This is not what they meant by “Communist Party”. Too bad, really. If Lenin and Stalin had gone to a few more fraternity keggers, Russia and Eastern Europe would probably be in a lot better shape than they are now. On Wednesday morning, I learned that the install techs for the work-provided Net service would [...]

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Artificially intelligent “assistants” are probably not ready for prime time, as shown. The people at the Cyc project are trying to reproduce something like “common sense” through a huge number of rules. I don’t know whether they can succeed in this or not, but it’s interesting to see them try. At work on Tuesday, we [...]

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This picture is from the Miss World 2008 pageant that was held a while back. Apparently, in one part of the pageant, the contestants have to dress in a “national costume”. This is what they came up with for the Dominican Republic. Now I’m not interested in fashion at all, but I just can’t see [...]

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This is an old color picture of Samantha in a pretty typical guinea pig pose. She loved being petted, chewing on papers, eating grass, and hiding under things. She died in 1993 at about 5.5 years old. I hope that she knew that she was loved, and cherished, and treated as well as we knew [...]

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Okay, this is the end of Pig Week. When I had a guinea pig, the cats were all afraid of her and never tried to lick her. I don’t know. . . maybe cats and guinea pigs can get along well if they’re properly socialized. Guinea pigs are larger than the mice, voles, and birds [...]

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Western Pig is fixin’ to saddle up and hit the trail. No News at Throat Lake is pretty good, but I’ve only read about the first third of it. It covers a British journalist’s sojourn in the small town near Northern Ireland in the 1990s, before Ireland had its mini-boom. He tries working on a [...]

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The Highway Patrol just usually isn’t this fuzzy down here in AZ. Let’s see. . . I finished Black Star Rising on the way to work on Thursday, since there were only 30 pages left. The ending wasn’t particularly good. Fortunately, the local alternative paper publishes on Thursdays, so I picked up a copy of [...]

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Curious pig is curious. And wants to know if you have any carrots, hay, apples, or grass. Went to Steve’s last night. Had good chicken parmagiana, then dealt with MTAs, the OSI 7-layer-burrito networking model, and an old laptop with a PCMCIA 802.11 card that had no native kernel module. That meant we had to [...]

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It looks like it’s pig week. Oink proudly. Started reading Black Star Rising, by Frederik Pohl. It’s all right, but not nearly as good as Gateway or its sequels. Nuclear war devastates the earth, a century later, China runs North America, and then aliens show up demanding to speak to the President of the USA. [...]

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Continuing yesterday’s economics theme, we see a couple of pigs with their heels firmly planted on the necks of the proletariat. The working classes would obviously throw off their shackles and engage in a glorious revolution if their oppressors weren’t so darn cute and fuzzy. Finished reading Yellow. Of the 3 books about racism in [...]

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