October, 2006
Obligatory Political Endorsement
If you live in Utah and are able to vote, then there is only one thing I ask. Vote for Pete Ashdown. Although I don't agree with all the guy's politics, he has a major thing going for him: he is not the complete and utter mess of a human-being that is Orrin "what's a due-process?" Hatch.
He also has very cool approaches to campaigning - publishing his chat transcripts from IRC, commenting like a madman on Slashdot, and even hosting a wiki on his website where people can collaborate on issues. He's very solid on issues.
If nothing else, check out his website here, it's interesting: Pete Ashdown for Senate.
NaNoWriMo
Okay people, I'm doing it. I am officially enrolled in the annual NaNoWriMo competition. What is NaNoWriMo, you ask?
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) in the 30 days of November. Everyone who finishes wins! You win your name on a list of other people who finished, and certificate (that you have to download and print out yourself), and a "Winner" image you can place on your blog.
Will I finish? Will I only write one chapter, one page, one sentence, or a single word? Who knows! Only time will tell. But the way I figure, I need to write 1666.66 words per diem, which is uhhh.. like six and a half pages each and every day for a month.
I figure I used to spend the time on DIY:happy (which has recently spun off to new management) so I shouldn't have any problem doing it. And by "shouldn't" I mean "most definitely will."
Anyone want to do it with me?
The Problem with Bush
Brace yourselves - it's a politics post.
Bush has a huge problem - it is that he his physically unable to do anything right. No matter how hard he tries, everything is his fault - from natural disasters to flawed intelligence on Iraq, to a terrorist attack on America. The rest of the government doesn't actually exist - nobody else is screwing things up - there's no congress, no house, only "The Bush Administration."
Okay, so Bush has actually done a lot of good things, the real problem is that he could never dream of getting credit for any of it. I won't list all those things, I'll just get straight to what this post is about.
There is an article here talking about a new law Bush has signed allowing him to declare marshall law. Let's not even mention the fact that presidents have had this power since JFK (and maybe even earlier?). Let's just talk about this article for a moment. Here's the opening line:
"In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1)."
A stealth maneuver, was it? A stealth maneuver that was first passed by the house and the senate. It's not like Bush just made this stuff up and declared it law. The article misses the fact that we live in a democracy and that passing a law is a very un-stealhlike process.
Let's move on.
The article goes on to mention that this new law changes the Insurrection Act, which says what a president can and can't do in regard to military presence in a state. In the past, a president could only send in the military at request of the state itself. This law changes that so the president can act by himself.
Despite all the screaming about how this is Bush setting himself up for another term, how he's going to suppress the voice of America with armed force, and all the other hoopla going around about this, this is about something entirely different.
Katrina.
People screamed and yelled at Bush for not responding to Katrina when, in fact, he had no right to do so because the state government refused to ask for help. That's a power of the state, not the federal government. So here, Bush fixed it so that next time the slow response actually WILL be the federal government's fault.
But Bush can't win. Either he sucks for now going around federal law and flying troops down to New Orleans, or he sucks for changing the law so it won't happen again.
Someday I hope we live in a country where people aren't retarded. If a president really sucked, it wouldn't take lies to convince everybody. Let's live in a country where people look at everything the government does, and their motives, and makes informed decisions. I wish reporting like this was punished, not by the government, but by smart, informed readers who stopped reading (supporting) their garbage.
Usenet
The first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet. I'm telling you about it now, though, because I care. After you read this, please forget all about it and never think of it again.
Usenet is the seedy underbelly of the Internet. It was conceived in 1979 and made up the Internet in it's entirety for a long time, before the WWW layer and other things were added. Most people don't know anything about it, or don't care to know anything about it.
So what is usenet? Basically, it's a world-wide distributed bulletin board system. Publicly accessible chat conversations, essentially. It's here that you can find things like Linus Torvalds announcement of the first Linux kernel and other such momentous occasions (google keeps usenet records all the way back to 1981).
But it's not the conversations we're interested in here. It's the binaries. Binaries = files. Everything in usenet is divided into directories, like on your computer, and the alt.binaries directory is especially for transferring files. It is here that new movies, music, and software are posted (then on torrent trackers and IRC, then on all the P2P networks). The best part of it is not really monitored. You can't tell who is downloading like you can with torrent files and on P2P networks. It's actually the closest thing to anonymous in filesharing.
If you have an internet connection, you probably have access to usenet newsgroups. For example - if you're on comcast your news server is news.comcast.net and your login info is the same as you use to log into comcast's website. But you're better off going with a dedicated news service because they will retain the files for a longer period of time. Comcast retains for maybe a week or two, and often drops parts of files for no apparent reason. Giganews, on the other hand retains files for 90 days, giving you a better chance to find what you're looking for. They charge $12/mo (first month is $5 off) which I think is pretty fair considering what you're getting.
