Monday Fiction resumes next week.
Category: General
Signs of Stroke
I’m borrowing (stealing) this from Jennifer.
Please, Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’ve Been A Good Boy This Year
According to this article, Netflix is in talks to produce a fourth season of Longmire.
Sources caution that negotiations between Netflix and Longmire producer Warner Horizon have been tricky, and there is a chance that a final agreement may not be reached, though there is a will on both sides and insiders are hopeful. If a deal closes, Season 4 of Longmire eyes a tentative March production start date.
I promise, I’ve been a good boy (relatively). Can the great FSM grant a Holiday wish?
Update: Netflix will produce a 10-episode season 4 debuting in 2015.
Nissan Being Awesome
Do you remember this video a guy made to sell his beat-up ’96 Maxima?
Nissan, being awesome, bought the car and asked the populace what it should do? The overwhelming answer: restore. Not only did they restore the car, they made this awesome video:
I may have to make a side trip when I go to Nashville this spring for the NRA Annual Meeting.
Captain America and Theater Reaction
My brother and I, along with a couple of our friends, went to go see the new Captain America flick. Overall, I thought it was pretty damned good. I especially like the theme of “what price for security”.
We went to the same theater of the “texting shooting”. Not for any reason other than it’s the closest theater to my brother’s place. I remember shortly after Aurora, movie theaters had warnings running during the pre-show about letting management know about any suspicious person. The pre-show this time had six warnings to silence your phone and not to text during the film.
Barn door, meet fleeing horse.
Constructing a home cloud
My brother and I have decided to build a NAS for a “home cloud.” Essentially a single place to upload our media and documents to free up space on out home systems.
My brother is more versed in this than I am, so I’ve let him select the NAS RAID system and how to set it up. Since we have four slots, we started discussing drive configurations. The debate was should we get commercial 4TB drives or NAS-specific 3TB, since they were about the same price. Then comes this article.
Enterprise vs. Consumer Drives
At first glance, it seems the enterprise drives don’t have that many failures. While true, the failure rate of enterprise drives is actually higher than that of the consumer drives!It turns out that the consumer drive failure rate does go up after three years, but all three of the first three years are pretty good. We have no data on enterprise drives older than two years, so we don’t know if they will also have an increase in failure rate. It could be that the vaunted reliability of enterprise drives kicks in after two years, but because we haven’t seen any of that reliability in the first two years, I’m skeptical.<\blockquote>
The gist is that as long as we expect to change drives about every three years, we should be fine with commercial drives.
Anti-Smoking Crusaders Can’t Accept a Victory
Witzman
H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.†He might have been describing contemporary anti-smoking activists, that dour band of fuss-budgets constantly on the prowl for new ways to make life slightly less bearable by limiting the choices available to grown adults.Incredibly, the latest push from tobacco eliminationists doesn’t involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, and Three’s Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.
This time, the buttinskys are trying to douse the dreaded e-cigarette, a device that supplies a safe nicotine hit to the user without bothering or endangering anybody else. E-cigarettes use replaceable cartridges in which nicotine or flavors are heated, vaporized, and inhaled (users are called “vapersâ€). Some e-cigarettes look like conventional cancer sticks and others look more like something from a bad Sylvester Stallone movie set in the near future. Questions of fashion aside, they are not just a safer way for smokers to get the nicotine they crave, they are apparently as safe as milk (well, pasteurized milk, anyway, and assuming you’re not lactose intolerant).
I’ve had several friends who made the switch from tobacco to electronic. One in particular saw his “smoker’s cough” vanish completely. Granted, this is purely anecdotal, but the scientific evidence is there.
A Lady Blademaster
Okay, now this is just kick-ass! A lady sword fighter wins at the longsword tourney.
Even better:
She has several swords, and she designed the ones she uses the most. They’re specifically made for the style of fighting she does so they’re strong but not necessarily sharp. Regardless, I wouldn’t make her angry.
Your Morning LOL
Because the free ice cream machine needs to be refilled.
Spiders and Cats
Some of you may know this, but I hate spiders. Intellectually, I can appreciate the biological niche they have carved out for themselves. Emotionally, my response is more “KILL IT, KILL IT WITH FIRE!”
Yeah, that about sums it up.
So, of course, I am having a weird dream where I am precariously perched with a large spider skirting about. I am desperately trying to keep my legs from getting within jumping distance of this abomination.
I don’t know what I was murmuring or what was going through that FSM-damned kitten’s mind, but that was the exact moment that EBC decided to pounce on my legs.
I was very lucky not to have sodden sheets. Or a dead kitten.