ricketyclick

In a total splurge, I got a Wacom Bamboo 6 x 8 graphics tablet.

It’s wonderful, and I wish I were artist enough to use it properly.

Unfortunately, last time I updated Ubuntu, it quit working. I had hoped that the upgrade to 8.10 would fix that, and it did — almost.

The stylus on this thing has an “eraser” button, which can be set in the GIMP to work just like an eraser. There’s also a wireless mouse that works with the tablet.

The stylus works, pressure sensitive, side buttons, and all, but neither the mouse nor the eraser work. I just spent a couple of hours dinking with /etc/x11/xorg.conf, which controls the user interface, but no joy.

So here’s my current mood:

self-doodle

Look, on a good day? I can pick out “Chopsticks” on a cheap toy piano. Controlling the GIMP with the Bamboo is like putting me in front of a really big pipe organ. I can pick out “Chopsticks” on any number of interesting-sounding stops.

Strongly, strongly recommended for anyone with any interest in drawing on the computer. Far easier to use than a mouse (fingers instead of wrist), pressure sensitive strokes — fabulous. I hope to be worthy.

One purchasing choice to consider: I went for the 6″ x 8″ pad. This gives you extra resolution. However, the cursor position on the screen is controlled by the absolute position of the stylus on the pad. To go from one side of the screen to the other, you must move the stylus from one side of the pad to the other. You cannot do this with simply wrist action; you must move your whole forearm. Also, with an ordinary mouse, if something on the desk gets in your way, you pick up the mouse, move it back a bit, and put it down. This trick does not work with the Bamboo. These problems would be less severe with the smaller 4″ x 6″ pad. Moreover, the small pad comes in a stripped down package with no mouse and no software — $70 versus $200 for the 6×8 Bamboo “Fun” package I got.

I think I prefer the larger version, but it’s definitely taking some getting used to.

[update]
I believe that ergonomically, the pen position, with your wrist held sideways, is far superior to the flat wrist mouse position. It’s the difference between a good handgun stance and the gangsta grip.

I just finished upgrading my Ubuntu Linux installation to 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

The biggest difficulty is that many temporary files are put in the /var and /boot folders. Normally, this is not a problem, but when I set up the system, I gave them dedicated partitions. I sized them according to the advice I found on the web, and in fact oversized them.

Not by enough, apparently. I gave /var a gigabyte, and /boot 100 megs, and they both came up short, by more than half.

I couldn’t easily resize them, because they’re always mounted.

Finally, I booted from the live CD of Ubuntu 7.10 in Hudson and Hudson’s Ubuntu Unleashed, which doesn’t require those folders to mount.

I moved /var (and /tmp) to a 500 GB SATA I’ve installed but not set up yet. This was an interesting exercise, involving hand-editing the /etc/fstab file.

The /boot partition was a bit trickier; I’d hope to use the space recovered when I deleted the old /var and /tmp folders, but unfortunately, they were in an extended partition, and boot is in the primary; apparently, the extended partition cannot be resized. I ended up stealing a couple hundred megs from the vastly oversized /swap partition.

For the most part, the upgrade went smoothly after that. There was one glitch with only the root account being able to log on to the desktop; somehow the permissions on the /etc folder were screwed up.

All done now, though, and I believe 8.10 is noticably snappier than 8.04. Biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the file browser, particularly in folders with heavy graphics content.

Aside from the problems I caused with an overly-spiffy disk layout, the upgrade was essentially painless.

On a midnight post-office run (I don’t like to leave Netflix returns in my mailbox; sometimes they get lost) I impulsively stopped for Jack-in-the-Box cheesecake.

Exiting the drive through, I was approached by a panhandler. I shouldn’t have stopped, much less rolled down my window, but I did. He was middle-aged, middle-class, well-kept, well-spoken, and didn’t reek of alcohol or have that gap-toothed meth-head manner to him. (I hate being an easy touch. Dogs, cats, and children pick up on it too.)

“I know you! I’m one of your neighbors, from over there!” — and he points in pretty much the right direction. I hesitate for a moment, thinking, “Well, most of my neighbors are Hispanic, not black…” but I’m more or less sympathetic.

Unfortunately, he runs on:

“Listen, my kid just died, and….”

What? What the fuck? You bring that out, you lay that on me, you damn well better be playing straight.

“What’s the name of the street?” I ask.

His mouth gapes for a moment, then he frowns, and his voice takes on an impatient edge. His middle-class act starts to fray as his script derails.

“I don’t know the name of your street, man! Look, I’m not trying to come across as funny or nothing.” Well, pardon the hell out of me.

“What’s the name of your street, then?”

Long, fumbling pause, then he says a name.

“Never heard of it.” I pull away, and start rolling up the window.

“Hey, man, I got the wrong guy, I’m not trying to come across as funny or nothing…”

On the way back from the post office, there he is, across the street at a filling station, talking to an SUV…

… and pointing in the opposite direction.

You asshole, I think.

You pimp your dead kid to get a fix?

You worthless piece of shit.

Your dead child?

