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How the Republicans Broke Congress

Living the dream

In the Spring of 2010 I was driving a really nice car while wearing a grey pinstripe suit. I saw a man standing on the median holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I pulled up next to him.

I pulled $200 out of my wallet then held it up in front of him then sternly said "No drugs! No Alcohol! No cigarettes!" then gave him the money.

"You just got me off the street!" he shouted in great joy.

"I was once just like you!" I screamed in agony.

"Pay it forward bro. Pay it forward!"

I gave him my card then asked him to call me the next day. I never heard from him again.

I was so upset that when the left turn signal turn green I very nearly crashed into three cars. All three of them swerved to get out of my way.

During the summer of 2012 I walked into a restaurant in Oceano California while carrying a shopping bag and a kitty litter bucket then asked the manager for a job. "Your kitchen floor needs to be swept."

"I'm sorry but it's the end of the season."

I sadly walked outside then pulled a newspaper from a garbage can so I could look at its help wanted ads. A man who watched me do all this walked up to me then without saying a word he gave me one hundred and twenty dollars.

I bought food with it, and shared some with a couple other homeless people.

A few days later I walked into a pr0n shop in Grover Beach. The manager said "Put down the bags." I didn't. I just looked at him. "Put the bags down NOW!"

I put them down then said "I came to apply for a job," then offered him a flash drive with my resume on it. That resume had over twenty years experience as a coder, with the last ten years being mostly self-employed as a software consultant.

"I'm sorry, I can't accept that. You need to apply to our head office."

"No worries," I replied then put the stick back in my pocket.

"How much do you think I could make," I asked him "doing work that I regard as morally reprehensible?"

He went slackjawed with his eyes open wide. "More than this shop makes in six months."

He was correct: as a result of my experience as a Quantitative Investment coder I had been solicited dozens of times to write Sub-Microsecond Precision High-Speed Trading code, mostly by Bloomberg and Solomon-Page. I never responded to any of them.

Such high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street. Some Congresscriters have proposed a punitive very short-term capital gains tax so as to piss on all the billionaire quants but none of those proposals ever achieved traction.

I got paid today, in the form of a wire transfer from my client's Chinese subsidiary. I'm paid by China for Chinese tax reasons.

After work today I'm going to drop by the Portland Rescue Mission then donate a thousand dollars.

"Buy yourself something nice," I'll say.

I'm getting a similar wire in three weeks or so, when my clients OEM customers sign off on my macOS driver for a USB Video chip. My client just makes the chips, the OEMs build them into dongles for sale to end users.

When I get that final paycheck, I'm going to donate a thousand dollars to Right 2 Dream Too. It's more commonly known as The Tent Camp, and is a homeless shelter operated by homeless people.

R2D2 is quite forward thinking because both men, women and couples can sleep there, and one can sleep during the day. Every time I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I was able to spend the next day sleeping at R2D2.

I'm also speculating - NOT investing: speculating - on cryptocurrencies. I plan to divide eight or ten grand evenly between bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, etherium and peercoin.

Just now I bought $1000 of etherium.

My credit union's security people do not permit debit card withdrawals by coinable - "It has a high potential for fraud," the teller told me after he rang up their security people. Three $60 and one $200 EFTs went through OK but I am uncertain whether the credit union will permit much larger EFTs. So I'm going to break up the trades, with the dollar amount I buy increasing with each EFT so I can be sure they all go through OK.

When I get that last wire I'm going to donate a grand to CityTeam Ministries. I speculate - SPECULATE now - that I'll make quite a bit of money off the cryptos. From time to time I'll sell some then donate to the Blanchet House Of Hospitality, Union Gospel Mission, St Andre's Catholic Church, all of them in Portland, as well as Vancouver's Share House, a church in Vancouver that serves a free lunch, the St Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz California, Dorothy's Drop-In Center and Kitchen in Salinas, and Vancouver's Consumer Voices Are Born.

CVAB is a day center for mentally ill folk. They also do stuff like job training, they have six computers and a laser printer to enable the members to apply for jobs.

And an upright piano. The first time I saw that piano I was onto it like a pit bull on a pork roast.

"Consumer" is a euphemism for "Mentally Ill Person". I have a furious hatred of the word "Consumer". I call myself a patient. Look man, if you had heart disease, you'd call yourself a patient too, wouldn't you.

Two winters ago a Canadian Soylentil sent me three pairs of wool socks, wool gloves, three chocolate chip cookies, a Starbucks card and $50 cash so I could buy a pair of pants.

Please donate some of your own money to your community's soup kitchens, homeless shelters and rescue missions. I once met a disabled, homeless former welder who said to me "You talk to some guys on the streets, and they tell you they used to make six figures."

I didn't tell him I was one of those six figure guys.

I once earned quite a lot of money but for all the good it did me I should have burned the banknotes to stay warm on cold nights. But I live in a very modest way; I can easily afford to lose ten grand should the crypto exchanges collapse. I can easily afford to donate the occasional grand to those who serve Portland and Vancouver's homeless.

Amazon's Alexa is officially coming to Australia and NZ (early 2018)

"G'day, cunt!"

Garrison Keillor fired by MPR: 'I put my hand on a woman's bare back,' he says (comments)

Garrison Keillor off the air after misconduct allegations (archive)

The Latest: Keillor says his firing is 'bewildering'

Garrison Keillor Jokes About Improper Behavior Allegations: 'All My Heroes Got Fired'

STATEMENT FROM MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO REGARDING GARRISON KEILLOR AND A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

State of sexual McCarthyism? Or was there a little more than a pat on the back?

