The Ministry of Minor Perfidy

Ministers

Chairman, Ministry Blue-Ribbon End-Times Parade Committee

Second Amendment Sister

'Hey... what's this button do?'

Beauty School Dropout

Bad monkey, no banana

Chess Hooligan

Minister Emeritus

Windy City Mike
social democrat, ca. 1930 trade-unionist, and professor of alleged history

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

But not a real gooey brain, that’s cruel

In what has become a holiday tradition, the unhappy hordes of clenched-lip grinches have released their lists of toys and games deemed unsuitable for the fragile minds of our youth. Unable or unwilling to feel joy, they seek to deny any glimmer of happiness in others. Thanks to their never-flagging and unholy efforts BB guns, cap guns, action figures with spring-loaded projectiles and riding bicycles without helmets are now part of the dead past. Challenging puzzles with small pieces were next. A vast array of inherently fun toys have been banished, tarred and feathered with the labels ‘unsafe’ and ‘violent.’

We live in an unsafe and violent world. Evolutionary psychologists have learned that (as common sense had long held) that play is just nature’s way of preparing our young for the vicitudes of adult life. What better education is there than a childhood filled with guns, knives and imaginary bloodshed?

But now, the grim advocates of pacificism and perfect safety have gone too far. They are even now attacking a time-hallowed and beloved, nay, essential part of American childhood. They are insisting that cannibalism has no place in the life of a mentally healthy child. Who among us has not joyfully and creatively relived in play the tragic story of the Donner party? And who has not played explorers and headhunters? Even small girls with their easy-bake ovens have traditionally joined in this wholesome fun, pretending to bake elaborate long pig quiches or presiding over tea and fingerbone parties with her dolls.

We need to preserve the last vestiges of this sacred tradition. The only place that cannibalism now remains, the only place that children can partake of this feast of joy is in modern console games like “F.E.A.R.” and “Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse.” These soul-sucking killjoys partake of ritual and symbolic cannibalism on a weekly basis. Don’t let them take this from us. We must fight these hypocrites, fight them, tooth and nail so that we may enjoy our virtual cannibalism in peace.

Why do they hate our freedom?

Posted by Buckethead on 11/30/05 at 02:50 PM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Sticking it to the Cable (and Satellite) Man

I refuse to believe that I get $75 worth of “programming” on DirecTV each month. It’s crap, I tell ya. Crap! So I get it into my head the past few days that I’m going to see what my alternatives are. I’ve noticed that the quality of shows on the “cable channels” has dropped, on a scale of 1 to 10 to around 1.5 or so. Getcher double-indian head collector’s coin pressing here! I’ve also noticed that the only shows I enjoy watching are on the networks (stoopid shows like Surface and Invasion, which I like—screw you).

It turns out that in the Washington DC area we’re quite fortunate to be living in one of the best Newfangled Digital TV centers around. We get quite a long list of channels (and sub-channels)—2,4,5,7,9,11,13,20,43,45,50. Some of the channels are from Baltimore, but come in just fine. But how to get all this free digital goodness, given the need for the contained black magic of an ATSC tuner, which is not the same as your father’s NTSC tuner?

More Perfidious Goodness...

You’ve got a couple of options for high def TV. You can go with cable and get four or five locals in HD, paying about $80 a month, if you’re lucky. You can go with DirecTV, pay $200 for your equipment and installation, then discover that what you’re actually doing is getting the HD channels over the air. You can go with Dish and be in the same situation as DirecTV, although it’s a bit cheaper overall. I’ll also say that DirecTV really pissed me off two weeks ago. The new mpeg-4 compatible HD receivers arrived at Best Buy. These new receivers can use a 5-LNB dish to receive current and some future programming from DirecTV, which will include very shortly the local channels from this area in high def; they also have an ATSC OTA (digital over-the-air) tuner built-in. I picked one up for $200 and brought it home, then called DirecTV to inform them of the equipment change. The customer support person informed me that they couldn’t activate the receiver unless I agreed to a 2-year commitment. Since I had just gone out and bought the receiver myself, I asked exactly what I was getting in return for the two year commitment. Dedicated phone person told me “Nothing!”. That just didn’t seem fair to me. I told her I was going to return the equipment and possibly cancel my service. “I’m sorry about that!” was her chirpy response. Ridiculous—I’ve changed equipment before and not had a problem.

