Get your The Passion of the Christ™ merchandise. My personal favorite is The Nail. I can't wait for the movie to come out. I'm considering going to the Philipines during easter so I can see a real crucifixion!
I received a letter yesterday:
February, 2004Dear Oregon Music Purchaser,
As Attorney General for the State of Oregon, I am pleased to enclose payment for your claim in the settlement of the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation. This lawsuit was brought by the Attorneys General of 43 states and three territories and by the counsel for the Private Class Plaintiffs on behalf of purchasers of music CDs. In accordance with the terms of the court-approved settlement, payment is being made to music purchasers who filed a valid and timely claim.
Whether you filed your claim online at the settlement web site, www.MusicCDSettlement.com, or by mail, the attached payment represents full payment of your portion of the Settlement. Please note that the attached payment instrument must be cashed by May 20, 2004.
It is a pleasure to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion and to return value to consumers who purchased CSs while the challenged pricing policies were in effect.
Hardy Myers
Attorney General of Oregon
I'm going to use the $13.86 to buy CD-Rs.
This flash movie caused some controversy at work due to a certain part in the opening scene (watch and you'll understand). I personally think it's funny; others didn't. I'll leave it to my legion of loyal readers to decide.
Check out Subtly Simpsons for a long list of insider jokes featured on The Simpsons:
When Sideshow Bob is in jail, his prisoner number is: 24601.
This is also Jean Valjean's number in Les Miserables
Episode: 8F20, The Return of Sideshow Bob
I should've read How To Write Unmaintainable Code when I was in school. I would've learned a lot, and given the graders migraines at the same time.
Words fail to describe the epicness of this, the best use of Flash I have ever witnessed in my life.
Be sure to have speakers at a hearty volume when enjoying this saga.
George W. Bush has a nifty tool on his website: a form which allows you to send letters to editors of newspapers in your area. It is intended to be used by Bush supporters to send pro-Bush messages to newspaper editors, but there's nothing stopping you from using it to send any message you please. I did. I received feedback from teh editor of The Multnomah Village Post asking me what organization I represented because he'd received several emails in this exact same format. Here's the letter I sent:
When are we going to be united?George W. Bush ran for president promising that he was "a
uniter, not a divider", but here we stand today with our nation
torn apart by his call for a constitutional amendment to deny a
minority group the right to engage in a civil union. How did this
happen? Why does he believe the government needs to intervene to
prevent the States from deciding their own fate? The
rationalizations he presented in his speech demonstrate an unfounded
fear of homosexuality and an unfounded fear of the effects of
allowing governments to recognize it. Legalizing homosexual unions
is portrayed as endangering heterosexual ones. How? If the
government wants to secure marriage and considers it crucial to the
stability of our society, why hasn't the president called for a
constitutional amendment prohibiting divorce?
Submitted for you approval: free programming resources for programmers in a host of languages, from Ada to XML. Many are entire books in PDF form, such as "Thinking in C++".
Researchers at Penn State are using microbes to turn waste into power. It makes perfect sense to me; I saw Back To the Future 2, and I'm patiently waiting for garbage-powered flying cars. We'll see how it works out, but I know it's going to end up being a great way to generate electricity. Someday every home with a septic tank will be using bacteria to generate its own power.
Free After Rebate demonstrates that the best things in life are free, after six to eight weeks. Especially if you believe the best things in life are CD-Rs.
Author unknow, but I found the list at this fine weblog:
1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
3. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
6. Gay marriage should be decided by people not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
10. Children can never suceed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to cars or longer lifespans.
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “seperate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.
The argument against gay marriage I find the most humorous is the 'it's not natural' argument. Suppose it were proven that in fact homosexuality *is* natural? Would the opponents then drop their objections? Because homosexuality is common in nature. The Nazi argument against homosexuality was it was too natural, and was dangerous because it let people revert to their animal instincts. Watch for religious conservatives to ape the Nazis on this one. I'm just going to make this prediction right now.
What's the deal with state-endorsed marriage anyway? It's a sacrament, according to our president. So yeah, it's a good thing we live in a theocracy where sacraments mean something. As a muslim, I think marriage is under attack from all these harlots who walk around with faces exposed, in public without a written permission slip from their husband or father on their way to their degrading office jobs.
Yes...if you're going to make a 'defense of marriage' amendment to the constitution, make sure you add the section banning divorce. Duh.
Tour squidfingers / patterns when you're looking for trippy patterns to soup up your pages.
Wow, it's going to be a good year before I digest all the information contained in this Beck directory. Kudos to the people who put this together; Beck dominates.
Go to Grey Tuesday and download the Grey Album. I wonder what Jay-Z and Paul McCartney think about this...
Read up on these Classical Computer Science Texts to learn why Dijkstra wrote Goto Considered Harmful.
