Speakeasy

I am leaving soon and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly.

I've always wanted an occasion to use those words. :)

This is my last new post at LiveJournal. The account's gone back to free status and, at the end of the month, I'll be deleting it. It's been fun, but I've come to want a different venue.

For anyone interested in following my further adventures on the web (or in need of a cure for insomnia), I have two blogs:

Public Secrets, my blog for politics, foreign affairs, current events in general*, and where I still post as "Irishspy."

*(Center-Right, American scale)

A seat by the fire, which is more for everyday life, hobbies, amusing events, and ... stuff. I post there under the name "Barliman." It's only just started, so there are but few posts there, and a couple of those are transplants from the archives here.

I created separate blogs because I know some people don't care to read about politics and the like, so "A seat by the fire" was created for them. Knowing me, there will be occasional slippage between the two, and I might one day merge them, but, for now, this will do. :)

Anyone reading is welcome to comment, though I usually don't answer at PS. I think of that comment area as belonging to the reader, and for readers to argue amongst themselves. I'll likely be more interactive at Seat.

I'll still be following some LJs, but I was disappointed that there's apparently no feed that Google Reader can pick up. Anyone know of a workaround?

And now, it's time to go.

Gort -- veracto!

edit: Apparently the links I put under the blog names aren't working. Here they are in their raw glory:
Public Secrets: http://irishspy.typepad.com
A seat by the fire:  http://breeland.wordpress.com  

That necrophilia really is illegal in Wisconsin.

(And Kind of shocked to learn that only about 20 states specifically ban it....)

I can't wait.

My paid account here at LiveJournal expires in a few days and, when it does, I've decided to delete the whole thing for reasons to do with the company's Russian ownership. There are quite a few posts I'd like to save, however. Is there any software available that will let me, in essence, download my entire LJ? I've done a bit of searching, but haven't found quite what I was looking for.

Thanks!

An obesity map of the United States. There are some interesting regional clusterings: I'm not surprised that most of the the states of the Confederacy top the chart (other than Florida), but I was taken aback by Wisconsin being only in the middle of the scale; based on the many GenCons I'd been to in Milwaukee, I'd expected the Badger State to leave Mississippi in the dust.

Interesting that the West and New England are the most sleek and svelte parts of the country.

Well, isn't this special. My street has become a scene out of Cops. Sirens, helicopters, cops blocking off intersections, and, while I'm outside satisfying my curiosity, I overhear one of LA's finest say the magic words "two guys with guns."

I think I'll stay inside this evening.

Today's the anniversary of the first modern-era UFO sighting: June 24th, 1947, near Washington's Mt. Ranier.

And just a few decades later, Seattle has become a high-tech hub for the world. Coincidence? Hah! I mean, doesn't Bill Gates look like an alien to you?

Sad news. George Carlin has died. In his heyday in the Seventies, Carlin was sheer comic genius, a caustic wit who scorched his targets (usually on the Right) with screamingly funny monologues. He wasn't nearly as funny in later years, perhaps his time had passed, but his best routines still had the power to make me laugh.

In Carlin's memory, here's one of my favorites: Carlin on the differences between football and baseball.

 

People who put sky-blue skulls in their aquaria should be drummed out of the fishkeepers corps.

For these guys, it's building the first A1 "Peppercorn" steam engine in Britain in more than 60 years. Neat!

A map of Sherlock Holmes flat at 221B Baker Street, as reconstructed from information found in the 60 canon stories.

Circumnavigating the globe. I wonder if their leader is a Drake?

Which poison fits your personality?

