Archived News starting from 09-18-2003 and earlier
BlogA
family is suing the makers of
Grand Theft Auto claiming their children were influenced to kill random strangers after playing the game. The fact that they have access to a .22 rifle doesn't seem to concern the parents as much as what videogames they are playing. I pray to whoever can sway the verdict that the judge tosses this out. Kids that can't differentiate between reality and fantasy have some serious parental education issues. I'm not going to blame the parents though, these two idiots immediately said "the video game made me do it" so they probably heard a story somewhere earlier and said "Hey, we can make money if we blame it on the video game!" To them I say: thanks for contributing to the sea of lawsuits. You've helped make our world a better place.
A
european Ford commercial has been floating around lately so I thought I'd post it. I think Ford needs more cars in the United States like the one advertised, and more advertising like this commercial. Unfortunately, the demand for small, efficient cars isn't the same here as it is in Europe, nor is the tolerance to jokes involving animals (no matter how obvious it is real animals weren't used). Oh well, at least I have Europe to keep me entertained.
Back in 1998, I was (and still am) a member of
The Planetary Society. As such, my name (along with about a million others) was placed on a microchip attached to the STARDUST spacecraft bound for Comet Wild 2. I recently
found my name on the list again and thought I'd reflect. Millions of years from now, when I'm long gone, the comet will still have the microchip with my name on it. Feeling left out? You can
send your name to Comet Tempel 1. Better hurry, deadline is January 2004.
I recently had an
interesting conversation with an AIM user. Apparently someone started sending messages around that AOL was going to cancel inactive accounts unless they send a specific message to ten of their friends. With all the
email scams going on, you'd think in such a large mass of people, at least one might have asked "Why?," but apparently everybody swallowed it whole without thinking. It's sad that this is our future, but at least now when I'm short on cash, I'll just reword the same message to specify the need to send credit card numbers and expiration dates as well.
The
Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a
petition for congress expressing outrage on the
recent lawsuits against P2P users. The petition requests concentration on legalizing P2P with appropriate artist compensation instead of generating thousands of lawsuits. It also touches on the amnesty program, which if you look carefully, is a crock. The record labels are issuing the subpoenas, not the RIAA. Amnesty from the RIAA is meaningless.
sign the petition and avoid buying CD's at all costs. Each one you buy only helps to fund the giant legal machine that is the RIAA.
In a
previous update I mentioned that the new 64 bit processors are coming out soon. I had planned to wait at least a year to get one, or a dirt cheap 32-bit system. Well, I've been a bad person and bought a 32 bit system today.
Duane bought one and it was so cool I had to have one too. It's the
Biostar iDEQ 200N. In my defense, I had $250 from a recent e-Bay sale which brought the total cost of the machine down to $280. I'll post specs when I get it (hopefully sometime next week). So much for self control.
It's a sad truth. Instead of being a true geek and using web technology to implement his
photo albums, he has created a windows macro to crop/resize and display his photos. All I ask is a simple ASP or ASP.net script that parses through the files and generates thumbnails on the fly, like any lazy web developer would implement. His complicated maze of macros and automated non-web scripts make me ashamed to admit he is a friend. Let's all pray he eventually does the right thing.
Today on my way to work I saw a squirrel dart out in front of the car in front of me. He made it to the space between lanes, then ran away from the car in the lane next to me. By this time I had moved up to where he was parallel with me so he ran back again and went under my car for a loud WOMPFH noise. I saw him bounce up in my rearview mirror and manage to get off the road, but I already felt sick from it. If he had just stayed calm and waited he would have been fine, but pure panic took hold of him and made him run around until he got hit. Now he's just another
curb squirrel.Today I woke up at 2:00am to start work at 3:00am. I came in early because the company I work for only makes changes during this timeframe (minimum traffic window) and today was the day of "the big push." For the past month I've been working on
Equity Online! exclusively and today it finally went to production. I'm very happy with this application because it had good marketing requirements and a good overall design. I put alot of effort into writing highly efficient and reusable code and I feel I did a pretty good job. Needless to say I now have a huge weight off my chest and plan to sleep the remainder of the day. I can attest that driving at 3:00am is a very relaxing experience.
I read a recent
article discussing fine increases from traffic enforcement. Since the economy is down, people are buying less and making less, which means less taxes are getting to government. Instead of raising taxes to compensate, which would cause riots (similar to the ones witnessed when
gas prices go up) more and more local police are concentrating on traffic fines as supplemental income. This means the traffic cops that liked my flashy car before have a stronger hunger than ever to pull me over. As a result, I'm forcing myself to do the speed limit and stop at yellow lights no matter what. Let the people that can afford it supplement our shallow tax base. I'll drive 65 (and save gas doing it too).
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