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Tonight we went and had a few drinks and sung karaoke at a bar near our house. Its nice, because its walking distance. There were a bunch of prospective grad students there, and a few people I hadn’t seen in a while. I sang “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen and “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix. I tore it up on the dance floor. Now I smell like cigarette smoke, which isn’t as great as it sounds, believe you me.

The new ‘currently playing’ script is in action, look for it down below on the menu bar. A plugin for Winamp3, called SpyAMP, sends a POST query to a script on your server which parses the results and displays them on a webpage. The included script is very bare-bones, so I wrote my own that accepts the song information, stores the last 10 songs in a mySQL database, and then there is a display script that searches the database, and puts up the entries in order. If the script detects that there hasn’t been an update for more than 20 minutes, it displays “Not currently playing.” It also displays a google link to the artist if there is ID3 tag information for the song (this could be easily modified to submit query info to other search engines, or amazon.com or something), and if there is no ID3 tag info, it simply displays the filename.

The script is written in PHP and uses mySQL, and is designed to connect to SpyAMP for Winamp3 (my PC is my jukebox). Its pretty hacked up at the moment, but I’ll release a more complete version of it once I have it set up the way I want it. Think of it as a ghetto KungTunes for Winamp3. If anyone wants the files as they are, go ahead and contact me and I’ll email them to you.

Hey, if you are a cowboymail user, then note, Cowboysofjustice.com is on its way down, to reappear in its new location, hopefully with all your mail and passwords intact! Its good timing too, because the folks at Unixhoster.com (I won’t even provide a link to the jerks) have decided to cancel my account on 48 hours notice for some reason. Frankly, I don’t think they know what they are doing, as I was always having trouble with the account, and their support was terrible. Which is why I’ve switched Flex (and now Cowboysofjustice.com) to Intense Servers which is a pretty legit outfit. They have treated me well so far, and I would recommend them to anyone at this point.

Thai Iced Tea. If you’ve ever been to a Thai restaurant, you know this delicious orange beverage. It is very strong, very sweet, and very good. It also has a great presentation, with its bright color and the layers formed by the milk. Here is my recipe for this tasty iced tea, which is the perfect complement to a hot day, or a hot dish.

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup Thai tea leaves


• 1 2/3 cup Water


• 1/2 cup Sugar


• 1 1/2 cup Evaporated Milk (12oz can)

Procedure

Bring the water to a boil. Remove from heat and quickly add the tea leaves. Mix it up good so all the tea leaves get moistened. Cover and let steep for 4-5 minutes. Be careful not to let it go longer, or you will get a more bitter tea. Strain out the tea leaves by pouring through a strainer into a pitcher. Stir in the sugar until dissolved. When serving, pour the sweetened tea over ice, but leave the top inch or two of the glass empty. Pour evaporated milk into the glass until full. Enjoy! Serves 2.

Notes

I like to serve it with a straw, so people can mix up the layers if they like, or keep them separate and sip alternately between layers. Part of the goodness of this beverage is the uniqueness, so anything you can do to accentuate the uniqueness is good.

As far as the ingredients go, I usually find myself using less than the recommended amount of evaporated milk, but some people like more milk than I do. Also, some people premix the milk with the tea before serving, but I think that makes the drink less fun. However, if you are making tea for a lot of people, or want to lessen your work, you can make a big batch of the tea, and then simply add the milk at the time of serving. I like to make a quadruple batch (or more) of the sweetened tea, and then just save it in the fridge and keep a few cans of evaporated milk handy. Then its ready for whenever I want some, with minimal preparation.

As far as ingredients go, the hardest to find item is the Thai tea leaves. Go to your local asian food store and look for “Thai Seasoning Mix” or “Thai Tea Dust”. It usually comes in a clear plastic brick-like bag, and looks like dark brown shredded tea leaves. The kind I have right now is called “Police Dog Brand Thai Tea Dust.” Evaporated milk can be substituted with soy or rice milk (I recommend Odwalla Milk, if you can get it, its a mixture of oat milk, rice milk, soy milk, and a little banana/mango puree) if you want to make it vegan. You can also substitute white sugar for evaporated cane juice or “raw sugar”.

For a strainer, you’ll need a pretty fine strainer. Traditionally, a tea ‘sock’ is used, which is a sock-like piece of linen with its opening pulled open by a loop of wire. They are available at many asian food stores. You can also use a regular kitchen strainer, but you’ll let through more sediment. Basically, you want as fine of a strainer as you can get your hands on. Of course, if you only have a basic kitchen strainer, it will still work, you’ll just have more little floaties in the tea, and they won’t hurt you.

