Octopodial Chrome

So I was watching the video for Jefferson Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now and had an idea: a cheesy 80s film night. This isn’t for the true classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it’s for the guilty pleasures like Top Gun, Adventures in Babysitting or Mannequin. Probably Weird Science, Real Genius and Revenge of the Nerds. Maybe License to Drive or Blind Date. I wonder what others would qualify? I’ve never seen Footloose, but it sounds like a likely candidate. Ditto on both counts for Dirty Dancing.

Anyone else have thoughts? There are probably too many for a single night, but a whole series of Cheesy 80s Film Nights sounds fun to me.

Theodore Dalrymple—a British subject and physician, and thus with intimate knowledge of their health care system—warns us that there is no fundamental right to health care and that State-funded health care is often insufficient. Takeaway line: There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article about how food safety is wreaking havoc on the environment. Apparently food buyers are trying to make plants—grown in nature, under the sky—as sterile as possible, by mandating dead zones around vegetable beds, killing off of animals and so forth.

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to…wait for it…just wash off the produce?

I recently happened upon Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet. It examines how it is that an approach that succeeds for one company doesn’t necessarily work at others. This isn’t rocket science, but one sees it happen over and over. Basically, cargo-cult imitation of what worked in one situation doesn’t necessarily work in another situation any more than the original cargo cults succeeded in bringing back the angels-with-gifts by setting up bamboo airfields and coconut headphones.

The real method behind every successful methodology is this: take an honest look at your problems, and find a specific solution for them. The solutions to someone else’s problems may address some of yours if they are sufficiently similar—or may lead you in entirely the wrong direction.

This should be well-known, but apparently it isn’t.

Use your head: stop at red.

Nat Friedman has some interesting thoughts about nerds and jocks. He refers to Germany as a country where engineering is respected. I wonder how true that is…isn’t football pretty popular over there?

On this anniversary of our independence, you might take a moment to consider how fortunate we were in our Founders. Unlike so many other revolutionaries, they didn’t trust in man’s good nature, but rather his baseness; they formed a government which was meant to control itself.

Smart guys.

You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.

Not that Linux—or even Unix—is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS. The remaining midrange OSes like IBM i might not be a bad fit either.

The problem with Windows is not simply that it’s shoddy: all software has bugs, generally lots of them (Lord knows Linux has plenty). The problem is that it’s not resilient to those bugs, and that one has a great deal of difficult working around those bugs and flaws. Unix really isn’t that great in and of itself but one can extend it and massage it into shape; Windows isn’t that great (although the operating system itself—I don’t mean the user interface—might actually be better), but what you see is more or less what you’re going to get.

