Each year a mechanical horror claws its way to the surface from the swampy bottoms of the mass graves of dead Union soldiers. With cranks for arms, chain rings for eyes, and teeth made of spokes, the SLAUGHTERAMA comes to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood.

Waves of silent deadly terror will crash over the innocent as the SLAUGHTERAMA seeks to slake its millennial thirst in the mighty James. Unable to find solace in the coursing waters of that ancient river it will release its hatred on cans of cheap beer.

Those who gaze upon the rotting maggot filled corpse of the SLAUGHTERAMA — and survive — are said to live out their lives in greatness, reigning as kings over the weak and mere mortal!

See you Saturday! ^_^

An aide to our very own Jim Webb was arrested the other day for trying to carry a loaded pistol along with 2 loaded ammo clips into the US Senate office building.

Maybe someone should let the Capitol Police know that in Virginia, this is perfectly normal, accepted practice.

The penitent man GOES UNDER HIS HOUSE ALL BY HIMSELF!?!

This weekend the wife and I decided to start a square foot garden — well it is actually four square feet, but you get the idea.

As you may know, plants necessitate water. To get them their needed water someone had to go under the house and cut the hose back on. For some reason, probably because I don’t do anything else around the house, I was tasked with either the job of actually going under the house or finding someone to do it for me.

I decided to man up.

Really I decided to get in there quick as can be while my wife shouted “you’re so brave” into the tiny spider cricket infested crawl space. But hey, I did it!

Today is the anniversary of Patrick Henry’s famous speech down there at St. John’s Church in Richmond, VA. You know the one, about the liberty and such. If I had to guess, I might predict that there may be a reenactment or something going on there, although that may simply come from spending too much time living in Williamsburg - I’m not sure how they do things in Richmond. How they roll.

So this is a famous speech, or at least, it is a famous last paragraph of a speech. The whole thing - in its entirety - is pretty short though, and is worth reading. Even without a preconceived burning hatred for the British, it is pretty effective in instilling one, at least to me. You can read it here, if you like: wikisource.

Of course, something to keep in mind while reading that, and something which the wikipedia article does not mention, but which I am fairly certain is, nonetheless, true, is that no one wrote the speech down while he was speaking it, and Henry was not the sort of person to write down his speeches beforehand. So there is probably a degree of creative license, or creative memory there; be warned.

I might be thinking of the Gettysburg Address though?

The title of this post is stolen from the Daily Show book. FYI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_liberty_or_give_me_death

The guy that invented FORTRAN died this month, John Backus. For those of you without the wonderful sublime pleasure of knowing FORTRAN, it was the first high-level programming language ever invented. This means that it was the first one to sort of kind of look like English. If you have actually used it before, you know that “sort of kind of” is the operative word there, but then again, if any of you have programmed in assembly before, you also know what a wonderful gift to the world FORTRAN was.

This guy has an awesome quote which describes I think a defining motivating characteristic of Computer Scientists and Programmers:

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Why spend an hour doing something when you can spend 5 hours figuring out how to get a computer to do it for you? There is no good reason.

Another interesting tidbit is that FORTRAN was apparently the first programming language to come with a manual. This is a feat that is still yet to be equaled even today by much of the community.

Here is an illuminating quote from one such manual:

“The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.” —Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

On a final note, an interesting thing about Computer Science is that it is such a young field. Right now, many of the people that invented some of the major first steps are still alive, or, in this case, are dying now. That is always crazy to me, since so many other things were invented so long ago that you only hear about the people in history books, instead of in the news.

RIP, John, you will live on in the dreams and nightmares of engineers and programmers everywhere (respectively).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran - WARNING: contains numerous awesome nerdy FORTRAN jokes

Now, I don’t normally type headers in all-caps. The woman I’m married to can’t stand it. But if ever a time came when an all-caps title was needed … that time was now (WTF tenses).

Seriously, Slaughterama Four. Saturday March 31 on Belle Isle.

Slaughterama is the sweetest darn bike festival on the eastern seaboard — held right here in our town. And by bike festival I mean drunken explosion of cranks and chains. Words don’t really do it justice you really need to check out the pictures.

More details to come but this far the events include:

• Six pak attak
• Four way whiplash (this is seriously awesome / someone might die)
• Chicken fight races
• Chariot races
• Best in show
• World’s smallest messenger race

If you miss it, you’ll feel like the biggest toolbox. Come to watch, bring a beer, get arrested for drunk in public!

We’ve been having an interesting discussion here about Richmond City’s (possibly) unreasonable minimum monthly water bill. To summarize where we are so far:

• Richmond City residents pay a minimum monthly water bill of 43.55$ regardless of how much water they actually use.
• The average American uses around 400 cubic feet of water a month (supposedly).
• If you use between zero and 10,000 cubic feet of water a month you pay 0.01144$ per cubic foot of water (and 0.01684$ per cubic foot of water water (this is based on how much water you use, not how much is actually waste)).
• If you use between 10,100 and 200,000 cubic feet of water you pay 0.00585$ per cubic foot of water. A savings of 49%.
• Richmond seems to have a much higher minimum monthly water bill than the surrounding counties. Henrico, for instance, has a minimum monthly bill of 26.50$ and that includes 600 cubic feet of water.
• A couple of surrounding counties bill utilities on a bi-monthly schedule. The idea is if you can send out 1.5M less bills each year you can save some cash.

A couple of thoughts that came out of the discussion:

• It seems unjust to charge poor people a (possibly) unreasonable amount for a life necessity.
• Switching to a bi-monthly billing schedule would put an unreasonable strain on poor families, especially in the winter months when gas bills are in the 300$-400$ range per month.
• It might be good to give a “deep discount” to customers who use a small amount of water.
• Perhaps businesses, especially restaurants, depend on the bulk water usage discount. Increasing their rates would ultimately hit our pockets somewhere down the line.
• There is no incentive to conserve water.

Now the question is, “where do we go from here?” Richmond’s Green Party representative, Scott Burger, addressed the City Council about this issue on Monday. I guess a starting point would be to contact your city council representative. A good idea might be to organize a bit and come up with some solutions, or gather some more information.

Also, Burger is offering 100$ cash to anyone that can “find any city in the entire United States that has amore[sic.] regressive minimum water and sewer rate than Richmond’s.” More details after the jump.
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