So I decided to do one of the Slashdot parties. Normally I try to keep my real life and my activities on sites such as Slashdot as separate as possible, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

So I drive the 45 miles to the location of the party, being held at the in-state rival of my alma mater. After struggling to find a parking space, and then walking around trying to find the building, I finally reached the location.

You'd think there'd be a sign mentioning the Slashdot party on the door, or on a bulletin board or something. All I had to go on was "Penguin's Nest, Dearborn Hall, Oregon State University". There were no signs of anything called "Penguin's Nest" in Dearborn Hall. There were not so many people around, and the ones that were there were studying or otherwise absorbed in activities that I didn't feel like interrupting.

I explored three floors above and one below ground level, trying to see if I could find anything that looked, sounded, or smelled like a Slashdot party.

Coming up empty, I went home.

18th October, 2007, we lost a dear old friend, a (mostly) Siamese cat yclept "Gwai-loh." Gwai was quite vocal, as are many Siamese; he also had some strange characteristics, for instance you could hold him upside-down on the ceiling and he would walk around - inverted - for as long as you were willing to hold him up there. For years, we kept him around the office, and he had a habit of coming up for affection when whoever he was approaching was on the phone. So he'd come up to you, get right up to your face (and the phone) and let loose with a really loud meow. Which you would then have to explain to the customer. One time I was on the phone with a rather famous Hollywood special effects dude when Gwai let loose with this, we had a good laugh over it. Eventually, we put up a web page on our site with a .wav of Gwai's signature meow, and a picture of him staring at a screensaver on a ginormous (for the time) monitor. A surprising amount of the code in WinImages was written with Gwai warm and settled either in my lap or across my arms.

Well, eventually, the old boy's liver failed, and I put out a rather startling amount of money to see if we could get around that, and amazingly enough, it worked. We got two more years of Gwai, all of it of quite high quality, before he finally laid down for the last time. His last couple of days were spent purring and head bumping while all the while refusing to eat or drink... finally, he just didn't wake up.

I miss him terribly. Sometimes it hits me right between the eyes and I can't even think straight. I can't dig over a decade and a half of unconditional love and affection out of my system with any amount of rationalization or any other flavor of self-bullshittery. Here's to my grizzled old friend. I only hope he knew how much I loved him in return.

Yeah Red Sox!!! Clean up the Rockies in the World Series!

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

So I wake up this morning, and Putin has dissolved his government.

Then, same morning, Russia announces a bomb with nuclear-level destructive capability. But they say they're not escalating.

Then, later the same day, the US announces they have a matter-antimatter (proton/positron) annihilation laser, which, they say, is to normal lasers as nuclear weapons are to normal bombs.

At the same time, Bush, old "We'll never pull 'em out", is about to announce a troop pullback in Iraq.

Oil's hovering around $80 a barrel. The dollar is in the outhouse, and we've basically had many of our civil rights eliminated or made irrelevant.

Did I miss something here?

As always, there are rumbles of discontent from the scientific community with regard to global warming. This article (vile email registration required) from R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, lays the overriding mechanism of climate change squarely at the feet of the various solar cycles. In the article, he explains that solar energy impacting the earth is part of the mechanism, while the sun's solar wind drives cloud formation in a complementary cycle that enhances the effect of the actual heat input. But that's not the kicker. The interesting part is he is predicting global cooling, rather than warming.

But wait; there's more. This months Discover Magazine (print version also) has a lengthy article about this same mechanism, that is, cloud formation driving the climate and the sun driving cloud formation by way of modulating the effect cosmic rays have, by Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

Svensmark says that we are in a warming trend, so his conclusions are at odds with those of Patterson; but they both agree that CO2 isn't nearly the looming threat that it has been made out to be with regard to climate change.

Hey, there are *three* of the particular item you are bidding against me for on eBay. I am bidding on two of them, leaving one available for you. Why don't you bid on the third one that has *no* bids on it right now, so we can both get what we want for cheap?

Or, instead, you can be a dickhead and continue to ignore the third identical item and drive up the bids I have placed on the other two.

Sigh.

Recently, Montana legislators made news when they passed legislation outlawing Real-ID, calling it a threat to privacy and liberty. Now, legislation making the taking of property by eminent domain for the purposes of increasing tax revenues illegal has been passed and signed into law by Montana's governor. For more on why this is a serious issue, check out the Supreme Court's "Kelo" decision, named after a Connecticut woman who (unsuccessfully) fought to keep her home from city plans to arbitrarily take it and subsequently turn it over to private developers with the objective of collecting higher tax revenues from the property.

Montana has a 2% unemployment rate at present, and maintains a balanced budget, something the feds might want to give some consideration to. I have to say that although I am typically very cynical about government, and although Montana has made some very serious mis-steps in terms of liberties in the last few decades, the state seems more interested in doing the right thing than the wrong thing at this point in time, and I am feeling very pleased with my representatives right now as a long-time resident.

My integer is 89 21 42 8C A0 98 90 D8 5B DF BE 21 EB 40 33 33. From this front page story.

You are hereby notified that redistributing this number is a violation of the DMCA and I'll sue your ass if you do. :-)

This was a two-part maintenance:

First, I just marked a whole bunch of people neutral who were on my friends list. If one of them was you, don't take it personally - though I doubt you are reading this since you met both of the following criteria:

(1) You haven't posted a comment or journal entry for a long time.
(2) You never reciprocated my friendship.

