/blog
Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief:
Blogging here has been fun and all, but I think it’s time to call it quits.
The longer version:
I ‘ve enjoyed having a place for the last few years to post things that ignite my interest, but as time has gone on I’ve found less and less I want to write about.
Religion? I don’t believe in God and you religious people are so tiringly repetitive. You got boring to write about a long time ago.
Politics? It’s so tiringly repetitive.
Linux? All I’ve found to write about Linux lately is… nothing, really, because I’m no longer playing with it as a hobby. I set up a LaTeX environment, install media codecs, and let things lie. I’m not doing much with it.
I’m not the kind of person to spam the Interblag with my personal life or even more funny pictures, so there’s no longer any reason to continue posting here.
The comment threads are still open and I’ll check back every once in a while to see if anybody’s said anything new but there are no longer any new posts for me to add.
LOL@Republicans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7908476.stm
US President Barack Obama has addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time, warning that the nation faces a “day of reckoning”.
Stressing the severity of the economic crisis, Mr Obama told lawmakers the US would emerge stronger when it ended.
“We will rebuild, we will recover,” Mr Obama said, adding: “Now is the time to act boldly and wisely.”
Republicans said Mr Obama’s plans were “wasteful”, saying they spent “money we do not have on things we do not need”.
Is there like a reality insulation field in Washington or something? Hasn’t “spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need” been the modus operandi of the entire War on Terror, including good portions of the bullshit happening in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Yet Another Outraged Post Regarding Berlusconi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/08/englaro-italy-vatican
Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister to Italy, has issued an emergency decree after consultation with the Vatican which forbids the suspension of food and water for any patient depending on them, in response to a controversial court ruling that would allow a severely brain-damaged comatose woman to be taken off life support after having shown no signs of improvement after 17 years.
On a certain level this is just Terry Schiavo with English subtitles. What makes Berlusconi’s decree uniquely repugnant is that, in defending the decree (which, by the way, the Italian president has refused to sign), he states that she is “in the condition to have babies.”
What an utterly insane comment! How in the name of God does her fertility figure into the question of her life or death?! And even if, in some insane bizarro-world run by the most conservative of Christians, her fertility did somehow count, she’s a freaking vegetable! This isn’t going to be Terry Schiavo and the first part of Kill Bill with subtitles, is it? How would you say “My name is Buck, and I’m here to f*ck” in Italian?
On another note, I find it worrisome that he felt the need to consult with the Vatican. They’re supposedly spiritual ministers, not policymakers. Ignore them, the Vatican does not deserve a special voice in Italian society.
“Change Has Come”
Now that President Obama has been elected, all is puppies and sparkles!
Just look at the bad old days before Obama: Outrage as US Bombs Pakistan Border Post, Killing 11 Soldiers
Now look at how different everything is: Deadly missiles strike Pakistan
It looks… the same?
When it comes to high-profile issues like Gitmo where people are not dying, Obama’s right on it. When it comes to matters of life or death… for people in Waziristan, who fucking cares? Who even knows where Waziristan is?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Mr. Obama is President… but I’m getting a little sick of the over-high expectations for radical change I’m hearing from people. America is still America, it’s still evil and the President will make many unsavory concessions. It’s the nature of the beast: to be led into a smoky dark room and shown footage of the Kennedy assassination from an angle that you’ve never seen before…
Do Not Buy.com
A friend purchased some RAM from Buy.com on behalf of a certain grandma recently. The RAM was bad so we decided to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization); with all due alacrity (since Buy.com’s return policy only gives you a two-week window from the day they ship it to return an item no matter what) he went to log in to use their web interface to request an RMA and, wonder of wonders, the account under which the order was placed had simply stopped being accessible. The password didn’t work and neither did the password reset. My friend fired them an e-mail explaining the situation… and they never responded.
Buy.com scrupulously hides its telephone number from the average consumer, evidently hoping they’ll not see it on the website and give up there. The attitude is obvious: customers are only valuable when they might lend us their credit card. Ask us to fulfill our obligations as supposedly-honest business people and we won’t have the time of day for you plebs.
Thank heavens my friend has what he describes as “extra anger towards corporations” else he wouldn’t bother to perform the requisite investigative work to find their damned telephone number.
After successfully reaching a hominid on the other end of the telephone line my friend was batted around a couple departments until he was put on with someone whose only acquaintance with English had been briefly at a party many years ago who kept putting him on hold for no discernible reason.
He finally got the RMA, though, no thanks to Buy.com’s shyster bullshit.
I’ll admit that it’s not as good as some customer support horror stories but it’s still abysmal and I strongly recommend avoiding them if you can.
UPDATE, 5 February 2009: The RAM finally arrived a couple of days ago and it seems to be working fine. The reason for the delay is silly but not Buy.com’s fault: when we got the RMA we forgot to specify if we wanted a refund or a replacement and so they waited until we told them. Once everybody was on the same page they sent the RAM quickly enough but still…
My New Year’s Resolutions:
None.
I think New Year’s Resolutions are probably the biggest waste of thought and breath since the invention of Rush Limbaugh. It’s a ridiculous custom: you know full well before making your resolutions that you’re going to break them. Then you make them (sometimes with great fanfare), you may actually invest some serious effort in thinking about what you’re going to do differently over the next year; you may even perform some honest introspection and come up with ways you may genuinely become a better person. The New Year comes around and you follow your resolutions for about a day. Then you break your resolutions because you didn’t care about them in the first place. And why didn’t you care about them? Because if you actually cared about changing something you wouldn’t wait for the New Year to change it. You save the things you don’t genuinely care about for New Year’s. It’s a deliberately self-selecting system for oaths you don’t care enough about to abide by. The sad part is the people I know who don’t get this and actually feel bad when they don’t keep their New Year’s Resolutions!
