Q&A from a friend on a mailing list
Question: What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
Question: What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
Linked from Slashdot, a great article on what is encryption?
Most people reading this will know that our son, P, has food allergies. Not severe, thank heavens, but present and uncomfortable for him. Once he was diagnosed, his doc said that we had to be incredibly strict about what he eats, and that he has a good chance of outgrowing the allergies. What we had to do was be vigilant about what he eats. No dairy of any type, eggs, tomatoes, strawberries, shellfish or nuts. Til he’s 3. Which meant for the next 17 months. I’m still nursing him (not too often, we’re at about 2x a day), so that means I’m off all that too. And if that’s the case, then B might as well be off it. So we try to not have anything in the house that would make him break out.
It’s much easier to do here (Ireland) than when we are in the States. The ingredients on ready made foods here look something like this:
Contains: Wheat flour, sugar, whole egg, skimmed milk powder, natural flavourings, E122, E723
Where in the States, a package of bread has more chemical names than everything I learned in chemistry class put together.
So we’ve learned how to read food labels really well. It’s interesting, you learn a lot from those labels and a bit of research.
We don’t really do much takeout anymore (tomato and dairy avoidance means no pizza, egg and nuts mean no Chinese, tomato and dairy also means no Indian, shellfish means….). The chipper around the corner does us well, once a week when we’re just freaking tired and don’t want to think anymore.
Most of our food is homecooked. And it’s pretty good. I’ve always liked cookbooks, I read them like regular books. So we’re learning how to adapt recipes using soymilk, Rice Dream rice milk, egg replacer and fake butter (as I call it. Most margarines still have dairy in them, we’ve found in Ireland that Pure doesn’t and is deeeelish for both spreading and cooking). Most recipes have turned out okay. Some we haven’t even tried yet. Toad In The Hole (sausages in mini Yorkshire puddings) even works decently. Any recipe that uses more than 2 eggs is out tho, the replacer doesn’t work for that.
Funniest thing we’ve found: Boland’s Custard Cream Biscuits don’t have custard or cream. And generic Double Stuf Oreos don’t have any dairy in them.
Adam Curry put an audio comment I did for him into the DSC yesterday. Wheee 🙂 Meant to create our first podcast last night, but the fates were against us. Today, hopefully, since we don’t have anything pressing today. Other than grocery shopping. Urk.
For a couple of days I’ve been trying out the Acqua theme for my linux-based KDE desktop. It makes everything look like a Mac, even if it’s just a costume.
I wish they’d make Darwin, the open source copy of Mac OS X, function on x86-based processors instead of just the PowerPC. Seems like that’s what I want to play with next. Ideal: Mac OS X with full linux binary compatibility running on the new paper-thin Sony Vaio X505 laptop.
The BBC News doesn’t report on web sites until they have become really popular. So when an Election apology starts net feud, the worst must be over. That said, if you haven’t visited, http://sorryeverybody.com/, love it or hate it it’s worth a visit.
What I apologize for in the two-party systems. The powers that be only allow room for two pigeon holes, but there are five or six pigeons. The third parties get censored out by the two bigot ruling parties. Most registered voters, rather then voting for what they believe in feel they need to vote Democrat or Republican. The United States has a façade Democracy; they say voters have a choice, but voting Democratic or Republican will result it nearly the same policies. The scary part is, I believe most Democrats and Republicans believe there is a large difference!
I think of the current two party systems this way. Vote Republican you are voting for a tractor trailer, Democratic an SUV. The question is: which vehicle would you like to run over you and your children?
I think I’ve gotten the audio blog stuff to work. Now I just have to figure out how to post it for those of you interested in listening to it. Probably not many people, since I haven’t given out the URL of this yet.
Basically, I used the Engadget way of doing things. Pretty easy, overall. One small hiccup in the import and convert in iTunes…I couldn’t change the bit rate and the sample rate to make the comp happy. So I blew off that part, and it sounded better. But then it compressed down to 1.4M. I don’t know if that’s big or not, for about….44 seconds of audio? I guess I need to know what the hell I’m going to talk about before I start it…make every bit count .
I’m getting addicted to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. (Hmmm…just hit a bug. When using WordPress to create the above link, the link itself was under the parameters of the typing window…so it jumped back to the top of the entry.) Anyway, Adam’s funny, and geeky, and all that I look for in a man. Eerrrrrrr…all that I look for in a podcast. Yeah, that’s it. Any guy who will sit there and say “boooiiiiinnnggggggg” for 50,000 people…what a freak. In a good way. I think he’s like Howard Stern used to be when I was 10 and listened to him on AM radio in New York. So Adam’s influenced me enough to try podcasting. And I’m gonna do a cooking show. Somehow. Maybe I can do a videoblog, with separate audio if you need to watch. Or just rant about being a mom. But who the hell would listen to that? Ah, well, *you’re* reading this, so you’re not objective.
Patrick and I were reading stories out of a book of “children’s verse” today. Turning the page, I see a story titled Tender Heartedness. Sounds harmless enough for a 3 year-old. It is a book of stories for children, right?
You tell me the age of the kid who should hear this gem. 🙂
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
When I’ve got a work contract, I’m upstairs in the office (rear bedroom) hacking away and like to listen to either music or podcasts of different kinds including Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the Rock and Roll Geek Show, Air America Radio shows, Reel Reviews, iPodio news, RasterWeb! Audio (silly jokes), and lots more. A visit to audio.weblogs.com shows you the last 100 podcasts to be put on the Net, which you can also have feed right into your player to let you listen to a wide variety of things.
While this started to give yet another cool way to use your iPod, if you don’t actually own one you can still listen to the mp3s for it on your PC, or on your own mp3 player of another company. (Though you’re probably still reconsidering your choice and looking at the iPods of others with a bit of envy, right?) The iPodder client is available for MacOS and Windows, with a Linux version being worked on as we speak. Right now I use the bashipodder scripting hack, though it’s got one bug: sometimes a revised mp3 on a server can trick it into downloading it again. (Update: a tweak to cache the RSS file for comparison based on modification date reduces the need to repeatedly download the full file, and a look for the local file using the basename of the URL to get the name of the mp3 avoids multiple downloads.)
Anyway, I was working away with my headphones on listening to the awesome Rock and Roll Geek Show. Elana came into the office and started cracking up. She said, “Don’t you hear that?” I took off the headphones because I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Only to hear the podcast coming out of the speakers on my desk. I’d not actually turned them all the way down. Duh!
(What’s a podcast? It just started in August 2004; a small blog post offers some history behind it.)
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