Planet Geek!

The end. Or is it?

Terry Schiavo dies in hospice

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (AP) — Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman who spent 15 years connected to a feeding tube in an epic legal and medical battle that went all the way to the White House and Congress, died Thursday, 13 days after the tube was removed. She was 41.

My initial reaction was "Okay, I'm so glad THAT's over with." But, given all the idiocy and ranting going on around this case, I'll lay odds that sometime in the next 4-6 weeks, either another single PVS case will come to the fore, or legislation or some other 'big visibility' process will start, keeping this issue burbling.

Bob Parsons goes off the deep end

Recently I was pointed to a series of postings on Bob Parsons blog regarding some decisions made by the company that administers the .US domain (that being Neustar).

Mr. Parsons, who is the founder of GoDaddy, a very successful domain registrar, goes on to comment that the recent decision by the NTIA made it 'illegal to have a private registration' of a domain.

While the decision by the NTIA may be poorly founded, and Neustars interpretation of the decision flawed (nowhere in Mr. Parsons postings, nor on Neustars site, nor on the NTIA's site did I find a link to the rule change that is being talked about), I feel Mr. Parsons reaction to be overly dramatic and in fact harmful to the clear and informed process that should be followed when things like this arise.

From Mr. Parsons posting on March 29th :

But Mr. Parsons doesn't stop there. This is not a poor decision by a government beaurocracy. This is an ASSAULT on our RIGHTS to PRIVACY! I will quote here:

It's ironic that we lost our right to privacy on the one domain name that says we are Americans! I find it ironic that our rights to .US privacy were stripped away (without due process) by a federal government agency that should be looking out for our individual rights. For them to choose the .US domain name is the ultimate slap in the face. .US is the one domain name that is specifically intended for Americans. Think about this for a moment: These bureaucrats stripped away the privacy, guaranteed by the first amendment and that you're entitled to as an American, on the only domain name (.US) that says that you are an American. I am outraged by this --- you should be also.

Let me be clear here. I think the NTIA's decision was a poor one, and should be addressed, but I feel that Mr. Parsons has gone off the deep end equating a poor decision by a government agency with an all out assault on our rights as US citizens.

Domain registrations are a process of creating a space in the public forum where you wish to voice or present information that is uniquely associated with yourself. It is not an anonymous forum. "Private Registrations" are a false workaround to publishing Whois information, by registering the domain through a secondary proxy (in GoDaddy's case, they are using DomainsByProxy, an affiliate website. The legality of this form of registration is already questioned, since the ownership of a domain could already be perceived as being misrepresented.

I wholly support the process of calling the NTIA and/or Neustar to task for this decision, but it should be pursued in a sane, intelligent way, not via rants and handwaving in the style Mr. Parsons seems to prefer.

Sing it, bruthuh!

My friend Michael got a wonderful editorial published in the Boston Globe railing at evangelical christians...

THE PORTRAIT of the Wilkersons (''For family, religion shapes politics," Page A1, March 29) is an appalling study in the hypocrisy that has subsumed modern Evangelical Christianity. Michael Wilkerson is quite happy to wave First Corinthians 6:9-11 around to justify his bias against gays. For the Wilkersons, who rake in $120,000 a year and own a BMW, I have the words of Jesus, as written in Mark, 10:25. ''It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

Definately take a few moments to entire commentary.

Sometimes...

... the urge to just pack up all this weird technical junk and run off to a mountain top, find some old hermit willing to teach the deep dark secrets of fiddle playing, and disappear for 20 years... is mighty hard to resist.

(this "wanna run away" moment brought to you by the wonderful wailing fiddle of Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek. She's 23, (was probably 21 when this particular track - 'Smoothie Song' - was recorded), and is an absolute master of the instrument.

Scientific American gives in.

Scientific American will be publishing their new policy of "Fair and Balanced Science" in the April edition. They do detail some of the reasoning for this change...

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

I have to give great marks to Scientific American for their outstanding use of the written form to set things right.

What a let down.

David Byrne's taste in music stinks.

I tried it. I really did. But a bad cover and 2 hip hop songs later with some lady screeching in the background over a finger jabbing dork goin "Youuuuu!" over and over again. Sorry, David, I'm outta here. I'll stick with Radio Paradise.

On the flipside, he does have a journal, and the interview he did with BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin is interesting at least.

And just to make sure all is NOT spit and vitriol

The first bike ride of the season is always special. Zach and I went riding yesterday for the first time this year (well, anything over just noodling around in the driveway or the like). We took a loop I've ridden many times that goes around the south side of Bolton. Total distance is about 6 1/2 miles.

