FLATEOTM: May 2003
I’m going on vacation for the next two weeks, so here’s an extra long list of stuff to peruse while I’m gone. One per day until I get back. Enjoy!
- I have a friend in the Navy who is assigned to attack subs. This isn’t his sub, but I bet he didn’t think he might one day encounter this on a deployment.
- Read this article. About halfway down you run across this wonderful gem: Despite this, Bush insisted that France’s opposition to the invasion of France “wouldn’t influence my policies.”
- Too much free time on their hands dept: Lego Nebuchadnezzar
- A little something you can do for the boys over there
- I want one of these
- If this is about drugs, its another reason not to do crack. If this is about something else, the question is: “What did they expect to find?” Just read the title of the article, the rest is gross.
- One reason why we like the Poles
- M.S.S. has found a job as a webmaster.
- More evidence the Star Wars beats Star Trek hands down.
- Beautiful.
- This might be a repeat, but it makes for good reading. If you like military history, that is.
- Over the next few days this online comic will show some boy-band lookalikes get whacked.
- Nice to meet ya Morty! My name’s Jeff!
- Another relative scale page
- This link has a wonderful quote: At the Place de la R?publique, the meeting place for the masses of demonstrators in Paris, children rode on an inflatable carnival ride while street vendors sold kebabs and French fries to hungry marchers and onlookers. The Communist Party of Maoist France sold copies of Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book. A communist party is selling something. As John Clark so eloquently put it in The Bear and The Dragon, “What the hell?”
- And finally, on a sad note, Rachel Lucas has posted a few good stories about her recently passed grandfather. A good read.
Rain in the desert
There was a strange liquid falling from the Tucson sky yesterday afternoon. I think it is known as rain, but I’m not sure. I hardly ever see it. The last time it happened was back in mid-April, around tax time. George Bush just signed the tax cut bill a few days ago, so maybe that has something to do with it.
On a more serious note, this rain is really needed. As you can see from this graph, the Tucson area is at least an inch and a half behind the normal rainfall for the year. If monsoon season starts now (with 3 successive days of a certain humidity level), it will be a rough summer as far as comfort goes, but excellent if we get a lot of rain. It’s clouding up right now, and I’m praying it will start dropping in buckets.
FLATEOTM coming later today.
Mom, don’t read this!
My mom hates guns. That’s why I don’t want her to read the following, it would make her upset. I’m thinking of getting another gun.
Read more…
Apple Wears the Dunce Cap
Over at brain terminal Evan Maloney seems to think that Apple’s new iTunes music store is the wave of the future, where people will be able to “pay for music that they could otherwise steal online.” Of course, the success of the store depends not so much on people’s willingness to pay. It also depends on accessibility, a lesson Steve Jobs still has not learned after two decades.
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Lunar & Eclipse Photos
Well, I got the photos back from last week’s lunar eclipse. They were awful, each frame looked indistinquishable from a crescent moon. So I scanned some pics from back when I was in high school. The first in the zip file is a full moon shot, the second is from the lunar eclipse on my birthday in 1993. Enjoy. (1036k file)
The World At War
There are some things that people have to know about. World War 2 is one of them, since it has shaped the events of the past 60 years and will continue to do so for the foreseable future. The best video history of the War that I know of is The World At War, made by Sir Jeremy Isaacs for the BBC in the early 1970s. Narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, it goes into great detail, not only of the battles, but of the people.
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Correspondence Games
Haven’t updated the chess category in a while, so here it goes. This is a pgn file of my currently running and recently completed games. Pretty average stuff, as far as chess games go. I’ll update this as time goes on.
Dual headaches
So I got the two Athlon MP 1600s for the two-headed computer last week. Problem is, one of them is dead on arrival. Ugh. The guy I bought them from on eBay said to check back in a week, he might have more of them. He still doesn’t have any in stock. Double ugh. At least if I have to buy another one I’ll probably be able to get it fairly cheaply, since AMD is coming out with their 64-bit chips.
Oh, and the laptop is still in pieces.
The Great Spam Experiment
I signed up for a free e-mail account at Yahoo Mail and Hotmail today. The goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to see how fast I can get spam at these two addresses, as well as finding out how fast the two e-mail addresses spread across various spam lists. Updates will be forthcoming.
A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier
Reading through modern history books and watching TV like the History Channel can lead you to believe there aren’t very many stories from the low-level people who made history, like the private soldiers and the secretaries and the gophers. Thankfully, as Joseph Plumb Martin shows us, that is far from the truth. The following is a review of his memoirs of his part in the American Revolutionary War, a side hardly ever depicted in media.
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