"Hey!"
I see that your site is as vibrant as ever.  Don’t change!
Maybe I’ll be able to stop by now and then, I seem to have computer access at the moment.  SARS has an adverse affect on my computer usage.  That’s why I say I’m freakin’ in Harbin!
Bye bye!

Ew.  Ew ew ew.

Quote:

There are still many people who cling to the magical notion that George W. Bush did not legally win the Presidency. Challenge their contention with evidence and watch them move the goalpost:

Bush stole the election. No, he had the majority of electoral votes. Yeah, but Gore won the popular vote. The President is not elected by popular votes. He’s elected by electoral votes. The electoral college is outdated. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but you don’t get to change the rules after you lost the game. Gore really won Florida. Not according to three recounts he didn’t. The recounts don’t matter because the Supreme Court selected him. The Supreme Court only told the Florida Court to play by the rules. Bush stole the election because I say so!  Ahhh. At last. Now we get down to brass tacks.

That’s a tender morsel from Bill Whittle’s latest, "Magic."

well, I got my card back from evga...  sorta...

what i sent back - 128mb Geforce4 TI4600...
what they sent me - 256mb Geforce FX5600

:)

I had a problem with "kicker" disappearing while using KDE on RHL 7.3.  I found the solution on your site, but now I can’t find it using a search.

I am trying to document my solution.  I think it was just to launch "kicker" from a term.  Is this right?

Get up at 6:30am.  Leave for work at 7:15, arrive at work around 8:15.  Leave work at 4:30, arrive at home around 5:30.

I need to go to bed around 10pm if I want to get any decent amount of sleep.  That means I have the time between 5:30pm and 10:00pm, that’s 4.5 hours, of non-working non-sleeping time.  In that time, I need to eat dinner and shower and shave, so make that ~3.5 hours.  3.5 hours of life per day.

That is so sucky and depressing.  It’s not that I don’t love my job -- I do.  I’m incredibly thankful to have any job at all right now, and especially this job in particular.  The pay is spectacular and the other engineers I work with are the nicest group of guys you could ask for.  But 3.5 hours of life per day is no life at all.  Curse Adam for cursing me thusly.

My options are:
1. sleep deprivation (not an option)
2. move to Europe where the work week is ~30 hours (looking better and better every day...)
3. move closer to work (probably the best/easiest option, but it requires graduating first and saving up money to get a house/apartment)

In the meantime... ugh.

We had an amazing first quarter at Unisys.  The biggest news is the launch of the ES7000/500, a server that "scales from four to 32 Xeon MP processors and offers the same functions as Unix servers that cost twice the price."  It’s big stuff and all of us within Unisys are excited about it.  Because of that, and also just to foster "the company spirit" as it were, the head of my department (which is roughly the "computer engineering" department) took us all out to see the Matrix Reloaded on Friday morning.  Over a hundred of us went, and we filled the theater.  You just can’t beat watching a cool new movie on the company dime, with free popcorn and soda (iced tea for me) to boot.

So anyway, about that movie, it rocked!  If you haven’t seen it yet, and you plan to, then stop reading here, because I’m going to talk about it.

There were some fantastic special effects that I really liked.  The movie opens with Trinity driving a motorcycle off the top of a building, jumping off and doing some gymnastics in mid-air, and letting the bike crash into the security post of a building.  She ends up diving through a window really high up on this skyscraper, falling down in super slow motion, and shooting at the agent who is falling after her.  My first reaction was "all right, this is cool but sorta too unrealistic and flashy" but it turns out that it’s just a dream that Neo is having.  But what’s REALLY cool is that towards the end of the movie, you find out that it wasn’t actually a dream, it really happened, just... in the future.

Two tractor trailers collided head-on in slow-motion, and from the air you saw their bodies slowly crumple and ripple from front to back, and the cabs eventually exploded.

Neo can fly now, so he flew in and rescued Morpheus and the keymaker from the top of one of the trailers just as they exploded.  "The superman thing" is sort of cheesy, but also sort of cool.  And you can’t say that it isn’t handy as anything.  And when you’re inside of the matrix, life isn’t real anyway, so why not?

