Legalese, Canada Style: [The teacher] replied to students’ answers on occasion — “That is not what your mother said last night” which the students interpreted as the Member implying that he had spent time socially with that student’s mother.

I actually had to reboot a Linux machine tonight to get it to display web pages properly. Restarting apache didn’t do the trick.

(Magic post)

I went to the Ravnica prerelease today and had a blast.  Got some nice cards, too.

At the table where we were constructing and playtesting our decks, I played a game against a EE major from Cal Poly SLO. I was using a card with a mechanic called Dredge, which has, as a cost, putting cards from your library into your graveyard. One time when I used the ability, I lost the one card from my deck that could have won me the game against him.

“That’s why Dredge is dangerous,” he said.  “You can lose your best cards.”

An aerospace engineer, another technical person, and I all chimed in to disagree. We contended that it was just as likely that worthless cards would be put into our graveyard, giving us access to our better cards.

The technical person to my left said “I consider the top card of my library at all times to be the superposition of all the cards in my library until drawn,” and grinned.

“But then you open up your deck box and your cat is dead,” I countered.

The engineer exclaimed “What’s this dead cat doing in here?!”  And we all laughed.

“We’re nerds,” I said.

The full spoiler for Ravnica is up, and it is phenomenal. Thirty cards are going directly into decks when they are released (that’s an average of one per deck.) Twenty-four others look quite playable in Legacy, but I don’t know where to put them yet. Char and Lightning Helix together mean R/w Burn will be viable in Extended, I predict. Moonlight Bargain is going to get a ton of play. Cloudstone Curio combos with about half a million cards to form infinite combos; I’m sorry now I scrapped my Aluren deck. Pre-order auctions are already ending on eBay.

Read.  Salivate.  Repeat.  A set hasn’t looked this good since Urza’s Saga.

For Magic players, CardShark seller greggo4randy is donating all proceeds on card sales to “relief efforts for the people affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina”.  He has 9249 cards in stock.

I opened a corked bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape this evening. This time it was an inexpensive wine, but last time it was a $135 vintage Jaboulet Hermitage.

From wineanorak.com: “A slightly dangerous response is that in old world wine countries there is less emphasis on product quality and greater tolerance of what could be considered wine faults by consumers and even the wine trade. The fact that the wine industry trades heavily on tradition may imbue it with a degree of inertia, and thus a significant change such as changing closure type is perceived as more problematic than a 5% taint rate.” This from a very interesting article on screwcap closures.

If Blogger broke the formatting of your blog, as it did mine for the last month, go to Settings -> Formatting and change “Enable float alignment” to “No”.

Very, very sad day.  Mark Gottlieb will no longer be writing House of Cards.

Last year’s film Suspect Zero wasn’t that bad.  It gets a 5.7 at IMDB.  I gave it a 6.  Unlike my brother, I like to watch director’s commentaries. I almost always watch them, especially if I either loved or loathed the movie. If I’m just apathetic about it and can’t imagine sitting through it again, I might skip it. So I put in the commentary for the movie. I made it two and a half minutes in. I transcribed the beginning of it for you. Enjoy.

My name is Elias Merhige and I am the director of Suspect Zero.

I did not set out to make a serial killer genre film, I did not set out to make a film about serial killers, I set out to express something much more deep, about the nature of the unconscious and the nature of justice and the nature of how the human mind works. These opening titles demonstrate the synapses of Orion’s brain, as each neurological fiber of his brain screams out to find and hunt. Right out of the titles we pull out of a drainpipe off of some lonely, forgotten highway. We come out of the unconscious, out of the earth, out of the bowels of the earth, and what do we see? A lonely can, tossed aside. A baseball that’s been used; for how many games? A broken doll that was once loved. Where is its owner?

