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corivax and I as we both like it better than The Matrix but recognize that it achieved less success and acclaim, and not just because it was shorter on stars, etc. I also recognized many of the themes as being things that were very Jungian, which made it fit well into my current, ongoing analysis, etc. Indeed, I found many of the themes particularly resonant, and as I have thought about it, I've come up with a small number of ways in which it significantly differs from The Matrix such that I think it is less likely to be resonant with people or enjoyable for them.First off, The Matrix has a much clearer dichotomy between the Real World and the Fake World — there is a Real World that exists independently of the Matrix and which is the real world we are supposed to identify with. It is Earth, albeit in the future. We are supposed to recognize that reality as a possible future of ours, but otherwise decidedly real and solid. Likewise, the Matrix exists entirely within our heads and computers, much as the fiction of today is comfortably contained to dreams and books and such. There is a true, waking world into which all can enter, which is decidedly-authentic, whereas the other seeks to subdue and use us without our knowledge.
On the other hand, Dark City's world has much blurrier lines. There is an Earth or something like it, but it's not very real or even really remembered by the people of the movie. The reality there is one that is completely malleable, including our waking perceptions of it and who we are in it. There is no Real World into which we might awake — the world is just as fake when the film ends as when it begins. In that regard, Dark City is more about the malleability of consensus reality and the falseness of our subjective experiences, whereas The Matrix offers up the idea that there is something Authentic out there that we can and will find.
The roles of our heroes and the form of their actions is likewise more comfortable and contemporary in The Matrix. Neo is a hero and that is more or less all there is to him. His messianic role and actions are guided by those around him — he works for the benefit of the Collective and is supported by it. He crushes the oppressors with means provided by the strength of the Collective and promises to bring all of humankind to salvation by way of waking them up to the Real World and freeing them from the Matrix.
In Dark City, we see a much grimmer (and I would argue more human) experience in the lead. John is reluctant and was not chosen for any special reason. He exists as he does because he does, no particular skill or evolution or fate brought him to it. He lacks identity but goes through a process of defining himself through the movie. Except for the Strangers, everyone is acting more or less as an individual — John makes no particular efforts to save people and goes so far as to ignore Dr. Schreber entirely at the end of the film to explore his own desires. He shapes his reality and everyone exists more or less in his reality. He acts out of emotion, killing all of the Strangers rather than trying to keep any of them alive to learn anything or control anything for the benefit of the Collective. It is likely that the Strangers could have taken them home to Earth, if Earth still even exists, or could have told them who they really were, but instead John is content to play out his fantasy/dreams (the Ocean) and follow his heart.
Where The Matrix offers up authenticity and greener (if only truer) pastures, Dark City reminds us that while we shape the world as we experience it as individuals and can become more aware of its nature, it is still a lonely, fake place made up of consensus truth. I think there is something uncomfortable in thinking of reality as degrees of illusion controlled by either the Collective or the Individual, rather than that there is something Authentic out there. And where Dark City is about the triumph of the individual, The Matrix is about being subservient to the Collective in a way that almost seems to imply that if you accept your role in the real world and accept the real world as real, you will be rewarded with true experiences. Really, though, Neo accepts a lot of what he is told without proof, and accepts the consensus reality provided by his peers as superior to that provided by the machine, as though there was ever any difference or some way to know which one was the Real World in the first place.
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How often have you experienced "missing time", i.e. there is time that you cannot account for or that appears to have passed without your awareness.
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Never.
9 (20.0%)
Once or twice. 14 (31.1%)
From time to time. 15 (33.3%)
Fairly regularly. 6 (13.3%)
All the time. 1 (2.2%)
How often have you experienced "sleep paralysis", i.e. full or partial consciousness and awareness when waking up or falling asleep when you can not move your body or can only move with great difficulty?
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Never. 10 (22.2%)
Once or twice. 16 (35.6%)
From time to time. 16 (35.6%)
Fairly regularly. 3 (6.7%)
All the time. 0 (0.0%)
How often have you found unexplained scars, marks, bruises, etc., on your body after waking up?
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Never. 17 (37.0%)
Once or twice. 11 (23.9%)
From time to time. 15 (32.6%)
Fairly regularly. 2 (4.3%)
All the time. 1 (2.2%)
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Check those that are true for you.
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I was sometimes bullied when a child. 59 (85.5%)
I was sometimes a bully when a child. 15 (21.7%)
I have a phobia. 28 (40.6%)
I believe in transubstantiation. 2 (2.9%)
I eat fast food once a week or more. 17 (24.6%)
I drink sugared drinks at least once a day. 11 (15.9%)
I drink caffeinated drinks at least once a day. 46 (66.7%)
I eat meat. 59 (85.5%)
I eat cheese. 64 (92.8%)
I drink milk. 46 (66.7%)
I use a computer for 8 hours a day or more. 51 (73.9%)
I have health insurance. 52 (75.4%)
I have a master's or doctorate. 21 (30.4%)
I pray. 23 (33.3%)
I grow my own vegetables. 24 (34.8%)
I own a car. 41 (59.4%)
I own a bicycle. 38 (55.1%)
I own a motorcycle. 5 (7.2%)
I own a house. 21 (30.4%)
I own a horse. 1 (1.4%)
Poll #1379358
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If you had to define yourself as just one...
Did you play with legos as a kid?
Squirreled away on one conspicuously-inconspicuous domain, burtleburtle.net is the website of a user bob who is too sophisticated to bother with all that ~ nonsense for users' web data. At burtleburtle.net/bob there is a web site. Or at least, there used to be — replaced now with a blank index.html as so many of us find ourselves tempted to do.
But it isn't bob's home page we should care about, it's the stunningly-innocuous hash subdirectory under there. At burtleburtle.net/bob/hash there used to be a web site, too, but its index.html has done as that of its parent for reasons mysterious to me.
If you are lucky enough to find a link to a page under that directory, it may still work, but be careful what links you follow as many lead to similar dead-ends. This is not the twisty-ouroboros that you expect from the mental cheese of the Internet, perhaps made better by the fact that it isn't. This is the web I fell in love with, and almost unknown these days.
Bob Jenkins is an earnest computer scientist (and other things) who I confess I know absolutely nothing about beyond his fantastic treasure trove of a website. He covers those classic pageturners: random number generators, hash functions and cryptography. Far from today's flashy computer science with its "let's be like string theory" mantra that produces little that is practical, well-honed or rigorous, Bob Jenkins' output continues at the circa 1987 pace that is responsible for the contents of all of those "intro to algorithms" books. Indeed, Bob Jenkins' prose reminds me of a more loving variant of a strange book of Pascal data structures that I stole recently.
