If any of you ever get the chance to go through the process of buying a house…. don’t.

It is seriously the most difficult, time consuming, and stress inducing thing you will ever have to go through. I don’t know if having my own home is worth it. I’m generally a pretty laid back person, but this has me stressed the fuck out!

It’s especially horrible due to the fact that I’m self employed. All the paperwork and information I had to give to the mortgage broker makes me feel like I’ve been anally raped with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

Anyway, Now you know why I haven’t posted anything here recently. I’m too busy having my gag reflex triggered by way of my anus. Hopefully it will all be over in the next month or so, and I’ll be able to post more here from the comfort of my very own basement office.

It’s true, my life revolves around forums. I manage servers for some large forum sites, and when I’m not working, I spent time reading and posting at places like SomethingAwful and occiasionally FARK (I still don’t “get” *chan, though. Deal with it!). I guess my obsession started out with BBS message boards, and things like FidoNet. It’s kind of nice to have a job where you get to do what you love.

While in my Internet travels yesterday, I came across one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long time. If you don’t at least chuckle at the following, you don’t spend enough time on the Internets.

WARNING: Video contains language some might not find suitable in a work environment. I also won’t be responsible if you get fired for laughing loudly.

My wife has been quite obsessed with lolcats recently. While listening to TWiT tonight, they mentioned this picture, which I believe is the best lolcat picture ever. seriously.

Edit: Now, I know that it’s not “correct” by physics standards, but it’s absolutely hilarious by LOLCat standards.

I love MAME. Mainly because I’m a huge fan of oldschool games. For the longest time I’ve wanted to build a stand-alone MAME box in an old Arcade case. A few weeks ago I broke down and bought myself an iPhone, and today I found out that work is being done on a MAME port to the iPhone.

While it’s a bit slow, and can only play a few games decently, It’s a good start. I can’t wait until I can play some of my favorite Arcade games on my iPhone.

Every year at DefCon attendees get to play “spot the fed” where federal agents are “outed” at the annual hacker convention. This year, in an interesting twist, attendees were tipped off that there was a mole from Dateline NBC.

When an elaborite plan was put into motion, dateline producer Michelle Madigan bolted from the room and left the convention. You can read more about it here.

On a side note, I’ll be in Chicago until the middle of next week. Updates may be sporadic, or even not at all.

KDE announced today that the first public beta of KDE 4.0 is now available. From the annoucement:

Now the KDE libraries are rather stable, the development focus is shifting to finishing other components of the desktop. One of the most notable components is Plasma. While the developers are pretty much ready with the infrastructure for the plasmoids, most of them are not yet shipped by default Development of those features is happening in KDE’s source code repository in the playground module. Thus, you will still see good old Kicker, KDE’s panel and taskbar when you boot up KDE 4.0 Beta 1.
Javascript support has been added to plasma, and according to its lead developer we might soon support the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. Superkaramba applets are supported already, Opera widgets might follow soon.

It’ll be kind of neat to have a globalized widget platform, as there’s a lot of good widgets out there, but generally the ones you want arn’t for your chosen platform.

Also, the file manager portion of Konqueror has been split off and named Dolphin.

I’ve always been partial to KDE. As many times as I’ve tried using XFCE and Gnome itself, I just always find myself going back to KDE on X. You can download KDE 4.0 Beta1 in pre-compiled packages for Kubuntu (Feisty and Gutsy), openSUSE, and Mandriva.  There’s also a portage overlay available for Gentoo users, however it’s been reported to be not very stable.

For the first time ever, a federal judge has ordered the first reimbursement of expenses to a defendant in the music industry’s “war on piracy”. Capitol Records has been ordered to pay nearly $70,000 to Deborah Foster to cover attorney fees and litigation costs she incurred when she was wrongfully sued for illegally downloading music.

The case, which started in 2004, was eventually won by Foster, She then petitioned for recovery of expenses with an itemized claim of more than $114,000. After reviewing the claim the Judge Lee R. West ruled on Monday that Foster was entitled to receive $68,685.23.

The judge disagreed with Capitol’s argument that Foster wasn’t entitled to an award because she had every opportunity to stop fighting the case and settle saying, “Throughout the course of this litigation, the plaintiffs have alleged that had the defendant appropriately assisted their copyright infringement investigation and litigation, she could have avoided being sued. The court has rejected this argument on numerous occasions and declines to entertain it yet again. The defendant was entitled to litigate the claims the plaintiffs chose to bring against her and … she is entitled to recover reasonable attorneys’ fees.”

The RIAA issued a statement saying, “We respectfully believe that this ruling is in error and is an isolated occurrence. Our interest in these cases is enforcing the rights of the record companies and artists, while fostering an online environment where the legal marketplace can flourish and the music industry can invest in the new bands of tomorrow. In the handful of cases where the person engaging in the illegal activity in the household is not the person responsible for the ISP account, we look to gather the facts quickly and do our best to identify the appropriate defendant.”

In the thousands of suits the RIAA has slammed down upon people, only six have sought to recover costs from their battles. Deborah Foster is the first to win that battle.

Ray Beckerman, an attorney who has represented some defendants in the illegal downloading suits, predicted that the Oklahoma court decision “will be seen as a landmark” for several reasons. “The court has indicated that the RIAA’s theory for trying to pin liability on a parent is marginal,” Beckerman said. “The court has held that the RIAA cannot insulate itself from liability for attorneys fees by just dropping the case, and the award will encourage (a) defendants to fight back, and (b) lawyers who have not yet done so to join the fight.”

Hurrah.

Apparently we aren’t the only ones in the world upset with horrible cellular coverage. A man in Sydney Australia got his hands on an Armored Personel Carrier (APC) and went on a rampage, taking out 6 cell phone towers, and was apprehended on his way to a seventh.

“He continued to destroy mobile tower communications sheds by crashing through the perimeter fence and colliding with structures, causing significant damage.” said Suburban Mt Druitt police Chief Inspector Guy Haberley.
Our hero was charged with malicious damage, breaking and entering, predatory driving and driving in a dangerous manner.

I’m pretty sure each and every one of us have wanted to do this. I know I have, more than once. I get horrible reception at my house, and according to AT&T’s coverage map, It’s supposed to be one of the strongest areas in the city.

Seriously though, I wonder how the cops apprehended him? I don’t think there’s a single soul that hasn’t felt the pain of having a dropped call. Even if you don’t own a wireless phone, I’m most people have talked to others who do have them, and know what it’s like when they keep cutting out.

I need to get me a tank. Anyone up for a joyride?

CCP has offered a free 5 day reactivation of your Eve account for people who used to play Eve Online that wanted to check out the latest Revelations II patch. I decided it would be a good idea to log back in and check it out, since it seems as if Eve has become even more popular as time has progressed compared to most MMORPGs which tend to start out pretty big, and progressively die off.

I hooked up with Goonfleet, one of the largest corporations in the game (a corporation is like a guild) comprised of members of the SomethingAwful Forums. So far things are going pretty good, I really do like the game, as it’s different from every other MMO out there.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

I grew up watching Mr. Rogers when I was a kid. Fox News just managed to insult my entire childhood, and told me that I’m a rotten person because he told us we were “Special”. Good Job Fox News. Just when I think you can’t get any worse, you do.

Fred Rogers was a great man. I don’t think that I’m “Special” and “entitled to everything” as you claim I should. I worked very hard to get where I am today (Sitting on my ass at home and running my own business), I wasn’t entitled to it, nor when I got bad grades did I blame the teachers.

You are evil, Fox News. The proof is as follows: