Honeypot.net

It snowed!I went outside today and played! bet I would have stayed out there if it had snowed more and if my feet didn’t freeze, I would have stayed there longer!

I was at grandma’s house last weekend, and there was a power outage.Turns out, it was a squirrel chewing on the power lines, and got electrocuted.We found out when my Uncle Brian came in saying,“There’s a dead squirrel that was chewing on the power lines.“When I heard that I fell on the floor laughing!That squirrel is nuts!Or at least was nuts…

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for “meta-ETA”, so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META.

Grandma and Grandpa got here yesterday!My camera is working again to!I took a picture of a mirror,and when I saw the picture I saw me and my camera flashing!Anyways,I am very exited!They’re staying 2 weeks!

As of mid-August, I can’t watch the local ABC affiliate TV channel over my satellite dish because they tried to jack up the rates they charge Dish Network for carrying their channel. Never mind that their advertisers pay them by the number of viewers, regardless of whether that’s by antenna, cable, or satellite. Dish Network could almost get away with asking KCAU to pay them for the task of handling all the transmission details. Anyway, here’s a letter I wrote to KCAU’s president:

As you mentioned on your website, I could watch your programming over-the-air for free. While your position regarding Dish Network makes sense on the surface, it falls apart quickly. They are redistributing your signal at no cost to you while you still collect money from advertisers. Frankly, they’re doing you a favor by handling your broadcasting. Imagine that you could still get the same advertising revenue without having to pay for transmitters and the associated electricity and personnel. Nice, huh?

Since you’re not directly paid by viewers regardless of whether they watch by rabbit ears or by satellite dish, you can hardly claim to be losing money with the latter. In the mean time, your viewership is lower by the number who can no longer receive your signal (and you’re crazy if you think I’d downgrade from a crystal-clear satellite signal and DVR to a snowy analog antenna). The other local network affiliates must be rubbing their hands together with glee as you throw away your audience.

Finally, consider that a five-minute Internet search returns downloadable versions of current programming. While I personally don’t (yet) consider that a viable option to local programming, as of today that would be the easiest course for a lot of your viewers who have been cut off.

Please allow Dish Network to resume broadcasting your signals at no charge to you so that I can go back to watching “Lost”. Thank you.

Sincerely, Kirk Strauser

I have no particular feelings for either company, but Dish Network’s position in this one case seems by far the most reasonable of the two.

We took a trip to Grandma’s house on Thursday last week, and on Saturday we went to the lake.A couple hours before we left we went boating.It took a long time for me and my friend to get off the tube. And when I did get off the tube I asked the boat driver if we could stop the boat and swim fora while. When we left the lake it was a long drive back to grandma’s house, and I almost fell asleep!I had half a hamburger and went to bed.

This is kind of a hard review to write. Short take on the music: it’s brilliant. If you like Irish folk or punk, you’ll like “The Meanest of Times”. However, I just can’t get past the awful recording quality, and by awful, I mean truly, utterly terrible.

As though the music industry didn’t have enough problems to deal with, such as the string of lawsuits against its customers, the major labels have been busy with something called the “loudness war”. The thinking is that the louder music is played, the better most people will think it sounds. In an effort to make their CDs sounds better than their competitors’, the companies are recording music as loudly as possible. There’s nothing inherently bad about turning up the volume, but they try to squeeze out a few extra decibels by smoothing out the sound so that even the quietest sounds can blow out your speakers.

“The Meanest of Times” is a sad example of this. You’d think that a bunch of angry Irish punks would rattle your fillings, right? Nah. The music is painstakingly compressed until you can tell that someone’s playing the drums, but can’t quite make out the kick or snare.

Track 8, “(F)lannigan’s Ball”, starts with an aggressive bass line. After the first two notes, you know it’s going to be noisy. Too bad the drums kick in then, and the total sound of the bass line and the drums would have been too loud because the sound engineer already had the volume up all the way, so the compressor kicks in to mute both of them. Instead of THUM—THUM—THUM, we get THUM—THUM—splut.

So, there you have it. The music is wonderful, but the sound quality is horrible. “The Meanest of Times” could have been the soundtrack to a riot, but it’s been successfully tamed for the “Matlock” crowd. If your grandpa ever asks what punk music is, give this to him.

We already suspected that Warner Music Group hates their customers, and this just proves it. Go see Dropkick Murphys live if you can and buy lots of their stuff, but don’t bother with this album.

Hi! You’re the guy who sat behind me at my 8-year-old daughter’s teeball practice. I thought you’d want to know that you were talking loudly enough for everyone to hear you, including the coaches. I mean, we could all tell that’s why you were bitching so loudly the whole time, and I figured you’d be happy that you were heard.

Now, I’m sure you’re an expert in the game. You definitely sounded like it from 30 feet away! Still, I thought perhaps you might appreciate a few clarifications:

• When our daughters were sitting on the ground talking to their coach, she was explaining terms like “offense”, “defense”, and “sportsmanship”. I know you thought she should have been teaching them how to play baseball (because you said so firmly and repeatedly), but I’m certain she meant well.
• You were rather bothered that the coach didn’t teach the girls how to bat by lifting their front foot to swing harder. Rest assured, should our daughters advance beyond the first week of girls’ 8-year-old teeball, their future coaches will show them this technique.
• Although you and I are past our athletic primes and the bases seem farther apart than they used to, I don’t think it really takes fifteen seconds to run from each base to the next. In fact, I’m fairly positive I could hop that fast with a broken ankle. I only mention this specifically because you sounded quite authoritative as you explained this to your son and everyone else on our bleachers, and may wish to update your calculations.

While I’m sincerely honored to have been the recipient of your shared wisdom, I respectfully request that during future practices you endeavor to please shut up and watch our little girls play. Thanks!

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it’s not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.

The Model M keyboard is like that: it’s loud, ugly, heavy, and utterly lacking modern niceties like buttons to change your sound volume or check your email. And yet, it has that transcendent feeling that’s hard to explain, that sense of rightness where you realize that you’re using the best that’s ever been made, that every change since then has been superfluous and cosmetic. With time, the loud clacking becomes the background music of your work, the harmony that tells you that your thoughts have become words. Its beige boxiness yields to elegant simplicity and the realization that true beauty is born of function, not appearance. The sheer weight of the thing turns to solidity and the confidence that it will stay where you put it. The dearth of features becomes the singleminded dedication to the parts that really matter and a proud disregard of unneeded distractions.

A tool attains its peak when a craftsman forgets that he’s using it because it has become an extension of himself. Thus the humble Model M has become the iconic favorite of hackers everywhere, an ode to the engineers who grasped for excellence and acheived it.

In Nebraska’s May 13 election, two Green Party candidates ran for Douglas County Commissioner, District 3. Between them, they received one vote. How stoned do you have to be before you forget to vote for yourself?

At least neither can accuse the other of splitting the election.