Author: Nate

One for the Star Wars fans…

FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE
IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION (“DEATH STAR”)
WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED
AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD
VADER. I ESCAPED ALONG WITH THE AID OF
BRAVE REBELS AND WOOKIES, AND AM NOW I
AM LYING LOW DUE TO THE SITUATION IN
THE 4TH MOON OF YAVIN TILL WHEN THINGS
GETS BETTER. I HAVE CONTROL HERE OF
THE SUM OF $25, MILLIONNN IN IMPERIAL
CREDITS DEPOSITED WITH A SECURITY COMAPNY
FOR SAFEKEEPING ON TATOOINE.

One version of the Nigerian Spam, a-la Star Wars.

“Why he didn’t propose the banning of giant mutant spiders…”

Kos on the SOTU address:

Bush had two BIG initiatives yesterday, it seems — a blue ribbon presidential commission everyone will ignore to produce a report no one will read, and, more dramatically, the banning of that scourge of Western civilization — the human/animal hybrid.

Why he didn’t propose the banning of giant mutant spiders and killer self-aware robots is beyond me. Those are scary fictional crises as well!

(emphasis mine, purely because I love the line.)

Clearly Bush needs to meet Mearls.

“Addicted to oil:” a HUGE credibility gap.

Bush says U.S. addicted to oil

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush will say “America is addicted to oil” and must develop technologies to address soaring gasoline prices in a State of the Union speech on Tuesday night that argues against a U.S. retreat from Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Why should we believe that someone an administration which came out of the petroleum/energy industry can or will actually do a damn thing about this supposed addiction? (Especially when it has remained in bed with them through every public bit of “energy policy” since it came to power. And by “administration,” that just doesn’t just mean failed-oilman Bush; remember what Cheney’s background is as well.)

This is by far the funniest thing I’ve seen in the lead-up to SOTU. It’s rather like the head of Phillip Morris saying that the country has a lung-cancer problem.

It’s not a matter of whether you win or lose…

Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose – it’s how drunk you get.
– Homer Simpson

I’ve been approaching today’s state-of-the-union address with some mixture of apprehension and interest; at lunch today, I realized (talking to Marie; it may have been her idea) that the Preznit’s speeches are RIPE for a drinking game, and that there probably already was one. Well, sure enough, I get back to my desk and hit Google and there there are quite a number of “Bush’s speeches” drinking games, as well as a number of State-of-the-Union ones.

Two stood out:
* First, there is a serious attempt at a college-style drinking game*†
* Second, purely satirical version by Will Durst, which he has done for at least some past years.

† the same guy did ones for 2002-2004; the 2005 version was at the current URL had to be dug up on the Wayback Machine

I may print and try the first one tonight. We’ll see, and if I do, we’ll see how drunk I get.

Also worth noting
Arianna Huffington: State of the Union 2006: Make Your Party Plans Now
archibaldtuttle on Daily Kos diaries: The State of the Union Drinking Game Party!
And the intriguing but more general HuffPost Presidential Speech Drinking Game!

WordPress 2?

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.  It seems to work with my old home-grown theme, and the default it offers is still the 1.5 one, so I’ve kept my custom one for now.  So far it looks like most of my plugins work, and the new editor looks cool although may get annoying later.  We’ll see.

Anything you viewers notice? Let me know… I may try playing with some alternate themes later.

A little close to home for comfort…

The Onion
U.S. Holds Going-Out-Of-Business Sale
January 17, 2006 | Issue 42•03

WASHINGTON, DC—In an address broadcast on late-night television Tuesday, President Bush announced that the federal government will liquidate its holdings in a going-out-of-business sale scheduled to begin Friday.

After 200-plus years of service, the U.S. government is closing its doors.
“The U.S. government, America’s place for law and order since 1776, has lost its lease, and everything must go, go, go,” Bush said. “But our loss is your gain, and make no mistake: You, the people, would be crazy to miss out on these amazing closeout bargains.”

The Washington-based government, which hasn’t shown a profit in five years and carries the highest debt in its history, was ultimately driven out of business by costly overhead and cheap foreign competitors. As a result, Bush said, everything—from flag stands and Capitol cafeteria flatware to legislation dating from the early days of the republic—will be marked down 30 to 90 percent.

Go, read the rest. The Onion is hitting a little too close to home these days.

Video game edition…

First, file this one under “why am I not surprised:”

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese

December 9, 2005
By DAVID BARBOZA

FUZHOU, China – One of China’s newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are “gold farmers.” Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they “play” computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.

That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

Second, I’ve discovered a webbed version of a cool old 80s game “Alter Ego” (linked review is scathingly funny, BTW) when trying to find a better downloadable copy of game. Sadly, rather than abandonware, it seems to be still owned by Activision even if they’ve long since stopped selling it. But the web version seems fun and pretty acurate to the original even if it’s a bit slow to play and not quite the same as the old 40-column CGA version.

