scents

This weekend as Alisha and I went down to her house for wedding planning. As we met in an Italian bakery to discuss food and other arrangements, I was struck by the ways in which the sense of smell affects us. There were flowers all over the table, but what really made it noticeable was the abundance of cinnamon candles. It really felt like something of significance was about to happen.

That’s definitely a good thing for our wedding. The smells totally changed the atmosphere into a place where anything could happen. I like the idea that people will remember it and take notice as a momentuous event.

Two months ‘till it happens!

teatotalitarianism

I’m blessed/cursed with the inability to understand the irrational. Maybe it’s just me, but making decisions based on connotations seems like a bad thing to do.

conflicting reports

I don’t know who to believe….

I’m leaning towards the latter. Although Urge Overkill may have it right with The Kids are Insane....

celebrate?

Happy birthday, Internet!

hypnotic

The iTunes Visual Effects.... I could stare at this thing for hours….

christian gentleman

Today I made http://knightsofiluvatar.info , a replacement for the old Knights of Ilúvatar site. The old site was a quick two-day hack from last January with the calendar being the only interesting feature. It was in need of a rehaul, and I’m happy with the way it turned out. They had a sale on .info domains, so I sprang for it.

The Order of the Knights of Ilúvatar is an organization of Christian gentlemen with whom I live. We try to organize our life around the tenets that man was made to live in a community and that such is the best way to become virtuous and extend the Kingdom of God.

Needless to say, it’s a big project. But it’s something that can really put forth a transcendent cause, and that makes it exciting. It’s definitely something worth living for.

ronin

So, I updated my resume again…. Alisha went in for some job-search related help, and I copied some of her changes. I may end up going in on my own if I can find the time for it; it sounds helpful.

Does it seem lame to put in an active description for certain jobs? For some jobs you can make it sound cool: Created and maintained a standards-compliant, attractive site to inform and facilitate interaction. But sometimes you really can’t come up with anything that doesn’t sound lame: Kept a contacts database up to date.

The other problem is that it tends to lead to such self-important verbiage as ‘utilized’. The problem with the word utilized is that it is three syllables and means the exact same thing as ‘used’. Basically the only legitimate and necessary use of the word ‘utilized’ is that which either mocks or otherwise attempts to imitate PHB-subculture.

i spoke horticulturally!

Saw Biola’s performance of The Importance of being Earnest tonight. All in all a great show. I have to say it was the best portrayal of Dr. Chausible that I’ve ever seen. He was simply fantastic. I was a little unsure at first of what to think of the change in setting to the contemporary American south, but it worked out surprisingly well. The accent was a little odd because it was rather close to the British one in which it is originally set, but once the show got rolling it ceased to bother me.

if Athanasius made web sites

“Which of the browsers sets forth our page layouts as they were meant, this which Microsoft vomited forth, or that which we have downloaded and compiled from the Mozilla Foundation? If our browser be not CSS compliant, nor able to antialias fonts, nor render PNGs with suitable transparency, you shall have leave to say what you will, and so shall the users, and the present developers.


But if Firefox be standards-compliant and secure, and rendering pages as is proper to their code, and ‘blessed for ever,’ is it not becoming to obliterate and blot out that other browser and those nonstandard sites, as but a pattern of bugginess, a store of all security exploits, into which, whoso falls, ‘knoweth not that zombies are compromised with her, and doth accumulate an abundance of spyware?’


This they know themselves, and in their craft they conceal it, not having the courage to speak out, but uttering something else. For if they speak, a condemnation will follow; and if they be suspected, proofs from CERT will be cast at them from every side.”

Paraphrased from Contra Gentes by St. Athanasius (Chapter 3 Section 10)

1.0 time

What’s sadder, the fact that thousands of people around the world are throwing parties to celebrate the final release of Firefox 1.0 or the fact that I’d really like to go to one?

I’d be on contract, so it’d be less fun than it could, but I’m just imagining how crazy it would be to have a room full of people who are strange enough to be excited about the release of a standards-compliant, fast web browser.

john wayne says:

‘Life is hard, but it’s a lot harder when you’re stupid.’

duel

Neal Stephenson was interviewed on Slashdot recently, and this was just dynamite:

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?


Neal:

You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.


The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building’s roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.


Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling’s professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers’ conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

the who

WHISKEY MAN

Whiskey Man’s my friend. He’s with me nearly all the time.
He always joins me when I drink and we get on just fine.

Nobody has ever seen him.
I’m the only one.
Seemingly I must be mad.
Insanity is fun
If that’s the way it’s done.

Doctors say he’s just a figment of my twisted mind.
If they can’t see my Whiskey Man, they must be going blind.

Two men dressed in white collected me two days ago.
They said there’s only room for one and Whiskey Man can’t go.

Whiskey Man will waste away
If he’s left on his own.
I can’t even ring him ‘cause he
Isn’t on the phone.
Hasn’t got a home.

Life is very gloomy in this little padded cell.
It’s a shame there wasn’t room for Whiskey Man as well.

Whiskey Man’s my friend. He’s with me nearly all the time.
He always joins me when I drink and we get on just fine.

