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Moonlapse

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Blog Entries posted by Moonlapse

  2. Moonlapse

    Something Beautiful

    By Moonlapse,

    As I sit here at the computer in a room on the second story, there is a window to my back that overlooks a panoramic view of this area of the city. There is a nearby baseball stadium that regularly shoots off spectacular fireworks displays at the end of winning games. The booms are exaggerated by echoes off of the ridge that the house is on. Tonight, there is a massive thunderstorm looming across the horizon a dozen or so miles away. As the fireworks explode into sparkling orbs, bright atmospheric lightning continuously lights up the sky and clouds with incredibly long horizontal arcs, sending low rumbles to mingle with the echoing booms. Occasionally, a long and bright fork of pure whiteness hits the ground, unobscured by the distant rain and mist.
  4. Moonlapse

    Spin

    By Moonlapse,

    Geez, I seem to be turning into a subversive propaganda syndication. Weee! No really, I found this fascinating. Ever wonder what politicans talk about when they think the camera isn't rolling?
     
    http://www.brasscheck.com/videos/spin.html
  5. Moonlapse
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5034100.stm
     
    This scares the hell out of me. How come this is the only solution concieved to address the issue of cases being filed by disgruntled workers posing as legitimate whistle-blowers? Now the truthful people whose personal honour and principles do not allow them to remain silent in the face of corruption will be stifled. I thought the Bill of Rights was designed to protect citizens from the government. How many more rulings will be made to protect corrupted government from its citizens?
     
    I can't even describe the indignation I'm feeling.
  6. Moonlapse

    I Hate Grass

    By Moonlapse,

    I have some advise for anyone who will take it - do not buy a house on a 1/4 acre lot that is mostly covered in grass lawn, unless you are a lawn freak or have the finances to hire someone to maintain it.
     
    There is street bordering three sides of the property, since I am at an intersection and on the edge of a cul-de-sac, and the lawn runs front, side and rear of the house. Anyways, one section is overrun with root suckers from a quaking aspen, another part is continuously eaten bare by the legion of rabbits in the neighborhood, there are huge spots dying from some disease or insect infestation, the section at the rear of the house is directly across the street from undeveloped land and has picked up more dandelions than grass, and the best part is that there is an utterly massive ant colony in the back yard. I'm talking about a bared mound of dirt bulging out of the earth roughly 6 feet in diameter, and I've found entranceways as far as 25 feet way from this mound.
     
    I plan on absolutely ridding the back yard of grass and covering it with shredded bark with the addition of some trees and shrubbery *gasp*. I'm sure that no one likes to hear me complain, but at least maybe I can help someone avoid this type of thing.
  7. Moonlapse

    Google's Compromise

    By Moonlapse,

    Google agrees to China censorship.
     
    Some of the censored topics:
    Tiananmen Square Massacre
    Taiwan's Democracy
     
    The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
    - Ayn Rand
     
    Google's Motto: "Don't be evil."
  8. Moonlapse

    Big Dump

    By Moonlapse,

    Sounds pretty sick, right? Actually, BigDump is a staggered MySQL dump importing script. Anyone who has loaded a large database backup, transported a large database to a new host, or made a mirror test database knows how challenging it can sometimes be if you administrate remotely without using shell access.
     
    Fortunately, this script makes it a complete snap. Instead of breaking the SQL file into chunks that wouldn't cause a PHP timeout, then loading each one manually, I let this thing run while I went to work. 220MB later, the databse was loaded without a snag. A big thanks goes to Alexey Ozerov for writing such an awesome, time saving tool.
  9. Moonlapse

    Rofl!

    By Moonlapse,

    China Defends Internet Controls
     
    How transparent is this guy? I'm amazed that the people who witnessed this briefing did not laugh in his face at the contradictory stupidity that he spewed forth. While I agree that the U.S. government is over-stepping its power wrongly in some cases for the sake of its citizen's protection, you cannot correlate the freedom of private enterprises to censor their own productive work to the act of forcing them against their will to censor certain topics.
     