Here's what he's known for: A Prairie Home Companion

The Meaning Of Meghan: 'Black' And 'Royal' No Longer An Oxymoron

Britain’s black queen: Will Meghan Markle really be the first mixed-race royal?

Oh yeah she was on a couple of episodes of Fringe.

Meghan Markle.

I realized last week that I could build one of Apple's driver stacks at home. I wanted this so I could turn on its logging as well as to enable source code debugging.

Each day I updated my clients on my progress, however by today I was quite dismayed that I still couldn't get it to build. This because Apple has a private SDK called macosx.internal. The drivers from Apple's Open Source site once built out of the box, thereby enabling OpenDarwin, but now they don't.

I at first had no clue what was in machos.internal - damn autocorrect! - but eventually figured out that it needed some headers from the xnu kernel.

I figured I should try building the kernel first, but again it depends on macosx.internal. All I really needed was the headers, so I tried:

      $ make installhdrs

... which did install lots of headers, but not the ones I needed. The only headers it installs are already in Kernel.framework. I needed some of the private headers. As I figured them out I added them to my own private Kernel.framework.

When I started work again today I mailed my clients with "Working at home to continue building the IOGraphicsFamily. I am dismayed that this is taking so long."

Dismayed because the client wants to send my driver to OEMs on the first.

Eric wrote back, "Do you think this will help?"

"Yes. It should enable debugging of that showstopper bug."

"The one Lucas fixed last week?"

Part 3, final part of the series?

Friend’s reaction to high school boy’s penchant for crossdressing is both unexpected and cute

This 17-year-old boy crossdressing "news" was not brought to you with generous support from any of the following businesses:

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But it was brought to you by readers like you.

His Eye Makeup Is Way Better Than Yours

Would you be inclined to buy makeup because a 10-year-old boy is showing you how to create a look on Instagram? If we’re talking about Jack Bennett of @makeuupbyjack, then the answer could well be a resounding yes.

Since convincing his mother to start his account in May, young Mr. Bennett, who lives in Berkshire, England, has amassed 331,000 followers and attracted the attention of brands like MAC and NYX, which have offered products to create looks. Refinery29 has celebrated him as the next big thing in makeup.

He is the latest evidence of a seismic power shift in the beauty industry, which has thrust social media influencers to the top of the pecking order. Refreshingly, they come in all shapes, sizes, ages and, more recently, genders. Hailed by Marie Claire as the “beauty boys of Instagram,” the early male pioneers, like Patrick Simondac (@PatrickStarrr), Jeffree Star (@jeffreestar) and Manny Gutierrez, (@MannyMua733), have transcended niche to become juggernauts with millions of followers. And their aesthetic is decidedly new: neither old-school-rocker makeup nor drag queen.

The sequel to Bread Boi.

Older articles at NYT:

• Sparkly Eye Shadow? These (Male) Beauty Bloggers Are Experts
• Is Huda Kattan the Most Influential Beauty Blogger in the World?
• Those Lips! Those Eyes! That Stubble! The Transformative Power of Men in Makeup
• Meet CoverGirl’s New Cover Boy

(My writer's block has finally gone away. I used to be a passionate writer but had been unable to write for several years.)

I thought I'd just got banninated from Portland's DamnSingles group over an epic flame war the other night.

But no none of Facebook was working. Sometimes this helps:

      $ sudo ping -f -c 1000 facebook.com

If your net is slow in general, do that to nsa.gov, fbi.gov, vatican.va and cern.ch.

Keep track of how long it takes the nsa to stop replying to your pings.

But no, it was not to be.

    $ ping 8.8.8.8

No? Maybe just the name servers are down. I left this running for a half hour:

    $ ping 4.2.2.4

During this process I cycled my Mac's WifI, power-cycled my AirPort Extreme and cable modem, but still no replies.

I puzzled over what it would cost me to get cell phone directory assistance for Comcast support. This despite that I was using mobile safari so I could continue on Facebook.

Why don't I try the World Wide Web? I hear http is up to 1.1 these days. Will the wonders never cease?

Comcast's support site goes way out of its way to impede your progress toward a live human, but I expect that's for the best as I only pay $29.99 for my first year of their lowest tier. Maybe I'll get satellite internet at month 13.

Amit from support was courteous and helpful, doubtlessly because he has yet to get the memo regarded my Net Neutrality activism on Facebook. That's the great thing about sharing the work of others - you get to pretend you make a difference despite that you're preaching to the choir!

When he asked me to verify my contact details I realized that my phone number changed when I bought my iPhone, but I didn't update my number with Comcast. What was my number? Heck if I know I never called it!

The Wayback Machine saved the day. Good thing I don't worry about my privacy!

      http://web.archive.org/web/20170421201738/http://soggywizards.com/

I knew everything would check out, and Amit said it did so my my feelings towards net neutrality soured considerably. Shouldn't this fine, publicly-traded corporation be rewarded for its courteous and helpful tech support?

I began to hope he never receives that memo. I'll start sharing the right wing's posts from now on.

Amit asked to test my modem, which I was cool with. The test took two to three minutes.

"Can you verify that your Internet is working now?"

It wasn't.

But I used to be a network admin, and I know that things break, and as I told Amit, no one is at fault except for googling getting Portland to revise all its regulations to enable google fiber only to back right out.

So I started my usual troubleshooting.

That went very quickly when I realized my Wifi wasn't connected.

Oopsy. It always disconnects when I power off my AirPort Extreme.

Where is "Den Of Iniquity" in my Airport menu! Ah there it is.

I selected it.

... and promptly commenced receiving ping supplies.

Amit asked me to take a brief survey when we parted.

When asked whether I would recommend Comcast to others, I selected 10.