While, I’ve finally got the photo gallery moved to Textdrive. So, now it should load a bit faster. I’ve also changed gallery systems while I was at it. I like the new one a bit better, except that the description stuff isn’t as nice, but that’s okay. It works 🙂

Other than that, I’ve started reading again, which is nice.

Well, something really strange happened today. Almost strange enough to make me start wearing my tinfoil beanie…

About a week ago I was in Tower Records browsing the magazine department, and I came across a bunch of Linux magazines, MAKE magazine (which looks pretty cool), 2600 magazine (the mag. for phreakers) and Wired magazine. Well, I thought the cover of Wired looked really cool, so, to myself I mused out loud “Hmm, this looks pretty cool. Maybe I should get a subscription.”

Today in the mail came a notice from Wired themselves asking me to buy a 2 year subscription. In fact, the notice looks more like a renewal notice, but as I do not get Wired magazine, it can’t be. 🙂 So, I won’t be getting a subscription, since I’m poor, but hey, at least they were kind enough to send one out, despite the fact that they must be reading my brain waves, or have REALLY good people on the lookout at Tower. So yes, very very strange.

On another note, I’ve decided to stop learning Japanese for a while (not that I’ve done much more than practiced the Kana recently) to pick up Esperanto, mostly because it looks nice and easy to learn. And there is a community of nice people around the world who speak it.

This is an interesting article about IP (Intellectual Property). Since I can’t come up with a good explanation, here is a quote:

In an unbelievable twist of fate, a combination of terrible drug laws, intellectual property laws, and misguided patents and copyrights have come together to prevent me from receiving lifesaving medecine. I need your help to publicize this issue, take it to the mainstream, and let it start the ball rolling to take out this immoral copyright system. The story of the death of my family and my current life-threatening illness, caused in no small part by IP law, is a perfect starting point to bring this into the next level of public discourse. Let’s expose the copyright barons for what they are. It’s not just me; 200 million others are also infected, and 95% don’t know the problem, yet. It could even be you. Let’s become lifesavers.

Well, I’ve finally given up and gotten webhosting from TextDrive, which seems to be one of the geekier and more trendy (in the geek world) hosting companies. So far, they’re doing pretty good. I’m working on getting a new gallery set up, but I’m having some problems right now.

So anyway, for anyone watching, the new address is: http://www.irasnyder.com which just redirects to the blog, for now. It should hopefully change in the (near) future. Please update your bookmarks.

I’ve also got a new email, which I won’t post here, as I don’t want to get too much spam just yet. You can probably guess what it is though, if I haven’t already told you.

Well, now back to fixing the gallery.

This is the best news I’ve heard all year, literally. The fact that Parliament rejected something that was lobbied for very strongly by big corporations is good news to me. I have faith in the EU’s democratic process with this.

Software patents were rejected by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions. That is just amazing. I guess it just shows that real grassroots efforts can pay off.

Now all we need is to get this in the US, but I really doubt that it will happen unfortunately.

Here is some coverage:
http://www.europe.redhat.com/news/article/431.html
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/eu_bins_swpat/
http://lists.ffii.org/pipermail/news/2005-July/000302.html
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?Feed=AP&Date=20050706&ID=4905885
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/1235211