Reading (For Dummies)

I'm in stitches

A little strip to brighten the linux nerds' Monday. Laugh. It's good for you.

More on the FTC do-not-call list

A helpful slashdot gnome points out this story on CNN. Apparently the FCC has decided to go along with the FTC, and now airlines, banks, and long distance carriers will be force to obey the do-not-call registry, too. So I guess I spoke a little too soon.

The do-not-call registry still needs some work, but it suddenly looks a lot better.

Ohwell. I won't be having a phone pretty soon anyway, so I guess it's kind of moot :-).

Don't call me, I'll call you

What happened to the Do Not Call Registry? It sucks. Take a look at what's not covered: Long Distance companies, Insurance, banks, airlines, political fundraisers, charities, surveys, companies that you purchased an item from (subsidiary companies too?). Okay so companies in these businesses can no longer outsource their telemarketing to someone else, but I'm sure they'll find a way around that. This sucks, I was hoping that I'd never have to be woken up or interrupted from dinner again.

Meta-Tracking

Inspired by a recent Lisa Rein post, I'm trying to figure out how easy it is for a so-called C-List blogger to have a story picked up by a million people. This could have interesting ramifications. Suppose the FCC ruling doesn't go away, and two or three big networks end up owning all the airwaves in the US. We should be prepared to open up the interweb to maximize vocalization. This includes giving us wee little blogs the ability to have a story read by a massive number of people, without pressure or necessarily direct communication with a larger blog. Does this work in actuality inside the current structure/social layout of the blog world? Would it work at all, or would it open up the system to crackpots and bad data?

An experiment: Create a meta-news item whose sole purpose is to be tracked and carried from C-List bloggers to C-List bloggers. See if passive communication between C-listers can get the meta-news item read by 1 million people within a short amount of time (say, 48 hours). Even better, can the meta-news item be picked up by an A-lister with massive readership using only passive communication (that is, someone reading the item, then linking or quoting it in their blog only, not actively sending the information to anyone)?

Sound dumb? How long does it take an A-list blog to pick up a news item, especially when just one lone person is trying to communicate it? There may come a time when news needs to be disseminated more rapidly than they allow...

Hooray for gays

The Supreme Court made it's first sane ruling in a string of very stupid ones, saying that Gay Sex is A-OK.

More QT Debians

Yeah so those debians have some problems. I can't figure out why the "provides" descriptor doesn't work right. If I say my packages provide libqt3-whatever, then use apt to install a program that needs that library, it won't install. I really thought that's what the Provides: directive did, but I guess not.

Anyway I'll figure out the problem and have more packages (including gideon snapshots) in a day or two.

QT 3.2.0b1 debians

I got my packages built at work, QT 3.2.0b1 for debian. You can snag the .deb's here. I made them with the suffix "-reidtest", and they're built to replace and provide the old libqt3*. They should work for any of your old programs compiled against the old libqt3. As with anything of mine, though, I make no guarantees that this will work for you. It may have broken dependencies that I don't know about. Feel free to let me know. And of course, props to where props are due, I couldn't have done this without stealing^Wborrowing Ivan Moore II's debian build data. And of course I'm probably not following etiquette about package distribution or something, don't yell at me. I just have a bunch of co-workers who have been wanting the packages, and they're not officially available yet.

Naturally 3.2.0b2 came out yesterday, but I have debian packaging madness all sorted out finally, so I'll get that built pretty soon.

Feeling Fine

Ever have one of those days where you wake up just feeling...great? And then you proceed to have a really excellent day, and it isn't any specific thing that makes it good? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Then there was frisbee. I was hurtin' for certain yet again. My feet just ache when I play. Going to try some kleets out soon and see if that doesn't help.

I also figured out what kind of motorcycle I want to get. Now I just have to save up and find a cheap'ish one.

Then there was the sunset

When the sun went down, I decided to hit my cafe for a little jazz action.

All that jazz...

