Random

Time for another long, rambling post that hits on a number of random topics and has no real point. Those of you who merely skim, you will probably want to do a lot of that.

Some random magazine that we get had an article featuring pre-teen bands. One of them is a group of three 12- and 13-year-old kids that call themselves Care Bears on Fire. Points for the band name. Music isn't bad either.



When I was thirteen, my hobbies were watching TV and playing Pong. Huh.

Work has been interesting. The restaurant has been very slow. Tuesday was the worst day since it opened, Friday and Saturday were both the worst Friday and Saturday ever. I hope this doesn't continue for long. Of course, now I have a backup if the restaurant tanks working at the bakery in the same complex. I do have to wonder about the bakery owner: my second day at work, everyone ran out the door at closing while I was in the back washing dishes leaving every single light on and all the doors unlocked. The first I knew that I was alone in the store was when someone wandered in trying to buy bread. I had no idea what needed to be done to close up the store, no key to lock the place up, and no phone number for the owner (or even a last name). I finally caught one of my co-workers still wandering around outside and figured out how to lock the place up so I could leave. Strange way to run a business.

I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking about electronic distribution of music, movies, books, magazines, etc. The one thing that I'm not sure about is that little concept of ownership and how it seems to be changing. I've talked before about set-top boxes that give you access to a catalog of movies for a set monthly fee. There is talk about similar deals for music and books that would use your iPod- or Kindle-style device as the set-top box, as it were. The advantage, of course, is not having to store anything. I'm sitting next to a shelf literally groaning under the weight of CD's, DVD's, video tapes, and books. I'm using up a good chunk of a terabyte of disk space with MP3's, video, and e-books. All that disappears into the "cloud" under this new model. The problem is that I would no longer own anything. Most people under 30 I talk to have no problem with this as long as they can build play lists or favorites lists and access them from any and all electronic devices. My problem with this system is the ease that things can disappear or be altered. One minor example: the digital erasing of the Twin Towers from movies shot prior to 9/11. I think this rather stupid idea has been shelved for the most part, but if no one has a private copy of any movie, it would be pretty easy to do. Or remove objectionable scenes. Or whole movies. Politically incorrect books simply vanish without a trace, or are subtly changed. Legal wrangling between band members causes the sudden disappearance of their entire catalog. Maybe this isn't important to people. Maybe it should be. Maybe 1984 needs to come pre-installed on every Kindle. And maybe Eurasia really has always been the Enemy.

I ws listening to TWiT and just decided that John C. Dvorak is the biggest ass on the internet. And that takes some doing. I cannot stand his rudeness simply for the sake of rudeness combined with a complete ignorance of pretty much everything. I'll still catch Leo Laporte's Tech Guy podcast, but screw you, Dvorak. Leo Laporte needs to do himself and the rest of the internet a favor and dump this jerk.

This has been around for a while, but it is still funny. It's a voice mail some guy left as he witnesses a car crash and the resulting altercation between the guy at fault and the car load of old ladies he hit. Only in Texas.

The mainstream media is starting to pick up on the fact that there is still plenty of controversy over just what is happening to our climate and why. That a lot of very smart people who have spent big chunks of their lives studying such things are very unconvinced by the so-called consensus. That we should be spending money on reducing the uncertainty in the data instead of burning tons of fossil fuels to fly politicians all over the world to plan the destruction of the only economy with the capital to actually do something should it prove necessary. Fact: the climate has been warmer in the last thousand years than the worse-case scenarios being pushed by Uncle Al, yet we have penguins and polar bears, Venice survived, and the world's forests didn't burst into flames. The "consensus" ignores this, or simply waves it away with "it's different this time." If you ask the obvious question of how it is different, you are written of as a "denier." This entire episode will go down as the classic case of the failures of the peer-review process combined with government-funded research.

Quick note on the "Currently Reading" and "Recently Read" lists: you may notice that books suddenly appear as recently read without first showing as currently being read. That is due to the fact that both of us (Debbie more than myself) frequently complete more than one book in a day. It's a bit of a pain to update the lists, so I only do it once every day or two.

Next week should be interesting. I start off working doubles Tuesday and Wednesday at the restaurant. After that, I should start settling into the "normal" routine of mornings in the bakery, a couple hours break, then evenings in the restaurant. I should get 10-12 hours a day, which will help with the budget even as I die from overwork and lack of sleep. It will be nice to have some extra cash for the cruise, so I won't be making any adjustments until we come back. Then we will see what shakes out. I'd like to see if I could work the bakery job into something closer to full-time and drop the restaurant. The only problem with the bakery job is that I am surrounded by bread and cookies, so I expect to weight about 300 pounds in a few months.

Told you this was going to be random.