In an article about the upcoming Windows XP SP2, Microsoft’s general manager of worldwide partner marketing said this about the linux / open-source movement:

Microsoft has a "structured delivery system to make sure our customers and our partners are getting exactly the technology they need to drive forward, whereas in that other space it is an unstructured cowboy atmosphere."

I guess he must be a "general manager of worldwide partner marketing," because he sure isn’t preaching to Americans.  We don’t view "cowboy" as an insult here, tranzi epithets notwithstanding.

In pseudo-related news, it worked, just as al Qaeda said it would.  Get attacked, give up.  Let’s hope our other real allies demonstrate a little more mettle than this as the war continues.

it is official, anthony is the best person to go along with you when you are new music shopping.  i had a very pleasant drive from JERSEY to pittsburgh today because of the wonderful medley of new music I had to choose from.  of course thrice hardly left my cd player for more than 2 minutes.

What kind of daemon process doesn’t detach itself from the TTY upon execution?  The mysqld, for one.  So when I rebooted my server late last night and it started to come back up, it got to mysql and stopped, having exec()ed the init process into the mysqld process.  So mysqld and any other processes that had already started were running fine, but nothing else (including the web server) ever saw the light of day.  THEN, my internet connection died, so I couldn’t even get into my server to fix the problem.  I waited about an hour and my connection still didn’t come back up, so I went to bed.  So my site was unavailable from about 1AM to about 1PM today.

I feel like I need to say something about dogs.  A friend of mine has an outside farm dog, a miniature collie named Coby.  January was much colder than normal this year, and during one particularly cold stretch, Coby died.  About a week later, my sister’s house burned down, and her dogs Kiraly and Stoklos both died (from the carbon monoxide, fortunately; they weren’t burned).  Last week, my brother Brian had to put his dog Tundra to sleep.  He had suddenly developed (or at least, suddenly started showing symptoms of) epilepsy, causing him to have seizures, but also might have had a brain tumor, because his personality suddenly changed and he was being vicious after having a seizure.  Despite spending a lot of money trying to make him better, they ultimately had to put him down.  And tonight, I watched Newlyweds because it’s Wednesday, and the episode was about them getting a dog.  Sigh...

Coby, Kroisie, Stokie, and Tundy, we miss you.

My brother Rolly suggested that I make active conversations "sticky," meaning they stay at the top of the list on my site.  It’s a good idea and I’ve been thinking about it over the past week or so, because for example this dialogue went largely unnoticed.

I’m not going to change the order that the posts are displayed in; I want the newest numbered post to always be on top.  Instead I’ll create a short list of links to the 5 most recently updated posts.  This was actually trivial to code; it took under an hour, and most of that was deciding how to format the list and keep it short.

The hard part is deciding where to put the list.  I love this new "spring" layout, I love how clean it is, and I don’t want to complicate it at all.  I honestly can’t think of anywhere really good to put this list (suggestions are welcome).  For now, I’ve made it a slidey menu on the "blog" link.  This isn’t ideal because the slidey menus can be disabled.  It also isn’t ideal because I want to keep the menus smallish, which means I need to abbreviate post titles, and I can’t include the author of the update, nor can I indicate whether the update was the creation of a new post or a reply to an existing post.

And I really want to use "yesterday" for posts that were updated yesterday, instead of the month-abbreviation followed by the day, but "yesterday" is far too long; I’d have to abbreviate the subject even more.

Anyway... I think it’s an awesome feature, I’m just not certain where its permanent home should be.

I saw The Passion tonight.  It was the first time I ever went to a movie by myself.  I’ll probably never do it again, but for this movie, it wasn’t bad being alone, and I couldn’t wait any longer to see it.  (And plus I couldn’t wait any longer to read other people’s blogs about it.)  There were only about 15 people in the theatre, too; it was a Monday night show at 9:30 in a college town during spring break.  I still have my whole ticket because there wasn’t anyone ripping them in half.

(Warning: spoilers follow.  Not that you don’t know the story already.  But if you haven’t seen it yet, you might not want to read this yet.)

Despite all the whining I’ve heard up till now, the movie wasn’t any more violent than lots of other R-rated movies.  And that whole issue is irrelevant anyway because this is a true story; Jesus was violently beaten and violently killed, so a movie that faithfully depicts those events will be violent.

At times I got very angry.  First of all, the people were so barbaric.  And the soldiers constantly whipping Jesus as he carried the cross... how much of a moron do you have to be to not realize that if you want him to go forward, you can’t knock him down?  I was also really mad while the soldiers almost scourged him to death, after they had been ordered not to kill him.

The only time I got really choked up was when Claudia brought the white towel/sheet to Mary.  I’m not sure why then; maybe because they just got done showing so much of Jesus’ beating, and you could still hear it in the background, and just all the emotion between the women.  Ironically, Claudia thought the situation was unjust while Mary understood that it needed to happen.

Some things made me really happy, too.  It was awesome when after they nailed Jesus to the cross, they flipped it over, and the whole thing was levitating about a foot off the ground.  I presume this is because of the prophecy which says that no bone in his body shall be broken; certainly flipping the cross over and dropping it face-down with Jesus on it would have broken ribs and probably legs.  And I almost jumped up and cheered when the crow pecked out the eyes of the murderer who was laughing at Jesus on the cross.  At the end, I thought it was really neat how the stone rolled itself away, and the camera panned past the vacant shroud, and you saw Jesus just crouched on the ground, waiting to walk out.

