Well, that went from informative to ranting pretty quickly...

I have my options set to use Classic Index under both the Classic Index tab and also under the Dynamic Index tab. Yet, I'm getting the Dynamic Index. I'm running FF3 on an Ubuntu install (which has got to compromise a huge chunk of the the /. populace), and instead of being able to simply change the threshold as in days of yore, I have this ugly-ass, stupid slide that FALLS OFF THE BOTTOM OF THE F'N SCREEN!

Seriously slashdot, you are supposed to be a den of nerds. A place where geeks congregate to commiserate about the poor decisions made by their Pointy Haired Overlords that lead to a crappy product. So HOW CAN YOU JUSTIFY PROVIDING SUCH A CRAPPY PRODUCT!

I've been here 9 years now and seen a robust community decimated by crappy "improvements." Some of the improvements have been really good. The Classic Index is a fantastic example of that. And yet, instead of doing tweaks here and there, you roll out the crappy, unnecessary kludge called D2. In all seriousness, who was actually clamoring for this? Seriously, who?

Frankly if, the good index is truly gone, then there's a damn good chance I am, too.

Boise St. is one step closer to a National Championship appearance. Assuming they win out, which has been their "thing" after all, they'll be a single loss by either Ohio St. or Oregon away. Not that a it would surprise me that a 1 loss Alabama would eventually get ranked above Boise St., even though Alabama could've easily lost to Arkansas, too.

The important thing is making the BCS all the more ridiculous so we can finally get a playoff.

Today, I realized I hadn't told you guys I'm engaged.

I went to tell you, and found Slashdot journals down. I figured they didn't care, but turns out it was brought back up.

Anyway, yeah, I'm engaged to a lovely, smart and funny gal who was already into Linux and tabletop roleplaying when I ran into her. May 20th, 2012.

Not bad for a guy who spent his formative years on Slashdot.

They fixed it almost as soon as I saw it, but I managed to get a screenshot of what some would argue is the epitome of a Slashdot story these days :-)

https://slashdot.org appears to be unavailable this morning. The regular address (http://slashdot.org seems to be working as usual.

(SSL access is available to subscribers, and generally provides a more stable Slashdot experience, such as it is.)

And I'm back. Did a 3 week road trip, touching as far South as Carlsbad. I reconnected with a lot of friends and family and am now home with the puppy dogs (back to work tomorrow). I would also add that Medicine Lake, by Mt. Shasta, is stunning beautiful.

World Suicide Prevention Day. Story worth reading. Learn about causes and warning signs.

It may well be closer to you than you think. And you can make a difference.

Although he has admitted covering up sexual abuse, Cardinal Sean Brady, archbishop of Ard Mhacha (Armagh), will not resign. He ought to be in jail. The continuing record of the Catholic Church on this is shameful - going right up to the Pope. No one in the hierarchy really seems to understand.

It's interesting to note that despite its modest size (a population of just under 15,000 in 2001), Ard Mhacha is the seat of the primates of both the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

        Look at my face I can hear you
        Just how I feel I will tell you
        Wake up and start feel emotions
        When you're dancing on the club

        We are the kings of the music
        I wanna be your illusion
        Wake up and start feel desire
        When the beat is coming up

        The beat is coming up

        Look at my face I can hear you
        Just how I feel I will tell you
        Wake up and start feel emotions
        When you're dancing on the club

        We are the kings of the music
        I wanna be your illusion
        Wake up and start feel desire
        When the beat is coming up

        And sometimes
        I wanna see the sunshine
        The night is cold
        I can freeze so hard

        And sometimes
        I wanna see the starlight
        The moon is dark
        We can see the stars forever

                                        -- East Clubbers

I would be the warmth in your coldest night...

        i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
        my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
        i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
        by only me is your doing,my darling)
                        i fear
        no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
        no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
        and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
        and whatever a sun will always sing is you

        here is the deepest secret nobody knows
        (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
        and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
        higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
        and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

        i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

                                        -- E. E. Cummings

As ever...

        From you
        I don't want anything new
        no more gifts
        nor the scent of landscapes
        rising to fill us,
        no bouquets of insight
        left by my head
        in the tenderness of morning,

        no intoxication
        of thoughts that open horizons
        where rooms are low,
        nor the sever of spring
        under the grid of old words
        that has set on our skin,
        nor my favorite blue,
        the cobalt
        colour of silence.

        No.
        All I want
        is your two hands
        pulsing in mine,
        the two of us
        back in a circle
        round our love.

                                        -- John O'Donohue

Thee, now and always.

Every Sunday, and often on a weekday or two, millions of Americans eat Jewish flesh and drink Jewish blood. As a Jew, this scares the shit out of me.

The people doing this claim theyâ(TM)re faking it; that itâ(TM)s not real Jewish flesh and blood. Yeah, right. Thatâ(TM)s like Rush Limbaugh saying he really isnâ(TM)t a hateful bigot, heâ(TM)s just kidding, hah hah hah.

But let me tell you something: before the Army sends you off to shoot at real people and kill them, they have you practice on human-shaped targets.

CPR and first aid are the same way. You practice on a dummy before you are turned loose to do it on real people.

And kids who torture or kill pets often grow up to be serial murderers.