    "Harmful information" HAHHAHA Harmful to their method of pulling the wool over the eyes of their citizens.
  10. Moonlapse

    The Haps In October

    By Moonlapse,

    To recap my month...
     
    I read Choke by Chuck Palahniuk and The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. I enjoyed Choke more than most of the books I've been reading lately. I've been slowly reading my way through The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand for several months and pondering it while working during the day. I've also been slowly completing After the Ice by Steven Mithen. I would highly recommend this book to anyone curious about human pre-history.
     
    I've spent copious hours of my free time working in Photoshop on a super-duper not-so-secret project. The more I work on it, the more excited I get about it. This also involves a lot of reading and research and mostly pestering PP for information...
     
    And my birthday... if people didn't remind me, I'd probably have forgotten about it. To my delight, the wifey got me a 19" LCD monitor and a Microsoft Natural Comfort Wireless Desktop to make my time working on the computer easier and more enjoyable. I find this highly ironic because my computer is her biggest rival for my attention...
  11. Moonlapse

    Google Video

    By Moonlapse,

    After seeing a few of the funny/strange/impressive things that Vig has found on Google Video I decided to waste some time searching around and I found some excellent videos of some of my favorite music WEE!!!!
     
    Porcupine Tree - Trains, Start of Something Beautiful, Blackest Eyes
     
    Opeth - Closure, The Drapery Falls
     
    In Flames - System
     
    Depeche Mode - Precious
     
    Meshuggah - New Millenium Cyanide Christ <<LMFAO!!!
  12. Moonlapse

    E.u.s.s.r.

    By Moonlapse,

    I've been reading things here and there about the EU mandating, on penalty of an incredible fine, that Microsoft ship its own product Windows without Microsoft's own media player and to reveal parts of its programming code to rivals. Microsoft has already settled with the U.S. Justice Department, revealing code and allowing PC makers and conumsers to hide the bundled software. All this in the name of 'fair competition'.
     
    This isn't just about Microsoft, it's about property rights. Personally, I favor Apple computers even though I do not own one. However, because Microsoft has been more successful with Windows, which will run on a very wide selection of hardware, does this mean they should be penalized for including additional software in their own product?
     
    I would rather destroy this site than be forced to remove certain content or functionality for the sake of 'fair competition'. This site only exists because people produced it, and it in no way should be subject to the whims of those who have not created it.
  13. Moonlapse
    I recently finished reading this book, and I have to say that at first I was almost disappointed with the ending and that something really bothered me about it. In fact, I kept thinking about it for a couple of days and realized that when the method of narration and the nature of the main character is taken into consideration, the story becomes something that is opposite of what the words in the book describe. This is the first time I've noticed that the physical method of delivery of a book can unlock a whole new dimension to the story, and now I wonder if I've failed to see the deeper meanings or implcations of other books...
     
    Aside from this astonishment, I found the characters and the subject matter very interesting. Almost reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis, but with something much less bleak.
     
    Check it out at Amazon.com
  14. Moonlapse

    Global Currency

    By Moonlapse,

    The G20 moves the world a step closer to a global currency
     
    This article reminded me of a CFR essay by Benn Steil titled The End of National Currency that I read a couple of years ago. Steil's essay is remarkably astute, not only for his understanding of national fiat currencies, but of the nature of gold as real money as determined by thousands of years of human interaction. While I would welcome the end of nationalistic currencies, I utterly detest the idea of a global 'paper' currency manipulated by a global central bank. In fact, I think it would eventually lead to another dark age. I just hope that any superseding currency is based on something with real value, and not subject to manipulation by a political class.
     
