Had a really good day today. Last night was pretty cool too.

Last night Teh Remy came over and we watched The Transporter (a sweet movie if you like to see people get their butt’s kicked a lot) and The Matrix. I also entertained myself by watchine the various trailers for Matrix Reloaded. Remy was a pansy and wouldn’t watch any of them for fear of spoiling the movie. X2 is also high on my list of movies to see.

Today I rewrote a huge chunk of the scripting on a project I’m working one for work. I’m such a geek it’s not even funny. I LOVE UNIX shell scripting even though I’m not the greatest at it. I learned on csh but have moved to bash because of it’s function capability and it’s just plain easier to program in. For those without a clue, UNIX shell scripting is sort of like programming, but without the compiling part.

I got a realy charge out of the progress I’ve made in this project even though I’m not fond of the reasoning for the script.

This weekend also looks like it’s going to be sweet as Crystal has the weekend off and desparately needs the rest. I’m going to try and make this weekend easy for her, if I can. Maybe I can get her into some gaming to help get her mind off of stuff (which she has a very difficult time doing).

Cest la vi! Time to pick up Shelby.

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I’m feeling the pull to linux again. I just read an article about WineX 3.0 improvements (via TransGaming have been tweaking the crap out of WineX and adding many improvements, such as a graphical management system for installing games and such.

Couple this with the fact that Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003 have linux versions, the recent revelation of a Linux Neverwinter Nights installer and the fact the WineX supports Diablo2 (I’m assuming the Diablo2 expansion, also) and Warcraft 3, it’s very tempting.

I would definitly buy another drive to put it on and dual boot for a while before I made my final decision (I do have Adobe Photoshop Elements and several other packages I want to find alternates for).

I can hear my Redhat 8.0 disks singing to me…

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[EDIT: Changed the link that pointed to Randy's blog entry about SharpMT to the home page he has setup for it.]

[Link found on The .NET Guy]

It looks like w.bloggar is going to have some competition in the near future.

Well, not really. SharpMT is a w.bloggar-like tool, however, it’s written specifically for MT whereas w.bloggar is written to post to many types of blogging software.

The differences? w.bloggar has to assume the lowest common denominator, meaning it’s very difficult for it to use the advanced features of the blogging software it blogs to. Things like pinging, trackback and excerpts aren’t able to be used (though extended is in there) while SharpMT can take advantage of all the features of MT.

It’s reminiscent of the Post to MT Bookmarklet, but doesn’t require you to be online (once configured) and has shortcut buttons for inserting html tags, much like w.bloggar.

I’ve got it installed and will be actively watching this one.

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How sad is it that RIAA is moving in on a new IRAQ to force them into their idea of what’s right?

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I had a very invigorating and restful weekend. A lot of relaxing and chilling with the baby (who giggles everytime I look at her). Got hooked on Neverwinter Nights. Mainly because I want to become a high enough level to try out some of the expansion modules.

That’s basically it. I feel a lot more relaxed and even managed to dream up (literally, I do dream up code) some solutions to some scripting issues I’ve been having. Now, if I could only get the darned job script generation function to work right, I’ll be good as gold.

Kinda busy at work, so I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting.

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Holy Mother of God! A Judge with a clue! For details, get thee over to TADSpot and click on the link provided in the post titled Wow!! Wow!!. Now! What are you still doing here!

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Lately I’ve been on this “Hate the World” kick and I have no idea why.

It could be having to hear about how I’m a music pirate because I copy my cd’s in .ogg format.

Maybe it’s because I have to sign a privacy statment to get medication or to see my doctor now.

It definitly coinsides with having to drive the highway again.

Whatever the case may be, I really need to get out of this funk I’m in. Maybe some hardcore Final Fantasy will do it. Dinner and a movie with Teh Wife couldn’t hurt. I could seriously geek out on the PC, but I do that every night and it’s not helped yet.

Anyone have some ideas for something entertaining to do? A new PC game? Board Game? …DRINKING GAME!!!!

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[EDIT: If you don't believe what I've said below, check this out and draw your own conclusions.]

Interesting article on topics revolving around hacking the Xbox to run linux and other codes.

