Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.

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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
vulpine137	12:53p	The Kitchen Glock and other Stories Hurrah for Saturday. Hurrah for sleeping in today. Hurrah for going for cheesesteaks in a little while. Had a good night last night. Friend of mine's favorite aunt was in town, and she wanted her aunt to meet her weirdo friends. So I drove by and snagged Amythest, we went by Target to get stuff for the party, cheese for the buffalo burgers that were planned and fruit for dessert. We also looked at pool toys for Nymaz's new place, and I snagged a battery powered shark toy that's black and neon green. *grin* Also, got a copy of the latest Discovery Channel dvd release of shark shows. So it started as a very sharky evening. *grin* Get to Pat's place, say hi to everyone, meet the aunt. Nice lady, fun to talk to. Dinner was good, buffalo is yummy. We chatted about all kinds of subjects, including the new catch phrase of the week. 'Kitchen glock'. Always good to keep a gun in the kitchen, in case of food critics ;) Headed home around 1am, after lots of chatting. Dropped off Amythest, came home to hyper ferrets who needed to play NOW. So they played while I tried to stay awake. Finally went to sleep around 3am. A very good start to my weekend. Now, to order and get lunch, and then figure out the rest of my day. Ciao people :) Current Mood: good Current Music: A Haunting on DVD (Comment on this)
ffutures	5:34p	Tooth and Claw RPG disk contents This is the current contents list for the distribution CD for the Tooth and Claw RPG; it's about 319 MB all in, though a lot of that is the movie of The Lost World and three versions of A Voyage to the Moon. Does this sound OK? What else would people like to see up to say 350-400 MB? ( contents ) (Comment on this)
dduane	3:25p	Slate countertops are starting to sound like a better idea than granite The uranium content of granite has always been somewhat in our radar since we moved to Ireland, since there’s a lot of granite in Wicklow;  and where there’s granite, because of the decay of the tiny amounts of uranium it often contains, sometimes there’s radon as well. But here’s a side effect I hadn’t given that much thought to. As the popularity of granite countertops has grown in the last decade — demand for them has increased tenfold, according to the Marble Institute of America, a trade group representing granite fabricators — so have the types of granite available. For example, one source, Graniteland (graniteland.com) offers more than 900 kinds of granite from 63 countries. And with increased sales volume and variety, there have been more reports of [radioactive] or potentially hazardous countertops, particularly among the more exotic and striated varieties from Brazil and Namibia. “It’s not that all granite is dangerous,” said Stanley Liebert, the quality assurance director at CMT Laboratories in Clifton Park, N.Y., who took radiation measurements at Dr. Sugarman’s house. “But I’ve seen a few that might heat up your Cheerios a little.” Eek. I do not want my Cheerios heated up. Not even slightly! One more thing to think about for when we redo the kitchen… Tags: uranium, radon, kitchen, counter, countertop, granite, decay, radiation, radioactive (8 Comments |Comment on this)
ffutures	2:36p	Jonathan Coulton in Eire / UK in October For any UK / Irish Jonathan Coulton fans who don't already follow his blog feed j_coulton or the actual blog, he's doing some shows here in late October 10/24/08 - Dublin - Whelan's -7:30pm 10/25/08 - Glasgow - Oran Mor - 7:30pm 10/29/08 - Manchester - Manchester Academy - 7:30pm with Paul and Storm 10/30/08 - London - Shepherd's Bush Empire - 7:00pm with Paul and Storm Might be able to make the London show, I need to check some dates but can't until I'm back at work. (Comment on this)
rfmcdpei	9:19a	[BRIEF NOTE] Denialists in denial? Dana Millbank's coverage in the Washington Post of the testimony given before the United States' Congress by one Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness, against the idea of keeping non-closeted non-heterosexuals out of the United States' military, seems to be fairly conventional in terms of its incredulous tone. Holding the first hearing in 15 years on the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, lawmakers invited a quartet of veterans to testify on the subject and also extended an invitation to Donnelly, who has been working for years to protect our fighting forces from the malign influence of women. Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of "transgenders in the military." She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading "HIV positivity" through the ranks. "We're talking about real consequences for real people," Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about "inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community," the prospects of "forcible sodomy" and "exotic forms of sexual expression," and the case of "a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier. At the witness table with Donnelly, retired Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, a lesbian, rolled her eyes in disbelief. Retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, a gay man who was wounded in Iraq, looked as if he would explode. Inadvertently, Donnelly achieved the opposite of her intended effect. Though there's no expectation that Congress will repeal "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military, the display had the effect of increasing bipartisan sympathy for the cause. [. . .] It was tempting to think that Donnelly had been chosen by Democrats to sabotage the case against open military service for homosexuals. But Republicans had consented to the witness panel, which also included retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, a black man who likened the current policy to racial segregation in the military, and retired Army Sgt. Maj. Brian Jones, who argued almost as passionately as Donnelly for the need to keep the military straight. I've recently had the luck to re-read Jean-Paul Sartre's classic Anti-Semite and Jew. A passage there struck me. What he contemplates without intermission, that for which he has an intuition and almost a taste, is Evil. He can thus glut himself to the point of obsession with the recital of obscene or criminal actions which excite and satisfy his perverse leanings; but since at the same time he attributed them to those infamous Jews on whom he heaps his scorn, he satisfies himself without being compromised. In Berlin, I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury, and passed his time at swimming pools. The anti-Semite is like that, and one of the elements of his hatred is a profound sexual attraction toward Jews (46) (1995 edition) Ah, the powers of repression. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
supergee	7:41a	Fox News admits it wants America represented by blue-eyed blondes. Thanx to Oliver Willis (8 Comments |Comment on this)
supergee	6:58a	Stompsky chomps smut Chomsky stomps smut. Thanx to The Sideshow. (Comment on this)
supergee	5:56a	Happy birthday, magicwoman and mrissa (1 Comment |Comment on this)
angusabranson	10:19a	Fantasy Moguls Update I have one Studio's season coming to a close and another Studio entering into Week 4 of the next season in Fantasy Moguls - the online Fantasy Film Studio game which is played in the same way as Fantasy Football, but dealing with what's on at the Silver Screen! With one week to go The Phantom Syndicate is currently 2nd out of 28 Studios in it's League - plus I have one more film to open this weekend which will hopefully keep my earnings and ratings up for the close of the season. The last film on my slate is the new X-Files film so I have my fingers crossed for a raesonable showing. I'm 9.5 points behind the leader (Murphworld) but they had a weeks head start on me as I joined the season late - but saying that, we're both beating a number of studios which started the season two weeks before that so are doing pretty well to have caught up and clinging on to the top two spots! My second studio in a Legaue that only started a few weeks ago is the imaginatively titles Cubicle 7 Entertainment - can't think where I got that name from :p. Anyway, coming into Week 4 I'm currently flying high in 1st place with points of spare and 3 of my 6 seasons films now released (Hellboy 2, Dark Knight and Space Chimps). My other three releases this Season are Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Babylon AD and Bangkok Dangerous - so we'll see where I end up come the end of September - although this week I scored the top marks in every catagory so fingers crossed for a similiar showing in this League compared to the one now ending! Anyway, I need coffee. Catch you guys and gals in LJ-land later and hope you all have a great weekend! (Comment on this)
lrc	12:15a	Tonight's photo invention On my drive home from work this evening, I was thinking about setting exposure in cameras. In short, camera light meters haven't really changed a lot in 50 years, despite the fact that your basic camera is ten million light meters. They are optimized for snapshots, or action shots, but pretty much suck for posed shots. When I'm taking a picture that I care about, I'll fiddle with the light meter, take a guess (or let the camera take a guess) at the exposure, take a test shot, look for blinkies, check the histogram, readjust the exposure, lather, rinse, repeat. If I really care about the picture, I'll bracket. The general goal is to get the brightest point in the frame to be just under the point where it is totally over exposed (or clipping to use signal processing terms). In some cases, I may let some highlights clip so that I can get details in the shadows. When I'm doing all this, I'm basically taking a SCWAG at the exposure, hence bracketing. My histogram is a combination of all of the colors, and if one color is oversaturated, it may not show up in the histogram, or the blinkies. The camera, on the other hand, especially if it had a CMOS sensor, could do this all, a lot more accurately. Let's take that simple, non-HDR, case. The camera could take a picture at a nominal exposure. It now knows the exposure of every single pixel in the frame. It can calculate the value of the brightest pixel, and based on that value, set the exposure so that it is just shy of clipping, take a check shot, and then set that as the exposure, until it gets changed. That's the most basic version, there are many possible enhancements. The first one would be to allow the photographer to set some percentage of pixels that can be