Category: Uncategorized

Talking to one of my friends who is on the verge of making the Great Migration, we began to discuss the quick tech support which is available for Red Hat and other Linux distros on the newsgroups in places like alt.os.linux.redhat and so forth. He was concerned, though, about posting his email and generating even more spam, and mentioned that he might set up an account at Hotmail or Yahoo in order to avoid that problem.

Of course, Pan and Pine and pretty much every other newsreader lets you use fake emails anyhow, so if you’re content to wait for your answer to get posted, there’s no reason to use real address. As proof, I cited one recent post I’d seen was made by one Nyarlatothep, giving an email of cthulhu@yog-sothoth.com. My friend conceded the point, with the caveat “if it’s not fake, we’re all in a lot of trouble!”

The Elder Gods have awoken at last from their long sleep of centuries. And they’ve got email!

..but there’s something about seeing “Griese” on the back of a Miami Dolphins jersey that makes me smile. I’m not a Dolphin’s fan, but I hope that Brien Griese finds a little more success down south than he did up in Denver. I remember watching his last game as a Wolverine, the 1998 Rose Bowl for which his father was half of the CBS broadcast team. Bob Griese was professional throughout, but when his co-announcer – all-time announcing great Keith Jackson – complimented Griese on Brian’s success and the pride Jackson knew the father took in his son, Griese came perilously close to breaking down.

A good moment in college football. Of course, I’ve got Peyton Manning going today, so here’s hoping for a 42-35 shootout.

Front Page Sports Football Pro used to have one, and it was a blast. You call the plays and let the AI-controlled players implement them. The chess aspect of football is the most interesting one, in my opinion, and this is the only way to be able to make the experience a purely strategic one. It’s a little ironic that the only role you can’t play properly is the one that the guy for whom the game is named made his name playing.

Love the new logos, though, especially the ability to use your own colors with them. I’m approaching the playoffs in my fourth sixteen-game season with 2004 – the addiction is under control.

And then I realized I loved her more than I ever had before…. Yes, she’s hot, she’s blonde and now she’s down with the Penguin. I’m even a little envious of her setup, as her Windows partition is VFAT, not NTFS, so she has full write access to her old Windows files. Come on, hackers, let’s get cracking on that NTFS format! The mountain is not yet climbed!

Anyhow, installing Linux on her machine – more to the point, downloading 1.7 Gigs of CDs – has taken a bit of time and caused the relative dearth of bloggage lately. And since everyone has different operating idiosyncracies, her use of web mail has necessitated my learning a bit about the so-called poppers, which allow POP and STMP access to the more popular web programs such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. There are a bunch of them, but Hotwayd is proven to work with Evolution, so that’s the one I went with. Report to follow soon.

For some reason, I just had a very strange flashback to that weird Apple commercial with Jeff Goldblum. That was a humiliating experience for me, as I was absolutely sure the IMAC was going to bomb. Who would want a computer that was crippled to the point of being little more than an email machine, but cost as much as a real computer? Well, a lot of people who hadn’t used the Internet before, it turns out.

Since Linux now has no trouble handling all the email, surfing and word processing that consists of the vast majority of casual computer usage, it can only be a matter of time before someone creates a cheap Linux blackbox and sells a bunch of them. They probably won’t come in tangerine, though. So, Apple still has that going for it.

As readers of my column know, a friend of mine committed suicide a few months ago. I wrote Shadows, Sex and Sorrow in an attempt to express some thoughts that my friend’s action had inspired, as well as to say a few things that I wish I had thought to say to her. I was not writing a eulogy, nor was I writing for the benefit of those who knew her. Indeed, I did not even tell anyone who knew her about that particular column.

Nevertheless, word has a way of getting around, and so a number of her friends and family have apparently come across the article. Many of them understood the spirit in which the piece was written, some, however, have not. I received one interesting email – an extremely polite one, I hasten to add – which raised some points worth addressing. It was from a friend of my friend of whom I was previously unaware and who I have never met.

I’m sure you can imagine that I, and others I’m sure, would be pained by your description of her suicide as a decision of “cold logic in its remorseless nihilism.” I don’t know whether anyone besides God knows the reality of her suicide. Perhaps you were completely accurate in your description, through your own spiritual confirmations. But either way, it is my hope that all of our spiritual convictions are always tempered by our most compassionate vulnerabilities when writing or reflecting about [her] or others who share struggles similar to hers.

Now, it was never my intention to inflict pain upon anyone in writing this particular column, most particularly not upon those who have already suffered a tremendous loss. And yet, something bothered me about the assertion that one should temper one’s spiritual convictions simply to spare the feelings of those who do not share them. Would one temper one’s view of the gravitational force and the role it played in the death of one who jumped from a rooftop? Especially if one was speaking with those who did not share one’s belief in gravity?