We come upon a grimy milk carton. The rain begins to wash away the grime. The dirt falls away and we see this adorable, innocent child. Her date of birth. She’s been missing. Where is she? Most people don’t know, but since 1972, that this close to ninety thousand people: adults, women, men, children, that are all missing [sic].  Their bodies unaccounted for, their whereabouts unaccounted for.  Where are they?  That’s a fact, that’s not a fiction.

Neighborhoodies.com. Custom-lettered clothing, no minimum order, lots of choices in clothing styles, real designers designing every piece. T-shirts are about $20. Looks wonderful. Anybody have experience with the company?

(Coupon code “BLOGGER” for 10% off, according the the ad on MeFi.)

No matter what you think of Gorgeous George, Jeremy Paxman’s interview with him last night was off the map  (As in “bizarre and out of line”.  I think some readers thought I was endorsing Paxman’s diatribe.  I don’t like Galloway, but good lord, Jeremy.)  Anyone have a link to a transcript?  Post at the discussion page, please.

OK, here it is:

JEREMY PAXMAN: Mr Galloway, are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: What a preposterous question. I know it’s very late in the night, but wouldn’t you be better by starting by congratulating me for one of the most sensational election results in modern history?

JEREMY PAXMAN: Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: I’m not — Jeremy, move on to your next question.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Well, you not answering that one?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: No, because I don’t believe that people get elected because of the colour of their skin.

I believe people get elected because of their record and because of their policies. So move onto your next question, because I’ve got a lot of people who want to speak to me.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Are you proud…

GEORGE GALLOWAY: If you ask that question again I’m going, I warn you now.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Don’t try and threaten me, Mr Galloway, please.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: You’re the one who’s trying to badger me.

JEREMY PAXMAN: I’m not trying to badger you, I’m merely asking you whether you’re proud of having driven out of Parliament one of the very few black women there — a woman you accused of having on her conscience the deaths of 100,000 people.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Oh, well, there’s no doubt about that one. There’s absolutely no doubt that all those new Labour MPs who voted for Mr Blair and Mr Bush’s war have on their hands the blood of 100,000 people in Iraq, many of them British soldiers, many of them American soldiers, most of them Iraqis. And that’s a more important issue than the colour of her skin, I may assure you.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Yes, because you then went on to say including a lot of women who had blacker faces than her.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So don’t try and tell me that I should feel guilty about one of the most sensational election results in modern electoral history because the person I defeated is a woman or a…

JEREMY PAXMAN: I put it to you, Mr Galloway, that Nick Rainsford had you to a tea when he said you were a demagogue.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: I’m sorry?

JEREMY PAXMAN: Nick Rainsford. You know who I mean?  Nick Rainsford, Labour MP.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: I don’t’ no, I don’t know him.

JEREMY PAXMAN: So you’ve never heard of him?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: I’ve never heard of Nick Rainsford, no.

JEREMY PAXMAN: What else haven’t you heard of?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, I’ve been in Parliament a long time.

JEREMY PAXMAN: He’s a parliamentary colleague of yours until very recently.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, most of them just blend one into the other, Jeremy.  They’re largely a spineless supine bunch, and…

JEREMY PAXMAN: Have you every heard of Tony Banks?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes I have, yes.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Right. Tony Banks was sitting here five minutes ago and he said you were behaving inexcusably — you had deliberately chosen to go to that part of London and to exploit the latent racial tensions there.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, you are actually conducting one of the more, even by your standards, one of the most absurd interviews I have ever participated in. I have just won an election. Can you find it within yourself to recognise that fact, to recognise the fact that the people of Bethnal Green and Bow chose me this evening.

JEREMY PAXMAN: We recognise it.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Why are you insulting them?

JEREMY PAXMAN: I’m not insulting them. I’m not insulting them.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes you are. You are insulting them. They chose me just a few minutes ago. Can’t you find it within yourself even to congratulate me on this victory?

JEREMY PAXMAN: (sarcastically) Congratulations, Mr Galloway.  How do you propose to use your time in?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Thank you very much indeed.  I’m off.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Oh, I see, it’s another occasion you’re not wanting to talk to someone who doesn’t agree with you.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: No, no, no, no.  Actually, Jeremy, it’s too, it’s too late.

