don't pay the ferryman; do pay the taxman

sheena was a punk rocker
Not shaping up to be a good day -- first I've got to give the State of Maryland a huge tax payment, then I find out Joey Ramone died. I will be sedating myself in his memory later today.

who let the funk out?
Since it's getting to be springtime (leastways 'round here it is), here's the home page of the Dirty Sole Society, a group of people dedicated to being barefoot. (Hey, everybody has their thing, ya know?)

big bro, watchin' you watchin' him
The ACLU has a new ad out spotlighting the US government's electronic surveillance programs. Too bad they didn't run the ad in more papers.

when they are out to get you
The Jim Bell "stalking" trial has concluded, unsurprisingly, with a number of guilty verdicts. The trial is summarized here, for those of you who haven't been following it closely.

#censored#
And while we're on the subject, Project Censored's top censored stories for 2000 are out.

quilting with perl
Found via Usenet, a Perl-generated graphic showing all possible triangle-based quilting blocks, and the actual quilt featuring all those blocks.

servicing the customer
Unfortunately, that's probably going to be the last set of links I get off Usenet for awhile, because Speakeasy, my ISP, cut off Usenet access for its dialup customers on Friday. Yes, dialup customers only; DSL customers still have full access. They did this because "dialup users were slowing the service down" for the DSL users.

I've used Speakeasy for about a year. I would have been really happy to get DSL through them and Covad, had it been possible for me to do so. However, I'm stuck behind fibre for the foreseeable future, which means I'm screwed on the DSL tip, and Speakeasy reducing the services I get, with no advance notice, has told me how important my $20/month is to them.

So, I'm looking for a new ISP. Nationwide access would be nice, Usenet access is a must, and they should be at least OS agnostic, if not Linux friendly. Send your suggestions to jacobs@genehack.org.

anatomy of a joke
This was a pretty slow year, April Fool's joke-wise. One of the better ones I did see was the story about Perl and Python merging to form the new language Parrot. Simon Cozens, the man behind the joke, let's us in on how it was done.

pretty
In case you missed it, have a look at APOD's shot of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.

it could be worse
While you're at work on Tax Day (for the USians) or Monday-after-holiday-weekend (if you got time off) or just regular old Monday (if neither of the two apply), and you're having a bit of a bad day, pause and give thanks that you don't have any worms in your brain. Probably.