Posted 8:02 PM by Floyd

The Vodkapundit's fame has spread so far and wide, a Mountain View, CA bar has been named after him!

Posted 6:25 PM by Floyd

A week ago today I was at a surprise birthday party for my friend Joel Singer. Joel and his wife Melissa moved to Ann Arbor last year, and were in town for a wedding. We played a few hands of bridge. I was partnered with my friend Scott Benson, playing the Caroline Club; Joel was at my right. There was a hand where I played well, and another that was not-so-well.

On the first hand I am in fourth chair. There is no vulnerability in this informal game. (Some of the spots are invented; where this is done they are irrelevant.)

AQ942

A73

AK

T54

LHO passes, Scott passes showing 9 or fewer HCP, Joel passes. Caroline Club is a strong club system, so all strong hands are opened with 1. In first and second seat "strong hand" means 16 or more HCP; in third and fourth chair all bids are two points stronger so 18 points are needed. This hand has 17 but the five-card suit and controls make it worth more. So I open 1.

LHO passes and partner responds 1. This shows five or more hearts and game forcing values, say a good 7 to 9.

I could bid 4 right away but slam is possible opposite a stiff club. I don't want to bid my spade suit; we have a already found a good fit and concealing the long suit may help during the play. So I bid 2.

Scott bids 3, which is not what I want. 4.

A low diamond is led and dummy appears:

2

JT864

Q83

A932

I cash two rounds of diamonds and cross to the ace of clubs for a club pitch on the diamond queen. I want to ruff clubs, so I lead ace and another club. RHO wins the second round with the queen.

RHO returns a middle spade. I rise ace and ruff a spade low. RHO follows with the ten. Unless he's fooling around he has another spade. Now I ruff a club with the seven. RHO plays the queen and LHO the jack, so my last club on the table is good.

I ruff another spade with the six of trumps. RHO plays the king on this trick.

At this point I have eight tricks in and need two of the last four.
Dummy has - JT8 - 2
I have Q9 A3 - -.

I have a 100% play for the 10th trick: I ruff the master club with the ace of trumps and lead my last trump. If LHO plays an honor that sets up a trick for the JT. When he plays low, I play the jack. RHO (Joel) wins and is endplayed. He had KQ9x over dummy so careful handling was required.

---

Now, sadly, we pass to the not so clever side. I hold

Qxxx

AQx

x

AQ9xx

Scott passes (showing 0-9, remember). Joel opens 2 weak. I pass (opposite a 0-9 hand bidding 3 is crazy, though I could understand it at matchpoints). All pass and it's my lead.

I start with my stiff diamond and dummy appears:

AKx

xx

Kxxx

Txxx

Dummy plays small and Scott plays the ten. Declarer wins with the queen. It looks like Scott had AJT of diamonds. Rising ace to give me a ruff would be wrong as he can't have a reentry.

Joel plays a spade to the ace and leads a trump down. I duck. He goes to dummy with the other spade honor, but this time he leads a club to his king. I win the ace and play a spade.

Joel ruffs and plays the heart king. I win and am at the crucial point. I don't want to be thrown in later so I cash the heart queen and exit with my last spade.

Disaster! Joel leads the nine of clubs. Cashing the last spade set up a winkle! If I duck, Scott is endplayed with the jack -- he has only diamonds left and must play ace and a diamond. I have only clubs left, so rising queen sets up dummy's nine of clubs and I must exit a club.

The correct play was to cash the club queen after the heart queen. Now I can exit with the last spade. Joel has only trumps and diamonds, and must lead diamonds out of his hand to go down one.

Posted 3:58 PM by Floyd

This week I have been trudging through my recovered files. Many of them are corrupt, but I was not too concerned as I had made a backup a few months ago.

I got the backup file pieces off zip disks and joined them. Then I rooted around for the Win2K backup utility. It did not recognize my "backup.qic" file and could not do anything with them.

I was disturbed, but not unduly so. Surely Microsoft had not lost backwards compatibility with backups. I'll repeat that one more time for your amusement. Cue the cute little kid voice and puppy eyes:

Daddy, you can upgrade to a newer Microsoft O/S and not lose your backups. Right Daddy?

I went to the Microsoft site and searched for qic in the knowledge base. And there it was, in ASCII and white:

The Backup tool in Windows NT and Windows 2000 uses a different format for tapes and files than the Backup tool in Windows 95/98. The two formats are not interchangeable.

You must restore the data from the tape or file using the Backup tool on a computer running Windows 95/98.

Ever see the movie Dreamscape? It came out around 1984 and starred Dennis Quaid as a person who could enter others' dreams. His enemy was a nasty young man with the same power. At some point in the movie Quaid points out that an old lady had died while the villain was in her dream, to which the villain sneers, "That's a fucking shame."

The Microsoft knowledge base would be greatly improved, at least from an honesty point of view, by the use of this phrase:

The Backup tool in Windows NT and Windows 2000 uses a different format for tapes and files than the Backup tool in Windows 95/98. The two formats are not interchangeable. Your hard drive crashed and you need your backups? That's a fucking shame.

You must restore the data from the tape or file using the Backup tool on a computer running Windows 95/98. You don't have access to one? That's a fucking shame.

By the way, taunts from Mac cultists and Linux weenies will be sent to /dev/null.

That is, if I had a /dev/null.

Posted 9:24 AM by Floyd

In his most recent blog post (no link due to Blogger bug), Eric S. Raymond says "The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist." In his previous post he called for a new imperialism against radical Islam. Now there are a lot of people who claim to be anarchists who are nothing of the sort; they ooze contempt for freedom from every pore, and spent half their time calling for state action against private individuals, and the other half smashing windows at the local Starbucks. But Mr. Raymond is not one of those people.

Most people probably have heard of Raymond through his work as a Linux/open source evangelist. Before that he wrote The New Hacker's Dictionary. But I first came across Raymond in the late 80's when I was in college and read political newsgroups. Raymond was a fun and witty proponent of libertarian anarchism; it was his Usenet articles and the writings of David Friedman that convinced me that libertarianism without government was superior to a minimal state.

So when Raymond says "I see no alternative to state action as a way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world", I stand up and take notice. And I treat what he has to say with respect. But given all that, I think that he's overreacting.

Raymond says that Islamic fundamentalism poses a deadlier threat than the Soviet Union. All I can say is that thirteen years of peace must have dulled his memory. What could be scarier and more menacing than international communism? They tried to subvert half the damn planet; for the first 60 years of the USSR's existence, once a country went communist it never went back.

What made the Communist threat really dangerous was the support it engendered from within its enemies. Much of the Western intelligentsia was openly pro-communist. In countries like France and Italy there was a communist party that polled a significant fraction of the vote. Every Western country had its traitors, such as the Rosenbergs in America and Kim Philby in Britain.

Does anyone really think there will be an American couple who sends atomic secrets to Saddam Hussein? That a highly placed CIA officer will act as a mole for Al Qaeda out of love for Islam? That the Koran will become required reading and citing in university English departments?

Raymond also says that

... what Al-Qaeda wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did.

Excuse me, but where is the Al Qaedan as stone cold crazy as Pol Pot? If you find him too provincial, then what of Chairman Mao, who said that nuclear weapons didn't bother him because after a nuclear attack there would still be 300,000,000 Chinese? How about Krushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Raymond said that he entertained and then discarded the idea of an anarcho-capitalist military as a heavily armed militia with a few professional soldiers. I agree that this defense system will not work well against terrorists delivering weapons of mass destruction. A static, defensively-oriented military has been obsolete since 1918.

In the world that we live in it was not difficult to find and punish Al Qaeda after 9/11. Within 24 hours there were strong suspicions that Bin Laden was behind the attack. It was less than a few days later that President Bush was issuing ultimata to Afghanistan. What made this possible was not government, but power projection -- aircraft carrier groups, bombers, and the capability to deliver infantry to a remote location. There is nothing specifically statist or anarchist about a B-52 bomber.

Posted 5:10 PM by Floyd

A Hand Appears on the Ledge

It's been hell but I am getting back to normal with my computer. Saturday I spent a few hours with Bo the Tech installing a new hard drive. We attached the new drive and were ready to install Windows 2K. Bo put the first installation disk in the floppy drive.

I/O Error

Fortunately I am the master of every situation. When I bought my current computer in '99 I kept my old computer around, and it was under the house in a big plastic bag. I went under the house and lugged it up. We unscrewed the cover, removed the floppy drive, and attached it to my current computer.

I/O Error

I started to wonder if I would have to throw my computer off a cliff. I called my neighbors to see if they would let me borrow a floppy. No one was home which was just as well; can you imagine their reaction? "Hi, it's Floyd. I was wondering if I could dismantle your computer?"

My wife, who is a saint when I am stressed out, left for Fry's to get a floppy. Bo loaded Windows XP and started a scandisk of the old drive. Sherry returned in record time. Scandisk did not help, but later I was able to use the chkdsk tool. chkdsk found some files on the old hard drive and put them in some directories named DIR00xxx, where xxx is a number from 001 to 667.

Sunday I took a break from all this to play in a Swiss Teams in Marin. It was my second opportunity to play on an expert team. We played well in general, with a 5-1-1 record, and beat every good team we played against, including Ron Smith's team. But we never beat anyone by a lot and finished with 81 VPs on a 140 average, which was good for only fourth out of eight in our bracket. Third place was just one VP ahead of us. I played fairly well but made a few mistakes, including one hand where I went for 800.

Monday I slogged through all the DIR directories and saved the data. Most of the stuff that I had not been working with was okay; some of the data I had dealt with last Wednesday was corrupt. Then I started installing programs. There's a lot of work to do yet but now I have office, Eudora, Palm, etc. (In many cases I got more up-to-date versions of my software. I must say that the new Palm desktop had the most butt-ugly color scheme I had ever seen.)

Later tonight there will be more blogging. I plan to comment on Eric Raymond's latest post. I may even do some bridge-blogging. But for now I am trying to deal with level 3 difficulty on Civilization III.