Mandarin: it's more than just an orange.

Turns out there are some pretty nice tools for learning Chinese. One is a Firefox addon that translates from Japanese, Chinese or Korean to English just by holding the cursor over the word. I'm trying to learn Mandarin and this is pretty much the most handy thing ever. You can find more about it at Perapera-kun and you can find the addon itself here.
The other is an excellent podcast called Popup Chinese. The Absolute Beginner and Elementary episodes are to the point and entertaining enough to keep listening to. If you're interested the website is at http://popupchinese.com/.

Branded

I've been branded by the Federal Government. No, not the kind of branding that might make you think of Revelation and end times and all that. Just a moniker. "Rightwing Extremist". Yup. Just look at the following passage out of the most recent Department of Homeland Security memo

“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

I added some emphasis to the bits pertaining to myself as a state and local rights advocate. I happen to think highly of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, particularly the Tenth Amendment, which states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

I also oppose murder of innocent children, which puts me int the 'opposition to abortion' crowd. Never pegged myself as an extremist, even if the Obama administration does.

SPAMbalaya

So, apparently, jambalaya primarily consists of three ingredients, with other ingredients as a bit of an aside. As part of Mardi Gras I figured that this was as good a time as any to make some. Here are the 'big three':

1. Onion
2. Celery
3. Green Bell Pepper

Brown a meat, in my case cubes of SPAM, fry the veggies up together with a little oil, I added some salt, pepper, Louisiana hot sauce (peppers, vinegar and salt), garlic, sage and a couple bay leaves. Threw it in a crock pot with a few cups of rice... It smells good so far, I'll know more in another hour or so.

Final Day at the Fair

The final day of the '07 Nebraska State Fair was a blast! We went there in the early afternoon and ended up watching a polka band which the boys loved. I haven't heard a live polka band in a long time and it was a lot of fun. We picked up our winnings from the SPAM contest and the cookies my wife baked, then we went and saw the Charlie Daniels Band perform. He was spectacular and we had a lot of fun. On the whole, and on each part, this year's State Fair was an excellent experience. Having won the SPAM contest I'm not eligible to compete next year, and that's why I'm going to start working on brewing beer and drawing... Hopefully one of those activities will produce something of good enough quality to enter next year.

Jars Of Clay

Ever since the summer before we started dating, my wife and I have gone to at least one concert at the Nebraska State Fair. This year we went to see Jars of Clay and I must say that it was one of the best concerts I've been to in a while. It was a bunch of guys, who were quite popular some time ago, on stage with just instruments playing and singing because they love it. They aren't quite as popular now, but that doesn't matter, I don't know that it mattered to them all that much back in the day either. They played some new stuff which I didn't recognize, and some old stuff that I did, and even a cover of the Cars (who played the following night). I enjoyed all of it. There wasn't a song that I didn't connect to the music, and that's kind of rare for me. Nothing seemed forced, and there weren't any distracting pyrotechnics or anything like that. We took my, nearly, four year old. He thought the music as too loud for the first song and a half, but then he started to get into it and by the end he was telling me that he wanted to go talk to 'that guy' (meaning the singer). We went up after the show, while they were tearing down (yeah, the band helped tear down their own set!) and the drummer talked to him a little bit and gave him a set list. He was so excited! I think bands like Jars of Clay are all too rare anymore. If more bands played sets like that and interacted with their fans on a personal level I think the pop music scene would be severely diminished, and the state of music would be that much better for it.

SPAM-a-lot

I made 寿司スパム and, with it, won the title of

2007 Nebraska State Fair SPAM Cookoff Chapmion

I'm rather proud of my little concoction, which is simply vinigared rice, nori, some fresh vegitables and, of course, SPAM. It was great to win this year because I really liked my entry last year (SPAM pot pie) but it didn't place. A friend also recently introduced me to 30 Days of SPAM which, in turn, let me to The Book of SPAM. Another friend of mine is going to see Monty Python's SPAM-A-Lot. So, everything is turning up SPAM! It turns out my son likes it quite a bit too, which is good because now we enjoy canned meat together. I hate to keep shamelessly plugging for Hormel here, but it has to be said at this point, plus this is a first for me winning something at the State Fair even though I did a lot of animal shows here when I was younger. I'll have more on the fair as it progresses.

Growing up as a boy

I loved Calvin and Hobbes as a kid... now I see them again, and am constantly reminded of my son, who's almost four now, and his awe inspiring imagination. I feel bad sometimes because, as a dinosaur, sometimes he bites and I get after him... then I think, he's just being a kid, I shouldn't be so hard on him. After all, I remember being just like that...

Thor!

It's been nearly a decade since I bought a comic book, and for some reason the format is really appealing to me once again. At first I bought the, excellent, Bone One Volume Edition and I really loved it. Somehow, in the last week or so, I saw that there is a new volume of Thor starting, and that it's apperantly very good. I went out and picked up the first two issues and, lo and behold, the are really good! I never read Thor before, or the Avengers for that matter, back when I was into comics in my childhood. I was pretty strictly X-books until my midteens when I branched out to other things and eventually just stopped buying them. What attracted me to this book now, I don't know, but I'm glad I picked it up. The story (after some Wikipedia and Marvel site history lessons) is excellent so far and the visuals are great. Simply great. When Donald Blake steps out of his truck, I could feel the breeze and hear the footfalls in the dusty ground. Maybe it's from living in the midwest, I don't know, but I really connect with the small town he's chosen to live by. My biggest hope for the series is that the people of the small town will remain part of the story and not get lost in the grand over-arching stories. I subscribed to the series, and am eagerly awaiting Thor's confrontation with Iron Man. I never liked that guy anyway...

Turning 26

For my birthday, I got up before dawn and drug my family downtown so I could run just over 13 miles at just shy of an 11 minute pace. No, I'm not fast, but I ran it, and it was great. There was a light rain, off and on, and it kept me nice and cool. This was the 30th annual race, and I don't expect them to stop having it any time soon, so I'm going to run in this race every year that I'm able. Next year I'll run the full marathon. I've already begun training to get my pace under 10 minutes per mile. Here's to next year!

Linux or Solaris?

I have a Sun Ultra 5, that I got from a member of my local LUG for $50... Not a bad price, considering that if I bought one on eBay I'd probably pay that in shipping. The problem was that it had 64 megs of ram, and a 270 MHz processor. It wasn't a bad machine, but they are the lowest specs that the 5 comes in. So I turned to eBay, found a gig of ram and a 440 MHz CPU and now I have the most souped up Ultra 5 you could have, and all for less than $200. The only question then was what to put on this thing. I tried Ubuntu Linux, which I normally love, but the Ultra just has too funky of hardware, and a lot of stuff just didn't run quite right. Every time I tried to install Solaris, though, it would fail at some point. So I ordered some official install disks from Sun, for free, and they came in about a week. After about a week of using Solaris, I want to run it on everything! I'm sure it's because I'm running it on Sun hardware, but I'll be darned if it doesn't work like a charm. There is one little problem though. I don't want the Ultra 5 in my living room. I got an IBM NetVista off eBay for $20 to fill the living room position, and I use it to log in to the Solaris box. It mostly works, but there are a few kinks to work out, and I'd like to figure out how to do sound accross the network, but I'll take it one step at a time.

8 miles

Running is getting harder. I don't know if I'm just running out of steam, or if it's the weather warming up or what's going on, but it seems like running is a lot harder now than it was two weeks ago. I ran 8 miles on Saturday (It's now Friday night, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's 9) and it was probably the most interesting run I've had to date. It started out hard, like all of my runs do, and after a mile I was telling myself to turn around after two miles and just do half. So I pushed on through the second mile and by the time it was done I was thinking I may as well go three. So I did that, and about halfway through the third mile it started to rain pretty hard, so I told myself I'd turn around at three miles and head back. By the time I go to the end of the third mile it had stopped raining mostly, and I was feeling really good by then so I just kept going. By this point I felt like I could do the half marathon right then. Right before the fourth mile it started to rain again, and this time it was coming down quite hard. Running in the cool rain felt great, just really great. It rained most of the way back and only let up for the last mile or so, and by the end of the run I was tired but feeling pretty refreshed from the rain. Then my iPod chimed in that I had finished the run, and when I ended the work out it informed me that my pace was under 11 minutes per mile, which is my goal for March. So then I felt really good about myself. April is almost here, and the April goal is to get my time under 10 minutes per mile for the Lincoln Marathon, which is the first weekend of May. MacPractice, the company I work for, is paying the registration for the four of us who are entering the half marathon and getting us some running jerseys. Exciting stuff! My midweek run was really tough, but I realised after looking at the run data when I got back that I started off way too fast and it made more sense that I was really tired. Now I'm tired because it's getting late and Sam is sleeping on my chest, which always makes me want to zonk out too. I think I'll do that now...

Small Epiphanies

I was running this afternoon when it occurred to me that my running is a lot like my attempts at using emacs. Both start, go for a while, then stop. I think I’m over the hump with running though. I ran five miles today and didn’t feel like I had to quit at any point during the run. It took me three weeks and a lot of pushing through the little pains to get there though. First I had side splits, because my lungs were out of shape and I never really ran long enough to get past it before. Then my shins begged me to stop, but after running through the shin pain for a week and a half they seem to be ok with my milage now. All in all it wasn’t a terribly painful run, and it was the longest yet in my training for the Lincoln Marathon. What does it have to do with Emacs? I think learning to use Emacs as my editor will be the same way. One of the things that holds me back now is that I’m so used to the difference function in TextWrangler that whenever I need to compare files I just use that. What I need to do is work through the pain of figuring out the functions I need, I know they’re there after all. Another pain with Emacs is remembering how do cut and paste, which I still have to look up half the time (as well as doing regex searches). I imagine there will be a hump that I’ll cross at some point (and not know it) where I’ll know those things and it won’t feel so painful. I’m also aware that there are other pains I’m going to want to work through with Emacs like making the Windows key (at home) or the option key (at work) be the Meta-Key when I hold it down (instead of having to hit esc all the time!)... but I’ll work through that one in time too. I guess the key is to just keep at it.

Prediction: Next Big Language will be concurrent

I've been following the development of computing hardware and programming languages for a while now. Not as long as, say, Paul Graham, but long enough to have some opinions. Mr. Yegge recently posted about the Next Big Language. I think he's right on with it. The next bandwagon language that makes it big will, indeed, follow all of the guidelines he put in for it. One thing I think he's missing from the list is that NBL will have good, high level concurrency built in. The reasoning is that multi-core chips are going to dominate the next several years of processor advances. Processors built by Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun all ship with multiple cores. The upcoming lines scale the number of cores up greatly. These improvements solve multiple problems that have been around for years such as power consumption, the speed barrier. The problem with all of these cores, though, is making good use of them. The OS can dole out processes, true, however there are plenty of processes that could make good use of the extra horsepower. The problem is that doing so now is rather difficult and software engineers are going to have to come up with some way to ensure that concurrency can be handled with at least modest ease. This means safe process threads like Erlang gives, along with all of the other traits of NBL. Everyone can see where processors are headed and I can't imagine that NBL won't be in on it.

radio

03/03/07 - Note: I wrote this post over a year ago and a few things have changed. For one, the morning hosts got moved around, and the new ones just aren't quite as good. I don't mind much, though, because now I take the bus to work. The premise remains though, and I'm reposting this to remind myself to get the foxhole radio back out of the closet and get some pictures, write up a post on how I built it and try to get a station again.

01/06/06 - I was driving to work the other day, listening to the local AM morning hosts talk about everything from local sports and city government. A member of city council came on and talked about the upcoming agenda for the year, project priorities and budgeting. The reason I love AM radio so much is that no other news source feels as compact and useful. In a short stretch of time I can hear about a wide variety of topics of interest to me. The single drawback to this format is that I have no say in which stories are covered, and very little say in which ones I listen to (there are only so many stations in my area). The reporting, I’ve found, is superior to print media – papers in particular seem to be very bad at getting stories correct, and grammatical and spelling errors don’t jump out in radio. The stories are better than can be found on television, which is much more ridden with gimmicks locally and annoyingly repetitive nationally. Cable news is especially depressing because there is enormous opportunity to cover a wide variety of interesting news stories and they really drop the ball.

The second reason I like AM radio so much is that it is very accessible and nostalgic as well. I recently began fiddling around with plans for a foxhole radio. The concept is great, some wire coiled around a tube, a metal pin and a razor blade for a diode, an antenna, ground and earpiece, and there you have it, a working radio! Try building a television that simply. While it’s true that print media is far simpler to create and use, I find that words printed on paper are far more effective if they’re describing things a bit more intellectually hefty than what gets reported in USA Today. Things like programming languages, Christian history, political treatise (unlike the dribble spouted today). AM radio has shortcomings, I recognize that, but I still find it to be the best way to hear about what’s happening in my area, with some insights to the rest of the world too. Besides, it’s the best I can get on the drive to work. Thank you Nicola Tesla (notice, I didn’t thank Guglielmo Marconi).

American History

I think it's important to know where we've come from... most people I know have never read the documents that form the basis for our civilization. So my task is to re-read the founding documents of America...

The Declaration of Independence

The United States Constitution

The Bill of Rights

Once finished there are countless more items to be read including the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, any thing written by Abraham Lincoln and important bills and court decisions. Reading material does not have to be old, however, to be enlightening. For a more modern article, I suggest reading the FairTax bill, currently before the House. It isn't long (133 pages, compared to the 60,000+ pages of tax code it will replace if passed) by nearly any standard. I've read the bill, along with papers and arguments for and against the bill (See the FairTax link on the sidebar) and I believe it to be a giant step toward the economic and political growth that America needs. The economic benefit for all Americans is clear, and has been accepted as 'common knowledge' by economists. The political benefit is a transfer of power from Washington bureaucrats to the American citizenry by placing the amount of taxation on every retail sales reciept. Currently, it is impossible to know how much you've paid in taxes. Even if you know your tax bracket you can not know the amount of embedded tax, the tax that companies pass on to you when you buy thier products, and so the government can raise taxes without you ever knowing. You will still pay more (via the embedded tax) even if taxes are only raised on 'the rich.' By making the tax visible to everyone, and easy to understand, when the government hikes the tax rate on us, we'll know, and we can let our representatives know. If our representatives will not address our tax burdens, we will replace them. I could be wrong, of course, but I'd like to find out...