Second, I just marked a lot of people on my "fans" list as friends, except for people who haven't posted for a few months, and a few people who didn't make it past Slashdot cutting me off with "you have used this resource too much recently, please try again later."

I'll try and get to you soon.

If you feel you have been neutralized or omitted from friendship in error, comment here.

With the recent news about cellphone activity allegedly being the underlying cause for the sudden loss of large numbers of bees, an insect that forges an absolutely critical and irreplaceable part of the food chain, is Apple's iPhone doomed to enter the market just as cell phones face severe clampdowns, or even wholesale replacement?

Cell phones operate at microwave frequencies for a pretty good reason; basically, microwaves enable small equipment. They also do a decent job of penetrating many types of structures, if not through the walls, then at least through the windows. However, there are other frequencies available, lower frequencies that have been busy for many decades without any significant observed effect on bees or other life. People already understand how useful cell phones are, and there are manufacturers with significant experience in VHF radio, to name one technically possible replacement band — so an interesting market shake-up is certainly feasible. Excellent VHF transceivers are marketed by amateur radio manufacturers, for example.

Normally, we would assume that an established, profitable market similar to the cellphone market would be stable and have a long, healthy life expectancy based on the functionality offered to the market. However, if the bees go, we will too - and that, ladies and gentleman, is an outcome that not even Steve Job's legendary reality distortion field can deal with.

Perhaps Apple should get back to working on OSX, and forget the iPhone. I have this nagging feeling that the iPhone is going to be this year's "politically incorrect" device. I know I've stopped using my cellphone for anything but emergency calls; how about you? Seen any bees lately?

I was going to resist.

Then I wanted to leave a comment.

Same user name there as here.

I was browsing around freshmeat and found this little gem of a shareware program.

Here's the scoop from the description page. For only $10 you get:

General:

        * Delete ALL files (in the specified directory) with file dates older than the specified days.
        * For Unix/Linux system only.

Features:

        * E.g. Delete all files older than 30 days - regardless of the permission setting of the files.
        * Can be run manually from browser, telnet or automatically using crontab.
        * Support deletion of files in multiple folders and of different ages.
        * Only two variables to edit - the directory and the file age.

Requirement:

        * Perl
        * No MySQL needed.
        * No SSI needed.

Here's what they are charging $10 for. Only they've written it in perl.

--- BEGIN CUT HERE ---
  #!/bin/sh
  DIR=/path/to/directory
  AGE=30
  find $DIR -mtime +$AGE -exec rm -f {} \;
--- END CUT HERE ---

Only two variables to edit, deletes everything in the specified directory (DIR) older than AGE days. You can even do multiple directories with different ages by deleting the DIR= and AGE= and copying the find command a few times, substituting the values in for $DIR and $AGE. You can run it as-is from telnet, and from cron, and by adding "echo Content-type: text/plain ; echo" at the top, it might even run as CGI.

Oh, and you can have the above for free. But if you want to send me $10 for all 10 seconds that took to write, be my guest.

Every now and then I see a comment that is just ignorant, wrong, or just irks me like no other. This is one of those comments.

kimvette wrote:

Executive orders

They're unconstitutional as Hell but Congress and SCOTUS are not doing a thing about it, and we aren't either, because we're not using the power of the vote to correct the matter. We keep reelecting the same bastards into office time and again. We need a revolution, and the revolution should be this: vote out the old guard, and vote in candidates who actually care about long-term survival of our nation as a FREE country.

An executive order is a directive to the executive branch of the government to enact policy and/or procedure. Guess who is in charge of the executive branch?

Enter the Constitution:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

That line right there says the President is the head of the executive branch. Saying that the President cannot issue executive orders is like saying the CEO of a company can't give instructions to subordinates or enact policy statements for the company.

So, how exactly are they unconstitutional?

For what it is worth, an executive order can be unconstitutional if it is counter to the Constitution or laws passed by Congress. Congress can certainly revoke or modify an executive order by passing legislation - there is nothing stopping them from doing that. However, executive orders in and of themselves are not inherently unconstitutional.

By the way, the first executive order was issued by George Washington in 1789.

I bought my daily-driver Mac, a mini, pretty much when the PowerPC mini was released. I was tempted beyond belief by that form factor, and the price. I loaded it; a gig of ram, bluetooth, wifi, modem, big drive (for the day), the superdrive, and so forth. I bought every option because the more that was jammed into the box, the more I liked the form factor. I know it's a little weird, but there you have it.

Since then, I've used the little box daily, for just about everything. It's been powered up since I bought it (thanks to a UPS.) This year, a couple of months ago, I bought a Mac laptop - a top of the line 17" Mac Pro - but I still use the mini every day. I've rebooted the mini many times, almost always in response to an Apple upgrade or security modification, once when I went from 10.3 to 10.4, never as an attempt to fix a problem. I've never had any problems of that kind, frankly.

Today, without any particular warning, my Mac dimmed the screen, locked my mouse and keyboard, popped a black rectangle up which informed me in no uncertain terms that I needed to reboot. Now. I lost a long post I had been writing for Kuro5hin.org, and I failed to even reach the level of being annoyed about that because it was just so astonishing to me that the mini had actually - gulp - crashed.

I just want to say that I hadn't even realized that my expectations had been silently and sneakily leveraged to be so astonishingly high. After years of being screwed with, and over, by Microsoft operating systems, I no longer expect that an OS should, or will, crash. Massive kudos to Apple.

...and my little PPC mini came right back up, and yes, I'm using it right now, and I still don't expect it to crash. :) I was using a beta version of a web browser and my guess is it was just a little too beta.