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Sorry, sorry. I just got through with a one and a half week rush of compounding school assignments but I think I've managed to come through it with my grades mostly intact. Chinese is still my best subject by far this semester, I'm not sure why but I just really catch on to the language pretty quickly.

Gosh, I haven't even talked about the movies I've seen recently. Lets get through a run down:

Music! Check out Beulah (If We Can Land a Man on the Moon Surely I Can Win Your Heart; Popular Mechanics for Lovers; *everythine else*), Badly Drawn Boy (Chaos Theory; Once Around the Block), G-Love and the Special Sauce (Rodeo Clowns), Robert Cray (Baby's Arms; *everything else*), J. Rawls (Great Caper), Rollergirl (Dear Jessie).

Did I mention that I recently got to floor (albeit reservedly) a BMW 740il? Nice car, V-8, lots and lots of leg room.

Conversely, the Nova seems to have reached the end of its driving days. It's been sitting in Ragan's Garage whilst we decide what, exactly, to do with it. The Stratford Hills Geek Compound is without wheels, dang.

Eric (Saalon) and Brennen have each posted rants proclaiming their disappointment with the current state of computers. I feel compelled to write as well, but later. Now I must finished a Tale of Kieu and then read more of The Republic of Wine (which I already recommend to Brennen).

Speaking of books, it seems that Bren didn't enjoy "The Shadow of the Hegemon" as well as I did. I throughly enjoyed that book, especially Card's grasp of politics in South, Southeast, and East Asia...so I may be a bit biased in that respect :-). But goodness, that was well done.

...That was freaky, the stuff of undergraduate nightmares. Here I sat, for almost seven hours straight I typed and worked on my term paper for history 87. I finish, I recall that the printer has been acting up, receiving jobs in the queue but not actually printing them. lpstat -t says that /dev/lp0 can't be found; I try a few fixes; I shrug; I reboot. While the computer is rebooting I head off to walk around and clear my head, I return.

The words are immutable on the screen, happily informing me of a slight problem booting my operating system, Linux. Hmm. Perhaps the hard disk suffered a fatal meltdown, I recall reading many stories recently on /. about melting drives, oh good.

Windows boots, if that can start without a problem then the hard disk must be in excellent shape. I return to the grub boot loader, file not found...

Poking around reveals that grub gives me access to a primitive command line, I examine the steps in the boot process. initrd.img is listed by cat, but not found when initrd attempts to load it, that's exciting.

I fiddle with the failsafe loading setup, learning much more about grub in two minutes than I have in the past two months. I point its kernel loader to see /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-12.3mdk (the shiny new kernel whose rpm installation probably caused this mess), it loads. I point initrd to initrd.img, cat reports that the file exists but initrd says otherwise, dang.

Finally I reconfigure grub to boot the kernel and not run initrd at all, all in failsafe mode (meaning I get options about booting parameters). It works, everything works. The network, X, my usb mouse, except the printer...naturally.

I took an exam on Wednesday, and I'm working on a take home that's due tomorrow while studying for another exam for tomorrow as well. Then there's the GRE on Monday....

Know what's cool about blackbox? I can configure the time display on the console to show the time exactly as I use it on my updates.

But more seriously, the "war" on terrorism is getting out of hand. I'll try and rant my thoughts in .txt soon. "They must not have heard, there's no negotiations." - G.W. Do we really need this kind of macho posturing? Can hate be stopped by military action or will we see the rise of more terrorist organizations seeking revenge for the eradication of Bin Laden's, if we manage to do that at all? All this and more in my next rant. Future rants could include: the sham that is the "Free Tibet" movement (they really mean, convert Tibet into an amusment park showcasing their oh-so-quaint traditions), Can War ever be called "just", and Trunks vs. Vegita vs. Goku vs. a squadron of stormtroops vs. the borg vs. a cyberdyne version 101 Terminator vs. a Predator vs. a hive of xenomorphs.

I've found lots of cool music lately, I'll post a list in the not-to-distant future.

