Month: April 2005

Striking another blow for fascism, on March 3, 2005 the US Congress introduced a bill seeking to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts over congress.

Yes, that’s right. Our elected representatives are attempting to tie the hands of the judiciary so it can’t stop Congress from raiding the cookie jar.

Specific provisions of this bill, which is still in committee, (but you can bet your last dollar will appear either by itself or added as a rider to a much more popular bill within the next year):

• Section 101(a): The Supreme Court would be forbidden from reviewing any case involving a lawsuit against any governmental body or employee, whether or not that person or institution was acting in an official capacity.
• 102(a): The same restriction will apply to district courts.
• 201: In reviewing the constitutionality of legislation, the court is specifically forbidden from considering international law in their judgment. They cannot also consider any non-US laws other than English Law prior to the Constitution. The chief concern to me with this provision is that it means that human rights agreements, peace treaties, and other agreements to keep peace with our neighbors can’t be considered in any judgment. Hello, war with Mexico. Again. Last time it was over territory; this time, it will almost certainly be over immigration.
• 301: Any previous judgment which would be disallowed under these changes would be invalidated. What does this mean in practice? Every single ruling ever made by the High Court which involved a practice of government is now up-for-grabs. Don’t like Roe V. Wade? Now you can go back and challenge it. And the best part? The High Court’s not alowed to hear your challenge, so it passes unopposed! Hooray for Fascism! (OK, I overstated this: previous invalidated judgments would be remanded back to State Courts. So now, hooray for inconsistent application of the law! Welcome back, state-approved segregation, coat-hanger abortions, and separationist dogma!)
• Now, the icing on the cake: Section 302. In summary, it states that if a judge opposes this law and declares it unconstitutional, or agrees to rule on something prohibited by this law, she’s guilty of treasonous action (violation of constitutional oath) and can be forcibly removed from office or incarcerated!

This is one of those bills which I hope will die in committee, yet like the DMCA and PATRIOT act, I’m certain someone will find a way to pass it. At the very least, it serves one useful purpose: it tells me who the enemies of democracy and freedom in our House of Representatives are, as listed in the introduction:

Mr. Aderholt (for himself, Mr. McCotter, Mr. Pence, Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia, Mr. Bachus, Mr. Ryun of Kansas, Ms. Foxx, Mr. Barrett of South Carolina, Mr. Wamp, Mr. Wilson of South Carolina, Mr. Rogers of Alabama, Mr. Pitts, Mr. Everett, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Souder, Mr. Cantor, Mr. Price of Georgia, Mr. McIntyre, Mr. Weldon of Florida, Mr. Jones of North Carolina, Mr. Bishop of Utah, Mr. Herger, Mr. Goode, Mr. Hall, and Mr. Lewis of Kentucky) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

I think it is no accident which states are represented by those introducing this bill: Viginia, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, Kentucky. What I think I may be seeing here is the new axis of the Confederacy, attempting to find another way to secede from the Union and carry on the bigoted, Anglo-centric practices which were squashed in 1865.

Who knows? I could be wrong, and I probably am. But seeing the name of my elected representative affixed to this ridiculous attempted usurpation of the separation of powers makes me angry. And when I get angry, I get stupid and go out and do stuff like set up promotional web sites and carry on grass-roots campaigns…

OK, no, actually, I’ve never done that kind of stuff. But seeing this latest attack on the Constitution makes me wanna. Badly.

Text of the bill here. However, this particular link may expire in time.

I’m wondering if anyone has a technology solution for creating a merged calendar for home use.

Right now, there’s a scheduling problem on the homefront because my fiancee and I continuously run into schedule conflict. Between my gigging and her social scheduling, we always run into problems. It results in one of us canceling a committment.

I’m hoping there’s a way to merge our personal calendars into a master household calendar. Updated daily. Able to be accessed and altered externally.

Ideas?

Recently, attorneys have been debating the appropriateness of forcibly medicating Wandar Barzee, one of the two kidnappers of Elizabeth Smart. Yeah, the girl’s been home for two years, and they still can’t figure out a way to try her abductors.

Here’s the question: Wanda Barzee, it has been determined, could be found competent to stand trial if she took her antipsychotic medication. She, however, insists she’s not crazy and refuses medication because she believes it’s a plan of Satan.

Should she be forced to take the medication and stand trial for her part in Smart’s abduction and captivity? Keep in mind, the sentence for kidnapping is generally much less than life in prison.

Or should the government not force her to take the medication, and effectively imprison the 59-year-old woman for the rest of her life in a mental asylum because she’s unfit for trial?

