...and it’s on Monday, no less!

is a spoof of the matrix with a message about factory farms. It’s pretty funny, check it out.

How was your weekend?  Mine was fantastic.

Friday Jeremy and I jammed for a little bit, until he blew out the speaker in his makeshift guitar cabinet.  Still, it was fun especially since I hadn’t played the drums in about 6 months (because Jeremy was holding my set hostage).  Then I helped him record a few songs at his apartment, and that was super.  He’s such a good musician.  One of the songs was "Seasons Change" which is just pure beauty.  I remember 3 years ago when I first heard him play it and begged him to hurry up and get it recorded because I wanted to be able to listen to it again.  There’s been one "finished" recording of it already, on the first Owned and Operated EP, but I think he wants to get just a pure acoustic-and-vocals take recorded.

Anyway, recording is fun because you record one instrument at a time, so we did the guitars and then the vocals.  Of course the vocalist needs to wear headphones and listen to the guitar track as he sings, but since I was just manning the computer, I didn’t actually need to listen to the geet.  And it was really cool to just listen to him sing a capella.  But it was also hard to just sit there and not sing along to these songs that I love.  At one point, while I was humming at what I thought was an inaudible level, Jeremy stops and goes "Are you humming?!?"  Heh.  Sorry.

THEN, when we finished recording, and I got home around 3:30, I finished up a few things on my computer, and was going to get to bed.  But since I had to get up fairly early and drive home in the morning, I decided that I probably wouldn’t feel like showering and shaving in the morning, so I did it before bed.  Well when that was all done, at 5:45am, I heard a cat meowing on my back porch!  I opened the door, and the cat tried to charge right in, but I held it back so I could get a look at it.  At first I thought it was the same black cat that I saw walking around on Wednesday, but then I noticed that he had a slit in his left ear!  He also had a tiny patch of white on his neck/chest.  His meow was really different, but that could be explained by having been in really cold weather and from having been crying loudly a lot; his coat looked different (smoother and tighter to his body), but that could also be explained by having been in the cold; his face was thinner but that could be explained by not having eaten enough lately; his eyes were different (gigantic and too glassy) but that could be explained by having been in the dark and the cold.  The thing that convinced me completely was that although he was really friendly, rubbing up against you like there’s no tomorrow, he wouldn’t do it to my nose/face.  Every other cat we’ve ever had (and probably that I’ve ever seen) would do that, but CJ will not rub noses with you.  He’ll rub his nose on your arm, leg, foot, hand, or doorways, boxes, pretty much anything except your face.  That I’ve never seen in another cat, and combined with the slit left ear and tiny patch of white (many black cats have a white patch on their chests, but CJ’s is tiny -- literally about 15 hairs -- and he has no other white on him), I know it’s him.

So I gave him some fresh food and water, but he wouldn’t touch it.  So I broke out a can of wet cat food, and he tore it up.  He ate it so fast there were pieces of it flying around.  I don’t know how, but there was a big mess of it on the floor when he was done, splattered all around the plate.  After he was done, then he was willing to eat the normal dry cat food, and drink water.

He’s now safe and sound, happy as a clam, sitting in my lap as I type this.  He won’t tell me where he was for those 10 days either.  I asked him, but he’s being all shady about it.  You know how cats are.  I didn’t have time to post about it until now because my weekend was pretty packed (it was 6am when he came home and I hadn’t even gone to bed yet), and my mom beat me to it.

After sleeping for a few hours Saturday morning, I went home to attend my brother Rolly’s wedding reception.  It was at the Collegeville Inn and was quite fancy.  Margie’s dress was beautifully minimalist (not that there’s anything wrong with big fancy dresses, but this one was really nice), and she wore a thin white veil-type thing over her shoulders from the front, and those things combined with the way her hair was done made her seriously look like an angel.  Rolly’s suit was white (or an off-white/tannish color) and he was definitely looking Rico Suave; I think either I haven’t liked white suits other times I’ve seen them, or I just expect them to look silly and not-serious for some reason, but on Rolly it was perfect.  Tasha took photos and said she’d send them to me so I can post them, so I’ll do that.  I didn’t take my camera; I’ve never taken photos at a social event like this because I think I’d feel strange about it.  At a wedding it seems OK because there’s a pro photographer there, and everyone is taking photos, but at something less formal and more social I’d think it’d be weird walking around taking photos.  But since lots of other people did, and since there were disposable cameras provided at each table, it’s probably pretty kosher.  Maybe it’s also the fact that my camera is a mammoth compared to all these new tiny things that are out now, and a camera around your neck is a lot more obtrusive than a tiny little thing around your wrist.

