Tim's Bits and Pieces

... well if we pretend these guys (including several Nobel laureates) don't exist.

I saw these two headlines beside each other in my news reader yesterday:

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My Slackware laptop had decently fast boot times (a little over a minute), but I'm impatient and decided to see if I could speed it up some more. Here's the changes I made and the results down the bottom. This is on a Dell Vostro 1510, with 4GB of ram and a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo. Obviously the results will vary depending on your hardware.

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"Viva Cuba Libre"

About a fortnight ago my GMail account started giving me weird errors when I tried to login via POP3; the error I was receiving was something similar to "-ERR [SYS/TEMP] Proxying required. {XDH}".

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I'm moving my blog to a new host: NearlyFreeSpeach.NET and to a new domain http://blog.timp.com.au.

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How the government "injects money into the economy"¹. While it's true that the Queensland increase only amounts to 1.5% of the total stimulus, extrapolated out to the rest of the country it comes to around 20% (QLD Pop: 1.5M, Total Australian Pop: 20M), and then of course there's the Alcohol industry which probably experienced similar increases. (There's also smoking, illegal drugs, prostitutes, and other vices as well) In total we are talking around 40-50% of the the economic stimulus being wasted on vices².

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Whilst this argument has been stated previously (C.S. Lewis formed the first version with only three L's, and Legend was added later), I feel it is well worth repeating. This is essentially an argument as too who the real historic figure of Jesus of Nazareth was. There is extensive historical documents surrounding this Rabbi from Judea who claimed to be much more than just a Rabbi. (Don't believe me that Jesus claimed to be God? See Matt. 27:43, Mark 14:62, Luke 22:70, John 6:35, John 6:40, John 6:51, John 8:12, John 8:23-24, John 8:58, and a bunch of others that I couldn't be bothered to look up right now)

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Just a bunch of interesting links I've found over the past while, don't worry I'm still planning to write a real blog post this weekend as well. Also sorry for missing the last two posts, Christmas was deliberate, but I just didn't get anything done on the 3rd/4h.

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A comparison of deaths caused by firearms to deaths caused by cars and motorbikes in Australia during 2006 (most recent year available). All tables including ICD codes for cause of death.

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