WISH 47 is Learning Your Lesson (original), as follows: Name one lesson you learned in gaming that you will (hopefully) never have to learn again. So mine is “Differentiate.” I had an awful problem early in my gaming career; I tended to see other people doing cool stuff and I wanted to do the same cool stuff. Self-esteem issues, probably. At one point a friend pointed out in no uncertain terms that I was stepping on her character’s schtick. ...

Just for reference, this map shows the proposed Texas federal districting, and this map shows the current Texas federal districting. I can see some pretty weird looking districts in the latter (check out 15, for example), but the former certainly doesn’t do any better. In fact, 15 is worse. You can’t see it at this scale, but the proposed district 15 has a mile wide strip along the bottom of the state that connects it to a little bubble of territory under district 23.

I’m not sure if this is ironic or not, but Bush’s appointees have made a strong pro-gun control statement. In Iraq, of course. Gun ownership is, for the nonce, illegal there. “Rise up against Saddam! Then drop your weapons.” It’s aimed at looters, of course, but I find I’m still amused. Gun ownership is only a sacred right if the people who own guns agree with you, I guess. More cheerful news: Umm Qasr was turned over to a local council the other day. Good for the Brits. They did have the advantage of working with a relatively small town. I’ve heard that they brought in actual policemen to train a local police force, which seems clever to me.

Saw it, liked it. In brief: Visually impressive. Nice to see the Wachowskis showing off their ability to do eroticism again (go see Bound). Clever enough conceptually. Fun villains. Very good car chase scene. Harold Perrineau, who is always a pleasure. Second act of a third act play, which always has problems. But good solid fun and I’m excited for the third one.

Well, that sucked. If anyone cares, I’m running MySQL 3.23.55 on OpenBSD 3.2 running on an old Mac. It is flaky — MySQL, that is. Sometimes database access just fails. This happened big time last night; I couldn’t even load my previous entry for editing. All messed up. Whenever this gets too annoying, I try and get MySQL 4.0 running; it doesn’t ever work, for reasons that are beyond me. The compile goes OK, I can get the daemon running, but the mysql client can’t connect to it. I’d think I was using an old version of the client but the client straight out of the source tree fails too. Go figure. ...

Oh, sure, you can talk about your Asian dictator Live Journals and so on. But I don’t think that sort of thing even comes close to Julius Caesar’s weblog. Hee hee hee. (Via Brad De Long.)

Tim Dunlop makes a totally unsubstantiated report on terrorist recruiting. (Via CalPundit.) I do not believe or disbelieve it, I just think it’s worth noting. The interesting bit is the increase in MI6 recruitment. One could take it as evidence that the terrorist threat is increasing, or one could take it as an indication that public fear drives hiring in certain government agencies. Both are rather distressing. Speaking of which, the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002. Much trumpeted, since the number of terrorist attacks went from 355 in 2001 to 199 in 2002. Woo! However, if you look at the numbers, you’ll find that most of that drop is because of a sharp drop in Latin American terrorism. ...

Phil Carter reports on an important piece of news out of the Army War College. Essentially, to quote Phil, “America’s strategy of pre-emptive defense might lead to pre-emptive strikes by terrorists and rogue nations around the world, possibly with weapons of mass destruction. Asymmetric warfare — striking at U.S. weakpoints with unconventional tactics — will also become the norm by which our enemies fight us.” I’m a little surprised that this is seen as surprising; we have already entered into that era. What else was 9/11? Still, if this raises awareness, I’m glad. ...

Mr. Sterling, titan of the Friday night prime time landscape, will not be returning next fall (original). Total cliffhanger: now I’ll never know if he was gonna get reelected! I imagine I will assuage my grief with badly written fanfic… No, no, I won’t do that. It is more or less being replaced by this (original): Kate Fox (Silverstone) works as an associate in her father’s Los Angeles law office. In addition to being a sharp divorce attorney, Kate has a knack for matchmaking. She considers her gift a hobby until a socialite bride credits Kate and word of her talent spreads. Soon Kate is juggling the conflicting worlds of divorce and true love. Her father Jerry would rather she focused on work — and her reluctant law partner Nick couldn’t agree more. However, Kate is determined to “spread the love.” Plus, a chance meeting with a handsome stranger (David Conrad, Relativity) may help her find true love in the process. ...

My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for “always be closing”. Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal. I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30621.html">Andrew Orlowski</a> is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.