Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in klyfix's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Saturday, May 10th, 2008
3:06 am	And then my brain breaks... Been going through the "I'm Not Making This Up" pages at the TV Tropes site and this one...oh, I'll just give you a quote: "Barackula is a short political horror rock musical about young Barack Obama having to stave off a secret society of vampires at Harvard when he was inducted into presidency at the Harvard Law Review in 1990." Umm, yeah... (Comment on this)
3:01 am	Redesigning the (British) Flag, umm, maybe not.... See the story and some of the flag ideas here. Basic gist is that there was a suggestion that the British flag should incorporate the symbol of Wales, a dragon. Note that the Welsh flag is not a cross variant like the other flags of the UK incorporated into the Union Jack, but is a winged red dragon. Wales is thus kind of left out of the flag. The idea was to try and incorporate the dragon into the Union Jack and produced wacky results. I'm of course a bit fond of the second choice, which is actually the Welsh flag with a pink haired anime girl riding the dragon and the Union Jack kind of behind the girl. Obviously these weren't necessarily serious proposals. One suspects that the UK isn't going to be changing it's flag anytime soon. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2008
8:30 pm	Copyright vs. Klyfix I've been recording Lost for pretty much ever partly because once it went on Thursday it was difficult for me to watch it in realtime and partly because the nature of the show is such that it is nice to be able to rewind and pause. Since I've had the VCR/DVD recorder with digital tuner I've been recording it on DVD because I can't record digital signals on VHS, something I didn't realize before I bought the thing. All well and good; the quality of the video is superior to the analog recordings by a long ways and the only problem I'd had was when I'd not paid attention to how much time I had left on the disc. But this Thursday something funky happened. When I checked the recording there was a message "Copyrighted material detected; recording was halted." And then an anime dominatrix with a whip appeared and said "You've been naughty and must be punished." Umm, okay that latter bit didn't happen but the former did. I knew the machine had provisions to prevent one from making illegal copies, but who ever heard of not allowing recording a broadcast TV show? Goodness, don't like half the people out there record stuff with Tivo and DVRs and what-not so they watch stuff later. I assume that this was a glitch; something in the signal was distorted somehow so that it looked like the "Hey! I'm not supposed to be copied!!" code and thus it shut down. I gather that at the moment the digital broadcasts are to some extent in a shakedown mode and some odd things happen. I certainly hope it was some weird error. It's not that big a deal; when I had the earlier problem I downloaded the episode from iTunes (I know there are sites where you can get it for free; I don't happen to begrudge creators and distributors of content their money) as with my slow DSL I can't practically watch it online at ABC.com. Still, it is annoying and I have to wonder how often copyright protection stuff causes things like this to happen. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
12:33 am	Thing I didn't know that I should have... Until I saw this comic and followed up by checking on the Wikipedia, I did not know that Cinco de Mayo was a commemoration of a battle victory in a war the Mexicans ultimately lost; the war where the French conquered the country and installed Emperor Maximilian. I knew that it wasn't Mexican Independence day, but thought that it commemorated when the French were finally driven out of Mexico. Never checked on it. And I'd never have elected to look this up, probably, save for the comic. Go figure. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
5:53 pm	Iranian Possible Attack Conspiracy Theory Notion of the Day (Politics) I've been seeing rather a lot lately about a possible US strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, with the most extreme suggesting possible use of our own nuclear weapons and something like a million or two million Iranians killed. Now, my feeling is that our military people's talk about this stuff is largely posturing; they know good and well that we're not in any position to take on another war. The basic insanity of such a move would seem obvious; the price of oil would go insane, and our troops on Iraq would be in an utterly unsustainable position as the Shia Iraqis and the assorted groups somewhat allied with Iran (including the people dominating the elected government) turn fully against us with many attacking our forces. Iranian military forces aided by the militias would be pouring across the border. Oddly and perhaps ironically this would lead to a quick