flog

I left my outdoor Christmas lights lit thru the longest nights of the year and the sun came back and is waxing again. I can take the lights down now.

It amazes me how some comedians can continue to rake in cash by continuously re-telling the same joke for years on end. I guess it says something about the imagination of their audience.

The claim is often made (or at least it was when I was in the faith) that atheists are arrogant for not believing in a god because they are claiming that they have scoured all of existence and knowledge and can be sure that there is no god or gods to be found (let's ignore that many atheists don't actually make positive claims about any gods one way or the other).

If this is so, then just about every theist on the planet is equally arrogant for not believing in Santa or Thor or the Tooth Fairy. Gods are no more deserving of special treatment than any other fictional character.

This raises an interesting point. Instead of trying to lie about the united $tates' wars against exploited and oppressed people, the media could lessen the importance of "news" in the first place by encouraging people to focus on sadistic reality TV shows. This would kill two birds with one stone: the inculcation of sadistic thinking (or just feelings) in the population, and distracting the population from reality by giving them a "reality" (reality TV) that is not the truth.

I dreamt last night that I was on the verge of death (within the end of the day) and I was ok with that because I knew within the dream world, I would plunge into the void for a little while and then I would come back (either as myself or another person - the details of the reincarnation had not been worked out by my subconscious mind). I could live (or rather die) with that.

I still find the truth (extinction), however, unbearable. Philosophical musings about my constituent particles going out into the universe to mix with new beings or my DNA soldiering on safely housed within my children offers little solace.

It's strange that an illusion would be so distressed by its demise.

I would infrequently in my early days at Initrode bump up against ML and he always struck me as a hard-assed prick. Recently I've had occasion to work more closely with him on a couple projects related to the HR and Payroll systems for the telephone center and he seems to be direct and to the point, but not really prickish at all.

Who changed - him or me? I don't know.

In conclusion, the Powerpuff Girls are a reactionary, pseudo-feminist enterprise.

Just a link to another blog commenting on some of the highlights released by Man's Ruin.
Even though Man's Ruin is defunct I have all the albums mentioned due to the wonders of the dang ol' internets.

http://slavetoshuffle.blogspot.com/2007/08/rise-fall-of-mans-ruin-vol-ii.html

For completeness's sake, here's Vol 1:
http://slavetoshuffle.blogspot.com/2007/08/rise-fall-of-mans-ruin-vol-i.html

I received the email below today. Please consider signing the petition for IBM to release the OS/2 source.
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Malmö, 7 december 2007: More than two years ago on September 25, 2005, we sent IBM a letter with a petition that contained 11,613 signatures requesting IBM to release the source code of Operating System 2 (OS/2 Warp) - or at least release the source code that IBM owns - to the public under an open source license. Sadly IBM was ignorant enough to not answer our first letter and this is why we sent a second letter to IBM.

On November 19, 2007, we sent the second letter to IBM where we insisted on implementing the stipulations contained in this petition because we believe that OS/2 is an important part of the history of the Operating System, and furthermore, it still contains values that the computer science field considers unique.

After talks with the OS/2 development community, we have found that the following three important components will be basic to the continued development of OS/2:

* SOM (System Object Model) Core. This will also be a good contribution to the open source community in general and to the computer science educational area.
* Workplace Shell (WPS). According to press documentation, the OS/2 graphical user interface (GUI) was developed 100% by IBM. There are no third party restrictions to open sourcing it.
* OS/2 Kernel.

We have also opened up a 2nd petition round to get IBM to open source OS/2. So for those of you who believe this should be in the best interest for all involved parties; please then sign the new petition (this way we can also keep you informed about the petition progress) that has been set up at following link:

http://www.os2world.com/petition

Who did we send the letter to:

http://www.os2world.com/content/view/15847/1/

Also, as always we really need the entire community to spread and post information to local, regional and national news sites all over; so we really would like to ask all of you to pass on this information and comments old and new stories where OS/2 is mentioned. We did great last time; let's make it even better this time!

With Kindest Regards,

Kim Haverblad
Webmaster & Founder
OS2 World Foundation
Sweden
http://www.os2world.com

Note: You are getting this e-mail since you have earlier signed the OS2 World Petition list. To be updated with progress regarding the new petition, we then kindly ask you to sign it -> http://www.os2world.com/petition