The Iggblog

So this company Wicked Lasers recently came out with a new toy. When I look at it, I think to myself “I should never own anything like this” and “I have to have one” at the same time. Previously, high powered laser “pointers” would go for pretty ridiculous amounts. Usually the high hundreds to over a thousand dollars. The reason this device is surprising is not only that it is ridiculously powerful (1 watt is massive for a diode laser), but it’s only $200 because they were able to get the diodes for very on their end. The other laser they show in the beginning of the video is $2000, for example (and ~400 mW). Ok enough blabbing. I’m really only posting this because I wanted to show the video. Love the transition from the little laser’s “oh look you can kind of see the beam even without smoke!” to the big one’s “… Holy shit”

Original source: Gizmodo

So there’s this guy at our place with a Segway. You know, the dorky pogo stick with wheels that middle age yuppies and mall cops think are really cool. Well, this guy thinks it’s real cool. And he’s fucking creepy about it. I first heard about CSG one saturday morning when Emily came into the apartment after doing something or other downstairs. She said “did you know there was a guy with a Segway that lives here?” to which I of course said no. I mean, who really owns those things in real life? Turns out, that guy does.

Not only did she run into this random dude with a Segway, he was in the elevator. Standing in the back corner of the elevator car. On his Segway. Staring at the doorway when it opened. I’ve never run into him in that capacity, but I have seen him come out the back door of our apartment tower to take the trash out to the dumpster, buzzing along on his merry way. This struck me as odd since it isn’t exactly a long haul to the dumpster. I used my trusty jet pack to get a good view to illustrate:

(clicky for larger image)

I mean, a minute or so out in the harsh wide open. Maybe he’s a vampire, and he’s afraid he’ll either burn up if he’s outside for too long… or blind some people with his sparkly skin (depending on your flavor of vampire). The really creepy part is that he was just throwing away small bags, and we have trash chutes on each floor that they could have easily fit in. Maybe he didn’t want the facilities guy going through his trash in the morning? Sounding more and more like this guy is ditching body parts.

Today it got even more weird… I saw this random creepy white van when I was driving into the parking lot. It’s never been here before. It looked like someone was moving or something, because the back was open and there was what I thought was a dolly on the back. Nope, it was a Segway. Just like the trash incidents, it’s only a couple dozen paces from the door. And although he’s not exactly in underwear model shape, he’s not so massive and slovenly that he needs a machine to get around. So there CSG was, washing down the outside of his totally not sketchy windowless white van. Cleaning blood, no doubt. Dismembering bodies is messy business.

Although I risked life and limb to get this next picture, I figured the internet deserved more than one lousy shot. So stealthy as I could I got another. It’s not immediately obvious from the thumbnail, but he is no in fact riding the Segway naked. Although I’m guessing that’s in the near future. He’s just wearing skin colored clothes. I guess it could be clothes made of skin, I was kind of far away…

On the subject of the the following article,

Full Text (via Huffington Post)

I often think I could have been a lawyer or a politician. I think a lot of this generations bright and well meaning potential politicians have been scared off by how much BS and red tape there is in the way of “doing good” in office. And they ended up engineers like me. I think if there wasn’t an ez-mode vote-for-your-party bipartisan system, people would be forced to investigate issues more before voting. It would be inconvenient, but in my opinion people aren’t entitled to an easy voting process. If hard issues come up, you should have to think about them before putting your hand in.

Criminalizing gay marriage, and laws prohibiting it in general, are wrong. I can’t find any argument not religious or at least reasonably tangentially/implicitly religious (EG, “that’s the way we’ve always done it”) that holds any water in this area. I’m not into dudes, but I don’t see why that should be the next dude’s problem if he is. In fact it’s nice to know that option is there, because that tells me my peers are good free thinking people, not squirming under the thumb of fear or authority. I’m tired of seeing words like “abomination” and “unnatural” trying to keep people from the lifestyle they want to pursue.

In fact, I’ve gone to the trouble of re-hosting PDF copies of The Constitution and The Bill of Rights for your convenience. A quick search shows zero results for the words God and Christian. But go on and see for yourself.

