Nokia 3588i confirmed to work with Linux

Just added the Nokia 3588i to the database of Sprint Phones known to work with Linux for data access. The info comes from a post over at PeerFear

1999 Ford Escort SE Engine Misfires between 40 and 60 MPH

I'm starting this thread tonight that I'll be updating after I go to the mechanic this week. My 1999 Ford Escort SE started stuttering and riding hard last night on the way up to see my fiance. I hit some extremely heavy rain and very light flooding on a major interstate on the way, as I was coming through one of the cities halfway between us. That's when it started.

When I would accelerate from around 40 MPH to 60 MPH, the car would start to ride hard, almost stuttering or shuttering. Like a quick series of hesitations, the car would feel like it was jerking a bit. It would clear up around 65 MPH or so, but I did experience it between 70 - 80 MPH for a few minutes.

I'm at about 82K miles on the thing, after being bought around 40K. Never had any serious problem with my fuel injectors sticking, and I just had the engine decoked at around 70K. Other than some problems with an improperly installed fuel filter, an IAC valve that wanted to go bad a lot, and one leak in my EVAP system, the car didn't give me much trouble.

I stopped during the rain, after feeling it stutter a few times, filled up the tank, and put in an engine treatment that would remove water, an STP brand I believe. Didn't do any good. It still stuttered in that MPH range on the rest of the way up, but the rain slacked off, so I could easily keep it above 70 MPH for the rest of the trip, letting it ride smooth.

On the way back down, it kept stuttering in the same MPH range. Then it got bad and the Check Engine Light started flashing, indicating the engine was misfiring.

A friend of mine theorized that perhaps the Escort took up some of the water and maybe it got in the distributor. I did a quick bit of research about that, consulting the Haynes manual for Ford Escorts & and Mercury Tracers, 1991 - 2000. However, The engine, a 2.0L SPI (Slit Port Injection?) engine that 1999 Ford Escort SEs have, doesn't have an distributor, like many newer engines. However, the theory may still be helpful—I may have water in my ignition system.

Of course, it could be many other things causing me to misfire. As long as I drive it smooth it seems okay.

I'm going to see a local mechanic tomorrow and I'll probably update this entry with any details.

Update: Mon Oct 25 20:55:56 CDT 2004

The problem was caused by faulty spark plug wires. A tune-up seemed to do the job and the car seems to be riding a lot smoother. Cost: $150.

Current total: $1665

Sanyo RL-4920 phone tested with Linux: works great

I just added up a compatibility report to the list of Sprint Phones known to work with Linux for data access, specifically for the Sanyo RL-4920. I tested it personally with the data cable I use with my 4900 and it worked great.

Just got engaged

This weekend I asked my girlfriend of almost 2 years (and friend of around 8 years) to marry me, and she accepted. For collateral, I offered her a expensive lump of crystalline carbon on a white gold band, a questionable tradition at best. But you have to do what you have to do to get the girl you want to marry you.

Mozilla Pagerank Calculator

Do you run Mozilla or Firefox? Do you want to know what Google thinks about the pages you visit (including perhaps your own)? Then check out Pagerank extention for Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Finally, a cross-platform browser extention to view standings in the greatest popularity contenst of the digital era. I'm using it here under Gentoo Linux with Mozilla 1.6 and it works great.

Fahrenheit Skepticism

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this holiday weekend, and overall I was fairly impressed. I've maintained a mild dislike of Michael Moore ever since I had the misfortune of seeing his piece-of-shit-Bowling movie, so needless to say, I had low expectations of Moore as a filmmaker. I can say, however, that I was hyped about seeing this flick, so that balanced things out. Like I said, overall, I was fairly impressed.

Of course, this movie has gotten people up-in-arms raving about how the movie is nothing more than a pack of lies. I've seen a lot of goofy "criticism" of Moore and his latest artistic endeavor. Don't believe everything negative you hear about this movie. However, that being said, don't believe everything you see in F911 either. For some balanced criticism of Moore's conspiracy theories, check out Brendan Nyhan's article on the topic at Spinsantiy. Rather than screaming about how Moore is a dirty liar, Nyhan does a decent job of pointing out some parts of F911 where Moore strings mostly accurate things together to give a potentially misleading impression. Good reading.

And even better, for your linking pleasure, check out an unofficial transcript of the first 43 minutes of Fahrenheit 9/11. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this transcript.

DHS says stay away from IE

Internet Explorer users beware! The Department of Homeland Security is advising surfers to use other browsers in light of the recent severe security flaws in IE. A malicious website may be able to snoop your keypresses on the keyboard for things like creditcard numbers. Woops. Via /.

"Brain and brain! What is brain?"

Today while listening to Marty Kaplan's show on Air America Radio, I heard that some theater troop is putting on a stage version of my absolute, 100%, all-fscking-time favorite episode of Star Trek, "Spock's Brain". God damn, this was one excellent episode. For readers out there not familiar with episode 61 of The Original Series, some women alien comes on the ship and replaces Spock's brain with a Twinkie or some shit. What a great plot idea.

The scam is this—these alien women called Eymorgs ganked Spock's best organ to run their underground city, dubbing it "The Controller". On their quest to retrieve the controller, the crew of the 'Prize rig up a remote control for their science officer's lifeless body. They end up with a pimped out RC vulcan and they get to hear Spock's disembodied voice spout trippy little quotables while searching for his brain in the Eymorgs' underground city. "I seem to have a body which stretches into infinity..." Does it get any better than being captured by the givers of pain and delight who use Spock's brain as their master computer? I think not.

Hailed as the best and worse of Star Trek, this episode is now being done in the theater. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

Samsung N400 Linux compatibility report

Another big thanks goes out to Wijay Kesuma for a on the Samsung N400. This Vision compatible phone works great with Linux with the same cable that the A460 uses. Thanks, Wijay!

Google to open parts of their source?

Google may be looking to give back to the world by opening parts of their source. Net4nowt.com is reporting that the internal Google project to do this was mentioned in a presentation to software engineering students in Melbourne, Australia. This could be anything from massively parallel, high-availability, fault-tolerant server software, to the code that powers their various web APIs, to anything else that is behind their kick-ass search engine.

Before anyone gets all excited, I haven't been able to find much independent verification of this. I believe the presentation may have been a seminar on June 18th at the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne. However, the seminar description doesn't mention anything on this topic. Anyone know of anything to back this up?

