I've Been Upstreamed!

I received a random AIM message today:

CrushedCoho: You know, some guys just can't hold their arsenic.

Apparently there is a thing going on where someone calling themselves "Project Upstream" is running some AIM bots that send a weird message like this to 2 people & then forward their replies to each other.

I imagine that these folks usually end up doing exactly what I did - making some stupid punch-line reply that comes off like another non sequitur and then falling into a pattern of childish accusation of who IM'ed who first.

A quick google search provided Nixie Pixel to explain... and to give me the magic cheat code to unsubscribe for life - Just reply to the IM message stream with:
$optout

This prompts you to verify it - and claims that it will opt you out forever - and that it is not undo-able.

This is probably a very good thing, since to victimize someone with this 'spim' all you need to do is to go here and enter their IM handle. Note that once someone is opted-in in this way - they are not provided with the opt-out code - so Google is a useful ally in this situation...

Now - can I get the 1/2 hour of my life back that I wasted on this non-sense?

Serious Talks & Serious Money. Seriously.

The Rumors look more true every day.

Blue Sun - a Reality?

IBM (aka "Big Blue") is reported to be entertaining the notion of buying Sun Microsystems - to the point of being "in talks" with them.

This has set a lot of people's hair on fire recently.

From my perspective - any economic downturn will herald corporate consolidation. It happens because it needs to happen from an economic point of view. There are overlapping product-lines from both companies competing for the same markets. AIX vs. Solaris, WebSphere vs. GlassFish, DB2 vs. MySQL, etc..

In the long term I do not think it will be good for the customer since prices will inevitably go up while development slows.

It may be good for Java - since both companies have a serious stake in it's success.

But the burning question on my mind is - will they re-brand the companies to something new?

Simple Solution: Remember Ma Bell?

I have a solution to the AIG problem. It is Very Simple.

The Problem: AIG was a very successful insurance company run on a very low risk and conservative business model. Deregulation allowed them to get into the financial services industry and do amazingly risky things that turned around and bit them like a crack dealer's neglected pit bull. This was really a Very Big Problem because they now have their tendrils embedded deeply in many Other Industries - which they will drag down with them in their death throes.

The Wrong Answer: This bailout nonsense. As I mentioned before - the number of the bailout is the same number that we owe to China. Essentially we're losing at the craps table and have decided that rather than cut our loses - we're going to double-down and throw the dice some more.

My Answer: Since the US Government now owns >80% of the company - they can do what they like with it. I say Split AIG Up into Smaller Companies, just like Ma Bell. Their interests are too broad. Let the financial services division fly or go down in flames on their own in a Free Market.

Everyone is so upset about the bonuses that the executives all received from AIG. Do The Math. That $156 Million represents 0.1% of the total $30 Billion that AIG received. That is a rounding error! Who cares!? Where is all the rest of the American taxpayer money going & why don't we get more say in how it is spent?

I pay my taxes to run the government, not corporations. They get my money on their own - and only the Good ones do that. The Failing companies should do just that - FAIL. That is what a Free Market means.

Our bankers are Communists. Yes - China is still a communist country. Never forget that! When exactly did America start copying from their playbook? You can try to call me Joe McCarthy but in my humble opinion Secretary Clinton is a communist sympathizer, and so were the Neocons.

Aiming for short term gains are what got us in this mess. China plays a very long term game. How much longer until they take back Taiwan? They have maneuvered us into a position where we can now do NOTHING to stop them.

Do I have to remind everyone of what they did to the spy plane that landed in China in 2001? The Chinese government has no love for America - they still refer to us as "Imperialists" to their citizens. They still do represent a threat.

Me Bitter?

I'm sure everyone is very concerned with the current economic crisis. We're all worried about losing our jobs - so we can't take the time to wonder what got us here. "Living in the past" is the label slapped on people looking to assign blame/bring people to justice/exact revenge.

Unless you are either too young to know any better, or have bought into the philosophy of fear that has been sold to everyone for almost a decade now -- let me try to explain to you what I am so grizzled about, by reciting the Preamble as the last administration seems to have interpreted it:

We the People ^Sheeple of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect ^{drive a wedge in our} Union, establish ^selective Justice, insure domestic Tranquility ^{National Security}, provide for the common defence ^{pre-emptive attack}, promote the general Welfare ^{of corporations}, and secure ^undermine the Blessings of Liberty ^{in the name of security} to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish ^{radically modify} this Constitution for the United States of America.

