CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

It's Aliveish!

All assembled, plugged in, and booted into BIOS. CPU speed reports as 200MHz, which is a bit of a worry...

Time to burn myself an operating system and do a little installing, I think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Slotless in Seattle

So I'm putting my new PC together. So far I've installed the motherboard, the CPU, the video card.

I have one slot free.

Because the motherboard includes a wireless adaptor, which takes up one slot, and two USB panels, which each take up a slot, and a USB/Firewire panel, which takes up a slot. And the video card has a little daughter-board for HDTV, which takes up yet another slot.

Without actually installing any expansion cards, six out of a theoretical seven slots are gone.

Fortunately, the motherboard also includes eight SATA ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight-channel sound, and SP-DIF in and out, so I'm not in a hurry to add anything.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Which Indecipherable Script Are You?

Rongorongo (Easter Island, C.E. 1800)

You are RONGORONGO. You are the script of the language Rapanui. The language is still spoken, but no one can read the script. Are you ideographic? Phonetic? Ideo-phonetic? Hieroglyphic? A comic strip? Illustrations for a fairy tale? No one knows.

Which Indecipherable Script Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Swiped from Renata's World, one of the Secret Munu Forums)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The World Stood on its Head

I didn't even know they had the New York Times on Bizarro World:

As the old newsroom saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads." And while it is understandable that newspapers like to report stories about violence, crime, conflict and mayhem, it means that good news is often relegated to the back pages, if reported at all. This happens the world over, be it in Boston, Berlin — or Baghdad. People who live in Boston or Berlin know, of course, that the bad news is never the whole story. Baghdad, on the other hand, is far away, and Westerners have no choice but to rely on reporters to tell us everything that is happening there. And while there's no denying that there is much bad news — the recent spate of audacious attacks by the insurgents is a prime example — the international press has been so focused on the setbacks that few readers are likely know about [sic] the daily parade of small triumphs that mark slow but steady progress. Consider a month's worth of such stories.

The byline?

Arthur Chrenkoff, Helene Silverman, Norman Hathaway.

What happened to the New York Times we all knew and loathed?

(via Tim Blair)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:51 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Bitznpieces Empire

All the sundry components for my new computer are now safely scattered about my living room, waiting to be, like, plugged in.

I'm thinking of doing a full review of the process. With pictures! And benchmarks!

Now, Fedora Core 4 Test 3, or Centos 4? Hmm. Fedora Core 4 will be out in a month, but I can't wait a month. And reinstalling this box once it's in production could prove irksome. So I'm leaning towards Centos this time round.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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O Canada!

Canada, 2005:

A senior government official said the prime minister won't be taking any direction from Clarkson.

"The Governor General receives advice from her first minister. She doesn't tender it," the official said.

Australia, 1975:

On 17 October Whitlam told an interviewer that the Governor-General could not intervene in the crisis because he must always act on the advice of his Prime Minister.

And we all know how that one turned out.*

First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

* For my overseas readers, Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government on November 11, 1975.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dogpile on the UN

The UN Dispatch, a blog sponsored by - but in no way representing the opinion of - the United Nations Foundation, has developed an unhealthy fixation on Roger L. Simon.

They ask,

Is Simon's hyper-focus on a single UN-related issue based on deep convictions? Unbending principles? Moral outrage?

It is true that along with Claudia Rosett, Simon has been consistent in holding the UN's feet to the fire over the Oil-for-Food scandal - UNSCAM - which just happens to be the largest case of embezzlement in history. He hasn't been so thorough in covering, for example, the UN's tardiness in providing aid to tsunami victims or their insistance on five-star housing when inspecting disater areas, or on the endless rounds of peacekeeper sex scandals, and taken little advantage of the opportunities for black humour made possible by the presence of Syria and Cuba on the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Meanwhile at Daniel Drezner's blog, Suzanne Nossel is trying to convince the regulars the UN is not completely corrupt, comparing the UN's misappropriation of billions of dollars of Iraqi money to the fact that there is inadequate documentation for $100 million of US money spent on aid programs in Iraq. She does admit to some UN weaknesses:

Non-Proliferation - Top of mind this week, due to all the ferment over North Korea. This one's largely the fault of the Member States for not strengthening the UN's non-pro mechanisms. See this post at DA for more.

