There really are Illinois Nazis!

Karen and I went to see The Prestige last night. I think I've got it mostly figured out by this morning, and can only speculate that Obeqra frag Natvre ba n jvyq tbbfr punfr nsgre Grfyn, rkcrpgvat uvz gb jnfgr lrnef ybbxvat sbe n frperg gung qvqa'g rkvfg, ohg vafgrnq Grfyn znantrq gb npghnyyl ohvyq n qrivpr juvpu jbexrq.

I can also speculate that the linked rings illusion was the only one Christian Bale was able to actually learn, since that's the only other trick I can recall seeing Borden do.

Spurred on by Zach's slug successes, I decided to bite the bullet and move my slug from UnSlung Linux to full Debian Linux. It took forever, but I now have four complete Debian systems.

One of those systems is being shipped out this week. My current Web host is going downhill fast: bogus charges, unreachable customer service, horrible mail service, support techs who insist there's nothing wrong until I walk them through the problem every step of the way. A friend of mine from high school runs an ISP, and he's letting me hang my own server off his tubes for much, much less than I'm paying now. And I'll have complete control of the box — I'm tired of begging for upgrades to software and being denied because having a version of software compiled within the last six years could "negatively impact other customers". (You should have seen the acrobatics I had to go through to create a working pamperspective binary for the On Notice Board Generator, since they removed all the compilers from the system. Thank goodness they left the linker...)

So I'll finally have my own server on the Internets again. Way, way back in the days before the Web, I had my own leaf node on UUCPNET, but that was nothing like it is these days. Why, you young kids have everything done for you; I had to write my own mail and newsreader software! While trudging uphill through great drifts of snow!

Get off my lawn!

Watching the Election Incident Reporting System is like crack, though the site is thrashing heavily and frequently does not respond. Indiana has only had seventy (reported) incidents at the moment, which is pretty good compared to Florida's 196. Both pale in comparison to Ohio, which currently shows 693. Damn. Not all the incidents seem to be in the right categories, though; some of the "Voter Intimidation/Deceptive Practices/Law Enforcement Activity" incidents don't seem to fall under any of those three descriptions.

And it was almost anticlimactic when I did go vote. Sure, the poll worker who handed me my Diebold card looked like she'd been sucking lemons for the past eighty years, but that was the only unpleasant thing about the whole experience — the machine even purported to register all the selections I'd made. Not happy about the utter lack of paper trail, but you can't have everything.

My boss said "I hope you voted [political party]" when he called later to give me an update on one of our issues. Even though, for the most part, I had (I have never voted a straight ticket in my life), it still made me uncomfortable. I don't even remember my parents discussing candidates when I was growing up. (But given that they belonged to different parties, I suspect that it was just something they agreed never to talk about.)

Why are U-Haul's rates so low? Because they don't perform maintenance on their trucks.

Back in February 2005, I congratulated myself for not letting myself get sucked into Second Life, an MMORPG that lets you build and code new in-world objects. I know I have an addictive personality, and I know very well that a game in which you can do both 3D modeling and coding would suck up just about every waking moment.

But then the bastards put out an alpha version of a Linux client.

I told myself I could just take a quick look to satisfy my curiosity and then delete it.

That was ten days ago.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. I know I have an addictive personality, I remembered how much time I spent in MUDs in college (instead of, say, sleeping). Yet here I am, frittering away my time making my avatar look like Popeye, or trying to code wings that flap (still haven't managed to keep them in sync, damn it), or creating new character animations and importing them into the game.

Well, at least I haven't actually spent any money playing it; some people spend ridiculous amounts of real cash to buy virtual land in a computer game (or to buy in-world money). At least I'm not that far gone.

And I can quit any time I want.