Hmm, $1,800 for either an LCD iMac or… an MTV computer! Now, which do you think your average college kid is going to pick? But wait, don’t answer so quickly, for you see, the MTV computer has ‘MTV-specific content‘ [Sidenote: remember when MTV used to be cool?] and their new music player. (And as a bonus, you get crunchy DRM for free! Never worry about having fair use rights again! Do your part! The freedom to innovate!)

Yah, this is gonna sell like hotcakes. Welcome to the 21st century.

Completely unrelated: Just got back from seeing Brotherhood of the Wolf. What an awesome movie. It’s very damn good; it’s beautifully and creatively shot, and it’s funny, and fun, and super-stylized, and stylish, and exciting, and utterly and unabashedly romantic and fantastic and cheezy; oh, and filled with buxom peasant girls… and Monica Belluci. What a hundred pounds. So in summary, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

My Acoustic Research HC6 system came in today. The box contains a pair of white gloves with the manual, presumably to keep one from marring the glossy piano black finish of the speakers on installation.

The Bachelor Cookbook – an amusing link sent to me by an old college buddy. I’m not sure why one would want to semi-make chili vs. canned chili unless there was some special recipe. Here, btw is the one semi-real meal in my personal cookbook.

Yesterday, one of my new co-workers (he just started work about two weeks after I did; he’s been programming forever and was a founding member of the now defunct WaSP) tells me about HTML-Kit. Now, last night, while reading the /. discussion on RMS‘s “We can put an end to Word attachments” editorial, I noticed a reference to HTML-Kit on a thread about demoronizing Word generated HTML (something that we were also discussing at work the a few days prior). Hmm, there’s no point to that, really, but I wanted to say that HTML-Kit kicks so much ass it’s not funny. The cool thing is that I don’t have to re-install HomeSite now. Screw you Macromedia!

BTW, the best suggestions about Word alternatives is using RTF (one of the suggestions was something I actually did while I was at Xerox; instead of paying for an ASP DOC/XLS writer COM module, I actually just generated HTML and gave them the proper MIME/extension type to the client-browser. Vióla! Instant Office compatibility). Also, there’s a nice little solution on how to make people use RTF.

Now, TextEdit on OSX is a great little application for reading and generating RTF’s, which is the one thing that’s missing from both UltraEdit and HTML-Kit.

Peculiar sidenote: Quite a few /. discussions have been uncannily relevant this past week. A short list:

• Are There Limits to Software Estimation?
• Writing Documentation
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome not a Disability
• LDAP Tools – Where are they?
• Making It Personal

It’s weird. Sometimes /. just gets in this awesome groove, and sometimes it’s, I dunno, posts on Aibos.

This reminds me of when I locked my keys in my car three times in one week in Novemeber. I had honestly, never, ever, ever done it once in my life prior to that, and then when I was looking for apartments, I did it once, and then twice, and then three times that week. I’m on number two with accidentally closing the blogger window. OK, this time I’m serious about the typing in a separate editor.

I’ve given up trying to figure out how the height is calculated for absolutely positioned CSS2 blocks and have tweaked the design to accomodate for my utter failure to be able understand the spec.

As Bill Keller says, good riddance to Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H. They and many others in our government blacken and disgrace us more than any outside force can.

Hmm, I have to stop mulling over this stuff, it’s rather pointless and just gets me all moody. I mean, things aren’t all bad. I’ve got a desk, broadband, my blog back up, and having been getting oodles of cool music: Sigur Rós, more Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, India Arie, The Gloria Record… As you can tell, I’m still going through my whole post-emo indie rock consumption phase (I bought like the whole Post-Parlo library a few weeks ago, hopefully I’ll be getting that soon; a former co-worker was drummer for two bands, Subset and Silver Scooter), and also getting into some shoegaze as it’s apparently called, and just some random stuff.

So it’s early Saturday morning now, and I’ve been surfing around, catching up on reading and thinking about how there are all these people who are way more talented than I (or at the very least, way way more accomplished) who are suddenly looking for work and it’s sorta weird. It’s one thing for your pals to be out of work, but actually I don’t know what I’m saying, it’s just weird and different and time flies and it’s 2002, not 1998 and… It’s late. The economy sucks.

On a lighter note, here’s an article on a way to scientifically recreate The One Ring using modern technology. The result? The One Humvee.

Another part of my monster post, was that I did some thinking on how I got my “world news.” Although I try to keep up, I’m not really a news junkie, and I’m politically aware and active, but I wouldn’t mind not having to deal with all that if I could just sort of be left alone [Give me the ability to work and make a decent living, the freedom to do what I want, balanced against the rights of others to do what they want, and you can have the rest. I have the former now, but the latter seems to be causing such a fuss].

In any case, as my dream world does not exist, I’m left having to keep up with what’s going on. I probably should read the EFF headlines more than I do (same w/ the ACLU), but in any case, most of my initial views of news is filtered, ususally through blogs or lists (Politech, Crypto-Gram, etc.)I read, or /., or k5 or occasionally mefi. When the spirit moves me, or when something interesting goes down, I will go to places like the IMC, Disinfo, Alternewswire, and Cryptome to balance off anything in the mainstream media (The Guardian, IHT, BBC, NYT, Yahoo, and if need be, MSNBC and CNN). There are also some magazines that I try to keep up on: The Economist, Salon (not nearly as much as I used to), The Nation.

In any case, there’s not nearly enough time to keep up on all of this, especially since my primary interests lie elsewhere. But I try not to depend on any single source of information but rather try to get some different viewpoints, dig on my own for anything that catches my eye. Hmm, okay, more than enought unneccesary typing for the day.

Oh, one thing worth retyping at least some of are my summaries of some reading material. I know I’ve posted some of this over the years before, but hey, here’s some good stuff:

• Separation Of Church And State Home Page – Apparently, the resource on the issue. With full disclosure and the most balanced, complete, and academic perspective I could find.
• About.com: Separation of Church and State – This About.com category is maintained within the “Agnosticism/Atheism” guide. This sort of makes sense, as this group has the most vested in the matter. Without the separation they’d be persecuted no matter which official religion was in power. The articles and links are very diverse and address the issue from a variety of perspectives.
• The Secular Web Library – There are both modern and historical sections. While both sections are good, I found the historical section to be completely fascinating and engrossing. Food for thought.
• General interesting stuff: What The Founders Believed About Separation Of Church And State (academic), Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State (christian/academic), The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (secular/academic), The Freethought Zone: Church and State Library