(no subject)

An interesting editorial from the Tehran Times. It starts off with questionable-context material biased to MIM Notes levels (charging that Americans are intentionally targeting mosques and civilians within Fallujah as a prelude to razing the whole city), but it then ends in unexpected territory, with what looks like an appeal to American readers. It got top linking in its category under Google News. I wonder how typical it is of other editorials in that region.

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Also, a delightful 1971 Doonesbury; yes, that's who you think it is, behind the podium. (And as Gene Weingarten (from whom I lifted the link) notes, it's always interesting to see how Trudeau's style, visual and written, has matured since then.) (And yes, I'm as caught up in the most recent storyline involving B.D. as you are.)

Wow

Chilling effect in action: Comedy Central seems to have bleeped the word "cunnilingus" during a Daily Show broadcast. (Context: a weak non-pun a guest made off the word "linguist".) Yay, let's bleep words at random just to be safe. Damn you Janet Jackson

(Man, now that I'm thinking about it, they might have bleeped "fornication" earlier, but I'm not sure.)

Computers big and small

Small computers: Prototypical autodocs, straight out of Niven, if a little inside-out in execution. (In future, ROBOT DOCTOR goes inside YOU.) This is very exciting. Hook me up.

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Big computers: I got the G5 on Monday. It is certainly the largest computer I've ever owned, and yet, it does in fact look like a giant cheese grater. I have named it Stilton.

I have been quiet, but not from the G5 -- I actually haven't haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet. ICG stuff has my hams a-fryin. We're in daily-slip mode on this project. (Which is to say, the launch-date slips forward a day for each, um, day that passes. Hmm... though as I write this, it's down to an hour-by-hour thing. At least the done-time now seems to be permanently suspended a couple of hours into the future, as opposed to a couple of weeks, as it has been for the last 18 months. So there's some sort of graphable progression here, I'm sure.) This is also why I've been socially invisible for the last week or so, and will continue to be so until I'm not anymore.

First impressions on the Mac, anyway:

It's weird to be unable to shut off the monitor. It was weirder to learn that the monitor's power button sleeps the computer! (You can shut this off in System Preferences, and thereafter the monitor's power button does nothing at all.) It's clear that Apple wants the user to see the monitor (sorry, "display") as part of the computer, rather than a stand-alone peripheral; I can see where they're coming from, though I wasn't expecting this.


Now that I have two Macs I might subscribe to .mac just for the synchronization features, but part of me would feel bad about it; can't I just write some perl scripts instead? Isn't that worth saving $100? meeenh

I have some fun projects involving the new beastie already underway, insofar I've entered into the eBay-running for various doohickeys that would help me start implementing my smart-house (cough) ideas. Perhaps they'll start arriving when I start my vacation...