Dumping Grounds

OK, so ABC has a new TV show. No, not the one with William Shatner (Boston Legal, which looks like a lot of fun), and no not the one with all the incredibly horny women (Desperate Housewives, not The Bachelor, although I guess both fit the description.

This one is called Lost, and it’s supposed to be ABC’s new kinda edgy, somewhat violent, cult drama.

Except for one thing. They’ve done it before. It was edgy 10 years ago, when it was called Twin Peaks. It’s the same show. Only in a jungle. I expect by week 8, we’ll see a midget in a red suit walking strangely down the beach.

With all that said, it’s still entertaining, and yes, I am hooked. But I was a huge Twin Peaks fan, too. I even went to see that crap movie they made.

All Lost needs is a catchphrase, which Twin Peaks was chock FULL of. TP was very quotable. â??The owls are not as they seemâ? â??She was wrapped in plasticâ? â??Damn good good coffee, and HOTâ? â??this is where pies go when they dieâ? all phrases I didn’t even need to look up, even a decade later. Lost doesn’t have this yet… episode 2’s â??Where are we?â? didn’t seem to have the same lasting impact.

Personally, I don’t think this show has a long life ahead of it, I just hope ABC has the common sense to wrap it up, which they never did with Twin Peaks. But I’ll have fun watching it until it goes away.

Now playing: American Pie by Don McLean

Hopefully this will not cut the volume of comments even further, but I just spent an appreciable amount of time deleting viagra spam.

From now on, comments will be moderated, and will operate the same as they have before. you will get an ugly, unstyled page in response to comments that you post.

There is an alternative, for those of you who are interested. If you register with SixApart (at www.typekey.com) you will be able to become â??registeredâ? on this site, and your comments will be posted immediately. They don’t ask for any personal information, and I am fairly sure that they will not sell your e-mail address to anyone.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Note: I did leave one spam entry up, because I thought it was funny, and it was obviously written by a human. It’s a response to â??Scattershootingâ? I don’t know who this person is, and I have the strong feeling that they didn’t know Francie Hammett

Yet more living proof that people have far too much time on their hands:

It’s a question that has taxed generations of the finest minds in physics: do humans swim slower in syrup than in water? And since you ask, the answer’s no.

Now Playing in iTunes: Cocaine by Hoyt Axton

This is my very first post that actually has a link to the iTunes music store. If you plan to buy anything, click my link please. I’ll get a nickel. (iTunes links to the store, The artist links to Google. I’m still trying to figure out how to link directly to an artist or album.)

In the last hour, I have watched HBO’s Nine Innings from Ground Zero, about the role that the 2001 World Series, and the Yankees in particular, played the the nation’s recovery following the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Center.

It won’t get the press coverage, or inspire the violent reactions (both pro and con) of Fahrenheit 911. It’s not that type of documentary. It’s not about hate for the president. It’s not about hate for the terrorists. It’s about the healing process. It’s about love for country, baseball, and the Yankees.

I don’t know that I have any deep review, and I don’t really know that it even made me think that much. But it does take quite a bit of filmmaking (or maybe just spectacularly tragic events) to make me almost like the Yankees. They even have a quote from members of the Red Sox front office saying “I did not think there was anything on this earth that could make me cheer for the Yankees.”

It’s hard to say that anything about 9/11 can be a feel good story, but this was close. The stories of what the players did for the community. The stories of the president and Mayor Giuliani, and even the stories of Joe Torre put a different, more personal face on the tragedy, and the days after.

And yeah, there are some really goofy Yankees fans to laugh at, too.

Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

Currently playing in iTunes: I Feel Lucky by Mary-Chapin Carpenter

I was talking to Alan the other day about a series of media stories that had come out (or at least to my attention) on the same day.

The first was the supposed documents that “proved” that President Bush did not complete his military commitment to the National Guard during the early 1970’s.

The problem was that this document had an appearance that would have been difficult, if not impossible to produce with 1970’s technology. It was in an inappropriate font (which was, at the time, in an unapproved font for government memorandum) and had typesetting features that were damned near impossible to produce on a typewriter.

In other words, it was a forgery. A fairly sloppy forgery, which anyone who looked at this mysterious document through eyes that did not want to see something to help get John Kerry elected, would have very likely noticed right away.

This was not a mistake. This was intentional. The researchers knew it. CBS knows it. And Dan Rather knows it, too. Anyone surprised at how quickly this story has disappeared? When it reflected badly on a conservative President, it was trumpeted on every news cast. When it reflects poorly on a liberal news outlet, and a doddering old fool who stood by the story, it goes away in a day or two.

The second was a story carried by the Associated Press about a rally where the President was speaking, and while addressing the crowd, he wished former President Clinton a speedy recovery from his bypass surgery. At this point, the story reported, the crowd began to boo, and the President did nothing to stop them.

There was only one problem. There was video of the event. The video showed that there was no booing. No catcalls. No harassment or ill wishes expressed for the former President at all. I guess when the issues are not enough, when exaggerations and half-truths are not turning the public to think as you do, the press does what any red-blooded American would do. They just flat out lie. Just make it up. After all, even if you get caught, none of your friends in the media will cover the revised story, will they? Even the Associated Press never retracted the story. They simply deleted it. Again, the story disappeared almost immediately.

The story this election season is not the lies that the candidates are telling about one another. While the election has been nasty, and I expect it to get even more nasty as the differential in the polls gets even larger, the true story is that this was the year the media lost all perspective in reporting the news. This was the year that CBS and the Associates Press decided to enter the fiction market. After all, that’s where the money is, right?

