Diary of a Wolfeman

Not a damn thing. Just thought you’d like to know.

Once again, I have proved worthy of the title “Techie from Hell”. Yesterday, the washer went on the fritz, spewing water for about 20 minutes before we caught it. Today, after a fairly rudimentary and minimal websearch, I determined the source of the problem, and after work tonight repaired it.

The fix? Three zip ties.

Found this european article by way of Wired Tales:

Boom for Busty Danish Natural Resources

Eva Andersen reported some very good news in yesterday’s Jyllands-Posten (Danish Women Are Bursting with Health): the trend has been upward (meaning, I suppose, “outward”) for some time in women’s bust-sizes there. She reported agreement on this point among anthropologists, gender-researchers (k?nsforskeren – you know, those fellow students who were into “Gender Studies” back in college) and, most definitive of all, national underwear producers.

Now, I myself have noticed this phenomenon here in the States, only I saw it way back in the spring of 1990. I don’t know for certain if this has remained a constant in the intervening years or if it has ebbed and waned, but I notice the difference now as well.

See, back in ’90, I was in my senior year of high school. I had survived the ’80’s and was looking forward to graduation and the new decade. For those of you who did not experience this timeframe, you may have noticed that all of the movies geared toward the younger crowd from that time (you see them on USA Network,) featured leading actresses who were rather less endowed than what you see today.

Now, I only noticed this in spring because that’s when the jackets started to come off for the warmer weather. I got to comparing the new Freshman class to my agemates and realized that the only Senior girls with comparable bra sizes were generally larger girls.

At the time, I felt kind of robbed, ya know?

In the years since then, I had no real reason to hang around a high school, so I don’t know what it was like. I can tell you though, that as I have travelled around I have seen fairly consistently that women about three to five years younger than myself are generally buying larger bras than women my age or older. Now that my own son is in high school, I have once again noticed the disparity – and felt like a dirty old man for noticing. (Ahh, the wonders of fatherhood!)

Some might want to chalk this up to the current trend toward obesity here in America, but I would have to disagree. My last job had me driving by both a high school and a college on a daily basis, and most of the girls were of an average, healthy weight.

I have two theories for the difference:

The first is that it might be due to the trend of girls to go through puberty at a younger age. This is theorised by many (if not proven) to be the result of a fattier diet these days. Now, medical science says a girl will enter puberty and have her first cycle when her body is physically capable of bearing a child to term. The magic numbers here are 107# and 14% body fat – when these conditions are reached, menses begins. So, if we eat a fattier diet, a girl retains more fat and adds weight more quickly, thus enters puberty much younger and has more years to develop physically. Seems reasonable enough, no?

The second is that it may be something in the milk. Think about it – the farmers are going to want to select the cows who produce the most milk, and they quite possibly have added supplements to their diet to further increase their production. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have a similar effect on the milk-producing organs of a human female?

It could also be a combination of the two. Of course, I should probably stop wondering about it and simply enjoy the results ;)

Over the weekend, BtFR agreed to loan his washer / dryer pair to C, since Greyduck brought his older pair with him when he moved in and C was using a lousy laundromat for her wash. Swapping the pair in/out wasn’t an issue, and it gave me a chance to chat with C’s new guy, who it turns out is beginning to tinker with Linux and had a couple questions. Happy to help the guy out :)

Anywho, I went down earlier tonight and threw in a load of wash, then went back up to veg with the boys. I went back down after an hour or so to swap the load over to the dryer only to find that the float sensor for the washer had jammed, and water was pouring out into the garage and soaking the bit of carpet at the end of the stairs. Commence swearing here.

So tomorrow it looks like I get to dust off the ol’ tool kit and see if I can’t convince it of the error of it’s ways.

Well, that was mostly a bust.

Went to the Kriegstreiber Tournament this weekend out at Milo McIver state park. A pretty small event, it only attracted 4 or 5 merchants, and not enough cars to fill the parking lot, despite the Royal presence.

