I don't gamble, but I do play poker. In fact, it turns out I'm pretty good at poker despite still having to sit and calculate the odds sometimes. One thing that playing poker has helped me learn is that people do stupid things to get ahead. Consequently, there are stupid rules to keep them from doing it.

For example, if a player puts in only one chip and that chip is worth more than the current bet, unless they announce that they are raising that chip is considered a call and they are owed change from the pot. This keeps the player from getting information from other players' reactions prior to deciding if they will call or raise.

Lewis Black has a similar rant on the topic:

They needed to do this because as the Jews were wandering around willy-nilly in the desert, one of them no doubt led a camel up to a rabbi and said, "I met her at an oasis and it's been wonderful. She looked at me in a way that I've always wanted to be looked at. We're in love and, well, Rabbi, we want to be married."

And the rabbi said, "Perhaps you didn't notice, but she's a fucking camel." Then he went back to the other rabbis and informed them, "Son of a bitch, we have to come up with another rule! Today a guy came back with a camel and yesterday one of them showed up with a snapping turtle. God knows what's going to happen tomorrow. We've got to get these people on track." Hence, the man-woman marriage rule in the Bible.

So when you complain that a law is stupid, realize that it's because someone did something stupid to cause it to become a law. When McDonalds started labeling their coffee as 'hot' because of a 'frivolous lawsuit,' realize that the person who brought that lawsuit suffered 3rd degree burns from 'hot' coffee. When you think that helmet laws infringe on your right to let your hair blow in the wind on your motorcycle, realize that it frees others from the trauma of killing you in the event of an accident.

Not that there isn't such a thing as a truly stupid law.

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This weekend was a surprisingly successful deer hunting trip to the great brown north of Minnesota. After sitting for the morning on opening day, I was not expecting to see any deer all weekend. I was pleasantly proven wrong when two fawns walked into sight and hung out long enough to be gutted and dragged out of the woods.

In years past, we've spend the week after deer opener processing meat and freezing it for long-term storage. This has always included removing all the fat and as much of the silver skin as possible prior to freezing. This year, we decided to try timeshifting some of that processing by freezing large pieces of less-processed meat that we'll finish processing when we thaw it out to cook. We're hoping that what this lacks in convenience later will be made up with a lack of frustration now.

I also decided to try another project. I heard about Mocetta last winter from JCC at You Have To Cook It Right. He used the recipe from Hank Shaw at Hunter Angler Gardner Cook after he roasted a whole goat for Frustrated Farmer Rick's fall farm festival at Caerwyn Farm and Spirits. The original Mocetta is a Northern Italian, cured, spiced, air-dried goat leg. Now...I don't have any goats, but I figured that venison leg would be a reasonable substitution.

After cutting up two of the hind legs for roasts and the front legs for burger and sausage (I'm going to try another of Hank's Recipes there) I set aside two of the legs, hopped on my motorcycles and headed over to Penzey's Spices to get some juniper berries. Making the rub was simple enough; Hank's recipe made exactly 1 pound, so splitting it up into two parts was simple. After half an hour of preparation, the hams are sitting in a plastic tub in the refrigerator and I'm waiting not very patiently for the first two weeks to pass and the second application of rub.

I still have some kinks to work out as far as where to hang it when the time comes, but this is an old meat product and I'm sure it, like beer, has been prepared under a wider variety of conditions than I can imagine. Only 6 months to go...

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This was just a few words too long for a tweet.

Exhibit A: The University of Buffalo is about to publish a paper "Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone," in which they examined over forty years of Rolling Stone covers to determine that women are more objectified than men and that women are more objectified than they were in 1967 on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Exhibit B: Psych Central posts an article about the paper in which they use one photo. This photo is not a Rolling Stone cover and shows two women who are clearly quite willing to be comfortable with each other for the camera.

Exhibit C: Business Insider posts an article sourcing the Psych Central article that uses many Rolling Stone covers for illustration, clearly showing women being sexualized.

Exhibit D: Tease.TheDailyWhat picks up the Business insider article exclusively for the photos. They were formerly Hawtness after all.

Exhibit E: I had to dig to find the photo of a sexualized male subject on the cover of the Rolling Stone to use for this post.

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I'm afraid you might be in for a bit of a rambling rant.

On 19 August, 2011, 4 people died at a the Pukkelpop Music Festival in Hasselt Belgium, just 5 days after 4 people were killed by a collapsing stage at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis.

To me, this is a fine example of "build it cheap, get it done, and damn the consequences," a mentality that penetrates any money-making operation. It is also a fine opportunity to discus why we have safety regulations and why they should be enforced.

I would think that restaurants would welcome health inspectors, that factories would welcome safety inspectors, and that construction contractors would welcome building inspectors. I would think that these companies would understand that injuring or killing their customers or employees would not be the desired outcome of their business transactions.

Sadly, as @arclight said on Twitter last night "Every industrial safety regulation can be traced back to at least one headstone."

And from @CaerwynFarm: "You would be surprised how often I have to answer a request at work with "Cuz it is F'ing illegal!"

In the US, it took until 1971 for the government to set up the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Since then the rate of reported serious workplace injuries and illnesses has declined from 11 per 100 workers in 1972 to 3.6 per 100 workers in 2009. There are no accurate statistics from 1970, but it is estimated around 70 workers were killed on the job per 1,000,000 US residents. That number fell to approximately 14 per 1,000,000 in 2009.

If you're a Republican or Libertarian (and if you are why are you reading this?) you'll be about to say something like "I guess you want to live in a nanny state. I, quite frankly, am tired of the one I live in." Which...I guess...is your right...at least to say...but it also makes you a complete ass. How can you possibly feel that employers have the "freedom" to kill their workers or that builders have the "freedom" to kill their customers? The plain fact is that people who profit from cutting corners need nannies to stop them from hurting people for profit.

I find it ironic that the ideology that feels employers should be allowed to maintain unsafe workplaces is the same ideology that feels workers should not be allowed to collectively bargain. Most of the people buying a company's two-bit products probably care less about the people who made them than the company does.

Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Your right not to wear a motorcycle helmet ends at your family suing me for your death in a crash. Your right to build with cheap materials ends at my right not to die when your building falls on me.

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An open letter to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show that they will probably never read AKA slacktivism extraordinaire.

Dear Jon Stewart,

I am a liberal and I love the way you mock hypocrisy even when that mocking is directed at the hypocrisy of other liberals. I am an atheist and I love the way you mock the hypocrisy of religion, even when that mocking is directed at the hypocrisy of others with no religion. I believe that it is a hallmark of liberals that we are able to see both sides of the debate and through that vision have come to side with the most correct side of the debate.

Recently, however, you mocked the American Atheists desire to be free from religious symbols at the September Eleventh Memorial in New York. This moves beyond the mocking of hypocrisy and into the mocking of what minorities already endure on a daily basis.

I agree that the American Atheists could have made their comments more sensitively and they could have avoided openly mocking religion in this context; that's really your job, not theirs. But I can't help but wonder why you are in favor of having a Christian symbol at a national memorial where Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims and others were killed in a horrific, religiously-driven attack against the United States. In other contexts, you seem to be in favor of the First Amendment separation of church and state, why are you against it now?

Atheists endure daily threats of death, violence, rape and vandalism simply because they don't believe in a god. They face daily reminders that the majority of the United States sees them as outsiders. You ask that atheists to 'just think of it as a metal t-shaped thingy.' That is akin to asking blacks in the south faced with the KKK standing on their front lawn to 'just think of them as campers making s'mores with that t-shaped burney thing' or to ask Jews to think of neo-nazi skinheads as 'just clean-shaven history buffs.'

I am happy that this cross currently rests at St. Peter's Church and hope that it will not be moved and included in any state-sponsored memorial or museum. Those i-beams may have been just a t-shaped thingy at one point, but once it has been raised on a concrete plinth and blessed by Christian leaders it becomes a cross, and that cross could only serve to make non-religious visitors to the memorial feel unwelcome.

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I have a problem with the Gnome Keyring. A Keyring is supposed to be a secure place to store passwords for your applications so that you don't have to remember them all, but malicious users and applications won't have access to them. I think Gnome fails on this point.

When I log into my Fedora 14 box in the morning, I'm prompted for my Keyring password so that 'an application' can have access to it. What application? Why? Is this some malware? Is Firefox trying to run a Javascript function to send my passowrds to Romania?

And why is the dialog so freaking huge?

When an application wants access to the Mac OS Keychain, the Keychain is very specific about what application wants it. That way, I can at least know that the application wanting access is 1. something I've opened, and 2. something that needs access to my Keychain.

I'm hoping that Linux will be a good desktop OS someday. It's definitely better than Windows, but sheesh!

