LaserBlog.com

I feel crappy. Just, stress. Tired, unmotivated, sad, angry, crappy. Something happened this week which caused even more stress. Each day that goes by I hate the world more. People suck. People are mean. Society is messed up, our government is messed up, and I just wanna go live in a hut in Tibet w/ my laptop and satellite internet.

/ crawls under rock

I love the internet!
I love it I love it I love it!
I had no idea David Boreanaz was in Dido’s White Flag video!
Download it here:
http://www.buffy.nu/article.php3?id_article=1386
BTW, buffy.nu is THE source for all things Buffy & Angel.

From Slashdot.org:

“Developers: A Thoughtful Look at Indian Outsourcing-
thefinite writes “This article needs to be read by anyone interested in the outsourcing of IT jobs to India, no matter your opinion of it. It dispels some rumors (for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon’s highest-rated programming companies Indian?). It addresses all of the arguments. Perhaps most importantly, it adds faces to the problem. It not only tells us about the American programmers who are out of jobs, but also about the Indians who are getting them. In the end of it, this is what Free Trade is about: people. This article makes that clear.
Read More“

From the article:
“”We can’t stop globalization,” Turner says. But outsourcing, especially now, amounts to “contributing to our own demise.” When jobs go overseas, governments lose income tax revenue – and that makes it even harder to assist those who need a hand. Losing IT jobs has particularly frightful consequences. In a jittery world, “it’s really foolish for us to become so dependent on any foreign country for those kinds of jobs,” she says. What’s more, she continues, it imperils the US middle class. “If we keep going in this direction, we’ll have just two classes in our society – the very, very rich and the very, very poor. We’re going to look like some of the countries we’re outsourcing to.”"

My sim (The Sims Online) had given up on finding a roommate and so spent good money on a small house. Then that same night, some people asked my sim to be a roomate. I (my sim) now live in a gay nightclub! It’s way more fun (and beneficial) to have roommates in TSO.
=:D

I heart…

Buffy
Angel
Kitties
TextAmerica
Coffe Cake
Wine
Internet
Technology

Hot Synch your Palm EVERY DAY!

I had not hot synched my palm (sony clie ux50) in a couple weeks and decided to do it tonight, JUST after I finished putting photos online. And what do u think happened just BEFORE I Hot Synched? Ahhhh, the baby died and I had to hard reset! I lost it all and had essentially had to “go back” to where I was two weeks ago or so, plus have M help me REconfigure all the settings so that I can SMS w/ the thing, send email directly from the thing, surf on it via WiFi, surf on it via Bluetooth, yadda yadda yadda.

Bang head, learn lesson.

Thanks SO MUCH to the very bored telemarketer who just couldn’t stand it anymore, and left me a RASPBERRY on my voice mail! Thank you so much mister 800-349-9589!!!

RASPBERRY.WAV (109k sound file)

Here are some Pencam SD photos:
.:PHOTOS:.

I have not been good about getting out w/ my camera(s). Just been lazy. I seem to rely on my camera phone mostly. Here are some pix from my Canon D60 that were sitting on the flashcard.
.:PHOTOS:.
A Wood Stork in the back yard, plus some really neat clouds.

From kuro5hin:

“If you’ve ever wondered how the brain on acid sees life, without going through the actual trouble and expense of doing LSD, you can now surf over to Cowboybooks.com.au to view the results of an experiment, conducted during the 1950′s.”

I stayed up too late last night playing TSO and then slept in. Now it’s almost midnight and I’m nowhere NEAR tired.

Feeling the void today.
Not sure why today especially.
So sad.
So lost.
I want him back.
It hurts.
Why did he have to go???
I can’t stop crying sometimes.
Stop it!
“This is so unfair.”
Yes, my love, I agree wholeheartedly.

Man, the whole sims thing, and esp the whole TSO (the sims online) thing is just almost too extensive for me. All I do is walk around homeless with no apparent way to find a roomate or make money. So much crime is going on in there to. Tons of cheats you can buy but why should I spend real money to buy cheats? And if I don’t buy cheats, I’m at a severe disadvantage from the other players. I wonder if this game’ll get more fun or not.

From /. :

“HAL9OOO writes “I found an article that as well as giving a good overview of “SCO – The Story So Far” also provides an interesting insight into the character of a certain Mr Darl McBride Esq.” It’s a fairly lengthy article providing a lot of insight. Necessary reading to anyone new the SCO/Linux thing, and recommended to anyone who just wants some interesting details on SCOs position on the whole thing.” ” Read More @ slashdot.

