My house is cold, even though I have had the heat on for about a week and a half... This is the coldest d--n Spring in memory.

Short Flash vid...
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1273610622233RA56

Canadian pre-orders started today.

64 GB WiFi version ordered, should be here by May 28. No need for the 3G version, I can tether with MyWi on the iPhone.

My dad picked up the similar model on a trip to the US last week. Was playing with it on the weekend, awesome device. Perhaps not magical but still most impressive.

--Last night, I said something that hurt somebody I really care about.

--Needless to say I did not get any sleep, and had a horrible day wracked with guilt and shame - wishing I could take it back and make things OK again... We were actually having a pretty good time until I caught Teh Stupid.

--Looking back on it, I am appalled not just at my own words, but also the way I said them. I thought I was "being honest", but I was really being insensitive (and blinded to it by my own callousness.)

--I kept checking my phone for texts that never came, and feeling low. Spent most of the day thinking about it with a big pain in my heart, and keeping the tears back.

- I couldn't get this song out of my head all day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoW3bqnr7tw

--She is one of the best things in my life, and I acted the fool.

--Honey, Six -- if you're reading this, please forgive me - I really am sorry.

I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

I posted this here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1318879&cid=28869075 and decided I liked it so much, I wanted to save it, and point to it every time someone starts saying that we shouldn't have regulation of blah blah blah.

------------------

In a TRULY free market, the government wouldn't have power to establish currency, protect ownership, extend licensure... all sorts of things that the economy depends on.

The "hypothetical free market" requires perfect information, perfect competition, and perfect mobility. As none of these are feasible to attain, government regulation is required to simulate them or compensate for their lack. For example, legal definitions of what "organic" produce is, and establishment of certifying bodies (which are private enterprises, but have some sort of charter or something from the government that establishes their certification as adequate for usage of the term "organic") help compensate for the lack of perfect information about farming practices. Without them, someone could say "Yeah, my produce is organic!" after spraying it with tons of pesticides, and you wouldn't really have any way of verifying that unless you traveled out to their farm yourself and watched them for a while... or brought your own lab kit to the market.

So, markets that work on the scale we expect them to will always require SOME amount of regulation, and insofar as there is such regulation, there will be disagreements about how that regulation should be put in place. Some methods would favor the producer or the consumer. Hence, there's a business interest in attempting to shape the regulatory process.

I'm all for making lobbying illegal... but that, some say, is over-regulating the market.

1) They have perfectly ordinary and reasonable first names, but last names that appear to be semi-random assemblages of letters in a vaguely pronounceable order. (These are probably approximate transliterations of their true alien names.)

2) Dislike for pizza and ice cream, but strange affection for haggis.

3) Internet presence appears to date back to 1997, but hits only reference memes from 2005 or later.

When I find out more, I'll let you know.

Oh, to -not- be feeling sick on Cmas...

I've got the typical upper-respiratory garbage; excessive mucus, sore throat, mild headache. All stuff I could do without, especially since I have a largely phone-based job.

So far, 2008 hasn't been the greatest - except for Holly. It all would have been about 3x as hard to deal with if it wasn't for her.

I miss the Old Farmers Almanac and the Honey Nut Cheerios.
But, I got some really cool stuff this year - Holly went all-out and got me -all- the Halo sci-fi books, plus a GPS navigation system. So I got that going for me. ;-)

Wishing you all a great Christmas... :D

I had this come to me today.

Is this legit? A well crafted spam/mining operation? Sent to zillions of /.ers?

My tinfoil hat is buzzing, probably for no reason as is the norm.

Dear grub: My name is Lily Liu. I am a PhD student carrying our a project with my supervisor Christian Wagner (iscw@cityu.edu.hk) who is a professor at City University of Hong Kong. We are trying to understand the popularity of Slashdot to its active contributor, such as you. We hope you might be able to help us in our effort by answering three questions.

*Question 1:*
In your opinion, what (if so) makes Slashdot special among online discussion sites? Is it the content, the group of people it draws in, the discussion engine (e.g., content rating and filters), or possibly other factors?

*Question 2: *
Compared with other discussion sites you know or/and have used, do you consider Slashdot's technology platform to be better? In other words, does it encourage (a) more sense of community or (b) more active participation?
(In answering please also feel free to mention the other discussion site or sites you might be comparing to)

*Question 3:*
As a unique user in Slashdot, could you please rate your own reciprocity by assessing what you get from the community compared with what you contribute to it?(you can give an answer such as: i think i get more or i contribute more,of course we would be very appreciative for your explanation of detail)
**

Please let us know at your earliest convenience. We will quickly summarize results and gladly send you a summary, if you are interested (and sufficient replies are received to create a meaningful summary).

Thank You for Your Time and Valuable Feedback!

Sincerely,
Lily

Rock Out video from the great new disc Motorizer.

They had to change "Rock out, with your cock out, impress your lady friends" to just "Rock out, rock out, impress your lady friends"

Ah well, all is great. Hope they make it back here, you feel like you've been through 10 rounds with Mike Tyson after a show.

Things are quieting down a bit at work, which is nice. Holly and I are still doing well together :)

More updates as time allows...

Well it's pretty much been a horrible week so far. Been stuck in a stuffy room for Citrix training the last 4 days, (with NO BREAKS scheduled besides LUNCH, mind you) -- and been SO TIRED, that I can barely function well enough to drive all the way home from work without crashing into the guy in front of me. Not to mention that homeward traffic has been sucky all week too.

The instructor zoomed thru the whole course like a bat out of hell, which pretty much left me in the lurch as to: HOW DOES THIS TRAINING APPLY TO MY DAILY JOB?? ~:(

Then Wed, my hard drive CRASHED at work and I lost pretty much everything stored there, including the Virtual Machine I've been developing to make the server farm searchable. Last backed-up copy on my USB stick is from like the 18th.

On top of that, I haven't been able to see Holly all week (except for Tue night Bible study) -- then I get the guilt trip for BEING TIRED and having to cancel plans.

Need prayer -- overwhelmed, annoyed, and feeling like some major change needs to happen.

Just over a minute, you have time to check out this great ad spoof.

Haven't said anything about it till now cuz I didn't want to Jinx it. I'm working for a large agricultural company, doing monitoring and troubleshooting of their (extensive) Web server cluster. It may involve Vmware ESX admin skills in the future - and it's 1st shift :-)

So far it's 1/2 year contract-to-hire possibility -- please PRAY for my long-term job needs, as right now it looks like a very good place to build a career!

Going good so far -- will try to post more often, but it depends on how busy I get.

Please write me an email if you have time!

Dave

Some time ago I asked for virtual machine advice. Having read the comments and other stuff on various blogs and sites I opted to try VMWare, VirtualIron and VirtualBox.

Here we are nearly a year later and I have to say that (IMHO) Bang for the Buck goes to...drum roll VirtualBox!

The basic edition is open source, well supported and just plain works. A small download of less than 30 MB will get you running.

It isn't a bare metal install, but on my testing with Linux as a host OS it screams running XP and OpenSolaris. I have an OpenBSD VM set up but haven't gotten X to work yet. Installing the guest extensions gives you all sorts of cool stuff.

Eleventy thumbs up!