Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

This one’s for Rob. Crispin Glover, the “thin man” from the Charlie’s Angels movies, was once on Letterman. There’a a video clip that was linked from Metafilter and it’s one of the most uncomfortable media moments I’ve seen. He’s suffering from some sort of combination of paralyzing shyness and drugs. Possibly both.

The United Nations has a lot of member states who all pay dues - like a bowling league - to support the various functions of the organization. We (Canada) pay our dues, usually on time and as far as I can tell in full. According to the Wikipedia and other sources, the United States owes over a billion dollars in back dues, and has no real plans to pay it. This could be common knowledge to those in the know, but I had no idea just how detached the U.S. is from the United Nations (though they helped create it). And it’s not a Bush-specific thing, it’s been going on for many years.

So for the last while, the States have sat in the U.N., voted, directed and approved U.N. peacekeeping actions…. They just don’t pay, so they get the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately the U.N. homepage doesn’t have any nice graphs of what countries owe and who has paid what amounts, but if anyone finds anything that illustrates this factoid well let me know.

By the way: I’m always terrified when posting anything to do with politics despite the fact that I’m fiercely interested in the matter. I love it, and I love learning more about different systems, concepts and views but I have no self-confidence really when it comes to articulating my views. There’s always more things to learn, and it’s virtually impossible to become any sort of expert really in any of the various areas. It’s the opposite of computers; with computers, specifically programming, I can feel confident that I’m not going to look like an ignorant fool when espousing the virtues of a linked list or something. With politics it’s a whole other ballgame though - and this post is only really linking to information for God’s sake, there’s not even real opinion there :-)

I’m having some painful DNS issues with my site right now, so maybe no one can see this. My ISP changed my IP address along with the nameserver IP addresses, and I thought all was going well after I reconfigured my server and pushed my new DNS data to the aforementioned nameservers. The problem is that Verisign lists the stale IP addresses for my nameservers - meaning that only about a third of DNS lookups for Neurotech return the correct address right now. Go Verisign! Fortunately e-mail retransmits and what not, so I’m not losing anything. It’s just inconvenient as hell for me and the other denizens of the server.

If you own Half Life 2 and don’t have Garry’s mod, go get it now. It’s basically a multiplayer-enabled sandbox for the game, allowing you to spawn, move around, and pose any of the in-game models. You can also attach moving parts like wheels, fans (actually manhacks) and balloons to things and then watch the awesome physics engine work. It’s a really cool little toy.

Again, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted - mainly since I’ve been doing very little. Some random, unordered, recent stuff:

• Chie came up for the Christmas break, and great fun was had by all. I managed to bring her to Iron Bridge to meet the most of the family, as well as a dinner with some of my family that lives in Oakville (the Cavanaghs). She even managed to score a ride on a snowmachine, and have breakfast at the Iron Horse.
• I’ve been playing a life-consuming amount of World Of Warcraft. I’m not alone though - our Guild (Tubgirl) is has six people, and we get a lot of ass-kicking done.
• One other game worth mentioning that I got for Christmas is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Painfully long title, I know. Anyways, this game came out so buggy that I didn’t even open it until the first patch was released, and even then it’s still full of bugs. Even with all this, for me it’s the best game I’ve played last year - one notch above even Half Life 2. It’s basically an open-style RPG similar to Deus Ex and Fallout, so if you’re not into those don’t bother. If you are though, you need this game.
• Chie and I have been sorting out the logistics of our wedding ceremony in May. My parents and brother were the only people I was always sure were going, but then my cousin Jaime and his girlfriend Andi told me they’re in too. Then Robin decided to come. So that’s all good - tentacle porn for all!
• I’ve still been buying truckloads of books, and still don’t have nearly enough room to keep them. One of the highlights is the latest book from John C. Wright, “The Last Guardian Of Everness”. I started reading this and was totally, completly enthralled. I made it about fifty pages into it and saw in an interview with the author that it’s the first book of two, so I swore to put it down and not read it until the complete story was in my possession. That didn’t last. I’m in awe of Wright’s work - he’s turned me into a complete fanboy. I’d bear his children if that was biologically possible.
• Robin and I both got a disc for the Playstation 2 called HDAdvance. It’s derived from the original HDLoader. This toy allows you to plug pretty much any IDE hard disk into your Playstation’s network adapter and then copy games to the drive. Then you can play the games without the disc with the added bonus of reduced load times for most of the games. There’s some titles that don’t work with it, but it’s still worth the fifty bucks. I recommend modchip.ca if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

That’s it for now. I’m actually at the office today with Rob, and we’re standing by in case anything goes wrong with a site upgrade that’s going on. So I’ll go back to waiting for the alarm bell, with the promise that I’ll post more often.