Saw it once at Skycity in 3D and then again last night at IMAX 3D. Movie is awesome. Relates to real life on so many levels.

For one, its just like everytime America (or UK in the old days) invades a country to steal their natural resources. Iraq/South America/Africa. Same old (evil) story… greedy foreign capitalist scumbags trying to make a buck leaving the country (planet) impoverished.

In the Navi’s case it would have no doubt ended in the forest dying and becoming a desert planet… the unobtanium is probably tied in with the neural network – guess we’ll find out in the sequels.

The other thing I thought was awesome is the networking thing in the planet. Imagine that! Petabytes and petabytes of biological storage linked by a global neural network. Thats how it should be. Its like a modern primitive race…

This movie makes me want to go bush. If only we had creatures as interesting on earth (I’d probably get eaten).

Also I downloaded the movie… does that make me a criminal? I paid 38 bucks in total to go see it at the movies and they made over $2 billion dollars off the thing, I don’t think they’ll mind me not forking out another $40 for the DVD.

I do think though at the end of the movie they should’ve fed all the humans to some thanators, instead of letting them go home… they’ll just come back, They’ll tell everyone how close a battle it was, someone will probably send a nuke straight at the tree of souls from outer space. What the fuck are the Na’vi gonna do then?

At least if a shuttle turn up and finds massacred people everywhere and a dead base, and multiple warships destroyed by some savages with bows and arrows it’ll strike fear into them and they might piss off never to return… but I digress, it’s just a movie.

The time to act to protect the public from hard drugs is now. People talk about cannabis being the gateway drug, when really, it is the current Misuse of Drugs Act that is gateway LEGISLATION.

Because cannabis is driven underground with all the other hard drugs, this means that the only way for people to get hold of cannabis is to go to drug dealers, who most probably want a customer for their more expensive, and more addictive drugs.

With 51% of the population having tried cannabis and up to 15% of the population actively using cannabis that makes for a lot of people to potentially have exposure to hard drugs. It also shows that despite the illegality of cannabis, people are willing to smoke it.

We need to take control of cannabis out of the hands of drug dealers and gangs. These unregulated distributors sometimes adulterate or lace their cannabis with harder drugs, or harmful substances such as lead particles (to make it weigh more) or microscopic glass beads (to make it look more potent).

This makes the drug a significantly more hazardous to the health of the people that choose to smoke it (regardless of the legality), because the government doesn’t provide a means of safe access.

Cannabis has been scientifically and anecdotally proven to be beneficial for over 300 ailments and diseases. Making cannabis a class D drug would open up the doors for research on it, allowing scientists to extract the chemical cannabinoids and make newer, safer, and natural drugs.

It is a little known fact that in the human body there are four types of cannabinoid receptors (that have been found so far). Cannabinoids are produced in three ways. Naturally by the human brain (endo-cannabinoids), naturally by the cannabis plant (phyto-cannabinoids) and artificially in labs.

I would also like to compare the situations between the Netherlands and the United States. The United States Government is vehemently opposed to drug tolerance, treat drugs as a criminal issue and as a result have very high drug use rates. The Netherlands on the hand, regulate the use of soft drugs, and treat drugs in general as a social health issue – I.E. providing easy access to education and rehab for those that want it. The Netherlands drug use rates are half that of the United States. These figures can be found within 5 mins on google.

Do I need to mention what happened when the United States prohibited Alcohol?

To put cannabis into the class D category is to take a step in the right direction. It is to take a step into governmental control of drugs, instead of governmental restriction. This is what is needed to protect our citizens from hard drugs.

First of all the articles states two different figures for hospitalization for cannabis users in 2005. $32m and $35m.. which one is it? We’ll take the figure of $35m and divide that by the 400,000 users in the country (as reported by the DHI in the NZ herald here) and you have health costs of approximately $80 per user. With an estimation of only half of people surveyed admitting to smoke cannabis you have a figure of 800,000 user in NZ, this equates to around $40 per user. Is this really an issue? And what constitutes an admission for cannabis use? It is my bet from stories I have heard that these admissions are from first time users, having too much and freaking out as can be seen in the documentary “Should I Smoke Dope”. In the documentary the reporter freaks out when she smokes a whole joint at a cannabis shop. First time users should not smoke a whole joint. Its not a danger to their life or bodies at all, however they can freak out and think they are overdosing. But at least cannabis users who freak out and think they are overdosing still have the piece of mind and ability to go to the hospital. Lets see someone with alcohol poisioning or a heroin overdose admit themselves to the hospital.

Now lets look at the alcohol figures quickly. 4700 people a year die from alcohol use with an estimated $1.5b to 2.4b of social harm as reported here in the NZ Herald.

