I feel terrible I didn't even know of his passing until now, but better late than never. Sydney Carter, one of the greatest Christian songwriters, and folk songwriters of any religion, passed away in March of this year.
His best known song, without a doubt, is “Lord of the Dance,” a song that is sung and resung by many people who assume it is traditional . . . pagan, even. Carter’s genius was writing songs that, while undoubtedly Christian (in a gentle, Noncomformist way), could speak about the essence of faith to anyone, of any religion.
If you needed any more proof that Enoch Powell was a moron, the fact that he wanted to ban “Friday Morning” for being blasphemous should be sufficient: a more intensely devoted Christian song has probably never been written.
Don’t let me scare you off his work; it’s not “Christian Music” any more than J. S. Bach’s is. If you have never heard much of his work, you are in for a treat. Find a copy of Lovely in the Dances, the tribute album that Maddy Prior and other luminaries put together in the early 1980s.
It appears that Adult Peer is a commercial version of BitTorrent (I have no idea if they use the same underlying protocol or not, but the marketing copy on Adult Peer makes it obvious that it is using the same concept).
Adult Peer should be very happy that the developer of BitTorrent chose not to patent the key concept, which is the distributed download sources; it's a more patentable idea than 99% of what passes for software patents these days.
Sin City is using it to download their free "on the set" features (via Fleshbot).
It's that time of year, and that time of year means that it is time for us to renew our Cisco support contract. You would think, Cisco being such a hip, with-it, connected company, that this would be as painless as spending money ever is.
Oh, and how wrong you would be.
First, you can't just walk up to Cisco and say, "We'd like to renew our support contract, please." Oh, no, you foolish little mortal, Cisco does not deal with the likes of you. You must go to your Cisco Partner, and they will pass your supplication along to Cisco for consideration.Fine, whatever. We go to the company we buy a lot of our tech stuff from, and ask them, "We'd like to renew our support contract, please." And they say, sure, we'd love your money . . . and here's how it works:
How is this superior to going to Cisco's web site, giving them our credit card number, and having our contract being renewed on the spot? Well, it's not, of course, but it's just the Cisco Way.
SonicWall used to do something remarkably similar, but they wised up and let you renew without having to buy a Very Important Number from a dealer, and having that VIN shipped to you in a box. Someday, maybe Cisco will figure out that this web thing is pretty cool for selling stuff.
I was worried there for a moment: I thought George W. Bush had said something I agree with.
Asked, "Can we win?" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
Yes. Precisely. Exactly. This is the most sensible thing I've heard yet out of the Administration on the subject. This not a war in which, one day, we'll lead the tanks in a victory parade down the middle of the enemy's capital. What we want is a world in which terrorism is as unacceptable as slavery is now, and that will be a long, slow slog, and it will require winning hearts and minds more than just dropping bombs.
We are never going to "win" it by just showing that America has superior military power. They know we have superior military power; that's why they are using terrorism instead of conventional warfare.
And if we are always going to be fighting it, we need to acknowledge there are no "temporary" measures: No "temporary" loss of liberty "until the war is over." The "war" will never be over, so if we give up liberty for it, it's gone forever.
Of course, he then retracted the statement. Pfew, that was close.
(Yes, I know that Edwards made political hay out of it. Shame on him, too.)
We're often asked (often by people who call us because sex-chat lines cost money, so they thought they'd try us) "What's your most popular toy?"
Right now, it's The Aneros. As I have often said, you can never go wrong by developing new things for straight men to stick up their butts.
For me, the decision is stark and easy: George W. Bush wants me in prison. Why in the world would I vote for him?
Some of my more conservative friends will murmur sympathetically that they don't think the War on Pornography is an "appropriate use of resources" or "reflects an administration priority." That's very nice. They can come visit me when I have 6-10 years of my life taken from me. You'll forgive me if I'm a tiny bit resentful if I and the company I've built are among the eggs that need to be cracked in order to shore up Dubya's conservative base.
This is what the "ownership society" means: It's the "I've got mine" society, as in, "Well, my stock portfolio's doing OK, so who cares what happens to anyone else?"
I have no opinion whatsoever about the facts of the matter, but this has to be the saddest story I've read today.
OK, OK, maybe I do have an opinion on it: If you spend 15 years screwing someone, you have an obligation to them. You do not just send them packing and hope that the State Basic Pension will take care of them. "Cad" does not even begin to describe it.
I normally don’t bother just adding a link to another story, but in this particularly nasty time when we have a rather astonishing number of outright lies being circulated in an attempt to make sure the incumbent wins election, and when you have the Speaker of the House of Representatives issuing politically-motivated slander, this one bears linking to: “At least” 90% chance that the CBS National Guard documents are fake.
Updated: The more I read, the more convinced I am that they are, in fact, forgeries, and not particularly good ones. Given that, the question becomes, of course, who is responsible?
I hate this campaign.
I was the lead architect, back when I was at Scient, for Fasturn, a sourcing site for the apparel industry.
Just out of curiosity, I tried their URL, http://www.fasturn.com/. Back to the primordial ooze it has gone. I wonder what happened to all that software we wrote for them? Last I heard, they had licensed some of it to Accenture.
Ever since we moved to our new place in Alameda, we’ve been getting more telemarketing calls. No big surprise; world+dog can find out that we’re new home owners from public records. What surprises me is that some of them are rather, ah, specific. In particular, many of them ask to speak “to the lady of the house,” and apparently I won’t do.
Today’s was even stranger. Ring, ring, click, hello, “May I speak to Mrs Pettus, please?” I honestly say that there is no such person here, as my wife has never used my last name, but I helpfully inform the caller that he has reached Mr Pettus. Silence. Long, awkward silence. “May I help you?” I finally prompt. “No, you can’t,” he replies. More silence.
That was too creepy. I hung up. I’m still not sure what that was all about.