This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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December 2008
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Beaker Joy!

(via Neatorama)

Rodent on Keys

(via Huffington Post)

Yeah, yeah, you’ve all seen it before, it is old, blah, blah, blah.

Podcast Now Fixed

I corrected the error (my audio accidentally got offset by 12 seconds from Ivan’s for the first 15 minutes, which made it kind of unlistenable) and pushed out the corrected version. For any of you who have not yet downloaded it… just do your normal thing and all should be well, let me know if it is not.

For what I believe are the two people who already downloaded it other than me…

I tried to do it in such a way that iTunes will actually detect the change and download the new version, but iTunes is sometimes finicky. If you have the broken version… which I believe only three people do, including myself, and iTunes doesn’t get the new version for you on its own then you can try going to your podcast section in iTunes, right click on Curmudgeon’s Corner and choose “Update Podcast”. If that fails, you can always click through directly to the XML file to find the new file, or for that matter, here is a link directly to the corrected mp3 file.

I’m letting my iTunes just sit to see if iTunes does end up actually grabbing the new one on its own. The only other time I had to do an after the fact fix it did not, but I’m trying something different this time.

Do let me know what works or does not work in terms of forcing iTunes to pick up the new one.

If you are one of those two people that is. (One of whom is the person who pointed out the problem to me… thanks Chris… and the other of whom is somebody who looking at the IP and the traceroute I don’t have a guess as to who they are.)

Anyway… all is well now. :-)

And it is time for me to run to work.

Podcast Fix Coming

Looks like something got horked on the first section(s) of the podcast this week after my original editing. It will be fixed in a few minutes. If you haven’t downloaded yet, hold off a bit. If you have, wait until I post again that all is fixed then force a redownload.

Curmudgeon’s Corner: There Goes The Year

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Post Election Malaise
  • Year in Review
  • Gaza and Israel
  • Auto Bailout
  • Retail Fail
  • Last Year’s Predictions
  • Madoff Reactions
  • 2009 Predictions

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First Hundred Days

(from Good Magazine via Matthew Yglesias)

I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but never got around to it. Click through on the image above to see it at a readable size. It is a rundown of the events that occurred in the first 100 days of each Presidency since FDR.

Some abbreviated highlights:

  • FDR: Emergency banking and stimulus legislation
  • Truman: VE Day ends the European part of WWII, Signs the UN Charter
  • Eisenhower: Not much
  • JFK: Starts the Peace Corp, Bay of Pigs Invasion
  • Johnson: Not much
  • Nixon: Starts secretly bombing Cambodia
  • Ford: Pardons Nixon
  • Carter: Not Much
  • Reagan: Gets shot
  • GHW Bush: Not much
  • Clinton: Kills a bunch of Branch Davidians at Waco
  • GW Bush: Not much

Looks like “not much” is a decent possibility. We’ll see how Obama does.

I Shall Be Mr. Sneeze

That is what Brandy says I should be as I roam the streets sneezing on evildoers. Suggestions for my costume are welcome.

Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US
(John Harlow, Times Online, 28 Dec 2008)

There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who are willing to dress up as comic book heroes and patrol the urban streets in search of, if not super-villains, then pickpockets and bullies.

They may look wacky, but the superhero community was born in the embers of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when ordinary people wanted to do something short of enlisting. They were boosted by a glut of Hollywood superhero movies.

In recent weeks, prompted by heady buzz words such as “active citizenry” during the Barack Obama campaign, the pace of enrolment has speeded up. Up to 20 new “Reals”, as they call themselves, have materialised in the past month.

The Real rules are simple. They must stand for unambiguous and unsponsored good. They must create their own Spandex and rubber costumes without infringing Marvel or DC Comics copyrights, but match them with exotic names – Green Scorpion in Arizona, Terrifica in New York, Mr Xtreme in San Diego and Mr Silent in Indianapolis.

They must shun guns or knives to avoid being arrested as vigilantes, even if their nemeses may be armed. Their best weapon is not muscle but the internet – an essential tool in their war on crime is a homepage stating the message of doom for super-villains.

(via Fark)

November 2004 Top Ten!

It has once again been a long time since I did one of these, so for background anybody new can check out the post I did last time. In any case, yesterday I finally put out the results of another Email Top Ten and notified the winners. Today I post on the blog. Click through on the link below for full results:

November 2004

When I put out the October 2004 list back in March of 2007, I said that I would try to catch up by counting subsequent months at a rate of at least one month a month… well, given that it is now 21 months later, and I am only now putting out the results for November 2004, I obviously failed utterly at that. I have no real excuse either, as October 2004 was the last month effected directly by the great email disaster of 2004. November 2004 was intact and easily counted by the normal means… as are all months since then.

The timeliness and relevance of this exercise is now more than questionable, and the original purpose of the top ten… namely as a mechanism to encourage friends to keep in touch by sending email, has been eroded quite a bit by the fact that these updates are now more than four years behind real time. But never the less, being stubborn as I am, I will persist. And once again I will say that I will attempt to do these counts at a pace fast enough to eventually catch up with real time. But sometimes life gets in the way.

As I said, I will try not to wait quite as long before doing the next one. I have to do more than one a month in order to eventually catch up.

DVD: Amadeus

Time for another movie. This time it was my turn. And specifically, it was time for another from the AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies list. Having started at #100 almost a decade ago, I’m now at #53, Amadeus. It was long… on a double sided DVD that you actually had to flip over… so we split it over two nights of viewing.

Anyway, I think I had seen parts of it on TV over the years, but am not sure that I ever saw the whole thing straight through. If I had, I did not remember.

The movie of course won all kinds of awards after it came out in 1984. Sometimes that sort of thing holds up, sometimes it does not. In any case, I liked the movie. I’m always a sucker for period pieces and character stuff, and this was pretty much 100% that sort of thing. No chases and such, just period costumes, psychological drama, and lots of Mozart music as you track Mozart’s life and interaction with Salieri. It is the kind of thing that after you are done compels you to go read a whole bunch of Wikipedia pages to learn more about the actual people and events as compared to the fictionalized version. Well, OK, at least it compelled me to do so. I probably spent a couple hours starting at the Mozart and Salieri pages and branching out from there to a variety of related people and topics.

Amy did not watch this movie with me, but Brandy did. She had watched it when it first came out, but not since. She said she had remembered she liked it, but was less impressed this time around. And particularly, she was annoyed by the character of Mozart’s wife. Personally, I liked the wife. OK, she was a bit whiny at times, and did not seem particularly bright. But she was cute. :-)

Anyway, for those who haven’t seen it in awhile, and who like this kind of movie, it is worth the rental.

A Change on the S&P

I have heard through the grapevine, although I have not confirmed for myself, that my old employer, Merrill Lynch, which will soon cease to exist as an independent entity, is being replaced on the S&P 100 by my current employer. Seems somewhat appropriate. At least for me.