Read Dave Barry‘s columns, or his answers to questions on slashdot.

Some people are too paranoid. Others are not paranoid enough.

From how many more rooftops must I yell: “WHY DO WE CARE WHAT THE FRENCH THINK?” before somebody starts listening? A couple of friends and myself with pointy sticks could take over France in a matter of hours; why should we care what their stupid pacifist gay cheese-eating surrender monkey opinions are on our matters of war and peace? Now the EU is starting to side with them. [link from Rick, the rant is all my own.]

Tuesday night, the old Union Bank building in downtown Pulaski burned. I got some photos and video of the action. Most didn’t turn out great due to the darkness, but you may find them interesting:

(link removed – 07-June-2003)

Local news coverage: WKSR || Citizen Press

Some day…

X-Top Expert-10 5-over-5 configuration (10-monitor setup)

Dumb furry critter’s prediction — I completely forgot about Groundhog Day. Not that I really cared anyway. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I’m tired of cold weather, and I’m ready for summer. NOW.

Also… New wireless 11g ‘standard’ ends in tears. Who’d have guessed. It is probably mostly the fault of that varmit for predicting more cold weather [see above].

Rick posted this link: Boosting The Performance of your PHP Applications. I cannot connect this link with woodchucks, but read it anyway.

I have decided I would like to take possession of a porcupine as a pet. Everyone should own such a cuddly, soft animal. I’m sleep-deprived and nearing delirium, imo.

Frank traded his Motorola V200 phone for this Audiovox. In the aftermath, I grabbed his new Motorola USB Data Kit, which will also work with my V60c. This means I can connect to iGiles using my laptop from anywhere I’ve got cell service (albeit at 14.4kbps; but hey, it beats nothing in a pinch).

Finding an acceptable mail client in Windows has long been the bane of my existence. Outlook/Outlook Express are simply terrible (HTML mail, top-quoting, and prone to virii just for starts) and most of the others (Eudora, FoxMail, PocoMail, Pegasus, Becky) either have poor filtering, folder mgt, bad interface, fatal bugs, ads, non-free — SOMETHING that makes them unusable for me. I have finally found a Windows product that I can use and even recommend — [drumroll]

Kaufman Mail Warrior.

Light (about 700 KB), elegant, multiple account support, filters… Just what I’ve been looking for. No installer — just save the EXE to a folder and run it. It will make the subfolders it needs, and you can back everything up and move it to another computer by simply ZIP’ing the whole folder. After a couple of hours, it seems stable enough. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m about to install Debian on macduff as a trial-run for redoing several (4-6) servers over the next week. This is going to be fun.

Update [21:36]: README for getting KDE 3.1 to work under Debian. This saved me tonight.

Update 2 [23:18]: This screenshot is brought to you by the letter “DEBIAN GNU/LINUX” and the number “RUNNING KDE 3.1.0″.

Update 3 [05:10]: Sound works. Check the emu10k1 driver out of CVS from opensource.creative.com; recompile kernel and driver module, tweak it, you’ll get it eventually. I should post some working docs on this since nobody else seems to. I’ve conquored the beast; I’m going home.

Also, Andrew Balsa submitted to DistroWatch a review of Mandrake Linux 9.1-beta3 posted.

Random tip: Type “about:config” in the Location bar of Phoenix for every option you could ever wish to tweak. Play at your own risk.

Hooray for new software on a Monday.

• Mandrake Linux 9.0-beta3 is out. Download 3 ISO images here.
• A new Win32 release of Gaim came out 22 Jan with the redraw bug fixed. [download]
• KDE 3.1 hit the streets 28 Jan.

And some news…

• NASA – Space Shuttle Columbia and Her Crew
• MSNBC – NASA memo figured wing damage
• MSNBC – SPACENEWS Front Page (latest on Columbia)
• Iraq vows heavy toll if U.S. attacks. Blah, blah. Why exactly haven’t we put the boot to them yet? Does anybody still really believe that we’re the aggressor here?

more coming soon, as I go through my inbox and today’s news…

This made me laugh. A lot.

“This is a video taken in 6000 feet of water.
An undersea robot is sawing a 3mm wide slit
(1/10th of an inch…remember that width) in a pipeline.
Inside the pipeline is normal atmospheric pressure
while the pressure outside is 2700PSI (1.3 tons psi).
And then a crab walks by…” [source]

Watch the video: [crabvspipe.mpeg || 1.8 MB]

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog burns Simon from American Idol. Gold. Vidcap by Dren.

I was a the office until 02:30-ish, but I got XP installed on macduff and all my necessary software configured. So far, its been stable (after a whopping one whole day of use). I was going to put Mandrake Linux 9.1-beta2 on as my dual-boot alternative, but the ISO for CD1 I got is bad (error during download or buring to CD-R — who knows). I’m currently downloading Yoper 3.2.1-rc3, but don’t hold high hopes for getting it installed tonight.

