Science, Mad. And some movies.
Spaztastik provides “fire performers,” DJs, and rave equipment (lighting, decorations, etc).
It’s run by friend Scott, who worked with me at a startup. He was working as a sysadmin, but at the same time was a certified EMT, who was an acrobat and stunt-rode motorcycles for fun.“CMRN”
I was driving through Oakland and heard this staticky broadcast instead of 104.9 FM, which is a commercial pop station. I think it may have been spillage from 104.1 FM, which is Radio Free Berkeley, a pirate station around here. Who knows!Forest destruction is so sexy!!
Victoria’s Secret, part of Limited Brands, claims to be a good global citizen. Yet by mailing more than a million catalogs a day, the company is leading the way in global forest destruction.
Web link of note: Victorias Dirty Secret
(At http://www.victoriasdirtysecret.net/)
The Energy Foundation awards grants and takes direct initiatives in the electric power, buildings, transportation, climate, and national policy and analysis sectors. In partnership with the Packard Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation, it administers the China Sustainable Energy Program. The foundation’s geographic focus is the U.S.and China.
Web link of note: The Energy Foundation
(At http://www.ef.org/)
I’m using .bash. For whatever reason, it doesn’t detect aliases!
This bit me on the ass recently: a party who shall remain nameless had the default grep aliased:
alias grep='grep -i'
Yuck.
So when I searched for some debugging info, I got thousands of lines of false positives. Very bad.But when I did a “which grep” it just told be the location of the executable. Not that it was aliased. So it looked like my grep (bash on debian) was broken!
What I wanted for which is:
So the magic command to make which behave like it should is:
alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --read-alias'Just kidding. What that does is “crash your bash.” Who knows why. Crebbs told me that’s what it was (so much for nameless) and I almost locked myself out of my computer. Turns out the “magic” command is simply
type
which is built in to bash. Gah!
DANH: does anyone have an adult size bunny suit i can borrow for a few hours on saturday? it would also help if you have 10 or so extra ones
I’ve been playing a little GTA: San Andreas, and I gotta say, if there’s one thing I’m pretty stellar at, it’s fighting fires. I must be the only firefighter in Los Santos who has bought 4 homes just out of money earned from freelance firefighting.
Once you get to Level 12, you become fireproof. Not explosion-proof, just fireproof. This will be handy if I ever get the flamethrower…
But while you are fire proof, you can still catch on fire. This enables my new hobby- I wreck my car, which catches on fire, and then blows up, spreading flaming debris all over the street. Then the fire department comes, and parks in front of the car as they try to hose it down.
While they are busy, and partly blocking the road, I set myself ablaze. Then I walk to the cars blocked behind the fire truck and set them on fire with my own flaming carcass. If I can get enough cars on fire, enough of them blow up to keep the firefighters perpetually busy.
Soon the entire street is covered in piles of flame. Cars start blowing up without my help because they cannot escape the street inferno. A car blows up every ten seconds. People run around in a panic, but there is nowhere to go. I have created hell!
Sort of ironic since I am a retired firefighter. I guess it’s like Dennis Hopper in Speed, since he was the retired bomb squad guy who took up making bombs as a second career. Except it’s almost nothing like that.
Ellen Feiss is the girl in the Apple “switch” commercial who became a celebrity because of her stoned delivery.
She tells a story about losing her essay on her dad’s PC… her eyes are bloodshot. Yeah yeah, Ellen claims she was on cold medication at the time, but most people still think she was stoned.
Web link of note: Ellen Feiss
(At http://www.ellenfeiss.net/)
I was just reading about Bernhard Goetz, the ‘Subway Vigilante,’ in a chapter in The Tipping Point, a book on epidemics of memes. I was reminded of Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.
Miller’s famous Batman story almost single-handedly ushered in a new era of comics for adults, and I have read it many times. Since I first read it in the early 1990’s when I was in high school and didn’t read the news much, I didn’t catch a number of the cultural references. I had no idea about the crime wave that was hitting most of the country, which would crest in the late 1980s / early 1990s (for those who are feeling nostalgic, don’t worry, I have a feeling the insanely high crime rate will be back soon).
Anyway, one such reference: In a subway scene, young hoodlums drop a hand grenade into a doomed woman’s purse. The news reports the story in a single sentence. As Batman mania hits the streets, an unemployed wrestler is inspired by Batman’s vigilante methods and attacks a “client” in a restaurant, dressed as Batman. Another, Taxi Driver-inspired maniac hears the backwards lyrics to Stairway to Heaven and goes on a shooting spree in a porn theater. This time, both incidents are blamed on the Batman by the media (no that porno theater shoot-out had nothing to do with Batman).
In another reference, the psychologist of The Joker analyses the Batman and how his personality predisposes him to violent situations, and how The Joker is a victim of his Batman-infested environment. Much as people at the time made excuses for Bernhard Goetz and saw patterns in his life that led up to this particular incident on the subway.
The epidemic of crime in New York in the 1980s cannot really adequately be described. I remember my parents telling me about how rotten the subway was. But when I finally rode the subway, it didn’t seem so bad. The difference? About ten years- they had ridden it in the mid 1980s, and I rode it in the late 1990s, after several waves of highly successful “clean up” initiatives.
Looks like termites will eat paper.
I was cleaning out my mom’s garage, and there were boxes of random stuff that hadn’t been moved in months. One of the boxes had a very weak bottom, so we got some spare boxes to transfer its contents.
When we started moving the books and paper out, we found… an entire termite nest! White and fat as system administrators, they wriggled around like an obese Wal-Mart patron having a seizure.
Apparently termites do just fine with (bleached) paper. We had to throw out boxes and boxes of software manuals and old college papers, but fortunately no photos. One of the books had been eaten down to the lamination that was once on a cover; it was just a sheet of clear plastic.
Next on the menu: Poison!