    BTW, are you guys ready for the bust in commercial real-estate and Treasury bonds?
  17. Moonlapse

    Negative Interest

    By Moonlapse,

    Rates: When Zero Is Way Too High
    I believe the article is mistaken on a lot of things but, they are correct about increasing credit expansion in order to prevent the onset of recession. In fact, the rate has to increase exponentially. However, that can't happen indefinitely. A deep recession cannot be avoided, only postponed and exacerbated.The Theoretical Explanation of the Process of Stagflation (according to Austrian school economics - Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, etc):I believe we have experienced A, are now experiencing B, and are heading into C. Meaning we are trying to indefinitely postpone the consequences of the previous boom with an even larger and ever accelerating monetary boom. In fact, the last boom was the postponement of the 'dot-com' bust. This doesn't hinge on nominal percentage rates of interest though, there are multitudes of ways to initiate credit expansion. BTW, these are the six microeconomic reversion effects (apply it to the housing market during the boom):1. The rise in the price of the original means of production.2. The subsequent rise in the price of consumer goods.3. The substantial relative increase in the accounting profits of the companies from the stages closest to final consumption.4. The "Ricardo Effect." (inflation pushing down the real value of wages, causing an incentive to use labor instead of capital goods and intermediate products)5. The increase in the loan rate of interest. Rates even exceed pre credit-expansion levels.6. The appearance of accounting losses in companies operating in the stages relatively more distant from consumption: the inevitable advent of the crisis.
  21. Moonlapse

    Maoist Roots

    By Moonlapse,

    Here's another little excerpt gleaned from the Underground History of American Education, recounting the influence, in China, of the same prominent ideologues that influenced much of our educational system.
     
    From 'Education and the Philosophy of Experimentalism', John Childs - 1931
  24. Moonlapse

    I Concur

    By Moonlapse,

    I recently read an article by Nathaniel Branden that nicely articulated a mass of something that has been in my mind, of which I could only grab bits and pieces when I attempted to understand it as a whole.
     
    http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/ar...untability.html
  25. Moonlapse
    Like many people, I found the first few books in the Camulod Chronicles to be exceptional but I lost a little bit of interest in the latter books of the series. Not that any of the books were less than great, they were worth every penny in my opinion. It's just that the first books were so remotely distant from anything 'Arthurian' and so intimate with the lives of the Romans that the story was centered on.
     
    Although the stories in subsequent volumes are intriguing and well written, it seems that it was almost unavoidable to subconsciously label them as the transition or stage-setting from the exciting newness of the accounts of Publius Varus and Caius Britannicus to the anticipated culmination of the Arthur's tale set in the gritty and violent realism of post-Roman Britain.
     
    The Lance Thrower, to me, is the start of the anticipated culmination. Before reading the book, I was expecting that it would necessarily remind me somehow of the traditional story of Arthur. After all, the main character is the well known 'Lancelot', right? To my enjoyment, this was not the case at all. This is the story of Clothar of Ganis, raised in the Frankish kingdom of Benwick in southern Gaul. I'll abstain from explaining the discrepancy between the names and leave that to the book itself. The book, in fact, harkens back to the freshness of the first books and for the most part is quite remote from the scenarios of the recent books. Only in the last pages does the story tie into ongoing struggles of Arthur and Merlyn in Camulod.
     
    I was deeply drawn into the story of Clothar, which sets the stage for an unresolved personal quest for revenge in Gaul in addition to creating and defining the personality that will be so intimately involved in the eventual dissolution of everything built upon in the series so far. The only thing that I can really criticize in the book is Whyte's erroneous geographical references. In describing the location of the kingdom of Benwick, he refers to Lake Genava which would have been Lacus Lemanus or Lacus Lausonius in the given time period. The lake took the name of Genava/Geneva later in the Middle Ages. Whether or not this was intentional for the purpose of clarity is unknown to me. However, he also refers to Benwick as being in Gallia Cisalpina which is an obvious error since Gallia Cisalpina is essentially the valley of the Padus in northern Italia and Genava was located in Gallia Narbonensis (Transalpina).
     
    Regarless of any minor technical errors, I enjoyed the book considerably and urge anyone who may have been put off by the recent books in the series to get this book since it introduces some needed freshness and provides more of Jack Whyte's excellent realism-based storytelling.
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