Entries from July 2007 ↓

Wow — normally, I wouldn’t give two shits and a fart about Beyonce, but I was trying to show someone the video of her falling on her ass recently, and it’s become nearly impossible to find! It’s removed from YouTube, from Google Video, every goddamn thing!

Apparently, Sony’s started kicking up a fuss about one of its main stars (and sources of income) being made to look like a clumsy oaf all over the damn world, so apparently they’ve been slapping everyone who hosts the video, from big sites to small, with “DMCA”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA requests (even if they’re not actually filing the actual requests, they’re at least threatening to, I guarantee).

I _finally_ found the damn thing on a site called “PinoySpyTV.com”:http://pinoyspytv.com at “http://www.pinoyspytv.com/view/158/beyonce-knowles-falls-on-stage-in-florida-concert/”:http://www.pinoyspytv.com/view/158/beyonce-knowles-falls-on-stage-in-florida-concert/, which I’ll post for you below:

You can download the actual source of the video at “http://www.pinoyspytv.com/flvideo/158.flv”:http://www.pinoyspytv.com/flvideo/158.flv (right click and go to “Save as File…” or something like that).

Like I’ve said, normally I wouldn’t give a shit about something like this, but I just think it’s scary as hell that a company—not even the government mind you, but just a damn company—is actually trying to erase an event from history like this! (Think that’s crazy? Do you think Sony isn’t sitting there wishing they could do exactly that?)

Download it. Save it. Remember it. Remember the day Beyonce fell on her face like an idiot and slid down a flight of stairs on her mug.

Trust me, today it’s videos of Beyonce disappearing, tomorrow its the Constitution.

What, you don’t believe me?

I was going to go through the “Bill of Rights”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights here and describe how each one is being threatened today, but it quickly got too depressing… feel free to check ‘em out, though I’m sure you’re already acquainted with them, right?

Over the years, I’ve become quite the connoisseur of rice. Do I have a special liking to rice? No, not so much as I just appreciate being to buy 10 lbs. of food for $3!

You can’t beat it. Rice is the staple food (and for some, the only) of most of the world — this is what most of humanity eats along with breakfast, lunch, and dinner (if they get three meals a day at all).

Me — I just eat it to save money. Why eat more?

*Regular-old White Rice*
Nothin’ fancy about this rice — it’s what your mom used to cook for you. Two cups water, one cup rice, boil, and then simmer for 20 minutes. Doesn’t get much harder than that. If eaten plain (I don’t recommend it), this type of rice is utterly tasteless and has a texture that will bore you to tears.

*Basmati Rice*
Grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, Basmati rice has a naturally fragrant smell — you can really notice the first time you cook a pot. The rice has a slightly longer grain than you might be used to, and when fully cooked is slightly drier as well — this is probably due to the lesser water requirement of Basmati rice (1 ½ cups water to 1 cup rice).

I’ve only ever been able to find it in these big 10 lbs. woven bags with a whole bunch of Pakistani writing on it — a neat touch.

*Jasmine Rice*
The particular brand of Jasmine Rice I bought was from Thailand — Jasmine Rice had a very nice flavor and texture, slightly fragrant but not too much so. Now that I think about it, there wasn’t very much special about Jasmine Rice, except for that it seemed to be of a slightly higher “quality” — I know that’s real subjective, but it was just something about the way it looked, tasted and smelled.

*Botan (Calrose) Rice*
When I first opened this rice’s bag, I instantly noticed a difference — the rice’s grain was very, very small! Seriously, it’s like half the size of a “normal” grain of rice like what you’re used to.

Its requested ratio for cooking was slightly different, too — the bag requested a ratio of 1.5 cups rice to 2 cups water. The rice, when done, was very, very sticky — just how I’d expect from a type of rice used in sushi!

*Saffron Rice*
The mother of all rice — a rice with such a nice natural flavor that you can just eat it plain. It’s rice flavored with a spice known as “saffron”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron — whatever the hell Saffron is, I know it’s good!

You can have this rice with a curry or a stir-fry, but just eaten plain it is a dream. It’s not spicy or overpowering, but has such a _rich_ taste that you won’t want to put down your bowl.

Not really sad, just didn’t have anything to title this entry as.

Nothing much going on now — I’m firmly convinced now that the loud vibrations present in our Beetle Bug is because of old tires… I had checked them, and the tread seemed fine, but I was only paying attention to the middle. I neglected to really look at the _entire_ tire — had I done so, I would’ve noticed that the outsides of the tires that had been on the front of the car (before I rotated them) were almost completely worn out.

Yeah, I think I found the problem. Though, it’s not bad, considering they’ve been on the car since its inception.

I’ve lucked out, however — in the back of the bug is a *full-size* spare! Yep — it’s basically like getting a tire for free! All I have to do is use that one with another that I’ll buy from “Tirerack.com”:http://tirerack.com and we’re all set.

Well, this morning I decided to move around my partition tables on our main gaming computer — yeah, I know, silly idea, right?

“Why do you keep fucking around with stuff if it’s working fine?”

