aubreyturner.org

It would appear that modern man does not have a monopoly on bad taste:

The glittering “grills” of some hip-hop stars aren’t exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says.

Ancient peoples of southern North America went to “dentists”—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico).

Make sure to click on the link to the article to get a glimpse of an ancient skull with gem stones embedded in its teeth.  I wonder if the next discovery will be the remains of ox-carts with giant wheels and spinners. 

I have become increasingly annoyed by what I am seeing as a more and more common reaction to a righteous shooting these days.  I suppose it’s to be expected given the fact that the Internet is now bringing together two populations that previously would not have had much chance to mix it up with one another.  But you can set your watch by the time line of these things:
* Shooting occurs
* Newspaper publishes online article and/or blogger posts about it
* Comments come in from pro self-defense citizens (“One more criminal off the streets,” etc)
* Outraged friends and family of the dead perpetrator find the article through Google or other search engine
* Friends and family post:
    – He was such a good kid, he couldn’t have done this
    – No one has the right to kill someone else
    – People are hearing the whole story, he was set up
    – What was the victim doing with a gun?  Was he some kind of criminal?
* Pro self-defense people respond
* Lather, rinse, repeat…

The latest incident can be seen in the comments at Beyond Right Field concerning this incident.

An 18-year-old Fort Worth man killed Tuesday afternoon inside a north Fort Worth apartment had apparently forced his way inside, armed with an aluminum bat, when he was shot by one of the apartment’s residents, investigators said.

Derek Splawn, a student in the Keller school district, had been upset with the apartment’s 18-year-old resident and had reportedly threatened in an earlier telephone conversation “that he was tired of this and he was going to come over there,” homicide Detective Curt Brannan said.

Around 4 p.m. Tuesday, police said, Splawn made good on his word and had a friend drive him to the Watercolor apartments in the 8600 block of Spring Tree Lane, near Beach Street and North Tarrant Parkway. As the friend waited in the car, Brannan said, Splawn first pounded on the apartment’s patio door, shouting for the 18-year-old resident to come out, before beating on the apartment’s front door.

Though the resident did not emerge, Brannan said, Splawn was able to force his way inside the apartment after the resident’s roommate opened the front door to peek out and saw Splawn standing there with the bat.

“Before he could get the door shut, the man [Splawn] pushed the door open and had taken several steps inside the doorway in the direction of the [18-year-old],” Brannan said.

Brannan said the 18-year-old, in turn, picked up a shotgun he kept in the home and fired once, striking Splawn in the face.

Provided the facts are as stated, this seems pretty open-and-shut.  A hothead attempts to attack a rival with a deadly weapon and is killed in the act.  I will grant that the media often gets a lot wrong, but most of the article seems to be direct quotes from the Detective working the case.  So, unless and until someone can present credible evidence that something in the above is materially incorrect, I will go with the assumption that the facts as given are correct.

I almost got sucked into this vortex, but this comment made me realize that there’s probably no hope of meaningful communication between the two sides:

If you came up to me with a bat,And i had a shot gun
who do you think would win?
I dont care what you say you cannot justify shooting someone in the face with a shotgun because he had a bat.
Mabey you could call it self-defence if he shot him in the leg.
But no,Hes just needed an excuse to kill derek.
I knew derek very personally and i knew sam as well,And i can tell you that sam didnt give a crap whether derek had that bat or not
He still would have shot him
but now no justice is coming and thats the hardest part about it.

My first thought is that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to take on someone who had a gun if I had a baseball bat and I am certainly not going to be bursting into anyone’s apartment anytime soon.  Finally, shooting people in the leg is what people do in stupid movies.  In real life you shoot to stop the threat. 

It finally dawned on me, though (after I responded that I most certainly could justify the shooting) that this commenter really doesn’t grok the idea that a baseball bat can be a deadly weapon and that you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself against someone with a bat.  It’s almost like he’s looking for some kind of “fair fight,” which would be stupid beyond belief.  Am I supposed to just stand there and let someone hit me with a bat because a gun is supposedly unfair or something?  Deadly force is deadly force, and a baseball bat can certainly constitute deadly force in some circumstances.

But it’s sometimes difficult for me to remember that your average person hasn’t contemplated these sorts of things, and that goes especially so for your average teenager.  However, it’s exactly the sort of thing that you must confront if you choose to carry a gun or to keep one at home for defense.  You must have a passing familiarity with the law on deadly force as well as an understanding of what “deadly force” means. 

