Original article

Before I get all the comments about how DailyKos is usually a “left wing propaganda tool”*, this is actually a very good article on the recent HB Gary Federal (a federal contractor in “IT Security”) scandal in which one of their employees tried to infiltrate Anonymous. The fallout of that fiasco was that HB Gary Federal’s network was cracked (reportedly by a 16 year old girl), and 50,000+ e-mails were released.

* – which it may very well be, but I honestly don’t care about those kind of politics.

From my understanding, most of the e-mails were harmless, but as the DailyKos article mentions, some government agencies actually went for a “Persona Management Software”, which allowed any user of the software to create a number of drones and spray propaganda. This is highly problematic considering the hoards of misinformed masses latching on to FaceBook status updates, Twitter twits (yes I know it’s “tweets”), and other social media that can easily start rumors and influence public opinion.

Have a look, it’s an interesting read. And, as always, don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

This topic, I’m sure, has been blogged about and hashed and rehashed a million times, but here it goes anyway. Stream of consciousness about reality TV:

The banality of evil is a well broached subject. However, the banality of existence and subjugation is a topic I have not studied in any extent. We live in an age of relative painlessness.

Do you have a headache? Take an Aspirin™. Diarrhea? Pepto Bismol. Hereticism? Well, not so clear. We live in a state where free speech is valued and (almost) expected. In other countries where publishing my thoughts may be met with a sentence of death, we are fortunate enough to live in the United States, where as long as it’s not blatantly subversive to the common good, it’s allowed.

Anyway, back to my main topic of reality TV. One of the primary side-effects of this unobstructed freedom is the subconscious realization that life without pain is 100% boring.

And how else do we cope with this boredom in a country constricted on all sides by the media? We delve into the abyss that is reality TV. In this comfort we find our humanity: fear, danger, pain, and discomfort.

With that random bit of jagged thought, I leave you with this, a quote from Alduos Huxley’s A Brave New World:

Said the Controller (authority figure in the Utopian society in the book):

“We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Jobs of Yesteryear – NPR.org

For a while after upgrading my work system to Fedora 12, my sound wasn’t working. After ridiculous amounts of searching through extensive instructions on how to fix it, I stumbled on a solution today. For my system, ALSA sound worked just fine (found this out by trying the ALSA output plugin in audacious).

In / etc / pulse / default.pa, I changed the line from

# load-module module-alsa-sink

to

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0

Then, killed and restarted pulseaudio as such:

$ pkill pulseaudio
$ pulseaudio -D

When I heard the pop in my headphones I knew something went right and soon had sound in both Google Chrome (YouTube) and in Audacious. Sweet!

Ctrl + Shift + T : reopens the last closed tab. Good stuff; I love hotkeys, especially when I accidentally discover a useful one.

Running Fedora 11, I forgot I installed Google Gadgets, so while I’m waiting for PEAR to install, I figured I’d register my disappointment here.

All of them look relatively decent, but unfortunately the 4 or so I’ve tried (out of hundreds, I know), aren’t SVG. So that means when I make them bigger to show off, they distort. :-/

Ha. Chose to not put the mother-effer part in the title; my mother reads this! lol.

It was nice to see Krav Maga get some media exposure recently, having Rhonda Walker visit the studio and do a story on how Krav can help with self defense and physical fitness. I should have went …

Video on ClickOnDetroit.Com