Waves of Mourners Honor Reagan in D.C.
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer
(snip…)
Donna Hand of Ashburn, Va., waited five hours to see the casket and spent
about three minutes inside. “It was a very moving experience for me. It was
very solemn,” Hand said. “It made you feel patriotic.”
(Pointed out by Brooke McEldowney on rec.arts.comics.strips. The AP has apparently corrected the text in the story since it first went out.)
On the way over to the data centre this morning to check on an ailing server, I heard the following on the radio traffic report:
“Backups on 75/85, where the HOV lane is blocked due to a medical emergency. a pregnant woman is in labour.”
And I thought to myself, “Gee, some people will do anything to get to use the HOV lane…”
Autographedcat: And now, here’s Robert Plant, David Gilmour, Jack Bruce, and Neal Peart, who have formed a supergroup called “The Hideaways” to perform their cover of ABBA’s “Fernando”
JTW RCCC: ROFL
JTW RCCC: You’d never make it to the end of the song…there’d be too many bass solos
JTW RCCC: You know Gilmour would play bass too, just to fit in 🙂
JTW RCCC: Eventually Plant would leave and see what Craft Services had on the spread
autographedcat: Well, I put together a singer, a lead guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer, so that’s a band 🙂
JTW RCCC: I’m telling you, Bruce would play too many bass solos 🙂
autographedcat: oh, definitely 🙂
autographedcat: and, with Gilmour producing, it would be on the album as:
Fernando, Part I (the intro)
Fernando, Part II (the first two verses)
Fernando, Part III (Jacks’ bass solo #1)
Fernando, Part IV (the next two verses)
Fernando, Part V (Jack’s bass solo #2)
Brand New Key
Chevy Van
Fernando, Part VI (Jack’s bass solo #3)
Fernando, Part VII (Dave’s guitar solo)
Fernando, Part VIII (the last verse)
Fernando, Part IX (drum solo and outro)
JTW RCCC: ROFL
JTW RCCC: I’d give anything to see Robert Plant sing Brand New Key 🙂
I normally eschew this type of meme, but I couldn’t help but admire the sentence:
If there is someone on your friends list you would love to have an epic, sweaty, damn near legendary, 12 hour, nitrous infused, wake up the neighbors, loud, hair-pulling, squirting, soul wrenching, exploratory, tongue up the ass, pile o boobies, pounding, body slappin’, oh My God, explosive, cuddliscious, I’ll even make you breakfast, fuckathon with, post this same exact sentence in your journal.
(In deference to my friends list, I will only post this once, and not once for every person on my list for which this is true. I think the people for whom this applies know who they are.<g> )
Ever since I officially got promoted to a more managerial position at work, it’s has become painfully obvious to me that I needed some sort of external brain to keep track of all the things I need to be tracking. I can keep notes on paper, but its hard to keep everything organized, and my PC is easy to keep organized, but not portable. The solution was obviously to replace my long-abandoned Palm Pilot.
Back in 2001, i got a free Palm m100 when I bought my cell phone. It was a Best Buy promotion, and it was attached the phone I had already researched and wanted to buy anyway, so I regarded it as a curiosity. It was a useful address book and calender, but with only 2mb of memory it really couldn’t do much. It was also large and bulky, and I eventually stopped carrying it around. Eventually, I gave it to telynor, but soon after that it stopped syncing up and became officially useless.
kitanzi and I had decided to get telynor a replacement Palm for her birthday in time for her to take it to London with her, so I had already done a significant amount of research on what was available, and I ended up buying for myself the same one I selected for her: a Tungsten E. The T-E really does have the best price/performance ratio of any of the units out there. (If the Zire 72 had Wi-Fi in addition to it’s 1.3 mp camera, it might have been worth the extra $100. But at $200, the T-E is hard to beat.)
I had everything working beautifully at home, but at work I had a small problem: I don’t run Windows, and Palm doesn’t officially support Linux. But all I really need to have working here is the Calender and Tasklist, and Evolution will do that. All I had to do was get my Debian Linux box to talk to the Palm, and I should be in good shape.
Step one was finding out that my current installation had no USB support. I still had the kernel source from when I had to recompile it to enable multi-processor support, so I figured it’d be a fairly simple process. (Especially since I had great instructions from fleetfootmike on how to accomplish that). Unfortunately, the newest version of gcc appears to not like the 2.2.20 kernel source.
Well, I’d vaguely been thinking of upgrading the kernel anyway. Not that I had a pressing need to do it, but it was something I honestly had never really done, and horizons are for seeking. So I downloaded the newest non-development kernel, 2.6.6, and set to work.
