typewriting

From Mr. Smith Goes to Washington:

Half of official Washington is here to see democracy's finest show, the filibuster, the right to talk your head off, the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form. The least man in that chamber, once he gets and holds that floor by the rules, can hold it and talk as long as he can stand on his feet providing always, first, that he does not sit down, second, that he does not leave the chamber or stop talking. The galleries are packed. In the diplomatic gallery are the envoys of two dictator powers. They have come here to see what they can't see at home. DEMOCRACY IN ACTION.

This was my introduction to the filibuster, and a reinforcement of the innocent idea that anyone can create change in this democracy. I'm surprised no one in the Democratic Party has thought to use this well-known movie to tie these two ideas together. I can't imagine a more effective defense of the filibuster than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, short of finding a new Bible verse that says "Jesus loves filibusters."

• Morels tend to grow near dying - but not dead - trees, particularly elm and apple trees.
• Morels generally grow in three phases, by color:
  1. Gray
  2. Yellow
  3. Black
• These phases combined usually last a month or two.
• Animals don't eat mushrooms.
• Turkey hunting is restricted to certain hours of the day.
• Deer poop looks like piles of pebbles.
• Morels should be picked at the stem, so a stump remains.
• Picked morels should be carried in a net bag, so spores can drop and plant new mushrooms.
• Morels should be soaked in salt water, to encourage bugs to depart.
• Morels have a subtle taste, so breading should be only lightly seasoned.
• Black shirts should not be worn while breading morels (or anything).
• Plastic forks should not be used near frying morels (or anything).
• I should not be allowed near frying morels.
• Even poorly fried wild morels taste pretty good.

Yesterday I watched on C-SPAN as a representative from Eli Lilly told a story of how their products helped a person with diabetes. The story was told to promote Eli Lilly's position on patents. I'm not clear on all that was said, but I gather the patent system will soon get worse, not better. The debate was largely over the process by which two companies should dispute a mutually claimed patent. I didn't see anyone suggest that there might be situations in which patents should not be held by anyone. I think allowing people to profit from the medical problems of others is something we will some day look back at and wonder how that could have happened.

I have no reason to believe that Eli Lilly is any better or worse than any other pharmaceutical manufacturer. I had a vague sense that pharmaceutical manufacturers are generally bad. Specifically, I suspected they often put profit ahead of the public good. It didn't take a lot of research to confirm this suspicion. Eli Lilly is a member of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which in 2003 petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "to make approval of generic biologics more difficult." To protect profits, Eli Lilly worked to prevent other companies from selling insulin to diabetic patients at lower costs.

When I was low on money a year ago, my health suffered because I couldn't afford medical supplies sold by companies like Eli Lilly. I was working full time, when I could find work, but that wasn't enough to afford the necessary medical supplies after rent. These supplies could be cheaper so people like me don't face such situations. Patents on medicine keep medicine artificially expensive at the expense of citizens. It's sad that the U.S. Senate held a hearing on patent reform in Washington D.C. yesterday, and not one person there stated the obvious: medical patent monopolies are bad for Americans.

I think Mac OS 10.3.9 is the first system update I've had that made my computer less functional. That's not something I can say of my experience with Windows (where I often lose functionality), so I guess I should be glad, but I'm a bit disappointed that Apple hasn't already released an update. If you've installed 10.3.9 and find some of your applications will no longer open, you can solve the problem by re-installing Security Update 2005-002. That worked for me, anyway.

Update: Apple has since released an update that fixes the 10.3.9 Java problem.

I hadn't looked at my server statistics for a while, so I was surprised to discover yesterday that about 80% of my bandwidth over the past month has gone toward the serving of the pope image. The image was being hotlinked - pulled from my server rather than copied - from hundreds of sites, including the popular fark.com and dozens of livejournal weblogs. This explains why this image is the first result for "pope" on Google's image search. Lucky for me, I have enough bandwidth on my account that the extra 4Gb or so didn't do any real damage this time. But I thought it better not to wait until the next time some image on my website becomes wildly popular, however unlikely that may be. So I started blocking hotlinking, and redirecting to an image that says:

Sorry, direct linking of images on randomchaos.com is turned off to conserve bandwidth; however, please feel free to make yourself a copy of this image and host it yourself. I recommend Flickr.com for free image hosting. Thanks, scott@randomchaos.com.

I hate to break context on a bunch of sites that will now be referencing this bit of text as if it were the pope, but I'm not willing to have my site broken or made more expensive for the cause of silly pope pictures. It's a great cause, but I have a few other things I'd like to do with my website.

Life tip: cut the tops off of half-empty bags of potato chips, bread, etc. I read this five days ago on Ask MetaFilter, and it has already saved me from two messes. In retrospect, it's so obvious.

MeetUp wants organizers to pay $9 a month to organize meetings. What a terrible idea. And that's the special introductory rate. I could create a specific website for a MeetUp group to provide the same basic functionality MeetUp offers for less than that. In fact, if anyone is interested, I will. I'll charge $8 a month for your own group-specific MeetUp website. Comment or email me if you're interested

And that's how we discovered that the entire staff of Apple is composed of clones of Steve Jobs. But clones would be different ages.