couch potato chips

On the Arts & Entertainment channel you can watch a show called Dog the Bounty Hunter where some, white trash, fifty-something-year-old man, who appears to have stepped right out the ring of a WWF event, brandishing a blonde mullet*, and an open shirt, hunts down other white trash criminals with his wife: Did I mention that's on the “Arts & Entertainment” channel? Art, indeed.

Next up, The Learning Channel. Oh yeah, lots of learning going on here. Tune into to Toddlers in Tiaras, and watch disturbed mothers, dressing and dolling up their soon to be disturbed, spoiled rotten, little princesses, in revolting costume, creating the image of a slut or prostitute affixed unwitting to an innocent child. Watch them parade in front of judges, despite not having anything to parade: Perverse. How about a little history, by way of a show call Ancient Aliens from the friendly folks at the um... History Channel. A giant load of shit passed off as pseudo factual information. MTV, yeah we all know they haven’t had anything resembling music on in twenty some years. You can however, watch a show called, 16 and Pregnant in keeping with the success of their morally void, ‘real world’ material that has become their new gravy train.

Next up, AMC, American Movie Classics. If you want to watch an, edited for TV version, of The Nutty Professor II, tune in. I’m sure they will be playing it over, and over, and over again. A true American classic, sprinkled, no saturated with ads, like my new favorite from Taco Bell, where a young Mexican American boy drives 900 miles with his friends (I didn’t know it was possible to drive 900 miles without running into thirty-six of them) to visit a Taco Bell to enjoy a new Frankenfood product available from the chain... a taco (with traces of meat in it, just enough to be able to call it beef) in a shell made from Doritos. I shit you not. More favorites... any of the Progressive Insurance ads. For example, an ad where a family is transported to the insurance giants fictional offices and is overcome with wonder, as though they have just entered Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, except here, instead of chocolate, its insurance policies, some required by law. Nothing evokes wonderment more. The teenage boy’s eyes are wide as he surveys the stark white walls where I guess he will be buying, um... insurance. Ha!

If you haven't yet had your fill of the constant drum beat for war with IRan, you can tune into any of the national news programs. Ironically you will have to tune into Comedy Central's Daily Show or Colbert Report, for any dissenting opinions on the matter. The sad comic tragedy of all this is, you’re paying for it, or at least someone is: $50-$100/month for this crap. A lot of someones. We can be proud that all this is emanating from the earth at the speed of light, albeit encrypted now. Those aliens gotta pay for this shit too. Perhaps they have a friend and can get it for free. Which is vastly more than it is worth.

*Yes! They’re coming back, though Dog is probably not aware they ever left. Full disclosure: I had one in the eighties myself.

last supper

I was working at Mr. Stabbert's home today. He stepped out for a minute. I kept hearing a noise, which i dismissed as being a heating radiator or something. After a minute I realized the racket was a little rodent slash mouse, that had been capture. I went to the kitchen to find some crumbs to put in one of the holes of the metal box trap. I found some chocolate but decided against that, thinking it might not be good for the critter. I scooped out a sliver of butter, the size of an apple seed, with my finger and put it in one of the holes of the cage. The critter ate it up. When Mr. Stabbert came home, I mentioned that he had a new guest. I asked if he wanted me put him outside. Mr. Stabbert said he was going to take him for a swim, that is, flush him down the toilet. So sadly, the little dab of butter was his last supper.

Taxi to the Dark Side

The documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was recently nominated for an Academy Award. The film investigates some of the most egregious abuses associated with the so-called war on terror, including the US torture of prisoners. The film is directed by Alex Gibney, who also directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney sold the television rights to the ’Discovery Channel’ who own them for the next three years. The Discovery Channel had told him "we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing." The following is Alex Gibney speaking on Amy Goodmans Democracy Now!

"Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn’t so interested in discovery ... I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves. It turns out, Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel."

If the film comes to your local theater, you might consider seeing it, as you won’t be seeing on your TV for the next three years. An update to this posting. The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary and HBO bought it from the Discovery Channel.

why is my computer slow?

why is my computer slow? I get asked this a lot. It's always a PC that's afflicted. The short answer is, take a gander at your computers processes. You can do this by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and clicking on the processes tab. Click here to see an example. If you see enough processes that you have to scroll down to see them all, your in trouble. This list is inversely proportional to the performance of your computer. That is, as it grows, your PC slows, hey that's pretty good, i think i'll use that, he he. Okay now what? Yeah that's a topic for another post. Short answer... get rid of them.

Moon

Moon, stars Sam Rockwell, who plays a single person left to man a helium mining operation on the moon. Kevin Spacey plays Gerty, the movies every present base station computer. Sam has been on the moon base three years and is starting to go crazy. Gerty, a modern HAL 9000, could have been a very interesting role, a post 2001: A Space Odyssey, post 1968, artificially intelligent computer. Sadly, a very talented Kevin Spacey doesn't get to go anywhere with Gerty. The character could have easily been omitted, as though in the forty years since the cinematic introduction of the artificially intelligent machine, there really wasn't anything new to add, outside of an LCD screen that displays only emoticons (sad and happy faces) which was just silly. As though four decades of technological innovation have lead to little more than an AOL instant messaging program with arms.

The film does have some twist and creates an environment for solid character development. Sam Rockwell does a very good job as the lone keeper of the station. When i first saw the trailer for this film, i had a pretty good idea of what it was... basically a shameless rip off of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was pretty close to my first impression, but more of a collection of early sci-fi movie cliches, like material from Soylent Green, Logan's Run and The Body Snatchers, bundled into a modern movie. I give this movie a thumbs up because of Sam Rockwell's performance, but you could skip this one and just rent some of the movies I've mentioned, as they become available on BlueRay. Surprisingly this was rated 8.3 on IMDB. Perhaps much of the material in this film is new to many of the folks rating films today.

Hi Steve.

Angels and Demons, and other crap in theaters now.

I somewhat reluctantly went to see Angels and Demons with a friend who had read the book and was eager to see it. My expectations were low and i was hoping the movie would at least surpass them. It managed to exceed my expectations in terms of how much it sucked. It started with four or five Hollywood motion picture logos, not a good sign, and some scary string section and quickly went downhill from there.

For starters we got to watch a preview for what presumably will be another piece of shit, staring John Travolta, in which he kidnaps and murders hostages on a subway, while Denzel Washington talks him down on the phone. I was thinking 'well at least i don't have to watch that garbage' only to find that minutes into our feature the evil villain, has kidnapped, and is going to torture and murder his captives.

The super villain carefully follows some cryptic plan that dictates were he is to dump his murdered bodies, which only Tom Hanks can decode through some absurd puzzle skills that only he possesses. Like turning pages of text upside down or reading the margins of some antiquated text, stored in the Vatican vault, or in this case a Hollywood set.

For some reason a particle accelerator plays prominently in the film, along with some antimatter, that is going to wipe out all of Rome unless Tom Hanks and company can get to the Plexiglas canister containing it. Schlock. Garbage. I can't say enough bad things about this film. It's too bad, Ron Howard, the films director, seems like such a nice guy. After all, he was Opie on the Andy Griffith Show.

If you died riding an ATV, call us.

The title is from a TV commercial in which a group of scumbag lawyers are suing YAMAHA on behalf of the dumb asses that have injured themselves while riding an all-terrain-vehicle, and feel they have a right to be compensated. The commercial actually ask "If you died..." I wonder how many people who have died contact them? Presumably the friends and family are supposed to do that, i guess.

Worst Mobile

Here is an ad from a new television advertising campaign by Boost Mobile. In this ad a pig can be seen eating a dinner of ham. The pig, a Boost Mobile customer, goes on to tell us how he has switched his cell phone provider etc. In another ad, a man operating on a dead body drops his food onto the body, then picks it up and eats it. Another ad portrays a young woman on a bike, who's underarm hair is so long it blows in the face of her boyfriend riding behind her. At one time, say the 1950's for example, companies selling products idealized their customers portraying them as smart, beautiful, people making intelligent decisions. I was astonished by this campaign in which the company has so little regard for its customer, as to literally portray them as cannibal pigs, people lacking a sense of personal hygiene, or a man eating food off a dead corpse. It's supposed to be funny i guess. It's funny on a few different levels, and sad.

The Whopper Virgin

I thought this ad campaign was funny. The folks on Madison Ave have come up with the idea to find people who haven't yet eaten a BigMac, OR a Whopper, and quiz them on TV, after some editing of course. These folks are from, rural, remote communities, who presumably locally grow and raise there own fruits, vegetables and meats. You gotta wonder what there initial reaction to tasting for the first time an agri-business tomato might be. Interestingly they are probably exposing themselves unwittingly for the first time to genetically modified food, too. A typical hamburger patty, has beef from as many as a thousand cows in it, as opposed to beef from just one cow for example. If they had any idea of what they where eating, perhaps they would refrain from participating in the quiz. Well, it makes for good TV.

QuickTime thumbnails

This patch, to the WindowsXP operating system, provides thumbnails for QuickTime movies, in folder views. This may also work with the Vista operating system, though I have not tested it. Download these two files, msvcr70.dll, and QuickThumb.dll. Place them in your 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32' folder. Leave the 'SYSTEM32' folder open and go to the 'start' menu and choose 'Run...' Paste the following code 'regsvr32 QuickThumb.dll' into the Run window and choose OK. You should get a message saying registration was successful. You can uninstall this by pasting 'regsvr32 /u QuickThumb.dll' into the run window and running it with the SYSTEM32 window open etc. It looks harder than it is. Good Luck.

multi-touch

Right around the corner is a revolutionary way to interact with computers, destine to push the mouse into the recesses of antiquated computer hardware alongside the floppy disk and magnetic tape drive. Click here to watch a demonstration of the technology. Be sure to check out the various links available at the bottom of that same page. Jefferson Y. Han, a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, is one of the main developers of an interface-free touch-driven computer screen. The screen is based on “multi-touch sensing,” which is similar to existing touch-screen interfaces but able to recognize multiple points of contact.

Apple’s current iPhone, iPod and laptop computers are already making use of the technology on a small but significant scale. For example you can scale and rotate photos by pinching and stretching two fingers. You can move forward and back in Safari with a combination of fingers, swiped in a particular direction.

A plugin for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari called, PicLens allows you to effortlessly browse hundreds of images, zooming in and out, while pushing a panel of images forward and back with the mouse, and mouse wheel, simultaneously. It’s a clear step in a multi-touch direction, and widely available now.

bookmark

Have you ever sat down to your laptop, or a friends computer, or a computer at your local library and wanted to access a bookmark or favorite site from your home computer? Add this extension to Mozilla Firefox and you can sync your bookmarks with your other computers. You can even access your bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet, by visiting, um... what was that web address? Oh yeah, my.foxmarks.com. Pretty cool, hey.

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.

sax and violins, minus the sax

I was at a friends flipping around various cable TV channels and just astounded by some of the stuff i was seeing. For example, a man operating a machine gun from the pulpit of a Hummer, sawing a tree stump in half by machine gunning it. Next, video recorded in a prison yard. It was the poor quality, black and white video, synonymous with surveillance cameras mounted in the facility. The video was of a prisoner violently beating another and finally kicking him multiple times in the head. It was strange to see, as most of the violence i see on TV is fake, but this was the disturbing kind you wouldn't want to show your children, or anyone for that matter. Next. CNN, RAPIST MAN HUNT, the text read on the screen. 'Serial attacker on the lose' Nineteen year old girls dead body, slash, remains found... oh that's nice. If it bleeds it leads. I was reminded of this, very funny video from the folks at the Onion. The CNN coverage was strikingly similar to the spoof sadly. Next. Charles Bronson takes his gun from his suit jacket and shoots dead, at point blank range, a black man who was stealing the radio from his car, Oscar material. Next. Mythbusters, this show dispels various myths. Today's episode had the host transporting a barrel of gunpowder as a trail of leaking powder is burning behind him. Ah... yeah (he said quite sarcastically) this 'myth' is from a cartoon. Wow! You've got to be pretty hard up for material, when your dispelling events that have happened to cartoon characters. Perhaps next week they'll drop an anvil on someones head, hopefully theirs. Now that i would tune in to. Lastly i stumbled upon a comedy show, in which some, not very funny material was followed by a recording of people laughing. My friend actually pays for this crap, ouch. I titled this post 'sax and violins, minus the sax' a play on the words, sex and violence. Where is the sex though? I think i would rather see some of that.

three years

A new documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was recently nominated for an Academy Award. The film investigates some of the most egregious abuses associated with the so-called war on terror, including the US torture of prisoners. The film is directed by Alex Gibney, who also directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney sold the television rights to the 'Discovery Channel' who own them for the next three years. The Discovery Channel had told him “Look, we love this film. We’re going to give it a broad and very prominent airing.” The following is Alex Gibney speaking on Amy Goodmans Democracy Now!

"Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn’t so interested in discovery. I mean, I heard that—I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn’t want to cause any waves. It turns out, Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel."

If the film comes to your local theater, you might consider seeing it, as you won't be seeing on your TV for the next three years. An update to this posting. The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary and HBO bought it from the Discovery Channel.

congratulations you're a wiener!

The title of this posting should be rapidly blinking, to the point of causing you to go into spastic convulsions on the floor. And the reason your a winner is... well, cause you did that very unique, courageous thing of visiting a web page where this insanely annoying ad appears. While surfing you may come upon one of these terribly annoying banner ads, alerting you to claim your winnings for being the 999,999th visitor. Of course your not stupid enough to respond to such nonsense. Are you? I never pay much attention to these vile, repugnant things, as hard as that can be sometimes, but i looked at it and paused for a moment and assessed the risk associated, and decided to put the hook around my mouth. I decided to claim my prize. The one for me being the 999,999th visitor. Okay i know what your thinking. Don't do it. Stop! Go back. Run for your lives!

Well, throwing caution to the wind, i decided to click the banner, which was indeed blinking and actually exclaimed my status as the 999,999th visitor. I entered my email address and clicked return. You see, I have this neat option of being able to create as many email addresses as i want, and give them names like 'fraud@blahblah.com' for example. I was asked to provide my physical address and phone number. Here i paused and wondered if i should provide an address, like my parents for example (mom i hope your not reading this. Your moving soon aren't you?) Well, while i left the window open, and considered my options for a few minutes, I notice an email came down the pike. Now this is at 3am, and i don't get many emails from friends at 3am. Checking my mail reveled, that in the few moments of my contemplation, my junk, virgin, email address had already been compromised, i mean violated. The horror.

Now keep in mind, i haven't even signed up for, or agreed to any terms or conditions, and i have already received four junk emails, from 'The University of Phoenix' and 'eHarmony' specifically sent to my brand spanking new email address, that i provided only to them. A Google search for ConsumerGain.com reveals another company MemberSource Media, LLC. Another search reveals a Federal District Court filing in the state of CA of the United States of America vs. MemberSource Media, LLC. Hmm, i wonder if i should peruse this further, or just jump out of the boat? Oh by the way i've visited the webpage were i first saw the ad, it seems i'm the 999,999th visitor again, and a winner, or wiener again.