philisha.net

New links system is up. The catch is that this time, you can add links of your own.

On the horizon: voting system so you can give input on which links are the best and a comment system for each link.

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Fellowship 9/11:
One of the most controversial and provocative films of the year, Fellowship 9/11 is
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s searing examination of the
Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep.

With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering – or if
necessary fabricating – the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn
and where it has led us.

He looks at how – and why – Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the
Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that
attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by
Isengard.

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“When do we rock? Omnia nocturnia extensis.”
-Dr. Sanders

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We’ve been engaged for a year now! Well, we will be in an hour. And then tomorrow, we will have been going out for three years. And then the next day, Alisha will turn 21!

What a week.

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Nothing too exciting going on here.

Noteworthy: Wedding page fixed so it looks decent in IE, and RSVP added for your convenience. Also, a ThinkGeek Wishlist for gift ideas in addition to our Target registry. Can’t have too many sources of gifts.

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“I would like to point out that in his political career, my opponent voted against a bill. This bill would have passed a law which would make things illegal. Now it’s clear that by voting against this bill, my opponent has shown his stance against Law. I just don’t see how you can be fit to run this country with a voting record like that.”

Pulling out-of-context voting records is a terrible way to debate. Both sides do it, but it doesn’t say anything about a person.

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Yesterday I’d been messing around with my server trying to get mail to work. I need to learn how to set up a mail server for a class of mine, and I thought I might as well learn on my own machine; after all, my name at philisha.net would be pretty cool. So I messed around with it, and I found I had some trouble because the permission settings were pretty tight; I couldn’t get it to accept mail from gmail or Biola’s mail server. I finally figured out how to get it to accept mail from anywhere to phil@philisha.net and decided to call it a night.

So then the next day I go around, and it seems like my site is running a little slow. Well, let’s see what’s up…. 100% CPU usage on my server? That’s strange. Whaaait a minute, it’s all the mail server! I’m getting 196 concurrent connections from all over the Internet!

It turns out I had left my permission settings a bit too loose after tweaking them, and left my machine as an open relay. In other words, anybody could send mail from my machine not only to my machine, but to anywhere else. And fifteen or so spam machines were taking advantage of the opportunity, spewing out as much garbage as they could during the night my server was unsecured.

Now I feel kind of dirty…. I don’t know when the spammers discovered my server, but they could have easily sent out millions of messages; it doesn’t take hardly any resources to send them. Well, anyway…. I learned my lesson. It’s not enough to make sure that you can use your system well; you’re not done until you’re sure no one else can use it either.

And now I’ve learned to Really Hate spammers. I’m not sure what would make you twisted enough to try crap like that, but it makes me sick just thinking that there exist people like that. Come on everyone—capital punishment for spammers! It’s the only way to stop it. It’s not like we’d be getting rid of valuable life….

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They just don’t do stuff like this any more.

David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a concept album that tells the story of a man from Mars called Ziggy Stardust who comes to Earth in a time of crisis five years before the Earth is to be destroyed. He comes as the only one with the potential to save the planet.

The album is the story of how Ziggy comes with his ideas of rock and roll to free mankind from everyday life and the upcoming destruction of Earth. He is The Rock Star in every way: drug-loving and wild, it is eventually these things that destroy him after an all-too-successful career as an inspirational rock star.

The album is really epic in its scope. It’s something that is not as accessible as what I’m used to; you have to continually pay attention to really enjoy it. It’s not so much the music (although there are a few songs that are just killer) but the story just pulls you in.

The most notable thing to me is that really on top of being a science-fiction story, it’s an album about what it is to be a rock star. I think this comes from an era where rock was much more defined by certain personalities that really stood out. Ziggy as a character is fascinating. The dreams of the rock star and their inevitable crumbling are particularly interesting to see in the album, because their appearance shows that Bowie acknowledges the way the life of a rock star turns out. Yet even with this knowledge, Bowie was tremendously influenced by the character of Ziggy; he said

“It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.”

You could draw parallels to the tragic hero…. one who may see his destruction ahead of himself and yet is unable to turn his course….

Anyway, it’s a tremendously interesting album if you really listen to it.

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