Not only have I lost two disk drives so far this week, but I've come down with a nasty cold. At least I'm better off than this guy:

There'll be an airplane crash in Burma next week, but it shouldn't affect me here in New York. And the feegs certainly can't harm me. Not with all my closet doors closed.

No, the big problem is lesnerizing. I must not lesnerize. Absolutely not. As you can imagine, that hampers me.

And to top it all, I think I'm catching a really nasty cold.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Very much not yay.

I suddenly have 250GB less files to worry about. Came home this evening, thought about burning another DVD, decided to have a nap first. Had nap, came back to computer:

The disk in drive D is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?

Excuse me a moment.

_{fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck}

Sorry. I wonder if the disk is dead outright, or if the filesystem has been corrupted. I'll have to see what is available in the way of recovery tools.

Sigh. At least I got to back up the anime.

Update: The disk is not dead; the filesystem is corrupt. Probably recoverable. So, anyone know what the best, reasonably priced utility for recovering poodulated FAT32 filesystems is? I downloaded a copy of GetDataBack, which has let me know that the files are there. Is there something better I should be using? Does Partition Magic do this? (Because I have other uses for it, if it does.)

Update: The demo version of Stellar Phoenix has found 388,063 files totalling 377.859GB. This includes deleted files (which, given that the disk was full, are a lost cause - but that's okay, because all I want is the not-deleted files). I just told it to exclude the deleted files, and it's having a bit of a think. (Read: grinding the CPU into powder.) Every file I expected seems to be there, with no signs of corruption in the directory structures. The demo version won't let me at the files, but so far I'm tempted to buy this one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Burnt 49 DVDs without a hiccup... Number 50 was a coaster.

Oh well.

I've ordered another hundred disks. Did I mention that I have a lot of files?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Another disk drive went South overnight. Acutally, given that this is the Southern Hemisphere, it may actually have gone North. Hard to tell without a magnetometer. Anyway, last night, working fine. This morning, as dead as Blogspot's archives on a bad day.

Fortunately, I spent much of the weekend running backups.
Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to that drive yet.

Of course, it's part of a RAID-5 array, so all I have to do is reboot, and it will fail the drive out, run a file system check...

Run a file system check...

Run a...

Reboot. Go into interactive mode... I said, go into interactive mode...

Grr. Reboot. Go into interactive mode. Zap that filesystem out of the table so that it doesn't automount. And...

Reboot. Boot boot boot. Good. Mount the filesystem manually... Good.

Now, copy all the files across to... Um. Did I mention that I don't have any disk space left? Hmm, now that I've backed up all these files, I don't actually need to keep them on the disk. Not as such. So zzzzap! Bye bye 50GB of, well, stuff.

Copy copy. Now why is there an scp process running on the target machine, chewing up 99% of the CPU, and doing no I/O whatsoever? And why has my copy stalled? Kill the process. Kill the... Bugger. Reboot - the other box, this time.

Copy copy copy. And now I have no disk space again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I have extracted my blogroll from the evil clutches of Blogrolling, and put it up here for all to see. Yay!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Railroad Tycoon 3 is out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

If you are an anti-idiotarian, rightist (is that a word?), centrist, or even a non-barking-moonbat lefty, there's still time for you to get over to the New Blog Showcase and vote for Defending the Blogosphere Front in the War on Terrorism at Irreconcilable Musings.

We've already squished the LLLs like bugs, but there's always room for more squishing.

And if you are a barking-moonbat lefty, keep reading this blog and your cure is assured! (Warning: Some thinking may also be required.)

Update: It looks like the League of Losers tried a little Chicago-style "Vote early and often" chicanery, but they are rank amateurs at the game compared to Harvey of Bad Money:

Earlier this week (twice, actually) a bunch of losers ran a denial of service attack on Hosting Matters. Pissed me right off. First, if you don't like someone's blog, you should make a better one yourself. Second, if you're not qualified to do so, then just hit the damn back button & don't give them your traffic.

Irreconcilable Musings has a NBS entry that discusses this topic, and even offers an idea for something you can do to keep a good blog from being knocked down again. That makes him a winner in my book. Or at least votable.
And just for fun, I'm going to give IM some Chicago-style bonus votes. Rumor has it the Bear's vote counter is a little wonky. Well, when in Rome...

