So apparently "Willis Insurance" (who I have never heard of before) is moving into the Sears Tower, has acquired naming rights, and expects everyone henceforth to call it "Willis Tower" (story).
Yeah, ummm, good luck with that, chumps. Hope you didn't pay too much for the naming rights, cuz I really don't see too many Chicagoans actually changing how they refer to it....
This guy could be my long lost brother....
I'm glad I saw the Police back in 2007, so that I wouldn't have to choose "which was my favorite concert of the year" between that show and last night's Metallica gig at Nassau Coliseum.
Holy. Fucking. Crap.
It was a setlist designed to appease... to make amends with veteran fans from way-back-when who were as much in denial about the existence of Load and Reload as Highlander fans are in denial about Highlander 2. In their two hour setlist, not a single song featured on the "Load"s appeared, nor did anything from their album after that, St. Anger.
All the setlist had in it was what could best be called "classic" Metallica tracks, from the black album prior, as well as "new classics", songs from their recent release, Death Magnetic, which was a clear return to their roots.
I've seen plenty of Metallica shows in my day. When they toured in support of the black album, I must've seen them a dozen or more times. There was a point in time where Little George and I could've talked ourselves through the inter-song banter, "insert-city-name-here"ing ourselves through two hours of great tunes.
Last night's show? Quite possibly the best show I've ever been at. The setlist was filled with tons of rarely heard classics: Phantom Lord -- only the second time since 2003 that song has come out of the vault)... The Thing That Should Not Be -- holy crap what a rush when they started into that....
I ended the concert completely dehydrated (major props, by the way, to the Marriott front-desk woman, who when I asked her to break a $20 so I could find a vending machine and buy some bottled water, just went into the back and got me, Big George, and Mark three bottles for free even though she knew I wasn't a guest... great service!)... my neck still hurts, and there's still a little bit of hoarseness in my throat from singing and shouting all night long.
The boys are definitely back. Felt like old times. Almost enough to make me forget the decade of crushing pain in between "then" and "now" .... :-)
On Facebook, a friend of mine linked to this article, which claims that low-price airfares are damaging the environment because aircraft emissions are SOOOO much worse than other types, etc., etc.
Here are some of its claims:
Air travel produces 19 times the greenhouse gas emissions of trains
"produces" how? In terms of "ppm per hour"? per passenger? per passenger-hour? total?
Remember that a train by and large takes far longer to get from A to B than a train does. So while it may produce "more pollution per hour", an airplane trip from NY to LA only takes 6.5 hours, where a similar train trip takes 62 hours. Is it worth generating only 2x the emissions to get there 10x faster? I'd like to think "probably".
One return flight to Florida produces the equivalent CO2 of a year's average motoring
An average motorist drives 15k miles per year on their car, give or take. A round-trip flight (which in "Brit-speak" is a "return flight") is approximately 8k miles (4k each way). A British Airways 747, in its most "packed" variation, holds 295 passengers. So if the statistic that you get 2,360,000 flight-miles for the same emissions as driving a car-load (4 passengers) of people a total of 60,000 passenger-miles, then I'm perfectly A-OK with that.
Of course MY interpretation of the statistic provided doesn't provide nearly the gloom and doom value of their interpretation, now does it?
Who knows which of us is right? I don't. They didn't cite their source for the statistics so there's no way to go back and look to see what the statistics WERE (as opposed to how they were interpreted for easy consumption). My experience tends towards "oh, they didn't cite their source? Then it probably says what they say it does, but not what they say it means."
Holy cow. Old Metallica is back!
After the ultra-disappointments of Load and Reload, and a promising but ultimately still not-that-great St. Anger... I was braced for the worst with their latest release Death Magnetic. After all, we'd heard it many times before - that they were going back to basics, revisiting their roots, all the euphemisms bands use when they want to say, "Ummmm, we strayed too far and started to lose our core fanbase. Shit!"
From the long forlorn intro to That Was Just Your Life, you wonder what you're in for, but then it proceeds to just attempt to kick your ass over... and over... and over again.
There's a couple questionable decisions (Unforgiven III?? Seriously, you need to go back and tap that well again!??... I mean, it wasn't your greatest success to start with, let it go... At least you didn't milk the same riff the entire song this time like Unforgiven II) but overall the disc marks a honest to goodness return to what made Metallica popular in the late 80s and early 90s, and not a moment too soon.
It's no secret that at times in my past I've been one of Metallica's biggest fans, and later that turned to being one of their staunchest critics. This album reminds me a lot of the Metallica tapes I wore out over and over again in my old Dodge Shadow, with George and I road-tripping to Metallica shows all over the northeast, and while I don't foresee D and I jumping in a car and driving to Boston "just because", I'm definitely looking forward to the January show I've got tickets to...
... just so long as they play as little as possible from the Loads. :-)
UPDATE: Oh, and I forgot one other thing.... props to the return of the kick-ass instrumental. How long's it been since they put one of those on? Oh, right... friggin ... And Justice For All, that's how long.... 20 years.
I'm in a big of a pickle. I have been a loyal American Airlines customer since around 2001 or so. Between flight miles, bonus miles, credit card miles, etc., etc., I've banked a metric fuckton of Frequent Flier Miles. Where I live there are only two convenient airports, Stewart/Newburgh (SWF) and Albany (ALB). Six months ago, American pulled out of Newburgh. In September, American is pulling out of Albany.
I simply can't see driving two hours, dealing with city traffic, etc., etc. to go to a NYC airport that has American Airlines, when there are two airports that are local, very convenient, mostly traffic-jam free, etc., etc.
So now I need to pick out a new "preferred" airline... Here are my options....
So let's get rid of some of them right off the bat:
Cape Air - goes to like two places. Seen that sitcom Wings? Yeah, it's like that.
AirTran - Leaving SWF the same day as American, I think.
Air Canada - Only connects through Toronto. I don't think I want *every* flight I go on to be an international one going through customs.
US Airways - If I fly out of SWF all my flights, and from ALB most of my flights, will fly through their Philadelphia hub, which according to consumerist.com has an absolutely horrendous lost-baggage rate, and a 60% on-time rate. Woot.
Northwest - Has anyone forgotten the way they treated their passengers in the 1999 Blizzard? Did they even apologize? :-)
jetBlue ... oh, jetBlue, how I want to love you. If only you flew to somewhere other than Florida from SWF. Fly me to a major city, and let me partake of your glorious service. Unfortunately, they don't, and my connecting options through jetBlue are limited to "fly to Florida, and then connect to somewhere else on the east coast, and then fly somewhere west." It's just plain silly, and won't work long-term.
So that shortens the list quite a bit....
Southwest is usually cheap (which is sweet) but I really really really hate the cattle-call. It doesn't usually affect me that much, since (as D can attest) I am always early to my flights, but the fact is that when I connect through somewhere, I can't be any earlier than my flight drops me off. I've got long-ass legs and I want a guaranteed aisle seat so I can stretch them during the flight. So Southwest is really my "last ditch" airline, and certainly not where I want to start banking miles again.
I used to be a rabid United flier, but -- in all honesty I have no idea why -- I distinctly remember being SO pissed at them about something that I immediately "changed loyalties" to American. My memory is extremely hazy, but I remember that "United fucked me somehow, and American swooped in and saved the day with great customer service," and I was sold. But I'm not sure if I can hold against them something I can't remember.
Continental is, by most accounts, awesome to fly on, but you pay for that level of customer service, as I also seem to recall them being one of the more expensive airlines to fly.
Delta... I dunno. I've flown Delta recently (when I was flying back from LAX on AA a couple weeks ago, AA cancelled my LAX>ORD>ALB flight for weather (all flights through ORD actually) and AA only connects through ORD, so AA had to throw me on another airline, and hence I got to experience Delta. My Delta experience was ok (heck, they came through for me in a pinch), but my view is a bit jaded by the fact that my connection time was hellishly short (30 minutes), the first leg was late, and I ended up having to haul ass through Charlotte trying to get from my arrival gate to my departure gate.
Anyone got any good long-term experiences with any of these four? Recommendations for or against?
I shouldn't be blogging this from work, but someone forwarded it to me and I have to, before I forget...
I've always love Gordon's shows. He makes for entertaining television, and it's clear from watching him in various shows (other than Hell's Kitchen that is) that -- to a certain extent at least -- there is a bit of a softee behind the loud, abusive, exterior.
One quote I absolutely loved, from a recent tvguide.com interview, which made me realize how much I like him?
TV Guide: What's your favorite comfort food?
Ramsay: In-N-Out burgers [an L.A. chain] -- I absolutely love them.
Oh, HELL YEAH. My boy Gordon likes himself some In-N-Out? I wish the TVGuide reporter had asked him what his favorite Secret Menu item was.....
As JR says, decimal points are a bitch.
I can't blame JR for not saying anything. For as badly as those guys have been gouging us for years, it's nice when you can turn the tables on them for a while....
I've been thinking a lot about the Virginia Tech thing the last few days. Partly because my brother-in-law is a VT alum, as is my father-in-law. Partly because I also work on a college campus. But I've been very reticent to talk about it. Why? Because to a certain extent, I agree with this blog entry about it not being an appropriate moment yet to discuss my real thoughts.
Because oh, do I have thoughts on the topic. But right now is a time to, as Jack Bogdanski says, shut the fuck up about such thoughts.
