RSS is the new “Push”, for those of you that were reading the tech rags in the late 90’s. Er, but it’s done right this time.
While furiously refreshing favorite sites looking for updates has been gone for a while, I’d never have thought to look for it for the few sites that I really want to be notified of updates. I’m tracking 5 packages right now from UPS and this UPS tracking -> RSS trick couldn’t come at a better time.
Dead Like Me, the only reason I have fancy cable channels, has been canceled.
:sigh:
I use and recommend purchasing as I did Acquisistion for the mac. When Acquisition gets a new song, it adds the song to an “Acquisition” playlist in iTunes, making the new stuff super easy to filter, tag, and check out.
Thanks to this week’s randomness, I’m ear-surfing to a mix of Danny Gatton live, Bonobo, Pink Floyd’s “The Committee” soundtrack, Husker Du, Hexstatic, DJ Krush, They Might Be Giants, Velvet Revolver, and Greyboy.
This is a PSA and everyone is supposed to reply with “oh you should check these guys out” type comments. Backup plan: get “The Committee”, it makes for great spoken word stuff between anything. Quoth the random snippet I was able to retrieve from Internets about the film:
THE COMMITTEE (1968)
Directed by Peter Sykes.
Produced by Max Steuer.
Pink Floyd produced the music to the film. It was originally Syd Barrett who was suppossed to make the score, but his work was not finished.The soundtrack has not been released.The film is short and probably a bit strange. The cast: Jimmy Gardner, Paul Jones, Tom Kempinski, Robert Langdon Lloyd and Pauline Munro.
The clips sound like eery late 60’s SF sound effects backgrounding dialog that is absolutely the bee-knee’s.
Paul-when-listening-to-random-tune-on-his-PC: Ah, this must be from Grant. You can tell it’s a Grant song when there are random bits with people talking and shit over the music.
Oh, and since starting this post I’ve switched to just Simon Green, er, Bonobo. Dig.
I like this guy’s photography. Puts my shit to shame. I did get a “hey don’t forget your camera tomorrow” call from work for the holiday party but wow, good stuff on Croslin’s site.
Discovered by clicking on someone’s username on mf reading the comments on one of the previous posts links.
For those of you not following: John Perry Barlow groggily packed some mary jane in an ibuprofen bottle leaving this years Burning Man festival and was busted at LAX for drug possession by the TSA. Because marijuana is highly explosive or something. Via mefi, an excellent write up of the proceedings.
The surprise witness in question was a former aviation screener who worked for a foreign military during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia….He proceeded to testify that in his extensive military experience with improvised explosive devices and with aviation security screening, he had learned and taught other people how to deal with suspected explosive devices safely.
First follow-up question: If you think a bottle contains an improvised explosive device, is it appropriate to shake it?
No, that’s almost the worst thing you can do.
Second: Is it appropriate to open the bottle?
No, that’s the worst thing you can do.
I know one person that has been called and served at trial for jury duty. Mom.
The case was as follows: Car full of kids pulls out of a the seedy alley in Frederick city and doesn’t have lights on as it does so. It is dark out. The police pulled the car over for driving at night without illumination and for some reason saw the headlights being out as a good reason to search the car. Beer was found in the trunk. The passengers and driver were under 21. Curses!
In court the kids were found not guilty because the jury decided the police didn’t have probable cause to perform the search. It made the city paper, Mom was quoted something-or-other (she was on the “this is bullshit” side of the jury) in the city paper which isn’t archived on the web or I’d linkify, and justice was served.
This whole Barlow thing is the same, only the guy caught used to write lyrics for a band called the Greatful Dead, hang out on The Well, write for a magazine called Wired, and was a cofounder of the EFF, and happens to have a few lawyer friends. Oh, and he was caught by the TSA, not some random police officer.
My apartment used to be operated by two leasing agents and an onsite resident manager. All three were a pleasure the few times we needed their help.
In the past month for various reasons, all three have been replaced. We currently have one leasing manager and she has one assistant. Although the leasing manager lives in the building, she is not a resident manager, which kinda sucks.
Our apartment has two lofts. A spiral staircase leads to one, which we use as a bedroom. The other loft is used for storage - it’s about 100 square feet and accessible with an aluminum ladder.
The previous resident used that space for an office - they had a computer desk and chair set up. We I have too much shit to accommodate that but it makes for a great place to keep bikes, boxes, etc…
The ladder was in our apartment when we moved in. It was in the apartment when we toured when the previous resident was in the unit. We have been in the unit for a few months now and use the ladder frequently, initially stashing and retrieving bikes, lately retrieving tools, computer parts, etc that I need.
Two weeks ago we came home to a note on our counter.
We borrowed your ladder
- Maintenance
OK, we thought.