I thought that satan’s constant presence was interesting and well-done.  I’m glad (s)he was portrayed as just plain evil and subtle, instead of being red with horns and a pitchfork.  (Though it was kind of interesting how everyone in the movie was dressed in clothes from that time period, while satan wore what looked to be a modern black hoodie.)  Apparently the role was played by a female, but I don’t think the face looked any more female than male, or vice-versa.  And I’m glad I didn’t end up seeing the movie with Dimitry like I was supposed to, because satan’s face and eyes were very similar to his.  I’m additionally glad it’s spring break and Dimitry won’t be back for a week.

My favorite character was Pilate.  He was really tough and cool, and really skeptical.  I didn’t like how they portrayed him as needing his wife’s permission/guidance before making any decisions, but whatever, in gay upside-down feminist American entertainment, that’s what you get.

The soldiers who were scourging Jesus were beating him so hard that they were out of breath.  That is telling.  Truly the only way Jesus was able to stay conscious through that was through God’s sustenance.  The body signals the mind into unconsciousness in the face of that kind of pain, but Jesus had to feel the pain.  And the way they yanked on his arms to dislocate his shoulders to crucify him... terrible.

One of the languages (probably Greek) was pretty similar to Spanish in a lot of words; I picked out cuando for "when" and verita- for "truth" a few times.  Um... there were others but I forget now.  Of course I understood Cephas for "Peter" and Yeshua for "Jesus."

One thing I was waiting for that didn’t happen was for one of the soldiers to say, "Truly this man was the son of God" after crucifying him.

All in all I think the movie was superb.  It reminds me very much of this song by The Cross Movement.  One of my friends had said it was overly Catholic, and that the story mostly just followed Mary around the whole time.  I don’t see it that way at all.  It followed Jesus, and showed a decent amount of Mary, which I’d say is appropriate.

My internet connection died today around 2pm and was out for about 6 hours.  That’s annoying and it happens fairly often (for much shorter durations), but it’s no big deal.  At that point, however, what I don’t want to see is a commercial on TV for Adelphia’s "always on, lightning fast" internet connection.  Anyway... now it’s out again.  (I’m posting this 2 hours after writing it.)  I called them and got a recording saying that I don’t need to stay on the line, because they are aware of a problem affecting service in PA, NY, VT, NH, Mass (yeah I’m not sure of the abbreviation for that one (MA?  MS?), and I can’t exactly look it up right now...), RI, CT, and Maine (MA?  ME?).  So whatever the problem is, it would appear to be formidable, having ensnared 8 states so far in its death-grip... I mean, having taken 8 states offline.

And you know, there’s something very wrong with the world when Tropicana makes a "light and healthy" version of orange juice.  Normal Tropicana orange juice contains... orange juice.  Nothing else.  Not from concentrate.  Nothing added.  You know what’s "light and healthy" about this new version?  Less sugar and carbohydrates.  Give.  Me.  A.  Break.  Maybe if you are having problems with your health/weight, you need to FREAKING EXERCISE, and maybe orange juice isn’t your biggest problem.

Moving right along, I’m sick of commercials that portray white men as imbeciles.  When was the last time you saw a commercial that made fun of a woman?  Or a black person?  Right, never, because in the make-believe world of politically correct American media, the only person whom you can make fun of without getting sued is the white man.  (Because, of course, the white man is the cause of everything bad that has ever happened in the universe, and must be in a perpetual state of apology for that, and all women are perfect, as are all people with dark skin.)  Anyway here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Note that I only watch an hour of TV per weekday (The O’Reilly Factor), plus American Dreams on Sundays, and Newlyweds on Wednesdays.  So all these are from that little bit.

Mastercard commercial about gym memberships, where the guy can’t open the pickle jar, and the girlfriend does it for him, convincing the boyfriend to start going to the gym.

Progresso soup commercial where the kid(s) just moved out, the husband is about to make condensed soup, and the wife says in her best you’re-so-dumb voice, "What are you making?  Condensed soup?  The kids are gone, we’re moving on."  She then pulls out a can of Progresso soup instead.

Tampon commercial where a guy and a girl are in a small rowboat on a lake, the boat springs a leak and magically the guy doesn’t notice it.  The girl says "...the lake," the guy says, "the lake," then the girl pretends that she actually said "the leak" and points down at it.  The guy says he’ll handle it, turns around and fumbles around for something; meanwhile the girl grabs a tampon and puts it into the hole, stopping the leak.  The guy turns back around with a small plastic cup that looks like the lid to a can of spray-paint, presumably as his solution to the problem, only to find that the girl has already stopped the leak.

Lending Tree commercial where a kid gets accepted into an ivy-league college, and the dad starts selling things to raise money for it.  He comes home with some strange man who is going to be renting the kid’s bedroom while he’s away, and the wife says, "Honey, I’m getting a home equity loan to pay for college."

Earthlink commercial where the wife switched to Earthlink because she "needs answers fast" and "needs to stay on top of things around here" as her clumsy husband keeps botching various things out in the yard.

And just to be clear, I don’t mind being made fun of, not one bit.  What I mind is the whiney babies who would scream and cry if a non-white-male were to be made fun of in a commercial.

I thought it was cool that I am visitor # 53808 today ;~]