Unfortunately I was riding the Giant trail bike, as opposed to my recumbent (which hasn't been season-prepped yet), and it reminded me why I dislike upright bikes so much. Very hard on the tailbone (even with a sculpted seat), as well as hard on my overly-sensitive hands (too much weight on the handlebars).

Anyway, Zach did great and we paced at 8-9mph the entire way (mostly flat), which is just fine for a kid on a bike with 20" wheels :)

Need to fix my rear derailler (which, being a click-shift, has drifted to 'between gear' state, which also means I can shift right down into Gear 0. Troubling :)

On the plus side, the Assabet River Rail Trail group met last week, and I volunteered to help out with some projects on the trail (new kiosks, some clearing, etc). The trail should have about 5 miles of paved road this summer (last year only a mile and a half or so was done). Zach and I took a look at the new tunnel and some of the new trail last week, and things look great. It's going to be a beautiful ride.

Yay spring!

How far can they go?

More bad news from the runaway policies of the Bush administration.

A report by the TSA itself has said they were "not entirely accurate" when they were asked point blank about security issues. They're not saying they lied, but every indication in the report says they did, in fact, lie through their teeth repeatedly.

Every time I find myself going "Okay, this is normally wavy stuff in politics, it'll all correct itself, and things will balance out", things go further and further off kilter.

Did you know it's virtually impossible to find a currently-available sex-ed school book that is not "abstinence only"?

Did you know that piece by piece the US government is curtailing the first amendment?

Seriously, how much further to the right can this country go without a popular uprising?

Biofuel in Boston!

There's a company in Dedham that will happily supply your home with biodiesel for heating oil.

I wonder if I can not only fuel my home, but my car from the same source. Hmmm.

Review: Rocket Mania

Game: Rocket Mania
Language: Java
Category: Puzzle / Action
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 5 out of 5
Offered by: Popcap Games (link)

---

Sometimes there are games you just can't get enough of. Ones that you'll play for hours until every muscle cramps into place, and you find yourself staggering, quasimodo like, to bed at 2am, your hand and body permanently stuck in that crouched mouse-clutching state

With that sort of intro, how can you not be intrigued?

Rocket Mania, from Popcap games, assaulted my sense of relaxation time about a year ago. I had downloaded and actually paid for a version on my PC (under Windows, alas), and since then have moved on to a total Linux desktop experience. While going through some more games to review, I remembered this particular game, and decided to run it up again

The Java version isn't as immersive as the Windows version. Some of the voice tracks are missing, and some animation is changed, but the gameplay and just plain Funness is still there.

The goal of the game is to connect up matches to rockets. The premise is you're a fireworks expert in ancient China, putting on a show for the crowd. The more rockets you launch at a time, the happier the crowd is (Oo! ah!), and they throw you money. The money can be used (if you pick it up) to upgrade your rockets. Better rockets mean more points, and more spectacular shows.

To accomplish this, you use the mouse to select small squares to rotate. The squares are bits of fuse in various patterns. Make a route connecting a match to a rocket, and fwoosh! Off it goes! If you make a path that connects up more than one rocket to a match, they all launch at once, and the crowd gives you kudos (more oohing and ahhing, more money).

Simple, eh? Well, it gets more complicated. Each round you need to launch more and more rockets before daybreak (I suppose the crowd gets jaded, and demands better shows). I've played this game for almost 2 hours straight, getting into the range of needing to launch 35+ rockets per round, and that's quite a challenge. In addition to the time limit, the game starts throwing in 'dead ends' - bits of fuse that are just caps and just end the line. They also include bombs that can wreck your fuse arrangement when you launch. On the plus side, you also start getting little clocks that 'freeze' the time so you can catch up if you fall behind.

This is one of the top notch games available, particularly in Java / Flash form. Try it at least once, and if you like it, keep going, but give it a shot. I'd also recommend having the sound on, just to hear the FWOOSH of the rockets as they go off, and the happy hoots and whistles of the crowd when you get off a flight of 5, 6, 8 rockets a shot.

The long game time, even challenge, and simple approach make this one a lot of fun to play for a long time at a stretch. Check the clock often, and don't start it up on days where you have deadlines looming.

Java Geek Trick du Jour

I'm trying to compile some sample classes to learn how to use Apache Axis the Java webservices system. Part of Java is that it needs to know where to load class libraries from. This is normally set by the CLASSPATH environment variable.

