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From Obama's prime time speech:

This is our strategy to destroy ISIL. It is designed and supported by our military commanders and counterterrorism experts, together with 65 countries that have joined an American-led coalition. And we constantly examine our strategy to determine when additional steps are needed to get the job done.

That's why I've ordered the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review the visa waiver program under which the female terrorist in San Bernardino originally came to this country. And that's why I will urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.

It sounds like Obama may be taking a U-turn. The Second Crypto War isn't over yet.

Recall that I reported that I was getting depressed.

Yesterday I sang on the street, just one set but I earned $4.50. Enough to buy a new charging cable for my phone. My previous charger was stolen, the main homeless-on-homeless crime around here in theft of phone chargers. Also I bought a day pass to get to my storage locker on the bus, to fetch my other coat, as the zipper broke on the one I was wearing.

I got up at ten o'clock. That's not early for most people but it is for me as I am a confirmed night owl.

Last night I practiced guitar for about an hour.

Going to the locker is a huge PITA even under the best of circumstances but actually I had a good day today.

I kissed a pretty girl on the hand this evening. Next time I see her I'm going to ask her to meet me for coffee. To do that I'm going to have to sing for enough tips to buy TWO coffees.

I think I headed off the depression. It would have been harder to do so had I let it go longer.

The Social Security Administration just pointed out to me that I have a little over seven thousand dollars in a 401k retirement account. I had totally spaced that. It's just like me to do stuff like that.

I am very chagrined to say that while I fixed the busted taillight that I got a fix-it ticket for back in 2010, I never got it signed off. California wants $900 out of me for that. Then there's insurance, and ~$56.00 for an Oregon driver's license (or something like that) plus when i buy the van I'm going to immediately replace at least some of the parts that are likely to go bad.

A used cargo van from craigslist is about $3000 so I'll have some left.

It's just as well I didn't find out about it until now, I would have blown it all on hats.

Canadian Liquor Stores Want You to Be Able to Buy Weed with Your Six Pack

Liquor stores in British Columbia and Ontario want to start selling weed once it becomes legal in Canada.

The two unions representing BC's public and private liquor stores announced a partnership this week—the Responsible Marijuana Retail Alliance of BC—through which they're advocating to sell recreational pot at retail locations by next Christmas.

Their logic seems to be that liquor stores already sell a controlled substance that gets people fucked up, so adding weed to their mix just makes sense.

"Just as with alcohol, there are legitimate concerns about access to marijuana by youths. Our stores are an over-19, age-controlled environment and our industry has demonstrated the strongest compliance with identification checks," said Stephanie Smith, president of the BC Government and Service Employees' Union, which represents the province's 200 public liquor stores.

It would also be cost effective. Because liquor stores already have a warehousing and retail system in place "there is no need to reinvent the wheel," she said.

Last month, Warren "Smokey" Thomas, head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO employees, said LCBO outlets would be ideal weed retailers because they already have "social responsibility" covered.

"They do age checks, they do refusals if somebody's intoxicated."

[...]

I'm sleeping too much. If I sleep too much I get depressed, if I get depressed I sleep too much. It can be a vicious spiral.

Today I got up at 3:30 in the afternoon. I wasn't up particularly late last night.

It's not just the sleep by I find myself uninterested in the things that usually interest me. I haven't been singing because the weather has been bad. I haven't been practicing guitar because I just don't have the gumption. Really there is no excuse.

If it continues I'll go to my p-doc and ask for some Happy Pills.

Ever wonder who the top trolls are around these parts? Yeah, me too. So I wrote up a quick script to find out. Now keep in mind our moderatorlog table only goes back so far; it gets the tail end trimmed off every so often by one of our slashd jobs. Without further ado, here are our top ten finalists, excluding Anonymous Coward and counting only Troll moderations:

1. Ethanol-fueled: 430
2. Runaway1956: 187
3. The Mighty Buzzard: 157
4. Hairyfeet: 129
5. jmorris: 114
6. frojack: 105
7. aristarchus: 98
8. zugedneb: 60
9. MichaelDavidCrawford: 59
10. VLM: 55

If you didn't make it this time, keep trying! If you want to have a gander at the whole list to see how close you got, here it is.