In Kansas City, MO, a young man certainly has a good chance of becoming one. Joe R. Thompson, 18, was catapulted 25 feet into the air during an auto accident, but managed to grab onto overhead power lines and dangle there for 20 minutes until rescue crews could get him down. Amazing. I would have loved to see that happen. Of course, this kid is now officially a Bad Ass Motherfucker, and can lord that over all his friends.

How NOT to Talk is a great little article describing some of the most common forms of ‘conversational cheap shots’ that many people use when debating. I shamefully admit to having used some of these tactics in the past, but I make a conscious effort not to, something many people cannot say for themselves. Most of these have formal logic analogs, but the ones he focuses on are the ones most commonly used in day to day speech, along with very realistic examples. I swear I’ve heard most of these examples come out of my ex-boss’s mouth at one point or another…

The intent of detailing and naming these insidious tactics is so that the reader may AVOID USING THEM, to quickly recognize if someone else is using them, and for fun. There is much humor in the way people (consciously or unconsciously) conversationally cheat.

It is hoped that exposing these tactics will help muzzle the growing abuse in our conversational landscape. Give copies to both perpetrators and victims (only NOT for profit use).

So take a good read, and be a little better prepared when someone tries to trip you up in conversation.

I’ve updated the styling of Flexistentialist a bit, and I rather like the change. It may look the same to you at first glance, but try resizing the window. Instead of having the main area stay a fixed size, it is now fluid, changing with the size of your window! Thats a welcome change, I feel. Also, the logo image is now comprised of three layers. The background color, which is a dark blue, then a background image, set not to repeat, of clouds, and then a 24 bit PNG of ‘Flexistentialist.org’ with alpha-channel transparency (look at the pretty drop shadow). The words follow the right edge of your screen, and stay nice and pretty looking over the clouds.

If you aren’t seeing that, please let me know in the comments! In particular, the browser I’m concerned about is IE 5 for Windows. I’m using a small hack (I feel bad about using them, but the alpha channel PNGs are just so pretty, I had to give it a try..) to give IE 5 and up the PNG served up through one of Microsoft’s special filters that apply alpha channel transparency, because IE for windows itself does NOT support it. Despite the fact that the specification has been around for 7 years, IE/Win just can’t seem to get around to supporting it! However, using a DirectX filter, we can convince IE to render the alpha channel transparency.

Take a look at my source code if you are curious how it works. It uses a bit of Javascript to see if your browser is IE 5 or up for Windows. If it is, then it changes the properties of the image tag a bit to cause IE to use the AlphaImageLoader that it has to view alpha transparency of PNGs (why it doesn’t just support the alpha transparency like it should is something I don’t understand.

I’ll probably be making a few little tweaks here and there, but the design is stable for now. Once again, please leave any comments, particularly if you are using IE 5 for windows, as that is the one browser I haven’t had a good chance to test.

Check it, people. New Powermacs. They come in a single 1Ghz, a dual 1.25Ghz, and a dual 1.42Ghz. They feature bigger 2Mb L3 caches on the dual 1.42Ghz, and 1Mb L3 caches on the others. The new macs all feature Firewire 800, and Airport Extreme (802.11g, the newer, higher bandwidth brother to 802.11b (which is fully backward compatible, don’t worry)). They also support internal Bluetooth, and come with ATI Radeon 9000s, with GeForce4 Titanium and Radeon 9700s available as custom options.

The other sweet thing available now is a new 20inch widescreen Cinema Display, and amazing new pricing on the 23inch Cinema Display. The 23” is only $2000 now, where it was $3500 before. The 20 inch is only $1300, and the 17” has been lowered to a very affordable $800.

I’m really jazzed about the displays. I’ve been hoping for them to release an expanded display line for a while, and the prices really needed to come down a bit (and they came down more than I expected, too!). The new powermacs are nice too. With the price drops, a totally pimped out, dual display, everything maxxed to the gills dual 1.42ghz powermac is now just over $10,000, where as the previous generation would hit close to $15,000 if you pimped it out fully. Also, the single 1Ghz powermac is a very affordable $1500! Then its only $500 more than that to go up to a dual 1.25Ghz. The dual 1.25Ghz seems like the best deal at the moment, as far as I can tell, based on speed and features per dollar.

Oh well, not like it matters for me, I can’t afford any of them! Someday though, someday.. Just bide your time.. Bide your time.. Muahaha!

