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Deep Thoughts Music/Movies

Redundancy of Heavy Metal Redundancy

hair-metal-fashionToday is one of those days. Not sure what brought it on, but I somehow have ended up listening to a bunch of Hair Metal from the 80’s, bringing back with it lots of memories from my youth. My Glory Days, as Springsteen would say, I guess. The days when all the band members during a live show would line up to  each perform 15 minute solos. By the 12th minute of the drum solo, I remember thinking: “I get it. You are good at drums. Now, dear God just stop”.  Also these were the days when we were told quite frequently about why, when and how we were about to “be rocked”, which in my opinion, might be the single most annoying aspect of Heavy Metal. Maybe music in general, although I haven’t studied the frequency of the phrase in other genres.

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Cartoonz

Education

ObamaEducashun

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Random Crap

American socialist holiday

Also known as Labor day, that we celebrated yesterday. Normally it really means nothing. No parades, no convoys of giant military trucks with missiles attached to them, just an excuse for a day off to barbecue. And below is a video that pretty much sums it up by Ze Frank.

Categories
Deep Thoughts

A Devolution in Music

BrokenguitarI see myself as a musically-competent person. Nowhere near perfect pitch, but I can carry a tune in a bucket. Sometimes in even smaller containers if needed.

Throughout my life I’ve played a number of instruments, starting with the piano at the age of 7 and moving to other instruments as I got older. Although my piano career didn’t last more than a year, due to motivational challenges and a short attention span (which unfortunately never got much longer), I soon thereafter got steered in the direction of the violin by my parents. For a few joyful years, as I blessed them with sounds that be could be described as fingernails-on-chalkboard meets very-frightened-cat, I eventually learned to play well enough not to invoke facial expressions usually attributed nausea and facial paralysis. My parents rejoiced. As did most others forced to listen to my repertoire.

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Cartoonz

Estimation

estimation

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Tech Junk

Twitter’s security breach

Not sure if any of you have followed the recent breach of Twitter. For me, it hit close to home, as my Gmail account was compromised not too long ago and from reading the article below it might provide an explanation of how my account got breached as well. As many others, I too get lazy and used the same username/password for many of my online accounts.

The Twitter document leak fiasco started with a simple story that personal accounts of Twitter employees were hacked. Twitter CEO Evan Williams commented on that story, saying that Twitter itself was mostly unaffected. No personal accounts were compromised, and “most of the sensitive information was personal rather than company-related,” he said. The individual behind the attacks, known as Hacker Croll, wasn’t happy with that response. Lots of Twitter corporate information was compromised, and he wanted the world to know about it. So he sent us all of the documents that he obtained, some 310 of them, and the story developed from there.

It’s clear that Twitter was completely unaware of how deeply they were affected as a company – when Williams said that most of the information wasn’t company related he believed it. It wasn’t until later that he realized just how much and what kind of information was taken. It included things like financial projections and executive meeting notes that contained highly confidential information.

More here.

It’s a lengthy article, but a very interesting read, as it describes how “easy” it to gain access and hijack most online accounts.

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Dagens I-lands Problem Deep Thoughts Tech Junk

On the fence

htc-magic-vodafoneHere I am, at the dawning of an imminent release of a new smart phone by my cell phone carrier. I’ve been contemplating getting one for some time now and the new one that’s being released looks pretty interesting. No, it’s not an iPhone. Those are exclusive to the AT&T network, to which I’m not connected. I could change, I guess, but I don’t want to. Because I don’t really want an iPhone. Why? Well, let’s say it’s for ideological reasons. I’m just not very wild about the fact of having Apple controlling what I can or can’t do (not that they don’t already, since I own an iPod). Yes, I know. I can jailbreak it. Although, that just seems like a giant hassle, and again, it would just piss me off having to bypass something that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

So, the phone I’m talking about is the HTC Magic which uses the Android operating system. On the T-mobile network it will be called “MyTouch“,  a horrible name, leading any clean mind with pure and innocent thoughts straight down into the sewer. But despite the name, it looks like a very compelling device. It’s already been out for a while in Europe as I understand, but is just now coming to the US. It’s got all the good stuff that you would expect from a smart phone. Camera, touchscreen and access to thousands of apps on the Andriod Market. There are of course minor issues that would annoy the bejezus out of me too. And they are really minor, yet just as annoying as that STD you got on your happy fun trip to Thailand last year. There’s no official Facebook app!! Apparently there’s a pissing contest between Facebook and Google about some advertising deal that went sour. Not sure what, but who cares, right? Give me my Facebook app!! That’s of course just one of the things, but there are more, I’m sure. And things like that just have a tendency to turn me off and scrap the whole idea of getting a smart phone altogether.

Categories
Tech Junk

Google’s final nail in the MS coffin?

Here’s something interesting. It looks like Google is planning on releasing an Operating System next year. Could turn out to be quite the nightmare for Microsoft. As with other Google products, it looks promising. I say this without drinking too much of the Google kool-aid.

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Read the rest of the article here.

It’s most likely going to take a lot more to de-throne Microsoft on the OS front, but Google sure is trying.

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Tips & Tricks

Money saving tip

So, I guess the latest story on airlines saving money is to put “standing room” seating instead of conventional seats to utilize the most space. Am I the only one thinking that the “seats” look like beds? If that’s the case, why not make bunks out of them and stack people. I’d much rather be laying down than standing up. Stack me, I don’t care. There’s more money to be saved that way. For extra savings, use hammocks.

standing_room_only_flights

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Cartoonz

Famous person died

famous