The Vegan Militia

Universal Abundance?

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I just happened to see the transcript of the Q4 earnings call for Tesla, and once Elon started speaking I was astounded by his semi-coherence, and this passage, in particular, stood out:

Amazing era of of abundance and and I think with the with the advent with with the continued growth of AI and robotics. I think we actually are headed to a future of universal high income, not universal basic income, but universal high income. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of change along the way, but but that is that is that is what I see as the most likely outcome.

Suicide Food!

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:31:09 +0000

One of my favorite blogs was Suicide Food which ran from 20-Dec-2006 to 27-Dec-2011, and it documented some of the most horrific examples of suicide food.

This is one of those things, that once you are aware of it, you see it everywhere. I submitted a few photos to that blog back in the day, and I kept accumulating photos after the blog’s end. I tried my hand at making similar posts here (see the suicide food tagged posts) but wasn’t able to keep that going. I tried starting up a discussion group on Lemmy but the instance I was on vanished.

Default, dear Brutus, is in our stars

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 10:37:42 -0400

When I first started using computers, I remember spending lots of time poring over manuals, and finding all the settings and places I could customize my settings. I would change my prompt, add lots of aliases and shortcuts. When the first windowing systems came along (for me it was SunView) I did the same thing. I moved all the icons around, customized the menu and how things worked to suit me. If there was a setting, I goofed with it.

Two Wrongs

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:37:42 -0400

One of the most laughable moments of the Presidential Debate was when Trump asserted that “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Anybody with half a brain can see this is an obvious racist hoax and I’m sure you can find many who can pick it apart.

But I want to look at it from another angle, from a vegan’s perspective, in particular, one who follows Gary Francione’s theory of animal rights.

What's the reverse of pump and dump?

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:12:50 -0400

I was chatting with a good friend about the collapse of the stock market on Friday and we were trying to figure out why someone would do this. It is obvious that Trump himself is so addled by narcicism and dementia that he is not likely aware of what he is doing. But I cannot believe that those around him would blindly do something so stupid as to crash the entire economy. That every single one of them could be so deluded, stupid, or, sycophantic. Someone would have tempered what he was doing. Moved the tariff percentages a bit more toward sanity. Or perhaps set a longer timeline. Something.

Podcasts You Should Listen To

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 09:28:46 -0500

TL;DR: I listen to podcasts. A lot of them. Perhaps too many. There is a list below of my favorites. You can look at the list rather than reading my rambling introduction, I guess.

So it was 1993, the internet was a blossoming place. The world wide web was rapidly gaining over a variety of other services. I think it was an O’Rielly newsletter which pointed out the first episode of Internet Talk Radio. One of my friends had the task of downloading the audio file, which took hours, and we sat around his computer listening to it. Being that cumbersome I don’t think I ever listened to any other subsequent shows.

I Surrender

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:37:42 -0400

I surrender. Last weekend I was looking at the decaying remnants of my garden, and then I went and tore it all out. The deer fencing, the trellises, the decaying and collapsing boards around the raised beds, the dead weeds and such from last year’s neglect. That was probably the first time I went out there in years. But now it is gone.

I spent my younger years on a small farm. My mother had a large garden, but I never really paid attention. I always had my nose in a book, or, in my teenage years, in front of a computer keyboard. I went off to college, moved to the city, and forgot about it. When I bought a house I briefly got a garden going, inspired by Eugene Coleman’s gardening TV show (back when the Discovery channel had good shows). I got a good crop of tomatoes, but between work demands and a failing marriage, that fell by the wayside. The house was sold and I spend several years moving around the country, forgetting many things: the garden, old friends, my boat, etc.

The Riflebirds Return!

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:37:42 -0400

Anybody who knows me, knows that I have tasten which run towards that which is obscure, unpopular, or simply forgotten. This is particularily true of music. In the late ’80s I discovered Phil Ochs and was so taken with his work that I created a web site as tribute to him.

One day (again, in the late ’80s) I spotted a small write up about a local band called The Riflebirds and that they were playing at the Dublin Pub. I was getting together with a bunch of friends and I talked them into going there for the next show. I was immediately taken with the band, and went out to buy their new album.

The Goblin Reservation

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Even though I was always interested in science fiction, I really never read very widely. I honestly cannot think of anything I read which was not connected to a TV show or movie (e.g. Star Trek, 2001, Hitchhikers Guide). After I started playing D&D I veered off into fantasy, which was most of my fiction reading for many years. As I have gotten older I have found that my diet of mainly non-fiction books was hard to maintain, so I now always try to have two books in progress: one non-fiction, and one fiction, when I get tired of reading the former, I will read the latter. This is a good strategy and has increased how many books I am able to get through. As such I have started reading older classic science fiction, many from Appendix N.

Who's Driving?

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Some time ago I had a long discussion with my father (someone who has a long history with cars starting with riding his father’s new Ford Model A) about the prospect of autonomous cars. I don’t have any particular knowledge on the topic, beyond working in an unrelated specialty of computer science. Though I do have experience being hit by a car. And I got a “C” in high-school auto shop class. So take everything I say with appropriate grains of salt.

You've Got to Haggle!

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:34:10 -0500

I think we have all heard the old story: A man asks a woman if she will sleep with him for a million dollars. Of course, she says yes. He then offers her two dollars and she gets mad, saying, ‘What do you think I am?’ He answers, ‘We know what you are. We are just haggling over the price.’

I think most people would agree that killing Hitler (or anybody else who has killed millions of people) would be justified. And, conversely, most of us would agree that killing someone who has done no harm to anybody is utterly unacceptable (though I can think of some police officers who would disagree).

A Big Hole

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:57:43 -0500

Most of my childhood was on a farm. I experienced death all the time. When I was about 8, I was closing up the hen house for the night and found her, a small hen, sitting on the floor, rather than on the roosts like the rest, her head twisting in a gentle, spastic way. Though I was young, I could see she was in a bad way. I took her into the barn where my father was shoveling out the manure. I sat down on a bale of hay and held her. She could not move in any sensible way, she could not stand, and her head would slowly twist to the left, and then spring back to normal, and repeat. That got slower and slower until finally she slumped over, her wide-open eye staring vacantly towards the rafters. She didn’t even have a name, she was just one of the brown hens. I found a shoe box and my father helped me dig a hole by an old apple tree where we buried her. I don’t think there were any tears or grief, just a bit of sadness; just another day on the farm.

Shooting for Gold

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:37:42 -0400

A couple of days into the Olympics, by step-son pointed out that the US had not won ANY medals in one event: shooting. I was shocked. For the United States the gun is the holiest of holy! How could we not get any medals? To my relief, in the subsequent days the US did win some medals, including a single gold, but we still placed third overall. What a tragedy!

I came to the conclusion that the structure of the existing Olympic event was not fully compatible with the gun culture in the United States. We should push to get a new event which would better reflect our true skills as a country. The event should take place in a large room, the targets scattered randomly in the room, some of them partly behind obstacles like desks, chairs, and tables. The targets should be smaller, maybe 4 feet tall. The goal would be to burst through the door and shoot as many targets as possible. There would be several rooms set up like this, and the goal is to go from room to room and shoot as many targets as possible in limited time (the average 911 response time). The firearms used would be limited to ones which can be legally purchased in the shooter’s country, which should further guarantee the US supremacy in the event.

Profile and be lazy

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 14:57:43 -0500

One of the unfortunate side effects of Moore’s Law is that the immense amounts of computing power at our fingertips masks over many horribly inefficient practices. For example, something I have commonly done for a very long time is use a sort, uniq, sort pipeline to tally up something; say you have a CSV containing users and the 2nd column is the country, so you want a quick list of how many you have from each country:

Wild Goose Chase

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:37:42 -0400

I used to rant on here about awful error messages, but I kind of gave up as the problem kept getting worse. It seemed that error messages were getting less informative and error handling in code was getting worse. (I complained about this years ago) But here’s a cautionary tale about what the cost of this sloppiness can be.

So I inherited an internal service from another team, and one day I go to deploy an update, and the service will not start. I barely understand this thing or the language it is written in, and now I have to debug it!

The River Not Taken

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 01:57:43 -0500

Every decision produces regret. Sometimes it isn’t a big thing or it is quickly forgotten. But for other decisions the thoughts of what might have been weighs heavily. I find that the older I get, the more I think about these things.

The year 2000 was a momentous year for me, the pivot of my entire life. I spent the previous year working hard fixing y2k bugs and trying to make my failing marriage work. Only one of those worked out, but, regardless, both were over. I am sure everyone has had a situation where you were working on a project frantically for a long time. But once you finish and the weight is suddenly lifted, you are confused. You haven’t had to think about what needs to be done for some time, but suddenly you do. This was where I found myself at the beginning of 2000.

Catch Me Now, I'm Trying

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:07:12 -0500

I first learned to program when the primary mechanism of error handling was to check the return value of each function call and react appropriately. This often led to awful code where functions are called with no checking, and things mysteriously fail several steps removed from the actual error. Therefore I learned to add in lots of error handling so that any error messages would be very specific and easy to fix, to the point that I was once told I had too much error handling. Theoretically more modern programming languages with their try/catch syntax would help, but I am not convinced of that. syntactic sugar is no replacement for programmer discipline. Here’s a case in point, what’s the difference between this:

Escape From Drakkenheim

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 10:41:53 -0500

A few weeks ago I listened to Mike Shea talk about running a Ravenloft “funnel” for Halloween. And around the same time one of the players in my newly started Drakkenheim campaign had written up an elaborate backstory which had his character escaping from Drakkenheim as the meteor hit the city. As with peanut butter and chocolate, these two should go together quite well.

So first I need a way to generate a bunch of level 0 A5E characters. I have done some searching, but have not found anything yet. I may end up writing a tool, stay tuned.

