Let’s Ride

19 07 2009

I’m so happy to have my two-wheeled rocket back in ready-to-ride condition. I really missed her, and last weekend a nasty cold denied me the chance to rediscover her pleasures, so this weekend I was especially eager. Today I managed to avoid the rain and get in about 210 miles, quite a few on country farm back roads at triple-digits speeds. With my new open-faced helmet it is much less unpleasant to gear up and ride on a 95F day…

Now I’m starting the farkling to make her a better long-distance touring machine. First was the improved helmet. Next I’ve got better mounts coming for my gizmos, and a complete communications / music package on the way. Once the sticker shock from that wears off I’ll be looking for cruise control, highway (forward) footpegs, and a cooler jacket for the warmer weather. I’m aiming to do my first multi-state ride in September, at minimum to North Carolina and Tennessee for a weekend at the Dragon plus a day in Helen, GA for Oktoberfest, but if I can get everything together in time I’d really like to take two weeks vacation to tour much of the east coast and drop in on my family in the Pennsylvania / New Jersey area.


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The end of an era

6 07 2009

AOL has shut down CompuServe. I was surprised that anything from CompuServe still existed… Once Netscape IPO’d, everything that was “online” and not the Internet was doomed, worthy or not. Even AOL is dead, they just haven’t incinerated the corpse yet.


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All the good TV shows have been cancelled.

6 07 2009

So I was watching Watchmen this weekend, and it wasn’t at all what I had expected. In a good way.

For no logical reason, the movie made me think of The Middleman TV show. Which I hadn’t realized was cancelled. I’m a little bummed, it was a witty, smart, and funny show. A little too squeaky-clean perhaps, like every ABC Family original show, but it was quality entertainment. I probably shouldn’t pick on ABC Family, they’ve done a great job of building family-friendly shows around subjects like teenage pregnancy and college fraternity life that confront difficult issues, but it ain’t the network to be on if you’re hoping to attract a broad audience…

With the Terminator TV series cancelled by Fox, I’m not sure that’s there anything left that makes TV worth watching. Maybe Supernatural… It’s no Miracles but it ain’t bad…


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Getting Things Done

4 07 2009

My theme for the week has been getting all the things done to my G8 GT and FJR1300AE that I’ve been putting off.

The FJR stuff was easy since I wasn’t going to do any of it myself, I just needed to get her towed to the motorcycle dealership.

  • Safety recall for ignition switch failures
  • Replace front tire
  • Oil change and other routine service

For the G8 I’ve had a growing list of things to get done:

The O2 sensor has been a thorn in my side for like five months. Rear O2 sensors don’t do anything terribly important — they are mandated by the government to verify that the catalytic converters are functioning, whereas the front sensors make sure your air-to-fuel ratio isn’t so out-of-whack as to destroy the cats — but their failure triggers a Check Engine Light… and the CEL disables the remote start function of the car. It’s friggin’ hot around here this time of year so I’m extremely grateful to again have the ability to start my car — and the air conditioning — a few minutes before I leave the house. It may not be “environmentally sensitive” but I don’t enjoy burning my ass on the car seats.

The de-badging only got partially done, on the trunk I took off the word Pontiac and the dealer sticker (major PITA). With just G8 on one side and GT on the other it actually looks pretty good. Replaced the dealer’s plastic license plate bracket with a metal one that seems to rattle quite a bit less — the trunk unfortunately only has two screw-holes for the license plate so rattling is always going to be an issue. The intake I was going to save for cooler weather but replacing the turn signal bulb required removing half of the original intake so I figured I might as well keep going…

Next up I think will be getting the windows tinted.


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GPL-tards want to steal your work

2 07 2009

The WordPress GPL brigade is at it again, claiming WordPress Themes are derivative works that must be GPL licensed. This time they have an opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center. According to their web site:

We provide legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

According to this group of impartial lawyers with absolutely no agenda, the PHP portion of a WordPress theme must be GPL-licensed:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

This is absolutely wrong. Writing a theme or plug-in for WordPress does not require copying a single line of code, or anything derived from the code, into the theme or plug-in. Unless copyright now applies to function names and APIs, in which case the WINE and Mono people are in serious trouble.

