Abodes.org

I think that this sums it up the best of anything I have seen yet.

Hat tip to Steve Horwitz for the link.

Even if you have ADHD (Elf I’m talking to you) read the whole thing.

I will reference Will Wilkinson in this one but reverse the statement (I love you Will and read you every day send me an autograph please!! /fanboy).

I prefer McCain over Obama in much the way I prefer rancid milk over rancid milk regurgitated by a cat.

Here is a good nerd theme song. Ignore the video, just let this play in another tab.

Really annoying in this case.

Oh, and Washington D.C. has a really annoyingnon-voting member of the House of Reps. Some people are not made for public speaking. As an extra bit of knowledge, there was a proposed constitutional amendment to give the District of Columbia the full voting rights of a state in 1985. 38 state legislatures would have to have agreed to it for it to have happened. 16 did.

I for one praise those other states. D.C. is primarily under the control of the Congress (and through some laws they passed it has its own mayor and council) and I don’t think that reciprocal power (voting rights and political control) would be a necessarily good thing.

Oh, and Bob Barr was on the Colbert Report last night. I don’t know if I’m voting for him. I’ll vote for his mustache though.

The tribute to the robot helmets was a nice touch. They are also lucky there aren’t more words to the song.

To emphasize further how few words there are in the song (although it has much awesomeness)

And then last but maybe least but still entertaining

Still here? You have too much free time. Read this post.

From trying to sell the wife on a logitech programmable remote.

Hey wife, read this blog post.

Tyler Cohen (who is one of the few people who write posts I actually look forward to reading in my many RSS feeds) writes about Saudi Arabia’s new ban on selling cats and dogs as pets.

It seems that the Saudi religious police are taking the fact that men are walking cats and dogs (seriously, walking cats?) to make passes on women. From Tyler’s post:

The final question, of course, is how do you use a pet cat to make a pass at a woman? I’ve heard of people walking their cats, but I expect it is not an easy experience. To limit sex, cats should be subsidized, not taxed. No?

So I wonder. Is the Saudi society somehow undermined if people meet each other on a sidewalk? Is this a threat to arranged marriage or something?

I see promising gains being made all over the world in freedom and acceptance of differences. And then I look at one small area of the world full of ignorance and fossil fuels and I scratch my head.

Oh, and the cats make their own arrangements when that time comes around, but I have to lock the dog up in the basement or the bathroom or something or he just starts barking. So in my experience at least cats aren’t as bad as Tyler makes out.

Am I the only one that thinks the price of the iPhone and the shittiness that is AT&T’s make the iPhone seem pretty unappealing?

The price would be fine if you could use it on any service but me thinks the only way to get me to go back to AT&T is to give it to me plus a few hundred dollars.

Then again, I’m paying $54 a month (after taxes) for two phones, a ton of minutes, unlimited texting and unlimited internet. So pretty much every plan AT&T offers looks like a bad deal.

So the elf and I went to Canada last weekend. This review is about the Cannota we saw during the weekend. There might be other more different Canadas but I can’t say for sure.

Kanida is hot, muggy, smelly, and expensive. It was really humid the entire weekend and the only thing that made it acceptable was a strong breeze off of Lake Huron. Lake Huron gets a 9/10 btw since it was smooth the whole time and cool and not smelly and practically free.

We saw a really run down indian reservation. That got a 2/10. The restaurant in the shopping center near there though had “traditional native fried bread” which gets 8/10.

So Canatuna must have like 99% sales tax. A hamburger and fries was $13. Fish and chips was like $15. For perch. Not even for pufferfish or anything. Around where I live it’s usually like $7. Drinks at a bar were $5-8 a piece which is a bit steep but when you factor in that they didn’t appear to even have any alcohol (and tasted just like mixer) a shot of liquor must be like $20 there.

We stopped at a liquor store and a beer store. The Beer Store actually. You see, Soberada is a socialist nation. The best way to control a populace in a tyrannical nation is to control the alcohol supply. Hence The Beer Store. It’s the only place (seemingly) you can buy beer. A 6 pack of beer is roughly twice the cost of what people in the States pay. This probably explains the people with hand carts and 20 18-packs of bud light coming back over to Canadia on the ferry. Oh, and about the liquor stores. In Corndidia the only liquor stores are LCBO stores. They are pretty nice as far as stores go, more like a Macy’s than a Walmart. A 750mL bottle of Jose Cuervo runs about $35 Eh’dian. Right now greenbacks and loonies are about even so we can say that’s roughly $35 USD. Three blocks away from my house I can buy the same bottle of Cuervo (or at least a close cousin) for around $16.

If it wasn’t for a minimum wage of $8 and up and healthcare/retirement/etc that the people with jobs have to pay for in their probably 200% income tax I don’t know how anyone can get drunk in Nadcania. There must be a bum booze subsidy program or something for the stinky part of the population.

Overall, Candidia gets a 6/10. It’s fun to visit but expensive, hot and smelly. You don’t think Candacia is hot? I can say honestly that 100% of the times I have been to Candardia in the last year it has been hot and muggy. Proof enough.

It’s called a new lappy. I bought a refurbished (don’t laugh, the last place I worked we bought a lot of new and refurb Dells and the refurbs had a much lower failure rate) Dell Inspiron 1720. 17″ screen, pretty good graphics card, a moderate amount of RAM that I already upgraded (cheap cheap on Newegg).

So that parts good. But then I had to buy a laptop case. You see, my laptop bag that I held my 12″ PowerBook in was not nearly big enough for the beast that is this lappy (it has a full numeric keypad!). While shopping for lappy bags, I thought to myself, “Self, this lappy is so big that if you carry it in a soft bag you will bash it into everything. Maybe you should look into a hard sided lappy case.”

Thus I purchased a Solo Attachè on Newegg. (God typing the grave mark over a vowel is way more of a pain in Windows). It’s sweet. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s sweet.

Closed case on my stove.
Case with lappy and accessories
Case with objects to give relative size

Now, before you say “Wait sloth, that looks really bulky for a lappy. Why did you buy that?” let me point out that there is nothing light or easily portable about a 17″ laptop. I bought it for three reasons: 1) my desktop sucks by modern standards, 2) I wanted a new machine to game on, and 3) I wanted a new machine to code on. A big portable desktop that happens to have a battery included was the perfect solution. This case is basically an armored shell to make sure it survives from point A to point B. If point B happens to be on the other side of point IRAQ it had better well make it unscathed.

Also, if you ever need a large amount of money carried somewhere I have the perfect case for it. I only charge 5%.