Never been one to let the carrier drop

Today I indulged in one of my less fortunate hobbies and went over to www.carm.org to chat with the Christians. As usual, we didn’t agree. What’s unusual is that they banned me. And I wasn’t personally insulting anyone, or anything. Oh, I did talk about how God and Satan might be the same entity, but I don’t really think *that* was worthy of banning.

One bit about my final defense struck me as apt, so I’m going to quote it here. Later I may regret it, but right now it feels true.

Sheer: I want you all to remember
Sheer: This is what happened to Jesus
Sheer: people didn’t like his ideas, so they killed him
Javy: Loan…sheer embraces contradictions and says they’re not contradictions y
et used the same logic he tries to defy to arrive at his explanation that they a
re not contradictions
Javy: No need to listen to him.
Sheer: Javy doesn’t like my ideas so he’s about to ban me
Javy: He’s just silly.
Sheer: Not as bad as killing, but still pretty much a ‘shut the *** up’.

He did, of course, ban me almost immediately.

I had to fight with the urge to knock the chat room off the net. I certainly could have – with a couple of well placed commands, even – but it wouldn’t be right for me to do so. It’s their place, they can kick me out if they want. It just doesn’t seem like a very enlightened attitude to have.

And perhaps my problem is that while I’m violently disagreeing with the tenants of Christianity, I’m looking for enlightened behavior from Christians. I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive – after all, I’ve known some pretty enlightened Christians – but just that they aren’t particularly aligned either. There seem to be so many people who can’t imagine what it would be like to be on the other end. Maybe at times I’m guilty of that particular sin myself, but at least I’m aware of it.

I do, honestly, feel like it was their loss.

1) I need to figure out how to change my home directory in Windows. When I deleted and recreated my account, it was recreated as Sheer.DAISYII rather than Sheer, but all my cookies point back to Sheer. Hence, many things do not work. Tried creating a shortcut, totally useless.

My windows laptop has developed the interesting personality flaw of (wow, they added some nice features to LJ) not letting me log in as myself. All other logins (i.e. administrator, owner, kayti) work fine. I’ve been told to back up my home directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Sheer) and blow away the directory, then recreate the user profile and restore the directory. Hopefully this will work.                          

On the WinAmp side, I’m a defector. While I will still probably use winamp when I want some visualization eye candy, for most audio playbacks I’m now using DeliPlayer 2. I got it because WinAmp wouldn’t open some of my favorite MODs, but it has a lot of good behavior that winamp doesn’t have. Unfortunately, it’s a audio only player, but it handles many things far better than WinAmp.

Long ago and far away, me and JL used to use the ‘at’ command to schedule alarms to wake ourselves. We both had disturbingly large stereos connected to our PCs, and the advantage was you had to remember waht the mp3 player command was called so you could do a killall on it – if you really wanted to torture yourself, you could log out afterwords and then you’d have to log in, run killall mpg123, by which time you were at least approximately awake.

Well, it’s been a while.

For a long time, I didn’t have any sort of audio at all hooked to my linux machine. THen it was doing audio in tasks so it had a sound card, but the only jack in use was the input, and I feared having the output driven to the mixer that was feeding the input because linux is not always the most reliable OS in its choice of volume levels on the audio hardware..

Lately, I’ve been staying up way too late.. I think I’m a touch manic.. and there’s no one to remind me to take my pills until Kayti wakes up at 6 am or so.

I think I have a solution – I need to work out some of the bugs – but..

I hooked the new file/mail server to the audio input of the machine next to it via a jumper (until I can get another RCA -> 1/8″ that is long enough to handle the task of hooking it up to the DJ mixer that drives my Mackies and the little Rokit speakers – I should really replace this thing with a Big Knob, it would be better suited to the task it’s doing, but anyway..)

Then, I submitted a job via at. Two, actually – one for a few minutes from the time I submitted, to test my syntax, and another for 3 am, to remind me to take my pills.

Then, I started thinking of other cool things I could do with a linux server hooked to my speakers.

The most obvious is a text command that will support some additional features. Below, I’ve typed out a example of behavior (I’ll write this command RSN – probably meaning never – but it would be fun):

audioslave>play some roxette next
OK
audioslave>stop playback
OK
audioslave>play some roxette now
OK
audioslave>play joyride now
OK

If only I didn’t have to work. 😉

Maybe some other night.

I added another of my possibly-useful-to-people-elsewhere scripts to my code directory. At some point I should round up everything that I intended to share with the world, code wise, and dump it in there. If nothing else, if the wayback machine is working it means a free backup – I think. Or is that only for html?

Does anyone know of a really kick-ass free web-based calandering package?

mysql> select is_spam,avg(processing_time) from spam group by is_spam;
+———+———————-+
| is_spam | avg(processing_time) |
+———+———————-+
| 0 | 3.3227 |
| 1 | 3.9323 |
+———+———————-+

For those of you with spamassassin and old maildirs lying around full of spam, we have a solution for you – sheer’s excessively overwritten but possibly still buggy spam cleaning script. Feel free to peruse/critique.. it’s in my code directory. If you want to use the optional mysql logging (helps speed things up when the process gets interrupted) you’ll also need to import spam.sql, included

I’m thinking of writing a RIA application that is a interface to search engines like Google that makes it easier to search for things, bookmark results, keep results archived, etc.

Does anyone have any features that they’d want in a search engine front end? Is anyone else interested in such a application? It would run inside a browser as a .swf, although it would probably depend on a LAMP backend..