September 2009
Monthly Archive
Feeling a little jumpy
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
These girls have mad skills.
If a ninja comes and kills you in your sleep, it might be one of them. All fourth- to eighth-graders from a single school district in Ohio.
What’s also really cool about this video is watching the crowd. At first, everyone thinks they are too cool to deign to watch a bunch of girls jump rope. By the end of it, everyone is cheering their heads off — and deservedly so.
Fuck IT. Oh wait, I work in IT.
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
If you’re blocked from running Firefox at work by group policy, or basically any way that’s possible to block it, I can show you how to run it no matter what your IT department’s software restrictions are — even if you are not a local admin on your work machine.
Renaming the exe itself is the easiest way that usually works (and running the portable edition), but if the detection software is more sophisticated, you can use a hex editor to change certain parts of the executable itself and it will then become essentially undetectable by most blocking software and their detection methods.
It gets more sophisticated from there, but still possible. With physical control of a machine, basically any policy can be defeated. And I can show you how.
Cuz when it comes to this gangsta shit you motherfuckers know who run it.
Your band is wide
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
This is just a money grab.
Verizon Communications Chief Technology Officer Richard Lynch told a 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo press conference today that the broadband industry “will see a pricing paradigm shift” because Internet service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone.” His comments are believed to mark the first time a Verizon executive had publicly supported metered billing at some point in the future.
I work in the IT field. I’ve hooked up T-3 and faster lines. Guess what? Bandwidth costs are falling about 50% every 3-4 years, and probably even more for the big ones like Verizon.
Bandwidth costs make up about 8% of an average carrier’s costs, and probably less than that for Verizon.
But if the large companies can find a way to screw you, they will.
I haven’t yet been able to find that guy’s email address, but I did find 14 Verizon exec’s email addresses here.
Email them and tell them what you think. I am going to.
Work to teach
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
Lance Mannion has a good post up about the work teachers do, and the arrangement of our current economic system.
It’s wasn’t teachers who designed an economic system that has no problem using vast numbers of human beings as beasts of burden and pays those human beings based on the same logic and degree of compassion a stingy farmer would have towards feeding an ox or a mule, which is to give them no more than they need to get through the work day with the strength to do the job at hand, and also has the same stingy farmer’s expectation of uncomplaining patience and dumb gratitude from his livestock.
He’s wrong about human behavior, though, in an earlier portion. Studies and actions consistently show that most people would lower someone else’s relative status to raise their own. I don’t have this urge and I don’t understand it (just as I’ve never experienced jealousy — probably related), but 95%+ of people would make that choice.
Soccer sucker
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
The best soccer team in the world has only a 28 percent chance of winning the World Cup even if it makes it through to the knockout stages, according to a new statistical analysis.
That’s what happens in any low-scoring game, and I realized that when my shitty PE basketball team was able to sometimes beat three-on-three teams of actual basketball players in one-shot wins games.
One of the reasons I really like tennis is that, usually, the best player (at that moment, anyway) usually wins pretty decisively.
Bloodfinger
| Posted by Chill on 30 Sep 2009 |
I usually don’t go in for this style of computer-generated art, but this is a cut above. Beautiful detail work on the non-model’s back, and the image is both sexy and completely demented at the same time. (Click for largest version.)
For various reasons, she seems not quite human, and I like that.
I’ve got a gesture for you
| Posted by Chill on 29 Sep 2009 |
How anyone can use a browser without mouse gestures, I have no idea.
If you tell me you’re using a browser sans mouse gestures, my brain hears, “I drove here today in my car with no steering wheel, no gas pedals or brakes, blindfolded.”
What in the hell
| Posted by Chill on 29 Sep 2009 |
What is up with this chair?
That’s just…incomprehensible.
Where’d they get that, off the set of Star Trek? WTF?
I found it while doing research for my soon-to-be (when we move houses) turbo-ninja-super-awesome-spank-my-ass-and-call-me-Sally desk setup with monitor arms, real speaker stands, etc. It’ll be expensive, but having a real command center will be worth it. Yes, I will nuke you.
Fine, a fine
| Posted by Chill on 29 Sep 2009 |
I agree with this, even if their intentions aren’t noble.
The health care proposal, as it’s framed now, is another attempt at criminalizing being poor. That will hurt a lot more people than it will help.
