Blogspot/Blogger...you rock!

Graham over at Blogspot/Blogger set me up with an ad-free site. Just because I asked nicely about when paid Blogspot space was coming back.

Would Slashdot do something like that for me? I don't think so!

Thanks, Graham! My propeller beanie is off to you.

Disney is DEAD.

You heard it here first. Stick a fork in them, they're done. After 2006, their last cash cow, Pixar, will go looking for a new distributor.

I think old man Walt is laughing in his urn now. Kill traditional animation at the Mouse House, watch the rest of the company die. In a weird way, this is justice. The reason why Pixar movies like "Finding Nemo," "Monsters, Inc," "A Bug's Life," and the "Toy Story" movies were so damn good was not because traditional 2D animation is outmoded, but because John Lasseter and his buddies know how to tell a good story. Kind of like what Disney did back in the day.

Not even Roy Disney can save them now.

NOOOOOOO!

This spells doom for the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie. Ford Prefect, according to The Hollywood Reporter, will be played by....gah! rapper Mos Def.

I mean, if they really wanted to make the H2G2 cast diverse, they could have used either Danny John Jules or Chris Barrie, both of Red Dwarf fame. Both are black, and both are BRITISH. And most importantly, both are genuinely funny.

You see...the character might be from Somewhere Out In Space, but he's very, very British. He's had to live for several years stranded on Earth, where he's been trying to make a living as an actor on the British stage while waiting for the next passing starship to go by. He's gone somewhat native. In short: HE SHOULD HAVE A FREAKIN' BRITISH ACCENT. He should not sound like a New York rapper trying to affect a British accent. He should sound like he's from Britain.

My dream casting for Ford Prefect has always been Eric Idle. He would absolutely nail Ford Prefect's personality. I also have always envisioned Bill Murray as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Since both are getting on in years, their participation wouldn't work unless they did H2G2 right...as an ANIMATED movie. Then again, traditional animation seems to be an endangered species anywhere but in Japan.

Some of the other casting decisions weren't bad. Martin Freeman of The Office is a damn good choice for Arthur Dent. Zooey Deschanel would work as Trillian. But this miscasting of Ford Prefect is going to make this movie badly, badly suck.

And speaking of Jules and Barrie and Red Dwarf, it looks like this won't suck. Original cast, original creators writing. And none of Hollywood's smeggin' meddling tentacles involved.

I gotta put a link to this up...I'm one, are you?

I am pissed off about this worm, MyDoom. Whoever wrote this was not a friend of Free/Open Source Software. Basically this is a spam worm with a few cute little extras (keystroke logger for someone's phishing pleasure, back door for a future r00ting) and a DDoS client set to strike at the litigious bastards, um, I mean SCO website on February 1st.

Some people are actually having a lovely case of schadenfreude over this worm. After all, it only affects Windozers, right? Well it affects all of us who believe in F/OSS. It reinforces a certain stereotype some people have about our community as being a den of evil, wicked h4xx0rz who knock over websites for kicks.

Someone on Slashdot suggested that this is a "Reichtag fire" maneuver by SCO, Microsoft or both, to discredit the F/OSS community. (Yeah, yeah, Godwin can bite me.) The likely suspect would be SCO because they have staged DDoSes in the past on their site and blamed it on the F/OSS community. I would not have a hard time believing that the litigious bastards might have an in with some spambot writers.

Anyway, whoever did MyDoom will be in a heap of trouble. If SCO paid a skiddie to write MyDoom it would eventually get back to them. I'm sure anyone who would be facing USA-PATRIOT charges of "computer terrorism" would sing like a canary if someone put them up to it. And if someone did this out of a misguided desire to stick it to those litigious bastards at SCO they should understand that they have hurt the F/OSS community far more than they have helped it. In any event, if I may end this with a message to the unknown skiddie responsible for this: j00 5uxx0r, d00d. Turn yourself in to the Authorities, and apologize to the F/OSS community, asshole.

