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1) The motherboard on my primary laptop died, six weeks after the end of a four-year warranty. I cannot renew the warranty -- because Dell only offers warranties up to 5 years, only sells warranty periods in units of one year, and the laptop is four years plus six weeks old.
I bought a new motherboard to install. It's supposed to be on its way by now but I haven't heard.
2) My Mac Mini has repeatedly hung with CPU failures ("cpu #1 [of a dual core] has stopped responding to interrupts.")
3) My Drobo (NAS drive) died, taking every bit of data I own with it. It turns out there was massive filesystem corruption, taking ~10% of my files with it; the rest is being recovered with Disk Warrior.
4) The 120GB external drive I first used to try to make a backup of my laptop died (just a month old! Shipped back under warranty.)
5) One of the 300GB drives making up my Addonics tower has died.
All of this has happened since Thursday.
Don't read this blog entry -- my mojo might be contagious.Current Mood: stunned and depressed |
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Again, a USB2-connected (through a PCMCIA card) storage tower vs. a dedicated Intel NAS box.
The Addonics tower is using three drives, while the NAS uses 4 drives; both are RAID-5.
tdb@bow:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/AddonicsRaid/zerofile bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 198.193 seconds, 5.2 MB/s
real 3m18.889s
user 0m0.632s
sys 0m12.473s
tdb@bow:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/NAS/zerofile bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1334.64 seconds, 767 kB/s
real 22m15.187s
user 0m1.176s
sys 0m51.887s
tdb@bow:~$
The NAS drive has gigabit ethernet but the server only has 100M, so that's a wash. For comparison, from another server to the NAS drive using wired gigabit, not much of an improvement due to the networking:
arrow:~ tdb$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/public//zerofile2 bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 1111.925912 secs (920925 bytes/sec)
real 18m31.995s
user 0m4.679s
sys 0m57.112s
arrow:~ tdb$
Update: For completeness' sake, I did the same test from the other server to the shared Addonics Raid, and was surprised:
arrow:~ tdb$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/AddonicsRaid/zerofile4 bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 496.690487 secs (2061646 bytes/sec)
real 8m16.797s
user 0m4.571s
sys 0m54.870s
arrow:~ tdb$
So the complete matrix:
| (times in minutes) |
to Addonics tower
w/Software RAID5
to Intel NAS
w/GB ethernet |
|
BOW, USB to Addonics, 100Mb net |
3:18 |
22:15 |
ARROW, GB ethernet |
8:18 |
18:32 |
Not what I expected to see at all. |
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Note: During this process, I emailed Addonics Tech Support for assistance, and in addition to their (quick) email response I received a phone call the next day to discuss the situation. Apparently this was a configuration they had not encountered before and so I offered to write up the results. (If you are not here for that technical information, now would be a good time to leave. :) )
Hardware:
Addonics JBOD USB tower with four drives (2x300GB, 1x320GB, 1x180GB).
IBM Thinkpad Pentium 3-M laptop with USB 2.0 served through a PCMCIA card.
Software:
Xubuntu 7.10 with all updates as of 4/2008.
Goal:
RAID 5 with the first three drives (around 300GB each.)
HOWTO:
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch26_:_Linux_Software_RAID.
Tools:
/proc/mdstat
/sbin/mdadm
/sbin/mkfs
/bin/dmesg
/sbin/fdisk
Attempt 1: At first I wasn't aware that there was a lot of initializing to do for the array, and attempted to continue to mkfs as soon as the mdadm command completed. The mkfs repeatedly failed:
root@bow:~# mkfs -t xfs /dev/md0
...
mkfs.xfs: pwrite64 failed: Input/output error
root@bow:~#
...or ...
root@bow:~# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0
...
Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block from filesystem resulted in short write
...
Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block from filesystem resulted in short write
...
ext2fs_update_bb_inode: Illegal triply indirect block found while setting bad block inode
root@bow:~#
Attempt 2: Around this time I noticed that the CPU meter was still pegged even though I wasn't doing anything. Seeing mdadm still running made me look up mdadm's man page, which directed me to /proc/mdstat, which indicated the initialization was still proceeding:
tdb@bow:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid5 sdb1[3] sdc1[1] sdd1[0]
586067072 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [UU_]
[===>.................] recovery = 16.4% (48195320/293033536) finish=1010.3min speed=4035K/sec
unused devices:
tdb@bow:~$
Eventually I noticed that the recovery percentage never went above around 2% (unlike the above sample, taken later) before getting back to a completed state:
tdb@bow:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid5 sdb1[2] sdc1[1] sdd1[0]
586067072 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
unused devices:
tdb@bow:~$
This process took about 10-15 minutes. Since there were no error messages in /proc/mdstat or dmesg, I assumed that the work was all front-loaded and the "other" 98% of the work was trivial, like setting up a partition table, rather than calculating and writing parity blocks. However, the errors from mkfs didn't change, and the result was still unmountable. I also tried altering the partition type from fd (Linux raid automount) to 83 (plain Linux) but there was no effect.
Attempt 3: At this point I was starting to wonder if one of the drives had gone bad, although I wasn't sold on the idea because they had worked right up to the start of this process. Still, I repartitioned the drives to start at cylinder 100 (leaving the first 100 cylinders blank on each disk) to skip past any initial problem spots on the drives. There were still no changes to the error messages, indicating the problem did not shift geometry with the partition change, which in turn suggested that the problem was probably not physical.
Attempt 4: I emailed Addonics tech support. Though they had not previously encountered my configuration, within that conversation there was a clue that the creation of a RAID 5 array takes a long time ("3 500GB drives takes as much as 24 hours.") I went back to thinking of the mdadm command as the culprit, wondering why my initialization step terminated at 2%. Again, attempting to force some kind of change in geometry, I recreated the RAID array with the drives in reverse order: sdd1, sdc1, sdb1.
This worked. Completely. I was rather gobsmacked. I was able to create an XFS filesystem and mount it.
I have since repartitioned the drives back to use the complete drive geometry (20gb is wasted on one drive, shucky-darn) and everything is still working fine. I also note that the partition type (83 or fd) doesn't seem to affect the creation of the array, although it may have other consequences for mdadm and related tools (don't know yet.)
tdb@bow:~$ mount
...
/dev/md0 on /media/AddonicsRaid type xfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
tdb@bow:~$ df -h /media/AddonicsRaid
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 559G 1.5M 559G 1% /media/AddonicsRaid
tdb@bow:~$ sudo mdadm --query --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Fri Apr 18 10:56:23 2008
Raid Level : raid5
Array Size : 586067072 (558.92 GiB 600.13 GB)
Used Dev Size : 293033536 (279.46 GiB 300.07 GB)
Raid Devices : 3
Total Devices : 3
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Update Time : Sat Apr 19 08:44:38 2008
State : clean
Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 3
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0
Layout : left-symmetric
Chunk Size : 64K
UUID : b3c7a2c5:d065d41c:80d35bfa:21d4c790 (local to host bow)
Events : 0.4
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1
1 8 33 1 active sync /dev/sdc1
2 8 17 2 active sync /dev/sdb1
tdb@bow:~$ touch /media/AddonicsRaid/testit
tdb@bow:~$ ls /media/AddonicsRaid
testit
tdb@bow:~$
Et voila! A new use for those old drives. See next entry for relative performance measurements...Current Mood: accomplished |
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[full article from the Seattle Times is here]
The unsettling thing about living in a surveillance society isn't just that you're being watched. It's that you have no idea.
That's what struck me about a story told last week by a border agent at a meeting of 200 San Juan Islanders. He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs.But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."
It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.
"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."
The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.
Did he find a nuke?
"Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier," Giuliano said.
He added: "That's the type of technology we have that's going on in the background. You don't see it. If I hadn't told you about it, you'd never know it was there."
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Yes I am back home -- sharing living quarters with Laurie, eating like a pig, and consulting to start building up the bank account again. My life in a nutshell. :) Perhaps at some other time I will expand on that, but everything else is trivial (i.e. "it's all small stuff". :) )
The reason for reactivation of this blog: my thesis project has rather come to a grinding halt... many reasons but the end result is the same, and I am looking for a new topic. One which shows promise is something to do with the One Laptop per Child project -- which for those of you who may not have noticed, you can get one of your own, right now, for one more week. If you want one and don't live in the U.S. or Canada, let me know, and I'll order it for you and forward it. (Price with shipping to me is $423 ("Give one get one", you're really buying two of them; one goes to you and one goes to a kid somewhere) and I'll forward it for free.)
