#
John Farnam’s Quips -

23Mar05: Your new M4 Case — rec­om­mends the

FirstAct

elec­tric gui­tar case, avail­able at Wal*Mart for $20 (but not on
their web site) or

via mail-order from FirstAct for $33, as low-profile
trans­port for a short-barreled rifle or shot­gun.
bq.
Styl­ish, durable, heavy duty case fits most elec­tric gui­tars. Padded
for gui­tar pro­tec­tion and secure fit. Back­pack design with com­fort­able
shoul­der straps. Rugged cush­ioned car­ry­ing han­dle. Bungee strap­ping
for large acces­sories.
[End the War on Free­dom]

I won­der if this would fit my Steyr Scout Rifle?

M 6.1, Nias region, Indone­sia. March 28, 2005 18:30:43 GMT [USGS M>2.5 Earth­quakes]

There have been over a dozen 5.0 or greater earth­quakes in this area in the past 24 hours–that must be rather nerve-wracking for tsunami survivors.

Ice­land Grant­ing Cit­i­zen­ship to Bobby Fis­cher. Lit­tle Ice­land has stepped for­ward to stand up to the U.S. The Ice­landers note that Fis­cher has remained a hero in Ice­land due to his 1972 vic­tory in Reyk­javik. [Par­lia­men­tar­ian] Mr. Benedik­ts­son said… “A new gen­er­a­tion of inter­na­tional chess play­ers… By Stephen Car­son. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Unfor­tu­nately the linked arti­cle requires reg­is­tra­tion to read, so I don’t know if it answers my ques­tion: does this mean that Fis­cher will be released? Cur­rently he’s impris­oned in Japan–not because he’s bro­ken any Japan­ese laws (he hasn’t), but at the behest of Japan’s Impe­r­ial mas­ters in Wash­ing­ton. It’s great that Ice­land is stand­ing up to the Evil Empire, but it’s not enough by itself–now Japan has to be will­ing to let him go.

For iTunes users, I’ve cre­ated an iMix titled Musi­cians I’ve Pho­tographed. As the name sug­gests, it’s a col­lec­tion of sam­ple tracks from musi­cians I’ve pho­tographed (or at least, those whose music is sold through iTunes).

Recently I’ve noticed that many of the musi­cians I pho­to­graph are using a new weblog ser­vice called MySpace. It looks like the same idea as Live­Jour­nal, but with a built in music player–which no doubt has some­thing to do with its pop­u­lar­ity with musicians.

Mac­in­touch has posted a series of reader com­ments on Apple’s pol­icy of remov­ing RAM from com­put­ers sent to them for repair, claim­ing (falsely) that the RAM is bad. They had done that with my recently repaired TiBook, result­ing in a com­puter that was actu­ally DOA when it was sent back to me (and until I put the mem­ory back in).

Aus­tri­ans Say The Darn­d­est Things. Nes­tle chief rejects the need to ‘give back’ to com­mu­ni­ties:bq. Com­pa­nies shouldn’t feel oblig­ated to “give back” to the com­mu­nity, because they haven’t taken any­thing away, the Austrian-born chief of the world’s largest food com­pany told local exec­u­tives yesterday.

In a stun­ning broad­side to cor­po­rate cit­i­zen­ship as Bosto­ni­ans have come to know it, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe — head of Nes­tle S.A. — said com­pa­nies should only pur­sue char­i­ta­ble endeav­ors with an under­ly­ing inten­tion of mak­ing money for investors. Via Mar­garet Griffis. [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

This is an uncom­monly sen­si­ble state­ment to be mak­ing it into the main­stream media. I expect that the social­ists who infest Boston so heav­ily will soon be scream­ing in outrage.

Microsoft Buys Groove. Microsoft to Acquire Groove Net­works, Com­bin­ing Tal­ents to Cre­ate Any­time, Any­where Col­lab­o­ra­tion Prod­ucts and Ser­vices: This is kind of a no-brainer. Micr­soft owned 25% of Groove, and it was only a mat­ter of time until Groove got built into Windows.

bq. Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will acquire Groove Net­works Inc., a lead­ing provider of col­lab­o­ra­tion soft­ware for the “vir­tual office.”

This will essen­tially give every copy of Win­dows a built-in pri­vate P2P net­work. The RIAA can’t be happy about that prospect.

I’m not a big fan of Groove. I spent $700 on it, alto­gether. It did the job, I guess, but I ended up using it for lit­tle more than file sync­ing between machines — about 10% of the app. I just never felt com­fort­able with it, because of the Win­dows lock-in. [Gadgetopia]

I bought it myself, but only one copy at around $125. I tried to inter­est the other peo­ple in my depart­ment at work in it, but with­out success.

Iron­i­cally, it would be most use­ful for the Mac group, which has mem­bers who work from home often and oth­ers who are located in dif­fer­ent states. Unfor­tu­nately that’s not an option, because it’s not avail­able for OS X, and Mac devel­op­ers tend not to have Win­dows com­put­ers around.

My TiBook came back from Apple today–it had died last week. When I opened the box I was sur­prised to see that the RAM had been removed, lead­ing me to think, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

A call to Apple revealed that they had actu­ally replaced the moth­er­board, and only taken the RAM out because it wasn’t made by Apple. On putting the RAM back in, the TiBook was fine. It’s a good thing they didn’t look at the hard drive–it’s a replace­ment too, and much harder to reinstall.

The moth­er­board replace­ment is actu­ally really good news for me. One of the DIMM slots in the TiBook had failed some time ago, and couldn’t be repaired short of a moth­er­board replace­ment. Now, that prob­lem is fixed too. Not only that, but I found that the new moth­er­board has metal clips on the DIMM slot, replac­ing the cheap plas­tic ones that had worn out before. Appar­ently at some time in the past Apple had qui­etly acknowl­edged their mis­take and cor­rected it, and now my TiBook has two DIMM slots and 1 GB of RAM.

PSYCHIATRY, SOVIET-STYLE. Now:

An Army intel­li­gence sergeant who accused fel­low sol­diers in Samarra, Iraq, of abus­ing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his com­man­der of being delu­sional and ordered to undergo a psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tion in Ger­many, despite a mil­i­tary psychiatrist’s ini­tial judg­ment that the man was sta­ble, accord­ing to inter­nal Army … [The Light Of Rea­son]

Con­sider also how this ties in with the Bushevik’s plans for forced “men­tal health screen­ing” and invol­un­tary drug­ging of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, espe­cially children.