If you don’t copy anything subject to the GPL then your work isn’t subject to the GPL. It is as simple as that. And I will back up my claim by quoting section 0, paragraph 2 of the GPL v2:

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted [...]

The GPL-tards conveniently ignore that sentence-and-a-half. In this instance they haven’t bothered citing any text from the GPL to support their ridiculous claims. They try to confuse you by talking about memory spaces, functions, and intermingling while ignoring what the GPL actually says.

I’m not against Free Software or the GPL, but I am sick of their advocates trying to abuse Free Software licenses in order to appropriate other people’s work.

Update: I do, however, fully support their decision to only promote GPL-licensed works in their themes directory. It is perfect reasonable for a Free Software project to choose not to promote non-Free works.


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Underinsured

2 07 2009

The New York Times, Insured, but Bankrupted by Health Crises:

Although the brochure on his Aetna policy seemed to indicate it covered up to $150,000 a year in hospital care, the fine print excluded nearly all of the treatment he received at an Austin, Tex., hospital.

He and his wife, Claire, filed for bankruptcy last December, as his unpaid medical bills approached $200,000.

It’s easy to blame the insurance company for selling a nearly-useless policy, and staring at nearly $200K in unpaid medical bills would make most Americans consider bankruptcy, but that’s not the whole story.

St. David’s says it tried to persuade them to apply for charity care, under which the hospital would absorb much, or all, of the unpaid bills.

But the couple says a lawyer advised them to turn to bankruptcy as the way to be certain they would not be left with too much debt. “I knew we were getting way, way over our heads,” Mrs. Yurdin said.

How many tales of “medical bankruptcy” are due to people listening to a lawyer who wants to generate fees instead of having an earnest conversation with the hospital about reducing their bill? The “dirty little secret” of the medical industry is that standard billing rates are massively inflated compared to what Medicare or insurance companies will pay. Try negotiating with the hospital before your account is sold to a collections agency and you may just be able to get it reduced by 80-90%, without having to qualify for any charity program and without affecting your credit.

Ultimately I favor a “single payer” healthcare system that covers everyone, but if we can’t have that then I think the first step in reform should be capping the massive disparity between what a hospital charges an insurance company and what they charge the uninsured. The amounts that hospitals bill the uninsured are unconscionable and indefensible. This is one of the few problems that our government should be able to fix with little resistance, and without raising taxes, debt, or unemployment.


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Above and Beyond

2 07 2009

For the past two years I’ve been using the Midas near my office for things like fixing my car’s A/C, installing a new exhaust, and other things that are just too inconvenient or difficult to do myself. I didn’t necessarily love giving them my business — in particular their prices for services not listed on the wall are relatively high — but the location is highly convenient, the staff are pleasant, and they give me a ride back to work.

This Wednesday, however, they truly impressed me.

I dropped my car off in morning as I’d finally obtained a replacement for the O2 sensor that was stripped when my original exhaust was removed — not their fault, some tosser at the Holden factory routinely cross-threads that particular sensor — and needed someone to install a set of headers for me. I filled out their forms, noting that there was damage to my bumper, and they dropped me off at my office.

Now, the bumper was damaged a few weeks ago when it got caught on something. Before I realized what was happening the driver’s side of the bumper had popped off several of the doohickies that secure it to the car. It wasn’t a big deal but repairing it from above the car looked like more effort than I wanted to expend so I left it alone and was planning to have the dealer take care of it next week when I dropped it off for a recall order. Figured the dealer would probably take me for $75 or so…

Imagine my surprise when I returned to Midas and saw that they had fixed my bumper.

For free.

I didn’t ask them, and they didn’t ask me. With the car already on a lift they saw that it would only take a few minutes to fix, so they took a little extra time to do it.

There are many ways for a business to delight their customers but my favorite has always been when they proactively solve my problems.


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