Blackmoor Vituperative

My sweetie and I spent our Christmas Eve watching a movie called Zombie Strippers, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I admit I had very low expectations from Zombie Strippers. I have recently seen a lot of bad attempts at horror-comedy, such as the atrocious Splatter Beach, and I expected no better from Zombie Strippers. To my surprise, it was funny, and gory, and had decent acting (far above par for the genre), and good writing, and the special effects were inventive and well done. In fact, the only thing that prevents it from being classified along with such classics like Evil Dead and Re-Animator is that there is no single standout performance (like Bruce Campbell or Jeffrey Combs in the aforementioned classics). But really, that’s a faint criticism. Zombie Strippers is probably the best horror movie I have seen in quite a while, and the best horror comedy I have seen in a very, very long time.

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

“Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will.” — Doreen Valiente, 1964

“I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody business but by own.” — Billie Holiday

If you have not read it (or not read it lately), I suggest you spend some time with Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, by Peter McWilliams.

I just found my wedding ring! I lost it at the beginning of October.

It was in a cardboard box, one of a stack of cardboard boxes that I had been meaning to throw away. But I have some stuff to sell on ebay (old hard drives and so on), so I haven’t. And I was peeling the stickers off one, getting ready to pack my calculus books in it (yay, no more calculus!), and there was this sliding and bumping sound, and I was like, “What’s in here?” And I looked under the old packing slip in it, and there was my ring!

Two months. I had given up on finding it.

Chad Perrin has a short article on TechRepublic giving a back-of-the-napkin overview on encryption as it is viewed by the courts. It is worth checking out and clicking the relevant links.

I have set up a free, public OpenID provider at http://www.blackgate.net/openid/, using software from Community-ID.

Fedora 12 has been released into the wild, and the general response is positive.

Every time a new version of Fedora (or any major Linux distribution) is released, there is always a great deal of confusion over the various releases: x86, i386, 686, and so on. Here is a quick guide that covers the vast majority of cases:

i386

• A generic “lowest common denominator” designation for Intel 80386 compatible CPUs (includes all of the above, but does not take advantage of extended instructions on those later CPUs).

Don’t use this unless you have to.

i686

• All Intel 32-bit Pentiums (excluding Pentium 1 and Pentium MMX)
• All AMD 32-bit Athlons

If your computer is several years old, you will probably have nothing to lose by using this version. However…

x86_64

• AMD’s Athlon 64, Athlon 64-FX, and Opteron
• Intel EMT64 processors – Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, Celeron D, Xeon and Pentium Dual-Core processors, the Atom 230 and 330 and in all versions of the Core 2, Intel Core i9, Core i7, Core i5 and Core i3

If your computer is less than a few years old, try this version first. If it won’t work on your machine, you will know almost immediately. If it does work on your machine, you may find that the performance is improved slightly (when compared to a 32 bit kernel), because the compiler was able to take advantage of slight improvements made in the instruction set for your processor.

So, start with x86-64. If that does not work, try i686. If that doesn’t work, try i386.

Good luck!

I was just creating an account on a new web site. It has freaking ridiculous password rules.

Your password must have 2 upper case letters, 2 lower case letters, 2 numbers, 2 special characters, and be a minimum of 9 characters and a maximum of 12 characters in length.

Why don’t they just generate a random string that they’ll accept and save me the bother? It’s not like I will be able to remember this monstrosity.

When I was at… Philip Morris, I think it was… there were two systems that had complex password requirements, and they were mutually exclusive. Like, one required two numbers, and the other forbade more than one number. Something like that. So ridiculous. The whole “password” thing needs to die.

I wish more places would clue into OpenID. After exams, I think I will set up an OpenID server on mortshire.org.

(I heard about this from The Breda Revolution.)

There is a grassroots organization in Virginia called the Virginia Citizens Defense League. Their raison d’etre is to make sure that law-abiding Virginians are not forced to be disarmed and defenseless by the laws of our state. They are reasonably successful at this.

Last night, a couple of dozen VCDL members, some of them residents of Richmond, attended the Richmond City Council meeting, with the intention of informing the City Council of their opposition to the Mayor’s membership in New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s deceptively named anti-gun coalition, Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns (it is, in fact, “mayors against all gun owners”).

I will let Philip Van Cleave, current president of the VCDL, describe what happened:

Very interesting and long night at the Richmond City Council meeting
tonight. We had over twenty members present. The Dark Side had five.

I had signed up to speak at the meeting three weeks ago by contacting
the City Clerk, who dutifully took down my name and said I was good to
go for November 23rd. She also asked what I was going to be talking
about.

But, tonight when City Council finally got to public comment, they
called 6 names only, 3 of which were anti-gunners who praised the
Mayor for joining up with Bloomberg’s anti-gun coalition.

MY NAME WAS NEVER CALLED and they moved on to other business quickly.
[…]

(from Dirty Tricks at Richmond City Council, VA-ALERT)

Whether or not you think their cause is worthwhile, these people have a right to be heard. They followed the prescribed procedures for signing up to speak. They obeyed the rules. What did Richmond City Council do? They put five shills in the audience and called three of them to speak.

You might not think this is a big deal. You might think normal, law-abiding folks should not be permitting to own and carry firearms. You would be mistaken, but that’s not really my point with this.

Let’s say that your local school is infested with rats, cockroaches, and centipedes, but the Mayor has joined a coalition that seeks to require all schoolchildren to come to school barefoot (because kids can smuggle drugs in their shoes, or some such nonsense). Outraged, you and nineteen other like-minded people find out how to address the city council, you contact the City Clerk weeks in adavnce to sign up to speak, you show up on time, you wait your turn… and then of the six people’s names who are called, none of your group is called. Instead, half of those asked to speak spontaneously praise the Mayor’s bold membership in the anti-drug group, Mayors Against Illegal Shoes.

What the hell just happened?

Whether or not you agree with the VCDL’s particular cause, this is a blatant abuse of power by the Richmond City Council. Every citizen of Richmond and the surrounding cities should be offended by this corruption in local government.