Why is it so freakin' hard to find a USB/Firewire external hard drive
enclosure for SATA drives? Every single damn enclosure in existence
seems to be for IDE drives.

What, SATA drives don't need no portable lovin'?

I've been searching for one for a week now, my only requirement that it
not cost me more than half what the drive did ($50, the drive was $100).
I don't care what it looks like, whether it has flashy lights, or a
brushed aluminum look, or any of that crap. I just care that it exists.

I don't suppose anyone has seen one anywhere, have they?

Okay, so I'm in the market for a digital audio player, and I'd like some
suggestions.

Here's the requirements:

• Ogg Vorbis Support
• Audible.com Support
• Decent size storage (>20GB prefered)

Current Mood: frustrated

Ugh.

Had a short power outage last night, and after everything came back up,
I noticed that one computer was showing a blank screen. After playing
with it for a few minutes, I determined that it's probably dead. Powers
on, fan starts spinning, but nothing else. No display, and nothing to
indicate it's actually starting/POSTing.

I'm gonna try to pull it apart and see where the problem is tonight, or
possibly tomorrow. This is so not how I wanted to spend my
weekend.

18:15 <@pounce> max!
18:17 * pounce pokes at max.
18:20 <@max> Hiya :>
18:20 <@pounce> any chance you can log in to WoW long enough to invite me into the guild?
18:20 <@max> yep, a moment
18:21 <@max> loggin' on now
18:21 <@max> maxcast anyone? :>
18:22 <@max> there ay go
18:22 <@pounce> yay
18:22 <@pounce> thanks :>
18:22 <@max> MY RANK IN THE GUILD IS HR MANAGER?!
18:22 <@pounce> bahahaha
18:22 <@max> WTF?!
18:22 <@max> hhahahaha

*sigh*

I just saw a commercial for Kaze no Tani no Naushika (IMDB), better known as Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (nausicaa.net). It's almost hard to how excited I am by this. I've been wanting this for almost 20 years, since I first saw the horribly mangled and cut bastardization of it, Warriors of the Wind¹. Even as mangled and horrible as it is, I saw the beautiful animation and imagined the potential behind it. When I found out later that it had been hacked, I managed to acquire a fansub of the uncut Nausicaa, and it was everything I'd hoped for. I also later got the whole Manga, and found out there is so much more to the story (The Nausicaa Manga is, in Japan, on the level of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (and deservedly so)).

At that time, there where no Ghibli Studio films available in the US, as Hiyao Miyazaki, the "main man" behind Ghibli, had been so upset at the treatment that Nausicaa got with Warriors of the Wind that he flat out refused to allow any of his other films to be released outside of Asia.

It wasn't until 1999, when Princess Mononoke was released in the US that I began to hold out the barest glimmer of hope that some of the other Ghibli films might get released in the US. Then a few others followed (Kiki, Totoro, etc), and Spirited Away, which won an Academy Award.

Princess Mononoke is actually the #3 top grossing movie in Japan. #2 is Titanic, and #1 is Spirited Away.

All of the movies by Miyazaki are great, but Nausicaa is truly amazing. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't seen it (which is likely everyone ;-), to see it. I would easily rank it among my top half dozen all time favorite movies. Even those who don't care for Anime will likely enjoy it.

I had a lot more I was planning to put here, because I really think that highly of this film, but I've been awake for 28 hours, and I'm afraid I'm not really at my best right now. I'll revisit this later with more information. If you want more information about it, check out the URLs above, or just go to http:/www.nausicaa.net, which has tons of great information on Nausicaa, and Miyazaki's other films.

Nausicaa is to be released on Tuesday. I can't stress enough how good it is, and I encourage you all to pick it up. ;-)

[1] In 1986, an American company gained the rights to distribute Nausicaa. Unfortunately, they decided that the only way we would like it would be if they mangled it by cutting over 20 minutes and destroying the plot, to make it more "action oriented", and "kid friendly". This hack job is horrible and should be avoided at all costs, especially now that an uncut version is being released. Heck, if you look at the cover, you see images and characters that don't even exist in the film.

Current Mood: jubilant

I recently noticed that a large quantity of the spam I receive, particularly the worm/trojan caused spam (the ones that come with a single sentence and an attached .pif or .scr, or whatever) all come in with a 'HELO' of 'zyp.org', which is the destination domain.

