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2006

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Fantasy leagues for women

Bill Simmons at ESPN.com might be on to something: fantasy leagues for females.

Let’s be honest: most women don’t understand males’ fascination with all things fantasy, from baseball to football. But what if they had their own? Base it on Us Weekly, spend dollars against celebrities, and let the fantasy league be played!

Here’s the beauty of my new league. Let’s say you took a $5 flier on Denise Richards a while back, hoping she and Charlie Sheen would patch things up. But when, out of nowhere, she lands in a love triangle with Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear, she suddenly becomes Chris Shelton or Jonny Gomes, a bona fide sleeper! On the downside, I could easily see someone overpaying for Nicole Richie, thinking she might start to date Diddy or seek help for an eating disorder, and when she doesn’t, you’re playing catch-up for five months. See? The possibilities are endless.

Check out the article, Mr. Simmons is on to something.

The Must Have Game of 2006

The must have game of 2006 for me is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. With the Strogg invading Earth, the two sides do battle with unique classes, weapons and vehicles.

The Enemy Territory website has been updated from the placeholder it used to be.

And even better, Gametrailers has the two and half minute trailer in high definition. Watch it in your browser, or click on the link on the right and download the Windows Media or Quicktime HD versions.

Stunning – I don’t see myself ever playing Battlefield2 after this comes out, and with the already announced Linux support, I”ll be in heaven.

Dear Lazy Web: I love you

I love the inter-webnet thing. Ok, seriously, I do.

I love Web 2.0. The applications that are being built are making my life easier.

Over on the right of this blog, I’ve had my del.icio.us bookmarks listed for sometime. As I’ve come across a new link I find interesting, I use the del.icio.us Firefox plugin to capture it. You can see the links on the right or just visit my del.icio.us userpage and see all my links.

I only use my Firefox bookmarks for stuff I visit everyday. The good news is that del.icio.us’ importer is finally working, so last night I imported all my Firefox bookmarks in to it, and can use del.icio.us to manage all my bookmarks. I have to make them visible, check their tags and sort them, and I’ll be good to go.

The other thing I did this week was something I should have done a long time ago. I forwarded my two @silwenae.com email address to my Gmail account. Gmail’s spam filters are just so superior to anything else I’ve tried, that no spam gets through. I created my labels (which I still think of as tags) in Gmail, set up my filters, and away we go.

I subscribe to a lot of different mailing lists – (Twin Cities Linux User Group, Pho, and Banshee to name just a few. Gmail is the best at viewing mailing lists. The way it shows threads is superior to anything I’ve seen in Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution.

And I can access it all from my mobile phone. (Not that I ever really need to, but still). And I’m looking forward to adding my picture / avatar for Gmail & Google Talk. (Now if I could just get my friends to drop MSN Messenger for Gtalk, I’d be set!)

Ubuntu Dapper + Banshee

Are you a fan of Banshee and using Ubuntu Dapper but frustrated because you can’t use all of the latest and greatest plugins that are available in CVS?

Well, Josiah has put up a webpage that includes a .deb file for Dapper, and the plugins to download, with instructions so you can use the latest and greatest version of Banshee. Included on the page are:

  • The MiniMode Plugin

  • The Podcast Plugin

  • The Radio Plugin

  • The Recommendation Plugin

  • Banshee-daap plugin

  • Banshee CVS

  • Everything above

Hit the link to get ’em. I decided to be daring, and installed the plugins in my .gnome2/banshee/plugins directory, but only the Recommendation plugin worked. Trying to use the Podcast or MiniMode Plugin would crash the default Dapper Banshee – so make sure you download the Banshee CVS deb!

Thanks Josiah! One of these days I should spend some time and take this the next step – compile CVS weekly and set up an apt repository for Dapper users.

The Angry Liberal Club

Via BoingBoing, C.B. Shapiro has written an amazing piece of work, titled “Hark, the Angry Liberal Sings“. I’ll let his words explain, he does a much better job than I ever could, and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s been some ink spilled lately denigrating so called ‘angry liberals,’ that is, people who have allegedly lost their right to be taken seriously because they are ‘angry.’ And they are ‘liberal.’

Well, I hereby declare myself a charter member in the ALC (Angry Liberal Club).

