As usual, Garrett gets the prize for strangest link of the day/week/month/etc.  Apparently some people in North Carolina have a possum drop like NYC has a ball drop for the new year.  Quite bizarre, needless to say.

They don’t hurt the possum; it’s "dropped" like the ball in NYC, which is to say, it’s gently lowered.  Still, the animal-rights morons need to cry about it:

"I’m sure the animal is traumatized," Ms. Overman said.  "You walk up on a possum in the woods, they freeze; they’re terrified.  They’re putting it through horror for hours.  Instant death would be better."

Nevermind that their freezing is actually a survival mechanism that is well-studied and understood, and has nothing whatever to do with being "terrified;" when you’re an animal rights moron, you aren’t concerned with things like science and facts.  Instead, you lie through your teeth, or speak out of pure pathetic ignorance of basic biological facts.

Sadly, the wackos succeeded in getting the Possum Drop shut down.

Well, I updated my page on New Year’s Eve, and the good news is that validator.w3.org thinks it’s real spiffy. Ok, maybe not "spiffy" but "valid" would be a better word for it.  Valid HTML 4.0 Transitional.  I’m proud of this accomplishment because I think it means that I’ve learned something, and I’m not just tossing some things together that I think will work.  The bad news is that "Bobby" still doesn’t like it, and fooling around with this stuff has helped me to procrastinate on submitting final scores for my students.  That’s pretty insignificant bad news, so I’m happy.  Thanks for your advice!

Since I’ve got this unfortunate tendency to live abroad, my dad and I decided to swap computers - my Cube for his Powerbook.  Now, the Powerbook has a 10 GB hard disk.  For a while I’ve sorta coveted the iPod, but it’s a) too expensive b) I’d be afraid to damage or lose it because it’s so expensive c) if I wait longer I’m sure someday it will have more PDA-ish abilities.  So I’ve pretty much decided to buy an external drive, and I’ve pretty much decided which one to buy, although I’m debating between having only Firewire or having Firewire and USB.

So here’s a question for you, or anyone else who has 2 cents: is it possible to partition an external hard drive in various file formats, allowing me to access the Windows-format partition if I hook the drive up to a PC?  My co-workers always seem to want me to help out with computer stuff, so it would be useful if that was possible.  I’ve been looking for an answer to this on the web and I’m almost sure it can be done. However, when I experimented with the Mac OS X Disk Utility and a 128 MB flash card, the only options that were available were Unix and Mac formats.  Yet if I reformat the card without partitions, the Windows format is available.  Hmmm.

And if I could get that to work, would it be possible to use this
and install Windows on the partition, so that I could have a "Windows machine"?

It appears that all features on homestarrunner are down (no e-mails, toons, etc.).  I hope it comes back up soon.  Oh well, happy new year all at "no divisions."  I know this next year I will be praying for elections, Iraq, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other important things that we are all aware of.

It’s like a screenshot, only.... different.  Really I just wanted to show how cool these little speakers look.  They’re the Creative "I-trigue 2.1 3300" model, and the point-one is a black cubey subwoofer that’s on the floor.  They sound really good, I think, for computer speakers that were only $80.  They’re no Infinity RS3s or anything, but the whole point was that I didn’t want to unwire and bring home my RS3s and my receiver for only 3 weeks.  I compared them to a $100 set of Logitech speakers, and a $140 set of Altec-Lansings, in the store, and thought these sounded the best.  (The source material was Christmas songs sung by the American Idol winner girl, which were surprisingly really good.)

To complete this multimedia presentation, I give you a new song.

Here’s a few photos from Christmas day.

I can’t believe that the weasels collective are trying to claim that sanctions and "peaceful processes" are the cause of Qaddafi’s decision to end his WMD programs.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I really didn’t see this one coming.  It’s just so blatantly false on its face; I guess you really have to be as irrational and desperate as France and Russia to pretend that this isn’t the result of US-led action against Iraq.  Argh.  I don’t feel like writing about this, and fortunately Den Beste already has summarized it quite succinctly, so I’ll just quote:

The idea that this was somehow a triumph of diplomacy and soft power pressure (e.g. sanctions), as is variously claimed by China, Russia, France, and Solana at the EU doesn’t stand up to the light of day.  Why was it the British (and indirectly the Americans) that Libya contacted, not China or Russia or France or the EU or the UN?  Why did Qaddafi begin his diplomacy last March, and not earlier or later?  And why the final agreement now, rather than last August or next August?
...
Why did he call the British, rather than the French or the Russians or the EU or the UN? ... What has developed over the last couple years is that Blair and Bush are doing a superb good-cop/bad-cop act.  Blair is the good cop, the "reasonable" one.  Unlike Australian PM John Howard, Blair has leftist/internationalist credentials, and has positioned himself to be the only world leader with such credentials who has significant influence with Bush and who has some ability to restrain or deflect Bush.  Bush is the bad cop, the cowboy, the moron, the devout Christian, the one with blood in his eye, who also happens to be commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world and appears very willing and perhaps even eager to use it against those he dislikes... That characterization of Bush is facile and wrong, of course; but he has that reputation in many places and it has actually served us well.

It’s absurd to suggest that it’s just coincidence that Qaddafi only started to negotiate when we attacked Iraq, and just coincidence that he only finally capitulated right after we nabbed Saddam.

It’s been a wonderful day with you and all the kids.  Hope your Christmas has been as blessed as mine.

Lvu, always,