I had no idea this was going on tonight. Luckily, I still caught it. The sky was clear too!

If you missed it, too bad. The next lunar eclipses visible in the Americas will be in 2007. One on March 3rd, which will only be a partial. One on August 28th, which will only be total for people on the west coast. The next total lunar eclipse visible in the Eastern United States will be on February 21, 2008.

Total Lunar Eclipse of October 28, 2004

] Chief Justice William Rehnquist has undergone throat
] surgery after a diagnosis of thyroid cancer, but is
] expected to be released from the hospital this week,
] according to the Supreme Court.

CNN.com - Rehnquist has thyroid cancer surgery - Oct 25, 2004

... see you all soon!

Update:

In a word, enjoyable. It was great seeing everyone, as always. I look forward to next year.

I should have given a MemeStreams talk. A number of people pointed this out to me. I have no idea why I didn't. Maybe the novelty of going to a con and not speaking for once..

I missed seeing a number of people due to missing most of the Saturday late night festivities. I had to take care of one of the fallen. I view it as karma for my over doing it at Interz0ne last year. Shit happens.

The Stadium Days Inn is a good hotel for PhreakNIC. Friday night had a sort of funhouse feel. By the time I got to soak in the vibe Saturday, it was 4am and everyone was already quite dead.

Till next year..

An online database of what switches control what NPAs. Useful if you want to see what company any given number block is assigned to. For instance, if you have a number xxx-yyy-zzzz, you can lookup the xxx-yyy portion and see who its assigned to. Due to number portability, this isn't an authoritative way to tell who is currently using a given number, but it might yield a clue about where it started.

BellMind.net Phreakery Tools

The section about fighting with Gibson is funny, but the comments about accountability in the writing profession is the part you shouldn't miss.

Slashdot Neal Stephenson Interview

] ...because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At
] times, to be silent is to lie."
]
] ...One actually has to be something of a specialist, today,
] to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how
] baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of
] the United States has since been made to be.

Gibson blogging again is likely a sign he has finished writing his next novel.

I get the feeling that Win Pollard's character is going to be developed more..

William Gibson is blogging again...

Decius wrote:
] I forgot to mention that we also have .org, although it points
] somewhere else....

Proactive or facetious? You^H^H^HThe lawers decide.

Introducing: The MemeStreams Defense Fund (memestreams.org)

Memestreams.com now points to Memestreams.net... and there was much rejoicing!

Memestreams.net 'Its dot com!'

This morning my beloved 17-in Powerbook decided to die. I was browsing through some RSS feeds when all of a sudden it crashed to a grey screen. Whenever I turn it on, it just beeps three times in a tone that sounds similar to the phone company saying "no". Apple had me reseat the RAM and test the SIMMs individualy before declaring my logic board dead.

Long live my PowerBook, my PowerBook is dead.

[weep]

My posting frequency is about to plumet even further.

Apple says they should be able to turn it around in a week.. I hope they are correct. This is going to be a massive inconvience.

On a flight back from Berlin, Barlow turns up his voice of reason to comment on Kerry vs. Bush. Barlow is a Kerry supporter of the "anyone but Bush" flavor, but it is a mistake to brand him as such. Barlow is unhappy with Kerry, but terrified of Bush.

His central point is a common one; A reminder that a presidential election puts a power structure in place, not a person. It is necessary to look past the personality fashion show, and keep the laser beam on the specific issues and larger ideologies that guide them.

As is the tradition, I'll quote out of context and expect you to read the whole thing:

And let's face it, folks, John Kerry is really irritating. There. I've said it. And, having broken the surface tension on that spleen blister, let me just get the rest of this off my chest once and for all. ... Worse, Kerry's transparently theatrical efforts to out-macho the Republicans make him seem, as a friend recently put it, all dick and no balls. ... Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst administration in my lifetime is unfathomable. ... Gradually, I have watched the steam go out of the Anybody-But-Bush crowd as we realized that anybody, in this instance, was the increasingly irksome John Kerry. ... And I have become, I must admit, one of these. Being an actual Kerry *supporter* just seems, well, un-cool.

... and the gear switch. Lincoln vs. Douglas it was not.

But is Kerry really as personally lame as he appears? Well, in fact, no. ... I would say not, especially when we consider what's at stake here. ... I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King. ... Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial. ... We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. ... Along with the man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than the hands-off President himself. ... We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. ... His masters, his servants, and his fundamental beliefs will all be very different, whatever his marketing wizards (all of whom study Rove) are telling him to say now. ... While it would be a wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into existence. ... He has started the United States on a path towards oligarchy that, unchecked, could turn America into a country that makes Mexico look like Sweden. ... I won't attempt to repeat the list of his catastrophes here. ... Neither can the rest of us who have any regard for the well-being of our descendents. ... Yeah, John Kerry makes a lousy candidate for Prom King. But that isn't what he's running for.

BarlowFriendz: Supporting Kerry Anyway...