And one more, then. - 18 October 2007

Well, I started my upgrade when I went to work. When I came back, it was about 50% done. By the time this entry publishes, it should be into the install phase. Or so I hope. Getting 7.10 should hopefully make a lot of things better and updated and cooler. And then I can wait for December and KDE 4 to appear. Then it’ll be March or April before the 8.04 release. It is kind of nice having a regular updating schedule to your Linux system, even if it does mean regular downloads of large amounts of files.

See what happens when Potterheads meet J.K.. That’s grade-school Potterheads, by the way. I think Rowling’s become the rock star of the Potter generation.

My professional self cringes at the idea of the Society for HandHeld Hushing, but I can see where people wouldn’t want to be interested in someone else’s cellular conversation in a public place. One of the gentlemen today in the library was on speakerphone with the mobile at his ear, so I wonder if it was not knowing that speaker was on, or wanting to make sure everyone heard both sides of the conversation.

The Slacktivist puts up Theory #2 on why Christians are primarily seen as gay-hating peoples - Theory #2 is that those who are complaining the loudest are the ones most likely to engage in the behavior, or are fighting that kind of behavior themselves. Plenty of examples abound of people who might fit that bill. It’s not the General Theory of Gay-Hatin’, though, so there’s more theories to be discussed. While we wait for those, we can marvel at the Regent Law student being disciplined because he posted a video of Pat Robertson scratching his forehead with the middle finger. Apparently, he has to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before they’ll let him back in.

And then we can have a chuckle at "the growing crisis of sexual addiction among Christian women". Hrm... something tells me that the idea of submitting to a male isn’t flying, excepting for those who are submissives, and that women want to be able to enjoy their sexuality, too. The World Health Organization says the best way to avoid abortions is to make contraception widely available. Naturally, taking that news to heart, the new Department of Health and Human Services contraception person is someone who has spoken out against it. I’d sigh and say “Only in America”, but I suspect we’re not the only ones.

Kohl's tries some solar panels on top of some new stores. Wouldn’t that be a great place to get energy from - if the system could somehow harness the heat that the blacktop gives off, too, that would make malls contribute some of their energy consumption back. Enough to power themselves? I don’t know, but that would be neat to see done.

In related envrionmental news, the maritime shipping industry generates about two times the carbon dioxide emissions as aircraft, according to a study released by Intertanko. I wonder how much that’s true of the entirety of the shipping industry - what’s their carbon footprint like compared to others?

Getting into things that are political, even when they’re judicial, the United States is an odd man out when it comes to sentencing juveniles to life sentences without parole. This idea that someone can commit a crime deserving of spending the rest of their lives in prison without release at a young age, such as 13 or 14, is unique to the United States compared to the European law which it is closest to. And there are some who don’t think it’s possible, and want juvenile lifers to have their sentences reconsidered and possibly paroled as the length of time served goes on. Since we do ban killing juveniles, it makes sense that sentencing them to die in prison might also be harsh judgment for someone who hasn’t fully matured or understood things.

Whoops! No nuclear sites here, says Syria, and the U.N. concurs, deciding that it was an errant translation. An even bigger gaffe, for many, is the Roman Catholic priest that gave Communion to two gay men dressed in nuns' habits. Of course, in hindsight, he realizes he shouldn’t have done it, but as he notes, there’s nothing in the code that says you deny the bread to anyone dressed flamboyantly. Something that’s not a mistake, however, is that Turkey approved a plan to enter Iraq to beat back Kurdish insurgents. And that the Canadian postal system refused to carry advertisements for a political group calling itself "The Sex Party", because of the potential offense the brochure could give. While apparently allowing a rather nasty anti-gay tract to go through. Must be something about the words being used in one and not the other. Something like that would probably happen in the States, too, with the material for the Sex Party being described as obscene. Next time, I guess the Sex Party has to use discreet envelopes for their pamphlets.

bradhicks doesn't believe the official, court-confessed story of Michael Devlin, who admitted to kidnapping two underage boys and holding them to him without their will. He suspects that there was likely consent involved, but it’s not socially acceptable“ for that to be admitted, and so kidnapping is the charge confessed to and everyone will think of Michael Devin as the dangerous kidnapping stranger and not someone who may have been an attractive person for a boy to run away to.

In contention for the Quiche of Stupidity tonight, the United States military, which was caught advertising recruitment on gay-friendly websites. Once their gaffe was exposed, the military said they would pull the advertisements immediately. If the surge strategy continues, though, they might have to put them back up to meet recruiting goals.

Also in contention is the original contents of a supposed "Canadian" talking about he health care system. The debunking done to it is very effective and shows the original e-mail for what it is - deceit.

Getting close to a winning entry is the accounts of younger and younger children being punished and arrested for sexual misconduct - one a four-year old giving a hug, the others 13 and 12 that were apparently all playing a butt-slapping game with the girls, who were participating just as much as anyone else. With the stigma that sexual offenses carry with them, arresting the kids rather than calling in the parents seems to be a really extreme step. Especially for a four-year-old. Does he even have the concept that what he’s doing could be sexual in nature?

