Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Balloons Originally uploaded by vanRijn. Well, since I’ve not blogged in a month or so =:(, I just got this in an e-mail today and I thought it was absolutely hilarious: Tired of getting stuck in slow moving traffic? Want to have your own lane on the highway??? Simple, tie these balloons to the rear of your car. Belt it down the Interstate (or any other road you wish to drive fast) as fast as you can and watch other car drivers freak out and simply get out of your way! When you get stopped by the police, tell them you thought they were real!

Just a warning, this is a bloody rant: Novell’s Nortel VPN package comes REALLY close, but it doesn’t handle PIN/RSA SecurID yet. PLEASE get this working guys!! In fact, please hire me and pay me to get it working!!! =;) The ONLY choice you have in Linux (if you find yourself needing to connect to a Nortel VPN that uses SecurID) is to fork over $100 for Apani’s Contivity client for Linux. Oh–and, by the way, you can’t use that on SUSE 10 or any other modern distribution, since it’s still looking for gcc3 and other things that aren’t found on my SUSE 10 laptop. Although, to be fair, the Apani support guys are very quick in their e-mail replies Read more…

This is pretty deep and insightful for a Thursday afternoon… “What’s fascinating to me is that I grew up in a time when my friends related to Luke and now, my kids relate to Anakin. There is an interesting social comment there — that when I grew up the hero was an optimistic young neophyte who becomes this hero and the new generation’s hero is a strong-willed, ambitious and ultimately vilified protagonist who is misled and, for reasons of ego and heartbreak, literally becomes the very villain that my generation fought against.” — Director JJ Abrams From this starwars.com page, found on the ubiquitous binarybonsai.

SFAC WTF? Originally uploaded by vanRijn. How in the world can “pez man 81” manage to be on Xbox live 3 times at once? Mind you, he is really good (and cheap as all get out), but that just seems odd to me. =:/

Merry belated Christmas wishes all! =:) One of my presents this year was this amazingly sweet Logitech VX Revolution mousie. It is really cool and uber-geeky. The spin-wheel scrolling thing just gets me all excited. =:) I have yet to get all the buttons working in Linux/X, but Button8 and Button9 (the buttons near the thumb) are recognized out of the box. What I want to get working (without having to futz around with recompiling stuff) is the back/forward mouse motions (tilting the scroll-wheel left or right). A virtual beer, oh LazyWeb, to the lucky soul to point me in the right direction! =:)

As if I didn’t have enough time for all that I already have going on, I had to go and find myself a new addiction. And find it I did and quickly. I think the twin causes for this new addiction are: Searching for Bobby Fischer (a really great movie–how on earth did I manage to not see that one yet?!!!) Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” video (after I got done laughing my tuckus off, I realized that I actually do identify with about 90% of that video!!) I’ve always loved Chess. My Dad and I used to play it as I was growing up and some of my fondest childhood memories are of my Dad and I playing Chess. Read more…

I found Jerry’s SeinLanguage book in my bookshelf a while back and I’m reading through it, here and there.  This made me laugh tonight, so I thought I’d share… I love to exercise, but I still have to laugh at it.  You go to the health club, you see all these people and they’re working out; they’re training, they’re getting in shape.  But nobody’s really getting in shape for anything.   In modern society, you really don’t have to be physically strong to do anything.  The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout.  So we’re working out, so that we’ll be in shape, for when we have to do our exercises.  That’s Read more…