I’m always telling myself that I shouldn’t wait until something monumental to be writing in my blog. I mean, the main point is to just talk about what’s going on with me, what I’m thinking about, etc, right?

So, in that spirit, I’ll write simply to say that my parents just headed home from a visit with me. We didn’t do nearly as much work on this visit as we sometimes do (for reasons I don’t fully understand, they are extremely generous with helping me with house projects, I’ve learned a lot from them and they’ve just plain done a lot to make my house look nice and function well, and to keep it that way. Thanks be to them!). We mostly had fun. Friday night we had ice cream (my mom loves butter pecan sundaes from the Chocolate Moose) and talked for a couple of hours before going to bed. Saturday we played disc golf (my dad is really in to playing these days, but rarely goes by himself) and then went shopping. I bought a new weed wacker, that was easy. whew, the story of the old one is probably deserving of its own blog post. But, that’s not this one.

Then we shopped for a new couch. Funny story, the couch I’m sitting on as I type this belonged to my grandmother, and it was the couch that my great aunt Esther was always sitting on when we went to visit. I find the couch comfortable and I also appreciate the familial connection, but it is undeniably old and worn, and I can understand why I get a bit of pressure from some people close to me (mostly my mom and Sue (who I gather have done a bit of conspiring on the matter)) to get a new one. Shopping for furniture, though, is not an activity I’m prone to enjoy. So, it was very helpful to have my parents along for moral support. I didn’t buy one, but I think we narrowed it down to two possibilities, both at the same store. Cool.

Saturday night we went to the wonderful Esan Thai for dinner. We ordered three dishes, with ratings of 3, 4, and 5 on their spiciness scale. The “3” was not very spicy, the “4” was about as spicy as I can handle, and the “5”… well, my dad certainly ate it and enjoyed it, but it was the first time I can ever remember him saying “I would enjoy this more if it were less spicy”. Wow. In any event, we all sat there with noses running and really feeling a little high on [Capsaicin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin) (Hey, look! Here I was kind of joking about that, but that wikipedia article even talks about a capsaicin “high”. All I know is, I felt pretty loopy, and they don’t even serve alcohol at this restaurant.)

We got another Chocolate Moose on the way home, and then played our standard game of three handed pinnochle. Definitely not the best games of pinnochle we’ve played… my dad won everything handly. After a while, we switched to the card game we call “golf”, and that was fun, as usual.

The weather was nice this morning, so after our Easter donuts (from Cresent Donut) my dad convinced us to go out for another round of disc golf. Sure! For some reason, I was playing a little less seriously today, as evidenced by my many bogeys and my frequent practice “rolling drives”, which frequently made us all giggle. Still, considering how much less often I play than I used to, my skill level remains about the same, I think. That’s nice.

We came back home, ate lunch, and my mom and I played Perquackey. We also played with some of my perl-coded Perquackey tools, the first time that I’ve run them on this laptop (I think), and that was fun but also distracting to my game. That being said, my mom was totally on her game, and I think she would have beaten me even if I hadn’t been distracted.

And now, they’re driving home. It’s fun to have them visit. They are good people, thoughtful people, and as I say, very generous with their help. But most of all, they are fun to be around. I’m lucky to be able to say that about my parents.

So, today I was looking for some video capture software stuff for Linux, and I ended up searching
[Dag’s site](http://dag.wieers.com/) for the thing I was looking for. Didn’t find it, but the point is that when I ran
this Google search from Dag’s site I was greeted by a link called “Linux” paid for by Microsoft. “Independent Windows vs Linux data. Download free white papers.” Setting aside the question of whether or not it’s in any sense valid to use the word “independent” in such a case, I just thought it was interesting that MS was paying Google for *anything*, particularly the word “Linux”, especially in the light of [Steve Balmer’s recent statement to CNN that his kids aren’t allowed to use Google (or iPods)](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/04/03/8373041/index.htm). (That they aren’t allowed to use Linux, I’m sure, goes without saying). Of course, it’s obviously trying to contrast its server products to those of Linux, I don’t see this as at all scandalous. Just interesting.

By the way, [a much simpler search](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux&btnG=Google+Search) shows the same thing.

Who knows how true it is, but I certainly enjoyed [this episode of the K-Chronicles](http://www.buzzle.com/showImage.asp?image=11041). And it sure seems believable. You’d think that anyone against, say, increased government spending would not appreciate the current administration.

Ever since getting a laptop, I’ve pretty much stopped sitting at my desktop. It acts more like a home server these days, and not a very busy one at that. One thing that it has been doing for me, though, is music. It’s right next to my stereo, so I can play music on my computer through my stereo just by short cables running between them.

But, this is now inconvenient. Since I use my laptop much more frequently — including right now! — it’d be nicer to play music from here than climbing up to my desktop. I thought “someone should make a sound transmission system that works like WiFi or cordless telephones.” I could plug a little transmitter into my laptop, and then send the sound signal to a receiver connected to my stereo.

