khbrown

Interesting fact about Scrabble for ipod/phone - the word fuck is not in its dictionary whereas cunt is.

Today things changed and probably will never be the same. Don't want to say any more about it at this point; may feel differently subsequently. Suffice to say it was not a change for the better.

Thinking about genocide:

There often seems to be an exceptionalism which says the Holocaust was unique and somehow more evil than other genocides? To me the application of industrial methods seems more a technological factor, something which became possible but which would have been used 100 or 200 years before had it been available, and which could still be used in the future; could you say that radio broadcasts in Rwanda impelling Hutus to kill Tutsis were also specifically modern, in that this technology would not have been available 100 years earlier.

Do Holocaust deniers apply the same looking for excuses logic to those other genocides that they cite to downplay the Holocaust: The Nazis get the benefit of the doubt but the Soviets or the Chinese Communists etc. do not?

Can anyone recommend any 'objective' comparative studies of genocide? Or collections which have radically different perspectives on the topic? Was genocide possible before the word and the definition?

Had an annoying incompatibility between my machine and the server where the EFG website is hosted.

I was getting the list of film screenings out of the database and formatting them on the web page. One of the fields was the season a screening is in. I had a hash mapping the season names to the ids of the pages about them, so that I could do a link with the name of the season that went to the page.

One of the seasons was for the Spanish director Luis Buñuel. On my own computer the ñ caused no problems for the matching of the seasons to the keys but on the server it did, even when I tried substituting diacritics with their simple equivalents before doing the comparison. Ended up sticking in an extra couple of lines to do a regex match on the Buñuel season. Probably easier than figuring out what differences there were between the two installs and their character encodings.

Now sleeping regularly. Only issue is that it's 3am-11am or 4am-noon.

PCL-R test - admittedly crappy online version, not to be taken seriously.

Convict

You scored 21 out of forty on the psychopathy scale

Forensic studies of prison populations have reported average scores of around 22. You should be in jail, congratulations. Oh the bright side (if you’re a man) I don’t think you'’ll have to worry about being anally raped; you are a bit to frightening to be molested. So sharpen your shiv and go at them.

That I am not is probably a) being sufficiently middle class and b) getting my anger towards others under control after choking a friend into unconsciousness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17972781 - article about OG (I refuse to use the official term; if they try to copyright this one then Ice-T and similar might have a claim to prior art) ticket touts being arrested.

Police voice says: "If you buy tickets from unofficial places, you run the risk of paying over the odds for a non-existent ticket, ending up disappointed by not getting to see the game that you paid for, and risk having your personal and credit card details stolen for use in other crimes."

So, if that is the case, why is ticket touting not illegal in its entirety, in a no ticket shall be sold at more than its face value?

Also, what about those touts who sell legitimate tickets and who do not defraud their customers or use their credit card details? Would it be good business for them to piss off their customers? Wouldn't they want some sort of trust/reputation system that could distinguish them from the bad guys?

And, most fundamental of all, isn't it just a supply/demand issue that should, in terms of the capitalist economic logic of our system, be endorsed as seeing a market opportunity?

Nope, because it's not about capitalism for the individual, only for the corporation (see also grey imports etc.)

I like that the voting system used in the council elections allowed me to express some support for the Pirate Party candidate, not that they have much hope of winning.

NTFS Configuration Tool:

"This program allows you to easily configure all of your NTFS devices to allow write support via a friendly GUI. For that use, it will configure them to use the open source ntfs-3g driver. You'll also be able to easily disable this feature.

It just so happens that this program is a newer and improved version, but very few people know about it. It's better to install the disk-manager."

Uh, so are you saying I should install this or that I should not?

My PhD thesis has finally been submitted, six and a half years after I started. Now to try to get some semblance of a normal life and routine/structure back.