One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Today the House of Representatives followed the Senate into grandstanding their way toward revoking the rights of most people charged under war crimes laws. What does this mean for thee and me? Well, it’s like this: if you get called a terrorist, they can torture you until you admit… well, pretty much whatever they want, then admit that to a court as evidence and have you killed.

Legally.

Please refer to this NYT article and this Common Dreams article. They pretty much summarize how I feel about this issue.

I’d love to carry on endlessly on how torture isn’t an effective means of interrogation. In the end, though, it really is a question of humanity: we, as a society, are best judged by the way we treat our worst enemy. We can best define our humanity by the way we treat a stranger, or an enemy; I have been looking for eloquent ways to put this idea across and then it hit me, there was this dude named Jesus a really long time ago who came up with some interesting ideas. And whether you think he was God or just a rather crazy dude with a lot of followers, the point is moot because his words speak for themselves:

Matthew 5:43-44 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

It sickens me to think that I, a bitter, seasoned athiest, can read this and understand the message clearly, yet the Republican, Christian right can read this and so completely fail to miss the point.

This is truly a turning point. We have defined our prisoners as less-than-human, as animals. I am very sad for us.

Today, I traveled back in time to June 28, 2004. It wasn’t just that, though; some crazy dimensional shifting crazy shit happened because Boise became somehow interdimesionally tangled with San Francisco. Why? Because I sat through an hour and a half of presentation from Microsoftie Chris Avis (who seemed like a smart and damn nice guy, but it didn’t help) and all I could think of when I was done was that this was way fucking better when Steve Jobs did it at WWDC 2004. It was original then.

This is long, ranty and Mac-slanted. Fair warning.
Continue reading “I saw some serious shit and lived to tell the tale”

It looks as though we may be coming up on something I have not seen since Goldeneye: a really, really good James Bond movie. Witness the new trailer! (apologies in advance, I don’t normally link AOL but it’s not on Apple’s site.) If you’d like to directly grab it, here’s the URL:

http://pdl.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2006/casinoroyale_018129/casinoroyale_trlr_02_bbhiq_56dsrjud_dl.mov

Use wget, or block referrers with Web Developer.

Graham Chapman, Monty Python member and great British comedian/author, died way back in 1999. Why do I care? Because somebody thought it neat to post a bit of his funeral on YouTube.

If there was ever a good way to go out, having all your friends onstage singing “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” has to be it.

Holy fuck, there was an SA Forums goon present when that Lenovo portable caught fire in LAX! He has pictures!

I hope Sony really eats ass for this. I figure as a suitable punishment all the execs that authorized the release of these products should be required to use them exclusively for the next 3 years, never knowing when their laptop or cell phone is going to burst into flame and severely burn them.

Now that’s metal.

Being an old fuck, I get to look back occasionally at what we’ve got now and tell all the young whippersnappers why all this shit is cool.

My mom and I had a short discussion at dinner yesterday evening - she said that sometimes she thinks the world would be better without the Internet.

Fuck that shit.

Last weekend at RD’s wedding, I pulled up a movie schedule for Boise on my phone. While standing in the middle of a field. In Roseberry, Idaho, a “town” that I didn’t even know existed until about a week previous.

This same phone saved me something like $70 bucks in Vegas - $10/day for Internet * 7 days. Also, it’s really cool cruising down the road at a cool 80 MPH while surfing the SA Forums.

Yesterday, I got a 5G Video iPod. Today, I dropped a video of a TV show that was on Sunday night on a neat little goon-made program called VisualHub and it automatically converted it and imported it into iTunes 7. Then I pulled down some YouTube videos with iTube (although I’m gonna try PodTube tomorrow) and put that on there too.

I have isolated myself almost completely from traditional forms of media. I haven’t listened to any radio besides NPR since I got back from Austin. I have no cable or satellite, and I quit buying CD’s (save anything by “Weird Al” Yankovic.) The only traditional form of media that I still use is DVD’s, and that’s because I really do enjoy collecting the goddamn things - if I could get them without funding the MPAA, believe me, I’d do it. The thought’s crossed my mind to stop buying those too, because it’s not like I need to. I do it because I can.

I do what I want with my media. And almost everything I do is illegal under United States law. Rip a CD to MP3? Lawsuit. Rip a DVD to MP4? Illegal and prosecutable under DMCA. It’s infuriating.

We treat this shit far too casually. It’s all being used against us, and will continue to be used against us. And we accept it.