Another major advantage of newsgroups over P2P networks is speed. Since you are downloading from dedicated servers and paying for a premium service, you can pretty much saturate your downstream and go as fast as humanely possible. Where it might take a few days to download a 2GB file using a torrent, it will take something on the order of a few hours from usenet.
It's really important to have a good client. Since most files come as multiple messages, a good client will group messages together and list only files, pushing all the nonsense to the background. The best news reader I've found for OS X is called Unison. It costs money, but again - it's worth the price and one of the very few pieces of software I'm willing to pay for. It not only groups binaries into single chunks of files for easy downloading, but it has a system that gets rid of all the trash newsgroups (there are A LOT) and only shows you what you want (Movies, TV Shows, Rock Albums, etc). The only decent one I ever found for Windows is called Agent - but I really recommend buying a Mac if you plan on doing this.
You will also need a way of finding the files you are looking for. Usenet doesn't have any type of search functionality built into it, so you have to use a third party search engine like binaries.nl or binsearch.info. I prefer binsearch.info because it is better at grouping files together like Unison. You search for the files you want then create an ".NZB" file which you open with your reader. Your reader then knows to download all those files.
So in short, usenet is a superior way of getting files you want. It has both legitimate and illegitimate uses, and there is a lot of crap you won't want on there. If you do decide to give it a try, Giganews has a free 3 day trial (well, it's free so long as you cancel with in the first 3 days) and $5 off the first month. They also have various plans depending on how much you plan on downloading. Follow this link to check it out (I get a kickback if you do).
As a side note, I don't encourage downloading copyrighted materials. I have used usenet for downloading freeware game mods, open source programs, and media licensed under creative commons. It's a good distribution system for people who don't have a lot of bandwidth to spare (like small linux projects).
DVD Changers (...are retarded)
As technology progresses, we are constantly finding ways to make thing more convenient. Like a machine, we churn out a better version of just about everything every couple of years. Better cars, better appliances, razors with more blades, etc.
Sometimes, technology progresses in this way regardless of rational thought. It is as if a computer really is inventing all of this stuff using simple logic like "if 2 blades is good, 3 blades is better, and 4 blades is even better, than 1,000 blades must be ever more awesome!" As a side note, following logarithmic expansion of technologies, it is predicted we will have razors with an infinite number of blades by 2015.
One such inane byproduct of of this technological expansion is the multi-disc DVD changer. Putting the thought of such a device into your head for about half a second reveals the sheer absurdity inherent in it's design. I can imagine the logic that created this monstrosity; "if one DVD is good, and two DVDs is better, than surely consumers will want control of 6 DVDs at once!" I wouldn't be surprised then, if by 2015 we have DVD players with infinite DVD slots (okay, that might actually be pretty cool).
The problems with multi-disc DVD changers are manyfold. First is the slowness of using such a system. Most people only want to watch one DVD at a time. To put the DVD in the player you have to push either one of six or more eject buttons or push a sequence of buttons to eject a certain disc. This is followed by some awkward waiting while the DVD changer makes all sorts of odd noises, finally spewing forth it's tray ready to accept your DVD.
On some players, you then have two slots exposed, and you're not sure which is which. You need to get up and turn on the light so you can read the faint numbers scrawled on the plastic on the tray. You then close the tray, having to remember where you put the disc, and wait for the machine to load it up and finally start playing it.
Let's not even consider what happens if you don't know which disc you want. You have to go through each one, with a long pause as each one loads, until you get to the menu and can tell what it is you're watching. Convenience at it's best. If it takes 1 second to load a VHS tape, 10 seconds to load a DVD, and 1 minute to load a multi-DVD changer, then it stand to reason that it will take infinite minutes to load video players in the future. I, for one, welcome our new video playing overlords.
The next problem with multi-disc changer (remember: besides the complete inconvenience of using them), is that they are completely and utterly unnecessary. If you really want to watch several DVDs in a row, and are too lazy to GET UP ONCE EVERY THREE HOURS to change the movie, than you have much, much bigger problems than lack of convenience in switching between DVDs.
I cannot honestly imagine a scenario in which a person knows the next six DVDs they are going to watch, and also will not move from their couch within the 18 hours it takes to complete them. The person would have to be dead to enjoy such a situation. "Hey what are you doing today?" someone might ask, "Oh, I'm going to load up six DVDs in my multi-disc changer, than fail to move from the same spot for the next 18 hours while I watch every Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie in succession, but not until after I slit my wrists and do pushups in saltwater."
