Normally, I'm not here, dah-links. Normally, I'm elsewhere. Usually on twitter or fb. And yes, I'm bettiwettiwoo there too. Bien sÃr.

I've installed Fedora 17 on my laptop. I'm getting things dialed in, copying back over files I backed up and getting it all comfortable. The install went real well, though I did things differently than I've done in the past.
 
Going to the way back (for me) I had done full installs and just used the stock deal - choosing both gnome and kde things - then flipping everything to default to kde. That worked fine and I've been very happy. Though as I was getting ready to do this - I decided to go a different route. Fedora now has all these 'spins' and so I installed from the KDE spin. I downloaded the disc image, burned it and then booted to it. It is a live cd that has the option to install the image to the hard drive. I did so and got things installed. Then I just used the package management system to install all the other stuff I want. This approach was quite a bit easier as I didn't have to undo all the gnome stuff. I think when I am doing a full install in the future, this is the route I will take.
 
Normally I usually only run even versions. Skipping every other version has worked well for me with Fedora and their schedule. They usually do a good job of getting much of the best stuff back in the previous version anyway - so it's not a killer. But I just felt like kicking over to this one. Not sure why to be honest, just seemed like it would be fun to do.
 
I like to keep my desktop and laptop in sync somewhat - so I'll probably move the desktop to 17 within the next week. I'll probably go the upgrade path on that one.

I went into the barber today. She was Hispanic, so I said, "I don't care what haircut I get, but I don't want to look like Wayne Rooney."

Goddamnit. Now I look like fucking Wayne Rooney. Fucking Manc bastards.

Just ordered my Raspberry Pi. I got the email from Allied Electronics & RS Components, telling me that I could order, last week. I've just been crazy busy so it had to wait. It was nice though, because I had been getting emails that always said something like, "We got a bunch more boards and told the people who get to order them - your turn will be coming." I was getting tired of that. My turn finally rolled around.
 
The email included a promo code that allowed me to log into a page just for the Raspberry Pi and I could add the board to my cart and then they had a set of accessories. They are very reasonably priced so I threw in a power supply and hdmi cable. (I've got plenty of rca/composite stuff laying around - and I think I have one of those little hdmi cables but I wasn't 100% sure.) They also had other cables like ethernet and usb as well as flash cards. Though the CF cards with the OS already on them were listed as out of stock. How does that happen? Can they not create them faster than they can ship them? That's really odd. No matter - I'll enjoy setting it up myself anyway.
 
I think I will build a case out of lego for starters while I think of a better approach. If I had the time and motivation, I'd see if I could get something fabricated for cheap and sell them. But I don't, so I wont.
 
They said they expect it to ship in 3 weeks. So a little more waiting, but that is o.k. Gives me more time to think about ways I may try to use it. If I can come up with some good ideas that work well, when they become more generally available I'll get more.
 
My total - with the computer, hdmi cable, power supply and shipping was $66. That's with VAT and it being shipped to Hungary. Pretty amazing. It cost my parents more than that just to mail us a small care package from the states.

It requires government interference to turn a recession into a depression. That is to say, a government must interact with an economy, changing the fundamental landscape of that economy in a negative manner to cause a depression. The First Great Depression started because of land speculation. It turned into a depression when the various nation-states of the world enacted tariffs, reducing the complexities of the overall global economy. The Second Great Depression started because of housing speculation. It turned into a depression due to the high cost of education, drastically shrinking the overall adult population of the country capable of borrowing credit.

There's discussion about the necessity for new banking regulations in Congress today. Of course, all this would be easily resolved by the elimination of banking regulations. Specifically the 1999 Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA). GLBA is the reason why Too Large to Fail Banks are making Too Stupid to Succeed Gambles. Companies and people will always act to maximize their benefit. When a bank (or any business, such as GM) is too large to fail, it leads to moral hazard. In the case of a bank, this moral hazard typically results in poor investments and misleading consumers. For an auto company, this might lead to poor union negotiations or mismanagement of long term production.

Gramm Leach Bliley overturned the 70 year old Glass Steagall Act of 1933. It was an effort to make the United States more competitive internationally, allowing the CitiBanks and the Lehman Brothers to form massive conglomerates, mixing Wall Street and Main Street banks. Of course, it was precisely this mixing that led to the 2007 Financial Meltdown, AKA Second Great Depression.

If Congress was serious about fixing the Second Great Depression, it would start by reworking and reinstating Glass-Steagall. It would heavily subsidize community and state universities. It would legalize marijuana. It would end the wars overseas, then shrink and make transparent the military. It would create a Service to Eliminate College Debt program. It would heavily restrict and pull back on the outrageous EPA and ADA. Until these things happen, the Second Great Depression will continue.

Fixing immigration would strongly help. This would be accomplished by streamlining legal immigration and punishing through creating an expensive path (either through service or through monetary fines) to legality.

Education pays enormous dividends. An educated populace is a productive populace. Although we as a nation require manufacturing jobs, these jobs can be filled by educated and productive engineers. Decrease the costs of engineering and science degrees.

Millions are needlessly in jail due to buying and selling marijuana. A plant that easily grows and harms little cannot be outlawed. For comparison, firearms are infinitely more complicated to create and maintain. But attempts to outlaw them have failed in all societies but one island nation, where even this only lasted due to borders closed ala North Korea. These is no need to waste money incarcerating for marijuana crimes, nor waste the incarcerated man's free market labor.

The people who have already contracted debt for a college education cannot have this debt forgiven. Under no circumstance should the US Government ever participate in a debt forgiveness program for debt voluntarily entered into. Instead, a not very onerous program should be created to substitute labor for debt relief. One weekend a month, two weeks a year, though this program should not involve carrying weapons.

The EPA and ADA have created so many regulations that creating and maintaining businesses is difficult. This is an anchor on the economy. Although most small businesses are poorly planned and poorly executed, these drags should not be there to exasperate a bad situation. The EPA and ADA are commendable goals, but have generally moved into extreme areas that they were never intended to be in. Most government programs will do this in an effort to justify growth. This tendency must curtailed by Congress whenever possible.

Most importantly, the financial backbone of this country must be fixed. To do this, a Glass-Steagall separation of different financial regulators must be implemented. The free market works with many small businesses competing with each other. As a country, the too big to fail banks are good when they provide commercial services to other banks. But these banks cannot also create mortgages, sell these mortgages, insure these mortgages, and place a value on these mortgages. Information disparity will necessary lead to corruption, both of the buyer and of the Congress itself through lobbying efforts.

These small steps will fix the financial disaster. Greece will be able to topple and other nations in Europe too. But by increasing the size and complexity of the global economy, the United States can insulate itself from the worst of the shocks and make itself stronger when she emerges.

Found out today I'm going to Turkey in September. I realize that's a little bit off - but should be sweet. Gonna be in Izmir. From the pics it looks pretty darn nice. Where we will be staying is like a 20 minute drive from the ruins of Ephesus. Yay travelling to new places. But even better - the last 3 times I did these meetings they were in Thailand. I love Thailand but it's a lot of travel, even from here. Now that I'm in Hungary, Turkey is close. I'll only be 1 time zone over and my travel time should be around 5 or 6 hours - as compared to 24+ when I was going from Orlando to Chiang Mai. Woot.

I was driving in to work the other day and heard a song by Korpiklaani. I really like their music quite a bit. The song I heard was Tequila which is pretty fun, though PÃÃt Pois Tai Hirteen is one of my more favorite songs so far. They have that acoustic stringed instrument at the start and the way it is played sounds just like how the word "hirteen" sounds with the rolling of the r. Very cool.
 
I know that Finnish and Hungarian share some roots way, way back - though I don't think they have much in common now in terms of words or anything. But I do find it's pretty easy to follow what I hear as I read the lyrics as far as the way things sound making some sense. (Finnish and Hungarian are related to one another like German and English are related to one another. It's not a real close thing.) Regardless - I like the music a lot. It goes well with this little folk painting I bought in Slovenia.
 
I've talked about this a lot - probably too much - but here we go. I would love it if Slashdot had built in Journal exporting functionality. To my knowledge it never has. A while back LeoP created a Python program that would go out and grab journals. It's still out there - you can download it right here. Unfortunately it is broken. I am guessing (I haven't spent the time finding out for sure) that the regular expressions it uses no longer match the pages. All the URLs still work but I think the layout has changed too much. In a post I made about it Pudge posted his own archiver in the comments. It's a Perl script that depends on a SOAP interface with Slashdot. I can't get that to work either which may be due to my inexperience with Perl or some change in Slashdot.
 
So I've been working on something similar to what Leo made. I'm moving along pretty well - mostly because the old pl journal page is still working. ( I had posted that the old journal list was no longer working but it is now.) That's key because I have no idea how I'd go about doing it with the new javascript, self loading way - and even doing it manually I haven't been able to get it to scroll back anywhere close to the start of my JEs.
 
As I was working on my approach I found myself wanting to do some regex stuff - but that's something I've never learned very well. Looking for help I stumbled across a nice tool, Kodos - The Python Regular Expression Debugger. I'ts really helpful. It also uses some older QT stuff and doesn't seem to have been worked on actively for a while. So I emailed the author to verify that it wasn't under active development and asked about moving it to PySide. I'll see what he says if I hear back from him. I'll probably try to do it for fun either way - but it would be cool if he let me contribute that and have it be a part of the project.

If I have a boy child, and when he pops out and I decide I don't like him, I'll name him Skyler.

More here.

As a bonus , I'll probably soon reveal the unbelievable story of how I acquired my legal knowledge - by doing something nobody else ever has, and which, until now, would be considered pretty much impossible.

I'd rather not, because there is some danger involved, but it's necessary to achieve my goals in an open and transperent fashion.

Advice and help sought and welcome.