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Mod points both here and slashdot at the same time. And here I'm working on three books!

There's Mars, Ho! which I'm hopeful I'll publish soon.

Then there's Random Scribblings, a collection of articles and stuff I've posted on the internet since 1997. Its subtitle will be "junk I've littered the internet with". Even though there's probably less than 10% of what I've written it's huge, well over 100,000 words. It will probably grow a little, because I just found six articles I thought had been lost forever.

This is kind of related; much stuff from my old Quake site is there. Someone once asked if I could re-post the shoutcasts, but there's too much RIAA music in them and they would surely be quickly taken down, so if you want them, email me and I'll send them as attachments.

Finally there's MarsBars, a collection of short science fiction stories. I worked on Voyage to Earth some yesterday. That book is less than 20% done.

I've been working harder than I worked when I still worked. So I'm glad I got all those mod points, I needed a break.

I got a Sierra Wireless Aircard 802S (3G/4G internet dongle). The retailer specified that it could be connected via USB under Windows Vista or higher. The vendor's user manual said XP or higher. I wanted to connect it to a mini-ITX Pentium M board running Windows 2000.

When connecting the device, a USB storage device appears which contains the drivers for the network interface. I run the setup program, which then runs an installer, which fails. It was trying to copy an update KB841880, which it says is missing. Since this is a Windows 2000 update, there must have been some thought put into making this installer work on the old OS after all.

So I download the update myself and install it. Try the driver installation again, which still fails because it can't find this file. I see that the installer is just a lonely EXE, all the files that it is trying to copy must be contained within. And there doesn't seem to be any option for skipping this file or otherwise bypassing the error, nor extracting all the files from the installer.

So I do some searching and find a program called cabextract. I try using this to extract the drivers from the installer. Instead I get a single MSI file. So it's an MSI hidden inside an EXE. Of course.

I do some more searching and find a program called msi2xml. It needs MS XML blah blah to run, so I download and install that. Then I use msi2xml to extract the MSI which I had previously extracted from the EXE. A bunch of stuff comes out, multiple SYS and INF files. Since I have no "found new hardware" window or anything in device manager relating to the Aircard, I don't want to try manually installing drivers if I don't have to. Instead I try using xml2msi to rebuild the MSI with the missing file included. No dice. Then I try editing the XML to remove any reference to the file so it doesn't attempt to copy it. Being unsure exactly what edits need to be made, it takes a few tries, but finally the installer runs and the device works.

Thanksgiving morning I was ready to pick up my daughter and visit our family a hundred miles south in St. Louis.

My keys weren't in my pocket. An hour later I gave up looking and called all concerned with the sad news; no Thanksgiving for me this year; I was stuck in my house.

I found them Saturday.

I'd ordered a copy of Mars,Ho!, hopefully the final pre-print, on Monday before Thanksgiving. I expected it to ship Saturday, but it still hasn't shipped. So I doubt I'll have it published by Christmas, let alone soon enough for it to be gifts.

Sorry, guys.

They say that Santa's coming,
He comes 'round every year.
He comes he'll meet a shotgun slug
'cause he ain't welcome here.

Five years ago this Christmas
The fatass came around
With jingle bells and ho ho hos
And looking like a clown.

He came in for a landing
As I let out a yawn
My house is pretty little
So he landed on the lawn.

I didn't have the time to yell
As he came through the fog;
He came in fast and and came down hard
And landed on my dog.

He looked around all furtive like
As I reached for my gun,
Then jumped in sleigh, yelled “giddie up”
And took off on the run.

And so, that fatassed bastard
Better stay away from here
'cause ever since he killed my dog
I have no Christmas cheer.

Two more carols, in MP3 format:
I saw Mommie Killing Santa Clause
Rudolph the Four Legged Stroggie

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
In these modern secular days
With a secular tree with secular lights
And a Santa in a secular sleigh

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
With lots of secular snow
With a secular wreath and some secular lights
And some secular mistletoe

No baby in a manger
No wise men at his bed
No thought of Jesus Christ at all
Just get him out of your head

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
With lots of secular snow
With a secular Santa in a secular sleigh
And a secular HO HO HO!

No baby in a manger
No wise men at his bed
No thought of Jesus Christ at all
Just get him out of your head

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
Have a Happy Holiday!
Don't forget the secular eggnog
Just forget just whose birthday...

---

The above is of course sarcasm, but I think that ironically, antitheists might embrace it.

I am offended by the Honda commercials, where toys given to adults when they were children as "holiday gifts" are attempting to sell cars.

There are no "holiday gifts". Only Hebrews and Christians; it's Hanukkah gifts and Christmas presents. and only 1.8% of Americans are Jewish. Damned Japanese! Then I had a second thought -- is there a Japanese holiday where gifts are exchanged?

It turns out that there is a Japanese holiday, this year on the last day of Hanukkah. It's the Emperor's birthday, but gifts are not exchanged; the emperor's palace is open to the public on that day.