Don't even get me started on in-car CD changers. "Oh, you wanna listen to this CD? Hold on let me PULL OVER AND OPEN MY FSCKING TRUNK!"
For the average person to properly utilize a multi-disc changer, you have to be an incredible planner. Since the average american watches something on the magnitude of a couple of movies every week, you will need to intricately know what moods you will be in for the next several weeks to make your DVD mulit-player worthwhile. Oh man, I'm so glad that last week I thought I might want to watch The Princess Bride today, I was so right on! What would I ever have done had The Princess Bride not already been in there? I might have had to get off my duff and fumble around with that odd device under my TV!"
New Wallpaper
Microburst
Since it's been far too long, I present to you a brand new gthing.net wallpaper for your computer. This wallpaper is 1440x900 for 15" widescreen computers. I will convert to other sizes by request. Click the image above for the full size.
You can find more here.
New Shoutbox
I added a shoutbox to the right sidebar. So, if you want, you can type in a comment and it will appear live for the whole gthing.net fan base (currently maxing out at about 3 people). Right now it's open to all (even anonymous) users.
Look right ------>
Update: The original shoutbox got deleted because either it was broken or someone was abusing it. The new one is super awesome and fixes the problem. I'm telling you just in case you wonder why your comment got deleted.
What I Read (And You Should Too)
People sometimes ask me; "Sam, what are some good websites I should be wasting my time at work on?" For those people, and for the rest of you who have thought about asking but haven't, this list is for you.
I have 112 website feeds in my feed reader, and I use bloglines to read them all. I would recommend you do the same. This list is not comprehensive, but only includes the websites that I would expect you to know when I reference them in casual conversation.
Boing Boing is a blog that covers just about anything. One of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow writes on there regularly, as well as some other hip people. As with any time you get a little bit of everything, you get some good stuff, some bad stuff, and some plain weird stuff.
Lifehacker is a personal productivity blog. They cover all sorts of ways to stay more organized, be a more awesome person, and GTD (get things done). They also cover cool software. Sound boring? It's more exciting and informative than it sounds, trust me.
Slickdeals isn't so much a news site as just a list of the latest hot deals from around the net. Most of it is technology related (like right now there is a free router and a $1 pack of DVDs), but they cover just about anything if the deal is good enough.
Slashdot is the first blog I ever started reading regularly. They state their site is "news for nerds," and they accomplish this task. All stories are user submitted and admin approved, so they are slower to get some of the bigger stories. The best thing about Slashdot though isn't the stories, but the comments. You can always read the user comments to get more useful information and opinions on any given story.
I put these two together because they are essentially the same thing. These blogs cover the latest gadgets from around the world. They also cover gadget rumors. This is cool stuff to look at and then tell your friends ("Hey, did you know the japanese have a lifelike sex robot!?")
TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)
TUAW covers news related to Apple computers. If you're into that kind of thing, TUAW is a good site because they only cover the more serious rumors, interesting apple news, etc. They're not flooded with crap, in other words. This is the only mac blog I read (but I do watch freemacware.com for the free software pick of the day).
Neatorama is a lot like Boing Boing, but less political and more just about finding interesting things. This is another one of those ones that brings up cool things to talk about with friends.
Not a blog, per se, but still an interesting place to visit. This is the online home of Orson Scott Card's weekly political essays that are published in his local newspaper, The Rhinoceros Times. Card is a conservative democrat (I think that means "Republican") and always has a very insightful take on current events and various other issues. These essays are highly recommended!
Snide Remarks is Eric Snider's weekly humor column. It used to appear in BYU's Daily Uni-farce, then in the city paper, and then only online. For a long period of time the articles were available only to paying subscribers (i.e. hardly anybody), but they have recently been made available for free to the public once again. I actually found Eric Snider because Orson Scott Card once said that Snider was his favorite columnist, or online writer, or something like that.
I think that's about it. There are several more blogs I read regularly but don't have so much mass appeal as the ones I listed here. I also read a lot of personal blogs, but none of them are updated enough to warrant a mention.
MSN Selective Messenger Gateway Service
I was recently chatting online with one of my cohorts using the venerable MSN chat service. I, shunning all things Microsoft, use this network via a chat client called Adium. After many long pauses, strange and out-of-place statements, and general awkwardness of conversation, I had the suspicion that MSN was not properly sending or receiving all the messages involved in the conversation. My suspicion was confirmed when the other party quoted something they had just said moments before that did not show up in my chat window.
