I missed the news that four have been arrested in connection with Nick Berg’s murder. Thanks to C. Smash for pointing it out. Head over there, he’s got plenty of good stuff. Make sure you read the profile of Nick Popaditch here.

I took Jeff‘s quiz too:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Test

Yeah, yeah, so I dig slappin’ skins. Banish me to the second level of hell. I’ll just go find me some Helen of Troy to spend eternity with.

I just got finished making a Libranet install CD. My lil’ sister’s boyfriend gave my mom a computer a while back to replace her very old one. It’s a 266 mhz Packard-Bell that spent it’s last year of service constantly being worked on by yours truly. It was falling apart and had a lot of trouble running win2k. Today I plugged in an NIC and am planning on turning it into a linux box for use behind the firewall. Should be good practice with Linux, the best way to learn something is to just do it, after all. And it’ll be nice to have someplace on the home network for me to run scripts on big files without eating up cycles on my primary office machine. Libranet has a lot of features that I probably will rarely use, since I plan on accessing it solely through terminals once it’s set up. It looks like a good place to start though. And it’s a free operating system!

Big news for today: These guys had the first successful rocket launch into space by a private, amateur organization. Also, Ali al-Sistani publicly challenged al-Sadr‘s position today, urging Shi’ites to locally protest the military occupation of Mosques in Najaf and Karbala by Sadr’s thugs, and asked for both Coalition and Sadr’s armed men to withdraw from those cities and allow police to resume control. Big stuff.

I’ve been burned out lately, and getting irritable, so I’m taking the day off. Mowed my girl’s lawn this morning. Now I’m getting ready to watch Reign of Fire. I’ve already watched the first fifteen minutes or so. There’s a fairly nifty scene of post-apocalyptic entertainment devices. The heroes act out the scene from Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader reveals his paternity to Luke, using an odd narrative register. That sort of thing is fairly interesting. There’s a scene in the Terminator where a kid is staring at a TV that has a fire going inside it. Always stuck with me for some reason. Big game tonight, Matty Mo versus Tom Glavine in NY. Maybe I’ll go watch it. Hit the batting cages, too. That always picks me up.

This is kind of an eerie picture, painted by some dude with the same name as my pop and bro.

Took a trip to STL Thursday, Friday, and returned yesterday morning. Been busy this weekend with my girlfriend and her sister’s graduations. Check out Belmont Club for some analysis on the Rumsfeld/Myers visit to Iraq and other good stuff. I won’t have time to write much until tomorrow.

I had far too much fun playing with this website. The language technology there is pretty rudimentary. Weaker than King’s Quest I Sierra On-line systems. Still funny though. Here’s an article about him.

I think I might have lost focus quite a bit the past few days, and at least today. Got into a little disagreement with some nitwit over in Hawspipe’s comment section. Found this accusation worth noting.

But all of that stuff is unimportant. What’s important is routing these terrorists. Killing them or capturing them and bringing them to trial. The reward for actionable intelligence against Ayman Al-Zarqawi is $10 million. Maybe it’s time to increase that. Figure out where Nick Berg was kidnapped, and track down the barbarians who did it. Rip up the network. Put the squeeze on the arabic news channels, track down who posted that disgusting video. Find these monsters where they sleep and give them new accomodations six feet lower. I’m pissed off. Really steamed. Now to breathe deeply, and immerse myself in work so I can take a few days off tomorrow. Have some fun. Take my mom out for supper.

(This replaces a post I had here earlier and now find innappropriate.)

Kevin Connors at SSDB points out the connection between AG and the Stanford Prison Experiment that I made a week or so ago. (Aren’t I fecking clever?)

He also makes the connection between what went on there and the far worse things that happen in domestic prisons and are the routine subject of blase jokes. This sort of thing really sickens me. But the press is silent about it. I have no idea what to do to reform the prison system in this country. Drug de-criminalization is probably a good place to start. Put the drug money in the hands of the guys running the gas stations and away from the thugs hanging out behind it. Break up the cartels with the power of the market.

In any case, a prison term shouldn’t carry a quiet death sentence from AIDS. And people who joke about this sort of thing are low, senseless trash.

Jeez! My nephew is getting fat! Happy eighth week birthday, little dude.