He speaks like I'd like to speak if I had such a website: with a wise, slightly-coy, gentle, reassuring voice. Never uneven or uncertain, but very approachable and sometimes almost playful or perhaps joyous. I know someone rather like him (those of you who follow FreeBSD might know him as Bruce Evans; those of you who followed Linux in the '90s might know him as Bruce D. Evans) who is very much responsible for my approach to programming and, more specifically, the C language.
Bob Jenkins churns out quirky code that is deceptively-simple; in a tired and weary state I catch myself wondering if he's an NSA plant sent out into the world to lure us mere mortals away from otherwise-imminent breakthroughs, offering us great (and very real) rewards. Bob Jenkins' hashing functions are legendary, as is his short tome (perhaps the best description) on hash functions, which took yours truly from "I get hash functions" to "man, woah, have you ever thought about your fingers?"
His rolling hash is basically universally-used, since it is approachable and warm and loving, and his legendary mix function elevates it to truly sublime heights. Incredibly simple, fast, no overhead to speak of. You can even trivially generate hashes for any number of lengths out of your input window, with a mind-boggling amount of not much work at all. His work is intuitive and excellent. Most trivial perfect hashes can be rolling hashes, too, and if for some reason you shun the 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the well-known reversible hash (so long as you don't mind his well-known reversible mix which is present in almost all of his software) Bob Jenkins puts out, you can use some of his perfect hash code as a starting point.
His pseudo-random number generators are so simple as to be memorizable (a point of design) and have nice little drawings and very dignified disagreements with RC4. He comes at things from a very math perspective, but while he occasionally applies higher-math principles, it's usually in a way that's procedural and obvious, while remaining much less painful than IRS worksheets. He is rigorous and methodical and seems to have a way with very simple functions and generators and piecing things together that I deeply admire. That he still puts new things on the web gives me hope that there are simple things for me to discover and enumerate, since I'd much rather that than the complex things. That his web pages from 1993 are still relevant (indeed, they are applied often at the cutting-edge of real technology implementation) is a testament to his position as a minor, but devoted bishop in the hierarchy of whatever thing Knuth is at the top of today. Perhaps some day to be a minor saint whose name one invokes when one needs to hash, look for, encrypt or disorder substrings. That his web pages from 1993 are basically unchanged (and his primary output beyond a few scattered bits and pieces including an ancient Dr. Dobbs article) promotes the quiet dignity in which such madmen do their work.
He elevates differential cryptanalysis and reversible hash functions to the level of sitting in a study smoking a pipe by a fire. What's in the pipe is left as an exercise to the reader.
With three fingers -- 1, 2 and 3 in order -- I often find myself wandering to simple patterns like "1 2 1 3" and picture them as a sort of rocking side to side motion, with alternating fingers falling on the second note. This invariably means that what I play turns into something like "1 2 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 2 3-3". Which is all well and good, but not what I intended. In fact, that's one of a few patterns I invariably fall into when trying to play "1 2 1 3" depending on how I'm thinking of it in my head. Again with the geek, it seems like at some point the pattern gets compiled into an intermediate representation that gets loaded into kinesthetic memory and then that's the pattern I can play. But as long as I think of "1 2 1 3" as rocking back and forth, it never comes out right.
On the other hand, if I think of it as (and this is going to sound silly) sort of a triangle with a tail, as "1 2 1" and "3", I can more or less get that down to my fingertips without fail.
There's a piano behind our couch and I can easily reach it with one hand whenever I'm on the couch, which is often. When thinking or watching TV or doing just about anything that doesn't require two hands (or the one hand that can reach the piano at any given time) I find myself vamping or trying to work out other people's melodies or my own. I often have my back or side to the piano, working with the spatial and kinesthetic rather than the visual, which makes the patterns and conceptualizations all the more noticeable and important. Sometimes I just spend a swath of time staring, so to speak, at the shapes and textures that come out with my fingers on the keys.
And let me go back to Senator Barack Hussein Obama for just a minute. The man who couldn't even swear on the book upon which his country was founded, who turns away from the flag and doesn't recite the pledge of allegiance. This guy, they try to tell you that he's whiter than Bill Clinton, he's clean, he doesn't do drugs, he's respectful and he speaks proper English. At the same time they try to tell you that he didn't get where he is because of his race, but does that make sense to you? The guy went to college, became an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and is now a candidate for the Democrats' new socialist Presidential coup. Do they even remember affirmative action? Of course they do, but they hope that you don't. They want you to fall in love with the Cinderella story of Obama as a stand-in for all the people they think make this country great, finally given a bite at the big apple, at being President. A black President, a Muslim President, a homo President. Are you buying this?
I know you aren't, folks. You'd have to be a moron. This guy would have us believe that Saddam Hussein wasn't behind 9/11. He doesn't think Hussein hated America. Yeah, they were burning flags to show us how much they love and respect our great nation and the people who built it. I don't think so, folks. Hussein hated America, of course he did 9/11. You think it was just a couple of guys in the desert high on opium in Afghanistan thought this all up? To try and make that make sense, you know what the Democrats say? They say we trained them. The CIA told them how to fly planes in to buildings. Couldn't be Hussein, nah, he's a saint. That Osama guy? He was our best friend, that's what they want you to think. We gave him guns and money and taught him how to be a terrorist. What does the United States know about being a terrorist? We've never tortured anyone or blown up Jewish babies with car bombs.
This idiocy has to stop. Does that sound like "hope" to you? If you have to vote for a Democrat, vote for Hillary. She has the experience. Sure, she might have sex with a white house intern, but at least she doesn't want to blow up America.
- Start a proper pizza restaurant in Ulaanbaatar. The Mongolians seem to've gotten their Pizza intel from the Russians, who in turn got it from Martians and Moon Men who thought that Mozzarella was overkill when you could use parmesan or something like a rather poor gruyere. To say nothing of their soggy crusts that bear more resemblance to McDonald's french fries than any sort of bread. The problem with a restaurant, of course, is you stop being a rich foreigner and make as much as other restauranteurs in the economy, but I think it'd be fun. I would call it "American Best Pizza" and we would serve хуушуур (you could dip it in marinara or ranch) and would have mutton pizza. It could be near the embassies.
- Sell licenses to my microkernel or something else I've written for personal enrichment. It would be interesting to see something I wrote to be generally-usable to be put into general-use, rather than just endlessly tested by me. I've sold all kinds of software, but always made to order, never something I'd already written.
