What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

I saw this a while ago, and it’s pretty great if you like Animal Collective. Sorry I didn’t share earlier.

Allegedly I know my unicode but I still get rad surprises:

䷂ - U+4DC2 HEXAGRAM FOR DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING

bad start.

I was just upgrading WordPress and noticed I haven’t said much in a while! Not for lack of anything going on, but it’s mostly been personal stuff and work stuff. Seeing as this is already a meta post, I’ll summarize for those following my stream that care (hello, facebook).

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Oh yeah. So was I. The current version of Adobe Flash for Linux (9.0.124 for the intrepid) breaks as soon as you load the myspace music player. If you’re any kind of music fan, that kinda ruins 50% of new music availability. I got agitated enough to do something about it today, here’s how i installed the new flash 10 beta and fixed the issue.

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I spent a good chunk of the night reading the transcript of The Fog of War which I got from a post on Ben Fry’s blog which I was reading because Zero informed me Ben Fry dropped some serious Glagolitic Capital Spidery Ha. It’s the wisdom of Robert McNamara from being involved in WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. If you believe that failure is the best chance to learn, this is a chance to read about insight gained from probably the biggest failures in the past century; the atomic bombing of Japan (after already essentially decimating them by firebombing their cities), the willingness to lose everything in atomic war, and the inability to understand the central motivations of what was essentially a civil war. McNamara gives the following lessons with amazing historic perspective:

• Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
• Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
• Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self.
• Lesson #4: Maximize Efficiency.
• Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
• Lesson #6: Get the data.
• Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
• Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
• Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
• Lesson #10: Never say never.
• Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature.

Spidery Ha.

Please see exhibit A, Episode 3 of Oddistry, a video blog produced in part by my pal Chadrick who is evidently Valleywag’s mascot. As if I didn’t have enough ego gratification.

just because.

So I was just ego surfing and found a song written by Niko Donburi that has a line about my work persona, Poppy Linden. Woot! Here’s the song…

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I just built my own computer, and I’ve been planning a writeup, but I’m still doing research because this went so well that I am planning on rebuilding my main server as well now. I decided on a low-wattage AMD CPU (the 45W BE-2400) so I could run fanless, and it was the best decision I made. I decided to look in against the performance of the Core 2 Duo E6600, which has become somewhat of a standard. The performance of the E6600 beats the BE-2400 but the BE-2400 is a $90 part, and as I suspected you get a lot more bang for the buck as it seems you do with all AMD CPUs right now. How is AMD allegedly doing so poorly if it’s satisfying customers with great value like this?

You just need to see this.

I’ve been busy, and my free time has mostly gone into the heap of busted that is all my computers. Few more weeks of that. Work is always busy.

Happy purim, easter, equinox, all that.

I use ubuntu (now kubuntu, whatevs) and had the little network manager applet go AWOL on me - it was stuck with “manual configuration” and wouldn’t do its magic for me. Now, I’ve had to write my own nastiness for ifup/down scripts before, so I could cope, but it sucked. I have looked around, but only recently found a page with the solution to the problem. Life is tastes better now.

these people know. If you live in CA they’ll tell you to go to the state info page which points you to Earth911 which takes your zip code and tells you to go to some local place. In the end it just tells me to go to Cole Hardware in the haight, which is exactly what a pal told me. LMAO@me.

Hey folks! If you’re a unix nerd like me, you probably use rsync for everything. Unfortunately I learned today that if you do rsync -vaP --delete source dest you may not have sync’d files. Why? Because that only uses the timestamp.

Yeah.

Anyhow, rsync -c is what you want. This does a checksum everytime regardless of timestamp. A word of caution though: it takes forever. However, my 80GB cache of corrupted MP3s are thanking me.

If you are in the USA and have Comcast high speed internet, you may have had to call them on certain occasions. If so, you are familiar with their particular brand of pain. I’ve had 2 run ins with them lately, one good and one bad.

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So it’s the holidays, and cards pour in. My roommate has “family members” who like to “inappropriately” quote things in cards. (ie: with “love” to you).

Funny enough, I ran into The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks around the same time.

That’s “Uncanny”

Pippin, you were a good cat. We love you, and we miss you. Rest in peace.

What a surreal existentialist post-modern urban masterpiece. If the bout of pretension in the last sentence didn’t knock you unconscious, or if you generally like creepy shit, check out Terminus:

One of my biggest gripes with Getting Things Done since I started trying to heed its sage wisdom in 2004 was once you make these lists, they are your new psychic hell. I have been experiencing that for a while now. Basically, you need to go through your inbox one item at a time and decide to do it if it takes less than 2 minutes, defer it, or delegate it. Delegation doesn’t really happen that often for personal lists, so you have a huge pile of “deferred” - a bunch of stuff that isn’t in your inbox because you’ve already looked at it, but you haven’t done it because it takes more than 2 minutes.

What the hell do you do with that stuff?

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can’t doubt it

gotta shout it

sean + paul

having a party, this friday, 2007-11-16

see our web flyer for .infos

http://www.pauloppenheim.com/misc/party-2007-11/