My Quiet Life

Kudos to TDOT:

All lanes of Interstate 40 at White Bridge Road and Briley Parkway opened to traffic Thursday, five months ahead of an estimated November completion date.

SayUncle has always been on top of taser abuse, and Kevin Carson now joins the fray with a post worrying about our further slide into a police state:

My dad was a cop, and a good friend of mine is a cop now. But every time I see a police cruiser behind me, I get real nervous. And if it follows me through a couple of turns, I just about go ballistic. I know my dad was a good man. I don't know these guys, and an awful lot of people are attracted to the uniform for the same reasons as Dim in A Clockwork Orange. As jittery as cops are nowadays (what with the hostile occupied population and all), you never know when they'll interpret the wrong kind of nervous eye-twitch as "aggressive behavior" or "resisting arrest" and taser you about 47 times or so--and then taser you some more for "not obeying instructions," because you're too busy convulsing in agony. And if anything happens, unless you're lucky enough to be videotaped, it's your word versus theirs. They'll probably throw as many charges as possible at you to blackmail you into copping a guilty plea. As somebody once said in a comment thread over at Eschaton, I'm starting to feel like I'm in a Paul Verhoeven movie based on a Phillip K. Dick novel.

Yes, yes, technically it's Wednesday, but I already had this stuff compiled, so I am posting it early. Sue me. I went a little overboard this week, but oh well. There was a lot of cool stuff this week!

Lots of F1 news this week:

(more...)

Why not work from home?

In industrial societies we had to go to factories because that was where the machinery was.
With this reason no longer applying for many of us, one would expect to have seen an explosion in the numbers of people working from home. After all, there are enormous costs to having workplaces separate from our homes; commuting and rent to name but two.

...

Of course, there are lots of things keeping us working in offices: data-feeds; the desire to see colleagues (so I'm told); a need to get away from the kids; and the vain hope that there might be a meeting that isn't a complete waste of time. But I suspect the main obstacle to the growth of teleworking is not technology but power. Offices (and maybe factories too) exist not because they are technically efficient but because they provide easy ways for the boss class to supervise and control workers.

Check it out, I'm FAMOUS.

Okay, so I am a bit mystified. I got some run-of-the-mill trackback spam, last night, for example on this post.

The odd thing is, the site they linked to was just the EPA's page on light trucks. Uhh, what?

Maybe some spammer was just testing their botnet or something, I don't know. I am confused.

Jackson has a post on his increasing fascination with the internal combustion engine as he works on his Volvo.

With that in mind, I have a quick list of car book recommendations:

• Auto Engines by James E. Duffy. This is an ASE certification test prep book, and it's awesome. It covers the ins and outs of the basics, but it's on a very technical level. But it's the sort of book a nerdy engineer will love.
• Supercharged! by Corky Bell. I am cheating here, because although I have this, I just got it and haven't read it, but it comes recommended by just about every gearhead I know.
• Maximum Boost by Corky Bell. Ditto. This one tackles the turbo-charging side of things.

Okay, so it's a short list -- I know there are a lot of lurkers that read my blog now and then that are major car buffs. Maybe some of them will pipe up and offer some more recommendations?

This is the best IMDB movie plot summary ever:

Gus was jobless. One day, he noticed his talent for computer. He was ordered to do wrong by Ross president of a big company. But his wrong doing was blocked by Superman. So Ross asked Gus to kill him but it failed. The invincible computer was made by Gus's plan. At last the fight between Superman and the computer broke out.

Summary written by Rena Okada {okd@yo.rim.or.jp}

Did you know that you can get all sorts of movies that have passed into public domain (among other things) on archive.org?

I don't see anything on the news about this yet, but I was stuck in traffic trying to get home because evidently some guy is holed up in a house with a hostage on Kirkwood between Vaulx and Franklin Rd. Someone said something about his wife buried in the yard, but this is all third-hand info from random people I asked in the parking lot of Wal-Greens.

Good times.