Defending the Blogosphere Front in the War on Terrorism over at Irreconcilable Musings

I see that the Axis of Weenies has put in all their 27 votes for the post saying Bush=Hitler, Cheney=Satan, we're all being Enron-ed. Grow up, people. It's not the best written post, or even the most entertaining. If a liberal version of Frank J. ever appeared in the Showcase, I'd vote for it because it would be FUNNY. Actually, since most liberals are humor impaired, my example is a huge stretch, but you catch my drift. Anyway, voting for someone's blog just because you happen to agree with their ideology only makes you look stupid. Look, I can make like a liberal blogger, too: Bush is Hitler! Halliburton controls my life because Cheney is Satan! Bill Clinton makes me wet:uke::. Sorry, there are some things I just can't do.

Update: I see that the Axis of Weenies decided to cheat by treating the New Blog Showcase as their own personal Chicago-style election. I've decided to try their approach and make the assault so pernicious that Truth Laid Bear will cancel all the multiple votes as cheating. Since the lefties have decided to create a Florida redux election by manufacturing votes, I'll join right in.

In fact, Physics Geek posted that not once, but three times! Applause!

Update: Loyal reader and occasional commenter Mitch H. of Blogfonte tsks loudly. He has a point. But they started it! Um... I'm only reporting the news, not making it! Let's see... A rolling stone... No, that one doesn't work at all.

The drugs made me do it! Or possibly the devil! Devildrugs!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Burning DVDs. Burn burn burnity burn. Number 18 is being toasted right now, containing episodes 1 to 25 of Groove Adventure Rave.

This, I have to say, is pretty cool. $2.40 for the blank DVD-R (Shintaro 4x) and it will hold a whole season of an anime series. (Or 9 episodes of Buffy.) I could have done this on my CD writer, but it would have required 7 times as many disks, so 7 times as much effort. Burning (counts on fingers) 126 CDs - probably more, in fact, because I'd only get one episode of Buffy to a CD - isn't all that attractive. In fact, I don't think I've burnt 126 CDs since I bought the writer. Writers. Um, there's four in the three main PCs, one for the notebook, one in the G4 Mac. I think the SGI has a CD writer too.

But DVDs are in the sweet spot, at least for now; they hold enough that it's not painful to do backups; both the drives and the disks are reasonably priced (and getting cheaper fast).

Sony (and others) are working to obsoletify the DVD as quickly as they can, and I salute them for their efforts. Who the heck wants to have to change disks in the middle of Fellowship of the Ring? And that's not even HD - which will naturally require higher bit rates.

But right now, DVDs it is, and I'm happy. Except that they are crappy little things with pathetic cover art. I'm sure some of you are old enough to remember LPs -y'know, vinyl - and how with 144 square inches to work with the artists could produce something that actually stood out. I have a whole bunch of laserdisks, too, and particularly the ones from Japan have some wonderful artwork.

Bring 'em back, I say. A 12" double-sided Blu-Ray disk would hold something like... carry the twelve... 300GB of data on a single layer. All of Buffy on one disk. Woot! And I'd actually be able to find the damn thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:53 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sheep Ship of Shame Finally Unloads
Eritrea Given Politically Embarrassing Sheep
Eritrea Home for Sheep of the Desert
Sheep to Shore in Eritrea
Sheep of Fools

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:25 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blog of the Day is Ironie Ambiente:

Fouille. Aha! Matrices! UM, j'ai déjà environ 200 matrices; ils vivent dans un vase sur ma table de café. Je ne suis pas sûr pourquoi j'ai pensé qu'I a eu besoin des autres (compte) 28. Ils sont jolis, cependant.

J'allais signaler une information d'avertissement et suivante reçue d'une source secrète * que le poison d'une grenouille D'or-Jaune de dard de poison pourrait tuer jusqu'à 1500 personnes, et que vous devriez tous envoyer m'à de grands montants d'argent pour m'aider à éviter cette menace en achetant un bon nombre d'ordinateurs parce que nous tous savons cela qui produit des ordinateurs crée l'anhydride carbonique, qui est très mauvais pour les usines du ** de jungle d'Amazon où la grenouille D'or-Jaune de dard de poison a sa tanière. Ainsi si vous me donnez assez d'argent, je puis acheter assez d'ordinateurs pour les essuyer dehors entièrement! Et même si je puis seulement acheter un ordinateur, ce pourrait être assez pour tuer au moins une grenouille, et économiser les 1500 vies humaines.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:19 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Two picks stand out in this week's New Blog Showcase: Wally at Irreconcilable Musings on the Jihad against the Blogosphere - and what you can do about it, and Scott at Demosophia about the dangers liberal democracy faces from totalitarianism.

