congratulations to jP for passing his qualifying exams and becoming a real, live PhD candidate.

do you have a log of what markov generates? b/c some of them are pretty funny and the first thing that comes to my mind is top 10 list.

<p>like today&#8217;s </p>

<p>&#8220;reading trashy astrology books, connect the dot porn (don&#8217;t ask), and Oprah&#8217;s magazine (we learned how to find that oddly comforting.&#8221; </p> 

dhs.org appears to be having some trouble. they’re a free service that provides simple domain name functionality. for the last couple years, i’ve been using them to point thraxil.dhs.org at this site. my main rationale for using dhs.org instead of going the ‘proper’ route and registering thraxil.(com|net|org) has been simplicity. i’ve never really bought into the whole mindset that you need a good domain to be cool. the system is a beaurocratic nightmare with the main players abusing their customers every chance they get. stories about squatters selling domains for millions of dollars just made me laugh. i’ve never had any great desire to subject myself to that kind of abuse.

<p>dhs.org seems to be having problems lately though. you may have noticed that this site was inaccessible for the last couple days. it should be fixed now and thraxil.dhs.org should exist for at least the near future. however, the future is not looking so good for dhs.org. at the very least, it&#8217;s unstable enough to have me worried.</p>

<p>so i bit the bullet and registered thraxil.com, thraxil.net, and thraxil.org. i grabbed all three because i couldn&#8217;t make up my mind at it was pretty cheap. it could take a day or two for <span class="caps">DNS</span> to propagate fully and for any/all of them to work.</p>

<p>once they stabilize, you&#8217;ll want to change your bookmarks and links to point to one of the new domains (for the time being, all of them will point to the same place. in the future, i might decide to different things with different ones though).</p>

<p>in other words, in the next couple days, thraxil.dhs.org will be deprecated.</p> 

today was a great day. i now own the following four My Dying Bride albums:

<p>34.788%</p>

<p>The Dreadful Hours</p>

<p>The Light at the End of the World</p>

<p>Turn Loose the Swans</p>

<p>i freakin love this band.</p> 

i found a great cd store today and grabbed a bunch of shit, all for around $2.00 each. the highlights are:

<p>Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads</p>

<p><span class="caps">NIN</span>: All that Could Have Been</p>

<p>Napalm Death (double): Harmony Corruption and Leaders Not Followers</p>

<p>Dizzy Gallespie: Coolworld (1965)</p>

<p>Bud Powell: Hot House  (1964, France)(cool because he was pretty brain damaged at this point and since its a live, small venue recording, you can hear these grotesque, inhuman grunts and squeaks coming from him on all his solos&#8230; all of which are entirely distracting). hes a pianist, btw. </p>

<p>Type O Negative: After Dark (<span class="caps">VCD</span> with home video footage, plus videos for Black Number 1, Christian Woman, My Girlfriends Girlfriend, Love You to Death, Cinnamon Girl, Everything Dies, and fucking cool backstage stuff reminiscent of Panteras home video Watch It Go.  </p>

<p>because i was so impressed with the diversity of the music selection of this tiny shop, i also picked a bunch of random death metal which i wasnt familiar with.  my criteria for selection was: coolness of cover art, coolness of band name, and coolness of track names.  one of the picks was called Lacrimosa- and this ended up surprising me, pleasantly. its actually opera music, mostly sung in german.  its playing now.</p>

<p>hmm.</p>

<p>its entirely listenable. theres a full classical orchestra, occasionally classical guitar, all behind some calm and collected vocals by some german dude, or his totally hot dudette. </p>

<p>basically, this seems to be sort of a sedated Theater of Tragedy.  the two occasionally seem to be singing in response to each other, sometimes together in harmony.  and oooh, as im writing now, it just started to get a little faster with some borderline metal guitar. this has potential to be great if the dude starts getting angry or something.   </p>

<p>err.  its staying slowish.</p>

<p>losing me now.</p>

<p>hmpf. </p>

<p>whoa, kick ass!   its Dich Zu Toten Mir Schwer (track 6) and the dudette just got totally pissed off at something and yelled over some heavy metal riffs before a while.</p>

<p>dammit. the dude came back and is pissing me off now. he killed the metal. neat bubbly septic tank sounds though&#8230;</p>

<p>yeehaw! picked up again! (please, pah-lease let the chick come back!)</p>

<p>gaaa.  shes gone.</p>

<p>but wait&#8230; wait, wait, wait&#8230;.  this is pretty cool. an angel chorus is now chanting Sanctus&#8230;      Sanctus&#8230;..      Sanctus&#8230;   Dominus&#8230;.   over and over.  </p>

<p>and now other stuff i cant make out. </p>

<p>yeah man, Sanctus! Sanctus!  hehe.  </p>

<p>two mood-dependent thumbs up for Lacrimosa.</p> 

I noticed that most of what I’ve posted lately has been harsh, political, drivel. I’m sorry. I pull the diamond from my ass that was formally a lump of coal (awkward Ferris Bueller reference for the unedjumacated).

The drug war has failed. It is not winnable and it is the largest source of attrocities of the American government on both American and foreign citizens.

<p>But even when we&#8217;re not <a href="http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/papa/panamaus1989.htm">invading other countries</a>, <a href="http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/peru_americanplane_010422.html">shooting down planes of missionaries</a>, or <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-180es.html">bastardizing the bill of rights in this war</a>, and we actually try to help treat drug users, our country screws it up.</p>

<p>Read about the <a href="http://www.theagitator.com/straightfox.php">tough love treatments</a> some of the Drug War&#8217;s biggest supporters would advocate (Including our ambassador to Italy and the Bush family). Read about the <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/2002/06/07/Floridian/_In_the_middle_of_a_n.shtml">victims</a> and what they now have to live with. Why do we as a country put up with it? And why do we allow the people who advocate these attrocities to run the country?</p> 

a coworker of mine drove up to maine last weekend. as a favor, he brought me back a case and a half of shipyard export ale, which pretty much can’t be found outside new england but is one of my favorite beers in the world.

I know this isn’t cutting edge news, but I was wondering how people felt about the distribution of the Daniel Pearl murder video. Has anyone here watched it? Has it changed the way you feel about the US/UK/Western Nations war on terrorism? Or the India-Pakistan strife? Or the Israel-Palestine conflict? Or American foreign policy in general?

<p>Should the <a href="http://prohosters.com/pearl/">video</a> even be shown?</p>

<p>I&#8217;ve seen people all over the net debate this topic. I&#8217;m interested in what the folks at Thraxil have to say.</p> 

mozilla 1.0 has been released.

<p>rejoice.</p>