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I woke up early today to get in a couple hours of exercise before starting my normal routine. One of the first things I saw was a link to this article about a convicted rapist who won't be doing any time because Judge Robert Dewar in Manitoba said his victim was 'asking for it' by dressing suggestively and kissing her assailant.

Of course, the first thing I thought of was the Not Ever campaign and their advertisement.

I wonder if Judge Dewar would tell a man wearing a Rolex who was robbed at knife-point that they were 'asking for it' by dressing smartly. Or if he would tell a mother who's child was kidnapped that she was 'asking for it' by having an adorable family. Or maybe he'd tell the family of a pedestrian who was killed by a drunk driver that he was 'asking for it' by being out walking after last call.

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I was informed earlier this week that Twitter wasn't updating Facebook for some users. I checked mine and I had nearly a month of tweets that didn't go to Facebook. Shows how much I use Facebook...also tells me why my Facbook friends never commented on my tweets.

Here's the trick, courtesy of Modhran.

1. Log into Facbook and search for the Twitter app, or go directly to it.

2a. If your accounts are not connected, connect them now. (I had to)

2b. Click on "Want to disconnect your Twitter and Facebook accounts?"

3. Log out of Twitter and Facebook.

4. Lock back into Twitter and Facebook.

5. Go back to the Twitter app in Facebook.

6. Re-connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I'm not 100% sure how many of those steps are absolutely necessary, but those are the instructions I followed.

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I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for my own hosting service and on nearly every server I interact with at my day job. So Fedora, as a spin-off of Red Hat, seemed like a logical choice. I chose Fedora 14, since it's the latest and I've heard good things about it.

Like Mac OS, Fedora comes with a good command line interface in the form of a bash shell and terminal application. It, of course, supports SSH out-of-the-box as well as X forwarding for remote X sessions and applications. Under Mac OS, I could emulate the middle-click "paste selection" function in Terminal with [command]-[shift]-v, which was great for pasting output from the terminal into my next sets of commands. Fedora seems to actually require a middle click or some futzing with the keyboard mapping to make one. I haven't dug into it too far, since my laptop keyboard includes a middle-click button next to the trackpad. It's a little annoying to reach over and hit the button but...it works.

Like Windows, X has problems with multiple monitors. On my Mac, I can plug in a monitor and it will turn on and become either a mirror or an extension of my desktop. The Displays preference pane controls which one and what arrangement they are in. If I connect a projector, months later it will remember how I set up that projector and will use the same configuration. Fedora...well...you have to log out and log back in to restart the X window server and allow the new monitor to be recognized by the system. The nVIDIA driver improves the situation a little bit, but not much. With nVIDIA, you don't have to log out and back in, but you might as well.

Unfortunately, using the nVIDIA packages brings up a new problem. Since the nVIDIA parts and the Fedora parts aren't always synchronized, sometimes a kernel update will break the nVIDIA parts and sometimes an nVIDIA update will break the nVIDIA parts. I've had both happen and both were not 'fun' to recover from. In both cases, the laptop would boot, but wouldn't start X. In one case I had to revert to the earlier kernel and in the other case I had to uninstall all the nVIDIA packages and reinstall them.

Strange things seem to happen with the Gnome desktop under Fedora. There's a fast user switcher menu in the upper right corner, next to the clock and calendar menu. Within a day of installing Fedora, all those menus had disappeared. This is apparently a known bug that nobody has bothered to fix. The way to keep it from happening is to disable Compiz, which makes the windows render more slowly. So you have a choice: a fast interface or a broken one.

I find myself using the Mac OS Dashboard for little things like checking CPU use, using the calculator, checking the battery on my wireless keyboard, and looking at the weather forecast. I didn't get much time to play with the Windows 7 sidebar, but in Fedora, I miss having a readily available calculator rather than a calculator application. I also miss having a weather report that shows more than just today. I usually have a terminal open, so I can use htop to see CPU usage or awk to do calculations, but it's not as convenient as the dashboard.

I've been told that Fedora handles software updates extremely well. I've found that to be mostly the case, though it's clearly far better than Windows. I don't think a single day has passed where I have not had at least one package to update. There's two ways to look at that I guess: either Fedora is really on top of fixing stuff or there's a lot of stuff to fix and it's really annoying to have to do it every single day. It's not a huge deal; usually I just run the updater ¹, take whatever it gives me and go about my day as usual. Sometimes there's a second set of packages that has to update after the first (usually selinux-related) package. Sometimes it tells me I need to log out and back in to preserve system security and I go about my day as usual. Once I got this message though:

What's up with that? There's no useful information in that message. I even quit everything that was running and tried it again and got the same message. It only worked right after logging in after a fresh reboot.

