Diamonds aren’t forever.  Diamonds are for about 10¹⁶⁰ years ... just like any other baryonic matter.

Keeping up with the while-waiting-for-cappucino regimen fairly well.  I’m missing a few days, true, but that’s mostly when I go a day without making a cappucino.  I’m up to 40 reps now on most of the free weight exercises, and I’m doing 50 reps on all the blocks and 100 karate punches.  Pirate tries sometimes to copy the blocks, but her form is way loose and she can’t manage it with the hand weights.  Goose likes to think she Knows Kung Fu (</keanu>), but can’t actually be bothered to practice them with me, with or without hand weights.

This is about a soldier.  We’ll call him Steve.  He was from Scottsdale, Arizona.

Steve joined the US Army at 17, and served in several theaters before returning to civilian life, where he earned a Ph.D in psychology from the University of Delaware and then went on to teach in California.  It seems civilian life didn’t sit well with him after 9/11, though, because after his wife died, he re-enlisted in 2007, and went first to Afghanistan then to Iraq.  It was in Iraq that he died on May 10 while training Iraqi troops, when his vehicle was hit with an IED.

But this isn’t just another soldier-killed-in-Iraq story.

You see, Steve Hutchison’s first enlistment was in 1966, and his first term of service began with two tours in Vietnam.  He was 58 when he re-upped in 2007 after retiring twice — once from the Army, once from teaching — and 60 when he was killed in Iraq six weeks ago.

That, friends, is dedication to duty.

<paulesyllabic> *snerk* ref:fark(“The Army sniffer dog who swallowed a Taliban bomb... and SURVIVED.  Your dog does not want an IED”);

<paulesyllabic> comment:  “Arf..arf..arf. BOOOM! @$)(^%*^###/No Terrier.”

I fire up the Gaggia espresso machine to make myself a cappucino.

Having run the shot, I open the prohibition cabinet and grab the bottle of Isle of Jura to spike my coffee, it being a cold and grey day.

As I uncork the bottle, the skirl of the pipes comes from babylon5 in the other room as ddj cues up the Massed Bands, Pipes and Drums of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines and the Black Watch, playing Morag of Dunvegan...

The Silly Goose had a friend over recently, and a friend of theirs didn’t have a Facebook page, so they set one up for him.

I do not have a Facebook page.

I do not have a MySpace page.

Nor will I ever.

If you see any page on FaceBook or MySpace purporting to be me,

IT IS NOT ME.

That is all.

Trouble-free so far.  No bleeding to speak of, no pain to speak of.  The dentist offered me a prescription for narcotic painkillers, but I declined because I didn’t figure I’d need them.  I was right; I haven’t needed any pain meds at all.

I can no longer claim I have all my own original teeth.

Well, that is, I can ... it’s just that one of them is in a sealed plastic baggie.

I’m not the most regular visitor to dentists, but I’ve never needed any care in the past other than a couple of deep-cleanings.  (Two, I think.)  Last year sometime, I became aware that I had a cavity on the outer face of my last right upper molar, those which the US likes to call wisdom teeth.  Unfortunately, I kept forgetting to get to the dentist to get it checked out.  Then in January, we lost our dental insurance when cymrullewes was laid off.  I hoped that it’d keep until we had insurance again.

It didn’t.  Last night, one cusp broke off the tooth, and from the discoloration of the broken fragment it was clear the tooth was in very bad shape.  So this morning I called the local dentist; his receptionist said “We can fit you in right now if you want”, so I went off down there for X-rays and an exam, which showed it to be a case for extraction.  (I can manage without the tooth fine, though it wasn’t causing me any problems aside from the decay, and it was a choice between $160 to extract it, including the exam, or $2000+ to salvage it...  $2000 that we don’t have to spare.)

So, he sent me off to pick up 4g of amoxicillin, take 2g of it, then come back at 15:00.  And by about 15:45, my tooth was out.  (I continue to fail to adhere to the norm; “wisdom teeth” normally have three roots, but mine turn out to have four.)

Still, I did manage to go 48 years without a single filling, extraction or cavity...  that’s not a bad record.