This list has been circulating for years, but it’s true by all accounts.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it grey and live in it for six months.
2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house, on the outside of the walls and label all the piping so you can identify what you just hit your head on.
3. Pump 10 inches of nasty crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean it up and paint the basement Terracotta.
4. Every couple of weeks dress up in your best clohtes and go to the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $20 per beer until you’re hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.
5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawn mower.
6. Raise your bed within six inches of your ceiling.
7. Have your neighbor come over at 5am and blow a whistle so loud the Helen Keller would hear, and shout Reveille, reveille,all hands heave out and trice up.
8. Have your mother in law write down everything she wants you to do that day, then you must stand in the backyard at 6am and have her read it to you.
9. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere, this is to ensure that your engine is properly lit off.
10. Repaint your house once a month.
11. Have your neighbor collect your mail for a month, randomly losing every 5th item.
12. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, only to watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
13. Have your 5 year old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.
14. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
15. Periodically, shut off power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting Fire, fire, fire! and restore power.
16. Purchase 50 cases of toilet paper, locl up all but two rolls, ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
17. Sleep on a shelf in the closet, replace the door with a curtain, have your wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you gp to sleep. She should then shine a bright flashlight directly into your eyes and then mumble Sorry, wrong rack.
18. Safety wire the lug nuts on your car.
19. Drive to the gas station, get permission from the service attendant to refuel your car, don rubber gloves, apron, and face shield, start pumping, then tell wife and kids in the car,We’ve commenced refueling.
20. Move in with all the guys you wouldn’t get caught dead hanging out with from high school for 6 months.
21. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. Jump and get dressed as fast as you can, making sure you button the top button on your shirt and your pants tucked in your socks, run outside and uncoil the garden hose.
22. Install a small florescent lamp under the coffee table, get under it and read books and/or sleep.
23. Raise the thresholds and lower the top seals of your doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
24. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan whlie it is in the oven, spread icing on real thick to level it off, serve at every meal.
25. Every so often throw the cat in the pool and shout man overboard, starboard side, then run into the kitchen and sweep all the pans and dishes off the counter, yell at the wife and kids for not securing for sea!
26. Put on the headphones from your stereo, hang a paper cup around your neck with a string. Go stand in front of the stove and say stove manned and ready. Stay there for 3-4 hours and say stove secured, going offline. Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box mounted on the wall.
27. Have your little sister yell We are in a training environment then have your dad frantically wave a red and black rag at you yelling Black smoke and fire while you wave an uncharged garden hose at him.
28. Stand in the doorway of your house and every time the dog comes through the doggie door, ring the doorbell twice and announce Peleliu arriving, then when he leaves, ring the bell twice and announce Peleliu departing.
29. Lock yourself in your home for six months, consuming only Snickers and Pepsi/Mountain Dew. At the end of the six months go to the high school track and try to run a mile and a half in 9 minutes and when you can’t, you must stand at attention whle your wife yells at you for not being Within Standards.
30. Go outside at midnight, open the fire hydrant full force, then try to hammer a piece of firewood in the hole.
31. Every hour for 4 hours walk about your house, checking the water level in the toilets and the refrigerator tempt, go over to the neighbors house. Ring the doorbell, when he answers, salute him and say All Secure.
32. Stand at the end of your walkway behind a podium with a stick, when your little sisters friends come over, ask to see their drivers licenses, those who can’t produce a valid ID, you must harass them about it but let them by anyway.
33. Have your mom sew your name on the back of all your pants.
34. At midnight, write on a legal pad which neighbors are home, what sinks, showers and ceiling fans are online, and whether or not your wife is at home.
35. Tag out all the power to your livingroom to change a lightbulb in an endtable lamp
36. Call your youngest kid Crank and make him do the dishes for 90 days.
37. Draw and test a daily lube oil sample from your car.
38. Yell Attention on Deck every time your wife enters the room you are in.
39. Paint a glow in the dark ring around every doorway leading outside your house. Then paint a glow in the dark box on every wall in the house. In the box write the name of the room and give it a useless nubmer and call that box a Bull’s Eye.
40. Put red lights in every light fixture leading outside the house and install a switch that turns this light off anyways when the door is opened.
41. Get the same phones used on stove watch, go the the backyard and say Aft Lookout Online and stay there all day.
42. Yell at your kids for wearing white socks.
43. Flip your kids’ mattress on the floor because the seam of their bedsheet was running the wrong way.
44. Install a 2 by 2 foot shower and try to wash your feet. (GOOD LUCK)
45. After a rainstorm, get a mop and get up all standing water from the porch and sidwalk, so the wife wont’ bitch, and don’t forget to sweep away all the standing water into the street.
46. Install a wooden box with a small slot in the top and a hole in the bottom that leads directly to the trashcan, and on the box in bold letters writte Suggestion Box.
47. Pay for the kids to go to small engine school. When the lawn moswer breaks call SEARS to come and fix it.
48. Serve dinner at 4pm. Give your fat son a generous serving because he looks hungry, and be sure to starve the skinny one who is actually very hungry, and secure dinner before everyone eats.

I sometimes think our old man might have been using some of these on us.