Now, since zyp.org is my domain, no one else *should* be sending that as a HELO to my mail server. This gave me the idea that I should find a way to blacklist certain HELO strings. I started searching for a qmail patch that would do that, as I didn't really feel like writing it myself if I could avoid it, and came across qregex. qregex offers a number of extensions where you can add regex filtering to kill spam. Luckily, one of those places is HELO, in the form of the badhelo file.

And, as luck would further have it, the Debian qmail-src package already includes qregex (not quite the newest version, but new enough to include the badhelo addition).

So, I went ahead and created a badhelo file, added my domain name, and tested it (it worked). Glancing through my log files, I've already found hundreds of mail attempts that have been rejected by the badhelo. I'm impressed. ;-)

Anyone using qmail, or any other MTA, I highly recommend blacklisting your own destination domain from the MTA's accepted HELO strings. I would estimate I've reduced my spam by as much as 20%-40% with this.

Okay, I still think Mac hardware is overpriced, if cool. . . but damn, I want one of these. ;-)

Mac mini

I've mentioned my feelings on the whole 'freeipods.com' spam scam thing before, but a friend of mine was talking about it earlier, so I went through their 'privacy' statement out of curiosity.

Although, honestly, I'm not sure how they can call it a privacy statement. What it really should be called is a 'this is how we're going to screw you over, abuse your trust, and annoy the hell out of you by totally ignoring and disrespecting your privacy' statement.

Here's some interesting bits:

To create an account, we collect your name, email address, and a shipping address. You will also create a password that you may change in the Account page of our site. We use this information to set up your account, to send you a registration confirmation email and to log your shipping information so that we know where to send your order. We may also use your email address to send you information about new services, features, and special offers from us. Members may opt-out of receiving future mailings of this nature by following the relevant instructions articulated in the body of these promotional emails.

Translation: You give us your information. We then sell it to everyone who will pay us for it, and if you want to opt out of it, you'll have to opt out separately for every single one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of companies we sell you to.

We may work with other third party businesses using the personal information that you supply to us on the main signup page to bring selected retail opportunities to our members via direct mail, email and telemarketing. These businesses may include providers of direct marketing services and applications, including lookup and reference, data enhancement, suppression and validation and email marketing.

Translation: We will sell your information to known spammers, provided they pay us for it. We'll also sell it to telemarketers, junk mailers, and data whores who collect this kind of thing so they can resell it.

There is no way to deactivate an account; if you no longer wish to remain a part of a Gratis Internet website, simply stop logging in to your account. Gratis Internet will not share your information.

Translation: Be prepared for a lifetime of spam at a level well above what you're currently experiencing. And since we have it in the fine print, you can't stop us. Heck, we'll keep selling your information to spammers even after you're dead!

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our web page.

Translation: We'll change our privacy statement whenever we feel like it, and we're not going to tell you about it. And since you can't delete, remove, or even deactivate an account, that means that we can pretty much do anything we want with your information and you'll probably never know about it.

Doesn't that sound like fun?

I've just signed the "Thank you, Poland!" letter.

It's a letter thanking Poland, and Mr. Wlodzimierz Marcinski, Poland's Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology, who spoke out at the EU Council meeting to prevent the software patents disaster.

Basically, it's because this guy stepped forward and spoke up that the European Union didn't decide to screw people over by adopting a similar patent travesty to what the US has (where people can patent things like "1 click buying", among other asinine stuff).

Software developers especially, may wish to sign the letter. I'm still holding out a hope that the EU will smarten up and drop the whole software patent thing for good, and that maybe, just maybe, the US will then pull their heads out of their asses and follow suit.

Yeah, I know, I'm a dreamer. ;-)

Dimebag Darrell Abbott
1966 - 2004

For those who haven't yet heard, "Dimebag" Darrell Abbot, the former guitarist for Pantera, and currently with Damageplan, was killed at a concert when some deranged and moronic asshat fan climbed on stage and opened fire. Darryl and four others, including the gunman, were killed.

This is a very sad day in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.

An interesting article from mediaweek.com. . . apparently the Federal Communications Commission received more than 240,000 indecency complaints in 2003, up from only 14,000 in 2002.

