A good deal of the seclusion of my house comes from being behind other houses. There's the typical row of houses on the street, but my house is behind those. This leads to an interesting side effect: I share a driveway with two other houses. Those two houses are rental houses. For the last 3 years, there's been a constant group of people in one of the houses. I generally liked the people in that house. One of them is now my girlfriend. (Her moving in was the longest distance move... ever.).

That group has left the house, and now there is a new group. I haven't really gotten to know them yet. They're still moving in, and I've been busy as school is about the start. However, the car situation is like lord of the flies. People parking in the driveway, on my property, or blocking the center of the whole parking area.

Aren't there any grownups at all?
I don't think so.

I'm hoping that it's just ignorance. They'll realize that they have to park in spots, and that their guests need to follow the rules too. Hopefully they'll clue up, because I'm on good terms with their landlord and I have an egress/ingress easement.Until then, I'll just enjoy the show as a detached observer. Play the how-many-points-will-this-turn-be game. Will-they-move-before-the-tow-truck-comes roulette. Jack or Ralph?

We push reality TV to the top of the ratings. We use too much oil. We can't find the USA on a map. We don't why that is.

History works in cycles, and one of the most compelling cycles is The Crowd and The Screamer. It goes something like this: The crowd knows that water is brown. "The water has always been brown. The water will always be brown. That is simply the way things work. Water is brown." Meanwhile the screamer is on the sidelines. "You fools! You're drinking mud. Water should be clear. Crisp, clean and clear. Mud!!"

This is exchange is often followed by a burning or inquisition. Some time later the crowd realizes that clear water is superior, and screamer is redeemed in the history books. Soon after, some crazy assed guy starts going off about the rotting meat for dinner.

Over time the screamer has given us evolution, orbits, cubism, laughter, and a little religion known as Christianity. In fact the screamer is the expert, and the crowd is usually anything but. The problem is that you don't always know about the screamer, and even if you do there is an automatic tendency to ignore him. After all, if water was supposed to be clear we would have all known that the whole time.

Now with the internet, we're all screamers. Everyone one of us with our hypertext soapboxes and wikipedia accounts. Even Walter Cronkite has a blog. (That may be mentioned somewhere in the book of revelations, I'll have to check.) If everyone is a screamer, than no one is. If we are all experts, then there are no experts. We've created a cycle where a person with the right blog can get something onto the nightly news. History and the present has taught us that the crowd is filled with idiots, but the screamers are now just people from the crowd that have wifi! We don't know who to trust anymore. We're all screamers now, and we're all in the crowd. We've thrown the wheel of history off its axle.

For this one moment though, because I am writing and you are reading, you are the crowd and I the screamer. Only for a moment though. That's the way it is on the internet. We slip into one role or the other. We don't have enough time to get good at either role, we're always so busy switching between the two. I worry that we might be spending so much time switching between the two that we don't see the real screamers out there. I worry that we might not have screamers anymore. That job may have been crowdsourced.

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed. I lied about my blog ending. That's the internet for you. Can't trust anything.

When I started writing on this website, in June of 2002, I was depressed. I was living alone in an apartment in East Lansing; socially disengaged, fighting insomnia, and basically bored out of my mind. This seemed to give me a lot to say.

Now, I sleep well, have too much to do, and haven't been depressed for a long time. As a good friend of mine once said, "I stopped drinking and suddenly didn't have anything to write about."

More than that though, I find myself no longer spending time on the computer for the sake of spending time on the computer. I still am at the keyboard for a good chunk of time each day, but I have a task to complete. I get in, I do it, I get out. There's something about pursuits that don't involve typing or electricity, gravitas or something.

It's been a long strange ride with this site. In the end, I'm proud of most of the things I did, and ashamed of a few. Mostly, I'm saddened by the people that are no longer in my life. As of right now, there is not one person from my WPI days that I keep in regular contact with. Around WPI hinges that great question in my life, "How would things have been different if I had stayed?"

