Linkstew

Arnold Unplugged - It's hasta la vista to $9 billion if the Governator is selected

Well, it's not like I was going to vote for Arnold anyway, but I fear this will just be too little too late -- much like the late-game drunk driving news about Bush that didn't save us.

Damn, BofA approved my credit card application. Those punks. Not having a credit card was something I was kind of proud of, but now I'm going to end up in debt just like everyone else. Man, the real world sucks.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the fact that having a credit card is damn near required in this day and age? Because I do. And I mean required in the "the only way to do this transaction is with a credit card" sense, not in the "I can't afford stuff" sense. Case in point: The reason I applied for this credit card in the first place was just so that I can get a new cell phone plan, in my name (rather than my dad's).

So my other roommate bought the Star Wars Episode I DVD, and we watched the documentaries and we watched the bloopers and we enjoyed it. All in all, it's a very nice package full of content that I think was worth the two-year wait for the DVD. BUT!

Tonight my other roommate and I were talking about the DVD, and I mentioned today's Slashdot Story which said that Episode I DVD owners would be able to watch the Episode II trailer on "the web." We wondered how they were going to restrict viewage to owners of the DVD, so we went in his room and played with the DVD and ended up at dvd.starwars.com. dvd.starwars.com looks like something targeted as the home of extra content for DVD owners.

Curious how exactly they were restricting the site, I went to dvd.starwars.com with my PowerBook, and found a list of requirements -- most notably was the one which reads "Viewing the Exclusive Star Wars DVD site requires the following: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+ running on a PC with Windows 95 or higher."

Hi. So me, the Mac user, is left out in the bloomin' cold.

And to add insult to injury, the video content at dvd.starwars.com is exclusively in QuickTime, and the window that spawned to play the Episode II stills trailer featured a giant Apple logo along with "Think Different."

Such bullshit.

I'm a Dr. Pepper fan, and in Berkeley, Dr. Pepper is a Pepsi product. The problem is that most of campus sold its soul to Coke long ago, and so when I'm on campus, it's far easier to find a coke vending machine than a Pepsi vending machine, and so I'm forced to resort to a Coke to fill my to fulfill my carbonated beverage needs. I don't mind Coke, I just far prefer Dr. Pepper.

For the last three years, though, there was a Pepsi machine in Evans hall serving my Dr. Pepper needs. Until this August, when I went into Evans and found my faithful Dr. Pepper dispensing machine replaced with yet another big red Coke machine. I have yet to check on the Pepsi machines in Wheeler and Soda (hall, that is) to see if they've survived Coke's onslaught, but the outlook is bleak. (The word on the grapevine (being the grapevine associated with my job, not student transmitted rumors) is that the campus cut even more of an exclusive contract with Coke). So now to have a Dr. Pepper during class, I have to plan more ahead and pick it up before I'm on campus.

Hot on the tails of the release of Mac OS X, Microsoft has released Windows XP Beta 2... Win Super Site has extensive review of the beta, and a lot of interesting features are mentioned. It's interesting reading, and it leaves me wondering why so many people are dismissing this upcoming version of Windows as just another Microsoft product. Either those people haven't read about the system, they're blinded by hatred, or they're afraid of what they're hearing. It's something to watch, and it's a good thing OS X 10.1 is slated to come out before XP.

A quick list of places where I have digital information which I find myself having to keep track of: Four computers (though only two are used regularly), a Palm Vx, a cell phone, a Diamond Rio, a web site, nine unix shell accounts (five of these I don't actively use. The other four cannot be consolodated.), three database servers (each with numerous sub-databases), one web page, and five email addresses (which I have to check in three different ways).

The items on the above list are used to manage my contacts, music, bookmarks, todo lists and calendar items, email, "work", and a broad category which can only be called "files". Note that the first list is more than twice as long as the second list. Wouldn't it be nice if my PDA also contained my cell phone and my mp3 player, and if that pda could effortlessly synchronize it's contact list with my email address book? There are a lot of things I could do to simplify my information management tasks, but a lot of them rely on my tools of choice talking to each other. Which they don't.

So when I read this article on news.com about .NET and what Microsoft wants to do, I felt myself wanting to give in. The idea of a person centric paradigm instead of a device centric paradigm made my head spin. "Imagine the possibilities!" I thought to myself. No more having three copies of my contact list, no more managing three different email accounts, etc. I felt myself wanting to give up and embrace Microsoft's person centric information management strategy. I was even convinced that this would be something worth paying for!

Even now, the idea sounds so appealing... All I have to do is stop resisting and agree to put my faith in Microsoft to manage my information for me, let my information live on Microsoft's hardware instead of my own, hand over my soul and embrace Microsoft as my one true lord and savour from the information overload which is apparently getting to me big time.

But then I remind myself that Mac OS X is coming out in 4 days. (Which is scary to remind myself of, because that means I have a term paper, a cs project, and two homework assignments due in less than 3 days) Then I tell myself that other companies will implement solutions that require less submission. I know that Mac OS X won't solve all of my problems out of the box, but I really hope that it will serve as a foundation on which tools will be built which can help me consolodate my information.

Billy, you should get to be good friends with Pill, because for the rest of your life, you're going to be stuck in this pill based culture. This Article on msnbc is very scary -- Schools demanding that parents give their children Ritalin. I wonder when it'll be revealed that whichever drug super power owns the name Ritalin is funding children's television and bribing these school officials...

