Has Obama duped you?

Let’s face it. Barack Hussein Obama will be the next president of the United States. I feel kinda sorry for McCain, actually. His party left him out in the cold. At the same time, however, he sold himself out from the man he was in 2000. He pandered to the right wing and abandoned the very independent streak that made him alluring to many individuals.  He should have known better.

That’s not the point of this, however.  The point of this post is how unnervingly hypocritical Obama and his supporters are running on some dreamy premise of change.

Obama has raised more money than any candidate in history.  His beaming white teeth have been showing up on the politics page of CNN for the past several months.  He has had the funding to submit a 30 minute advertisement to the American people on the major networks, funneling money into the pockets of those whom he challenges to retain their grip of power over American democracy.

He outright lied about accepting public funding when it became readily apparent that he would not have to suffer from the shackles of having no money in current-day politics.  It was a safe bet.  It was a bet like .com’s going “beta” and Mountain Dew announcing “only-for-this-summer” flavors.  If it’s a success, all the more power to ‘em.  If it’s a failure, we chalk it up as an experiment.

Barack Obama is nothing different than what we have come to expect in American politics.  He has shoveled money into duping the American people from a far-left (or right) perspective, only to join a centrist methodology.  You know, the pragmatic one offered by Hillary Clinton.  (Full disclosure, I am a Hillary supporter.)

What amazes me is this nouveau crowd that thinks he is going to change things in Washington!  He’s merely going to come to the center and accommodate the process.  For it’s the process that must be accommodated, not individuals.  That’s fine and dandy and almost anyone is an improvement over the bone head George W. Bush, but who ran on this platform initially?  Hillary Clinton.

It’s quite interesting to see Obama supporters attack McCain’s choice of Palin as a running mate based on “inexperience.”  Hello.  Your candidate is a first-term senator with a great smile, a temperate complexion, and as much accent as experience.  Who’s being duped here?  You’ve sold your souls to an individual that made you believe he was different.  You, Obama supporter, are, in fact, completely myopic.  You have been duped.

Yes, he’ll be an improvement.  But he won’t have the statesmanship and command of policy that Hillary Clinton would have.  You, Obama supporter, merely support the policies of the Clintons from day one.

I hope your bet pans out.  As for me?  I won’t abandon my principles.  I’ll write-in Hillary.

Hulu down, sadness ensuing

Hulu appears to be down.  Or, rather, it looks like Akamai might be screwing up their dns.  No A record for hulu == bad for business and for my viewing pleasure.  :(

Hopefully they’ve got some black box monitoring that doesn’t rely on their own nameservers.

rwoodrum@slard:~$ dig www.hulu.com
.
; <<>> DiG 9.5.0-P2 <<>> www.hulu.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; -<<HEADER>>- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 2366
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
.
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.hulu.com. IN A
.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
hulu.com. 418 IN SOA use9.akam.net. dnsadmin.hulu.com. 2008102102 10800 3600 604800 900
.
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Tue Oct 21 19:20:41 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 88

This guy is as sad as I am right now. :_(

Update: Yay, our friendly A record is back again.  Downtime?  ~10 minutes.

Shards of Alara - Rare Commons?

So I just finished cataloguing my first box of Shards of Alara having opened them over the past couple of days with many duels in between.  I bought four boxes from my regular cardboard crack dealer at dogstargames.com - he sells on eBay and directly from his site; his customer service is excellent and he ships on the spot.  If you’re looking for magic cards, check out the site and shoot an email if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Anyway, enough shameless plugs.

My Chupys and I always tend to christen a new expansion with some sealed deck games.  So we open our 5 packs, add land as we see fit, and then duke it out.  To make things exciting, after the first few games, we add two more expansions, shift around decks (if it seems prudent) etc etc.

I must say, Shards of Alara so far is a challenge for a straight up sealed deck.  You’re ramrodded into one of the shards pretty easily and there’s basically just very little room to maneuver.  That, however, is content enough for a separate post.

