Pretentiousness

I live in D.C. Actually, I live on Fort Belvoir, which is located in Fairfax County, which is located in Northern Virginia, which is part of the larger forsaken region know as the National Capital Region (NCR). The NCR consists of D.C., Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland. The entire area is teeming with congressmen, dignitaries, and politician. Worse yet corporations, contractors, and lobbyists vie for the notice of the before mentioned groups. Everyone in D.C. seems to think they are important... Some are, MOST are not! However, everyone in this most sinister of cities has to keep up the act, not letting on for one second that they are not as important or as well-to-do as they would have the entire world to believe.

Quick Factoid: The average unsecured debt in the National Capital Region... $250,000. It's expensive keeping up with the Jones' in the NCR.

The point of this blog, however, is not to rant and rave about the nature and actions of the misled people in the NCR. In fact, the point I'm trying to make is after two years in this most pretentious of places I can say with some confidence that... I know pretentiousness! I am simply establishing my authority as an expert observer of the snobbish, pretentious and grandiloquent.

With that being established, I would like to point your attention to the piece of chrome-plated pretentious crap displayed in the picture. This is the new "companion" to the American Express Gold Card. As if flashing your AMEX Gold Card around during business lunches and/or dates was bad enough, now you can throw around this little nugget. It’s a Chrome carrying case for an AMEX Gold card!!!!!

Lets stop for a second… First, if you have one of these nuggets and you’re reading this blog, STOP. Stop reading my blog. I’m not even going to tell you why, just stop reading now!!! If this is your first time viewing the “Butterfly” and you think this craptastic gizmo is cool you also must stop reading and immediately report to my house so I can knock some sense into you!!!!

If I was a waiter and some pretentious turd tossed this contraption in the payment tray I would feel obligated to shove this phallic icon where the sun don’t shine! He/she was asking for it!!!

Sparky

To get a closer look at what all the lemmings, which have more money (or is that debt) then sense will be carrying this fall check out this Site.

Google World

For some time now, I have used Google as my search engine. In fact, I have www.google.com as my home page, my on-ramp to the World Wide Web. Whom hasn’t used the phrase, “Just Google it!”… or was that “Just do it”? But I digress…

I never gave much thought to Google as more then a search engine until earlier this year. I was looking for cheap photo editing software. I didn’t need the power of Photoshop, I just wanted to fix some red eye and adjust brightness in a few pictures. After doing some research into different photo editing software I found one called Picasa2 by Google. I tried it and loved it!! Best of all… It’s Free! After a few weeks of using Picasa2, I decided to see what else Google offered. It turns out google offers a whole smorgasbord of programs designed to store our data and organize our lives.

My next taste of the Google world was with Gmail. You have to be invited or have a cell phone you can send a special code to because it offers an ever increasing storage capacity of 3GB, yes 3GB, and Google is trying to prevent rouge elements from using there site for evil doing. Gmail is the best email client ever!!! I don’t say that lightly. Being in the military, I travel constantly. During those travels I’ve had tons of email addresses from tons of different email clients. They have all had problems, but Gmail is as close to perfect as I could hope. Amazingly, Gmail is still considered beta. If only Microsoft could produce a beta as near perfect as Gmail. I’m not going to ramble on about all the features, but if you try Gmail out you will not be disappointed. My wife and me both use Gmail now and we’re never turning back. I mean that!!! With Gmail we’ll never have to switch email addresses again during our moves, unless we want to.

Next, we tried out Blogger by Google. If you’re reading this now you know I love this Blog site. Enough said!

Our latest dive in the Google pool has delivered Google Calendar. It’s an online calendar/schedule that’s based on the iCal protocol. We again love this Application! It is sooo much better then Outlook!!!!! Again, I’m not going to ramble on about features, but if you try it you’ll love it! You can click the link to the right to see my public calendar. This is just one of the many overlays you can make public, keep private, or share with individuals or groups. The possibilities are endless!

In closing, I hope to see everyone in the Google world very soon; and when you get here drop me a Gmail, or better yet share your Google calendar and I’ll share mine!

Sparky

DRM Sucks!

I love the above picture. I giggle when I see it. I think it’s funny for no other reason then the fact that everyone has seen those stupid black figures dancing on their TV at one point or another… and wanted to choke them.

The pictures are the idea of an organization called “Defective by Design”. Their cause is to force “governments, corporations, and politicians take the steps necessary to protect our rights.” More specifically, to force the previously mentioned parties to end DRM (Digital Rights Management), and to allow us, U.S. citizens, to practice our “Fair Use” rights.

Digital Rights Management, or more appropriately Digital Restrictions Management, is used to prevent theft, duplication, and piracy of digital copyrighted works.

Fair Use is base on our First Amendment right to Free Speech, and allows limited use of copyrighted material without approval from the copyright holder(s). An example of Fair Use rights in action would be making a recording of a CD, to a tape, to listen to in your car. Another example would be to convert the tracks on that same CD to MP3 files to listen to on your MP3 Player. Both these scenarios are legal as long as the recording is for your use only.

Unfortunately the major recording studios, record labels, movie studio, “Hollywood”, and the Entertainment Industry (EI) as a whole has used DRM to cripple what we can and can’t do with the things we buy.

The EI started out legitimately enough trying to shut down file sharing web sites like Napster and Kazaa. These sites hid behind the Fair Use rights trying to say everyone on their site was a worldwide collection of “friends” and it was legal for these “friends” to share their music. Everyone can pretty much agree there was a problem with that.

Now the EI has taken it too far. They have encroached on the rights of normal law abiding citizens to practice their Fair Use rights. Everyone but the EI can agree there is a definite problem with that.

Can I download a song from iTunes and listen to it on my Creative Muvo? Can my uncle download a song from Rhapsody and listen to it on his iPod? Can I convert a DVD to a MPEG file to watch on my PocketPC while I ride the bus to work in the mornings? The answer to all of these is NO! These are all things that should be legal under our Fair Use Rights, but thanks to overbearing DRM practices they are not capable or are illegal to bypass.

Recently Defective by Design held a protest outside several Apple stores. The iTunes/iPod combo is not the only show in town with horribly overbearing DRM practices, but with the largest share of the market I feel they have a responsibility to their customers to act as a middleman against the EI. Instead Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Virgin, and all the other online music providers have enjoyed tremendous success while pointing their finger at the Entertainment Industry anytime someone questions them about their DRM policies… Shame.

Sparky