- Learn to read and write in more writing systems. I've started on Hebrew, which is nicely simple. I'm tempted by Arabic, but it's rather at the other end of the spectrum. The problem is that all of these have a lack of a practical use for me, and I just can't retain things that don't. I'd like to get a few orders of magnitude better with Cyrillic, but that will depend on regular use of a language using it, too. I'd like to for, say, learning Mongolian, but Mac OS X (at least my version) doesn't even have a Mongolian keymap, so I'd be short a few vowels if I switched to a Russian keymap (at least I can get silicone Russian overlays or a whole Russian keyboard for my MacBook.)
- Become a priest some day. Duh.
corivax and I went through Russia from Ukraine to Mongolia via Moscow, I was continually struck by the number of cities with a population of over a million that we passed. I'd never heard of any of them. Some were historical capitals of cultures I'd only heard of in passing, their name perverted almost beyond recognition. Many were just cities along the trans-Siberian trail, built to support the building of roads, railways and empire, that had flourished over time. I was ashamed that I'd never heard of them. Sure the people there didn't fare any better than I did in their knowledge of the USA by and large, but we ran into a few people with friends or family in the States, even a few people who had heard of Seattle (once we explained we were from Vashington oblast, not Vashington with the White House, heh.) But I've been to every city in the US with a million people except San Diego, but I was shocked at the number of large cities in Russia.So I give you all the cities in Russia and the US with a million people or more, and the one just below that threshold. The methodology differs as does the definition of city population, I'm sure, but it's hardly apples to oranges, all the same.
| Russian city. | Russian city's population. | I've been to this Russian city. | US city. | US city's population. | I've been to this US city. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moscow | 10.38 million | Y | New York City | 8.25 million | Y |
| Saint Petersburg | 4.6 million | N | Los Angeles | 3.849 million | Y |
| Novosibirsk | 1.4 million | Y | Chicago | 2.83 million | Y |
| Nizhny Novogorod | 1.3 million | Y | Houston | 2.14 million | Y |
| Yekaterinburg | 1.29 million | N | Phoenix | 1.5 million | Y |
| Samara | 1.15 million | N | Philadelphia | 1.44 million | Y |
| Omsk | 1.13 million | Y | San Antonio | 1.296 million | Y |
| Kazan | 1.1 million | Y | San Diego | 1.25 million | N |
| Chelyabinsk | 1 million | Y | Dallas | 1.23 million | Y |
| Rostov-na-Donu | 1 million | N | San Jose | 0.929 million | Y |
| Ufa | 1 million | Y | |||
| Volgograd | 1 million | N | |||
| Perm | 1 million | N | |||
| Krasnoyarsk | 0.9 million | Y |
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Would you rather not have to deal with the feelings and emotions of others?
In this context "yes" is affirming "I would rather not have to deal with the feelings and emotions of others" and "no" is "I do not mind dealing with the feelings and emotions of others" or "I do not prefer to not have to deal with the feelings and emotions of others". "I don't know" is "I do not know if I have a preference with regards to having to deal with the feelings of others." Just for clarity (or to increase confusion.)
- You know how the Christian Right in the US has, of late, been lambasting the Middle East on women's rights, and how they love to go on about the horrible injustices women face in cases of rape? It's become something of a minor cause - they can actually bolster support for religious wars abroad on grounds that the secular left is disinclined to argue! What thinking liberal is going to say "well, you know, those are the laws -- she should always go out with 50 men so that if some of them decide to rape her there will be at least the minimum number of witnesses for her to win!"? Absolute none! Which brings me to the first thing I found myself screaming at: the phrase verifiable rape. This has shown up two prominent places:
- Medical Conditions and Services Not Eligible for Sharing Possible exception(s) Any exception must be approved, prior to treatment, by the Medi-Share Review Board: AIDS/ARC/HIV (except HIV contracted from transfusions, verifiable rape reported to law enforcement authorities, or contracted in the practice of a healthcare profession.
- Maternity Pregnancies of Unwed Mothers In accordance with the Scriptures, members must not engage in sex outside of traditional Christian marriage; therefore, Medi-Share Members do not share maternity medical expenses for unwed mothers (except as a result of verifiable rape reported to a law enforcement authority). However, in order to encourage and support the preservation of the lives of these unborn children, Christian Care Ministry is dedicated to assisting in arranging for maternity and adoption services through Christian organizations.
The wording alone is brilliant! In the second case, the use of the singular makes me suspect I could tell a criminology professor that I'd been raped, and it would count, since they'd be an authority on law enforcement! Also, ignoring how hard it is to "verify" rape, these are the same people who rail against government involvement in health care, and then require it. GOOD TIMES! - Fat is a lifestyle choice and against Scripture, like being gay or using drugs! I'll just get right to the citation and let you fill in the blanks:
- Needs Not Shared by Members Lifestyle Changes Failure to follow the Christian lifestyle attested to during the application process can result in needs not being shared and termination of membership. Examples of behavior that can lead to non-sharing include, but are not limited to, the use of tobacco in any form, the abuse of drugs including legal drugs such as alcohol, excessive weight gain (weight that exceeds the Medi-Share height/weight standards), and participation in activities with willful disregard to personal safety.
Which would mean, in the last case, that missionaries to war-torn regions wouldn't be covered, right? - If you thought that, you'd be wrong, at least probably. There is an entire section about how motor vehicle related health care costs must exceed $25,000 in order to be eligible for sharing by the program, but there follows an addendum that suggests that missionaries are allowed to ignore their own personal safety if it's necessary in the culture they're trying to
demolishinfiltrate:- Motorized Vehicle Accidents Missionaries Abroad The $25,000 AMR can be waived for members injured when operating a motorized vehicle or aircraft while performing mission work outside of the United States and its territories. Prior to operating a vehicle or aircraft in a foreign mission field, missionary members should call the Needs Audit and Services Department at (800) 264-2562 to apply for a waiver. A motorbike, motor scooter, or motorcycle can be included in the waiver if it is a common mode of personal transportation in the locale of the mission work.
- As mentioned above, they require that you be HWP! Their criteria, naturally, are not mentioned.