There will be plenty of time to talk about "where things went wrong" at a macro level, or any of the various blame-game type things. For now, it's time to let people grieve, to give them the time and support they need to get through the upcoming days. After the worst of that is past, then we can look back and start to try and prevent future occurrences.
I'm trying to figure this out.
1.) Paris Hilton abandons her property in a storage unit.
2.) Someone buys that stuff at auction.
3.) They put pictures, captures, MPEG encodings, etc., of their property (they bought it perfectly legitimately through the abandoned-property process) up on the web.
Where, exactly, is the "problem"? Certainly, I can understand that Ms. Hilton may be embarrassed by the content (admitting that you take it up the butt in exchange for some drugs, for instance, may be considered awkward if that gets out, an example I am told is in the collection). However, I'm hard-pressed to figure out what legal standing Paris has over the use of stuff that is no longer her property.
Maybe she can pitch a legitimate fit over the use of her name in the domain name, for example, but what other legal leg does she have to stand on, and why has a court, temporarily at least, sided with her?
I was reading a CNN story about a guy who ended up in Montana when he wanted to fly to Australia, and while my initial thought was the "hahahaha!" inner-monologue mocking, I remembered that I damned near booked myself airfare and hotels for Portland, Maine during the week of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference being held in Portland, Oregon. (I'd made the hotel reservations, and noticed when American Airlines, unlike the hotel web site, demanded clarification on my input of "Portland"... the hotel had simply fed me the first Portland hotel it could find, which also happened to be a convention center hotel, etc., etc.)
So instead I'll just say that this serves to underscore the power of a typographical error.
Recently, you received a memo which said, in closing:
If you see open windows in classrooms or dorms on campus when it is cold outside, please close them!
Let me be the first to tell you that if you do that to my window, I will break your fingers, slowly and painfully. OK, maybe I'd settle for just banishing you from my building or something, but work with me here. Pretend like this is an honest to goodness threat here, OK?
Unfortunately, Buildings and Grounds, along with the Sustainability Committee, has drilled it into peoples' heads that "opening windows in the winter is bad." And while I might agree that it can be bad, it is not always bad.
For instance, if you have a south-facing room, with large spacious windows, it's entirely possible that the heat of the sun beating down on your building all day long will heat your office up to the point where you don't want or need "campus heating" at all, but in fact would much rather they turned on the air-conditioning again.
My office has its own thermostat, controlling JUST my room. I have it set to 55-degrees. It's 84-degrees in my room. But remember, I'm evil for leaving my window open.
So, word to the wise -- don't touch my window, despite what ResLife is telling you to do.
Now, I'm not saying she did it, but c'mon, tell me that the picture to the right, which is an artist's sketch of the woman who slashed a woman to steal her newborn, doesn't look exactly like you'd expect an artist's sketch of Britney Spears to look.
I'm officially tired of clearing out the junk comments. Leaving a comment will require a TypeKey login to authenticate with. The upside, though, is that comments will go right up automatically if you've authenticated.
Damned comment-spammers.
After reading this, I feel a little (and I do mean little, not a lot at all) bad for confronting an Air Marshal in Baltimore/BWI yesterday, explaining to him that if he's going to try for "I'm just a business traveller talking on my crackberry, honest," that he should probably not be giving physical descriptions of passengers loud enough for passersby to be immediate winners of the "Spot The Fed" game.
I don't actually know that he was an Air Marshal, he might have been TSA, he might have been FBI, who knows. I do know that if he was trying to keep cover, he did a piss poor job, and I did (extremely politely and calmly, I might point out, not like some raving lunatic) point out to him that he might as well have been wearing a uniform for as "subtle" as he was being.
Hell to the yeah, Iron Maiden's back. Their new single, The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg is available via iTunes Music Store, and it kicks serious ass.
It evokes the power, both in terms of vocals and writing, of the Powerslave era, and that's saying a lot.
I can't wait til the new album, A Matter of Life And Death, is finally released in September.
My crappy week just got a little bit brighter...
ZD has an article which says that some investment group is seeking to have a resolution voted on which would essentially make the Class A stock and the Class B stock "equals" in terms of voting power. The theory being that the Class B stock, which is only held by three top Google executives, holds far more voting power than is accounted for in actual shares held.
Now, here's the kicker, the article points out, "By their ownership of 86,753,907 shares of Class B common stock, three of the company's executives (Eric E. Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin) controlled 66.2 percent of the total voting power of all the company's shares...even though they owned only 31.3 percent of the total shares outstanding," the proposal says, according to Google's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
So, wait... they have 66.2% of the voting share? How the hell does this investment group expect this referendum to pass? "Yes, I'd like to give up my control of the company voluntarily"? Seriously, even if every single shareholder except the top-three voted for it, it would still only be 33.8% of the votes, a clear minority.
Weird the way people will waste their time on fruitless pursuits.
Someone in the UK want to order me a few of these and send them my way?
I got my copy of Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime II CD today. As I was reading the liner notes, I notice this funny thing:
Photcreds: Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come vToo come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come
The "v" in there is actually in the credits. Although anyone who's used a word processor knows what happened:
Oops.
While picking up some random household supplies at Target today, I looked up at the TV screens in the music section and saw a music video for a Rob Zombie song I'd never heard before. Lo and behold, Rob has a new CD out, Educated Horses.
Is it Hellbilly Deluxe? Nope. Is it Sinister Urge? Again, nope.
Does it kick ass, though? Hell, yeah.
A couple weeks ago, I drove by this little church (old enough to have a historical marker, FYI). Out front they had a little sandwich board for their "Friday Film". It said "MONTY PYTHON: MEANING OF LIFE".
That's kinda cool, I thought, a church that's willing to take a step back and laugh at itself to a certain extent, and isn't so "lofty" as to insist that anything which might poke fun at Christian Mythology is inherently evil.
But, I'll be honest, I didn't give it much thought past that point. Until a couple days ago, when I drove by again, and this week's "Friday Film" was a little further out there: Dogma.
Now, this takes things to a whole new level. I mean, Meaning of Life may poke fun at Christianity a bit, but Dogma takes it completely to the next level. I mean, Dogma describes Jesus as, "The nigger who owes me twelve bucks", which of course is delivered by Chris Rock, playing the ostracized thirteenth apostle (written out because he's black, of course). It implies that God likes to take time off and hide out playing Skee-Ball on a New Jersey boardwalk, to the detriment of anything else that might require his (her?) attention. It's got the Buddy Christ even. George Carlin as a Catholic Cardinal?
Dogma is not the kind of movie I'd ever expect to see playing at a Church's "Friday Film Night". Heck, I'm an atheist, and I almost want to go over on Friday night just to congratulate the minister for having the balls to be open-minded about everything.
I'm glad to see it, though. Christianity can, at times, be really really full of itself.
When two people come to the door of the restroom, one going in, and one coming out, the right of way is always yielded to the person going in, because by and large, they're in a lot greater hurry than the person coming out.
Seen on Peter David's blog, taken from Bill Mumy's Site, Andreas Katsulas -- known to science-fiction fans as G'Kar of Babylon 5, known to Star Trek fans as the Romulan Commander Tomalak, and to non-sci-fi fans most as the one-armed man in the movie remake of The Fugitive -- has died of cancer at the age of 59.
He was a consummate character actor, and I've never read another actor say a bad thing about him in all of my readings. His portrayal of G'Kar over the five years of Babylon 5 is quite possibly one of the best performances in all of science fiction history.
The world is a lesser place now.
Apparently, Jeremy has tagged me and now I have to go do one of these meme things:
Four Jobs I've Had
Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
Four places I've been on Vacation
Four of my Favorite Dishes
Four websites I visit daily
Four places I would rather be right now
Four bloggers who I am tagging as "it". (ugh, I hate doing this)
Man, did anyone else watch the ABC "New Years Rockin Eve" thing last night? D and I had joked that we had to watch it because Disney/ABC was going to wheel out the animatronic Dick Clark robot again, and that's always got to be a hoot to watch.
Except this year, the robot was defective. It can't move, it slurs its speech, and only about one in three words it says were able to be deciphered. Whoever had the idea of "Let's let Dick host the show again" seriously should have their employment reconsidered.
And Ryan Seacrest, throwing it back to Dick for the final countdown? Dude, are you high? What were you thinking?
I'll be the first to acknowledge that Dick Clark has a huge place in Hollywood history. He started out with a small local dance show and parlayed that into a television empire. But, that said, you have to know when your ego is going to cost you viewers, and having Dick on TV last night just seems like one of those "what were you thinking?" moments.
John Spencer died of a heart attack at age 58.
I've always loved him as an actor, since I first saw him on L.A. Law (although, as it turns out, I'd seen him years prior as a missile silo airman in WarGames, but didn't realize it until much later). He was a classic character actor, who was able to bring a certain charm to even some of the worst characters.
Not that this is at all important in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly does leave me wondering where the hell West Wing is going to be heading in the next six months. Given that he's supposed to be the VP Candidate (and, given that the last president's VP had to resign in disgrace, how believable is it that a second VP would get elected and then vanish), that's a pretty huge hole to fill.
I guess it depends on "what's in the can" already, and what may already be in the can that they want to scrap so as to make his plot-exit easier. Right now, it seems like the easiest solution would be for Vinnick to win the election. Then Leo can simply vanish into obscurity. But without the ability to write him out gracefully, I'm not sure what else they can do, especially after last week's "We want Leo to replace Josh as the campaign manager" plot twist (which, luckily for the writers, Leo did not accept or it'd just be harder to weasel out of).
But all that aside.... rest in peace, sir.
Season 4 of Red Vs. Blue is well under way, complete with its usual great quotes:
(on the hasty retreat they made in the last episode)
Tex: "This is a long range weapon. I need distance to use it effectively."
Tucker: "Where were you plan on shooting him from? The fucking moon? If you'd have backed up any further you'd have had to mail him the bullets."
So I received an e-mail earlier this morning, telling me I hadn't made any payment on my postseason tickets for any (potential! potential! mustn't anger the Baseball Gods) postseason play. But then they followed that message with another, explaining that it was sent in error:
Please disregard the following email. According to our records your 2005 Postseason Account is paid in full. Sorry for the incontinence.
Incontinence? I didn't realize they'd sent me anything like that via e-mail.
D: I need to put some more comfortable clothes on.
Me: Oh?
D: I had to get dressed up to go to work today at the edit.
Me: Isn't your editor's edit-shop in like his attic?
D: Yeah, but I had to get dressed up. I had to put on a bra... and underwear.
Me: *laughing hysterically* I miss working from home.
Bob Denver goes to that deserted island in the sky.
I apparently first encountered this concept, amusingly enough, in an episode of Red Dwarf:
Rimmer: They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you'll have an anarchy.
I spent this morning trying to find the "real" source for that, but can't. It appears that it may have actually been a made-up quote. Regardless of it's pedigree, though, it has certainly proven to be true, given the events in New Orleans.
In the first 24 hours -- the first three meals -- society hadn't really "broken down" yet... people were waiting to be rescued, holing up wherever they were, dealing with crappy conditions and accepting them as temporary (or at least, anyway, that's the way it seemed here watching it all on TV).
After 24 hours, though -- when you'd gone past the third missed meal -- all hell seems to have truly broken loose. Rape and murder inside the alleged safe-haven Superdome, police themselves became looters (I saw a nice AP photo of this, with a cop walking out of a wal-mart his hands full of DVDs and it looked like stemware, but I can't find the picture now), you name it, it happened.
In fact, to anyone who's read Stephen King's "The Stand", this seemed like you were watching a real live televised interpretation of the first third of the book. If you were a Christian person, living in NOLA, you might seriously wonder if you were witnessing the "end times".
D and I were discussing last night, "What's going to happen to all these people who shot other people who were trying to come after their food, etc.?"
Louisiana state statute RS 14:20 says:
§20. Justifiable homicideA homicide is justifiable:
(1) When committed in self-defense by one who reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of losing his life or receiving great bodily harm and that the killing is necessary to save himself from that danger.
(2) When committed for the purpose of preventing a violent or forcible felony involving danger to life or of great bodily harm by one who reasonably believes that such an offense is about to be committed and that such action is necessary for its prevention. The circumstances must be sufficient to excite the fear of a reasonable person that there would be serious danger to his own life or person if he attempted to prevent the felony without the killing.
(3) When committed against a person whom one reasonably believes to be likely to use any unlawful force against a person present in a dwelling or a place of business, or when committed against a person whom one reasonably believes is attempting to use any unlawful force against a person present in a motor vehicle as defined in R.S. 32:1(40), while committing or attempting to commit a burglary or robbery of such dwelling, business, or motor vehicle. The homicide shall be justifiable even though the person does not retreat from the encounter.
(4)(a) When committed by a person lawfully inside a dwelling, a place of business, or a motor vehicle as defined in R.S. 32:1(40), against a person who is attempting to make an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, or who has made an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, and the person committing the homicide reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the entry or to compel the intruder to leave the premises or motor vehicle. The homicide shall be justifiable even though the person committing the homicide does not retreat from the encounter.
(there's a 4b, but it says basically "unless the person committing homicide is a drug-dealer").
So it would seem clear that if a person is in their own residence, business, or is, simply "there lawfully", that they could easily shoot-to-kill anyone who attempted to break in, without having to attempt retreat. So those people are protected.
More interesting, though, are the reports of people (including police officers and National Guard troops), who were simply telling people "If you come any closer, I will shoot and kill you." The fear of bodily injury was so great that even trained soldiers were ensuring that they kept the upper hand by making sure they didn't get into hand-to-hand range. So, given the circumstances, a reasonable person might be able to make the case that "that person I don't know simply coming near me is an imminent threat, especially if trained professionals also felt exactly the same way." That would give him a sub-paragraph (1) defense for the homicide.
Now, and here's the interesting part -- with a complete absence of evidence, how do you differentiate someone who shot a man because he was positively fearful of what would happen if the man kept coming closer, and someone who shot a man because he had some food that the killer wanted? Answer: You really can't.
And when you can't differentiate between "lawful homicide" and "unlawful homicide", that's pretty much when society ceases to exist. And the revolution has begun.
I just realized that on my flight back from OSCON next Saturday, I've got a fargin' four hour layover in O'Hare. Now that I look at it, I remember the whole "the next earliest flight would have had a two-minute connection time, and that's a bit rough," thoughts going through my head. It's not an "epic" layover by any stretch (I've had that once before, but I can't for the life of me remember which airport I got stuck in for a while), but it's still an ugly thing to look forward on the return trip.
But, I've got my copy of Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill (Acoustic) loading into my iPod right now, so I'll be all set. I could put that disc on repeat for a while and not get bored of it, I don't think... it's that good. Go buy it. Right now. Seriously. One-click that puppy. Trust me.
I was watching the latest episode of Iron Chef America, with Kerry Simon as the challenger, and Michael Yan was one of the judges.
I remember watching his show, "Yan Can Cook", as a kid. I've never been a huge asian food person, but I always found just watching him to be entertaining. When I first was exposed to him, it was the era of Julia Childs and such who -- while extremely talented -- were extremely boring to watch. Yan was way ahead of his time (years before anyone thought of a "Food Channel" cable network) in realizing that success was to be had by actually entertaining while teaching cooking (even if I was too young to be able to follow along really, and possessing little desire to try foods from that realm of cuisine).
It doesn't look like he's got any show on the air currently, and that's a shame. Maybe Food Network will wake up and realize Yan's got a place in their lineup.
D and I had tickets to last night's Def Leppard / Bryan Adams show. Their co-headlining tour this summer, the "Rock and Roll Doubleheader Tour," was only playing in Minor League ballparks. The local date was being held in Dutchess Stadium.
Having ascertained in advance that Def Leppard was the "closing" act last night, and not having any interest in Bryan Adams at all, we decided to head over a bit after the start of the show, and try to avoid as much of Adams' set as possible.
We get there to find that:
Now, seriously, who the heck designs a stadium but doesn't give its parking lot enough capacity to handle the max capacity of the stadium? This wasn't like the lot was "barely full" and there were a couple cars parked outside, there were, on the side-street we found, which was the first place to park, about a mile of cars parked on the side of the road. This is way more than "slightly over-capacity".
In the end, we decided that Def Leppard was not worth walking a mile (just to the stadium entrance, let alone how far we might have to walk into the grounds itself to get to the show), and bailed on it completely. Instead we went to see War of the Worlds, which pretty much sucked.
So needless to say, not a great evening.
So I finally got scrutinize the eight hours of MTV/VH1 coverage from last night, as well as the ABC "recap" two-hour shot. First off, let me say how disappointed I was that ABC didn't grab the HD feed and use that. Instead, I DVRed the HD channel and got the SD feed because they were, apparently, lame.
I got to the only part of the Live 8 concert that I actually gave a wet slap about - the only part that actually had me and a couple friends pondering "Could we somehow manage to get tickets to the Hyde Park show?" and that was the Pink Floyd reunion.
I will give a small amount of props to MTV/VH1 for at least "not completely butchering their performance" the way they did for most artists (you get to hear about one song out of their entire performance, with the VJs rambling inane tripe over the start/finish of it, and then about another 30-45 seconds of a different song as they use it trail out to a commercial).
Instead, with Floyd, (starting at +06:02 for those who care), you got to hear almost the entire 25-minute Pink Floyd set without any sort of interruption. The set, at least what we saw of it on the Empty-V, was Breathe, Money, Wish You Were Here, and Comfortably Numb.
Of course, it wouldn't be Empty-V if they didn't fuck with it. In the middle of Numb they cut away to the VJs who are going to throw it to a commercial in the middle of the song. Then, they go back to the band-shots, and it seems like they're going to fade out. But they don't. So you think "Hey, maybe some producer somewhere got a clue and decided no-fucking-way do we cut on Floyd, period."
Then, just as Gilmour starts to fucking shred on the guitar solo that is the ending of the song, they cut away. Because, you know, fuck world poverty, fuck great music, if Dreamworks has to wait another 45 seconds for their 100th repetition of their War of the Worlds spot to run, there's gonna be hell to pay!
But, Empty-V annoyances aside, they were hellishly great together. There was a great point where Roger Waters dedicated Wish to "everyone who couldn't be there, especially Syd," which was quite cool. Also of note was a great shot while Roger was doing Wish vocals and, thank goodness for a lucky cameraman placed behind Nick Mason, Gilmour looks over at Roger, then back at Nick Mason (and the camera) and smiles this big-ass smile.