The thing I’m most annoyed with is:

WTF are all the commons?  So a booster box is:

36 packs of 16 cards == 576

minus 36 x 1 marketing cards == 540

minus 36 x 1 land cards == 504

So we’ve got 504 cards to work with.  I ended up with:

  • 7 mythic rares
  • 29 rares
  • 110 uncommons
  • 357 commons

The astute will note a series of discrepancies here.  We’re minus one common due to a foil land and minus two more commons due to foil uncommons.  The number of distinct commons received was 101, which means at least one of each common is represented.

Now, this is only one box, so this spread may not be representative if the distribution is truly random, but I thought these numbers seemed a little suspect.  (Once I open my second box, I’ll update this and see how it turned out.)

  • 1x distinct common x8
  • 2x distinct commons x7
  • 4x distinct commons x6
  • 16x distinct commons x5
  • 27x distinct commons x4
  • 28x distinct commons x3
  • 16x distinct commons x2
  • 7x distinct commons x1

Not even paying attention to which had only one or two, doesn’t this distribution seem out of whack?  I’m well aware of the C-N ratings given to prints of card sheets, but this seems extreme.  I’ve opened a non-trivial number of booster boxes for my own collection and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any commons with only 1 received per box.  Let alone 7 distinct ones.

I hope this isn’t another way for wizards to skim some more fat off the milk and leave us with the water.  I could be wrong, of course, but it seems like this only requires people to purchase more boosters.  It’s like the fat-pack decision to remove the book…?  Big :( on that one.  Apparently both the books and the fat packs were selling well enough that they could decouple them and make a little more profit.

Well, as an owner of Hasbro, I can’t say I dislike it… but as a player, I can say I definitely dislike it.

Coping with a house fire

So we had a house fire on Friday night.  It’s all been a soot ridden blur since then.

The house we’re living in is absolutely awesome.  It has a magnificent back yard, a great layout, wonderful outside lighting and is just really cool.  I love the huge pine trees, the squirrel’s carefree frolicking in the back, and my Music of the Spheres windchimes hanging from the front porch which transform a breeze into a gentle music.

So what happened?  Tale and images follow.

We were downstairs in what is basically a very large den where we have our computers setup, play games, and such.  We were playing Magic: The Gathering and listening to some Miniature Tigers on one of the computers.  We had gone to Costco earlier in the day and purchased some Tikka Masala curry which was simmering on the stove upstairs.

The music wasn’t playing very loudly but it’s hard to hear anything upstairs from the downstairs just because of the staircase layout, carpeting, etc.  Having lived in relatively small places (this house is 2300+ sq. ft., not huge but big enough) it’s kind of the first time it’s dawned on me that you might not know what’s going on in another part of the house.

At one point, my super hearing managed to cut through the immediate stimuli and after a “what’s that sound?” I went to run upstairs.  As soon as I got even close to the stairs, I knew it was the fire alarm which wasn’t immediately horrifying because, you know, sometimes they go off when something in the kitchen is burning a bit.

Smoke everywhere hanging probably about two feet down from the ceiling.  I see a pan on the stove on fire as well as flames engulfing the microwave and cabinetry above the stove.  My first instinct is to wet some towels and throw them on the pan that was burning.  My next instinct was a much better one:

We have a fire extinguisher which we use (not by design, originally) as a doorstop for when we’re loading groceries from the garage.  So I knew exactly where it was.  I shot back downstairs, ran back up, pulled the pin and within a second or two the fire was out.  Being something of a fan connoisseur the next instinct was dealing with smoke which was heavy from the plastic of the microwave.  We opened all the windows and got fans in place to help pump out the smoke.

Something that didn’t occur to me was to check the attic.  Once the fire was out as far as I could see, I never thought that it could already have spread elsewhere.  The fire in the kitchen had reached the ceiling, but you could tell there were no breaches in the ceiling leading to the attic.  That’s not a sure sign or anything, but had I seen an actual hole or something I obviously would have though “oh crap, the attic.”

The curry wasn’t the culprit.  The curry was in the pan completely unscathed.  (No, we didn’t eat it.)  There was a pan next to it, however, along with some “heat resistant” kitchenware and a bar mop towel which are always flocked about the kitchen.  I suspect at this point it was a towel too close to the burner which burned long enough to catch the grease from the filters under the microwave.  The microwave was thoroughly destroyed and its slow burning plastic didn’t help matters with the smoke and the cabinetry above.  The smoke damage in the cabinets was extensive and we’ve had a grand time washing every single piece of dishware from the upper caibnets.  Not just running through the dishwasher, but washing, scrubbing, de-sooting.

