Author: Sammy G

The time has come when we all must accept that it’s not worth it to sit on the sidelines anymore, and enter the fray of digital ebook readers and join the future of literary passage.

The choice: Amazon’s Kindle vs. Sony Reader Digital Book.

Let’s start out by commenting on the names of the product. They are the dumbest names ever. I think if you want a breakthrough product the people in charge should have done something better with the titling. I’m on a plane yesterday and the guy across the aisle has got the Sony reader and I interrupt what is no doubt the slow process of his eyeballs becoming slowly corroded by the tiny radioactive lights emitting from the gadget because it’s still relatively early mass technology and these things haven’t been fully vetted by consumer safety engineers, not unlike my cell phone which is likely causing testicular cancer from bouncing in my pocket all day long, and I ask him, “Hey, do you like that Sony reader thing with the digital thing face on it?”

Actually, I was a lot slicker than that. I was reading a firm, physical version of the New York Times on paper and the full back page ad just happened to be the announcement of Sony releasing 500,000 free domain books through Google on their specialized reader app. What I did was slide that ad across the aisle as the conversation starter. The guy sees it and goes, “Yeah.” Then he returned to reading. So I had to prompt further to get some answers.

The biggest takeaway I got was that the Sony Reader Digital eBook NextGen Thingy is more plug-and-play because it doesn’t require a subscription and transfer release. Apparently, the battery only pumps on page turn so it can last 3 weeks+ on a full charge. Also, it can hold a lot more info than the Kindle. Meanwhile, the Kindle requires a subscription and you have to email the book to your service so that Amazon can forward it back to you? However, the Kindle has newspaper and magazines, which is cool.

Thoughts? Experiences with either? They ain’t cheap.

The U.S. is left with a disaster scenario thanks to Presidemented Bush. His work destabilized our nation and imperiled long-term safety and prosperity. Meanwhile, I’m so fed up with the Obama administration already. For his entire campaign we heard “change”. This guy hasn’t brought any change. He’s brought “tinkering”. His slogan should have been “tinkering we can believe in”.

This made me realize, thanks to a recent post by Matt, that the two political parties really don’t have anything to offer as a distinguishing platform. Nobody in today’s two-party system is really out to change anything. They’re only out to amass power and then minutely tweak existing systems to keep their contributors appeased. Never mind we have some systems that are truly broken. Keep adjusting, tinkering, modifying, but don’t bring any real ideas to the table that result in change. That’s the Democrat and Republican way.

When was the last time you truly trusted people in government to come up with the big ideas? If I had been voted President…

1. NO LONGER ARE WE A SUPERPOWER. The United States is no longer interested in serving as the global police. We are done with holding everyone’s hand. We’re trying to put a democratic government into a nation half a world away but we can’t put a man in an apartment here at home? NATO – over. UN – over. We are people who raise kids, play baseball and grow old. Please come visit us because we like tourists. We hope you like our food. But don’t expect us to pick up the phone for your request of military, diplomatic, or economic intervention unless a true coalition of the willing amasses and brokers our involvement.

2. SELL ALASKA AND HAWAII. I’m looking at a ridiculous deficit. I’m also looking at two states that came into the union in 1959 and today account for less than a percent of our population. On the 50th anniversary of their ratification into the union we are packaging them for sale to Russia for half a trillion. I only wish we could sell Texas to Mexico as shameful punishment for Bush.

3. ACCEPT THAT SOMEONE NEEDS TO BE BETTER OFF AND SOMEONE NEEDS TO BE WORSE. We become an export country. The only way we ensure continued safety and prosperity is by building things that other countries want. A societal mores is continuously promoted that levies honor and accolade among those people who build and ship things that other countries buy. We prop up industries that serve other countries buying needs. We penalize those industries at home which are the tantamount of massaging each other’s back for no real productivity gain. For example, lawyers get a salary cap because they do nothing except translate English into a language nobody else can understand. As a result of all this, the U.S. becomes valued for something else entirely, which means…

4. CUT MILITARY BY 66%. The reason we currently need to have a big military is because we operate as the world’s superpower. We don’t need a military if we become innocuous. I think our #1 export right now is our military. And we’re paying for it. But each person in the citizenry will serve in the military for 2 years between the ages of 19-21. We all learn how to defend.