Do these âoeChristiansâ expect us to believe that after practicing for years, even for decades, on âoetransubstantiatedâ fake Jews, they donâ(TM)t want to sink their fangs into the real thing?

I am not a big fan of Islam, but given a choice between people who blow up a few Jews now and then and people who openly practice ritual cannibalism on Jews all the time, Iâ(TM)ll choose the Muslims any day of the week â" especially Sunday.

Hey, for anyone who still reads this. Rosetta Code's doing awesome, content-wise, and we're starting to implement Semantic MediaWiki. (To what end? Not sure. I've got a couple ideas, but I'm more an opportunist than a front-end planner.) I've also been shooting a bunch of photos and putting them up online--even photos that aren't cosplay, if you can imagine that. (Which you probably can; I doubt many who read this were following me on Flickr back when I went to Anime Weekend Atlanta for the first time in 2007. If you want to read what I'm really thinking, either follow me on Multiply, or see the same stuff over on LiveJournal--but get your adblock armor up; it's a scary place. I'm also on Twitter, if you really care. I'm a minimal participant, really.

If I show up as a fan for you here, I do read your journals; the My Amigos RSS feed is still useful.

Why this collection of links to me at other places? Easy; I know there are still some of you here who never showed up in those other places, and I miss the interactions. I'd post my blogs here, too, but Slashdot has relegated itself to an incredible degree of backwater status. I was lucky to find the "Write in Journal" link. I'm tempted to find some Perl script to have it suck in blog posts via RSS, and post them to Slashdot. (That's how I'm inducting my blog posts into Facebook, too.)

I miss what this place used to be. I miss the people this place used to have. I still see some of them on two or three other social networks, and some of the bonds there are tighter than they ever were here, but there's still a bunch of you missing.

Yes, there are "terror babies" among us. But most of them were planted here many years ago by Russian Communist spymasters, not recently by demented Muslims.

One notorious Soviet-planted goon is Sarah Palinsky. Her parents and her husband's parents were secretly transported across the Bering Strait from The Motherland in the 1950s.

Note that Todd Palinsky has agitated for Alaska to secede from the United States, no doubt so that it can rejoin Russia, and Sarah Palinsky has noted, wistfully, that she can see The Motherland from her home in Alaska.

This song -- http://tinyurl.com/Sweet-Ala -- could easily be rewritten as "Sweet Home Mother Russia" and used to help Americans realize that Red states are going to become Red for real.

You see, the nefarious commie plot is subtle. Right now, in Phase One, the main objective is to impoverish the American working class while further enriching the richies. Phase Two, of course, will be the violent workers' uprising. In Phase Three, a resurgent Soviet Union will send troops "to restore order."
Newt Gingrovich, Ron Paulowsky, Rush Limbauvich, and Glenn Beckovits are also leading members of this evil conspiracy.

So, too, is GOP Chairman Michael Stalin (Stalin is "Steele" in Russian).

Please, fellow Americans. Go to the rifle range and hone your shooting skills. Make note of the tea party people, Republicans, and other traitors who live near you, and be ready to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights on them when the day comes, which won't be long now.

And remember, no matter how evil the Richies and their Republican stooges become, We are the country, we will survive!

Face it: we're going to have at least two or three more years of economic decline, and Obama is a DINO who worries more about his image on Fox News than about doing anything that might actually help working Americans, so we might as well have a Congress that agrees with him.

Here's what we'll get if we vote in a Republican Congressional Majority:

• More local and state government layoffs as federal aid to local jurisdication stops
• "Obamacare" gets repealed despite presidential veto; Blue Double Cross and other health care insurers raise rates 50% to celebrate; Columbia/HCA and other Medicare-defrauding pain profiteers rejoice
• Less Medicaid funding; reductions in other medical care for poor people; many deaths due to lack of medical care
• No taxes at all on Paris Hilton, the Walton heirs, and other useless rich parasites, lower income taxes on speculators' proceeds than American Workers pay on their salaries (if you include FICA, which *I* do)
• National parks and other government amenities we take for granted closed or their operations drastically curtailed
• More homeless people as more of the long-term unemployed stop getting any government aid at all
• More crime as more of the long-term unemployed stop getting any government aid at all
• More BS from Republicans about "the free market" and how "fiduciary reponsibilities" are the reason their asshole profiteer buddies keep laying off American workers and sending jobs overseas even as more long-term American unemployed stop getting any government aid
• This George Carlin routine becomes the most popular video on YouTube
• Formation of local Coffee Party groups that hold mass firearm training and target practice sessions at local shooting ranges
• Massive long-term unemployment leads to wave of assassinations of Republican politicians, thieving richies, and Fox News anti-American commentators by laid-off blue-collar workers who have nothing left to lose
• Assassination fear leads to mass resignations by Republican politicians, corporate thieves, lobbyists, and other traitors
• 2012: Election of a strong Democratic majority in Congress and a "for real" Democratic President with balls, possibly Hillary Clinton -- who appoints Barrack Obama to the Supreme Court the next time there's an opening.

Yeah. Let the Republicons do their worst for the next two years. We're Americans. We're resilient. We will survive. And once we totally discredit them, we can get on with the business of moving America into the 21st Century.