Wow neat, this comment on the AMD Opteron story at /. has some links to an AMD Powerpoint presentation (‘AMD-Opteron.ppt’) which has lots of interesting information.

McGraw Hill contacted me recently about a college writing book that I had contributed some essays towards a few years back. Apparently, it’s actually going to be published and they needed a picture of me. I looked through my archives and dug out a few from around when I was working on the book. The other night, I also went over to Jaime to take some more headshot-y pictures. Here’s they are. Oh, here are two outtakes.

The past few days I’ve been rejiggering my LAN in my spare (ha!) time. My primary NAT/file server box is now running Gentoo Linux on ReiserFS (except for grub, which apparently breaks on ReiserFS 3.6. that was but one of those fun little discoveries I had along the way). My theory about Gentoo is that it’s become really popular because there’s something about compiling your whole system from scratch that’s just plain satisfying. It’s like the old days, except slightly better documented. I’m definitely digging the Portage package system. It has the best things that I liked about Debian: you know everything installed on your system, easy-breezy updating, merging/unmerging that actually works, and, as a bonus, the packages are much more current than Debian’s. The only slight pain is having to manually do all the config/rc-updating manually after install, but then again, it doesn’t butter my toast either.

Ernie’s reliving the pain that everyone goes through when they decide to go ‘fully standards compliant’ – the problem with this being of course, there are no browsers that are. Personally, I think css filtering (like Tantek’s high pass) is for the birds. If you’re gonna hack to browsers, then go all the way. phpsniff is your friend.

I noticed that Larry’s presentation is on the syllabus of at least 3 classes. free culture is homework. Cool.

• UC Irvine, Writing 139 (37 ref)
• University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, TNMA 300/500, Creativity in the Arts (29 ref)
• George Mason University, NCLC375/ENGL360, Textual Media (23 ref)

These classes look sorta fun. More interesting than anything in the similar vein that were offered at USC.

Rafe unveils his own XHTML 1.0 (strict, no less) compliant site redesign. Predictable results on the hiptop ensue. Ok Ernie, your turn.

CNN.com – FindLaw Forum: Should the 17th Amendment be repealed? – September 17, 2002

The Federalist Papers cited in the article:

• Federalist No. 10, Madison – The Same Subject Continued:

  The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection

• Federalist No. 51, Hamilton or Madison – The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments

Lessig’s first person account of the oral arguments and other related Eldred case stuff has been /.ed. I just spent most of my moderation points on the threads. Also, and this has been making the rounds, is Eugene Volokh’s predictions on his ‘blawgs‘, which he made as a participant in wustl’s Supreme Court Forecasting Project. Here’s the Eldred v Ashcroft forecast page.

Last week Wired.com had a full overhaul, aiming for full W3C standards compliance. Indeed, while certain stories still don’t, the front page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2. Eric Meyer has interviewed Douglas Bowman of Wired for DevEdge.

(BTW, of course, since this is fully standards compliant, it renders all wonky on the hiptop). I sent another message to Danger, but they only seem to listen to Anil, not anyone that actually owns the device. 😛

Tonight on campus, DJ spooky and the Nortec Collective will be spinning as part of the Race In Digital Space 2.0 events. I’ll be trying to swing by in between 2 birthday shindigs.

I went to the Bright Eyes concert at the Henry Fonda Theatre (casenet) Thursday night. The Bruces (not my cup of tea) and M. Ward (very cool) opened.

Despite the sound being horrible all night – it seemed to get muddier as the night progressed; there was also an ear-splitting feedback incident which seemed to have taken out Conor’s right ear for the night (the show must go on) – I really enjoyed the set. I didn’t quite see the fifteen-piece orchestra, but the overall ambience created was good (the actual acoustics was shite of course). They played pretty much the entire Lifted album, with some of the songs translating better than others. For the encore, there were one or two new songs that I’d never heard before.

My friend commented that he couldn’t figure out if the arrangements were really good or bad because he was hearing lots of unisons, but it could have just been because the sound. While I’m not going to judge Conor’s compositional genius, I did notice that a lot of the harmonies/counterpoints (not to mention lyrics) didn’t make it through the board. What a total mess.

I also learned that yellow loading striped zones are not ticketed at night around there. This trick apparently doesn’t work around the tourist areas in Hollywood anymore because too many people had been catching on.

Just some other random hiptop rumination. Using it as a phone is pretty awkward. The more I think about it, the more I wish they had put the microphone/speaker on the back of the device. It just makes so much more sense. Even as it is, it is fairly natural for me to be able to hold the Sidekick in my hand w/o touching the screen. A slight molding, and it could work perfectly (holding it symmetrically, with the pad of your palm across from your fingers is slightly awkward, but holding it with the pad of the palm against the bottom corner and your fingers wrapping around actually feels pretty good).