At a time when terrorists are blowing up bombs all over the planet, and the US is being invaded by millions of illegal immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is on the job protecting us from... pirated copies of Star Wars workprints. Yes, when our borders are more porous than cheesecloth, when terrorists are trying to hijack planes and kill thousands of Americans at a time, DHS and ICE are there keeping a few kids from seeing bad copies of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. What's that? You think I must be joking? I'm afraid not. This is the original DHS press release in PDF format. This apparently an ongoing policy at ICE. Rather than protecting our borders and enforcing immigration law, they're busy being the movie police. Osama Bin Laden was the best thing to ever happen to George Bush. Bin Laden has given Bush a blank check from the idiotic American public to destroy the country. If a magic genie popped up and gave me the choice between preventing 9/11 or preventing Bush's election in 2001, right now I'd go back and undo Bush's election. He's FAR more dangerous to the US than any terrorist.

Update: It seems there's ambiguity in my post there. Let me amend it. "But you think Bush actually cares about Star Wars workprints?" No, I think Bush cares about protecting big busness more than the people. He wants to replace the Constitution with an End User License Agreement. You will purchase your rights from USGov Corp for a limited period of time, subject to approval by DHS and your local Identification Verification Center. If you are found in violation of your license, you'll be sent to a Repatriation Center for whatever training is deemed necessary by the Board of Patriotism Regulation.

We're not the lead dog yet, but we're definetly part of the pack...

Via Pictures I Like For A Variety Of Reasons

Thanks to Sander, Tristor, and Jesse. I have been smacked upside the head with a baton. A musical baton that is, not the kind the cheerleaders or majorettes have. It's an interesting moment for self-analysis though...

Total volume of music files on my computer:

1,905 Files, 8,341,171,980 bytes (7.77GB).
The vast majority of which is legal, ripped from my own CD collection. This still only represents about half of my CD collection. Roughly a hundred files are singles, half of which I ripped from CD collections, leaving about 50 or so of questionable origin. I do not recall how they got into my collection, I swear.

Last CD I bought:

Hmm, I'll go one better. Well, three better.

• Latest artist repeat-buy: U2's How to dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
• Latest artist-first-buy: Dido's Life for Rent (then No Angel shortly afterwards)
• The actual Latest CD purchased: Sequentia/Choral Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis Chill to the Chant, although this is a replacement for the original I bought in 1995 that has been lost in the mists of time and moving, repurchased April 30 for $1.96.

Playing right now:

Tony Bennett Unplugged

Five songs that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):

• Depeche Mode's One Caress - I've sung this for exactly one person, although I've sung it in front of many more. It's just four minutes of purple velvet from my soul.
• Frank Sinatra, It Was A Very Good Year - So bittersweet and honest, it tells a story with no regrets.
• Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings (Opus 11) - It just rips my heart out every time.
• The theme from the original The Legend of Zelda - Why? if you need ask why, then you also need to listen to an orchestral version. To me, it's a soaring theme with a simple but bold melody. It brings to mind being eight years old playing in a lush, verdant field and rolling hills, and infinite adventures beyond the horizon.
• Phantom of the Opera, Music of the Night - Again, for exactly one person. It's a sweet pain that reminds you what it is to live life to it's fullest.

Five albums that mean a lot to me (also in no particular order):

I've added this section because coming up with those five songs reminded me how I feel about albums. I agree with the artists that still cling to the artistry that is an entire album. With these five choices, the album is a masterwork of flowing moods. For me, choosing one song from these would be like picking a single color from a Van Gogh, or a single word from Shakespeare.

• U2's Achtung Baby - The entire album just fits me like a second skin.
• Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes - Incredibly revealing, you just can't turn away. You're forced to share yourself in return.
• REM's Automatic for the People - A long look back at the life you've lived so far, coming to terms with it, accepting it, holding on to it, and finally accepting who you are. And that's ok.
• Depeche Mode's Violator - Peeling back the veneer of civility to reveal the base desires in us all. A cool yet smouldering passion.
• The Cranberries' Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? - A time of many firsts and many loves. The memories attached to this are so strong I literally couldn't listen to it for about seven years. And yet I could never forget it, or let it go.

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton (still in no particular order):

• ct^ - He's just freakin' cool.
• MightyMu - The second best non-native-Pennsylvanian you'll never meet.
• Wil Wheaton - I hope I can get Uncle Willie to reply in his "Big Willie" style...
• Nosebleed - Don't drip on the carpet, it's new!
• Asa Dotzler - Just to see if I can get him to reply. About as likely as Wil...

Now it's your turn. (Some linkage below if you're interested...) [Read More]

Every week PostSecret has a new batch of confessions sent in from all sorts of people from all over the place. I read it every week (I may have even sent one in, but if I told you, it wouldn't be a secret any more). I find it far more interesting and far more cathartic than group hug because it takes more time, energy, creativity, and effort to submit to PostSecret. You have to get a post card, express yourself on it (anything from simple text to elaborate artwork), address it, and mail it. with group hug you just fill in a form and hit Submit. PostSecret is far more personal because even the simplest entries reveal something about the creator. And with PostSecret, the secrets tend to be actual secrets, as opposed to stories; plain facts about the sender.

I see a trend in the vast majority of them, and that reveals so much mroe about all of us, not just the senders. Most are either past abuse, lies we tell, or a love we wish we had. We're ashamed by past abuses even though we're the victims. We're afraid to tell the truth about ourselves, even when we know it's the right thing to do. And we wish we either were loved, or still had that one special person in our lives but are too afraid to find them or tell them.

I guess none of us is as brave as we wish we were...

<jX> Have you ever been out ghost hunting and suddenly needed a USB flash drive, or been transferring files to your USB flash drive and suddenly needed to check for ghosts?
<jX> PROBLEM SOLVED! (magic token)
<jX> Intricate diagrams in crazy moon man language here: (I can't read this)
<MightyMu> jX: make sure jwz knows about that...

A week ago, this story about AntiBoothBabes.com hit Slashdot about AgeTec boycotting boothbabes. It's completely stupid. I commented thusly. But the broadly held suspicions that this was a stunt are true. Anyway, my opinions still hold true for boothbabes, bikini girls, et al.

And so, I now bring you links to a multitude of E3 Booth Babes. Please feel free to add more links in the comments, but they have to be Booth Babes, not like the N-Gage girl. Notice how a less than desirable "console" gets a less than desirable girl...

• Purrr...
• That's it ladies, mingle!
• Hot future girl can stay...(reference)
• The one on the right. Left-girl is awful. Too much lip-collagen, and bad implants (note ladies, implants are always bad, but these are awful)
• She's cute, but that THING is a bit unflattering...
• Hi-Def BoothBabe video! I loved the dance routine! The rest of the HiDef boothbabe videos (2, 3, 4) are subscription only, so let me know if you find them, even lower resolution copies.

Updates!

• I4U's Photo Gallery, delish!
• E3Girls.com I love the motto, "It's not about the games". I heartily approve.
• No one said MMOGs were like this!

steeler_fan over in #bs tossed out this URL. It's in-fucking-credible. I got chills and giggled like a schoolgirl. Speaking of girls, the chicks in this video are cute too. So, it's great music, these kids can sing, and the choreopgraphy is great. It's a trifecta, like a cold bucket of awesome was thrown in my face.

Wow. This extension basically allows you to edit and save web sites so they display this way each time. It's as though every site now comes with a "fix me!" button. Thanks to Asa for linking to it. I can think of half a dozen sites to use this on already...

I have no idea why I'm doing this, but free is always cool. It's come to my attention that Playboy.com has a couple free trial offers for their Cyberclub thing. So, if you're into super-airbrushed breast implant carriers, you can get either three free weeks of the Playboy Cyberclub, or 500 free hours (they expire after the first 3 weeks). You have to have a credit card to sign up. This way they can do a rudimentary age check, and charge you when the three weeks are up if you don't cancel. I have no idea how hard it is or isn't to cancel because I haven't signed up.

[23:10] <Asa> I can't wait to sell out
[23:10] * Asa waits to see that one quoted somewhere.

These have been up for a while, but I guess I never linked them up, for some reason. These are a couple old gags I did years ago that I still find funny. The National Toilet Association (You can have my toilet when you pry it off my COLD DEAD ASS), and the ever so subtle Trendy Cafe. The Trendy Cafe I honestly find cute and fun, and am somewhat proud of how far I could take it before I got hungry, er, bored. The National Toilet Association is built around exactly one joke. And what a great dead horse it is! :)

Don't look at the big Spinfox too long, you might get sick. As it is, I whipped up replacement throbbers for the toolbars, and accompanying userChrome.css mojo so it works with large, small, and text only sizes of buttons. Next up is userChrome.css for the tab throbbers, and then packaging it all in an XPI/Extension, but this is a good start... The individual frames are here. Note, this isn't just the logo rotated, only the fox spins around of the stationary globe. Whee!

