Give a man a fish and he owes you one fish. Teach a man to fish and you give up your monopoly on fishing.

Spent the night blogging…

Almost wet my pants reading Scylla’s halarious story on The horror of blimps over at The Straight Dope.

Back To Iraq 2.0 is by a former AP reporter and he relates stuff he’s heard from his contacts. It’s more news from the ground rather than the “news” and position statements that we usually get from the US press. I don’t know what his position is but this is the raw news.

Speaking of raw news, don’t forget Warblogs:cc.

Picture Yourself has a cool concept of a collection of pictures of people taken by themselves. The 800+ entries there range from the introspective to the nerdy to the just fun.

I’ve been grumbling about all the talk shows on the radio. Even the music stations I usually listen to are now full of talk shows. One does this show around home commute time that’s just a bunch of guys just sitting around and shooting the bull.
Now, radio people are not dummies and they have done the listener numbers and they must have concluded that these shows make money. So, I was thinking about whether the RIAA was soaking up so much money that it was cheaper to just have people sit and talk rather than play music or any other rational reason that would explain all this talking and lack of music.
Last night I was riding home about 10pm and trying to find some music and I kept finding the music stations with talk shows. Why no music? Arghh.
Then it struck me, maybe the audience doesn’t want music. Maybe they want to talk. Or, at least, hear other people talk. What if the reason that CD sales are down is because a new generation of listeners does not hanker after the “golden age” of music but instead hankers after conversation and interaction?
There is some sense to this. Just like my parents witnessed TV shows changing from variety shows to sitcoms, I am watching sitcoms turn into reality shows. MTV doesn’t play music videos — they now play “road” shows. Radio is not a music source, it is a conversation source. And that doesn’t even get into the Internet and chat and blogs. Maybe the type of content is what’s changing. Maybe people these days want talk.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to determine the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

What parts of “shall make no law”, “shall not be infringed”, and “shall not be violated” don’t you understand?

I must Create a System or be enslaved by another Man’s.
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.
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Always fool them into thinking you are dignified… When, in fact, you’re still just a great big ape.
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Don’t hurry.
Don’t worry.
Don’t stop.
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Last week, a crew from TechTV came to our house and spent the evening interviewing and video taping our family. They had origionally phoned before Christmas but they didn’t have a crew in the area to get here for ChristmasCam. Instead, they came last week to talk to the family who has been “on the web” for eight years.
The oddity is that we have had cams in our house for years and the kids have grown up with them. It started with ChristmasCam eight years ago and the cams have just stayed around ever since.
That and being a “connected family”. We have one room with all of our computers — one for each member of the family — and we spend more time “together” there than anywhere else in the house. It is truly our “family room”.
Anyway, you will be able to find our TechTV interview on the air tonight at 8pm and 11pm EST and many times thereafter.

Last week our second phone line failed — DSL still worked but there was no dialtone. I spent a few days unplugging phones until Sunday when I finally crouched in the rain at the access box trying all the lines to discover that there was no dialtone coming into the house.
So, I phone Qwest for service. They have received a few sanctions for bad service so I was apprehensive. I phoned Sunday, on hold for 5 minutes, they ran a “line check” and said a service person would be out the next day. That’s monday — President’s Day!!
The next day, the service fellow shows up and finds that the line and it’s associated lines are shorted — “Must be in a puddle somewhere”. He’ll have to call the “cable crew” to fix it. “Oh, great”, I think, “there’s another week”. No, they came out that same afternoon!!
The bottom line is that Qwest fixed the phone in one day with no hassle. Those big, bad telecommunication companies can do things right every now and then.

I have installed MovableType and I will be adding journals, blogs and other effulent from my mind. This is the first entry and things will only get better from here.