silveradept | Ah, wow. All that and more

This i posted at this time because my Internet decided to be cute and not work for several hours.

I embarked on a project of half-cleaning and organizing my music collection today. I say half-cleaning because a large part of what’s there could probably be filed in various folders, but it would probably not be something I would want to do. So my OCRemixes stay in the root folder, rather than being organized by some schema. I also found out that policies are updated for the convention - the parcel mail shipment was apparently an accident. Those bringing proof to convention will only have to pay $5, and it is refundable.

And there’s a lot of stuff that came across my desk today, so sit down and be comfortable.

I’ll stay in the anime category to start with Seiyuu (voice actors) and Animators are Slaves, not Stars, which notes that the voice-acting industry is just as competitive (if not more so) in Japan, with a less-than-stellar salary to go with it. As the American actors have said, you don’t get into the business because you want to make large amounts of money. And in the same manner, having many jobs in acting is the way you make the bills.

Moving to Slashfood - a keyboard waffle-maker, which, to me, is great, as well as my brain going “You know, you usually try to fill all the spots in with melted butter. You know that waffle would probably kill you if you tried it with that.”

A Canadian study released found no link between mercury exposure in vaccines and autism. Somewhere else lies the cause, then.

A question worth pondering - Is on-line rape a crime? (In these cases, there’s no actual physical assault, but that’s not to say that in the end, the people victimized don’t feel violated.) Should something like that be a matter for the police, beyond the moderators and the administrators?

bradhicks weighs in on the Republican presidential candidates, based on the recent debate. His conclusion: The people on the TV want to bomb Iran, possibly in a nuclear manner, and continue the aggression of the United States against other countries. While they may be reacting to the possibility of Iran having ICBM capabilities in eight years, I’d say the willingness to use nuclear weaponry so quickly disqualifies the slate of candidates there. Depending on how the Democrats stacked up against that question, many of them could be disqualified as well.

For people looking to improve the colors of their photographs, Unfocused Brain suggests: Steal the colors from classical art using a photo-manipulation program and apply them to your own photograph. It’s a great rationale - the people doing art that’s lasted had to worry about color balance, and they’re probably Smarter Than The Average Bear about it. So take their colors and make your own pictures shine. The technique also works for those looking to make mood influences or to make their photographs “vintage”, so long as there’s a picture which conveys the appropriate mood or time period. If you want some flesh tones, then the not-safe-for-work (bewbs) Timeless series might be a good place to start. Lots of color in those pictures as well. Speaking of 18+ material, a time capsule planted by the 1957 class at the University of Washington gained a prophylactic, some underwear, and some 1980s-era pornography. All the original material was still there, but someone had added a few things in the intervening time.

The sequence of hexadecimal values is, naturally, spreading far over the ‘net, which means that the same kinds of people who put “All Your Base” everywhere now have put hex values all over their imagery, some done well, others poorly, but all of them with those values.

The New York Times Diner’s Journal has an interesting short piece about a writer taking students to lunch after they complained about their portrayal. Both sides learned a lot about the food and the journalism industries. I’d say that’s one way of running a correction.

Mixed opinions regarding the progress of Iraq. Some say the troops in Iraq are stemming the flow of al-Qaeda forces,
others may be worried about whether progress is being made because of the discovery that a girls' school being built had bombs laid in with the structure. In addition to being defeatists, apparently, the Left loves disasters to befall people, so that they can gain political points from it. Such an accusation cannot be directed solely at the Left, of course. What sounds more likely for me is that people love disasters when they can be used for political advancement. Which is really rather sick, when you think about it.

At home, A leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Reverend Wiley Drake, publicly expressed his support for a person on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. The person was on there for killing an abortion doctor and others. The organization that Kopp (the person on the list) is part of has quite the lineup as well. But this knowledge does not appear to be making much of a stir in the media. Perhaps because it’s mostly violence against atheists, abortion clinics, and because, at least according to the article, the Baptists themselves are not doing a whole lot about it? If you’d like to see a declaration of support, (although it is now without Drake’s name - perhaps it was removed?), have a look for yourself.

Outlook Power is looking into the issue of the missing White House E-mails, and offering a human-readable summary of the key questions in the problem, and then tracing back the domains in question to their owners. More to come from them, but so far, they haven’t found anything that’s a smoking gun. I wonder if they’ll turn up anything that does look out of sorts.

My common sense sense is tingling hard at the web page for MacLockPick, a device that purports to download several chunks of data off a Macintosh OS X computer, assuming that the person using the device has physical access to the computer. Even though it says that it’s only for law enforcement personnel and would require proof of this, what I want to know is - why advertise it? If it’s such a neat thing for the police, why are they offering it up on a publicly available web page? (Unless it’s supposed to goad people into changing their defaults on the Keychain to something more secure, assuming that’s possible.) Plus, it requires physical access to the drive. What gives, here?

However, while that’s a curiosity, the following sequence will likely get a lot of people very cheesed off. It starts with a good thing, the House of Representatives passing a bill that would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the list of things covered by hate crime law. (James Dobson thinks that it’s a muzzle for people of faith and that people who read anti-homosexual things from the Bible will be considered thought criminals.) The President, however, has already said that he will veto the bill if it gets to him (Well, at least we’re getting him to exercise the veto now, rather than the signing statement stuff). For a little while, though, Rupert Murdoch had the winner - What is claimed to be an error in the code of MySpace, owned by News Corp, prevented users from selecting "gay" as their orientation for some time. Orientations such as bisexual and lesbian are not affected.

Last for tonight, Pastafarians worldwide rejoice as CBS's new reality television show will make 16 pirates sail the seas and seek treasure. We might see a temperature reduction for the course of the show because of this.

The Telegraph today has two pieces about a teacher who took his own life by jumping from a church tower. One from one of his students, praising him as a teacher everyone should have. This was on his good days, apparently, as the second piece, focusing on his wife and their newly-born daughter, shows that he was a roller-coaster of emotions and felt like he was losing control. Genius and madness are always so close to each other. It’s a shame that we stigmatize the madness so much that even the geniuses fall victim to it and take their own lives.

Likely partially in response to the increase in royalty fees and licensing furies, Pandora, a Web Radio service, will begin checking IP addresses to exclude non-U.S. listeners. As with any technical impediment, though, there is a workaround, of course.

Showcasing creativity for the parts of the world that aren’t the wealthiest, a slide show of "socially responsible design" products keeps people safe and healthy. Some of those things, like the bike designed for cargo transport, would probably be useful things here, too. If you can carry your cargo on your bike, then maybe the need for cars would be alleviated some.

Lacking in creativity, however, is the zero tolerance response that happened when school officials at the Fort Bend Independent School District transferred a student to the alternative education school after swords and a modified Counterstrike map were found. They don’t even know that the swords were going to be used to effect violence, but since the kid had a level map, he must have obviously been planning to do violence to people! Way to go. Another over-reaction. Jack Thompson would be proud.

Some Interesting material in technology - a service that lets you call a toll-free number and leave voice clips that are then translated to text and sent to people. The service, Jott.com, can also send the clips without the voice-to-text translation service. If the translation and recognition software is good, I can see this being a useful service, just as a way of getting a hold of a lot of people without having to contact them all individually, if you’re away from the desk.

To end on a happy note, yesterday was No Pants Day. Of course, I always seem to come across these things after the day is done. Oh, well. Leaving with a laugh, have a look at Forked Up, poking fun at all the commercials where tasks always are harder until “the product” is used, unto which it becomes easy and the uses swear they’ll never use anything else again.