Sense

Chicago: You're Being Screwed

2009-07-16T17:04:38Z

Check this out:

Last year, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, after bum-rushing the City Council to fill a supposed multi-hundred million dollar gap in the city budget, sold the city parking meters for, potentially, a billion dollars less than their worth. At the time he claimed that there was no other way for us to come up with that money. This year he is threatening lay-offs and/or furlough days for hundreds of city employees because he said there was no other way to close the city's fiscal gap.

At a meeting tonight sponsored by IVI-IPO (Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization), Cook County Clerk David Orr, Alderman Scott Waguespack and Chicago Reader reporter Ben Joravsky will reveal over 500 million dollars of city tax money hidden away in slush funds around the city, money that could easily close those gaps.

Now, while I think you can reasonably suggest that there's value in the city having extra funds tucked away to help act as a buffer, this situation is pretty appalling. They rushed through a plan to privatize parking meters under the theory that we needed the money. Yet, we'd have made more money in the long run had we kept them under city control. Daley is making this out to be a major crisis situation when we actually have a lot more money out there that could be reallocated.

So what would make more sense is to dip into that buffer while we do a more managed plan where we consider our options. We could make sure that the people to manage the meters are actually up to the job. We could insure we were getting the best deal possible or perhaps simply skip the deal all together. Right now the city is in a short fall, but once the economy gets going again that short fall should go away. So why panic? Just another power play by Heir Daley.

The value of pet insurance

2009-07-16T16:42:23Z

I'd been wondering lately about the value of pet insurance. It seems like a typical reimbursement is for about half of the cost of whatever work was done. So I was beginning to wonder if it's not a better deal to just set aside money in my own accounts to be an emergency fund rather than paying VPI. Now, ignoring the pratical reality that I probably don't have that kind of discipline, here's some perspective on the math of it.

I currently pay $40/month for Moly's insurance. So that's $480/year. Recently I got her heart murmur tested and this cost $700. Out of that I received a $350 reimbursement. So here's the math:

With insurance: $480 (premium)+$350 (unreimbursed expenses) = $830/year
Without insurance: $700/year

So if no other vet trip is needed for the rest of the year, then I'm losing money on the deal. If the ~50% reimbursement rate continues then by my math I'd have to run up another $260 in vet bills to break even. For a standard vet appointment it's $75, so unless there's another major event, then I'm going to lose money on the deal.

Of course the catch in all of this is that it's a variable and unpredictable cost. One year there may be no cost and the next year there might be $2000 in costs. This is ultimately why people buy insurance because, while they necessarily lose money on average, it protects them when there's a large spike in costs. It turns unpredictable risk into a predictable monthly fee.

So my conclusion is that if you have a decent amount of savings such that you could afford to pay off an emergency vet bill without going into a hole, pet insurance is not worth it. However, if you do not have that buffer, then it's almost certainly worth it, especially if you have an older pet.

Dedicated to a friend...

2009-07-16T02:03:23Z

You know who you are:

Game Review: Far Cry 2

2009-07-15T15:30:27Z

My most recent delivery from Game Fly is Far Cry 2. Been playing it for a few nights and so far my opinion of it is rather mixed. The gist of it is that it's a sand box FPS. Most FPS games tend to be very linear, but this one allows you to wander over a fairly large map and do different missions. So how does that work out? Pretty poorly actually.

Open World: Fail

To get a mission you have to drive to a location where a mission is available. Then once the mission is assigned, you'll see it appear on your map, generally speaking, on the other side of the map. So then you have to drive to the mission. Driving generally takes a long time and all along the roads there are check points where people will start shooting at you for no reason. Apparently the cab driver who drops you off at the beginning of the game is the only person in the entire area who's not a gun toting psychotic ready to shoot any passerby at random.

To make it even more annoying, sometimes driving in the absolute middle of nowhere you'll have some random gun toting psychotic drive up and start shooting at you. So inevitably most of the time in the game is spent killing random people who are just getting in the way between you and where you want to be. So by the time you get to where you actually want to be you have to go get more ammo and heal yourself up which is a further distraction.

