No more death, yo.

Funniest thing in a while.  (Warning: contains some foul language.)  NSFW if you work with any die-hard republicans or democrats.

Of course Lil’ Brudder is a close second : )  That guy has the heart of a champion.  No foul language and thoroughly SFW.

I saw the best license plate ever today: it said CTRL-C.  (That’s SIGINT, not "Copy," to all you non-geeks out there.)  Of course, :wq would be even cooler, but alas the colon is not a valid character for license plates.

Coming in at a close number two is this plate that Nate snapped a photo of, as we drove down Atherton street one day:

But I’m more geek than I am black, so CTRL-C gets first place :)

This is amazing and disgusting.  GoToMyPC charges people $180/year to be able to remote-control one PC from another over the internet -- to access a home computer’s desktop from work, or vice-versa, etc.  But anyone can do that anytime for free by just installing VNC.  I mean I gotta hand it to them, they obviously know a thing or two about marketing and capitalism, but still... VNC, people.

Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist whose article was dropped from Monday’s USA Today posted the banned article on her own website. The article was supposed to be printed in time for the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Here is the link to the printer-friendly version for enjoyable, easy reading:

I visited Ricketts Glen State Park this weekend with Jeremy, Kev K, Steve K, and Caleb.  It was quite the awesome.  The weather forecast said 50% chance of rain all weekend, but it didn’t rain at all.

The main attraction of the park is its 33 waterfalls, some of which are 80 and 100 feet tall.  There’s a 3-mile trail that goes all the way from above the first one to below the last one, and in lots of places you can walk across the river on rocks or fallen trees.  It’s all very beautiful, but the real main attraction (for me at least) is that in a few places, you can jump off the rocks into the water, from heights of about 8 to maybe 25 feet.  The water in the two places we jumped into was 6-7 feet deep, so your feet can touch the bottom, but as long as you bend your knees while jumping, you don’t "hit" the bottom with any amount of force.  True, I only weigh about 150 pounds, but Caleb is a big strong guy who’s probably got a hundred pounds on me, and even he jumped off the high spots with no problem.

It wasn’t too hot outside though, and the water comes from a spring-fed lake, so it was pretty freezing.  Still, I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity for some cliff-jumping, and fortunately Kevin agreed.  (It’s a lot easier to jump in when someone else says "I’ll go if you go.")  As we started taking off our shirts, other hikers passing by were going, "You gonna jump?!?" so of course we no longer had any choice.

We actually had to camp at Frances Slocum State Park, because even a month in advance when I made the reservations, Ricketts Glen was booked.  But Frances Slocum is only about 20 miles away from Ricketts Glen.  And it’s really nice -- the sites are huge, with the tent-pitching areas set in the very back of the sites, almost in the woods.  There’s lots of trees/shrubbery between the sites too.

One of the highlights of the weekend was on Saturday morning when Jeremy and I went to look for firewood.  The park office lady told us to go out of the park, and right across the street, to the house of a guy who sells firewood.  It’s a normal-looking house from the front, but around back is a huge field with piles and piles of firewood.  This 73-year-old man takes us back there with a wheelbarrow, pulls a tarp off part of one pile, and starts picking nice, dry pieces of wood one at a time and placing them carefully in the wheelbarrow.  He’s talking to us the whole time -- really friendly and talkative guy, if a little grumpy and vulgar -- and climbing all over this pile of wood.  From looking at him, you might think he’s a fragile guy, but you’d be wrong.  So he’s stacking this firewood and soon there’s 15 pieces in there, and he’s talking about how he wants us to have a good fire, not a "sh---in’ little fire" like you get when you go to Those Other Places who give you 5 pieces of wood for 5 bucks.  Nay, he’s giving us an entire wheelbarrow full for 5 bucks.  After about 20 minutes, he moves over to the kindling pile.  This contains long flat pieces of wood that he picks up and lays across a tree stump and axes into long slivers.  He then breaks these across his knee into individual pieces of kindling.  Another 15 or 20 minutes here, then we move around front to load the wood into Jeremy’s Jeep.  When we’re done, he spends another 20 minutes or so telling us his life story, where he’s worked, how he was in the army, how "millions of people" died on D-Day and the officers were all evil for planning it, how us kids today don’t know what work is... not that it wasn’t all interesting, but it’s been an hour by this point.  Sure, it’s only 5 bucks, but it’s an hour of your life too.

