Good morning web

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

So now that I have Phil doing an increasing percentage of the day-to-day image processing, I'm figuring out how to squeeze more work into my schedule… One of the things that's going to mean is finally finishing off some old projects, like a rewrite of the QOD system which as started in May of last year according to my code notes. It's actually kind of infuriating working on older code like that because what I write these days is so much cleaner…

I will probably keep a few current people on staff, but when I get the software completed, I'll be looking for a few new people to answer QOD questions. If you're interested, drop me a line at glider@zentastic.com and include your qualifications, and I'll send you a “test list” of questions. Outside of organizational issues, the major upgrade is that this version of QOD has support for pictures.

Let's see… So Syria says that it'll open “the gates of hell” if the US follows through on its threats to invade… I've always wondered about that expression; about that threat. Does it imply then that Islam (or whatever the source of the threat is) comes from the power of Satan? Or maybe they're just saying that hell is going to have to open its gates because of all the oncoming infidel corpses. I don't know. Either way, staging war around fairy tales is pretty sad; [via] for example:


...just before one of the 2003 attacks on a residential compound in Saudi Arabia, an attacker who was in contact with his superiors was "heard on the mobile phone counting down the seconds to the 'beautiful maidens.' His last words were: 'One second to the beautiful maidens.' He then blew himself up."

Just a general comment — you're not a martyr if you're in it for the hoors… and a drug dealer isn't doing charity work if he lets you suck his cock in trade for crack. Well, at least Islam trades sex for violence… The US Christian Army is so cheap all you get is a couple of iTunes downloads.

Hey, great news from Debbie Downer for those of you looking for either a heavenly harem or pre-death online music: Iran has put radicals in charge of their nukes, wealth continues to pool in America and the rich — but incompetent — get high-responsibility jobs that they're not qualified for, war and deception goes on and on, pandemic flu is on the way and unprepared for… and kids get kicked out of highschool for having piercings because “it's too dangerous”, even though thousands of youths are killed or injured due to combative high-school sports every year.

Remember kids, violence = good, personal expression = bad!

Here's a good solution:

PS. Deja Vu?
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Where have I been?

Monday, October 10, 2005

Long day today (and much longer for Rachel who's done most of the work)… Had a computer failure yesterday (on the machine that updates BMEvideo, so it will be a few days before the next update) and discovered that it's disturbingly difficult to make an NTFS boot disc (or CD-ROM) if you can't boot off your harddrive, but need to update a single file on it so you can (a core Windows DLL got damaged)… to be honest, Knoppix seemed like by far the easiest way to go, minus the big download that is.

We bought a new computer here (a 3.2Ghz VAIO), but it's not as simple as just plugging it in… It came with Mexican Windows, which means that every single interface is in Spanish, and there's no way to change that. And it came with only a modem, and no ethernet card installed, which was a surprise since that's one of those things you just “assume” is going to be there… Anyway, that's sorted out now. Other than that, we also had to do a bit of running around because I lost my FM3 (sort of like a Mexican green card) and had to go to the police station to file the appropriate reports and forms.

On to a couple things I've cooked in the past few days, starting with this experiment… It's nothing amazing, just a walnut, yellow pepper, zucchini, red onion, and cactus stirfry on sauce-fried noodles.

The spicing was an experiment to try and make something close to a pad thai sauce… I can't remember exactly what I put in it but it was a mix of various chile peppers, including I think some smoked ones, and garlic, lime, soy sauce, and brown sugar…

I made some chilli as well, which I managed to eat inside 30 hours.

It's got a can each of red beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and black beans, as well as a big can of whole tomatoes (which I quartered), and a small can of whole mushrooms. This is added to lime-grilled onion, garlic, zucchini, yellow pepper, and cactus. If I remember right, it's spiced with three or four kinds of fresh-powdered chile along with lots of chipotle pepper. This is all ground up with paprika, cumin, black pepper, salt, and brown sugar (and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting). It's not really anything special but it was really delicious and super easy to make.

Sorry I haven't been posting more!

PS. Raw Food: Before and after pictures!

