I know I haven't posted in a while, and a ton has happened in my life, but, there is something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while now. Something that has been really pissing me off. Humans are being forced to unnecessarily use their minds!

OK, whenever you go into a two story building that has an elevator, you always have to choose the floor you want to go to. There is a button for the first floor, and a button for the second floor, along with the usual door open and close button. One of the buttons is always disabled. In order to get the elevator to properly function, you need to choose the OPPOSITE floor than the one you are currently on. This is very difficult. Studies have shown that many humans select the current floor when they are on the elevator with only two choices. Elevator makers purposely leave both buttons there just to piss us off. Elevator manufacturers could very easily remove both the floor choice buttons and you can move to the opposite floor by simpily pressing the door close button, and it would require less thinking, but no, you need to think about the opposite floor that you are currently on! I want to encourage everyone to revolt against all places that make you use your mind unnecessarily, and boycott two story elevators with all the floors as buttons and the buildings they are contained within. By boycotting them, you will help the world become a better place where you don't have to think as much!

Choking on water

This is something we all have done, or at least so I think, I only seem to remember myself doing it. Its embarassing. What kind of signal does it send out when you are drinking clean, cold water, just like everyone else around you and you start to choke. Well, I finally got the insight to see what the answer to that question is.

The people around you begin to think: "What is wrong with you? You don't know how to drink water? How stupid are you! Freak!"

While you are choking you think: "Am I going to live? I don't know how to drink water! The other people around me make it look so easy! Why is it so hard to drink this stuff? Maybe I should just stop drinking."

My question is why IS it so hard to drink water? Why must I choke on this substance? And how do you stop yourself from choking and clear your throat? Normally when you choke on food, you can drink some water to clear your throat, but you can't clear water with water.

I haven't blogged in a while, so I figured just so you guys no I'm alive and not well, I'd blog now!
Last week, I learned a valuable life lesson. Because I learned it the hard way, I'll tell you about it so you can learn it the easy way. I learned that you should not jump over fences. Yes, so last week, I was playing basketball, and the area where the water fountain was inside a fence, and the gate to that was locked. I figured, hey, I could jump over it into that area. I jump over the first one just fine, the second one, I'm going good. I get the drink. Going back now, jumping over the first fence and my foot gets caught on the top. I pretty much entirely destroyed my knee as it like twisted aroudn when my foot was caught up there. Of course, I try to walk it off though, after walking around for a couple minutes, I decide "whatever, I'll jump the last fence to get out" and do that on one foot. Amazingly, throughout all of this, I never fell on the floor, I always landed fine on my right foot, but my left leg is now in a full leg brace to hold my knee straight and they want to do surgery on it. I'm stuck in the brace for 4 weeks and the full recovery is suppoesed to be 4 months. It sucks. Take it from me, don't jump fences, they can be dangerous.

On the other hand, being handicap has its advantages. At Universal you get to skip all the lines, and then at Sea World, in addition to that, you don't have to get off the rides when they are over. Of course, being concerned about how safe going on a bottomless rollercoaster with a knee that can't bend kinda makes up for it.

Anyways, moving on, life on computers has got a lot more boring lately. Nothing new, interesting, exciting, or something for me to rant about has happened. Its all more of the same old stuff that I've warned about for years. AOL dumping their privacy policy and having the "we'll post your private conversations on our wall and laugh at you as we publish them" policy proving my point that Jabber, an open standard for instant messenging, is important. People still are ignorant on what they refuse to try and so on (yes, thats an authentic link to Chris Terry's blog on mine, shocking). People still don't know how to spell. Nothing has changed on the online world. Gnome 2.10 was released, which includes Totem and Sound Juicer, but it doesn't seem too impressive, not much really new. I'm still sitting here waiting for Beagle, and since I'm on my laptop, NetworkManager, to stabilize. So what else? Seems like this was the least ranting I've done in a long time.