To make matters even more annoying the game has specific save points. You can't just be in the middle of nowhere and decide you want to quit for the night, save your game and move on. No, you have to drive to a safe house, or an arms dealer and save there. You'll also get save points after completing missions, which is a little bit merciful. But the result of this is that sometimes you'll drive all the way across the map, then manage to get yourself killed but a random gun toting psychotic, and then have to start waaaaay back where you came from. It's just annoying.

Buddies

Now, along the way you can meet "buddies" who will help you out with alternate ways to complete missions. You can also meet buddies who will come rescue you if you get yourself dead. However, there's a couple catches on these buddies:

They will only rescue you once until you get to a safe house to reset them. So you drive past gun toting psychotics, then die and get rescued but if you get killed again, you're out of buddies and have to go back to your last save point, likely on the other side of the map.
Your buddy can get killed too. If they get shot you can go save them if you have a styrette (the magical heal all injector you use to heal yourself). If you don't happen have a styrette your choices are leave them to die or put them out of their misery. Furthermore, if the buddy rescues you, and you manage to escape unscathed, the same may not be true of him and he just shows up as dead and you don't even notice until he doesn't come save you the next time.

Artificial (Un)intelligence

The AI in the game is pretty wonky honestly. Sometimes I come up to an area and somebody's immediately shooting at me. Other times I can sit back and snipe for days and nobody seems to understand what's happening. They just run around a lot. Sometimes the AI will cleverly get in a jeep and try to run me over. Sometimes they'll get in the same jeep and try to run me down when I'm standing at my jeep's machine gun, mercilessly mowing them down as they come at me.

I think though that really it comes down to my assessment that they are all gun toting psychotics. They clearly have no sense of self preservation and so they will happily run into your gun fire without a care in the world and sometimes they'll just happen to sneak up on your and start shooting you in the ass. They'll be rewarded in the after life I guess? Perhaps I'd have more mercy for this had I not played Killzone 2 where the AI is phenomenally smart, acting like it actually wants to remain alive.

Action

The gun play in the game is actually pretty decent for the most part. However, there is one very frustrating bit. The sniper rifle you first get is a bolt action rifle. When you shoot, you do not automatically cycle out the spent cartridge. Instead, you have to release the aim button, then it will ready the gun, and then you press down the aim button again. Once you get used to this quirk it's not too bad, but it has gotten me killed more than once as I try to shoot twice forgetting I have to make it load.

Graphics

I figured being Far Cry the graphics would be gorgeous. Nah, not really. It's clearly blown away by games like COD4 and of course Killzone 2, one of the best looking FPS games I've seen. Granted, the game will actually play on something less than a mainframe, so that's a big accomplishment for Crytek.

The other thing is that it's kind of glitchy. You can see the physics engine vomit every so often as a character gets stuck somewhere and magically pops out. It's not problematic I suppose but it does kill the overall sense of it being a polished game.

Conclusion

I think the big flaw in this game is that it's clear that there was some attempt to make things "realistic". I say "realistic" in quotes because there's so many things that are decidedly not realistic that it's rather difficult to claim it without quotes. Generally though where I meet frustration is where they are trying to make things more real than they'd otherwise be. Like making me drive all over the map, or making me manually cock the sniper rifle. It's also not clear to me how realistic an entire country populated by nothing but gun toting psychotics really is.

Overall I find myself wanting to enjoy the game, but I find it terribly frustrating. I'm sure it has many many hours of game play, but that's only because it takes so much effort to get from one place to another. I suppose if I just wanted to mercilessly kill people all day I could have fun with it but I'd like to have a little bit of plot and maybe some strategy.

Baby Got Back

2009-07-11T23:11:00Z

Clusterfuckery Unleashed: The House of Blues

2009-07-11T19:37:10Z

I've been to the House of Blues on multiple occasions for concerts. I go there because there are bands I want to see, though I've actually gotten to the point of not bothering to go see bands I'd like because the venue sucks so badly. I would say that of the times I've been there, about 80% of the time, there's some kind of screw up. Last night I went to see VNV Nation at the House of Blues in Chicago and it was yet another illustration of why I avoid the place.