Via LXer.

No more Super Size?

A cultural era has truly come to an end.

McDonalds has dropped the Super Size meal portions from its US menu.

Source

You might be surprised to hear that McDonalds has done away with it's Super Size menu. Or maybe not if you eat there a lot. It might be a part of McDonalds corporate strategy against critics who claim that the obesity problem can be blamed on fast-food companies. I've seen commercials for new salad lines with some sort of free fitness-oriented gift and now they are axing the Super Size menu. Personally, I can't place blame on any business for what is ultimately a personal choice, but I suppose the corporate execs have to deal with their image problem, fair or not.

McDonalds worked hard to introduce the phrase Super Size into the cultural lexicon and now they are dropping it. Times are changing fast. I'm told by my girlfriend, however, that they still Large Size, and it might as well be as big as Super Size. So maybe it isn't changing as fast as I might think.

Donate a book

I saw this notice over at blunted's site early last week when I was in San Diego, about a book donation drive for Costa Rican children. So when I was there, I picked up a book to donate at the local bookstore and I was able to get it in the mail yesterday.

The goal for the end of July is 1000 books, so if you can, send one along—any book suitable for a K-6 student would be appreciated. The address is below.

Ray Smith
Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc.
Attention: Project Apollonia
17311 NW 47th Ave.
Miami Gardens, FL 33055

If you run a website, make sure to include a link to the site run by David Anderson at Group Utopia.

More on the murder of Patrick Anderson

More info on the murder of Patrick Anderson. Contrary to what I thought, the funeral was not last weekend, but yesterday. I understand it was a very large funeral, and while I don't know the exact number of those who came to show their respects, I heard offhandedly that it was "over 1000 people." Patrick was someone who took care of people in the community and was well liked. Two men have already been charged for the vicious murder—a cowardly shot through the back, puncturing both of Pat's lungs.

When dogs go bad

Aaaahhhhh!

Via jwz.

Shhh, don't tell the conservative pundits...

Anyone interested in fact over fiction in the debate on Reagan's tax legacy should check out today's excellent Daily Howler article. If you aren't already aware, Reagan's tax record isn't as simple and straightforward as conservatives would have you believe. Of course, we all know that president's don't raise or lower taxes all by themselves—only Congress can do that—but Reagan sure wasn't afraid to sign bills to raise taxes substantially, twice I might add. Somerby points out that Reagan's first tax cut, adjusted for inflation, was bigger than Clinton's biggest tax cut "in the history of civilization".

Don't let conservatives stifle real discourse by telling you that examining these facts are a disrespect to a dead man. We don't need to pretend to be politically correct in place of truly understanding the foundational legacy that has become unquestionable dogma in today's politics.

Once again, the record isn't as simple as simple-minded pundits would have you believe.

Blogging for bucks in San Diego

Holy shit! Blogging pays off in San Diego, in a very real, green, foldable way. Congrats to Brian for his upcoming publication in the San Diego Reader, which seems to be a popular rag around these parts. And fucking right, the whole deal landed him a solid 2G.

Now, I don't want to let my jealousy of Brian swimming in the scrilla get to me by pointing out that he just got a fat check for doing what other bloggers do out of a need akin to a crack habit. Cause Brian deserves the handsome payment. No less than myself, of course. Really. I'm blogging, I'm in San Diego (temporarily), and I too could use a couple thousand bucks—to pay off the student loans of course, not to take a 3 day, binge drinking tour of Tijuana with all of the dancing girls I could afford. You hear me, San Diego Reader? Your money would be well spent on my services.

Of course, if the Reader doesn't call me, it's because they know I value my integrity and would never sell out for something as meaningless as crisp, new dollar bills. Only someone without a shred of independence or sincerity would sell his soul like that. Blogging is so much more important, and the Reader knows I keep it too real for them to pimp me out.

Oh please, god, pimp me out! I'll work twice as hard for half of what you paid Brian. ;)

Anyway, everyone send a word of congrats over to Brian. At the very least you'll get in a trackback that might just help you greedy bitches get noticed.

The weirdest thing about San Diego

I'm getting into what is hopefully the last week of my more than a month and a half business trip to San Diego. My weekend has been undemanding, giving me time to read and relax. It got me to thinking about one of the weirdest things I've noticed about San Diego.

Cats here are crazy about the little dividers between groceries in the checkout isle. You know the ones I'm talking about—the long, thin plastic bars that divide your groceries from the next person's on the checkout conveyor belt. Everyone here, without exception, has insisted on using these dividers. Generally, where I live, people are relatively confident that the cashiers can figure it out and only resort to using the dividers when the grocery lines are long and cramped. But not here. You can be one of the only two customers in line with a small handful of groceries and the person behind you and in front of you will both still insist on setting one of these plastic dividers down. It's god damn creepy.

I really don't think the cashiers are exceptionally stupid here, so I chalk it up to how cramped San Diegans are. People here are so used to being smashed up against the person that it makes them paranoid about having to ask the cashier remove an item from their ticket that belonged to the person behind them. Weird.

Anyway... The best part about San Diego? Are you worthy?

What is NAS?

If you are interested in such things, head over to the Funkyware blog and read a rant about conflicting audio server standards in Linux. Martin-Éric Racine proposes we all adapt NAS, which he describes as the "one sound server standard..., which has been supported by HP, NCD and every other commercial X device manufacturer for ages". Typically NAS support is rolled up into the Xserver itself. Until today, however, I didn't know NAS existed, usually choosing between Esound or aRTS on a Linux box.

I've had a hard time googling up an authoritative site covering NAS, however, to find out more about it. Anyone care to offer a link covering the standard? I've been using Linux (and even admin'ing commercial Unix boxen, although never with sound support) for quite some time and I've never heard of this standard. Maybe the problem is exposure?

Ripples of Reagan

A day after former President Reagan's death, news of his departure and the subsequent reactions from those who knew him, those who worked with him, those who lived through his two terms, and those who build him up to mythic proportions dominate the airwaves. It's the only thing I can find on the news today. Regardless of what you thought of Reagan, you can't deny the reaction his death has evoked.

On my own bloglist alone the reaction has ranged the gamut. For some, he is a hero who defeated evil and rebuilt the Republican party, while for others, he is an all-but contemptible man with "blood on his hands" in a very personal way. For yet others, Reagan's death seems to be a touchy subject—if you can't find something good to day, your work might be boycotted. Some take this opportunity to obliquely criticize George W. Bush, who many in the media are lovingly comparing to Reagan, while others like the Highest Himself are simply happy to have a break from having Bush under the microscope.

