Machete-ing my way through the jungle of Harry Potter books left behind by my mother, it's number 2 in the series. This one was a notch down from the first one, I find. It was a bit longer, but failed to cover much new ground. Harry hates his foster family, he fears Hogwarts will be closed, everybody in the competing school house, Slytherin, is an idiot or a bad guy, yada yada.
Like the first book, this one is fully covered by the movie. There's nothing here that wasn't in the script, and vice-versa. Rent the movie, if you must, but avoid the book.
Nevertheless, there are five more Harry Potter books on the shelf in the living room that I have to read, lest I be disowned. I need a break, though, so Book Four of the year will be a bit more highbrow.
Spending a quiet Sunday here, doing Weekend Coverage for The Company. It can wear you down, going through your queue, waiting for some lackeys in Oceania to call you a lazy bastard in stuttering Pidgin.
Whenever it gets me down, though, I just think about the Happiest Video in the World, and everything seems to be right again.
If that doesn't make you happy, you must be some kinda Liberal. Go cry about acid rain or something.
I blame my mother for this one. She's obsessed with all things Harry Potter. She came to visit us for Christmas this year, and brought with her all 7 books and 5 DVDs. Owing to a healthy batch of presents, and a good bit of shopping, she was forced to leave the book collection here. I picked up the first book, having been unimpressed by the film, and decided to give it a whirl.
The first thing I noticed from the book was how dead-on identical J. K. Rowling's style is to that of Roald Dahl. There's the same sort of fairy-tale darkness lurking behind what is presumably a story for children. Think of the innate creepiness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to get an idea of what I mean.
All in all, it's an easy, entertaining read. If you've seen the movie, you can skip it. There's nothing in the book that wasn't explained in the amazingly well-adapted screenplay.
The psychiatrist looked at his watch. Sighing deeply, he looked around the room, checked his fingernails. It always looked better when a few more minutes had passed than were strictly necessary. Perceived value, and all that. He cracked his neck left, then right, then looked at his watch again. It had been long enough.
"Mr. Osterhase," he said quietly, "when you hear the clicker, open your eyes." He held up a plastic yellow device about the size of a matchbox, and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger. Click!
Damian's head, which had been lolling against his chest, eased upward, his eyes opening. "Wow," he said, "I feel great."
"Mr. Osterhase, do you remember anything we just talked about?"
Damian raised his eyebrows. "Of course," he said. "I'm pretty good at remembering stuff." He got up, thanked the psychiatrist, and passed the receptionist on the way out the door without speaking. "Fucking quack," he said as he walked away. "Two-hundred forty fucking Great British Pounds Sterling right down the fucking drain."
Deciding a walk would help calm him down, he avoided the bus and headed for his apartment on foot. Twenty minutes later, he reached his building, and walked into the ground-floor newsstand.
"Mr Damian," the man behind the counter called out, "how nice to see you today. Anything I can get you."
He stood at the counter for a moment, as if deep in thought, and reached for a pack of chewing gum. "I guess I'll take this," he said after a moment, and put a five-pound note on the counter. He pocketed the gum and his change without looking at either, and slowly walked out towards the door. Turning, he asked the cashier, "what was your name again?"
Heading up the stairs to his apartment, he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. A packet of gum fell out on the floor, unnoticed. Damian tried his front door, and was relieved that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, he called out the usual, "honey, I'm home!"
He heard her answer from somewhere in the house. He tossed his jacket on one of the living room chairs. Slouching onto the sofa, he put his feet up and reached for the remote control. His hand hung in mid-air. An open pack of cigarettes was on the coffee table. He quickly swiped it from the table and held it up. "She doesn't smoke," he said. "And I sure as Hell don't. Can't stand the smell."
His wife came in from the bathroom wearing her shower robe and a curious grin on her face. "And? How was it?"
He frantically hid the cigarettes under his jacket. "Well, I just paid over two hundred smackers for a forty minute nap. I don't feel a bit different. It was a complete waste of time."
She looked at him, and he noticed her eyes dart suspiciously to the table before him. Disappointment washed the brightness from her features, and she gave him a hug. "There, there, baby, at least it was worth a try." He held her tight, and noticed that her hair smelled of cigarettes.
"So, honey," he began, "where did you go while I was at the doctor's?"
She looked surprised. "Well, nowhere. I came right back here."
He thought again about the cigarettes on the table. "Anybody come by for a visit?"
She shook her head and looked questioningly into his eyes. Was he imagining a pang of guilt lurking behind her innocent expression? He walked around the living room, his mind racing. He needed a moment to think. Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide?
He went into the bathroom and examined the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. A man's cigarette. In his house. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held his face in his hands. After a moment, his anger overtook his pain and he looked frantically around the bathroom. There was the shirt she had been wearing when she had dropped him off at the hypnotherapists. He held it up to his face, and could barely believe the rank nicotine funk that was pouring off it.
