I can’t find a fucking thing in my YT faves anymore. Less than a day left. Please, please, please, America, don’t fuck this up. One 72-year-old cancer-surviving heartbeat away…

Potential VP, and perhaps even Commander-in-Chief of the world’s last superpower:

Hmmmmm…

I started with some link I don’t remember, then went to another about a book called He’s Just Not That Into You, and eventually ended up at this article on Web MD. Granted, not the world’s most credible relationship advice source, but I did read the article because I was curious as to what “no one” had told me about being married. Seriously…women need this kind of advice? Someone has to tell them that their husbands are not pets or accessories, and that a grown man comes with his very own, unique personality that you will not change, no matter how much you bitch, nag, threaten, sulk or cry? He’s going to do things that annoy you, yes…and you are going to do things that annoy him, too. If he’s the right one, the annoyances will be far outweighed by the good stuff. So he can’t manage to hit the laundry hamper three feet from his side of the bed, and he shaves all over the sink. So what–it won’t kill you to pick up some clothes or wipe the goddamned sink. This is the same man who picks up half a dozen roses for no reason beyond “I was at the store anyway”, even remembering that pink roses are your favourite, the same man who makes coffee every morning, even when he leaves before you’re awake, and the same man who faithfully does garbage detail every Monday morning because he knows that even the thought of garbage makes you vaguely nauseous. He probably doesn’t like it much when you leave the butter out to soften and forget to put it in the fridge when you’re done, and most likely is less than appreciative of discovering the odd and sundry 14″ hair coiled gracefully inside the clean underwear he’s putting on at six in the morning. He does appreciate having his own Laundry Fairy and Ironing Fairy, he does appreciate the drive-by smooch on the back of the neck whilst he’s working at his computer, and although he laughs, he does appreciate and does not feel objectified by the wolf whistle when he emerges from the shower. You’ll disagree, you’ll argue, and sometimes even fight, but you’ll get over it, and you’ll both survive. That’s what happens when two people live together for a long time. Jesus wept…that’s all common sense, common decency and respect for a human being, not some sort of big secret. Men are not women. Men will never be women. They don’t want to be women, and any woman with any sense doesn’t want them to be women, either. If you want your man to be like a woman, then what you want is a bull dyke with a strap-on (maybe a Swiss strap-on), not a man. Some are complicated, some are not very, some are thoughtful by nature, and some will forget your birthday, but they’re really not that difficult to understand, most are willing to work on solutions that suit you both as long as you treat them like equal partners, not some sort of child or animal that needs “training” (no matter what your mother told you, or whether you were daddy’s little princess), and IMHO, the fact that they are not women is a very, very good thing. I think mine is probably glad I’m not a man, too! 🙂

Commenting on an article about a Swedish lesbian couple who had a wedding ceremony at the Taj Mahal, some genius trying to be witty says…

“I want to see what a Swiss Army strap-on looks like.”

Switzerland, home of the Swiss. Capital: Bern. Located roughly in the centre-ish of Europe, bordered by France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Official languages: French, German, Italian, and (I think) another I’m too lazy to look up. Famous for Swatch (okay, clocks and watches in general, but I loved my 80s Swatch), the Swiss Alps/Matterhorn, milk chocolate, the “Swiss Miss” costume that appears at practically every Hallowe’en party in North America and gets smaller every year, ski patrols made up of hawt guys with sexy accents, the red/white cross flag, Saint Bernard dogs with brandy casks, neutrality, alp horns, and…cutlery. Perhaps its most famous cutlery…the Swiss Army knife.

Sweden, home of the Swedes. Capital: Stockholm. Located in Northern Europe, bordered mostly by Norway, and Finland in the north where not much other than reindeer and lichen are crazy enough to live, with the possible exception of some Sámi, but I think most of them are in Norway(?). At least that’s what Hannah said when she named her betta Sami. East across the North Sea from Denmark, north across the Baltic Sea from Germany and Poland. No official language; Swedish is the de facto standard, but everyone speaks English with some degree of proficiency. Famous for attractive people (beautiful women in particular), liberal attitudes, lingonberry jam (not 100% sure what a lingonberry is, actually), environmental responsibility, my beloved Linnaeus, Absolut, smorgasbord (the only vaguely Swedish word many North Americans know), weekend binge drinking, and, inexplicably, Swedish meatballs, which may or may not actually be Swedish in origin. My stepmother used to make those, and I thought they were horrible. Then again, she’s not exactly the Iron Chef. The Muppet doesn’t count because Jim Henson was American, but everyone thinks he’s funny and nobody thinks Swedes really sound like that.

