Zelda: the Wind Waker
"Hunter's Seventy Seventh Rule: The measure of the menace of a man is not what hardware he carries, but what ideas he believes." -- Jeff "Hunter" Jordan
# I've been playing Zelda: the Wind Waker (fancy Flash site), a Nintendo Gamecube game that my son got last weekend. I'm not as good at it as he is, but I've managed to get nearly to the end of the first dungeon, where I'll set the dragon Valoo free from his tormentor.
# Kurt Amesbury - Independence Day - I posted this back in June, but was just reminded of it. Worth a periodic re-read. [stanleyscoop]
Stirring from deep thoughts, the man's wife looked with respect and affection at the grizzled old man who was her husband and her hero. "Of course, they rewrote the Second Amendment", she said, "It wasn't the same back then. They added a line. Before the war for independence started, the Second Amendment said, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It wasn't until 2011 that they added, "Any person who questions this right in a legislative body may be shot without consequences." The change was enacted exactly four years after that first encounter with the U.N. troops, on the day when ordinary citizens took their firearms into the Nation's capital and came back with our freedom... Independence day, September 6, 2007."
# bob lonsberry - New York Should Leave Pistol Permits Alone - Mr. Lonsberry asks for the New York republican party to stand up to Pataki and tell him to leave the pistol permit system alone. That's not nearly good enough for me. The permit system needs to be entirely elminated, restoring our right to keep and bear arms as in Vermont and Alaska. [scopeny]
# Java 1.5.0 Beta 1 ("Tiger") is available from Sun. Java 1.5 in a Nutshell describes a host of new features: Metadata, Generic Types (looking forward to learning to use them), Autoboxing and Auto-unboxing of Primitive Types (yay!), Enhanced for loop, Enumerated types, Static Import, Formatted Input & Output, Varargs (Java gets Lisp's &rest, now we can wait for &key), class data sharing, performance improvements, and much more. Also see the Summary of New Features and Enhancements page. The Windows installer is 48.7 megs. It expands to 128 megs on disk including 18.9 megs of demos plus 17.5 megs of source code. The jre is 81.2 megs (the 1.4.2 jre was 49.6 megs, and the 1.3.1_02 jre was 29.5 megs). The Java front-end to our accounting system at work appears to run fine with it except that the splash screen is mis-sized.