At its peak, this site had a few thousand readers. That was years ago. As my interest in the site waned, naturally the readership did as well. So to the ten or so people that read this, that's all folks.

Conservatives think if they have a gun they won't get shot.

Neither side is particularly well connected to reality when it comes to this issue.

• The install is a bit more intimidating than FreeBSD's, but is actually no harder to use – it just looks harder.
• For a while I put off doing the install because I didn't want to order the CD and didn't want my network down for an FTP install. Turns out that the OS is pretty small, and my local mirror was pretty fast.
• Having used FreeBSD for years, I felt perfectly at home with OpenBSD. In fact, the only thing about the OS that I don't like is the RC system. FreeBSD is using NetBSD's new rc system, and I've been spoiled by it. OpenBSD's rc seems primitive and hackish in comparison. (Though, I do see why the OpenBSD developers haven't included it...)
• PF is the shit. I realize that I could have ran PF under FreeBSD, but given 6.x's poor UDP performance... Anyways, PF is the nicest firewall I've ever used. Fast, powerful, and easy to configure.

I made one critical error: I didn't test the backup tarball.

See, tar doesn't follow symlinks. My website was at the end of a symlink. No more website. D'oh!

I think a lot of this misery is because I haven't really done anything like this in a long time. You get rusty. You take things for granted. You break your website.

Luckily all the journal entries where in the database, which I did back up. The images in the posts are gone, but I have a thought on tracking those down. Emily's site is down for the moment as well, I'll get that back up tomorrow. I do like that I now have everything running under Apache 2.2. I used to have a funky two level setup with Apache 1 and 2. This was due to my reluctance to use mod_perl2.

Next on my list is upgrading the firewall/gateway to OpenBSD 4.

That is all.

So they hung Hussein. Big deal. Everyone saw that coming.

cnn.com covered it on their font page, as they should have. What I don't understand is the image they used. A nice font. Well framed. Even a tilde to show the span of years. Everyone knows that the tilde is the classy way to do that, not the hyphen. The hyphen is the white trash of the punctuation world.

Anyways... It was exactly the sort of image you would expect to see used for a dead artist of note, or a beloved sports hero, or a fallen president. Wait a second....

(If you still don't get the joke, then put your mouse curser over the picture to the right. If you don't get the joke after that, well, this isn't much we can do for you at that point. Perhaps you should think about going into accounting or perhaps reality television.)

Breakfast will be served in the morning. Food and booze will be present. Christmas gift exchange for friends as well.

"But house... you like range hoods..." you plead.

Then the house has a Ted Stevens moment: "NO!!!"

The second rule of working in an old house is that nothing is level. Nothing.

The third rule of working on an old house is that it will win. Kyle came down last weekend and we thought that we would get my new range hood installed in a day; day and half tops. Plan one was to simply snake some flexible duct thru the cavity between ceiling joists. This did not work. Then we considered doing the same thing in another direction – no dice. We thought about going up, going down. Serious consideration was given to a route via the fourth spatial dimension. In the end all we could do was mount the hood and say to ourselves, "Well, it's a nice hood."

The fourth rule of working in an old house is that you must work with the house. The ceiling in my kitchen has decorative beams. The beams look kinda crappy though. I could redo the beams, making them big enough to conceal the hood's duct. It's all decorative, so there really isn't any way for the house to fight me...

The fifth rule of working in an old house is that it takes time to do anything. I'm redoing my my kitchen right now. New stove, cabinets, countertops, floor, dishwasher and backslash. I expect it to take the better part of six months.

I'm probably being overly optimistic.

Yes, I called it football. Yes, I know most people here in america call the sport soccer. No, I don't care.

Fat is flavor. It's the dirty little secret of the culinary world. For all those voices in our culture speaking of low-fat, low-carb, fat free, sugar free, preservative free, MSG free, all natural, free range, fair trade, organic, sustainable, soy burgers – fat is flavor. The best fat for many foods - scallops, potatoes, mushrooms - is butter. Butter has this wonderful nutty flavor. There's a problem with the butter though: butter burns. Butter contains milk solids and butterfat. The milk solids burn at 150° C. But you can take butterfat up to the high 200s...

So you clarify the butter. You take a pound, you put it in a good sauce pan. You melt it and don't stir. When it's melted there will be a foam on top. That's the milk solids. Skim them off. Then pour the butterfat thru some cheese cloth. You now have clarified butter. Get some scallops.

The best part of clarifying butter is that you end up with clarified butter. But you get something else out of it as well: you grow a bit more connected to what you eat. There's something meditative about skimming of those milk solids. It takes concentration and patience. We eat too fast. We cook too fast. Not all meals should be made in the microwave. Not all meals are thirty minutes and one pan. So go to a farmers market. Clarify some butter. Stop and smells the roses for god's sake.

Present Wrapping: Check.

Liver Pre-run: Check.

We are go for the wedding. I repeat. We are go.

Tivo.com blows. I ordered my series 3 over a week ago. I was told it would ship within 48 hours. I was told I would have it with in 96. All lies. It was a long tale in the end. I got 3 emails, none of which agreed with each other. I was told it would ship on friday when I called friday. I was told it had shipped on thursday when I called on sunday. I was told it hadn't shipped yet when I was called today. I was transfered, put on hold and apologized to profusely.

It was, in retrospect, both predictable and avoidable for tivo. They probably had a good idea on what demand would look like and could - at the very least - had been ready to tell people that it would take time to get units out. Instead, they kept giving promises like "it will ship no later than friday" and "It's in UPS as we speak." It was clear that they were woefully unprepared for the demand and the subsequent breakdown in their ordering system. For a company like apple that went thru such growing pains it was non-fatal. However, tivo doesn't roll out new products every quarter. They need the S3 to be a hit, and while I think it will be, this still puts a stain on what could have been a very bright spot.

Why do I think the S3 will be a hit? Because I picked one up from Best Buy last night.

Opening a Series 3 tivo is an experience second only to opening an apple product. The black box is very fitting for such a high end piece of equipment. In going thru the layers of packaging there's a real sense of drama. I was very impressed that tivo includes both a HDMI and a component video cable. I'm not using either because I already had all the cables needed to hook up the tivo, but it's still a wonderful addition by tivo.

Once you get the unit out in the open, the first thing you are struck by is its elegance. Gone is the consumerish look and feel of the series 2. The S3 is sleek and sexy, with a look that would keep up with any other piece of high end audio-visual gear. The actual set up was as easy as any tivo. I plugged it into the home theater and my home network, turned it on, listened to the deep note, and went thru the setup.

Now I don't have the cable cards in yet, so I'm really only running my tivo at 30% coolness, but I can give a few impressions. First off the menus look awesome in hi-def. There is a real increase in readability. While the best quality will be HD records, and digital SD recordings the best after that; recordings off the analog cable still look much much better than those of my series 2.

My old series 2 was pretty dang old. Years and years old. So I'm still catching up to a couple new features. First off, dual tuners is the shit. Tivo just works better with two tuners. The whole experience is much smoother and satisfying. You can actively work with the tuners to watch two things at once (with two buffers!), or you can just let the tivo handle it and enjoy the lack of tuner contention. When I first heard about the dual tuner S2 my reaction was, "So what?" I get it now.

The series 3 is also faster. It's simply much more responsive for almost any given task. Downloading service info, changing channels, going to the Now Playing List – they're all faster. I suppose that's what happens when you go from a 4 year old PVR to the best PVR you can buy.

I still have to wait till tomorrow (oh.. the horror) to get the cable cards, then I can really get this thing going full tilt. Till then I can say that even running at 30% coolness, this is one of the best pieces of consumer electronics I've ever played with.