I know they’re both in Europe and begin with “S”, but Swiss and Swedish don’t sound anything alike. Jesus…if you’re going to attempt wit, at least get the goddamned geography somewhere close so you don’t make us all look stupid, dumbass. Are you one of those US Americans who doesn’t have a map?

Edit: Learn something new every day! A lingonberry is what I know as foxberry. Cool.

If you are full-blooded, you get to wear the full gear, feathered bone breastplate and all, and nobody gets to complain. You can even wear those god-awful “Native inspired” clothes that always seem to turn up in flea market booths and mall kiosks at Christmas. Hell, put bear fat in your hair if you want. Just by looking at you, Caucasians are meant to feel the “white guilt” for the acts of their ancestors and for oppressing the “red man” even to this day, so you get a pass even if it is the 21st century, and even if you do look really, really stupid and you’re a lazy, drunken bastard drawing welfare instead of working, and whose teenage kids huff paint instead of going to school. Spare me the sob stories; I’ve lived on a reservation and I goddamned well know.

If you are a half-breed, you get a pass for some native-inspired jewellery or clothing, but it’s got to be from your own or a neighbouring tribe. That means I don’t get to wear Navajo or Cheyenne stuff, but I do get to wear Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and maybe could push to Mi’kmaq (put up with them for enough years). No feathers or breastplates, or anything (EVER!) in fringed buckskin, but a tasteful beaded bracelet or necklace, or fetish earrings…that’d be okay. The more strongly you favour the white side, the easier you have to go on the Native-inspired anything. If you feel the need, yeah, you can hang one of those stupid dream-catchers on the rearview mirror, but remember that being a half-breed doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to have at least passable taste. Then again, better that than plastic Mardi Gras beads, I suppose.

If one of your grandparents was full-blood, then yeah, you can wear a few Native-inspired things, but keep it subtle because for practical purposes, you’re pretty much white. If you absolutely must have a dream-catcher, for the love of Gitche Manitou, put it in a room where no one will see it.

If you describe yourself as “one-eighth Chickasaw”, you’re white. Nobody is “one-eighth” anything. That’s one of your eight great-grandparents…you’re white. Kind of a homeopathic Injun. Don’t argue. Get over it.

If you are an old, fat, bald white dude in polyester pants, stay far, far away from the flea markets and the mall kiosks because you look like an idiot. I don’t care if you live just 50 miles from the Cree reservation, or whether your great-great grandmother’s third cousin twice removed was half Blackfoot. You…look…like…an…idiot.

Hungry like the wolf?

EDIT: OMFG. Just…OMFG. Ahahahaha! Aaaaahahahahaha!

Born to roam

Testing YouTube deep linking.

SSH

Since I’ll forget…

Intrepid didn’t install openssh-server by default, only the client.

When SSH bitches about “Host key verification failed”, do:
sudo rm -rf .ssh/known_hosts

Also, I’m in love. I get asked for the keyring pw on login to connect, but Intrepid doesn’t annoy me as openSUSE did by asking for it again every goddamned time the computer went idle. I was never sure whether that was a bug or supposed to be a feature, but considering that I often use the laptop so I have something to do during commercials (I mute them, but don’t want to have to look at them, either), it was rather annoying. I use a strong password, and it’s a pain in the arse to type all over again just because the computer was idle for more than ten minutes. Yeah, I could’ve changed the time, but if I haven’t done anything for ten minutes, I want it to reduce power consumption. I just don’t want to have to enter the goddamned password again. 🙂

Pretty, too, or at least it’s getting there. The Intrepid install went fine; took about 28 minutes from clicking the Install icon (after checking the Live CD to make sure wireless was going to work OOTB–it did) to a fully ready-to-use desktop, which is a few extra minutes, but that’s because I used manual partitioning (guided thought I wanted to keep openSUSE), and the servers were slammed, so enabling extra repos took a little longer. All in all, though, I’m pretty pleased. I did install the Dust theme that I like so much, but the DarkRoom theme is nice, too, so I’m using that, at least for a while. Hated the icons, so I replaced them with a set called Desert from GL.org. I updated OpenOffice.org to 3.0 even though I rarely use it on the laptop, installed aMSN, gftp, Skype, Alarm Clock and a few other little things, but that’s pretty much all I’ll need. I didn’t have time to mess with this today, but it’s ooh-shiny, and sometimes, ya just gotta do stuff. I don’t know when I’ll get around to doing the desktop, but I’m happy for now. Also tired, so I think I’ll get in bed now and read dumbass comments on Fark until I fall asleep, hopefully at a reasonable hour. Haven’t done that in a while. 🙂

