rant

Micro-rant: when you preface a game with an unskippable video featuring your logo, people begin to despise you by the fourth or fifth launch. I don't even know who ASPYR is, but I know they do Linux gaming and that they're annoying.

Create victimless crimes, imprison people (ideally in privatized prisons from which the ruling class gets kickbacks, or which they own) and then demonize them when they are freed to increase recidivism, because incarcerating the same people over and over minimizes the chance that the voters will notice. This is the right hand of the devil.

This diatribe is a response to a discussion containing repeated assertations of "false equivalence" between the Democrats and Republicans. I don't believe that individual Democrats and Republicans are equivalent, and I don't even believe that left to their own devices, the people who make up these parties wouldn't go in different directions. I believe that we have a system that permits the corporations to juggle us between these two parties, reducing them to a distracting false front that distorts our view of the actual situation: corporate governance.

The following is something I posted on someone's Google+ thread. Long rant follows the break as it did not there.

100 years ago there weren't laws preventing you from using humanure to grow your food. And no-till agriculture is more efficient than that nonsense using rototillers and tractors and so on. Of course, it's only nonsense if you're only producing enough food for your own consumption; machines have their place in agriculture. I eagerly await further advances in robotics in agriculture, as that is the technology that makes it possible for economically feasible mechanized food production without destruction of the soil, water, air, et cetera. However, we have masses of unemployed in most of our societies worldwide, and such an advance would only exacerbate this problem. (long rant which followed deleted and moved to my blog)

Let me follow up my inflammatory title with all due respect for CVS and what it has brought us, besides a thousand years of pain. Who knows how many man-hours were saved by CVS? Of course, there is always the argument about how many man-hours have been lost due to it as well, but then again we all know the importance of proper backups... especially when dealing with source code control systems. While CVS is one of the oldest, its legacy of suggesting it will do one thing and will do another is probably its most-emulated feature, so it is by no means unique in that regard.

I'm trying to download a file from rapidshare and they're making me solve a CAPTCHA. That's okay, but check out the CAPTCHA they gave me:

If you are using the GNOME interface and have the Serpentine audio CD-producing program installed, try this fun trick. (I'm doing this on Ubuntu Gutsy; things may look slightly different depending on versions and distributions.)

The following is an alternate version (a bit more wordy) of a review I wrote for travelpost about a visit to Comfort Inn at 5370 Clayton road in Concord, CA.

My lady stayed in this place and said she hated it, but we tried to get a place up the road and all the rooms were booked. It must have been because everyone else knew about this place, because it's Feb. 20th and nothing special is going on here. This is by far the LOUDEST hotel I've stayed in, which includes venues in Santa Cruz and Las Vegas. Outside noise is absolutely intolerable, and because of the neighborhood this place is in you can expect to hear loud engines, tires screeching, and horns honking all night (I did.)

Today while trying to figure out how to use two graphics packages, I discovered that people without internet connections apparently don't deserve documentation. I am still ignorant of how to rotate shapes in both Inkscape and Xara LX (two programs that will never ever challenge any real vector graphics software) assuming it's even possible, because the documentation is provided as a web link.