So, There's This Thing Called Open Source...

Windows XP Service Pack 2

"The good news is: this service pack has already been tested by literally hundreds of thousands of beta testers, in a vast array of hardware and software environments, and the feedback and fixes incorporated into the final release." -MS website.

I seem to recall a similar beta-testing program resulting in a little mishap.
Just maybe the idea ought to be fixing the underlying code library, instead of patching specific bugs.
Since M$ seems to have no drive to do this, let me tell you exactly what this means, and why it needs to be done.
See, when M$ built the original Windows operating systems, they created code, from scratch. As each new version of Windows has come out, they've added to this, but the core libraries remained basically unchanged until Windows XP.
Originally, there were two programming "tracks," one for home users: Windows 95 / 98 / Me; and one for business use, Windows NT / 2000. Each had its own core code library, and its own method of doing things. The NT/2K track featured security far beyond what went into the 95-based OSes, not limited to the OS itself, but even extending down to the file system - 95 etc. use the FAT / FAT32 file systems, which are good, but have no individual file security. NT uses NTFS, which allows locking flags to be placed on individual files directly.
Great.
Now, to avoid reinventing the wheel, When M$ built 98, they dragged-and-dropped as much of the original 95 code as they could. Same trick with 2000: huge quantities of NT code exist inside the 2000 OS. Windows XP is the first OS to unify the two tracks; both the home and professional versions are based on the Windows 2000 architecture; in fact, to a degree, it's fair to say that WinXP is Win2K, but more automated for all us dumb users.
Ok, I can understand why they recycle code, really. However, did you ever read the descriptions of the bugs in Windows Update that all the endless patches are designed to repair? 9 out of 10 are so-called "buffer overruns." The reason for this is that M$ treats ALL its software this way; every piece of software they produce draws hugely on the enormous, pre-existing code libraries from previous projects. When they need code to handle a buffer, it's already written; they just drag, drop, and rename the variables. (Well, it's a LITTLE more complicated than that, but not by much.)

The problem with this is that if a problem exists in the code libraries, it can get replicated hundreds of times throughout their software. M$ has shown a great willingness to patch "holes," in their products, but they've shown no tendency whatsoever to rewrite the relevant code in their libraries so that the bugs simply don't show up in the next release of Media Player Whatever, Internet Exploder, or M$ Office. Not that this would be a small project, but it's gotta be better than hiring hundreds of programmers to write patches.

Now we come to one of the alternatives.
There's this thing called "Open Source." I'm sure you've heard of freeware - software that's given away over the internet for free use, for whatever reason. Yeah. This isn't the same thing.
Most freeware is rigorously protected by its owners, who don't mind you using it, but don't want you reverse engineering it, or trying to find out how it works. Open source software is free, but it also comes with the source code, allowing you not only to see how it works, but in most cases, to rewrite it completely yourself. (As witness Bittorrent - the original program is good as far as the network code, but the GUI (Graphical User Interface) doesn't exist, and just about ANY of the knockoff clients is better than the original as far as ease of use.)
The question is, can you really get along without M$?
Well, I'm trying. Right now, I'm using BSPlayer instead of Media Player, Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Thunderbird instead of Outlook, and OpenOffice instead of M$ Office. Hell, I even replaced notepad.exe with Metapad. (And I mean replaced - took notepad out of Windows File Protection, renamed Metapad, copied it across, so now when Windows opens something with "notepad" what it really launches is Metapad.)
Of those, Metapad is the only non-open source software there, and it's free.
I'm currently building another computer to teach myself Linux, although I haven't yet decided on which distro to use. (Although I admit I'm currently leaning towards Debian.)

Open source software is coded not only by the two or three (or even one!) people who created it, but by anyone who wants to help out; both Mozilla (Parent of Firefox) and OpenOffice allow users not only to submit bug reports, but also to submit code repairs for bugs that they find, and to write their own extensions to the program.

Let me rave for a minute about Firefox. Firefox supports tabbed browsing, which is the kind of feature that puts a huge smile on your face the first time you use it. Firefox takes care of the user-written extensions by including an Extension Manager right in the Tools menu, which lets you install any plugin you want directly into the browser, update your plugins, and uninstall them again, unlike IE, which typically requires a Windows System Restore if you get a bad one. And some of the extensions are really cool - AdBlock and Bugmenot are two of my favorites. AdBlock lets you banish forever banner ads, Iframes, inline flash ads, and basically any other kind of web-based advertising by filters, even allowing wildcards. Good-bye,

http://*.doubleclick.net/*

Seeya,

http://Servedby.advertising.com/*

Later, alligator. Bugmenot lets you enter signin names and passwords to websites that really have no business knowing who you are, like the New York Times. Without signing up. Just by right-clicking. God bless ya.
Plus, Firefox is FAST - really, really fast. Since it doesn't have the enormous amount of associated kludge that IE does, it doesn't take as long to load, can fetch pages faster, and generally outperforms IE at every level.

Now, I started this talking about Windows XP Service Pack 2; so let's go back there for a second. I had a short, but spirited discussion about the anti-piracy features of this patch collection over on Wil Wheaton's forums with one of the other users, which all boiled down basically to:
(Me): The Service Pack won't install if you're running a pirated copy of Windows XP. That's really stupid.
(Him): No, it's not. M$ has the right to protect its *snore* and besides I have no love for pirates.
(Me): Yeah, yeah, BUT: you're really gonna hate it when, 6 months down the road, your favorite website goes down after a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack from a virus that's infected thousands and thousands of unpatched computers - that wouldn't have happened if they'd been able to patch.
(Him): *sounds of crickets*

See, that's exactly the problem. Microsoft can only protect its investment at this point through one of two means: either drop the price of their product to a point where Joe User can actually afford to buy it, or to allow huge security holes to continue to exist in the pirated computers, thus affecting (potentially) anyone who uses the internet, as the pirated machines become host to a never-ending series of attacks that will no longer run on the legitimate machines. They're not going to lower the price, rest assured of that; and the result of this will be felt in about 8-10 months. Those of us with Mad Phat Skillz!!1!1!!oneoneone, will no doubt still be able to get and install the patch; I've already seen copies of the SP2 release with the antipiracy features hacked available online. That's beside the point. There are probably, according to M$, over 5 million computers worldwide that are running pirated versions of Windows; of those, how many do you really think are run by people who are A. motivated and B. skilled enough to get and install the patch? Not enough, that's for sure.

This is why I'm moving to open source. There's simply nothing I do with my computer (outside of gaming, but I can run a dedicated gaming box in Windows) that requires any Microsoft software. Linux has its problems, but it's a hell of a lot more secure than Windows, and the software I need for my daily use is there. There are open source code compilers, open source office suites, open source music and video players, and sometime soon (take my word for it) someone will come up with a DirectX clone or emulator for Linux. ATi offers drivers for their graphics cards for Linux, and support is growing. Why? Because I'm not the only one that's tired of it. The carousel of patches needs to stop.

Sadly, it won't - most likely, we won't see Windows Longhorn in 2006, either, and even if it IS a full, buffer overrun-free rewrite of Windows from the ground up, it's also going to require a new computer for anyone that wants to upgrade to it. I just can't see paying $1000 or so for an operating system upgrade.

Maybe you can.

The Campaign Trail

Let's do a breakdown on the candidates we're faced with in this presidential election, shall we?

Covering the top 5 funded candidates that are still in the race:

George W. Bush

1. Self-Financing: $0


2. Funds whose sources are undisclosed: $8,991,572


3. Top contributors: Banks, and Microsoft Corp.


4. Receives most of his money from: Retired persons, Lawyers, Banks, and Real Estate


5. Has way more money than you or I: Yep.


6. Made the second biggest tax cut in history.


7. Set back our civil liberties over 150 years.


8. Doesn't have an ability to speak well in public.


9. "There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of
   others."
   - Niccolò Machiavelli

John F. Kerry

1. Self-Financing: $6,387,965


2. Funds whose sources are undisclosed: $20,081,288


3. Top Contributors: Universities (Harvard and UCal,) Time Warner, and Microsoft Corp. (Hmmmmm.)


4. Receives most of his money from: Lawyers, Retired people, Schools, and Banks


5. Married more money than you or I will ever have: Yep.


6. Won 3 Purple Hearts, the "You forgot to duck, stupid" award; and two "real" awards, the Bronze and Silver Star (1 each)


7. "Has more waffles than a House of Pancakes." (Thanks Jibjab, hope the lawsuits don't suck too much.)


8. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
   - Edmund Burke

Dennis Kucinich

1. Self-Financing: $0


2. Funds whose sources are undisclosed: $176,558


3. Top Contributors: Schools, Unions, and Microsoft Corp (There's that name again...)


4. Receives most of his money from: the retired, and small business


5. Has more money than you or I will ever have: Wealthy but not REALLY stupid.


6. Has been a Talk-radio host


7. Believes in peace to the point of letting terrorists own you


8. "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."-John Stewart Mill

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.

1. Self-Financing: $0


2. Funds whose sources are undisclosed: $207,642


3. Top Contributors: The U. S. Government


4. Receives most of his money from: Retired people, print publishing, government institutions


5. Has more money than you or I will ever have: Not exactly broke as a joke, but pretty poor. No wonder he wants this job.


6. Only candidate convicted of a felony


7. Conspiracy nut who says tax evasion and fraud charges prove he'll be a good President


8. "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking." -Ferdinand Foch

Ralph Nader

1. Self-Financing: $40,544


2. Funds whose sources are undisclosed: $25,452


3. Top Contributors: A mishmash, but Time Warner is in there


4. Receives most of his money from: Lawyers, retired people, and investment groups


5. Has more money than you or I will ever have: Pretty sizeable nest egg.


6. Starts lots of PACs


7. Sues to get on the ballot, even though he doesn't have enough signatures; thankfully, the Republican Party will gladly provide them


8. "Victory belongs to the most persevering." -Napoleon Bonaparte (A note: I had planned to use this quote for Bob Dole, but he's not running.)

So, this time around, we have a moron, a waffler, a hippie, a crook, and a Luddite. Great choices, guys. Can we please have someone new? Maybe? Hmmm?

Spin Control Is A Mofo.

"I even laughed at times," said Binladin, adding, "but a lot less when he states errors or inaccuracies about my family, knowing perfectly well that he's deceiving the public."

Amazing how Michael Moore's film is so widely accepted as gospel by liberals, when it's factually inacurate and openly deceitful, isn't it?
But I have to admit, I just LOVE the fact that Usama Bin Laden's half-brother is just openly accusing Moore of lying. More people need to do this. Let's see...

"That's false and can be verified by anyone,"

Hmmm. I think we just sorta ... did.

The movie also states that several family members attended a 2001 wedding of one of Usama bin Laden's sons in Afghanistan — a claim Binladin says is exaggerated.

"Nobody from my family was at this wedding in Afghanistan except for the mother of Usama,"

Great stuff, there. They all knew where he was, of course, because his son called his grandmother to come to his wedding. Geez.

In other news....

Did you know that Apple Computer, Colgate-Palmolive, Yahoo, and Oracle increased their CEOs' salaries by over 1000 percent this year?
Wow, way to pay attention to the needs of your stockholders, guys. The Michael Eisner no-confidence vote wasn't a clue, apparently.
For those of you who don't know, Michael Eisner, the CEO and Chairman of the board of Disney, after compensating himself at the shareholders' expense (to the tune of over a billion dollars in cash and stock options, over 20 years,) received one of the largest no-confidence votes in the history of corporate America. The response by Disney? Make him CEO only, and make someone else chairman of the board.

The Following...

...is a comment I left over at My Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, a conservative blog with bite.

This convention is only one of so, so many things that are wrong with this election.
Kerry's winning;  no, wait, Bush is;  the media's reduced convention airtime to 6 hours,  but media outnumbers the delegates by 3-to-1; Gillette's donating razors which are immediately confiscated,  Wal-Mart is exclusively selling "W" Ketchup,  peace protesters are beating up anti-abortion protesters,  and Bush is picking a new VP; while the Republicans work hard to get Nader into the race, Lyndon Larouche, an ex-con (tax fraud) is bankrolled by the IRS, and free speech goes by the wayside.
What a year.

Some More Good Election Tidbits...

Just a couple of brief notes I found amusing.

First, Lyndon Larouche is running for President again. No Surprise there, as he runs in virtually every Presidential election. However, THIS time, there's a difference - he's NOT the smallest candidate. Oddly enough, this time around, Larouche has almost 6 and a half times as much money to play with as Ralph Nader does, despite the fact that Nader has much better name / face recognition. In fact, only 3 candidates have more money than Larouche: Bush, Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich.

I thought that was interesting, so I looked up Larouche's top contributors, to see who's bankrolling him this time around. And what did I find? Our government, that's who. Well, some of it, anyway:

• The U.S. Postal Service
  
• The City of New York
  
• The City of Los Angeles
  
• The City of Philadelphia
  
• The State of New Jersey
  
• The Los Angeles Unified School District (?!)
  
• The U. S. Army
  

There were a few interesting companies, too, of course:

• Lockheed Martin
  
• General Electric
  
• Verizon Communications
  
• General Motors
  
• J. C. Penney
  

But to me, the real kicker was #9 on the list, the IRS.

