Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

A conversational summary, merely as background for part II:

o) Sister was watching internet TV

o) Mother requests computer for work

o) Sister refuses to get off despite good reason

o) Mother yells

o) Sister storms off in a hissy fit

o) I point out that maybe she’s clinicly addicted; she gets very stressed when someone so much as suggests she leave the internet for a couple of minutes

o) Mother says maybe I’m addicted

o) I point out I’m quite willing to get off computers, when there’s a good reason to

o) She tells me to, because she says so (no reason per se)

o) I ask for reason, and point out that I’m on the computer in the first place to look for university open days, as she told me to.

o) She tells me normal people go talk with friends and other such

o) I point out that that’s what I do, via computer

o) She tells me to go outside, read a book, go shopping, do anything that doesn’t involve a screen

o) I do exactly as she says (Part II details this)

… 6 hours later …

o) I come home to find her crying about how worried she was about me, and she goes on about how I don’t listen to her.

This being after I got off the computer, in the middle of something (I hate leaving in the middle of things), with the only reason being that she told me to, with the thing I was doing being something she told me to do, in order to do what she told me to.

With the incessant regular nagging over things where I’ve clearly and repeatedly said I’ve heard and will get to it ASAP, one wonders quite what’s going on in her head that she still thinks I need to be told everything several times, and still thinks I don’t do things when asked :|

So I have a list of links; each has a bottom margin of 16px. When I hover over them in IE the bottom margins disappear. Setting the A:visited property makes things work, by disabling the :hover. Setting the width of the links also stops the jittering…

On the day I leave, the modem dies -__- Two week downtime, new record…

Reminded by Digg, I find Dinosaur Comics manages to sum up online discussion.

Anyone know any online communities where the residents understand subtlety and wit? Or any which are simply not full of incorrect facts?

I wish scienceordie.org were still around… (I also wish it weren’t run by a mentally disturbed (albeit very intelligent) woman with a habit of dropping all her projects and changing identities every month or so, but that’s beside the point…)

Run by one of the TWiT related people; digg is slightly like slashdot, but the users get to rate the stories.

ED> Although after looking around for a couple of weeks, it seems just as full of The Stupid(tm) as most places; there’s a lot more intersting things than on slashdot, but also a lot more stories like “I always wondered what [sic] meant, so I looked it up” (that’s the entire story). And then other illiterates reply with thanks for the link and vote the story to the front page :(

Some russian dude brute forced a non-admin account on my server, then didn’t manage to do any damage as it’s fully patched and firewalled off in both directions~ Everything’s been reinstalled for paranoia anyway, which took about an hour to get re-set-up, using Debian’s latest stable (finally released \o/)

Trying SELinux, I gave up after 10 hours — the packages, where existant, seem both unfinished and several years out of date, and after installing manually it didn’t seem to do anything…

I’ve set up an icecast/ogg server with music database and web front end, so I (and anyone else, for that matter), can listen to my music collection from anywhere online \o/

ED for less hate> People fail at finding good software; Even when offering bittorrent / foobar / mplayer / firefox as replacements, most choose to stick with what they’re using already. Even those who are willing to change keep needing me to poke them along, else they get slack and end up using bad things all over again :( Much as I could use psychology-fu to explain it, chalking it up to “people are morons” is much more efficient…

To explain why this has a point more than religious style evengialism – if people used decent software;

* I could be distributing my videos in mpeg4 or snow, saving 25-75% of the bandwidth used on videos, and having higher quality. As it is I need to use the bloated and ugly mpeg1, because that’s all some people can play.

* With jpeg2000 I could further cut file sizes by 3-5 times, and have lossless mode for files worthy of it.

* With full alpha support I could have anti-aliased widgets, rather than the current indexed pngs, which are as jaggy as gifs.

* If people used IRC I wouldn’t have to deal with the horrible mess that are IM networks.

* With any decent music player, I could be using ogg or flac to get a better filesize / quality ratio, and not be infringing on encoding patents.

* If people used firefox I could spend 5 minutes writing good code rather than spending hours breaking things to look right in IE, having to work round all the rendering bugs.

The common denominators are so low that they hurt, yet people are happy with them through stubbornness and ignorance. So sad :(

Now not only is my site banned by websense, but now I’m banned personally too, by my own school…

It seems that the reason is that I read my school’s unofficial newspaper, Overmark — not content with merely banning the physical paper and threatening to expel anyone linked to it, they’re now going after the readers too >:(

On the one day that I really, really needed my site up so that I could grab some of my A-Level coursework off it, some cockwhore at websense decided my site was a games site, thus putting me on their blacklist >:(

And I made a small new app; dist — because knowing where stuff is takes effort; it’s easier just to use a command to find a file anywhere on the network and grab it. It also pushes files to other dist-enabled boxen, hence distribution.

This is just pathetic. It’s a great example of why I read at +5 with bonus for funnies though…