I’m a cookie monster

I rarely buy cookies because, whenever I do, I eat them all at once. I ate a whole package of delicious oatmeal cookies in the last 24 hours. I feel kinda like this:

Zoe…don’t go to this website

As many of you know, my dog Zoe is epileptic. Fortunately, her seizures are now mostly under control due to massive doses of medication. We still haven’t determined what sets off her bouts of seizures, but some epileptics are affected by flashing lights. According to a Wired article, some mean spirited people have taken advantage of this by inserting many flashing gifs into posts on a epilepsy support forum with the aim of causing seizures in people.

So, Mom and Dad, don’t let Zoe go to that website.

South Park now available free and legal!

Just read aslashdot article saying that all South Park episodes are now available for free from their website. Of course, I immediately went and tried to watch one…only to be greeted by “Sorry Australia, full episodes coming soon”
The same thing happens with Pandora and Hulu too.

Damn

I’m bored tonight, I guess that’s why I am posting so much.

Anyway, this hilarious video came via FauxReal

What’s different in Australia, #1

• We say “toe-may-toe”, Australians say “toe-mah-toe”
• There’s a lot of really bad hair styles. Tons of mullets, rat-tails (no offense meant to vulvasaur), and weird, puffed up/streaked/ I don’t even know how to describe what some of the young women have on their head.

Out of solitary confinement

Have you ever heard of the Angola Three? They were some Black Panthers in a Louisiana prison who were convicted of killing a guard in 1974. Two of them, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have been in solitary confinement since 1972.

36 years!!!!

Thirty six years spending 23 hours a day in a 6′x9′ cell – that’s over 300,000 hours. WTF? How is that legal? What’s worse, according to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee there is evidence that they were wrongly convicted. One of the Three has already been exonerated; Robert King was released in 2001 after spending 29 years in solitary. Today, Wallace and Woodfox were moved into cells with other prisoners, but they are still serving their sentence. You’d think they’d been punished enough, already.

linux, easter, etc

Well, I hope everyone had a nice dead-guy-on-a-stick holiday (aka Easter). Mine was super laid back. Since the weather was chilly, I spent most of my time reclining in bed with a book (actually, several books). I did manage to work up enough energy to go over to a friends house for a BBQ on Saturday, however, which resulted in me stumbling home at 1AM.

For the rest of my days off, I played with a new (old) computer that my work gave me. It has an OK processor on it, a P4 1.8GHz, but only has 256MB of RAM. Since it’s an older machine, I decided to put GNU/Linux on it and use it as a file server for the piles of hard drives I have sitting on my desk, but ran into some troubles. The LiveCD for Ubuntu needs at least 256MB of RAM to run, so I figured I would be OK installing it. It wouldn’t work properly on my machine, so I had to download another CD image, this time of the text installer for Ubuntu. This installed fine, but Gnome, the window manager included with Ubuntu, has too much eye-candy to be able to run smoothly on so little RAM. So, I decided to install the Xfce window manager which is known for being light on resources (one of the nice things about Linux is that the graphical user interface runs on top of the operating system, rather than being integrated into it, so different desktop environments can be used, or none at all; you can’t do that in Windows or Macs). I managed to get it installed fine, but for some reason it started up without any menus or anything – it just had a blank desktop with a few folders on it, so I had to do some configuring. The machine actually ran really quite well, but being a bit of a tinkerer, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and decided to start all over, but with Slackware – the true linux geeks distro. Slack installed great – no problems at all. Again I used xfce, and the machine pretty much screamed! I think it actually loads Firefox faster than my fancy laptop. I was pretty impressed. But then I realized all wasn’t quite as good as I imagined – I tried to play a music file and the xserver crashed; the scroll wheel on my mouse didn’t work; I didn’t have any sound; etc. I have been trying to figure out why some of these are happening , but to little avail so far. I’m learning a lot about Linux, more than I have while working with Ubuntu (because things just always seem to work in Ubuntu), but I don’t know if it’s worth it. I may just download a CD image of Xubuntu and start over…again.

While sitting here typing, my long lost friend the huntsman spider showed up to visit. This one used to sit on the ceiling in my bedroom all the time, but I haven’t seen it in a month or so. It’s big and scary looking, but harmless. Huntsmen can give a painful bite, but they aren’t dangerously venomous; if people react at all it usually localized around the site of the bite.

Kyle MacLachlan needs to do more movies…

I’ve always been a big fan of Kyle MacLachlan, who is probably best known for playing Special Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks. His career has been a bit down for awhile. Apparently he has too much time on his hands, because I just found out that he has a website for his two dogs, Mookie and Sam. But it gets worse – he makes movies of them!

ooo! A new Firefox soon

Firefox 3 should be out soon and I have to admit I am excited! It will be faster, more secure, and have a bunch of new and improved features. One of my biggest beefs with Firefox has been it hunger for RAM – it gets so bloated! The new version is supposed to significantly improve that. I can’t wait!

There is a review of the latest beta release here.

I’m baaacckkkk

It’s been quite some time since I posted anything here. That’s partly because I went to Tasmania for over a week, and partly (mostly) because I just haven’t felt like writing anything.

Tassie was great – we took the 20:00 ferry Spirit of Tasmania for the ~430km trip from Melbourne across the Bass Strait to Devonport, Tasmania. The ferry took about 11 hours, but was pleasant because we got a cabin so we had beds to sleep in, rather than airplane-like chairs to try and sleep in.

On the boat John, the person I went with, realized that he had forgot to pack underwear. Of course, I had to make fun of him, “Ha ha ha, what kind of dolt forgets his underwear” type stuff.

Twenty four hours later, while camping around Evandale, I went to change my clothes because I got a bit wet in the South Esk River where we had been collecting… only to realize that I had forgotten my underwear too. Luckily I didn’t make too much fun of John for forgetting his. We had to make a special trip into the Target in Launceston to buy new undies. I had to buy a pack of silly little briefs because boxer briefs, my regular style, were $15 a pair: