Come on, nobody look stunned.

I have always been a vocal minority trying to dissuade people from using artificial sweeteners at the rate at which they are consumed in our society. Now I cannot make any claim that I have ate any cancer before, but I would suspect that cancer would taste like a tall refreshing nutrasweet addled soda. Sweetness isn't supposed to have a flavor that makes you taste like you were drinking out of a test tube.

It's amazing to me that if there were proper and extensive studies on these chemicals prior to being shoved down our throats, that now... what about 15 years after it hit the market extensively (since 1983 limited approval) there is continued evidence that it causes cancer in lab animals. Meanwhile a natural noncaloric substitute (the active chemical discovered by modern man in the 30s, likely used by ancient man, and widely used in japan since 1977) has had a hard time being approved for use as a sweetener stateside with much less conclusive evidence accrediting its harmfulness. This is a chemical that tastes a lot better than sucralose, saccharin, and aspartame and also seems to have other medical uses.

I wonder if a certain subset of corporate america might have made it's approval difficult, far be it from me to insinuate that the FDA cares more about the profit of lobbyists rather than the well being of the American public.

"The War Prayer"

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain

So you want to be a webserver?

So you want to host and serve web pages from your own pc but spending your evenings configuring web and database servers isn't exactly your cup of tea? Xampp is for you!

While I thoroughly enjoy an evening of configuration, researching and testing, you may prefer to have your local development environment setup in less time than it would take to consume that caffeinated beverage you'd need to stay up and actually setup Apache webserver, MySQL Database Sever, PHP and Pearl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. Xampp is available for Linux, windows, os x and solaris. It includes an array of utilities to assist with other net tasks such as file transfer and messaging. Best of all, Xampp is FREE.

The philosophy behind XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution to get netizens into the world of Apache. It is put out by Apache Friends, an organization founded in 2002 to promote Apache, its ease and use, documentation and community.

To make it convenient for users XAMPP is configured with all features turned on. The default configuration is not good from a securtiy point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such environment. XAMPP can be configured securely by simply running an included script

More information available at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Political Wednesday

Nick showed me this video the other day, it's long for something you'd watch on your computer (45m). It's called "A history of Oil", performed by comedian/political activist Robert Newman of England. I'm starting to see a converging set of information leading towards this idea, admittedly most recently egged on by mr. Voidstar Runner.

We watched this piece by Newman, that touched on subjects brought up by this (very long, and pretty tedious to follow) documentary called the Money Masters (I must point out i've only made it through the first half). This evening right on the front page of Digg.com is a video of Ron Paul making a speech, if you will, about similar topics.

The reoccurring theme you might ask? The federal reserve bank (yea that's right... lower case suck it, vampires) and the likelihood of a failing of the United States 'greenback' currency. The Ron Paul video is 5 minutes long, Money Masters is about 4 hours, and Robert Newman is 45 minutes, please watch some part of some of this. I won't lie, this will not make you happy (the Robert Newman will give you guilty spats of laughter), but I thought it was intriguing to me how little this information stuck when I first learned it (or were we taught this????).

Running gmail securely

Bobu just laid this amazing tidbit on me (amazing if you're a paranoid uber geek, like me). You can log into gmail thru https:// . Which runs the whole thing through SSL, making it as secure as pretty much possible as far as standards on the web go. Apparently his boss has been doing it that way for the longest time, and just now found it interesting to tell him.

Also the shortcut keys on gmail are pretty fucking neat. It's worth turning them on even if you're not a keyboard junkie (like me). The option is the 3rd one down in your general settings tab, under settings when logged into gmail.

Online Grafitti??

I'm perplexed by this whole thing, it's a big ball of community driven pixel art? It's pretty neat but it's getting hammered by digg.com, causing me to lose connection both times I tried to add to the pink floyd prism. Check it out sometime in the next few days when the web traffic slows down.

food(water) for thought

Well it's about time I make my bi-monthly post (I need to post more, I probably think of (or read) three post worthy things a day but don't think to jump on here and post them. Somebody needs to get on my case about it!)

I swapped the blog over to blogger (at Google), and now It has these neat labels on the bottom.

Anyway this is pretty intriguing stuff here, makes you wonder how much is wasted on a global scale from the relatively new advent of bottled water. I found this while perusing www.treehugger.com, which by the way has the most annoying layout. Makes me want to rake out my eyes! Check back soooooooon, maybe I'll make this a bi-weekly blog :P