I dream quite a bit, but I'm not normally one to talk much about my dreams. Other peoples' dreams bore me, and I don't really think there's much wisdom or insight to be gained from studying them so I don't generally see a reason to share mine.

However this dream I had last night affected me somehow, and I wanted to get it off my chest. It was one of those long epic dreams that seems to last for days, even though in realtime it probably lasted only a few minutes or hours.

In my dream I was going about my normal business for a few days, and as is often the case when I've got a lot on I can go a few days without catching any real news. However I kept seeing headlines and short clips of news, which showed a weird red wibbly thing enclosed by some kind of space station, and footage of an astronaut aboard the ISS. I knew that something big was going on in space, because it was all over the mainstream news and space doesn't normally get much coverage. I gradually pieced more and more together until I finally thought I had the whole story, and then had time to sit down and watch a proper news report, to confirm my suspicions.

Turns out the Americans had either found or built (they weren't admitting either) some kind of device in close orbit around the sun that enabled instant access to any other star system in the galaxy. Somehow it also managed to teleport an astronaut from the ground to the ISS and back again. I remember watching the report in complete amazement, alternating between "this is impossible" and "this is awesome" for ages. In the meantime, all the people around me were entirely unimpressed, writing it off as boring nerdy space stuff.

By the end of the dream, there were adverts on TV selling land on distant planets, all of which appeared to be sparse rocky deserts with a little or no greenery. None of the planets had any animal life. There didn't seem to be any talk of infrastructure of any kind being built or artists impressions of how it might look in the future, just real footage of featureless land on uninhabited planets. There were also suggestions in the news that many countries were thinking of dumping all their incoming migrants onto one of these planets, where they would almost certainly starve. Footage of one planet showed evidence that the Americans had been there for some time, with a big military base / outpost of some kind built in the sea.

Weird, meaningless and probably dull I know, but the thing that got me was the profound sense of disappointment when I woke up and reality gradually asserted itself, and as the moment of confusion passed I realised that FTL exploration and settlement of the galaxy will never happen.

It did get me thinking though - if cheap and instantaneous access to the rest of the galaxy did suddenly magically appear overnight, how would humanity handle it? With resources and living space suddenly abundant would war disappear overnight, or would someone try to somehow hoard and control it all? Would the influx of cheap resources and materials from other worlds usher in a techno-utopia on Earth, or would it be too much for our environment to assimilate?

Union Gospel Mission served Sushi for lunch the other day. I Am Absolutely Serious. See, someone who distributes trays of sushi to grocery stores had too much of it, it would otherwise have exceeded its shelf life so they gave it to the homeless.

Two nights ago I stopped by Right 2 Dream Too, more commonly known as The Tent Camp, at 4th Avenue and Burnside in Oldtown Portland. They often have food set out for passersby to take with them. All they had was bread but what bread! What I took with me was a loaf of rye with caraway seed. There are vast quantities of bread made available to the homeless here even so much of it goes to waste.

One fellow saw me foraging for the bread and gave me two packaged sandwiches and a can of Dr. Pepper. One of the sandwiches was from Dave's Killer Bread. Dave was a felon who did fifteen years in prison until his brother took him into the family bakery business. Now 1/3 of Dave's Killer Bread's staff consists of people with criminal record; there are always fresh loaves on every table at the Portland Rescue Mission.

The problem here in Portland is not food but shelter many people sleep out in the cold, often in the driving rain. I myself have a tent and a warm sleeping bag, these because of the kindness of an old friend, also a propane campstove. Rod buys more propane when I run out.

When I had a short contract about a year ago - making good money but not for long - I bought a real wool sweater, wool thermal underwear and wool socks. I have a good coat that was given to me by my employer when I was an industrial control systems engineer.

A side effect of the startup boom, primarily mobile applications here in Portland, is that engineers are moving in from out of state, rents are skyrocketing and people are being forced out on the street. Making the problem worse is that Oregon has no-fault eviction - that is your landlord can evict you any time they please, for no reason at all. This is why I'm planning to buy a van to live in, were I to rent an apartment I would just be contributing to the problem while enriching a Portland landlord.