It wasn't quite as good as last week, though I guess the people might have been jazzed out from the big festival over the weekend. There is supposed to be another open mic this Friday, but I might not be in town. Ohwell. :\

The Hi-Tech Gift Economy

Jason sends me a very interesting little socio-poli-economic piece on why the 'net doesn't like copyright. It's an interesting read, although the writer gets a few major points wrong. Open source software is copyrighted, it's just licensed in a way that gives everyone permission to copy it. If it did not have a copyright, then violations against the license would be completely unenforcable. While technically I guess saying that GPL'd software isn't copyrighted is closer to the truth, the software generally does have an 'owner' in the strictest sense.

And again, this entire piece is relying on the idea that ideas are what make an economy tick. I guess these days that is true (in my opinion, anyway, but I'm no economist). Maybe I'm just out of the loop since I receive lots of ideas for free, being a net idjut.

In any case, knowledge wants to be free...

"...the Net remains predominantly a gift economy even though the system has expanded far beyond the university. From scientists through hobbyists to the general public, the charmed circle of users was slowly built up through the adhesion of many localised networks to an agreed set of protocols. Crucially, the common standards of the Net include social conventions as well as technical rules. The giving and receiving of information without payment is almost never questioned. Although the circulation of gifts doesn't necessarily create emotional obligations between individuals, people are still willing to donate their information to everyone else on the Net. Even selfish reasons encourage people to become anarcho-communists within cyberspace. By adding their own presence, every user contributes to the collective knowledge accessible to those already on-line. In return, each individual has potential access to all the information made available by others within the Net. Everyone takes far more out of the Net than they can ever give away as an individual."

Howard Dean for Prez

Howard Dean has officially decided to run for the presidency. While his name reminds me of a certain sausage patty, we'll let it slide. This should be an interesting campaign since it's lighting the blogosphere up like a bit of a fire. And I love an internet-centric grassroots campaign as much as the next blogger. Let's just hope he makes it through the primaries...

CNY Dirt

I went biking with new friend Chris (Ultimate player, Mountain Biker, and Rock Climber. I get the feeling we'll be hanging out now and then). We went riding with CNY Dirt, a pretty large group of off-road enthusiasts in the area.

Did I mention it was big?

We had no fewer than twenty riders on today's course through Split Rock. It was my first time there, and I certainly took the "worst bike" prize (being only one of two hardtail riders).

Unknown rides down a rocky hill while Unknown looks on

It wasn't a terribly long ride, but it took a while. Managing such a large group through blind turns and forking trails takes quite a bit of effort. When I go to Split Rock again, I'd probably opt to go with a smaller group, if only so I can ride father in less time. Biking for me is all about burning calories and getting my heart thumping, not so much the social aspects. And then there's enjoying a nice cold one afterwards, to undo all the goodness I just did for my heart.

I managed to snap two movies of Jeremy (one of the riders, and a worker at the Bike Loft) doing a downhill piece of the trail.

Jeremy's first run (2.6MB Quicktime)
Jeremy's second run (2MB Quicktime)

It should be obvious why I'm not a cameraman.

Nerd Alert

I read JLA: Tower of Babel the other day and have a bone to pick. J'onn J'onnz gets covered with Magnesium nanites, which supposedly burst into flame on contact with air. He has to get himself into an aqua-suit to keep the fire out. There are two problems. One, magnesium doesn't spontaneously combust on contact with air. It takes a little something-something to get it going. Second, diving underwater doesn't help the situation (much like it didn't for a certain British WW2 vessel with a hull of magnesium compound. When the boat was torpedoed it went down, and continued burning underwater. I'll dig up the name...). Magnesium burns just fine underwater, getting all the oxygen it needs off of this thing called H20. Also note that underwater diving flares are made of the stuff. Magnesium wants electrons that badly...

Not only that, but magnesium burns in excess of 5000 degrees. Seeing as how Martians are incredibly susceptible to even the littlest gasoline flame, Mr. J'onnz would have died instantly from his injury.

A moment of thanks

I've decided to send in my payment, at long last. Movable Type has impressed me, not only as a nice hunk of tossed-together code, but also because of the dude behind it. I've emailed Ben Trott a few times. One time I even found a bug that existed and had previously been patched. Every time I emailed him, I got a response within a day. Pretty cool for a guy that must be totally swamped with email, and working on coding something...

