On the R-Line in downtown Raleigh

Went downtown and rode the R-Line with the wife. It still had that new bus smell.



Ate a late lunch at Hard Times Cafe in Glenwood South. The "Cincinnati" Chile, with onions and jalapeños, was delicious. It went great with the Highland Gaelic Ale, which I hadn't tried before.

I chilled out on a comfy sofa while Jen shopped at Ornamentea.

We had fun walking around. The time went too fast.

Too many places are closed on Sundays, though. Bummer.

I'm looking forward to spending an afternoon downtown with the kids soon, checking out Glenwood South and Fayetteville Street and City Market by way of the R-Line. We'll have to make sure to do it on a Saturday, though.

Congrats to Raleigh for getting the R-Line up and running!

The R-Line is R-Some!

Metallic Pocket Lint

This is the "give a penny, take a penny" tray sitting on the counter of the chinese place where I ate lunch yesterday:



I saw it and thought to myself, "That's a lot of pennies."

But it's the guy the who ordered after me that did something interesting. He placed his order, got his drink and sat down at a table to wait for his order. Then, he took the trouble to go through his pockets collect all the pennies he had, walk back up to the counter and dumped them in the penny tray.

With that many pennies in the tray, I had to guess other people are doing the same thing.

Pennies are junk now, like metallic pocket lint.

What do you do with your pennies?

24 hours of Reddit: 597 stories! I gotta cut back.

I didn't go to reddit for a full 24 hours. from 11pm EST Jan 7 - 11pm EST Jan 7. But I did have a blog reader set up to track the stories. Here's a screen shot at the end of the self-imposed reddit denial:


Five hundred ninety seven stories in about 24 hours. In real-time during waking hours, that's about one every two minutes, but they come batches.

There's no way I could look at even 10% of that content. There's no way I could even evaluate which 10% I should look at. I doubt anyone could, except qgyh2.

This explains why I had the frequent compulsion to switch to a reddit tab and reload the page to see what was new, because every couple minutes something was new. And I clicked on it not because it was interesting or informative, but only because it was new. Fellow redditors, this takes up more of your time than you think it does.

That's going to stop. I need a better way to keep up with the intertubes and the world. Something that makes better use of my limited time.

I haven't yet decided whether or not to abandon reddit.

Why did I track reddit in Reader? I felt that reddit was taking up too much of my time, and wanted to free up some of that time without giving up my "reddit fix." I thought that if I used a reader to track the stories, I could skip the comments and just read the submitted content. (Yes, I know comments are the best part of reddit)

When setting this up, I realized I was subscribed to a lot of rubreddits. I unsubbed from many of them and kept the ones I decided I wanted. There are others not shown in the screenshot. The 'scifi' subreddit, for example, didn't have any new posts on its front page that day.

I did all that setup on Sunday. On Monday, my reader was busy, busy, busy. It always had "new unread messages" I kept marking them as read without even reading them -- there were just so many and I was busy doing, well, work.

On Tuesday, I just let the reddit folders fill up with unread messages, and at the end of that is where I took the screenshot.

Halloween cards are supposed to be scary

Tara, my seven year old daughter, made a Halloween card for her grandmother. On the back of the card, she drew a pretty butterfly. The butterfly was happy. Tara added glitter to the card to make the butterfly nice and sparkly. Then, she remembered that Halloween cards are "supposed to be scary." So she changed the card a bit....

Die-hard Republican outraged at Bush

A coworker of mine falls squarely into the social- and fiscal-conservative camp of the Republican Party. He is not ashamed to say that he voted for Bush in both elections. He believes in a small, limited government and that religion is the basis for morality.

He's a good guy, though. He not obnoxious at all.

Yesterday, he stopped by my office and talked politics for a few minutes. He knows I'm an ardent libertarian (who doesn't?) and can easily talk politics without it getting personal.

Looks like even this arch-Republican has had enough of the Bush administration over the lastest debacle. To claim that the President's and the Vice-President's offices are not part of the Executive Branch is "completely outrageous," he says.

Well, yeah. It is. But I was a bit suprised to hear him say it.

Last week, there were reports that Bush's approval rating had fallen to 26%. That's the lowest of his term. Lower than Carter's, and second only the Nixon's shortly before he resigned. And that was before the "President and Vice-President are above the law" bit. That was before my die-hard Republican co-worker finally became outraged at the latest egregious abuses of power.

I wouldn't have thought he'd come around, but better late than never.

It seems evens the last vestiges of support for the Bush are finally crumbling. It will be interesting to see the next Bush approval poll .

There's so much good music that I can't buy. Thanks RIAA.

I really like last.fm. It's a free streaming radio site where you rate song you hear, in a thumbs up, thumbs down sort of way. As you rate more and more songs, the content getting streamed to you gets tailored to your tastes.

And, dude, I'm hearing some really good music. So good it distracts me from work. I click over to the last.fm client. I click on the artist and song links. I look them up on wikipedia. I search for their lyrics on line. I do image searches to see band pics and album cover art. Seriously, I haven't enjoyed listening to music this much in years.

I've even -- shocker -- bought music based on what I've heard on last.fm.

But only a couple. Most music is beyond my grasp, for two reasons:

Most labels are RIAA members, and I've sworn off buying anything from an RIAA member. Everytime I'm thinking about buying a disc, I look up the label and see if they are on RIAA Member List (1). If they're on that list, they don't get my money.

It's bittersweet. It's good music, but I just can't bring myself to support the RIAA anymore. I wish there were an effective way to communicate lost sales to these bands and labels, to encourage them to disassociate themselves from the RIAA.

Another reason I don't buy some music is because it simply isn't available in the U.S.

It's no surprise to me that I don't like mainstream music in the U.S. I rarely listen to commericial radio anymore (thanks ClearChannel!). But I have learned that I like a lot of European bands -- bands that I'd never even heard of before because their discs are not distributed or promoted in the U.S.

Last.fm introduced me to them. I look them up on Amazon and many of them are only available as imports, usually costing $25 or for a single disc of music -- sometimes over $50 for one disc! While I have no moral objects to buying these discs, since they are not part of the RIAA as far as I know, I still can't bring myself to shell out that much money for a single disc. I'm not made of money.

Why aren't these bands available in America, as a matter of course, at 'standard' prices? I dunno. Pressing CDs is pretty cheap nowadays.

This is all very disappointing. The Amerian music industry is broken. I *want* to spend money on music now, with just two principles -- the artist must not be associated with and RIAA label, and the music must be reasonably priced.

Software Wars update

Software Wars gets updated -- barely -- by the end of the year, technically fulfilling my promise of "two or three updates per year."

I'll let the changes mostly speak for themselves, but I wanted to bring up just a couple things...

Of the many (dozens!) comments I got over the summer when the site got slashdotted, the most common was a request for some of representation of the database conflict, which I have added.

A close second was a request for a showing of the console front (XBox, PS2/3, GameCube/Wii). I struggled with this but eventually decided that, while Microsoft has a major stake in that conflict, it is most likely a different theater of conflict (to extend the "war" metaphor) and the FOSS movement isn't heavily involved in that theater. I think a "Console Wars" map could cover that, but I have no interest in making one.

Beyond consoles and databases, the comments and requests had a really wide spread. I included a few (like the Office conflict getting its own battle lines) and didn't include others.

It's not because I didn't want to -- I just don't have enough space. I wanted to keep the image within 1024x768 in dimensions and the file size to less than 100k. Within those parameters, there's only so much I can squeeze in before the text is too small and there's just too many arrows.

Anyway, I enjoyed the Holidays and hope you did, too. Have a happy new year and here's hoping FOSS does well in 2007. *toast*