2008 October

I was never much for Halloween. Yeah, I know.. you’re shocked and awed.
Much like Christmas, I enjoy it in the most crassly commercial sense. Stated another way, I’m only in it for the candy.
My wife loves Halloween. I have no idea why. I also have no idea why she tolerates [...]

It’s not that repeating the same old news stories quarter after quarter breeds familiarity or contempt, but our friends at Exxon Mobil just posted the biggest profit in US history.
This quarter’s figure surpassed even the past analyst estimates at $14.83 billion.  Some creative person with too much time on their hands computed this to equal [...]

Being a guitar player above most else, my music collection tends to reflect this (to what some would say is an extreme).  After many years of playing, I discovered that every song did not, in fact, have to feature primarily guitars and solos.
It’s not like I haven’t been a fan of Joe Cocker since the [...]

Schadenfraud is taking delight in the misfortune of others. Let’s say Dick Cheney took George Bush hunting and neither of them came back. If we were to giggle or break out into dance and song, that would be schadenfraud. A less extreme example would be gleeful fascination with Britney Spears’ descent [...]

Every time I think I’ve seen it all in the Twilight Zone<tm> (work), they surprise me. Mostly unpleasantly.
Today started off like any other day, with my wife watching the local Fox news. Unlike most other days, they were in the midst of their wall-to-wall Phillies coverage. In fact, Fox is changing their [...]

I have had no luck whatsoever with guitar software on linux.   The effects software squeals, farts, and generally refuses to work.  My ten minute exposure to tab editor/players was very similar.
Feeling brave (or forgetting what I learned), I downloaded some tab last night.  Some were visual, some in various formats for players.  The range of [...]

I’ve spent quite a while railing against what I refer to as the One Party: Greed.
I finally figured out a way to illustrate the distinction between R’s and D’s:
We’re going to get screwed in the worst possible place either way.
A Democrat will screw us and steal our money for KY Jelly.
A Republican will screw us [...]

Here’s an Instructable from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about tracking codes printers add to documents they print.
Yes, even your printer is spying on you.
RIGHTSWATCH VOTING SPECIAL
Princeton publishes how-to guide for hacking Sequoia e-voting machines
Beat them at their own game!
Want To Know Just How Bad Security Is For E-Voting Machines?
Hint: it’s bad.
Surprise, Surprise: E-Voting Glitches Found [...]

A lot of people meet in bars. I don’t drink, so I’m not a lot of fun in bars. Even if I did drink, I wouldn’t be a lot of fun in bars. Since I’ve been performing for a long time, I had a strict policy of not being in bars [...]

In one of my past lives, I was a medical biller for a private physician. I got to behold all sorts of people and episodes of lunacy. It was an odd time for me; kind of a bridge between my late teens and actually deciding to act like an adult (I’m still not [...]