Random Criminal Procedures thoughts...

I have a random fear of hiking in the woods, coming across a pot field, & being arrested & getting my body cavities searched.

I also have a random fear of being pulled over late at night while tired & being forced to submit to a blood test. Yikes, needles!

WHY DO PEOPLE PAY $18K/YEAR FOR A CLASS, THEN COMPLAIN ABOUT IT INCESSENTLY?

A random thought from Torts reading...

I would just like to state that "Nameless Wrong" would be an excellent name for a band.

I love monsoons!

Last night, a major storm ripped through my neighborhood. Lightning flashed right outside; the power flickered like a strobe. Rain blew in sideways onto our porch. We pulled the plugs on all our delicate electronics, closed up all the windows, and took everything breakable off the porch, and pretty much ignored it after that.

This was the scene out our kitchen window this morning. The carport in the foreground (you can almost see the tops of cars) used to have a roof on it. The carport roof is that crumpled bit of wood in the background.

Yay wind! Extreme weather is fun! I am SO GLAD that I don't live in that property, and even more glad that our car was parked UPWIND from that disaster.

This is the obligatory "Drunk Blog"

Because Everclear is a most wonderful substance, consisting of grain alcohol and...well...don't really know what else. 190 proof. Woot. And I thought the Bacardi 151 was fun. This stuff, I took a little tiny taste, and it just evaporates out of your mouth, leaving a tingling behind. If I weren't feeling quite so tipsy, i might be able to make a cool story or poem about that shift in POV back there. Clearly, I have not drunk enough, that I am still able to think of things like that. Anyway, the tingling is far superior to anything gleaned from Cuban cigars, PopRocks, 151, or Altoids. I must try it in conjunction with any one of the above; unfortunately, I have none of the above in my house and I am now far to inebriated to contemplate leaving.
This is how I spend my 4th of July - getting drunk, watching subversive movies. Except Volcanopele, who has joined in our revels, is a staunch, patriotic Republican type, and he is uncomfortable with subversive movies, so we're causing virtual mayhem & lawlessness through the medium of GTA IV instead. Which, if you think about it, is probably more damaging to the psyche & sense of justice & freedom & so forth than "Dr. Strangelove" ever could be. (Not that "Dr. Strangelove" is particularly subversive. It's just funny. But it's far from the usual Independence Day fare.)
Fun fact about me: Despite loving the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and everything this country stands for, I am far from patriotic & never have been. Back about, oh, 7 years ago, when the entire country went into this bizarre frenzied spout of patriotism just because a few misguided, renegade terrorists decided to stop bitching & actually do something, I managed to incite a riot by being my usual, not-especially-patriotic, tactless self. Silly me. I think that's when my former BFF & roommate started really questioning how much effort she wanted to put into salvaging our already-frayed relationship. If I was going to start trailing home angry mobs, she didn't want any part of it. This was probably a wise move on her part - though I have managed not to start any mobs since that time.
Of course, that is mostly due to Roni stifling me any time I start ranting publicly about anything, rather than any newfound display of good sense on my part. I am grateful to my wife for keeping me safe from lynch mobs.

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Celebrate freedom - subvert the dominant paradigm!
Oh, and drink Everclear!!!

Because the apocalypse *should* be funny...

A Boy and His Dog is my favorite movie. Not for the special effects (which are nonexistant); not for the random sex (though that is a nifty part); certainly not for the soundtrack (which desperately needs to be remastered). But because it is hilarious, campy, and everything a movie should be.

They played it at the Loft Theater tonight as part of their "Cult Classics" series. I tell you, seeing this movie on the big screen was one of the most wonderful cinematic experiences of my life. I was afraid that it would lose some of its punch - after all, I've watched it enough times that I know the jokes, including the big one at the end, backwards and forwards. There's something about experiencing these jokes with an audience, much of which has clearly never seen the flick, that made me relive the first time I ever saw the movie - only this time, I'm not 12 and I get it even better. The moment at the end when everything just comes together so perfectly, so twisted...when the audience falls silent for half a second then breaks into hysterical laughter...

But I won't spoil it for you.

I think part of the reason I love this movie so much is that it was one of the defining moments of my childhood. It was one of my dad's favorites, and he was overjoyed to find an old VHS copy for sale at our local drugstore/video rental place. But he wouldn't let me watch it. I was too young; I wouldn't get it; I'd have to have it explained and that would ruin it for me later. (I was probably 8 or 9. It probably says something about the way I was raised that my parents were not remotely concerned that I might see graphic violence and serious full nudity, but rather that I wouldn't get a joke.) So I waited. And one day, I asked if I was old enough to watch it...and my parents said yes. This was a milestone more profound than middle school graduation, more important than learning to drive. It meant I was finally my parents' intellectual equal (or close enough), able to comprehend on an adult level. It seems like such a small thing now, with 15 years' distance and a life that rivals this movie in sheer oddness (though, thankfully, not in plotline). But it was a big deal at the time, and a feeling that I have carried with me since that day.

Watch the film (if you can find it). It's a good one.

AUDGEY DOES A HAPPY DANCE!!!!

YAY CALIFORNIA!

See this as well: The Official Opinion from the California Supreme Court.
For all those legally-minded individuals out there.

Random humor

This is about the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Even if they did steal the joke from Nukees.