A day or few went by.
Amanda stopped by the building office (hard to do, they seem to never be open anymore) and talked to the new leasing manager. Apparently the ladder was the buildings’ ladder, not ours, and we could borrow it if we wanted to. Amanda was perplexed.
Yesterday I stopped in to verify this insanity after talking with a few other residents who all said things along the lines of “what, are they going to borrow your dishwasher next?” and met the new leasing manager myself.
Rough Transcript:
introductions, very friendly
“So I just wanted to stop by and ask about our ladder.”
“Your ladder?”
“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in our unit before but but we have a loft that we use for storage, and we’ve had an aluminum ladder going up to it since we moved in. There was a note from maintenance that they’d ‘borrowed it’, I guess from $name-of-the-only-maintenance worker? We never got it back.”
“OK”. She then got on her cell phone, apparently to the maintenance man. “Yes, I have a person here that was under the impression that the ladder that was in their unit was part of their apartment… OK…. right… OK I’ll explain that to him… right… oh he has a package?” She then starts digging through a huge pile of boxes that I’d walked past and not noticed on the way in. “OK… right, thanks.”
“That ladder wasn’t part of the unit, maintenance just had it there while they were checking on the air conditioning, he says”.
“It was there when we moved in. I don’t understand”,
“You can borrow it if you want. He will bring it over this afternoon”.
“Borrow it? We’ve had it for months”
The 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Contestants tried to write the worst opening sentence to a novel they could muster.
Winner for Detective Fiction:
Detective Micky Blarke arrived on the scene at 2:14 am, and gave his cigarette such a severe pull that rookie Paul Simmons swore the insides of the detective’s cheeks touched, but the judge indicated that that amount of detail was not necessary in his testimony, and instructed the jury to disregard that statement.
They are all so good, I don’t know how winners were picked.
Got this from my old roomate Phil:
This Saturday, the 18th, The Fighting Tricycles (billy, steve, phil, richard) are opening for New York Indie Rock Icons, ‘The Wrens’ at the Talking Head. If you haven’t checked these fellas out, they’re something. (Or as Robert Tilton might say, “Aren’t they something?”)
We’ll have a new demo with a few tunes, some live footage, and all of our ATM passwords.
Show’s 12 bucks but if you came specifically for us we’ll be sure to throw you a free CD, and with the ATM password you can easily recoup the losses.
So, happy holidays and hope to see ya there or anywhere else for that matter.
Phil
http://www.middlerivermedia.com/
http://www.garageband.com/fightingtricycles/
GarageBand for MacGarageBand for Mac has everything you need to learn, play, record, mix, and share incredible music, even if you’ve never played a note.Apple(go here for an mp3: http://www.middlerivermedia.com/varicoseveins.htm )
I will be sauced occupied at the office Christmas party and can’t attend.
Jeff Jarvis refutes Michael Powell usenet style.
(I love his copyright notice)
For nostalgia’s sake, grab “[March of Death](http://www.anti-bush.com/DJ Shadow - March of Death.mp3)”
It’s a “listen to it once, bob your head, and go back to whatever you were doing” type of song.
(Didn’t read the website; not planning on it either.)
I just signed up for Shmoocon, billing itself as:
an all-new, annual East coast hacker convention hell-bent on offering an interesting and new atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software & hardware solutions, as well as open discussion of critical information security issues.
I hope I get a t-shirt.
Every university has them and yes this country is better for it but it does get tiring. You corporate sellout babykiller satanist.
Specifically targetting LaRouche’s brainwashed masses.
Classic American cartooning walks into an anime flick and doesn’t get it. Hilarity ensues.
I’ve had my dock organized loosely by color for lack of a better scheme. Beaten.
Don’t complain about the consistancy, it’s a daily.
Via the [infowarrior] list, a reminder that yesterday was the 16th anniversary of the Morris Worm.
Wow. Just, wow.
NYT reporter Ron Suskind speaks with a Bush staffer…
The aide said that guys like me were ‘‘in what we call the reality-based community,’’ which he defined as people who ‘‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’’ he continued. ‘‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’
Follow links, read the articles, then check out the t-shirts.
I might just make my own. This has been a long time coming.
Col. Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains
Nation, Washington, DC
Tue, Sep 28, 2004 07:30 PM
Amazingly I just managed to snatch up three tickets the day before the event. Thanks for the reminder Sean.
UPDATE / GRIPE: The ticketma$ter surcharge for three tickets cost more than an individual ticket.
Freshmeat project idea: Replace Ticketmaster with an open system.
UPDATE TWO: I have an extra ticket! Erk! Brent! Anybody?
I’m a sucker for a good t-shirt.
LaMerkIndustries is a Stephen King / Dark Tower series reference. I’d have expected something with a satellite dish or the star shape of the beams for the logo but I love the back.