- They're xenophobic and isolationist in spite of supporting the crap out of missionaries abroad! I suppose if you're a crazy Christian ministry based in Florida there's probably some requirement that you hate on the Mexicans and the like. Some excerpts (brought to you by "WHY DON'T YOU JUST COME OUT AND SAY 'NO MEXICANS'!?"):
- Qualifications for Membership Non-U.S. Citizens Only legal residents with a green card or visa and a social security number who live full-time in the United States can qualify for Medi-Share membership. A physical examination and other medical tests may be necessary to determine whether or not the applicant qualifies for membership. [...]
- Qualifications for Membership English Language Required It is essential that the Applicant understand the Medi-Share Guidelines and is able to effectively communicate, as the Member, with Christian Care. Therefore it is necessary that every Medi-Share membership be registered under the name of an adult Member who is able to speak English fluently and read it well enough to thoroughly understand these Guidelines.
NO MEXICANS!
As a parting note, the Christian Testimony that they require:
Statement of Faith:
I believe that thee is one God eternally existing in three Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
I believe that the Bible is God's written revelation to man and that it is verbally inspired, authoritative, and without error in the original manuscripts.
I believe in the deity of Jesus Christ—His virgin birth, sinless life, miracles, death on the cross to provide for our redemption, bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven, present ministry of intercession for us, and His return to earth in power and glory.
I believe in the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit, that He performs the miracle of new birth in an unbeliever and indwells believers, enabling them to live a godly[sic!!!!] life.
I believe that man was created in the image of God, but because of sin was alienated from God. That alienation can be removed only by accepting through faith alone God's gift of salvation which was made possible by Christ's death.
How American! And not just "you must be Christian" but "you must be our particular recent warped idea of what it means to be Christian"! And I really, really suspect that they mean "the King James Bible" when they say "the original manuscripts" -- otherwise it allows for modern translations of the Bible to be in error! And, man, this is
Because packet fragmentation and more time spent in the reassembly queue is totally the best way to cut down latency! FUCK YEAH!
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What should I do for my birthday (approximately February 1)?
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Travel (domestic.) 1 (3.3%)
Travel (international.) 9 (30.0%)
Throw a party. 3 (10.0%)
Host a dinner somewhere. 1 (3.3%)
Throw a dinner party. 4 (13.3%)
Host a dinner somewhere and throw a party. 9 (30.0%)
Other, which I will explain in comments. 1 (3.3%)
Other, which I will not explain in comments cause I hate you. 2 (6.7%)
Which types of food are you interested in?
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Thai. 25 (80.6%)
Japanese. 27 (87.1%)
Mongolian. (хуушуур represent!) 19 (61.3%)
Greek. 17 (54.8%)
Turkish. 19 (61.3%)
Indian. 23 (74.2%)
Chinese. 26 (83.9%)
Anything vegetarian. 14 (45.2%)
Anything with meat. 14 (45.2%)
Imhotep. 11 (35.5%)
Which of the following do you desire in a party?
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Food. 27 (87.1%)
Booze. 16 (51.6%)
Drugs. 7 (22.6%)
Music. 20 (64.5%)
Hot tubs. 12 (38.7%)
Kissing games. 12 (38.7%)
Drinking games. 6 (19.4%)
Board games. 19 (61.3%)
Naked drunk kissing twister. 10 (32.3%)
Movies or TV shows. 8 (25.8%)
Light as a feather stiff as a board. 7 (22.6%)
People from out of town. 17 (54.8%)
Foreign language board games. 11 (35.5%)
Bonfires. 20 (64.5%)
Tom Wolfe. 2 (6.5%)
Where would you be able to attend a party or dinner some time around February 1.
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Seattle, WA. 11 (45.8%)
Olympia, WA. 7 (29.2%)
Portland, OR. 5 (20.8%)
Vancouver, BC. 3 (12.5%)
Depeche Mode. 16 (66.7%)
Would you be interested in playing Rock Band in Olympia some time?
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Yes. 8 (26.7%)
Yes, at a party. 4 (13.3%)
No. 3 (10.0%)
I don't know. 5 (16.7%)
Yes, but there is no way that I could do so. 10 (33.3%)
If a party, when a party?
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Friday, February 1. 12 (50.0%)
Saturday, February 2 (Groundhog day.) 10 (41.7%)
Friday, February 8. 9 (37.5%)
Saturday, February 9. 7 (29.2%)
This past Tuesday, February NaN. 12 (50.0%)
Smart-assed options...
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Too many. 1 (3.3%)
Too few. 1 (3.3%)
Just right. 10 (33.3%)
Goldilocks had no business being there in the first place. 18 (60.0%)
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Have you ever had a dream where at least one non-human animal could talk?
How old were you when you got a passport?
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0-6 11 (13.3%)
7-10 6 (7.2%)
11-16 21 (25.3%)
17-20 7 (8.4%)
21-25 15 (18.1%)
26-35 10 (12.0%)
36-50 2 (2.4%)
51-+Inf 0 (0.0%)
I've never had a passport. 10 (12.0%)
I don't remember. 1 (1.2%)
How many countries have you set foot in?
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1 0 (0.0%)
2-3 30 (36.1%)
4-6 14 (16.9%)
7-10 23 (27.7%)
11-20 11 (13.3%)
21-30 3 (3.6%)
31-+Inf 2 (2.4%)
I don't have any feet. 0 (0.0%)
When did you last set foot in a church?
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Within the last day. 1 (1.2%)
Within the last week. 4 (4.8%)
Within the last month. 15 (18.1%)
Within the last 3 months. 13 (15.7%)
Within the last year. 16 (19.3%)
Within the last 5 years. 24 (28.9%)
Within the last 10 years. 5 (6.0%)
Longer ago than 10 years. 5 (6.0%)
I've never set foot in a church. 0 (0.0%)
Which of the following have you cooked/baked at home?
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Some rice. 79 (95.2%)
Some rolls or a loaf of bread 66 (79.5%)
A hamburger. 61 (73.5%)
Some french fries. 49 (59.0%)
Some sushi rice. 35 (42.2%)
A pizza. 74 (89.2%)
Gyro/doner meat. 3 (3.6%)
Deep-fried won ton/wun tun. 20 (24.1%)
Some rolled (maki) sushi. 30 (36.1%)
Some pretzels or bagels. 20 (24.1%)
Beef wellington. 8 (9.6%)
Fried tofu. 34 (41.0%)
I don't cook/bake. 5 (6.0%)
I do cook/bake but have never cooked/baked any of the above. 2 (2.4%)
Cooking is for suckers. 13 (15.7%)
No vibrating pews. And no light, flaky Eucharist for us today. Just Compline, which was nice enough.
