blogwaffe

“The truth of that matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States, And the world would be a lot better off.”

–George W. Bush [Second Presidential Debate]

–Dick Cheney

In fairness the time period during which he did not make such a suggestion was not explicitly specifed. He could have meant “I have not suggested [within this debate] …”. But let’s be honest, Cheney’s full of crap. Well… I take that back. He’s not full of crap. Cheney’s very intelligent, actually. He’s just evil and manipulative.

He’s also very consistent on his inconsistency in labelling Senator John Kerry’s consistency.

Ah well – Hopefully I won’t have to see Cheney ever again for an extended period of time.

About the time I was finally able to get to sleep last night, a certain member of the Caltech faculty was abruptly awakened by the ringing of his telephone. Professor of Theoretical Physics David Politzer must have first awakened in annoyance when he heard the phone, then fear as he subconciously prepared himself for some sort of emergency, and finally elation when he realized what day it was. 10.05.2004: the day the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced.

He lifted the receiver and was connected with Stockholm.

I like to think the King himself was on the phone, but, as far as I know, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, though founded by the Crown, is entirely independent; I do not believe the current King is a member.

Dr. Politzer was awarded the prize for his earlier work in on the concept of asymptotic freedom. The strong nuclear force is responsible for holding together such “everyday” particles as the proton and the neutron (together known as nucleons). These nucleons are in turn comprised of other, more fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. The odd thing (at least in the early 1970’s) is that particle collision experiments suggest that quarks are held together only very weakly inside a nucleon, however they have never been observed on their own outside of a nucleon. How can particles held together so very weakly not be pulled apart and examined individually?

Read more…

Minus a few tweaks, I’ve finally got everything settled on my server. It was actually all surprisingly easy considering I had no idea what I was doing. Now that I’m hosting my own site, I have more control and can offer more functionality. It’s amazing how much better a truly database driven website can be over a “flat” design.

Excuse the mess while I change bloggin engines. Should be back to normal… sometime.
Theold site is (more or less) archived here

New domain: www.blogwaffe.com
New webserver: my old laptop
New blogging engine: … patience

So after a few days of compiling, my latop (~Dell Inspiron 7000) is up and running with Gentoo. Perhaps the biggest hurdle to usability was the button on the case that the lid presses when closed. This button suspends the computer. Since I wanted the laptop for a server, and since servers serve fairly poorly when suspended, this was unacceptable. I tried to install ACPI, but the daemon consistently refused to load no matter what kernel I used and no matter how completely I saw ACPI support compiled into those kernels. I finally decided my laptop was not compatible.

So I tried APM. The only useful feature that APM allowed was turning off the screen’s backlight. It had no control over the lid-close-button event. So, hell, I don’t need the button there, anyway, I thought. I’ll just take it out. I disassembled my entire laptop, removing drives, keyboard, screen, various bits of thermal shielding, etc. As it turns out, the button is not easily removed. This is an understatement. Not wanting to break out the soldering iron, I, after hours of attempting software control, and an hour or so of taking apart (and putting back together) the laptop, decided to cut off the button.

So I cut off the button. It works great now; I can close the lid, have the screen turn off and let the thing run as long as I want on less juice than a typical light bulb.

There’s no progress bar.

I’ve been sitting here for the past – I don’t know – 6 hours? installing gentoo on my old laptop (a Pentium II 366). I could have made the process faster, but I wanted everything built from the ground up, specific to my system. So I burned the minimal install CD, repartitioned everything, downloaded an immense package list, and bootstrapped into a base system (that’s right – as few binaries as possible for this install). More accurately, I should say “I’m bootstrapping into a base system” since I’me not now finished. Better yet, “attempting to bootstrap into a base system” since I don’t yet know the outcome. Checking just now, I see that I’m currently compiling glibc stuff. Glibc. Ugh, how many more packages must come after glibc?

Next up: the actual kernel.

Paul.za is already missing, presumed confused. He left for Ikea approximately twenty-two hours ago and has not be seen or heard from since.

UPDATE.11.40pm: Paul.za broke Greg’s car and got stranded in the Ikea parking lot. Greg and Laurel rescued him in my car and had Greg’s towed to some sort of automobile rehabilitation center. Meanwhile, I was eating dinner expertly prepared by Jeff and Ariele and the girls’ and replacing dixie’s brain at Evil Ltd. After coming back from Ikea (with only half of his purchases), Paul.za, Greg and Laurel joined us at the girls’. Simply to complicate, I had Paul.za drive my car back to our place, and Greg drove Heidi’s car.

Now Greg’s measuring his penis online.

Paul.za is back from .za. Claims to have had a lovely time, but I fail to see how he could have what with all the green rolling hills, white sand beaches, dolphins and five course meals.

Immediately after coming into town (immediately as in he and Greg were just pulling into the parking lot), Michelle, Dixie and I accosted him and forced him to go to dinner with us at Father Nature’s (a pretty good Armenian place). Though he had been travelling for 31 hours, we also convinced him to hit up the GSC new student party in the cats:

“Rum and Coke?”
“We’re out of Rum.”
“Gin and Tonic?”
“No tonic. Gin and Coke?”
“Uh… No – Gin and Sprite?”
“Sure”

Ah GSC parties.