nick's site

agitated.net is under attack! 😀

took me about six weeks, but i finally finished atlas shrugged by ayn rand. all 1069 pages of it at five AM.. dave gets it next.

i was supposed to read the fountainhead first. oh well.. who is john gault? 🙂

next novel i read will be the fuck up, a graduation gift from amanda

here’s a cool place to pull down some (if not all) of the shows from the various live-8 stages. enjoy!

get your disk space handy though..

while watching a lecture, Can we avoid catastrophic failures of computer networks?, i heard an interesting idea on how to reduce terrorism.

Reduce Terrorism. One aspect is to reduce injustice in (the) world as one of the reasons for terrorism.

“For me of course, this does not mean killing people, but it means that we are making sure that not too many people of this world are desperate. I am not an idealist. Even if all people are doing well in the world, there will be crazy people who shoot kids in highschools and there will be crazy people who throw bombs in northern Ireland; but a large proportion of terrorism is done because of sheer desperation. I visitied Gaza and if you talk to people there and you talk to a man who says that he has no future, and the children have no future, and his grandchildren have no future, you don’t approve what he may be planning but you certainly understand it.

So, I think we have to try to reduce the injustice in the world. This is an injust world.

.. So we have to try to help the third world and we can do this with computers. That was a big surprise for me. ”

he goes on to describe computers for reducing desperation and it happens because computers and internets make the process of sharing information a lot easier even something as simple as a man in India or central Africa learns a more efficient way to boil water.

interesting 1hr 17min lecture if you’ve got time to check it out. a lot more economic, social, and political aspects were discussed than i’ve come to expect from the geeky stanford ee380 lectures.

this is the week that neon junkies from around north america (canada too) congregate in detroit for the annual Neon 2005 event.

today’s event was the car show, held at the walter p chrysler museum. my plans for car-show prepping yesterday didn’t happen, too many other things going on. so i showed my car, dirty. it still looked like i lived in it. i scored a 3rd place 2nd gen stock class trophy. this included a year’s worth of webhosting from wild rose web hosting. with the few cars in the class, it might as well have been a participant trophy.

drag-racing day is tomorrow, i won’t make that. i should be able to show up for part of the bbq and bowling on friday. saturday’s track day. if we’re not house hunting, i’ll attend that.

maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad.. but my employment agreement changed at work. i now get paid for every hour i work, which includes (finally!) 1.5x time over 40 hrs in a work week. considering the projects, it’s an opportunity to make some extra money.

drawback is that the salary part of my job is gone (work under 40, get paid 40)

it was dated 6/13/05. since it was pre-dated, i asked if i had to sign it to make it effective. my account rep said, not really. the fine print says that i could be canned within 90 days if i didn’t agree.

docah had a similar experience..

around 9pm tonight, i was thinking to myself, i’d love to have a cup of coffee, although i’ll end up staying up until around 3am.. disappointed, i resigned to some lemonade.

at 10:45, my boss called and asked if i could assist with a late-night project tonight because they need some help. usually, it’s not a problem for me to stay up and tonight is no exception.

i powered up my laptop and fired off a pot of coffee.. so i work on my laptop, play with my site on my pc, from the comfort of my 2nd bedroom, and have a paid excuse to stay up all night.

😈