!  No idea what it means, but it’s sure fun to pronounce in English.

Some years back, someone was offering a neat service. If you had a high-traffic file on your website, you could create a link through this service — say, http://www.foo.com/mirror?url=http://mcgees.org/some.file. The first five (or whatever) times that someone tried to download it, foo.com passed the request on to mcgees.org. But on the sixth or subsequent times, foo.com would make a copy of the file and they would serve it for you. Anyone remember who offered this service, and anyone know whether it’s still offered? Maybe it had something to do with archive.org?

Anybody know a way to report a bug to Yahoo! Mail?

Truth be told, I mostly subscribe to Free Inquiry for Dawkins’s column and in spite of Kurtz’s. The latter is one of the most simple-minded voices in Secular Humanism today, but the former has such an intensely biting and ferocious wit and such reckless abandon to state what he believes that it’s worth the subscription price on its own, and makes up for the boneheadedness the rest of the magazine frequently achieves.

Two gems from the most recent issue:

“I have never found the problem of evil very persuasive … There seems to be no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good… [T]he “jealous God” of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction.”

“The world is divided into those who can see that the capacity to comfort has no bearing on the truth of a cosmic claim and those who cannot.”

Last weekend’s upgrade, as it was intended, was unsuccessful. After setting all my installation options, RedHat told me it didn’t support my hardware. At least it had the grace to inform me before it reformatted my hard drive. So I took the burst of energy, the Mountain Dew, and the gummi worms, and applied them to getting the things that were bothering me fixed in my Debian installation. I succeeded in getting X running, a bit of a chore under Debian, switched out mouses, and upgraded all my packages. I wanted Firefox, so I used Konqueror to get the installer from the website. Konqueror wasn’t that bad, though, so I was on my way to Blogger to report that fact when Konqueror crashed. So go ahead and ignore that recommendation.

I couldn’t get the Firefox installer to run, so I looked around, and found the proper way was to set apt-get’s distribution to unstable so Firefox would show up in the list of packages and use dselect to install it.

I was watching The Two Towers with my brother. It came to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all the young children were being ushered into caves while the men and older boys were being armed.

“I care about the kids as much as the next guy,” I said, “but surely even a seven year old boy or girl could ferry arrows to the front lines?”

“We don’t talk about the arrows!” said my brother.

Another Magic post. In 1994 I was trading cards on Prodigy, but I didn’t have very easy access to information on the rarity of cards. I offered my Demonic Tutor for someone’s Demonic Attorney. The Demonic Attorney was rarer, and I’ll never forget the response I received from the guy, namely, “Yeah right! What are you smoking and where can I get some?!”

Today, the Demonic Tutor is worth $7.23 and the Demonic Attorney is worth $1.52. I still have, and play with, the Demonic Tutor. It’s very nice.

But I won’t mention the Mox Sapphire I sold for $15 that same week.

I will be upgrading my Linux installation this weekend.  Expect periodic outages.

All my CDs have been re-ripped using the Apple Lossless Encoder. I was comfortable using this iTunes-friendly format because dbPowerAmp has a free converter out of the format if I ever choose to go to a new standard. Full CD-quality sound coming out of my computer speakers. 456 albums, 5243 songs, 146 gigabytes, 16.7 days of continuous listening. And it all fits with room to spare on a two hundred dollar hard drive I can hold in my hand. Staggering.

A quick story about the game Magic: The Gathering. Magic is a trading card game, the first game of its type: you collect the cards as if they were baseball cards, form them into decks, then play with them as if they were a card game. You can then take your favorite decks to shops, conventions, student union buildings, friends’ houses, and Taco Bells and challenge the people you meet to duels. The most interesting part of the game is that with the thousands of cards that have been printed, you never know exactly what sort of deck you will be facing.