Large and ExtraLarge only – I’ll have to ask him to set up a cafepress shop.
Whoa.
I used to have one of these locks but threw it away because I’d lost the key.
Cylindrical key-hole, meet ball-point pen.
We used to use them as spit-ball-shooters in elementary school.
Having recently placed a call to the Microsoft Clearinghouse to get a 25 character license re-activated and been bounced between multiple clearinghouse representatives, tech support, and back to the clearinghouse, I wanted to have this handy for posterity.
Here we are…
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu
There are many phonetic alphabets. The above one is the one Microsoft uses.
It looks like the RAF dropped Beer for B during WWI.
I just bought writequit.com.
Reg req’d.
“He said, ‘We can’t give it to you’,” Mr. Kennedy said, describing an encounter with an airline agent to the rapt audience. " ‘You can’t buy a ticket to go on the airline to Boston.’ I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘We can’t tell you.’ "
“Tried to get on a plane back to Washington,” Mr. Kennedy continued. ‘’ ‘You can’t get on the plane.’ I went up to the desk and said, ‘I’ve been getting on this plane, you know, for 42 years. Why can’t I get on the plane?’ "
The hearing room erupted in laughter.
OOoooOOOooOOOoooooh you waskawy tewwawist flag in the database!!
…Mr. Kennedy emphasized his concern for passengers stuck on no-fly lists. But he tried to make light of his own troubles.
He said, to much laughter, that he did not believe the mistake was a conspiracy engineered by his Republican colleagues. And as Mr. Hutchinson offered up his apologies, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, responded jokingly in kind.
Mr. Hutchinson said, “Senator, we do regret that inconvenience to you.”
Mr. Hatch said, “Quit smiling when you say that.”
Non-geeks: Groups can only e-mail a document back and forth to work on it at certain sizes. When it’s a few million lines it has to be maintained in one place and changes (patches) need to be inspected one at a time because hundres of people are throwing them in rapid-fire. Impressive account of a speech about stats about the developement of the linux kernel after moving from old-and-busted(CVS) to new-hotness(BitKeeper) versioning systems:
Pre-Bitkeeper, this is how they did it: maintainer sends patches to Linus. Wait. Resend if patches dropped. Lather, rinse, repeat.
January 2002 - patch penguin lkml flame fest. Worried about patchs getting dropped. Linus decided to use BitKeeper, 2.5.3 first kernel. “License weenies got their panties in bind, ah feh.” (Greg is like the Vin Diesel of kernel dev: I keep expecting him to shout “I! LOVE! THIS! DEVELOPMENT CYCLE!!!”.)
BitKeeper change things a lot. Bitkeeper maintainers got a lot more work. Linus sucks in all patches, discarded crappy stuff. Non-bk maintainers just sent patches as it goes.
Unexpected consequences: we knew what Linus was doing, so much better feedback. Bk2cvs and bk2svn trees. bkcommits-head mailing list so you could you see what was flying around.
All patches started to go through Andrew Morton; BK stuff goes through Linus.
Result: 2.6.0 = Two years of dev, 27149 different patches, 1.66 patches per hour. At least 916 unique contributors. Top developers handled 6956 patches. Ten patches a day for two years. People should research this data.
2.6.1 538 patches. 2.6.2 = 1472, 2.6.3 = 863 patches, 2.6.4 1385 patches…. keeps going. bY 2.6.7 2306 patches. Something is wrong. This is the stable kernel, but we’re going faster –- one million lines added, 700 thousand lines deleted: a third of the kernel. A lot of data, and this is stable. Feeling uncomfortable yet?
I need a new PC. I haven’t even booted a 2.5+ kernel. I was in 2.4 land ~2.4.2 praying for usb fixes that 2.2 wasn’t up to. A shuttle is in my future.
Everything you were afraid to ask about “Donnie Darko”.
Either you loved it or you hated it, it seems. I had a smoke and a beer, then came back in and watched it again, my first night with the DVD. Now I need to buy the directors cut.
Sign up for a free day pass with Salon and dig in.
I’m not really digging the latest BB songs as much as the past three albums but thanks to a pretty heinous hangover and a complete ignorance of what channel is what here in DC, I found myself watching VH1 this morning and caught the Check it out video.
I am most definitely going to have to get a Star Trek TOS uniform. I googled for a pic to place in this post and found this near the top of the list:
Reviewer: Jeff Conrad - See all my reviews
Just saw a beastie boys video today that reenacts the pon farr battle on a street corner.
The rest of the episode reviews are great too.
Quote fnord.org (I love this stuff):
“You will find that the State is the kind of ORGANIZATION which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.” - John Kenneth Galbraith THE MYTH OF THE APPLE OF DISCORD
It seems that Zeus was preparing a wedding banquet for Peleus and Thetis and did not want to invite Eris because of Her reputation as a trouble maker.*
This made Eris angry, and so She fashioned an apple of pure gold** and inscribed upon it KALLISTI (“To The Prettiest One”) and on the day of the fete She rolled it into the banquet hall and then left to be alone and joyously partake of a hot dog.
Now, three of the invited goddesses,*** Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each immediately claimed it to belong to herself because of the inscription. And they started fighting, and they started throwing punch all over the place and everything.
Finally Zeus calmed things down and declared that an arbitrator must be selected, which was a reasonable suggestion, and all agreed. He sent them to a shepherd of Troy, whose name was Paris because his mother had had a lot of gaul and had married a Frenchman; but each of the sneaky goddesses tried to outwit the others by going early and offering a bribe to Paris.
Athena offered him Heroic War Victories, Hera offered him Great Wealth, and Aphrodite offered him the Most Beautiful Woman on Earth. Being a healthy young Trojan lad, Paris promptly accepted Aphrodite’s bribe and she got the apple and he got screwed.
As she had promised, she maneuvered earthly happenings so that Paris could have Helen (The Helen) then living with her husband Menelaus,King of Sparta. Anyway, everyone knows that the Trojan War followed when Sparta demanded their Queen back and that the Trojan War is said to be The First War among men.
And so we suffer because of the Original Snub. And so a Discordian is to partake of No Hot Dog Buns.
Do you believe that?
This is called THE DOCTRINE OF THE ORIGINAL SNUB
- There is historic disagreement concerning whether this apple was of metalic gold or acapulco.
- Actually there were five goddesses, but the Greeks did not know the Law of Fives.
Earlier in the same doc: “The Classical Greeks were not influenced by the Classical Greeks. DO NOT CIRCULATE! What We Know About ERIS (not much)”
Switching must be tough. I remember kicking and screaming a bit but now switch app’s, os’, etc all the time. I don’t mean to imply that I’m Captain Open Minded.
Formal testing of a switcher to gnome 2.6 reveals how a lot of people I know would react when switching to gnome.
Don’t tell anyone but they probably acted the same way the first 10 times they did the same tasks in the OS to which they are now accustomed.
Morning commute to client near the Capitol building: 15 minutes.
The same commute from my previous residence: 1 hour 15 minutes.
Tmbg is Live on Penn on the 24th.
I’ll be there.
Via k10k: Akiyoshi’s illusions pages.
Headache fun!
Bullshit indeed. Couldn’t agree more.
I have ranted about information warfare by corporations as it affects the individual.
This is much larger scale and much closer to the bone. So very very drastically so.
The worst seems to have been from 2 to 6 this morning. [jamesbrown]Got a cold sweat!![/jamesbrown]. Ibuprofen and work today. Excelllent.
UPDATE: Well that sucked. I took off sick tomorrow, which as a consultant means I get to hold to my prior engagements from home and take phone support calls in bed. Damn phones.
Via bb: _Dr. Lewis B. Turndevelt’s Big Book of Forewords_.
Read it with Tofu. Or do this with htmldoc on a unix machine. Or uh, use cat or echo or type and speed read it on the command line. Mail it to someone else and ask them to read it allowed to you over the phone. Use the text-to-speach engine on your PC to make have it read back to you by a text-to-speach-engine. Put it on a PDA. Use cat, less, mail, and wait in a cron job and have it SMS’d to your mobile phone line by line. Print it.
(can you tell I like plain text?)
Now that the scare is over:
Amanda woke up Tuesday morning around 4 with chest pains, left arm hurting, etc. Around 5 we decided to see try the emergency room. I left around 7:30 assuming she’d be released and home by mid-day.
I got home to find out that she was being transfered to Adventist in Tacoma Park after an overnight for a catheter procedure whereby a video camera looks at her heart from the inside to make sure everything is OK. Blood tests were showing elevated levels of cardio-enzymes; I’m told this indicates that the heart is under stress… or something.
Lots of stress and unknowns later, she emerged from the procedure A-OK and is at my place, bed-ridden for the next 4 or 5 days. Do stop by if you have the time.
Those of you left in the dark – no hard feelings, we didn’t want to scare anyone but in hindsight probably would have spread the word a bit more.
Most impressive.
I would have liked to see more on the Father Callahan given his roll the series. The novel was the story of an addict priest with a faith problem, the movie is a vampire thriller. Both are good.
The cinematic treatment I recall was heavily focused on the boy and the priest – this longer format allows for an equal look at all of the major players. I’m two and a half hours into it right now and it’s not half over. If you have the time, check it out.
