For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.

Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.

Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?

In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.

I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
---
* -- sorry, bad joke.

For the 80GB iPod, that is.

Nothing stimulates progress like competition. Take World War II, for example. In 1939, most of the world's air forces were still flying biplanes. Some countries, like Poland, were still doing cavalry charges with actual horses. These countries were pretty much all eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Just six years later, the countries that actually wanted to win were flying rocket-planes and throwing atomic bombs at each other. That's progress.

In the mid-90's, various Cold War projects culminated in the Internet revolution. Developed in response to the Russians' supposed technological advances, which were mostly vaporware, these closely-held DARPA and NASA projects flooded the private sector once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians limped out of Europe. That's why we can sit at home today while idly browsing the Library of Congress or, more likely, bitterly masturbating to old Bangles videos on YouTube.

Let's face it: Once the Nazis and Russkies were out of the picture, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. The Clinton era was an eight-year smoke break in the march of high-tech materialism. Screaming like a girl and running away from competition, like in Mogadishu, was a viable strategy for the country, and it was reflected in such products as Microsoft Bob and the Mac clones.

The face of the Clinton era

But September 11, 2001 changed all that. The market's malaise was replaced by frantic acceleration; just six weeks after the towers came down, Steve Jobs announced the first iPod. With just 5 gigabytes of storage, this wasn't the device that was going to destroy our new competitors, the jihadis. But it was a first step, and everybody could see where it was headed: Total market domination.

In the last 5 years, the American iPod has progressed dramatically. Looking at the timeline, one can see that the sleeping media storage giant has stirred, and is rapidly approaching the 100 GB mark. With a strong presence in both the high-end and low-end market segments, many analysts believe the Radical Islamic media player may have been squeezed out before it has even shipped.

In stark contrast, Radical Islam's iPod has yet to reach the market. In-fighting among the various design teams, not to mention the fact that music and dancing are forbidden by Islam, has hampered progress on the device. Marketing campaigns, clearly influenced by the American iPod's own, have failed to rouse interest in the device among jihadis, probably owing to the subliminal association drawn between wearing it and receiving electrical-shock genital torture.

In hindsight, the Global Jihad probably should've held back their attack on the World Trade Center until they were further along in their development cycle. Instead of taking advantage of the initial buzz, they've stagnated and fallen behind. At this point, they'll have difficulty even joining the race, much less catching up to the strong offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Competition is necessary for a healthy market. Although the iPod is a great product, it may begin to suffer from its own monopoly. In situations where competition doesn't exist, everybody loses. That's why Radical Islam needs to buckle down, and bring its portable media device to market.

Bon appetit!

As you can see at the end of the movie, there's a part two in the works. Due next week!

Cross-posted at Sistaweb.

crossposted in German at Sistaweb

I've been a Vegetarian for over 11 years.  In 1995, I spontaneously decided that I much preferred cows to steaks.  Since that fateful Thursday, all those years ago, I've eaten neither meat, nor fisch nor fowl, nor Gummi-bears, and I've felt better about myself, being a friend of the animals.

But now, I say shit on 'em.  Maddox put it best, when he said, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat".  On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 (our monthly Date Evening), I, Rube, will, for the first time since the first Clinton presidency, give the knife-and-fork-treatment to an unlucky one of our four-feeted friends. And I'll enjoy it, despite current scandals in the German meat packing industry and the lugubrious braying of militant PETA-Hippies.

But it's not without its difficulties, this change in eating habits.  I've never actually eaten meat here in Germany.  I have no idea how things like Wienerschnitzel or Currywurst taste, not to mention what one puts on them.  Does mayonnaise go with Leberkse?  Does one eat Schweinsbraten with his fingers? I have no idea.  That's why Rube needs your help!

If you've spent some time in Germany, and know your way around the Teutonic kitchen, drop me a line in the comments. Or, if you've got some secret tips, like how one goes about eating Weisswurst, feel free to chime in.  I'm a complete beginner here, so no piece of information is too trivial.

Thanks for your support!

I watched Munich the other night with the little lady. It's a bit confusing, in an artistic sense. I know as much about the massacre itself as most people, and have concrete opinions about it that won't be changed by a Spielberg movie, so I was more interested in the dramatic aspects. There are some downright lame moments in the film, with the screwing-your-wife/fantasizing-about-gunplay-and-exploding-helicopters montage at the top of the list. Other than that, the only real lasting impression I took with me was just how great an idea it was to cast Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

Seeing Craig in a movie is an interesting experience. He's absolutely magnetic on the screen. You can pick his beady little eyes and hideously craggy face out of any crowded scene. He looks like the Thing, from the Marvel comics, which is exactly the same reason that men like Sean Connery.

I know this choice is unpopular with women. Dames just love Pierce Brosnan. I admit it, he's a sexy bastard, and if I were of a certain orientation or had a vagina he could save me from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. any day. But Pierce was just another dandy in a long line of ill-conceived Bonds. When the franchise switched from Sean Connery to Roger Moore, it also switched from being a man's movie to being a metrosexual mish-mash of hideously bad jokes and pretty-boy Bonds mugging for the camera.

That's not what men want to see. The Bond-film makers have finally seen the light, and want to bring the guys back into the theaters. With Daniel Craig, they've re-discovered the formula that made the Connery films so irresistible for men: An ugly-ass Popeye-looking dude who kills people at random, and gets more ass than a toilet seat.

Just get a load of that mug. Watching this palooka get it on with smokin' hot women from around the world is going to be an inspiration for ugly, hairy guys everywhere. And it will reaffirm our faith in women, who for the last 25 years or so have been giving it up to simpering little Fauntleroys like this:

Sheer brilliance, this Daniel Craig thing. Finally, a Bond movie that doesn't make you weep with shame at what our world, and the men who bone their way through it, have become.

You know, I had a feeling that there was a lower class of people hanging around the blog lately. Now I think I understand. How did this happen?

Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn't my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose "Xingha".  And since it's all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS's back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn't far off). Check 'em out:

• TinyMCE
• Xinha
• FCKEditor

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!

The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor ("Midas", they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox's user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I've seen.  It doesn't do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let's you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it's free, for Pete's sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.

Can you think of something that the government does, that everyone hates? Something that's completely unnecessary for the further functioning of State or economy, and yet places a substantial burden on the general populace? Here in Germany, we have something called the GEZ, or Gebühreneinzugszentrale. I would link it, but these bastards are like the IRS, CAIR, and the RIAA all rolled into one; as such, they probably wear out their Sitemeter looking for referrals from people bitching about them. Everybody who doesn't depend on it for their living despises the GEZ.

What is it?

The GEZ is the extra-governmental body in Germany that collects the monthly registration fees for televisions, computers, and just about anything else you can think of. If you have a television, a radio, or pretty much anything else that can send or receive information, you have to pay a monthly fee. For your first television or combo radio/television device, you're required to pay €17.03 (US$21.82) per month. A radio costs €5.52 (US$7.07). For an Internet-capable PC, that's another €17.03 (for now) starting in January. For a private home, with radio, television and Internet-capable computers, that's a whopping €39.58 (US$50.70) per month.

Where does it go?

In 2005, as you can see, the GEZ took in 7.12 billion* (with a "b") Euros in fees. Considering there are about 80 million people in Germany, that's almost 100 Euros for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the GEZ's web page, the loot was divided as follows:

(Note: in German, commas and periods have reversed meaning; e.g., 5.000 means five thousand.)

As you can see, ARD alone received 5.247 billion euros (US$6.7 billion) which were extracted from Germany's residents by force, under threat of fines and imprisonment. Every organization on this list is beneath contempt. They are pirates by proxy, benefitting from the plunder of the hard-working people of Germany.

What the fuck?!

Good question. The rationalization for all this is, "the establishment and maintenance of independent media for the general public." This is a bit of doublespeak that Orwell would've been proud of . It's actually the opposite of independent, since it's money dispensed by a central, government-controlled organization, extorted from members of the public, who have no choice.

