Keith Devens .com

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Sorry about the torrent of links. I'm catching up on some of the stuff I wanted to blog during finals while I wasn't blogging.

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Check out this neat video of the freebord, via Steve.

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Katamari Damacy is supposed to be a great game. Too bad I don't even know anybody with a PS2. Incidentally, I want to check out Gish over break (maybe some of the other Independent Games Festival finalists as well).

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Here's a video on the McGurk effect. My linguistics professor told us to go search it out when we were discussing relevant material, but I never did. It's fascinating, because you can't change what happens even if you try. Here's Wikipedia on the McGurk effect.

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Tim Bray relays an article on missile defense I'd like to read.

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Waiter Rant: Random Brokenness, via Ned.

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unixjunkie | unix hints, hacks, and tricks. Tip 3 is a neat Bash trick about how to run diff on things other than just files on your hard drive.

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WHEDONesque: Essay collection will dissect Firefly/Serenity till it hurts. A book on Firefly... sweet.

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One of the first things I thought when I heard about and saw a picture of the attack in Mosul the other day was that it was an inside job. Not a hard guess, but it seems I was right. "...the suicide bomber was a 24-year-old man from Mosul who worked at the base for two months..."

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What happened to The Gweilo Diaries?

Does anyone know what happened to Conrad and his site, The Gweilo Diaries? It's been disappeared for a couple weeks now. Hope he's ok.

Update: I'm not sure if he and his site were located in China (I'm not sure what Asian country he's in), but China recently had a crackdown that it's possible would have included Conrad's site. I want a list of those 1129 sites so I can find out.

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15:12 (utc-5)
edited: 2004-12-23 13:04 (utc-5)

Barney Home Page

Not Barney the purple dinosaur, Barney the White House Dog. Silliness! Watch 3:28 into the movie. Too funny.

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14:46 (utc-5)
edited: 14:48 (utc-5)

The United Nations

Via Glenn, Ed has some harsh words for the UN, all well-deserved. I'd like the president to put more pressure on the UN, and I'd like congress to do better at taking away their funding than the 10% they were talking about. The UN has lost any pretense they had to moral authority, and even any ideas that as a practical matter it's useful to deal with the UN are without basis. The president is a wiser man than I, but it seems he should focus on all this, lay it out to the American people, and explain how the UN is a corrupt, morally bankrupt, anti-semitic, and inept organization that doesn't deserve the level of support and deference we give them.

Personally, I'd be interested to see the "League of Democracies" emerge and come to replace the UN.

Hmm... TCS: The UN: The World's Greatest Trade Association (to read), via Glenn.

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13:36 (utc-5)
edited: 14:33 (utc-5)

Blogiverse

Can we please start calling it the blogiverse instead of the "blogosphere"? Blogiverse isn't all that much better, but I can't stand "blogosphere".

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13:18 (utc-5)

jEdit's JDiffPlugin is superb. I'm still happily using jEdit as my main editor. There are some rough spots, but overall I'm happy. And now I'm doubly happy to have a diff program in my editor.

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"A Kerry presidency would've been an unmitigated disaster"

Kos: "A Kerry presidency would've been an unmitigated disaster". Well, I'm glad we agree on something.

I may regret saying this later... "I voted for the $87 billion, then I voted against it." That wasn't nuance. That was idiocy. And with a primary campaign that consisted entirely of "I'm the most electable", Kerry entered the general without a core philosophy or articulated vision for the job.

Mark Simone on the radio made a funny point. While Kerry always complained about how the president didn't have a plan, Kerry was the one with no plan or agenda for his campaign -- during the last week of the campaign he got his talking points from the newspapers. The NY Times came out with that bogus missing ammo story, and that was what Kerry talked about for the last week. Lame. Via, via.

Oh, and the point I always made about Kerry's terrible campaign, which it seems everybody agrees it was, was that if Kerry couldn't even run his campaign effectively, how could people possibly want him in charge of the entire country!

Incidentally, I don't know why Kos believes the fiction that "the economy is going nowhere", when we grew at about 4% in the third quarter.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 6249

02:44 (utc-5)
edited: 13:00 (utc-5)

Sciral - Consistency:

[Besides calendars and to-do lists] there's another class of activities for which neither traditional calendars nor to-do lists are optimal. If you already use a calendar and a to-do list, you're probably trying to wedge these tasks into those tools, without realizing that they really call for a new kind of tool. Sciral Consistency is that tool.

I've long thought that calendars and to-do lists shouldn't be separate things. A task with a date is equivalent to an appointment and can be displayed in a calendar. This program, however, claims to track something else. Something to think about. Via Keith.

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Event Driven Programming using Template Specializations in C++, via Keith. Sounds interesting. To read. Also see Static versus Dynamic Event Handlers in C++, also via Keith, and also to read.

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