And just when it seems that a weekend couldn’t get any better, we discover that there are Grotto Pizza locations in PA!  There were two of them, in fact, right near the park we were staying at.  So Sunday on the way home, we went to the one at the Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre.  I could not believe that I was eating Grotto Pizza in my home state, without being at the beach.

CD-ROM drive won’t open and give your disc back?  Run "lsof|grep ide" or "lsof|grep cdrom" to see which program is still accessing the drive.  Then "killall ".  For some reason that wasn’t obvious at two o’clock this morning, and I was convinced that Satanic forces were holding the drive shut.  But today I said, "Oh yeah.  lsof."

Speaking of IDE drives, I drove past Idetown, PA this weekend.  Heh... that place is obsolete.  Satatown is taking over nowadays.

Oh man.  Geek humor.  Terrible.

Python is officially the dumbest language of all time.  If you don’t indent the code a certain way, it’s a syntax error.  Come on.

I saw Spiderman 2.  Not going to do a play-by-play on it.  But if you like love stories, you’ll love it.  And even if you don’t, you might still love it, because it’s action-packed, hilarious, really serious, and really sad.  It was just... such an experience.  I loved it.

[Update: warning: replies contain spoilers.  So don’t read them unless you’ve seen it.]

What happened to the Spring theme that I like so much? The whole site is a stark white, even when I choose Spring again on the settings page. (Running Firefox on Windows 2000 currently)

hi there anthony.  thanks for setting up our home computer.  what would we do without you???  i feel so connected again!  are you coming home this weekend?? are we going to see you on sunday??
love, heidi.

This makes me so angry.

"Marriage is something that is sacred," Smith said. "Some people view it as a union between man and woman. Some people view it as two people that are in love."

And some people are freaking liars.  Pointing at the ground while saying "sky" does not make the word "sky" mean ground.

"You are telling a whole group of people that their love is not valid and that their feelings for each other are not real," Edgell said.  "The point of marriage is love."

You are trying to change the subject because you know you are wrong.  No one is claiming "their feelings are not real."  The "point" of marriage is debatable, but the definition is not.

"(Being gay) is not something you choose to do," Kirwan said.  "It is who you are."

Who you are is a liar.  You aren’t "gay," you are a homo.  "Gay" was a perfectly good word with a definition, until homosexuals decided to change the definition, and everyone else looked the other way.

This Marriage Amendment was a bizarre thing.  I think the basic problem here is that there are two separate issues that most people are merging together (possibly without realizing it).  The first is the simple fact that marriage isn’t some idea invented by the government, it’s a word with a definition, which every dictionary (before the last few years) lists as "union of a man and a woman."  The second issue is that the government grants special privileges to married couples.

I think that most people, when presented with those two distinct issues, would say that 1) we don’t have the right nor the ability to just change the definition of a word, and 2) the government should not give special privileges to heterosexuals but deny those to homosexuals.  I think it would be unreasonable to disagree with those very basic statements.

But when you present those two issues together as "gay marriage," all hell breaks loose.  Reasonable people, who believe that the word "marriage" has a definition, will oppose "gay marriage" because it’s a contradiction.  Other reasonable people, who believe that the government should not favor one group over another, will support "gay marriage" because it’d be discriminatory not to.  Both of these otherwise reasonable groups of people are failing to recognize that there are two distinct issues here, and that most of them actually agree with each other.

