Please enjoy jwz mixtape 004.

Questions? Comments? Indecent proposals?

( Poll )

On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient's left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes. The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line.

Poll #906264 footit
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How many nipples did you body come with as stock equipment?

View Answers
Mean: 2.17 Median: 2 Std. Dev 0.81

0	2 (0.5%)
1	2 (0.5%)
2	357 (91.1%)
3	16 (4.1%)
4	7 (1.8%)
5	1 (0.3%)
6	0 (0.0%)
7	4 (1.0%)
8	3 (0.8%)

If the answer is greater than 2:

Let's say you found out you had a tapeworm. [*]  Let's say the doctor gave you some pills to kill it, and in due course, this giant thing came out of your butt.

Poll #874397 Unlike Mescal
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Would you:

[*] No, I'm not the one who has one.

Is a burrito a sandwich?

The Panera Bread Co. bakery-and-cafe chain says yes. But a judge said no, ruling against Panera in its bid to prevent a Mexican restaurant from moving into the same shopping mall.

Panera has a clause in its lease that prevents the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury from renting to another sandwich shop. Panera tried to invoke that clause to stop the opening of an Qdoba Mexican Grill.

But Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke cited Webster's Dictionary as well as testimony from a chef and a former high-ranking federal agriculture official in ruling that Qdoba's burritos and other offerings are not sandwiches. The difference, the judge ruled, comes down to two slices of bread versus one tortilla.

Poll #866525 The Burrito Issue
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Burrito: Sandwich?

McMuffin: Sandwich?

Shawerma: Sandwich?

Shawerma: Burrito?

Burrito: Shawerma?

Sandwich: Food Tube?

Poll #813637 bridge
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Your heading:

Poll #729849 N+1
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

N+1:

(Yes, I am aware that there is no Option Three. Take a fuckin' stand.)

Poll #726302 Burn, Packaging, Burn
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Best reason to download music/movies instead of buying CDs/DVDs:

Update: I just have to say that you are all fuckin' crazy: 374 to 38+28? Madness! The celophane is clearly the worst thing evar.

So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that I was thinking about switching to a Mac Mini or something for the DNA audio streams. What software would I use?

Right now I'm running Icecast 2.2.0, and I get audio into it by using the Perl "Shout" library. The MP3 bits come from one of two places:

• When the club isn't open, the audio just comes out of mp3 files on disk. This part's easy.
• When we're open, the audio comes from the sound card via "arecord -q -f cd | lame ..."

So I could continue just using Icecast 2.2.0 (it's somewhat of a pain in the ass, but I'm familiar with its failings by now), but what's the OSX replacement for that "arecord" command? I've googled up a few recipes that involve installing esound, but there's just no fuckin' way that's the sane answer.

Nicecast ($40) looks nice and simple, but I don't think it does what I need: it doesn't seem to be non-interactive enough. In particular, I need to switch back and forth between "live" and "archive" from cron.

Though, you know, I'm not sure anyone actually cares about that... Right now the live streams (and by extension, the Real stream) re-broadcast audio from the saved archives during the day when we're not open. I guess I could just give up on that and have them be silent during the day, and assume that people who want to listen to the archives will do so explicitly.

Suggestions?

Also: does a MacOS version of RealProducer even exist any more? I can't tell what all this "Helix" nonsense is about, but it looks like it all stopped in 2004. (Please note, I'm talking about RealProducer, not RealServer: Producer is the software that reads from the video card, encodes video, and sends a single stream up to RealServer for re-broadcast.)

(And before you ask, switching from Real to Quicktime is not an option, because GrooveFactory, the folks who are generously donating video bandwidth and re-broadcasting to us, only do Real, not QT.)

Poll #720645 dna media
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Audio:

Video:

I don't own a gun, and I find the gun-nuttery of everyone I know who does own one to be offensive enough that I think they all ought to be in therapy. They all own guns because of some fucking Rambo tough-guy fantasy, and not for any kind of defense. For example, Octal and every single person who camps at Thunderdome: I don't know one person who owns a gun who doesn't think it's just a big loud toy, rather than a tool whose only purpose is to kill people (and not in that fun video game sense, but in the "mess up your head for the rest of your life" sense).

