Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, Jcurious rightly observed that I’m being both racist and sexist by not wanting another old white male in the white house.

Okay,  I get that he’s correct, but it is how I feel. I don’t really even know that I think that how I feel is wrong, even though it is plainly both racist and sexist. We’re supposed to be a representative government but throughout our history, we don’t seem to represent anyone who doesn’t happen to be both white and male.. and lately we’ve added wealthy to the list of requirements for government officials.

What to do? I guess I just come to terms with being a racist asshole and move on.

Speaking of racism – or something – I recently learned about the seven principles of Kwanzaa, and I must say, I approve. Since all our holidays are made up anyway, let’s make *good* made up holidays 😉 Unfortunately, apparently Kwanzaa is supposed to be a black thing and therefore I would get some very strange looks for trying to participate and anyway I’m missing all of the neccesary cultural heratige. But perhaps I’ll celebrate it anyway.

We were discussing the possibility of shifting our major gift-giving holiday from Christmas to some other date – right now, because everyone gives gifts at the same time, the gift-giving infrastructure gets seriously stressed this time of year – it seems like it’d be better for everyone for people to agree to have different dates for gift-giving – days we were toying with included but were not limited to beltane, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Ghandi’s birthday, and candlemas. I don’t know that we actually decided on anything – I do suspect that next year we will be giving our gifts on a day other than Christmas. It also underscores my lack of support of Christianity as it is implimented in the U.S., which is always worth doing..

.. so, friends, if you don’t get a Christmas card or gift from us in 2008, don’t dispair. 😉

in all my whining about TCP slowstart and UDP, I was speaking of UDP *inbound* from $streaming_server on the internet to $my_pc behind a NAT (or, technically, a NAPT). Yes, I understand that $my_pc can send UDP any time it chooses, and I apologize for any that felt I wasn’t clear enough in my complaint. It strikes me that if you already understood the problem then what I said was clear enough, and if you *didn’t* already understand the problem then my very skimpy note on the subject wasn’t going to make any sense to you anyway. Of course, I suspect the person who complained the most was actually just annoyed at me for not liking Ron Paul. (Okay, I can’t prove that. But I wasn’t trying to write a treatsie on UDP, I was complaining that because it’s stateless it doesn’t go through NATs well – which is true – but because TCP is stateful, it doesn’t deal with congestion and delivery of time-sensitive data well – which is also true..)

Currently I’m supporting Kucinich, Hillary, and Obama. I really wish there was a strong contender that *wasn’t* part of the already highly questionable political system.. but there doesn’t seem to be. Mostly I’m trying not to get that involved because it will only lead to greater unhappiness. I sent moderate donations off to each canidate, and now I’m waiting for one of them to stand out – most likely by doing something I can’t stand. 😉

I really like the idea of someone with a bit of diversity as president. We’ve had old, corrupt, and sometimes evil white men for the last 200 years.. it’s time for a change.

For no reason I can directly identify, i don’t like Ron Paul

In case anyone is curious, the tricks to making the LucasArts game ‘The Curse Of Monkey Island’ run on a modern (SMP) system without constant crashes and sound issues are as follows:

1) In the control panel, under sounds and audio devices /  audio tab / sound playback / advanced / performance, set hardware acceleration to ‘basic only’

2) Monkey island has a launcher – it’s the autorun application for the cd. Once the launcher is running (either via autorun or via running monkey.exe off the cd), open the task manager (control-alt-delete), find the application in the list, right click and choose ‘go to process’. Then, right click on the process, choose ‘set affinity’, and uncheck all but CPU 0.

3) Now, go back to the launcher and click ‘launch monkey island’. Because the process is invoked by a process with a affinity mask, the game process will also have one and will therefore work correctly.

This trick may work on many games which otherwise have audio problems on SMP/dual core/quad core/multiprocessor systems. I apologize if everyone in the world but me already knew this. 😉

http://www.stansberryresearch.com/PRO/0704OILCOL49/WOILHB01/200704AUT-COL-49.html

Oh, Gee! There’s oil in the Rockies! We’re all saved…

oh, wait..

According to that article, what’s there is actually not oil, but oil shale, rock that yeilds oil when heated. You’ll be happy to know that heating a ton – literally – of this rock – will yeild 15 gallons of oil.

Anyone bored enough to figure out how much energy it takes to heat a ton of rock, and compare and contrast it with how much energy is in 15 gallons of oil?

We got a kitten.. named Allie.. obligitory kitten pics at my gallery.

There has to be some better way to handle streaming audio. Oh, right, there is, UDP, but it won’t go through NATs. Where’s my TCP-with-no-sliding-window-and-no-guarenteed-arrival-order?

I’ve recently installed the latest build of kplaylist and a flash streaming player. As a result (and due to carelessness on my part), all of my kplaylist users got lost. If anyone out there (including people who weren’t previously on my kplaylist user list) wants access to my kplaylist, drop me a line. Currently we have 17,265 tracks – I’m shooting for 20,000 by the end of the year.

I wish I knew more about selling short.. I bet I could make a fortune short-selling every spam stock that goes by. 😉

Lately someone is truly obsessed with SHTP – apparently some individual-shots-in-plastic-baggies product. I get like 20 spams a day about how I must buy SHTP right now.. and every once in a while, for amusement, I look at SHTP’s stock quotes. It’s, um, falling like a rock.

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1759