Archive for April, 2003

EPA agents are being used a personal servants, more proof that Saddam worked with Bin Laden, my former economics proffesor Dr Reynolds on his experience at the Dept of Labor, and a very informative interview of Victor Davis Hanson about Iraq, education, and left/right bias in universities.

Last year, I bought an IBM keyboard from CyberRebate, which sold stuff at many times the cost of rebate value, promising to give you a 100% rebate in exchange for paying many times the actual worth of the stuff it sold. If that sounds like a pyramid scheme, it was, and CyberRebate went bankrupt (over $11mln in debt) the week before it was supposed to ship me my $110 check for my $15 keyboard. Even worse, the keyboard driver only worked on Win98/NT, which says something about the crappy companies IBM allows to use its brand name.

Anyway, two weeks ago, I won an Ebay auction for a cool new Logitech keyboard, which was shipped by UPS, and finally got here yesterday. Unfortunately, I was taking a class when the brown truck came by, so I couldn’t be home to sign for it. Meanwhile, my fourth bike was stolen from outside my apartment. This was my third bike stolen this year, all from right outside my apartment. It was a cheap, broken down bike, not worth $10 (after having had two expensive bikes being stolen, I learned my lesson) but my regular transportation is also broken at the moment, so I have to walk a mile to class right around finals. What’s even force is that I had a class right around the time the keyboard was to be delivered today, so as I walked home in my jeans and 82°F, I was hoping to get back before the UPS came by. About ¾ of a mile from home, I saw the UPS truck pull away from my home street, and suddenly became sufficiently frustrated with the $#*$& bastards who stole all my bikes to run half a mile after the truck, track it down in a neighboring block, and proceed to get my package delivered in propria persona. I am still out $110 and four bicycles, but with a shiny new keyboard, I feel much better.

In other news, in my foreign policy class today, we were discussion US unilateralism, and I gave a passionate defense of US unilateralism, bashed European collectivism, Bush’s fence-sitting, AND Clinton’s pragmatism. With the possible exception of the two political thought finals next week, I will never again have to regurgitate Statist BS in a commie POLS class. From now on, you’re only going to hear 100% uncensored, unplugged, uncut greedy capitalist propaganda. Down with collectivism and pass the ammunition!

(Btw, I just plugged in my Logitech Internet Navigator keyboard, and not only am I able to use two keyboards at the same time, but Win XP’s native driver has built-in support for the multimedia keys! The keyboard has a great, albeit slightly too light touch, and in addition to my iFeel mouse, and Wingman joystick, Logitech is the only hardware company about which I don’t have any complaints.)

Check out today’s Cox and Forkum on the topic of my earliest post. Then read Turning Iraq Into Another Iran. Also interesting is an acount of media bias at Hootinan.

Yes, Fox reporters are so popular that they have their own fan sites, and Jennifer looks pretty "fair" and balanced to me Any day now, Iraqi women are going to riot against having such good-looking American women walking around without rags on their heads…

^{(Thanks, StarsnStripes)}

The power went out in College Station last week, and Texas A&M shut down for the day as the stop lights in the entire city died (see the photo I took above.) Moments after my power died, I heard the generator in the private dorm come on, while the rest of the city remained dark. Going to my [canceled] class, I overheard various cell phone conversations as one person said "pray for power" and another "the main power line for [XYZ] generator is down." (I leave the metaphysics lesson up to you.) In a scene eerily reminiscent to a certain book, I later heard that the power failure had been greatly compounded by faulty infrastructure caused by massive bureaucratic regulation of the state’s power grid. (My own conclusion.) The official response to nearly 4 hours without power? Keeping the citizens safe from food poisoning:

As the power outage stretched into its third hour, the Brazos County Health Department ordered all area retail food outlets without power to close the doors."There is a simple law under the Texas Food Establishment Laws that once food is being kept below 45 degrees it is no longer safe to eat," said Julie Anderson, spokeswoman for the health department. "We tried to get the message out through the radio, but some restaurants said they wouldn’t close so we sent inspectors out there," Anderson said, adding that they ended up having to urge only one to shut down.

Meanwhile, as the stop lights in the entire city died, I watched one-time coordination scenarios play out over and over, as thousands of students who had only been driving for a few years somehow managed to avoid hitting each other, and while traffic backed up, there were no major accidents and only a few horn blows. A policeman tried to direct traffic on one street, but seemed to give up when the drivers did a better job directing traffic on their own. Alternation between cross-traffic seemed to happen by momentum: whenever a driver paused before crossing an intersection, the cars next to him would pause as well, giving the cars and pedestrians on the intersection a chance to cross. When the first pedestrian or car paused before crossing the intersection, the other side would get started, starting the next cycle. The biggest pauses were caused by unaware or aggressive drivers who tried to initiate crossing the intersection without waiting for a prompt from the other side. All in all, an interesting study in game theory.