Pug’s Place

Some stuff posted on Slashdot… Enjoy!

Isildur disappointed to find Gladden Fields already littered with corpses, rings.

Dwarven metal-detector only turns up bottle-caps, shattered armor of comrades.

Isildur, eldest son and heir of Elendil, was disappointed late afternoon
last Monday when his attempt to find the ring which slipped off his finger
failed. “I was looking all through the muck, between the reeds and shrubs, and
I even wrestled a Gladden Gator to see if it accidentally swallowed it.” The
King of both Arnor and Gondor then employed his three sons to aid in the
search. After much searching amongst the reeds, Elendur, eldest of Isildur’s four sons, shouted in the gloom, “I have located it, father!” Unfortunately, upon putting the ring on, Elendur did not disappear, leaving the red embarrassment on his face plain to the eye. “Must be some other ring,” he grumbled. The many corpses strewn across the Gladden Fields did not help the endeavor either. “All of this cracked and broken armor is really throwing off the metal detector. It’s like trying to find a needle in a bloody, corpse-strewn haystack. I can only hope my insurance covers this.” When pressed for comment, Lloyd’s of London only said that “Insurance for rings of power laden with the capability of invisibility is not available, not even for a king of the Numenoreans, largely because “invisible rings” are a huge source of insurance fraud.” Later on in the day, the heir of Elendil was slain by an orc. “I can only hope the One Ring is not found by some scheming, hideous halfling-like creature which emanates bubbling-like noises, or else all is lost,” he said in his dying words, before another arrow punctured his larynx.

Hehehe… And another!

Undead Witch King Riding Through Hobbiton Raises Only A Few Eyebrows

Late Thursday evening, local hobbit Ted Sandyman was only mildly surprised to see the Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul, riding down the road leading up and over The Hill. “Aye, sir, I was a-walkin’ down the road to go do some fishin’ at the Bywater Pool when up comes this surly fellow all in black,” the miller’s son commented. “He says to me, he says ‘Where can I find Bagginsssss’ in a real gruff voice, as if he’s the Lord of Angmar, much like. I give him the ol’ long look and says straight to his face, ‘If it’s Baggins you want, then go up-on The Hill. But you look mighty famished, sir, as if you didna’ eat for a few centuries.’ I then offers him to come over to the mill for some biscuits and the like but ‘ee says he hasn’t ‘et anything for a few centuries ‘cuz he’s been dead for a few centuries. Than he went a-gallopin’ up to the Hill, not even bothering to bid me a good day.” Another hobbit, Millo Burrow, also saw the forsaken slave of the second dark lord stroll through the town. “It musta been noon-day when I sees him. He was a-ridin’ a black horse, and so at first I thought it was old Mr. Butterbur come from Bree on an errand, but no: I look closer and, bless my hide, it’s the Lord of Angmar. I shrug my shoulders and go on my way, seein’ as it’s no business of mine as to what an eternally damned witch king is doin’ in town. Prolly buying some fine Hobbiton cheese, no doubt.”

It’s terrible but true. At least yesterday I watched the Two Towers Extended Edition with The Elf, Liz and Katie. So that’s cool.

Hrmmm.. I need to find out when my last exam is, and when Theresa’s last exam is.

Orlando Bloom, who plays the elf Legolas, has no trouble summoning up his last day in costume. “I was definitely welled up, man,” he says. “I was choked. I was suddenly reminded of how lucky I was to be a part of this process and how much it changed me. Viggo being a real mentor to me, and Peter being this incredibly amazing, visionary director. They cut together a little gag reel. It was, like, four minutes of all these different Leggy moments from the whole shoot and outtakes and stuff. It was hilarious! It had all this ’80s music. You know that song ‘Hungry Eyes’? ‘One look at you and I touch the sky’? They had this homoerotic thing where they had a shot of Viggo pulling out his sword and looking at me, and me looking at him and drawing my bow. It was brilliant, man..”

Newsweek: Secrets of ‘the King’ Page 3

Pulling out his sword.

Drawing his bow.

Pulling sword. Drawing bow.

I don’t think we need The Elf to explain this one to us… I always knew there was something queer about that prettiest elf.

I’ve never been too in to wearing a company’s name scrawled over my breast. I usually refuse to purchase clothes that even have a logo emblazoned upon them, at least if it’s not a cuddly Tux penguin. I just ran across some someones who feel the same way: Aberzombie.com.