Kaboom!

The new Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope obviously works - and just in time too.

The picture here shows the largest burst recorded in history.

This kind of thing is important to study because the particles given off from this kind of thing are actually traveling at 99.9999% of the speed of light. Not a lot of things do that.

What's US$700B Between Friends?

It is easy to forget that when people throw around the name 'Clinton' these days, that we are talking about the current Secretary of State - the former Junior Senator "from" New York.

Recently also we hear numbers thrown around like $700Billion, $800Billion, maybe as much as US$1.25Trillion Dollars. These are absurdly huge numbers that belie the size of the hole that has been dug for the American Taxpayer to fill in for this absurd economy of ours to continue life-as-usual.

You might ask how the hell we got ourselves into this mess when as little as a decade ago we actually paid off the national debt.

Certainly The War Effort is to blame in terms of what we went on a shopping spree for with all that money. But where did it come from? How did we even allow ourselves to get into a situation like this?

When a college kid runs up $80k worth of credit card debt without ever holding a job you ask why the credit card company gave them credit to begin with. Why were they allowed to borrow and spend like that?

Well the answer to why we could do this is hinted to by Secretary Clinton urging China to keep lending us money. And that magic number we keep hearing reflects the $700Billion that we currently owe them.

I recall when her husband was in office looking on in horror and shame in 1998 as they sat in box seats overlooking a parade in Tienanmin Square - the site of the student protest for democracy that was mercilessly put down by the communist chinese government not a decade before that.


So if you want to know who paved the way for the Chinese to hold the mortgage to our economy it was the Clintons. If you want to know who used that resource like a crackhead taking cash advances from an ATM card then you can blame the Bushes.

Please Just Go Away

"He that winketh with the eye causeth sorrow: but a prating fool shall fall."
- The Bible, Proverbs 10:10, King James Edition

So the Winker is just doing anything she can to get in the news and push the party line.

You lost. Please fade back into obscurity. I have never seen someone who lost the election work so hard to try to turn public humiliation into a perk. But then again, if you went from nobody to being the center of attention in America - it's got to be hard to go back to being nothing.

Let's face it, she's now the Danny Bonaduce of Republican politics.

20090211 Nuke your Television

I remember very specifically early into the last administration's reign that there was a massive push in all of the ever-consolidating media companies to "clean house". Investigative journalism as we used to know it just outright dropped dead. The general tendency of the media to question the government and to perform critical analysis on press releases before just reading from them as a script simply went away.

Part of that was in step with the metaphorical and as I remember ACTUAL flag-waving that took place in pathological amounts starting in September 2001. No one wanted to question "our side" and to do so became "unpatriotic" in ridiculous measure - a sentiment that was echoed to great effect to stave off ANY questioning of government policy for the next seven years.

Interestingly when you stop asking questions publicly for that long - the public stops asking the questions. We have an entire generation of people who now just take every press release at face value and don't even know why that might not be a good idea.

What's more, the chilling effect on 'dissent' of any type has translated into the entertainment industry. The explosion of police/military-oriented shows, movies, "documentaries", etc. has warranted an entire new Channel on cable television.

I am sick to death of choosing between Disney-child-safe and Pro-Army-Crime-Drama as my categories. I am tired of morality plays and glorifying people in uniforms beating other people up. And I feel insulted every time a story devolves into the ever-more-popular hidden message of "Faith>Science"

Overused Trope of the Decade: Anyone who is smart is either portrayed as completely lacking common sense, as a mad scientist, or gay. (See CSI, Eureka, and Big Bang Theory for examples)

Eight years of this crap was enough. Someone let a few hippies out of the secret concentration camps and let them write a few scripts or something.

20090205 Blenderiffic

Blender is not new. Even the latest version isn't all that new. But I have finally been taking a little time to learn how to use the thing. As such, I have stumbled across several useful tutorials.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Blender is a free 3D modeling and animation tool. Do not let the price tag fool you and do not let the interface scare you away!

Blender has every major conceptual feature from every 3D tool released in the last 2 decades: Metaballs, Bones, Particles, Audio sync, Keyframe Animation with parameter curve graphs, NURBS, a game engine, etc..

The interface is designed to be useful and so is designed around the concept of heavy hot-key use. As such it is difficult to learn for the first 2 hours - but you will quickly see the benefits of working this way. The truth is also that every 3D tool has a steep learning curve and they all work differently from most desktop applications.