Barnson.org

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!

My sump pump has been crazy overactive since the ground unfroze this spring (spring technically begins in late March, but it almost snowed last weekend). Every 45 minutes, the sump pump is going off and spewing out approximately 5 gallons of water into the backyard through the exhaust tubing. Normally, this would make me feel secure, especially after a rainstorm. However, regardless of the weather, the sump pump has been going off, like clockwork every 45 minutes. That doesn’t make me feel secure.

Anyone have any experience they could share? Like before my basement floods?

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.

So I upgraded my venerable Raptor 30 v1 to a Raptor 46 (approximately a six-pound helicopter with a five-foot rotor span). It has some issues with the engine when I tried to fly it recently at the field, so I took it home and fixed a few things here and there. It turns out I’d lost the two screws holding in the carburetor on my OS .46FX-H; I pillaged another set from my similar aircraft motor. I bought a brand-new high-performance muffler, got it attached, and started running it up and checking things out.

I was out in my back yard doing a few test hops, getting the mix just right so that I had good head speed, pitch-pumping to listen to the engine and hear where it bogged, you know the drill. I had it just about dialed in. Second tank of fuel, I landed, adjust my throttle curve to get my new motor running at the right RPM, stood back, and applied a little collective. It got about two feet above the ground, right where I wanted it, so I backed off just a tad… and it kept rising.

I jammed throttle hold. No response. Total radio lockout. Zero control. The helicopter looked for all intents like it was going to fly to the moon. It described a gentle arc at probably forty to fifty miles an hour, sailed right over my house, then slammed upside-down into my front yard, ricocheted into the air on a bounce that went for fifty-four horizontal feet, landed on its skids, and proceeded to spin madly on until the motor quit.

Well, all in a day’s work, right? Expensive lesson in radio lockout, but it could have been worse.

Much worse.

There were eight children playing near my front yard. Four of them were mine. This helicopter, luckily, missed all the kids and the four adults doing yard work to slam into my yard and flip end-over-end out into the cul-de-sac.

If it had struck any person on its way toward beating itself to death, I’d have been devastated. I really like my neighbors. I really love my children and my wife. This big beast could have killed any one of them a few minutes ago.

Yet I was following AMA safety guidelines. I was over 100 feet from my house, and over 200 feet from the eventual point of impact. I had kicked my kids out of the acreage behind my house, counting on distance and objects to limit the possibility of damage to anybody other than me. I’d counted on a lot of things… but not a radio lockout sending the heli sailing in a rainbow arc toward family members and neighbors.

Upon further investigation, I think I found the cause of the lockout. I have a bad cell in my NiCD Rx pack, which seemed to hold a good surface charge, but dropped voltage under load. I believe the voltage hit the magic “don’t run below 4.5v” mark for my Spektrum receiver, rendering the receiver and all servos inoperable while it spent five seconds reconnecting.

I should have cycled the pack.

I almost hit someone because I didn’t cycle my pack.

I feel like crap.

Ran across a blog entry discussing the experiences of one geek’s girlfriend trying Linux for the first time. Verdict?

The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.

I’d love to see a welcome screen for the first time you open up your desktop, with little videos explaining a few key concepts to how Linux and Ubuntu work. Maybe it could ask “What do you want to do?” and then explain how they could do this.

Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do. Erin’s intelligent, quick to learn and is reasonably well-acquainted with modern technology. If she had as much trouble as she did, what chance to the elderly or at least the middle-aged stand?

I have to say, I basically agree with his assessment. If you want to make it really usable, you have to make it really simple — like the Author matthewPosted on April 28, 2008February 1, 2026

OK, yeah, I know, I’m talking about the weather. But this is the first beautiful weekend of the year in Salt Lake. Mid fifties, light winds, few clouds… and lots of smog.

You can’t have everything, I guess.