UPDATE: Just finnished it. 4 hours of my Sunday and it was ruined in the last 10 minutes. Weak ending, Very weak. – While I’m complaining, can we have a thriller movie that doesn’t end with Paint it Black or Sympathy for the Devil?
Winner of the Industrial Design awards and something we could have used when camping recently:
Why would anyone want a translucent bag?
I’m moving to DC. Assuming the credit check goes through…
I timed a morning commute yesterday from the new digs and made it in 30 minutes – down from the current 70 and my clients are even closer than that.
“Here, let me turn the light on for you!” isn’t helpful. I’m fully aware of the invention and mastered operation of the switches years ago. I’m getting much better guessing where the wallplate is and knew where that one was.
Now I have to thank you for being annoying.
Thanks.
This has been making the rounds and usually I’d not post what is available elsewhere but this is my only chance to emphasize that Cory Doctorow’s talk at Microsoft regarding DRM is a really good read. Check it out.
Seriously.
I’m pretty impressed that Aaron held out on showing this for nearly a year. Hilarity.
Shit.
June 8 is today.
This jogs my memory to relate somewhat stale SK news - he was the recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the U.S. National Book Foundation last fall:
During the ceremony, attended by 900 guests, King spoke warmly of his wife Tabitha. “When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single-spaced manuscript from the wastebasket,” he said.
King said he has no patience “for those who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.”
“What do you think?” King asked. "You get social academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?
Ah to be able to rant so well…
mjr argues security concepts on the firewall-wizards mailing list.
Join me in challenging the preconceptions of an industry that has grown up around “if you can’t do something RIGHT do something STUPID, HARDER!”
That’s what we’re talking about, here, with all the focus on patch management:
- Rather than run a good O/S: run a bad one and MANAGE it BETTER
- Rather than understand your connectivity: leave it OPEN and FIDDLE WITH your endpoints CONSTANTLY
- Rather than run good code: run bad code and UPGRADE IT DAILY
Yes, the vendors (antivirus / security / firewall / software / hardware) seem to have no problem with it eh?
This is the shit.
Seriously.
Whoa.
Executive Summary.
Track 4: Drum solo with a side of catchy pop song.
The two tracks on their home page aren’t bad either.
This message brought to you buy XMU.
Maybe the riffs aren’t as similar as my brain wanted them to be this morning but the bass/synth line from the Weather Report song _River People_ just might be the influence for the music to world 1-2. Just might.
This year’s Muzzle awards should get a harumph out of most…
Among last years bulleted list of items awarding John Ashcroft:
- Allowing $8,000 in tax dollars to be spent on drapes to conceal two semi-nude statues that often appeared behind the attorney general during press conferences in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. Ironically, the two statues represent “The Spirit of Justice” and “The Majesty of Law.”
I didn’t get a [HEDLEY LAMARR: Give the governor harrumph!
REPORTER: Harrumph!
GOVERNOR: You watch your ass.
">harumph]() out of you!!
Start [here](http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=103480&cid=8819645).
I seem to recall being taught Greek and Roman myths in grade school with no mention of the Norse counterparts.
I’ve erased a few sentances concerning why this may be (American puritanical roots, 20th century Christian dominance in our society, and more) but really all I am qualified to say is wtf?
Alternatively, the concept of “I’ve erased foo because I can’t think of how to communicate bar!” is so very tastily electronic isn’t it? If this were a letter that I’d pencil’d to you and was full of erasure marks, would you think me a thoughtful person?
Jokerbone archives go back to 2002.
I have “posts” on a “homepage” going back to July of '99. Does that count? Have I been “blogging since 1999”? Supposing I had, is that a point of pride or shame? For those of you that followed the link, I know, I know, it sucks.
I imported my old hand written php blog into MT. Should I import those five posts or so, plus others I have archived from various sites between that one and jokerbone.com into the MT system?
Congressman Nancy L. Johnson (R-CT), Chairman, Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Ways and Means, today announced that the Subcommittee hearing on the Medicare Drug Discount Card, previously scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 1, 2004, in room 1100 Longworth House Office Building, will now begin at 2:00 p.m.
Just got back from a bi-weekly work meeting. XM on the way home bounced around from a Faces song on Deep Tracks (Rod Stewart, pre-suck), a Pat Methany song on Beyond Jazz (I gave it 2 minutes - no guitar, changed it), Beastie Boys on Ethel XL (whachoowant?), then danced over all of my presets before settling on a c-span recording of todays House Ways and Means Committe.
When the transcript becomes available this space will be updated with the funny part
set -o vi
Problem solved. Add it to your bashrc. Play with your history with /., esc:0 to the beginning of a line, w, b, j, k, x, dd around or jump with /. Leave that pesky ctrl key to things you don’t do very often like exiting the shell.