screenshot

F5 F5 F5 F5… 🙂

Yeah, it’s finally 8.10 release day, and although the countdown timer is gone, I still see “Coming Soon!” I think I’ll ditch openSUSE after all. Sorry, cute little green chameleon-dude. Do I have time to do an install on either machine today? Hells, no! Do I still feel the need to have the install disc? Hells, yeah! I guess maybe I could do the laptop today, since I have everything but a few pictures I’ve downloaded over the last few days backed up already, but I’m really supposed to be playing Laundry Faerie and Ironing Faerie, and throwing some more RAM into that old HP, but maaaayyyybe. It’d only take half an hour or so….heh.

Aha…found the torrent on a mirror, and I’m sure there’ll be so many seeds that it’ll download as fast as my Stone Age connection will handle. I’ll have to choke my pathetic upstream, and Charter hates teh BT, but hell on ’em. If they’d upgrade their shit instead of finding new ways to nickel-and-dime their customers to death, they’d be able to handle the traffic. All of the official servers are going to be smoking today anyway, so BT is definitely the better way. No, I don’t need it now, and yes, I have other things to do, but…ooooh, shiny! Hm…maybe should check GetDeb to see whether they’ve got Intrepid stuff set up yet so I can get the extras I want. Dunno….maybe…ooooh, shiny! 😀

I want to like this show. I love Mythbusters, and I think that the only hope for that other lame-ass show…uh…Smash Labs is to kill it with fire and scatter the ashes to the four winds. I was hoping that with three nerds and one “build it” guy, and what appeared to be fairly interesting challenges, Prototype This would be good. I watched the pilot, and it was okay, and now I’m watching it again, but there’s just no chemistry. Joe is teh hawt, plus he’s an electrical engineer, Zoz is an Aussie and a code monkey with a Ph.D. (I’m ignoring the stupid hairstyle), and “Dr. Mike” is cuter than most Ph.D.s I’ve seen. I can’t stand that other guy–Terry or something–because he’s a whole bunch of annoying and not much geek. He’s somehow managed to take the special effects charm of Mythbusters and fuck it around until I’d like to cockpunch him to make him stop flapping his fucking gums and GTFO camera. Geeks are sexy, and so are engineers. Annoying special effects dudes who dress as if they might be homeless…not so much. Well, there may not be any chemistry and I may be typing this and only half-watching the show (never do that with Mythbusters), but at least they didn’t feel the need to add the “token woman who doesn’t actually bring anything to the show and just tries to look cute with power tools”. Technically, I guess Kari is a token woman on MB, but at least she’s cute and funny, and she’s pretty good when it comes to sculpting/artistic stuff. Maybe that’s what PT needs; a not-annoying woman. Maybe it just needs to be cancelled. Heh.

I was going to do some email, but I decided I’m too goddamned tired to say anything even remotely interesting, so instead, I’m going to sit here like some sort of root vegetable, stuff my face with raw baby carrots and learn how to make graphite hockey sticks, bronzed baby shoes, treadmills and handheld computers. Eclectic mix…I love How It’s Made. I was going to watch Obama on The Daily Show (yaaayyy–finally!), but I’ll watch that online tomorrow.

I may have pissed away my entire day off doing absolutely nothing useful, but it still turned out to be a good one. Cliffie isn’t at 100%, but his eye looks better, his jaw is far less swollen, he’s swimming around more, and considering that a week ago, I was pretty sure I was going to lose him, I’ll take what I can get. He’s old, and probably wouldn’t survive another infection, so I’m going to take him to the limit on the kana and cross my fingers that it will be enough and I won’t cause kidney damage. No crickets yet for Olena and Miss Vee, but the store gets their new stock in tomorrow, and I’ll presume they got their heat fixed so these ones won’t die as well. I haven’t laughed as hard as I did at B.’s “Word troubleshooting” in a very long time (still giggling over that because I can just see him doing it!) and sometimes, even the biggest smartass can be so sweet that I’m not even sure what to say. When Never Shuts Up is at a loss for words…yeah, that’s definitely significant. I’m not really doing anything, just telling him the truth, but it was still nice to know that he hadn’t just been kind of “brushing off” the things I say. Maybe it is some sort of approval-seeking behaviour, and maybe the validation shouldn’t matter, but “shouldn’t” and “doesn’t” are often not the same thing, and it does matter. Besides, although approval-seeking can be a destructive behaviour indicative of self-esteem issues if it means seeking approval anywhere, there is nothing wrong with seeking the approval of people one likes and respects. I suppose it’s like anything else; neither extreme is right, and the sensible position is somewhere in the middle.

