The story is simple enough. The End Times are here, Christ has raptured the faithful, and the unfortunate folks left behind have to face Antichrist and the tribulations. What makes it work is the stories are told from a very ordinary point of view, individuals you can relate to. The books are basically potboilers with evangelical intent. The hero doesn’t get the girl, he comes to Christ.

They’re entertaining. The stories are simple and well told. The language is plain but well chosen. The character names are great: “Nicolae Carpathia”, “Rayford Steele”. And you have to love titles like “Tribulation Force” and “Soul Harvest”. (See Slacktivist for an alternate view.)

Entertainment aside, the books’ real intent is to convert. Not buying. I can’t help but feel something sinister in this kind of proselytizing. The books aren’t overtly offensive. But the head of the UN is the Antichrist, religious peace and unity is actually The Harlot of Revelations, there’s a lot of excitement about 144,000 Jews converting to Christianity, and one of our hero’s minor nemeses is an obvious lesbian who is made out to be a mean bitch “who wears sensible shoes”. Not a worldview I choose.

Maybe when millions of people disappear suddenly I’ll believe this literalist form of Christianity. In the meantime, the books make for a fun commute. If I run out of the main series, there are enough auxilliary books to rival Star Trek.

Advertising is OK when it works right. This is offensive.

What’s really great is XBMC has Python embedded. It has standard Python2.3 and xbmc and xbmcgui modules for programming. There’s a forum for development discussion, an official script download site, and some docs and scripts from a developer.

I made text Python XBMC documentation from Alex’s Word tutorial if you want a quick look at how it works.

An XBox is just another PC, except it’s cheap and designed for your living room. It’s great that someone’s finally made your living room TV scriptable.

An old friend of mine from the 713 scene, Jason Asbahr, made Python for PlayStation 2 and GameCube.

Voting machines

It’s obvious that electronic voting machines don’t enable fair elections. The software is buggy, the companies are dishonest, and there’s hints of fraud. So why are we even considering using them?

Kerry and Vietnam

Kerry served honourably in Vietnam and then came back to the US and honourably protested the Vietnam war. Why is this a problem for his campaign? Shouldn’t it be considered a qualification?

Bush and Iraq

It’s painfully obvious that the Bush administration used the 9/11 terrorist attacks and selective intelligence as false pretenses to invade Iraq. They lied and now we’re in a disastrous war. Why is there any question about Bush’s fitness for leadership?

Budgets and tax cuts

The Bush financial policy is clearly headed for disaster. We’re simultaneously cutting rich people’s taxes, spending more and increasing deficits, and pretending the $50+ billion we need for Iraq isn’t part of the budget. Why is the Bush administration still seen as fiscally responsible?

This is all so clear to me, I wonder what the rest of the country thinks. Maybe I’m in some sort of weird bubble in San Francisco? Even so, young people coming back dead from Iraq seems hard to ignore.

Part of the issue is length: 944 is a lot of pages. But a lot of it is editing. The book is just too much. Too bloated. There are some really cool ideas in there, and some fun research, but it’s buried deep in the 944 pages. I finally checked out entirely after the second book about Half Cocked Jack. I kept waiting for something relevant or interesting to happen and it didn’t.

I like Stephenson’s writing. I thought The Diamond Age was brilliant and Snow Crash has a lot of interesting ideas in it. I even managed to get through Cryptonomicon, although it suffers from the same bloat as Quicksilver.

Maybe he needs fierce editing? Maybe I need patience.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that the MP3 market is being owned by computer companies, not stereo companies. And it’s nice, too. I love having 20 gigs of stuff in my car that I can sync to work. I love having 40 gigs of music on my stereo, letting me move from Górecki to Bach to Schönberg to Messiaen to Wendy Carlos without having to fumble for CDs. Isn’t it amazing that companies like Sony missed it?

First USA just sent me an offer to write a check for over $15,000 at 4% fixed APR for the life of the balance. There are a few catches, but they aren’t terrible:

• 3% of the value of the check is charged as a fee, but it’s capped at $50.
• If I screw up a payment in any way, including if I “pay another creditor late”, I lose the good rate.
• Any payments I make on the card first go to this loan, and only later go to pay off normal charges that bear a higher interest rate

AT&T’s only apology to me ever was two weeks’ free on my contract. $15 compensation for about twelve hours of my time straightening out their mess.

I received 8800 emails last month at home.
That’s 300 a day.
63% of that mail was spam.

If you’ve heard of Henryk Górecki it’s probably because of the Dawn Upshaw recording of his Symphony No. 3 that achieved huge popular success a few years ago. Where that symphony is haunting and lyrical, this 1980 concerto is forceful and propulsive.

Amazon has a sample of the recording I have, see track 5. The dizzying introduction gives a good flavour of the complexity of the piece. For minimalist music with relatively limited instrumentation there’s a lot going on.

Man, I need to make a million bucks a year.

I love Hot Links because the design is good and the thumbnails are surprisingly useful. For another linkblog aggregator (more data, less design) see delicious. And of course daypop, Blogdex, and Technorati give a view of what’s hot in blogs in general.

Online distribution isn’t anything new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it work so smoothly. Trymedia is the company behind this. Their ActiveMARK suite includes DRM, distribution, and payments. At $20 a game, maybe they’ll make this work? A quick check suggests that a crack for the DRM is not widely known. Trymedia’s survey suggests that folks who steal games by downloading them would be willing to pay for them if the terms are right.

The main site for this distribution channel is Trygames. The games there are generally second tier and/or old. I don’t know if Trymedia seeded the Tycoon bittorrents themselves or the publishers did. Atari/Infogrames, one of the main Tycoon publishers partnered with KaZaA to distribute ToEE awhile back.

Commercial mayonnaise is pretty good but homemade is supposed to be easy and better. I tried last night with a simple recipe and it didn’t go so well. The first attempt was going perfectly up until I added the last bit of oil at which point the sauce broke. You go from having a silky suspension of oil in egg to chunky, greasy mess of egg suspended in oil. The second attempt was better but I got the flavouring wrong. All told it took me an hour. I can’t imagine what it’d be like with a hand whisk.

Here. Listen for yourself. I believe I can fly (excerpt, ogg).

This spring, daylight savings time changes at 45 different times around the world. No wonder it’s so hard to know what time it is.

Note the evolution of these bots:

What’s most interesting is this is the first big bot network that doesn’t use IRC for the control channel. Instead it uses WASTE, bootstrapped by Gnutella. No encryption yet.

We’ve come a long way since The Morris Worm (whose author is now an MIT professor). Stacheldraht was the first of the coordinated worms I learned about; amazing how much further it’s come. We’re still not quite to the 8 minute nightmare of Warhol worms, although Slammer was close. These things are so powerful, I just wish someone could use them for good.

• Last night Ken’s cell phone woke me up at 5am. It starts beeping when the battery is low.
• Last week a quiet high pitched beeping woke me up at 6am. It took me 20 minutes to locate the source; a home security alarm panel.
• Smoke detectors make noise when their battery is low. The high pitched noise is frustratingly difficult to locate.
• My microwave beeps when it’s done microwaving. Then it continues to beep, twice every 30 seconds, until you open the door.
• One of my officemate’s cell phone beeps every 15 seconds when he has a message.
• Trucks all over the US make loud high pitched noises when they are in reverse gear.
• At every meeting, every conference, someone’s Windows laptop plays a little tune when it starts up.