“They call me David Nelson and my name has been besmirched
When I fly across my country, I will always be strip-searched
Somewhere a David Nelson is allegedly quite mean;
And the TSA ain’t able to declare my person clean . . .
I missed my flight from Texas and I missed my flight to Spain
You’d think my second cousin was a Tikrit named Hussein
I’m scrutinized and sanitized by security and then
The next time that I fly, they have to do it all again.”
— Patrick Short and Amy Gray

Apparently David Nelson is a bad name to have if you want to fly anywhere.

Squeaking muted
by louder wind,
battered windmill turns
my thoughts to steel, rust,
corrosion, us.
— Lee Tracy

Ok, plurk was bugging me to add content, and I did have a section for this, so I will now bring the wonders of Kuro5hin to the (apparently) content-starved zy.ca audience.

The gist of this site is that it’s kind of like Slashdot but anyone can post a story. To do this, you sign up for an account and post it. Anyone else with an account can see it, and if enough people with accounts vote on your story, it goes to the main page. There is also a diary area where you can just ramble on and no one can stop you, much like zyca. The actual content on k5 can be absolutely anything whatsoever. There are a bunch of sections but they’re merely guidelines, anything well written will get voted up. An example would be the recipe for goat head.

This let everyone post whatever bullshit they want but only keep the stuff we like policy has generated some really good articles out of what is essentially pure chaos. If you doubt the value of this site, look at the irreplacable Guide to Making Things That Are Hot Not As Hot Anymore or the various ramblings of j1mmy. Should this not convince you, there is a K5 Hall of Fame maintained by someone somewhere, and also a discussion of which stories are best.

When the whim takes me, I will be posting links to Kuro5hin stories and whatnot, perhaps even enough to appease plurk’s mighty thirst for posts and justify k5 having a section on zy.ca.

“The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet. The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads.”

[ Source: Yahoo! News ]

I have updated the blog software (as you may or may not have noticed). It is now running b2++ instead of b2. What’s the difference? Primarily, b2++ supports Smarty templates and plugins, caches pages, nicer archive links, and is a bitch to get working. Okay, that’s not fair. b2++ works fine with lynx and IE, just doesn’t work with Mozilla or Opera. So I spent the last five days ripping out code and building a smarty template for this site which would all run under every browser.

A side effect of the smarty templates was that I could include things like the comments on the main page. I am still working on the comments popup, but besides that, all is working good (well kinda). The // problem is still annoying, but I’m working on it. (PS If you have no idea what I’m talking about, good).

“Ah Kirk, my old friend. Do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.”

— Khan, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The article that Delg referenced in his last post referenced to an article on Sony’s Blu-ray DVD plans. Now, I had heard about the new blue laser DVD drives, that might increase storage capability but this is the first time I saw numbers. Sony claims their rewritable drive would have a capacity of 27GB and be on the market in one year! My DVD-R drive is already obsolete … 27 GB!!! My God! Toshiba & NEC are closer to release though, apparently they retooled their existing DVD factories and are expecting to be able to record to disc at a mere 20 GB. Peft, only 20 GB. I’ll wait a year for Sauron, I mean Sony. DAMN YOU DELG!

“No, I’m not happy to see you-that’s just a Radeon 9800 Pro in my pants.”
— Storm Shadow

I know I seem to be popping a lot off of Penny Arcade, but can I help it if they just always have such kewl Shit? Anyways This is actually a take on E3 from someone not on the PA crew but someone new. I have been going between drooling over his descriptions of the E3 booths to laughing my ass off over writing style(don’t get me wrong it is very eloquent… just Sarcastic and funny). One of the Things I really enjoyed was his comparing the HD-DVD format war to LOTR.

Here is Gabe’s take on Storm Shadow, which is mostly the reason I clicked the link to read it. What can I say I love those guys. er in a non sexual but professional way…. uh you know?

A new Hookup is available. We had the opportunity to hang out with Stormy down at E3 for a while and he represents and interesting dichotomy. First of all he does not look like us. That is to say he does not look like a dork. He is tall, in good shape and fashionably dressed. I’ll admit when he first came over and introduced himself to me I was not to keen on him. He was sporting some kind of ultra fancy motorcycle jacket and a pair of sunglasses that probably cost more than my car. He exuded confidence and he reeked of testosterone. He had a look about him that made it seem like he could at any minute begin lifting weights or fucking a woman. This is not the sort of person I normally hang out with.

