Oh, yeah, baby!

Just. Too. Sweet!

From ABC affiliate WZVN in Florida,

Two men were beat up and then arrested after Charlotte County Sheriff’s deputies say they tried to rob a paraplegic man inside his home.

As they say, get some.

There's An Hour I'll Never Get Back

The wife and I have season tickets for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). In the past, the music director was Yuri Temirkanov, a Russian who was big into the classics (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, etc). Then, a few years ago, the BSO selected Marin Alsop to become the first female music director of a major national symphony. All well and good. Except that Alsop is big on, er, um, contemporary music. Frankly, based on what I've heard, "contemporary crap" is a redundancy. Let me put it another way. How do you tell if what you're about to hear is equivalent to cat's mating in a back alley? Look for the word "dissonance" in the program. That is the catch word. Last week, we went to a show in which the program spoke of "ascending skyward" or some such. The name of one of the piece's was "UFO", written by a contemporary composer by the name of Michael Daugherty. It was written as a one-person percussion piece and was to be played by Evelyn Glennie, oh, excuse me, Dame Evelyn Glennie. According to her website, she's a "Musician, Motivational Speaker, Composer, Educationalist, Jewellery designer."

Danger! Danger!

The first part of the concert was a piece by Wagner. Actually, quite good. Then Evelyn made her appearance. She was dressed just like every feminist professor from back in my days at Purdue. Sun dress, long gray hair, the works. And she was playing something that appeared to be a discone antenna. It was supposed to be "other worldly", I'm guessing. I just wished it had stayed in that other world. She ratcheted up to playing a marimba and xylophone, along with (I'm not making this up...) a 55 gallon drum. There were also many "instruments" that I, even though I have a background as a drummer, did not recognize. The worst part? When she used a violin bow and ran it across the edge of a cymbal. Imagine a hundred kids running their fingernails over a chalkboard. THAT'S what that sounded like. I literally cringed and began curling up into the fetal position. I was almost to the point of sobbing, muttering "Please, mommy, make it stop!" when my prayers were answered. It was over.

Of course, many people in the audience were on their feet, clapping and howling. I was clapping simply because it was over.

I imagine some will consider me uncultured. And I would call you a sycophant. It was a cacophony not of sound, but noise. If you want to hear percussion that is truly a pleasant sound (loud though it is at times), I highly recommend the show "Stomp". I had the opportunity to see that several years ago. I remember going into the show and being seated near a lot of kids. I remember thinking, "Oh, this does not bode well." The wife and I had recently attended a show of the Beijing acrobats. We were near a group of kids who made the show a nightmare. We actually left early. But this time was different. When the first person of the "Stomp" cast made his appearance on stage, the kids quieted down. And they never had a chance to get bored. The show just kept them, and me, in awe. THAT was a truly worthwhile show. THAT was percussion. Evelyn's show, by contrast, was the equivalent of a talented child banging pots and pans in the kitchen.

The UFO (which stands for "Unendingly Frickin Odious") finally took back off. Good riddance.

Opera at Nats Park

Opera at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Kids were playing in front of a large screen down on the ballfield.

We're doomed

This just in. A scientist involved with the development of the Large Hadron Collider has completely destroyed the fabric of space-time in a single quote.

We're doomed.

BRAS for Everyone

I'm taking a graduate class, "Digital Telephony". I have to write a research paper. The topic is going to be a comparison of different broadband services to the home. I'm already researching different types of broadband services, including FTTH (Fiber to the home, which Verizon markets as "FiOS") and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). While looking through different documents for DSL, I kept seeing the word "BRAS".

That got a Tim Allen, "Bah-ROO!?!?"

It stands for "broadband remote access server". That's a special box in the network that allows for a great deal more of data to flow.

The question is whether the engineers who came up with that acronym were hard up, or just have a sense of humor.

My money is on both.

From the Archive: Republicans are 12.329 Times Better than Democrats, and I Have the Proof!

I originally posted this on my personal web site back in 2003. I decided to add it to my blog. Yes, it's political. I want to transfer as much as possible from the site because it's going to be completely changed.

The original post, with one minor correction, is as follows:

On 11 September 2001, Al-Qaeda mass murderers committed the most egregious attacks against the U.S. that she has ever suffered. Ever since that day, Congress and the American public have asked the question of, "How could the U.S. Government have allowed such a thing to happen?" Mind you, the U.S. had been subjected to attacks from Al-Qaeda before, namely the attacks against the World Trade Center (the first time in 1993), the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the attacks against our soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, the USS Cole, and the simultaneous bombings of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on the African continent. All of these attacks occurred during the administration of Bill Clinton, who entered office on 20 January 1993. The first attack was the bombing of the World Trade Center on 26 February 1993. He had from that date until he left office on 20 January 2001, a total of 2885 days, to deal with the problem. His maximal effort was the launching of cruise missiles at a couple of sites in Sudan and Afghanistan.