The other highlight of this week's showcase is the entry of the League of Losers Liberals into the sponsorship contest. No, let's call them what they are: Losers. The second post I mention, at Demosophia, about the dangers facing liberal democracy, that would be dear to the heart of all liberals, right? It would attract liberal votes the way a dead pygmy shrew attracts flies, right? (Please don't ask me how my Shrew Ranch is coming along. I just don't want to talk about it.)

But no, the LOSERS all vote for a pile up on Halliburton.

We don't need to lift a finger to marginalise these wankers. They've done it all by themselves, unable to see past their incoherent hatred for President George W. Bush.

PRESIDENT! GEORGE! W! BUSH! Hahahahahahaha!

Anyway, over at Munuviana, Susie calls on all Munuvians to vote. It's not just Munuvians who should vote, of course; all members of the Axis of Naughty, all the almost-but-not-quite-right-thinking people in The Alliance of Cheap Free Blogs, indeed, everyone who has a blog and is not a pathetic wanker, should get on the Ecosystem and show those "liberals" what the word used to mean.

Do it, because you know that if you don't, one day you will wake up to find that the frogs have taken over, and you won't be able to get a decent doughnut anywhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Dinner. I knew I was forgetting something.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 That explains all that rumbling from Down Under.

Posted by: Victor at October 23, 2003 09:50 PM (L3qPK)

2 The Complete SF Novels of Fredric Brown??? Please you have to share this .. ...

Posted by: the Butcher at May 15, 2006 02:50 AM (l2/lA)

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So I took my new anime goodies back downstairs to the living room, where they can sit with the other 80-odd DVDs I have waiting for me to have time to watch them, and there I noticed something odd.

The new volume of Chobits was number 4.

The existing volumes were number 1 (which I have watched) and number 2 (which I will watch, one day).

Those who have taken the advanced course will see the problem here.*

Well. I counted them twice, looked around in case it had crawled off to be with another genre. No dice.** So I headed off to the spare bedroom.

When I'm really busy, but not really really busy, I will go shopping, and then bring the goodies home (whatever they might be) and drop the bags in the spare room. If there's something I want to read or watch or listen to or install right away, I take that one thing, and leave the rest for later. Right now, there's about six months worth of goodies bagged and waiting in that room. Surely Chobits volume 3 was among them?

Well, lets see. Figurines from Love Hina, Oh My Goddess, and Dirty Pair. Not quite what I'm after. The Complete SF Novels of Fredric Brown. I really need to find time to read that, but not what I want right now. Two issues of NewType. Getting warm!

A bag full of Anime DVDs! Paydirt! Two box sets of You're Under Arrest; Inu Yasha, Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar***, Noir... No Cho. No Bits. Rats. Well, not actual rats.

Dig. Six Weird Al Yankovic CDs. Oh, yeah, forgot about those. A 120GB hard disk. Another issue of NewType. Scientific American. Aha! More DVDs.

But no Chobits.

Dig. Aha! Dice! Um, I already have about 200 dice; they live in a vase on my coffee table. I'm not sure why I thought I needed another (count) 28. They are pretty, though.

Rise of Nations. The latest Sims expansion pack.

And there, in a bag, all alone, Chobits 3.

Oh, and if you happen to see a guy in a full suit of armour wandering around, looking lost, I seem to have this grail-looking thingy too.

* "One, two, five!"
   "Three, sir!"
   "Three!"
** Well, actually...
*** Fear the power of the cute side!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just don't call me late to dinner.

I just realised that I am absolutely starving. I've been trying to cut back on the meals a bit, lately, and this is what happens. 'Scuse me while I go pig out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:23 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Went shopping tonight, which is something I just haven't done lately. My Anime-pusher had a stack of stuff waiting for me, including the latest volumes of Chobits, Card Captor Sakura (What? What?!), Inu Yasha (Hi Mookie!), Please Teacher, Full Metal Panic, Haibane Renmei (which I saw one-and-a-half episodes of at Animania), DNA², Noir, and His and Her Circumstances (Kare Kano). Also the latest two issues of NewType... Not that I actually have time to read it.

