Blackmoor Vituperative

I just woke up from a nightmare about getting my hair cut.

I was in someone’s room along with a friend of mine, several other friends of hers, and her roommate, and I was telling her about how I was letting my hair grow out, and she is talking about how I really should trim it to even it out, and she gets some scissors and just starts cutting!

And she cuts four inches off from a section. So now I have to let her finish. And so she keeps working on it, and takes forever.

She is laying on her bed along with one of her friends, and I am sitting on the bed and facing away from her, and her roommate is sitting facing away from me on the next bed, talking to one of her friends. Eventually the roommate gets pissed off because I keep reaching out and touching the other bed to keep my balance, and she leaves.

And I am burning up, and why the hell is this taking so long, and I am just too hot so I stand up to take off my shirt, and I wind up ripping it. And then I take off the t-shirt underneath, and then another t-shirt in a different color, and then a third, and a fourth, so no wonder I was so hot! Finally I am just wearing one t-shirt. And then for some reason I stumble and step on the hem of my slacks and I wind up tearing the crotch right out of them. So I am wearing the waistband and the zipper and the outer panels of my slacks, and everything else is just hanging down. And I stand there wondering how on earth this all got so out of control, when I didn’t even want a haircut, I was just here to say hi to a friend of a friend, and then I woke up.

Check this out this article from RoughlyDrafted Magazine: Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower.

I recently set up an old Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop to dual-boot Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 9. Neither distribution installed drivers for the Broadcom wireless-G card, but it was pretty straightforward. These instructions are for Fedora:


$ sudo yum install b43-fwcutter NetworkManager NetworkManager-glib NetworkManager-gnome
$ wget -c http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
$ bzip2 -d broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar
$ cd ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/
$ b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o


Then just select the wireless access point in Network Manager and enter the password, and you should be connected.

To think how much of a pain this was just a few years ago, it really is quite astonishing.

Here is a surprisingly cogent argument for the reform of copyright law. Check it out.

Philip Markoff is just like 85% of U.S. serial killers — young, white and male. When will we get that these guys are the rule, not the exception?

(from Why are we surprised when white preppy guys turn out to be serial killers?, AlterNet)