taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Life: seeing as yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, it’s worth noting that I gave up smoking last Thursday.

This is the first time I’ve taken the step of quitting with any seriousness. I’ve been smoking since I was 18 or 19, without any real attempts to quit before now. It was a gradual process, but imagining a smoker’s future, with the diseases and reduced life expectancy it involves, makes it quite sensible in the end. So far, it’s going pretty well — lots of occasional pangs, but nothing I can’t say no to… especially with the aid of Liquorice Altoids. wish me luck!

Tags: day, life, process, seriousness, smoking, step, thursday, time, tobacco, world, yesterday

Patents: lyranthe.org notes that the EU elections are coming up this Thursday, 11th June. Accordingly, here’s a single-issue roundup of the candidates, from what I’ve heard:

• The Labour Party, sadly, haven’t yet come up with a concrete policy on the issue — but the Dublin candidate, Ivana Bacik, has (verbally) stated her opposition.
• The Greens, however, are actively campaigning against them, their candidates clearly understand and have communicated with voters on the issue in the past, and the cross-Europe party policy is clearly stated.
• Eoin Dubsky is an independent candidate, standing on a primarily anti-war platform. He’s stated his opposition to software patenting clearly and publically. He’s also a total techie — with RSS feeds and a Redbrick account! ;)
• FG’s position is totally unclear, as usual… ;)
• And in the other corner: FF and the PDs are whole-heartedly supporting software patenting; in fact, they’re the ones running the EU Council which just pushed through software patenting law despite the democratic mandate from the European Parliament. boo.

(PS: these are my opinions, not those of my employer. ;)

(updated: I’d left out Eoin Dubsky! my bad, now fixed.)

Tags: candidate, issue, june, lyranthe, opposition, org, party, patents, policy, software, thursday

Funny: The latest MIT ‘hack’: a replica of the Wright brothers’ biplane on top of the MIT Great Dome. Nice work!

The model was dismantled Thursday by Barber and Cunha, the Institute’s hack evaluation and removal team, who salvaged a completed FAA certificate of airworthiness form for the MIT Museum.

Tags: barber, biplane, dome, funny, great, mit, model, replica, thursday, top, work

Yahoo!: Finns Scratch Heads Over N.Korea Porn Claim:

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish officials were at a loss to explain an allegation made on Thursday by a U.S. official that North Korea has been caught trying to sell pornography in the small Nordic country. ‘It sounds strange. It sounds wild,’ an official at the Foreign Ministry told Reuters.

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Tom Schieffer made the comments earlier on Thursday to the National Press Club in Canberra, saying North Korea was using a ‘mafia-like’ business model to make up a revenue shortfall when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

Found on MemeFirst, which looks like a pretty nifty site. Now to see if I can rig up RSS for it. One of the MemeFirst culprits seems to be Stefan Geens, who also has a blog; he reviews ‘How The Irish Saved Civilization’ in fine style, comparing the annotations of the medieval Hibernian monks to blogging. hmm…

He’s stuck in Dublin, right now, trying to figure out a way to get hold of some bandwidth. I wish him luck.

Tags: claim, finns, heads, memefirst, official, porn, reuters, scratch, thursday, yahoo