there’s a salon article on rotten.com. Dr. Michael Wong Chang, the pseudonymous proprietor of BonsaiKitten:

“The dichotomy between exploiting ‘distasteful’ subject matter in the guise of information and exploiting it as entertainment is artificial and hypocritical. Lurid details of human fault and misery are published in the ‘mainstream’ media for exactly the same reason that certain people exchange this material informally — to titillate the viewer.”

what’s interesting is that there’s a strong link here to a reading i was just doing for my art history class (photography and the politics of representation). an essay by carole vance on the attorney general’s commission on pornography seems especially relevant considering that the commission employed just this sort of titillation as a tool to further their own agenda.

adobe has an article on david carson.

i save a lot of time when i’m too busy to read /.

u2’s walk on single entered the charts at #1 and #2 in canada, but you can’t even buy em here in the us. grr…

so, i danced the priceline jig and lo and behold, got an austin roundtrip ticket for this saturday for $150. which means, i’ll be at sxsw. w00t. on my search for tickets though, a friend did point me out to smarter living’s Airfares Bargain Guide which would have been really useful if i actually bothered to get tickets earlier (or waited until wednesday to see what was being offered), but i decided not to temp fate too much.

grr, opening things that attach to the desktop makes my active desktop refresh…

anyway, to start typing again… real sucks ass. i think everybody already knows that. in any case, i’ve started listening to online streams, and it pops up rp8, even when it’s unassociated w/ mp3 playlists/streams. (apparently a lot of people have been having this problem)

why does this happen? turns out that real went about creating their own playlist extension, called .xpl, and then went and changed the MIME types of playlists and mpegurls to their proprietary .xpl format. it also changes the extensions of mpegs, mpgs, and mp3s to “.mpega” (again, associated to rp). pretty bastardly right? if you’ve been wondering how to get rid of it, copy this into a regfile (.reg) and run (double click):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00





[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mp3]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mp3]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpeg]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpeg]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpg]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpg]

"Extension"=".mp3"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/scpls]

"Extension"=".pls"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-scpls]

"Extension"=".pls"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpegurl]

"Extension"=".m3u"



[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpegurl]

"Extension"=".m3u"

fuck you real networks!

Unraveling the Mystery of Protein Folding

did i mention that folding@home is the best screensaver ever. the only thing that it needs is a settings screen show you can choose display options and maybe a built in screencap utility. it’d also be nice to run the thing as an activedesktop or windowed app. it’s just that darn cool

while i’m talking about computer stuff, i should mention that the new dualhead drivers, while a huge improvement in win2k, disables full screen opengl acceleration. this normally wouldn’t be a problem, but for playing games, it means changing monitor modes and rebooting. that’s retarded.

i seemed to have missed it the first time around, this is the OpenCola.comSoft Drink Formula. a little HOWTO on making your own soda.

a friend just let me that my site is #10 on google for “foo.” heheh, foo foo foo.

while you’re at it, check ok jesse’s bookmarklet page. it’s pretty neat.