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Professor Pausch, who was given a death sentence and responded by delivering the famous Last Lecture, has died.

At moments like this, I am reminded of something written by Larry McMurtry in Lonesome Dove - “Life is short. Shorter for some than others.”

That pretty much sums it up. There are some things we can’t control, and as for what we might have done to prevent them in the past, well, yesterday’s gone and we can’t get it back. The world is full of tragedy, pain, and injustice, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Another thing McMurtry wrote - “The Earth is a boneyard”. When you go outside, you’re walking on the bones of millions of dead creatures.

Strangely enough, this brings me comfort. We are all likely to die in some undignified, painful, miserable way. We will be buried and our bones will be walked on by the living. And since there’s nothing we can do about that, there’s no reason to worry about it.

Humans are cursed by the fact that we are aware of our own mortality. But we can rationalize our mortality by believing that we will live indefinitely. Pausch had no such comfort. He knew he had only a short time, and was in for some extreme pain. But as he said in the Last Lecture, there’s nothing he could do about that.

Here’s the link. Watch it some time this weekend.

I just finished the watching the documentary Zeitgeist. It’s very interesting and I’d like to know what some of the rest of you think of it.
Google video has a copy here
This is a torrent link to a DVD ISO image that can be burned or mounted. In my view, not much more quality is gained over the Google version.
Official Website.
The film is constructed in 3 parts.

Notes on part 1:

* Suggested origin of Judeo-Christian religions as being Egyptian.
* Comparison of Jesus and Horus
* Suggestion that Jesus never lived at all.
* 100 million Americans believe in the Biblical “end of the world” story.
* Vatican dominates Europe, instigates Crusades and other horrors.

Notes on part 2:

* Basic 9/11 conspiracy stuff, whittled down to most potent evidence.
* Buildings were demolished, no plane wreckage found, thermite used, evidence destroyed, videotapes secret etc.

Notes on part 3:

* Longest part
* Vicious, Ed Griffin-style attack on Federal Reserve.
* Repeated use of made-up or provoked “enemy” attacks by US government, including Lusitania, Pearl Harbour, and Gulf of Tonkin.
* International bankers like Warburg and Rothschild profit from war
* Rockefellers profit from both US and Nazi sides in WW2.
* Suggestion that US Federal Income Tax is unconstitutional and no actual law exists.
* US goes off Gold Standard, Feds confiscate all gold in 1930s.
* Prescott Bush shields Nazi money
* North American treaty to create “Amerro” currency.
* One world government.
* Aaron Russo reveals conversations with Rockefellers.

The flick also contains segments of comedy routines by Bill Hicks and George Carlin, as well as footage from the film “Network”, brilliantly written by Paddy Chayefsky and performed by Peter Finch. Going into this film, I expected a left-dissident approach, but that’s not what this is. There’s no talk of “the workers” or anything like that. Anarchism, which usually connotes a Lefty point of view, is never mentioned. The final sequences talk about the power of the individual, and given the references to the Fed and the Gold Standard, in addition to the attack on the Income Tax, it’s difficult to see this film as something Chomsky would entirely approve of. Instead, it’s more of an Antony Sutton world view.
My initial impressions are that it is an excellent entertainment, although it could use some edits. It is long and the Jesus segment lacks relevance to the second and third parts. In fact, the film might be better without the opening salvo against Christianity. The 9/11 segment may or may not be factually accurate, but it is ruthlessly edited. The film uses a narrator in parts, and he is easy to listen to. As a filmmaking exercise, the movie is technically a success. Artistically and factually are entirely other matters.

Quietly yesterday (I was using it for the past 24 hours without even knowing it), the stable Firefox 3 was released. This site was designed for it, so if you’re a regular visitor, I suggest upgrading. Alternatively, you could use Opera, if so inclined.
I wouldn’t suggest using … that other browser — unless pain is something you enjoy.
For those (like me) using Ubuntu, enable the hardy-updates repository in Synaptic, update and you’ll get FF3 automatically.
For those unfortunate folks using … that other operating system — grab FF3 here.

