+ 2 - 0 | § ¶A band that gets it...

Congrats to Harvey Danger for making their third album, Little by little, available for download via bittorrent. Bands don't usually make alot of money from album sales, and just use the record companies for distribution of their music. They mainly count on people coming to their shows to make money. By distributing their work via the internet for free, they take out the middle man, earn some good will, and get some new fans to listen to their music. It just makes sense to do it this way, I wish more bands would be this clever...

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Finally

I remember when I first played DOOM, I was too scared to actually play it without godmode on. While this was fun for a while, it made me totally miss the awesome experience that the game could provide. I've been playing through the game recently, only using my wits and reflexes... and finally today I got to the end of the 3rd episode of DOOM! I like how they keep you in suspense over what happens next...



Thank you to the people who packaged lxdoom for Debian! It helped me relive a dream :**)

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶pictures.labowicz.com

I have setup a new sub-site of labowicz.com: pictures.labowicz.com. This will be the place where I upload all my fun and exciting photos! I'm using qdig for the scripts on the page, in case anyone is wondering...

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Site Downtime

For some reason Yahoo decided to take my site offline for a few days. Repeated emails to their customer service dept resulted in them telling me that my password was wrong over and over. This was interesting since I could log in to my other yahoo services using the same password. Calls to their support line gave me a message saying that they all evacuated because of Hurricane Rita... which I can understand. However, one of the reasons that I picked Yahoo to host my site was the expected un-interrupted service that I would get. Hopefully this doesn't happen again, or I will be looking for a new host.

Sorry to anyone who couldn't access this site or Suzanne's Lesson page during the past few days!

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Google going too far?

From Google's new Secure Access Wifi Client FAQ: If you choose to use Google Secure Access, your internet traffic will be encrypted and sent through Google's servers to the Internet. The data that is received will then be encrypted and sent back through our servers to your computer.

I love alot of the things that Google does, but I'm thinking that sending all my internet traffic through their servers gives them a little too much insight into what I do online. I now can see why some people are starting to think that Google could turn out to be worse than Microsoft...

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Bruce Perens on Ubuntu

I recently got a chance to talk to Bruce Perens at a Linux and Opensource workshop. If you don't know who he is, in short he is the person who developed the open source definition and was the project leader of the Debian Linux distribution at one point. This is what he said about the Ubuntu project:

Interesting project until Mark (Shuttleworth) loses interest. The (Ubuntu) foundation is interesting, will have to keep an eye on.

Interesting comment for the OSS geeks reading this.

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Nintendo's new controller

At first glance, the new controller for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console looks like it will be really hard to use. When I first looked pictures of this thing, I thought it was a joke... but after reading a little bit more about it, I truely think it will be a breakthrough in how people interact with games. Maybe it will even convince my fiance, Suzanne, to try and play a few games with me...

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Where have I been??

I found this cool website that allows you to generate a color coded maps of where you're been in the world and in the USA. Here are my maps:

World



USA

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Long Live Battlestar Galactica!

I finished watching the Battlestar Galactica mini-series DVD last night at about 1 am. It took me a few sittings to actually get through the whole 3 hour show, but it was well worth it. The story is set in a universe where its been 40 years since humans have fought a bloody war with a race of robots that they created. The robots are called the Cylons and apparently the humans did some pretty bad things to them in the past... I'm thinking that they just took advantage of them and treated them poorly until one day they got intelligent enough to get mad about it. The main focus of the series, however, is the plight of the crew of the Battlestar Galactica, a ship that fought in the old war and is about to be decomissioned. I don't want to give too much away, but lets just say that things don't turn out as planned. Also, the Cylons produce some really sexy robot models :) For more info, you can check out the synopsis at wikipedia. Right now, I need to convince my Firefly watching friends to check this show out, and I need to buy the Season 1 DVD!

+ 0 - 2 | § ¶I hate Bush bumper stickers...

Someone, who shall remain unamed, wondered why someone would have an "I hate Bush" bumper sticker on their car. There are still plenty of reasons to hate Bush, here are a few of them:

1. He likes taking long vacations while Hurricanes destroy the South East coast.

2. He appoints completely unqualified people to head important agencies like FEMA. In fact he practically disabled FEMA by combining it with the department of Homeland Security.

3. He holds too many press conferences. Especially when he should be working on a solution for all of the people displaced by Katrina.

4. 60 percent of America thinks he's doing a bad job as president

5. He's against stem cell research which could save millions of lives. As a result the US is beginning to lag in this vital area of research.

6. He's not a good diplomat, he's alienating our old allies and creating plenty of new enemies.

7. Iraq is a quagmire and there is no end in sight. People are beggining to start protesting...

8. He is putting the US into trillions and trillions of dollars in debt. Someone will eventually have to pay for this debt. This deficit spending can't go on forever... What if we have another big natural disaster? Are we just going to throw a trillion dollars at it? Who's going to pay for that?

9. According to Kanye West, "He doesn't like black people" but seriously, most of his "Tax Cuts" only benefit the wealthy. How would the poor benefit from the removal of an estate tax?

10. He undermines the efforts of the UN and has pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol (a treaty meant to combat Global Warming).

I know the Democrats aren't much better, but this is about Bush and his actions. I hope that history remembers him correctly.

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶A Labowicz Hero

There aren't many people around with the last name of Labowicz. It's especially interesting to read about someone with that name, who took part in one of the greatest things that America ever did... liberate Europe from the Nazi's during WW2. Here's a link to a story about Vincent Labowicz Jr, a WW2 hero.

Here's what my Dad had to say about this guy:

Mike,
It is possible that we could be related with them somehow. I don't know if this could be determined now. It looks like they came to the US around the WW I. My grandfather Jerzy (George) was born in 1901 near Baranowicze in Bielorussia. He was the youngest child in the large family. Just FYI, his parents names were Teofil and Antonina. When the WW I started in 1914, a few of his brothers were drafted to Russian army. By the time the war was over, the family lost everything and they could not find each other. The Soviet revolution (1917) took all the property and killed a lot of Poles living in the eastern part of the former Polish territories. My grandfather escaped to newly created Poland and stayed there. He married my grandmother Stanislawa in 1931, and my father Robert was born in 1932.

These people from Massachusetts could be descendants of one of my grandfather's brothers, or maybe some other family. I don't think it is possible to find out, since most of the people who could remember those family details had passed away.

Dad

The full text of the story can be found below... (more)

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Online Music Rights

The Eff has posted an interesting article on their website. It's about the restrictions that the 'legal' online music stores place on the tracks you download. I find it interesting that the music companies want people to pay more for less rights. I understand that DRM has a place in the world, but there should be some freedom allowed. I expect to be able to take the mp3's I bought and do whatever I want with them aside from sharing them on p2p networks. What I would like to see is a company offer mp3's for sale that include a watermark of some sort but no other restrictions. That way, if anybody ever uploads the track to a p2p network, the music companies could go after the original source. This would discourage people from sharing music they bought, and enable people to keep the rights over the music they purchased. In this model, you could even share the file with close friends, knowing that they probably won't sell you out and share the file on a p2p network.

People might eventually find a way to bypass the watermark, but there are already hacks in place to get around the DRM in iTunes, so how would this be any different? I don't know much about audio encoding or the structure of mp3 files, but there has to be a way to embedd a watermark in the file in such a way that it's impossible to take out. Instead of trying to engineer ways that prohibit our rights, maybe the music companies (along with other content providers) should try and find a way to protect them... then again, I doubt that it will ever happen because that might just benefit everybody.