LifeDrive Notes: Failure #2

I’ve just got done trying variations of the iPod WTF? Method I posted about.

No joy.

Even worse, I think I lost one of the four screws!

I’ll wind up killing the damn thing by attrition…

Note For Kenneth Eng…

Black Racism

At age ten, I immigrated from China to Oakland, California, a city filled with crime, poverty, and racial tension. In elementary school, I didn’t wear name-brand clothing or speak English. My name soon became “Ching Chong,” “Chinagirl,” and “Chow Mein.” Other children laughed at my language, my culture, my ethnicity, and my race. I said nothing.

Well I’m Racist

You call me “Cracker”, “Honkey”, “Whitey”, “Gringo” and you think it’s OK.

…But when I call you Kike, Towelhead, WOP, Camel Jockey, Gook, Nigger or Chink you call me a racist.

Jaysus. What the fuck is in the air these days?

–linkswipes from reddit

Oh Shit. Now I’m In Trouble.

Finland: No Need for Words
Finnish people are defined by silence. Is that healthy?

Merete Mazzarella, a professor of Nordic literature at the University of Helsinki, tells a joke: How do you know if the Finn on the elevator with you is outgoing? When he’s looking at your shoes instead of at his own.

The key to the Finnish character is quietude. Finns rarely enter into conversation with strangers; words are chosen carefully; small talk is considered suspect. Instead Finns revere “sacred silence” and hold that keeping quiet is healthy and promotes thoughtfulness. In his book Cultures in Conversation, author Donal Carbaugh quotes a young Finn who admits, “I never realized that people in other cultures might regard the word ‘shy’ as a negative word… ‘Ujo’ or ‘shy’ in Finnish has a neutral or positive meaning.”

All this time that’s where I should be living? Not after all of this I’ve written!

Dammit.
–linkswipe via Reddit

Losing My Religion

Illness and Compassion

Eventually I did fall asleep. I did sleep well—a solid four hours, dreamless, the first good sleep in two days. But I thought about my prayer and God’s response. I asked the old question every child asks (and the best of us, I think, keep on asking): How is it that Jesus, and later his disciples, went around healing people like crazy, while here in our modern age the only Christians who seem to be able to heal anything always seem to be hoaxers?

What was stopping God from simply taking away my headache, or my whole illness and my son’s with it for that matter? Was I lacking in faith? Relative to some of the people Jesus healed in the Gospels—some of whom were really clutching at straws—I don’t think so. Would it have cheapened my faith, diverting it to the wrong focus? No: I’ve seen bigger miracles than that, and not so different from it. Was there something I had done to repulse God’s kindness? I certainly sin, but I don’t recall any looming sin that would warrant the cold shoulder treatment, nor do I think God’s compassion works that way.

Although I didn’t become an atheist during my suffering or contemplations, it occurred to me that there can be no more atheizing experience than unmitigated suffering. If you have no solid experience in your life pointing to the existence of God and you are suffering, nothing could seem more reasonable than to say that God is not answering your prayers because God isn’t there to answer them. You would say, How could this God who showed so much compassion through Jesus so fail to show it to me? Either he never did what they say he did through Jesus, or whatever God did those things through Jesus buggered off sometime between then and now. About the time of the Inquisition would be my guess.

This is a very interesting blog I will have to make time to read through.

Reference: Improving Firefox

20 must-have Firefox extensions

In addition, a poster over at JK on the Run pointed to a page with some instructions on how to improve Firefox. I followed all the steps and I have to say that I’ve seen an improvement, just not the 3-30x speed increase claimed.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Do NOT follow those instructions to speed up Firefox if you are using WordPress!

Goddam! These Are Fightin’ Words!

It Tastes as Good as it Smells

Likewise, Paul Haggis is a Hollywood hack, who writes and doctors up scripts by using every tired cliché known to man, and his dialogue also sounds nasty and absolutely hurts to watch.