Java stores class libaries in 'jar' files, (java archive). Unfortunately, some apps need dozens of jar files to compile / run, and the CLASSPATH variable can only point to individual JAR files, not say "This directory full of jar files".

So a fellow on #java suggested this:

export CLASSPATH=`echo mydir/*.jar | tr " " ":"`

Cute. Loads up the CLASSPATH variable with all the jars in a directory.

Review: Bookworm

Game: Bookworm
Language: Java
Category: Puzzle / Wordgame
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 4 out of 5
Offered by: Popcap Games (link)

---

It's been a while since I did some reviews, so lets do some catching up. Lately I've been angling toward wordgames, and I had remembered playing Bookworm before, so I ran it up again

Boy was that a mistake. This game is twice as addicting as I remember it, and I remember it being quite a hook. The double-whammy is it is also available for Palm devices, so using it on my Kyocera palm phone really cemented the addiction. Again.

The basic premise is simply 'finding words in the blocks'. The wrapping story is you're a little bookworm eating up letters before the library burns down. The longer the words, the more points you get. Letters are also scored scrabble-like, so a word like 'xylophone' will score more than a word like 'banana'.

You link up letters by either dragging the mouse across the letters, or by clicking them in sequence. The columns are staggered a half-square, so each letter is touching 6 others. Additionally, by making longer words, you get 'bonus tiles' that can double or quadruple your scores on a word. I've gotten as high as 4800 points on a single word.

The gameplay is methodical and quiet. No blasting away at aliens with this one. The interface is, as expected with Popcap, clean, easy to work with, and does its job well. The Palm version is an exact duplicate of the web version, so you can play on the road.

The long game time, even challenge, and simple approach make this one a lot of fun to play for a long time at a stretch. Check the clock often, and don't start it up on days where you have deadlines looming.

More nausea from the Hill, Onion style...

As usual, The Onion hits the nail right on the head. Bush managed to get approval for oil exploration in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

The Onion did one of their wonderful What Do You Think mock surveys on what people think of drilling in Alaska. One of the best responses:

"They're drilling in the Alaskan wilderness? That's too bad. Someone really ought to look into passing laws to put such places under federal protection so this doesn't happen again."

I used to think that there was only so far stupidity could push politics, but it just goes further and further and further. IF oil were found in Alaska, and IF it were ramped up to full production:

• a 1 percent increase in the amount of oil available to the US.
• 12 years until that oil is actually available in the US.

Bush's response to this?

"Developing a small section of ANWR would not only create thousands of new jobs, but it would eventually reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a million barrels of oil a day."

Well galldang. Ain't he the man. *spit*

NYYC to host 100yr Rolex Transatlantic Challenge

With its entry list now final, the Rolex Transatlantic Challenge 2005, hosted by the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) with the cooperation of the Royal Yacht Squadron (RYS), is holding true to its promise of being one of the greatest sailing races of the 21st Century. On May 21, 20 entrants—ranging in size from 70 to 252 feet (21.3m to 77m) and averaging 112 feet (34.1m)--will set out on a course from New York to The Lizard in England, recreating the Great Ocean Race of 1905. In that historic race, the schooner Atlantic, skippered by the legendary Charlie Barr, set a record that has not been broken by a monohull in a race for 100 years.

For those who like sailing pictures, there's a fantastic gallery of high resolution pictures of all the entrants available at the NYYC site. Full story at nyyc.org

Disgust at the Hypocrisy of the Administration

I've tried not to post too much political drivel here lately, but this one really pegged my buttons.

Apparently the Bush administration, in true show of how religion, opinion, and personal agenda is affecting state policy, has announced they will intervene in the Terry Schiavo case.

Ignoring the fact that all the courts, all the doctors, and the state legislature of Florida has sided with the legal guardian (the woman's husband), the Bush administration has decided they will intervene and pass emergency legislation against the wills of the husband, the courts, and the doctors in this case.

What bothers me the most about this is that it flies in the face of all that the Republican party is supposed to believe in. The rights of states to manage and legislate their own issues. The rights of an family to pursue their lives without intervention by the Federal regime, etc. Toss all that out the window. Bush feels that he knows better than the courts, the husband, and the doctors, and will force this woman, who everyone -but- the parents agrees is basically dead, to continue breathing and twitching in a horrible mockery of life.

