the martian it's a good fun read. the fact that i'm plugging a book for a buddy of mine has nothing to do with my opinion. honest. pinky swear. actually it is pretty good. i've enjoyed way worse books. the problem is putting it down. cause the guy's stranded on mars. completely alone. and every chapter something tries to kill him. with varying degrees of success. we're reading his logs. so we don't know if he makes it or not. it's pretty intense.  ¶ 8:00 AM

  safetability someone tried to kill me again today. by being nice. i really appreciate that people are paying attention to bicycles on the road. but man... drive. just drive. do what you're supposed to do. don't do something unexpected. you're not helping. suddenly everyone has to change their plans. and if we don't all land on the same page, someone's gonna die. most likely the guy in the glowing green jacket. bicycles move slower than cars. the key to bicycle safety is 100% predictability.  ¶ 8:00 AM

  dope okay more surveys. this time on the correlation between marijuana and fatal car accidents. there are a whole lot more corpses testing positive for cannabis. which is alarming. cause the immediate assumption is that pot is causing more people to die behind the wheel. and that we were right to persecute, sorry prosecute, untold millions of them dirty hippies for generations. but... and you knew there'd be a but. in states where pot use has been at least somewhat legalized, traffic fatalities have decreased more than in states where it's still illegal. but wait. how does that make sense? well, first, marijuana can be detected in the system for up to a week after use. long after the effects have worn off. so if billybob gets stoned on friday night and dies drunk on saturday night, he'd show up in the aforementioned statistic. i'm hoping this combination of stats indicates people are switching their drug of choice from alcohol to marijuana. which is a pretty major improvement. like i tell me kids: don't do drugs. but if you must do drugs, then do cannabis.  ¶ 8:00 AM

  astrolomy a recent study says half of young people think astrology is scientific. which would be really bad news on its face. digging a little deeper it's not that bad. the words astronomy and astrology are very close. i have several astronomer friends. and i have to be very careful that i don't accidentally refer to them as astrologers. cause that's like a pretty serious insult. i suspect if one redid the survey but instead asked are horoscopes scientific, one would get a very different result. in fact, someone did such a $5 survey. they repeated the original study down to the language. in addition they asked respondents to define astrology. astronomy is the study of stars and planets. astrology is how they affect people. thinking back, i'm pretty sure that i was in college when i realized that astrology means horoscopes. which are clearly feel good claptrap. so anywho, the guy found that he and i are not alone. a lot of young people confuse astronomy with astrology. those respondents to his survey who know astrology means horoscopes don't think it's scientific. duh. whereas those who think astrology is a synonym for astronomy think it's scientific. so really the survey results mean that most young people don't know the difference between astrology (nonsense) and astronomy (science).  ¶ 8:00 AM

  darn i came home the other day to find my youngest mending a sock i had never seen before. it wasn't his. it was a friend's from school. huh. i said. he volunteered he might want a favor from him sometime in the future. great i said. maybe next time you get your friend to wash his sock first.  ¶ 8:00 AM

  news i did something today that i haven't done in months: i booted my pc. i used to shut my pc down every day. and boot it up every morning. but them my hw miner from butterfly labs arrived. i ran it 24/7 from my pc. but my pc is a bit of a power hog. so i bought a nice little nexus 7 low power tablet. from the internet. sans charger. and proper cables. so i've been using the pc to charge the nexus 7 uh well 24/7. yeah i know that's kinda silly. it took a while to collect all the right parts. i was getting a new package from china every week for a while. the last one arrived yesterday. and i shut down my pc last night for its first good night's sleep in months. lucky it. mining is kinda fun. it's a bit noisier than i'd like. and it requires significantly more tinkering than i'd like. maybe being free of windows will help things. we'll see. i'd be happy to sell the whole setup at cost if anyone's interested. that'd 0.7 bit coins at today's prices.  ¶ 8:00 AM

  i hacker so i got to work yesterday. booted up my pc. started the script that does all my dailly chores. and blamo. nothing. my pc is not on the corporate network. ipconfig shows all media is disconnected. huh. okay check the cables. mac laptop is fine. huh. check the drop box ports. all of them work with the mac laptop. sigh. swap the cable to the pc. reconnect the hdmi cable. stupid piece of shit design that is. anywho, not the cable. at this point i'm thinking the nic died. sigh. okay. file a ticket with IT. rebooted. netops guy suggested removing the power supply. wtf? there's no way i'm opening up the box and physically removing the power supply. oh wait. that's netops guy speak for unplug the power cable for 60 seconds. so here i am under the desk again. when the IT guy comes running up. wants to know if i have a 192 address. okay you see those movies where the hacker glances at something and has perfect recall of it forever? okay, so that's me under the desk reciting the ipconfig from 10 minutes ago. there's a strange example.org. and the IT guy says 192 address in the 40s block. i say no no no. mine's 192.168.0.26. no idea how i pulled that number out of my ass. didn't even think of the super hacker thing until much later. otherwise i'd have had a lot more fun with it. anywho. someone was running a dhcp server in a linux vm for some thing they were testing prototyping developing. the IT guy showed them how to add a firewall so they don't fark people up when their leases expire. wee.  ¶ 8:00 AM