<hoche> i don’t think i ever saw the abyss

<hoche> there was some other deepwater movie i saw

<hoche> sphere?

<midi> I’m sorry.

<web> *twitch*

<hoche> it was pretty bad

<web> My friend strongly recommended that book to me and listed it as the “best book he had ever read.”

<web> ... I told him to read a second book.

I have three unused Dreamwidth invite codes.  If anyone wishes an invitation, please respond to this post and give me an email address to send your invitation to.  Friends will be given priority.  Responses are screened so as not to expose email addresses.

(Update at 20:07:  Two claimed, one left.)

This story is all over the ‘net today.  It claims a 14-year-old German kid was hit in the hand by a “pea-sized” meteorite, later found to be strongly magnetic (ergo, nickel-iron), claimed to be going 30,000mph, and that it bounced off his hand and hit the road, where it left a crater a foot across.  Kid claims the impact knocked him flying.

I don’t buy it.  I’m willing to believe that that’s what the kid THINKS happened.  But that’s not what happened.  Because the kid still has his hand.

And I’m sorry, but if a pea-size chunk of nickel-iron going 8.3 MILES A SECOND hits a 14-year-old kid in the hand, and the kid’s father is NOT named Kal-El, that meteorite is not going to “bounce off” his hand.  It’s going to turn his hand into pink mist and then continue on its way as though he wasn’t even there.

You want to tell me the kid was standing near where it hit, and a piece of flying ejecta hit his hand and the blast knocked him on his ass?  Sure, I’ll buy that.  I’d even buy that it missed him by millimeters and the plasma trail burned his hand as it went by, then the impast blast knocked him on his ass.  But an 8.3-miles-per-second meteorite hit him and knocked him flying, and left only a little tiny three-inch scar on his hand?

Bullshit.

But the story sounds sooooooo much more dramatic that way....

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s still an amazing story.  But it didn’t need any embellishment, and whoever just wrote down the kid’s version as is, without question, with all its logical inconsistencies intact, displays a severe lack of critical-thinking skills.

Update:  This MSNBC article is much less breathless and credulous, and is actually asking the right questions.

C|Net reports that Opera, the chief plaintiff against Microsoft in the European browser-monopoly case, “says that the move to strip Internet Explorer out of Windows 7 in Europe is an insufficient step that won’t lead to better competition in the browser market.”

I think that’s missing the point, and Ina Fried at C|Net apparently thinks so too.  I believe Microsoft is deliberately offering a solution that at best is unworkable, and at worst will lock users even more tightly into Internet Explorer.  If Microsoft offers MSIE only separately from Windows 7 installs, that appears to mean that new Windows 7 installs in Europe will not have a browser installed at all.  And that means that users who don’t already have another working machine with a web browser — any web browser — installed will be unable to go and download a browser to install, because the vast majority of them won’t know how to do so without a web browser.  And that, in turn, means they’ll have to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy an off-the-shelf packaged web browser.

And guess what’s going to be the only one there.

Sure, they could buy MSIE, take it home, install it, use it to download Firefox or Opera, then throw it away.  But realistically, how many consumers are going to do that after they just went to the store and paid additional money for it?

To compete, Opera and Mozilla are going to have to have boxed product there on the shelf beside Internet Explorer.  And neither of them can afford to do that for free.

This is a cunning and completely mendacious move on Microsoft’s part.  It’s fairly clearly been thought out to adhere to the letter of the EU ruling while totally violating its intent.

Of course, we’ve never seen Microsoft do that before.  And I have this really excellent historic bridge that I can let you have, cheap...

As previously noted, I’ve been trying to get a bit more of a regular exercise regimen going, starting with a bunch of upper-body exercises with 3lb hand weights while I wait for the espresso machine to heat up.  Not long into this, I started adding in first inward and outward blocks, then upward and downward blocks.  It wasn’t long before the Silly Goose wandered into one of my exercise sessions, and so I ended up teaching her the basic inward, outward and upward blocks.  She doesn’t practise, so her form is pretty sloppy, but she’s grasped the basics.

