Main Screen Turn On

My first laptop: I was a freshman in high school, I got some 80mhz juggernaught from a friend for $15.00. It ran windows 3.1 and had a battery life rivaling StrongBads. I broke the latch that kept the screen secured, which led me on a disassembly spiral – which reminds me, you’re going to want to keep hardware away from me when I am watching the first Mission Impossible.

My senior year I was given the church laptop to use and improve for awhile, and well… I snapped the latch off when I was moving one time…

When I got to college I got a new ibook g4, 800mhz and with wifi and bluetooth… it was teh roxor. First thing I noticed and appreciated was the retracting hinge latch that kept it from being snapped off.

Two years later, I am walking to my office in my uncomfortable and ugly button up shirt I dropped my laptop bag, thank goodness for my Targus backpack. and went through my night preparing myself to secure my network and machines (just wait until Heather finds out I’m throwing our network on to the EFF anonymous network to keep the man from keeping me down (she could care less, so I won’t lie and say “keeping us down”) and enjoying a very good podcast, Security Now.

As I was packing up I noticed that my laptop wasn’t closing properly…
I inspected the metal latch, and discovered my friends, my dear caring souls close to my heart….
IT BROKE, THE GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT BROKE….
um, yes… so now I gotta figure out how to fix it.

… I can just say, I’ll fix the sad ibook when I find the stupid part.

***

PS: I wasn’t kidding when I said my first laptop rivaled strong bads.

Soon to hit the Black screens!!!!

*Does RSS make you a more productive geek?

*Where to be in three years

*Why do I drink so much Dr. Pepper?

Okay, maybe not that last one – but we’ll see.

Fact one: I like the internet
Fact two: I’m constantly connected to the internet
Fact three: I go to websites looking for updates way too often.
Therefore I should probably invest in RSS technology to keep my obsessive clicking to a minimum.

Can you imagine the increase of productivity I may experience not having to constantly check boingboing.net and other geekier websites constantly, instead doing important things like… homework and dvd encoding?

Mirth inducing thought of the day children: Automation.
End goal? to ensure I never need to be on my computer again to do anything.

Actually, I could go for a snack right about now… hrm.

We’ve decided that Jin needs a pal, so let’s get him a younger girl type kitten friend, and let him have someone besides heather and me to play with. We can’t play as often as he likes, I think.

If it all goes well, I’ll steal a camera for your photographic enjoyment.

Being the perpetual geek that I am, I was going through my small collection of photos when I found an artistic rendition of my first Dungeons and Dragons troupe. Yes dear readers, I am a d20 wielding geek; have nat 20 will travel! Alas time is a cruel mistress, and has separated this merry band of brothers, scattering them about the plains. But to a path of enlightenment and happiness….

I am proud to say I am a geek, who managed to convince his Dungeon Master to create a whole buffing spell utilizing Mountain Dew.

Yes, I am that geeky.

I’m going to get in trouble later this week at work.
We just got some new employee hotel propaganda in the office done by graphic artists. How do I know this? Simply put, there’s a screenshot of Safari and the classic one button mouse of my youth. Despite the fact our software isn’t exactly mac friendly. I should probably digress – the propaganda, and my opinions of the system.

In World of Warcraft you can become respected by other groups you’ve meet by doing quests or giving them things. This is called reputation, and that process is called a rep grind. This is a popular past time, one I’ve even been guilty of, because the rewards are worth the time and materials.
An example for your fun and profit, a player named “imagirlrogue” decided “she” wanted a pirate hat. Why would she want it? Well, no one else had it, (they didn’t want it because the cost for it was too expensive.) What was the cost? An insane amount of grinding. You had to go from “absolutely ****ing hated” to “I would take a bullet for you” from this small group of pirates – and the only way to do that is to kill their enemies. lots of them.
“She” has killed so many of their enemies, who happen to be friends with EVERYONE else she is labeled a mortal enemy. Was it worth it? She would say “Yup!”

