On needing a vacation from my vacation

So I’ve been pretty crap at updating the blog despite my earlier intimation that I would. In my defense, it’s been a busy first week of my vacation. First, we visited Pickles and Lisa on my first Saturday night for booze and Wii playing, which was fun as always. We left a bit earlier than usual, hoping to beat the weather home, and we did.

However, the next day, there was a roughly 9-hour power outage in the middle of the continuing bit of cold weather, during which I not only had to barbecue water in order to make tea (and provide heat for Jodi’s snake), but also had to walk the new guy at the other site through bringing his office back up from their own power outages. Nothing like walking people through dealing with getting power back, when you have no power of your own.
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On needing a vacation from my vacation
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Beaten until he was sorry

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After showing Bush what the Iraqi people really think about him during the shoe-throwing incident that happened recently, Muntazer al-Zaidi (who looks disturbingly like Clifton — I think it’s the near-unibrow that does it personally) has stated that he is sorry for having misused his shoes as projectiles. Oops, sorry, that’s what I would have apologized for — evidently Zaidi apologized for throwing them specifically at Bush.

There’s some contention as to whether the injuries he sustained were only sustained during his being subdued at the press conference or while in custody afterward, but either way, it seems suspicious that someone driven to this kind of protest of Bush would suddenly have a change of heart and express his regret unless he was facing something other than inhumane and unjust punishment for what he did.

I am of the opinion that the punishment should fit the crime, personally.  While it isn’t a mark of a civilized man to throw something at heads of state, it certainly isn’t an act that merits beatings.  And I say this despite knowing personally the misguided fool who threw a pie at Jean Chretien, yet can’t find it in himself or his alleged “PEI Pie Brigade” to throw one at Harper.

Here’s Countdown’s mashup of the interweb tubes’ take on this one.

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If you’re wondering whether the training-up of the new IT guy means I’ll have more time to blog again, well, the answer is yes.  Expect a LOT more of me over the next two weeks as well, as I have some vacation booked.  Time to reconnect with my peeps! (Psst — that means you.)

Update: MORE SHOES!

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Beaten until he was sorry

My brilliant would-be scientist gets blogged!

And I am blogging about it!  I’m proud of her.  She’s asked how to go about getting into science, biology specifically, and knowing she’s an animal person she’s going to have a fun time.  She has a letter answered by John S. Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts on how to break into the biology field and he makes some excellent suggestions.

In the meantime, I am playing Fallout 3 pretty well every spare minute I can get away from work-and-work, which amounts to maybe a couple hours a night.  I am on call all the time and do what I can where and when I can for everyone, as evidenced by the fact that I have remoted into the “Other Site’s” computers half of the day and altered software for them.  My in-office time is spent avoiding total disaster with software pushes that don’t work quite right when there’s a lingering bad self-made MSI install of Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 that seems to not want to remove itself from certain systems even after the program files directory is removed, requiring removal of a registry key.  Software installs are not fun under Windows.  Now maybe if I had a way to remote into them like SSH, that I could do some awesome system stuff while someone else is logged in, that’d be perfect.  You know, like under a Linux computer.

I bet such a thing already exists for Windows, but I can’t imagine unless you can remotely spawn a local copy of a GUI application that it would be nearly as useful as under Linux.  I believe you can do something like that while remoting into Windows 2003, but unless there’s some third party out there, Microsoft can’t do it intrinsically, I don’t believe.  There’s one mentioned here that I want to look into, which looks to have the command prompt half of it at least.  It’s 1999 stuff though, so who knows how good it’ll be.

My brilliant would-be scientist gets blogged!

Prop 8: The Musical

I’m sorry, all, that I don’t really have the energy to vent about the Canadian political situation right now, despite the laundry list of reasons the length of my arm why Harper needs to be tossed out on his ear, and despite how wholly constitutional and legal the attempt to get rid of Mr. 37% of the Vote right this second.  The only thing I can say right now is, look out Canada, here come the attack ads.

I do however have a small thing to say about this:

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

I’ve always liked Jack Black, despite a number of really good reasons I really shouldn’t. And I couldn’t have picked a better Jesus if I tried.  Also: naturally, musical + gay rights = more Neil Patrick Harris goodness.  He hits on the best way to get conservative blowhards interested in equal rights.

