I replied to your Iran comment with something nearly long enough to be a blog post. Looking forward to any future debate on that thread.

Blender Nation has been one of the really great rigged up characters available for use in Blender, mancandy. It’s very useful for people who want to focus on backgrounds or learn how to create a semi-realistic humanoid and rig. After seeing this story about different pictures people created with mancandy, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a very well rigged character and I think I will use it to practice facial expressions and body language. I only played for about 5 minutes, so I know there’s lots I’m not taking advantage of, but here’s my best shot. It’s now my Windows background image. Link is to a background-sized image.

We’ve been asking for it forever and finally flickr has delivered! We wanted sets that contain sets - it makes for better organization - and now they’ve delivered in the form of collections.

Visit my collections page on flickr

I’m including the file here. It’s just a command line RSS reader. The included readme file will tell you which parameters to pass it. It doesn’t really do a lot of checking or than for the words “sub” and “unsub”. It’s a pretty neat proof of concept. I’m not going to improve on it much at this stage because it’s going to be used in issue 91, I believe, to create a GTK application. It would be my first ever useful GTK application, so I’m pretty excited about it. RSS Reader

John Edwards wife and Press Secretary Tony Snow. Cancer doesn’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on, it still attacks.

Those of us who read the newspapers, which tend to be focused on more details than Tv news, have read the stories that neither the administration nor Tv news have focused too much on: Iran was cooperating with the USA after 11 Sept 2001. They were helping us go after the Taliban and catching terrorists. Of course, I’ve learned recently they also had a self-interested motive in doing so as the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was [along with Iraq] one of their long-time rivals. However, they were helping us. Then Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in the Axis of Evil in the 2002 State of the Union. Besides providing a lot of fodder for SNL and other Late Night Shows, this had the effect of Iran ceasing to help us. They were thinking, “Axis of Evil? You SoB, we were just helping you in Afghanistan!”

It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for.

Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search on one character searches as opposed to a whole word.

Next issue begins a real program - an RSS reader. Since I have that issue, I think I’ll do it tonight and then turn in for the night.

This news is a few weeks old, but I’m behind on my “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” podcasts. However, a congressman said that we have to be really careful with dealing with Iraq and Iran (meaning bomb the stuffing out of them) or else our money may one day read, “In Mohammad We Trust.”

Hey you moronic, racist/religioust, jerk - does our money say, “In Jesus We Trust?” If your improbable scenario were to play out, our money would read “In Allah We Trust” and everyone knows that Allah == God. Therefore it would say the same thing it says now.

I booted into this disc to see what games it had. It is a decent disc and I discovered that there’s a Penguin-based Mario Kart Clone. It mostly has FPS shooters.

Anyway, when I booted back into Windows my network card was no longer working. After fretting for about an hour and rebooting and shutting down, I went on IRC and found the answer. Sometimes (although it’s never happened to me before with a livecd) the drivers get into a weird state. To fix it, just completely cut the power. That means shut down your computer and then pull the power cord and wait for about 1 minute. After that it will work again.