Yes, the plan was to make the door stand out, to proudly declare, “Here is the door!”

Instead, I get, “Warning! Tasteless crazy person lives here!”

The blue is temporary, tape masking off some trim which is colored a light apricot. I’m thinking I should have made the trim dark, and the door light. Ah well, a bad haircut grows back out, and a bad paint job can be done over.

And, you know, I live behind the door; I only have to look at it as I drive up to the house. Pfft. The neighbors can deal.

“Uncle Dave’s delicate condition.”

Finished door. Needs some touch up here and there, but nothing you can see in this pic. Glare from the in-camera flash; I’ll put up a cleaner pic later.

I intended the trim color to be a few shades darker, more like the occasional light orange bricks, such as what you can to the right of the top of the door. It’s actually pretty close, but against the dark orange, it comes off much paler.

Close up, it’s clear I’m a lousy painter. A few runs here and there, some rough edges around the masking, and a few spots where I placed the mask over the trim a bit too wide, which revealed the primer. Also, I really should have been using the roller from the very start. (I foolishly used a brush, because of the small area, but the roller leaves a vastly better texture. The brush marks, particularly from the heavy primer, are horrendous.)

Frame next, then the pillars holding the roof up.

I have been accused of being a conservative, mostly on the grounds that I believe that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that the Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote it and ratified it.

I deny the charge.

I enter into evidence the deposition of F.A. Hayek, who witnessed the rise of socialism and its demon twin Communism over the middle of the twentieth century in Europe:

I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.
…
A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

– Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, “Forward to the 1956 American Paperback Edition”
Reprinted in Bartley (ed.), The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 2, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 46.

Moreover:

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
…
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.

– Hayek, F.A., The Constitution of Liberty, “Why I am Not a Conservative”, University of Chicago Press, 1960
[Emphasis mine.]

I very seriously object to being called a “conservative”, especially on account of holding a position which is all about “empowering individuals”, including individuals who belong to groups that have traditionally been oppressed by conservatives, such as blacks, women, the disabled, and gays.

I object to being called a “libertarian” on the grounds that I like having a strong central government; I simply want it to exercise its enumerated powers, and no more; and I want it to rigorously respect at least my enumerated rights.

I acknowledge that I am not current on libertarian thinking, so I may be wrong here. Nevertheless:

I kind of regard strict libertarians the way I do the Amish: they are hothouse flowers that flourish only because the rest of us provide an environment where they can do so. I strongly suspect that if everyone lived as they do, we would in general have a far lower standard of living (lower with the Amish than with libertarians, though.)

Still, while I’m not tempted to be Amish, I do admire the stance that honest libertarians take. I believe that being a libertarian requires an exceptionally high degree of self-discipline, and this is why I think libertarianism would fail: most people are simply not capable of it; I’m pretty sure I’m not.

[Braces self for comment flood by enraged libertarians. But what leaves me weak with terror is the prospect of drive-by shunnings from the Amish.]

Once again, I find I cannot resist linking to Eric S. Raymond’s essay, “Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun“. To the degree that I’m libertarian, I caught it from Raymond. The lessons he teaches here are:

• it all comes down to you. No one’s finger is on the trigger but your own.
• Never count on being able to undo your choices. If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead.
• The universe doesn’t care about motives. If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot.
• Right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgment of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them. We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both.

Raymond continues:

To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
…
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.

And not only can we — we must. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood why. If we fail this test, we fail not only in private virtue but consequently in our capacity to make public choices. Rudderless, lacking an earned and grounded faith in ourselves, we can only drift — increasingly helpless to summon even the will to resist predators and tyrants (let alone the capability to do so).

[I have slightly reorganized Raymond's paragraphs  for my purposes. Read the whole thing; this should be a standard text in Citizenship Class, perhaps as a prerequisite for Militia Training.]

My results for this quiz on commonly confused words?

I’m an English Genius! I got 100 percent!

This test was too easy. Everyone with a high school diploma should be able to ace this.

There was exactly one question where I had to think for a few seconds about which word to choose.

I hesitated over another question involving punctuation, rather than spelling, because I didn’t understand at first that that’s what was being asked for, and then because I had trouble visually distinguishing between the two marks in question.

The graphs at the results page are all heavily skewed towards high scores, even on the Expert section. I’d like to see something more like a two-tailed bell curve. On the other hand, it looks like the sample size is relatively small, so far, and I expect that only people who care about grammar and vocabulary at all will bother to take the quiz.

[Ahem. This post has been up for, oh, two minutes, and I've already corrected four or five errors.]

Self-tagged with the coffee cup meme, via Ambulance Driver, where I also left a comment on my favorite beverages.

My favorite coffee mug art, from Christopher Baldwin’s comic Bruno:

Yes, yes, there’s lots of other mugs out there from comic strips I like better, or with political slogans I favor, or with funnier jokes. But this one actually has to do with coffee, and I love Baldwin’s art.

Here it is next to the mug I actually use, which is exactly the right size:

update:

Ah, I’ve been looking for this, and finally found it: another favorite coffee cartoon. I dearly want this on a mug:

From Mark Stanley’s wonderful comic, Freefall.