However, most, like myself, are left without much emotion, save perhaps a bit of sympathy. I was pretty young during Reagan's two terms and much of what I remember is a kaleidescope of cultural images.

However you feel about ol' Ronnie, his death has caused great waves around the blogosphere and mainstream media.

Artists subpoenaed under PATRIOT act

Lots of posts today, as I'm sitting around here in San Diego... This one from the American Street caught my eye.

WASHINGTON - June 3 - Three artists have been served subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury that will consider bioterrorism charges against a university professor whose art involves the use of simple biology equipment.

Source

This is a good example of the misuse of the PATRIOT act and how it isn't helping us be more secure, just less free. (Via the American Street.)

Ray Bradbury a hypocritical ass-hat?

WorldNetDaily reports that Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 is pissed off about Michael Moore's newest movie title, Fahrenheit 9/11. The WorldNetDaily's translation of the Swedish article from Dagens Nyheter reports Bradbury calling Moore a "a screwed asshole" and "a horrible human being — horrible human!" Of course, I don't yet know if this is a fair translation or if the source article is authentic.

If this article is true, considering that Bradbury has similarly borrowed titles from authors such as Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare, I guess that makes him a hypocritical ass-hat.

Via BoingBoing.

Reagan dies today at 93

Former president Ronald Reagan died today, at a ripe old age of 93. As everyone knows, Reagan battled Alzheimer's disease for years. Scary stuff to suffer through, especially to me, with a history of Alzheimer's in my family. Reagan was a dreamer, a purveyor of dubious theories, an articulate and moving speaker, a B movie actor, and a controversial president (also known as the Teflon President). As a "hero" of the conservative movement, his presidency has left us with a plethora of interesting phrases, like Reaganomics, "Just Say No!", "Star Wars", Iran-Contra, Reagan-Democrats, "ketchup really is a vegetable", "Winners Don't Use Drugs", "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do", and voodoo-economics.

Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer mirror

Waxy.org is hosting a mirror of the Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer. Get it while it's hot, but free software users be forewarned, it is a Windows Media file, so make sure to use mplayer or another capable app.

Gnome 2.6 hard to install? Not with Gentoo...

Over at Linux Planet, Kurt Wall complains that he had an insanely difficult time installing Gnome 2.6. Want some simple instructions? If you run Gentoo, it couldn't be simpler—just run emerge -v gnome. Then emerge the applications that you want. Installing Gnome was by far the easiest thing I did when installing Gentoo, and that included compiling every bit of it from source. (It will take several hours, so go get yourself something to numb your brain while you wait.)

Study on prayer and IVF probably a fraud

Another quick news item from Les today... Prayer will not help you conceive in-vitro. The study that claimed to prove so turns out to probably be a complete fraud. Let's hope this gets some media attention.

Palm-sized or not, double-click patent will hurt everyone

Better be careful, software writers, what you allow to be done with a mouse. Les reports that Micro$oft has just patented the double-click. Les does point out that the patent seems to focus on palm-sized devices, but I believe that will provide little to no protection against misuse of this (IMHO) illegal patent. With computing devices becoming smaller and smaller every day, more and more technology will come under the focus of this patent. Once again a company steps outside of the free market to use the government in an effort to extort money out of honest businesses. Repeat after me, kids, "the patent office is hideously broken and needs to be reformed."

Murder in the family

I just heard that my girlfriend's cousin, Patrick Anderson, was murdered just the other day. It doesn't seem to have made the papers yet and I'm not sure it will, being a small town homicide, but it's chilling nonetheless. I've not heard the circumstances surrounding the murder or any other details yet. Stop the fucking violence, people.

Update: Thu Jun 3 10:02:26 CDT 2004

A few news organizations are now giving brief reports of the murder. WDAM is carrying a story with Pat's name describing the killing. The Hattiesburg American is also carrying a story dated yesterday that does not include Patrick's name.

Patrick is survived by his young wife and two children, as well as by his father. The funeral will probably be this weekend.

Deep Concentration cellphone ringtone

Hand-made Gang Starr cellphone QCP ring-tone: Deep Concentration. Any cell phone that can handle QCP ringtones should be able to use this file. Sprint users can use Focus to send this file to their phone. Enjoy.

Samsung A460 works with Sprint 2G data access with Linux

Wijaya Kesuma emailed me with a link to his excellent writeup on setting up data access in GNU/Linux with a Samsung A460. This phone uses Sprints older, 2G data service, with slower data rates. I've added this writeup to my list of Sprint phones known to work with Sprint data access with Linux.

Gentoo fun

Fed up with trying to keep a frankenstein Debian-testing + hyper-unstable-custom-debs system up-to-date with the latest security fixes, I just ditched it on my laptop in favor of Gentoo, the latest fad distro popular with the uber-geeks. You know, the kind of geeks who gotta show the next geek up by custom compiling every single package on his system and wouldn't be caught dead using a mainstream, candy-coated distro. Anyway, after getting past some initial problems, I got it installed and working almost flawlessly out of the box.

Harddrive difficulty

I've installed many flavors of Linux on several types of platforms, from x86 to alpha and I've not seen a vanilla, precompiled kernel for a distro have trouble with the most basic of IDE hard drives. However, the default 2.4 Gentoo kernel failed to work with the drive in my IBM G40 in any way—nothing but IO errors. Their 2.6 kernel did a better job but was a bit of a learning curve for me, as I'm used to the dark ages in Debian, where people running stable shy away from installing such things. Once that was cleared up, most of the bootstrap install consisted of waiting.

Almost everything worked out of the box for me with little trouble. BBDB was a minor exception to that, failing to install. My only other complaint about Gentoo is a seeming lack of a centralized method for wireless card configuration. I found a custom ebuild for some wireless-config package that worked well, but it seemed like a step down from Debian in that regard. Otherwise, everything seems to work well with little to no custom packages, including Mozilla, Blackdown, and Newsmonster.

What's up with that, biznitches? I've got all my packages custom compiled and optimized for my hardware.

Berg Theory: two cameras, two timezones, perhaps US Pacific time and Baghdad time?

The more I've thought about the gaps in timestamps in the Nick Berg movie, the more I think two cameras must have been involved. The timestamps from the video are as follows.

• 2:18:35 - 2:18:43 : Nick in the chair speaking
• 2:40:33 - 2:44:11 : Captors read statement, followed by beginning of beheading
• 13:26:24 - 13:26:27 : More of Nick in the chair, speaking
• 13:45:47 - 13:48:49 : Captors remove the head

Why the 11 hour difference? Some, seemingly discounting the shot of Nick in the chair at 13:26:24, believe Nick was already dead when the majority of beheading was shown, which falls in the 13:45-and-on range. They suggest the terrorists started cutting at 2:44 and picked up taping again at 13:45, trying to make it look as if Nick was still alive.

There is at least some small reason to think this might be the case, as I imagine it can't be easy to cut off someone's head. It must take time to get through the spine and remove the whole head.

What caught my eye, however, was the similar length of gaps between the two 2am scenes and the two 1pm scenes. Nick starts in the chair at 2:18 and the beheading begins at 2:44, 26 minutes later. Nick also starts in the chair at 13:26, and the beheading is in progress at 13:45, 19 minutes later. If people are wrong in the hypothesis that Nick was already almost 11 hours dead when the 13:45 scene started, then a new explanation might be possible—perhaps two cameras were involved, with times set in different timezones.

If the difference in real time is small between when the beheading seems to start at 2:44 and when the beheading picks up at 13:45, and the difference in timestamp is due to two cameras set in different timezones, then we may hypothesize that Nick was truly beheaded on tape and quickly. This helps explain the fact that Nick began in the chair at 2:18, the beheading begins once at 2:44, then Nick is back in the chair at 13:26, and the beheading then continues at 13:45? (Obviously, there could be other explanations, such as having multiple victims, etc.)

Furthermore, if the difference in real time between 2:44 and 13:45 is very small, say on the order of 1 or 2 minutes, that puts the two cameras at almost exactly 11 hours difference. Strangely enough, this is the difference in time between the timezone of Baghdad and Pacific US time, according to a quick calculation from times at timeanddate.com. Perhaps one camera was set in Pacific time and the other was set in the Baghdad time zone. That just strikes me as strange.

Thoughts anyone?

Good K5 writeup of Nick Berg video discrepancies

K5 has a good writeup of supposed discrepancies in the Nick Berg video and circumstances. Here are some that caught my eye for further research.

27) Scream dubbed in: Screaming starts while Berg is not moving and before he is touched Whatever the mismatch in the speaker and video (next point), videotape cognoscenti have said the scream was amateurishly dubbed into the tape. The writer of this K5 article reviewed this issue closely: The screaming starts (at 4:31 - on the copy I viewed, not the time stamp) about 5 to 6 seconds before Berg is touched (at 4:36) and he is moved to his side. He is just sitting there like a lump.

28) Handling of papers on video "Terrorist" reader flips through pages of 'statement' at one point. He keeps ending up on the same page for awhile. As noted below, this would very likely produce a gap in speech, which is out of sync with the smooth timing of the spoken statement.

29) Audio is dubbed: Tape of speaker and video are out of sync Audio experts note the tape is clearly dubbed. The speaker recording is different from executioner video recording, due to lag between audio and video.

Source

Personally, I'm still wondering why the events, when ordered by the timestamp on the video, seem to progress like the following.

• 2:18:35 - 2:18:43 : Nick in the chair speaking
• 2:40:33 - 2:44:11 : Captors read statement, followed by beginning of beheading
• 13:26:24 - 13:26:27 : More of Nick in the chair, speaking
• 13:45:47 - 13:48:49 : Captors remove the head

Strange stuff.

Update: Sat May 22 21:55:04 CDT 2004

Corrected last timestap. Sorry for the typo.

RSS feed fixed

I didn't know until today, but my RSS feed has been broken for a few days. Changes here at Freeshell removed some of the dependencies my script needed to create the feed. Apologies to anyone who uses this feed.

New McDiet experiment

You too can eat McDonald's every day and lose weight. So says Soso Whaley, who is reproducing the "experiment" done by Morgan Spurlock for his recent film Super Size Me. (See my previous post on the topic.) Looking through Whaley's receipts, she seems to be getting below 2000 calories most days, some days getting as little as 1300. Some interesting things come up while I flip through the badly scanned receipts, like "what does 2270 calories get you at McDonald's?" The answer? Pancakes, OJ, a chocolate shake, a medium fry, a Caesar salad, and salad dressing. Not much. Anyway, this just shows you can live your dream, just aim high. You too can eat McDonald's every day and lose weight.

Via Diesel Nation.

Inconceivable!

Head over and take the "which Princess Bride character are you?" quiz. My results are inconceivable.

Via the American Street.

Back home and bad news

I'm sitting here in the San Diego airport catching up on various blogs and news and waiting for a flight back home. I'm heading back for a few days out of my month-long trip to take care of personal business. I'll also have the chance to see my girlfriend, my family, and her family. We just had some bad news the other day, when we heard that doctors think her mother may have a serious, debilitating disease. These past couple of days have been pretty rough and I'll be glad to get a few days out of Cali.

Update: Thu May 6 17:32:37 CDT 2004

Just touched down in Houston. If you've never been to the Bush International Airport, consider yourself lucky. It can be crowded and it is very dirty, especially the bathrooms. One more flight to go and this day will be over.

Weekend wrap up.

In case anyone is wondering what I've been up to, I'm winding down my weekend here in San Diego, sitting around the pool, drinking locally brewd beer. An Arrogant Bastard Ale to be precise. I went record shopping in Hollywood yesterday as a road trip. It took a solid 2 hours to get to LA from here, but it was worth the gas. I wandered around the area for a while and made it to Amoeba Music; I meant to go to Fat Beats too, but it was too late. I picked up a bunch of used albums at Amoeba, ate some Baja tacos, and walked around for quite a while. Hollywood is pretty interesting—it's the only place I've been besides Vegas where you can get flying trapeze lessons for beginners and see a child molester's walkway star.

I spent today by the pool reading about Microsoft's XFS standard, which is an extention for financial services to their Windows Open Services Architecture. Anything with the words Windows and open in the same acronym makes me laugh. Pretty boring stuff.

More from San Diego

It's been a very busy couple of days, but I'm having a good enough time in San Diego. There's something to be said for a place where I can go right across the street from my hotel and eat Vietnamese, Japanese, or Denny's. I wasn't able to get out much tonight, but I can't complain much.

