reesesWeb

I'm in the apparent minority of people, but majority of my friends, who think that we need to be in Iraq. Whether it should happen now, or should have happened years ago, or should not yet happen is an issue upon which I am undecided. However, I think a few things dictate activity in the region:

• The Hussein regime is criminal. They have violated both the borders of another nation (don't say it, because you'd be simplistic and wrong), and the basic human rights of their own citizens.
  
• We, along with the pommies and the frogs, are largely responsible for the current situation in the region. I would add the Soviets here, but they're irrelevent at this point. Suffice it to say, of all the manipulative nations throughout recent memory, our group redrew the borders of the middle east and apportioned out dictatorships like pats on the head, and had more of an immediate impact than anyone else available for blame.
  
• The ideas of complete national sovereignty are outdated and obsolete. We have the duty, as the most powerful nation on the planet, to fix a lot of the garbage that keeps people from attaining basic human needs. I'm not a fan of welfare, but I am a fan of removing obstacles. Just because an entity is above the laws of the land, do not make them above certain universal laws. If we can take that person to task, we are duty bound to do so. I am not including in the suite of "basic rights" things such as "the right to cheap cable" and "the right to buy Command and Conquer", but the right not to be the victim of pogroms, torture, or gassing. Yes, I believe the US should be held to these 'ideals', whatever knob-gobbler Scalia thinks.
  
• We have to start somewhere. We can't go after China, and we can't mow down every potentate who takes a dump on his people right now, but we must make it impossible for them to exist. The arguments that "someone else is just as bad" is irrelevent. That just means they should be on the list. Iraq is at the head of the list right now because they're an easy target politically.
  

I think the next ten years should see a very expensive, very violent, very distributed multi-front war to redraw the national borders of the region, and create a new set of nation-states that actually reflect the people living within their borders. No stupid 'welding together' of different people, a` la Lebanon or the supposed Palestine Mandate, but I could handle a Kurdistan or two.

It's hard to be against the war when you see such fabulous examples of incredible idiocy on the part of protesters.

If you watch the first video and the second video, this is what you'll see:

A girl with pink hair (I'll call her 'Pink') is lying between two knocked-over newspaper boxes. Whether she knocked them over, and fell, or tripped, or otherwise came to be on the ground is interesting and relevent, but not available.

She gets up and starts walking toward a cop, who is yelling something to her. No one else is in the street except for cops, so it's pretty clear Non-Cops Are Not Welcome in the street. The cop thwacks her on the meaty part of the thigh with his baton. He doesn't wind up, he just delivers a quick thump.

Pink limps off the street onto the sidewalk, which was the point of thwacking her in the first place.

The next video is of a brief interview of Pink, who declares that she was running across the street from Walgreen's because she saw her boyfriend f***ing with a cop, wrestling with them, etc. While she was running, she says a cop tackled her, hit her on the shin, and the leg, and knocked her into the ground. Oh, and she was very vehement about the fact that she was a 17-year-old girl!

Now, I know our recollection becomes blurry when we're stressed, but I have to call 'Liar' on this one. Not only that, if you're underage, but old enough to look like an adult, don't do stupid stuff and expect not to be treated like a stupid adult.

Whoohoo! I am the #1 Google hit for "reeses".

Fame and riches are inevitably around the corner!

For Uppie:

(defun html-entity-encode-string (s)

"Convert a string into HTML entities."

(apply #'concat (mapcar (lambda (c) (format "&#%d;" c)) (string-to-list s))))

(defun html-entity-decode-string (s)

"Convert a string from HTML entities to plain text."

(concat (mapcar (lambda (l) (string-to-number (substring l 2)))

(delete "" (split-string s ";")))))

(defun html-entity-encode-selection (start end)

"Convert the selection into HTML entities."

(interactive "r")

(replace-rectangle start end

Part of another toy emacs project required a string similarity calculation. I was lazy and didn't want to learn any new ones, so I picked Levenshtein, which is probably like saying,"I needed to sort some stuff, but all I know is quicksort, so I used that." That is, it's good enough for the vast majority of cases, and better than most algorithms in many cases.

Anyway, if you have a need, you can grab it here, or from my software page.

Every six months or so, in a fit of late-night boredom, I look at userfriendly to see if it has stopped sucking.

So I was thinking tonight, and did a little research. (Which involved all of clicking the 'comic archives' link and counting annual headers.) The strip has been online since 1997, so let's say six years, plus or minus a few months.

Let us also agree that one of the attributes of mental retardation is a reduction in ability to learn, hence, 'learning disability'.

So, that said, how bloody retarded do you have to be to draw every day for six years and not learn to draw?

Seriously, the 'artist' has shown no improvement from strip 1 to strip n. After all that time, even Corky would have picked up some basics of perspective and composition! It's beyond bad-as-in-I'm-slumming-but-can-really-draw, it's truly dreadful and inept.

Which would be fine if it didn't suck on every other plane, but I know a guy who apparently likes the strip enough to read it regularly, so someone thinks it doesn't suck. Then again, he's a canuck, and you can't go trusting those savages.

OK, so a pure elisp version wasn't hard at all, although it hangs sometimes.

