Yesterday, a coworker and I were driving back from lunch when we had to stop at the light for Jones Franklin Road. The light turned green as we chatted and we were first in line. Rather than jet out across the intersection like I sometimes do, I hesitated. The car on the right was stopped. Out of my left, a green car was headed straight for us at 45 miles per hour.

As she saw me edging out into the intersection, she had enough time to slam on brakes. She veered off to the right, her car stopping ten feet from mine. The look of shock and embarassment on her face was all the apology I needed.

If I hadn’t gone with my intuition and waited, I might have at best a few broken ribs now. At worst, I’d be dead. High-speed side impacts are no picnic.

Let’s be careful out there over the holiday weekend. And always keep an eye out for the other guy.

I was searching for some information on the FCC‘s website. What got my attention is their use of the word “consumer.” The FCC has a section – an entire bureau, even – devoted to consumers.

Uh, at what point did we become “consumers?” How about “citizens?” Or better yet, “frequency spectrum owners,” lest the FCC forget who actually owns the spectrum it pretends to manage?

This “consumer” stuff has seeped in coutresy of the entertainment industry, which would like to hold all the cards. I’m sick of being called a consumer! The word consumer implies one with no rights. A consumer’s role is limited to consuming what others produce. We’re supposed to take it and like it. The First Amendment only applies to big corporations now. Its the Golden Rule.

Screw that! We’re citizens, dammit! Take a moment to send former Tar Heel and current FCC Chairman Kevin Martin a note and remind him that we’re citizens.

The Recording Artists Coalition is praising the recent Grokster Supreme Court decision. I figured a little Mojo was in order.

Man, I miss Mojo.

—
Don Henley Must Die
Mojo Nixon

This is the sound of my brain
Then I said -This is the sound of my brain on Don Henley
Then I said -One two three four

He’s a tortured artist
Used to be in the Eagles
Now he whines like a wounded beagle

Poet of despair
Puffed up with hot air
He’s serious, pretentious and I just don’t care

Don Henley must die
Don’t let him get back together
With Glenn Frey, Don Henley must die

Cut on the TV
And what did I see
This bloated hairy thing winnin’ a grammy
Huah

Best rock vocalist
Compared to what
Bunch of pseudo-serious Kraft angst-a-matic
Satanic plot

Don Henley Must die
Put a sharp stick in his eye, don henley must die
Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya
Oh

Quit playin’ that crap
Youíre out of the band

I’m only kidding, can’t you tell?
I love his sensitve music
Idiot poetry swell

You and your kind
Are killin’ rock and roll
It’s not because youíre o-l-d
–Cause you ain’t
Got no soul

Don’t be afraid of fun
Loosen up your ponytail
Be wild, young
Free and-a
Get your head
Outta your tail

Don Henley
Must die
Donít let him get back together
With Glenn Frey

Don Henley
Must die
Put him in the electric chair
Watch him fry, Don Henley must die

Don Henley must die
Ah ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya

No Eagles reunion
The same goes for you too Sting
Ah
Oh

I was thinking that I haven’t heard much noise coming from Microsoft. Seems like the only headlines they’re getting lately are of security vulnerabilities in their software. Google and Apple seem to have a lock on creativity lately. They’re the ones pushing boundaries today.

It actually saddens me to think of Microsoft as old and busted. What happened to the company I once loved to hate? Now they just don’t seem to matter, even if they’re still making money hand over fist. Its not like they ever did much “innovation,” but what little they have done has been overshadowed by others.

If you had any doubts that America has the best government money can buy, the recent Supreme Court decisions should convince you. First, the Court rules that governments can take property from one private owner and sell it to another private owner. Then yesterday, the court rules that peer to peer services are guilty of infringement, even if they themselves aren’t doing the infringing. Using that logic, why aren’t gun manufacturers liable for murder?

In another case, the Court ruled broadband monopolies don’t need competition. Even though most experts agree that America has lost its edge in broadband innovation, the big cable companies praised this decision as “allowing them to continue to innovate.”

Innovate, my butt. What kind of “innovation” has occured in broadband service since its inception? The entertainment industry’s paranoid fear of piracy has kept a lock on upstream bandwidth that broadband customers can have. This has severely hampered innovative new technologies – especially multimedia-rich ones – which depend on such bandwidth to work.

