One of things I really dislike is that modern software companies jam pack computers with non-essentials. One of the non-essential programs that routinely gets me ticked off is tfswctrl.exe by Veritas. This program has something to do with writing to CDs. I have written to CDs about 10 times in the last three years. IMHO, anything dealing with writing to CDs should be loaded only when writing to CDs. Instead the program seems to get loaded at start up.

The current immigration debate is remarkably similar to the music sharing debate that rocked the Internet community a few years back. Both debates came about because antiquated laws simply were not geared to current needs. The strongest similarity between the IP and immigrant debates is the idea that if enough people break the law and create a social movement, that the laws will change in favor of the social movement.

I have to admit, one of my biggest enemies in life has been transcendentalism. Transcendentalism has been the rage since Kant.

A talking head on TV was squalking about how porn was ubiquitous.

As a hobby, I have been working on building community directories. To build the directories, I basically find central web sites in a community, then follow the links from these central pages until I have a good representation of the sites in a town.

This process brings me through a large number of web sites.

My picture gallery site seems stable enough to start adding pictures. (Assuming my ISP doesn't change the IP of the server, grrr.).

I have a big back log of subjects, most taken with my crappy old camera. The quality of pictures from this camera seem to have deteriorated through the years. Here's a few of of the new pages:

I finally made it out of the dungeons of doom on Rogue. My winning score will be up until 10:00PM MDT on 10/31.

Yep, I consumed thousands of hours trying to get out of that maze. I had the PC version of rogue ages ago. Even then I could not get out of the maze without cheating.

My final score was 29314 pieces of gold. (I could have spent a lot of time collecting gold to get a higher score. I just wanted out of the maze!!!!)

My user screen says I've posted 1001 comments. If I recall, I wrote about 5 messages that actually contributed info to the post.

Obfuscating your email address can help reduce the amount of spam that you receive. For example entering your email address as "name (at) domain.com" gives people the information that they need to contact you, while thwarting the spam bots.

It is also extremely effective to use an image with your email address name.

I've noticed several sites doing silly things like making the email address close to the same color as the background.

The thread on refining down to just three standard open source licenses did fire a few neurons. What I want is a world where people and companies who create things have a decent amount of control over the publication of their work.

I am listening to yet another assembly of talking heads on TV baffled that the exit polls did not match the election results.

Obviously, the Republicans cheated by burning the ballots cast by black people.

I used to believe in doing everything in moderation...until I realized I was being a bit excessive about it. Now I only do most things in moderation.

Once again, Congress is passing a pork laden budget. Even worse, a Congressional nimrod tried to sneak into the budget a rather nasty provision that would allow certain politicians in Congress access to Federal Income tax returns.

As Congress passes yet another flawed budget, President Bush predictibly calls for a line item veto (a favorite conservative cause.)

Once again, we are left with an election where the count is in question. In key states like Ohio, the election results are within a margin of error. If just a small portion of the Ohio vote were to turn to Kerry, then Kerry would be president.

With a second tight election, people are becoming more and more disenchanted with the electoral college.