Combating Terrorism - The UN's anti-terror mechanisms are pretty weak. Annan has proposed a series of ways to strengthen them, and the U.S. ought to get behind this agenda.

Human Rights - The UN's human rights mechanisms have essentially been held captive by rights violators. This has got to change, and once again Kofi Annan has the makings of a good proposal on the table.

Public Relations - Always a weak spot, and one that undercuts the organization's effectiveness in many other areas.

The fact is that the UN has been totally ineffective in the first three areas, and all too effective in the last. The solution as Nossel sees it is to give the UN more money and power. The commenters take her to task as well as I could, and probably better.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:14 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Shininess Abounds

Picked up my new toys today! Athlon 64 3200+, Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI, Logitech diNovo Media Desktop, Abit RX600 Pro-HDTV, and various bits and pieces.

Now I just have to take it home and put it all together...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:28 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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U.N. Sues U.S.

You all know the story of Oil-for-Food, right? The U.N. took over the sales of around $65 billion* worth of Iraqi oil over the period of a decade, and in turn provided food and medicine for the Iraqi people... Oh, and also provided palaces and luxury goods for Saddam Hussein and enormous kickbacks for everyone involved. Billions of dollars are unaccounted for.

Fast forward: The U.N. appointed an independent investigative committee to clear its name. Two of the senior investigators recently resigned in protest against the way the investigation was being run, and one of them, Robert Parton, turned over several boxes of documents to the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee in response to a Congressional subpoena.

Well, guess what? The U.N. - in the shape of chief investigator Paul Volcker - has filed a law suit to force Congress to return the documents.

The complaint said that the documents taken by Parton would damage the ability of the committee to complete its work and "potentially places at risk the lives of individuals who have cooperated" with the IIC.

Now that raises this niggling little question in my mind: The interim reports filed by Volcker have not presented any clear case for corruption - rather the reverse. Yet he claims that the evidence upon which he based those reports would put lives at risk if made public.

Why, exactly, Mr Volcker? What is it in those papers that is so damaging that it would lead to murder? And why isn't it present in your own reports?

A decade ago, I considered to US out of UN, UN out of US types to be part of the lunatic fringe. Today, I think they don't go nearly far enough.

(via comments on Roger L. Simon's blog)

* Originally I wrote $110 billion here, but that's incorrect. The $110 billion figure represents the sum of oil sales and aid contracts. Of course, with oil sales of $65 billion, there should be $65 billion in aid contracts, for a total of $130 billion... Leaving $20 billion to account for. The U.N. earned a 2% commission on the oil sales - around $1.4 billion - and there were other legitimate disbursements, but there is still a huge amount of money missing. And that doesn't even account for the kickbacks, which are included in the $110 billion worth of sales and contracts.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Journalists Learn... Nothing, Take Two

From our favourite pathetic hack rag, the New York Times:

Bloggers often invoke these journalistic standards in criticizing the MSM

You're the one claiming to have journalistic standards, buster.

and insist on harsh punishment when they are violated.

Nope. We insist on the truth. Remember that?

The blogs that demanded Dan Rather's ouster

Which were?

accused him of old-school offenses: not sufficiently checking the facts about President Bush's National Guard service, refusing to admit and correct errors, and having undisclosed political views that shaded the journalism.

Bullshit.

There are only two possibilities: Either Rather was duped by an obvious fake, in which case he is too stupid to be on television (quite the achievement, that); or he perpetrated or was party to an obvious fake, in which case he's a lying weasel and too stupid to be on television.

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, resigned this year after a blogmob attacked him for a reported statement at the World Economic Forum at Davos that the military had aimed at journalists in Iraq and killed 12 of them.

