I finally discovered how to make Gaim reconnect automagically: "apt-get install gaim-irchelper", and then mess with preferences.

My Linksys WRT54GL wireless router, with Sveasoft Alchemy firmware, stops relaying wireless packets every few hours or days, until power-cycled. Hardware failure, or flaky software? Maybe time to upgrade, maybe to non-Sveasoft code -- all the good stuff is in the mainline kernel, nowadays, right? (Earlier, I found that if Alchemy ever lost contact with one of its relay nodes, it would start hammering its upstream router with thousands of ARP requests per second. I wonder if that's been fixed yet. I moved the nodes closer together.)

The movie "Star Wreck: in the Pirkinning", available for free download or, now, on DVD, really is an astonishing accomplishment. Everything that wasn't filmed on location was shot against blue tile in the producer's apartment, and the background (and the control consoles!) rendered in. The bridge crew were filmed one at a time and pasted together, so the whole set is really just one office chair and one pair of thigh-high boots, shared among everybody on-screen. All that, and very funny too.

rmathew: The premier Free Source Code Browsing Tool these days is Synopsis, by Stefan Seefeld of Fresco project fame.

msevior: Any reason for neglecting Australia's greenhouse convection towers, in discussions of solar-power alternatives to nukes? Incidentally, it was demonstrated over and over again that an American nuke plant can reliably be taken over by one insider and only three or four attackers with .45's. It got embarrassing, so they stopped. What does it take to jimmy a pebble-bed reactor enough to melt down, given full control of the facility? How about the other 4G gas-cooled designs? Certainly current-generation installations are easy enough.

wingo: I have this notion that those guys "extraordinarily rendered" to torture dungeons in Poland, Romania, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who-knows-where-else had flights rather less pleasant than yours. They didn't have to pay for them, though. (We did, instead. The U.S black budget was >$40B last year.)

Congratulations to AlanHorkan for his newfound discovery of vertical whitespace.