I've been so damn busy these days, writing anything interesting for good ol Hongpong.com has been pretty much set aside.

It's a really weird political season, hell, around here it's been a weird weather season. There was freezing rain all over my car on Friday night. It's already the end of April. It's probably a good thing that I haven't been puttering around blogging and obsessing over what's on the Internet. That shit gets tiresome!

Can't Mess With The Atmos: I got the new Atmosphere album, "When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That S*** Gold", and it's damn good. Slug dropped damn near all the bombast, now he's just trying to tell us kids to pay the bills and get it together... Be sure to check out their awesome "Paint it Gold" webcasts - they have been really excellent.

Visit the "not Google Killer Google Killer": Twine.com: Quite a while ago I mentioned the interesting Twine.com project, which lets you add all your own bookmarks/notes/videos/etc into a big online repository, kind of like Del.icio.us plus Facebook.
Basically you can cluster your areas of interest by setting up "Twines" of semantically tagged content. Most interestingly, you can upload huge chunks of text and PDFs, and it will automatically scan through and pull out the names and organizations involved.
Finally I got the 'beta invite' to join Twine, and of course I dumped in as much hard Iran-Contra conspiracy evidence text I had laying around. Add a few bookmarks, and Twine went crazy all over the stuff, indexing all the CIA drug dealers, locales and front companies of interest. Verdict: Fantastic conspiracy data mining!
Look at all the Conspiracy Entity Names it automatically spit out (in orange at right) when I put in the famed CIA Limited Hangout Frederick Hitz report on "Allegations of connections between CIA and Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States." Contrary to popular belief, you can still read this report on the CIA's website (with some alterations).
If anyone else would like an invitation to try Twine, plz send me an email @ hongpong AT hongpong.com ! Use data mining to exp0se the stuff! Oh noooes!!

Sorry everyone, I got swamped with stuff going on and haven't had the time to knock out some blog posts. Sunday's big project during the April showers was to get ready to erase my main hard drive and get it ready for OS X 10.5.

I managed to consolidate my iTunes library by getting rid of a lot of duplicates, and 'consolidate' it onto one hard drive, which has never been done before. I fear that a few old free-floating Mp3s got chucked, but them's the breaks.

A lot of stuff got chucked, and I am pretty close to fitting everything on the main drive to where the music used to be. It was certainly an all-day project. Probably about 70% of the junk work is over with! I'm really looking forward to getting this beast onto 10.5, it'll be like a new machine!

*******

Other than that, well in the world it's been one series of grim news after another.

And I don't feel like talking about it. It's finally getting nice outside and things are working out pretty well for me right now. As long as I get enough sleep and have a bit of luck, everything'll be fine?