Politics: I'm not sure I believe the headline.

So I click on CNN.com, and the first thing I see is:

Feud between Bush, congressional Democrats heats up.

I expect to now go to the science page and see "Black hole gets denser" or "New, wetter water".

With any luck, both sides are busy enough with the hatin' that they forget to do any legislatin'. The next best thing to no government is a gridlocked one.

Boomsticks: New content up...

...at the other place. Got another essay due today, too.

Boomsticks: 1911 mods for the meathook-challenged.

For the Charter subscriber from Picayune, Mississippi who was wondering about "1911 modifications for a small hands", I would recommend three things:

#1: A short trigger. These are available from pretty much every aftermarket trigger manufacturer. I'm partial to STI, but Greider makes a nice unit if you don't want a polycarbonate trigger pad.

#2: A flat mainspring housing. I like Smith & Alexander because I like lanyard loops (which can be used to open bottles.) I've also had good luck with Ed Brown's part.

#3: Slim grips. These will require slim grip screw bushings and short screws. As an alternative, Navidrex offers coke-bottle contoured slim grips that will allow you to use the factory screws and bushings.

Et voila! A 1911 set up for the small of hand.

Avoid putting an extended slide stop on the gun. These are too easy to hit by accident with the support-side thumb while shooting, plus their increased mass can give them enough inertia to lock the slide during normal cycling. Nothing screams "teh n00b" like an extended slide stop on a 1911.

Don't skimp on your tires.

Why you shouldn't buy cheap tires for your jumbo jet, courtesy of Phlegm Fatale.

Windoze and iBorgs...

So Kim du Toit links to the post about Apple's iPhone battery goofiness, using it as the springboard for a rant against all things Apple. I don't see how anybody can get that worked up about them, but ranting is Kim's schtick, and he does it well. What followed is, however, pure comedy gold.

The iBorgs showed up in his comments section, sounding very Microsoftish with their "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" claims for the lack of battery swappage on the new iPhone, and pointing out that the iPod was this way, too. This ignores the fact that if your iPod batteries go dead, the worst that happens is you can't use your Super Walkman for a couple of days. The iPhone, on the other hand, is touted as a device to run your whole fricken' life; if it goes Tango Uniform, the consequences are much, much worse. There are plenty of people out there who don't even have land lines anymore; if they need to ship their iWidget off for battery replacement, they are well and truly screwed until it gets back: incommunicado, with their phone directory gone so they can't even call folks and tell them why they can't talk to them.

I really like Apple products for the most part. I collect old Macs. I paid over a grand for a TAM on ebay back in '03, coming out on top in a three-way bidding war. It was built in '97 and I still use it as a bookshelf stereo. I could probably get my money back out of it right now, too. By contrast, the Compaq Presario I owned back in '97 is probably in a landfill someplace. In 2001, I was looking to buy a portable DVD player. Most of them on the market back then were selling for about $1k. I bought a used iBook instead for about the same price; it's the computer I was posting on from Oleg's, having performed yeoman service for six years now far above and beyond its original duties as a gadget for watching movies on roadtrips.

Macs have always been solidly built, and their design has always inspired bizarrely cult-like loyalty. I mean, I love my Color Classic, but not like this guy does. However the iBattery thing is just the latest in a string of "WTF were they thinking?" moves that have been with us since the Mac debuted on my birthday in 1984. Take the Mac's mouse. Please. I know they claim they have reasons for it, and clinging to the archaic one-button setup is probably single-handedly responsible for the existence of Logitech, but have you ever seen anybody offer a one-button unit for Wintel machines? I rest my case.

Another annoyance is the Mac's keyboard. Every time I transition from my home machine, a Wintel P4 tower, to the iBook, I have to remember that I no longer have both "delete" and "backspace" keys, and that "delete" now means "backspace". Again, has anybody ever offered a simplified Mac-like keyboard for Wintel machines? No, but you can buy lots of zillion-key Wintel-type keyboards for your Mac.

The worst thing, though, is the fans. The iBorgs. I mean, does the bunker mentality come free in the box, or do they ship it to you after you've sent in the registration card? It's the same reason I have a cordial dislike for Glocks; the product may be adequate, but if you use it, people might think you're one of them, and I'm just not ready to join The Collective, thankyouverymuch.