The woman has died. Her collapse and later heart attack has destroyed most of her brain. The husband is not some 'money grubbing relative looking to slurp up the insurance' - in fact the husband has publically stated :

Raising the issue of a possible conflict of interest is the fact that Michael Schiavo stands to inherit the remainder of Terri's malpractice settlement upon her death. Michael Schiavo has publicly responded to this charge by claiming that, of the original $1,050,000 awarded in the malpractice suit, less than $50,000 is left, the rest having been spent under a judge's supervision on medical care for Terri and the ongoing legal battle. He has also stated that, if he does receive this money, he will donate it to charity.

So the only thing we can interpret from the administration is yet another attempt to foist Bush's skewed morals on a country, regardless of law, public commentary, or even consistency within the their own party.

What's wrong with a moving target release mechanism?

Recently, Slashdot posted an article

Debian's system is split into several releases - stable, testing, unstable, etc. The 'stable' 'release' hasn't been snapshotted as a 'release' in several years, and therefore is running some fairly out of date applications.

However, the 'testing' release is what I consider a 'rolling' version. It has no specific snapshot of the platform and applications that folks need to upgrad e 'to' or 'from'. I've installed Debian testing on the last 2 laptops I've worked with, over the last 14 months, and even though the actual packages and environment that went into each differed, and even though there was no 'release' I was installing from, everything worked great, and was completely up to date.

My point here is "why does there have to be a release schedule"? Why can't a platform track the current versions of applications, and use normal update mechanisms to make sure new versions and updates are synced into place?

I will, btw, accept there are a times a total clean cut from scratch may be necessary. Major kernel revisions may be one such (though 'testing' is distributed with a 2.4.x kernel, and installing a 2.6.x kernel was a matter of just apt-getting the appropriate files - and they are still maintained and updated via apt).

This is actually one my biggest beefs with Redhat and the spinoff Fedora projects. They are still stuck in a 'cut and release' model, when what they should do is distribute a simple baseline, and then the users net-update against the baseline up to the current version, much as the Debian Network Installer does now.

How to Destroy the Earth

I saw this referred to in pumpkin_pi's livejournal (talking in reference to some folks who think they may have actually created an atomic sized black hole)

Anyway, enjoy this detailed page on how to destroy the earth.

Snapshot of a coder's brain while working...

Setting: headphones on, listening to Radio Paradise. The entire office is now empty, boss has left with a 'lock up' tossed back over his shoulder.

Said programmer is locked in a deep conversation with 'hunter', the laptop, which is at the moment doing many things, one of which is attempting to run a small program that asks the local webserver for a simple answer. P is the programmer, H is the anthropomorphized (only slightly) answers from the program.

P "Connect"
H "Error"
P "Connect"
H "Error!"
P "Why is that showing a null?"
H "Error."
P "But you should have gotten an answer."
H "Error."
P "Well, what was in the response?"
H "null"
P "What? But you should have thrown an error."
H ""
P "Owait, you were calling a servlet on a webserver. what was the HTTP response code?"
H "404"
P "Ah... HAH!"
H "Error."

Such is the mental processes after 10 hours of Java hacking. Liberal delivery of nummy food to said programmer has been scheduled.

Dayblogging Ubercon - Day 3

Phew. End of the event.

I had all sorts of connectivity problems with the wireless network in the hotel, so I wasn't able to keep the postings nearly as up to date as I had planned. It was doubly troubling because we used the wireless services for credit card processing as well. Not good.

I really believe that hotels are rapidly getting more and more out of touch with reality. This is a mediocre hotel in not the most scenic area (Secaucus, NJ). I'd gotten used to dealing with some of the insanity hotels try to pull by working with the Arisia folks, but the Park Plaza is a far ritzier, far -larger- hotel than the Crowne Plaza. Unfortunately, hotels seems to be in the mindset that the reason they're not makign enough money off services is that they're not charging enough. So, charge more!

We've seen this with $4.00 hot dogs and $35 continental breakfasts, but now it's escalated to $150 per day per computer, per room! wireless internet access. This is only in the function rooms (such as the ballroom etc) - the room access, on a hardwire connection, is $9.95 for a week of access.

The hotel then decided that serving lunch to everyone in the lobby would be a good idea. At $3.00 for a bagel (cold), and $3.50 for a mediocre soda, they were suprised when folks would actually walk across the street and get a muffin and soda for $1.50.

If their rates were something tolerable, they'd do a heck of a lot of business, but I guess they dont' just think that way. I expect the next thing they'll do is make their corkage rules even more fascist, and dictate you can have no food in the hotel other than what they serve. (We were regularly getting bagfulls of Wendy's cheeseburgers, because the cheeseburgers the hotel were offering were $4.00 and terrible).

