Usually, I laugh at the Onion's horoscopes, but they never seem to apply to me. This week's does: "Marshall McLuhan once said schizophrenia may be a consequence of literacy. Avoid this by sticking strictly to watching TV." Done!

I'm a happy camper — I just got my new Toshiba laptop to work well running X Window. Option 'XkbDisable' 'true' — who knew it would be so easy? I have no idea why this works, but right now, I don't care.

I'm totally addicted to Bubble Bees. What a great game, and what an amazing website! Such creative and beautiful stuff.

Break out the champagne, I'm an uncle again. Twice. Early this afternoon, my sister gave birth to two healthy twins — Max and Sam. Congratulations Sarah, Hunter and Jack (the new "older brother").

Washington Post: Crises Strain Bush Policies. James Steinberg, former Clinton Administration deputy national security advisory: "…they have this sort of grand Bush doctrine to fight evil, but they haven't developed an elaborate set of policies on the second order of problems. If it can't be fit into the template of counterterrorism and the fight against evil, they don't have any strategies."

Leave it to Tom DeLay to make a total ass of himself… again.

I'm doing some late-night work, and I found myself in need of some tunes to keep me going. So… it's Neil Young's Harvest, which might not have been the best choice — it's got to be the saddest album ever recorded. But then again, I'm in a crappy mood, so maybe it works after all.

This evening, I went to hear Richard Stallman speak about copyright. He made two really excellent points: 1) enforcement of copyright law preventing individuals from sharing copies with other individuals can only be done in the context of a police state; and 2) the current copyright system serves only the interests of the big media companies, and not the artists. I'm not as sure as he is that I know what the proper solution is to our current copyright problem, but he has the problem diagnosed pretty dead-on.

Washington Post: Va. GOP Official Indicted on Wiretapping Charges. The fact that VA GOP Executive Director Ed Matricardi was indicted for listening in on a confidential conference call with the Governor is not surprising. What is surprising is the total lack of criticism he has received from other GOP officials until today. Now the GOP is spinning fast, but during the past two weeks, no Republican would even say what he did was wrong, let alone criminal.

Robert X. Cringley: Sorry, Wrong Number: Why Your Phone Company Hates DSL. I'm happy with my DSL service, but I'm paying an arm and a leg for it. I'm a bandwidth junkie too, but I want affordability more than speed right now. Running a couple of servers at 384 kbps shouldn't cost me $150 a month.

Edward Said: Thinking Ahead.

Clay Shirky: Communities, Audiences, and Scale. Interesting article on the limits of online communities. My first reaction: if a community grows and becomes a mere audience, then the original community needs to be reinstantiated at a number of different nodes on a smaller scale — i.e. a successful large community is by nature a distributed task.

OK, I'm just going to link to this site in the hopes that I will get blocked by all sorts of stupid filtering software.

Sound track for the night: Stone Roses, "I Want to be Adored".

I've got to stop thinking that work is all about, well, working. Sometimes I need to stop and just learn stuff. Why else did I subscribe to all these mailing lists?