What kind of poison is your personality? Ergotoxine You're so deadly you've chipped out a space in history! You were responsible for famines and tens of thousands of people fell victim to your deadly touch. Despite being a lowly grain fungus, you've managed to afflict people with fantastic flares of gout, hallucinations, ecstatic mania, and of course death. Hell they even blamed the Salem witch trials on you. Click Here to Take This Quiz

Quizzes and Personality Tests

I've mentioned before that I need to get a new laptop computer: mine's quite old now -- it came new with Win98SE, and there are a lot of things I can't do with it I'd like to do now.  Looking at what's on the market, Vista is straight out for me. I don't want to deal with Mickysoft's bloated, constipated elephant of an OS. So, I've decided that, when the time comes in the next year, I will either get a Mac (Auuummmm....perfect!) or a PC loaded with Ubuntu linux. I can test-run OSX with the laptops we check out to students here at work, so that's no problem. But I'd like to try out Ubuntu, which leads me to....

Sometime in the next few weeks, I will be turning my home desktop into a dual-booting WinXP and Ubuntu system. Right now I'm reading as much as I can about installation and configuration to make the experience as painless as possible, particularly regarding partition schemes: apparently the Ubuntu installation routine has its own partitioner, but it seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that it can only create a single Linux partition out of free space, and can't create a third FAT-32 data partition that could be read by both Windows and Ubuntu. (Ideally, I'd like to create a small "/home" partition where Linux could store settings, too.)

So, has anyone reading this done something similar? Any advice to offer? Warnings that "this way lies madness?" Is there software available that will let me create the partitions I want either before or after installation?

So, I have iTunes on my workstation, and so far it's an OK experience, not great. One of the problems I have with it is that I cannot tell it to play a limited subset of tracks without creating a playlist. Example: My library contains tracks 1-20. I want to play tracks 3-8 and not go on to 9. So far, iTunes insists I must want to hear track nine and thus keeps going. I find this defiance annoying. Is there a setting I'm missing that tells it to play only what I select, or must I create a playlist each time?

There used to be an old joke that, in the Soviet Union, you didn't just watch TV: it watched you.

I never knew that was true in the Motherland, too:

I really, really want to see Hillary pull an Atomic Drop on Obama. Or is she more of a steel chair kind of candidate?


McCain's an old-fashioned kind of guy: eye-gouging.

There's a seminar on Thursday titled: "<td valign="top" align="left">Hygiene and You." :D</td>

While waiting for(ever) for the event registration page to load, I had (plenty) of time to read this message on the log-in page:

Due to high registration volume, the registration process is working very slowly. We are currently trying to add additional servers to alleviate server load. We ask for your patience and that you please not continuously try to reload as that only increases load. We will update this message as new information comes available. Thank you for your support!

Call me naive if you will, but, after several years of server crashes both in Milwaukee and Indianapolis due to high load, and having plenty of reason to expect a heavy load again this year, would it not have been wise of Peter & Co. to add servers BEFORE registration day?

Must be some secret to success in the convention business that I'm not aware of.

Even at political journals. From The Weekly Standard's blog, on Obama's recent case of foot-in-mouth disease:

A couple months ago I asked whether or not Barack Obama's sonorous voice resembled the Voice of Saruman in its power to enthrall and persuade. (You can get the full geek here.) But now geektastic reader B.G. sends in a note wondering if Obama's latest bitter/cling problems don't also have an eerie parallel with the Saruman we see after the Battle of Orthanc:

After Saruman was imprisoned in Orthanc, his only remaining power lay in his Voice, but it was his undoing to have to use that power in front of a wider audience. He would direct the power of his Voice first to one listener and then to another, with varying degrees of success, but others who witnessed his conversation saw through the trick and were unswayed.

Here's Gandalf speaking with Merry about the encounter:

"He will have guessed, surely?" said Merry. "Were they likely to end any other way?"

"Not likely," answered Gandalf, "though they came to the balance of a hair. But I had reasons for trying; some merciful and some less so. First Saruman was shown that the power of his voice was waning. He cannot be both tyrant and counselor. When the plot is ripe it remains no longer secret. Yet he fell into the trap, and tried to deal with his victims piece-meal, while others listened."

Now Obama has fallen into the same trap as Saruman--speaking to an audience in San Francisco, belittling rubes in fly-over country. Unfortunately, for him, others listened.

Is there anything Dungeons & Dragons can't teach us?

Once a geek, always a geek. :)

I wonder how many hit-dice a senator gets?