goofballs

A blast from the past, circa 1994! Well here's a special feature on new groupz that appear on the IRC, this feature is covering the mysterious and often misunderstood SK, better known as SaTaNzKiDz. So who are these guyz? Well let me show their membership list cum info sheet : SK.NFO -=- STARTS HERE -=- SK.NFO [ Satanz Kidz ] Satanz Kidz is a group. The actuality of being a child of satan is handled on a per-member basis. We are not here to re-structure irc. We are not here to put out k-spiffy 'zines for people to chuckle at. We are here to look out for one and other, we are here to merely signify an alliance (excuse the pun) of irc kiddies that think in relatively the same distorted, sick, perverted manner. There are only two requirement you must fulfill in being a Satanz Kidz member; being a generally k-rad guy (or girl), and having [Satanz Kidz] in your ircname in some form. Tattoo's, brandin...

Wow..

The Des Moines Register has arbitrarily barred Democratic Congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (OH) from participating in their Democratic Presidential Debate. Please register your displeasure, politely, with the Des Moines Register here: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071212/NEWS09/71212029/0/NEWS09 Also, you can, and should, email or call them and register your displeasure. Public debate, regardless of being sponsored by corporate media, should be beholden to equal time rules -- barring Kucinich may not be illegal, but it is surely immoral and unfair. Call the Des Moines Register at 1-800-247-5346 and protest their private decision to censor a public election. The Iowa Caucus has National Implications and the Des Moines Register is excluding Dennis Kucinich from the Debate based on local politics. If that infuriates you, step up and call the Des Moines Register at 1-800-247-5346. Better yet, call their Editorial Board too: Carol Hunter...

27 years ago you were taken from this world, John. This was the first time I remember feeling sad about something, about someone I never knew. I was not even 6 years old. Your's is also the only Christmas message that seems to have anything at all to do with the philosophy of the Jesus Christ of the Bible: War is over (if you want it). Rest in Peace , Mr. Lennon. You may be dead, but you are not gone.

[Note: this is in response to Joe Conason's Op-Ed regarding the religiosity of Republican Candidates for President over at Salon.com ] It is interesting that of the three supposed forerunners on the Democrat side of the 2008 race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in order, the top to bottom, their pronouncements of faith are less and less disingenuous: Hillary Clinton, who no doubt is as religious as I am a Black-Asian Lesbian Amputee from Mars, to Barack Obama, who I am sure feels some affinity for a generic Church and form of worship, but whose real idols are secular progressive pursuits and their real-life embodiments in the Civil and Human Rights campaigns of the last century and Edwards, whose good works bely his Southern religious values of which I feel he genuinely and deeply believes (and, going through what his family is going through regarding Elizabeth Edwards, I'm sure that it is for him a source of strength and stability -- the only real purpose of spiritual belief in t...

Fuck the DEA. http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/sanfran120307.html Contact: Casey McEnry Number: 415-436-7994 Everyone is encouraged to call Agent McEnry and communicate how you feel about the illegal capture of political prisoners by our lawless prohibition junta thugs and their mendacious supporters in the legislatures. Thanks for ruining my New Years plans. LSD is harmless. Also: Rudy Giuliani, you are a liar. Your own kids hate you. Stop lying for once in your sorry political career.

After taking an incredibly unscientific poll of friends and colleagues, I have discovered that the Linux users tend to lean toward Ron Paul and the FreeBSD users tend to lean toward Dennis Kucinich. That said, I have a handful of 7.0-BETA2 and BETA3 boxes up and running at ApartmentNet. So far so good, no major upsets. I even managed a "JumpStart"(*) install of 7.0-B1.5 on a box without a CD/DVD without too much hassle. SMP seems to handle noticeably faster, but like the Ron Paul/Kucinich test, there is no hard data to back that up. What I've also never had any hard data to back up is why I have never really been comfortable with Linux and more specifically the Linux "community." It would be cliche (and also false) to say that my disdain goes back to the 0.9X kernel days where you had to download 20 floppy disk images over 28.8k modem, but I think that the real turning point actually came shortly thereafter when people started distributing their pre-packaged ver...

