TRANSCRIPT OF BUSH’S SUMMIT WITH PRINCE BANDAR BIN SULTAN is a pretty funny (fake) interview between these three fellows I found on the White House.org’s press releases section.

He has the Prince ask for “The One”, who turns out to be Cheney and includes the line “Never let it be said that your Christian whore is not civil.”. Happily, while I find it pretty funny, I’m not so far gone yet that I’d publish this in the Humor & Fun section.

(There’s another recent article with a (fake) transcript... [More]

Here’s a real quote, from none other than Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, a notorious punk band of the late 80s/early 90s. He once stormed college campuses, opening concerts with the following:

“WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM WITH A SPECIAL BULLETIN. AMERICA IS NOW UNDER MARTIAL LAW. ALL CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED. STAY IN YOUR HOMES, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONTACT LOVED ONES, INSURANCE AGENTS OR ATTORNEYS. SHUT UP! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO THINK OR DEPRESSION MAY OCCUR.... [More]”

“Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has been world domination − that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources.”

earthli.com will soon be leaving its home at Logicat, where it’s been housed for almost 3 years. I’m leaving Logicat and moving to Switzerland, so soon earthli will be served from there (hosted at Opus, my new employer). I’ve updated my resume (PDF) with my last work at Logicat.

3.998GHz! Now that’s an overclocked chip. This was spotted at Slashdot in an article called P4 2.80GHz Overclocked to 3.917GHz. In their English language abstract, they mention that they actually got it to run at 3.998GHz after all. Yeah, those numbers are correct. These crazy Finnish guys place the entire chip assembly into a bath of liquid nitrogen inside a styrofoam cup (see picture). In a couple of pictures, you can see the Fluke thermometer registering -193°C! The whole site’s in Finnish,... [More]

The New York Newsday published several news items today (and some from other days this week are pulled in), which together paint an altogether different picture of the U.S. than it would like. These are normal articles in a normal newspaper; information there for anyone with open eyes and an open mind to see.

The first, Caution Over NY Airspace mentions that the “federal government is expected to prevent foreign airlines from taking off or landing at metropolitan New York airports during... [More]”

We Must Cut Down the Forest to Save It on Plastic talks about Bush’s recent burst of environmentalism. You can check the NY Times article, Bush, Citing Fire Hazards, Wants Logging Rules Eased or the Forest thinning has Bush support article at the Washington Times (whose article title should have elicited a deafening “duh!” from its readers).

Bush must have been dancing once he saw this wonderfully facile reason for opening up national forests to his buddies in logging. Because that’s really... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 25 regular pushups
3. 25 wide pushups
4. 35 regular crunches (legs up)
5. 35 bicycle crunches
6. 25 leg raises
7. 15 squat thrusts
8. 1 minute knee bends

Drills

1. Practice bob and weave under opponent’s outstretched arms
2. Practice slip to the inside and outside
3. Combinations − straight lead, straight lead to backfist, straight lead to hook

Glovework

1. Wall drills − Practice slip the straight lead and cross
2. Wall drills − Practice mixing up the two
3. 15 Rear leg roundhouse

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 15 clap pushups
3. 30 diamond pushups
4. 30 seconds regular crunches (legs up)
5. 30 seconds bicycle crunches
6. 25 leg raises
7. 30 seconds jumping side-to-side over a kicking shield
8. 30 seconds rest
9. 30 seconds jumping front-to-back over a kicking shield
10. 10 squat thrusts

Drills

1. Mirror drill

   1. 2 minutes regular
   2. 2 minutes, with person leading throwing side kick, parry with rear hand and stay as close as possible
   3. 2 minutes, person leading throws side kick, other person evades (with pat of... [More]

Ashcroft Seeks to Abuse Use of ‘Secret Court’ in the New York Newsday talks about a court in the U.S. that is responsible for granting requests for “searches of its own citizens for foreign intelligence gathering”. This court is called the FISA court (which stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act…and don’t you sleep better knowing that’s around). It’s necessary because the constitution often gets in the way of surveillance of individuals that the government already knows are guilty, so... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 1 minute jumping jacks
3. 1 minute knee bends
4. 1 minute regular crunches (legs up)
5. 1 minute bicycle crunches
6. 25 regular pushups
7. 25 wide pushups
8. 45 seconds calf raises

Drills

1. Practice in the air along the long axis of the room (back and forth)

   1. Punch combinations (low straight, high straight, hook uppercut, backfist, all straight line punches)
   2. Kick combinations (hook, side, front, inverted)
   3. Hand to foot combinations
   4. Foot to hand combinations
   With the kicking shield

