soapbox

Ha-ha, take that RIAA, you fascist Nazi bastards.

seriously though, the above is a nice little description of why the music industry is having such a problem - “It’s the business models that need changing, not the technology,” said Brown, whose doctoral thesis in part covered DRM technologies…“Fundamentally, it’s an antiuser technology - it’s a technology that allows content owners to provide data to their customers with restrictions on how they can use it that aren’t justified by copyright law.”

amen.

For those who don’t follow the Best Two Weeks of Sports (other than the Olympics), history was made yesterday. 11th-seeded George Mason upset UConn in OT to reach the Final Four. (further commentary to be posted when work slows down.)

The Samuel Colt exhibition featuring prototypes, paintings of Samuel Colt, and general details about the rise of the Colt empire has been postponed.

Kirsten and I had dinner on Friday with a woman who works at the newspaper here. Apparently, some of the sponsors of the exhibition found out that a review of Samuel Colt’s life would include guns! And golly, you couldn’t possibly associate yourself with guns if you’re a sponsor of the arts.

Instead, it sounds like it’s going to become a traveling exhibition and is heading to Oklahoma and Texas.

I think it’s just a horrible example of overzealous political correctness. The old Colt Factory is still one of the largest and most impressive buildings in Hartford, although there are currently plans to to turn it into high-end condos. The actual Colt manufacturing facility is a run-down building next to the Home Depot that I usually go to. I’m not sure that they’re actually even producing things anymore. The Browning factory is somewhere around here too, well used to be, it got shut down a few months ago.

Are there any large gun manufacturers left in the US? I guess it’s in our national interest to have the Israelis, Chinese, Russians, and Eastern Europeans be the only ones who have the know-how to make lots of guns.

Ok, I can’t tell you anything about it other than it’s good.

Here are a list of other movies in a similarly good vein.
The Thomas Crown Affair
Ronin
The Usual Suspects

I’d be willing to give people a money-back guarantee on the film, so if you see it and don’t like it, talk to me.*

(more…)

The last few days I’ve notice the phone company pulling a lot of new wires (or probably fiber).

That’s cool, but I sort of have to take issue with the way that I’ve been seeing them pull it. Yesterday, they had a guy up on the cherry picker holding one end of the cable and another guy driving the truck forward to get to the next pole. I suppose on flat ground that wouldn’t be too much of an issues except for two factors. One, it wasn’t flat ground and the guy in the air was a long ways to the left of the truck (and it was one of the pickup truck sized ones, not the bigger ones). Two, the guy in the air was getting pulled through tree branches and was madly trying to hang on to one end of the cable with one hand while he protected his face from the oncoming branches with his other hand. He didn’t look like he was having any fun at all.

Do any of you know anything about the cross-band repeater (uhf-vhf) system located in the Physics room on top of the Fairchild Tower?

I don’t really want to make fun of Tom since he’s doing his job, but how many things in that sentence don’t I know anything about?
1) I can figure it out from the sentence, but “cross-band repeater”?
2) Umm, why would we want to go from uhf to vhf, or backwards for that matter?
3) And which way does it go?
4) Physics room on top of Fairchild Tower? Where is this exactly? Can I use it for a clubhouse?

Actually, I know all about it. It’s part of my race’s plan to enslave the humans.

This is plagiarism of another blog.. But if I cite it, it’s not plagiarism.

Cat-Sweatshirt People (n) homey midwesterners responsible for supporting a number of trends including Thomas Kincaid lighthouse paintings, the Chicken Soup books, and the career of Dr. Phil. Besides the namesake sweatshirts, they can also be recognized by kitchens decorated with lots of stenciled hearts and geese and by a mass forwards of emails about angels.