Ah well, the event otherwise has gone well. The LAN was managed by NJLP (New Jersey Lan Party), who did a great job. Much Unreal Tournament, Warcraft, Half-Life Counterstrike, and some other new bits. I'm still a fan of the UT2004 Onslaught, which is a team oriented game involving huge outdoor settings and outstanding vehicles. The balance between all the potential weapons, vehicles, and locations is excellent.

I did play a little Warcraft III as well (played Frozen Throne) - that's a mighty nice game, I'm apparently behind the curve, still considering Neverwinter Nights and Red Alert 2 as the 'top games i need to play more'.

I think it's time to get Cedega running on the laptop. Since I got OpenGL running at speed on 'hunter', I can consider doing some decent gaming.

The board games got me intrigued again too. I've heard good things about Carracasonne, and of course the venerable Settlers of Catan - both of which I've never played (really!). I also saw an updated version of Risk (like, 'Risk 2150' or something like that). Looks fairly post-apocalyptic but similar bent. Global armies, yaddayadda.

I'm pretty toasty, the car is all packed up, and I'm just doing some gaming before hitting the road heading for my clients site in Pennington. I'll be there for 3-4 days working on my Java project, expect more geeky yammerings as the week moves on.

Dayblogging Ubercon - Day 2

It's that standard Day 2 slump. We're in 'run-out' mode now - most of the folks who are going to come to the con are here, now we just sort of hang out waiting for the last 10% to show up.

I always forget how wearing these are :)

Dayblogging Ubercon - Day 1

Today we start our bi-annual Ubercon event. We're up to Ubercon V, so I guess we're an institution now, eh? We're just getting ready to go start setup, reg opens at 2:30, and I have some small code changes and database updates to complete, so we're off to see the.. er... hotel event manager.

I'll try and post some updates as things go along. So far, I set up all the equipment and tested it last night, things are working fine. This was, unfortunately, before 4 of the new Gateway terminals fell off the shelf I was working on. They seem okay, nothing rattling around, but I was not in the mood for powering up my terminals at midnight to watch them smoke, so I just quietly went to bed.

Off to breakfast and setup!

Update - 4:15pm
Aaaaaaaaaand, we're off.

Reg is open, and folks are flowing through okay. We have 4 Gateway terminals running, and 3 kiosk terminals, plus one badge printer. Equipment lossage has been limited to One (1) Gateway DOA, one bad keyboard, and One (1) I-Opener dying. We have another Gateway that's prone to sporadic reboots, so that gets a little annoying. I need to keep the active 'operator' terminals at 4 - 3 just backlogs too easily.

We have a slightly different arrangement with the helpdesk this time. We ran a cable up to the helpdesk / ops desk area, and there's a clued operator at the terminal there. If folks have problems at Reg, we can send them along to the help desk (about 50' away), and they can fix / research / find out hte problem. They can also send a badge print request to the main printer, which is close enough that the folks don't mind coming back over to pick up the badge. There's never a backlog at the printer itself, so it's really just a walkup.

I have some pictures, I'll try and post them during the next lull.

Mmm, GL Rendering

Gosh, what a difference. I've been wanting to do more game playing on my Linux laptop, but I've been stymied with trying to get the video system in it up to par. Today I went over the last roadblocks.

For the truly geeky, I have DRM working on the Radeon Mobility 9000 chipset in my IBM T40. The only tidbits I can have for folks who are trying to do this are:

1. Have the Radeon kernel module installed
2. Make sure you're NOT running at 1600x1200. You don't have enough memory to run GL in that. Running on the native 1400x1050 is fine.
3. Make sure you have a Mode 0666 line in your XF86Config file for the DRI module:

        31 Section "DRI"
        32   Mode  0666
        33 EndSection
   

4. Watch your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file for any warnings.

Once that was all set, and 'glxinfo | grep -i direct' showed me 'Direct rendering: yes', I ran glxgears. WHOAH! 865 or so frames per second (before I got this running, I was getting about 180. A slight performance increase, to say the least)

One of the motivations for this was to take a look at "Jake2" - a full Java port of the Quake2 engine. As advertised, I just needed the binary download, plus the Quake2 demo data files (see the webpage on how to get them), and voila! It just worked!

Go go gadget Java!

Anyway, now that it's all working, I'm looking for more GL games to play. I've played Tuxracer, bzFlag, CannonSmash, and Neverball (MAN that's a weird game). I jsut downloaded Flightgear, I'll let you know.

Any other recommendations?