Soot has the upper hand.  Soot clings and smears and permeates.  It has the advantage of gaseous form and finds its way into places that make life miserable.  Soot wins.  You lose.  If there is one thing we have learned about soot from this fiasco is that soot and water are friends.  Do not clean your soot ridden stuff with anything wet.  We also discovered that there are special soot sponges which actually work quite well.  On Saturday we were at the hardware store to buy a ladder and also these sponges.  Turns out Home Depot doesn’t stock them but a local Ace Hardware did.  The people in Home Depot actually didn’t even know such a product existed.  They act as erasers and pull the soot from the wall.  They’re used dry and then you can clean them with soap and water to reuse them once they’re completely dry again.

Still… repainting and professional cleaning are on the horizon.  We’re just not equipped to do it.  Especially in areas like up in the skylight in the kitchen which turned into something of a chimney.

There are some lessons to be learned from this:

  • Have a fire extinguisher.  Know exactly where it is and that it is charged.  I cannot express this enough.  The fire extinguisher we had undoubtedly saved the entire house.
  • No matter what you’ve got cooking on how low of a heat, don’t leave it unattended.  This may sound obvious but how many people leave something simmering on the stove?  Or a crockpot?  It’s just simmering on the lowest possible heat, right?  Never again will I do this.
  • Have more than one smoke alarm.  Ours was in the hall and was going off wildly but we just didn’t hear it.  If we had been sleeping we might all be dead.  I don’t know how this works but it seems like the smoke alarms should also be tied together.  I know buildings do this, obviously.  If there had been one downstairs that also went off, we would have known about it instantly.
  • Insurance.  Homeowners insurance is obviously required by law… but if you’re renting, do you have renters insurance?  The cost is so nominal compared to what it can save.

It has been a sad weekend indeed.

miniature tigers - tell it to the volcano

Buy this album.  Just don’t buy it from iTunes.

First and foremost, it’s a fantastic album.  You should at the very least listen to the self-titled song on Youtube here.  A band that very much deserves a good listen.

I originally heard them on XM satellite radio on the way home… on XMU channel 43.  Ethel (XM 47) has become more and more redundant and is basically an iteration of playing garbage Red Hot Chili Peppers and other to-be-tasted-but-those-you’ve-already-tasted bands).

So I’ve assigned one of my favorite channels from Fred (XM 44) to XMU 43.  I heard the Miniature Tigers song “Cannibal Queen” followed by “Tell it to the Volcano” and recognized the band as one that I though was “worth listening to.”

So I bought the album on iTunes.  I’m very willing to support bands whom produce music I enjoy listening to.  Otherwise, you’re biting the hand that feeds you, right?

Anyway… iTunes “music protection” soon got in my way after I wanted to burn a CD of the album I just _purchased_ so I could listen to it in the car on my way to work.  It was relatively circumventable using some standard linux foo… but seriously… I don’t see the point.  C’mon make things _more_ accessible to consumers, not less.

Bloated Bailout

Q: How do you make a $700+ billion dollar bailout even better?

A: Make it an $810+ billion dollar bailout!

Yes, that’s what our Dear Leaders appear to have done in Congress according to this article on Forbes.  Quite frankly, I’m both ashamed and outraged at the Democratic leadership in the Senate.  Now, I’m as staunch a Democrat as they come, but Henry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have served as nothing but spineless enablers for the Bush Administration, having abdicated their responsibility to check the power of he and his lackeys long ago.

So what sort of pork have they managed to cram into a plan designed to keep prices inflated and fervently disallow a market correction?  Hmmm… let’s see.  Let’s start with the “good” stuff first:

  • “$64 billion for a provision that keeps the AMT from ensaring an additional 22 million taxpayers in 2008″
  • “$11.5 billion for tuition and property tax deductions”.