King's Comics had the Azumanga Daioh manga - yay! I'm a huge fan of this wonderful show, but as far as I know the anime is currently not available. The fansub has been pulled from distribution now that the series has been licensed, but it hasn't actually been released yet.

Not that I care, because I already have it. Ha ha!

Then I took my few remaining dollars to Galaxy Bookshop (Sydney's best Science Fiction and Fantasy book store) where I found Lois McMaster Bujold's new book, Paladin of Souls. This is the sequel to her fabulous Curse of Chalion, which was nominated for the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel.* (The winner was Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I didn't like at all.)

Oh, and Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think and Lawrence Watt-Evans' Something-or-Other. Sorry, LWE, I just buy your books, I don't notice the titles so much...

But it's Paladin of Souls that's going to keep me away from the blogs for a couple of days. Try not to break anything, peoples, and beware of frogs. They're up to no good!

* Bujold did win the Hugo for Best Novel in 1991 for The Vor Game, and again in 1995 for Mirror Dance.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:17 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Heh, should I have known you'd be a Bujold fan I got 2 copies of Paladin through the SFBC. One for me, one for my mom's B-day Haven't gotten around to reading it yet, though.

Posted by: Chris C. at October 24, 2003 01:35 AM (3bb7g)

2 Bujold is teeeriifffic; I haven't read her non-Vorkosigan stuff except for an early dark fantasy (it was ok), but I've reread many of her Miles books time after time.
And "American Gods" was pretty pathetic. Spot on.

Posted by: Tadeusz at October 24, 2003 02:36 AM (bkSEZ)

3 I suppose I'll have to take one for the team & defend Gaiman. American Gods is a pretty solid fantasy, well-written, and entertaining. I loved the mid-book diversion into darkest Minnesota.
the Curse of Chalion, on the other hand, was decidedly minor Bujoldia. Fantasy isn't really her thing, and the Paladin/Chalion universe is missing a few gears. It might have something to do with the way she used late-Medieval Spain as her world-model, but excised the Jews from the narrative. Medieval Spain without Jews is kind of hollow, like an incomplete explaination. Don't get me wrong - I read, and liked both books. But they aren't particularly major works in any sense of the phrase.
I'm hoping that she has a few more Vorkosigan books in her, but I'm starting to suspect that the well might have run dry. The last Quaddie novel was fun, but a little overripe. Miles seems to be something of a played-out character.
Oh, well. I'm looking forward to that "Winterfair Gifts" short getting printed one of these centuries...

Posted by: Mitch H. at October 24, 2003 03:18 AM (tVSJJ)

4 I like Gaiman's work a lot. Neverwhere, Stardust, his short stories, Coraline, Good Omens, of course.
But American Gods struck me as a failed attempt at a Tim Powers novel. (I like Tim Powers' novels, but I prefer them to be written by Tim Powers.)
And I disagree with you about Chalion being minor Bujold. Grr! Grr, I say!
But I do agree that the last Vorkosigan novel was a bit weak - rather a disappointment given that she has been going from strength to strength with the series until now. I think it might be time for Miles to be put out to pasture.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 24, 2003 10:23 AM (jtW2s)

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It looks like mu.nu was partially DoSed by a group of Golden-Yellow Poison Dart frogs.

No, really.

I was going to post a warning, following information received from a covert source* that the poison from one Golden-Yellow Poison Dart frog could kill up to 1500 people, and that you should all send me large amounts of money to help me avert this menace by buying lots of computers because we all know that producing computers creates carbon dioxide, which is very bad for the plants of the Amazon Jungle** where the Golden-Yellow Poison Dart frog has its lair. So if you give me enough money, I can buy enough computers to wipe them out entirely! And even if I can only buy one computer, that might be enough to kill at least one frog, and save 1500 human lives.

You know it makes sense.

And the next thing I know, the gigabit line through wcg.net to Mu.Nu Global Headquarters goes down. No explanation, no warning, just the faint sound of ribbit from the conduit. Fortunately, gblx.net (who provide another of our gigabit lines) recently improved their frogproofing, so it was still possible to get at the goodies if you were coming from the right side of the net.

Anyway, I'm never one to back down in the face of danger, real or imagined, so here's the warning:

One Golden-Yellow Dart frog's poison can kill 1500 people.

This menace must be stopped before they kill again.

Please give generously to the World Anti-Wildlife Fund (WAWF) care of this blog.

Thank you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I understand that France has a standard 35-hour working week. Can anyone tell me if that means 9-5 with an hour for lunch, or is it really 9-4 (or something) with an hour (or whatever) for lunch, so less than 35 actual working hours?

Just curious, since I have more experience with 35-hour days than with 35-hour weeks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

That babble I posted over at Jen's about Picotechnology wasn't entirely babble. See, for example, this page on muonic atoms:

A muon m is a lepton with mass of 105MeV

It is possible to replace one of the electron in an atom by a negative muon.
[Scary-looking equations go here.]

Therefore muonic orbits much closer to nucleus

Since the muon (mu) mass is 206.77 times larger than the electron (me) mass,the atomic radius of muonic systems is approximately 200 times smaller than the H atom bohr radius.Since mu/mp~ 0.1,where mp is a proton mass, considerable isotope effects are expected to occur in muonic molecules.The lifetime of the muon is ~ 2 ns,which is much longer than current intense laser pulse durations,thus allowing in principle a possibility to manipulate muonic systems by superintense (I> 10 **20 W/cm2) lasers. Such high intensities are required since the ionization potentials are consequently 200 times larger than H and the muonic unit of laser intensity becomes 200**4 times larger than the atomic unit Io= 3.5 x 10 **16 W/cm2.The corresponding muonic time unit is 200 times shorter than the atomic one (24 attoseconds),ie 120 zeptoseconds. We derive scaling rules for the behavior of muonic atoms and molecules exposed to superintense laser fields using quasistatic models of tunnelling ionization and dissociaition akin to our previous work on H2+ in intense laser fields, ( Phys Rev Lett 84,3562(2000), Phys Rev A 63,,023409 (2001)). Ionization and dissociation rates for the muonic systems, ppu,ddu,ttu,will be presented for currently available superintense (I~10**22 W/cm2) 800 nm laser pulses in order to discuss manipulation scenarios such as laser induced recollision at such ultrahigh intensities where proton ponderomotive energies of 1 MeV can be now created.

But anyway: Smaller atoms! Coming soon to a store near you! But you have to act fast.

Update: This is why my lab exploded. Well, that and three hundred cases of Jolt Cola on a hot summer day...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I have a DVD Burner, as I've mentioned before. I use it to burn DVDs. Burn, DVD, burn! At around 4½GB a pop, and one-third the price of disk space (even leaving out the added cost of RAID), they make a lot of sense. (In fact, they're just about the only backup medium that currently makes sense, at least if you're looking at the price of storage rather than at the value of your data. Which is the wrong way to look at it... Unless you happen to have a terabyte of files that you don't value that highly but would still be terribly annoyed if you lost any of them.)

Where was I? DVDs, burn, right! So I bought a hundred blank DVD-Rs, which are conveniently white on one side so that they can be printed on and you can tell which way up they go.*

So, I have a hundred DVDs, which I am working my way through rapidly. I'll probably be buying another hundred before I'm done.

I have a hundred, will have two hundred... Identical disks, white on one side, silver on the other. Oops.

Labels would be good. I could buy some CD labels, print them out, peel them off, stick them on, hope I don't screw it up. Or I could get a printer that prints right on the DVD! Epson sell two models that do this, the Photo Stylus 900 and 960. They look like nice little printers in general, and they're not too expensive (particularly the 900).

But. Not. In. Australia.

Which. Just. Happens. To. Be. Where. I. Live.

In America, yes. In Canada, too. In Britain, in Denmark, in the Philippines, in Singapore.

But not here, dammit. I've emailed Epson; it will be interesting to see how (and if) they respond.

* No, really. Cheap CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are sometimes featureless silver on both sides, and the only way you can tell which way up they go is by studying the diffraction patterns. Or by sticking the disk in the drive and seeing what happens, which is often more reliable.

Update: Epson responded this morning. Good for them.