Now, if you're like me, you probably noticed that we're dealing with a rather dramatic increase here. In fact, FCC chairman Michael Powell said there was "a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes."

Hrm. Something like that.

If you look a little deeper, though, it seems that 99.8% of all indecency complaints filed in 2003 were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

As of early October, 99.9% of the complaints filed for 2004 (not counting those filed regarding the last Super Bowl halftime show, when Janet Jackson popped a boob (I'm still amazed that it generated as much bitching as it did. . . seriously, anything more than a 2 line note at the bottom of page 12 in a news paper is more than was warranted)) came from the PTC.

It really makes me feel good to know that one small, but loud, group of bitching people could determine what is and isn't acceptable for me to watch on TV, or hear on the radio.

It looks like I'm gonna have to buy a GameBoy Advance/SP/DS soon.

I've just discovered that Final Fantasy I & II are set to be released
for it soon. FF1 was the third Nintendo game I owned back on the
original Nintendo Entertainment System, and it's still one of my all
time favorite games.

One summer, me and a friend went through a couple dozen different
character combinations in order to find out what the "best" combination
is. We got to the point where we could beat the game in less than two
hours.

I wonder how long it will take me now? ;-)

The concert absolutely and complete rocked. These guys are so awesome.

Particularly cool is when it snowed. . . inside the arena.

Concert is tomorrow.

I'm so looking forward to it. Anyone who hasn't seen these guys live before, I strongly urge you to see them if it's at all possible. You won't regret it.

In a bit of an amusing situation, I got a call today from a local radio station, Retro 106.9, telling me that I'd won two free tickets to the TSO show. I've had tickets since before they went on sale to the general public, and the tickets I have are actually better than the free ones, but hey, still kinda cool.

I'm giving the two tickets to my parents as a sorta early Christmas present, since I know they want to see it.

I know it's wrong, but I can't help it. I've come to like the Food Network TV show, 'Dweezil & Lisa'.

For those of you not familiar with it, it follows Dweezil Zappa (son of Frank Zappa) and Lisa Loeb (pop/folk/rock/etc singer/songwriter/guitarist) as they tour the country eating things and trying learning recipes. If you're wondering how these two would ever end up together, Dweezil, a guitarist like his father, has played with Lisa as her guitarist (and, I think, lover) for some years now.

Here's a little blurb about it that I found:

Current Mood: hungry

Truly, this is CyberSex at it's finest:

http://t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=519072

Found on jwz's journal.

I can't help but find this rather disturbing for some reason:

http://www.wetterlinggallery.com/archive/nathalia/nathalia_main.htm
http://www.wetterlinggallery.com/newsletter/newsletter.htm

I'm not one who is easily bothered with this kind of thing, and I find it somewhat odd that it. . . annoys me, as much as it does. I have no issue with hunting in general, and in fact I have been out hunting more than once. I think PETA is generally moronic, and I find vegetarians who "do it for the animals" to be silly.

Maybe it's the senselessness to it. She can call it "art" if she wants, but I don't see anything artistic about it. It's all just too sensationalistic, like in the same way that Marilyn Manson says and does things just to get attention.

Oh, well.

On Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time: "It's like one giant runon sentence that just keeps going and going even though it should have been broken up into smaller and easier to understand parts which would have made for better books and wouldn't annoy people nearly so much and he might also be in a better position to finish the series that way too."

Swiped from drstevechaos who swiped it from libertarianism, which is where I would have swiped it from if I'd not come across his journal first. ;-)

Six Degrees of Voting

A neat little six degrees of seperation map of voting pledges by party. You sign up, mark the spot on the state where you're voting and the party you're voting for, and then see the vast web of people you're connected to, as well as who else has pledged to vote what in every state, in a time-evolved manner. It's pretty neat - try it out!

I think I've discovered how freeipods.com is managing to stay in
business while giving away free geek toys. They claim that it's by
getting you to sign up for other "special offers". But I think that's
only part of it.

I think they sell your e-mail address to every spammer with the money to
buy it.

I have a Gmail account that I recently created. It's barely been used,
and had not received a single spam. The same exact day that I decided
to investigate the freeipods.com thing, using that address, the spam
started. And I'm not talking about one or two e-mails, I'm talking
about 5-10 spams every day for the past month now.

