William Gibson's Neuromancer has one of my favorite opening lines to a novel ever; "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

In 1984 when this was published that was a brilliant way to introduce the dirty, broken, dystopia that is Chiba City. Static is a great metaphor for for a miserable city.  All non-uniform ( Read more... )

I'm not one that often joins into the outrage de jure, but this deserves it.

The fact that we as a nation are arguing about whether a school official can strip search an 8th grader over ibuprofen shows that something has gone very wrong.  The war on drugs and zero tolerance policies have combined to really fuck with our national psyche.

If a school ( Read more... )

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs ( Read more... )

I only got a couple of shots of the Derby girls in the Rochester St Patty's day parade.   This is my favorite:


( Read more... )

They've finally posted the full top 25 conservative movies list.

I can't believe some of the film they're claiming for the conservatives.    Brazil?  Groundhog Day?  Ghostbusters?

If your deelign with frontier and you are concerned about the upcoming 5GB cap then keep reading your Frontier bill carefully.   This month contained info that my contract was set to auto renew ( Read more... )

Bwa-Ha-Ha

Shorter Republican National Convention:

Click to view

Dear Tubes, Please help.

So I'm playing with Yacc for the first time.  I'm learning from the Flex and Bison manuals.  I own the dragon book but I haven't cracked it open yet (which may be part of my problem).

As a first project I'm trying to build a parser for the output of a game I play.  I can't redefine the language. In fact I don't have a ( Read more... )

For my birthday the very awesome sirwacki drew a steampunk version of Doorknob for me. Now I've finally gotten around to scanning it so I can show it off.


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So it turns out that when 2 drives in a 3 drive RAID die the system breaks. Oh well, there goes our domain controller. Oh hey, check it out, my home directory is over there too.

Wheee!