(Potentially relevant link)

BBC Headline: 'EU vets agree bird flu measures'

BCC decides ban prepositions. People seen singing and dancing the streets. English teachers give.

(Potentially relevant link)

I have a system.

It used to be that my shirts were piled in a big...pile. And each morning, I'd grab one and put it on. I'd grab one of my favourites. I'd end up wearing four or five shirts in a single week, with little variance from week to week. I had about twenty-thirty shirts, but the lame ones were kept at the bottom of the pile so I didn't have to sort through them.

But, my brother then gave me some of his shirts that he didn't wear.

So I made a useful system: two piles of shirts. I'd take the one on the top of the first pile, wear it, and when I got shirts back from the laundry, I'd put it on the second pile. Once the firt pile was gone, I'd flip the second pile back onto where it was and start over. Thst way, I wore each shirt once. Wouldn't wear the same shirt more than once over the course of a month.

But! Now because some shirts are quite lame and some are fab and such, and the first pile spreads out so much, I will pick and choose a bit, and occationally I'll completely skip the worst few.

These are my short-sleeved button shirts. The thing I wear 300+ days of the year. My long-sleeved button shirts are in my dresser.

(Potentially relevant link)

Earlier this year, the city of Washington, NC decided to improve their drainage system.

It didn't work.

The flooding seemed worse than when Hurricane Floyd hit in 1999, but maybe that's because we didn't go into town until the next day. Our yard was flooded more this time.

At Philosophy Club last night, Adam pointed out that he could make a machine that says 'Ow, that hurts!' when you punch it. So I threw this thing together. Dr. Murphy an d Dr. Vebber seemed to think it was amusing.

Anyhoo, this is similar to a basic computer program I bring up whenever idiots start talking about plants and vegetarianism. 'Oh, eating meat isn't worse than eating plants, 'cause plants an feel pain too!' Bullshit. Animals have a centre of subjectivity. Plants don't. Plants feel pain in the same sense that this button feels pain: it reacts negatively to certain stimuli. Most philosophies and certainly common sense insist that there's a morally relevant difference between animals and Javascript programs. Yet there's no basis for the claim that there's a relevant difference between a plant and the button. You can bullshit all you'd like about plants sensing whether you're a murderer or not, but _plants_ _have_ _no_ _mentation_. Animals do.

Once again, science defeats bad philosophy. The good philosophers know this.

From the pilot:
'I hate psychology; it's a soft science' -- Temperance Brennen, an anthropologist.

It's a good thing I don't write screenplays. The characters would seem totally unrealistic because they wouldn't say stupid things like that.

(Potentially relevant link)

Playing music on Windows XP? Hah! For a while, I was thinking I'd have to find some nice Ogg and MP3 libraries and write my own player. That was my plan.

Windows Media Player sucks in more ways than I can enumerate. Renamed a file? Crash! Moved a file? Crash! It's (plug-in'd) support for OggVorbis sucked. It all sucks. Everything about it sucks.
Winamp's Ogg plugin didn't work. I don't know why. WinAmp isn't what I want anyway.
Ashampoo was better, but had some serious annoyances, the slowness of it when trying to go through a 1 500 song directory tree being a major one.

Finally, however, I found a player for Windows that doesn't suck: yPlay.
At first, I was estatic because I could just do 'yplay --exit filename' and it would work like the UNIX 'play' command, but then I discovered I may not even need to. I'm undecided as to whether I'll even bother writing a Perl interface. Maybe I'll just use this thing. It's that good. Lightweight (No, I do not want to watch meaningless colours fly around to the music. I want to hear the music, and I want quick, easy playlists.)

I still may write the Perl interface so I can simply tag each song with flags and use that instead of playlists, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. That's what I really want. I don't know why n one offers that. I guess everybody sucks.

But yPlay is nice. Very nice. The randomising thing is more the way I think randomising generally should be (randomlise the list and then play through it, rather than jumping around randomly, letting the same song play over and over again), though the ability to rate music and have ++ed things played more could be nice. But that's not terribly useful. What's ++ at one time may be -- another time. That's why tags are good. Playlists will suffice, though.

I like yPlay.

(Having barely used it.)

UPDATE (before I've even posted this): When I move files, the only way I saw to refresh the song listing was to change the music folder and then change it back. Though I didn't try restarting.

September 12, 2001. I'm in line to give blood¹, and the people in front of me are talking. I get slighly involved, but not much. Anyway, at some point, what's-his-name asks Jessica her name, and she says she's alrady told him. She refuses to tell him her name 'cause he should already know it. A few days later, I see her in Brewster and ask her, and she tells me.

Some days later again, I see her outside Brewster, so I go up to her and say 'hey, what's your name?' 'Jessica'. 'Okay. This time I'll remember!' And I walk off.

A few minutes later, it occurred to me that the reason this person looked at me so oddly was that she may not have been the same person. I'm really not sure. She looked similar, but she didn't have a mohawk or anything nice and recognisable like that.

And worse, I've been calling her 'Jessica'in this post, but I really don't know. I've forgotten her name again. D'oh!

¹ For six hours. they told me it would only be three, and so I ended up missing class for the first time ever.

(Potentially relevant link)

Searchiong for 'mythical twins' gave normal results and then results for a suggested alternative search: Screenshot.

I've never seen that before on Google. If done well, it could be useful. Probably will be a small improvement, ast any rate. Probably more use for people without the good sense to refine their search themselves.

And, of course, I already had thought of Gemini. I want others. *refines search*

Challenged to come up with something good that George W. Bush has done as US president, my somewhat Liberal but more than a little Libertarian brother came up with medical malpractice award caps.

When Libertarian names price fixing as the best thing the Republican president has done, you know the world's all screwed up.

Liberals reduce the size of the government and end deficit spending, conservatives increase the size of the government and increase spending more than ever. And add price fixing to their agenda. I want a country where the parties pick their sides and stick with it.

(Potentially relevant link)

Normally I try to avoid MLP, but this fanfic is the best evAR. I muchly enjoyed Naked Quidditch Match, but this tops it, methinks.