What an interesting coincidence, don't you think? Within a few hours of
signing up for this thing, I start getting spam from a dozen different
places.

You know, I can deal with it when you fill out a form, and the company
there sends you spam. At least you know where it's coming from. But
damn I hate it when those bastards sell your e-mail address to everyone
else, because once it gets out there, you'll never stop it.

We really need to overhaul the entier e-mail infrastructure and come up
with something that has built in authentication and security.

Since I'm sure you guys couldn't care less are dying to know what happened Thursday night, when I saw Angela at Senior Matias, I'll give you an update.

By the time I got to the restaurant, a couple of my friends were already there. So, I sat down and casually glanced around the placed, wondering if I'd see Angela. A few minutes later, I saw her walk by, though she didn't see me. A moment after that, she was walking towards my table, and I realized that through chance, she was actually our waitress that night.

When she got to the table and saw me there, she immediately apologized for not calling me back, and said that she'd been really busy. I told her not to worry about it, as I can definitely relate to that. It was fairly busy, though, so we really didn't have much time to talk.

One amusing little bit happened a while later. One of the guys in the group commented that our waitress was really cute. I agreed. When she walked by again, he asked her what her name was, and she replied, "Angela". After she left, I said that I could have told him what her name was, as we'd had her as a waitress three weeks before. He shrugged and said he hadn't minded asking her, and said he'd like to know more about her. At that point I smiled and pointed out that she was a student intending to become a physician's assistant, she had another job, she was in her early twenties, etc. Then I pulled out my cell phone, pushed a few buttons, and said, "And her phone number is. . ." and rattled off her number.

He stared at me for a few moments, then said, "Oh. . . Never mind then." ;-)

Later, as we were getting ready to leave, I actually had a moment to talk to Angela again, and she mentioned that due to a higher-than-expected cell phone bill last month, she wasn't carrying her cell phone on her anymore. Then my friends were giving me dirty looks because they wanted to leave, and she had work to do, so that pretty much ended our chat.

Unfortunately, it left things rather inconclusive. I don't know if she said what she did about her cell phone to let me know that she would have trouble getting back to me quickly, if I were to call again. . . or if she said it as a hint that future calls are a waste of time. I wish I could have had a few more minutes to talk to her, and ask her if I should call her.

I suck at this whole 'dating' thing. Every really 'good' relationship I've been in, I sort of fell into. . . usually with someone I started out as friends with. The whole "pick up chicks" thing has never been my style.

I'm thinking I'll call her tomorrow (Sunday) night, and see if I can catch her. I want to break through this awkwardness and figure out exactly where we stand. Tell her that while I barely know her, I do like her, and that I'd like to take her out for dinner or something, so we can get to know each other better. Hopefully, if she's not interested, she'll just let me know, and if she is, we can go from there.

I may post an update here with whatever happens later. ;-)

Current Mood: contemplative

Okay, so I'm getting mixed signals from someone, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Luckily, I have all of you great LJ friends out there to give me advice on how to further screw up my life. ;-)

Here's the situation. Two weeks ago last Thursday, I went out to Senior Matias with a group of friends. Towards the end of the night, most of the group was getting ready to leave. As they were getting up, another buddy of mine called and said he was on the way. Since I had time to kill before work, I figured I'd hang out and wait for him, even though everyone else was leaving.

While I was waiting for him, our waitress came over and talked to me for a bit. Turns out her name is Angela, and as she was very cute, I didn't mind at all that she wanted to chat. (Hello, Angela, if you ever happen to read this. ;-)

After talking for a bit, we discovered that Angela actually works with my best friend's girlfriend. How's that for an amusing coincidence? Eventually, though, I had to head off for work.

The next week, I didn't see Angla (we go to Senior Matias almost every Thursday), but last Thursday, I did. I made it a point on my way out to talk to her, and while talking, I mentioned that me and some friends were going to be heading to Dundee Theater on Saturday, for their midnight movie (they were showing The Exorcist). She then gave me her phone number (she offered it, although I was about to ask for it) and asked me to give her a call about it.