After driving past their headquarters visible from NY Ave, NW on the way to and from the B/W Parkway with the knowledge that the 3+ hours a day in my car could be better spent, I’ve finally broken down and gotten an XM Radio receiver. This is 6 days after the first time I saw one outside of a store, so I guess I didn’t wait too long.
I’m very impressed. I have no idea where I’m going to mount the unit on my dash in my RSX but I’m not really worries yet.
When I figure that out, there will be pictures.
Erk mentioned that I haven’t ranted about EULA’s in a while.
There’s a great /. thread following a post about a Microsoft document giving ‘partners’ tips for how to sell MS Office to people considering migrating to the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
Office.
Superior.
Right.
(Do your best Bill Murray for the above three words.)
Don’t get me started on e-mail attached MS Office format files. Gawd.
Gross.
If you’ve forgotten how silly the country has become: red_alert.
Update: I checked out zefrank.com a bit. Very, very, very cool.
:00.00 -8
Having enjoyed Eastern Standard Tribe on my powerbook during my flight to New Orleans last month, I’m now looking forward to Doctrow’s newest.
Mike Newdow is suing to get the “under god” bit removed from the official version of the Pledge we all got to recite in school every morning.
It made for an interesting c-span-commute. To hear him debate, go to c-span.org and search for “newdow”. Come back and state your mind.
It is a slight change in the existing design, which is like adding a small fraction to zero and then rounding down. I like it.
The cookie sticks around once you hit it - my browser has been hitting it for the past week or so and I’ve just now noticed it enough times to blog it.
It is always nice when an idle curiosity uncovers the collection of a finely honed mind.
I just wasted 15 minutes learning everything there is to know about shoes.
Do check out his multi-page chronology of the Air Jordan for yet more evidence that the 90’s were ridiculous. Ah memories of being a middle school skater during what I think were the only three years that skating wasn’t cool. Everyone had to have the latest Jordan or Pump
The boss threw a lan party.
Yes, sitting like that with my tongue out improves my rail gun accuracy by 25%. Yes, that is Guinness the boss provided.
Johnathan and I took first in the ctf tourney. I was a one game trick thanks to an extremely short attention span and my powerbook but everyone seemed to have a good time.
Will was impressive for a UT player. David had wicked aim. Ethan was uhm, there too… damned CS players.
Jef Raskin interview:
Most of the other computer science grad students had the opinion that there were those people who got it and those people who just don’t get it. But once I observed them working, I realize it was not the people who were having the problem, it was the fact that the way our computer systems were designed that was giving them all the problems, and the reason why the people got it got it was because they spent a lot of time learning all the intracacies of how they work. And I realized that we should be designing computer systems to make them easier to use and that was more important than what I was being taught in my computer science classes, such as how to make programs run in minimal time or minimal space and how to do those trade-offs. All of that is interesting and valuable. I used that inflational time in designing systems, but it was the interface that was clearly most at fault.
FL: And this was during the '60s right?
JR: Yeah, I graduated in '67.
computer illiterate people: It isn’t your fault.
power users: Applied free time is not ‘getting it’.
everyone else: Yes, this applies outside of computing as well.
I don’t care.
It is three or more years away. Press releases from idontworkforthem@hotmail.com are not news from an anonymous insider, they are press releases.
K. Now I have a dated url to paste.
No, I don’t think I’m an outsider teasing fanboys for being fanboys when I myself am a fanboy (just not of MS Windows).
Ring Colors And Their Significance
Since 1936, when the concentric circles (called “rings” for convenience) opening was introduced on Merrie Melodies, the first color used was blue because of the advent of blue hues in the new 3-color Technicolor process opened up to Disney’s competitors that year. I Wanna Play House was the first Merrie Melodies with rings, while a later film (not known due to Blue Ribbon reissue policy) introduced the zooming WB shield (a device borrowed from WB’s live-action films) used on virtually every WB cartoon hence.
Great /. thread covering Anheuser-Busch’s distribution model. Best comment evar:
Why the very thought of anyone drinking such a low class beverage has CAUSED MY MONOCLE TO POP RIGHT OUT! And really, who drinks beer in this day and age anyway? Everyone should drink only expensive wine and scotch.
Why just the other day my chauffer took a wrong turn off of the freeway and pulled me past this run down little liquor store where this shabby looking man (who by the way was driving a Pontiac! A PONTIAC!!!) who hadn’t shaved for a couple of days was walking out with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. RED LABEL?! I exclaimed, exhaling a puff of cigar smoke and tipping my top hat back in a bemused manner. WHO ARE THESE CRETINS? I practically had my driver phone the police right then and there.
AmberBoch ain’t too shabby.
