With some luck, I may find out how accurate this quiz is.

How many five year olds could you take on at one time, assuming no weapons and no body armor?

34 five year olds. Hell yeah.

34

Take it yourself here!

A breakdown of my answers follow the jump.
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In the United States, that is.

Shall we play a game? Go to EPG Soft’s Visited States Map generator. This is a three-part challenge, so grab some coffee, tea, or whatever the fuck you’re drinking today.
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So, the store final for the Magic: the Gathering City Champs tournament I wrote about last month was on Easter Sunday. I had low expectations going in since this was my first “real” tournament. I was going to play against folks with a lot more experience and a lot better cards. I kept the deck I used in February basically the same, and set out with Stilts with one objective: to ruin someone’s day.

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Just got back from riding around a bit and visiting my friends Bond and Donut. I was zipped up in my lined textile jacket, lined textile pants, Sidi waterproof boots, and my trusty Held Ninja gloves. I cruised the twenty-some miles up the highway to see them.

It was a little chilly on the way up, even with my wicking base layer and SmartWool socks. Bond’s girlfriend asked me if I was cold. “My thumbs are, ” I replied. “I have sensitive thumbs, apparently.” I kissed the tops of my thumbs, feeling sorry for them.

I left about two hours later or so. I put my balaclava on, mostly because cold air was rushing under my helmet. The wind stung my face where my beard used to be. I shifted my paws around my heated grips, trying to warm up my thumbs and pinky fingers. Boy, was it this cold when I left?

I felt the all-too familiar numb-burning sensation from my bout of exposure in 2005. My heated grips were set to high, but my pinky and thumb on each hand weren’t getting warm fast enough. I flexed my fingers to try to get them to warm up, but eventually just thought, “fuck it,” and sped up. What a sweet sound the wind makes roaring around a bike at triple-digit speeds.

I computed the windchill after I got home: 8°F. Hopefully I won’t have the same sandpaper-on-sunburnt-skin feeling from last time. :)

It’s official — I spend too much time inside. My solar-powered watch died two days ago because I don’t go outside enough when the sun is out.

I had to recharge it with my desk lamp. It was at medium storage capacity when I went to bed last night, I’ve charged it for another two hours today.

This is what happens when the content system takes a dump ninety minutes before we’re supposed to launch:

Yeah, that’s right. Almost four hours and thirty minutes later and we’re still dead in the water.

I hit a milestone today at my old friend, the Ars Technica forums. Appropriately enough, it was about motorcycling. Hitting 5000 posts isn’t a big deal in and of itself. There are many users with far more posts than that, and as the Internet maxim goes, “you are not your post count.”

However, today’s milestone seemed like a good time to do a little self-reflection on my life. I joined Ars in August of 1999. What’s happened to me during my membership at Ars? Let’s see, in no particular order.
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New things that sparkle can lose their luster with time. I have experienced this first-hand among many things. Friendships, movies, jobs, electronic doodads, cars. Once the Honeymoon phase was over for something I started to see its flaws. Sometimes I just became used to something, and the gee-whiz faded into “ho hum.” But sometimes, just once in a very great while, something goes from being familiar to fantastic again.
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I loved living in southern Oregon. The weather was perfect for me, the way of life was slower without seeming backwater (unlike the South), and it symbolized a big tipping point in my career in Web junk. It also started my path towards self-sufficiency, and was a good cultural setting to learn about the three “Rs” of waste reduction: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

As indicated in my article about plastic bags almost a year ago, I like reusing stuff. That’s the easiest way for me to reduce the stuff I toss into a landfill. I keep a lot of the plastic containers that food comes in, try to reuse plastic or paper bags at least once before binning/recycling them, and re-use boxes and shipping components. I’ve stopped using paper towels almost completely in favor of rags.

Most of my “reduce” activities center around water and power consumption. I shave out of a big coffee mug instead of letting the water run the whole time. I use compact fluorescent lamps instead of incandescent bulbs where I can. I microwave my kitchen sponge for two minutes every time I run the dish washer to avoid tossing out a perfectly serviceable sponge and reaching for a new one.

Recycling was a part of the conservation triad that I always refused to participate in. Recycling was a major pain in the ass when I lived in Oregon. I had to separate plastic from paper (subdivided into newsprint, magazines/glossy inserts, and then other paper products), glass had to be divided up into clear and green (they didn’t take brown bottles … or was it green ones? I forget). I had to remove labels from all containers. Cardboard was accepted, but only if it was thickly corrugated. Who has time to wash, sort, and judge all that shit? Plus you had to pay.

So, fuck that. Fast forward almost six years, and the niece is living with me. She looked at all the other conservation shit I was doing around the house. “Why don’t you recycle?” I told her about my Oregon experience. She asked me to check into recycling here, and I did, just to appease her. I was completely surprised.

The Central Virginia Waste Management Authority runs a (free!) curbside recycling program that is dead simple for lazy people like myself. Their rules are simple:

1. Wash out your nasty stuff.
2. Throw away lids.
3. Only recycle plastic items with a 1 or 2 on it. When it doubt, throw it away.
4. Huck all your recycleables in one big ass bin. Or more bins, if you need it. No sorting necessary.
5. Tote big ass bin(s) to the curb every two weeks.
6. Don’t pay anything extra.

Apparently it’s all sorted out at a facility. I couldn’t be happier with the program. My fiscally conservative self is satisfied knowing those people aren’t sucking money out of the welfare system. I am putting less stuff into the garbage bin, even with the niece living here. Double the occupants yet only 2/3rds of my original waste going to the landfill? Score.

Instead of a sorting chore, recycling is a game now. I like filling the recycling bin up with junk mail envelopes and the magazines I’ve finished reading. I enjoy looking at plastic containers to see if I can recycle them or not. I was pleased to put my gigumbo-sized empty detergent bottle in the recycling bin instead of throwing it into the trash.

The moral of the story: check to see what your community does for recycling. You might be surprised at how easy (and effortless) it is.

I am not a big fan of knife sets. For one, you get a lot of junk you probably wouldn’t use. I do just fine with a large kitchen knife and a paring knife. Secondly, you tend to get substandard blades, even if you buy mid- to upper-tier manufacturers. The sharps found in sets (you know, the ones that come with a knife block) may bear the same name as the more expensive singletons, but they are not of the same quality.

The downside to buying one knife at a time is that there’s no easy place to store them. I have knives from a few manufacturers, so even if I went back and bought a block from Manufacturer A there is no guarantee that knife from Manufacturer B would fit.

I got around this in Oregon and DC by using a magnetic knife strip. Damn that thing was the tits. Unfortunately my kitchen in Virginia is such that I couldn’t install the strip and have it remain accessible. I put my knives in a drawer, and there they stayed for almost three years.
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