Status 200 and All Is Well

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0400

So I just ran into a piece of code which looked something like this

request = http.request(someurl)
if (request.status == 200)
{
  mystuff = request.body.foo
}

I showed this to my wife, who knows almost nothing about code. She said “what if it gets a status other than 200?” Despite the fact that her one and only coding class was in high school and she barely remembers it, she has managed to do better than the veteran who wrote that code! I responded, “Well, at least they are checking for the status rather than blindly proceeding!” I should not have said that. Fifteen minutes later, in the same file, I ran into code which was like this:

Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0400

So after finishing Cory Doctorow’s book I have been thinking about all the enshittified platforms I have been entangled with and how to reduce my dependence on them. Then I start thinking about how they tricked me into these situations. And then I thought about the OGL debacle (here are my earlier ruminations on the topic), and how badly WotC mishandled things with respect to “monetizing” the brand. It seems like the enshittification playbook has been demonstrated repeatedly, so it was a colossal failure on the part of management there.

Whither Veganism?

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 14:49:22 -0400

The topics I have discussed here over the years have veered around wildly according to my interests at that time, but, despite my domain name, I haven’t mentioned veganism in 8 years. Why not? Don’t get your hopes up! I have not become a born-again meat eater.

I didn’t even notice that the 23rd anniversary of me becoming vegan passed last month. After being vegan for that long it has kind of melted into the background. Even the day-to-day struggles of living in a world hostile to vegans has become mundane and routine.

Enola Holmes, Dungeon Master

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:49:22 -0400

When I watched Enola Holmes with my daughter, I really liked the protaganist breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. And I had a thought: What if someone ran an actual play D&D campaign with the same mechanism?

When I am listening to actual play podcasts, I often hear the players create an unexpected situation, sometimes I can even hear a sigh or some other reaction from the DM that indicates they didn’t expect it either. It would be really instructive in those cases to have the DM stop, turn to the audience and talk about the situation and what they are thinking about doing in reaction.

Any sufficiently advanced?

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

[I started writing this in 2016 and unearthed it amongst some old drafts. But 6 years have only intensified my feelings here, so here it is updated and finished]

I’m sure you’ve all heard the statement from Arthur C. Clark that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But I had an exchange which convinced me of a variation of that: “Any suffciently hyped technology is indistinguishable from religion.”

The case in point was a discussion with someone who seemed to think that Git was the only version control system which had checkin hooks. And after informing him that every modern version control system, indeed, every one of them I’ve used in the last two decades, has such things (in one way or another), he repeated the same thing later on in the conversation, as if unable to process this new piece of information which contradicted established dogma.

With No Output

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

So I create numerous SVN replicas and since it takes several steps to do this, I have it automated all the icky bits in a script. Usually it worked fine, but this time, the whole thing mysteriously fails with this:

svn: E165001: Revprop change blocked by pre-revprop-change hook (exit code 255) with no output.

Let’s translate “with no output”: “somewhere along the line a programmer neglected to detect and/or issue an error message”. A fatal error never fails with no output unless someone, somewhere, screwed up the error handling code.

Fool Me Twice

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400

I should have known better.

I wrote previously about my experience getting legal threats from TSR (and wrote more details later on, though DM David has an excellent post from a wider perspective). That experience caused me to abandon D&D and for the next few years my group played FUDGE. I had hoped that many others would follow my lead, but since I am neither articulate nor charismatic, that came to nothing and this was all forgotten.

AWOL in the Edition Wars

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 14:49:02 -0400

Sometime in 1997 I played my last D&D game. We were still playing AD&D first edition, as we had when we started about 13 years earlier. We had avoided 2nd edition as it just seemed like TSR was trying to sell us more books which we really didn’t need, and there didn’t seem to be enough improvements to justify the cost. Due to the events I related in a some previous posts, I stopped paying attention to what TSR was doing, and was unaware of what happened to company and the game for the next 20 years.

The Rest of the Tribe

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 14:46:16 -0400

My first attempt at DM’ing was The Keep on the Borderlands. I was probably about 16 years old and we bordered on being murderhobos. Even so, I was troubled when I hit this passage:

COMMON CHAMBER: The rest of the kobold tribe lives here. There are 17 males (AC 7, HD 1/2, hp 3 each, #AT 1, D 1-4, MV (40’), Save NM. ML 6), 23 females (AC 7, HD 1/2, hp 2 each, #AT 1, D 1-3, Save NM, ML 6), and 8 young (which do not attack). If their caves are invaded, those able will help in its defense. Males have d6 silver pieces each, females d4 silver pieces each; the young have nothing. Amidst the litter of cloth and bits and scraps of odds-and-ends there is a piece of silk worth 150 gold pieces. (If the party does not search it will not be located.)

Of course, the players marched in and started killing kobolds. We had a brief discussion about how to deal with the young ones, and we soon decided that since their race was inherently evil, killing them was not a problem. But it always bothered me. To the point that I remember that moment vividly over 3 decades later.

The Poverty of Computer RPG

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 21:37:28 -0400

I was introduced to both computers and Dungeons and Dragons around the same time. I did not even see a computer until I got to high school, and soon after I could be found in the computer lab every day after school playing a number of role playing games including Temple of Apshai, Akalabeth, and, Ultima II. I got my own computer not long after and was able to spend way too much time playing those games and others including Ultima III and SunDog. Note that I am only mentioning role-playing games.

Old Friends

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 14:48:34 -0400

“The band, Elwood, the band!”
“The band? The band. The band!”

It was the last day of my senior year of high school. Since seniors finished school a week earlier than everyone else, my final project in auto shop had to be evaulated. My partner and I had done a partial rebuild of a Vega engine. Mr. P. came over with his handtruck and other hardware for starting engines. He hooked up the jumper cables and tried to start it. Nothing, it was turning over, but never firing. But he kept trying until, finally, a gout of flame jumped several feet out of the carburetor towards the ceiling. Mr. P. jumped back (as we all did), recomposed himself, realigned his ridiculous comb-over, quietly unhooked the jumper cables, said “you pass” without making eye contact and walked away. I’m sure my partner was able to get the engine going in the next week, since he actually knew what he was doing.

The Parable of the Brush Turkey

Thu, 25 May 2023 10:57:42 -0400

[Disclaimer and credit: I do not remember where I first heard about the brush turkey, but I suspect it was Douglas Adams during a book signing for his book Last Chance to See. The details of the brush turkey are exaggerated and maybe even wrong, but this is to serve a narrative purpose, so any zoologists can sit down, this parable isn’t for you.]

The brushturkey is very prone to boredom. Every time she lays an egg, she thinks to herself, “sitting on these eggs for several weeks is going to be really boring. There has to be a better way. I have an idea! I will build a compost pile on top of the eggs, and that will keep the eggs warm and I can go have fun.” She gets up and runs all over the place gathering organic matter and piles it up on top of the clutch of eggs. She has to gather quite a bit in order to get the temperature high enough to incubate the eggs. But finally she finished! Now she can relax!

Screenshot dumpster dive

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 01:34:56 -0400

I had a whole bunch of error message screenshots saved and as I was looking through, I realized two things: first, even though there are only 2 dozen of them I don’t know if I have the energy to compose witty comments about each without becoming entirely demoralized. Secondly, I began to notice some themes. Therefore, I am going to take all the error messages I have and roughly categorize them. Since there is often overlap I am going to present it as a table, a sort of bingo card, indicating the categorization.

The Network is the Computer...

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Some of my early career was spent working on Sun workstations and servers. Way back then they had the slogan “The Network is the Computer”. Clearly, that slogan is the old wine in the new bottle labeled “Cloud”, but that’s another story. As I sit looking at an hourglass or a spinning “progress” icon, I realize that the original slogan was incomplete, the full version is:

“The Network is the Computer… and that’s why it sucks so bad.”

Lightning Strikes

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Over the last several years I have noticed a common topic which comes up whenever I talk with my father. He always mentions about how there was another shooting, and how bad the crime is in the city. After he repeated this enough I began to wonder what was going on. Whenever I visit, everything seems as good or better than it ever was (though the homeless problem is worse than ever). I did a bit of digging and found that the crime rates have been declining for years as they have most everywhere in the country.

TSR Meets the Internet, Part 2

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

So, several months ago I wrote up my experiences with TSR in the early days of the internet. A few days ago, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Plot Points, interviewing Shannon Appelcline, and was surprised to hear someone else involved in those long ago events.

While I had some bits of history he did not (e.g. the email TSR sent to me and related names and dates) I realize I left out some details. Also, in my searching, I found another account of these events, and a detailed web site and I found Rob Repp, himself.

OK, Boomer

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Many years ago, I was talking to my father about money and retirement, and he asked me “when will you be vested?” I looked at him as if he had three heads and said “vested in what?” Then it was his turn to look at me as though I had three heads. When he retired in the late 80’s he had a full pension, and, to this day, has health insurance as part of that pension. He had no idea that these things are almost nonexistent nowadays. We also talked about wages, and I surpassed his highest annual wages when I was in my 30’s; but that’s in raw dollars! Once adjust for inflation, I have never come close to his wages, and I never will unless my boss gives me a 60% raise.

Election Trauma

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

This post has been sitting half finished for a very long time. I hereby give up and post it as is…

So it was election night 2016, and it was becoming clear what we had done to ourselves. I began thinking about my daughter and what to tell her the next day. This would be her first memory of an election, and instead of being something to, at least somewhat, inspire her confidence about the power of democratic institutions, it would, instead, be a traumatic stain in her memory: someone got elected, under questionable circumstances, who, even an 8 year old could see, was clearly incompetent and indifferent to the democratic institutions of this country and the rule of law.

Null Message Body, Hope That's OK

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 01:35:26 -0400

Despite this error, Firefox did, in fact, launch correctly. So both unhelpful and incorrect.

But the sad corpse emoji makes it all better.

No Reason

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 01:35:06 -0400

I’m glad there could be a reason for this error. But, on the other hand, it may just be random, like the lottery in reverse.

TSR Meets the Internet

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 01:34:56 -0400

I will do my best to recount my small part amidst the decline of TSR, but many of the original files are gone (or are on media which nobody can read), so the exact dates are a bit fuzzy.

