Nothing new today. Check back next week.

Happy Thanksgiving.

More tomorrow.

The Comcat/AT&T Merger...

The FCC voted 3-1 for the deal over the objections of consumer groups, which filed a motion last week asking the agency to delay its decision. The groups claim the new cable giant would limit customers' choices in television viewing and Internet access.
But FCC Chairman Michael Powell said "the benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible."

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/IWK20021113S0007

And a short six days later...

The download caps, which were introduced by Telstra - and were almost unique to Australian broadband providers earlier this year - are not yet widely seen overseas. But there have been recent reports of US providers considering the pricing regime.
AT&T Broadband and Comcast are two providers looking at applying download caps.

Source: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,5512000%5E15318%5E%5Enbv%5E15306,00.html

And all this shortly after he rejected the Dish Network/DirecTV merger which would have actually created competition for cable companies (and given me my damn local channels.)

In other news, I saw Bowling for Columbine today. I highly recommend that everyone go see it.

Now.

Just got two CDs [1 2] from Second Spin. Since I don't actually listen to CDs anymore, the first thing I did was rip them.

The next thing to do, of course, was transfer them to my iPod. I really (really really) didn't want to boot my laptop into Windows, and it's my only computer with firewire. For some reason, wine isn't working for me at the moment, so I couldn't run EphPod from Linux either. So after a little bit of searching, I found gnuPod. It's basically a bunch of Perl scripts that let you (me) add and delete songs from the iPod in Linux. Awesome.

I now have no excuse for not finally getting rid of Windows from my laptop altogether. That'll probably happen this weekend. I can't wait to reclaim that whole 2gb of space.

I found this while browsing around the other day. It's pretty old, but it's hilarious, and worth a visit.

Here is another nice User Friendly comic, related to the one posted earlier. This one's over two years old though.

I really need to work on posting here more often. Don't really know why, but I feel like it's something I should do. Honestly, it's not laziness that keeps me from posting - it's just that I generally have nothing to say.

I lost my Tony Hawk 4 disc already. Played it about a week, and got pretty far, but now it's nowhere to be found. Somehow the CD that came with the PS2 network adapter ended up in the Tony Hawk box, and there was nothing in the CD sleeve that came with the network adapter. I fear it went out with the trash. As a result, the network adapter is currently useless to me. I'll probably end up buying another copy.

It rained all weekend in Santa Barbara. It's not supposed to do that. Prevented me from getting out and finally doing some photography this weekend. I guess my laziness didn't help there either, but I blame the rain. Of course, after crappy weather on the weekend, it's been beautiful for the first two days of work this week, when I'm stuck inside. To top that all off, the softball field is still soaked from the weekend, so tonight's softball game was postponed. We don't get to lose again for at least another week, now.

Here's a nice little User Friendly for you all to read. I like it.

In other news, A-Rod was again denied his MVP award. I still fail to see how an individual award can be best on how well the team does... but I seem to be mostly alone in this.

It's time for me to sleep, now. I'll be updating this more often. Really. Honest!

Or maybe not. I'll try, anyway.

Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot to mention. The photo section of the site has been updated recently. I haven't taken anything new, but I have finally been scanning in some old stuff. The recent scans are in the Pittsburgh section. I'll hopefully be adding a Santa Barbara section soon.

I really need to either update this more often, or just give up on it completely. Most likely, neither of those things will happen. So, tough.

Let's see, what's happened in the two weeks since I last posted. For starters, we lost two more softball games. No big surprise there. Our softball team actually has a webpage, here. Go check it out, if you feel like seeing how bad we are.

Last Saturday there was a WWDN party/usermeet in a pub in Pasadena. Around 25 'boxers showed up, including the Head Monkey himself, Wil Wheaton. It was a lot of fun. Reminded me a bit of the old PB usermeets, except this time everyone was a mature, civilized adult. Or at least they acted that way for a few hours. And no burning of Magic cards took place.

So the first thing we did at Lucky Baldwin's was watch the Angels amazing comeback in game 6 of the World Series. It was an amazing game, and the whole place went crazy when it was over. The rest of the night was a lot of fun. Not all that much to talk about, really, after we scared away the people who were there, and took the whole upstairs over for ourselves. Just hanging out, talking, being geeks. There are some pictures of the whole event here and here.

Moving right along... after the party I was back in Andrew's apartment dreading the ride home, when I must have gone temporarily insane. I bought tickets for Game 7 of the World Series, from someone on eBay. So I crashed on his extra mattress, and the next day went to a baseball game. Not just any baseball game, Game 7! It kicked so much ass, I can't even begin to describe it. All I can say is if you ever get a chance to go to a World Series Game 7... take it! You won't regret it. Especially if the home team wins, the whole place just goes nuts.

After the game, we went to eat, and then I drove back to Santa Barbara. Nothing interesting to report since then, I've just been working all week. Hopefully I won't be lazy this weekend and I'll actually get out and do something. I'll let you know.