Archive for uncategorized

A Gorey Begin

January 26, 2008 at 3:20 pm · Filed under uncategorized

The Edward Gorey Ball last night was a fabulous! The inclusion of exhibits and booths really added a lot to the night. The level of creativity and style present was inspiring — especially JD’s amazing crosshatch scope tree. I feel privileged to have such awesome creative friends!

I was looking forward to the ball for the fashion eye candy and the chance to see my friends dressed to the nines, and I certainly got that. However, I was happily surprised to find myself engaged in several deep and meaningful conversations throughout the night. It’s really a rare thing to have conversations beyond the simple “Hi you look lovely” at events like that. I wasn’t alone in this assessment either as SFSlim and Nifer also mentioned that they had the same experience.

Really a fabulous time over all!

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People like this make it hard to be a “nice” skeptic

November 16, 2007 at 2:52 pm · Filed under uncategorized + Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Politics

The Society of Homeopaths is holding a symposium on the treatment of AIDS in December. Their flier states that “Harry van der Zee will introduce us to a completely different and controversial treatment for AIDS in Africa using a new set of healing remedies created by Peter Chappell.”

And what is this “completely different and controversial treatment” you ask? He offers “healing downloads”:

“Downloads are based upon resonance which is an ancient principle for healing and resonance is a natural law that has always existed. Modern quantum physics is confirming resonance works on all levels of existence.”

And how do you get these “healing downloads”? Well he sells them on iTunes of course “engrafted” onto jazz music!

“The music is simply the carrier and alerts you to listen. The download is engrafted on the music by a special process. That is the new technology.”

Hell maybe we can just preload his quantum engrafted ancient healing resonance music on all those XO Laptops! That’ll solve the African AIDS crisis in no time!

ugh

It’s this sorta shit that pisses me off about hemopathology and all the other new ager placebo crap. I’m not gonna even bother disproving hemopathology for you here as others have done it better than me.

I ran into someone tangentially in my social circle the other day who exclaimed the benefits of using magnets to balance the body. I admit that my initial response was mildly snarky, and in turn their response was basically an outright distrust of “western medicine” because that’s “how [they] were raised.” For them it had become a religion.

Reiki, acupuncture, hemeopathology, prayer, MMR vaccine hysteria, witch doctors, raping virgins to get rid of AIDS — it’s all part of the same circle of faith-based medicine. At best it’s hucksterism sucking money out of wallets of dupes; and at worst it’s spreading disinformation and killing patients who forgo vaccines and real treatment. Obviously, it’s mostly the latter that pisses me off about the former.

When faced with this sorta new ager stuff (fairly common here in San Francisco), I think it’s important to challenge these ideas. However, it can be hard not to come off sounding disdainful (because frankly that’s basically how I feel).

Any other skeptics out there have ways of approaching these conversations?

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Medic Computer Down!

November 15, 2007 at 1:22 pm · Filed under uncategorized

Been in self tech support hell lately. A couple weeks ago, a power outage switched off my external drive in the middle of it being used which destroyed the file hierarchy. For various reasons it took about a week to recover all the data which didn’t live elsewheres. I restored the hard drive and copied everything back on to it.

Then just a couple days ago, my laptop froze up and then refused to boot again. I launched it in firewire target disk mode — which thankfully worked — attached it to Nifer’s machine, and backed up everything in my home folder to my external. Then I rebooted with a bootable DiskWarrior cd and set it to repair. This seemed to work. My machine booted, I immediately installed superduper and did a full clone of my laptop.

The next day, it froze again. I ran DiskWarrior again and it repaired a couple useless permissions but that was about it. Interestingly, it would boot in safe mode fine, but normal boots always resulted in either a generic lockup or this lovely corrupt stack kernel panic message:

Last night, I tried doing a fresh install of the operating system just in case. Unfortunately, the install process just errored out every time.

At this point, it’s looking like a hardware issue, so tonight I’ll run TechTool on it.

I’m glad I can do my own tech support, but I really wish I didn’t have to — I don’t have time for this.

UPDATE: TechTool was worthless as it said everything was peachy. I tried removing the one 3rd party RAM chip I have in there and sure enough that seems to have done the trick so far. Install completed fine and it loaded alright. Now I’m just restoring block-level from my superduper backup as I figure it wasn’t a software problem.

I’ll need to get some more RAM though as 256MB is just not enough. Interestingly it says lifetime warranty on the chip so I’ll have to look into that.

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Travel Hatinerary

November 13, 2007 at 11:58 pm · Filed under uncategorized

I’m heading to PA/OH to see the fabulous Morley and my Grandparents.

Step one: public transit — my least favorite part. The MUNI bus was late by 15min (hence the sour look on my face in the photo). I’m now
on BART on my way to OAK which is going ok so far.

I’m packed light. Only a simple backpack and no laptop. Burning Man has taught me how to pack with the minimum of gear, but it took a bit of digital prep work to not bring the laptop.

I had slideshows I wanted to bring, music, and videos. I kicked together a couple slideshows to show the grandfolks and put them both on my iphone and on a flash drive. Music housed several places: shuffle for simple tunes and long battery life, iPhone for all my current favs, and my old iPod 3G 40gig for hauling the rest and storage. I rearranged a bunch of my music on it, adding a bunch of new stuff I’ve gotten recently but have yet to fully listen to. Unfortunately, the battery in my 3G dies faster than an anorexic on a desert isle, but it’s good for when I can plug in. I powered it up last night, and I’m curious how long it’ll last.
I also converted my DVD of The Decent to iPhone format and loaded it on, so I have something to watch on the plane. Wish I had time to convert another movie — oh well.

K time to get off BART!

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28X airport express

October 8, 2007 at 6:49 am · Filed under uncategorized

Notice the smile? That’s what happens when the bus is on time and leaves on time and has nice padded seats. Granted the 28X is a airport express bus but still it’s quite nicer then my public transit experience in Oakland.

I’ve had a lovely trip so far and I’m glad I didn’t lug the laptop. The iPhone is quite fine. Must say it is rather odd being away with the whole twitter thing. I know the gist of everything my friends are doing back there on the west coast — and the gaps in my knowledge are more apperant because of it.

Morley and I fit a lot in to the past couple days. A little sightseeing and Italian food in the Strip District, line dancing to crazy gypsy music, drinks at an awesomely decorated club (what Noc Noc should look like), and a wonderful excursion through the autumn tinged countryside to fallingwater. I’ve come away with a excellent feel for Pittsburgh.

I’m writing this on the aforementioned bus on the way to the airport to pick up my rental.* Heading to Stubenville to see my grandparents.

*note thrifty’s website is clean and functional and works really well on the iPhone even over Edge. Dollar’s on the otherhand is unusuable on the iPhone.

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Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones oh my!

July 19, 2007 at 12:27 am · Filed under uncategorized + Design & Web Geekery

I’m full of big geeky joy because I got my convoluted email situation all working exactly how I wanted it!

On Edit: I’ve updated my approach to this and written a better description plus tutorial in a new post. I suggest you read the new post and skip this one unless you are interested in the process I went through to get to my current solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

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