The site has been updated to WordPress 2.5, which has changed the dashboard considerably, and for the better. I am staying with the default WordPress dashboard theme for the forseeable future. WordPress’s lead designer, Matt Mullenweg, created a short screencast of himself using the new dashboard to post and add images or galleries to a post. This may answer any questions you have about how this is done. I encourage you all to take advantage of the new features. The screencast can be found here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/

Björk has been pissing off governments all over the place with this new song. Here’s a live performance in California last summer:

And here’s the video:

Here’s a link to the lyrics. I particularly dig Damn colonists/Ignore their patronizing/Tear off their blindfolds/Open their eyes
Here’s a hard copy of the record, if you want it.

Obviously, many of the regulars here must have noticed that this site has been down for most of the day. The site has also been down for some time in the past, and has been very slow of late. Well, I hope to offer an explanation for these issues and a solution.
First of all, about a year ago our webhost upgraded their hardware and software to something more modern and powerful. Ever since, things have been going downhill. Their upgrades should have had the opposite effect. Approximately two weeks ago, the server’s RAID array failed and had to be replaced, a problem which included data loss. Today’s problem was a power failure followed by an improbable series of hardware mishaps at the GNAX datacenter in Atlanta.
As far as I’m concerned, and event like today can’t happen, ever.
So, to make a long story short, we’re changing webhosts and getting out of the GNAX center. It’s a bit of a pain in the butt, but we’re doing it because we just can’t depend on them anymore. We’re also planning on updating to PHP5 and Apache 2, which could cause some short-term problems because we’ve been on PHP4 and Apache 1.3 all this time.
I understand that many of you may be angry and frustrated at these issues, and none more so than me. But I assure you we are taking action to correct the situation. What follows is a more or less official explanation from GNAX, heavy on technical details, for today’s problem.

Originally Posted by Jeff
RFO January 9, 2008 4:45 am EST
At approximately 4:45 am EST the NAP suffered a power outage lasting approximately 10 seconds from Georgia Power.

The generators fired and came online 15 seconds after the initial outge and the load was transferred to generators which ran for 30 minutes while monitoring the incoming power quality from GA Power at which time the load was transferred back to utility.

One of the UPS’s that serves part of the facility suffered a battery outage on 2 different redundant strings which caused it to drop the load.
We installed a second redundant string approximately 9 months ago to minimize the possibility of this type of situation. The batteries in the 2 strings are setup in parallel meaning each is capable of carrying the full load for up to 5 minutes.

All it takes is 1 battery in a string to fail for the entire string to fail. this is the same in all ups systems and is the reason we installed the second string from advice from the manufacturer.

The original string batteries are 1.5 years old and were installed new. The second string is 9 months old and was installed new.

A single battery in the second string failed after 3 batteries in the first string failed.

We turned the generators back on to avoid an interruption during troubleshooting and maintenance and MGE sent a tech onsite within an hour to troubleshoot at which time we discovered the battery issue. we replaced the batteries within an hour of diagnosis and brought the system back onlnine and out of maintenance bypass.

The load is currently protected and all batteries have been tested again.

Both sets of batteries have been maintained and tested by MGE direct service every 6 months under a pm plan that they recommended for proper maintenance and operation.

This was extremely rare and unforseen to have something like this happen.

We are purchasing our own battery tester and will set up a monthly pm on the batteries that we will conduct ourselves in addition to the 6 month pm that MGE does on the UPS as well as the batteries. We are also researching a real time battery monitoring system that can predict battery failure.

Batteries are the weakest link in the system and we feel like we properly followed recommended engineering and maintenance on these systems. - however that will not assure 100% as we found out today in a very rare incident.

Extemporaneous events that continued to affect service during the outage:
one of the main metro e switches that runs the links of our backbone went offline during the outage and during that powerinduced reboot we lost connectivity to half our backbones. we have our backbones split in half - with half going out the east and half out the west side of the building taking dirverse paths across redundant switches to the final interconnect points.
the switch was unstable when it came back online due to a gbic that died and for some odd reason rebooted itself several times about every 10 minutes. we replaced the gbic with a spare we keep onsite.

This caused half the backbones to go up and down and placed a large cpu load on the different core routers we have due to bgp table loads going on - this is very cpu intensive and when you have a lot of up and down it can appear that the network is completely down (it is if you are on a link that is flapping) but the fact is that the entire network was not down but was impacted. this settled down when the switch was stabilized.

