The Mills

Holy cow. That’s all I can say about this screed. This guy has defined intelligent womanhood in such a way that no woman I know well (not my wonderful wife, with a degree in physics, and not the amazing friend of ours working on her PhD and already teaching at 3 universities) would want to fit his definition of intelligent. He seems to believe only the violently anti-male version of the women’s rights movement has any validity.

The painful quotes:

“every thoughtful or liberal or intuitive or open-minded white woman I know worth her vagina monologue and her self-determination and two centuries of nonstop striving for equal rights and sexual freedom and exhaustive patriarchal unshackling is right now openly horrified, appalled at what the addition of shrill PTA hockey-mom Sarah Palin seems to have done for the soggy, comatose McCain campaign…”

and

“Truly, among women in the know and especially among those who fought so hard to bring Hillary Clinton to the brink of history, nausea and a general recoiling appear to be the universal reactions to Palin’s sudden presence on the national stage, stemming straight from the idea that there’s even a slight chance in hell such an antagonistic, anti-female politico could be within a 72-year-old heartbeat of becoming the most powerful and iconic woman of all time. “

Wow. There’s antagonistic, and then there’s this. The crazy part? I do actually know people who agree with him.

The Solitude of Self Nocturnality

Originally uploaded by Fort Photo

This is a gorgeus picture!

Another good man passes on.

“I’m saddened and offended by the idea that companies exist to enrich their owners… That is the very least of their roles; they are far more worthy, more honorable, and more important than that. Without the vital creative force of business, our world would be impoverished beyond reckoning.” – Michael Hammer, as quoted by the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/business/05hammer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Update:I forgot to post the link to the original article. I first read about Michael at http://advice.cio.com/abbie_lundberg/remembering_michael_hammer_father_of_reengineering

So, this site looks the same as it has for a while, right? But now it’s on a new server!

For a long time now, I’ve been relying on the kindness of a friend of mine (Thank you James!) to host my web site for me. However, now that AT&T has changed the terms of service on at least one of their consumer dsl plans to allow web site hosting, we’ve made the jump. I am now hosting this site on my own machine!

What really gave the impetus is that I’m working on creating a home task list using dotProject, and I’d forgotten the master MySQL database password. Rather than resetting it for him (how tacky!) or calling again to ask, I decided to just move the site to my own machine where I can reset the password when I need to.

I may rely on James for backup storage in the future, but now I can avoid sticky situations [like the one where I created a pseudo-hacker site on his machine for a class project, but forgot to tell him, and then James panicked, thinking I'm not a hacker, and then... yeah. Like that. ]

I believe this.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeWHmehAH28

It’s why I can never vote for a wealth-distribution scheme (or cantidate).  I don’t have the right to take someone else’s rightfully achieved goods or wealth – even if I think the trade plied to get those goods is yucky (like porn, tobacco grower, etc.).  Since I don’t have the right, I can’t give that right to the government – not even with a group of others, because none of them have the right, either.

Contrast this with defense.  I can delegate the right to defend me to the government, because I have the right already.  Collectively, a group of us can also do so, because each of us individually has that right.

So somebody (who will remain nameless) sent me an invite to the Tagged! website yesterday. Not knowing what it is, I went to the site to investigate. In the terms of service, I found the following:

‘As a Member, you will be provided with a variety of services, as described on the Tagged website (the “Services”), including the ability to earn points for referring friends to the Tagged website.’

That’s all I need to see. I don’t need to join any site which encourages others to monetize their relationships – I grew up with family who thought Multi-Level Marketing was a great idea, and I’m firmly opposed to any organization that tells people to utilize their relationships for cash or points.

This is not to say I won’t invite people to something whimsical, like some of the Facebook apps (Knighthood, anyone?). But those are purely fun – no real world awards/rewards.

I guess I’m just a crochety old man.

Ok, so it’s time to come clean. I love clever lyrics. Wierd Al has some, Tom Lehrer has some, I’m sure there are others. But I have to admit to being somewhat a fan of Mr Ronfar Z3. Who’s he, you ask? Well, ask Youtube.

There’s The Hardware Store
STAT-60
New Math
The Elements
Hamlet
That’s Mathematics
The Hunting Song
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
The Irish Folk Song
N’T
You Probably Shouldn’t Move Here

Search for Ronfar Z3, Lehrer, or even Animaniacs on Youtube for more fun.

Cynthia arrived home today, from a very successful week-long geneology trip with her mom and sister Jenny.  We’ve missed her!  (So take the events of the last week, throw-ups, midnight fevers, and all, and run them through that filter!  Needless to say, we’re all glad to have her back.)

Kyle ran a fever all last night, around 103 degrees. Here he is at around midnight, his fever finally broken (temporarily, anyway) by the bath.

This is my shower.

This has been my problem for the past year. Yes, the shower is on full blast in the picture.

I have actually been using other showers in the house recently, since I disliked the low flow on the shower head so much. Below is a shot of the shower head, sitting on its face.

If you click through the above picture, you can see the detail better. Here is a couple of close-in shots of the regulator you can see in the neck of the shower head above.

Here is the regulator disassembled:

the O-ring:

The regulator without the O-ring, back:

front:

So if you remove the rubber O-ring from the regulator, and then put the regulator back in without the O-ring, this is what you get:

Success!!! No, it doesn’t break the other functionality of the shower head (massage, etc.) And yes, if I replace the O-ring, the shower returns to its normal (slow) self.