Maszman Speaks!

Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t find the descrip­tions of tak­ing Ectasy in X’ed out at all compelling.

There are other lev­els of con­scious­ness that are not depen­dent on ingested chem­i­cals, but admit­tedly they are dif­fi­cult to reach with­out time and effort. But time and effort are two things our soci­ety wishes to elim­i­nate, so I can see the appeal of some­thing that short­cuts the process.

Pac Bell’s Inter­net arm sues the RIAA over file-sharer IDs, say­ing the sub­poe­nas against it are ille­gal. Other ISPs have sim­ply turned over names in face of the RIAA, so this will be a care­fully observed turn of events.

Red­Pa­per was men­tioned in a Wired arti­cle recently. It’s a site that allows you to post just about any­thing, from recipes, to poems, to the Kobe Bryant court papers for oth­ers to down­load. Peo­ple then pay a small charge (called micro­pay­ments) to view them. If you’re a writer look­ing to get an idea of your skills, this is cer­tainly one way to do it. It might not be the best way to make a liv­ing writ­ing, though, given the low price for view­ing, but that’s prob­a­bly not the point.

If you’re an Apache mod_rewrite guru, please check out my post on forum​.mod​rewrite​.com (look for tom­masz). I’m try­ing to not be any more of an Apache hacker than I need to be. Thanks.

The Hous­ton Chron­i­cle has a multi-part inves­ti­ga­tion on NASA post-Columbia, start­ing with In search of a mis­sion — After Colum­bia, NASA rethinks rea­son for being. This is def­i­nitely not the right stuff.

Dell with­drew their Axim fix after dis­cov­er­ing some users actu­ally used it to upgrade older machines.