Category: Uncategorized

While surfing TV, I came across an episode of “Everybody loves Raymond” where a character who goes to sleep in a car so as not to drive home drunk is arrested.  I looked it up, and it’s true –you can get convited for drunk driving for sleeping in a car, with the keys in your pocket.

Just out: Google Pack, a suite of software from Google and other vendors that every casual and serious computer user should get. I highly recommend everything in the pack except for Norton Antivirus – I prefer the free avast! 4 Home Edition.

 

During my trip to see the family this weekend, I scanned over 100 family photos from Soviet Ukraine, some of them dating back to the 1930s. The photos are in various states of decay, and require touch-ups before they can be enlarged for printing. Fortunately, I have a copy of Photoshop CS2 handy, and started with this 30’s era glamour shot of grandma and her sis:

My other grandmother:

I got an Amazon.com Visa credit card last month, and ran up a huge balance, nearly a thousand dollars over the credit limit. I paid the full balance the day it was due, but it cleared two days later. Yesterday, I saw a $35 overlimit fee, and a $39 late fee on my account. The fees were totally my fault, but I decided to do my best to wriggle out of them. I thought of potential arguments and pleas for leniency and mercy all day before calling visa. The conversion went something like this:
“I have these fees on my statement…”
“I can definitely remove those fees for you sir.”
And that’s all it took. Can you imagine trying this with the IRS?

Two months ago, when I moved to Dallas, decided to I start biking to get in shape. I got my first road bike, and started with short 14-mile rides in the park. From that modest start, I moved up to over 100km in the Tour de Peppermint this Sunday. It took me a little over five hours of intense riding. Next on the list: competing in the 100 mile Hotter’N Hell race next August. Any corporate sponsors interested?

This post brought to you by my participation in the local atheist group, and my recent lack of interest in blogging:

Time and space are concepts that describe the relationship between particular entities. It is meaningless to speak of time or space outside of the entities they relate. In particular, in is meaningless to speak of something being “outside” or “prior to” the universe.

The universe is the set of all entities. To say that “something” is outside the universe means that there is “something” – an entity – that is outside the set of all entities. This a contradiction, of course, since that “something” must be part of the universe, and therefore cannot be outside it. Rather, the universe is an expanding balloon of relativity (with a radius of ~13 billion light years) within which time and space are meaningful concepts.

Time is a measure of the rate of change between entities in relation to a frame of reference. There is no “absolute” time independent of a frame of reference. (For example, we usually measure time as a relation to the rate of earth’s rate of rotation and revolution around the sun..) Time is therefore only applicable to a universe with multiple entities and changing relationships between those entities. It’s therefore impossible to attribute time or space to a singularity (the pre-big bang state) or say that something existed “prior” to the singularity.

For similar reasons, it is contradictory to speak of “multiple” universes. A universe is the set of all existents which are causally related to each other. If entities are not causally related, then they cannot be “aware” of each other, and therefore cannot engage in any relationships, including those of time and space. If we cannot be aware of such entities, then any such proposition must by definition be arbitrary. Thus, if there are dimensions other than those we are currently familiar with, they must be merely conceptually differentiated causal chains, not “separate universes.”

I have a few photos of my new furniture from Eurway up. What do you think?

BISMARCK, North Dakota (AP) — To sell things over eBay, Mark Nichols may be required to take instruction in rapid-fire speaking, breathing control and reading hand gestures, even though the transactions are done by computer keyboard and mouse.

To get a North Dakota auctioneer’s license, applicants must pay a $35 fee, obtain a $5,000 surety bond and undergo training at one of eight approved auction schools, where the curriculum includes talking really fast.

Quiz question: this legislation is about (a): public safety (b): raising revenue, or (c): creating barriers to entry to legislate online competitors out of business

If you’ve been following the net news, you know that the thug regimes of the UN are trying to seize control of the Internet’s DNS. The latest threat is that the net will “fall apart” within months if the U.S. does not turn over control. What does this mean?

Hidden behind the claims of “multilateralism” and “sharing of best practices” is a thinly veiled threat that if states are not given the power to censor the Internet multilaterally, governments wishing to censor the internet will split off their DNS networks to censor content unilaterally to establish isolated networks.

What’s mostly ignored in the news stories is that ICANN has been successfully managing DNS system without almost any interference from the U.S. Almost, but not quite none – the DOJ has delayed the issuance of some root domains, namely the .XXX porn domain.

The real question we should be asking is – why does the Internet need to be under the control of any regime – unilaterally or multilaterally? If a private organization has done a good job so far (and they have), why not officially hand over the DNS system to them?