23-5617-1021-401-72-1-429-12-5-79-434-2-1932.
11-1691-8-59-21-41-2161-2-1056-1650, 542-12-1339-37267.
147, 5443-9-21851-4676.

The movie industry likes to rank movies by box office gross, not counting for inflation, because this means the movie on top will always be a fairly new one.

However, using the Yahoo! list of top-grossing movies of all time and a handy inflation calculator to adjust all amounts to 2003 (the most recent year the calculator can do), the original Star Wars blows away the competition. It grossed $1,423,852,836.89 2003 dollars, compared to E.T.'s $839,840,340.63 or Titanic's $673,897,526.76

This better correlates with anecdotes I've heard about people who saw Star Wars forty times. With the advent of the VCR, who does that any more?

Our church has recently started recording the sermons on CD each Sunday. It's my job to get the CD after the service, rip the sermon to MP3, and put it up on the church web site. Nobody (other than the guy who set up the recording system) really knows how to work the CD recorder. There are hand-written instructions on it that tell which buttons to push in order to record and finalize the CD.

Apparently, some people are using the CD recorder as a regular CD player in the church. I've noticed that when I pop the sermon CD in my computer at home a random title and track listing pops up. I'm guessing that these are the title and first track from the last CD in the player. However they got there, they are burned into our original sermon CDs and can sometimes be humorous, as when the sermon was titled "The Pope on the Rosary" for a few weeks running (our church isn't Catholic). It's also kind of interesting to see what people have been listening to in the church during the week.

The best so far, however, was this week's sermon. The CD is titled "Sing You Bastards!" and the sermon track is labeled "C'mon Laugh You Bastards." I'm not sure whether the music director was trying a little tough love on the choir, or our assistant rector was looking for some new jokes for her sermon.

Of course, I change the label to something boring and appropriate before I put it online. But wouldn't it be awesome if you saw one of those signs outside a church announcing the week's sermon title that said, "C'mon Laugh You Bastards"? That would be one sermon I'd want to hear.

He may officially be the Representative from Virginia's Ninth District, but during the last few years he's often seemed to be one of the few people in the U.S. Congress representing the District of Cyberspace. Rick Boucher is running for re-election this year. I can't vote for him since I live in South Carolina, but to those of you who live in VA or near enough to help with his campaign, I suggest you take a look at the links below to see who I'm talking about. I'd be sorry to see this guy go.

DMCA Foes Find Allies in House
Two Congressmen Push for DMCA Amendments (/. story)
Boucher's DMCRA To Get A Hearing On May 12 (/. story)

Some of you may remember my technology policy / technology news site Technocrat.net. The site is reactivated. It's intended to be a more mature, and hopefully more relevant, forum than Slashdot. No ACs, a special focus on technology policy and high technology outside of the conventional corporate model, but conventional tech news as well.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd create a login on the site and submit articles. Especially original work, which hasn't always been well recieved on Slashdot - they seem to prefer linking to other people's coverage. RDF and RSS are available at http://technocrat.net/rdf and http://technocrat.net/rss, so you can keep track of articles from elsewhere.

Bruce

Well, the nutcases over at Christian Exodus have decided where they want to move: South Carolina. As someone who lives here, I'd like to say, please stay home.

This state has enough problems without a bunch of radical loons deciding to make it their base camp for launching a fringe political movement. Our education system isn't so good. We're having trouble keeping jobs and maintaining public infrastructure. And on top of that, we're still trying to improve race relations (with no help from another fringe political movement, thankyouverymuch).

We've elected a wonderful governor who is helping fix our budget problems, but he's still got a long way to go and is getting little to no help from the good ol' boys in the legislature. Bringing in a bunch of people hell-bent on destroying our government is not going to help the situation any.