This is outstanding: the wingnut Alabama judge who defied federal law in order to keep his satanic idol installed in the Alabama Supreme Court is mulling a run for president. His unlawful attack on the separation of church and state made him popular among other wingnuts, and has resulted in Moore being given rockstar status in certain Taliban-esque fundamentalist circles. They want to draft him because the president isn't hard on gays, Islam, and gun owners' rights. This is a great scenario, which could potentially result in a sweet case of poetic justice if Moore runs away with the religious fringe lunatic vote and costs Dubya the election ala Nader. I'll be keeping an eye out. Meanwhile, go to Foundation for Moral Law, Inc., and contact them to let them know how bad you want Roy to run for president! I'd donate money to his election fund.
Ouch! A slap in the face to Sun, written by one of their own.
A study performed by an outside team appears to indicate a rough parity in performance between Java and a common implementation of another OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing, October 2000, "An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages" by Lutz Prechelt of the University of Karlsruhe). Both platforms are Object Oriented, support web applications, serialization, internet connections and native interfaces. The key difference is that Python is a scripting language. This means there is no compilation to byte code so the Python runtime environment has to do two things in addition to what the Java runtime environment does. It has to perform syntax checks and it must parse the ascii text provided by the programmer. Both of those tasks are performed at compile time by Java and so that capability does not have to be in the JRE.
Given this data, it appears that the JRE can actually be simpler than the Python RE since Java does at least some of this work at compile time. The example above of "Hello World" is a good method for getting an idea of the minimum support code required at runtime. This support code includes garbage collector, byte code interpreter, exception processor and the like. Hello World written in Java2 requires 9M for this most basic support infrastructure. By comparison, this is slightly larger than automountd on Solaris8. The Python runtime required to execute Hello World is roughly 1.6M.
I didn't know it took 9M to run HelloWorld. That's some severe bloat.
I'm going off to teach myself Python now...
A secret report details some serious concerns held by the Pentagon about the environment's status as a national security issue. Basically, it's a bigger threat to national security than terrorists. This of course is a problem for the Bush administration, who has yet to acknowledge that climate change is in the realm of possibility. Shocking I know, coming from oilmen who have a proven track record of commitment to the environment.
Max brings us a tutorial for building CSS-driven webpages which play nice with older browsers. How nice.
Trucks and SUVs are unsafe, because they make you feel safe.
I found this 5 step plan for building a photoblog, and I think I like it better than my current one. I'm seriously plotting a ground-up redesign of my entire site.
With PHP.
Today's useful link is all about photography and photoshop. It's more useful than many of the photoshop tutorials I've seen, even going to far as to include links to some actions. It doesn't beat Adobe Studio for overall vastness of selection, though.
I don't know if beer is really good for my hair...but it's good for my belly sometimes. That is all.
I'm unleashing the power of PHP with my new service, PHPOpenChat. Go there and visit me.
Bram Cohen, the guy who blessed us with BitTorrent, proposes the following (and personally I'd replace 'want' with 'need'):
What Customers WantThe things which will make people love your software, by rapidly plummeting order of importance, are:
1. ease of use
2. stability
3. performance
4. featuresThe order of priority many people use when writing software, and, unfortunately, what users generally say they want when asked, are:
1. features
2. performance
3. stability
4. ease of useThis is a siginificant discrepancy.
I have experienced the direct effects of this recently.
Look at this chart for a breakdown of who's looking down their nose at you.
You learn something new every day: the Buddha was cannonized as a saint in the 16th century. It wasn't until 300 years later that the church realized their error and de-sainted the Buddha.
I don't remember how I stumbled onto Pacific Farms, but it's an interesting place in Oregon that managed to figure out a technique for growing wasabi. I like it on my sushi, personally, but they also offer a variety of wasabi dressings and other stuff which can be used to burn your mouth.
Willamette Week, Portland's premier free news rag, offers a highbrow vs. lowbrow comparison of some of PDXs finest restaurants. Enjoy.
Is Bush Yoga a derivative of Bikram yoga? Does anybody know the answer to this one? I'd laugh if Bikram tried to sue over this.
Here are a few Questions about 9/11 that need answers. Very interesting questions.
Play CRIMSON ROOM until you beat your head against the wall. You'll never escape.
You can't beat it:stamp-sized 1 to 10 gig storage. Coming to a Best Buy near you.
This site offers a neat php-based flash chat app which is soon going to be installed on my site. Look for it. Hopefully it won't be vaporware!
In keeping with my net-centric theme, I present you with the often picturesque Gallery of network images. I found the power grid particularly interesting.
I'm planning to continue the souping up of my intranet server with the power of Tomcat tonight. Soon I'll have my own bogged-down JSP server, just like Friendster el al. Heck, I can create my own elite version of Friendster available only to my roomates and their guests. I can even create artificial server brownouts/outages to create the same Friendster experience.
