WARNING: Political rant.

From a cause on Facebook :

We oppose the deterioration of our society and culture by the destruction of marriage by the inclusion of homosexual marriage.

What a crock of shit! The amount of FUD being televised on this is insane. I seriously doubt any school will include gay marriage in their curriculum let alone teach your child to be gay. It’s retarded people. Whether you believe that being gay is a choice or is learned, it’s a fact of life all over the globe and no matter how hard you try, your precious Timmy is going to find out about homosexuals sooner or later. I don’t understand the reasoning.

Furthermore, a lot of this anti-gay marriage bullshit is based on religious beliefs. What happened to separation of church and state? Keep your religious ideals to yourself, do not impose your silly belief system on others (or we will be forced to group you with the rest of the Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Here’s another bit from the description of the cause:

This is a cause for everyone who believes that marriage, as a tradition, should be preserved as between one man and one woman.

Again, you’re imposing your religious beliefs on others. Now you’re excluding Mormons. Fortunately (for you), no one cares about them because they’re all crazy. Hey, if I told you I talked to God in the forest and he gave me some magic stones, would you believe me?

No, you can’t see the stones. They are only for me, but trust me, they’re magic.

If you ask me, there are far more larger issues with this state than gay marriage. Why don’t you redirect your homophobic energies towards something more productive, like say, illegal immigration.

Today, I am one of the many fortunate people selected for jury duty. There were about 250 of my peers here this morning before they started raffling off spots in specific court rooms. Apparently, today is a slow day and this waiting room usually sees more than 500 people and is standing room only. I guess it’s not that bad; I don’t have to be at work, they have free WiFi for the jurors and, it’s Thursday. What does Thursday have that other days don’t? Usually, most cases have already been scheduled and a jury picked earlier in the week. Come Thursday, there’s few to no cases needing jurors. Take today for instance: Volume of prospective jurors is low (250 vs the normal 500-600), there was ONE case that was picking a jury panel and actually starting today, two cases that were just picking jurors today and two court rooms that have the rest of us in the poop pool on “stand-by.” It’s now close to 2 PM and we were instructed to be back from lunch by 1:30 PM. Nothing is really happening. Just a bunch of people watching a Wil Smith movie (the one with his son in it, the name escapes me). We’re all just sitting around waiting (hoping) for them to send us all home. It’s all very interesting.

Oh, on the wireless note: The courts here use some third-party provider for access. Kind of like you would see in a hotel. You connect, open a browser and they intercept the initial network traffic and direct you to a page where you either pay or enter in some access code to get connected to the outside world. Well, I had gotten the access code for today and began working on the side gig. Just before lunch, I had closed out all my windows to get ready to leave when I notice a Verify Certificate dialog that had been sitting there for a while. I’ve seen these before, nothing new there. But, this one took me as a surprise and I’m not sure if I should be concerned about it. At the very least, it “super unprofessional.”

Trust me ...it's super unprofessional

From the “scientist are people too” department:

One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year’s supply of condoms… [that] would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

I imagine it’s still going to be uncomfortable the day after.

It appears that Amazon is having some issues. Their site has been down for well over an hour now. I can’t imagine how much money this kind of downtime has on a company as large as Amazon. Maybe in the millions by now.

This screen shot was grabbed at approximately 12:10PM PST on 06 June 2008. About 30 minutes ago I was simply getting a “HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

Update: I did manage to get the home page at about 12:22PM PST, but after clicking a link, I get the same “We’re Sorry!” page.

Techcrunch has a post on it as well with a note from Amazon PR (if you can call it a note).

Update #2: Cnet speculates Amazon could potentially have missed out on close to $1.4M USD in the 90 or so minutes they were offline.

Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don’t include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

I feel bad for the poor schmucks who had to sweat this one out.

Is it really that surprising that M.P.A.A, R.I.A.A and others use flawed methods to determine who violates Copyright laws? These are some of the same companies that want to charge you more for a song purchased over a wireless network versus from a computer. Why? Just because. Assholes.

The researchers rigged the software agents to implicate three laserjet printers, which were then accused in takedown letters by the M.P.A.A. of downloading copies of “Iron Man” and the latest Indiana Jones film.

The Inexact Science Behind DMCA Takedown Notices - Bits

About a month ago, a friend (John) mentioned that he was on a mission to try 20 different holiday/winter brews before the New Year. I happily accepted his challenge and so began our journey. Over the past month, we have hunted near and far for the worlds finest holiday beers. So far I’ve managed to try 15 different ones and all of them have been really good beers but the following five are special beers that you should definitely try this year.

