I wrote earlier this week that I was going to try and give up internet debating for good (for at least as long as I can keep out of it.) I had a couple of open debates to finish though before I gave it up for good. Well, Both of them are finished now. No further posts from Vorn on the internet debate, so it’ll just probably be an agreement on “something needs to be done with different linux interfaces” as the rest was merely semantics.

I’ve found yet another project to keep me busy. I’ve been running my own firewall on an older linux based system, K6/166 with low memory and a small hard drive. It’s in an old style AT Desktop case that takes up a corner of my living room. I’ve been wanting to replace it with a smaller router for awhile, but could never find a hardware one that did what I wanted.

http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5057321.html?tag=fd_nc_1I guess that’s why I used Debian for so long. Too bad it’s not currently keeping up on the releases. The Progeny Componentized Linux looks like one to watch though. Maybe I’ll keep the Athlon 850 around once I upgrade Ruri to an Athlon 64 and use it to try new distros out. I’m thinking of switching to Ubuntu soon here though. Maybe this weekend.Blocks of Wood for no apparent reason!

It’s really eating up my time to participate in all these online debates. The truth is the majority of me hates debating and can’t stand online debates in general, but a small portion of me loves it and enjoys it while the rest of me feels like a total arse doing it. I’ve been letting that small portion of my personality dominate my time online for a couple years now and I really need to find a way to shove it back again.

Howard Tayler recently posted a car analogy to linux distributions. He says that Turn signals etc should be standardized in consumer cars. Turn signals, lights, hazard blinkers, etc are all methods of communicating to other drivers. Almost every distro of linux is standardized in that they communicate in the same way to the outside world. They all follow the RFCs for TCP and other protocols. These are your OPEN standards. How about other standards that apply to cars.

(Link dead, never to be seen again…)Interesting article on the difficulties of transitioning from the Soviet no-competition system to a free market system.

When my wife and I were voting for senate last year, we couldn’t really decide so we ended up splitting our votes. Not between Coors and Salazar, but between the Libertarian candidate and Salazar. I’m actually glad that Salazar won despite my Republican-leaning libertarian ideology. He’s show now that he’s not going to bend over for the democrats and he’s going to think independently. I don’t agree with him on every issue, but on several such as the confirmation of the various Bush staffers, the Patriot act (that it needs adjustment) and on social security he seems to be pretty close to right on with what seems logical to me.

Currently: RDM59/BST31/BLM29/WAR20/THF16/RNG2 All other jobs 1. (Yes, I have them all.)AF Status: All but gloves. No coffer key yet for eldieme. Can wear all but hat. 1.2k exp from that. /cry.

I went to the game store again.Newly acquired games (for me):Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy (expansion) $10The Political Machine $7Half-Life 1 $20And my wife asked for:Smackdown Vs. Raw $50Altarian Prophecy is a nice addon so far. Although it does make the universe a slightly less friendly place with the addition of one neutral and one very evil race. Below is a sample of my exploits in Galactic CivilizationsI’m nearing the end of a rather interesting game for a small universe in it.

And I think FFXI may be part of the problem. Not all of it though, because I still didn’t have enough time before I started playing it. I’m up to 54RDM and 29BST and nearing 30BST now in it…But I’ve ended up with a number of video games I have yet to even put in my game system. Last year, I believe, I rented Okage and played into it a bit.