I miss Apple's Mail(.app). It orders message threads intuitively. It figures out what messages with different subjects should be part of the same thread. It lets me instantly expand or collapse message threads from anywhere in the thread. It lets me instantly see what I typed as a reply to someone's email. It has an unread message count in it's dock icon. Thunderbird has none of these. Thunderbird adds space to subjects in threads until the subject disappears from my message list. Thunderbird makes me want to switch to using the Gmail web client.

The flash plug-in for Firefox has problems. Since I don't have iTunes on Fedora, I've tried some alternate methods of getting music to come out of my computer. Rythmbox works okay but obviously won't play any of my DRM protected music. So I've tried last.fm and other flash-based services and they, along with vimeo and youtube, all have the same problem. Flash will play fine if I don't do anything else (I use hulu to watch TV while riding my bike on a trainer stand with no problems) but if I open a new tab or switch between tabs in that browser window, it just changes to blankness and silence.

This one is a pretty tiny complaint but it really annoys me. The 'Pictures folder' screensaver pretty much sucks. The only thing it will do is show all the pictures from all the subfolders of your 'Pictures' folder. There are no options. If you have a folder you don't want to show in your screensaver, that's too bad. If you have a folder full of icons, expect them to show as super-pixelated, giant images. If you have a folder full of homemade porn, expect to show it to anyone walking past your computer when you're not there.

Tweetdeck crashes every other time I open it. It's a third-party application, so it's probably not the fault of Fedora or Linux, but it's a great example of the poor support companies give to this category of OS. It seems to happen whenever I'm opening more than one application at the same time more often than when I'm opening only one application. Maybe that's a sign of poor multitasking control under Linux or Gnome?

And my one, final complaint from the last month or so of using Fedora is: The Gnome Terminal seems to miss the obvious fact that, when I click on an active tab, I probably want to type in it. I can't count the number of times I've clicked a tab, started typing, sworn, clicked in the window, and re-typed whatever I just typed. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe someone had a really good reason for doing it. I have yet to figure out the exact circumstances under which it happens and cannot repeat the problem on-demand.

1: Just now I was typing this and running the updater in the background. When it finished it popped a window in front of this one that took focus. Since I was typing I have no idea what it said because it was dismissed when I hit 'delete' or 'enter' or some other key. I hope I didn't break anything.

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A friend pointed me to a New York Times article about global hunger, food prices and the assertion that we're 'one poor harvest away from chaos.' In reading it, the sentence 'Some experts warned that the world could be on the verge of a "nightmare scenario" of cut‑throat competition for the control of shrinking supplies.' really stood out for me and started me thinking.

A couple years ago, I was talking with a libertarian about poor people, school lunches, and taking responsibility for one's actions. I'll see if I can sum up some of his arguments...

Poor people have made a decision to get a job that doesn't pay well or to not work enough hours to make a living wage. Even if they didn't make those decisions directly, they chose not to get the education needed to qualify for a job that pays well enough. So either way, their lack of income can be blamed squarely on them. If these people then choose to have children the can't afford to feed, then they should be locked up for child abuse because they chose to have children they couldn't afford to feed. It's all their fault. The public shouldn't subsidize school lunch.

Now...I guess I can sympathize a little with that argument. Bad decisions shouldn't be rewarded. On the other hand, the state of sex education is horrid and I'm not sure it's fair to argue that having a child is always the decision of the parents. Sometimes it's really the decision of lobbyists who don't want their own children exposed to 'pornography' in school. Also, the cost of higher education is not tiny. Access to college is something that your own parents' income influences quite a lot. But I think most libertarians would run off on a tangent about the 'indoctrinated liberal elite' if I brought that up.

What brought me to this blog post was the sentence I quoted above. In a capitalist society, what determines the cost of food? I would argue that it's the people producing and, even more-so, selling that food. So, if you're going to allow the corporations that sell food to determine their prices and govern their profits, you're also allowing them to determine who is 'poor' and can't afford to feed their child. And, if you're going to allow corporations to determine who can't afford to feed their child, you're effectively allowing corporations to decide who gets put in jail for child abuse.

As I said before, I really do have sympathy for the libertarian viewpoint. That sympathy ends when human nature and greed take over and destroy the ideals.

(This doesn't even begin to consider the cost of food in countries that can't produce enough for their population or the repercussions of taking the libertarian dream to its logical conclusions in other situations.)

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