Ding Dong, the MacBook’s Dead :(
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Can you believe it? I got stung by that grahpics issue with the last generation MacBook Pro! You know, that one where the logic board completely fries and you have to send it back to Apple to have them fix it? Yes, after two trips to the Apple Store, 200 miles of travel total equaling about 7 gallons of gas with my car, I am now in a state of Maclessness. I say Maclessness because I can still post to my blog on this wonderful public use Windows PC that SMCC provides for all of the Communications and New Media students! I better hurry up with this post though, Bubba over there looks like he needs to use this machine for something. Well, at least I can come back later tonight to finish my project in Final Cut Pro…I mean Adobe Premiere…yay.
Needless to say, the blog posts are going to become sparce and there will be no DuoRadio this week either, which is unfortunate because I actually had some things to talk about and some interesting people to talk to. Which brings me to my next thing I wanted to mention, for the next few weeks, I won’t be live streaming the DuoRadio recording. As of right now, it doesn’t add anything to the show, because people are watching the stream but they aren’t chatting or talking back at all. It’s also become a distraction and takes away from the core content of the show (if you can even call it content). Also, no one really needs to see my ugly mug in a video, particularly one coming from my office/bedroom/breakfast nook. So, as of the next episode which will be next recorded next week, we will just be recording an audio show and posting it on the site with shownotes.
Until then, I will still be keeping touch on my Twitter account and will be making posts here every chance I get. Either with my parents G4 headlamp iMac or on this Piece o’Crap (PC). PC defenders can send their hate in the comments. Hey it’s the first of May this Friday! You know what that means!
Help! The Government is Going to Steal my Baby!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Legal Junk
Have you ever heard of the “Mothers Act?” I first heard about this on the last No Agenda (episode #91). Apparently, it is an act that passed the House of Representatives back in 2006 and went to the Senate, although I can’t find any information on what happened to it after the fact, that was back during the 109th Congress, and we are now in the 111th. What this act accomplishes is that it requires every new mother in this country (United States, in case you forgot) would have to fill out a questionaire in order to determine if they are mentally fit to take the baby home.
Well, I have two issues with this concept. First, we already have this questionaire, it’s that form where you actually name the child. If you name your child something like ESPN instead of a normal name like Justin or Jennifer, you are unfit to be a parent. The next problem I have is, if this wonder questionaire determines that someone is unfit to be a mother, what happens next? Does the Government just take the baby away from the parents? Put them in the reliable hands of the nation’s social services system? Thats right Mrs. Thomas, you are an unfit mother and we are going to give your child to someone who operates a foster home with a dozen other children and be sentenced to a childhood of caring for the numerous cats who are treated better than the children.
The idea is that new mothers suffer from and that we need to offer education and support to these new mothers so that the American family doesn’t suffer as new life comes into the world. Here’s the thing, it was introduced by Senators Robert Menendez (D, New Jersey) and Richard Durbin (D, Illinois) as found here on Menendez’s site touting how this is such a good idea. Which brings me to my next problem with this whole thing. These two gentlemen, if you can call them gentlemen, are just that, gentlemen. They are guys! What the heck do they know about giving birth? I think we have plumbing issue here if you ask me.
What business is it of our Government to decide who would be a fit mother and who wouldn’t be? The last time I checked, our Government could pick a fit Commerce Secretary, Treasury Secretary, or even a fit Health Secretary. Anyway, here’s a run down from this site called “Dissident Voice” which is a complete outline of why this is a bad idea. We already have a perfectly good working system to weed out the bad mothers from the good.
Are We Absurdly Wired as a People?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Allow me to set the scene, I was sitting at my usual position in a pew at church this morning. The person speaking at the pulpit was talking about music in the Gospel (the Mormon one) and was at that time mentioning how into Posicore she was. While I was laughing to myself and then explaining to my father, who was sitting next to me, what Posicore is, my Blackberry started vibrating. I ignored it at first, figuring that it was just an email that I could check later.