As this (early) political season and Christmas season heats up, remember that millions of Americans, wifes, children, fathers, mothers are separated from their loved ones held as political prisoners in America's war on Black Men and The Poor. Remember as our wars become more and more existential, our freedoms suffer as a result: the war on hunger, drugs, terror, ephemera, et cetera, et cetera. I saw Ethan Nadelmann give this speech , repeated several times on public access cable in Cleveland, Ohio over the Thanksgiving break. Nadelmann heads the Drug Policy Alliance, one of many organizations dedicated to decriminalizing victim-less crime and bringing awareness to alternatives to imprisonment of drug users and dealers. To be sure, Nadelmann forcefully points out that when someone harms someone else, whether or not as a result of drug or alcohol use, then that person must be held accountable. But in the drug war, he points out, usually no-one is helped and those harmed most are peop...

I know its a little early, but apparently department stores were open since 4am yesterday until midnight last night, so fuck it.

Looks like Dennis the Menace managed to Ron-paul the Kos post-debate poll: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/15/22252/245 And now for something slightly substantive. I'm sitting between gates 29 and 30 of terminal 1 of KSFO, San Francisco International Airport. The airport in general and this terminal in particular seem to have been designed by someone with a real love of flying: directly in front of me is the Bravo-Hotel taxiway, followed by 1L/19R and 1R/19L, and a view of approaches, plus the end of 10R/28L, approaches from the southeast. In the distance, the San Mateo Bridge, any frequent fliers favorite approach landmark coming out of 4000 feet. A Quantas B74 just taxied by on followed by a CO B73 and an AA B76. That I can't, whenever I want to, take the train in from the city into the BART station located just South of United International in terminal 3, walk through security and spend an afternoon watching planes is probably the most annoying feature of our new secur...

Wait, I'm confused.. a Republican.. with nice things to say about.. a.. liberal.. Democrat.. does not compute.. head.. exploding..

Here is my response to a recent article and interview with Newt Gingrich over at Salon.com : How about "no." How about "no" to sky-god worshipping white-male imperialists who want to turn the clock back to 1830 and the empire back to 1948. How about "no" to people who feel neither guilt nor shame at the systematic, institutionalized racism applied to our continent's first settlers and African slaves, and their decendants? How about "no" to old, white men who spend so much time and energy trying to figure out how to control a woman's uterus (especially now that the hysterectomy has gone out of fashion). Why? Is it out of jealousy? No. How about a "no" to those dirty, nasty men who will not let two people who are in love have the same rights as any other couple in love because they had the misfortune of being born with the same sex organs. These same dirty nasty men who seek illicit and unsafe trysts in public restrooms or prey o...

Shotgun Re-org A shotgun re-org is my own term for what happens when a business runs out of operating funds and immediately shuts down operations, or worse, posts a message like this: Feedster is Changing... We'll be back up soon with exciting news! I am citing this particular (and very recent) example by name because they failed to notify my company, their paying client, of their feed shutdown. As a result, my pager would go off twice every six hours: first, when my cronjob would complain that no new feeds were coming in and second, when our offshore "noc" would ditto the page (I swear, I think they just exist to infuriate me). Last night, as I was going to bed, I had the amusing thought that "wouldn't it be funny if they had gone tits up?" This morning, that intuition was confirmed when my co-worker IMed me to tell me that they had, indeed, gone tits up. I literally LOLed, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I worked for a marketing firm in 1997 that had ...

Wow, is our government really this stupid? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/112926/221 Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. Watch out, Rainbow Coop ! Big brother is watching what you eat! Stupid, stupid, stupid..

Meta-blogging is a term of my own invention about bloggers who blog about blogging (which, unless you are a moron, I bet you could have figured out yourself). I developed an aversion to meta-blogging, and its kissing cousin pro-blogging, out of a disdain for the types of blogs which are written centered around the idea that the object of blogging is to (a) attract readers and (b) create revenue. Certainly, it would be wrong of me to suggest that no one should blog for profit, to wit, pro-blogging; however, I can find nothing less interesting in than bloggers talking to other bloggers about the best way to snare readers and the best way to place ads or exploit patronage. That is my personal opinion on the matter. I have drawn criticism on places like stumbleupon for thumbing down meta- and pro-blogging related sites and articles. Incidentally, I've also been called everything from a fascist to a liberal to a racist and everything else, and I suppose I deserve it, since I am opinio...

