You need to see this movie. There are scenes that will grip you, not because of anything said, written, or done by Michael Moore, but because of the unadulterated and undeniable reality of what you are seeing. In one scene an older Iraqi woman walks amidst the rubble of her uncle’s home pleading with God to save them from the Americans, and asking where is He in their moment of need? When she cries out in anguish that “God is great” “Allahu Ackbar!” because she is scared and powerless to do anything else to protect her family and herself, you understand in an instant what the Iraqi people are going through. Exhorting God is the only way to keep your head up and your spirit from collapsing. It is powerful stuff and that’s just one small taste of it. Much of the rest of the film is the typical Moore ambush clueless politicians with a camera stuff, or talking to the average joe. Undeniably, Fahrenheit 9-11 will have a considerable impact on the election, especially if just half the people who see this movie vote in Novemeber.
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General
26
Jun 04
Fahrenheit 9-11
25
Jun 04
Firefox
There is an exploit for Internet Explorer out right now where any website can install anything it wants onto your computer. While visiting websites you may notice your virus scanner going off as a website tries to install a virus-laden dll. Until IE gets its security flaws fixed you might want to check out the mozilla-based browser, Firefox.
Short feature list:
- Small size: 4.7MB
- No need to install just run from wherever you have it.
- Tabbed browsing. Run multiple pages within the same browser instance so you don’t fill up your task bar while visiting websites.
- Built in pop-up blocker.
My dad left his computer with me this week since he’s been having a lot of trouble with it. His master boot record had two entries, one of which would not load windows and would just crash at the command line. In other words, during load the prompt would ask which of two install of Windows to load. Unfortunately, this was the default entry and with a USB keyboard, since USB keyboards will often not power up and work until Windows is loaded, he could not select the correct boot record. So, in researching this issue I learned a new thing that you too may benefit from: necessary entries from the boot record or boot.ini. One problem down and a few more to go.
After this, I loaded up and ran Ad-Aware 6.0 with its updated reference files to locate and remove any spyware. I found hundreds of bot programs and crap clogging his system. The “Program Files” directory was loaded with virus exe’s. This is a good thing to run every so often if you’re on a Windows machine.
25
Jun 04
Cereality
It used to be just an idea popular among couch potatoes, college students, pot smokers, and other motivationally challenged sugar-addicts: a restaurant that serves only cereal. But now, that idea is a reality….a Cereality. Here’s the gist:
- The employees wear pajamas (the last thing I want to see is a franchise employee wearing pajamas unless they’re cute high school girls like the kind that always work at hot dog on a stick)
- You get your choice of two name brand cereals even hot cereals.
- A topping (nuts and milkballs, etc. wtf?)
- As much milk, soy milk as you want
- Prepared in a chinese-food-style container
24
Jun 04
What’s with BoingBoing?
I’m starting to wonder if some of the folks at BoingBoing.net haven’t made some sort of deal with Nick Denton (the notorious blog advertising minimogul) and Gawker media. All I ever see on BB lately is fleshbot, fleshbot, fleshbot (not safe for work) or gizmodo crossposting. Is Wired News journalist and third member of Roxette, Xeni Jardin, working for them now? Does anyone know?
- Exhibit A: Best actual adult film title ever
- Exhibit B: What’s in Your Gadget Bag Xeni?
I actually like Gizmodo and Fleshbot a lot. I think they have a good format going for disciplined blog coverage without a lot of navel-gazing (like you’d find here, faithful readers). I check Gizmodo and BoingBoing several times a day. On a related note: Nick Denton et al are working some deal with Nike, since, you know, Nike likes to be on the cutting edge of cool. It’s called… . Maybe inner city kids aren’t buying enough Air Jordans anymore and they want to start reaching out to bloggeurs. I’d hate to think that all those Indonesian sweatshops are sitting idle.
24
Jun 04
Seeking Dick Artists
Detour Seeks Dick Artists Dept.: 
Flat Black Films (Waking Life) has sent out word that they’re seeking fine artists and illustrators to work on Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Says the press releases: “Applicants need to be highly skilled in fine drawing, particularly of the human face … experience with computer animation such as Flash is a plus but not required.” Send portfolios or examples of artwork to: Scanner Darkly, c/o Sara Johnson, Detour FilmProduction, 3109 N. I-35, Austin, TX 78722. Or, e-mail online portfolio info to bob@@flatblackfilms.com.
On a related noted, here are some photos from the set of A Scanner Darkly.
24
Jun 04
Indo-American dogfighting
Interesting entry from the ever informative Defensetech.org:
The whole world knows that if you mess with U.S. Air Force pilots, you’re going down. Hard.
Except, someone forgot to send the memo to India, apparently. Because, in recent exercises, Indian flyboys in low-tech Russian and French jets defeated American F-15C pilots more than 90 percent of the time.
24
Jun 04
More on Movable Type
I wanted to go over a few thoughts I had on Movable Type as well as respond to Anil’s comments:
1. Well, there’s new stuff from 2.64 to 3.0, and we’ll have a bunch more new features in the general release that’s a free upgrade for 3.0 users. So new stuff is definitely something you can still have on MT, particularly if you play with some of the plugins at mt-plugins.org.
23
Jun 04
An impressive response
I was surprised to see such a quick and thorough response from Anil Dash about my previous ranty post about MovableType’s plans. I don’t have any time right now to write further, just suffice to say that I am impressed by his communication here and it makes me think better of everyone involved at SixApart because I know they are trying sincerely to address user concerns, not just here. Thank you especially Anil. That being said here is what he had to say to my points:
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23
Jun 04
Making the switch
I’m thinking of switching from Movable Type. Why? Well, a couple reasons, purely personal.
- I like to try new things, and I’d like to extend this to blogging software and see what else is out there.
- The Ben–Mena–SFO–MT-cutesy-hipness annoys me, maybe simply because I’m not a part of it, but it annoys me nevertheless. I’m contrary like that. It reminds me of having to like the popular kids in school.
- MT 3.0’s new fee structure is too high. I think it represents San Francisco prices for a non-San Francisco world. Add to this the fact that MT is popular and successful because it was free and because people were encouraged by its cost and accessibility to use it. MT is a great product. Do I like it enough to want to shell out 70$-100$ for it? No. They do have a free personal version, but their terms limit how it is used, even for individuals, and who knows how long even this accomodation will last. I am not a fan of limits put in place simply to pad their bottom line. Should people pay for MT at all? Well, it is arguable. You should certainly support MT if you want to and appreciate it, however should you extend that same sense of appreciation to wanting to help build their company?
I think they should have adopted a different strategy: build out Typepad‘s services and subscriptions slowly while developing an enterprise level edition of MT that is different from the core popular product. This is not the case now. Keep MT free for sites without advertising revenue. Commercial sites should encouraged to upgrade to the enterprise level product which could natively support ad banners, etc. It seems like they wanted to start making some money right away and were willing to lose users in the process. That is a bad way to do business. Instead of restricting current features of MT to encourage upgrading to a paid license, restrict only newer features and newer versions. At the same time, allow any bugs in the older free versions to be patched for free. Users should not be forced to upgrade to a paid license to benefit from bug fixes. That being said, none of the restrictions in the personal versions are hard-coded, so you could violate the personal license and have more than one author, but then you would be in violation of the license. - Oh yeah, WordPress is open source, which means it essentially belongs in the public domain.
- Here are some rather extensive technical reasons to switch to WordPress, the likely candidate of the moment.