Will themes.org ever recover? All signs point to no. I'm sure there are a lot of talented web programmers out there that love Linux and theming, so where are all the rival sites? Even slashdot has Kuro5hin and newsforge.

CNN has dispatched six questions of questionable quality to Al Jazeera (through which they expect they will reach Osama Bin Laden). CNN seems to have filtered out any questions with merit and are instead essentially asking Bin Laden to directly incriminate himself. Silly newspeople.

Displaying my date Chinese style (biggest to smallest, just like their mailing addresses; in fact you even say "evening" or "morning" before the time if you want to specify it (PM or AM) because it's a larger unit than the actual time) for a change, oh the wackyness!

I see Bren likes to display updates twice, maybe he incorporated too much slashcode? :-)

I just got back from a really relaxing weekend at the beach with Sarah, her sister, her parents, and Simon (the lil doggy). A three and a half hour nap on Saturday with intermittant rain and wind is extremely restful.

I have discovered the perfect way for me to wake up: Xmms-Alarm. As you have probably surmised, it is an XMMS (X-windows MultiMedia System i.e. winamp for linux) plugin that allows it to be used as an alarm. You can specify the alarm time and (and this is what really makes it great IMHO) you can set a starting volume, an ending volume, and the amount of time it should take to go from the start volume to the end volume after the alarm goes off. I have it set to start off with Linkin Park - Mr. Hahn at 20% and over the course of two minutes go up to 80% of the volume which roughly corresponds with the "active" part of the song starting. Then I go into Good Charlottle - Motivation Proclimation, followed by the Get up Kids - Ten Minutes and The Jealous Sound - What's Wrong is Everywhere. Thursday night I stayed up until 02:30 so I knew that I needed something special to wake me up and music has always worked in the past but never found a good solution for it...until then. It's just so relaxing to wake up to music gradually getting louder, it kinda integrates into my dreams and then pulls me out of them.

I keep forgetting mention, I (along with much of the fam) have now entered the cellular age with a Spring PCS dual analog/digital band phone. Handy.

Enterprise...is really that bad. Sarah, her sister, and I watched it again on Wednesday but still see little hope of redemption. The actress playing the vulcan seems to think that acting without a smile seems to mean acting thinly hostile all the time, she sounds like an angry romulan all the time and just dripping with barely hidden animosity. There also don't seem to be any good characters, except for possibly the doctor who isn't as terribly Neelix-like as I feared. Every other trek series threw in bunches of controversial and interesting characters like a Russian in the cold war, a Klingon when we had been indoctrinated to think of them as the enemy in the original trek series, a Feringi and a Trill in DS9, and a shipload full of Maquis Terrorists in Voyager. Enterprise has one angry vulcan, a moderately amusing doctor, and a bunch of painfully wooden clichés. Instead of allowing the characters to start off essentially unwritten the writers seem to want to jump ahead in the series when the characters already have established relationships. Take Data and Geordi for instance, their characters gradually developed an interesting and dynamic relationship that just seemed to work, there is something endlessly fasinating about a blind man helping an android realize his own humanity. Enterprise, on the other hand, is trying to have those relationships already in place by having already written them into preconcieved character designs (ooh, impulsive guy here, fearful of the journey here, jovial guy here...) and it only comes off as obviously (painfully so) contrived scenes and conversations. The dinner scenes are especially awful in this regard, it's just so obvious that this is the design they came up with to fill the slot they had set aside for Kirk/Spock/McCoy arguments, TNG poker games, Dax and Sisqo (sp?) chats, etc. Voyager had a similar problem with Janeway's talks with Chakotay, Tom and Ensign Kim's buddy-buddy episodes, etc; I suppose I should have seen this coming.

How many people can tell that I've been watching a lot of TNG lately? (I just got a truckload of my old tapes from home) That series was just so well done, I had forgotten how good it actually was. The character dynamics, the acting, even the feel of the show is superior to Enterprise (and that's comparing it to the first season of TNG). I suppose its just as well I'm not watching Babylon 5, which still surpasses every tv series I've ever seen so much that's it's just not funny.

I actually purchased, downloaded, and installed crossover from CodeWeavers. It's a program that allows linux users to install windows only plugins into a fake windows environment in linux and run them as though they were natively coded. It's most prominent application is the use of quicktime in linux, quicktime plugins and the quicktime standalone application both run fantastically.

Well Bren seems to have a lil deutsch guide up so I figure I'll post some interesting facts about chinese:

Hmm, I think I made that more confusing than it actually is. I find that it's actually easier for me to learn Chinese (so far) than Spanish because with Spanish I could kind of guess at the meaning of words and sentence structure was a lot like English and that made it easy for my mind to assume parts of the language that weren't there. Chinese forces my mind into a language learning mode, I can't assume sentence structure or guess at the meaning of words so that makes me actually learn what I'm saying and to not just speak English in a foreign language.

Thanks to Brennen (who has been reliably updating his webpage lately) cluing me in to The Gimp's manipulate tool (with an arbitrary rotate feature...heh) I've been steadily working my way down the list of images, scaling, rotating, and thumbnailing as I go. You can go to the directory if you want to keep track of my progess (images edited in realtime!...kinda). Anything image with a corresponding filename that has a _thumb on it has been properly rotated and scaled (hence the creation of a thumbnail). I haven't done any color correction, etc yet but for fountain_left and fountain_right I did just merge them with the help of the rotate and perspective options of the manipulate tool into something that almost looks pretty good. Look for fountain_merge.jpg and see what you think, and e-mail me I guess, since this web page seems to actually be generating some real user type output. Weird :-)

It may not exactly be a war, but free speech and, by association, truth are certainly beginning to be hindered. Check out this story about Bill Maher's current troubles. The fun begins.

But on a much much better note, The Onion finally has a special feature about the terrorist attacks. Some notable headlines: "US Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With", "Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In 80's". Also a hilarious infographic detailing how to make America safer with tips like "All commercial flights to taxi to their destinations". Whew, for a while there I was worried that the onion would let us down but it's as good as ever with the same witty and insightful humor that it's always had. Shoulda known that they wouldn't give in to the terrorist attacks.

Well I just saw the pilot of the new Star Trek series Enterprise and.... It's not that its a bad show, but it seems to be lacking something...trekish about it. To me, star trek has always been a psychological show, full of deep exploration of the human mind and the meaning of existence. Take the pilot episodes to each series: ST:TOS - Where No Man Has Gone Before: deals with human nature and the desire for power, and the pitfalls of seemingly unlimited power; ST:TNG - Encounter at Farpoint: Picard and his crew are put on trial for the crimes humanity has committed, deals with the warlike nature of the human species and their potential for self destruction; ST-DS9 - The Emissary: deals with the nature of religion, linear time (with some particularly good dialog between the prophets and Sisko), love, death, and the power of human emotion; even ST-V - Caretaker: deals with the consequences of tampering in another culture's development and of judging cultures that are seperate from your own. Enterprise seems to deal with whining humans who are frustrated that the vulcans didn't give them the full technology for warp drive when they wanted it. Archer and his crew kept acting like they deserved the technology...why? What did they do to earn it? Why did they feel it was the vulcan's required duty to help them develop their technology? It also dealt with various foreshadowed antagonists, a klingon running away from a fight and later accepting help from a human to walk, a captain setting off some kind of anti-magnetism bomb and then waiting around in the space station held together with magnetism instead of running back to his ship, and other scenes of gratuitous quality. Of course I may be judging too harshly as this is only the pilot episode, but as ST pilots go this ranks slightly above Voyager considering there wasn't Neelix (that doctor is annoyingly close though) and not nearly as good as DS9's. It's quite nearly a million times better than Babylon 5's pilot though, but we all know that certainly isn't saying much :-).

