perpetually irrevocable

“You hereby grant Apple a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) right to exercise all rights, under copyright, publicity and related laws, in any media now known or not currently known, with respect to any content you post in any public site within iTools.”

The preceding is a passage, verbatim, from a ‘terms of service’ agreement with Apple Computer, for a service, formerly titled iTools, now called .Mac. A description of the service at their site reads “Effortlessly share everything you create — pictures, movies, blogs, podcasts, and more — with friends and family.” I found this somewhat amusing. Create your free web page, oh wait it’s not free, include a photo of your mom, a drawing of your girlfriend and suddenly they become the property of Apple Computer until the end of time. I found the above at a Macintosh enthusiast website. I think they have since changed or reworded the terms.

accomplished

Brian had mentioned to me some time back that he played the bass. I was a little suspicious of his skills, having heard him 'play' drums at a recent open mic. I warily invited him to a recent jam session. A dozen very qualified musicians were gathered. Brian proclaimed to everyone that he played the bass. He sat next to me, and as i played the piano, i watched him as he banged all four strings at once and jerked his had up and down the neck of the bass, merely as a gesture, never pressing a single note. We had to turn him down. Someone else took over, it was rather amusing. He then began drinking and had just taken medication. I'm sure your not supposed to mix the two, oh yeah don't forget the weed. Being turned down numerous times didn't discourage him at all. He picked up the bass again and again. I'm sure Brian still refers to himself as a bass player too. Update: Brian was at my house not long ago and played my acoustic guitar. I turned on my keyboard and asked him to play three notes, one of which was simply plucking a string without holding down any note. It was a tremendous struggle, and he quickly gave up.

icon positions

Sometimes your going to want to sort the icons on your desktop by file 'type' or the date 'modified' for example, but you might not want to disrupt the arrangement that they are currently in. Well download this tiny little patch for WindowsXP (layout.zip 4.11k) and unzip the download and place Layout.dll in the system32 directory in the WINDOWS folder on your hard drive. This is an example of the path where you want to place the file C:/WINDOWS/system32/
Next double click on the Layout.reg file to automatically make the appropriate changes to your registry. Now place your desktop icons exactly where you want them and right click on the Recycle Bin and select 'Save Desktop Icon Layout' Great, now move them around and right click on Recycle Bin again and select 'Restore Desktop Icon Layout'. Bingo!

tomatoes and oranges.

I recently got an email from a friend. It was one of those emails that had been forwarded countless times and finally made its way to me. The title of the email was 'What costs more per year than the Iraq war?' formerly in all caps and bold red. It then goes on to list various government programs for, what it refers to as 'illegal aliens', and the cost associated with them. For example, a food assistance program for poor families, that provides school lunches etc. The following is my reply to the email.

I think there are more important things to be concerned with at this moment than the vilification of some immigrants who have come to this country, probably cause our country is f__cking up theirs. Perhaps the author of this article would like to trade their job with the person who is picking their tomatoes, or oranges in Southern California. The Iraq war is projected to cost over 1 trillion dollars, and that investment has taken the lives of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, and 4,000 Americans. I'm sorry but i don't have any problem with our government spending 2 billion dollars (.002% of a trillion dollars) on a food assistant program, when we will spend over 1000 billion dollars on an illegal war. I can assure you that the information being spread via this email is thoroughly inaccurate. The idea that we are somehow spending over a trillion dollars on undocumented immigrants is frankly absurd. But that is not the point, this should not turn into a debate about the accuracy of the info laid out here, but rather what cause should you or i be championing... should we be picketing to remove food assistance programs for poor children? I think I'll pass.

The email suggest you... "send this to all you know. the entire population of the United tates needs to know this information..." again in all caps, red and bold. It's sad that this kind of garbage is polluting the internet, while we are asking our presidential candidates about flag lapel pins.

lapel pin

During an ABC News debate, a 52-year-old Pennsylvania woman, now nationally recognized, asked a presidential candidate, about the absence of an American flag on their lapel. Um, yeah. I have a question for our presidential candidates.

As United States senators, you are in a unique position to draft legislation bringing criminal charges against members of the current administration, for leading our country into an illegal war against a sovereign nation, that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, thousands of American lives. A war that will cost taxpayers literally trillions of dollars, and has had nothing to do with any attacks on our nation. Will you take steps necessary to hold the folks, currently appointed to uphold our constitution, responsible for their criminal actions? And will you do this in the next month? Or in the nine months leading up to the presidential inauguration? Or after you take office?

more ways to screw you.

My credit card account is set up to view and pay my bills exclusively online, and I just got an email from Chase.com, my credit card company. I was surprised to see that it was under some dozen or so emails that i had already received. The email from Chase shows that it was sent some 12 hours ago. So what happens to an email you've just received that says it was sent 12 hours ago? Well it gets put in chronological order under the thirty some odd emails you've gotten since then. Translation... the scumbags at Chase have figured out a way to bury their credit card bill in your email inbox, and increase the chance of you incurring a $30 late fee. You see, if you had just received a few new emails from friends at the same time the email from Chase appeared, you would have no idea that you had also received an email from Chase, buried in your inbox and out of sight and that is the whole idea behind this deliberate scam. It's funny too that it was sent in the middle of the night, as most folks will turn on their computers in the morning and get a dirge of new emails all in a tidy group with the exception of a bill from their 'friendly' bank that will conveniently be shuffled into the depths of their inboxes.

512k

Inspired by my high school art teacher, who brought his computer to class one day, in 1986 I bought my first Macintosh computer, a Macintosh Plus. It would be the first of a dozen I would own over the next decade. Formerly a 512k, one of the original Macs that was upgraded to one megabyte (that’s right one megabyte) of RAM, giving it the ‘plus’ denotation. By contrast my current computer has 1,500 megabytes of RAM. The Macintosh Plus didn’t have a hard drive, but rather two floppy drives. I got a job a few months later selling them. And when the next model came out and I saw it on a Magazine cover, I decided at that moment that I would have one, and within weeks I had sold my Plus and bought a brand new SE30. They sold for $4350 at the time (working at the store entitled me to a significant discount) The thirty represented a new Motorola microprocessor and this computer had a 40 megabyte hard drive (about the size of a single .PSD file) It was a significant upgrade. I would begin using Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on this computer, manipulating black and white bitmap images on the 512 x 342 pixel screen.

My next computer was the Macintosh IIci, my first color computer. The IIci was a different form factor and had a separate display. This meant it could be easily upgraded. I upgraded the graphics card, expanding its ability to display colors, from 256, to millions of colors. Just the card, was over three hundred dollars. It was on this computer that I would create my first ‘ray traced’ image, using a 3D program. At my job, I had access to a scanner and laser printer which was a pretty big deal, as they were still thousands of dollars.

All the computers to follow were just faster versions, with greater storage, of these early machines.