Wooden thoughts
| Posted by Chill on 29 Sep 2009 |
Contrary to popular belief particle board or pressboard is often stronger — and sometimes far stronger — than natural wood.
This is because it doesn’t have any of the flaws of natural wood, so it won’t break in the weak places that all but the highest-quality natural wood will possess.
Of course, natural wood tends to look better, and cheap pressboard is not all that strong. But in general, medium-quality pressboard is stronger than all but the most expensive natural wood.
Experience and seconds
| Posted by Chill on 28 Sep 2009 |
I just solved in literally five seconds something a couple of people had been working on for hours.
But it doesn’t mean I’m some sort of genius. It just means that I’ve seen it all before, so it’s hard to stump me.
Experience often gives the appearance of genius, just as someone who is very good at something like playing guitar or dancing makes it look easy, like anyone could do it. But that’s all an illusion.
FF
| Posted by Chill on 28 Sep 2009 |
The new ABC show FlashForward is quite good.
It shares a similar structure to Lost, though it’s completely different in nature. It also gives at least one very deliberate nod to Lost, which almost anyone will recognize instantly.
The show has potential, and this isn’t Fox, so that means it won’t be cancelled out of the blue despite high viewership and enormous spin-off potential.
Fox doesn’t share their crack with the other networks. They keep that good shit all to themselves.
Pre-goth
| Posted by Chill on 28 Sep 2009 |
Rudolf Koppitz, January 1925. He was doing goth before goth was, well, even a word in its current sense.
Sex and its discontents
| Posted by Chill on 27 Sep 2009 |
Even though feminism is an unalloyed good and is one of the best things to happen to the human condition, that doesn’t mean it’s not without complications.
Something I’ve often wondered about and been distressed about myself is dealt with in the two posts I’m about to link at the bottom. Even in the most sex-positive feminist spaces, most expressions of male sexuality are seen as threatening if not downright perverse, while any female expression of same sexuality is lauded.
While I understand how and why these distortions have developed, that still doesn’t make it any easier to deal with their consequences. It’s dehumanizing and frankly insulting to be told that your sexuality and your desire is innately wrong, and any expression of it at all makes you perverse or not a feminist or feminist ally — any man existing in feminist spaces gets told this multiple times very quickly, no matter how he expresses himself.
While I don’t believe that the genders are that different, I do believe there is an innate biological basis (statistically speaking) of how men and women approach and process sexuality. Of course, this is reinforced and promoted by culture, making it all the stronger.
The first post is by Hugo Schwyzer. It deals with Lust and humanity, desire and dignity.
But to a man, they were stirred up by the topic, and most were willing to admit to immense frustration and pain with this nearly omnipresent sense that their sexuality was dangerous, potentially predatory, and, as one fellow said, only to be celebrated when tightly controlled.
The second post is this one on Saucebox, discussing a particular male’s desire.
And in this place and time, the people whose respect I crave the most are always telling me that my very inner core is dirty, shameful, evil, wrong, disrespectful, backward, brute, and unevolved. But I can’t change it. So I’m stuck in perma-shame. That conundrum has always made me envy gay men. But I crave women. I desire their bodies. I want to fuck them. They’re so gorgeous and wonderful and perfect that I want to make love to almost every one I see. But I don’t try to fulfill that, and I don’t even admit those feelings to most people, and that’s how I get by. But I still feel like I’m acting through all of life. I have to pretend that the evidence of my respect for women lies in the supposed fact that I don’t want to fuck most of them.
As a rough guess, I’d say about 90% of straight men have this same profile, particularly when an adolescent or young (20s) man. I know I did, though I don’t think that kept me from seeing women as human.
And I bet that this description fits no more than about 10% of women — hence why I was talking about biological differences above.
The strange thing is, though most men seem to be able to understand the differences of breadth and intensity of female desire, almost no women seem to be able to understand how pervasive and overpowering the internal feeling of male desire is — I’ve met no more than one or two in my lifetime so far. And that’s a pretty big disconnect, and leads to a lot of misundestanding. I doubt that gap will ever be bridged, either, because it’s much easier to understand something that happens to you sometimes (all men experience periods of low or no desire), though I’ve rarely met any women who experience the raging, fever-dream intensity that almost any 18-25-year-old man’s desire is nearly-permanently set at.
And it’s very strange to watch the vast majority of women deny that it exists, or to seriously doubt it. Because it does, and it sucks, and most men would turn it off if they could. But you can’t, so there you go.