Voder-Vocoder

I got my birthday wish! It’s 14°F out!

I find myself praying for temperatures as warm as 15 ° F.

The Diary of Grand Moff Tarkin.

From The History of the DeCSS Haiku:

Finally, I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it can’t fight against its own suppression, and it gives less direct evidence of being in a human voice, leading some people to accept its stigmatization as “merely mechanical” or “merely functional”.

—Seth Schoen (link)

He’s too gullible:

I felt confident that Bush would work with the international community. I took the President at his word. We were told that any course would lead through the United Nations, and that war would be an absolute last resort. Many people I am close with, both Democrats and Republicans, who are also close to Bush told me unequivocally that no decisions had been made about the course of action. Bush hadn’t yet been hijacked by Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and that whole crew. Did I think Bush was going to charge unilaterally into war? No. Did I think he would make such an incredible mess of the situation? No. Am I angry about it? You’re God damned right I am. I chose to believe the President of the United States. That was a terrible mistake.

—John Kerry (source)

He believed the president. Idiot.

Sometimes they outdo themselves. On tonights Simpsons, the guest stars are Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Tom Clancy, and Thomas Pynchon.
(link)

The first computer that was mine and not shared with my family was dave, a gateway P2-233 that my grandmother bought me in 1997. Last week I permanently retired it from its duties as a web server. Last night I salvaged the last bit of useful hardware off of him: a pair of thumbscrews.

The name of the DNC’s blog is Kicking Ass. Ha!

Last night Mark and I ranted at each other for several hours. We want to come to the following conclusions:

1. Thing are bad, but things have never ever really been good.
2. This country is run by them, and they won’t do the right thing, no matter how many people rally against them. There is nothing we can do, not while the masses are . . . well, how they are.
3. So what if thousands of Iraqis died in the war? So what if hundred of Americans died and are dieing? There ain’t much we could do about it anyway. This is still nothing compared to the second world war. In April 1862, 23000 people died over a two day period at Shiloh. None of the current troubles comes close to that, by an order of magnatude.
4. So what if our economy is screwed? It is screwed by the facts. Americans consume a large percentage of the resources of the planet. We can’t keep that up, forever. Eventually, after enough high-paying jobs are exported to the rest of the world, we will reach a new equilibrium, where Americans are all just poorer. It’ll be okay. We can’t keep the rest of the planet down forever. Look, the dollar has already lost 29% of its value in the past two years. Only $0.71 left to go.

Ah, diminished expectations. |
It sucks. |
The Strange Tale of Two Moons

I’ve been using Fedora Linux on six computers I’m responsible for. I like it a lot. Here’s why:

1. The project is becoming more open. All of the how-to-hack-the-system info that RedHat never published is being provided bu the community now.
2. More and more third-party rpms are being made availible. Quality is improving.

If you have a FC1 system, you really should go to:

• fedora.redhat.com.
• The Unofficial Fedora FAQ: info on setting up yum repositorys (hint: use the mirror.kernel.org mirror), info on installing java jdk or sdk correctly. Maintained by Max Kanat-Alexander.
• FedoraNews: news from the fedora-list mailing list, beginner hints, building RPM packages for your system. Maintained by Thomas Chung.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (ch. 36)

I am fast aproaching my twenty-sixth birthday. I may even die someday. Scary thought. I could become a badass hero-type. I just lack proper motivation.

Here is a table of names I’ve given computers I’ve been responsible for: