The campus search program that I started writing last year and perfected 😉 just a few weeks ago with its 2.0 release is now offline, possibly permanently. The Recording Industry Association of American, an “industry trade group,” has decided to stop with its cease-and-desist letters and quit with its DMCA infringement notices and simply start suing college students. Along they way, the RIAA has come up with some fun new terms to compliment their old standby “piracy,” a term which is not only confusing in the visceral reaction it provokes but is also completely wrong.

Also completely wrong is the RIAA, which seems to believe that instead of growing as a business, embracing new technologies, and giving its consumers what they want, it can simply sue all of its consumers out of existance, surely not a good tactic for continued profitability. The RIAA mantra is, “Music: Our Way or Jail!” This latest round of evilness involves calling campus search systems “Napster networks,” a complete misnomer since they are neither networks nor at all Napster-like.

The best story so far is probably the one from The Chronicle, although I don’t really like the ending.

The comprehensive 350-ish page report says that cancer deaths will be up 50% by 2020. Here is a London Times story. This’ll be on the news soon enough, if the networks deem it scary enough in the face of war. Of course, they don’t find SARS relevent, because it doesn’t affect Americans. This report, however, does single out California…as an example of what is right. Lung cancer dramatically lower than most of the rest of the US thanks to strict anti-smoking laws. Still, our culture of apathy is causing a lot of problems even without the smoking. Culture of apathy, I like that phrase. But wait, that includes me! Uh oh.

Self congratulations here, after a fun and drawn out process, including Union Judiciary case, I won the second attempt at Secretary elections, 346 to 295. I never did actually talk to my opponent, Alyssa Krop, but hopefully there aren’t any hard feelings. Of course, nothing I did was ever directed at her (i.e. signs, campaign stuff, or case), so I hope she doesn’t have any irrational hatred of me that might manifest itself in a deranged killing spree…but the one time I saw her she seemed pretty nice, so I’ll assume no. 😉

Also, Adam Herman informs me that the last 3 presidents (before our new one, pres-elect Josh Brandfon) were all secretaries first. Neat-o.

Three people now have told me to try marijuana for my sleep problems. Three. And people say medicinal marijuana is fake!

Lots of tech professionals with pretty packed resumes are unemployed right now. And not just between jobs, seriously unemployed. So many of them in online postings and such casually drop that they’ve been out of work for 5 or 6 or 7 months, some for a year or more, and there just aren’t any jobs. That can’t be good. This doesn’t inspire any hope, either.

Igor alerted me to Fox’s response to the New York “die-in” protests. They used their huge ticker to poke fun at the protesters:

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn’t carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

“War protester auditions here today … thanks for coming!” read one message. “Who won your right to show up here today?” another questioned. “Protesters or soldiers?”

Said a third: “How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them.”

Read all about it at North Jersey Media Group. Perhaps I should be outraged at the news empire’s bias or whatever, but I’m just sitting here laughing…

I’m very upset at my body right now. Every day since we did the all-nighter preparing my UJ case I’ve been falling asleep somewhere between 4 and 6 am, and not waking up until past noon. Tonight I got tired at 10:30pm, and seeing my chance, tried to sleep. Three hours later, and I’ve gotten sick of lying in bed. ARGH!!!

A bit more site news. I’ve put up a new design that I think addresses most of my problems with the older one. It is more subtle but serves pretty well to differentiate the posts and the side navigation. I like it, and people I’ve talked to seem to like it. There might still be problems with IE/Windows, so I’ll have to look into that. Stupid Windows.

Posts are now being categorized, and clicking on a category takes you to the newest 10 posts in that category. At some point I’ll make a little category navigation menu on the left, but the left side is pretty big already as it is.

Finally, I’ve added a widget to the bottom of the page that allows you to go to the next ten posts. now when you’re on the homepage or click a month to view, it shows the newest ten posts with the link on the bottom to go to the next ten posts or back to the previous ten posts. I like it, hope you do as well.

Unless, of course, you have a C-Band dish and can tune into Al-Jazzera. And yet, this is whats happening. Slightly more newsworthy, in my estimation, than grainy green night-vision shots of tanks sitting around in the desert.