5. INSTITUTE THE FLAT TAX. The last thing we need is keeping 2.5% of our population working to help the rest of us figure out the 9,000,000 worded tax code. It’s out. Flat tax is in.

6. END THE RIDICULOUS OVERVALUATION OF PEOPLE WHO CONTROL MONEY. Explain to me again how investment bankers on Wall Street really help actual growth? They are vapor paper. Capitalism only goes as far as production and sale of exports takes us.

7. STOP BAILING OUT BROKEN SYSTEMS. When something breaks, it breaks for a reason. Trying to revive a dying fire with watered-down sticks doesn’t do anybody any good. We either retrain labor or don’t get involved.

8. A PENAL COLONY FAR AWAY. With the proceeds from the sale of Hawaii and Alaska we buy some land that becomes a distant penal colony. If you are charged and convicted of a serious offense, you are going far away to a cold and terrible place where criminals are tossed together in a hellish pit of terror. All the jails here are closed.

9. EVERYONE MUST SERVE IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS. Similar to mandatory military service, everyone must take part in some way in our political process. Through volunteering, appointment or weekend service, everyone is involved with the process.

10. LIVE AND BREATHE A MANDATE THAT ESPOUSES REAL ‘VALUES’. We are happy to live in the hills, the valleys, the shadows of tall trees. We are happy to share the earth peacefully with each other. We trade in ideas and intellect. Come over and meet my family. A smile is mightier than the fist.

President-elect Obama has chosen a HUD secretary. President-elect Obama said HUD is essential in the effort to stem the mortgage crisis, which “not only shakes the foundation of our economy, but the foundation of the American Dream.”

I tried searching through all my previous posts to find my diatribe on the fallacy of the U.S. housing situation. I could have sworn I went off on this sometime during 2008. Without repeating myself, let me summarize. The linking of ‘owning a home’ and the ‘American dream’ is an enormous fallacy. It is a financial marketing ploy that was irrationally grown by the detente of Wall Street and the U.S. Government. Look at where it’s gotten us. It seems there have been two major blowups this past year – Wall Street and the housing market.

Telling people that owning a home is the American dream puts a dangerous ideology in their head. The American dream should be having the freedom to choose a career and domestic path that allows each one of us the ability to find our own happiness. To the contrary, doing what it takes to move into a home, go way into credit debt, and have banks swoop up and package together all our little mortgage deals that eventually get shipped overseas so that foreign nations own 20% of our housing market is not what I would consider to be the American dream. It’s turned out to be a nightmare.

My problem with Obama is that he’s already not using his head. He’s pandering to the existing infrastructure of fallacy. I would like to hear Obama say that owning a home is nice but it’s not necessary to lead a full and happy life. I would like to hear Obama say that responsibility starts with the application of diligence, personal accountability and working to protect others in your family. I would like to hear Obama say that eliminating personal debt and executing a habit of good household finance is most important.

Friends don’t let friends get over-leveraged.

A couple nights ago I gigged a hospital corporate party with an enclave of pro musicians from around town. The organizer of the gig is a good friend of mine who is probably the best front man I’ve ever played with in my life. We had a bunch of tunes on the set list that featured some screeching rock classics; Separate Ways, Rock & Roll, Synchronicity II, among others. I guess when you work in the emergency room of a hospital these types of songs are considered calming devices.

It had been almost 18 years since I last played Separate Ways. If I recall correctly, that last time was when WS was jamming out at the QOHS pool during the back half of the Vermont senior high band home-and-away cultural exchange. And by ‘culture’ I mean the exchange of body fluids. At least for some of us. In the back seat of our cars.

But I digress. The point here is that I was floored 18 years of my life had past. 18 years ago. Kids born that night are now going to college. The price of a movie ticket has gone up 2,456%. Elephants have lost their memory.

At least everyone in the corporate crowd was rocking out to the tune. It wasn’t as though we were staring off the stage into an abyss of questioning frowns with hands covering their ears. It wasn’t as though a client spokesman was dispatched reluctantly to push their way to the stage through the force of our amplitude and to yell over the wailing rock coda solo a request to stop playing the oldies. That would have caused me pain.

And Ben, if you’re out there, I remembered my harmony part on the chorus.

