OK. I just finished up watching this week's Lost, and I gotta say...

Oh wait. Thar be spoilers in dese hills. I'll wait while the folks who DIDN'T read the parenthetical in the title to avert their eyes and click the "Back" button.







Oh wait. Who am I kidding. This is Slashdot. And if you didn't read the title, then there isn't much I can do to prevent the spoilage since Journals (mistakenly) don't have an introtext/bodytext like stories do.

I'd submit a patch, but I doubt TPTB would take it. Oh yes! Smell the irony.

Maybe they'd take a patch for a <spoiler> tag. Hmmm....

Oh! I digress...

Enough spoiler space, yet?







Eh...that should do it...

Now it seems that Abrams and Lindelof (and primarily Liz Samoff, who wrote this particular bundle of joy) enjoy torturing their viewers. It took them a single episode to get me hooked, a half season to get the plot really moving, another half season (or more) to finally get to the mystery of the hatch, and a season and a half to finally get me to like Shannon.

And one scene to kill her off in the lamest piece of shock value I have seen on network TV in a looong time.

Now, of course, I'll be back to watch next week, being the shameless, addicted vidiot that I am, but it just irks me that as soon as they make a character worth watching they kill them off.

It's.... it's.... it's ...shameless TV formula, and I thought Lost was above that. Silly me. Last time I expect to be surprised by TV.

Ah well, that's Boone gone, now Shannon gone. At least they didn't get rid of Michael. That would have really pissed me off.

You may now proceed to make fun of me in the comments...

Read it and weep.

Yes. I am a shameless Redskins fan. And I know the warm fuzzies may vaporize over the next two weeks. But dammit, I'm getting my gloat awn while I still can.

And my, oh my. It's been over a year since I've written in these pages.... Shame on me.

(Cross-posted to WWdN)

The final table of the 2005 World Series of Poker started at 4pm yesterday afternoon, and wasn't finished until just after 7am today. I'm not sure, but I think that's a record. I'd call Pauly to be sure, but something tells me he's crashed out until at least Sunday.

Two qualifiers from PokerStars made the final table, and one guy, who qualified using free play points, made it to the final two tables, finished in 13th place, and won $400,000. Not bad for a freeroll!

Speaking of Pauly and PokerStars, we're doing a charity tournament on Sunday in memory of Pauly's friend Charlie Tuttle:

Charlie is from Clarksville, Tennessee and he's a twenty-six year old music enthusiast who loves hanging out and playing poker with his friends. Charlie was dealt a bad hand in life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he has been battling this past year. A couple of weekends ago, he was hospitalized because two tumors in his chest pressed up against his lungs, causing him breathing problems. I don't have to tell you how serious his condition was.

Felicia Lee, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, knows several top professional poker players, so she got several of her friends to call Charlie: John Juanda, Marcel Luske, Max Pescatori, and Barry Greenstein to name a few. In fact, when Barry Greenstein won his bracelet in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, he dedicated it to Charlie.

As Pauly wrote:

Situations like this one make you reassess what's really important in life. Las Vegas is a city built on greed. Poker is a game that often attracts some of the lowest forms of life. However, in the past two weeks, there has been a small group of professional poker players who have earned my respect and admiration. Amidst all the darkness and debauchery, I have caught a few glimpses of the bright side of humanity. The hearts of some of the biggest sharks in Las Vegas are filled with compassion.

Thank you, Charlie, for inspiring us all. We'll never forget you.

Charlie passed away on June 22 and his friends have organized a charity poker tournament this Sunday at PokerStars. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see lots of WWdN readers there.

Details:

SUNDAY, JULY 17th
18:00 EDT (15:00 CDT)
PokerStars
Buy-in is $20 — all of it goes to charity.
"WPBT Charlie Tournament" under Tourneys -> Private tab in the lobby

I'm sure this is just begging for vandalism (unless those douchebags have grown up and finally kissed a girl) . . . but there is an error on my Wikipedia page that needs to be corrected. I'd do it myself, but that's against Wikipedia editing policy.