Background links to help you understand the whole sordid mess:

• Rick Ross big list of Elizabeth Smart Links
• Prosecutors argue for forced medication

So I wrote a little script for the accounting department here at work. It takes data from a variety of sources (Access DB, Excel file, flat text file), does some calculations on them, then emails out the results to the project leads. It gives them a breakdown of the financial status of their projects.

Our company is a little paranoid about their accounting data, so it resides on a separate network, which has no internet or outside connections. Therefore, the accounting people have to move the data from the acct network to the main network so the emails can go out.

Well, in order for my script to run, the Excel file has to be formatted a certain way. Meaning, the filename has to be the same from week to week, the sheet name has to be the same from week to week, and the column headers have to be the same from week to week. Not very hard, at least in my humble opinion.

Well, there’s a lady in Accounting who just doesn’t get it. Every Tuesday, when she runs this script, I get a phone call.

“It’s not working!”

I used to check the logs, but now I just look at the Excel file and tell her to make sure everything is named correctly.

“But I did!”

So I tell her what’s NOT named correctly, get the usual “Oh….”, and the script runs fine.

Now I know there’s 10000000000 ways to fix this to idiot-proof it, I just haven’t had time to do it yet. I just think it’s funny a human being can’t wrap her mind around the three little things that need to done in order for this script to run. A filename, a sheet name, and column names.

Am I asking to much here? Am I being that IT guy? I’m talking many MONTHS here of the same thing, over and over. My own personal Groundhog day.

My $.02 Weed

Yes, indeed, expert researchers over at snopes.com have determined that the urban legend about a woman finding a human finger in her bowl of Wendy’s chili is, in fact, completely true.

I trust Snopes more than I trust major media outlets. Those folks know their stuff, and as retired semi-professional hobbyists, they are more interested in truth than fiction. It’s their stock in trade, after all. The site’s gotten a bit pop-up heavy the last few years, though…

Anyway, the finger was fully-cooked, with a manicured fingernail (probably female), and appeared to have been torn, not cut, from someone’s body. They apparently checked all the hands of employees at the Wendy’s, and are currently moving backwards down the… ahem… “food chain” to figure out what supplier introduced the digit into the chili mixture.

I’ve made chili for Wendy’s before. Yes, I worked there. I’ve written about the experience, but not on my blog (yet, though I may have to recap it as a follow-up comment). The basic method is:

1. Fish out last night’s over-cooked hamburger meat from the refrigerator and chop it up. This is the stuff that sat on the grill too long the day before. It’s a crappy burger, but great chili meat.
2. Dump a massive bucket of ‘base’ with the meat into another large vat. Back when I did it, we had to add certain fresh vegetables to the base in order to make the chili more palatable. The base already contains the beans.
3. Heat for an hour before the store opens, and leave heated the rest of the day. Throw out the leftovers at the end of the day and start all over again.

So the most logical place for that finger to have been introduced was prior to the sealing of the vat of ‘base’. Unless, perhaps, some passer-by or employee threw the digit into the chili pot for some reason. I’m guessing the makers of the base just concatenate ingredients from suppliers and cook it, so the chain should be fairly short and lead back squarely to the packagers who work for Davco Foods.

It makes me wonder what other, less-bony body parts Wendy’s has served over the years?

Ick. I had about nine valid reasons for never eating Wendy’s Chili before. Now there’s an extra digit in my list of reasons to avoid it!

EDIT by matthew: Alas, it turns out the story is not true, it is FALSE. Snopes updated their story, and it turns out the lady planted the finger, which was given to her husband by an acquaintance to settle a debt. Ugh.

Warren Jeffs, self-styled prophet and leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been predicting the end of the world for quite awhile. Three of his predictions have fallen through and the world goes on!

He led 10,000 RLDS followers in southern Utah and once again predicted that today would be the end of the world. He took 2500 of his followers with him to Texas to “wait it out.”

So live today like it’s the last day of your life…..and tomorrow!

Frankly I hope he stays there. And I hope that the 7500 followers still in southern Utah have the opportunity to free themselves of the lifestyle they’ve been stuck in for all these years.

EDIT by matthew: Fixed leader name.

Periodically, in discussions with friends or online associates, I run across what I call “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” questions. These are questions which are phrased as a yes/no, or either/or proposition, yet that proposition doesn’t apply since the assumption underlying the question isn’t necessarily correct.

Often, this is called ignoring the “excluded middle principle”, or a “false dilemma”. In the classic example of an excluded middle, you can take the proposition, “Joe is bald”, reverse it, and end up with “Joe is bald, or Joe is not bald”. A true statement.