They all seemed truly happy to be together. Maybe, just maybe, they can decide "Hey, this is cool. Let's go out and do one last album/tour/something?"
Pleasepleaseplease.
I'm beta-testing a financial management application for the Mac. The instructions clearly said "You should continue to maintain data in the last production version, as well as in the beta version, as data files may not transfer from beta to beta." (or words to that effect).
Now, I'd been a beta-tester for this application before. Several times. In years of testing it, I never had a data-file that wouldn't migrate itself from gold->beta->beta->new_gold quite easily.
So I stopped actually keeping data up-to-date in the old "gold" version. Why bother, right?
Wrong.
Installed Beta3 today. It refuses to read the Beta2 file.
Looks like I've now got to recreate the last two months of transactions. Oh, and since I installed Beta2 on top of Beta3, I need to find a copy of Beta2 somewhere so I can read the data and recreate it accurately.
Can you say "Ugh"?
Pope John Paul, in his last will and testament, demanded that all of his personal papers be burned upon his death. The pope, according to Catholic doctrine, is the voice of god. What he says, god is saying, that's the deal.
So the voice of god said "burn these immediately upon the death of Pope John Paul."
... and his personal secretary thinks he knows better than the voice of god and has decided that not only must they not be burned, but that they must be made public.
Of course, it wouldn't be politically nimble for Benedict to excommunicate the old fucker for disobeying the dying wishes of the last guy-with-a-big-hat, but that's what he should be doing. After all, what kind of precedent does that set, if you only have to listen to the pontiff if you fucking-well-feel-like-it?
Last night, I trekked my ass down to Sayreville, NJ. There, at the Starland Ballroom, I paid witness to the return of the original lineup of thrash metal greats, Anthrax. (Ok, yes, to be pedantic, it wasn't the original lineup, it didn't have the singer who was only around for their first album and fired shortly thereafter, it had Joey Belladonna, who came after and lasted for nearly a decade or so).
Starland is a great little venue. I had arranged for pre-show soundcheck access. Because the soundcheck kept getting delayed later and later, the Starland folks agreed that when we all came back after soundcheck (because you get kicked out in between soundcheck and doors-open), we would use the VIP entrance, and come in 15 minutes before doors-open. This way, we all had first pick of the choice spots against the rail. And there I was, at stage right, for the entire evening. Right behind one of the camera-crew for the live DVD they will filming of the show.
It was a setlist filled with old classics that we haven't heard Belladonna sing live in years. I would have been intrigued to hear him try out some songs from the John Bush era (after all, Bush tackled Belladonna-era songs with the Greater of Two Evils CD). But, alas, it did not come to pass.
The show was great. Security was awesome (even gave me a bottle of water midway through the show, which I slugged from and then passed back to the masses like a good concert-goer). It was just an extremely pleasant experience all around.
I miss John Bush, though. It's still sorta up in the air what's going to happen with the "present-day" lead singer. In actuality, I don't think Joey has the right voice to sing Bush-era songs. So if Joey is back "permanently", those Bush-era songs are going to vanish into the ether more or less, which is shame, because some of those albums are just phenomenal, like Sound of White Noise or We've Come For You All.
Perhaps they could end up with the "two lead singers" thing. Joey singing Joey-era songs, John singing John-era songs, and then collaborating with some of each on new albums. That would be the best of both worlds, but who knows if something like that could come to pass.
Anthrax is going out on tour this summer with this lineup, you should definitely check them out when they come around.
CNN has a story that the runaway bride has been indicted by a grand jury. She was indicted - in Gwinnett County, Georgia, of "making false statements" and one count of "making a false report of a crime".
Except, of course, she did neither of these things in Gwinnett County, Georgia. The locality where those crimes were committed, Albequerque, New Mexico, has publicly stated that they will not press charges.
How in the hell does a District Attorney in Georgia have the balls to go after someone for something done elsewhere?
How in the hell does a Grand Jury have enough collective stupidity to actually indict someone for something that wasn't even done in their jurisdiction?
A Palm Beach Post story talks about Boynton Beach's high school yearbook. Apparently, the yearbook staff decided to have some fun with the usually completely lame "senior superlatives", and had categories like "Most Whipped" or "Most Likely to Be on Jerry Springer".
In other words, the students -- willing participants -- were poking fun at themselves. Apparently, though Robert Richards' mom (Jacqueline Nobles) is all upset now that her son had his picture taken in a leash held by his (now-ex-)girlfriend.
"I don't want this to be the memory any student has of my son," [his mother] said. "Just like these books went into circulation, they can come back out."
Seriously, is this woman a retard? I hate to break it to her but except for in the 24 hours right before a reunion, nobody except the perenially lame goes poring over their yearbook reminiscing. If she had kept her mouth shut, that picture wouldn't have been anyone's memory. Now, though, what he will be remembered as is "that kid whose mom had to butt her nose into everyone else's business and got the yearbooks held up and/or recalled."
And... recalled? Come on, ... nobody's gonna give those yearbooks up now if they've already gotten them, are you kidding me?
That genie is out of the bottle, and it's fine that way, all except for in the eyes of one uptight mother who seriously needs to get laid more.
So the runaway bride is agreeing that she will try to make amends for the city of Duluth's expenses (nearly $60,000) in trying to find her. The city of Duluth is quoted in this article as being of the position that she should pay some of the expenses incurred by the city.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm confused. Why exactly is it that she should pay some of those expenses?
I'll certainly agree that she was should have told her groom she was flaking and going for a ride, but the reality is that she's under no legal obligation to do so. People have the right to just up and take a trip on their own without checking in first. People have the right to simply vanish and not tell their friends and family where they're going. It's a shitty thing to do, but it's not something they need to pay the government money for when it's all over, simply because everyone assumed the worst.
Now, yes, the chick did lie to the police who found her, but the expenses had already been incurred at that point. It's not as though "her lying" led to the government's loss of cash. That loss of cash had already long since happened.
I think it'd be spiffy if she did repay some of the loss, but I certainly don't see it as a "should" situation.
Live from SJC, it's Derek the Air Traveler....
TSA: Sir, I'm going to ask you to take off your shoes, or you'll be subject to secondary screening.
Me: That's cool. You can screen me.
TSA: You'd rather be screened?
Me: Yes.
TSA: Than just take off your shoes?
Me: Yes.
[ insert me going through the metal detector ]
TSA: Please step over here, blah blah blah.
[ the following takes place while being wanded, patted down, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered. ]
TSA: This will take five to ten minutes.
Me: OK.
TSA: Have you ever been through a secondary screening before?
Me: All the time.
TSA: Really?
Me: Yeah. I don't like taking my shoes off.
TSA: Why not?
Me: Because it's a waste of time.
TSA: How do you figure?
Me: The terrorists have already tried that. They know we're "onto them" when it comes to that, and they'll just figure out some other way.
TSA: So why do you subject yourself to five or ten minutes of hassle?
Me: Because I'm not in a rush this morning, and while you're dealing with me, you're not wasting someone's time who is in a hurry.
Bonus points to anyone who can, without using Google, spot-the-reference. :-)
Yesterday afternoon I left work a couple hours early, on the premise that I would go to the doctor, and do "a couple hours" of work this evening.
I had to re-import several thousand images into our CVS repository (they got initially added as text, not binary, files). There were about 40 directories of images that needed processing. I wrote a program that would crawl a directory, performing the tedious "move out of the way, tell cvs to delete it, commit the deletion, move the file back, re-add it as a binary file, commit the re-add" over each and every file. I figured there was "a couple hours" worth of work there. telling it to process directories.
I chose to do the files one at a time for safety. If something takes a shit, it takes a shit on one file, not an entire directory, etc. This seemed to me to be the best way to proceed (especially when it's a process where committing to CVS automatically pushes the results live into production).
I started that process around nine PM last night. I finished it this morning... a few minutes ago. At the end, I said "fuck it" and started processing files en masse (mostly because I was dealing with less important files that I knew I could very easily recover from a backup because they're color chips and never change).
Wow am I tired. I haven't pulled an all-nighter in a long, long time. I told work not to expect me in today. I think a nine-hour overnight is enough work.
This past sunday ... it's freezing. Cold. Rainy. Ugly. Like "I want to wear three layers, gloves, thermal underwear and I'll still be cold" ugly.
Today ... got the windows open at quarter to midnight, probably leave them open all night. It's gorgeous out.
What the hell?
Brian pointed me to a post on the Chicagoist blog indicating that it appears that the venerable Aragon Ballroom may in fact be in the process of being gutted by fire as we speak.
Please let that not be so. The Aragon is one of those great small-hall places where many a metal act has brought the music to the masses.
Here's hoping it's like, the building next door that CFD is responding to, and not the Aragon. :-(
So I got my first invite to Yahoo 360 today. I suppose if I was a newbie to the computer world, this would be a really cool service. It has all sorts of blog capabilities, photo sharing, etc.
But, seriously, why would I use this?
... I have already got a blog.
... I already share my photos.
If I want to link to "my friends" I can easily do that from the sidebar of my blog. If I want to maintain "lists", ... well, crap, I don't even know why anyone would do that. If I want to review local attractions, I'll just write a blog entry about it, like I do all the time anyway.