At the House of Blues they offer special reserved seats throughout the theater that you can get by having dinner there. The first time I went there this deal pissed me off because it was poorly advertised and all the special blessed folks got seats when I did not. But now that I knew how the system worked I figured I'd take advantage. The way the deal works is that you pay either $50, $75, or $100 and for that price you get a reserved seat in a different part of the venue and you can put the money towards food and drinks. Obviously if you pay more you get a better seat. So I paid $50 and was told the following:

The $50 could be used for dinner as well as drinks in the main theater area
A seat would be reserved for me on the main floor in the rear of the theater

I figure hey, if I have dinner and a couple drinks I'll be spending $50 anyhow, and this way I don't have to feel rushed. I just skip the line and go in when I'm ready for the concert. Excellent theory.

Theory Meets Reality

So I get there, I go in through the lobby and I see a security guard there. I tell him that I got the reserved seat/dinner combo and he tells me to just go into the restaurant and they'll take care of me. Great, so I go in, sit down at the bar and explain to my overworked bartender what the deal is. He gets me my first beer, then tells me that I need to actually go back out to the box office to get my dinner ticket. Okay, no big deal, I go get the ticket, come back to the bar and get that all settled.

I order dinner, the jambalaya, which was pretty good. However, their menu has shrunk a lot since I'd last been there and it was basically either that or burgers. So I had a beer, the Jambalaya, a slice of key lime pie for dessert with a mojito (good limey combo). At this point it was about 15 minutes before show time so I figured I should head in to the theater and I ask to close out the check.

The bartender then asks me if I want another drink since there's still money left from that $50. Turns out that I can't use the money in the theater in spite of what I was told on the phone. It's only valid for dinner. Good thing I mostly used up the $50 anyhow. So I finish the remains of my Mojito, have him pour me another beer, and then I carry that beer out with me to go to the concert. Notably it's in a disposable plastic cup and probably half the size of an actual glass of beer for the same price.

Who are you?

So I head over to the entrance and the security guard asks my name. He then looks on his list and, of course, it's not there. I mean I knew I was on the list because I'd already gotten my meal ticket. So I wasn't concerned. He calls around on the radio and finally gets confirmation that somebody screwed up. Of course I'm completely shocked, but I take it in good humor because I know they have me on their computers somewhere. A moment or two later, he gets confirmation that yes I am on the list.

So he explains to another security guard there to escort me me up to the balcony. Oh, the balcony? The balcony is supposed to be for the $100 paying customers. An upgrade! I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised at this point. So I'm ready to go but before we head up they realize they need to check my ID so I can buy booze in the theater...

So, I PUT DOWN MY FULL CUP OF BEER, and get out my ID so they can check it. Then they give me a wrist band and I PICK UP MY FULL CUP OF BEER. I realize that they are just doing their jobs and the guy at the bar may have been psychotic and just handing out beers to any person who walked by, but it still cracked me up.

Where are we going again?

So then we start walking up to the balcony. Unfortunately the woman who's escorting me doens't actually know how to get to the balcony. So she goes and asks somebody else, and they point her in the right direction. To be fair, the layout of the place is a bit confusing. Finally we get to the balcony and I'm ready to take my front row, edge of the balcony seat, thrilled that I got a great deal! We get up there and she hands me off to another security guard who also has no idea what's going on. He gets on the radio and confirms where I'm supposed to be and for a moment it sounded like they were putting me in a box seat! WOW OMG BBQ!!!! Or not...

They finally figure out what's going on and escort me to my seat. Now, if you've never been to the House of Blues, let me try to explain the layout a bit. There's a balcony with a bar and the balcony has two levels. In front of the bar there is a row of tables with a railing. Then just below the railing is the slightly lower second level with area sto stand in and there's stools right on the balcony edge. Those stools are the $100 reserved seats. The bar tables and associated stools are open to anybody.

"Reserved"

So of course my "reserved seat" is just one of the random seats at one of the bar tables. One of the seats that I could have walked in right off the street and taken without a moment's hesitation and certainly without committing to spend $50 on dinner. Better yet it is one of the bar tables at the very far end with this view:

It's a bit dark, but as you can see, the right side of the stage is totally cut off by a giant column. You can also see the spot light that sticks up and further obstructs the view. So ultimately what happened was they sold me a "reserved" seat when they apparently had none available. Then in a last minute attempt to cover their mistake they give me a random seat at a random bar table.