First batch of pictures from San Diego

I just posted up some pictures from here in San Diego. All I have is my Sprint vision for data access, which is slow and spotty, so posting much has been a pain. More to come later.

Leaving Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, I leave for San Diego. To keep me entertained in the airports, I bought Bob Woodard's new book, as well as Paul O'Neill's book, which should both be good reading. I'll be posting trip pictures here periodically, so stay tuned if you're interested in that sort of thing.

How not to find an editor

Looking for a publication editor? Try using the word "it's" properly. I dropped off an email to the address listed on the ad because they obviously need an editor for job descriptions. Even I could see this mistake, and I'm only a grammar master, not a grammar god. I'm pretty sure I could handle it, though. ;) Here's to my new night-job!

(Via eclecticism.)

Like an escape tunnel in prison I started from scratch

I just realized that tomorrow, LAB-Y turns one year old. And it still hasn't made me a dollar. ;) I started this site mostly as a place to house old college class content and a project to drive me to learn PHP and Smarty. I posted my first entry on LAB-Y one year ago tomorrow. I've since ditched Smarty and wound up with a content-management system written from scratch in PHP, designed to run on Freeshell, powering the least read blog ever.

Unconceivable, unbelievable grammar like a hammer

How! grammatically you, "is being"? Which, to taking the quiz, might find us out '.Score me' Master only. :(

Via Eclecticism.

The blogosphere as a neural network?

Yesterday Simon posted an insightful essay about blogs functioning as a news filter. Blogs as filters—what an idea. By adding sites to his blogroll that he knows pull data he is interested in, Simon filters his news intake quite effectively. It got me to thinking... If Blog rolls function this way perhaps the blogosphere itself does much more.

Sure, Simon's blogroll is a filter from his perspective, and a good filter it is. But what analogy can be drawn for the whole 'sphere?

From a larger perspective, a group of bloggers doing what they do, posting, reading, blogrolling, linking, and tracking-back (or trackbacking?) functions like a large, complicated neural network.

The model

Every description of a neural network starts with a model, and this one is no different. Starting from the idea of a perceptron, each blogger is a neuron in the network. Each neuron at different points in time fires, based upon some function of its input. In the blog-network model, this happens when a blogger posts an entry. The blogger has received enough input to cause them to compose an entry. Each blogger also has a set of incoming connections in the form of a blogroll. Like the neuron whose synapses connect to other neurons to receive their output as its input, the blogger maintains a blogroll to receive input from other bloggers. There you have it—that's the basic model.

Let's get into the details.

Incoming stimulation

A blogger neuron receives input from the output of other bloggers. Not every other blogger out there, just a set few. That few are his or her blogroll or regular reading list. Other external input comes from sites that are not regular blog-like sources, which in this model I consider outside the network. These sources are analogous to external input fed into a standard neural network such as a training set or input upon which to operate. We can measure (to some degree) what incoming connections are being simulated by looking at what the blogger is linking to. Harder to measure are the strength of the links (weight) connecting the blogger neuron to its inputs.

Recurrence

Like a recurrent network, the 'sphere records state through trackbacks, referrer logs, comments, and Technorati, feeding stimulation in the opposite direction of reading and linking. Who is paying attention to my output? These reverse stimulation mechanisms provide the answer. A network that uses this structure is called recurrent and can predict sequences, or like a Hopfield network, perhaps simulate "robust content-addressable memory".

Training?

One hole in my analogy here is the lack of usual training that is involved with generating neural networks. How can you propagate error backwards on the blogosphere and correct error? Blogger's are individualistic about their tastes, making it hard to give even a guess as to what their activation function must be. Forget sigmoidal, it seems random at times from an outsider's perspective.

Without a differentiable activation function, error minimization is hard. If you don't know what direction to move in to decrease the error, you can hardly minimize it.

Here, the blogosphere resembles more a Kohonen map (or Self Organizing Map) than a neural network. By moving similar units closer together (blogrolling and other forms of association), the network organizes itself without supervised training. There doesn't have to be a "training set" with defined correct answers.

How could we use it?

The problem with this model is that any sane researcher training neural networks defines a way of drawing conclusions from the network. This might be a set of output neurons, one of which firing indications a particular classification of the input, for example. How can someone do that using the blogosphere?

I don't have any specific answers to that, but one thing does come to mind. We have the perfect platform upon which to build an application that does just that. Google. Because as Simon points out, it isn't just a search engine; it's "the world's largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications".

So one day, someone will develop the gigantic planet eating robot, with an ultra-sophisticated blogonetwork web app as a brain, drawing on the power of Google and the blogosphere to do its evil work. I for one am glad to be a part of it.

This car I'm pushin

What a weekend. I hit 70k in my Escort not too long ago and being the responsible me, I took the POS in for the regular maintenance. $Cha-ching$ TCO goes up another $230. In addition to all of the standard stuff they do at 70k, I needed the engine decarboned, a new drive belt, and my brakes looked at.

Current total: $1515

And not 10 minutes after driving off the lot, the ghost of Henry Ford popped up again to torment me. The damn engine light came on AGAIN. I'm 99% sure it is the %$@#% IAC valve that I've had replaced several times acting up again. Funny thing is, looking through referrer logs for LAB-Y, I get a lot of hits from people for info on Escorts with IAC valve problems. What the hell was Ford thinking?

So it's another trip to the dealership soon. At least I can hold out, as it won't cause me noticeable problems. Hopefully, it will still be under warranty, like last time. Replacing it then didn't cost me a dime (not even for the diagnosis).

Operation: San Diego

I just found out Friday that I'm heading to San Diego for about a month on business. How crazy is that?

I haven't been to San Diego (or anywhere in California for that matter) since I was a child, which I have little to no recollection of. So when I volunteered was drafted for this assignment, I was pretty hyped. Cali has my name written all over it. ;) I put my name in for the mission to hopefully catch a show with one of the Beat Junkies or one of the former Skratch Piklz.

To prepare, I'm buying a digital camera, probably tomorrow. With any luck, I'll be posting pics over a Sprint PCS connection periodically. w00t! Hopefully, my girlfriend will be able to fly out and join me.

Anyone have any hints for what I should see in San Diego? Anyone familiar with the hip-hop scene there? Or should I just bite the bullet and drive up to LA?

Elect us or you'll all die

Head on over to Gotham City 13 and check out the White House Kool-Aid gang. "You will obey." Brought to you via Blunted.