Ok, more geek shit, from ~2 seconds of a real Exim log this time:
x:x:13 SMTP connection from [221.232.74.44]:2373 (TCP/IP connection count = 1)
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "GET http://hpcgi1.nifty.com/trino/ProxyJ/prxjdg.cgi HTTP/1.0" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "Accept: */*" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "Accept-Language: en-us" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "Host: hpcgi1.nifty.com" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP syntax error in "Connection: Keep-Alive" H=[221.232.74.44]:2373 unrecognized command
x:x:13 SMTP call from [221.232.74.44]:2373 dropped: too many unrecognized commands
x:x:14 SMTP connection from [221.232.74.44]:2394 (TCP/IP connection count = 1)
x:x:14 SMTP connection from [221.232.74.44]:2394 lost (error: Connection reset by peer)
x:x:15 SMTP connection from [221.232.74.44]:2409 (TCP/IP connection count = 1)
x:x:15 SMTP connection from [221.232.74.44]:2409 lost (error: Connection reset by peer)
GET is an http command. SMTP is how mail is sent, it is not how web sites are served. People rarely go to the post office and scream GIVE ME A BIG MAC AND A LARGE SHAKE into their p.o. boxes. Well, most people.
It looks to me like the spammer is looking for open proxies on any port that will accept a connection and logging their existance at http://hpcgi1.nifty.com/trino/ProxyJ/prxjdg.cgi?en
Isn’t it annoying how computers make repetitive otherwise unsurmountable tasks mindlessly trivial? Ah, irony.
On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 10:05:52AM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote: Sorry, I should have added a smiley to my post. Irony doesn’t come over well in email.
MTA feature wishlist?
fanf2@domainremoved.ac.uk:~
: 0 ; telnet colon.colondot.net 25
Trying 193.201.200.70...
Connected to colon.colondot.net.
Escape character is ^].
220 colon.colondot.net sauce-smtpd ESMTP ready [Sarcastic]
QUIT
221 colon.colondot.net good riddance
Connection closed by foreign host.
I was visited by Wowbagger the infintely prolonged this mornig on New York Ave near New Jersey. I was in the far right lane but we weren’t moving because a truck was blocking the entire lane and not moving. I waited for a gap and poped into the middle lane without cutting anyone off. I always give myself room to go back in instances like this because OfficeSpace style, the truck immediately got out of the way, the middle lane stopped and the lane I’d just bailed out of became the only lane moving. I put my signal on and waited out the stop-and-go for a gap.
The person behind me got cut off by a raving bearded lunatic in a Subaru Outback honking his horn over and over from the far left lane. This lunatic was now behind me beep beep beep. I waited for a gap to get in the right lane again and when I saw one coming, started to lunge – only this time lunatic behind me slammed into the gap at mach 2, nearly sideswiped my car, continued honking his horn and with the front end nosediving, almost hit the car in front of him.
Middle fingers were exchanged.
Idiot then noticed that he had 20’ to get into the far left lane (from the far right) or he’d miss getting on 395S and be stuck on Massachusets. I saw him cut off three more people before making it into the long line before I was too far away to see the asshat in my mirrors.
I love commuting.
Went and saw the band Aaron managed to sneak himself into over the weekend.
The venue was a bar in my home town which I didn’t even know still existed (the bar, not the town). I used to ride my bike there to try to sneak in and pump quarters into the cigarette vending machine - the bartender was generally quick enough to chase us out.
The neighborhood “big kid” from elementary school who I haven’t really seen in 10 years was working the door. I’m 5" taller than him. He let us in without paying full cover as we lacked the cash so all is forgiven even though he ripped our tree fort down.
I’ve always thought that bands that cover any Hendrix song from “The Ultimate Experience” should have their guitars taken away but I’m cool if it’s played with the band’s style, which it was. Cheers to that.
Yes, they do run to the dance floor if you cover a Skynard song in some places. Seriously.
Tip your waitresses and bartenders please.
Lucas is putting out the Special Edition Star Wars flicks on DVD. Finally – when it can make him the maximum amount of money.
Keeping the your-mom joke lively – my mom and I went to see Episode IV when it was first re-released as a Special Edition on the big screen. Neither of us were impressed.
Greedo shot first. The only character we can all dig gets castrated him before they even left Tatooine.
Terrible.
When I first got started in 3d-rendering tech, all shapes were created by a process called “extrusion”. Improvements in technology eventually brought “primitives”, giving artists the ability to insert things like spheres, cones, blocks, stars and teapots. Current tech allows primitives to be sculpted like stone and rapid application of smart textures that remove the need for detailed mesh modeling.
But this was before we had that fancy shit. A block is the easiest extrusion – start with a rectangle of length and width and give it height (generally along the z access – the line pointing at you), leaveing the shape alone throughout the raising process. Voila. A sphere is a bit trickier. Take a circle of zero diameter, give it height and increase diameter in a non-linear but simple curve until the midpoint and then reverse the rate of change as you decrease the radius to zero again.
