The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone

My mom is the best mom in the world. If you happen to think differently, well, to each their own, but you're wrong. She's pretty, she's crazy, she's funny, and she's got two good-looking sons who love her dearly. She put up with a mountain of crap raising us, and came out smelling like a rose. Well, except for that one time that she beat me though I didn't deserve it. Not that I'd remind her about that, but you know.

Here's to you mom. In a perfect world, I'd come over today, and hang out in the kitchen, listening to the washer run, talking about anything and everything, and we'd watch the sun go down in the back yard with a pot of fresh coffee, and a mutual love of night air and whippoorwills.

My mom is awesome.

My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

The newer Apple laptops, the MacBooks, have a built-in sudden motion sensor that will tell them if they've fallen off a table, for example. This allows them to park their hard drives before they hit the ground, which avoids some types of hard-drive damage.

But I'm not sure Apple was counting on people having so much fun with these things.

Exhibit A: The MacSabre

Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.

Exhibit B: iAlertU

iAlertU is a car alarm system for your MacBook computer. iAlertU uses the built in motion sensor device to detect movement of your MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm. The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement.

Exhibit C: Smackbook Pro

Turns out, the laptop has a built-in motion sensor. Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is this: If the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards said earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact. It can, however, also be used in situations not involving lobbing the laptop across the room, fun though that may be.

Cool cool cool. Unfortunately, my Powerbook is old, unadorned with such wonderful gadgets.

Madonna is running out of ideas, methinks.

click to view

The uses for iPods just keeps on growing:

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones.

Hmmm. Unfortunately, I get the feeling Creative's will be getting a patent on this technology sometime around 2015.

Man, check out the site for this. If I was an excercisin' man, I'd actually like to try that out. Of course, paying $400 for a pair of shoes, not to mention $300 for an iPod Nano actually costs more than getting liposuction, so I'll wait.

If you're as vehemently anti-Socialist, read: libertarian, as I am, you've probably written Europe off. Europe is a socialist playground, unfortunately. Germany, France, England, and a few other countries are officially stuck in the tar, and have sadly already started their sad, slow, hopeless slide into the pits of 8th grade history class. It's all over but the archaeology at this point. But life goes on, and there will be a resurrection. If Europe is to live on, it must decide what defines Europe.

If you ask a European, he'll tell you that what defines a European nation is the 'nation' itself, which means, in the modern context, the race that inhabits it. Germans are Germans owing to either their pale skin, or, in the case of the rassige Germans, their family's documentable lineage. The French are exactly the same. There's a defined border between racially indigenous Europeans, and the dreaded Einwanderer, or immigrants. I could probably pass as a German, despite my bushy red sideburns. I understand the social requirements. I understand them at least enough to know how much they chafe at individualism, and I avoid breaking said requirements in exasperating ways. Once I get rid of my outrageous American accent, my pale skin and decorum would suitably qualify me as a German.

You see, Socialism dooms the Europeans. Socialism is itself an obvious lie. I'll give you an example. It's often said that Europeans are tightwads, but that's not exactly the truth. To understand them, you have to look no further than their tipping system. When drink in a German bar, for example, the tip is built into the price of the drinks. And it's not a stingy tip, either: It's 18%. This means, obviously, that no matter how good the service is, you're tipping them very well for a job not yet done. The joke is, it's an unspoken rule that you ignore the built-in tip, and give the waiter a little bit extra as trinkgeld, or 'drinking money'. I usually rebel at this point. I give at least 10% tip to whomever serves me, because I understand that the establishment keeps the 18% for itself. Now, never mind the fact that the average waiter in Germany gets paid a fortune in comparison to a waiter in the U.S. (basically, they actually get a real paycheck, and health insurance), and they can only hardly be fired, owing to the whole worker's paradise thing. Imagine being a waiter where it didn't matter how good you did your job, you'd still make rent and you couldn't be fired! How hard would you actually work? And for what purpose?

That is Socialism. I spent an evening talking with The Snowfrog, an ex-East German. We talked about an astounding array of subjects, as we usually do when we've had enough to drink. The Socialist politicians in Germany prey upon the good intentions of Germans. They practice extravagant charity with money that doesn't belong to them, and humility through the debasement of hard-working people that have no choice in the matter. All the arguments in European politics revolve around the getting of money, as all politics do, without the common courtesy of speaking directly with those to whom the money belongs!

European politics consists of morality brokers, who promise to use your money for moral purposes that you could only dream of being good enough for fulfilling yourself. They will force you, under threat of imprisonment, to be charitable and loving of your fellow man.

And your fellow man will be ungrateful, and will spit upon you, given the opportunity. At least when you leave a good tip, someone should say 'thank you'.

I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.

Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.

The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.

Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.

I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.

"We haven't been able to find the head."
I looked at the floor around the table, barely thinking. "You look in the cabinets?"
The uniform nodded. "Cabinets. Fireplace. We even looked in the toilet tanks. It ain't here."
Christ, another head freak. If there's anything I can't stand it's the trophy-hunters. A cannibal is a walk in the park next to these guys.
I walked out the front door and lit a cigarette. The Chief got out of his car and started across the manicured lawn.
"What's the story, Jake?"
"Upscale neighborhood, pricy dame–"
"Another head freak?"
"Yep."

The BBC wanted an expert opinion on the Apple vs. Apple Corps. copyright infringement debate. So, they invited Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net. And then they interviewed his taxi cab driver.

Video Here. And it's awesome. I only hope I would hold up as well, considering the circumstances.

Via Daring Fireball.

Found randomly on Flickr. I've looked at this picture for an hour straight, while listening to the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and it's become impossible to separate the two.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)

The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone