More random posting. Not quite done with our hours for today, but again, can't stop myself. Check out the title of this LGF posting:
The "!=" operator, meaning 'not equal' is not yet common currency in English, so Charles Johnson is a C dork... or maybe a Javascript dork.
This usage is a feature of the C language, and since has been used in C's many children (C++, Objective C, javascript, Java, and C# to name a few). It was not present in BCPL (one of C's ancestors), which used ~= as the not-equal operator. I can't find an online reference for B, C's direct parent.
Anyway. The sort of thing that catches a programmer's eye, when he's lazy and sleep-deprived.
I don't want to waste my energy on links, since I have a couple of essays I want to write. But I can't stop myself from writing about this BBC gem:
Persistent reports from senior Arab sources, as well as more recently from Israel, have claimed that Egypt and other countries helped Iraq to dismantle its arsenal during the four years after the last group of UN weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.If that is true - and the Egyptians have denied it angrily - the process simply was not enough.
When Hans Blix, the head of the inspection effort, reported to the UN on Monday, it was clear his team had serious doubts about the genuineness of Iraq's effort to clear out its weapons.
Iraq genuinely tried to give up its weapons of mass destruction, you see. They just can't find them all! Even with Egypt's help, they just couldn't find all their WMD caches. They lost the map and locked the keys inside the bunker.
.. it looks like we're going to make our ridiculously heavy hour target for this month. This work month started on January 10, when we got back from California. We wasted many hours, probably several full days, playing "The Sims". And in the last few days, when we needed to work more than 50% time (i.e., more than half the hours in each day) to make our goal, my wife and I got sick.
But it looks like we're going to make it.
Next month, we'll start earlier.
I have a couple of posts coming together in my head, one about communism and one about minimum wage, but that'll have to wait until after we hit our target and break out the vodka.
Our housemate's bacon on an IGA multigrain bagel, with coffee.
Our housemate is in austerity mode, so the bacon is very cheap and fatty, so what I wind up with is a big bready ring, encrusted with various kinds of seeds, with a thin line of bacon curled around the hole.
Not bad.
They don't really understand bagels here, at least not at the IGA or the local bakery which supplies the other IGA (McKernan IGA, slightly farther away). A bagel is not an Italian roll with a hole in it. It's boiled, do you hear me? Not baked.
The IGA is an interesting concept, too. Originally it was the Independent Grocers' Association -- they all banded together to resist the evil multinational grocery store, Safeway. Now they're basically just another chain. They don't have IGA's in California, but they do out east. Or they did, twenty years ago: after visiting Canada a few times I was surprised to find a bottle of IGA brand vanilla extract in my mom's cupboard -- bought, surely, when my family lived in Ohio or New Jersey.
Light posting ahead (what, lighter than it's been?), since in order to reach our hour target for the month we need to work 12 hours each day. That means, according to my wife's impeccable logic, that we need to get up and be working before noon each day. Yuck.
Got caught out in freezing rain last night as we were going to dinner at our in-laws. It's a physically unpleasant experience, not exactly painful and certainly not as bad as hail. But today the sidewalks are covered with ice, where yesterday they'd been shoveled clean.
I updated the blogroll down on the right side there. Now it reflects who I read and approximately in what order. The main beneficiary will be me when I'm on the road. Before this, my blogroll consisted of the "Links" toolbar on my IE window.
I've recently been reading from Classics of Modern Political Theory, a textbook for one of my wife's college Philosophy classes. Part of my on-going campaign to improve my mind; also to improve my access to anti-Communist arguments.
Seriously. I am an anti-Communist, by which I mean that I oppose the implementation of Communism. And for this reason I occasionally find myself arguing with people who think Communism is a good idea. Somehow, the fact that it hasn't worked any time it's been tried, and usually many people wind up dead in the trying doesn't convince them.
The book starts with Machiavelli -- readings from The Prince and another work on the history of the Roman republic. I liked Machiavelli, actually, and I found The Prince very sympathetic and non-Machiavellian. Perhaps the worst parts were edited out, but Machiavelli just seems to be explaining the most effective means of government to an absolute dictator.
But after about fifteen chapters of it, his style was killing me. "There are two types of provinces: those that have been ruled by a prince for some time, and those that have recently been republics. Of those that have been recently ruled by a prince, there are two kinds: ...". The whole book is lousy with this kind of Aristotelian distinction-drawing. It's like the captain and the windows in The Good Soldier Svejk. If Machiavelli had written a book on poker, it would be: "There are two ways a playing card can rest on the table: it can be face-up or face-down. When the card is face-up, everyone can see both the suit and the value. But when the card is face-down, only the player whose card it is knows the value and the suit." So I had to bail on Machiavelli. I think he had just explained that it's better to be thought miserly than to raise taxes after overspending the public purse. (Earth to Democrats... come in Democrats!)
So I started on the next guy. Hobbes. I could drown in his prose: it's like he's translating from the German. What stuck in my head was an enormously long list defining the various passions: VAINGLORY, PARSIMONY .... Locke was similarly impenetrable, but harder to read because of his anti-Catholic bias. (Gratuitous Colby Cosh dig: Ah yes, the right to bear arms in the English Bill of Rights... how does that go? "That the subjects which are protestants, may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law." Guess it doesn't matter for me, then, whether the Government of Canada regulates that right out of existence.)
There followed Rousseau, Montesquieu, Spinoza, some others... all impenetrable, all irrelevant. Cultural literacy WORKS, shockingly enough. If I apply myself, I can find the original arguments advanced by Spinoza in favor of freedom of speech and religious tolerance. Or I can regurgitate the arguments offered today, which are at least cast in contemperary words, not 17th-centrury philosophical jargon. Or I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of a society that guarantees both. (But then I'd have to move back south. I'll settle for 90% free speech and cheaper real estate.)
And then I got to Adam Smith. [Angelic chorus sings in background] He's modern. It's amazing, it's like a switch flipping. Suddenly this book contains writing which is interesting, unafraid of the first person, and compelling. It's better than modern expositions of the material, because it doesn't have to reply to Marx and Mill. It's beautiful, clear, believable. It's 18th-century blogging. Here's an etext version of The Wealth of Nations. Read it.
Those other guys were pikers, compared to Adam Smith. That's my considered opinion.
I was thinking I'd post a long one, but now I just committed myself to 10 minutes, so I better be quick. (Remember: post first, read next. Fix blogroll.)
Right, so it's cold. -35 C, which is about -30 F. Which is fine except for when you have to go out.
Last year we bought a piece of investment property: a condo. Actually, our company did, but whatever. So we rent it out. Currently, the tenants are a pair of college students; cousins.
Their cold water doesn't work in the bathroom, they call to report at 7:45 this morning. My wife took the call, so I don't know if they cheerfully reported it. The unit is right next to the boiler room, so the hot water is HOT, so I expect they weren't very cheerful. We'll get on it, we said.
The same thing happened a week ago, too: no cold water in the bathroom. Hot works fine in the bathroom; hot and cold in the kitchen; but no cold in the bathroom.
We contact the management company. No way they can send a plumber out, and are we sure it's not our fault? "There's a shutoff valve for the bathroom, you know."
"Not in our unit, there isn't." In most of the units of this type, there is, but in ours, the last two feet of the storage closet are cut off so that there can be a boiler room in the building. "Perhaps the valve of which you speak is accessible through the boiler room?"
In which case it's not our problem, being accessible only through the community property, we tell the management company.
But it only affects your unit, they tell us. And since they have nothing to lose, they do nothing. They win.
I am let into the boiler room by Bullwinkle [not his real name], the condo association president. I look at the pipes and detect nothing obvious wrong. We get the management company's plumber to finally come out, and by then the problem has gone away. Perhaps it's the temperature. The plumber points out that the combustion air intake for the boiler room, a large one foot by two foot vent, is only a foot away from the access panel that covers this valve.
We tell the tenants to leave the cold water running, just a little, in the bathroom, to prevent the pipes freezing.
And do they listen?
Obviously not, since the silly valve froze again this morning. So we went to Home Depot where for the first time in my life I received competent help. The cross-eyed guy who works at 9:00 AM on Wednesdays at South Edmonton Common -- he knows his plumbing. So we bought a heating tape and some insulation. At 9:50 my wife dropped me off at the building. Around 10:00 Bullwinkle showed up to open the boiler room. By 10:30 I had the heating tape installed. A cab picked me up at 10:40 ("Expect a twenty-minute wait," I'd been told just minutes before), and I was doing my volunteer librarian duties before 11:00.
And at 1:00, when we went by to check, the cold water was working again. Even though it's still -35 C.
"Cuba's having an election today," I tell my wife.
"Hmm." She takes a bite of cold pizza. "Wonder who'll win."
I just got e-mail from my dad and his wife, who are living in the Czech Republic now. They recently met with his aunt, my great-aunt, who's over seventy and has Parkinson's. I met her once, when I was 15. The main thing I rememver from that meeting -- this was in 1990, just after the Velvet Revolution -- was her explaining to me how she used to type samizdat.