The amendment might have been a good idea, and might have had a chance of passing, if it had properly identified these two separate issues.  It properly stated that marriage has a definition that ought to be respected, but it botched the second half.  The amendment said that states could not be forced to give homosexual unions the same privileges granted to marriages, but it should have also said that states could not be forced to withhold those privileges from homosexual unions.  By failing to make that assertion, the amendment would have allowed states to grant privileges to heterosexual unions (marriages) and deny them to homosexual unions -- indeed, that was the purpose of the amendment.  But many people find that to be unreasonable, and won’t allow it to pass in that form.

It’s wrong (and stupid) for pro-homo judges to try to redefine the term "marriage," but it’s also wrong (and stupid) (and dangerous) for the federal government to dictate what should rightly be state policy.  A federal-level mandate (i.e. amendment) saying "marriage is marriage" makes sense in light of the current stupidity of some judges/groups in this country, but a federal-level mandate that privileges one group over another does not make sense.

New theme.  Not quite finished.  Whatever you do, don’t go here and especially not here.  Yeah man, I’ll gnaw your face off.

Children should be
A. seen and not heard
B. cherished
C. given Ritalin
D. blown up

If you got a new puppy, what would you name him?
A. Rover
B. Fluffy
C. GK Chesterton
D. Infidel... and then hang him

The sun sets every night because of
A. the earth rotating
B. the earth revolving around the sun
C. the sun revolving around the earth
D. a Zionist conspiracy

My parents want me
A. to be happy
B. to make something of myself
C. to get a job
D. to blow myself up in a crowded area

At the end of the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I immediately thought
A. "What a great movie!"
B. "It could have been more faithful to the book."
C. "I need to pee."
D. "Kill the Jews!"

- imao

It’s sort of ridiculous that it’s possible for really big numbers to be prime.  Any number bigger than, say, a billion has no business having only two factors.  I mean, come on.

There’s something so enchanting about Philadelphia.  It’s a little scary for me, because of its sheer size compared to where I’m from, and because I got bike-jacked there a few years ago.  But there’s also a sense of security because Rolly lives there (he’s my big brother, you know).

On Saturday I headed down to see Saves The Day with my friend Mark.  We had a bunch of time to kill before the show, and we spent some of it driving around and walking on South Street.  I always feel like I could spend an eternity just taking it all in.  I definitely would not want to live in the city, but I so love to visit it.

We hit this one pizza place (Lorenzo’s?) and it was exactly like the soup nazi’s kitchen.  There’s a sign that says something to the effect of "toppings on slices?  don’t even think about it."  You wait in a line to order (which wasn’t too long at this particular time), tell him what you want, and within 13.82 seconds, you’re out the door.  I suppressed my laughter till we got outside to avoid hearing "NO PIZZA FOR YOU!  COME BACK, ONE YEAR!!"

The show itself was half crap and half awesome.  The crap half was the opening acts -- Boy’s Night Out and Hot Rod Circuit -- along with the inconsiderate people who go to enclosed places and fill the air with cancer.  Mark and I were both about to fall asleep during these first two bands; they were just completely blah.  They did say the F word a lot in between songs, though, so I guess that makes them cool.

But then, then.... then Saves The Day came on.  They were so super.  They opened with my favorite STD song, Holly Hox, Forget Me Nots.  They played tons of songs from the first two albums, Can’t Slow Down and Through Being Cool, and only 3 from the newest album (the 3 that I would have wanted, too), and even one from their awesome acoustic EP.  This was definitely one of the best ideas ever, playing songs from older albums instead of playing just/mostly new songs.  Bands who aren’t Saves The Day could learn a lot from Saves The Day in this respect.

Of course, there were lots of teeny-boppers there, but they weren’t obnoxious or anything, and at least they aren’t blocking your view :)  On the way out, I overheard a kid behind us say, "I’m 19 -- I feel old here."  Mark and I had a good chuckle over that.

This has been floating around the net for at least a couple years now.  I came across it again the other day while blog-hopping and decided to post it ’cause it’s just so funny (and sad).  I sanitized it slightly and fixed the myriad grammatical errors and whatnot.

It’s amazing that jerks can get girls.

