Archive for September, 2006

Wheatbread 1, Geek Squad 0

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

If you work in information technology for a living, you end up being the de facto tech support staff for your friends and relatives. This is perfectly reasonable. I don’t hesitate to ask my brother-in-law, whose home improvement and carpentry kung-fu is unstoppable, to help me when things break around my house. [...]

You can’t handle the truth

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Newsweek covers from around the world, compared.

Film roundup…

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Last weekend, I caught up on a few documentaries I’d been wanting to see. First was Robert Greenwald’s 2004 film, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (Wikipedia). Fox news is so obviously right-leaning that it’s sad anyone needs a documentary to point the fact out. But people still watch it, quite [...]

Clear guidelines, check

Friday, September 15th, 2006

I was pleased as punch that Colin Powell decided to publicly spank our president for his continued attempts to circumvent the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. All of this current rhetoric from the right about needing “clear guidelines” for our intelligence agents in the field is just an effort to reframe the [...]

Brave New DAW

Friday, September 15th, 2006

I got serious this year about doing more recording. For quite a while now, I’ve used SonicFoundry Sony Acid Pro as my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). It’s been good to me, but more recent versions (especially version 5, the latest I’ve used) have become cumbersome and slow on my, admittedly cheap, hardware. [...]

Defeating toolish Flickr image blocking

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

I love flickr, which is why I was annoyed when I discovered that they’ve implemented some crude–and easily defeatable–image blocking to some images. If you right click an image and it offers to save “spaceball.gif,” you’ll know that you’ve encountered this lameness first hand. spaceball.gif is just a blank image.
I remember [...]

A little Ruby for you…

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

The programming language, Ruby, which I keep meaning to learn, has a swank new home page. A particularly nice feature of it is this web-based, interactive tutorial, which gives you a nice little command prompt where you can try out examples as you go. Sweet! Every language needs a site like that.

personal weblog of James “Wheatbread” Martin