The American Way of Marmalade.

Yet again, I'm looking for a job. The contract position I was in will end next friday and the additional projects they wanted me to work on didn't get approval from the parent company in time, so here I am. If anyone knows of any programming positions, preferably in web development, please let me know.

Obama swore to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution, and then no more than 10 minutes later he indicated that he would violate it.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

The constitution says nothing about giving the government the power to enact programs at taxpayer expense to create jobs with "decent" wages, make health care affordable, and maintain the dignity of retirees, as if any of that were possible in the first place. It does however prohibit those and all other actions that are not explicitly granted to the federal government. If Obama follows up on this assertion, he will have violated the constitution and his oath to preserve it. How long do you think it'll take?

If anyone reading is interested in history, or even just looking for some good stories to listen to, I wholeheartedly recommend Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. (http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive) I've listened to several episodes so far. Dan Carlin can really tell a compelling story. In particular, the three part series on the Punic Wars was fascinating. I had no idea what the Punic Wars were before listening and I was hooked the whole time. I've also listened to Bubonic Nukes, Desperate Times, Nazi Tidbits, and Apache Tears. All of them were very good stories well worth listening to.

On election night, like many people, I went out with some friends to watch the election coverage. Unlike those people, I had a little map with numbers and McCain/Obama predictions on it. I was playing the swing state drinking game that Dan came up with a few days earlier. We took the list of swing states from pollster.com and bet on which way they would go. For each one we got wrong we took as many shots as they have electoral votes divided by ten. My bets were:

Montana	Obama
North Dakota	Obama
Missouri	Obama
Indiana	McCain
Ohio	Obama
North Carolina	Obama
Florida	McCain
Georgia	McCain

I didn't know how to pick. The obvious way to go would be on racism, states with a lot of good old boys probably would never vote for a black person. I went a different way though. I took the list of states with paperless voting systems and gave those to McCain, and the rest to Obama. In the probably misquoted words of Joseph Stalin, "It's not the people who vote that counts, it's the people who count the votes."

My guesses turned out ok. I got Georgia, Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota wrong. As the night went on and our states weren't being called we just went with the current poll numbers. The only problem with the game was it was too slow paced to do by itself, you need something to take up the time between poll closings.

In other election related stuff, Dan pointed out the following wikigroan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber

Edit: I remembered what it was I forgot about. Politicians always make sure their family is dressed in red white and blue whenever they're in public, and especially on tv. When Obama's family came out after his speech on Tuesday, they didn't follow this unwritten rule.



His family wearing black and red, the colors of the anarcho-syndicalist/communist flag! Also, the colors of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation! Finally, the truth comes out!

Congratulations on surviving doomsday. If you're looking for clever and insightful quips relating to the LHC, I recommend you check out the slashdot thread. My favorite comment, and one that would make the end of the world worthwhile?

Alien species are certainly going to take pictures of that (the black hole that swallowed the planet) and add the words EPIC FAIL on top.

And to keep you up to date on whether the LHC has destroyed the world yet, go to http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. (rss)

If you haven't heard of miracle fruit on your favorite social news site, you should check it out. It's a berry native to Africa, and when you suck on it for a while and then eat sour fruits like lemons and grapefruit, they taste sweet and delicious. I recently ordered some miracle fruit tablets from here and tried it out. I had all kinds of foods; lemons, grapefruit, grapes, 85% cocoa chocolate, mustard, peanut butter, marshmallows, jalapenos, gin, whiskey, angostura bitters, cheese, and probably more I can't recall at the moment. My roommates all got miraculized and ate all these things. The effect was as advertised for sour and citrus tasting fruits. Lemons were lemonade, grapefruits were just delicious, and the mustard also tasted like honey mustard. Most other things weren't affected at all, or had their flavor slightly diminished. It was a very interesting experiment, and I would do it again for fun with other people, but it's not convenient enough (yet) for this to be a sugar substitute like some people have talked about. We thought that it would make sense in a gum, since you hold that in your mouth like you have to do with this. So whoever out there makes that product, you owe me a dollar.

5 months to the day after I was laid off, I have a new job. I'm developing for a social networking site in PHP. The office is less than a mile from my house, and while I liked having lunch with the LUG people once a week it is convenient to be that close. I also have to use Windows on my work computer, which is annoying, but I'm working around it. I think it'll be an ok gig, and I'm glad to have a serious job again.

This summer I'm going to try and grow some food. I've planted a few things, as you can see here:




In the small planter is basil, oregano, mint, and rosemary. In the big one is a tomato plant and an onion.

I have a few questions for the gardeners reading this. The basil, and to a lesser extent the mint, don't look like they're doing to well. Is this just the cold weather? It gets down to the low 40's sometimes at night and I figure it's just not liking that. The onion's wierd too. You can see light brown parts on its shoots. They started doing that when it was living in a bowl of water in my living room (that plant started out as food and sprouted before we ate it, so we planted it). It got worse while it was in the pot you see in the herb picture. I trimmed the tan bits that got hard. Is this an expected behavior? I don't know what to make of it.

According to this article, employees for the Zappos call center are offered a bonus to quit after their training period is over. The $1000 to quit is supposed to get rid of people who don't care about the work and just want the money. That doesn't make sense to me. If I worked in a call center, it wouldn't be for my love of fielding angry customer calls every day, it would be for the money. And given that, I would not take this deal. By staying on the job and being good at it I can make much more money in the long run than this $1000 one time payday. It seems to me that this works better at filtering out dummies.

It doesn't matter if you've never heard of what is being reviewed on zero punctuation, check it out anyway. This is the funniest review I've heard in a long time.

Zero Punctuation reviews Army of Two