The Sims Online is weird. I love The Sims offline and I got bored with it when my sim got a good job and all that was really left was to make social progress. I don’t like to climb the social ladder IRL so why would I waste my time in a game where that’s all there is to do?

That’s how TSO is. U arrive homeless and w/ little money, and u have to make friends, get someone to invite you to be a roomate, and make money. I hope it’s not as troublesome as it seems.

I find The Sims addicting, and I bet that when I get the hang of the online version that it’ll be equally addicting.

I’m making a foray into the SIMS ONLINE world. I installed it (or started to) last night, but it took HOURS, and I eneded up going to bed after a couple hours of waiting for it to update.

Do u do the Sims Online?

I need to learn about it.

UPDATE: Geez, TSO is impossible! I can’t even create a SIM. Before you can create a sim you have to pick a city. I spend time researching cities only to find out that the one I want is busy. Then I pick another one and, oops! Must download more darn files! This is nuts. And I have broadband!

War Driving t-shirt!!!!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/60f0/
at ThinkGeek.com

From Think Geek:
“Finally, A Reason To Go Outside!
If it weren’t for geocaching or wardriving, geeks and hackers would develop blotchy white skin, a debilitating sensitivity to light, and cravings only for food that slips easily under a door (pizza, cheese, poptarts, hotpockets, etc).”

Uh… that’s me.

Get your “My job went to india and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirt here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/31/35084.html

Related story: “The Rise of India” from Business Week.

Disclaimer: I love India and the people of India. I just hope that the US can continue to provide jobs to it’s American computer professionals.

From the register:
“Hollywood has abandoned its attempt to stifle publication of DVD decryption code, by dropping its lawsuit against a Californian publisher. The DVD CCA (Copy Control Association) filed a trade secrets lawsuit against Andrew Bunner (and others) for disclosing details of the DeCSS, which circumvents the CSS encryption scheme used on DVD discs.” Read More…

In case you haven’t been following this: Somebody had to decode DeCSS, simply so that they could play their legal DVD’s in their legal dvd drive on their computer because it was the case that putting a perfectly legal DVD in a computer running linux meant that it would not play. Hollywood assumes we all use Windows or Mac, so there was no copy-protection translastion software for linux (Hollywood DVDs would not play on a Linux machine). So, as is standard procedure with Linux, an end-user wrote a program that allowed DVD’s to play on Linux machines. But in order to do that, he had to understand (or “crack”) the code and then shared his improvement. Such is the way of Linux. So they tried to throw the guy in jail.

But according to today’s news, they dropped the charges finally, after three years. Good.

Wanna hear about my day?
I went to lunch today. I had a sandwhich. The man who chews his tongue was there. He looks like an accountant- suit, but not sophisticated enough to be a lawyer. I took my Lomo with me. It was fun. The weather was nice. I took ten pictures before I realized there was no film in the camera and I had to start all over. I wanted to take a “stealth” photo of this suit-bimbo crouched (literally) beside a building smoking. Her in her nice office suit and shoes, crouched down like a homeless person by the loading dock behind the building dragging on a butt. What a picture. I didn’t have the nerve to do it, though. People are paranoid and may catch on to you trying to take a stealth picture of them. Then I went for a toffe-coffee @ my fav coffee place, surfed the web on my PDA (sony clie) using my cell phone’s internet service, using bluetooth as the connection between my cell phone and pda. Then I popped open my laptop and worked on my writing for a while. I overheard amazing stupidity from the dumb beeyatch at the next table. She didn’t know what a “zombie” was, and didn’t know what “The Shining” was about. But she knew ALL about Jesus. She had this “I’m on drugs and when I’m not I’m so burned out from doing drugs all the time” drawl to her voice. I also got to overhear the owner’s son tell the next table that the place (my fav coffee joint) is currently being sold to “a recovering crack addict from New Jersey“. Oh great. Then I went home only to find out that the meetup.com meetup we were looking forward to going to was cancelled. We ended up going to that venue for dinner anyway, and then came home to surf and watch tv. Shave and a haircut, two bits!

Tonight is the international slashdot meetup. Is there one in your town?

I’d just like to put my $0.02 in and say-

THIS IS COMPLETELY FUCKING ASSININE!

SCO Group chief executive Darl McBride has attempted to nudge the Homeland Security Advisory alert back up towards Red, by accusing foreign interests of undermining US national security in a draft letter to Congressmen.
How are they doing this?
“Instead of UNIX from any number of US companies or Windows from Microsoft, governments throughout Europe and Asia are using Linux I find this particularly galling because that Linux software contains thousands of lines of my company’s proprietary UNIX code – for which we receive no revenue.”