I'm tempted to toy with the new PHP abilities and create some WAMP apps too. Fun stuff. I can get an off-the-shelf PHP-based photo album, bulletin board, and mp3 server. Hooray. My roomates will be impressed for at least 30 seconds.
I'm currently powering up my box with the force of Cygwin, which will give me the power of Linux without hampering me with the command line. I mainly hooked it up to give myself the ability to SSH into the box downstairs (I'm going to Cygwin that one, too) but I was pleased to discover I would be able to run Apache and all other sorts of *nix stuff. I'm looking forward to getting setup finished. I wonder if I'll be able to use it to run WINE?
Note: It's done! I had to reference this page in order to pull it off. I also ended up installing emacs.
Note 2 - The Wrath of Note: I abandoned cygwin and instead followed this tutorial, and it worked like a charm. Cygwin isn't bad, but the tutorial was much slicker, and worked pretty easily. The only problem was the broken version of MySQL control center it's linked to. Other than that, it was smooth sailing.
Bug Me Not will free you from compulsory registration at major websites. Use it.
This makes me so much more bitter about the fact that my cat-allergic roomate prevents me from getting one.
I somehow stumbled onto Atmospheric Optics and it makes me want to look at the sky more often. We've all had moments like the ones pictured on the site. It's great.
The news stories keep piling up with interesting news on Bush's military record.
I have to chuckle to myself with the news of Microsoft's source code leak, largely because of the fact that the MS coders apparently have potty mouths:
Fourthly, for Microsoft to have this code paraded in public is hugely embarrassing. Not least because the code is littered with profanity and might show that many Microsoft programmers do not do a very good job.
In keeping with today's ad hoc theme, I'll just have to throw in Beej's Guide to Network Programming. I'm going to start beefing up for my next big project. I forced myself to sign a nondisclosure agreement, so if I told you what my project will be I'd have to take myself to court and sue for damages.
Of course, I couldn't mention the feared Gang of Four without giving a shout out to eXtreme Programming. Rekanize the design patterns.
The Gang of Four Design Patterns will school you in the seedy underworld of gangs, code, software design patterns, fours, visitors, states, and interpreters.
Bush moved to Alabama unit without Air Force permission. Did he do it to avoid being tested for drugs?
I keep finding articles which point in that direction.
The things you'll see at Fantasy Planes will blow your mind. It includes a link to Scaled Composites, currently in the process of developing an contestant for the X Prize.
I somehow stumbled onto Netdiver and am in the process of getting my socks knocked off. Just thought I'd fill everyone in.
Groovy is a dynamically typed programming language that compiles into bytecode which runs on the JVM. It seems like the world's gone crazy.
Yale's Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition. Read it. Use it.
Emese Gaal's Photography is a pretty amazing site. I'm impressed. He's done some very amazing work, mostly with a Canon G2 camera. Check out the gallery. I'm inclined to start a gallery of my own and license my prints to start making some money on the side.
John Kerry is probably saying to himself, "I knew that whole Skull and Bones thing would pay off!"
Go to we love you, yes you. for sweet valentines day nothings.
I just found the article about LaTeX, which was all the rage with the professors at the Computer Science Department at the University of Oregon. I waxed nostalgic as I browsed the article and remembered cursing it while I trudged through Discrete Math back in the day.
I stumbled onto Projectneo and have been getting my mind blown for the last hour or so. Just a quick heads-up.
Take a moment to follow this link and view my proposed lump-sum gift. This would combine all future birthday and christmas presents into one unbridled display of the love my family and friends have for me.
Imagination Engines, Inc. is responsible for the creation of Creativity Machines, neural networks which have been used to create inventions like the Oral-B Cross Action Toothbrush and other neat things. Read for yourself.
Stephen Wolfram is now offering his automaton theory epic, A New Kind of Science, online and free.
I located the photo of the day in Yahoo! News AP Photos. George W. Bush Toilet Paper on sale now in Japan.
The path begins with a single bite. Sweet Basil fed me insanely delicious Thai food last night. It made me weep with tears joy from my salivary glands. It was on par with even better than Nicholas Lebanese food. However, Nicholas still dominates in its own mezza-plattered way.
Now that I think about it, I've been eating really well. Last week it was India Oven...Yes, Portland kicks ass.
The Luminous Landscape Tutorials will teach you how to take good pictures and answer those nagging questions you didn't even know you had.
Someone I know has tried to talk me out of buying this printer. I don't understand; it's gotten stellar reviews and seems to be a great deal. I'm going to buy it. It plainly kicks ass, spits out borderless 8.5 x 11 photo-quality (or better?) prints in under 3 minutes, and operates at whisper-quiet volume. It's very tantalizing.