After the attacks of 9/11, everyone began pointing the finger at George W. Bush as responsible for "letting this happen". Mind you, he had only been in office since 20 January 2001, a total of 234 days.

Doing a quick bit of math, that means that George W. Bush was being held to the same standard as Bill Clinton. Since Bush only had 234 days to deal with the same problems that Clinton had 2885 days with which to deal, this means that we, the US citizenry, consider Bush, a Republican, to be 2885 / 234 = 12.329 time better than Clinton, a Democrat.

Hence, Republicans are 12.329 times better than Democrats. At least, this is how I see it.

It's At Times Like This That Homeownership Sucks

I was walking through the family room, in an area right next to our laundry room, when I noticed that the floor is wet. I didn't think anything of it since it's raining outside. It wasn't until a short while later that my wife called me into the kitchen to tell me that there was no hot water. Long story short, the new hot water heater installed less than 2 months ago has a leak. It's not in the water heater itself, but on the output pipe. It's at a difficult-to-reach area between the heater and a wall. It's not hard to imagine that the plumber who connected the pipe had an equally difficult time getting back there to seal it.

Unfortunately, we had water out under out carpet to a radius of about 3 feet. I shop vacced it as well as possible. Then we pulled the carpet, shop vacced it some more, then sat it over some chairs. We have a fan blowing over it. Hopefully, it and the padding will be dry before the weekend is over.

Q is Overrated; Barney Collier is Underrated

Face it, Barney Collier is the be-all, end-all of engineers. As the electronics whiz in "Mission: Impossible" from 1966 - 1973, he was the US response to Great Britains "Q". But he was not simply Q's equal. Barney was the true master. Q was a pompous, beancounting REMF who was not worthy to work Barney's slide rule. Barney didn't put things together, hand them off to the team, and say, "Here ya go. And bring it back in pristine order!" He was right there in the field working them himself. For Q, field work was the exception, not the rule. We never saw Barney in a lab environment, unless it was a field-expedient one. I'll bet Barney didn't even own a lab coat. Q tended to make things that were complex; Barney understood that "complicated" meant "more things that can fail". Barney provided enough technology to solve a problem. Barney, being a field operative, understood all too well that sometimes things go wrong and that the primary law of fieldwork is Murphy's. And if something went wrong, he was there to fix it on the spot. Not sitting back in a lab chiding a field operator for not returning some piece of equipment.

There hasn't been anyone like him since. In the 1980s, "Revenge of the Nerds" premiered. It set back engineering as a respectable profession by two decades. "Nerds" reinforced the stereotype of engineers as spectacle-wearing, pocket-protectored social inepts. Greg Morris, the man who brought Collier to life and a truly underrated actor, refused to play stereotypes. Of any kind. After "M:I", he would fall into obscurity because he refused to play stereotypical black roles. As an engineer, he never played a stereotypical technology buff. He looked just as comfortable in a suit with cufflinks as he did in dirt-covered coveralls. He knew and practiced analog and digital circuit design, electromagnetics, chemistry, physics, and power engineering. But he had no problem with social occasions. I'll bet he knew wines as well as he knew Ohm's law.

You may argue that there are others. MacGyver, for example. He's a tree-hugging hippy liberal, so far as I'm concerned. Doesn't want to pick up a gun? Great. Tell that to a man running at you firing a weapon. Barney never had a problem pulling the trigger if he had to. And sometimes, he did. Put it this way, who would you rather have at your side if you're doing an op? Barney? Or MacGyver?

I thought so.

I'm an Extremist? Yeah, baby!

So, according to a study done by two professors from Oxford University (though one has now moved to University of Durham, England), engineers make up the highest percentage of jihadis. Go figure. You're highly trained in all things technical, where watching a TV show that the guy says "Today, we're going to learn to make plutonium from common household items" sounds like a good time, but you can't get a job because you don't know the right person to bribe.

Oh, and women are strictly verboten.

You have an overabundance of hormones, no outlet, and after graduation, golly, gee, you also have a lot of free time.

Here's what gets me. Engineers are upset by this, calling it "ethnic profiling".

WHAAAAAAAAT!?

Ethnic profiling? Oh, get a clue. Better yet, here's a nickel. Go get a personality. And bring me back my change. I never realized wearing pocket protectors and glasses-with-tape-on-the-bridge made me a legit ethnic group. If so, do my flood pants put me in an extra special category?

Okay, I, a Purdue-trained electrical engineer, am not the least bit surprised by this finding. Not even a little bit. Unfortunately, it's not something I can put into words. I just understand it.

Second, it's this type of information that, if accurate, will help us to either (a) root out these "engineers" and kill them or (b) stop them from becoming bombers and extremists. It's another data point.

So, all you who are calling this "ethnic profiling" need to grow up. Stop trying to kill the messenger. Deal with the message.

UPDATE: I just checked and the paper is not available from the author's web site. Shouldn't be too hard to find elsewhere on the Internet, though.