I had been playing AD&D since the early ‘80 while in high school with two friends, but in total isolation. I rarely met anybody else with interest in it and so our games were pretty much limited to published materials and our own attempts to concoct our own. In fact, my first DM experience was with Village of Homlett and then I tried to write the sequel promised at the end of that module. It is probably a good thing that I lost those materials.

Digital Witchcraft

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 01:34:43 -0400

Years ago, in an episode of the Permaculture Podcast, the host joked that Computer Science was less science and more superstition and witchcraft. That had a familiar ring to it.

Several years earlier, I had started a new job at a company which was almost entirely Windows based (all my previous jobs had been primarily Unix). One day I was trying to track down a complicated problem. I asked my boss if there were any more diagnostic tools at hand which would help, to which he responded “would the problem go away if the computer is rebooted?” Most likely, but that won’t fix the root prob- “Then reboot the computer, it’s Windows, people are used to that. Don’t waste your time debugging.” I verbally agreed, but in my head I thought “how are things supposed to get better if we do that?”

Stop Calling me Un-Shirley!

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 01:34:30 -0400

Surely you cannot be unsure!

In all my years of programming I’ve never had an operation return an uncertain result. I’ve had my share of unexpected results, but that’s just sloppy programming somewhere along the line. Perhaps it is returning a result of type SchrödingersCat.

Satanic Regret

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 01:34:17 -0400

On a recent vacation I was driving through Utah and passed through Heber City. I had just started reading “Of Dice and Men” and the next day read the chapter about the Satanic Panic and this excerpt:

In May of 1980, parents in the “solidly Mormon” farming town of Heber City, Utah, convinced their local school board to shut down an after-school D&D club and acused its organizers “of working with the Antichrist and of fomenting Communist subversion.” Local Christian minister Norman Springer told The New York Times that the game was “very definitely” antireligious: These books are filled with things that are not fantasy, but are actual in the real demon world and can be very dangerous for anyone involved in the game because it leaves them so open to Satanic spirits."

Something is Missing

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 01:32:21 -0400

I recently upgraded my workstation and, once again, had to change music players. Though this is just as well since Banshee’s 20 seconds of unresponsiveness after changing tracks was pretty intolerable. So now I tried Clementine. It seems like a reasonably good player, but on certain tracks I get this:

Presumably the tracks in question were MP3, but knowing the track/file name and the plugin it wanted would be most helpful in locating the exact plugin I need. After installing a whole bunch of packages with different codecs nothing changed.

Gardening for Legalization

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 01:25:59 -0400

In 1986 I was handed a newspaper all about legalization of marijuana (it was actually an early version of the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes), and I have been supportive of legalization ever since. I voted for it a couple times, but it didn’t pass until I left the state. In fact every state I have lived in has legalized it… after I left! Perhaps supporters of legalization in Connecticut should start a fund to get me to move elsewhere.

Three Little Pigs (spoiler alert)

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 01:00:00 -0400

You know the old story about the three little pigs? Well, it didn’t end the way they say. You know that arrogant jackass brother of ours who built a brick house and was willing to let us be killed by the wolf? Well, we saw what was coming! Before the wolf got there, we marched over there and turned his big brick house into a restaurant and we fixed him real good!

Perhaps

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 01:24:33 -0400

The guessing games continue. This time we get to guess as to why the remote desktop viewer was unable to connect.

Perhaps the host was down? Perhaps my password was wrong? Perhaps there was a protocol error or incompatability? Perhaps the remote service was down? Perhaps my breath? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Dungeons and/or Dragons

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 01:10:29 -0400

It is one of those mid-summer days, and my daughter is struggling to find something to do. After several rounds of “I’m bored” and my unsympathetic response (“Bored? I was bored once… in 1974!”), I put on my headphones and pretend I’m having a meeting so I can focus on work. A while later I go out to get some tea, and I find her with a bunch of papers and dice, making up a story using the dice to determine what would happen next. That seemed familiar! Something I had not thought seriously about for about two decades came to mind: Dungeons and Dragons. Let the rambling history begin…

An Occurence at Error Creek Bridge

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:26:49 -0400

I haven’t been writing about error messages in a while. But this is not because these horrible error messages are hard to find, but rather I’m overwhelmed by them. We are all steeped in incomprehensible, unhelpful error messages every day and it just starts to become part of the background noise of our lives. It’s like blogging about drops of water in the river.

So in hopes of getting this going again, here’s one of the worst ones I’ve seen in a long time:

No Parent Should Ever Have to

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 08:39:13 -0500

Every year, around this time, I read through the Wikipedia article about the Sandy Hook Shooting. It would be good if everyone did this, it seems it has slipped from the memory of so many. But on this sad anniversary I am doubly reminded of the one thing that no parent should ever have to do: bury their own child. No parent should ever have to do this. While there are many tragedies which we will all have to face in our lives, I don’t know if there is any more painful than this one. Thankfully, most of us have never, and will never, face this prospect. But as I read every detail about Sandy Hook, tears streaming down my face, I know that the heartbreak I feel is nothing compared to what those parents went through, and are still going through six years later. No parent should ever have to do this.

Winter is Coming

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 14:25:15 -0500

I woke up this morning in a despondent haze over the election results. Not knowing what else to do, I took a walk through my garden, since a garden at this time of year is all about devastation.

IMG

As my feet crunched through the multi-hued blanket of dry leaves, I saw what the recent freezes had done: unripe tomatoes drooping from withered vines, the twisted remains of pepper plants, the nearly bare trees pointing into the grey skies. And this is before the New England winter hits us with its full fury, before the blanket of snow and subzero temperatures put an end to any survivors not strong enough to endure the punishment.

Bombing from the Heart

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Paris has been on my mind for the last week, as I’m sure it is for many others. Several years ago, I had the good fortune to spend a week in Paris. Coincidentally it was during a national election and it was very interesting to see how differently they conducted their election day. It was on a Sunday, and almost everything was closed (which made it difficult for a couple of vegans to find breakfast). The only places we saw people gathered were around the polling places. All else was quiet. It seemed that the process was treated with a quiet reverential dignity. During that election 83% of the French people voted. I felt privileged to be there to witness it.

Git comes up empty

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I ran into a situation today, which was quite astonishing: Git creates new repositories in an inconsistent state. Until the first checkin is done, the repository has HEAD pointing to a nonexistent location. I discovered this because I was replicating several other team’s Git servers for backup purposes. In experimenting with this I came up with this reproduction:

$ git init --bare foo.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/foo.git/
$ git clone --bare foo.git foo2.git
Cloning into bare repository 'foo2.git'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
$ cd foo2.git
$ git fetch
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref HEAD
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

While doing clone and fetch from an empty repository is a silly thing to do, but it isn’t worthy of a fatal error. No other systems I work with have this flaw. So now I have to modify my replication scripts to detect such repositories and avoid them.

The Importance of Penmanship

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I have a clear memory of being singled out by my 5th grade teacher as being the 2nd worst in the class at penmanship. Or maybe he just said that Neil and I were the two worst. I know I hated cursive, but it’s hard to remember, all these years later, whether I hated it because I had such a hard time doing it, or that I was bad at it because I hated doing it. I think the former was the case.

The Poor House

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

While doing research on my family tree, I run into a number of sad situations. Most of them involve infant mortality, which seems alarmingly frequent to our modern eyes. But this time I happened upon a different sad situation.

It all started when I found a strange birth record with a bunch of question marks and a surname I was researching. I look at the image of the record and found the original was perfectly legible: in 1868 Lucy Morse had a baby boy, at the age of 13 1/2! The father was listed as “not known, thought to be a Wilbur”. Further research showed that her entire family was living in the Cheshire County Alms House, listed on the census form as “paupers” at the “poor house”. Two years later this 15 year old girl married a 28 year old man with the last name Wilbur, presumably the father referred to in the birth record. They moved in with his parents and brother on their farm, which he soon took over. But sometime in the next 10 years, Lucy was dead; she wasn’t yet 25! Her mother-in-law was also dead by that time. A few years later the father ended up in the same “poor house” and died as a “county pauper”. He continues farming for the next couple of decades, but he, too, ends up in the “poor house” and spends almost 4 years there before passing on.

On Walled Gardens

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

When dealing with actual gardens, a walled garden can be useful. I first read about the phrase as a metaphor for a counter productive practice on wikis (and, by extension, the web as a whole).

But nowhere can this counter-productive practice be seen more starkly than in genealogy.

Here’s an example: I discovered an (indirect) ancestor named Mattys Blanchan, in the course of looking for him on WeRelate, I discovered 3 pages for this person (and a bit more digging showed there had been a fourth one). Each one with slightly different names and different lists of children. Each one from a different person’s GEDCOM, each tracing down to different descendants. Each of these GEDCOM files represented a different walled garden, people labouring to put together a tree, not knowing that several other people were doing the exact same work in their own walled garden. Thankfully, by loading their data onto WeRelate, these walls could now be broken down and all these people could see that we are all cousins. But, sadly, that did not happen; in all four cases, the GEDCOM file was uploaded, and then they walked away (what’s known on WeRelate as a “drive-by GEDCOM”), leaving that work to be done by someone else (me, apparently).

Cousins?

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

So it all started when I found a great grandmother with the last name “Cheney”. That got me scared. So I tracked down that part of my family tree and found that she, ultimately, descended from John Cheney of Newbury but Dick Cheney descended from William Cheney of Roxbury. There are theories that these two ancestors were related, possibly brothers, but no evidence has been found either way. So I could maintain some plausible deniability that Dick Cheney and I are not 9th cousins 1 time removed. Whew!

Disgruntled Town Clerks

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I happened upon this passage on page 906 of the Vital Record of Rehoboth

Lett none marvell att the promiscuous and disorderly setting downe of the names of such they are, or may be married, or doe, or may be born, or may dye; for they are sett as they were brought to mee as disorderly as they are sett downe. If the Courts order had bin minded respecting this matter, they had biue otherwise placed then they are.

