-- Update: Seeing the reaction this has generated is driving me to demand one of these for all upcoming concerts, get ready Natalie.

Last week we got to see George Clinton at the House of Blues. Thanks to HoB policy of a rectal exam for every male customer, I have no photos of this event, which is why Natalie whipped out the following illustration:

Click for massive

I'm really happy with the way that came out, she really went nuts considering I counted 21 on stage at one point!

We were so happy to see this circus on stage, but it was hard knowing how tough it's been for Clinton. For a family that's gone through so much in the last couple of months to be up performing with that much energy was awe inspiring.

This was also easily the best sounding show we've been to at the HoB. I attribute that to the venue finally getting everything dialed in, and the fact that these guys are just that good.

Also, introduced us to local keyboardist Danny Bedrosian, who opened the show before playing the main set, and who has several local dates coming up. We'll be there, definitely.

I grabbed this ad from a red line train:

I would LOVE to have a wallet that reduces my wallet size by 200%. Think of all the crap you could walk around with. Does it reduce the mass as well as the volume? Would I have a wallet that's much bigger on the inside than on the outside, but weighs like 4 tons, or is it more of a portal to a multi-dimensional space that you can just put things in? Like a TARDIS? Two Daleks can tow the TARDIS, even with all of the stuff it has inside, so is this like that? Can I put like a TV in there?

I think Cambridge, being home to the best engineers in the world, is probably a likely place for such a transdimensional breakthrough to make it to market.

I've just been playing with Google Chrome from the Dev Channel site. After 5 minutes, I've got some things I hate.

• Title Tabs Done Wrong:
  I like the idea of integrating the tabs into the title bar, however they don't go far enough. If you just reach up there and click-and-drag, chances are you'll grab a tab, and detach it or move it in the tab order.

  When Apple lifted this same trick in the Safari 4.0 betas, it was great because if you just grabbed any tab, it acted as the title bar would and moved the window, if you clicked and held, then started dragging, it would drag/detach that tab. That's how this should work.

  I like the fact that there's very little, well, chrome in Chrome. I like minimal layouts that give me maximum space for what I'm looking at and don't interfere. Chrome could probably drop 20 pixels by pushing the tabs to the top of the window and making them behave properly.




• Tabs open behind current tab:
  This makes me nuts. When you click a link in the current tab, the new tab opens behind the current one, and not all the way to the right like I expect. Here's a use case that shows how worthless this is. If I'm on Fark, and Fark is on tab 4 of 8, and I click 3 links and 3 comment section links, they're now jumbled in as tabs 5-10, rather than 9-15. They're not where I expect them, they're where I have to hunt for them. This cannot currently be changed by the user.




• No on-the-fly Search Selection
  I like Flock because, among other things, you can drop down the search box and choose an engine on the fly. By default Chrome will let you change your default engine between Google (go figure), Yahoo and Bing!. But there is no search box in the browser. What they mean by "default engine" is "what engine is used when you type text into an empty tab URL box, or highlight and right-click text in a page". That's pretty cool, but I'd love the ability to change that engine based on the context of the search rather than through Preferences. A good case is typing in "Big Trouble in Little China", dropping down the menu to IMDB and pulling up the IMDB page. The way to do that at present is to type "Big Trouble in Little China" into the URL box, right click the URL area, click Edit Search Engines, and tell it to make IMDB the default (after setting up the IMDB search engine yourself). Then you'll have to change your default back to Google later.




• Mid Click Auto-Scrolling:
  There is none. One of my main gripes in Safari is the lack of auto-scroll. For anyone not paying attention, the idea is you click the middle mouse button, and then move the mouse up/down left/right to scroll around, no need to slavishly ZING a scroll-wheel/ball around to go up/down the page, or dive to the edge of the window and try to grab the scroll bar. Civilized, brainless, and easy on the tendons.




• Chrome is low on Chrome:
  This is a "LIKE", I'm really happy with how sparse it is. The nav-bar + tab bar + window chrome is much smaller than Firefox, and even smaller than Safari. That gives more room to me and gives me a window that is small and tight, not annoying like FF. I also like the solution to the Status Bar, which is the bar at the bottom of Firefox or Safari where it shows you the destination of a link you're hovering, or how many items of a page have loaded.

  Chrome doesn't have a status bar, but instead they have a status "ribbon", let's say, that appears to cover part of the lower left of the window when you hover something or the browser has something to say, like that.

I'm sure there will be more, I'm not sure if it will be more positive or more negative. I suspect this will be another browser I use occasionally to see if it fixes the things I gripe about, and then put back in the drawer and go back to FF or Flock until it gets better, MOAR, or whatever.

My bathroom is being remodeled and is now completely gutted. Before this project, I proposed a change of venue to the brand new Hampton Inn like 7 miles away, but I was vetoed. I am to "suck it up" and use the serial killer Buffalo Bill bathroom in the basement of our house.

Here is that bathroom, and the journey to it. It took a good deal of self control to do this in the dark. Walking the length of the house in an unlit basement with only the timer light dealy on my camera...I fully expected to see a hand coming at me when the flash fired.

Take a tour with me:

Pictures

This is the DUMBEST argument against "public option" healthcare I've ever heard, and I've been hearing it more and more, even in such Lieburul Hotspots as NPR:

"CNSNews.com
With 50 Million New Patients Possible, Nation Needs More Primary Care Doctors"

On the one hand, these mouthbreathing fucking cretins challenge us to show them "a SINGLE American who ever went bankrupt because of medical bills", well, that was easily disproved, hell, I personally know a couple of people who came close to losing it all. People are denied care all. the. time, and many who get treatment are denied payment for the care they receive.

Now they're saying that since there are 50MM uninsured, if we suddenly insure these people it will be disastrous for the country because we'll run out of doctors. Right now, if these people get sick with an acute illness, they can go to an emergency room at their local "hospital of last resort". They must be treated for serious illnesses, then the hospitals chalk it up as "money someone should pay us sometime". The money that gets paid is generally in the form of the taxpayers paying the hospital. That system works great for "gunshot wound", but does not work for "colon cancer" or "congratulations, you've got diabetes". What it does do is encourage people to use ERs as PCPs. This stretches ERs limits.

What they're really saying is "These people are too poor/stupid to have medical insurance, therefore they don't deserve medical treatment, and should die". That is not "oversimplified" or "out of context". What they're saying is, "If you can't afford or are denied medical insurance on the basis of 'pre-existing conditions', you should not see a doctor, and you may die". After all, the claim is that if these unwashed masses suddenly had insurance, the healthcare system as we know it would collapse, because suddenly poor people and sick people can visit doctors for free.

Assholes. Staying alive is not a privilege. Where's your "right to life" now? What about the right-to-life of the worker who loses his job and can't afford COBRA, or COBRA runs out before he gets a new job? What's that? Fuck him? Ok, thought so, thanks for clearing that up.