Of course you can imagine how difficult it is to generate truly complex shapes via extrusion. I made the linked guitar body using graph paper and an estimated curvature on a rough six different slices spread throughout the extrusion. Software took care of the interpolation making the transitions smooth. Were I to lathe the actual guitar (like printing a drafting in 3d), I’m sure the low resolution of my work would have been highlighted.
PovRAY doesn’t have extrusion. PovRay, as I know it, doest not have any drawing whatsoever – it is pure math. Geeky. Neato.
The previous post’s fancy generated fractal shape renders quickly at low-low resolution but takes a few hours at standard size. I tweaked the colors used and that worked. I tweaked the input numbers and the shape disappeared.
I’m curious if any of you can get some interesting shapes out of the template. Povray is free software – google for your flavor (nix/mac/win32) and give it a shot!
Math-made-shapes. Now in 3d!
Found via computerlove.
As the clock approaches midnight I am surfing the usual suspects and wrap up with hitting my own.
A thought rises.
My mom checks jokerbone.
Not every day, I don’t think. Just every so often she’ll reply to a completely unrelated post with a “call me”.
I haven’t, recently, to shame.
She may respond to this post, and be on topic.
Cute.
If you are the sort of person into the sort of things that I get into but not always around to see what sort of things I am getting into, you may want to go get a free book. I’m getting into it.
As with mp3’s, after a few looks you may be so inclined to buy the higher-quality dead tree version.
The cover art isn’t too shabby but I wouldn’t mind seeing a copy that doesn’t have the > and : around Doctrow’s name.
We get it already.
Computers are hip.
I’ve been guilty of the same crimes to much larger extents – maybe I’m just being picky.
I am the anti-spam guy. I know where it comes from, what it looks like, who is sending it, and why. I sell this knowledge to clients by setting up front-end servers running the shizzle open source OS which in turn run the bomb mail transport agents and the absolute efffing wickety whack spam filtering software.
I charge for the installation voodoo. The software exists due to the work of others but the wetware exists because for every 100 people, a few will be complete assholes.
I am refering to the senders of spam. Assholes. Every one of them.
People with “solutions” to the spam problem are like integrations of assholes. They are asshole-primes. Read more here for a quick test you can use to demonstrate that they have indeed failed to succeed where religion, drugs, etc have failed to succeed over and over solving the whole “why is there evil” problem.
Paul’s ancient Rio started having battery problems. He took it to the store, mentioned his three year extended coverage deally and they hooked him up with something of equal or lesser as a replacement.
A 20GB ipod.
So many people to be jealous of, so little time.
I’m waiting for the color-screen-havin-120GB-802.11i monster 😃.
Very interesting progression of drawings over the course of an entire trip.
If you are running osX, you need sofa. On my powerbook, I need all the real estate I can get. I’ve temporarily sworn off virtual desktops / pagers in memory of running enlightenment for two years and have actually gotten used to Expose; if only I had enough RAM to make it responsive.
Combined with Another Launcher, osX can kick some ass.
Twice in the past month, she’s corrected me when giving my phone number to people standing behind cash registers – once at blockbuster and once at a shoe store. It has been long enough now that I can blog about it without sounding like I’m whining about being corrected – honest mistake.
I hadn’t forgotten my own phone number. I always make one up. I generally use old phone numbers mixed up. I do the same with my address unless I’m getting something delivered or credit card validation has failed once and I’m specifically told that the bogus addrses is the cause. I make up e-mail addresses@jokerbone.com because I can and when I know it’s junk anyway give out addresses@electricfork.com.
I like to think that I’ve polluted the information stream about myself enough that it is becoming white noise.
Motivation for this post: Pivotal actions that could swing my vote.
Packetstorm happened to link Aljazeera and I couldn’t help but follow it.
It’s always nice to see a local make good. In this case, DC’s own (well at least I remember it) Couric.
I was just surfing Modern Drunkard Magazine as linked from Kottke and couldn’t help but note that my own birthday (12/28) is listed as the unluckiest day of the year.
Further research tells me…
This day commomerates Herold’s slaugher of infant boys under the age of two.
Welcome to 2004.
Coincidentally I’m watching Groundhog Day on Encore this 1/1, among the Lebowski’s and the Office Space’s to which Ben and I pre-call most of the good lines. Bing!
“does he have to use the word poopy?”
John’s party was nice. 2003 was nice. I’d love to do the beginning over again so that I could have a cigarette. Lots of cigarettes. So many. mmmmmmmm.
Anyway, back to the movie…
I always say a prayer and drink to world peace…