Firsthand Knowledge

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In my experience, it is pretty rare to find genealogical information on the internet with any source citations at all. But on one site (which shall remain nameless), I actually found a source listed!

 Wilfred ***, firsthand knowledge. ...  Entered by Wilfred ***, Jun 21, 2012

Considering the page is about someone who lived in the mid 18th century, it seems unlikely Wilfred has actual “firsthand knowledge”; not unless he’s immortal or has invented a time machine!

If she weighs the same as a duck...

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sometime in between 1675 and 1686 my 8th great grandfather re-married after the death of his first wife (my 8th great grandmother). His brother married a few years earlier. Coincidentally, both these women were named Sarah. Soon, they had something else in common.

In the midst of the Salem Witch Trials, John’s wife, Sarah Alsbee, was accused of witchcraft but was acquitted. His brother’s wife, Sarah Davis was also accused, and imprisoned, but was released on bail and never brought to trial.

Climate Change Hits Home

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:09:42 -0400

When we first moved to Connecticut, I was doing some yard work in an attempt clean up the years of neglect of the previous owners, and my wife told me to be careful of poison ivy. Being from Oregon, I knew nothing about poison ivy, though I had seen my step-son go through the agony of a severe head-to-toe outbreak some years earlier.

So, I did some reading and and started spotting it growing everywhere in my yard. Up trees, on fences, in flower beds, etc. Everywhere. After years of battling the menace I had it nearly under control. But this year, it started appearing in all kinds of new places, next to garden beds, in walkways, by the deck, in the lawn, etc. Some friends also said it seems much worse this year.

Listen to your mother

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 08:03:11 -0400

Every time I visit my mother, we end up doing a bunch of genealogy work, and then afterwards I continue doing a bunch of research, and our latest visit was no exception. Several months ago I posted lamenting the lack of information about mothers in family trees. After visiting with my mother, I started looking at all the mothers in the family tree, rather than focussing on the difficult one on my matrilineal line, and started doing some searches on each and I turned up a number of books written about the families to which these women belonged.

Abusive mothers and Lions

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 08:03:23 -0400

Many years ago a friend of mine was telling me about her abusive mother, and about an incident where her little brother got into something poisonous (a cleaning chemical or somesuch). She proceeded to praise her mother for calling poison control. I remember looking at her, stunned, that she was praising her mother for doing something any mother should do. But my friend’s frame of reference was so distorted by the abuses her mother had heaped upon her children that it seemed like a noble act.

The Vegan Militia 3.0

Fri, 15 May 2015 12:09:56 -0400

Welcome to my reworked blog. This will mark the third incarnation of this blog. There was a short-lived Drupal based site, then I set up Wordpress 6 years ago.

So what’s that you say? It sounded like you said “so what”, but I know you really meant “how come?”

About a month ago I get an email from the good people at Laughing Squid informed me that I had vastly outstripped my compute cycle quota. I thought this was rather surprising given that few people ever read this blog, let alone comment. There had been a number of attempts by spammers to post comments on the site, but, at worst there were only a dozen or so a day.

Page Index

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This is an index of static pages, which, unlike posts, are likely to be slowly updated over time, or are for general reference.

About
ClearCase Critique – a critique of ClearCase which I started accumulating back in 2004. I doubt any updates are coming as I rarely touch ClearCase any more.

Pick a Different Two

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 10:54:46 +0000

There’s an old saying that I first heard a couple of decades ago:

Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.

I was listening to an NPR story about Moore’s Law. At first I was thinking that it gave us computers that are “fast” and “cheap”. But we never got the “fast”. The workstation on my desk 25 years ago was just as fast as the one I’m sitting at now. Ah, but that old Sun 3/50 didn’t have to do nearly as much as my current workstation, which is true. That old workstation didn’t have color, virtual desktops, animated 3d icons, streaming audio and video, bloated web and email programs, etc. But somehow I got my work done just as quickly. What’s happening here is another law is cancelling out the “fast” part of Moore’s Law: Wirth’s Law. That law basically says that software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster.

I B.M.

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 05:31:08 +0000

IBM comes through again! It’s bad enough they replaced the ClearCase installer with their “Installation Manager” (a classic failure to follow the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But now we get error messages like this:

The Installc executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.

Very helpful. We don’t know what library it was looking for, or where it was looking. Of course, I guess I should be thankful, as it is unusual to even get error messages from the Installation Manager.

Retroactive matriarchy

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 05:04:08 +0000

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by such things, but while researching the Dutch portion of my family tree, I ran across an organization, which had this statement on the web site: _“You may be eligible to become a member if you are a descendant in the direct male line of an ancestor who …” _

I have no interest in joining, but if that one word were not in that sentence I would be eligible. But since three women stand between me and the last male in the that line, I am apparently too tainted by the feminine for me to be in their presence. Had those three women been men, I would have no more blood connection to the ancestors in question than I do now, except I would have some remnant of their venerable surname on my driver’s license.

The Lessons of Technocracy

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 05:39:09 +0000

Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy, a utopian dreamer, always thinking about how to “save the world”, wandering through a county fair. In amongst the usual merchants he spots a booth run by an organization called Technocracy. A book with the title “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?” catches his eye and draws him in. Being shy, he grabs a few pieces of literature and wanders off. Upon reading these it seems to be the very utopian dreams he has had, and this organization claims to have the “blueprints”. He and his father quickly join the organization and become deeply involved in it.

Funny Spam

Fri, 27 Mar 2015 05:16:05 +0000

The only good thing that spammers do for us is to give us something to laugh at. The latest case was a comment in my moderation queue which started like this:

{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.

It continued on for quite a while, but I’ll spare you. Clearly someone screwed up their automation. Just for grins, I wanted to see if I could write a one-liner to process this input, and, viola!

But Weasels are Natural!

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 06:02:01 +0000

I have been involved or witness to a number of debates which have led me to the conclusion that the word “natural” should be considered a weasel word.

Being vegan I have people tell me that it is “natural” to eat animals, and on the other side I see vegans claiming that not eating animals is “natural”. People argue that the paleo diet is “natural”, or that a raw food diet is “natural”. On the civil rights front, people argue that homosexuality is not “natural”, and, in the past, people argued that interracial marriage was not “natural”, or that slavery was “natural”. People arguing against GMOs will say they are not “natural” and people on the other side will say the opposite (I’ll get into that one in a future post). I’m sure everyone can think of other examples of these, possibly coming from one’s own mouth.

Clickbait and Gandhicon

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 16:45:21 +0000

I’ve seen an increasing number of articles which make a point to put “vegan” in the headline even when the article is only peripherally related to veganism, or not at all. But regardless, the headline always points out how wrong vegans are. It seems to me that this is a clickbait strategy. The word “vegan” has become clickbait, luring both vegans and anti vegans to click the link. But I am confused, where does that place us on the GandhiCon scale? Are they laughing at us or fighting us?

Version Control Kool-Aid

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 05:51:35 +0000

I spotted this today in a discussion about Subversion, and a workaround for a situation which ended up corrupting the workspace:

Arr… the reason I’m trying to get us to switch to Git. Less of this funny business.

I will admit, I’m not a big fan of Git. But my biggest problem with it is the born-again fervor of some of its fans like the one above. I will freely admit that Git has some advantages over Subversion (but there are disadvantages as well). But to claim that workspace corruption and the attendant workarounds is something Git (or any version control system) is immune to is an indicator that someone drank too much kool-aid.

Guess again

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 02:44:26 +0000

Here’s an error message I first remember seeing a few decades ago. Sadly I just ran into it again. It seems guessing games never go out of style.

Error while changing the NIS password.
The NIS password has not been changed on somenisserver.

Gardening in March

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 03:14:08 +0000

On Facebook someone posted an article about gardening tasks for March. I thought that was, at first glance, a cruel joke. Here’s what my garden looks like right now:

Nothing is going to happen there for a while! Of course, I did just get out my soil blockers in preparation for seed starting. That and dreaming are about the only garden-related things taking place just now.

This is probably the first time I have shared anything about my garden. I have generally avoided doing so because I feel I am usually fumbling along, making lots of obvious mistakes, and generally not exhibiting the kind of skill I should have. Perhaps I’m just being hard on myself. I’ll try to share more here, maybe my posts can help one or both of us to learn something, or, if nothing else, it will give you something to laugh at.

An argument so tired it's unconscious

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 08:52:09 +0000

I spotted this in a comment thread. This is argument is a tired bit of nonsense, but I’ve never seen it argued with such verbosity.

To anyone saying we should all become vegans because of the inhuman way animals are being treated. You are not thinking things through. Say we all become vegans. Eventually farms all over the world would go out of business. And do you think they would just let all the cows and chickens or all livestock go free to roam where ever they please? No, you would be condemning millions of animals to a needless death because their would be no use for them. Are you going to take the 500 head of cattle at the farm down the street and take care of them? Are you gooding to make sure they are kept healthy and well fed? I think not. Becoming vegan is not the answer to the inhumane treatment of animals.

The most... human

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 02:21:42 +0000

I am deeply saddened by the news that Leonard Nimoy has passed away. Some of my earliest memories of childhood were watching the original series. The show was on every weekend and I watched it religiously. Spock was my childhood hero. I wanted to be just like him: incredibly smart, calm and unflappable in the face of any catastrophe. When being smart and idolizing such a character earned me the scorn and ridicule of my peers, he taught me not to let my emotions get the best of me. Though I never so much mastered my emotions as bottled them up. But I think Spock grappled with that as well.

The Vegan Book of Permaculture

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 05:30:02 +0000

Reposted from my BlurBlog: The Vegan Book of Permaculture

By Meghan

Graham Burnett has published a new book called the Vegan Book of Permaculture. This book combines ethical vegan recipes with permaculture principles for ecological living and gardening.

