Straws and camels

“How do you defeat a karate master? Offer him as many small coins as you can shove into a hat before he says “stop”. Of course, to get the money, he must catch the hat – with his head, as you drop it from the fifth floor.”
...To a libertarian, every new statist restriction is similar to a coin from this joke"


RTWT.    This is a concept I've been trying to articulate, he does a better job than I've been able to manage.     Each law passed adds a coin.  The "coin" may have varying monetary values--this is the beneficial part.  But each law/coin also has a weight--the restrictions it puts on us, the extra power given to government officials--in some cases making it impractically difficult to follow the whole law.  No matter how small or trivial each individual weight is, enough will crush us.  


Some laws are well worth the weight--the value of laws against murder, assault, theft and fraud are far greater than the restrictions they add.   


Some are not--what good purpose is served by licensing criteria for hairdressers beyond basic sanitation?  (or even licensing them at all?)  Does it make sense that thrift stores and garage sales can be held responsible for product recalls? 


(H/T to Oleg Volk)

Zoo picture dump

Took my grandson to the Columbus zoo today--First time we have taken him that far, he did well--but he was exhausted by the time we left, asleep before we were out of the parking lot.  Click on pictures to make them huge

They have a bucket of combs and brushes at the petting area.

He wanted to get in and swim with the fish...

It is really hard to get a picture of a toddler at the zoo that shows faces and that he's at the zoo.  Sometimes you just settle for faces.

Big snake














Giant aquarium.  I think it is fantastic, he wasn't impressed.

Fox Bats

He did like the tank with manatees and rays.

They had a fantastic playset, although I am not sure why it belongs at the zoo.  Kind of like the McDonalds ones, except much bigger and better.

The only downside was if your kid didn't want to come out, it was hard to get to him...

These were the "stairs" to the upper levels--a series of  steps like this, except with the hole in a different corner for each step--maximum fall level was only about 2 feet onto a stretched cloth floor.

Level 2 of 3 levels.

I am probably going to use this picture for a Gimp tutorial.

Catchy Song

There is a lot about this song I usually would not like--particularly the NSFW language. In this case it works, and the song is catchy and funny.  I've listened a dozen or more times in the last 2 days

(Mom, you probably don't want to listen)



(HT to Roberta X)

Italian Mantis

I moved one of my basil plants to the deck. It got a visitor:

I didn't know preying mantises liked Italian...

Technology shuffle

I wanted to upgrade my iPod Touch--despite it being barely over a year old, and being updated once in that time, the majority of apps I have tried to install in the last few months need a more recent version of the iPod OS.

It needs a Windows (or a Mac) computer to update, with enough space to make a copy of everything on my iPod--in this case, about 12 gigabytes. I have one computer left that can still boot into Windows, and it does have far more than 12 gigabytes free.

Except the iPod gives no choice in where that free space must be, it insists that it must be in the user's "my documents" folder, which is by default on the C drive. Windows makes it slightly difficult to install with 'my documents' anywhere but C, and even more difficult to move them after the install.

When I install Windows, I have been in the habit of partitioning the drive, with a small but adequate partition for the C drive, and the remainder as an E: drive for data. This means that if I have to reinstall, I can wipe Windows without wiping out the data.

There may be a workaround within iTunes, but I couldn't find it in the time I was willing to devote. There is a section within iTunes to enter a path, logic would lead one to believe changing that path would change where the backup would go--but when I changed it to a path with more than enough free space, it still tried to use the "my documents" on C: to put the backup.

I finally managed a workaround by adding a spare old hard drive I had available, shuffling data then using Linux to expand the partition holding the C drive--a project I had been meaning to do anyway. Once I did that, I was able to sync my iPod and run the update. I have no idea how long the update took, but at least several hours with the CPU running at 100% for most of the time, and virtually no indication of progress--usually a symptom of an application that has hung. I left it overnight and when I awoke, the upgrade had completed.

I am still amazed at how amazingly well Apple does some things, and how amazingly badly they do others. My brother is an advanced Mac user. He said that iTunes for Windows left such a bad impression, it kept him from giving Mac a serious chance for about a year.