Dave Kellam

If you don’t rock out to Self Esteem by the Offspring, you’re a liar. That goes for the rest of Smash too. It doesn’t seem like a good study album but I’ve owned it for a long long time, so it doesn’t seem intrusive. Put it on the stereo and take a trip to back in the day.

Last summer I had my bike stolen, right off the front porch. I called up the police and told them about it, they never found my bike. However, they were nice enough to put me in their telephone directory. So, whenever they’re looking for money to host some event or produce a brochure they call me and many others I imagine. Policing is a business too. I imagine they pull a lot of people in too, the ones who feel guilty about something. Maybe they’ve tagged every occasion that I haven’t given them money, so that when I reach a certain point of non-compliance they can arrest me for something stupid and get the money that way.

An article outlining a prototype for a tornado in a can. It’s used to pulverize whatever goes in; diapers, chickens, jellyfish. I know if i had one i’d be throwing everything in it. Here’s a diagram from the patent office that shows the machine in greater detail.

Here’e and article detailing one of the few remaining companies that press vinyl in the states (and the related thread on slashdot. There are some insights into the resurgence of the medium, most of it fairly obvious; movies and djs. I picked up a record player this summer, as a result most of the music i’ve paid for this year has been on vinyl. When you can pick up albums like Ziggy Stardust for a dollar, why would you bother going out and buying the cd? You own the album, so you can grab the mp3s and make a copy on cd legally. And there is of course the album art on records; so much better (and bigger).

Just finished giving the links section a quick once over. Culled out a bunch of deadlinks (I hadn’t looked at it in awhile) and updated the stylesheet. Still need to update it with more of the sites that I visit semi-regularly, but that’ll take a bit of time.

On a side note, I love BBEdit. A text editor that codes things depending on the file and allows you to open/save via FTP? I can open up templates and such, hack away at them for awhile, save and have the changes take effect right away. Whee.

That title is probably a mistake, google’s going to run buckwild. Anyway, free porn from the Modern Humorist.

I’ve reverted to the default moveable type templates in an effort to get to know the system a bit better. I’ve started tweaking them a bit, rearranged the archives, attempted to implement a site search and started work on some ideas in my head. Figured that I may as well dive into the redesign and make changes gradually, rather than starting something and getting bored/frustrated with it before I’ve finished it all. There’s lots of pictures and things i’ve written for the paper that are sitting around waiting to be formatted and uploaded.

Go watch the 5 minute episode IV. Chewie is cool.

It took me awhile to figure out how to get gnome installed and running but I did. It wasn’t too hard looking back at it. There’s a lot of nice things to help you out, like Fink and the graphical FinkCommander. Here’s a guide to help get the the x11 system running with Fink. I guess the key for me is to read some documentation, i can’t just dive into things and expect to know what i’m doing. All in all, my system is doing some neat things: running OS X, with Virtual PC running WinXP and XDarwin running GNOME.

I ran into some file permission crap when I was doing all of this. I found a nice little calculator to help out with chmod values.

Here’s a good terminal guide for OS X, aimed at people with little knowledge of unix.

An interview with Richard Gabriel, he holds a Ph.D in Computer Science and an MFA in Poetry. There’s some good talk of how the way computer programming is taught should be changed to reflect the creativity necessary to develop software.

I’ve been playing around with some stuff this afternoon, including KungTunes. It allows me to get at the playlist data from iTunes using AppleScript, which basically means I can have this nice page that says what the last 25 songs I listened to were.