As relayed to me by a co-worker:

• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1 tsp maple syrup (or cane sugar)
• 1/3 C water

Combine the above in a microwavable measuring cup and heat.

Add

• 1/3 C of the darkest rum you can find along with 1/3 C 151 rum.

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If Trillian’s driving you nuts and GAIM doesn’t do enough (or are tired of messing with upgrading GTK), give IM2 Messenger a try.

I just installed is and, I must say, it’s a tad faster and does quite a bit more than GAIM. I’m not sure if it’ll stay around because, well, I use GAIM because it doesn’t do a lot. I don’t video conference, fileshare, mess with skins or any of that stuff. If I did, though, IM2 would be my client of choice.

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The hard drive in my iBook died. This actually occured several weeks ago, but, apparantly, the iBook I purchased was so old that there were problems registering the Apple Care for it.

I got that straightened out only to find out that none of the regular DHL drop boxes in our area are big enough to fit the package in, so I had to waste several days trying to locate the nearest drop-off office and finding time to do so. Which I had done.

Apple recieved it on the 25th and it’s been sitting in repair status since then. I’m hoping that they haven’t had to order a drive and that they’re just running diagnostics on it, but, who knows. I will stalk Apple’s repair page with baited breath for updates.

Fortunately, I didn’t have anything important on it.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with Apple support since their online page still showed it as being in repair. A very nice-sounding lady by the name of Elise clued me into the fact that they had to order a new harddrive due to shortages. She didn’t give any estimates on when said drive would arrive, but I didn’t really push that hard.

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I really wish I had something interesting to post, but, to be honest, the past few weeks have been a series of mediocre progressive days.

Work has been busier, home has been busier with trying to spend more quality time with Crystal and Shelby. I’ve been trying to spend less time on the computer.

In fact, the only really exciting things that have happend is that I’ve got my forums setup and working, I managed to almost finish sorting my many hundreds of photos and my laptop is in service at Apple (more on that later).

Other than that, not much has been going on.

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WordPress Thong

I am both amazed and frightened at the same time. Originallt spotted here.

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Forums are up.

I’m using miniBB and absolutely adore it. It’s fast, simple and doesn’t include any of the jumk that’s been polluting the bigger BB systems.

Anyways, I have 4 sections up now; one for General chat, one for World of Warcraft, one for Off-Topic (one could agrue that everything I post is “off-topic”) posts and one for Political discussion. If there are any others you’d like to see, let me know.

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Someone to assume ownership of the IOPUG Yahoo! Group. I no longer have the amount of time the list deserves to maintain it.

Please be aware that this list is the very first one I signed up on when I was beginning my ventures into the Palm world. I’ve learned a lot from it and, though many only lurk there nowadays, there are many nice people subscribed to it.

In short, I’m not just going to turn this over to whoever wants it. It’s special to me and I want someone who will revive the list to it’s former glory.

Serious applicants can email me (link’s on the right sidebar).

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It looks like Crucial is selling a 128MB flash drive for $19.99 with free shipping.

I’ve already got mine on order.

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I need myself a web-based hierarchical (that’s personal information manager for the uninitiated). I’ll not go into the reasons for needing such an atrocity, but it is needed.

I need it to do calendaring, hierarchical todo list (preferably with categorization) with extended notes capability, some sort of popup remider system for events and todos that have come due, notepad and be decent to look at. I also need to be able to put this on my own web server, so I have to turn away from hosted calendars like Yahoo!’s and the like.

I do not need webmail, contact management or some craptabulous groupware solution that’s going to aggrevate myself and my hosting company.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask from such an application, but it’s nigh impossible to find. The closest thing I’ve found that I can tolerate is Tasks, but it doesn’t do a lot of what I want. To be fair, it’s not designed to, either.

Can anyone throw me a bone?

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There’s no doubt that privacy advocates out there are probably celebrating the statement that the FBI’s officially retiring the Carnivore program. For those not in the know, Carnivore was a program designed to snoop on emails sent through an ISP’s network for suspicious information. It required a court order to implement and encrypted all information gathered through it’s efforts. Think of it like a wiretap for email.

The question that should be on everyone’s mind, however, is actually twofold. Why did they retire it and why would they tell us?

I can tell you why they retired it. It wasn’t needed anymore. Why worry about getting a court order to install a monitoring program that can only be targeted on a single or select few individuals when they have the PATRIOT act? See, the PATRIOT act allows them to throw down the word “terrorism”, bypass the court order, put a gag order on everyone involved and collect as much data in the clear as they like, whether they actually suspect you’re a terrorist or not.

See? It’s a much better process that worrying about convincing judges, tangling with privacy rights and such. I think this comment from slashdot phrased it best:

You’re rejoicing that the FBI retired Carnivore. What Carnivore allowed was the collection of information, then the decryption and analysis of that data with a court order. They retired it because USA PATRIOT allows them to just collect it the good old fashioned way…no encryption, no court order. Whomever, whenever they want. The difference is that now they can look for suspicious activity via eavesdropping instead of first having a suspicion and confirming it via eavesdropping. You are celebrating that the FBI has thrown away their lock picks and not realizing that Congress has removed all your doors. -Slightly Askew

Now, as to why they would tell us? Personally, I think they believe this will relieve a good bit of the uninformed public’s suspicions that the government is spying on them. I mean, Carnivore made headlines and everyone got in an uproar about it without really knowing what it was. All they knew was that the government could be spying on them. They’re simply relying on that same reaction to put their mind’s at ease, hoping they won’t catch onto the fact that they have much better and more frightening ways to get more information. PR, baby. It’s what makes the world go ’round.

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