Actually, now that I think of it, it’s not that amazing.  They are jerks at heart, but to meet girls they lavish their undying love.  IT’S A CHARADE.  They act nice, friendly, and they listen... until they get into what they’re after.  Their prey thinks they are in love with them, however when they realize what jerks their predators really are, they pretend like the jerk is really nice inside.  The girl tries to change the jerk into a nice guy, but jerks will always be jerks.

She gets upset and goes to the nice guy to complain about the jerk.  But she claims to love the jerk... now this is where the theory begins.  She doesn’t want to look like she is easy so she won’t dump the jerk right away, instead she will stay with the jerk.  They don’t realize that the nice guy has been there all along.  He never had to PRETEND to be a good guy to get girls because he is naturally like that.

However, girls don’t see it for some reason or another.  They look at the nice guy as a friend, a trusted companion to whom they can tell their sad story about their jerk boyfriend.  But the nice guy isn’t THAT naïve.  He was trying to get the girl all along.  The problem is that since he is a nice guy he keeps listening.  Since girls get attached to things that pay attention to them, they think of the nice guy as a friend.  A FRIEND.  They don’t say, "Oh he’s hot" or "I want to have his children" about the nice guy, they just want the emotional support.  When they get the emotional support from the nice guy, they don’t need it from the jerk.  The nice guy gets the short end of the stick while the jerk gets all the action.

I am starting to wonder if being a nice guy is really the route to take to get the girl.  I have been down this path for all of my post-pubescent life and it has gotten me NOWHERE... at least not in the women department.  Perhaps another reason why girls fall for the jerk is because jerks ignore the girl they are with.  The women wonder, "Why isn’t he paying attention to me?" so they explore why.  They poke and prod and get closer to the jerk.  The jerk finally says, "I’ve let this beauty dangle long enough, time to boat this bass."  It is then he puts on his charade and the girl feels like she has won him... even thought all she has won is a jerk.

Once you have gone down the path as a nice guy or a "listener" you can’t turn back.  The girl will always go after the jerks because there are always nice guys there to listen.  Once you realize that you are a "listener" you can’t do anything about it... just pack up and close shop.  There is no way you will get the girl... ever.  There never is and never will be a situation where the nice guy will get the girl he has a crush on.  It just doesn’t work like that.  The girl won’t "come to her senses" and realize what a jerk her boyfriend is like in the movies... instead she will just go after another jerk, and unless you stop being a nice guy, she will never go after you.

Women complain that there are no nice guys in the world.  Right.  They are obviously not looking hard enough because there are nice guys EVERYWHERE!  Girls aren’t looking for nice guys... they say they are but they’re not.  They are looking for the perfect jerk, but there is NO SUCH THING as the perfect jerk.

All in all, the nice guy gets the shaft.  To all the girls out there with boyfriends that don’t treat you with respect, that don’t listen to you, and that don’t care about you I say this: look next to you.  The guy that has been standing next to you the whole time is the guy you have been looking for.  He is what you want your jerk to be like.  He knows more about you than you know about yourself... because he has listened to it all.

http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=1921261&s=88389482

From the WSJ:

Cynthia McKinney, the erstwhile congresswoman defeated in a primary two years ago after she made a series of anti-Semitic and otherwise inflammatory remarks, wants her seat back. The primary is July 20, and the seat is open, as McKinney’s successor, Denise Majette, is making an ill-advised Senate run. McKinney’s Web site tells her story of why she lost last time around:

Cynthia McKinney became one of the first Members of Congress to demand a thorough investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 and responsibly asked the question, "What did the Administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th?" she was vilified and targeted by Georgia and national Republicans. As a result of her thought-provoking question, an estimated 40,000 Republicans voted in the Democratic Primary to oust Cynthia. It is called "crossover" voting and her supporters have filed a lawsuit against this practice so that no voice of the people like Cynthia’s will ever be silenced again in such an unfair electoral practice.

That’s right, the "voice of the people" was silenced by . . . people voting!