The reality of war is always death and destruction. It always spews out dead bodies — torn, twisted and charred bodies — and legions of injured and maimed. It always creates prisoners of war. It always leaves in its wake homes reduced to rubble, lives blighted, families destroyed. It always brings suffering and misery, disease and hunger. It is not a computer game or a movie where, when it is over, we can get up and go and have a meal and a laugh. It is horrible and evil — which is why it must always be the very last resort — something that so many governments, so many people, told Washington and London, but something that they ignored — so convinced were they that it could be played and won with computer-like efficiency.

The ArabNews Editorial is a pretty well-balanced criticism. They make us read dozens of war-is-hell books in high school, to the point where 10th graders all want to commit suicide because our world is so terrible, but after a few years everything we’ve read has sunk away. Maybe everyone needs to be hooked up to a computer and virtually shot and killed once a year. Might help us with the perspective.

War is hell. War is sometimes unavoidable. But in this war, all of the rhetoric on both sides seems very…fake. George W. Bush and even Colin Powell don’t convince me that they mean it when they talk about this terrible burden. Meanwhile, the Hollywood-provided peaceniks aren’t very coherant. Sigh. Whatever happened to “vigorous public debate”?

Artists are people, but not normal people. Artists are their own species, I’ve decided. Shaina is an artist of sorts, in a school of artists, and she has become more of an artist because of it. There is something interesting and somewhat unique about an artistic high school like the one Shaina goes too — there is this fundamental give-and-take between the artistic pursuits and the academics. They aren’t entirely incompatible, but there is certainly a resentment between them. Like cats and dogs, each is unique, sometimes they get along, sometimes not. They have personalities.

If artisty is about creation, uniqueness, beauty, soul, inspiration, and learning is about study, repetition, fact, testing, proof, there is a disconnnect. And yet, both pursuits are about truth.

Still, artists are different. On the one hand, they have tremendous emotional drive that other people probably don’t have. More prone to mania, depression, or whatever we as society are classifying it as today, but it is raw and unfettered emotion, and that is what art is about.

While artists can be extremely insightful, they can also sometimes be extremely dense. While at times that they can be so thoughful and caring, at other times they can also be incredibly brutal and uncaring.

Artists are difficult to live with. Sometimes, you need to do some artistry of your own in attempting to mold them into a more subtle model…possibly slightly less artistic, which is a shame, but more livable, which is good.

It is the real world vs. the artists. It is the universal give and take. It is strange and scary and confusing and prone to small failures. And in taming the artist, one might dampen the artistry a bit. Sad, difficult, fraught with peril, possibly harmful, and yet so potentially rewarding. It’s probably worth it, I think.

I cancelled my semi-evil Eryxma account, and they shut it down a few days early (argh!). Luckily, I was able to recover the two posts I was missing from a Google cache and the two comments accompanying them from the auto-emails, so everything should be the way it was.

I finally fixed the problem with archive view, it no longer limits to ten posts, so you can actually see every post I’ve made in a given month instead of the last 10, so my Sept. 11-era posts are back online, along with a lot of others.

I’ve expanded the photo gallerys substantially, basically getting all the pictures that were in the old gallery into the new one (finally), so they make good browsing. I like our mexico trip albums, and the pictures of the cats 😉

A few people have been concerned with email addresses in the comments box. Don’t worry, they’re somewhat spam protected by each character being converted to Unicode. Most browsers should be okay, and most spambots should choke.

Thats all in the site news for today.

While buying groceries the woman who sells the vegetables was talking to another about the approach of American armies to Najaf city and about what is happening at Um Qasar and Basra. If Um Qasar is so difficult to control what will happen when they get to Baghdad? It will turn uglier and this is very worrying. People (and I bet “allied forces�) were expecting things to be mush easier. There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are oing what all of us are, sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn’t fall on them and keeping their doors shut.

Where is Raed? makes a very good read.

Is the House of Representatives a real lawmaking body, or just a joke?