Well, not surprisingly, such things do exist. In fact, they can do audio and video! I don’t have need for the video, but I couldn’t find an audio only version, so I ended up ordering [this one that does audio and video](http://www.x10.com/products4/google/wireless_video_sender.html). Only $50, and that includes free shipping!

So, I was pretty excited when it came last week. I hooked it all up and…. it sounded terrible. :( I was able to deal with many of the sound quality issues, but the one that I couldn’t get past was a fast clicking sound. Naturally, I was disappointed. As I frequently do in such situations, I decided to set it aside, and call the company about it another day.

So, a couple of days later, I called X10. I was on hold for a long time (about 30 minutes, after their phone queue had predicted 10 minutes…). It was long enough to do some more troubleshooting. I found that if I turned off both my computer and my wireless access point (WAP) then the clicking would stop. I actually think the clicking might have been caused by the wireless “beacon”, because that was set on my WAP to go every 100ms = 1/10th of a second, and that seemd to be about the frequency that the clicking was happening. It also makes sense that that would have been sending out a signal on lots of frequencies (changing “channels” on either the WAP or the VideoSender(TM) did not solve the problem).

Whatever the case, I eventually talked with a very nice support provider, and he said that some people had problems with this. He suggested moving the receiver further away from the WAP. My house isn’t that big, and basically, I just didn’t want to do this. He thought that switching to 802.11g might help, but couldn’t answer whether I would have to get both an 802.11g WAP AND a card for my laptop. Whatever the case, I was considering the experiment a failure, and was ready to give up. I scheduled an RMA for the product.

But! It was easy to be willing to give up, because while I was on hold, I had had another idea! Couldn’t I somehow rig something up where I could send the sound over my IP network? I figured I could probably at least set up an X Windows session such that the laptop was running a sound player on the server. I started running google searches for advice, and ended up learning that the [Enlightened Sound Daemon](http://freshmeat.net/projects/esound/) (which I was already running) can be set up to accept sound streams over an TCP/IP port! (16001 is the default port number, for anyone who cares). It turned out to be very easy to do, too. I’m not sure how far I got, but by the time I was done being on hold, I was pretty sure I was going to be able to get it working.

Well, it’s working. Not all sound players support it, unfortunately, but on XMMS it was very easy. So, I’m sitting here now, typing this post on my laptop, watching the activity light on my WiFi card glow warmly as it sends Dvořák (played by The Cleveland Orchestra (conducted by Dohnányi)) to my stereo via my desktop upstairs. Although the technology of it makes perfect sense to me, it still feels pretty much like magic. If I opened a hole in my firewall, I guess I could send music through my stereo from any correctly configured computer on the Internet! Not sure what the use of that would be, although I guess it could be used as a ramshackle VoIP phone. :)

But, yeah, sure am happy that I went this route. I’ll get my $50 back, and the sound quality is better than that other thing ever would have been. Plus I can just marvel at how cool it is! The one down side is that it won’t be as easy to have friends play music from their laptops through my sound system. But if they care enough, I think there’s esound support for windows. :)

Today is the first day that Indiana has been on Daylight Saving Time since 1970. And, as such, it’s the first time I’ve experienced the “setting of clocks” tradition since I moved here in 1992. That’s a long time, long enough for me to forget much about how it felt to “lose an hour”. My memory being a kid was just that TV shows and the like started at different times. But I remember feeling like the fact that the weekend was actually shorter was more about theory than practice. When you sleep through the time change like I did when I was little, I think it’s relatively easy to take.

Well, if that’s the case, then I’ve sure decided to take an abusive approach to this DST day. I went last night to an April Fools Day/Daylight Saving Time party. I stayed out well past the magic hour, and when I first woke up after not-very-much sleep, the time changes were confusing enough to my groggy brain that I couldn’t even figure out how much sleep I’d gotten. I knew it wasn’t very much though. So, after waking up and doing some things for a few hours, I decided that a nap was definitely in order. I slept from about 2-5pm. Wow!

So, now, here it is 11:45, only 24 hours after what was 10:45 last night, and I’m sure not feeling very tired. It sounds like a great deal of fun to be awake and do things right now, but I also know that I need to go to bed pretty soon to try to keep myself from getting thrown into a wicked sleep schedule. We’ll see what happens. I’m already looking forward to the longer weekend in October, though. :)

[Gene Hubert at a dance](http://www.newsobserver.com/cgi-bin/nao/obits/show_details.cgi?id=115948)
Last night I called a [contra dance in Indianapolis](http://indycontra.org). A few days earlier, a friend of mine from Indy emailed me pointing out that legendary contra dance choreographer, caller, and dancer [Gene Hubert had died](http://www.newsobserver.com/cgi-bin/nao/obits/show_details.cgi?id=115948). I had heard that he had been diagnosed with [pancreatic cancer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_Cancer) and was very ill, but I had not heard about his death on March 6. He was 51 years of age. This is obviously a terribly sad event for Gene’s family, but I don’t know any of them. What I do know is that Gene’s dances are some of the most frequently called in modern contradancing (at least in the Midwest), and that this stems immediately from the fact that they are so smooth and so fun.

