I finally set up a wiki! The address should be obvious to anyone with intelligence, who are the only people I want going on there. It's kinda high-bandwidth, mind, so if I catch anyone abusing it they'll have a banhammer embedded in their skull. Just setting it up so far (which isn't even complete) has taken nearly two megabytes of bandwidth! However, it's in a usable state, so go ahead and add content!

Svend, I have a few words for you. "I don't serve the members, I serve ASFAR"? You don't serve the members? Why, then, should we serve you with our votes? Oh, because you serve ASFAR? Well, what is ASFAR? I'd thought that ANY organisation is its members. Sorry, but just because ASFAR has noble goals does not exempt them from the rules of being an organisation. ASFAR is Just Not That Special. You cannot serve ASFAR without serving the members! You botched up on the officer appointments. I still didn't have an issue with you being President, I just wanted the elections re-held to allow it to be done fairly. But saying you don't serve the members? I don't even want you on the board anymore! Lucky for me (and the rest of the membership), you've decided to put removing you from the board on the schedule for the next meeting (we didn't even have to ask!), and you're letting the entire membership vote! I, for one, will support the motion to remove you from the board, and will campaign for others to do so as well, if you do not come up with an explanation for that statement.

One David X. Li has come forward and admitted his role in the Wall Street crash. He wrote a mathematical model of the economy, and it accurately predicted what would happen. Until it wasn't. Small differences were noticed, but it still worked well, so they were ignored. Then everything stopped working. Why? Because the model worked too well. Everyone started using it. Obviously, when everyone does the same thing on the market, things don't work well. Even worse, the model was based on the old methods of economics-- it didn't predict it's own use.

But it's not really David's fault here. He wrote a mathematical formula that could be used to model the economic market. A few investors started using it to get an edge. But then the secret got out, and everybody started using it. Wall Street investors were too interested in short-term gains to think about what would happen. Blame them.

I just wrote a paper, On the Construction of IPv4. I include it with this post.

Abstract
Unified extensible algorithms have led to many key advances, including object-oriented languages and I/O automata. In this paper, we show the deployment of access points. Here, we concentrate our efforts on showing that the little-known highly-available algorithm for the development of the partition table by Wilson et al. [1] is Turing complete.

Read the rest of this paper

My goddamn laptop just decided to, AGAIN, not bother turning on its fucking backlight. Without a fucking screen backlight, YOU CAN'T SEE WHAT THE FUCK'S ON THE SCREEN! Now, the good news is I have a dual-monitor setup, so I can just move to one screen and everything works (except that I have to move everything on the same screen, which sucks an ass's arse's left testicle. But THIS TIME, the fucking trackpad decides to interpret a click instead of a drag... RIGHT WHILE I'M ON THE "LAPTOP ONLY" option. This, of course, has to be dealt with immediately! So now everything's on the laptop screen (with no backlight), and the monitor is disabled. So I try restarting in safe mode to see what happens. Well, it goes to the monitor... but the DISPLAY OUTPUT option isn't available, because that's in a SPECIAL DRIVER, and I'm in safe (ie FAIL) mode. So, I restart to normal mode, hoping that it'll just take hold anyway. It doesn't. Everything's outputting to the laptop screen with no backlight. I remember that there's a "safe mode with networking support", so I try that. After all, the resolution and refresh rate might suck, but it is at least possible to see. But no. By "networking support", it means "your ethernet connection might work". But of course, I'm one of the last people in the world with shit dial-up, so it doesn't bother letting me use the modem. So I reboot again. Obviously I can't really see a damn thing, but I can at least make out basic shapes if I align the screen JUST SO to let it catch the light (which has to be RIGHT NEXT to what you want to see-- any further there's not enough light, any closer and it's just glare). So I eventually succeed in getting the monitor to work, but the screen still doesn't.

This isn't the first time this has happened, so I'll just wait for it to work again (as always happens). But this time I'll actually complain to the manufacturer. I won't name them yet, but I'll post about how it goes.

I'll be accepting submissions for the design contest through 13 March. Anyone can submit a theme, and I'll use whichever I like best (more likely I'll like several and make all of them available). By submitting, you agree to allow me to use the theme.

THE PRIZE: You get your name at the bottom of the page with a link. What, you thought I had money to give you?

This blag has been moved from Blagger to (hosted) Drupal. There's still a few things left to iron out, but the content is here now!