“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

I downloaded the release candidate of Windows 7 today, but found myself without a program to burn the ISO file to DVD. For some reason, ISO Recorder, the de facto standard, didn’t work with the drive in this machine. Looking a bit further, I came across Active@ ISO Burner, which worked. It had the added benefit of not needing to actually be installed: it could run after I downloaded and unzipped it.

Windows 7 looks and sounds good, from everything I hear: here’s hoping installing it on my primary box isn’t a really really stupid thing to do. :-) (And yes, I’m planning a full backup first…)

Hey, all (if anyone’s actually still reading this). Sorry I haven’t been updating lately: when I’ve had something to say, it’s typically been easier to comment on Twitter than to come up with a full post here. Also, I made the mistake of trying to keep things sane in a discussion about naming of Ireland-related articles over at Wikipedia — big mistake. :-)

Incidentally, I just upgraded to 2.8 final and re-enabled Redirection. Hope I didn’t break anything…

Categories were broken earlier, so I updated to the latest nightly build (11096) — now I’m having call-time pass-by-reference errors. Maybe it’s time to stop using the nightly builds and stick with the stable ones.

Edit: changed the theme to see if that would help. I can navigate by category now, at least, but I can’t change the (non-existent) title of this post.

Edit:Ok, it lied on me. The title did change.

From MSNBC today:

One of those present said that when asked, the CIA officers acknowledged that some foreign intelligence agencies had refused, for example, to share information about the location of terrorism suspects for fear of becoming implicated in any eventual torture of those suspects.

Remind me again how torturing suspects was supposed to get us better information, when it was causing other governments to hide suspects from us?

Senator James Inhofe, 2003:

But the Democrats, who cannot muster a majority to oppose him, are seeking, in effect, to change the Constitutional majority-vote requirement. By sustaining this filibuster, they are asserting that 60 votes, not 50, will be required to approve Mr. Estrada. If successful, their effort will amount to a de facto amendment to the Constitution. This outrageous grab for power by the Senate minority is wrong and contrary to our oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Senator James Inhofe, 2009:

I understand that Judge Hamilton’s nomination is still pending before the Judiciary Committee, but I had to come to the floor to speak so that the American people, who are very concerned about this nomination, will know that I and my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee are taking interest and are not just going to let this nomination sail through. In fact I will filibuster David Hamilton.

Yesterday, I was getting internal errors after updating the blog, so I rolled back the changes — only to continue the errors. Today, it’s working fine.

<Barbarino>I’m so confused…</Barbarino>

Edit: for the record, I just updated to revision 10988, and it’s working fine.

Edit^2: but Redirection is still broken.

I keep wondering about this and then forgetting I looked up the answer. :-) I just checked the FEMA map, and I live quite comfortably in Zone C, despite the proximity to the Penobscot River — the flood risk is minimal.

I still can’t help wondering what would happen if a hurricane blew a storm sturge straight up Penobscot Bay at high tide, though — would it peter out before it got up to us? The river does have an average 13-foot high tide at Bangor, with a record of 18 feet…

Sorry about not realizing the blog was down — I need to check consistently after I update to the latest bleeding-edge version. It appears there was an error in the Redirection plugin — disabling it brought the blog back so I could figure out what to do about it.

Update: I tried reinstalling the current version, 2.1.13, and got the error back, so if you’re seeing the same thing, wait for the next version.

It’s always good to follow up on your Twitter posts. :-)

robinbloor:

Pneumono ultra micro scopic silico volcano­coniosis is a lung disease – and a long disease. The longest English word that’s not a chemical.

sarekofvulcan:

@robinbloor Actually, it’s a made-up lung disease. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

robinbloor:

@SarekOfVulcan It’s factitious but not fictitious. Like dihydrogen monoxide.

sarekofvulcan:

@robinbloor /DHMO/ Did you know that’s a major component of acid raidn?

robinbloor:

@SarekOfVulcan I’m told that chemical companies in California have been dumping it into local rivers.

scottsigler:

@robinbloor what’s your source on Cali chemical companies dumping into watershed?

robinbloor:

@scottsigler ur joking, right?

scottsigler:

@robinbloor Um, no. I live here. What’s your source for that story? A link? Journalism or word-of-mouth.

robinbloor

@scottsigler DHMO (Dihydrogen Monoxide) is water. It’s a long running joke (since 1997) to accuse companies of polluting areas with DHMO.

scottsigler

@robinbloor wow. Hysterical.