A cowboy to hell

Dimebag Darrell

1966-2004

Sad, sad news today in the metal world. We lost an amazing guitarist last night. Dimebag was a very original guitarist and inspired many budding metalheads. I have seen Pantera a couple of times and they always put on an amazing show. I guess any chance for a Pantera reunion died along with Dimebag.

I even went to see this Damageplan tour when they hit Las Vegas. We didn't stay for Damageplan regrettably, mostly because they aren't all that great, but I wish I had now, just to see Dimebag play one last time.

And this all happened at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. I often went to the Alrosa because that's where most metal shows went in Columbus. What a tragedy.

Many news postings are claiming no motive is known. It seems pretty obvious to me that it was some disgruntled Pantera fan. Perhaps even one that has been angered by the harsh words between Dimebag and Phil Anselmo and ultimately took Anselmo's side. At least the gunman was shot dead by the police at the scene. I salute Officer James D. Niggemeyer for handling the situation so well. He probably saved many other lives.

If you want some Pantera listening today, SnakeNet radio is playing exlusively Pantera today.

LaTeX RoX

I have a crapload of work due next week. I was even assigned a paper in two of my classes. I've always hated writing papers, I'd much rather just take a 2 hour test and be done with it. So with these papers, I've decided to do them with LaTeX. Despite my lousy writing abilities, at least the thing will look good. Learning all the code for writing something in latex hasn't been too difficult. Although, I had to fight with it today for a bit in trying to get a fancy diagram showing how negative temperatures are achieved. But I finally got it to do what I wanted, and let me tell you, it looks damn good. The paper is on statistical mechanics, so I got to put in all sorts of fancy equations and LaTeX can just do it all and do it beautifully.

Every document I write from now on will be in LaTeX.

Here's a pdf that gives an introduction to LaTeX. Get it, because LaTeX slays!

Limping along

So I went snowboarding again over the weekend and managed to wreck my leg. I still managed to get a couple of runs in after I did but I had to call it a day earlier than I would have liked. I could barely walk Saturday evening. The pain is slowly going away. Enough at least so that I can go buy myself a snowboard so that I can wreck in style on my own board next time.

I can now kind of ride toeside as well as heelside. Now I just need to interconnect the two and I'll be a pro.

...Well, at least the kind that doesn't eat snow when attempting to change direction.

Slaves to the IRS

Evan Coyne Maloney makes a good argument against graduated tax rates.