pull-out of our troops from Iraq; not exactly a great exit strategy. But now we get to the Conspiracy Theory type thing. Suppose that it is "leaked" that the military and the Bush administration feel that a Democratic President would not be able to "Do the right thing" in relation to Iran, and that if the Democrat wins the strike against Iran will go off almost immediately after the election. However, the military and the Bush administration (it is leaked) have confidence in John McCain's ability to handle the Iranians and if he wins nothing will be done until the new President has a chance to assess matters and perhaps even finds a way to pressure the Iranians into doing what we want and thus eliminates the "need" for military action. Thus all the current and future talk of a military strike is really preparation for a sort of blackmail; vote for McCain or we bring on the Apocalypse. I'm going to note that I've seen nobody anywhere suggesting that this might be the case. This is totally my notion, and I'm not seriously suggesting that this is what is going on. And I'm probably a little crazy. Still, it comes close enough to making sense to be a good Conspiracy Theory, IMHO. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 21st, 2008
11:10 pm	Ain't Markets Wonderful? Caught a bit (I think on ABC news Sunday) on worldwide high food prices, and while one noted factor was biofuels (and it is sad that the only Presidential candidate to appear to be against ethanol fuel subsidies is John McCain; this despite there being no net gain in either energy or reduced carbon output to the atmosphere) another was hording by traders wanting prices to go up even more. And caught a bit on ABC earlier on how perhaps $30 or more of the increase in the price of a barrel of oil is because investors are going out of the stock market and into commodities like oil. So, much of the pain at present is because of people out for a buck; isn't this just terrific. One can hope that this at least will encourage a second look at the stupidity of grain biofuels, and might encourage alternate energy sources and fast tracking of projects like Cape Wind. But one can't forget the grand potentials of human stupidity. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:29 am	So, the Necronomicon is actually a cute anime girl? With big eyes and pink hair of course. Goes by the name Al Azif, or just Al. Binds to a sorcerer by kissing him after hearing his name. And the whole of the Cthulhu Mythos can more or less be made into Mecha Combat. Well, at least to something called Demonbane; not released as an anime in this country although there are fan-subby things on YouTube. Falls into the "Those Wacky Japanese" area I think. HPL would have gone into shock upon seeing it. Found by way of the TV Tropes "I Am Not Making This Up Anime Examples" page. (The Necronomicon shouldn't do panty shots; it's just not right...) (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
11:45 pm	Zombies vs. Vomit on the T I was heading home late Saturday night and got on the C train at Park Street. As the MBTA tends to ignore that a lot of people actually do ride the trains late, particularly if there is a concert or sports event (like the Bruins game that night) at the Garden, I had waited for quite some time and the train that arrived was rather crowded. As it happened there were a fair number of zombies on the train; hey, this happens every now and then. Crowding notwithstanding, it wasn't too bad a ride but then something happened, something that hasn't happened when I've been on a trolley in some time. Some drunken person upchucked on the train; later, Bruins fans blamed it on the Montreal Canadiens, the team that the Bruins are facing in the playoffs. Puke spattered on the floor. Now as it happened it was a distance from me and I was a bit stuffed up so I didn't really smell that much of anything, but this was apparently too much for the zombies. One would think that animated corpses would be able to handle such an occurrence without batting a rotted eye, but not this bunch. The zombies all shambled off at the next stop (one noting, if I heard correctly, that if anyone got in their way they eat their brain), leaving a void on the train near the remains of excessive drinking. The rest of the trip passed relatively uneventfully. I got off at Washington Square to pick up Chinese take-out as I often do and walked home. Presumably the zombies made it to wherever it is the Undead go after a night on the town. And that was the exciting event of the weekend. (Comment on this)
5:34 pm	Funny Fake Ad Here. One is almost surprised this isn't a real ad. :) Found at Eschaton. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
12:29 am	Those Wacky Fortunes Okay, tonight the fortune cookie from my Chinese take out says, "You be spending time in the outdoors, in the mountains, near water." What flashed before my eyes is my dead or highly unconscious body up in the mountains by a creek. Which probably reflects either my weird sense of humor or my tendency towards pessimism. Or both. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