I guess I could have accepted the commitment. But you can also say “Screw the Man” to yourself, and see if there’s a way to cut them out entirely. The catch, as always, is that your significant other really likes Tivo, and you’ll die a terrible death if said “Now Playing” list goes missing.
Because of the waffling at the federal government level over the “broadcast flag” (which would make it illegal for an electronic device to make a copy of information that was so-flagged) there’s been almost a complete lack of investment by companies in developing convergence hardware. Convergence in the media equipment realm is the notion that a single, fast general purpose computer can do it all—it can play music, record television, show DVDs, interact with the internet...you name it. With the federal government repeatedly on the verge of declaring general computing to be illegal, companies don’t spend money developing products that might be legislated out of existence.

Tivo is a kind of convergence box (lightweight), and there are others on the horizon. But your garden-variety (or slightly above garden-variety) PC has far more horsepower and far more capability than those consumer boxes do. Shouldn’t it be able to do the job?

If you want Tivo-like capability for over-the-air without cable or satellite, your choices are minimal. Sony has an OTA tuner/hard drive recorder combination that sells for $500 for the base model. It can do the job. If you go the PC route, you can use a couple of different packages. The free Linux alternative is MythTV. I haven’t set one up yet but I am going to give it a try. The limiter here is that very few TV tuner cards have Linux drivers. Apple has their new G5 system, where a media center TV function is built in. As far as I know it does not yet support HDTV. Microsoft has the Windows Media Center Edition, which as of the latest service packs supports HDTV. It’s a somewhat expensive proposition to buy a media center PC at this time—the cheapest you can get one is around $750. You’d need to add your own tuner card to that as well.

I ended up buying an ADS Technologies Instant HDTV PCI card and a Terk outdoor antenna. I had an older PC setup (AMD64, 200GB HD) that I wanted to start with. I could have gone the Linux route, but the capture card situation just didn’t seem to be all that great. There are some significant financial advantages, though --

Linux—free O/S, free TV software (MythTV), but you need to find the right capture card with Linux drivers, which is tough.

Windows—XP Home ($90), decent software costs ($50 or so), good card and driver support. Total cost is about $300, assuming you already have decent hardware to run on. If you have hardware that has XP already, deduct that. I moved my XP installation to my new computer, so it was not available for the old one. You can run XP in trial mode for 30 days, though, which allows you to evaluate the quality of your eventual solution. If you like it, then buy the OS and you’re good (one quick note—an unauthenticated XP will not download certain patches. Use your activated XP machine to retrieve them, then copy them over to the test machine).

For Windows, the Instant HDTV comes with BeyondTV Express, a somewhat limited TV-watching program. BeyondTV offers an upgrade to their latest full version for $50. Alternatives include SageTV, which seemed to be a bit cruder and not speak HDTV quite as well. What I was surprised by was my discovery of Meedio—a visual stunner that aims to be the true convergence app for PC hardware. Sadly, Meedio does not yet support the Instant HDTV card so I could not test its TV functionality. What I was amazed by was the clean UI, extensibility, and general polish of Meedio—the way that Meedio looks, the way that you use it...it is very much what I thought a good convergence app ought to be like.

There are some instructions on the Meedio web site indicating how to configure an unsupported capture card, so I guess I’ll try that next and see if Meedio does a good job with high def. If so, it’ll probably be the best choice. I can’t really say that I was looking forward to messing around with MythTV all that much. I can get an OEM Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition for about $120 at a DIY shop around here, and I think it would be a good thing to have regardless.

There have been a few “weird” bits—I had the system record “Surface” last night, and the encoding seemed to be messed up. I got an SD picture instead of SD—considerably better than DirecTV’s garbage, but far from HDTV. Each station’s transmission is delivered in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream form, which can encode multiple channels of information. It can contain an SD program, an HD program, and additional channels (like weather). Part of what a TV app needs to do is select out the right subchannel and display that. The good news is that the raw data is still captured on my system, so I’ll be able to experiment with it and find out if the HD content is really there, or if it’s just plain missing!

I can’t say that I’m ready to say “screw you” to the cable man just yet, but I’m getting close. I am hard pressed to name a channel other than SciFi that has any programming I am interested in—and even there there’s just one show (Battlestar Galactica, you nerd) that I actually want to watch.

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Ross on 11/29/05 at 05:05 PM
The Miracle of Science • Permalink

Monday, November 28, 2005

The new voice of the antiwar movement

This just amuses the hell out of me. Professional angstmonger and shrill leftwing nutjob Cindy Sheehan is seen here overwhelmed by her legions of fans.

popularity

Posted by Buckethead on 11/28/05 at 02:15 PM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Precipitous fall from a not very great height

British rocker Gary Glitter has been charged with child molestation in Vietnam. This follows being banned from Cambodia after child rights activists put his name on an entry blacklist, a brief stay in Cuba, and leaving Britain after convicted of possessing over 4000 pornographic images of children on his computer.

Kinda sad when even third world countries with a penchant for brutality won’t put up with your antics.

Posted by Buckethead on 11/28/05 at 02:10 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Happy Thanksgiving

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. Unless you’re some sort of commie who thinks Thanksgiving symbolizes oppression and racism. If that is the case, The Ministry hopes that you get a life, punk. But for everyone else, if you are traveling, travel safely; give thanks and enjoy the turkey and most of all good company with those you love.

Posted by Ministry on 11/23/05 at 04:35 PM
Perfidy • Permalink

Monday, November 21, 2005

Speed Kills

Perfidious Crony EDog is well into his NaNoWriMo entry, and it’s pretty fuck good! Read Propane Jockeys, about the secret underground world of forklift racing, today.

Posted by Johno on 11/21/05 at 02:03 PM
NaNoWriMo • Permalink

Instalanche at one remove

Perfidy crony NDR has been instalanched!

Posted by Johno on 11/21/05 at 01:15 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Follow the money

In all seriousness, if you have a hankering to get a little technical, Sterling’s online course would be an excellent way to get access to some very marketable skills at a very reasonable price. Sterling’s a sharp guy.

Posted by Buckethead on 11/19/05 at 12:58 AM
Filthy Lucre • Permalink

Loneliness and cheesburgers. Without the cheeseburgers.

Loyal reader and crony EDog sends this link to a video that is sure to tug on the ol’ heartstrings.

Posted by Johno on 11/19/05 at 12:07 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Friday, November 18, 2005

I love the smell of willy pete in the morning

Long time commenter over at Murdoc’s place, Nicholas, has spun up his very own blog. The Smell of Freedom is off to a shiny start, with several long, but yet tightly argued posts. As a fer-instance, check out his piece on the white phosphorus non-controversy, which is about the best explication of the issues involved as I’ve seen.

Posted by Buckethead on 11/18/05 at 07:23 PM
War • Permalink

Orion shall rise. Maybe.

Brickmuppet informed me - oh, jeez, last week or so - of his post on the new Orion research. I’ve been meaning to throw a link up, but I am a slacker. But not completely so, and here it is.

Orion, for those not in the know, was a program in the late fifties intended to produce a working spaceship powered by atomic bombs. On the face of it, this sounds like a rather spectacular sort of lunacy. But the eggheads in charge were the real deal, and they had it all scoped out. By inventing on the spot a sort of nuclear shaped charge, they were able to focus the energy of the blast where it would do the most good, propulsion-wise. They envisioned a massive steel pusher plate that was to be connected to the ship by the largest shock absorbers you can imagine. And they scaled up a coke vending machine to colossal size to eject the bombs from their magazine.

All the theoretical stuff was worked out. They exploded bombs, and got the results they expected. They built a scale model, named “Putt-Putt” that was propelled my ordinary chemical explosives. On its first flight, it went miles into the air. Everything was on track for the construction of a spaceship that would loft payloads the size of a WWII US Navy cruiser straight into orbit. Travel times to nearby planets would be in weeks. The outer system would take only months. And no screwing around with tiny, tiny robot probes that always point their antennae toward Sirius - just fire up an Orion, and you’d have a full crew of scientists in orbit around your holiday destination of choice.

And this, mind you, would have been in the sixties. The scientists on the project were saying, screw the moon, we can be to Saturn by the end of the decade.

Ignorance and the prejudices of others brought an untimely end to this project. But now, people are looking at the idea all over again. This time, it won’t be actual bombs, but rather - well, hear it from the Brickmuppet:

The new system has several improvements over the original version as it disposes of the actual atom bombs in favor of using a magnetic system to pinch the fuel into critical mass....this allows far more controlability!. This is much closer to the classic science fiction view of a spaceship engine. It also doesn’t require having lots of atom bombs lying around for your spaceship (and what space entrepanuer wants the ATF hassles THAT would bring?)

Check out the homepage for the researchers, here. As BM says, this would actually give us a reason for the proposed heavy lift vehicle. But, as is typical with space policy issues, we run into the chicken egg problem. Without heavy lift (and a lot of research) the Orion isn’t feasible. Without Orion (or some other program requiring the kind of payload only a big dumb booster can provide) there’s no reason to develop it.

There is no reason to expect that NASA or the government will do anything even faintly resembling smart. But the likelihood of private space gaining a toehold is getting better by the day. And once they have that toehold, they can begin to ratchet their way to ever larger capabilities, fueled at each stage by incremental growth in both flight envelope and profitability.

Posted by Buckethead on 11/18/05 at 06:45 PM
That Buck Rogers Stuff • Permalink

Resistance is futile

Not long ago, my friend Sterling got a call from Bill Gates. He was sitting at his desk, pretending to work, when out of the blue the phone rang. Not a normal phone ring, but the theme from Blackadder, because Sterling is just that kind of guy. The kind of guy who not only knows how to reprogram his phone, but does, and choses the theme from Blackadder as his digital mating call.

But anyway, he answers the phone and hears, “Sterling, this is Bill Gates. No, really, its Bill Gates. I want you to come to Seattle and swear undying fealty to me; and in return I will pay you less money to live in a damp, dismal climate far from everything you hold dear.”

Sterling hesitated not at all in replying, “Yes, sir! Where do I sign? Do I need to use my own blood for ink? ‘Cause I can do that.”

Bill chuckled, and said, “I’m not the devil.” Sterling wasn’t sure, but he might have heard a muttered, “Yet.”

“Anyway, pack up your shit and move out here before I call someone else.”

With another brisk, but not too obsequious, “Yes, sir!” Sterling signed off and began packing.

Now, deep in the belly of the beast, Sterling spends his time as an acolyte at the main campus of the Cathedral of Bill in Redmond. He has been tasked with proselytizing the infidel, and has called upon me to pass the word. By simply clicking on this link, you can begin the process of being subsumed into the Microsoft collective. And best of all, its free! Sell your soul for free! What kind of bargain is that?

You, too, can learn the eldritch arts that Sterling has sacrificed years of his life and all hope of social graces to gain. You, too, can be a Certified Microsoft Small Business Server Guru. (And remember, it’s free.)

Posted by Buckethead on 11/18/05 at 06:18 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

It’s A Damn Good Thing

Since it’s Friday, the day of cat- and beer-blogging, and since I have nothing of particular global import to share with the Ministry’s eager readership, here is the menu for the dinner I’m making for a few friends tomorrow. I’m Martha freaking Stewart, but with man-parts.

NOV-TOBERFEST
Theme: Rotten and delicious, a tribute to tame bacteria

Appetizers Cheese plate with New England and European cheeses
Homemade sourdough bread
Flammekueche (Alsatian flatbread topped with bacon, caramelized onion, and cheeses)
Assorted olives
Homemade beer

Soup course Vegetarian borscht

Main event Home-cured sauerkraut with various pork products
Home-cured sauerkraut without various pork products
Potatoes with parsley sauce
Buttered peas
Reisling or Beaujolais Nouveau or more of that homemade beer

Dessert Individual molten chocolate cakes
Vermont maple-sugar vodka and Vermont milk-sugar vodka

Plane fare will totally be worth every penny. I promise.

Posted by Johno on 11/18/05 at 04:00 PM
Entertainment • Permalink

Sacrifice

Via Blackfive, this incredible story about the Marines who take care of their fallen comrades and their familes here at home. Don’t read it at work unless you have someplace to go be alone for a while.

Posted by Johno on 11/18/05 at 03:58 PM
War • Permalink

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