All sillyness aside, I feel terribly bad about the hurricane victims of Katrina. I saw that over Google, there are 6,000+ related links about this disaster. I know exactly what this feels like, when Juan hit Nova Scotia, a couple of years ago.
That was around the time when leading hurricane expert-ordinaire Anderson Cooper was presenting the 3 minute Pop questionaire at American Morning.
We watched both the Rings movies last night. We had seen ‘The Ring’ in the theatre before but decided to get and watch both of them. The ‘Ring 2’ does not even come close to its predecessor.
First of all, there are so many goof-ups that the one we discovered weren’t in the extensive list on IMDB. The goof at and after the deer incident was the part that signalled that the worst was yet to come: watch the driver’s window after the first attack.
As for ‘symbolism’ used in the movie: while the producers appear to praise this part, I find the ‘symbolism’ highly incoherent. It’s like if somebody has seen Twin Peaks and thought it was neat to drop in a couple of burning trees, deer and water all in a random order. The result is an unsettling movie: unsettling as in ‘bad’.
Humans are packrats. I’m not kidding. I just finished browsing through the files on a CD-ROM disk called ‘sources and downloads from laptop’. As the name reveals, it’s a disk full of older sources from my old laptop. I was actually looking for a piece of Python code, a framework for sifting through newsgroups. I didn’t find the software, but I ended up reading up older code, examining zip files and trying to decipher the functionality of executables with weird names.
Take for example all the source files: they have been divided over three zipfiles with sizes varying from 20 MB to 60 MB. There’s ‘ProcNavigator’, ‘Hearts (is not a game)’ and other funny stuff worth mentioning but not right now. Later maybe: I need to think about why humans are such a packrats.
Call me old fashioned, but I have to smile when I read the following over at Kottke:
For those of you who read the remaindered links in a newsreader, you may not have even noticed the change.
Kottke on reading his remaindered links
Since when do people associate ‘newsreader’ with blogs? Hey, newsreaders: that’s software that you use to read news from Usenet! Blogs? I read that from within my browser, and I’ll keep it that way.
Via Mernit’s a rather provocative picture of (what I presume is) art: women wrapped up in meat packages (link only, NSFW [possibly]).
It reminds of a couple of years ago, during Alfons’ second visit to Canada (his first one was the wedding visit) when we were walking through a Sobeys watching the meat in the packaged meat section. He loudly exclaimed ‘That walking along the aisles is like walking at the beach!’.
It was that very day, I decided not to become a vegetarian just yet.
updated:Related: The first human zoo.
Interesting discussion between Alan (website) and Cory (website), as pointed out by Alfons).
I find it hard to formulate the right words in the whole discussion, noting that I find this part of the law is a moral mudpit of rights and wrongs. Was Copernicus quilty of blasphemy when he pointed out that the Earth was not the center of the universe? Was he wrong in sharing this with the world?
I‘m 
not the only one who noticed that doing ‘apt-get update’ on my Debian system is hanging frequently: I’ve been carefully updating and upgrading my system, only selecting the pieces I actually need.
Today, I decided to try a complete ‘apt-get distupdate’, knowing that I might just as well do the complete distribution update: ‘Fetched 133MB in 25m37s (86.6kB/s)’. Not bad. However:
Retrieving bug reports… 0% [0/153]/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:42:in `timeout’: execution expired (Timeout::Error)
from /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs:1087:in `join’
from /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs:1087:in `create’
from /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs:1059:in `each_key’
from /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs:1059:in `create’
from /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs:1317
Warning: apt-listbugs exited abnormally, hit enter key to continue.
Aha. It’s actually listbugs that is bugging apt.
Update: Picture added (see above): After restart, for some kind of reason, I expected to see KDE load up in my terminal. Ha-ha. Funny. Not.
Update 2: Hey: at least my terminal closes normally instead of hanging…
There’s both dismissive and speculative talk abound about Google Talk, Google’s IM and VoIP application for Windows.
The point of the Google talk isn’t all about ‘another IM contender or so’, ‘evil empire’ or ‘Skype is next’. Nope: Google supports the Jabber protocol. People who followed the IM scuffle in the early 2000s may remember how MSN, Yahoo and AOL tried to work together on a protocol to offer as a standard to the IETF. This effort failed and all parties decided to go on with their own business to keep their protocol or network closed. With Google backing Jabber, it wouldn’t surprise me that the Jabber protocol finally gets the acceptance it deserves. That’s the important message of today’s release of Google Talk. I mean, why would you want to hang around a closed IM format?
