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Well, I just got done watching the season finale of Tru Calling, and I gotta say… nice. Natalie’s been making me watch the whole first season episode by episode, and while I was intrigued, the idea behind the show, that Eliza Dushku’s character, Tru Davies, has the power to relive days in order to save people who died, was getting kinda old. Then they introduced Luke Perry and his character, Jack, and I thought at first it was a cheap publicity stunt.. and then things started to get interesting. I’m not much of a Luke Perry fan, trust me on that, but I like Jack. He’s got a whole antihero vibe to him. And that season finale… well, at first I could predict pretty much every plot twist and turn, but by the end… let’s just say things just got real interesting, and I’m actually eagerly looking forward to the next season. Color me a fan.

You may notice that certain links and random elements in my articles from now on have little pop-up tooltips with more information or snarky commentary. That’s because I think floaty tooltips are cool. But anyway, my point is that I managed to hack the code for Wordpress enough to actually create a little ‘floaty’ button in the article creation/editing interface itself, to let me insert those floaty bits with a minimum of fuss. This is neat.

I love Open Source software. If this had been closed source and I wanted this silly little feature, I would have had to beg the original programmer, then hold my breath to see if maybe, just maybe it got implemented somewhere down the line. With Wordpress, however, I had full access to everything, so I could just hack it in myself given the right skills, or I could have asked someone else with better coding skills than I to do it for me, with no problems. Now I’m wondering if maybe I should contribute this silly little hack back to the Wordpress community? It would probably require a bit more work to be useful to others, and would likely need to be recoded in plugin format.. maybe giving people the ability to choose the background color and size of their tooltip on their own… we’ll see. Might be cool.

This is priceless: Apparently Bush’s White House handlers made the mistake of letting Monkey Boy talk to a real reporter (Carole Coleman, Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish public television network) instead of the tame pussycats that make up the White House Press Corps, and Bush did not react very well to the whole incident. Here’s a choice bit from the article:

Coleman is a mainstream European journalist who has conducted interviews with top officials from a number of countries - her January interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently solid enough to merit posting on the State Department’s Web site.

Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader.

She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps - at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” - she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.

The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups - “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

@whee!

If you use Windows at all (and especially if you use IE), you’ve probably run into spyware: nasty little programs that take over your browser, install themselves on your computer, download all their friends, and make your computer slower, less stable, and more full of annoying ads. And if you’ve run into spyware, you’ve probably looked around for a spyware removal program. If so, be careful, as many so-called ’spyware removal’ tools are actually made by the spyware makers themselves, to take your money and leave open doors for even more spyware to come in.

So which spyware blockers are good, and which are evil? Perhaps not surprisingly, the vast majority of spyware blockers are the bad kind. You might want to check this page to see which ones are good and which are bad: http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm. However, as a public service to readers of this blog, I’m gonna go ahead and point out the tools I’ve found to be most effective in preventing spyware from getting into my computer, and removing it when it manages to sneak in anyway. These are all mentioned on that page as ‘good’ spyware removal tools, they’re all free, or have free versions available, and I highly recommend them to any Windows user:

• Ad-Aware: With a free version available, this is one of the first, and one of the best, spyware blockers out there. Fast, powerful scanning, and the ability to quarantine files before removal, and resotring of files if you make a mistake.
• SpyBot Search & Destroy: Another great weapon in the arsenal against spyware, it scans, detects, and removes thousands of spyware programs. Anything Ad-Aware might miss, SpyBot will catch, and viceversa.
• JavaCool’s SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard: a pair of free utilities that can keep your computer from getting infected with spyware in the first place. SpywareBlaster does a bang-up job of closing the security holes that many spyware programs exploit to get into your computer in the first place, while SpywareGuard acts like an antivirus, scanning anything that comes into your computer to determine wether it has any spyware hidden inside.

