Bob had a really good post a few days ago about the current state of the music industry.
Jan 292004
Jan 272004
Cory Doctorow has a great post on BoingBoing about the sad state of music downloads in response to someone else who recommends that we choose the lesser of two evils. I voiced sentiments similar to Cory’s something similar a while back. I still refuse to use one of these services unless they offer in a format that I can use on any player that I choose. Once I buy it, I want the right to decide what to do with it. If I do something bad with it, come get me, but don’t give me a choice that’s worse than what I had before. Until someone finally comes up with a reasonable solution, I’m holding on to my cash.
Jan 272004
None of the ROTK stuff was a surprise. I’m guessing that they’ll give it best director and best picture. If not, Lost in Translation should get one or the other. It’s certain to win for screenplay.
Bill Murray has to take the best actor, although I’ve heard a lot about Johnny Depp’s performance. Tough call there.
I’m guessing Charlize Theron for best actress. The academy loves it when beautiful actresses make themselves look crappy. I’ve heard it’s a good performance. On the other hand, Keisha Castle-Hughes was quite good and could pull an Anna Paquin.
Not having seen any of the other performances, I’ll have to go with Tim Robbins for best supporting actor. He did a good job in an otherwise overhyped movie.
I’ve got no pick on best supporting actress other than that Marcia Gay Harden absolutely shouldn’t win, her performance was crap.
Jan 272004
Baby Chaos for the new year.
Jan 262004
Okay, so I’m just parroting stuff from BoingBoing, but these are just too damn funny.
- What would the comedy world do without GW? If I wasn’t laughing so much, I might cry.
- IKEA is opening a Dallas location in 2005 (Frisco, actually). Mary’s made a few pilgrimages to the Houston location and pressed me into service when I had a business trip there last year. Having been there once and being a gamer, this had me on the floor.
Both grandmas were in town this weekend. Be on the lookout later tonight for new pictures of the week.
Also, to be a complete jerk and annoy all of you northeasterners buried in snow and freezing your asses off, it was in the 70’s and sunny today here. The current weatherpixie reading is 73. I wore shorts all day today and we took the kids to two different parks in addition to eating lunch outside at Curra’s.
EDIT: New pictures are up. Note that The Boy is wearing shorts and a t-shirt and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Man, do I love Austin.
Jan 222004
I found a few links this morning worth mentioning. Bob Mould’s new blog pointed me to a useful comparison of the democratic candidates courtesy of the Washington Post. Also, I saw on Off the Kuff and Burnt Orange Report that D Magazine has started a group blog. It’s very Dallas-centric, but Tim Rogers, who graduated from my high school a year ahead of me, is usually good for a laugh.
Speaking of laughs, you’re probably sick of hearing me rave about The Daily Show, but last night was hilarious. They ripped apart the State of the Union address and then had a great interview with John McCain. Before that, The Wife and Mother-In-Law, who’s in town for a couple of weeks, were watching a show on Trio called Girls Alone. It’s British reality show (sorry, couldn’t find any decent links) that placed 8 (I think) preteen girls in a house alone for a week to see how they’d manage. There’s a companion show called Boys Alone as well that airs tonight. Predictably, things degenerate into a Lord of the Flies situation rather quickly, especially with the boys. And I thought some of the Fox reality show ideas were questionable.
Jan 212004
I just ran across this via BoingBoing. Mark, one of the editors, had his own run-in with some TSA employees. We had a similar incident of our own on our way back from Maui this past summer.
On the one hand, I can understand this from the point of view that I suppose it’s possible that some terrorists out there who wouldn’t be above using children to forward their cause. However, as Bruce Schneier often points out, security is about trade-offs. Currently, I don’t believe the government and, more specifically, the TSA is making the correct ones. I thought the whole point of the government taking over airline security was to raise the quality of the screeners/security personnel. Judging from the automaton-like behavior of those mentioned in these stories, I don’t think we’ve improved. There’s got to be a better way to handle families with small children, especially, mothers travelling alone with multiple children.
As for the childless travellers who give those of us with small kids attitude, I take great delight in pointing my children directly at that person during flight and making their life as much of a living hell as possible. The majority of people are civil and even helpful, but I’ve got no sympathy for impatient, “holier-than-thou”, childless assholes.
Jan 172004
I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more about this in the news and on other blogs. In his speech announcing that another billon dollars will be allocated to NASA over the next 5 years (nevermind how we’ll pay for that either), our esteemed leader referred to astronauts as "spacial entrepreneurs". While this may be gramatically correct, it’s more than a little odd. It loses something without his stilted delivery and trademark smirk, but the Daily Show wasted no time in poking fun last night. While I agree that many of our advances in technology over the last 40 years can be linked to the space program, I still think it’s a little ridiculous to be making such a big deal out of it. Call me cynical, but there’s been talk about about establishing a base on the moon for at least 40 years and nothing has come of it. I’ve read that this is all just a way of quietly phasing out the space shuttle program.
Jan 142004
So after failing several times to figure out how to get the Debian machine not to boot into the screwed up X Window configuration, it dawned on me that I could ssh into the box from my WinXP machine. Duh. A little "su" and some "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and I’m now posting from my nifty new Linux install. My first lesson is that Konqueror sucks as a web browser. It couldn’t render the security code for login on this site. Thank god Mozilla is installed by default as well. Wonder how long I can go before I screw something up and abandon this. Anybody want to place a bet?
Jan 142004
I sense a tremendous time sink in The Fall.