U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a House of Representatives subcommittee on March 26 that the United States did not take on the “huge burden with our coalition partners (in Iraq) not to be able to have a significant, dominating control over how it unfolds in the future.”
So, I have been fascinated by RSS feeds lately. I spend a crapload of time surfing the same sites over and over again, and so it occurred to me that some aggregation was in order.
Most people that I knew used RSS with a standalone client to view RSS feeds, which is nice, but not what I wanted at all. (Not to mention that I couldn’t find one worth a crap that didn’t require installing the entirity of GNOME).
So, I finally got on it, and created a section of RSS aggregation for my personal use (and anyone else’s, if they want!). I built it using magpie, an RSS toolkit written in PHP. It made the whole thing pretty simple, really. In addition, while in the process of looking for good news feeds, I discovered newsisfree.com, a site with RSS feeds (some scraped) for just about anything you can think of.
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| Candlelight Peace Vigil. Denver, March 16th | Baghdad, March 20 |
It didn’t work.
Amanda and I decided to go to the candlelight vigil for peace yesterday. When I first heard about it, the stalwart machismo self-conscious side of me reacted predictably: “Candles? Singing? gay.” But, it occured to me that as I realize more and more we live in a country full of people that just don’t care about anything, I really should go. I should do something.
So, we went. It was nice, but I felt unsatisfied by it. There were not as many people as I expected, which was disheartening (other more seasoned protesters seemed impressed by the turnout, so I guess that’s relative). Furthermore, there was little/no media coverage. There was some guy with a really big camera, but he might have just been some guy with a really big camera.
It was mostly a gathering of the peacenik variety. (Well, duh, Chris, it’s a candlelight vigil). This is fine and has its place, but I am more interested at this time in protesting the proposed war at hand. I am more interested in voicing my opinion that this isn’t a just war. I haven’t convinced myself that there’s no such thing as a just war, but this doesn’t come close.
They had some decent speakers give brief oratories, but they laid on the Christian prayer nuances a little too thickly for my taste, at something that’s supposed to be, in their words, an “international event”. They started off well, with the diplomatic reference to “God, or Buddha, or etc etc or whatever you call him”, but quickly degenerated into “our father, hallowed be thy name” type stuff that just makes me sweat.
I guess all in all I just felt like gathering in a park and holding candles is nice and all, but what good does it do if no one notices, because no one cares. I felt more depressed about it than anything. I think I would have enjoyed a more vocal demonstration or protest with some good speeches, instead. Hence my provocative and mostly facetious title.
But, all in all, it was a nice event. Looks like across the world, it yielded some beautiful photographs, at least (like the one from Denver shown above).
I have been enjoying mineral water quite a bit, lately. I spotted my boss drinking a bottle of San Pellegrino at work. At first I scoffed, because, well, I don’t know, I’m just a scoffer, I guess. But that night I decided to try a small bottle while at the grocery store. I really liked it!
After doing some searching on the web, I ran across the site referenced above, http://www.mineralwaters.org. It reminds me of the Cat and Girl strip, which is the source of one of my favorite quotes:
Connoisseurship makes anything interesting.
Since then, however, I have only been able to get Perrier at the local Kroger, and it’s not nearly as good. It just tastes like regular ol’ sparkling water to me, pretty much.
Some of you may be groaning already, but I had never heard this before. Evidently, a number of people over the years have speculated on Beethoven’s ethnicity. I think it’s pretty clear he wasn’t 100% of African descent, but the most realistic speculation is that he was a “mulatto”, to use the parlance of the time.
This page gives many interesting quotes and tidbits to back up this claim (none of which I have the time to independently verify in any way), including this one which is interesting:
In speaking of the immortal Haydn who was Beethoven’s teacher, Andre de Hevesy, says: “Everybody knows the incident at Kismarton or Eisenstadt, the residence of Prince Esterhazy. In the middle of the first allegro of Haydn’s symphony, His Highness asked the name of the author. He was brought forward. “‘What!’exclaimed the prince, ‘the music is by this blackamoor? ‘Well, my fine blackamoor, henceforward, thou art in my service.’”
Here, however, is a pretty stern refutation of this speculation, claiming that Beethoven’s lineage is well-documented (but giving no references as such).
Beethoven’s Death Mask (alternate view)
Given the aforementioned evidence, I think that I can say with 100% confidence and accuracy: Beats me.
On a more perplexing note, some are ruffling feathers by asking an even more provocative question: Was Michael Jackson black?
These are just some tips for making LDAP authentication work in Linux. I am not going to write a full HOWTO, as that HOWTO already exists, and is very helpful.
What I hope to provide here, instead, is just a list of things that I missed or that weren’t clear after reading the HOWTO and found myself really banging my head against, trying to make this work. I have admittedly not done the extensive fact-checking to make sure that this is all 100% accurate as I would have if I had been writing a more official HOWTO, so if anyone finds an error or an inaccuracy, mail me, and I’ll update it.
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I watched this video last week and a few times since. It’s supposedly a video taken from an AC130 Gunship as it rains down death and destruction on a supposed “terrorist compound”, although I have been unable to find on the web any real evidence as to a) where this video was shot, b) when it was shot, or c) who the supposed terrorists were.
Go ahead and view this video and read on for my general reaction.
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Cool Things