We split our backbones up over several different redundant backbone routers.

once this switch was brought back online and stabilized the network stabilized as well.

an access switch that serves 16 servers also died and we replaced it with a spare once we found the issue. we keep spares on site for every piece of network gear we have.

an apc that was only 6 months old and is a dual fed apc from 2 different power sources (including the newer ups) failed and did not come back - we replaced it with an onsite spare. it was bizarre to say the least and of course it powered one of our 3 main dns clusters so we lost dns capacity for an hour.

Most of the issues currently going on are related to server hardware that did not do well in a power reboot situation or need a fsck. we are actively working on them and will not rest until all is well.

Many customers in the facility do have A and B feeds from our power. we offer this through different ups systems / different power panels and different transformers. Some very early customers that purchased a and b feeds when we only had one ups system at the NAP are on the same ups and as such lost power. those customers will be offered a free move on their b feed to the newer ups to increase their power diversity - they simply need to open a ticket.

What are we doing on power in the future?

We have another UPS from MGE on order as of 4 weeks ago that is due to deliver in mid Feb that will increase the diveristy of the power in the facility. We plan on having 2 battery strings on it as well.

We are in the process of installing another set of 5 cummins generators and another 3000 amp transformer which will further diversify our generator and transformer plant - this will be completed in mid february - construction of this is going on currently we took delivery of the switchgear and generators 2 weeks ago. 4 ups/ will be moved to the new power feeed and g enarators to diversify the power source to the UPS . this will give us 100% redundancy on the A / B feeds at that point.

We installed a redundant b feed to our metro e gear and 2 dual fed apcs at our TELX cabinet after TELX suffered a complete UPS failure at 56 marietta 4 months ago. This turned out to be good because there was another complete failure of the B ups 4 weeks ago - but we were not affected since we had a redundant feed from them. the outage affected all customers on the second floor. we would have more than 50% of our network had we not been on dual fed apcs and dual power feeds at the building which would have been bad.

we are increasing the battery pm schedule to monthly from biannual.

we are researching a battery monitoring system for the strings.

we will be taking a fuel delivery this week to restock our main fuel supply

we are examining in depth on of our 4 core metro switch abnormalities this morning and if we do not find a rfo from the manufacturer will be examining replacing it or upgrading to a different more robust solution - which has been in our long term plan but may get moved up.

we will be doing another power examination of our core swithcing routers ( currently 6 of them all with dual fed power ) and our core metro e switches (currently 4 of them) to make sure that our power feeeds are truly redundant and no legacy circuits are there to affect them.

we will be examining our on site spares inventory to make sure we are still at correct levels since we used some items this morning.

We appologize for the outage caused by the failure of hte primary and backup batteries and will continue to provide the best service at an excellent price.
The MGE tech that has all the major accounts in Atlanta including coke and several others told us that this was a very freak occurance with negligible odds of happening and in his opinion we have done everything right on our maintenance and pm and redundancy of the batteries and he would have done the same thing and that there was really nothing he would have recommended different at that point.

we are still going to make the changes above that I mentioned though.

Any of you can read some of the angry forum posts from webhosts asking GNAX for answers on when the servers would be back up. Some were up early in the process, others took all day.

Um, I think I called for this in a comment awhile back on this site. Anyway, the streaming section for each show now contains MP4 links for video, as well as a “More Video Formats” link which takes you to archive.org where there is a youtube-like flash version, complete with embedding code.

Also, there is an OGG THEORA version, which of course is completely GNU/LINUX open source. I specifically called for that in the comment (which I’m too damned lazy to go back and link to). For the fanatics, there are MPEG-1 and 2 versions, which are suitably DVD size and could be burned onto a DVD for distribution. It looks like the THEORA version is only for recent shows, but the MPEG and flash versions go back all the way to the beginning of the show, in the late 1990s.

There is also a videocast and podcast feed. They thought of everything.

