I will be going on my honeymoon pretty soon and so my server will be the last thing on my mind. Besides that, there won’t be any Linux computers easily accessible because I’m not taking my laptop. This is bad news for the server because of the constant thunderstorms in Tampa. For the past two weeks we’ve had thunderstorms every day and we even lost electrical power a few days ago. Since a UPS costs money and I neither have paying advertisers nor paying hostees, if the power goes out, rebooting my server, there won’t be any service until I get back. Of course, this is sad for me too because it means you won’t get to read any of the pre-written posts I wrote, but, in all honesty, that’ll be the last thing on my mind. See ya when I get back!

weather has delayed her arrival to 1 am !

get to see my fiancee in about 5.5-6 hours! Then we’ll never be apart for more than the length of a business trip.

f-spot is a new program for organizing photos in Linux and is currently in early development. It looks really nice! It seems to rival most picture organizing software out there for any platform. The thing that really got my attention, however, was that the developers are asking people to send in RAW photo files so that they could build in support for that. If they successfully do that, I’ll never turn on my Windows computer again. The only thing I use Windows for nowadays is Photoshop. I have games like Sims 2, but I never have time to play them. Right now I’m too busy planning for the wedding and afterwards I’ll be too busy being married. Therefore, all I need to do is Office stuff and Internet which Linux does amazingly well. I hope the f-spot comes out soon.

You may know, because they are relatively famous examples, that in British citizens wishing to enter inner London streets during peak times have to pay a toll. This was enacted based on the economic premise of marginal benefit. In case it’s been a while since you took Econ101, marginal benefit is the amount of money someone is willing to pay for a service. If they pay less then that, they feel they are getting a good deal. If they pay that price, the believe it is fair. They refuse to pay a price above that price. In other words, if your marginal benefit from a bag of chips is $0.50, you will cease to want a bag of chips if they cost $0.60. If you still want it at sixty cents, then that was your real marginal benefit. Therefore, the British government figured that they just had to raise the price high enough that a majority of people wouldn’t use the roads and then congestion would vanish. It has mostly worked out right.

By this time next week I will have been married for around six hours. We would have been married under God and with all of my relatives as our witness. We would have had some fun, albeit muted fun, at my reception. If things to go plan, we would have been at our wedding night hotel for about two hours now. In about six and one half we’d have to start getting ready to fly to New York. And twelve hours from this time next week, I should be in New York City, resting or helping get things ready for the New York Wedding. Of course, I’ll volunteer to help, but often times in their culture, this is women’s work to be done. That’s fine with me, I’d certainly try for a nap if I could get one because even we were sleeping at this time next week, we’d still only have six hours of sleep after running around all day. Wedding days are notorious for using up not only all the energy you have, but also your energy reserves. Hopefully I can sleep on the plane to New York, but I don’t usually have good luck sleeping on planes. I have to make sure to find my travel pillow before I go.

Video game fans may recall the dissapointment when, last year, uS courts forced Bnetd servers to shut down. Bnetd, short for Battle Net daemon, was created by some hackers who had become very upset with Blizzard’s Battle.net. There was rampant cheating and latancy problems. They did what any hacker would do when confronted with a software problem - develop new software that fixes is. They created their own servers to play Warcraft (and Diablo, etc) on and life was good. that is, things were good until Blizzard too,k them to court and won an injunction against them. The judge had cited that law which I hate so much, the DMCA, as one of the reasons why this software was illegal. Also, he said, Blizzard’s license (which you have to agree to or else can’t play the game) says that you can’t do this. Aha! I knew I should have been reading that crap instead of just clicking next to install my favorite software.

I haven’t Googled myself in a while, so I decided to see what would come up with my first and last name. What a paper trail I’ve left since the last time I was here.

Item number 2 on page 1 was a link to my book at Lulu.com, the self-publishing company. Items 3 and 4 were links to my ICQ page (I had forgotten about that!) Item 6 went to my webpage on Tripod.com Item 8 was a question I had asked on the Octave List-serve

I recently found something interesting - a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like the artist, they will buy the music. I think this is true as I have recently bought “Mmmhmm” by Relient K, “Dichotomy A” by GRITS, and other CDs I could have easily downloaded. Below is a letter written by one of the founders/owners of the record label - Fading Ways which I loved. I will reproduce it and write comments where appropriate.

I used to to love Anime. I don’t hate it now, but I don’t have as much zeal for it as I used to. Two things happened. First of all, anime is very expensive. Most DVDs have four episodes and cost $24 dollars. Usually it takes 6 DVDs to complete a season or $150 + tax. That’s a lot of money. Second, now that it’s mainstream it’s hard to tell the good anime from the bad anime. Back when I first started watching, it was just starting to become mainstream. There weren’t many titles available and whatever existed was pretty darned good. Studios couldn’t release crap over here or it wouldn’t sell. Basically there was awesome anime and hentai. Now there’s so much anime that best buy almost has an entire aisle dedicated to it in Ithaca. I remember when it was a few shelves and resided next to the porn. I hated being in that section. Now it’s usually by the sci fi movies.