I love the Internet Archive. Thanks to these folks, and despite capricious web hosts and hard drive crashes, I’ve recovered all of my old blog posts back to 2000. They’ll be coming back online slowly, as I’ll be pasting them into Blogger as I find time. All of the links in the archive calendar are active, but not all of them work yet.

There’s nothing quite like the glee of recovering something you created that you thought was lost forever, even if it is something as disposable as a bunch of weblog posts.

Magpie, PHP, and RSS. Lately I’ve been looking for a way to harness all of the RSS feeds coming my way from del.icio.us and Netflix and Bloglines. This looks like the simplest way so far. Too bad I don’t have PHP on this host. And of all the feeds Netflix offers, why don’t they syndicate the movies you’ve rated, with ratings? They have a library of about 500 films I’ve rated, and I’d love to have access to that data.

Boing Boing brings us news of a working, cockroach-guided, robot. As elegant a hack as this is for overcoming the limitations of machine logic in a real-world environment, it’s still f*cking creepy. Maybe it’s just my innate hatred of cockroaches, but damn, that’s nasty.

Fabricating evidence Statistical analysis through google searches:

i hat emy life 21 results

i hate my life 35,700 results

Thus: the more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to be depressed. Incidentally:

i hate my wife 2,620 results

Proof that married men are predisposed towards mendacity, as there are way more than 2,620 men out there who can’t stand their partners.

People familiar with our new Attorney General’s record (of which I am emphatically not one, as I’ve never heard of him before today) take a dim view of his appointment. So we may be worse off in terms of the Justice Department fufilling its appointed role, and not just being the enforcement arm of the administration’s political agenda, than we were this time last week.

Light pollution has been one of my peccadilloes for a while, but I’ve only just now found out that there’s somebody trying to do something about it. The International Dark Sky Association works to “build awareness of the problem of light pollution and of the solutions, […] the adverse problems affecting our view of the universe in which we live […] to preserve the beauty of the night around us.” I still remember moving from the boondocks to the suburbs when I was a teenager. I’ve stepped up to even more urbanized areas since, and I still miss the night sky.

Amazing to me: Wal-Mart in Germany is officially recognizing their cruisiness. Here I was thinking that my local 24 hour supercenter was unique with their unofficial Friday night 12-2 am mobile gay bar. It is slightly creepy, though, to imagine what must be going on in housewares at the back of the store.

“Evolution is a theory, not a fact.” Yes,of course, it is all just theoretical. But so is gravity, plate tectonics, and the sapience of people who interpret the Bible literally. Actually, I want that on a t-shirt.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. ‒ Bertrand Russell
Cheney came out of his bunker and saw his shadowy business dealings, meaning we’ll have four more years of economic recession and erosion of our civil liberties. Try as I might to be non-partisan, I genuinely believe those two dubious accomplishments will be the lasting legacy of this presidency. Possibly less of the latter, with Ashcroft resigning, though — as much of a scary bastard as he is — I can’t imagine we’ll have a kinder, gentler DOJ the second he’s out the door. Speaking of scary bastards, can we get rid of Tom Ridge, too, please? That man gives me the heebies in a way only Steve Case or Bill Gates should be able to do.

Update: A Reuters story lists Ridge as a likely retiree.

South Carolinians voted overwhelmingly yesterday to do away with the minibottle.

For those of you unfamiliar with our weird liquor laws here, for the last decade South Carolina has constitutionally prohibited the sale of alcohol in bars & restraunts in bottles larger than 2 ounces. I’m unfamiliar with the history of this, so I really have no idea what the point supposedly was to begin with, but the result has been really strong, really expensive drinks in the state. This also no doubt contributes to our astronomical rate of alcohol-related deaths.

So with the passing of this ballot initiative, South Carolinians will get cheaper car insurance, cheaper drinks, and what has long been a rite of passage elewhere, flirting and/or schmoozing their way to get stronger drinks. Of course, we also get the experience of getting stiffed by a cheap bartender, but everything’s a trade-off.

Another blogosphere-denizen we haven’t heard from lately, Greg Knauss pops up to prove he’s still smart. He’s not the first person to say, or to feel, that the quality of our political discourse today would leave the founding fathers weeping, but he says it well.

Current time in the US (an experiment with SSI and javascript):

hours=;

mins=’‘;

function dotime(lessGMT) {
lessGMT += hours;
if (lessGMT

TDK has created a supertough, fully transparent coating for delicate displays and optical media. I so need this. With the way the spousal unit abuses various form of media, I’m lucky if a CD lasts 3 months in the car before I have to burn another copy. And let’s not go into the subject of my collection of Final Fantasy games, half of which won’t boot up past the opening movie when you start a new game. Grr. [via /.]

Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Count on Anil for smart, non-partisan * summation of the issues. Though I don’t quite agree with his position on offshoring, that may just be my knee-jerk protectionism resulting from one of the 800,000 jobs that went poof in the last four years having been mine, which now belongs to five, no doubt lovely, people in Manila.

* And plus, he’s funny: Despite all this, I’m voting. […] I don’t want to be part of the mass bloodshed when P. Diddy has to murder 60 million people tomorrow night.