All it really achieves is the destruction of the television market in Germany through what amounts to slave labor, and the strangling off of independent news sources that aren't beholden to Berlin or the GEZ. For instance, GEZ-supported news sources rarely run stories that are embarrassing to the government, or question its policies. And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll criticize the GEZ directly.

All any political party would need to do to gain power in Germany is promise to disband the GEZ, so hated are they. The so-called libertarians at the FDP, unfortunately, forgot to make it a point during the last election.

* - billion in the American sense of 1000 million, not the British million-million.

Me and the little lady are about to head off into the Bavarian countryside, for a beer-tent afternoon among friends and German hillbillies. It's a long train ride there and back, so potential terrorists be warned: If you blow up my train, I will break through the wall that separates the living from the angry dead, and personally take a shit in your turban.

This is awesome.

That is all. See y'all in a couple weeks, I guess.

If you're anything like me, then your life is an endless stream of screwing stuff up, then jumping through uncountable scads of hoops trying to fix it before anyone notices.

The latest humiliation came when I overestimated the driving power of my trusty old 19" CTX monitor, while running OS X. Many may not realize that when your monitor doesn't just come out and tell your computer what resolutions it supports, your computer will do its best to destroy your monitor, and with it whatever admin street cred you've spent the last 20 years building up.

Futzing around with my OSX86 installation, I decided that my resolution looked a little dodgy: The circles looked like eggs. Instead of checking whether 1280x1024 is 4:3 (it ain't, it's 5:4), I decided to go for a resolution with easier math involved. So, bringing up the display preferences, I clicked on 1600x1200, and was greeted by a strange, unearthly buzzing sound that was probably the death-rattle of my monitor's flyback as it choked on the new resolution.

Now, OS X is generally pretty good about not letting you screw yourself, but sometimes you can fall through the cracks. There's no 'confirm this setting' dialog for changing monitor resolutions, for example; you break it, you bought it. Apple software knows what Apple hardware can handle, and generally leaves it in a working state. But when you've got, erm, let's just call it 'third-party hardware' running OS X, things aren't always quite so foolproof.

So, with a buzzing monitor, and no way to undo my screw-up, I decided to go about setting the resolution remotely. It's doable, but it requires a couple of conditions before it'll work:

• Remote SSH logins enabled
• A working Internet connection
• Nerves of freakin' steel and nothing to lose!

Ok, maybe not that last one. There's precious little to do with crocodiles or bungy jumping.

Basically, what you want to do is a) Get a running VNC server for your out-of-range desktop; b) connect to it from the working machine using a VNC client; and d) change the resolution to something that works, douche.

Ok, here's how to do it, step-by-step. First, open an SSH session from another computer to your patient. The easiest way is to open Terminal and hit Cmd-Shift-K, which will bring up the Rendez-jour 'Connect to server' dialog. Just browse to the ailing computer, and click connect. If you're on a Windows computer or don't feel like screwing around with Bonjourvous, then connect as you normally would.

Once you're in, grab two copies of OSX-Vnc; one for the machine you're sitting at, and one for the patient like so:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] curl http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/osxvnc/OSXvnc1.71.dmg > osxvnc.dmg

This will save the remote file into a DMG disk image. You can then mount the disk image by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] open osxvnc.dmg

If all went well, the disk image is now available in the patient's Finder. You can find the image's mount-point in your SSH session by typing 'mount' and pressing enter. You'll get a list that looks like this:

/dev/disk0s1 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)

automount -nsl [171] on /Network (automounted)

automount -fstab [176] on /automount/Servers (automounted)

automount -static [176] on /automount/static (automounted) /dev/disk1s5 on /Volumes/NO NAME (local)

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/DUMBGUY'S IPOD (local, nodev, nosuid)

/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/OSXvnc (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, journaled, mounted by dumbguy)

That last one looks good, so we'll just go there for the VNC software by typing:

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd /Volumes/OSXvnc
[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc.app

As we see, inside this directory is an application bundle called 'OSXvnc.app', which is actually a directory, as such things are in OS X. Let's change into that directory, where we'll find a command-line VNC server, and crank 'er up.

