All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

It seems like lately every time I go to publish my blog, something goes wrong and I have to remove all my files and republish everything from scratch. This isn’t so much difficult as it is extremely annoying.

If I figure out what the hell is going wrong I’ll share it with you. 🙂

Ahh. Earlier on, I was pondering why Comedy Central would air a depiction of Mohammed in a South Park episode called “Super Best Friends”, when they wouldn’t air a depiction of him in last week’s episode (“Cartoon Wars II”).

The answer is simple, blatantly obvious, hypocritical, and I missed it.

“Super Best Friends” aired before the 9/11 attacks.

Let’s all revel in the hypocrisy of it.

It’s struck me recently how people have problems using verbs with their DVRs. Even me. I’ll say, “I’m taping…no sorry, I’m DVRing…no, I mean, recording…oh what the hell…”

Now, what a LOT of people say is, “I’m TiVoing that show tonight.” Even if they don’t have TiVos. I bet if you go out there and compare the number of people who say they’re “TiVoing” something, only a very few actually have TiVo.

Now, I find it fascinating that TiVo, which is by no means the dominant DVR system at the moment (mostly due to proprietary DVRs that cable and satellite companies use), is the active verb a lot of people use when referring to digitally recording something.

I know this is silly, but in that way, TiVo has triumphed. They get their name repeated over and over again by people who have never even seen a TiVo (and yes, folks, TiVos are different than other DVRs, mostly because of the “push” technology they use to recommend shows to you — much the same way as Amazon.com uses “push” technology to recommend books to you).

So it’s an idle thought. So I think too much. But it’s kind of interesting. 🙂

Ah, fresh from the Trojan war front. A couple of days ago, my computer started acting up — mostly Internet Explorer. I would load say, one page — the front page of Wikipedia, for example — and then try to look something up and I’d get blank white pages with the correct URL.

I ran NAV. I ran several spyware programs I have. They cleaned up over 397 files, but they didn’t do squat about this. I began to think I’d need to reinstall Explorer all over again (what a bitch). I finally used a secure system manager thing on a freeware basis — I can’t remember the name, just look up “secure system manager” or something, or use a non-secure one and locate the file I’m about to tell you about — and it told me that a “directpt.dll” file was using up a lot of resources and taking priority.

I did a quick search on “directpt.dll”. Apparently it’s part of a Trojan backdoor/haxdoor rootkit (for those who don’t speak jive, that’s “nasty virus-like thing that lets people control your computer from afar”). So I quarantined the bastard, deleted it, and behold, everything is back to normal…except all my icons now look generic.

To fix *this*, I just opened up display properties and resized the icons from small to large and then back again. This forces Windows to rebuild the desktop. This hung after a while, so I tried a hard boot to see if it was working at all and — it completely fixed the problem.

Anyway…maybe this will help someone down the line.

Whoops. Episode 1004 of South Park appears to have been censored. In “Cartoon Wars II”, Kyle races to make sure an episode of “Family Guy” that features Mohammed giving someone a football helmet will air. The scene where he’s (finally) supposed to appear is just black with the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Now, at first, I pretty much thought that this was a bit of self-propaganda; namely, South Park getting miffed over its “Trapped in the Closet” episode, plus the fact that the scene is followed by Bush, an unwed mother, and Jesus pooping on each other and the American flag (the idea being, look what we CAN show you, then look at what we CAN’T).

There’s one problem. Comedy Central has aired a South Park that showed Mohammed WELL BEFORE THIS. In “Super Best Friends”, Mohammed is right there, and nobody got held hostage at Comedy Central’s offices.

So what is this? Just a reflection of heightened concern due to the Danish problem? Or is this maybe a sneaky way of portraying themselves as martyrs again, although this time under false pretenses? I’m inclined to believe that Matt and Trey did want a short picture of Mohammed, and that it is the change in times now, but I’m one skeptical son of a bitch and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a publicity stunt, perhaps with Comedy Central complicit because of the whole Scientology debacle (“You take a heeet for us now, Comedy Central!”).

Anyway, it’s worth debating.

Well, just writing a quick note to let all you good folks note (all three of you) that you may have noticed kiplange.com was down for about four days, and my mail was also down for that period. The good folks at 3Media Web Solutions were performing a software upgrade, and it’s now finished, so I am pleased to say that I am back and blogging away again. Did you miss me? 🙂

Alright. I have to admit it. I like the new Doctor Who. Yes, yes, I know it’s kind of crappy, but I like it. They at least kept the spirit going much more than, say, the idiots who did Star Trek: Enterprise did with Star Trek (may that awful thing descend the bowels of the Earth and be seen no more).

Whew. That’s a weight off my shoulders.

I recently picked up a copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I’ve always been a Civ addict — you can find me after a week locked up in a dark room with only the light of the monitor illuminating my stubble-covered face, sweating in my boxers and mumbling, “I’ve got to fortify the northern rim!”

Anyway, for those who are wondering, yes, Civilization IV, the, um, fourth Civilization game, is a big step up from Civ 3. Although most of you are going to need a patch for it, as it considers my 2 GHz, 1024k RAM system “low-end”. The 1.52 patch at the Civilization website fixes that. Anyway, the interface now looks more like a RTS (real-time strategy — like Command & Conquer) than the old plain vanilla Civ interface. You can now zoom way in, zoom way out, the units are animated…and so on. It’s a little bit clunky, though.

As for gameplay, it’s mostly the same, although, mark this, I have not played the game for that long. New additions include religions and a much more complex political system. One feature they took away, which is unfortunate, is the ol’ aerial view of the city, where you could view the wonders you had built in your city and get a general idea of how big it was.

On the whole, yes, the new Civilization is a big step up in looks, and is much more complex (like it NEEDED to be more complex, though). I have not tried online gaming yet, as most of the time if I play a game online without pwning the computer AI, I get destroyed by legions of pimply-faced teenagers, and that’s not good for my UC Berkeley-educated ego.

Should you buy it? If you have the money and you love Civilization games, the answer is yes. Just make sure your computer can RUN the damn thing, first.

Hah! Good news. I have converted both of my parents into loyal watchers of both “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”. How? Relentless and subversive suggestion — it’s always the way to go.

The best part? We’re all still die-hard conservatives. Muhahahahaha!

My personal goal? Elimination of all networks except Comedy Central, The SciFi Channel, and, yes, of course, Fox News.

Okay, found a really good link to a BitTorrent stream for “Trapped in the Closet” — South Park Episode 912, the one Tom Cruise doesn’t want you to see. For information on BitTorrent and a client to download the file, follow this link.

To download “Trapped in the Closet”, South Park Episode 912 — the one Viacom will not re-air because Cruise has threatened to pull his publicity from Mission Impossible III if they do, follow this link right here (you need a BitTorrent client, see above).

Note: I am not hosting this file. The above is a link to a completely different site. In other words, if you want to yell at me about copyright infringement, don’t waste your time. First off, I believe I’ve read over and over that Mssrs. Stone and Parker are not that worried about their episodes being available online, and I’m damn sure they don’t mind if you’re finally free to see “Trapped in the Closet” for the first or second time, since it has effectively been censored. Beyond that, as I have said, the file is not on this server. So go bother someone else if you have nothing better to do than gripe that the world is ending because of filesharing. 😉

Again, the link to “Trapped in the Closet”, AVI format.

Fuck you, Tommy Cruise.