Today, I started adding in forward snap kicks as well.  It turns out I can do a left-foot forward snap kick pretty easily, but right foot is much harder because I cannot plant my left foot properly — for my left foot to be close enough to under me to support me even for that brief moment, my weight has to be divided about 60/40 between the ball of my foot and my toes, and my heel isn’t within two inches of the floor.  My foot also isn’t level side-to-side because the first ray of my foot is dropped about half an inch relative to the rest of my foot, which throws my foot to the outside.  So my balance on that side is terrible; I can barely keep my balance even long enough to throw a snap kick.

Anyway, once again Goose wandered in while I was trying to do the right foot front snap kicks, and started trying to copy what I was doing, so I started correcting her, and then the Dread Pirate Bignum got into the act, except that Pirate was really excited about it (even more so than Goose) and wanted to turn it into some kind of wild leaping thing out of bad anime.  So I would up teaching them both the basics of the front snap kick.  Pirate had a big over-excited problem going on and wouldn’t pay attention at all, then got bored after a couple of minutes, but Goose at least got the basic idea, although she wasn’t really paying the least attention to her stance and I had to keep correcting her.  She wasn’t getting the form too well either; she kept leaning back and hunching her forward shoulder into it, she kept letting her stance get too narrow, and when she thought she’d got it, she forgot about what she was supposed to be doing, and ended up letting it drift into something somewhere between a side snap kick and a side thrust kick, so then I wound up having to show her those and the difference between them as well to show her what she was doing wrong.  So once again my intended exercise session turned into martial-arts instruction.

Goose probably could actually do pretty well at a martial art, if she could calm down and take the time to properly learn the techniques and develop a bit better awareness of her stance and her form, and if she could develop the patience and and the ... dedication, for lack of a better word ... to actually practice.  But at the moment, she’s only willing to put enough effort into it to flail wildly around and think she’s Naruto.

Still, at least she has the “worst swordsman in Spain” thing going for her, and the fact that she’s big and strong for her age.

As currently going around ...

This, USS Harry Truman (CVN75), is one of 148 images currently in my wallpaper directory.  (I rotate them when the mood takes me.  And thinking about it, it’s time to switch again.)  I am now supposed to exhort you to post yours.

In practice, it isn’t.

This chart (from the linked article) compares the Obama administration's projections for unemployment to actual observed data.

The projections:

• Without the stimulus plan (light blue line), unemployment starts to level out sometime between Q3-2009 and Q1-2010, peaks at a hair over 9% during Q1-2010 and Q2-2010, then begins to decline.

• With the stimulus plan (dark blue line), unemployment unemployment starts to level out in Q1-2009, peaks just below 8% in June 2009, and is declining by Q3-2009.

The reality:

May 2009 ended with unemployment just shy of 9.5%, with the curve still steepening.

“Oops.”

See also this article, which also notes that the unemployment rate has risen almost two points in four months, the highest job loss rate recorded since the beginning of US unemployment statistics in 1948.

“All applicants must be able to detect and alleviate there own spelling and grammer mistakes.”

Much has been written, on both sides, about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. President Obama has repeatedly said that he feels the Supreme Court needs her “empathy”. Sotomayor herself has said on many occasions that “a wise Latina woman [...] would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” when it comes to judging the law.

I have grave reservations about this nomination, and a few minutes ago, I realized how to distil out the central essence of why.

You see, the United States is a Constitutional republic, a nation of law, and the duty of the United States Supreme Court is to be the final judge and arbiter of the nations laws and their rectitude. It is the duty of the Supreme Court’s Justices to make their judgements as fairly, as correctly, and as objectively as they possibly can. Their responsibility is not to judge the ethnic sensitivity of the plaintiff or the hardships faced by the defendant; it is to judge the fairness, the correctness, and the Constitutional soundness of the applicable law itself. If the Supreme Court cannot be objective, it cannot properly discharge its duties and responsibilities.

Yet, our President is nominating to the United States Supreme Court a woman whose strongest and most vital qualification for the position — or so he tells us — is precisely that she is not objective.