clipped, either over or under. That way, if it's a dark room, and there is one small, very bright light, you can throw away detail on the light bulb, and get a decent exposure on the rest of the room. The next level of enhancement would be auto HDR. The camera would go through the same routine as above, but do it to calculate the values just short of over exposure at one end, and under exposure at the other. When you click the shutter, it would take multiple exposures, at different shutter speeds, so that among the different shots, every pixel is properly exposed. You then use software in post processing to combine those shots and get one with a much wider dynamic range than the camera can get in one shot. People already do HDR multiple exposures, but the cameras don't automatically set them up in this way (so far as I know). There are, of course, issues, of something moves in the shot. There are, of course, many more enhancements that could be made on these. For example, when shooting macro, have the camera automatically bracket either/both exposure and focus. Memory is cheap. Speaking of bracketing focus, I'd love to see something that uses a wide aperture, and multiple frames, scanning the focus, to develop a 3-D model of a scene, by post processing and determining what is in focus in which frame. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
libertango	11:15p	Randy Pausch, 1960-2008 Obit in the New York Times. No surprise here, but the "Last Lecture" is very inspirational. Here's the original 1hr 16min version at Carnegie Mellon. Here's the website for the book. Here's Randy's CMU homepage. (Note: some of those sites are timing out at this writing) Below is the 10 min version he did on Oprah: *^*^*^* {hat tip to nayad, who posted the original pointer to Randy I followed.} (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
jlundberg	1:58p	jokerized Courtesy of Joker Graffitti. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
lrc	10:51p	Update in Vik, Zab's Civic After spending 4th of July unsuccesfully looking for parts for her car, Zab finally tracked them down on craigslist. We were going to pick them up a couple of weekends ago, in Fremont, but he had left them at work. Zab didn't want to stop by Fremont on her trip up to SF recently, so I spent an extra $10 to have him mail them to us. When we hadn't gotten them by yesterday, we sent him an email. He gave us the tracking number. The USPS said that it was delivered on Wednesday. The day that there was no mail of any kind in the mail box. So, I'm out $45, about 1/3 of my uncommitted days off for the past couple of months, and we still don't have the part. You wouldn't think that used parts for a 10 year old honda would be that tough. There are plenty for hondas that are > 15 years old. I guess that the damn things are too reliable. To replace the missing parts from the dealer: hazard light switch $54 big plastic piece it all goes in $135 heater control $230 Rear Defroster switch $107 Basically $600 with tax. (Comment on this)
lrc	10:47p	I got one phase of my test program working today. There weren't any problems with the code it was testing, only a couple of minor issues with the test program, most of the past week has been spent wrestling with build environments. I did not go dancing tonight. I could have made it up there, but I wouldn't get to sleep before 5am, and I can't afford that tonight. Time to go home. I'm not feeling super tired, but I'm no longer productive, and I just reached a breakpoint. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
rfmcdpei	12:22a	[DM] "Demography and culture: French Canada's fall and Québec's isolation" Over at Demography Matters, I've got a post up exploring the trends behind the gradual assimilations of almost all of Francophone Canada outside of Québec, and its usefulness as a study of an oft-neglected, oft-politicized demographic issue that is only one of many such. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
stillsostrange	7:58p	Playlist recs, cheesy 80s vampire version! I'm compiling a playlist I should have compiled ages ago: the cheesy 80s pop vampire song list. I don't mean goth classics like "Bela Lugosi's Dead", oh no. I mean stuff like "Take Me Home Tonight", "Love Bites", "Black Cars", "Sunglasses At Night", and possibly "Maneater". Songs you listened to in grade school/junior high and just knew were about vampires. Lou Gramm's "Lost in the Shadows," too, though it may be cheating to use an actual vampire soundtrack. "Bloodletting" may also be too obvious (and too good). I know I know more songs than I have right now, but I'm blanking. So I turn to you, beloved f-list! Current Mood: silly Current Music: Corey Hart - Sunglassees At Night (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
digitalraven	1:19a	Character Creation 14: Trinity ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. ) (Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
