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I've been listening to KSHE since the day they changed format in 1967. They play some great rock and roll.

They're a hundred miles away; Im in the fringe reception area so I listen online. So a few days ago I'm editing random Scribblings and the music stops. I curse Firefox and Flash and ComCast and pull the browser up to refresh the page that plays the music, and I see "Still listening?"

Well, no, YOU SHUT OFF THE MUSIC! WTF, if I wasn't listening I wouldn't have it running!

I do see why they started that, though: $$$. They have to pay the RIAA and ASCAP fees, which vary according to how many people are listening, and they don't want to pay for someone who isn't.

Still, it's annoyance.

When I was in college, I often took workshops in the summer. Two weeks of eight hour days equaled a normal class for a quarter. It would allow me a couple months vacation.

One was a blacksmithing workshop, where I learned to fashion stuff out of steel, learned a little metallurgy, and learned where a lot of the "old sayings" came from: blacksmithing. One is "too many irons in the fire", which is where this journal's title comes from. I'm working on three books right now.

Mars,Ho! is in its final editing stages, and I hope I'll be able to publish it next week; fingers crossed.

Next up is Random Scribblings, a collection of stuff I've posted on the internet since 1997; what I consider the best of what I can remember and find. It's also in the editing stage, but there's a lot more work to be done. it's huge, well over 100,000 words.

Then there's Mars Bars, a collection of short science fiction stories. It's in the beginning stages, with seven stories written so far and Voyage to Earth about half a novelette, at a little over 3000 words so far. I still don't know how long that story will be, or what other stories I'll come up with when it's written.

I'll probably post Fourteen: The Final Chapter a week from Thursday. I'll have a rant about my favorite radio station tomorrow or Monday.

I plan on trying the suggested browsers, but thought I'd revisit Opera first. It dawned on me that changing browsers is going to be a big PIA, since Firefox holds a bunch of passwords.

It's been at least a decade since I've tried Opera; it was brand new when I last tried it. So I installed the latest one. The result was...

Who designed this gawdoffal mess? Look, folks, I'm all for hiring the handicapped, but you shouldn't have the learning-disabled designing interfaces. Look, folks, it shouldn't take five damned clicks to get to a bookmark. And what idiot had the idea to have each bookmark take up a square inch or two, with stupid illustrations?

I haven't uninstalled it yet, maybe there's a way to make the interface less idiotic (Firefox does), but I'm not hopeful.

Saturday morning I started working and just wasn't in the mood; I needed a weekend off. I probably wrote a paragraph in "Voyage to Earth". So I did a little random googling and ran across the fact that Windows lets you easily catch and save an audio stream, but it's disabled by default.

I'd been using EAC to sample my LPs and tapes for years, but it will only run on the XP tower. Someone clued me to Audacity a few years ago; it's been installed but unused.

I fired it up to see if I could indeed catch streams, and it does indeed.

And unlike EAC or Opera, it has an excellent interface and its manual is actually useful! I love that program! There are a ton of advanced features I'll probably never use, but it's good that they're there.

Sunday night I copped ACDC's new album, a Deep Purple "best of", and the Grateful Dead's "Skullfuck" album from KSHE's "Seventh Day" show. I guess I need some blank CDs for the car...

A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation about smoking with someone and they posited this argument in favor of smoking being illegal near entrances and exits after I'd pointed out that the danger from second-hand smoke in an open-air environment was so minuscule as to not exist: The smell offends me.

That went up one side of me and down the other and today I say to everyone using being offended as an argument for anything what I said to him: I do not care.

No, that is not me being an asshole. That is me refusing to allow you to mold the world to suit you at my expense. You have no natural, societal, legal, or God given right to not be offended in this life. And neither should you.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Those, right there, are your chief three rights. It's quite important to note that you do not have a right to happiness but only to its pursuit. Also, the the end of each is precisely located where you would start infringing on the same for anyone else. Taken together with all the other rights enumerated in the Constitution, there is a further right that is very much implicit but I believe should have been explicit: The right to be an asshole. Beyond Life and Liberty, I would go as far as to say it is our most fundamental right.

