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2005

Upcoming Time Travel Convention

MIT is hosting the first Time Traveler Convention.

I can’t put it any better than they can:

Why do you need my help?

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

silwenae.net

Silwenae.net should be back up today, after the domain expired. Looks like the transfer finally went through, so I’ve updated the name servers.

Darth Vader Has a Blog

Darth Vader Has a Blog! And it’s hilarious, here’s a snippet:

20050418

Haste Makes Waste

Bloody interrogation. Imperial audience. More leg woes.

Did you ever have one of those days?

It can be challenging to maintain your dignity as a dark tyrannical overlord when the circuitry in your left leg constantly misfires, threatening to send you off on a mad pirouette without notice. It requires a serious effort of will to maintain my poise, the tendrils of my connection to the Force reaching deep into space to feel out my distant quarry and at the same time wrapped around the mechanisms of my own body to keep them working.

I am stretched too thin.

The traiterous dog Krelcon was captured early this morning and brought around to the Imperial palace after breakfast. I had poached eggs with ham, buttered crumpets and a glass of wetfruit juice.

During my interview with Krelcon he admitted to me that he had been involved in smuggling the stolen data tapes of the Death Star’s technical readout to the Rebel Alliance. In order to produce similarly fruitful results I used the Force to crush all of the small bones in his hands. Krelcon became most chatty then, and we discussed likely locations of the hidden rebel base.

Things went badly after that point, however. I confess that Krelcon took me off guard when he mentioned the prophecy. Eyes burning in a masque of pulp and blood he screamed, “The son of the suns is nigh, knight-bastard! He is on your very threshold!”

I had meant to backhand him but my passions were aroused and my concentration faltered, and so instead I released control of my errant left leg and instantly found myself doing a frenzied, lop-sided jig that turned me in place.

Krelcon found the strength to laugh. Thus, with one powerful thrust of the Force I burst his skull.

Which was probably premature. But que sera, sera.

Dell 2405 First Impressions

It’s here, a day early even. Here are some random thoughts & first impressions of the Dell 2405 24″ LCD Widescreen Monitor:

  • It’s bright. Much brighter than the Sony 21″ CRTs I’ve been used to.
  • It was a snap to set up physically. (Hmm, bad pun). Snap the base into the screen, and voila.
  • The base is quite sturdy. I don’t think the cats jumping off the window ledge will knock it over.
  • Thanks to Bernd Paysan’s Dell 2405 web page for the correct scanlines to use in Linux. (Courtesy of Google).
  • 1920×1200 resolution rocks.
  • I need to get a DVD playing ASAP. Just for kicks.
  • I’m not used to feeling like I’m sitting so far back, even though it’s just the monitor pushed back farther on the desk.
  • I’ll have to keep my desk clean now that I have all this extra space. (No, really).
  • I’ll be able to hear my speakers again as my monitor isn’t blocking them.
  • Coding web pages and stuff will be fun with multiple windows.
  • I can’t believe I bought something from Dell.
  • I can’t believe none of Dell’s competitors can compete. The nearest monitor even close to this was a Sony 24″ at $1800. Buying a Dell became a no brainer.
  • The 9 in one flash card reader is a very cool feature on the side of the monitor. And the 4 USB ports.
  • Even better, Ubuntu recognized them without any prompts.
  • Need to post the pictures. (And done)
  • No burned out / dead pixels
  • When scrolling this blog really fast, I get some motion blur on background on the far left, but you really have to look for it
  • UT2k4 in 1920×1200 is jaw droppingly gorgeous.
  • No noticeable motion blur in UT2k4. Get sucked right in and you dont’ even notice it’s an LCD anymore.
  • I should probably go boot into Windows and check performance. But I’m lazy.
  • Dell’s customer service still sucks. After the hard drive return process I went through last year, it’s not any better. The hoops I had to go through over the weekend, after I made the purchase, just to find out if it shipped with a DVI cable, were ludicrous.
  • It ships with a DVI cable, FYI

Learning curve

Tonight, I learned all about LVM (Logical Volume Manager) on Linux. How to take 2 hard drives, and tell Linux to look at them as one drive / directory.

Nailed it on the second attempt. Might try it on the server later in the week.

For Wed: Learning rsync. Then I can do incremental backups from the server to my dedicated backup box via cron and never worry about my data again.

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Small things annoy me…

Small things annoy me… like links that spawn new browser windows.

If I’m clicking the link, I obviously want to go there. Don’t leave the current screen up.

All I do then, is shut the one that just popped up and open it in a new tab. But still, annoying.

Great music lives here

Re-ripping my CD collection for the 4th time in as many years, I’m reminded of all the great music I own, that I rarely listen to.

Having everything located on a central server you can stream from, either by artist or just random, let’s you hear things you haven’t heard in years.

I need to get the server back up. Soon.

Time Warner vs. Comcast

From all appearances, it’s anything but Time Warner vs. Comcast. From a business point of view, Comcast owns 22% of Time Warner. They’re jointly buying Adelphia together and splitting it up.

And that’s where it get’s ugly.

In doing the joint venture to buy the US’s 5th largest cable company (Adelphia), and divest Comcast of it’s 22% share of Time Warner, what they don’t tell you is they’re going to swap some markets around. The Star Tribune has the story.

And one of those is here, the Twin Cities. Today, TW owns the South and West suburbs, as well as parts of Minneapolis. Comcast, through it’s purchase of AT&T, owns St. Paul and the northern suburbs.

And a year from now, they’re gonig to trade a market. And Comcast gets the Twin Cities.

Which just plain sucks.

Financially, Comcast is going to raise my rates over 25%. But what chaps me is the level of service. Since Comcast bought AT&T, who bought TCI, they’ve been upgrading those cable lines for years, and are almost done. Time Warner on the other hand, has had wonderful service for the last 5 years.

Comcast blocks ports, such as 80, so users can’t host different kinds of servers.

Time Warner not only doesn’t block them, but once every few months I get an email saying “Hey, we see you running an email server, so we scanned it, and it’s not a relay”. Even though it’s against the TOS for me to do so, they give me a heads up that they know, and continue to let me.

I’ll be honest – I’m not a big fan of Big Media companies, and Time Warner is one of the biggest. But their cable broadband service has been phenomenal. Few service outages, ok customer service, and the quality, including boosting from 3 to 5 megs down earlier this year, has kicked ass.

I am not looking forward to being a Comcast customer. They’re going to raise my price substantially, because I choose not to subscribe to TV service from them, they have antiquated cable systems, and are now going to try and merge someone else’s cable system in to theirs.

Great.