空き家

One of the BRCM guys mentioned that he was looking into akiya in Japan partly because his niece was married to a Japanese guy (ironically he wants to stay in the U.S. and she wants to live in Japan).  Anyway, he sent me a link regarding akiya and the potential issues with buying such property.

Linux Recovery

Well, this is just a note to myself rather than a bunch of weird links.  So...if you do "prime-select intel" on a hybrid graphics system and everything freezes when the boot sequence gets to X:

1. Hard reboot and wait for the BIOS screen to pass.
2. Hit Esc to bring up the Grub bootloader menu (holding down Shift didn't work on my system).
3. Type 'e' on the first entry to edit the boot commands.
4. On the line with "linux", append " 3" (space, 3).  This will restrict the runlevel to 3, which is multi-user mode.  Alternatively, one could append " single", but single-user mode is perhaps less useful because you can't start X from there, nor do you have network access.
5. Hit F10 to boot with those options.
6. Log in and do your thing.  In multi-user console mode, you can hit Ctrl-Alt-1 through 6 to get tty1-6.  Ctrl-Alt-7 is X, usually.  If you have something to try, like fix the graphics selection: "sudo prime-select nvidia ; systemctl stop lightdm ; systemctl start lightdm".

Of course, that may not completely fix things either, but getting access to the system is better than being locked out.

Link Dump!!

• Crash-only software, etc.
• Eat More Fat (sitting in my reader for five months?!)
• Surviving a winter storm without power
• 10 prepper games
• Augmented reality display comparison (Oculus Rift, etc.)
• Radon mitigation (diagram included)
• StartMail (whitepaper)
• Sullivan's Travels (saw this in Nov.)

Links from FB

Stefan Molyneux on the Hypocrisy of Gun Control (from 2007):

In general, the argument for gun control comes down to this.

Guns are used to commit crimes.
A crime is defined as the initiation of violence against a peaceful citizen.
Thus guns must be restricted or banned, in order to reduce crime.

It is easy to see the illogic of this argument. How does the government go about banning guns? Why, by initiating violence against those who possess them “illegally.” Thus there is no way to ban guns without initiating the use of force – in other words, a certain crime must be committed for the sake of possibly preventing an unknown crime at some point in the future. We might as well jump off a cliff when we are 20 to prevent the possibility of falling off a cliff when we are 70.

Indeed, anti-rights activists ignore the aspect of who is doing the confiscating. The implicit statement is that the government has the authority to do all of this, "for the greater good".

A blogger with "A Message for My Beloved Children Who Insist Their Lives Are Really Really Hard"—ugh, HuffPo, but it's a funny post.

How Different Cultures Understand Time, by author Richard Lewis.

The guy who created the company that made the Video Toaster, Tim Jenison, did an analysis of how Vermeer may've created his photo-realistic images--which was turned into a movie by Penn & Teller.

Random

Topics from last week's breakfast:
Trombe wall - for passive solar heating
SIPs - a pre-fab sandwich of OSB around a rigid foam core
Militec - weapon lube; apparently several products are called Militec...

Random Comment

GCA68 was partly racially motivated: the Black Panthers were unabashedly armed. The cover for passing that law was the assassinations of JFK and MLK, and people supported it based on emotion alone.

Never mind that anyone with basic handyman skills could build a black-powder zip gun and knock off any politician he can get within 10 yds of. Knocking off one person with a homemade gun is easy; resisting Brownshirts is another matter. And like most laws, the GCA only applies to people who follow the law, unless you enforce it with the threat of deadly force.

Shine on with Shana

２月の出張で会社のKIさんがスローガンについて聞いてきて、結局化粧品会社のために考えていた。そのスローガンがウェブサイトに載っているが、記念日のことは載っていなかった。あ～ぁ。

Eclipses

How to view solar eclipses, like the one I missed on Sunday (2012.05.20)....

Metal Spigots

Most gravity-pressure water filters have plastic spigots, which sucks.  There are a couple sources for metal spigots that I've found online, but one of them is only in Europe.  The commercial dispenser spigot manufacturer is Tomlinson.  Unfortunately, the type with a watch glass is still a plastic body.  I suppose the other alternative would be to have a machinist make one to spec.

Escape

For some reason, I thought Jimmy Buffet sang this song, but it's a guy I've never heard of, Rupert Holmes.

Tree Headstones

While looking for more information on Occupy Wall Street's origins, I ended up at AdBusters' site.  There was an issue with a cover of a guy shoving two guns through the side of his face and out his mouth, so I clicked on it, and there was an article entitled "The Holy Shit", so of course I had to see what that was about.  The article itself is an idealistic piece, but the interesting tidbit was the concept of a tree headstone.  That is, when you die, you're buried in a biodegradable coffin a couple feet below the surface with a tree planted over the coffin.  The tree would then grow from the decomposition of the body and so a bit of the essence of the deceased would continue to exist.

I didn't particularly like the idea of being cremated or being preserved, so this might be how I'll ask to go.

Find Me a Dream

Perhaps it's just coincidence, but in the short story Find Me a Dream in Kurt Vonnegut's short story anthology Bagombo Snuff Box, one of the main characters is the widow of a famous trumpet player.  The implication was that he's a real figure, but is never named.

While browsing Betty Grable's entry on Wikipedia, I noticed that she was married to a trumpeter, and that the scant other details fit, that they had two daughters and that alcohol and infidelity plagued their marriage.  Of course Harry James lived, yet it's interesting to think that perhaps Vonnegut intended the widow character to be Betty Grable.

One of those weird things that results from reading Wikipedia late at night.

Helen Gurley Brown

Somehow as I was reading an WSJ article, at the bottom a link to a 2009 article from The Atlantic on Helen Gurley Brown popped up.  The headline intrigued me, but more importantly, WTF, how did they know I'm a pervert? ;-)  I've no time to read it at the moment; however, an article on the pre-eminent post-Steinheim feminist ought to be interesting.  Know thy enemy.  Or could she be considered friendly?

Jicama

Last week a coworker told me about jicama (pronounced "hicama"), an edible root.  Funky.  If I can get ahold of some, it'd be interesting to try.  (And what's up with that scientific name, "Pachyrhizus erosus" ?! Sounds...cool.)

Kye Kye Kule

最近ジアダがアンパンマンのDVDを毎日見て俺は頻繁に「チェッチェッコリ」の歌を聞いてしまって頭の中で回る。歌詞の意味を調べたところ、別に意味がないと分かった。「ぴっとんへべへべ」みたいなもんだな。

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

We had to take the MBTI test at work.  Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia entry has this to say:

Voluntary
It is considered unethical to compel anyone to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It should always be taken voluntarily.

Confidentiality
The result of the MBTI Reported and Best Fit type are confidential between the individual and administrator and, ethically, not for disclosure without permission.

We were compelled to take it, and the results will probably be aggregated at the manager level.

Anyhow, I mentioned it to the wife, and she wanted to know more about it, so I dug up a test for her in Japanese.  I found a second source as well.  She was exactly what I had her pegged as.

Curling Guide

Meant to post this graphic while the Winter Olympics were going on:

A Logic Named Joe

I need to read this at some point.