My roommate was pissed: he's not so good with the women, and he had hung out with this girl a few times and took her to dinner, but it never went anywhere and yesterday she was all, "Oh crap, you thought that was a date? Sorry, not only did we figure out this wasn't going anywhere, but I didn't even think of that as a date. YUO FAIL IT." So he was all pissy. I was all pissy for different, but related reasons. That's why I watched Conan the night before. So, after I got back from the gym, we watched Rambo: First Blood.

Reading: "Wizard and Glass", "Wolves of the Calla", "The Hundred Days", "The Witches of Eastwick".

I hope it lasts until April.

Plus Holiday wrapup, cruelty to carp, resolutions, Zooloretto, Wages of Destruction, my daughter the jock, and less.

 Is great. however I am having to run it through the bose thingy. I set up airport expresses in the house so that the same music plays in the lounge/bed. However: airport express == fail. It doesnt work when playing movies through itunes, the sound comes from the computer, not the airport express, also how can i hook up the iphone/pandora or pandora to the airport express network? since everyone here works for M$, any solutions?

Strange questions circling.

And art.

I saw this this morning:

From March all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year.

I knew this was comming (and wrote to my MP about it), but seeing it in the news again got me wondering about email encryption.  I use email for work (Outlook/Exchange, the privacy of which is not my problem to worry about), for technical mailing lists (gmail account, which I do not think of as private), and personal/private email (a dot-mac / MobileMe account).

Dienekes:

[T]he genetic structure of human populations has been interpreted as the result of a process of "serial bottlenecks", starting from the major "Out of Africa" bottleneck, and followed by a series of other ones, as humans colonized the world. Bottlenecks reduce genetic diversity, but so does selection, and it is imperative to directly sample genetic diversity of past populations, to see how well they conform with the expectations of the "serial bottlenecks" theory

...

This paper argues in favor of selection as a mechanism for keeping genetic diversity (and hence effective population size) at low levels. This selection process, is not, however, envisioned as affecting the species as a whole, but rather proceeded in its own way in regional subsets of humans. These groups did not exchange genes randomly with other such groups, but rather according to their degree of cultural similarity.

The kids got a few movies for ConsumerMas, some of which are plagued with unskipable trailers. A couple of them are blessed with no trailers at all, immediately load a menu which autoplays the feature in 10 seconds if you don't hit a button. Amazingly sensible.

I was just about to rip+reburn the offending DVDs, but that's a huge pain in the ass. Obviously the solution is to embrace a totally different pain in the ass, so I downloaded knoppmyth and just installed it on an old junker.

For a couple of years now I've been toying with the idea of copying all the damn movies to the file server and put a MythTV frontend in the TV cabinet. I'm attracted to the idea of never flipping thru another CD wallet.

Who am I kidding? I'm living beyond my means.

I drank a quart of egg nog at lunch yesterday. I am oddly emotional at times, even illogical.