Author: matthew

The time: 11:00 PM The place: a data center in Salt Lake County The event: an air-conditioning outage.

Enter our protagonist. Let’s call him Bubba. Bubba hand-scans past the door of the data center floor to try to bring down some machines (and bring up some others), and is blasted with a wave of oven-like heat from the thousands of computers acting like little space-heaters in a confined space.

Bubba enters the cage containing our computers. Most of them have already shut down due to the overwhelming heat. Some few, mostly older units or computers nearer to the floor, are struggling along. Bubba sees a new, junior system administrator attempting to bring up some important production machines that had crashed.

Bubba notices three large, brand-new window air conditioners sitting on the floor. The raised-floor tiles are pulled up. These AC units are plugged in. Their fronts face the inlets of this junior admin’s machines.

The rear, hot side, faces the disk arrays to which these machines are attached.

Now, for those in the audience who think that opening your refrigerator on a hot summer day will help to cool off your house, here’s a quick science lesson. The rules of conservation of energy are simple: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. You can’t get more out of a system than you put into it; the best you can hope for is to break even.

By leaving your refrigerator open to try to cool off your house — unless it’s a refrigerator from the turn of the 20th century that runs on actual ice blocked from a river and stored for months under some straw — you’re actually making your house hotter. Yeah, really! That little space in front of the fridge is the only thing getting cooler; those hot coils in the back are blasting lots more heat than cold, resulting in an overall warming of your house.

Air-conditioners are, basically, refrigerators. But they make your house cooler by pumping the heat outdoors.

In effect, what Mr. Jr. Admin was doing was adding three enormous space heaters to the inside of a stewing oven, and pointing the hottest part of their blast cone right at the disks supporting the environment he was trying to bring up.

I don’t know what else to say, although some clever hand-gestures and sophomoric noises come to mind.

So today, for the first time, I heard the term “muffin top”. I am turning into an old man, I guess. From Urban Dictionary:

muffin top 1013 up, 179 down

Muffin-Top is a word used to describe the strange and bizarre waist scrunching effect that results when females wear tight fitting, low-rise/hip-hugger pants along with small-sized, navel exposing, mid-riff tops.

Though, the effect is more extreme with heavier females, all females, with the exception of anorexic models, can fall victim to the muffin-top disaster. The reason for this, is that the design of low-rise/hip-hugger pants, originally popular during the late 60’s and early-to-mid 70’s, defies the natural shape and contours of the average females’ body; forcing the skin and fat around her waist, back and upper buttocks to spill out over her pants and through her tiny crop-top, causing a muffin-top effect.

Originally, the idea behind low-rise pants and mid-riff tops, which made their first reappearance during the mid-to-late 90’s, was to produce clothing that would make a woman’s torso appear longer, and possibly thinner, than it actually was. Normally, men’s pants are designed with lower waists, because of their naturally longer torsos, narrower hips and smaller pelvises. In order to recreate this “longer, thinner torso” appearance for women, clothing manufacturers adopted shorter-waist, men’s trousers, modified the design for the female market, resulting in the catastrophe that the word, “muffin-top” currently describes. The muffin-top’s legacy, if anything, describes the disaster that can result when the fashion industry goes terribly wrong. The existence of muffin-tops is currently quite common, which is a testament to the fact that women will buy and wear anything, regardless of how vulgar and ridiculous it looks, as long as it is popular.

Wow, look at that muffin top! tags whale-tail low-rise low-rider hip-hugger chucha by Mr. Cheesy Cheeseville Jul 15, 2006 email it

This term was used to describe a late-night guard at our disaster-recovery site. I instantly recognized what he was describing when my co-worker said of the guard, “She likes to wear really skanky clothes with lots of leather, and it kind of grossed me out because she had a big muffin top below her halter.”

Never heard the slang term before, knew what it meant the moment I heard it. Now that is a useful phrase!

Came across a post on RationalResponders about How To Irritate An Atheist. Here are some of my favorites, that actually work really well on me if you’d like to drive me nuts:

15) Say that seperation of church and state isn’t in the Constitution; insist that the Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments.

37) Explain that the lack of proof doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

38) …and give him a blank look when he says that all people tried for a crime would go to jail.

39) Blame absolutely everything wrong in society on evolution.

44) Accuse him of being an agnostic, since he isn’t 100% positive that God does not exist.

59) No matter what he quotes from the Bible, say that it’s out of context.