You're probably thinking I am an asshole about now. Why would I say something like being an asshole is one of our most fundamental rights? It's simple, really; because anyone at any time can call anyone else an asshole for any old arbitrary reason. If this has any bearing on the rights of the person being accused of being an asshole, then they do not really have those rights and never did in the first place. All their rights are subject to sanction or removal by cultural fiat. No due process whatsoever. Only if you have the right to offend anyone, at any time, without fear of oppression are any of your other rights secure.

Large portions of our political landscape have always been made up of unscrupulous bastards who incessantly try to convince you that offending someone is bad or wrong. See this for what it is: an attempt to get you to place chains of your own making upon yourself. They know they cannot force you to behave according to their approval or disapproval, so they attempt to shame you into doing so by being offended. There is no difference today between the puritanical right and the Social Justice Warrior on the left in this; the tactic itself is as identical as it is reprehensible.

So, convince me of your position by logical or moral argument all you like. Tell me I should do or think something because it offends you though? You can jam that right up your shitter and blow some fucking bubbles with it, you fascist asshole.

So, that girl from the previous entries and I had a second date yesterday.

I picked her up and took her out to the mountains for a short hike to a canyon that has frozen waterfalls, and then we had lunch at a place that makes flatbread pizzas.

I think she was still pretty nervous, because I had to make most of the conversation for the first 1/2 of the day. After a while she started opening up and talking a lot more. She seems like a really nice person, but I don't think that we are very compatible.

At the end of the date, I took a peck on the lips, and left. I felt pretty used after the date. I thought that I had arranged for a pretty damn good date, I paid for everything, and not even a thank you. I'm not upset that I didn't get any action (quite the opposite... there was no chemistry, so it would have felt weird...), but just a simple thank you would have been very nice. I'm not even upset about paying for everything (I probably make double what she does), it's just that it felt like it was taken for granted... Maybe that is what I'm going to have to get used to.

I was really hoping that it would work out because just getting a first date was a terrible process filled with rejection.

Anyways, back to square one.

As usual when I boot on Patch Tuesday, I open a bunch of tabs, the notebook slows to a crawl, and this time it was locked up so tight that Windows gave a message saying it couldn't display the message and to use the power button. I had to pull the battery to reboot the damned thing.

So I start Firefox back up and it says it's updating. It finally opens, with an extra tab, one telling me that it changed my default search to Yahoo.

WHAT THE GOD DAMNED HELL, FIREFOX??? This is bullshit! If I wanted that God damned Yahoo, an even worse search engine than Bing, I would have chosen it.

Yahoo, when your product is so shitty you have to trick people into using it... fucking morons!

There used to be a drop down by the search box; it's gone now. I tried tools->options; that's where it is now. Non nerds would give up.

Pissing off your users is NOT the way to get more of them. Anybody have any suggestions for a less annoying browser?

Also, I need to dig out that kubuntu CD and load it on a thumb drive; I'm damned sick and tired of Microsoft's patch Tuesday.

Excuse me while I reboot. Again.

This morning I wake to my daughter throwing up all over my pillow.
File under: "when you known today is going to be a good day."

The mod changes recently announced by The Mighty Buzzard are another step in the right direction for the somewhat thorny moderation puzzle (What is the best moderation system, anyway?). Overall I've been pleased w/ using SN and try to visit daily, and I have somewhat relegated my visits to /. to every once in a while. Most recently I went to see if any stories related to the social login attack were posted due to its close proximity.

However, I'm still seeing a lot of stories on SN that have low comments. Why? Is the story not interesting to anyone in the SN community? Was everyone just busy that day?

What seems to be missing is the "a guy that works at CERN would chime in" feeling that a larger user base would naturally commence. SN is at, what, 5000-6000 users? The initial registration momentum seems to have tailed off somewhat.

Will a better mod system attract more users?

This is a book review for the book "Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships" by Tristan Taormino

http://www.amazon.ca/Opening-Up-Creating-Sustaining-Relationships/dp/157344295X

I don't really know the proper format and style for a book review, and I frankly don't care, so this might be in an unconventional style.

This is a book all about open relationships. The history, the different kinds, as well as some related topics - jealousy, setting rules and boundaries, dealing with problems, raising children, and a few others. For those that have been following my other journal entries, you will know that my wife and I are opening up our marriage. This book is often highly recommended to couples (or individuals) who want to explore open relationships.

