The morning came with a minimum of fuss, more out of habit than anything else. More energy this morning… I was running on fumes yesterday. Today is going to be a walkabout and a mind-blanking workout.

I am really glad that I have so much bandwidth available on my website. People have been hitting the audio and video pages pretty hard the last few days.

Current Reality Settings – Better than yesterday, but I want to get back to 4-color, wacky, full.

Spectra-Analyzer (Monochrome / 4-Color / True-Color / Thermograph / X-Ray )
MPAA Rating (G / PG / R / NC-17)
Kill switch (Off / On / Wanton Murderous Rage)
Weirdness Tank (Empty / Low / Half / High / Full)
Laugh-O-Matic (Serious / Satirical / Witty / Wacky / Insane)
Cliche Blender (Pulse / Blend / Puree / Oh, Ugh!)
Global Soundtrack Volume (off, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11!)
Personal Soundtrack Volume (off, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11!)
Batteries (Empty / Low / Half / High / Full)

Well, the get-together yesterday was delayed, but maybe next weekend. constance1010 had to work, at the last minute. Hopefully I won’t be on call next go ’round, and can catch her and tarpo.

Sights and sounds from what I did instead –

More Marker-code. TNT/YYM.

Scribble-doodle – more from the TNT people from before?

More Sticky-letter graffiti

Little band in the riverwalk pavilion. the crowd was nigh-empty:
What the band was playing – 145k ogg

There’s some bad juju in the air this month. I wish I was more superstitious, so that I could do some sort of banishment ritual and feel that it works. Flies banging on a windowpane, promising something outside that’s probably unpleasant.

Bid on a replacement model for my poor dead camera on ebay.. it’s so old that I can safely bid about $50. I don’t really need a brand new bleeding-edge camera for snapshots.

What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Utilitarianism.

Your life is guided by the principles of Utilitarianism: You seek the greatest good for the greatest number.

“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
–Jeremy Bentham

“Whenever the general disposition of the people is such, that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things, good government is impossible.”
–John Stuart Mill

You scored as Justice (Fairness).

Your life is guided by the concept of Fair Justice: Everyone, yourself included, should be rewarded and punished according to the help or harm they cause.

“He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.”
–Leonardo da Vinci – I truly agree with this sentiment, which is why my merciful side suffers.

“Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

I don’t want the most-remembered term of 2005 to be “feeding tube”.

People don’t give hips and collarbones enough credit in the sexiness department these days.

Moment of Lyric: (mp3)

What’s that sound
Comin’ from the dresser on a night as black as pitch?
What’s that sound
Comin’ from the bureau, do I dare turn on the switch?
Them bones, them bones, them dry bones
All bleached and deathly white
I’ve got skeletons in my closet and
They’re rattlin’ tonight

The cheat bone’s connected to deceit bones
And thereby connected to lies
I-love-yous said indiscriminately make the sockets for the eyes
The love bones knock against the hate bones
And fingers click in time
There won’t be sleep for the weary tonight
‘Cause all those bones are mine

I forgot to mention… on Friday, Dan gave me a copy of Kelly’s Heroes. on VHS. I don’t own a VCR anymore. I wonder where I can go to swap it out for a DVD version? It’s a great flick.

There’s a solid piece at Wired News about Buprenorphine, a treatment for heroin that kills withdrawal symptoms quickly, but without the abuse potential of methadone. Unfortunately, it hasn’t taken off as expected, in part because of some ill-conceived regulation:

After bupe had been on the market a year, the law was amended to permit methadone clinics to prescribe it, but only under the same rules used for methadone (one dose per visit), which erases one of bupe’s major advantages – that you don’t have to schlep to a clinic every day. Meanwhile, many methadone providers have remained openly skeptical of the new med, fearing that it will further stigmatize methadone, or siphon off their most stable patients. The government reimburses methadone programs for the number of patients they oversee, not for the specific services they provide, so the payment for a stable patient who takes a dose and goes to work subsidizes treatment for more fragile clients with multiple addictions, mental illness, housing and unemployment issues, and more.

The regulatory problems didn’t stop there. Influenced by tales of unscrupulous methadone clinics taking on huge case-loads for the reimbursement cash, Congress barred doctors from maintaining more than 30 bupe patients at a time. And in a monumental blunder, the law classified giant HMOs like Kaiser Permanente, as well as hospitals, as single providers, with the same 30-patient cap that Kolodny has in the solo practice he maintains on evenings and weekends. Four years later, the law remains unchanged. One clear sign of the law’s unintended consequences: The world-renowned Addiction Institute of New York (better recognized by its old name, Smithers) doesn’t mention bupe in its advertising because with a 30-patient limit, it fears it would have to turn people away.

In elementary school I remember the teacher telling me that the vowels were AEIOU and sometimes Y and W. But I can’t think of a single word where W is used as a vowel. Are there any?

Sure. Try “how,” which is phonetically equivalent to “hou,” as in house. Ou and ow are diphthongs–that is, two vowel sounds that kind of slide together when you say them. W and Y are often called semivowels because they go both ways, as it were, depending on the company they keep within the word. (Low morals are obviously a problem at every level of our society.) In cow, for instance, W is a vowel, but make the word coward and you can hear W working as a consonant. Similarly with Y become I in copy and copier.

I dig how Google and Yahoo are duking it out.

Last month’s launch of Google Maps was impressive, but not as cool as Yahoo’s placing of live traffic conditions on its map this month. Google’s webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too. Google’s purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger’s table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo’s blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce.

Google has an image organizing application in Picasa, sure; but Yahoo just bought Flickr, perhaps the smartest and richest online application ever written. Yahoo has a rich site summary (RSS) aggregator, Google does not. Yahoo has a search engine for online movies, Google does not. Yahoo has quietly launched search.yahoo.com/cc, a search engine engineered to find and index Creative Commons material.

1 year ago – Hellboy, Le Gren, Marlin Maniac

2 years ago – Bro issues w/LL, sponsored links, Meredith out front

3 years ago – Walkies, baby sharks, programming, local hones go to 10-digit dialing, Reality settings, Wolf files, army men, schoolhouse rock

4 years ago SOP, enature, symbols, psa for my bio page, C++ DST bug