Dave Easterly’s Bravo Sierra Blog

Idaho Supports Plutonium Production Plan – Yahoo! News – or “Amazing Douche Team-Ups #1 – Dubya Douche and Dirk the Douche”

Idaho Supports Plutonium Production Plan – Yahoo! News

Idahoans better pay attention! _THIS_ is what Governor Dirk the Douche is bringing into our back yards. Most interesting quote:

Plutonium-238 is not used for nuclear weapons, … It is many times more radioactive than weapons-grade plutonium-239, however, and ingesting a speck can be fatal.

And the Feds haven’t agreed to allow the waste to be sent to New Mexico (not that I’d wish that crap on New Mexico, either) for disposal yet… so the 95 or so 55-Gallon barrels of toxic waste created each year may wind up sitting on the Snake River Aquifer for centuries. I’m not a tree hugging environmentalist, but doesn’t this have “retarded” written all over it?

Everything in Texas is bigger… Especially the lies they tell

I know a lot of Texans. Some personally, some as business acquaintances, and still others by either correspondence or what I read about them in the media. And let me tell you, they all love to brag about how everything is bigger in Texas. At times that’s pretty cool but sometimes being the biggest isn’t something to brag about. Especially if you’re a douche.

Take, for example, the Illustrious Leader of the Neo-Conservative administration currently in power. Thank goodness the country is finally starting to recognize that we’ve been lied to and hustled. How do people expect someone like Dubya who has run every company he has ever led into ruin to do any differently with our country? He bankrupted a Texas oil company, traded off Sammy freakin’ Sosa to the White Sox, and then proceeded to bankrupt the state of Texas! And now we’ve gone in a few short years from having a thriving economy and a Federal surplus to having record oil and gas prices and the most enormous spending deficit in our great nation’s history. He is the first president to ever enter office with a criminal record, appointed more convicted criminals to cushy government positions than any other president, changed the government’s policy so that convicted criminals can now be awarded lucrative government contracts, and his largest lifetime campaign contributor is Kenneth Lay. You know, the former CEO of Enron. AND PEOPLE STILL VOTED FOR HIM TO GET A SECOND TERM!
All I can say is “WTF?? OVER!”

It should be a given that the actions of a political figure are subject to scrutiny and accountability, right? Well, not for Dubya. Try to get minutes from a corporate meeting of one of the companies he ran into the ground or even some of the records from when he was governor of Texas. You can’t! They’re all locked up and sealed away in Daddy Dubya’s “private library,” safe from prying busybodies who might want a glimpse into the dealings and character of the man who now runs the greatest nation in the world.

Do you see a picture emerging here? If this man weren’t in his current position, would you hire him for a job at your company? Let’s see… convicted criminal, convicted DUI (busted in Maine – his Texas driving record has been “sealed”), investigated by the SEC (again, you can’t actually see the records of what the SEC found), known to keep the company of other convicted criminals, has been known to refuse to take drug tests in the past, has bankrupted pretty much every organization he has ever led, and last but far from least has been exposed to be involved in a web of lies many of which have contributed to the death of over 1800 of America’s finest men and women in uniform. I’m thinking this guy is a bad risk for a job pushing a broom, let alone a job where he has his finger on the proverbial button.

So if you’re a douche from Texas, you are ONE HELL OF A DOUCHE!

Luckily, not all Texans are like this. Many of the Texans I know are decent, honest, ethical people. Big hearted Texans have some of the biggest hearts in the world. Smart Texans (no jokes about how few and far between these are, please) have some of the largest intellects I’ve ever encountered. I could list a page full of good Texans, but I only want to talk about one. I’m talking about Congressman Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a Republican. You might be shocked that I’m saying something nice about a Republican after all I’ve just said about Dubya, but you shouldn’t be. You see, I’m the political equivalent of a duck-billed platypus… I’m an Atheist Republican with a lean toward Libertarianism. I screw up ALL the demographics. Ron Paul and I would disagree on a lot of things, but we agree on a lot of the big issues. We both think the PATRIOT Act is anything but patriotic. We think consumers’ rights should be more important than a corporate stranglehold on how people use content or technology after they have already paid for it. We think law abiding citizens should have every right to own fire arms for hunting, recreation, or home defense but convicted criminals should not. We both believe in a balance between personal financial responsibility and helping your neighbors when they fall on hard times. We disagree on a few things, but I attribute that to differences in our generations and the fact that he is a Christian (not the currently in vogue hypocritical variety, either) whereas I am an Atheist.

Ron Paul is a member of The Liberty Committee and has an email newsletter called Freedom Watch. He supports protecting civil liberties, a smaller and more accountable Federal government, a policy of fiscal responsibility, getting our troops out of the Middle East, and sane foreign policies on everything from the United Nations to international trade.