Very cool. Make a South Park style character.

Asa gave a little airtime in his blog to the eminently talented Jesse Ruderman, linking to a post about how Jesse tests application security. Moral absolutists, those who wish to define what is right and wrong for everyone and bar dissent, turned it into a forum for ad hominem attacks on the porn industry, insults on the intelligence of women (declaring porn degrading to women despite the fact that many women disagree), and declaring tens of millions of people as sexist purely based upon their excercise of their first amendment rights. One even insinuated that the Mozilla Foundation should somehow stop Jesse from using the name Pornzilla, and chided Asa for merely mentioning it.

I find these closed minded people to be anathema to the foundations of America and our preservations of Freedoms. Apparently they feel we're free only to believe as they do, and if we do not, we're branded as sexist and immoral. It's also anathema to the ideals of open source and free software, that you can use and change the software as you please provided you return your changes to the public. I never saw a morals clause in the GPL.

There's been a lot of fantastic work done on Bug 274784, "Make back and forward blazingly fast and side-effect free." Well, at 3am thoughts were rolling through my mind, and I came up with a cool name for this new feature. Whiplash. I like it, a few other folks do. Let's make it official! "Firefox 1.1: Faster, Smarter, and now with Whiplash!"

Another six gigabytes up in smoke again yesterday. Recently Slashdot ran a story that perfectly phrased a thought I've had for years. The Social Contract. I don't block most ads because I feel viewing a few ads and occasionally clicking an interesting one is the least I can do in exchange for free content. I also don't really mind TV ads, except when the SCREAM AT ME and such. I block ads from DoubleClick due to their heinous data tracking efforts, and popup ads. Those break the advertisers' and content providers' end of the Social Contract. But normal ads, I leave them alone, because I'm not going to break my end. The key to it is equity and fairness. Don't make your ads evil or obnoxious, and I'll view them.

But then there's Fusker, a web tool to blatantly break the social contract. It's used primarily for image and porn galleries. It allows the users to scrape all the images on a page or gallery at one time in the browser, bypassing a site's framing and support content. In the forums they suggest disabling Referrer Logging, to bypass referrer blocks. Referrer identification is useful to servers to help prevent file and image hotlinking, a big drain on bandwidth. I moved from TCH to DreamHost specifically to get more bandwidth. I now have 6 times more than I did. But I got Fuskered again, and at this rate I'll burn up 180 GB of my 120 GB by the end of the month. That'd leave me with -60GB, which would cost me an extra $60 this month alone. This is not good.

I'm trying to keep the Shared Media directory as open as possible, but I'm having to lock it down a touch. Most people will never notice what going on. That's good, it means we're abiding by the social contract. I thank you for that, and that's why I have some stuff up for folks to enjoy.

But A few of you may be reading this when you were expecting something else. If that's the case, you were redirected for hotlinking. You're making it hard for other people to enjoy the stuff I'm trying to share on my nickel. I don't ask much; don't be a jerk.

Ok, I visit Astronomy Picture of the Day on fairly regular basis (one could quantify it as daily). It's always got something great to see. Today's picture is just flipping gorgeous. I had to know more. I emailed the photographer Larry Landolfi. I was fairly sure he would be deluged with mail, and mine would go unnoticed. Not the case! He replied rather quickly with a lot of useful information. Nice guy. And I visited his site. This guy is a really great photographer, and not just of astronomical phenomena. You need to check this out, JoesRoom.com. He also mentioned in a few days his official site will be LandolfiPhoto.com, so when that goes live I'll linkify that one.

Well, now that I'm on better hosting, I enabled "fancy urls", or queryless URLs. When you click a blog link, it takes you to urls that look like this: http://www.burntelectrons.org/item/90 rather than http://www.burntelectrons.org/index.php?item=90. This makes it more Google friendly, possibly easier to remember URLs too, and looks cleaner. Also, down on the right by the "Valid X" buttons is a button and link to Nucleus.org. I use Nucleus here, as does Tristor (in the linklist), and other folks I know. I really like it. It's small, fast, flexible, and in PHP. It's surprisingly easy to extend with plugins, or even just to edit the rather well designed PHP code, even for folks with minimal coding experience.

I'll get the Annoyed Contributor's Network back up soon too. It died in the move, but I wanted to work on it more anyway.

If you see anything broken on the site, let me know with a comment here.