Thursday, December 16, 2004

That blog thing

In the grand tradition of blogs linking to better blogs, riverbend has something important to say.

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Thoughts on flags

Each morning on the ride into work, I pass the tattered remains of a thousand flags. They flap, forgotten, from car radio antennas that sift Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh from the airwaves.



They cry out, "We are what remains of your glorious liberty; that which you left to wither in the wind so that you might smugly pronounce your patriotism."

/. gems



  • Moral men admit mistakes. Immoral men will go to any length to justify their actions and will never admit wrong doing.


  • Moral men think long and hard about starting actions that result in the deaths of 15,000 people.


  • Moral men start wars as a last resort.


  • Moral men start wars as a last resort when they say that is what they intend to do - i.e moral men keep their word.


  • Moral men do not prey upon the fears of Americans to facilitate acts of foreign agression.


  • Moral men are not certain in the face of all doubt but always doubt their information and actions when either of those result in harm to others.


  • Moral men do not accuse others of "flip-flopping" if they themselves have "flip-flopped" repeatedly - i.e. moral men are not hypocrites.


  • Moral men do not misconstrue the words and ideas of their opponents in order to attack an easier target - i.e. moral me do not construct straw men.


  • Moral men step down from positions of authority when it is clear they don't have the intellect, judgement, or leadership to justly execute that authority.






War for the Dollar

Petrobucks

Apocalyptics

Thursday, December 2, 2004

Props to SpeakEasy and Covad

I've got a cold that's been kicking my butt for a week now, but the upside is that since I was sick I was home when the DSL installers came out (for the 8th or 9th time) and finally got my DSL setup working at a tolerable, if suboptimal, bitrate (924 kbps).



I've got to take a second to give major props to the folks at SpeakEasy.net. They have provided the best technical support I've ever experienced throughout this process. The techs and the installers from Covad have actually listened to me and treated me like a technically knowlegable human being, which is almost unheard of in the tech support world. When the problems they've encountered have gone beyond my knowledge, they explained the details of the loop circuitry to me so that I could interact with their onsite techs better. It's been amazing. Moreover, since they weren't able to delivier the full 1.5 Mbit service, they've given me a bit of a break on my static IPs to make up for it.



I ran across some awesome FAQ-type pages for C today, as well, on c declarations and the ANSI C standard.



Note to self: possible option for X login for the laptop:

Set shell to /usr/X11R6/bin/startx (may need to add /usr/X11R6/bin/startx to /etc/shells in order for this to work.)