(A PS: I would like to clear up one point, however. KdT got some digs in on TD's work in firing up his old NeXTstation, poking especial fun at this:

NEXSTEP, by the way, was the first operating system shipped on CD-ROM. NeXT computers, though, did not come with CD-ROM drives.

It should be pointed out here that the NeXT was not a home computer, but a business workstation intended to operate on a network. The reason it had no external media drives is so that Suzy Secretary or Joe Accountant or Eddie Engineer wouldn't go sticking floppies or CDs with virus-filled, buggy Mahjongg games and Star Trek screen savers into their work computer. If software needed to be loaded, it'd come from the server. If the OS needed to be re-installed, some guy from IT would trot down with an external CD-ROM drive and install it. In other words, it was designed to keep the end user from dicking around with things with which they had no business dicking around, something that every IT guy who supports an office full of Wintel machines would heartily applaud.)

Bleg: SWF, old, cranky, eccentric, ISO...

...battery and A/C adaptor for PowerBook 520c. Other accessories considered. Must be cheap(ish).

Neato!

Wind-powered giant insectoid engineering sculpture thingies!

(H/T to Victory Soap.)

Boomsticks: If you are not aware...

...of the monumentally stupid new proposal from OSHA regarding ammunition and reloading components, War and Peace has the situation summed up in a nutshell.

I missed it. (But not much.)

The first Live Earth concert in Australia, that is. Still, it must have had its moments. For instance:

Wolfmother's wild-haired Andrew Stockdale was more bombastic, in keeping with his Grammy-winning band's Deep Purple-style stadium rock aesthetic.

"Saviors of the world raise your hands," he shouted.

Is that not just pure comedy gold? I note, however, that a more cynical attitude towards the Live Earth concerts has begun creeping into even TASS er, CNN reporting.

Critics say Live Earth lacks achievable goals, and that bringing in jet-setting rock stars in fuel-guzzling airliners to plug in amplifier stacks and cranking up the sound may send mixed messages about energy conservation.

That sounds more like something from Les Jones' Live Earth site than from CNN. Pravda on the Chattahoochee remained staunchly loyal to the official party line, however:

"The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert," The Who's singer Roger Daltrey recently told a British newspaper.

Organizers say the concerts will be as green as possible, with a tally of energy use being kept. Proceeds from ticket sales will go toward distributing power-efficient light bulbs and other measures that will offset the shows' greenhouse gas emissions, they say.

"This is going to be the greenest event of its kind, ever," Gore told The Associated Press recently. "The carbon offsets and the innovative practices that are being used to make this a green event, I think, will set the standard for years to come."

...

In Johannesburg, four-time Grammy nominee Angelique Kidjo offered a tart response to Daltrey's comment. "Criticism is easy," she said during a news conference Friday that involved performers in the local concert. "And there is a kind of fashion of cynical people around us. You are cynical — what the hell are you doing to change the world? Get your butt out there. Do something."

And it is beyond time to do so, she explained.

Honey, according to your own beliefs about human effects on the climate, the best thing you could do for the planet would be to stay home and shut the hell up.

Who didn't see something like this coming?

iCan't believe they're that dense.

$79 and a three day turnaround? That's going to play well in Peoria. Good job limiting your potential market to the bunker-mentality types with Apple tattoos, Stevie. Now the rest of us will just have to wait until Sony clones your toy for less money, but with replaceable batteries.


(H/T to #9.)

W00t!

VFTP Command Central is wired for sound again, baby!

I'm posting from the comfort of my own office chair with my own iTunes playing and with a cat trying to scale my leg and mooch some of this cheeseburger I'm eating. (No, I'm not kidding and no, she can't has cheeseburger.)

Blog Stuff: Leaving Nash Vegas.

Well, the cats are probably plenty hungry by now, and I don't want to get caught up in rush hour either here or back in K-ville, so I reckon I'd better point the Zed Three eastward. Hopefully service has been restored back at VFTP Command Central.

Catch y'all on the flip side.

If you just have to extort money from me...

...then at least spend it wisely. Here's a good example:

Say you need to design a new glove for astronauts. You could establish a new NASA Glove Design Laboratory, or you could take $200k (which wouldn't cover the annual salary of a few government engineers, let alone equipment, facilities, and assistants,) print that amount on a big cardboard check, and offer it to the person who brought you the best space glove.

Hey, presto! It works.

(I wonder if we'd achieve similar results if we just printed a quarter of NASA's budget on a cardboard check and offered it to anyone who, say, gave us a space program...)

I love how the...

...Live Earth On MSN logo has swirly green vines and noble lions and majestic monuments like the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, and the Brandenburg Gate. Omitted from the final design were ice floes, sand dunes, tundra wasteland, tumbleweeds, a chigger, a pack of jackals, the anopheles mosquito, a Sudanese slave market, and a brothel in a back alley of Bangkok, since these were not considered part of the live Earth.

Save the planet, kids. (Or at least the pretty parts.)

News: Our agent has failed!

The CIA mole we sent to Venezuela under the thin cover of US Ambassador has failed in his mission to destabilize the government of Pugsley and topple him. We must recall him in disgrace, and send another crafty minion of the Evil Overlord Bush.

Via Site Meter...

...I notice that I seem to have inadvertently doubled the normal daily traffic of Concretechange.com, leading proponents of "Visitability" on the 'net. Sorry 'bout that.

More stuff I just don't get.

TFS Magnum links to a Tulsa World article on concealed carry in Oklahoma, which has been around since 1995 now. In the article is the expected line

"In the beginning, some people thought a wave of shootings by license holders would occur, but those fears have proved to be unfounded, [Jessica Brown, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation] said."

Now, I'm going to step back from the snark for a minute. While I don't believe that a BA in Journalism from a state college necessarily indicates that the holder of said degree is likely to stumble across the Unified Field Theory or write the next Great American Novel, I do accept that it probably proves that they are smarter than your average box of rocks. I also don't think that the typical journalist is maliciously eeevil, and would willfully write a lie so transparent that they know it would be pounced on within minutes of publication. This leaves only one explanation: Ignorance.

So, here is your journalist working for the Capital City Picayune in Capital City, Anystate. They've grown up in the 'burbs of Capital City, wrote for their high school paper, put in their four years of partying at Anystate U., and now have their dream job writing for the big paper that they grew up reading, maybe even on the editorial page. Guns are just not a part of their life, except what they've seen in the movies and on TV shows like Law & Order and CSI. Now the big news is that Anystate is about to vote on shall-issue concealed carry, so they express their opinion that it will lead to "Dodge City" and "shootouts over parking spaces."

And that is what I just don't understand. Is our hypothetical journalist's work ethic that poor? I mean, all the states bordering Anystate have concealed carry laws; some have had them for decades. Our journalist works in the news industry; don't they keep up with the news? Don't they think that if permit holders were likely to engage in shootouts that they'd have read about it occurring in neighboring states? If they hadn't been keeping up with the news from neighboring states, did they not do one iota of research before setting fingers to keyboard?

For heaven's sake people, if you are going to be that lazy at your job then you have no right to bitch and complain when the nasty wingnuts call you stupid or evil; you have only your own slack to blame.

Future computers from the past!

TD fires up a NeXT. At the end of the epic saga, victory.

As someone who has engaged in a vicious ebay bidding war to win a TAM and occasionally boots up her Color Classic just to watch toasters fly, I can totally sympathize.

News Flash! Desert is hot in July!

This has apparently taken some folks by surprise.

Some non-desert areas got fairly warmish, too. Spokane hit 100, which is only 8 degrees shy of the record set back in SUV-crazy, CFC-pollutin' 1928.

Personally, I blame the Gulfstreams For Global Warming concert and all the CO2 from Al Gore III's doobies.

Tam sells out!

AdSense.

I feel so cheap. Next comes the tip jar... (Advice from anyone who has successfully fiddled with ads & whatnot are always appreciated.)

Hey, hopefully this visit to Oleg's will generate some gun pr0n for more essays at the other blog when I get home, and people will be so amazed at the new content there that they will say "You should get paid for writing!" and then, you know, actually do so. (Assuming I has teh intarw3bz there again.)