In other words, there's really not a lot of "value-add" for someone unless they're a complete newbie, in which case they won't mind being completely locked into Yahoo's system (and, to be fair, this is the same argument I made against Blogger, and the same argument I made against Flickr, even before Yahoo borg'ed them up). All this buys you is not having to "maintain" something that really requires very little maintenance in the first place, once set up.
Maybe I'm missing the attraction. Certainly, I've got enough Yahoo readers that they'll tell me what I'm missing, one would hope.
I'm really starting to get annoyed at the tipping culture these days. My local chinese food restaurant -- which is nothing more than a walk-up counter -- has a tip jar on the counter. The Dunkin' Donuts in Goshen where I sometimes get my morning dose of sugar has a pre-printed-by-Dunkin-Donuts tip-mug "for excellent service".
Excuse me? Since when did either of these types of establishments get tips? What possible level of "excellent service" could someone ringing me up for two donuts give me that would be worthy of a tip? Are they going to carry it out to my car for me in the rain and prevent me from getting wet?
What's next? Will the McDonald's put a tip-jar on the counter, so that you can reward them for their "excellent service" of getting your order right? At what point do we as a society say "this is the job I'm paying you for, and that's why you get money, if you want a tip, take it off what I'm paying you?"
I'm not a stingy bastard when it comes to tipping - at all. I'm frequently the guy who tips way too well. But it annoys me to see people who have no business even getting tips trying to do their best into guilt-tripping people into giving them tips.
.... come home from dinner-and-a-movie extremely tired around 11
.... login to World of Warcraft "just to check to see if that item you were selling finally sold."
.... see someone online that you hadn't talked to in a while
.... realize that it's quarter-to-five in the morning and you're still not in bed
Ah well, I'll sleep really late, and be really awake for poker tonight.
From a conversation with Lady Marmalade (I don't make this up, she asked to be called that!):
DB: American Idol so penalizes TiVo owners. If you don't happen to vote in that narrow window, you're screwed.
LM: So true. This is also the case with, say, Presidential Elections. You sleep through the day, your vote is not counted.
kinda hard to counter that logic.
As I've often pointed out, I rant incessantly about bad customer service experiences, mostly because I like the idea that people will do Google searches for companies they're thinking of doing business with, and maybe think otherwise.
But then there are the counter-examples. The companies that I am so extremely and totally happy with that I feel like their examples must be told as well, so that if people Google for them they'll know how great the company is to work with. These are the companies I talk about how "I might even be paying more than I have to, but I know the service is so damned great that I just don't care."
For me, one of those companies is Hollywood Poster Frames. As someone who collects movie posters, I was always dissatisfied with the crappy frames you got everywhere else, and Sue at Hollywood surprised me with high quality stuff, and great customer service.
For example, I have been ordering frames from them for a number of years, and ordering them in the same style. I placed an order for a couple frames I'm getting for some posters in my office at work. She left me a voicemail message to indicate that the metal in the "Gunmetal" style I'd been ordering for years is now a little different (more of a true gunmetal color, the old color was a little more bronze-like). She immediately offered to cut some samples from the new gunmetal, the bronze, and another color that she can get but doesn't really advertise, and ship them to me to compare them against my existing frames to decide what metal I wanted to use. (Luckily, since these will be at work, and not right next to any exising posters, I was able to tell her just to use the new gun-metal, and include the samples so I can do comparisons against the other frames for future orders).
And there will be future orders, because they go the extra mile to make my experience a pleasant one. I know I'll get quality stuff, I know it'll look good, and I know they'll stand behind it.
If you need frames (of any size, really, they do custom-cutting) ... talk to Sue there, and tell her I sent ya. :-)
Is there any faithful reader in the UK who would like to help me out by offering me the use of your shipping address for something? Nothing illegal or huge or anything, I just want something shipped to you there (since the company won't ship to the US) and have you re-ship it to me here in the U.S.
Please and thank you.
I want MTV to make this so bad it hurts...
"This is the story .... of seven terrorists .... picked to live in a cave ... find out what happens ... when people stop being nice .... and start killing for real .... Real World: The Undisclosed Location"
Seriously, I've played the MP3-rips of my Rammstein: Live Aus Berlin CD over and over for the last month (which only convinces me more that I need to get the DVD of the show as well).
I don't pretend to understand much of anything they're singing, but herzeleid.com has some great lyric-sheets (along with English translations so you can see how fucked up some of the songs are).
I could seriously see myself having a kick-ass time when and if these guys finally come back to the States.
How come all those people who leave flowers and pictures and candles and crosses and crap on the side of the road don't get the same fine for littering as all the rest of us do.
Is it not littering if you place your junk reverently as opposed to just hurling it out the window?
George and I were talking today, and realized that it's time for a summer festival tour like the days of old.
Five bands, we figured.... the two headliners (alternating on some sort of schedule of their choosing who goes on last): Iron Maiden and Judas Priest ... both of whom have summer-tour availability at the moment.
Now, the "first two" bands on any festival tour like this are local to regional up-n-comers, so we didn't really try to figure out who they should be, because it's going to widely vary. So who sits in the middle, taking the "We're known, but we're not quite headlining festivals level yet" spot? Well, given that both the headliners were European acts, we figured it'd be another Euro group. George suggested Scorpions, but I vetoed them on the "what the fuck have they done lately?" logic and, besides, you want a middle-act that's different enough to bring in a different group of people, but similar enough not to get boo'ed off the stage.
Then he saw exactly where I was going... Rammstein ... angry German metal would fit perfectly into that middle slot.
I wonder if there's any tour promoters reading this. I'd seriously pay good coin for this lineup, man. Someone make it happen.
Touching on something I mentioned recently.... there was recently (well, there still is actually) a thread on rec.arts.sf.babylon5.moderated where someone asked Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski about his opinion of a letter Ron Moore (of Battlestar Galactica [2004]) had written.
The gist of the letter was "We know it's airing in the UK and not the US, and we appreciate your fandom, but please don't download it, it hurts our bottom line."
JMS went into -- what was to me a large surprise since he always seemed so much brighter and so out of step with Hollywood norms -- a near clone-like rendition of the standard "Hollywood Copyright You're Hurting Us" doctrine. I responded to his message trying to explain to him exactly where he was wrong, but someone has fed him that line of shite, and he's too emotional about the issue to actually see the forest but for the trees, insisting on thinking that the people who download the content (who are, you know, fans!!!) are scum-sucking weasels, blah blah blah. To say that "I ripped into him" would be an understatement. I definitely won't be invited to be in the next Babylon 5 production, you can guarantee that. He responded to me, wherein he basically said "trust the rights holders we know how this stuff works", to which as part of a lengthy reply I also pointed out that I also am a rights-holder, and probably (since I get paid per-unit on real sales, and not in aggregate) am much closer to the "feeling the pain for every illegal copy" place than he will ever dream of being.
First we need to explain where TV shows make their money. An initial run of a TV show is paid for by the network or the syndicator, and everyone involved in creating that show gets paid. If the show does well in the ratings, then the show may get repeated or renewed, resulting in additional residual funds in the case of repeats, or additional contracts for first-run materials in the case of renewal. Such funds and contracts are the bread and butter of the creators of the art we call "TV".
So, to document this whole concept for the future, let me describe the four different classifications of "people who download TV shows, as it relates to their effect on the money".
Effect on initial run revenue - $0.00 the show still airs
Effect on residual revenue - $0.00 That person wasn't going to be a viewer or not be a viewr, to keep the show alive or kill it anyway
Effect on initial run revenue - $0.00 the show still airs
Effect on residual revenue - Positive as expected. They continue to watch future airings just as they would be expected to.
Effect on initial revenue - $0.00 the show still airs
Effect on residual revenue - $0.00. They were never going to be a repeat viewer, anyway, so there is no revenue that they "would have represented and generated". There is a possibility that their lack of initial viewing may contribute to a perceived lack of demand for repeat viewings, but that will be addressed later.
Effect on initial revenue - $0.00 the show still airs
Effect on residual revenue - The rightsholder is deprived of any residuals that the cheapskate represented in terms of increased audience or viewing demand
Now, in the first two cases it's quite clear. There is zero financial loss to the rights holders.
In the third and fourth cases, there is at least the potential of real loss to those rightsholders. In the case of the Casual Viewer, that potential is only really evident if the Casual Viewer is also a Neilsen household. If the Casual Viewer isn't a Neilsen household, there's no way of knowing what he did or did not watch, and so his or her lack of viewing does not in any way affect the perceived demand for future airings, and thus does not affect any residuals.
In the case of The Cheapskate, there is a greater "perceived" loss. After all, this is the asshole. This is the guy Hollywood wants to paint the other three categories of people ass. Except that, again, unless he's a Neilsen household, his lack of viewing still doesn't deprive the rights holders of any of their revenue!
This is, in no way, saying it's ok to copy DVDs, CDs, etc. Those are all things for which your copying of them has a much higher chance of actually being a real detriment to those rights-holders' bottom lines.
If the TV industry was to set up something like an "iTunes for TV", that offered first-run shows for download, then and only then would there be "real loss" for downloading TV series episodes for free off the net. Because then you would have deprived their revenue stream - the one you should have paid into to download the content - of its income. (Although many of the above arguments might still hold water in that situation, I just don't want to get bogged down in what is largely a theoretical debate, and would rather just concentrate on "what's reality as of today.")