You would take a sheet of letter paper, which is like tissue paper used for packing, and lay a carbon under it, and another sheet of paper, and another carbon, until you had about ten or fifteen pieces of paper. And then you'd carefully roll it into your typewriter, and then you'd type very hard so that it would impress on all ten copies. And that was how forbidden literature would get distributed, under Communism.
But that was a long time ago, and things are different now. Vaclav Havel just completed his last term as president of the Czech Republic. In the seventies he was in prison. He was a high-profile political prisoner, so ultimately he was treated pretty well. And if you credit the cynics, the real reason the Velvet Revolution of '89 went so smoothly was that Havel cut a deal with the Communists.
I'm not a cynic, though. I think the point is that the Czech Republic used to be a country where, in order to read something critical of the government, you had to use samizdat. Now you can get political commentary on the Internet.
And now Fidel ("faithful") is going to be unanimously re-elected. And I fully expect some news service -- possibly even Reuters -- to report it with a neutral or positive spin; failing to call attention to the fact that this election, like all those under Communist dictatorships, is a sham.
Here in Canada it's fashionable to vacation in Cuba. I find it hard to understand how Canadians can feel good about supporting the last totalitarian Communist regime in this hemisphere, but they do.
Lousy day today: had to deal with a flat tire on somebody else's car. I was stuck outside for about an hour dealing with it. Part of the problem was that the jack wasn't appropriate to the hard point (it's a Volvo), so I tried to jack it up from the frame, which was partly rusted, and so failed.
Luckily for me, my head was not squashed like a pumpkin. But the car's lower frame is a little hosed, even if the door still cleanly opens and shuts.
That was around 1:00 PM, and it put a damper on the rest of my day. A few Caesars (vodka+clamato juice) have sort-of helped, but I haven't wanted to work since then, and my only attempt at work resulted in committing the changes to the wrong bug, so I quit.
I'll try again now.
I've never thought hard about income tax, so I don't have an opinion on whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. My brother-in-law, who frequently skims the Economist, claims that income tax distorts the economy more than consumption taxes do. Perhaps.
But it really gets me when people confuse wealth and income; when the confuse the quantity with its first derivative. Don't they get simple calculus? Check out this site:
The wealth of the three most well-to-do individuals now exceeds the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries.
So what?! Income is in dollars/year and wealth is in dollars -- they're not comparable quantities. Your brain should be screaming "UNIT ERROR!" when you try to write this.
Sheesh.
Even if that's the next thing in the phone book. I would like to inform my last caller (Pvt. Number; what an odd surname!) of the purpose of those dots in the telephone directory. They're present to guide your eye from the name to the number.
Mikes is an odd surname, though. I believe I'm the only listed Mikes in Alberta, and one of about twenty in all of Canada. The name is Hungarian, originally, and it's pronounced "mik'-esh" in that language. Neither of my parents had that name when they were born, so how we wound up with it is a story in itself. But that's for another time.
Of course there is no shortage of Michaels, and they often open eponymous businesses: Mike's Garage, Mike's Bar. Mike's Storage is not one I've been called about before.
It makes it hard to get a vanity domain name, let me tell you. Way back in 1994, mikes.com was already registered to a Mike's Garage somewhere; now it's Mike's Web Design. Then mikes.org and mikes.net went, and even smikes.org is taken (by a St. Michael's school), though smikes.com is still free. I guess sammikes.com and samuelmikes.com are still free.
But sambal is better, I think.
Somehow, even though it's -20C, birds have returned to our neighborhood. A swarm of jay-like birds has been on our property today. They roost in the weeping birch (now totally nude of leaves) and madly fly in circles, singly and in flocks. Occasionally one bangs into the kitchen window.
The cats are very excited. "Stupid birds!" they think, noses plastered to the window. "Stupid mating birds! Perhaps we can cull them!"
So we got "The Sims -- Deluxe Edition" for Christmas, which is a terribly addictive video game. Rather than post interesting new content today, I'm going to recycle something that I wrote about a year ago and distributed privately. It follows below:
presents
-- one in an occasional series --
You may be wondering, why should I shovel my walk? After all, I got by without mowing my lawn for several months. Why shovel my walk? Actually, there are several good reasons to shovel your walk.
Although Canadians claim not to sue anybody, there do seem to be an awful lot of lawyers up here. And I if I do get sued, all the lawyers and judges will be wearing funny wigs, and I'll probably get put in jail for contempt of court for laughing at them.
