RubyGems >= 0.9.4. Please install RubyGems and try again: http://rubygems.rubyforge.org
When you check gem --version you find that you already have RubyGems 1.1.1, or some other version higher than 0.9.4 that Rails ought to be happy with.
At some point you installed MacPorts. MacPorts built and/or installed a redundant version of ruby, even though you didn’t ask it to.
To confirm that this is the problem, type which ruby and see if the answer has /opt in it. If so, yes, MacPorts hosed your Rails/RubyGems. Solution: sudo port uninstall ruby
(I’m pretty confident that MacPorts is at fault here because I installed it for the first time this evening to build bzr, which involves no Ruby, and indeed is from a bunch of Python programmers who would probably sooner drink raw sewage than require Ruby for anything. So thanks, MacPorts.)