existence trainer

I can't yet watch it through the browser, but here is how you can watch it in mplayer: mplayer -playlist http://www.cnn.com/video/live/cnnlive_1.asx

The teaser of Harris's article is this: "To his fans he's a lovable patriot with a maverick streak. But to his critics he's an anti-abortion Creationist who surrounds himself with religious extremists. Paul Harris uncovers the dark side of John McCain" I'm an Obama supporter, but merely from the teaser I already want to run to McCain's defense. An "anti-abortion Creationist"? Really?? Bullshit. This is like the Obama "Terrorist fist jab" teaser on Fox - its utterly stupid. And provably so from a not-to-long ago debate: The rest of the article is blindingly obvious in its propagandistic machinery. Briefly mention a few reasons someone might think he's not such a bad guy (make sure to put it in the subjunctive). Claim this is all a facade to "propel him to the Oval Office". Expose the "dark side" that "lies behind his public mask". Pull out any dirt you can and start slinging. Precisely this formula is

McCain has had a number of really interesting ideas lately. At least they are not the standard tired Republican BS that you hear spouted from the likes of Hannity and his dippy followers. Here are the ones I'm referring to: Town Hall meetings with Obama - This is a great idea! It gets us away from the silly and uninformative debates where each candidate is supposed to boil down a solution to a complex problem into a 30 second sound-bite. Not only they get to deal with the public directly (which will probably lead to its own silliness though), but the newish format would suggest that both campaigns are really interested promoting a different type of politics. Unfortunately it looks like Obama won't take him up on it :( Here is a snipit from a recent Time article : After expressing interest in the idea initially, Obama has since backed away, saying he will meet McCain for only one joint town hall, on July 4, when few Americans will be huddled around a television set to watch pol

The only two Republican Candidates for president that I could have ever seen myself voting for were John McCain and Ron Paul (I liked, and still like Huckabee, but definitely not as a leader of this country). But one thing I'm very surprised about is McCain's blatant undermining of habeas corpus. Here is a pretty good analysis of the issue (and those issues surrounding them) by Ron Paul. McCain, in contrast, called the court's ruling "one of the worst decisions in history. It opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our Constitution.'' Obama, on the other hand, is committed to restoring habeas corpus to detainees, further commenting that it is an important step toward "reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus" Technorati Tags: Ron Paul

It took me a while to find this , and it should not be done on a production machine (I'm installing it in Virtualbox), but here is how to install very early version of the next version of Ubuntu: 1. Install Hardy 2. change /etc/apt/sources.list so it contains only this: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted universe multiverse 3. sudo aptitude update 4. sudo aptitude dist-upgrade EDIT: You can now download an iso of Intrepid from here (note: These ISO's don't seem to work with Virtualbox - see bug report here ). EDIT EDIT: If you want to try a liveCD, look here . EDIT EDIT EDIT: Now that the alphas are out, the easiest way to upgrade to Intrepid is with the following command (still not recommended for production machines): sudo update-manager -d Technorati Tags: ubuntu , Intrepid Ibex

And there was no fraud. His mom helped him to fill out the application that was sent to him, and they put in all of the correct info. You can find the story here . Technorati Tags: stupid , humor

... that Britney Spears made famous 70 years or so later. I'm talking about: Oops! I Did It Again Check it out - you can listen to it online! I especially love the doo-wop section! Technorati Tags: Louis Armstrong , Britney Spears , music

This guy works his ass off. If you haven't checked out his live online broadcast, check it out here . You'll learn alot! Technorati Tags: Leo Laporte

A Bigger picture can be found here . Technorati Tags: coke , soft drinks , humor

No answer. Just a curiousity.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu , Obama

I started trying to compiling a list of my favorite albums of this decade, but I ran into the problem of trying to figure out what to call this decade. Here is an NPR interview on it (I love NPR). Here are some of the proposals: The Oughts The Naughties The Double Os The Zips Though none have really stuck. The first thing to come to mind is: The Bush Era Which means a couple of decades from here no one will really refer to it anyway (much like we don't refer to it in the last century). I guess it might be a decade worth forgetting, I've spent pretty much the whole damn decade in graduate school. I'm just hoping we will usher in the next decade with the change, hope, and vision Obama may bring. I'm looking forward to turning the page. I'll just call it: The First Decade of the 21st Century. Unwieldy, but at least everyone knows what I'm talking about.

The internet sometimes sucks. I spent about 20 minutes searching the internet for an easy way to decode a base64 file in linux. Shouldn't be that hard. In fact, there is a base64 command. But fuck me, I sure couldn't get it to work with the file I had (which was supposed to decode into a .jpg). There is tons of nonsense about the theory and some stupid unhelpful web applications, but no practical examples. That is, until I stumbled upon this little gem - which gave me exactly what I wanted. perl -MMIME::Base64 -ne 'print decode_base64($_)' < file.txt > out A one-liner in Perl (of course). The fact that this info was so easy, yet it was so hard to find pisses me off. I'm sure there are other ways to do this. In fact, if you know of other ways to do this, then please leave me a comment telling me how. I hate when good info gets buried under the load of crap clogging the internet tubes. Technorati Tags: linux , base64 , perl

Technorati Tags: Fox News , stupid

For purposes of this tutorial, I will assume that you already have installed Virtualbox (th Personal Use & Evaluation License Version), have installed Windows XP as a guest, and have also installed Guest Additions. Here are the steps from here: sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh. Uncomment these lines (arount line 42): mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644 ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb sudo /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start Virtualbox - Settings: Make sure to enable USB created a group named "usbfs" and added yourself to it. sudo gedit /etc/fstab Add (make sure that the devid is correct for "usbfs" in System - Administration - Users and Groups): usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1003,devmode=0666 0 0 sudo mount -a (which will remount everything in fstab) That did it for me! Hope this helps someone. Technorati

Powerful.