Still, emotionally, I think stuff like that should be controlled, and I just don’t think comparing something by Alan Moore with lolicon is fair. Like Gaiman, I’ve never actually seen lolicon, but I have heard of its reputation, and I have come across some very misogynistic non-lolicon works (in fact, I eventually realized most works by male manga authors always seem to have this weird sleazy angle to it [random panty shots that have nothing to do with the plot!?!]). Tenjo Tenge is one. It’s an action-packed, martial arts manga on the surface (with the usual male mangaka perv angle, or so I thought), but every x chapters, there’s a rape, and eventually, in the words of SomethingAwful.com, it’s not just mild rape, it’s insane rape. Very reminiscent of warcrimes committed during ww2. The first “normal” rape I could rationalize. “Hmm, ok, maybe he’s setting up some kind of emotional trauma to explore its ramifications. Now there is a vendetta between both sides.” But no, the victim never really thinks about it, ever, whether alone or with others. Like it was no big deal. The other characters treat it like that, too. “Oh, just rape. It’s coo. We’ll go punch him in the face.” Then the rapes start getting S&M-y, and then eventually execution by mutilation starts happening. Yeah, I stopped reading. It kind of blew my mind that it was picked up for conversion into an anime series, as well as for import to the US (with a lot of it redacted). But I searched the author’s name, followed the rabbit down the hole, and saw some things I wish I had never seen. So yeah, comparing Alan Moore with that? I don’t think that’s fair at all. For the record, I haven’t read the cited Moore work, Lost Girls, but I have read Watchmen, and I’ve seen V for Vendetta, does that count? I figure those works alone are so far above a mindless martial arts manga with rampant rape.

Anyway, I must go soon. Cue something about drawing the line on freedom of speech, and how mobile it is through time and space (what country you happen to be in), and something about how the blogger in Taiwan got arrested for a negative restaurant review, and another example from Europe, how insane the rape scene is in the King James bible, blah blah blah. You guys fill in the blanks. You’re smart. Write this shit for me.

Update: I suppose if I compare this to very liberal drug laws, which seem to be quite effective, perhaps it should be open season for anything when it comes to fiction, too. For those unfamiliar, various countries have tried letting people do whatever the hell they want when it comes to drugs, which has actually lowered crime due to the muted effect on the black market. Still, to succeed those countries also needed to create a support network to get people off drugs. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for insane fiction.

For example, last week I went to the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, CA. I knew it was in the desert somewhere, and didn’t have the full address, so I put in Indian Wells, CA. Google then assumed I meant the significantly further, unincorporated community between Sequoia National Forest and Edwards Air Force Base, and gave me directions based on that, rather than the much, much closer Indian Wells by Palm Springs. Thankfully we only drove the wrong way for about 5-10 miles before we realized what was happening.

Here is what you get if you search for Indian Wells, CA with Google maps on the iPhone or at google.com: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Indian+Wells,+CA&sll=33.688907,-117.832607&sspn=0.008659,0.013754&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Indian+Wells,+Kern,+California&ll=35.771029,-117.957458&spn=1.080783,1.760559&z=9. Or just try the search yourself. Today is March 21, 2010, btw, just in case this behavior becomes obsolete one day.

This is what you get when you search at bing: http://www.bing.com/maps/#JnE9eXAuSW5kaWFuK1dlbGxzJTJjK0NBJTdlc3N0LjAlN2VwZy4xJmJiPTQ5Ljk3MjM3Mjc0NjEyOCU3ZS04OC4wNjM3NTEyMjElN2UxMy41Mjg0NDQ0MTkzNjAxJTdlLTE0Ny4xMjYyNTEyMjE=. Bing nicely points out that there are two possibilities.

So now I suddenly remembered how I was unable to find another address several weeks ago. My aunt invited me to a dumpling-making party in celebration of Chinese New Years. In an email, she gave me the address as “412 Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805.” Much, much more complete than “Indian Wells, Ca.” We never found the place however. Fast forward to today. I found a paper invite, with an even more complete version of the address. “412 EAST Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805.” Oh, damn. Again, if you dump “412 Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805″ in Google, it will spit out one location. Bing will point out that there are two.

I’m starting to wish Apple would decouple the iPhone from Google maps and allow the user to specify a different map app (is there a way that I don’t know of?). But the Google maps integration is so good. All your contacts show up as bookmarks in your google maps if you have addresses listed for them, and you can access their phone number straight from the maps app, too. Handy if you’re about to arrive and need to call.

A good time waster. I could probably re-watch it in about a year.

Here’s an interesting article on the BBC website.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression, caused by the Bush administration’s ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”

The problem is, the left doesn’t play like that (whether you think the collapse was the Republicans’ fault or not), even if the average voter would eat that right up. The left prides itself as intelligent and intellectual (not to say I haven’t met some intelligent and intellectual conservatives), and above all that. They want to reach across the aisle and hold the conservatives’ hands. Sounds like an ivory tower. As Mao said, politics is war. And despite having a majority in the senate that could not be filibustered, the Democrats couldn’t pass the big stuff. Sure, there’ll be excuses on why it didn’t happen (some very good, actually), but the end result is failure. If the situation was reversed I doubt the conservatives would give a damn about working with Democrats. They somehow seem to be able to move in lockstep towards their greater good.

On a somewhat related note, I think many liberals assumed Fox News, known for generalizations like the quote above, would kind of just go away, or remain a niche product, and yet it’s actually become quite popular, despite how much the liberals bitch about it on the internet. Arrogance or naivete?

The skull logo seen at 0:42 is designed by his friend, Huck. Ken Block had seen a similar logo at Huck’s site, which can be seen here: http://huckgee.com/.

I guess he makes a pretty nice living as an artist/designer. They were just going to license the skull logo to Block, but QuickSilver wanted to buy the logo out completely (and they did, for a nice sum).

Huck also designs for kidrobot.com, which sells zany stuff, such as a Soviet walrus plush. The artists primarily have urban roots, according to my coworker.

I don’t know how this led to Nigo, and Bathing Ape, but it did. Nigo is some popular designer from Japan, and Bathing Ape is his brand of trendy clothing that people like Kanye West wear. All for ridiculous prices of course. Nigo has teamed up with two others to form the Billionaire Boy’s Club/Ice Cream, where you can buy $80 shirts, and $250 hoodies. Insane.

What was the point of this? I don’t know anymore, sorry. Well I stripped out all the business parts because I didn’t know how much of that I could talk about, but it looks like if you have talent, there’s some fun ways to make some money!

“I did not sleep at all last night. It hurts like the devil! A snowstorm whipping through my soul, wailing like a hundred jackals. Still no obvious symptoms that perforation is imminent, but an oppressive feeling of foreboding hangs over me . . . This is it . . . I have to think through the only possible way out: to operate on myself . . . It’s almost impossible . . . but I can’t just fold my arms and give up.

“18.30. I’ve never felt so awful in my entire life. The building is shaking like a small toy in the storm. The guys have found out. They keep coming by to calm me down. And I’m upset with myself—I’ve spoiled everyone’s holiday. Tomorrow is May Day. And now everyone’s running around, preparing the autoclave. We have to sterilise the bedding, because we’re going to operate.

“20.30. I’m getting worse. I’ve told the guys. Now they’ll start taking everything we don’t need out of the room.”

Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.

White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.

If you were a little thrown off by the Zodiac control like I was, they’re just showing that a person’s sign has no bearing on how compatible people are (based on their compatibility algorithm).  You can read more about how they calculate compatibility and the effects of religion here.

SQL Server Management Studio 2005 forgets password

As does the 2008 version. I ran into this issue and was (not) surprised to find that the bug dating back to version 2005 had still not been fixed.  Hey, at least you can delete some files to fix it though.

Edit: Just to make it more clear, from Voot’s post in the link above, you need to go to C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell

and delete SqlStudio.bin.

Make sure SSMS is not running when you delete it. Fire up SSMS again. All your credentials will be gone, so you’ll need to reenter them, but it should remember them from here on out. I have no idea what causes it to initially mess up.

On another note, it’s not often you see a woman write something like the following (what can I say, there’s not that many women in my field):

It doesn’t take too long to set up a tool to monitor a file or directory – you can download FileMon from:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx

The Connect to Server dialog can pop up in different situations where there is no security context for the connection to use. If you use registered servers (and save the password there) when you view the registered servers, select a server in the Registered Servers task pane and then click New Query on the toolbar or Right Click, Connect, Object Explorer or New Query which will result in connecting under the security context you used when registering the server. If a server isn’t selected, there is no security context available so the Connect to Server dialog pops up. I haven’t heard of passwords  being “lost” or “forgotten” using the registered servers task pane and saving registration information there.

Good info.

http://jalopnik.com/5390929/mustang-crash-gallery/

Do consider a Subie.

http://www.drive.subaru.com/Sum06_WhatsInside.htm

During an extrication seminar I was conducting, several members of an area fire department approached me with a question and a challenge. They had encountered a Subaru Forester involved in a crash and were unable to cut through the B-pillar with any of their extrication tools. Their cutter and their reciprocating saw were both unable to sever the pillar. They actually went back to the junkyard the next day and used a gasoline-powered rotary saw with an abrasive blade to totally remove the B-pillar. They brought it to the seminar to show me.

When I saw the pillar, it was clear that something was different about the Forester B-pillar construction. It was eight layers thick! One of the layers was a round steel rod that resembled a concrete reinforcement bar (rebar). That B-pillar had more layers of steel than I had ever seen in a vehicle.

I do realize that it’s not a totally fair comparison. Who knows if the Subaru’s roof could have withstood the same thing…but it does seem clear that the Subaru has superior reinforcement regardless. So why not? That and…I wouldn’t want a car with a live axle anyway.  I should note that the Mustang had a wannabe rollbar in it, too, that totally failed to do anything.

Now here’s an interesting site: http://www.boronextrication.com/2009/10/2010-ford-fusion-side-impact-protection.html

It’s basically a blog for firefighters showing where to cut up cars during an emergency.