I had a few rough spots, as I kept finding stuff that I had left out that I needed, but this morning I was able to boot, and a couple of recompiles later I got back networking and serial communication. 🙂 Finally, after searching, I found a great website specifically aimed at demystifying what bits were needed to get my Palm device talking to Linux. One more recompile later and I was able to set up my Palm and sync it with Evolution. Yay!
I’m inordinately impressed with Debian’s kernel management process. The last time I had do this, it was a much less painless procedure, which is one of the reasons I’d been putting it off for so long. Yet another reason I’m glad we’re moving towards it as a platform for our work servers as well.
This was a pleasing way to start the day.
Ok, so everyone has probably heard William Shatner’s…..um…..”rendition” of the Lennon/McCartney song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.
If you thought that it couldn’t possible get more surreal….well, you were wrong:
Some folks produced a video. Available in Quicktime or Windows Media.
Enjoy.
I haven’t posted that much quizzage lately (for which I’m sure you’re all grateful), but I couldn’t resist this one, since I came out with my very favourite Doctor ever. (I wonder if “Which Doctor?” conveys the same sort of psychological insight to a person as “Which Beatle?” does?)
You are the Third Doctor: Charming, commanding,
physically competent and more than a little bit
vain. You share the Second Doctor’s amiability
and the First Doctor’s lack of patience with
small-minded idiots. Your urge to take care of
the entire universe often leads you to
arrogance, but you’re dashing,
self-sacrificing, and brilliant when a crisis
erupts.
Which Incarnation of the Doctor Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that when I first went to college in 1988, I was a journalism major. I was deeply interested in politics, and had some ambition to write about it professionally.
By the end of my first term, I had soured on the idea, largely because of the intensely negative presidential campaign that year. It seemed to me that the line between the legitimate press and the tabloids was becoming increasingly blurred, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be any part of that. I ended up deciding to change my major to English not too long before I left school altogether for a variety of unrelated reasons.
Over the last 15 years, the direction of the media hasn’t made me regret my decision.
All of this is prelude towards this story on New York Magazine’s webpage, in which Alexandra Polier, the woman who was falsely accused of having an affair with presidential cantidate John Kerry, details how the story unfolded, and what she found when she tried to track the rumours back to the source. Fascinating reading. Don’t skip this one; it’s an eye opener.
Mocking Matthew
AND
Pope George Ringo
opening for
THE ALABASTER SAINTS
with special appearance by
St. John Patmos,
lead guitarist from the band
The Revelationaries!
This is a bit of silliness inspired on JediMUD today.
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Cicada
by Rob Wynne
I.
If you like squishing cicadas
getting caught in the rain
II.
Oh cicadas, you’re breaking my heart
You’re all on my lawn and I hate you
Oh cicadas, please please go away
For seventeen years i won’t miss you
III.
I’m gonna kill the bugs next door
Ain’t gonna chirp anymore
They’re underground for seventeen years
Then they come up and drink all my beer
Gonna squash em with my boots
How i wish i had a gun that shoots
Gonna kill kill kill kill kill kill kill those bugs
IV.
Cicada blues
You make me cry
I don’t wanna lose this feeling
And if i choose for you to die
You would be in your grave
V.
You walk across the lawn and they will crawl up on your pants
Shake them off your shoes and you do a little dance
Worst of all you find their shells are stuck to all your plants
Hey, they’re cicadas!
VI.
I squashed cicadas
But i did not squish the ladybugs
VII.
Wasting away again here in Cicadaville
Searching for a safe path I can walk
VIII.
I walked out on my lawn
To face my fears
The last time they were here
Seventeen years
It’s cicadas
They climb on everything
Nowhere to sit
I wish they’d go away
I must admit
Damn cicadas
IX.
One day, bugs will rain out
From beneath the rainspout
And then you will hear ci-
cadas come and chirp the night away
X.
Cold rain on the front lawn has softened the grounds
For seventeen years they have slept in their mounds
But now they have surfaced; the night rings with sound
Cicada’s will rise with the moon
XI.
They are very noisy bugs
Cicadas chirp outside your bedroom
They go away for seventeen years then they come back
And they get in everything
Those bugs are pretty tasty
(That bug’s a Cicada!)
The kind of bugs you read about
(In science magazines!)
They haven’t left my lawn yet
(The bugs are cicadas)
I think I’m gonna squish them
(Everywhere I step)
They’re not right! They’re not right!
These bugs are not for me!
They are cicadas! Cicadas!
I hate Cicadas!
XII.
Little cicadas
Crawling everywhere
You’re pretty sure they’re even crawling in your hair
Where did they come from
Underneath the ground
Seventeen years past and not one could be found
XIII.
Guess who just got back today
Those little bugs that had been away
Everywhere, cicadas in your way
And if the bugs wanna chirp, you better let ’em
Bonus points if you can place all thirteen tunes 🙂
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