Jeremy's Blog

Redneck entertainment

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:32:00 +0000

Me and my dad... easily amused.

Social links...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

I finally got around to updating my seriously neglected personal website JeremyParnell.com with links to all the social networks I hang out at. Yeah, I know, I really need to update the other stuff, but at least this is a start.

Just look for these links at the bottom of the page:

Follow Me:

Twitter boost: A free portrait or web site design to one of my followers

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:59:00 +0000

In a blatant attempt to unfairly bump my Twitter popularity (what's the point in talking to yourself?), I am offering a free website design or a hand-drawn portrait to one random follower, if my Twitter followers increase by at least 700 people over the next 30 days (timestamp on post). Pretty straightforward, eh?

I've set up and used a number of Twitter accounts for clients and side projects, but as the world's biggest procrastinator I just recently got around to setting up a personal account. Now I need to fill it up with followers. I can't promise brilliance in tweets, but at least the links I post are interesting. Follow me. Give it a chance. Drop me if you get bored.

In exchange, I'm offering to one random follower a website design (something I do professionally) or a hand-drawn portrait (something I do when I have time, usually as Christmas gifts). I've posted some of these to my website, so feel free to check out the "Projects" section [http://www.jeremyparnell.com/projects/] to see if this is of interest to you. How I pick the winner will be totally random. I mean seriously random. I mean, I'll feed the follower list into a C# program that picks a random winner type of random (I should have explained from the outset that I'm geeky). If the winner doesn't respond within a week, I'll just repeat. Some random follower will get the prize is what I'm saying, essentially.

700 followers. One of them is you. Take the challenge and come follow me! It'll be fun.

http://twitter.com/JeremyParnell

Supersizing quantum behavior

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:01:00 +0000

Read Supersizing Quantum Behavior @seedmag http://bit.ly/9SvPl Discovering quantum weirdness on a macro scale has huge implications.

Basically, everything around us is governed by Newtonian laws, laws that predict objects will act in very less than strange ways. Take it to the quantum scale and all sorts of weird things happen; for example, an atom may exist in two states at once, they may possibly communicate over great distances faster than the speed of light or (as some experiments hope to demonstrate) even across time. There's a whole host of weirdness at the quantum level, things that, if they occured on the macro scale, would be considered nothing less than paranormal. The argument against quantum mysticism was never that it didn't make sense at the quantum scale. The arguments have always centered around the premise that quantum effects don't scale up. Supersizing quantum behavior, even a small Newtonian fail, gives a tiny (quantum?) bit of plausibility to the ideas presented in books like The Holographic Universe and films like What the Bleep Do We Know?

What I Understood

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:00:00 +0000

What I Understood
by Katha Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

"What I Understood" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009

Scarefest 2009 photos

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:32:00 +0000

"We're ready to believe you!"

Danielle Harris. She's been in a couple of things -- Rob Zombie's Halloween II, for example -- but I'm a fan from back when she did The Last Boyscout, playing Bruce Willis' daughter.

I look like a retard in this picture.

Cool ghost hunting equipment. Probably completely useless, but they make pretty colored lights and noises.

And they call me big headed.

Some demon trying to grope my mom.

Independent documentary film maker who recently made a film about a "true" Kentucky haunting. The film's been on KET and other places, and he signed my copy.

Kane Hodder. Played Jason in a couple of the Friday the 13th movies.

Pig man was awesome! Seriously, his mask was so well done, you couldn't see any seam where man met beast.

Zombies rock! Braaaaiiiiiinnnnns.

Smelled like fried chicken.

Creepy gypsy lady.

Incredibly tall monster dude.

Geeks get things done, but they're still geeks

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:22:00 +0000

Senior Wired editor Daniel Roth quotes Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of High Tech High, in his essay Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education:

"Geeks get things done. They're possessed. They can't help themselves," says Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of eight charter schools in San Diego County collectively called High Tech High. He has come up with a curriculum that forces kids to embrace their inner geek by pushing them to create. The walls, desks, and ceilings of his classrooms teem with projects, from field guides on local wildlife to human-powered submarines. (A High Tech High art project called Calculicious, based entirely on math principles, now hangs in the San Diego airport.) The students all work in small groups as a way to foster shared enthusiasm: Get two kids excited about something and it's harder for a third to poke fun at them.