Now, this is what coffee should be like:

[click for full size] [source][ad for Heterodyne Spark Roast]

I…despair of explaining the context of this image. Here’s the machine that made the coffee this young man just took a sip of. The lady with the wrench is a “spark”, a genius mad scientist in a world where magic is crucial to technology. I cannot urge you strongly enough to start here and read the whole bizarre story. The phrase “steam punk”, stretched to tatters, might evoke something of the flavor of the Foglio’s world.

OMG: this image is available on a mug — and on t-shirts, bbq aprons, mouse pads….

“Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don’t kid yourself.”
– Frank Zappa, Burnt Weenie Sandwich

Now read this, over at Overcoming The Bias:

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black.  It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Damn straight, Skippy.

I know people who simply refuse to like anything they hear on Top 40 radio, simply because it’s popular, and they can’t tolerate along with the crowd.

Shakespeare’s bad, because, you know, he’s a cultural icon.

Most of them are against the war in Iraq, because, you know, they’re questioning authority. They’re speaking truth to power. They’re out on the edge.

‘Scuse, please, but they’re credulous starry-eyed sheep. Avowed skeptics and inclusive multi-culturists, they’re bowing down before the most racist, sexist, close-minded, anti-progressive religious cult to come along in the past thousand years, a cult that openly promises to enslave or kill them. They’re trying to elect a presidential candidate from the Chicago Machine they’re treating like the Messiah. Meanwhile, if I can keep from vomiting on the voting machine, I’ll vote for this guy.

I know, vaguely, what wearing the clown suit feels like, because I’ve come out to “liberal” friends and family as a gun owner. My advocacy of possessing a tool that would allow me to actually resist tyranny made me a pariah to folks who are very strident in their rebelliousness. (I probably also wore the clown suit a lot in school, but wasn’t aware of it. I don’t think that counts. Hm, I did almost start a fad for carrying Slinkies around, but the teachers put a stop to that, because they’re so damn noisy. Does that count?)

And mind, by the standards of the linked article, I’m still not a true rebel, because I didn’t figure out, on my own, how crucial the right to keep and bear arms really is; I picked it up from a chance conversation back in ‘76, and had it reinforced by Gharlane of Eddore, a nut job science fiction fan posting in the Babylon Five usenet forums.

I’m giving up on trying to be a rebel. I swear, from here on out, not to care how popular or unpopular my positions are, but only whether or not I feel they’re right. If I conform, too damn bad.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast.  Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see.  I would totally have worn a clown suit to school.  My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either!  It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.  That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.  Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them.  You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker.  It’s not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way.

So I liked Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. So sue me.

[update]

Holy. Crap.

Overcoming Bias is a serious trip, particularly if you’ve let yourself get intellectually lazy. It’s a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes. Very, very strongly recommended.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve met a crucial milestone:

My weight has dropped below 200 pounds. I’m at 199 +/- 1.

Best of all, I’m even on schedule.

It was my plan to photograph my scale when this happened, but unfortunately, I dropped my camera yesterday, and the shutter no longer works.

I actually saw 199.5 earlier in the week, but I got off the scale to get the camera, and when I got back on, about a minute later, I weighed 202. (My scale is a Taylor 7362. It claims to read to the nearest 1/2 lb, but in fact it, like many digital scales, is notorious for being horribly unrepeatable–in my experience, it can vary by as much as +/- 3 lbs over successive readings. Still, if I weigh myself several times during the day, I do get a reasonably consistent number.)

The 199 lb reading seems to be pretty stable, though.

I really wish I had a camera….

The other reason I wish I had a camera is that I accomplished this by pressure-washing the front of my house. The before and after shots wouldn’t be as dramatic as some I’ve seen, but noticeable nevertheless.

As far as weight loss goes, although the moment-to-moment effort involved in pressure-washing is not that large, if you do it for several hours, it adds up.

I also did some spade work. Let me explain. My front yard does not gently slope from the house to the street. Instead, it humps up in the middle, peaking about 6″ higher than the porch slab. (I plan to measure this over the weekend. ) To make it worse, the front walk is about 1.5″ lower than the porch slab. What this means is that mud washes down from the lawn and flows over the walk just where it turns to meet the porch at the front door. Once a year or so I have to get a shovel and scrape the mud off the walk, and dig out the excess from in front of the porch. That’s what I did today. I’m thinking of buying some concrete pavers to build up the walk to the level of the porch slab. There are other solutions (like, oh, say, skinning the sod off the lawn, removing about six inches of soil, grading properly, and putting the sod back, which is of course the real solution, and which will probably have to be done sooner or later), but that’s the easiest and cheapest.

I’m also probably going to dig a simple gravel-only french drain leading from the front downspout, which lets out right next to the porch, down to the sidewalk by the street,

Posting will be light to non-existent for the foreseeable future, because somebody broke into my house and stole my computer–system box, monitor, keyboard, mouse, cable modem, and, yes, even the cable itself.

Currently posting from my parent’s house.