Anyhoo, I've got mine on order (so does Laurie :) ) and I've also got simulators up and running in VMware. Cool stuff, very different.
I'm posting this primarily to track some oddities about what I'm seeing so that I can track them down again later.
- Some installations of a new VMware virtual machine result in a repeatedly crashing X server.
The failure occurs (obviously) during X startup; the screen turns white, the X cursor appears... but about at the point where a working copy's cursor changes to the large arrow, the failing ones crash.
I've made about ten copies of this install image. Half of them worked, half of them didn't. The only fix I've found is to delete the image and recopy from the template.
- I have four simulations running. One of them has created a shared document, two others are participating in the writing. In the fourth simulation's Neighborhood view I should see a document with three (or two, if the document counts as one itself) XOs clustered around it. I see the document but never the never see that many, only zero or one. This does not appear to have anything to do with whether one or the other has designated the viewer or the document owner as a "friend".
- When one simulation attempts to connect to a shared document, sometimes it gets the correct document, but other times it gets a blank new document with the shared document's XO colors.
- Something closes with a hard crash/coredump during shutdown/reboot. Can't tell what's doing it, though, the diagnostics are more than a screen long.
I don't know if these are artifacts of the fact that I'm running in a VMware simulation or not. We'll find out when the machine comes...
Other bits:
- I still haven't figured out what "groups" are.
- I want to find out more about the school servers.
- OLPC has a job listing for a "Back End Engineer" that leads with, "Are you interested in problems of scale?" :D I've sent them a resume.
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'Nuff said.
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I have earned all the credits and passed all the courses I need for the degree, other than the thesis itself!
[insert sound of Kermit the Frog cheering...]
Thank you, thank you... and I even have one extra credit (about 1/6th of a typical class credit) left over...
Received the last outstanding grade today. In total, a credit-weighted average grade of 7.8. I am very happy to report that of the 14 classes I ended up taking, I anticipate 9 having the strong possibility of being directly useful in my ideal job (whatever that is,) which is an even better rate than I anticipated -- vs. 50% -- and far higher than if I had taken any of the distributed computing degree tracks I saw in the U.S.
So I guess all this means that my time in Amsterdam is winding down. Like most transitions, this is both good and bad, but overall I'm looking forward to getting back.
Sorry for the long hiatus here but, while lots of things have been going on, none of them have been particularly new or noteworthy...
- First, of course, there are the typical winter doldrums which seem to be exacerbated by a near-total lack of sunlight for months on end...
- I took a visit back to NH in February just because I was feeling a bit homesick...
- Continuing struggles with Moxie's health, although I think she's turned the corner and is gaining a bit of weight back...
The exception to the rule: My thesis has started up! I am indeed doing the NEW-TIES related project in Scotland, and will be back and forth there a couple of times -- I've already gone once, but no pictures to speak of. I'll be staying for a weekend at some point and hope to get some shots then. In the meantime, for those interested in following the thesis in detail, there is a new blog at http://pdcs-ttg.livejournal.com/ which I am using to document events, milestones, decisions, etc. for posterior's sake.
But worth posting are these videos I took of Queen's Day celebrations two days ago -- I went out and bought some orange hair and saw some funny stuff...
First, a demonstration of the great respect and affection which the Dutch hold for their royalty:
And second, traffic jam on the canals!
Current Mood: Pleased with the milestone |
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I shouldn't be posting this because I have an exam tomorrow but I already know I'll be up late anyway... There's a news story I've been following because of some issues of personal interest to me, and I ran across some comments which were so jaw-dropping I couldn't resist exposing them to the light of day.
There's a deaf kid in New York who has gotten into a legal fight with his school about whether he can bring his new service dog to school with him (original story here.) Most of you know that I'm deaf in one ear and some of you know that my parents raise service dogs, so I'm pretty familiar with most of the issues involved.
I can understand why the school is unhappy about the dog -- they are worried about it being a disruption and a liability (both of which are ludicrous, and only expose their ignorance of service dogs - the mother, when asked about the dog's behavior during the heated argument, said, "He behaved himself impeccably, which is more than can be said for the adults, including myself, I might add.") and they may also be worried about the perception by others that this kid is getting special treatment by bringing a "pet". All of this should be fixable simply with everybody getting together and getting educated on the subject. There are other logistical issues around this -- what if some other kid is allergic, and apparently the school was asking for some kind of bureaucratic review which the mother didn't pay any attention to -- but the bottom line is simple: the dog needs to be with his person, and the law says the dog can be there. That's all, there ain't no more.
