A Guinness Commercial

I just bought a stick of Right Guard Extreme Anti-perspirant. Why? Because it’s one of the products being whored out on Spike TV in conjunction with my favorite sport — Mixed Martial Arts fight competitions.

I feel lame for doing it, but then again I don’t. I want nothing more than to see this sport thrive. And if I have to buy Xience and Right Guard to help accomplish that goal, then so be it.

On another note, here’s a cool commercial.

I was listening to NPR sometime last week or so and caught a piece of a very intriguing program. The show itself was called This American Life, and it’s evidently part of their regular lineup.

The program for that day, however, was called Godless America, and the feature I came in on was an excerpt from Julia Sweeny’s Letting Go of God.

I found her essay to be one of the most compelling descriptions of someone “seeing the light” when it comes to religion, i.e. someone who’s always been Christian figuring out that the Bible (and Christianity in general) isn’t necessarily what they thought it was.

I’m not going to go into any more detail than that for a number of reasons, but I urge everyone to listen to this program as soon as possible. It’s an hour long — the first 30 minutes or so are about religion in the U.S. in general, and the last portion is the essay. I think the whole thing is awesome, but at an absolute minimum you have to listen to the essay excerpt. Also, stay tuned for full versions of the essay in CD and book format, as well as a movie.

NPR - This American Life - Godless America.m4a torrent | direct

Congrats to Jason on his new baby. :)

This looks pretty interesting.

So Apple’s released a new line of Powermacs, and the new high-end model has four CPUs.

OMFG.

As enthused as I am about the new Intel lineup, I really want to get one of the G5 models before the switch is made. Ideally, it’d be one of these quad beasts.

For no particular reason at all I just feel like mentioning how much I like, and have always liked, Indian people.

To start with, I don’t think I’ve ever met an Indian person I didn’t like. It’s almost as if having a good nature is an element of the culture. When I think of Indians that I’ve known over the years (starting all the way back in school in the Bay Area), pleasant memories come to mind in every single case.

I guess my first statement wasn’t quite right; the reason I’ve been thinking about this recently is because not a week goes by when I don’t hear conversations where Indians are spoken of in a negative way. People (especially in the South) think of Indians as mindless idiots who go around stealing jobs from hardworking Americans. They make fun of their accents, the fact that they work so hard, and anything else they can cling to. The saddest funniest thing is when these mouthbreathers try and make fun of Indians based on their Muslim faith. “They need to get out of my face and go worship Allah!!”, they’ll say.

I’m quite tired of it. Not only are Indian people good natured, but I love other parts of their culture as well. I like the fact that they are quiet. You never need to call the police to complain about your Indian neighbors, for example. I also like the fact that they have such strong family values, and how focused they are on education. I love their desire to acheive.

People make fun of the gas station stereotype, for example, but what they don’t realize is how much of an accomplishment it is. These people who had to learn Engish as a second language, and here they are thriving in a foreign land. I applaud it. And to those who are bitter, I say you’re sad little people who should be ashamed of yourselves.

To put a point on it, I think this country would be a whole lot better if more Americans were half as intelligent and motivated as the average Indian in this country. Luckily, there is a cure for the problem — books. Unfortunately, they’re like Kryptonite to so many in this country.

So I’ve had a theory for many years now. It’s not particularly poignant or anything, but I figured it’s my blog so I might as well indulge.

I think it may be possible to determine the degree of masculinity/assertiveness a person has by observing how they prefer to place a roll of toilet paper on the spool. I find that most women like to have it come off from behind, i.e. push it “away from you” in order to take some off the roll. The opposite preference seems to exist with the few guys I’ve asked.

What comes to mind is the balance between being passive and being assertive. Those who are more passive are more likely to have it in the back, and those who are more assertive would like the the appearance of the roll facing “toward” them and rolling in their direction when extracted.

I’ve seen women freak out when seeing it face forward — like it’s some sort of affront to their personality. This could be a simple matter of learning it one way and not liking it any other way, but I’m a student of the school that says the subconscious steers much of our behavior. As such, I think this personality issue may be driving people’s preference on the issue in the way I describe above.

I’m quite sure I’m reading too much into this, but I wonder if there’s anything at all to it. I submit the idea for your review. Thoughts?

Someone pointed out this Gentoo flame article the other day and I just got around to finally reading it.

Well, it was lame. Not because the guy likes Slackware better than Gentoo, but because of the reasons he gave. His major gripe seemed to be that it was difficult to get KDE running in Gentoo.

I say bovine fecal matter. I just showed two relative Linux novices how to do this exact same thing in very short order, and I’m not even a “Linux on the desktop” kind of guy. Do you know what the key was? RTFM. Gentoo’s documentation is utterly sick. Between the official offerings and the Wiki, you can essentially do anything you want by reading the literature. That’s anything from getting sound working to getting Snort to report to MySQL.

Look, I’m a fanboy, to be sure, but I’m an inclusive fanboy — meaning I love singing the praises of my distro but I don’t get off on trashing the alternatives. My basic philosophy is that which is highlighted in my article called Geek Battles: A Call For Perspective.

Essentially, if you like a given tool and are able to use it to effectively create things, then that’s all that matters. How leet that tool is, or whether or not leet people use it, is irrelevant. You can’t be leet by using leet tools but failing to do anything with them.

Anyway, I digress.

I love Gentoo for a very simple reason — it’s the Linux distro I’m the most comfortable with. I have a good friend that spent a lot of time in a Redhat shop, and he keeps finding himself going back to it. Why? Because it’s familiar to him, and that’s the most natural thing in the world. Any fool running UberLeet Distro version 7 better know some serious Kung Fu if they intend to give my buddy any flak for running what many idiot’s think is a “lesser” distro. They’re likely to be severely embarassed. Ken knows crane style, and if uberboy isn’t versed in defecating chinchilla he’s in for a rude awakening. :)

Look, use what you feel comfortable with. For me that’s Gentoo (and Debian to a lesser degree). But for the love of God, if you don’t feel comfortable with a distro, don’t embarass yourself by claiming it’s trash — especially when the main problem you had with it was based on not reading the instructions. People like this need to seriously get a grip.