Why I hate Apple users "who don't preach about the glory that is Apple"

OK, this blog entry is another nice long rant about Apple. This time its about the users rather then the company. Of course, since I like my rants to be entirely valid, I did stick in some of the company's problems throughout the post.

You know, this is what I hate about the computing world today. I've seen Apple users for a number of years now, and they claim they quietly think that their platform is better then Windows and other alternatives. They deny that Linux has a GUI. I mean, seriously, I take my laptop, I'm sitting there using Linux with a GUI. "You have to use command line for everything!" Even though I don't open a command line at all and perform more tasks then the other people on Windows can do without opening there command line. But thats skewing off topic. The real point is the beginning of this post is a modified quote from a comment (to reverse the point) from an article regarding the overpriced iPod shuffle and how other, cheaper player with more features, more space, more of everything is a better choice.

Read this article, and I'm sure you can find the comment I'm talking about: http://davesipaq.com/articles/iPOD_Shuffle_Sandisk_MP3/1.html

The iPod Shuffle doesn't have a display. According to Apple lovers, when you have a media player that small and can't scroll through the songs, a display is pointless! I mean, who would look for a song to play on an MP3 player? And that random song from your computer that was randomly placed on the MP3 player you haven't heard in a long time and really like and want to listen to at home, why should you be able to find out the name of the song, artist, and album? I have a cheap, piece of crap MP3 player. Occasionally my friends listen to it. They like a song. They ask me what the name of it is, and I can't remember the name. Thanks to the wonderful screen on the device, I can look at them and tell it. With the iPod Shuffle, you are screwed, and can be proud of it when you tell your friends that! And of course, Apple can save you a couple of bucks by not including a screen, even though if you just don't buy from Apple you can save a lot of bucks and get a screen.

Apple users also are aware that the radio, which I commonly use in my car to listen to music which I don't have on CD since I haven't heard before and sometimes talkshows on it are interesting, is entirely useless. I mean, what the hell, something is broadcasted? Just like TV, radio is entirely useless.

Voice recorders. Well, voice recorders have no use. Duh! Any Apple user could have told you that one! Why bother with something with a microphone that you can easily and conviently bring to a class to record a lecture? Of course, getting an external and seperate device to do that would be better.

File compatiblity. AAC with Apple-DRM is going to save the world! It works with iTunes, which everyone must use! Using other music stores makes you evil too!

The $16 extra charge to get a worse MP3 player in every department is clearly worth it!

Of course, the next part of this blog entry is more geared torwards comments made to me because I state the FACTS about what Apple does. To anyone that disputes that statement, I have a challange for you: Find where I am spreading FUD and not FACTS. Quote me. Please.

I have recently been accused of being evil, hating all companies, and trolling. Apparently, not loving Apple means I'm evil, hating what Apple does means hating all companies, and stating what Apple does means trolling. I cannot stand when people accuse me of trolling when they make out Apple to be this great company, complimenting them for something they didn't do and quite commonly did the inverse. A great example is explained in this previous blog entry: http://aent.blogspot.com/2004/10/apple-vs-open-source-software-lot-of.html

I would go on about this, but I think that post speaks for itself and you can figure the rest out, so I'll end my Apple discussion with this statement: Apple users annoy me.

P2P

Well, the MPAA and RIAA and such succeeded again. They managed to get suprnova, one of the biggest sites sharing movies and such, shut down. Previously when sites like this got shut down, they took down the legit uses too. This loss isn't as important as the others, as it leaves the valid and legal users of bittorrent unaffected. The real issue I'm going to talk about is WHY users like myself prefer to use P2P networks to using services like iTunes and Napster.

The root of the problem is not when iTMS and the others were introduced. If they were introduced the day the internet was born, it would still be a problem. The real problem is DRM. DRM has multiple fundamental problems making it an unattractive item to purchase.