The fight scenes were out of control at times.  Neo alone took on about 300 Mr. Smiths simultaneously with nothing more than a pipe and his super flying abilities.  It was cool for a while, but it went on for quite a few minutes, and it got old.  Still it was awesome to see Neo take out the one guy by kicking the pipe into him, and then catching it when it bounces off... just like in stickman battletime.  (I wonder if they watched that?)  Stickman battletime, of course, uses the super slow-mo 360°-camera-view flying kick, in a style taken from the original Matrix movie.

...

Ugh.  I wrote that all on Saturday night and here it is Wednesday.  I’ve meant to finish this post but haven’t had time, in 4 days.  How sad is that.  There was a bunch more I wanted to say but I’m feeling rather tired and uninspired so I’ll just say some of it quickly.

It was really cool how Trinity shut down the power grid using *nix and an ssh exploit that actually exists (well, existed).  And it was really retarded how that whole "rave" or "dance party" or whatever, went on for about half an hour, with all the people’s shirts soaked in sweat and therefore partially see-through, and all the while they’re switching back and forth to Neo and Trinity having sex.  No, it wasn’t really retarded that it went on for half an hour... it was really retarded that they put it in the movie at all.  There wasn’t any "actual" nudity except for the semi-seethough shirts, but even that is totally unnecessary, and the whole thing in general was pointless and added nothing to the movie.

[moved from guestbook]

I love your site however one saying from Short Quotes does jump out and speak to me on a PERSONAL LEVEL.

"Gandy only briefly discussed abortion during her speech, ..........
"I’d just like to point out that technically speaking, murder is not a "reproductive right."  How pathetic and selfish and self-deceiving people can be. -Anthony

Anthony do you believe that all counts are, as you put it murder. 15 years ago before I came to America, My very good friend and confidant was rapped! Was she to carry her rapist’s baby for 10 months? And then to give birth to her rapists baby and bear the pain, again? And after  all this has happened, the pain of giving up an innocent child? As men we have know idea what women go through we can only imagine. If these women were your mother, sister or wife would it "technically speaking, be murder" or simply a women’s  "reproductive right".  I know how I would feel. I respect your right to your own opinions and view, I just sometimes feel that until we have had this event in our life (or family) we will never really understand it.  As a point of intrest the next but one quote was very appropriate

"You never know what you have, till you get it ripped out of your chest. - Saves The Day"

Anthony, again this is just my opinion. Great site and useful Linux resource. glad I found it. I will be back.

On the way to work today, I saw one of those flashy orange-light roadside information signs:

Buckle up... click it or ticket!

Need to sleep, soon.  But I wanted to say that Joshua’s album "Singing to Your Subconscious" is my favorite album.  In my opinion, this is as close to perfect as music can get.  The songs on my page from this album (What Love Requires, and This Past September) are mostly slow and sad, but the album has some very upbeat (even slightly hard) and happy songs as well.  In general, it’s just incredibly emotional, and not in an emo way.  He’s not a kid and he doesn’t have an emo voice, but his lyrics and his tone are very emotional.  This CD just moves me so much every time I listen to it, and it’s one of the very few CDs I own that I can listen to even when I’m not in the mood for it -- because I get a few seconds into the first song and it makes me want to hear the whole thing.  As I say on my music page, I really think this CD would appeal to nearly everyone.  The thing is, I haven’t met anyone who’s been excited about them at all, and I really can’t believe it.  Not that I’ve campaigned to discover such a person, but the couple people I know who’ve heard it have had decidedly cool reactions.  I just want to find someone feels like they’re going to burst with pure joy upon hearing it, as I do.

Has anyone ever RMA’d something before?  I bought an eVGA video card off of newegg.com, and they said that I needed to go through evga for the rma (it went bad, think it was the ram on the card), so, I goto evga’s website, and apparently, my video card is registered to someone else, not cool, so i email them, and they get everything sorted out, and they authorize my rma, and i ship it back to them, last friday, 3 day, and they signed for it on Tuesday.  I paid 15 dollars to RMA it, another 20 for them to ship it back 3 day, plus the 20 for shipping it to them 3 day.  So, 55 dollars.  Well, I still haven’t heard anything back from them, and my video card still isn’t here, and I haven’t received any answers to my emails to them about the card.

