Sunday, February 4 gave rise to...

I'm not watching the Superbowl today, but...

I have seen a few of the commercials. I saw one good, one bad, and one...puzzling. There's going to be a commercial for Nationwide Life Insurance aired tonight that features Kevin Federline, Britney Spears's estranged husband. It shows him in a music video, and then working at a fast food restaurant.

Why would he agree to something like this? The only thing that I can come up with is that he desperately needed the money, and he spent his life learning that the quickest way to happiness was whoring out one's talents (in his case, dancing, apparently) to the highest bidder.

I read here that he said he thinks it might "land him some good roles in Hollywood."

Boy is he going to be sore when he sees how it is received.

Related post

Federline Superbowl commercial

Apparently MC Hammer signed up for the same thing not too long ago...

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Saturday, February 3 gave rise to...

Hating Paint.NET. Or, How to fix GTK.

I guess I'm making up for lost time.

If you've received an error message when opening up The GIMP (aka, the FREE alternative to Adobe Photoshop), or other GTK programs in Windows that says something like " could not find libexpat.dll ," you might want to ask yourself, "Am I using a beta version of Gaim?"

(Gaim is a free software alternative to AIM that does AIM, MSN, Yahoo and a bunch of other things all in one convenient window/buddy list/program.)

If in fact you are, your beta version of Gaim probably messed up GTK for other GTK-using Windows programs. It did to me, anyway.

You can fix this by installing a newer GTK runtime that supports the newest Gaim beta (2.0.0.6 at the time of this post), and will also allow you to run your other GTK apps with no hassle. The official release at this point is 2.10.7, but there is a 2.10.8 available on the internet. I got it here. That's a personal website. I'm sure if it's down you can find the file elsewhere by searching for the file name 'gtk-runtime-2.10.8-rev-a.exe'. You know, it's probably even on the GTK Win32 website somewhere. Anyway install it. Oh, and if the GTK runtime installer says to you "error opening file for writing." make sure you aren't using Gaim or any other apps that use those files while you're trying to install this. It took me about 10 minutes to figure that out.

Anyway, this should fix your GIMP.

I didn't know what was wrong with GIMP for at least a week, and I've been in Windows a lot lately. I installed what I thought would be the next best thing, Paint.NET. I hated it. It didn't feel very full featured OR very intuitive, and I think those are two things it's aiming for.

Hope this post helps you a) fix GIMP and b) steer the fuck clear of Paint.NET.

Thanks to Google and a bunch of different posts at forums and such, but mainly, this one guy's blog post for helping me to realize what the actual problem was.

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Spiritual Leader Gains Over A Million Follows, Then Declares Himself The Anti-Christ

This story speaks for itself. And very clearly, I might should add.

A native of Puerto Rico, de Jesus, 60, spent his youth drifting from the Roman Catholics to the Pentecostals to the Baptists. Then one night in 1973, he says, he awoke to a vision of two hulking men at his bedside who announced the arrival of the Lord, who, says de Jesus, "came to me and integrated with me." In the early years after founding Growing in Grace in Miami in 1986, de Jesus didn't claim to be Christ. Instead, he worked as a pastor spreading his doctrine: that under a new covenant with God, there is no sin and no Satan, and people are predestined to be saved. But as his following expanded, his claims did, too. In 1998, de Jesus avowed that he was the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. Two years ago at Growing in Grace's world convention in Venezuela, he declared himself Christ. And just last week, he called himself the Antichrist and revealed a "666" tattooed on his forearm. His explanation: that, as the second coming of Christ, he rejects the continued worship of Jesus of Nazareth.
Full story

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Human Exposure to the Vacuum of Space, or, GET YOUR ASS TO MARS

GET YOUR ASS TO MARS



I just finished reading some information about what it would actually be like to be in the vacuum of space. Apparently, you don't end up like Arnie in Total Recall.

Here's an excerpt about where shit went really wrong with a Russian space shuttle. Apparently the skin swells to two times its normal size, but then within a few hours it returns to normal. Hence, no signs of vacuum exposure.

"Recovery personnel soon came upon the crew who looked like they were simply asleep and showed no swollen skin or other signs of vacuum exposure. Believing they had only been unconscious for a brief period, personnel attempted CPR but were unable to revive the crew. It is believed they had already been deceased for 15 to 20 minutes by the time the rescue party arrived making any resuscitation impossible."
Link

Discovered via reddit.

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I'm done with class for the next two days and had time to make a short post, or, "The System"

Our system is designed so that you need a really good education to not get taken advantage of and fucked over by its many pistons, cogs, and sharp-pointy things. Oh yes, I would argue that the system works, but only if you have a college education. And even that is not enough; unless you yourself as a student really branch out and take the classes at college that are going to help you understand how this society works, and not, say, the chemical engineering tract, you will be left in the dark, and eventually, fucked over by this system.

Furthermore, I would say that it's possible to get by with a high school education, or even less, but the curriculum taught at the public schools all around this country doesn't teach people how to exist on the only free education they'll get here. It only teaches them how to get to the next level (where they are also fucked upon completion of a degree), and even then, only the truly outstanding will get there. Public education sucks at preparing kids for college.

Education is partly about the novelty of learning something new, and partly about the necessity of it. If you aren't learning what you need to know to survive in this society and what want to know to make yourself happy, you're wasting your time. It takes much longer and is much more soul-damaging to change your own life to suit your education. You won't recognize yourself when you're finished.

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