My outrage has been building for a long time, but Penny Arcade pushed me right over the edge with its The Last Christmas project. Yes, that’s right — it’s time to start doing something about the excessive commercialization of Cthulhu. Look, when I was a kid Cthulhu was straightforward. You’d read the HPL stories, maybe…
December, 2004
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Today was a very unhappy day, as my wife and I attended the funeral of my aunt, Opal Shrontz. Not too long after my wife and I were married, Opal was diagnosed with Huntingdon’s Disease — a genetic degenerative brain disorder. Currently there is no cure for Huntingdon’s. The disease is caused by a defective…
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I lurk on a mailing list about e-mail lists, and recently the list has been going back and forth over using challenge/response systems to control SPAM. In a challenge/response system, typically if you e-mail an individual using such a system, you will get back an automated message which requires you to reply to it in…
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I mentioned the other day that I had experience problems configuring BitTorrent to work with my router. This guide at The P2P Weblog did an excellent job of making it clear how t handle the port forwarding.
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This page has a nice list of all of the fighting words (“Bam,” “Pow,” etc.) from the live action Batman series, along with how many times each word was used and the list of episodes in which the word appeared.
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EFF senior staff attornney Fred von Lohmann has an interesting op-ed about Marvel’s lawsuit against players in City of Heroes infringing on Marvel’s intellectual property by playing Wolverine or Cyclops characters in the game. Von Lohmann writes, Marvel’s assertion of copyright and trademark rights over the noncommercial expressive activities of its fans is both unprecedented…
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My daughter turns 8 later this month and we had a birthday party for her this weekend. We’re sort of cycling through all of the cheesey birthday party themes, so this year we took her and several friends bowling. Now nothing beats getting home from a party, looking through the pictures and seeing your 8-year-old…
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For the most part I can’t stand baseball. I can have fun going with my kids or friends to an occasional baseball game, but I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time than watching a non-playoff baseball game on television. On the other hand, like a lot of folks I’m fascinated with baseball statistics and…
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The other day I mentioned a New York Times story on e-books, and how more publishers should emulate Baen’s e-book program which features a) no crappy DRM, b) multiple formats, and c) prices that are lower for the ebook edition than the paperback version. A commentor on Boing! Boing! notes that Fantasy & Science Fiction…
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Ever since I discovered it a few months ago, I’ve been plugging the Slogger extension for Firefox. Slogger allows the user to automate saving a local copy of every web page he or she visits. Doing so takes up 100-150mb a day, at least for me, but storage is cheap so why not? Slogger also…