I have about 60-90 days left before my SSI starts. This is SSI just to start with, I expect to qualify for SSDI but there is a problem with my tax records from 2003 that I need to straighten out with the IRS. I have all the records I just haven't dealt with it yet. But with the SSI, possibly not when I first get it but if I can somehow save that money for a month or two I'll have the cash for a van.

A fellow I met on the train argued that I should buy a sailboat; he lives in one and it works well for him. A boat would cost more than a van but he argues that it is cheaper to live in. "Isn't the maintenance expensive?" "Not if you live in it, and stay on top of the maintenance," he told me.

When I get my SSDI I might buy two or three acres of unimproved land then build a house on it, also plant a vegetable garden and keep chickens. Maybe I'll keep goats as well I'm heavily into drinking milk. The SSDI is retroactive to the earlier of when one became disabled, to a maximum of twelve months. In rural oregon or washington one can buy two acres of land for $5,000.

I'm writing some code that I expect will make good money. When it does I'm not just going to blow it all on hats as I did when I was able to work regular coding jobs. I would put it into that house that I'm building, donate quite a lot to the portland rescue mission, R2D2, the Union Gospel Mission, the Salvation Army and the Blanchet House of Hospitality.

Just because something is a nonprofit that doesn't imply it's a charity - but all those are real charities.

A year or so ago, an executive from an electronics company (Apple, if I remember correctly) spoke of the lack of innovation in television sets since the 1950s, and my reaction was “He’s either stupid or thinks I am.”
        In the 1950s televisions had knobs on the set for changing channels. Remote controls were brand new, expensive, limited in capability, and used ultrasound rather than infra-red.
        The screens were vacuum tubes, and most were monochrome. Color television was brand new, and it was nearly 1960 before any stations started broadcasting in color. Rather than being rectangular, color sets were almost round; even black and white sets weren’t true rectangles.
        They had no transistors, let alone integrated circuits; the IC had yet to be invented, and transistors were only used by the military. They were a brand-new invention. TVs didn’t have the “no user-servicable parts” warning on the back. When the TV wouldn’t come on, as happened every year or three, the problem was almost always a burned out vacuum tube. One would open the back of the set and turn it on. Any tubes that weren’t lit were pulled, taken to the drug store or dime store for replacement. If that didn’t fix the problem you called an expert TV repairman.
        The signal was analog, and often or usually suffered from static in the sound, and ghosts and snow in the picture.
        There was no cable, and of course no satellite television since nothing built by humans had ever gone into space.
        However, there is one thing about television that hasn’t changed a single iota: daytime TV programming.
        In the 1950s most folks were well paid, and a single paycheck could easily pay for a family’s expenses. Most women, especially mothers, stayed home. As a result, daytime TV was filled with female-centric programming like soap operas, game shows, and the like. Usually there were cartoons in the late afternoon for the kids.
        Today the rich have managed to get wages down so low that everyone has to have a job. The demographics of daytime television have radically changed as a result. Now, rather than housewives (of which few are left, and we now have house husbands), who can watch daytime TV? Folks home from work sick, both men and women, folks in the hospital, the unemployed, and retired people.
        Yet daytime TV is still as female centered as it was when I was five. Soap operas, talk shows with female hosts and female guests discussing topics that would only appeal to women, and game shows.
        What’s wrong with the idiots running our corporations these days?

It seems to me that the point in time at which I stopped enjoying using computers came right around the time that "UI" fell out of fashion to be replaced by "UX" - User Experience.

The problem seems to be that all the UX Designers fell the need to come up with something original and unique. The result is that all but a very few applications and websites, I regard as intolerable.

We all know about Firefox but fortunately we have Pale Moon. I have very few gripes about Pale Moon.

What really drives me round the bend are javascript scrollbars. It's not that they're implemented in javascript, it's that they never work right. Perhaps if someone gave away a readymade scrollbar implemented in JS that were used widely but no every single page on the internet has to roll its own scrollbar.

I found Linux Mint unusable until I figured out how to enable scrollbar arrowhead in BOTH Gnome 2 and Gnome 3. The response of The Self-Appointed Experts is that one should grab the thumb then drag it up and down but that does not work well when I'm editing source written by someone else, which source has very long files.

At least I do have my arrowheads back. Now if I could only convince my family and my high school friends to hang somewhere other than FaceBook.