Nothing to Say and Saying It Loudly

“A costumed woman wearing a tutu met police at the door.”

With my pseudocable, I only get a certain subset of channels, which I may have mentioned before. These include numerous shopping channels, Rhode Island public access, a couple of Portuguese and Spanish language channels, as well as the all important Catholic channel (which itself, occasionally has some shopping - buy this lovely rosary). As David Lowery said, “Sometimes I wish I were Catholic. I don’t know why.” Anyway, I used to get Food Network, but no more. I do get BET on channel 99, but I don’t watch it very often.

The point is that the only moderately worthwhile channel I still get is Discovery. No longer the “Sharks and Nazis“¹ channel, they have switched, apparently, to true crime, trying to ride the wave of CSI (which I haven’t seen but can imagine well enough that I don’t feel the need).

So I watch these shows on forensic detectives and the like. One common theme runs through all of the stories, usually involving some type of serial killer - prostitutes. They are always killing prostitutes (usually in southern California, but that’s another story). So this leads me to wonder: are these shows only spotlighting prostitute serial killers as some type of deterrent to those thinking of signing up?

Or it could just be that one is more likely to be killed by a serial killer if one is a prostitute. In which case, it’s just coincidence.

¹ Hutchison, D. 1994. Personal communication.

The thing I don’t like about having all this snow, aside from people who seemingly lose their minds while driving, is all of the craters that have opened up on the streets of Providence. Typically, the streets are bad, but after a big snow, and for the rest of the winter, they are particularly so. I don’t want to leave my transmission on the road or blow out a tire. What to do.

I have my first major complaint about OS X. Pretty egregious, actually, this fault is. Apple has yet to implement SCSI tape drivers under OS X (here). So I would be forced to use 3rd party software, like Retrospect, to back up my iBook to tape. With a FreeBSD core for Darwin - Power of Unix, they say - it seems particularly curious that there is no tape implementation. How hard can that be?

Furthermore, I don’t want to have to go buying software to perform what amounts to a basic Unix functionality. Let me use tar to back up my hard drive.

While no /dev/rmt may seem like a minor issue, if Apple wants to sell Xserve, it would be nice to have a backup method that suits the type of nerd that would be administering such a system. Suffice it to say that if you are purchasing G4 servers, you probably have your own ideas about backup and restore.

In other news the Providence French Film Festival has returned.

Apparently I didn’t get very far yesterday. I never can seem to remember what I was going to say, once I am in a position (e.g., typing) to say something. So blah blah blah. Nothing to say here. Please disperse. Maybe tomorrow.

The

There is quite a large amount of snow here (Providence, now - and, no, the drive up from New York was not bad at all). Being that it is plowed up on the sidewalks, between 1.5 and 3 feet thick, it is understandable that people are walking in the street. While acceptable to walk in the street, on the side of the street, it is not okay to walk in the middle of the street. This practice is likely to get you run over. And then I’ll say, I told you so.

I drove down to New York, rather Brooklyn, on Sunday to visit my friend. At the time I was vaguely aware that there was some type of storm coming. I figured it wouldn’t really be all that bad, because weather people tend to exaggerate. You can’t really blame them though. If your job is to be a talking head, who only reports what comes off the wire, I guess you have to play it up for all it’s worth. If people stopped watching local news, which is about 40% weather, there would be many people out of work (perhaps joining those who decided to air the NBA All Star game on TNT). They make such a production about the weather when there is literally nothing happening. So when something does happen they need special coverage.

Does any of it matter one way or another? I propose that it doesn’t one bit. Weather is weather. It happens via forces that are, at best, only minimally understood. Not to belittle the work of scientific meteorologists (as opposed to talking heads), however. Some of the most powerful computers in the world are used to try and predict weather. What is that worth? So I can know if it will be 34° or 36°. So much time, energy, and money wasted on weather. Why don’t we just take what comes?

This from someone who studied bird feet for 6 years.