This via slashdot:

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”

Anyone else recognize the RIAA in this quote? Heinlein wrote this roughly 40-50 years ago, but it’s especially relevant today.

I’m an opera fanboy. No, not the music, click on the link. Anyway, one of my favorite features is the mouse gesturing system. I’m addicted to it and get frustrated when I sit in front of a browser besides opera. Now it’savailable for mozilla/Netscape 6 as well. And it works on the mac. Browsing heaven, especially on the mac os x side where opera is not nearly as good.

….you would have said ‘bullshit!’

And yet it happened.

Can you believe that man’s luck?

I got my new machine up and running this weekend. If you’re interested, read on, though be warned that lengthy and arcane techno geekery is to follow….
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I’m addicted to lip balm. Yes, it’s true. Especially in the winter months, I can’t live without it. Today I made a gross observation. Take your lip balm out of your pocket, especially if it is one of those plastic - mini-toothpaste shaped tubes of Carmex or some other brand. Give it a good sniff. Nice huh? What the hell kind of toxic goo is growing in my lip balm, that’s what I want to know.

Think legos are for kids? check out what these folks are building with legos, they’re really very impressive.

Today I did my weekly hotmail cleansing. I use the account as a clearing house for junkmail. Some of the email is legitimate so I have to look over the emails somewhat carefully. It usually takes me 10 or 15 minutes. Today I noticed an invitation to visit the adult Boob village. I never read the actual email beyond the subject line, but I have to say I find the prospect of there being an adult boob village out there somewhere in the world compelling, if best left to my imagination.

So today on the ’steampunk’ yahoo mailing list, someone wrote:

Hello Sarah, it's meatloaf from planet jazz!!! I'm a steampunk person and loving it!!!

So, umm, its time for me to get the hell off that list. I’m not a steampunk person, seems to me, nor do I want to be
steampunk is a genre of fiction that proposes an alternative history. Generally this history has some version of a victorian society that’s evolved somewhat from what actually occurred in that time period but with advanced technologies based on steam power. The Difference Engine from Sterling and Gibson is a good example of the genre and a fairly entertaining book, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a decent example of the genre in comic book form

I saw Following last night. This is by the same fellow who did Memento, which I really enjoyed, so I had high hopes for this movie. I was not disappointed. This is a ’small’ movie - unknown cast, low budget, only a few sets and a few characters, and it’s shot in black and white. Even so it’s compelling stuff with a tight script and a tense ‘where is this going’ feel to it. Plus the director plays with sequence such that you really have to pay a bit of attention to keep track of where you are in the story. Not to the degree that he does in Memento but enough that you have to pay attention to it. All in all I would say Memento was the more entertaining movie, but that’s not to say you should skip this one. Three stars from me.

me: hey who do I ask this question of? Is it this guy?
other guy: yeah probably, but good luck getting anything useful out of that guy, he’s about as sharp as a sack of wet mice.

Now that’s comedy folks. Other guy eventually admitted that it was a foghorn leghorn line, but not until I’d stopped laughing.

newegg.com refunded my money today, leaving me free to shop for replacement parts for the new machine. This leads to the one advantage to this whole struggle, so far at least: the prices of computer parts are constantly dropping, such that for the same money I spent 3 weeks ago I can now get an identical motherboard from the same manufacturer but with ATA 133 support on board for the same price (the dead one only supported ATA100), and I can get the next AMD cpu up the scale or save $20, whichever I prefer.

I have this ongoing fascination with data visualization tools that provide easily navigable visual ‘portals’ into complex data sets, especially as they apply to website navigation. Mostly the interest stems from work, where we face this issue on a macro level (how to organize access to a website that has over 30k pages broken into a huge number of ‘content areas’) and on a micro level as we have one project in particular where we’d really like to have a tool that offers students the ability to navigate complex biology subject matters easily. So, today I ran across Touchgraph, which is completely awesome. You’ll need a java enabled web browser to check it out.

The other reason I’ve been fascinated with these comes from reading Gibson and Sterling and the other cyberpunk authors and recognizing that basically they’re onto something when they describe near future computer interfaces, it’s just a question of what that something ends up looking like, and these tools I’ve been linking to are glimpses….or potential glimpses anyway

I went to see Brotherhood of the Wolf this weekend. It’s well worth catching while it’s still in the theaters. It’s a horror/martial arts/period piece flick from, of all places, France. The plot’s based on a historical event, but just barely, and covers the appearance of a murderous supernatural beast in rural France and the efforts of the main characters to get rid of it. The action is truly superb and the cinematography is very cool, lots of swooping camera angles, slo-mo/fastforwad effects and really awesome morphs between scenes. The movie is also chock full of great costumes and sets. Be warned though - it’s subtitled and it clocks in at over 2 and a half hours. And about 30 minutes of this feels a bit….it could have stayed on the cutting room floor and the movie would have been just as good. But still, all in all, well worth your $7.

Between Lord of the Rings and this movie I am really wishing they would bring back the intermission. People need to pee and 2 and a half hours is too frigging long to sit in rapt attention.

Beer magnified 10,000x under a microscope looks like something I’ve seen after about 14 beers or a microdot. I know this because I’ve scoped out the Molecular Expressions site, particularly their beer section.

Check out these absolutely beautiful cases. My next geek project after I finish the still incomplete gaming rig is to buy one of these cases and turn it into a combination gaming rig/mp3 repository for my home entertainment system. They aren’t cheap at $500 for a half complete box but I can turn the thing into a finished PVR rig for well under a grand. This is where my tax return is going.

The landlords, after three years of prodding, finally agreed to do some work on the house. We got a host of improvements - new windows, they fixed the garage door and roof, replaced the house’s doors, fixed a number of things in the bathroom including the floor, and more. They also installed a smoke C02 emission detector. Almost every room now has a smoke detector in it and it’s a centralized system so that if one detector gets a whiff of smoke, they all start beeping. And this is no petite beeping either, this is make your ear hurt beeping, this is make the dog howl beeping, this is beeping that your deaf grandmother would hold her ears to hide from beeping. How do I know this?…….
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I don’t have anything particularly erudite to say about this flick, but I warn you in no uncertain terms, it’s an utter piece of crap. The movie has no redeeming qualities. Well, ok, wait, there is one redeeming quality - one of the annoying characters ends up being killed off. But it’s the least annoying character in a movie populated with very annoying characters so it’s small solace. Don’t rent it, don’t watch it on cable, don’t even watch it on regular tv. That’s my .02 cents.