Well, true, sort of. I do believe that geeks have an inherit drive to be artists and create. What this school seems to be doing is inspiring focus and direction in geeks, who have a tendency towards ferret-like ADD. That's admirable. But the overall point of the essay is that if you foster an environment where academic achievement and creativity is positively reinforced by peers, it somehow becomes "cool" or socially acceptable.

Well, again, true, sort of. While it may be true reform in academics to make learning socially acceptable, it's artificial geekiness, less "education reform" and probably only cool in the bubble of the education system itself. Out in the real world it's still socially awkward to be brainy and creative, no matter how cool you make it seem. Geeks are still different from people in general who don't care as much about less life-practical things, say, like, the fibonacci sequence, quantum computing, or the human genome. Creating an environment where these guys can get together and socially reinforce each other is great, but I'm not convinced it's really the "education reform" we need. Education prepares students for the real world, including the world outside of academics. Out there, true Geekdom will always be a sliver of the population, no matter whether individual schools themselves are completely geeked-out.

I think a true reform would be to foster an environment that celebrates and integrates diversity, rather than an environment that just replaces one homogeneous population (wedgy givers) with another (wedgy recievers). The real problem, especially at a high school level, is the obsession students have with fitting in, being cool. Simply encouraging them to fit in with a different group, changing the definition of "cool", doesn't address the underlying issue, doesn't teach them that there's nothing wrong with being different. Different is fine. Encouraging this principle would be true reform, with life-long benefits that carry over into the real world.

Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:01:00 +0000

In 1990, veteran information technology attorney Mike Godwin made the observation that "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." This adage has become known as Godwin's Law, and it holds true. Follow any heated discussion on the web long enough and you'll find, sure enough, someone ends up calling someone a Nazi.

The Internet is generally understood to be a broadly diverse spectrum of the entirety of humankind. Unfortunately this includes on the lower end, which is sadly more populous it seems, darker elements of the human presence who clearly have no desire to be decent people. The anonymity of web, and the statistical improbability of being punched in the face by some guy you pissed off hundreds of miles away, likely contributed to this condition. It's well understood that if you're not encountering assholes on the web on a regular basis, you probably forgot to pay your DSL bill.

Outside the web it used to be different. Television and radio talk show hosts seemed to have higher standards. Sure, every now and then a fringie might have blurted out a Nazi comparison in an interview, but the host would quickly cut them off and, rightly, label them as a loon. They certainly never encouraged that sort of thing, nor promoted it as they seem to be doing now.

As Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in an editorial published in the Detroit Free Press: "it seems obvious the Nazis have invaded American political rhetoric in a big way. As in Rush Limbaugh declaring health-care reform 'a Hitler-like policy,' swastikas popping up at protest rallies, a poster depicting Obama with Hitler's moustache and a pamphlet that says: 'Act Now to Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!'"

Dutifully listeners are repeating in step, Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.

So what's the big deal? It's just political rhetoric after all, a little slanting of the historical facts, a little colorization to give a speech more impact. Just words. Obama's evil anyway, right?

The big deal is that it's absurd. It's absurd and it profanes real human tragedy, the nearly 6 million people who died at the hands of real Nazis, real human ugliness.

Pitts reminds us of the real Nazis: "It was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those 'little Jews' could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, 'tore him as one would tear a rag.'"

Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse because nothing in modern America compares to the above.

There are real places in the real world where human atrocities continue, where genocide is policy, where the ideology of Nazism may possibly apply, but it's not here. We don't suffer nearly enough.

Zombie robots?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:25:00 +0000

No says a company that designed a robot for the military that runs off "biomass", eating biological matter to run perpetually. Our robot "is strictly vegetarian" the company said... Yeah, um, I saw a movie about this...

Full Story

Now the star wars can really begin

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:51:00 +0000

I can remember a time when astronomers were excited to have discovered the first extra-solar planet (planets outside of our own solar system). It was only 1991, which wasn't that long ago. I'm no astronomer, but I was excited by the discovery as well. Somehow it made the infinitely huge universe seem that much larger.

Well, that discovery was, like, sooo last decade. Since then astronomers have identified nearly 350 planets abroad in the Milky Way. Some of them, scientists speculate, are likely to have similar conditions to our own planet Earth.

But wait! There's a new reason to feel that the universe is expanding. Astronomers are now stating that they may have seen the first extra-galactic planet. It showed up when they applied a microlensing technique in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy, roughly 2.5 million light years away. The new planet is said to have six times the mass of Jupiter.

No one has stated yet whether the newly discovered planet is inhabited by wookies.