And hopefully my donation will finally convince him to give out PGP signatures with his bundles of joy...

Did you hear the one about the Polish Scholarship?

Went to my usual coffee (or tea?) haunt, and I ran into a little festival, just winding down.

That's polishscholarship.com, folks

Dumb ideas

No offense meant to the polish, but it's generally not a good idea to hold your fundraiser in the Clinton Square fountain (which was drained for the festivities) in one of the rainier cities in the country. The sitting/standing/walking area for the concert and foodstands was in a gigantic puddle, since the fountain bottom is the lowest point in the area. Even with its little drains, my feet were getting quite wet standing around.

Aside from that, the coffehouse was a bit busier than usual. Old men were teaching young high-schoolers about poetry in a move that sparked pedophilia scares among their parents. In reality, I remember hanging out with some of the same old men (one I remember especially well was this old dude Walter, a vietnam vet in Mt. Holly who was weening himself off heroine and onto methadone. A bunch of friends and myself used to hang out and listen to the dude. The coffeehouse (Down to Earth, it's hard to say if they're still in business or not...maybe I'll swing by there on my next trip to Jersey) was pretty hippy'ish and receptive to that sort of thing. More so than here, maybe. Ohwell, take the good with the bad.

Bad Day for Free Speech

Looks like Jerry Falwell finally got his way, at the expense of parody. Yikes!

Mac OS X annoying behavior solved (sort of)

I mostly figured out why Mac OS has been making me annoyed. It happened again tonight. My computer is out of swap. The real root of the problem must be a massive memory leak in Apple Mail, Safari, or Apple's X11 server, because over 1.5 gigs of disk was being used as swap. When OS X runs out of swap, it keeps trying to allocate more on the boot disk. If that happens to be where your accounts are stored, you are in trouble. Preferences files get ruined for open programs if you quit them and there isn't enough disk space left to write the prefs out. So once again, I lose bookmarks, preferences, mailboxes, etc. Since this is the fourth or fifth time this has happened in recent history, I'm becoming a pro at recovering. How I wish for a way to select which disk to use for swap...I have my laptop's disk partitioned into core os and media, with media having lots of free space and core os not so much. Yargh.

Weekend updates

Hit up Rochester for the weekend. Rain then sunshine meant a rather nice little (annual?) picnic. Yes, I do sometimes wonder if history repeats itself until the first new episode of the next Fall season...

Mike Livingston mans the grill

That night we hit up a show nice bar with some of my favorite belgian ale, and for only $3.50 a pint, no less (versus $6 in syracuse). The music, unfortunately, wasn't up to my speed.

Sunday came the day of walk and talk, in a graveyard no less.

Dun dun dunnnnnnn......

I remembered over the weekend that I'm really no good at this relationship stuff, but I'll figure it all out. It's all worth it in the end.

Then, of course, there was Frisbee on Tuesday.

Some guy whose name I forget grabs the disc

Tuesday night (er, tonight) was a wonderful night of musical and self-discovery, the kind I sort of miss. I went down to my new coffeeshop for what was listed in the New Times as "Open Mic Night." I got there to find a regular jazz jam session. I've really taken a love of jazz lately, and tonight reminded me why. It's not the destination, it's the journey, right? I mean, we're all going to end up in the same place (a pile of dirt or ash or whatever), we all get so long to play. Jazz is like life, you go and ride the dissonant chords out and if you're good, they look great while you're doing it.

And of course this only puts firm that this is the coffeeshop for me to live in. No smoking, they serve coffee and beer and wine, jazz on Tuesdays (and Sundays) with no cover charge, friendly owners that don't care if you just come in and listen to the music or read a book without buying anything. The place reminds me of a better Down to Earth café (Mt. Holly, NJ).

The Onion

Syracuse peeps, listen up. The Onion is in town in dead tree form. So head on down and grab yourself a copy.

In the Marshall Square Mall, in the lower right, "Free!"