DRM removes the rights from the consumer. This means they cannot use the media files in any way they like. If I want to use it in a media player which isn't made or licensed or approved or whatever by the company who sold me the music, I can't play it. The players for the most part do allow you to burn a certain number of CDs or transfer it to a certain amount of devices or whatever, but that means a couple of things. 1) I'm limited to what devices they choose I can play it on. 2) I'm limited to how many CDs I can make.

Lets go to the next level up from the record companies. CDs. Audio CDs were great. They basically had a universal standard, and I can take any CD I like and play it on any CD player or any portable music player (that takes CDs; and if it didn't, I can put the CD in my computer, rip the song, and put it on my portable media player) I want. I don't have to worry about anyone approving it or not. CDs were great and you could even preview them in stores many times, but the real problem was that I can't pick and choose the songs I want and I can't get them from the convience of my own home, which isn't taking advantage of any of the new technologies. That of course is not a big deal, but I'd prefer just to buy what I want.

Well, then there is the P2P networks. The great thing about this is I can choose exactly what I want and it comes without restrictions. I can copy it to as many CDs as I want, play it in my car, play it in my portable media player of choice (well, not of choice for me, of cheapness rather since it doesn't support any format but MP3) and heck, any media player on my desktop! If I go buy a song from iTMS I'm stuck playing it in iTunes. I'm limited to the versions of iTunes that support it on the operating systems iTunes supports. Thats not a very good thing. The day the music labels offer DRM-free music where I can do everything I mentioned, well, thats when I'll start buying music online, and I highly recommend against purchasing music online until that happens. Any method of obtaining music is better then that IMO. Its giving up the freedom that you've had for a long time and have done nothing to deserve to lose it.

Apple vs open source software

A lot of people think Apple supports open source software. Sorry, all of you are full of shit.

Apple is probably one of the companies most against open source software, because of the way they work. They not only are against open source software, they take advantage of it. Apple has violated the GPL in the past, and would love to continue to do so, and Apple is just as bad every other company which violates the GPL and just sticks GPL code in there applications. What does Apple do?

Well, first they start out by looking around the open source market to try and find a base for there software. Lets take KHTML for example. KHTML was freely available under the GPL, and Apple decided to take them. Apple then acts like they made the rendering engine, and during the development of the browser they don't honor the GPL, not until they release it and the patches they develop for it are so old they are worthless will they make them available back to the authors of KHTML as the GPL requires. They aren't doing this willingly, they are doing them forcefully. In order to ensure that even if they do imlpement all of the patches the rendering engine will be worse then the one they took from them, they do all of there new development in a middle level layer which is designed to be incompatible with KHTML so that the work can't be used in it.

Next what Apple does is they try to find Linux users, try to convince them that they're easier to use by feeding them BS and they aren't Microsoft, so some people unfortunately fall for it. But a lot of very highly skilled developers still don't switch to it, so what they then do is recruit them to work for them, and get them to sign a contract which disallows them to work at all on any open source software. Wow, Apple, every time I find out more about what you do, the more clear it is that you really, really hate Linux and open source software, and just want to exploit it. At least Microsoft doesn't exploit the actual source code of open source software, even if they steal ideas and claim them there own sometimes... Apple does both.

Different kind of post: politics

The following is a true story.

This year, as some of you may know, I am president of two clubs. However, the politics behind them is an interesting story. For the computer club, I decided I would try out democracy. I received the majority of the votes and became President. All members now to refer to me as Mr. President.

I thought it was too much hassle to use the same technique on another club, so I used the hostile takeover technique. This process involves removing the elected officials from power in the time where the power is changing. Our military takeover involving aent warriors was very successful, and while there are still occasional revolts organized by previously elected officials who have not yet been captured by our organization. We feel that leadership under me would be superior for all those involved and will continue to fight and find those who want to revolt against my leadership. We want the best for the people, which is of course my being President.

The following has been a true story. I assume no responsiblity for the content of this story.