What do I do?  I mean, I paid for 3 day shipping, and obviously, this isn’t 3 days worth of shipping, now, granted, it should possibly take them a day or 2 for processing, but, in that time, shouldn’t there be some form of communication?  Especially since I emailed them not only the tracking number, but also because i have emailed a few times about the status of it?  What are my rights?  Does anyone know?

mr vw dealer: we can get you out of your lease, plus give you five hundred dollars for being a loyal vw customer.
me: super.
mr vw dealer: so, what is the miles on your vw now, over the limit?
me: eighteen.
mr vw dealer: eighteen? eighteen what, you mean eighteen hundred?
me: uh, no, eighteen thousand.
mr vw dealer: EIGHTEEN THOUSAND!!  ANTHONY, WHERE ARE YOU DRIVING??

"If a server fails and heals itself instantly, did it ever really fail?"

(One of Unisys’ taglines for our self-healing servers)

Did I mention that I love working here?

Rolly just sent them to me, go see!

As much as I love O’Reilly, Whitaker is right on this one:

Like so many other fanatical integrationists, Bill O’Reilly demands that “the races” be mixed in the name of “Americanism.”

First of all, this has nothing to do with “the races.”  Nobody cares whether Chinese and black people intermingle.  No one demands that Japan or Taiwan let in third world immigrants. No one demands that Africa let some other third worlders have some of its empty lands.

When integrationists say “the races,” they mean the white race.  When they say “getting rid of racism” it is code for getting rid of whites.  Respectable conservatives want ONLY white majority countries to bring in the third world, and they demand that EVERY white majority country bring in the third world.

But O’Reilly and the conservative integrationists wring their hands when their children go to college and learn to hate America.  What exactly did they expect?  The highest morality they taught their children is to fight for the extinction of their own kind.  So naturally that sick “morality” will not be limited to a hatred of their own race.
...
Like everybody who criticizes the Israeli Lobby, I get accused of being anti-Semitic.  When the space shuttle disaster occurred I got an anonymous e-mail saying I was probably happy that happened because a Jew (an Israeli) was killed.

A lot of gentile Americans were killed on that shuttle, but that never occurred to the person.  Did it occur to this guy that even if I were anti-Semitic, the death of my fellow gentiles might bother me?

Of course not.  He assumed that I was as totally obsessed with Jews as he was.
...
The Israeli Lobby interests me because it is a real threat to our national interests.  The Anti-Defamation League says the white race must go.  They say that anyone who mentions saving the white race is a white racist which means it is anti-Semitism.  The Methodist Church says the same thing, which is why I left it.

A Jewish Professor at Harvard, Noel Ignatiev, stated this position honestly and bluntly:

"The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists."

...and what if the hokie-pokie really IS what it’s all about  ;->

But seriously, can anyone help me find a contact email address or a postal address or a phone number for the manufacturer of the Cabbage Patch Dolls?  I know the name listed at Amazon.com and Toysrus.com is ’Pacific Playthings’ but the owner of that www domain name definately does not make these dolls. 

I thoughts since all you kids are out of school on summer break and have lots of spare time on your hands (hehe) you could do some searching  for me. 

Maria has two dolls that have a manufacturing defect and I want to contact the makers to see if they can remedy the situation.

Thanks much, lvuall

p.s.  Anthony, hope it’s ok to post a request on your messageboard  :-)

I am home for the summer.  I love it here.  I love being near my family -- not just mom & dad and Nick and Maria, who live here, but also Rolly, Brian, and Tasha and their families, who are now "within range" instead of 3+ hours away.  I don’t know how I manage, being be so far away for 2/3 of the year.

Today my dad took my mom and my grandmom out to lunch (plus me, Nick, and Maria... heh), at the Coventry Tea Room.  This is a quaint dining room that’s used mainly for formal occasions; for example, Brian and Heidi had their wedding rehearsal dinner there.  Anyway they cook some amazing meat... at the rehearsal dinner, I had a filet, and today I had prime rib, and man... was it ever delicious.  And when we asked for it medium-rare, they cooked it that way, to perfection I might add, which most nearly every restaurant manages to get completely wrong.  Even my dad, who is the least tolerant of us all when it comes to meat cooked to order, agreed it was good.

