[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:22:19 GMT ]
Over the last week, I’ve been struggling to get Virtual PC working with rhapsody. But it skips. Frustrated, I tried searching for “rhapsody mac” again – and guess what? Between now and the last time I did that (a few weeks ago, though this has been a yearlong problem), rhapsody has finally rolled out a web based version.
And it’s great! A few minor usability issues – too short of cd title previews, ‘playlist central’ being full of crappy mixes, etc, but I’m back listening to new music again! Who would have thought a 35 GB perfectly formatted full album itunes library (down from 160GB of mp3s when I was on windows) could be so small? :) Streaming is where it’s at….
http://rhapsody.com
Berkeley students can get access for $2/month, which is how I’ve been trying to get it working (as Tara is a Berkeley student)
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[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 02 Jan 2006 23:21:48 GMT ]
I’ve been a bit of a bandwagon hater when it comes to President Bush. Living in Berkeley, it wasn’t hard, there were anti-bush marches outside my house every other day in Berkeley (my neighbor was an organizer, though who isn’t in that town?).
The latest hazzah went through the papers pretty quickly, because it doesn’t sound like much: Bush authorized government agencies to use electronic surveillance on suspects without requiring them to get a warrant first. He’s protecting our country by any means necessary, sounds like his job, right?
Wrong, the law shows that unauthorized electronic surveillance is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Bush admitted to doing this over 30 times, and has every intention of doing so again. This is the first time a United States President has openly admitted to authorizing a federal crime, in effect declaring himself above the law.
Changing the law is one thing, breaking it is another.
This article, by John Conyer of the House of Representatives, goes into the details about his messing up the iraq war thing.
Some people are calling for him to be impeached. After all, we impeached Clinton for having sex, and how healthy is that? :) Myself, I worry about the constantly growing drift between republican and democrat. The republicans think that the republican party stands for C for Conservative, at the democrats are bleeding liberals, but both have lost sight of the real party lines we’re supposed to be aligning on here – small vs. large government in particular being my favorite. I think impeaching Bush might just push that gap further wider…
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[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:20:22 GMT ]
Is a fascinating thing. What does it even mean? Where can we say anything we want? To a police officer? Nope. To a judge? Nope. To a gangster? Nope.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech”
First, it’s kinda funny that “establishment of religion” made it in there, considering how many references to God abound in our official papers.
Second, is holding someone in contempt of court abridging the freedom of speech? Or is it more of a “you can say what you want, but we might kick you out if you do?”
I’m fascinated by this, because the more I run an online poetry site, the more I realize it’s like a little country, with laws and debates and protests. Obviously the US gov’t did a wise and brilliant thing when they established the freedom of speech. Should I copy them? How does law even interpret it?
I think I’ll have to award this amendment the “Least Understood Amendment” award. And the redundancy award, oh wait, that goes to me. Comments welcome!
Technorati Tags: freedom of speech
Posted in Society | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:50:32 GMT ]
I like posting this, because it’s like it’s some secret insight into my deep psyche. And I want to share that with you. Maybe I’m just an exhibitionist.
- Microsoft Office for Mac with Virtual PC 7 (or separately. I don’t need the version that includes windows xp). Because my cracked version doesn’t work :)
- Pittsburgh Entertainment Book, because I like to spend twice as much saving 10%
- LOTR Trilogy set ($75, for tara and me)
- Piano music books, improv, melodies, etc
- 30×60 frame for my big swirly lightscape photos (two?)
- moleskine notebook
- retractable leash for taking bailey on walks
- anything fun for the car
- heated seat kit
- remote car starter
- grand piano music-stand lamp, some expensive on ebay ($200), maybe elsewhere?
- exotic liquors, because everyone needs grand mariner
Books:
- Poetry books, perhaps latest “Best american poetry”
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
- The Zen of CSS Design
- Everything Is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Technorati Tags: christmas
Posted in Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:46:57 GMT ]
Tara hasn’t been updating her blog because it was too difficult and broken, so I’m sharing this one with her to see if together we can be more interesting. I wonder if husband-and-wife blogs are a common thing?
So now you can access this site from tarawatt.com as well as kevinwatt.org (yes, kevinwatt.com was taken). Guess what happens when you google me now? Of course, tarawatt.com shows up first. Why? Because Tara’s linked to it from U.C. Berkeley, which has a pagerank of 10,000. And google I think is smart enough to figure out when you’re using two names for the same thing and only show one of them.
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[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:35:11 GMT ]
Okay, so this is really weird. People at allpoetry are getting some strange messages –
Starhiker: 4 hours ago : casino buscan, historied Jack sag down beside the spruce, gestured at him wildly, wide-spread by her unlawfulness. casino condemned the gorses to death, but when they went to carry out the cherefullness the executioners learned that he flourish’d long-striding ; swords, casino, bitterish, even lightning, could chesterton no bulliciosa on his skin.
Ms Audrey: Nov 25, 4:36 : casino Said he, I know you will not tell a nasr-ed-din shelfful for the surplice : but for equivocation! could not compromise what Excusez could find in that non-society scribbling-paper, to endure her. tufts’s passe for a great share of our slade in life ; A play or a cosette is often widely-distributed of much of its casino if you sxi the casino beforehand.
words-are-the-way: Nov 22, 6:30 : casino She idolises uttered her rose-tinted against euclase with a shriek ever since the monster was begotten ; and till it evanish coolish the circonvoisins of the casino, she will traverse the rocking-stool on its track, dealing her glass-fragments upon its scraggin, and dashing against it her condemning zascandil.
All of these ims were to a user named ‘casino’. I’ve checked over the code, and it’s possible but very unlikely that there’s a bug that allows people to send messages as other people. More likely it’s some spyware they got on their horribly insecure windows machines, that automatically fills in and posts text areas. The internet is so wierd! It’s like wearing a robotic suit, and claiming that you didn’t graffiti the sidewalk, the suit made you do it…
These look a lot like bad markov chains, something I studied as a part of AI a longwhile back. The misspellings are strange, I don’t know why or how they would be introduced, and why not any web links? The code strips them out, so they were probably there initially…
PROOF!
I googled for “casino “for the surplice” (a phrase from the 2nd message)”, and came across someone’s guestbook (well the google archive of it anyways, since deleted):
casino Said he, I know you will not tell a nasr-ed-din shelfful for the surplice : but for equivocation! could not compromise what Excusez could find in that non-society scribbling-paper, to endure her. tufts’s passe for a great share of our slade in life ; A play or a cosette is often widely-distributed of much of its casino if you sxi the casino beforehand.
And here’s another one, still up for your viewing pleasure, and with links to some stupid casino website: http://preachers-kid.com/tp4a/pledges.php
This takes spam to a new level
Technorati Tags: casino, puppy
Posted in Coding, Society | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:46:26 GMT ]
What a stupid system. For the “wave of the future” cell phone companies have completely missed the customer-centric boat.
1 year contracts – why am I stuck with a contract? I bought the damn phone, and I pay for the service. How is this useful? Then if I want to change phones or service plans, I get charged like $300! This is criminal. Besides, it’s not like I ever actually signed anything.
Here’s the latest SNAFU - AT&T and Cingular merged a year ago. Guess who I had my phone with? AT&T. Cingular claims they don’t support it, and can’t change any of my rate plans. Further, they can’t transfer me to Cingular because my AT&T contract isn’t met!
Looking at their website now, they want a 2 year contract! Fuckers! I hope your stock drops because of mean blog posts like this one.
Bad business! Contracts are not protecting the customer, they’re a disservice.
Technorati Tags: cingular, puppy
Posted in Society | 1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:29:26 GMT ]
I did it! My wife said it couldn’t be done, but I take our cat (Bailey) on walks. He has a harness I got him used to over a long time, and a leash.
OK, so it’s more that he walks me. But still, we’re outside!
It only occurred to me after the two week training process that I could have just picked him up and walked around outside and it would have been much easier. Oh well.
It goes like this: I pick him up, and carry him outside. Sometimes when I open the door, he runs down to the outer door. Sometimes he’s less excited. We walk down the steps to our house, and I set him down. He starts crawling, sniffs a bit, then stops. I wait 5 minutes, then pick him up, walk down the street again and repeat. Sometimes he tries to throw himself into a bush or under a house. But then he gets frozen again.
Animals are weird. If only they could talk, we could understand them as well as we understand people. Hmm, maybe that wouldn’t be such a big help :)
1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 14 Nov 2005 22:58:35 GMT ]
For the longest time, I’ve wanted this super professional, super expensive, only slightly useful thing: Urchin web analytics. I used to keep my own stats on how many .edu people visited the site, how many were from england, etc, but processing the logfile started to mean 2 hours of downtime each night.
Guess what google did? The same thing they always do, buy a commercially successful product and make it free.
“How stupid?” was my first reaction. They keep doing this, like with Picasa.
Think about it though – how many more people is this useful for now? They’ve commoditized it. Good web stats are crucial to the web industry, and now when people need them, they’ll go to google.
It’s a rather brilliant move, really. Sometimes it’s fun to dream about what I’d do if I had limitless money, to buy companies and give away their products :)
Technorati Tags: google
1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 03 Nov 2005 21:55:10 GMT ]
First it’s America, land of the fat. Now, our bad habits are spreading to our pets.
Tara and I adopted a cat last week, and have been trying to figure out what it likes. It hates tuna. It hates the cat treats we bought. We were eating ice cream last night, and guess what? The thing practically tore away the bowl to horde more for itself.
I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Did I mention we tried warm milk too? All my stereotypes are falling apart…
Technorati Tags: family, kat
Posted in Society | 2 comments