Sure, at first I felt guilty — what right do I have as a patriotic American to be angry? Or liberal? Oh, I tried to repress the ‘angry thing,’ I tried — if I was asked, I claimed I was a ‘peeved moderate.’ Or a ‘mildly upset centrist.’ But after much work through ‘BIT’ (Blog Immersion Therapy), I stopped feeling the shame. I’m coming out of the closet to announce I am an Angry Liberal Guy. And I am pissed.

You might be saying “Man, what are you so angry about, Angry Liberal Guy?â€?

I’ve compiled a short (and by no means complete) list just so I could see it all in one place:

I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)

And I’m angry about a smug, simple-minded, incompetent, unqualified President, and a press that denies the obvious fact that we have a smug, simple-minded, incompetent unqualified President.

If these things don’t make you angry, I have to ask — what the hell is the matter with you?

And what would it take to make you angry? — C.B. Shapiro

Sony's Playstation3 Unveiled

Sony unveiled the Playstation3 at a launch event at E3 last night.

Quick facts:

US Launch: Nov 17th

2 Versions (Comparison Chart Here):

$599: 60GB Hard Drive, HDMI, Wireless, Memory Card Reader

$499: 20GB HD, none of the above

2 million to ship at launch, 2 million more by end of the year, worldwide.

The combination of Blu-Ray built in, as well as the previously announced Linux operating system make this the console player for me. But only the $599 one – HDMI is a must-have!

Toshiba's HD-DVD player: Just a HTPC?

Could Toshiba’s just released HD-DVD player, the HD-A1, really just be a home theater PC disguised as a normal DVD player?

Sure enough, as seen on this blog and in the video, Toshiba’s HD-DVD player contains an IDE HD-DVD drive, P4 2.5 ghz, 1 gig of RAM, and a flash disk running Red Hat’s linux operating system.

As The Digital Bits noted, no wonder it takes the thing a minute to boot up.

Like the blog author above, I’m waiting for Blu-Ray – sure, it’s Sony’s technology, and their track record isn’t the best, but the compression and size opportunities (for the discs) are better with Blu-Ray than HD-DVD.

Stop the RIAA – Join the Petition

The EFF has started a petition to send to Congress regarding the RIAA’s tactics in stopping music piracy.

From the petition:

We respect reasonable copyright law, but we strongly oppose copyright enforcement that comes at the expense of privacy, due process and fair application of the law.

We urge you, as our representatives in Congress, to stop this madness.

As of this morning, the petition is at 80,758 signatures – with 100,000 signatures the EFF can send this to the Senate and House Commerce and Judiciary Commitees.

I purchased 3 CD’s last night – I’m all for supporting the artists, but the music industry’s governing body is out of control when they’re blackmailing 12 year old girls and suing families who don’t even own a computer.

Sign the petition today, the RIAA’s madness has to be stopped.

Ubuntu Dapper+1: The Edgy Eft

Ubuntu’s sabdfl, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced the next Ubuntu release after 6.06 Dapper Drake will be the “Edgy Eft”.

What is an eft?

An Eft is a youthful newt, going through its first exploration of the

rocky territory just outside the stream. And that’s exactly what we hope

the development team will do with Ubuntu during the Edgy cycle – explore

slightly unfamiliar and uncharted territory that is perhaps a little out

of the mainstream.

The exciting news in Edgy Eft, as posted in the announcement:

And here’s why. Edgy is all about cutting edge, perhaps bleeding edge,

brand new code and infrastructure. It will be the right time to bring in

some seriously interesting but definitely edgy new technologies which

lay the groundwork for the next wave of Ubuntu development.

…

So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other

wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first

flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing

on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager…

and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly

on the horizon.

We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned

out so well. We have a great answer for people who need super-solid

and super-predictable results: Dapper is still fresh, will continue to work

on modern hardware for some time, and has plenty of legs in its support

cycle left to run.

One of the reasons that led to my break from my blogging habit over the last month or two was playing with Dapper Drake from Flight 2 on. I’ll post later on my thoughts on Dapper, but even the cutting edge stuff I was playing with, in what will be a Long Term Support release from Ubuntu was amazing – I could play with XGL/Compiz for hours.

I hope to see things like Leaftag, Gimmie, and many other goodies in Edgy Eft.