General

After hiding indoors for most of the Fourth of July holiday, I dragged Laura to Boaz, with a promise of Slurpees and cemeteries.

The first stop was a mercifully brief visit with my grandparents. Please understand: my grandparents are very sweet, very old, and live across the street from their Southern Baptist church. I’m not quite sure they understood Laura’s jet-black hair or sporadically-pierced head.

After the “Uncomfortable Silence Fun Palace”, we met up with the world-famous Beth, and drove around the countryside snapping photos of old country graveyards. Even better, Beth got me stuff! Stuff includes: the Heavy Metal Candlesticks O’ Doom, a little demon for my car antenna, and a framed cross-stitch. Yay!

“The Scourge of Arial” – an interesting essay about the font we all know and … well … feel inappropriate feelings for.

Beth is participating in the 2002 Blogathon. This year she’ll be blogging every half hour for twenty-four hours to raise donations for the Tourette Syndrome Association.

Do something nice (I won’t tell anyone) and sponsor her!

Over the weekend, I got an iPod. It holds up to 5GB of MP3s, syncs with my MP3 collection in about five minutes, and even stores contact information much like a PDA. For more information, check out this detailed review.

In reference to the “Pledge of Allegiance” hubbub lately:

There is a fundamental hypocrisy in demanding changes of an inherently Socialist educational system. By definition, a State-run school will have very little direct oversight by the populace, but will instead exist as any other Socialist entity: as a jobs program, and most importantly as a way to perpetuate its own existence as a State institution.

By submitting to a State-run institution, a person may not pick-and-choose by which rules he will abide. If the State dictates that person swear allegiance to a god or a flag in which he does not believe, that person must swear so, based on that person’s prior, implicit submission.

W00t! My Bloginality is INTJ!

“_As an INTJ, you are Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging.

This makes your primary focus on Introverted Thinking with an Extraverted Intution.

This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung’s Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type, and more specifically the Mastermind or Scientist.

You aren’t as openly affectionate as some of you NT counterparts, and this may cause other bloggers to assume you aren’t as friendly. Your ideas and actual applications for these ideas are brilliant, however, and you might be more likely to create something masterful on your journal.“

Susi is trying out for Nintendo’s “Ultimate Summer Job”. As the site says, there can be only eight members of the Nintendo Street Team, so go vote for her a lot!

War Chalking, invented by Matt Jones, is a simple set of symbols used to denote discovered 802.11 wireless networks.

Other than the one Robert set up at our apartment, do any of you readers know of some nice WiFi networks in the Atlanta area?

Irritated by the NY Times‘ moronic insistence on harvesting your private information before letting you read documents on their site? Try out the NY Times Login Generator!

Recipe for easy use and management of Open-Source Unix apps on OSX:

1. Download and install the Apple Developer Kit. It’s a pretty hefty install at around 500MB, but you’ll need it for the Darwin C compiler, cc.

2. Download and install X11 for OSX.

3. Download and install the OroborOSX window manager.

4. Download and installFink.

5. Finally, download and install FinkCommander.

FinkCommander is an excellent, indispensible GUI interface for the command-line Fink package manager. It allows you to update your installed Unix packages at the touch of a button, and to search for new packages by name or by keyword.