Oh and the final punch line: they never even checked my ticket. My name was on the list, but I didn't have to buy a ticket to do that. In theory they're supposed to check my ticket at the door, but never did. So I could have just paid $50 for the dinner thing and seen the concert for free essentially.

In the end I had a good time in spite of the House of Blues tremendous clusterfuckery. It's very obvious to me that they do a terrible job of training people because no two people seemed to have the same understanding of how things worked. Overall you get the sense that they are doing their best to extract every last dollar out of you and are making no effort to at least make it a welcoming experience.

Hibernate Fun

2009-07-08T17:18:21Z

So I discovered an ... eccentricity of Hibernate that upon reflection makes sense, but can be problematic. Here's an example where the Period object is being set for an event. The event has a start and an end period, periods representing quarters generally.

Here's what the code might look like for the setter of the end period:

public void setEndPeriod(Period endPeriod) {
        endPeriod = endPeriod;
        if (endPeriod!=null) {
            log.debug("END DATE: "+endPeriod.getEndDate());
        }
}

Now, what I'd expect is that the print out would be:

END DATE: 12/12/2005

What I actually get is:

END DATE: null

The catch is that, in Hibernate, the period object is not null, but it also may not have had all of its values completely initialized by the time this setter is called. The only value that has to be populated at this point is the ID value for the object. Other values can then be loaded later in the deserialization process.

Good times.

Then and Now

2009-07-08T05:05:33Z

It's interesting to compare photos I took in the past against photos I've taken more recently to see how I've changed. Tonight I went to shoot some fire spinners, and I shot tacit doing similarly almost two years ago. So what difference does two years make?

Here's the best picture I got originally:

Here's the best picture from tonight:

Now obviously very different shots, so not exactly comparing apples and oranges, but part of the reason you can't make that comparison is that I shoot my photos very differently. The biggest difference, i think, is that I'm much more comfortable with getting the shots in very tight. With the older photos, all of them were wide angle showing the entire world around us. In the new shots, I'm zoomed in tight on just what I want to see.

Also, the overall framing of the shot is much better in the newer photo. Granted, some of that was done through cropping, but I could have easily cropped the older photos but didn't. It also doesn't hurt matters that I have much better equipment now ;).

Maybe I'm getting pretentious here, but I feel like my newer photo is telling more of a story if that makes sense. The older photo is a shot of somebody spinning fire. But it's kinda sterile? I mean it's pretty, and has some nice colors, but it doesn't have a lot of feeling in it. Where as the newer photo is more dramatic and powerful.

Musical awesomeness due soon?

2009-07-06T21:57:40Z

So I was wondering to myself what had become of System of a Down since they hadn't put out an album in a while. I knew Serj had done his own thing but didn't know what the rest were up to. Then I found Azochen. It's a project being put together by the bassist of System of a Down and the RZA. Two great tastes that taste great together? Their first album is supposed to be out in September though that date has been pushed back a few times.

To make things even better, the album they are working on is a collaborative album featuring:

George Clinton
John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Kilah Priest of Wu Tang

Ooooooohhhhh...

And the wing nuts fly off the deep end...

2009-07-01T16:04:53Z

Okay, watch this:

So is it just me or is he literally rooting for BIn Laden to attack to prove to our government that they aren't doing enough to prevent Bin Laden from attacking? And here I though us libs hated America, but clearly we're not really trying hard enough.

Jeff Goldblum Dead at 56... Twitter said so!!

2009-07-01T05:06:44Z

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jeff Goldblum

Note to Kim Jung Il

2009-06-29T17:22:33Z

The US Air Force just sent a love note to North Korea. This is what a successful missile test looks like:

The Air Force says it has successfully launched an unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile from a California base, firing it to targets in the Pacific Ocean.

...

[The missile] carried three unarmed re-entry vehicles that hit their targets near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 4,200 miles away.