60) …and when he points out that the quotes are in correct context, tell him you need to be a Christian to understand the true meaning of the Bible.

61) Tell him you must study the Bible for many years to reject Christianity.

62) …and when he points out that you reject Islam despite never having studied the Qu’ran, say that you have faith, and faith is all you need.

82) Smile smugly and tell him that there are no atheists in foxholes.

89) Equivocate scientific faith with religious faith, and conclude that, metaphysically, you are both in the same boat.

105) When he takes the time and trouble to explain where your analogy or interpretation is at fault, begin your response with a sigh, so he’ll know how patient you’re being.

120) Claim that Einstein was a Christian.

121) Claim that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed.

123) Vehemently claim that the theory of evolution is incompatible with theism, then turn around and blame the theory for promoting atheism.

125) Tell him it’s his responsibility to prove that God doesn’t exist.

129) Ask what he believes in, if not God.

130) …then tell him that nonbelief is also a worldview, therefore there is no such thing as an atheist and Christianity is true.

148) Tell him that Hitler was an atheist. (–MattNote: Hitler was Catholic–)

156) Argue the most insignificant point you can think of; when he doesn’t address your pettiness, claim victory.

157) Constantly attempt to equate atheism with theism.

172) For Muslims only: Say that it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to convert to your religion, but no one has a valid reason to leave Islam; it is the [most] perfect religion. (–MattNote: this applies equally to a religion of which I used to be a member…)

185) Insist that Thomas Jefferson was a Christian.

226) Tell him he has to believe before he can understand the evidence.

244) Grossly misunderstand the word “theory.”

269) When the subject of homosexuality comes up, say “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

275) Reply to every statement he makes, “That’s only your opinion.”

279) Point to something in nature that’s really cool, and call it proof of God’s existence.

284) Take advantage of a horrible national tragedy, caused in large part by religious fanaticism, by pushing your own religious fanaticism as the only thing that will save us all.

285) …and announce that the tragedy only happened because of those who ignore your religious fanaticism.

281) When ending your conversation with the atheist, promise to read whatever book the atheist may have mentioned, knowing darned well that you yourself never made it through Leviticus. (–MattNote: Yep, did this with a Christian friend, we exchanged Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” for Sagan’s “Demon-Haunted World”. I asked him if he’d read the book he loaned me yet, and he hadn’t. Several months later, we exchanged books again… and he hadn’t read the Carl Sagan book at all, yet I’d read Behe’s work and highlighted a bunch of passages. Dunno if I want to repeat that mistake.–)

All-told, a great post that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

I transferred registrars from Register.com — whom I’ve been a customer of for 10 years — to Godaddy.com. Still waiting on it to come through, so at some unknown time, my site will go down for at least a few hours until I bring up the new records.

So after watching tonight, my list of movies made much better by Rifftrax™ has increased by one! Star Trek V has been on the list for a year — that movie is hilarious when you watch it with RiffTrax™ — and now I must add Eragon to the list.

Favorite line: “Wait, wait, wait for it… pull my finger!”

Highly recommended. If you’ve never before watched a movie with RiffTrax™, these two are, in my humble opinion, the best places to start. Eragon had us in stitches for two hours straight watching the sad excuse for a movie adaptation of the really quite-decent book.

Well, OK, the book is actually quite a bit cheesy in ripping off from other books and movies in the genre, but the movie appears as if they ripped out all the non-cheesy parts from the book, condensed the remainder for time, added an extra heaping helping of stinky cheese, and then shoveled Lord of the Rings-like melodrama and massive battle scenes with scores of corpses, blood, and fabulous gold lamé battle costumes and overweight men dressed like Orcs — er, I mean, Urguls — to attract the key eight-to-fourteen-year-old element that so loved the book.

Umm, but one suggestion: The ending, with Disembaudio singing all the way through the credits? Yeah, much like Oh Holy Crap of yesteryear, it’s only funny because it’s so awful, and nothing else happens for the rest of the RiffTrack. Enjoy!

I… simply don’t know what to say. How can he assume such vile things about the video-gaming community?

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/jack-thompson-p.html

The juicy quotes from this letter from Jack to Strauss Zelnick, the producer for Grand Theft Auto IV. Jack has been prohibited by the court from contacting Take Two directly, so sent it to Zelnick’s lawyer…

Dear Mrs. Zelnick:

Your son, as you may know (or maybe you don’t know), is Chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., whose most popular video games are the Grand Theft Auto murder simulator games banned in some countries but sold to children here…

…Experts note that the recent plethora of cop killings is caused in part by your darling son’s entrepreneurial energy. There are three policemen dead in Alabama because of Grand Theft Auto…

…Is there a Ted Bundy merit badge? If so, your loving son deserves one now…

…Maybe you, Mrs. Zelnick, were so taken by your handsome son that you spared the rod and spoiled the child. That would explain why he has brought you, by the way he presently acts, “to shame.”…

…Your son, this very moment, is doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be “a Boy Scout.” More like the Hitler Youth, I would say…

This man is sociopathic. Write a letter to the mother of a computer game developer, blaming her for the murder of cops in Alabama?

Shame on you, Jack. Grand Theft Auto IV may be violent, bloody, and not something a socially responsible parent wants their child to play, but you made it personal.

Added a Twitter block to the right-hand side of my page. I hop on a couple of days a week, do a half-dozen mad updates, and then do something else. I think maybe if it’s on my blog, I’ll remember to update it more regularly.

I dig the brief-social-networking aspect of Twitter. No more than 140 characters means you must be succinct.

Ring, Ring.

“This is Matthew.”

“Hi, Honey, it’s Christy.”

“Hey, babe, how are you doing this morning?”

“Well, the Federal Express man just came and brought two shiny new boxes from Apple.”

“Our iPhones came?”

“Our iPhones came.”

“Will you please take them out and plug them in so they are fully-charged by the time I get home tonight? That way we can activate them right away.”

“I won’t be home tonight, I’ll be out with a friend.”

“So sad for you.”

“But I’m looking forward to my new iPhone!”

“So am I. OK, I’ll see you tonight, love.”

Got off phone. Did happy dance. Co-workers universally told me I suck because I have an iPhone and they don’t. Didn’t care.

Happy Cinco de Mayo. It’s practically a US holiday anyway, so go celebrate in US style: drink some Corona with lime, set off a bunch of fireworks, and eat way too much Mexican food!

Yesterday afternoon, I heard news that Senators McCain and Clinton, two of the political candidates for President of the United States, supported a “vacation” from gasoline taxes from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

This is a bad idea.

1. If we simply sacrifice $10B from the highway budget, as McCain recommends, the American consumer still pay the price in vehicles damaged by under-maintained highways. Or, if we instead transfer money from the “general fund” to pay for such a holiday, we’re adding more to the national deficit. Yep, let’s borrow imaginary money together.
2. If we, as Clinton recommends, instead fund that $10B in “windfall profits” from oil companies benefiting from the enormous hike in gasoline prices over the past year, we are encouraging those companies to take a lesson from enormous defense-contractor Halliburton: De-list in the US, and list their companies in some other country with more friendly taxation policies.
3. Didn’t either of these two politicians take basic economics? Oil prices rise during the summer due to increased demand. Refineries and distributors commonly experience shortages during the summer due to this seasonal demand peak in the largest gasoline-consumption market in the world. Many families reduce their usage during peak-demand times due to the high price of gas. If the price of gasoline drops 18.5c per gallon, demand will rise considerably, resulting in a much smaller break for the taxpayer, and a considerable profit increase for the gasoline vendor.
4. The Highway Administration is already $3.4B short of what they need to keep US highways maintained. For every dollar spent by this particular administration, nearly $6 is generated in revenue by the use of the roads.
5. Such a tax break does not address the fundamental issue behind rising gas prices, that all the candidates are conveniently ignoring: the value of the dollar has gone down tremendously in the past 18 months. Contrary to some government-paid analyst announcements, I don’t believe it’s due to “rampant speculation” on the dollar. Such a large shift — half the value of our currency — represents a fundamental money-policy change. The most logical explanation is that such a devalued dollar serves our national interests at the moment: increased exports, increased jobs, and easier repayment of the national debt.

This almost makes me want to make a break from my position of studied neutrality on the Democratic front and side with Senator Obama. (I oppose McCain principally on the basis that he has publicly stated his intention to “bomb Iran” if he takes office.) Obama is the only one of the three who seems to have the backbone to oppose such political pandering on economic grounds. He alone seems to graps the economic reality of such a “tax holiday” amounting only to a bump in profits for the gasoline vendors, shifting the burden of the cost either to the very consumers the policy is trying to help

Just like he was the sole US senator to oppose going to war with Iraq.