There's an interesting story about a phone setup that provides an insolated environment so people can really focus on their phone calls. In a pool, wearing a big helmet. I can just imagine it... *RING* *MAD DASH TO THE CLOSET* (don't hang up!) *RING* (get into swimsuit) *RING* jump into pool *RING* pull helmet on *RING* *RING* *NO RING* Damn! Heh. Anyhow, no, it maybe is a good idea, for previously scheduled calls, provided there's a pool nearby with the needed equipment, and provided that equipment is very very waterproofed. The way they're describing it, maybe it's attempting to return people to the womb in a sense, for their phone calls. There's something really funny in that.

MIT makes progress in cooling technologies, using magnetic suspension to hold the stuff being cooled. It's interesting that this is the same thing that the europeans are working on in their fusion power research facilities, at least for Tokkomak reactors. The quests to manage things that are very hot and very cold have a lot in common..

The NY Times has an article talking about how BushJr's (pbuh) adventurers are not popular with foreigners, but said foreigners are willing to finance it. I suspect this article is mainly written for conservatives, who are getting increasingly defensive about things going sour over there, so said conservatives can feel that foreigners are being hypocritical. Not that they're likely to read my blog (at least in massive numbers -- there are probably a few conservatives among you, invisible public in the past, present, and future), but no, you don't get to feel better about yourselves on account of this. As I'm sure you realize, money flows in ways that the masses don't have a big control over -- if rivers were economies, the very wealthy constitute their own, almost seperate, flow of water within the larger stream. Read up on investment banking, and how the money flows, and the BIG accounts they handle. The wealthy are likely to be less political than the masses, so it is not at all surprising that europeans in general dislike BushJr but their very wealthy have a thumb in that, as they do in any possibly profitable venture. It'd be far more surprising if said folk kept their hands away from opportunity.

My virtual server was getting a lot of weird traffic, and it turned out to be from this company called NameProtect that sells monitoring of brand name usage on the internet, in order to protect intellectual property. From their purpose, I already had a dislike for them, and they were gobbling a *LOT* of bandwidth. Well, I blocked their robot from my site, following their instructions, as they claim to follow the common practice. Then I noticed that their monitoring didn't stop. Niice. So I tweaked apache to not give them pages, mapped by their IP. Schmucks.

I had another interesting conversation with someone on consensus and power structures in groups. I'll probably share it sometime. I'm all excited for today's race. W00t!

Oh, I tracked a lot of my terminal problems to rxvt. For some stupid reason, when compiled in multibyte mode, it sets its TERM variable to 'kterm', and that results in really messy terminal problems. It also is apparently having problems with some locale-related stuff that sometimes causes it to be very slow in closing. In all honesty, the only reason I use rxvt is that it gives me NeXT-style menus on a terminal, and I really like the NeXTStep look and feel (that's why I use windowmaker). Maybe I'll dig into the sources and try to fix it, or try another version, or something.

Wieder!