A friend of mine in Mongolia is a student there and her dream is to come to the US. She recently earned a scholarship for a program to live and work in the US for her summer vacation put together by the Center for Youth Educational Cultural Exchange. They help arrange a J1 visa and provide preparation, support and help arrange a service industry job so the student can work on their English proficiency and gain some hands-on experience with the US (they, most notably, do not pay airfare, though they do claim to help arrange it.) It's like a student exchange program, without an educational aspect. As she spent some time with
corivax and I while we were in Ulaanbaatar, she is turning to me for some advice.Unfortunately, I'm roughly clueless. I've never been a foreign exchange student or been in a family that took one in, and my only foreign travel of note has been the Mongol Rally. I know she cannot hope to work off the debt that she would incur for travel costs just by doing service industry work for a few months in the US - truthfully, she probably makes better money working as a tour guide in Olgiy, which is how she normally spends her summers. But she has the opportunity to do this thing now and has worked very hard to get this far alone. She, rightly, is worried about how much of a scam this sort of thing might be, and while I get some dodgy vibe off of the ECE's website, that could also be because they're running a small, imperfect program with the aims of helping out what few people they can. If they were a US-based organization, I'd almost know where to start looking, but as it is I can't even figure out what name I should be looking up.
They pointed her at a website called J1 Jobs to find employment opportunities for J1 visa holders, but if there's a better place to look, I'd love to point her at it. Something along the lines of a work experience program seems like it would make more sense than one of the service industry (or housekeeping!) jobs this place seems to specialize in. She's studying International Relations and Business, and I don't think it's going to further her view of America or her education to be away from home all summer just to keep house in the US. I don't even see how she'd have the opportunity to travel here and get to see much of the US with the sort of schedules those sorts of jobs mandate and the little flexibility they allow.
So I turn to you, LiveJournal. Does this seem like a bunch of scam (or perhaps scamola)? Is there something better I should point her at? I want to do everything I can to help, even if that includes telling her to stay away from this program and look for a better opportunity. Whenever she ends up visiting the US, I certainly hope to push her to see as much of it as she can, but while some amount of sacrifice from her seems reasonable to try to attain her dreams, she shouldn't give up a summer of real work to go further in to debt than she's seen money in her lifetime. I know a guy in Mongolia who went to school in Canada, so I'll certainly ping him, but the perspective of anyone with more clue on this (or just more people chiming in having glanced at the website with whether it looks bogus) would be terribly appreciated. I also don't want to talk her into passing up on something which would actually be a good opportunity.
Thanks, smart folks!
Juli.
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Have you ever found a rock in lentils?
View Answers
Yes. 28 (50.0%)
No. 14 (25.0%)
It was not a rock...it was a rock lobster! 21 (37.5%)
I don't eat lentils. 5 (8.9%)
I don't eat rocks. 17 (30.4%)
ETA: I'm surprised how many salt abstainers I know!
- Mood:ow my teeth
81% Mitt Romney
79% Tom Tancredo
74% Mike Huckabee
71% John McCain
56% Ron Paul
55% Rudy Giuliani
30% Hillary Clinton
30% Joe Biden
29% John Edwards
27% Barack Obama
25% Chris Dodd
24% Bill Richardson
18% Mike Gravel
14% Dennis Kucinich
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz
- If you are going to organize an online Hymnal from a variety of sources including MIDI versions of the music and all of the words, how the hell can you justify not presenting the music visually? (Yes I could walk three feet for a copy, but that's beside the point.)
- The big local Episcopal church does separate Adult Baptism and Adult Confirmation, somehow missing the point that Adult Baptism is like Baptism before Infant Baptism, which was a conscious choice made in good faith by someone above the age of maturity capable of making an informed decision and the commitment that would bring them in to the church. And yet, their Adult Baptism (without Confirmation) has an prerequisite of being informed and committed and acting on your own behalf in good faith. Confirmation was split out from Infant Baptism because Infant Baptism was not representative of a choice and knowledge and commitment and faith on behalf of the person being Baptised, it was a commitment on the part of the parents to raise the child in the church and to educate them, and made in good faith reflected only on the soul of the infant, not their bodily status within the church. Some churches offer a separate ceremony for adults who want the fully redundant ritual experience that their Infant Baptised peers have, but for the most part Adult Baptism is inclusive of Confirmation, and adults are Baptised in the same ritual as children reaching maturity are Confirmed. I find a broken theological understanding the only possible basis for Adult Baptism(+Confirmation) with a further requirement for later Confirmation. The underpinnings of faith in a person who has completed the Journey that church guides for adults seeking Baptism must be extraordinarily weak, which is the only possible excuse I can see for needing a second Confirmation to be Right by the Church, which seems to imply that the Church is at least misleading the adults it Baptises about the meaning of the ritual they undergo, and possibly acting in bad faith the first time they confirm them. Not a church for me, if they can't get the most fundamental of rites right.
- Not every small parish church really needs to develop their own website infrastructure. In fact, they should be discouraged. The results are either unnavigable, laughable or just plain broken. I'm not even sure they should have the option. A Diocese the size of ours can certainly warrant hosting a CMS with varying degrees of customization.
- Churches whose main page is dominated by pictures of tailgate parties win over my cold, black heart, no matter how High Church I might think of my leanings.
- Churches whose main page is dominated by conspicuous displays of wealth, large agrammatical copyright statements and a few vague mentions of one or two social programs make my cold black heart a little colder, a little blacker.
- Churches whose main page is dominated by mentions of how remote their location is and a Biblical genealogy style explanation of how they came upon their current Organ (and where their old one went, and where the one that it displaced went, ad absurdum) get my black heart back up to somewhere just short of room temperature. Sunday plans: apparent.
- The local Episcopal church with strange ideas about Baptism has a Compline choir and weekly Compline, at least, which avoids any theological head-butting and provides something to do with Sunday evenings.
- A distant, but drivable, Episcopal church set in woods with lots of natural light and general nature abundance does a Monday Evensong that will definitely be worth hitting come longer days and summer weather!
- Church shopping is hard. And tedious. (But kind of perversely fun.)
Remarkably, [Obama] even beat Hillary Clinton among women [in the Iowa Democratic caucus.]
Because women don't understand this whole politics thing and would totally all vote for a woman given a chance. All women are hoping for Handbag Thursdays to be instituted as a national holiday, and Sex and the City Saturdays, "so many of us already live our lives around handbags and TV shows where extravagant single women talk about the raunchy details of their sex lives and hang out with gay men that we really think it's time there was a candidate who speaks to us and for us and – most importantly – is willing to gossip with us," said one caucus-going woman.