My quick take on Monster

I went down to the cinema to see Monster this weekend. I'm not sure what possessed me but I did. If you are, like myself, a fan of lesbian kiss scenes, do not go see this movie. Seriously.

I love a little lesbo action, but damn, Charlize Theron was straight skanky in this flick. If I wanted to see a rotten-toothed chickenhead french kiss Wednesday Adams, I'm sure I could have found it on the internet for free and saved myself the disgust of seeing this in the theater. I will say that Theron was convincing as the homicidal man-killer, but that wasn't enough to redeem the movie. Convincingly in need of dental work, not washing the random John's cum out of your mouth, and lip locking with Pugsley's sister is not entertainment—it's convincing but revolting.

Send a test trackback my way, please.

Trackbacks at LAB-Y are back, after being disabled since December. I've been very slowly working on rewriting trackback support since then, and it is finally in a state to test out. So somebody please hit me up with a trackback to help test my support!

The tb url for this post is http://dast.freeshell.org/tb/20040321160615 (not linked so Google doesn't follow it). Fire one off in my direction.

Soon, comments will also be hosted here locally at LAB-Y instead of with Squatbox. Soon... Anyone have a script for extracting old comments from the squawk?

Update: Mon Mar 22 18:35:59 CST 2004

Comments are now hosted locally here at LAB-Y on a trial basis. I don't have comments converted over from squatbox yet, as it is a major PITA. I may get around to doing it someday.

If you have any problems with submitting comments or trackbacks, please email me. My email address is (obfuscated) in the footer of every page.

Update: Tue Mar 23 22:48:19 CST 2004

Comments have now been moved over from squatbox. Many validation errors have been fixed too.

You're Jurassic Park!

Just took the Book Quiz and the results are pretty darn funny.

You're Jurassic Park!

by Michael Crichton

You combine all the elements of a mad scientist, a brash philosopher, a humble researcher, and a money-hungry attracter [sic] of tourists. With all these features, you could build something monumental or get chased around by your own demons. Probably both, in fact. A movie based on your life would make millions, and spawn at least two sequels that wouldn't be very good. Be very careful around islands.

Source

I think it was that "aren't dinosaurs cool?" that ultimately determined my book. Ha!

(Via Kirsten.)

Eolas patent struck down

I just read over at peerfeer.org that the US patent office has finally got a clue and has reversed the phony browser patent plugin held by Eolas Technologies. In case you missed this debacle, Eolas pulled one over on the patent office to claim ownership of the "technology" for using browser plugins, in violation of Title 35, Chapter 10, Section 103, paragraph (a) of US patent law.

A patent may not be obtained the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.

Source

There was plenty of prior art for browser plugins, and it was arguably an obvious solution to the problem of having to pack every kind of file viewer into the browser. Eolas used their counterfeit patent to try to muscle Microsoft out of distributing their browser, which I wouldn't have missed anyway. However, the patent had dangerous ramifications for all web browsers everywhere. So have a beer tonight in honor of the overturned patent. The web is a better place without fictitious claims to "intellectual property".

Strong evidence for past water on Mars

Those crazy guys at NASA are reporting today that they have found strong evidence that water once "drenched" parts of Mars. And you know what that means, kiddies! There once might have been life on the red planet. Good news all around.

Technical Difficulties

LAB-Y has been down for a little while, due to some technical difficulties here at Freeshell. I don't want to get into the details of the problem, but for now, it has forced me to disable PHP sessions. Let's hope it clears up soon. Much love to the admin of freeshell for his hard work.

My DJ's so nice he don't slice he [fails you]

Looks like Berklee College of Music is offering a class to all you wanna be DJ's. The professor (ha!) did a spot on NPR, complete with a demonstration. CNN carried the story.

I'll show you beef. Where's my hot iron poker?

Wow. I saw this one over at Stupid Evil Bastard—a foster parent was caught abusing her two adopted children by a man who installed a wireless surveillance camera in his house. What a way to be caught.

The guy bought the camera for the security of his own home but mistakenly picked up a feed from a neighbor. He saw two children, standing for more than an hour, arms outstretched.

He decided to tape the event and later witnessed a woman enter periodically to beat the children with fist and stick.

God damn. What in the fuck is wrong with people?

To my surprise, neither Les nor Dave talked much about what kind of abuse this was. It looks like some sort of sick "punishment", forcing the children under penalty of beating to stand for hours with their arms outstretched, not allowed to move. And with the wonderful power of affordable, wireless security cameras, the evil bitch could constantly monitor the children. Anytime one of them lets their arms drop or otherwise change positions, whamo, they get battered.

With this technology, in almost no time you have dominated the children mentally, convincing them you monitoring them 100% of the time. That is, they think they are being watched even if you pop off a bit from watching the camera feed to do other stuff. This shit is mental and physical torture, not just abuse. The cruelty this woman demonstrates is inhuman. What can someone get out of torturing children like this?

If I wasn't against the death penalty, I'd like to go find a hot iron poker and have a bit of fun showing her what her intestines look like up close. And I'm not the kind of guy who always asks "but what about the children?"

"Twin Cobra Fist!"

Do you want to dispense Asswhoopery like the US government? Learn the 1000 Styles of Rumsfeld and your skills will be almost unmatched! But can you beat his Appease a Corrupt Dictator on Camera technique?

Via Dave.

Furry Humans

Found this via jwz, and it is perhaps the most disturbing thing I've seen in a while.

New lyrics from Lexicon

As a follow up to the previous lyrics I posted, I've transcribed some more from Lexicon. This bit of lyrical heat can be found on their latest album, Youth Is Yours, out on Ill Boogie records.

Happy Blogaversary Kristen

Happy blogaversary to Kirsten of geek*muffin. If you don't read geek*muffin, you should.

Update; Tue Mar 23 22:05:10 CST 2004

Corrected spelling.

Final proof that Califoria is stupid.

California suggests your buildings should channel positive energy. As if we needed more proof that California is stupid.

I will die fighting

Just found out via Suburban Blight that Fidel Castro says he will "fight to the death" if invaded by the US.

Honestly...who said anything about invading Cuba?? Puh-leaze, Fidel. All the arm waving...all the drama..."fight to the death!"...when in reality he has no one to fight, and is content to starve his people instead.

Source

Yeah, but you never know...

