Polynesian stick charts at the nonist

The nonist (whatever that may be) has a cool article on polynesian stick charts.

I think I saw this some time ago. Interesting things reflect and repeat on reddit/digg and other interesting-things-aggregators. This isn't a bad thing in moderation.

you forgot torture

Torture, you forgot torture. And multi-year solitary confinement. If you don't confess, or if you have nothing to confess, you'll go insane, and even then they won't let you out.

Like missionaries showing the heathen

wow, that's quite a rant. And all to the point. I would quote, but then I'd have to quote the whole. Let the interested follow the link. And the americans, well, the truth lies there, but they look away. Afraid of the truth, unable to see in the light, as it shames them. Not understanding that it's not the light that shames, but themselves, and their cowardice.

growth spurt

Timmy had previously (a week ago and before that), slept through the night from bedtime (7PM) to too early for me (around 5:30AM). A few months ago, sol and I read about how sometimes infants will have a growth spurt and (we assumed the obvious) would require more food for that spurt, the logic being a convoluted version of Newton's third law of motion.

Several times between 2 months and 6 months he'd wake up at night for a week at a time and cry. One of us would utter the key words ("growth spurt"), and the other would make the milk (no, it's not real milk, it's baby formula).

Most of the time, these last few months he sleeps pretty soundly all through the night. Lately though he'd been waking up precisely at midnight. Sol would give him milk (we've got an electric milk heater, it's on her side, and what with the effects of sleep on the Quimpo metabolism, no one should trust me around any sort of electric heating element, particularly one that requires putting water into it).

It seems that the growth spurt is done for now though. He slept through the night last night, and it's 12:30 and I've not heard him crying. Either it was a growth spurt, or he just wanted more than the six ounces of milk he was getting before bedtime. He's now getting 7 ounces, possibly that's getting him through the night. We're going to have to get new bottles when he gets to eight ounces or more.

He's going to be a giant of a boy though because we indulge his growth spurts and he eats enough cereal (real cereal, not this ordure that gets processed with all sorts of sugars and chemicals) and chicken (real chicken... oh you know the drill) that he's already about the size of the average filipino one-year-old. I'm wondering if he'll get big enough (and neckless enough) to be one of the All Blacks.

Go Carly

New Bombay

Sol treated the family to lunch two sundays ago. We had always been curious about the New Bombay restaurant along Wilson in Greenhills and had heard rave reviews of the chicken tikka masala at a going away party a few nights before, so we decided to try it out.

I wasn't sure what time the restaurant would open. I was pretty confident it'd be open for lunch, but confidence is not the same as certainty. Fortunately, google is my friend and a quick search found a positive review of New Bombay along with a phone number. We got all excited about the food though, and since the review indicated that the restaurant would be open by 1:30PM (sol got confused about the "closes at 12:30AM part, but she got deconfused pretty quickly), I didn't call anymore.

At the time I didn't see Toni's review of New Bombay so we weren't forewarned to expect that the service would be slow and a bit confused. The food was very good though, and to be fair the service wasn't terrible, it just wasn't great (as it is, for instance, in the competing Queens Crystal Garden Restaurant on Jupiter. I expect that sol and I will try the H. dela Costa branch now instead of going back to the flashier, but badly-served Wilson branch.

I think my mother-in-law was a bit overwhelmed by the spiciness of the food, but she enjoyed it (particularly the mutton dish, I think it was the Mutton Rohan Josh).

I would love to go back to Queens. It's very comfortable, the staff are good and the food is *very* good. We had some sticker-shock though when we last had dinner there. But we're over that, it's time to go back :-).

Apparently I'm LMAO

interesting but i'd rather not try it

Great article, "You meet the nicest people in prison".

I don't know whether it's true. I'd really rather not find out. but if it is, it's very inspiring. Perhaps there's hope. but it's not in the government.

Do you write anti-american material?

Traveller to the United States is asked by U.S. customs if he writes anti-american material.

So, that's it. I'm not going to the U.S. for at least another ten years, maybe more. Although, feckless as the Democrats tend to be, there'll probably be another idiot Republican in the White House in ten years, so more likely, I'm not going to the United States in this lifetime.

Oh, so Samar Mazloum is probably either Lebanese or Canadian, or (more likely) has dual-citizenship).

I was wondering what the customs officers would have done to her if she were an american. But if she's not even a U.S. citizen though, then she could just have been deported.

rabbit vs snake

There's a funny video of a battle between a rabbit and a snake, with a surprising winner and a loser climbing a tree

Created an Account! Logged In! Inconceivable!

It's rarely (well, practically never) that I'll register on a site and actually log in to upvote an article. I did for Life in a small town, the lawnmower story though.

Rain and Timmy

It's been rainy the last few days. I actually ran out of pants to wear to work because everytime I'd come home at night my pants would be soaked through (I drive a motorcycle to work and back). Worse than that, all of my usable work shoes were soaked through too (one of them in disgusting flood water that's indistinguishable from sewer water).

So yesterday (Wednesday) I stayed home because I had nothing to wear to work :-). This was fortuitous too since timmy's nanny

had to go to Cagayan de Oro to resolve a family emergency. I'm low on cash, so we didn't send her on the plane. And it takes 2 days to travel by boat. She'll be out for a week, so she'll be back this weekend.

So, since it was raining and difficult/dangerous to go to work, I stayed home to take care of timmy. I was supposed to do some version control work too, but I didn't get more than started on that since the version control server is at work and I had to download so much data on what turned out to be a relatively slow line (limited at the office, I think, since other downloads were very fast) that I had to play all kinds of rsync tricks to get the whole copy (around 2GB) done in a few hours rather than a few days.