   1. front kicks... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 10 Squat thrusts with 5 pushups on each one
3. 35 crunches (legs up)
4. 35 left over right
5. 35 right over left
6. 25 leg raises
7. 100 jumping jacks
8. 60 calf raises
9. 10 squat jumps

Drills

1. Mirror drill − 3 minutes
2. 20 Inverted hook kicks
3. 2 minutes practice spinning back kick
4. 2 minutes practice spinning hook kick
5. Pak sau, opponent resists, go to lop outside
6. lop outside, opponent resists, go to pak sau
7. opponent paks, you pull back to avoid the pak and pak the opponent
8. Low straight lead to... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 30 regular pushups
3. 30 diamond pushups
4. 35 regular crunches (legs up)
5. 35 bicycle crunches
6. 35 leg raises
7. 100 jumping jacks
8. 100 knee bends
9. 5 squat thrusts
10. 5 squat thrusts with a jump at the end
11. 5 squat thrusts with a pushup in the middle and a jump at the end

Drills

1. Mirror drill − person leading attacks with straight lead, either snap away or curve out and hit (intercept)
2. Single direct attack drill − straight lead, backfist, lead hook, shovel hook, cross (or rear straight)... [More]

MSDN has published Full Eiffel on the .NET Framework by Emmanuel Stapf, Raphael Simon and Bertrand Meyer, all of ISE (though Meyer is identified as being at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, so perhaps he’s teaching there now, which, for someone moving near Zurich, is pretty exciting).

“[It d]escribes the implementation and integration of the full power of the Eiffel language and method, including Design by Contract, multiple inheritance, genericity, and other advanced facilities, into the... [More]”

Ars Technica has a rundown on the latest Apple/Mac conference, MacWorld New York, in MWNY Keynote: Time to line the RDF with asbestos?, which announced a lot of new products, both hardware and software. Most of the hardware changes are incremental updates, with the IMac upgrading to a 17" wide screen, which is very cool. The IPod now has “[u]p to 20 GB of storage, official support for calendar and contacts, and Windows support via MusicMatch.”

The most interesting updates are on the software... [More]

Opera casts off legacy code for speed on CNet’s News.com provides basically a press release about Opera’s new 7.0 browser, dubbed Presto. Latest information on the 7.0 release is available on Opera software’s 7.0 page.

“Dubbed Project Presto, after the musical tempo-character marking indicating speed and lightness, the rewritten browser was designed to make Opera both faster and more compatible with the Document Object Model (DOM), an emerging standard technology that lets scripts, like... [More]”

Almost 2 months ago, the Mozilla project finally released a 1.0 version of its browser. Mozilla Milestone 1.0: the Review on Ars Technica gives a good overview and review of the final product.

Those who’ve downloaded builds of Mozilla over the years have doubtless found that Mozilla seems to suffer from an identity crisis. Sometimes it seems like a browser, sometimes it seems like a standards-compliant rendering engine, sometimes it feels like a development environment cum operating system. It... [More]

State of Decay on DDJ documents a new classification system for a phenomenon everyone in the computing world has experienced: cruft. Cruft is defined thusly:

“When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that’s cruft. It is also the word “seperate,” added to a spellchecker’s private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by... [More]”

Apple has bowed to industry pressure and crippled their music device, the iPod. Each iPod has one “home” machine with which it stays automatically synchronized. Once you’ve connected the iPod (and only then), you can change on-board settings that control whether this happens automatically for all songs, for just selected playlists (useful if your library is larger than the iPod’s capacity) or not at all. If you select the manual mode of music transfer, iTunes and iPod still enforce moving songs... [More]

I read this whole article: Let History Come to You. And I’m proud that I managed to make it through without just shaking my head in disgust and closing the window. The tenor of the writing, the fact-checking, the mixing of argument, the heavy use of the straw man all perfectly match the picture of the smirking jackass at the top of the page. But, sometimes, you should read something you think you won’t like just to make sure your filters aren’t set too high.