But I ran across a reference to this story on FreeRepublic today (the lunatic fringe right-wing site) and the comments on their story range from reasonably aware to "ignorant and proud of it" to downright evil.
A lot of people with hearing problems would really get angry to be called disabled. Kid has a pet he wants to bring to school, get over it kid.
I'm getting the feeling this mother is fishing for a lawsuit against the school (using current state and federal special education laws).
He is handicapped beyond mainstream and should be in a schools for the deaf. His mother refuses to admit she birthed a defective.
Admittedly this is a one-sided sampling, but it's the majority side.
I just wanted to take this moment out to thank my parents for raising me right. :)
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I've been in Amsterdam for a year and a half now, and in terms of Dutch food I've primarily been exposed to snackish stuff:
- french fries with mayonnaise-like sauce
- the "cheese souffle", cheese wrapped in a packet of something which is sort of halfway between pasta and dough, then breaded and fried
- and of course herring -- pretty good smoked, but that's hard to find in town and I can't get around the pickled ones which are everywhere.
- and recently, poffertjes, basically tiny, slightly chewy pancakes of no particular taste other than they're served with a big hunk of butter and covered with powdered suger.
But I'd never really had any of the few "traditional" Dutch main courses. I've been rather put off, not only by the quality of the food I have had, but by their descriptions (as in here for stamppot specifically, or here for a general food review I posted this time last year.) And to give it a really fair test, I should go to a place recommended by a Dutch person, right?
Well, I broached the subject with a Dutch friend and he recommended a place called "De Keuken" (The Kitchen) at Spuistraat 4 near Central Station. So some classmates and I checked the place out. I, of course, neglected to bring a camera, but not everybody was as silly as that (thanks Ann!), so I give you stamppot:
click for larger image
- Cook and mash some potatoes (no milk, just mash them up, and leave them chunky)
- Mix in some chopped lettuce (raw, as opposed to the cooked cabbage I saw in the prior description)
- Sprinkle with pieces of bacon (lots -- this is the only part of the dish with any flavor)
- Add a hunk of sausage -- not spicy, not smoked, just sort of plain
- Cover it all with a little thin brown gravy
Presto, stamppot.
click for larger image
See? Not as bad as I thought it might have been...
You may notice the two soda bottles behind me? 0.2L each -- together they're just slightly larger than one 12 ounce soda can. I could have gone through a lot of those... but they're US$1.75 apiece, so I restrained myself.
So all in all it was a good night, and the Dutch food was not as bad as I thought it might be. But "high cuisine" it ain't.
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| » The "Heartbreak Hill" of the Masters Program: the Thesis arrives |
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Well, I've narrowed it down to three topics to choose from for my masters thesis.
The first one offered would sound really good to the folks at Progress (if I cared about that, which I'm not sure I do.) It's about how to replicate a running database. Professor Friendly (not his real name :) ) has some theories along these lines about dividing up queries by matching them against certain templates and using these to allocate the queries among partial replicas of the database (subsetted by table) which can be generated or decommissioned dynamically based on load. I see this as possibly technically doable but with some pretty dramatic drawbacks in terms of real world use -- which means that the supposed applicability to Progress is actually a mirage anyway.
Professor Theory (see note about Professor Friendly) has offered me a straight implementation problem. He (or a friend of his, anyway) has developed and proven on paper a parallel algorithm suitable for reducing the complexity of state models so that the models can be more easily used to prove stuff (see the joke about the difference between a physicist and a mathematician.) He wants somebody to develop a running version of it. A mind-stretching problem (even fully understanding the problem and the solution is going to be some work for non-mathematical me) but one with little direct or visible applicability to much outside the theoretical world.
And finally, just today I managed to talk with Professor Busy's (ibid., op.cit., etc.) TA's research assistant's scientific programmer... who has outlined a need for a peer-to-peer dynamically scaling world state repository suitable for a bunch of evolutionary agents to run around in. I went to this professor originally because I was interested in evolutionary computing, but this project would touch upon absolutely no evolutionary concepts... but the dynamic scaling, load-balancing, neighbor-interactive nature of the project is also appealing. Also appealing is the fact that I do understand the problem and it's not databases. And that there's a reasonable chance it would involve (or at least let me rationalize) a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, which has always been on my list of places to see.