In other news, is BBSpot a joke news site, or is it the only sane one in a nuthouse full of TV news?

Looks like Matt Sachs finally got a blog. If he actually continues to post, I’ll have to add him to my friends list. His latest words of wisdom on family and relationships: …oh, and it was nice seeing my family, of course. They got a new couch.

General Wesley Clark to Salon about the Iraq war:

You’ve referred to the campaign against Iraq as “elective surgery”; I imagine that means that you support disarming Saddam in principle, just not with the same urgency the Bush administration feels.

My view on it was and has been that at some point you’re going to need to take actions to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But those actions didn’t have to necessarily be military and they didn’t have to be now. It’s the administration that chose to do this set of actions at this time. And the reason they’ve had problems persuading people of the necessity for doing it has been because they couldn’t address the urgency.

My feeling exactly.

Many libertarians seem to dislike the Libertarian Party. Wouldn’t the libertarian thing to do be to set up a competing libertarian party and may the best party win?

Watched episode 2. Uninspiring, too much stuff packed in too quickly, not enough emotion. Too boring/annoying to recap here, even though that was my intention. But I’ll keep watching. For now.

This blog format is too structured, the middle bit will be changing. And I’m going to start categorizing posts, and going back through old ones and categorizing. Just have to decide if I’m sticking with b2 or moving to MovableType when I put it on the new COG box.

What does one do at 3 in the morning on a Saturday? Why, watch Alias, of course. Obvious.

My dad was watching this show, and I’ve been meaning to. It seemed somewhat fun, semi-deep, stylistic, at least a bit, and seems to hinge a lot around Jennifer Garner as the super CIA agent who can do just about anything. Cause she’s super. Almost…gifted. Embued with powers. Chosen.

I’m saying this because I couldn’t figure it out. I watched the pilot, and generally I’m pretty forgiving of pilots, and this one had good and bad. It was very professional, very…cut. It wasn’t like the Buffy pilot.

Wait a minute…powers…chosen…super-girl…Buffy! Yes, I must be incredibly dense, because I didn’t realize why I liked the show until Television Without Pity enlightened me. I’m watching Buffy 2.0. Only…slicker. Network-worthy. Without the humor, the endearing amateruness of the first couple seasons.

I found the layout of the pilot to be very confusing, I felt very little emotion for the dead fiance, and the fight scenes were yawn-inspiring, but something captivated me about the show. It wasn’t the jarring musical switches (something “thematic,” I guess, rock for normal girl, techno for superspy). Yet I do see real potential. Of course, I’m two seasons behind, but I have all the episodes on my computer so I can catch up. If I get bored along the way, I can always stop. But Jennifer Garner in her varied “disguises” is a good pull… They just keep finding weird things to put her in. And she seems to be able to go anywhere, do any mission, know every language and custom. And yet, no super powers. No calling…well, maybe one will be explained.

The two-hour pilot felt very rushed, there was probably a better way to tell the story. And the glitz is annoying. But, again, I see potential. Not really sure why, but I’ll keep watching. We’ll see.

I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be hitting, and how hard, but the networks sure aren’t doing it. In contrast, there is this:

The first time, I was sitting there in my house being bombed, and thinking “OK, bring it on! We will be freed.” We lived about four miles from the shelter that housed women and children — of course then as now, Saddam has kept his weapons in schools and other civilians and institutions. Back then, when I was hiding under the stairwell with my family. I thought OK, anything to get rid of him.

But now … (voice breaks, again) After the bombings, they callously left him there, purposely, because it suited their ends. Now, the same people who made the decisions back then, are arguing for the morality of the decision, as if he wasn’t evil 12 years ago.

It’s really hard for me, as an Iraqi and as an American. For all intents and purposes, America is my country. As an American, if the attempt is to avenge Sept. 11 and Bin Laden, I think this is 180 degrees from what needs to be done. I think it’s a policy of arrogance, and all Americans, we are going to be in danger in ways we don’t even realize it. This just a free campaign of recruitment for bin Laden.

The interviews are at Salon. Stop complaining and get the bloody day pass. Better, subscribe.