Today I spent 4 hours in a courtroom. The first 3.5 hours were spent sitting there listening as other people’s hearings happened. Then I got to sit in a little side room for 20 minutes as they started the proceedings for the case of the stolen scooter. Then I got to come in, and I got sworn in, and sat on the stand and told them about how I didn’t give anyone permission to jack my scooter, and how it had $1400 worth of damage done to it, and how I called the police immediately after discovering the theft, and all that stuff. The defense attorney grilled me a bit, hoping to find some angle with which to insert a lever to free the defendant. However, I was tight as a nun, and my testimony was unpenetrable. The scooter wasn’t at all damaged before it came up missing, there is no proper way to start it without the key, I had never met the defendant before, and I had even brought an official itemized damage estimate courtesy of the dealership. For a brief moment, the defense attorney seemed dissappointed that he couldn’t find any holes in the case, but then he realized that he had 100 more orange-jumpsuit-wearing people to defend that day, and that there would be plenty of other opprotunities to tear apart unsuspecting witnesses and make frequent objections.

After the courtroom business, I filled up Madalene’s car with gas, took it to a car wash to scrub all the filthy road salt off of it so it doesn’t rust up, and then replaced all three of her wiper blades. They had gotten to the point where the running the wipers actually made things worse as the rotten rubber simply smeared the filth about rather than pushing it off the windshield. The new blades cut through moisture like a hot knife through vegetable oil based butter-like vegan spread. Huzzah!

I also bought some Cherry Coke.

Update: Pictures added by request, see bottom of post.

This morning (or more appropriately, this afternoon, though it was functionally morning, since I had only been asleep for about 6 hours), Madalene woke me up, and led me to the window. Outside on the curb in front of our apartment building was a desk. It was one of those particle board basic desks, black and blond, with a little ‘hutch’ over it. I remembered that one of the other tenants of the building had mentioned the possibility of getting rid of her current desk, in order to make room for the huge desk she was purchasing in order to properly continue her dissertation. A quick run up the stairs and a knock on the door revealed that the desk was in fact her old desk, and that she no longer needed it, and was trying to figure out what to do with it. Being the gallant one I am, I immediately volunteered to take responsibility for the desk. Madalene and I hauled it inside, and a reorganization began.

The desk I had been using up until this point was not actually a desk. It was a metal table, similar in size to a regular desk, but deeper, and less wide. It was also much taller, table height, rather than desk height. It also was very thick. There is a wooden border hanging underneath the metal top, with a drawer that pulls out from it. The end result was that the desk was very high, putting my monitors far too high, causing me to strain my neck peering up to them. The keyboard was also far too high, which was doing a number on my wrists. I had taken to pulling out the drawer, setting the keyboard on the drawer, and using it as a makeshift keyboard tray. However, that was highly inconvienent, and blocked access to the drawer. Also, the wooden border made it impossible to slide the arms of my rather large, but high quality steelcase chair underneath it, meaning I was always stuck rather far out from the table. All in all, a bad situation.

I gutted my side of our ‘office’ which is simply the unused bedroom in the two bedroom flat. I have three computers to deal with, two monitors, three keyboards, four mice, a drawing tablet, a set of speakers, a printer, a webcam and a phone, all vying for precious horizontal desk space. The old solution was to stash the extra keyboards on the floor, and lift them up to my lap for use. That was no good. Hard to move around! The new solution involves putting one of the computers (the Beige Mac G4) into a cabinet on the new desk. That same cabinet also contains the external hard drive and external CD-R for the Mac. I’m slightly concerned about heat issues, though the cabinet does have an open back. I think it will be fine, but I’ll keep a close eye on it. The PC is on the floor next to the desk, with the headless PowerMac 8100 running linux set up on top of it.

To get the monitors in, I had to modify the hutch to accept my 19” Hitachi on the left side, and a 17” Apple on the right side. The hutch looks a bit weird now, but is structurally sound, and fits the monitors perfectly. The printer sits up on top of the hutch. The 17” monitor sits on a little raised section of the hutch, with just enough room underneath it for the USB hub, the DSL modem, and the 10/100 switch. The desk has a small bookshelf on one side of it as well, which is serving nicely for the small excess of books I have, that had no bookshelf space.

I still have quite a bit of organization to do, but the new desk has made my ergonomic situation infinitely better, and has opened up a bit of much needed space in the office. I’m going to eat some food (I haven’t eaten yet today.. The excitement and agitation of reorganization has kept me from thinking of it), and then finish this cleaning job.

(click to zoom)

I’m digging the new desk, see my thumbs up?

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Here is the cabinet that the Mac is being held oh-so-snugly in. Its a bit warm in there, maybe I’ll add a fan…

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Just another shot of the cool free desk, showing the two computers piled up on the far right.

Seems like a large chunk of the internet is down at the moment.. Rumor says that there is a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack going on right now targeting MS SQL servers. Apparently some root DNS servers are down, and it is hampering some people’s ability to get around, and making life slow for others. Hopefully it will clear up soon. I’m having a hard time getting info about it, as the few resources I’m trying to get info from are unreachable for me. If you are reading this, and having trouble, just sit tight!

Update: Yup, DDOS it is. Its an MS SQL worm that is spreading through UDP port 1434, it seems. Its done some major damage to DNS root servers, which is causing a lot of the trouble. Check out the 24-hour reachability and packet loss graphs on matrix.net (the last few hours, starting around midnight Central Time, it seems, have been in bad shape, though it looks like things are beginning to clear up), and for more technical details, check out the NANOG Thread Index. This seems to be the specific exploit used, and that file lists a patch at the bottom. Don’t worry about it unless you are running MS SQL Server 2000 (all service packs). Oh, and here is a CNN article about it.

In a totally unrelated comment, I just ate some pasta that contained both Penne Rigate (tubes about 2” long, and about 1/2” in diameter, cut at an angle) and Rigatoni (like Penne Rigate, but about twice the diameter). The reason it contained both was simply that I had exhausted a box of the Penne, and started a new box of Rigatoni. The mixture was about 30% Rigatoni, 70% Penne. However, the odd thing was that while eating it, I noticed that every single Rigatoni had a Penne slipped inside of it. The Penne fits easily, and could have worked its way into the Rigatonis during cooking and stirring and whatnot. I’m just surprised that the nesting was complete. No Rigatoni was without a Penne slipped inside. There has to be some sort of chaos theory principles that explain this curious noodle behavior. I’m tempted to try some other multi-pasta experiments, to see if this nesting tendency is widespread, or limited to the Penne/Rigatoni combination. Perhaps Large Shells and Small Shells could be combined to interesting effect… We shall see.

Tonight I will be seeing an opera, and then going to Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival. Its a good balance of culture and, uh, disgusting animation, including favorites like The Happy Tree Friends.

Until then, I’m going to eat some food, drink some tea, and watch Space Ghost episodes. Why? Because I gotta.

Oh, and the searches just keep pouring in for “women peeing” (try searching for that on google, and see where flex comes up).

Many of you probably know about Tibetan prayer wheels, or “Mani” wheels. A prayer wheel is simply a cylinder set on a rotating axis, and inscribed with Buddhist mantras, such as “Om mani padme hum.” The wheels can be anywhere from small and handheld, to larger tabletop versions, to huge wheels over 6 feet high in temples. The wheels are spun clockwise by hand, wind power, water power, or anything handy. The effect is that the mantra engraved on the wheel (or written on rolls of paper inserted into the wheel) gets ‘recited’ once per turn. Mantras are short prayers which are intended to be repeated over and over again as a method of purification and meditation, so the more repetitions, the better.

This begs the question, what about the files on my computer’s hard drives? They are spinning round and round at over 7000 revolutions per minute. Turns out that the Dali Lama has even commented on this, and noted that it was very effective to have files containing the mantras on one’s hard drive, as the rotating drive would serve as a continual purification device, emanating waves of healing spiritual energy. As such, I suggest that everyone keep a few copies of the mantras around on their computer. I’ve got 4 hard drives, each whipping the mantras around 24/7. I’ve got two more 10,000RPM drives coming on order, which should do wonders for my holiness.

However, it would be suggested that the true benefit of having them around isn’t the constant rotating, but rather the fact that they will come to one’s mind more frequently, and serve as a reminder of the six qualities of the enlightened heart: generosity, harmonious conduct, endurance, enthusiasm, concentration and insight. Keeping the goals in mind helps the path stay clear.

More on Prayer Wheels.
More on Digital Prayer Wheels.
More on the mantra “Om mani padme hum”.

Incidentally, now that you are reading this, your computer is currently a prayer wheel, because anytime you read “Om mani padme hum” on this page, the file you are reading is cached on your drive, and hence whirling about at this very moment. Enjoy.