The basic tenet that the government... [More]

John Carmack gave a long presentation (almost 3 hours) at Quakecon 2002 which covered the current Doom technology and the future of gaming as he sees it. Gamespy has the complete coverage in QuakeCon 2002 − John Carmack Speaks. The future of graphics technology involves rendering effects like lens flares and specular highlighting in a more realistic manner; not that they look more realistic necessarily (though they will), but moving more rendering into the ‘standard’ pipeline instead of... [More]

Warmups

1. 25 squat jumps
2. 25 regular pushups
3. 25 wide pushups
4. 25 diamond pushups
5. 35 crunches (legs up)
6. 35 bicycles
7. 25 leg raises
8. hold legs 6 inches off ground for 45 seconds
9. Stretch up

Drills

1. Mirror drill − 3 minutes
2. Front hand education − straight lead/backfist, straight lead/hook, hook/backfist, low straight to high straight
3. Knife drill − standing in place, practice 5 angles of attack
4. Knife drill − with a partner, parry (meet) 5 angles of attack with the same angle, going back and forth across... [More]

Warmups

1. 25 squat jumps
2. 10 squat thrusts with 5 pushups on each one
3. 90 jumping jacks
4. 35 crunches (legs up)
5. 35 bicycles
6. 25 leg raises
7. 45 seconds jumping over the kicking shield
8. 45 seconds knee bends

Drills

1. Front hand education − straight lead/backfist, straight lead/hook, hook/backfist, low straight to high straight
2. Snap elbow − lead hand
3. Down elbow − rear hand
4. Straight lead to front knee
5. Straight lead to rear knee
6. Pak sau to swing the lead arm out, exposing the side, rear shovel hook into... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow box − 2 minutes
2. 35 crunches (legs in air)
3. 35 crunches, left over right
4. 35 crunches, right over left
5. 25 leg lifts
6. Stretch up (like a seal) 3 times
7. 25 diamond pushups
8. 10 negative pushups (long)
9. 100 jumping jacks
10. 25 squat jumps

Footwork

1. Step and slide forward
2. Step and slide back
3. Step left, step right
4. Quick advance

Drills

1. Standing front kick
2. Pendulum front kick
3. Quick advance front kick
4. Standing hook kick
5. Pendulum hook kick
6. Quick advance hook kick
7. Sensitivity drills − lop inside, lop... [More]

Gamespy has another article called DOOM 3: Behind the Horror, covering Doom III’s new features. Doom III promises to loosen up first-person gaming from its often amusement-park ride feel. By that I mean that sometimes you feel like you’re in a cart on a track, where you can’t investigate this door because it takes you off the plot, or that light can’t be shot because you need to see the level and the shadows cast from it are pre-rendered. Doom III promises to remove most of those... [More]

Warmups

1. 50 jumping jacks
2. 10 squat thrusts with 5 pushups in the middle of each
3. 8 small jumps, hop 3 times (off the ground), then hop once rotating 90° counterclockwise (2 full revolutions)
4. jump side-to-side over a kicking shield − 45 seconds
5. 30 regular pushups
6. 30 wide pushups

Glove Drills

1. Jab for jab (You jab, opponent jabs, you jab, opponent hits with *) − passive avoidance: curve, intercept, low straight, snap away
2. Jab for jab − low straight only on second jab
3. Jab for jab − catch the second... [More]

Warmups

1. 165 jumping jacks (15 × 11 people)
2. 110 knee bends (10 × 11 people)
3. 35 regular crunches
4. 35 bicycles
5. 25 jack-knives (bring arms and legs up in a crunch)
6. 15 squat thrusts
7. 25 regular pushups
8. 25 wide pushups
9. 10 clap pushups

Drills

1. Front hand education − double straight lead, straight lead to backfist, straight lead to hook, straight lead to uppercut
2. Front leg kicks − front kick, hook kick, side kick, inverted hook kick
3. Hand to foot drills − straight lead to front, hook and inverted kicks... [More]

Here’s a little skit in Flash about the lives of two sample containers in a doctor’s office. It’s called Samples and is hosted on Crapbox.

Warning: Austin Powers/American Pie-like humor contained within.

Grappling

Warmups

1. Neck roll, both sides
2. Rotate arms, both ways
3. Cross arms (swinging), both ways
4. Rotate waist
5. Stretch legs outward, standing
6. Lean to the right leg, left leg (hold for 20 seconds)
7. Forward roll to fall (6)
8. Backward roll to standing (6)
9. ‘Cockroach’ fall to either side (1 minute)
10. Practice sweeps (cockroach landing). Instructor grabs arm and applies backward pressure. Student stays loose. Instructor sweeps rear leg and pushes down. Student breaks fall.

Moves

1. Get in guard (legs around... [More]

There are no paid firefighting services. It makes sense on the surface to have them; whoever puts out the fire gets paid for doing so. Different Companies compete to get there the fastest and put out the fire the quickest, with the least amount of damage. A perfect example of the free market choosing the best solution, no?

Now, the best thing for the populace is to have as few fires as possible and have them put out quickly when they happen. The competing fire companies quickly discover that... [More]