Everyone Should Drive A Race Car

Americans are always crowing about safety in automobiles. You: a soft, squishy bag of guts and sinews regularly plop yourself into a very hard and unforgiving metal cocoon filled with explosive fuel and race down the road at speeds far exceeding even the fastest Olympic runner. Nature did not design us for going from 65mpg to 0 in an instant. Bad things tend to happen in such cases. And yet, most of us don't hit anything and make it home alive at the end of the day. Still, thousands of us don't and this is very sad. There's nothing fun about a car accident. It can really ruin your day. But really, if the American dream of quasi-immortality and safety obsession really put its money where its mouth is, I propose the following.

Everyone should drive a race car. Only the race car would have a smaller engines that only went as fast as regular cars. Most of the pro sport auto racing crashes you see are just spectacular explosions of parts at high speeds, but then the damn driver JUMPS out of the car and he's relatively unhurt. There's none of this sissyboycrap; "Oh gee I'm hurt! Oh no, my legs are trapped under the engine block...boo hoo! Oh poor me, my intestines are stretched on a road sign for a quarter mile...waaah!" Those guys usually make it out well enough to go beyond fundamental mortal concerns like "Wow, I'm still alive" straight into "Oh shit I lost the race!" The car saved their ass. Oh sure, maybe a tire flew into the stands and took out a couple two 'tree people, but hey that's collateral damage. The price you pay for watching a dangerous race.

Now just take that designed-to-dissipate-energy car body and drive it at a fraction of the speed and Joe Sixpack would almost be immortal behind the wheel. Am I crackers? If people stopped caring about their hair and clothing it would seem to make all sorts of sense to put on the full face helmet and leathers for the morning commute and strap into the roll cage with a 5-point harness. People are always crowing about safety but won't go all the way. Oh sure, that would mean cars would cost millions of dollars, but the way I figure with everyone driving one and without having to worry so much about all the fine tuning of an actual race car the prices would be reduced. Not to mention the lucrative sponsorship money you'll get. But there will be sacrifices; when you exit your car in the parking lot at work people will run up to you and immediately slap a baseball cap on your head. A small price to pay methinks.

I think many folks will be pleased as punch if they could go beyond simply collecting the highly attractive and tasteful Nascar merchandise and actually commute to work in a real Nascar race car. I suppose the low speeds will make it not as cool, but remember we're all about safety here. This plan is for dramatically reducing traffic fatalities, not fulfilling the desire for racing action!

Now all we have to do is pass some legislation on this and get it going. It's a good idea and good ideas should be made into law. Anyone who doesn't drive a racecar is better off in jail. Hey, I didn't make the rules I just obey them. OBEY!

Defining Half-Ass: The OS X 10.4.9 Eject Key Delay

So are you telling me you people accidentally actually hit the Eject key a lot? Hmph. I guess I must be super skilled cause this delay is a real bummer.

The real problem is obvious: the slimmed-down Mac keyboard. They want to be artsy and designy and so they had to make these cute little compact keyboards with the eject key right next to the sound volume keys which you probably hit more often. Not so smart. But hey, they're better than the old iMac keyboards which were a fucking joke.

The delay added with the 10.4.9 update is retarded. That is a half-ass solution if ever there was one. Gee, I keep hitting the wrong key! Oh I know, we'll just make that key not work...just yet. Oh, did you REALLY want to eject the disc? Well then, you better MEAN it and keep holding it down! Hang on now, wait for it...wait for it. EJECT! *whew*

Now here's a radical concept; put the eject key on the DRIVE. You know, where I am going to pick up the CD? I know, it's too crazy. The world is not ready for such things. Better that we have clumsy, crammed up keyboards and just delay the response time for all the mistakes you're bound to make.

Now, to look into how to disable this crappola...

Ahh now I see...it's the laptop keyboards that are extra-touchy with the eject key. Well, I'm glad for ya'll, but this is still half ass. How about a nice PREFERENCE for this delay in the Keyboard system preference? Wouldn't that be nice? A choice instead of a mandate? Yes, people can make mistakes but I'd rather have INSTANT RESPONSE rather than this age old "Are You Sure?" horseshit! YES I am sure. I am ALWAYS sure even when I'm not, okay? You, idiot computer, do what I say at all times and do it NOW. Instantly! Not in a few milliseconds, not tomorrow, NOW.

Buckling to FDA pressure

I discovered why my favorite drug, Triaminicin was pulled off the market some years back. As usual, it's because of FDA heavies' threats. Oh I'm sorry, did I say threat, oh I meant to say "suggestion". Well you see, some women MAY have had strokes because of this drug, but the other billion people didn't BUT FUCK YOU EVERYONE ELSE WHO TOOK IT SUCCESSFULLY, FUCK YOUR RIGHTS! There's RISK involved! WE CANNOT HAVE RISK IN THIS SOCIETY! Everything must be SAFE! Humans can be made IMMORTAL with enough government regulation don't you know?!

