Standard Mischief

Sure it’s a free country, and as Michelle Malkin puts it, I’m glad you Wal*Mart hater types have suddenly done a one eighty on property rights. Even if our freedoms protect the right of people to assemble freely on a piece of private property, that does not make the idea a good one.

I’ll tell you what. The next time we send American troops overseas to shield the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from attack from someone like the Iraqi Republican Guard, we need to tell them it’s a package deal. Along with the Privates, Platoons, and Patriot surface-to-air missiles; we need to make it clear that we’re going to send Pornography, Pork BBQ, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. We left those traditions home with us during Operation Desert Shield out of respect for our hosts. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Screw the rest of the world’s peaceful Muslim community, maybe we should have just nuked Masjid al-Haram, (via suborbital trajectory, because it’s the only way to be sure), in retaliation for the al-Qaida attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

On a slightly less hysterical note, can we hope the over-regulators in Manhattan exercise a little eminent domain abuse?

So I’ve noticed that several of my regular reads have also been reading, (and commenting), over at Claire’s blog at Backwoods Home Magazine.

The problem with the above blog’s RSS feed is that its not a full text feed.

The hyperlinks are missing in the full text of  this version of the feed. Nevertheless, I’d much rather read it than the official one.

I really hate Yahoo pipes, with its kludgey and slow attempt at a usable GUI, but this was someone else’s work and it was free. It’s good enough that I haven’t bothered to code up anything better for myself.

Since at least a third of my income this year has been from writing exactly these types of screen-scraping scripts, I probably don’t have an excuse for that. Oh well.

Enjoy.

Shouldn’t we name bills after heroes, when we can? Isn’t that better than naming them posthumously after an innocent victim?

Louisiana’s governor Bobby Jindal signed House Bill 1272 into law that allows “any church, synagogue, mosque, or other similar place of worship” to exercise control over who may carry firearms in defense of the congregation. That means it would be legal for someone in Louisiana to be a hero just like Jeanne Assam was at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

As you can expect, the left side of the “separation of church and state” crowd doesn’t like this slight relaxation of the laws concerning churches one bit. You’ll get all the usual “blood running in the pews” and “fights over parking spaces ending in gunfire” scenarios that somehow never really pan out as true. I won’t link to that crap, but if you want to find it, they’re calling it the “guns in churches bill”. Knowing that, you don’t need anything higher than a white belt in “search engine-fu” to find all the hand wringing you want.

Let the anti-freedom crowd pick the catch-phrases, and you’re fighting an unfair fight with one hand tied behind your back. I know what I’m going to call HB 1272.
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Jeanne Assam has a blog and a book out.

nola.com published a link to the bill. Thanks, I’m always bashing the MSM for not doing that.

You can find the text of the bill (linked as a pdf) on this page, and it’s a compact 3 pages of double spaced text and the usual wide margins, so you just know it was meant to be read by the voters.

This is probably the backstory to Clayton Cramer’s finale. The Las Vegas Review-Journal is specifically mentioned as one of Righthaven’s customers in this story by Wired’s Threat Level.

Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements.

Clayton claimed he only published excerpts and links, but since he removed his entire archive, that claim is hard to verify. I suppose the Righthaven business model is to buy the right to sue at a pittance from the legacy media and then send out threating letters with an offer of settlement that’s less than the cost of even discussing your fair use legal defense with a lawyer.

While “fair use” is codified in copyright law, there’s no “safe harbor”, no easy-to-understand rulebook for staying in compliance.

I fully support the rights of a copyright holder, but I’m also a defender of fair use, excerpts with attributional, and deep linking.

Last time I went in for an eye exam, my regular doctor wasn’t there. I like my regular doctor because he’s ex-military and understands peep sights, 6 o’clock holds and minutes-of-angle. He’s also the first optical professional that didn’t laugh when I told him my dominant eye sometimes switches. For these reasons I like going to him even if he’s at the awful discount chain around here called For Eyes. I just take my prescription from the Doctor and leave.

The other reason I like him is because he’ll take walk-ins, which is handy if you get flunked on you eye test the day before by the Maryland MVA. The last time I went I had a competent substitute doctor. Since there were no customers, I was able to talk directly to the Optometrist, and I asked when she could fit me in. She said right away, so I asked her if she would provide me with my pupillary distance if I paid her in cash (saving her maybe 2-3% in credit card processing fees, though I’m sure as a professional, she paid her share of taxes in any case). She agreed and then started the exam.

She also showed me how she takes it, and she merely had to read the scale right off the phoropter, which is the big, bulky, “try different lenses until you can see the eyechart” tool. My measurement is 59.9 mm, (though 60 mm is close enough when you get around to ordering.) While optical professionals are required by law to give you a copy of your prescription, the pupillary distance number is left off, even though it you’re going to need it at some point. The excuse is that this is the responsibility of the Optician that actually fits your glasses. If so, the last three Optician I had order my glasses did it wrong (although one used a proper measuring tool after I refused to accept the wrong frame size she chose using a scientific wild-ass guess instead of the tools of her trade).

With my prescription and pupillary distance, I then hit up a few web pages to understand how glasses are fitted, and then I placed my order at an online retailer called Zenni Optical. Getting ready to order, I went over my old, broken glasses with a metal ruler with a millimeter scale. That let me get the proper size of the frames themselves, including bridge the width and the bridge sizes.

There’s about six sites online to order glasses from, so feel free to pick your favorite. At Zenni Optical, at least you can tell that they’re not spending any profits on the site itself, because it’s awful. I spent about two hours browsing the frames before I groked what was going on. The very cheapest frames were like $8, but what they don’t tell you is that not all frames fit all heads. Even worse is the fact that you can’t enter in say, the width of your head or your pupillary distance and be shown only the frames in stock that would fit. Eventually I got it right, but I looked at the return policy to be sure the risk/reward ratio was acceptable to me. It was. Including shipping I could have re-ordered glasses online nine times in a row before breaking even with my last pair of “fitted” glasses.

I’ve shown my pair to several people, telling them I bought them online and asking how much they guess it cost me. Everyone was amazed at the price. My first pair cost me about $12 plus maybe a bit for shipping, (I don’t have the receipt handy). Mind you that’s bare-bones with a UV coating only. There are also “memory” flexible frames, eyeglass tinting and line-less bifocals to chose from. Zenni lets you order a frame only for half the cost of the frame + lens price, so I would highly recommend ordering yourself some spare parts at the same time if you are as rough on equipment as I am.

Even if you’re happy having someone locally to yell at if things go wrong for your primary pair of glasses, I would highly recommend you get yourself a few backup pairs. As a minimum, I’d say that you need a spare pair of eyeglasses in every glove box, every range bag and every Katrina Kit. Nowadays that does not cost a fortune.

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This post was inspired by Linoge’s, though mine is solely based on my real life experiences and is completely payola free. I’m not your healthcare provider and I’m not dispensing medical advice, (and this sentence is a magic incantation meant to ward off a lawsuit).