Thursday, June 29, 2006

Only While It's Useful

Government is not a right, it is a privilege and therefore should be refused when it doesn't suit you.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Broadband Speeds

My DSL at work gets: 384 kbps down, 379 kbps up. sDSL in case you hadn't noticed.

My cable modem at home gets: 4.55 Mbps down, 361 kbps up.

Numbers side by side:

4,559,704 bps up/361,752 bps down - CABLE
 384,496 bps up/379,240 bps down - DSL

DRM = DRSUX!

The DRM is a law to protect analog structured industries in a digital era. The product has evolved without the seller. Good for greedy, impersonal entities that will die off in a hundred years. Bad for the advancement of civilization.

Flag Burning...yes again.

You can tell when it's election year in this country when the dumbest ideas come up for approval for Congress to codify into law. I don't understand why our lawmakers want to add Constitutional amendments restricting rights? Why start that precedent? I actually think they'd be shocked if they got something ridiculous to pass. They just want to appeal to their constituents, not really change anything. It's a dangerous game they play, regardless of their intentions.

So flag burning is up for debate...again. They want to make it a constitutional amendment to ban this practice. I have said this before but it'd be interesting bookends if it passes, the last amendment superseding the first.

Personal view aside, I don't understand why we need law enforcement for this action? Is the practice really that rampant that force is needed to respond? Does our law enforcement not have anything better to do? As I understand, the number of yearly cases of this is virtually 0. It's something like less than 100 cases of flag burning in a country of 300 million people, if you don't count the patriotic groups that are disposing of old flags in some ritual fashion that makes it ok to burn it. And how do you enforce that? How do you write that law in a way that millions of police officers can discern between the proper way a flag is being burned and the improper? It can't be done. Mistakes will be made, assumptions incorrectly created, conclusions improperly drawn. You just can't do it on a national level anyway. Not even on a state level. Maybe you can neighborhood-level...MAYBE.

So a few people want to burn the American flag every year. Why do you care? Because it's offensive to you? If we passed a law for everything that offends people, we'd be living in a police state and no one could do anything! We'd be in a country so full of laws, the Nazi's would say, "That's cold."

You might think public flag burning hurts the country's image, creates disrespect, incites rebellion, etc. I really don't see that happening. Not as long as people like you are committed to protecting that flag and people like me swear allegiance to our country. They will never convince us otherwise. We will stand together, united and not be swayed by these protestors. Not with blackmail, not with torture and certainly not by asking us to bear witness to a burning of a piece of fabric. I know it won't change my mind about my country.

So let them do it. Best case scenario, they burn themselves during the stunt. Why would you want to stop Darwinism?

We don't need the amendment.

Summer Wonderland

Half way to Christmas...

Monday, June 26, 2006

"Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past."


--Rage Against The Machine

Recorded Thoughts

The lead character in the fourth Dune book, God Emperor of Dune, had a technology that was wirelessly tapped into his brain. And during his 3000 year reign of the universe, whatever thought he had was recorded somewhere in some archive. All he had to do is consciously think it and it was written down.

There are times I wish I had this technology. Many times I've had ideas that I wanted to write down or even blog about here, but I'm usually not in a position to get it added before the thought is gone.

I'm sure the idea for the technology came about from the author of the book, Frank Herbert. He was a thinker and probably wished, like me, he had the technology to provide the service.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Summer, Summer, Summertime.

Yesterday, happy Anniversary to me and Mrs. Lock. Happy Summer Solstice to everyone. I performed my annual summer solstice ritual again last night. I blogged about it last year. Loads of fun. Woot.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Flashback to Newer Songs

It's funny to me to hear the local "new rock alternative" radio station still play songs from Nirvana. And even more funnier when they play one of their songs from 16 years ago and then immediately start the "Flashback Nooner. This one goes all the way back to 1995, ten years ago..."

Rituals

I'm not a fan of rituals. I don't like giving or receiving gifts on a certain day of the year when it's expected of me. I'd rather give gifts when I feel like it, not when it's required of me or of someone else to give them to me. I say this on the eve of my anniversary too for no particular reason.

I really don't like rituals (unless they're my own and I think them up). Mrs. Lock asked me if we could get married on a certain day. I agreed. She arranged the wedding and we did it. Every birthday/Christmas I'm asked what I want, I say, "nothing." I never get nothing though. Curses.

Celebrate life not dates. It's an emotional feeling and you're not supposed to schedule emotions. Celebrating something on a specific day, the same day from year to year implies you don't care for it the other 364 days. If you know when it's coming, what kind of joy is that?