I am leaning toward the last project -- I am tired of databases and not convinced that the templates/replication idea will amount to anything useful, and I'm not sure there's a whole lot of reward in understanding a mathematical project that really can't be used anywhere else. The P2P world state thing has its drawbacks too -- poorly (read: not) spec'd, some political shenanigans associated with this multi-university project, and I'd have to work a little harder to get it approved because technically the project is outside the PDCS department. But I actually feel some excitement about it, unlike the first two, which is not only a clue but important in its own right, right?
Dec. 14th, 2006 @ 06:12 pm
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| » Wow. |
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A little slow in posting for a bunch of reasons: first, Laurie was here for a week around Thanksgiving... always a good thing. :) We went to Cologne again and had real steak and soft pretzels... no, not together. Note for Philadelphians: yes, the street vendor pretzels there are based on the same recipe -- but the originals are fresh out of the oven and just wonderful. I had some two day old ones -- and those tasted exactly like Philly soft pretzels. :)
Then all of a sudden I had an absolute ton of work to do. A major graphics assignment to code, a research proposal to write, a 20-minute presentation to give, and one-page reviews of 8 other presentations, all due within a five-day span. Woof.
So the graphics thing I got done early, and the research proposal was easier for me than it apparently was for some others, once I found an appropriate topic. The presentation -- well, it's this afternoon; it won't be my best ever but it won't be bad.
And in the middle of this apparently I'm supposed to be picking out a Masters thesis topic. I guess I thought something as major as that would be something they'd set aside time and guidance for... silly me. I've met with one professor already and have another meeting with another in 15 minutes to talk about topics. A third, I've written to (a week ago) but heard no response. So I don't know what I'm doing yet.
One option is in database replication, which would go right along with what I've been doing for work for the last umpty-ump years -- which I'm not sure is something I want to do. The meeting today is for a parallel implementation of a theoretician's tool which I don't understand and don't care much about (the tool, not the implementation -- parallel algorithms are fun.) Option 3 is something to do with evolutionary computing, which is also fun, but I'm not sure how it would relate to the "parallel and distributed" meme. So we'll see.
But it's been nonstop work for a while. Last night I took a detour on the way home from school and had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe; they have reasonable if pricey American food and, even better, they give you a decent size drink glass and refill it like an American restaurant. (In a Dutch restaurant, if you order a Coke, they bring out a can, pour it half into a glass (if they poured it all it would look silly because the entire can often doesn't fill up even the tiny glasses they have here!) and charge you two bucks.)
So I was sitting there looking out at canals and canal boats and listening to 80's American rock music and looking out at the 18th century Dutch architecture outside and drinking 7-Up and hearing people speak French at the next table and studying for a Masters degree.
Wow. Welcome to my Neverland life. :)
Dec. 7th, 2006 @ 02:27 pm
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| » OK -- just one more idiot to go... |
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While under ordinary circumstances I would favor a government split across parties, the R's have had it all their way for 6 years. I wouldn't mind a couple of years of straight Dem control to aid in the rollback of the most egregious excesses before sharing power again.
That said, I ran across this little riff somewhere today:
"Isn't it appropriate that the last two Senators to concede were Burns and Allen? Such comedians!" :)
Back to schoolwork...
Nov. 10th, 2006 @ 01:49 pm
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| » IOKIYAR ("It's OK if you're a Republican") |
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By now most of you know that the Republican National Congressional Committee has been running an election eve dirty-tricks campaign to get voters irritated at Democratic candidates across the country, including the NH-02 candidate Paul Hodes. Let's look at some details.
- The NRCC admits to being the source of these calls.
- The calls cover 20 races across the country.
- The calls are prima facie illegal in that the identification of the calling party is at the end of the call rather than the beginning, and that calls were being made to people on the Do Not Call list (calls by live people to people on the list for political purposes are legal; robocalls are not.)
- If (and only if) you hang up before finding out it's a negative ad, the call gets repeated. A lot. Meaning that you think the Dem candidate is harassing you -- which is really the point of this whole exercise; it's called voter suppression and, despite the fact that actvely discouraging voters from voting is about as contrary to running a democracy as you can get, this is a repeated theme of Republican election efforts these days.