The article glosses over a lot of things and simplifies too much, but it provides good points and history about what’s going on.

However, I have a problem with this statement: “Hackers and enthusiasts will keep poking around, and somewhere in the middle, the lawyers, the courts and the public will have to decide what’s a product and what’s not.”

Like the courts have done an exceptional job protecting the publics rights. Please note the sarcasm in that line.

If left to the courts and lawyers, those with the biggest checkbooks win, which is NOT the public.

Companies have no interest in what’s best for the public or their rights. They only care about profit margins. I’m not saying that’s totally a bad thing, I mean, a company that doesn’t produce profits doesn’t stick around. However, when conglamorates such as the RIAA, the MPAA and Microsoft are actually lugged into courts to clear these matters up, they dump millions into their lawyers to stall out as much as possible, draining the finances of the opposing force. If a favorable outcome doesn’t appear to be in the near future, they dump even more into lobbyists and political donations for the next presidency.

When the public’s opinion differs from that of Corporate America, we’re labeled hackers, software or music pirates or thieves. They then use these skewed and mis-concieved numbers to convice congress that, in order to protect their profits, our rights have to be whittled down or just plain stripped away.

Is this the mechanism and process that we want deciding what we’re able to do with the things we purchase? Can we really trust Corporate America’s lawyers to present cases that are in the public’s best interest?

If you think so, I have some really nice swampland in Florida for sale.

Let’s face it folks, these companies have taken the lead from Microsoft and know that they can run the majority of consumers over. MS proved it with the EULA’s that they force you to sign to keep your OS working. If it works for MS, why not the rest of American business.

I swear, one of these days, I’m going to seriously consider moving to another country that doesn’t force it’s citizens to deal with this crap.

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I’ve asked to be de-listed from Blog Shares and that my account be deleted.

Before I get any flack, it really doesn’t have anything do to with this.

If I had to give a reason, I’d say that I just don’t get it and I really don’t have time to figure it out. Now, I could have left the link up and not cared about what was going on, but I’d rather leave links up to things I’m involved in.

My site may appear up there again as, apparantly, they have a problem de-listing things that ping Weblogs.com, but I’m not trading.

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You know, I don’t link to Belly-Flop as often as I should. I think the kid has a surprising grasp of things and offers pretty good insight into topics that were above me when I was his age.

For instance, today I ran across this post on his site that references this article about the Supreme Court reviewing the Miranda Rights the police read to someone who’s been placed under arrest.

In the article, a colorado man was arrested for violating a restraining order, however, he wouldn’t let the police finish reading him his Miranda Rights and told them about a gun he possessed. Now courts are ruling that the gun is inadmissable because he wasn’t read his rights.

The issue before the supreme court is how to handle these situations. If someone refuses to allow police to read them their rights, should what they say still be admissable?

Not suprising, the Bush administration if pushing for changes to police proceedures via supreme court ruling to clarify these problems.

My take on it? I think the reading of a person’s rights is something that cannot be changed. It has to happen to prevent someone from saying something in the heat of a moment that they could be help for later or to keep police power in check. But when an English-speaking (read: someone who understands what he’s been read) refuses to allow police to read their rights, I think it would be prudent to assume the person knows their rights. I stress that this can only be assumed in cases where the person in clearly coherent of thier situation, can understand the language the police is speaking and just simply refuse to allow police to read them their rights.

It’s also easy to go overboard on this subject. How many interruptions will it take? How well does the person speak english? Who determines that level of understanding?

Given that this is occuring during the current Bush administration, who are throwing around Acts and Laws designed to limit our freedoms, one has to wonder what changes or revisions the Administration is hoping to get out of it and if they have any input into these revisions.

I would normally say it’s better to error on the side of caution, arrest him and have his rights read to him in the presence of his lawyer, but he would have to know that he shouldn’t say anything until his lawyer is present. Thus, the Miranda Rights HAVE to be read to him at the time of arrest. If he doesn’t allow police to finish reading him his rights, he can claim he didn’t know his rights and has an easy out.

I can’t help but think of the quote “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”. Should the same stance be taken in regaards to a person’s rights? It’s an interesting topic in either case.

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