My hotels incentive program gets you to enroll as many people a day as possible into their “free” program that gives them lower rates and a few other things. It’s primarily been “we’ll give you a dollar under the table for every person you sign up” and I can’t see how it’s much changed. Oh, I’m sorry, it has a graph. Now we get to see our monthly numbers, in hopes of inspiring us. Where is my reward: money, pride, social responsibility? I’m never going to enroll as many people as the Company HQ wants me to for exactly that reason. People will do seemingly stupid things, I among them, for rewards tantalizing enough. I will not sell you a special club membership for lower rates and if I feel like it, a free breakfast (why yes, I do have such power, ah, being a night manager is good.)

Your homework assignment if you choose to do it is wonder why you do a task you consider monotonous. Send me an email

My friends, this will be the winter and spring, and perhaps even the summer of thought.
For the opportunity of too many books to read, and too much to think about has arisen by the powers that be, namely my professors. Luckily for you I’m going to have an overflow of ideas, a natural byproduct of coming to understand all things. Enough with my ranting… on to the good stuff.
Bicyclemark of bicyclemark.org fame did a podcast the other day about Terrorist groups and their politcal entities. Specifically whether these politcal parties should be allowed to conduct in the governments they want to change. I’ll refrain from giving any definite statements at the moment, I only heard it this last hour. But obviously I think it’s worth consideration, let the diametric process begin!

It’s really quite a shame that people only read authors when their wonderful stories are converted into a (sometimes) trite rendition on the silver screen. Trying not to be disheartened by such realities I was upbeat when I enrolled in a philosophy of religion class, concerned entirely with the works of CS Lewis (or, amusingly, Jack as his friends called him). Most pleasingly we don’t have to read the Chronicles of Narnia in leu of less allegorical works (but not by much) and this class is packed full. More english majors than I expected, but hell, live and learn, I need to attend class with more than philoosphers, it’s hard to win conversations that way.

At the grave risk of scaring all my friends who may happen upon this blog (without my gentle nudgings, I assure you), I do seem to be enjoying my philosphy of religion classes. It amuses, confounds and worries my friends to see me taking so many. Perhaps they fear I’ll abandon reason, an unlikely thing I feel. I just thought I’d say that it’s most hilarious, but at least the classes are enjoyable. And frankly I’m one for knowing what’s going on, and my decisions and arguments should be ones of fact, my examples lacking there of begin with the whitehouse, and just go down from there.

I should say real quick I’m not a political mizer, and do my best to keep my comments a) based on shit I understand and b) to myself. But I’m always up for a round of equal opportunity bashing of political figures. Just for your information.

Work says it’s time to do things I’m paid for, except of course deal with humans, that’s not in the description.
More will sure to come later on, look ahead for the mental overrun, I’ll keep a towel handy. I think the babelfish will have to stay in its bowl, however.

It’s January, which means four things: taxes, school starting up again, CES and MacWorld Expo.
The first two are universally reviled, and typically only mac heads (go Steve!) go nuts about MacWorld – no, this is about CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I feel it’s time I inflict you, my gentle reader, to my thoughts and opinions of the new items of digital nature, most specifically Sony’s new ebook, geniusly named the “Sony Reader” which I lust for almost as a new PowerBook.

Peter Kafka aluded in his Forbes.com article Sony’s possible intention to create a market with their e-books similiar to Apple with their ipods. Sadly this enlightening insight was never followed up. I shall compare the products, Apple’s iPod and iTMS with Sony’s Reader and BBeB (Broadband electronic Book) store to find the dis-analogy between the two.

Next to me is my ipod, a simple 30 gig model with video, given to me as a christmas present that cost $290.83 (give or take) with a student discount. It has roughly 12 gigs of music and the occasional video podcast, dl.tv, DiggNation and when Jenn Cutter gets an episode out, OpenAlpha. What is it you say? Yes, I’ll stop gloating over my christmas present…
What truly made the iPod a viable option for me was my huge resource of music and video I had before hand. Those Napster commercials comparing their $30 a month service (or however much they are charging now, please feel free to correct me) to a ginormous $10,000 price tag to fill up a 60 gig ipod – which was quickly panned by geeks as misdirection and balogna. I have had a respectable collection of music before considering a digital media player, and my first two mp3 players were not iPods, I certainly would not have bought all the music I have from Apple’s store, DRM is still DRM, and the thought of going through that many songs with JHymn doesn’t appeal to me.