We get on just fine.
Just fine.


© The Who

idjuts

So, according to Macromedia, Coldfusion will increase your productivity when compared to PHP!

This article is just too ridiculous. It takes a bunch of really bad examples of PHP code, and shows how well-written Coldfusion code is shorter, cleaner, and easier to read. Classic straw-man arguments. For instance, he uses the example of sending mail, and pulls out a twelve-line piece of code just to send a piece of mail in PHP, and compares it to a four-line bit of Coldfusion code. But the PHP code is strung together in a messy way which could have been written to be just as quick and simple as the same function was in Coldfusion. He then goes on to explain conditional includes with a bunch of code that could be written much more cleanly in PHP while implying that it’s not even possible to do in PHP. It’s just too much.

Remind me again why anyone would want to use Coldfusion to program web sites? I guess they must be getting pretty desperate for reasons when they have to pull out junk like that.

hope for purgatory?

Well, so much for Kerry’s claims to be a Catholic. That’s the nice thing about Catholicism—there’s a central authority. None of this searching through records to see if something is true. If it comes from the Church, that’s what goes. It’s also encouraging to see that not only political motivations led to it—simply convictions against killing:

Balestrieri, a self-identified political independent, says that his actions come as a defender of the faith and Holy Eucharist from sacrilege and scandal, not as one focused on an electoral outcome. “Our victory can come as early as today: It would be for Sen. Kerry, who publicly calls himself a Catholic and yet in violation of Canon Law continues to receive Holy Communion, to repent of his grave sin and publicly recant his abortion advocacy.”

operator get me Bei jing jing jing

It’s official: 47 percent of the visitors to my old site are there because they were searching for Banana Phone. It is the fourth site that comes up when you search for banana phone mp3 download, (which seems to be a relatively popular search. I can’t imagine why….) but the first one that actually gives you what you’re looking for.

I guess everyone who really has a reason goes to the new site, but the search engines still remember the old one. Google never forgets.

linkage

New links system is up. The catch is that this time, you can add links of your own.

On the horizon: voting system so you can give input on which links are the best and a comment system for each link.

too good to pass up

Fellowship 9/11:
One of the most controversial and provocative films of the year, Fellowship 9/11 is
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s searing examination of the
Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep.


With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering – or if
necessary fabricating – the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn
and where it has led us.


He looks at how – and why – Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the
Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that
attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by
Isengard.

all night long

“When do we rock? Omnia nocturnia extensis.”
-Dr. Sanders

engaged year

We’ve been engaged for a year now! Well, we will be in an hour. And then tomorrow, we will have been going out for three years. And then the next day, Alisha will turn 21!

What a week.

move along

Nothing too exciting going on here.

Noteworthy: Wedding page fixed so it looks decent in IE, and RSVP added for your convenience. Also, a ThinkGeek Wishlist for gift ideas in addition to our Target registry. Can’t have too many sources of gifts.

"debates"

“I would like to point out that in his political career, my opponent voted against a bill. This bill would have passed a law which would make things illegal. Now it’s clear that by voting against this bill, my opponent has shown his stance against Law. I just don’t see how you can be fit to run this country with a voting record like that.”

Pulling out-of-context voting records is a terrible way to debate. Both sides do it, but it doesn’t say anything about a person.

zombie

Yesterday I’d been messing around with my server trying to get mail to work. I need to learn how to set up a mail server for a class of mine, and I thought I might as well learn on my own machine; after all, my name at philisha.net would be pretty cool. So I messed around with it, and I found I had some trouble because the permission settings were pretty tight; I couldn’t get it to accept mail from gmail or Biola’s mail server. I finally figured out how to get it to accept mail from anywhere to phil@philisha.net and decided to call it a night.

So then the next day I go around, and it seems like my site is running a little slow. Well, let’s see what’s up…. 100% CPU usage on my server? That’s strange. Whaaait a minute, it’s all the mail server! I’m getting 196 concurrent connections from all over the Internet!

It turns out I had left my permission settings a bit too loose after tweaking them, and left my machine as an open relay. In other words, anybody could send mail from my machine not only to my machine, but to anywhere else. And fifteen or so spam machines were taking advantage of the opportunity, spewing out as much garbage as they could during the night my server was unsecured.

Now I feel kind of dirty…. I don’t know when the spammers discovered my server, but they could have easily sent out millions of messages; it doesn’t take hardly any resources to send them. Well, anyway…. I learned my lesson. It’s not enough to make sure that you can use your system well; you’re not done until you’re sure no one else can use it either.

And now I’ve learned to Really Hate spammers. I’m not sure what would make you twisted enough to try crap like that, but it makes me sick just thinking that there exist people like that. Come on everyone—capital punishment for spammers! It’s the only way to stop it. It’s not like we’d be getting rid of valuable life….

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

They just don’t do stuff like this any more.

David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a concept album that tells the story of a man from Mars called Ziggy Stardust who comes to Earth in a time of crisis five years before the Earth is to be destroyed. He comes as the only one with the potential to save the planet.