But, I enjoy his articles and I decided to give him a chance. We went out to dinner that night with some friends and I got to see the other side of Stormy. Stormy the dork. He gave all of us a 20 minute lesson on the difference between all the various HDTV modes from 480i to 1080i. He talked about videogames and gadgets and even laughed at our stupid dork jokes. One of the guys with us has a pretty cool job where he sits in a meeting room all day during E3 and tells people why their games suck and why they will never be allowed to publish them on his console. We decided to play a little game where each of us at the table would pitch him an idea for a game and he could shoot us down just like he would a real developer. Needless to say the dork level at our table exceeded the recommended daily allowance. I kept a sharp eye on Stormy to see when he would flinch. Waiting for him to roll his eyes or look as though he was bored out of his mind but it never happened. He pitched his silly game idea right along with the rest of us and laughed harder than anyone when our friend told me my idea for X-TREME AMISH BUTTER CHURNING would fail because my core demographic didn’t use electricity.

So go check out Stormy’s latest article confident that even though it might not seem like it, he’s just as big a fucking dork as the rest of us.

I wander into a website called Chasing Hats Magazine. I’m not quite sure if the magazine is published (or exists only on the web), and I’m not quite sure exactly what its focus is, but it does have fiction. In it’s Imagination archives I ran across the stories of Youssef Sleiman and all I can say is wow. They aren’t the types of stories I would actively seek out, but they are incredible involving. They sort of grab you and refuse to let you go until your done reading them. There are three stories available there so far: the four-part “The Color Green” (the first story I read of his), “The Old Man’s Briefcase” and “A Hero’s Life”. I can’t really pick a favourite, but the last one I read, “The Old Man’s Briefcase”, is a very good description of someone randomly wandering across this guy’s stuff. You just keep reading it, and you can’t stop until they are all done.

“In one month there was a EUR 300 million drop in French sales to the US. Suck on that snail breath.”
— Random Stupid Guy, who happens to be American

After France opposed their actions in Iraq, the US Congress changed the name of French Fries to Patriot Fires (or some such crap) to snub the French. They haven’t stopped there and proceeded to further damage their relationship with one of Europe’s most powerful economies. For a country that is suffering of the largest economic collapses in history, you’d think they’d forgive and forget, but idiot’s like this guy seem to abound throughout the United States, well at least through the people in power. It really isn’t the fact that they are Fucking France, but rather that they aren’t treating Germany and Canada the same way. This is typical Americian behaviour. Forget about Canada, even in their revenge! This behaviour is simply not acceptable. I demand that if you take revenge on France that you also take revenge upon Canada and Germany as well. Fair is fair. (And don’t get me started on the Racial Profiling at your borders, it is your right but I would rather you impose the restrictions across the board to all visitors rather then people that fit some fucked up profile). The side-effect of this would be a tighter economic relationship between Canada, Germany, and France and I can’t see anything wrong with that. Then Canada could stop ship you assholes all that oil, water, and power and start giving it to deserving countries that don’t promote the whole-sale looting of a country.

WTF! Now this irritates me even more. Frog’s done has a list of products from countries to boycott. The only two countries on the list are GERMANY AND FRANCE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU AMERICIANS? I’m not saying that we as Canadian mind that you left us out of your vengence, but it does irke us some. You always ignore us! WHY!?! </sarcasm>

What would you say to taking a nice suburban and making some “little” modifications and getting a Tank. Well somebody has and it is beautiful. If you have ever had the wish of unloading 3200 rounds of 7.62mm bullets in about 80 seconds from the comfort of your truck during rush hour try SARACEN INTERNATIONAL. They even have different armor levels to pick from and different weapon options.

The SCO lawsuit is getting interesting. A Linux Kernel Developer has asked SCO to cease and desist their sale and distribution of their linux distributions for they are in violation of his copyrights. Under the GPL, you can use GPL’ed code within a GPL program. Since SCO has not GPL’ed the code they are suing IBM over, the kernel SCO is distributing is in violation of the GPL and hence the developer’s copyright.