Unfortunately, it started going again and again. It vibrated to the point when my leg started to feel numb and I just had to know what was going on. I got it out of my pocket to reveal that my friend Nick, whom you may, but probably didn’t, hear on DuoRadio a few times, had been messaging me on AIM. I don’t know why the AIM app was even on, I usually have it set to invisible because I don’t like to IM away from a computer keyboard. Here’s what Nick had to say:
Hey dude, I’m on my new iPod touch now, this is wild.
Wow, what a wonderful world we all live in. Nick was able to send a message on his iPod touch over Wi-Fi from his dorm room at UMaine that went over the Internets to AOL’s central servers and then back over the Internets to T-Mobile who sent it to me over their wireless network to my Blackberry while I was sitting in Church listening to my friend’s talk about her love for music and Posicore.
Are you freaking kidding me? Is this what we as a society have accomplished? Clearly, finding a cure for AIDS is too complicated and better treatments for Cancer is another 20 or 30 years away. But, sending each other annoying messages over vastly complicated and expensive network infrastructure, well, the future is here everybody! And that’s not all, now when we see someone in an Airport Terminal wearing a messy clown wig and begging passers by for spare change, we don’t have to call all of our friends and tell them about it with our voices. Nope, we can just send them all a picture at the click of a button, unless you have the same phone my Dad has, then good luck.
OK, rant over. By the way, the above links for the Blackberry (Curve 8320) and the iPod touch are to my Amazon Associates account. I wanted to try this out and see if I could make any money at this whole blogging thing without annoying banner ads all over the place that no one would click anyway. Is linking to Amazon in a blog post not acceptable on the Internet? Anyone have any thoughts? If not, then I won’t ever do it again, but you have my word, I only link to products that I have used or owned and can recommend.
BitTorrent Dead? Don’t Bet On It
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Legal Junk
If you don’t read Wikinews, you really should start. It’s a collaboration of news sources from around the world combined with the opinions of people from all walks of life. Because if anyone should be reporting the news, it’s people who are smart enough to edit a wiki. I came across this story there today. Apparently, the administrators of The Pirate Bay are in some hot water thanks to the courts in their homeland of Sweden. And it’s not a hot tub full of cute Scandinavian girls, it’s a year in prison and a 30 million Swedish krona or $3.5 million fine. But it was totally worth it to be able to download Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay a week before the DVD release. It wasn’t like I was going to actually buy or rent it or anything.
The RIAA and the MPAA have finally done it, they have killed The Pirate Bay. No more illegal downloading of music and movies or software or…wait, hold on, the Pirate Bay claims that they aren’t going to shut down. In fact, if you read all the news out there, they aren’t going to pay the fine and they are going to appeal the case. Of course, what else would you expect from the guys who poke fun at all of their legal threats in a public forum.
A “spokesman” for The Pirate Bay summed the entire case against them quite well when he said “…nothing will happen to The Pirate Bay, us personally, or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theatre for the media.” Remember how in the 1800s, in classrooms, when a boy misbehaved, the teacher would call them to the front of the class, pull their pants down and paddle them? That’s what companies like Warner Bros. and Columbia want to do to these guys, make an example of them.
It’s like when that poor woman from Minnesota named Jammie Thomas got sued by the RIAA for supposedly sharing 1700 music tracks on a file sharing network. She was found guilty of sharing 24 songs on Kazaa from such bands as Aerosmith and Green Day. The court ordered her to pay $9,250 per song which comes to a grand total of $222,000 worth of pain and misery. Enough to make anyone who runs Kazaa or LimeWire to poop their pants multiple times. That is, unless you are absurdly wealthy in which case, why don’t you just buy the music from iTunes?
