my examined life

Yesterday, I read an op-ed piece on the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker. In it, she talked about Jessica Corry “of Colorado, a married, pro-life Republican mom, soon to be “freedom fighter of the month” in High Times magazine,” and while Jessica doesn’t smoke pot, one of the main reasons why she’s fighting for its legalization is “protecting her children should they decide to try marijuana someday.”

That last line struck me as funny since it conjures up images of parents running around trying to repeal drunk driving laws, or texting while driving laws, etc. I mean after all, those parents are just trying to protect their children should their sweet little angels to do something illegal just like Mrs. Corry of Colorado.

While most people would argue that she is well within her rights to fight a blatantly unjust law because driving drunk actually kills people and smoking a little pot never hurt anyone, the point I’m trying to make is that teaching your children the difference between inalienable rights and self-perceived rights is a much better place to start for lasting change in our society.

I have a gumstix Connex 200 sitting under my desk. Aparently, it’s been sitting there for a long time.

Uptime:
15:43:34 up 678 days, 21:16, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Obama warns against trade penalties in trade bill.  Despite what he says, the global recession has nothing to do with it. It’s more like some of our biggest trading partners haven’t accepted limits on global warming pollution (hint: think China).

My first smoke in over a year was on Memorial Day. I was planing on having brisket, but after finding chuck roast for a dollar a pound cheaper at Sam’s Club, I decided to give it a try since my Weber Smokey Mountain can smoke about anything. Luckily, the Virtual Weber Bullet had an article on smoking a chuck roll, of which chuck roasts are cut from.

I ended up picking up 14lbs of chuck roast which from the picture below looked beautiful.

When smoking, you always need to estimate the amount of time it will take to correctly cook the meat.  This is especially true for large cuts of meat since you don’t want your dinner guests to show up and gnaw through a piece of brisket or pork butt that is hours away from being done. Everything that I’ve read says chuck roll should be cooked just like brisket, which is about 1-1.5 hours per pound, so for the math challenged that works out to 14 to 21 hours of cook time. In my opinion, it’s better to over estimate than under estimate, since there’s nothing like bitting into undercooked pork.

Erring on the side of caution, I decided to put the meat on around 9:30 Sunday night to have the meat done by 3:30PM , and ready to eat at 4PM Monday afternoon.

Here’s how the meat looked before it went on, all nice and covered with a salt & pepper based rub that I made up. I’ll have to post that recipe later.

I actually go the meat on at 9:15PM, and pulled it off around 3:30PM for a grand total for 18 hours of smoky goodness. The smoker temperatures stayed between 225F and 250F the whole time. And yes, I actually woke up at 1:30 and 4AM to check the temps. All in all, it was a beautiful smoke that got be back in the mood of smoking again. I used hickory wood which works wonders with beef cuts, and the meat tasted wonderful. As you can see from the pictures, I had four chuck roasts, two I was able to slice like brisket and two pulled like pork. It was amazing. Enjoy the pics.

I don’t know about you, but in the past few years I have read a number of articles in which scientific studies are showing that more and more of how we behave is based upon our genes. This interesting article talks about how genes may play a roll in the age at which we loose our virginity.

Personally, I like to believe that I’m in control of my decisions and not my DNA, but if you wish to remove one’s responsibility from one’s actions it sure is nice to have science back you up. Being LDS, I have to say most Mormons must have slower genes as most of us are pretty old, compared to the rest of the world, when we first have sex. Though, I’m sure this has more to do with our upbringing and/or religion than our genes.

Another Cabinet nominee, Governor Sebelius for Health and Human Services, has tax problems. The funny thing about this time is that I couldn’t find the story on the front page of any major news site, but I suppose it has become so common place that no one cares any more.

So, I’m thinking either our tax code is so messed up that everyone is a tax cheat, or anyone making over a certain amount just plain isn’t paying their share.

I’ve been using OpenDNS for almost two years now, and I’m a big fan of their service. Their DNS look-ups are quick which can make web surfing noticeably faster, but what really sold me was the free content filtering. I used to run my own proxy server using DansGuardian for web filtering, and while DansGuardian is a awesome web filter I decided that I didn’t want the noise, power consumption, and maintenance of an additional computer in my house, and OpenDNS fills that void nicely.

Their content filtering is top notch, and customizable with over 50 filter categories and whitelist/blacklist capabilities. They offer typo correction for the most common sites, which means that if you type www.google.cmo in your brower’s url bar you’ll end up at www.google.com which can be handy for those fat finger days. For other mistyped URLs they send you to their OpenDNS Guide which is a google-like search results page to help find the correct site, coincidentally the ads displayed on the OpenDNS Guide pages are how they pay for the service. You can also add images and custom messages to the blocked pages to personalize, and maybe have a little fun with those boring blocked pages. But, best of all the service is free which you can’t beat in today’s economic climate.

If any of this sounds remotly interesting, take a look at their use OpenDNS page to get started, you won’t be disappointed.

Obama campaigned for the stimulus, and said things like: “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.“ Now, his aides are saying this: White House dampens stimulus expectations.

It’s no wonder they’re back peddling. When you act like your stimulus bill will work miracles, you’d better believe the uneducated masses will think that was well.

But, at least, he’s understands what will happen if his bill fails to do much: “Now, look, I won’t lie to you, If it turns out that a few years from now people don’t feel like the economy’s turned around, that we’re still having problems, that folks are still unemployed, that our health-care system’s not more efficient, then, you know, you guys won’t applaud me the next time I come down here.” Source

Wow, from the way things are going for Obama appointees you’d wonder if democrats even pay taxes anymore.

Link here

So far, I’ve done a couple of hard drive images and swaps on devices that run Linux. The latest one was on my laptop. It’s quite easy once you know the steps, and frankly, I’m writing them down here, so I don’t forget.

1. Image the whole hard drive using what ever imaging software you desire
2. Place new drive in system, and boot from linux rescue disk
3. Mount the new hard drive and chroot it, i.e. chroot, mount /proc, mount /sys, etc.
4. Edit grub files with new hard drive. These would be device.map and menu.lst
5. Reinstall grub
6. Edit fstab to boot new hard drive
7. Reinstall mkinitrd with the proper device drivers to boot new hard drive

That’s about it. See, I told you it was pretty simple.