Dang’s Weblog

Or at least all blog entries. Today, I discovered my blog front page was empty. I guess I’ve been neglecting it, and it feels disconsolate. Well, poor blog, here’s an entry, to brighten your day.

Of course, I don’t really have anything to say, and that’s the whole problem. I was so good at first, writing random thoughts all the time, but, as time went on, I started slipping longer and longer. No more brain farts. Not, mind you, that anyone actually cares if I write or not, but it’s the principal of the thing.

So, I guess I’ll try and get back to spewing the random gunk of my mind all over my little corner of the Internet. I can’t promise I’ll succeed, but I’ll try.

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Okay, I’m confused. You see, this morning, some terrorists blew up some rush hour trains in Madrid, killing lots of commuters. This is a horrible thing, I’m not debating that.

However, I’ve read any number of statements recently about how things are getting worse and worse. The quote that sparked this particular post, however, was this: “it seems that our moral fabric is being shredded, inch by inch.” Now, that’s complete bull. Things are no worse now than ever, in terms of humanities capacity to commit attrocities.

Nothing that Al Queda (currently being blamed for the Madrid bombs) has done even comes close to comparing to the Holocost or the Pogroms of Stalin. The Romans fed captives to starvin lions as a spectator sport. Throughout history, there have been whole cultures that castrated every woman in them, to keep them from cheating. This still happens today, but less than it used to. Historically, female children have frequently been killed at birth, for the horrible crime of being female. The list goes on and on.

Humanity has always been capable of horrific atrocities. This is nothing new. The only difference is we have to work less to make those attrocities directly affect more people, and we have good news services to spread the information far and wide.

Face it, folks. We’re not getting worse, we just can no longer hide our nastyness within our own borders.

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I finally got an invitation to orkut about a week ago. I was beginning to think I wasn’t cool. So, I’ve been looking around for a while now, and, frankly, it’s not very interesting, unless you’re dating. There are hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of “communities”. Sounds like it should be good, right?

Wrong. First, there’s the basic interface issues. The communities are basically forums, but they don’t have the basic forum features that make a forum usable. Most obviously missing is any way to track what you’ve already read. I mean, come on! Having to troll through all these posts looking for new ones you haven’t read is really a pain.

Then, the communities aren’t very active. Most of my communities have over a thousand people in them, but noone’s posting. Probably because of the previous gripe.

The actual links-to-other-people feature is pretty cool. That is, afterall, the point of orkut. However, I’m not really a people person, and so meeting people isn’t my dish.

So orkut, fix the forums, and people will be much more interactive.

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Janette’s new laptop is here, and it’s a nice one. It’s under 5 pounds, has a 12 in. screen (with 1024×768), is an Athlon XP-M 1600, 30 GB, 512 MB, builtin 802.11b, DVD/CD-RW, and so on. And, it was cheap, only $940, which is $600 less than any other laptop with the size/featureset combo. Really cool. I wish I’d known about it when I got mine.

Anyway, she wanted to run Linux on it. There are a number of reasons, but I think the deciding factor was the SameGnome game. She may be the only person in the history of computing to switch to Linux for the games.

The first install of Gentoo was a disaster for her. Random things were crashing right and left. Distributed builds didn’t work. The synaptics driver wouldn’t load. Firefox was crashing. OpenOffice wouldn’t start. Just horrible. My guess is that we got a bum stage 1 tarball, and the compiler or the glibc was borked. Just painful. And, nothing like that has ever happened to me before.

So, I decided we should reinstall from the GRP (prebuilt packages) disks. A couple of hours laster (downloading two ISOs takes a while), we had a full install, minus OpenOffice. Everything worked great. We emerged Ximian’s verison of OpenOffice, and all is now working great. Phew!

Now, we’ll see how Janette gets along in Linux.

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Well, it was bound to happen, I suppose. We’re getting spam comments in our blogs. Not a log, only a few a day, but it’s still annoying. We’re likely going to have to turn off comments until the new version of MT is out that does registration for commenting.

The odd thing about the comments is that they’re not intended to be read by people. There there to get google ranking points. The more sites that link to you, the higher you show up in the google rankings. So, companies pay to have other companies put links to them in millions of blogs, artificially raising their google rankings. Very annoying to us bloggers.

So, if you suddenly find you can’t comment on our blogs (not that any of you have commented recently anyway), now you know why.

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Playboy.com had this vote running, to select which of the Tech TV women (namely Morgan, Melanie, Sarah, Cat and Laura) we would most like to see pose nude on playboy.com. I voted for Morgan, of course, and now it’s been announced that she won. Coolness. Not, mind you, that I expect her to actually do it. I can see Cat or Laura doing it, but not Morgan or Sarah. Needless to say, Playboy.com has extended the invitation to all of them. The most turnout on one of their votes, ever, has prompted them to try as hard as possible to get at least one of these women to pose. Should be interesting to see what happens.

The funny thing is that only Laura has been advertising it. Of course, only Unscrewed is aimed at the correct audience, but Morgan hasn’t even mentioned it in her blog (both Sarah and Cat did). Morgan fans of the world, unite!

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