Summation: Unless you're a Neilsen household, or allow your data to be collected in such a manner, there is zero effect upon anyone in Hollywood's bottom line if you download TV shows from internet sites.
At Thanksgiving dinner last night, we postulated that there are three possible categories of people who might go out shopping today:
I have a hard enough time mustering the ambition to go to the mall on an ordinary day. Crappy stores. Crappy parking. Teenage losers trying to explain to you why "no, you really don't want that product, you want this one instead," even though you know the people personally who worked on both products, so you know which one you want, etc. Add in the usual "Black Friday Bullshit", and I firmly believe that stupidity, insanity, or genetic disposition are the only reasons someone might actually voluntarily subject themselves to it.
I made a prediction in the car, though. I believe that "Black Friday" won't be so "Black" within ten years. There's a lot more people like me, using the Internet for their shopping. I see no reason that trend won't continue, especially as more and more people realize they don't have to all show up in the same place at 5:30 A.M. to get the sale price, but can point-and-click from anywhere in the world if they see fit.
So if this comes true, I can point to this and say "I told you so"...
Step 1: Go to bed late
Step 2: Wake up at 6, think to yourself, "I can grab another 30-40 minutes of sleep"
Step 3: Just as you start to drift off, hear a cat retching a hairball
Step 4: Realize that if you fall asleep now, you'll forget the hairball and will probably step in it when you wake back up
Step 5: See that the cat puked up all over your clothes
Ugh. This must be Friday.
Spoken today by yours truly:
The man's an intellectual leper. As soon as he talks, you can start to feel your brain decaying inside your head from listening to him.
Man, did the ending for Halo 2 ever suck fucking ass. No sense of completion, so sense of victory, the final sequence (other than a cut-scene) isn't even Master Chief kicking ass, it's the lame-ass Arbitor.
The ending might just as well have said "To Be Continued... Next Week, Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel", except that it'll probably be another three years wait.
Seriously, is this what we waited three years for? If so, can someone explain to me why?
I've been watching NBC coverage of the election results, and have been struck, not by the numbers Brokaw's talking about, but the numbers that the Bank of America commercials have been spouting.
They keep talking about how many million checks a day they process, what percentage of small businesses "trust us with their money", blah blah blah. One thing that kept occurring to me: How would your numbers be if you hadn't been borging up every other bank on the face of the planet for the last couple years?
Sure they have these huge quantities of businesses as customers, because they've been swallowing whole the banks that people have been using for years, and now those folks are suddenly "B of A customers".
It's amazing the crap you can do with numbers.
The last few years I've averaged 1/6th of a trick-or-treater per year. From Halloween 1998 when Fraulein Bitch and I moved to California, through last year, I had a grand total of one trick or treater, a cute little girl when we lived in Fremont (who walked away with about half a bowl of candy).
Every year I bought a big-ass bowl of candy, with padding allowed for "what Derek was going to consume before the kids ever got near it". Every year I turned on the lights. Every year, nobody showed up.
I'd begun to wonder if trick or treating was dead. If my fellow man had just decided "bringing my kids to strangers houses just isn't safe any more" (as if to imply that at some point in time it actually was safe).
Tonight, I've had dozens of kids of all ages come by the door begging for chocolate goodness (well, that and Smarties... it's not All Hallows' Eve without Smarties in the bags).
I'm glad there's still some kids (and their parents) doing the trick or treating thing.
I got this month's issue of LinuxWorld magazine, and on page 23 is this huge beautiful, full-page ad for PartyPoker.com. It's an ad specifically for LinuxWorld magazine, because it has a promotional code in it that is "CASHLINUX".
So they know they're advertising in a Linux users' magazine. You know, as in, not a Windows users' magazine.
I emphasize that point because PartyPoker.com supports only Windows. If you go there with a Mac, they tell you to go get VirtualPC. I haven't gone there from a Linux desktop, but I'd have to believe they tell Linux users something similar (e.g., "here's the windows executable, go fire up VMWare")
Seriously, where's the logic in that?! I have to believe that there are better places to spend your advertising money than to put your product in front of people who absolutely positively cannot use it.
Dumbasses.
It's widely held that John Travolta's career was deader than corduroy until Quentin Tarentino cast him in Pulp Fiction, paving the way for a comeback that far exceeds his original career.
I'm a firm believer that William Shatner is on track for such a come-back. I met him briefly at a convention a couple years ago, and chatted for like two minutes tops. I won't claim to have "gotten to know the man" or anything, but it was clear that he's a thoughtful, funny guy, not at all like the caricature he is often parodied as.
After being ridiculed for his oft-en... dram-a-tic! .. delivery of his ... lines! he seems to have finally come to grips with Hollywood's perception of him, even if it is largely inaccurate. The first evidence of this was his appearance as himself in the 1998 film, "Free Enterprise", playing a send-up of himself "as portrayed by the media"... womanizing, arrogant, buffoon-like, cornered in a bookstore by a pair of trekkies while he's trying to get a better look at the Hustler Honey in the June issue.
The end of that film featured "The Artist Formerly Known As Shatner" performing Julius Caesar, as a rap number, in stereotypical "Bill Shatner Style". Later, Shatner joined Priceline as their spokesperson, taking that musical style to their commercials, which put him and his humorous delivery in front of all levels of the populace. Not just "Trek Geeks" were watching him and laughing.
He got a recurring role near the end of ABC's "The Practice", and had a character, again, who is a parody of his own stereotype. Rude, arrogant, a dullard, in fact, his Denny Crane character is, in many senses, exactly how some of the media have portrayed Shatner. Crane is a has-been. He's got some talent but he's outlived his usefulness and everyone just wants him to go away. That character is now the centerpiece of ABC's "Boston Legal", as the senior partner in a prestigious Boston law firm
Shatner's even taken that "has-been" moniker on as the title track of his new CD, Has Been is a mix of some moody spoken word stuff -- ranging from his rocky relationship with his children to the trauma of finding his wife face-down in their swimming pool -- as well as some truly funny tracks where he points out "Live life like you're gonna die... because you're gonna," and another where he and Henry Rollins (yes, Henry Rollins, bad-ass mofo) duet on the things in life which piss them off.
And the best part is that "it works"... this isn't the "William Shatner sings Mr. Tambourine Man" of old where you're laughing at the artist, it's as though you're sharing a private joke, that being that Shatner can poke fun at his own image, and - more important - that he's comfortable with it. All the while, though, you feel like you're brought into the close circle of people who know "it's just a media thing, that he's not really like that".
But the point of this long story? I think Shatner is at one of those Travola career-points. Originally, T.J. Hooker was going to be Shatner's means of "breaking away from Trek" into a rejuvenated career. It never really achieved that. I think, though, that now, with his final acceptance of what his image is, that's he's making that comeback, and it's long-earned.
Right now, the local NPR affiliate, WAMC is having their annual fund drive. Now, forget for the moment that "having the annual fund drive" is actually a coded-phrase destined for my ears only which translates to "make sure you bring the iPod with you in the car today so you can have something worth listening to." The annoyance-level of an NPR-station fund-drive isn't the cause of this post.
The last few years, I've contributed during the fund-drive. This year, though, that isn't the case. "Why?" you may ask (then again, you may not, in which case, the rest of this post is probably meaningless to you, so may want to move on).
I'm not contributing because they fired Bob Edwards from the show he helped create for no damned good reason. NPR tried to make some silly-ass assertions that Bob was happy with the change (and even went so far as to release a press release, in his name, saying so), but it was clear from the interviews he gave that he was far from pleased about the situation.
Within a couple weeks of "his" press release indicating he'd continue to stay with NPR, how happy he was with the change, etc., etc., he had signed a deal to start doing the morning news program on XM Radio.
I had a brief e-mail exchange with Alan Chartock, the president of WAMC, wherein he agreed to me that this was a huge misstep on NPR's part, and that they should be doing everything they can to get him back.
Well, they didn't.
I have no control over National Public Radio. I only deal with their affiliates, the people who bring me the programming over the air. My only recourse to punish NPR "national" is to punish their affiliate by withholding my funds, and give the affiliates ammunition to use against the national organization.
In other words, the value to me provided by the affiliate is diminished because of the actions of the national organization. In fact, the money I would have given to NPR will, in all likelihood, end up in the pockets of the folks at XM, a growing megacorp the likes of which NPR stations are usually railing against.
Maybe some day they'll learn that "if it ain't broke, ya don't fix it."
Now, I can freely take the blame for why my package destined for Goshen ended up in Colonie/Latham area. I transposed the ZIP code digits "10294" into "12094", which misrouted the package in a big way.
But what makes me laugh is that they somehow think they figured out what truck it goes on and have sent it out for Delivery. I think I'll be even more impressed if someone signs for it.
Now, Brian mentioned how we all re-cast Star Wars once using different actors, chosen mainly because we'd love to see them performing certain lines.
Today's Friday afternoon entertainment was putting Arnold Schwarzenegger into a variety of roles he should never ever be contemplated for. Some examples...
Use your imagination...
A couple weeks ago, George was lamenting that he hadn't been to Yankee Stadium in a while. I pointed out that I hadn't been to the stadium much either myself.
He revealed he hadn't been to a game since before the renovation, which puts his last attendance somewhere in the twenty-plus-year category.
So, I started combing TicketMeister and found that there were really good seats for the Labor Day game available. I decided to treat, and bought a pair of tickets.