I should go get in the shower now, but fuck it–I’m gonna be a rebel and do it in the morning. That’s me…wild and crazy, living life on the bleeding edge! 😉

Interesting, the odd things that stay in our auditory memories. Snippets of TV and radio commercials, the way a colleague said a particular word, the sound of a wedding ring clicking against a stainless steel sink when your grandmother or mother shook water off her hands after washing dishes. I think I probably remember a little more than average, since I’m more auditory than I am visual, but everyone has some sounds they remember. I once had a discussion with B. about that. If P., for instance, liked a particular song, he just likes it. Not me. For me, it has to be the same version of the song, exactly as I remember it. A live version or even a different studio version just won’t cut it because it’s not the same as I remember. Hell, I can even remember exactly where Andy Kim’s “Rock Me Gently” used to skip on the K-tel record we had when I was a kid. I have a digital copy, which doesn’t skip, of course, but my brain still listens for the skip in that spot.

Put it in a song, and I can remember fairly long strings of random numbers. If you asked me to write the number from The IT Crowd episode where they changed the number for Emergency Services, I couldn’t do it unless I sang it first: 0118999881999119725…3. (Hee–I love you, Moss!) I was telling B. that I can still remember a commercial for PEI tourism from the 70s that featured Stompin’ Tom Connors, singing the toll-free number. He said he can remember one for Radio Malmöhus from ten years ago (and AFAIK, he did–the number was 040-73910). Although I hadn’t heard “eight-double-zero, five-six-five, seven-four-two-one” for probably thirty years, it was still stuck in my mind, and I remembered every word of the commercial jingle. Out of curiousity, I did a quick search to see whether the number was still valid. If it is (dunno, got distracted), it’s not the number for PEI tourism anymore, but someone dug up the old commercial and they have 30-second and 60-second versions available for download. Also, if you go to www.8005657421.com, you’ll be redirected to the PEI tourism web site; it would seem I’m not the only one who remembers Stompin’ Tom. I remember both the short and long versions of the commercial, but the long version was the one I heard most often.

It’s odd…how memory works. I’m still looking for the “right” Zoodles commercial, and the Cadbury Caramilk one where the two guys are trying to buy the Caramilk secret from the devil.

“My people are prepared to pay…fifty million!”
“Not enough!”
“Seventy-five million, for the Caramilk secret.”
“Not enough!”
“A hundred million, tops!”
“Sorry!”
“I’m willing to pay…anything.”
“Anything…thing…ing?”

Heh…and if you’ve ever eaten an elephant, chewed on a kanga-roodle, or bitten a buffalo, then you must’ve been eating Zoodles. Zoodles…that’s “oodles with a zed!” 🙂

OMG! Astar is on YouTube. This absolutely fascinated me when I first saw it and I totally wanted my own robot. Still do. 😉

This was posted to an Ubuntu list. The guy could’ve just said nothing, but took the time to find the list and say thanks. Made my day. 🙂

This post is for all of you out there who have developed or contributed to Linux/Ubuntu projects and all of the open source coders who read this. I do not know where to send a post like this so I hope this one email will find its way in the sea of posts out there.

I thank you to the point of tears.

Earlier this week I installed Kubuntu on a refurbished AMD computer I purchased for $184 from a discount online vendor, it came with no OS. It now runs like a champ.

We cant afford much and this was my 14 year old daughter’s birthday present this past week. She is overjoyed. And she is already trying to tackle Adept Manager and exploring Linux; adding bling and her music, of course.

I cant tell you how much I appreciate the work you all have done. It’s a work of art. If I could thank each and every one of you I would.

You have given her the world to learn and explore.

So if you get frustrated or tired in your work for Open Source/Free Software, just remember that somewhere in Missouri there is a 14 year-old girl named Hope, an A-student who runs on the track team, who is now your biggest fan and one of the newest users of Linux/Ubuntu.

Thanks most sincerely,
R.B.A.
Missouri

Oh, I just noticed that he correctly used a semicolon. I love this guy!

P.S. Why can’t I have a Darpa BigDog? Well, when they make it quieter. I watched the video again, and I always feel bad when they kick the poor thing. Don’t hurt the nice robot! 🙁