Distributed Mind

I was just reading the license agreement for the OS X Starcraft Installer, and... It turns out the license prohibits tunneling! In other words, you want to play, you have to play on Blizzard.NET.

This is, I think, one of the top three most ridiculous things I have seen in a license agreement (I have forgotten the other two... except I think I remember a license for an early spyware program that was supposed to give them the right to collect just about any data and reuse it - yeah, let me just click okay here...). I think it is repressive, and downright silly. In other words, twenty years from now, when Blizzard is shut down, none of us will be reminiscing about how great Starcraft was and pulling it out to play (like we do with, say, Combat, which is actually slightly older than 20 right now) because we won't be able to play it properly. Well, we will, but only if sitting on the same local network, which is much more restrictive than playing it wherever we want, as we do with every other networked game now. Not that there would be any technical restriction, that is the whole point of using the tunneling - we can get around even old dumb games networking code, like, say, our beloved Warcraft.

Way to step back in time, Blizzard. It's a shame Blizzard has turned out to be such an obnoxious company (this isn't the first time they've done something stupid and mean), because they are certainly excellent game designers. But eventually, bad business practice will catch up with you. Gamers won't put up with idiocy forever.

(I have to wonder how enforceable this clause is, but I assume completely. I mean, you know what you are getting into, right? I have to say though, I probably wouldn't have bought yet another copy of Starcraft if I had known playing it on Mac OS X would have involved seeling my gaming soul. Which makes me annoyed about licensing agreements in general. I havce always been against them, but the as they become even more idiotic, I am beginning to hate them even more, if that is even possible. You have no idea how much I appreciate open source software with a sane license at this very moment [er, I wasn't thinking of GPL-licensed software when I said "sane," though I admit it has its advantages].)

Sometime yesterday, the fly finally gave up. Thus ends the short adventure in keeping a horse fly. It is sad, but probably for the better. What kind of existence can a horse fly really have in captivity? (And it is still supposed to be too cold till to release a fly for the next week at least.)

It didn't have a name, but if it had, it would have been called Harvey.

Right now, it is so beautiful outside. It is just below freezing, and large, dry snowflakes have been falling for a few hours - not enough to accumulate much, still too warm, but enough to leave a slight white dusting on everything. It is twilight now, and the few purple rays that are making it through the clouds have given everything an odd glow. It is wonderful. It makes me just want to stop and stare, and think about how good everything is (even if it isn't).

But, I know also that our new beautiful cold weather will mean that many people in Bloomington will be very cold tonight, and there isn't much, if anything, I can do about it. It's time like these I hate the world, not for my sake, but for everyone's. I am reminded once again of a verse I have always found to be appropriate to the way I find the world:

For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. Not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body. (Romans 8:22-23, WEB)

Paul writes that after saying (in verses I actually heard a sermon preached on just last night, incidentally):

For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21, WEB)

I can't wait.

Yesterday we managed to get a fly in our apartment. And when I say fly, I mean albatross. This is one of the largest flies I have ever encountered. It was loud flying around too, which made him that much more obnoxious. It flew around for a few hours before I finally caught it in a jar and then evicted him (I don't kill things, of course). Well, then it occurred to me that evicting it was probably tantamount to killing it, since it was only 39 Fahrenheit at the time, at least according to Weather.com, with below freezing temperatures to come.

Well, at least he had a few hours right? Too late now. Or so I thought. I came home from the ban a few minutes ago to find a half-frozen, enormous fly on my porch. Although I can't be certain, I would stake a fair amount of money on this being the same fly. So, of course, I rescued it. I now have a pet fly, living in a jar (with an air hole of course). I didn't know what to feed it so I gave it spinach. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it... I am not sure how long I can keep a fly in a jar, or how long the fly should live without being confined to a jar. Time for some research, I guess.

[It is, of course, almost certainly a horse fly, which makes it all that much more bizarre, I know. Should also make feeding it interesting, one might guess.]

I have turned on comments again. Rather than require every one who wants to post a comment to become a member, I have Nucleus set to require moderation on comments for posts older than 7 days. So, if you comment on an old item and it doesn't appear right away - that is why. Don't worry, I will get to it.

I apologize for the possible inconvenience, but this way I only have to delete 7 spam comments each time instead of 150.

[Uh huh, like anyone ever comments anyway....]

After complaining that the Christian Challenge Blog had been spammed within 24 hours of being set up, and noting that this journal had not been so treated - well, I should have known that was inviting disaster, shouldn't I? Yesterday this blog was hit by over 100 comment spams in less than 5 hours from some on-line Casino. Very annoying to bother deleting all that. And I almost didn't notice it was there, so it might have sat here for some time!

I did, however, notice that I actually got a comment from Tal Klein in response to my earlier post which had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle. Neat! So I guess some good came of this.

I will see if I have more trouble in the future. If there are more problems, I will see about taking action. For now, one isolated incident in 10 months of operation doesn't really warrant more drastic measures from someone as lazy as I am.

[Right, so naturally, I have already been spammed again. Sigh...]

[End result: Comments turned off entirely, temporarily.]

[And now they are back on again, this time with moderation on posts over 7 days old.]