Honda ad agency people, you are idiots. 1.8% of Americans are Jewish, 77% identify themselves as Christian. Guess what, morons? You just offended half the Christians in the US while trying to not disenfranchise the less than two percent who are Jewish.

If you're trying to use Christians' second most holy day to further your worship of mammon, you better damned well mention Christ, or risk pissing off half the population.

The long and short of it is, there won't be one. We're pushing it until January due to me and PJ being occupied too much with holiday and Life stuff.

What you can look forward to:

• Moderation Rework

Not a final version and we haven't touched meta-moderation yet but this will cut down on the echo chamber effect, mod bombing, and lay some groundwork for combating spam as well.

• Input vs Output Wackiness

Currently if you put html entities in and hit preview they get transformed into literal characters. There's also wackiness if you try to put double quotes in a submission title. I hate this, you hate this, and it needed to stop so most of the code for it is already done and being tested on dev.

• RSS/Atom Feeds Moving to SSL

There is really no reason to have http links in the rss feed rather than https links, so they're changing. I'm also doing my best to get them to encode only the necessary characters and display properly but it seems like no two readers display the same.

• A Couple New Themes

Occasionally I get bored and do up a theme instead of actually working. This time around we have the VT100 and the OMG PWNIES themes. These are actually pretty easy to do. Feel free to mod and submit your own. All it takes is a custom stylesheet if you're okay with reusing existing favicons/logos.

• Support for Additional Tags

We're adding standard support for sub/sup/abbr/strike tags. We're also adding support for the custom tags sarc/sarcasm and two forms of a "user" tag.

• Additional Minor Bug Fixes

Bunch of minor bugs, some of which you would have never seen because they were on admin pages.

I think that's all but I'm not sure what the last one that went into our point release after the 14.12 update was.

There's enough Akashic bad-karma residue on that one, to knock a Kali-yuga off it's millennial axis.

Sundays at noon an old friend has a blues show on a local college radio station, WQNA. Of course, since the blues and booze go so well together, Sunday is my "drink too much" day. So by eight I was too drunk to edit. I put the book down and picked up the notebook and started typing.

It's only started, with only a few more than 600 words so far. The title is "Voyage to Earth". It starts in John's bar five years after arriving at Mars. He's gone to college, learned chemistry, and is brewing the most popular beer on Mars.

Meanwhile, They're going to Earth so Destiny can collect a Nobel in astrophysics for her paradigm-shifting results from her new telescope, John is going along with a shipload of beer to export to Earth ("Earth is buying beer from Mars? Even with the shipping costs? What the hell?"
        "Rich dumbasses trying to be cool. Mars is cool now, I could piss in a can and they’d buy it.").

Tammy is getting an award for her work with drug addicts, not the Nobel and will be accompanying them.

I have no idea how long it will be. It could be a short story or a novel, I don't know yet.

I sent for another copy of Mars, Ho! yesterday. I'm hopeful I'll be able to release it for publication this round, but I doubt it will be on sale in time to buy them for Christmas presents. Bummer.

Saturday I'll post a secular Christmas carol I wrote back in 2005 that almost nobody has seen.

Until recently I could see the number of stories in queue in the upper right, but that seems to have been removed. It would be nice to see this back and enabled for all registered users so we can see what's already been submitted. If we're going to submit stuff, it is preferable that it not be a duplicate topic of another pending submission.

It looks like a triumph of the designers...over the users. It's Android 5 Lollipop and the associated app changes. For those who haven’t had the privilege yet, we have:

– Integrated private and business email and calendars. These used to be separate, but now both appear in the Google apps. It will be very easy to accidentally send business email from your private account or vice versa. If you create a new calendar entry, will it go to Exchange, or to Google calendar? I would have thought it obvious that most people prefer to keep their business and private lives separate. Now, doing so will be a huge effort, or else will require the installation of third-party apps.

– Reduced UI functionality. Just as an example, the font size in Mail and Calendar is now huge, with no option to reduce it. There is no longer a zoom function, so you cannot change the size that way either. To compensate for the huge font,, they have reduced the days you can see to 5, so as you scroll through your calendar, it is no longer by week – the day on the left is Monday, then Wednesday, then Friday. You can turn the phone to landscape to see a full week, but then you can only see 4-1/2 hours of your day (again, no zoom option).

– Arbitrary UI changes. Designers just cannot leave well enough alone. Just as an example, at the bottom, the “back” function used to be a curled arrow pointing left and the “home” function was a house. Now the “back” function is a triangle and the “home” function is a circle. Huh? What brain-dead designer thought changing things like this was a good idea?

A sign of the apocalypse? Until now, Google’s software has clearly undergone a lot of user testing. This time, I cannot imagine anyone but the designers would like the changes they’ve made – they just ake no sense for the typical user.