I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take this as legal advice, but a quick reading of the above two links to the Penal Code indicates to me that I don’t have to let the attacker get a hit in, nor do I have to worry too much about the instrumentality he or she is using provided that I reasonably believe that it’s capable of inflicting death or great bodily injury on me and that the person is intending to do so right now.  It occurs to me that while it was designed around knives, the lessons learned from the Tueller Drill would seem appropriate to someone armed with a bat as well.  Perhaps even more so, because I would fear that one hit from an aluminum bat could leave me unconscious and at the mercy of the attacker, while I might be able to still respond after the first knife thrust.

I suppose this all might seem a bit blood-thirsty or dark to someone who hasn’t considered the topic much before.  But the average gun owner is not sitting around cackling with glee at the thought of killing someone.  It should be noted that we do not shoot to kill, but to stop a threat.  If the perpetrator dies as a result, the fault lies with the perpetrator for initiating deadly force against us.

In keeping with my affinity for strange remakes, here’s Señor Coconut doing his version of Smooth Operator:

And to cleanse your musical palate, here’s the original: Sade – Smooth Operator

Another user interface annoyance of mine are low-battery alarms.  I recognize that they can be useful, but I’ve encountered a few that deliver more annoyance than function (like the cell phone that I once had that would beep regardless of the phone’s vibrate settings).

The latest one to annoy me is the pager that I carry for rehab callouts.  It’s a Unication Alpha Elite model.  When the battery gets really low (25% or lower) it will beep once every so often, which is not unexpected.  However, last night at midnight it unleashed a full alert.  When I looked at it the only thing I could infer was that it was complaining about the battery, which was somewhere around 33% according to the meter.  There was no message and nothing was flashing.  It also did this about a month ago just before I changed the battery. 

So, it appears that it’s programmed to alert at midnight every night when the battery is below some preset voltage level.  Which seems designed to cause maximum annoyance.  Why midnight?  Why not just display “low battery” on the display and then go to beeps when it gets really low?  If my pager makes noise at midnight I expect someone to be trying to reach me not a battery problem. 

It seems to me that this is a badly implemented feature that was obviously not vetted by any real users before it was released. 

I’ve had a computer sitting around in the closet for nearly two years now.  I originally bought it as a fairly inexpensive barebones kit that I was going to build out to give to my Mother for her birthday.  But after I built it I decided that it wasn’t quite what I wanted and so I shelved it and I ended up giving her a new HP for Christmas later that year.  So into the closet it went, only being pulled out long enough for me to scavenge the video card and memory for some other systems that needed them. 

About six months ago I decided to revive it.  It was pretty lagging edge, but still useful for a basic computer for someone who just writes a few documents and checks email/surfs the web.  I had found a video card that I’d forgotten that I had while searching for something else in my office, so all I needed was memory, which I found for $20 or so on eBay.  As I was putting it together I noticed that the tab at the bottom of the metal bracket on the video card wouldn’t seat correctly in the hole, so I took a screwdriver (do you see where this is going?) to try to “guide” it into position.  Unfortunately, the screwdriver slipped, and when it did it hit one of the tiny surface mount resistors on the motherboard, completely annihilating it and ruining the motherboard in the process. 

Now I was at a decision point:  abandon the system or replace the motherboard?  I almost abandoned it when I started pricing replacement motherboards.  The system was so far behind the curve that no one was making new ones for this socket configuration anymore, and all of the online retailers were asking ridiculous prices for such old technology.  But eBay came to the rescue with a lightly used motherboard of similar configuration. 

So… I replaced the motherboard but realized that I didn’t have the proper ATX plate insert for all of the motherboard connectors.  I went ahead without one, but it was nagging at me that it could cause problems.  But, it didn’t appear to have any adverse impact as the system booted right up the first time and loaded the OS without any problems.  Or so I thought.  Once I shut it down it wouldn’t come back on until I’d unplugged the power supply for a few minutes.  If I didn’t all that would happen is that the front panel power light would come on but nothing else would happen (no fans, no HD spinup, etc; like it was in hibernate mode).  I tested the power supply with my ATX PS tester, and it showed all green lights for all of the supply lines on the MB connector as well as all of the molex connectors.

I thought maybe I had some weird grounding issue, so I went back to eBay and managed to find what seemed to be the one remaining ATX insert for this motherboard on planet Earth (only $6.00!).    Once I had it in hand I proceeded to remove the motherboard (which is always a royal pain), install the new plate, and check all grounding points to make sure they were in contact.  So I plugged it in, booted it up, and then shut it down.  Then I pressed the power button again.  No joy.  Same problem. 

