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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Why Roscoe Isn’t Allowed in the Bedroom

Dog Pillow
(Scott Adams, Dilbert.com, 2 Jan 2009)

Few things are more soothing than sleeping with a warm puppy. I decided to use the dog as sort of a little pillow for my snout. It felt wonderful to snuggle my nose in between her ear and her neck area. She was totally unconscious so she took any position I assigned. It was great, but perhaps one more adjustment would make it perfect. I decided to put one arm around her and slip my hand under her head, just to get extra comfy. But there was just one problem.

HER HEAD WAS MISSING!

Click through to read the full thing and surprise ending. :-)

Amy Statement of Sing

The above is a statement Amy had to write as part of the application process for her current school. This was quite awhile ago at this point, but I only recently got a copy of it back. At the time it was written, I remember thinking “Wow, that came out of Amy?” as this was written completely without prompting and without any interference or coaching from any adult.

Wrong Comparison

Another something I’ve been meaning to post for a long time but never got around to:

The Real Great Depression
(Scott Reynolds Nelson, Chronicle Review, 17 Oct 2008)

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

(via The Daily Dish)

OK, Cute

(via DCW)

Happy New MegaBears!

(from DShort via Calculated Risk)

Sara’s New Bed

For Christmas we sent Sara a bed just like the kind Roscoe likes.

HNYTY HNYTY

It is now 2009! (UTC of course.)

Woo! Good riddance 2008!

OK fine, it was a fun year.

But still.

Woo!

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.