In this context marriage is a LEGAL institution not a religious one. Way to legislate hate. As for Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas my expectations have always been much lower, however, shame on you “values voters” who only respond to dog whistles.
Archive for the 'Editorial' Category
This is a case of too much yet not enough.
I tried, really tried, but this weighted tome dragged me under and held me until sputtering and choking I put it down for bright skies and fresh air. Melville could have used a good editor as the liberal use of semi-colons left me eyes bulged and teeth gritted waiting for the sweet relief of a period. Coupled with the near worthless expositions of natural history, metaphysics, and self-congratulatory displays of knowledge about biblical and ancient myths the worthwhile parts are stretched too far apart like so few of those whaling stations he wrote so fondly about.
I dashed that out late Saturday night after tossing the book aside in frustration but is it really a problem with the prose? After some honest self reflection, I’d say no. This is a classic “It’s me, not you” situation. Too put it in perspective my time and resources are over taxed, over allocated, and poorly invested. I subscribe to over 200 RSS feeds, participate in dozens of online communities, chase after my year-old, work a full-time job, consult on the side, and try to cook a decent meal. When I carve out a moment to read, like I have been trying to do for over two years with my reading list, the most I can concentrate on is linear fluff. Melville is too dense and while wandering around the woods with Gabi I came to the conclusion that I need to carve up my life and discard those pieces that are superfluous.
200 feeds, seriously I would wake up in the morning with some 1800 unread items and after skimming 200 items I would just make the whole stack as read. What is the point of that? Wasted time, wasted energy, and the whole process left me feeling both mentally fatigued and scatterbrained. After hacking my feed list up and sanding it down it now stands at 53 feeds and when I wake up I have around 80 items unread.
Online communities? Paring it down as I type with the goal of abandoning nearly all with the exception of where my co-workers and friends hangout: Facebook/Twitter/Geezeo for work and a private site for my friends. I’m still following the blogs of friends and will chat there but gone are the days of commenting on Digg, Reddit, eMusic, Last.fm, ad nauseum. One thing that I have learned is that soaking in it can be mentally toxic; how many Ron Paul stories can you read and how many posts can a lonely divorcee make while drunk to what was once my favorite music destination? Really, I don’t give a fuck how much Chardonnay you drank or how horny The National makes you and Ron Paul? Get serious, he is a Class A fuckwit. A post or two might elicit a chuckle, but any number beyond that makes me want to hurl my laptop right out the front door. The noise is overwhelming the signal.
Getting back to basics. It is really more like reconstructing my pre-Internet life: time to read and listen to music, time to work, time with family, time to be creative, and time to be active. While I might not be able to drop everything and hit the trails for an epic ride like I did some 10 years ago I can carve out time for a walk. Better yet, we signed up at a local community center which has everything you could wish a health and fitness center could and would: daycare, playscape, Olympic sized pool, exercise classes, free weights, cardio room. It will give us a chance to spend time as a family as well as provide us a place to maybe get a little less doughy.
So what does this have to do with Moby Dick? My life as I have been living it is keeping me from being able to really read it and that is a symptom of a bigger issue. If I cannot put forth the time to read a book typically assigned in a high school English class what else am I missing out on and who else is getting shorted when it comes to my attention and energy. So, while I’m putting it down and picking up something a little more trashy, I am not willing to give up on it completely. Maybe after I put things back in perspective you might find me banging out some sets on a recumbent while polishing off the closing chapters of Melville’s love letter to the semi-colon.
Seriously,
“But I always have marmalade in my sandwiches!” exclaimed Paddington, when he was first approached by the advertising agency.
“That’s exactly why we think you would be perfect for the campaign,” they explained. “We want people who normally have something different in their sandwiches to try Marmite”. (Paddington Stars in a New Series of Marmite Ads)
This is just plain wrong. So fucking wrong. Thanks for taking a shit on my childhood, Mr. Brown.
Fuck Apple and fuck their iPod Classic.
So, it’s finally happened. Unhappy with other media players being better than iTunes, Apple have apparently decided to stop them from working with the new range of iPods.
Who does this affect?
This affects Linux users - there’s no iTunes for Linux, so popular Linux iPod management tools like gtkpod and Rhythmbox will not work with the new range of iPods.
Windows users who just plain don’t like iTunes and perfer an alternative like Winamp, Ephpod or many of the other iPod management applications out there.
That is more than enough for me to ditch the notion of using their player at all and even if the gtkpod team gets it working that is just plain bullshit. Face Apple, iTunes is a steaming pile of shit and fucking worthless if you want to manage a collection bigger than a handful of tracks and locking people into it by way of the iPod db is a real asshole move.
Doctorow says it better (and with less cursing) than myself:
…this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware.
It’s hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can’t build their own players to load up iPods — now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it’s conceivable that we’d get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy — this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).
Hopefully Cowon will roll out a large capacity player soon or I’m going to be one miserable bastard.
I’ve been out of the loop for a little bit with the tech news, having my nose to the grindstone for the past couple of months, so I was a little alarmed when I saw this news item from ZaReason, “Today was filled with articles such as, ‘Ubuntu Kills Linux, Then Self, Dell Suspected of Foul Play‘ which had a lot of depressing but true points and even more depressing and untrue points.” A little taken aback, I re-read the article and the comments thinking to myself that this person certainly has a dislike for Linux. I then scanned the sidebar for what other articles that had been written and not really surprising it was filled with charmers like these:
- The More Dell Lies, the More Ubuntu Community Embraces Dell
- Ubuntu Kills Linux, Then Self, Dell Suspected of Foul Play.
- Ubuntu’s Death Rattle
- Typical Linux FUD Campaign towards Microsoft.
- Ubuntu and Dell, a Mismatch Made in a Place Called Hell [IdeaStorm].
- Smartest Linux Move Ever? And Why Ubuntu will Fail
- Microsoft Thanks Ubuntu For Increasing XP and Vista Sales
WTF? Sounds more like someone has a score to settle or is on the payroll.
Curious about the company behind the blog I peek at their homepage which proudly crows, “open-source, non-proprietary solutions for Windows.” Ah, a kernel of truth. They are in the business of selling WAMP tools, “Apache Web-Developer Server Suite for Windows including PHP, MySQL, ASP, JSP, Perl, SSL” which, in my experience makes whatever they have to say pretty worthless. Look if you cannot figure out that Apache and MySQL run like shit on Windows and that you are better off sticking with Microsoft product offerings then you are pretty fucking ignorant. Guess what? Windows Server 2003 family ships with IIS. Why in the hell would you try and bolt on Apache? Sure it is superior in my experience to IIS but it runs like hell on MS products so if you are going to use Apache then use a *nix derivative otherwise stick with the Microsoft product family. Same goes for the database, if you have the cash to pony up for 2003 then you sure as hell likely have it for a SQL Server license as well. If not, then why are you screwing around with Microsoft for your back-end services?*
So to the fine folks at ZaReson, no need to get depressed or be saddened. In short, there is nothing to see there or even really worth listening to and for as how well reasoned those arguments seem or sound it really boils down to an individual trying to protect their tiny little market share and for all the “Linux, Windows, MacOS? Who cares. Just give me something that works!” comments it is quite clear what they think the world should use. FUD indeed.
* Note: I spent eight years as a Windows System Administrator and three so far as a Linux Systems Administrator.
When checking my mail this morning I was greeted with a pile of new ads boxing in my mail experience with Yahoo which on my current laptop makes reading damn near impossible.
Since I’m too tired at the moment to really work myself into a froth I’ll just say that if you are looking for my new home I can be found at james AT guess-what-domain-this-is DOT com.