Who, me? No, I'm not paranoid. Just a little bitter. Sure, I pop aspirin all the time, but I believe that they work. If someone replaced my apsirin with sugar pills, my belief would work just as well as the aspirin. Unfortunately, I can't replace them myself, because then my mind wouldn't let the trick work.

Belief is a damn powerful healer, but in this "advanced scientific age," people no longer believe in belief or other forms of healing -- they need "advanced" medicines and surgeries -- I'm just as vulnerable to this as anyone else, but I can recognize it in myself and others.

It's a shame to see pills being forced upon little billy as soon as possible. "Get him hooked on the program," the drug makers say. "Make him believe in us."

So recently I noticed a couple of movie previews featuring songs by The Offspring, which is sad because it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing The Offspring would go and do. One of the movies was Monkeybone, which has gotten less than stellar reviews, and I cannot remember for the life of me what the other preview was. All the same, it struck me as very unusual.

Until I remembered The Offspring's mp3 plans, and how Sony subsequently smacked The Offspring down, and I realized that Sony was further getting back at The Offspring for *gasp* planning to give away music by selling Offspring music which Sony effectively owns to bad movies. What a shame.

On a side note, Monkeybone is guilty of other dirty advertising tricks, notably "By the director of Nightmare Before Christmas." You see, if you're like me, you'd have thought that Tim Burton directed Nightmare Before Christmas; But he didn't. Between thinking it was a Tim Burton film and The Offspring in the preview, the trailer for the movie actually got me curious enough to read a review about it. Dirty Rotten Bastards.

Earlier today I described the briefest recollection of a dream, and you probably wonder why I even bothered with such an incomplete fragment. Well, the reason is that I seldom remember dreaming at all, and so remembering the slightest bit of a dream is a novelty, and if I hadn't written it down I would have already forgotten it. In fact, I'd already forgotten what it was I'd dreamed, despite having made a record of it this morning.

I don't know why I can't remember my dreams. Everyone else certainly has no problem remembering their dreams, but mine always elude me. It probably has to do with my sleep habits. In general, I have a very difficult time falling asleep, but once I'm asleep, I like staying asleep. Recently I was asked when I'm happiest, and I said I'm happiest when I'm half awake in bed. Between sleeping very heavilly and enjoying being curled up in those blankets, any dreams I do remember when I wake up don't hang around very long. Instead of rehearsing the memory of my dream to make it stick, I prefer to preserve the blissful, unthinking, half-awake world where I don't have to worry about anything.

I was poking around the Windows XP site, and I knoticed that they want you to sign up for the Windows XP Preview Program. I actually was kind of interested in signing up, and I thought it'd be amusing if I signed up for their newsletter with my @mac.com email address. So I went to click on the "Register" button, and it tells me "The parameter is incorrect."

So I came back again later on my laptop running Internet Explorer, and I get in, and I realized that "Of course it's not going to work in Netscape on Linux! What was I thinking?"

So I get in and it tells me that to sign up I have to have Microsoft Passport account. Passport account? What the hell? So I poked around for a few minutes reading about Passport and I became very afraid. I wasn't interested enough in the Windows XP Preview Program that I'd sign up for something like Microsoft's Passport.

Now, it isn't the idea of Passport that scares me. I actually like the idea a lot. What scares me is the idea of Microsoft having control of something like Passport. You see, Passport wants to be your account on Microsoft's the Internet, keeping track of your credit card numbers and so on. If Microsoft were more cross platform in their approach, I probably wouldn't even mind it so much. What scares me is the way they want everyone to go through them for everything, it seems. I wonder how long I'll be able to go before I have to sign up for Passport.

You know, Passport (and .net, etc), actually sounds a whole lot like what Kevin described in this essay he posted on fury.com today. Mind you, Kevin wrote that Essay 12 years ago. I wonder how he can sleep at night, knowing what he handed Microsoft. =) It's too bad that Microsoft is doing all of the things Kevin descriped except for the cross platform part.

The Election is two weeks from today. Here are two resources that I've used in thinking about who I'll vote for. First, there's this page which allows you to enter your opinions and it will tell you which candidate most closely matches your opinions. And after that, there's this page which shows funding figures for each candidate. Damn Bush got a LOT of money from individuals... Seems fishy, to me.

Gamers.com is running a feature this week, last week, and next week, on Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd Edition. All the improvements sound like good ones to me. Too bad I'm too busy to contemplate playing it, let alone do I have anyone up here to play with.

And on that D&D note, gamers.com also has this article which discusses Verant's... questionable actions towards their customers who've written fanfiction. I've never played Everquest and don't care one way or the other about the future of the game, but the idea of role playing and the free speech and exploration associated with it being squelched really caught my attention. Freedom to say anything and explore new ideas are definately an important issue, and they're getting more and more important. I get the impending feeling of doom that the U.S.A. is approaching the FSA (Federated States, as I vaguely recall) as depicted in Trinity, which isn't a happy depiction at all. And this article on SF Gate just supports that vision... We don't need a nation run by Corporations... Corporations aren't actually people!

Now I've got a good reason to not play Everquest besides the part where I don't have time... I've seen a lot of people sink an insane amount of time into that thing, and can't imagine doing so myself. Which is yet another reason I'm afraid of Final Fantasy X/XI...