It’s the same as the recent story about Roger Friedman, a movie reviewer, being dismissed from Fox News for downloading X-Men Origins: Wolverine and admitting to it on his online review. Heaven forbid that people actually learn that the Internet is useful for something other than text and banner ads. Of course News Corporation who owns Fox News, also owns 20th Century Fox, the same major movie studio who owns distribution rights to (you guessed it) X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s too bad they fired him too, according to Wikinews, the review of the movie was pretty positive, unlike the one I’ll be giving when this torrent finishes downloading.
News and the Collective Conscience
Posted by Andrew | Filed under New Media
We truly live in a wonderful time. Back when my dad was growing up, there were only three channels and most of them had “BC” in their name. That really reflects the era of time that their idea of broadcasting came from. And in other countries around the world, it was more of the same. Mostly public government owned broadcasters both on radio and television, at least in America, we had three “unbiased” private corporations bringing us our news. Man, times were much simpler back when only major corporations like General Electric and Walt Disney were the only ones who could report the news.
But then, people like Dave Winer, Adam Curry and Leo Laporte decided to take a dump all over this perfect American media system. They started writing blogs, and hosting podcasts and managing RSS feeds and now they are Twittering! And then people like Kevin Rose decided that the audience should be the one to decide what the top news headlines should be! And then the ultimate thorn in the side of any major media corporation, Craig Newmark, who decided that advertising and classifieds can be free.
Back in the old days, the only way your opinion could get on the air was if you owned the station. Alternatively, you could buy a newspaper company and get your opinions out there, and I’ve heard there are some great deals out there now. But, you can just save your money by going to Blogger or Twitter and just posting online for absolutely nothing. And now, most news organizations allow people to comment on the stories that they post right on their websites! From small and measly local papers and radio stations to major national newspapers and networks. NPR will now read people’s Twitter responses on the air!
Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Andrew, you post a blog, you host a podcast and post regularly to Twitter and read Digg and all of that.” You of course are absolutely right, but what you are forgetting is that my opinion actually matters. And guess what, yours does too. All news and information out there is biased and has an agenda no matter what. But, the Internet and new media have allowed us to display different points of view on events and ideas reported in the media in a single place. People thought that CNN was a revolution back when it came on the scene. But the revolution that is taking place right here, right now on blogs like this, podcasts, and other social networking, and information aggregating (wow, thats a word!) sites is one hundred times more earth shattering than anything Ted Turner did.
How Reliable is the Internet?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Look at it, the Fail Whale, the ultimate symbol of crisis on the Internet today. Every time this shows up online, a million Twitter addicted souls cry out in agony as their only means of communication is severed for the duration. Because clearly, when Twitter goes down, which happens a lot, MySpace, Facebook, Email, AIM, and the United States Postal Service go down as well.
I don’t understand why people freak the heck out when they see the Fail Whale, or the much more common “Twitter is over capacity” message. It’s not a big deal, calm down and have a warm drink (Hot Chocolate really calms my nerves, but I almost can’t stand the sugar) and read a good book (I recommend John Hodgman’s “Areas of my Expertise“). While you are doing that, consider all of the people through out different areas of the world, such as Africa, South America, parts of Asia, who don’t have access to Twitter or the Internet at all because it’s either too expensive or the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.
But this does bring up a good question, is the Internet reliable? We do so much over the Internet, emails, chatting, blogging, podcasting, music downloading, video streaming, you can even solicit sex online (I know, crazy right?). Things that the Internet and the infrastructure it rides on weren’t actually built to do. Most internet traffic goes over phone lines via dial-up and DSL, a network that was designed to carry analog voice only. Now, the crazy thing is that with the advent of Voice over the Internet (or VoIP), we now send voice over the Internet which transmits over phone lines that were meant to carry voice. Of course, that sounds completely ridiculous.