Oh well. I guess it does something for the economy.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Grocery Cart Games

I have this game I play with my daughter (btw, I'm getting away to referring to her as Baby Lock since she's not much of a baby anymore. She's Toddler Lock), where we're in the grocery store, she's in the front cart and I push the cart away from me down an empty aisle. As she's freewheeling away from me, I say "RUNAWAY BABY! RUNAWAY BABY!" and it makes her laugh to see her father getting smaller.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

WOW! Sixties...plural

I kick, streeeetch and kick. Iiiiii'm 60...again.

Since last October, a good portion of my recreation time has been poured into a little unknown game called World of Warcraft; Blizzard's highly successful MMO. And today, my alt, a Warlock named Bunner (named after my pet rabbit) hit the highest level you can get in the game (until expansion time later this year). That makes him the second character I have to top out at 60. My main character is a feral druid named Hafgan (named after the main character in the book 'Druids').

In celebration of my two high level characters and a reminder to the time I've wasted to build a virtual empire which translates to having nothing in the real world, I'm posting some screens I've taken over the course of a year from my playing time.

Enjoy!







Tuesday, June 06, 2006

18

Hail Satan! >:)

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Shower Talk

It disappoints me when I go to take a shower, I turn on the radio in the bathroom, tune in a station playing something good, hop in the shower and when the song ends, it's five minutes of commercials. I'm stranded in the shower listening to ads.

So what I've tried doing lately, is finding a station that is in commercials when I start my shower so when I get in the shower, the music will start soon and I'll have a good running time by the time I get out. Lately though, I seem to catch commercial breaks at the very beginning for some reason, so I still get all ads, then maybe half a song.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Losing Face Has Its Benefits

A benefit to having America disliked is our government will begin to lose the ability to bully other countries. Before, we somehow had the say in what was right and wrong in the world. Other country's governments bowed to our government's pressure because we were the U.S., the most powerful and richest country in the world. But with the world opinion turning against us, others will feel counter pressure right at home, from their own people to stand up and not listen to what our government has to say.

The more respect we lose, the less others will listen to us. Because what do we know about their country? Our government doesn't even know how to run ours.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Don't Hate The Playa

You can't understand what you hate. If you hate your enemy, you can't understand their methods. If you don't understand their methods, you are doomed to be affected by them forever. Strategists can admire their opponent for their guile and compose a counter attack because they understand their enemy, how he thinks, why he makes the decisions he does and what's going to come next.

If you hate someone, you literally do not understand them and you refuse to understand anything about them. Your pride demands this ignorance. Any guesses or predictions you may have about them, chances are, you are wrong, very wrong. No one should listen to you. You can not be an expert on what you hate. You are a novice. Actually, not even a novice, just completely clueless.

Knowledge begins with empathy.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Mario's Got A Gun

So I forgot to post on the last day of May. I counted 32 entries from that month.

Actually I didn't forget, I was busy with New Super Mario DS. Side scroller for the DS? What genius! And a great IP to boot.

I'm not sure how the replayability is going to be. I'm already on map/level/world 8 and near the end after only owning it for a few weeks. I believe (if memory serves) the NES version was this easy to beat, maybe easier with the warps so you just played it over and over because it was fun. Nowadays, with the video game industry and the high quality title selection, short games are getting squeezed out for new ones. It's not like I don't have a good size library I could switch to.

I just finished an adventure/fps game called Gun. A lot of fun, but I think I beat it in 2 or 3 sittings. There was a short game but for $18, I got my value.

--

Snapshot


Market:
DJI 11260, NASDAQ 2219, SP5 1285

#1 Movie at the box office:
X-Men: The Last Stand

Last movies I saw at the theater:
The Da Vinci Code
Mission Impossible III

Last movie(s) I saw not at the theater:
Bewitched (VOD)
Bourne Identity (DVD)

Books I'm currently reading:
Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum. (On #3, Ultimatum right now)

Albums (cd/mp3) I'm listening to:
Lots of radio.

Video games I'm playing:
World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft and more World of Warcraft (60 Druid, 58 Warlock, 17 Priest)
New Super Mario DS
Gun

Price I'm paying for gas:
$2.61/gallon

Last several Google searches:
10BaseT
wear sun screen vonnegut
24
awesome town
robot chicken theme
/dev/st0a
linux backup dump script
hp tablet screen orientation
geforce4 420
blogger templates
angry ip scanner
after midnight project
flight sim x
xp automatic login
world's smallest political quiz
communist manifesto planks
tanya roberts