Running neck-and-neck with the winner as we turn down the stretch, the United States Congress, for giving in and granting some telecommunications companies immunity over their warrantless wiretapping.

Regarding the SCHIP debate, here’s a perfect contrast (which ericmonster already put up and I’m shamelessly swiping because it’s that damn good). First, Senator Pete Stark's remarks about how the administration just likes to blow things up, be it Iraq, the United States, or bills in Congress. He also finds it unlikely that the administration that spends so much money fighting in Iraq can’t find money to insure more people. On the Republican side of the coin, and a clear victor in tonight’s Quiche awarding, Representative Steve King, who said that SCHIP stood for "Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents.", including a visual of the backronym. I don’t think it can get any worse. Can it get any worse? Well, Congress couldn't must sufficient votes to override the veto, so I think it did just get worse. As has income inequality.

Something fun that I found while trying to answer someone’s question today is the Museum of Talking Boards, or as they are known by a famous brand name, Oujia boards. Plenty of examples in the gallery, along with some other material on history and the superstitions that abound around these devices.

A really great thing to read about (and to keep any ego ideas I might have firmly in my head) are the Gallileo fallacy and the Gadfly corollary, both of which tell us that thinking you’re alt and outside the mainstream and getting plenty of people mad at you does not make you an original, popular, or oppressed person. You are not Galileo. And neither am I.

Finally, if you want to spend some time flexing your vocabulary might for what appears to be a noble cause, try on Free Rice, which claims to donate ten grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme for every time you can pick the correct matching word for the one given. And it adjusts down and up to your vocabulary as needed, showing off your level, if you want to have some bragging rights. I’ve hit forty-four (of fifty, and Humes are said to rarely get above forty-eight) as my highest level, and that’s some pretty weird stuff up there. Turns out that learning roots here and there really does help. Might be perfect to use for someone studying for the verbal parts of the SAT or the GRE. Or those looking to brag about the size of their lexicon. Either way, your call. After 2000 grains, I think that’s enough for me tonight.

Reasonable success - 19 October 2007

Managed to get my way through the upgrade installation and sequence to arrive at Gutsy Gibbon. At least, I’m pretty sure I’ve made it all the way there. Yay, release. I’ll have to see what’s available yet for me to play with and/or do neat stuff with, but I think things have been properly navigated.

Our lead tonight is Improv Everywhere goes shirtless. Which makes for quite the display of shirtless men, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. If, instead you prefer cartoon Gauls that can fend off Romans with super-strength, you might be more interested in learning about how well Albert Uderzo, who helped create Asterix, is doing. However, if biting political satire is your thing, rejoice in that Viacom is opening up the entire archive of The Daily Show to be watched on-line. And for those of us who hate having punctuation abused, The "blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

In technology news, shifting off certain program parts to chips called field-programmable gate arrays can improve processor performance. The processor makes a determination on which ones to send based on the most-executed sequences of instructions.

Aggravating (and possibly explaining a few things), Comcast is interfering with the transmissions of its users, blocking some attempts to upload complete files through peer-to-peer networks. With a swarming application like BitTorrent, this throttling done by the ISP can affect other people, as well. Comcast does not do this as the ISP, however, but masquerading as another computer user and sending a stop signal. This is supposedly a mechanism to prevent peer-to-peer traffic from overwhelming the network, but it definitely violates the idea that all traffic should be treated equally. (If peer-to-peer is what everyone wants, then so be it.)

Hello Kitty AK-47. That’s not just Hello Kitty Hell, that’s Hello Kitty Rambo Hell. Paired with pistol crossbows, one has quite the arsenal of damaging and death-dealing stuff. What is worrisome, however, is when robotic weaponry malfunctions and discharges its stock of ammunition, killing and wounding humans. I don’t think this will deter people from trying to develop fully robot weapons, just so that no human actually has to look as other humans are killed without remorse.

In the interest of keeping healthy over time, Australian scientists have recommended that those who have low sperm counts should have sex every day to improve their county and virility. (For those who have low count and/or DNA damage, but probably for the rest of the people, too.) Isn’t that just what someone wanted to hear? “To help you try and improve your sperm count, I’m telling you to have sex with your partner at least once daily.”

Something that appears to be more scary than substantive, unless there’s also research being done on finding ways to counteract what might result from it - an amino acid change in the H5N1 avian flu virus makes it much more able to spread in mammalian respiratory tracts. Which, I suppose, is nice to know, but what point does it have being released to the public at large?

