Freyburg

Here’s some nice invective about “Not One More Damn Dime Day,” yet another ineffectual bit of “power to the people” protest that doesn’t accomplish anything while also not involving any sacrifice.

After reading Adbusters, which is the same damn histrionics month after month, and seeing the stinking rich liberals in Vancouver saying “Oh, I hate Bush, we have to do something about that guy” while they sip on their Starbucks and climb into a hybrid SUV filled with Lululemon bags, it’s kinda tough to take some of the left seriously. It’s just as tough to listen to the rantings of religious warmongering wackos of the right, other than that they seem to be in charge at the moment, so we haven’t got much choice BUT to take them seriously.

But don’t listen to my weak dribble; read the witty bile for yourself.

Now that’s a magazine cover. Drink more, and when you wake up, you’ll be in Canada!

The feature article ain’t bad either, though only my Vancouver readers can get any use out of the Seattle bar guide. 🙂

After a cursory glance at my stats page, it appears some site called Pimptress haslinked to me on several occassions. I haven’t got a clue why, though I like the name. 🙂

And among the search terms that drive people to this site are “Khalid,” which makes sense since he reads this site fairly regularly. But other, more puzzling terms include “japanese sexy” and “powerranger.” My favorite? “Molest a statue.” 🙂

The NYT has an interesting story about how Mecca, unlike the rest of Saudi Arabia (generally speaking) is a fairly tolerant, open city, filled with debate and awash in multiculturalism. It’s a pretty interesting read, at least for a non-Muslim like myself who knows next to nothing about the place. This may be old hat to Muslims or others who are less of an ignoramus than I am. 🙂

Time was when I would jump in and muck with the newest and most untested hardware and software in order to be on the bleeding edge of the technological curve. Those days have passed; I’m far more content to have a computer that does everything well than to have the newest, fastest, and most likely to crash machine out there.

The hardware and home software market has come to reflect my apathy. Most computers now are incrementally better than they were a year or two ago, but the six-month cycle of amazing new graphics cards and the like is over.

But the one place innovation keeps pushing forward every day is web-based software, particularly when it comes to blogging. That’s where my tendency towards laziness keeps me way behind the curve.

Gizmodo has a link to a cool set of pictures and a blurb about an abandoned Apple store in Kuwait. I don’t know what’s spookier, the store or all that obsolete Mac OS 9 software still lining the shelves.

I was just listening to Rice’s confirmation hearing on the radio on the way to work (ah, the joys of living close to the border and getting NPR) and she mentioned the State Department still uses Wang computers. WTF? This ain’t 1980. No wonder the government couldn’t prevent 9/11, my Palm Zire has more power than those things!

On the other hand, I did get to hear Condoleeza Rice say “wang” on the radio. Heh. Wang.

Apparently the record industry is using artificial intelligence to help pick what songs will be hits. This is one of those things we always suspected, but now we’ve got proof. Not that I really care; I haven’t listened to top 40 radio in years. The closest I get to hearing the new mainstream stuff is a curious click on the iTunes music store. And that’s why ITMS doesn’t have more of my money. 🙂

Amiga will never die. No matter how many times the long-suffering computer is pronounced kaput at the hand of a new batch of incompetent investors, somebody always comes along and says “No, this time for sure.” It never amounts to anything, other than making the Amiga faithful scream and writhe in pain, but apparently it’s happening again.

Personally, I’m surprised the true believers haven’t just created their own Amiga-like operating system, or diddled around with Linux to create something they could run on any old hardware. Plus, the last time the Amiga was innovative was the early 90’s. To be fair, at that time the Video Toaster and Lightwave were revolutionary products, but you can pretty much do anything the Toaster could do nowadays with a copy of iMovie.

Seymour Hersh, who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and more recently scooped everyone with the Abu Ghraib scandal, says U.S. Special Forces are operating in Iran. Apparently they’re softening up the joint, targeting nuclear installations and missile sites.

Well, that’s just great. You’d think the pit the U.S. dug itself into in Iraq would be a small clue as to the stupidity of this initiative, but no, evidently not. The White House said his report is ‘riddled with inaccuracies,’ which I think is code for “damn, he’s onto us.”

Update: Here’s Hersh’s New Yorker article.