The Latest Political “WTF?”

Published at 22:49 on 30 June 2012

The President of Paraguay was recently impeached, not because he broke any laws or anything, but for so-called “poor performance of his duties”. In this case, that means firing two officials (the chief of the national police and the minister of the interior) in the wake of violence involving the national police. To make matters stranger, the votes in congress were both wildly in favor of the impeachment, meaning that they were backed both by the impeached president’s own party and the opposition.

I’ll confess to not knowing much about the Paraguayan constitution, but if Paraguay is like most countries, both sacked officials supposedly serve under the president and at the president’s approval. That’s probably why a number of neighboring leaders aren’t taking too kindly to the antics. This includes President Piñera of Chile, who is from a right-wing political party, so this can’t be accurately portrayed as simply a case of leftist leaders trying to shield one of their own from being held accountable for malfeasance (of which there really doesn’t seem to be any).

More details here and here.

An Executive Summary of Ruby

Published at 10:06 on 15 June 2012

I’m having to learn it for work purposes, and have already studied the language enough to be able to offer the following brief executive summary:

Ruby is a merger of an elegant, Scheme-like language which offers functional programming and metaprogramming with an ugly Perl-like syntax and design philosophy.

Thinking of Moving to Portland? Read This!

Published at 18:54 on 12 June 2012

No, I’m not going to rehash why I’ve chosen to leave Portland and not return; I’ve done that enough already, and most of the reasons for doing so are personal and thus not necessarily applicable to most others.

And no, I’m not going to try and talk anyone out of it. Portland is indeed by many measures a great place to live.

What I am going to do is warn anyone against moving there without a job in the hopes of finding one once there. Unless you have a lot of money squirreled away, and are prepared to weather a significant period (read: a year or more) of unemployment, don’t do this!

Portland has the most depressed economy of any major West Coast city. Expecting a job — any job, but especially a good job — to materialize just because The Great You just moved there is the epitome of self-centered magical thinking. I’m still subscribed to a Portland-area mailing list, and I’ve lost count of how many “Help! I moved here and a job did not materialize for me!” type messages I have seen.

To reiterate: it is not easy to find work in Portland. Even for what are entry-level service positions in most other major metro areas, in Portland employers will expect experience, often significant experience. If you don’t have that, they will throw your résumé out and move on. And odds are they will find someone with the desired experience.

Also, don’t assume because that because you do meet the minimum requirements for a job, even a menial one, you can easily score one. You might end up competing with (and losing to) other applicants who well exceed those requirements.

I am not being negative here; I am merely being realistic. There are many great things about Portland, but the local economy is definitely not one of them. It stinks.

If you’re itching to try living in Portland, find the job first, then move. Or be successfully self-employed. Or save up a lot of money and gird yourself. Or fly out and couch-surf with friends and be prepared to fly back if you don’t find anything.

Just don’t pull up stakes and expect something to materialize because you need it. Or I will just say I told you so.

Cautiously Optimistic the Bastards are All Dead

Published at 19:25 on 8 June 2012

I’m back home after fleeing for a week to let the scabies mites die in my absence, after treating myself a second time with permethrin. After some worrying false alarms caused by scratching provoking old rash areas to temporarily inflame (only to calm down in a matter of hours), I’m at the point of being on the optimistic side. Though it’s probably going to be a while before I cease worrying completely about reinfection, given how hard it was to get rid of the infection.

I have yet to figure out how, absent a good measure of luck, one is supposed to ditch the buggers without doing as I did. The insecticidal ointment is intended to be applied before bedtime, left on for 8 to 14 hours, and washed off in the morning. Given that, there’s really not enough time to do the thorough cleaning you’re supposed to do while you’re toxic to the mites.

Which leaves two options for performing the cleaning, both of them unacceptable: Attempt to do the cleaning prior to treatment, and risk infecting what you are attempting to clean, or do the cleaning after treatment, and risk reinfecting yourself.

