The Null Device

2001/12/13

This looks interesting: WinTel, a MacOS X program which can run PC OSes under MacOS X. They're selling it for US$30. Judging from the screenshot on their site, it appears to be just Bochs, an open-source PC emulator, with some more user-friendly packaging.

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14 quotes; some are from Senator Joseph McCarthy at the time of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, and some are from current US Attorney-General John Ashcroft. Can you tell which ones are which? (via onepointzero)

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Proof that terrorist whackos come from all stripes: The FBI has arrested the chairman of the Jewish Defence League, the militant Jewish nationalist group founded by the late Meir Kahane, over plans to blow up a mosque in Los Angeles and the office of a congressman of Arab descent. According to an informant, the attacks were planned as a "wake-up call" for Arabs. (Presumably Arabs being kicked off flights for their suspicious names and skin colour and randomly assaulted by all-American rednecks (along with turban-wearing Sikhs) wasn't enough of a wake-up call.)

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I also picked up the new Set Fire To Flames CD, sings reign rebuilder. and it's quite lovely, in a A Silver Mount Zion-meets-early-Black Tape For A Blue Girl kind of way. Some tracks seem a bit pointless, but others (such as the haunting steal compass/drive north/disappear) more than make up for it; and the booklet is quite good too, consisting of a disjointed collection of vaguely disturbed pictures, similar in concept to Radiohead's Amnesiac book. The whole effort seems to echo the stark, desolate Canadian winter in tone, though it has its moments of warmth, and is not soul-crushingly bleak. (I'll probably write up a proper review for RAN)

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USENET... hmmm, yes, I remember that: Google has just put online a USENET archive going back to 1981. This contains many posts of historical significance, such as Linus Torvalds announcing his pet project, and an excited discussion, from 1982, about a doovy new gadget called the Commodore 64.

Which of course means that all the silly juvenile rubbish that one posted to the Net is now available for all the world to see what a bozo one was.

No, I won't link to all the daft shit I posted to USENET; you can find it easily enough (hint: look in alt.religion.kibology). Suffice it to say that I was a snotty smartarse with no life to speak of outside of USENET. (In my defence, I lived in an outer suburb an hour away from where anything of interest happened.) Whereas now I'm a smartarse with a weblog, who lives in the inner city, sees bands and pontificates on obscure records. (Which doesn't make me cool, incidentally; just a record-collecting geek. There's a reason why it's compared to trainspotting, you know.) But at least now my friends are people I've actually met...

However, two posts of historical note from the archives: the post where I proposed the creation of alt.discordia (I was "Lee Harvey Oswald Smith"), shortly after having read Illuminatus! and decided that I was a Discordian. (Which I still am, when I feel like it.) And here is my first-ever USENET post. Oh yes, and the thing about my being the most evil person on the Net in 1994 is true. Quake before my godlike mojo, foolish meat-beings.

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US authorities are interrogating John Walker Lindh, the captured Taliban fighter from Northern California, and he has started singing like a bird, saying that there will be a massive biological attack on America this Sunday and so on. Mind you, it's not known how much of that is genuine intelligence, and how much is Dr. Hine E. Craque using his natural gift for spinning a line of bullshit.

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