"I won't vote for anyone without a uterus, a vulva and a bleached anus. Those boys don't have the balls to do what it takes," she added over a Cosmo, while reading Cosmo, standing under a statue of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, since all Democrats want the US to be like the Soviet Union.
Obama's victory with women was clearly an upset by those tomboyish farm women who are totally all lesbians anyway and thus don't count as women, and thus aren't lesbians, and thus are just tomboys, and thus are really FTMs, and thus are really women, and thus couldn't possibly have voted for anyone but Hillary "The Clit" Clinton.
Reporting for ABC News in Hickville, Iowa, Mike Misogynist. I mean Gary Langer. Dickhead.
Tell my family about cities.
Spend more time with my ad-hominem networks.
Put fifty entropy sources a month into my savings account.
Volunteer to spend time with cargo cults.
Spend less time on symbolism.
Buy new shadows.
I would like to do all of those things but one! (I can finally get that blue shadow I've been wanting!)
The last few days of the year are such weird limbo. Somebody should tell the people who think they're going to get $800 for a Wii on eBay right now that. (And why would you want one when you can get a Dreamcast, Marvel vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for $100! All the 4096 hit combos you need to make your life more interesting.)
It is illegal to classify someone as an independent contractor if they are not an independent contractor. You may not classify someone as an independent contractor if you control how, when and where they do their work. You may only control the end product.
Thanks much,
Juli, who was just told "Thank you for your time." when asked if a "contract-to-hire" position would allow her to actually be an independent contractor in addition to being classed as one, by a recruiter who tried to sell "contract-to-hire" positions as some new, up-and-coming thing that all companies were totally moving towards because of convenience. Cause hiring people is hard. I want the convenience of doing my work naked on my couch, then, assholes.
PS: I do not have a hard time finding at-will employment where I am classified as an employee. Implying otherwise is just gauche.
PPS: I really wish Washington mandated health care for full-time employees, in which case it'd be fun to start as a wrongly-classified full-time employee, rack up some expensive health care, and then sue for the full amount plus damages. Alas.
( Edited to add: latest email from recruiter. )
I don't like long flights very much, as a result, because it's very easy to feel very trapped. I mean, what if I got all panicky a few minutes in to the flight, and then there was nothing I could do for the next, oh, eight hours? That feeling along is often enough to create the panic attack in the first place. It's miserable, broken brain malfunction that I inherited, and I do my best to control it. I've taken a couple hundred milligrams of Lorazepam in my lifetime because (for reasons of placebo or otherwise) of flights. According to the Interwebs, I've spent a bit more than a week of my life in the air, and almost all of that in the last five years.
So I am rather horrified when the conservative nutjobs latch on to video of someone clearly having a panic attack (whatever the circumstances) on an airplane and start saying that the only possible explanation for his behavior was a desire to blow everyone up. By shouting and begging for water and throwing himself back and forth in his seat as people tried to restrain him. Shit, I've done a lot worse than that during a panic attack. He lashed out at the people trying to restrain and calm him — something else I've done. I'm no terrorist. All of the armchair psych people trying to justify causes for the panic (schizophrenia is a common one, which is just short of bizarre coming from someone acknowledging it as a panic attack.)
Of course they spend a lot of time discussing the TOTAL FACT that this guy was OBVIOUSLY being extradited and that the people next to him were CLEARLY CIA. Much more obvious that some people who'd encountered this sort of thing before (and may have been in the employ of the airline — in this case our enemies the Canadians) and who were trying to do what was best for him while looking out for the rest of the people on the plane. They knew his name SO CLEARLY HE WAS THEIR PRISONER. Because it's not like the airline knows the name of every person on the flight and where they're sitting. And standard approaches for calming someone down from a state like that often include trying to get their name out of them and using it repeatedly to try and reconnect them to the world around them.
And he was totally screaming ALLAH AKBAR (and fifty other spellings the conservatives like the bandy about.) Not that I don't beg my god for some sort of something when I'm having a panic attack. He was clearly going to blow up the plane with his unfortunate adrenaline reaction. And he was clearly a "nut" and probably a "terrorist". I wonder if I'm exempted from that by virtue of not being brown or Muslim, or if I can be a target of violent hate, too. I mean, my flying experience just wouldn't be optimal without knowing that someone's "first instinct would be to jam a pencil through [someone having a panic attack's] ear just to make [them] shut the frig up." And what kind of person restrains themselves from dropping the f-bomb, substituting "frig", while advocating deadly violence against some random person?
For bonus us and them bigotry:
And while you can’t generalise about all Indian Muslims, etc, etc…..it’s good to see that apparently they want us dead too.
Not that the people on YouTube are much better:
I would've cracked that fucker's skull for saying "fucking white people"
Yeah! FUCK THOSE SAND NIGGERS! They better not talk shit about white people or we'll fuck their shit up!
Good times!
(As an aside, thanks to
arjache and corivax for putting up with me in the throes of panic attacks way more often than any of us would've liked! *grin*)corivax holds my skin steady.
“Hate speech” is defined as material which encourages violence against a particular ethnic, religious, or racial group.
Even Wikipedia knows better. Now that's what I call revolting!
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Are you a programmer?
View Answers
Yes, by education and trade. 20 (37.0%)
By education, but not by trade. 4 (7.4%)
Not by education, but by trade. 8 (14.8%)
No. 10 (18.5%)
Other. 12 (22.2%)
Which of the following would you say that you hate?
View Answers
Programming. 10 (22.2%)
Programmers. 20 (44.4%)
Programming languages. 8 (17.8%)
Functional programming languages. 5 (11.1%)
Non-functional programming languages. 17 (37.8%)
Dysfunctional programming languages. 34 (75.6%)
Templates (as seen in C++.) 21 (46.7%)
Pointers (as seen in C.) 8 (17.8%)
Functions. 2 (4.4%)
References (as seen in C++.) 13 (28.9%)
Forward-declarations (as seen in C.) 15 (33.3%)
External storage declarations (as seen in C.) 16 (35.6%)
List comprehensions (as seen in Python or Haskell.) 3 (6.7%)
Lambdas (as seen in Lisp.) 5 (11.1%)
Anonymous functions (as seen in JavaScript.) 9 (20.0%)
Scripting languages. 6 (13.3%)
Typedefs (as seen in C.) 13 (28.9%)
Pattern-matching (as seen in Haskell.) 4 (8.9%)
Regular expressions (as seen in Perl.) 9 (20.0%)
Strings (as seen in C.) 23 (51.1%)
This LiveJournal poll. 16 (35.6%)
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.
It stirs up thoughts about our prohibition on gay marriage and "In God we trust" in modern times, for such as me. Perhaps to a fundamentalist it is about separation of church and state (with great irony given Paine's own feelings.) Perhaps it is the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. In any event, the words that follow it seem amply comforting, though it is hard to not take that comfort as being implored to wait, bide time and do nothing — indeed, it is the opposite.
... But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Full text here from Project Gutenberg.
I need a fluent (ideally native) Mandarin speaker who can call the hotel
corivax and I stayed at in Huhhot, Inner Mongolia. Their business center was supposed to ship the calligraphy we commissioned in Mongolia home to us, but a few weeks after we got home they said they needed more money. They aren't very responsive to email, and we need to change our destination address since we've moved in the mean time, in addition to figuring out how to get them more money, which they've been shifty about. They were supposed to charge our FedEx account number, but they've come back and said that FedEx China cannot bill to international FedEx accounts. We're prepared to trust them with a credit card number or mailing of a check, bad ideas though those be, but we'd like to make sure we both understand what's going on before doing that, and going through their language seems more likely to work than going through ours.If you or someone you know has the Mandarin knowledge and is willing to help us out, please let me know. We can pay for the international calls and some negotiable amount on top of that. I'm willing to hire a professional service if anyone has personal recommendations, but I'd rather try friends and friends of friends first.
Please let me know!
Juli.
Of course, it turns out (small print at the bottom of the page) that they make the WSDOT page available, including traffic maps. Everything is going through some sort of proxy, which makes sense given that they're using a Hughes satellite data service. They're using something which refers to itself as doing TCP Acceleration which seems to be intercepting HTTP requests. It is painfully obvious, immediately, that this isn't something high-quality like what Riverbed makes, this is bottom of the barrel.
A malformed HTTP request? It doesn't get to the server on the other side. It just goes to the proxy they're using. Moreover, their proxy seems to be on the other side of the satellite link, while their TCP Acceleration is on the local side of the satellite link, which they would have to do, so that makes sense. The problem is that their HTTP parser is downright miserable - they should be able to terminate a connection by the first newline or the first chunk of data, but for some reason they don't do this, in spite of doing invasive inspection and termination of data from the start. You can send endless nonsense at it which breaks the TCP Accelerator and briefly shuts down the satellite link. They're not even rate-limiting unpaid users.
Beyond that, though, they use the HTTP/1.1 "Host" header to determine where to send the request on the other side. So you can telnet to port 80 on one of the IPs they allow access to and supply a bogus Host header. That said, a GET request doesn't work for a Host other than those allowed, as far as I could tell. Mind, they seem to endlessly search an access list (or to at least present a silent failure mode) if the Host specified is not one of those allowed, which is not an ideal response.
What they don't do, however, is restrict 'HEAD' requests. It is downright trivial to create a proxy server that uses HTTP/1.1 HEAD requests and responses to do bulk HTTP data transfers. It's only slightly more difficult (but still trivial) to create a proxy for all forms of network traffic which operates via HEAD. We live about 10 miles from the nearest Road Connect WiFi Hot Spot. I am dreadfully tempted to throw something together as a proof of concept (though I did verify that my server sends unfiltered headers in response to a HEAD request already) and go give it a try in the field. I desperately hope the Great State of Washington doesn't waste our money on this crap. I've developed better systems in a weekend.
I'm kind of horrified - I can't imagine many software developers who could get away with this sort of nonsense in an open market with competition. LiveJournal could provide continuity of service for people who want to more or less maintain membership in the LJ community through use of OpenID and rename tokens, but move their journals to external hosting without this sort of absurdity, but I'm not aware of anyone who's tried to perform some sort of transparent migration with OpenID accounts and rename tokens, but it really seems like someone ought to write up a way to do so if there is one, and we ought to all pressure SixApart to create one if there is not. It's becoming abundantly clear that while we may all value the LJ community and the infrastructure it allows us for communication and socialization and the like, SixApart does not value the traditional high quality of LiveJournal and it practically looks down upon LiveJournal users, seeing them as nothing but a source of Ad Revenue, and with an increasingly narrow understanding of the community and the (paying or otherwise) users who make it up.
Such great LJers as
substitute and catamorphism use tags at great length as a component to the posts they write and the entertainment and interaction they provide through their journals. That SixApart makes up for its technological inadequacy by suspending the accounts of people who have paid for a lifetime subscription to LiveJournal (which in most cases still hasn't paid for itself vs. buying a paid account monthly or even yearly) is unbelievable.( An anonymous support response to a question by catamorphism about this issue: )
- Location:Angryville, CT
- Mood:
bitchy
I drank a lot of it on Saturday night.
- Mood:
accomplished
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
Would you ever get your DNA sequenced?
If someone else were going to sequence your DNA, would you want to know the results?
If you were going to know the results of a DNA sequencing of yourself, are any of the following things you would ignore / ask not to be told?
View Answers
Propensity for Alzheimer's. 10 (40.0%)
Any sort of hereditary illness. 8 (32.0%)
Ethnicity. 9 (36.0%)
The gay, or other stigmatized sexual preference/fetish/brokenness/... (transsexuality, pedophilia, ...), that could conceivably have a DNA marker. 8 (32.0%)
The miniature CIA radios in my DNA are broadcasting a stage play the Wizard of Oz! Wait, now they're switching to Equus. Oh God. Aaaaaa! 17 (68.0%)
corivax and I have been sick and corivax has been overworked for the past week. We're feeling a fair bit better today, which is great because we didn't really want to call the thing off, but we would appreciate it if, for them as are coming, you didn't come until around 7pm if at all possible, so we have a bit of extra time to clean and cook and such, since we need a bit more sleep today than hoped. (i.e. I have not been able to sleep in spite of trying since 2am or so.)Love,
juli!
I chose to not link to any of their posts as I find them emotionally-charged and very heavy-handed. On top of that, other people I know who have been participating and posting have a habit of referring to all Police as "pigs" and to seemingly genuine shock and offense at their childish attempts to get a rise out of Police and Military people in the past succeeding. There are frequent logical fallacies that render their sentiments difficult to reconcile with reality, and there is frequent backpedaling which is very unsuited to the medium (A comments "X", B says to A "X iff Y; not Y", A says to B "I never asserted X", which is pretty black and white in text.)