Google’s actual VoIP implementation is not bad. It’s easier to set up than other implementation and seems to work right after plugging the microphone in. Now, if only they had clients supporting platforms like Linux and Apple.
Will Google officially announce their “Google Talk” service tomorrow? That’s the buzz now and that actually wouldn’t surprise me. After years of locked-in IM protocols, popularity IM contests and ridiculous IM bloat variants (MSN, most notably, with their pay for features), it’s about time that there should be a universal IM standard and if that’s going to be Jabber, it’s for the better. Time to get rid of ubiquous sub standards.
08/24/05: They did it.
Our Internets were broken last night. The problems started around 7 pm and lasted (probably) around 8 am this morning. I think the problem was around (either) Aliant’s gateway(s) or DNS server(s): logging in went fine. After login, the proper IP addresses were assigned but pinging the outside world always ended with the dreaded ‘host not found’. With luck sometimes ‘request time out’. Initially, I was blaming the firewall(s) [sofware and hardware], but after plugging those out, the same observations were made: ‘host not found’ or ‘request time out’ messages. A call to Aliant’s service line brought me as far as a message on tape saying that ‘there were connection issues in all 4 Atlantic provinces’. What took them so long? Note, that nothing has been mentioned on Aliant’s network status page, a page that appears to be stuck with a message from the 15th of August, saying that we customers should be aware of a virus. No really. Aliant’s administrators should have a blog. That be interesting for a change.
So, I ended up watching 2 of the 3 ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies. I haven’t decided yet if I should be watching the third one. After seeing the movies for the umpth time, I keep wondering why Aragon chooses Arwen instead of (what’s her name again). I mean, elvens are boring, because of the fact that they are inmortal (that is unless they haven’t died by the sword naturally) aren’t they? Just as boring as watching older movies over and over again, because the Internets are broken. We need a spare internet.
Being part of a twin is the greatest coincidental curse one has to live with. The best part is to make two-liner jokes about it:
– “So you guys are twins?”
“Eh, no, actually, I was there first, that was until I noticed that he was there too”.
– “So are you twins or what?”
“I was actually looking for my triplet brother”.
– “So who is better in math, you or him?”
“We’re both as fast”
– “Twins huh. You look smaller though.”
“Yes, that’s because he pushed me out before it was actually my time.”
– “Twins huh. You look smaller though.”
“That’s because he stole my food when we were inside”.
– “You don’t look like twins!”
“What would you look like if you were put in solitary confinement with somebody else for 8 months?”
– “Are you the oldest one?”
“No, my sister is”
– “Where is your brother?”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
– “You should switch seats and see what the teacher thinks!”
“Brilliant idea! Do we have to wear the same clothes too then?”
I was never aware of the fact I was using mesmerizing in the wrong context, until I saw an incoming link from Alan saying that:
Arthur makes up a great word for a being in a deep daydream: mesmerizing1
I have always used mesmerizing in the context of pondering or wondering, well, the state of daydreaming as Alan says: little did I know that it actually has to do with enthralling the crowd, as in ‘captivating the audience’. The question remains, where did I actually get that word from, and to be honest: I think this word stuck with me before I even decided to settle down in North America. The next coming days, I’ll be thinking hard to find out why I decided to use that particular word to describe the state of ‘mindlessly thinking about good things past’.
On the other hand: you could also see it as a contribution to enrich the English language, as so many others before me have done. Unintentional, of course.
1 No link here, so literal quotation from Alan’s Blog
Talking about Caffeine: one of the things my dad apparently enjoyed was A&W’s rootbeer. No joke. As far as I can remember, I haven’t seen it around over in Europe, which is logical since it has always been associated here with A&W, which is an all-American franchise. Or restaurant, that is how they call it over here (I can hear the European jokes alright already).
Recently the Canadian part of the company (about A&W) has gone on the ‘retro-50’s tour’, something you’ve most likely noticed on the amounts of ads on the Tele-Vision. With much success, I’d say. While I don’t mind eating a Papa Burger so once in a while, I’ve always wondered what the amount of sugar was of a glass of rootbeer. Probably a lot.
As for my Dutch siblings overseas: the closest that comes to rootbeer is ‘dropwater’. Which is something you’d be able to find in your nearest pharmacy (see aisle ‘cough drinks’). Don’t thank me. I wouldn’t want to wish you a bad cold.