Yet often, we misuse it. Some examples I pulled from the Wikipedia:

• Either you go to college, or you will wind up flipping hamburgers for a living.
• You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.
• Either creationism is true, or evolution is true. Therefore, if it is shown that evolution is false, creationism must be true. (or the inverse: if it is shown that creationism is false, evolution must be true…)
• There are two kinds of people in the world…

I hear it from the radio every day. It’s the heart of strong demagoguery, and a way to really rile people up against the threatening hordes of vile “not-us” people. I hear it from the right and the left though, admittedly, far more from the right than the left. Maybe it’s just an artifact of established right-wing radio.

Nevertheless, it bugs me. 50% of the U.S. does not read more than 1500 words in a given week. How can you appeal to logic adequately and try to frame a question in terms that actually make logical sense, yet not look weak compared to the guy that’s good at presenting nice sound-bite-sized logical fallacies for the non-reading public?

They may not read, but the non-readers listen, watch, and vote.

What other false dilemmas do you encounter regularly?

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity. — G.B. Shaw

I recently have become involved in some newsgroup discussions regarding digital recording. Inevitably, someone asked “what microphone should I get?”, and received several responses of consumer-oriented dynamic microphones such as the Shure SM-58.

I replied: Although the Shure is a fine microphone for what it is, it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a good vocal mic for a studio setting.

It’ll get you by, though, if you can’t afford better. And it’s a great stage mic. However, the frequency cutoff on it is 15,000Hz, which doesn’t even capture the full sound of a voice in a studio.

A large-diaphragm condenser microphone using Phantom Power will set you back about $150, but the difference between a condenser and a dynamic mic is night and day as far as recording quality. In general, dynamic mics are only used in the studio for instruments with extreme transients (such as drums) or where feedback might be a concern (live performance).

That said, what you pick is up to you. If you go with a condenser, you’re going to need some way of providing phantom power. I use a small mixer, but many I/O interfaces provide their own.

Anyway, if you want really darn good vocal response, don’t use a dynamic mic. They work fine when you are getting started, but their lack of high-end reception starts to wear thin after a while.

I’ve been using a pair of (relatively) cheap condenser microphones for about a year now, and the difference in clarity of my mic-based recordings is astounding. The ironic thing is that, as much as I love the greater “air” in the recording due to using a condenser microphone, it is precisely this “air” which is lost when compressing to my preferred distribution formats of MP3 or OGG.

Of course, inevitably I received the follow-up question, “What is Phantom Power?” I’m fairly certain there are a lot of us in recording who don’t really understand the differences between dynamic and condenser mics (other than “condenser mics sound better”). I know I was fuzzy on it, until I bought one and desired to learn how microphones actually work:

Dynamic mics (the type you usually see for school assemblies, outdoor concerts, and such) function by using a barrier with a magnet attached. The barrier/magnet (generally referred to as a diaphragm) is next to a coil of wire. The movement of the magnet with a wire nearby produces a small electric current. This current is fed into a “preamp”, which makes that tiny signal much louder (bumps it up to what is called “line-level input”), and then you can record or hear it.

Ribbon microphones function by a similar principle. However, rather than a robust circular diaphragm, they use a small ribbon with a magnet on either end. This makes them more sensitive to sound than a traditional dynamic mic, with some pleasant natural compression, but they are also extremely delicate and expensive. That ribbon can break easily. However, they produce very rich vocals, particularly for female vocalists. Generally, it takes much less air pressure to produce motion in the relatively large, flat ribbon. However, the ribbon is also quite sensitive to location; you’ll have a steep decibel dropoff with a singer singing at the side of a ribbon mic.

Now, so far, these microphones require no power to run them. They generate their own current through the movement of the sound waves you’ve created.

Enter the “condenser” microphone.

Essentially, the diaphragm in a condenser microphone is a capacitor. That is, it’s an electrical apparatus which holds a charge. One plate of the capacitor vibrates in response to sound waves. The second plate is steady. The capacitor’s capacitance (farads) changes depending on how far apart the plates are. The plates in most decent quality condenser mics are gold, in order to resist corrosion and provide a longer useful lifetime for the microphone. (Well, they’re actually gold dusted onto a plastic diaphragm). Some of the cheaper ones, like the ones powered by AA batteries that you buy at Radio Shack, use steel or silver instead of gold, and are only useful for a few years before their frequency reponse diminishes.

Savvy so far? A capacitor stores electricity. The amount it can store varies based upon the materials used for the two capacitor plates and the dielectric (the stuff between the metal plates). In the case of microphones, the “dielectric” is just air between the two nearby plates.

The net result of measuring a capacitor’s capacitance changes, versus the small electric current changes created by a moving magnet in a dynamic mic, is that the condenser microphone is far more sensitive to smaller and shorter sound waves. In other words, you can play softer sounds and they’ll be picked up. You can also play higher-freqency sounds which a dynamic mic misses because the sound wave isn’t large or long enough to move the magnet noticeably.

In the case of the condenser mic, the electric charge to the capacitor is provided by a “phantom power” source. Without phantom power, condenser mics simply don’t work, because the capacitor has nothing to charge it. Phantom power is provided right along with the regular signal. It is extremely small, and phase-cancelled if your input is balanced.

Phantom power is only needed for condenser microphones. Turning on phantom power will not harm dynamic or ribbon microphones. However, startup order is important: you will want to turn on your mixer, turn on phantom power, and THEN turn up your master volume level if you value your ears.

Here’s hoping this actually explained it for some of the musicians on our board!

I’m currently hosting this web site, and others, with a company that was really reliable. It was a one-man shop, very personable, advertised with grass-roots marketing. I liked it a lot.

And then at some point, it changed. I had to cancel a web site, and instead of the usual prompt, courteous service I had come to expect, I got the run-around from some woman I’d never met before. I called to complain, and talked to some man I’d never spoken to before and, worse yet, he didn’t know what I was talking about. As far as he knew, I didn’t seem to exist as a customer. Apparently, this was the case with a lot of early customers. Paypal wasn’t enough information for them, and they wanted me to fill out this massive, time-consuming information form about myself before they would give me back any of the money I’d already paid for the web server.

I was extremely busy that day, and what I was getting paid to get the job done that I was working on outstripped the money I’d lose by not getting a pro-rate back. Ultimately, I gave up on getting any pro-rated fees back, cancelled that PayPal subscription, and just chalked up my lost twenty bucks to experience.

Recently, I had a similar experience. I needed some technical support, and instead of getting the knowledgeable guy I usually did, I got some flunkie who had no idea what I was talking about. The dude obviously didn’t know FreeBSD (the operating system which hosts barnson.org). Eventually, I got to talk to the guy that I knew well, and he resolved the problem in short order.

But recently, there have been outages. LONG outages. Hours. I can see the ones that last more than just a few minutes by looking back at my logs, because I have “cron jobs”, or automated processes, which take care of some housekeeping on this web site every 20 minutes. The site was unavailable for almost 3 hours in the middle of the night last night. And yesterday, during the day, there was a one-hour outage.

These outages aren’t documented or explained. I suspect that the “boss” that I used to always talk to when there was a problem has moved on to better things, and the business is now in the hands of incompetents who, worse yet, don’t care about the quality of their service.

So I’m thinking of moving webhosting providers. My budget is $30.00 per month. I strongly prefer a UNIX-like environment, and preferably one where I have “root”, or equivalent access, so that I can set up new services. Although I liked the “small shop” feel of my current provider, they’ve lost it. It’s not a priority; uptime and courteous, professional customer service is. I need about 3GB of storage for all the MP3’s and photos I keep here. Who do you recommend?

Alright, how many of you out there would like to see the IRS abolished?

Right now, there’s a 130(+)-page bill proposed by Sen. Linder (R) that offers to eliminate the 55,000(+)-page current IRS code. The bill proposes that a 23% consumption tax replace the federal income tax. This means that the only tax collected by the government would be 23% on anything bought.

I’m a pretty liberal dude. I’m all about high taxation for public service and helping out those in need. I like social services. That’s why it’s kind of scary that I like this bill and may contact my Senator with an endorsement.

Before the comments begin, allow me to offer a personal experience living within a flat tax zone. For two years I lived in TN, which advertises itself as a music-loving, hippie state, so that tourists won’t realize they’re really bringing tourist dollars into a state controlled by rich, white corrupt Republicans. The first whiff of “something wrong” occurs when one of the many homeless people saunters by and emits that nasty homeless odor. Yes, no income tax in TN. A flat consumption tax in its place. I had never seen such economic disparity before, not even in the homeless pits of Fells Point, B’more, that rivaled the streets of Nashville. I saw the toll a flat tax takes on the people.

But…I saw where Linder’s new bill offers a neat household rebate equal to the sales tax on consumption of essential goods and services.

Still, the questions lingered for me. What was the U.S. like before the IRS? What would the benefits be of getting rid of the IRS now?

George Will’s recent editorial did it for me.

What do you all think?

EDIT by matthew: Linked.