It was clear to me that the writer did not understand that although my friend was obviously the inspiration for the column, the piece was also addressing much more universal matters than a single human life. From the perspective from which I write, all nihilism – and thus suicide – is rational given an atheistic worldview. This logic contradicts the mainstream perspective, which, being a veneer of Judeo-Christian ethics without the underlying belief system, is highly irrational. I am far from the first to point this out, however, people are more accustomed to hearing it from the likes of Nietszche, Sartre and Camus, not to mention Voltaire and Socrates, than an evangelical Christian. And yet, I am not saying anything that has not been said before, and more eloquently, by some of humanity’s greatest minds. Very few people are truly able to handle the inherent implications of being their own god.

I said as much in a response to the writer, who in his response clarified that my initial take on his email had been correct. “I… am writing to restate my hope that you grow to gain a more heartfelt appreciation of [her] and perhaps of those who do not share your specific religious views.” At first I though this was strange, as I could not see how anything I had written could possibly be construed as a lack of appreciation for my friend. But to the faithless, the notion that an individual is responsible for his own actions is frightening, since relying only on oneself to bear the entire weight of an uncaring universe is simply more than can be faced by any except the most exceptional. This is why Nietzsche – not one to shirk the dark – considered Christianity a coward’s path, and likely why the writer interpreted my bringing up the point as being uncompassionate. But in what sense can it be considered compassion to leave others to drown in the dark? I do not regret a single word I wrote; I regret only that I did not articulate them in time to share them with my friend.

Pat Buchanan and others have written of a great cultural war that is dividing America. They are no doubt correct, but what is perhaps more ominous is that the two poles of religious faith and secular humanism have separated to the point that it is becoming very difficult to communicate effectively across the divide. The friend of my friend also added “I’m not sure this dialogue will be fruitful right now…. In any case, I would like to leave off corresponding here.”

I’m afraid his instincts are probably correct.

The GPL is their downfall. It’s almost amusing watching them get all tangled up in its terms. They can’t satisfy their greed and abide by the GPL at the same time. Poor SCO. Poor Microsoft. They will have to write their own software, and they can’t. They write it, but it isn’t as good. They can’t match our software because they won’t use our method. The open source/free method of developing software results in better, more stable, more secure code, and it’s developed blazingly fast in comparision to their pokey ways. They want the results, but they’re so terrified of the open process, they won’t use it. The apparent solution they have come up with is to steal GPL code. Maybe they think if they can get it put in the public domain, not that they can, then maybe Windows software will finally become secure, once it’s running on Linux, like Apple runs on BSD. – Groklaw

How is this guy not a lawyer yet? For those – the vast majority across the globe – who haven’t been following the SCO debacle, I’ll explain it briefly and almost surely more than a little inaccurately. But you’ll grasp the point.

1. The GPL is the license that allows anyone to use a large library free open source code, as long as they freely release the source code that they subsequently derive from it.

2. GPL code is very good, and many corporations want to use it.

3. They don’t want to abide by the GPL, however. But they are scared sans fecal matter since they also are trying to sell their software in competition with the free GPL software which in many cases is arguably better. This is Microsoft, in case you haven’t guessed, by the way.

5. SCO received a big investment from Microsoft in order to act as its sock puppet and attack the GPL in court, arguing that it is not legally valid and therefore they can use GPL code without having to operate under its restrictions. Some of the parties to the lawsuit SCO has brought includes their own customers!

Keep in mind that every bit of Microsoft software is licensed, which, if you read the fine print, means that even though you paid for it, it isn’t yours, it’s theirs, unless it breaks something or causes you to suffer some kind of damage, in which case the liability is yours – although you can sue them for the princely sum of $5 at which point your damages are capped. That license, of course, is considered Holy Writ, but a license that says: here, it’s free, you can use it if you want it, but you have to release anything derived from it under the same license, that is apparently unenforceable, null and void.

Why? Well, because it prevents Microsoft from making large sums of money off other people’s intellectual property! Considering that they’ve been doing it that way from the very beginning, no wonder Bill and company are having a hard time understanding that they won’t be able to do it here.

Gerald Gardner, writes Cerelia, “holds the distinction of bringing contemporary Witchcraft to the modern world.” Indeed he does. Somewhat awkwardly for those who maintain that Wicca is descended from an ancient cult of the Goddess, this retired British civil servant made most of it up sometime in the 1940s and 1950s. The eccentric Mr. Gardner’s pastimes were not confined to witchcraft. He was also a keen naturist and a fan of flagellation. Cerelia grumbles that many of Gardner’s “personal likes and fantasies” may have crept into the rites that he developed. Indeed they did. As she notes, the insistence that witches had to be “skyclad” (naked) while practicing their craft was “probably” (probably?) his idea, and her description of the initiation ceremonies in Gardnerian Witchcraft does seem to include a remarkable amount of binding, blindfolding and “whipping with cords.”