So I'm joining the club. I vow that I will fight to the death if I am invaded by the United States. I will die "with a gun in my hand" if they come to overthrow me. Um, yeah.

Spirit may recover fully.

Looks like the Spirit is back on track to full operation.

As for the ailing Spirit rover, NASA deleted 1,700 files from its flash memory Friday and then rebooted the rover.

"I am pleased to report it appears to be working just fine," said Glenn Reeves, chief engineer for the rover's flight software. He said NASA should be able to declare Spirit "fully recovered" by Sunday.

Source: AP

Fantastic news. If you are interested, it sounds like the problem was software related—the OS may have run out RAM just trying to manage the files on the flash file system. Read on to find out more about what makes Spirit tick inside.

Exploding Whale Gut Fun

Exploding whale entrails stop traffic in Tainan. This one stands for itself. Via jwz.

Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours. The 56-foot-long whale had been on a truck headed for a necropsy by researchers, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.

The whale drew the attention of locals because of its large penis, measured at some five feet, the Taipei Times reported. "More than 100 Tainan city residents, mostly men, have reportedly gone to see the corpse to 'experience' the size of its penis," the newspaper reported.

Source

Go check out the pictures for more exploding whale gut fun.

Joint Marketing Agreements

Every time I get a privacy policy in the mail, usually from a bank, I groan. They are all the fucking same. They are all contradictory. And most of all, they are all bad.

The scam goes like this. They claim they don't "sell your personal information to third parties." Just what I wanted! BUUUUUUT... They turn right around and give it out freely to "companies that perform marketing services on [their] behalf or to other financial institutions which we have joint marketing agreements."

So instead of directly selling your information, they set up "joint marketing agreements" or hire other companies to advertise, and give it to them. Same fucking outcome. I get spammed and other organizations get some of the info these banks collect, including "name, address, social security number, assets, income, account balance, payment history, parties to transaction, credit card usage, creditworthiness, and credit history." Fuck banks.

Power Point Literature

Found this via Dave today—literature condensed down to Power Point. And condensed is the key word. And we all know Power Point makes you dumb. Wow. Dumb out with some power point literature.

Smile! It's the McDiet.

This just in from eclecticism—fast food may be hazardous to your health. Within 30 days, a diet of McDonald's may cause vomiting, high liver toxicity, rocketing cholesterol, sexual dysfunction, headaches, splotchy skin, hefty weight gain, and, not surprisingly, depression. As Michael points out (via Kottke), who would have thought?

I do have to admit, I'm a bit surprised at how fast Mr. Morgan Spurlock, the subject of the film-documented, self-experiment, fell apart. He didn't even make it a month on the McDiet. We all know, "people don't go to McDonald's looking for diet food", but they do expect to not fall over dead after a month or two.

If you want to know more about what's in your fast food, check out Fast Food Nation, by journalist Eric Schlosser. See if you can eat Mc'eeDees and enjoy it the same way after that book.

And if you want to see first hand what the McDiet will do to you, you'll have to wait for Spurlock's documentary, "Super Size Me", to make it out of the Sundance. Good glub I love self-experiments. He should have blogged it.

Flashin' to the Beat.

You've probably already heard by now that NASA engineers have reestablished an intelligible link with the the Spirit Mars rover. They believe their problems are related to one or more of the rover's flash microchips, a solid-state memory chip you might find in your digital camera, game console memory card, or USB pen drive. The rover has 256 megs of this stuff, apparently used as a filesystem.

NASA got the rover back online by using a "RAM drive", consistent their bad flash theory. (A RAM drive creates a filesystem in the computer's RAM, which will be lost on reboot.) One thing to note—flash chips are fast when it comes to reading data from them, but very slow and often timing sensitive when writing to them. NASA is currently talking to the rover at 120 bits per second, a slothful communication speed not seen here on Earth in many years, which I have to imagine would make it very difficult to try to reprogram one or more of the chips. When writing data to flash, these chips expect data at a certain rate; if NASA couldn't feed data to the flash fast enough—at 120 bps I would consider that likely—the chip would probably "time out" thinking the computer was prematurely done programming it. This would cause the chip to stop accepting data and go back into a "read-only" mode. You can see the problem here. If they can perhaps identify which chip may be acting up, if the problem is indeed a bad flash chip, they might have to update the rover's software with logic to avoid using the misbehaving chip.

Sheesh. I think I have problems debugging embedded software. I'd hate to have the job of the NASA techies who have to fix this mess. Good luck, guys.

Got this monkey on my butt

Something tells me this must signal the end of the world.

Be the first on your block to get Funky Monkey Panties. Or for the guys, "bright red briefs for men featuring Chinese characters for wealth and prosperity," (via AP).

The Chinese new year is almost year, and 2004 is the year of the Monkey. So get your Monkey Panties in time, and you too may be prosperous and successful.

Strangest thing I've seen in a while.

I found this over at found objects and it is the weirdest thing I've seen in a long time.

Head on over and check out the box of reject vampire teeth someone found in South England. I guess Europeans don't make vampires like they used to.

What's even more strange is that something like this was thrown on the side of the road.

Me Vs. Henry Ford, Round Five

This Sunday I took my car into the local Walmart for an oil change. This overdue oil change unfortunately waited a thousand miles or two over the suggested miles between such fun events. I decided to make a stop down at the local Walmart, the purveyor of everything good, cheap, American, and plastic for the scheduled maintenance.

At Walmart I found that the last mechanic who had worked on my car kindly stripped the oil plug, the technical name for the thingy that holds the oil in the bottom of your car. The tired looking Walmart technician (wannabe mechanic who works the desk) informed me that they can remove it but they can't replace it. A 99 Escort model apparently isn't an oil plug they carry, as it isn't exactly a popular car in SUV land. It looked like it had to have come from a Ford shop.

The local Ford place in my parent's hometown did my last oil change. The assholes had snuck it in on a 60K mile maintenance, just after my previous oil change. The sticker stated a clear mileage beyond the then current odometer reading but they did it anyway. These are the same fuckups that tried to kill me by leaving my fuel filter halfway installed and not fixing my IAC valve. Great to leave someone driving away in a car that stops all of the time—thanks to the IAC valve it may die while idling—and a fuel filter that could explode any time I crank the damn thing.

They must have it out for me or something.

Sometimes cars seem to get more use out of me, dragging their asses around to be repaired, than I get out of them, driving.

"I'm having a website emergency."

