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!