[ music | Peter Gabriel – Shock the Monkey ]

Whoa. Pardon me while I have a cup of awesome. This press release from Qualcomm is incredible. I used to use Eudora years ago, and loved it, but switched over to MozMail for the integration in the Suite. When Firefox and Thunderbird hit the shelf, I moved over, and they work great together. But this bit about Eudora now being based on TB is awesome, because we’ll get Gecko goodness with Eudora’s feature set. I just hope they keep or improve on TB’s spam filtering. This is something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

[ music | Depeche Mode – A Pain That I’m Used To ]

So, a couple times in June and once in August I get this near-pain in my upper abdomen. A little research showed that it was in the area of my gall bladder. It wasn’t horrendous pain. I just had to sleep carefully on one side, and it only happened after a couple really cheesy meals, so I assumed it was some kind of indigestion of the fatty cheeses.

Flash forward to last night. About 11:30pm I get the same pain, although it dulls a little. I get a couple hours sleep. The pain returns about 8 in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. Still not really bad yet, I waste a couple hours then get ready for work. It’s getting pretty bad now. 1pm rolls around and I feel like I’m being stabbed over and over. This is a little more than I can deal with, so I decide to go to the hospital. Over the next ten minutes it got much much worse, and getting to the hospital on my own is no longer an option. I’m doubled over in agony, pale as death (from what I hear), sweating like a klansman in Harlem, and call 911. By the time the ambulance comes I’m weak, shaking, dizzy, and nauseous as hell. They put me on oxygen and hit the gas to the hospital. I do the technicolor yawn twice during the ten minute ride. We arrive and they start an IV, take blood, give me a wonderful cocktail of painkillers in my IV, and I’m back on Earth.

A few hours and tests later we find out I need my gall bladder removed. I have three gallstones, and they can’t do the ultrasonic crushing like kidney stones. So, I’ll consult with some surgeons, watch my diet, and get it yanked in the next few weeks.

I’d like to take this moment to thank the Republican party for helping make it possible for 44 million Americans to have no health insurance by demonizing every national healthcare initiative as “socialism”, and not raising the minimum wage in over a decade, yet raising their own pay 7 times in the same period. Rock on!

[ music | NIN – We’re In This Together ]

The miniseries was incredible. The first season was so fracking huge it didn’t end until six episodes into the second season. The last 5 minutes of the Season Two finale took my head and twisted completely around.

The season premier of Season Three completely blew me away. Best TV show ever. This is why God invented TV.

[ music | The Ramones – I Wanna Be Sedated ]

Back from the dead. Register.com was actually very helpful. Kudos to them. Still in hibernation though, for now… We’ll see…

[ music | Depeche Mode – I Want It All ]

It’s very simple. Debian currently values their name and logo, and you can’t use it willy nilly without their permission. Same goes for Mozilla and their Firefox trademark. Now, so far Debian has been using the Firefox trademark with permission from Mozilla. It was a lax permission, and the rules of that permission have changed. The rules did not change to be mean, or to be arbitrary, but due to the fact that the law states trademark holders must defend their trademarks or lose them. Adobe asks you not to call photo editing “Photoshopping”; Google asks you not to say “Googled” when you went to a search engine; Xerox barely managed to hold on to their name due to aggressive marketing, which is why you probably get documents photocopied instead of xeroxed. Mozilla must do the same, and the problem that Debian is running into is they want to heavily edit the codebase to the Mozilla foundation’s flagship browser, essentially creating their own product, and yet still call it “Firefox”. You can’t have it both ways.

There is a branding “switch” built into the Firefox codebase. Turn it on, and the the official logos and names are used. Turn it off, and you can build your own branded browser automatically with almost no extra effort. Debian broke this switch (knowingly, this wasn’t an accident, it was broken because they “needed” to make various other edits) and wound up hardcoding the Mozilla trademarks into the Debian browser. Rather than doing what other vendors do, rebranding it, Debian is pitching a fit because Mozilla is saying, “Look, we need to fix this situation. Stop using the trademarks, or start following these updated rules.” Had Debian not broken the branding switch, this would be incredibly easy for Debian to fix, just flip the switch and call the browser Iceweasel or Doodyhead or BigDaddy or whatever they want to call it. But they broke the switch, and painted themselves into a corner, and want to blame Mozilla.

Stop whining. We had to change the name from Phoenix because of Phoenix BIOS’s products. We changed the name from Firebird because of the Firebird project. We changed the Mac based browser Camino from the former name of Chimera. Those were all legit requests. When Firebird was picked, it was a logical choice, but poorly researched. The fiasco after that and the response by both the Firebird project and Mozilla were incredibly poor, but it was resolved in the only logical fashion. As of now, Debian is being asked the same thing. Please follow the rules we have for our name or change the name of your product. The code itself is as free as it always was. The issue is not about code, it’s about protected names, identities that users attach to one product and organization.

Otherwise, I’m going to launch a line of manure-based fertilizer called Debian, with the slogan, “We’re so full of shit, it’s like getting ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag!” and of course, I’ll slap the official Debian logo on the bag. After all, valuable and trusted legally-protected identities want to be free!

[ music | Imogen Heap – The Moment I Said It ]

I always loved this hour of the day/night/what-have-you. Right now it’s ten to five a.m., 54 degrees out, and foggy. There’s just something about it tha tmakes the perfect endcap to whatever kind of day I had, good or bad. Sitting up in the wee hours, chatting with a friend or three, watching the world sleep. It makes me feel powerful in the sense that there’s a whole nothing day ready to dawn, I can see and feel it coming. It really makes the idea of a life stretching out before me palpable. It’s one of the few times I can look around a find some genuine hope, a feeling not ginned up nor blindly clung to for the sake of mental health. There really is another day coming, life goes on.

It’s been one of the roughest years yet so far, and it’s not over, but frankly I think rock bottom was hit, and is receeding at an increasing rate. You can sit and think about how you’d take various forms of bad news, but you’re never right. I really assumed I’d take certain things a lot harder before I could move on, but I didn’t. That shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. For a mere moment, it was, “Holy shit.” But a beat later it was, “Well, ok, so, where do we go next?” Unchangable situations are just that, unchangable, so don’t waste your time complaining. The faster you get on dealing with it the easier it is. I guess the old advice is correct, just rip the bandage right off and get it over with.

I still love the nights, too. I think I’m almost ready to start finding someone to share them with, too. Almost, I’m not that mature yet. 😉

[ music | Johnny Cash – Cry Cry Cry ]

I don’t know exactly what’s up with it at the moment. Looks like Grok forgot to renew it. I’ve fired off an email, and hopefully will get ahold of him or his wife ASAP…

[ music | In Denial – Pet Shop Boys ]Ok, look people. I do not have pictures of Kari Byron nude. Anywhere. Ever. The rash of outdated links you’re following was a gag, and they weren’t even of Kari to start with. Yes, she’s gorgeous, no she’s not naked. Hell, I think she’s even married. The pics you were lured here with are of the British model Alex Sim Wise. Go Google her if you want the photos that USED to be here. They’re gone now. DO NOT ASK ME FOR THEM.

[ music | Morningwood – Easy ]

Want an old manual typewriter that you can hook up to a PC and be both retro-mod and cyberpunk at the same time? Let me know. I happen to have access to an old Underwood manual and a Smith Corona manual, both in excellent shape with their cases too. And my hardware hacker roots would love to convert one to a keyboard for you (for a fee, of course). Hit me up if you’re interested.

[ music | Badly Drawn Boy – Say It Again ]

The imminently talented (and cute as a button, redheaded) Neko Case was interviewed by Pitchfork back in April, I just now found it thanks to fak3r. In the interview she goes off on the rampant cheating of both artists and audiences by the prolific use of pitch-shifting and autotuning in modern pop.

Now, frankly, I think modern pop is crap anyway, but the point here is rather than actually working on their vocals, the artsts are both being cheated, and cheating their audience, by letting producers tweak the recordings with the equivalent of sonic Photoshop. Why is this cheating? Because these singers aren’t writing their material to start with, the lest they could do is actually learn to perform it, but they don’t. And you can hear the difference. It’s no longer even anything close to art, it’s just artificial. In the course of my life so far I have spent incredibly amounts of time practicing my singing, and it shows. I remember in high school I worked for weeks just to hit a single note in a song for an audition rather than change the key. And it paid off. I was a better performer for it.

You see, this cheats the audience too, because on tour these performers are just lip-synching to recordings, they’re not actually singing, because they can’t do it without the help of post-production. They didn’t put in the sweat-equity to be able to actually do the material justice, they faked it, and can’t back it up. So when you go to see a show, you’re being stiffed because you’re not getting what your’e paying for, you’re just paying to see them fake it for two hours.

And other artists who have put in the time and energy to better themselves get shafted because it no longer takes talent to break into the business, it just takes good marketing. And who wants to invest in creating a new brand when the old one can just be repackaged and autotuned into shape again?