Dave Kellam

An article on Walter Cronkite. Two excerpts:

— Jimmy Carter was the smartest president Cronkite met, and the only one who bothered to actually read the lengthy bills passed by Congress. “He knew so much about everything and was not timid about telling you about it.”

— Our arrogant stand in nearly all our diplomatic approaches to the rest of the world with this administration has been such as to deeply embarrass the United States,” declared Cronkite. His sarcasm was quietly withering.

Nowadays, most people seem to remember Jimmy Carter as the bumbling idiot who builds houses.

I got an interesting email from the administrators of my website:

To: dave@eightface.com
Subject: Warning about your e-mail account.
From: administration@eightface.com

Dear user of e-mail server “Eightface.com”,

We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may
contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe,
please, follow the instructions.

Please, read the attach for further details.

For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is “47518”.

Kind regards,
The Eightface.com team

Apparently, my administrators have taken time out of their busy day administering my site to inform may that some clever monkey may be sending me viruses.

I’ve spent most of the last day or two plugging away at my presentation for the final project. I have Go-Moku on the brain, it is oozing out. That is all.

We just finished up issue number 25 at golden words. Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year. Thanks to everyone who was a part of it this time around. Still have transitition issue next week, but the management of content creation is now out of my control.

I was feeling the need to make something in photoshop tonight, and was trying to avoid doing work on my CISC499 presentation, so I made some new wallpaper. I present you with two wonderful versions: glorious 1280×960 and magnificent 1024×768. Enjoy.

I made the image with a bunch of brushes and fonts from misprintedtype.com. Check it.

From an article about open-source software in government — China on open source software:

Countries such as China have concerns about the closed nature of a proprietary product such as Windows, and the national security risk this creates. They want greater transparency, and at the same time believe that embracing open source will spur local software development.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think China complaining about the “closed” nature of something is pretty funny.

Ohio woman gives birth to six babies in one minute:

“The speed at which the babies came out was overwhelming. It was like a popcorn popper,” the baby’s grinning father, Keith Hanselman, told reporters.

He’s also quoted as saying, “Crunchy, a little boney though,” after dipping one of the babies in melted butter and trying it out.

It was fake journal time this week, it went over pretty well. Some forum feedback: LiveJournal, GW forum. The .pdf of the journal isn’t online yet but should be soon. The wee issue of GW is up now.

Fallout includes: departmental meetings in English and Women’s Studies, email activity in chemisty department, angry TAs, confused Compsa people, Leggett throwing the paper at a secretary, irate student-president elect, and a letter from the fencing club among others. It was a lot of fun putting together and I have to say it was worth staying up until 7am. I don’t want to see the sunrise in EngSoc ever again. Big thanks to the Journal and Omar for letting us use their shit. And everyone else who was there.

Just finished up watching Dog Day Afternoon, an Al Pacino vehicle that chronicles a bank robbery in the 1970’s. Pacino plays Sonny Workzit, who was robbing the bank to finance a sex-change operation for his gay lover. The credits roll and you see that Sonny was serving a 20-year term. That means he’s out now. So, I decided to google it and see what came up, didn’t find much beyond Dog Day Afternoon stuff. I gave Vivisimo a shot, which does this cluster style search. I found an article with comments about the robbery. Not an easy thing to find info on (well, fast info anyway).

His real name is John Wojtowicz and he still appears to be alive (judging from the message board posts). This site has facts about the film and a Life magazine article about the actual robbery. Apparently, there was another movie made (The Third Memory) in which Wojtowicz reenacts the bank robbery and tells the story from his perspective. Here’s an interview with Pierre Huyghe, the artist who directed the film and a Village Voice article. Lastly, here are some newspaper clippings.

Bush backs constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:

“Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society.”

What happened to the separation of church and state? I’m glad that the monkey wants to fuck around with the document at the core of American law, the same one that guarentees freedom of expression and civil liberties.

Update: There are gay penguins living right under our noses at central park.

One of the things I still remember from my creative writing class is rule #5 of Elmore Leonard’s rules: Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

I haven’t been around the computer much today, forgot to activate the Grey Tuesday templates. It’s a simple web protest in favour of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. EMI doesn’t like him remixing Beatles samples so much. I think it’s a pretty solid album, and there’s no way he could have afforded the rights for those songs. Go download it if you didn’t listen to me the first time.