blogwaffe

So it seems the pizza fest was a success. At the very least, no one complained or openly admitted to having a bad time. Maybe if grad school doesn’t work out I can open up a little pizza place. I’d call it “Fratello’s” after the pizza dough’s provenance. The only disappointment on my part was Dixie having to leave early before I was even able to get out of the kitchen and socialize. Oh well. Cheers, Dixie. At least I got some material goods to make up for it: (one third of) a wine rack from Jeff and Ariele, and an official burninating uniform from Heidi and Greg – both highly appreciated.

In other SLR news, I met a couple of our new downstairs neighbors today. Seem quite nice. All of them downstairs are +/- my age and working at various jobs in Pasadena. Hopefully I’ll see more of them.

“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.

It’s decided; the best idea for a blog ever goes to one \_jeff_{krimmel} for his coverage of his Madden 2004 football double elimination tournament. Others may have had similar ideas in the past, but Jeff’s is the first I’ve seen, so he get’s it: the honour of an oh-oh-ficial blogwaffe shoutout.

He starts off with a good description of the situation and continues with an in depth commentary on each of the games he’s played. Humble enough to admit and explain his limitations, but still very concerned about the outcomes of the games. And who wouldn’t be? He’s got a lot riding on this. Like getting Ariele pissed off that he’s spending too much time with Madden.

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

Damn you charter cable! Here I am spending hours trying to figure out what’s wrong with my webserver (it couldn’t be seen from outside the router), and it turns out that you’ve been blocking port 80 all along. You asses! What the hell kind of problem do you have with me having a webserver?

Huh?

Tell me. Now. ‘Cause I’m listening. ON FREAKIN’ PORT 8000!!

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.