These decisions prove that money talks, and the Supreme Court loves to hear it.
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It was an interesting weekend, to be sure. Quite busy, too. On Friday night, I joined a group of ghost hunters looking for ghosts at the State Capitol building. We romped around the darkened building until 3 AM! Though I didn’t see any ghosts, I certainly experienced unexplained things with my other senses. And I also got my picture taken at the desk I may one day occupy for real.

Saturday, I rode down to Columbia with my parents to attend my aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary. It was great seeing my aunt and uncle and cousins, though my uncle has Alzheimer’s. He seemed to have a good time, though, even if he didn’t recognize everyone there. It was also fun spending time with my parents on the drive there and back.

Sunday I had plenty of Daddy Time, as Kelly needed to focus on her work project. I enjoyed being top parent for a change. 🙂

As I mentioned before, we went tree shopping this past weekend, buying four trees for our yard. Yesterday, we had them planted. Kelly and I are still marvelling at how great they make the yard look. What used to be a empty, grassy yard has leaves and shape to it now. We’re particularly pleased with how the maple looks. Already, its providing relief from the brutal afternoon sun, with the temperature markedly cooler in its shade than out of it.

Our neighbors have admired our new trees, too, which seems to be the start of a landscaping arms race. Hey, if it spurs our neighbors to plant more trees, we’re thankful for the competition. Adding trees to the sparse yards in our neighborhood would make a huge difference in the the appearance of the neighborhood as a whole.

Our huge back yard needs some additions, too, though we’re not too sure what to add there. In my mind, I’ve been reserving space around our existing deck to save space for a future, expanded deck. Any plants or trees we might add to the house have to work around these imaginary boundaries. I think I might be wasting my time with this approach, though, as no one knows when we may decide to expand our deck, if ever.

The tree planting was not without its adventure. Our planting guy cut a utility line when planting one tree. We were puzzled how it could happen, since we had the utility lines in our yard properly marked. The line that was cut was not marked at all. From the looks of it, it appeared to be an electrical cable: one for our streetlight, I supposed. A Progress Energy lineman came out and declared it a telephone line.

A telephone line? How did that not get marked?

After the lineman left, I probed the cable with my fox-and-hound set. Hearing no telltale telephone buzzing, I realized the line was unused. Curious, I hooked up another tool that measured wire length (thanks, Al!). The reading on one side of the cut was just 25 feet. Hmm…

Getting out my tape measure, I walked off 25 feet. It ended exactly at the foot of our mailbox! Aha! The line had been severed when the house was built (and the mailbox planted). The phone company left the dead copper in the ground and buried another line under the sidewalk. That’s the one which was properly marked.

An aside: I had called Bellsouth repair after realizing it may be their line. Upon learning we were not a Bellsouth customer, the repair rep refused to help me. “But I’m calling on behalf of my neighbors. Their service could be out now,” I protested.

“Sorry, you’ll have to go through your local provider, sir,” was the reply. It didn’t seem to matter that I was doing them a favor by reporting it. Nice.

If that’s the kind of attitude they have, I told Kelly, we were gonna plant the tree there anyway, outage or no outage. And we will.

I recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 1 to Fedora 3. It used to be that this kind of upgrade was seamless, as the Red Hat Package Manager took care of most of the upgrade bits. This time, however, lots of pieces fell through the cracks.

The first clue was my inability to burn CDROMs. Whenever I tried, the system locks up, hard. Nice job, fellas. The second clue came today when I noticed my CUPS print daemon segfaults on startup. It’s like Fedora has implemented DRM on my machine: I can’t output anything on paper or disc!

On a separate, completely clean machine, I installed Fedora Core 4 this weekend. Or tried to, anyway. When it booted, something about the LVM partition completely blitzed the bootloader. This was the minimal install, too. Nothing fancy. I suppose the idea of testing software has gone out the window (or heck, I could blame the beta testers. Heh).

This might be a good time to check out Ubuntu a new distro that’s been making lots of waves. It’s Debian-based, which used to spell heartburn, but now seems to have gotten more user-friendly. The Ubuntu “live” cd (one that lets you test-drive Linux) that I’ve run looks impressive. What do I have to lose?

One night, Kelly asked me how much toilet paper I use on our infant son Travis. After giving her a quizzical look, I replied “none.”

“Well, why do you always see babies on the packages for toilet paper?” she asked.

Good question. Why do babies appear on toilet paper packages? They don’t use toilet paper, they use diapers! Charmin and Angel Soft were unavailable for comment.

Bonus link: Just when you thought you’d seen everything on the Internet, there’s the toilet paper encyclopedia.