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.