It’s now illegal to name your children “Hitler”.  Can you believe this?

So I was listening to the radio the other day, and some Republican congressman or senator dude was talking about why he voted against the stem cell bill.  As part of his delicious slippery slope argument he said something to the effect of “if we allow this, someday we may start harvesting the organs of death row prisoners because like the discarded embryos they are going to die soon too.”

What struck me was not that his argument was dumb — I’m rather used to that by now.  Instead what struck me was that it’s considered unethical to harvesting the organs of a prisoner, but to kill them is considered ethical to this person.  The funny thing is that I have a strong suspicion that this strange ethical position is actually majoritarian, yet it makes absolutely no sense at all.  Prisoners may not have the rights to live, yet they are allowed the right to keep their organs beyond the grave.

Why all the hubub about Charles Wheeler skipping a neighborhood forum Wednesday evening?Unless he’s cloned himself (now that’s an argument against stem-cell research), it would have been hard to have been both at the forum and his “attorneys only” fund raiser at campaign headquarters.

Wheeler’s campaign manager, Maureen Galey, says the forum notice arrived the day before and the lawyer event had already been scheduled. (An attorney confided beforehand that the Wheelies were having a hard time getting lawyers to show up so it was downsized to the campaign headquarters. Sanders, of course, has been working hard in the vineyards of the legal firms.)

Galey pronounced the event a great success.

ref

Mind blowing…

The internets seem to be back again so I happily return to my usual perma-connected behaviours!  Miss me?

Ken Dryden had an editorial posted on the Toronto Star the other day about Canada’s “place in the world”.  If I can rudely summarize, he places it as “Canada is the US’s polite little brother, and our primary role should be to act as a middleman because the US and the world can’t really understand each other but we understand both.”

I think he’s right.

Ok, this has been all over the news since it happened yesterday.  The shooting took place about 7 blocks from where I work, less if you go by where the crow flies.  But the really fracked up part is that yesterday my supervisor and I walked to and from lunch past the very same Jewish centre where the shooting would take place just a few hours later.

It was kind of mind blowing to read the news and then realize… hey, I know where that is… hey, I just walked past that today.

The Internets are Down. I repeat: The Internets are Down.

The suspicion is that we have some sort of wiring problem that causes problems when the heat gets up, which is why we don’t have phone service in the afternoon but still in the morning. And obviously if the situation is that bad, no wonder we don’t have internets working since that depends on the phone lines. But golly gee whiz does this still totally suck. Thankfully there is a weak signal from a generous neighbour in our bathroom, but it only barely works some of the time and really isn’t a proper substitute at all. So I return to my away status and home the repair guys can come soon so I’m not lost all weekend.

I have had no end of difficulties with them.  Sometimes just the phone works, sometimes just the internet works, most of the time none work.  The last two days I’ve had phone service in the morning but not the afternoon.  Frigging frig this is totally unacceptable.  If qwest can’t fix this soon I’m going to have to ditch them for cable even though I strongly prefer DSL service.  But crappy cable is still better than no DSL.  And then maybe ditch my phone entirely for our cellphones (cingular is sending me a new one for tomorrow yay!).
I am posting this via mega unsecured free seattle wireless at http://www.udistrictchamber.org/wifi/, from which I can get a very faint signal some of the time.  Depending on what I’m not entirely sure… perhaps the wind?  I really don’t want to start blogging at work which is why I’ve been neglecting you, poor readers.

My internet at home is down.  So is my phone line.  Also, so is my cellphone.

totally uncool.

As a gift to my good friend joh3n whose first child was born just a few days ago, I made for him a Book of Zogg. This was one of the coolest things I have ever done — though I give credit for the idea to my lovely wife. Read more for the pictures in all their glory!

(more…)

Leaving for here as soon as I get a text message from my lovely wife!

It’s going to be hella hot.

