Interesting Stuff

First off, I am seriously considering switching OSes: the world file on my Gentoo system (kernel version 2.6.17-r4) seems to have been destroyed, and I’m having a lot of trouble rebuilding it and keeping everything working. I’d like a system that is less work to maintain. I’d been trying to choose between the different flavors of BSD when Mac showed me Xubuntu (a variation of Ubuntu that uses the XFCE desktop environment), and that definitely has possibilities, too. I’ve got a bunch of questions I want to have answered before I switch, though. Who among you has administered an Ubuntu system?

I have found a beautiful new webcomic, called XKCD. I suspect computer scientists will appreciate it more than others, but it has some insightful, witty concepts in it (it discusses computer science, love, happiness, “your mom” jokes, and much more, all with a postmodernism twist), and smatterings of beautiful abstract art (sandwiched between the stick figure drawings of which most of the comic is made up). Definitely worth browsing the ~150 comics in the archives (though the current strip is kinda lame). Fun strips can be found here, here, and here.

Several weeks ago, Michael showed me a trailer for a game called Portal, which seems to be a takeoff of Halflife (it will be released with the next Halflife game). It’s a puzzle game with a really cool premise.

Since this was a Wednesday, I naturally spent the evening drinking. A bunch of Googlers went to Ye Olde King’s Head Bar (about 5 blocks from work), and hung out for about 4 hours. A group of about 8 of us formed a team to compete in the weekly trivia challenge. We took 7th place out of 10, though we could have taken 5th if we hadn’t gone for broke in the final round. It was a pretty fun evening.

If you are so inclined, go take a look at DownsizeDC, which is trying to introduce the Read The Bills Act into Congress. The basic idea is that nearly all bills are passed into law without more than a handful of lawmakers actually reading them. An excellent example of this is in 1971 when the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a bill praising the Boston Strangler (a member of the house had introduced it to demonstrate that his peers pass bills without reading them). The Read The Bills Act would require all congresspeople to either read or listen to the entire text of a bill before voting on it. This will hopefully stop more pet projects, controversial measures, and unpopular riders from being unknowingly passed. It would also limit the amount of legislature that could be created, hopefully leading to smaller government. We’ll see. If you think this would be a good idea, please write/call your congresspeople!

Finally, in The Economist recently I read an article about Kinky Friedman, who is running for Texas Governor. He seems to be running on a platform which notes that everyone is fed up with both Democrats and Republicans, and want someone new (this is pretty much why Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger were elected). He seems to want to curb bureaucratic government spending while giving more money to teachers, firefighters, and other people who are actually doing useful and underappreciated things. I’m not sure he has the wherewithall or policital know-how to actually pull this off, but it would certainly be interesting if he was elected.