Every once in a while the magnitude of how special this particular time is gels in my mind. I wonder how we’ll feel in 50 years when putting up a blog will cost [insert prohibitive sum here] and it simply won’t be thought of to buy one physical copy of anything - you’ll have one stored on a home server, and another license for the copy you carry with you, and yet another for the one you view over the net at work. I wonder what it’ll be like cracking your computer’s integrated hardware-based obscenity filter so you can watch porno, or view ‘pirate’ signals.

Somehow I think you’ll probably be able to dim your computer, but not turn it off.

Fucking join the EFF already, you slackers.

Overview:

• iTunes 7: Gapless: Fucking awesome. New interface: pretty sweet. Complete lack of ability to download movies without crappy DRM: Big turnoff. And they’re expensive. 2 bucks less than a DVD. Did I mention you can’t play them anywhere but iTunes? Oh well, the sheep don’t care. Baaaaa.
• New Nanos: They were cool when they were called the iPod Mini.
• iTV: Once again, if it can only play DRM’d video and music, who cares. The verdict’s still out.
• Faster Minis: Onboard video. Don’t care.

No new MacBook Pros. Please, Apple, make a Conroe MBP. I need a good Christmas present for myself. Plus, I still have this bizarre illusion that I might be able to run a corporate image through BootCamp

Twelve years (give or take a few weeks) ago I walked into a business. Metaphorically, that is, even though literally sorta works too. A few months more and I’ll have been in my present home for twelve years as well (notwithstanding the 18 months or so I spent in Moscow.) Most people my age haven’t been anywhere long enough to make any memories. Here on Taylor Street, they have to be brushed away like day-old spiderwebs. You try to brush them away, but they come back overnight - those little fuckers are nothing if not thorough.

Twelve years ago I had an entirely different circle of friends. We used to lan at my house nearly non-stop. (For those guessing, I sucked just as bad at games back then as I do now.) We used to sit out under the tree in my front yard and drink and talk about what we were going to do. I had no fear, because I had my own shop. No fear of the future at all.

Twelve years later, one of those people has a promising career. One went from tattooing to IT administration and back to tattoing at his own shop. Another found a new career working in same tattoo shop. Yet another found a love of art and is now studying at the University of Idaho. (I-D-A-H-O! IDAHO! IDAHO! PLEASE SUCK LESS!) Two of those people got married and moved to Oregon and then Nevada, developing a rather large family in the process. One is on his way to an aspiring acting career by working his way up from IT, neither of which have to do anything with his two degrees.

Meanwhile, I have gotten older, fatter, angrier, and far more bored than I ever was before.

I’ve been studying for my MCSE this week, trying to prepare to take the 70-291 and I’m having a really hard time with it. Finally, today it hit me: it’s big and complicated and really fucking boring.

I was talking to Beta last week and he told me that I make my own depression. Maybe I make my own boredom, too. I’ve got a job that many would love to have, and I’m just bored a lot. I sat out on my doorstep tonight, smoking & drinking & trying to think of what the answer is - what I should be doing instead. I have no idea what that is.

Fuck, I really hate Sundays.

I’d heard so many good things about House M.D. I had to watch a few episodes, and now I’m hooked. Oh well, I can afford to slack off one night… I’m gonna have to hit the books just that much harder tomorrow.

House got me thinking, though… which is harder, medicine or computing?

Well, in medicine you have people from all around the world, different races, environments, societal factors, etc. that all combine to make up thousands of different systems. On top of that, the medical research community is neverending, new theories about every branch of medical science come out on a yearly basis. Doctors train for 8 years or more and then have to go through a brutal residency period before they begin to be accepted. Often, even after that the working conditions are less than optimal.

On the other hand, we have computing. A vast land in which its “people” (computers) are so dramatically foreign from one another that they might as well be from seperate planets. These people evolve dramatically from year to year, with a complete internal structure change every 4-5 years. In addition, these people’s “brains” (operating systems) are often completely different, and in the case of *nix, different even amongst similar families. There is a huge research community, redefining the landscape of computing every 18 months or so (if you believe Gordon Moore’s hypothesis extends to software too) and in addition to that, a fairly impressive amount of the discoveries made are locked behind proprietary walls, where like the black box, we can feed them inputs and interpret the outputs but never study the internal design. Training for computing-related jobs is far easier, as one’s patients don’t die if misdiagnosed, and thus training for the industry often revolves around a great deal of self-learning. Hours are easier initially, but through promotion get more and more brutal until reaching the same or worse levels as their medical counterparts. Salaries are also comparably lower, although admittedly techs usually do not need to carry blindingly expensive malpractice insurance.

I should have just gone to fucking med school.

Check this out: Sci-Fi is showing ten short pre-season 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica on their home page. They’re nondownloadable, and they’re very small, but they’re new BSG so it doesn’t matter. Go now.

http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/