I’ve been getting along with my parents amazingly well for the past couple years.  It’s been that way pretty much forever with my mom, but my dad just seemed to have trouble connecting to us or talking to us at all when we were teenagers.  He’s pretty tough on the outside, unapproachable to some extent, and at least in the past, was a lot more grumpy than not.  But more and more I’m starting to believe that’s just a thin candy shell, and he’s all gooey chocolate on the inside.  No, seriously, I guess since all of his kids (well except Maria) are adults now, it’s just easier to get along with and talk to him.  He’s always been hilarious in a really dry, sarcastic kind of way (which I’m sure is where I get my sarcasm...), and he’s still the always-right, my way or the highway type... but lately he’s been getting more and more friendly it seems.

So anyway... I’m really really glad to be home, away from school, starting work tomorrow, and standing on the edge of summer.

Oh, and in unrelated news, this messageboard now has spell-check.  Enjoy.  Oh wait, that would require ACTUALLY POSTING messages.  Honestly people, if it weren’t for my mom, Rolly, Steev, and Joseph, I’d swear I’m talking to myself sometimes.... not that there’s anything wrong with that, right?  Right.  But still.

hey all, really weird request here... or at least, it is to me... but i’ll try it anyways, i ummm, finally went to church tonight, was nice, i enjoyed it alot, and think im going to start going every thursday night (its a college group type thing)  and well, I want a bible, and due to the fact that I have a lack of a vehicular mode of transportation, I am wondering if anyone knows a good website to buy a bible at, that maybe uses paypal for payments (not a requirement though), and if so, if you have done any purchasing from there, and any recommendations basically.  thanks

Mercury is a lot smaller than the sun.

My 2-year contract with Cingular is about to expire, so I need a new contract.  I’m thinking of moving away from Cingular to a different provider, for a couple reasons: 1) they require a 2-year contract, which means you’re locked in for a long time, and it also means they have little incentive to improve their service (since there’s no chance of people switching to another provider after a year).  For example, you can get AIM Wireless with every major provider except Cingular.  2) Cingular has such a small selection of phones and they’re all boring.  3) I’ve been with Cingular for either 2 or 4 years now, I can’t even remember it’s been so long, and I know I’ve had countless frustrations with them that I can’t even recall right now.  So I just want to try something different.

However, Cingular does now have free rollover minutes, and the "nights" in the "free nights and weekends" recently began starting at 7pm instead of 9pm.  So...

Anyway, if you have a cell phone, with Cingular or anyone else, post a reply and let me know if you’re happy with your service.  And also where you’re at.

Hideho, people.  I just got back from the Agape Festival in Greenville, Illinois.  It was awesome.  We got there a little late, considering it’s a three hour drive for us, and got there just in time to see Pax 217.  After them Five Iron Frenzy played.  They rock so much they rocked my socks off.  (They did the song "Pootermobile" from the Cheeses of Nazerath C.D.) They have such a great stage presence.  They kept screwing up, but they didn’t care and neither did the crowd.  In fact, the lead singer (I forget his name) even said, before they started one song that he forgot the lyrics to half of it.  But, in true Five Iron fashion, they played it anyway.

We met some other guys there.  They brought a couch with them and we set it out in the middle of the field, cut a hole in it, and shoved an umbrella in it for shade.  Then we took some golf clubs and elastic bands and made a little lean-to.  It was pretty cool. 

The Elms, By The Tree, The Benjiman Gate, Superchic[k], Skillet, and Jars of Clay played the next day.  I’m sorry, but even though they are not my favorite band, Superchic[k] still rocks.  And maybe I like them for all the wrong reasons.  Maybe it’s because Trica and Melissa are just as cute as they are.  I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a thing for Trica.  I talked to her a little bit (don’t know if she knew I was hitting on her or not) and found out that she is actually younger then Melissa.  I always thought she was the big sister.  She’s 23 while Melissa is 26.  They all initialed my shoe and signed my C.D.  Max said I needed to work on the smell of my shoe.  It wasn’t the smell of a man, apperently. 

I’m actually grounded right now, because I got home at 2:41 A.M.  My friend Jimmy wanted to stay until Jars was completly done.  They just never seemed to get done.  They even left the stage, waited and came back to play a few more songs.  It was funny, because they played a slow, melancholy version of "Girls just wanna have fun"  Yes, they really did that.  None of us could believe it, but we loved it anyway.

