There was just something about Christopher Walken.

Too bad more slashbots can't be forced to read this, Clockwork Orange style. Seems the last time the issue came up on the front page, hordes were claiming that iTunes and iPod were a complete lock in, despite the true facts.

I just wasted hours of time trying to figure out how to install three goddamn upgrades to a debian system that doesn't currently have any network connectivity. I *finally* found a debian document that talks about using dpkg-something and creating a Package file and gives the most brief mention of putting "deb file:/dir debs/" somewhere. Of course they mean in the sources.list file, but they couldn't explicitly say that. And guess what? It didn't work even then, even after an apt-get update (which they conveniently didn't mention either).

I like apt. It's sweetly convenient to do "apt-get upgrade" and not have to think any further. But it is the most useless PoS possible if you have no network.

I need advice for a decent distro that actually works in a normal fasion (i.e. 'hey, install the package in this file' without jumping through a billion hoops, and by the way, we have this nifty automated tool too, oh and we document things in multiple places instead of making you find the needles in the haystack of self-referential "no, see THAT man page" crap), without having to pay Red Hat's exorbitant support fees. I was thinking of checking out Ubuntu until I saw that it's just a Debian variant. Does Fedora fit the bill?

And of course all this stems from yet another round of "Linux can't do wireless". Decided I wanted to make my network more secure with WPA instead of WEP, had an article talking about how easy it was to set up wpa_supplicant to work on Linux, and away I went. My wife's mac changed over easily. My goddamned PRINTER changed over easily. Hours have been wasted in the last three days trying to get either one of my wireless linux boxes to work even halfway. I did get the laptop going, but if I run VPN (seeing as it's primary use is for WORK) it panics. Joy. And that's SuSE, so don't go there either. At least SuSE uses a halfway sensible package manager.

The Divinyls most recognizable hit, covered by.... a girls choir.

diggit: http://www.devilducky.com/media/42822/

If you haven't seen it yet, Library Thing is yet another nifty "web 2.0" (blearcgh) web application/site. Lets you catalog your library. Despite my dislike for the hype over Ajax and similarly driven sites, it works pretty well and has a lot of cool stuff. Plus you can go browse my library (once I get all several hundred put in, I'm only about at 350 right now). I have the same nick there as I do here.

It's been very entertaining to see, for example that there actually IS at least one other person who still has a copy of the Tab book "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot" book from like 1978.

Roses are red
Grass is green
What the hell is this
poetry meme?

Have a happy birthday, hope I made you laugh at least once. :-)

1) I have a killer Google Maps app in mind, but don't know enough about the API or anything to know if it's feasable. Feel free to take the idea, but if you make lots of money, I'd like at least like a nice dinner out of it :-). The idea: let me map my route from A to B and THEN do a search for businesses, mapping out which ones are closest to my route (within a distance I can select). Example application: I drive here to there to work every day, and I want to know where I can find a CompUSA that's "on the way home", despite never seeing one along my route.

2) Everyone says they want free elections and the spread of democracy. But I'd argue that none of us really do. We want people to be compliant with our wishes for them. Good example: everyone talks big about free elections until suddenly Hamas gets into power and it's a problem. Or the "threat" of the islamists in Iraq. If free elections are truly free for the people participating, you have to be willing to peaceably take the bad with the good, just like here you have to take the other side winning occasionally without rioting. Any discussion otherwise simply underscores that what we really want is for our ends to be met "nicely". Maybe for some peace activist the ends are "we want them to not kill each other" but they're still the peace activist's ends, not necessarily theirs.

First: I don't usually read dailykos, mostly because of their reputation as stonethrowers on the left. Mirror image of LGF maybe. Or maybe that's not fair, but I don't usually read it anyway. BUT the following seems pretty free from BushBaiting, and puts an interesting spin on the "muslim cartoon" fiasco: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/2/5/13149/60748

And then there's this hilarious yet totally blasphemous movie that puts the lie to the moron on NPR claiming that blaspheming against christians or jews wouldn't be tolerated, so why is everyone defending those cartoons: http://mercurio.free.fr/Video/jesus.mov While that's not exactly mainstream media, you really have to wonder where he (the NPR guy) has been for the last 40 years or so. The video is pretty typical, actually.

That some of you guitar heros would LOVE playing this thing: http://www.worth1000.com/view.asp?entry=252349&display=photoshop

Oh, and the reference to making a baby for the first time. But otherwise....

http://community.livejournal.com/21406/4276.html?thread=1222068#t1222068

Ridiculous, if it weren't so scary. Sounds to me just like stories of apparatchiks forcing particular outcomes and statements on Soviet scientists, actually.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/02/04/outrage-at-attacks-on-nasa-science/

Time again for another backup of the iBook. This time the battery board is hosed; the battery won't charge, the little LED won't come on, but everything else works fine. The nice thing about this is that it gives us some leisure to get the backup done easily/straightforwardly.

So I'm questing for a good (enough), cheap/free backup solution for Tiger that won't make me manually figure out how much will fit on a CD. I want to say "back up this whole directory and prompt me when you need another disc".

I hear that the Apple Backup program works for this, but in a big WTF (shouldn't this be a BASIC OS FUNCTION?) it is (reportedly) only of any use to burn to CD if I own a .mac account. Hello? If I have a .mac account, chances are good I'll do most of my backup to there maybe?

Google is not coming up with a huge amount of helpful suggestions (possibly due to the ambiguity of "mac os x" or "macos x" or any of the other dozen variants I could use to indicate what OS I'm after. Anyone have any good suggestions? ( and no, Retrospect doesn't meet the "cheap/free" criterion)

I was a big fan of the pixies back in the day.

Recently I was reading (yet another) summary of the senate hearings on Judge Alito, and was reminded yet again of the lovely word "bloviation".

For those of you who can't already see where this is going, I'm trying to find somewhere the inspiration to actually finish the idea inspired by "Wave of Bloviation".

Dude, you have to enable comments :-)

And I forgot your email address, lost in the morass of my email overload.

CINO is a good name. I think Thomas actually had a sorta reasonable argument, how can you square this decision with Raich (medical MJ), except it's pretty easy to point out that MJ is explicitly called out by Congress (not just the AG) as schedule 1, whereas this case has to do with non-schedule 1 substances. I like that Kennedy authored the opinion.