Politics at large, internationally first: More than 100 people in Pakistan have died as a bomber detonated himself next to the opposition leader's bullet-proof bus while she was on parade. Whomever it was, I don’t think that’s going to be enough of a deterrent toward the negotiations in trying to bring a democratic government back to Pakistan. Elsewhere in the world, The United States has said it will not review plans for a missile defence shield in Europe if Iran gives up its nuclear program. Still putting pressure on Iran to cave, and at the same time, a NATO general says a seized arm shipment bound for Afghanistan originated in Iran. Can you feel it as Iran becomes the latest target of a ramp-up to attack? And all the while, more National Guard units are being called up to fight in Iran and Afghanistan. Isn’t there some rule about how the National Guard can be deployed with regard to foreign service? It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

And then domestically, Code Pink continues to decry the presence of a Marine Corps recruiting office near areas that are famous for their liberal politics. Additionally, Brownback is withdrawing from the 2008 United States presidential race, deciding that he’s not going to get enough votes or money to get the party nomination he wants. Something with more grist for the rumor mill is the Bush Administration's counter-terror chief saying that Iraq hasn't made America safer, and then three days later stepping down for health reasons. I’m sure there’s a joke in there about how telling the truth about Iraq pains him so much that he has to go seek help for it, but officially speaking, this is just a coincidence. Maybe in a few months we’ll find out it wasn’t.


Our beginning entry for the quiche contest is WorldNet Daily's "Christmas Defense Kit", which consists of three magnets, with the option to purchase more, or a bracelet. While they claim to ward off the “ACLU Grinches”, I don’t think they’re going to be very effective. Other than loudly proclaiming oneself to be someone thoroughly interested in insignificant things.

There’s pet abuse in these segments of our quiche contest, so if you don’t like the idea, or want to read about them, take my summary as true and don’t click. The first is someone so fed up with the cats of a neighborhood that he/she removed them and then let them loose 25 miles away. Worse than that, though, is the man who chained his dog to a wall in a gallery, refused to feed him and instructed others not to feed him, and called it art. The dog, naturally, died from this act of cruelty.

The Foot-In-Mouth department submits a transcript where Senator Clinton is called a "Vaginal-American" because the commentator wants to encourage women not to vote for the Senator on the sole basis of her being a woman, despite statistics that say if the Senator is on the ballot, they’re more likely to go out and vote. I agree that someone should vote their principles, and not gimmicks, but that was a less than tactful way of putting it. Not to mention that it sort of reinforces the idea that women are a minority group of some sort. I don’t know what the gender balance is, but I would certainly not run a campaign that treated all women as if they wanted the same things.

The RIAA cabal is trying to get out of paying attorney's fees for a case that was thrown out due to insufficient evidence. The amount of fees incurred by the defendant is supposedly larger than the judgment exacted against Jammie Thomas. Not only is the RIAA trying to shirk paying the costs, they insist that even though there wasn’t a case to move forward, that the defendant was guilty of engaging in infringement. “Well, you’re guilty anyway, so we shouldn’t have to pay anything even though our case was tossed.” I hope the judge orders the cabal to pay up, and that other judges do the same, so that the cabal stops with spray-and-pray types of lawsuits. Or that they go back and try to produce content that people will actually want to buy (and watch their piracy rates plummet downward as a result! Shock and horror!) The RIAA wins the Institutional Quiche for tonight with this act of hubris.

Something that is just scary, and wins a personal Special Quiche for whomever it is that allowed this to happen, an eight month-old baby managed to consume a tablet of ecstasy. The baby survived, luckily, thanks to the doctors, who also found out that the baby had burned through a very large portion of the drug faster than adults do. What I really want to know, however, is who the extraordinarily stupid, stupid rat creature it was that a) had the stuff, and b) had it where the baby could get it.

Finally getting out of rampant stupidity, we present the amazing talking Neandertals . As it was explained to me (as I do not have sufficient knowledge of genetics and anthropology), the premise of the piece here is to establish the idea that Neandertals had the genetic capacity to form structures that would permit speech. Not necessarily what we would categorize as human speech, but a method of communication more refined than grunts, that could be identified as a language. I was a bit surprised that the whole language thing was under serious debate, and I honestly probably wouldn’t be able to follow it, but I pass along the information for those people who can take it and run with it. My professional self is satisfied.

Speaking of my professional self, I have to get up in the morning and go to work, so I think I’ll head to bed and make it work.

P.S.: For those who are fiction writers, please take note of the following thing - Albus Dumbledore is a homosexual. Thus, the slash writers have one on the rest of you. But, I would also caution that Albus is a wise headmaster, and would not be of the pedo type, so please don’t glut the place with Harry/Albus, please.

/usr/games/random: Chronology of Advice

There’s been a thing going around saying “If you could give five pieces of advice to your sixteen year-old self, what would you say?” Which is a fine and dandy thing to think about, and so there are responses below, which hopefully will would not cause paradoxes were I actually to be able to communicate them to my younger self.

1. If it isn’t safe, don’t go for the tackle. You’ll thank me later.
2. You’re better at working around problems than you think. Don’t despair if things don’t go according to plan.
3. Don’t be afraid of being honest with someone. Yeah, it’s not always a positive result, but you’d be surprised what you learn.
4. Similarly, don’t be afraid of being honest with yourself. There’s more potholes here, but the learning and the results are awesome.
5. It really is better once you get beyond the narrow world of high school. Take heart.

But given my penchant for going One! Step! Further! than that, I seize hold of the cloth and give it a new wrinkle.

What five pieces of advice would you give me now? After all, I’m in that segment of life where advice about what is upcoming is certainly something to be sought or found. So, as a recently graduated, recently employed, recently moved twenty-something with possibilities in front of him, what advice would you give me?