You sometimes don't recognize it until it's gone.... I recently recognized another great thing about Squirrel Hill. There's no McDonalds or Burger King. Of course, there's still some Starschmucks..

Here's a fun comic poking fun at a certain line of arguments that some flavours of religious people like to spout. Of course, such people are too busy to read such things -- they're probably too busy complaining about transexual models in the army. South Korea has some pretty freaky America-wannabe-ism going on, from abandoning their beautiful language for English, to performing mouth surgery on their kids to make it easier for them to pronounce English (google for it). Now there's plastic surgery apparently being rather popular, at least according to the article. I find it disappointing that people give so much of themselves for competitiveness in business. On the other hand, I guess it is easy for me to say that, living in a country with inflated wages, with a retirement plan, and all that. If the wages for work across the globe were evened out, and the U.S. didn't need protectionism to protect the way of life it's been able to provide its people (witness tech jobs heading to India, and farms .. farms getting enough subsidies here to prop them up against basically everywhere else), maybe I'd be singing a different tune. That's something that, I wager, will be something the U.S. will increasingly struggle with in the next 20 years.

On Sunday, for the second time, I did indoor climbing with Dimitry and friends. It was, again, a lot of fun, although my hands and arms are sore. When it comes to climbing, it's useful that I'm really flexible -- I was able to pull myself up on one of the bouldering walls from a foothold at about head-height, and it's good that I have Texas-sidewalk feet (went barefoot this time), but it's bad that I have very little upper-body strength, and also bad that I again chose not to use chalk. I think I'll likely make that a fairly regularly sunday thing.

Robert Cringely has an article on Wireless AP availability (The term Wi-Fi is hopelessly lame), which, unlike most proposals I read where I have some reservations, I agree 100% with. I hope it could work -- he proposes that end-users and businesses, on agreement to share their AP, be given it gratis (I submit that at reduced cost might also work out), and that this would ensure that access points are almost everywhere. If it could work financially, it sounds like a good plan.

Strange. Remember Scorched Earth? The classic DOS tank game? There's apparently a Java clone. Cool.

If you're using Fedora and yum, note that you'll do well to change your yum repository to something like this. The main ones are usually too busy.

The U.S. military gave some of its members the boot after they were found to have seriously abused some Iraqi prisoners and lied to the military courts about it. Sadly, although one of them recieved a dishonourable discharge and loss of 2 months salary, the others got honourable discharges. This really bugs me -- these seem to be really serious abuses of power that merit jail time, and instead they're getting off with just being fired. Texas justice, perhaps? :)

Interesting theories. It brings to mind a recent daydream, of technical conferences being held by our primitive ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago. The reception and Question-Answer sessions for controlled fire must've been fun... Project: Prometheus as a codename :)

Some of the new systems we've been getting at work support HyperThreading. I've enabled it where I could (one of the workstations uses a funky videocard that needs a kernel module that won't work with the SMP kernel). The idea behind Hyperthreading is simple -- there are two CPU cores on a single chip. They're not as good as two complete CPUs -- they share cache and some other resources, but they're usually better than a CPU acting on it's own. I've been reading up on hyperthreading. I also read that the next version of GTK will have a nicer file selector. Amusingly, some of the ideas are things I thought of years ago... it just goes to show that it's hard to be original, and actually often it's an overemphasized thing in making things better. Too many companies chant 'innovation' as if it's a mantra, and go on to create really bad software. Do you want to buy a toothbrush that's marketed as innovative? Certainly not -- innovativeness is as good as a roll of the dice -- sometimes good, sometimes bad.

From a conversation on IRC, "I find it very sad that Miguel's broken from most of the GNOME community on this issue." (C#) "To most of us in the community, Miguel's efforts are slightly worse than a complete waste of time" (because of its divisive nature)