Laying out, big time

We played in the rain today. Syracuse Ultimate meets every Tuesday and Thursday, rain or shine. Exceptions are made for hail and tornados. I'm officially really f***ing sore after laying out poorly in the mud. After this, I'll actually be looking forward to "just" riding 60 miles on my bicycle per day.

Wet, sweaty, muddy, and sore

I got a couple of little presents in the mail when I got home.

The official Wegman's card of Anize D Org

I do, of course, request to keep one of the keytags Doug :).

The scene

I have had an active few days, which is a welcome change to sitting around compiling code. My newfound financial savior/process algebra advisor, Dr. Older (Doug's good friend), recruited me into playing with the Syracuse Ultimate pick-up team (with a threat to drop my scholarship, so "Sir, how often do you want me to lay it out, sir?"). I headed down to the field on Tuesday evening...

Err...

Only problem was that the field was being eaten alive. Obviously they've decided to turn Hookway field into a wheat field or something. I guess now that Shaw is retiring, he needs some additional grain alchohol to keep himself busy.

Frisbee was an amazing experience. My legs still hurt as of Wednesday evening. I couldn't even ride today. I guess 3 hours of running does that to you.

I also got paid, for the first time in almost a year. It was a mediocre paycheck, but was actually two paychecks (so pay now will definitely classify as "small"). I already have the money set aside, with rent, utilities, and an accidental new book purchase (my wishlist has been updated to reflect new purchases).

While out, I figured I would stop and take a picture of one of the most ironic trinkets I have seen for sale of late.

Simplify. Riiiiiiight.

Jer-ry, Jer-ry, Jer-ry!

I was unsure if I should put this story under, "Politics," or "The coming Apocolypse." I settled on the former.

A while I mentioned that Jerry Spring might be running for senate. He appears to be putting more consideration into that effort.

I suppose it's good and bad. Good because more choice is always good. Bad because it's Jerry Springer. I don't think Jerry Springer is a bad guy, not by a long shot. He's done a few seedy things in the past, and has run a fake reality teevee show. These things are forgiveable (more forgiveable then, say, starting a war under false pretenses). On the downside, he has no plan. Nobody ever does, but it's a shame. "Power to the people," is his general message, but what about a plan?

I suppose I shouldn't worry about this so much, since I'm not from Ohio, but hell Ohio helps make national law too.

An Intorvert's Weekend

My mum and Jack came into town for a visit, and to go to a wedding. Unfortunately it rained most of the time Thursday/Friday, so not much getting outside. That, and I'm avoiding buying anything but food, so it amounted to a very lazy couple of days.

I watched Donnie Darko on Saturday, after a bit of a bike ride. It's very bizarre. I might describe it as American Beauty meets Owl Creek Bridge. I could provide further analysis but it is one of those sorts of movies that questions...well, I'll stop myself from rambling.

I went out to my new coffeehouse on Saturday night. I sat around and finished one of my books, sipping chai and listening to a large group talk about plans to visit Italy. They wanted Euro coins. They wanted to know what to do with their luggage once they got there. I suppose I could have told them all about these things, but I was happier with listening. Yes, it's been an introverted weekend. On the plus side, the Coffee Pavillion is a pretty smoke-free less crowded place, and the people there seem to be happy having some weird-looking bookworm living in the corner. So I'll probably make a usual thing out of it.

Sunday was bike riding, bike riding, bike riding. I made it down to Fabius and back by way of Apulia Road and route 91 (round trip somewhere around 50 miles). Not bad for 3 hours on a mountain bike. It made my heart feel good, and released some endorphines which act in opposition to whatever hormones your body releases when you wander back to the, "Am I alive?" question.

Anyway enough existential crises for one night. I'm going to bed.

Mac OS X sucks encore presentation

More weird behavior. My computer now just duplicated every piece of mail that I received before March 28th, 2003 in my inbox. I am wretchedly confused and annoyed.

Mac OS X sucks?

