If we're to have holidays, we may as well have ones to celebrate something worthwhile. As always, I'm disturbed by all the holidays around this time of year.. first, there's Thanksgiving, which I find to be reprehensible. It's a celebration of a shared meal between the pilgrims in the United States and the Amerindians who decided to help them out. Not actually disgusting, until you consider the full historical context -- recall that the generosity of the Amerindians was not paid in kind. Instead, they lost all their land and were escorted into deserts which were euphemistically called "reserves", moved whenever said reserves happened to actually have anything valuable in them. They were intentionally given diseases, slaughtered, and discriminated against. So, yes, you can celebrate Thanksgiving, but it disturbs the hell out of me. Of course, up comes Christmas, where we can celebrate the birth of a confused and primitive religion that has unfortunately taken the world by storm. Right now, despite irritating Christmas music being everywhere, we've a way to go to get there -- we're actually just wrapping up Channukah, where we can celebrate a "purification" ritual done by one religion to "fix" the actions done by another, in a religious centre long since demolished. Pah, holidays. That's why, in the face of all this celebration of disturbing, pointless, and wacky holidays, I'm going to celebrate peristalsis. *grumpy*

I can't say we're celebrating first snow, because that happened on the day of thanksgiving. However, yesterday came the second snow of the year for Pittsburgh. Yesterday also came illness, for me. Actually, maybe it came on Friday -- I had a migraine then, and haven't been feeling well since. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be feeling better. Yesterday evening, when I got up to go hang out with friends, both of my legs were asleep, and it took them a good ten minutes to wake up. Na klar, I was trying to walk, and I had literally no feedback from them. It's surprising -- one never notices how important it is to get feedback until one tries doing without. My legs were entirely unmanagable until awakening -- even my toes curled under my buckling feet. It was, at least, amusing..

It's struck me -- I'm actually using Java programs on a day-to-day basis now. I never thought I would, but the software to manage my Neuros, a filesharing application called Phex, and a lot of brain analysis tools that I use at work (NIS-tools and similar) are Java programs. Unfortunately, it's still more of a pain to run such programs than real binaries -- sans script or alias, I need to launch them with "java -jar /path/to/jarfile.jar" .. Oh well.

So, I'm sure some of you are wondering, why haven't I BLOGged for awhile? The answer is that I've had a lot less free time recently, and I've been mentally busy with a relationship. Work keeps me busy too. Wikipedia too.

I recently have found two other new distractions -- I've been playing Final Fantasy 1 on an emulator (but just beat it), and I've been playing a lot more on 2nd Life, an immersive virtual environment that's massively multiplayer. Imagine hundreds of people online wandering around a virtual world, able to buy and sell things, land, and design their own things. Fun! Unfortunately, my laptop really isn't powerful enough to do it well -- the graphics and memory limitations mean that I tend to crash a lot, and I've had to turn the graphics down to a bare minimum. It's still fun though. Maybe sometime I'll get a powerful enough computer to play it well.

And now, the news that's worth knowing about... there's a lot of it.

• More noise about making old information the government has collected available. I've been hoping for this for awhile now.
• At least some Palestinian groups are uninterested in peace. *sigh*
• Check out the latest kook and fraudster. His name is Sollog. Apparently, he's been creating a fuss on Wikipedia because he wants to have an article on himself. He has been harassing people, relating to this. Oy.
• We live in the land of the free.
• We're also exporting our freedom to Iraq. Lucky them. This makes me very angry.
• Here's the Official God FAQ
• More censorship, thanks to BushJr and friends
• Jwz pointed me at this, thanks to his blog. Yuck. Don't image google for teratoma, as he notes.
• Running is a big thing, evolutionarily
• The OpenBSD folk are cloning CVS. What a waste. CVS is dead. Use Subversion
• Go Brazil!
• Go, anti-spammers!

There's more to say, but I'm still ill.

Sigh... like so many of the slashdot comments I saw on this, you're missing the point. CVS is "good enough" for what they need, except for security problems which cannont be addressed because of the license. Everything in the oBSD world revolves around secure/correct code, and open (BSD/ISC) licensing. I suspect they refuse to use Subversion because its security record thus far hasn't been very good either, and reading the license, I can see a couple things Theo would enjoy urinating on.