The piece of tooth fell out after game 1, where I after who knows how many agonizing moves finally checkmated my roommate(*). On Halloween. I was literally on the third pack of Smarties when I felt something weird. "Hm.." I thought to myself, "The factory must have fucked up, because one of these Smarties has a crunchy part." I pulled the candy and everything else out of my mouth, and looked at the offending chunk of hardness. That's right around the same time my tongue found the gaping hole in the interior side of one of my right molars. Oops. My roommate went to bed, but I'm loosing as white: I have her queen, one rook, one bishop, one knight and two pawns but she has my queen, one rook, one knight and four pawns, and a positional advantage. The point is, (1) Happy Halloween and (2) brush AND FLOSS..

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is not Adolf Hitler. He is not anything like Hitler. Shut your war mongering fascist pie-hole, Norm.

Have you joined " 1 million Strong for Steven T Colbert "? Well, have you? If the election were held today, Steven Colbert would be President-elect tomorrow. Easily, handily.

Yes, let's call this one ten. Nine needs a rewrite anyway. I just spent 24 of the last 48 hours racking and stacking since one of my hosting companies decided they needed to move me. I'm venting toward the middle of the room since I'm pretty sure that they are 4+1 CR/AC units short of what they will need if they fill their room up with servers (not to mention the power, but that's another issue -- I have three extra 20amp circuits for an insanely cheap $150/mo, so I'm good to go and fuck everyone else, haw haw). Also, 80amps per cabinet is twice as much as the hosting company upstairs lets me get away with, although, as I said before, the lack of air condition and UPS may just bite me later -- nothing too important down there though. So, here's how you know you have been working too long on racking and stacking: when, at 5am, you drop a 1u grid machine (don't worry, the thing had a value in today's dollars of probably $350, but it cost $1700 back in 2005...

A moment of levity.. Fuck it, I'm voting for Colbert..

Congratulations to the Cleveland Indians!

Sir, let me first say that I appreciate you remaining in Cleveland and playing for the Cavaliers, and continuing to support the community. Certainly, I do not need to remind you that Cleveland is a city with numerous image and economic problems, and while I do not agree that having a successful sports franchise is in any way a panacea or even a suitable Band-Aid for our city's ills(*), I cannot argue that your continued support does do some good. That said, when you (allegedly) tell your friend not to tip a valet because "they get paid to do that anyway," I feel I must take offense and correct you. Certainly, valets are paid. Usually, they are paid a fraction of the minimum wage. The reason this is possible is because they are employees, like waiters and bartenders, who earn a portion of their income from tips. In July, the minimum wage for Cleveland , the lowest in the nation, went up to a dismal $5.85. According to the text of the bill, an employer may pay 'less tha...

I just finished watching a surreal interview with Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart on last night's The Daily Show. "This is the worst interview I've ever had in my life!" Damn straight, Matthews. The book is called "Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success." If that doesn't make you NOT want to read this book, I don't know what won't. In fact, if that title does make you want to buy that book, you are probably a fucking scumbag. I will not deny that there is a place for politics and political tactics: politics. But there is a reason that "politics" gets a bad name: politics are bad. Politics is what politicians are doing when they aren't helping their constituents (voters, not companies) -- which is my not so subtle way of insinuating that politics is what politicians are doing 99.9% of the time. And what are the lessons, the aims of politics: get out there and make the most...

I you haven't watched this movie , you should do so ASAP. Also, G. Gordon Liddy is a douchebag.

I didn't know the Pentagon hired trans-genders. Maybe I've been wrong all along about the administration. Oh, wait.. "I hate all Iranians." Looks matches the ideology.

Vindication! What is this? INFO | jvm 1 | 2007/09/28 02:20:33 | 2:20:33> |||| [inprogress/] S! [clown]/1/gg_cars-com.product.spd5//-1/1{t:119 c:gg-cw01.dev.COMPANY p:100.30 ems:3839652 qms:28414413 I'll tell you what that is.. that's Java running our application on Free-fucking-BSD, that's what.. How you like them apples, Product Manager?

A moment of levity.

Wondering where to find resources online to help in the struggle to defend the sovereignty of Iran against criminal mad-men Bush and Cheney? Look no further: http://www.iransolidarity.endofempire.org/ If you live in New York, or you simply love the first amendment, please let this scumbag know: As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus. In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school. Regarding the World Trade Center debacle, in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanted to place a wreath of mourning from the Ir...

