dannyman.toldme.com

Yayoi came home from Japantown today. She was excited. “You must try this new product,” she explained.

It was a flat, pink, gelatinous food substance. Mochi! Mochi is basically a a bland, dry, rice-based(?) wrapper for snacks, like “mochi ice” which is a lump of ice cream wrapped in mochi. (Think of it as a flexible cracker for snacks.) (more…)

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“When George W. was governor, we executed a man every two weeks on average. I want to put an end to that. I hate for you to have to hear this from a Jew, but what would Jesus do about this? Would Jesus be interested in these men’s death or their salvation? That’s what you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re a Christian.”

To which this Atheist replies, “Amen, Kinky Friedman!”

If you live in Texas, you might want to save your vote for Kinky in next year’s gubernatorial primary.

If you don’t live in Texas, you could drop a few bucks on his campaign.

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There’s nothing like a downed remote machine at 7AM on a Saturday morning that will get you up to speed with the workings of your terminal server, and your datacenter operations staff.

Thank you, Cyclades!
Thank you, Nick at Abovenet!

Fortunately, it was a backup component that failed in a very scary the-harddrive-has-crashed way, but a reboot cleared that up. Now, if I can just figure out how this other thing I set up on the machine gets restarted, I can go back to being lazy. :)

The weirdest thing, and I am not bullshitting, the weirdest thing is that right before the pager went off for the first time, I was dreaming that my manager said “bad news” and started to explain that a disk failure on far more important machine had been detected. As I started to mull that over, my Sidekick started to beep. Is there such a thing as SysAdmin ESP, or do I dream of such things all the time, I just don’t remember them? Weird, man, weird!

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“What of America’s Christian Roots?”

From what I can tell, the founding fathers were about as Christian as other Americans. Which means, some were plenty Christian and some were pretty open-minded, or minimalist, like me. I think this excerpt from The Week, June 10, 2005 explains our Christian Heritage fairly well: (more…)

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You may ask: “what about ‘Under God?'”

When I was growing up, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance every day. “One nation, under God, indivisible . . .” at first, I just went with it. Then I began to wonder why an Atheist should profess to “one nation, under God” . . . if I didn’t believe in God, wasn’t swearing that my nation was “under God” dishonest? Really, didn’t saying “one nation, under God, indivisible” basically negate, for an Atheist, the entire pledge? Was I lying? Was I being disloyal? (more…)

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These days when America’s leaders are trying to make the place look more “Christian” I worry a bit because old-fashioned Christianity has from time to time endorsed the torture and murder of non-Christians. (more…)

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So, I’ve been playing with AdSense for a few months now. It seems I earn about $5.00 per month. June was a mere $4.80.

But Google gives me plenty of stats, and I have calculated that I could earn my current salary through AdSense if I can boost my page views to 642 million per day.

I think ratchet would melt under the strain of 7,500 hits per second. (more…)

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From: Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com>
To: themail@newyorker.com
Subject: Those Little Subscription Cards

Hello,

For generations, our species has been plagued by little slips of paper that fall out of magazines like The New Yorker when we are trying to read. This is very distracting, as the environmentally conscientious reader must bend down and pick these off the ground, and carry them over to the paper recycling bin. (more…)

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There’s a phenomenon called Hubbert’s Peak, named for the guy who correctly predicted that once the United States had consumed half of its oil reserves, that increasing demand would combine with diminishing supply to push prices steeply upward. From my reading, I have found that this prediction worked out domestically, but the oil prices didn’t shoot up because we have been successful at importing oil from overseas.

The really interesting Hubbert’s Peak, is when the world’s oil reserves will pass the 50% mark, at which point, unless we successfully adopt alternative energy, the oil prices will definitely shoot up a great deal, and they will never, barring a crash in the world economy, come down. I have read in a few places, that most predictions place that between between now and 2025 or so, 2012 seems to be the median. Some good advice I read said not to trust oil company estimates, because they try to over-estimate their reserves to improve their stock prices. There’s a decent chance that we are already at, near, or just a bit past, the peak: (more…)

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The flag stands for our nation, and its values, including Freedom of Speech.

Our men are dying in Iraq, and our nation and our planet have far more serious problems than flag burning. Our nation is run by crooks who write laws to please whomever pays them the most. We are sacrificing our moral superiority by torturing people, many of whom turn out innocent, and Osama bin Laden is still on the lose, and you have the cojones to tell me it is illegal to be unpatriotic?

If the jingoistic idiots running our nation do manage to pull off that flag-burning amendment, I will only be able to conclude that our nation is in fact in deep sh_t, and the only adequate way to express that will be by burning the flag in public.

Unless I’m a big chicken.

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When Yayoi and I got married, we wanted to collect whatever wisdom our families had to offer on living together, translate it into English and Japanese, and have it available at the ceremony. That project kind of fell through, but we have some material and I want to keep it somewhere accessible. So, why not share with the Innernet? (more…)

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