Hehehe…

Hurray. Let’s all get our patriotic shirts and hats out. The juiciest parts of the Patriot II act have just been passed (last Friday) in secret by being tacked onto an intelligence spending bill, the sort that gets no public comment due to ’security issues.’ Here’s Slashdot’s story with comments and Wired News’. Excuse me a moment…

GOD DAMN IT!

Okay, so we’ve expanded the secret unaccountable investigative powers of our soon-to-be police state. Measures have been and are still in the works to pass “super-DMCA” bills that would make file sharing illegal [Text of the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 (eff.org)]. Since 60 million Americans use peer to peer file sharing and that’s 10 million more than voted for President Bush, you start to realize that slowly but surely, the guys in the Department of Homeland Security who are simply ‘Preserving Life and Liberty’ are slowly making every US citizen a felon, be it by music-sharing or, simply playing legally-purchased DVDs on Linux. Add that together with the fact that these people are capable of spying on you without needing any reason and we start to see that all of this is adding together to give the government the power to jail any member of its citizenry who steps out of line.

Will that happen? Probably not in the near future, but not all regimes have the same moral standards.

I can see a future need to be 21 so that I can start exercising my 2nd Amendment rights and purchase handguns.

Please, someone recommend to me a different country. One that doesn’t follow the U.S.’s lead blindly.

According to the New York Times (article link: inhalation of terminal Ebola required — registration-free link), Yamaha and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain are putting the finishing touches on a computerized voice synthesizer that can reproduce a variety of “concert-quality voices” in an exceedingly life-like fashion.

Well, um, good for them, but I’d rather have real humans performing at restaurants and… concerts! Though it would be quite cool to have my computer sing to me… Well, when Katie is unavailable of course!

I plugged my USB flash drive into a Windows XP computer’s USB 2.0 port this morning while it was set to write-protect mode (hardware switch), and once plugged in the status light started blinking rapidly. It wouldn’t get recognized by Windows, either. So I pulled it out and hooked it to a USB 1.1 port on the back of the computer. The light came on as it should and the computer recognized it, but said it was not formatted. Windows 2000 said the same. I’m going to have to get a Linux box and check it, but it appears I somehow wiped my flash drive. This meant I had to proxy through the UF computers this morning to re-retrieve some Science articles from the mid-70s for a report I’m going to write today.

I spent last night dog-sitting my brother Jay’s three Boxers. They’re cute, but they like licking wayyy too much. They’re more demanding of attention than even I, the Pug, am! I took a couple of cute pictures though; I’ll see if I can’t get them online before the week’s out. Anyway, this morning when Jay got home from work (he works nights), we hopped in his hot tub (it was about 65 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but 104 in the tub!), talked for a bit, and he took me out for breakfast. That was great. Anyway…

The documentaries on The Two Towers Extended Edition are so far pretty cool - I’m about an hour and a half through the first disc of appendices.

1050 miles later, J.C. has returned to his home in Northwest Florida. The drives were good, my car performed admirably, the weather was perfect, and the company excellent. No complaints.

I’ll try and keep the blog up-to-date over the holiday. Hurray for remote shell access to Linux systems!

Also: Another congratulation to Theresa for getting DVDs playing entirely on her own!

I’ll write more later, probably while falling asleep, but for now let’s just say I’m leaving town in 15 hours, and I’m about to go take a physics test that could pass or fail me. God be with me.

Well, I’m a bit low on sleep today, but that’s alright. My longest term paper is almost complete, and the next one… well, it’s not started yet, but I’ll get it!

Physics is being bad right now, but I’m going to study hard and nail the exam Thursday at 12:30 — I’m taking it early since I’m leaving town Friday.

I have a bunch more Aikido pictures that I’m going to add to the UF Aikido website soon. Linda gave me two CDs of pictures from the last seminar and related events yesterday. They’re not in ISO9660 format though, that threw me for a minute. They’re in UDF format. Very weird. I don’t know what the difference is, except that it’s not a normal CD. *shrug*

I just want to show off my desktop background that I created a couple days
ago. I put a screen-shot in the href="http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~jcjones/index.php?spgmGal=Computer_Stuff">Computer Stuff gallery in my photo galleries, but here’s a direct link as well. It’s essentially xplanet showing daylight and night, with real-time clouds overlaid as seen by various weather satellites, and the current regional and local radar overlaid using ImageMagick.

Yep. That’s about it. And James and I are making burritos tonight. Whee!