DMCA bait

AC F9 10 02 90 74 E3 5B D7 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Oops! Pardon me.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

There that's better. Oops! Forgot about:

11 F9 18 02 9D 74 E0 5B 13 AC 56 FF 63 56 88 12

and

AC F9 17 12 1D 7E EE 5B D2 41 56 C1 63 44 88 C0

Sorry 'bout that.

Get it? Good. If you don't get it, you don't get the absurdity of the DMCA. There's nothing to see here. Move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

The Virgina Tech Tragedy

As you may have noticed, aside from Twitter posts, I haven't done any blog updates. I've been busy with proposals, post-conference wrap-ups, and sales meetings. Nevertheless, nothing else quite so dampens blog-posting enthusiasm as a local mass-murder.

As you may already know, I am a graduate of Virginia Tech (Electrical Engineering '95). I've lived in Blacksburg Virginia during the school year and also during the off-season. I've gone back to visit it several times for mini-vacations and weekend trips. For those who aren't familiar with the lush natural beauty of the Shenandoah mountains, all of the 'lake' scenes from the movie Dirty Dancing were filmed just outside Blacksburg.

It is highly probable, that I took 2 classes as an undergraduate (Mechanics of Deformable Bodies and Dynamics II) in the very room where the massacre took place.

Previously, Virginia Tech was not very well known outside of the architecture and engineering professions.

Now, unfortunately, it's known world-wide as THAT "Columbine College".

Outside of vacations and a few months here and there for work in various foreign countries, I've also lived in Virginia all of my life.

Clearly this tragedy 'hit home' for me on several levels, though I do not personally know anyone involved.

From what I can tell (I stopped watching TV 'news' years ago), the usual litany of retrospective finger-pointing, 24x7 news 'coverage' (air-quotes), and various legal machinations are running their predictable course. The perpetrator (he doesn't deserve to be called by a name) was clearly without remorse for his premeditated actions and had not been in a reasonable state-of-mind for months.

Suicidally motivated individuals have always been able to instigate tragedy.

This fundamental historical truth seem to be missing from the coverage noise on gun law loopholes, step-by-step forensic tactical reconstructions of the shootings, and psychological analysis of PR/Media "press package" left behind.

Our electronic Internet-worked society and "if it bleeds, it leads" journalistic culture is wonderfully efficient at bringing us the images, the sounds, and the words--the data. Unfortunately, it utterly fails to bring understanding, knowledge, or resolution.

For myself, that can only occur after considerable time, effort, and distance away from the media milieu.

A bit of a musical summary regarding my feelings. Thank you Mr. Henly et al. for speaking truth to power.

Follow-Up: Jon Stewart--brilliant as always.

Future Sport -- The monster

Nice one Len! Niiice. Did Obsidian request this one?

Dealing with vendors

A great vendor delivers and, over time, becomes a partner in your enterprise's endeavors. The performance of 2 vendors I've been dealing with recently can best be characterized by both Dr. Poop & Dr. Beaman. Sometimes it's best to simply call a "Vondrook" a "Vondrook" and be done with it.

CNET TV's new 'blog'

I'm generally not a fan of "corporate blogging". Most companies screw it up and end up dis-engaging their customers with PR-speak, but I have to give Tom credit for using the 'ole meta-transparency trick with his blog post. Yes Mr. Merritt, your PR kung-fu is strong.

Now if they would just enable comments...

Yummy RAID goodness

Drobo looks to be a portable, intelligent, and dead-sexy looking RAID enclosure. I already have a 3TB Infrant, but you can never have enough storage riiight?

I wonder if it supports jumbo frames for faster media streaming. It looks like it uses a proprietary RAID controller to allow for volume expansion even under non-uniform RAID partition (i.e. disk) sizes.

Monster-By-Mail

Attention K-Mart shoppers, there's a bluelight special on monsters.

Help Len's family out, get a neat piece of art, and watch it being created on YouTube. Mine is "bonsai".

Wha?! "Logging In" to YouTube?

Since when did you need to login merely to rate a video on YouTube?!

Perhaps since the sale to Google?

Eh, Firefox's BugMeNot plug-in to the rescue. C'mon Google, it's just a video ranking! I'm already going through a proxy so you're server logs are useful only for geo-spatial load balancing from that proxy and, perhaps, one more blip on your user-agent and page-bounce statistics. I didn't even bother to play the clip or hit a control so Flash event logging is also out of the picture. Sheesh.

TED talks are online

I totally forgot to post on TED. This year all of the TED talks, or at least most of them, will be posted online. Subscribe via your favorite RSS reader such as iTunes and...bask in the TEDness. I haven't been to a TED--yet.

"Ride the Snake"

Via kottke:

A simply sublime roller-coaster visualization of inflation-adjusted U.S. primary-residence real estate valuations since 1890.

This post's title was inspired by Jim Carrey's classic SNL skit. Ya' gotta love the homage to Scanners. As a real estate investor since 1996, me thinks it's time to get off the ride.

Tantek's first vblog

Ok, ok man. I see that you're all up wid 'da video blogging now, but there something to said about attaching a wee bit too much symbolism to things.

Sometimes a tunnel is just a tunnel. Your mug is all over Flickr. It also belongs on your vblogs too.

Gmail Paper

The sad part is, assuming they handled pagination and typography in a reasonably intelligent fashion, there are plenty of law firms which would pay good money for Google's April Fools service.