"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

The Things You Learn As A Laptop-Wielding Weirdo

Word to the wise: should you have any mid-to-large gauge body piercings, for instance a nipple, and you happen to own one of these lovely Apple laptops with the magnetic power adapters, be cautious when unplugging the end that goes into your lappy.

If your the type who likes to grab the plug and start coiling it in one smooth motion, and the magnetic end happens to hone in on the metal stuck in yr body, you're in for a shock. Literally.

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Civil War LAN

My mom is pretty much the coolest.

Through University of Oregon cultural forum, she's been throwing large all-night LAN parties in their Student Union for a few years now with great success, but this year it's going to a new, historic level. They've coordinated with their counterparts at Oregon State up in Corvallis to do the first-ever organized intercollegiate gaming competition: Civil War LAN. It's pulled off using their ultra-high-speed Internet2 connection, and could be an indicator of future intercollegiate competitions.

No word yet on Nike sponsorships.

Digg it.

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An Example Of What's Wrong With The World

Try and find video of Usain Bolt's 100m astonishing world-record run this summer from Beijing. I remember happening to catch it in the kitchen in Westhaven. It was spectacular.

But you can't find it online.

NBC owns it, and their stuff is only avaiable via their own (shitty) website and using a (shitty) proprietary Microsoft plugin-requiring format.

I was going to make a post using that video an analogizing w/the presidential race -- as the McCain tailspin tightens and the backstabbing begins -- but I can't. Because the Olympics are the intellectual property of NBC Sports, and they're a massive gang of wankers.

And speaking of a massive gang of wankers:

The little blond girl making monkey gestures at the beginning really gives me a twisty feeling in my stomach. Drawing out the toxins, this election is.

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A little something I whipped up

Hopefully this will help:

There should be more artists coming in soon as MFD's A&R operation starts making rain. Cool concept: you sign up here, we do some magic on the internets, and you get a robo-call from a musician you like reminding you to vote. Spread it around, yo!

BHO haulded in $150 million dollars in September. That's fucking insane, by the way. He also got the Colin (Powel) endorsement. I lost all respect for that half-cuban cocksucker when he did that bullshit -- and obviously so -- dog and pony show at the UN with the fake-ass areal photography and the little vial of white powder. However, for the same reasons that the press ate that up like strawberry shortcake, his endorsement will help cement elite opinion for Obama. So bully for you Colin. Way to go out on a limb for the cause.

This is the part in Mortal Kombat where Obama gets the Finish Him moment. Let's make this election a fatality for the conservative movement.

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The Great Release

Things have been busy to the extreme but thankfully its the good kind of busy that brings a sense of purpose and joy to life.

I've been struggling in my meditative moments -- mostly on mass transit -- with the cyclical trap of self-awareness. Third-person camera vision; thinking about telling a story about a girl to another girl and asking advice about life, and knowing this is on some level a maneuver, and that killing the whole appeal.

Thinking about how this condition of cynical self-consciousness prevents interesting things from happening, prevents simple happiness and authentic experience from emerging, creates an unattractive air of uncertainty, hesitation and pessimism.

And I look across the BART isle and there's a middle aged man, kids-off-to-college age, assembling a book of Magic the Gathering cards, which I remember from high school, and he's got a look of pure and unadulterated joy on his face, putting his new cards into their little plastic holders, arranging them just so. Totally unconscious to whatever else and just loving it in whatever personal world he inhabits. It was a poignant moment for me.

To use a theatrical phrase, sometimes we have to suspend our disbelief in our own lives, perhaps as a precursor to Really Actually Believing again.

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Bold Moves

I believe the Black President is wrapping it up in terms of the election. This is looking a lot more like 96, 84 or 76 than 2000 or 04. That's good.

So now there's this: Obama campaign buys 30-minute time block on Oct 29th. My guess/hope is this will be a Perot-style policy demo. Our debt-based economy is rapidly collapsing, and as clever as Zack's "25% hit on 401(k): five grand. President Obama? Priceless" line is, there's a reality that shit's real fucked up right now and it's going to start hurting regular people, and badly, quite soon.

For my part, I agree with Zizek that we need a new theory, and I'm young and dumb enough to go one further and venture some guesses.

The sketchy wind-up:

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The Kids are Coming Up From Behind

Quick meta-notes: my prestigious google ranking for the keyphrase "authentic experience" is not long for this world, methinks. Couldn't be eclipsed by nicer folk though. ;)

I did some good work today on the Drupal for Firebug project, which my colleague Matt has been rocking. It's interesting getting into new technological territory in terms of writing extensions for Firefox. Still following reliable trailblazer John Reisig, one of the real shining lights of the internet. Big ups and terrorist fist-jabs for him.

It's got me thinking about how much I'm over this old Dirtstyle website. Coming into the Autumn, I feel the need to start living the dream a bit more, even if that means experimenting around the margins of what the dream might entail. Fortune favors the bold, and I think it might be fun to work on my own website as a project. My entrepreneurial activities of the past two years have sucked a lot of the joy out of the web for me, and that's a real shame. Doesn't have to be like that.

This might also a good way of getting back into a regular writing pattern. I've realized that this (writing) is something I'd like to keep up, and that in the longer-run, maybe I can have some of my career based around writing english rather than writing code. That or I'll hit the high grade one of these days and can start living that charmed boho life that suddenly becomes possible when you've got a pile of cash on reserve. Ah, dreams.

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Retreat!

The Chapter Three gang is assembling in our Eureka office for a few days of long-awaited retreat, teambuilding, and planning for the future. It's not quite Drupal in Paradise, but it should be pretty fun and productive. As long as I'm geeking out about work, my new favorite thing is the awesome graphic Monica whipped up for us:

Tree of Life

We actually have a tree in our SF office now, so that's pretty exciting to be all in-sync.

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"I think God lives on the Sun, don't you?"

More resisting apoccalyptic thinking: researchers at MIT improve solar cell performance:

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel [e.g. a window]. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell "by a factor of over 40," Baldo says.

The real solutions to all of humanities problems are energetic in nature. Currently, as we confront an end to the burning of a billion or so years worth of stored photosynthesis that we dug out of the ground -- that's what oil, coal and natural gas are, really -- we look in new directions. The future is in fusion, and while there are some exciting things (which aught to get funding) happening with small-scale earthbound actions, we have a pretty functional fusion reactor up and running in the neighborhood. It'll burn you too, if you're not careful.

The Sun is the root source of almost all energy, of all life on our Earth. With the exception of geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power, everything else comes exclusively from the Sun. It's a mind-bogglingly huge thing, a mas of incandescent gas emitting literally incomprehensible amounts of energy. There is no scale of reference that can even begin to convey the reality of what the sun is, it's power.

It is truly the most God-like for 35 light years around. We should do a better job of worshiping.

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Firefox 3.0

Lots of little links today.

If you get to this before noon on wednesday, give yourself a better web experience and help set a world record:

Please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18, 2008. That's 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

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