First, the runner ups:

Jubilale

Brewery: Deschutes ABV: 6.7%

I’m a huge Deschutes fan. I really like their Hop Trip fresh hop ale, Mirror Pond and Black Butte Porter. Their winter brew, Jubilale, is a decent choice as well and would have made my top 5 last year (had I actually tried more beers last year).

Santa’s Little Helper

Brewery: Port Brewing ABV: 9.5%

I was recently introduced to Port Brewing (and the lovely Pizza Port chain of pizza “joints”). Let me tell you, this company creates some excellent beers. Santa’s Little Helper is a fair example of their talents. It’s an imperial stout with a lot of kick. It has a slight taste of alcohol at the end, but it’s a tasty little bugger. If you really want a good beer (and like extra hop), try their Hop 15!

5. Winterbraun

Brewer: Lost Coast ABV: 6.5%

Lost Coast’s label are always entertaining. The beer is usually always tasty and the Winterbraun is no exception. This is a nice brown ale with an excellent malty taste that’s easy to drink.

4. Celebration Ale

Brewery: Sierra Nevada AVB: 6.8%

From my alma mater hometown of Chico, CA. Their Pale Ale is one of the beers that brought the ale back into main stream in the early 90s. Every year Sierra Nevada makes the Celebration Ale to celebrate the holidays and it’s great every year.

3. Old Jubilation

Brewery: Avery ABV: 8%

Avery produces some very tasty ales. Old Jubilation is definitely one of them. Very crisp. This is the type of beer you want to have with you while sitting next to a fireplace on a cold winter’s night.

2. Yule Smith

Brewer: Ale Smith ABV: 9.5%

The first bottle I purchased of Yule Smith happened to be the summer version so be careful when looking for this beer. The summer version has fireworks on the label while the winter (holiday) version has a nice little wreath. Not that the summer version isn’t good (it was and I’ll look for that this summer for sure), but the holiday version was especially tasty. It slightly hoppy but not overly so.

1. Delirium Noël

Brewer: Brouwerij Huyghe ABV: 10%

This is an excellent beer! It’s a Belgium style ale with an extra kick. Despite its high ABV (Alcohol by Volume), it doesn’t have the alcohol taste. It’s smooth, flavorful and full bodied. It goes down easy and a pint full will definitely put you in the holiday spirit. Careful, this is a potent beer and will sneak up on you. Especially if you buy a 22oz bottle and enjoy the whole thing in one sitting.

In all fairness, all the beers I’ve had this year were excellent examples of what todays smaller breweries have to offer. Sure some where tastier than others, but overall, I was never dissatisfied. I’ll post a full list when the competition is over.

I just noticed that my MacBook Pro’s memory usage was rather high. I’m not working on anything memory intensive (Vmware, Photoshop, etc). So I opened up Activity Monitor to find this

Why the hell is Preview taking up nearly 350 MB of ram with NO windows open? I don’t remember opening any large files with it. I’ve been gone all day. I smell a leak!

See here, Bullet point number one:

Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.

Mac OS X 10.1 came out just over six years ago in 2001. If you’ve been using the “upgrade” option every time you update your OS X version, I think it’s time you performed a fresh install. Especially on such an old system (what do you have, an original Quicksilver? No? Older?). If you’ve made it this long without having to do a clean install, congratulations. You’re one of very small number of people. Hell, I haven’t kept a computer for longer than two or three years.

I bought my first Apple in 1997 — PowerPC G3 300Mhz (of the Beige kind). I bought my second Apple in 2000 — Quicksilver 733Mhz (non-shiny doors). Sold the G3 in 2002 (or so). I bought my first Powerbook in 2003 (G4 1Ghz Titanium) slightly used from a nice girl (with buyer’s remorse) in San Francisco. It took a dump about two years ago and I succumbed to way of cheap x86 hardware and Linux. But I redeemed myself about a year and a half ago when I bought my second Apple laptop (Macbook Pro 2.16Ghz).

I digress. What I’m saying is that, even if you’re lucky enough to have the same computer for the last six years (or more), I doubt you’d be as lucky going through four separate system upgrades (assuming you upgraded every version). Even if you didn’t and you went from 10.1 directly to 10.5, I highly doubt Apple spent much time testing that upgrade path (if at all).