Being as it is now Friday night, I am presented with the options of either (a.) sitting here at the office and catching up on work, (b.) going to catch a movie or shoot pool or something resembling entertainment with the guys, or (c.) going home and sleeping. Presently, option (c.) appeals to me the most, but I know I’ll wake up at 02:00 Saturday or something stupid, be wide awake, and have nothing to do. My sleep schedule is already b0rked enough as it is. That leaves me to decide between options (a.) and (b.), and as (a.) requires less energy (that is, not moving from this comfortable gray-cloth-upholstered office chair), I think I’ll go with that route for the time being. I may migrate elsewhere later. I’m such a boring clod.

Tomorrow looks like… well, work, oddly enough. I love being behind. My Clie tells me I have about 7 things “To-do”. Wooooo, wooo[1].

Update: Well, that settles it. I’m going to Taco Bell, then meet up with the crew and go see a movie or something equally pointless. But first…

Sony To Phase Out Smaller CRTs.
“Sony is making plans to leave the CRT market. By phasing out the seventeen and nineteen inch displays, Sony hopes to push users towards their LCD offerings. For the rest of us, that means: An increase in production, and an (eventual) decrease in cost.”

[1] See below.

Whistle tips? And Frank thought the straight pipes on my Silverado were bad. Stupidest. thing. evar.

Dell migrates from Sun to Dell servers running Linux (link from Critch by way of Rick). Speaking of Critch, he’s got a 5-head setup on his office workstation, which I somewhat envy.

Windows XP refused to boot on macduff today. It would blue screen during boot with all sorts of arcane errors. Mandrake booted fine, as always. I’ve never had a Windows install on that box that worked respectfully, so I’m in the process now of switching hardware. After verifying the integrity of the RAM, I replaced the SoundBlaster Live! card with an Audigy MP3+, replaced the ATI Rage128 Pro (32MB) video card with an ATI Radeon 7000 (64MB), and rearranged the order of the drives in the hard disk array. I’m moving all my media from the 3-40GB IBM drives to the 120GB WD, and letting one of the IBMs take over from the WD as system disk. I may put XP and Linux on separate disks, but either way, this afternoon has been spent switching hardware around, and tonight looks like it will be spent installing operating systems and software. Fun times ahoy, but I’m resigned to cromwell as my primary PC until I restore some functionality to the big box.

Yesterday saw FedEx delivering my new Clie and UPS dropping off the 40GB laptop HDD and a much-needed book [IP Addressing and Subnetting, Including IPv6] from B&N.

The Clie works great; I guess I no longer have an excuse to remain unorganized. Furthermore, the laptop drive install went without a hitch, and by 19:00 I had Windows XP and all my software reinstalled and configured to my liking. Now back to configuring all this new network hardware for the office — we should be running in Lawrenceburg on Tuesday, but its going to require a long working weekend to make it happen.

The new battery in the 4Runner is working flawlessly. That seemed to be the source of most of my electrical problems. Common sense would tell you to start troubleshooting with the most obvious point of failure, so maybe my lesson was learned there. I should have things all wired up so I can easily hook the laptop in (thanks to S-Video out on the Dell) and play audio/video through the 4Runner. Now that I’ve got a big 40GB drive to fill with media, I’ll have to test it out in the near future.

Network Solutions is giving me fits of fury trying to get a domain name with out-dated registration information transferred to new DNS servers and updated with proper contact information. Click “more” for all the boring details…

It seems there are 22 days remaining during which people shall spend endless sums of money in the hope of getting an equivalent gift in return. Kind of seems pointless, eh? I’m such a scrooge this year. This is the last full week of classes, then finals the week following.

I’m moving back to Pulaski after this semester finishes. Alex is transferring up to Freed-Hardeman, and I think I’ll go to Martin for the spring term. In other news…

EFF Analysis of the USA Patriot Act.

Time-wasting Flash trinket of the week: Horse Harmony

Personality Disorder Test
My results:
Paranoid: Moderate
Schizoid: High
Schizotypal: Moderate
Antisocial: High
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: Low
Narcissistic: High
Avoidant: High
Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate

Well, after taking two years off after high school, I’m going to Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) in Murfreesboro, TN. I moved here 3 August. It is just about an hour away from Pulaski. I guess I’ll major in C.I.S. (Computer Information Systems). I’m still working for iGiles – they’re letting me telecommute mostly, which is great.

I now have a blog. This means I am now caught up with the rest of the world, or so the media would have me believe. I’m using Personal Weblog which is in PHP/MySQL, my combination of choice for web apps.

Maybe now I’ll have incentive to update this site every now and then. Or not.