Skillet did a pretty cool altar call, but it almost got ruined by some guy "touched by the spirt" who kept yelling out things.  Skillet told him that they appriciete his passion (you need spell check on this thing), but he was ruining their altar call, yet he still kept going.  It got annoying, but still a few people went up and ’got saved’.  Let’s hope it’s true for all of them and not just a show which some people do, unfortunatly.

Well, all in all, it was a great concert/festival.  Made some friends, heard good music, hit on Trica from Superchic[k], and had some fun.  I’m hoping to go again next year.  Also, it was nice that I got in for free. (It’s good to know a D.J.)

I’m starting to be tired earlier, and am getting back to a normal sleeping schedule.  Go me.  (And yes, it is 1am... anything before 2am is early for me.)

Thursday, apparently a hard disk died in the server that my site lives on, so my site was inaccessible for a while.  Actually it was 8 hours.  From ~3pm to ~11pm.  There is no way a hard disk failure should cause 8 hours of downtime.  With mirroring RAID-arrays, there are 2 independent copies of all data, and a dead disk can just be replaced and re-mirrored.  Depending on the RAID subsystem, the disk can even be hot-swapped.  I was under the impression that all hosts used such a setup, but I’d venture a guess that mine does not.  If their servers weren’t so fast, and they didn’t give me free SSH access, I’d be looking for a new host right now.

Friday I had someone from the treas.gov domain -- that’s the US Department of the Treasury -- on my site, downloading Submerge songs.  It’s pretty unusual for me to get hits from government computers; in all of last year there were only about 30 out of some 20,000 visitors.  You gotta expect that the government frowns upon use of public machines for downloading mp3s.

Also on Friday, the bassist from Freemartin IMed me.  He came across my site site by searching for info on a show that his band played.  Anyway Freemartin is an up-and-coming band that I stumbled upon about 6 months ago, and I really like them.  But they only have one CD, and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, so I just have mp3s.  Well this guy IMs me and tells me they have a new EP coming out, and he wants to send me a free copy, along with the old album, and a t-shirt!  All because I have his band listed on my music page, saying how much I like them.  See, it pays to have a cool website  : )  So the bass player (he has a name, it’s Shawn, why don’t I call him that from now on....), Shawn, was really nice and we chatted for a while.  If you’re into indie/punk/emo definitely check Freemartin out.

I just put up some photos of my room.  They’re fun.  Go see.

Let’s end with something ridiculous from Bob Whittaker’s site:

In this [comic], the guy who sends messages by throwing them into the ocean wrote:

"We have a new Department of Homeland Security to protect us.  I recommend it to you."

The reply said, "We don’t need it.  We just enforce our immigration laws."

Entirely true and entirely ridiculous.  Bob also points out how ridiculous it is that Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum is being called anti-gay for his recent comment on privacy laws.  He may well believe that homosexuality is wrong, but #1 there’s nothing wrong with believing that, and #2 that’s not what he said.  What he said was that if a "right to privacy" exists such that the law cannot interfere with people’s actions behind closed doors (in this case, sodomy), then such a right would by definition prohibit the same interference by the law in cases of any number of other things, like incest.  Which is, of course, undeniably true by simple logical implication; however liberals cannot be troubled by such things as "truth" when sacred Political Correctness is at stake.  Free speech is becoming such a joke in this country.  No one is allowed to say these things that everyone knows are true.

As Tool so hopefully put it, I have a suggestion to keep you all occupied: learn to swim.  If only.

We make an agreement with North Korea, in which they promise to dismantle nuclear weapons programs in exchange for five hundred thousand tons of oil per year from us, tons of food aid, and for the world’s help in building 2 "safe" nuclear power plants.  A few years later they reinstate those weapons programs (sounds familiar by the way), so we naturally stop giving them $100 million worth of free oil.  This throws the already-hopelessly-failed country into a crisis.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il then proceeds to blame us for their development of nuclear weapons:

North Korea has since said the crisis spawned over the admission could be settled if the United States were to back off from its "hostile policy" toward the country.