This serves as a good reminder of what a real nuclear missile threat is. Delivering three nuclear warheads anywhere on the planet in minutes with minimal fanfare is a nuclear threat. By comparison, North Korea has a medium range missile that's of questionable accuracy and reliability that is probably not capable of carrying a nuclear war head. They've successfully tested one nuclear weapon, but there's no evidence to suggest that this is in a state that it could even be strapped onto a missile, let alone delivered with any accuracy.

Detonating a nuclear bomb in a controlled test is one thing. It's mostly a complex manufacturing problem as the basic physics of it has been well understood for decades now. The hard part, if you're going to have a genuine nuclear weapon threat is:

Developing a delivery warhead that's reliable
Developing a missile that can accurately deliver that warhead. Hitting "somewhere in the pacific" is rather easy. Hitting Honolulu is a not.
Manufacturing enough of #1 and #2 to make your threat credible. That is, if you have only a few missiles, there's enough chance that it could fail that it's really not a viable threat.

Don't get me wrong, eventually the North Koreans can pull this off but they aren't close to that point yet.

My appearance on The Dish re: Public Option

2009-06-26T16:15:52Z

One of my e-mails got posted by Andrew Sullivan on public option. I'm the "Another" e-mail, but here's the excerpt:

The public plan won't be subsidized by taxpayer money. Sure, implementation of a public option would require some seed capital to set up the infrastructure for such an endeavor. But beyond that it should not receive any subsidies nor have I seen evidence to suggest it would. The reality is that the system is not competitive today and having a public option that's focused on cost containment and quality rather than profit margins would provide genuine competition to a market that badly needs it.
If we do not have a public option then any rules we put in place to contain costs will be routed around by insurers. If we say they can't charge more in premiums they'll raise out of pocket costs. If we say they can't raise out of pocket costs they'll cut benefits. It becomes this cat and mouse game where ultimately the costs are not contained in any meaningful way. Having a mandate will just make the situation worse by pumping more cash into a broken system without any means to insure that costs are ultimately reduced.
On the other hand, if we have a public option then we can actually deregulate the private insurers to a large extent. We can give them free reign to price their plans as they wish. We'd just have some requirements that prevented them from discriminating based on preexisting conditions and clearly disclose their pricing and coverage. As such they can raise premiums, lower premiums, offer different benefits packages, etc, and the government doesn't get put into a position of needing to regulate this. They just have to compete against what the public option is offering and they'll live or die based on the merits.

My Barack Obama

2009-06-26T15:31:08Z

Stop egging on the crazies, please!

2009-06-26T14:13:03Z

Next year the Census is coming up and this means that we'll have lots of people representing the government going door to door through out the United States. What I'm a bit concerned about is how the right wing crazies are going to deal with this. They are being egged on by various media outlets and political celebrities and I'm starting to wonder what this explosive combination will yield.

First of all, ACORN is going to be involved in helping the government recruit the 1.4 million workers that are needed to help with the work of conducting the census. Now, of course ACORN is one of those magic boogey men of the right wing that's supposedly destroying our Democracy by rigging the vote. This is, of course, totally ridiculous, but we're talking about the right wing crazies.

So then we're going to have many people seen as agents of ACORN going door to door and asking these crazies for their personal information. Then you get the kookiest congress critter, Michelle Bachman going on the record like this:

In an interview Wednesday morning with The Washington Times "America's Morning News," Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, said the questions have become "very intricate, very personal" and she also fears ACORN, the community organizing group that came under fire for its voter registration efforts last year, will be part of the Census Bureau's door-to-door information collection efforts.

"I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home," she said. "We won't be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn't require any information beyond that."

Bachman went on to site the use of the Census information in helping to round up Japanese Americans during WW2 for internment just to really give this some flavor. Of course the law says you have to answer the Census questions or you can be fined $5000. Then today in my e-mail I get this from the Traditional Values Coalition:

One of the most corrupt “community organizing” groups in the U.S. will be involved in taking the U.S. Census for 2010. The Association Of Community Organizations For Reform Now (ACORN) will work with the Census Bureau to recruit 1.4 million temporary workers to go door-to-door to conduct the census.

President Obama, a former legal advisor for ACORN, has approved their role in the census.