Turnkey Home PBX System

This is so cool. We have a PBX here at Homeport, but it's a very old hybrid digital/analog system that works 'okay', but the handsets are rapidly falling apart, and it really just needs to be trashed.

I've been watching The Asterisk Project for quite a while - it being an opensource linux based PBX system, but haven't jumped into trying it because the rampup / investment in hardware process was more than I was ready to deal with.

Now someone's put together Asterisk@Home, a pre-packaged bootable CD that will install Asterisk for you, and do all the basic configuration, including setting up the web interface and everything.

Tempting... tempting...

(This was pointed out from an article on slashdot

Stonekeep's new technical staff.

"Here at Stonekeep Consulting, our crack technical staff works hard at providing you with the highest quality badge printing services."

Just had to share this one :)

Ubercon - March 11-13th!

One of the fun things about my business is I get to go to cool conventions.

One of my oldest customers is UberCon, a gaming convention held twice a year in the Meadowlands, NJ. A weekend long gaming experience, they have board games, RPG, LARP, and LAN events running all weekend, 24x7. Everything from walk-up fragfests in Unreal through sanctioned Munchkin tournaments.

I'll be there all weekend, running registration and doing all sorts of fun things with badges and badge printers and terminals and stuff. Plenty of time for gaming and socializing, so why not cmon down!

Slowly I learn... Step by step...

I'm learning again. I mean, really learning stuff. Working with the folks down in NJ and learning things that I really want to learn. Things that not only make it easier for me to represent my ideas to my temporary employers, but also make me more marketable and give me a broader base.

In the last 2 weeks, I've increased my knowledge on the following topics a hundred fold:

J2EE, JSP, Hibernate, EJB, Object Persistence in Databases, Rich clients, DotNet, Eclipse, JBoss, WebSphere, Ant, Servlets, RMI, JNI, JMS, SOAP, WSDL, and general XML concepts.

Man this is cool

Teacher lashes out at student for not standing for the national anthem

A Brick Township teacher lashed out at a student who wouldn't stand for the national anthem. The teachers rant was caught in a cell phone video. The result? The student was suspended for 10 days, and the school is considering banning all cell phones from the school. The teacher has had no reprimand, and the school is considering pressing charges against the student.

Jay's friend who was in the class at the time, Corey, says that their teacher had been strict in the past in demanding that students stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance. That's why they brought in a camera - to expose the teacher in case he did anything again. "The teacher and school principals wanted him (Mantel) to press charges against us...they tried to blame it on us like it was premeditated, like we did it just to get him on tape, which is false. We knew he was gonna go nuts because he frequently used to" said Corey.

Link to the story, complete with video.

Update: - The full article at the Independent Media Center of Philadelphia has many more details. The commentary section is particularly interesting.

My political chart...

This will come as a surprise to no one:

You scored as Democrat.   Democrat 75% Socialist 75% Anarchism 75% Green 67% Communism 67% Fascism 33% Nazi 25% Republican 8% What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In? created with QuizFarm.com

Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Adventure

Well here's something convenient. Not only is it a cool lead in for the upcoming Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy movie, and not only is it a flash game that runs fine on Linux and Mac machines, but it's nifty keano too!

This is an updated version of the original 1984 Infocom text adventure based around Douglas Adam's excellent 5-book trilogy (though in fact when the game was written, I believe only the first 3 books of the trilogy had been completed).

Normally I'm not particularly thrilled about having to 'flash up' a text game to make it more modern, but in this case it's done quite well, with a pleasant interface that doesn't get in the way of the gameplay, as well as some interesting 'views' reminiscent of the graphics used in the TV series, coupled with the original 'graphic adventure' concept (still images with an interactive story line) that came out of the old text adventure games.

I haven't gotten too far into the game yet, but so far it looks good. Do you remember how to get the babel fish?

Try the game on the BBC's website.

Pabst Blue Ribbon review

Mark A writes up a great review of some Pabst Blue Ribbon someone left over at his party...

This is a "crisp, clean" beer, which is a euphemism indicating that it has almost no flavor whatsoever. The back-taste is a bit disturbing, hinting lightly of skunk cabbage and Wonder Bread. It's possible that the carbonation was due to the fermentation process, but I can't escape the nagging suspicion that it was added just before canning with an infuser.

For some inexplicable reason, this beer comes in 16 ounce cans, rather than 12 ounce bottles. One theory is that Milwaukee, being situated on a Great Lake and being surrounded by bogs, had extra water that it needed to get rid of. Nonetheless, there is very little hint of swamp, indicating that some decent filtering happened.