Another Ugly Truth

Published at 08:45 on 30 May 2012

Is that my first attempt at scabies treatment failed so it’s time to start another, more thorough and expensive, one. I’ll be off line for most of a week because this treatment involves leaving my apartment for a week with basically only the clothes on my back, because one likely possibility is that I am infected with hypervirulent scabies mites and I reinfected myself while attempting to cleanse infected items.

The Ugly Truth Starts to Come Out

Published at 08:19 on 30 May 2012

And that’s that the ill-considered initiative measure to privatize liquor sales in Washington State is certain to increase prices. The Establishment media is at this late hour, one week before the state liquor stores close for good, starting to feebly offer the caution that prices “might” go up.

Really, now, how couldn’t they? One of the measure’s selling points, trumpeted by its advocates, was that it would not reduce revenues to the state; the legislation was crafted to be revenue neutral. And capitalists are capitalists: in the retail liquor business, as in any business, the goal of business is to make a profit.

So, the state is still making its profit. To that picture, we now add capitalists taking their cut. Just where is that money going to come from? Does anyone honestly think the new for-profit liquor stores are going to harvest C-notes from a secret orchard of money trees and make their money that way? This is not rocket science we are talking about.

Sure, some of it is going to come from union-busting and pushing worker pay down. But that can only go so far. The advocates of paying workers less always overestimate the profits for owners that this will generate.

In short, prices will go up. It’s as close a thing to a future certainty that a simple economic analysis can predict.

Die, Fuckers! DIE!!!!

Published at 21:33 on 22 May 2012

Today I went to the doctor, expecting to launch a protracted odyssey trying to figure out how to find the root cause of a mysterious (and increasingly annoying to the point of becoming intolerable) allergic itch that has been plaguing me ever since I moved. That’s because allergies, particularly chemical sensitivity ones, are not something that Western medicine understands very well.

Instead, Western medicine, in the personage of my physician, took one look at me and informed me I had scabies. Not having had any intimate contact in years, the only plausible way I could have gotten it is via some re-used box utilized by the movers to pack my bedding. Which I believe they did, given that they showed early in the morning before I had much chance to pack it myself.

The good news is that it’s something Western medicine understands very well and has excellent treatments for. The bad news is that I now have to try and decontaminate any piece of cloth I might have touched in the past several days. That, and, and the fact that killing the little bastards responsible doesn’t make the damnable itch go away promptly.

Clouds, the Bane of Astronomy in the Pacific Northwest

Published at 16:56 on 20 May 2012

Mind you, in general I’m happy to live in a place where I don’t feel continually under assault by overly-strong sunlight which is threatening to burn my skin, but whenever something in the skies grabs my interest, sometimes I end up wishing I lived someplace that wasn’t so continually cloudy.

And so it is today, when the eclipse is happening above a thick layer of overcast which has about zero chance of clearing. And the normal trick of going to the eastern side of the Cascades is of no help today; today’s storm is one of those strong enough to make it across the mountains.

Sigh.

Avoid the Motorola SBG901

Published at 15:16 on 20 May 2012

If you’re in the market for a DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem, I suggest you avoid the Motorola SBG901. Based on my experience, they’re pieces of unreliable junk.

I’ve now tried two, and they both exhibit the same symptom of continually rebooting themselves (causing a lost connection) every few minutes. The modem I’m presently renting from my broadband provider, the Ambit U10C018, almost never does this, so it’s not an issue of my signal from the cable company being weak or unreliable.

Given that two completely different samples have behaved in the same way, I would also have to say that the odds of this being two random defects are pretty low. It appears to be a design defect of this product. A Google search on “motorola sbg901 keeps rebooting” comes up with more than a few matches of others who have run into my problem, which provides further  evidence of a design defect.

It’s a pity, as the Motorola product has the desirable feature of combining a wireless access point with a cable modem in one box.