So, we have this combination:

People convinced that ACORN is some nefarious organization that Obama is in league with
People representing the government that may have been indirectly hired by ACORN going to the door steps of crazies
Crazies being given the impression that the Census might be used to track them, throw them in internment camps, etc
Crazies, elsewhere, being given the impression that the government is going to come for their guns

I'm concerned that some Census worker is going to go to somebody's home that's been watching a little too much Fox News and they are going to get killed. Some nut job is going to think they are a branch of the Illuminati or whatever and turn over his guns, bullet first. I also fully expect that the right wing media is only going to egg this on further in the mean time. Talking up ACORN and the Census, and screaming about how our Democracy is being destroyed.

We've already had incidents where right wing crazies have been under the impression that police have been coming for their guns and they've responded by murdering those police. This seems like the next illogical step in their twisted world and I'd really appreciate it if the right wing media would step back a bit and realize what they are encouraging. If a census worker gets killed it's on the heads of folks like Bachman for actively feeding that paranoid fantasy.

Brilliant Civil Disobedience

2009-06-23T21:05:59Z

Huge credit to organizers in Iran for coming up with an utterly brilliant strategy for maintaining protests. Rather than trying to form up in public squares wearing green, they are taking a page out of George Bush's advice book: they are going shopping!

Every day at 9am they are supposed to be heading the bazaars and simply shopping. They won't actually buy anything but the problem the government runs into is how to even begin to crack down on that. You can't forbid people from going to the bazaar. If they question people, they simply say they are going to do some shopping. Sure it happens to be right at 9am and thousands of others are going to do it too, but what's wrong with that?

So they can gather in large crowds in public and demonstrate their resolve and unity, and yet there's nothing the government can do unless they want to shut the bazaars down and that would have consequences all it's own.

Fucking brilliant!

How to get Lollapalooza on your iPhone

2009-06-19T01:01:02Z

So I got the new iPhone OS 3.0 and discovered the wonderful new calendar features. At the same time I discovered the rather clever tool on the Lollapalooza website to plan out your concert attendance schedule. So I figured I'd put these two great tastes together and here's how you can do the same thing:

Make sure you have the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS. This won't work without that.
Go to Lollapalooza's website and make a schedule. Once that's done right-click on the link in the upper left hand corner of the site that says "iCal". Then select the option for copying the link.
Copy that link into your e-mail, then e-mail the link to your iPhone. This step isn't strictly necessary, but you'll need to get that URL onto your iPhone, so it's either this or just punch it by hand, your choice.
Go into your iPhone, bring up your e-mail message then use the hand copy and paste tool to select the URL
Go back to the home screen on the iPhone and select the "Settings" app. Scroll down until you get to the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" setting.
Select "Add Account..."
Select "Other"
Then under the "Calendars" section you'll see "Add Subscribed Calendar". Click that.
Where the app says "server", paste the URL you got from the Lollapalooza site (or type it in)
Save it and then you should be all set. Your calendar will now have the Lollapalooza schedule.

I haven't tried to see if the phone will pick up changes to your schedule. I believe it will though because the iPhone has settings for saying how often to update that.

That should be it. Enjoy!

Healthcare Reform

2009-06-18T20:23:23Z

There's work beginning in Congress to get some form of healthcare reform passed. The only way this is going to be effective is if all of the following are true:

Private insurers are forbidden from price discrimination based on past medical conditions. If you have Ashtma, Diabetes, or Cancer, you pay the same price as if you were healthy. If you allow private insurers to discriminate in their pricing then they will price out the sick and give the impression that their plans are cheaper to the healthy.
Everybody will be required to obtain health insurance, either through their work or on the open market.
Employers with more than a certain level of revenue and number of employees must provide health care coverage to their employees either through a public or private plan. Companies under that threshold should be given government assistance to help get their employees covered.
The government must offer a public health care option that competes on level ground with private insurers. If this doesn't eixst then private insurers can charge whatever they want. With a public option, the government can work to bring down prices in a competitive market driven fashion.
The government must provide subsidies to help people meet the insurance requirement that can be used for any plan, public or private. Requiring people to get insurance that can't afford it makes no sense.

Without all of those things being true, health care reform does not work.

