Conserve! No, wait...

States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile

And that saves him almost $300 a month in gas. It's great for Just but bad for the roads he's driving on, because he also pays a lot less in gasoline taxes which fund highway projects and road repairs. As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead.

This stuff makes me batty.

Here in Colorado, we've had a drought going for the past several years. Of course, all the powers that be tell us we have to conserve water — even going so far as to start up police patrols to ticket people who water their lwans on the wrong days. Then what happens? Well, the water people lose revenue and have to raise water rates!

It's like nobody is thinking about the consequences of conservation. I mean, really. Conservation means consuming less. That's going to cost someone some money. The "powers that be" need to think about these things before it becomes an issue.

Reactionary Big Brother shenanigans are not a proper incentive for beneficial (and important) behavior changes.

Hell yeah!

BOSTON UNIVERSITY CLAIMS 26TH BEANPOT TITLE WITH 3-2 OVERTIME WIN AGAINST NORTHEASTERN

Freshman Chris Bourque scored with 5:50 remaining in the first overtime to lift Boston University to a 3-2 victory in the title game of the 53rd Annual Beanpot Tournament in front of 17,565 fans at the FleetCenter. It marks the 26th time that Boston University has captured the Beanpot title.

Wow. Ray's boy does us proud with the Beanpot winner? Good times.

Mind you, that's 26/53... I call that half (with a little rounding) out of a four team tourney — Wow! Go BU!

Dog Fight: Awesome!

My BU Terriers ("Ice Dogs", thank you) will be taking on the Northeastern Huskies for the Beanpot title on Monday.

The Terriers reached the championship game for the 21st time in 22 years and will play Northeastern for the title next Monday night. Earlier, the underdog Huskies beat Harvard 2-1 on Tim Judy's goal 2:01 into the second overtime.

Sweet. Of course, I couldn't be happier about upsetting BC.

Oh, and check this out:

Terrier head coach Jack Parker, who improved his win-loss record in the Beanpot opener to 28-4 while his overall record in the Tournament is 48-15, couldn't have been more pleased with his team's performance.

The man is a hockey GOD!

Good to have some good news on the hockey front. The NHL situation just sucks.

Trying on the Ruby ring

A couple of weekends ago I finally got my feet wet with Ruby on Rails by following along with this OnLAMP tutorial. I didn't even finish the walk-through (yet), but I'm super-impressed. Rails and Ruby both seem to be incredibly powerful, easy, and fun. Now I find Amy Hoy's review of / supplement to the OnLAMP article, which fills in some holes and give you some of the "why" behind the examples. It also does a nice job of summarizing the experience of playing with the new language:

... Ruby (not just Rails) has very lax rules when it comes to syntax. But without an explanation, you might not immediately realize how lax. (Hint: The answer is 'very lax.')

You don't have to use semicolons—but you can. You don't have to use parentheses—but you can. You don't have to use curly braces on code blocks—although, of course, you can. Variables don't start with $, either, unless they're globals—but they do sometimes start with @ as we've seen.

I used to wrinkle my nose at code with so few constraints, especially the lack of variable signifiers (mmm, I like associating coding with $$$!) in languages like Python and Ruby. But I was wrong, and perhaps just a tiny bit scarred by my PERL experience. But Ruby is gorgeous—spare like a Japanese tea room, as functional as a Zen studio. I want to marry Ruby and have its babies. But I have the feeling that a language like Ruby lives a life that resembles its syntax; I'm sure it's not looking for that kind of emotional entanglement. Somehow, I soldier on.

Good stuff. Someday I will spend some more time futzing around with this junk. I might even get the book.

Also note Justin French's experience after he switched (seemingly whole-hog) from PHP to Rails.

The Grand Old Tradition

Train kills 2 BU students

Yesterday, the commuter rail engineer told T police he saw the students through the darkness at around 1 a.m. when they were about 50 feet in front of him, as his train hurtled inbound from Worcester at 50 miles per hour. At that speed, a train takes a half-mile to stop. He did not have time to hit either the horn or the brakes, said the engineer, who was not identified and has been operating T commuter trains since 1991.

"It's the worst part of the job without question, and I think every engineer will agree with that," said Walter Nutter, a T engineer who has hit and killed three people over his 32-year career. He now leads a counseling team for engineers involved in similar incidents.

It may be exagerated in my memory, but it seems like BU kids get killed by the T almost every year. Usually it's because the new crop of freshmen assume the Green Line trolleys will actually stop at the crosswalks.

Crawling through a hole in the fence to hang out in an active rail yard is just asking for trouble of numerous possible descriptions, if you ask me.

The early 90's called...

... They want their music back. First we have the surviving members of Alice in Chains reuniting for a tsunami benfit:

Along with Damageplan singer Pat Lachman, they will take the stage of Seattle's Premier club on February 18th. The relief concert will also feature fellow Seattleites Krist Novoselic of Nirvana, Ann Wilson of Heart, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Christ DeGarmo of Queensryche and members of world music group Children of the Revolution.

(Is it just me, or is Seattle getting a little sad?)

Then there's this: Did you realize Us3 released more than one record and are still around? Hip trip, flip fantasia, indeed!

Eleven years after scoring a Top Ten hit with "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" by sampling Herbie Hancock, Us3 are sampling themselves. The London collective -- set to release its fourth album, Questions, in the U.S. on April 26th -- now has a nine-piece live band creating jazz grooves to mix with its hip-hop beats.

Biddy-biddy-bop!

As in "the fruits of the Devil"

For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil'

In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, a group at New York University has been developing what it calls a depravity scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details.

And a prominent personality expert at Columbia University has published a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, derived from detailed biographies of more than 500 violent criminals.

He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis.

I think I'd prefer people keep their moral chocolate out of my clinical peanut butter, but it's an interesting discussion.

Tabula Rasa

So, yeah. My old host is gone, daddy, gone:

Our main commercial network has been compromised and we are no longer able to continue providing service due to a large scale hack. After looking at the damage and after alot of soul searching I am sorry to say that we are closing our doors.

Or to put it another way:

So over the years Acta Divina (a semi-large hosting company) has been doing really bad on the business side of things, and even worse on the security side. They were recently hacked, badly, and it was going to take weeks to get back on their feet. But instead of wasting more money, they decided to shut down and leave everyone in the dust.

Super. My rotten hosting luck continues. Here's hoping I've found a good one now.

Attica! (Ook-ook!) Attica!

Row over Delhi's errant monkeys

The authorities in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have refused to accept the animals, saying it would create problems for them.

"We received the last batch in June last year. We got a lot of criticism for this in the state at that time too," the state's chief forest conservator, PC Shukla, told the BBC.

"Now, Delhi wants to send another lot but we are not interested. This is their problem they should be able to tackle it."

The simian prisoners are currently being held in a makeshift monkey jail outside of Delhi, but those conditions will not last. It's the same age-old crime and punishment dilemma.