It's been a decent week, between having Monday and Tuesday off and not doing so much on the other three days. Last night was particularly awesome, when I was handed a giant bag of food by someone saying 'Your parents went through a lot of trouble to get this to you.' Well looks like I won't be going hungry anytime soon. Thank you

Recent work department

I made some changes to www.roaix.info a couple of days ago. I removed the description and keywords META tags. While these tags still had a little bit of use back in 2002, nowadays none of the major search engines use them. I also added some hidden links to the menu page. All of this should improve the site's ranking a little bit. In the meantime, www.faldara.com seems to be doing fairly well in google. Every so often I manage to compose a search string that'll actually pop up this website...

In the meantime, AJ's moved the entire site back to his server in The Netherlands. The trouble at WorldWide DNS seems to over too, so all is good now (as opposed to last night, which was a little frustrating...).

Remember that musical cartoon with Kerry and Bush singing 'This land is our land?' Well the makers have released a second cartoon. Get it here. If that doesn't work try my local mirror: here.

I'm running a mirror of the movie because the JibJab site is currently getting hammered. The movie just aired in the Tonight Show as an exclusive, so a lot of people are trying to get it for themelves now. I think it's very well done -- a little slicker even than the original. Enjoy!

In the good news department: my economics exam went much better than I thought. In fact, if I'm not careful, I'll be getting higher grades for Economics than for Computer Science. I think I may have some repressed Econ-anger issues; I've been very anal about getting this grade. Ah yes... perfectionism...

Open Source should not be ripped off department

I posted a comment on www.opensourcecms.com, a website that runs demos of all major content management programs. I recently discovered that Blog:CMS is listed there. It's basically a ripped off & rebranded version of Nucleus together with a bunch of plugins that were ripped from various other sources. Having tried Blog:CMS and having concluded it's a time-waster, I decided to leave this message:

Blog:CMS adds a lot of random code changes to the Nucleus CMS source code. Unfortunately, these changes have made Blog:CMS less stable and much more buggy than Nucleus. In addition, I found Nucleus to be easier to customize and generally less time-consuming to use. The userbase is a lot wider than that of Blog:CMS, which is basically a one-man show.

And in case you're wondering: yes that did make me feel better. Especially because the 'maker' of Blog:CMS has a link to this page. In the meantime, Kaleena's laptop is now blocked from the Blog:CMS support forum, oh dear. *evil holler*

First of all, congratulations to Kaleena who will be going to Korea this winter to research her family history. Her fellowship proposal was accepted today. Makes you wonder what I'm going to do with mine doesn't it? Yeah, me too.

In related news, I got back my COSC 304 exam today. Turns out it wasn't quite as terrible as I thought it would be. Now let's hope my Economics exam wasn't a total loss and all will be good...

Vice-presidential candidates face off

Today marks another great day in America's elections -- the debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. The New York Times headlines: "Cheney and Edwards Split on Iraq Policy." Seems like that's a little obvious; not a very good headline.

Overall, the debate was pretty interesting though. When gay marriage came up, the discussion inevitably turned to Cheney's daughter. Edwards politely used this as an example. Cheney, in turn, simply thanked Edwards for his "kind words" and chose to forgo his remaining 80 seconds of response time.

The rest of the debate was generally more interesting than last Thursday's between Kerry and Bush. Cheney and Edwards were actually responding to each other's arguments. Kerry and Bush were much less 'interactive.'

New York Times reports (read: buys AP article) on Dutch government websites

In another recent goof-up, The New York Times reports that Several Dutch government Web sites remained offline Tuesday after an attack by hackers protesting unpopular policies of the right-wing Cabinet, the government said.. Darn right-wing CDA! In addition to this, the article has a less-than-stellar explanation of what a Denial of Service attack is.

And in my humble little life department...

After much deliberation I have settled on a Kodak DX7440. It's a little bulkier than the Nikon Coolpix 4200 (which I was considering earlier), but has a few more features. It also looks/feels a little sturdier.

Beyond going to the mall, I didn't do much of interest, unfortunately. More news & pictures as they occur...