A kind reader sent me a link to Independent.co.uk an extremely good world news site. In several stories on CNN and other news sites about the United States freezing of assets I couldn't find one list of the individuals and organizations whose assets were being frozen...it's on the front page of the Independent along with many other detailed and insightful stories. Check it out (I'll add it to the links page when I rebuild it).

I actually discovered public use scanners on campus, in the ILS Library of all places. It has about a couple dozen computers and most have Really Nice scanners (HP 6300's). So I spent about an hour scanning in various pictures from my Germany Trip (that travel log will be up in the Distant Future [unlike themes.org I set realistic dates for my completion schedule, and if I finish before I say then it is a bonus {not to flame t.o., they are doing very good work and I'm sure the new site will be very praiseworthy but really}]). The pictures aren't exactly cleaned up yet, I have done nothing to them but scan them in. Some are askew and it seems that The Gimp lacks an arbitrary rotate features like photoshop so I'll have to reboot to straighten them out. I'll wait 'til they are production ready to make an associated web page but if you wanna check out the pictures as they are just go here.

My timelime for Revolutionary China is finally posted, it's somewhat incomplete but it just meant to be a quick reference to the major events in China in the past 150 years.

"Military retaliation against a terrorist attack would be just as effective as carpet bombing LA to wipe out street gangs...and just as ethical." - Anonymous slashdot post

You've all seen the video, read the news, and heard about the tragedy. I don't have much to add except that in case any of the crew checks this and doesn't know Lauramac is ok. I have to say that I was mightily impressed by slashdot and google who saw that the major news sites were going down under a heavy flood of users and worked to provide information as best they could. Slashdot posted a series of stories that allowed people to post copied news reports from down or heavily lagged news sites, and google posted links to its cached copies of news sites for people to use. I might post more thoughts on this later, but not now.

Sheesh, I keep forgetting to mention my current internet fad: anime music videos.

Widely available over LimeWire, these are music videos made from anime footage and cool music. My current favorites are:

So the 21:46:40 time would seem to be correct, that means that the 2:46 is probably the GMT time (which is what the unix clocks are actually counting from) mislabeled as EST, weird.

Yeah I know I'm a little waffley about the day-month order on my date line but does anyone seriously pay attention to the date other than to say "Hey, a new update!" Heh, and this way it's harder to tell how long it has been since my last update :-).

I'm sure at least one person reading this already knows (you know who you are) tonight will mark the billionth second since epoch time for unix systems. Backstory: unix clocks start from an epoch time of January 1st, 1970 and have been counting seconds up since then, tonight an extra digit will be added as the numbers flip over from 999999999 to 1000000000 and any programs that don't account for that extra digit will behave...interestingly. But I seem to be getting conflicting times for the time of the epoch, "date -d '01/01/1970 00:00:1000000000'" returns Sun Sep 9 02:46:40 EDT 2001 while "perl -e 'print localtime(1000000000) . "\n";'" returns Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001. I'm not sure which to believe at the moment but in either case running watch -n 1 "date +%s" will display the seconds counting up, currently at 999963821, I suppose it would be trivial to whip out the calculator and do a lil figuring but nah.. All of this is on Linux of course, it's kinda cool that I'm actually sitting at Sarah's win2K box running these programs over sessions of putty but then I'm silly that way :-D.

I just think it's pretty cool that the campus unix server has ssh installed so if I'm on campus I can telnet into the system (the campus windows terminals don't have ssh of course, and technically don't have telnet access either but telnet:// works) and then ssh into my computer and run mutt to remotely check my e-mail which is being downloaded for me by fetchmail and delivered into my local account. Of course this means that my ssh password is being sent cleartext through the telnet session, so if you're more paranoid about security (and rightly so) I wouldn't advise doing this.

I saw Jeepers, Creepers with Sarah and Laurie last night and actually thought it was pretty decent. The evil character was pretty cool and the ending was pretty bold for a movie like this.

I'm still around, really I am. I just got busy with school, work, study, and Sarah; a recipe for a jam-packed schedule if I ever saw one.