I was gabbing today about bookmark checking sites, and how they tend to suck. As a result of this conversation, in which I joked about writing the equivalent to run in emacs, I wrote this, available on my software page. Yes, it's ridiculous. Yes, it's unwieldy. Yes, it's only going to be useful for me.

But it's free, and you can mangle it to your heart's content without getting whiny email from some bogus service provider wanting $10/month for their lame service. It's yet another abuse of emacs, brought to you by uncle reeses.

I think I'm dying.

I have some flu variant that gave me a sore throat, and made me feel as if wads of sandpaper were shimmed in between all of my joints, including my spine. They feel stretched out and irritated. I don't think I can drink any more water or tea today, but I really, really want to flush this out.

Whine, whine.

In some ways, I'm a pretty typical nerd, and in others, I tend to be a bit of a luddite. In terms of home hardware, I really tend to lag behind. I usually go on a binge every 3-5 years, bringing everything "up to date". (which really means, buying lots of stuff that is right at the low-end of the price/performance sweet spot -- that is, about two months shy of obsolescence.) Then I won't buy anything for several years, until it's time to throw out or give away the garbage I bought in the last round. If you looked through my hardware history, you'd see very specific geological strata:

1990-1996: 386 upgraded to "486" using those silly Cyrix upgrade chips, NeXT cube, Sun 3/80.

1996-2000: 486/120, p166, SGI Indigo2 Impact

2000-present: Thinkpad 600x, Athlon 700, Pentium III (given away prior to moving from SF)

As soon as the last generation is entirely too slow to do anything useful, and the disparity between home/work gets too wide to be palatable, I'll go nuts and buy a new machine, usually slapping Linux on the old box and stuffing it in a closet.

While I am always ahead of the curve on RAM, one thing I am _never_ up to date on is optical media. I didn't buy a CD-ROM drive until 1994 or 1995, and then it was a used 1x mitsumi, which you may recall as the first super-cheap drive, with a proprietary ISA interface. I can't believe I remember that.

Well, last night, I finally bought my first CD burner. We went to Staples last night for Post-Its for Kat, and ended up with a 52-24-52 (How's that for an hourglass figure?) CDRW, a spindle of 100 CDRs, and 50 slim jewel cases. The occasion was a barrage of rebates that brought the price down to about $50 for the whole shmear.

Those who know me (and some who don't) know my stand on IP theft. I'm quite strongly against it, and will bore at length anyone in the proximity when the topic is brought up. Don't steal music, don't steal software, don't steal young girls and sell them into slavery overseas. OK, I just meant the first two.

;>

Anyway, as we were at the counter, the clerk said,"Oh, you're going to burn some CDs?"

I thought this was an obvious thing to say, like,"Oh, it's raining out, is it?" when someone sees you soaking wet, carrying an umbrella. They're just making polite conversation. I'm buying a CD burner and a big pile of media. Yes, I'm going to burn some CDs.

"Yeah."

"That's a good idea. You'll never buy music again."

Again, those who know me will know that I have a little problem. I go from aloof and diffident to in-your-face and opinionated. I don't have grey zone. I have,"Yeah, whatever," and "Let me tell you a little about that...(rant, rant, rant)". If I care about something enough to have an opinion, I care enough about telling you about that opinion, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

It took everything in me not to try to back up that conversation. I was so stifled, I couldn't say anything else, and had to explain myself to Kat as soon as we left the store.

"Were you proud of me?"

"What?"

"Well, she asked if I was going to burn CDs (blah blah, story above, blah blah)"

"Yeah, I noticed that. I thought it was kind of strange, and I was thinking,'Wow, he changed his stance on that issue!'"

See what happens if you don't spout off all the time? People jump to conclusions and get the wrong idea!

Remember that the next time I go off, writing a hundred kb of email or ranting for ten minutes.

The great thing about idiots is that they're so readily willing to share their idiocy with the rest of us.

This is one of the funnier things I've seen lately, in a "people are sleazy" context. See, Seattlewireless.com has nothing to do with seattlewireless.net, other than stealing some of the maps and imagery (and momentum), and of course irritating a lot of the people whose free open APs suddenly appear on this 'commercial' network. I don't get to complain as much because he put silly text over my map point in the apartment I no longer inhabit. :-)

In fact, the sleazeball even went so far as writing the following very misleading "press release":

Wednesday, March 5, Seattle - Seattle Wireless, a Social Wireless Area

Network (SWAN) platform provider, announced the expansion of its

services to the 12 largest metropolitan cities across North America,

making the Wi-Fi technology company the nation's largest Wi-Fi provider.

Unrivaled from other community wireless providers, Seattle Wireless is

dedicated to offering the convergence of telecommunications and

computing.

"At Seattle Wireless, we see people as not being slaves to the wires.

With the instantly accessible, coast to coast rollout, it is true

Wi-Freedom.meaning a network from and for the people," said Pano Kroko,

CEO of Seattle Wireless. "With the availability of Seattle Wireless in

these cities, Seattle-based businesses and consumers can depend and

trust our technology wherever they may travel. We also are looking

forward to adding additional cities in Q2."

Keeping the love alive.

Is this chechen beer?