Animated dinks and plaudits among Academy Award (r) nominees:

Nominated in the Animated Feature category:
* Brother Bear
* Finding Nemo
* The Triplets of Belleville

Dinked in the Animated Feature category:
* Tokyo Godfathers

Nominated in the Animated Short category:
* Boundin'
* Destino
* Gone Nutty
* Harvey Krumpet
* Nibbles

Dinked in the Animated Short category:
* The nine shorts that make up The Animatrix

Other nods and dinks:
* Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King, featuring the incredible work of WETA Workshop in concert with Andy Serkis with the animated character Gollum, dominated Oscar (r) nominations with 11
* Thomas Newman, the nephew of Randy Newman, the son of Alfred Newman and scion of the Newman film composing dynasty, got a nod for his score for Finding Nemo
* The title song of The Triplets of Belleville is in the running for Best Original Song
* There were no nominations for Kill Bill Vol. I, which featured animation by Sunrise Studio, the studio which also gave the world Cowboy Bebop

Why do I consider Tokyo Godfathers and The Animatrix to have been dinked? Well, there was definitely "room for one more" in the Animated Feature category. Tokyo Godfathers was almost universally critically acclaimed, although it didn't get much play in theatres. At least one of the shorts that make up The Animatrix, "The Final Flight Of The Osiris" would have qualified for consideration as Best Animated Short, and deserved to be in the running. Basically, the take-home message here is that even though Spirited Away/Sen To Chihiro is an Oscar (r) winner, Anime has yet to completely register in the minds of Academy members. It's a shame, too...Japan is where all the action's at in animation right now. Too bad.

From the part of it's gone but still too much of it remains department:

Part of the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001 has been repealed by court fiat. There is no guarantee that the Feds won't appeal this decision...on the contrary, they probably will take this all the way to the Supremes. However, we can celebrate...a little.

Here's the discussion about the ruling on Slashdot. Plastic.Com seems to be flaky today after being down for most of the weekend so I don't know if it's there or not.

The sounds of silence...Panorama City style.

We went out to grocery shop today and we found that one of our local indie supermarkets, El Mexicano, is shutting down. Very, very depressing. This fucking supermarket strike means that we are extremely dependent on stores like the one that is going under.

There was no fresh fruits and veggies, the meat case was long ago cleaned out, and the place had a very "picked over" look to it. The store was running a 50% off sale on everything remaining, so we took advantage of it for canned goods and other staples. Like salsa. And hot sauce. Here, those are necessities of life.

It seems like there's been a wave of failures of businesses out my way since the December Shopping Season ended. KayBee Toys is on its way out now...the whole chain. Asahiya Bookstore in Little Tokyo is shuttering, as are other stores in the chain. The Asahiya in Gardena will stay open, but other than that one it looks like the rest of the stores are going bye-bye. Plaza del Valle, an attempt to replicate a Mexican/Central American style plaza market in what was once part of the parking lot of a decrepit shopping center here, is failing miserably. The small-scale businesses that were supposed to occupy the Plaza can't afford the rent that the company that runs the place is charging.

It looked, for a time, that Panorama City was going to revive itself. Oddly enough, when WalMart took over the old Broadway department store in the Panorama Mall there was a lot of motion towards opening more stores up here and sprucing up the neighborhood. But now, more and more, things are dying here. The Wherehouse at Van Nuys and Roscoe liquidated and moved out, as did a few stores right next door to them. The building formerly owned by Union Bank and then the County of Los Angeles is 100% vacant. The old Montgomery Ward store next to the Mall has been shuttered for years now...well, since Montgomery Ward went the way of White Front, Zody's and Nahas. (god I'm showing my age by listing those...) There was a SavOn Drugs on Chase at Van Nuys right next to a still-thriving Pep Boys a few years ago but that has been vacant even longer than Monkey Ward. And there is still a condemned high-rise, red-tagged since the Northridge Quake ten years ago, that is home only to ghosts and pigeons and maybe a homeless person or two. I think it remains up only because it's the high ground in our neighborhood and there is cell phone stuff up the wazoo on the roof.

It's all so damn depressing. But it's par for the course when you consider how the economy has been sputtering. Despite news reports and assurances by economists, the guy on the street can't see a recovery unless there's people getting jobs and stores opening for business, not closing up.

