Mo Rocca @ Cornell!
Mood:  chatty
Topic: School Stuff
Mo Rocca came to talk today at Cornell, thanks to a Sponsership from Hillel, the Campus Jewish group. Why they invited him, I don't know because he revealed during his performance that he was Catholic. But he did have a hilarious opening bit where he told this whole story using Yiddish.

He was quite hilarious and I caught some of it on my camera's video mode. I'm not 100% why because I don't normally use my camera for video but the picture is a bit jerky. Weird for a 12 MP camera. But I will be posting the video on my other blog probably tomorrow.

He also suprised the audience by giving us this traditional Jewish treat he had made for us. He actually put it on stage at the beginning and there was a crowd of people rushing to grab it.

He began his talk with he coverage of the 2004 presidential elections. His jokes brought forth both tons of laughter and a few jeers depending upon which political candidate he was talking about. But he stayed pretty neutral, lampooning both sides of the isle. The picture immediately above was accompanied by the joke, "yeah, the wedding photographer didn't do such a good job with those two." hehe...

He told us about his personal life, including the fact that he's good friends with Flava Flav, who you might know from the Surreal Life on VH1. He recounted a story when he went to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC with Flav where they were in the lobby and it's all quiet like church when Flav says, in a loud voice, "I want to see something with a f***ing pendulum!"

He talked about his contributions on VH1's I love the 70/80/90s and quizzed this kid on 90s stuff. He won a Celine Dion CD autographed by Mo Rocca.

All in all it was an awesome show! I also got to take a picture with Mo as well as get an autograph from him. I didn't scan the autograph, but here's the picture I took with him.

Today's Post
Mood:  chatty
Topic: politics
You can find (at least one of) today's posts here on my other blog, It's A Binary World 2

Happy Lunar New Year!
Mood:  celebratory
Happy New Year (Tet) to all of the Chinese, Vietnamase, and others out there Asian or not who celebrate. It is the year of the Rooster!

May all of you have prosperity and luck in the New Year!

Today's Post
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
Today's post can be found here at my new blog on my server. Again, a reminder that this will continue to be my blog through at least Sept and, for sentimental reasons, I may let this blog see its second birthday before fully migrating away. So don't stop coming to this site. Whenever I post on my other blog, I will link from here.

The Gospel of Tux
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Linux
I was listening to a book about hackers and the following excerpt from the Gospel of Tux was reproduced. I laughed so hard, partially because my study of the Old Testament allowed me to know that this is a parody of a real King. It took me about 10 minutes, but I found the passage.

2 Chronicles 10:12

"Three days later Jeroboam and all the people returned to Rehoboam, as the kind had said, "Come back to me in three days." The king answered them harshly. Rejecting the advice of the elders, he followed the advice of the young men and said, "My father made your yoke heavy, I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with wips; I will scourge you with scorpions."

Having read that, you are now more fully able to appreciate the parody found in this passage.


'Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse:

"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live."

And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bogacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux.'

You can enjoy the entire Gospel of Tux by clicking here

Quotes are good for the soul
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"Yeah, a nalgene bottle is indestructable, but I've never had a problem with my water bottle being destroyed." - Dan

(why it's dangerous to discuss sims w/o telling the other person first)
Danny: dude
Danny: stargazing is dangerous
Me: ?
Danny: I had Ian outside stargazing
Danny: and a satelite fell on him
Danny: and he died
Danny: and I bargained with the Grim Reaper
Danny: and I won
Me: oic
Me: I thought u meant in real life

"Google is awesome, but one can become so dependent on Google as to forget to check local sources such as books" - Eric Mesa

What will become of my blog?
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
I just put up another blog on my server. I talk about my plans and the pros and cons that page. Check it out! Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn't shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn't work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also...I'm a bit of a geek. q;o)

Note: That link may not work in a few days or weeks because my apartment complex is switching from wired to wireless internet, as I have previously mentioned. Therefore you can be certain that I will continue to blog here AT LEAST until around September 2005 or whenever my server comes back up.

New toys
Mood:  chatty
Topic: computers
Just got a new 160 GB harddrive with my "thank you points" from my credit card. The sucker took around four hours to format, but it's up and running and I've been able to move a bunch of files onto there, saving my music hard drive for music and also being able have a lot more space for my photography. Since I now have two 512 mb cards for my camera, I can potentially download 1 GB per session if I completely fill up my camera. Since I only had 3 GB left on that hard drive, I was able to move my pictures over.

Then I took one of my other hard drives and connected it with my Linux box. I learned how to format a hard drive for Linux and also how to make it available for use. So I'm glad I went through that process since I'll be building a Linux computer from scratch in the future. It's exciting and I love technology and stuff like that!

stick it to M$
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Linux
If you really want to give M$ the finger, install Linux on your Xbox. It's the cheapest way to have a computer - nearly half the cost of an emachine - and you have the extra "in your face" attribute of Linux running on Microsoft Xbox. This site has instructions on how to turn your Xbox into a Linux/Xbox or just Linbox. If you do the software modification you can still play all of your Xbox games as you normally do. If you do the hardware modification you can't use it for Xbox games anymore, but you now have a cheap PC.

Part 1: Why it's bordering on illegal that some websites only accept Internet Explorer
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Farewell To Arms" - Five Iron Frenzy
Topic: internet
I was going to write about this topic independently when I came accross this news article. It really ticks me off that people are cooperating with MS to keep people from using other browsers. My post will follow in a Part 2.
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Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(