Generally, if you’re serious about keeping spyware off your machine, you’ll want all four of those applications installed and updated on a weekly basis. Between SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard bringing up all your shields, and Ad-Aware and SpyBot patrolling your computer to kill any invaders, it’s about as secure as you’re going to get.

And before I forget, if you want to eliminate the two main sources of infection for spyware, malware, and viruses, ditch IE and Outlook Express and switch to Firefox and Thunderbird. Your computer will thank you for it.

I’ve been reading about the INDUCE Act for a few days now, and it’s pretty freakin’ horrible. Basically, the proposed law would make any device or company that ‘encourages’ people to download music, liable for all sorts of damage. Here’s a few choice quotes and the articles I got them from:

INDUCE Act: Ipecac for Fair Use:

Ernest Miller brought to my attention something called the INDUCE Act, a bit of proposed law spearheaded by Senator Orrin Hatch that could possibly be used by record companies to sue companies that “induce infringements of the Copyright Act,” meaning portable music stalwarts like Apple and Toshiba could be penalized for providing iPods (and the drives that power them) because they encourage users to download music. If by my description the proposed act seems too vague and indefinable, that’s because, basically, it is. The INDUCE Act would be another weapon in the music industry’s fight against its own customers — you and me.

EFF: Prelude to a Fake Complaint

Senator Orrin Hatch and his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee have introduced the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act (”The Induce Act” [PDF, 25k]) this week. They want us to think the Act is no big deal, and that it targets only the bad guys while leaving the good guys alone. They say that it doesn’t change the law; it just clarifies it. But they’re wrong. And this legal complaint is the proof.

» Fake Complaint against Apple, Toshiba, and C-Net for Inducing Infringement of Copyrights

* PDF, 290k
* text, 19k
* or just keep reading…

Take a look. Scared yet? You should be. When the lawyers at EFF first sat down and asked “Whom could we sue under the Induce Act if we were an abusive copyright holder?” the answer was clear: pretty much everybody. Playing the devil’s advocates, we knew we could draft a legal complaint against any number of the major computer or electronics manufacturers for selling everyday devices we all know and love—CD burners, MP3 players, cell phones—and that with that complaint, we could file a lawsuit that would survive any attempt to dismiss it before trial, costing the targeted company up to $1,000,000 per month in legal fees alone. The Induce Act is a nasty, brutish stick in the hands of the wrong plaintiff.

Basically, the INDUCE Act would make things like the friggin’ iPod illegal. And while they’re at it, it would outlaw VCR’s, DVD burners, probably tape recorders, hell, most likely outlaw general purpose computers. It’s one of the worst abuses of law in the copyright arena that we’ve seen in a very long time, and something has to be done to stop it. Our best bet is the EFF: they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re talking about, and they have the means to do something about it. If you haven’t done so before, and you value your hard-earned digital freedoms, you might wanna consider joining the EFF and their friends in the fight against the INDUCE Act today.

UPDATE: You know what else gets my goat? The fact that this bullshit law would affect me, yet I am powerless to let my opinion be known about it, since Puerto Rico doesn’t have a congressional district assigned to it, so we don’t have a senator that we can complain to. Sure, we do have a ‘representative’, but all he can do is maybe talk about it a little, he holds no real power and can’t cast any votes. So, basically, this law can screw me up, and I can’t do diddly about it. Anyone out there in the states who actually has a representative up in Washington, take action on this. It affects more people than you think.

Just thought I’d mention this article from Seattle PI: Celebrity 18th birthday countdowns have long been the rage, which basically states:

Most older readers who find this behavior reprehensible no doubt stopped reading several paragraphs ago. For those who stuck around, here’s some more bad news: This isn’t a new phenomenon. And your generation started it.

They then mention the intense countdowns that went on for such olden stars as Shirley Temple and Annette Funnicello. There’s also this choice quote from the article:

There is, of course, huge irony in all of this. The demographics that are most obsessed with the coming of age of hot young actresses — basement- dwelling Internet geeks and middle-age sports talk personalities — have the smallest chance to score with the fantastically wealthy Olsens.

