Financial Armaggedon Is Unfolding in South America! (And it’s by design) – is this article accurate? I have no idea. Still, it’d be interesting if the US headed into a cyberpunk style mega-debt meltdown.

Heh, the Lessig talk is #2 on daypop’s top 40 right now.

Ok, I think I’m done tweaking. I’ve enabled mod_gzip for just about everything (turning it off for ns4 users because I’m a nice guy), and I’ve set up some mod_throttle rules that should hopefully keep me out of trouble in the very remote case that I ever get a lot of traffic. It’s too bad that you can’t assign multiple policies to one container. It’d be nice to be able to stack some of these.

Site’s going up and down right now while I tweak mod_throttle and mod_gzip stuff.

Where oh where does the time go? For those who read this blog for the technical content, I noticed Simon Willison’s Weblog in my referer. If I updated my blog regularly, this is the kind of content I’d want to put up on it.

Simon has also recently started beta testing a searchable css-discuss database. This thing is really great. Really, really great. No, make that Insansely Great™. Now I can delete my old css-d messages without feeling like it might come in handy the next day.

Simon also links two other neat blogs: Mike Pletch’s Daily Scribbling, and Column Two.

Mike Pletch talks about an interesting Business Week writeup on Macromedia and its financial woes. While it’s sorta non-sequiter, I have to take that counterpoint and bitch about Flash MX. The reason it’s not going to catch on is because it just doesn’t cut the mustard if you need to do any real programming on it. Simply put, it’s a huge pain in the ass to do anything vaguely useful with it (see previous rant).

Earlier this week, I did some work on the PowerPoint to Flash conversion. I thought that was it, but since the timings were way off and I wasn’t anyone else to do it, I ended up spending the afternoon manually retiming the slide timings. In any case, here’s the result (it’s an exclusive for now boys and girls!):

• Lawrence Lessig – Free Culture [Flash 5+, 8.4MB] – Keynote given at OSCON 2002, slides synced with audio

Oh, do me a favor and don’t submit this to /. — Larry will be doing that w/ his own servers soon enough.

Yesterday, I walked two blocks up to the local Kia Dealership and took them up on their free LOTR DVD offer. They asked me if I was interested in the certificate or the test drive, and in the interest of saving everybody’s time, I answered the former and walked out a few minutes later with a neato holographic certificate. I called in the number while I was walking home, and that was that. If all goes well, the DVD should be coming in the mail in a few weeks.

I’ve been spending more time than I probably should be on VWvortex recently. And, while the forums are active and sometimes even useful, the articles are great too, like this article on The Clean Future of the Diesel Engine. Volkswagen’s Lupo 3L TDI is pretty crazy, averaging 2.38l/100km at an average speed of 85km/h on a 33,333km trip. Running that through the ol’ converter, that’s 98.8mi/gal averaging a speed of 52.8mi/hr on a 20,700mi trip.

Also, some great eye candy: Silver 16v, Hooligan Hybrid, and RS-4Door among them.

Wow, today’s Mozilla build is the worst I’ve tried in quite a while. It’s crashed 5 times today already, 3 times in the past 20 minutes.

Invoking Godwin’s Law on DRM: Hitler, It Seems, Loved Money and Died Rich.

I’m reading the comments attached to the /. poll on Living off the Grid. There’s some good stuff in there.The thread revolving around one person’s (incorrect) calculations is very interesting. The corrections are very informative. Also good are the threads on hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, ac-dc hacking, solar howtos etc. It’s also just fun reading about people’s setups.

Related: Wireless Internet In An Off-Grid House, Renewable Entergy Policy Project, Home Power: The Hands-on Jounal of Home-made Power, Maine Solar House