“Long time permaculture practitioner and activist Graham Burnett has written a very practical guide to living lightly using permaculture design within the ethical constraints and opportunities of a vegan diet. Based on lived experience rather than ideology, the strong focus on food, complete with recipes, helps vegans and omnivores alike make better use of the diversity of plant based ingredients in cool temperate climates. For vegans wanting to reduce their ecological footprint, maintain nutritional balance and increase their autonomy and resilience in a rapidly changing world, this book is the ideal introduction to permaculture living and land use.”

A tragic love poem waiting to happen

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 09:41:30 +0000

Here’s a sad story from the Van Bunschoten book, which would be a great premise for a tragic love poem (like The Highwayman)

Sarah, b. Jan. 8, 1786; d. Sept. 5, 1803. She was to have married John Greene, … He came up from New York to his home near Hyde Park with an illness that proved to be yellow fever and she nursed him. He died; she caught the fever from him and also died, and they lie side by side in Hyde Park church-yard.

A Case Study: Banshee

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 04:57:24 +0000

For many years I was forced to use Windows on my work computers. I almost always listen to music as I work, so I needed a music player. I quickly grew dissatisfied with Windows Media Player, and after some searching I found Foobar2000, which I really liked. A utilitarian, but capable, interface which did most everything I needed and did it pretty well.

A few years ago I switched my desktop machine to Linux. Hurrah! But now the music player again became an issue. I tried Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok. None of them were very good. Nothing close to Foobar2000. All seemed to suffer from the same issues: lots of pointless graphical flourish, confusing and/or dumbed down interfaces, poor functionality, and lousy error handling. By process of elimination, I ended up with Banshee. A grudging choice which I regret on most days.

Too much error handling?

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 22:15:48 +0000

Years ago one of my co-workers complained that my code had “too much error handling”. I was astonished, but said little in defence since I was the new guy on the team. Looking back on this, years later, I am bothered by this attitude. It is easy to write code that works correctly when everything it depends upon works correctly. Given the complexity of modern software and hardware, there are an endless number of things which can fail.

Descendants of Liberty

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 09:14:40 +0000

We just finished watching Sons of Liberty. I think they took huge liberties with the historical facts, and the amount of time spent in commercials seemed rather extreme (over 25% by my measure). But I thought it was well made and entertaining.

But I’m not a movie critic and I’m not going to even pretend to be one. Rather, I will share a section of the Van Bunschoten book which provides a glimpse of actual history related to the events in the show.

Making a killing with this argument

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 04:22:57 +0000

After reading An Open Letter From a Farmer to Angry Vegetarians I was pondering how to respond…

I was driving home from my in-laws late at night, and one can’t help but notice the white crosses at the side of the road, or the bodies of many deer, raccoons, squirrels, etc. smeared across the roadway. And I suddenly connected the dots!

The truth is that there is no road we can drive on without killing. None. A trip to your local grocery store may not involve running over a single child or small animal, but the building of that road costs endless lives.

Law and Order -- New Netherlands

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 11:20:15 +0000

I found this tragic story in the Van Bunschoten book, which starts out sounding like an episode of Law and Order, but then goes medieval.

On April 20, 1682, Arendt Isaacs’ wife died suddenly and not without suspicions of foul play. Her body was examined by the magistrates, constable and two doctors, and in conclusion — “Arendt Isaax, her husband, was ordered to place his hand upon his breast and call upon God Almighty to give a sign if he were guilty of his wife’s death; which he did. But no change was visible.”

Suicide Food

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:09:48 +0000

One of my favourite blogs was Suicide Food. After reading that blog I started noticing more occurrences of this repugnant practice, I started taking pictures and submitted some to the blog. But then the blog stopped. I still have dozens of images I have collected, and I find more every now and then. You can see the raw photos in my Suicide Food album. I may post about them every now and then, but don’t expect any noose ratings or well-written commentary like the aforementioned blog.

Three things

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 20:21:09 +0000

It’s sad that I still have to try to convince people that they should be using some sort of version control. But I do. One of the things I say is that there are three kinds of things in the world: Things that are checked in, things that are generated from things that are checked in, and garbage.

Slavery in the family

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 09:04:41 +0000

Since this is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it seemed like a good time to document some disturbing things I have found while researching my family tree.

For several months I have been reading Concerning the Van Bunschoten or Van Benschoten family in America: a genealogy and brief history, and some time ago I first noticed (with shock and horror) the word “slave”. None of these were my direct ancestors, but rather distant cousins many generations removed (obviously). But regardless of how there is a connection, having any connection to slave ownership is shameful.

Genealogy

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 09:55:53 +0000

When I was about 12 years old my mother got a little booklet from a distant cousin which listed the family tree of the Way family (my maternal grandfather’s family) going back to the late 1600’s. For a social studies project that year, I copied the information onto the given charts and was quite proud that I had three pages. But, I had no understanding of the value of this information, how hard it was to get and what was missing. With that, I dropped it and didn’t think about it for a very long time.

See logic, circular

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:26:22 +0000

I noted this error, but forgot to note where I got it. I’m pretty sure it was IBM’s support site:

There is an issue with your login that needs to be addressed before you can successfully login to SR. Please contact the SR help desk.

So I can’t log into the SR system due to an “issue”, and to get it resolved, I need to file an SR. My head is spinning, just like the logic.

What you don't want to hear

Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:19:13 +0000

An old friend of mine and I often needle each other about various things. Since I became vegan he will often try to find various things to change my mind. The latest was that he sent me a link to Allan Savory’s TED talk. I watched it through twice and read a couple of critiques of it. I also watched What’s Wrong with TED Talks?, but that’s another topic.

One thing I noted was the enthusiastic applause in the video and the love-fest in the YouTube comments. Why is that? And why did my friend forward this to me? Because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. The key point of his talk is that not only is it acceptable to eat that hamburger, but it is necessary as it is the only way to feed the world and reverse climate change.

Defensive omnivore bingo on GitHub

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 17:14:23 +0000

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I just put Defensive Omnivore Bingo onto GitHub. So if you have any contributions, feel free to send me a pull request. Of course, email still works.

In progress

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:13:53 +0000

Next blog post in progress…

Every day I see many of those supposed progress indicators. But they don’t indicate anything other than lazy and sloppy programming. That little icon will go on spinning regardless of what is actually happening. In the rare situations where it really does relate to work being done, it rarely relates in a useful way. It seems that these days most software is written with several assumptions in mind:

Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:57:43 +0000

Reposted from my BlurBlog: Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives

By timothy

reifman writes Upstart social networking startup Ello burst on the scene in September with promises of a utopian, post-Facebook platform that respected user’s privacy. I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn’t. It isn’t an open source, decentralized social networking technology. It’s just another privately held, VC-funded silo. Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with “an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online.” Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward. In part one of “Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives,” I revisit/review six open source social networking alternatives in search of a path forward beyond Facebook.

Conflicts of interest in nutrition research:

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 14:39:01 +0000

Conflicts of interest in nutrition research:

By Marion

Over the July 4th weekend, a reader sent a link to a paper about to be published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition titled Increased fruit and vegetable intake has no discernible effect on weight loss: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

I took a look at the abstract:

Studies to date do not support the proposition that recommendations to increase F/V intake or the home delivery or provision of F/Vs will cause weight loss. On the basis of the current evidence, recommending increased F/V consumption to treat or prevent obesity without explicitly combining this approach with efforts to reduce intake of other energy sources is unwarranted.

Apparently The US Is Pretty Selective About What Science it Believes

Tue, 13 May 2014 03:26:27 +0000

Apparently The US Is Pretty Selective About What Science it Believes

![Apparently The US Is Pretty Selective About What Science it Believes](http://ift.tt/1iKypwO)













      













    Submitted by:
    (via [Phene Thyla Mine](http://ift.tt/1hocsPt))









    Tagged:

infographic , funny , science , usa , g rated , School of FAIL

[Share on Facebook](http://ift.tt/1iKypN7)

April 23, 2014 at 8:00AM

via FAIL Blog http://ift.tt/1mPSTVC

It takes a village

Fri, 02 May 2014 14:34:19 +0000

A few days ago I was investigating a bug (which caused Subversion to dump core) and I discovered this sentence in the commentary about a very similar bug: “A friend of mine told me it was normal, and it was not the duty of apr_hashfunc_default to ‘sanitize’ the parameters it receives.”

When I first saw that statement I thought “no, it takes a village to write a program”.

That commentary above is now doubly hearsay, and I have no idea if this is their official stance on the bug, but it is a troubling sentiment, in any context. Software, these days, is composed of countless layers of libraries and it is everyone’s responsibility to deal with unexpected inputs in some way. Otherwise you will end up with confusing error messages which are far removed from the actual problem (which is an increasing problem as we all know). Simply letting a segfault happen is not acceptable, if you’re going to insist on crashing the calling program, then at least issue an error message first. Do something!

Secret codes

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:44:06 +0000

This popup just came up on my wife’s phone:

Alert!
 Sorry, we ran into a problem. Please try again. If the problem persists call us at 800-xxx-xxxx. Error Code 1000.

While it is admirable when engineers make an effort to enumerate all the possible errors a program might get, but to do so without providing further on-screen explanation is just plain mean. Perhaps they should supply a secret decoder ring for those who don’t simply want to stare confusedly at the screen and retry the operation under the assumption that the unspecified “problem” will simply go away.

Stupid Password Rules

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 13:38:23 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of stupid password rules in my day. Some of them indicate shoddy programming, for example, sites that require you to use symbols, but then exclude many of them (the phrase “SQL injection” pops into mind). Others reflect antiquated systems, for example, requiring that the first 8 characters contain all types of characters (upper, lower, number, symbol) but allowing longer passwords, or just overly limiting password length.

Solving Problems We Don't Have

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 14:05:08 +0000

After attending Subversion & Git Live 2013 in Boston, I was thinking that I need to get this written down, and where better than a rarely updated and even more rarely read blog?