Friday was a quiet night, since we arrived after 8pm, and it was just the four of us in the Fabritzio camp, quite a small turnout for us.

Saturday’s weather couldn’t decide what to do with itself. The morning started overcast, then the sun came out for a couple hours, so we went wandering around to see what was out there. Like I said above, not much. It wasn’t long before I was forcibly reminded of the opportunistic drives of plant life: we had had enough sun for everything around us to send off about a billion spores of pollen, and my allergies hit me full force.

Later on that evening, we found ourselves huddled up in our cloaks playing Gin Rummy as the lightenss behind the clouds faded (AKA the sun set), we realized there were much better things we could be doing elsewhere, rather than shivering in the dark playing cards. An hour later, we were on the road home.

That’s the benefit of a local event, I suppose.

Symptomology:

That’s right boys and girls: allergy season has arrived. I had thought that maybe the sinus infection I had last year may have cured my allergies, since they usually show up before now, but I guess it ws just Mother Nature playing tricks on me.

Maybe this year I’ll have better luck finding a combination of treatments that allows me to function instead of simply knocking me out. I tell ya, those packages shouldn’t read “may cause drowsiness”, they should read “don’t make in fuq’ing plans”.

Achoo!

Ok, I’ve played with it for a couple days, and I have to say that Arch Linux definitely shows alot of promise…but it needs more work.

There are several known bugs in the package lists, most notably in KDE itself. While I was able to get the sound working, I had to jump through a number of hoops to do so, and arts still isn’t quite on the bandwagon, even though alsa is.

One major drawback is going to be the hardware incompatabilities. There are certain hardware vendors that only provide rpm drivers, (notably ATI video cards) and this system is rpm-unfirendly. While it is possible to get these drivers installed, it is a long and arduous process that leaves this distro in the hands of the guru rather than the mid-level enthusiast.

If you want to learn more about how Linux works, right now would be a good time to play around with Arch, before the developers iron out all the kinks. If you want to run Linux but don’t want to have to delve deeply into the command line, stick to one of the big boys like SuSE or Mandrake.

As for me, I think I’ll be investing some time into an ftp install of SuSE 9.1 over the weekend.

Well, I’ve gone over the hill and through the woods to Grandma’s house for the weekend, and I’m typing this on the computer I put together for her out of spare parts I had lying around the Den. She had a PII-MMX 233, and we’ve just installed my old eMachine eTower 500 Celeron. Which runs better than twice as fast as the poor old dinosaur we’ve just retired (after gutting it for the video card, a 32Mb nVidia PCI card.)

Aside from a small memory issue with her dialup, (IE, we forgot the settings) everything has gone quite smoothly, and she is quite happy with it. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma!

My brother John is home on leave from the Marines for a week, and he showed up for dinner before running off with his friends. He looks good, and we’re all damn proud of him for taking the huge leap of joining the military.

Unfortunately, his unit will be shipping out for Iraq when he gets off leave to releive another unit who is coming home. He was talking about the Rules Of Engagement our troops have to follow over there, and it’s scary. Each family in Iraq is allowed to have an AK-47. Now, as an American, I’m all for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms we were granted in the Constitution, but an assault rifle is a bit much, ya know? If they see an Iraqi walking down the street with an RPG (that’s Rocket-Propelled Grenade, not D&D) they can’t fire on them until that person shoulders the weapon – the theory here is that they may be taking it to the military to turn it over.

I just hope nobody does something stupid. Like leave Dubya in office long enough to keep my brother there long enough to get killed. We need to end this ‘war’.

For some oddball reason, I have been considering the ethics of myself and others lately; probably has something to do with politics of late.

In any case, there’s one topic that I haven’t really written about here and I figured it’s time I chimed in with my two cents: Polyamory. For those of you who are familiar with the subject, feel free to wander elsewhere for now, I won’t be saying anything you haven’t heard before. For the curious though, read on…

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