Archive for January, 2005

software licensing vs. food

Monday, January 31st, 2005

“Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger,”

said Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group.

bday party in louisville

Sunday, January 30th, 2005

i went to louisville for mike and billy’s drag birthday party with madeline and hannah. it was good to get out of town, though perhaps inopportune timing given that there’s a ton of stuff to get done for tour. it was nice to hang out with the louisville kids and to dress like a woman. madeline did far better dressing as a man, despite the last minuteness of her getup. transformed by an emporer cutoff t-shirt, a hyperrealist hat, and a thin, pencilled on mustache, the casualness with which she dropped dudish one-liners was crazy. when she played, as “mad dog”, it was amazing, alternating between dudish song descriptions like “this song is about my car” and her usual amazing playing. the part of the uncle murder ballad #2 where she sings “never shoot at moving things, just feels good in my hand, makes me feel more threatening makes me feel like a man,” made her burst into giggles which was real funny and nice. the party was marked by some akward dancing from me, some crazy sexy dancing from jamie, corey, and shakes, and some even crazier sexy dancing from a cadre of teenaged burlesque girls, and these girls who showed up from nowhere dressed in this amazing hip-hop thug getup. i drove madeline’s car back fast up i-65 and got to work two hours late, seemingly without consequence. i feel groggy now.

110685780480166758

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

i decided to walk up 7th street to work today. it seems like i always ride up 6th these days. maybe the change today happened because i was walking and 6th is less hilly and more fun to ride a bike on, or maybe, feeling better about other things, my subconscious didn’t need to direct me to walk one block closer, hoping for a chance meeting at an intersection.

i walked up the hill towards the elementary school. “walk faster,” i said out loud, my words freezing as they exited my mouth. i did walk faster, shivering, as if the cold were a bully waiting to pummel me from behind some bushes on the way to school.

heating problems

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

the heating guy from airtech came today. seemed to be in a rush. one thing that he noticed was that the thermostat was wired wrong so that the air conditioning was coming on along with the heat, so they were working against each other, not heating very efficiently. he said that the furnace would also need a thorough cleaning and that he would talk with the land lord to schedule that. I mentioned the duct problems to the heating guy and he said that they could check that out and give an estimate when they came to clean the furnace.

counter-inaugural protest coverage

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Protesters Target Bush’s Inauguration
Demonstrators make it loud and clear: polarization trails Bush into second term
Late Protest Shattered Event’s Relative Calm

monitoring mysql

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

so it looks like the bottleneck for most indymedia installations is mysql. the mtop tool might be useful for determining when its neccessary to switch over to more static content or to do some kind of cacheing.

http://mtop.sourceforge.net/

this article seems helpful too:

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/newsletter/2004-01/a0000000301.html

configuring linksys befw11s4 as ap only

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

this page:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,2737069~root=equip,16~mode=flat

was pretty helpful after struggling for about an hour with this.

primer on audio compression

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

this article which was on /. might come in handy if i ever work on adding ogg tagging to cctools (if it hasn’t been implemented already)

socially conscious tsunami relieve

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

jonny mayhem posted this on friendster:

I know that this a week late, but for those of you
who are looking to give money to tsunami relief
but want to be sure that you not are supporting an
NGO with questionable politics, here is a list of
organizations that are a safe bet.

This list is at Grantmakers Without Borders

http://www.gwob.net/issues/tsunami_dec2004.htm

If you are interested in the criteria that GWB
used when making the list

http://radicalreference.info/node/487?PHPSESSID=24d51d7384a04dda6fe95a0ba21d8ae2

best answering machine message ever

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

sparky vs. the telemarketer