Denis Coderre says that Canada’s new Immigration points system ‘sucks‘.

Yeah, he’s not the only one.

…after printing up the forms months ago, I am finally mailing in my direct marketing opt-out forms. The aformentioned website is great, it generates them all for you, and you just print ‘em out and send ‘em in.

Looking forward to less junkmail soon.

How connected are you?

Here’s a graph of my Livejournal dotfile. It’s huge.

Want to know how to do it?

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=24468851

Another LJ thread entered, laden with theological discussion and theory. It’s really oozing out from the cracks, here and there. I just simply don’t think I can exist in this ignorant state that I’ve been in, ever since college finished up. I need an outlet for this, and all the debate channels on LJ suck. I haven’t found a church around here that has the qualities for which I’m looking. There are no seminaries within a reasonable distance. I’m not looking to be Johnny Bibleseed, but I’d like to find a few people who want to share the fruits. It’s a theologically-barren orchard here, however.

The landscape doesn’t look much better, either.

I want to study religion, but I don’t necessarily want to be preaching ‘the good word’. I just want to find knowledge. At the same time, it’s not a selfish motive; It’s not like I’d be jealously gnostic, holding all this knowledge to myself. I think knowledge and shared experience emanate by necessity from one who is learned. I just don’t want to consider anything I say preaching “at” or “to” people. That’s not my goal.

I dunno. Too many thoughts in my head about this one right now.

<drbrain> I went through 4000 ports and found 21, 389, 1025 (blackjack), and 5000 open on your box, ibri
<drbrain> what kind of shitty firewall lets me in to all that?
<drbrain> its like using sheepskin condoms

Great night at the bar, probably one of the best ever. I’m really too tired to write this entry, but I didn’t want to forget it.

Went down to a bar in Manassas, where a friend of mine is a bartender. Went with my friend M, met up w/ my sister, my aunt, and her fiance. Live jazz, great pianist. Had a few drinks; The three other family members left around 11.30. M and I hung around.

A while after the band had left, M got the green-light to go ahead and play a tune or two on the piano. He thought he’d “lost the touch”, but he sounded great, playing the Beatles, Elton John, and Queen. He had a few people really listening to him, but I don’t think he noticed. Probably played for 1 1/2 hours. Apparently, they have open mic on Wednesdays, and I have a feeling now that chances are pretty good we’ll end up there sometime soon.

Meanwhile, there were two women (plus others, probably) who were in town from San Jose. Very progressive, west-coast mindset sorta people. They knew a friend, who in turn, also knew my bartender friend — for kinda the same reasons, actually. They were nice enough, I guess, very gregarious. Per request, I took some photos, and I had my picture taken w/ them a few times — anywhere from a “friends” type photo to a “standing up on the bar” type photo — for whatever reason. I didn’t have any interest in these women, but I’d also never prowled around on a bar before. Always worth doing something once, eh.

Silly statement of the night: While I was up on the bar, the one girl looked down and said, “…and anyway, you’re wearing Vasque [boots] — that makes you cooler!” I just kinda shrugged it off, although it surprised me a bit.

My bartender friend was having a good time, too. We were all standing around, when he said something to the effect of, “You all are here (pointing to the women), Corey, you’re here, we’ve got some Elton John on the piano – and this will never, ever happen again.” Everything just fell into place. Indeed, it was a great night, one I’ll remember for quite a while.

A belated birthday greeting to Unfurl! He’s the one who introduced me to Livejournal!

There’s only one thing in this world more frustrating than the poorly documented, wildly erratic program called ‘procmail‘. And that is trying to implement ‘procmail‘ on a Maildir system.

2/4/2002 CAPITAL ONE ONLINE ACH PAYMENT : $400

2/12/2002 CAPITAL ONE ONLINE ACH PAYMENT : $120
2/19/2002 CAPITAL ONE ONLINE ACH PAYMENT : $300

Having no balance for the next billing period: Priceless

Daniel Pearl is dead, according to reliable sources close to the investigation.

I still want to be a journalist.

I am a Neutral Good Elf Bard Ranger, apparently, according to this test.

I never played D&D, although I played a bit of M:TG in my day, and still enjoy Nethack.

My sister just got a Livejournal. And her first entry is sick.

Know a teenager? Know a teenager who has a livejournal/blog/open diary/whatever account?

Run this generator a few times and see just how different the entries might be.

Addendum: Credit where credit’s due -> writergeekgirl

An amusing examination of ‘Unprovoked maximum verbosity“, courtesy of my sister.

catfish, why didn’t we ever use that phrase as some sorta ad campaign? Sounds like something we’d have said.

Woke up earlier this morning, had some extra time, so I poured a bowl of cereal, as opposed to my usual habit of grabbing my typical granola bar and dashing for the door. Stood on the balcony a second to check on the weather, and it was nice, probably around 45, and no wind. Overcast but not dreary.

I decided to take my cereal out on the balcony and eat out there. I guess that’s nothing spectacular or newsworthy… but it was very refreshing. Reminded me, I guess, of working at the camp, waking up early in the morning, going off to have 10 minutes of quiet time, and then eating breakfast out in the woods.

An excerpt from my post on Slashdot:

“…how hard would it be to make a search engine smart (ethical?) enough to search a website to assure that the keywords people bought have something to do with the products on their site? Or is that just counterproductive to a coherent business model?”

As my post points out, I clicked on an ad, sold by Google, acting as if it had the product for which I was looking, when in reality, it had no such thing.

My thinking is: First they started making search engines “smarter” to avoid people spamming them (i.e., putting everything under the sun in their META keyword tags to rise to the top of the search results). Then they start selling keywords to companies, whose ads will appear whenever that term is searched. So is it ethical for companies to sell ads for keywords that have nothing to do with, or are deceptive, regarding their product? Or can search engine companies use their own technology to determine whether or not such things actually exist on the sites in question, as a validity check?

Argh.

So, I figured my boots were due to arrive today. And they did. Or tried to. But UPS wouldn’t leave them w/o a signature.

Calling UPS, I found that I can’t waive the signature. That’s nucking futs. Now, I do have another option — I can go pick the package up… 15 miles from here

So I gotta sit around, 10.30 till sometime, tomorrow, waiting for the package to arrive.

Stupid.

Here are some of the images from a few weeks ago. Click on the thumbnails for the larger images. I didn’t upload the full 1600×1200 images, because they’re just too damn big.

First picture I took. Standing on a footstone in the middle of the creek.

This tree stood out from all the others.

After the walk was over, I happened to glance outside and notice everything had a red tinge to it. Decided to try and get a good picture, in the 5 minutes I knew that I had to get anything, before it all went away. This was the best I could manage in that amount of time.

I have almost never in my life used an HTML editor. I did, for about 15 minutes when I first started learning it, back in 1995 or so, but then I realized how easy it was, and never turned back.

Until this week.
Desiging testcases, and refusing to use MS-Word (as it seems to crash on me when I use lots of tables — and it’s not really portable), I started making some HTML tables…. and it is a pain in the ass if you have to make lots of ‘em. Now, I’m a table kinda guy. I like my HTML nicely organized, and for years, I have done the stuff by hand. But for something mass-produced such as this, I just want to get it done…

So what am I saying?
I’m saying that Mozilla‘s HTML editor is quite nice. It’s not pretty, or fancy, but it gets the work done — and it make nice, clean HTML.

I’m not saying that I’m gonna switch over for everything – there’s just too much I like to fine tune by hand. However, for making usable documents, it’s a nice piece of work.