[Full Story]

This was hard to figure out...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:46:00 +0000

... and it doesn't even include the regex .dll I had to write in C# to make the stored procedure work! Watch it crash when I actually put it live : )

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[UpdateFolderSort]
(
@folder_id int,
@folder_sort int = NULL
)

AS

DECLARE @root_decimal varchar(500)
DECLARE @folder_parent int
DECLARE @old_decimal varchar(500)
DECLARE @folder_level int
DECLARE @pos int
DECLARE @level_loop int
DECLARE @regex_prefix varchar(500)

BEGIN
SET @folder_parent = (SELECT folder_parent FROM Folders WHERE folder_id = @folder_id)
END

BEGIN
IF @folder_parent IS NOT NULL
SET @root_decimal = (SELECT folder_decimal FROM Folders WHERE folder_id = @folder_parent)
END

BEGIN
SET @old_decimal = (SELECT folder_decimal FROM Folders WHERE folder_id = @folder_id)
SET @old_decimal = RIGHT(@old_decimal, 4)
END

BEGIN
SET @folder_level = (SELECT folder_level FROM Folders WHERE folder_id = @folder_id)
END

IF @folder_level = 1
BEGIN
UPDATE
Folders
SET
folder_decimal = STUFF(folder_decimal, 1, 4, SUBSTRING('0000',1,4 - LEN(CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))) + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))
WHERE
dbo.RegexMatch(folder_decimal, @old_decimal + '\.') = 1 AND folder_lineage LIKE '%/' + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_id) + '/%'
END
ELSE
BEGIN
SET @pos = ((@folder_level - 1) * 4) + @folder_level

SET @level_loop = 1
SET @regex_prefix = ''
WHILE @level_loop < @folder_level
BEGIN
SET @regex_prefix = @regex_prefix + '\d{4}\.'
SET @level_loop = @level_loop + 1
IF @level_loop = @folder_level
BREAK
ELSE
CONTINUE
END

UPDATE
Folders
SET
folder_decimal = STUFF(folder_decimal, @pos, 4, SUBSTRING('0000',1,4 - LEN(CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))) + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))
WHERE
dbo.RegexMatch(folder_decimal, @regex_prefix + @old_decimal + '\.') = 1 AND folder_lineage LIKE '%/' + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_id) + '/%'
END

BEGIN
IF @root_decimal IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
UPDATE
Folders
SET
folder_sort = @folder_sort,
folder_decimal = @root_decimal + '.' + SUBSTRING('0000',1,4 - LEN(CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))) + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort)
WHERE
folder_id = @folder_id
END
ELSE
BEGIN
UPDATE
Folders
SET
folder_sort = @folder_sort,
folder_decimal = SUBSTRING('0000',1,4 - LEN(CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort))) + CONVERT(varchar(4), @folder_sort)
WHERE
folder_id = @folder_id
END
END

You know you're having a bad day when...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:39:00 +0000

You're bicycling down the road and all of the sudden you're knocked out by a corpse thrown from a speeding car.

True story.

Don't Answer

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:59:00 +0000

I don't want answers.

I want to be inspired to the possibilities.
I need a mystery,
A promise of an answer
Skirting softly in flickers of secret glances,
Written in glyphs carved in stone
no one remembers,
Spoken in dead languages,
Indecipherable,
An old key to a lock to no one knows where
found in a box in the back of the closet.
Mysteries open ended where the truth,
if there ever was one,
is whatever story you wove that fit the clues

or simply the question alone,
left unanswered.

When you said no,
that you were leaving,
I couldn't understand.
You spoke too clearly.
What did you mean?

Gun control laws are totally useless...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:55:00 +0000

I read the following and thought, there's no amount of safety laws you can have to protect people from guns.

Glasgow, Ky, Oct. 21 -- Luther Johnson, a young farmer living in the southern
part of this county, blew into the muzzle of a shotgun early this morning to see
if it was loaded. It was.

Actual death notice published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 22, 1899

Facebook, you don't know me.

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:11:00 +0000

Facebook has unveiled a mockup of their new home page, which looks like an improvement at first glance. There's new features for filtering out the noise and showing just what means most to you. I like that.

Then I saw the new "Hilights" section and rolled my eyes. It's not surprising that Facebook would move towards pushing content to its users. It's more surprising that it's taken them so long to get around to that. It's the way that they're doing it that makes me cringe.