Because if I didn’t, I’d never learn anything new, would I?
Anyway… I moved around the partition tables (I wanted to make one partition bigger), and all of a sudden Ubuntu wouldn’t boot correctly anymore.

I mean, it _worked_, but it would hang during boot and give me a terminal screen. At this point, I could safely press Ctrl-D to continue the boot process, and everything would be fine. Annoying, but workable, I guess… but I want to know how to fix it.

So, I notice it’s hanging on something called “fsck” during the boot process (some kind of disk management utility for Linux), so I google it along with the word “Ubuntu,” and it leads me to this page:

“fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve”:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/66032

Turns out that in your “/etc/fstab” file in your Linux installation are a collection of entries regarding which boot partitions will be loaded at boot time, and there was an old entry for the drive that I had resized (I had actually deleted it and created a bigger one, now that I think about it).

I just commented out the line (with a “#” character) that referred to the old drive that I had deleted, and whatta-you-know… it works. No more dumping to the terminal screen during boot.

Now, the partition manager I used is called “Parted Magic”:http://partedmagic.com/ — it’s a great little application that comes in the form of a bootable CD (by way of .ISO file). It’s got an amazing GUI-based interface (looks like it’s based a bit on “KDE”:http://www.kde.org), and is easy as crap to use, trust me. It runs amazingly fast and has booted fine on every computer I’ve tried. Try it!

!http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/6.jpg (Green Eye)!:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2438897
“Ask me about Blindness”:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2438897

For about 4 hours or so today, I sat at my computer, enraptured, reading the most amazing thing. I just couldn’t stop reading, no matter what.

Follow the link above, and you’ll find a “Question and Answer” session by a fellow who’s blind. He’s been blind since birth, and has never known the sense of sight… because of this, he has some of the most unique perspectives on life, meeting other people, _et cetera_ that you’ll probably ever hear.

You don’t have to read every post in the (14-page-long) forum thread — just search through it for posts by him (his name’s _Caffeinated Sloth_). He quotes the questions put to him before he answers them, so you won’t be missing anything.

There. Done? If you’re not, go back — it’s really cool. The guy seems like the most laid back individual in the world — he’s asked several times about what he’d do to have sight, and he answers (basically), “To tell you honestly, I’m not too concerned about it.” Remember — he’s been his whole life without sight; he’s never experienced it or knows what it’s like.

Think about it this way. Someone comes up to you and says, “You’re missing a sense called ‘Ingtoc.’ I have this sense and you don’t. With this sense, I can tell that this object here [points at phone] has the quality of ‘furl.’”

Would you be that concerned that you didn’t have this magical sixth sense called “Ingtoc?” (It’s a bullshit word — don’t bother looking it up.) No, you wouldn’t be — you have no frame of reference for what this sense does, and furthermore, you’ve gone your whole life without it and probably feel like you get along just fine that way.

The guy also posts a quick MP3 he makes of his screen reader program working away (he’s a blind person that doesn’t use braille all that much — prefers screen readers) — either he’s messing around (I don’t think so), or he can actually listen to spoken text at an incredibly fast rate… he explains it later on, and debunks some of the amazing-ness. Says it took him years to reach that speed, and it only works with that one program he uses (an accessibility program called “JAWS”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29).

It’s made me think more about my web design, for one thing. He says he can’t stand images without proper “alt” parameters (his screen reader just skips over them) — this is directly in line with the official Document Model Specifications provided by the “W3C Internet Consortium”:http://w3.org, of course. He prefers the use of “h” tags as well (h1, h2, etc.) — they make it easy for screen readers such as his to quickly “jump” across sections (what I think they were originally intended to be for). Makes me feel bad for neglecting them all these years, it does.

“CAPTCHA’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha (like the one I use on this site) are also a pain in the ass for him, as you might imagine — there is no computer system known to man (at least publicly) that can figure out a well-made captcha, and that’s pretty much the point… An alternative would be the question-based authentication at a site like “Ajaxian.com”:http://ajaxian.com — this type of spam-proofing asks a simple question before you comment (What is two plus two?) instead of giving you an image to decode. It’s enough to fool an automatic spam robot, but a screen reader like “JAWS”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29 should read the question just fine.

It’s made me think a lot more about coding standards when it comes to markup such as HTML, for one thing, and just why such things are important to individuals such as him. (Are you listening, Microsoft? I’m sure there’s some upper-level execs in your organization that are sight-impaired in some way.)

By the way, from time to time feel free to check my “Tumblr Blog”:http://captainskyhawk.tumblr.com — it’ll just be quick little things that I send from my cell phone! Yep — pictures, quick text messages, all straight from my cell phone.

The site is even PDA/Newton accessible via “http://captainskyhawk.tumblr.com/mobile”:http://captainskyhawk.tumblr.com/mobile (hint hint nod nod wink wink), so you lucky owners of internet-enabled PDA’s can have fun, too.

Hey, if you noticed, I’m changing a lot of shit to do with the design of my blog — I wanted something brighter and “happier.”

So, I decided to go with a light gray instead of black. Neat, huh?