Gangstories is back:
I miss the fucking neighborhood. Fuck these phoney whores out here. These clowns have no fucking idea what it means to fucking struggle and fight to have something in life. They have no fucking idea what a fucking insult it is to me to have them mock ghetto culture and pretend to have lived that life, when they’re studying for a fucking law degree at top university.
You fucking cockroach. Fuck you motherfuckers.
First, I had to update my dashboard. My XBox is running a standard Xecuter BIOS, and I went with Avalaunch 0.49, the choice of kings.
Due to my crappy DVD drive, my XBox can only read DVD-R media. No CD-RW for me. Gonna have to get me a Phillips or maybe just the Thompson laser. After several unsuccessful attempts, I had DVD-R media my XBox could read.
Then came Debian. Or, more appropriately, Xebian. Even though it has horrible documentation, I managed to come out on the other side, a few hours later. I pulled a fakie on the FS so that it thinks all the needed partitions are inside one big 3GB file on my HD. This makes things simple.
THEN!
The Apt-Get nightmare. Hours and hours spend fighting with compilers, version conflicts, dependencies, and everything else I hate about Linux. I made it through, but just barely. I’ll have to take it easy for the next few days, glibc has sapped my strength.
In the end, however, it was all worth it. It took the day, but I got what I wanted. Linux running on an XBox, with full joystick support. Not because I give a crap about Linux, oh no. A much, much better reason.
The Ur-Quan are coming, bitches.
In today’s news, Japan shows us once again that they are seriously fucked-up.
This, my friends, is the JVC HX-GD8. When not in use as a stereo receiver or a DVD player, it doubles as a Battlestar.
In other news, Robert Anton Wilson is teaching courses online, and The Ramones are one step closer to reuniting.
We built machines out of light and cloud to keep the wild dogs away.
At night you could see the shadow of men, and the spaces between.
From an Ask MeFi thread:
“Well, I want a fence for my kids, but it’s not to keep them in- it’s to keep other things out. The harder it is for a predator (be that in the form of an unleashed neighborhood dog or a sex offender looking for a convenient victim,) to get to my kids, the better.”
My beautiful Leslie got me the most beautiful get-well flowers.
I love you most of all, pretty girl.
The federal election’s coming up soon, my Canadian friends. If you haven’t had time yet to learn about the party policies, there’s an easy way to help you decide.
(What, no Green party? And where’s my Marxist-Leninist?)
Bluebird
by Charles Bukowski
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
Twiin: we had a pretty fucked up childhood, eh?
Josh “The brain” Lazer: yup
Josh “The brain” Lazer: we turned out pretty good
Twiin: pretty impressive
Twiin: …or is it?! BLASDFASHA!!!
Josh “The brain” Lazer: WOO WOO WOO WOO
Walk without rhythm, it won’t attract the worm.
I’m about to head out for my traditional birthday coffee. Leslie’s hanging in the living room, Zanne’s on the computer, and Charles and Yann are playing old arcade games on the XBox. X-Men, to be specific.
Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes. I wish I had been feeling up to throwing a birthday party, but it just wasn’t in me this year. (My birthday snuck up on me, actually. I got one of those ‘free stuff on your birthday’ emails from a site I’m a member of, and I thought that I the site must have my address confused with another account.)
I think I’ll have to make up for it with a bash this summer, after things finish settling down here at The Geekhaus.
Thanks again, everyone. I must go drink coffee now.
Well, that’s the first time trying to wrap my head around string theory has actually made me physically ill.
Whenever I’m upset about the world, and where things are going, I can always find solace in Nine Inch Nails. Laugh at my gothic tragicness if you must, fools, but you’re the ones missing out. Leaving Hope is a brilliant, beautiful piece of work. My love is an unashamed love.
NIN.com has undergone renovations recently, including a fantastic low-tech redesign (read: I wish I had thought of it first), a near-complete discography, studio updates, and a suprisingly candid question and answer section.
What I’ve read about the new album is promising, if only because there seems to be a very real sense of direction with this work. Also, there are a lot of wires involved. And a cat.
…
I spent some time today pouring over various text-analysis papers and theories, trying to determine what the best solution was to my spam problem. It is a very large problem, and I fear that the best solution is to change my email address.
However, I did learn a lot about Apple’s mail.app functions, and how it handles spam.
I’m currently using a combination of methods to defeat The Spam, but mostly I’m using a form of bayesian filtering. Bayesian filtering works as such: Every word (or string) in every email is assigned a score, based on the probability of that word being used in spam mail. The score is totalled, and if it is larger than a predefined value, then the message is tagged as spam.
What mail.app does is this: The occurance of each word (or string) is counted, and stored in a table. Each message is assigned a point in N-dimensional space, where each axis is a word (or string) and an email’s position within the axis is how often a given string appears in an email. You can then do dimensionality reduction on this space, collapsing dimensions which are noisy, useless, or redundant.
By eliminating dimensions in this way, you can bypass a lot of spam trickery. Putting unique words in spam (amoral legendary chrysolite, anyone?) doesn’t help the message’s chances of passing through the filter, etc., etc. Just throw away the bigger common null subspace in the word matrices, do a little massaging, and, voila! Latent semantic analysis!
(Or, if you prefer: Magic!)
…
GMail appears to have (accidentally, I assume) upped my storage limit to one terabyte from one gigabyte. If anyone had any 1000000MB files they needed to email me, now’s the time.
Yanno!
Do you needs our music for tonight?
This is a two-story house a 3-min walk away from Billings Bridge, which has 97 service until after 2AM. The 1 and 111 routes are a block away, and the 5 literally stops on the front door.
There’s a convenience store right across the street, and within a 2-minute walk there’s a Blockbuster, Market Fresh, and everything else you need in a mini mall.
The house itself was renovated last year, and is two stories, with the upstairs having a separate entrance. Downstairs there is myself, Leslie, and Suzanne, and living upstairs there’s a wicked guy who makes his own chainmail, and another geek with spindles of PS/DC games and a Juno-106.
We have the full digital cable package, rogers high speed internet PLUS 4-meg uncapped DSL, and about 250GB of shared apps/movies/games/mp3s on our PC network. There is also a gas fireplace, and the house is not physically attached to any others, if you’re concerned about noise.
The location used to be a cafe, so there’s a massive wooden cafe-style deck on the front porch, with a barbeque. We have a HUGE lot/backyard. Before it was fenced in, there’d be a half-dozen schoolbuses and mack trucks parked there every night.
This is a liberal and GLB-friendly environment, and we are looking for an intelligent, financially stable roommate who wants more than another place to crash or a place for his friends to party all the time.
Rent is 450 a month, including phone/cable/both internet connections/heat/hydro/etc. First and last is not required. Interested parties can contact Jairus or Leslie at 249-0287.
(Forgive the X-Posting)
“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” he said.
“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one – but still they come!”