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[2002-12-23]

Not-really-in-the-kitchen-with-Chunky

Jalapenos make an EXCELLENT addition to any pizza, one of my personal
favorites being Ham & Pinapple.


[2002-12-22 - Later]

I've just watched Fight Club again. Man, that movie's good.

And while I was watching it, a couple thoughts that I'd forgotten about
occurred:
The conclusion of the movie is that some tall buildings get blown up.

A few weeks [months?] ago, I was talking to someone about this film. "I
think it's a f***ing great film", I claimed. "Well, I used to think
it was OK, but now I think it's pretty tasteless and should be removed
from shelves" came the response.

Sorry, that's just not right. First, the obvious [to everyone]:
When the film came out, it was good. After some events, the film is now
considered bad. Fuck that. History doesn't change because of current
events. Any film I've enjoyed in the past, I still recognise that I liked
it and may still do - whether or not current events have any relevance
to it.

I would have said something at the time of this discussion, but the
person making the above comment is an, uhm, "imposing" character, and
arguing things like this kinda leaves one slightly afraid. So I let it be.

The other point, somewhat obvious to some, not at all obvious to
Americans, and apparently pretty politically incorrect, is that two
buildings is f**k all.

I spent most of my life [20 yrs] being ousted from various buildings,
tubes, trains, busses, and random streets. Why? Because terrorists were
about to blow said items up. I've been within hearing range of more than
one [ok, only two, but still...] bomb blast, from terrorists.

I don't like to sound callous, but it's really hard to be sympathetic
to some people who think their world's coming to The End just because
a comparatively minor infraction has been suffered against some
people, several thousand miles away, who just happen to be of the same
nationality.

And I've not even started comparing attacks on the Japanese subway yet.

I have huge amounts of sympathy for all directly involved, and the events
of September the 11th were a truly terrible thing. It's just that to some
people, they're considerably less than "an attack on the fundamentals
of humanity", and really need to be treated as such.

And don't forget who was supplying the IRA with their weapons pretty
much the whole time.

"But that's different..."


[2002-12-22]

You know, it never used to amaze me that people used IE - to be honest,
it was considerably technically superior to any of the other
offerings. Faster, simpler, and it didn't crash as often. Moz early
adopters, you know what I'm talking about.

I'm sitting in front of my mother's computer right now, using IE, and
seriously wondering why anyone ever uses it at all anymore, doubly so
for the technically inclined people.

If you're technically inclined, I no longer believe there's any excuse at
all to use IE - with the scary security problems that crop up weekly,
and it's shitty support for normal HTML development [a view source
shortcut? Anyone? Please?], I don't understand what would make someone
actually use it as their primary browser of choice anymore.

And for the non-technically inclined, I probably oughta point out here
that I've seen no end of pop-ups, pop-unders, flash banner ads, etc,
etc, and two things:
1) I have even less sympathy than I used to for all the people who don't
install ad-blocking software.
2) The least the advertising companies could do is WRITE SOME WORKING
CODE. I've seen a whole bunch of piecemeal 404s, broken javascript,
crashing the browser, and sundry other things. Of all the browsers where
it may or may not work, my mother's 6-month-old off-the-shelf machine
running windows and IE /really/ oughta be getting it right.

For bonus points, this machine is a LOT slower than my machine at
home, although the sheer number of CPU cycles available to one browser
instance/load time is considerably higher here. Phoenix loads faster on
my machine at work than IE does here, and I don't even have working
{Normal_IDE_Feature_XXX}.


What I'm looking forward to is the day that some little bastard breaks
into either the BBC or CNN's site, and puts some malicious code on the
front page that formats everyone's hard drives. I firmly believe this
is gonna happen sooner or later, and I'm glad I won't be using IE when
it happens. It would be even neater if they broke into the MSN search
page [the one where you end up every time you mist-type something into
the address bar], or google, but I think that's setting my hopes a
little high.


[2002-12-02]

If you're reading this, you should know that I have trouble replying to
e-mails with a From field of the form "Mumble Mumble <>"

In other news, 89 in a 70 zone. Fuckers.


[2002-11-14]

Went out last night with a guy I know from juggling caled
"Catastrophe". He's in the video business, and is interested in
open-source, geekdom, and linux.

We go out for sushi. Seems a noble goal, really. It's pretty disarming
when you get there, and he's talking to the Japanese people, in Japanese,
and everyone's smiling and laughing except me who doesn't understand a
single word of what's being said. Which is nice. But it was good, and seems
that's in danger of becoming a regular thing. Which would suit me pretty
much just fine.

Over dinner, we ended up discussing mostly the merits of open-source, and
what the various licenses are.

He's currently reading "Free As In Freedom" to give himself first lessons
in Open-Source. Which I would say is a lot like reading Mein Kampf to
learn about keeping unemployment low.

So all that was good.


We then went to a "British Pub" in Santa Monica, "The King's Head".

The door man was wearing a shell suit, which took a whole lot out of
the experience, really. Mostly it was pretty good, and they had pint
glasses. I got whupped at darts, but then I never was any good.

I'd give it a 9 out of ten for effort, and roughly 4 and a half for
implementation. I have a feeling I'll be going there again, as I did
enjoy it, after all.

It was nice, too, to hear a liverpublian lass sounding off about
Alex Ferguson.


[2002-11-12]

OK. Since I've had one or two responses about yesterday's comment:

Firstly, my machine did not get 0wned; Nor did any forums that I run.


Basically, I had an argument online with someone, semi-publically.
[Dagnammit. It was a 5-letter correction sent in a patch to a mailing
list]

He then wrote an article with what I took to be a backhanded attack on
me in it [relating to our argument]...

I posted a reply on the forum, and it was changed to be completely
contrary to what I'd written, while keeping it in my style of
writing. Which just really pissed me off, since it could genuinely have
been mistaken for me saying something I very much didn't.

In all fairness, the forum is anonymous/unauthenticated in the first
place, and people have written stuff as me on more than one occasion.

Someone else pretending to be me doesn't annoy me, so long as they're
either clearly not serious, or at least not writing something that I
care about or have an opinion on.


I've also sent an apology to the guy for me making an ass of myself,
although I still stand by my points.


[2002-11-11]

On the acceptable use of technology.


It's not, in my humble and considered opinion, acceptable to
electronically permanantly change statements made by someone, because
you disagree with what they've said.

Doubly so when it is changed to something that still seems to be from the
original author, and is completely contrary to what was written before.

Hell; I don't change my OWN statements from the past, even though some
of them are flagrantly wrong/shortsighted/whatever.

The idea of someone else changing them for me just seems a little...

Wrong.


[note: old plan entries are all available at
http://icculus.org/~chunky/oldplan]

When this .plan was written: 2002-12-23 13:21:28
.plan archives for this user are here (RSS here).
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