Anyway... there was a live band, which was nice.  And the food was good too, it was a buffet, and who doesn’t love a buffet?  Mmm roast beef, and shrimp, and scallops, and pasta... On the funny tip, my Aunt Karen was at our table, and she tried to tell me that roast beef is the same thing as prime rib.  Therefore I don’t think she’s ever actually had prime rib.  She is also one of those people who, when you say that you don’t like fish, she responds with "but try the salmon, you’ll love it!!!"  Um, no, I don’t like fish.  "But you’re eating shrimp and scallops!!"  Yes... those aren’t fish.  That conversation cracks me up every time it happens, which is actually pretty often, which is troubling.

I rounded out my weekend with a double-dose of computer fixing.  My mom’s computer died 2 weeks ago (the power supply failed, and decided to fry the hard drive on its way down), so I had to install Windows and a few essential programs and restore her data from her external backup hard drive.  I had just installed this backup drive about 3 months ago, and good thing too, otherwise she would have lost all her digital photos and financial stuff and all her other data.  Tasha decided she should probably keep an active backup too, especially since she uses her computer for her business and needs to keep the files for 7 years.  So we headed down to Best Buy, picked up a firewire drive just like my mom’s, and set that up today.  I also installed Mozilla on her computers; score +2 for the freed-from-the-bonds-of-IE camp.

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For those interested in backing up their data on Windows (see here for how to do it on Linux), here’s what I do.  Install a second hard drive that’s at least as big as your main hard drive.  This can be an internal or external drive; external is preferable because then you can turn it off when you’re not backing up, and because that helps to guard your data in the event of a virus.  Once you’ve got this second drive set up, as F: for example, then install xxcopy and run this command:

This will copy your entire c: drive into the folder f:\backup\c_drive\ and it will log any errors to the file c:\xxcopy.log.  (For example, some files, like Windows registry files, refuse to be copied, so those will show up in the log.)  And the next time you run that command, it will only copy those files that have changed since the last time you ran it, so if you run it once a week, then it’s pretty quick.

For various reasons, including the fact that some critical files won’t allow you to copy them, you cannot simply take this backup drive and boot it and have it work just like the original drive did.  (Contrasted with Linux which naturally allows this by design.)  So if your main hard drive fails (as my mom’s just did), you’ll have to reinstall Windows and all your programs on a new hard drive.  But the point of the backup is to backup your data files, not your program files.  Programs can be reinstalled; digital photos, tax files, email, etc., cannot be; they are lost forever if you don’t have them backed up.  Also, it might then seem like a waste to backup the entire drive; why not just back up the data?  Two reasons: first, the size of the OS and program files is generally only a gig or two, so when backing up a 20 or 40 or 80 gig drive, that’s negligible.  Second, most people have files that they consider "data" in various places (browser bookmarks/favorites, files on the desktop, saved email, in addition to any files that the user manually saves from within an application, plus some programs save their data into their own program folder), so you’d have to run xxcopy a handful of times for a handful of folders if you wanted to try and exclude program files and OS files.  You’d be doing a lot more work for very little benefit (the small amount of space you’d save), or no benefit (because you probably shouldn’t be using that space on your backup drive for anything else).

Finally, use "Scheduled Tasks" in the Control Panel to set xxcopy to run once a week (in the middle of the night one day, for example).

Hi !  A quick note to thank you for getting me up and out into cyberspace once again.  The withdraw was really getting pretty bad.  The only REALLY upsetting part of not having my pc was that I missed being your 50,000th visitor, boohoohoo ;-(  Who was it, when did they get on and what was their prize?  So glad you have your CJ back home safe and sound.  Enjoy him!  lvu,

So I’ve been pretty depressed for the past 10 days or so since my cat disappeared, but it’s starting to become more of "something that makes me really sad when I think about it" and less of "something that makes me constantly depressed because I miss the cat and can’t think about anything except how I should be out looking for him."  And in case you’re about to make fun of me for being a sissy... shut up.

Some pretty funny things have been said of late, so that’s helped.  My sister’s comment about the trailer park was hilarious.  Then tonight I had an exam, and apparently the room got double-booked so all of us CSE465-ers were squished in with a full room of Math110-ers.  (For non-PSU students: Math 110 is math for people who didn’t have math in high school.  Or something like that.)  So anyway, we’re all crowding into this room, about 300 of us, I’d say, and a professor goes "CSE students in the odd seats, Math students in the even seats."  And one of my CSE classmates says, "Although if you’re in Math 110, you may not know what an ’even seat’ is."  Uncontrollable laughter erupted.  (Well, not from the Math students...)