I have a very large mug that I drink water from at home.  It’s something I had from when I was a kid and a big football fan.  It’s hard to see from that photo but it’s substantially larger than three coffee cups.  How much larger?  My lovely wife wanted to measure it, but no way — it’s the size of one metric dan marino.

So I measure my water intake at home by the quantity of Dan Marinos I’ve drank that day.  Since I usually drink about 1 L (pronounced “ell”) at work, I usually try to get at least one and even better two Dans so to not be dehydrated.

Then this means that you have reached my new blog at the new location at http://worsethanhitler.org. It also means that you are browsing on my spiffy new server, which is also awesome. And now it’s time to sleep.

Please let me know if you find anything amiss with your browsing experience, as I’ve had only limited time to get this all working thanks to busy work and crappy home internet service.

As an update to the previous entry, my internets seem stable again.  And I only had to leave work 30 mins early thanks to Qwest’s awesome policy of having the tech call you as he’s leaving for your place so you don’t have to wait home all day for the dude to show up.  To test to see whether or not it was still broken I opened up ten tabs of the local transit system bus schedule and reloaded them rapid-fire.  I must have loaded over a hundred times in a minute, which means a thousand pageviews a second from my IP hitting the same bus schedule page over and over again.  I’ve probably got some poor technician there scared of a DDoS or something, but — I’m back, bay-be!

Haven’t been around much today, the DSL has been up and down like a yo-yo all day.  Good thing I pay twice what I did in Canada for this extremely crappy quality of service.  Oh yes, if I pay double what I’m paying now to switch to Speakeasy, maybe then I’d be able to stay on the net for a whole day in a row?  If this crap keeps up I may have to forgo the (often theoretical) fast upload speeds and go back to cable.

Frigging Qwest.

When I ride the bus, it usually costs me $1.50 in the morning and $1.25 on the return trip — even though I’m going the same distance on the same exact route.  The reason for this is that King County Transit has decided in all their wisdom and glory that rush hour trips should cost more than non-rush hour trips.  This makes sense from a business perspective, you want to match your busiest times with your highest prices so that you can smooth out labour costs.  However, we’re not dealing with business, we’re dealing with public transit — and for this circumstance King County Transit has it completely backwards.

The point of government being involved in managing city transit is that it makes sense for a large public institution to build and provide the infrastructure that everyone can use free of charge (except for taxes).  Once the infrastructure is in place people will be able to live there, businesses will thrive, and so forth — all but the most shrill and ignorant libertarian agrees with this point of view.  And people generally accept this for roads but at least in most North American cities they are hesitant to pay for trains and buses.  The cost of roads of borne and given to the public for free, except that people wanting to use transit have to pay a monthy or trip-based user fee and for many people they except these fees to make money or at least break even.  As if this part of transit infrastructure isn’t somehow as worthy of investment compared with the relatively more inefficient road system?

But whatever, that’s the culture here and I suppose I’ve got to accept it.  But when I see them charge extra money for peak hour usage I really have to wonder: why are they trying to discourage people from going to work on the bus?  Even from the perspective of someone who never rides the bus at all, each person they can convince to train or bus or whatever will be one less person clogging the roads they use every day.  If anything, the situation should be reversed and people should pay less money to ride at rush hour, not more.  Bah.  I’ll pay the extra quarter, I don’t really care about the money all that much.  In fact I pre-paid a set of $1.50 tickets so none of this actually matters, except the principle of the thing.

Ok, so I have been known to harp a bit on the media constantly misreferring to Islam as a “religion of peace”.  So in the interest of fairness, I’m going to link to an example of a dude who actually lives up to this moniker.  This guy risked life and limb to do something both awesome and dangerous, and I admire him for that.  I’d buy him a beer, were I to know where he lives — except of course that as a devout Muslim he couldn’t drink the beer.  So I’d have two beers, but the thought would be there.

