Crap post – sorry. Lots of stuff – no motivation. So, yet again, another list:

• Someone persuaded me to update Oliver and then SourceForge asked me to explain why a project was resurrected after so many years.
• Lily is growing up nicely.
• Summer Fridays.
• Hillage and Miquette are still turning out quality chewns.
• The nice folks of mpg321 have incorporated my crappy little patch.
• Back in the HAM game – Dan and I are determined to get licenced.
• Hoagiefest!
• Oh yeah – it’s our 13th Wedding Anniversary today. How did that happen?

For the benefit of my memory, here are some recent events. Apologies to you, loyal reader, but I don’t want to get involved in lawsuits, because the law is an ass…

• In the enlightened world, we understand that driving a car is something that deserves one’s full attention. So observing people who talk on the phone or, worse, text whilst driving is therefore quite bizarre to us. Tonight, as I was being given a ride home, I noticed the woman in the car next to us was texting and had neither hand on the steering wheel… OK we were crawling along, but it was I76 (expressway/motorway). I regarded her with contempt and tried to make eye contact. I failed.
  Less than 10 Meters down the road we heard a screech of tyres and managed to observe the silly bitch brake and drive onto the hard-shoulder just in time to avoid hitting the car in front.
• I for one welcome our new (potential) Dutch overlords.
• We have a new house-guest, a little powder-blue and white budgie. Let me know if you’re interested in giving him a full and loving life (and you live in/near Philly). We’re trying to find his genuine owners but if we fail – he’ll need some love.
• mpg321 can’t handle ID3v2 tags properly. I have a patch if you’re interested.
• I miss my family

Short geek rant.
Again I’ve been booted from my goto torrent site; a site I blogged about before and a site from which I have been banned more times than I like to remember. Every ban but one was unjustified and involved me accidentally transgressing one of their seemingly infinite number of rules. The “administration” there consist of a bunch of 1990’s IRC throwback kids who like to be in a position of power…you get the picture (well you do if you know what I’m talking about). If you can’t imagine them, picture the last Labour cabinet as 16 year old kids put in charge of the sixth-form common room.
Some examples of their impotent authoritarian posturing:

• I got banned this time for breaking the rule “only one account per household.” This was because I sent an invite to a friend, who then tried to login to his account… while we were both using the same Internet connection. So household can mean “the people currently in the coffee shop with you” – I wonder if we can get a tax break for that?
• You don’t get a warning or explanation, you just get blocked. If you want to find out why you were blocked, you have to go their IRC channel and talk to one of the “admins”. When I said that I thought that it was a harsh interpretation of that rule, he gave me a straw man: “I suppose you think everyone should have as many accounts as they want” and then pasted the household rule from their 10,000 commandments page, in case I didn’t understand that I was clearly a terrorist.
• At this point they like you to kneel and beg for forgiveness but seeing as I’d rather fellate a warthog, I left.
• They will immediately ban you for using a torrent client that isn’t on their state-approved list.
• A month or so ago I was given an official warning for “making an anti-racist remark” in one of the forums. You read that right.

Oh well, time to blag another a new account and start getting my ratio up again. Honestly, what a shower of twats.