Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

Times Online

Amen!

What a terrible Friday

Should I rant here?  I know you guys want to know what's going on, but what happened on Friday is so annoying and disturbing that after reading about it, who's gonna want to come back to read this blog again?

Well, just a hint...  I'm in the process of renewing my visa and work permit.  There're these two guys with whom sometimes I work with, and whenever I make them a promise, I always deliver to them exactly what I told them or better, and always on time or sooner.  It happens that I told these guys two months before my papers would expire about my situation, and they reassured me that they'd take charge, and everything was under control.

My papers have expired, and I'm still without renewed ones.  Through all this process everything has been improvisation and eleventh hour handling with even changes of the changes of plan... and to top it off, I have to smile while listening to them how they pat themselves on their own shoulders for a job well done (hey, it's not over yet!!!).

I don't wanna work with them any more, ever.

Judge Orders Tattoo Ink Health Warnings

ABC News

I don't understand. I thought tattoing was something that has been practiced for thousands of years. How come it's done with dangerous chemicals? Ummm, maybe there're several types of ink. But in that case, if there're safe and unsafe inks, why manufacture unsafe formulas? Sorry, tonight I'm a bit dumb.

UK admits smashing jail wall in rescue bid

ABC News Online

This is ridiculous. So do they have or do they don't have respect for the authorities that they themselves have imposed on the Iraqi population? How come "the rule of law" doesn't apply when it comes to Brittons in Iraq? Weren't those two guys detained by the local authorities?

This is really angering.

Knoppix kicks ass!!!

KNOPPIX Linux Live CD

I bumped into this thing by reading somebody else's blog... and it made me very curious because previously I'd never really paid much attention to "livecds". Really, how much good could an OS running straight from the CD (without installing on the hard drive) be?

I gave it a shot, and WOW WOW WOW!!! Out of the box it recognized everything I had in my laptop computer, and even connected me to the wifi network! Unbelievable! I didn't need to configure anything by hand. It just... worked like a charm! This is how OSes are supposed to work Bill!

Well, well... this was such a nice surprise that I'm hooked now, and I'm trying to find other Linux livecds. But I read somewhere some reviews saying that actually Knoppix is the best in this kind of job?

Ummm, right now I'm not sure for what am I gonna use these livecds. Hopefully I won't need them for a system rescue operation! But as a technical curiosity, I think I should follow.

Bush and Hitler 'back' stray dog campaign

Ananova

Hey, it says here that even the most hated dictators on this planet receive love from dogs!!! And this came from Romania!!! Huh, those guys are really sharp campaigners.

Red Cross Catching Hurricane Scam Artists

WTOL-TV

How despicable trying to make a quick buck out of other people's tragedies. Why can't we have some more decency?

Fly powered model airplane

Electronic Mail Services

I wonder if somebody has actually made a model airplane like this. Kind of cruel to the flies, I believe. But hey, sometimes they're awefully annoying to us too, aren't them?

Thief hid phone up her bum

Ananova

Yuck!!! I wouldn't want that telephone back!!!

I'm not sure this is just my imagination

... but some days ago I updated Winamp in my laptop computer, and since then, Internet radio sounds much better!  I was using Winamp 5.0, and now I've got 5.1.  When listening to the same Internet radio station as before, now I think I'm getting surround sound with the very same tiny laptop speakers!  This is awesome.

Shame on you IBM + Lenovo!!!

Today I ran my "Software Installer", which is a very convenient piece of software that came with my IBM laptop computer.  You use it to update all of the utilities that are particular to your IBM computer.  I run this utility perhaps once or twice a month, and today I found that there were two new updates for my computer.

One of this was something called ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery.  It was a humongous 235MB download.  Fortunately, I have high speed Internet, but still, it took a good couple of hours to bring.  Then when it started to install, the installation process took forever.  I don't know how many minutes, but definitely more than 30, perhaps closer to 60.

When the progress bar was finallly going to reach the 100% mark... bang! I get an error message claiming that there's an error in one of the files of the package, that the installation cannot proceed, so everything will be rolledback.  Mother fucker.