A Newsweek poll now has 52% of the public wanting to see Regime Change in the US. This after the bounce Bush The Younger got when they caught Saddam. One can only hope that this might be a sign of things to come. Another sign was the applause Bush got during the State of the Union speech when he mentioned that the Patriot Act was set to expire next year, applause Bush didn't script in because he hadn't gotten to his punchline...that he wanted to make it permanent. Again, one can only hope...

From the equal time for Dem boo-boos dept:

Apparently Howard Dean's embarrassing reenactment of Steve Ballmer's monkey dance is costing him in the polls.

Perhaps if he doesn't make it as the Democratic challenger to Bush, there's a job waiting for him at Microsoft? ^_^

From the "___Gate" department...

If the leak revealing the identity of a CIA agent didn't turn your stomach, here's a new bit of dirty tricks from The New GOP.

Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose...

Anyone but Bush. Please. He needs to go and he needs to go in a LANDSLIDE to prevent a repeat performance of shenanigans like what happened in 2000.

I don't care if it's Dean, Kerry, Edwards, Gen. Clark...I would care if it's Lieberman because his culture war bullshit reminds me too much of assholes like Pat Buchanan...but anyone else of the current crop would be fine. Even Rev. Sharpton would be an improvement...we'd get 4 years of entertainment, at least, instead of 4 years of revulsion, fear and loathing.

The tax cuts were a bad, bad idea. Cutting taxes while on a war footing is foolhardy. Now Bush wants to make them permanent. He also wants to make the horrible "USA-PATRIOT" act permanent. That's not just a bad idea, that's downright evil.

As far as the comments on marriage go, here's my response to those who insist "marriage is between a man and a woman." OK, fine, if marriage is going to be defined by religious standards, marriage should be a religious sacrament only and the State should get out of the business of defining and enforcing marriage contracts. No more automatic assumption that the surviving spouse inherits everything should the other spouse die. No more rules about bigamy. Divorce would be a religious matter only, which would mean a chaos of different rules depending on which religion you belonged to.

You can't have it both ways. If the State has legitimate reasons for regulating marriage as a legal contract, then you mustn't allow it to be defined by religious standards. I know that Bush and his like don't like the separation of Church and State, but it's no accident that it's in the Bill of Rights. Since other laws have established that you cannot discriminate on account of sexual preference, you're either going to have to deal with the idea of gay "domestic partnerships" with all the legal weight of marriage but without the verbiage, or you're going to have to put up with the chaos that would ensue if the State got out of the marriage business. That's the way it is.

You can't expect people to pay out of pocket for their own health insurance if they have to routinely make choices about whether to pay bills, pay rent or eat. No amount of tax incentive will change that. Most working poor take the standard deduction and don't itemize anyway, so the "incentive" simply isn't there. I said it before, I will say it again: Medical Care is as much a matter of public safety as fire departments and police. There are good reasons why fire departments and police, both of which were private entities 150 years or so ago, were made public institutions. It's time to stop the fake free marketeer blather. We need to accept the fact that private, employer-issued or personally purchased health insurance doesn't work; and that either a single-payer or public/private partnership model of health insurance for EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE, is a necessity to "provide for the common defense." Especially when we have seen what happens when some bozo sends Anthrax spores through the mail, and what happened in Japan when another bozo lets Sarin gas go in the subway. Some Al'Qaeda schmuck could infect himself with Smallpox and take a ride on the NYC Subway for as long as he can before he drops...do we really want to have to deal with the consequences of uninsured people with no access to health care in the aftermath of such an occurrence?

Please, folks. Decide on an opposition candidate. Leave the "vote Green" and "vote Libertarian" stuff for another election at another time. Get behind that opposition candidate and PUSH HARD. Again, if "Regime Change" is to be affected here in 2004, we need to do it by a landslide. Tonight's lame excuse for a State Of The Union message should be enough to convince anyone. VOTE THE BASTARD OUT.

One last thing for the day: I didn't go in to work...my voice is still well-fux0r3d. I need something different, and soon.

From the I hate my job, Part Two department:

My throat feels like I gargled with sandpaper, and it's all my job's fault. I am still struggling with a residual cough from the three weeks I struggled with The Evil Flu. Last night I had a coughing fit and found once I recovered from that I sounded like Brenda Vaccaro and Rod Stewart's love child. I was able to make it through the rest of the shift on two Chloraseptic lozenges, but I'm still fuxored.

I'm going to see my doctor on Wednesday so hopefully we'll find out what's going on. And hopefully I will be over this all by the time I get into the teacher credentialling program at CSUN. One needs a voice to teach.

I think I want to lay some money down on Blogspot to get rid of that damn Google ad. It seems like after my screed on the Christian Taliban and their hypocricy on abortion, there are now two anti-choice links being offered by the Blogspot Google ad. Wonderful. Hopefully it won't cost me too much cash to get rid of it.

No such luck, unfortunately...Blogspot says "coming soon" when it comes to paid options for hosting. Ok, Blogspot guys, let me know when you make up your mind about when those options will be available.

Call this Palm Saturday.

I went to the Dr. this morning for a routine checkup. Jorge, my Dr.'s Physician Assistant, told me "I have something I think is yours." He goes rooting around in one of the cabinets and comes back with a familiar little black zipper case. "This yours?" It was Ume-chan, the Palm m125 I was cursing the world about around Xmas time.

Apparently he saw that I had left it in the examination room last time. He decided that instead of just putting it in the Lost and Found box, where it might have disappeared and been someone's Christmas present for real, he would hide it someplace safe and give it to me personally next time he saw me.

Jorge's getting the m125 I bought off eBay. I put the message "Reward for safe return, no questions asked" in the Owner information box of my Palm, and I have to honor what I said. In this case, the fitting reward was the other m125. I'm going to burn him a CD with Palm goodies on it too. If he needs a Mac CD he can get with me but I'm guessing he's running on Windows like most non-geeks do.

I'm also giving him a Palm case I got from the 99 Cents Only Store (the place rocks, it should be on your list of things to visit when visiting Los Angeles) and a Belkin lighted stylus. He'll have to get himself a sync cable and an SD or MMC memory card, but that's not a hard thing to do. The Palm I got from eBay doesn't have a dummy card (dummy plug? ^_^) to protect the memory card slot, so I think for the safety of the thing he should get one soonest.

A Palm is a good thing for anyone in the medical field to have. There's tons of handy medical programs for Palm, including a Palm edition of the Physician's Desk Reference.

Gotta love it. It's a fundamental law of the Universe that when you replace something you misplace, you find the old one almost immediately thereafter. Welcome home, Ume-chan.

W00t! My Fall 2003 grades came in from LA Valley College.

Read 'em and weep: Three aces and an incomplete. A on Speech 101, (Wasn't expecting that) A on History 11, (expected) A on Health 11. (expected)

The incomplete is on a non-transfer course, Math 112, which is a prerequisite for the Math courses I need for completion of my AA and transfer to Cal State Northridge.

exhale...

I am a happy camper now. I just bought all my books for Spring Semester 2004 and paid less than $150 for the whole kit and kaboodle. God I love Amazon. Let others sweat at the LAVC bookstore and pay out the rear for books you'll only use for 4 months. A little poking around, and everything's cut down to size.

I didn't like putting it on my credit card, ^_^;; but my grant money comes in February and Spring Semester starts on February 9th. Plenty of time for all the books to come in, too. L33t.

I'm putting this here because I am bound to be modded to oblivion on Slashdot...I was responding to an off-topic post with an even more off-topic one. I need to say this, though. I need to speak my peace. The post is about that sure conversation stopper and fight-starter: abortion.

If you get right down to it, the anti-choice are less about "saving the children" and more about controlling the lives and choices of women. A barefoot-and-pregnant woman having babies every 9 months is also likely to be tied down to home and hearth, with none of the "uppity" ambitions that give these (mostly) men fits. She's also likely to die young, too.

A century ago, women like Margaret Sanger took up the cause of birth control because of the plight of the wife-as-baby-factory. Yes, she also had weird ideas about eugenics, but aside from those (which were common in her era) her arguments about the necessity of birth control are still valid.

In societies where safe and effective birth control is available and women are able to plan their families, women and children lead better lives. All religions except the Catholic Church and a small subset of Orthodox Judaism accept birth control now.

The thing that the anti-choice need to support is artificial womb research. If they want to end abortions, they should support research into making them obsolete. Instead of "killing" a fetus, you simply transfer it out of the womb and into the artificial womb until it comes to term. Then when the child is born, you find willing families to adopt.