In my job, I work with numerous version control systems. When I was first exposed to Mercurial and Git, I realized they very nicely solved a problem which had plagued the free software community for years.

Several years ago, I wanted to contribute fixes to p42svn, which is in a Subversion repository (though what I am about to say applies to most any pre-DVCS system). I created my workspace, and then set to work on my fix. When I was done, I could not check in, since I didn’t have checkin access, and didn’t expect to be granted such access since the owner of the project had no idea who I was and if I could be trusted to checkin to the repository. So, I had to do a diff and then mail that to the owner. But, now, for my next change it got trickier. Since I only want to send the owner the changes I made since the last patch, I had to manually save a copy of what I sent last time (since I couldn’t check in). At this point I could have just created my own repository, and started checking in, which would have simplified this. Fortunately, I never needed to do that as the owner kindly gave me access to the repository.

Silent failure

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:29:20 +0000

I often rant about lousy error messages, but it seems that a growing (and maybe more worrisome) phenomenon is silent failures. Here’s an example I just ran into with ClearCase (this is not a new bug, I first encountered it over 10 years ago):

$ ct desc -l vob:. | grep MITTR
 SLC0314:C:\views\MITTR.vws [uuid 107553f5.340c4e00.bd2c.3f:52:42:42:31:7b]
 $ ct rmview -force -uuid 107553f5.340c4e00.bd2c.3f:52:42:42:31:7b
 Removed references to view "SLC0314:C:\views\MITTR.vws" from VOB "/vobs/factcheck".
 $ ct desc -l vob:. | grep MITTR
 SLC0314:C:\views\MITTR.vws [uuid 107553f5.340c4e00.bd2c.3f:52:42:42:31:7b]

What exactly is happening is unimportant, what you can see is that there was an entry in the “desc” output, then I tried to remove it, which the output indicates happened, but double-checking indicates nothing was done. It_ failed_, and lied about it.

ClearCase -- A Eulogy

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 03:15:16 +0000

Back in 1994 I was just a few years out of college, where I was often pushing people to use the new-fangled RCS system. On my first day at my new job I was handed a stack of ClearCase manuals and told help get it deployed. I was amazed. While the system was difficult to configure, it presented some amazing features, a few of which have yet to be equaled.

Spam, spam, spam...

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 03:28:45 +0000

The majority of comments I’ve gotten on this blog have been from spammers. But fortunately these vile dregs of humanity have managed to amuse me a few times. Here’s a sampling of my favorites:

I love to visit veganmilitia.org every day hemorrhoids piles

I’m really not sure how to interpret that. Are the daily visits to my site helping your condition? Or causing it?

Oh my goodness! a tremendous article dude. Thanks Nonetheless I’m experiencing challenge with ur rss . Don’t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anybody getting equivalent rss drawback? Anyone who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx

Subverted synchronization

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 03:25:03 +0000

This is a fun one from svnsync:

Synchronizing repository some-replica...
Transmitting file data ......................................!
.......................svnsync: Error!  while replaying commit

What’s even better is that a Google search reveals a number of people running into this exact error. Sadly, few of them got replies, and those that did get replies did not get helpful replies. Certainly no solutions.

Mashing the error message on the previous line is a nice touch as it makes it harder to spot the error message, especially when there are numerous periods (thousands, in my case).

I'm not telling!

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 03:29:50 +0000

Is what I get for dutifully installing all updates?

Telling me that the install failed twice is nice, but does not hide the fact that I still don’t know why. I feel like I’m playing a guessing game with my 3 year old daughter: “I’m not telling!”

I know that if I go to IT they’ll want to reimage my machine. At first their predilection for reimaging bugged me as I thought more effort should go into figuring out the root cause. But over the years I’ve come to sympathize with their position. Usually after hours of probing you run into a brick wall, an OS bug or some silent failure and without source code there’s no way around it. And figuring out a root cause only helps if there’s some hope that the problem may be fixed. So why bother?

Slow down or stop?

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 04:56:40 +0000

[I just found this blog entry had been sitting in my drafts folder for over a year, better late than never, I guess]

As I was reading On PETA and Weekday Vegetarians, I was reminded of a story I heard a long time ago: A guy did a rolling stop at a stop sign, and immediately got pulled over. The police officer told him that he failed to stop, to which he answered “But I slowed down!” The officer ordered him out of the car, and began beating the man, after a few seconds of this, the officer asked “do you want me to slow down or stop?”

Musings about Hackerspaces

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:21:14 +0000

Recently I attended the inaugural planning meeting for the Danbury Hackerspace. During the inevitable “why are you here” discussions, I stumbled through some impromptu thoughts on the subject, but I’d like to flesh out my thoughts here.

I spent the first 10 years of my life on a small farm. My father also spent his first 10 years on the same farm, but in the depths of the Great Depression. The echos of that experience reverberated throughout my own childhood. But I’m not talking about poverty or starvation, but rather about the resourcefulness and creativity of my ancestors in a situation where every commodity was precious; where, if you wanted something, you often had to make it yourself; if something broke, you had to fix it rather than throw it away and buy a new one. Many materials, which today would simply be thrown in the trash, were saved and reused in creative ways.

Repeat what I just said

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:20:02 +0000

When I was a child, my parents would often tell me to repeat what they just told me, since I usually wasn’t paying attention. Now I have to do the same thing with my own daughter. Payback time, it seems.

But this blog entry isn’t about parenting, it’s about error messages.

I was just writing some code and realized that an important rule when writing error messages is to repeat back what the user said. There are many violations of this rule, the first one that comes to mind is this one from Windows:

Using Perforce, perforce

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:49:58 +0000

The more I work with Perforce the more I dislike it. I just wasted over an hour of my life doing what should be a trivial action: adding a user.

At this point a parenthetical rant is needed: I don’t think the administrator of an SCM system should have to do such things. User management should be an IT issue, and the project owner should be in charge of who can access their repositories. The SCM administrator should just be in charge of making sure the system is set up such that that is the case.

What part of 0x80070057 don't you understand?

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:42:30 +0000

Another nice one from Thunderbird:

The hex number is a nice touch: provide the illusion of being specific and helpful while not actually doing so. The suggestion to contact a system administrator is a good one, as misery loves company.

Was failed?

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:23:03 +0000

The new installer for ClearCase is a mess in many ways, but this error made me cringe:

System kernel was failed to build properly and as a result MVFS was not loaded.

The bad grammar and missing punctuation are just a little extra insult to the injury of not being told HOW the kernel build failed, or, perhaps better yet, what to do about it.

Yet again

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:54:29 +0000

This seems to keep happening to me: I get caught up in a lot of other things in life and never quite get around to my blog. Then after a year or so of inactivity, I suddenly remember it, update the software (now running trunk!) and start posting again. Let’s see how long I can keep it going this time. I’ve got a bunch of mostly written drafts in the queue so expect them soon.

First seeds!

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 14:31:29 +0000

Winter here has been brutal, and while it has slackened up quite a bit, I still have a thick blanket of snow (about a foot is my guess). A couple of weeks ago I started thinking about getting the garden started this year, and got several books both on indoor and outdoor plants. I also started finding gardening blogs one of the first ones I found, Your Small Kitchen Garden, was doing a seed giveaway, I signed up and forgot about it. But yesterday I got a letter from an address I didn’t recognize and opened it to find this:

ClearCase Critique

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:23:45 +0000

NOTE: I started writing this on 22-Jul-2004, tranferred it to my personal wiki on 15-Oct-2006 and the last edit was on 4-Feb-2011 (except for an update and formatting fixes).

I have been working with ClearCase since 1994 and have become very familiar with its problems and shortcomings. I am using this page to accumulate a list of what is wrong, broken, or sub-optimal with ClearCase. This page has been written gradually over several years, often when I was in a bad mood after running into a problem. There are a number of good features of ClearCase which are not included in this page, but that information is readily available from IBM marketing.

Too Specific

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:47:44 +0000

I have seen a number of Facebook friends join the cause NO DOG SHOULD BE BEATEN, and then I got an invite. Should I join or not? Of course, I cannot disagree with such a sentiment. However, it feels a bit odd. It would be like saying “No 4 year old Connecticut girls should get beaten with yardsticks”. Again, something very few people would disagree with, but far too specific.

If we widen the sentiment out to all animals, dogs, human or otherwise, that is better. Then replace “beaten” with “harmed in any way”. That sounds much better to me. But, I doubt that cause will get 1.3 million members, as it would require them to look at what is on their plate and realize they have to do something more than click the “join” button.

Ninety percent solution

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:13:48 +0000

Very early in my career as a programmer, someone gave me advice that I needed to aim for the “ninety percent solution”, in other words, don’t waste time trying to get the perfect 100% solution. Tom Cargill of Bell Labs provided a concise explanation: “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” This is analogous to the problem of distilling ethanol, getting it 97% pure isn’t too hard to do, but going beyond that takes enormous amounts of energy, and normally isn’t worth it (that is based on fuzzy memories of college chemistry class, so forgive any technical inaccuracies).

Evangelizing

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:44:44 +0000

I just read the article Why I Hate Telling People I’m Vegan, and I can partially understand the frustration with the barage of questions (often silly) and nutritional misconceptions. Go play some bingo to get a sampling. When I first became vegan, I often wouldn’t have clear answers in these situations and dreaded them. Over the years I’ve read enough that I can now address many of these questions.

However, there is a passage in this article which begs the question “why are you vegan?”

Aw, snap!

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 17:55:55 +0000

Here’s one from Chrome:

Cute icon! Funny phrase! I guess those are supposed to distract us from the total uselessness of the error message.

Defensive Omnivore Bingo

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:25:54 +0000

A while back I happened upon a “defensive omnivore bingo” card at veganporn, I then found the original, a revised version, a more artistic version, a feminist version, and many reposts.

