Father of the year

What kind of spin do you put on this when you're eight years old and someone asks about your dad? [They'll say "real dad" to distinguish him from your stepdad, or stepdads, or foster dad.]

Will you say, "My real dad's in prison"? "He's dead"? How about, "Dad saved my life from a vicious dog and the dog's owner got in a fight with my dad and Dad killed him in self defense but the dead guy's friends told a bunch of lies in court and Dad got locked up"? [That fantasy may fly when you're eight, but by the time you're twelve...? Forget it. Have fun in middle school!]

Sucks hugely to dwell on the knowledge that your dad is 1) the worst kind of loser and 2) not around to actually, you know, be a dad. Screws a kid up something awful. Screws a kid up so badly that I would like to hit the world's crappiest parents over the head with a board. Run home for an actual frikkin' shotgun...? Brilliant move, Pop! I'm sure your kid will appreciate the gesture as he grows up without you, you stupid, stupid, stupid idiot.

P.S. I've seen the pup. Seemed nice and friendly.

Two brothers pleaded not guilty Tuesday in connection with the fatal shooting of a transient after an argument over his dog in a Redlands park.

Peter Soto, who turns 21 today, and Paul Soto, 18, were arraigned in San Bernardino County Superior Court on one count of murder each.

The older brother is charged with firing a shotgun to kill Ricky Dean Davis, 48, on Saturday at Jennie Davis Park. Paul Soto is charged with assaulting him with a knife.

Davis was slain at 1:30 p.m. in the playground area of the park, where homeless men often hang out. It was Redlands' first homicide since August 2006.

Redlands police said the Soto brothers argued with Davis after his dog approached the infant son of one of the men. The brothers walked to their apartment, dropped off the boy and returned with a shotgun, police said.

The brothers thought the dog, a 10-month-old male shepherd mix, got too close to the child, who was in a stroller, police said.

"They had more than enough time to walk away," Redlands Police Chief Jim Bueermann said. "And, in fact, they did."

The brothers are documented Rialto gang members who recently had moved into an apartment near the park at New York Street and Redlands Boulevard, police spokesman Carl Baker said.

Witnesses saw the brothers sprint the short distance to the apartment, Baker said. They were arrested there three hours later.

Davis' dog was unharmed and taken to the city's animal shelter. On Tuesday, officials said it likely would be picked up by one of Davis' siblings.

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And the dog is like, "Just google 'Ubuntu Help Forums.'"

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The penguin has landed

Seriously, folks, Vista is beautiful. Really. [Are my new glasses playing tricks on me, or does the Linux penguin seem to have little man-breasts?]

Just skip this post unless you are interested in my adventures with KGRUBEditor and dual boots and oops! it should be sudo kate, just let me type that again...

Warning: nothing but geek in this post.

First things first: I love my external hard drive. I love it with all my heart, because without it I'd be a) poorer and/or b) minus every photo and word document I've ever saved on my old [2005] Dell desktop. [Note to self: keep a copy of Contacts on the external hard drive from now on, too, Einstein.]

Ever since I got the new HP laptop [it rocks hugely, by the way] I've been messing with Linux on my desktop PC. For the record, the 64-bit Vista does not play well with others and a dual boot [Vista + the latest Kubuntu] on the laptop is never going to happen. Vista it will remain, with Firefox and Opera as my browsers of choice. On the desktop, though, an XP/Kubuntu dual boot was totally a possibility. And a reality, for a week or so. Just for practice, I started by adding Kubuntu to my machine at work and everything went smoothly, right down to a beautiful custom splash image [Yosemite] and Windows as the default OS for non-geeky subs/visitors.

The dual boot setup at home went well, too, except that something was wrong with GRUB. It wasn't just that I couldn't seem to develop a nice splash image — the entire booting process became erratic and troublesome. BIOS or the boot manager or something appeared to be seriously messed up. If I were an authentic geek instead of a hapless, freshly-hatched noob, solving the problem would have been a snap. Instead, I made it worse.

Since I knew that all the important things [photos, docs] were safe on the external hard drive, I started to experiment. I removed Kubuntu, erased partitions, fooled with QGRUB and KGRUB editors and various hard drive tools, and at one point found myself with two XPs instead of XP and Kubuntu. And at last the poor desktop decided it wasn't going to take any more abuse, and for the first time in my less-than-a-decade with 'puters, a fatal exception occurred: the fabled blue screen of death.

I called a friend who works at a software firm and got the news I expected: things were looking very bad. So I figured, what the hell — I'll give this puppy one last shot.

At some point I had loaded Active@KillDisk on a CD, so I popped it in the tray and told it to wipe the hard drive cleaner than clean. Once that was done [and it took hours: three passes plus] I put the Kubuntu disk in one last time. It reformatted, repartitioned and restored my hard drive with a shiny new operating system, which that same day became even shinier and newer with the installation of KDE 4.0.4.

Am I happy? Very much. [I'm writing this post on my Kubuntu 'puter.] Everything so far seems fast and smooth and efficient. Lots of new stuff to play with. I'm mainly using Firefox, since Opera and KDE butt heads a little bit. As of this moment I would certainly recommend Linux, with the qualification that it presumes a willingness to get a little bit geeky at times. Nothing outrageous, IMHO, but your mileage may vary. And having not one but two computers to play with...? So. much. fun. ;~)))))

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The 'us' in platypus

The daily cladogram.

Biologist PZ Myers has written a terrific post on the draft of the platypus genome: an important post, since the popular press was so busy playing up the "weird little composite creature" angle that they missed the central point of the study. A comparative analysis of the genomes of multiple organisms, with emphasis on the newly revealed data from the platypus [writes Myers] "reveals unique signatures of evolution." [In fact, that's the paper's title: "Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution."]

From Myers' post:

Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is "weird" or "odd" or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — "the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal". No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as birds are an independent and (directly) unrelated lineage; you can say it is part reptile, but that is because it is a member of a great reptilian clade that includes prototherians, marsupials, birds, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, and us eutherian mammals. We can say with equal justification that we are part reptile, too. What's interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.

Every organism is going to be a mix of conserved, primitive characters and evolutionary novelties — a mouse is just as "weird" as a platypus from an evolutionary perspective, since each is the product of processes that promote divergence from a common ancestor, and each are equidistant from that ancestor. It's just that we primates share more derived characters with a mouse than with a platypus, because we are more closely related, and the mix of characters in the mouse are more familiar to us.

[M]odern echidnas, elephants, and emus are all products of different evolutionary trajectories through history, and no one by itself is a representative of the ancestral condition. We derive the ancestral state by comparison of multiple lineages. And that is the virtue of this paper, that it adds another lineage to the data set, one that diverged from ours over 160 million years ago. It is a lens that helps us see what novelties arose in that 160 million year window … on both the eutherian and monotreme sides.

Read the whole post at PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula.

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Look! Something shiny!

I am easily distracted.




Dogs with Cones:




That's Bingo, top, and Pogo.


Ugly Overload [you've all been subjected to Cute Overload, yes?]:


That is SO cool. [As always, click for big.]

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