First, you need tools: a snow shovel and a good outside broom. You can buy the outside broom in advance, but it's not possible to buy snow shovels in advance. Just try it! You'll be laughed out of Home Depot.
Traditionally, you wait until the first snow day, when all the traffic is tied up and the roads are extremely slippery, and then you drive (half off-road) to the nearest drugstore and buy the cheapo snow shovels they have there. These you use until they break. If you're lucky enough and it breaks in the middle of the season, you might be able to find an ergonomically designed shovels; otherwise, you just get lower back pain ("Canadian Soloflex").
Optionally, you can get an icebreaker. These very handy tools are best if you need to open a channel to an iced-up port. Some of the best icebreakers are made in Finland, home of sauna, Nokia telephones and attractively-priced 60% grain alcohol...
Sorry, just my Finnish tourism implant going off again. An icebreaker is kind of like a garden hoe, except the blade is attached directly to the pole (no bent part). You use it to chip at and shatter ice.
Don't bother getting salt. It's too cold for salt to work.
Really nice warm gloves. Boots with decent traction. Everything else is optional, though if you plan to do your front walk, there are decency laws you should follow. (A normal ski jacket, ordinary wool socks, jeans, a sweater is fine, even in -30 C, for as long as it takes to shovel. Haven't tried -30 and naked yet.)
Push the snow into a pile. Lift it with the shovel and throw it off of the walk. Throw it downhill.
After shoveling, sweep the snow off the shoveled surface with brisk back-and-forth strokes. Don't worry about where the snow goes.
Shovel early -- before lots of people walk by (and before you drive your car out of the driveway.) Snow that's packed down is hard to get off.
Wait until the sun has come out before starting to shovel. This way you can be sure that it's stopped snowing(*). As a bonus, the snow will be a little softer, and when you're done shoveling, a little bit of extra heat from the sun helps evaporate the last specks of snow (but see below).
But don't wait too long -- shovel before the snow half-melts and creates an enormous thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk in front of your house (*).
Shovel downslope, so that in three days when the temperature pops up above freezing, there's no snow that you shoveled upslope to melt and run down across the sidewalk creating an enormous thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk in front of your house (*).
Always sweep after shoveling. If you don't, the snow that's in the cracks of the sidewalk will be melted by the sun and will later refreeze, creating an enormous thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk in front of your house (*).
Items marked with a (*) were learned personally through experience. In case you hadn't guessed.
... and it doesn't even snow very much in Alberta.
Movable Type is eating my site right now, so I'm going to try this test post to see if it's fixed.
My sister has a '55 Buick Century station wagon: a true boat. It probably weighs about two tons as it's made of steel-wrapped steel beams.
I got to drive it today, well, yesterday. We took their two oldest kids (ages 6 and 7) to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Along the way we stopped to pick up a trunk she'd bought on ebay which is too big for UPS shipping.
This car is so old that it's designed to take leaded gas. You have to add lead substitute supplement to your tank to make it happy. It has power steering and brakes, for which I am very grateful. I cannot imagine how hard I would have had to push on the brakes without power assist, in order to get the car to slow down at all. It's a lot like I imagine driving a harvester would be, only it tops out at 80 mph.
Oh yes, the speedometer was broken, registering 110 mph when I was going speed-of-traffic 70ish (speed limit 70). The dashboard lights never come on. The dome light is broken. The windshield wipers work when it's not raining but won't retract when it is, leaving the wipers extended. And the side-view mirror was shattered when a hit-and-run SUV sideswiped the parked wagon. The only mirror was the rear-view, which was blocked by the large chest.
We drove down in the carpool lane, which was a mistake. I spent way too much time freaking out about whether we were going to climb up the jersey barrier and flip. I'm still tense in my shoulders from steering out of leftward bumps. On the way back up, I drove in the #3 lane, which was much more calming.
It's funny: in the carpool lane, there's a solid obstacle to your left 100% of the time; in any other lane, there's one only when you're getting passed.
One night, I had a premonition that my future life would consist of endlesss hours spent in roadhouses along desert highways, listening to stupid drunk women vomiting. Tonight that premonition is fulfilled in all but the details.
We spent New Year's Eve with school friends... only they've aged and diversified. The last hour I was up listening to the drunken singing and guitar-playing of people I don't know and don't want to know. My spot on the couch was stolen by a pair of drunkards I don't care to kick off. And I've realized something about my ideal L.A.: it's empty of people. At least, if these are L.A. people, it's empty of L.A. people.
At least there weren't any terrorist attacks today.