As an exercise for learning Jquery, I wrote a javascript enabled version which picks random statements from a long list including ones from the versions above and some of my own. I started to add answers to some of the statements in popups. You can even place chips on the squares (by clicking), but the “bingo” is entirely anti-climactic. I actually started writing this months ago, but I just worked out a couple of annoying bugs. Feel free to send me any suggestions for additional statements and/or answers.

The more things change...

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 13:33:44 +0000

Back in 1992 or so I was writing an email-based trouble-ticket system which tried to match up incoming emails to existing trouble-tickets by looking at the In-Reply-To: email header. Much to my chagrin, I found that a few email programs did not add this header when replying to messages. So I had to add a set of kludges to hook together tasks that were mistakenly broken by such email messages, and some subject-line shenanigans to allow tasks to be manually specified.

Quantity over Quality

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:39:46 +0000

I got this error, which definitely wins the quantity over quality prize:

23:56:50,545 [main]  INFO historyLogger:84 - EXCEPTION CAUGHT: org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.CCException: java.io.IOException: No space left on device
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.internal.CCContentRetriever.getContent(CCContentRetriever.java:94)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.calculateLengthAndChecksum(SvnAddFile.java:104)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.dump(SvnAddFile.java:83)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.SvnRevision.dump(SvnRevision.java:127)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.SvnDump.dump(SvnDump.java:191)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.saveDump(Main.java:221)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.run(Main.java:91)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.main(Main.java:49)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: No space left on device
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.writeBytes(Native Method)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.write(FileOutputStream.java:260)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.Util.copy(Util.java:303)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.FileCache.put(FileCache.java:72)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.FileCache.put(FileCache.java:87)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.internal.CCContentRetriever.getContent(CCContentRetriever.java:90)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.calculateLengthAndChecksum(SvnAddFile.java:104)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.dump(SvnAddFile.java:83)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.SvnRevision.dump(SvnRevision.java:127)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.SvnDump.dump(SvnDump.java:191)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.saveDump(Main.java:221)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.run(Main.java:91)
 at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.main(Main.java:49)

So, after that deluge of “information”, all I know that I ran out of space on a filesystem. Which filesystem, you ask? If they told us that would ruin the fun of this guessing game!

Self-fulfilling stereotype

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:50:13 +0000

I’m sitting in a doctor’s waiting room looking at a diet/nutrition magazine, which really seems to be a “how much meat and cheese can we squeeze in and still be healthy” sort of magazine. I just ran into the “special diets bookshelf” section and see a vegan cookbook listed. The reviewer says

… with dozens of recipes each proving that “lactose free,” “ethical” and “environmentally sustainable” are not synonymous with boring or difficult.

Born Again?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:41:11 +0000

My comment about ex-vegans in a previous post was, apparently, ahead of its time. Recently, a couple of newly ex-vegans have blogged about their experiences, and while there have been a number of good responses, including this, this, this and this. I wanted to address a different angle.

I have run into several ex-vegans (or ex-vegetarians) over the years and have recently started to think of them more as “born again meat eaters”. Like the stereotypical born again Christian, they hang onto a pile of partly-understood rationalizations for what they are doing, believe they have discovered absolute truth, and won’t shut up.

Could you be more vague, please?

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:47:20 +0000

Thunderbird popped this one up one day:

I cannot remember the context, but then I shouldn’t have to! So, basically some unspecified operation failed, for an unknown reason. It’s nice they mentioned the network connection didn’t get cleaned up, though it’s rather useless information since I don’t know what should be done about it, let alone what the impact is. As a programmer I can guess that the dangling network connection is just a minor adminstrative detail which will get cleaned up on the next reboot. But I can imagine my mother getting this error message and being worried that viruses or spammers are going to sneak onto her computer this way.

Friendly or insulting?

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:57:33 +0000

There is a fine line between being user friendly and treating people like morons. It is apparent that some programmers think that users cannot be presented with meaningful details of error situations as it will scare or intimidate them. This crosses the line and is simply insulting. Case in point (from Google Chrome):

Wow, that’s terribly uninformative. In this case, I am trying to debug a mod_rewrite configuration (a Sisyphean task, to be sure) and I did figure out how to dig in and see the real error message, which distills down to this:

Scaring users

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:25:33 +0000

Some years ago I ran into a piece of code which shocked me, and in the time since then I have realized that it exemplified a lot of what is wrong with software. Sadly, I have since lost the code, so here is an approximation:

unless (open(F, "/some/important/file"))
{
    # We don't want to scare the users with an error message
    # warn "Unable to read config file";
}

Am I the only one who is outraged by this? What is scarier to a user, to get an error message when a genuine error situation occurred or let the software plod on getting even stranger and more non-sensical errors which cascade from this initial problem? For example, imagine the following code further on:

These are great mysteries

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:14:45 +0000

To kick off my error message “hall of shame” series, I thought I should share my all-time favorite. I got this one many years ago, I was minding my own business and suddenly this pops up in the middle of my screen:

I did not have the presence of mind to take a screenshot back then, so this is “faked” from memory, but all the essentials are here: An empty title bar, so I have no idea which program generated the error, the “unknown error” deepens the mystery and the “ok” button serves as a cruel, taunting punchline.

Eating Skippy?

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 03:11:25 +0000

The Oct 9th issue of New Scientist had an article titled “Eating Skippy?” written by a now, former vegetarian about the merits of eating the flesh of Kangaroos.

I like to think of former vegetarians (and vegans) more as “born-again meat eaters”. Like some born-again Christians, they often hang onto a pile of partly-understood rationalizations for what they are doing, believe they have discovered absolute truth, and won’t shut up.

Fortunately the author of this article doesn’t seem to be one of these. Her article seems to be pretty compelling, but in the end it shows that if you do something for the wrong reason, it won’t stick.

Error messages

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:45:23 +0000

There’s an old joke told many years ago by those who didn’t like Unix:

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, he says, “will usually know what’s wrong.”

Site moved and hopefully resurrected

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:32:06 +0000

I just migrated this site to Laughing Squid’s new cloud hosting and upgraded WordPress. I’ve been hoping to get this blog going again, as I have a bunch of rants bottled up, but it has been a very busy year: My daughter just turned two, we moved across the country last year and the house has needed a lot of work.

I debated setting up separate blogs for the different topics of concern to me, but I figured that’s just too much work, so there will be an odd mix of topics here including: veganism (from an abolitionist viewpoint), bicycling, gardening and various computer programming topics.

Translation: Prepare to lose your lane... twice!

Thu, 21 May 2009 14:00:50 +0000

Since there isn’t much traffic on 124th Avenue and it doesn’t generally go anywhere useful, Bellevue decided to put a bike lane on it. That isn’t quite fair. There numerous houses in that neighborhood, so if you live there and are commuting into downtown here’s the baffling situation which will greet you as you approach 8th Street. Rather than do something logical, like put up a sign that says “bike lane ends” and simply stop the lane marker, they chose to instead force cyclists towards the curb, twice! Since the bike lane marker doesn’t end properly, car drivers get no indication that they may actually need to expect bicyclists to merge with traffic in order to get to the intersection with 8th St, so they zoom right past blissfully ignorant of your plight. So really, this bike lane translates to “get off the road”, but that title would get monotonous.

Translation: Thin cyclists only, beyond this point

Mon, 18 May 2009 14:00:27 +0000

NE 8th Street is pretty frightful place to ride, with the worst part being the I-405 overpass which I generally call a “wrongful death lawsuit waiting to happen”. Fortunately for the inevitable victims, Overlake Hospital is right next door. But once you get to the other side of the freeway there are fragments of bike lane! One helpfully appears on the westbound side at 120th Ave, right as you begin scaling a steep hill. But once you get to the top, around 123rd, the bike lane gradually loses about 1 foot of its width, which means you’re just a hair’s breadth away from the Mercedes SUVs piloted (to use the term very loosely) by the gesticulating, bluetooth enabled maniacs.

Translation: Turn Right!

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:00:45 +0000

Our oh so brief sojourn down 106th Ave comes to an abrupt end at 4th Street. Of course it isn’t enough to simply bring the bike lane to an end, but to re-assert the God-given supremacy of the automobile. Rather than just paint the line straight to the crosswalk, they swerve the line over, squeezing cyclists and making it rather hard to continue up 106th Ave. The implication is that you should instead, turn right… though watch out for the Hummer taking advantage of those extra couple of inches to accommodate their bulk as they proceed around the corner.

Translation: Inhale! Exhale!

Tue, 12 May 2009 14:00:04 +0000

As we labor up the hill on 106th Ave NE, towards 4th street we are presented with this odd situation: for no readily apparent reason, the bike lane briefly shrinks to about 1 foot wide, and then back again. I suddenly remember yoga class. Inhale! Hold! Exhale!

Translation: For your next trick, make a bicyclist disappear!

Sat, 09 May 2009 14:00:15 +0000

We continue south on 106th Ave NE towards Main Street, and here we are greeted an opportunity to do a magic trick! Make a bicyclist disappear, which is the apparent intent of this bike lane as in gradually narrows into nothingness.

It is too bad the bike shop moved from the storefront on the right, as they were conveniently located to commence repairs on bikes whose riders did not succeed in the vanishing trick, and instead ended up in the lane with the drivers, who, around here, don’t tend to notice cyclists until they bounce off their windshield.

Translation: Remove Panniers and Duck!

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:00:43 +0000

More so than the rest of Bellevue, downtown has almost no bike facilities. However, on 106th Avenue between 4th and 2nd something resembling a bike lane can be found! Something unique in downtown. But, like so many of the other bike lanes I’ve been talking about, I think this one was another “accidental” bike lane: there was extra space on the pavement so they painted lines which resemble bike lanes and lull us into a false sense of security, for we shall soon be disappointed.

Annexing the Sudetenland

Sun, 03 May 2009 21:44:33 +0000

This is the latest capitulation to the automobile taking place in Bellevue: They have decided to widen NE 8th Street, for two blocks! I am uncertain how these two blocks will do anything for the unfixable traffic situation, other than move the head of the traffic jam two blocks farther along.