I am not in Brother Bear. Willie Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Jr., and Reginald Maudling (Mrs.) are all not me. I've tried to get this taken off imdb, but someone (well-intentioned, I'm sure) keeps putting it back, and Wikipedia editors (also well-intentioned) are putting Brother Bear back up . . . so we're in an infinite improbability loop, and my towel is getting dirty.

Would someone please correct that, and cite this journal entry so it doesn't get corrected back?

[First, let me take a moment to say thanks to a grateful reader.]

Telemachus (nee "frugalRepairs"): No, your story is exactly the reason that Ask Slashdot exists. I don't feel that there's been any "reversion" at all, and I'm glad you got your hard drive installed successfully! I hope your first hard drive replace has built up your confidence enough so that you will continue to tinker with more hardware.

You can never be to old to become a computer geek, no matter what everyone else says. Men aren't dogs, and can learn new tricks whenever they set their minds to it.

Thanks for the question, and thank you again for the gracious "Thank you" note. (Is that enough thanks, yet?) -- It's readers like you that are the reason I get up and do this job.

Take care!

[ ...now back to your regularly scheduled dead journal space... ]

Seriously folks. Ask Slashdot exists to help the entire range of users, and while I try (and many times fail) to prevent the rank and file of FAQs. Soemtimes "Google" only gives you part of the answer (and many times gives you too large of a haystack in which to find your needle). As always, if you don't like the content, or feel that the stories presented are "beneath" you, feel free to move on to other aspects of the site, or better yet, to submit your own questions to "up the ante" of quality to Ask Slashdot. I have no problems with criticism (even harsh criticism), just as long as it's helpful.

Mindless flames, as always, will be routed to /dev/null...

...not again!

It's not just that Corrine Brown was censured (although it can be argued, by most diabolical logic, that there was a valid reason for her censure, but this country is already falling along a slippery slope when it comes to fairness in our elections. Florida has had years to get this straightened out, and yet here we are, not even in the home stretch and already rumblings of wrongdoing are being reported by the press. I should be encouraged, however. It is getting reported, which is a far cry from the deafening silence that was experienced before and after the 2000 election. I can only hope that eyes continue to remain on Florida and other states where such shenanigans may be likely, and that the scrutiny applied to the American Voting Process as a whole remains everpresent.

One wonders what might happen if another Florida-like scandal occurs in "Decision 2004".

Odds are, it won't be pleasant.

Cool! If you are interested in the inner workings, you can get all of the gory details to boot! Thanks to Slashdot reader Saqib Ali for the (inadvertant) pointer.

I have a livecd that fires up Sun's Java Desktop. I got it with a copy of Linux user and Developer, a magazine from the UK.

I'm surprised by how nice it is. I'm using it now. The browser is Mozilla, and it has flash and java working out of the box. I have a nice copy of evolution, and star office, all on the cd.

The whole thing is attractive -- it's slick, and looks like it was "designed". It's a morphix cd, and I like it a little better than the normal gnome morphix livecd that I use.

The only problem is that it doesn't have the best hardware support. For some reason it couldn't find the netcard on the mobo of a dell dimension that my mom owns.

In my previous entry, I talked about how my sister was able to sit down at the morphix gnome livecd and use the email program, despite having never seen linux before. This java desktop livecd is slicker and nicer -- I think it would be easier for someone who didn't know what they were doing.

It's just occured to me that for the first time in my life, linux is starting to make sense for ordinary people. I want to try to explain why in this entry.

Like most slashdot readers, I get called to help people I know with their computers. Almost every machine I see now is riddled with malware of some sort -- viruses, spyware, or whatever. My sample is skewed because people with machines that work well don't call and ask for help, typically. But malware is a real problem for windows users.

The average person doesn't do very many odd things with their machine now. They hit the web, they send email. They do their banking through the bank's web site. They use IM software to talk to their friends. They don't want to fight with the machines, or to learn how to do cool new things, for the most part. Most people I know aren't chomping at the bit to learn video editing, or how to use sound samples with a midi sequencer.

The computer is almost like their car. They need it to do specific things that are absolutely necessary, and they need it to work. They don't want to put time and money into it. They want it to be there, and to work.