Heehee.. so true. And, hey, they even mention our favorite countdown site:

If there was any question whether we live in a society of tasteless and inappropriate thinkers, the headline on the “Official Countdown Site to Hermione’s 18th Birthday” pretty much seals it.

“The bewitching hour will soon be upon us!”

And then we’re all going to hell.

From the Beeb: Iranian woman ‘gives birth to frog’. Headlines about 4 horsemen, moon turning red, and rivers turning to blood, to follow soon.

I was talking to my good friend Jan today, and was reminded of why I rarely read fanfics anymore. Thinking about it a bit more, I managed to come up with some basic Laws which I think apply to fanfiction as a genre. Without further ado, here they are:

Katsushiro’s Laws of Fanfiction
• 1st Law of Slash/Non-Slash Equilibrium: The amount of Final Fantasy 7 Cloud/Sephiroth yaoi slashfics is always equal to at least two times the amount of all other fanfics, combined.
• Law of Enmity to Anal Penetration Proportion: The amount of hatred between two male characters in a series is directly proportional to the amount of yaoi slashfics written where these same two characters will buttfuck each other.
• 1st Law of Author Superiority: Whenever the author of a fanfic includes him or herself as a character in the story, he or she will inevitably be smarter, faster, stronger, and cuter than any of the other characters, all of whom want to have sex with the author.
• 2nd Law of Author Superiority: Each fanfic author will always consider his or her version of same-sex love between two or more main characters to be the definitive version of the story, and will deride all other attempts to convey the same story by other authors. (You can imagine this leads to some very tiring dicussions re: the sheer amount of Cloud/Sephiroth yaoi slash)

Well, it looks like my wannabe-political activism is being stifled. I just checked, and neither one of the major movie folk here on the island, Caribbean Cinemas or Cinevista, is bringing Michael Moore’s newly-released film, Fahrenheit 9/11 over here. Not even in Fine Arts. Crap. I’ve been really, really looking forward to seeing this, and I really don’t have the money or inclination to fly to the mainland just to watch a documentary. And, somehow, waiting for the DVD just doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty damn likely to buy the DVD once it eventually comes out, but until then, I want to see this film! Looks like eMule will have to come to the rescue. Wish me luck, and I’ll be more than certain to tell you what I think once I do see it. In the meantime, here’s the movie poster:

Proving that Canada is, indeed, the Greatest Country on Earth, I present to you: Evil Dead 1 & 2 - The Musical. I would give my right hand and replace it with a chainsaw if it meant being able to go see this!

For those of you out there who stubbornly stick with their hole-riddled Internet Explorer to surf the web, I just have a couple of links for you:

• New Attack Hitting Web Users Through Major Sites
• Researchers Warn of Infectious Web Sites
• Experts Studying Internet Attack

All three of those stories, from InfoWorld, News.com, and CNN, detail the exact same attack that’s going on now: Many sites, including some very very big ones, no one’s naming names, but they include an online auction site, a price-comparison site, some financial sites, and even a search engine, have been compromised and are sending malicious Javascript to users who browse the sites through Internet Explorer, by exploiting yet another set of unpatched vulnerabilities in the browser. The Javascript then directs yout o a site that automatically downloads and installs some pretty nasty software, including a keylogger that can see everything you type into your computer and send it off to crackers, and trojan programs that can turn your computer into a spam-sending slave node.

And to think, if you’d simply switch to Firefox, you wouldn’t have to deal with any of this.

This is too cool for words: Browncoats : Official Serenity Fan Site appears to be the official website for the upcoming Firefly movie, based on Joss Whedon’s short lived but crticially acclaimed and fan-loved series. One last trip with the crew of Serenity.. I can’t wait.

