I need a small cabin in the woods

What did I do to provoke the maelstrom of technological failings that plagued me for the last few days? It was a perfect storm. Sometimes it was just people I know like Rebecca calling me because her iBook wouldn’t boot anymore. Most of it was aimed directly at me.

I have a few boxes hosted with different ISPs, in different countries even, yet they both had upstream routing problems hit them. I have a database of web sites that I check to see if they update and suddenly 20,000 of them vanished from the database. It kept about 50,000 in the database. Is my computer exercising some kind of editorial decisions now? The mighty Spam Assassin started choking on incoming emails and I had to turn it off because it was slowing down mail processing. Verisign’s whois went down for a bit. However, the icing on the cake was the mysterious disappearance of one of my servers at about 2:30pm yesterday. I could ping it but some visciousness had rendered most of the servers unresponsive, including my already opened ssh connection. The support folk at that ISP didn’t respond to any reboot requests till about 2:30am despite claims of 24/7/365 coverage.

Safari is innovating how Bookmarks work

When will Christians stand up and say these people aren't Christians?

Salon has an excellent article about George Bush’s war on nature, it’s religious underpinnings, and then jumps from Sumer to Stalin to point out what happens when you ignore eco science. The first page is a bit dull, stuff we’ve seen a hundred times. Stick with it though It’s a fascinating read. I grabbed a few zingers from the part about conservative Christian leadership:

[During Kyoto Protocol climate change negotations] Then John Schiller (Ford Motor Co. executive) drops the bomb: “The earth, he says, is just 10,000 years old – not 4.5 billion years old…You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.” The Book of Daniel, he tells Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the End Time and return of Christ.

Texas "Republicans" Take Note

A small note for all the Texas Republicans that are really Libertarians but delude themselves year after year.

“The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America as a Christian Nation,” the platform says, and seeks to nullify the separation between church and state. It would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and Department of Education. It dismisses global warming as “myth.” And it promotes public school education “based upon biblical principles,” not upon secular humanism, which teaches Darwinian evolution theory and a scientific worldview.

Omphaloskepsis

Wired is hyping up the power of bloggers in an article giving them credit for the ouster of Trent Lott. It seems to miss the point that mainstream news sources broke the story first, and it’s when they picked it up again that something actually happened. Sure, some key bloggers like instapundit kept it alive but I’m a bit dubious as to how important that was. Bloggers have a much, much tighter production schedule so maybe they just beat the mainstream news sources to the punch and the mainstream were going to run with it more once they had their facts straight.

A bit harsh, but still some valid criticism: > “Bloggers are navel-gazers,” said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California’s School of Journalism. “And they’re about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books.”

Visitor Q

I’ve never been a Nipponophile. I pick and choose the pieces of Japanese culture that interest me and leave the rest behind. However, I’m beginning to think that the Japanese culture fiends are onto something. Perhaps being bombed into the twentieth century has a funny way of setting you free from cultural limitations and promoting invention and creativity. Tonight I saw Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q. In 11 years he’s made 52 films according to IMDB. It’s clear from this movie he’s become quite skilled. This is certainly one of the best digital pieces I’ve seen. It’s also clear that he will never find a large audience because they don’t come much more extreme than this.

Brilliant, but Canceled

Okay, it’s television which is generally crap but this is Brilliant, but Cancelled television on Trio. They built a list of 150 cancelled TV shows and whittled the list down to:

• The Ernie Kovacs Show (Particularly innovative production techniques)- Now and Again- Action (One of many great shows Fox idiotically canceled)- The Famous Teddy Z- Kolchak: The Night Stalker- United States- Gun (Robert Altman’s (!) TV series where the only repeat character is a gun- East Side/West Side (George C. Scott was in this one)- Profit (Another Fox show. A very dark show about evil multinational corporations that had difficulty selling ad time to evil multinational corporations, imagine that) These are showing this month on Trio. These are showing this month on Trio.

Ararat

If a million people died and nobody remembers the story did it really happen? In 1915 the Turkish government turned on its own citizens and killed or forcefully deported a million Armenians. “Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?” A line allegedly spoken by Hitler to his top generals to quell their concerns of getting away with the Holocaust. Atom Egoyan’s new movie Ararat tries to tell the story of the Armenian genocide, and a the same time remind of us of film’s inability to tell the whole story.

I just finished watching the

I just finished watching the “Fellowship of the Ring” and I am really touched by the friendship between Sam and Frodo. It’s unwavering no matter the peril each may face. I guess I find such a constant reassuring in a world that seems more and more alien to me every day. I remember when I was young, and on into my early twenties, having friends that I thought were like that. I don’t feel that way now though. As I grow older is it time to put away childish things? To quote another movie “Everyone dies alone.” Maybe it’s folly to yearn for someone or something always at the ready?

Get Ya War On!

Have you guys checked out IAO yet? That’s the new Information Awareness Office, complete with freakin’ illuminati logo and a globe focusing on north east Africa, and mid to east Asia. As if those countries didn’t have enough to be paranoid about already? But that’s not the funny part, they picked John Poindexter to head the thing. (Remember him, he was convicted of lying to Congress and illegally funding a war, but that’s not important now.)