In the story "Is Coffee the Persuasion Bean?" I suggested that people PayPal me a buck and I'd post the results later in the week.

Of course I meant it as a joke but I had three people take my advice! Thanks to N.H., D.B. and K.L. I have, after PayPal's fees, a CA$1.86 balance in my account.

It'll go towards a mega-large Dr. Pepper or Pepsi Slurpee this weekend.

CHEERS! :)

(Pardon typos, I'm not in the mood to correct much)

I'm officially wisdom tooth free today. Had an appointment at the oral surgeon's at 8:45 this AM.

My mouth is sore even with the Tylenol 3s (codeine, baby!) and Advil. I can only imagine the pain without.

To avoid laughing and the associated pain I'm watching cheese sci-fi and horror movies at home today. Just finished Event Horizon What a sad rip-off of (Alien|Hellraiser|the genres as a whole).

Cheese Moment #1: the heroes are put into liquid-filled tubes to survive the G-forces of the ion drive (I guess the ion drives of the future will accelerate much faster than the ones today...) When they exit the tubes, their coffee cups and other junk are still on tables around the ship rather than being debris crushed along the back walls.

Cheese Moment #2:On the Event Horizon there's a long tunnel separating the main ship from the spooky gravity drive. Along the tunnel are loads of explosive charges so the ship can separate in case of an emergency. "Right. Those will come into play later." I thought. Later on Lawrence Fishburne is able to run around the spooky ship setting those explosive charges by opening a cover and hitting a button. Wouldn't such devices have some safeguards for people going postal or sabotage?

There's more but I'm tired of typing and am going to watch The Off Season Judging by the reviews I'll have another JE later...

Cheers.

orthogonal writes: "But the deletions were not done by process, but instead by the fiat of a heretofore unheard of "Front Office", an end-run around the community consensus that wikipedia presents as its public face."

Damn straight. Because the community processes were failing, and we must have some way to correct for that. Wikipedia is first an encyclopedia project, and only second a community.

So, about the clerks? You know what they do?

They open cases. And they close cases. Sometimes they nag people to vote when there are not enough people chiming in to close a case. This is more of a pain in the ass than one might think. Occasionally they will write summaries of evidence (though not always or even often) or will beat evidence and workshop pages into something resembling a proper format. The committee reads the evidence for itself, writes proposals, decides the case; the clerk position has in my experience had no effect upon the actual nature of the job.

How were the clerks chosen? People the arbcom trust and think would be good at the job, usually because they've had experience working with cases. (Yes, orthogonal, insert obligatory reference to Snowspinner^w Phil Sandifer here.) Their task is primarily in interfacing with the arbcom, not with the community; their positions exist to make our jobs easier and should not have any effect on the process as seen from the community side.

If a case goes wrong, blame the committee, not the clerks; it's our responsibility, not theirs.

(I'm sure I've written something very like this on the talk page of the Clerks page somewhere, but I won't bother to look it up and likely you won't either.)

helicobacter has launched a /. meme. Go to wikipedia and type in the month and day (no year) of your birth. Pick out three interesting events, two births and a death, and post them in your journal.

EVENTS:

• 1986 - Halley's Comet is visible in the night sky as it passes in its 76-year orbit around the sun.
• 1962 - Ranger 3 is launched to study the moon. The space probe later missed the moon by 22,000 miles (35,400 km).
• 1802 - The U.S. Congress passes an act calling for a library to be established within the U.S. Capitol; eventually this becomes the Library of Congress. It's a geek thing.

BIRTHS:

• 1961 - Wayne Gretzky, Canadian hockey player, coach, and team owner.
• 1918 - Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanian dictator (d. 1989.) I only picked Ceausescu because I remember how much the Romanians enjoyed executing him.

DEATHS:

• 1997 - Jeane Dixon, American astrologer (b. 1904.) And she never saw it coming!

I love my anti April 1 rants last night, very thought out and well said [rolls eyes].

Anyhow, I had some excellent news at work on Thursday and Friday, probably the best news of my entire 20-ish year working life, hence the celebrations last night. :)

It's still under wraps, will share later.

G (who can't wait to get back to work on Monday)

My posts of tonight illustrate that.

blahhhhhhhhhhhh....

Has /. ever published a statistical breakdown of visitor stats? Something like Google's Zeitgeist?

I think it'd be interesting to see how many visitors to an "open source friendly" site were actually using open source and non-monopoly OSs and/or browsers.

Granted there are things like proxies and agent modifing software but I think those would only skew the stats by a very small amount.

Taco? Anyone?

Slayer!!! I haven't seen them since 1984! My ears will be pounded to mush.

Oh yes, my little girl is due on July 5. You're never too young to start banging your head, right? Maybe I'll get a discount on a ticket for a 4-day-old...

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

So I went the Wimpy Route and started mucking about with the stuff on blogger.com. It's sftping to the server.

Not much there yet but have fun: I Rule.

"Blog" I hate that word, it sounds as stupid as it looks.

Any suggestions for "blogging" software? The world needs my input. Has to be Open Source, I plan to run it on OpenBSD or (less likely) FreeBSD.

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

My geek-days become a little more complete when I read a funny slashdot comment.

Ages ago I recall a trollish comment about open source. The author wrote about making an open source leather jacket from scratch. It was a bit gruesome and ended with something like "I'll be leet!" I laughed like hell at the time and didn't save it (yep, I save a lot of funny /. stuff) It's bugged me for a looooong time. Slashdot's search engine is lacking for this and google wasn't much help.

My challenge to you, good Slashdotter, is help me find that post! I'll give a US$10 Amazon gift certificate to the first person who replies with a link to said post.

Certain words that stick out in my memory are "open source", "leather jacket", "decomposing", "leet (or l337)"

Canada is having a federal election today. For my non-.ca journal readers I'll fill you in on how it's done here.

Every eligible person gets a voters card in the post. If you don't have one (lost, recently moved, etc) it's not a big deal if you have proper ID. Head off to the polling center, ours was at a school gym a short walk away.

Walk into a gymnasium at the school. Inside was a table for people needing directions and ~10 polling stations scattered around the perimeter, each numbered.

Walk to your designated station as printed on your voters card. Each polling station is a simple table with two (or more) people at each one, those people are witnessness for different parties (my area had 4 candidates (Conservative, Liberal, Green, New Democratic Party). They stroke your name off the list, hand you a paper ballot pre-folded with the simple verbal directions "Mark your choice with an X in the circle."

Walk behind a screen, open the ballot. You see a list of names, black on white with the party name and to the right a large white on black circle for your mark. Make your choice (who sucks less?), fold it back, hand it in. Every witness at that station watches the handoff of the ballot and the deposit into the ballot box.

Apparently the public can watch the actual count of the ballots although I've never done it. Right now on CBC TV they have live updates of the count, to the vote. ie.: a poll which just started the count here had just 8 votes counted when I started typing this.

Within ~3 hours from now they have tallied the ballots and a country of ~30 million people will have a completed election.

Is is that hard? Why do people insist on electronic voting? Because they can doesn't mean they should.

I will be 40 years old tomorrow (Dec 24) at 5:33 PM. I thought to write this now as I will probably be senile with broken hips and diapers by this time tomorrow.

It's been good knowing you all, I hope I can remember some of you... eh? what's that? Speak up! Get off my lawn, miserable hooligans!