What Texas and the rest of America needs is to elect more people like Ron Paul, Zach Wamp of Tennessee (one of the most clueful people in D.C. when it comes to how law can affect technology and vice versa), and others like them. These men are our modern day Thomas Jeffersons and Ben Franklins. And if we’re going to rescue America from unaccountable, self-serving tyrants for the third time in our 230+ year tenure (the second time spanned from the years leading up to the Civil War and lasted into the last years of the Industrial Revolution until the Progressive Era began, all of which centered around labor issues), we need to be putting men like these in office and not perpetual failures, habitual liars, hustlers, con men, and former action movie stars.

Wake the hell up, America. The future of the world depends on it.

Monday Moanin’ Blues

I feel like breaking out some old Sonny Boy Williamson or Blind Lemon Jefferson albums. It’s funny how music about having the blues actually has the opposite effect on you when you listen to it. There’s a research paper somewhere in that idea.
Anyway, I really need to pull my head out of my ass and get over the blue funk I’ve been in for the last several days. I’m feeling so down that I think I’m letting it affect my health. I know it’s affecting my work and my relationships. I tried to get some work done last night and in about 2.5 hours I got about 3o minutes worth of actual work accomplished. I can’t focus or concentrate. I used to be really good at juggling several tasks of varying priorities but now I can’t even finish one simple thing. I can’t remember things I should know backwards and forwards. I’ll pull it together eventually… I always have when it came down to the wire. But for the life of me, I don’t know why I get this way. This weekend I had a bunch of those idiotic “teen angst” type of thoughts… Like “what would happen if I just drove my truck off the Perrine Bridge?” or “what if I chased a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of liquor?” I sound like one of those faggy goth kids I usually poke fun at. I know that just sounds stupid and juvenille and I’m WAAAY too old (I’m in my mid 30′s, as if anyone ever read this or gave a shit) to be having such stupid thoughts but they just kept coming out of their own accord. Screwed up, huh? I’m taking today off work to try to sort my head out and try to feel better (both mentally and physically). More likely I’ll just sit around and mope and wish I’d have not made so many mistakes when I was younger. Whatever. Either way, trying to fix something as broken as me is probably futile.

It really bothers the shit out of me because I know there are people I count as friends that I’ve been letting down lately… I wish I could just tell them what’s going on, and that I’m sorry for being such a shithead lately. I’m generally not real comfortable talking about “feelings” and crap like that but I feel fairly safe that noone will ever really see this. I have the Apache logs to prove it. Oh fsckin’ well.

Hackin’ the Dish

I was really feeling like a pile of day old camel shit this evening. I didn’t get any of the things I really wanted /needed to accomplish done today, there were “issues” at work, and I got to thinking about things that really bum me out like how much I miss my son. I was supposed to go help a buddy with some work but I was just so depressed I couldn’t. I sat around and watched X-Men cartoons on the Dish PVR for a few hours until I couldn’t take it any more. I thought about going to sleep or at least taking a sleeping pill to help me sleep. But then I though “Screw it. Why not see if I can transfer the videos from the PVR to my MythTV box.” I thought it through and decided if I can find a long enough IDE cable I can at least mount the file systems and see what is on the PVR’s drive. Even after going to DefCon, I still feel like my “inner geek” is slowly dying so I figured a little computer geekery might cheer me up a little.

A little background:
I’ve been using MythTV for almost 2 years now, and I love it. I’m currently running it on a Dell Dimension 4500S with an el-cheapo K-World PCI TV Capture card and a PCI 802.11B wireless card under Fedora Core 3. I’d like to build my own AMD box to do it, but I already had the 4500S and the small desktop looks “not too bad” on the entertainment center.

What I found out:
The Dish PVR 522 has a crappy little 5400 RPM IDE hard drive. It’s slow, but it’s quiet because of the low RPM speed. The file system on it breaks down like this:

1. First Primary Partition (/dev/hdc1 in my case) is a Linux EXT2 filesystem about 1.9GB in size
2. Second Primary Partition (/dev/hdc2 in my case) is a Linux EXT2 filesystem about 65GB in size
3. Third Primary Partition (/dev/hdc3 in my case) is a Linux EXT2 filesystem about 84 GB in size and is the partition with all the videos

There were a couple of things to note. If I stood the PVR on its right side I could actually use the original OEM IDE cable and power cables for the DVD+RW drive to connect to the PVR’s HDD. Another thing to note is that when I got the PVR, it was described as having a 120GB drive, but clearly Linux sees about 151GB of disk space so it seems more like a 160 GB drive.

There are three types of files on /dev/hdc3. The important ones (the videos) are *.tsp files. The other two file types (*.bm and *.sct) are binary, but I haven’t figure out their purpose yet. Running “strings” against the .bm files actually gives me a little of of the episode information for not one but two shows I recorded. I copied a .tsp file over to the videos directory for my MythTV and it played beautifully without any changes or modification of any kind. It looks like the PVR 522 uses a hardware MPEG2 encode which explains why it can capture to a slow-ass 5400 RPM drive without skips and stutters. I began to copy all of the .tsp files to their own directory on the MythTV box so I can sort them out. The naming of the files on the PVR appears to be simply sequential (es8049.tsp, es8051.tsp, es8054.tsp, etc.). I’m thinking the gaps in the sequential file name scheme are shows I’ve deleted to make room on the drive. The copy was as slow as hell but that’s no surprise with that crappy 5400 RPM drive. But the files play beautifully on MythTV!