Throwing the shirt into the sink, he grabbed one of his own shirts from the hamper. It, too, smelled like an ashtray. Jesus, he thought, was he smoking right here in the bathtub while she scrubbed his back?
He walked back into the kitchen, numb inside. She was standing with her back to him, calmly scooping coffee into the machine. "Maybe you can go back for a second visit? You know, talk the doctor into giving you a freebie?"
He quietly slid open the knife drawer, and pulled out the first one that met his fingers. "Freebie," he said, chuckling bitterly to himself. "Yeah, and I guess that would be a good way to get me out of the house for another couple of hours."
"What's that?" He plunged the knife into the back of her neck, and she went down without so much as a twitch. He winced as her skull cracked against the tile. He calmly walked over to the phone, a destroyed man. He dialed the police, and begged them to come get him.
Watching through a two-way mirror, the Detective stood motionless while Damian sat at a metal table and drank coffee. The side door opened and a uniformed police officer entered the darkened observation chamber. "Detective Penske, the hypnotherapist is here."
Penske walked out the door and greeted the doctor. After formalities, he got to the point. "What exactly was the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Osterhase this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm a hypnotherapist. I helped him stop smoking. We do this by removing the desire to smoke, and indeed the the very idea of being a smoker, from the patient's personality."
Penske looked at the door to the observation chamber and shook his head. "Nature hates a vacuum, Doc."
Owing to a rather good harvest this Christmas, I've been blessed with an embarassment of riches when choosing my first book, Foucault's Pendulum.
This is the second book of Eco's that I've read. The first, the excellent Baudolino , much like Pendulum, shows an unhealthy fascination on the author's part with pseudo-Christian mythologies like Joseph of Arimethea, Templars, and the Holy Grail. I was waiting for Prester John to show up in this one to convince me that all of Eco's books are the same.
This one went down well, with the typical chaos of Eco's back-and-forth, mind-bendbending intellectual dialogues. I have to admit, though, that the last 40 pages or so were a bit of a let-down for me.
WTF? I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Watching the video, I start to think that there's no other way it could possibly be understood. Of course, listening to one you actually do understand, the uninformed translation is actually better than the original text. I'm pretty sure that's true for the Indian texts, the Subcontinental Aesthetic being what it is.
Took me some tcpdumping to figure this one out, but here's the deal: If you're missing the "Shared" sidebar in Leopard, it's probably due to some sort of fancy-pants DNS cleverness from your provider or someone else, like OpenDNS. Fix it by doing this from the terminal:
$ sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
and add the following line to the [global] section:
name resolve order = lmhosts bcast wins
Save it, then disable and reenable file-sharing from the Network panel, checking "Advanced..." to make sure that SMB is enabled. After a minute or two, your Shared should be back in the sidebar.
Why does this happen? A local name is searched for via DNS first, and instead of returning a "host not found" and thus triggering the next stage of name resolution (lmhosts or bcast), the name is resolved into the address of the provider's search machine, supposedly to make your life easier. But it doesn't make your life easier, it breaks stuff like Samba. A name shouldn't resolve if it doesn't exist. There are methods for handling things like this, like the built-in "Host not found" pages of many web browsers.
Well said, Sam. Glad to year you're enjoying the Maccy goodness. I'm sure some would be naysayers, holders-on to the old ways of Macs being the sole dominion of grandmas and graphics weenies. But then again, actions sometimes speak louder than words.
Last login: Mon Oct 22 16:54:46 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
ericbook:~ eric$ uptime
19:16 up 13 days, 23:50, 4 users, load averages: 0.43 0.58 0.50
ericbook:~ eric$
Microsoft's puppet group is probably going to ask for an injunction against Novell and Red Hat. Sadly, the entire future Linux could be decided by a judge in the next few days. Whether the suit has legs or not, an injunction would pretty much mean the end of every organization that depends on the distribution of Linux.
Sadly, the patent covers virtually any tabbed interface on computers. Software patents: They're awesome.
Freediot.com. "Idiots in love with free stuff" is their tagline. How do you turn a Wordpress Blog into a money pit? Well, you go 'round the net paying rubes to post links to you. Oddly, I wasn't able to find too much free stuff I would have been interested in, seeing as most of it is composed of free food or age creams and I am immune to Father Time's hoary touch; but there is probably the odd 400ml sample bottle of personal lubricant that you can still get past the TSA.
You might call it spamming, but I would remind you: even the great Orson Wells did commercials for wine he probably wouldn't have cleaned lug nuts with. Gotta pay the bills.
I was sitting outside smoking this afternoon, and a phrase hit me from out of the blue. That phrase would be “tight-rolled pants”. And whaddya know, there's a page for it on the Wikipedia.
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