My mom just shook the hand of the most powerful man in the world!!  President Bush rolled through Pottstown, and his bus stopped right in front of where my mom and sister were standing.

Hometown represent!

A funny thing just happened to me.  I tried to post a message, and I got an error saying it couldn’t be written because the disk was full.  It’s funny because my server has 2 gigs of space, and the OS only takes about 800 MB, and my website only maybe 100, so that means... roughly 1100 MB -- that’s 1.1 gigs, folks -- just materialized out of thin air and onto my server.  Hm.

A little du -hm shows that it’s all in my default maildir.  Apparently the default installation of qmail is set to accept all mail to non.existent.accounts@nodivisions.com instead of bouncing it back to the sender as invalid.  (Deleting the file .qmail-default remedies the problem -- all invalid mail gets returned now.)

1.1 GB of email.  Considering that most emails are just a few KB, and that 1000 KB = 1MB, and 1000 MB = 1GB... that’s a stinking TON of email.  184,660 messages, to be exact.  All spam, too, since no one but spammers is going to send email to every.possible.word@nodivisions.com.  Here’s the breakdown:

Nov   4129  (138/day)
Dec   5183  (167/day)
Jan   4952  (160/day)
Feb   6384  (220/day)
Mar   6191  (200/day)
Apr  12535  (418/day)
May  42545 (1372/day) (1/minute) (253 MB)
Jun 102740 (3425/day) (more than 2/minute) (600 MB)

184660 total / 243 days = 760/day average.

600 MB of spam -- about one CD’s worth -- in the month of June alone.  And you thought you had spam problems.

O’Reilly interviewed John Edwards a couple months ago, and he played the tape tonight in light of Edwards’ having been selected as Kerry’s running-mate.  Asked what he would have done differently than Bush post-9/11, he said he’d relieve the FBI of the job of fighting terrorism, and create a whole nother organization just for that.  Can you say CTU? :)

Hate spam while you can -- the UN is on the case.  The UN has been smashingly successful at its past and current endeavors, so no doubt spam will be little more than a memory in a couple years.

A few fun images to celebrate our great nation’s birthday:

- Cox and Forkum, Let Freedom Reign

- Cox and Forkum, Aid and Comfort

- Muaaaaahahah.  From the webpage for ePSXe, a Playstation emulator that lets me play my playstation games on my PC (which is to say, OddWorld, since that’s the only game I have or want).

(show full-size image viewer)

It’s gotten to the point of absurdity.  There is a new security flaw reported in Internet Explorer every week or two.  Even more scary is the fact that there are likely just as many that go unreported -- only the bad guys know about them.  IE flaws are no longer news; a month or two WITHOUT one would be news.

I used to cringe at the thought of friends/family using it.  Now it’s to the point where I’ll have to start telling people, "It’s either me or IE."

The latest couple of security exploits to surface are one MS "fixed" 6 years ago, and one that monitors "secure" connections to banks and sends the captured sensitive data to the crook’s server.

If you use IE, you are insane.  It’s that simple.  It’s analogous to storing your important real-life stuff -- cash and jewels and financial docs -- on your front lawn in little bags labelled "take one."

You can install mozilla for free and use it instead, without removing IE, without negatively affecting your system in any way, etc.  Even CERT is recommending it:

The U.S. government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned Web users to stop using IE, because of the ’significant vulnerabilities’ found in domain/zone security model, DHTML object model, MIME-type determination and ActiveX.

Notice how Microsoft "innovates" security flaws into many parts of the browser, not just one or two.

In other MS news:

There won’t be a retail product [of Windows XP64], he said.  Resistance to that, Marr writes, "really surprises me. SB (system builder)/Disti (distribution) is the easiest and least expensive way to get your new OS, especially if you build your own PCs."

Translation: our product is so stinking expensive (since it takes us 2-5 years to make a single release, and at any given time we’re paying to litigate a half-dozen lawsuits against us) that the only way people will pay for it is if we hide its price in the cost of a whole computer.