Sony’s Ebook Reader (and you thought I had forgotten, ha!) is quite possibly the best ebook there is, technologically speaking. Their libre in Japan was not as popular as they had hoped for a reason so simple you probably have never thought about it – there is no market when peoples media can’t be used on your machine. Allow me to elaborate…

For the same reason Napster’s commercial was misdirection, electronic books haven’t made reached a critical mass, people already had converted from their “bulky” Compact Discs to .mp3, ,ogg, .wmv, a band of small musicians… People weren’t forced to re-encode, or worse re-purchase the music they already owned, which the music industry has shown constant contempt – an article that’s already been written by countless smarter individuals than I.

In order for an eBook to become popular enough with “the people” there must be a way to get copies of books they already own affordably and without DRM. I’ll give my reasons for the DRM-less nature later on. When .mp3 converters came out they cost varying amounts of money (most entry level consumer software cost roughly 10-15 USD) which were used by the percentage of computer users who A. knew what mp3s were, B. thought filling their 10 gig harddrives with 96kbs copies of Aerosmith would be a groovy idea and C. weren’t “geeky” enough to use command line programs which were free. The entire reason it cost money was to develope a usable interface (and most rarely were, ah the good old days…) and pay the license fee to the owners of the mp3 copyright.

While converting a CD is really quite easy, hell even my mother can do it, because it’s already a digital form. it’s not called Compact Disc Digital Audio for nothing: converting one type to another is quite easy. This makes converting my cds to too many gigs of compressed lossy files a task I can complete in under a weekend. But with books, it’s a slightly more difficult issue. I don’t want to use SonyConnect™ to buy a copy of a book (or 100) I already own, even at a %25 markdown (gee, paper, shipping, manufacturing must cost so little)

Unfortunately I can’t personally convert my copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth, well worn with repeated reading. For those who haven’t had the opportunity to read Isaac Asimov, I would suggest you start with Caves of Steel, not all science fiction sucks. I would have to manually scan each page with a scanner, which I do not currently own, possibly numerous times to ensure the scans were good enough for some computer software to convert into text, such software has a 95% or so accuracy rating, and at 300 odd pages it becomes unviable. This would take hours or days to accomplish, which is not something most individuals would want to do, much less to all their books they may wish to read.

You might say, Dear night auditor, if you have a copy of Foundation and Earth, why do you want a digital copy of it? Two very good reasons; it’s good to have insurance in case something happens to the original, and I can’t effectively carry around all the books I want with me. Sony’s Reader is tauted as having a capacity of 80 books, with an expansion for even more content. For me, this would be a godsend. I’ve done enough traveling, and even in a daily basis when I wish to read in public, to know that taking my books to read is difficult and some times dangerous. Once I accidently ruined my girlfriend’s copy of Lord of the Rings which her grandfather owned on a trip. She’s finally forgiven me, but it shows the hazards of taking something so delicate as bound paper on the road, not to mention the heft involved.

My solution? Strange as it sounds, a subscription to a service provider to do it for you. I feel that Napster and Real’s Rhapsody $15 a month “all you can eat” music provisions suffer from a lack of ownership, or I shoud say, you don’t get to keep what you eat. This hypothetical digital content provider, eBook-Monthly™ (we’ll say) would charge you a small monthly fee to provide you copies of books you’ve proven to them you own. Or for those who prefer the $.99 route, or don’t really own enough books to make a per-month credit card charge. Providing both revenue options really would be in the best interest of eBook-Monthly… for reasons that I frankly don’t wish to explain.

The service isn’t the music, like Rhapsody, I’m not paying the $15 to keep ownership of these little files which are merely copies of what I already own. Instead I’m paying the company a service-fee for getting a high quality copy of the book for my own personal use. Which brings me to why these files must be DRM free. The book I have has no DRM, the police do not show up at my door if I highlight or mark in my book, or *gasp!* loan the book to a friend to read. eBook-Monthly does not own the books, the book publishers do. I’ve paid/inhereted a physical copy to do with as I please, even resell at a profit.