Later, it turned out that my investment doubled of its own accord, as a make-up game was added to the schedule and the day-game turned into a single-admission-double-header. Life was good.
Except that right now, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are stuck in Florida, pinned down by a big whopping hurricane that doesn't appear to be going anywhere in a hurry. It's moving incredibly slowly and probably won't even reach Tampa until this evening. Whether or not the Rays can get out of town tomorrow in time for the game is in serious doubt.
I feel so petty caring about "missing a double-header" while the weather destroys so much property, but I was trying to do something nice for someone, and it got completely screwed by the weather. This sucks.
What sucks even more: Even when TicketMeister takes the tickets back, they're still not going to refund their heinously-high service charges and crap.
As the geek community has, to a certain extent, been all aflutter about the last few days, Chuck Yerkes passed away a couple days ago after suffering injuries suffered during a motorcycle accident.
I didn't know Chuck all that well, never having met him personally that I can recall, but I did know him in the way that many others seemed to in that he was a constant source of good advice on many a mailing list for system administrators. He was always willing to help out pretty much anyone who asked for it.
The world needs more people like him, and now it's got one fewer. Rest easy, Chuck, you'll be missed.
As fellow former Yahoo RayG noted, Jeremy made a very interesting post about "how to get launch.com music working on non-windows platforms". He didn't really go into detail, he just linked to the content on O'Reilly's site.
It was removed from Jeremy's site shortly afterward, based on intimidation from people on Yahoo's staff, one would assume. So, in the interests of preserving net history, and of thumbing my nose at Yahoo, I present Jeremy's post as rescued from the Google-Cache by RayG... the more places it's mirrored, the harder it is to make it go away. :)
The folks behind the Spidering Hacks book from O'Reilly have posted a very helpful article: Viewing launch.com music videos under *nix with mplayer.
This Perl script is a basic hack that performs these lookups, given a video ID. This ID is obtained by mousing over the desired video link at launch.com, and entering the number given in the javascript call as the sole commandline parameter of the Perl script. The script will parse, build, and execute the requests as needed, and attempt to open the resulting stream with mplayer.
Here's the funny thing. I suspect that some of the most grateful readers are going to be those who work for Yahoo.
You see, a common complaint of some engineers at Yahoo is that our multimedia stuff simply ignores the growing user base on Linux and other Open Source operating systems who don't have a version of RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. The fact is that many of these users can access this content on Yahoo, but they're never told how and are often turned away with discouraging messages regarding their "unsupported" configuration.
These people don't want support, they want the content. They're often quite willing to support themselves.
Posted by jzawodn at July 30, 2004 11:08 PM
Random thought:
If I steal a consular limo, can the cops legally pull me over? Does the trial have to happen in the country whose limo I stole?
Now, I'm not trying to brag about having had long sessions or anything, because ok, everyone's had their own personal marathon or so. That's fine. The only reason I'm mentioning it at all is that, really, I've got nothin' on the pair of house-flies that were doing the wild thing on my Jeep antenna this afternoon (and yes, biology fans, I know very well it doesn't quite work the same way for insects thankyouverymuch).
As I got into my car, I saw them there, stuck to each other having a grand old time of it. As I pulled out and drove to the mailbox, they were still there, hanging on for dear life as I drove through the lot at 10 m.p.h. As I headed out the apartment complex road at around 30, I thought for sure they'd be gone (after all, when I have a yellow-jacket or paper-wasp on my Jeep, that's about as fast as they can hang on for)... but nope, these two little buggers were persistent.
They didn't even seem to mind the six mile journey I took them on a short while later at 55 m.p.h. They just flattened out their wings perpendicular to their body so that they were parallel to the airflow and ignored the fact that the Jeep was moving at all.
Went to Best Buy, ran some errands in the mall, came out. Still there. Drove home, making a couple stops along the way.... still there, still attached to each other as if me and my errands never even happened upon them.
Now that's persistence.
As I've mentioned in the past, I am a firm believer in Steve Martin's advice from My Blue Heaven, in that "you tip everybody," but as I was bringing my car back this afternoon, I had a thought.
Valet parking... do you tip the guy who takes your car (to make sure to keep it safe), the guy who brings it to you (for being quick at getting it to you)? Both? Neither? Just seems like the tips alone could add up after a week of in-and-out valet service. Of course, there's no option for non-valet parking, so I can't make it easy on myself that way.
At least tipping.org suggests only a buck ... I guess $2.00 a trip out and back isn't bad in the grand scale of things.
Maybe, just maybe, if AT&T is getting out of the long distance business, then isn't just a tad bit possible that the way the government is handling competition in the marketplace is just a tad bit wrong?
It reminds me of a really funny story which I heard once upon a time. I can't speak to the veracity of it, but it certainly seemed plausible.
Once upon a time, GTE and the Baby Bells were offering Caller ID everywhere, and life was good. Except in California, where the CPUC had made ludicrous demands like "you need to spend umpteen million dollars educating our moronic populace how to block their caller ID info" and stuff like that, which neither PacBell nor GTE wanted to do.
Now, so the story goes, a Very Senior Person at PacBell contacted the CPUC one day to say "You know, we're not seeing a lot of growth potential in California due to ludicrous demands by the CPUC, so on $THIS_DATE, we're leaving, and we're taking every piece of infrastructure we own with it including but not limited to poles, wires, switches, microwave stations, you name it, and we're going to relocate those to other places where markets are friendlier. You may want to try and find someone to service those areas effective on that date.
... and then GTE said something very similar within a couple days. Mysteriously, opposition to Caller ID in California vanished, and neither telco threw California back to the Stone Age.
Now, again, I can't speak to the veracity of the story, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. At some point any industry leader, no matter how large, is going to say "you know what? this bullshit simply isn't worth it" and pick up their toys and go home, and that's exactly what AT&T is doing right now.
More power to them. I know a lot of people are going to talk about how evil AT&T is for throwing around their weight, but so what? Seriously. When bit players say "fuck this" and go home, nobody even notices. It's lucky to get three column-inches on page 19 of the Journal. When the big boys do it, though, that gets noticed.
Anyone who's worked in telecommunications, for a big company or a small company, will all agree that the system is completely screwed up. It's designed for maximum screwage. Big companies get screwed. Little companies get screwed. Residential customers get screwed. Business customers get screwed. The only ones making any money are the lawyers and the lobbyists... and, well, of course, the politicians who take the donations. :-)
There are some things in this world, I'll never understand, and people who, literally, turn themselves willingly into wage-slaves are the ones I will never ever understand.
It is, in fact, possible to work too hard. I'm a firm believer in making sacrifices in order to succeed, etc., etc., but there have to be limits to that.
My friend has a job where he travels a lot. Like he catches a plane Sunday night to $SOME_CITY and returns home Friday night, spending the entire intervening time elsewhere. When Sunday rolls around again, the process is repeated. My friend enjoys his job, and that's extremely important in life. That type of arrangement can be kinda hellish on a family, but it's something that you can work through, usually by making weekends be "all about the family".
Except that's not what he does. He's had a side-business for a while, and on weekends, he spends the entire weekend doing work for $SIDE_BUSINESS. For example, it's a holiday weekend. The wife and kids are all off camping, enjoying a Fourth of July Weekend like a good number of other families are doing. What's he doing? Some crap for his side-business.
Not a day goes by that he isn't doing work. And I don't mean just like "He did an hour of work sunday morning" type thing, but several hours or more (frequently much more) every day of the week. He does it, he says, "to pay the bills". And I can understand that, to a point...
People get too caught up in having the latest and greatest toys, houses, cars, whatever. I would much rather live in a crappy apartment in a shitty neighborhood, and drive a beat up eight-year-old-car with rust spots, and know that I get "me-time" (or, some day, "family time") than to have my entire existence defined by "what work I'm doing today".
All the cool houses, toys, cars, and shite don't mean a lick of difference if you don't actually have time to enjoy them. If you're only paying for the crap so that others can enjoy them, then you're doing something completely fucked up (hint: slaves used to bust their ass quite a bit so that other people could enjoy the fruit of their labor).
Worse still, it's a self-reinforcing condition. Once you feel like you "need" to work that hard "to survive" (for your perception of survive), it's very hard to break free and realize "I don't need to kill myself in order to enjoy life, and in fact, it's kinda counterproductive to do so".
I've known my share of workaholics... Yahoo, back in the day, was literally populated to the brim with them. But even then, the people who were pulling 60 hour work weeks still made sure they arranged for quality time with the family. Even when they had (literally) millions of reasons to dedicate every waking minute to their employer, even those guys saw the value of time away from work.
It makes me sad, because I know that years from now my friend will look back upon his life and realize he's wasted it. The time he had to enjoy it will have past, squandered trying to squeeze every ounce of available "working time" out of it.
I've worked in many, many, different fields over my lifetime, but I've never really worked for a car dealer, so I've got the following question for anyone who has...
If you left the keys to one of the cars in the car, and that car was out on the edge of the lot, and someone decided to just use the showroom key to drive away with the car, how long would it really take for the dealer to notice the car was stolen?
I mean, there wouldn't be a key in the rack to make it "obvious" there was a missing vehicle. There wouldn't be broken glass around the parking lot. The car's off at the edge of the lot (right on the street), so it's not like the thief would have to do a lot of work to get the vehicle out.
