Computer Troubles

    What would a vacation be without some computer trouble? I’ve been noticing a lot of large files clogging up my hard drives, with generic names like “00093284.wav” or “00094726.avi”. And more recently I discovered these files were being orphaned by Windows. The OS was claiming it was deleting these files, but it wasn’t. It would say my drives had plenty of free space, but when programs I’d run off these drives would crash. What was most troubling was Windows Explorer would say I’d have hundreds of MB open, but my Norton Speed Disk would show the drive as being practically full, with many files bearing similar names to what I mentioned above.
    So I got around this by simply wiping my C:\ drive and starting fresh. Drastic, perhaps; but I guess it was around time for a fresh install anyway. Which meant I spent most of Sunday reinstalling all my programs, and making constant visits to the Windows Update site to make sure I had the latest patches and fixes.
    An interesting sidelight is that the more updates I loaded in, the buggier Windows seemed to act.
    Hmmm.

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Pre-Empted

    “The show you would like to be watching, and which can be seen by the rest of the country, will not be shown so that we can bring you this old low-rent program we can pack full of local commercials…”
    Is it like this in your neighborhood? It seems all the affiliates here in Detroit will do everything in their power to pre-empt network shows for their own personal gain. They’ve run so many promos for “local news first” they’ve begun to take themselves too seriously, believing we’re only watching them for local programming. Sorry, guys. This short fat guy watches you despite your local programming, despite local news’s desperate need to force feed me grief and suffering and fear (“Something in your house can kill you!“). So stop your censorship, stop your media blackout, and air the programs you’re supposed to!
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Changes

    Now that the new TV season is starting, there should be an update on the TV page soon; and I recently placed an order with Oupost.com so hopefully I’ll have an update for the Gadgets page too. Until then, I might as well finally put a link up for the great SFG Message Board. I don’t expect a great flurry of activity, but all the other sites have a Yabbse message board, so why not mine?
    Later.
nbsp;   P.S. How about that snazzy new menu on the left (for all you Java-enabled-browser users)?! [since removed]
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BNL Live!

    It’s time for a new offering.
    The latest MP3 is from Barenaked Ladies. It was recorded a year ago at Pine Knob, during their “Barenaked Summer’s Night” tour for their album Stunt. This MP3 also boasts at least six songs in one, as the band breaks off into a series of musical tangents. Partly for this reason, the MP3 has been slightly edited for both time and tightness, but I strove hard to make the cuts seamless.
Barenaked Ladies – If I Had a Million Dollars   (8.4 MBs)
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JBO

    It looks like Jimmy Buffett Online is back online! This is great news, even including the legal restrictions imposed on the site. (Funny, I thought the name would be one of the things to go.) Now if only Bill Clinton and John Major could get Fingers and Bubba in the same room, and there would be peace in our land at last.
    Until then I’ve been noodling around with a few more improvements. As discussed before, I’m upgrading a few select files from RealAudio to MP3. My sights have most recently turned to the 1998 setlists page. I’ve “remastered” the Jimmy Buffett / Brian Wilson duets, and also added a file. So be sure to check them out.

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While Sitting in the Wendy’s Drive-Thru…

    “The Wendy’s Drive-Thru Query”: Why is it you always get your drink before your meal, but you only get your straw with your meal? So you get to sit there holding your cola, unable to do anything with it until the rest of your order arrives.
    “The Wendy’s Drive-Thru Observation”: The possibility your diet Coke will be a regular Coke increases with the size of the drink.
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Amy Grant Live!

    Still haven’t found time to create a full-fledged Music section, but I did manage to encode another MP3. Maybe this is an effort to beat the department stores at their own game, but despite its being only Labor Day, I’m uploading a Christmas song! However, it’s a great Christmas song — and one of my favorite Christmas songs off my favorite Christmas album, recorded live at the Palace of Auburn Hills, on Friday November 27 1998.
Amy Grant, Michael W Smith, CeCe Winan, and the Tennessee Symphony Orchestra – Little Town / Emmanuel   (4.7 MBs)
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Got DeCSS?

    I’m not quite sure I understand this. A website, specifically 2600.com, links to the infamous DeCSS.zip file, which allows the copying of DVDs, and is taken to court. It is ruled that the site is guilty of allowing people to pirate copyrighted intellectual property. The decision is based on the judge’s ruling that HTML code is not protected as free speech.
      So this mean I can lawfully opine that I’ve heard U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan romances farm animals. But if I type it like this:
<html>
<body>
Unidentified sources claim U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan
romances farm animals.
</body>
</html>

…then I’m a criminal.
    Interesting. And also a telling example of how the legal profession is so paranoid about the computer revolution. The World Wide Web is evil, right? You can use if to download porn and find the ingredients for bombs. So everyone using a computer — including you! — must be guilty of something.
      The new motto of our times: Innocent until proven online.

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Avoider

    For some unknown reason, I’m here at work on a Saturday — all the more reason to kill some time uploading a message to my web site.
    I, like most of America, spent last Wednesday evening watching the final episode of Survivor. I have to admit, this was the first time I’d watched the show, but, since everyone else was talking about it, I pretty much knew everything I needed to know (and would ever want to know) about the people involved. Having watched an episode, I can see why people were so hooked on it — the omniscient, removed perspective of people under stress; the island scenery; the frequent shots of bikini’d bottoms — but I’m not sure I liked it. (The show, I mean.)
    For one thing, I was very dissatisfied with the ending. For a show called Survivor, taking place on a remote island, I would’ve assumed the winner would have had to prove him or herself, to outlast the others, to show the skills needed to, in a word, survive. So…where did this “jury” thing come from?
    The contestants, or originally the tribes, had to compete in challenges — I don’t see what that has to do with surviving on an island either, but, fair enough, I assume these challenges were supposed to test the contestants’ physical strength and endurance — so why wasn’t this continued to the end? Why weren’t the final two contestants forced to compete in some ultimate challenge, some triathlon incorporating physical or mental skills? Why did the outcome finally come down to the decision of a ragtag and rather biased jury? No wonder the “corporate trainer” won — he was dealing with a focus group. But, to me, this doesn’t make him a survivor. To be perfectly fair, CBS should have to rename the show to Finagler or Manipulator. Even Headhunter. But I guess CBS was more interested in Lord of the Flies than in Robinson Crusoe. But, to that end, they could’ve saved a lot of time by simply shooting the whole show in some office workplace. They’d get the same result. But, then again, the outfits wouldn’t be as skimpy.

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U2 Live

    I plan on revamping this page [the old Music page] soon, to have it include full setlists of shows I’ve seen (much like my Buffett section); but until then, here’s another audio file. This is one of my first DATs: a U2 show from Pontiac Silverdome, which capped off a great season of following the band across the country…well, to three or four shows in the Midwest, that is. This particular show, on October 31 1997, also happened to be Larry Mullen’s birthday (as well as my dad’s). Remarkably, this was the second time I’d seen them on Halloween.
U2 – Last Night on Earth   (6.9 MBs)
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