furtive explorations

This isn't tomato ketchup folks; the anticipation is killing me.

Now, on the other hand, I find waiting to see the next Star Wars movie a pleasant kind of anticipation. The last thing I want to do is ruin that with spoilers and VCD previews. I want to see it big screen, without annoyances, a full plot rundown, a known list of errors and flaws, or anything else that will detract from me making up my own mind and/or enjoying the film. Thank you for playing along and being understanding about me deleting your voice-mail unheard when it started off "So in Star Wars..."

Oh wait, that's right, I have to work late tonite... shit, that will have to do. And no, tinkering with the blog earlier doesn't count as a completed mission at work. =)

OK, SO I got the list added on the right... cool, no I feel I've accomplished something. =)

Yes it is great that they update so often but I just want one more package without worrying that one of them won't work with the old kernel and will stomp the old package out of existence. Oh and since they notice all the other packages are out of date they set off an install cascade that would take all night and would certainly break something.

Bah. If it wasn't 100x better than Windows I'd be pissed right now. Luckily I have no fear so I'm just going to compile it raw. =P Try that on windows...

Updated: High School Pr0n Invitations... what a funny bit. Good as well and this ain't half bad at all either.

• LED lights handy links to places to buy or get reviews...
• When you get a link in email, at work, that goes like this: http://www.strap-on.org/users.html with no other note attached you would be afraid to go there too. After all, the same doofus sent me a huge email full of topless pictures, the link to suicide girls and about 400 links on LEDs and particle physics. A site called "strap-on" has low odds on being about science... but it turns out to be a list of journals. I'll let the about page tell you more about the site but it is "first glance" safe to peek at at work.
• this article on changing news stories marks one of the rare occasions when /. steps outside its geek shirt and pubs something that anyone online could and should read. You should know that the news article you read may not be the same by the time your friends get to it...
• If you use wireless this news about 2.4 Ghz interference from lights may be of interest. The lights are the new super-slick microwave pumped incandescents. Micro-nuke a piece of sulphur and it glows. So stick it in a bottle, continuously phone home and light up the room. Neat. Damn shame it craps so much noise into the radio spectrum that we'll have to choose between being able to see and being able to surf the web.

which was followed by a screed about our poor feeble useless government: "I have never had any confidence in the Federal Reserve's ability to maintain the value of our currency. But even I was astounded at this revelation. The complacency of the public in the face of potentially disastrous mis-management is equally astounding!"

To which I was forced by my own brain, at seizure-point no less, to respond.

You know, over the past 90 years, economically, we have been on a war footing around 6 or 7 times, had a couple of national level droughts, been hit by hundreds of hurricanes, crushed mutiple world-domination plots, pushed Europe into a Union to compete with us, and more. Also, we've become easily the most powerful country in the world, possibly by a factor of 2 or 3...

Don't encourage them to tinker, we're doing just fine, thanks. =)

The Fed's main job is to moderate change to prevent destabilising disruption of the market. They aren't expected to make it all rosy and purty and keep it that way. They just gotta take the edge off the worst parts.

I was going to be a lot more cogent, reasonable, clear-headed, and even meaner about the topic but I just couldn't bring myself to enough of a boil. Plus, once you look harder at those dates you realize what the have in common... One is a few years between WW1 and Ye Olde Tyme Dustbowl/Depression and the other the spare few years between Korea and the worst of Vietnam. I'd rather our dollar be a bit weak versus having to put down more empires and madmen and Democratic circus throwing.

But then I remembered there was one article he wrote where he mentioned that he was at the top of the google search for "exploding babies" and bam we had Mr. Scalzi's Whatever column in one go. Hopefully he won't mind following the Transformers...

While we're on the topic, Solve this, or read this book, or boggle at the existence of a Transformer's On-line Encyclopedia.

As was mentioned in David Chess' blog, scroll down a bit, this is the same Fukuyama that once declared History itself dead back in 1989. Not the sharpest stick-in-the-mud.

Not to sell short Dodd's recent J.D. but do keep in mind the main requirement for getting a Ph.D. isn't intelligence but is, in fact, stubborness. Well, that and an intense desire not to enter the workplace for a few more years...

Rather than poke apart the core of his nonsense, I'd just like to remind you of the big "Libertarian" light-goes-on from 9/11: pilots are suddenly aware that even civilian boat captains get to carry weapons with which to defend their command. That and a bunch of trained-to-be-victims people growing backbones and storming the controls of a plane.

And we've always been pro-defense budget, minus a few "$10,000 toilet" pecaddilos. The only difference I've seen between us and the GOP on that is that we are also pro-open-budget. If they are going to spend billions, I'd like a bit more of a peek at where it is going, thanks...

Boy am I going to miss these guys. I had kinda lost them on the socko stuff but I can't count the number of times I dug through their archives to dig out a suddenly relevant comic to show someone. Mostly I have problems getting past ten since my new shoes are the "tie" type rather than velcro and I usually lose my place by the time I get them off. Counting is hard.

The Clone/Burger one is my all time favorite. Lordy have I showed that to a buncha people! This one is my dream T-shirt image after I get rich enough to be above the law, you know, like famous people. There was Smurf humor too. And this one that everyone should memorize.

And it gives me a break from parsing text files into data structures... ah the pure fun of grunt coding.

I know The Wall was greatly improved by a combination of 2 different allergy medicines, pain killers, and some booze that one time. The next couple of times I saw it I was rather missing the purple floaty bits and sudden heart-flutterings. purple floaty bits, green rustling paper, red haze, yellow flashes of insight, blue notes, and pink floyd are a part of this great breakfast.

BTW, for my day off, I get rain. I was snuggled in bed and thought, "I should get up, today is going to be a great day." This was immediately -- seriously, it couldn't have been better paced in an Altman film -- followed by a huge *crrrrrack-booom* and the sound of hard rain pouring down. So I had to goof off for half an hour for the rain to stop, which meant I dozed back off just in time to get a phone call. =)

I always thought that The Universe hates me and wants me dead. Now I'm not so sure. It may just like seeing me be uncomfortable.

Video of stupid people gives me great hope for the future. Sooner or later I'm going to figure out a good way to exploit these idiots and make some money. We are, after all, talking about a society that once went nuts over garbage pail kids. And those particular drivel-brains are now the prime buying demographic. Their kids are the ones that got hooked on Digimon and Pokemon.

All I need is one good idea and I'm cleaning up, baby.