Gay Marriage Rant

In many of the United States, a bill promoting homosexual "civil unions" has made its way onto local ballots. The idea of this is that if a gay couple wishes to get married, then they can get a civil union which gives them all of the rights married people have without the marriage status. Everyone I have conversed with about this has said that it is a good step towards gay marriage. I HATE STEPS. We should not be taking steps towards gay marriage. We should be allowing it. It upsets me that the bill-writing-people would permit civil unions and all the rights that entails without actually allowing marriage - probably a move to earn the support of Christians and/or those who think being gay is unjust. I think that a bill such as this is a step in the wrong direction - instead of welcoming homosexuals into our culture, we single them out with a special status called "civil union," promising full marital status in the future. Not only could this turn out to be an empty promise, it's one we can fulfill. The bill that should be on millions of Americans' ballots is one permitting marriage. If nobody votes for it because they don't want to equate homo- and heterosexuals, then it proves that we're not ready - at least it was an honest vote. Basic point: Don't change your writing just so that people will vote for the bill. Get an honest opinion and grant full marital status, both in life and on paper. My rating of the gay rights bill is 5/620973 stars. It takes a seriously shitty idea to get a denominator like that.

foobar2000 review

Developers, this is how you kick ass:

Foobar2000 is the best piece of software since the launch of Apple Lisa. In short, it's a music player. In longer-than-short, it's the Firefox of media players. I know, that's what Songbird is supposed to be, but, let's face it, Songbird is the biggest failure since the invention of the steam turbine. Foobar offers the ultimate in customization, sound quality (gapless ftw) and equalizability. The 18 (?) band EQ is pretty kickass, allowing even amazing-er sound quality. Customizable hotkeys, with the ability to set them as global, rounds out the experience.

That said, Foobar is not easy to use. It is, in fact, very difficult to use and even harder to customize. It doesn't do syncing for MTP devices, but the library feature works great. For brevity's sake, I will truncate this review and say that it's a definite thing to try and see if you like it. If you need device syncing, get something else.* Overall rating: 936/987 stars. Could be easier to use for the old folks, but otherwise has solid features, great codec support, and customizability aplenty. Awesome software. Bookmark http://www.foobar2000.org/ now.

*Do not get MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey see, MediaMonkey bog down system resources and crash.

One more anniversary

In my excitement over the amazing Berlin wall destruction 20th anniversary, I forgot to mention that today is the continuation of the Sesame Street 40th anniversary. Most everyone has figured this out by now, however, due to the Google doodles that have been running all week. Anyways, Sesame Street has officially been corrupting kids' minds for 40 years and counting. Yay?

Germany: 1989 > 2009

Man, Germany has come a long way. 1989 was the year they finally took down the Berlin wall. Today, the 20th anniversary of that historic event. Not one to blog endlessly about what this memorable happening means, I will provide this link: New York Times, "A Division Through Time"

Check that out. Pretty sweet photography, and a great way to remember that day.

Crunchbang puts the L back in Linux...

...which is a double pun. Not only does LINUX stand for "LINUX Is Not UniX" ( = recursive on the L) but by "L" I meant "Life." Either way, this is a distro I can live with. Though it does not support the old-school graphics card on my craptop, nothing does, so no worries. Crunchbang uses Openbox + tint2 for an extremely lightweight (xfce status, people) experience that almost works with only 128MB of RAM. It isn't designed by the maniacs behind other distros who think that every goddamn package has to be open-source. This means that the app suite is actually kind of useful, including stuff like Skype, AbiWord (buggy as hell) and some random terminal apps. (Yes, ABW is open-source.) The web browser is Firefox, not crap like Iceweasel.


My review of Crunchbang would be something like 469/472 stars. Highly recommended distro, it's based off of Ubuntu Minimal which gives it that easy-to-install-ness and is fairly user friendly. For those seeking to convert from Windows, Fedora or Ubuntu might be a better choice, however, I would not leave out Crunchbang.

btw, Bill Gates is amazing

It is a common event for everyone to blame the horrors of windows on our good friend Bill. Not true at all, check this shit out:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Though the email dates from 2003, the word on the street is that he sends emails like this all the time. I guess we need to get him back into the CEO chair. (Move over, Steve!) Too bad he's retired from that position.

Even more of the same...

The pentakisdodecahedron is finished! Yes, that's exciting. So exciting, in fact, that I made a high-speed video of the creation.

(To spare viewers the time, I've left out the cutting and folding at the beginning. It takes forever.)



Apparently Blogger has a built-in video hosting thing, so we'll see how this goes. Once again, these cutouts are from korthalsaltes.com - check it out.

More of the same...

In my high-speed description of the last 6 months I failed to mention another thing I've found: RSS feeds. All I really use them for is podcasts; however, anythingbutipod has a feed. That's a good thing.

In the last 2 hours, I have made more polyhedra.


















(Yes, I have a life.)

In the front, from left to right, are the truncated hexagonal prism, truncated icosahedron, icosidodecahedron, and decahedron. In the works is a pentakisdodecahedron - so stay tuned. Or don't. I don't really care, because nobody reads my blog anyways.

Waiting, Podcasts, and Polyhedra

Considering how long it has been since I've posted, I wandered over to my "Edit Posts" section to see all my rantings. I haven't posted since February. So here's a little post for the heck of it.

I've recently discovered this strange thing called podcasts. Just because I can, I'll list some of my favorites:

PC World - it's funny in that weird nerdy kind of way
The Linux Experiment - crazy dedication to trying to use Linux
And others.

Polyhedra - if you are ever bored, ever, then go to this website. This guy has made PDFs that you print, cut out, fold, and tape/glue to make 3-D shapes. Like the truncated icosahedron (soccer ball), dodecahedron, snub cube, and truncated hexagonal antiprism. It's addicting - trust me. I'm through two tape rolls and counting.

Timelapse Fish

I switched to Vimeo.


Timelapse Fish from Max K.