A Day in Paradise

Top News Article | Reuters.com

Nothing to say here. There will never be peace when a handfull of militants can bring the process to a standstill.

LinuxPlanet – Tutorials – Inkscape: Vector Graphics For Linux – Vectorize Your Logo

You’ve got to chuckle at this ad that they are running. The great thing about it is that there is this little pencil and they ask you to check what you want check the TCO of Linux or Windows. The ad could be from anyone.

Assuming it was pro-linux (and wondering if the little pencil really drew on the flash ad) I clicked and was politely informed that Linux was 3 times more expensive than it’s Microsoft based counterpart!!!

Of course, I already knew this… I even picked up a “Get the Facts” t-shirt from the MS booth at LinuxWorld.

Til Schweiger

I spent a couple hours bumming around Zeil today and ran into someone who looked VERY familiar… I couldn’t place where I knew him from, and by the time I realized where it was he had disappeared.

If it wasn’t Til Schweiger it was someone who looked JUST like him. So, Til if that was you… it was cool seeing you… if it wasn’t then whoever you are could probably go on the road with a look-alike show or maybe sign up as a stunt double!

What%u2019s the Story? %u2014 By Aaron Wormus � F*cking Spammers

Chinese Spammers have class, at least they are somewhat honest about sending from a fake address:
(more…)

Numa Numa Dance

I hope nobody reads my blog for intelectual content… if you do leave now before I totally shatter your image of me!

The last 2 weeks I have been hammered by googlers coming to this page looking for the that silly Dragostea Din Tei song. Anyway I just bumped into the page that started it all, and listed all the copycat videos… I guess this song is just making it over to the States, after annoying the hell out of us all over here last summer.

As far as silly summer hits go, my favorite was Space Taxi by Stefan Raab et al.

There you go! Feel wiser?

Linspire.com – Michael’s Minutes

So anyone who regularly reads my blog knows that I’m already a big fan of Michael Robertson. His Minutes are fantastic, probably the only mailing list that I’m on where I read ever single newsletter.

The MP3Beamer, a looks like a TiVO for MP3s. In reality it is just a compact Linux based computer which is running a copy the MP3Beamer software suite. MP3Beamer can be set up through the Click ‘n Run network for current Linspire users. Not exactly super high tech or innovative but it’s clever and I like it.

The last bit of cleverness in his latest minute, was the annoucement that the first person to guess the band name of one of 3 songs would get a free MP3beamer. This no doubt sent people digging through the piles of free mp3s at mp3tunes.com. Nice way of killing two birds with one stone

Embrash – Kottke.org == Kottke.com?

Quitting your day job to blog is silly. Quitting your day job to persue your journalistic talent is another thing.

Most of the blogs I read, I read for the links and BRIEF commentary, when people start to put too much time into blogging then your blog turns into an average livejournal.

I also don’t bother reading blogs that take more than 5 minutes a day to get caught up. So I think it’s a fine line to walk, by putting more time into your blog you may just be taking away the reason why people visited you in the first place.

Utterly Boring has a nice of comment to link ratio

Quitting your day job to Conference-blog is another thing. Which reminds me… based on the success of the IPC2K blog, we’re in the process of setting up a blog for the upcoming IPC2k5SE in Amsterdam. It will totally rawk, more details soon

So I was totally slaughtered last night! I thought that Stella was lucky with the two 7 letter words last time… but I was the one who was lucky in that I came that close.

This time around I crashed and burned, couldn’t come up with a word longer than 4 letters and ended up 130 points behind Stella. The death blow was “Queer” with the Q on a DLS and hitting a DWS as well, after that she got “Quite” hitting the TWS.

Of course, if Foo was accepted as a word things could have turned out differently

OK, so I’m cackling at my own cleverness, but I’m very surprised that none these whiney editorials picked up on the pun.

Anyway, it’s a weird country where people get all worked up over the fact that the President “might have” smoked weed 20 years ago, and have no problem at all with the carnage that he is purpetrating around the world.

Maybe smoking a bit of weed right now would help him make saner decisions.

So Wead for President… err, no… Weed for the President.

On the topic, Bush is in Frankfurt today… some major highways are closed, and with the snow that is falling, the rest of the city is in a mess. There is a no-fly zone in place, garbage bins have been removed and all the garage doors have been sealed shut along the route that he will be taking.

One of the police involved in the security effort was on the radio saying, “We don’t really care about the President, we just don’t want some idiot blowing up half of Frankfurt.”

Stella and I pulled out our old scrabble board and played the first game in years. It was quite a good game except for the fact that half of the good words which I had were strangely “unacceptable”. I mean who invented these rules anyway? Since when were vax, exim, lmao, ada, gui, vrml and zod not words?

Anyway, despite being unable to use most of the words in my day-to-day vocabulary, and Stella getting two 50 point 7-letter bonuses, I think I made a pretty good show of it and in the end of the day came in 1 point behind her.

I think I’m hooked on Scrabble again… I need to write a program that records and replays scrabble games… then I can do scrabblebloging

As seen here

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

What is a pseudo-terminal? What programs use pseudo-terminals?

That was from the Excersizes after the Chapter of Linux Administation Handbook on Serial devices…. And the point of this excersize was?

What’s the Story? By Aaron Wormus

So I’ve upgraded to WP 1.5 — not too shabby. Changed the theme too. Will be working on this over the weekend. Get my annoying ads back up to keep that revenue stream flowing (yeh, right!).

Anyway, I’m getting hammered by people coming in from google looking for nekked pictures of Candice Michelle… and they ate up almost 100mb yesterday, so I’m seeing how a slimmed down site works.

ABC News: AP: Iraqi Died While Hung From Wrists

Very disturbing story of how one of the “ghost” detainees died during an CIA session which used “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Read the story and then tell me how our secret interrogations and killings are any better than Saddam’s.

Marco just got done covering the basics of what it takes to become a ZCE in the online Zend Certification Web Seminar.

The seminar used the same interface which will be used in the upcoming php|symphony seminars. You can read all about it here. It has a simple, unobtrusive interface with an open chat and list of users on one side, and then the presentation area on the other side.

It took a couple minutes to get everyone set up and at the correct sound levels, but once it got going it ran pretty smoothly. Towards the end of the second half of the seminar the sound started breaking up, it seemed to get progressively worse until the end. I have plenty of bandwidth so the issue must have been on the server end. Others mentioned the same problem. There were between 20 and 30 people in there, people came and left freely.

Anyway, it was fun and I even learned a cool way to abuse wordwrap Daniel Kushner from Zend attended (We’ll probably see a PHP 5 Zend Certificate in the end of next year), as well as Chris Shifflet, one of the authors of the Zend PHP Certification Study Guide.

Looking forward to seeing more cool stuff from php|symphony in the near future.

Wright This Way: iPod Shuffle RAID

ALL I want for Christmas is an iPOD Shuffle RAID

As seen on utterlyboring