Revolution and the 2nd Amendment

2009-06-18T17:07:40Z

One of the oft sited reasons to protect the right to bear arms in this country is for some mythical day when the government may turn on us and we'll need to fight back. When the jack booted thugs come, we'll have our guns and we'll fight them off. It will give any authoritarian turn in our government a lot of second thoughts. Right?

In following the events in Iran, I've been thinking about this. One of the things we've seen play out a bit is that there are militias, police, and military forces all aligned with the government that are all armed. The populace is largely unarmed. So, this would seem to present a clear disadvantage to the populace. They cannot meet violence with violence and so they are at the mercy of the government. Or are they?

The Power of the Military

There's two fallacies in the logic that somehow an armed populace would stand a better chance in such a situation. The first is that the military will always have vastly superior firearms. Perhaps in a day when everybody had muskets and swords, the odds were a bit more even. Today though, the military can simply use tanks, airplanes, and even robotic vehicles to wipe out civilians if they so choose. So even the most well armed person isn't going to be any kind of match for a real military.

The second is that it assumes that the military, police, etc, are all one mindless automaton. The reality, as we're seeing in Iran, that these people are just civilians with training, uniforms, and weapons. While they may be trained with a duty to the government, they have friends and loved ones, and are potentially sympathetic to their cause. If a popular movement is strong enough then the military and police will often fragment into factions or turn against the government entirely. Then the populace suddenly has tanks and airplanes available to them as well.

To illustrate my point, think back to Tianamen and the guy who stood in front of the tank. Imagine that same scenario if the guy is armed. Does the tank driver think long and hard about whether to run the guy over? No, he's now a threat, so full steam ahead. Granted, if he had a gun he'd probably not go stand in front of a tank, but then the tank would be firing into the building he sought refuge in, likely killing others. Unless the guy has an anti-tank missile, an unlikely scenario, he's up a creek.

So in the grand scheme of things, does the 2nd amendment really do anything in this kind of situation other than get more people killed?

Skynet

On a related note, this may be a reason to void going down the road of putting too many robotic weapons in our military. The main thing that unseats dictators is their inability to keep the military under their control. If the military is largely computer controlled machines, it's a lot easier. Convincing a soldier to run down unarmed civilians is difficult. Convincing a machine to do it is a flick of a switch.

Sigma 30mm F/1.4 First Impressions

2009-06-17T00:20:05Z

So I finally came to a decision on a good low light lens and picked up the Sigma 30mm F/1.4. I did a lot of research going back and forth between several different lenses. Before I get too into what I think of my Sigma so far, here's some other lenses I considered and why I didn't get them:

Canon 17-55 F/2.8 IS

This was the leading contender for a good long time, but at almost $1000, I could never quite get myself to pull the trigger. I have every reason to believe that it would take gorgeous pictures, but I just can't justify shelling out that kind of money. Also, I read a great review of this lens and their conclusion was that if you needed a zoom, get the Canon, but if you didn't get the Sigma 30mm. That's pretty much what swayed me as I can live without zoom for the cost savings.

Sigma 18-50 F/2.8-4.5 OS

Initially this sounded like a great deal coming it at around $300, but it's not one of Sigma's EX lenses, so I suspect the glass and build quality isn't going to be top notch. I saw almost no reviews of this lens online since it's so new, and so generally speaking I wasn't convinced it would be much better than what I have. This is especially true given that my Canon 28-135 is at 3.5 from 28-50mm and so would actually outperform the Sigma, give or take lens quality, etc.

Tamron 17-50 F/2.8 and Sigma 18-50 2.8

Both of these looked like good lenses, but without IS, they really wouldn't give me enough of an improvement in lowlight performance to justify picking them up.

First Impressions

So having outlined all of that, time to go over what I've seen of the Sigma so far. To begin with a couple sample images that I took today around the office and on my walk over lunch:

I absolutely love this shot, and it really seems to be evidence of what this lens is capable of. The softness around the periphery from that wide open F/1.4 really makes a difference. I'm not a total expert, but I really don't see any obvious issues with how this shot turned out.

