barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

First, I haven't posted any blogs in a while because I've been working on the web site for my Planetside outfit, the Outlanders. You'll see a link to that site on the right-hand side. It uses the same technology as Barnson.org to drive it (Drupal), but it's a newer version. Once that new version graduates from "release candidate" to "release", I'll be updating Barnson.org as well.

Second: My life used to be pretty boring to all appearances. Yeah, I'm always excited about my work, technology, and music, but outside of those arenas, we didn't have much in the way of interpersonal conflict with neighbors or any other strangeness to be worried about. I mean, it seems like there are people who thrive on disasters. For a really great treastise on this subject in an easy-to-read fiction form, try The Losers, by David Eddings. It's an engrossing read by a popular fantasy author, but it's not fantasy. It's a modern-day urban good vs. evil morality play, and really worth the time to read. It's not very long, either.

Unfortunately, I found my life closely resembling The Losers last night...

Here are some tips I picked up recently off the Sony boards that I thought were relevant. If you don't play Planetside, this will probably make no sense to you.

So Slashdot linked to an article about Gator, the much-hated and much-imitated adware/spyware program that many people accidentally install on their Microsoft Windows [WARNING: Strong language] operating systems. I almost exclusively use GNU/Linux, particularly Gentoo, at home and work, so I'm not susceptible to accidental installation of this program... <read more>

This faith called "Otherkin" made the front page of Kuro5hin today. I must admit that I, like probably every other science-fiction fan on the planet, occasionally play with the idea that if I just think harder I can make that pencil on the desk move with my mind (heck, there's a training course you can take to teach you how), or that I'm really the malevolent god Hastur. Or whatever.

But building a faith around it? Well, no accounting for taste, but stuff like this is one of the reasons I avoid religion.

So I've been running Gentoo Linux on my home machine for several months now, and other than one thing, I'm in love. It's an amazing, stable system, easy to geek out on, yet incredibly easy to run once you get everything working. That's a big "once" there.

I made this post on Slashdot.org today, and felt like I wanted to mirror it in my weblog. I really think that an "inclusive" approach toward Artificial Intelligence, one that is multi-disciplinary, can be the key toward creating our ultimate goal, which is (basically) a new class of slave. I'll leave the moral implications of creating our own mechanical slaves out of the discussion for now, but really, the main benefit of creating an artificial intelligence, besides having it do stuff for us, would be to give us some company...

Just picked up a cheap PC desk ($120) from Fred Meyer, but it actually looks pretty nice! I'll post pics later. Just finished getting it together, and that is always a pain.

Christy and I arranged a date tonight. We've been pretty good about making sure we have a date every single week for the last few years; it's a tradition I really enjoy. Lately we've been looking for more interesting things to do than the traditional dinner or movie thing. Last week Christy suggested we go dancing, so I said let's do it this week. We did it, and it's a lot of fun...

From the keepen-dem-mittengrabben-offen dep't:

Polly Harris is a woman of many talents. Search and rescue worker, computer game programmer, intensely physical martial artist, and (reserve) police officer. To top it all off, she has a great sense of humor and has become the ad hoc discoverer-of-hilarious-quotes-on-weblogs for a small mailing list I participate in. Read the original article at the National Review (careful, due to one exceptionally-long sentence, the whole page ends up really, really wide), or Mean Mr. Mustard's excerpt, reprinted here almost in its entirety.

In the "Yet Another Repost" category, here's one of my old articles examining the differences between GNU/Linux and High-End UNIX out of insights gathered from a Slashdot discussion. Yeah, I know a lot of people slam Slashdot for the technical ignorance manifested there, but if you're familiar with the territory, it's not that treacherous.

Read more for the repost from March 3, 2003.