But back to Twitter and their 98% uptime in 2007 (99.9% is considered the average uptime for any online system). Twitter is only text, and they are having issues scaling with their users. How are we supposed to do audio and video if a text service has trouble scaling? How does Ustream provide 1.5 million veiwer hours of live streaming video a month? That’s massive! And all it takes to bring down a system like that is to have just one more viewer than your servers and bandwidth can actually handle. And with a local television station, you don’t go down unless some drunk guy in a pick up truck runs into your transmitting tower. That, or some clumsy intern trips over a power cord in the studio while fetching coffee for the news anchor who acts like he makes as much as Matt Lauer and owns the station as a result.
The Christian YouTuber, Not Very Christian
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Internet Culture
My friend, Andrew Reed pointed this YouTube character out to me today. He’s the Christian YouTuber (username: ChristianU2uber), and he is twelve years old and wants to use YouTube to spread his knowledge of God. I’m all for this because I have found that everyone seems to be against God in almost everything. It’s okay for people to spread Religion in new and exciting ways, like on YouTube, but this kid is going about it the completely wrong way.
He posted a video called “hateful comments” asking the YouTube comment posters to think about what they are posting before they type it. That’s like asking a dog to stop wagging it’s tail. I know it’s bad and you really don’t want to hear any of it, but the best thing to do is to just ignore it. In fact, get your own website like I have so that you can just delete them and deny them the pleasure.
And don’t ever respond to them like this. Some commenters have been calling the kid a “homo” and the next thing you know, there’s a video of him almost crying and throwing a hissy fit about it. That really isn’t Christian. What else isn’t Christian is being angry at a toddler for calling you names and hitting you, its a toddler! he or she probably doesn’t even know better and yet you are taking it way to personally. I also love how he isn’t accepting his friend’s apology, but not to his friend, to YouTube. That isn’t Christian either, being Christian is all about “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” What if you were the one apologizing? Wouldn’t you want the other party to accept that apology?
By the way, a video where you claim you are going to hurt yourself and then start smacking yourself across the face and then hitting your head repeatedly isn’t a “very funny video.” No, it’s disturbing and suggests that you need to seek some sort of counseling. I definitely think that it is possible that this kid is just to immature to do what he is doing, he is taking the anonymous attacks from trolls to seriously and is sharing information that is way too personal for a public forum such as YouTube, where anyone can stumble across it.
Religion and Technology Don’t Mix
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
I’ve got to say, John C. Dvorak’s Dvorak Uncensored is a great resource for what I would call “back door” news. You know, things that the Mainstream American News Organizations don’t report on because “real” Americans aren’t interested in it. But this story that I have found is another prime example of how people around the world are continuing to take Religion too seriously, by imposing old and outdated ideas and rules in the modern technologically advanced new world. Apparently, a group in northern India has issued a “fatwa” on mobile phone use in the Muslim world.
Never heard of a “fatwa”? Neither have I, which is why I did what any sensible person with a computer and an internet connection would do and looked it up on Wikipedia. According to the article, as of today (April 14th, 2009), a fatwa is “…a a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar.” It can be binding or non-binding depending on the sect of Islam you are in and the status of the scholar in that sect. Well these scholars have spent countless hours contemplating the ways of Islam and the laws in place and have decided that no one is allowed to have an aayat (a verse of the Qur’an) as their ring tone.
The rational behind this, is that if you use an aayat as your ring tone and someone calls you and you pick up before the cell phone is finished reciting the aayat, you are in violation of the laws of Islam. And of course, if you allow the phone to just finish the ring tone before picking it up, you risk two things. First, the ring tone could start playing again and you would have to keep waiting until it’s finished again and second, the aayat could be so long that by the time it finishes, the person calling has given up and hung up. By the way, the fatwa also includes a clause against setting your phone to vibrate when you are praying. Because it would “distract” you from what you are doing.
In my experience, if you are praying correctly, nothing could possibly distract you. Unless the cell phone’s vibrating causes your leg to jump up in some sort of weird reflex, that would be really distracting. Why do the larger world religions seem to be at odds with technology in their teachings while smaller organizations are trying to embrace the same?