Next thing to try – See if I can get mythcommflag to nuke the commercials. I have a couple of photos I should be posting eventually… one of these years.

Update! Photos posted here.

A couple of thoughts…

A few things of mention..
First, as a geek I’m not normally accustomed to manual labor. But last night I pulled an all-nighter running smurf tube and drops for CAT-5 and RG6-U with a buddy whose house was recently damaged by a fire. We worked from about 9:30 at night until about 7:00 in the morning. Why so late, you ask? We live in the freakin’ desert, that’s why! During the daytime, it got up to around 106 degrees Fahrentheit and the inside of the house was closer to 115 or higher. So working at night makes much more sense. That having been said, it was actually pretty fun. And I think I sweated off about 5 pounds.

The other main thought was that I turned on the news after I woke up today early in the afternoon. And there is Tom Ridge on the tube talking about a “National ID system that doesn’t compromise peoples’ rights to privacy.” The first thought that came to my mind was “My ass! You god damned lying bastards don’t give a flying shit about peoples’ privacy. This is nothing but a way for you to track and oppress law abiding patriotic citizens’ day-to-day lives. This has SHITE to do with National Security!” Why the hell do so many people stand idly by and let these Neo-Conservative radicals run roughshod over The Constitution and our civil liberties?!? Our country is fighting a bunch of radical religious zealots who want to impose their brand of Islamic Theocracy on the rest of the world, and yet our own government is now run by equally radical Globalist zealots who want to impose an Orwellian doublethink-controlled police state on it’s own citizens. Does that mean that the wacko Neo-Cons are terrorists like the radical Islamic factions? No, but they are equally evil and their actions equally malicious. Stand up for your freedoms NOW! Write your Senators and Representatives and tell them to OPPOSE things like the PATRIOT Act, the National ID system, extending special rights and privileges to large corporations (especially those who are consistently large campaign contributors), the squashing of consumers’ rights with wrong minded legislation like the DMCA and the National Broadcast Flag. If they don’t vote and respond in a way that is in the best interests of FREEDOM LOVING Americans and not the data-mining, corporate funded Orwellian puppet masters who are already taking control of this once-great country then vote the bastards out of office and put someone capable of thinking for themselves in!
Join the EFF, read Media Matters to see through the right-wing spin of the major media, and THINK FOR YOURSELF! Don’t just trust what the government says just because they’re “The Government.” One of the main duties of the Federal Government in The Constitution is “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” yet the current path our nation is head down does neither and in fact condemns us to a future of further and escalating violence due to our Middle East and other foreign policies that are contrary to the “general Welfare” and robs us of “the Blessings of Liberty” rather than securing them.
And that’s all I have to say about that.

A funny thing happened…

Yesterday was basically shite, but there was one really good highlight. I was helping one of my best friends with a Netware server problem over IRC when he spoke up and said “Novell blows flaming porcupines.” I found the concept of “flaming porcupines” to be utterly riotous and so in a fit of exhaustion-driven silliness I rushed out to godaddy.com to register “flamingporcupines.com” for my next web project. Now I just have to figure out WTF to do with it. I’m thinking I could sell “I’d rather (give birth to/blow/screw/poop – pick any one) a flaming porcupine than _______________” t-shirts, where _______________ could be “vote for [insert corrupt, morally bankrupt Neo-Con's name here].” or “use anything from Microsoft.” and so on. I just need snappy flaming porcupine logo and I’ll be in business. Or not. Either way, the thought made me smile.

Stuff that’s cool

My l4m3 opinion only.
1. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
2. Metal
3. Open Source and Free Software
4. Kids when they’re not being unholy fsckin’ terrors
5. My job. I actually really like it.
6. Hummers (and I don’t mean the gas guzzling pieces of crap that WASP soccer moms and guys compensating for small genitalia drive)
7. Broadband
8. The desert. I freakin’ love it.
9. Hexadecimal
10. Sleeping in late

Here’s the flip side – Stuff that’s “teh suck”
1. The fact that I have a severe case of CRS (Can’t Remember Shite)
2. Reality TV shows
3. Reruns
4. Any R&B made after 1986
5. Script kiddies
6. Games that only run on Windows
7. Windows in general
8. Data loss (Back your shite up, you frickin’ ignoramuses!)
9. Waiting in line
10. George Dubya (along with all the other radical right neo-conservative crooks in power right now)

Mental Masturbation

Well, I’ve finally decided to break down and get back on the blog-wagon. I was blogging on inhuman.net 3 or 4 years before anyone used the term “blogging,” but I got tired of reading my own rants. But now I’m back at it. I could write about all the wacky shite that happened at DefCon 13, but I’d rather just post links to my friends’ blogs about it since they’ve already done most of the heavy lifting. My photos are at http://www.mvlinux.net/gallery/ for those who care.