Featured photos, events, notes and more that you don't want to miss. Stories are chosen based on what your friends have interacted with.

[My emphasis]

In the early days of TiVo, users complained about the heavily played up profile feature that automatically recorded programs that it thought its users would want to see, without them explicitly specifying such programs, based on what they had watched before. It sounded like a good feature, that is until TiVo decided they were gay.

Look, Facebook, here's the thing. You don't know me. And you're not going to find out what I like using some algorithm that analyzes what my friends click on. I don't really have much in common with my friends (even the real ones, not just the ones I recruited to help me kick ass in Mob Wars). I like my friends exactly because of our differences. I tried to hang out with people who are like me and it was just annoying, probably because I often annoy myself.

I've got some weird friends too, into some weird things. It's fine that they're into weird things, they're my friends, but I don't really go there myself, you know? No, you don't know. And that's the point. You're just a super-computer sitting out there running statistics to see how many of my friends watch a certain television show. If enough of them are lesbians and watch The L Word, somehow that means I'm a lesbian too?

Dude, you seriously don't know me, so stop pretending that you do.

Oh, and by the way, you suck at pushing content anyway. All those people you think I might know sitting over there on the side of your old home page... I didn't know any of them. That creepy looking guy with the mean mug that you left up there for three months thinking I might know him, though after hundreds of page loads your algorithm should of guessed that I didn't, well, he's just creepy. Please don't push me any content he clicked on.

Thanks.

Partial sunshine of the spot-filled mind

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite movies of all time is Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Basic plot:

A couple undergo a procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship turns sour, but it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with.

Awesome tagline:

I already forget how I used to feel about you.

So anyway, giving credence to the idea that there really is a pill for everything, it appears that scientists in the UK have developed a pill that promises to selectively erase painful memories. Woah, talk about redefining the human condition. As one medical ethics lecturer in London put it: "Removing bad memories is not like removing a wart or a mole. It will change our personal identity since who we are is linked to our memories."

Everyone has their personal traumas and demons. I know I have mine, and I've never met a person who didn't suffer from some dark memory. But I don't think I could give them up. I wouldn't say that personal identity is "linked to our memories". I would say that they are entirely comprised of our memories. Any sort of present awareness is transitory, slipping into the past in less than nanoseconds. The only thing that connects these isolated moments to a personal identity, a sense of self, is memory.

The question, instead, is whether bad memories have good value. That's a really tough call. Imagine, really, an eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. I mean, it's called the human "condition" for a reason. It's nearly impossible to even think about a complete bliss. The best we could even consider, if we're being honest about it, is a near-bliss. I think we need our bad memories in some way to be human.

Maybe a partial sunshine of the spot-filled mind is spot on, and being half-miserable is being full-human.

(See also Memento, where a man suffering from short-term memory loss has to rely on tattooing important things on his body to cling to a sense of self.)

X-Files 3 is a definite maybe

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:43:00 +0000

I know everyone out there who saw the X-Files: I Want to Believe and wasn't impressed will roll their eyes, but I don't care. With 2012 looming on the horizon, and the show's mythology targeting that date for an end-of-the-world alien colonization, it's just enough to keep hope alive in the franchise despite lackluster box office earnings for the second movie last summer.

Frank Spotnitz (X-Files Producer) responded to the XF3 possibility question at a book signing on Feb. 21, 2009 by saying "I will be very surprised if there isn't another X-Files movie before 2012." [view video of the response]

Yay!

The second movie didn't completely bomb, and it did turn a profit. Plus, a lot of fans said that they were disappointed that it wasn't an epic alien flick like this possible third one promises to be. Blah, blah, blah, I don't care. Just put Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in it, stamp a big X across the movie poster, and at least one fan, I, will watch it no matter what.

Ice storm '09 pics

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:47:00 +0000

[Finally got around to posting pics of the ice storm... what, almost a month later? : ) ]

So there was snow and ice, and before it could melt off there was more snow and ice. It wasn't that much -- I think we only got three to five inches total around here -- but the weight of it all accumulated on the smaller twigs at the end of limbs and around 1:30 in the morning on Jan. 28th we heard a few big breaks and the power went off. The power stayed off for seven days, and we had record low temperatures in those seven days. And it was cold.

This is what I woke to in my front yard on Wednesday. We have two beautiful flower producing trees out front and now they just look sad. This picture doesn't do it justice. You couldn't walk anywhere without having to step over branches. See that big clump by the front door? That wasn't there when Tracie walked out the first time. She stepped outside on the front porch, came back in, said it was bad, then BOOM! and the whole front porch was covered. She missed it coming down on her head by five seconds, at most.

The dog loved it, though.

Everything was covered in snow and ice. This is our back deck. As you can see, most of our yard is covered in trees. We thought it was charming. Don't tell the neighbors, but I think it was the trees in our yard that knocked all the power out in the neighborhood. Oops.

It was cold. I'm not that chubby. That's five layers of clothes. We spent most of the time under a mountain of clothes and blankets, but I get antsy if I'm idle too long, something about the amount of coffee I drink.

Exactly one day was halfway decent. The temperature got up to the upper '50s, so we spent the day out on the deck soaking up the sun, just relaxing. This actually made the whole experience worthwhile. I have a pretty busy life and forget to take the time every now and then to just... relax. When forced into that situation, it doesn't escape my notice that it's different, and special. I grilled up some of the meat from the freezer before it went bad and just enjoyed nature for a few hours, at a time when any sane person would be bemoaning it. The sun really does replenish the soul.

See? That's a Jeremy squinting in the sun, but at peace with everything.

The dog loved it.

And even the cats were happy for awhile (of course the particular cat pictured here is the most spoiled cat in the entire world anyway).

Most of the days weren't this nice, though, and it was a bit of a struggle. It's not like I'm a landscaper who makes his money off grinding falling limbs. I'm a techie who sorta needs power to get things done. So I spend a lot of time running around borrowing wi-fi connections from coffee shops, the parking lots of hotels, and the library.

Now that's actually interesting, and worthy of comment. I was an early adopter of wi-fi and bought one of the first laptops to come equipped with a wi-fi antenna. I set up my house with a wireless router, had fun moving from room to room without breaking connection, and loved the freedom it gave to work anywhere around the house. The first day I got it, I went wardriving, looking for open connections around the neighborhood. Eventually, though, it lost its novelty and I stopped carrying my laptop with me everywhere I go. When I'm out, the last thing I want to do is work, so I don't spend much time surfing the web when I'm away from the home or office. I'm probably one of the few who don't bother getting a data package for his mobile phone. I don't really need it.

So anyway, forced to rely on wi-fi after the ice storm, rather than recreationally wardriving out of curiosity, I'm amazed at how far the adoption has come in just a few years. I mean, it used to be that you had to creepily park out in front of people's homes or offices, or maybe hop a few fences to get a decent connection. Nowadays we're permeated with Internet signals. They're everywhere. If you can't find a public, open, and free connection today, you really are off the map. I guess it's always been that invisible radio signals were passing through us carrying the voices of talk show hosts and Elvis, but it's weird to think that spam, porn, and this guy are now out there microwaving the cells in our brain. *shivers*

Back to the ice storm...

We shouldn't bitch. Across the state of Kentucky, at least a half a million homes were without power and the storm is blamed for at least 36 deaths. We had some resources at our disposal, and I was like a friggin' Boy Scout as a kid and went camping all the time in winter, so we didn't do too bad.

Every day the news was talking about how many houses had their power turned back on that day. It was a lot, but I knew we were towards the bottom of the list. Towards the end, you could sort of guess when they would have yours back on (there weren't many left). When we figured there was only a day or two without power left, we sprung for a hotel room with a hot tub in it.

Why the hot tub in the room? Well, 'cause that's how we roll.

-------

After the power came back on, things pretty much went back to normal, but we had a lot more debris in our yard than most of my neighbors. I didn't want to waste the opportunity, so last weekend we had a big bonfire, a couple of beers, and some marshmallows to toast it all.

My dad came down for our little party. He's drunk.

It was fun. I guess I could of dragged all this stuff out to the side of the road and someone would have picked it up eventually, but what better way to celebrate ice than with fire?

A pirate's life for me... definitely.

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:44:00 +0000

So what do you do when you're the most infamous repository of file sharing links on the web, and someone finally drags you into a Swedish court? Well, if you're PirateBay.org, not only do you bring your entourage of Harvard Law students and a "media juggernaut of bloggers, Twitterers, and press", you cart them all from Belgrade to Stockholm in this totally awesome bus called S23K. Then you promise to broadcast the entire spectacle via Twitter feeds (#spectrial), IRC channels, blogs, and you throw in a live audio feed of the entire trial to boot. And then, in the middle of it all, you throw a HUGE party paid for with donated cash!