I owe a friend of mine in Canadia some money after I pledged to support her in a charity event.  Since I owe her Canadian dollars I figure the least I can do is give her Canadian dollars in return, but obviously I don’t want to mail cash.  So I do what I always have done in situations like this, I go to the bank and request a money order in the currency I want to send — in this case getting a money order from my bank in Canadian dollars.

When I asked for this, the tellers at the bank looked at me like I just asked them for a hot dog made of kittens — that is to say a combination of absolute bewilderment and horror that anyone could possibly desire such a thing.  After consulting each other, the tellers decided that the only way to do this would be to go to the main branch downtown and ask them if they knew how to do such a thing.  So uh, I guess I’m just rudely sending a cheque in USian dollars then.

For this fifth bicentennial epside, the topic was chosen by fluffy.  I take a gripping look into the sociopolitical climate and the ramifications of the Balkanization of the American continent, in point-counterpoint format.

Podcast episode 5

I’ve been known to say that various things are the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, so much so that it’s a bit of a joke because the term has such little meaning anymore.  However.

The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard is that passports will be shipping with RFID emitters, broadcasting information out instead of passively containing information to be read.  Offhand I cannot think of a more shockingly bad misuse of technology, a glaring oversight that should be plainly obvious to any observer.

The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, coming soon to a pocket near you.

I say this hesitantly because at least one of my readers works there and will probably be slightly offended (or just annoyed) by this.  But I am pretty frustrated by how amazon does some pretty senseless things with larger orders.

Last week as previously mentioned I bought a lot of things from them: a series of books, four video games, a hard drive, and a ds lite.  The ds lite and hard drive shipped from 3rd party sites and the rest was from amazon proper.  It asks me if I want to save money by shipping them together, so I agree to this.  Then yesterday I get a notice on my mailbox when I get home that a delivery was made, except that delivery goes to the sales office for the apartment so I can’t pick it up until the next day.  I want to know which of the three batches it was so I log onto amazon’s “where’s my stuff” and I see that the ds lite was scheduled for delivery yesterday, the hard drive scheduled for today, and the rest?

October 19.

Uh, okay.  It seems that one of the books I ordered isn’t released until then which means that it all its wisdom they decided to hold my entire order for three months until at which point the book goes on sale so they can ship it all together in one bundle.  Um..  So to get this straight: in order to save $5, I’m going to not get the video games I ordered to go with the video game system I ordered for three months?

I can hear someone say “but they told you that they were going to do this and you agreed to it”.  Which may be true, I’m not sure.  What I do know is that it’s an extremely horrible default and if they are going to do something like this they really ought to make it more clear what is going on to the end user.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I’m pretty certain that I’m more technically and internet savvy than the majority of amazon’s customers… so if I missed this I’m sure it happens all the time.

In defense of Amazon, I’m going to point out two redeeming factors.  One, they let you change your order so I once I discovered the error I could pretty easily change my shipping method and they’d ship me the games and books that had been released and it would arrive in a few days.  However since the games system already arrived, I wanted the games now.  And secondly, they let me cancel part of the order, so that is precisely what I did.  I went down the local GameStop and bought the games I would have ordered and my books will come next week and I’m fine with that.

So I’m not saying BOYCOTT AMAZON IS SO LAME, I’m just frustrated with the baffling default that forced me to suffer through the annoying experience that is retail shopping.  Seriously, I think the staff at GameSpot are actually chimpanzees — one of them threw feces at me while I was checking out my order.  Regardless, I now have a DS lite and my silly games.  Animal Crossing is so frigging awesome.

The latest in the ryanthiessen.com family of websites, http://flagwavingbeaver.com/

It’s also the first website located on my brand new server. Gotta start with the important things first, eh?

You may have noticed a disturbing lack of posts yesterday.  The cause is that my new server is finally set up so I’m configuring and moving sites over to it one at a time, which means that I have slightly less time these days to tell you about the joys of Kansas City and the wonders of the Time Cube.  But don’t worry, I’ll still try to cover the basics and then be back in true form in a while.