Saturday came around, and I tried calling her. I ended up getting her voice mail, and I left a message. I didn't hear back from her before the movie. So, Monday, my next free day, I tried calling her again. Same result, I left her a voice mail. Yesterday, I tried again, and as before, I ended up leaving her a voicemail.

My question is, where to go from here? She gave me her phone number, so I can't help but think she's at least a little interested in me, but I've called her three times now, and I have yet to actually talk to her. Also, I've left my number twice, and she hasn't called me back.

I'm guessing I'll probably see her tomorrow at Senior Matias, but what then? Do I say anything about her apparent lack of interest? Should I wait for her to say something?

Arrggghh.

Why do women have to be so freakin' difficult? ;-p

Current Mood: curious

It's amazing how much cruft can gather on a system over six or seven
years.

I've been going through my oldest machine, nexus.zyp.org, package-by-package, in an effort to reduce cruft and clear out some of the old junk that is no longer used, or has been superceded by newer versions.

So far today, I've managed to remove almost 400MB of stuff. I'm hoping to be able to remove at least that much more, before I'm finished.

Which reminds me. . . although most of the stuff I've been able to remove has been found via manual walking of the installed packages list, anyone running Debian should take a look at deborphan. It's a very useful utility for removing cruft. Another useful, if slightly less so, utility in Debian is cruft, named after what it helps you remove.

A: Because it reverses the logical flow of the discussion, making it difficult to follow.
Q: Why shoudn't I top post?
A: No.
Q: Should I top post?

Alternately:

A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
> > A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
> > > Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

Current Mood: working

Wow.

Here's a very in depth look at the "evidence" of Iraq's nuclear program. In a nutshell, while Bush, Cheney, and company, were telling us that they had irrefutable evidence of Iraq's efforts to build nuclear weapons, and that those efforts could be completed at any time, the truth is that they ignored the fact that the US's top nuclear officials considered the "evidence" to be at the very best, incredibly suspect, and that in reality it was so remote as to be laughable.

The article comes from the New York Times. Note, it's a fairly long read, totaling 15 pages.

I have to admit, any confidence I had in the current administration is rather hugely shaken by this.

Oh, and I'm also really pissed off for being lied to. I've always felt this war was more politically motivated than anything else, but reading this just slams home how thoroughly the People of the United States have been played for fools by the White House.

Current Mood: discontent

My new printer, a Samsung ML-2552W, just arrived. So far, it's working
beautifully.

The only problem is, I didn't think about where I'm going to put it
quite as much as I should have. ;-)

Trans-Siberian Orchestra has posted their tour schedule for the year.

I saw them last year, and to put it simply, it was amazing. I guarantee that if you go see them, you will not be disappointed. In fact, I'll be surprised it isn't one of the best shows you ever see (I know it's one of the best I've ever seen!).

I will be seeing them on November 23rd, myself. ;-)

( Schedule )

Current Mood: excited

I encourage everyone to check this out, sign up, and help out.

Okay, this show freakin' rocks.

I was just flipping through channels, and Father of the Pride came on.

And I have to say, it was very good. Like Shrek (this is made by the same people who did Shrek), this show seems intended more for adults and older children, than it is for kids (in other words, it's not dumbed down kiddie entertainment).

It stars John Goodman, and others, doing voices. I didn't catch the credits, so I'm not positive, but it sounded like Andy Richter and Lisa Kudrow playing the two pandas (since they weren't mentioned during the little after show "making of", I'm thinking they're guest stars).

If you didn't catch it tonight, I strongly urge watching it next week. It's one of the better shows I've seen in quite some time.

I was just taking a moment to check my American Express account, as I tend to check all of my accounts quite frequently (at least 2-3 times a week), when I noticed that my balance is at $2700! It should be at $200!

A quick glance at the recent activity shows a whole bunch of Google Ad Word charges on there, totaling well over $2k.

Son of a bitch. It looks like some bastard got a hold of my credit card number, and is committing fraud with it.

I can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with my recent printer order, from CompuVest.com, which has gone to hell lately. I'll speak more on that later.

I'm off to call American Express right now, before that piece of trash out there manages to do anything else. I hope they get him and nail his ass.

[Update: I just want to note that, for a non-violent man, I seriously want to beat the crap out of the loser out there who's doing this.]