Last week, at a summit featuring such noted nutrition experts as SpongeBob SquarePants and Jared the Subway sandwich guy, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that forbids public schools from selling sodas.
— The Center for Consumer Freedom, 9/21/2005Multiple-choice gun safety
I finally got around to acquiring California’s new Handgun Safety Certificate, one of the pointless bureaucratic hoops the state makes you jump through before you can buy a handgun. There’s still the ten day waiting period and background check, the mandatory trigger lock, the safe-storage requirements, the one-a-month purchase limit, and, of course, the limited selection created by ineptly second-guessing the manufacturer’s ability to create a safe, functional product.
No one has been able to demonstrate even a tiny benefit to society from any of these laws, but then again, who would have rationally expected one? There is very little overlap between “people who obey gun laws” and “people who commit crimes with guns,” after all, and legislators who vote for gun-control laws know this.
Munitions go boom
Well, actually it’s just the DNS server, which I have no control over. It looks like the caches started timing out around midnight. IP address for munitions.com is 209.81.13.66.
Landscaping
As a happy suburbanite, I like having an attractive yard. As a mostly-nocturnal, white-collar kind of guy, though, I don’t like actually going out there and doing the work myself.
I just met with my favorite landscaping contractor (Richard’s and Adan’s Landscape - Maintenance, serving Monterey County, CA) yesterday to have him trim, weed, and replant my front and back yards. Fairly basic stuff, but the jasmine is taking over the sidewalk, one of the trees is growing so well that it’s tearing itself apart in the wind, the weeds grew four feet high while my back was turned, and about a third of the plants front and back have died from my benign neglect.
"How could you not know?"
As airport-restaurant dinners go, it should have been one of the best. I was sharing a table with three friends, two of whom were former Playboy centerfold models. Good people. Reasonable food. Interesting conversation.
Then the topic turned to astrology.
HTML forms suck
It didn’t shock me to discover this, but it was one of those things about the web that I hadn’t really played with seriously. Then I started trying to expose all of the parameters for my random web colors page, so people could tinker with the color-generation rules.
Not only did the form add 24K to the page size, it increased the rendering time by about an order of magnitude.
Death Manga
I’ve been away from the comics scene for a while now. Indeed, I just dumped most of mine into my storage unit because I hadn’t opened the boxes in years and had other uses for the space. I still wander into a comic shop once every few months, but there’s very little that I want to buy.
This, however, I could not pass up. Death of The Endless, already the cutest goth chick in the known universe, in a breezy manga-styled graphic novel. And it’s as good as it sounds.
Color combinations for web sites
I’ve stumbled across two interesting tools recently. The first is the Mac application ColorDesigner, which generates random color combinations with lots of tweakable knobs. The second is Cal Henderson’s online color-blindness simulator, designed to show you how your choice of text and background colors will appear to someone with color-deficient vision.
I decided to try to merge the two together into a single web page, using Mason and Cal’s Graphics::ColorDeficiency Perl module. It’s not done yet, but it’s already fun to play with: random web colors.
Right now, the randomizer is hardcoded, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll be adding a form to expose all of the parameters.
Online music done right
Just for amusement, a list of the albums and songs I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store since it went online.
Complete albums:
- A Wonderful World, Tony Bennett & k.d. lang
- Jazz Cello, Ray Brown
- The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, Ray Charles
- In Blue, The Corrs
- Count Basie's Finest Hour, Count Basie
- Getz for Lovers, Stan Getz
- Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, Stan Getz
- Best of Al Jarreau, Al Jarreau
- B.B. King: Anthology, B.B. King
- Late at Night with Dean Martin, Dean Martin
- The Best of the Moody Blues, The Moody Blues
- Confirmation: The Best of the Verve Years, Charlie Parker
- Blues Etude, Oscar Peterson
- Tracks, Oscar Peterson
- We Get Requests, Oscar Peterson Trio
- With Respect to Nat, Oscar Peterson Trio
- Oscar Peterson: Stéphane Grappelli Quartet, Vol. 1, Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli
- Liz Phair, Liz Phair
- The Dynamic Duo, Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery
- Great American Marches I, John Philip Sousa
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Trevor Jones & The London Symphony Orchestra
Individual Songs:
- You've Made Me so Very Happy, Blood, Sweat & Tears
- Do You Wanna Hold Me?, Bow Wow Wow
- Takin' It to the Streets, The Doobie Brothers
- What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers
- Radar Love, Golden Earring
- The Day Basketball Was Saved, Jackson 5
- I Think It's Love, Jermaine Jackson
- Laura, Billy Joel
- Beth, Kiss
- Detroit Rock City, Kiss
- King of the Night Time World, Kiss
- Shout It Out Loud, Kiss
- Head to Toe, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam
- Insanity, Liz Phair
- Don't Stand so Close to Me, The Police
- Every Morning, Sugar Ray
- Macho Man, Village People
