the frig blig

The only reason I-1053 “made it” to this year’s ballot is because several dozen corporations collectively put up close to $600,000 to help Eyman. Not counting Eyman’s loan, their contributions constitute about 76% of the funding for I-1053. That’s more than three fourths!

The top corporate and trade group contributors to I-1053 are:

* BP (yes, that BP) – $65,000
* Tesoro – $65,000
* ConocoPhillips – $50,000
* Shell – $50,000
* Washington Farm Bureau – $50,000
* Washington Restaurant Association- $45,000
* Washington Realtors – $25,000
* Washington Beverage Association (Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper) – $20,000
* Kemper Holdings – $20,000

The above information helpfully provided by Northwest Progressive Institute and brought to my attention by Publicola — good work y’all!

Today at work I rewrote a SQL stored procedure, replacing code which used a cursor with code that does not. I did this because since last week when we upgraded the database engine, this stored procedure has been executing dog-slow. I’d heard that cursors cause a performance hit so I was very happy to see the cursorless version running at least twice as fast as the original.

The new version declares a variable as a table datatype, which acts like an in-memory table. This technique was new to me. So I was very pleased when my work paid off.

If I were a genetic engineer dabbling in DNA I would definitely want to attempt mixing chromosomes of dogs and cats.

Of course it would not be easy, but if the resulting creatures lived and were able to reproduce, I would quickly patent them and begin marketing them to pet-lovers as super-pets, containing all the best and none of the worst qualities of each species.

This would certainly confuse many people, especially cat lovers who despise dogs and dog lovers who despise cats.

But it would appeal to the exotic pet crowd, and would eventually grow a legitimacy and constituency of its own.

The first person/company to successfully enter this market will make history, and a killing.

You heard it here first!

I like Doc Searls’s post about Daniel Schorr’s death:


Sad news

He was 93. We should all live so long, and well.

My wife and I have been discussing the possibility of retiring, eventually, to Florida’s Gulf coast. But now that, thanks to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the Gulf of Mexico contains a hundred or so million gallons of oil, not to mention toxic dispersants such as Corexit and methane gas…I’m wondering if Florida’s Gulf coast will be such a desirable place to live in upcoming years.

I’d really like to see some serious scientific forecasts of the extent of the effects of the oil plumes, dispersants, and methane on Florida’s Gulf coast. This information could (and should) bear on our decision to spend years of our lives there.

This seki showed up during my lunchtime game with JJ today. I can’t recall ever seeing one before which included two points for one side!

My ISP inwa.net was back up this morning when I tried it from work. So ‘nevermind’ my previous post, my normal email account is working again and I think I’ll keep it as my main point of contact for now.

However, the first thing I did after checking my email (I use pine) was to make a local copy of my addressbook. A quick google led me to a convenient, time-saving script to reformat my pine addressbook into a CSV file importable by gmail. This little gem saved me mucho time, so many thanks to Cengiz Gunay for writing his perl script pineaddrbook2csv and posting it on the internet.

If and when inwa goes down again, next time I won’t lose all those contacts!

My ISP inwa.net has been down since July 2 — at least 4 days, quite long in internet time. I’m not sure if they’re the victim of a malicious attack, suffered catastrophic hardware failure, or just pulled the plug. If it’s the former, I wish them well fixing the problem. If the latter, I’m disappointed that they didn’t give their customers advance warning.

Be that as it may, I no longer receive email sent to my inwa.net address. Until such time as they are online again, please use my emergency backup email address: frieda dot peeps at gmail dot com (translated into the standard format). If you sent messages to me between July 2 and now, please resend them to this address.

The main thing I’ve lost with my inwa account is my addressbook. Shoulda backed it up; I know better. Let this be a lesson to me.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.

Natalie Angier, in her New York Times article ‘Save a Whale, Save a Soul, Goes the Cry‘ quotes biologists who equate the cetaceans’s mental and social abilities as being on par with people’s. Granting personhood to these creatures will not protect them from being ‘harvested’ by actual people, however, given how we kill our fellow humans with impunity. Call them communists or terrorists or islamofascist or just plain evil and they become worthy of slaughter.

Or just spew a few million barrels of oil their way and let’s see how smart they are. Whatever. The whales aren’t hiring.