Radiohead is free from their EMI contract and free to do what they will with their latest release. Sell where they want, when they want and charge whatever they want for it as well. Which is why it makes sense to do what they are doing now: Sell it for how much YOU, the listener, thinks it (or the band itself) is worth. I imagine it’s akin to jumping down a rabbit hole; you never know where the idea of leaving it up to the consumer to pay for your products will end up. I’m not quite sure how it will pan out, but I’m fairly confident that Radiohead will make out O.K.

I’ll admit that when I first read of the It’s up to you pricing scheme of the new release, the first thing that popped into my head was, “Sweet! Free music without the guilt.” But then I stopped to think about what Radiohead was actually doing. They could charge whatever they wanted for the digital download of In Rainbows (even if it were only a few bucks for the album). They spent the better part of two and half years working on this album. Even if they didn’t work 40 hour work weeks writing/recording/mixing, it’s still a chunk of someone’s life. What’s that worth?

I know Radiohead could probably afford to just give the download away, but then the album would loose it’s worth. A friend of mine told me a story about this rather nice office chair he wanted gone. It was your average office chair and was in pretty good shape. He had put it out on the sidewalk in front of his house with a sign that read “FREE.” The chair sat in the same place for a week. No one wanted it. After a week, he put a different sign on it. This sign read “$5.” The chair was gone by the time he got home from work. It’s like the word “Free” has a neutral connotation (maybe even negative for some people) where it means, “Oooh, it’s FREE!” or “It’s free? Why?” I suppose it also depends on the “what” as well, but there are a LOT of people downloading free music everyday (just ask the record labels).

For me, I’m much more willing to shell out a ten-spot for an album when I know that most of that will end up directly in the pockets of the artists. In fact, I was “this” close to pulling the trigger this afternoon on the pre-sale, but I was either too lazy or too busy to pull the wallet out of my back pocket to get my credit card. I will buy this album. I won’t say for how much.

The only possible downside of this pricing scheme maybe the guilt factor of paying too little over paying nothing at all. It’s easier to just leave the field blank than to have to quantify the value of the album/artist. Even when you really like the artist and have complete faith that the album will nothing short of stellar. However, that said, I also believe most people are honest (maybe I’m naive). I predict more people will pay something than nothing. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Thom, if you’re reading this, drop me a line in 6 months and let me know how well this business model works out.

Work Politics and the Stationary Career Path

Work has been a pain. There’s really no other way to describe it. Everyone is getting pissy because of tight deadlines and it’s only a matter of time before the finger pointing begins. I’m OK with that. Finger pointing doesn’t affect me as much. I just shrug it off and laugh. Usually in front of the person doing the pointing.

One of the things that really bugs me though is the fact that my career there feels stagnant. I’ve asked for a title increase once and been shot down. It’s not the fact that I was shot down that upsets me. It’s the response I received from upper management. Something about “implications” surround the idea of promoting me. I’ve been told by several people at the company that my name comes up often as the “go-to” person when it comes to getting things done and picking up where others left off. I’ve been told by higher paid employees that I am far more knowledgeable than they are and that I am highly regarded.

I don’t get it. I think they want me to quit. I’ll ask again, but I fear I will either get the same response or worse, no response.

Ruby

I was all gung-ho the other night about diving into Rails. I still am. I am just running out of steam these days. Between the nine hours at the day job and a couple hours after on the side gig that doesn’t pay, I just can’t find the time.

It is going to happen though. It is. Shut up.

VMware and Unity

Is it me, or is VMware really giving Parallels a run for their money? I’ve been using VMware Fusion as my virtual machine of choice for the past several months. I’ve always felt that VMware has had a slight leg up on Parallels in the performance department. Now with Unity, I think VMware has a solid lead in the VM race. It is just an awesome product. I highly recommend trying it out. It’s still in beta, but so far, I haven’t had any issues running XP or Ubuntu (Feisty). Best of all, if F R double E whilst in beta.

Cable vs. DSL

We’re cutting back on the spending around the house lately. One of the things I’ve chosen to sacrifice is Cable to DSL. As much as I hate the pone company, I’m willing to save $20 or so bucks per month for (what I thought was) a slightly slower interweb. Slightly was a total understatement. While downloading the latest VMware, I really felt the pain. First off, my download speed was a measly 68Kb/s and then to top that off, the transfer died 50MB into the download. Luckily, I just hooked this all up tonight and have not canceled cable just yet. I pulled out the cable modem and finished the download in four minutes (averaging ~700Kb/s). Pathetic. I think if I do a cost per bandwidth, I’m actually getting ripped off by DSL.

There was a whole host of other mishaps with the DSL order, but, I’m not going to get into that.