“Cannabis-related hospital admissions exceeded the numbers admitted for opiates, amphetamines and cocaine combined. “

They say there are more admissions to hospital for cannabis use than any other drug. HELLO!!! This is because more people use cannabis than any other drug! This is a good thing, would you rather your kid smoke a harmless herb, or get cooked on Pure Methamphetamine? Approx 95,170 people admitted to using other drugs than cannabis compared to 400,000 cannabis users who admitted to using. I think however times both figures by a factor of two because how many people are going to admit to using illegal drugs?

“The majority of patients were suffering from a psychotic disorder, followed by cannabis poisoning, harmful use, dependence and acute intoxication.”

They say people admitted had a psycotic disorder. Could it be that these people were self medicating with cannabis? So they were using cannabis to fix the psycotic disorder rather than the cannabis causing the psycotic disorder? Treatment of depression and bipolar disporder with cannabis has been proven to be beneficial.

There are over 300 medical uses for cannabis.

“The majority of patients were suffering from a psychotic disorder, followed by cannabis poisoning, harmful use, dependence and acute intoxication.”

It also states that people got marijuana poisoning. This is not possible. Cannabis is not POISON!!! You IDIOTS!!! Do some research and you will quickly find that the chemicals in cannabis are naturally produced by the healthy human brain. These chemicals, known as cannabinoids are produced in the cannabis plant and called Phyto-cannabinoids. The cannabinoids produced in the human brain are called Endo-cannabinoids. There are so far 4 known cannabinoid receptors in the brain and body cells that when stimulated help with pleasure, brain cell generation and neuroprotection among other functions. Cannabis is far from poison.

Health Minister Tony Ryall said he had not yet read the report, but suspected the cost to the health system would be “significantly higher than that, when you consider its contribution to accidents and family breakdown”.

Contribution to accidents? Which? Where? What accidents? And how can cannabis breakdown a family? I think you mean alcohol and its prevalence for causing domestic violence?

“A new breed of powerful cannabis and ballooning costs in treating its health effects have led to calls for urgent action…”

The final beef I had with the article was this opening line. First of all more potent cannabis IS BETTER!!!! It means you have to smoke LESS to get the desired effect. This means there IS LESS SMOKE ENTERING THE LUNGS. And any smoke, even cannabis smoke which has had cancer links disproven, is still not good to inhale. There are better ways to consume cannabis than smoking.

What you are celebrating is actually an ancient pagan ritual called Yule-tide, stolen and renamed by christianity in order to try and get rid of paganism in Northern Europe.

So this year I will be wishing people Happy Yule-tide in protest of this christian bullshit takeover.

HAPPY YULE-TIDE!!

I don’t understand why he got a peace prize? For taking troops out of Iraq and putting them into Afghanistan? That doesn’t really equal peace does it? Especially because doing this is completely self serving for OPEC and other corrupt organisations.

You see, now that they have stopped Saddam drilling his own oil to use for his own country (like he watched the UAE do), they need to secure Afghanistan to allow a oil and gas pipeline to run through the country.

To run a pipeline through the country they need to get rid of the Taliban because they’re not really down with a pipeline. That is one of the supporting factors of 9/11 being a false flag operation. Talks with the Taliban about putting a pipeline through were breaking down before 9/11. A war on terror (and the Taliban) was a perfect excuse to take out those standing in the way of the pipeline. Not to mention the fact that the Taliban had destroyed all the poppy fields slowing the supply of heroin into America, and thus slowing the need for drug war spending (this is bad, the law enforcement agencies would lose their jobs with no drugs/users to confiscate/apprehend).

So back to the point of the of the story… it would seem Obama is sending US troops back into Afghanistan to make sure the Taliban are kept down. This in turn allows for a stable country for a pipeline to carry oil and gas from the resource rich countries north of Afghanistan, down to the sea for American ships to take as they please.

The problem here is that the country is not stable. Even if the Taliban are kept down, the country is in pretty bad shape since America invaded. Infrastructure and housing are needed and all promised aid has not arrived. This makes for desperate people living in poverty, and they are going to grow up angry at America because they dropped bombs on their houses and didn’t repair them.

Which is completely understandable right? If America invaded my country I would be fighting back. Some would label that being a terrorist, but I would label that being terrorized. America are the real terrorists in this world.

So basically it all comes back to greedy oil companies taking valuable resources from smaller countries that can’t protect themselves, with the help of the American Government/Army (aka Terrorists/Bullies), under the veil of The War On Terror. With utter disregard for the deaths of soldiers and civilians – they just want their money.

You got that? The only terrorist threat comes from America… everyone else is just a desperate patriot trying to fight back against the military industrial complex that has targeted their country and is stealing their resources.

Patriots exist in places other than the USA you know…

Today I managed to get 4 containers done and fixed, thats gotta be a pretty shit number though. Usually have to use the grinder with a sanding attachment on it (which kicks ass) to sand the plywood floors of the container, then blow all the dust out with an air hose, reattach with rivets and silicon up the door seals, and on one of them I had to reweld a bit that wasn’t welded properly.

I saw a dude replacing a corner post though, apparently any damage on them and they have to be replaced. Cut out the whole corner post with a gas axe then welded a new one in. Can’t wait till I get to do that.