Some vignetting here, but honestly, I like the effect it creates. Easily correctable in Lightroom if I care to mess with it. Finally:

Nice and crisp where it needs to be and it fades out beautifully. Totally loving this lens so far :)

The build quality of the lens is really solid. It's a bit of a heavy lens full of that big ole F/1.4 glass, but not unwieldy. Certainly lighter than my Canon kit lens. I had mixed impressions of my first Sigma lens, but this one definitely convinces me that when they really try they pull off a winner.

By the way, you'll likely see lots of reviews for the Sigma online that talk about focus problems. From everything I've gathered it comes down to primarily problems with the Nikon variant, and the fact that it's F/1.4. If you're off on the focus of an F/1.4 by even a smidge it makes an enormous difference. Some suggest that it's a quality control issue and that some are better than others but so far this looks like a winner.

That's all for now, I'll update once I get more of a chance to test this in more low light situations.

I keep meaning to try this...

2009-06-15T17:17:07Z

QOTD

2009-06-12T23:04:37Z

From my e-mail today:

"If you had a gold fish, you would ask for a bigger instrument."

I'm a bit confused by the mixed metaphors here. First he's talking about small fish, then instruments. I don't know if he means musical instruments, or surgical instruments, or some other kind of instrument. So I'm not precisely sure what having a gold fish would have to do with wanting an instrument. I mean, if I have a gold fish and want a bassoon, that's one thing, but if I want a scalpel, that's entirely different.

Furthermore, if I have a gold fish, and I am reading the metaphor appropriately that suggests he's talking about the size of my penis, wouldn't a bassoon be a hell of a large upgrade? I mean sweet jesus, you could cause dangerous injuries with something like that. I don't really know why you'd want to cause dangerous injuries with your penis. I mean, isn't the point fucking? And if the point is indeed fucking, then it usually works better if the other party involved isn't running in abject terror at the size of your man meat. I mean even if you're going from a gold fish to a piccolo, that's a pretty big leap.

Also, gold fish can get pretty big, non? I'm not precisely sure on the relationship between conventional "live 3 days and croak" gold fish as compared to Koi, but I think it's pretty close. I mean if you toss a gold fish in a big pool of water and feed it a lot, won't it get pretty big? Perhaps he should be offering me fish food for my gold fish rather than the more confusing instrument. Also, I may be packing Koi, in which case I really don't need his french horn, timpani drum, or god help you, grand piano.

Or maybe he meant the crackers...

The reality of Iran

2009-06-12T21:13:26Z

I was reflecting a bit today on the political structure in Iran and the election that's happening today. What got me started was this chart from the BBC as seen on Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Note where the armed forces are. Ahmadinejad for all that he's been portrayed as the devil has absolutely no power over the Iranian military. If there's going to be conventional attacks, proxy attacks, or the building of a nuclear arsenal in Iran, only one power initiates it and that's Khameni.

What strikes me as fascinating about this is what my memories are of Iran as a child. Back when I was growing up Ayatollah Kohmeni, Khameni's predecessor, was seen as the pure incarnation of evil. He was such a boogey man that I actually remember the day of his death as well as I remember the Challenger explosion.

I was staying at a Baptist retreat that my brother's soccer team was using as a temporary residence while playing a soccer tournament in Colorado Springs. As a kid, I did not sleep well unless I had a TV, and so I had the Sony watchmen that my parents bought, and I was watching it in bed. They interrupted the TV show I was watching with a breaking news alert which I assumed was to inform me that the Soviets had launched their missiles and I had 15 minutes to kiss my ass goodbye. Of course, once again it was not armageddon but, instead, the death of Kohmeni, that was announced. It was tremendous news at the time.

So why do I bring this up? Because it strikes me as odd that Iran passed into the hands of a more moderate Ayatollah (granted that's a relative term) and, rather than that Ayatollah, the true power in Iran, being the focus of our political discourse, we instead focus on the crazy guy, Ahmadinejad. It's not like the power structure in Iran changed such that he has more power than previous Presidents in Iran. No, the reason we emphasize him is because he fits the line on Iran better: that they are dangerous and crazy.

A rockin organ

2009-06-11T03:58:15Z

Hat tip rsncrntz :

What I've been wondering...

2009-06-11T03:34:50Z

When does this guy...

... turn into the kind of person who goes and assassinates a doctor, or murders people at a holocaust musem?