I’m only going to say one thing on this topic.

Never before has so much been asked of so many to bail out so big a problem created by so few people.

Now I gotta get back to work.

So I’m watching the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics, and during a break I see a commercial for a car that advertises “MP3 connectivity.” Does that sound wrong to anyone else? MP3 is a file format, not a hardware specification. Say I have MP3s on a hard drive, is that compatible? No. They should say “audio jack connectivity.” The car itself doesn’t have any hardware or software specifically designed to decode MP3 files (unless they were talking about an MP3 CD player, and they weren’t.)

And then there’s another commercial that touts “IPod compatibility.” Okay, that’s a bit more accurate, but still, that’s like saying, “this CD player can play Soulja Boy CDs.” Soulja Boy isn’t the only music artist on CD out there, and the IPod isn’t the only portable music player with an audio jack connector out there.

First of all, let me say that I never signed up for DirecTV. It’s one of the mandatory “features” provided by my apartment, along with the four unique home phone numbers that I never use. So, there I am watching the Euro 2008 finals between España and Deutschland when, shortly after Spain scores her first goal, the TV goes blank, and all I see on the TV for the next 30 minutes is “Searching for Satellite Signal…” Later the signal would come back, but only sporadically, making it impossible to watch. So, I basically watched the rest of the match on justin.tv. The lesson to be learned here is, don’t buy DirecTV service unless you’re willing to risk losing your broadcast signal at the most inopportune times.

Anyway, as I’m typing this now, I’m still listening to the hyper Spanish commentators on the Internet stream which, I assume, is coming from a Spanish source (ya, there are Spanish commercials coming on now). Man those Spaniards are crazy about their football. I’m glad Spain won. Their style of play was a lot more entertaining to watch than that of the Germans.

… is not going to be caused by a nuclear holocaust or a deadly virus. It’s going to be caused by bad grammar on the Internet. I swear, I lose at least a couple brain cells for almost every article I read. Surfing the net has become as dangerous as wallowing through a swamp infested with mosquitoes capable of penetrating through human skull. Every time I see someone misuse its, it’s, their, there, they’re, two, to, too, or any other words a six year old would know, or anytime I see verb tenses violated like a supple Japanese school girl in a hentai series– “i went to teh store to bought some candys”– I die a little inside.

Apparently, Apple is the new Microsoft– or, at least the things we (used to) love to hate about Microsoft. This PC World article indicates that some people are finally wisening up to the reality that Apple is not the ambrosian elixer of eternal happiness for which so many disillusioned Apple fanboys drool, climax, and otherwise give of their body, soul, and bank accounts. Let it be known, before Apple-hating becomes trendy, that I hated Apple before it was the cool thing to do.

I hate taxes. But now I hate TurboTax even more. They royally screwed up K-1 entries and thus all income from S corporations, and I need to file returns for two S corporations for two different states this year. From now on, I’m just going to file on my own now and will never buy TurboTax crap ever again. I’d write something more indignant if I wasn’t so tired from staying up all night trying to get this piece of **** to work. :(

At first I thought this was nothing more than a joke created by a third grader considering the atrocious website design, but it turns out to be the real deal. The RIAA has just launched a website that allows people to settle their lawsuits online. Not only is this convenient for the students and little kids targeted by the RIAA, it also streamlines the RIAA’s extortion process and probably saves a few trees as well. Plus, they take Mastercard, VISA, and Discover. What’s not to love? They even have a nice FAQ page where they answer questions such as:

How are P2P copyright infringers identified for lawsuits?
They are initially identified by their Internet Protocol (IP) address – the Internet address that the computer uses to communicate.

which seems to fit in nicely with their privacy statement:

This Web Site collects… non-personally identifiable information (for example, this can include your domain name, browser version, service provider, and/or IP address).

Brilliant.

Here’s a screenshot I took this morning of Windows Taska Manager on my work computer after closing Firefox, which had been left running over the weekend. The pagefile usage went from 1.6 GB to 476 MB after ending the firefox.exe process, which was the only way I could shut down Firefox since its main window wasn’t responding to any mouse clicks. Can you say “major memory leak problem?”

I sprained my right ring finger while playing basketball yesterday, and now I can only type at about 10% of normal typing speed. This sucks.

While it’s good for contractors and vendors, defense spending as I’ve come to discover can be a total waste of taxpayer money. I’m going to be very vague here because I don’t want to get into any trouble. During my visit to a certain well-known Department of Defense client of ours in Washington, DC last week, one of their network engineers complained to me about how his department is throwing a significant amount of money (easily into eight figures) into a highly costly technology that not only doesn’t improve their network, but actually decreases their network’s fault tolerance and survivability. This wasn’t a case of opinion or personal preference; any network engineer would come to the same conclusion. (Read on …)