The other party (you know who you are), seemed annoyed to a minor degree, if at all. This kind of behavior from my software, however, drives me completely insane - especially when I am relying on it as a sole form of communication. My frustration was only magnified by the other parties' lack of interest in the subject of lost IM messages (or maybe they weren't hearing my complaints at all?)
Let me give you a scenario. You're telling a story to a friend. Something like "Hey Joe, I was walking down the street and this guy came up to me and said 'I'm a child molester and I kill nuns!' So I freaked out and beat him up and turned him into the police." Your friend is listening, but all he hears is "I'm a child molester and I kill nuns!" All this because the air on which the sound waves travel decided not to pass the rest along.
I was trying to make plans with my friend, but instead a five minute conversation became an hour long conversation with both parties (and by both I mean myself) wondering what the heck was going on.
I contacted Microsoft about this bug. They informed me that this wasn't actually a bug, but a feature! It's called selective messenger gateway service, and is provided free (as in beer) to all MSN users! My contact at Microsoft informed me that "bandwidth is expensive, and we figured we'd cut down on costs by only passing along a percentage of messages that go through our service. This will cut down on fees from ISPs and will eventually trickle down to the consumer." While the economics are sound, I'm not so sure this is a great strategy.
Hangers
There is a mystery that has plagued my mind for the past few months. It involves my closet, and how many hangers I have in my possession.
The strange thing is, every time I go to my closet to hang something up, there are no free hangers. The number of hangers always exactly matches the number of things already hanging up. I will take a shirt off of a hanger, then go to hang it back up that night - and the free hanger will have magically disappeared.
My first thought was to invest in more hangers - but the problem has persisted so long that I fear I am just supplying some unknown hanger-mooch with more free hangers. Perhaps I should buy some of those really frilly pink hangers that girls use to hang up their unmentionables. It would be easy to spot the perp with this method, for obvious reasons.
For now I have taken to hiding extra hangers in my other closet (I have two). This method seems to have worked so far, and I'll know if THOSE hangers start disappearing, than it's someone who reads my blog.
Perhaps I'll set up a hidden camera in my room to capture the hanger thief. If I do, you will see him (or her) revealed via the Internet, and thusly shamed for all eternity.
A Win for Chinese Censorship
China has long enacted a policy of forcing web sites to filter their content or risk being blocked. That means if a site, let's say google, does not comply with China's demands then nobody in the country can access your site anymore - you lose an entire market.
Unfortunately google and other search engines ran scared when China made it's demands. Their engines are filtered for any content China deems dangerous - information about Chinese policy, democracy, etc. is all filtered out so the people don't see it.
What Google and Yahoo don't realize is that they are as valuable to China as China is to them. They didn't properly use the negotiating power they had. They sold out to the man, when they probably didn't have to.
Wikipedia went another route. When China asked them to filter their content for Chinese users, they told them nicely that it went against the entire purpose of Wikipedia, against their morals, and was just not going to happen. China responded by quickly blocking them. No more wikipedia in China.
This causes a few problems. First of all, China knows it's people are going to use Wikipedia anyway. All these people automatically become criminals as soon as Wikipedia is blocked, and clogs up the Chinese legal system. If everyone is a criminal, than the laws will just stop mattering to people (remember prohibition). Second, and most important, China needs to keep the economic advantage of having important resources like Wikipedia available to it's citizens. They simply can't block half the Internet and expect to stay competitive with other countries.
So today Wikipedia was unblocked by China. This is a huge win for the citizens across the pond. This means the Chinese government has actually made a concession and given their people access to potentially harmful information.
I hope the Google and Yahoo will change their policies and stop supporting governments that don't give their people basic rights. If only Google and Yahoo had the confidence in their service to realize that China NEEDS it. I hope all the search engines learn a lesson and stop taking their policies from foreign countries.
Hi Ninja City
We were sick of being jealous of those cool kids who hang out at the park and dress up like knights, having sword battles and drinking grog or whatever. So Dave, Jon, and I got our own swords and had a battle in my backyard. It's pretty intense, and not intended for viewers under the age of 18.
A Few Photos
Jake is back in town for an indeterminate amount of time. He has quit his job and is livin' the high life of a modern hobo - hitching rides on airplanes across the country.
A bunch of people came over to commemorate his arrival, and some pictures were taken. None of them are of anything of particular interest.
Laura's new dog. I think it's name is Max or something, I can't remember.
Maybe Laura will leave a comment with the right name.
Ryan and Jake with crazy light painting.
More light painting. Look at it for a minute and then ask
yourself how it was done.
Jake draws a circle in the air.
Ashley draws a weird heart.
This is Jake, holding very still.
Ryan's new wheels with some magical lighting.
Juggling in the dark.
Technorati Tags: photos, dog, light painting
