Which War Is This, a very interesting article on media doublethink, labelling of rebels vs. insurgents etc.

Also very much recommended (but depressing) is Orwell Today, as is Riverbend's blog from hell.

This is all very depressing, disturbing, disgusting, rotten and Wrong. I hate oppression and totalitarianism, and the news (except the mainstream bootlicker media of course) is full of stupid assholes in power - it's so depressing.

So, do I have to burn off my fingerprints now or can that wait a couple of months? Is the RF-safe wallet the next thing I'll have to buy? Or an RF-safe overall, to be worn like a decon suit over all your RFID-infested clothes? Is ThoughtCrime next on the WIPO agenda?

What a bloody lousy outlook.

Last week my last grandma and Cornelia's hamster died. Both were fairly old, grandma at 90+, and the hamster was an Elder Hamster, too.

Grandma surely didn't mind finally dying; the last few years she didn't really enjoy herself very much anymore - eyesight pretty much gone, too frail to do anything, breaking bones every couple of months and so on - but she still was lucid and happy about my (infrequent) postcards and even more infrequent calls.

The hamster never received any phonecalls from me, but I'm sure it had a good life in Cornelia's care nevertheless.

I wish both of them a happy next life, or happy sansara or whatever they may feel appropriate.

The weather today was mostly lousy, so I didn't go flying. didn't do anything useful as a matter of fact, just went looking for tiles for the kitchen splashbacks (unsuccessfully) and picked up four new used sf books in Coolangatta.

There's days like this one when about everything sucks. I feel like Gestra Ishmethit, the place is a mess but I don't feel like cleaning up (beyond the bare necessities), the laundry is waiting but I don't switch on the washing machine, a lot of code is waiting to be developed but I don't like to code and so on. I'd like to sublime away now. (But I'm 350 pages into John Varley's Demon.)

Two days ago I sent the churn request. This morning there was a five hour outage, then I got my notification via SMS and email and now the new ISP does the bit-shuffling: Westnet.

As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.

Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).

My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.

And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)

It was trivial (quel surprise).

I'm really bad at chess (understatement alert; haven't touched it in about a decade) but I do appreciatete the geekfactor of this seriously cool chess set.

Again: Dart, the ISP (mostly) providing net access at home has been bought out. The new owners are not exactly well-known for competence, and proved that prejudice very succinctly during the customer migration: they fucked it up big time, repeated outages up to 18hrs, less services, mad switching around of static-vs-dynamic IP addresses and so on.

Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.

But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.

So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.

Some Indymedia servers had been confiscated in October, with no reason given. EFF and Indymedia filed for disclosure of the reasoning behind that, and all they got was:

• it's your gear but you lack standing to contest the seizure,
• an unnamed foreign government made us do it,
• the unnamed foreign government's rights trump the bill of rights,
• and we're waving the ever-useful "it's because of terrrrorrrism" card, so get lost.

So the US finally have joined the ranks of dictatorial banana republics. Well, I wasn't planning to go there ever again anyway.

Indymedia articles
EFF articles

Well, he's gone now. The next fashist bastard is certainly already waiting to undermine what's left of the 'murkin democracy.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said... "Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.

Link to the boingboing article

...you wake up in the morning only to discover that your house has turned into an island overnight.
click here for the rest of the story...

Well, that sure fucked up this Saturday; it's still thunderstormy and raining.

In the beginning, long time ago...dammit, I'm really a fair bit behind with blogging...when I moved in a year ago, I decided that the kitchen would have to go eventually.
click here for the rest of the story...

So, the murkins have decided on another four years led by the dangerous idiot. (That is, if this "election" was kosher - which it certainly wasn't everywhere but apparently mostly so.)

The int'l observers - when not barred from entering the polling stations - observed:

"The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski..."

Apropos electronic voting, Andrew Tanenbaum has this to say on his electoral vote predictor website:

"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."

Terrific.