Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

I noticed this over on Boing Boing:

URGENT: Call your Senator RIGHT NOW or live with the goddamned Broadcast Flag forever!
Danny sez,

We’ve heard rumors that the Broadcast Flag that Cory, the EFF, and a coalition of pressure groups have fought so hard against (and beat in the courts) will be sneaked back via an amendment to the giant Senate Appropriations Bill in a sub-committee at 2PM EST on Tuesday 21st. This week is Hollywood’s last chance to ram the flag past Congress, and they’re working hard to get it under the radar.

There’s no time to write letters or start a media campaign…

Be sure to let your senator know you oppose this fair-use killer! If you’re not sure the best way to contact your senator; then check out this EFF Action Alert for more details.

Update 2005-06-22: For those of you who are unfamiliar with what the Broadcast Flag is…

A broadcast flag is a set of status bits (or “flags”) sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates whether or not it can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. Possible restrictions include inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials.

Taken from Wikipedia.

In a time long ago, when Ariesna was first moving in with me, we purchased a pine coffeetable at a garage sale for ~$251. It was nothing special, just something that we knew would serve as a place to rest our feet on from the couch and a spot to drop some books. When we bought it; we didn’t really care for the finish on it and said we’d redo it one of these days. About seven years later, Mamabear started making comments about moving back to Michigan; I knew I’d better get off my duff and get the table redone while I still had a friendly garage to do it in. Since this was Memorial day weekend; I figured it was the perfect time to tackle this summer project. I intended from the start to document this project, but got a bit excited about doing this myself and forgot to take pictures of the table before I started. Prior to beginning the project, the finish on the table completely obscured the wood grain and was an olive-tan color. Definitely an ugly beast.

Saturday, we got up and went over to our local Lowe’s store to pick up some needed supplies. Before I go into any further details on this project; I’m going to remind you to read and follow all the safety instructions from the manufacturer on whatever chemicals or tools that you use when doing this sort of thing. Some of the stuff used can be extremely dangerous if mishandled!
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Most Wednesdays, myself and a couple of co-workers will walk to the nearby dealer of our espresso fix, the Terrapin. Upon returning to the office today, one my co-workers chanced to remark:

This job has sucked every scrap of knowledge out of my skull and all of my will to live… Oooo bagels!

I’m probably just about the last person to mention this… but Darth Vader has a blog! It’s a well written blog taking an rather different sort of look inside the world of Vader. The references to other movies and books that the author works into the blog are rather funny and really, this quote just rocks:

Shape up or sputter to the floor unconscious — that’s my motto.