The Constitution
The Bill of Rights

Separation of church and state is out there. From what I gather, there are political parties that refute that. But they’re wrong. It’s on the books. In a number of places. Each instance and incarnation of it being put as a reaffirmation of the facts that we were not founded on any religion, that the political powers in this country have no place making decisions on peoples’ religion, and that political powers in this country have no place using religion (popular or not) to make laws. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc all converge towards the idea of freedom of thought… so long as expressing those freedoms doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights. So long as such freedoms don’t interfere the next guy’s set of those freedoms. I don’t see how two consenting adults of the same sex doing what they want in the freedom of their own homes* encroaches on anyone else. Or even how such a couple getting married encroaches on anyone’s rights. No matter how much you want it, and I have no idea why you would want such a thing, you are NOT entitled to the company of purely heterosexual peers. You’re just not. Like it, hate it, it’s your right to harbor any opinion you want. But you don’t get to inflict it on someone else’s desire to live a lifestyle.

Now forget, if you’d like, everything I’ve said here. Just using that pair of links above, reconcile the following proposals for the Republican platform in Texas.
(Keep in mind, I make no claims for or against Republicans or Democrats in general. As I’ve said before, I think the bipartisan system is stupid. I merely put in “Republican” as a qualifier of the source)

* “We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases.”

* “Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have beenordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.”

* “Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.”

My point should be obvious and I think any more flavor text would just serve to bore. So I’ll finish up here. If those above points in the Texas GOP platform doesn’t horrify you, it really should. By all means, feel free to holler at me if you find some huge holes in my what I’ve said here. I always welcome opposing opinions.

EDIT – Before punching submit on this article I decided to go to The Texas GOP’s website. The place reads like it was written by a bunch of ignorant vindictive 16 year olds.

Yes, that’s for really reals. Adults wrote that, for other adults to think about and vote on. On a site for a potentially authoritative political party.

Disclaimer: I’m not telling you to vote democrat, or that republican is bad. Again, see the first paragraph of this post. I’m simply commenting on this platform for this party in this state.

*FOOTNOTE: When I wrote this, I meant “in the privacy of their own homes” as a meta statement meaning “in their own lives”. But as was pointed out to me, this implies a few things I did not intend. Taken from Asinine in this thread:

“My one gripe with what you’ve said is the mention of “in their own homes.” I think the “in their own homes” qualifier (your next sentence notwithstanding) really needs to go the way of the dodo bird when talking about gay rights for two reasons: 1) it implicitly, no matter how inadvertently, reduces a gay “relationship” to simply sex. Think about it for a second. When we say, “do what you want behind closed doors”, isn’t that the “between the lines” implication? And 2) why should it be a dirty secret?”

Which is a very valid point, and a very good caution about using popularized statements. I leave my initial post unedited as a good example of how these things can be misconstrued, and why things should be stated carefully and specifically.

So I’ve been away from blog-land for a while.  I recently migrated my main server for iggdawg.com from FreeBSD to Ubuntu, mostly due to lack of CUDA support on FreeBSD.  The details aren’t important, and you probably aren’t here to listen to techno-babble.  Unfortunately during the move, a Bad Thing happened and I managed to lose my WordPress database.  This sort of put me off to blogging in general for a while since WordPress has been my main medium for a while, and I really wasn’t motivated to start from scratch.  Recently though I was looking around the software again, tinkering with the idea of starting it all up again, when I found that WordPress had a quick and dirty livejournal import tool.  I’d been crossposting to LJ since I started using my own blog, simply because I’ve been on it for so long.  It never even occurred to me that I more or less had a backup copy of everything sitting around.

So the upshot of all this is that not only did I get all my posts back, but I have my entire livejournal history imported into WordPress.  All the way back to 2002 when I first hooked up to LJ to keep in touch with Brian.  To boot now I have all my comments from people sync’d up as well.  The only downside is that my imported posts now have that little “you can comment over at iggdawg.com too!” footer from my crossposts.  I can’t think of an easy way to zap all of them, and its ironically self-serving ugliness serves as a scar to be more careful with my backups and server migrations.

Anyways, it’s good to be back writing on my internets again.  Moderate cleverness and tolerable complaining are coming soon to an internet near you!