Month: September 2006

So I was strangely compelled to watch Paris Hilton’s new music video. A few thoughts:

1) The song’s not bad for pop drivel. It’s catchy and listenable. I’m not putting it into the Pantheon along with U2 during the late 80s early 90s, but it’s ok. 2) The actual video is not what I’d expected at all. Paris did the “Can’t Buy Me Love/The Girl Next Door” route where the poor, picked on boy has the hot girl raise his status in school. Why can’t anyone make a good, funny movie these days without ripping off the 80s? Is it because the 80s covered all possible good teen coming of age type movies? Did John Hughes ruin it for everyone for the rest of eternity? 3) I totally recommend The Superficial if you have that curiosity about celebrities but like to make fun of them because you feel ashamed for being curious about celebrities. 4) From a musical squib point of view, how much of that song is Paris’ talent and how much is being able to buy the best producers and such in the music industry?

My $.02 Weed

Possibly the best Weird Al video of all time: “White And Nerdy“

So I was listening to my XM radio, and I heard a band I’d never heard before. They were darn tight.

They’re called “Panic! At The Disco”. I found some of their songs here: http://www.purevolume.com/panicatthedisco

Positively weird music video for “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”, but dude, where did these guys from? Aside from having the most annoying background music ever on a web site, it looks like they’re some kind of rising stars or something. Sold out shows across the US.

Anybody know where these guys come from? Apparently, they came out of nowhere with a music video that won some major awards on a budget right around the catering budget for most videos.

So today, I finally retired my old work laptop. As I’m a relatively security-conscious person when it comes to my old hard disks, I thought I’d share what I did.

First off: Even if you “delete” all the information on your hard disk, it’s still there. Yep. A format doesn’t get rid of it, and it’s possible to extract that old data. There’s only one way to permanently delete so that it is unrecoverable without physically destroying the disk: use a utility which overwrites the data with something else.

But just one time won’t do it. You have to overwrite it a bunch of times, because the old data still lurks as a magnetic “shadow” of its former self, right there on the disk underneath the data.

Enter “shred”. You can boot from any Linux Live CD (Gentoo, Ubuntu, and SuSE all have one), and there will be a little utility called “shred”. You will probably have to download and burn an ISO image first to get a copy of Linux.

Once you have the CD burned, boot to it, and type the following commands at a terminal window (The “$” and “#” indicate a prompt, you don’t type that):

$ sudo bash # shred -vfs /dev/hda

This will take a few hours, but once it’s done, you can rest assured that your old data is unrecoverable by all but the most expensive and time-consuming recovery methods, and then, it will probably be only a partial recovery, if any. Your hard drive will be safe to sell on eBay or whatever.

Now, if you want to be really pedantic, rather than overwriting the default 26 times (25 times with random data, 1 time with zeroes at the end), change the flags to “shred”:

# shred -vfs -n 100 /dev/hda

This would erase the data 101 times in a row (100x with random noise, 1 time with zeroes for a final pass). It may take a weekend to complete, but that hard drive will be clean and ready to get rid of without compromising your personal information.

As the coup de grace, of course, on this hard drive I have in the laptop before me which is being shipped back for destruction, I will install Ubuntu Linux. Just to remind whoever gets the machine that I am, after all, a budding Linux guru. Fear me.

Since some of you aren’t sports junkies like Mr. Graber and myself, I thought I’d enlighten you to a story involving sports, drugs, and the Constitution.

Recently, Barry Bonds, who is #2 on the all-time home run list behind Henry Aaron (not counting silly Japanse players, cause this is America, land of sports greatness). Barry Bonds was a great player but not a great home run hitter, until about age 37. Then, at the age where most athletes start a serious decline in ability, he added about 20 pounds of muscle, inches to his head circumference, and starting hitting more home runs than anyone else in the history of the game.

Naturally, he attributed this un-natural power surge to lifting weights. Certainly. But then BALCO, a California-based pharmacutical company, was busted for selling designer, untraceable steriods. And lookie here, the owner fingered Mr. Bonds himself as a partaker in the medicinal magic.

Well, of course the federal government’s involved, and there’s a grand jury, and Bonds testifies, and he says he thought it was flaxseed oil and not steriods and blah blah blah. A secret grand jury, mind you, that was suspoed to be sealed.

Except two reporters for a local paper received some leaked testimony about what was said during that grand jury testimony. The used that information in a book they were writing which was an expose on Barry Bonds, which stated he used steriods and was a general a**hole. Not an article for their paper, but a book with profits and all.

Now there’s a big hubbub because these reporters have been jailed for not giving up the source of the leak of the grand jury testimony. The press is up in arms because how in the world can you make money reporting the “news” if you can’t have people breaking the law to give you the scoop. The government is prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law because how can you cover up the bad things you do if people have full rein to tell the press the bad things you do.

You can read about the story here.

Do you think the press should have the right to shield their sources?

My $.02 Weed

So my son told me a week ago that he wants some Lego Mindstorms NXT for Christmas…

For those of you unfamiliar with what these are, they are programmable Legos. The kit includes little servos/motors, and a very intuitive “programming” interface for your computer. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and they’re proven to develop interest in programming and logic in children.

He’s the right age for it (a bright nine-year-old, though the thing says it’s for 12 and above). He’s really enthusiastic about building things with Lego already, and has a zillion parts. I think it could be a good bonding experience for us to build things together.

“Cool!”, I thought. Except he already has an expensive Lego toy in the closet, and then I looked up the price: $250. Ouch.

Has anybody here tried these out? What do you think? Worth the cost?

Since Monsieur Schuman posted the topic about Robotron (“Weed, you prayera are answered”), I find it hilarious that the Google Ads are showing links to topics petaining to cannabis.

I AM WEED! I AM EVERYWHERE! I AM PERVASIVE!

/end ego trip My $.02 Weed

I found a wonderful link that can help speed up your internet connection. All you need to do is click on the link below to download a copy of the entire Internet! That way, you can browse the Internet with your own personally copy. The best part is it’s on your local machine, so you can browse quickly and more securely! http://www.w3schools.com/downloadwww.htm

Quite amusing…

Aye, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! On this fine day, everyone can talk like a pirate all day long. ‘Tis a fine way t’be speakin’, and if ye’ disagree I may make ye’ walk the ol’ plank and send ye’ ta’ ol’ Davy Jones’ Locker!

While not as popular as Christmas or Arbor Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day is a recognized and heartily celebrated international holiday. On September 19th, people awake transformed: their voices deeper, their usual pedestrian walk replaced by a seaman’s swagger, and whenever they speak, they speak with the voice of a pirate.

Yo ho – Yo Ho its a pirates life for me…

I have been so busy for ever that I haven’t even logged on or been to the site in awhile. Hi Everyone. Please excuse me if this has been talked about but…TIMPANE…did I see you on TV the other night??

I was watching tv and this commercial came on for Marlo Furniture. I saw this guy talking and thought…geeez he looks familiar and then it hit me…I KNEW who it was.

So am I crazy or was that you????