At this point I’m convinced that this system is cursed and I decided to cannibalize it for parts.  But when I started my latest build I had two older-style ATX power supplies (including the Enermax) that I could not use in newer systems.  As a last-ditch effort to revive the system I swapped the original power supply for the Enermax.  And the system now works perfectly!  So the problem had been the power supply all along, despite the fact that my power supply tester showed no problems.  Either the PS was marginal for the new motherboard or it had gone bad while it was in storage. 

I guess the lesson learned is that if you suspect a power supply is bad to try another one even if the original tests OK (provided you have another PS on hand, of course). 

Now I have no idea what I’m going to do with this system; it was just sheer cussedness on my part that made me want to get it running again.  If someone is in desperate need of a new PC I’d be willing to give it away (it’d have to be someone local since the shipping would be prohibitive).  If memory serves, it’s an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a 16X DVD-RW drive, and it’s running openSUSE (11.0 I think).  No tech support or exorcist included. 

I’ve long been a user of the openSUSE Linux distribution (I actually started when it was just SUSE, before Novell bought them and created the openSUSE community).  So I had already downloaded the DVD ISO for openSUSE 11.1 when I started my recent system build.  But the day before the build I saw that Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 had been released and that it was generating a lot of good reviews.  Ubuntu is based on Debian, and a couple of years ago I had used Debian on a backup system and found that I liked their package tools, so I decided to give Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 a try.  I figured that the worst that could happen is that I wouldn’t like it and that I would be able to wipe it and install openSUSE.

However, I don’t think that is going to be necessary.  I found it to be one of the smoothest installations I’ve been through in years.  It found and installed drivers for every component in the system and when it finished the final reboot the system was immediately usable.  That’s a far cry from any Linux distribution I’ve used before and better even than Windows, where I often have to install anywhere from 2 to 10 drivers after installation.  The system even included a utility to automatically install the proprietary ATI/AMD video drivers, which was a nice touch.

There is only one fly in the ointment so far.  While the system was usable, it did not correctly manage my dual displays so I ended up seeing the same image on both (stereo!).  This appears to be an issue with the ATI Catalyst 9.4 drivers.  To further complicate matters, Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 contains a pre-release version of the 9.4 drivers.  After I figured this out and applied the latest released Catalyst 9.4 drivers it seems I’m tantalizingly close but can’t quite get there.  The ATI configuration utility tells me that I have to create a second desktop to enable Xinerama, yet the desktop configuration page won’t let me create a second desktop.  It says to “drag and drop” the “objects” yet nothing will drag and drop. 

I’m continuing to investigate this one, but in the background when I have free time, which has been limited of late.

But I don’t blame the above on Ubuntu, since they don’t control the proprietary driver.  Overall I’d say that Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 has been quite polished and easy to work with.  I think it’s the first desktop Linux that I’d be comfortable giving to my Mother to use (once I’d set up everything, of course). 

I tend to accumulate computer parts over time as I upgrade older systems or replace them.  I also keep an eye out for good sales on parts that I can either keep on hand as spares for current systems or use for new builds/upgrades.  So when the upgrade bug struck recently I already had a number of parts on hand, including a 500GB SATA drive, DVD-RW drive, a couple of ATX power supplies (including a really high-end Enermax 450W unit), and a really nice Cooler Master Centurion case.  I started looking around at motherboard and CPU combos.  What I wanted was a motherboard capable of supporting dual monitors and a multi-core AMD CPU.  I was also intending to run Linux, so as I came across motherboards I checked for compatibility of video, LAN, and audio drivers.

I eventually settled on the following setup from Newegg.com:

• BIOSTAR A760G M2+ motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 Brisbane CPU (AM2)
• Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit

Not exactly bleeding edge, but I got all three of the above for $150, which is pretty good for a new system build.  While waiting for the parts to arrive I pulled the Enermax PS from another case where it had been sitting.  That was when I noticed that it had the older 20-pin ATX motherboard connector, rather than the 24-pin connector that the motherboard required.  Now some motherboards will run without the extra four pins (you just plug the 20-pin connector into the first 20 pins of the 24-pin connector on the motherboard).  However, the manual for this motherboard did not mention this as an option so I ended up having to shell out another $50 for an Antec Basiq 500W power supply.  A bit annoying, and now my budget build was starting to fell somewhat un-budget. 