I and some friends of mine were discussing "strange music" last night. The one couple was playing Tom Waits and Spike Jones for us as there example of strange music. I hadn't heard Waits before, but of course Spike Jones I am familiar with. I said that Spike Jones is sometimes too weird even for me. Some of his "music" is of course just not very musical, but some of it is just, well, strange. The strangest part of Spike Jones music is usually the downright bizarre instrumentation. Not that I am not used to that by now - after all I have cited Weird Al as being responsible for history's best gurgling solo - but still, when there is enough of it at once it can have a jarring effect. But then today, inspired by a quote in "Southern California Purples" (by Chicago, of course!), I decided to listen to "I am the Walrus." It's amazing what enough listening will desensitize one to: this song, well, I mean, we knew it was weird, but have you really listened to it lately? The sounds are so bizarre! (And of course, as far as the Beatles' later work goes, lots of it was pretty strange, so while this might be an extreme example it is far from unique.) So, thus, I was shown to be ignorant of how strange the music I routinely listen to really is. The irony is that I tend to think of the Beatles as mainstream compared to a lot of what I listen to. But I guess mainstream does not exclude strange. I thought it was a funny twist to the whole thing.

In Luke 10, Jesus sends out seventy of his disciples ahead of him, giving them instructions on how to conduct themselves, and telling them to heal the sick and to declare to them that the kingdom of God is near. This passage in itself is intersting, and worth study. But here I am interested in what happens when the disciples return:

The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” He said to them, “I saw Satan having fallen like lightning from heaven. Behold, I give you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will in any way hurt you. Nevertheless, don’t rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:17-20, WEB)

For all of the great deeds the disciples were doing - though, of course, it was not them, but rather the Spirit - Jesus says that what there is to be truly thankful for is that they have been accepted into heaven. A simple thing, but so incredible and profound. And Jesus words are a useful reminder, I think, for I know I for one am often looking for the kinds of miracles the disciples were seeing, when the truly important miracle was done long ago.

As seen on a soy latte carton (yes, they have that): "Not to be used for infant formula."

Okay, my day has been made... I just found out two really useful things you can do in Emacs:

• Resize "windows." If you use split windows in Emacs (C-x 2), it will split the windows evenly. To resize the one window, use M-x to get to the command buffer and then enter the command enlarge-window. On my copy of Emacs, the shortcut is C-x ^ (which is a bit awkward to enter, but hey - better than typing "enlarge-window" 5 times...).

• This is the big one: Make Emacs scroll one line at a time! Incredible... Anyway, the command is M-x set-variable then scroll-step then 2. That is, of course, long, so you could also add (setq scroll-step 2) to your .emacs file. This command works in newer versions of Emacs though (20.1, perhaps?), so if you are on an older one, you are out of luck. (This tip I found in an article by Larry Ayers.)

Having smooth scrolling has just made my life so much easier.

[Update: Why on earth does that article suggest a value of 2? Two works, but set it to 1 for much better effect. I noted at the time that was an odd value, but I assumed there was some reason for it - though apparently there isn't.]

[Okay, so I have been having trouble at least on Mac OS X with it set to 1. Beats me. Anyway, you may experiment, I guess. Or look it up. I will eventually....]

Well, I finally got the new blog for Jon at Christian Challenge up. In the end I did end up using Wordpress. It was a close call, as both provide pretty much identical functionality. I have the feel for Nucleus down much better, I admit. Wordpress had three advantages, though: (1) out of the box it was (narrowly) closer in functionality and compatibility to what we needed (e.g. XHTML without chaning one thing), (2) it (as far as I can tell right now) cooperates with our established PHP includes, and (3) it has a much simpler intial setup, which meant I was able to get it working with our site much faster. As it is I actually don't have either one integrated right now, but it will be much simpler to get the Wordpress one fixed (I am pretty close). Mostly it was chance I had Wordpress up first. By the way, Nucleus does have a few things going for it: It has a much simpler page layout that lends itself to better integration with an existing design, and its functions return strings instead of printing out text - much easier to combine with an existing page, except for the whole lack of PHP integration. It is a shame that the initial design is so complicated - it isn't necessary. But I had to change a lot of HTML to get it to where I needed, and I had to change both "skins" and "templates." The split functionality of the two has some advantages, but it has a high cost for intial setup if you don't accept a default skin and template. Next step is to make the blog fit in with the rest of the site, instead of having a completely different appearance.

People are always asking me about lake effect snow. Lake effect snow was usually a moderate amount of extra snow, though some areas like South Bend got much more of it than we did, so for them it might not have been quite as moderate - though it doesn't exactly create blizzards. Chicago does sometimes get it, but it is really on the wrong side of the lake to get too much; Northwest Indian get more, though still not as much as North Central Indiana. APOD, I noticed, had posted this great image from the satellite SeaWiFS satellite a few days ago (though the image is from 2000):

Notice that in this case, Valparaiso appears to be snow free, while South Bend is getting plenty.

Since I can't post anything useful, let me post something useless (which, as Justin would be quick to point out, may mean it is useful - see Chuang Tzu for more on that)...