And speaking as a Christian, it sounds to me like these Exodus folks have not been reading their Bibles. If they were, they would know that Jesus told his followers to go out into the world and spread the gospel, not huddle together in a little enclave of like-minded believers. Most of the New Testament is about people going out and founding new churches. If these Exodus people really took their mission as Christians seriously, they would be moving to the state with the fewest Christians and finding ways to help the poor and disadvantaged there.

Did you know that July 2 is the middle day of the year in non-leap years? The things you can learn from Wikipedia. It's also the birthday of Hermann Hesse and Richard Petty.

What are you planning on doing on July 2 this year? It's a Friday and the beginning of a long weekend in the U.S., so I will probably be working as usual, then going home and relaxing on the back porch.

On the surface, this place hardly seems like a bastion of facism. But according to this article, Rio Rancho principal Gary Tripp has decided that the students at his school may not create art or poetry that disagrees with his personal political opinions.

Tripp fired teacher Bill Nevins for supervising a poetry club where the students dared to express alternate opinions. Then he tore down art around the school that he didn't agree with and fired the art teachers who refused to censor their students' work. Here's another account of events from a local New Mexico paper.

Censorship makes my blood boil, especially in this case where it's public school kids who probably don't have the option of going to another school and escaping the situation. I really hope that someone comes along and tells them that their principal is wrong: it's OK to have opinions, and OK to speak your mind.

Please read this article. And please pass the link around, if you agree with it.

Thanks

Bruce

I saw this comic in the Atlanta Sunday paper, and thought it was pretty neat, if a little cheesy: Stone Soup

I just received the following message, sent to the network outage listserv:

UPDATE TO EXISTING OUTAGE BULLETIN
 
This notification was originally posted for 4/28/2004 10:20:05 AM. It has since been updated with the following information...
 
Details of System Outage:
****UPDATE (4-28-04 11:35 AM)
 
This outage was created by a termite swarm in the closet where the primary switch is located. The insects crawled into the switch and shorted it out.
 
The room is still full of termites and repairs cannot be completed until they have been removed. If insecticide is used, we will have to wait for an "all clear" before returning to the room to replace the dead switch.
 
Updates will be posted as information on the termite invasion becomes available.****

I found this search query in our site logs from yesterday. Yes, that's right: someone typed "people" in the search box on the university web site and ended up at our research group. I'm picturing some CE student who shut himself in his dorm room all weekend playing Half-Life and eating Cheetos and now, desperate for human contact, he goes to the university web site to find out where the heck all the people are.

Well, I can tell him that they're not here. Other than the server fans it is very quiet in the office right now. I share this huge room with 1 1/2 other people and they're both out. Maybe I should be searching for people. At least I know where they are: hogging the parking spaces in front of the mini-mart.

I knew this was in the works, but now it's official: 'SERENITY' GREENLIT

Deals are in place for Whedon to direct and for the original cast of the TV show to reprise their roles.

That's all I need to know. Oh, and the movie is expected to be released next year.

I haven't been able to find this information anywhere, not the jargon file, not Google, nor anywhere else I've looked.

Can anyone explain to me how "^H^H^H^H" became text-speak for "ahem"? As in "Windows 95 was filled with miscellaneous bug^H^H^H^Hfeatures." (OK, not the best example, but you know what I'm talking about.)

Last night I attended the victory party for John Edwards here in SC. It was awesome, one of the best parties I've ever been to. Everyone was talking and shouting and having a good time (perhaps you saw us on the news last night). One of the neatest things about the crowd there was I could go up to anyone, say hello, and start talking because I knew by their presence at the event we had something in common.

Art Alexakis, the lead singer of Everclear, was there. He'd been hanging out on the USC campus earlier in the day to drum up support for Edwards. I got to meet him and hear him play a short acoustic set. It was awesome! And Edwards' victory speech was good, a nice new variation on his usual stump speech. He didn't speak for long, though, since he's got bronchitis.

The day before, I drew a little cartoon while waiting for a meeting to start. Here it is. Yesterday's victory restores my faith in the average person. It seems not everyone is willing to roll over and do whatever the media tells them.