I’ve been out of town for what seems like 2 weeks (it’s actually more like a week and 2 days) but it feels like longer. Well I’m officially back and will be posting again like a fool.

Apple Cup weekend has come and gone. This time around it was 15 of us in Seattle. On Friday we all met in this pub/eatery joint called the Ram-something and started the drinking, talking and fun-having. We migrated to University Ave. for some pub crawling shortly after that. I can’t remember what time I got back to the hotel room, but I think it was after 2 AM. Sometime at about 3 am, the Jagermesiter and beer started having and all out brawl in my stomach and I spent most of the rest of the night praying to the porcelain gods.

The next morning I got up and dragged myself to the tailgate party where I took it easy in an attempt to recuperate from the last night. Not a whole lot of drinking happened before the game. The game was a good time although we had horrible seats. I guess 2 of the people in our group were interviewed for King 5 in Seattle although I never saw the interview personally. After the game we did some more tailgating and I made out with some college girl. Then it was back on the road the next morning for the trip back to Portland.

I was watching the Suze Orman show this weekend (don’t ask, just go with it) and she is talking to this single mom with financial and depression problems. During the conversation, Suze says something akin to “All the hope lies in the children”.

For some reason, the nature of that statement is offensive to me. As someone that is no longer a child, it seems to imply that my generation doesn’t have the capacity to inspire hope anymore. Are we so old that the purpose of our lives is pretty much forfeit with the exception of procreating so that we can bring “hope” into the world? It reminds me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where there is this alien that is a brilliant scientist and he helping his world extend the life of their sun. However, because he is “old” by their standards he has to go home and basically kill himself before he becomes “too old”, senile, etc.


I’m not stupid, I know what Suze was attempting to say, but just because you are 18+ years of age that doesn’t mean that you can’t inspire “hope” in this world.


And since we are talking about the children, go here and read about all the fucking crap that happens in public schools now. Utterly ridiculous.

The Sci Fi channel has re-made the classic Battlestar Galactica into a two part mini-series. Part one premiered last night at 9 PM PST with the second part airing tonight at the same time. Overall I thought it was quite good. Below are some of the things that I liked and didn’t like.


The Good

• I loved the ship to ship communications. Absolutely loved it. It sounded like the kind of stuff that you would hear nowadays in fighter to fighter communications. Gave it a real touch of class.
  
• All of the space fighter combat.
  
• When the pilot of the shuttle was fixing the ship she had to look at the plans.
  
• How the injured pilot shot the crazy dude that jumped on the shuttle. He blew him apart. It was very realistic. Very ballsy sci-fi.
  
• The crew chief and his rant about 45 seconds. Good stuff. I think that 45 seconds is going to haunt that character for a long time – as it should.
  
• When Commander Adama tells his son that he is taking orders from a school teacher. Good stuff!

The Bad

• Why do they have to play scenes of what happens before the commercial break? ARRRGHHH!
  
• It doesn’t really make sense as to why the Cylons, after 40 years, want to blow away humans? Maybe that is explained later.
  
• Not much else that I didn’t like.

I heard about this yesterday but didn’t feel like posting about it. But just in case you have been in the same hole that Saddam was in, we caught him.

Two software music players made their debut this week. Winamp 5 and iTunes 4.20


Let’s talk about iTunes first. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of new in iTunes, I think it is just an update really. Regardless, I’ve been using iTunes off an on for a while and I think it is ugly. It’s horribly ugly. What’s with the un-inspired gray all over the place? I would like to be able to skin my iTunes interface. The display where it plays songs is lame. I know it’s supposed to be imitating an iPod display, but an iPod is a little device which can’t handle color. This is a PC that can handle millions of colors. Perhaps, Apple, you would like to use some of them. I also cut down the columns that are displayed in the interface. Seeing what genre the songs are is ok, but seriously if you are listening to it, you pretty much know WHAT type of music it is. I don’t think that I need to be reminded of the genre, how many times I’ve played the song, etc. I’ve cut mine to only display Song Title, Time, Artist and Album (I can live without this column too).

One more thing, if you download a song from iTunes Music Store, it downloads it to a protected AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format. The file in this format cannot be converted to an MP3 from iTunes. Why? I just legally paid for it! Why can’t I use it in any manner that I want? I can’t transfer the thing to my MP3 player because it doesn’t accept that format. Thanks DRM. I hate you, leave my life alone. And no, I’m not getting an iPod. I refuse to get something that costs almost as much as the rent to my apartment. I would rather have a place with 4 walls to sleep rather than sleeping under the bridge with my iPod.

On to Winamp. Winamp 5 has several features that I have found. You can rip CDs right to your computer without having to donwload a separate plugin. Unfortunately, unless you want to pay for Winamp 5 Pro, you can only burn to AAC format (there is that fucking format again). That sucks. Of course, updating your player to Pro will eventually be hacked just like everything else. In fact, cursory check of astalavista.com shows that, yeah, it has already been hacked. Some other cool features that I have noticed are opacity and scale. You can scale your player down to 10% its original size or increase the size of it by 300%+. You have similar settings for opacity.


Oh and I just found out that Walmart has started their music download service. You can download tracks for 88 cents. Beware however, you need Windows Media Player 9 with DRM (I hate you DRM) in order to play the wma files. It gets even worse, check out all the restrictions on the files that you buy!

Here is a billboard (originally found here) that doesn’t seem to be getting the message across correctly. Where is it written that you have to forego sex to be an engineer? No wonder there are so so few engineers nowadays. I bet the “doctor” billboard says “Be a doctor, you can have money and SEX too”!

Want a list of all of the Microsoft Bloggers? Well here it is.

A U.S. appeals court has just handed the RIAA a setback in their underhanded tactics. Their ruling says that RIAA does not have the ability to subpoena customer names from Internet providers without filing a formal lawsuit. I find this funny; the appeals court said one of the arguments by the RIAA “borders upon the silly,” rejecting the trade group’s claims that Verizon was responsible for downloaded music because such data files traverse its network.

This is great news!

RealNetworks is apparently suing Microsoft to the tune of 1 billion(!) dollars because they used Windows Media Player to gain an unfair advantage in the digital media market. Here is what I have to say; fuck you RealNetworks! They lost the advantage in the digital media market because their product sucked. For years I refused to install or use the invasive program on my Windows machine and it wasn’t because I was using Windows Media Player. I stopped using it because it was a terrible software program that always started no matter how many times you removed the damned thing out of the registry. It’s hard to argue this point when the majority of the online community hates your product and your company. I hope that the judge throws your case out because you tortured his computing experience.