This evening, I've redone my outgoing email MTA and routing. Speakeasy or SourceForge was silently bitbucketing emails to SF lists for at least the last two weeks. I'll have to go through and resend some other emails to people that I'm not sure they received. P.S., the amoral spammers who've caused this mess have my most heartfelt hope that all manner of misfortune befall them.
A few weeks ago, saw a pile of dirt that I'd hoped would become a permanent installation, but alas.
Due to the intrusive HCI of FOAF and Community messages on Orkut, people knowledgeable in the ways of online social networks generally avoid using such messages. And I think use of these messages is overwhelmingly by the less-knowledgeable. Today's most amusing misuse comes from a Harvard Economics alum.
Released sigbegone.el version 0.9.
Kazumasa Hirai's and Shotaro Ishinomori's 1983 anime film, "Harmagedon." I always choose subtitles over dubbing, but this DVD player was missing many controls, including the one that would've suppressed the terrible English voice acting. The musical score was bizarrely bad too. However, to a US-based audience, it was gratifying to see carricatured representatives of all the people of the world join together in loving brotherhood (with notably poor European participation) to destroy evil with superior firepower.
If you're wondering why TAB no longer auto-completes
addresses from BBDB in VM's mail mode, see
/usr/share/doc/bbdb/README.Debian.gz, edit your Emacs
initialization code, and use M-TAB. I'll probably reimplement the
original TAB behavior for headers at some point, if Debian doesn't
fix it first.
Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves" (1996).
Fawning, and has he sold the made-for-TV movie rights: Linda Greenhouse, "Atheist Presents Case for Taking God From Pledge," New York Times, 24-Mar-2004
Wondering why Judith Miller still has a job at the NYT, rather than been kicked to Fox, MSNBC, or CNN?
At one point, a college reporter asked Sulzberger a pointed question about one of his newspaper's star writers, Judith Miller, who has been widely criticized for misleading coverage of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq last year. The publisher defended Miller, saying he had known her "for decades," adding that she "has fabulous sources."
—Sonya Moore, "Sulzberger on Blair, Miller, Getting a Job at the 'Times'," Editor & Publisher, 22-Mar-2004
It appears that SourceForge has been silently dropping my emails for at least a week. I was actually kinda waiting on responses to two of my messages, concerning some Web-scraping stuff I'm working on.
My Privoxy actions file no longer blocks favicons.
Nautilus has surprising faith in ext2 large-directory
efficiency:
[christy ~/.thumbnails/normal] ls | wc -l ; df -T . 30060 Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda7 ext2 65337896 37530428 24488444 61% /home
By the way, building the majority/minority party designation into the House's URLs isn't a terribly good idea, considering the majority party status changes over time. (Hopefully it changes within my lifetime.)
I now have a favicon.ico, thus continuing my
nightmarish descent into conventional Web vapidity.
In an unusually combative display of physician anger, AIDS specialists in Boston and elsewhere across the nation are protesting a drug maker's steep price increase by boycotting that company's medicines, shunning its sales representatives, and severing research relationships.
—Stephen Smith, "AIDS drug's high cost spurs doctors' boycott," Boston Globe, 19-Mar-2004
Industry cleanup continues? But carelessness that would let an editor say "never" in this context isn't reassuring. Lose the passive voice, and everything that goes with it, too.
"As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems," the newspaper's publisher, Craig Moon, said. "For that I apologize. In the future, we will make certain that an environment is created in which abuses will never again occur."
—Christine Hauser, "USA Today Says Reporter Faked Stories," New York Times, 19-Mar-2004
"El Otro Lado de la Cama" ("The Other Side of the Bed") was amusing.
Sometimes, when Boston Globe columnists have you thinking it might be, not a second-tier paper, but a third-tier one, a little context is helpful.
"Sedmikrasky" ("Daisies")
A little late-winter snowfall certainly won't prevent Boston St. Patrick's Day supplies from getting through.
The government also prepared scripts that can be used by news anchors introducing what the administration describes as a made-for-television "story package." In one script, the administration suggests that anchors use this language: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare. Since then, there have been a lot of questions about how the law will help older Americans and people with disabilities. Reporter Karen Ryan helps sort through the details."
—Robert Pear, "U.S. Videos, for TV News, Come Under Scrutiny," New York Times, 15-Mar-2004
Jus' me an' Fabio, hangin' out on Orkut. Why, hey there, ladies...
Martha Stewart: the poor woman hasn't even been incarcerated yet, and already they're lining up replacements.
Howard Dean campaign office in Central Square had closed. No more pizza meetups!
It's been implied that the bashed window photo the other day was utterly poor, and that I should've at least tweaked the contrast. My favorite part, the torn chicken wire, didn't capture well; the intact layer of plexiglass wasn't helping.
In a lobby at MIT today, loaned a stranger a black Cross pen
engraved with "NEIL" and "ENSEMBLE 1992," but he got
distracted with a conversation and forgot to return it. Maybe he'll type
"neil ensemble mit" into Google shortly after the
Googlebot visits.
Released HtmlPrag 0.7, which adds proper parsing of verbatim elements like
script and xmp.
Dream in Kodachrome, speak in Technicolor?
A bashed window snapshot on walk to work this evening.
New URL for a page linked yesterday: The Arc Toward Justice (new link)
Tom Tomorrow, "Where Dubya Really Went in 1972"
Back cover of this month's Brown University alumni magazine is a Maserati ad. Are they quite certain they have the right school?
Mark Jurkowitz and Donovan Slack, "Barnicle signs on as Herald columnist," Boston Globe, 8-Mar-2004. Dan Kennedy noted this on Friday.
Jim Youll has condensed over 18 hours of Massachusetts Conventional Constitution talks into slightly under half an hour, entitled "The Arc Toward Justice." This medium-resolution encoding is 60MB, and he's looking for mirrors and streaming servers ASAP. He's also currently encoding a broadcast-quality version.
If you use Nautilus under Debian, remote filesystem access over SSH:
apt-get install gnome-vfs-sftp
Saw Michael Radford's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on DVD last night. It was done well, although the Ministry of Love portion was wearying.
We saw Errol Morris' "Fog of War" at Kendall Cinema today. Recommended, and not quite the downer that was expected.
David Remnick, "Passions, Past and Present," New Yorker, 8-Mar-2004 issue, posted 1-Mar-2004
"Mulholland Dr." (I'd link to the official website, except I think I'm now boycotting Flash-only sites.)
I dropped the ThinkPad X20 on a brick sidewalk, but fortunately the laptop was wrapped in a Martha Stewart towel from K-Mart, which protected it from all harm. This is not just any towel — this is Martha Stewart's towel, the source of all her power (the loss of which suggests why she's going down).
This feeds my suspicions that another metro area, Boston, has a secret law that no point should ever be more than 100 feet from noisy auto traffic:
One of the underlying principles is that streets work better when they are filled with cars and trucks. In contrast, pedestrian-only zones, which were once a favored device of planners, can sometimes seem lifeless. "Vehicular traffic not only makes a street feel more public but more vibrant," said Amanda M. Burden, the director of the City Planning Department [...]
—David W. Dunlap, "Planners Seek More Streets Through Trade Center Site," New York Times, 2-Mar-2004
Go, Portland! "Oregon county issues same-sex marriage licenses," CNN.com, 3-Mar-2004 2:12pm EST
Just stumbled upon School Uniforms by Neil Roberts, and after regaining my composure from disturbing flashbacks, am thinking, in a spirit of gender equality, that I could make some money on the side by purchasing a Catholic Schoolboy Uniform and putting up a fetish website.
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