Yeah something really nasty just happened to my computer. Apple Mail started barfing on an incoming comment submission, then it said I had no messages in any of my mailboxes. Then it unexpectedly quit. I tried restarting it but it wouldn't start. I tried rebooting, and a ton of my system preferences disappeared. All my Mozilla/Explorer/Safari bookmarks, the fact that I turned off all the annoying window closing/opening animations. It's like someone deleted parts of ~/Library. What gives? I wonder if Indierocklibrarian sent me a specially formatted comment that took advantage of a buffer overflow present in Mail? Kinda doubtful since MT doesn't show anything odd. =).

The weirdest ass thing about this whole experience? I imported my "old" os x mailboxes. It kept a few messages from my sent-messages and inbox prior to 2003 (seemingly at random). It kept all the mail in my other mailboxes, though. So naturally when I went to check my mail (I leave all my mail on the server), it downloaded 4000 messages, mostly duplicates of everything that was sorted.

Oddly, mail kept my mail filter rules. A few other apps have kept some of their prefs as well (X11 kept the applications menu, but forgot about my mouse preferences).

In conclusion, it seems that I randomly lost random pieces of random software's preferences. I'm not sure whether to be PO'd or not, so I think I will be.

Web news

Geneva Overholser (University of Missouri) and Alex Jones (Harvard University) were on CNN tonight talking about the Jason Blair scandal. For those that haven't heard, the two chief honcho editor dudes at the Times resigned.

The weird thing is that both of them went into a big spiel about how the 'Net had a big influence on these guys walking away. Like all these blogs and news site and stuff are holding people accountable and questioning the credibility of the news...

More on my Student Loans

@#$%^&*(!

Today I got on the horn with ACS again. Then I called the Dept. of Ed. It turns out that my loan is and has been eligible for student deferment this whole time. ACS claims to have typed in the name of my school wrong. Is it just me, or does the fact that I called them about 8 separate times about my loan not deferring raise any flags? It's funny that I had to be the one to find the Federal School Code (FFEL/CBEE code) for the University of Dresden (anybody trying to find it? It's G30865). That should be their job.

Anyway I'm going to get a credit report and find out what damage they caused. And I'll be making a call to the family attorney to join happy fun suing America (because I'd be in Germany hiking with Ferri right now if they didn't do this). Can I sue them for having to relocate (plane tickets, mailing boxes, cancelling rent early)? Can I require them to send me a credit report free to verify that there is no damage? Anybody ever experience anything like this?

And does anybody have a *good* student loan company? I'd like to transfer my balance to someone who gives a shit what I have to say, especially after they make a big boo-boo that makes me move 5,000 miles.

Link of the Day

Stephen sends me undeniable proof that the Iraqis have WMDs.

Funny Thought on Filesharing

Do people who think napster, bittorrent, etc are wrong also think that gun control is a good thing? After all, bittorrent doesn't pirate movies, movie pirates do.

Smokin'

Doug gets me thinking again. Start here continue here.

It's hard to say whether this whole smoking ban is good or bad. I like it. Doug has a point though.

But still, if the argument is to allow market forces to regulate these environmental laws, why don't we just repeal all environmental law (since I want to be so black and white) and let market forces decide what is environmentally safe.

Tired of having a polluted Hudson? Stop buying steel from Carnegie & Co. Tired of having a three-inch layer of mercury sludge dumped in Lake Onondaga every year? Stop buying from Crucible. In reality we've needed laws to force the market into a health and environmentally conscious state. Without these laws, changes happen too slowly and damage is done.

The powers that be are saying there will be 1 billion smoking-related deaths in the next hundred years. Compare that to 49 million people dying in WW2. Drastic realizations about the environmental impact of some chemicals requires drastic laws to restrict their effect.

Bars and restaurants operate a lot differently than a factory, for sure. Bar and restaurant pollution is far more localised. However, social pressures keep even us non-smokers going to smokey bars and restaurants.

Again I'm totally biased and arguing like a shithead. Ohwell.

Annie's Tattoo

Annie got a little tattoo of a little goblin grinning mischeviously.

The little guy

We'll leave the location to your imagination.