Yeah. I wonder why he chose to resign?

Their complaint was even more basic than in Mr. Rather's case: they were upset that Mr. Jordan said something they believed to be untrue.

Well, upset that Eason was spouting anti-American propoganda at an international convention, yes.

But what the blogs asked for was the tapes made of the convention, so that we could determine whether the reports of what Eason said were accurate. Instead, he resigned.

But Mr. Rather's and Mr. Jordan's misdeeds would most likely not have landed them in trouble in the world of bloggers, where few rules apply.

Look, bub:

One, no-one's paying us. Well, in the case of the big lefty bloggers, most of them are getting paid, but you don't have a beef with them, do you?

Two, any blogger trying to present the pathetic "Bush memos" as fact would be torn to shreds exactly the same way CBS was. Bloggers are equal opportunity piranhas.

Three, you're the ones claiming to have these lofty journalistic standards. Dickhead.

Many bloggers make little effort to check their information, and think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first - or calling the target at all.

And many bloggers do check their information. And many, many journalists don't.

They rarely have procedures for running a correction.

Bullshit.

Bloggers run corrections all the time. And we don't bury them on page Q-17 either. Right there on the front page, strike out the wrong facts, add "Oops, looks like I screwed the pooch on this one, apologies to Mr Eastwood. And to the Association of Left-Handed Moose-Hunters too."

The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent.

Eh? It's, like, fifteen pixels! Any more and it wouldn't fit on an 800x600 screen!

(Wonkette

Always bloody Wonkette with you.

a witty

Snort.

and well-read Washington blog, posts a weekly shout-out inside its editorial text to its advertisers, including partisan ones like Democrats.org.)

And?

And bloggers rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they write about.

And bloggers rarely do receive money from the people or causes they write about... Except on the left. But that's not what you're complaining about, is it?

Think I'm being too hard on this pathetic partisan hack? Let's look at the blogs he mentions:

Arianna Huffington's planned bloglike object
FishbowlDC
Drudge "I am not a blogger" Report
Daily "Screw 'em" Kos
Joshua Marshall
Wankette
Wankette again

Many bloggers who criticize the MSM's ethics, however, are in the anomalous position of holding themselves to lower standards, or no standards at all.

Would that be the bloggers you list above, or do you have someone else in mind? Do you have an example?

Look, bub, whether we have standards or not doesn't matter, because our readers have standards. If we bullshit our readers the way you do yours, they'll know, and they'll go somewhere else.

There are 8 million blogs on the naked Internet, and no matter what your readership may be today, you're just one of them.

That may well change. Ana Marie Cox, who edits Wonkette

Wonkette.

notes that blogs are still "a very young medium," and that "things have yet to be worked out." Before long, leading blogs could have ethics guidelines and prominently posted corrections policies.

Leading blogs - at least, the ones that have earned that place, like Instapundit and Powerline - don't need ethics guidelines and prominently posted corrections policies because they have ethics and they make corrections. Because, unlike a certain newspaper of record, their reputations are at stake with everything they write, and their reputations are their lives - as far as blogging goes.

Bloggers may need to institutionalize ethics policies to avoid charges of hypocrisy.

Sh'yeah, right.

One, bloggers aren't institutions. They're just people with a web page.

Two, you miserable hacks will accuse us of hypocrisy no matter what.

But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline.

Well, that's good to know.

So why don't you follow your own rules?

Oh, and does this mean that bloggers are journalists now? Can't have it both ways.

As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.

Which completely misses the point.

In the (non-crazed-lefty) blogosphere's quest to reform the media, all we have ever asked for is accurate reporting.

That's it. Tell the goddam truth. Stop distorting stories, stop the use of weasel words, stop omitting inconvenient facts that undermine your worldview. Stop pretending to be neutral and objective when, well, this.

Stop, in a word, being journalists, and go back to being reporters.

Of course, that would deprive us bloggers of the club with which we have been beating you so severely - your own words - and force us to go out and find honest work, but hey, them's the breaks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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