I have a relative, and estranged friends, who are gay. I hope they understand why I’m being indirect in saying this, since I care about their well-being, and would be afraid, in this world of ours, that something bad might happen to them as a result. That even now, in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide economic collapse after horrible mismanagement of that one country that thinks it’s “exceptional”, there are people out there who aren’t satisfied with worrying about their own coffers and would go out of their way to abridge the rights of a minority group (with intention only, as far as I can see, to make themselves feel better after that whole “causing an economic meltdown” silliness)… well, the whole thing baffles me. I have been thinking lately that I’m not nearly cynical enough. If you care about having your rights intact, then you must care about everyone’s rights — yes, including all those people that your damn holy books may or may not (read Leviticus more carefully, asshats) actually condemn.

To my friends and family: I’m sorry I wasn’t around to protect you or “your people” while you were growing up, and discovering you were expected by society to do something unnatural to you, and all the pain that resulted from learning to deal with that dichotomy. In some cases I was oblivious, or had hints, or in some cases just didn’t know you soon enough in your life to have made any kind of difference. Now that I have a voice out here on the interwebs, though, I got your backs now. Small consolation though that might be.

Afterthought: the fact that I have to put this into Politics is sad, considering basic human rights shouldn’t be something up for political debate.

Prop 8: The Musical

Fuck yeah!

Daily Show is always full of goodness, but John Oliver just absolutely BRINGS IT regarding the “industrial strength douchebags” putting together terror attacks in Mumbai. Skip to roughly 3:25 if you don’t care to hear about the Wal-Mart Consumerist Massacre of 2008.

“There have always been motherfuckers. There will always BE motherfuckers. But what we can’t do is let them control our motherfucking lives!” So bringeth John Oliver.

Oh, and Comedy Network? Get with the times and set it up so you can embed clips. Ultimately you drive traffic back to your site for minimal bandwidth costs. I’d have embedded from Comedy Central instead, considering they DO allow embedding, but they don’t allow Canucks on their servers, the ratfink bastards. You Comedy Network dudes are only getting a reprieve because I can at least connect to your servers.

Fuck yeah!

Open thread

Since I’ve been neglecting this blog while work is slowly wearing me down (and Fallout 3 has so much of my attention), please, feel free to consider this a “blank post” so you all can rant to your hearts content.

I’m upgrading WordPress again, as well, so let me know if anything breaks.

820 spams blocked?  Jeez.  Why do they even keep trying?

Open thread

Why do people, PhDs included, keep misunderstanding the concept of evolution?

This is why physicists don’t generally work on biology problems, and vice versa.  Two scientists at Princeton University made an interesting protein discovery, where a specific protein acts as a sort of error-correction for DNA strands, only now they think the protein they found is actually the mechanism driving evolution.

Now, you must be thinking, “what the hell is a computer geek with no science credentials doing, telling some PhD level scientists they’ve got their heads up their asses?”  And normally, you’d be dead right.  But in this case, these scientists are claiming that this protein is driving biological organisms to change themselves within their own lifespans, when all they’ve proven is that the protein corrects DNA replication errors (think Scandisk for the DNA in all your cells).

Here’s the thing about evolution.  It has no intent.  There is no driving force, no guiding hand — evolution is not equal to God fiddling with our DNA, it is rather the by-product of the natural world.  Evolution is defined as the net sum of what happens when biological organisms change from generation to generation, with the environment and random chance (like how even creatures with evolutionary advantages might sometimes eat a rotten berry or get seen by a predator and eaten), ending certain genotypes early.  Evolution is not pushing creatures to change — evolution IS the change, over time, of creatures upon whom an evolutionary influence is exerted.

So, here we have creatures that mutate certain genes naturally when they reproduce.  Some of these gene mutations are advantageous, and those creatures have an increased ability to survive.  Some are disadvantageous, and they are more likely to die before reproducing.  These mutations happen when the zygote is formed.  Later on, once out of that zygote stage, those aforementioned proteins try to prevent DNA replication errors throughout the body, because if a cell’s DNA is altered through a mutation, it can become a freckle, a mole, a cancerous tumor, et cetera.  So these proteins fight what could become cancer and kill you, but they don’t actively drive a living creature to suddenly sprout an extra arm or grow gills during that creature’s lifespan.

There need be no magic mechanism that “explains why all that random chance formed you and I”, because the naturalistic explanation works just fine in explaining that.  Over millions of iterations of reproduction, wherein genes have fused, new genes expressed, genes have had errors in transcription that happen to work out nicely, whole new features can come into being practically spontaneously when the environment selects for certain abilities.  The Cambrian Explosion happened after a dramatic shift in the environment.  Likewise when plants evolved to emit oxygen and started pumping out that otherwise corrosive gas in record amounts, so too did creatures evolve to breathe it.  No need for an invisible hand rewriting our genetic code, and no need for a special protein to drive us to change within the span of our own lives to adapt to the new circumstances of our environment, when reproduction and natural selection (meaning specifically, how some genes can be advantageous for survival or reproduction) both have explained the whole process quite nicely.

I’m likely to edit this post later to include a bunch of links or videos to explain things better.

Why do people, PhDs included, keep misunderstanding the concept of evolution?

Two computer cases I had tonight.

Tonight I fixed two computers “on-the-side”, not relating to my actual job.  One was a Vista laptop whose password had been lost — I downloaded and burned a copy of Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, used that to change the person’s password to the same as her BIOS boot and hard drive passwords.  This was a bright, shiny new Compaq, and incredibly hefty.  The screen was gigantic and beautiful.  A shame it was sullied by Vista.  I’d have had Ubuntu on that baby and travel in style, with XP on a boot partition for playing games away from my desktop (which would be possible given the sweet on-board NVidia it had access to — a shame it was wasted on Vista’s Aero decorations).

Heeeeey, I could play Fallout 3 on it and be able to not be a hermit.  You know, hang around out in the living room with Jodi while playing that Oblivion-engine-based Fallout revival.  I’m a bit surprised by how much of Oblivion I can still see in that game.  They did a decent job making what appears to be a first-person shooter with heavy exploration elements, basically Oblivion with guns.  Called shots (VATS — dunno what it stands for) are cool.

But I digress.  More on that later.

Case number two was a fantastic issue, and by fantastic I mean it puzzled me for several hours.  Local-ISP Internet Security Services, a rebranded F-Secure by F-Prot, apparently stomped on some files installed by Google Toolbar, causing the venerable old toolbar to refuse processing DNS while in Internet Explorer.  By extension, because the stomping seems to have damaged the internet stack itself, which Firefox has to share, it refused to process Firefox requests for certain webpages, and seemingly pushed all internet traffic over a localhost-based proxy (which I’m assuming Google Toolbar used to interpose itself into the flow of internet traffic).  As a result of this, the issue I was approached with was that the Local-ISP internet services installer was unable to, after installation of the software, actually contact their registration service (since its own traffic was redirected to that no-longer-existing Google Toolbar proxy).  The poor owner shut the computer down rather than letting the computer run without any kind of antivirus, and called me for help.

Local-ISP Tech Support had been no help whatsoever, having run through the uninstall and reinstall of the security product to no avail.  I’m thinking either they’re not aware of the incompatibility of their software with Google Toolbar, or I might just be off base on the exact cause of the situation as the whole timing thing is my only real concrete link between cause and effect in this case.  That, and uninstalling Google Toolbar via HijackThis having fixed the issue, which isn’t quite a solid evidence one way or the other for whether or not the security suite actually stomped the Google Toolbar files.  The thing is, I can’t see any other possible cause for the toolbar to have just fallen over and died.

Anyway, the installer for the Local-ISP software is running now, and I have all through the weekend to finish this thing, so I might as well go to bed.

Oh yeah.  Back is still sore, I’m heading back to the doctor ASAP.  It’s getting better, kinda, but it’s way slower than it should be.  Granted, I haven’t come to another crisis yet, I’m more worried that I’m just going to be stuck like this if we don’t start getting some x-rays or MRIs or whatever else and figure out what the hell is bugging my back so much.

(Mini update — I fixed the time frame.  I had intended to post this tomorrow morning if I didn’t get it finished, but I did, and forgot to go back and change “last night” to “tonight”.  Bet that’ll be funny in the RSS feed.)

Two computer cases I had tonight.