Also, look closely at the building in the middle of the picture and the distance between it and the new curb. Somehow, I doubt a usable sidewalk can be put there.

World's Newest Vegan

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:36:35 +0000

The world got one more vegan yesterday (5-Nov-08) at 6:14pm when Madeleine Helen Marie Fisher was brought into this world. She was 7 lbs 1 oz and 20 inches long. As can be seen in this picture she quite liked laying on her front with her butt up in the air. Contractions began just after Obama’s acceptance speech, so obviously she was waiting for that before gracing us with her presence.

Translation: Dead End?

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:15:08 +0000

While riding down 114th Ave NE, near SE 2nd St, I spotted this amusing juxtaposition. Just in case you can’t tell from my terrible photography, there is a sign helpfully indicating that the bike route for the Lake Washington Loop is straight ahead. But from this angle, directly ahead of that sign is a “dead end” sign. Maybe this is a different definition of “loop” than I am accustomed to.

Translation: Bicyclists use even more caution

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:51:32 +0000

Here we are at 118th Ave SE, approaching SE 8th Street. The “motorcycles” warning sign wasn’t there last time I rode through here, otherwise you could more easily see the irony here. The small sign is a route marker for the Lake Washington Loop bike route, which helpfully indicates that the route is straight ahead. Of course the temporary warning sign is not just blocking the bike lane, but also obscuring the fact that it narrows down to nothing. Nothing says “bike route” like vanishing bike lanes.

Translation: Buy a Hummer!

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:56:14 +0000

116th Ave NE is Bellevue’s “auto row”, and, ironically, has a nice wide bike lane along the uphill side of an otherwise rather busy four-lane street (though it only extends about 6 blocks). But then it is abruptly tapered down to nothing just before the intersection with the unbelievably hostile 8th Street (more on that in future posts). The red and grey sign on the right is for the local Hummer dealership whose driveway is right where the bike lane ends. So this is obvious attempt to make me turn right and trade in my bike for an SUV so that I will fit in more amongst the botox and silicone laden, cell-phone wielding, trophy wives in their Lexus SUVs who menace the streets of Bellevue.

Translation: "mountain bikes only"

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:08:31 +0000

If you look at the Bellevue bike map, you’ll see 118th Ave marked as a bike route (the map does not distinguish bike lanes from bike routes as it would show how few of the former exist). After leaving downtown 118th Ave does have a couple miles of bike lanes. But at the intersection with SE 8th Street bicyclists are apparently expected to jump over the curb extensions on both sides of this intersection. So, mountain bikers will get a bit of jumping practice, but those of us on road bikes or recumbents are left in a position where we will undoubtedly have to stop and wait for traffic to clear, and, if the light is still green, proceed. A harsh reminder to bicyclists of their second-class status in the eyes of car drivers and road designers.

Gandhicon Three?

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:27:18 +0000

Are we at Gandhicon three yet? We now have two cases of anti-bike people demanding environmental reviews of facilities for bicyclists, one in San Francisco and one in New York City. (of course the supreme irony is that these people probably would have fought environmental reviews for car-oriented facilities). Whatever, I’m looking forward to Gandhicon four.

Musings on "productivity"

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:08:41 +0000

Quite often in economic news I hear mention of increases in worker productivity. I never really thought much about the deeper meaning of that until recently. It is obvious that the amount of work a given person can do in a day can only increase so far, so where does this extra “productivity” come from? Certainly, machines can make a worker more productive or even make them redundant, but that also has its limits. But I’ve recently come face-to-face with this increased “productivity”.

Translation: Traffic or Ditch, Take Your Pick

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:43:37 +0000

As I ride my bike I notice some odd traffic features, and one day I thought that all the lane markers and signs communicate an action, “don’t cross this line”, “stop here”, &c. So I started thinking about what bike related markers were communicating to me. Since Bellevue is, relatively speaking, pretty hostile to bicyclists, what they communicate is often hostile or at least confusing. So in this and any subsequent “translation” posts, will share such things.

Thoughts on CSAs

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:31:25 +0000

I have been a member of the Helsing Junction Farm CSA for four years now. In their recent newsletter they were asking a variety of questions mostly related to two topics: should all veggies come from the farm or is it ok if they buy veggies from other farms or even wholesalers, and the quality of the produce. Here are my thoughts.

My motivation for joining a CSA is probably different from most. Industrial agriculture has spent the last half century or so destroying family farms, biodiversity and our health. On a personal level, we have distanced ourselves from the seasons and the reality of food production, further subjecting small farmers to our fickle sense of convenience. Reducing food production to mere consumerism is an insult to farmers and a capitulation the worst attributes of humanity. So for me, joining a CSA was a concrete way to speak out against this, to reconnect myself, directly, with a small farmer, and make all our lives better in the process.

Symbiosis?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:38:47 +0000

When I read Omnivore’s Dilemma the first thing that struck me was their use of the word “symbiosis”. I grew up on a farm, and I took care of the chickens, and I started thinking about “symbiosis”. Symbiosis implies that when the two creatures interact, they both benefit from the relationship. But for anyone involved in animal agriculture to use this word is simply a whitewashing to hide what really happens, or a way for them to assuage their conscience.

Green Tyranny?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:45:38 +0000

When I first read Greens are the enemies of liberty I didn’t even think it was worth responding to. Kind of wrestling with a pig. The article is a mess of strawmen, broad generalizations and hysterics, but amongst this there are a few vital points to contemplate.

He rightly fears authoritarianism, and I think everyone, aside from those in power, fear that too. There are people on every side of every debate who might want to impose their will on others, but to generalize an entire movement in such a way is fallacious. I certainly have no such desire, as domination and hierarchy have been the source of most injustices throughout history. However, he does confuse demands for legal proceedings (i.e. “criminal tribunals”) with authoritarianism. Justice and revenge are very different things.

The First Symptom

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:15:35 +0000

In a rare display of sanity, the FDA has, for a third time denied Merck’s applications to sell Mevacor over the counter. They noted that “high cholesterol is a chronic condition lacking overt symptoms, unlike other health problems that are currently treated over the counter.”

Actually, there is usually a clear symptom: that sausage you’re shoving down your gullet. Knock it off and you won’t need to pay Merck for dangerous chemicals.

A Nation of Bicyclists?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:34:38 +0000

This passage is from a recent op-ed by David Brooks:

The high point of his campaign, so far, has been his energy policy, which is comprehensive and bold, but does not try to turn us into a nation of bicyclists. It does not view America’s energy-intense economy as a sign of sinfulness.

While I seriously doubt that any mainstream candidate intends to turn us into a “nation of bicyclists,” I have to ask… what’s wrong with that?

Separate but Equal?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:41:43 +0000

Years ago I went to a bicycle legal clinic where I first heard cyclists called an “embattled minority”. Since that time I have ridden many thousands of miles in many cities and found it to be true in a variety of minor ways. One of them is parking. The condo complex where I live has such a policy. Let’s review… here’s what car drivers get:

Here’s what bicylists get:

A meat by any other name...

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:09:39 +0000

Yesterday morning there was a segment on NPR about “vat grown meat” and a few days earlier it was discussed on VeganFreak Podcast. Of course a vegan wouldn’t eat it, but why not?

Let’s review the three main reasons for being vegan: for the animals, for the environment and for your health.

The health argument seems obvious: whether the cells are grown in an animal or in a test tube, they are still animal cells, with all the well known health risks that go along with that. Of course, by carefully engineering the cells, it may be possible to reduce these harmful components, though it is unlikely that a profit-driven enterprise will do this. Furthermore, a number of chemicals will undoubtedly be involved in the production, and at least some of those will be in the end product.

Raise Alarm

Mon, 12 May 2008 04:24:50 +0000

I spotted this on http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/grist/daily_grist/~3/285422414/index.html

“Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm.”

Uh, no it wouldn’t, that happens every day. 10 billion animals are killed every year in the US alone… granted, that probably doesn’t represent the one out of three statistic, but it should “raise alarm.”

Mine, Mine, Mine!

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:49:02 +0000

The other day I was watching an episode of Law & Order SVU. The perpetrator in this case was outwardly a clean-cut pillar-of-the-community, but behind that mask was a psychopathic killer (which is an apt metaphor for many corporate executives, but that’s a different rant). But one of the clues someone noticed was that he never referred to his wife or son by their names, it was always MY wife and MY son, and it was clear he meant those in the possessive sense.

The big question

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:16:58 +0000

I’ve heard about this video going around, and No Impact Man points out that we are Forced to face the big questions.

His only mistake is saying “Don’t watch it if you are queasy”. If you eat meat you must watch it. You must be able to look at all parts of the production of your food and be prepared to not only watch but to participate. If you are not willing to hold that captive bolt gun and watch it slam into a cow’s head, if you are not willing to gut that chicken, if you are not willing to cut up that corpse, then you are a coward and a hypocrite. The vast majority of people in the developed world are happy to let others engage in this horrible, brutal (and dangerous) work so that they can pick up their meat, neatly wrapped in plastic, from their grocery store, and remain blissfully and willfully ignorant of the full reality of what goes on.

What did he mean "slow of mind"?

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:20:04 +0000

Now that I have completed my 41st orbit around the sun, I figured it was about time I got my act together and got a blog going. I have been waffling between wikis and blogs for some time. This site was a blog about 4 years ago, and recently I’ve been messing with wikis. Neither of them is the ideal solution for collecting and organizing the various ideas and things a person runs across. It seems to me that the wiki doesn’t work so well for random little thoughts and such, but the blog doesn’t do much for helping organize things. But, it’s been years since I last tried blogging, so we’ll see.

About

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 15:34:59 +0000

The Vegan Militia is a group of six-toed hillbillies who love animals in ways not permitted in 46 states… well, not really.

This blog is the ramblings of a recumbent bike riding leftist abolitionist vegan nerd and all-around weirdo. This blog is just a place to put my random thoughts, meditations and rants about things of interest to me. Whether anybody else finds them of interest remains to be seen.