But wait a second. Didn't Lyndon Larouche spend time in jail for tax evasion and fraud? Why yes; yes he did. It's even on his resume, although of course he calls it

a politically motivated fraud, from beginning to end.

and goes on to say that

LaRouche is the only presidential candidate to have been convicted in a Federal criminal case. As the measure of a man's virtue is often the numerousness and savagery of his enemies, the fraudulent character of that conviction is, in fact, the most powerful proof of his exceptional qualifications for election to be President.

Great stuff, there. The IRS gets him put in jail, and pays for him to run for President. Wonderful. Gotta love THIS election cycle, it's really entertaining.


In other news, I ran across a chart of the Top 100 political contributors of all time; the chart speaks for itself, but I find it interesting that out of all 100, only one company, Amway Corporation, is solidly Republican. And they're #82 on the list in $$ donated.

INDUCE Me Some More, Baby.

Washington's Top 50 Political Contributors

Figures are based on contributions reported to the Federal Elections Commission and state Public Disclosure Commission as of mid-July.

There are some really interesting connections between the Democrats, the media companies, the computer companies, and the INDUCE Act.

Of the top 50 contributors this year, 13 of the top 15 are Democrat donators; one, Bill Gates, donated to a bill rather than to a party, and therefore counts as both, and #14 of the top 15 is the first Republican contributor in the list.

Oddly enough, Bill Gates' father, William Gates Sr., is one of the top 50 as well, as a Democrat.

In fact, 34 of the top 50 Washington contributors this year are Democrats, 10 are Republicans, and 6 are fairly even-handed. So, let's break this down, shall we?

Of the top 50 individuals contributing to the mess in Washington, a total of $5,130,589 was donated to Democrats. $655,034 was given to Republicans, and $466,380 was handed out evenly to both.

But where does this money come from? Well, let's see.

Among the Democrats:

• Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of Real Networks


• Nicholas Hanauer, founder of Avenue A, and an initial investor in Amazon.com


• Jim Sinegal, co-founder of Costco


• Jeffrey Brotman, co-founder of Costco


• Jack and Charlotte Spitzer, owners of Covenant Mortgage


• Joseph Schocken, president of Broadmark Capital


• William Marler, the lawyer who sued Jack-In-The-Box about E.Coli


• 8 different current and former Microsoft Employees, and Bill Gates' father, who oversees the Gates Foundation

The Republicans:

• George Rowley, a developer


• Bruce and Jolene McCaw, got rich from cell phones (Seattle Times gives no detail)


• Wes and Nancy Lematta, owners of Columbia Helicopters


• William Conner, founder of Conner Homes


• Mark Pigott, chairman and CEO of Paccar, truck manufacturer


• James and Ann Wiborg, former CEO and chairman of Univar Corp.


• John Stanton, CEO of Western Wireless


• Craig Clifford, owner of Clifford Enterprises


• William Weyerhaeuser, chairman of the board for Columbia Banking Systems


• Charles Pigott, former CEO of Paccar.

The "both"s we can leave alone, as they at least donate fairly. I find the Microsoft numbers really, really interesting, especially since regardless of Orrin Hatch's (a Republican, $158,860 in Hollywood contributions this year) reknowned sponsorship of the INDUCE Act, his co-sponsors include some people you might not expect.
Like:

• Senator Hillary R. Clinton, D, NY (has received $149,580 in contributions from Hollywood companies so far this year, BTW.)


• Senator Barbara Boxer, D, CA, $517,660 Hollywood this year


• Senator Tom Daschle, D, SD, $382,760 Hollywood this year


• Senator Patrick Leahy, D, VT, $220,450 Hollywood this year


• Senator Paul Sarbanes, D, MD (no specific data on Hollywood,)


• Senator Debbie Stabenow, D, MI (no data on Hollywood contributions yet.)

and two Republicans, Bill Frist of Tennessee ($58,550 Hollywood this year,) and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina ($72,273 Hollywood, this year.)
Also let me add that in this election cycle, media companies and their associated PACs have contributed $17,483,489, $11,504,336 of which went to Democrats, and $5,947,916 to Republicans.

(A side note: Did you know that no Republican Senator has sponsored more bills later declared unConstitutional than Orrin Hatch. Just thought you'd like to know.)

Far be it from me to suggest that Microsoft employees are supporting the INDUCE Act, oh no, never that; but it does look a bit suspicious. Especially considering Microsoft employees have donated $750, 808 to these same Democrats this year alone. And that doesn't count Microsoft Corporation itself, which has contributed 61% of its $1,880,946 in donations this year to the Democrats.

And boy, some of those names just crop up again and again: when you look at the top recipients of donations from computer or Internet companies, lo and behold, at numbers 11 and 17 respectively, Barbara Boxer of California and Tom Daschle of South Dakota. But wait, look at the top 20 recipients of media contributions: there they are again, Boxer, Daschle, Leahy and Clinton. (numbers 6, 7, 10, and 13 respectively.)

Things that make you go "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..."

Oh, and a final note: I find it hugely interesting that despite the Republican's constant labelling as the "rich people's party," the facts contradict this so heavily. The number that the media loves to point to is the fact that donations to the actual parties themselves are heavily stacked towards the Republicans. This is true; this year the Dems have raised $194,089,385, while the GOP has raised $264,493,293. However, this number is an illusion, as the war chests for the Dems are much higher: $713,556,957, as compared to the GOP's $647,196,047. The media loves to ignore the donations to the actual candidates themselves. In fact, if you look at the donations' complete breakdown, here, you'll see that contributions towards Democratic Congresspeople are 14 million dollars higher than for the Republicans, and John Kerry et al. are out ahead of the Bush camp by $122 million, nearly 60% higher.
Be like me. Get tired of media bias. Look up the numbers yourself, and decide from the facts.

The INDUCE Act, Part 3...

I'm not bothering with quotes today, and I will have links galore, I suspect. Be warned.

The INDUCE act is in consideration today. I wish I had C-SPAN, because I'd be glued to the tube to see how the debate and voting goes.

This is a law which could conceivably make PCs illegal to manufacture in the US. Think about that. Think of the number of businesses which are not only largely computer-dependent, but would actually be incapable of operation without them.
Banks.
The NYSE.
NASDAQ.
Blockbuster Video.
McDonalds.

This law is an immense threat to our way of life.

Now, I've heard comments from many people who live outside the US, not only on this, but on many issues, which give me the notion that people outside the US have their heads in the sand.

Let me explain.

See, people in other countries seem to think that the US is somehow not connected to their economic wellbeing, and would in fact cause no problems whatsoever if our economy were to melt down overnight.

Sadly, this is simply not true.

Let's start with the government. Googling reveals a few key agencies within our government, each responsible for some aspect of foreign aid: USAID gives an appropriations budget for FY 2004 in excess of 18 BILLION dollars.

UN-sponsored Official Development Assistance from the US to other nations was almost 16 BILLION dollars in 2003; so far we're up to what, 34 billion? Chump change, I tell you!

The general, non-specific "Foreign Operations" budget for 2002 was $15 billion - up to 49 billion so far - Iraq's Freedom Fund Contingent Emergency Reserve gaffled another $25 billion, bringing us up to 74 billion dollars.

But that's nothing! Foreign Military Aid for 2003 alone was another 4 billion, the State Department has another $9 billion to throw around, non-USAID related "loans and grants" account for another $11 billion a year, bringing us to a grand total of $89 billion in direct, immediate federal aid to other countries, from a google search for "US foreign Aid."

Now, that's not the whole story, of course. See, US corporations do trillions of dollars of business in foreign countries a year, providing jobs world-wide, providing money world-wide, and most importantly of all, letting foreign companies buy stock in them, world-wide.

See, there's the trick. If the US economy should collapse, those US companies would be hurt, probably killed, by their cross-investment with other US companies. The foreign companies which had invested in the US comapnies would also be hurt directly, as their own holdings become worthless, but also indirectly - the more foreign companies suffering economic damage, the more likely that they will have cross invested in one another as well, thus worsening the blow.

This is true of any major country to some degree, but the economy of the US is the world's biggest, and therefore would have the most far-reaching effects were it to collapse. Many citizens of the rest of the world love to bash the US, but if they were paying attention, they'd know that it's in their economic best interest to wish us good health and prosperity. We're all in this together.

Which brings me to my next point: some of us are more in this than others. The American media companies have given a really staggering amount of money to US politicians, under the guise of "political contributions." The companies often display a quite amazing partisan bias in their donations, but not always in the way you'd expect.

For example:

Each of the following companies gave over 55% of its contributions to the Democrats in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, with percentage and total contributed dollars:

• AOL Time Warner, 63%, 6.2 million dollars.


• Vivendi Universal, 65%, 3.4 million dollars.


• Viacom, 81%, 3.1 million dollars.


• CableVision Systems, 59%, 2 million dollars.


• Sony, 67%, 1.2 million dollars.


• Cox Communications, 56%, 340 thousand dollars.


• Discovery Communications, 90%, 312 thousand dollars.


• NBC, 77%, 250 thousand dollars.


• USA Interactive, 80%, 240 thousand dollars.


• Hearst, 68%, 180 thousand dollars.


• Liberty Media, 57%, 66.6 thousand dollars.


• Gannett, 57%, 35 thousand dollars.


• New York Times, 94%, 11.6 thousand dollars.

Next, the companies that did the same thing with the Republicans:

• News Corporation, 62% 1.7 million dollars.


• Charter Communications, 65%, 715 thousand dollars.


• Clear Channel Communications, 75%, 705 thousand dollars.


• Adelphia Communications, 77%, 289 thousand dollars.


• McGraw-Hill, 61%, 69 thousand dollars.


• Washington Post, 58%, $8200

And finally, the companies that donated fairly evenly between the two parties:

• Disney, 55D/45R, 2.8 million dollars.


• EchoStar Communications, 53D/47R, 2 million dollars.


• Comcast, 47D/53R, 1.2 million dollars.


• Hughes Electronics, 50D/50R, 261 thousand dollars. (The big winner for evenhandedness.)


• Tribune, 54D/46R, 189 thousand dollars.


• E. W. Scripps, 38D/53R/9I, 10 thousand dollars and the only one to give any significant percentage of its donations to the independents.

This info comes to you thanks to the wonderful folks at CapitolEye.org.

Now think about this for a second. For a total of over 26 million dollars in the last two election cycles, the media companies have been buying votes among the Congress, and this is why. Because the INDUCE Act allows them to determine what technology you can own, but more importantly, what you can build once you've invented it.

The chilling effect of this on our economy cannot be overestimated, and this Act should be beheaded and buried face down with a stake through its heart.

I don't Think He Wants Your Job, Mr. Cheney.

"As far as me and the vice presidency is concerned ... I spent a number of years in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark and (was) fed scraps, and I don't know why I would want to do that all over again," - Sen. John McCain

Wow. What a statement of distaste.

The thing is, it's almost entirely justified.
The Vice President acts as president of the Senate, spending loads of time trying to keep wonderful folks like Barbara Boxer (D., CA,) Hillary Clinton (D., NY,) Orrin Hatch (R., UT,) Ted Kennedy (D., MA,) and Arlen Specter (R., PA,) in line and behaving in a relatively civil fashion.
He only gets to vote if there's a tie, in which case he votes along strict party lines. (He's really supposed to vote his conscience, but that's virtually never happened since the late 40's.)
He's the heir to the throne, figuratively speaking; if the Prez dies, or can't perform his duties, then the Veep steps up to the plate. But wait: he's privy to practically none of the information that the president has. Most of the intelligence briefings are cleared for the Prez only, and he's not present for most of the Cabinet meetings, because he's either busy with the Senate or off putting out political fires for the sitting Prez.
His salary is way lower than the President's, and he's virtually given himself the political kiss of death by accepting the office.
Yet somehow, he's held accountable as though he had a large degree of control over the Prez' decisions and behavior, and he has to endure the same endless security arrangements as the Prez. He is in a position traditionally used as a fall guy by the Prez in the case of a scandal, and has essentially no defense against any allegations of misconduct that may arise.
On top of which, no-one pays attention to anything he says.

What a great job. Gee, I wonder why Senator McCain wasn't more enthusiastic about it?

The INDUCE Act, Part 2...

cm. from LifeandLiberty sent me a comment about an earlier post that deserves a reply, but I decided to do so at (belated note: MUCH) greater length than the Comments section provided, so here goes.
Why am I on the "bandwagon" against the INDUCE Act?
Well, I'll tell you.

I own 2 VCRs. I own a digital camera, an audiocassette recorder, a CD burner, and a computer. And because I own all these things, I enjoy the ability to transfer freely the digital content that I've legally purchased into a form that suits whatever I'm currently doing.

A tape of my favorite CD for when I'm driving in a car with no CD player, for example. A backup copy of a movie I bought on DVD, so that I can still watch it if my original disc gets scratched. For that matter, a backup of a movie I bought on VHS.

But it's more than just that. See, I can use the CD burner to burn copies of ANY CD, whether or not I paid for it. I can tape TV programs, or even record songs off the radio. Those of you with TiVo boxes can record video from TV even better than I can. And, see, the INDUCE Act says that doing that is piracy, and subject to even more harsh penalties than you're already subject to under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which made it illegal to even talk about or host a webpage discussing, technical means of bypassing copy protection or encryption, even if the purpose of this is to improve security. DMCA took away your right to fair use, that is, your right to make a personal, private backup copy of whatever you buy, so that you don't have to buy a new DVD of "The Lion King" every time your five-year-old spills juice on it and scratches it off.

The INDUCE Act, on the other hand, goes much farther than the DMCA. The INDUCE Act says that if a device CAN be used for piracy, it IS piracy, even if no piracy has been committed.