Just found this through BoingBoing: a series of bizarre Spider Man comic strp remixes. Some of them are fairly stupid, but some are downright sublime:

(Click on the strip above to see more, then just keep refreshing the page to see them all. There’s about 20 of them but they’re shown randomly, so you’re likely to see several repeats before you catch all of them.)

For all 2 of you out there who think about security and encryption, I just figured I’d put this out there for everyone to copy: it’s my PGP public key for my GMail account, with which I will be signing all my GMails. Well, most of them, in any case. (And if you’re wondering why you should start using PGP/GPG and signing your emails, well, read this.) So there you go:

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

mQGiBEMftM4RBAD+cOqyJrUUL5sd+kbIragRFpUMNGNWi5qfZPSOzC6GMZX8rAPI
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You know, it was easy to believe that there was no possible way that something like the Dungeons and Dragons movie could be worse. But you’d be wrong. There’s one way that you can make it so much worse: Cast Paris Hilton in the lead role.

If you have even the slightest bit of worry about the crazy-ass and fairly dangerous self-proclaimed Messiah Sun Myung Moon, and his hold over the US Congress and Senate, you need to click this link and download and view the video that’s there: Where in Washington, D.C. is Sun Myung Moon?: This really happened at the Senate office building.

Basically, these US Congressmen and Senators crowned Moon as the new messiah and one true agent of God on earth.. scary stuff. The video was actually taken down from Moon’s site once word started getting around about it, but the guy above found it and set up a Torrent for it. Go, fetch it for yourself.

Here’s a few choice comments from that article:

“Moon describes God as a neurotic being that is always nearly in a state of emotional breakdown over the world’s problems. God is barely hanging in there, and probably should be given some heavenly Prozac or maybe even Vallium before He cracks up completely. However, to cheer God up, all people have to do is support Sun Myung Moon. According to Moon, the sight of people applauding and praising Moon is what makes God happiest of all. So when the congressmen literally crowned him instead of crowning him in the more figurative way that he actually deserves, this made God’s day, at least, according to Moon.”

And another:

So in pure legal terms what did the congress men do in regards of representing their constistuents? I mean, we elect congressmen (or we used to) and they crown a Messiah? Does that mean we are endorsing this guy without knowing it?

w00000000t!!!!

Thanks to Fark I am now the proud owner of a GMail account! That’s it, it’s official, I am now a member of the tech elite, for I have a GMail account.. w00t! If you’re wondering what my new email is, well, my username is katsushiro, and it’s @ GMail.com, so, I think you can figure out the rest.

And yes, as soon as I start getting invites to hand out, I’ll let people know here first so I can watch you beg me for one! Mwahahaha!

… I know.. but I can’t stay away.. the horror is too much.. I mean.. this is from his site:

That’s just not fucking right. Not fucking right at all.

Update: Allright, it’s a joke, it’s not real.. fooled me, though. I guess it’s a commentary on the sad state of the Net that I was so willing to beleive this shiat was for real. Thankfully, it’s just a parody.. and seen in that light, a pretty funny one too. Also, here’s a quote from the Fark thread where I saw this site debunked:

Okay, I’m trying to stay away, but.. WTF?! This is one of the creepiest things.. ever. The Official Countdown Site to Hermione’s 18th Birthday is made by some scary 30-something self-proclaimed UNIX geek who’s obsessed with Emma Watson.. or moreprecisely, Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books, as played by Emma Watson.. I think she’s not even 15! I mean.. I was amused by a lot of the Olsen Twins countdown sites.. at least, in the past few months, when their birthdays were only a few months away… but Emma’s 18th birthday is over 4 years away! And you’re a 30-something UNIX geek, man! Plus, you look like this:

Jeez. shudder… and to top it off, for a self-proclaimed UNIX/linux geek, he can’t even make a site that displays well in Firefox.. way to code in IE style, asshat.

Just a quick note: you’ll have to excuse a general lack of postings for a few days, I’m trying to focus on writing all those reviews I owe over @ AniGaming.