[patient:~ dumbguy$] cd OSXvnc.app


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 dumbguy dumbguy 170 Feb 1 2006 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 dumbguy dumbguy 238 Feb 1 2006 ..

drwxr-xr-x 6 dumbguy dumbguy 204 Feb 1 2006 Contents

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 28 Feb 1 2006 OSXvnc-server -> Contents/MacOS/OSXvnc-server

lrwxr-xr-x 1 dumbguy dumbguy 26 Feb 1 2006 storepasswd -> Contents/MacOS/storepasswd


[patient:~ dumbguy$] ./OSXvnc-server
--- lots snipped ---
2006-08-03 23:18:49.696 OSXvnc-server[312] IPv6: Started Listener Thread on port 5900
2006-08-03 23:18:49.697 OSXvnc-server[312] Started Listener Thread on port 5900

Don't forget that './' at the beginning, or OS X won't find the file. So, now we've got a working VNC server on our patient. All we need now is a working VNC client to connect to it, we're all ready to go! I was a bit peeved to find out that OSXvnc is just the server software, and therefore a second download was needed. All bepeevedness was gone, however, when I discovered that the excellently written, if disappointingly named, VNC client for OS X, Chicken of the VNC, has a new version out.

At this point, all you need to do is open up CotVNC, point it at your patient using the port number spit out above, and badda-bing, you've got a ginormous VNC window showing all those pixels that your POS old monitor couldn't handle. Just click on another resolution in the still-visible display preferences (and do try to keep it reasonable this time...), and you're back in business.

Notes

This should also work on Linux, but you may have to use something like xhost to get the SSH session authenticated with your X server. OS X doesn't sandbox the window server like X-Window System does.

You're SOL if any of the following are true:

• The patient is running Windows
• You didn't enable remote SSH logins on the patient
• You don't have a working Internet connection
• The patient is in a private subnet, and you're not in it with him

If you've got a firewall running on the patient that allows SSH but not VNC (port 5900 is standard), you can create an SSH tunnel for VNC packets like so:

ssh -L 13900:127.0.0.1:5900 patient.local

Where 13900 is a random open port on your working machine, 5900 is the VNC port on the patient, and patient.local is the address of the busted machine. You can then point your VNC client to 127.0.0.1, port 13900 and it'll all be forwarded to the patient's VNC server.

If you're on an internal network, and not connected directly to the Internet (e.g., behind a DSL router), it's always a good idea to enable SSH connections. SSH is a fairly secure protocol, and you never know when it'll come in handy. The technique describe in this article could be useful for other situations as well:

• Your laptop display dies or, as is the case with a lot of Powerbook G4s, won't come out of sleep mode. You've got documents open, and resetting the machine would cause data loss.
• You want to see what your other machine is doing, but you're too lazy to get up and walk to the other room. But you're not, it seems, too lazy to type the 30 or so commands needed to get a VNC server running.

To anyone who finds this article looking for command line utilities to quickly change a Mac's resolution, leave a comment if you find something.

I hate Photoshop. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to understand. I've been trying to use it since version 2 came out for Irix. About 5 minutes ago, I tried to draw a box around something in it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I realize that that is a job for Illustrator, and not Photoshop, seeing how it's a vector operation. But do I really need a $300 program just to draw boxen?

I don't understand why everyone hates Macromedia's Fireworks. It's a perfect balance between raster- and vector-oriented graphicking. Unfortunately, now that Adobe has swallowed Macromedia, Fireworks is dead. Fuckers.

Here's a simple task I just did in 2 minutes in Fireworks:

With Photoshop, that could easily become a life-long assignment. You will become old and gray, while earning a very livable pension, trying to create outlines from the text, creating a union intersect, and, God help you, finding the stroke options anywhere in the menus. Not to mention the fact that you'll quickly pop a vein cursing Adobe whenever you click on an object and drag it somewhere, only to see the background mask move instead. And I'm sure there's a reason why at some point you can't right click anything anymore. I'm sure it's a mode or something.

This program sucks.