In a column originally for the Rhinoceros Times, picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Orson Scott Card demonstrates this bias through samples he found in the paper one morning. The column is a bit too long for my tastes, in my opinion Card had proven his point long before he stops presenting examples. Keep in mind this article is written by a man who is a lifelong democrat, and yet believes that the party has left him (much like Zell Miller, only without that annoying bit of insanity).

I’ll admit it. Most internet humor isn’t, well, funny.

However, these two links are the funniest things I saw, well, today.

E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone (be sure to check out his other lists as well)

Rules for Posting

The news has hit today, from a number of sites, almost all of which are pointing to the article posted at Unsanity.org as their source, that an independent software developer has imbedded his code with a booby-trap.

Type in a pirated serial number, it erases your home directory.

For those of you who are not on Macs or Linux, the home directory, by default, stores your desktop, all your mp3s, all your application preferences, all your mail, your bookmarks, all your photos, anything you saved to “My Documents”…

In other words, a lot of stuff.

Right up front, let’s get this clear:

• This was not established, nor terribly popular software. It was however, mainstream enough to be featured on Apple’s own web site.
• The offending code has been removed (supposedly) and was only available for about 12 hours.
• The code DID trigger. People lost their data.

People who know me know that not all the software on my computer has been registered. Some of it has. When offered the choice between competing products of equal quality, I tend to to choose the free one. I plan to pay for Ecto (which I am using to post this). Also know that I have released shareware products that I wrote, and not only did several people register them, I found them on pirate sites. I didn’t get too torn up about it. I don’t think anyone ever heard me complain even one time about it. All in all, I was astounded by the number of people who DID register.

What this developer did was unconscionable. Without some reason to believe that trial software is safe, non commercial software development will die. I already run software that alerts me anytime any application attempts communication on the internet. I don’t want to be forced to run software that makes me OK writes to the hard drive.

Many sites, including Unsanity, are electing not to post this developer’s name. I haven’t decided yet. Yes, I know who he is. A little searching, and you can figure it out, too. Several things about this particular case just make me absolutely sick to my stomach.

• This software is based upon open source linux programs that are freely available to anyone who knows how to search for, and compile them. I question the amount of work the developer put into this product.
• The software has a feature set that appeals to, you guessed it: DVD pirates. So, I’m going to supply you a tool that allows you to pirate other people’s work more conveniently, but if you try to pirate MY work, I’ll erase your hard drive.
• How many times have you typoed a serial number? What if this had zapped one of his paying customers, who was guilty of nothing more than having fat fingers?
• The developer is in the United States, and therefore has committed a felony.

I don’t really know what else to say, I just read this story and was appalled. I am not the only one outraged, as the forums at the developer’s site have already been completely closed because of the level of abuse being posted there. no one deserves to have their work stolen, but it also perfectly reasonable to expect that if you write software for a living, yours will be. It is a cost of doing business. Price your product accordingly.

On a brighter note, stay tuned for some more fun Bush-Kerry thoughts later today.

I just upgraded to MovableType 3.11, and it could not have possibly gone smoother (and no, this is not the new software I am testing).

It adds quite a few new features, but the most noticeable one is likely that I can now have sub-categories, which I plan to take advantage of in the photography section as soon as I can. Probably won’t be tonight, as I have to go to work early in the morning.

The software that I have been talking about for the past two entries is something called Ecto (available for both Mac OS X and Windows). It runs on your desktop, and allows you to maintain your blog (making new entries, editing old ones, setting preferences, etc.) all from a desktop app, so you don’t have to paste everything into a web form. It has a good preview function, which even goes and gets your site’s style sheet so the preview is accurate. It will also auto-scale and upload pictures to your blog (which I plan to take advantage of, as it will be a LOT easier to post photos. It even has an integrated spell checker.

Unfortunately, Ecto does not yet support the sub-categories of MovableType 3.11, but I am sure it will before long.

Ecto can also add the little “iTunes is playing…” messages to the bottom of my blog entries automatically. I plan to link them directly to the iTunes Music Store, so if by some bizarre chance I am listening to something you want to buy, click the link from my site, and I’ll get a nickel.

I also plan to make a couple of changes to the style sheet in the next couple of days, although I am not going to change the look as drastically as I planned to before.

OK, so I know this post was light on content, but it’s basically another test to see how Ecto will behave. I’ll get back to my normal level of useless crap soon.

EDIT: It is worth nothing that there is a beta of Ecto 2.0 available, and I am only using 1.1.8. 2.0 may do all sorts of cool stuff I have not even realized yet.

Love And Luck from the album BUFFETT LIVE Tuesdays,Thursdays,Saturdays by Jimmy Buffett

You should be seeing this now… I am checking to see how some new software for posting to my blog works. I have to make this long enough though that it actually will auto generate a summary. If I get this working correctly, I will probably write up a message about how cool it is. I’m not sure if this is long enough, so I will write just a bit more.

I’m going to edit this next link to actually link to the iTunes music store.

Come Around from the album Carencro by Marc Broussard

The full article should no longer be mislinked. Seems like I should not assign multiple categories to a post. If anyone knows what a trackback is, and how it works, feel free to go ahead and test that. I only know of one person who links to any of my stuff… so, Liz, you might be my only Trackback tester.

All of you Blogger folks, this software works with your system too, and it’s available for Windows… so help me test Let me put a body in here to see if I can make it work.

UPDATE: I don’t think anyone is reading this entry but me, but I have subcategories and multiple categories working. Woot! Now I just need to come up with some decent content.