As if I needed more evidence that the Project Manager title was a secret cabal intent on interfering the the affairs of operations personnel I give you the following example: This morning the same project manager described in Datacenter Confidential #6 sent an email to my boss complaining about, well, let's put it in his own words: We’re running short on PROJECTNAME grid machines. I wonder if we have a status on PROJECTGRIDWORKER, which went down few weeks ago. Also, is it possible to run Linux on PROJECTMYSQLSERVER? It appears that in order to run our java programs on it, we have to modify/port the underlying scripts. We’re really have no time to do such a thing. It will be much easier if all grid machines are consistent and run on standard operating system. I’d strongly recommend we standardize on Linux for all of our production and development grid/non grid, as it is consistent and seems to be the industry standard. We need a couple of machines to be configured for golden gate ...

If you are a "pro-blogger" you are a columnist. Saying "pro-blogger" is like saying "professional amateur." goofballs has spoken! (Watch this come back to bite me later.)

Here is a link to an interview with Reverend Lennox Yearwood , the man illegally battered and politically imprisoned by fascists in the video above. Government should fear the people not the other way around. Revolution now.

Apparently (and it comes as no surprise, again), I can list as an intellectual ally one Anthony Bourdain : Chocolate martini : Both chocolate and liquor are good in bars, but ordering them together announces that you don't like or appreciate either. Anyone who requests this drink should also get a T-shirt that says "I am an asshole, please take my money." Chef Bourdain has been known to guest blog over at Michael Ruhlman's site , who is a fellow Clevelander. And of course the Bourdain quote is a direct ideological validation of my previously stated thoughts regarding the state of the modern cocktail in general and "status" vodkas in particular.

Here is the playlist and text of the "liner-notes" I am sending to my Aunt and Uncle in upstate New York. Briefly, on background, I used to send them tapes when I was much younger. My Aunt, who was then a school teacher for troubled children, would play my mixes and discuss them with her students. My Aunt, my Father's Sister, has always demonstrated a greater appreciation for music I deemed "cool" or "relevant" than my actual parents, probably as a result of dealing with a large number of individuals in my age group. --- JANE & TED'S EXCELLENT MIXTAPE (AHEM, CD) 2007 EDITION PROGRAMME A: 01) The District Sleeps Alone Tonight / The Postal Service / "GIVE UP" 04:44 02) Easy On Yourself / The Drive-by Truckers / "A BLESSING AND A CURSE" 03:28 03) Don't Leave the Light on Baby / Belle and Sebastian / "FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT" ...

A few items (possible future blog topics): watching a short promo for a KQED program entitled "immigration in-focus" i looked up to notice that they were subtitling the, in english, words spoken by an indian woman with a slight accent. i was having no trouble understanding what she was saying until my brain was suddenly saddled with reading and listening (at the same time! omg hard). are americans really that dumb? of course we are, and, in fact, i often wish there were subtitles in real life when some of them speak (and i'm not just talking about the president). allen greenspan insinuated that the war in iraq is about oil, but then insinuated that is wasn't. we report, you decide. meta. let's talk about meta-blogs. you know, blogs about blogs. worse, blogs about writing better blogs. almost without exception, a blog written about writing a better blog is not worth reading. moreover, the raison d'etre of writing a (boring) blog about how to write blogs is sl...

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/ That's a lot of money just to blow up a few hundred thousand brown people.

Folks, let's talk about a menace creeping across the nation. It may already be in your town or province. You may know someone who has succumbed. You may have already fallen victim. I am talking, of course, of "premium vodkas." What is vodka? Well, vodka is a grain alcohol and it can be made with wheat or potatoes, or in a pinch, rice. Here's how wikipedia defines it: Vodka is one of the world's most popular distilled beverages. It is a liquid containing water, ethanol purified by distillation from a fermented substance such as grain or molasses, and an insignificant amount of other substances: impurities and possibly flavorings. Except for various types of flavorings, vodka is a colorless liquid. Vodka usually has an alcohol content of 35% to 50% by volume. The classic Russian and Polish vodka is 40% (USA 80 proof). This can be attributed to the Russian standards for vodka production introduced in 1894 by Alexander III from research undertaken by the Russian chemi...