January 2003
13 posts
The State of Oratory
Yesterday I watched yet another poorly-composed speech delivered by our commander-in-chief, who, incidentally, has still not learned to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
As always, Bush’s prose was completely uninspired. Aren’t there any good speechwriters left? What happened to the person who penned the following for Reagan in 1986?
Government growing beyond our...
Protect Me From Your Followers
I watched Hell House on DVD tonight. It’s a documentary about members of a Pentecostal church in Cedar Hill, Texas organizing their annual fire-and-brimstone haunted house
As visitors walk through the Hell House they witness meticulously staged (and badly scripted) depictions of ravers getting date-raped, homosexuals dying of AIDS, drug deals gone bloody and the unrepentant burning in...
Oh, It's A Tradition? Never Mind
Isn’t it just a little odd that Trent Lott gets skinned alive for making an offhand comment about Strom Thurmond while George Bush can send flowers to Jefferson Davis and get away with it? It’s amazing what you can do when it’s a “tradition.” (from MetaFilter)
Is It Sweeps Season Already?
I have to admit that I’m a bit of a CSI junkie. It’s a great show, but I’ve noticed that it seems to be getting more graphic with each episode. This week brought the following lovely visuals:
A raven chomping on a human eye, with veins and nerves dangling
A syringe extracting vitreous fluid from the same eyeball
A severed and decaying human leg
A decaying body with a...
The Stamp Act
Note to self: Remember to purchase drug tax stamps before dealing anywhere in Kansas.
Free To (Think We) Choose
Over the past few days there’s been an interesting series of posts on the nature of free-will amongst several free-market bloggers. Will Wilkinson began it with a very poetic rumination on the difficulties and relative merits of attempting to live a fulfilling (and consistent) life while maintaining a belief in hard determinism. Gene Healy followed by commenting on the absurdity of those who...
Macromedia Acquires Presedia
Today I received an email from the CEO of Presedia, a company I’ve done business with for the last two years. They’ve got a great enterprise-class product for converting Powerpoint presentations to Flash. The email was to inform me that they’ve been acquired by Macromedia, the 800 pound gorilla of the web development software business.
I pay Presedia in excess of $13,000 a year...
French-Fried Clams
From the Onion:
Rael is French for “L. Ron.”
A "Check" on the RIAA
Quality control is one of the main problems with P2P networks in general. Between truncated songs and spoofed fake audio tracks placed on networks by companies like Overpeer, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find what you’re looking for without having to download and sift through a lot of shit in the process.
What we really need is a filesharing network linked to a public...
First Contact
Yesterday I saw a Segway scooter for the first time here in Dupont Circle. Two of them, in fact. I remembered seeing one of the riders from CNN. He was actually one of the first people in the U.S. to take delivery of the vehicle. The news segment showed him riding around wearing a helmet, which, interestingly enough, he wasn’t wearing yesterday.
If it really just is “an extension of...
The Satellite Office
My broadband provider was apparrently having DNS issues all day yesterday. We were unable to get any work done all morning.
So what did we do?
The three of us (CJ, Matt and I) went around the corner to Sparky’s Cafe with our laptops and spent the latter half of the day using their 802.11b wireless network. It worked quite well. So well in fact that Sparky’s is now my official...
The New Sound of Music
I bought a new pair of cans from Headroom last week and I’ve been giving them quite a workout. They’re made by a company called Grado Labs in Brooklyn and they’re absolutely amazing. The model I bought (The SR60) has relatively high signal output so it doesn’t require a headphone amplifier, which makes it ideal for use with portable devices, like my iPod.
I’ve been...
Trends To Watch (First In A Series)
I’ve been using etree.org lately to download Dave Matthews Band concert recordings. Under the band’s taping policy, such non-commercial activity is completely allowed.
When I first began doing this, I was a little suprised to find that downloads were predominantly available in a single format—and it wasn’t MP3 or Windows Media. It was the lossless variety of Shorten, or SHN.
...