Here, check out this link which doesn't work cause you're not a member of Medscape. What the heck, I dunno - it works when you click it from google, but not from here. You're on your own I guess. You'll figure it out I'm sure.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/406803

Poor sweet Triaminicin, I will miss you dearly. I still have one lone box with about four pills left. But now, by the wagging of the FDA's fists I am no longer free to buy a drug that works when I have a cold or allergy attack. Holy, sainted bureaucrats and their cronies will be making my decisions from now on. Just surrender your life to the State folks, they know better than you. They've never met you, they live thousands of miles away, but they are your fucking guardian angels. Don't fuck with them, they'll put the hurt on you. If you want to know what's good for your health it's deferring every judgement to the FDA gods, by shuffling their papers they will ensure you live a long and happy life.

Unexpected Software RAID Success

Last night I did something seemingly stupid and dangerous with my Mac but it ended up working flawlessly. I recently added two new 750GB Seagate Barracuda drives to my PowerMac G4 (these drives are quiet!) and mirrored them. These were used for a gigantic video editing project which consumes the gigabytes like a fish drinks water. These giant drives replaced a pair of smaller drives which I had striped in a RAID pair using Apple's Disk Utility. I had copied over the files from the striped set onto other single drives, however I realized I missed something along the way. One folder was short about a dozen files. And not junk, but stuff I wanted to keep! Doh! I had not done anything to the old RAID set however I had no idea if it was possible to remove the drives from the computer, reinstall them at a later time and have the OS still recognize them as a RAID array in days of yore.

Then I did something really really dumb, I shut down my machine and removed the mirrored 750GB drives (a total lie actually, the capacity is 698GB...bastards) without backing them up! Well, I had no place to back them up. Not enough free space on the other two single hard disks! So here I was potentially sacrificing the entire video project if this didn't work. Fucking moronic, I thought.

I then reinstalled the small striped RAID (I was at least smart enough to mark the position of the drives before removing them the first time) and to my surprise they mounted once again upon reboot, just like before! Sweet! I copied off the missing files to one of the single disks. Then I removed the striped RAID disks, reinstalled the 698GB mirrored pair and that too reappeared without a hitch upon reboot! Fucking amazing! The only price paid was judicious amounts of lost sleep, but we can blame some part of that on stupid ass Daylight Saving Time. Maybe the government should pass a law saying there's now 48 hours in a day instead of 24. Heck, that way we'd all have more time after work to do stuff. It's Magic™!

So the moral of the story is yes, you can remove software RAID'ed disks from a Mac, stick them back in and have them act as they did before. Perhaps I truly believed this was entirely possible in the back of my mind, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. But it did feel like an incredibly risky and foolish thing to do when I was contemplating it. I figured the relationship these two disks had to one another was forgotten once they were extracted from their host machine. Ahh, but it was not so, thankfully!

Clearly the world is now a better place having those dozen or so drum solo AIFF files restored. Ahhh...This is something humans will have to deal with more and more as time goes on. This bizarre attachment we have to something as abstract as magnetic blurbs on platters. How sad to have one's personal sense of well-being hinged upon the integrity of computer data. What can I say, that's the world we live in. *sigh*

Environmental Holocaust Solution

As you all know, any day now the world will collapse into utter chaos. Melting glaciers, floods, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, giant clouds of black pollution melting people's faces off, famine, disease outbreaks and just general unpleasantness. It will certainly happen in our lifetime, much as it will certainly happen in every generation before us. Oh yes my friends, we are all fucking doomed and it's our fault. Wretched humans destroyed the planet! There's no hope! We're all gonna die! It's the End Times don't you know? Oh yes indeed, Jesus is coming back and will judge the living and the dead. I swear, it will happen in our lifetimes. No, seriously if you read the bible it says so. It's us man, it's our generation. Everyone else was wrong. Ooh cripes, I can feel the apocalypse drawing near! Look out!

Or is it? Do we have to accept global holocaust which is coming Any Day Now? I think not! The solution is simple. The problem is overpopulation. The earth is just too loaded up with pesky humans and a finite amount of natural resources. The quality of life for everyone will increase if there are less people and more resources, right? Of course. So the solution is that half of the human population must be eliminated. Now hold on, I know what you're thinking, this is utter madness! Murder is wrong! Well yes, of course it is. But my plan is entirely voluntary. What you must do is find another person; preferably a stranger, or even someone you know if you prefer. Every human must pair up with another human. Race, sex or religion is not important. Once you have found your teammate you will then flip a coin to determine which one of you will commit suicide. The loser of the toss must kill him or herself within one year. The winner will get a special t-shirt to wear indicating that their partner lost and will be sacrificing themselves for the Greater Good. Within a year 50% of earth will be gone. Oh I know, it will be sad to see so many people die, but remember, this is to avoid EVERYONE dying! Which would you rather have? There's no question if we don't implement a world wide suicide solution that our Mother Earth will be a hideous black mass of death and devastation.

So go out and find a partner today! By this time next year, if you are one of the lucky survivors, you will be enjoying a bright new future. If not, be glad in the fact that your grisly sacrifice will be for the Benefit Of Future Generations. Because you know, it's not your life that's important, it's people that will be born 500 years from now. What kind of legacy will you leave them if you continue to sit around existing and wasting precious resources? Your great great grandchild will curse your vile name as they are dying of lung cancer in an overcrowded hospital floating on a barge off the coast of the former Mount Everest! Don't be such a greedy, selfish pig! Suicide is the only way to ensure the survival of the planet!