Bill O’Reilly was on Letterman the other day and Letterman let him have it!
“60% of what you say is crap”
Wonderful!
More (including must-watch video) here.
Snowy Photos
On December 31st we went out to my sister’s place in Afton.
There was some beautiful heavy snow around, so I took a bunch of photos.
Kids and Cameras – Part I
I gave both of the kids a Fuji FinePix1400 Zoom for Christmas and they have been snapping away like mad since then.
Not the highest quality images, but they look great in a web browser!
Sadly, Roz managed to erase all her Christmas images from the card in her camera by accident, but she has taken a bunch more since then.
Roz and I put a bunch of her images up on her website tonight. Some of them are really cool.
Stephanie and I took a bunch too, but they are not up for viewing yet. I’m sure we’ll get them up later this weekend.
iTunes Server for Linux
Nate at work turned me on to MT-Daap – a Daap server for Linux.
Daap is the protocol that iTunes uses for sharing your libraries.
MT-Daap runs as a daemon on your linux box and shares out your files (mp3, mp4, aac, etc…) as an iTunes library share.
One of the cool features that MT-Daap has is that you can setup smart playlists in a config file and they will work just like the iTunes ones.
Slick!
I am installing the nightly build now – has a bunch of changes and new features, so we’ll see how that works out.
Wow. That’s way cooler than the stable build! The web interface is much better – you can actually build smart playlists with it! And there is a Java applet that plays your mp3s in your browser!
It’s so cool I’m laughing!
DVD Haul
A week before Christmas I got a $100 gift card from work as a thank you for doing a bunch of hard work for the Olympics and some other stuff.
So I went out and bought a bunch of DVDs.
I also got a few for Christmas (including one duplicate – that’s what I get for buying things so close to Xmas!)
So here is what I ended up with:
- The Ghostbusters Gift Set –
- The Back to the Future trilogy:
- Hang ’em High – Classic Clint Eastwood
- Terrence Hill’s Trinity trilogy – classic spagetti westerns:
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
- The three Wallace and Gromit shorts – with the ten Cracking Contraptions shorts!
- Chicken Run
- The Thin Man collection – Includes
- The Thin Man
- After The Thin Man
- Another Thin Man
- Shadow Of The Thin Man
- Song Of The Thin Man
- The Thin Man Goes Home
- Alias Nick & Nora Bonus Documentary Disc
- Groundhog Day
That’s a lot of movie watching to do!
All the links are to the Internet Movie Database
I’ve also updated my Online DVD list at Intervocative. This is free software that allows you to catalog your DVDs AND upload your list to their server where they will host it for you!
Pretty cool.
And I still have some credit on the gift card and a movie to return, so there will be more DVDs soon.
What to buy, what to buy?
Online Card Game Rules
From Mike Ebeling’s blog comes this site of rules for card games.
A very useful reference.
Beer for Darwinians
And it comes from Utah.
Surrounded by Morons
Today I have a nice list of moronic encounters – and it’s not even lunchtime yet.
We can start off with one of our customers. Three days ago they decided to change ISPs at 8:00 PM. They didn’t bother to tell us about it, so of course all our firewalls started blocking them because they are now coming from a new IP address range.
How is this our fault?
I got that all fixed up, but it’s three days later and we are still seeing fallout. I got a call this morning saying that none of the computers in their building could resolve our DNS domain. A little chat revealed that the people could work from home and resolve us, and a little work on my part revealed that all the rest of the Intarweb could resolve us. So I suggested that perhaps he should look at his firewall.
Again, not our fault.
Then we can proceed to our sales people who use BlackBerries.
We are using RSA SecurID to provide authentication to our SSL VPN servers. Most employees have the standard key fob RSA tokens, but since the sales people didn’t want to carry extra stuff, we got the software tokens for their BlackBerries.
This stuff isn’t rocket science, yet we have a couple of users who just can’t figure out how to log in with this system. Out of 20 or so people, there are two or three who just can’t get it.
After that we can proceed to the user who states that when she logs into the SSL VPN she doesn’t get any bookmarks. She’s in the exact same group as her Manager who is saying that this needs to get fixed. There are bookmarks in that group, I checked.
Hurra Torpedo Rockumentary
I can’t decide if this is for real or not.
There is a video out there in the mighty intarweb of a “band” from Norway called Hurra Torpedo. They sing old pop songs and accompany themselves by beating the crap out of old appliances.
This morning a co-worker (thanks John!) sent me this link.
It’s a site about a supposed rockumentary that is being made about this band. It’s a total sendup and I can’t decide if they are really making a film, or if it’s just a good humor web site.
The subject of my film is Hurra Torpedo, a rock band from Norway that bangs out pop songs on beat up old kitchen appliances. As you can imagine, they’re a new kind of band that deserves a new kind of rock documentary. (Most people call them “rockumentaries,” I know, but that’s awfully precious, isn’t it?) I’ve done my homework on this one. I’ve seen every rock documentary ever made pretty much, and I’ve eaten A LOT of herring. Very early in the process, I learned that I don’t like herring. But I do love a good rock documentary. I’m going to follow Hurra Torpedo as they tour across the United States, and capture every smashed fridge on film.
In any case, the video clips on the site are hilarious and well worth watching.
These guys sort of remind me of Savage Aural Hotbed – a local band that uses power tools in their shows. LOUD!
President Bush’s Unchecked Presidential Power
Bruce Schneier has a wonderful, fact-filled blog entry about President Bush’s Unchecked Presidential Power. It was published today in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s OpEd section.
This isn’t about the spying, although that’s a major issue in itself. This is about the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search. This is about circumventing a teeny tiny check by the judicial branch, placed there by the legislative branch, placed there 27 years ago — on the last occasion that the executive branch abused its power so broadly.
In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It’s a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country … merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world.
It is getting pretty scary over there in Washington.
We have a president who appears to have placed himself above the law, surrounded by lawyers who are telling him that it’s okay.
We have a congress who is just now starting to think about investigating these actions.
We have a press who sat on this story for quite a long time, and who doesn’t seem to be pushing this issue nearly hard enough.
And, judging from all the comments on Bruce’s blog posting, we have a country which is dividing itself around this issue.