The author sent out a questionnaire to collect data from people in nonmonogamous relationships, and the book incorporates the results of that questionnaire through stats and case studies that are sprinkled throughout the book. The book overs many different types of nonmonogamy - partnered nonmonogamy, swinging, ployamory, solo polyamory, polyfidelity, and also when one member is monogamous while the other is not. Each of these gets it's own chapter where the book explains each in detail.

From there, the book provides information and examples on how one might negotiate an open relationship, and deal with things while in one.

I read this book earlier this week, and really found it really helpful. I come from a large and pretty close family that is quite conservative, and so for me, nonmongamy is pretty foreign. This book really helped me wrap my head around everything, while providing examples of relationships that were working while being open.

This book definitely has a favourable bias towards open relationships, there were many case studies of relationships that were working, but very few (if any) of relationships that fell apart. This may have been intentional by the writer, or it may have been a result of the self selected respondents of the survey (people that it didn't work for might not have responded).

I find that this book helped me 'normalize' the concept of open relationships. My wife is currently reading it as well and is about 1/3 of the way through. She has enjoyed it this far, and has also said that it has really helped.

I agree with the many other people that have recommended this book. This is a must read for people interested or currently in open relationships.

-- Snow

So, if you haven't read my first journal entry, I would suggest you read that before reading this:

http://soylentnews.org/~Snow/journal/800

When I wrote that journal entry, I was really in a low place. My job sucked, my sex life was lacking, I had lost my self identity, and I was just generally confused with my life. It has been just under a month from that last entry. I wasn't entirely surprised by the response from that Journal. Many people identified with my struggles. I think that these problems are rather common, it's just that it's so personal, that no one really likes to talk about it.

Unfortunately, my job still sucks. I still feel undervalued, and not appreaciated. Right now, that is okay. It was really shitty though when I didn't really have anything working in my life. It's nice to have SOMETHING that is going right, be it your job, your relationships, or something else. Just something that makes you feel good.

In my previous entry, I revealed diffrent parts of my life. One was my frustration with my sex life. At around the same time as I wrote the journal entry, I had a chat with my wife and we decided to cut back her hours. We could easily make do with the cut to our income, and she would come home exhausted and just wanted to be alone. She is now working 4 days per week, and I could immediately see a difference. She was happier, I come home to a nice cooked dinner on Mondays, and I'm getting a lot more sex. Since having her hours cut back, I've been getting laid 3-4 times per week (except for period time, which is right now). She gets aroused more easily, and we have all around better sex. We bought some sex toys, and have been lightly eperimenting with new things.

It has been 4-5 months since we started discussing opening up our marriage. It's been an interesting experience. We spoke at length last night, and believe it or not, at this point we are both in agreement that so far, this has been a positive thing for our relationship. Let me explain... We have been together for a long time. Like any couple that has been together for a while, there are good times and bad times. There were times where we were teetering on the edge of breakup, but never quite pulled the trigger. Time would go on and things would change and get better. I didn't even realize it, but I really took her for granted.

Since having conversations about opening up, I have been treating her much better. I don't know if it's because of guilt or appreciation of her acceptance of my situation, or something else, but I find myself wanting to do little things for her. She says that she notices a change for the better though, so that is good.

I was pretty depressed last journal entry because I wasn't having much luck with the dating website I was on, and it was just the cherry on top of everything else. Im happy to report that I had my first date in 12-13 years last night. I was really nervous - my hands were really clammy while I was waiting for her to arrive -- but it went really well. I had a lot of fun, and it was exciting to get to know someone new like that.

After the Date, my wife and I chatted for a couple hours about the date, life, and conventional monogamy. She says that in her heart, she is okay with the nonmonogmay, but her brain she is battling the ideas that we have all had impressed on us for our entire lives. Marriage is one man and one woman. They love each other unconditionally. Always. Everything is always perfect... blah, blah, blah. We couldn't think of one marriage that we know that was actually happy. We both refuse to raise kids in a broken household, so maybe there are other ways than the normal conventional style.

This whole experiance has been really weird. We are just taking things one day at a time, and going from there. Again, it's good to get my thoughts and feelings out, and who knows, there might be people that read that that can identify or benefit from my experience.

I'll try to keep posting every once and a while for those that wish to follow.

This last week has been really good :). Please feel free to comment below, and provide your advice or comments. If you have questions, I'll try to answer them.

-- Snow