In more news of happiness, Andy put up a bunch of really artistic webpages over here.  The kind of stuff that makes me want to do a new site layout or something, until I realize that my site has way too much stuff on it so all the beauty of that kind of layout would be destroyed.  Oh well.  (PS - on his site, click the little Vs at the bottom to see more.  And if you get the fiery red one, you have to scroll way over sideways (just pretend you have a gazillion inch monitor like Andy :) to get to the Vs.)

I haven’t posted anything about Homestarrunner in a while.  So here are two emails that you should check out right now: Labor Day and Impression.  On "Labor Day," at the end, click on the sign on his cooler, and you’ll hear Homestar rapping.  It’s hilarious.

If a man means to kill you, either you persuade him that he should not, or you kill him first, or you die. Sometimes you can get him locked up, but that only postpones the problem. By the same token, if an enemy political power is engaged in war with you with the goal of your destruction, you either persuade its supporters that they should not, or you kill those supporters, or you die. The international equivalent of imprisonment (diplomatic and economic sanctions) only postpones the problem.

We are engaged in a massive effort to destroy the ideology which threatens us by persuasion and coercion. We mean to eliminate the ideological threat by convincing the bulk of its supporters to abandon it. This is unprecedented and it is risky; we’re on uncharted ground. To a great extent we’re making this up as we go along, and that means we’re making mistakes and learning-while-doing. We might not succeed.

If the experiment in Iraq fails, if we cut and run, and Iraq reverts to savagery, if reform efforts elsewhere in the mid-East falter and succumb to an extremist backlash, and if the governments in that region become more radical and unite against us, then all hope of reform in the region in the short run (20 years) would be gone. As time went on, those nations would certainly acquire (covertly or overtly, developed or purchased) more and better industrial age military capabilities, with range and striking power able to threaten us with catastrophic losses.

If our attempts to eliminate the threat through reform fail, then we face the decision to either kill them or let them kill us. It’s worse than that: we would inevitably have to kill them. Once our cities begin to get nuked, we would respond massively, causing unprecedented devastation, resulting in a tragedy that it might take centuries for the world to recover from. Such attacks against us are inevitable based on the ideology that opposes us unless we surrender to it. If we refuse to surrender (and we aren’t going to surrender), then the only decision we’d have would be whether we should kill huge numbers of them before or after they’d started killing huge numbers of us.

Whatever else you might have to say about genocide, the one thing everyone can agree on is that once completed it is conclusive and irrevocable. (But nearly everything else you will probably want to say about genocide is negative.) If you face an implacable foe who refuses to be dissuaded or deterred from trying to kill you, you must kill or die. At the level of nations, you must commit genocide or become its victim.

If we reach that terrible eventuality, where we must commit genocide or succumb to it, we would not rely on anything as clumsy as fleets of aircraft indiscriminately scattering bombs over enemy cities. For an information age military, it’s still one bomb per target, only the targets would be cities and the bombs would be thermonuclear, and the destruction would be total.

No one wants it to come to that. That’s why we must remain dedicated to fostering reform. It may be risky, and difficult, but it’s still preferable to surrender, or committing genocide, or being the victims of genocide. The reason we’re following the strategy we are is that it’s the only way we can avoid defeat without resorting to total war.

- Steve Den Beste

Today while walking around looking for CJ, making the "pswswswswswsss" sound at the top of my lungs, a black cat ran out of someone’s yard and came right up to me.  This cat was just like CJ: smooth black short hair, no visible white spots, the same size, and really really friendly.  But it wasn’t him.  His face was a little different, his hair was a little less fluffy, he wagged his tail strangely when he walked, and he didn’t have a cut on his one ear like CJ does.

Anyway, that’s 3 black cats I’ve come across now, that aren’t CJ.  And one of the guys I ran into while walking said that he had a cat that came 30 miles back to him after he sold it.  Maybe hopefully CJ’s on his way home (safely).

But on a lighter note, here’s a snippet of a conversation I had with my sister:

me: and there’s this trailer park near my neighborhood, so I might go look there
Tasha: ew, you didn’t go into it, did you??
me: well, not yet, but...
Tasha: ANTHONY, IF HE’S GONE, HE’S GONE!  GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF!!

Heh.

Listen.