redbird	7:56p	walked my ... hip? ... off OK, that's an exaggeration. But I did go for a fine long walk today, despite knowing last night that doing so would be pushing things, and I think it was all worth it. roadnotes, rezendi, and I met at the soon-to-close Strand Annex on Fulton Street, and then walked over to South Street Seaport to look at the "Waterfalls" temporary public art thing. From the edge of the pier there, you can see all four of the waterfalls clearly; it was immediately clear to me that the one at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, worked better than the other three, I think because it has the solider backdrop. Overall, at least on a sunny afternoon, it's unimpressive: I shouldn't be looking at your fancy, expensive public art and thinking of how much better Multnomah Falls is. (At least, I doubt that was the artist's intention.) Part of the difficulty is that it's difficult to make the East River look better, these days (the water may still be polluted, but what you see is a few random logs, some gulls, maybe a cormorant, and lots of bright shiny water. And the bridges themselves: the Brooklyn Bridge is also hard to improve on. So, we looked at the bridges and the water features, and walked north a bit, and then over the Brooklyn Bridge, talking some, looking at the river and the harbor some, and they took pictures. We wound up sitting and chatting in an odd organic cafe on Henry Street. The smoothie I got there wasn't as good as the one I got on the streetcorner yesterday, but it wasn't bad, and they understand tea enough to have brought me a cup of tea, not a cup of hot water and a nearby teabag. Eventually, Rezendi had to go off to another appointment, and Roadnotes and I talked a bit more. Then I gave in to temptation, despite knowing it might be a bad idea: instead of getting on the train right there, I walked down to Atlantic Avenue and bought assorted interesting things (pistachios, olives, chocolate, teas, two kinds of duck pate, vanilla beans, two kinds of pita bread, and cucumber salad) at Sahadi's and Damascus Bakery. Then back to the A train, via my bank. My knee had been a bit unhappy by the time we started the bridge; by the time we were halfway from Cranberry Street to Atlantic Avenue, my right hip was bothering me. But we have determination, sometimes when it would be better not. cattitude got on the same uptown A train I was on, which was pleasant; we brought my groceries home, plus milk and soda and beer from a nearby deli. I have taken two ibuprofen, taken off my shoes and enough clothes that I won't wander outside again without thinking, and am mostly going to spend the evening sitting down. The duck stuff, bread, and cucumber salad will make a nice summer dinner. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
captainlucy	12:44a	Dark Knight Review ( under the cut: ) Current Mood: impressed (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
bellinghman	11:43p	#277 Neal Asher: The Engineer ReConditioned Neal Asher: The Engineer ReConditioned Hardcover: 260 pages Publisher: Wildside Press (3 Feb 2006) ISBN-10: 0809556766 ISBN-13: 978-0809556762 Category(ies): SF ( The review ) this is a proper collection of nearly a dozen Asher short stories. (Comment on this)
supergee	6:26p	SF wish-fulfillment checklist Thanx to cynthia1960. (Comment on this)
supergee	6:20p	Asshole proud of asshole son* Bill Kristol Hank Steinbrenner Andrew Giuliani *--The Onion (3 Comments |Comment on this)
cynthia1960	3:18p	How does your hero rate on the wish-fulfillment checklist? io9.com has a fun checklist of how the main characters of various sf franchises (media and literary) compare on various wish-fulfillment criteria. I am especially amused by the inclusion of Honor Harrington and Miles Vorkosigan on this list. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
angusabranson	10:37p	Aaron's Art "Flood Sale" aaronace, a friend and great artist who's done work for Cubicle 7 in the past and is currently working on a future Victoriana cover for us, suffered from a flash flood a few days ago which has wrecked the ground floor of his place. He's having a 'Flood Sale' to raise some extra cash so if you've ever fancied a signed piece of his art now is the time to get your orders in! He's only charging $15 per piece with free postage in the US. I've already put in an order for, er, a few bits :p Anyway, his words: ----- $15 for signed 9"x12" prints, with free shipping in the US. You can browse through this journal (aaronace) or my flickr gallery. If you see something you like, drop me a line at aaronace [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll let you know if it's available. ----- Here's a few samples of his work...         (2 Comments |Comment on this)
antipope_cats	10:36p	Unamused autopope has disappeared again and left that incompetent feorag to serve me. As usual, I am having to put up with food arriving at erratic times, and less than prompt cleaning of the litter tray. I have taken to crapping outside the tray as an expression of my disgust. I think she might have spotted me running up the stairs the other day. Since then, I have been careful to walk gingerly, a little unsteady on my paws, in the hope that she will think she is mistaken and that she really saw the other cat who does not exist. Update, 22:54: And now she is being even more unreasonable. She dumped a large amount of litter over the "gift" I made her, and left it a few minutes. Then she used a dustpan and brush to scoop it all into the tray, which she cleaned (at bloody last). The horror is that she is now using The Machine That Eats Kitties to deal with the few fragments of litter on the floor. Current Mood: unamused (4 Comments |Comment on this)

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