8:09 pm	Okay, am I the only one who finds this a bit odd? (Politics) The moderators for the Pennsylvania Primary Debate are Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. They're likable guys and all that, and I'm sure they're about as objective as an average mass media person on a network is. But there's an odd thing.... George Stephanopoulos used to work for Hillary Clinton's husband; he was a political adviser when Bill Clinton was running for President and was his communications director after Clinton won. It would appear that Barack Obama's people either are relatively trusting or recognize that the moderators are really pretty meaningless. Still looks kinda funky to me thought, but I'm probably just really weird. Update: I didn't watch the pseudo-debate (these things are basically a mutant press conference, not a real debate); as most of you who've been paying attention probably know I'm voting for the Democrat whoever they are and generally don't watch these things anyway. Talking Points Memo has several posts on the debate, however. The gist seems to be that it was truly awful; that the moderators (particularly Gibson) sucked, and that Obama at this point seems very tired. Understandable that; this campaign has been going on seemingly forever. Again I see the virtue of a Parliamentary system where the campaign is maybe a couple of months; a Presidential campaign that starts right after the mid-term election is a disgusting and expensive absurdity that doesn't serve democracy. And yet I've seen Crazy People saying that this moronic marathon somehow "tests the candidates"; yeah, it makes it so that the President is chosen for their ability to do a campaign and not for their actual policies or capabilities which of course what the Founding Fathers intended. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
12:01 am	If Hedgehogs are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Hedgehogs Apparently New Zealand is so short of actual weaponry that a man used a hedgehog as a weapon. Left a welt and puncture marks; hedgehogs are spiny critters, often kept as pets, and are pretty much nothing like Sonic. Heard about it in the strip here, which features some speculation on the possibilities of combining creatures as weapons. So, in a duel with choice of animal as weapon, which would you take? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
11:27 pm	Curse Foiled Again, uhh, huh? Okay, so a construction worker who hates the NY Yankees buried a Red Sox shirt (a David Ortiz jersey) in the new Yankee Stadium in an attempt to curse the Yankees. Sure, that would work... And what did the Yankees do about it? They had the shirt dug up out of the concrete. With jackhammers. One wonders how seriously they actually took this "curse" business; one might have observed that with Ortiz not doing that great lately it might not have been much of a curse. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
7:11 pm	"Your Cell Phone Service Can Be Taken Out With One Missile" Just saw an Air Force recruiting ad that opens with (note imperfect memory) a satellite in space and "Did you know that your cell phone service can be taken out with one missile?" Next see the satellite getting blown to little pieces parts by a missile and "It can." The remainder of the ads suggests that the US Air Force is working to deal with this and saying that this is a reason to join up. Hmm. Okay, at this point the only nations to have demonstrated an ability to take out satellites are China and, well, the United States. If the Chinese start shooting down our satellites (and I think communication satellites are in Clarke Orbits way out there; let us note Sir Arthur's recent passing) losing cell phone coverage might be the least of our worries. How, exactly, would we take out a missile heading for either low orbit or high orbit? Put missiles on the Space Station? Heck, I've seen a suggestion that any country that can launch to low Earth orbit could make it unusable just by dumping the equivalent of a large barrel of gravel in an orbit opposite of those the satellites generally take; not much the Air Force could do about that. Mind you, I generally like the Air Force ads better than the Army ads that rather gloss over the reality that it's "Join up and become cannon fodder in Iraq." Still, this one is taking an unlikely problem which has unlikely solutions and using that as a recruiting tool. They could just about as well take scenes from the two Stargate television series and say that people should join the Air Force to protect us from enemy extraterrestrial aliens. Am I too off base here? (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
10:56 pm	Adventures in Shopping and Digital TV I finally elected to go and pick up a VCR/DVD recorder with a digital tuner. As it happened, it was beautiful day when I went out; while I'd expected there to be lots of rain it was quite pleasant with the clouds acting to make it not overly bright out (I'm a little light sensitive; not quite to "vampire bursting into flames" but it does hurt my eyes) and not cold or windy. I poked around Back Bay a little bit before going to the Best Buy (the one where the Tower Records and then the Virgin Megastore used to be). My sight fixed on a Panasonic unit that was way reduced in price because it was an "open item" and I talked about the thing with a handy Best Buy guy. It turned out that open items lack certain things, like oh, a remote. Modern electronics being such as they are I was not about to buy a unit without a remote. I then looked at an LG unit that was cheaper than the full price Panasonic player and the Best Buy guy noted that it lacked certain features that are nice to have when one actually gets an HDTV. That wasn't too big a deal, but then the odd thing happened. I'd read and seen on TV that "haggling" was becoming common even in places where one would not expect it; that even at Best Buy they were willing to make deals. I'm not a haggler usually; I prefer that a price be a price and that I don't end up thinking that I screwed myself compared to somebody who can actually do that kind of stuff. And I didn't haggle here. No, the Best Buy guy said he'd let me have the new Panasonic player at the same price as the LG player. I figured, "Why not?" since eventually I'll probably have some kind of little HDTV. And when we went to pay for it I ended up getting the two year special warranty thingy (I know, I know, nobody should buy these things and I should be forced to listen to Vogon Poetry for doing it but I don't buy big expensive things very often and I'm paranoid) the guy noted that for doing that another $10 was dropped from the price. This is kind of weird really; it's like they're desperate to have people buy stuff. So anyway, I managed to get it home in one piece. And I managed to survive the painful hooking it up process which wasn't really as much of a problem as the moving a whole lot of other stuff process; we have very little room and a fair amount of electronic stuff that I don't use (an old TV, two old monitors, and now the old VCR and DVD player) but is problematic to get rid of. The thing is a little funky. For one thing, it seems to have almost a "booting up" routine such that it doesn't instantly turn on; there's an option to make it turn on faster but that uses more energy when it is supposedly turned off. Also, it seems to default (at least at the moment) to the VCR even if I don't have a tape so I have to actually tell the thing to show TV. And as near as I can tell the remote has no "eject" button; I have to use the ones on the machine. I don't have cable; in fact, I have a rabbit ears with a built in signal amplifier. This can make getting stuff in kind of tricky. Still, I seem to be able to get in at least some of the digital stuff. Digital is different from analog, well, for a lot of reasons but for one thing you have to have an adequate signal or you have no picture at all. However, if you have the picture it's a rather nice picture; comparable to DVD I think. Now, since I have a cheap analog TV the actual display can be interesting. If the original item is HD, it ends up as letter boxed; considering that a lot of stuff on analog already is that way I can't complain. If the original is not, you have a smaller image that is however really sharp. Oh, and digital allows for stations to have extra channels after a fashion. Channel 7 seems to use one digital channel for HDTV and another for a weather station. I suspect there are some digital channels I'm not getting because I'm not in a terribly good place to get reception. Not sure if I'll end up getting cable or not; I have some aversion to it and the hassle of getting somebody to hook it up. Eventually I'll get a small HDTV, but I don't know where to put the old TV then. I'm probably going to want to get a new computer monitor also, and then again we have the "Where do I put the old one?" problem. Oh well...... Update: I fiddled to get more reception and then reran the automatic channel setup. And was somewhat fascinated to see that GBH 44 has four digital channels with one having the content of the analog station and the other three being "World," "Create," and "Kids." Channel 68 has four also; the same as the analog, "Qubo" which seems to be a kids channel, "ION Life," and "Worship" which at this time of night is religious music. So it does appear that the stuff about digital TV giving one more channels is more or less true. Does this and the superior video quality justify the cost and hassle of the big change? Maybe. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
7:12 pm	This is....uhhh....something.... See this vid here. I am pleased that I'm not crazy enough to do this sort of thing. Found link at August Pollak's site. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 31st, 2008
