My logs today revealed the following two port scans.

Fri, 2009-09-04 15:24:10 - TCP Packet - Source:216.34.181.45 Destination:X.X.X.X - [PORT SCAN]
Fri, 2009-09-04 15:24:12 - TCP Packet - Source:216.34.181.45 Destination:X.X.X.X - [PORT SCAN]

So I left wondering why slashdot is port scanning from 216.34.181.45?

The Madison WI alder for district 20 Thuy Pham-Remmele is an idiot.

I mostly vote for democratic candidates and when I donate money to candidates I mostly donate to democratic party members. But I never donate to general campaign funds because those funds can be divvied up and used to help jackasses like Joe Lieberman and John Dingell get reelected. Today I would like to highlight a couple more reasons why I do not donate to general funds:

Blanche Lincoln, Senator Democrat from Arkansas:
In these tough economic times when rich people are scraping to get by and Blanche feels their pain. To help them she wants to cut estate taxes for super rich, the top 1%.

North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad is a fucking jackass: First, he opposed a provision to limit tax deductions for high-income earners. Second, he opposed a new cap on crop subsidies to farmers who take in more than $500,000 per year. And, third, he upbraided Obama for not doing more to reduce the budget deficit.

*I would be more likely to donate to green candidate general funds, but greens are not often competitive at the national level due to our undemocratic outdated election laws(electoral college, gerrymandered districts, Simple majority voting).

It just astonishes me that they got everyone out of that plane safely. Kudos to the Coast Guard and whoever else ran that operation. It's absolutely mindblowing.

It just astonishes me that they got everyone out of that plane safely. Kudos to the Coast Guard and whoever else ran that operation. It's just mindblowing.

My new wireless router came with a coupon for 50 free downloads from eMusic. Is there a particular strength that store has? It seems like mostly the usual unfiltered jumble of unknowns, with no good way to see what gems others have found and Todd Snider is the only one I know at all, with shovelware albums from some bigger-name artists mixed in.

Any suggestions for an artist or genre I could try out, or a better way to browse? The site also has a lot of scripting that my Firefox doesn't like.

I'm not qualified to have an informed opinion on the bailout bill, and I certainly understand the skepticism and hostility towards it. But I get the feeling that this was a huge missed opportunity to avoid disaster...

Anyway, Shanah Tovah to all Jewish readers!

houghi and mr.witherspoone, a couple of comments down on this exchange from the Saudi supercomputer story.

But I see Frank Mundus died yesterday. I read Monster Man as a kid, and remember it almost verbatim today.

I'm still not entirely sure what that commercial is selling (Oreos, right?) but I wonder if I'm not the only person who watched it and thought "The four of them of them totally ought to date!" They seem like they'd hit it off, actually, and it might be the only way the Brady-Bundchen/Monahan kids will get any serious competition.

Remember when there used to be those window managers whose big selling point was that you could do things to them in LISP, back when people still cared vehemently about window managers. We now have qtile which now allows the same thing in Python. I'll give it a try to see why anyone would want that, which I never understood for the LISP browsers.

Either I'm easily amused today or there's a lot to post about: Hal Porter on the Las Vegas Star Trek exhibit.

Chinese lab chooses abbreviation for their newly-invented copper nano-tubes -- points if you've already guessed where this is headed...

Fallingcow, on a pretty dumb Ask Slashdot. (Not dumb of the questioner, necessarily, but you'd think Timothy would know better.)

This deserves a front-page link but Friday afternoon at 4 isn't conducive to my composing a blurb: sudoku solving using Debian's package dependency resolver.