Oh, silly me. Lots of kids are waiting for adoptive homes...where are the anti-choicers when the time comes to adopt? They're not there? What happened to "adoption, not abortion?" It went the same place as caring for the "poor unborn children" when they get born.

Well, SCO's response to the court order was underwhelming at best and Contempt of Court at worst...here's the Groklaw take on it.

In a similar vein, here's the true bitch slap amongst the recently released Novell/SCO files...

VIA FAX AND CERTIFIED MAIL
RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED

May 28, 2003

Mr. Darl McBride
President and CEO
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042

Re: SCO's "Letter to Linux Customers"

Dear Darl:

As you know, Novell recently announced some important Linux initiatives. These
include an upcoming NetWare version based on the Linux kernel, as well as
collaboration and resource management solutions for Linux.

Put simply, Novell is an ardent supporter of Linux and the open source
development community. This support will increase over time.

It was in this context that we recently received your "Letter to Linux
Customers." Many Novell business partners and customers apparently
received the same letter. Your letter compels a response from Novell.

As we understand the letter, SCO alleges that unnamed entities incorporated
SCO's intellectual property into Linux without its authorization. You
apparently base this allegation on a belief that these unnamed entities copied
some UNIX System V code into Linux. Beyond this limited understanding, we have
been unable to glean any further information about your allegation because of
your letter's vagueness.

In particular, the letter leaves certain critical questions unanswered. What
specific code was copied from UNIX System V? Where can we find this code in
Linux? Who copied this code? Why does this alleged copying infringe SCO's
intellectual property? By failing to address these important questions, SCO has
failed to put us on meaningful notice of any allegedly infringing Linux code,
and thus has withheld from us the ability - and removed any corresponding
obligation - to address you allegation.

As best we can determine, the vagueness about your allegation is intentional.
In response to industry demands that you be more specific, you attempt to
justify your vagueness by stating, "That's like saying, 'show us the
fingerprints on the gun so you can rub them off.'" (Wall Street Journal,
May 19, 2003) Your analogy is weak and inappropriate. Linux has existed for
over a decade, and there are plenty of copies in the marketplace with which SCO
could attempt to prove its allegation.

We are aware that you recently offered to disclose some of the alleged Linux
problems to Novell and others under a nondisclosure agreement. If your offer is
sincere, it may be a step in the right direction. But we wonder whether the
terms of the nondisclosure agreement will allow Novell and others in the Linux
community to replace any offending code. Specifically, how can we maintain the
confidentiality of the disclosure if it is to serve as the basis for modifying
an open source product such as Linux? And if we cannot use the confidential
disclosure to modify Linux, what purpose doe it serve?

In your letter, you analogize SCO's campaign against the Linux community to
that of the record industry against major corporations whose servers contained
downloaded music files. There are crucial differences between the two
campaigns. The record industry has provided specific information to back up its
allegation, which SCO steadfastly refuses to do so. In its allegation letter,
the record industry provides evidence of allegedly infringing activity that is
specific to the targeted company. This offers the company real notice of the
activity, sufficient information to evaluate the allegation, and an opportunity
to stop the activity if it determines the allegation is true. If SCO wants to
compare its actions to those of the record industry, it should follow the
example set by that industry and present specific evidence of the alleged
infringement.

SCO claims it has specific evidence supporting its allegation against the Linux
community. It is time to substantiate that claim, or recant the sweeping and
unsupported allegation made in your letter. Absent such action, it will be
apparent to all that SCO's true intent is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt
about Linux in order to extort payments from Linux distributors and users.

This true intent becomes clearer when one considers various public statements
you and other SCO personnel have made about SCO's intellectual property rights
in UNIX. SCO continues to say that it owns the UNIX System V patents, yet it
must know that it does not. A simple review of U.S. Patent Office records
reveals that Novell owns those patents.

Importantly, and contrary to SCO's assertions, SCO is not the owner of the UNIX
copyrights. Not only would a quick check of U.S. Copyright Office records
reveal this fact, but a review of the asset transfer agreement between Novell
and SCO confirms it. To Novell's knowledge, the 1995 agreement governing
SCO's purchase of UNIX from Novell does not convey to SCO the associated
copyrights. We believe it unlikely that SCO can demonstrate that it has any
ownership interest whatsoever in those copyrights. Apparently, you shave this
view, since over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to
transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected. Finally, we
find it telling that SCO failed to assert a claim for copyright or patent
infringement against IBM.

SCO's actions are disrupting business relations that might otherwise form at a
critical time among partners around Linux technologies, and are depriving these
partners of important economic opportunities. We hope you understand the
potential significant legal liability SCO faces for the possible harm it is
causing to countless customers, developers and other Linux community members.
SCO's actions, if carried forward, will lead to the loss of sales and jobs,
delayed projects, cancelled financing, and a balkanized Linux community.

We, like others, are concerned about the direction of SCO's campaign. For now,
we demand that SCO either promptly state its Linux infringement allegations with
specificity or recant the accusation made in your letter. Further, we demand
that SCO retract its false and unsupported assertions of ownership in UNIX
patents and copyrights or provide us with conclusive information regarding
SCO's ownership claims. In the future, we hope SCO will adhere to standards of
strict accuracy when stating its rights in UNIX.

Sincerely

[signature]

Jack L. Messman

Two words after that. Boo. Yah.

Disclosure at last...

Novell has posted the smoking gun memos that say, in no uncertain terms, that they 0wnz0r UNIX and that SCO has no right to extort money from pointy-haired bosses who don't know better. Between this and the indemnity deal that came to light yesterday, it is safe to say that the Smoking Crack Organization is toast. The smack hath been laid down.

I'd put the links to the docs here, but unfortunately Novell's server is coughing and wheezing under the stress of a heavy-duty Slashdotting.

Of course, discussion of this new development are going on in the usual places, Groklaw and Slashdot. The text of each of the docs is being reposted on Groklaw.

BTW, today is put up or shut up day for SCO. IBM and (surprise!) Intel has put their own money where their mouths are and funded an indemnification fund for corporate end users. The fund will be administered through the Open Source Development Lab. $10 Billion is chump change for these corporate behemoths, but it's a start. It is also a strong signal that when SCO puts its cards on the table, it will be a pretty lame hand.

Here's an interesting idea to battle the flight of jobs from the US offshore: a globally-enforced, culturally sensitive minimum wage.

Dr. Howard Dean needs to embrace this idea. It's actually quite a good one.

Here we are, almost 20 years to the day since Apple announced Macintosh with a spectacular Super Bowl ad. And the world has changed, big time. IBM's no longer Big Brother, it's big brother to a cute, towheaded kid named Linux.

I just sat down and watched the 1997-vintage Quicktime of the Mac Big Brother ad. They seem to me to be like bookends for one another. They serve the same purpose: to announce a commitment to a new platform. They also do another thing quite well...tug at your heartstrings.

Links:
IBM spots, including "Prodigy" which introduces Big Blue's little brother Linux.
The Macintosh "1984" ad, re-encoded for some new version of Quicktime I don't have...[grumble]

It's official now...Disney is going to close its Orlando, FL, US animation studio. Will Burbank be next?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=599&e=1&u=/nm/20040110/media_nm/entertainment_disney_dc

Whew! Community College fee waivers are safe...for now.

Here's the full story: http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/8075540p-9008146c.html

This is cold comfort for those who are not in the lowest of low-income categories, but that's where I am at present. The merely middle class, who have to pay out of pocket for their fees, will have to pay $26 per unit, up from $18. That's not good.

Some of the other ramifications of the Schwartzenegger "Terminator 2004" budget are pretty scary. The handicapped and working-poor who rely on elements of MediCal are going to be stuck it to pretty fierce, and lots of kids who would have qualified for "Healthy Families" will not. That's pretty piss-poor priorities.

The DNS change has already propagated as far as my ISP. We're on the air.

OK, in about a day it will be official...welcome to MsGeek.Org mark II.

The MsGeek.Org domain will be pointed towards this site, thanks to the good offices of Dotster, my registrar of choice.

I will be blogging here about tech stories that interest me, as well as the boring minutiae of my life. And this time, no idiot crapflooders will be able to fsck with me.