But after watching the Libertarian hootenanny that New Orleans turned into, I actually started considering whether owning one might not be such a bad idea, living as I am in a place that's prone to both earthquakes and zombie attacks.

Then, of course, the morons who live in this town went and voted to outlaw handguns. It's ineffective, unenforcable, and probably Unconstitutional, but wow, it sure is irritating.

Poll #609688 guns
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who's more annoying?

View Answers


Gun nuts.
258 (45.6%)

Anti-gun nuts.
308 (54.4%)

The Second Amendment guarantees your right to:

View Answers


duck hunting.
81 (14.3%)

violently overthrow the U.S. Government.
393 (69.4%)

love a man in uniform.
92 (16.3%)

Godwin in... five... four... three...

Attention: Please only fill out this poll if you are actually a Mac user. I don't give a flying fuck what you use on Windows! I honestly didn't think I had to spell this out, but apparently I do.

Poll #511923 Fight!
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Browser:

Mail:

AIM:

IRC:

Please explain your answers. Especially if you said "Other!"

(  --More--(25%)  )

Poll #467064 pennies
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What do you do with pennies?

        Other:

I think it's funny that Mel Gibson's wankfest is now called "The Passion of The Christ" because that reminds me of the "Batman" / "The Batman" naming controversy.

Poll #233487 Theology
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who'd win?

So every now and then I get the notion in my head that having a stand-up arcade cabinet running MAME would be a good idea. The notion has come again.

(I already have stand-ups of Millipede and Star Wars. If I were to buy another stand-up, it'd probably be Tempest, since vector screens are just intrinsically cooler hardware than raster.)

So, there are four paths one could take:

1. Build one from scratch, using someone else's plans.
   Pro: the controls would be where I wanted them, and it would only cost a couple hundred bucks;
   Con: I don't have much woodworking experience, though I could probably borrow the tools.

2. Buy some crappy game just for the cabinet, and gut it.
   Pro: somewhat easier, and about the same cost;
   Con: fitting a new controller configuration in might be harder than it would be when starting from scratch. Gutting a game is somewhat sacrilegious.

3. Buy a pre-built cabinet I can put a Linux box in, e.g,: ArcadePC ($3000 without computer); or MassSystems ($1200); or X-Arcade ($1000, and I think it's a lame `mini'-cabinet.)
   Pro: Shit would Just Work;
   Con: Jesus, Mother of Fuck! That's a lot of money! Plus shipping!

4. Decide I'd rather play video games lying down than standing up, and just get a controller and figure out how to get the computer to display on my TV.
   Pro: moderately easy.
   Con: extremly low coolness factor.

Of course the real problem here would be figuring out how to lay out the control panel so that it works for the widest variety of games. Games are always designed with specific controllers in mind, and the quality of play goes to hell if you're using the wrong controller. (How could you play Tempest without a spinner? Star Wars without a yoke? Marble Madness without that gigantic track ball? Q-Bert without the joystick being at 45°? Even Joust with a space bar and arrow keys is horrid.)

So I'm somewhat worried about ending up with a big mess of controllers that aren't quite right for any game.

Poll #94463 juego terminado jugador 1
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

¿Quién es más macho?

After waiting five hours for tape #1 to be written and verified, I see:

Total bytes written: 10723840000 (10GB, 991kB/s)
dump started at Wed Sep 25 04:20:44 PDT 2002,
    finished at Wed Sep 25 07:18:23 PDT 2002

verifying archive...
tar -f /dev/tape --blocking-factor=200 --diff

c/01/mp3/babes_in_toyland/spanking_machine/10-dust_cake_boy.mp3: Contents differ
c/01/mp3/belly/star/06-witch.mp3: Contents differ
c/01/mp3/coil/the_snow_ep/05-answers_come_in_dreams_ii.mp3: Contents differ

verify finished at Wed Sep 25 10:16:32 PDT 2002

Poll #62964 democratizing the sysadmin process
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

So what should I do?

Poll #50033 bored now
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Anarchist fantasy hootenanny you'd least want to attend: