I played a civ4 scenario for the first time last night. I played the American Revolution as the British. The map was really neat to play on, as they duplicated the eastern US pretty well. Each side starts out with about half of the cities on the map. Various actions cause loyalists to join the British or Colonials to take up arms. Also, accurately enough, the British are reinforced by German Mercenaries. From time to time British reinforcements arrive in Canada.

I read a book a few years ago called “Don’t Tell the Grownups” about how some authors hid their dangerous messages in the form of children’s book. As I was listening to some music from the cartoon Animaniacs, I also heard some hidden messages that the kids might not quite understand. For example, in a song where the Warner Brothers sing the names of the US Presidents, they end the song with, “…the one in charge is plain to see, it’s Clinton - first name Hilary.” So even in this kid’s show we see the joke that Hilary is in charge of the White House instead of Bill Clinton. This is pretty mild, but even more contentious is where Yakko sings all of the countries in the world. He mentions Taiwan as one of the countries. As we all know, we’re supposed to pretend that Taiwan is part of China when, for all intents and purposes, it is its own country in all but name. But here we are training kids that it is its own country - very interesting!

Wired Magazine’s April 2006 issue explored this premise in a very unique way. Instead of saying that we still don’t have conclusive evidence that video games do any damage (and in fact there is some that they are helpful in some instances) they mentioned that the battle between older adults and younger adults/kids is age-old. Below are the quotes they used in their article.

Novels

“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?” - Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Momoirs of the Bloomsegrove Family, 1790

When I found out a baby panda had been born at the National Zoo, I wanted to see him as soon as he was available. Unfortunately, the tickets to see him sold out right away. Now, nine months later, the tickets are largely an unnecessary formality. However, I didn’t know that when Danielle and I woke up at 5 am last Sunday to get a glimpse of Tai Shan. I had read that before 0830 tickets were not necessary to see the Giant Pandas, so I got all my gear ready on Saturday night and set my alarm for 0500. Then we went to go see Tai Shan. I found a group of photographers who all visit at least once a week (some every other day) to see what antics little Tai Shan was up to. He’s currently weaning, so he’s learned that bamboo goes in his mouth, but he still doesn’t eat it as voraciously as his parents. I had no idea I would find him so amusing! I ended up taken nearly 150 pictures of him. In raw mode, that cost me nearly 1.5 GB of space! Below are some of my favorite pictures from that day and I’ll be adding more soon.

Someone built a difference engine - the first computer ever designed by Charles Babbage - out of Legos. The difference engine is more of a calculator than a computer in that you can’t load multiple programs on it, but it was still extremely revolutionary for its time. In fact, it was only designed on paper and wasn’t actually built until the 1990s!

Here’s the link to the Lego Difference Engine…. raw geekage at its best!

If you haven’t done so already, install xen by typing

yum install xen

This will install xen as well as taking care of any needed dependencies. Now you need the xen-enabled kernel so type

yum install kernel-xen0

(That’s a zero there) While we’re waiting for that to install, it’s time to learn some Xen terminology. Xen causes all operating systems to run virtualized. This is why we need the xen kernel. It’s also why Xen is not available on Windows XP- you can’t virtualize an OS that doesn’t expect to be virtualized. However, there is still a primary OS and then a series of guest OSes, depending upon how many OSes you want to run and how much RAM you have. The primary OS is domain 0 and is referred to as dom0 online and pretty much everywhere I’ve read about Xen. All guest OSes are called domU. The first one is called dom0 because programmers start counting with 0. The guests are called domU because U stands for unpriveledged. Unpriviledged means they can’t reboot the physical computer and other such restrictions. Done? Good!

He is one of my favorite comedians so I have translated two of his jokes for you today. Enjoy!

A woman walks into a pet store and tells the man at the counter, “I would like to buy your canary which sings most beautifully.”

So the man at the counter comes back with a bird and tells her, “this bird sings more beautifully than any other canary. It sings so beautifully that I cannot sell it for less than $1500.” She thought this was a lot, but for a bird that sang that well, she was willing to pay the price.

Christian Rock/Pop music has been around since the 1970s when Larry Norman pioneered the genre. Since then it has become a HUGE market encompassing all areas of music from rock to ska to punk to rap. There is a large popuplation of Jews in the US, so why wouldn’t there be Jewish music? Finally, our country has put enough of our prejudices aside that I heard Matisyahu’s single “King Without a Crown” on the pop radio station here in the Baltimore Area.