So the coffee machine at work was broken a few days ago.  This of course caused great panic from the caffeine addicted population, so when the coffee machine repairman came I was pretty excited.

He seemed a bit baffled as to why I was worshiping him as a god, though.  I suppose in hindsight, slaughtering a goat and then smearing the blood on myself and dancing around in a circle chanting may have been a bit much.  You’d think though that in his line of work he’d come to expect that.  Freak.

You’re calling out (albeit in a very very quiet voice): “Where can I go to find pictures of Canadian politicians hoping to gain votes by dressing up into ridiculous looking cowboy outfits?”

The answer, my friend, is here.

In case you are completely crazy, I have provided a convenient service for you!  You, Joe Blogreader, can aways be just a few short keystrokes away from figuring out the local date in the Time Cube calendar.

All you need to do is fire up your favourite xmlrpc client and direct it to https://threeducks.net/cgi-bin/time.cgi and use the method get_time().  It has an optional method “mode” in case you don’t like the default mode “cube”.

Example python client:

import xmlrpclib
server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(”https://threeducks.net/cgi-bin/time.cgi”)
server.get_time()

That’s it, and unlike all those educated stupid people around you, you’ll know the correct date.

I had a great day at work and my mood is totally upbeat.  I’m currently rocking out to Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and it is great.

But really, soccer fans, all is not lost!  This weekend you could catch the Kansas City Wizards play the Colorado Rapids.

After going undefeated in the three games leading up to its current string of seven games, Kansas City has hit a bit of a road bump since falling 1-0 at D.C. United on June 24th to open its 22-day adventure. The Wizards faced D.C. again four days later, dropping a 3-2 contest at Arrowhead. Three days after the second loss to D.C., they lost a 2-0 decision to Los Angeles at home.

Amazing!

I got to work this morning and saw that the time on my new Time Cube was a bit off.  I was a bit disappointed, though I did realize that timekeeping in four simultaneous Earth days is substantially harder for educated stupid single day folks.

Except that it turned out that my PC’s clock was the one that was off.  The Time Cube?  Perfect.

I haven’t posted much, contrary to my “post early post often” strategy I’ve been employing over the past few weeks.  The last time I did a blog I hardly updated it at all and thus no one ever read it.  So I figured when I started a new one I should take the opposite tack and give people a reason to visit the site — even if there is no “real” content they will get a silly picture of a duck or something.

I think it’s working alright — contrary to the title I seem to have a few readers and I get a comment or two every day.  So that’s nice, overall I’m pretty happy with my blog.  I’m thinking about keeping things exactly as they are now, but moving the site to one of my other domains, worsethanhitler.org — most blogs have a title and mine is the bland old “ryan thiessen” which is accurate I suppose but not really inventive.  And why have a billion domains like I do if I’m not going to use them at all?

So what I’m thinking is to use rt.com as a menu and then pointing to my various other sites for subcontent.  Don’t worry, if I do switch over I’ll mirror the blog here for a while and then seamlessly redirect if I ever do fully 100% move.  And I know you were worried.

Yesterday I bought:

• a Nintendo DS lite
• four DS games: Mario Kart, Brain Age, Mario Bros, and Animal Crossing
• Five books by Richard Dawkins
• a 500Gb Hard drive

That should keep me busy for a bit!

In case you were thinking you had a bad day at work, think again.  That guy had a bad day at work.

I demand it.  Do you?

In this fourth tri-weekly podcast, I look at some of the ways the world is today which we just take for granted. It’s pretty easy to forget that for just a few minor details the world would be a lot different — your old “butterfly flaps its wings” argument. Sure, some things like if Russia hadn’t joined the Allies in WWI have been beaten to death, but what about other things like if Lincoln hadn’t been shot or if the guy who invented sliced bread was eaten by a bear? Let’s imagine what the world could — but never will — be.

Podcast episode four.