Dispatches from Tallahassee

First off, I really feel for the friends and families of the victims of last week's shootings in Blacksburg, and to the entire Virginia Tech community. As somebody who knows and has worked with quite a few Hokies, I really feel for them all. Unfortunately, it seems like in the wake of any tragedy (such as this one) in the United States, that the news networks and newspapers - those that profit and thrive off of incidents such as these - are desperate to fill their time and end up putting complete and total assholes on the air.

These assholes get on TV mere hours after a brutal incident and spout their partisan garbage, always trying to promote whatever agenda they're big on. Gun control, anti-gun control, stricter privacy laws, video game violence, television violence - each one of those was purported to be the cause of these killings by some asshole who's trying to push across their personal agenda. The killer can't be an evil, twisted being - no, that would be too simple. TV made him do it. Or Playstation. Or the "lax" gun control laws in Virginia.

All of which, of course, is complete and total bullshit.

Over on the spectacular BoingBoing.net, they brought up a post-9/11 article entitled "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics" from Adequacy.org; a fitting article for the crap that filled the airwaves in the hours and days after what happened in Virginia. Using the pain and suffering of others as a catalyst to promote your own agenda - it's just so incredibly scummy. I've got no insult terrible enough to be appropriate for these assholes.

In other news, if you want something to smile about (and you like beer), then you should try Samuel Adams' new Cherry Wheat beer. It's sweet, it's light, and it tastes incredible. In a very short amount of time it has become my favorite beer, even if it is a pain in the ass finding it in Tallahassee.

From a nerd standpoint, I recently did some (financial) damage at one of FSU's surplus auctions, buying 5 laptops, 4 Apple PowerBooks (G3) and 1 old Sony Vaio. The Vaio was a somewhat curious buy for me - it's a Pentium II (366MHz) - a nine-year-old laptop that is considered a dinosaur by today's computing standards. So why buy it? Because it is one of the tiniest laptops I've ever seen - a 12" subnotebook with a scant 3.5lb weight. Per FSU requirements, these systems do not come pre-loaded with an operating system; this proved to be quite a pain in the ass for me as the notebook didn't come with a CD-ROM or a Floppy drive, and these are the two easiest ways to load an operating system. So what did I do? I disassembled the laptop, put its hard drive in one of my desktop towers, installed an operating system (Xubuntu Linux 7.04), put the hard drive back in the laptop, and booted it up. I don't know how it worked, but it did. This ancient laptop had no problem getting online with an old wireless card, opened applications (Firefox and OpenOffice.org to name a couple) pretty quickly, and even had no trouble playing music (Last.FM or local/network MP3s) or movies (streamed XviD files), something that wouldn't be possible if I had installed Windows 98 on the machine.

In case you mentally checked out when I went into geek mode there, I apologize. This week is finals week at FSU, where I'm wrapping up the next-to-last undergraduate semester in my 2nd degree. This week will be chock full of studying and tutoring my students for their finals, but next week I've got a whole lot of nothing to do. Look for the return of more 11-Word Movie Reviews and hopefully a recap of my favorite albums of the year so far.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it, check out this PSA created by the Cliff Freeman agency for the Youth AIDS foundation. I think this does an incredible job of expressing a message in a way that catches your attention:

[Image gratuitously stolen from stirlingmclaughlin.com]

Do you use Twitter, Digg, or del.icio.us? Let me know! I'm always looking for people to add to my friend list on those websites. If you haven't heard of OpenID, it's an interesting concept. Theoretically you'll be able to log into multiple websites by using only one login/password, solving the age-old problem of trying to manage having tons and tons of usernames and passwords. The problem with having so many usernames is that most people tend to just pick a password and use it for everything, making them somewhat prone to identity theft if somebody can get a hold of your usernames. What I like to do is use the wonderful open source KeePass, (also available in a portable version) which stores and maintains an encrypted list of passwords. If you're using Firefox, the built-in password manager in Firefox is a great alternative, but please go to Tools -> Options -> Security -> Password and select "Use Master Password" - if not, whenever somebody has physical access to your computer they'd have complete access to any account with a stored password. If you want to see my OpenID site, head over to http://claimid.com/cataphoresis and see.

In the world of sports, I've enjoyed the Red Sox winning this weekend's series against the Bronx Bombers; especially lighting up Mariano Rivera on Friday and the 4 HR in back-to-back-to-back-to-back fashion in tonight's game. Last night's fight (UFC 70) was pretty tame with exception being the main event, where Mirko "Cro Cop" was obliterated by a high kick to the temple by Gonzaga. What a ridiculously surprising ending to that fight; some gave the guy a chance, but nobody thought it would end like that.