However I am sympathetic to pleas for information to be passed on. The only cold, hard facts I can offer are videos from The Olympian and other local sources. The one above is the most recent. The first that I saw was this one, which includes such highlights as chanting of "fuck you" at the police interrupted briefly by a
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
Will you be coming to corivax's and my housewarming this Saturday, November 17th, in Olympia? (If you intend to bring guests, that's great, but please give us some idea how many in the comments.)
If you do come, will you need crash space?
Would you be able to help with transport for folks coming from Seattle?
View Answers
I can bring one person who needs a ride. 2 (8.0%)
I can bring a couple of people who need rides. 2 (8.0%)
I can bring several people who need rides. 2 (8.0%)
I don't think so. 19 (76.0%)
Our address is 1718 Jasmine St NW, Olympia, WA. We will have booze and food and Mongol Rally pictures. We will probably also be playing board games or similar. We may set up glasswork stuff depending on whether we can clear an appropriate space somewhere - unlike the last house which had a room with a bare concrete floor, we do not have a good indoor lab space. We could do glasswork in the garage, but there are obvious discomforts due to the weather this year, and the cold can shock the glass causing shattering, in addition to making it harder to keep a piece warm with the equipment we have. We might do small-scale glasswork indoors in spite of the omnipresent carpet. Any suggestions or requests are welcome in comments.
As we have people coming in from out of town, there will be some amount of socialness and house-cleanliness all day Saturday, but we would request that folks show up in the late afternoon to early evening. Show up as late as you want, as I'm sure we'll keep going into the night.
I might make some rye kvas, but am weary of serving home-fermented drinks to guests! I don't want to make anyone ill.
Also, I have some dry sausage from Mongolia left over that I am increasingly disinclined to eat myself as I backslide into the loving arms of vegetarianism. Animal unknown. They are small sticks for snacking on. You should come gnaw on one if you are so inclined.
- Location:1718 Jasmine St NW, Olympia, WA
- Music:Twin Peaks
- Location:Flavor country
corivax: Well, you know, the police are supposed to show up and give them gum drops -- they're not sure why this isn't happening. Gum drops, I tell you!ETA: Yesterday I made:
Mozzarella, yoghurt, vanilla bean and meyer lemon ice cream!
- Location:1718 Jasmine St NW, Olympia, WA
- Mood:
amused
- Mood: cheerful
I am appalled at the apparently-in-earnest use of "GLBT" in this email where "GLB" is clearly meant.
I got what seems to be a form letter in response (but at least it's not centered.)
We understand your concern and anger at the situation; the email you received was meant to acknowledge this important first step to fight workplace discrimination and not in anyway celebratory of the fact that our transgender brothers and sisters were not included in this bill. We want you to know that we will not stop fighting for the inclusion of gender identity in ENDA.
Although we decided to support this version of ENDA in the final hour, throughout the entire process our goal was to have a fully inclusive bill go to the floor. The disagreement on strategies by advocates for equality should not make us question each other's commitment to the common goal of getting protection for all members of our community. The truth is our real enemies will stop at nothing to prevent equality from moving forward for GLBT people. That the extreme right wing is doing all they can to lobby for the defeat of ENDA, but it has nothing to do with whether or not it includes gender identity. Their goal is to simply have our movement fail and for ENDA to die in Congress, which would severely hinder any chance of protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans.
While the bill Congress passed this week was not the bill we wanted, the Human Rights Campaign decided to stay at the table with Congress to ensure that millions of Americans receive the protections they deserve, and because passage of this bill is a first and absolutely necessary step toward preventing discrimination based on gender identity. Very soon, HRC will launch a new initiative to ramp up efforts on educating Congress on the importance of including gender identity in ENDA and protecting the entire gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. HRC continues to break down barriers in the corporate world through our Workplace Project. This year a record 195 major U.S. businesses earned the top rating of 100 percent on our Corporate Equality Index, and for the first time, a majority of rated firms - 58 percent - provide employment protections on the basis of gender identity.
The bottom line: The commitment of HRC's Board of Directors for a fully inclusive bill has not changed. Because HRC stayed at the table, something we will continue to do, we were able to secure an unprecedented commitment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Without a doubt, the only path to achieving a bill protecting our whole community was by securing passage on this historic vote.
After twelve years of hostile leadership, we have come so far and changed so many hearts and minds. Only a year ago, it never seemed possible that we could pass any GLBT legislation. For the first time in history, both houses of Congress passed a hate crimes bill, and for the first time ever a workplace antidiscrimination law passed in the House. Even a year ago, we could not imagine this coming to fruition. Our fight will not be won overnight; it will be won one step at a time.
Whether or not you stand with HRC, we hope that you will continue to take action in the fight for equality for the entire GLBT community.
Respectfully,
Dana Campbell
Dana L. Campbell
Member Services Coordinator
Human Rights Campaign
1640 Rhode Island Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20036
202.216.1500 (p)
202.216.1505 (f)
It's funny how their glorious leader writes "gay and lesbian and the occasional bisexual not that they exist" and they automatically convert that to "GLBT." Maybe it's my fault for viewing his HTML email in Lynx. Maybe it was actually
GLB<s>T</s>.( The letter of the lol. )
corivax and I have a space in the 2009 Mongol Rally. We hope to use the year and a half to become prepared enough to do it on the cheap. We're thinking we'll do it in a Daihatsu HiJet again - you can't beat a car that you survive a roll in - which would also mean we could do it in a larger team, which might be fun, we think. I'm planning to help organize visas for US citizens doing the 2008 Rally and possibly to help out at the launch from London.Also:
yoshio (and any other The The fans), did you see that there's an M&Ms commercial using "This Is The Day"? I am disturbed! Having proper TV is scary.ETA: The Mongol Rally 2008 signup window is currently open. You should all go to the Rally homepage, create an account, and click the "sign me up" link on your homepage! Everyone should do the Mongol Rally. It will be open for a little under a day from now. Places will be assigned randomly to all who sign up in this window and those who signed up in the previous one but did not get a place.
And if anyone knows someone who would be able to help me import some Chernigivske Svitle from Ukraine for the upcoming housewarming, I'd be greatly appreciated. I've found a source for Maggi Hot and have a friend in Russia sending us some Paprichi Shashlyk sauce, but it just wouldn't be complete without delicious Ukrainian beer. (And dried, smoked mozzarella braids, but I hold out hope that I can find them locally.) I'm new to this import/export thing, and while it's fun to use random sources, it can be a pain finding them! :)
And even if he doesn't, at least i have his phone number now.
Things can only get better?