The second most interesting thing is that practically no one knows how to play the game. I don’t mean people on the street don’t know how to play, I mean the people you play against don’t know how to play. It takes about an hour to learn the basics of the game, and after a couple weeks you should be fine with 99% of the card interactions. But that last 1% of card interactions takes years of intensive study to master. The Comprehensive Rules take up more than one hundred 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper. Most cards don’t do exactly what they say as there are extensive errata for the game. The casual players among you think I’m exaggerating. Quick: Name the six layers of Continuous Effects, the errata for the card Humility, and how to combine them to explain what happens with both Humility and Opalescence in play. If that’s too easy, what happens if you put a creature with morph into play with an Illusionary Mask?

In 1997 Wizards of the Coast decided to simplify the game for younger players.  The sets called Portal, 1998’s Portal: Second Age, 1999’s Portal: Three Kingdoms, and 1999’s and 2000’s respective Starter sets were the result. Some of the simplifications made sense, but some were boneheaded. For instance, in regular Magic creatures can block incoming creatures.  But to simplify the game for children, instead of talking about blocking, they renamed it intercept, which is probably a high school vocabulary word. The cards had regular Magic card backs — that is, face-down you couldn’t tell them apart from normal Magic cards — but were not allowed in standard Magic. The end result of this was that all the beginner-level cards kids bought turned out to be essentially worthless when they graduated to the next level.

For a long time I’ve been publicly advocating for the legalization of these sets. It actually simplifies things, as that would mean all white- and black-bordered cards would be legal for play, rather than having to memorize cryptic symbols to remember which are legal and which are not. And now it has happened: as of October 1st, Portal and Starter are legal in the formats I play.  I’m very pleased.

This server runs Apache 2.0 under Linux.  I tried to archive an access log using mv mcgees_access_log mcgees_access_log.2, then I executed touch mcgees_access_log, assuming that Apache would continue writing to mcgees_access_log.  It didn’t.  My second guess would have been that it would start appending to mcgees_access_log.2.  It didn’t do that either.  Instead it stopped writing log files and I lost three weeks’ worth.  Restarting Apache fixes the problem.

<campvoice> It’s all just soooo reassuring! </campvoice>

The End of Late Fees!  Big advertising blitz!  Rejoicing in the streets!  All hail!

So I asked the young woman at the counter what the details of this are.

Joshua: Could you tell me the details of the new program?
Employee: You still have a due date, but you have seven days from the due date to bring it back.
Joshua: And then what?
Employee: And then we sell it to you automatically, and it’s yours to keep.
Joshua: You what?
Employee: We charge you for the video, and you don’t have to bring it back.
Joshua: That’s pretty sneaky.
Employee: You have 30 days from when we charge you to return it for credit.

But hey, that’s not a late fee, I guess.

I almost want to let them do that to me once so that I can make a tidy profit when the inevitable class action lawsuit goes through.

Oh, and the “refund” you get?  “You will be charged a restocking fee plus applicable taxes.” Why? “BLOCKBUSTER incurs processing, administrative and other costs when we have to convert rental product to a sale, as well as when you return the product after that sale. The restocking fee helps to cover that cost.” Poor buggers. You almost feel sorry for them, don’t you? Pitiful bastards with their administrative costs when the big mean customer makes them take a video back.

I almost left my purchases sitting on the counter and walked out, but I didn’t want to be confrontational with the employee who, despite complicity by having no intentions of informing me of the new policy without my asking, couldn’t seem to care less. And I really wanted to see Life of Brian tonight.  But I had no idea how mad I’d end up.

The address, if you want to cut up your card and mail it with a nasty letter, is

Blockbuster Inc.

1201 Elm Street

Dallas, TX 75270

This company is so going to tank.  Divest now.

I had an odd experience last night. I cut open an onion, but exactly one of the layers had transformed into goo. When I squeezed on the shell of the onion, the contents of the layer oozed out like brown oniony toothpaste.

Wow, I just received a 4-1-9 letter en français.  New export markets for Nigeria?