As it happens, the version control work I have to do involves cutting down the size of the working copies (by reorganizing things) so that they'll take less space and a LOT less time to check out or update. This is for the whole tree though. The main working branch isn't that large, but because of the way we do branching, the whole tree gets very large. I need to cut that down. Or switch to git-svn, of course, but that project is on hold for a bit.

My other version control project involves getting SourceGear Vault (demo) up and running. This is so we can test it out and when we're sure we like it, I can get the procurement process moving. Testing it out goes very slowly though since I'm not really into Windows and I've tried to setup three different vmware machines now and I keep missing something so it never quite works right. I'm on my fourth vmware machine now and I'm going to make this last effort work.

Bravo

Search for "soul" here and you'll find a statement to the effect that:

In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.

The trouble with men isn't what they know, it's what they know that just ain't so. Michael Nolan pretty thoroughly demolishes the assertion, demonstrating that Valentius Acidalius made it up in the late sixteenth century.
And then, on a completely different front, Sharon Olds publicly snubs Laura Bush.

Bravo.

Diving Old Volcano and White Island

On our second day on Camiguin, we dived Old Volcano and White Island.

That's diggi our dive instructor and dive guide chatting with Philip, a dive instructor from Bohol.

We didn't get to take any pictures at Old Volcano because sol was carrying the camera and, having been away from diving for more than a year, diggi saw that she was having troubles with bouyancy and equalizing and he took the camera away (going back up to the surface to hand it to the boat crew) so that Sol would be able to concentrate on diving. That was certainly the right conservative decision to make. He could have handed me the camera though :-).

I always love the coral at White Island

I love the aquarium quality of White Island, and I like the simplest fish even more than the most extravagant or larger specimens, but the coral is really why one would dive White Island

And then there's the CLOWN fish


This was my best picture of the dive

The highlight of the dive (although pretty early into the dive) was the sea snake

And these were diggi's. Of course, they were also his only pictures of the dive. At the safety stop though, he decided he wanted to take some pictures of us, even having us scootch over to be closer and taking another.

There's that clown fish again, always a happy diver

And a view of White Island itself, a few hundred meters away from the fish sanctuary/dive site

I really like the CamiguinAction dive boat. It's big, fast, comfortable. A big change from the much smaller dive boats CamiguinAction used before they got this one about a year and half ago.

birthday week dinners

It's my birthday week (I never give my real birthday anywhere). And that link can cause some confusion.

Now it really is my birthday week though, and sol and I came up with a great idea. I'm going to have a weeklong family dinner party :-). Last Monday was Pork and Beans night. That's always been my favorite. My mother used to make gallons of home made pork and beans and freeze it. I'd then eat it over a week or two.

Last night was clam chowder night. Sol made the best clam chowder she has ever made and I ate a heck of a lot of that last night, and then again for breakfast :-).

Tonight I think might be pho night, but I'm not sure.

Saturday is japanese night, so it'll be sukiyaki, sushi, sashimi and tempura night. No sake though, I drank that two years ago :-).

[Update]
It's saturday now. We just had japanese night. It was wonderful. I think I ate too much. Which is surprising. I didn't think you could do that with japanese food. But of course I'm wrogn there. I just haven't had enough sushi and sashimi in front of me before :-). Naw, I've had this happen before, at Saisaki :-).

Anyway, Friday night *was* Pho night. This has been a wonderful week. Sol is exhausted from all the preparations though.

Killing children

Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse.

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want,"

"This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."

Four year old male suicide bomber and a three year old female ahhh, suicide bomber.

Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse

He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, "this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."

wow, decapitating the driver without killing his son takes some goddamn artistry. Give that man a congressional gold medal and, no, don't let that president anywhere near that man. He'll just pull him down to his level.

Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.

They're not "fighting them there so they won't have to fight them here", they're MAKING MORE. And people, the arabs are out procreating all of the developed world combined. Did I say that they were making more? I mean that BOTH SIDES were making more terrorists. And the only way to win that war is to nuke ALL of saudi arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Something the U.S. can't afford to do. Instead, they'll just create more terrorists and spend the next 50 years applying superior firepower, torture and genocide. Letting the blood flow so that the oil may flow too.

Not Coming to America

In the Guardian, Joshua Steinwonders why the british aren't coming to America as much as they used to and suggests places to visit There are more suggestions and some polemic in the comments.

And then, further down, this gem.

The only way you'd get me there would be by extraordinary rendition.
Posted by tarquinbullocks on July 24, 2007 8:39 PM.

Bravo. I wish I'd said that :-)

who's messianic and apocalyptic

In The Economist Binyamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying:

“THE Iranian regime is basically a messianic apocalyptic cult.

That's pretty funny since the same can be said for George W Bush who is hoping for the rapture to make his problems go away, and is doing all he can to bring the rapture on by creating armageddon.
And, actually, Netanyahu himself, that ultimately vain death merchant (smoother, but just as evil as Avigdor Lieberman who wants to create a holocaust of those troublesome arabs) is similarly messianic and, if he gains power, will create the apocalypse by nuking Iran if Olmert doesn't get there first.

cat haiku

Hahahaha. Cat Haiku

among them,

Humans are so strange.
Mine lies still in bed, then screams;
My claws are not that sharp.

and

You must scratch me there!
Yes, above my tail!
Behold, elevator butt.

That must be why

That must be why I'm so happy then.