Apparently the reason the 900 and 960 are not available in Australia is that they use dye-based inks (the email actually said "die", but never mind) rather than pigment-based inks. The pigment-based inks are water-fast (which means that they won't run), but the dye-based inks are not.

Epson helpfully pointed me to the Stylus Photo 2100, which is available in Australia (which I knew) and can print on CDs and DVDs (which I didn't know). It's a very nice printer, 2880x1440 dpi, 7 colours with individual ink cartridges, able to print on paper up to A3+ size with edge-to-edge coverage (no borders). It has parallel and USB and Firewire ports. (I like Firewire.)

It costs $1789.

Yowie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:25 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Or you get a sharpie and start writing. Err, that's assuming that the nice white side is actually opaque so you don't mess up the data.

Posted by: Chris C. at October 23, 2003 04:12 AM (3bb7g)

2 I'm not sure exactly what a sharpie is.
But if I write on them with a permanent market (the sensible thing), and then Epson brings out their neat printers, only I can't print nicely on the DVDs now because I've scribbled all over them, I'll really be annoyed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 23, 2003 04:20 AM (jtW2s)

3 Sorry, "Sharpie" is a brand of permanent marker here in the US.

Posted by: Chris C. at October 23, 2003 04:27 AM (3bb7g)

4 and to add to your useless errata file, it's pronounced "sharp-y" not "shar-pie"

Posted by: Chris C. at October 23, 2003 04:28 AM (3bb7g)

5 Right. But I'd still rather have pretty labels.
Well, I'm filing them sequentially in a nice binder for now. As long as I don't drop it...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 23, 2003 04:29 AM (jtW2s)

6 Just make sure you give the DVDs number labels when you burn them. That'll let you sort them out (slowly, unfortunately), even if they physically get mixed up, by loading each DVD and checking the volume label. And you can keep a file listing each DVD number and its contents for use later when you make said pretty labels.

Posted by: Chris C. at October 23, 2003 04:40 AM (3bb7g)

7 Yep

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 23, 2003 04:47 AM (jtW2s)

8 So why can't you order a printer online and have it shipped to Australia? (or perhaps have a nice American friend buy one for you and send it as a belated birthday present?)

Posted by: Susie at October 23, 2003 04:49 AM (0+cMc)

9 Well, the U.S. version is a puny 110-volt device that would explode if I tried to plug it into our manly Aussie electricity.
The U.K. version would work, though...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 23, 2003 04:56 AM (jtW2s)

10 Depends on if it has an external power brick. If so, you could probably get a new one that will do the correct AC voltage conversion.

Posted by: Chris C. at October 23, 2003 05:17 AM (3bb7g)

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Most people are pretty sensible. (When I say "most people" here, I am specifically excluding teenagers, that is, women between the ages of 13 and 18 and boys under the age of 30.)

I've served on a jury, for example, and I was impressed by the common-sense, level-headed approach taken by the other 11 members. (I was just there for the free sandwiches.) It was not a case that - as far as I know - any of us had had to deal with before, but we listened to the evidence, took notes, and came fairly quickly to a unanimous verdict.

Get a few guys together and they can talk about cars - or computers, depending on the generation - for just about any length of time without the least sign of animosity. Even sport, with its strong team rivalries, is usually a safe topic.

As soon as the subject of politics is raised, though, the debate becomes heated, and almost invariably devolves rapidly into yelling and swearing. Unless everyone in the room happens to barrack* for the same team.

I have a theory as to why this is so, and it is this:

People don't know what they are talking about.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Consider the family. The family is, in essence, pure socialism. Mum** and Dad earn the money, and it gets spent where it's needed. Centralised planning, from each according to etc etc. This works because it is a family, and everyone has everyone else's best interests at heart.***

Obviously a good thing, right? But when you try to scale it up to running an entire country, you end up with millions of people dead.

When you try to scale a process, things change. Talk to an industrial chemist about it sometime.**** Factors that might be insignificant on the small scale come to the fore. Those same factors were present in your small scale experiment, but they scale differently - some might grow linearly with N (the size of the group), but others might grow as Log(N), or as N² - or even as something scary like 2^N or N!, though such things grow so fast that theories affected by such scaling tend to get wrecked by ugly fact pretty quickly. The factors of accountability and greed and the costs of centralisation and information flow were all there in the family, but with a group that size they didn't matter. With a hundred million people, they predominate.