Napster punked out, totally.

So as a programmer who enjoys his own rights to his own intellectual property, I don't know where I stand on their swap everything service, but I do like their anti-establishment style. With all their crew of personal press, they don't miss the opportunity to thumb their nose at the traditional press, saying, "[we] do not speak with assholes".

Full story

We're rascals, scoundrels, villans, and knaves,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Kerouac quotes that come to mind...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:14:00 +0000

"A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world." - Jack Kerouac

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" - Jack Kerouac

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac

Chevette memories, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:10:00 +0000

In '94 I got my second car, a 1979 gray Chevette. Billy had bought it off a little ol' lady who never drove it, so the mileage was actually pretty low for a late-70s car. He had gotten into some trouble and couldn't drive, something about driving without a license and getting into an accident. He said I could have it for $375. I didn't have that much so my girlfriend paid for most of it. I think I paid her back. I can't remember.

My first Chevette was just rust pretending to be a car, a stack of paper clips waiting to fall apart. This one... this one was a tank! I couldn't kill it no matter what I did. I'd be driving down the road and on a whim decide to swerve off and try to flip it on the embankment, but nope, it wasn't having that. It'd keep trucking on, forty-five miles per hour at a forty-five degree angle, and I couldn't flip it for nothing. That surprised me too because Chevettes are really light vehicles. At school, about five of us got together and lifted Steve's Chevette and put it on some cinder blocks, as a prank.

In parking lots, when there's tons of snow they scoop it up into big piles that become solid ice eventually. I ran my little gray Chevette straight into one and, nothing, just plowed right over it. The thing was a pure tank. Mail boxes, railroad ties, street signs, mud, nothing stopped it.

It actually caught fire once. I was driving back from Columbus, smelled gas, and saw some smoke coming from the engine. I pulled over to the side of I-71 and lifted the hood to find the carburetor on fire. It was just a little fire, and I was able to pat it out. Got back in and kept driving. Like a tank, the car just kept rolling.

[Note: Hey Kaitlyn and Padrick. Skip reading the above. Your uncle is an idiot.]

Don't get me wrong, the car wasn't perfect. For one thing, it had the baldest tires I've ever driven on. There was this one corner over by Blue Rock Road where every time it snowed, no matter how slow I took the corner, the car decided it would keep going straight and run into a telephone poll. Every time. I can only imagine what the people in the house across the street thought when they'd see me come down the road, slide into the poll, get out to push the car out of the snow, come back a few hours later and slide right into it again. And again. And again. Not even on purpose.

The other problem with Chevette 2 is that the ignition system eventually went out. I tried to fix it but, again, I don't know anything about cars. The only way I could start it is by popping the solenoid, that is, taking a screwdriver and crossing two spokes to make a spark. This is done in the engine and the key needs to be turned to start when you do it, so you need a friend to turn the key for you while you damn near electrocute yourself. Luckily, Billy, license-free, was always palling around with me. But when you're by yourself, you have to come up with elaborate ways to keep the key in start while you're doing it.

Eventually, the ignition thingy didn't work at all and the car wouldn't start for me whatever I did. But, here's the thing, it did not die! Still! I couldn't kill it, but rather, it just got tired of me I guess. I got it towed out to my parent's growing car graveyard and left it there thinking it was dead-dead. But no, I learned later that my younger brother got it up and running and drove it, too, for the longest time. In fact, I don't know exactly what ever became of it. The tank is probably still out there plowing over stuff for some kid that just got his license.

Believe it or not, there's a part three.

Chevette memories, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:11:00 +0000

My first car was a 1982 blue Chevette that I got in '93, I think. I was a late driver. I got my learner's permit at age fifteen, like everyone else, but I didn't get an actual car until I was 17. I didn't have any money as a kid, didn't have an evening job, worked a summer job once but blew all of the money on stupid stuff, and was one of three military brats in a single-income family. We weren't poor, really, but an E-8 pay grade isn't as much as you'd think it should be. My dad bought this car for me, but it was only $250.

It was my senior year at a Cincinnati high school and my dad had just retired from the military and bought a house out in rural Ripley, Ohio, which is basically the sticks. I didn't want to go. I really, really didn't want to go and got into so many fights with my folks about it, it was crazy. My dad (love the guy) thought it would cheer me up if I had a car, and found this ol' beat up Chevette a neighbor was selling. Out in the sticks, the rumors are true, everyone has three or four broke down cars in their yard for sell. We test drove it down 763, a hilly and curvy rode which is actually perfect for test driving cars. It made a lot of rattling that we thought we could fix, so we bought it.

I didn't give us a chance to fix it. A few days later I was missing my girlfriend and got the itch to get back to Cincinnati. I packed all my shit into the Chevette and "ran away". Downhill it was fine, but on every uphill the car would start ticking -- a tick, tick, tick, tick -- just like a bomb, I swear. It was something about some rods or something in the engine. I didn't and still don't know anything about cars.

The foothills of the Appalachians east of Cincinnati are all hills. So it was like, smooooth... tick, tick, tick, tick, smooooth... tick, tick, tick, tick, smooooth [smell of something burning]... tick, tick, tick, tick... tick... tick... TICK, TICK, TICK BOOM! Just like a bomb, big poof of smoke and everything.

I had made it to just outside of Mt. Orab and had to call my dad to come and pick me up, which was just demoralizing. It's hard to make your great escape when you end up having to call the prison guard to come and pick you up. We strapped some tow cables to the Chevette and dragged it back to my parent's farm, where it sat in the yard for a few more years before someone bought it for $25 as scrap metal. I think I may have put at most 50 miles on that thing total.

So ends my first car, my first Chevette, RIP.

Latte with a shot of ectoplasm

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:26:00 +0000

I just recently learned that a coffee house I frequent is home to the ghost of a man who shot himself in the head in 1929. This happened in the bathroom, and apparently the bullet hole is still there today. It's hard to say "cool" considering the circumstances surrounding the man's death, but I must check this out!

From the web:

The Lock and Key Coffeehouse can be found at 201 Main Street in Georgetown, and it's located in a building with quite a checkered past. Built in 1899, it was originally John McMeekin's Furniture and Funeral Parlor, then went through a number of permutations over the years, including a bank, a food stamp office, and an antique mall.

In 1929, during its incarnation as the Georgetown National Bank, president George T. Hambrick committed suicide in the bank's restroom by placing a pistol to his head. It exited through his skull and lodged in the wall, where the bullethole is framed today as a historical curiosity.

A farewell to Bushisms - Top 10

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:35:00 +0000

As George Bush left office today, so, sadly, did the unique form of humor we call Bushisms. In honor of this passing, here are the Top 10 preserved for posterity:

10) "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

9) "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." —Greater Nashua, N.H., Jan. 27, 2000

8) "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004

7) "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." —Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

6) "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." —to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

5) "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." —Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

4) "They misunderestimated me." —Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

3) "Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" —Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

2) "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

1) "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

They'll see us waving from such great heights

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:47:00 +0000

I had to give a website demo at the Hilton Netherland Plaza in front of forty or fifty people today. That was interesting, but just business. The fun part is that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and visit the observation deck atop the Carew Tower.

The Carew Tower (pictured below) was built in 1929, in a French art deco style, and still maintains many of it's original art deco charms today. It's also Cincinnati's tallest building, but only gets to claim that fame for a few more years. In 2011, the new Great American Insurance building at Queen City Square will be 86 feet taller.

It was cold outside, overcast with snow flurries. I was surprised the deck was open today. Actually, the last time I had been to the top of the Carew Tower was exactly ten years ago, pre-911, so I wasn't sure if people were still allowed to go out there. Cold, but happy, I found that at least some things don't change. Still $2.

To get to the 49th floor is kind of interesting. The main elevator doesn't go that far. It stops at the 45th. You have to get off at the 45th floor and round a corner to a service elevator and take that up the remaining four floors (or take the stairs). The service elevator smells like old grease, or body odor, I couldn't tell which. It's about as large as a porta-potty and you get the feeling that it should have been decommissioned thirty years ago.

The actual observation deck is open-aired (cold air today). No bars, barely a rail, and I was wondering what velocity a penny might drop if you tossed it over the edge and resisted the urge to do so. It takes a minute to get your bearings. Though it's perfectly safe unless you have the actual intention of jumping off, you still get a little vertigo from just being outside that far up.

It's cliche, but the people really do look like ants.

That's my car circled in red. I parked on top of the garage just so I could take a picture. By the way, driving down the corkscrew to leave the garage is fun too.

It's a strange perspective to you find yourself looking down on other tall buildings.

They'll see us waving from such great heights.
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away.
'Come down now,' but we'll stay...