So, they don’t pay taxes while simultaneously receiving funds from the U.S. In other words, they get many of the benefits and don’t have to contribute. That’s why they can’t vote, by the way; they don’t pay income tax.

Anyway, there was a baseball tournament there recently and the Puerto Ricans were cheering for the Cuban team rather than the American one. It seems they’ve come to admire Cuba now, and are interested in attaining their independence from the United States.

I say let them go.

Let’s see what the country looks like in 5 years after they no longer are a colony. It’d be interesting to see how much they admire Cuba after actually becoming more like it. I abhor those who don’t appreciate what they have.

I mean, it’s important to note that nobody seems to be risking their livelihood to escape Puerto Rico via inner tube. It takes a certain type of intense, negative pressure to push a human to do such a thing, and to advocate embracing the system that created that pressure is, in my mind, utterly foolish.

I’ve been wanting to find some of this guy’s stuff for years — never having the presence of mind to actually write his name down while hearing him on XM Comedy and then track something of his down afterwards.

He actually came up in a conversation the other day with a friend, and upon realizing that this guy shared my enthusiasm for Hedberg, I then promptly found out that he was dead.

The feeling I can’t shake is that if I had gotten into him earlier, i.e. found his content on iTunes and spread the word, etc., he maybe wouldn’t have died. It’s like, I postponed my expression of interest and he paid the price for it. Lame, I know, but it’s crossed my mind.

Anyway, this guy was an uber-genius. He was a total god - I mean, like one of the best ever. If you haven’t heard anything of his, go to iTunes and partake of the goodness. It’ll be well worth your time.

So I’m pretty enthused right now — I’m using the new, very beta, universal binary for Firefox. And yes, it’s way faster than the PPC version — as would be expected.

All I’m waiting for now is some widgets that make this thing look like Safari or Camino.

Just saw a story about OpenBSD being in financial trouble. It’s sad because this project lends so much to the OSS community — most notably OpenSSH. There are two things good people do when they hear about this type of thing:

1. They say, “Wow, someone ought to help them out.”
2. They take 4 minutes out of their day (immediately, since you were just reading news anyway) to go and actually donate.

I urge you to please choose the latter option.

Indeed, the impossible has happened. I convinced a buddy to give FC5 a try the other day and he’s absolutely loving it (well, actually I convinced him a couple days ago to reconsider his view that Redhat sucked). Since my current Gentoo install is a bit stale (I havent’t done anything cool with it lately), I figure I’ll give FC5 a go myself tomorrow.

Not only is it to try something different, but it’s also just a general good idea to be familiar with Redhat* given its dominance in the corporate Linux space. So anyway, for a number of reasons I’m going to give it a go. We’ll keep you updated on how it turns out.

I’ve been a role-player since 7th grade and had the good fortune of being indoctrinated into a very elite form of the hobby — custom games. When I say custom I mean anything home-grown vs. store-bought, i.e. someone actually came up with the setting, mechanics and other inner-workings of the game.

The Difference

What I’ve noticed about those who play custom games vs. those who exclusively play D&D, etc. is that the former tend to be far more creative than the latter. I think I figured out why.

It’s not that all store-bought and “big” games demand mediocre imaginations from their players; there are tons of people who play mainstream game systems and do so in a very advanced way. But I’d argue that they are in the minority.

The trick is that creative people believe the things that they make up are just as legitimate as the things other people make up.

Non-creative people can’t make that jump. So to a non-imaginative person, developing a game setting, a storyline, characters, etc. is doomed to failure from the very beginning. In their own minds anything they come up with is immediately stupid and inherently not “real”.

The Symptoms

It is for this reason that these same sorts of people shy away from role-playing systems that don’t have an official logo on them. In their minds, if it doesn’t say “Dungeons & Dragons” on it then it’s not role playing. This is a limitation of them, not necessarily of the system in question.

Try this: create in your own mind a traditional D&D-style monster. Make it unique. Imagine what it eats, what it can do, how it attacks, etc. Now give it a name. Think of what it would look like. Could you describe it to someone? Could you convince another role-player that this is a real, “legitimate” monster that they hadn’t heard of?

If you can do this then you’re likely to be able to write a short story or create a custom game system. If you can’t then you’re afflicted with an all too common ailment these days — a lack of creativity.

All this really means is that you don’t believe you’re creative. It means that you could come up with a very cool idea but you’d never believe it was simply because you came up with it. That’s where my tree-hugger, love everyone, hippie education came in handy. I was always told that everyone could be creative, and I believed I was included.

Make Your Own

So to all those who role-play, but don’t play anything that’s not “real” fantasy game, I offer to you that you should expand your mind with some basic exercises. Try and make a game yourself. Make a new system. Make some characters. Make a combat system.

Put some real thought into it and get it so that you can convince someone that it’s a “real” system that just came out from Wizards of the Coast. Once you can do that you’ll find that your creativity in general has been boosted. Boosted by confidence.

That’s the bottom line — if you believe that you’re creative then you probably are. But if you believe that you aren’t then you almost definitely are not. Don’t let negative thoughts effect your reality. Change them.

If you are, or ever have been, interested in Zen or Buddhism — go read this:

Zen Is Boring

Full firewalls all within a virtual environment — very cool stuff…

http://edge.i-hacked.com/firewalls-ready-to-go-with-vmware-virtual-machines

President Bush reaffirmed his strike-first policy against terrorists and enemy nations on Thursday and said Iran may pose the biggest challenge for the United States. — Associated Press

You have got to be kidding me. Reaffirming his strike-first policy? Is this guy seriously considering taking on Iran? This is utterly insane…

I was doing some bash autocomplete on various two letter combinations while thinking of a name for a tool I’m writing and came across an awesome little tidbit I’ve never read about anywhere.

If you go to the command line in OS X and type:

say foo

…it’ll literally invoke the computer’s voice and “say” what you gave it as an argument (in this case it’ll actually say, “Foo”). Very cool stuff; I’ll be tinkering with this as of immediately. Imagine finishing a backup and having it audibly tell you, “Backup complete.”, or tracking the progress of a tool that takes a while. If you do this, for example:

say 10%

…it’ll actually say, “Ten percent.”

I’m imagining all sorts of mostly useless but very cool applications for this in custom programs. Enjoy.: – Edit: Oh, and yes, you can make it use … “non-standard” language. I just made it say, “You are an asshat.” It’s quite rich. And it’s even got the main George Carlin seven in there too. For bonus points you can make it say, “Your father is a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries.” Yes, much more fun than it should be.