HackTV 3
Episode 3 of HackTV was released a while ago. As usual, the production quality is low, but it’s still entertaining.
The City of Lost Children
The City of Lost Children is a cyberpunk film about a mad scientist who kidnaps children to steal their dreams, in hopes of slowing his aging. It’s French, and it’s excellent. In fact, if it wasn’t for the drugs, strippers, and murder, it would be a good children’s film. Go watch it.
I'll either be too hot or too cold
Tomorrow morning is my snowshoeing trip.
From what people have been telling me, it’s a whole lot of work – should be interesting.
I packed by bag tonight and I have a feeling it’s going to get really heavy after the first hour or so, but most of the weight is water, so there’s not much I can do about it, save drink.
What I’m wearing: 1. Wigwam INgenius hiker socks 2. ECWCS polypropylene long underwear 3. UnderArmour ColdGear mock-t 4. Acrylic watch cap 5. Polarmax zip mock-t 6. Normal cargo pants 7. 5.11 HRT Waterproof boots 8. Best Defense ECWCS GORE-TEX Pants 9. Normal snow jacket 10. Patagonia Lightweight Capilene Glove Liner 11. Blackhawk Hellstorm ECW gloves 12. Patagonia Neck Gator
Everything in layers. Everything but the pants are moisture-wicking, synthetic fibers.
A Vision of Cyberspace
About a week ago I went back to using Electric Sheep, a screensaver which uses your idle CPU cycles to generate animated fractals – the collective dream of sleeping computers.
Basic Security Practices
http://www.al.com/redstone/index.ssf?/base/news/1132827506165260.xml&coll=1
As a government employee, you've heard it all before * lock your computer screen, protect your computer password, shred unwanted government documents, be careful about what is discussed in unclassified phone calls and e-mails, and practice vigilance in all matters related to workplace security.
Government employee? These are the bare essentials that any one who’s in contact with technology for more than 10 minutes a month should practice. Of course, you’d replace “shred unwanted government documents” with “shred everything but the newspaper”, “unclassified phone calls and e-mails” with “anything that isn’t encrypted with a 2048 bit key”, and “workplace security” with “personal security”.
1,462 days
As of this very minute, my blog has been running for 1,462 days (4 years and 2 days). That is, my blog has been running on some sort of automated software for that long (blogger.com lead to b2/cafelog which lead to wordpress). If you count updates via static html, you can add another couple years onto that count.
(I find this interesing.)
Michael Badnarik's Constitution Class
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been watching Michael Badnarik‘s 8 hour Constitution Class available on archive.org. It’s an excellent video series that introduces you to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights – what it says, and how the government has bastardized it. He focuses on privileges vs. rights, property, the legality of the IRS and Federal Reserve, inflation and deflation. I’m not even a Libertarian (although I agree with him on more than one issue) and I’m giving two thumbs up.
Go. Watch it.
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
I’ve finished reading R. U. Sirius’ Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, as per recommendation of Douglas Rushkoff. It’s an excellent book, which covers, as the title suggests, counterculture from the early counterculture of Socrates, Tao and Zen to the Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, Beats, Hippies, Punks, Hackers, Ravers, and even mentions S.P.A.Z.. The second part of the book (it’s split into three parts – defining counterculture, pre and post Hiroshima) reads more or less as a condensed history of the Western world.