Yeah, there’s only two bullets.  I guess I didn’t need bullets.  Nope, they didn’t solve the AMT in a sane fashion, they just put it off — again.  C’mon folks.  Either get rid of the damn thing or add “adjusted for inflation” to the law.  Whew, that sure was tough.  And isn’t it startling that the one major tax deduction (mortgage interest) a large portion of the middle class claims is always on the chopping block?  The answer to that question is, of course, “no, it’s not startling” because it’s the responsibility of the middle class to pay the taxes.  After all, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Now for some of the pork:

  • $36.8 billion for R&D business tax incentives
  • $344 million for tax breaks for films and TV programs
  • $140 million for “motorsports racing track facilities”
  • $5.8 billion for restaurant and retail improvements
  • $624 million to accelerate depreciation on business property == tax break
  • $132 million in tax incentives to attract businesses to D.C.

Interestingly enough, there is also an $8.8 billion energy extension “for wind and solar energy tax credits, incentives for carbon sequestration projects [read: plant trees] and a credit for owners of plug-in electric vehicles.”  And, according to Forbes, “The energy provisions of the bill actually raise government revenue by $61 million”.  At least there is a glint of sanity in there somewhere.

So what do Congressional “leaders” have to say about all this fiscal flotsam?

“I am very, very happy with this vote tonight,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “I think it shows that when we work together we can accomplish great things.” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken. said: “This has been the Senate at its finest.”

These people need to be stripped of their offices, plain and simple.

House of Representatives’ web infrastructure not scalable

With all of the madness of the markets and the Bush Administration’s $700 billion (bare minimum, of course) bailout fiasco, CNN reports that the website of the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed.  This is slightly amusing because I actually used the site this past Friday on 20080926 and noticed the abysmal performance.  And by “abysmal” I mean the page for Jay Inslee, representative for the Seattle area, took about 8 tries and 4 minutes to load.

I was, of course, doing what many others were doing at the time and emailing my representatives to vote a big, fat NO on more of Bush’s big, fat failed policies.

Bush: This is a grave situation and requires that you, the American people, give me and my administration more power.

But I digress.  More to the point of this post, the House of Representatives must have a pretty crappy web infrastructure.  Check out this graph from Alexa showing two sites: house.gov and kodak.com over the past year.  You can see what is probably Kodak’s Christmas bump but other than the huge spike from the past few days on the House’s site, they’re pretty close.  And c’mon who goes to Kodak’s website?

From the Alexa graph, you can see that maybe the House’s traffic tripled or quadrupled.  Hell even if you’re generous and say it peaked at 10 times normal load, that’s a pretty sad infrastructure that can’t handle 10 times your average load.  Ten times normal load and you’d have a graph like this; more like if you threw woot.com into the picture.  And Woot’s users are religious who by definition are driven to visit the site once a day.

Alexa’s data is by no means perfect, but it’s close enough for these purposes.  The CNN article linked above has some funny gems:

“This is unprecedented,” said Jeff Ventura, communications director for the House’s chief administrator.

…

Ventura compared the situation to the “old days, when you listened to a radio show and the 10th caller got a toaster. Then everyone calls the same 1-800 number at the same time and all you got was a busy signal.”

“This was a massive digital busy signal,” he said.

Thanks for that explanation and, no, it’s not “unprecedented.”  Websites get overwhelmed all the time.  What is kinda unprecedented is constituents actually giving a shit about what’s going on in the world.  The massive signal here is that your website sucks and can’t handle any load.  Now in all fairness, this could simply be a function of bandwidth, but I doubt it.  By the time you’re sustaining reasonable traffic, the load on your systems is already higher.  Hire some engineers to fix your site :(

I’m also particularly tickled by their solution:

“This morning, our engineers sounded the alarms … and we have installed a digital version of a traffic cop. We enacted stopgaps that we planned for last night. We had hoped we didn’t have to.”

Now, when House.gov or individual members’ sites begin to get overloaded, a message will come up on the computer screen saying, in effect, “try back later,” Ventura said.

Now that is innovation.  At least they don’t appear to be running crappy, bloated Microsoft software:
Server: "USHR Webserver Ver 5.4.1"
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:10:16 GMT
Content-length: 13429
Content-type: text/html
WWW-authenticate: Basic realm="Sun ONE Web Server"