Technology is wonderful. It really is. It is the one thing in my life I can always count on to bring new possibilities of emergency situations. Year after year, with a robotic certainty, I wind up with some heretofore unknown catastrophic failure of some bit of technology. What other human institution can do the same for your life?

When Ford invented the automobile, within years I'm sure we discovered its cousin, the automobile accident. Yep, you could end your life in an all new, grisly way. (Don't get me started on Ford just yet. I've got beef with him and I'll have to let him have it shortly—I don't need it anyway, as I'm a vegetarian.) Then, when the Wright brothers took their pioneering flight, they probably only narrowly avoided the previously unknown airplane crash. With each new technology, the human race learned about a new way for it to go all kinds of wrong.

And, dear readers, I apologize, as I am the victim of the technological failure of created by the age of bloggers—the website emergency.

Looks like the admin of Freeshell decided to push through the PHP changes, leaving my entire website down and misbehaving. I just got home from visiting my girlfriend, late Sunday night, and before I even put away my groceries (still haven't), I noticed my my website had taken a nose-dive. Broken scripts galore.

After a about 40 minutes of recovery, I have my front page working. None of the links into /blog, /section, or /gallery, work. As of 8:16pm CST, I am about to set up a small (working, hopefully) script to redirect all of these links to the frontpage, so everyone can read this explanation. Sorry for the outage, folks.

Update

As of 8:53pm CST, things seem to be actually somewhat working. A bit of digging through the suphp source turned up a bit of apache magic to save the day. (I hope.) More on this later.

LAB-Y back up now.

LAB-Y is now back up after about 40 minutes of unscheduled maintenance. I upgraded to a new version of backend code I've been working on. For the most part, you shouldn't notice anything different, but if anything appears broken, please send a note my way. My email address is "obfuscated" in the footer of every page.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading LAB-Y.

Maintenance Man Mishap

This made me so mad I just had to say something about it.

I rent an apartment and, like all apartments, periodically a maintenance man has to come in and fix something. No biggie. It is a fact of life for renters and as a matter of fact, I appreciate the service.

For the past month or so, my shower has been leaking. And not just leaking, but pouring water constantly. Now, I don't pay for water—it is covered in the rent—but it is annoyingly loud. The apartment manager has known about it for a while and the maintenance man promised a while back to fix it.

Today when I came home for my lunch break (the double-illusion hour), I found a set of keys in my lock. Just sitting there. A few other tenants were going about their business but there was no maintenance man or apartment manager to be found. Just keys hanging in the door, which I quickly found to be unlocked. When I came in, nobody was inside.

So I took the keys out and went on inside. A bit later, the repair guy came around and knocked on my door. Stumbling over his own words and scratching his head, he informed me that he fixed my shower; he didn't mention anything about any keys. Before he walked off, I showed him the keys.

He quickly offered an explanation, which made the situation much worse. "When I have to work on a bunch of units, I leave keys in the doors that I need to come back to." Greeeeaaaaat, so he does this all of the time and to everyone here.

The worst bit about the whole situation was that he didn't even remember that he had left any keys in my apartment. For fuck's sake, anyone could have come by and snatched them, since he was nowhere to be found when I came home.

I haven't decided what to do about it. I asked him to please not do that again, and after an initial protest, he agreed. I just hope he doesn't decide to do something nasty in return, like giving my keys out or taking something out of my apartment.

New Kernel Bliss!

Tonight, right before I began my workout, I started new kernels compiling on all my machines—version 2.4.24 to be specific. If you haven't heard already, there is a local root vulnerability in 2.4.23 that is fixed in this version. I had upgraded to 2.4.23 not too long ago due to the previous security issue and it gave me problems with NewsMonster. Specifically, I got tons of DNS errors, causing failures fetching many of the RSS feeds I subscribe to.

I'm extremely happy to report that I don't see that problem in 2.4.24. So now I'm pimpin with a new, shiny kernel. And I can't put my finger on it but it seems faster on my laptop. But anyway.

Amen, Les. Fsck fixing cars.

I'm with Les on this one. Fsck fixing cars. Like he points out, you can save money that way, but I say only if your time has no value. Fsck fixing cars. My time is worth something—a hell of a lot more something than what I pay someone to change my oil.

Unlike Les, I didn't have an opportunity to learn to fix them. The only mechanically inclined parental figure (or something) I knew was my biological father, who skipped out on me early in life. The father who raised me wasn't as mechanical but faithfully paid others to maintain his vehicle, right on schedule. Personally, I agree with Les, when he said "my plan was to have a decent enough job that I could afford to pay someone else to fix my car."

I'll never forget one of the guys I worked with at my previous job. He was a chemical engineering major working a summer job as a programmer who always did all of his own car maintenance. And not just the easy stuff, he did almost all of it, including the difficult stuff. I've never seen someone with a supposedly working set of wheels have to ask for so many rides to work. Having only a few hours in the evenings and the weekends to do his repairs, his vehicle spent a lot of time out of commission.

So fsck fixing your own car. Pay someone else to do it.

My predictions for 2004

Seems like everyone has had their chance make predictions for 2004 except me. The predictions range from dramatic events in the blogosphere to world events, and from personal goals to hip hop forecasts. I'm not much of a prognosticator, but I've got a prediction of my own.

Bloggers will continue making predictions for at least another week or two, yielding enough of a pool where at least a few of them will prove to be true. The predictions will slowly die down, people will forget about them, and in the end, the bulk of them will turn out to be bogus.

Thank you.

The neglected vacation blog

Sitting around, waiting for the Playstation to free up is about the only time I spend during my vacation doing anything blogging related. Reading Stupid Evil Bastard, Les hits it on the head—vacation is like an extended weekend, when blogging is rarely done.

On the weekends I don't tend to post as often because I generally sleep in and miss the news programs and I'm at home where the lure of countless partially finished video games manages to overpower my admitted short-at-times attention span. Well, when I'm on vacation it's kinda like one big weekend. Toss in the holidays and the fact that I've received a plethora of new games as of the 25th and I have even less reason to make my usual web surfing rounds.

Source

I've been tossing around the idea of using moblogging to fill in these gaps. Or perhaps that is just me making an excuse to buy a snappy new camera-phone. Oh well, whatever it is, those video games are calling my name.

Happy New Year

Happy new year, everyone. Party like the end of the world is here, cause it's 2004 and our robotic overlords and masters are a few years late. We're living on borrowed time so make the best of it.