04:37 - Pat deposits a $10 check into his checking account, at the Oakland National City on Fnord. 04:48 - Pat finishes biking back to his apartment in Squirrel Hill

Step back a bit... Went to India Garden around 23:00, ate, and stopped by work to rebuild a system (moving it from Redhat 8 to Fedora 1). Worked a bit on my psych term paper, although I left my laptop at home, so it was mostly conceptual work.

Not very interesting... But I just worked a bit over 5 hours when I'm normally sleeping.. :)

For all you database junkies, there's a new version of Postgres out -- 7.4. The best goodies are: Autovacuum, better regexes, more efficient subselects, and some cursor improvements. Yay.

There are some intersting articles in the Jerusalem Post, but because they're being schmucks and want you to register (even though it's free), they're not getting a link. Oh well.

You might like this comic. Or maybe this..

The world needs more cute oddness.

This is a good overview of the state of the desktop on Linux today, from a severely geeky point of view.

Things are getting really REALLY interesting in Georgia -- it's not everyday that protesters take government buildings and make the existing order flee... Al Jazeera has an interesting (but short) analysis on the role of Russia and the U.S. in the crisis.

A thought -- I've noticed that in bands, there's almost always someone who's the leader of the group, who gets pretty much all the focus during music videos. I wonder what it feels like for other band members, and if that's a frequent source of tension..

Here's another step, a bit worrying, in nanotech: self-assembling DNA-based nanites. It's fascinating.. I hope people are careful with it.

For the many guys out there who have trouble attracting women, well, one of the big turn-offs, bad breath, might be tied to something much worse. Hell, not that I'm one to talk when it comes to romance, but the guy in that story looks like he has still more things to worry about on that front :)

This guy is one of those cool magicians who tells you how it's done. He's selling a book on Cold Reading, a technique that 'psychics' use to fool the poor people who believe in that crap. Another person who does this is The Amazing Randi.

This site traces some of the ideas that eventually got compiled together into Judaism.

I've never had this happen, but perhaps someday I will.

Oh, Today. .. er. .hmm. On Saturday, PUSH met up with the Mormons. It went pretty well -- we discussed some theology, and then moved into foundations of belief, and initial steps. Like the Judaists, the Mormons have a bit of a 'Chosen People' thing going on.. Overall, we avoided being too confrontational, although I did feel that some of us were giving them too much of a hard time. It's ok to ask hard questions, but not so good to phrase them in ways that intentionally are poking fun. I did feel that we learned a lot from the discussion -- their theology really is very different than vanilla Christianity, and I begin to see the point when some question if they really should be considered Christian, although from their POV, the answer's clearly yes.. In some ways, it's refreshing, seeing people with such a different interpretation, and they were remarkably open, upfront, and willing to say they didn't know when they didn't, and that things can look stupid from the outside. We might do something similar to this with other groups.

A thought on China-Taiwan .. the history of the communist revolution there is interesting. Read this Wikipædia entry on Mao Tse-Tsung, particularly the section starting with War and Revolution. I wonder exactly how extensive the Russian influence mentioned there was, and what form it took. Apparently, like in the Weimar Republik in Germany, the massive social change took place in a period when the government was falling apart. It's suggested here that the Nationalists lost much of their economic stronghold to the Japanese invasion, and after the war, the Soviets subtly aided the Communist cause in China. Chiang Kai-Shek's [http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek after Chengdu fell must've been an interesting flight...

Bedtime.