Headed home…

And that’s the end of Marie and my trip abroad… I am headed home in a few hours, although it’s going to be a long trip (especially in steerage on a non-OneWorld airline.. we’ll see if the seats are OK or not). In any event, sorry for the lack of updates/pictures… I’ll let you all know when the pictures are up on sandbox or my gallery, and maybe fill in a travel story or two here.

Til then, be well.

Happy New Years…

My vacation has been very enjoyable so far; after the obligatory family time, I’ve enjoyed my traveling quite a lot. New Years Eve in Singapore is interesting – the noise level since midnight has been constant and very high (it’s 12:45AM here on 1/1; I’m 16 hours ahead of California time right now here) and I suspect if I wasn’t still recovering from jet lag it would keep me up. As it stands, it’s sort of a non-issue since I am dead tired and will be back up in about 3 hours to fly to Thailand anyway.

I have taken some photos, including this one Me, looking silly. of me in front of a statue of some legendary Chinese warrior (which is in turn in front of the Singapore Hilton.) Not as many as I’d have liked – my battery ran out halfway through the Singapore Zoo. Also unfortunately the little camera I’m traveling with doesn’t zoom in nearly as far as I’d have liked for some of the zoo shots – ah well! it’s better, for these parts, than the DSLR just on size and not-getting-mugged counts (OK, the latter is not an issue here in Singapore, but it IS is the less nice bits of other places.)

Overall, I’m quite impressed with Singapore, although with only two full days on the ground(*) it’s hard to really get a sense of the place, a problem I still have with Hong Kong as well. I’ll enjoy it if I ever make it back, and I do hope to.

(* and fighting jetlag, sore feet, and a sore back/shoulders from overhard bed – the latter being nearly universal in hotels – at least from my perspective, although it seems worse in Asia.)

Tech stuff.

Two quick notes:
1) WordPress 2.0 is out. I plan to upgrade when I get back to the states; I’m not convinced it’s really going to be an improvement, but I need to keep up to date with the security patches, so there’s not much choice. Hopefully my old style/theme will still work. If not, expect a very bland defauly style until I have more time…

2) ReiserFS sucks for news spools, even with “notail” on, at least on RAID1. I’d wondered if that was it, and it appears to be the case. My leafnode spool runs to about 1.5 million articles, and 9GB; when I put in the mirrored drives, I put it on it’s own file system and switched it from ext3 to ReiserFS. I noticed then that it took about 6 hours every day to run texpire, which seemed long – but I hadn’t been checking since it had been growing. Well, “notail” sped it up a bit but it still took several hours…. so I got fed up, and with the wireless here, migrated it back to ext3. On ext3? (with dir_index on, data=”ordered”, and commit=60) it took a whopping 12 minuts… or a 40:1 improvement.

This is only a test…

Ok, this is just a test to see how well posting works from my little PDA thingee. So far I am not terribly impressed with how this site looks on the mobile screen but logging I and bringing up the post form works OK and the miniature keyboard is not half bad – if a little slow.

Anyone know about optimizing these thing for both desktop and PDA user? Does anyone out there with a Treo or Blackberry want to comment on the way the site appears on your device?

Update looking on the PC – one bad typo “botb” and one extra line break. Not too bad. Can we say “blogging through boring meetings?” anybody?

“P.S. I am not a dictator!”

From today’s Presidential Press Conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. I wonder if you can tell us today, sir, what, if any, limits you believe there are or should be on the powers of a President during a war, at wartime? And if the global war on terror is going to last for decades, as has been forecast, does that mean that we’re going to see, therefore, a more or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive in American society?

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I disagree with your assertion of “unchecked power.”

Q Well —

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, please. There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law, for starters. There is oversight. We’re talking to Congress all the time, and on this program, to suggest there’s unchecked power is not listening to what I’m telling you. I’m telling you, we have briefed the United States Congress on this program a dozen times.

This is an awesome responsibility to make decisions on behalf of the American people, and I understand that, Peter. And we’ll continue to work with the Congress, as well as people within our own administration, to constantly monitor programs such as the one I described to you, to make sure that we’re protecting the civil liberties of the United States. To say “unchecked power” basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the President, which I strongly reject.

Q What limits do you —

THE PRESIDENT: I just described limits on this particular program, Peter. And that’s what’s important for the American people to understand. I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country.

(resisting the urge to correct “The President” to “El Shrubbito”)

John on AMERICAblog summarizes it nicely:

Q: Are there any limits on the power of a president during war time. And if the war on terror will last for decades does that mean we’re going to see a permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive during wartime.

A: I disagree with the phrase unchecked power. blah blah blah. I am not a dictator. [paraphrase]

[THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES JUST HAD TO DENY BEING A DICTATOR]

This reminds me of what my college buddy Mearls used to say “PS I am not a crackpot!”