However, AirNZ have already called me back about my application for the Business Analyst role, which could be worth up to 70k I reckon, I’ll find out tomorrow if I get an interview with them, then I’ll have to take a sickie to go to it.

I’ll be doing sanding and painting mostly by the sounds of things, with the occasional cutting out and welding in new sheets of steel. Luckily its sanding with an electric sander and painting with a spraygun.

So I start monday, damn its going to be hard getting up at 5am again… Also, everyone else I saw there was black, so I’m gonna be a white computer geek blinding everyone. Will have to take my iPod too cos they crank some gay RnB station there.

Its a 3month trial, that standard thing that Labour bought in so I’m going to keep looking for IT jobs in the meantime but if I don’t get one this job sounds pretty fun, and its nightshift.

So I played it by ear and I’m going to post how I did it so you won’t have to. You’ll need to be using mdadm. I’m going to assume the partitions you want raided are /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 and that you are currently booted to /dev/sda1. A rescue disk will also be helpful.

We are going to get a mirror going with just /dev/sdb1 (empty I hope) in it. Then we’ll copy everything over to it so everything is the same after reboot when it does a resync. Makes your data a bit safer.

Here we go…

Have you tried to setup raid before on these drives? This checks them for superblocks.

If it spat up lines like “ARRAY blah blah UUID=34cd3:etc”, zero them. Don’t worry not dangerous to data.

OK now we want to copy the partition tables over:

Now we create the raid array in a degraded mode with the master drive missing and format it to your filesystem.

Have a look at your new RAID:

Now we need to make sure that the kernel modules for scsi and raid are built in to the kernel. I am not actually sure if this step is needed but it worked on mine.

Now you’ll be presented with the kernel modules config screen. Find Device Drivers then in SCSI Device Support. In this section we need to make sure a few things have the asterisk in the brackets (should mean built in on the legend). These things for me were RAID Transport Class, SCSI device support, SCSI disk support and SCSI generic support. Press spacebar on each of them to change the M or blank in the brackets to an asterisk. Then exit out of it saving your config as you leave.

Now the important part – creating the kernel image. This worked for me… at about the sixth time and exhaustive google searches:

Now you want to modify /boot/grub/grub.conf and /boot/grub/device.map.

Need to make sure we have both devices in there
/boot/grub/device.map:

Need to make a backup bootloader entry and a raided one too
/boot/grub/grub.conf:

That boot list boots off /dev/sdb before and loads into the system with the raid array active. This allows you to add /dev/sda1 into the array. If it booted off /dev/sda1 (e.g. hd0) then /dev/sda1 would be locked and you would not be able to do the mdadm command.

It also allows you to boot without the raid array if your raid setup failed to boot (i.e. kernel panic). The setting for root in fstab doesn’t matter if its set to /dev/md0, /dev/sda1 still becomes the root drive.

Now install grub on /dev/sdb:

Now change the root device in your fstab to be /dev/md0
/etc/fstab:

Now we need to copy everything over to the raid array, however it will probably crash out copying with the running system like mine did, but not to worry we are pretty much ready to go here.

Shut down and boot into a linux rescue disk (the first cd of RHEL5.4 has it), and get to the command line, don’t bother mounting filesystems or anything.
Try this:

If that doesn’t work then try this:

and push y if it asks you to create over another array.

Create mountpoints and mount your drives:

Now copy everything over:

Wait a while till that is done then reboot. Hopefully you don’t get a kernel panic, and it boots up on the degraded /dev/md0 array. If it does then add your /dev/sda1 in like follows:

Now you can watch the resync progress like this:

mdadm is pretty smart.

Here’s some other links that may help you out if you’re stuck:
http://wiki.clug.org.za/wiki/RAID-1_in_a_hurry_with_grub_and_mdadm
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-raid@vger.kernel.org/msg09672.html
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/238
http://unthought.net/Software-RAID.HOWTO/Software-RAID.HOWTO-7.html

I will quickly mention this though. You may have noticed that pricespy.co.nz has recently been changed. Some think its good, most people think its crap. This is because it was bought by the swedish pricespy who changed it to match the swedish pricespy. However it is quite complicated and sometimes difficult or annoying to use.

So me, Alkaif, and a dude Phil the Mysterious (lol) went about creating a site similar to the old pricespy, but with more advanced features. After another one of the team decided to split off and start his own one, we closed the source, however our site seems to be the best out of the 2 similar sites that have spawned since the pricespy change.

Anyways today we went live beta. So check it out at www.howmuchisit.co.nz.

Our categorization is pretty much down pat and accurate, we have a search friendly urls like howmuchisit.co.nz/for/an/amd phenom X4.

We also have forums temporarily located at project.hackproof.co.nz where people can submit feature requests or bugs that they have found.

So far the feedback has been good, both from retailers and users of the old pricespy. So spread the word if you could. Pricespy is dead.

by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945