Glenn Augenstein called an entire program of dances by Gene at the [contra dance in Louisville](http://www.louisvillecontradancers.org) on Monday night, and I decided to follow his lead and the suggestion of my friend and do the same last night. It’s caused a good deal reflection for me about everything from what makes Gene’s dances so good to how the great people in the American contra dance community have contributed to the joy of others. Gene was a member of a very small group of contra dancers about whom I am prone to use the word “legendary”. The fact that he is gone at age 51 is a tragedy. At the same time, his dances are likely to be part of my life for as long as I continue to live.

Thank you, Gene. On behalf of all of us.

I burned myself. It’s a small burn, nothing serious, it’s not even going to blister, I bet. But, I hate burns. As I often say, I’d rather accidentally cut myself in the kitchen ten times than burn myself once.

What’s interesting about this burn, though (and this has happened to me at least once before) is that the burned part of my thumb never came into contact with a hot liquid or solid object. It was steam! I took the, uh, center thingy out of my rice cooker (funny, I never realized I don’t have a word for that), and while moving it across the kitchen I bumped the lid with my pot holder, allowing steam to escape right onto my thumb. It was one of those where I wasn’t sure I had burned myself. But now, a couple hours later, there’s no question. Dang. I hate burning myself.

*On Food and Cooking* taught me that liquid water cannot be hotter than 212 degrees F, but that this limitation does not apply to steam. Sometime in my teens the “conductivity” issue was pointed out to me: you can safely reach your hand into a 500 degree oven, as long as you don’t touch any solid object. But the air in there is the same temp as the solid! Why doesn’t the air burn your hand? Because it doesn’t transfer the heat as efficiently, that’s the way I understand it. Well, my thumb tells me that the steam does transfer the heat efficiently enough. Dang….

Back on January 25 I wrote a post I called
[The question is: why no warrant?](http://davidernst.net/blog/2006/01/25/the-question-is-why-no-warrant/), referring to the NSA’s “domestic spying” program. Now I sit reading a [Reason Magazine](http://reason.com)
interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice. Wow. I can’t believe this didn’t bigger coverage. I can’t believe it didn’t get more prominent placement inside this magazine! But, whatever the case, I’m feeling a bit smug after reading Mr. Tice’s closing words of the Interview:

>There’s no reason the two thousand warrants could not have been done through the FISA court. The
>question is: Why wasn’t it done?

I mean, that’s just about as close to exactly what I said as you can get! Of course, all signs I see point to [Feingold’s censure resolution being defeated without much of a hearing](http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14142031.htm). I sure don’t know much about presidential censure, but the self-described Republican who voted for Bush but later blew this whistle on the program used what seems to me to be much stronger language:

>Well, some time ago, we impeached a president for cheating on his wife, which as far as I’m concerned
>should’ve been between his family, his wife, and if he believes in one his God upstairs. When it comes to
>high crimes and misdemeanors, knowingly and willingly doing *this* and then being arrogant about it and
>saying we’re going to continue doing it—I would certainly think falls into that category of high crimes.

He also apparently has stories that he wants to tell congress about but won’t tell to the press because it’s too sensitive. I really recommend reading the Interview.

And, you silly Democratic congress people… focus on the missing warrants, not on the eavesdropping. Warrants!!!! I mean, you should say the word “warrant” twice for every time you say the word “spy” or “rights”. “The executive branch absolutely has the right to do this kind of thing, as long as they **get a warrant**.” Warrant Warrant Warrant!!! You can’t say it too much!!! Don’t let the White House control the discussion with talk like this (from Scott McClellan [quoted
here](http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/11277)):

“[The censure motion] has more to do
with 2008 politics than anything else. I think it does raise the question
of how do you fight and win the war on terrorism, and if Democrats want
to argue that we shouldn’t be listening to al-Qaeda communications, that’s their right.”

I’ll say it again, just about like Russell Tice said it: **The question is: why no warrants?**

Quick Review: This documentary, about (but *not* by) Michael Moore being scheduled to speak at an unusually conservative college campus in Utah, left me swimming in thoughts about the state of our nation.

(more…)

Quick reviews:

Tuesday: If we just introduce and accept the concept of *evitability*,
then there’s no conflict between Determinism and Free Will.

Thursday: Religions are a lot like domesticated animals, except that
they propagate via memes instead of genes… and that purpose that
they serve is a lot less clear.

(more…)

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