heavy-handed tactics

Ernie Ball Guitar Strings went all open source. This explains why, which is far more interesting than the rather humdrum fact that the switch to open source has gone swimmingly. Especially interesting is that the BSA has a Congress-approved guarantee that anyone they pursue has to pay their legal fees.

housing update, or why I have to move

For the last year, I have paid €1,200/mo to a semi-retired optometrist (or somesuch eyedoctoring) living in a big house around the corner from me. As landlords go, he's been pretty good; doesn't hassle me, in fact if it hadn't been for the washing machine giving trouble (as mentioned elsewhere on this journal) I'd not have seen him for the entire duration of the lease. The house is a two-bedroom two-storey terraced affair within a gated enclosure (burbclave, if you wish) except that the gates haven't ever worked while I've lived there. Recent surges in the property market have pushed the cost of one of these houses to €300,000 or more, which is nice, but ten years ago you'd have snapped it up for €100,000 or less. Even taking that into account, 1200 per month is easily covering the mortgage and then some.

So basically my lease ran out yesterday.

The landlord called over last night to discuss renewing the lease, and made some mention of costs he's paying that have increased: property management fees and refuse collection, plus some registration fee or other. He then used these increases to suggest he should raise the rent. Fact of the matter is that I'm just about breaking even with the rent as-is; I can't afford to pay more. He asked if I'd consider taking on a room-mate; I pointed out that the whole reason I'm in a two-bedroom in the first place is so I can use the spare bedroom as an office. So much muttering and the like later, nothing was really resolved. Having said early on that he'd think about what I'd said (that I couldn't pay more, and in fact am hoping to pay less), on leaving he appeared to have made up his mind not to budge as he suggested that I call him after I'd thought about it some more. Mmmhmm. I've thought about it all I want to, and what I want is to pay less money. So now I'm looking for new digs and trying not to move too far away.

Welcome to Blogistan|Blogger Nation|Whatever The Hell

So all the rad kids over at Boing Boing and the like are full of whoop-de-doo tech hype about their status as "citizens of Blogistan" and other such nonsense. In the course of tooling with an RSS aggregator I noticed that Boing Boing's feed wasn't updating the lastBuildDate flag, so as far as a good aggregator is concerned the page hasn't been updated since some time in July. I mailed one of the Boingers about this, and got a reply to the effect that it wasn't their problem because Blogger generates all their RSS.

The nice thing about belonging to "Blogger Nation" and being an "a-list Blogger" is that you don't have to give a toss for standards, evidently.

kids these days

from #samba, name retained to highlight the guilty:

<gimpy> cant they like change the gpl to not allow sco to use anything licensed under it?
<gimpy> its sco, nobody will mind im sure

Sigh.