Joining the Jihad

... the Unitarian Jihad, that is.

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Rail Gun of Patience.

Get yours.

... and I'm not even a Unitarian, although they're probably closer than almost any other religion to what I actually believe.

Safe Blogging

From docbug_feed and the EFF mailing list, here's an article on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) -- by which they really mean "How to Blog Anonymously".

I take a rather different approach, and simply assume that anything I put on a website is eventually going to become public, and that everything I write can pretty easily be traced back to me, so I may as well be open about it. Even if I were to set up a blog on invisiblog.com (and how do you know I haven't?), I might carelessly let something slip, or be betrayed by a turn of phrase or a reference to a secret only a handful of people know, or a minor fact that limits the possibilities. (Just as an example, I might mention the fact that the house I grew up in in Connecticut was torn down to make way for a freeway interchange.)

So I rarely use friends locking here on LJ, and don't hide the fact that the Mandelbear is really Steve Savitzky. Anyone who's sufficiently interested can hit Google and find out that I was using that handle on alt.callahans more than a dozen years ago. I try hard to be polite and respectful in what I write (not always successfully), and simply don't mention certain things. I don't go out of my way to mention where I work, but anyone interested can find it out pretty quickly, so I don't worry too much if something slips, and I'm careful not to mention any trade secrets, or indeed anything that I wouldn't casually mention to somebody at a trade show. Even if they don't work for a competitor now, they might in the future.

If I were starting now, in a post-9/11 world, living in a country that's in grave danger of becoming a right-wing theocracy, I might be more careful. The net's not as safe as it once was. But for me, the open road is probably the only one left, so I might as well stay open and make the best of it.

Mixed messages?

So, Eric Rudolph has confessed to being a serial bomber, thereby avoiding the death penalty in exchange for four consecutive life sentences.

Rudolph is a Right-wing Christian whose anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-Semitic hatred resulted in a series of blasts in Georgia and Alabama in the late 1990s that killed two people and injured more than 120.

In the two years after setting off a backpack bomb in Atlanta, Rudolph attacked a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta and two abortion clinics -- one in Birmingham and one in Atlanta. The Birmingham attack killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse.

Why do I get the feeling that the real reason for the plea bargain was to avoid a high-profile public trial for a man whose principles are so perfectly in tune with those of our current administration and their religious-right power base?

Is it possible...

... that the fact that this is my fourth post this morning has something to do with the fact that this is the last weekend before taxes are due? Does that also have anything to do with the fact that I'm tidying up the office?

Conclusions are left as an exercise for the reader.

Found filk, or something like that

From eleccham comes this flash video for a song called "March of the Sinister Ducks".

The video is recent, but the song was released in 1983, by Alan Moore and members of Bauhaus. Further details can be seen here (look for "March of the Sinister Ducks" on the page - the entry for Jan. 31, 2004).

Surreality check

The person on /. who called this "the most surreal thing I've seen today" obviously hadn't also seen The March of the Sinister Ducks. But it's a close second.

Not that perpendicular recording isn't pretty cool; Hitachi is announcing a half-terabyte drive, after all.

Tax update

Well, I've entered this year's W2 info -- that's the easy part. To get there, I resurrected flower_cat's old computer so that I'd have a clean machine to work on that wasn't likely to accumulate spyware over the next year.

( geekish details )

In other news, I've been helping chaoswolf with her homework for her Intro to Unix class. She's at about the same stage with it that she was at with guitar on Wednesday -- struggling and having doubts. I see a pattern.