American News is on Trial
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Mainstream Media
American News outlets are finally getting some attention from the rest of the world thanks to the Internet and services like YouTube. People outside the States can finally see the trash that America’s major media conglomerates call “news.” I found this video on Dvorak Uncensored (John C. Dvorak’s blog), and it summed up the situation pretty well. It was produced by the BBC’s Charlie Brooker, whom I will admit is a comedian and a writer, not a reporter or a journalist. Granted, he does make a good case and backs up everything he says with video evidence.
He says that the best part about American television news is the fact that everyone is attractive, which certainly is true. That is, as long as you don’t count Ann Coulter, who like Brooker, isn’t a reporter or a journalist, she’s a political commentator. And yet, she was hired by MSNBC and shows up constantly on Fox News. Why is it that these networks are always hiring people who are clearly biased and not afraid to show it? Brooker’s piece mentions Keith Olbermann who hosts a show called “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.” It started back in 2003, and up until the end of his Presidency, was dedicated to yelling at George W. Bush. As the Brooker piece pointed out, he liked calling Bush a “fascist.”
But, who can forget to mention Fox News when it comes to reporting opinion as fact? Let’s take a fair and balanced look at the kind of people they parade around as television news reporters. Who could forget Bill O’Reilly? The man who believes that if he says it, it’s true. But that’s another issue for another time. The main point Brooker makes is that Bill O’Reilly acts like a child, as evidenced by this video, which if you haven’t seen it yet, watch it. And then watch this awesome parody of “The O’Reilly Factor.”
That’s another thing, what is it with the egos of these people that they need the show name to have their name in it? “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” whatever. This isn’t “Duo Citizenship with Andrew Davis” and I still take all the credit for the rubbish I write here. That’s what the Colbert Report on Comedy Central is all about. Have you ever noticed that Stephen Colbert’s desk is a giant “C”? And what about the transition into the interview at the last segment of the show?
And who could forget my favorite television personality, Glenn Beck? Whom, Brooker said is insane. By the way, Glenn Beck’s new program on Fox News is called, get this, “Glenn Beck.” Wow, creative and not in the least bit egotistical. You should watch the piece for yourself, it’s pretty funny to say the least.
Please Leave the Obamas Alone
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Mainstream Media
You know, we have a lot of issues going on today. Our world’s economy is in a melt down, our environment is a wreck, we have massive healthcare and education issues in our country. Why is it that all anyone cares about is Barack and Michelle Obama? I know they are the President and First Lady, but they are constantly in the news and I’m sick of it. As a country, we don’t care about the economic recovery, we don’t care about the AIG bonuses, we don’t care that GM and Chrysler are going out of business.
No, according to the media, we are much more interested in the latest Obama faux pas which was bowing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. My question is, why wouldn’t you bow to a King? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? In many cultures, it is customary to bow to one another as a sign of respect for the other individual, especially when you are meeting to conduct any sort of business. Last time I checked, most Americans weren’t aware of any culture other than their own, so, who are we to say that it was the wrong move? (via dvorak.org/blog)
And why are we so obsessed with Michele Obama now? Oh well, it seems that Lindsay Lohan has cleaned up her act, and Miley Cyrus isn’t up to anything yet, and let’s face it, we beat Britney Spears straight. Who are we going to torment with our constant media blitz? Clearly Michelle Obama deserves all the criticism in the world, she actually hugged the Queen of England! But man, does she have style and her arms are spectacular.
Why do all of these so called “News Organizations” do this? This constant peddling of worthless information is what has caused people in this country and many others around the world to become, for lack of a better term, dumb. I don’t care about the Obama’s search for a new dog, I’m more concerned about his search for a Secretary of Commerce. As long as the dog isn’t influencing policy, it doesn’t really matter. What I am asking people out there in the world to do is take note of stories like this about our President and First Lady, and ask yourself, does this matter and is this important? If the answer is no, then you should find somewhere else to get your news.