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

Politico.com says the left is starting to sour on Obama, reporting that “A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet – suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush.”

A growing number of organizations, bloggers and pundits, many of whom kept quiet about slights in Obama’s first few months, are now going public with their disillusionment.

“On torture, change we wanted to believe in feels like more of the same,” the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch said in a joint statement Friday.

“I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on [gay] issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away,” the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan wrote last week, dismissing Obama’s pledge to end the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy as “toilet paper.”

Apparently one of the candidates under consideration for the SCOTUS nomination is Jim Corney, a deputy AG in the Bush administration Justice Department. Obama aides say he would be “a viable choice because he stood up to the White House over wiretapping and criticized what he saw as efforts to politicize the Justice Department.”

Hey ... maybe if he stood up to Bush over wiretapping, he might stand up to Obama over wiretapping too. Sounds like a win to me.

The article makes interesting reading though. Frankly, it sounds like for an increasing number of the left, the honeymoon is over, and the new Emperor’s new clothes are starting to look a little shabby and thin.

Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition said many Obama supporters (with support from voices on the right) built him up to be more of a liberal icon than his public speeches and writings ever justified.

“They invested in Obama everything they wanted the next president to be. They thought, ‘He’s black, liberal, anti-Iraq War… urban, young.’ He was all of that and smart and he went to a radical church. They just knew,” Meyers said. “They exaggerated him. They saw him as a messiah. No president is a messiah.”

Got that? “No president is a messiah.” And any Presidential hopeful who tells you he is a Messiah (or hints at it) is a liar. A mandate from God is not a qualification for the Presidency. The oath of office doesn’t say anything about being a messiah. It’s all about upholding and defending the Constitution and faithfully executing the duties and responsibilities of the President.

More on the earlier PSA:

Sterlingtek.com, Las Cruces New Mexico: Canon BP511-“equivalent” battery, for values of “equivalent” meaning 2000mAH vs. original 1100mAH. $11.99 vs. $90 for OEM battery. Fits, uh, about fifty different Canon cameras including the Powershot Pro90 IS. Ordered Friday with USPS first-class shipping, received today. Two thumbs UP.

Laikeet.com, domain registered in Pennsylvania, ostensibly based in Bradenton Florida: Nokia BLC-2 battery, $2.99, fits about 18 different Nokia phones including the Nokia 6010. OEM-equivalent 875mAH. Ordered Thursday with allegedly USPS flat-rate shipping. Will probably receive it sometime this month... you already know my opinion of these wankers.

I'm probably going to have to go ahead and order another phone battery, because I need a working phone this week, not three weeks from now. So my laikeet.com order is a total loss.

A ZFS RAIDZ2 pool without hot spares can survive simultaneous failure of up to two devices and still continue operating in degraded mode.

So, naturally, between when we left for the elementary school this morning at 0755 and when we got back home at about 1015, apparently THREE of the twelve 300GB SATA disks in babylon4‘s main storage pool failed.

I suppose that’s what I get for trusting Maxtor disks. But they were free-to-me, so I can’t complain too loudly. Unfortunately, I have no spare disks, and can’t spare the money right now to replace them with better (not to mention new) disks, or I would have already done so.

Equally annoyingly, I hadn’t gotten backup migration from disk to tape set up yet. I’m more annoyed at the configuration work - principally Apache2 - that I’ll now have to redo than the little data that I’ve lost, which principally consists of a couple of minor edits to our recipe book, a dozen or so ISOs that I can re-download any time I want to, and a dozen or so source code tarballs.

To add insult to injury, I’d been going to work on tape migration next, after the full backup that was scheduled to run this morning completed....

Update: As noted in the comments below, a network-wide Full backup ran last night, starting at 03:10 and putting heavy, sustained load on the array. By the look of things, an already-weak disk folded under the load at 04:29:55, increasing the load on the remaining disks and setting up a cascade failure over about the next four and a half hours. The second-weakest disk succumbed to the increased load at 08:49:29, increasing the load on the remaining disks still further, then just under eight minutes later at 08:57:06, the third-weakest disk followed the first two and the entire array went down.