This is one of the best banners I have seen. It nearly got me! I was really tempted!

For me, the phrase “Let’s roll” will forever be connected to the events fo September 11, 2001. I am pretty sure that this phrase also means the same thing to many others. Is it over-sensitive of me to find this ad a little distasteful?

As a side note, finding stupid banner ads has become a great hobby of mine! :)

I am pretty surprised that no one has posted anything about this yet, considering it was pretty much stupideverything inc. that was at the movie! So, I shall be the first.

I hadn’t heard too much about this movie, and I wasn’t planning on going to see it, except for, I was incredibly bored and I was invited by some cool people. I heard it was based on a comci book (no, excuse me, “graphic novel”) and so that didn’t particularily apeal to me.

The movie does have an interesting feel. It is different to have a big government conspiracy movie that was NOT set in the US. I think that was done so that all of the allusions the movie made to the current political situation in the US would not be so obvious.

I took this movie to really be a statement about the George Bush regime. It was also very George Orwell in the way it showed the government: always on a TV screen, spying on its citizens, listening to their phone calls….hmm, does any of this sound familiar?

Was the movie good, though? Yeah, it was pretty good. I liked the character “V” alot, he was intellegent but sort of creepy too. Sorta like the mystery and undergroundness (I know that’s not a word) of Batman mixed with the wisdom and foresight of Morpheus (I really didn’t want a Matrix reference…) mixed with the insanity of any Jack Nicholson character. Natalie Portman was also very good and her accent was pretty believable. It was a strange movie, it was a mix of so many other movies/tv shows/books that we have seen before, that everything felt familiar. I was sitting there thinking “This is like ‘1984′ or ‘The X-Files’ or ‘Batman’ or …. yeah, that other movie these dudes did.” You would think I would be able to see through the patchwork that made up this movie, but I didn’t. I believed it was all new material.

This movie is good. I recommend seeing it if you like any of the above mentioned works, or renting it if you sort of like any of those. If you hated all of the above, do not see this movie.

I am waiting for a bow hunting school to open up.

I so want a sword.

Castle Keep, Isle of Skye - Fine Handcrafted Blades

Hand made swords, and you can get them done in Damascus steel? Yeah, that’s the ticket. Personally, I would go for a Damascus Viking Blade. I think it’s just beautiful.

What would I use it for? Well, if I ever needed it, I’d have it. Society is going to hell anyway. Be prepared, I always say. Or maybe that’s the scouts. Either way.

Definitely on the list of cool things I want.

The Joel on Software Discussion Group - Why I Hate Frameworks

Amen.

I am very much opposed to DRM. It seems to be a complete waste of time and resources - I don’t see how they expect the informed public to stand for it. I really hope people don’t.

I can really relate to this mentality, after my recent aquisition of an ipod, and my interaction with itunes.

An excellent article.

The big DRM mistake

I work for a pretty great company - they bought us all Ipod Nano’s - an unexpected but very appreciated gesture.

Apple are the kings of UI. This thing is slick:

Rotating the command dial took a minute to get used to, I was expecting to use the circular dial as 4 push buttons - but this is much cooler than that; by sliding my thumb around the dial I can easily navigate the menu’s. I guess it’s pressure sensitive or something, but you just have to slide your thumb over the dial. On the left side, down is up. The center button is the enter key. This is all pretty intuitive after a few minutes of playing around.

When a song is playing, you can adjust the volume by rolling the dial thing in the same way you navigate menu’s. Hit the select/enter button and you get the ability to move to any part in the song (the blue dot is where you are, you can drag it back and forth) and then hit enter again and you get a rating system for that song.

The nano’s very easy to use, fun to play with, and even has games that are worth playing on it. I enjoy the earphones, Moby sounds fantastic on them. The battery charges itself when you plug in via USB. And, again, it really looks awesome.

There is, however, a downside to this experience.

The whole itunes thing is just ridiculous. All I want to do is move some music over to the nano - can we do that? No. We have to create playlists, import music and do a dance around a fire chanting in some forgotten language. Only after we sacrifice a bull to the gods, can we listen to music on it.

If Apple wants to sell some software to help you manage your music collections, then that’s great. But to make that software the only means to interact with an ipod is just stupid. Some people already have methods of organization in place for their music, and don’t want to be forced into theirs.

I use Linux, and I wanted to play with the new toy - I am fully aware that I may have to pay a price to get anything working in Linux that isn’t supported, and that’s fine. I tried Rhythmbox, Amarok and gtkpod. The first two look really neat (Amarok especially has an impressive UI) but they just weren’t working nicely … or at all. In the end, I’m using gtkpod ’cause it’s what I could get working.

Rhythmbox and Amarok are easy to install (yum install {rhythmbox,amarok}) but they will only work if you mount the ipod to /mnt/ipod/, and even if you do that, it might not work right. In fact, I did mount it that way and didn’t get it working. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but tonight I’m impatient as I just want to play music - not mess around on the computer. Since they both use the libgpod library that the gtkpod folks made, I thought I’d try gtkpod.

I’m running FC4, so I used RPMs for the install. It was a bit of work for me as I don’t have my yum configured to pull packages off any interesting servers - ie, I’m only using the defaults. I grabbed anything yum couldn’t find off of rpmfind. So, in case you need the RPMs, here’s what I ended up with:
First, the dependancies:
* libgpod-0.3.0-1.2fc4.i386.rpm (I got that on the intertron - from rpmfind.net)
* yum install libid3tag (I grabbed that with yum)
* faad2-2.0-4.2.fc4.i386.rpm (again, found that on rpmfind.net)

You might have other dependancies that you’re missing, but that’s all it took for me. Now for the main package:
* gtkpod-0.99.2.1.2.fc4.i386.rpm - that’s the whole app.

When you get that setup, then you can run gtkpod, which looks a little something like this:

Start that up, edit your preferences to make sure you’re pointing at your nano properly (it expects /mnt/ipod - I had to change it to /media/ipod - if you don’t, it’ll segfault during a synch). Then read/import your DB from the ipod. Now add some music and write/synchronize it. That should be it! At this point you can listen to music on that cool device of yours.

For the record, installing the software isn’t that bad, and gtkpod is actually pretty nice. Using it is fine, once you’re used to it. I would rather, instead of this itunes mentality, something that just shows me what’s on the device, and a file browser so I can drag things on/off of it. I’m sure someone will make an interface that’s a bit more useful in time - until then, I hope this helps anyone out who has one and wants to use it with Linux.

And now a random fact about Chuck Norris…

I was recently involved in a debate about Oreo’s. Now, they’re great cookies, but the icing to cookie ratio seems a bit low. It’s much more fun if you can have the icing with one of the cookie sides. I used to eat lots of Oreo’s. So many, in fact, that there are documented occasions where chipmunks have actually taken from my vast stores of Oreos - and taken them to which I assume would be some sugary emergency food stockpile.

I was chatting about how to open an Oreo, and it seems to me like it’s fairly simple. You want to carefully twist off the top. The twisting seems to work really well for me. You know, as opposed to just throwing the cookie on the ground and expecting it to break properly. I have no idea how else you’d seperate the cookie - maybe with a blowtorch? Perhaps a laser? Craig was having some trouble getting the icing to stay to one side, so I went to pick up some Oreo’s to document the whole thing. I got one package of double stuff Oreo’s (mmmm - double icing) and another of some weird peanut butter/chocolate combination.

The first ones I tried are the PB/chocolate ones. And they reacted very poorly to the twisting. I tried about 5 cookies, and this would be the best of them:

So, it seems that single layer Oreo’s aren’t very easy to peel apart.

Then, I tried the double layer Oreo’s, which are the ones I normally get. Why the hell you’d pay the same amount for less icing is beyond me. Anyway, I twisted those off without a problem, the icing always stays to one side, for example:

The double layers are no problem at all. So, don’t buy the single layer cookies - they apparently add some sort of glue-like substance to the icing to prevent seperation.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.