MsGeek.Net seems to be taking a little long to be disgorged from DomainDirect, but I'm not sure what I will do with that domain. Maybe I'll just park it on top of MsGeek.Com like MsGeek.Org was for a year or so.

BTW...isn't this "put up or shut up" day for the Smoking Crack Organization? Will Darl McBribe show the code? Or will he be going up the river for a while for Contempt Of Court? The world wonders.

Well, perhaps I spoke hastily when I posted last. Richie (my husband) saw me moping around the house after posting, and took a look at my G3's screen. He said, "whatever happens, this is not the end of your college career."

Even if we have to sacrifice further for it, I'm going to continue to go to LAVC, and hopefully I will be able to graduate and move on to CSUN and their teacher prep program. Full speed ahead, with or without the fee waiver. Ganbatte.

There goes my college career.

Community colleges were particularly anxious. They are preparing for the governor to propose hiking fees from $18 per credit to $26, which would raise more than $90 million in new revenue.

Administration officials have also signaled to the colleges that they are considering eliminating fee waivers for disadvantaged students, in the hope of saving an additional $150 million or so.

Thanks a whole freakin' lot, Ah-nold.

Full story, from the LA Times. Sorry about the "free registration" if you get hit up for it.

Steve Jobs...you idiot! You really bungled the iPod Mini. $249 is NOT an entry level price. And why the fsck would someone willing to pay that price not pay $50 more and get more than three times the storage space? Ooh, it's in PASTELS. Someone call the Fab Five.

This reminds me of the unveiling of the plug ugly iMacs with multi-color shells like "Blue Dalmation (sic)" and "Flower Power." They looked like crap, there were no performance improvements, and consequentially they bombed. Only after the iMac G4 (which I like to call the iLuxoJr. after the creation of Steve Jobs' Other Company) came out did they redeem themselves.

This is not the iPod I was hoping for...the iPod iCouldAfford. Maybe the Fashion Club will like this. But not me.

I hate my job. I hate my job. I really hate my dumb fsckn job. I suppose I should be grateful I have a job in this employment climate, and a job that will bend over backwards to accomodate my school schedule, no less.

However...being a data collector at an opinion research firm is like walking around with a "kick me" sign on your back. People associate you with telemarketing. They've seen Boiler Room and thousands of news reports about unscrupulous telemarketers being busted. Never mind that you're only out to get someone to answer a few questions that will never be personally identifiable. Never mind that you're not selling anything. You are *scum* to the average joe and they never let you forget it.

Hopefully my grades from Fall 2003 semester will mean I can get enough scholarships lined up to where I can bail on it, finally. Hell, I wouldn't mind a dumb work/study job where I'd work on the LAVC campus...I'd quit my survey job in a NY minute in favor of that. Picking up squirrel crap in the Quad is prolly better than some of the abuse I get doing this. :P

Amazing. It was buried, but I actually had one story I submitted to Slashdot approved for posting. Perhaps if it had been put on the main page I would have gotten more information on the topic of external TV tuner boxes designed for use with computer monitors, no computer required. However, the upside to not being on the main page is that the crapflooders didn't go in and puke ASCII goatsex guy and other lovely things all over the story.

This is my first successful story posting in 8 tries. So yeah, it does happen.

Oh yeah, and the ViewSonic NextVision 5 is looking pretty sweet to me. Amazon.Com has a good price on it. Just gotta get through this lean period before my financial aid for Spring 2004 comes through.

Frustrations, frustrations, frustrations. I have been trying for quite a while to get VCD play going on my ThinkPad, and I've hit another snag. A friend of mine made me some VCDs and basically WiMP couldn't make heads or tails of them. The reason? VCD2. WiMP can grok VCD 1.1 but not VCD2. Bleah. I'd use Linux but apparently there's something funky with the video driver here which doesn't allow a video overlay. All I get when I try to run a VCD in Linux is a solid blue screen in Xine. The audio plays, but no video. Oh well, time to do some more research.

Well, it really is New Year's 2004. Didn't do much, hung out with my friend Chad who came down to LA from Santa Barbara to visit me and another (local) friend Kara. Didn't make it in to Little Tokyo, oh well. Still, a good start to the year. I will have some announcements to make here soon if all goes well, but right now it's too soon to make them so I'll just shut up. Happy New Year, everyone!