** Read the whole article.
** Read the slashdot thread about it.

These SCO people are psycho. Absolutely dillusional and psycho.

(In case u r clueless, SCO is a company that is claiming [falsely] that some of their copyrighted code is in Linux- Linux is a FREE and open-source operating system. They are lying and they are refusing to say WHICH code. The whole world can tell they are lying and just trying to get publicity so that they can sell all of their stock before they go down in flames. Follow slashdot and the register to keep up with this and other tech news.)

Yay! One of my fav sites for tech news (theregister.co.uk) now has a mobile version so you can view streamlined version on your cell phone or PDA:

The Mobile Register

I have to sneeze.

I just sneezed.

I refuse to watch the “president” talk. He makes me nausious. But M came out of the room and was telling me that he’s on tv spouting platitudes and then says something like “soon, parts of the Patriot Act will expire“, and he was interrupted by applause from the democrats, which he clearly didn’t expect. Stupid moron thinks we’re all as stupid as he is.

I want to put Linux on my Fujitsu P1120 laptop but I’m not sure which distro would be best.

It’s tiny (footprint no bigger than a mousepad) and has no cd-rom drive. I have an external cdrom drive so I can install from a cd, but since it’s an external drive I don’t want to use a cd-bootable distro.

It’s an 800mhz Crusoe chip,
256 memory
30gig hd

It also has a touch-screen which others have gotten to work under linux:
http://www.interstice.com/journals/Simon/20030911.html
http://hamsterrepublic.com/james/linux/lifebook-p1000.php

This laptop is a bit pokey running XP… (things like a new browser takes a few seconds to open, drop-down menus take a second or two to drop down, etc.) …and so I’d like to install a nice, LEAN distro of linux to see if it performs better under linux.

But I don’t know which distro would be good. Surfing, reading, looking…

P.S. … and it has to be relatively easy to install since I’m a linux newbie.

Seems like every time I head out on another road trip, I’ve got newer technology at my fingertips. In August I had my new camera phone and was thrilled to be able to snap a picture and upload it immediately from my cell phone to my moblog on the web.

Then recenly I got a new tiny laptop that’s no bigger (footprint-wise) than a mousepad. Taking that on roadtrips meant all I needed was a WiFi connection and I was good to go. Stopping at a Borders or Starbucks meant I could get online for a while.

Now on this last road trip, I had my new PDA, a Sony Clie UX50 (look up “ux50″ at SonyStyle.com), and was able to use the built-in bluetooth to connect to my bluetooth-enabled cell phone and use it as a modem, using the cell phone’s AT&T mMode internet service. This means that I can be practically ANYwhere (so long as I have a GSM signal) and surf the web.

The UX50′s browser is great, when surfing you view the web pages pretty much as you would with a PC, (pic) …I’m not limited to stripped-down WAP sites like I am when surfing on my cell phone. When surfing the web using just the cell phone, it will load just about any website, but it works best with stripped-down WAP sites. But the Clie’s browser is full-graphical and it’s almost like surfing at home. My mMode package is for 8mb a month, so I leave graphics off sometimes and limit the use. If AT&T comes out with an unlimited plan, you know I’ll be signing up. They may have already, for all I know.

Being a techie, I’m beside myself to be able to get online literally ANYWHERE. When we took our last road trip, while I was driving, I had M get online and look up the phone # for our fav Asian Grill to see how late they were open. I can now surf at the sushi bar, wifi or not. It’s addicting, though.

Patent lawyer puts claim to entire Internet
NSI and Register.com at end of ridiculous lawsuit.

Takin’ another road trip. Mobloggin‘ as I go, of course. I like a change of scene. Go to computer stores, etc. Went to Comp USA and bought some RAM. Went to our fav restaurant for lunch. Same shit, different road trip, but it’s fun. Went to this mall where the 2nd floor shook the whole time, it made me feel sick. I hate feeling sick away from home.

Still very sad.
Very sad.
I worked on his website yesterday and that made me feel better. Everybody is very happy with it. I put up a memorial and in the near future will overhaul it and make it into a useful site for writers, with links, etc.

Concidentally, a friend of ours has been training for a run-walk-bike triathlon to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma society. He has offered to carry my brother’s name with him during the race. His offer to do that brought tears to my eyes and chills to my skin. Everyone is very moved and excited about this. What a way to honor his memory. And heck, if our friend can raise some $ to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma society, that’d be wonderful, too.

My brother died today.

He was only 48. I am very sad but I don’t really want to write much. This is not really the place for it. I will blog, but I am going to be busy and distracted for a few days. Another sibling is visiting along with M’s parents, so all is hectic.

I am feeling very sad, I’ll talk to you later.