I’m no lawyer, but the jury nullification practice makes no sense to me. Read a story like this, involving a fourteen year old boy who was lynched in 1955 for whistling at a man’s wife. The jury nullified, finding the murderers not-guilty in the face of compelling evidence. In cases where the crime is so heinous, and the jury nullification is so obvious and contrary to the public good, as in the Emmett Till case or the OJ Simpson case (although I don’t see any evidence that he’s killed anyone since then), the jurors become accomplices to the crime.

Just got this massmail:

A boil order is in effect until further notice for University of Illinois

campus buildings. A contractor hit a water main near the northwest corner

of Bevier Hall (at the intersection of Goodwin Avenue and Gregory Drive).

The water pressure in campus buildings dropped below an acceptable level

but has since been restored. As a result, the Illinois Environmental

Protection Agency mandates a boil order until samples can be taken and

analyzed. That will take at least 24 hours. People in University of

Illinois campus buildings should boil all water used for drinking and

cooking until further notice. The water can be used for washing, but

should not be used for drinking or cooking until deemed safe in accordance

with the Illinois EPA.

EEEEEKK!!!

This is the third email I’ve gotten related to this today. The first one said, don’t use any toilets above the first floor. A main broke and they don’t have enough water pressure to flush. That came at 12:30. Then a copy of it, forwarded from one of the secretaries. Then at 2:08 another secretary emails my department not to drink the water. Then at 2:30, at least two hours after the main broke, everyone on campus is told not to drink their water.

Way to be on the ball, dudes.

I’m surprised this page hasn’t been updated to reflect any of the UNSCAM news.

Blackfive has more on Brian Chontosh’s heroism, mentioned four posts down. In this account is this observation about the scarcity of such stories in the press:

That’s what doesn’t seem to be making the evening news. Accounts of American valor are dismissed by the press as propaganda, yet accounts of American difficulties are heralded as objectivity. It makes you wonder if the role of the media is to inform, or to depress – to report or to deride.

I think it’s pretty clear by now what the majority of those in the journalism business think their role to be. The point is also taken up here.

This has been the best semester I’ve had in a long time. I added two very useful skills to my bag o’ tricks. One was learning the scripting language Python. Before I’d use Ada as my main programming language. I never liked C++ much, it seems sorta sloppy to me, and I didn’t get good enough at Java to bother using it over Ada. Python lets you get a lot of work done with very little code, and the pickle package is super handy. The other is the LaTeX markup language, which lets you make very professional looking papers. I only started learning that a week ago, but found it significantly useful that I’ll be using it for all my papers for now on. This means I can leave behind the world of Microsoft Word forever, and all my writing will be done in notepad. Or vim.

Of course, my classes were also interesting, and think my skills with protools have reached about the peak for what I need it for… That just as we’re getting rid of ProTools and going with Bias Peak as our combined recording/editing platform. Works for me. I dig Peak.

Blogger was updated over the weekend with some very impressive improvements. Now individual posts are stored in their own page on the blogspot server. Just click on Link above this page to see for yourself. This makes blogger-powered blogs post-searchable, meaning that a google search will eventually take you to the individual post, and not just that month’s archive. This is a welcome improvement. They also added their own MT-style commenting feature, where instead of a window opening, you’d be taken to the post’s webpage and could add comments therein. I’m testing it out now, so haloscan comments are gone for the time being, but if the blogger comments don’t work out I’ll resurrect them. One of the nice features of their commenting system is that it sends me an email when I get a comment, something that BlogBack did but Haloscan doesn’t. It’s nice when some jackwipe googles in to an archive page and posts some nonsense. Then I know where to go to lay down a verbal beating.

Just a tip to others using blogger, you might need to update your template. My left column is rather long, and the individual posts were coming up with the right-column content centered vertically. If yours does this too, find the <td> tag that begins the column that your blogger code is in, and add a valign=”top” command to that tag, so it’ll look like: <td valign=”top”>

Anybody feel like a Hillary Clinton joke?

Brian Chontosh is one tough marine!

And check out this post, while you’re there. It’s a story about one of the soldiers in the new Iraqi army.

This is kind of scary… It’s a database of driver’s licenses. Mine is in there, but I don’t mind, it’s a really good picture of me.

My sister is on the mullings mail-list, and she sent me Rich Galen’s thoughts on that one big issue that I have chosen to stop writing about. It’s well worth reading, as is VDH’s guest WSJ column.

Update: Chief Wiggles comments on that topic as well. Seeing as he is a military interrogator, what he has to say is worth your time.