The Null Device
2001/2/22
It has been a busy day, hence not much blogging. I spent most of the day trying to remember enough LaTeX to do overhead slides (it'd be quicker than whipping up a handcoded PostScript system that does what I'd want, and I'd rather not have my overheads locked up in a proprietary Microsoft format), installing RedHat 7.0 on a spare computer and writing the process up for beginners, amongst other things. (Did I mention that I work at a university, and Semester 1 starts on Monday?)
Since announcing their vast taxpayer-funded slush fund for religious groups, the Fundamentalist-controlled White House have been beset with the problem of keeping the fringe religions out. African-American statesman Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam is likely to be denied all funding because of its allegedly hateful views, whereas the Church of Scientology will probably get government funds for "faith based" charity works.
Every year, Antarctica hosts an outdoor music festival named IceStock. This has been going on since 1990; the festival has had more than its share of technical problems, between players getting frostbite, guitars going out of tune in the low temperatures and gear generally packing up. IceStock's indie cred can rest assured, as its fortuitously remote location has kept the unwashed alternateen masses from jumping on the bandwagon; the bands, with names like The Shackletones and Penguins In Bondage, are comprised of people working at one of the frozen continent's research stations, and don't exist for long. However, this year, there will be an official IceStock CD.
How To Mix a Pop Song From Scratch; it looks very enlightening, and should be useful. (ta, Graham)
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's prolonged spells of hot weather. Two of the posters in my room have gotten into the habit of falling off their respective walls, most probably because the heat has deteriorated the Blu-Tak (or, more precisely, the bright green Blu-Taklike adhesive) holding them up to the point of unusability.
Britain's navy is faced with a dilemma: what to name its warships. Traditionally, the choicest names (Trafalgar, Formidable, and so on) were reserved for old-fashioned warships, with submarines and mass-produced ships getting more mediocre names, often alliterated and recycled. Some series of ships are also named after places (a common, if not quite stirring, occurrence), which is why the Royal Navy's latest assault ships have less than awe-inspiring names like Largs Bay,
"Then you get the problem of personal nostalgia," he said. "Someone gets into a position of authority in the navy and says 'My granddaddy served in the war on HMS Beetle and I want the new destroyer called Beetle'."
(via Lake Effect)