heatxsink.com

Once again props to Christian.This is why they call Clinton, "Slick Willy!!"

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.Al Capp

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.Isaac Newton

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.Isaac Asimov

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.Erica Jong

Been under the weather lately, I think it's allergies and NOT the bird flu, but I have had SOME flu-like symptoms. So i'll keep you all posted, that is if I'm alive and/or not hospitalized cause of the bird flu.A shoutout to Christian for getting me hooked on Monster, and my LCD so that it's turned vertical!If you want to make your LCD go vertical, and lucky enough to have a nvidia graphics card, and running Linux. Just add this line to your "Driver" section of your xorg.conf or XF86Config file(s).

For those of you that run windows (may God have mercy on your soul, well maybe not that dramatic...), I believe that Dell supplies a cd with drivers that allow for this kind of usage. But I've never used them. Anyways, restart X. Then in your terminal type the following.Happy Hacking vertical style!

I picked up this novel entitled, Survivor, written by Chuck Palahniuk.The following is an excerpt from the book.

A guy's calling to say he's failing Algebra II.Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself.A woman calls and says her kids won't behave.Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself.A man calls to say his car won't start.Kill yourself.A woman calls to ask what time the late movies starts.Kill yourself.She asks, "Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex?"I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

God, I LOVE this kinda of humor.

Pacers' Jackson calls ban on chains 'racist'. This is hilarious.This basketball player is seriously looking to pick a fight, and/or Kanye West has probably offered to pass him a race card??? SO I guess the NBA is getting wise to the antics that has transformed it into a run down polluted game. I'm sure the commisioner's hand over fist money making machine has seriously made him wealthy enough NOT to care. But with the NBA growing more and more out of control with younger and younger players being drafted, WITHOUT even an hint of college which translates discretely into immature/uncultured kids/adults running a muck. It looks like the NBA is trying to change it's "whatever works" mentality, by enforcing a strict business casual attire, which seems to include no jewlery hanging out side of one's shirt! THE OUTRAGE!!! I think this is GOOD!!! Think about the message that it's sending to children in all walks of life, including race.

I think it's a racist statement because a lot of the guys who are wearing chains are my age and are black," said Jackson, 27. "I wore all my jewelry today to let it be known that I'm upset with it.

Okay back up a second. What is the race distribution of the NBA? Like Mr. Jackson has so elequently stated, "black." Last time I checked there are more "black" people than any other race. So how could the rules be ONLY going after NBA players that are black, Jackson's age, and wearing chains. I hope this guy isn't on crack! Well i'm upset with the NBA and how it's players are sending the WRONG message to children. Wheres my say in the rules? I'm also upset about taxes, I'm just not going to pay!!!! Ya, right! How about this one. I'm upset with work, and the dress code we have. So I'm going to come to work with no clothes on anymore! Get real, you're pulling in millions of dollars to play a sport!!! Sad.

Stitched together my pictures, they came out pretty crappy. But here it is nonetheless. When you click on this thumbnail below, try and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the far right. You should be able to see this orange dome (the dome of the Exploratorium) just to the left of the Golden Gate bridge, and to the far right you can see the outline of the lights on the Bay Bridge. I believe the bright light to the far left is the lighthouse on Alcatraz. It was a beautiful night, unfortunately I am not very skilled in night time photography.The funniest part of the ride happened in the first minute. We got everything assembled our wheels were on our bikes, GPS units had a lock, heart rate monitor was working, head and tail lights were functioning. The ride had begun down a street in the "marina." All of the sudden my front derailer seemed to be shifting my middle gear down to my lowest gear. It was pretty funny, imagine riding and then you feel your front derailer magically shift itself into a lower gear. Puzzled, I stop check my front derailer, it seemed to be functioning just fine. I thought, "Must have been some kind of weird coincidence." I continued riding, and again the magical down shifting. Of course I stopped and then thought, "I bet I have a bent chain tooth." With the help of my apartment-mate, I inspected the middle chain ring, and discovered that my hunch was correct. Then I remembered about this gift I received entitled, Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance, more specifically the chapter about emergency repair. It covered absolutely nothing (at least from what I could remember) about a bent chain ring tooth. I thought probably because you're completely screwed if you encounter something like that, plus you're not completely hosed you do have two other chain rings. Then I thought well since mountain biking is really about roughing it, and I'm going to have to replace the ring, it's time to try and fix it somehow. I then sorted through my tools that I had with me, mainly a swiss army knife and my trusty topeak mini. I found that none of the tools on my topeak would even help me bend it back, accept this can opener/screw driver head tool with a notch that seemed to fit just right to pry the aluminum tooth back to almost true. It seemed to kind of work! Then I took the butt of my swiss army knife and just started banging the living shit out of it. And after like a dozen hits, it worked!!! Well it worked well enough to use my middle gear in front with my rear middle gears, too high or too low would cause this really bad situation called, "chain suck." Which would send the rear derailer slamming into my frame. That happened a few times, but my bike survived and more importantly so did I. I wasn't completely riding without a middle chain ring either.

I'm alive, but not feeling all that well. It was beautiful though. I'll post more soon.

My apartment-mate and I are embarking on a crazy midnight Marin Headlands excursion. From somewhere in SF to Tennese Valley. They say midnight mountain biking is beautiful. This ought to be interesting to say the least. I hear a variety of animals are on the trail at night. I hope not to meet any of them!! Anyways I should be back sometime in the morning so I can report to my cubicle. If I don't show up on AIM, or report back via this blog by this time tomorrow, I think you should send a search party. And that is a VERY serious statement. I don't plan on being lost so I'm already one step closer to being lost!

Thanks once again to Nat, for posting about this presentation. I think this is important for EVERYONE to see. It's one of Lawrence Lessig's last talks on the topic of Free Culture, this is now known as the Lessig Method of presentation. So check out the presentation here.

The Lessig Refrain

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
4. Ours is less and less a free society.

Did you know...

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.The solution ... is patenting as much as we can .... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.Bill Gates

If you are on myspace.com, and hate, despise, bad mouth conservatism, and Fox News did you know this? Just remember the next time you are wasting time on the internet adding all kinds of friends, that you're using something paid for by a news network you might not agree with. So you are contradicting yourself!

Yes today is the day when we should be celebrating Columbus Day. Thank you for re-writing the history I once knew. Just step back and be in complete awe that there is no more columbus day, and they say there's no such thing as a leftist indoctrination.........right!

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.Mark Twain

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.Mark Twain

While I was writing some code just moments ago, I noticed this vertical red line appear on my laptop screen. I thought oh, the X server or something or GTK or Gnome's pixbuf's some how are fucked up. I'll just restart X, I restart X, restart the machine. And this fucking red line won't go away.

"The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind ... is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, bu straight from the heart."

It is important for the common good to foster individuality: for only the individual can produce the new ideas which the community needs for its continuous improvement and requirements - indeed, to avoid sterility and petrification.

Guess who? Albert Einstein. I think the second quotation should definitely be sent to Microsoft, or any other innovation stifling company. I think Einstein would totally be a perfect fit in the open source software community. Too bad he's gone.

Life as we know is SO simple.

When browsing my feeds, I found a particular post that Nat did and I saw how he got his pictures to stitch together. Of course I couldn't sleep so I found some photos I had taken like two years ago with my old digital camera and decided to try and find the software that did this. It turned out rather cool.I believe this panorama is from the Presidio side of the Golden Gate. I think I took the picture around here.This is a cool picture of half moon bay from a state park.