The album is the story of how Ziggy comes with his ideas of rock and roll to free mankind from everyday life and the upcoming destruction of Earth. He is The Rock Star in every way: drug-loving and wild, it is eventually these things that destroy him after an all-too-successful career as an inspirational rock star.

The album is really epic in its scope. It’s something that is not as accessible as what I’m used to; you have to continually pay attention to really enjoy it. It’s not so much the music (although there are a few songs that are just killer) but the story just pulls you in.

The most notable thing to me is that really on top of being a science-fiction story, it’s an album about what it is to be a rock star. I think this comes from an era where rock was much more defined by certain personalities that really stood out. Ziggy as a character is fascinating. The dreams of the rock star and their inevitable crumbling are particularly interesting to see in the album, because their appearance shows that Bowie acknowledges the way the life of a rock star turns out. Yet even with this knowledge, Bowie was tremendously influenced by the character of Ziggy; he said

“It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.”

You could draw parallels to the tragic hero…. one who may see his destruction ahead of himself and yet is unable to turn his course….

Anyway, it’s a tremendously interesting album if you really listen to it.

giving back to the dataflow

I started consistently titling my posts with lowercase letters on the 25th of August, FYI. I’m not sure why that was. It’s not because I switched layouts or anything; that was later.

Today I opened up my articles section. Several reasons: (1) my article on how to install Linux on my old laptop has been the #1 traffic-generating item on my whole site. This article on TechUser.net basically says that in more words; content is what matters. Useful content matters.

The second (2) reason is that I have to document all the stuff I’m doing for my Operating Systems class. We’re setting up a Linux segment of the existing (dismal) Computer Science lab. Lots of fun, and I’m going to have an extensive collection of documentation written for it before too long. Right now I only have one on installing Debian Linux and one on using SSH, but this number will grow.

I’m doing the project with Joel Watson and Andre Arko, so perhaps some material written by them will appear.

Hope someone finds it useful!

there are some who call me... tim

I’ve heard a lot of bad arguments about online music file sharing and how it doesn’t hurt the artists. Basically it’s fairly obvious that such arguments are made simply to justify peoples’ wishes to take advantage of free stuff.

this, however, is different. This is from the mouth of a publisher himself, theoretically the kind of person who would be most hurt by online sharing of copyrighted content. It’s worth reading because Tim O’Reilly really gets it. He’s one of the first content providers to really embrace new technology instead of fearing the change that it will inevitably bring. He understands how conventional content providers need to change their mindsets, not just legislate to survive.

gmail

I realized I’ve got a bunch of spare gmail invitations sitting around. Five of them, to be precise. So, adoring fans and loyal readers, if you want one, leave me a comment. I’ll share the love! Seriously, gmail is great. If you’ve used webmail before but been a bit disappointed with their poor interfaces, give gmail a try.

stuck inside mobile with the memphis blues

So, my RSS feed is active now. In addition, I’ve put up several other emblems too. Because emblems are cool.

a list apart

I found a nifty article on A List Apart about writing for the web. It’s fairly interesting. Lots of stuff that should be obvious, but still a good read to help get a feel for the atmosphere of the web.


A List Apart has some fairly helpful content on all sorts of web topics in the bit that I’ve perused from them. (One of my favorite lines: “Like Soylent Green, ALA is people. Visit the Credits page to find out about them.” Heh.)

la la la

Shuffle by song on a library of 9GB is a head trip.

be afraid

Well folks, it looks like they are making a Doom movie. Yikes. The only thing that could make this any better is if The Rock were to star in it. Oh, wait—he is!

new toy

preemptive registry

[phil@Technomancer ~]$
whois googlesucks.com
/>
Registrant:
      Google Inc.
      (DOM-258923)
      2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
      CA
      94043 US

    Domain Name: googlesucks.com

Funny. It doesn’t go anywhere.

stepping up

Today at work I drew an E/R diagram.

And it made me happy.


That may sound strange, but it’s not just because I’m a twisted man. (The book from which I’m learning Coldfusion makes the remark ‘Actually, there are humans existing on our planet who love gazing at databases, but with your prayers and financial support, science will some day find a cure.’ I’m really not that bad.)

Anyway, it’s cool because it means my job is turning into more than just glorified HTML-enhanced data entry and brochure-ware. That’s not meant to be belittling; I like my job. But I’m quite happy with the prospects of opening up to a little more creative work. I want to build things…. systems.

If you don’t understand this, imagine building with Legos (sorry, I mean Lego Bricks^tm) and for a while only building things that were just there to look good. That’s fun for a while, but if you’ll remember your childhood, the real fun starts when you get into building things with—yes indeed—moving parts. Space stations and castle drawbridges and hidden lairs…. building is always more fun when there is interaction.

big plans

“And then, if we buried them, we could fit like eight Cessnas in our back yard! More if we tore up the deck!”

The context really doesn’t help on this one, trust me.

something I never thought I would see

Today I saw Mr. T and Richard Simmons on Johnny Bravo.

Will wonders never cease?

i was not the only one who clapped

“[...] in fact, it’s safe to say that most people in most times don’t actually think. Hence, the existence of the Windows operating system.”

-Dr. John Mark Reynolds in top form at a Defending the Faith lecture.