Month: February 2004

  • Email Troubles

    Due my recent hosting problems, I’ve discovered that my david (at) rationalmind.net address has lost a ton of email. If you’ve sent me anything during the last week(s) and I didn’t reply, please send it again, and CC it to capt_david (at) hotmail.com just in case. Hopefully, things should be back to normal soon.

  • Sorry, the "land of the free" is now closed to the opressed.

    Cubans hoping to ‘drive’ to freedom aboard a converted Buick are stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard near the Florida Keys — and now face repatriation, exile leaders say. You can find a discussion of the issue here.

  • When Gay Animals Attack

    Interesting NY Times story: Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called “ecstatic behavior”: that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have…

  • Wardrobe Malfunction

    I experienced a “wardrobe malfunction” during a caving trip this weekend. Fortunately, the bastards at the FCC can’t censor these photos…yet. It was a lot of fun, and I hope to start going caving with ASS (Aggie Speleological Society) every other weekend or so.

  • New PC

    Check out the new computer I put together. I think I’ll call it “The Ghost” The Specs: Case: Aspire X-Dreamer II CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton Cooling: Thermaltake Volcano 9 Motherboard: MSI K7N2 Delta-L (nForce 2) Memory: 512-MB PC3200 DDR (w/shims) Hard Drive: 120GB Generic 10K RPM Video Card: Sapphire Radeon 9600 Speakers: Altec…

  • Death By Environmentalism

    There are four well-known cases of environmental regulations that forced engineers to use ineffective flame-retardant compounds and may have led to loss of life: the Columbia space shuttle, which had to use the less-efficient foam insulation rather that Freon (see this, this, and this), the Challenger space shuttle, which had to use defective O-ring putty…

  • Where did my site go?

    Here’s the scoop: The good news is that my website surpassed 5 GB of traffic 2/3 into the month.  According to my webhost, this should be enough for a “high 5-digit” number of visitors.  According to my own calculations, if each visit consumes 50K of bandwith, I should be good for approximately 100,000 hits/month.  So,…

  • Dear Valued User.

    Email from [email protected]: Dear Valued User. At 0 : 12 Eastern Time on Thursday-January 29, 2004, Microsoft started investigating reports of a variant of a new virus “Mydoom”, known as Mydoom.A. This worm reportedly stops access to some websites, including our Microsoft.com websites. The worm is noticed to entice electronic mail recipients into opening a…

  • You know there's something wrong with your religion when…

    …Your deity wills mass death during the grand finale: Nearly 250 Muslim worshipers died in a hajj stampede Sunday during the annual stoning of Satan ritual in one of the deadliest tragedies at the notoriously perilous ceremony. The stampede, during a peak event of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, lasted about a half-hour, Saudi…

  • Building a New Computer

    I made the dubiously wise decision of selling my current computer to my dad, after not being able to fix his old one. My intention was to fallback to my Linux box, but I discovered to my horror that my hard drive is not supported by my backup pc, so I won’t have access to…