My first ex-gf Martha has the latest version of her website up. Among other things, there's a portrait of me, Charles, and a self-portrait she did that I have. Be careful while browsing -- the site is (presently) on geoshitties, so it has a fixed hourly transfer limit. The site's still partly under construction, with some broken internal links, but it's really cool what she can do with a brush, and it shows. This is really neat..

I'm hoping she'll be up for it being hosted on my server, and of course, that goes for any of you who know me -- if you have a website, especially if it's on one of those lousy public sites that has adverts or caps downloads, I'd be happy to host it. I can provide email for you too, and if you're a unixy type, shell access too. I can handle DNS for your domain if you have one, and if you don't, you can get them cheap at GANDI. $12/year, and if you later want to move your email/web stuff elsewhere, they can either redirect the mail/web to other places, or point them there. Just drop me an email..

While looking up their number yesterday to ask if my bike is done, I came across this page on bike brakes on BikeTek's site. Apparently, the 'squeeze brakes' that I have are now obsolete, with two varieties of disc brakes above them. The top variety usees hydraulics. Hmm. Unfortunately, to fix my bikes, they're needing to order some parts, so it's going to be about 1 more week of hoofing it.

It seems as if the Geneva Convention is a liability for the U.S., and so they ignore it at a whim. I'm not much for rule of law, from the individual's side, but I generally think that it must be adhered to from the governmental side. I think it's a problem that the U.S. doesn't seem to see things that way, happily declaring people it captures to be 'enemy combatants' or other such things that clearly mean 'prisoner of war' that they'll claim arn't. Withdraw from the Geneva Convention or amend it, but don't twist it. Particularly worrying is that they'll eventually torture him so he'll start making stuff up to please them, and they'll claim that there were indeed 'weapons of mass destruction' (whatever that means), handing the fool at the helm a political save. After all, some stupid court, according to that article, decided that the following arn't torture: sleep/food deprivation, forced standing, and sensory deprivation. Think seriously about this -- if you were being starved, forced to stand, and had a mask over your face by american military/cia types, for days at a time, there's a good chance you'd eventually be telling them anything they wanted. More than that, it's just uncivilized to treat anyone that way.

If you haven't heard about it yet, White Box Linux is a build of the sources that RedHat has made available for Redhat Enterprise Linux (whose binaries they'll only sell). It seems that recently, there've been a number of companies who are making their money off of the crumbs Redhat leaves, whether in symbiosis or parasitism only time may tell.

My dad occasionally is in Pittsburgh for business, and apparently, someone from the local office suggested a new indian resturant, called Bikki. I'm going to try to get some people together from work to do lunch there sometime. .. oh, foo, I guess I mean dinner -- I just noticed that it claims to just be open 17:3-22:3.

Despair.com has some new designs up, and they also have some candy hearts called bittersweets with depressing messages. To snag some text from that site,

Truly, "BitterSweets(tm)" are the perfect gift for you OR for someone you love, especially if that special someone is one who doesn't want to hurt your feelings but just doesn't feel that way about you but still wants to be friends so they can torment you with stories about their crushes on someone who doesn't appreciate them like you do, can't love them like you can, and actually takes pleasure in corralling a herd of fawning "just friends" behind themselves as they indulge in one self-destructive relationship after another, with no hope of ever finding true love, despite an army of souls eager to lavish it upon them. (You know what we're talking about.) Indeed.

An officemate pointed me at some rare earth magnets she has. She has a few of the smallest kind in the office, and despite their small size, the things are absurdly strong. Running one of them over a monitor produced visible distortion (degaussing fixed it, na klar), and placed against each other, they were a little tricky to seperate (their small size was admittedly a factor). The largest ones they have are 1 inch by an eigth inch, and apparently can hold 30 pounds between two of them. If you order at least 3 packs of five, the packs are $7.15 apiece, so I ordered exactly that.. Unfortunately, they're not permitted on anything but ground freight, so shipping and handling was a bit expensive, but if they're really that strong, I'll have enough that I could build myself a hammock that would support me. I probably should order some more to be safe if I actually want to do that -- one thing to remember is that average force isn't the same thing as instantaneous force, so like someone jumping up and down on an elevator, I wouldn't want something that I'd need to be gently lowered into. However, if they remain as toys, like the giant ball bearing I keep in my office, that wouldn't be a concern..

I've read a bit more of the online art of unix programming I mentioned last entry (or maybe a few ago -- I don't remember), and was interested particularly by this part here on editors. As noted, one's editor is a deeply personal choice, where people typically spend, over their life, many hours customizing it with dotfiles and the like. Personally, I can use ed (although it's painful), I can do basic text editing with emacs, and I prefer using an advanced offshoot of vi called vim. At some time in the past I was an emacs user, and before that, when I was on DOS/OS2, I've used both MS-DOS's EDIT (which was pretty cool) and PC-DOS's E (which was cooler yet). As a result, my .vimrc (vim config file) has keybindings I wrote emulating some emacs (mainly navigation stuff) and E commands (mainly the F-key file operation stuff).

Last night, at the Zets gathering, we were talking about spammers, and how best to put them out of business. Various types of vigilanteism (including violence, which I'm not comfortable with), legal changes, social activism, and things that are in all sorts of grey areas were discussed, all in the light that they have some very clever and well-funded people on the other side who have opposite ends.

Gah, the Nameprotect people are at it again, running their rude spiders over my site, slowing my site down while they collect data for their nefarious ends. I wish I knew all the IPs they have. I could probably find out, through above or below-ground means, but I'm too lazy. :) Goodbye, nameprotect.. (thunk, another IP blocked).

This is funny.

And, ladies and gentlemen, this is something I thought I'd never see.. but it'll no doubt change my life forever.. *sniff* Click HERE.

I guess, considering that last link, it's good we have something new to play with while we mope. 2.6 was released yesterday! Booyah!