Video Night

Just a reminder - tonight's video will be either Who Framed Roger Rabbit (if Jen makes it through) or Three Hours of Arguing over Videos (if she doesn't).

8pm, my place. I haven't seen WFRR in over a decade. I'm rather looking forward to seeing how it stands up.

Harry Potter wrongness

jwz: magic wang.

All you HP Slash Writers - give it up, Search and Replace is just as good as you...

Yay for Categories!

lj_dev: Why are there no *categories*?

Brad's announced that he's in favour of categories, and CRSchmidt is going to be looking into it.

Oh happy day!

Buffalo Soldiers

Just a gentle reminder to all you UK people:

Buffalo Soldiers is out today.

GO AND SEE IT!!!!!

Democracy I like

I'm not a fan of Democracy, but short of spending all of my time running the world personally I'm not sure there's a better way of doing things.

A nice suggestion is Liquid Democracy, whereby you have a form of proxied direct democracy - assigning your vote to various proxies depending on how you feel about that particular issue, or even voting directly yourself.

So, for instance, you could assign your "business" votes to Labour, your "Law" votes to the "Legalise Everything Movement" and your "Ecology" votes to the "Destroy the Earth Alliance", keeping everything else to yourself on a case by case basis.

Not a perfect system, but I think it's a step better than what we have at the moment.

Genes and Behaviour

The Anxiety of Depression

Individuals with the "long" version of the gene, which regulates serotonin, could cope with challenges such as the death of family a member, a major breakup or getting fired. People with the "short" version of the gene were much more likely to fall into depression following a major life crisis.

Only 17 percent of those with the long variation of the gene who suffered multiple stressful events developed depression. Forty-three percent of those with the other version of the gene became depressed.

She added that other research offers evidence that the 5-HTT gene is the active gene. "It is known to be expressed in the brain and it has been shown to be associated with reactions to stressful stimuli in mice, monkeys and people undergoing brain imaging," Moffit said.

Eight prior studies found no direct connection between the 5-HTT gene and depression.

Moffitt said she and her colleagues found the connection between 5-HTT and depression only because they took individuals' stress histories into consideration in addition to their depression status. She suggested researchers use the study as a model for studying the nature-vs.-nurture question vis-à-vis other mental disorders.

"In my opinion," Carlezon said, "the most important aspect of this work is that it makes a connection between specific genes in the brain and complex behaviors in people."

Buncha whining bastards

[Poll #158119]

Superman syndrome

Woman dumps man for his online alter ego

Insecure man decides to test his girlfriend's love by having an online affair with her under a pseudonym. She dumps him for his online self. He commits suicide.

Meanwhile, Clark Kent is desolate that Lois Lane prefers Superman to him...

Spam from beyond infinity

Greetings,
We need a vendor who can offer an immediate supply. I'm offering an auto responder magic ebook just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment). Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone number. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll send you an auto responder magic ebook. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.
1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator #52 4350a series wrist watch with Z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available.
2. The special 23200 or Acme 5x24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement is needed with the complete jumper/auxiliary system.
3. A reliable Crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.
4. I will also send to you the auto responder magic ebook for schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufacture which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.
If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you an auto responder magic ebook.

The link at the bottom led here.

Most odd

Video night sigh

Khi texted me two days ago to say she wouldn't be able to make it.

Jen's in Bathgate with her sick mother.

Guy's got visitors up.

Sana hasn't slept properly in days.

Bekka's moved down South.

Anna told Erin she would be here but is now missing in action.

I may just spend the evening in bed with my pillow over my head.

Good day at work

I was tasked to take a file, copy it 50 times and make a change in each one to reflect the file number (file NQT001 was to be copied to NQT002...NQT050. Inside each file there were a few pointers that used the number of the file itself). This would take me, probably, a couple of hours. And bore the shit out of me.

So instead I spent 6 hours learning how the IBM Mainframe scripting language (REXX) works and making it do it for me. Much more fun, I learned a lot, and in the end I discovered that the task will probably need to be done weekly. So I've saved myself 2 boring hours a week. Yay! And learned something. Yay!

If only all days were this good.