Saw this in dowtown Lugano
Denial is Transcontinental
January 19th, 2010Wow
November 26th, 2009
this was posted near my house - notice it is from ClearChannel!
observations
September 18th, 2009I feel like it is too much effort to write something involved for every post - hence the non-updates for over a month. From now on, I will try to regularly post random observations I have about living over here.
First random observation:
The people here consider it to be quite rude for me to make fart noises with my mouth. I don’t think people back home care as much.
Tits
August 6th, 2009Great company name!
stupid birthers. here’s a great quote about the morons.
July 28th, 2009It might seem, to the average person, that the “Birthers” must have a tough time proving their case. After all, Barack Obama has released his Certification of Live Birth (pictured above), which meets all the requirements for proving one’s citizenship to the State Department. The authenticity of the certificate has been verified by Hawaii state government. Moreover, Barack Obama’s birth announcement was found in two newspapers at the time, and such notices were provided directly by the Hawaii Department of Health.
Faced with this overwhelming evidence, the average person will no doubt shrug and consider the case closed. There is no question that the evidence points to the conclusion that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is therefore a “natural-born citizen.”
No question, that is, if you accept the dominant paradigm of metaphysical realism. That is, the idea that things exist independent of the mind and that those things are perceivable and knowable. Moreover, those who insist that Barack Obama is an American citizen also rely on philosophic naturalism–the idea that reality is subject to objective, knowable natural laws that can’t be tampered with.
However, if one rejects these two philosophic concepts, it’s quite easy to demonstrate that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to be President of the United States.
from here
I see your 3wolf shirt
June 6th, 2009And raise it one further.
I saw this on the hood of a car near my neighborhood today…
a dirty new filesystem I like the name of: NILFS
June 3rd, 2009sounds dirty, don’t it? here’s how dirty:
One of the most noticeable features of NILFS is that it can “continuously and automatically save instantaneous states of the file system without interrupting service”. NILFS refers to these as checkpoints. In contrast, other file systems such as ZFS, can provide snapshots but they have to suspend operation to perform the snapshot operation. NILFS doesn’t have to do this. The snapshots (checkpoints) are part of the file system design itself.
One of the really cool features of NILFS is that these checkpoints can actually be mounted along side the primary file system. This has many, many uses, one of which is to mount a checkpoint to recover files that were unintentionally erased.
In addition to being able to recover recently erased files and extremely fast crash recovery times, there are a number of other features of NILFS that are very attractive:
* The file size and inode numbers are stored as 64-bit fields
* File sizes of up to 8 EiB (Exbibyte - approximately an Exabyte)
* Block sizes that are smaller than a page size (i.e. 1KB-2KB). This can potentially make NILFS much faster for small files than other file systems.
* File and inode blocks use a B-tree (the use of B-trees in a log-structured file system stems from the implementation which use something called segments)
* NILFS uses 32-bit checksums (CRC32) on data and metadata for integrity assurance
* Correctly ordered data and meta-data writes
* Redundant superblock
* Read-ahead for meta data files as well as data files (helps read performance)
* Continuous check pointing which can be used for snapshots. These can be used for backups or they can even be used for recovering files.
Geez. Why haven’t I blogged lately?
June 3rd, 2009Um, could be that I spend my life in a mad dash between work, family, drink and sleep!
Oldies: Chinese Drop
June 2nd, 2009So I wrote this song probably in 1996 or 1997, in my living room. I recall coming up with the chord progression while sitting on my couch, my bong on the coffee table, skipping class from college. The first time I recorded it was with planet zorn, tho I played it for many years prior to this recording with several bands.
The lyrics are a play on rhyming schemes. I wanted to have an artificial AAAAA BBBBB CCCCC rhyme scheme, where for each verse, there is only one repeating rhyme. The subject is a general paranoia song about fear of the Chinese and their nuclear missiles, their suppression of the Falun Gong, and their menacing of Taiwan. Next I move to the police and their fun practices with mace and smashing faces. Then I move on to the hypocrisy of America’s obsession with fame and giving passes to famous and/or powerful people.
The chorus was written as a separate song, which I cut up and inserted into the middle of this song. The song that the chorus comes from was a silly tuning song that was literally following the progression of the strings, which we played so everyone could tune without the normal choatic, boring tuning that most people do. The lyrics in the chorus refer to how hard it will be for us to get to the ideal, an impossibility.
I have played many, many roles in bands throughout my ‘career’: Keyboardist in my first band, and from there, bass player, singer/bass player, guitarist, singer/guitarist, singer, singer/keyboardist. I’ve played drums, as well as singer/drummer. One time I was a singer/guitarist/bassist, but we won’t get into that.
In this first track, it’s all guitars. I don’t like the production, but that is merely amateur work - and who plays the guitar solo? me, that’s who:
The next recording is from a live show:
You can hear me talking like the fool I normally am on stage at the beginning.
And finally, the latest version, recorded with a beautiful Wurlitzer organ for the main track:
This last track is definitely my favorite version. The third time is a charm, as they say.