What it boils down to is that most people have no idea about how to run a country, because they never have run a country. And because it's complicated, and it is not at all obvious how the scaling rules apply to even one element, let alone the huge number of disparate and conflicting elements needed to make a country run successfully.

Which is why even the people who do have this experience mostly just muddle along, making small changes and hoping they don't screw things up too badly.*****

I have a cure for this. If I get it right, it might even make me rich... If I ever get time to actually work on it.

* Root, but Australians attach another meaning to that term.
** Yes, Jen, hee hee.
*** It works in my family, anyway. No, I don't want to hear about your family.
**** But don't blame me when you can't get him to stop talking.
***** And relying on the scientists and engineers to drive economic growth and generally improve things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Hee, hee!

Posted by: Jennifer at October 23, 2003 09:44 AM (OT4zr)

2 Great theory; makes a lot of sense. The thing is, I think, that the family is heirarchical and that's fine for a system defined by adults and kids. When governments become the "adults" then the People become the "kids" and that's where the trouble starts. Mum and Dad don't like being treated like kids by their government. The "adults" (government) then need to apply strict "tough love" to their "children" which results in extensive "scoldings" and millions die.
The petulant "my way or the highway" attitude neccessary for Socialist systems to "work" is akin to childish bullyism that, when scaled "upward", looks like a freaky Bizarro version of the adult/children heirarchy of the Family.
Jus' my "2 cents". ""

Posted by: Tuning Spork at October 23, 2003 11:46 AM (uKrbC)

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If you put that nifty "I'm a Flowering Plant on the Blogosphere Ecosystem" script on your web site, and then Hosting Matters gets attacked by varmints again, your blog will suffer too.

Die, varmints! Die!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:44 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Really? Should I take it off mine? I don't want to infect Munuvia....

Posted by: Susie at October 22, 2003 04:54 PM (0+cMc)

2 It's not infectious, it's just that people will have trouble loading your blog, because it tries to read data from the Ecosystem which is hosted by Hosting Matters.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 22, 2003 04:57 PM (LBXBY)

3 You can see my solution at left under the monkeys.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 22, 2003 04:58 PM (LBXBY)

4 ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Susie at October 22, 2003 05:08 PM (0+cMc)

5 Since you're either not answering or not getting your email, who is Writer's Noose?

Posted by: Susie at October 22, 2003 05:10 PM (0+cMc)

6 Aha!
Um, all will be revealed...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 22, 2003 06:03 PM (LBXBY)

7 Well, piddly poo, and just as I was feeling comfortable being all braggy.

Posted by: LeeAnn at October 23, 2003 01:17 AM (HxCeX)

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With world fisheries declining at a dizzying rate* one of mankind's greatest culinary experiences** is pretty much doomed.

I'm talking, of course, about the anchovy.

What I'm planning to do (as soon as my friendly Nigerian financier comes through with the cash) is strike out in a bold new direction: pygmy shrew farming. Of course, we won't call them pygmy shrews, as our marketing test group rated that as the second least tasty-sounding animal, right after the leaf-nosed bat and just before the bandicoot.

No, in honour of their farm-raised heritage, I'm going to call them ranchovies. Get your pizza with 100% organic free range ranchovies today!

As for the shrews? It's gotta be better than the way they live now.

* Due to the French.
** After, for example, fried octopus.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:11 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hugh Hewitt, whose permalinks seem to be somewhat haphazard, uses the word demagouged in talking about a recent Howard Dean speech. Is that where you make an impassioned appeal to your audience, but just end up digging a hole for yourself?

Update: Rats, he's fixed it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:45 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Washington Post reports on A Dislike Unlike Any Other:

Has this unassuming man in a rumpled sports shirt lifted the lid on a boiling caldron of anti-Bush fury in liberal precincts across America? Or is he just an overcaffeinated, irrational liberal, venting to a minority of like-minded readers?

Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that "not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Looks like all those other blogs that didn't make the grade to be hosted at mu.nu have gone down again. You know, Instapundit, LGF, IMAO, people like that.

I expect Hosting Matters are suffering another DDoS attack. I hate Microsoft.*

* This is not in fact a complete non-sequitur, as most of the machines used to launch DDoS attacks are Windows boxes that have been hacked.

Update: Back again. Maybe it was just a glitch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:26 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)