I did see JASBSB and I can say that it was without a doubt the best movie I've seen all summer, but whether that speaks more for the lackluster quality of movies this summer or the brilliance of the movie I'm not sure.

My job at the library is ok, I work in the Acqusitions Department and basically ensure that various amounts of paperwork get done until they pile up again. It's actually a pretty relaxing job, I go in and for three hours do fairly menial tasks that occupy my body whilst freeing my mind to wander around to its content, it's like working in the dish pit with a pay cut :-). Whoa...I just discovered that the "insert" key switches vi(m) between insert and replace modes. I think I should take the time to actually read a tutorial on vim someday.

My classes are all quite interestin', the History of Native Americans east of the Mississippi has turned out to be the sleeper hit of the season, look for a myth debunking rant in txt sometime. Chinese is shaping up to be a pretty fun course (even if it does meet five days a week), ni hao (anyone know how to write a third tone (looks like â only with the ^ upside down) with the compose key?) and all that. For cool facts and a nifty Chinese name generator, check out Mandarin Tools or Zhongwen.

Speaking of Chinese names, I asked my Chinese TA to help me think up a cool one (I didn't like any the generator was giving me) and she came up with shî dě wén based on the sound of "Stephen". In this case shî would be my family name and dě wén would be my personal name. Shî means "history", dě means "king", and wén means "knowledge, cultural understanding" all loosly translated of course but it's still oddly appropriate I think :-).

I had the greatest time yesterday! I (along with two other classmates) lead the first discussion session for the post Mao Chinese Lit class. Doctor Yue thought it would be best to start off with the historical background before moving on to the stories so that's what we got to talk about, and it was so much fun! We did so well that instead of Dr. Yue cancelling next week's Friday class he thought we (my group) should lead a class discussion again, and I am sincerely excited about it...maybe I'm hooked.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back! started last night. I haven't seen it yet but I'm quite excited about it as it will be the first Kevin Smith movie I've ever seen on the big screen. The fact that all the reviews are very favorable so far is a nice bonus :-).

Germany was quite exciting, I'll post a travel log whenever I take the time to write one down. I have the highlights written up in my journal but I haven't fleshed it out on the 'puter yet. I find that it is very difficult to write long thoughts down by hand because my thoughts come out faster than I can write, typing seems to be pretty close but maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to. I'm sure someone writing with a thought-to-text dictation system in the future would feel as constricted by typing.

On the trip I managed to finish The Honk & Holler Opening Soon, E=mc² A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, and Jingo (yahoo links used where possible because bn's are...extremely long and kinda hard to work with as I'm ssh'ing into my computer thru putty). They were all extremely good, the Honk was a good "real world" story, Jingo was a fun Prachett romp, but the real prize was E=mc². It went through an extremely interesting history of the development of the equation (doing a very good job of highlighting the women scientists that had done significant work but had been written out of the books). It then went through a histoy of the development of the atomic bomb and the allied efforts to sabotage the German atomic development which came very close to beating the allies to the bomb. There was this one military raid that I cannot believe has been overlooked by the gaming industry, it reads like an FPS setup except that it actually happened. Remote factory outpost (producing the heavy water required for the atomic war machine), protected by the harsh mountains of Norway, the only way in is a single bridge guarded by German troops, and nine Norwegian speical ops have to get in, sabotage the equipment and escape (though that was assumed to be impossible, it was essentially a suicide mission). Wanna know how it turns out? Read the book, heh.

Well I'm back from Germany and have completed my first week of school. I'm taking Hist33 - Traditional East Asia, Hist72A - Eastern Native Americans, Hist 87 - Imperial Japan, Chin138 - Post Mao Chinese Literature, and Chin001 - Elementary Chinese. I also just started my new job at Davis Library where I will be working 15 hours a week (3 hours a school day), right now I'm just doing basic work but I'm learning new jobs each time I go in. Hopefully it will be fun and a good source of research experience that I can put on graduate school applications.

I'll try to update more often but with this schedule I have very little free time, whee!

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