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T-Shirt Contest: First Wave

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Because I want honest feedback, I'm not listing the names of my favorite submittors in the t-shirt contest (still ongoing; click here for details). There were about thirty submissions in the set; these are the ones that I think turned out the best. Click on any of them to zoom in.


For naming purposes, here's the shirts, left-to-right:
  1. BME Goddess
  2. …and this little piggy went BME
  3. The World is Divided
  4. BME Girl 9 (I think that's the right number)
  5. They Came – They Saw – They Bled
  6. Wide-Eyed Asshole Bingo
  7. Planet of the BME Apes

Colors could be changed on any of them of course as well, these are just quick postings. Want to see one (or more) of them printed? Drop us a line in the BMEshop forum, and as I said, we're still accepting submissions for this t-shirt design contest.

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God Loves War

Friday, October 7, 2005

So there's a news story going around right now (officially denied) that quotes Bush as follows,


"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God I'm gonna do it."

Back in 2003 I made the (then crazy sounding) claim that Bush was framing the context of these wars as a holy war. Whether he's doing that as propaganda or whether he's genuinely insane, if you haven't seen the video yet, consider checking out his statements of March 26, 2003, to troops about to ship off to Iraq.


TWO MEG WMV FILE

Any time you listen to one of these speeches, to flip your prejudices, replace “God” with “Allah” and imagine it's some mullah rather than Bush. If this rhetoric was coming out of the Arab world — and yes, I know that it is as well, on an all-too-regular basis — it would not be well received and it would not speak well for the lucidity of the speaker. But welcome to a world where the single largest sociopolitical issue is a debate over what our invisible friend's name is and who he likes best, and we've spent the last 30,000 years killing each other over this triviality — and God sucks, statistically speaking.

Makes you wish for a more mundane 2000.

Other than that, I got some very strange usage graphs this morning on the server. CPU load was heavy but not totally unnatural, but all of a sudden memory use spiked and then climed for a while, and then suddenly dropped. This memory use made little difference on performance (luckily), and even odder, nothing in the process table appeared to be consuming it…

Anyway… Phil's going to do a members update today and continue training, and I'm going to be practicing for Porn Sunday since I kind of lazed off on pandemic awareness week.
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Millions of dollars – Online bubble II

Thursday, October 6, 2005

Among other properties, MySpace got bought for $580 million, Skype for billions, Upcoming for undisclosed riches, and now AOL is dropping $25 million to buy Weblogs, Inc.. It's fascinating because in each of the cases, the software/media properties are pretty basic, have had only a limited time on the market, and could be replicated [better] for a fraction of the purchase price… it really blows me away that traffic and users, which are what's actually being bought, are worth this much.

The reason it blows me away is that one thing that has been shown on the Internet over and over and over is that online properties are like television shows — they can skyrocket to massive popularity in less than a year, but disappear again in the same time period as another property replaces them… It just seems like a strange decision, making an online investment that's going to take a solid ten years to pay off — unless the big corporate players see the market as cooling off and stabilizing? The problem is that if anything, trends will go the opposite way — media and software development is still well within the hands of the common person, hosting and bandwidth is relatively inexpensive, and advertising networks are open to anyone, making it very difficult to block newcomers.

I know, I know, many of you have been telling me to commercialize more fun projects of mine. Now that I have some help on BME maintenance maybe I'll do that… I could definitely use the millions billions.

Speaking casually of computer stuff, I agree with this article that computers are bad for kids. While I want her to be fluent, I don't want Nefarious to get hooked on computer watching any more than I want her to get hooked on television watching. I'm perfectly happy to see her using computers or producing television, but I think with modern computers being so media and software heavy it's very easy for a kid to become the submissive in the relationship, whereas in my opinion a kid should have a dominant relationship with its toys and environment (ie. growing up should be about learning how to create).

In other news, the Catholic Church has finally admitted that “parts of” the Bible are fictional. Thank you, Satan. I wonder what future the Death of God will herald? I predict amateur teener porn, computer-aided drinking contests, and suspension hook animal mutilation. Luckily I've got no particular problem with anything but the last bit of that trifecta.

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