Originally, Pat wanted it to be called “Keep Out The Wetbacks!!!”. Sadly, he was overruled by his publisher, which has named it “Day of Reckoning”
Here’s Drudge’s preview:
“To prevent America becoming “a tangle of squabbling nationalities” Buchanan urges: No amnesty for the 12-20 million illegal aliens; a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville; Congressional declarations that children born to illegal aliens are not citizens and English is the language of the United States; and a “timeout” on all immigration.”

No amnesty. No amnesty…what does he mean by that? I guess he wants to expel these people. That’s perfectly reasonable. They’re illegal, as Lou Dobbs says 47 thousand times per show, so they should be expelled. Now that we’ve settled that, how will that procedure be carried out?
The United States has a population of 300 million or so. Buchanan is urging the removal of as many as 20 million people, or approximately 6.67% of the entire population of the United States.
What if they don’t want to go?
They’ll have to be coerced. Men with guns will have to round them up and get rid of them. Well, that’s happened before, I suppose. Actually, it happens all the time. They really got into that kind of thing in the 40s. Every country seemed to think that was a good idea. The US, Germany, the USSR, et al. Israel was created by permanently displacing 750k people. We love Israel right? Maybe Buchanan really has something here…
OK, alright, this book does have some good stuff. He basically wants a Katyn massacre-type thing for the Neocons, which I think all Americans can agree with at this point. Take them out back and plug ‘em. And he wants to close most of the thousand or so US bases internationally, and call off the new Cold War with the Russkies. Those would all be positive steps (especially the massacre). But I keep wondering what happens to all of those troops he wants to bring home. Are they fired or are they used for something else? Something for which their firearms might be of special use?
That brings me back to his ideas about “illegal” immigrants. What if they don’t want to go?

After a year of work, Mozilla has released the second beta of Firefox 3. It’s much faster than Firefox 2, and has a better graphics and layout engine.
Also, Opera 9.5 is out as an alpha, which should be less stable than a beta release. Of the two, Opera is more sophisticated, the layout engine is more advanced, and the browser is probably faster. I don’t believe it has the plugins (adblock, flashblock et al.) that Firefox has, but it still might be a better bet.
Releases follow the following pattern: alpha=>beta=>release candidate=> full stable release, ready for production use. Firefox 3 went through 8 alpha releases before finally arriving at beta 1, and the current build is beta 2. As an Alpha, Opera will crash unpredictably, for unexplained reasons, and should not be used in a “production environment”. Nevertheless, here are the download links if you want to try them:
Firefox 3
Opera 9.5

No, really. Here’s his platform, according to a news story:

higher taxes for the highest income earners or would require tough energy conservation standards to wean the country off its dependence on foreign oil while dealing with global climate change.

He said his universal health-care proposals would take power in the health-care sector away from health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. He also called for more subsidized housing and rejected privatization proposals to help save Social Security.

“I don’t believe in privatization. I don’t believe in raising the retirement age or in cutting benefits. We need to find a new revenue stream,” he said. He has proposed raising the Social Security wage earner cap to far above its current $90,000 level.

His energy policy precluded nuclear power and would penalize corporate polluters with heavy fines — producing revenues that would be reinvested into aggressive renewable energy research and programs.

So, an Edwards presidency would involve a complete takeover by the government of the lives of all Americans, from cradle to grave. The reason is that obviously humans are incapable of caring for and planning for themselves. As the industries Edwards plans on taking over become cartelized, unionized, and monopolized (which they desperately want and hope for) and it raises the cost of living for everyone, and the quality of service drops to unimaginably poor levels, the resulting America would resemble this:

The Onion’s take.

I saw this on IMDB today.

Concerned about the current negative image of the American military in many countries, Paramount Pictures and Hasbro, the toy manufacturer, have decided that in their forthcoming film featuring comic-book patriot G.I. Joe, the character will become part of a multinational force, the London Daily Telegraph reported today (Tuesday). Even the character’s name has become an acronym for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, the newspaper said. Word of the makeover is likely to anger U.S. conservatives, the Telegraph noted.

So Joe is still a murderer and a terrorist, but now he’s under the command of a UN type-of-thing … wait. What the hell does that mean? Global Integrated what? It sounds like a prosthetic limb. It sure doesn’t sound like any organization I’ve ever heard of. Who’s this guy supposed to be murdering anyway?