My gut says that nobody would even notice it missing until one of the sales guys went to show someone "that Black Wrangler", and found the spot empty... but with the keys missing, the salesdrone would probably just write it off as someone else selling the car. If nobody actually thought to check "Who sold the car?" or "To whom?" it would probably just get ignored for quite some time.
In case anyone gets the wrong idea, when I was at the Jeep dealership today getting my state inspection, I came across a set of keys in one of the cars. I brought them inside like a good little citizen, but got to thinking to myself about what if someone bad had found the key instead....
Anyone know for certain?
Seriously, if you are gullible enough to buy this, then you deserve all the mocking and ridicule the world can heap upon you.
Fark pointed to a story about an Indiana Pizza Hut delivery driver who was confronted with an armed attacker wielding a 9mm handgun. The delivery driver responded in kind, taking down the attacker with his own legally-carried concealed handgun.
The shooting was determined to be "a clean shoot", e.g., self-defense, and no charges were pressed against the delivery driver.
His employer, Pizza Hut, on the other hand, terminated him immediately, citing their "no guns permitted" policy.
Now, as someone who has actually worked -- not for this particular Pizza Hut store, but for the same franchisee -- I can speak to this topic with particular authority. When I was a Hut delivery driver in Fort Wayne back in 1994, there were a rash of pizza delivery driver robberies. It was at that point that, company policy be damned, my Smith and Wesson 915 came out with me to every delivery I made.
My assistant manager, also a shooting advocate, was tacitly aware of my carrying my weapon (I had it in my money bag, which he took the hint that "he shouldn't handle my money bag at all, because I don't want you to have to do anything you won't want to do.")
I had many a regular customer during that time period ask me if I was scared about the robberies, and one even asked, "Do you carry a gun now or something?" ... knowing them for a regular (and a decent guy at that), I answered them honestly that "If you ask me on the record, I'll tell you that Pizza Hut's official corporate policy is that its drivers are unarmed and go out like lambs to the slaughter. If you ask me off the record, I'll tell you that I'd rather be fired than dead."
Pizza delivery companies routinely send people out into high-crime areas carrying wads of cash (don't kid yourself, it may say "Driver carries less than $20.00", but that's a crock, since they're usually delivering four or five orders in a single run, you do the math). They're out there, with lots of cash in their hands, very little in the way of "supportive protection" and are pretty much sitting ducks.
I'm not saying "carrying a gun is for everyone", not at all, but if you are the sort of person who feels comfortable having the ability to defend yourself against an armed attacker, you damned well ought to do so, and screw the workplace restrictions. Like I said... better fired than dead.
Here's to you, Honeycutt, hope you find a new job real soon now!
Fark pointed to a story where a woman withdrew $20.00 from an ATM, got a fake $20, and immediately walked into the bank to get it swapped for a real one. The bank originally tried to weasel out of it, but finally did it "as a good faith one-time thing".
But the reality is that the bank really has no choice but to do it, unless they really want a mess of hassle. If I pass a counterfeit $20, even unknowingly, I can still be pimpsmacked by the law for doing so (it's usually not done unless there's reason to believe the person who passed it was less than innocent).
The bank could just as easily be held to the same criminal standard of liability. They're giving out a bad $20.00. This is even worse, if you think about it, since these are the institutions that are supposed to have the tools for auto-detecting the forgeries (and by the accounts in the news story, this had to be one of the worst forgeries ever).
If I pass a bogus $20, and it's pointed out to me, then I pony up another (hopefully real) $20, and I take the hit. If a bank does the same, they should also be held to the same standards.
Now, the bank spokesman pleaded that they have no way of knowing if someone walks in off the street whether they really got it from the ATM or not. Too bad. If you want to anonymise your customers (and even if the recipient doesn't have an actual account, they're still customers, since they get charged a service-charge by the bank for doing the service of providing them cash), then this is the price you pay for doing so.
For what an ATM brings in on a daily basis in service-charge add-on fees, the bank can afford to pay out on the occasional bogus bill that slips through (the spokesperson indicated that in twelve years, he'd only encountered two bogus bills in the ATM). Figure a couple hundred customers a day times $1.50, times twelve years. The ATM service charges, over twelve years, assuming 100 customers a day, totalled $657,000 ... if they can't handle forking $40.00 for the two mistakes (that they made!!) then maybe a prosecutor should have some fun by pimpsmacking such a bank around and seeing what shakes loose.
Once upon a time, I lamented that a certain Yahoo's "parting goodbye e-mail" was probably the most glorious blazing of bridges that had ever been seen by mortal man.
I was wrong.
Gawker had this excellent missive from someone who definitely should not try to seek a reference:
From: [REDACTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 1:11 PM
Subject: FW: Goodbye...
As many of you are aware, today is my last day at the firm. It is time for me to move on and I want you to know that I have accepted a position as "Trophy Husband". This decision was quite easy and took little consideration. However, I am confident this new role represents a welcome change in my life and a step up from my current situation. While I have a high degree of personal respect for PHJW as a law firm, and I have made wonderful friendships during my time here, I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities. In fact, I dare say that I would rather be dressed up like a pinata and beaten than remain with this group any longer. I wish you continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated associates into an aimless, shambling group of dry, lifeless husks.
May the smoke from any bridges I burn today be seen far and wide.
Respectfully submitted,
[SIGNED]
ps. Achilles absent, was Achilles still. (Homer)
This afternoon I moved my blog from a server in Norwalk, CT to a server located outside Boston. It's no longer "http://www.megacity.org/blog/" but is now the more simple "http://blog.megacity.org/".
All the old URLs will continue to work (they're set up via RewriteRules to redirect to the corresponding new URLs, in fact the site you're reading from right now is the new site), but you may want to set up your news aggregators, etc., to fetch the newer URLs to save yourself time. :)
A little over two years Megadeth announced their disbandment, after a serious injury to Dave Mustaine's arm threatened to end his career, with doctors telling him he'd never play again, etc., etc.
It appears the doctors may have been a little mistaken. He appears to be rehab'ing his arm by recording a couple tunes. You can download Kick The Chair, or the aptly-named The Day The Music Died.
You can tell there may be a little bit of the edge taken off his usual shredding, but as I told a bunch of people, "Even a weak Mustaine is better than three-quarters of the guitarists out there today."
Here's hoping he makes a complete recovery and brings Megadeth back to life. The world needs great metal bands, and Megadeth was definitely in the "no compromises" category.
I was listening to Queensÿche's Empire on iTunes today and heard this part of the song:
Federal law enforcement expenditures ranked last in absolute dollars, and accounted for only 6% of all federal spending.By way of comparison,
the federal government spent 24 million more on space exploration,
and 43 times more on national defense and international relations
than on law enforcement.
Wait... Federal Law Enforcement expenditures are 6% of the budget. But they spend 43 times that on national defense, or 258% of the budget?
Both of those figures can't be true. It was either 6% of the budget, or they spent 43 times as much on national defense and international relations. If both are true then the federal government spent, well, more than it actually spent, which wouldn't make much sense, now would it?
It's no secret that I'm a Metallica fan who left the fold. However, I was intrigued by their recent embracing of MP3s. Now, you can go to LiveMetallica.com [Caution: If you're going there with FireFox on a Mac it will bone your browser... something's wrong with their flash animation...works great on MacIE, though] and download entire live concerts as recorded off the soundboard. A 2-hour concert in MP3 format is $9.95, in FLAC (full CD quality) format is $12.95.
Now, I'll be the first one to applaud them for a job well done. Admittedly, they're basically doing exactly what Pearl Jam did a year or two ago except with people downloading the discs instead, but it's still a very cool distribution method.
So Kudos for that.
Of course, no review would be complete without a download. Having heard from someone else (I wish I remember whose blog I'd read it on) that they were, for the first time in history, playing Dyer's Eve start-to-finish, I went looking for a show where they played it, and so I grabbed their Los Angeles show.
Man, am I glad I didn't try to pony up coin for a ticket. It's pretty bad when they start to roll an "old favorite" into the concert program, but don't know the fucking lyrics. And it's not just like he was changing and improvising on the tune (as some groups are wont to do from time to time) but this is full on hesitation and then poorly guessing at what comes next.
Add to that an obvious inability to hit the notes like he did when he was in his twenties, and you've got a really disappointing show. Why couldn't they have come up with something like this back when they were worth listening to?
OK, thanks to Tera, I finally got around to downloading some of the episodes of Red vs. Blue. For those who aren't familiar with it, these guys write a script, and then "film" it by doing video captures of a game of Halo, using the guys in the game as the "actors".
There are only two times in my life I was in serious jeopardy of passing out from laughing so hard. The first was the "kosher air" discussion with Jay (don't ask), the second was watching Episode 14 of RvB.
I can't believe I've been missing this. I feel like I did the day I first discovered MC Hawking now. :-)
This is just one of the coolest things I've ever seen... there's this Russian girl who rides her motorcycle into the Hot Zone from the Chernobyl disaster and takes pictures of what she finds. She rides along with a radiation detector, and tries to stay where it's relatively safe, but there's homes, schools, offices, all completely as they were the day they were hastily abandoned. It's sort of a snapshot of the region, pre-Soviet-collapse, and it's sort of sad when you think about how many people had to basically give up everything they owned that was irreplaceable ... photos, etc.
I highly recommend checking it out.