Tonight I continue my services as Dennis’s manservant. I shall drive to his house, pick up him and his bass, and travel to the music hall. Then I will set up his base for him, and sit back to read Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh and John Lynch. I’m drawn to books about mathematics, especially the people and culture surrounding its study. Math is a pure science. In fact, it could be argued that it is the only pure science. When a theorem in mathematics is proven, it is proven for all time. The Pythagorean Theorem is as true today as it was over 2000 years ago, and it will be true until the end of the universe. This is very different from other forms of science, where theories are put to the test against observations and experimental data, and then refined. A scientific theory is never complete, it is always changing, adapting with new information. A scientist today knows that his theories will be modified hundreds of times in as many years, and that in 1000 years, what they know as ‘truth’ will be seen as laughable history. However, a mathematician knows that, upon their logical generation of a proof, that absolute connections have been laid out, and that the theorem will be known true for all time. Its very interesting. More on this later…

UPDATE: This isn’t deserving of its own post, because its really quite prurient, but its worth noting… Several months ago I posted some search strings people had used to reach my site. One of those search strings was “free pictures of women peeing using urinals.” I had no idea how they got to my site with THAT, so I ridiculed it and joked about it. But then, earlier today, someone got here from ask.com using the search query “pictures of women peeing on themselves.” Boggled, I searched for that query, and THIS is what I found. Thats right, Flexistentialist.org is #2 for women peeing on themselves. Right above an article by Ann Coulter (appropriately enough…) and right underneath a site that is actually about women peeing on themselves. I feel so proud to between two of the most repugnant things I can think of, though the link above mine is probably less of a hazard to morality than the one below. The curious thing is that the reason I showed up there for women peeing is because I had mentioned the search string in that post, hence raising my ranking in that area. My talking about the search string, causes people to arrive here looking for that. Now my talking about it now will make me even more relevant to that search string! So bring it on, urination fetishists! I know there are lots of you out there, and hopefully I can get some well needed traffic to my site with your help. Its good to know your audience.

A fun new feature has been added to Flexistentialist that you might find rather keen! Using the magic of PHP, and a script addition for Moveabletype, visitors to the site via a search engine get a special treat. The script identifies from your referrer information whether or not you came from a search engine, such as Google. It then strips the search terms out of the URL, performs a comprehensive search of my entries, and displays a little box at the top of the site proclaiming that I noticed you arrived from a search engine, and lists the top 5 entries from the local search.

This is great for blogs, because frequently I get people who arrive searching for odd things like “beethoven symphonies free downloading” or “a rabbit costume in fast motion video” or “honda aero 125”. Those people, when they arrive at my home page, are left wondering where the heck the info on the relevant search term is to be found! This way, they will be quickly presented with some links to the posts containing the info they seek. There is also an option to highlight all the search terms! If you want to see how it works, click here and click on the first link Google pops up. That will take you back to this page, but via google, and you will see what I’m talking about. Neato keen, huh? If you’d like to implement a similar thing, and are using Moveable Type, then check out the developer’s page for MT-RefSearch! As always, if you need help getting it working, feel free to contact me.

If you would like a similar feature for your site, but aren’t using Moveable Type, then you can get a similar effect by using Google Hilite by Dean at Textism.com. It will work with any site, and simply detects the search term used to reach your site, and then highlights that term anywhere it appears on your page. It works purely through PHP, and is a snazzy bit of programming.

We arrived back home to find on our doorstep a package containing 15 video CDs of Space Ghost episodes! For anyone who isn’t familiar, Space Ghost Coast to Coast is a cartoon show on Cartoon Planet that features Space Ghost, superhero turned talkshow host. He interviews celebrities with the aid of Brak, Zorak, and Moltar, three space villians he captured, and now forces to work for him. The show has been around for almost ten years, and is really hilarious. I highly recommend it.

Also, a new version of Kung-Log, a blog entry tool for OS X and Moveable Type, was released. It is now fully Cocoa, and includes niceties such as on-the-fly spell checking, syntax highlighting, editing of recent posts, and more! Sweet.

This week I continue my search for a job, and help out my friend Dennis with his bass. He is playing string bass in the pit orchestra for an opera, but since he recently had bilateral hernia surgery, he isn’t able to lift his bass yet. I have agreed to be his manservant for the period of the opera and rehearsals, so tomorrow I will pick him up, get his bass, take him to the opera, and get the bass into position for him. Then I will wait for the rehearsal to finish, and I’ll get the bass, and take Dennis home. It will be quite jolly, being a manservant or ‘bass chauffeur’ as some have called it. Hopefully I can get some good reading done during the rehearsals, and the music should be quite nice as well.