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.
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.
It seems Western‘s proxy is down, or something else is preventing me from accessing the internet without going through Tor.
Update: Apparently the problem was thus: “An upgrade of a piece of equipment, during which the netmask was incorrectly defined in such a way that certain IP addresses (for example google, yahoo) were thought to be on the local network (i.e. No Route to Host as people saw).”
Apparently my phone called 911 a little bit ago. (At least, that’s their story.)
The phone vibrated once in my pocket. When I took it out to look at it, it was in a call. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Hello?
911: This is 911. Do you have an emergency to report?
Me: No...
911: No, this is 911. Do you have an emergency to report?
Me: No.
911: Did you call 911?
Me: No.
911: Who had your phone?
Me: Me.
911: Where was it?
Me: In my pocket.
911: We received a call and then it sounded like buttons being pressed.
Me: It must have dialed you itself.
911: So you have no emergency to report?
Me: Nope.
911: Do you know how to lock your phone?
Me: Yes, but when you lock it, it can still dial 9 1 and 0, noob.
911: STFU noob. You can disable that.
Me: I'll look into it.
911: Do you have an emergency to report?
Me: No. Bye.
I’ve done some searching online and I’ve yet to find anything about how to disable the 9, 1, and 0 keys when the phone is locked. There’s also no mention of it in the manual, nor can I find any option in the phone’s settings (It’s a Sony Erricson t616). If anybody has any ideas, feel free to enlighten me.
The call log is where it gets interesting. It shows me receiving a call at 5:23PM from 1-425-551-30800 (that extra zero is supposed to be there and the area code of this phone is 425) and then, after that, me placing a call to 888888 at 5:23PM.
I’ve often noticed that the call log on this phone will reverse calls, so it’s possible that I dialed 888888 before the 551 number called me, but, in any case:
1) I never dialed 911.
2) I cannot use the 8 key when the phone is locked.
3) That number that called me is pretty strange looking.
Odd occurrences all around. I think those shifty bastards called me.
Today, I went down to The Savvy Traveler in Edmonds to attend a seminar on Thailand.
It ended up being a bunch of old people talking about 4-star hotels, which was slightly depressing, but they mentioned what sounded like a few interesting places to visit, so it wasn’t a total loss.
