#swhack

Link Dumpage: Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid

The heat is oppressive and so is my reading queue.

  • Jeremy Zawodny has a six part series (six dumps for the price of one!) on how he lost 50 pounds (of himself) over a year with three simple steps. I've no intention of ever following, or going on, any sort of diet plan (for the same reason I dislike taking medicine -- it seems an admission of dislike with whatever grande scheme I happen to believe in at the moment), but I do find some interest in reading over weight loss tips for people who sit on their ass all day. I've a belly, sure, but I can still see my penis. Good enough, right?
  • The Library of Congress: Web Capture: "In 2004, the Library's Office of Strategic Initiatives created a Web Capture team to support the goal of managing and sustaining at-risk digital content. The team is charged with building a Library-wide understanding and technical infrastructure for capturing Web content. The team ... is identifying policy issues, establishing best practices and building tools to collect and preserve Web content." Their primary acquisition tool is the Internet Archive's Heritrix, an open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler.
  • Is the RPG Industry Screwed?: A useful read if I ever get around to finessing a Ghyll book. "Paradoxically, it's never been easier to get an RPG published, but never harder for a new RPG company to support full-time endeavour. The scalability of the new publishing model means that although it is very hard to make money, you are much, much less likely to lose it through an expensive litho print run."
  • The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web: "When it comes to the Semantic Web, you might call me a disillusioned advocate. I’ve been dipping in and out of the technologies for the last 5 years or so, but am increasingly frustrated by the lack of any visible progress." Some questionable conclusions here, like drawing a negative inference that there are more AJAX books then RDF books. AJAX is graphic/UI whizbangery that has more than enough glitz to harm the web vs. RDF which is much more grounded in information design (and more difficult for someone to just "pick up"). Bonus points for the shoutout to crschmidt (from #swhack).
  • BBC Domesday Project: "The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership ... to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence ... In 2002, there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer)."

With Great Sadness...

Yesterday, I watched all three extended LORD OF THE RINGS movies, it being my first time seeing the second and third (second time seeing the first). I started at 4 PM in the afternoon, and ended at 4 AM in the morning, the longest I've stayed up for two or three years. I didn't feel tired at all, quite odd when I normally hit the hay around midnight (I long ago eschewed the need for all night hacking sessions, instead desiring to just be overly "productive" at all regular hours irregardless).

The movies, (though, or perhaps, because) incredible, left me with an immense depression that they were finished... I awoke from a night of LOTR-related dreams with an immense need for "closure", and I scoured for an old copy of RETURN OF THE KING to re-read the last chapter, and watched the "end of production" related extras.

I was hit with an immense feeling of inadequacy - perhaps aggravated by my recent complaints on #swhack that "i think i'm doing good work now, just like i thought years ago when i wrote that. and ten years from now, i'm gonna look back on today and grow just as weary as I do now. I suck". Where is my Lord of the Rings?

And with that (and this), I fell (fall) into a downtrodden mood, near crying.

Cleaning Out My Closet #6a

In response to my previous entry, cskaterun in #swhack says that I "portrayed teenagers in a not so good way". To which I immediately replied that when I was in school, the girls weren't giving blowjobs in bathrooms, nor was it a nonchalant affair. Hell, they were wearing regular old panties under their skirts, not like the thong-teasing youth of today. Damn my age, damn my age!

And, even if they were giving blowjobs when I was in school, I would never have gotten one -- I have a mortal fear of public bathrooms and it all relates to this traumatic experience I had when I was very young (less than 10, I'd suspect). I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, so every Sunday we'd head off to church, yadda yadda yadda. Welp, one day I had to take a piss, so off I scampered to the church bathroom, ready to let "a stream of amber urine flow from my dick".

And then the lights went off. Me, being a youngin', opened the stall door and walked out with my pants around my ankles whimpering to "turn the lights back on". And on the lights came at the behest of a "big kid", who proceeded to laugh and point, point and laugh, Mortal Kombat Humiliation, and so on. That was Jehovah's Bathroom Incident #1. The second one occurred at a religious convention in Massachusetts. Since there are a kazillion people there, the bathrooms are uber chaotic and filled with folks. Always nervous about a relapse of the first experience, but "really having to go", I sat down and began my business, only to have the door kicked open by someone else, also apparently "really having to go". He promptly apologized, but I assure you, my bowels flowed faster than I would normally have preferred.

Both of those things combined to ill effect on my impressionable youth, and today I can't use a public bathroom unless it is totally empty. And if it is, my goat reflexes are always on the alert for interlopers, and I've been known to cut short any attempt, or not even begin, if there's too much commotion around. Damn Jehovah's Witnesses scarred me for life!

Surviror: TechnOccult

From #swhack:

<Morbus> i have to figure out how to parse newsml in php.
<Morbus> i'd rather be using perl. sigh.
<Morbus> i just may end up using perl. they'll never know.
<AaronSw> oh, i thought you were on SURVIVOR: PHP for a second
<Morbus> heh, that'd be a good tech game show.
<Morbus> i'd watch ;)
<Morbus> actually...
<Morbus> you know. we should do something like that.
<Morbus> we could have different tribes like python and perl.
<Morbus> and we'd battle it out for use of powerful modules in future challenges.
<AaronSw> heh, that'd be hilarious
<Morbus> yeah, it would be.
<AaronSw> Alright, now the perl team is going to calculate the prime numbers using only the letters a, b, and punctuation

AmphetaDesk Interview

Want to know more about the new release of AmphetaDesk? Read THE #SWHACK EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, conducted by Aaron Swartz and Sean Palmer.

Whooo! Moving On To Others...

Welp, I finally finished the GFDL version of FREE AS IN FREEDOM (the "no frills" version). I'll add it to my book list (maintained since 1992), and move on to the other forty or so bookmarks still sitting in my root folder. Boy oh boy. I have far too many things to read. I haven't even opened AMPHETADESK for a week or so. Stupid IRC (yeah! blame the SWHACK crowd, whooo!).

Subscribe to RSS - #swhack