The combination of ‘online’ and ‘misrepresentation’ hasn’t reached standard household, or geek-hold, term status. But it might soon. Real soon.

I’m fascinated by the outcome of a court trial in which a MO woman was convicted of ‘accessing computers without authorization’. She had assumed a false identity online to cyberbully a younger teenager and that teenager went on to commit suicide. For her criminal conviction she faces the maximum penalty of 3 years in jail and a $300K fine.

Going deeper into the story, what you find out is that this MO woman created a fictitious identity on MySpace and used that faux persona to berate some girl who had previously wronged the MO woman’s daughter. Once that girl took her own life it appears some CA prosecutors got on board to find some available legal channel by which to allege a crime. MySpace is headquartered in CA. I’m sure the reason this case even reached a judicial decision, resulting in conviction, was because of the heinous outcome and the media attraction. That and the fact that the CA courts are pretty friendly terrain.

Now, what I believe this means for the greater public is a potential enormous shift in online mores. This kind of thing has resulted in death. How soon until ‘accessing computers without authorization’ gives ways to a more relevant term used in this case – ‘online misrepresentation’. Everything that falls under tort, contracts and criminal code is in play. How soon until people pretending to be other people online, resulting in harm, becomes regularly qualified as criminal?

Online providers are typically immune from this kind of liability because of everything in their ULAs. My belief is that these providers will do everything they can to continue staying outside of liability by releasing details of their users who are involved in criminal activity. Much like copyright infringement. They will just get out of the way and turn detail over. So, thinking about screwing someone over on eBay? Going incognito on Facebook?

Better think twice.

One of the really annoying things that happens is the constant revival of ‘My Pictures’. This thing will not die. No matter how many times I manually delete this folder continues to return. Help on putting this thing in the grave once and for all?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/11/14/second.life.divorce/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

I believe Ben once wrote a song called ‘Computer Love’.

People are stupid.

Now that the election has passed, let’s get back to the important stuff, namely, helping Sammy G with his tech needs.

I need to know how to create an exact replica of an install DVD. I have a 100% legal copy of a popular office software program that was bought with legal tender. I then had to send the DVD on to another office. To have a working backup copy of the original DVD on-hand, I tried ripping an .iso file and then burning the .iso file using MagicIso but it didn’t work.

Help?

I will always remember from Orwell’s 1984 the point about the massive propaganda machine put into motion by the state, and how as soon as a new story broke, the entire machine was made to forget the past.

Does anyone remember the war in Iraq? It’s absurd, over this past month, how all political speech has moved off Iraq and onto tax policy, the domestic economy, and general candidate character issues without mentioning Iraq. It’s as though the entire issue has been forgotten. Meanwhile, I’m a single-issue voter on this issue alone. It’s pretty disgusting.

Over the past 5 years I’ve witnessed the rise of social and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Myspace. I’ve also had many friends create and run their own blogs under their names. I’ve get email invitations asking to join these types of social sites and blogs almost daily.

Consistent with the rise of these types of sites has been my rampage to eliminate all traces of my traceable, personal identity from their pages. At first it was because I didn’t trust the public nature of the internet. Everyone thought I was weird. The internet has changed the way in which we present and communicate ourselves, I was told. Everyone is putting themselves online.

Perhaps I am the social-net luddite. I used to think it was because I was turning ‘intensely private’. Now I realize it’s because I’m against being ‘intensely public’. My in-laws have three kids, one with serious special needs, and they have a rotating roster of in-house nanny help. These nannies are all under twenty-five. One of them last year decided on her Facebook page to post pictures of her getting ripped at a college party. My in-laws, who were invited friends to her page, caught these pictures and then summarily dismissed her. Who wants that kind of behavior around the kids? We all know stuff like this happens. Why broadcast it to the world?

I think this is what the younger generation doesn’t realize about publicly presenting yourself onto the internet. At some point a professional or career life awaits and the internet doesn’t have an erase button. I’ve hired people only after checking out their online history, and determining if they’re the type of person I want to bring into the workplace mix. A trail as wide as the DNS registry can be harmful.

Even for the older, hip generation, there can be consequences. Without knowing much of any details, I can only imagine the personal travails of our blog-friend Pete Dunn. Intensely public can have drawbacks.

Anyway, just wondering what you all think. Is everyone but me joining the online social surge?