This is the amazing thing: this livecd, the one that I'm running now, would do all of that for most people. It's very close, in any event (putting aside the obvious problem that it doesn't have any persistent storage).

This web browser is fine -- it works on most pages, you get the flash (evil though it may be) and you get java. It just works. The email program is great -- I love evolution.

I'm not a groupware person, so I don't use a lot of outlook's features, but as a mail client, I like evolution much better than outlook.

Star Office isn't as good as MS office in my opinion, but it's good enough. I think I could do a big writing project with it just as easily as I could with word. It's a little slow, a little bloated, but it works.

And this is the other amazing thing: Microsoft is dropping the ball. Everyone says that linux is "too hard". But it's becoming harder and harder to keep a windows system healthy in the real world. Time and time again, I see people who have perfectly good computers (hardware wise), who can't do anything because the malware is killing the performance.

Now if you ask yourself: What would those people prefer? A linux system, with the good old gnome desktop, open office, and evolution, which they can use more or less intuitively, or the old familiar windows system, with all of the malware problems? The windows system that *doesn't work* for them in the real world?

For the first time in my 12 years of running linux, I really think that a lot of ordinary users that I know would be better off with linux. I'm not saying that as an ideologue. My main desktop computer is a windows machine, and I love it. I was never sympathetic to the people who used to try to push their friends to run linux -- I've never done that in my life, except with a couple of geeks who really needed to see it.

But I think that you can make a real case for linux in some people's homes now. For the first time. It's a new situation that's derived from two new circumstances.

The first is the quality of modern linux desktops. They're good, and they're intuitive. The gui apps that are available (like evolution) are pretty solid.

The second is the massive security meltdown that we're seeing with windows and malware. It's causing a great deal of pain and suffering out in the real world.

*I* don't have a problem with it. I apply patches, don't run suspicious binaries, have anti-virus software, a firewall, and scan regularly with ad-aware and spybot. I suspect that most geeks don't have a problem with it. The guys writing articles in magazines don't have a problem with it, and the people who buy magazines probably don't have many problems with it.

But low end users are getting creamed by this stuff. It's hard to keep your machine clean. It's hard to keep a windows machine healthy in the real world now.

What I think has happened -- although no one has said it -- is that the difficulty of keeping a windows machine clean has started to exceed the diffculty a windows user has coming to terms with the gnome desktop. I think it exceeds it by a wide margin.

That's a pretty big thing.

Politics. It's like an itch I just can't stop scratching.

OK, so if the White House can release backgrounders for political reasons like attacking Clarke, why can't the Plame Investigators get the same priviledge? Has anything even happened with Plame in recent months? I haven't heard any real news about it in a while.

My mom has a small travel agency business that she runs out of their house.

When my parents go out of town, I go up and check on the mail, make sure the fax machine has paper, and all of that.

This time, they're gone for ten days, so I booted her machine from a morphix gnome livecd. That way I could set up my own bookmarks and cookes, configure the mail program so I could check my mail, etc., without mucking up my mom's stuff. My mom runs windows 2000.

I have the evolution mailer configured to leave mail on the server, and to BCC me anything I send. This way I'll have copies of whatever emails I've sent to friends from my parents' house.

Last night, I got an email from my sister. It was a BCC to a message she sent to my mom. "Wow, your computer sure looks different, but it's been awhile since I've used it." Then she went into a few practical details about travel bookings.

The point is that my sister, who has never seen a linux desktop, and who was expecting to find a windows desktop, sat down at the machine and figured it out. She didn't even know it wasn't windows -- I think she thought it was some sort of funky windows configuration. She sent email, and she probably used the web, too. (I haven't spoken with her yet.

She did this with no help, and no warning.

I think it's a good sign for the future of the linux desktop. It's a little thing, but it shows that things are becoming a lot more intuitive.

OK, Sam -- here we go! A while ago, I was impressed by RDewald and a piece of off-the-cuff fiction and it reminded me of an old excercise that I used to engage in from my BBS days:

Collaborative Fiction

So I was wondering who would be interested in such an experiment, here on Slashdot, in our journals?

