Category: General

On the scale of bravery, obviously the highest reaches are reserved for those who willingly and without hesitation give their lives to save another’s.

Not at those lofty heights, and on a more manageable scale, are those who are dorks. Those who publicly and knowingly stumble, just because; those who make funny faces or wink or stick out their tongues; those who know that fart jokes are truly the great equalizer; those walk funny or talk funny; those with the gift of not caring if they’re viewed as “adults”.

Be a dork and you may not attain vast power over mighty empires and mind-boggling fortunes.

But you may end up rewarded with the infinite richness of smiles and laughter. And even if you don’t – you won’t care.

You’ll be too busy having fun.

“You big dork” is among the most powerful of the Three Word Sentences that shape the world (the other three being, of course, “I love you”, “Let me help” and “Dance with me”). Use it wisely foolishly.

Being an atheist, I may not celebrate the religious holiday of Easter.

I do, however, appreciate chocolate bunnies.

Especially dark chocolate bunnies.

Happy Easter, everyone.

…and the video is pretty snappy, too. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjVtJzTSuPw]

Smacky has somewhat disappeared from my blog. But he’s still around, in that way of cats of demanding attention when he wants it, and being prickly and scarce when he wants to be.

Last week sometime he must’ve gotten into a fight with another cat. I’m guessing it was a white cat because Smacky had little tufts of white fur in his claws, along with a bunch of new scars on his left cheek and a nasty tear in his left ear. After a huge fight like that, Smacky sticks around the house and doesn’t go outside much. I can’t tell if that means he won, or lost. Maybe he won and he doesn’t feel the need to patrol his territory; maybe he lost and is avoiding the winner until he heals up.

Mostly he sat on top of his cat condo, near the heater (hard to remember on this sunny warm Friday morning, but it was cold last week if you’ll recall) or on my bed, curled up in the blankets.

This week I’ve been spending a lot of time catching up on “Battlestar Galactica”, which translates into being curled up on the couch under a blanket, maybe a small amount of delicious white cheddar popcorn to snack on, while I watch TV for a couple of hours (3 hours of viewing time equals four full episodes minus the commercials).

Smacky would do one of two things:

1. Completely ignore the warm lap I was offering for a long time and stay curled up on his cat condo or in the bedroom… until about 5-10 minutes before I was ready to turn off the teevee and go to bed, at which point he’d wander over, jump up in my lap, curl up, and then growl and hiss 5-10 minutes later when I had to move him to stand up.
2. Or he would find me immediately, jump up, burrow under the blanket, and then growl and hiss and bite if I moved at all, even a little.

Cats are so random.

Last night I came home and my neighbor lady, Peggy, and Old Barfy were sitting on their front step. As I walked past them and said “hi”, the lady laughed and said, “Someone’s waiting for you!” Smacky was hiding in the bushes, but when he saw me, he came out, rubbed up against my legs, and meowed constantly until I got the door open to let him in.

It’s nice to feel wanted. Even if it’s a cat.

Happy Ougadi! What’s “Ougadi” you ask? Why it’s the New Year holiday for an ethnic group in India, the Telugu people. It is also the birthday of Ganesha, the god of wisdom and “remover of all obstacles”.

Today, the 5th of April, was also the birthday of Thomas Hobbes, the man who brought us social contract theory, which proposes that self-defense against a violent death is the natural right of all men, and is the basis of all human rights. Hobbes then proceeded to tell us that it’s in the King’s best interest to abide by the law. I guess Hobbes never counted on men like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Others born on this day were Albert R. Broccoli, producer of the James Bond films; Ivar Giaever, a Norwegian physicist; and Pedro Rossello, the sixth governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Today was also the day that Kurt Cobain chose to leave this mortal coil. Bye, Kurt. Kurt shares this day with John Winthrop, the Younger, the governor of Connecticut in the 17th Century (y’know, before the U.S.A. was formed); General MacArthur; and Saul Bellow, who was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 but passed over, and who won it for reals in 1976.

And that’s what happened on This Day In History!

Jimmy Doohan, who played Scotty in various incarnations of Star Trek, will finally, years after his death, reach space, the final frontier.

His ashes will be launched into space. It was apparently his wish for after he passed away.

Bon voyage, Mr. Doohan.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

It’s so true. Ol’ Bill Congreve knew what he was talkin’ about.

I’m sitting here listening to my music, conveniently contained on my beautiful video iPod. I’ve heard Barenaked Ladies’ folk-rock, to System of a Down’s hardcore rock (I loves me some “Pogo” to get going in the morning), to Seattle band Harvey Danger, to Morphine’s slow, jazzy rock, to Radiohead… It’s all good. Because it’s my music, and everything I put on there is something I like, for one reason or another, and I’ve got (I think) broad tastes.

Apple and EMI Music announced yesterday that they’re going to start selling non-DRM’ed music in the iTunes Music Store, online, for download.

My personal thoughts on DRM, or encrypting music to lock its use to one or a few devices, are this: it’s treating the customer like a thief, it’s ineffective because there are always ways to crack it, and it’s more about making the customer pay for the fair use that they should get for free. So I applaud the basic idea behind EMI experimenting with unlocking their music – but, again, they’re charging more for the right that should be free. They’ll still offer FairPlay (heh) enabled tracks for US$0.99 each, or super-special “free” tracks for US$1.29.

This comes after Steve Jobs said that Apple would drop DRM in an instant if the labels gave their OK (which I almost blogged about), and EMI stepped up, half-heartedly and still looking to siphon money from their customers in the process, but, y’know, still.

Once the music is available, I will likely, as a way to support the concept, upgrade any EMI tracks that I’ve purchased. Of course, since I only have a handful (maybe 40? 50?) songs that I’ve purchased from iTMS, it’s unlikely that I will be dropping very much dough.

The vast majority of the 4400+ songs in my digital music collection is legally obtained from ripped CDs – remember those? Yeah, they’re not encrypted or locked in any way, so it’s easy-peasy to buy them (used, most of the time, so discounted), then use my computer to suck the songs off and then onto my iPod. I get to choose the quality of the songs, instead of being locked in to the 128kbps or 256kbps that iTunes offers – I can even listen to nothing but full-on, non-compressed digital music.

Another large selection of my library is made up of songs that the artists themselves have offered for free on the internet. Not all artists are locked into serfitude with one of the five major labels, you know, and most artists like the fact that people want to listen to their music, so they’re open to distributing it in any way possible. Look at Harvey Danger’s free digital distribution of their awesome third album, “Little By Little”, for an example.

And most of the time, I’m downloading because I want to try something new, or I’ve been turned on to some new song or artist by a friend and want to sample them. If I like them, I turn around and buy their CDs (see two paragraphs ago) and attend their shows, maybe even buy the t-shirt or somethin’. It’s like the free songs are advertising. Wow, where did that idea come from – letting people hear the songs for free so that they’ll turn around and spend money on the band? Oh, right… that’s the model for radio. Which is apparently so old-fashioned and 20th century that the major labels are just not interested. Except for EMI. Sort of.

I do have a few (probably less than 200) songs that I’ve either pirated off the internets, or

But, y’know, still… I guess that’s my reaction to the whole announcement: “But, y’know, still…” It’s great, but…

OK, so I gave in to another teevee show that “everyone” said is really good. And it turns out that I like it, too.

Are you sitting down?

The new “Battlestar Galactica” rocks.

I know, I know… You’re thinking “cheesy space opera” and probably “Star Wars rip-off” but, seriously. In the “re-imagined” new series, the writers have given us an awesome people-oriented drama. And there’s this whole tension between the military commander (Adama) and the political leader (President Roslin) that makes for great political drama. Plus it’s got the sci-fi aspects, plus the writers are doing the whole modern “continuing storyline” and how that has consequences for the characters.

Plus the chick who plays Starbuck is butch-y hot – and she’s from Portland; a home girl!

I kept reading online about the Season 3 finale, realized I didn’t want to be spoiled, and I decided to catch up on it. Turns out I like it. I found the disks at my local video lair (no, really – it’s called Video Lair and it rocks) last week and have been going back for more.

I just finished Season 1 last night. I’ll start Season 2 tonight. Don’t nobody spoil anything for me or I’ll kick your frakkin’ ass!

Earlier this week I wiped my new sexy thing clean and reinstalled everything, from the OS up. Just an annual clean-up, plus I had some nagging problems that I wanted to try to fix.

I didn’t want to reinstall everything – I only wanted to have what I needed. In a year I collect a bunch of stuff that I use once or twice, then forget about. Plus, I have two programs that aren’t “universal” programs (able to run natively on Intel) – Quicken and Excel. Both of them are used to keep track of my finances. Both of them require Rosetta to run on my new sexy thing, which slows it down.

I didn’t really feel like putting MS Office v.X back on, just to open spreadsheets. I’d tried Google Docs in the past but my spreadsheet was too complicated and Google Docs didn’t support it at the time.

Looks like Google has made some improvements, because I just tried again and it opens the file just fine!

Google for the win! Buh-bye, Microsoft Office.

Moments that put everything else into perspective:

Spending lunch with two good friends, laughing so hard that we couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk, and certainly couldn’t finish the conversation that prompted all the laughter.

Part of what made it all so funny was the fact that we were in a public cafeteria in a public building, surrounded by both folks we worked with (and should probably maintain some kind of professional manner around) and the general public, whose view of county employees would be shaped by our actions.

And another part of what made it all so funny was the topic which prompted the laughter, a topic that, in itself, is among the first things to provoke laughter in humans, and remains funny right up until our final days.

I wish I could do justice to that moment.