A review of The Black Donnellys, which I’ve yet to see.

Prior coverage of Paul Haggis on this blog:
Go See The Best Ever TV You’ve Never Seen!
Paul Haggis

Interesting Legal Tactic

Motion to Kiss My Ass

The case concerns a man by the name of Matthew Washington, a prison inmate and frequent pro se litigator. In 1996, a district court judge in Georgia, William T. Moore, ordered that Washington post a $1500 bond before he was allowed to file any more lawsuits or motions. Why?

Because in connection with a civil rights lawsuit that Washington brought against various judges, Washington filed a “Motion to Kiss My Ass” asking “all Americans at large and one corrupt Judge Smith to kiss my got damn ass sorry mother fucker you.”

–linkswipe from Pajiba

Rude? Yep. Absolutely Correct? Absolutely Yep!

Advice to the Bush White House: Why Not Pardon Scooter Libby? You Got Any Honor Left To Lose?

There you are, the Bush administration, now with nearly two-thirds of the public against your policies, with every morning bringing in more news about how every butterfly flutter of action in the first term has become a nation-wrecking typhoon in this second one, where you can’t even trumpet moves on peace with North Korea because it’s been revealed that you lied about its nuclear capabilities, where the VA hospital debacle threatens to become this year’s Katrina, where the last Katrina is still this year’s Katrina, where you’ve become so friendless in the world that you’ve had to blink on Iran (goddamn, how that must’ve made Dick Cheney’s body temperature rise from the level of a hibernating mole rat to that of a lizard), where you can’t even do a decent political purge of U.S. attorneys in order to install your own lackeys without creating a huge uproar among those fucking Democrats in Congress (here’s a hint: don’t fire a bunch of ’em in one day), where evil and rank incompetence are smacking together like flint and steel over a pile of dried-up newspapers, where all that’s left for you legislatively is to try to keep shit from passing that undoes your work of the last six plus years, where any advances in your policies have to come from executive fiat or your much-abused (and, truly, untrustworthy) Commander-in-Chief status, where in any real democracy you’d be in jail, and where you know, at the end of the day, history’s gonna portray you as making the Nixon and Harding eras look like the salad days of the republic.

Does Sony Have An iPod Nano Killer Here?

Looking at these comparison pics, the first thing I noticed is, My God! That screen is huge!!

And then looking at this YouTube video, I noticed that it’s a contender. Sure, it lacks a wheel of any kind, but with that screen, why would I choose an anti-iPod such as the Sandisk Sansa e-series? Sure, the Sansa has a card slot, but do I want to mess around with the added expense of a card plus the possibility of losing one?

And then someone (Sony’s Viral Marketing Division?) put up a YouTube video ad for it.

The (UK) product page has some impressive specs too: At least 6 hours for video!

I’ll have to wait for the reviews, but I’ll also put this on my Must Fondle list.

Flipstart & Samsung Add To Upgrade Season Choices

Over at JK on the Run there’s a 20-minute embedded YouTube video of that fiend James Kendrick giving us a looksee overview of the Flipstart microPC he’s gotten his greedy paws on. It’s a very interesting device. Let me give Flipstart a standing ovation for Shutting The Fuck Up and Just Doing It. Over at the Flipstart site, they’re not giving out any info, so hop over to JK’s site to watch the vid.

Engadget caused me to have massive drooling this morning when I saw they had advanced info about the upcoming Samsung Q2 UMPC. Oh, just go look at this picture! An embedded split QWERTY keyboard that rips off mimics the Pepper Pad 3! (Warning: Disgustingly-overdone Flash animation at the Pepper Pad 3 Hanbit site!) Man, looking at the Q2, I think I’d rather have it over the Fujitsu Lifebook 1610 (the one Kendrick The Professional Fiend uses).

There’s also rumor of a successor to the Raon Digital Vega.

And of course, I still wonder about getting a Mac notebook.

Choice is good!