Primetime did an (extremely biased) episode on a couple of young Neo-Nazis. And very poorly done. It's bad when the Neo-Nazis sound more educated than the national reporters. 'Oh, you're just teaching your own kids your own political views! Shocking!' Well, duh! I'm sure normal kids never pick up political beliefs from their kids. Oh, and I especially like how peaceful neo-Nazi protesters were attacked by rioters, so Neo-Nazis are /clearly/ dangerous.

They talk about people refusing white-only Katrina aid, but how about doing something about moronic reporters arguing for our side? Reminds me of the SNL skit where Saddam publically supported...Kerry? Bush? Clinton? McCain? Anyway, yes. Please, 60 Minutes, you're not helping the anti-racism cause..

Of course, it's quite normal for /Primetime/. I once watched part of a pornography thingy they (or /60 Minutes/?) did. The reporter v. pornographers was like Britney Spears v. Stephen Hawking.

/Primetime/ is the prig's /Jerry Springer/.

Because I recentlyish got a Kodak digital camera and have been receiving their newsletter, they sent me an online survey about it and their newsletter.

Some tips for their survey writers:
* Don't mix multiple choice answers. 'I like taking photos and REALLY like editing my pictures' is not true. You need either two distinct questions or include the entire Cartesian product for answers about photo /taking/ and photo /eiditing/ options.
* Same thing for sharing photos and editing phots.
* If the question says '(Enter whole dollar amount. Please enter 0 if none. You do not need to type in the "$" sign.)', it shouldn't prohibit you from entering numbers under 25.
* Don't assume I've read the newsletter and have opinions about it. Yes, I /think/ I've been receiving it, but I certainly didn't /read/ it. But I will happily check the 'Too many images' box.
* Don't make me answer every question. You want random choices for questions that are completely irrelevant, or for me to give you nothing at all?

(Potentially relevant link)

Nearing that time of year again. Several of my friends have been planning for a month or two already. I started something like this many years ago, and was thinking it could make an interesting NanoWriM, but I doubt I'll do it that way. But, you know, when you're short on words for the day, throwing in a H2G2-esque article from time to time could be appealing. Coherence will not be something I demand of my story.

Graham (who alerted me to NaNoWriMo with his blog entry last year) is talking about how much harder it may be for him this time, since he succeded last year. For me, that's no problem. It can't really go much worse.
2004-11-01: Five hours of sleep the night before. Too tired to write much that evening. Why did they have ot make it start the day after Halloween? I wrote under 800 words.
2004-11-02: I wrote under 400 words, as I recall. I just /had/ to go watch the election results come in instead.
2004-11-03: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
2004-11-04: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
2004-11-05: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
2004-11-06: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
2004-11-07: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
2004-11-08: Four more years. Too depressed to write.
...

I wrote a tad more around the twelfth, or so, but by that time it was obviously a failed endeavour. This year, maybe I'll just go ahead and forget all about quality as I had planned. Writing poorly is not the easiest thing for me.

Thursday, a homeless guy was talking to me (or foodless, anyway) and he asked where I was from. I told him I was from Chocowinity, NC (this was in neighboring Washington, NC) and he didn't believe me. Apparently the way I speak is too proper. 'You must be British or something'.

Now, I don't have the southern accent of everyone else in the area, but I'm certainly not British. Of course, this guy had trouble understanding anything I said for some reason.

Anyway, if I wear a blue shirt today and a red shirt tomorrow, no one thinks 'He switched from medical to operations! That's weird.' It's perfectly normal. But if I switch to a Cockney accent for a day, people will think I'm totally bizarre (and annoying). People are stupid that way.

(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.