The way I was thinking about doing it is this. We'll try a short story, for a test. If we like doing it, we can try and get more ambitious until we get bored with it. I have a few guidelines to start us off, and am welcoming suggestions from those who are interested.

First off, the list of guidelines, I've thought of:

• As stated, let's start off with a short story to see how well this works. Depending on the number of participants, we'll do [n] chapters of [n] parts, where [n] is the number of participants. If we get a large number of folks interested in this, we'll limit the number of chapters to 5-10 -- whatever you guys decide.
• Anything goes in the genre. It will be interesting to see how it starts and how well some of us can weave our characters together into a cohesive plot.
• Anything goes with your own characters. Treat them as you see fit, however no writing out someone else's characters. You can back them into a wall, but leave the owner a way out (and we're all friends here -- I hope -- so in the interest of drama, if you write a cliffhanger, please communicate with the character owner your intent). Characters whom their creators wash their hands of are free game.
• We can lay out the story chapters in several different ways. For consistency, however, each part from each different participant will start off as a comment in the journal that starts each chapter. As each part is fleshed out and adjusted in the comments, the JE entry that holds the chapter will be updated with the new text.
• Chapters can appear here, or we can alternate who starts what chapter among the participants in the comments attached to the previous chapter.
• Let's get the arrangement and clarifications out of the way, first, before we officially start writing anything.
• I would have liked to open this up to everyone, but in the interest of focus, I've marked this journal as "Friends and FoFs" -- this will probably be the recommended setting for each chapter unless the majority of you feel differently.

That's all I can think of right now. Let the discussion begin. I'll update this JE with suggestions, ideas and conclusions that get hashed out in the discussion.

Have at it, everyone! :D

_______________________________
So far so good, 3 people have expressed interest:

• johndiii
• SamTheButcher
• Em Emalb

When .gov sites like these start showing up, can the Independent Counsels be that far behind?

Well...yes! That particular law was encouraged to expire, and eventually did, on June 30th, 1999.

Still, it makes one wonder what the Justice Department is doing with the resonsibility it reassumed, with the death of the Independent Council Act. Why do we have a website made by the House of Representatives pointing out misleading comments by officials, that led to a war, instead of attempts at impeachments or censure for these same officials?

Hopefully the appearance of such sites means that someone is taking steps to make sure the current administration comes clean on the reasons they were made, in the first place. When such statements lead an invasion of a foreign country, in a war sold on false pretences, I would hope that someone would seek to find those responsible and make them answer to the American people as to why the trust we have place in them, to lead this country, has been so betrayed.

It's not that I want the Independent Counsel act to be reinstated, as was called for by Lieberman to investigate the Plame Affair. It has been used as a partisan weapon once too many times, with the taxpayers footing the bill of political prosecution after political prosecution. However it seems that this administration has been able to coast by on many questionable issues during its run, and in an Election Year, it is high time this administration becomes accountable for the things it has done, during its tenure in power.

Will this happen? Only time will tell...

I just got back from Starsky and Hutch.

Surprisingly funny. I bet the DVD will be great.

Best part was how anyone in the theatre under 30 didn't get about 70% of the best jokes.

Now I'm hoping that they'll make a CHiPs movie. I wonder what other late 70s to early 80s TV shows would translate well into movies?

Oh, and if you're not watching TRIO every night, you're really missing out on some fantastic television.

Crude, rude and lewd, but so awfully, accurately true.

Controversial issues, aside, I was pointed to this article, today and just thought I'd share this bit of zen:

...Is this true? Are there actual verses decrying gay marriage? Are they anything like those other Biblical verses, about the rules and regulations surrounding marriage that are making the rounds on the Net right now? Real verses. Actual verses. Verses o' sanctimonious fun. Have you seen them?

Like this: "Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take multiple concubines in addition to his wife or wives." (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21).

Or maybe: "A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be stoned to death." (Deut 22:13-21) Isn't that cute? Isn't quoting Bible verse fun? Ask your local pastor about that one. ...

Thank God (pun, intended), for the New Testament.

As the differences between New and Old Testament show, things change, ust like things are changing now. Hopefully these changes, in whatever form they finally settle into, are for the better.