And not only is it our fault that they violated the agreement, but in fact, we declared "nuclear war" on them:

"This is a declaration of war, a nuclear war against the DPRK. Therefore, the U.S. openly violated and destroyed the DPRK-U.S. agreed framework and nullified the North-South joint declaration on denuclearization," the Rodong Sinmun said.

North Korea huffed and puffed for months in an attempt to wring concessions out of Bush.  They threatened that New York, Washington, and Chicago would be "aflame" and there would be "nuclear war" if we took out their nuclear facilities.  Despite these lunatic ravings, and the lunatic ravings of some Americans saying that we shouldn’t attack Iraq because we weren’t attacking NK, Bush quietly refused to humor the dictator’s demands.  Presumably, he believed that Kim Jong-Il was all hype.  A few months later, without any actual substance behind all their big talk, we can only conclude that Bush handled that situation pretty well.

Now here’s the funny part.  After breaking their agreement with us, losing the benefits of that agreement, and showering us with empty threats, they want us to do it again -- but this time, they’ll only hold up their end after we’ve satisfied a long list of demands:

Administration officials said that during talks in Beijing last week North Korea had asked for a step-by-step package under which it would receive oil shipments, food aid, security guarantees, energy assistance, and economic benefits, among other requests. In return, they said, North Korea had offered to dismantle its nuclear weapons, but only at the end of the process.

Ok Kim, let me get this straight.  You lied to us once, so we should not only trust you again, but trust you even more, to the point that we don’t ask anything of you until we’ve already delivered our half of the deal?  Right.  I think you’ve been talking to Carter too long.  President Bush is no Jimmy Carter (thank God, honestly), and he understands that appeasing a tyrant is not an acceptable solution.

I am constantly impressed by my roommates.

Monday morning, our plumbing backed up.  When my roommates’ dad bought this house last August, the basement wasn’t finished; in fact, it was a damp mildewy mess, with some walls made of mdf-ish wood, some made of just wood paneling, with a drop ceiling, a thin wet carpet, and just altogether gross.  The plan was to finish the basement and put a full bathroom into it, so that the basement could become my bedroom.

They did that, working every weekend for a couple months, and the result is amazing.  They conquered this basement and I love living in it.  But while working on installing the bathroom, they discovered that the plumbing in the house was done all wrong.  Instead of the main sewage pipe sloping down 1 inch every 4 feet, it’s nearly level through the whole basement floor.  Which means that... um... the stuff doesn’t drain so well.

Which wasn’t a huge deal, until they put this shower in down here.  Because now when stuff backs up, the lowest opening in the system is the drain in my shower -- as opposed to the sinks on the first floor, which would never be in danger because any back-up would never climb an entire story.

So, Monday, it backed up, and there was about a half-inch of yucky water in the bottom of my shower.  Not really nasty gross yuckiness, but pretty gross, and it did smell.  So plan A was to get a plunger and try to force the obstruction through the pipe and out where it belongs.  Plan A didn’t work.  So Konstantin went out and got a sewer tape (sometimes called a sewer snake), opened the clean-out on the main sewer pipe (which is in my closet, incidentally), and started running the tape into there.  In case you don’t know (as I didn’t), a sewer tape is a flat, stiff band of metal, about a half-inch wide and 25 or 30 or 40 feet long, rolled up into a circle.  The end of it is much like the end of a fancy arrow, like a four-pointed 3D triangle.  So when your stuff gets clogged, you feed this tape into the pipe and hope that it breaks through the obstruction enough that you can flush it away with a toilet.

That took a decent amount of effort on Konstantin’s part, and after about 15 minutes of battle, he prevailed.  And I spent the next 2 hours cleaning my bathroom.

I think I’m a fairly handy person.  My dad is a roofing / siding / window contractor, and he’s one of those people who can build and fix just about anything... and I have learned a lot from him growing up, both around the house, and working with him during the summers for a couple years.  But we’ve never had any plumbing problems at my house that I can recall, so I don’t have much experience there.  And Konstantin and Dimitry spent 5 years (re)building their entire house with their dad, literally 5 years, every day after school and on weekends.  And then they did a lot of re-doing on this house here.  Between the two of them, if there’s a problem they can’t solve, I’ve yet to see it.