As I said, I could do all these things. However, I almost never do. But that doesn't matter, anymore, because under the gimlet eye of the INDUCE Act the mere possession of a device which COULD pirate content, means you're a pirate. I have no urge to go to jail; I also have no urge to give back my VCRs because the movie companies are pissed off at some jackass in Thailand copying their movies.

Frankly, I believe that filesharing is an inevitable consequence of price gouging by the movie and music companies; it's not a mistake, or an error, that every time music prices drop, filesharing of the popular CDs also drops. There is a 1:1 correlation between the increases in filesharing and CD price hikes. Whether you believe that filesharing is evil, or good, I don't really care. But if someone else commits a crime, am I guilty as well, merely because I have the same type of electronics in my house?

That might have been true back in the day when CD burners were ridiculously expensive and only people who were planning on using them for something serious owned them, but these days there's a burner, CD or DVD, in every new computer that comes off the racks at Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Conn's, and a million others. You cannot go to Best Buy and buy a computer that has no CD burner without having it custom-designed anymore; yet this is but one of the hundreds of devices that we take for granted every day, and use for a plethora of different reasons, that will be made illegal by the INDUCE Act; not because they ARE being used for piracy, but because they COULD.

Under the INDUCE Act, you are presumed guilty; if you have a device which COULD be used for piracy, you are considered a pirate, whether or not it's ever been used for that purpose. Even if your iPod is filled to the brim wih tunes you bought, for a total of thousands of dollars, at the iTunes store, legally, the fact remains that you are a content pirate, and subject to jail time, because the iPod is a device which MIGHT be used illegitimately.

I am on the "bandwagon" against the INDUCE Act because it pisses me off that the movie and music companies get to freely circumscribe my liberty, criminalize me, confiscate my personal property, hack my computer, and randomly screw up my day, merely because they can afford Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah's (admittedly low) asking price.

Orrin Hatch is willing to, to use a phrase from the old South, "sell us all down the river," into indentured servitude to the media companies, merely to line his pockets. I am not aware of another living human being more worthy of disgust, revulsion and contempt; save maybe those worthies from the great state of Utah who keep electing him.

But more importantly, I am on the bandwagon against the INDUCE Act because I see it as another element in a pervasive attempt to criminalize John and Jane Q. Public. The USA-PATRIOT Act made it legal for the government to assume you are guilty, disregard due process, ignore your rights against unreasonable search and seizure, and reduces us all to the same status as convicted felons - hoping that the next random sweep doesn't pick us up. Every attempt in history to create a police state from within a country, has succeeded.

Every one.

Nearly every police state requires outside help to topple the corrupt forces of the government, and in a day and age when the United States is surrounded by countries that are often police states themselves, and lack either (or both) the resources or inclination to help us if we needed it, I wonder from where our rescuers would appear? No cavalry is on the horizon, folks. If you don't defend your own civil liberties, you will lose them. Our best line of defense against the ongoing circumscription of our civil liberties is our willingness to defy it, and we must never lose sight of that fact.

I love this country, or I would not have served in our Armed Forces; I went to Kosovo to help bring peace to a region which, like Iraq, has known little in recent years, and I came home still in love with this country, but knowing one thing about this country that we should never forget.

Your love of it should never, ever eclipse, not even for one second, your awareness of the potential for abuse of governmental power. Our nation was founded on a refusal to bow before tyranny; and that's a sensation we should never have lost.

Descartes, What A Guy.

He Thinks, Therefore He Is Making Unsafe Assumptions.

But it could not be the same with the idea of a being more perfect than my own; for to derive it from nothing was manifestly impossible; and because it is no less repugnant that the more perfect should follow and depend upon the less perfect than that something should come forth out of nothing. I could not derive it from myself.

It remained, then, to conclude that it was put into me by a nature truly more perfect than was I and possessing in itself all the perfections of what I could form an idea--in a word, by God.

What a great line.
Rene Descartes starts off by assuming that everything is false, so that his thinking is not contaminated by irrelevancies and inaccuracies. He makes one solid realization (which I'll discuss momentarily,) and then springs headlong from there into assumptions, leaving behind his brief foray into logic and instead churning out some kind of half-baked hash.
His first, logical, and eminently true realization is that "I think, therefore I am." In other words, even if you disregard the evidence of your senses entirely, write off any communication from others as fantasy, and ignore your surroundings entirely, you cannot escape the fact that there is, in existence, at least one thing which thinks, and it is yourself. Now, this would make a wonderful springboard for a venture into solipsism - the belief that you, alone, are all that exists, and all the rest is merely fantasy - but he doesn't bother with this notion.

Instead, he says that - get this - since he's not perfect, and he can conceive of the idea of perfection, and - assumption # 1 - perfection cannot arise from something imperfect, that the notion of perfection must have been placed into his brain by some external agency, which must in and of itself have been perfect.
Whoa, there, chief.
First off, you still haven't proved that there's anything outside of you at all anyway.
Secondly, your unwarranted assumption that perfection cannot arise from imperfection sabotages your whole argument.
But thirdly, when you then go on to declare, as he does, that any being which is perfect must be God, and therefore the notion of perfection has been placed into his head by Jehovah himself, you've gone off into the realm of the looney tunes entirely.
Especially when you follow it with this bit of doggerel:

To which I added that, since I knew some perfections which I did not possess, I was not the only being who existed, but that there must of necessity be some other being, more perfect, on whom I depended, and from whom I had acquired all that I possessed; for if I had existed alone and independent of all other, so that I had of myself all this little whereby I participated in the Perfect Being, I should have been able to have in myself all those other qualities which I knew myself to lack, and so to be infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, almighty--in fine, to possess all the perfections which I could observe in God.

In other words, God taught him everything he knows, and if he had NOT learned all this good stuff from God, then he himself must in fact be God, because he would somehow have attained perfection merely by being able to conceive of it without help. Since he's clearly not God, God exists.

Sheesh.

Don't get me wrong here. I believe that there is a life-force in the universe, which is a fundamental field of energy from which all things arise - there's physical evidence of this, by the way - and that this life-force consciously protects itself from intrusion - there's physical evidence of this, too, by the way - and that a life-form encompassing all that we are able to percieve as the material fabric of the universe is, in any sense that might be useful to us, God.

That doesn't mean He takes a personal interest, though.
See, certain concepts are inherent in the nature of thought itself - "quality." "Good." "Evil." "Perfection." These ideas occur to us naturally through the process of thought, without any need for a progenitor which embodies any of them. Define "quality," anyway. It's something so fundamental, and yet it's very hard to pin down, because it's a concept which is in itself dependent upon the observer.

Like the "inalienable rights" named in the Declaration of Independence, these concepts are inherent. They exist, separate from and independent of, any given thing, residing wholly within the observer. They don't require permission, or lessons.

I realize that this post has gone on a bit longer than I initially intended, and so I will conclude it. However, I intend to make a more formal, multi-post breakdown of what I think about in my off time a bit later, say two or three days.

So, There's This Game Called Baseball...

The Astros LOVE it!

* Friday - Tuesday, July 9-13: FanFest will be held at the George R. Brown Convention Center
* Sunday, July 11: the Futures Game and the Legends and Celebrities Softball Game
* Monday, July 12: the Home Run Derby
* Tuesday, July 13: the All Star Game

So, what this means is that all our hotels are full to the brim with people urgently rushing to Houston to go to the convention center downtown and use the batting cages. Somehow, this seems less impressive to me than it apparently does to others. I guess maybe it's because I'm more of a football guy.

Or maybe, it's because, unlike the Super Bowl, there's no money to be made here. See, at the Super Bowl, the cab companies were on the ball. They set up a fixed route for the cabs to go to Reliant Park, set up a refreshment stand for drivers who were waiting in line, got organized, got it together, and the cabbies who participated cleaned up, taking people to their hotels, the airports, wherever.

This time around, though, they had a fit of the stupids, and let the hotels arrange shuttle busing for everyone staying with them for the game. See, what this means, is that there's this huge convention center downtown, with thousands of potential customers wandering around, all of whom already have rides back to their hotels.

Which same means that since most of Houston is tied down with the All-Star frenzy, there's no money to be made anywhere, until next Wednesday. Thanks so much, cab guys! You're just... swell.

Really, really f*cking stupid, but swell.

The Horror, The Horror...

So, these last couple of days have been reallllllly interesting.

In, you know, a sort of "not" kind of way.

First, on Monday, I managed through a combination of exposure to the elements and total lack of sleep, to horribly violate myself with a case of heat exhaustion that left me unable to work yesterday or today.
Second, my brother, in a fit of proving that he's cooler than I am, came over and played Megadeth on our mother's acoustic guitar in our living room.
Third, my fiancee damn near broke her toe - not once, but twice; not different toes, but the same one both times; on the exact same hallway obstacle both times. I said something, the exact text of which escapes me but was something along the lines of "Didn't you learn where it was from the first time?"
Fourth, I found out today that my wife-to-be swears like a drunken sailor.
(She justifies this by saying "It hurt. I'm not good with pain.")
I'm not either, but REALLY.
(She points out that the SECOND time she did it, she managed to repress the shrieking due to our company, and held it down to a stifled "MMpppPpHH!!")

My father had a car wreck, and bought a new car already.

Tara's very, very close to the end of FFX. Since we don't have FFX-2 yet, she's playing in reverse order - from this one she's going to play FF9. I'm playing Summoner, because I was already so miserable that I figured maybe the agony would provide me some revitalizing contrast.

Being as Tara's very proud of her burgeoning gamer-grrrl-hood, I should make sure to list her achievements thus far.

• Dungeon Siege


• DS: Legends of Aranna


• Diablo II


• FFVII


• Chrono Trigger


• FFX


• FFXI


• Silent Hill


• Silent Hill 2


• Unreal Gold


• Unreal Tournament 2003


• Tekken


• Dungeon Keeper 2

That's actually a longer list than either of us really realized.

*Takes a moment to reflect*
*Puts his mirror away*

Now, where was I?

A Simple Game.

Petals Around The Rose

The game is quite simple. Only a basic understanding of math is required and an open and creative mind. The game can be used as an example of how different people look at the world differently, and how these different ways of looking can yield different answers. In "Petals Around the Rose" there is always one correct answer. The problem is how we define the problem.

Just so you guys know, Bill Gates had trouble solving this game. It's not complex - in fact, it's forehead-slappingly-groan-inducingly-OMG-why-didn't-I-see-it easy, but how fast you solve it depends on how you look at problems.

I first looked at this game as a link from somewhere else, it was about 11 pm, and I wasn't thinking too clearly. Looked, and after a few repetitions went *shrug* "ehhhhh."
A few days later, my fiancee asked me if I had ever solved it, and right then when she asked me about it, I knew immediately what the solution was.

This game has very few rules. It's played with 5 six-sided dice, and the players can be told the following information:

• The name of the game is "Petals Around The Rose."


• The name of the game is significant.


• The answer for any given dice roll is either zero, or an even number.

Each player can also be given the correct answer for each given dice throw.

The prime rule for this game is very simple indeed: if you know how to solve it, you can NOT tell anyone else how to do it.

Have fun!

Where, Oh Where, Do I Begin...

...to describe the truly magnificent silliness that is Van Helsing.

Warning! Spoilers! It may even spoil you wanting to see this movie!

Now, I admit, I didn't go into this movie expecting a whole hell of a lot from it. But in this case I'm ever so glad we saw it at a discount theater.
First off, Van Helsing requires that you not only buy the vampires, werewolves, and the Frankenstein's Monster, but it also requires you to restrain any basic understanding you might have of physics, too.

Here's an example. They're being chased by flying vampires, as they flee in a horse-drawn carriage. At no point does the movie give any reason why a major, frequently traveled bridge over a vast abyss might be out; but it is, leaving a gap longer than a carriage drawn by a team of 6 horses. Now, I've seen a steeplechase; horses have trouble jumping a couple of FEET; not to suggest the existence of super-horses, but they were able to clear the 50-foot+ gap in the bridge, easily. The carriage falls, though - no problem, as it turns out to have been intentional. However, I'm seriously wondering if Stephen Sommers understood when he was writing this movie that the reason cars in Hollywood movies explode when they roll over / fall off something / get bumped in a parking lot is that they have huge tanks of volatile material attached to them. Horse-drawn carriages, as a rule, don't have gas tanks; yet on several occasions in this movie you'll see one roll over or fall off something and burst into flames. (Yet, oddly enough, Frankenstein's mostly-wooden laboratory fails to burst into flames despite near-constant downpours of sparks from the mysterious machinery above.) After the vampires figure out that this carriage was a decoy, they go to seek the other one, which got across the chasm on, I suppose, the other, completely different, and UNDAMAGED bridge.

The plot of this movie sounds like something from The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Dracula, who can only be killed by a werewolf, is trying to capture Frankenstein's Monster, so that he and Igor can use the Monster to bring Dracula's undead offspring (thousands upon thousands of blood-drinking gargoyles) to life. Using anyone other than Frankenstein's Monster is a no-go, as it results in a shelf life of only a few minutes for the offspring before they simply explode into green slime. Van Helsing is a slayer of all sorts of supernatural monstrosities for the Church, as represented by a secret society so secret it only appears in the film for 2 minutes or so, as kind of a nod at Van Helsing having a past.

There's great attention to detail here, too: in one scene a computer-generated werewolf jumps through a glass window. We're not supposed to notice, I guess, that the glass breaks INWARD, even though the werewolf is jumping outward. Nice squib work, guys. Who knows, maybe no-one else noticed. They were too busy oogling Kate Beckinsale, which was no doubt the whole idea.

Numerous times in this movie you'll get to see one or another of the heroes fall off something hundreds of feet high and not only live but remain marvelously uninjured; at one point KB and HJ use a wire at least a kilometer long to swing down from the top of a castle. The wire gets cut, and they swing down to a perfectly safe landing, despite the fact that with the pendulum effect, their landing force would be on the order of a 100-mph car accident. And KB, who falls hundreds of feet in perfect safety at least 3 times in the movie, is mysteriously killed instantly by having a werewolf tackle her from 15 feet away, to land on a SOFA. Mmmmmhmmmmmm.

Both Kate Beckinsale and Hugh Jackman deserve better than this, and they (at best) looked embarrassed to be involved in it, although I suppose I can understand why they were; if your movie career is as limited as theirs have been so far, the prospect of a multi-million dollar paycheck can assuage even the most offended sense of "how-the-hell-did-I-get-into-this-again?"

If you just HAVE to see something with vampires and werewolves, rent Underworld instead; granted, it's cheesy, but still enjoyable. This, like The Core, was only "enjoyable" in terms of "Oh, my God, who came UP with this bullsh**?"

The worst part of this movie, the absolute worst, is the dedication at the end. After sitting through an hour and a half of bad dialogue, computer-generated creatures, and unbelievably poor writing, you are treated to a screen saying "Written and Directed by Stephen Sommers. In Memory of My Dad." If I were his father, I would return from the beyond to pimp-slap him, in public.

Away, Technology! Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!

The INDUCE Act 0WN3Z J00!

Filing a lawsuit under the Induce Act is like dropping a litigation bomb on any company that gives users products that have even the slightest potential to assist in copyright infringement.

The INDUCE Act is a piece of legislation that's kind of slid in under the radar; most people don't know anything about it. Today, I'm gonna do my part to fix that.
See, the Act has already passed in the Senate - it has only the House to go before it becomes law. Once that happens, the onslaught begins.
What onslaught, you ask?
The onslaught of lawsuits.
Under the INDUCE Act, VCRs, audiocassette recorders, TiVo, DVR, DVD- and CD- burners, MP3 players, and computer hard drives all become illegal, or at least subject to an endless flood of lawsuits, because they are devices which allow "copyright infringing use."
Until now, the standard has been that any device, software, or other product which has legitimate, non-infringing uses, is legal. Under INDUCE, that's not true anymore. Any device which can be used for piracy, and advice which can be construed as advocating piracy, will be illegal, and subject to really outlandish penalties.
The EFF is really upset; they even wrote a fake lawsuit to demonstrate the kind of thing that will be possible under it.
Now is the time to write to your Congressman. Really. Once this becomes law, the music and movie industries will have the legal right to confiscate from you any product you possess which they deem to have uses for piracy. Maybe your camcorder, or your digital camera, or your microcassette recorder. And you won't be able to stop it.

If there's one thing you can say about Orrin Hatch of Utah, it's that he's honest. Once you buy him, he stays bought.

I just worry that people won't realize what's happening until it's too late.

The Lame, the Halt, the Blind, and the Brainless

Ok.
I hate to do it, but it needs to be said.

Houston drivers are the worst in the known universe.

No, really.

See, in Houston there is no such thing as "following distance." You know, that thing that sane drivers use so that if the guy in front of them suddenly stops to admire the flowers at the side of the road, they can stop without running into him? Yeah. Don't have that. See, in Houston traffic, if you leave any space at all, it is an absolute guarantee that some jackass suckhole will swerve violently in front of you from one side or the other, narrowly missing your bumper.
But Houston drivers fall into four main categories: the Lame, the Halt, the Blind, and the Brainless.

The Lame are those who are constitutionally incapable of driving at the speed limit. Whatever the reason, they creep along as much as 20 miles below the posted limit, driving everyone crazy. Now, most people believe (erroneously) that speed itself is somehow inherently dangerous. In fact, this is not the case according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Now what does affect safety is the presence of motorists travelling at different speeds. The Lame are dangerous, regardless of the context in which they appear.

The Halt are otherwise known as "The light-will-get-greener people." As you can tell from their name, they love to sit at traffic signals, stop signs, and ESPECIALLY blinking red lights, and never ever move. Ever.
Ever.
They are also the perpetrators of such joyous tricks as coming to a complete halt in the middle of the road before turning right into a driveway, street, or parking lot, even one with complete visibility around the corner.

The Blind are those who cannot see out the windows of their cars. They cannot see the cars around them, they cannot read street signs, they cannot see traffic signals to obey them, and they are very very likely to sue if their inattention causes an accident. This syndrome is often caused by cell phone use.

The Brainless are those who cannot properly operate their own cars. These are the people whose cars mysteriously roar forward while they're changing gears, for no reason at all, as they will loudly assure you. They were pressing the brake as hard as they could. Far be it from me to suggest that they were pressing the wrong pedal, but Hey! Dumbass! The pedal on the right is the one that makes it GO. The "stop" pedal is on the OTHER side. (In case you were wondering: this phenomenon occurs so frequently that there's actually a name for it: SAI, Sudden - Acceleration Incident. I prefer P. J. O'Rourke's term for it: SUI, Sudden - Unintelligence Incident.) They can't work their turn signals, only manage to find their brake pedals in the last five feet or so, have no idea how big their car is, and thus can't make a left without obstructing the ENTIRE street, and they just. Plain. Can't. Figure out that driving at night, in the rain, with no lights, is STUPID.

One of the great joys of my life is that I spend upwards of ten hours a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY, on the road with these boneheads.

I'm With Stupid. Won't You Join Us?

So, there's this movie called Fahrenheit 9/11.

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

Nasty.

Michael Moore is a filmmaker who produces "mockumentaries," films which purport to be factual, while actually presenting Moore's opinion and supporting it with "facts" which are often wrong, sometimes outright made up, and spun so heavily they're unrecognizeable even when they're accurate.

There's been a small furor over this movie, for no reason that I'm able to fathom. Disney, in a stroke of wisdom so rare amongst their recent decisions, decided not to carry it for U.S. distribution, because it would be contrary to their chosen corporate image. Predictably, Moore tried to use this as evidence that his movie was being "suppressed."
Reality check. No-one was oppressing you. It's just that they think you suck.

Moore's films cater heavily to the hyper-pacifistic left wing, but they require that even the most openly leftist liberal totally disregard common sense and logic, suspend any requirement for evidence, and mindlessly roll along with Moore's babbling rant. Sadly, unlike his previous film Bowling for Columbine, which was at least skillfully enough executed to seem believable, F-9/11 seems instead to have rolled off into the deep end entirely.

In other news, New York Senator Hillary Clinton is not only a communist, but convinced in advance that the Democrats have this election in the bag.

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Wow. Great stuff.

Sweet Jesus, I'm Tired.

Getting up at 5:30 AM, and working until 8:30 PM, sucks.
That said, at least I earned a good chunk of change today.

Believe it or not, you get a lot of good reading done if you're driving a cab. Sometimes you can drop someone off and sit for half an hour before you get another trip, and sometimes if you're waiting at a hotel or club to see if anyone comes out, (in gamer-speak, "spawn-camping" like a mofo,) you can end up with a good chunk of time on your hands. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to do if you're sitting for 45 minutes in a car, in a parking lot somewhere.

So, you read. My tastes run to the Speculative Trifecta: SF, fantasy, and horror. Recently, I re-read Peter Straub's classic novel Shadowland.

Shadowland is one of a very small number of works by Straub that I actually like. As far as I know, I've read everything he's published, but he's very hit-or-miss for me. A short breakdown follows:

*Ghost Story: Just plain cool. At first it tends to wander a bit, but when all the myriad plot threads finally come together at the end of the book you get a dose of severe creep-out.
*Floating Dragon: This novel suffers greatly from schizophrenia. It has all the elements of two pretty good novels, including two complete storylines; sadly, it's meant as one novel, and as such just plain makes no damn sense.
*Koko: Crap. Really. Don't bother.
*The Throat: Sequel to Koko. Remember what they say about sequels.
*Houses Without Doors: Anthologized short fiction, some of which is really amazing. "The Juniper Tree" is very hard reading, for reasons which will become immediately apparent to anyone who picks it up, but it's only one excellent story among several in this collection.
*The Talisman (with Stephen King): This book is cool, but it's obviously the first time King and Straub have worked together. Their writing styles are so wildly different that the book suffers from a sense of disjointedness. It's clearly evident to anyone familiar with both authors' work when one leaves off and the other takes over.
*Black House (Sequel to The Talisman, also with King): This time around it worked much better. Their writing styles, both of them having matured a bit in their craft, flow more smoothly into each other, so that this is a much more coherent narrative; there's never really a point where the narrative voice shifts clearly from one writer to the other, and as a result you can enjoy the story without getting jarred out of your immersion by wild linguistic shifts.

*Shadowland.

This is Straub's best book as far as I'm concerned. I've come back to this book maybe 15 times as I've grown up, and gotten something a little different from it every time. Not many books can do that - Clive Barker's Imajica, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Richard Bach's Illusions, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island. The few, the proud, etc.

Shadowland is the story of a young man who is taken to an estate, called Shadowland, to visit his friend Del's uncle, Coleman Collins, who is a magician. Not a nice one, either; Tom is brought to Shadowland because Collins sees that Tom has the potential to be a magician, and plans to vampirize his power to continue his unnaturally extended life. Tom, in the process of learning magic from Collins, learns how to defeat him.

This book isn't what I would call light reading; but it shouldn't be. This is the kind of book you should enjoy, night after night, in a comfy armchair. Read it. It's really good.

Well, it was worth a dollar fifty.

http://www.punisherthemovie.com/
"The Punisher" is a long, dark slog through grim revenge. Unlike most movies based on comic book heroes, it doesn't contain the glimmer of a smile, and its hero is a depressed alcoholic -- well he might be, since his entire family, including wife, child, father and even distant cousins -- has been massacred before his eyes. As he seeks vengeance, he makes the Charles Bronson character in the movie "Death Wish" look relatively cheerful and well-adjusted.

This from Roger Ebert.

Oddly enough, I find myself in agreement with Ebert most of the time, although he reaches his conclusions after listing reasons that aren't necessarily mine.

Now, this movie wasn't bad. It just wasn't good, either. It suffered, as Hollywood movies nearly always do, from the syndrome that causes screenwriters to change elements of the original source material for no reason whatsoever.

For example:
In the original comic book, "The Punisher," Frank Castle was a cop, and former Marine, whose wife and son were killed by accident in a car bomb meant for him, by the New York Mafia.
In the movie, he's an FBI agent and former "Delta Force" counter-terrorist operative, whose whole family out to the cousins and so forth, about 30 in all, were killed on purpose by hitmen sent by a gentleman named Howard Saint, whose wife asked for their deaths as a gift. This, of course, all takes place in Tampa, Florida, rather than up north.

Never at any point did they attempt to justify these changes; but let's rise above that and move on to the meat of the movie itself.

It suffered greatly from being cheesy. Had they attempted to play it with less comedy, and more as a straight actioner, it would have been both a better movie, and more true to its character's roots. For example, Mr. Saint hires an assassin to come and kill Castle, and the assassin first comes into the diner where Castle is eating and plays him a song on his guitar, and then talks smack to him.

I told my fiancee, "Hey, look, honey, they watched El Mariachi too!" It was incredibly difficult not to laugh out loud at the overacted melodrama present in what was obviously meant as a serious scene, full of menace...

Heh.

There were good moments, the fight between Castle and "the Russian" was so over-the-top it was utterly amusing, and the sheer number of walls that got destroyed was really impressive.

One bit I particularly liked was the scene in which Castle "tortures" one of the lower-echelon hoods that work for Saint by showing him a blowtorch, and then poking him in the back with a popsicle. FYI, that bit can be found in Punisher: War Zone, issue #2. Oddly, let's-change-itism struck again; in the comic, the hood's name was Mickey; in the movie it's Nicky. Tell me, someone, why THAT was actually necessary.

The movie was fun, even in places where the makers clearly didn't intend for it to be, and as such was definitely worth $1.50 a ticket. I'm fairly glad we didn't attempt to see it in a first-run theater for $8.

Oh, Hollywood? Are you listening? If you advertise a soundtrack for a movie with songs by Drowning Pool, you oughta do the band the courtesy of at least having their song appear in the movie. Especially since the one real hit single Drowning Pool has had, "Bodies," is probably the most appropriate music you could have found for this movie. Well, with the possible exception of Dope's "Die, Motherf*****, Die."

Oh boy, here we go.

First off: Xeno, also known as "Zeno" was a Greek philosopher and mathematician from Elea, born sometime between 495 and 480 B.C. He is famous for proposing "paradoxes" to challenge what were then considered mathematical truisms. He wrote nearly forty original paradoxes, of which only eight have survived. His most famous are the Dichotomy, the Achilles, the Arrow, and the Stadium. More information than you could possibly want to know about him can be found here.

Thus the name. Since most things in my life right now are Catch-22's of some sort, or just outright paradoxical, it seemed an appropriate name.

My fiancee has an online journal, in which she rants about all the things that stink for us right now. Although I admit that if I have a bad day, it'll likely spill over, I'm going to try to focus instead on other things.