- And if you haven't already decided the instigators of this trick are slime, here's their response:
"It's a complicated legal question that's not going to get adjudicated this weekend," he said.
In other words -- we picked this time to do it expressly so that you can't stop us.
And a bit of perspective: Two million dollars is enough, in these internet-phone days, to make something on the order of a hundred million phone calls. Concentrate that into 20 districts, at 650,000 people per district -- let's say about 400,000 voters with phones to receive five million calls. Does this still sound like a "kinder, gentler GOP"?
I'll be making lots of GOTV calls today. I hate cold calling -- but some things are worth it.
GO VOTE!
(Side note: Hey Hopfgarten, are you still reading this? What's your defense of your party? This oughtta be good.)
Nov. 7th, 2006 @ 04:59 pm
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| » Beautiful Night Pic |
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Click for a larger version.
Oct. 31st, 2006 @ 12:50 am
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| » The man's got a point... |
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The point of terrorism is, as the name suggests, to terrorize. Not simply to kill and destroy, but to frighten the broader population. It puzzles me why the RNC has found common cause with terrorists in their new ad campaign...
Source. The ad in question.
Oct. 21st, 2006 @ 01:31 am
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| » Cricket for Foreigners |
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I remember seeing, years back, a poster with this description of "Cricket Explained for Foreigners" on it, and someone from Scotland telling me that yes, it's pretty accurate... finally ran across it again today, and so here it is. I'm sure it'll clear the whole confusing game up.
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he is out. When they are all out, the side that's been out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out, he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who are all out all the time, and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.
Oct. 19th, 2006 @ 10:47 pm
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| » Dependable weather |
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Amsterdam doesn't have weather. It has climate.
The five-day forecast:
| High | Low |
| Today: | 60 | 57 | Cloudy, chance of rain |
| Tomorrow: | 60 | 57 | Cloudy, chance of rain |
| Friday: | 60 | 57 | Cloudy |
| Saturday: | 62 | 59 | Cloudy, chance of rain |
| Sunday: | 60 | 55 | Cloudy |
Oct. 18th, 2006 @ 02:07 pm
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| » I want one! |
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I've always wanted a library in my house. Cozy little room, lots and lots of books, dark wood, comfortable chairs, maybe a fireplace.
Come to think of it, it should look something like this:
... or maybe this ...
For those of you who actually like this idea, or these photos, see more here.
First exam of the year is next week and I've finally got a copy of the book.... have pity :)
Oct. 18th, 2006 @ 12:01 am
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| » Uproariously funny, or Frighteningly Real? You decide... |
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I haven't seen a post that puts this stuff in perspective any better than this one from The Carpetbagger Report -- so I'm stealing it whole cloth:
New York magazine has a great feature story in its new issue on Stephen Colbert and his bombastic, over-the-top, O'Reilly-like on-air character. New York's Adam Sternbergh raised an interesting point I hadn't seen explored much elsewhere:
Colbert's on-air personality…leads to a peculiar comedic alchemy on the show. During one taping I attended, Colbert did a bit about eating disorders that ended with his addressing the camera and saying flatly, "Girls, if we can't see your ribs, you're ugly." The audience laughed. I laughed. The line was obviously, purposefully outrageous. But it was weird to think that this no-doubt self-identified progressive-liberal crowd was howling at a line that, if it had been delivered verbatim by Ann Coulter on Today, would have them sputtering with rage.
True. Colbert's absurd right-wing rhetoric is funny because it's a parody. We laugh, of course, because he's mocking the Coulters and Savages of the world by highlighting just how ridiculous their comments are.
That said, Sternbergh thought it'd be fun to include a list of statements, all of which came from Stephen Colbert or Ann Coulter. Give it a shot:
1. "Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now."
2. "There's nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell."
3. "I just think Rosa Parks was overrated. Last time I checked, she got famous for breaking the law."
4. "Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'Kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and answer to the name Muhammad.' "
5. "I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior."
6. "[North Korea] is a major threat. I just think it would be fun to nuke them and have it be a warning to the rest of the world."
7. "Isn't an agnostic just an atheist without balls?"
Answers are here, at the Carpetbagger link.
Some of you may remember Colbert's roasting of the Head Evildoer back in April. I learned then that quite a number of far-right types actually thought Colbert was a serious right-wing commentator...
Oct. 13th, 2006 @ 05:12 pm
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