The estimable Stuttaford has written a timely essay for Halloween. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that an occupation which involves women running around naked and going in for bondage should have been conceived by a man. I always find it amusing how every new ‘religion’, from the first Gnostics to the Albigsenians to modern Gaiaism, always involves women taking their clothes off and sexually servicing men. And if you dig deeply enough, you can almost always find the clever, fast-talking Lothario who invented the new way to get some action.

There is nothing new under the sun.

The Gender Genie purports to be able to identify the gender of a writer by their choice of words and phrases, but it’s pretty clear that it’s only accurate in that men tend to write more about things and ideas and women tend to write more about their feelings and relationships. A man who writes about the latter or a female who writes about the former will likely be able to confuse it. I ran my last three columns through it and it came up with the following results:

Shadows, Sex and Sorrow = Female +36.4%

Breaking up with Bill = Female +9.3%

The End of Art = Male +19.9%

It did correctly identify a fiction short, though, as Male +16.8%. It occurs to me that these gender tendencies may be why I so loathe women writing about sports. Almost invariably, they tend to write about how the game affects them and their feelings, so their columns are devoted to how cheering for two different teams can pose a challenge to a relationship (McKendry), how other writer’s attitudes affect them personally (McKendry), how their knowledge of football can intimidate a man they are dating (Pressman), and then, you have the mystifying subject matter shear of how it feels to imitate Sarah Jessica Parker (Casey).

Meanwhile, the male writers are writing about who should get into the Hall of Fame (Dr. Z), who will be the best rookie wide receivers this year (Ralph Wiley), which team is blowing its salary cap (Pasquerelli), and how the Red Sox losing makes him sad (Simmons). Of course, the Sports Guy is clearly a bit of a girl from time to time – after all, he not only watches the Oscars, but keeps a running diary on them. Still, to be fair, his usual motif is massive multipart prognostications on how the various NFL/NBA/MLB teams will do in the coming season. Not to mention even longer pieces devoted to the seasonal fantasy drafts. And diaries of the actual professional drafts. A lot more snails and puppy dog tails than sugar-and-spice, actually, if you consider his entire oeuvre.

This subjective/objective dichotomy reminds me of a girl I dated long ago, a model who tended to attract an amount of attention wherever she went. I realized I couldn’t keep seeing her when we met up at a nightclub one night after having hit different establishments earlier in the evening. When I asked her how Club X had been – in other words, were there a lot of people there, was it fun, is it hopping tonight, should we go there later – she answered with an encyclopedic litany of who had noticed her and exactly how they had reacted to her. At the end of her recitation, I had no more information about the question I’d asked than before she opened her mouth. That brief glimpse into the yawning horror of life with someone who believes that the entire universe is nothing more than a mirror encouraged me to run, not walk, out of that relationship.

She was an extreme example of total narcissism, of course. But just as it behooves male writers to open up from time to time and allow their readers to learn more about them as human beings, I think it would also be a good thing if female writers – especially female sportswriters – would keep in mind that the subjects about which they are supposed to be writing generally have very little to do with them and their feelings.

Bad enough that ESPN fired Tuesday Morning Quarterback Gregg Easterbrook, one of the more amusing writers dedicated to the NFL, for the sin of criticizing Michael “my evil plan to destroy Disney is working, ha ha ha!” Eisner and his role in pushing a carnucopia of gore on America. Unbe-freaking-lievable is that they replaced him with a little blonde girl who writes about riding the trapeze in New York City. Just like Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex in the City! Eek!

[insert expression containing roughly balanced degrees of vulgarity and disbelief here]

Did I miss it, or did ESPN hire its new web editor from Chick Flick magazine? This is akin to having Dr. Z write a hard-core article on offensive line blocking schemes for Cosmopolitan. Chris McKendry was highly annoying at times, but at least she knew a bit about sports. Now we’ve got Stacy Pressman and some older woman writing about their dating mishaps, a dork making lists about Hollywood actors, and now a girl living out her dream to recreate Sex in the City scenes. Bill Simmons – now, with Ralph Wiley, officially the only good thing about Page 2 – is no doubt debating whether he should use lighter fluid or paint thinner to set himself on fire.

Looks like Mr. Joseph Farah has nailed it again. He called the DC sniper, and he also predicted that the California fires would turn out to be a form of Muslim terror attack. I have to admit that I was skeptical about the latter case, but it turns out that the first arsonist arrested is named Dikran. I don’t know my Arabic names well enough to be sure of Mr. Arnouchian’s heritage, but it surely isn’t a name that turns up frequently in the Lutheran churches around here.

Update – DZ points out: “Nationality — Surnames ending in “ian” are generally Armenian. Armenians are generally Christian. They are certainly not fans of Islam, given the genocides precipitated by the Turks.”

Fair enough. Ergo, the jury is still out on Mr. Farah’s prediction.