Young people are AWESOME.

http://www.dayofsilence.org/

Yay to all the students & so forth being active & taking part in nifty events & peaceful protests! Tell your friends! (Or don't. Tolerance works both ways, yo. But my own position within a larger Community insists that I think such things are rockin' cool and spread the love. LGBT-etc-folk take waaaay to much shit in this great nation of ours, sez I.)

Yay future!

I would like to make an announcement:
I will be attending University of Arizona Rogers College of Law in the fall. Go me!
That is all.

Yet again, being cheap pays off

Ok, so we went to play Halo 3 on XBox Live today. Yay, Halo. Well, we never bought the $10 Heroic Map Pack on the grounds that we already payed $60 for the game, which was pretty awesome; why should we pay extra for 3 maps we really didn't need?
Well, so we go to sign on today to go beat up on prepubescent children, and to our extreme annoyance, we found we could not enter Big Team Slayer because we didn't have the correct maps.
Fuck, we thought. Stupid Microsoft. Making us buy the map pack in order to play.
So fine. We're adults; we're used to getting screwed by the system. So we went to go pay the stupid $10 for the stupid map pack.
Download...Free, said XBox Live.
Sweet! Knew there was no reason to buy that thing in the first place. Wait long enough, good things come to you for free.
That's how we got our living room lamp, our 3rd TV, most of our furniture...

Volcanopele, upon finding out he had purchased the map pack for nothing, proceeded to swear in an annoyed fashion. Fenner (the cat) started licking his head.

Who needs the candy store?

I made nougat using this recipe:
http://www.candymaking.net/Nougat.html
It was really easy. My mom would never allow me to cook candy when I was younger; she figured I'd mess up the kitchen and come out with a sticky mess. The one time I tried to cook candy in her kitchen, that's exactly what happened. It wasn't until years later that I figured out why I couldn't cook candy in my mother's kitchen, and why she had never successfully cooked candy either:
YOU NEED A CANDY THERMOMETER.
Duh. So now I can cook candy. It's remarkably simple; you just do what the recipe says and take it off the heat at the right moment.
I love cooking candy. Some recipes you read through and you can imagine exactly how the food will turn out. Not so with candy. These recipes you read through and think, "How in the world will that mess turn into the candy we know and love?" But it does. Egg whites turn into froth; syrup turns into sticky solid stuff; put them together and it turns white and becomes nougat. Amazing.

The hazards of open windows

Note to dog owners: Yelling at the barking dog only encourages that behavior. You are barking with the dog. Barking is a self-rewarding behavior anyway, and barking along with the dog makes it even more fun for the dog.
Much, much less fun for your sane, cat-owning neighbors.




(when i get a dog it will not bark. says i.)

Red Hat on a Crappy Old Compaq

Ok, so in a misguided effort to be less dependent on the monstrosity that is Microsoft (and because we were sick of the damn thing bitching at us that our version of XP Pro *might* not be genuine), we put a Linux partition on Roni's laptop.
Thoroughly unnecessary backstory:
This laptop used to be mine, but the hard drive went bad and I got my desktop. We cannibalized Roni's old laptop that the cat destroyed to give my old laptop new life (larger hard drive, more RAM, etc) so that Roni would have something to use. But the XP Pro install went bad, and eventually the thing just kept BSOD-ing completely at random. We determined it was either a bad stick of RAM or a bad install. So we tried swapping out the RAM but it kept having the same problem, so we tried reinstalling XP. Unfortunately, we had lost the serial number on the XP disk (assuming we ever had one for it, which is an interesting puzzle), so the install didn't go too well.
Back to the main thrust of the post:
So we went to install Fedora 4 on the laptop, which is a Compaq Presario 1600 that I got back in '00. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the video card on this damned thing (Trident CyberBlade i1) is not supported. I got the OS installed by using the text-only installer rather than the GUI, but then I was stuck. If I tried to start up normally, all I got was a big white blank in the middle of the screen. I tried changing display modes, but all that got me was new and different screens full of garbage. I could kind of tell that a command line was supposed to be being displayed, and I could kind of tell when the mouse was moving, but that was about it. I couldn't see what I was telling the machine, and I couldn't see what it was telling me, which knowing my tendency to blaze forward without really knowing what I'm doing could be a recipe for disaster.
This is a known problem, apparently. I found various workarounds online, but could not make any work.
As you may have guessed, I am a complete Linux noob. My knowledge of this particular OS begins yesterday, when I started reading the book. I grew up on DOS, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of a command line, but I have not learned the language for Linux yet. It does no good to tell me to modify the xorg.conf file, because I have no idea how to get to said file.
I managed to start up without the GUI, but then I was stuck. I had my little command line; I had an instruction to type in gedit etc/X11/xorg.conf; and I did that and got an error message that it could not be displayed. gedit apparently does not work without the GUI, and every time I got anywhere remotely close to the GUI, I got garbage.
So I called up my good friend the Ethergeek, who has been very patient with my sporadic and usually abortive forays into the world of computing since high school. He had me open xorg.conf using vi rather than gedit, which worked much better and reminded me forcibly of good old PCWrite that I used to type reports on back in elementary school. We edited the driver for the video card to be "vesa" instead of "trident"; exited the editor & tried the GUI. This worked. Yay!
It amazes me that he was able to carry on a perfectly coherent tech-support conversation over an XBox Live chat while playing Guitar Hero on hard.
I don't expect this to help anyone; I just wanted to document what I did before I forgot. If anything seems out of place or nonsensical, I don't want to hear about it.
Thank you for your time.