On the radio, Doug Urbanski is subbing for Jerry Doyle. He's talking about the Charlie Brown Christmas special. On a lark, I decided to google "Charlie Brown Christmas tree," to see what would pop up.

You really can buy anything on the Intartubes these days. Even a Charlie Brown tree. Too bad they're sold out. :-|

(Even that would've been more than what I have set up at home...which is nothing, because I've only been in the new place one week today and I'm heading out of town Sunday.)

Blackfive found this:

Going Postal

It's an email exchange back-and-forth between what turned out to be a congressional aide and what he thought were a couple of "31337 h4x0r d00dz" who'd fix his college records to improve his GPA.

It's obvious the mark has never heard of RFC 1149. :-)

From today's Best of the Web, in the sounding-like-our-enemies department:

"You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."--John Kerry, Oct. 30

"Witnesses say Mr Ahmadinejad also tried to ridicule the students by referring to the university disciplinary code, under which those with three penalty points are suspended from studies. 'He joked that he was going to issue a presidential order for those with three stars to be enlisted as sergeants in the army. That made the students really angry,' said Mr Zamanian."--Guardian (London), Dec. 18

Long time, no write...spent last week moving across town. Friday, I managed to load up a 17' U-Haul with most of my stuff, get across town, and unload the thing into the new place in about five-and-a-half hours.

By myself.

I'm still a bit sore from moving boxes and furniture around.

Anyway, you might find this amusing. A truther gets in an unsuspecting bystander's face and doesn't like it much when he gets his dumb ass handed to him.

Edit: I really should check my messages before I post.

Liposuctioned fat could be biodiesel fuel

One person's liposuction is another person's biodiesel fuel, as a Norwegian businessman wants to use suctioned fat to develop an alternative fuel source.

Biodiesel can be produced from either plant oils or animal fat, and Lauri Venoy sees the product from liposuction procedures as a renewable energy source, Aftenposten said.

Venoy's firm in Miami is in negotiations with a hospital to give the company about 3,000 gallons of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which the company says is enough to produce about 2,600 gallons of biodiesel fuel.

In Norway biodiesel is primarily produced from fish oils and used fryer fat.

Occasionally, the blind squirrels that are known as "Slashdot editors" find a nut. For those of you who don't bother with the front page anymore, give this a shot:

Silly String Goes to War Against IEDs

In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq.

Smash has this post up for the events of 65 years ago today. The first reply he received is a pointed commentary on how we dealt with existential threats then, vs. how we deal with them today.

(Reposted so that the trollbait from Captain Splendid (in his own mind) could be sent down the memory hole where it belongs. Welcome to my foes list, assmunch.)

SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0;
Empty set (0.00sec)

1. What is your occupation?
Software Engineer/Network Admin.

2. What color are your socks right now?
White.

3. What are you listening to right now?
Rush Limbaugh.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?
A couple of donuts.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yes. Haven't owned one since an old fart in a Lincoln cut me off and totaled my Chevette ten years ago, though.

6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
I would've said blue, but the damn Democrats stole that color. They're the frakkin' communists among us; they ought to be red so that the real Americans can call ourselves blue again.

7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
My parents.

8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
If I didn't, he wouldn't be on my friends list.

9. How old are you today?
34, until a little more than a month from now.

10. Favorite drinks?
Beer.

11. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Mu.

12. Have you ever dyed your hair?
No.

13. Pets?
A dog and a couple of plecos.

14. Favorite food?
Pizza.

15. What was the last movie you watched?
Casino Royale (the new one).

16. Favorite holiday?
They're all good.

17. What do you do to vent anger?
Hulk Smash!

18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?
Anything that lets you build stuff: Lego, Tinker Toys, Erector, Lincoln Logs, Radio Shack electronics kits, etc. Computers, too...had a TI-99/4A (bought another one to replace the one left behind in Germany), and still have an Apple IIe (bought a IIGS upgrade kit for it in '92).

19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?
Either of them is better than the scorcher that is a Las Vegas summer.

20. Hugs or kisses?
It depends.

21. Cherry or blueberry?
Blueberry.

22. Do you want your friends to send this back?
Cribbed from RailGunner: "Like I can stop a meme going around the journals."

23. Who is the most likely to respond?
?

24. Who is least likely to respond?
?

25. Living arrangements?
About to pick up a second condo, haven't decided whether to rent or sell the first. Just me and my dog.

26. When was the last time you cried?
What kind of damned-fool question is that?

27. What is on the floor of your closet?
Clothes, tools, and other junk.

28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?
Whoever's been reading my JEs the longest.

29. What did you do last night?
Stayed up too late.

They were created by man. They evolved. They vacuumed. There are many models, and they have a plan. (via The Corner)

Here's something to warm the cockles of our hearts, or maybe the subcockle area, or...oh, wait a minute...

Westboro Baptist Church Freaks Chased Away (via the Rott)

Everything you do comes back to you, whatever it may be. What you do as an angel, or what you do as a devil will come back and pay you for your deeds. This is the karma of preaching hate. I'm kinda glad the ACLU defends these idiots to spout their idiocy.

Via Break.com

Those religious nut bags at the Westboro Baptist Church were not welcome at this funeral for a soldier who died in Iraq. They are pretty much running for their lives [like the pathetic little nancy-boys that they are--ed.] and trying to drive away as fast as possible. This crowd would have torn them limb from limb.

What else can I say about this group than I abhor them. They are lunatics. They spread their message of hate not only at gay funerals and soldier's funerals, but any high profile funeral that brings them media attention. They threatened to protest at the little Amish girls' funerals who were shot in cold blood, and made an appearance last week at the funerals of teenagers killed in a tragic school-bus accident in Huntsville. They deserve anything that happens to them in consequence to their message of hate.

NSFW:

Love is in the air

A further indication of just how insane-in-the-membrane Hajji really is.

More sickness from Hollyweird:

Sundance Festival Will Feature Horse-Sex-Death Documentary

A documentary called "Zoo" about the guy who had sex with a horse. Or, more accurately, the guy who made a horse had sex with him, and died hours later from, ahem, internal trauma.

As if kicking puppies isn't bad enough, I heard on the radio this morning about some frakked-up mom back east who put her baby in the microwave and cooked the tyke on high power for a few minutes. Such has been the stuff of urban legends for some time, but now some sicko has gone and done it:

Mother charged in death of baby who might have been in microwave

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- Coroner's investigators suspect a month-old infant who died last year in Dayton may have been put in a microwave oven.

Director Ken Betz says the Montgomery County coroner's office has its own evidence, and he says the conclusion also is supported by police findings.

The baby girl's mother, China Arnold, was arrested yesterday and is charged with aggravated murder.

Defense attorney Jon Paul Rion denies that Arnold had anything to do with the child's death and says his client was stunned when told a microwave may have been involved.

The coroner's office says the baby showed no external burn marks, but an autopsy found she suffered internal heat injuries.

Police say a microwave has been taken as evidence.

More at el Reg.

I scored a cheap (only $10) USB WiFi dongle on Black Friday. I had no idea if it'd work with Linux, but I figured I could afford to experiment at that price. It looks like it'll end up fixing an annoying problem I've had for the past few months with the built-in wireless in my notebook...cool.

First, though, some background info. I bought a new notebook a few months ago...the HP Special Edition L2000, or the "Lance Armstrong special." I put Gentoo on it fairly soon after buying it, and over the next month or two, I got nearly all of the built-in hardware working with it. At this point, only three things don't work: the modem, the SD-card reader, and the built-in WiFi.

I don't care about the modem; I almost never have to use dial-up anymore, and if I do, I have a controller-based PC Card modem that works better than any winmodem ever will. Having the card reader work would be nice, but I carry around a USB multi-format card reader that gets the job done just the same (the built-in reader isn't a USB device, but instead is part of the system's CardBus/PC Card controller).

That leaves the WiFi, which is some POS Broadcom mini-PCI card. Neither ndiswrapper nor the bcm43xx driver work with it. ndiswrapper doesn't work at all. bcm43xx worked for a brief time, but (1) it has transmit-power control issues that severely limit its usable range and (2) while it worked in 2.6.17, it appears to be broken in 2.6.18. Since bcm43xx is a reverse-engineered driver (and it's reverse-engineered because Broadcom is one of those nasty Linux-hostile companies), there's no telling when (or even if) this problem will ever be fixed. (A few months earlier, it was questionable if there would ever be an open-source driver for Broadcom WiFi at all, so some credit is due the bcm43xx crew for what it has managed to accomplish.)

I tried replacing the card with an Atheros mini-PCI card purchased off eBay, fortunately for not much money. I know the madwifi driver should work with one of those, as I used one with my previous notebook. Unfortunately, the computer wouldn't even POST with this card installed. HP gets a Grr for that bit of brain-deadness (a pity, as everything else about this machine has been pretty nice, all things considered).

Now we get to the luck-with-cheap-hardware part. I saw that Fry's had a USB WiFi dongle in its Black Friday ad for $10. At that price, I figured it was worth a shot. Unlike all of my efforts at getting the built-in POS Broadcom NIC to work, this one was a snap to set up. It turns out that this is based on a ZyDAS USB WiFi chip, for which support is included with the kernel source for Linux 2.6.18. All I had to do was build the zd1211rw module, download some firmware files from the URL given by make menuconfig, move the firmware files to a directory under /lib/firmware, and plug in the dongle. Once I had the dongle's MAC address plugged into the access point, it connected to the WLAN without any further trouble. It's currently talking to a Linksys WTR54GS; so far, I've tested it with no encryption and with WPA-Personal AES encryption, and both work. The only snag I've seen so far is that it's only connecting at 11 Mbps...after some investigation, it turns out that you can set it manually to run at 54 Mbps (iwconfig eth1 rate 54M) once it's up and running (as long as your AP supports it, of course). emerge sync to the company Portage mirror hauled along at a decent speed.

If you need Linux-compatible WiFi and don't want to spend a fortune, it looks like this gadget is a winner. Even at $25, it's still cheap. At $10, it was a steal.