The man known only as 'Stine' speaks here

My LPIC-1 book arrived from the library today. That's the Linux Professional Institute Certification book.

The software that came with it? Yeah, it doesn't run on Linux.

Heh.

I'm too stupid to remember if I posted this previously and too lazy to check, but here it is:

#!/bin/bash
while [ true ]; do
lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org | head -12 | tail -1 >> futurama_quotes.txt
done

I'm sure some of you already know about X-Bender and friends, but this is the most compact and fastest way to generate some that I've found. I have noticed they've added quotes from Bender's Big Score and possibly from The Beast with a Billion Backs, but I don't know for sure since I try to block most of that movie out.

Hopefully after I finish reading my bash book from the library, I can add some pattern matching to remove duplicates. If you know how to do this, please don't tell me. I'd like to figure it out myself. :-)

RIP, George.

Mr. Nader to the white courtesy phone, please.

I was hoping Obama wasn't going to make the customary lurch to the right that all Democrats do once they've sewn up the nomination. I'm very slowly coming to the conclusion that Obama's shtick is just that. All hat and no cattle as they say.

The new Firefox/Iceweasel is exceedingly awesome.

#!/bin/bash

BEGIN=11
END=41

for((BEGIN; BEGIN <= END; BEGIN++))
do
wget -r -l2 -nc -nv --no-parent -A.tif http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llac/0$BEGIN/
done

Note that I downloaded 1-10 manually.

Listen to this Illinois State Rep. tear into a guy because he doesn't believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. She asserts that the gentleman doesn't have the right to testify at the hearing because he doesn't believe in the Magic Man in the Sky. The jaw-dropping moment was this:

"[I]t’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!"

No shit. Because rationality is the enemy of all religion.

This is ridiculous on so many levels. And Christians think they're persecuted? Could you imagine if she had said the same thing to a Jew or Muslim? She'd be out of a job by now.

We're making inroads on helping out our GLBT friends get their rights (and thankfully we already have ours), but we need to work with them on acceptance as well.

Friends and the odd parent or two who reads this,

I'll be doing political blogging over at The Wrong Lizard. If I can roll 7s consistently for the next 2 or 3 years, I might be able to make a small living out of it. Desperate times, etc., etc. There isn't anything up yet, but I invite you to throw it in your RSS reader in case I say something interesting.

I'll do my best to keep this LJ account mostly about personal stuff, which means it'll be behind the lock more and more often.

And just to amuse me, post something here if you regularly read my journal.

Who wants to see Emo Philips?

November 6 - 9, 2008

Wiley's Comedy Club
101 Pine Street
Dayton, OH 45402
(937) 224-5653

In?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Doug McDuff - Thermodynamic Law Party

As President of the United States, I would work to make our nation better through applying the Laws of Thermodynamics to its problems. Thermodynamics orientated government offers our nation proven solutions for the difficulties that lie ahead of us in the 21st century. These solutions are both cost-effective and potent. By using Thermodynamic principles and techniques, such as scientifically validated Kelvinian Meditation, my government will preside over decreases in Entropy -- in areas as diverse as the economy, crime, and education -- as have never been seen before in the history of our nation or any other.

It's about time someone talked about the real issues. Increasing entropy will lead to an overall increase of chaos.

D - Obama
R - Paul

Vote for higher taxes.

That will be all.

Update: Lindsay mentioned that if you read the post in a certain way, it seems to rhyme. I had no intention of doing that.

I like "The Sweet Escape" by Gwen Stefani and I'm not ashamed to say so.

No matter how poppy her songs get, I tend to like them....

So I got to thinking that the best website ever for classified ads (Craigslist.com) doesn't care to cater to hillbillies that live relatively far away from a major city. They have listings for Cleveland, Toledo, and Mansfield...not helpful (note here that Sandusky is almost exactly equidistant from each of the three).

I'm thinking of starting a website to basically duplicate Craigslist functionality, but I don't know anything about web programming and/or development. I figure free postings for everything but jobs and real estate plus some unintrusive AdSense-type ads would be enough to make something near $10 a year. A spare computer, a business-class interweb connection, and Debian Etch with lighttpd and php should be enough to do it (one would hope).

Advice? I'm looking at infamousnato, iplainsdrifter, and remotesensing in particular.

Pundits love to talk about how cheap it is that black people vote for Obama because he's black, rather than because of some substantive agreement of the issues. I will direct them to the results of the Utah primary:

Romney: 90%
McCain: 5%
Paul: 4%
Huckabee: 1%

No one has berated the Mormons for voting for one of their own. But then again I forgot it's ok to vote for someone because of their religion, but not their skin color, gender, etc.

I start Monday.

Be afraid, Dayton. Be VERY AFRAID.