12:20 am	Odd Humor Thing Here. It's a Lego animation set to an Eddie Izzard routine. Link found in the Wotch web comic forum; all manner of odd things are linked to in web comic forums. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
6:48 pm	Obama's a Lefty! :) (Politics, lightly) Just saw a bit on ABC with Barack Obama campaigning in Pennsylvania. At one point he was bowling, and I realized something I'd not before; Senator Obama is left-handed. The last two Presidents who were left handed were Bill Clinton and Bush the First. Which of course means relatively little; lefties are supposedly more artistic as I recall which one could figure might be why he's such a good speaker but I don't suppose it really makes that much difference. Still, he'd surely be a better Prez than our current right-handed incompetent. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
12:39 am	The Democratic Race (Politics) See the Oliphant comic here. It's a nicely humorous take on the state of the campaign, if reflecting Pat Oliphant's rather caustic wit (he basically hates everybody, although he does seem slightly more favorable to Obama). There seems to be some belief that Senator Clinton is on a "If I can't win neither can Obama" kick, possibly in anticipation of a 2012 run. I have doubts about that (as Drum does in the noted post) but it is possible that the net effect may be the same as if she and her minions were intentionally sabotaging Obama's chances. Thing is that with such a long gap between primaries and apparently little chance Hillary could win without the DNC deciding to give her Florida and Michigan (even though Obama wasn't even on the ballot in the latter and didn't campaign in the former) and her also gaining the Superdelgates (what color of Kryptonite takes out Superdelegates?) there's not a whole lot of benefit to the Democratic Party in dragging this affair out. The rational thing to do for the good of the Party (and the country, frankly) is, as insane as it seems, for there to be an agreement that Obama is the Presidential nominee while Clinton is the VP nominee. Yes, that sounds nuts but let us recall that JFK and LBJ ran against each other for the nomination and didn't much like each other either. The point is that with it actually being rather close and with both sides having devoted followers it is probably better to go for Unity than for victory of one side. This would require that Clinton be willing to be a second banana, and it is entirely possible that she won't be willing to do that. The biggest danger is that in a year when the Democrats should be running away with the election that they're going to in effect self-immolate and let the Republicans keep the White House and retake one or both Houses of Congress. We have a situation where perhaps because the Democrats were in such a good position they ended up selecting as the final two risky candidates rather than safe candidates, and this may be leading to higher emotions and higher expectations and more to trip up either candidate. However nice it might be to have the First African-American President or the first Woman President it is more important to end the Republican Regime and it may well have been better to have a boring but experienced and competent candidate with little controversy about them. Water under the bridge now, and we have to go with the candidates we have. Either Democrat is going to be an improvement over Bush; I'm going to flat out state that the demonization of Hillary from both the Right and the Left is to the point of irrational insanity (and no, people, I'm not totally ignorant of her vote on the war and excessive leaning to the Right and the strange exaggerations of her record and so on) and she would be wildly better than Bush or McCain. The Republicans need to be not just defeated but crushed, destroyed, humiliated, annihilated, folded, spindled, and mutilated. The Democratic Presidential candidate has to be supported no matter who they are; none of this self-gratifying "I'm going to vote for an independent or Steven Colbert if Hillary (or Obama) is the candidate" because the Enemy is truly dangerous and must be destroyed. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
7:30 pm	Something Hitting The Air Moving Device? (Politics and Foreign Wars) It looks like that the cease-fire the "Mahdi Army" was following is kinda over. And the article suggests that our government thinks that the Iranians are behind this to some extent. This could be a Bad Thing; what benefits the "Surge" provided would look to be ending rather abruptly. Mind you, it's possible that the US military and the Iraqi military will just crush the Madhi guys and peace will reign and ponies will fly. Well, we'll see. (In a bit of silly, the warning in parenthesis in the subject is taken from The World News Polka) (Comment on this)