But this was the only hiccup, as the system went together really smoothly once I had all the parts together.  I think it only took about an hour total to get it assembled.  Since my phone was handy I snapped a few photos for posterity (which also prompted my previous whining about user interface annoyances). 

Cooler Master Centurion with Antec PS installed, awaiting installation of components:

Motherboard and CPU:

Optical and Hard Drives:

All components installed:

There’s something satisfying about taking a bunch of boxes and parts and converting them into a pile of trash and a working computer.

I don’t usually bother using my phone for pictures, but it has a decent camera for a phone and it occasionally comes in handy.  But getting the pictures off the phone is kind of a pain.  I don’t have a USB cable for it, so I either have to pull the memory card (which involves turning the phone off, removing the back cover, pulling out the battery, pulling the card, putting it in a reader, and then reassembling everything) or send them to myself in email. 

Sending email is only slightly less annoying.  First, Verizon has put the photo options under a menu item called “Get It Now.”  This is not what one would intuitively expect for accessing your photos.  Once you successfully navigate to your photos, you can select “Options” and “Send,” which is not too bad.  But once you’ve sent the photo the phone returns to the main menu.  That’s both counter-intuitive and annoying, as I have to work my back down to the photos if I want to send another one.  It’s a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it’s yet another small user interface annoyance and something that could be fixed easily if someone at Verizon really cared about it.

From the ‘crap that costs me money’ department…

The day that I’d been dreading for the past year and a half finally came about two weeks ago.  The ancient (23 year old) air conditioner that came with the house finally went Tango Uniform.  I’d been kind of expecting it, because when units get that old the compressors start to wear out, generally due to insulation breakdown in the windings.  In this case, one of the terminals on the compressor had completely burned off (I didn’t ask whether it was the start or run terminal, although it really doesn’t matter at this point).

I was preparing for a battle with the home warranty company, but they didn’t put up a fight about authorizing a new 13-SEER condenser unit (the outside part for those of you not up with central air lingo).  I contemplated this for a bit, and then asked the A/C contractor for a quote on a new system (applying the money the home warranty was offering to replace the condenser to the new system) because connecting a 13-SEER condenser to the existing inside air handler/furnace unit would de-rate it and reduce its efficiency.  And given our usual Texas summers and my past electricity bills I decided it was worth it to investigate a more efficient system.

They gave me two quotes, one for a full 14-SEER system and another for a 16-SEER system (16 is now required to get the energy tax credit).  Both quotes were eye-popping, with the 16-SEER coming in at just under $8K.  But once I picked myself up off the floor, and after checking their finance offer, I decided on the 16-SEER system.  With the amount paid by the home warranty, my cost on the 16-SEER was $7170, and I would get $1500 back next year through a tax rebate, which puts my actual cost (eventually) at $5670, which wasn’t much more than the 14-SEER.  Further, they had a 12-month “same as cash” offer, which would put my payments at just a hair under $600 (for the whole amount of $7170; the $1500 doesn’t get back to me until I file taxes next year).

I’m hoping to recoup some of that during the summers. It’s hard to calculate the exact energy savings in advance, because the old unit did not have a SEER rating, but given its age, it could not have been more than an 8 or 9.  And going from an 8 to an 16 would have the potential to save up to 50% on energy costs.  Last summer I had electricity bills ranging from $400 to $600 during the worst of the summer months.  At 50% savings, and factoring in just the worst three months ($1500 combined), the system will pay for itself in 7.5 years.  At 30% savings it will take 12 years.  And that’s not taking into account future increases in electricity.  If some in the current administration, Congress, and/or the EPA get their way, we could be looking at significant energy cost increases as they implement an ill-advised cap-and-trade carbon emissions plan.

I may also get a little back on the gas bill in the winters, too, because this is a full system replacement that includes a new 95% efficiency furnace.  Although I’m not expecting a lot, since I don’t generally use the heat much.  I like the house to be fairly cool and my dogs love it cold, so I don’t use the furnace much (my worst gas bill in the winter so far has been about $80). 

Anyhow, it’s funny (in an ironic, rather than comic, way) because I just paid off the Avalanche in February, which freed up a little over $600 in my monthly budget.  Is there some kind of conservation of outlay rule (kind like conservation of energy) about monthly cash flow?  Or is the universe just being perverse, as usual?  Sometimes the timing of these things just seems way too coordinated to be coincidence. 

Oh well… here’s to a cool, and (hopefully) comfortable summer.

I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of taxpayers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

H/T The Smallest Minority (original at AR15.com).  Via Instapundit.