Do yourself a favor and kill this stupid custom dead. It’s pointless and stupid.
[Remind me not to register so late for Spring quarter, I've too much free time now thanks to my wonky schedule...]
Year++
Happy New Year everyone!
Oh, and to Governor Ted Kulongoski: instead of wasting a lot of money on satellite schemes why don’t you just use odometers if you’re going to implement a mileage tax? And why don’t you just kick up the gas tax if people are buying less?
Jesus And Buddha Walked Into A Bar
The Boston Globe has a fascinating piece about the spread of Christianity in Asia via the Nestorian Church. Pretty cool stuff:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/12/14/when_jesus_met_buddha/?page=1
Tip: Fix CapsLock Indicator on Macbooks in Ubuntu 8.10
Yes, I have indeed installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Macbook. Almost everything works out of the box (Amazingly!)- Compiz accelerates fully and without artifacts, sound is fine (if a little tweaky- just don’t plug your headphones into the jack while it’s booting), the trackpad is fully supported (although you need to perform some small tweaks in HAL to re-enable multitouch capabilities, almost a necessity with a one-button trackpad). I’m impressed.
However, the CapsLock indicator key was broken, which pissed me off. I never knew if it was on or off. Some quick Googling furnished me with a fix: uninstall mouseemu. If you setup multitouch functionality in HAL you don’t need it anyways. A quick apt-get --purge remove mouseemu and a reboot later (X seemed to stop taking keyboard input after it was uninstalled but it was fine on reboot) and my CapsLock key was working like a champ again!
Formatting a Paper in MLA Using LaTeX
As a challenge to myself and to explore the ins and outs of the LaTeX document preparation system I’ve decided to write my final paper for my English class using LaTeX exclusively. It’s been interesting because I’ve started out with basically the idea of LaTeX being a WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) system, and the fact that it’s based on the earlier TeX, and nothing else, and learned everything necessary to produce a working paper with a bibliography.
The fun part is that this is an English class and so my teacher wants me to format everything using MLA but LaTeX is aimed at people not writing in MLA. I’ve been scouring the Interwebz looking for a good way to format my paper in MLA using LaTeX and this is the condensation of my searching:
- Go get the mla-paper LaTeX package, which is available in Ubuntu in the
texlive-latex-extrapackage. It has EVERYTHING you need to format a paper in MLA (as long as you don’t need BibTeX, in which case go get the BibTeX styles). - To use it, put
\usepackage{mla}in the preamble and write your document inside thedocumentenvironment and themlaenvironment. - If you don’t need to format your bibliography using BibTeX (ie, you’re only writing a bibliography for a single paper), use the
workscitedenvironment from the mla package at the end of your document but before the end of the mla environment. Entries start with\bibent, don’t take a citation key as far as I can tell, and otherwise work exactly like the thebibliography environment. - the mla environment is entered thusly:
\begin{mla}{FirstName}{LastName}{Teacher'sLastName}{Class}{Date}{Title}
LaTeX will handle the formatting of the header based on the information you pass to the mla environment and after that you can get right to writing.
You People Disgust Me
Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
Two shootings at SoCal Toys R US
People DIED on Black Friday in a rush for CHEAP STUFF. There is no way to express in text how angry I am that our society has degenerated to the point where people can get so worked up over the possibility of a cheap USB key that they will TRAMPLE SOMEONE TO DEATH and not only will they trample someone to death, they’ll IGNORE THEM and continue to stampede while police and paramedics attempt to fight their way to the body.
Stampede, that’s a very good word to use when talking about a society which is beginning to resemble a gigantic cattle farm- stupid, apathetic animals, totally disinterested in the welfare of one’s fellow-creatures.
Network wasn’t just visionary, it was fucking prophetic.
Stop! Stop The Proliferation of Ubuntus!
Thanks to the fractious and mostly insane and overly political nature of my family I’m feeling sufficiently aggravated not to feel thankful for a goddamned thing, so here’s a mini-rant:
STOP the proliferation of Ubuntu-based distributions! We get it, it’s easy to remix! Hooray, an enthusiastic LUG in some small country has produced a special remix just for their own use whose primary difference is a different wallpaper and some switched-out applications.
You’re special, we get it. Now please stop submitting your special remixes to Distrowatch unless you’ve REALLY customized it, like for instance Crunchbang. I’m getting sick of reading an entire page of “Imspecialux, a community-based distribution designed for [Bosnia,Czech,Slovakia, Brazil, China, Thailand, or anywhere else] users, has released a new version which is exactly like Ubuntu except they changed the wallpaper and switched the default locale.”
Racism’s Getting Violent (Again!?)
We Americans have had a black President-elect for barely three weeks and there have been more than 200 reported instances of death threats, hung nooses, racist graffiti, cross burnings, betting pools on when Obama will be assassinated, and effigies of the President-elect.
I don’t feel like we’ve come very far at all.
What’s Postage On A Convicted Turkish Drug Dealer?
In more weird news from the BBC, a Turkish drug dealer has escaped from a German prison where he was serving a seven-year sentence. How did he get out? He was making stationery with fellow inmates and concealed himself inside a box which was subsequently picked up by an express courier and taken directly out of prison.
I have to give the man points for cleverness. I certainly would never have thought of something like that!
Who Stole the Church From the Russian Village?
Who, me? Couldn’t be!
A group of thieves managed to steal a 99-year old church in Komarovo, Russia (roughly 186 miles NE from Moscow) by dismantling it brick-by-brick before anyone noticed. (How do you not notice when a building goes missing?)
Thieves in Russia apparently have a nasty habit of dismantling churches(!) to sell for building materials(!!); while I have to admire their sheer chutzpah to try something like stealing a building, I can’t say I like either their profession or their choice of building.
